Contemporary Chinese Literature: From the Cultural Revolution to the Future

Contemporary Chinese Literature

This page intentionally left blank

CONTEMPORARY CHINESE LITERATURE From the Cultural Revolution to the Future

YIBING HUANG

contemporary chinese literature Copyright © Yibing Huang, 2007. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-1-4039-7982-7 ISBN-10: 1-4039-7982-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Huang, Yibing, 1967Contemporary Chinese literature : from the Cultural Revolution to the future / By Yibing Huang. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-4039-7982-0 1. Chinese literature—20th century—History and criticism. I. Title. PL2303.H824 2007 895.1’09005—dc22 2007011753 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Macmillan India Ltd. First edition: November 2007 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For my father, Huang Songping and my mother, Zhuo Zhifang who have lived through an unimaginable history

… overleap his own age, jump over Rhodes …

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

1 Introduction: Bastards of the Cultural Revolution 2 Duo Duo: An Impossible Farewell, or, Exile between Revolution and Modernism 3 Wang Shuo: Playing for Thrills in the Era of Reform, or, a Genealogy of the Present 4 Zhang Chengzhi: Striving for Alternative National Forms, or, Old Red Guard and New Cultural Heretic 5 Wang Xiaobo: From the Golden Age to the Iron Age, or, Writing against the Gravity of History 6 Epilogue: An Unfinished Bildungsroman

1

137 181

Notes

189

Index

213

19 63 105

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgments

When I started research for this book around ten years ago, I did it in anticipation of an as-yet intangible future. That future has now receded into the past, but it remains present, nonetheless, in this imperfect form. I extend my thanks to all of those who have helped me navigate this process. In particular, I would like to thank Theodore Huters and Shu-mei Shih, who served as my most valuable intellectual guides and generous friends during my years at the University of California, Los Angeles. Those years were crucial for me. For the same reason, I also thank Emily Apter and Teshome Gabriel, who served on my interdisciplinary committee, for their unwavering trust in and support of my dissertation project, from which the current book is derived. As for the many others to whom I owe equal gratitude, I cannot name them individually, but they should know that their names are in my heart. I would also like to thank two of the writers discussed in this book: Duo Duo and Zhang Chengzhi, each of whom I interviewed during 1997–1998. My research has been supported by fellowships, most notably from the Committee on Scholarly Communication with China, the Social Science Research Council, and the American Council of Learned Societies. I want to express my long-due appreciation to these institutions. Portions of the chapters on Duo Duo and Wang Shuo have been, in somewhat different forms, published previously: “Duoduo: An Impossible Farewell, or, Exile between Revolution and Modernism,” Amerasia Journal 27, no. 2 (2001): 64–84; and “‘Vicious Animals’: Wang Shuo and Negotiated Nostalgia for History,” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 5, no. 2 (2002): 81–102. I thank the two journals for their permission to reprint. James Joyce, via his protagonist in Ulysses, said: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Lu Xun, for his part, spoke through a shadow in his Wild Grass: “There are things I dislike in your future golden world; I do not want to go there.” Nevertheless, I want to reserve my final

x

●

Acknowledgments

thanks to my parents, Huang Songping and Zhuo Zhifang, who brought me into history, on that night in the throes of the Cultural Revolution. And that night still awaits its sequels and revisions, as nothing has been entirely told. New London, Connecticut February 4, 2007

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Bastards of the Cultural Revolution Ciao, Mao! —from a commercial poster at the Central Station in Amsterdam If you ask what we are Balls under the red flag —Cui Jian, “Balls under the Red Flag” 1

O

ctober 1, 1998. After my arrival at the Amsterdam Central Station from Schiphol Airport, the first face that greeted me was a smiling Chairman Mao waving his hand, and at the bottom of this commercial poster: “Ciao, Mao!” A weird sensation of déjà vu instantly captured me and cast a strange spell. As someone who was born into and grew up during the Cultural Revolution, I had been more than familiar with the political pop art of this sort (from Andy Warhol to young Chinese artists in the 1980s and 1990s) as exhibited in galleries and museums or printed in art magazines and catalogues, in both the United States and China. Moreover, the very purpose of my trip, my first to Amsterdam and to Europe, was to present at an international workshop my dissertation research on Chinese “cultural bastards,” which was to serve as the basis of this current book, and to interview one of these “bastards,” Duo Duo, then living in exile in Leiden, who had said “ADDIO”2 and “farewell” even much earlier as a young underground poet in China in the early 1970s.3 Nevertheless, I was still completely startled by this unexpected and displaced “live” reencounter. What startled and fascinated me? It was the apparent oxymoron and paradox conveyed by this commercial image: a most impossible and uncanny coupling of Mao with capitalism, Mao with the West, and at last, a parodic

2

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

invitation for Mao’s ever-increasing omnipresence through that very ambivalent “Ciao.” It seems Mao, not unlike the other popular icons from the 1960s—Che Guevara being among them—who have been simultaneously elevated/exploited as representing a mystified revolutionary idealism and a consumerist youth culture, had acquired a transnational charisma and immortal aura, representing not just a past Chinese revolution, but more pertinently, a new postsocialist/capitalist revolution.4 Yes, in that odd combination, Mao is an individual sign and icon incarnating an ongoing Chinese modernity “under Western eyes,” which is, however, highly unstable and suspect throughout, and indeed, you may say, a “bastard” modernity. “New Man,” “Orphan,” and “Bastard”: From May Fourth to the Cultural Revolution Throughout the twentieth century in modern China, the spell of modernity5 bonded the nation and the individual together and catalyzed a common obsession: to break with the past and tradition, to be completely new. As China strived to remake or re-create itself as a new modern nation, the individual subject also longed to give birth to itself as a “new man,” one who is not contaminated or burdened by the malaise of the past and tradition and who is thus endowed with privilege and legitimacy as the agent and subject of history. This “new man” was in fact nothing less than an “orphan of history,” as opposed to one with a contaminated, impure, and illegitimate origin, that is, a damned “cultural bastard.” Such tension between the “new man,” the “orphan,” and the “bastard” is seen prominently in the case of Lu Xun, the founding father of modern Chinese literature, particularly in his classical short story “A Madman’s Diary” (1918). Ironically, this Madman, the very first “new man” of modern Chinese literature, suffers from the discovery of his own rootedness in and contamination by a premodern history. Thus, he issues a desperate call at the end for the coming of a new generation: “Perhaps there are still children who have not eaten men? Save the children …”6 This desperate call conceals a deeply rooted doubt, perhaps unconscious, about the utopian prospect of a Chinese modernity possessing an uncontaminated and pure origin. It also illustrates the impossibility of tearing madness apart from the Enlightenment rationality embodied by modern individual subjectivity: the “I” can only “see” the cannibalistic nature of four thousand years of Chinese history in the guise of a “madman.” In other words, the birth of the “new man” in modern China was not innocent or pure at all, but rather, an ambiguous discursive construction and complicit with “delusion” or “madness.” Apparently, although constantly calling for the birth of the

Introduction

●

3

“new man,” Lu Xun could not so easily hold the faith that he himself would be qualified for such a title. Contrary to Lu Xun’s ambivalence and pessimism, the mainstream May Fourth discourse on this subject was a far more confident and optimistic one, and found its representation in an unknown youth from the province, Mao Zedong. In fact, as early as 1917–1918, a mainly self-taught Mao had already developed his own version of what he called “spiritual individualism” ( jingshen zhi geren zhuyi),7 which was the result of a hybridization of the traditional Confucianism with the newly imported German idealism and nationalism, emphasizing individual development and fulfillment as the foundation of the Chinese nation-building project. His early writings were full of frequent references to the case of German history in asserting the compatibility between individualism and nationalism, which is attested most tellingly by, for instance, a statement found in his reading notes on Friedrich Paulsen’s A System of Ethics: Furthermore, a group is an individual, a greater individual. The human body is constructed of the aggregation of a number of individual parts, and society is constructed of the aggregation of a number of individual persons, and the nation is constructed of the aggregation of a number of societies. Separated they are many, together they form a single whole. Thus the individual, society, and the state are individuals. The universe is also an individual. Thus, it is also possible to say that there are no groups in the world, only individuals.8

Thus his “spiritual individualism” was endowed from the very beginning with a nationalistic as well as universalistic vision, and the tension and contradiction between the individual, the nation, and the world was discursively reconciled in Mao’s conception of a grand individual subjectivity.9 On comparison, both Lu Xun and Mao Zedong demanded the emergence of the “new man,” or modern individual subjectivity. Yet, Lu Xun, in the end, was exceedingly aware of his own cultural bastardy and of the problematics of individuality itself. In contrast, Mao expressed full confidence in the belief that the grand “I” (dawo) of the national subject can and will be achieved through the small “I” (xiaowo) of the individual equipped with a global vision. In many respects, it was not Lu Xun, but Mao, who most directly counterbalanced the hegemony of Western modernity embodied in individual subjectivity. His early “spiritual individualism” was to develop into a Maoist voluntarism imbued with both a Nietzschean “will to power” and a Hegelian teleology. And he would present a powerful omnipresent discourse of Chinese modernity, such as offered in his “On New Democracy” (1940),10 with regard to the prospect of creating a new Chinese national culture.

4

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

Therefore, it is most suitable that Mao’s omnipresent vision of Chinese modernity apparently had won over the course of modern Chinese history. Lu Xun’s introspective vision, instead, had been superseded and he himself was later appropriated and canonized by Mao as a revolutionary saint and national hero, representing the successful realization of a Maoist “new man.” While it appeared that Lu Xun and Mao Zedong would become the only two super individuals of modern Chinese culture during the 1966–1976 Cultural Revolution, the truth was that Mao was the sole model of the “orphan” and the “new man,” and Lu Xun, whose bastardy was erased, was turned into an alter ego of Mao. It is in this sense that we may understand the Cultural Revolution as, the culmination of an ambitious modernist project, that of brewing an entire generation of “socialist new men” indoctrinated by this totalistic Maoist vision of individual subjectivity. The price, of course, was the subordination and elimination of heterogeneity of individual subjectivities for the sake of modern nation-building and its newly acquired universalistic claim. The tension or dialectic between the “new man,” the “orphan,” and the “bastard” has been replayed in the post–Cultural Revolution era. Following its aftermath and throughout the 1980s, while the baggage of the Cultural Revolution was intended to be debunked, ironically, the very Maoist persistence of a modernity with a radical historical discontinuity prevailed. This persistence is manifested by the equally totalistic assumption that the Cultural Revolution had been a pure dark age during which no real literature had been produced. Accordingly, the post–Cultural Revolution literature has been designated as the so-called New Period (xin shiqi) literature and another totally new beginning. For example, Liu Xinwu, one of the major writers of “scar literature” (shanghen wenxue) that appeared right after the Cultural Revolution, summarized retrospectively in 1989: “Because it was re-created from the ruins and corpse of the Cultural Revolution, Chinese literature between 1977 and 1980 is like the encounter between a sperm of a primitive life form and an egg so as to conceive a new life.”11 A new historical orphanhood of post–Cultural Revolution literature is thus established, which, in turn, blesses the resumption of the May Fourth modernity project—a project highly charged with Western Enlightenment ideologies, marked by terms denoting historical linearity: progress, evolution, development. Both Chinese and Western critics have also been more than eager to send post–Cultural Revolution literature, this “orphan of history,” back to the grand trajectory and axis of the so-called world literature and look for its siblinghood through a series of parallel comparisons of modernism and postmodernism between China and the West. In other words, whereas the continuities between the Cultural Revolution and contemporary literary and

Introduction

●

5

cultural developments have been masked by artificial and surface discontinuities, the gaps between China and the world (almost a synonym for the West) have been all too easily bridged via another round of an imaginary catching-up game in the name of “marching toward the world” (zouxiang shijie). During this process of double displacement and reorientation, consequently, the legacy of the Cultural Revolution has become either nonexistent or an inconvenience that eventually has to be left out of the picture. It is against the very one-dimensional discourse of orphanhood, which assumes historical discontinuity and normative purity, that I set my goal: to challenge the often-sanitized and too-neat picture of the post–Cultural Revolution literature and to restore the bastard origins of the supposed orphans of history. Just as, for example, the currently resurgent studies on the late Qing literature attempt to relink it to May Fourth, I will bring the Cultural Revolution back into the picture and argue that the Cultural Revolution is not only a no less important landmark of the Chinese modernity project, but more critically, a radical watershed, and its legacy has marked contemporary Chinese literature with not just a scar, but with a brand of bastardy. Twisted Pursuit of Modernity and Its Disillusionment: The Legacy of the Cultural Revolution Joseph R. Levenson, in his Revolution and Cosmopolitanism: The Western Stage and the Chinese Stages (1971), points out early on the duality of modern Chinese revolution, which was first incarnated by May Fourth “[r]evolutionary spirits” like Lu Xun himself. For Levenson, this revolution was fostered “in a cosmopolitan spirit—against the world to join the world, against their past to keep it theirs, but past.”12 He also acknowledges that “In the 1950s, the first decade of general Communist rule, China was reasonably open to cosmopolitanism,”13 and thereby comes up with the notion of “communist cosmopolitanism.” Levenson’s evaluation of Mao and the then still-ongoing Cultural Revolution is, however, ambivalent and wavering. He considers the Cultural Revolution as having “a provincial cultural spirit”14 and laments its apparent loss of cosmopolitanism. Nevertheless, by the end of his book, while commenting on the fate of those whom he views as the cosmopolitan dramatists and translators of Western stage arts who fell victim to the Cultural Revolution, Levenson issues a curious plea or prophecy: If the translators were almost solitaires, out of touch with their past history and their immediate environment (though they wished to affect it), the Cultural Revolutionaries, their foes, were their semblables, their frères. The

6

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

provincialism of the culture of the Cultural Revolutionaries is a mark of loneliness, too, a cutting off from their past and the contemporary world around them. They try to speak to the world, as our men of the foreign theater tried to speak … One way or another (the choice of ways is fearful), China will join the world again on the cosmopolitan tide. Cultural intermediaries, Cultural Revolutionaries—neither will look like stranded minnows or stranded whales forever.15

In other words, Levenson intuitively senses a certain affinity between cosmopolitanism and the radicalism of the Cultural Revolution, despite their apparent incompatibility. But as to why and how exactly “One way or another … China will join the world again on the cosmopolitan tide,” Levenson fails to offer a clear answer. In the view expressed in the official Chinese press, such as the Beijing Review, at that time, the Cultural Revolution was not provincial at all. On the contrary, it was seen as internationalist, serving to inspire the worldwide national liberation and independence movements across Asia, Africa, and Latin America through the export of Maoism. The Cultural Revolution was hailed as the third and so far, the most advanced, stage of the development of Marxism-Leninism and world revolution in general, with China being firmly situated at the center of this upcoming world revolution in confrontation with both “American imperialism” and “Soviet revisionism.” It was deemed relevant not only to modern Chinese history, but also to modern world history. In this sense, we might see the Cultural Revolution as a Maoist hijacking of the teleological agency of world history from the West. In the Maoist vision, the Cultural Revolution represented China’s regaining its central position in the world. And this can be viewed as evidence of an eagerness to embrace modernity on a teleological scale and a firm stamping of the “global citizenship” (qiuji)—in Mao’s own term—of China. In fact, Levenson already sees this other side of Maoism. In his view, Mao, quite unequivocally, represents himself not as a Chinese sage prescribing for the world, but as a world sage in a line of sages (Marx, Lenin, Stalin … ), bringing China—agreeably, to the nationalistic spirit—to the forefront of history, everybody’s history … To the nationalistic Communist (Mao), the satisfaction comes in having Chinese history matter to the world.16

Hence Mao is someone who arrives at a modern synthesis … He sees that a considerable Marxist-Leninist ancestry might establish China’s leadership, not its dependence … Aspiring

Introduction

●

7

to a world leadership that would reflect glory on China, Mao contends that he has creatively enriched in China what has nevertheless drawn openly from international sources.17

Seen in this light, Mao, then, has meant to be Chinese nationalist and Marxist theoretician. He united the two personae in moving on from a westernizing to a modernizing zeal … As modern, but not as “western,” China could still be “theirs” without still being traditional. With the aid of a Marxist time-scale, China might own its own share of modern time—a huge share for a huge country— instead of deferring to the West.18

These are brilliant observations. Levenson’s attempt to envision the working out of a dialectic, however, stops there. Quintessentially, he views the Cultural Revolution as a nativist or provincialist withdrawal of China from the world and a deplorable total break with cosmopolitanism, being it a “communist cosmopolitanism” or a “‘bourgeois’ cosmopolitanism.” Separated from Levenson’s observations and prophecies by a time span of more than twenty years, and with the Cultural Revolution in retrospect, Jiwei Ci, in his Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution: From Utopianism to Hedonism (1994), utilizes the same idea of the dialectic. But whereas Levenson stops, Ci takes it one step significantly further, and argues for the Maoist vision of Chinese modernity as “the detour on the road to capitalism.”19 Ci pinpoints the key role of Marxism and the Cultural Revolution in Mao’s project of modernity: via “a blend of nationalism and internationalism that China has never seen before,”20 they eliminated the peripheral mentality imposed upon China since the Opium War and also restored the central mentality of China—the latter has to be distinguished from the old Confucian sinocentrism: What was new was the internationalism, and what was new about the internationalism was its teleology. Thanks to its new teleological underpinnings, the center mentality returned with a vengeance. China used to have the center mentality but no teleology and hence, in the future absence of the expansionist dynamic that marked capitalism, no global political project. Marxism, with its confident teleology, gave China a dynamic that the old Confucian center mentality had been unable to generate … In this light, the Cultural Revolution may be seen as an attempt by Mao simultaneously to remain the center of China by means of domestic revolution and to become the center of the World by means of the projected global revolution.21

8

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

Here Ci reveals a crucial fact: anti-Westernism is itself a symptomatic obsession with the West. Hence the Hegelian “cunning of reason”: But in setting itself in opposition to the West, Mao’s China helped to keep the West alive in the Chinese imagination—as a time bomb—and thereby to make possible the later transition from communism to capitalism.22

Marxism, through its Maoist application, in turn, only facilitates and hastens this later transition by playing a decisive sleight of hand: For Marxism also stamped China’s new self-identity with something of fundamental importance that Marxism shares with capitalism, both having grown, in large measure, out of the problematic of the European Enlightenment. To use Max Weber’s distinctions, we might say that Marxism shares with capitalism the spirit of world-mastery as opposed to the spirit of world-adjustment, the latter marking the cultural paradigm of traditional China. Although Mao Zedong’s “application” of Marxism to Chinese reality was in many ways very superficial, the adoption of the outlook of world-mastery ran very deep. China’s abandonment of world-adjustment in favor of the Western cultural paradigm of worldmastery proved to be one of China’s most fundamental paradigm-shifts; from this many other important transformations, including China’s later move from communism to capitalism, were to follow.23

If we follow this argument, then, the Cultural Revolution should not be perceived as a fundamental break, but rather as a peculiar, yet continual, unfolding of the Chinese modernity project. In other words, if modern Chinese history since the late Qing can indeed be depicted, as often suggested, as a process of transformation from empire-declining to nation-building and modernity-pursuing, the Cultural Revolution symbolizes a pivotal point when Mao attempted to establish China’s status as a modern nation-state and a world power (or the engine of world history) via a series of both—real or imagined—domestic and international revolutions. Thus the Cultural Revolution stands as another Great Leap Forward of the Chinese modernity project, carried out with a global vision and in the name of a grand national subject. To put the Cultural Revolution in this perspective can help explain the revolution’s utmost emphasis on the emergence of “socialist new men” equipped with new consciousness and subjectivity. As we have discussed earlier, if the modern Chinese individual subject was born at the same time as the modern nation itself, this individual subject was from its very first moment of birth charged with a nascent national consciousness and was expected to develop into a national subject. Frantz Fanon made a powerful

Introduction

●

9

case in his “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness” and “On National Culture” about the necessity for non-Western subjects to create a national culture in order to achieve national liberation.24 The role played by Maoism and the personality cult of Mao during the Cultural Revolution can also be partially understood as such. That is, Mao himself embodies the fulfillment of a teleological project of Chinese modernity by converging the historical progress of the modern nation and individual development into one supernational subject. The deification of Mao during the Cultural Revolution is thus nothing else but a divination or cult of modernity, with the attribution to Mao of the visionary ability to master the whole progress of world history. Thus, the Cultural Revolution is a grand spectacle of the trinity of modernity, the nation, and the individual. Furthermore, for the first time in modern Chinese history, Mao’s own vision of Chinese modernity was to be indoctrinated into the subjectivities of millions of adolescents. In other words, Mao’s vision of individual development and national subjectivity became the canonized norm to be followed during the Cultural Revolution. The most prominent example of this was the Red Guard movement (1966–68). The experience of the Red Guard generation during the Cultural Revolution and thereafter thus offers a most significant yet extremely complex picture of individual development in relation to the Chinese modernity project. For this generation, the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guard movement were rituals of initiation into a capitalized History. They were brought up as both the “socialist new men” and the successors of the proletarian revolutionary cause. Indeed, to a great degree they were the first generation of Chinese youth who could be legitimately called the children of Mao, and many of them took Mao as their personal idol. But on the other hand, their idealism and radicalism were also accompanied by a peculiar rebellious spirit that Mao saw as the necessary qualification for their being the future successors of the revolution and the communist state, which was attested by the famous Red Guard slogan: “It is right to rebel” (zaofan youli). What happened to this generation consequently appeared to have provided enough material for, and a collective plot of, a Chinese bildungsroman, or, to be more precise, bildungsroman as a national form.25 This bildungsroman might have included the following moments: initiation—the Red Guard rebellion; wandering in the world—the so-called revolutionary exchanges (geming da chuanlian); reeducation—the sent-down or rustication movement (shangshan xiaxiang);26 and disillusionment—the increasing doubt about the Cultural Revolution and Maoism and the emergence of underground experiences. The last move was critical: for the majority of this generation, the original title “socialist new men” or “vanguards” of “world revolution”

10

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

became devoid of any substance, and the newfound identity as “educated youth” (zhishi qingnian or zhiqing) served only as a veil for “cultured laborers with socialist attitude,” which in fact threatened to fix them forever at the bottom of society. The latter prospect, along with other rampant doubts, became the focus of concern and a source of bitterness for this generation. And, deprived of the telos of revolution, their crisis of self-formation and individual development was much more profound and complex than many later observers could have realized. This crisis eventually led to their transformation from the legitimate successors of the revolutionary cause or the future masters of the nation to illegitimate “bastards” who would have to search for a new pattern of individual development for themselves. In other words, this bildungsroman turned out to be one of a generation of “bastards” grown out of the Cultural Revolution and yet lost in history. This bastardized self-search can be best confirmed by the “underground literature” (dixia wenxue) phenomenon that emerged in the late 1960s and continued through the 1970s, in urban centers such as Beijing, with its main members being from a broadly defined Red Guard generation. For many of them, their initial idealistic “It is right to rebel” would eventually evolve into a discontent with and rebellion against the ideological dictates of the Cultural Revolution itself, which would later be most powerfully voiced in Misty Poet Bei Dao’s famous “The Answer”: “Let me tell you, world, / I—do—not— believe!”27 But this very defiant “answer” demonstrates that it has its own underground origin within the world of revolution instead of coming from without. An extremely complex, even if not fully articulated, double consciousness and double vision of self, history, nation, and the world was formed and developed. However, the double consciousness and double vision that characterizes “underground literature” owes itself to the education of the Cultural Revolution, which also bears a duality, as we have discussed above. This “underground literature” began to draw attention only as its insiders started to make their own testimonies available. In 1988, the poet Duo Duo published a ground-breaking essay, “Buried Chinese Poets 1970– 1978,” which probably for the first time made visible to the public in a detailed way this then-unfamiliar historical existence and its linkage to the post–Cultural Revolution literature—marked by the founding of the already legendary samizdat literary journal Today (Jintian) in 1978.28 In doing so, Duo Duo not only foregrounded the importance of Today as a milestone for the development of post–Cultural Revolution literature, but resituated this “today” as a continuation of its “yesterday” and demanded legitimacy for the latter. Duo Duo made it clear that his generation was truly more a generation of cultural bastards bred by and grown against the Cultural Revolution, than orphans of history born—as Liu Xinwu had assumed—only at the demise of the Cultural Revolution.

Introduction

●

11

In 1992, Yang Jian published a book titled Underground Literature during the Cultural Revolution,29 which was somewhat crudely written, but nevertheless deserved much credit for being one of the first attempts to rescue extant material and offer a general survey of this sensitive subject. Ever since then, more studies in this field have followed. For instance, in 1997, in an article published in the Hong Kong-based journal Twenty-First Century, Song Yongyi compiled a very informative list of the “internally distributed” (neibu faxing) books that had strongly influenced the bastardization of many members of this generation during the Cultural Revolution.30 In 1999, another book, edited by Liao Yiwu and titled The Sunken Sacred Temple: A Portrait of Chinese Underground Poetry in the 1970s, came out in China, even though it was banned shortly thereafter.31 As a matter of fact, during the past two decades, and particularly since the late 1990s, a large number of general works on this subject, including personal memoirs and reminiscences, have steadily emerged into the public view and constituted one of the most intriguing cultural spectacles in contemporary China.32 This surge of new historical testimonies, although their qualities inevitably vary to a great extent, in turn, proves that a new kind of interventionist and in-depth case study of this illegitimate generation of cultural bastards is in order.33 “Balls under the Red Flag”: Cui Jian and a Case of Chinese Bastardy In order to pinpoint this inherited and continuing cultural bastardy in contemporary China, I will cite one example: Cui Jian, the most renowned Chinese rock musician, singer and songwriter. Cui Jian was born in Beijing in 1961 to ethnic Korean parents who were also artists in a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) performance troupe. He started his career in the early 1980s, like many of his Chinese and Eastern European contemporaries during the Cold War, by listening to and imitating Western popular music—mostly imported through unofficial channels. He soon developed his own eclectic yet distinctive style and emerged as the first Chinese rock idol, in 1986, with two songs, “It’s Not That I Don’t Understand” (Bushi wo bu mingbai) and “Nothing to My Name” (Yiwu suoyou). Since then, he has remained productive and has won great popularity in China as the godfather of Chinese rock music. Both in China and in the West, especially following the immediate aftermath of Tiananmen in 1989, he has been often viewed as a dissident hero who challenged the orthodox socialist ideology and called for individual freedom in a repressive environment. Cui Jian himself, however, has repeatedly refuted such an association and categorization, stating that he is first and foremost a musician and one who pays more attention to culture than to politics.

12

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

I argue that Cui Jian’s own claim is validated not so much by turning a blind eye to the political edges of his music, but rather by acknowledging the very ambivalence and complexity of his messages, which always defy a simplistic reading. In other words, Cui Jian is not so much a political dissident as a cultural bastard. The bastardy of Cui Jian and his practice of what he had called “rock ‘n’ roll on the New Long March,” in terms of both its content and form, is actually a stubborn adherence to, as well as a meaningful manipulation of, the very historical specificity of his own individual vision, which bears a direct link to the mixed legacy of the Cultural Revolution while confronting a hybrid Chinese reality in the 1980s and 1990s.34 I’ve heard of but never saw the twenty-five-thousand-mile Long March Too much talk not enough action; who knows that it’s not easy Bend my head walk forward looking for myself This way that way cannot find my red base anyway (…) How to speak how to act and really be myself How to sing how to hum and finally feel happy Marching and thinking of the snowy mountains and grasslands Marching and singing of our leader Chairman Mao

This is from the title song of Cui Jian’s first major album Rock ‘n’ Roll on the New Long March,35 which was released in early 1989, right before the Tiananmen incident. By juxtaposing “rock ‘n’ roll” and the “Long March,” the song itself becomes a highly ambivalent and ironic statement, especially if we consider the fact that the heroic myth of the Communist Red Army’s Long March in the 1930s has already been appropriated at least twice since the 1960s in China. The first time was during the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, when hundreds of thousands of young Red Guards retraced the route of the Long March to prove their legitimacy as successors to the revolutionary tradition. The second time was right after the end of the Cultural Revolution, when modernization became the new national agenda and was eulogized as the “New Long March.” Quite often critics tend to read this juxtaposition as a bold attack on and clever mockery of the Communist Party and the socialist state that utilized the Long March as an ideological myth to enhance its own legitimacy. For instance, according to Rey Chow, Instead of words with sonorous historical meanings, Cui Jian’s lyrics read more like grammatically incoherent utterances. Even though they conjure up “historical” images, his words speak against literate and literary culture by their choppiness and superficiality. The Long March, one of the nation’s

Introduction

●

13

best-selling stories since 1949, is a signifier for something vague and distant, and Chairman Mao a mere name to complete the rhyme … [T]he words and music are also mutual renditions of each other in so far they both dismember and dis-remember official history.36

Chow’s reading is sound in its own sense by pointing out the disruptive and subversive nature of Cui Jian’s song. But such a conjuration of the Long March and Mao in the song may be far from a simply blasphemous wordplay. On the contrary, it can also be understood as seeking a kind of spiritual anchor and marker for the children of the Cultural Revolution to cope with the uncertainty felt when confronted with a new post–Cultural Revolution reality. That is to say, rather than “dis-member and dis-remember” a petrified Long March or a misnamed New Long March, rock ‘n’ roll in fact becomes the agent of this very New Long March by recharging and “re(-)membering” the old Long March; and “singing of our leader Chairman Mao” is, on its own terms, a positive, earnest invocation of Mao for inspiration and guidance, rather than a sarcastic parody or bashing. There is a carnivalesque and dizzying fusion played out here. In this latter perspective, the rock music maintains the ambivalence and tension between history and reality, deconstructing and reconstructing at the same time, negotiating with a muchcomplex postrevolutionary and postsocialist reality, which hinges on an unstable and indecisive moment of the present. Accordingly, this “I” in the song is someone who is caught in the dilemma of how to find his own identity, enjoying this lack of a clearly defined identity as the very sign of free agency for the individual, at the same time also yearning for a return of direction in a utopian, almost revolutionary fashion. Cui Jian carries the same ambivalent and yet negotiating attitude into his second album, Solution (1991).37 Compared with “Rock ‘n’ Roll on the New Long March,” the title song “Solution” makes an even more edgy effort to explore and plumb the breadth and depth of such an indecisive, anxiety-ridden, repressive, and yet stimulating present as experienced by individuals. It again ends with no definite answers but a tentative, hedonistic release or erotic “solution”: In front of my eyes too many problems, no way to solve But there’s never any chance, that’s the bigger problem Suddenly I see you staring at me The first thought to cross my mind is to solve you first

What Cui Jian expresses thus is again a bastard identity enveloped in a postsocialist reality, which promises, at once, fantasy and frustration. The same predicament, on the other hand, only exposes the protagonist’s fundamental

14

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

rootedness in his past and history, as shown in one of Cui Jian’s supposedly more politically charged songs in the same album, “A Piece of Red Cloth” (Yikuai hongbu). By manipulating the highly symbolic image of the “red cloth,” the song starts with an utterly satirical and critical tone: That day you used a piece of red cloth Covering my eyes and covering the sky You asked me what I saw I said that I saw happiness

But the song, most tellingly, reaches a melancholy impasse in the end: I can’t leave and I can’t cry Because my body was drained dry I will always be like this and with you Because I truly know your sorrow

This melancholy impasse, however, can be seen as a resolute gesture: he does not want to be out or set apart, but to be in and through. By deliberately blurring the distinction between a public/political critique and a private/personal narrative of an amorous experience, Cui Jian has thus delineated most acutely the historical specificity of postsocialism that he and his generation feel and live in. Yet, this historical specificity is also determined by himself, owing to his unwillingness to separate these two parts of the same (social and individual) experience as well as the two moments of the same (past and present) history. In short, he is less a dissident hero against the currents than an ambivalent bastard submerged in the currents. In fact, a positive sympathy between rock music and Mao or the Cultural Revolution ought not be taken as odd at all. We need only to remember how Mao and the Cultural Revolution had once stirred the imagination of the West and were echoed in the student movements sweeping from France to the United States, as well as in the youth counterculture and rock music itself. Even if some might claim that such sympathy had been a misapprehension at its outset, for the generation of Cui Jian and his audience, the Cultural Revolution, besides signifying a historical catastrophe, nevertheless also remains a cultural memory and signifier of a permanent “shake up” that offers a residual utopian and fantastic space, mirroring the release of a free, unbounded, uninhibited, and anarchic energy that rock music brings up as a popular art form. This explains why the Cultural Revolution had become the main theme of political pop art in the 1990s and why another famous actor and director, Jiang Wen, once claimed that the Cultural Revolution

Introduction

●

15

was a big rock concert and that Mao himself was a rock superstar.38 As for Cui Jian, during the 1980s and early 1990s, he had persistently appeared both in his concerts and on the album covers dressed in an old green army jacket decorated with a red star—typical Red Guard dress, which was fashionable among young people throughout the Cultural Revolution. This seemingly impossible combination of the Cultural Revolution and rock music thus becomes a timely reminder, on both conscious and unconscious levels, of the historical specificity of Cui Jian’s music that cannot be smoothed away easily, but needs to be decoded and reinterpreted in the context of an infinitely complex postsocialist reality. Hence it is not at all strange that Cui Jian’s 1994 album, Balls under the Red Flag would make further efforts to grasp the social changes and individual dilemmas by a continuous negotiation with the collective memory and unconscious of the Cultural Revolution. This becomes significant as it also helps his negotiation with a postsocialist present and future.39 This double or multiple negotiation is best concentrated in and illustrated by the title song, “Balls under the Red Flag”: The sudden opening Is not so sudden Now the chance has come But no idea what to be done The red flag is still blowing With no fixed direction The revolution still continues The old men are even stronger Money is as present as air We don’t have any ideals The air is fresh But we can’t see any farther Our chance has come But we still have no guts Our personalities are round Like balls under the red flag

Obviously the picture painted here in the first two stanzas reflects China in a particular moment of time, with “red flag,” “revolution,” “money,” the everpotent “old men,” and the evaporating “ideals” mixed together. It might be tempting to quickly conclude that the image “balls under the red flag” simply serves as a subversive parody of the legacy of the Cultural Revolution.

16

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

Yet this convenient interpretation cannot exhaust the song’s entire content, since the following stanza provides a positive twist: Power is as present as air Hitting you often on your shoulder Suddenly there is an idea No longer follow others without a head Although the body is still too soft Although it can only cry Look at the sun at eight or nine in the morning It’s like balls under the red flag

The last two lines draw on a well-known quotation of Mao that was appropriated by the Red Guards as evidence of Mao’s support of them during the Cultural Revolution: “The world is yours, as well as ours, but in the last analysis, it is yours. You young people, full of vigour and vitality, are in the bloom of life, like the sun at eight or nine in the morning. Our hope is placed upon you.”40 So it can be understood that Cui Jian gives this image a positive reaffirmation in opposition to the new hegemony of “money” and “power.” Therefore, the image of “balls under the red flag” becomes highly ironic and mutable, containing different possibilities. The song ends on an even more ironic and mutable note: Reality is like a rock Spirit is like an egg Rock might be hard But only the egg has life Mom is still alive Dad is the flagpole If you ask what we are Balls under the red flag

The image of “balls” or “egg” (“ball” and “egg” are the same word in Chinese: dan) reverts from signifying the roundness of “our personalities” to signifying “life” itself against the harshness of reality. And, by stating the genealogy of himself and his contemporaries in relation to the still-living “Mom,” “Dad,” and the “red flag,” Cui Jian, toward the end, emphatically shows his rootedness in the past, present, and future at the same time. That is to say, instead of denying or effacing his historical specificity and cultural bastardy, which cannot be subsumed by an idealized and teleological New Period, or by an ambivalent, mercurial era of capitalist-oriented “reform” or postsocialism, he rather underscores it. In this sense, cultural bastardy is only a topic, not the end or conclusion.

Introduction

●

17

Why Duo Duo, Wang Shuo, Zhang Chengzhi, and Wang Xiaobo? Cultural Bastards and Contemporary Chinese Literature Cui Jian is not the only cultural bastard that we can see today on the Chinese cultural scene. He is just one example of this cultural bastardy that has been demanding a more bastardized and more careful reading. The four authors whom I study in this book each stand as a mixture of “new man,” “orphan of history,” and “cultural bastard”: Duo Duo, an underground seer-poet; Wang Shuo, a “hooligan” writer; Zhang Chengzhi, an old Red Guard and new cultural heretic; and Wang Xiaobo, a defiant yet melancholy chronicler of a dystopian modern world. Writing in different genres, such as poetry, fiction, or essays, by acknowledging, questioning, subverting, and negotiating with their own peculiar and distinctive origins of “bad blood” or bastardy, they each have fashioned bildungsroman-like, sustained allegories about the individual’s subject formation and continuous development, and have proffered distinctive individual (re)visions of a doublefaced Chinese modernity against a collective legacy of the Cultural Revolution. In other words, I regard them as four of the most provocative and challenging authors from their generation specifically, and from the contemporary Chinese literary and cultural scene in general. In my own readings of them, by rearticulating this cultural bastardy that was first formed both above ground and underground during the Cultural Revolution and reconnecting it with the Chinese modernity project that continued to unfold in the post-Cultural Revolution era, my critical concern has always revolved around what Fredric Jameson has aptly summed up in his The Political Unconscious as “the ideology of form.” As he succinctly explains, “What must now be stressed is that at this level ‘form’ is apprehended as content”;41 or, as he further elucidates, “With this final horizon, then, we emerge into a space in which History itself becomes the ultimate ground as well as the untranscendable limit of our understanding in general and our textual interpretation in particular.”42 This appropriation of Jameson might partly explain why my readings tend to draw out those nuanced, inherent contradictions in the four authors and sometimes present dialectical antitheses against some of the previously drawn conclusions in the field. For instance, whereas Duo Duo has been viewed by some as a modernist poet rebelling against revolution, I find in him also a bastard child of Baudelairean modernism and Maoist voluntarism; whereas Wang Shuo has been viewed as a frivolous “hooligan” writer, I find in him also a deadly serious prophet of an unfolding capitalist revolution as a second coming of the Cultural Revolution; whereas Zhang Chengzhi has been viewed as an outmoded Red Guard and dangerous cultural heretic in the

18

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

new age of postsocialism, I find in him also a steadfast seeker of alternative national forms, through exploring civilizational heterogeneities and subaltern differences, and radically challenging a rigid, narrow, and static conception of both literature and “China;” whereas Wang Xiaobo has been viewed as a spokesman for a burgeoning Chinese liberalism by fashioning and asserting an independent individuality in a once-closed society, I find in him also a world-weary skeptic and pessimist anticipating a dystopian continuation of a linear and progressive history. So, in the end, the cultural bastardy of all these four authors under study is at once the form and (dis)content of Chinese modernity, and behind the individual, there always stands modern history. The current book is titled Contemporary Chinese Literature, which may seem to boast a literary history possessing a comprehensive and definitive form. But it is not. Rather, it should be taken as an alternative (arguably more personal and, perhaps, more risky) perspective and intervention into an ongoing, protean, and not necessarily self-evident phenomenon called “Contemporary Chinese Literature.” That explains why I have chosen only four such cultural bastards—they are my subjects providing focusing lenses. Furthermore, in each case, my approach has been deliberately selective, and not exhaustive. What, then, exactly do I mean by the “future” in my subtitle From the Cultural Revolution to the Future? I shall refrain from offering any immediate theoretical speculations and leave my interpretations to be seeded in the subsequent individual chapters. Again, my purpose is not to close the ends, but to break confines and boundaries. After all, a book is a journey, not a catalogue or manual. One clarification, however, can be made. This “from … to … ” is not intended to denote a teleological or linear progress. This journey could lead to a nostalgic farewell, but also could lead to a déjà-vu-like reunion.

CHAPTER 2

Duo Duo: An Impossible Farewell, or, Exile between Revolution and Modernism

Begin, at the beginning that has not yet begun Reunite, reunite in the time of reunion — Duo Duo, “Northern Nights”1 This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet … But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned … This storm is what we called progress. — Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”2

E

arly in the year 1989, Duo Duo was invited to go to England to give poetry readings; this trip, his first to the West, was scheduled on June 4. It turned out that Duo Duo spent the eve of his departure on Tiananmen Square and witnessed another turn of twentieth-century Chinese history, an event that in the future would be known as June Fourth. Upon his arrival in England, he found himself, all of a sudden, the focus of Western media attention, and his identity that of a dissident poet. Soon after, he, like so many fellow members of the so-called Misty Poetry generation, such as Bei Dao, Gu Cheng, and Yang Lian, became a poet in exile, and rose from relative obscurity to international fame.

20

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

Coincidence may not be an exception. The year 1989 could be called a year of historical coincidences: it coincided with a series of anniversaries in both world and Chinese history. For instance, 1989 was the seventieth anniversary of the May Fourth movement of 1919, which, according to the standard Chinese historiography, was in fact a cultural revolution that had marked the true dawn of modern China. It was also the bicentennial of the French Revolution of 1789. But it was not mere coincidence that both spectacles, 1919 and 1789, which had long been etched into the deepest layers of the contemporary Chinese political unconscious and collective imagination, were actually invoked and replayed on Tiananmen Square in 1989. And it would not be an exaggeration to say that it is precisely through such an invocation and recuperation—as ambivalent or problematic as it might have seemed— of a certain grand vision of revolution and world history that the Tiananmen of 1989 came to world attention, acquired a universalistic look, and has, in the end, found its own place in twentieth-century world history. In fact, revolution had almost simultaneously served as both the tool and the goal of modernity in twentieth-century China. It had fundamentally altered the course of China as a modern nation and had, once and for all, put China back into the grand progress of world history—be it in a Hegelian or a Marxist sense. In the context of Tiananmen in 1989, we, again, not coincidentally, can hear the strange echo of another, not so remote historical event, that is, the 1966–1976 Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. In fact, when an English translation of Duo Duo’s poetry, titled Looking Out From Death, appeared in 1989 shortly after June Fourth, it was subtitled From the Cultural Revolution to Tiananmen Square.3 One doomed revolution, in the guise of a phantom, haunted another. Ironically, the Cultural Revolution itself had its own precedents as well, which included the Russian October Revolution of 1917 and the Paris Commune of 1871. The seizure of power during the Cultural Revolution, for instance, was widely applauded at that time as the successful appropriation of the Paris Commune’s practice of smashing the old state machine. But despite such historical precedents, the Cultural Revolution, particularly at its beginning stage, ambitiously presented itself as the summa of all the previous revolutions in world history. It thus endowed China with the power of hijacking world history in the name of “world revolution,” with the revolutionary Chinese youth—the Red Guards—as legitimate agents carrying out this task under the command of the great helmsman, Chairman Mao.

Duo Duo

●

21

This radically utopian vision was evinced, most typically, in the poetry of the Red Guards themselves during the 1966–68 peak period of the Cultural Revolution: We are the faithful Red Guards of Chairman Mao! What Could hinder our train of revolution? No, nothing ever could! Because, here we Are the mother country of the proletariats in the world And the homeland of the third milestone of Marxism and Leninism! (…) In the heart of the world revolution On the great land shone over by the red sun Our motherland is forever young Our red flag unfurls in the wind4

The style and vocabulary of such poems, which some critics have called “political fantasy verse” (zhengzhi huanxiang shi), are typical of all Red Guard poetry.5 If 1989 would eventually mark what Francis Fukuyama has called the “end of history,”6 the “political fantasy” conveyed by the Red Guard verse is exactly this kind of “end of history,” not only of Chinese history but also of world history, although in a totally opposite direction. Thus, the Cultural Revolution would be viewed as another thrust or Great Leap Forward: from history toward utopia, from the nation toward the world, via the momentum of revolution; and the subjectivity of the Red Guard generation would be formed in this progress. Indeed, we can almost sense a kind of futurism or avant-garde mechanism working here in these verses. But then, what happens after this imaginary supreme stage? Or what is to come after the “end of history”? A millenarian kingdom on earth or an end of an end? A continuous revolution—indeed, as it was called then, a “continuous revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat” (wuchan jieji zhuanzheng xia de jixu geming)—that keeps its subjects “forever young,” or an apocalyptic scene of exhaustion and decadence? Moreover, if the progress from history to utopia, from the nation to the world, is taken for granted, then, along with the end of history and the waning and decaying of the will to power or world mastery, is it not probable that all the tensions and gaps between these oppositions will reemerge and eventually make subject formation itself problematic? Despite the fact that there were poets from Duo Duo’s generation who might have touched upon this theme earlier, I believe that Duo Duo was the first and only Chinese poet who had most

22

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

consciously and effectively seen into his particular historical conditions and related them to our own contemporary time. With regard to origin, Duo Duo could have easily appeared suspect from the outset. On the one hand, his early poetry could be viewed as a bastard child born of the confluence of modernism and romanticism, flowing from different sources that represent critiques and subversions of the ideology of revolution in general and of the Cultural Revolution in particular. On the other hand, his poetry could be seen as, obviously to the regret of some critics, somewhat colored and corrupted by the same ideology that he apparently attempted to critique or to subvert. Indeed, on the same body of his poetry there can be seen a clear birthmark or imprint of some of the very logic of the Cultural Revolution and Maoism (or Mao Zedong Thought in Chinese), because of which he runs the further risk of being exposed as a disadvantaged, bad-blooded bastard of revolution and modernism. It is, however, through this very genetic impurity that Duo Duo has gained his own historical subjectivity and individual agency. The mixed legacy of the Cultural Revolution has led Duo Duo to continue to exercise and refashion this bastard subjectivity and agency, albeit on a negative path, and to develop, or, push them to their schizophrenic extremes. The same genetic impurity has exiled Duo Duo’s poetry, but also has enabled it to generate some of the most meaningful and nuanced reflections and retrospections on history and revolution, as well as on modernity and modernism, in the broad context of China and the world. It is within this context that we should consider, or reconsider, the origin and formation of Duo Duo’s singularly modernist vision from the underground of the Cultural Revolution. “The Motherland Was Led Away by Another Father”: The Birth of a Poet and the Decline of History Gregory Lee, one of the first translators and commentators of Duo Duo in English, made the following statement connecting Duo Duo’s witnessing of the June Fourth incident to the poetry he wrote during the Cultural Revolution: And in hindsight, much of his poetry may be seen as uncannily prophetic. Reading through those of his poems written in the atmosphere of terror and oppression that characterized the decade of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), one senses that history is repeating itself, that China is now being plunged back into the same old nightmare. In interpreting this nightmare Duo Duo is more than a mere poet, he is a seer.7

Duo Duo

●

23

By using the term “seer,” Lee is indirectly invoking an analogy that Arthur Rimbaud has made in his “Voyant Letters” of 1871, the same year as the Paris Commune: “I say one must be a seer, make oneself a seer.”8 And this echoes another famous declaration made by Rimbaud: “We must be absolutely modern.”9 In fact, these two maxims go hand in hand and to a certain extent have determined the whole course of Western modernist poetry since the nineteenth century. Charles Baudelaire, according to Rimbaud in this letter, was the first seer. From an ideological point of view, however, one can see that what makes the seer-poet “absolutely modern,” and different from his premodern predecessors, is his singularity. The vision that he has seen is not of anything else, but of a capitalized History unfolding on the nineteenthcentury European horizon, accompanied by a series of revolutions and counterrevolutions, and that would eventually lead to the Russian and Chinese revolutions in the twentieth century. A revelatory vision of history, of course, has been a powerful ideological medium to convey some of the most astounding messages of our time. The most well known vision in modern Chinese literature, needless to say, can be found in Lu Xun’s short story “A Madman’s Diary” (1918), which marked the beginning of modern Chinese literature itself. The diary starts with the scene in which the Madman suddenly notices the moon in the sky: Tonight the moon is very bright. I have not seen it for over thirty years, so today when I saw it I felt in unusually high spirits. I begin to realize that during the past thirty-odd years I have been in the dark.10

And this further drives the Madman to another vision: I tried to look this up, but my history has no chronology and scrawled all over each page are the words: “Confucian Virtue and Morality.” Since I could not sleep anyway, I read intently half the night until I began to see words between the lines. The whole book was filled with the two words—“Eat People.”11

Through this deranged vision, a rupture is inevitably produced, an extrahistorical or posthistorical perspective is formed, and a modern subject is born at a moment of absolute illumination. But what instantly complicates this vision or illumination is that this new modern subject should at the same time recognize his own embeddedness in premodern history: later the

24

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

Madman indeed suspects that he himself might have participated in eating his younger sister. If Lee’s equation of Duo Duo to a seer-poet is to be allowed, then the same ambiguity and agony surrounding Lu Xun’s Madman would have to haunt Duo Duo as well. Duo Duo was born in Beijing in 1951 to an intellectual family. When the Cultural Revolution broke out in the summer of 1966, he was fifteen years old, a junior high student in Beijing. That summer, like most of his contemporaries, he aspired to join the Red Guards. He experienced several “revolutionary exchanges” and traveled south to different parts of China. In 1969, he, together with his classmates, Yue Zhong and Mang Ke (both of whom also later became poets and key figures in the underground literary movement during the Cultural Revolution), voluntarily went down to the countryside in Baiyangdian, Hebei, a province bordering Beijing, to receive “reeducation” from the local peasants. Two years later, due to illness, he returned to Beijing. Duo Duo’s real creative career as a poet started in the early 1970s. Among the educated youth who found a way to remain in or later return to Beijing, many small circles (or “salons,” as some insiders would like to call them) were formed to circulate books and exchange clandestine thoughts and their own writings. Duo Duo gave his own account of this initiation by offering a whole list of books and people that had constituted the general intellectual environment in which he found himself at that time.12 On the list is a mixture of Western modernist works and the Soviet Russian literature of the “thaw,” including J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Vasily Aksyonov’s Star Ticket, Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s Babi Yar, Eugene Ionesco’s The Chairs, and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea. These works were all then translated and published as “internally distributed” books for critical usage. There are also other fellow Chinese poets from the Cultural Revolution, such as Guo Lusheng (Shi Zhi), Mang Ke, Yue Zhong (Gen Zi), and Yi Qun. Yi Qun’s long poem “The Centennial of the Paris Commune,” for instance, although still retaining orthodox content, adopted a free-verse form, and evinced a vague desire, or fantasy, one that we have discussed earlier, to bridge the gap between China and world history by seeking analogies between the Cultural Revolution and other world revolutions.13 Such attempts by Duo Duo’s slightly elder peers paved the path for a gradual transition from the Red Guard “political fantasy verse” in the late 1960s to the upcoming underground modernist poetry— Duo Duo himself soon would become a representative of it—in the early 1970s. For Duo Duo’s initiation as a poet, however, there is another fact we should take into account. Before Duo Duo ever began feeling interested in

Duo Duo

●

25

writing poetry, he was deeply interested in philosophy and political economy. From 1967 to 1969, Duo Duo was devoted to reading classical Chinese literature, and, most importantly, selected works of Mao Zedong.14 Apparently, he was quite serious about his reading of Mao, which continued even after 1969, when he was living in Baiyangdian as an educated youth. There he was even selected as one of the “enthusiastic elements studying Mao Zedong Thought.” Yet, his most decisive encounter was with the poetry of Baudelaire in 1972, as recounted by him almost twenty years later: “My boyhood was but a gloomy thunderstorm … ” In 1972 I first read poetry by Baudelaire. Well then, had my boyhood been but a note in the eulogy for Mao Zedong? While we sang each day: “Chairman Mao is like the sun,” Baudelaire said: “The sun is like a poet.”15

On many other later occasions, Duo Duo has repeatedly affirmed that reading Baudelaire (in Chinese, particularly the translation by Chen Jingrong, a female Chinese poet from the 1940s) inspired him to start writing a totally new style of poetry: As a secondary school student, he [Duo Duo] was not interested in poetry at all. The turning point came when he started to read Baudelaire: “If I had not read Baudelaire, I would probably never have started to write poetry.” He feels that he and the French poet are “kindred souls”: “between him and me, there is a kind of innate sympathetic resonance” (wo gen ta you yizhong xiantian de gongming).16

This instant sympathy and encounter between Duo Duo and Baudelaire pushed Duo Duo, again, into another moment of revelation, which marked his birth as a poet: On June 19, 1972, on the way back home from seeing a friend off at the Beijing railway station I got a line: “The windows open like eyes.” Since then, I started to write, and produced my first volume of poetry by the end of the year 1972.17

Although this line, “The windows open like eyes,” has never appeared in any of Duo Duo’s finished early poems, it nonetheless serves as an almost visionary note of Duo Duo’s appearance as a seer-poet in the mode of Rimbaudian or Baudelairean modernism. Indeed, Duo Duo’s first poems immediately strike one’s eyes with their intense, estranged, and surreal images and visions.

26

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

ADDIO (Farewell) Ahead lies the gray and vast plain field The bell sounds the evening prayer in the countryside One by one, falls upon the deserted hearts Slowly and solemnly Along with the gradually descending dusk Puzzlement, sorrowful feelings, are glittering Awakening their star-like dim lights Amen— The bell, still resounds emptily and faraway Reflecting vainly all that was not done wrong The earth under the feet forever will be the innocent witness The evening breeze blows the shoulder-length hair Those standing-still people, speechlessly facing each other Only turn around together, toward him, make a deep bow 1972

This was the very first poem that appeared in the notebook manuscript of Duo Duo’s first volume of poetry finished in 1972. And it also opens Salute: 38 Poems, his first and only volume of poetry—prior to his exile— officially published in China in 1988.18 Putting Duo Duo’s debut poem in context, one may be awed by the degree to which he had diverged from the grand vision of history set forth by the Cultural Revolution. In contrast to the Red Guard poetry style, the picture presented here appears strangely abstract, ambiguous, and elliptic, lacking any particular and direct national or historical reference. Is this a Chinese countryside scene? What are the bell-sounds for the evening prayers and the line “Amen—” about? What is the gender identity of “Those standing-still people” with “shoulder-length hair?” Also, who is “him” who appears at the end of the poem, and why do those people suddenly turn around and bow to him? Is he God? A godlike figure? Or, the personified setting sun? Then again, even the title itself remains elliptic and ambiguous: “ADDIO” was what Duo Duo first chose in his original manuscript back in 1972. This choice added yet another mystic flavor to his beginning as a poet; but in the Salute version officially published in 1988, Duo Duo changed it to the Chinese “Zaihui,” which means “farewell,” yet could also potentially mean “reunite.”19 Along with this anonymity and ambiguity, another important characteristic of this poem is the total omission of the lyric first-person subject “I” or “We,” which was frequently overused in Red Guard poetry. However, it is exactly because of the absence of “I” or “We” that a new and almost elegiac voice strangely starts to loom over the whole poem. This is accompanied

Duo Duo

●

27

by a retrospective gaze that implies the birth of a new kind of reflective consciousness, such as in the lines: “Puzzlement, sorrowful feelings, are glittering / Awakening their star-like dim lights;” and, “The bell … / Reflecting vainly all that was not done wrong.” But most important of all, this retrospective gaze charged with a new reflective consciousness appears alienated suddenly from its immediate surrounding, as if it comes from another space and time. This alienation is not clearly spelled out as rebellion but carries much ambiguity, as can be seen through the gesture of bowing itself. While the bowing might signify a gesture of breaking away from “him,” does not the same gesture also suggest an almost religious gratitude to “him”? Thus, the title “ADDIO” or “Farewell” registers not just a simple and definite act of breaking away, but an emotional complexity around this act of making “a deep bow.” It is exactly through this ambiguous alienation that the underside of revolution and history start to be revealed and a new unnamed subject is born. That is to say, within this short poem, two parallel yet opposite movements are enacted—one is the decline of history; the other is the emergence of new subjects. Yet what makes the latter new is not a definite awareness of where these subjects are headed, but rather the nascent awareness of the pastness of present history: that they are witnessing the very twilight of history and that at some point, history has suddenly lapsed from teleological progress into aimless dissolution and weary decadence. Shortly after this debut poem, Duo Duo wrote a group of short and fragmented poems between 1972 and 1974 under the general title “Recollections and Thoughts” (Huiyi yu sikao), in which he addressed the theme of awakening and alienation from history in a more concentrated way. These poems continued and developed along the lines of “ADDIO”: they were also written from a retrospective point of view, treating the Cultural Revolution almost as an already-past historical event. But a nightmarish atmosphere clearly prevails through a series of shocking visions regarding the violence unleashed by the Cultural Revolution. Hence there is a paradoxical realization of the fact that despite his alienation, the narrator was still living within a history that was decaying, but not yet actually ended. When the People Stand Up from the Hard Cheese20 The sound of singing eclipses the bloody stench of revolution August is stretched like a cruel bow The malevolent son walks out of a peasant hovel With tobacco and a parched throat The cattle have been savagely blindfolded

28

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

With blackened corpses hanging from their haunches like swollen drums Until the sacrifices behind the fences are gradually obscured Far off, is marching closer another smoking troop … 1972

Untitled21 The blood of one class has drained away The archers of another class are still loosing their arrows That dull and banal sky without any inspirations That ancient dream of China haunted by ghosts When that gray and degenerated moon Rises at the edge of deserted history In this dark empty city Again is heard the urgent knocking of red terror … 1974

Untitled22 All over the befuddled land Are the coarse faces of the people and their groaning hands Ahead of the people, is an endless expanse of suffering Barn lanterns sway in the wind It is the soundly sleeping night and the wide-open eyes You can hear the emperor’s powerful snoring with his rotting teeth 1973

Considering the circumstances in which Duo Duo wrote down these verses, they could have certainly been labeled as “counterrevolutionary,” putting the young author’s life at risk. This is true particularly of the last poem, which might have been accused of directly alluding to Mao himself, the “great helmsman” and the “glowing red sun in our heart.” Its deadly satirical power could be compared to the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam’s 1933 epigram on Stalin. Indeed, these dense, obscure, short pieces are unprecedented in modern Chinese poetry, just as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution itself was hailed as “unprecedented” (shiwuqianli). What makes the former unprecedented, however, is that Duo Duo has depicted the other side of the brave new world promised by the progressive teleology of the Cultural Revolution—vastly wasted lives and a devastated history. Deviating from the grand epic narrative of revolution, these surreal, almost apocalyptic images are collated together by a nearly elegiac tone that laments the reality

Duo Duo

●

29

underlying the utopian illusion: instead of making rational progress, the revolution has made history blunder into further fragmentation and dissolution. In the end, only an unnamed and dark, alien force of madness prevails. “The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history”23 was one of the most quoted of Mao’s maxims during the Cultural Revolution. Another of Mao’s pronouncements, “a revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery … A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another,”24 was also often chanted by the Red Guards in the summer of 1966. This was particularly so in August, when violence was spreading widely in Beijing as the Red Guards started to search houses and beat up residents. Many people committed suicide or were beaten to death. That August, referred to as “Red August” (hong bayue) by some of the Red Guards, was later called the “Red August of Terror” (kongbu de hong bayue). The poems listed above, “When the People Stand Up from the Hard Cheese” and the two “Untitled” poems, may be read as direct allusions to the memories of that period.25 Revolution degenerates into the naked and absurd terror of class struggle, and the people, instead of serving as the abstract subject or motive force in the making of history, actually suffer as acted-upon objects. Duo Duo conveys a genuine sense of exhaustion vis-à-vis the vicious circle of violence in the name of revolution and class struggle, particularly through these lines: “The sound of singing eclipses the bloody stench of revolution”; “Until the sacrifices behind the fences are gradually obscured / Far off, is marching closer another smoking troop …”; and, most of all, “The blood of one class has drained away / The archers of another class are still loosing their arrows.” He seems to suggest that it is exactly this kind of intensification of violence unleashed from the Maoist ideology of revolution—again, the so-called continuous revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat— that is responsible for the further infertility and barrenness of Chinese history. Faced with apocalyptic scenes of the nearly dead end of history brought about by revolution, what awaits the recently awakened and nascent subjects is nothing but a series of further farewells to and alienation from history. Thus supremation is replaced by marginalization and progress by decadence; the subject himself is hit by further shocks of unfamiliar experiences. In another short poem, “Blessings” (1973),26 Duo Duo imagines a farewell to the nation itself by directly personifying China as an orphan of history vis-à-vis the West in a dramatic scene of alienation, dislocation, and exile: When society had difficulty giving birth That thin, black widow once tied magic charms on a bamboo rod

30

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature And waved them at the rising moon A blood-soaked streamer emitted an endless stench Made vicious mutts everywhere bark the whole night long From that superstitious moment on The motherland was led away by another father Wandering in the parks of London and the streets of Michigan Staring with orphan’s eyes at hurried steps that come and go And again and again stuttering out old hopes and humiliations

Once again, here, birth and the initiation of the subject into history has from the very beginning been paired simultaneously with alienation from that very history. It is matched with exile to the West, where the passers-by’s indifferent, hurried steps constantly stun the consciousness of the “orphan.” What is striking in this scene is its similarity to what Walter Benjamin describes as the “shock experience which the passer-by has in the crowd” in the Western metropolitan capitals of Baudelaire’s nineteenth century.27 The crucial difference between the two, however, is that in Duo Duo’s poem the one who has this shock experience is not just any unnamed individual subject but the “motherland” itself, a personified China that has been “led away by another father” and forced into being just an unnamed “orphan” in the Western world. This bitterness of one’s own nation being abandoned and exiled to the world yet totally ignored by that world can only serve as the cause for one’s deeper despair and isolation. Duo Duo’s depiction of the “motherland” as an orphan in the world’s eyes conjures yet one more, perhaps the most uncanny vision of dislocation of all. That is, this “motherland”-“orphan” is, in fact, a projected alter ego of the young poet himself. He feels what the nation feels. That is to say, his alienation as an “orphan” of history instantly becomes a recognition of himself in the nation, the “motherland.” Such a self-recognition or double vision hence merits further attention. As we already pointed out earlier, these poems of Duo Duo’s are not immediate reactions to 1966, but rather mediated recollections, retrospections, and reflections, which is apparent from the dates of their composition and by the general title “Recollections and Thoughts.” Nevertheless, despite the efforts of locating a posthistorical vantage point, Duo Duo’s critique of the Cultural Revolution obviously comes from an insider’s instead of an outsider’s point of view. That is to say, it would be erroneous to conclude that what is expressed by these poems is a totally transcending, objective, and rational critique of the Cultural Revolution. On the contrary, it would be more challenging to ask where exactly Duo Duo himself stands vis-à-vis these surreal and distorted pictures and how he has developed his own subjectivity against where

Duo Duo

●

31

he stands. When we explore these questions further, we see an extremely nuanced, or even paradoxical and conflicted, starting point for Duo Duo. In other words, by presenting these pictures of betrayed revolution and decaying history, Duo Duo would have painfully found out that he does not and cannot possess a unified subjectivity and identity. Neither does he or can he claim a pure and innocent origin. The “malevolent son” in “When the People Stand Up from the Hard Cheese” may also portray a certain self-image of the poet back at that time. The same ambivalence and nuance has been illustrated by one of his contemporaries, the Misty Poet Bei Dao, in his poem “Accomplices”: “We are not guiltless / Long ago we became accomplices / Of the history in the mirror.”28 Hence there is a genuine bitterness in finding oneself betrayed by history and yet unable to escape from a history that was always already a part or even the very core of oneself. It is exactly this mark of history that will be, like Cain’s mark, the evidence of one’s doomed and impure (or bad) blood. Thus one cannot assert an easy binary opposition of independent individual subject versus the nation and history. Instead, as seen from “Blessings,” a farewell to the nation becomes impossible since here the nation is identified with the individual subject himself, and one’s alienation from the nation and history has, in fact, proved one’s deep embeddedness in the latter two. Therefore, the decline and decadence of history and the nation will be personally infectious as well. After having witnessed the turn of history, the nascent individual subject will inevitably have to view his own subject formation in a problematic light. He is born into history and thus has no way to quit: he is doomed to proceed forward with his head turned back to where he started, like Benjamin’s “angel of history.”29 The origin has become an original sin, and the experienced or anticipated decay of revolution and history has caused the decadence of the nascent individual subject himself. However, it is through this decadence that the subject has to develop his own identity and seek his liberation in an underground world. “I Write a Poetry of Degenerate Youth (Unchaste Poetry)”: Decadence, Night, and the Poet in the Labyrinth One of the most radical experiences of modernity in our time is the emergence of the “underground man,” who may have first found its literary incarnation in Dostoevsky’s 1864 novel Notes from the Underground. This experience and notion of modernity is closely linked with the experience of decadence in the first place. Matei Calinescu spends one whole chapter, “The Idea of Decadence,” in his Five Faces of Modernity to explore the connection between decadence and modernity. In tracing the history of the

32

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

usage of the term “decadence,” Calinescu notes in passing the relationship between decadence and revolution: In England, the OED tells us, “decadent” was used as early as 1837 (in his famous History of the French Revolution, Carlyle spoke of “those decadent ages in which no Ideal either grows or blossoms”). It may be that Carlyle had come across this word during his research on the French Revolution.30

Although Calinescu does not further pursue the relationship between decadence and revolution in the history of modernity, his comment helps us assess the problematics of subject formation in Duo Duo’s poetry against the background of the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution created its own underground world and decadence. In this case, decadence was brought out by the profound sense of disillusionment prevailing in the post-1968 period, particularly in the early 1970s, among urban youth across the nation. As for the capital city, Beijing, after its heyday as the center of the Cultural Revolution, with a large number of the young population being sent down to the countryside, it also suddenly appeared deserted. While revolutionary zeal and enthusiasm had faded, skepticism and cynicism started to rise. Despite the official political rhetoric that was prevalent in everyday life, the revolution itself was pretty much stranded. The red sun, Mao himself, was ailing, almost completely withdrawn from public view. People were already waiting for the arrival of some kind of an end and some kind of a new beginning. In other words, during the later years of the Cultural Revolution, things had gone awry, were breaking from the designed course, and were allowing the silent germination of anonymous underground subjects. That transitional experience of underground subject formation is exactly what Duo Duo strived to record in his poetry from that particular period. After his initial “Recollections and Thoughts,” Duo Duo shifted his focus to the theme of new subject formation amid declining and stagnant history, which is first reflected in a series of poems concerning the new subject’s relationship with the sun. In “Ah, the Sun” (1972),31 a poem bearing a direct association with the theme of “thaw,” we have already seen such a bold and upfront gesture of awakening and rebellion: Younger brothers are already fully-grown With their long limbs and indignant noses Take a great wide brush and write: TODAY While still facing, as always Facing the forest keepers in their green uniforms—

Duo Duo

●

33

In a less vocal and yet equally telling fashion, at the end of a long love poem, “Honeyweek” (1972),32 Duo Duo recounts what happens on the seventh day of this souring love affair: Redrawing a faith, we march into Sunday (…) We argue: who are the worst bastards in the world Number one: Poets Number two: Women The result is satisfying Yes, we are bastard sons and daughters Facing the east where no sun rises, We start to do morning exercises—

He implies in this last stanza that the subjects’ becoming bastards is the only logical result of “Facing the east where no sun rises” and that in turn “We” ought to accept this result as a new identity. The same bitterness and irony appear in another short poem, “Summer” (1975)33: Still the flowers put forth their false blooms And the hateful trees are still ceaselessly swaying And ceaselessly dropping their unfortunate children The sun has already scaled the wall and fled like a martial arts master Leaving behind the youth, facing the melancholy sunflowers …

Before and during the Cultural Revolution, the juxtaposed images of the sun and the sunflowers had been appropriated as the most common simile to refer to the relationship between Mao and the Chinese youth, who were regarded as Mao’s children. However, here, for the first time, the youth, like those melancholy sunflowers, have to face the fact that the sun can no longer be taken as either a constant or as real. Each young person senses that he or she may be betrayed and deserted by the sun and thus possesses no certainty about his or her own individual future. In another poem, “To the Sun” (1973),34 which directly addresses the sun in second person, Duo Duo questions the omnipotence of the sun as the sole legitimate guide and supervisor of the young generation: Giving us time, letting us labor You sleep long in the dark night, pillowing on our hopes Baptize us, make us believe Under your benediction, we were born and then die (…)

34

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature Adoring fame, you encourage us to be brave Caressing everyone’s head, you value the ordinary You create, rising in the East You are unfree, like a universally circulating coin!

The true critical power of this poem comes from the last line. As almost the entire poem sounds like a reformulated ode to the omnipresence and ominipotence of the sun, echoing the then orthodox popular eulogy of Chairman Mao as the red sun, the last line, however, suddenly exposes an epiphanic realization of the tragic fate of the sun itself. We find an echo of this same realization, although more weary and melancholy, in the following lines from the poem, “Untitled” (1976):35 The past sinks into silence without any reason Along with the principle of the sun shining all over the earth And the dreams once written in the books. They once existed and vanished subjectively In the permanent graveyard of time

It seems that one has indeed reached the midnight of the Cultural Revolution and of history in general. No longer being able to have faith in the sun, the individual is clearly overwhelmed with an almost dizzying sense of loss and powerlessness. It should be kept in mind that Duo Duo’s main objective here is not merely to confront or expose the supposed tyranny of the sun with a moralizing tone. Instead, he takes the new historical situation of the setting sun as the background against which the task of this new subject formation and individual development is to be brought into focus. The green fields are like thoughts that are slowly calming down Constructions are like an unending dusk When the future is marching closer, like a troop You, you are like someone who is pushed onto an unfamiliar side path In that remote alley which leads you toward growing up The lights of all the households are isolated There is only the shepherd, gripping a red whip-stock Ah, he is guarding the dark night, he is guarding the darkness—

The above poem, “At Parting” (1972),36 shares a thematic and formal continuity with the other poems that we have discussed from “Recollections and Thoughts.”37 The background or setting in the poem is, like in many of the

Duo Duo

●

35

other poems, filtered by a rather private perspective that focuses mainly on the night, the darkness, or the side path, the other side of reality. But what makes this poem distinct is that here, there is a subtle constructive process going on; a new individual subjectivity is quietly and persistently striving for its own formation.38 It is undertaken not under or facing the sun, but entirely in the dark, unseen yet felt, less vocal yet more thought through and more persistent. Although the subject is “like someone who is pushed onto an unfamiliar side path,” nevertheless, this “unfamiliar side path” or “remote alley” seems to be the only path the subject would actively choose for himself against the “future” that “is marching closer, like a troop.” In this respect, the title “At Parting” echoes Duo Duo’s debut, “ADDIO,” both poems suggesting a determination of embarking on a divergent path with regard to history and future. Also similar to “ADDIO,” toward the end of “At Parting” there appears an equally unidentified and ambiguous figure: this time he is a “shepherd” who is “gripping a red whipstock” and “guarding the dark night” and the “darkness.” Again, Duo Duo brings to us this paradoxical existence, which has gone beyond the sphere of normal cognition yet always lingers there like an ineradicable shadow, and makes us wonder exactly what relation this shadow bears to the newly formed subjectivity. Eventually, dusk and night become the dominant, often-nightmarish, and threatening background against which each individual, particularly if he is a poet, has to set out his own agenda. Such is the case in “Night”(1973):39 In the night full of symbols The moon is like the pale face of a patient Like a mistaken, shifting time Death, stands in front of the bed like a doctor: Some merciless feelings Some terrible changes in the hearts Moonlight softly coughs on the empty space in front of the house Ah moonlight, is hinting at the clearly seen exile …

However, unlike the poems in “Recollections and Thoughts,” night now also offers protection from being exposed to the sun. And, most importantly, it provides a bed for unnamed inspirations and revelations, such as “the night full of symbols” and “Some merciless feelings / Some terrible changes in the hearts,” which strongly resemble the process of a new kind of modernist verse making itself. Thus, in another short poem also titled

36

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

“Night” (1977),40 night itself resembles a poet in the agonizing process of creation: It once lingered in a place of misery Left unconscious and unintelligible black spots on the memory Like a poet, it could not sleep, tossing In and out the ancient rooms of dreams …

That is to say, this artificially prolonged night has provided a new intellectual enticement of adventuring into an underground world where a certain freedom is to be granted in the depths of the dark. While “tossing / In and out the ancient rooms of dreams,” the insomniac poet is forced to produce some neverbefore-seen visions, which hopefully may provide an exit from the labyrinth of the night. Hence the paradox: in order to break out of this labyrinth, the poet must sink even deeper into it. Indeed this echoes Lu Xun’s “A Madman’s Diary” as well as Rimbaud’s description of the modern poet as a seer: The poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all senses. All forms of love, suffering, and madness. He searches himself … Because he reaches the unknown! … He reaches the unknown, and when, bewildered, he ends by losing the intelligence of his visions, he has seen them.41

But unlike Rimbaud, who displays a self-consciously Promethean gesture by his “derangement of all senses,” Duo Duo looks at this “derangement” with a much more mixed and always-conflicting emotion. To Duo Duo, this derangement is, first of all, a curse inflicted by history on him. Only then does it become apparent that this is also his only way to preserve himself and to transcend history. And only at the very last, underneath the equally woeful tone of his poems with regard to the uncertainty and futility of a poet’s fight against such a night of history, there can be discerned an extremely subdued, although no less haughty, voice that prides itself in its unwillingness to entirely surrender. We see more of this complexity over the poet’s role and identity in the following poems: Poet42 1 Bathed in moonlight, I am hailed as a wimp-emperor Succumbing to bee-like words Swarming and poring over my young body They bore into me, ponder me Reduce me to a do-nothing 1973

Duo Duo

●

37

2 Wine, has not fulfilled the poet’s wishes Dusk again is closing one day’s sorrow in a rush Ah the futile years spent in the china shops Perhaps, this is our capital city And its literature … 1974

Dusk43 1 Loneliness is secretly awakening Details are also quietly going on The poet twitches, like a beetle Producing unknown feelings In the dusk which is as usual broken by the servant … 1973

Dusk44 Following the green ray of the sun Once more, in my subtle heart, the symbols are set alight: Illusions, begin to move in and out of the forest of thought Riding on the backs of countless stampeding wild beasts And bathing in the hazy sunset The golden dust of twilight All the images attached upon my eyes Are so profound and so rich As if many strangers Are slowly walking toward me From their voices As if those red and black Sick thorns In the valleys Are secretly spreading and surrounding me … 1974

These poems tell us much about the very process of the poet’s everyday creation. It is almost exclusively conducted in the dusk or at night and it is almost always conducted with a poignant agony, without knowing what exactly the outcome will be. More significantly, beneath his creative and active persona, the poet seems to possess a deeply rooted passivity and

38

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

negativity. The creation of poetry very often is just a reaction from one’s own insect or vegetable instinct: he is succumbing to the bee-like words swarming and poring over on his body, he twitches like a beetle producing unknown feelings, and his visions are those sick thorns that secretly spread and surround him. In other words, although the poet feels some kinds of changes going on which may enrich his interiority, he cannot be sure on what ground he can rightly justify his own endeavor. This creative activity, lacking any universal criteria, has undoubtedly further isolated and alienated him from his surroundings. While the night has made him a seer-poet, it has also deprived him of any chance to land on solid ground and to draw on other stable resources. All of this makes poetry writing a seemingly hopeless gamble. Here we shall dwell for a moment on the theme of decadence and night itself, by putting it back in its historical context. If we say that the Cultural Revolution itself was an avant-garde action of pursuing modernity with radical antitraditionalism, the decadence of the revolution does not automatically negate this radicalism. On the contrary, it only serves as momentary evidence that the nation has so thoroughly isolated itself from both the world and tradition. Neither the revolutionary poetry of that time nor the classical or modern Chinese literary traditions can provide any guidance for the young poet. In his effort to cope with the novel reality he is facing, Duo Duo also finds himself in a dead end. He has become a true orphan of history and a loner in poetic experimentation, both in terms of representing the nation and in terms of justifying his own individual existence. In order to beat this dead end and break out from isolation, one has to reach out from the nation itself and find analogies between one’s own historical condition and that of others. This, in turn, requires one to historicize and allegorize one’s own subjectivity with regard to the relationship between the nation and the world. So, it is through this tunnel of darkness that Duo Duo searches for foreign traditions. Just as he had intuitively found a kindred spirit in Baudelaire, the inventor of the flowers of evil and the observer of the Paris spleen, now he also finds correspondence and sympathy between himself and Marina Tsvetaeva, the modern Russian poetess who witnessed and suffered through the Russian Revolution, which has long been viewed as the precedent of the Chinese Revolution. Through the prism of her fate and poetry, Duo Duo gains a historical perspective into revolution as a twentieth-century world phenomenon. Duo Duo dedicated his second notebook of poetry, written in 1973, to Tsvetaeva.45 The following poem, “Handicraft,”46 is a special tribute to her, both spiritually and stylistically:

Duo Duo

●

39

Handicraft After Marina Tsvetaeva I write a poetry of degenerate youth (Unchaste poetry) I write a poetry raped by poets In a long narrow room And dismissed by cafés to street corners My indifferent No longer remorseful poetry (Itself a story) My poetry that is read by no one Just like the history of a story My poetry that has lost pride Has lost love (My aristocratic poetry) She, will finally be taken as a bride by a peasant She, is my wasted days … 1973

Strange as this affinity that a young Chinese poet during the Cultural Revolution has for Tsvetaeva may appear, ultimately it proves to be one of the most memorable cross-cultural fruitions in modern Chinese poetry. Duo Duo may not be the first poet in modern China to identify himself with Baudelaire, although he might be the one who eventually stands closest to that French poet in the genealogy of Chinese modernism. It may, however, be true that Duo Duo was the first person to really discover Tsvetaeva and incorporate her into the creation of a distinctively new lyric voice. Through a persona, Duo Duo thus summarizes and defines directly the nature of the poetry that he had been writing so far in the underground. What is striking in this definition is that by echoing Tsvetaeva, Duo Duo presents his own poetry as the story of a woman’s fate. It is, moreover, a story of a woman of aristocratic origins who has degenerated and lost her innocence, pride, and hope. Indeed it is equally intriguing that here, Duo Duo, a young twenty-two year old, a child of Mao, a “new man” brought up by socialism, would now turn to identify himself with one who had a noble origin from the “old society” or from “before the revolution.” In fact, this poem should be read as an allegory of disjunction during the general upheavals of history and revolution in our modern times. One way of reading it is to take this disjunction as existing between the individual and the history where he (she) is situated. While history has been

40

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

involved in a nonstop series of changes, movements, and turmoils, the individual’s inner world lags behind, becoming stagnant and unable to renew itself. This appears to be the same personal tragedy that Tsvetaeva suffered through the Russian Revolution, since she could not keep up with the accelerating pace of history. Yet there is a more daring reading of this disjunction. Can the “She,” the poetry that Duo Duo is making after Tsvetaeva, also symbolize the stagnant and spiteful condition that China as a nation suffered during the waning stages of the Cultural Revolution, as well as the more general fate that modern China has suffered in spite of its successive revolutions? If we read the poem in this sense, the degeneration of youth and poetry coincides with— instead of contradicting—what has happened to China as a nation versus the world. Here, again, we find that the poet/subject becomes a national subject or China itself, the same as in “Blessings,” where China, the motherland, is depicted as an orphan “led away by another father.” It seems that in both poems, the identity of the poet and his poetry has been closely intertwined with the identity of China as a nation in the world. Again, the ambiguity of the poet’s own identity surfaces. Duo Duo, as a poet, finds in despair that he himself has been plunged back into his own history just as he wants to break out and be liberated from its confinement. In the end, the poetry that he is writing is like the nation itself, amounting to nothing but “wasted days.” There is a deeply felt pessimism or fatalism underneath the feminine elegiac tone. But in the meantime, by allowing himself to write after Tsvetaeva, Duo Duo is obviously trying to reach out for an alternative space in which to liberate his historically conditioned being, or at least for a vantage point to reexamine the origin of the history that he is situated in and conditioned by. This is a project with double or paradoxical objectives: the first is futureoriented and utopian; the second, past- and present-focused, is historical. Either way, it suggests an attempt to pull the nation out of its isolation and dark night by placing it in the grand picture of world history. Only by doing this can both the nation and the individual be illuminated and rescued. We shall continue to explore the paradoxical nature of this project in the discussion below. “Ah, Noble Marguerite, Ignorant Marguerite”: Intertextuality and Negotiation between the Nation and the World If in the poems of Duo Duo discussed so far we have found a strong critique of the nation and history, underneath this critique we also find an equally strong urge to reach the world and utopia. One fact, however, must be pointed out in advance: for Duo Duo and his generation, Russia’s presence

Duo Duo

●

41

versus the West has to a great extent complicated the whole picture, since the Russian Revolution has occupied a stronghold in the minds of many of Duo Duo’s contemporaries, and served as a landmark for their understanding of the course of world history in the twentieth century. Perhaps not purely due to coincidence, as we have already seen, the two foreign poets with whom Duo Duo chose to identify himself at the beginning of his writing career are Baudelaire and Tsvetaeva, who stand at two historical poles of modernities and modernisms. Duo Duo’s different relationships with them also exhibit that his reaching out from the nation and to the world is not a uni-dimensional affair, but a multiply mediated and dialectical one. Let us further discuss the sympathy that Duo Duo found between himself and Tsvetaeva. In “Handicraft,” Duo Duo presents his poetry as female, which to a certain extent has introduced into it a kind of amorous feeling. In fact this amorous feeling can also be seen as directly addressed to Tsvetaeva herself, which is revealed even more explicitly in a poem titled “Sad Marina” (1973):47 “Marina, I love you” Like yesterday, she gives her moist lips to me That sober, that easy “I belong to you, Marina” Like yesterday, her blue gray eyes are staring at the far away No fortune, no fame … “Don’t abandon me, Marina” Like yesterday, she is still in my arms No answer, no refusal “Marina, don’t abandon me” Like yesterday, her blue gray eyes are staring at the far away No fortune, no fame …

If we believe that this Marina indeed refers to Marina Tsvetaeva, this love mirrors more the first-person lyric subject’s own fate than anything else. Duo Duo recognizes that what has most likely doomed Marina would equally be in the offing for him. This realization in turn helps him prepare for his own future. By appropriating the Russian poetess’s fate into the Chinese context, Duo Duo projects the present of China onto a comparative historical screen. Intertextuality becomes, for Duo Duo, the most immediate way to make sense of the labyrinth that he is in. Another text which could help us see this mechanism of intertextuality is a long poem, “Doctor Zhivago” (1974),48 which reflects upon the Russian Revolution as well as the fate of, mainly, Tsvetaeva, but also of many other Silver Age poets, including Konstantin Balmont, Alexander Blok, Valery

42

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

Bryusov and Sergei Esenin, as Duo Duo calls them, “a generation of decadent Russian poets.”49 This poem is divided, accordingly, into three parts: A, B, C. Part A reads like a summary of and commentary on the Russian Revolution itself: The year of nineteen seventeen descended On the sober and desolate land of the beginning of this century The heavy-hearted attention of history, moved to the East (…) A strange baby was born like this Descending from a clay womb Into the cold candlelight of the Winter Palace This rigid baby who could not get freedom Used his first cry to curse To shock—the whole world blessed by God This stubborn baby in a pool of blood Was what had been conceived long since And had been pushed to birth with violence by country folk That is: The International Proletariat (…) From then on history had been painted by artists and painting workers As red noons Red gravestones of predecessors, red Swords of revenge of the martyrs

Just like Boris Pasternak’s novel, from which the poem derives its title, there is something very unorthodox and ambivalent about this depiction. It would be certainly wrong to say that it is entirely counterrevolutionary. In fact the poem narrates the revolution in a very sympathetic and understanding tone. For example, by viewing the revolution as a revenge against “the whole world blessed by God,” Duo Duo seems to imply that the Russian Revolution was actually a (il)legtimate experiment in competing with the West by taking a different historical course. It is against this background that Duo Duo gives a concentrated description of Tsvetaeva’s personal tragedy in the second half of part B: Still noble, still sorrowful Marina Tsvetaeva Was seeing off the chariot of youth

Duo Duo

●

43

While begging with indifferent expression In a Bolshevik spring She is holding the flower basket made by her daughter This is Tsvetaeva Who died in poverty and chastity (…) Leaving behind her proud heartbreaking verses Like love, like disciples Wandering on the Kremlin Square in solitude Around which the white snow wall of Communism has been silently erected

If in part A there is a certain sympathy of tone toward the revolution, and even a kind of emotional identification of himself with “This stubborn baby in a pool of blood,” in parts B and C, Duo Duo shifts his perspective and sides with those who fell victim to the revolution as single individuals. Cannot this be read, again, as an imaginary autobiographical account of China and Duo Duo himself ? Through the prism of Tsvetaeva and the Russian Revolution, Duo Duo has attempted to give a diagnosis of the predicament of the Cultural Revolution as well as of his own generation who grew up experiencing it, and whose fate has also been closely bound up with that of the nation and history. In the end, the fate of Tsvetaeva and the Russian Revolution, like a mirror, proves to Duo Duo that the revolutions in Russia and in China have failed to achieve vanguard status for these two nations in world history. They have only further walled themselves into a deeper isolation from the world, which turns out to be, in fact, embodied in the West. Even if Duo Duo’s sympathetic love for Marina turns out to be a doomed, tragic self-recognition, this self-recognition, along with his critique of the revolution from a historical and intertextual perspective, has also inspired, and even intensified, a utopian longing: to reach out for the world. To be more accurate, this is a world as seen and represented by the West, But Tsvetaeva and the Russian Revolution have served as a dialectical link for Duo Duo to make that leap. Such a cosmopolitan longing and outlook is most curiously sketched in his series of short verses under the general title of “Kaleidoscope” (1973).50 Here are some excerpts: A (…) Ah, Paris Is the Paris in its old days, the Paris in its impressions The morning of Paris has fainted under the gas light It is the decadent Paris, the Paris that has spent all its talents The conquest of Paris is already past— (…)

44

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature B Germany has lost Germany is sacred and sad Like a black cello Germany, a depressed talent C With perfumed sideburns, you Stroll in the museum of the past days You, an English gentleman Occasionally will again reveal The manner of a British pirate (…) D It is a luxurious place It attracts sailors from all around the world When gold coins rain down from the sky The people there will just humorously open umbrellas It is full of joy, it Is called America

Given the fact that these were written at the time when China was in selfimposed cultural isolation from all Western influence, it is understandable that the young poet has spun his imagination about the West. However, beneath these collaged, often seemingly exoticized and cartoonish pictures, we nevertheless discern a uniquely keen historical consciousness. Even in the fanciful depiction of America as a golden land blessed with fortune and joy, for instance, by saying that “When gold coins rain down from the sky / The people there will just humorously open umbrellas,” one can still read between the lines and perceive a subtly ironic tone that could have eventually developed into a critical one. Therefore we can say that Duo Duo’s longing for the world or the West is not as naively romanticized as it may first appear. On the contrary, it is equally charged with irresolvable tensions or dilemmas. And at no place are these better demonstrated than in the poem “The Travels of Marguerite with Me” (1974).51 If, as we have already seen, Duo Duo’s love for the “Sad Marina” tells of the emotional affinity he felt with Tsvetaeva, then Duo Duo’s “kindred” identification with Baudelaire is revealed as a much more complex and troubled one in his imaginary travels with this “Marguerite.”

Duo Duo

●

45

The poem is relatively long, divided into two sections, A and B. For the convenience of discussion, I shall quote below the first few stanzas of part A: A Like you promised the sun Get crazy, Marguerite: For you, I will rob A thousand of the most extravagant jewelers in Paris I will cable you a hundred thousand Wet kisses from a Caribbean beach If you will bake me some English pastry Fry two Spanish steaks And from your father’s study Steal me a little Turkish tobacco And then, we shall flee The wedding’s hullabaloo And go to the Black Sea To Hawaii, to the great Nice With me, your humorous Faithless lover Go to the seaside To a nude beach To the coffee-colored beach that is the poet’s Stroll around, kiss, leave Straw hats, a pipe, and random thoughts behind … Will you? You, my Marguerite Together with me, go to a country of warmth and passion?

Many Western critics of Duo Duo have commented on this poem and have noted that the female addressee bears a Western name, which implies that she is the lyric subject’s Western lover. But no one has noticed that “Marguerite” is actually borrowed from Baudelaire. This Marguerite is none other than the addressee in Baudelaire’s “Autumn” in The Flowers of Evil, and “Autumn” is among the very nine poems of Baudelaire that Duo Duo read in Chinese translation back in 1972.52 Hence, an intertextual framework should be immediately established here, as we did with “Handicraft,” “Sad Marina,” and “Doctor Zhivago.” Therefore, the lyric subject “I” in part A is not only designated as Duo Duo himself or as an anonymous Chinese poet writing in the underground during the Cultural Revolution, but it also evokes Baudelaire, the first modernist poet, or, “a lyric poet in the age of high capitalism”—using Walter Benjamin’s phrase—from Paris, the “capital of the nineteenth century.”

46

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

In other words, it seems that Duo Duo has temporarily suspended his national and historical identity and has, in a notably carefree fashion, adopted a universal, cosmopolitan perspective and tone. But any sensitive reader should instantly register that this universal, cosmopolitan subjectivity and perspective is itself a product modeled on a specifically Western historical period, the nineteenth century. During that period, capitalism and its attendant system of colonialism were in their global heyday, with the West already establishing its hegemony of self-claimed universalism at the expense of the non-West. This convergence of perspectives is of the utmost importance in our assessment of all the extravagant, facile, lighthearted, and fast-paced displays and consumptions of exotic scenes in part A. In fact, without part B, part A itself would have stood very much reminiscent of Baudelaire’s “Invitation to the Voyage” in its escapist or idealistic tone. But before we go deeper regarding this comparison, let us now turn to part B, which is quoted here in full: B Ah, noble Marguerite Ignorant Marguerite Together with me, go to the Chinese countryside To the peaceful, impoverished countryside To take a look at those Honest and ancient people Those wooden, hapless peasants Peasants, my love Do you know about peasants Those sons of suffering In the blaze of the sun and fate In their black superstitious hovels Have generously lived so many years Go there and take a look Melancholy Marguerite Poetess Marguerite I hope you will always remember That painful picture That guiltless land: The pockmarked wife prepares the offerings for thanksgiving Washes her children, bakes the red-hot holy cakes Silently holds a rural ritual And then starts the working people’s Miserable, holy evening meal …

Starting from the very first line of this part, although the invitation, “Together with me, go to …,” remains the same, both the destination and

Duo Duo

●

47

the tone become drastically different. Maghiel van Crevel has much to say about this discrepancy between the two parts: But in part B the story changes radically … Now he compellingly suggests that she accompany him to what is a different world from their extravagances: the Chinese countryside … His words still hint at sympathy for Marguerite, not hostility. At the same time it is hard not to feel that his loyalties lie much more with the guiltless Chinese soil than with the foreign nude beach … After the boisterous part A, the restrained passion of part B has the effect of the tears of a clown. In retrospect, the skin-deep romanticism and exoticism of part A can be viewed as an unsmiling tongue-in-cheek performance.53

Peter Button has a similar reading: If the first of these two poems seems to have deployed traditional colonial modes of representation of the non-European world … [t]his last journey is utterly lacking in the giddy abandon of the first poem, nor does the voice of this second poem partake of the conspiratorial intimacy that the two lovers share in poem A … Where in the first poem the native inhabitants of other lands were rendered as benign aestheticized projections for the visual consumption of the two lovers, the Chinese peasants in this second poem acquire an unsettling, disturbing depth. What is central to these two poems is the lyric voice that occupies the locus of mediation between the two worlds—in the first, a positive, self-affirming gaze unproblematically negotiates a radical plenitude of difference, and in the second, that plenitude of difference collapses into a negative, ever-“ancient” synchronic essence. The exteriorized horizonless subjectivity that dances unhindered across a global expanse of diversity returns to its provisional origin in the recessed interior of the “small dark room of superstition” [Button is referring to the line “In their black superstitious hovels” in a different English translation] … It is precisely the inscription within the hegemonic discourse of the West and the plenitudinous gaze it would seem to afford that enables the construction of a national character by mediating between a universalized human subject and the particular cultural identities that remain as yet beyond its pale.54

Through a Lacanian reading (in regard to the relationship between gaze and subjectivity), Button deftly pinpoints the ambiguity of the lyric voice or the subjectivity-charged “plenitudinous gaze” that mediates between the two worlds in parts A and B. Now, in this light, let us come back to the earlier proposed comparison between “The Travels of Marguerite with Me” and “Invitation to the Voyage.” We will give another reading of the relationship between the world and the nation by spinning the dialectic between utopia and history. If part A of

48

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

“The Travels of Marguerite with Me” fits perfectly in the category of utopia, part B of the same poem fits perfectly in the category of history. And a part B with a historical dimension is exactly what was lacking in Baudelaire’s “Invitation to the Voyage,” which also explains very convincingly the different historical conditions and moments in which Western modernism and nonWestern modernism are situated. Even though Baudelaire might have been suffering from spleen and agony in metropolitan Paris, he could nevertheless afford to forget reality and indulge himself, even if just momentarily, in a utopian and exotic voyage. Yet the lyric subject in part A of Duo Duo’s poem might have known from the very beginning that his romantic invitation was perhaps just a fantastic projection, or parody, of the Baudelairean “Invitation to the Voyage.” That is to say, the romantic subjectivity that a Chinese subject can attain might itself merely be phantom rather than real. Hence, beneath the sharp contrast between the spontaneity of part A and the somberness of part B lies a poignant historical irony. A knowledge of this only becomes apparent in part B, which presents the grim picture of China as the backwater nation in reality, and indeed, as the “countryside” of the world. Thus the picture presented in part B to a great extent upsets the endless self-generative capacity of the universalist gaze, since this gaze can only gloss over the surface, not penetrate to the essence. In other words, part B supplies a moral and historical critique of the ahistoricity of the utopian picture of part A and, at the same time, marks where the lyric subject really belongs. Here we can introduce a curious comparison between Marina and Marguerite. In fact, does not the pleading tone that the speaker adopts toward Marguerite in part B remind one of and yet differentiate itself from the tone used by Duo Duo in the “Marina” poems we discussed above? At first glance, while Marguerite does not really reside in the same territory as the poet, the poet apparently shares much common ground with Marina. If Marguerite represents an exotic yet elusive ideal that lures Duo Duo with its transnational and cosmopolitan ahistoricity, then Marina represents a reality that is bounded to nation and history, at once sorrowful, yet much more tangible, and possessing an emotional depth. While Duo Duo may be attempting to chase after these two different objectives, he is experiencing great difficulty in pursuing these two different directions at the same time. Hence we see the agonized discrepancy between the two parts of “The Travels of Marguerite with Me.” However, what is fascinating is that in part B of the latter poem, as the “noble Marguerite / Ignorant Marguerite” gradually journeys into the heartland of the Chinese countryside, she is transformed into the “Melancholy Marguerite / Poetess Marguerite.” In other words, once entering the realm of history and the nation, she is transformed by this journey into a different subject. She now shares the poet’s secret burden, even if not totally regaining that amorous intimacy

Duo Duo

●

49

that they once shared in their global travels in part A. This transformation may actually be seen as a convergence between Marguerite and Marina, which, in turn, only brings all the “travels” and movements—spatial and emotional—to a final standstill. That is to say, although the poet cherishes a great desire for the cosmopolitan world, which epitomizes liberation from the stagnant history of the Chinese nation, ultimately he realizes that he has no way to really escape from the latter. The poet’s ultimate preference is for Marina, who is herself “a story” and has “the history of a story” (“Handicraft”). Marguerite has to become Marina, who, as we have discussed earlier, comes to represent the poet’s self-acknowledgment of his own embeddedness in history and the nation. What we encounter here is, again, an impossible situation. On the one hand, if part A may be seen as the expression of a natural longing to reach the world, to rid oneself of one’s national identity and become a universal subject, part B must serve as a subversion of this longing by showing the reality of the nation itself. From this perspective, an escape from the nation to the world eventually ends up with a return to the nation. On the other hand, however, this sorrowful picture of the nation in part B, conversely, could serve as evidence of the revolution’s ultimate failure to fulfill the promise of progress it delivered to the nation as well as the nation’s own fundamental incapacity to self-regenerate. And this latter realization may in turn call up another question: could it be part B, not part A, that has presented a phantom of history, instead of representing a true history? If, as we already discussed earlier in this chapter, Duo Duo depicts China during the Cultural Revolution as an orphan who has long lagged behind the fasterpaced world, then we may have to admit that it is the world that represents the real history on its teleological scale, whereas a stagnant China is deeply stuck in not so much a reality as a miserably failed utopia. If so, that might be the most despairing nightmare of all: by a sleight of hand, the relationship between history and utopia has been completely confused; the torn subject might find himself untrue as well, a fiction or a mistake from the very outset. In such a situation, only hallucination and madness remain for the subject. Only in this second sense can we partially agree with van Crevel’s comments: Just like the world across the borders in part A, the Chinese Peasant of part B is a caricature, glorified by the narrating agent’s sympathy in a way reminiscent of Communist propaganda. As such, part B is no less romanticist, exoticist or cliché than part A.55

It is actually true that if we examine closely the picture of the Chinese countryside presented in part B, we can find that this picture is not a realistic

50

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

one at all, and that it bears many non-Chinese imprints in such lines as “The pockmarked wife prepares the offerings for thanksgiving / … bakes the red-hot holy cakes.” It seems to be implying that even such a supposedly genuine representation of the reality of the Chinese nation is a borrowed one, while the “authentic” China remains unrepresentable. This raises an almost impossible barrier for Duo Duo. Since the nation and the world, history and utopia, romanticism and modernism have already become so deeply intertwined, any attempt on the part of the subject to discriminate between them is pure madness. And I see this as the ultimate burden that Duo Duo has to carry in the course of his subject formation as a poet. In a process of violently oscillating between the poles of the nation and the world, the final problem comes down to the very possibility of a stable subjectivity itself. “Of All You Find Contemptible, Nothing Will Ever Vanish”: Negative Subjectivity, Madness, and a Never-Ending Journey If we continue the arguments from the last section, we arrive at a unique and strange conclusion: that is, the construction of individual identity and subjectivity for Duo Duo is an impossible one, since it works at the same time also as the deconstruction of that very identity and subjectivity. It is like Penelope’s web in the story of Odysseus: all the weaving done by day will only be undone at night. Yet it would be equally wrong to assume that this is an entirely hopeless or futile project, since it is precisely during this dual process of construction/ deconstruction that some new and complex subjectivity has indeed been bred. The real challenge will be, then, how to name and situate it. We come to a meaningful turning point of time and history: 1976, the year that saw the first Tiananmen incident, the death of Mao, and subsequently the demise of the Cultural Revolution itself. Accordingly, Duo Duo’s poem “Instructions,” written in this year, offers a vantage point from which to summarize and to further explore the contradictions and complexities surrounding his generation’s subject formation against the background of the Cultural Revolution and Chinese modernity. In fact, the same year also saw Bei Dao’s famous declaration of “The Answer,” which soon became one of the first rebellious outcries to surface from the underground and enter the public consciousness. In fact, this poem served as the memento and signifying milestone of the Misty Poetry for one entire generation in the post–Cultural Revolution era. But we shall see some significant differences in terms of historical orientation between Bei Dao’s “The Answer” and Duo Duo’s “Instructions,” which did not appear in print form until 1985.

Duo Duo

●

51

In Bei Dao’s “The Answer,” there underlies a skeptical, yet resolutely heroic tone. It is reflected in the most quoted two lines of the poem: “Let me tell you, the world, / I—do—not—believe!,” and also in the heretical questions that come before: The Ice Age is over now, Why is there ice everywhere? The Cape of Good Hope has been discovered, Why do a thousand sails contest the Dead Sea?

But, most importantly, it is echoed in the concluding stanza: A new conjunction and glimmering stars Adorn the unobstructed sky now: They are the pictographs from five thousand years. They are the watchful eyes of future generations.56

Despite strong sentiments of modernist disbelief, the ending decisively invokes “A new conjunction” and puts hope in the continuation of tradition and future, hence retaining a residual humanistic faith in teleological history itself. Now let us come to Duo Duo’s “Instructions” (1976).57 Considering the importance of this poem, I shall quote it in full: Instructions In remembrance of decadence Just in one night, the wound had opened And all the books on the bookshelves had betrayed them Only the greatest singer of our time With a hoarse voice, bowing down to their ears, was singing: The night of Jazz, the night of the century They had been excluded by the high-class jungle of society And were limited to this theme: It was only to serve as a foil to the world’s misery That they appeared, and misery Thus became their lifelong duty Who says that the theme of their early life Was a bright one, even to this day they still think That is a pernicious saying In nights without any artistic plots That lamplight had its source in illusion What they saw was always A monotonous string of falling snow appearing in the winters

52

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature They had to go on playing tirelessly Wrestle with what fled, and Live together with what could not be remembered Even if they had recovered their earliest longing Emptiness, had already become their lifelong stain Their misfortune came from the misfortune of ideals But their pain was self-inflicted It was self-consciousness that made their thinking be sharpened And lose blood because of this self-consciousness But they could not be reconciled with tradition Although long before they were born The world had already existed uncleanly for ages They still wanted to find The first criminal who had discovered “truth” And the time needed to wait Before tearing down the world Facing the shackles around their neck Their only madness Was to pull them tighter But they were not comrades Their scattered destructive power Had not nearly seized society’s attention And they were only reduced to being criminals of the mind Only because: they had abused allegories But in the end, they would pray in the classroom of thought And faint away when they see clearly their own handwriting: They have not lived in the time arranged by the Lord They are men who were born by mistake, who have stopped in a place where life has been misunderstood What they have experienced—is only the tragedy of birth

Entangled with contradictions and paradoxes throughout, and in contrast to “The Answer”’s reaffirmation of the Enlightenment rationality at the end, Duo Duo’s “Instructions” delves far more deeply into the crisis of consciousness and narrates what he has learned about the other side of Enlightenment education. That is, we see how the production of subjectivity functions with regard to the project of modernity: namely, through negativity. Thus, instead of displaying a romantic, heroic gesture, Duo Duo has given a highly self-conscious, dialectical account of his generation’s intellectual journey through a series of shocks. This series of shocks and doubts regarding identity formation may have started at the very revelatory moment brought about by the Cultural Revolution: “Just in one night, the wound had

Duo Duo

●

53

opened / And all the books on the bookshelves had betrayed them.” But the origin of this traumatic revelation reaches far beyond the Cultural Revolution itself and dates back to their very early life: “Who says that the theme of their early life / Was a bright one, even to this day they still think / That is a pernicious saying.” Also, instead of seeing any hope of finding truths and attaining a tangible identity during the process of growing up, What they saw was always A monotonous string of falling snow appearing in the winters They had to go on playing tirelessly Wrestle with what fled, and Live together with what could not be remembered Even if they had recovered their earliest longing Emptiness, had already become their lifelong stain

Moreover—burdened by this indelible stigma of “Emptiness”—Duo Duo holds a pessimistic attitude toward his and his contemporaries’ rebellious acts or artistic deeds: Facing the shackles around their neck Their only madness Was to pull them tighter But they were not comrades Their scattered destructive power Had not nearly seized society’s attention And they were only reduced to being criminals of the mind Only because: they had abused allegories

In this manner, Duo Duo forces his generation to squarely face the realization of their true fate, underscoring the paralyzing despair of this realization: But in the end, they would pray in the classroom of thought And faint away when they see clearly their own handwriting:

Now comes the final judgment: They have not lived in the time arranged by the Lord They are men who were born by mistake, who have stopped in a place where life has been misunderstood What they have experienced—is only the tragedy of birth

What constitutes identity and subjectivity is nothing but “the tragedy of birth”: that they “were born by mistake.” In other words, this subjectivity is a negative one, which has no reality or “truth” in itself.

54

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

Yet it is precisely here that we find a dialectical way of thinking. A negative subjectivity is still a form of subjectivity, just as even if an ideology is a kind of “false consciousness” in Marx’s place, it actually is no less than a kind of consciousness. The paradox can be expressed as follows: against the background of the decay and decadence of history itself, a new kind of subjectivity still requires its own formation and form (and naming), even if in the negative form of “abused allegories,” or ruins. Duo Duo echoes Walter Benjamin’s famous discussion regarding the correspondence between ruins and allegories in the German Trauerspiel: In the ruin history has physically merged into the setting. And in this guise history does not assume the form of the process of an eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay … Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.58

Hence, the ruins of history become the symbol of individual subjectivity expressed in Duo Duo’s poem. It seems that even though the revolution may be over, the drive for subjectivity has not yet exhausted itself. It is still pushing ahead by its own inertia, only along a negative path. Obviously what works here is not merely optimistic Enlightenment reason, but a barely veiled irrationality or madness inherited from the revolution. Gregory Lee has noticed symptoms of this irrationality or madness in Duo Duo’s poetry in general: “Underneath his intense, passionate, but carefully controlled poetic voice, lies a barely restrained hysteria.”59 That is to say, a negative subjectivity born out of the Cultural Revolution, like the Benjaminian ruins, serves not only as a historical critique of the revolution but also as its enduring emblem. To put it even more boldly, we may say that the “Instructions” of the Cultural Revolution have not totally failed; quite the contrary, they have succeeded in the sense that they have once and forever indoctrinated an eternal utopian (or hysterical) drive into their subjects. When the revolution as a political event is over, the utopian drive continues and becomes, perhaps, the most permanent legacy that Duo Duo and his generation have to carry along on the journey of (re)constructing an autonomous subjectivity. This journey, however, is doomed to be endless and hopeless, because, again: “They are men who were born by mistake, who have stopped in a place where life has been misunderstood / What they have experienced—is only the tragedy of birth.” They are historically doomed precisely because they are historically conditioned, even if this history itself may have been, from the very beginning, a mistake from their perspective. With this paradox in mind, we can say that it is wrong to assume that the end of the Cultural Revolution would necessarily lead Duo Duo as a poet to start anew and to be less political or historical and to be more universal or

Duo Duo

●

55

un-Chinese, as van Crevel has implied: “In Duoduo’s [Duo Duo] later poems politicality and Chineseness disappear, and clichéd representations of love fall victim to individuality.”60 “Within Experimental poetry, his work repeats the move that first set such poetry off from its orthodox environment: away from the political, the public, and the collective and toward the personal, the private and the individual. In Duoduo’s later work individuality comes to dominate all else.”61 Van Crevel might have been partly right in saying that individuality has become Duo Duo’s main theme, but what if that individuality itself remains for Duo Duo nothing other than a prism of the problematics of the relationships between history and utopia, the nation and the world, all of which we have seen in Duo Duo’s early poetry from the Cultural Revolution? Indeed, the other tendency that van Crevel detects in Duo Duo’s later poetry is even more revealing: “But on the whole, roughly from 1983 onward his poetry becomes ever more headstrong. This is especially true for the nature of its imagery and for its language, which is often willfully oblivious to the rules of ‘preferred usage.’”62 This, instead of proving that Duo Duo has turned more private and unpolitical, only reaffirms the point I made earlier, that the utopian drive for subjectivity inherited from the Cultural Revolution is even more intensified and further stretched toward its dialectical opposite: schizophrenia, irrationality, madness. The past and history have become an unexorcisable part of his unconscious, which always returns from its suppression and further manifests itself through innovations of language and poetic form. This means that the seemingly pure linguistic and formal innovations can be also ideological, and the internal struggles and splits within the subjectivity are now playing out in the sphere of language and form. In other words, Duo Duo’s method of exorcising the past of the Cultural Revolution is to further the extremes, further the madness, as he already made clear in “Instructions”: “Facing the shackles around their neck / Their only madness / Was to pull them tighter.” Paradoxically, it seems that only through this kind of hysteria can one gain the necessary psychological distance to look back at history and thus get the upper hand in his wrestling match with it. In this sense, Duo Duo has not changed much since his very first poem, “ADDIO.” One of the most explicit examples of this continuous review of the Cultural Revolution theme is the poem “Fifteen Years Old” (1984),63 which again refers back to the theme of bad-blooded origins by alluding to the summer of 1966, when the Cultural Revolution just broke out: Fifteen years old and sowing steel When the ripened crops opened fire (…)

56

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature Struggle was a great big mop Still scrubbing for dear life even though no blood could be seen The belly of a summer opened up And all the little nitwits raised their heads The world was one big ambush The world was one big infant That opened its cruel eyes: Sometimes, blood must flow for a beginning Sometimes, beginnings are used to stem blood Fifteen years old and kicking new shoes into the trees

But there are more implicit and more ambiguous references to the experiences of subject formation gained from the Cultural Revolution, which challenge any clear-cut reading. Such is a stanza from the poem “Northern Voices” (1985):64 I, was one who grew up in the storm The storm holds me close and lets me breathe As if a child weeps inside my body I want to understand his weeping as if to harrow myself with a harrow Each grain of sand has its mouth open Mother will not let the river weep But I recognize that this voice Can rule over all authority!

Van Crevel makes great efforts to disentangle the political references from the nonpolitical or universal meaning in his reading of this stanza: Duoduo’s [Duo Duo] generation’s history justifies calling the storm an image for the Cultural Revolution … The image befits social upheaval regardless of time and space. The last two lines of this excerpt employ political vocabulary: recognize, rule, authority. But these words are spoken in awe of the power of Nature, slighting man-made forces at work in society: politics, for example … A political reading of Voice of the North [“Northern Voices” ] does not yield the greatest degree of coherence.65

As perplexing as the ambiguity of the poem’s message may seem, and as understandable as the attempt to separate politicality from unpoliticality may sound, there may be another way of looking at this poem. Why, then, do we not admit that there is no pure reading of it, whether politically or aesthetically? Why not admit that the poem’s vocabulary and message are

Duo Duo

●

57

by their very “nature” bastardized with politicality, thus making attempts to disentangle the various layers impossible and unnecessary? However, to admit this would also mean admitting that the very virtue of this poem lies in its resistance to critics’ wishful attempts to separate it from the continuum of Duo Duo’s early poetry; instead, it confirms that Duo Duo’s later poetry is a continuation and development of his earlier work. This also means that we have to embrace the ambiguity, impurity, and complexity of the legacy of the Cultural Revolution embodied by Duo Duo himself, which demands that its own legitimacy be recognized, just as the line reads: “But I recognize that this voice / Can rule over all authority!” The same also goes for another poem, “Reform” (1987),66 which begins: With reformed tools reform language With reformed language Continue to reform

Again there is a problem when we try to distinguish the political message from the aesthetic one: In recent Chinese history there is a godlike male protagonist whose remolding of language was so successful that a considerable part of modern Chinese usage was named after him: Maospeak (Mao wenti). The first stanza brings to mind how Maoist politics monopolized the management of language. But there is no unambiguous connection with the rest of the poem … and the poem’s opening lines could just as well as be about undermining that monopoly, as Experimental poets did in the 1970s.67

However, if we are bold enough to cross the purist dividing line between politicality and aesthetics, this ambiguity can be seen as the very essence of Duo Duo’s message instead of as a problem. That is, Mao’s own attitude toward language refashioning very likely could have served simultaneously as a positive (no matter how ironic this may sound) as well as a negative influence and inspiration for a poet like Duo Duo. Actually, the paradoxical nature of this stanza may have been intended to illustrate the very fact that what Duo Duo has at hand is not anything innocent or pure, but rather, the already “reformed tools” and “reformed language” that he had no choice but to inherit and to continue to work with. If this seemingly endless circular movement can be interpreted as van Crevel did—“these lines reach far beyond the borders of politics and China: this is also poetry about poetry, about search of a language of their own carried out by all poets with a desire for originality”68—can we not see that these lines may at least in

58

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

certain respects also owe themselves to the original drive of the Cultural Revolution and Mao himself: for a new world and a new language brought into being through the destruction and reform of the old? Furthermore, can we not understand that even the seemingly vicious cycle of class struggle (as so poignantly described by Duo Duo himself in lines such as “The blood of one class has drained away / The archers of another class are still loosing their arrows”) and the Maoist “continuous revolution” could well be recycled and regain positive currency in the aesthetic sphere, in which language “reform” and the yearning for originality have long been legitimized by Ezra Pound’s famous motto of modernism, “Make It New”? In fact, this latter analogy is not as far-fetched as it may seem if we juxtapose Mao’s Cultural Revolution and modernism’s tireless pursuit of originality in the common context of the quest for modernity across the globe and throughout the twentieth century. But if this analogy is allowed, a series of oppositions such as rationality/irrationality, nation/world, history/utopia will have to collapse; individuality and subjectivity will have to betray their respective fictitious natures; and modernity as a concept itself will have to expose its own dangerously impure origin. Perhaps it is here that Duo Duo’s meaning lies: any reflection and critique of the Cultural Revolution will also have to become a constant reflection on and critique of modernity and its attendant concepts, such as rationality, individuality, and subjectivity, and equally, of the very raison d’être of modern Chinese poetry itself. Hence, individual development and subject formation has become a bildungsroman-like journey that, however, is doomed to a Sisyphean fate. This is reflected in Duo Duo’s “Milestones” (1985):69 A wide road attracts the very first direction that makes you dizzy That is your starting point. Clouds envelop your head And prepare to give you a job That is your starting point That is your starting point When prison forces its character into a city Bricks and stones hold you tight in the middle of the street Every year’s snow is your old jacket The sky, however, is always a blue university (…) You are a wrinkled broad bean in a strong storm You are a chair, belonging to the sea You must read anew, by the seaside of mankind To seek yourself, on a journey of knowing yourself The northern snow is your road

Duo Duo

●

59

The flesh of your shoulders is your food Ah traveler who will not look back Of all you find contemptible, nothing will ever vanish

While the whole poem sounds like a journey of self-education, it takes a dramatic turn in these last two lines: Ah traveler who will not look back Of all you find contemptible, nothing will ever vanish

Again, this negative declaration invites the following reading: the lyric subject’s own past and the history that he belongs to and comes from will forever remain with him, no matter how contemptible he finds them to be. Sooner or later he will have to look back, whether voluntarily or involuntarily. In this sense, the future is what one finds in one’s past, in history. In fact, this gesture of retrospection recurs more and more frequently in many of Duo Duo’s later poems, such as “Looking Out from Death” (1983), which begins with “Looking out from death you will always see / Those whom all your life you ought not to see;”70 and “In One Story There Is All His Past” (1983),71 the closing lines of which read: “Therefore in one story there is all his past / Therefore even one thousand years shall also turn back its face—look.” This means farewell has almost become a permanent gesture. What accompany this process are the equally obsessive, endless innovations of imagery and language, further demonstrating a Rimbaudian “derangement of all senses”—or, to be more accurate, “a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all senses,” as Rimbaud had originally emphasized it. This penchant for utopian refashioning of language and consciousness is reflected in the poem’s title “Wishful Thinking Is the Master of Reality” (1982)72 and in the first stanza of the poem “The Making of Language Comes from the Kitchen” (1983),73 which reads: If the making of language comes from the kitchen The heart is the bedroom. They say: If the heart is the bedroom Wishful thinking, is the bedroom’s master

Again and again, Duo Duo puts his bet on “wishful thinking,” as if only through such “wishful thinking” can reality be caught and language be made. Thus Duo Duo has consciously turned a paradoxical bastardy to his own advantage so as to battle against a fatalistic history along with all its

60

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

absurdity. The most telling statement comes from the last lines of the poem “The Winter Night Woman” (1985): Please, give me a new pair of hands. The poet’s Original vocation: to preserve That which orders the stripes on the tiger’s back His madness!74

Thus we may treat this statement of the poet’s original vocation being “to preserve … His madness” as both a symptom and a diagnosis, in its historical as well as utopian sense. While such a stance may be understood as the embodiment of a modernist heroism, it is the poet Bai Hua who has offered an alternative interpretation of Duo Duo’s bet on “wishful thinking” and madness in terms of its link to the Cultural Revolution. In his memoir titled Left Side: The Lyric Poets in the Era of Mao Zedong, Bai Hua points out the profound influence of Mao’s voluntarism or “will to power” beneath Duo Duo’s modernist facade: I see the aftermath of this explosion and the silhouettes of many poets in this aftermath: … Duo Duo’s admiration of Mao Zedong’s individual will at the same time also has brought out his Cultural Revolution-like splendid virility and dazzling innovation of poetic craft.75

Another anecdote told by Bai Hua, along with his analysis, further testifies to the endurance of Mao’s influence: The poet Duo Duo is a prototype of “Great Hero” with a child-like passion. It seems as if he has forever been living in the surrealistic 1960s, and with the flame-hot heart of that era he has never stopped singing out the most penetrating high notes among the Today school poets. … He once told me: “I am unbeatable, because I am one who has been armed with Mao Zedong Thought.” A very intriguing statement. Here “Mao Zedong Thought” has been transformed into a symbol of a super ideal and a passion of eternal youth, and it is exactly this sort of unprecedented and never-to-be-seen-again “passion of youth” of Chairman Mao’s that has creatively inspired his artistic passion. This passion of “seizing the day” has urged him to experience one storm after another: from a Red Guard in the Cultural Revolution to an educated youth in the rustication movement to a journalist of the Peasants’ Daily, he has never rested for one moment. He is such an innocent, carefree, sensitive, impatient, never-ailing poet, who longs to cast off his whole blood, who will at any time suddenly stand up to sacrifice himself for the sake of truth or for the sake of “mad art.”76

Bai Hua’s interpretation has, of course, been colored by his own position as an acclaimed experimental poet as well as a self-professed admirer of Mao,

Duo Duo

●

61

but it nevertheless remains an important testimony to the fact that Duo Duo’s aesthetic origin is a bad-blooded one. It also establishes that the utopian momentum of the Cultural Revolution, set off by Mao, has not yet completely run its course, but has been joined by a new modernist thrust. Just as Mao once dictated that every seven or eight years there ought to be a Cultural Revolution, this almost Nietzschean “eternal return” could be the real answer to the riddle of Duo Duo’s fate as a poet exiled between revolution and modernism. Let us return to Duo Duo’s own account of his initial encounter with Baudelaire, which we quoted earlier in this chapter: “While we sang each day: ‘Chairman Mao is like the sun,’ Baudelaire said: ‘The sun is like a poet.’” We may now identify another layer of contradictory meaning and irony in it: are the statements “Chairman Mao is like the sun” and Baudelaire’s “The sun is like a poet” really so incompatible? Has not Mao himself been one of the most acclaimed and influential poets in his own right in twentieth-century China? Was not Mao himself, like Baudelaire, a restless modernist innovator just as Baudelaire was, like Mao, a revolutionary visionary of modernity? Thus Mao’s spell—along with his Cultural Revolution—shall remain, like Baudelaire’s, as a lure of modernity and modernism, as long as we are not completely rid of the spell of modernity itself. Hence Duo Duo’s other poetic statement in “The Captured Savage Hearts Forever Turn toward the Sun” (1982)77 remains a suspect homage to this utopian ideal, even if history in its revolutionary sense has supposedly already met its end: Tomorrow, tomorrow there is still We do not have the experience of tomorrow Tomorrow, the gifts we exchange will be savage as usual Sensitive hearts never ever make exchanges with tomorrow The captured savage hearts forever turn toward the sun Toward the most savage face—

It seems that what matters is no longer tomorrow or the future, but the past or the origin, as if one has been forever captured by the latter. Eventually, it is history that keeps utopia alive, whether in the form of utopia or dystopia.78 Yet this utopia has a high price—it has a most savage face, and only madness or savage hearts could stand facing and challenging it on an equal level. This kind of schizophrenic face-off has signaled the price not only of the Cultural Revolution but also of modern Chinese poetry—the former in the form of revolution, the latter in the form of modernism. But ultimately they have shared a common form: experiments of modernity in twentieth-century China.

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 3

Wang Shuo: Playing for Thrills in the Era of Reform, or, a Genealogy of the Present I am a hooligan, who am I afraid of ! —Wang Shuo, “Nothing Real or Serious”1 There is a very complex interaction between his relation to the present and his relation to history. But a closer theoretical and historical examination of this connection would show that the writer’s relation to the social problems of the present is decisive in this interaction … These observations, however, have a much broader theoretical foundation, namely the whole question of whether the past is knowable. This question always depends upon the extent to which the present is known, the extent to which the contemporary situation can clearly reveal the particular trends which have objectively led to the present … On the one hand, the development of the social novel first makes possible the historical novel; on the other, the historical novel transforms the social novel into a genuine history of the present. —Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel 2 All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. —Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto 3

W

hile constantly provoking controversies, Wang Shuo was the darling of the Chinese literary market throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In fact, Wang Shuo may also be one of the most ideologically ambivalent and shrewd figures on the contemporary Chinese literary scene, due to the fact that he is the creator of the brand-new

64

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

“hooligan literature,” in the form of best seller and popular fiction, which has drawn the attention of supposedly high-minded literary criticism both in China and in the West. Wang Shuo’s popularity in the contemporary Chinese literary market is so self-evident that he dares to make one of his characters in the novel Playing for Thrills (1988) say the following: “You must have read his stuff. In China now the only book with a larger run is Selected Works of Chairman Mao.”4 Now, this juxtaposition may seem merely a blasphemous joke, since Wang Shuo’s own style is often viewed as frivolous when compared to Mao’s didacticism. But it may not be as entirely bogus as it seems, for it actually invokes an important question regarding Wang Shuo’s relationship with the Cultural Revolution and Mao himself. If Duo Duo is a bastard child of the Cultural Revolution and modernism and manifests the fundamental contradictions of modernity in China in both a critical and pessimistic manner, then Wang Shuo, almost one generation younger than Duo Duo, may be depicted as a bastard child of the Cultural Revolution and postmodernism, one who manifests the even more ambivalent and indeterminate condition of a China stuck in the so-called era of reform from the late 1970s to the 1990s. As a self-proclaimed “playing master” (wanzhu) and “hooligan” (pizi or liumang), is Wang Shuo purely a subversion of Mao, or, more likely, a subversion of Mao? It is hard to give a yes/no answer to this, particularly since Mao’s own public image has undergone dramatic (if quite contradictory) transformations during the last three decades. In particular, in the Western media, Mao has fallen considerably from being the great helmsman to not only a cold-blooded tyrant, but also a notorious Casanova, or simply a hooligan.5 From Mao to Wang Shuo, from revolution to hooliganism, this transition (or convergence) shows that there is an internal dialectic that binds these seemingly opposite extremes of China’s course during the reform era. This dialectic is what I shall investigate in this chapter. Alongside this, I will also pursue an investigation of the “present” in Wang Shuo’s works. Although he started publishing at the height of “roots-searching literature” and “experimental fiction” in the mid-1980s, Wang Shuo first chose to write in the genres of urban romance and crime story.6 Moreover, Wang Shuo’s fictional characters are characters living with their consciousness exclusively focused on the present. It seems that the main function of his works is instant consumption or entertainment. They target the newly emerging urban middle class in the 1980s, with the present as the sole locus and stimulus of adventures, and remain willfully blind to the burden of history and to the shadow of the Cultural Revolution. No other orientation could distance Wang Shuo further from his contemporary writers, who focus either

Wang Shuo

●

65

upon cultural roots-seeking (“roots-seeking literature”) or metaphorical explorations of Chinese history (“experimental fiction”). But in defining Wang Shuo’s present, we must be careful not to confine Wang Shuo’s presence to a narrow period. For instance, Jing Wang dedicates one chapter of her High Culture Fever to discussing Wang Shuo in the post-1989 context, which is marked by the craze of market economy and cultural commodification in China. She claims that very few literary historians would disagree with me in singling Wang Shuo out as the most conspicuous and articulate epochal marker for the transition of the 1980s into the 1990s. Although some of his best known works were published around 1987 and 1988, the post-topian sensibility that emanated from Wanzhu (The masters of mischief ) (1987) and Wande jiushi xintiao (What I am playing with is your heartbeat) (1988) is unmistakably not a product of the 1980s—a decade designated as the “new era,” reigned over by intellectuals, and marked by unbelieved humanistic sentiment and the will to de-alienate. In defying intellectualism and paying impious homage to alienation, our author has clearly eclipsed his own decade and overtaken the other almost by chance.7

Jing Wang’s position is quite representative of many other critics of Wang Shuo, in that it emphasizes Wang Shuo’s “presentness” in order to squeeze him into the 1990s and to break him off from the continuum of the previous decade. This perception nevertheless has its serious pitfalls by overlooking the fact that the “present” Wang Shuo has represented in his works is a constantly shifting and evolving one and has its own historical precedents, which date back at least to the Cultural Revolution and to the late 1970s when the reform era first started. That is to say, Wang Shuo’s “present” itself has its own origins, is very much always present, covers a much longer historical span, and deserves a careful genealogical investigation instead of owing its birth to the newest normative discourse of the “post-New Period” (hou xin shiqi) in the 1990s. Put into historical perspective, Wang Shuo’s “deviance from the zeitgeist of the 1980s,”8 is not a given fact, but rather a misperception by his critics, who had failed to recognize his messages earlier on. A genealogical investigation of the present in Wang Shuo’s works is necessarily intertwined with a genealogical investigation of the hooligan or “hooliganism.” While both the present and the hooligan are, by definition, fluid and mutable, by tracing and locating different historical presents—or different historical moments of the present—of the formation and development of Wang Shuo’s hooligan protagonists, we may nevertheless find that Wang Shuo has been, from the very beginning of his career, a faithful embodiment

66

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

of the zeitgeist of China’s reform era. What comes out of this process, then, is a kind of hybrid history or autobiography that constantly negotiates and compromises between the past and the present, between the Cultural Revolution and socialism in the 1960s and 1970s and economic reform and capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s, between “masters of the future” (Red Guards) and “masters of the present” (hooligans). Only in the very end do we find out that what Wang Shuo has created is a new genre: the current success story of capitalism in contemporary China with its uncertainty regarding the present and constant nostalgia for its socialist origins. “The Rubber Man”: Sentimental Hooligans, Birth of the Present, Loss of Innocence, and Accumulation of Experiences In Wang Shuo’s novella “Emerging from the Sea” (1985), there is a short exchange between the male and female protagonists when they first meet: That girl said to me smiling: “Now I know what your vocation is.” I waited for her words. “Hooligan,” she joked, a bit premature. Lao Ji immediately led others to laugh, and laughs continued; I had to follow, smiling too: “No, nothing to do with hooligan; they said that I am a ‘young reformer.’”9

This is a typical case of how Wang Shuo and his protagonists play with identity labels. In fact, what has made Wang Shuo’s appearance on the literary scene in China in the 1980s scandalous is this very ambivalence of his origin and the shift in identity between a “hooligan” and a “reformer.” This ambivalence of origin and identity may have reflected the reality that terms such as “hooligan” and “reform” have themselves become equally ambiguous and versatile in the 1980s. In retrospect, we will find that one of the direct consequences of the Cultural Revolution’s denouement is the bankruptcy of the ideological purism of socialism and revolution. Revolution itself has been largely replaced by reform, while socialism is increasingly hollowed out by capitalism. The latter occurs despite the party’s official insistence that reform is a self-perfection of socialism. That is to say, reform itself is a rather ambiguous cover-up and has produced an equally ambivalent present. The pure and monolithic socialist and revolutionary world has now lost its own legitimacy and has given in to its opposite: a nascent capitalist world operating under the name of reform. Of course, this nascent present of a (post)socialist/capitalist world is not fully articulated or correctly named, but remains rather anonymous.

Wang Shuo

●

67

As Marx put it in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “here the content goes beyond the phrase.”10 Yet it is precisely due to its anonymity that the emergence of this new present causes even greater anxiety, since it remains unrepresented and unrepresentable. The teleological halo is lost before anybody is able to possess a proper historical awareness of it. In this light, Wang Shuo stands unique, starting from the early 1980s, as one of the very first writers who directly responded to the present by introducing the equally ambivalent hooliganism into the arena of popular literature. These hooligans neither reflect nor metaphorize, but simply act and play, indulging in crooked economic schemes and womanizing. In short, they are adventurists in a new, unknown social territory, acting as an acid, permeating the old world of socialism and creating a moral void. The ultimate scandal, however, is that the hooligans would come to publicly claim their own legitimacy as the true fresh blood and vanguards of the era of reform, as Wang Shuo himself does later: All the motivating forces of reform and openness come from hooligans. It is the hooligans who do business, build factories, and open shops. It is their craziness that prompts the society to run … Take a look, all those who have really succeeded, who have already become rich, are all hooligans.11

However, such a scandalous claim of endowing hooligans with the status of vanguards of social progress is not entirely new. In fact, it was Mao himself who once famously declared that “riffraff ” were the “vanguards of the revolution” in his “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan” (1927), a canonical Maoist text.12 Even more ironically, the Wang Shuonian hooligans are actually transformations from the very idealistic generation of “masters of the future” who finished their early education during the Cultural Revolution and have retained and recycled Red Guard mentality in a peculiar way. It is the sudden rupture between the two worlds of socialism and capitalism in the late 1970s that constitutes the historical moment when these masters of the future find that they are no longer compatible with their previous incarnations. It is also the sudden revelation of this moment that has propelled them to ride the new wave of capitalism and become “masters of the present,” that is, hooligans. Born in 1958, Wang Shuo grew up in a military compound in Beijing and received his entire school education during the Cultural Revolution. He joined the PLA navy in 1976 and served for four years. From 1980 to 1983 he worked in a state-owned pharmaceutical company in Beijing. In 1983, he quit his job and was engaged in various shady enterprises with his friends and went broke. Only then did he determine to sit down and write fiction.

68

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

Wang Shuo’s own life experiences provided unique material for his autobiographical or semiautobiographical hooligan sagas. Hence it is quite ironic that, in fact, the first fiction work that marked Wang Shuo’s popularity and mapped the genesis of Wang Shuonian hooligans is a novella,13 “The Flight Attendant” (1984),14 which is a love story, not dissimilar to the popular romance stories of Taiwanese female writer Qiong Yao that swept the mainland Chinese book market in the 1980s. It begins with a most innocent and naive encounter between the first-person protagonist and a young high school girl, who falls in love with the protagonist at first sight because the latter then was in the naval service, wearing a PLA navy uniform, and looking supremely handsome and heroic. Yet things start to take a turn when the protagonist leaves the navy and returns to Beijing temporarily unemployed, yet unwilling to accept any kind of state-assigned job. All of a sudden he finds himself stunned and overwhelmed by the flux of quick changes in the new urban life: Back home in Beijing, having replaced the tight-cut navy uniform with loose ordinary people’s clothes, I almost felt panic. Walking on the street, witnessing the rapidly arising urban construction and more and more crowded vehicles and people, I felt a kind of vertigo of life as it was dashing ahead … It had been always hard for me to become acclimated to a new environment, always hard. I had been too devoted to the first cause that had occupied my heart; once it was lost, I was almost like a bird with broken wings, falling from on high, from a carefree position.15

This new urban life unleashed by the post–Cultural Revolution economic reform and open-door policy is now eroding not only the old cityscape but also the protagonist’s old ideals. In this mobile world, it seems that the present, whose motto is “permanent change,” has quickly disposed of the recent past and has become the magic glue holding all different social elements together. An abyss suddenly opens before the narrator’s eyes. Unable to adjust himself to his immediate environment, he finds himself alienated and displaced to the periphery of society and enveloped by a crisis of identity. In the meantime, Wang Mei, the female protagonist, the former innocent admirer of his heroic and romantic image, now a flight attendant, grows disillusioned with him after becoming his girlfriend. This role reversal in their relationship, despite the good will on both sides, eventually leads to their break-up. After he finally loses Wang Mei’s love, particularly after he learns of her death in a flight accident, the protagonist can no longer control the feeling of tremendous grief and overflowing sentimentality. In his dreams, he keeps returning to who he once was: the young sailor in the idealistic pose that

Wang Shuo

●

69

first attracted Wang Mei. He becomes fixated on the lost past and his first love to take refuge from a rapidly changing present. But what truly makes him sentimental is that while sensing this stream of rapid changes and irreversible losses, he is ultimately unable to historicize and articulate it. And herein lies the most important message of the novella. However, one detail in this story deserves close attention. That is, facing this new present, the first-person protagonist also seems more than ever resolute in refusing to follow the well-trodden path of accepting stateassigned jobs. Instead, he starts to look for a new career “doing less work, getting more money; doing nothing, also getting money,”16 which offers the first sign that, despite all the sentimental losses, a free-willed Wang Shuonian hooligan is already in the making. The next novella, “Emerging from the Sea,” continues more or less in the same mode of urban romance charged with sentimentality, but makes it clear that Wang Shuo’s priorities have shifted: idealism and even sentimentality itself have increasingly become burdens to be jettisoned. In addition, in the story, the protagonist’s gradually increased receptivity to the sudden urban bustle in a post–Cultural Revolution China is foregrounded. This change is manifested in the beginning of the novella, where the same flux of changes surrounding the new protagonist, Shi Ba—who has just emerged from a failed business venture—no longer reduces him to the same level of paralysis as it does the protagonist in “The Flight Attendant.” Instead, Shi Ba quietly shows that he has quickly mastered and absorbed these shocks: The evening had fallen. The tall buildings on the streets were fully illuminated, and the brightly-lit imported cars were passing by continuously, with the whole avenue appearing as a flashing and rapidly flowing river … I hurried ahead with the flow of crowds. The forest of neon lights in the commercial districts enveloped the shining billboards, various commodity goods, and smart-dressed young boys and girls in a kind of red and green, bright and shadowy atmosphere; a string of big luxurious tourist buses was parked in front of the entrance of a splendid-looking hotel, from which descended hundreds of broadly smiling foreign tourists with cameras around their necks, and neatly dressed doormen were extremely courteously giving them directions. A traffic officer was yelling at a young Chinese man who was blundering about. The young fellow mumbled carelessly: “What’s the fuss, what’s the fuss, aren’t they just a bunch of Hong Kongers?” “Hong Kongers? They are Japanese.” I laughed, and many passers-by also laughed as they rushed past.17

70

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

It is easy to see that while the description of the cityscape is similar to that in “The Flight Attendant,” the protagonist’s position has changed: now he merges into the flow of the crowds and hurries ahead, no longer feeling totally lost. However, the truly meaningful scene is that of the traffic officer’s correction, which causes Shi Ba, as well as other passers-by, to laugh. What are they laughing about? Neither Shi Ba nor Wang Shuo, the author, really gives us any answer. Nevertheless, we may discern several levels of meaning from this laughter, which might prove more ambiguous than it initially appears. The first level may be that Shi Ba is satirically laughing at the police’s subservient mentality of looking down at fellow Chinese and looking up to foreigners (chongyang meiwai). But it is quite likely that he is also laughing at the young man who is not only unable to tell the difference between the nationalities of tourists, but, more importantly, unable to absorb the fast changes in. Apparently the young man is a bit out of step with the new flux of time. In this sense, Shi Ba may have found part of his own past in this young man. That is why Shi Ba’s laugh is morally ambiguous. By adopting a spectator’s point of view, on the one hand, he is expressing pity toward that part of the past that is no longer compatible with the present; on the other hand, he is quietly strengthening his own determination to reshape himself according to this constant becoming of time, to merge himself into the mobile masses and become an anonymous “new man.” In short, this laugh signals that an inverted new world has already entered urban social reality as well as the collective consciousness. Beijing, from its position as the once-acclaimed socialist capital of the forthcoming world revolution, has transformed itself into a vibrant new metropolis, which for a moment may recall a comparison with the Paris of Baudelaire at the height of flourishing capitalism. This also means that Beijing is no longer a city only for Chinese locals, but has opened to foreign visitors to such an extent that confusion about identities is rampant (as shown in the comic scene of the innocent young fellow mistaking Japanese tourists for Hong Kongers). The game has changed. Accordingly, a new social consensus is forming, and the traditional mentality of “socialist new men” and “masters of the nation” no longer works. But for Wang Shuo’s protagonist, this change can and should be accepted. Moreover, he can and should be versatile enough to transform himself into a new type of master of the nation by riding this tide of new opportunities, taking advantage of whatever resources are available to catch up with the fluid present. In this sense, Shi Ba’s laugh shows his self-confident ability to absorb this shock-experience without being traumatized or enraged. In other words, the Maoist master mentality of the Cultural Revolution is now searching for a fresh start in a new generation

Wang Shuo

●

71

of “heroes.” The hooligans or “riffraff ” once again shall claim their “vanguard” legitimacy in a new hybrid world of socialist-capitalism. From this vantage point, we can grasp the heterodox messages of this kind of urban romance. The male protagonist belongs to the emerging class of new men free from attachments. The hooligan/reformer, Shi Ba, has no stable job or fixed vocation, and is always stuck in business deals that never materialize. What drives him is an endless and often-futile pursuit of money, the currency of modern upward social mobility. Yet it is also this pursuit of mobility and emancipation from attachments that has now put his pursuit of love and romance in jeopardy. The kind of innocent romantic attachment that unfolded in “The Flight Attendant” here is increasingly at odds with Shi Ba’s goal, and quite often only serves as emotional compensation for the failures of his economic adventures, an emotional residue of the traditional idealism that is about to be deemed entirely passé. Shi Ba’s view of life is stated well when Yu Jing, his girlfriend, visits him in the hospital after he is injured in a car accident. Confronted by Yu Jing’s question “Do you think money and good looks are so important?” his answer is, “Yes, if you ever lose your good looks and are penniless, I shall abandon you without a second thought, no matter how many Mr. Moralities would condemn me.”18 Obviously, what compels Shi Ba is a restless desire, oriented less romantically than materially. This is as commented by Yu Jing after they marry: “You liar! I can feel it. Even when you lie beside me, you are still like a hungry lion, roaring with scorching eyes.”19 Innocent love can no longer satisfy Shi Ba. His craving is for the “real”: “All of our difficulties and problems can be summed in one word: poverty. In order to root out this poverty, I will not give a damn about anything else, I will bet everything I have without a frown.”20 In fact, this statement is not only about getting rid of material poverty, but more importantly, it indicates an even stronger desire to dispose of the burden of the past—a desire to be contemporary with the present. However, similar to the “I” in “The Flight Attendant,” Shi Ba eventually can only strive to repress his sentimentality, which has become an Achilles’ heel, and has difficulty completely ridding himself of it. This irrepressible and periodically erupting sentimentality, emotional baggage from the past, is precisely what many of Wang Shuo’s critics have overlooked when they emphasize the “hooligan” origin of Wang Shuo’s protagonists. When Shi Ba meets a woman who was his high school classmate and has now acquired both foreign citizenship and wealth through marriage to a foreign man, they talk about their past, providing a rare occasion in the novella where he touches upon anything but the present. In a half-joking tone, Shi Ba talks about how once he almost converted to Christianity and

72

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

how he eventually gave it up. Then the whole tone of the conversation changes, and they confess their frustrations to each other in an extremely sincere manner, partially owing to the influence of alcohol: “I quit my job in an extremely depressive mood. At that time, I didn’t actually know what I wanted to do in the future. Now I don’t know what I want to do either, but I have always felt that I shall do something. I want to search for the meaning of life, I feel really bad … ” I started to lose the coherence of my utterance. “You know, when I was little I also wanted to become Liu Hulan, molded into a statue of a martyr by others,” she was also a bit drunk, stuttering. “When I was little how proud did I feel for the achievements of our revolution, proud of myself for being Chinese instead of any other kind of bastard. At that time I truly believed that the world was up to us to be liberated. Damn it, they don’t need us to manage their affair at all, in the end it’s me who became a capitalist.”21

To a great extent this reveals the true core of Shi Ba as well as Wang Shuo’s sentimentality: a nostalgia and yearning for the world in which he grew up and which now has almost entirely evaporated. Yet despite all the nostalgia, he does not allow himself to dwell upon it. There is a serious moral message underneath. The socialist masters of the future are now entering a present where they are completely lost, and have to recast themselves in a new and unknown mold. They have to unlearn what they were taught throughout their youth, reinventing their own moral principles and narratives. This theme of the reinvention of the individual is further developed, and presented in a tone of greater ambiguity, in “Half Is Flame, Half Is Sea” (1986).22 Now the first-person protagonist, Zhang Ming, appears as a true hooligan who lives on the spoils of organized prostitution and blackmail of Hong Kong businessmen or foreign tourists. This is no longer the urban romance of the previous two novellas. Here romance gives in to a Balzacian realistic crime story filled with conspiracies, lies, and betrayals. What interests Zhang Ming is the pure process of accumulating experiences. Furthermore, Zhang Ming obviously enjoys his hooligan status and uses it as proof of his new master status in the present reality. In other words, now Zhang Ming has fashioned his own philosophy of hooliganism and practices it successfully. A very interesting discussion occurs between Zhang Ming and the female protagonist, Wu Di, who, again, is a rather innocent college student whom Zhang Ming tries to seduce: “Then, it seems that you read books on your own, and search for truth on your own?”

Wang Shuo

●

73

“Wrong,” I said with a saucy smile. “I am one who never learns from books. While living, why not live freely. Have fun, suffer, cry, laugh, all with free will. Better than burying oneself in books and sighing and envying other people’s fates. Aren’t we supposed to be masters of ourselves?” “To learn more from the lessons of others, doesn’t it help you make less mistakes, take less detours and have clearer goals?” “I don’t like that one can clearly know the outcome of everything, and achieve his goal step by step. That’s too boring. The more foresight, the less excitement. If I know by each step what I will meet, and what result I will produce, I will immediately lose interest in living.” … “But you will definitely die …” “That is why I make full use of each moment to eat, play, and have fun. While living we will taste everything, right? On every dish I will stretch my chopsticks and get a taste.” “Haven’t you already experienced more than one hundred girls—not enough yet? That should hold you for your whole life.” “Each one is different from the other, and now even noodles can be made into a full banquet with various types of dishes—the world is developing at such a fast pace. For example, just one week ago, I couldn’t even have dreamt that I would have met you, yet now we are having dinner together and having a heart-to-heart conversation. God knows what shall follow, perhaps it will become very wonderful, and it totally depends upon us. Isn’t this very interesting, and encouraging for us to live on?” “Tell me,” Wu Di asked with interest. “What further developments will there be between us?” “Perhaps you will fall in love with me.” She was hooked, and I felt quite pleased. “And I will fall in love with you … Yet you change heart so easily and fall in love with someone else … Many years later, we’re both old, and meet again by chance in this restaurant …” “I see that it’s not that you don’t read any books,” Wu Di laughed and quickly spat the wine she had just drunk into the bowl, opening her moist lips. “You have read enough sentimental novels.”23

While expounding on his seemingly vulgar hooliganism (almost a vulgarized existentialism, one could say) and expressing disdain toward any existing social conventions, Zhang Ming is now manipulating and parodying the very narrative convention in which Wang Shuo’s popularity was first established with “The Flight Attendant”: the urban romance and the sentimental novel. The latter are now merely tools by which Wang Shuo’s protagonist achieves his pragmatic goal to be a professional predator and womanizer.

74

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

As anticipated, the story develops with the curious, yet inexperienced, Wu Di falling prey to Zhang Ming’s seduction, whilst Zhang Ming tells himself, “I don’t love her or anybody. ‘Love’ the word is too laughable in my eyes; even though I also often say it, it’s only because it’s as casually pronounced as the word ‘fart.’”24 Eventually, the desperate Wu Di degenerates into a prostitute and joins a criminal gang in order to exact revenge on Zhang Ming for the genuine love she cannot get from him. She commits suicide by the end of the first part of the novel when the whole criminal gang is exposed and faces trial and imprisonment. But, the second part of the story takes an unexpected sharp turn. After he is released on parole and learns about the death of Wu Di, Zhang Ming suddenly finds that he was actually in love with her. From then on, he is stricken by a strong sense of guilt and penitence. It is in this self-purifying and repentant spirit that he saves another girl from the situation Wu Di was once in. That is to say, the plot develops into yet another sentimental story, a story that Wang Shuo, through Zhang Ming, claims to be free of. Many critics view the second part as purely a smoke screen for the scandalous first part, a ploy to elude censorship. Yet this turn of plot does show that Wang Shuo’s hooliganism is an ambivalent and eclectic one, and he has never completely escaped from the constraints of sentimentality. Perhaps only Wang Shuo, the author, knows better than any of his protagonists that he intends to create neither merely commercial sentimental stories nor merely subversive dark tales of contemporary Chinese society. His stories are a negotiated pursuit of new individual identity charged with ambivalence and anxiety. As we shall see, sentimentality becomes almost too convenient an excuse, preventing Wang Shuo and his hooligan protagonists from reflecting further upon the consequences of their actions. In the meantime, this unarticulated sentimentality also constitutes a fatal hindrance preventing them from proceeding further along the path of hooliganism. In other words, sentimentality has spoiled their self-claimed hooliganism. In the end, these new “heroes of our time” may find that they are lame ducks of their own past instead of true masters of the present. They are actually sentimental hooligans and they are torn between the poles of past and present while trying to reinvent themselves. This great tension between sentimentalism and hooliganism culminates in “The Rubber Man” (1986),25 which also concludes Wang Shuo’s early hooligan sagas. The first-person protagonist here is stuck in the same situation where he “had no job, and killed time in bars and restaurants with money coming from god knows where.”26 Here, again, the pursuit of fortune or money has become the primary concern and has been given a symbolic dimension: to reestablish one’s self-confidence and social superiority in the new world. In order to achieve this goal, one must be calculative of

Wang Shuo

●

75

everything without wasting his feelings on anything deemed unnecessary. Indeed, this pursuit becomes a game of gambling. More than any of the previous three novellas, the story of “The Rubber Man” comes closest to a suspense story full of unpredictable turns: mutual betrayal and selfdisillusionment comprise the real themes. Departing even farther from “The Flight Attendant,” Wang Shuo has taken another step toward stripping bare his works of the illusion of sentimentality and pushing the alternative hooligan’s master mentality to its extreme. However, the internal tensions and contradictions remain. The protagonist needs to pursue money in order to prove his superiority, yet the game of money cruelly mocks him and teaches him the lesson that any residue of idealism, even if minimal, will prevent him from attaining his goal. His pursuit leads him to be suspended forever in the void of present, between the unrecoverable past and the unattainable future. For example, from the beginning of “The Rubber Man,” the first-person narrator and hero possesses a very ambivalent sense of his different origin and superiority: When I was little, I was a scared child. When I grew up, I became a man who lives all of his days in fear and depression. I know that I myself have an unusual origin. This sense of superiority becomes stronger when I am merged in the crowds in the streets than when I stay alone indoors. The essential difference between me and the other people is so great that I am afraid that my ordinary face can no longer cover my own inhumanity, and that I often have to lower my head, and look sideways at the unknowing others.27 I am like an eagle roosting on the cliff, gaining an indifferent bird’s eye view of all that which human beings feel proud of and depend upon as well as human beings themselves.28

However, this partial-knowledge of one’s own origin is not fully illuminated, which cannot but create one’s eventual insecurity and inability to adjust to the urban crowd. That is to say, the suspected origin will become a burden that prevents one from merging completely with the flow of changes. Indeed, as the story unfolds, the protagonist’s detached, self-important view is constantly challenged and exposed as a delusion. The master mentality in his consciousness apparently will never get the chance to materialize in reality. He keeps absorbing the shocks from the outside world, yet in the meantime, he also keeps feeling lost in the negotiations over his identity, particularly when he withdraws temporarily from his own chainof crooked actions and dwells on the very nature of the fast changes inthe present.

76

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

In the narrative of the story, Wang Shuo presents two such moments of reflection that are particularly illuminating in juxtaposition. In each moment, while temporarily suspended between the last and the next action, the protagonist finds himself in an environment that induces a strong sense of loss. The first one happens in a tourist hotel, the symbolic landmark of China’s opening door to the outside world and capitalism in the early 1980s: In the evening, I didn’t want to eat, so I went downstairs to the music bar and ordered two bottles of beer, sat there drinking and lonely, felt kind of lost while staring at the foreign tourists and Hong Kong businessmen crossing in the hall. Each of these well-dressed men and women looked self-important, calm, confident, yet each had a vulgar face, which cannot help but upset you, the fact that such vulgar fellows are so rich. Sitting in this environment for fifteen minutes can make you learn something more profound than attending a hundred classes.29

Shortly thereafter, when he waits for a business appointment with his crooked friends in a cemetery park, he again feels alienated from the present: I looked around for a circle, didn’t find Zhang Yansheng and others … and then walked up to the memorial sculptures on the hill along the long and wide steps. This was a group of sculptures of figures in intense gestures made of huge and rough granite. Once half a century ago, an armed uprising happened in this city that shocked both China and the world, and many foreign revolutionaries, CCP members, workers and peasants shed their blood together. From high school on, I had already learned from the textbooks about this famous uprising. Even here and now, I could not help but become solemn before the martyrs who had devoted their lives to their ideals. Looking up to those giants who were calling and battling in silence, I felt lost, even forgot my original purpose in coming here … … “I know what you are thinking about,” Li Bailing suddenly said. “What the fuck do you know!” “My grandfather died in that uprising, and later on several of my uncles also sacrificed their lives.” “More than Chairman Mao’s family?” “I know what you are thinking about,” Li Bailing said calmly. “Whenever I come here, I feel just as bad as you, although I also know that this is quite meaningless.” “But I didn’t think about anything. As for feeling bad, I only feel bad about the rain, and really want to find a place to eat or drink something hot or screw you.” Li Bailing looked at me, I looked away with a vicious grin.30

Wang Shuo

●

77

Within a very short time span, the protagonist feels lost twice. He has no way to feel otherwise between two drastically different worlds. One is the suddenly emerging capitalist world saturated with materialism but no idealism, a world that may appear repulsive and, yet, lures him more than ever because it represents a goal to be attained at all costs. The revolutionary martyrs’ cemetery serves as a reminder of the other world of idealism and heroism that nourished him in his early years yet no longer provides him a tangible future. While unable to reconcile these two apparently incompatible worlds, the protagonist has to repress his inner sentiments in both situations in order not to expose his own nakedness and vulnerability. In fact, each of these two scenes of contemplation is just a random pause in the whole chain of actions by the protagonist. He does not allow himself this luxury of time to dwell further upon these moments. He sublimates both the future and the past with their attendant feelings and emotions in order to plunge even deeper into the currents of the present and to act on a reactive and primitive instinct. Also, this time the innocent love and romance that has always served as a final emotional escape or remedy for the protagonist is no longer possible. In a twist to the gender relationships presented in Wang Shuo’s previous works, now it is the male protagonist who suffers at the hands of women. In fact, the final blow comes from Li Bailing, the woman who claims to love him, yet proves that she is a true master of games by having deceived him throughout the story. All his endeavors only lead him falling into her trap and thus end in vain. Equally, his surviving trust in true love and genuine human relationships is completely shattered after he finds out about her deception. It becomes utterly impossible for him to discern truth from lies. Nothing is real or serious, and everything is a game. Ultimately, the protagonist is hollowed out: he no longer possesses any real human identity, and retrogresses into “a lifeless rubber man.”31 The carefully repressed sentimentality once again returns and explodes by the end, leaving an unspeakable taste of bitterness and melancholy in both the protagonist’s and the reader’s mouths. In summary, from “The Flight Attendant” to “The Rubber Man,” by creating a series of hooligans born at the dawn of the reform era and involving them in various schemes and adventures, Wang Shuo actually becomes the first Chinese writer in the mid-1980s to reveal to his readers the almost sinful pleasure of the new world of capitalism. But from the perspective of today, what strikes us about this series is not that Wang Shuo’s protagonists appear as hooligans, but rather that they appear as sentimental hooligans. Almost without exception, their quests for money and women do not lead to any real success, but end up in sentimental voids. It is exactly this

78

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

sentimentalism that, instead of hiding, actually unveils an irrevocable rupture between the past and the present that has fundamentally affected and altered Wang Shuo’s hooligan protagonists’ consciousness. That is to say, the upcoming era of reform of the 1980s in the sentimental eyes of these hooligans is a much more violent and traumatizing experience than most other Chinese writers and critics could have realized or acknowledged. Even if unable to fully grasp and articulate the historical content and significance of this new present, Wang Shuo and his protagonists appear no less intuitively aware of the enormous impact of the triumphant course of capitalism in China. One of the immediate lessons the Wang Shuonian hooligan has learned is that he has to completely repress or sever himself from the past that was once part of him in order to gain a foothold in the present and future. One has to either act fast to sever oneself from one’s origin or to bastardize one’s origin: he has to be eclectic and versatile to be good at playing games. In the light of this, the sentimental hooligan is just a necessary stage through which Wang Shuo’s protagonists finish their “sentimental education” and graduate into real hooligans. Just like Rastignac overlooking Paris at the end of Balzac’s Old Goriot, the Wang Shuonian hooligan undergoes a similar transformation by cursing the new world of capitalism with rage, and yet returning to embrace it and to play a new game according to a new set of rules. He rebels through compromise, and appears defiant by being eclectic. It is through such a paradoxical scenario that Wang Shuo reveals the depth of individual disillusionment and alienation. However, it is also through such a process that a Wang Shuonian hooligan has absorbed and accumulated enough shocks and experiences to allow him to attack and conquer the present. In other words, ideologically, he has finished his primitive accumulation and has gained enough capital and credentials in the new era of reform. Having succeeded in this, like a snake shedding its old skin, Wang Shuo proves himself as perhaps the only sensitive illuminator of the true zeitgeist of the 1980s. Now he is fully prepared for the real game-playing.32 The Playing Masters : From Antirepresentation to Self-Representation, and a “Vulgar” Defense of the Present In retrospect, what is most striking about Wang Shuo’s early series of hooligan sagas is the fundamental tension or split between the present and the past, with the past signifying not only socialism, but also idealism, integrity, sincerity, innocence, and authenticity. The loss of all these qualities has propelled Wang Shuo to create a certain ambiguity and elusiveness,

Wang Shuo

●

79

or shrewdness, of individual identity. In his next work, The Playing Masters trilogy, this kind of strategic shrewdness has been played out to an even fuller degree. The first-person sentimental hooligans of his early hooligan sagas are now transformed—and expanded—into a collective gang of “frivolous hooligans” or “playing masters,” who have no depth and who no longer even aspire to possess any. Instead, these playing masters set out to totally and confidently submerge themselves into the celebratory present. All the works in The Playing Masters trilogy share some commonalties: a very simple or almost nonexistent plot; under the cover of such plot is a group of playing masters, whose characters and identities are almost identical and interchangeable and who keep on inventing and indulging themselves in the seemingly endless new schemes and farces in a comic and almost-virtual reality. In the first story, “The Playing Masters” (1986),33 three buddies, Yu Guan, Ma Qing, and Yang Zhong, set up a Three T Company (“troubleshooting, tedium relief, and taking the blame”34) and accordingly play different roles upon demand, such as, a husband to allow a wife to vent her anger, or a substitute boyfriend to accompany and talk to a girl, or a phony literary committee to give a phony literary award. In the following story, “Nothing Real or Serious” (1989),35 the same group of buddies, joined by the first-person protagonist, Fang Yan, and other playing masters from Wang Shuo’s other novel, Playing for Thrills, decide to become writers and to get famous. In the last story of the trilogy, “You Are Not a Vulgar Person” (1992),36 the now-collective playing masters cook up yet another scheme: they found a new company whose service is to help various ordinary people play out their daydreams in reality, even if just for a short while in one day. Although the plots of these stories seem rather capricious and surreal, they strike a certain contemporary chord. The urban Chinese reality has evolved into such a fluid and hybrid state that it can no longer be named and placed into any predesignated categories. Instead, it presents itself as a hollow void where things become substitutable and thus lose their historical rootedness and authenticity. Language, history, and ideology—everything becomes a purely disposable utilitarian tool as well as a battlefield for discourses. This chaotic picture fits perfectly the frequently changing and often self-contradictory official ideology of reform itself. In other words, the reform has created for itself an indefinitely suspended and prolonged present, which can only be correctly named when it is concluded in an equally indefinitely postponed future. Everything has to be deprived of its original and fixed context and allowed to flow freely in the air or on the surface. Facing this fluid and hybrid present, Wang Shuo—unlike other Chinese

80

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

writers who were still pursuing originality—has chosen to be completely in tune with it and has decided that the only originality that should be allowed and would not look outdated and silly is parody and pastiche. This adoption of parody and pastiche easily serves the purpose of a kind of social satire. Following a line of utilitarianism and eclecticism, these playing masters will use whatever is at hand to bash all those deemed as laughable. As a matter of fact, Wang Shuo’s satirical and sarcastic thrust is aimed not only at the petrified official ideology of socialism that increasingly reveals its own hypocrisy and uselessness, but also at the newly imported trendy Western intellectual modes and discourses, which are viewed as half-digested and “pseudosizing.” For instance, in a comic scene in the original story of “The Playing Masters,” Yang Zhong complains to Yu Guan on the phone about his assignment to accompany a girl who appears to be a so-called modernist (xiandaipai): “I can’t take it any longer, this woman is killing me … You don’t know, this woman is a modernist, the kind that likes to find life’s meaning; I’ve used up all my vocabulary and all the foreign names I could remember.” “I’m good at dealing with modernists,” Ma Qing said on the side. Yu Guan gave him a sneer, and continued on the phone: “Talk Nietzsche with her.” “I’m not familiar with Nietzsche … ” … “Ok, we’ll come to bail you out. You should first shift the conversation to something vulgar, change your image, let her think that you are a boor … Remember, use Freud as transition.” … Ma Qing displays a broad smile … “I am good at Freud, I am the Chinese disciple of Freud.” “You are the self-duplicating Chinese version of the Freudian virus.”37

Hence comes the frequent accusation of Wang Shuo’s anti-intellectualism. But this anti-intellectualism or cynicism may also just be a gesture of persistent refusal to categorize, define, or fix anything, including the present or these playing masters themselves. We may understand it as a stance of “antirepresentation.” The undefinable present remains the only terrain where the “untouchable” playing masters can exist, and “I play, therefore I am” is their motto. This stance of antirepresentation, to a great extent, has not only put Wang Shuo at odds with the tradition of the orthodox socialist realism in the post-1949 Chinese context, but has also separated him from the trends

Wang Shuo

●

81

of roots-seeking literature and experimental fiction that were viewed as avant-garde during the 1980s. Many of the authors in the latter two camps had purposely detached themselves from the present and dwelled in an imaginary past or distant history, or attempted to represent modern Chinese history in a neohistorical or ahistorical fashion. In both cases, by claiming to choose roots or history, these authors have in fact voluntarily given up or missed their true roots and history, which are nowhere but in the present itself. Wang Shuo, on the other hand, by taking such a defiantly radical position of antirepresentation, has largely refused the temptation of any historical “depth,” which he sees as ultimately confining or illusory. Accordingly, the antirepresentation of the present becomes Wang Shuo’s primary theme as well as his main strategy (via parody, pastiche, and satire) of coping with history. For Wang Shuo and his playing masters, this position may also symbolize an utter liberation from the outdated rules of history by refusing to concede any legitimacy or authority to the latter. But that is not yet the whole secret. If the socialist/realist notion of a totalistic development of the subject has been subverted and dissolved by the refusal of Wang Shuo and his playing masters to develop or grow into a national subject as dictated by the education of the Cultural Revolution, Wang Shuo is apparently taking it a step further and revealing the potentiality of a new development: that is, to become playing masters who can fully accommodate themselves to the flow of the present and eventually tame and dominate it through a game on their own terms. This is testified to, near the end of “The Playing Masters,” by two minor characters who cannot quite match these playing masters in this game and have to resign themselves to being spectators: “Don’t listen to what they say,” Bao Kang and Zhao Yaoshun stood shoulder to shoulder, gazing at Ma Qing and Yang Zhong, who were in high spirits, talked to each other loudly, and dominated their dancing partners’ paces skillfully in the ballroom. “These guys are really finished, not even one word of truth comes out from their mouth.”38

Notice this nuance: unlike their early incarnations—alienated, sentimental hooligans—now it is the playing masters, as a collective, and shedding the burden of depth and truth, who are dominating the center stage, leaving the others to feel loss and envy. And thus antirepresentation is complemented by an agenda of “self-representation.” This dialectic of development into “masters” and seizure of power via “play,” or self-representation through antirepresentation, can be seen even

82

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

more clearly in “Nothing Real or Serious,” the second story of The Playing Masters trilogy, in which the playing masters now find themselves a new profession: writing. This change is heralded sarcastically as: “All the hooligans in Beijing have now changed into writers!”39 These hooligans-turnedwriters continue to cook up various kinds of schemes of antirepresentation, but this time in the arena of literature itself. They challenge and profane all sorts of conceptions about representation and history. Their runningwild mockery spares almost no one, from a supposed Western sinologist with leftist inclinations (“We are waiting for capitalists, not for you.” “You don’t know that we hate ultra-Leftists? As you said, that is an entertainment for rich people, why should we poor people follow that? Get rich first and then we are going to look for fun”40) to a senior and supposedly canonical author of modern literature (who, according to the playing masters, is just an “old hooligan” from a different era41), to a young, decadent, and politically dissident poet (“you are from the group that promotes ‘wholesale Westernization’? … You all try to give directions for China, but we’ll not follow you anywhere!”42). Wang Shuo’s antirepresentation, therefore, clears the way for the selfrepresentation of the playing masters and the present. Such a self-representation comes to a scandalous climax in the story when the hooligan writers, who are accused of practicing literature without license, put on a splendidly provocative and performative self-defense in front of a court. The trial turns into a carnival, and they win. The entire story thus becomes a direct and bold showdown by the “vulgar” playing masters and emerging literary heroes, who now demand their own legitimacy through self-representation. In other words, a self-confident possession and dominance of the present via play has almost automatically guaranteed the new vanguard and master status to these self-representing hooligans and playing masters. The present in Wang Shuo’s works, hence, is ultimately mythologized and deified despite its concrete historical nature. And, correspondingly, “vulgarity” becomes the label these playing masters wear on their sleeves. Thus, it is only natural for Wang Shuo to conclude The Playing Masters trilogy with the novella titled “You Are Not a Vulgar Person,” in which the present is hailed as the existential and invincible core of the playing masters: How did I not tell you the truth? What I said is totally true … Why should I pretend to be the legitimate successor of human cultural treasures? I indeed like the things coming out only after I was born! I like to use everything new! … This is my, a vulgar person’s, criterion, different from an intellectual’s—and I’m proud of it.43

Wang Shuo

●

83

But as the celebratory playing seemingly comes to reign in an eternal present, a shadow also creeps in, which is the eventual boredom of the present after the initial excitement of playing gradually wanes. If in the first novella, “The Playing Masters,” both the readers and the characters could experience a kind of sinful pleasure and thrill over the series of transgressions and profanations, then in “Nothing Real or Serious,” behind the deliberate gesture of playing and profanation already there lies a sense of repetitiveness and boredom. The first motive for the playing masters to become writers is in fact more or less connected to this sense of boredom and emptiness. Even Wang Shuo’s trademark verbal sarcasm becomes no more than the symptom of this self-inflicted boredom, and appears to have its edge dulled. In the story, when Fang Yan was talking to a sinologist about his next novel, Never Take Me as Human,44 there is an exchange like this: “Eh, not serious,” the foreigner looked at me with pity and shook his head. “How come I’m not serious? Because I didn’t write about Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science?” “You are promoting a cynical lifestyle, we Westerners don’t like it.” “This you don’t understand at all. We Easterners always view body and soul in opposite proportion, the more the body degenerates the more likely the soul will be saved. We are more thorough than you are, and have more sense of history than you do. We always let history tell us about the future—it’s got nothing to do with the present.”45

While Fang Yan’s devaluation of the present in the last sentence is entirely ironic, we do sense a kind of hollowness and wariness behind his deliberately dramatic tone. That is, the present in the end may not be as wondrous and thrilling as Wang Shuo would have wanted to impress upon us through his playing masters. Instead, the present may actually be quite monotonous, boring, and, eventually, even depressing, since nothing really happens and nothing really marks the passage of time and life. In the end, a sense of anxiety toward this unnamed and rootless present grows and forces Wang Shuo to put this present back in a historical perspective in order to reassess its origin—together with the origin of these playing masters themselves. The Unbearable Lightness of the Present: A Capitalist Manifesto, and the Second Coming of the Cultural Revolution In 1988, barely four years after “The Flight Attendant” was published, Wang Shuo published his first full-length and arguably most acclaimed novel, Playing for Thrills. While further exhibiting the self-confident and

84

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

provocative play on the surface of the present, Playing for Thrills also shows a playing-master who has now reached a pivotal stage in his life where he is almost entirely saturated in the present, afflicted with a historical amnesia, and unknowing of what awaits him in the future. In other words, such a fantastic and supposedly interminable game based upon a willful oblivion of history has its serious consequences in real time. Beneath the unbearable lightness of the present, we sense impending crisis and real danger. Unexpectedly, Wang Shuo picks up the theme of “origin.” In fact, 1988 was also the year that the post–Cultural Revolution reforms—after having already been in full-winged progress for a decade— had to contend with a highly volatile situation where various social contradictions were converging and searching for their proper moments of volcanic release. A historical reassessment and retrospection of this overstretched or ill-defined present of reform was, at that point, badly needed and yet unavailable. Put in this sociopolitical context, Playing for Thrills, strangely, stands as the only important literary work (from a labeled “hooligan” writer) produced in the 1980s that has provided an apocalyptic vision of the decade, which was soon to conclude in a new eruption of historical violence in 1989. The narrative of Playing for Thrills is a highly engaging and innovative one that combines farce and suspense, two modes that Wang Shuo has deftly deployed in his previous works. It starts with the present of 1988, which first appears orgiastically jubilant and scandalously playful. Fang Yan, again, the first-person narrator and protagonist as well as the alter ego of Wang Shuo himself, indulges in his usual activities of gambling and womanizing. But all of a sudden, in a Kafkaesque scene, he finds himself visited and interrogated by the police. He is suspected of having committed a murder ten years previously (which according to clues in the novel ought to be 1978), the year when the post–Cultural Revolution open-door policy was officially adopted and the economic reforms started. In order to prove his own innocence, he must recount what he did during a certain seven days during that time. However, having immersed himself for too long and far too deeply in the instant plays of the present with his gang of hooligan friends, Fang Yan finds himself utterly unable to recall his recent past. From there, both the readers and Fang Yan himself begin to realize that the carnival present, which appears free of social restrictions and historical burden, is actually not as healthy or normal as it seems. It starts to reveal its other side, one plagued by social paralysis and historical amnesia. As in the case of the Madman in Lu Xun’s “A Madman’s Diary,” suddenly there is a historical urgency for Fang Yan to resituate and reassess his own identity and relationship with the present.

Wang Shuo

●

85

Thus, we find the following exchange between Fang Yan and the police at the beginning of the novel: The interrogation ended with more questions about how I spent those seven missing days. After swearing up and down that I couldn’t recall, and that I wasn’t trying to pull anything over on them, they gave up, and agreed to give me time to think. They’d be back in a few days, and in the meantime I was to write down everything I’d done from the day I was discharged up to the time I started work, who I’d seen, and where I’d gone. I said I could write a novel, and still not get it all in, and if I did it in journal form, I’d fill three notebooks. “No fanciful sagas, now,” they warned. “We’re not here for a good time or to nurture new literary talent. Make up a story, and you’ll wish you hadn’t.”46

“No fanciful sagas … Make up a story, and you’ll wish you hadn’t.” The police’s warning may also serve as a reminder for both Wang Shuo himself and those critics who viewed Wang Shuo’s works as just a celebratory farce on a carefree present, as manifested in The Playing Masters trilogy particularly. Indeed, what is at stake here is the protagonist’s very own life, history, and identity against the indefinite and light present. The answer to “who am I?” relies upon the answer to “who was I?” Thus, there is a strict demand for fidelity to the past and history. Now this present has to pay a price for its own frivolity and lightness due to its loss of history and memory. So, it is not strange that after this interrogation, as the presence of the police fades into the narrative, Fang Yan has to start the search on his own for his lost past and identity. This search, initially out of situational pressure, soon gains a historical or metaphysical dimension as a journey of selfdiscovery. This dimension is also highlighted in the following exchange between Fang Yan and Li Jiangyun, the female protagonist who eventually proves to be the key figure mediating between Fang Yan’s lost past and the present: You have a very high opinion of yourself, don’t deny it. Otherwise, why is it so important to get to the bottom of things that happened so long ago? Let people talk … ” “If I don’t get to the bottom of these things, young lady, it’s my head.” “That’s just an excuse. I can tell by the extent of your concern that there’s more to this than just clearing your name. It’s mainly self-knowledge. Your anxiety comes from the sudden realization that you don’t understand yourself, as if you’ve lost something, as if your image of yourself were somehow incomplete. If you can learn what happened then, I think your anxiety will disappear, even if you find you’ve done something terrible. Nothing is more important than having a thorough understanding of yourself. At the very least, it gives you an idea of what to do next, and how to do it, since there’s nothing worse than having your future controlled by others.”47

86

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

As the search goes on, an intriguing as well as confusing convergence happens. Gradually, the dividing line between the present and the past, between the real and the surreal, is blurred. Fang Yan gets a new, yet vague, sense that the past is not really gone, but has been existing in the very present as a shadow or ghost, and he has been rubbing shoulders with it the whole time. Upon this discovery, Fang Yan begins to alienate himself from the present. The present in turn appears to him an unstable, hybrid, and unreal existence, almost like a labyrinth of the past: Now I know this city like the back of my hand, having visited every inch of it over the decades, and I can tell you how monotonously similar its neighborhoods can be, sort of like a bathhouse, where one naked body is pretty much the same as all the others. Each neighborhood has the feel of home, since I’ve had dealings of one sort or another with people from all over the city … I walked up one lane and down another, passing all kinds of gates, some open, some shut, some locked, and wondered where that woman might live … I was curious and lost at the same time. A segment of my past life is closed behind those gates. Which door do I ought to push open and release it?48

It is through walking in those old alleys that Fang Yan starts to revive the past of which he himself was a part. But often these attempts at reviving the past turn out to be self-deceptive: After the passage of years, the restaurant now sported a different sign, but its appearance looked the same, the same long, narrow arrangement within a square, cinder block building, like a theatre aisle … I stood across the busy street, looking through the windows at diners as they ate, drank, and talked … I knew without being told that this was no longer the fine restaurant of earlier times. It had been converted into a trendy Western-style fast-food joint geared to turn a fast profit for its Japanese investors … No possibility of reviving the old dreams. I’d gone back a few days earlier, and sat there for a long time, numb, like a cigarette arranged in a pack.49

What we get here is a sense of contradiction: a strong nostalgia for the past, which can no longer be recovered, coupled with deep doubts about the realness of the past. Did the past truly exist or was it only a reality fashioned by Fang Yan’s own imagination? Fang Yan cannot guarantee the credibility of his own memory either. Instead, what he finds is that neither the present nor the past or even his own memory is tangible. What Wang Shuo questions here is the faculty of memory and identity itself. Things have changed yet have not changed; they are the same as in the past yet not really the

Wang Shuo

●

87

same. If so, how is it possible to negotiate between the present and the past and retain their respective tangibilities in the meantime? This same intangibility of identity about place and time also applies to people. When Fang Yan first appears, he is confidently surrounded by his playing master friends, who, to a degree, have shielded him safely from the pressure of any individual identity quest. Yet as the story unfolds, he finds out that many of his acquaintances actually bear double identities and ambiguous linkages to the past, which causes Fang Yan further confusion in terms of distinguishing people purely by their present identities. This intangibility of identity is even stronger in the case of Fang Yan himself. In the process ofthe investigation, Fang Yan discovers that his identity had been stolen by someone else and foreshadowed by the early playing masters. Morever, Fang Yan is also constantly dazzled by the multitude of changes to his own identity ever since his childhood, as we see when he glances through a photo album in a dream scene: That guy took down a cloth-covered photo album from the bookcase and began flipping through it. It was filled with yellowing black-and-white photos: men and women of all ages and all types caught in a variety of poses and settings. I appeared in some of the photos, a sour look on my face and a red bandanna around my neck, rowing a boat in a sailor outfit, long hair and smoking a cigarette. The people with me kept on changing: First it was my parents, then Gao Yang and Xu Xun, and finally Fat Man Wu and Liu Huiyuan. Included too were many people I had long forgotten and some who were mere chance acquaintances. I appeared in photos mainly with Gao Yang and Zhuo Yue … I pretty much grew up with those two and even the expressions on our faces evolved together from innocence to cynicism. Then Zhuo Yue simply vanished, never to reappear; after that it was Gao Yang, whose face is absent from the images. I appeared in more and more photos alone, older and older, my smile more and more forced, until, in the last few my head was bowed.50

All these different images of the same person from different moments of life are bound together to serve as confirmation of Fang Yan’s self-identity. Ironically, utterly unable to give a cohesive recounting of these different moments, what Fang Yan gets from staring at his own photo album is just a fragmented and ahistoricized hollow self-image. As a consequence of this intangibility of identity, a sense of unnameable historical conspiracy surrounds him even more thickly, which is revealed later in a description of Fang Yan’s revisit to an unidentified southern big city of China, where he stayed ten years ago, about the same time of the suspected murder.

88

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

I was struck by the air of carefree prosperity as I sped past upscale boutiques and fancy restaurants that were a feast for the eyes, and all of them filled with shoppers and diners. The lack of anxiety was palpable, unchecked, and so obvious it seemed artificial, extravagant even, as if it concealed a trap for the unwary, a conspiracy in which all the residents participated based upon a silent agreement. In this city the sun’s spreading rays carried a sense of doom.51

However, while Fang Yan increasingly suspects that a web of conspiracy has been woven against him by all the people and events surrounding him in the present, he also starts to feel a kind of excitement and even thrill—this time, not for the present, but for his to-be-recovered past. He tells Li Jiangyun the reason later: Yes, and reaching that understanding has been a real eye-opener. You should feel honored to be in the presence of such an extraordinary person … I’m told that all the signs point to the likelihood that I once was some sort of merciless gangster … I think back to those days when we had just been discharged, all primed and ready to go. There was nothing we didn’t want to try or were afraid of doing. The proverbial masters of the nation. If we wanted love, we went out and took it, if we felt like going on a rampage, we did it. No one could stop us. But the times weren’t right, so we turned bandits.52

That is to say, now Fang Yan’s attention has totally shifted away from the dreary present and toward a mystified past of ten years ago. What is invoked here is a recurrence of the old fantasy of hooligans being the true masters, as had been propagated by Wang Shuo’s previous hooligan sagas. All the traces of this past eventually lead Fang Yan to his final encounter, in that same unidentified southern city, with his “ghost other,” Gao Yang. This old friend and the supposed victim of murder has actually lived a shadow life passing himself as Fang Yan and has continually crossed the real Fang Yan’s path. The murder is exposed as a farce or game. Even so, what preoccupies Fang Yan now is the question of whether the “master” fantasy was ever once reality. Thus, the following exchange: You underestimated me,” I said with a laugh. “I’ve never passed up a chance to be a central character.” “I should have guessed,” said Gao Yang. “ … So tell me, in all these years, have you ever found a more interesting thing to do, and become the central character of it?” “In all these years, this has been the only thing that I’ve found interesting. I suddenly found that in the past I had been an important character, had

Wang Shuo

●

89

committed something important, which even pushed me to have a reason and guts to commit murder. This was really exciting, which means that I had not always been a mediocrity. I really wish that all of these had been true”53

However, Gao Yang’s answer comes as a blow: There was no thieving, no smuggling, no big-time robbery, no criminal gang, none of that. We just hung out, stuffing ourselves, and getting drunk and concocting bold schemes we wouldn’t carry out in a million years. We were a bunch of gutless wonders, kids in grown-up bodies who played at being bullies and killers. We all wanted to be stars, we wanted to rule over a craven world, while in fact we were destined to be little fish capable only of making tiny ripples in a big pond.”54

This answer, in one way, completely shatters Fang Yan’s nostalgia for an ersatz past, which did not exist as he had wished. Ironically, he finds out that contrary to his wishes for a past as a master in control of his own destiny, he was just a passive character, instead of a real killer, in a fictitious murder schemed by his even more disillusioned friends ten years previously. Accordingly, the last decade that preceded the present has just been, instead of reality, a fiction noir born from constant nihilistic game playing. Although this final encounter and exchange between Fang Yan and Gao Yang may seem to be all that we need to locate the origin of Fang Yan’s crisis and to end this farcical suspense story, it turns out not to be the entire picture. Not all the built-up tensions have been completely released. Instead, the urgency is maintained by new revelations as the story continues with further self-searching. The murder is not just a harmless and empty farce that Gao Yang claims it to be. In the end, indeed someone had died, not Gao Yang, but another character, Feng Xiaogang, who himself had insisted on carrying this game of murder to its very logical end and making it authentic by paying the price of his life. This game of death indicates that the crisis and disillusionment of the present has had a far more devastating consequence than it seemed at first. It is at this point in the narrative that Fang Yan suddenly recovers his memory of the past. While skipping the seven days the police have asked him to recall, he begins to recount, in reverse order, another thirteen days that he and his old friends spent in the southern city. In the meantime, the backward narration of these thirteen days has created further uncertainty of the causes and results regarding the events, which indicates the multiplicity of moments and origins of this spiritual crisis and transformation.

90

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

Fang Yan’s most visible crisis is manifested in his change of attitude toward the possibility of genuine love. On the tenth day, when Fang Yan and his girlfriend at the time, Bai Shan, sat in a restaurant, Fang Yan warned Bai Shan not to take his words literally and told her that in his case “Seven or eight out of every ten sentences that come out of my mouth are pure bullshit” and that this is so “To anybody at any time and any place.”55 Although Fang Yan himself refused to clarify this statement further, as we come to the ninth and eighth days, we see that the origin of Fang Yan’s disillusionment with love lies in his betrayal by Li Jiangyun. While he was expected by his friends just to have casual sex with Li Jiangyun, he was attracted to and moved by Li Jiangyun’s stories of her traumatic personal life and relationships with men under the shadow of the Cultural Revolution. Li Jiangyun’s story is in some ways a quick rehearsal of the post–Cultural Revolution scar literature. Particularly, her stories about the first three men in her life are directly linked to the Cultural Revolution itself. But what is unorthodox about these stories are that these three men (her high school teacher, her father, and a young Red Guard) who seduced, raped, or abandoned her all perished as victims during the Cultural Revolution. Therefore they could have appeared as positive heroes rehabilitated in scar literature. Li Jiangyun’s stories, however, suggest that scar literature itself, being oversimplistic, may have covered up many more complex and perhaps darker human truths and unnamed historical traumas. In doing so, these stories have actually opened up to Fang Yan as well as to the readers a so-far-unknown vertigo of alternative history and reality of the Cultural Revolution. What has made things more complicated is that while Fang Yan was completely moved by Li Jiangyun’s stories and accepted her credibility, he also expressed an innocent hope that such confessions would finally enable her to put an end to her dark history. Obviously this was not the case with Li Jiangyun herself. The next day Fang Yan saw, with his own eyes, Li Jiangyun’s betrayal of his trust with his other friends and was mocked by them for his naiveté. It was at this point that Fang Yan determined no longer to trust anybody and no longer to take anything seriously. This also indirectly declares the bankruptcy of scar literature, which had been intended to purify and heal the traumas of the Cultural Revolution. Instead, we see that the virus of history, along with the negative legacy of the Cultural Revolution, has now infected Fang Yan through Li Jiangyun. When Li Jiangyun appears again in Fang Yan’s life in the present, she actually serves as a messenger of history as well as a mysterious reminder for Fang Yan of his own link to the past that he can no longer remember. That is to say, the legacy of the Cultural Revolution lives on in the present even though Fang Yan has great difficulty facing it due to his loss of contact with his own past.

Wang Shuo

●

91

Although it seems that Li Jiangyun constituted the most direct cause of Fang Yan’s spiritual crisis and disillusionment, ultimately we see there is another, and more fundamental, cause, though at that time it appeared less explicit. That is the then nascent awareness of the social and ideological rupture and transformation from socialism to capitalism in the late 1970s. Back to the sixth day, in the absence of Fang Yan, his friends, while facing the street traffic, were fancying a new coup d’état as if playing a game: “Then the city would be under our martial rule. We’d shoot our way into the municipal government and change it into the commune, where we’d form a revolutionary council and take turns holding the reins of power.” … “Right, we can’t repeat the mistakes of the Paris Commune,” Gao Yang announced with a laugh. “We shall use an iron fist, that’s the only way to consolidate power. Burning some books and burying a few Confucians alive, big deal. When we start the killing, there will be rivers of blood … ” “What if the rest of us joined forces to kill you?” Xu Xun laughed. “Because by then we’d all have fiefdoms and troops under our command.” “Then we’ll launch a ‘Cultural Revolution,’” Gao Yang replied. “You’ll be criticized and ostracized and trampled under ten thousand feet.” Everybody laughed and loved every minute of it.56

Beneath this seemingly naive and joking facade, again, a real and serious message has been conveyed: the form of the Cultural Revolution has gained its permanent currency in the consciousness of Fang Yan or Wang Shuo’s generation, and it can be recuperated as a vehicle carrying paradoxical or mixed contents of the new era. In other words, even if devoid of definite ideological content and incarnated only as a game, the transformation from socialism into capitalism is going to be just as violent, unpredictable, and traumatic (if only psychologically) as the recent Cultural Revolution. In this sense, we are once again reminded that “playing” itself is indeed “for thrills” and cannot be overlooked as purely frivolous and harmless. It is along this direction, replete with a catastrophic imagination, that we are led to the very first day of the thirteen days, which appears near the ending of the novel yet is really the beginning of the original story. It is at this point that the first-person narrative almost undiscernedly changes into the third-person narrative: “I” has become “Fang Yan.” And the scene is set in the big city square where Fang Yan and his army friends had just arrived after they were newly discharged from the navy: I like it here,” Fang Yan said happily as he took in the view around the square. “I really take to the sun-drenched southern cities. I enjoy seeing elegant homes and handsome, well-dressed people.”57

92

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

Yet his friend Gao Yang immediately puts him and others down by saying, “If you plan to stick around here, you’d either make a lot of money or learn to do without.”58 This provokes the others to fight back: Why should we do without?” Xu Xun said with his eyes wide open. “Who are we, anyway? We’ve always been the cream of the crop. We’re people who eat meat while others drink soup, and this is no time to change.” “I don’t believe it,” Wang Ruohai protested loudly. “How could a great place like this not hold anything for us? Who are the masters of the nation? I’ll send my troops to level the place.” … “Right, don’t lump us together with those people. Let those fuckheads make their fortune, then when they’ve got enough, we come at them with a one-hit-and-three-anti’s campaign, and confiscate everything,” Fang Yan said. “Why do we need money? We can manage as well without money as other people can with it. Don’t they know where they are? Whose world is this? Don’t tell me it’s capitalism now.”59

Here again Gao Yang speaks, almost solemnly, in the tone of a new prophet: “Ignore them,” Gao Yang said to Gao Jin. “They are still in their dreams. Give them a few days here, and just watch them change. What good is money? Lots of good. There are two kinds of people who don’t know the value of money: Those who are born with it and those who have never tasted its joy. Don’t fucking pretend to be high-principled nobility! Where will you find China’s nobility? They’re in power now, but back thirty years ago they were all just a bunch of cowherds. Close down the national treasury, and they’ll all be out on the streets begging.”60

What immediately follows this prophecy is a highly allegorical scene with Gao Yang further providing its background voice: Just then a building on the edge of the square caught fire … half the building was engaged, flames burning through the roof and leaping into the bright sky, now painted red. Clouds of black smoke billowed upward to foul the vast blue sky. Speeding fire engines dragged siren wails behind them as they converged on the square and rushed to the building in flames. “I am utterly tired of all those people who have no capital but act like they’re members of the nobility, the upper class. The task of this epoch is to bury people like that, eliminate their kind from the face of the earth before they spawn the second generation,” Gao Yang said ferociously. “Their demise won’t even match that of the descendants of the Manchu dynasty, who at

Wang Shuo

●

93

least left behind treasures that could be pawned for cash. All these people have at home is ugly government-issue furniture.” The high-rise was now a towering inferno, as bright as an enormous pine torch. In the radiant sunlight the flames were the reddest of red … flames leaped into the red and black sky, burning fiercely, a wanton display of might high up; rooftops, some flat, others tapered, were bathed in serenely stupefying sunbeams.61

The fire broke out on the square under the blue sky and in the radiant sunlight against a strangely serene backdrop, as if it already had been accepted as part of everyday reality. This is indeed an apocalyptic scene and endows Gao Yang’s pronouncement with an ever-present historical urgency, which, however, could not yet be fully discerned and absorbed by other people such as Fang Yan himself, who, as Gao Yang puts it, were “still in their dreams.” What Gao Yang is pronouncing is nothing less than a Capitalist Manifesto, in the mode of The Communist Manifesto, that foresees an even greater impending disruptive historical force immediately following the Cultural Revolution. In other words, ironically, what is to come is neither a restoration (of the social order and power structure before the Cultural Revolution) nor just a reform, but something far beyond most people’s scope of understanding back then. It is going to be a totally new experience: in fact, a new revolution. In this sense, Gao Yang happened to be the real mouthpiece of Wang Shuo, the author, in 1988. He gave a deadly blow to the whole master mentality nourished by the Red Guard generation during the Cultural Revolution, a mentality that had enabled Fang Yan and his other friends to view themselves as the natural inheritors and future masters of the nation. He was also correct in predicting that Fang Yan and the others would soon change from residually naive and idealistic future masters of the nation into cynical and pragmatic playing masters of the present. Seen from this view, the idealistic education of the young generation that culminated in the Cultural Revolution has now gone bankrupt altogether. But — and here is the key — what turns out to be most ironic and unsettling about Gao Yang’s pronouncement is that, if we examine it carefully, his prophecy of the apocalyptic coming of capitalism is screened through the very lens of the Cultural Revolution itself. That is to say, Gao Yang was, in a backhanded fashion, almost predicting the second coming of the Cultural Revolution itself, only this time as a radical revolution that would sweep against the whole socialist past of China of the last thirty years. Even more clearly, the pronouncement that “The task of this epoch is to bury … ” reminds one of the very style of another of the most famous and

94

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

frequently quoted of Mao’s dictums and the Red Guards’ mottoes during the Cultural Revolution: Our generation of youth will participate in the battle of burying imperialism with our own hands. The task is heavy and the road is long, and yet the Chinese youth with great determination must fight with all our lives to accomplish our great historical mission.62

The difference is that now Gao Yang (and later Fang Yan and the others too) has recuperated and recycled the whole Cultural Revolution along with its radicalism, only to serve a totally reversed goal: to embrace capitalism and become its vanguards. Accordingly, while admitting the bankruptcy of the old master mentality, neither Gao Yang nor Fang Yan is willing to let it go completely. One thing remains unchanged: they were educated to believe that they are the future masters of the nation; now, facing the danger of losing this privileged position, they must ride the new tide and regain it. If they can no longer be the masters of a socialist nation, then they will be the playing masters of a new capitalist present. Idealism has degenerated into cynicism and opportunism, but the master mentality has managed to survive through hooliganism and invented game playing, with history itself becoming just a vessel, a form or genre that can be parodied and played with. And this is the real journey that Fang Yan and his friends have embarked upon during the past decade of the era of reform: to reinvent another Cultural Revolution. And it is exactly in this sense that we shall see that Gao Yang’s recuperative Red Guard-like capitalist manifesto is not just an anachronism, but indeed has its own historical legitimacy and pressing urgency. Apparently, this second Cultural Revolution has gone awry again. In the present of 1988, after various games and negotiations, Fang Yan and most of his friends find that, perhaps to their own dismay, they are just a bunch of playing masters who once again have exhausted their inventiveness in the present and have lost the momentum of looking forward to the future course of history. History sinks hopelessly in the present and they are playing wearily, day and night, in a total void. Nevertheless, Gao Yang’s new capitalist manifesto issued in 1978 has not become any bit less valid or apocalyptic as of 1988. The carnival of the present that Wang Shuo and his playing masters once celebrated by dropping the burden of history is soon to be retaliated against by the very recent history that still lurks underneath the surface of the present. That is when Fang Yan, who is spent and bored with the present, suddenly awakes to find himself a suspect of an unsolved murder case and a captive of his own history.

Wang Shuo

●

95

Back in 1988, Wang Shuo was probably the only writer in China who had provided an alternative vision of the past ten years of reform in the fashion of a recharged Cultural Revolution. That apocalyptic scene of the fire on the square at the end of Playing for Thrills was supposed to have happened in a southern city ten years before 1988, yet in a surreal way, it mirrors the upcoming apocalyptic scene of fire and smoke in Tiananmen Square barely one year later in 1989. Wang Shuo may have also been more accurate than many other Chinese fiction writers in locating the genealogy of that liminal moment of crisis and showing us that the legacy of the Cultural Revolution did not expire entirely, but, like a beast in the jungle, prevailed through the whole of 1980s and has constantly haunted and invaded contemporary Chinese social imagination. If in his early hooligan sagas Wang Shuo had expressed a sentimentality over the sudden rupture between the past and the present at the dawn of the era of reform, then in Playing for Thrills he shows that the rupture between the past of revolution and the present of reform can be rebridged by viewing the latter as a recuperation and reinvention of the former in a new capitalist mode, along with all its vehemence and violence. To imagine or to admit it, indeed, would have meant for most critics of Wang Shuo “playing for thrills” or, literally, “to play is to have your heart race.” “Vicious Animals”: Negotiated Nostalgia for History, or, a Success Story of Capitalism Let us dwell upon the ending of Playing for Thrills. We have already found that the messages conveyed by Gao Yang, Fang Yan, and others are all quite paradoxical and ambivalent ones. At one moment, Fang Yan and others are still defending their idealistic origins from the Cultural Revolution and cursing capitalism, yet at the next moment, Gao Yang is already sarcastically savaging their once-common naive idealism and issuing a new capitalist manifesto, which itself is at once a residual imitation as well as bold appropriation of the tone and mode of various manifestos current in the Cultural Revolution. By the very end, however, the narrative takes another, and final, turn. Now Fang Yan and the narrator “I” are finally split into two different roles: “Like a bead from a broken strand, I rushed toward the boundless land, and in that urgent state, there, settling earthward in the distance, I saw another Fang Yan.”63 The former is a character in the novel, and the latter is now a reader of the unfolding novel: I am sitting beside a window aboard a rumbling train, reading a book, it seems … The protagonist of my book is a compulsive gambler who never

96

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

does an honest day’s work. One day he finds himself suspected of murder. Forced to delve into his memories by calling on old friends, he produces a book of life that is missing seven of its pages. I read how he takes extraordinary measures to ferret out old ghosts, all the way back to his youth, but to no avail. How stupid he is, running back and forth without a clue as to how anything might turn out … The author appears reluctant to lay down his pen, wanting to keep at his copious excesses and take this fellow all the way back to his mother’s womb. I don’t feel like reading any more, since I figure he’ll end up a chubby little darling with laughing eyes who waves his hands and sucks on a baby bottle as he’s pushed around town in his stroller, rocking back and forth, loved by all who see him. I close the book after getting through about a third of it; the pages I’ve already read and those I’ll never get to are as different as: black and white.64

In the end, what we have is a metafictional open ending, which is fully parodic and ironic. On the one hand, we as the actual readers may have already come to the actual end of the novel itself and accept the thirteen days in reverse order as the ultimate origin of all the disillusionment and crisis that Fang Yan has suffered. Yet on the other hand, we are told by the newly emerging “I,” the fictional reader, that this quest is far from closed, and that in fact it could have been continually traced back to an even earlier age and through the entire years of Fang Yan’s growing up. Thus, it is only reasonable to say that Playing for Thrills itself is far from being a finished version of the genealogical search for the origin of the present along with all its crises; instead, it awaits its sequel. Wang Shuo admitted later that while writing this novel he encountered difficulty over how to end it.65 This difficulty of ending may be proved soon to have double implications for both Wang Shuo, the actual author, and Fang Yan, the character. What awaited Fang Yan, when he reached backward to that particular apocalyptic moment of 1978, was the inevitable further deviance from the present and a search further back to the years of the Cultural Revolution. Meanwhile, what awaits Wang Shuo is the upcoming apocalyptic 1989, its uncanny resemblance to his own dark prophecy of a violent capitalist revolution in the novel only confirming the urgency of a continual genealogical examination of the relationship between the present and the Cultural Revolution. This urgency is only further enhanced by one of the crucial facts about the 1990s or the post-1989 era. That is, the grand march of the new capitalist revolution in China has not been stopped or slowed down; on the contrary, its pace has been accelerated and its logic has been made more than ever apparent. Accordingly, this new capitalist revolution has more than ever revealed its own duality regarding its linkage with the legacy of the Cultural Revolution.

Wang Shuo

●

97

Therefore, it is not entirely strange or sudden for Wang Shuo, right after 1989, to finally reopen the history of the Cultural Revolution and to refresh or refashion the collective cultural memory of it. Yearnings (Kewang), a TV drama series that was coscripted by him, became an instant national hit by representing in a melodramatic mode ordinary people’s life throughout the Cultural Revolution.66 In the meantime, “Vicious Animals” (1991),67 a semiautobiographical novella about a group of Beijing adolescents’ coming of age during the later period of the Cultural Revolution, was immediately hailed as a pioneering work for having offered an alternative vision of the connection between his generation’s coming of age and the Cultural Revolution. “Vicious Animals” should be viewed as the sequel of Playing for Thrills. It continues the retrospective search for individual identity and a personal history, or the genealogy of the present, that was initiated by Fang Yan but left unfinished with an open ending in Playing for Thrills. The story appears to be a summary and remembrance of the first-person adolescent protagonist’s initiation during the later period of the Cultural Revolution. Retrospectively, it serves as an intriguing fictional illustration of urban Beijing life in the 1970s that had already been succinctly represented twenty years ago by Duo Duo in his poetry. While Duo Duo’s underground poetry had by the 1990s become historical, “Vicious Animals” was a work from the 1990s attempting to recreate and refashion the contemporariness of the Cultural Revolution through history. Partly owing to the generational gap, what differentiates “Vicious Animals” from most works of the previous scar literature or educated-youth literature from the early 1980s is that it reveals another world, one in which the experience of adolescent initiation can be described as preconscious or prehistorical and is enveloped by a moral ambiguity and relativity. This is also to say that it appears as rather phenomenological, instead of overtly ideological. As represented in the story, there is the presence of an adult world associated with social and educational institutions, such as schools, teachers, and parents. Yet at the same time, during the later period of the Cultural Revolution, these educational institutions had apparently already lost considerable authority over their young subjects and had actually receded into the background. Instead, foregrounded in the story are the protagonist’s wild experiences and adventures in the company of his teen friends from similar family backgrounds as a group of junior playing masters. In particular, the story focuses upon the young protagonist’s sexual awakening and initiation, eventually effected through both psychological and physical violence, as in the protagonist’s final conquest of his erotic object, Milan, the female protagonist, after having endured a series of frustrations and humiliations. Later Wang Shuo, the author, would designate such an

98

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

unguided coming-of-age experience, one marked by emotional brutality and violence, as “cruel youth” (canku qingchun).68 All these may invite a quick association of these young playing masters with the so-called rebels without a cause as represented in the familiar, almost already stereotyped Western version of youth culture (as found in works such as, say, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye). But what makes “Vicious Animals” ultimately distinctive is that it reveals how an orthodox socialist revolutionary culture, which has been the major content of education during the Cultural Revolution, has allowed the unorthodox seeds to germinate and emerge from the cracks of this very education. This education has not led to the formation of legitimate successors of the revolutionary cause as the protagonist’s PLA officer father has wished, but to the awakening of the beast instinct and savage desire inside the young subjects’ selves. Hence the novella’s title: “Vicious Animals.” That is also to say, Wang Shuo has represented and probed into a yet unnamed psychological gray area and unveiled the ambiguity of the education of the Cultural Revolution itself. We shall see the ambiguity and nuances of this initiation experience in the following examples. The story starts with the protagonist’s junior high life in Beijing in the mid-1970s, during the later period of the Cultural Revolution, when “there were not many young people around in the city; they all went to the countryside or to the military,”69 and the school can barely maintain its normal educational order and function. It is against this background that the protagonist has his fantasy of life: At that time I went to classes only to not lose face. I did not worry about my future at all, which was already pre-determined: after graduation from school I would join the military and become a junior officer with a fourpocket uniform. This was my entire dream … What only accounted for fantasy was a Sino-Soviet war. I longed so much for a world war. I never doubted that the iron fist of the PLA would crash the war machines of the Soviet Unions and the United States, while I myself would emerge as a war hero looked up to by the entire world. I only shouldered definite responsibility for the liberation of the whole world.70

But school life forces him to live in a more banal and boring reality, and this contrast in turn provokes a reaction in him: While one was forced into a banal and boring life that conflicted with one’s own will and interests, one would seek a base habit as a gesture or a symbol, instead of staying passively bored and sick.71

Wang Shuo

●

99

So, he frequently deserts school and slips into strangers’ apartments. One day, by accident, he is struck by the beauty of a girl’s photo in one of the apartments that he slips into; he is erotically awakened and develops an obsession from that point on. Now, revolution and war start to lose their appeal in the face of this new obsession: That year international communist movements had gained impressive triumphs worldwide and particularly in Southeast Asia. The Viet Cong, which had always been supported by our country, took Saigon and then swept over the whole of Indochina. The Khmer Rouge and Prince Souphanouvong of the Pathet Lao came to power in their countries respectively. The United States suffered a face-losing defeat. Yet all these glorious triumphs no longer excited me. I was now facing urgent individual frustrations that needed to be dealt with.72

And he seeks emotional comfort and guidance from the revolutionary bildungsromans that were then circulated in private such as The Song of Youth, How the Steel Was Tempered, and The Gadfly,73 while admitting that my first revolutionary romanticism and longing for a dangerous life on the edge was indeed inspired by them … What fascinated me the most were those episodes of romance between these revolutionaries and bourgeois women. When Pavel finally lost Tonya, I felt a deep regret for him; when Tonya and her bourgeois husband appeared again, I felt a sharp pang of being torn. Ever since then I have been trying to seek a compromise between revolution and romantic love.74

The last sentence gives a keynote to the protagonist’s subject formation during that period. As a result of this compromise, the longing for revolution eventually degenerates into a longing for “a dangerous life on the edge,” and the romance between the revolutionaries and bourgeoise women inspires his desire for a pursuit of status and success (or a quest for bourgeois life). This kind of eclecticism and conformism later proves to be a crucial mental exercise and preparation for the transition from the Cultural Revolution to the rapid embrace of capitalism in the post–Cultural Revolution era. Via this logic, the conflict between desire and revolution is eventually resolved and turned into a transition from the latter to the former, and the emergence of the hooligans and playing masters is one of the most natural consequences of this transition. Apparently there are no available alternatives to help the protagonist survive this weltschmerz, or, “world pain,” except his self-acquired animal instinct, which eventually leads to his violent possession of Milan and his cynical worldview. The story ends with the

100

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

young protagonist’s quasi-existentialist, nausealike reflection on the surrounding world and his desperate effort to hold on to something solid and not drown in the swimming pool when one of his former victims takes revenge on him. This scene can actually be read as a metaphor for the protagonist’s existential condition during his adolescence and the later period of the Cultural Revolution. The stable and old world collapses around him, yet he cannot find a firm place to stand: I was rolling and crawling through the clear and transparent water of the swimming pool, moving my limbs in fear, trying to touch bottom and standing upon something solid and firm, yet whatever my limbs touched was all just soft emptiness. I could feel its heavy and pliable existence, yet it was shapeless; whenever I tried to grasp, I saw it slipping away between my fingers … I started to cry, sobbing in despair while swimming.75

But this ending is an ironic one. While the protagonist in the narrative at that particular historical moment was suffering from adolescent confusion and despair, the narrator is obviously narrating it with self-awareness and a strong sense of nostalgia. This nostalgia, if we put it more bluntly, actually comes from the perspective of a successor in a new reality, namely, a quasi-capitalist reality—and he belongs to a newly emerging elitist class: the new masters of the present and the world. This perspective is indicated by the narrator and protagonist’s confession at the very outset of the story: “After thirty, I finally lived a decent life that I had longed for, for so long. All my efforts had paid off.”76 That is to say, he lives the life of a successful, self-made, middle-class individual in contemporary China.77 In fact, within the narrative itself, the first-person narrator constantly invokes analogies between the young playing masters back at that time and the ones from the present, and draws a scandalous lesson about the Cultural Revolution: I am grateful to the era in which I lived, when students gained unprecedented liberation, not having to learn useless knowledge that was doomed to be forgotten. I feel a great sympathy for today’s students, because they can do nothing even if they have realized that they are wasting their youth. Even till today I still insist that people force young people to study and tempt them with bright futures, only in order not to give them the chance to make trouble on the streets.78

But this claim clearly shows that it is a calculated claim, based on the fact that the narrator is now a success in the current social order. Thus, this

Wang Shuo

●

101

claim is also a strategic move to help the narrator further solidify his newly acquired social status as a successful middle-class individual. The following analogies make this intention ever more obvious: We looked up to and envied those gangsters and hooligans who dominated different parts of the city, just like people adoring those popular music stars of today.79 At that time the chicness and classiness of military uniforms were well above those of today’s name-brand fashion clothing … These boys and girls, wearing old military officer’s uniforms from the army, the navy and the air force, looked very striking on the dim streets back more than a decade ago, and all of them felt very good about themselves, holding respect for each other and looking down on all the others, the same way that stars, dressed glamorously, gather together to give awards to each other in movie circles today.80

By a sleight of hand, Wang Shuo now collapses the division between the past and the present and reconnects them by drawing a comparison between the young playing masters during the Cultural Revolution and the new social symbols of success in the present—the pop music and movie stars. In doing so, he suggests that these two eras can actually be rejoined, just as those young playing masters of the past could very easily have reinvented themselves as the new playing masters of the reform and capitalist era (or, conversely, the playing masters now can repackage and showcase their Cultural Revolutionary past in terms of the images of the new capitalist era). All this testifies to and legitimizes the success achieved by a selective and negotiated combination of rebellion and compromise. In this respect, Wang Shuo’s protagonist and alter ego appears to be a faithful illustration of Deng Xiaoping’s pragmatic golden rule for the reform era: “Black cat or white cat: if it catches mice, it is a good cat.” The “vicious animals” are precisely such cat-animals—the former Red Guards and the young hooligans are remodeled and reunified in their new incarnation: the playing masters of the new market era. However, this kind of successful transition and transformation may have been achieved through the exclusion of those parts of history that may testify to the opposite. That is to say, history needs to be refashioned in order to conform to the agenda of the present. Seen from this perspective, indeed, the whole story of “Vicious Animals” may not be as “true” a historical account of the Cultural Revolution as it claims to be. Ultimately, it is no less a (meta)fiction of the reality of China in the 1990s than Playing for Thrills is of the conspicurous reality of the 1980s. That is why, about two-thirds

102

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

of the way through the story, the narrator suddenly jumps in and confesses, Now my mind is as lucid as the bright moon, and I find that I am making things up again. At the beginning I once swore that I would honestly tell this story and restore the truth.81 This story that began with a sincere narrative effort has already become lies on paper, in spite of my enormous exertions. I no longer dare to confirm which were true and indeed happened, which were false and were borrowed, mixed, entirely fabricated.82

While originally meant to be a genealogical search going back to the Cultural Revolution, this search finds its ultimate roots in the floating and versatile present, not in the past. In the end, the narrative of “Vicious Animals” proves to be a constant interplay and oscillation between the never-fixed present and the ever-reaccommodated past. Gradually, the Cultural Revolution itself has evolved into a new cultural signifier in the 1990s, to be re-encoded and re-decoded according to various cultural and ideological, as well as public and personal, agendas. The nostalgic recuperation of the Cultural Revolution thus serves as an emotional tribute to the residual history of the past, an ideological legitimization of the newly emerging social order and hierarchy, and the new cultural logic of a mushrooming Chinese capitalism in the 1990s. Indeed, a significant change has occurred between the pre-1989 Wang Shuo and the post-1989 Wang Shuo. If in the former we see a more blasphemous Wang Shuo who still embodies play and game with a recuperated residual ideology of revolution, for the latter, this revolution has already completely degenerated and can only be refashioned as the object of a conservative nostalgia for consumption in the mass imagination and collective memory. In other words, a secret anarchist passion is finally spent. What comes as substitute is a public, although more ambivalent than ever, call for indulgence, material as well as psychological, in a simulacrum of history: Let us pretend to know how we got here, even if we “really” don’t know. That is also to say, by referring to the Cultural Revolution in his TV melodramas and best sellers, Wang Shuo has actually admitted his inability to fully comprehend the history of the Cultural Revolution or to further historicize it. What he does, instead, is to represent the Cultural Revolution in a neohistorical fashion informed by nostalgia, which resembles Fredric Jameson’s discussion of what he calls “nostalgia film” in a postmodern American context.83 In this sense, nostalgia is a deliberately selective and subjective mechanism of memory, or rather an indicator of the tenacity of the Chinese capitalism flourishing in the 1990s, after the decade of reform

Wang Shuo

●

103

in the 1980s. The revolution is dead! Long live the revolution! The “revolution” will live as long as it is its own souvenir, and for sale. From this perspective, the Cultural Revolution has indeed made its successful comeback, if only under an unspoken agreement that its original history be purposely suspended or represented solely for the sake of the present. “Always the present!”—this can even be seen as a Faustian pact between the nascent bourgeois middle class and the still-self-titled socialist state in contemporary China. Via such play, Wang Shuo has accomplished his coup d’état of regaining his master status—he is now the star author of best sellers, the darling of the media, and the cultural idol and “godfather” for an entire new generation of ambitious Rastignacs or “urban new men” (chengshi xinrenlei). If the Fang Yan in Playing for Thrills found himself broke, the Fang Yan in “Vicious Animals” (just like Wang Shuo, the author) has become a symbol of success.84 But the price for this success or seizure of power remains high. It is accompanied by the eternal loss of the authenticity of the past (alongside that of the individual), which in turn, underscores the futility of any attempt to recapture an objective history of the Cultural Revolution through fiction. This is not purely an aesthetic or stylistic problem, but an ideological one as well. It proves again what Marx had predicted in The Communist Manifesto, that “All that is solid melts into air”—this time it happens during the rapid progress of capitalization in China. Accordingly, within a few years, the once-provocative and subversive Wang Shuonian “hooligans” and “playing masters” of the 1980s have assumed new identities and appeared much more conservative or conformist in the 1990s. Socialism and capitalism have made their negotiated peace through a strategic marriage. Revolution itself has finally been reformed—“sublated”—into not just a cultural commodity or souvenir, but the very origin and form of a burgeoning capitalism itself. More than ever before, individual development is redesignated and measured against the standard success story of the individual in the capitalist market economy. The idealistic development of revolutionary youth is only a prelude to this success story of capitalism. Herein lies the real “vicious” moral behind Wang Shuo’s mode of cultural nostalgia and individual development in the 1990s. Yet Wang Shuo should also be viewed as one of the very few contemporary Chinese writers who has most pointedly represented the locality and hybridity of the present of China. Through such a scandalous and unsettling “hooligan” metanarrative, he lucidly demonstrates that history is always rooted in the present and is ideologically charged as well. Hence, no pure history exists, just as there is no pure present; rather, it is a product of compromises and negotiations between various forces and positions, for

104

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

instance, between the past of the Cultural Revolution and the present of the undetermined progress of capitalization. While Wang Shuo has chosen to popularize the Cultural Revolution to serve his own aesthetic and pragmatic causes, by revealing and exposing the artificiality of this popularization, he has deftly shown the crisis-charged nature and the full complexities of this transformation from socialism to capitalism in contemporary China. In the end, with all his sleights of hand or maneuvers, Wang Shuo proves to be a truly cunning playing master of the era of reform, in all its ambivalent and ironic senses.

CHAPTER 4

Zhang Chengzhi: Striving for Alternative National Forms, or, Old Red Guard and New Cultural Heretic My history began in 1966 … the name of “Red Guard” was coined by me. If anyone asked me what my first creative work was, I would say “Red Guard.” — Zhang Chengzhi, in an interview in Morning Sun 1 Not only will I not regret the principle of “for the people” that I have believed in ever since I picked up my pen for the first time, but I also will stick to it forever. It is not an empty concept or didacticism at all … Even if this is mocked by others with contempt, I will not give up—although I will not walk on a smooth path in the process of enriching, modifying, and developing it. — Zhang Chengzhi, postscript to The Old Bridge 2 The content of socialist revolution, by contrast, is excessive of all form, out in advance of its own rhetoric. It is unrepresentable by anything but itself, signified only in its “absolute movement of becoming” and thus a kind of sublimity … It is less a matter of discovering the expressive forms “adequate to” the substance of socialism, than of rethinking that whole opposition—of grasping form no longer as the symbolic mould into which that substance is poured, but as the “form of the content” as the structure of a ceaseless self-production. To conceive of form in this way is not wholly incompatible with Marx’s classical aesthetic; indeed it can be seen from one viewpoint as just such a unity of form and content. — Terry Eagleton, “The Marxist Sublime,” in The Ideology of the Aesthetic 3

106

I

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

n 1995, a public debate broke out in the newspapers between Wang Shuo and another writer, Zhang Chengzhi, over the current state of Chinese literature. Seemingly the complete opposite of the frivolous and profane “playing master,” Zhang Chengzhi fiercely denounced the degeneration of Chinese literature represented by “hooligans” such as Wang Shuo himself. The exchange attracted a lot of critical attention and curiosity. Yet, as one of my critic friends privately summarized it: “Well, in the end, this is just a grudge between a young Red Guard and an old Red Guard. They may know quite well that they share more in common than they would like to admit.” Such a casual comment is as curious as it is illuminating when we come to map out the cultural spectrum and divisions in China in the 1990s. For Chinese literature, if the 1980s was an era of zealous pursuit of modernity through seemingly endless innovations and experimentation with forms and ideas, then the 1990s was an era plagued with doubts and anxieties. Many of the once highly praised ideas and writings produced in the 1980s appear to have suddenly become invalidated, both thematically and aesthetically, and many writers seem to have been stricken by intellectual aphasia and impotence. Facing the bankruptcy of the orthodox ideology of socialism and pressed by the foreseeable domination of capitalism, they confronted one terrifying question: Did the dawn of the 1990s mean not only the final demise of socialism in China, but also the expiration of the entire tradition of socialist literature that once served as the form of national literature? It is with this question in mind that we will discuss Zhang Chengzhi’s peculiar presence on the Chinese literary scene, which embodies a complicated synthesis of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, elitism and populism, avantgardism and conservatism, pietism and defiance. Unlike many of his contemporaries, being the inventor of the term “Red Guard” itself back during the Cultural Revolution, Zhang Chengzhi has outspokenly defended the idealism of the Red Guards and expressed few regrets about his “rustication” in Inner Mongolia, which was seen as a positive and literal “reeducation” that allowed him to merge with the subaltern people and identify himself as their adopted son. Zhang Chengzhi is also distinguished among his generation of Chinese writers by having a rather complete and almost elitist educational record. He holds prestigious college and graduate degrees from Beijing University and the China Academy of Social Sciences. He was trained as an archaeologist and later became a scholar of Central Asian and Islamic studies and traveled extensively both in the ethnic regions of China and overseas. Furthermore, with a Hui ethnic minority origin or Chinese Muslim identity, he became the spokesman of the Jahriyya, a Sufi Islamic sect in China, and had a large readership among the impoverished Chinese

Zhang Chengzhi

●

107

Muslim population. In other words, he comes closest to the classical prototype of an individual who has succeeded in fulfilling his own destiny of development and maturation by having undergone ordeals one after another, thereby evolving into a cultural hero in contemporary China. The halo of a cultural hero is not always a blessing. In many senses, this halo creates ambivalence and makes Zhang Chengzhi a lone, suspect figure of cultural heterodoxy in the post–Cultural Revolution era, and particularly in the 1990s. Ironically, whereas the once-marginalized Wang Shuo actually moved to the center and enjoyed a privileged status as a playing master and an “antihero” of this new epoch, Zhang Chengzhi, the classical “hero,” was pushed to a marginal status and deprecated by some as a “cultural heretic.” Zhang Chengzhi, however, singularly retains and embraces the possibility of an integrated, sublimated, and positive subjectivity that once was the ideal of the education of the Cultural Revolution. In other words, despite all the inner contradictions and self-doubts, he still believes in the possibility of a positive modern Chinese bildungsroman that overcomes alienation in a more or less romantic or socialist fashion. What he leaves in question is only this: In what form or genre can this bildungsroman be finally molded and represented? This explains Zhang Chengzhi’s nearly obsessive search for and experimentation with literary genres, languages, and forms throughout his creative career. Poetry, folklore, the novel, history, and the essay have all been appropriated according to the author’s own subjective will and needs. Generic borders have also been frequently and freely transgressed. And, in all these generic transgressions, there always has been a tendency toward lyricization and sublimation. Such an idealistic and romantic persistence in searching for alternative national forms, with all its aesthetic problematics, actually betrays Zhang Chengzhi’s affinity with Duo Duo and Wang Shuo in terms of cultural origin and identity. That is to say, like Duo Duo and Wang Shuo, Zhang Chengzhi is less an orphan of history than a cultural bastard who has maintained his ties with the legacy of the Cultural Revolution. This common origin proves once again that the legacy of the Cultural Revolution is far from being fixed and definite, but on the contrary, is wide open to polarized reinterpretations and reappropriations in the hybrid and fluid present of Chinese and global reality. Reading against the grain, I will argue that the real meaning of Zhang Chengzhi’s striving for alternative national forms is twofold. This endeavor has cast some radical light upon the internal heterogeneities and differences—under the name of subaltern histories— within the boundaries of the once-static and orthodox “nation” in contemporary China. On the other hand, this endeavor has also reenacted and

108

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

revived a certain critical positioning against what he calls a “cultural surrenderism” (wenhua touxiang zhuyi), which is informed by the new hegemony of a capitalism-oriented ideology and discourse of modernity ingrained in a postsocialist intellectual mainstream. In both respects, Zhang Chengzhi, the old Red Guard and new cultural heretic, proves that “nation” and “subjectivity,” even if already seriously doubted and badly damaged, are not yet outmoded terms in the contemporary Chinese cultural imagination.4 From “Red Guard” to “Son of the People”: Initiation and Transformation during the Cultural Revolution Zhang Chengzhi was born in 1948 in Beijing to a Hui Muslim family. He received his high school education in one of the most elite schools in Beijing at that time: the Tsinghua University Adjunct High School. Although an intellectually accomplished and politically dedicated student, he always had an awareness of his subaltern background. This was partly because of his Hui minority origin (which historically has been discriminated against by the Han majority population) and partly because of his family’s poor plebeian status (despite his parents’ revolutionary credentials) in contrast with many other classmates, whose families boasted high-ranking Communists. This paradox is exemplified in one of the most important events in Zhang Chengzhi’s life. In 1966, when the Cultural Revolution broke out, schoolmates with high social and political status immediately organized a rebel student group. Although not a central figure, he actively participated in and was responsible for giving a name to this group: Red Guard. Originally a private aesthetic signature on his classroom artworks, “Red Guard” (Hong weibing ) would eventually become a collective and political sign of the vanguard of the Cultural Revolution and be permanently inscribed into modern Chinese history. More than twenty years later, in retrospect and in his uniquely unapologetic tone, Zhang Chengzhi claimed: “My history began in 1966 … the name of ‘Red Guard’ was coined by me. If anyone asked me what my first creative work was, I would say ‘Red Guard.’”5 But his formal literary debut would have to wait for more than a decade. Soon after the Red Guard movement declined, in 1968, Zhang Chengzhi, like millions of other urban educated youth (many of whom were former Red Guards) went down to the countryside for reeducation. What makes Zhang Chengzhi’s case distinct is that he volunteered to go to Inner Mongolia, settling down with a poor indigenous Mongolian family of three generations. He soon developed a deep emotional bond with them, particularly with the head of the family, an old Mongolian woman whom he called Eji, or mother.

Zhang Chengzhi

●

109

Evolving into a herdsman, he very quickly adopted the indigenous Mongolian customs and lifestyle and learned the Mongolian language also. He was even assigned to be a Mongolian language teacher for the local elementary school. After four years of nomadic life on the grassland he was recommended to study, as a then-called “worker-peasant-soldier student” (gongnongbing xueyuan), at Beijing University in 1972; he later graduated with a degree in archaeology. In 1978, he began graduate studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and became a scholar in the field of northern Chinese ethnic minority history. During all those years, as part of his fieldwork experiences as an archaeologist and a historian, Zhang Chengzhi frequented the vast northern Chinese ethnic territories. Also in 1978, he wrote and published two of his debut works: a poem written in Mongolian, “To Be the Son of the People” (Zuo renmin zhizi), and a short story, “Why Herdsmen Sing about ‘Mother.’” The latter immediately won him a national literary prize and a solid literary reputation as one of the most colorful and promising young writers of his generation. If “Red Guard” can be seen as a more or less spontaneous creation in 1966, with its young author not yet able to fully anticipate its eventual historical impact, then these two works published in 1978 have proven to be the result of Zhang Chengzhi’s self-conscious attempt to embody his mission as a writer. While his fellow writers from the same generation were writing scar literature and educated-youth literature, denouncing and lamenting the catastrophe brought to the individual by the Cultural Revolution, Zhang Chengzhi apparently thought differently. His aesthetic principle, as he later said, was “for the people,” which is further confirmed by the title of the poem, “To Be the Son of the People,” and the Mongolian name he signed with, “Aladingfu,” also meaning “son of the people.” The short story, “Why Herdsmen Sing about ‘Mother,’” is a prose illustration of this principle and theme, about the gradual development of a deep emotional bond between an educated youth from Beijing and his Mongolian Eji. The story ends with the following exaltation of the “motherpeople” theme: Why do herdsmen sing about “mother”? I think you have already found the answer. Perhaps you have never been to our grassland, but you are living among the mother-like people. … “Mother-People,” this is the eternal theme of our lives! This eternal theme is made of gold. No matter how time lapses, and no matter how the earth transforms, she will shine forever and ever!6

This claim illustrates Zhang Chengzhi’s heterodox stance as compared to that of his peers. That is to say, in Zhang Chengzhi’s view, the rustication and

110

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

reeducation experience was not a dark journey of total deception, disillusionment, or wasted youth but a more complex, bittersweet, and perhaps even necessary ordeal that converted the Red Guards from the elitist and personally privileged vanguards of Chairman Mao into the sons of the subaltern people. Zhang Chengzhi reads the history of the Red Guards as one of spiritual rebirth through their reeducation experience. Such a reading provides a kind of moral defense and salvages what he perceived as Red Guard idealism. We can see this salvaging effort even more clearly in another early short story by Zhang Chengzhi, “The Name Inscribed on the Heart” (1979),7 which pinpoints this role transition or merging of the Red Guard and the Son of the People. At the beginning of the story, the protagonist, Xiaogang, a former Red Guard and now an educated youth living among the Mongolian people (very much the alter ego of Zhang Chengzhi), wants a Mongolian name that has the same meaning as Red Guard. Yet, as the story unfolds, he starts to realize all the “mistakes” that the Red Guards committed; by the end, he feels torn and lost: Only he knew where his soul resided: the dear Red Guard … He was only ardently pursuing his ideal: to become the faithful heir of the revolutionary cause with the aid of the Red Guard spirit … today, he had made mistakes … He would never shamelessly try to evade responsibilities. Yet, was the Red Guard principle and spirit wrong also?8

It is at this point of disorientation that Old Dad Sangji, an elderly Mongolian man whose son was a victim of the Cultural Revolution, comes to his rescue. Old Dad Sangji forgives Xiaogang, adopts him as a son in the name of the entire people, and gives him a new Mongolian name, Aladingfu (as if in a baptizing ritual), and an interpretation: I thought up for you a most beautiful Mongolian name—Aladingfu. Aladingfu—son of the people! … I remember that you wished the meaning of your new name could be the same as the name Red Guard that you love. I think that the meanings of these two names are the same. Only, Aladingfu is even more important. Child! A Red Guard ought to remember that he is the son of the people! Without this principle, your Red Guard would fall into a great crevice … Your Red Guard spirit should not be abandoned either … Child, cherish this spirit of yours! I think it is in appreciation of this spirit of yours that Chairman Mao invited you onto Tiananmen … if this spirit can be used to serve the people, it could be a real treasure!9

These words may seem too artificial, less likely from an old Mongolian man’s mouth than from the author’s pen. Nevertheless, by this convergence

Zhang Chengzhi

●

111

of Red Guard and Son of the People, Zhang Chengzhi clearly shows his intention to redeem the history of the Red Guards. Just as he invented Red Guard, he has reinvented himself in the Mongolian name Son of the People. In doing so, he renounces the once-notorious “bloodline theory” (xuetonglun) of the Red Guard movement that justified discrimination against people from supposedly bad class backgrounds, yet he retains the idealism that encouraged a rebellious spirit against any oppression by the bureaucratic hierarchy. That is also to say, in a dialectical way, Zhang Chengzhi makes a transition from the center to the periphery, from the vanguard of an abstract revolution that has gone awry to the spokesman for the subaltern and minority groups that have often been discriminated against. Admittedly, Zhang Chengzhi represents a rather provocative interpretation and defense of the legacy of the Red Guard movement and the Cultural Revolution itself. This was particularly so in the late 1970s, when the total denunciation of the Red Guard movement and the Cultural Revolution had become the consensus through both official and unofficial representations. Of course, this justification risks subjectivism and may have glossed over many unsolved contradictions and self-doubts, an unspoken guilt complex that constantly disturbs his mental equilibrium. In other words, Zhang Chengzhi bears the burden of a mixed history, which drives him even more ardently to seek an aesthetic redemption and alternative understanding, so as to separate the Red Guard as an embodiment of individual idealism and romanticism from the Red Guard as a collective historical movement (even if short-lived) with a record of violence and terror. To accomplish this revision, Zhang Chengzhi urgently needs to locate a vantage point, simultaneously historical and aesthetic, from which he can have enough distance to contemplate, evaluate, transcend, and reconcile various contradictions as well as balance losses and gains regarding the subjective development and maturation of his generation. This effort reached fruition in his two widely acclaimed novellas: “The Black Steed” (1982)10 and “The Northern Rivers” (1984).11 From “The Black Steed” to “The Northern Rivers”: Reeducation and Losses, or, Deferred Maturation and Sublimated Tragic Beauty Even today, “The Black Steed” still stands as an artistically accomplished and solid piece of work, and testifies to Zhang Chengzhi’s continual dialogue with the subaltern Mongolian land and life into which he was adopted. It has a deceptively simple plot. Since he was a young child, Baiyinbulag, the first-person protagonist, has lived as an adopted member

112

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

of a poor Mongolian family of two—a grandmother and her granddaughter, Somiya. He and Somiya, while growing up together on the grassland, fall in love and get engaged. He goes away to school. When he returns, he finds out that his beloved Somiya has been raped and impregnated by a villain. What pains him the most, however, is the seemingly passive acceptance of this fact by Somiya and her grandmother, who hold an altogether different attitude about the value of life. It dawns on him that he and the women he loves belong to two different worlds and that he is ultimately an outsider to the grassland. This profound and irreconcilable schism presses him to leave. Many years later, the grown-up protagonist returns again and visits Somiya and her family. Witnessing the harsh life that Somiya has accepted and lived through with a tough will and dignity—as many previous generations of Mongolian women have done—the protagonist acquires a sense of spiritual cleansing and rebirth, and starts to reflect upon his failure to face the challenges that life brought him. Of course, such a summary does not do justice to the full value of the novella, which conveys a superb lyrical sensitivity throughout its narrative. In fact, the story borrows its structure from a simple and short Mongolian folk song also titled, “The Black Steed,” with a stanza quoted at the beginning of each narrative section. The song starts with a herdsman’s undertaking a journey to search for his lost “sister” and ends with the abrupt discovery that the woman he eventually finds is actually not the sister he has been looking for: Later, after I reached adulthood, whenever I hummed this song while remembering Somiya, I would always think that it was here that this ancient folk song accomplished its beautiful sublimation. With “not,” such a plain word, it resolved most forcefully a lingering suspense, and molded an impression of endless sorrow and primitive, tragic beauty.12

If we compare this “not” with Zhang Chengzhi’s vow to be the son of the people, we may discover an intriguing layer of this “endless sorrow and primitive, tragic beauty.” That is, underneath a seemingly positive and confident facade resides an agonized consciousness and self-doubt about the gap that exists between the self-titled son of the people and the people, which appears insurmountable: I wanted to call her “Grandma,” yet could not say so. She looked at me in such a strange way, which made me feel extremely uncomfortable. A truly horrifying thought occurred for the first time: I suddenly remembered that I was not really her descendant by blood.13

Zhang Chengzhi

●

113

I found my difference from the environment. I could not tolerate the grassland’s customs and its natural laws that Grandma was used to, even though I loved the grassland so deeply with my whole heart.14

Again and again, the protagonist deplores the fact that he can never look at the world and life from the same angle as Grandma and Somiya do. One of the most enduring intellectual complexes in modern Chinese literature since May Fourth has been rehearsed here: the first-person protagonist’s alienation from the masses or the people. The changing relationship between “I” and Somiya clearly mirrors the one between the narrator “I” and Runtu in Lu Xun’s classical short story “My Old Home.”15 Accordingly, Zhang Chengzhi may have raised a gnawing doubt to himself regarding the usefulness of the young individual’s efforts to be one with the people and become their real son. Such an agonized consciousness may, however, also highlight the validity of the sent-down movement and reeducation program during the Cultural Revolution. This reeducation program was intended by Mao, at least theoretically, to forge a generation of “socialist new men” who would overcome such alienation. While for the others, this overcoming of alienation between the individual and the people has been, from the beginning, a doomed socialist fantasy, for Zhang Chengzhi, it remains a viable path and a historical mission for the individual subject to take on. In other words, what Zhang Chengzhi self-consciously pursues is not modernist irony or postmodernist cynicism, but the romantic sublime in the guise of a “primitive, tragic beauty.” Facing contradictions, dilemmas, and paradoxes, he chooses not deconstruction but sublimation; and only through such a trial can his own subjectivity finally be tempered. Near the end of the story, when Bayinbulag stares at the adult Somiya, the entire journey of his beloved’s growing up quickly flashes through his mind: I felt that for one like myself, it was very difficult to completely understand everything about them. I stared at Somiya directly … I seemed to have already pictured a journey and witnessed a soul-shaking story of life and humanity. Mature quickly! I called on myself silently.16

“Mature quickly!” That call illuminates the real agenda of reeducation: both the realization of the individual subject’s alienation and the overcoming of this alienation (and the achievement of reunification) at a higher stage of historical development. Alienation is just a prerequisite that the individual subject must overcome in order to achieve unity with history. In other words, there is an eagerness to recognize and objectify the individual’s

114

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

historical limitations and mistakes. Quite naturally, this self-recognition and self-objectification has to be achieved in a more metaphysical, and, allegorically, national dimension. He cannot easily and hastily cut off parts of his own life or past, but must learn to accept, understand, and objectify them in a broader historical and civilizational context. Indeed, this call to mature quickly is reminiscent of the nineteenthcentury European, and particularly German, bildungsroman, which often served as an ideological expression for a longing for national unity, integration, and maturation.17 In this sense, “The Black Steed,” despite or perhaps because of its ethnic flavor and folkloric form, may well be viewed as a disguised allegory of an educated youth seeking a rationalization and legitimization of his journey to the subaltern people, which in turn manifests a longing for a new, integrated Chinese national form and subjectivity. In short, it can be cited as a Chinese bildungsroman. “The Northern Rivers” makes even more explicit this yearning for the maturation of a new national subjectivity. Again, the story is simple. In the 1980s, a recent college graduate, once a Red Guard, decides to take up geography as his subject of graduate study and struggles to overcome various obstacles to get into graduate school. Yet, there is another, what may be called “aesthetic,” project, which for him is more personal and meaningful: to survey the several northern rivers and to write a long poem about them. Analogous to the structure of “The Black Steed,” the entire story of “The Northern Rivers” is built upon the protagonist’s encounters—in real life, in memory, or in dreams—with these five rivers in northern China: the Yellow River, Huangshui River, Ertix River, Yongding River, and Heilongjiang River. The different characteristics of the rivers correspond to different aspects of the protagonist’s psyche or subjectivity, which in turn provide varying experiences of self-recognition and enlightenment. Ultimately, the rivers, as Chinese national symbols, are projected and fused into the protagonist’s own subjectivity (or, absorbed by it) and thus help him achieve the final fusion of the external and the internal. Such a quest for maturity comes at a high price. On his journey, the protagonist meets a female photographer who shares much of his experience and interests. Nevertheless, by the end and not without a sense of sorrow, he decides to part ways with her, because he feels that she is still not exactly the ideal companion he is looking for and would prefer to remain a solo explorer for the time being. As in “The Black Steed,” the quest itself suffers from a series of losses, some inevitable, some chosen. There are subtle differences between these two kinds of losses. The inevitable ones are due to the fact that the protagonist himself cannot completely control his own fate, and the logic of life or history overtakes his own

Zhang Chengzhi

●

115

personal will. In this predicament, the best way for the subject to cope is to consider these losses at a distance or in retrospect so as to learn a historical lesson. The chosen losses mean that the protagonist actively makes a decision to give up something valuable. Though he knows well the consequences of his decision, he is fully ready to accept this responsibility along with all the losses for the sake of a higher goal. In both cases, losses are accepted as parts or even preconditions of development and maturation of the subject. But they must be mediated afterward, and must be constantly and repeatedly negotiated to attain a more stable, mature subjectivity. While the chosen losses, such as the protagonist’s decision to part with the girl, might appear as striking exemplification of a kind of individual courage and free will, the truly profound losses in the novella are, in fact, the first kind, the inevitable losses caused by history. A most telling example comes early in the story, when the protagonist has just met the girl. On the bank of the Huangshui River, they find and try to repair a broken painted clay pot, which has had more than four thousand years of history. But their effort is unsuccessful: Clean and smooth lines flow from the shoulder to the bottom of the clay pot, but at its broken center is a dark hole. “Look how beautiful it is,” she murmured. “What a pity it is broken.” How things in the world go against one’s wishes; life is also often broken like this. “What a pity it is broken,” she repeated.18

This still image of a broken clay pot (a “primitive, tragic beauty” indeed) thus emblematizes the collective subjectivity of the Cultural Revolution generation. Not by coincidence, Xu Huabei, another character, later reacts in an even more bitter tone while staring at the same image as captured by the girl through her camera: “It is broken, inevitably with a part missing. Eh, I feel that this is almost the life of our generation.”19 The male protagonist himself, however, is unwilling to succumb passively to such a predetermined life and fate. Instead, he chooses a much more active and forward-looking attitude, which motivates him to overcome obstacles one after another. The story ends with a dream scene in which he finally reaches the Heilongjiang River (the last and only river he has not yet explored in real life), and merges with it. This lyrical and almost ecstatic scene is presented as an impatient anticipation of—once again—the subject’s maturation: He is in a sweet and deep sleep. He no longer murmurs in dreams. His voice already merges with this roaring of huge waves, and he feels that his own

116

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

body, together with this birch boat, is transformed into a huge wave. I am about to mature, he hears himself speaking in the language of waves, I am about to be a grown-up. I am going to spy out the secret of the north. He feels that he himself is advancing along with the flowing current, and a sacred pride is filling his heart. I thank you, northern rivers, he says, you bring me up with your rough water and earth, and you subtly inject courage and profoundness, wildness and tenderness, tradition and civilization into my blood all at the same time. You deprive my body of old days with steel-strong waves, and in your world I shall become a true man and warrior.20

This description falls right into the category of the romantic sublime. The appearance of such a lyrical tone in the mid-1980s was not an isolated phenomenon at all; on the contrary, it corresponded to a widespread call for the launching of a neo-Enlightenment project of reconstructing subjectivity.21 At that time “subjectivity” (zhutixing) was one of the most circulated words in cultural discussions, as attested by, for instance, the literary theorist Liu Zaifu’s influential article, “On the Subjectivity of Literature” (1985).22 In fact, such an exalted and sublimated heroic subjectivity as displayed in “The Northern Rivers” had been applauded by both literary critics and young readers as the true expression of the zeitgeist. Yet, from today’s perspective, “The Northern Rivers” also stands as a rather vocal defense and justification of the Red Guard generation’s unique place in history. This message is less explicitly presented in the story itself than in the author’s note found at the beginning of the novella: I believe there will be a just and profound realization to sum up everything about us: only then will the struggles, ideas, scars and choices unique to our generation reveal their significance. But then we will also regret our former naiveté, mistakes, and limitations, and lament the fact that we cannot start life anew. This is the basis for a profound pessimism. But for a nation with a vast territory and a long history, the prospect will eventually be bright. Because there will be a bloodline, a native environment, a creative power within this matrix that will help bear lively and healthy babies into the world, and all sick and weak groans will be drowned by their happy screams. Seen from this point of view, all should be taken as optimistic.23

Zhang Chengzhi thus transgresses the boundaries of individual subjectivity and transforms it into a national representation. Moreover, he hints that a fuller, more nuanced, and thus more balanced interpretation of the entire history of the Red Guard generation can only be achieved in the future, when all the previous mistakes or losses will be redeemed and reevaluated against the eventual gains. In other words, maturation can be realized, but not through a simplistic cutting off or renunciation of one’s history.

Zhang Chengzhi

●

117

This dialectical reasoning is the application of a particular philosophy of history. We already see it working in “The Black Steed,” when Bayinbulag rethinks his original abandonment of Somiya and the grassland: It had been a total of nine years since I left her. I left her in such an anger and fury, because I thought I should follow a pure journey of idealism toward tomorrow. Like so many young people, we always hastily cut off history at one stroke and choose a new path.24

The same view is later more explicitly expressed by Zhang Chengzhi himself in the postscript to his first collection of novellas and short stories, The Old Bridge: What we have passed while advancing probably is an old bridge … We together with our motherland are advancing while carrying a heavy legacy and baggage; denouncing them is equivalent to denouncing youth, life, and ourselves … I oppose that frivolous cutting off or canceling. I even think this bridge perhaps is the only passage leading toward tomorrow for everybody, including myself. Even if it is old … [n]evertheless it is a bridge, which connects mountains and rivers, past and future. It is the starting point of our renewed ardent pursuit, and a step toward the moment when the inspiration of history dawns once again on the Chinese nation.25

Here indeed, Zhang Chengzhi reveals the profound effect of a heavily Hegelian or Maoist developmental dialectic of the nation and the individual upon the construction of his generation’s subjectivity. And only through this prism can we, surprisingly, see that the protagonist’s errant journey in search of the northern rivers is continual, from his days as a Red Guard embarking upon the “revolutionary exchanges” to the present. Just as history is a constantly flowing river, so is this errant journey itself. All detours and mistakes only serve the same goal: the ultimate culmination and maturation of the subject. However, once again, such an ultimate culmination and maturation can only be approached, but never fully achieved in the present; it must be indefinitely deferred to the future. In other words, it always has to be a romantic absence, like the German romantic “blue flower” that can never be a completely present reality. Such an infinite approximation and indefinite postponement becomes the true secret of Zhang Chengzhi’s aesthetics of individual development. That is why the ending of “The Black Steed” only provides a prospect of the protagonist’s maturation; the same is true of the ending of “The Northern Rivers,” where the protagonist’s fusion with the Heilongjiang River happens in a dream. Accordingly, Zhang Chengzhi’s

118

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

romantic ideology and aesthetics (which is always affirmative and thus optimistic) will sooner or later reveal its own contradictions and cause further tensions between the content and the form. We shall see such inherent contradictions and irreconcilable splits within the effort at synthesis and sublimation in Zhang Chengzhi’s next major work, the only novel he ever wrote, The Golden Pasture (1987),26 and its revised version, The Golden Grassland (1994).27 From The Golden Pasture to The Golden Grassland : Failed Novel, Untranslatable Belles-lettres, and Salvaging the Content from the Form In “The Northern Rivers,” the protagonist attributes his ambition to be a geographer partly to his early extensive travel experiences as a Red Guard and his love of the freedom to roam. In fact, for Zhang Chengzhi, any specific professional identity is rather insignificant and does not really affect the protagonist’s internal identity. Zhang Chengzhi’s true protagonist has always been a prototypical individual subject who is on a spiritual quest striving for his own maturation, although that quest is rarely fulfilled. Even when it is, such fulfillment is only momentary, an ecstatic and liminal experience that dissolves immediately thereafter. What Zhang Chengzhi can approach and approximate may be, at the most, an aesthetic redemption, rather than a historical one, particularly given his self-confessed difficulty in fixing his content in a proper genre or form. Zhang Chengzhi’s novel, The Golden Pasture, was written and published at the height of his literary reputation in the 1980s. Thematically, the novel incorporates nearly all of the themes and motifs of his previous shorter works. Structurally, it has two parallel lines, marked separately by the letters “J” and “M.” Part J recounts the first-person narrator and protagonist’s experience as a visiting historian in Japan, engaged in a collaborative research project, which is intertwined with the memories of his research journeys into Central Asia (Xinjiang) and the heartland of the Islamic Yellow Earth Plateau. Part M tells about his nomadic experience as an educated youth sent down to the grassland of Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution, which is interwoven with the story of a group of young Red Guards’ retracing the old route of the Long March. All of these narrative lines, juxtaposed, lead to a common spiritual pilgrimage: the (re)birth of an exalted subjectivity. Despite Zhang Chengzhi’s ambition of packaging all these disparate materials into a coherent novelistic form, the spiritual pilgrimage, as presented, is incapable of being finally accomplished. The moment of completion is

Zhang Chengzhi

●

119

thus indefinitely deferred (and transferred) to the next generation, and the novel can only conclude by leaving itself open: “Sun! Please roll over here fast, Sun! … !” My little daughter is facing that wheel of fire fearlessly … My little daughter is running toward the sun, totally forgetting herself, toward that pure fire. I gaze at it, feeling moved. I have found the ultimate truth. Yes, life is hope. What I worship is only life. The truly noble life is simply a secret. It wanders, free, and it always makes one among the human tribes refuse to give up, following and looking for its own golden pasture persistently and remorselessly.28

Underneath the statement “I have found the ultimate birth” lies, apparently, an unsatisfied desire for reconciliation of internal divisions and contradictions. The lyrical sublimation that worked well in the shorter forms of “The Black Steed” and “The Northern Rivers” now sounds pale and forced within the grander structure of the novel. No wonder its publication was greeted with mixed reviews, with many critics who had been enthusiastic fans of Zhang Chengzhi now finding some fundamental deficiencies in the novel. Li Jiefei and Zhang Ling’s frank opinion is the most representative: We can view The Golden Pasture as a classic autobiographical novel, recording the journey of the author’s intellectual life. As a biography, it is true; as a novel, it is false. Perhaps we can admire the author’s upward spirit, but we cannot agree with it as a novel.

Therefore, the abovementioned critics called The Golden Pasture “a text that belongs to a past epoch.”29 Zhang Chengzhi himself later publicly admitted that the novel is an artistic failure, but this acknowledgment must have been painful and frustrating. Moreover, while regretting having failed to construct an integrated allegory of individual fulfillment in the form of a novel, he has another, more fundamental fear of having ruined the value of the spiritual pilgrimage itself. In other words, by failing the form, he fears that he may have also failed the content: The Golden Pasture was written in a rather awkward and constrained way, and the entire design was totally wrong … The pity is that a failed form has annihilated many important experiences and thoughts. After all, they are the thoughts that I myself have held for twenty years, and they are the experiences that took a journey of twenty years for me to absorb. I really feel that it is a pity.30

120

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

Zhang Chengzhi expressed similar sentiments on other occasions. He eventually felt compelled to revise and shorten the novel into another work, The Golden Grassland. In the preface to this revised version, Zhang Chengzhi once again made a self-criticism about the structural cumbersomeness of The Golden Pasture: Two plot lines and the inserted monologues of recollection have summarized most important events and reflections on them from the 1960s to the 1980s. The content refers to the rustication of the educated youth, the self-reflection upon the Red Guard movement, the long march of youth entering the bottom ranks of society and the historical Long March accomplished by the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, beliefs and the education given by the landscapes of the borderlands, the injustice of the world and the justice of the world, state and revolution, art and distortion, idealism and the spirit of youth … too much to be covered.31

This realization, in turn, drove Zhang Chengzhi to further reflect upon and reconsider issues of form, genre, and representation in a larger context: How can one properly translate a lyrical subjectivity into a genre or form such as the novel without sacrificing the fullness of its historical content or the uniqueness of its aesthetic value? Actually, Zhang Chengzhi has been very conscious of this tension between content and form or genre throughout his entire creative career. He brought up this problem on an earlier occasion while discussing “The Northern Rivers”: I originally wanted to write an objective and distanced piece of fiction, and yet “The Northern Rivers” turns out to be a subjective and lyrical piece of nonfiction. I name it “nonfiction” because I knew how to write it into an authentic novella—and quite probably would have done so—by designing the characters, balancing my judgment, and choosing plots and vocabulary accurately. But while writing I forgot all of these, only wanting to confess everything to my unknown friends.32

But the fact is also that throughout the 1980s, Zhang Chengzhi had been hailed by many readers and critics as one of the most stylistically accomplished writers, particularly in the genre of “lyrical fiction.” So why this agonizing discontent on his own part? Apparently the problem arises from this pursuit of lyrical fiction itself. Zhang Chengzhi once wrote an essay—a personal aesthetic credo, in fact—titled “The Desert of Belles-Lettres” (1985),33 in which he defines his

Zhang Chengzhi

●

121

aesthetic ideal as the creation of a particular kind of “meiwen”, or, belles-lettres: Narrative language, together with the entire conception and structure of fiction, should be a narrative of beauty. A piece of fiction should be a piece of music, a painting, a poem. While blending together all the feelings, ideas, structures, music, and painting, the entire poem should be realized by the narrative of the language. Thus fiction should be, first of all, authentic belleslettres.34

That fiction should be quintessentially belles-lettres is a vague and selfcontradictory definition typical of Zhang Chengzhi. Meanwhile, he also strongly questions the translatability of such belles-lettres on several different levels: Till this very day, I … in private have established a nontheoretical realization, that is, I think it is impossible for the outstanding works of contemporary Chinese literature to be communicated to foreigners. Why? … What I want to point out is: belles-lettres are untranslatable.35 Such belles-lettres are impossible to be translated … This problem exists not only between nations but also within the same nation that shares “the same language and the same race” [tongwen tongzhong]. Sometimes the difficulty of mutual understanding could drive one to such despair that a translator would be badly needed. For true belles-lettres, sometimes loneliness is inevitable.36 (bold in original)

A more careful reading reveals that this untranslatability of belles-lettres is not merely a linguistic or formal matter, but, more importantly, an ideological one. Hence the question of whether the writer can truly represent or “translate” himself: Due to the manipulation of history, our generation of “young” (?) writers have acquired a deep and harsh subaltern experience. Our consciousness of the people and of freedom resulting from this experience is perhaps the important basis for us to establish our aesthetic judgment of our own literature. In other words, after having discussed the cases of international and domestic communications, what we are talking about is the problem of the possibility of “translating” ourselves.37 (question mark and bold in original)

That problem may be the most poignant, highlighting the limitations of the writer’s ability to express his subjectivity and subaltern experience fully

122

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

in a proper form or genre. Furthermore, the subaltern experience he mentions directly alludes to the one acquired during the particular period of the Cultural Revolution. Hence what truly torments Zhang Chengzhi is not just the possibility of aesthetic merits being underappreciated, but also the probability of a unique subaltern experience and subjectivity being depreciated or even muted. In other words, what might remain utterly untranslatable is not the form, but the content. Thus, this apparently purely aesthetic concern of belles-lettres becomes ideologically charged and historically oriented. Realizing this, we can better understand Zhang Chengzhi’s revising The Golden Pasture into The Golden Grassland. According to the author’s preface to The Golden Grassland, the core contents of the original, The Golden Pasture, remain intact in the revised version: Memories of the Long March, knowing the nation, memories of climbing over the ice mountain, questions about the Red Army and revolution, appreciation of the Tianshan Mountain and the Yellow Earth Plateau, listening to avant-garde music, introduction to the leftist world in the 1960s, longing for romanticism and youth, humanism and justice, belief and life.38

What have been altered or deleted are mostly the plots and details that Zhang Chengzhi now deems superfluous novelistic devices and artificial decorations. The artistic failure of The Golden Pasture inspires him to overcome aesthetic constraints as imposed by the form and to preserve the content: Today I feel that what is more important than self-criticism is the protection of the crystallized thoughts. Looking back, the design of packaging twenty years’ experiences into one golden pasture is a failure. This is because one should not force the thoughts acquired through twenty years’ thinking into one framework. Yet it may also be put in an opposite way: the failure of the novelistic form is perhaps due to the fact that the novelistic form cannot contain its content. I regret the lack of success of this novel, but this does not mean that I will trash the above-mentioned ideas. Today I doubly feel their thematic importance; and I hope that I can, together with my readers, rethink them one more time. So here is the primary motivation of this revision: To give up the novelistic form (including the framework that was under the influence of structuralism), so as to protect the intellectual journey that I have held on to for so long. To give up untrue plots, so as to persist in true spiritual pursuits; to give up an artificial vast pasture of thirty thousand words, so as to preserve for myself a small patch of grassland in my heart— even if it is tender and fragile.39

Zhang Chengzhi

●

123

In other words, content (that is also to say, history) should take priority over any preexisting genres or forms. While the content or a subaltern history needs to be expressed in a form, it has to be an alternative one. Hence, Zhang Chengzhi’s conception and practice of belles-lettres, in the end, comes down to a mediation between history and the aesthetic, aiming to create a fusion of the two: a history of subalternity that is also an aesthetic sublimation of both individual and national subjectivity. Now we shall move on to a singular example of this fusion, a work aptly titled Heart History (1991).40 From Belles-Lettres to Heart History : Beyond the Aesthetic, Into Subaltern History Zhang Chengzhi’s confessed affinity for subaltern people and, to a great extent, his divergence from the Chinese literary mainstream became most pronounced in Heart History, whose subject is the Jahriyya. The Jahriyya is an Islamic Sufi sect that had struggled for survival over more than two centuries in some of the most impoverished regions of the country, such as in northwestern China, and under bloody governmental oppression. It had always preserved its own secret documents in opposition to the government’s official historical accounts and never revealed its own version of history to the outside world until more modern times. In the early 1980s, by chance, or by “predestination” (mingding), in his own words, Zhang Chengzhi became acquainted with the Jahriyya, was deeply moved by its history, and decided to convert. Moreover, Zhang Chengzhi was entrusted to narrate and make the secret history of this subaltern people known in Chinese. The result is Heart History, not just a book of history or literature in any secular sense, but a hagiography and, apparently, a religious deed. If in his previous Mongolian tales of the 1980s, Zhang Chengzhi viewed himself as an adopted son of the indigenous Mongolian people, in Heart History he reclaimed his original Hui ethnic minority origin and Muslim identity. By crossing the boundary of romanticism and literature and entering the realm of religion and history, he set for himself an even more ambitious goal. Zhang Chengzhi’s reinvention of himself may appear sudden to some of his critics, but it seems natural when seen in light of his overall intellectual development as discussed above. In fact, as early as 1985, about the same time as “The Desert of Belles-Lettres,” Zhang Chengzhi wrote another essay, “History and Heart History,” in his role as a scholar of Mongolian history, in which he coined the term “heart history” (xinshi) for the first time, in a way already foreshadowing the birth of Heart History (Xinling shi) in 1991.41

124

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

In that essay, as in “The Desert of Belles-Lettres,” Zhang Chengzhi started to explore the possibility of a “history of human hearts and emotions” via the aid of literature; in Heart History he had the chance to practice it and create a heretical subjectivity that seeks a reunion with and salvation for the subaltern Chinese Muslim people. In addition, Zhang Chengzhi sees a significance in the Jahriyya that is far beyond the group itself. It not only stands for an obscure Sufi Islamic sect in China but also mirrors a new alternative for the self-regeneration or selfrenewal of Chinese culture. Consequently, through writing Heart History, Zhang Chengzhi discovered the possibility of a work that creates its own form, “molds history, religion, and literature into one and withstands challenges from these three sides at the same time.”42 That is to say, content and form merge into one—heart (xinling) or spirit (jingshen)—which also serves as “the protagonist of this work of my life.”43 And Zhang Chengzhi’s goal was no longer to be an ordinary individual writer among his peers, but “to be a pen of the Jahriyya, to write a book that they will use their lives to protect!”44 From this perspective, what Zhang Chengzhi tries to express in the form of “heart history” should be seen as a continuation and development of the central theme that informed all his previous works: idealism—only this idealism has now found a new incarnation against the currents of political cynicism, nihilism, defeatism, and the frenzy of economic capitalism: No, you should not think that what I have described is just religion. What I have been describing has always been the ideals that you have been pursuing. Yes, ideals, hopes, and pursuits—all these that have been abandoned by the world yet loved by us. I will also formally describe the humanism that I have finally found; after reading the book you will find that this kind of humanism is much more authentic than the one sold cheaply by those from the Chinese intellectual class.45

And this idealism is also a reaffirmation and culmination of his original principle of “for the people”: For me—for me who you have wordlessly followed since “The Black Steed” and “The Northern Rivers,” this book is the peak of my literature. I dare not say that I will have other works that will surpass this one. I am even considering making this book the period at the end of my literature. As to the slogan that I shouted out like an innocent kid without any second thought in 1978—those three words that have been mocked constantly by others: “for the people,” I already can answer without any guilt: I have practiced and realized it. This has been a promised commitment for you; now I have kept my word.46

Zhang Chengzhi

●

125

But what exactly does Zhang Chengzhi mean by such statements as “this book is the peak of my literature. I dare not say that I will have other works that will surpass this one”? It is interesting to compare the quite-different evaluations of Heart History and The Golden Pasture by their own author; as discussed earlier, the latter is seen as an artistic failure that could only be partly redeemed through being revised and compressed into a much shorter version, The Golden Grassland. Careful examination shows that Zhang Chengzhi actually carried over much of the same narrative structure and intonation of The Golden Pasture into Heart History. Like The Golden Pasture, Heart History, despite being a historical work, essentially remains a lyrical narrative interspersed with authorial monologues and subjective commentaries. In other words, many of the stylistic characteristics that in The Golden Pasture were deemed deficiencies by both, the critics and the author, exist in Heart History as well. Why, then, does Zhang Chengzhi still hold Heart History in such high regard? The answer may be found in the reason that he gave for revising The Golden Pasture into The Golden Grassland. As already touched upon, the lesson that Zhang Chengzhi drew from what he viewed as the artistic failure of The Golden Pasture was not to salvage the novel form by deleting his long-winded thoughts and lyrical monologues, but, on the contrary, to give up the novel form, “to delete the structure and plots of the original work while preserving and persisting in the original lyricism and monologues.”47 In other words, for Zhang Chengzhi, the core of his creation is always the lyrical content of belles-lettres rather than the narrative genre. The former represents subaltern history that longs for a true sublimation; the latter, artificial confinement that stands in the way. Hence, Zhang Chengzhi’s “heart history” is a history that is overridden by an indefinable, free heart or spirit (reminiscent of the Hegelian “absolute idea” or “world spirit”). That is also to say, what Zhang Chengzhi undertakes is still an ambitiously romantic quest in which the heart or spirit eventually overrides various formal conventions and divisions to become a form that serves as its own content. That ecstatic moment of transgression, for Zhang Chengzhi, also means transcendence and the ultimate merging of the individual and the collective subaltern people he or she attempts to represent, which, in turn, culminates in a utopian reconciliation. What we usually call artistic or formal defects no longer matter to the author. The text has acquired a singular aura and halo, and also represents an individual aesthetic fulfillment of the sublime, which makes the text a Text sui generis, resisting any easy categorization or criticism by others or even by himself: Heart History is not fiction but has taken the approximate advantage of the cover of literature. It is not historiography either but is more reliable than all

126

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

the footnotes. Compared with purely religious works such as Rashaha, it has preserved a secular, broad, and individual right. In fact, I myself cannot categorize it—perhaps its nature as a work is like its own title as a book, which only represents the thoughts and feelings of myself along with millions of Chinese people who have beliefs.48

That is also to say, by endowing Heart History with scriptural status, Zhang Chengzhi seemingly wants to put all the disputes regarding the work’s literary or aesthetic merits to rest, once and for all. This time he is determined to ignore the responses and opinions from the mainstream literary circle, as attested by his answer in the interview quoted below: L: What are the responses of the literary circles? Z: I do not pay as much attention to the reactions of the literary circles as I do to those of the Hui people.49

Indeed, in the Jahriyya, he has not only found new subject matter and inspiration but also a new readership, whose authenticity thus automatically guarantees his immunity to conventional literary criticism: When I realize that my old readers are hastily abandoning me and are looking for entertainment from the popular book market, I look firmly onto my real readers, the readers who will not betray: the Jahriyya. Whenever I think that this book will be loved, cared for, and protected by several hundred thousand people, my heart is full of happiness. This alone is the writer’s primary happiness. In order to acquire it, any price is worthy and any hardship can be endured.50

Eventually, Zhang Chengzhi presents via Heart History a radical revision of literature and Chinese literature. That is to say, Zhang Chengzhi directly challenges the purist conception of literature as an individual aesthetic creation and the static and narrow conception of Chinese literature as a Han-centric national literature, and thereby radically redefines both literature and Chinese literature in a much broader social, cultural, ethnic, and historical sense: All these realizations—I know that they are indeed too alien for the Chinese literature that people have been used to. Yet I believe in the value of this kind of literature. —All details are real, all facts are incredible, all truths are exiled. I attempt to use the Chinese language to construct an unknown China. I attempt to use archaeological truths to fictionalize the intuitions and feelings of several hundreds of thousands of the Jahriyya people. I have always wanted to let silence speak.51

Zhang Chengzhi

●

127

Ever since they [Hui Muslim people] came to China … they started to lose their homeland. Ever since the end of their diaspora in China, ever since the end of their first generational blood linkage, they gradually got used to speaking Chinese and lost their own mother tongue. What else do they have? … The loss of the mother tongue—Chinese and other sinicized ethnic minorities do not understand the pain of losing the mother tongue. I am a writer. I make my own fiction change forms constantly, until it changes into poetry, and now into this Heart History—my wish remains one: to let the Chinese language in which I write break free from the constraints of the squareshaped Chinese ideographs!52

Zhang Chengzhi’s full-blown claims invite obvious questions and doubts, appearing pretentious and self-serving. Jian Xu, for example, incisively points out the fundamental contradiction inherent in Zhang Chengzhi’s representation of the Jahriyaa and what he calls a “radical ethnicity.”53 That is, according to Xu, Zhang’s Apocryphal history not only defamiliarizes the Han majority’s sense of a unified Chinese nation but also disrupts the relation of the “superior” culture to its imaginary other: its “primitive” ethnic brothers. In this regard, Zhang Chengzhi is unique; no other Chinese writer has ever taken such a radical ethnic stance against the identity of a nation that, since the May Fourth Movement, has always been the matrix of idealisms.54

However, Xu sees in Zhang’s representation a displacement of the nation with an “absolutist faith” that “turns out to be the condition of possibility of a particular experience of the sublime that is paradoxically essential to the humanist subjectivity.”55 Xu’s doubt and critique is sharp and solid. While I completely agree with his observation regarding the paradoxical—and problematic—nature of Zhang Chengzhi’s vision, I disagree with Xu’s conclusion and labeling of it as coming “from [an] Islamic fundamentalist or universalist perspective.”56 Moreover, while I also agree with Xu’s other observation—that quintessentially, Heart History is Zhang Chengzhi’s “self-expression,” and subalternity or the religious sublime is just the medium, not the end—I also argue that this self is not just entirely individualistic or aesthetic but also an ideologically invested national subject. What underlies Zhang Chengzhi’s appropriation of radical ethnicity, the religious sublime, and historical subalternity might be a far more ambiguous and ambivalent agenda than being “fundamentalist or universalist,” which includes a more secular, specific, if no less utopian concern. This is so not the least because of Zhang Chengzhi’s own statement: “The Jahriyya distances itself even

128

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

further from fundamentalism; more and more it symbolizes a totally new phenomenon—Chinese belief and its form.”57 That is, instead of sabotaging the “nation,” he is defending it by seeking alternative national forms and subjectivity. Whereas Xu sees contradictions, Zhang Chengzhi believes that such contradictions will be overcome and subsumed.58 It was precisely by striving to overcome and subsume contradictions that Zhang Chengzhi reaffirmed the utter importance of Heart History to his own creative career in 1994, in the postscript to his four volumes of selected works: A writer must admit his own limits. Since the time when I set out from the Mongolian grassland and held a dream of expressing myself, I have taken a road of explorations and experiments. Subsequently I have thrown myself into different disciplines such as archaeology, Mongolian history, exploration of Central Asia, and Islamic studies, and have utilized, alternately, forms such as the academic article, fiction, poetry, and prose essay, and have even used different languages such as Mongolian and Japanese. Ultimately I earned the trust of the plain and sincere peasants who are believers in China; and, with their support, ultimately finished Heart History, which cannot be defined by any of the above disciplines or forms. So let scholarship, knowledge, and art stand on the muddy Yellow Earth Plateau and hold contempt for the intelligentsia class who have been detached from the masses; return nobility, dignity, and respect to the discriminated and subordinated masses—I know this is my peak. Having taken this step in my life, I begin to have the wish to summarize.59

By moving beyond the aesthetic into subaltern history, Heart History ought to be understood as a bold literary experiment. It should also be read as a deliberate assault on various current “literatures” as well as a self-conscious ideological intervention in the context of the 1990s. Having witnessed the rapid expiration of the socialist aesthetic principles and practices (such as “for the people” and creating a new unity between the individual and the masses), and anticipating the increasing atomization and commercialization of individuals, Zhang Chengzhi is not giving up hope for alternative national forms and subject formation springing from all possible seeds—in the case of Heart History, the seed of a subaltern people’s religious belief.60 So, his literary career was not really closed by Heart History. Once again, that longed-for moment of concluding or reaching fulfillment has only been achieved halfway, as an infinite approximation and indefinite deferment. By declaring that he had already passed the peak of his literary career, Zhang Chengzhi only stands out forthrightly as a cultural heretic in the 1990s.

Zhang Chengzhi

●

129

Cultural Hero or Cultural Heretic? A Fin-de-Siècle Reflection of Contemporary Chinese Literature and a Defense of Alternative National Forms Zhang Chengzhi’s post–Heart History journey continued to cause a stir. Just as he had left the Mongolian grassland in 1972 after four years of rustication, he left the Jahriyya of the Yellow Earth Plateau and went overseas (sojourning in Japan and Canada as a visiting writer and scholar) for a few years, in the beginning of the 1990s, into a sort of self-imposed exile in the wake of Tiananmen in 1989. It was during that period that his thinking and writing reached out even further to ponder broad and fundamental social and intellectual issues that had been profoundly affecting contemporary China during its quick and yet turbulent integration into a new post– Cold War world. Ironically, having experienced the uncanny moment of June Fourth and also having embarked on the path of negating or jettisoning its history of socialism and the Cultural Revolution, China entered a postsocialist epoch that has indirectly announced the ideological bankruptcy of the “reform era” of the 1980s. Chinese literature’s modernist dream of catching up with or joining the so-called world literature has becomes less and less attainable as world literature itself has proven to be a utopian and purist fantasy and been hollowed out and replaced by global capitalism. Having witnessed the global triumph of capitalism as well as the “clash of civilizations” in the form of the Gulf War, and disillusioned particularly by contemporary Chinese literature’s inability to present an efficient and effective critical response to this new reality, Zhang Chengzhi stands up again, lashing out at the spiritual malady suffered by Chinese literature. In Zhang Chengzhi’s eyes, such a spiritual malady or crisis amounts to no less than a crisis of the nation: It is the situation, the dangerous situation faced by China that I have deeply felt in the Western countries, and the situation of the horrifying degeneration of Chinese culture that I have felt in Beijing, that has sent me into an almost rage-like excitement. Since the completion of Heart History, I have considered putting down my pen and concluding my own literary career—yet I cannot pretend to be an outsider. … Put simply: although I have always felt proud of rebelling against a Chinese-style culture (zhongguoshi de wenhua), when foreign powers and their running dogs conspire to destroy China, I fight for China alone.61

This time, having long acknowledged the limitations of various literary conventions, genres, and forms, Zhang Chengzhi chose the prose essay

130

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

(sanwen) as his literary medium, deeming it the most direct and free form: “The form of the prose essay perhaps is more superior to the novel, in terms of conveying thoughts … the prose essay is a formless literature, I finally understand it.”62 In 1994 he published two important collections of essays, The Abandoned Road of Heroes and The Clean Spirit. In several of the essays, notably “Aidless Thoughts,”63 “A Letter to Master Lu Xun,”64 and “Take the Pen as Banner,”65 he continued his radical revision of Chinese literature. Staying with the theme that he established in Heart History, namely, “Chinese who have beliefs” (xinyang de zhongguoren), Zhang Chengzhi made himself a steadfast defender of idealism or, in his own coined term, a “clean spirit,” as a protest against what he saw as the currents of nihilism, cynicism, and a “cultural surrenderism” that had come to dominate contemporary Chinese literature and culture in general. Zhang Chengzhi’s disappointment with and doubts about various preexisting trends and definitions of literature are foregrounded in his essay “A Letter to Master Lu Xun”: For more than a decade I have been constantly searching for references, yet mostly have been disappointed … since I started to live by the pen, I paid a lot of attention to writings of the men of letters, yet my conclusion is negative.66 —This raises a very meaningful question: What is literature in the end? Is the artistic criterion an absolute first precondition? I have been agonizing over this question for a very long time.67

If we take literature here as an expression and form of modernity, can we not also view this nearly existential agony over the meaning of literature as an agony over Chinese modernity itself ? In this sense, Zhang Chengzhi’s resolute search for an alternative Chinese literature also means a search for alternative national forms of Chinese modernity, which may partly explain why Zhang Chengzhi chose Lu Xun as his addressee, since the latter was the founding father of modern Chinese literature as a national literature—a point noted by Fredric Jameson in his famous “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.”68 In other words, quite contrary to many of his critics’ accusations and suspicions, Zhang Chengzhi actually insists upon defending Chinese literature as a national literature, in a contemporary and global context, as if reviving the same historical urgency at the dawn of modern Chinese literature that Lu Xun once faced. Such a historical urgency was reflected not necessarily in Lu Xun’s later Wild Grass (Yecao), a work for which Zhang Chengzhi holds great admiration, but in his “Preface to Call to Arms” (Nahan zixu), or even in his earlier “On the

Zhang Chengzhi

●

131

Power of Mara Poetry,” which was written in Tokyo in 1907, when Lu Xun was twenty-six: Today looking everywhere in China, where are the warriors in the field of spirit? Who can make a truly sincere voice, leading us to goodness, beauty, strength and health? Who can make a warm voice, leading us out of wilderness? Our home is gone and the nation is destroyed, yet we have no Jeremiah crying out his last elegy to the world and to posterity.69

It was precisely as a grand gesture of a “warrior in the field of spirit” that Zhang Chengzhi titled one of his most controversial essays “Take the Pen as Banner,” which can be read almost as his own “call to arms.” It begins with a summarizing description of the sudden demise of the era once hailed as the New Period of Chinese literature, the 1980s: A big farce that had almost been taken for real has suddenly closed. The New Period that was applauded eight years ago or even earlier by colleagues not only has become old, but has already been dispatched into the antique shop … Before the firing of cannon, the sparrows have already flown away, and the literary mob has dispersed. Those who now occupy the forum are stockholders who view it as a marketplace: no sooner after their entrance than they declare that they will quit—with no shame—if no money can be made in this trade. This, one has to say, is positive progress for history and literature.70

It is against such currents that Zhang Chengzhi dares to “uphold my faithful pen and let it become my banner,”71 and firmly proclaims his own dissidence: I have no interest in adding more entries to a dictionary that interprets what literature is. It is not necessary to blow bubbles about literature in terms of variety, popularity, avant-gardism, good and bad, philosophy and sex. I am only the son of a fecund culture, and I do not want to ignore the depression and degeneration of culture. I am only a heretic of an era of trends, and I do not want to chase the currents. Despite the millions of literatures they make, I only believe in one kind of literature, which is not called “pure literature” or “serious literature” or “elitist modernist literature,” or “high-brow literature.” What it has is not entertainment, playfulness, aesthetic or artistic qualities—what it has is belief.72

Such a bombastic tone certainly risks further distancing himself from the mainstream, but apparently this is a price that Zhang Chengzhi is willing to pay. Underneath these pronouncements, there lies frustration and pessimism,

132

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

yet also a resolve to redeem contemporary Chinese literature via alternative traditions of subalternity and spirituality. This resolve again invokes Lu Xun’s similar efforts as manifested by “On the Power of Mara Poetry,” “seeking new voices from foreign nations” (bieqiu xinsheng yu yibang)—only Zhang Chengzhi replaces “foreign nations” with subalternity and spirituality, which, for him, have remained foreign to the mainstream Han-centric Chinese literature. That is precisely what drove Zhang Chengzhi to the Jahriyya: “The secret about China has been always this: when there came a time that the upper classes were rotten and lost, the subaltern people started to take the stage.”73 It is not hard either to detect an echo of the Red Guard spirit and the language and tone peculiar to the Cultural Revolution itself in such statements. It appears that a reformed and recharged Red Guard spirit persisted in Zhang Chengzhi’s subalternity and spirituality, though it had remained a taboo subject in public during the reform era. In 1992, Zhang Chengzhi published a memoir, The Red Guard Era, in Japanese (so far it has not been translated into and published in Chinese), in which he records his own development from a Red Guard into a believer and spokesman of the Jahriyya. He ends this intellectual journey with an ultimately affirmative conclusion: This is the journey of a Red Guard finding his real mother among the people. Although Red Guards were marked with the shadows of their previous privileges, during contact with the subaltern people, such shadows were completely eliminated. The spirit of rebellion and anti-establishment has merged with the struggles of the subaltern people for the restoration of spiritual freedom. In sum, after a continuous twenty-year critique of bureaucracy, they have come back among the Chinese masses. I myself am such an example. As a Red Guard, having discarded what should have been discarded and having insisted upon what should have been insisted upon, I finally approached the Jahriyya. The road has been long and full of risks. However, I have persevered.74

What has been gained is a national subject with roots in a socialist past, and Zhang Chengzhi demands recognition of its legitimacy in the 1990s, when both “nation” and “subjectivity” had been increasingly doubted or jettisoned altogether by many others. Zhang Chengzhi also demands a more careful and nuanced evaluation of the legacy of the Red Guard movement along with the Cultural Revolution itself. To him, they were indeed authentic experiments of modernity in national forms, both culturally and aesthetically.

Zhang Chengzhi

●

133

Furthermore, through the writing of The Red Guard Era, Zhang Chengzhi puts the Red Guard movement and the Cultural Revolution into a much larger context, that of the globally radical 1960s, in order to balance its gains and losses. When mentioning this memoir in another essay, Zhang Chengzhi contends: After all, I have yelled myself hoarse for the 1960s—that great epoch; after all, I have provided a way of understanding Mao Zedong—that probably last lonely giant in Chinese history. After all, I have firmly appraised the Red Guard—which, after all, is a word created by me—along with the youthful and rebellious spirit of the Red Guard movement. … This action not only is a paean to the Red Guards’ anti-establishment image but also includes an accusation against the Red Guards’ “bloodline theory” and my own reflections on this. Furthermore, I take it to declare my own never-ending battle as a writer against the establishment … The Sixties truly ended … At this transitional juncture between the old and the new, at this juncture when fewer and fewer people bother to recall the past and the future road becomes rougher and rougher, it should be said that it is not the participants of the May Revolution in France, not the hippies of the antiwar movement in the United States, but we—the group of Chinese Red Guards who have firmly broken with the bureaucratic establishment and have been searching for truths in the impoverished remote countryside and among the subaltern people—who are the symbols of the great Sixties … So, I hope that this is a book for the future, not just a memoir.75

For Zhang Chengzhi, a fuller evaluation of the legacy of the Red Guards and the Cultural Revolution at the historical juncture of the 1990s would also provide a precious resource and a much-needed vantage point from which to critique and historicize an increasingly actualized reality of postsocialism and homogenizing global capitalism (and postmodernism as its cultural manifestation). So by rehabilitating a subaltern position of an old Red Guard, Zhang Chengzhi rather self-consciously reshapes himself into a new cultural heretic, as testified by his own words printed on the front cover of The Golden Grassland: “Let the currents abandon and surpass me, I am proud of being a true heretic.” Here the word “heretic” almost sounds like a synonym for “hero.” Cultural hero or cultural heretic, such a provocative position has been seen by some as a dangerous sign of a religious or cultural fundamentalism that runs against the mainstream currents of progress and modernity. For example, Zhang Yiwu, a prominent critic and promoter of postmodernism

134

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

in the 1990s, accuses Zhang Chengzhi of forging a “cultural myth” and “neotheology.”76 The fairness of such criticisms is another matter. One question, however, could have been easily raised in the face of it: If Zhang Chengzhi is fabricating a cultural myth and neo-theology, what should we call those new reigning terms such as modernity, progress, market, and global capitalism? Zhang Chengzhi has tried to answer this. In another essay, “Words Disappear When the Ink Is Ready” (1997), Zhang Chengzhi further links the urgency of a reexamination of the legacy of the Cultural Revolution and socialism with issues such as the rights of ethnic minorities, religious beliefs, and environmental protection in contemporary China. At the end of each section focusing upon these respective concerns, he states “No”: “No, I don’t have the freedom to reflect upon revolution”; “No, I don’t have the freedom to express my suggestions about religious belief ”; and “No, I don’t have the freedom to express my worries about the environmental destruction.”77 All these negations relate back to the ultimate question of whether there can be any room in the contemporary Chinese cultural spectrum for alternative critiques of a monolithic vision of the Chinese modernity project. As put persuasively in the essay, Zhang Chengzhi is defending his right and freedom of dissidence against the Chinese intellectual mainstream and discursive hegemony in the 1990s, which he views as having been the blind follower and worshipper of modernity and progress. Meanwhile, there are further examples of Zhang Chengzhi’s continuous project of giving form to an individual fulfillment through constant experimentation and revision. In 1999, he published a new book, Lands and Feelings. It is a collage of excerpts from many of his previous works (short stories, novels, poems, and essays) about the three Chinese northern minority regions—Inner Mongolia, the Hui minority or Chinese Islamic Yellow Earth Plateau, and Xinjiang—together with photos that record his chronological journeys and relationships with these peoples. In the preface as well as on the back cover, we read the following text: The principle of categorization and selection in this book is: to use photos to describe again the three lands in which I have rooted my own literature—the Mongolian grassland, the Hui minority’s Yellow Earth Plateau, and the civilization of Xinjiang; to illustrate the support, friendship, and nurturance I have received from the people of these three lands. The writer is only the son and the plot thread that connects them, while the people themselves are the real subject and protagonist.78

While it seems that the individual subjectivity serves only as “the plot thread that connects” and has been subsumed in this new form of humanistic

Zhang Chengzhi

●

135

geography, what we see eventually is a superhero, a supernational subject who can connect with the lands and people. Does this mean that the national subject that Maoism and the Cultural Revolution have helped to forge still reigns and is yearning for further formation, development, expansion, and interiorization? The answer may be “Yes.” Zhang Chengzhi’s real goal has always been to find an alternative national subject(ivity) that embraces and mediates ethnic, regional, cultural, and spiritual heterogeneities and contradictions, that persists in a continuous historical development that binds the past, the present, and the future together instead of completely cutting off one’s historical past—and to create a proper form that retains all the possibilities of synthesizing and sublimating such history. This ambition calls to mind the concept of “totality,” which has been closely associated as much with the legacy of Hegelianism as with the tradition of socialism or Marxism, and many Western Marxist theorists such as Georg Lukács, Fredric Jameson, and Martin Jay have insistently argued for its contemporary relevance.79 Thus totality may also be the true ideological content of Zhang Chengzhi’s romantic or mystical lyricism, whereas such a “lyrical totality,” along with its inherent tensions and problems, remains the true name and secret of his national subjectivity. If this lyrical totality in today’s world is falling out of favor and branded a “bastard,” it only signifies the fundamental predicament of the centuryold project of Chinese modernity in the form of a belatedly developing nation-state. Corresponding to the increasing marginalization and subalternization of revolution and socialism as both discourse and practice, and against the rapid progress and domination of capitalism in a new global context, Zhang Chengzhi may seem to have been fighting a losing battle in an outmoded costume of national literature and to risk suffering a heroic, that is to say, quixotic, self-delusion. No one can be certain of the tangibility of Zhang Chengzhi’s efforts, which might be deemed, as The Golden Pasture once was, “a text that belongs to a past epoch.” However, whether or when this persistent striving for alternative national forms can reach its fulfillment may not be the most relevant issue. Perhaps Zhang Chengzhi is also quite aware of the limits, if not also the potentially errant nature, of his own endeavor. Perhaps its success or failure should not be judged according to a single contemporary criterion. In other words, perhaps Zhang Chengzhi’s striving for a lyrical totality and alternative national forms from the very outset has been aiming not, as most of his critics and even he claim, at a final closure, but at a constant reopening of the horizon of a post–Cultural Revolution history while evoking all the unrealized, yet still-viable possibilities. For instance, his disappointment

136

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

with the preexisting form of the novel and longing for a more open and free form strangely concurs with Czech writer Milan Kundera’s defense of the novel, despite their apparently opposed stances and different contexts: But hasn’t the novel come to the end of the road by its own internal logic? Hasn’t it already mined all its possibilities, all its knowledge, and all its forms? I’ve heard the history of the novel compared to a seam of coal long since exhausted. But isn’t it more like a cemetery of missed opportunities, of unheard appeals?80

It is exactly here that we must seriously reconsider Zhang Chengzhi’s own aesthetic manifesto regarding the untranslatability of belles-lettres. Perhaps this so-called unfinishedness or untranslatablity will become the most enduring testimony to his work’s historical and aesthetic value, as demonstrated by the broken clay pot in “The Northern Rivers,” discussed previously in this chapter. Its brokenness is deplored, yet this very brokenness might mark the clay pot as a collector’s item that has survived its own historical era, hinting at abandoned or missed possibilities and yet retaining a unique aura and a sense of hope. This realization may not seem as outlandish or willfully heretical as we might think, and indeed fits quite well with another of Zhang Chengzhi’s multiple identities: an archaeologist who salvages (and repairs) the damaged and neglected historical content that has been preserved in broken or anachronistic forms (alternative national forms).81

CHAPTER 5

Wang Xiaobo: From the Golden Age to the Iron Age, or, Writing against the Gravity of History Walking in the silence, walking across the sky, And penis hanging upside down. —Wang Xiaobo, “The Year of Independence”1 But even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built. — Bertrand Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship”2

B

orn in 1952 in Beijing into an intellectual family, Wang Xiaobo, on his resume, looks like a standard character from his generation, the generation of the Cultural Revolution. He went down to Yunnan as an educated youth in 1968, at the age of sixteen. In the early 1970s, he came back to Beijing and worked in a street factory. From 1978 to 1982,

138

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

he attended People’s University in Beijing and majored in economics and trade. From 1984 to 1988, he was in the United States, studied at the University of Pittsburgh, and received a Master’s degree in East Asian Studies. After that he came back to Beijing, first working as a lecturer at universities, then quitting his job in 1992 to become a freelance writer. None of these experiences, however, are exceptional enough to distinguish him from the majority of the others. What does distinguish him from his contemporaries, such as Duo Duo, Wang Shuo, and Zhang Chengzhi, is that although he started writing back in the 1970s and occasionally published pieces here and there, Wang Xiaobo had remained an utter outsider to the 1980s literature altogether, as represented by scar literature, educated-youth literature, roots-seeking literature, or experimental fiction. And it is precisely this prolonged absence and anonymity that had established the context for his unexpected burst onto the Chinese cultural scene in the 1990s, with an inimitable voice as embodied in his fictional works that literally stunned everyone. Literary critics, while excited by the “Wang Xiaobo phenomenon,” also puzzled over this question: Where does this Wang Xiaobo, who has been hailed as the true “master outside the literary forum” (wentan wai gaoshou), come from? Wang Xiaobo’s own answer is simple: he comes from what he calls the “silent majority” (chenmo de daduoshu), as he explains in the eponymous essay “The Silent Majority,” which invokes his growing up and existential experiences in China: In The Tin Drum, Günter Grass writes about someone who doesn’t want to grow up. Little Oskar found the world around him too absurd, so he made up his mind to remain a child forever. Some power from above helped him achieve his goal and he became a dwarf. This story was too fantastic, but very interesting nonetheless. One may not be able to be a child forever, but it is possible to keep one’s silence.3 I have lived in silence for many years: as sent down to the countryside, as a worker, as a college student, and later as a college teacher … I believe, one can keep his silence no matter what he does. Of course, I also have a hobby: writing fiction. But after I finish I don’t publish it, and still keep my silence. As for the reason behind this silence, it’s quite simple. That is, I don’t trust discursive forums. Based upon my rather limited life experiences, that circle is a disgraceful madhouse. What I doubted at that time was … all the discursive forums.4 Later I suddenly realized that I myself had also belonged to the largest minority group throughout history, that is, the silent majority. The reasons why these people keep their silence are various: some don’t have the ability or the

Wang Xiaobo

●

139

opportunity to speak out; some have their own concerns to not talk; some others, due to all different causes, hold a deep disgust toward the world of discourses. I myself belong to this last category. As someone from the last category, I now also feel obligated to talk about what I have seen and heard.5

Wang Xiaobo’s breaking of his long silence came at a crucial historical juncture in the early 1990s, and stands in sharp contrast to the more or less muted and stagnant literary and social atmosphere of that time. Wang Xiaobo was fully aware of his own standing and voice—an idiosyncratic voice unprecedented in post–Cultural Revolution literature, a hybrid of dark skepticism and melancholy existentialism, simultaneously ironic and lyrical, bleak and fanciful. And he was ready to break the ice and present this unique voice to a fuller degree, as attested by an e-mail message he sent to a personal friend living in the United States on April 10, 1997: I’m just about to publish a collection of essays, titled The Silent Majority. Its intention can be roughly put like this: as we grew up, all that we had seen was totally inverted. Underneath a noisy discursive forum, there has always been a silent majority … But from now on we will start to speak out, and all that has been said before will no longer be relevant to us—in short, we’ll make a clean breakoff.6

This turned out to be a fateful claim, insofar as he often predicted about the destinies of his fictional protagonists. Wang Xiaobo died of a sudden heart attack, alone in his writing studio, that very night, or, probably in the early hours of the next morning, at the young age of forty-five. Wang Xiaobo’s literary reputation largely lies in his fictional works despite the fact that he was also a terrific essay writer in the same daring and free-thinking vein. In the short space of a few years in the 1990s, until his untimely death, Wang Xiaobo was incredibly prolific, writing the following series: The Golden Age (Huangjin shidai), which depicts individual experiences of and reflections upon the Cultural Revolution; The Silver Age (Baiyin shidai), which presents an Orwellian future world of total surveillance and no exit; and The Bronze Age (Qingtong shidai), which projects contemporary Chinese lives into a past world of Tang romances. Although some of these works had been published separately in book form or in literary journals, they were published together posthumously in 1997, in a three-volume collection, under the general title of Trilogy of Our Time (Shidai sanbuqu). Besides, Wang Xiaobo also left behind a body of unfinished works and early works in manuscript form, which were edited and published one year later, in one volume, titled The Iron Age (Heitie shidai).

140

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

All of these works, one way or another, revolved around the same historical axis: the Cultural Revolution. As Wang Yi, one of his Chinese critics has said, for Wang Xiaobo, the Cultural Revolution is one of the most primary, and most influential negative coordinates in Chinese culture and modern Chinese history … Wang Xiaobo’s work has made a preliminary finding: for today’s Chinese people, to truly and profoundly understand the Cultural Revolution is the undisputable precondition to ponder various important social and intellectual topics, and it should be a pre-installed “starting program” when we face the future.7

Wang Xiaobo demonstrates an obsessive urge to constantly record and rewrite both the collective and private memories of the Cultural Revolution, similar to what the German writer Günter Grass has done with the Nazi past in his Danzig Trilogy. The fact that these stories were written not during the early or mid-1980s, at the peak of scar literature or educated-youth literature, but a decade later, in the 1990s, when China had already further embarked upon its grand march of postsocialism/capitalism, proves only the resilience of an unexpired and not yet thoroughly examined legacy of the Cultural Revolution. Under Wang Xiaobo’s pen, the Cultural Revolution becomes an open theatre for exhibiting private human peculiarities—a full spectrum of bizarre human emotions and dark comedies. This is, as Wang Xiaobo himself has put it, a “totally inverted” world. While in general, the Cultural Revolution has been depicted as highly oppressive, both sexually and politically, Wang Xiaobo sets out to make evident that there still is a vast and dark realm of sex and libido exisiting underneath, which we can scarcely penetrate with our normative reason. In doing so, Wang Xiaobo has exposed the grotesque struggle between the utopian grand discourse of progress and revolution on the one hand, and the libidinal, primitive, willful, but no less utopian/dystopian drive for perversion and for relief from the gravity of history on the other. Such an interpretation of the Cultural Revolution, in fact, also serves as an Orwellian warning against any blind belief in a teleological and linear history. From the Golden Age of the Cultural Revolution to the Silver Age of a dystopian future world, and, finally, via a reinvented Bronze Age, to an unfinished Iron Age of no time and nowhere, Wang Xiaobo hints at a revision of how our modern history has progressed, or, degenerated. In the meantime, by creating a ubiquitous fictional alter ego Wang Er, who is doomed by the history of the Cultural Revolution and yet, freely crosses into different worlds of the past, present, and future, Wang Xiaobo is also exploring a way for the individual to defy and transcend the omnipresent and omnipotent rule and gravity of time and history. In other words, through

Wang Xiaobo

●

141

a multiplication of the protagonist Wang Er across time and space, Wang Xiaobo anticipates the possibility of establishing an extrahistorical or posthistorical subjective position. Such a position enables the individual to rebel against historical gravity and yet also contemplate the frail human condition, against a panoramic picture comprising contemporary China, its recent past of the Cultural Revolution, and its impending future. Entering into Wang Xiaobo’s fictional world(s), what we see, then, is another, or many, almost oneiric allegory(ies) of the individual’s endless wrestling with history in twentieth-century China—as we ourselves are his Wang Ers. ”The Golden Age”: Awakening from a Modern Arcadia, and into History “The Golden Age” is the first story of The Golden Age series, and, at first glance, does not appear to differ from the majority of the educated-youth literature that blossomed in the early 1980s. During the Cultural Revolution, Wang Er and Chen Qingyang, two educated youths sent down to a farm in Yunnan, meet, fall in love, carry on an affair, but are eventually discovered by the “production brigade.” The leaders interrogate the couple separately, force them to write detailed confessions, and carry out a series of public struggle sessions against them. Other educated-youth writers wrote similar stories in the 1980s, but these stories were generally written as “exposé literature” and often carried a straightforward and nonironic (albeit, a sometimes covertly sensationalistic) tone. Instead of following this well-trodden path, “The Golden Age” takes a very different spin, with an unexpected and almost comical turn. The two protagonists are actually lucky enough to be eventually acquitted from the more severe punishment that usually awaits those who violate these taboos in the revolution. So, what has saved them? There is a peculiar logic in play here, particularly regarding the nominal differentiation between innocence and sin. Chen Qingyang, the female protagonist, at first will not admit to her interrogators that she has committed any sin, because she believes that sex is noble friendship and sacrifice, not “sinful” pleasure. This is so even after the end of the Cultural Revolution, and more than twenty years later when she and Wang Er, the first-person male protagonist, again rendezvous in a hotel: Chen Qingyang said that was also her golden age. Although she was called a slut, she was innocent. And she had been innocent until this very day. Hearing this, I started laughing. But she said that what we are doing now can’t be counted as sin. We have had a great friendship, running away

142

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

together, going through struggle sessions together, and only see each other again after twenty years. Of course she would open her legs and let me in. Even if this was a sin, she didn’t know why it was. Even more importantly, she had no knowledge of this sin. … [S]he still insisted that this wasn’t a sin. Like Socrates, she knew nothing. Although she had now lived for more than forty years, what she saw before her eyes was still a brave new world. She had no idea why people had wanted to send her down to a remote place like Yunnan, nor did she have any idea why she’d be allowed to come back … She was so ignorant, hence without sin.8

The “golden age” is founded upon the presumption that sex between Wang Er and his “accomplice,” Chen Qingyang, is a totally natural and spontaneous act. As a matter of fact, both Wang Er and Chen Qingyang appear more or less like naïve simpletons who have been blessed with and shielded by a kind of blissful innocence. However, to the readers’ surprise, Chen Qingyang eventually does lose this “naturalness” or “innocence.” Like a modern Eve, she awakens, or falls, into an entirely different realm of self-knowledge and identity based upon her “original sin”: Chen Qingyang said that her true sin was what happened on Qingping Mountain. That time she was carried on my shoulder, wearing a wrap skirt—it was wrapped so tightly that it bound her legs together, her hair falling low and reaching to my waist. In the sky the white clouds rushed by; only the two of us deep in the midst of mountains. I just spanked her twice on her butt, very hard. A sensation of burning spread and evaporated. After that I put all cares aside, continuing to climb upward. Chen Qingyang said at that moment she felt weak, and then she collapsed, hanging over my shoulder. At that moment she felt like a spring vine entwining a tree, or a little bird clinging to her man. She no longer wanted to think, and at that moment she wanted to get everything else out of her mind. At that moment she fell in love with me, and this was a fact that would never change.9

Through this lyrical, sensitive, yet also mocking description, Wang Xiaobo shrewdly demonstrates that love, like sex, can be a unique and individualized experience and is thus the original sin that has led to Wang Er and Chen Qingyang’s fall and exile. Morever, now we come to Chen Qingyang’s last confession, which is just about the end of the story: Chen Qingyang said that confessing this meant confessing all her sins. In the security office, people showed her all kinds of confessions others had written,

Wang Xiaobo

●

143

and nobody had written one like hers. But she insisted on writing like this. She said the reason that she wanted to write it down was because it was far worse than anything she had done before. In the past she had admitted that she had spread her legs. Now in addition to that, she admitted to doing it because she liked it. Doing it and liking it were totally different things. The former deserved the punishment of being struggled against to entertain people, while the latter deserved that one be drawn and quartered. But no one had the authority to draw and quarter us. So they had to let us go.10

That is to say, it is this ultimate confession of original sin that has shut their interrogators up and saved both of them. In doing so, Wang Xiaobo is actually proclaiming the triumph of a sort of Enlightenment philosophy, the placing natural rights above the unnatural and absurd regulations of the revolution. What Wang Er and Chen Qingyang experience through their affair is indeed a positive, affirmative sexual awakening of the Golden Age—love is nature and thus is reason.11 Seen through this logic, Wang Er and Chen Qingyang’s experience of the Cultural Revolution is a “paradise lost” that turns into a “paradise regained.” Instead of picturing the Cultural Revolution as sexually and politically oppressive, Wang Xiaobo presents it as a world that is desolate and uncivilized, yet also peculiarly fertile and organic, or, to put it in short, a world of wilderness obeying its natural laws. Accordingly, the foregrounding of this natural world points to a “barbaric” facet of the Cultural Revolution, which is marked by an inherent conflict between low human “nature” and high revolutionary ideals. The decaying social structures and wild natural environment have only worked together to help the individual subjects rediscover their own nature and navigate through the tides of time and history simply by clinging to their new-found natural instincts. Thus, an uninhibited and illicit sexual love has been endowed with a nearly utopian and redemptive function for the individual. Wang Xiaobo seems to imply that Wang Er and Chen Qingyang’s fall and exile into nature, brought on by the Cultural Revolution, have also brought a kind of rebirth or regeneration through natural cycling of time. Indeed, a secret, almost neoromantic and primitivist fantasy is potent here. Fredric Jameson has given a brilliant illustration of this hidden utopian ideal in his reading of Chevengur, the Russian writer Andrei Platonov’s novel written in the 1920s, with regard to the return of an organic, barbaric nature and time and what he would call “a new form of socialist culture”12: So it is that in Platonov also the great inaugural experience of secular organic time returns, but within the framework of a devastated peasant landscape rather than in Baudelaire’s city: the pulse of this new kind of time is the time

144

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

of the watchman (lone survivor in an abandoned village) … This peculiar experience of time—“sauvage” in Levi-Strauss’s French-literal sense of growing wild in a state of nature, like the burdocks here everywhere across the steppe—is reiterated by the other characters, but refracted through their Utopian diversity and their bizarre characterology.13

And Jameson further elaborates upon this theme: Here, however, in this new Utopian form from out of Second World realities, we find something more dynamic than either the static contemplation of Being or the sterile Western longing of a work of art to be more than mere art but indeed the World itself … A first moment of absolute immanence is necessary, the blank slate of absolute peasant immanence or ignorance, before new and undreamed-of sensations and feelings can come into being … we might think of the new onset of the Utopian process as a kind of desiring to desire, a learning to desire, the invention of the desire called Utopia in the first place, along with new rules for the fantasizing or daydreaming of such a thing—a set of narrative protocols with no precedent in our previous literary institutions.14

Similarly, in “The Golden Age,” right after the introductory chapter in which Wang Er and Chen Qingyang get acquainted, a new chapter starts with the following passages recounting Wang Er’s waking up on his twentyfirst birthday, with an erection, in the wilderness, under the sun: The day was my twenty-first birthday, and I was herding buffaloes by the riverbanks. In the afternoon I fell asleep lying on the grass. Before I fell asleep, I covered my body with some banana leaves. When I woke up I found myself in the altogether (the leaves might have been eaten by the buffaloes). The sunlight of the subtropical dry season had burned me red all over, unbearably painful and itchy; my “little monk” was pointing straight up toward the sky, with an unprecedented size. This was the way it was on my birthday. When I woke up the sun was hurting my eyes, the sky was frighteningly blue, and my body was covered with a thin layer of dust, like a layer of talcum powder. Of the countless erections in my life, none could have been as virile and magnificent as that one, probably because I was in an extremely remote and wild place with no one in sight. … Of course, I have different opinions about this. For me, this thing [“little monk”] is as significant as my existence itself … On that day I was twenty-one years young, in the Golden Age of my life. I had many luxurious

Wang Xiaobo

●

145

wishes: I wanted to love, wanted to eat, and also wanted to in a blink transform into a half-bright half-dark cloud in the sky. Only later on did I learn that life was a slow process of being hammered and castrated, of aging day by day, and seeing one’s hopes dwindling day by day, until one finally becomes like a castrated buffalo. But when I had my twenty-first birthday I couldn’t foresee that. I felt I myself would be virile forever, and nothing could ever castrate me.15

This is a highly suggestive scene: a Rousseauean “noble savage” waking up in a twentieth-century Arcadia, and at “the new onset of the Utopian process as a kind of desiring to desire, a learning to desire,” as Jameson has stated. It is also, in fact, the first introduction of the term “golden age” into the story, with an emphatic lyricism, which would be echoed by Chen Qingyang’s erotic awakening on her own part, as discussed previously. While “lying on the grass” and facing up toward the sun, Wang Er’s erection stands as a mythically cocky gesture, defying the gravities of the earth and the existential environment. The “I” is fascinated by the phallic spectacle as if in a ritual of primitive phallic worship. In this light, Wang Er indeed appears to be a bastard child of the Cultural Revolution, endowed with a utopian virility against the gravity of time and reality, and bearing the potential for liberation from history.16 It is probably only here that we may understand, at least partly, why “The Golden Age” had been one, among all of Wang Xiaobo’s fictional works, that was most readily welcomed by his Chinese readers and critics. It is as if Wang Xiaobo had, through a Rabelaisian play of forbidden pleasure and healthy defiance, finally helped cleanse and rescue a piece of broken utopia for the individual subject from a bleak history of the Cultural Revolution. But, that momentary phallic self-fascination, as the unfolding story demonstrates, is short-lived. It is not expanded into a boundlessly selfindulgent and self-celebratory utopia of virility or primitive life force, as it was in the 1980s roots-seeking and primitivist showcases such as Mo Yan’s Red Sorghum or the 1990s commercialized chic sex adventures like Wei Hui’s Shanghai Baby. What turns out to be the real epiphany, is Wang Er’s gradual and melancholy realization in hindsight of that unfolding of Fate: “Only later on did I learn that life was a slow process of being hammered and castrated, of aging day by day, and seeing one’s hopes dwindling day by day, until one finally becomes like a castrated buffalo.” That is to say, ironically, the individual development is not a linear progress of gaining further youth and freedom from this awakening onward, but a gradual process of aging, decaying, being pulled down by gravity.

146

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

Even more ironically, this realization dawns upon Wang Er only later in life. So, while experiencing that particularly fantastic moment of sexual awakening, he remains utterly ignorant of the fact that he is living in his Golden Age, which is, however, doomed to be soon past and irreversibly lost. Moreover, he has no control over this irreversible process. Hence the lamentation: Wang Er is indeed a “savage” in history, because the only power he has to prove his existence is the unenduring life force which he possesses by nature. What is truly dominant in this Golden Age is the castrating force of external time and history. Under such gravity, neither the “savage” Wang Er nor the “innocent” Chen Qingyang is the real master of their “savageness” or “innocence.” What awaits them is nothing less than decadence and fall. Contrary to the Maoist utopian dictum that “there is a boundless stage for action between heaven and earth” ( guangkuo tiandi, dayou zuowei ) and that man can freely change and shape nature and history at his will, as propounded by the sent-down movement, these young individuals in reality are subject to the Natural Law of History. History, in turn, amounts to nothing but the castration of nature. We can compare this theme with George Orwell’s 1984. During his first sexual meeting—as a deliberate act of rebellion—with Julia at a secret hideout in an old pasture, Winston, the male protagonist, muses: “It’s the Golden Country— almost.”17 But this almost “Golden Country” is doomed from the very outset. Such a dialectic is also what “The Golden Age” suggests: while nature, which includes human sexual instincts and the primitive life force, might provide a short-lived escape from history, ultimately this utopian moment can only be diminished and devoured by the ever-mighty forces of man-made history and inhuman time. The Jamesonian Utopia may eventually be short circuited by the Orwellian Dystopia—“paradise regained” remains a “paradise lost.” In other words, Wang Xiaobo has not fallen into the simplistic trap of indulging in the fantasy of a modern Arcadia in a primitive Cultural Revolution. He is actually much more somber and pessimistic than that. This awakening from a modern Arcadia is fundamentally also an awakening into the grimness of modern history. Starting from that double awareness, Wang Xiaobo, via his alter ego Wang Er, further plunges into examining the reverse side of such a Golden Age, that is, the inescapable existential condition of the individual in history. “Et in Arcadia ego,” at first appears to promise a joyful self-discovery of a young individual subject awakening to his Golden Age—“I am also in Arcadia”; however, if looked upon closely, it turns out to be a melancholy motto and reminder of the factuality of life: “Death is also in Arcadia.”18

Wang Xiaobo

●

147

“The Year of Independence” and “Years Like Flowing Water”: The Melancholy of Being If “The Golden Age” offers a utopian moment of awakening and liberation to the individual during the Cultural Revolution, the subsequent two novellas in the The Golden Age series, “The Year of Independence” and “Years Like Flowing Water,” drift away from that Golden Age into Wang Er’s thirtieth and fortieth years of life respectively. While increasingly pessimistic about his prospects for life and melancholy about the already wasted years in retrospect, Wang Er, still the first-person narrator and protagonist, starts to explore the long-standing impact time and history have exerted upon individual subjects who are now stuck in their rather mundane and even morbid everyday adult lives. And the experience of the Cultural Revolution always haunts him as he contemplates his relationship with history in a Proustian mode of “remembrance of things past.” It is in “The Year of Independence” that Wang Xiaobo clearly fashions Wang Er’s own existential philosophy. This story also starts with a vertical image of Wang Er, accompanied by a sense of disbelief of his own situation in the world, only this time the erection of “The Golden Age” is replaced by a phallic chimney he used to climb up as a youngster: Wang Er was born in Beijing, I am Wang Er. On a summer morning, I was riding my bicycle to work when I passed by the gate of the school. I looked at the serious-looking gate, looked at the wide playing field and the tall chimney in the background, and I suddenly felt: no matter how, I just could not believe it. Not long ago, I was still just a first-year student in junior high. After school I was fighting with my classmates at the school gate … at that time the whole class was enraged, yelling, chasing after me. I ran across the playing field, toward that gray chimney. Later the principal walked out, and saw me climbing the high scaffold, braving the strong east wind, baring my young bosom, shouting: “Motherfuckers! Whoever dares climb up, I will kick him off !” This was as if it happened just yesterday. In the blink of an eye I’ve become a grown-up, with a height of six feet two, and a weight of more than one hundred and eighty pounds. No matter how, a bunch of young boys from the first year in junior high would have no way to chase such a big fellow up to the top of chimney, so I absolutely would not believe it.19

This scene of climbing the chimney is both symbolic and important. The erected chimney certainly, in a classically Freudian sense, suggests the young Wang Er’s once-youthful virility and erotic identity of “independence.” Now, in 1983, as the story starts, he is already past the age of thirty, the

148

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

year of independence (erli zhinian) according to traditional Confucianism. However, reaching this so-called year of independence has brought Wang Er, now an ordinary biology lecturer at a university, neither consolation nor clarification regarding life’s meaning or his individual identity in the world he inhabits, but instead offers him an acute sense of loss and emptiness as his bygone golden age can only be glimpsed in retrospect. Wang Er acknowledges his existential dilemma of being caught between ideals and realities: he is unwilling to accept the world and his existence as they are, and yet he has no way to transcend them (as he used to be able to do by climbing the chimney and literally rising above his existential condition). His existence is fraught with contradictions forced upon him by his immediate surroundings, as shown in the quasi-sophistic deduction below: If we say that Wang Er exists, then he must exist with true reason. But in the world where Wang Er lives there is no such clarity, thus it’s hard for him to exist. To give one example: Humans are mortal. The emperor is a human, long live the emperor and he is immortal. More: Humans are mortal. The emperor is a human, so the emperor is also mortal. Wang Er accepts both statements. You see, isn’t he hopeless? Obviously, there are two systems working in this world. One is derived from the necessity of living, the other from existence itself. Therefore for every question there exist simultaneously two answers. This is called hypocrisy.20

Apparently, through analyzing his daily life, Wang Er draws the conclusion that no one has really learned to live a life true to his own nature, that is, his own existence. As for existence itself, Wang Er has the following to say: For me, existence itself has endless charms, worthy of giving up all vanity and fame … At that time I also wrote that in the future I want to do everything sincerely, I want to reason like Descartes, attack the windmill like Don Quixote. Whether I write poetry or make love, I’ll do it all with the greatest sincerity. Hic Rhodus, hic saltus. Here is Rhodes, here I leap—I do this for no other purpose, and this is existence itself. In my view, a tiny blade of grass growing in springtime is free of purpose. A stud horse is in heat as wind blows, also free of purpose. Growing grass or a stud horse in heat, neither has the purpose of performing for someone else, and this is existence itself. I will do all what I do with the great sincerity of grass growing and a stud horse being in heat, rather than coyly performing in front of other people. The way I see it, everyone loses their own existence to performance.21

Wang Xiaobo

●

149

Wang Er nevertheless dreams of taking up battle on his own, making that “leap,” and proving his existence; the option that he thinks of is writing poetry: I come to think: it’s not necessary to write a poem for others. If someone comes to enjoy a quiet night by himself, then my poem has no use for him. Reading it to him would only prevent him from enjoying his own poem on the quiet night. If a person can’t sing, then all the songs in the world have no use for him; if he can sing, he must sing his own song. That is to say, poet as a profession should be eliminated, and everyone needs to be one’s own poet.22

Thus, the act of writing poetry itself is expression and proof of one’s existence. At the end of the story, Wang Er imagines his deathbed in a hospital fifty years hence, with a graphic and naturalistic description of the repulsive and dreadful details. Upon awakening from that nightmare, once again, Wang Er’s poetic flight takes off: On such a night, one cannot help thinking of death, of eternity. The atmosphere of death is closing in, as if boundless death is about to devour a human being. I’m a rather insignificant being; whatever I might have done, I have the same insignificance. But as long as I move, I transcend death. Now I’m a poet. Although I’ve never published one line of poetry, precisely because of this, I’m even greater. I’m like those troubadours, chanting verses to themselves on the horseback, going through those long cold nights. … If I really have to die, I will choose a bloodsoaked glory … When they drag me onto the guillotine, those executioners of my own choosing— nice-looking girls, dressed in black leather mini skirts, will rush to me, bestowing wreathes and kisses.23

But the deep implications of such a poetic and fantastic flight and longing for transcendence will not be fully comprehended without an understanding of their concrete historical background. Torn between banal reality and a poetic flight, this year of independence remains an unfulfilled one, and the origins of its failure to achieve realization will still have to be traced further back into the past. These origins are explored in the last story of this series: “Years Like Flowing Water.” At the very beginning of “Years Like Flowing Water,” Wang Xiaobo introduces more characters and supplies further details, compiling the chronology of Wang Er’s life thus far: Wang Er’s chronology: 1950. Born. 1966–1968. The Cultural Revolution. Is a high school student, living at the College of Mineralogy. Witnesses Mr. He’s suicide by jumping off a building and Mr. Li’s being kicked and getting hematoma on his penis head.

150

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

1968. Makes explosives for fun with Xu You in the basement and causes an accident, hence gets serious bad luck. Initially is dealt with by the proletarian dictatorship, then arrested, beaten. 1969–1972. Released. Goes down to the countryside of Yunnan as a sentdown youth. Meets Chen Qingyang. 1972–1977. Works in Beijing outskirts as a sent-down youth. Has an affair with Little Zhuanling. Acquaintance with Mr. Liu. Death of Mr. Liu. Later on is called back to Beijing, and becomes a worker in a small street factory. 1977–1981. Attends college. 1981–1984. Graduates. Passes thirty, the year of independence. Marries Er Niuzi. 1985–1990. Encounters old lover Xiantiao, and is surprised to find out that she married Mr. Li. Goes abroad to study for a higher academic degree. Father’s death. Divorce. Returns from abroad. 1990. Turns forty.24

Wang Xiaobo clearly intends to use Wang Er’s resume to highlight the common fate that has befallen many of his contemporaries, the generation whose fate had been decisively shaped by the Cultural Revolution. This fact is further underlined by Wang Xiaobo’s entry of the Cultural Revolution of 1966–1968 as the second most important event in Wang Er’s life since his birth in 1950.25 As he enters the 1990s, Wang Er reaches forty, the year of enlightenment (buhuo zhinian), again, according to the Confucian tradition. Yet his wariness and doubt toward the world have only deepened as his knowledge of it has grown. It is through this long time span that Wang Xiaobo presents his transhistorical reflection while weaving together his protagonist’s flight and plight under the gravity of history. The central theme in “Years Like Flowing Water” remains the existential condition of the individual during historical upheavals like the Cultural Revolution, along with the question: How can an individual ever transcend history? If the answer in “The Year of Independence” is for one to become a poet, now the solution is to become a historian, record, and, thus remember a real history. This latter answer is the key to understanding Wang Er’s seemingly endless catalogue of physical abuse and terror inflicted on the people with whom he once was associated during the Cultural Revolution: As the years flowed like water, some incidents slipped away, while others wouldn’t even after a long time. Besides the incident of Mr. Li’s hematoma on his penis head, there is also Mr. He’s suicide by jumping off a building. Actually Mr. He is just Mr. He, he had got nothing to do with me at all. But his death had been embedded in my mind; if I can’t figure it out, I won’t be able to tie all the threads together of my own life.26

Wang Xiaobo

●

151

That is to say, the history of the Cultural Revolution is far from being treated exhaustively by the current literature. Moreover, the memories of the violence have become such a quintessential part of Wang Er’s life history and being, that revisiting the history of the Cultural Revolution becomes crucial, if Wang Er is to establish his “independence” (erli) or reach any kind of “enlightenment” (buhuo). While echoing Wang Shuo’s satirical warning against historical amnesia in Playing for Thrills, Wang Xiaobo nevertheless faces the question of how to preserve and write such a history. His approach is to offer seemingly detailed and realistic descriptions that turn out to be surreal: In the winter of that year, there was not even one clear day in Beijing, and the sun was hidden from view. In those days the College of Mineralogy was just a big courtyard about one square kilometer, two-thirds of which was a pine grove. At that time many people (revolutionary teachers and students, revolutionary staff ) came from all over to the College of Mineralogy, but couldn’t find any toilets after having eaten too many coarse corn buns, so they were taking “wild shits” in the pine grove, and the piles of shit were all horribly thick. In those days in the College of Mineralogy the big-character posters were pasted on the walls one on top of another, layer upon layer, until they were a foot thick, and suddenly, with a huge crash, one thick layer collapsed. Xu You’s grandma was seventy-eight years old, and literally died of fright upon hearing this sound of collapse behind her back. In those days in the College of Mineralogy there were many loudspeakers making noise all day and all night. Later on nobody in our generation could learn English well: our ears had been damaged, unable to hear the voiceless consonants. In those days there were particularly large amounts of wastepaper, and many kids were collecting wastepaper, driving little carts they had made themselves, skating gracefully on the streets. In those days many maniacs were released and worshiped. In those days I had just reached my year of making life goals, and witnessed all this, with my eyes wide open. If I want to write all this down, I will have to use the pen of a real historian. I don’t have this pen yet, so when I narrate my years like flowing water, I only need to talk about Mr. Li’s hematoma on his penis head and Mr. He’s jumping off a building. Neither of these happened to me (I was lucky), but still had a lot to do with me.27

Hence the Cultural Revolution is represented as an amalgam of grotesque and bizarre spectacles seen from a particular pair of eyes—and yet it is all truths. Wang Xiaobo displays an almost obsessive persistence in the way he dwells on, magnifies, records, and reflects on such spectacles and incidents with a full awareness of the continuum of time, where history merges with one’s present life. Without such persistent questioning or questing, though

152

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

it might be accompanied by a certain amount of self-inflicted violence, no true clarification of one’s life can be achieved. At a certain point in his narrative, Wang Xiaobo pauses and explains, in a gloomy elegiac tone, the title of “Years Like Flowing Water”: Years like flowing water are all that you have, and they are the only thing that truly belongs to you. The rest is just fleeting happiness and misfortune, which also quickly merge into years like flowing water. None of the people I know have really treasured their own years like flowing water, and they don’t even realize they possess such a thing, thus they all look haunted and hollow.28

Eventually, Xiantiao, Wang Er’s former lover, encourages Wang Er to record our years like flowing water, and pass it on to future generations, no matter how miserable it truly was, no matter how offensive it might sound to others. I have always been doing this, but Xiantiao said that in my stories there were only good things, that I had avoided the bad, and not revealed the full picture of the years like flowing water, not written truthfully. If I really want to write about the years like flowing water, I must write down everything, including the things which might at first glance invite disbelief. Not daring to write down such things would amount to kitsch.29

One such thing that might invite disbelief is that during the Great Leap Forward movement, in the experiment of using human excrement as fertilizer, some village cadres urged the peasants to boil shit in their cooking woks in order to speed the process of fermentation: The episode of shit boiling absolutely cannot be left out, because it was a thread in our years like flowing water. It makes plain that once upon a time, everybody had to be a dumbfuck (what Xiantiao means by “silly cunt”—a note by Wang Er), and there would be no other choice anyway. By then we were still very little, not old enough to make our own choices.30

But the Great Leap Forward movement that Wang Er had experienced as a child was soon to be superseded by some of the woeful episodes of the Red Guard movement during the Cultural Revolution that Wang Er’s generation had now been fully involved and would later tend to be left in oblivion: When we grew up, we had two choices, either to be a dumbfuck or to be a renegade. We chose not to be dumbfucks, but renegades.

Wang Xiaobo

●

153

If I tried to record all the deeds of these renegades, there would simply be too many. Many of our friends died, a death not worthy of even a fart. For example, while in Yunnan, some friends wanted to go to liberate twothirds of the world population that were suffering. They crossed the borders, joined the guerillas, and ended up being killed. Such deaths were truly miserable. Think of it: 1. About two-thirds of the world population that are suffering, do you know exactly who they are? 2. About two-thirds of the world population that are suffering, do you know exactly what they are suffering from? 3. Just as Chairman Mao said, there is neither love without cause, nor hatred without cause. You know nothing about them before you die for them, isn’t it a bit too tacky? Among those dead were some of my friends, who originally set out to be renegades, yet ended up as dumbfucks. Such stories are too miserable, and I can’t bear to write them down. If the years like flowing water have to be written down truthfully, then I’ve already committed the sin of distortion. I know more stories that are even more miserable—in my view, the greatest sadness in one’s life is to be fooled and manipulated. Can I possibly enumerate all these miserable stories?31

An obligation, moral as well as aesthetic, arises for Wang Er: to be a historian, a chronicler of human folly and misery in contemporary Chinese history. Unlike in his “The Year of Independence,” here Wang Xiaobo seems to assert that one cannot merely be a poet and pursue individual transcendence; more importantly, one must also be a historian and squarely face history. And the skyward flight has to be balanced by a more earthbound exploration of one’s own rootedness in history. “Years Like Flowing Water” ends just on that note: If I decide to write about years like flowing water in this fashion, I won’t have to worry that I have nothing to write about; on the contrary, I would only worry that there might be too much material. To get all this done would require the pen of an erudite historian, or many pens. Where can I find such a pen? Where can I find so many comrades? Even if I did find them, I would still have to dedicate all my energy and write nonstop as I age and before I die. Only by doing so can I gain the opportunity to straighten up and face the punishment of aging bestowed by ancient heaven, to prove that I’m good. But to make this decision, I still need a bit more time.32

Measuring “The Golden Age” against such a high bar, we may find that endowed with a more or less romanticized and affirmative overtone, its grasp of the existential depths of individuality in the era of revolution

154

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

appears somewhat insufficient, as testified to by Xiantiao’s observation “that in my stories there were only good things, that I had avoided the bad, and not revealed the full picture of the years like flowing water, not written truthfully.” That is why from “The Year of Independence” on, and particularly in “Years Like Flowing Water,” Wang Xiaobo has chosen to chronicle a more mundane and, yet, also a more nightmarish history that individuals have been trapped in and are unable to break free from. In this history, neither one’s erotic instincts nor one’s creative instincts would have ever been fulfilled, and only a profound melancholy of being prevails. Nevertheless, Wang Xiaobo’s representation of this history always is, as stated earlier, filtered through a deliberately distorted and twisted perspective, with a preference for the grotesque and surreal. In this regard, Wang Xiaobo’s Wang Er is indeed reminiscent of someone like Grass’s Oskar Matzerath in The Tin Drum. By adopting a similarly first-person narrative charged with a highly self-reflexive double consciousness, Wang Xiaobo allows his protagonist, Wang Er, to wander through and poke at the fabric of history that he was born into and grew up in. In doing so, Wang Xiaobo probes into the deeper currents and layers of this history, and reveals the close connections among the most seemingly private realms of love and sex and the grand historical backdrop of the Cultural Revolution itself. That is to say, the highly subjective experiences of love and sex have become the lens or prism through which Wang Xiaobo feels that he can truly record and reflect upon his own “years like flowing water” and those of his generation. And contrary to what is depicted in “The Golden Age,” a fuller, more complex, darker, and also more bizarre panoramic picture of the intertwining of eros and politics, or love and revolution, is displayed in Wang Xiaobo’s next novella “Love in the Era of Revolution.” “Love in the Era of Revolution”: Eros Perverted Eros and politics, or love and revolution. This has been one of the most important dual themes in modern Chinese literature dating back to the May Fourth literature and notably, the “revolutionary literature” of the 1920s, with its formula of “revolution plus love.” Extensive critical studies have already been done regarding this great modern pathos, such as Leo Ou-fan Lee’s influential The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers,33 and more recently, Chen Jianhua’s insightful rereading of Mao Dun in The Modernity of “Geming,”34 as well as David Der-wei Wang’s illuminating article “Revolution Plus Love.”35

Wang Xiaobo

●

155

This has also been one of the first and most sensitive topics in post– Cultural Revolution literature. Many scar literature stories have touched such taboo issues as love torn and alienated by political or factional divisions, as treated in Zheng Yi’s “Maple” (Feng ); rape, in Zhang Xian’s “The Corner Forsaken by Love” (Bei aiqing yiwang de jiaoluo); or even quasiincestuous love in Kong Jiesheng’s “On the Other Side of the Small River” (Zai xiaohe nabian). In other words, sex and its more perverse manifestations lurk almost like a subversive tease or a voyeuristic obsession, beneath the facade of a noble calling to restore love in its normative and Enlightenment sense.36 For the generation of the Cultural Revolution, sex, or eros, inevitably becomes a forbidden and secret realm for the individuals trying to acquire knowledge of selfhood in an ascetic environment. It is also a prism through which they can surreptitiously reexamine the world around them. For example, Fang Yan, the first-person protagonist of Wang Shuo’s “Vicious Animals,” as we have already discussed in the previous chapter, admits to the formative influence of “revolution plus love” novels such as Yang Mo’s The Song of Youth, Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered and Ethel Lilian Voynich’s The Gadfly, which he read as an adolescent during the Cultural Revolution. Liu Xiaofeng, the noted cultural theorist, has also written poignantly on this subject in his essay “Remem-bering Tonya with Love.” Drawing upon his personal experience of witnessing the senseless deaths of Red Guards (and particularly, the young female Red Guards) during the armed factional battles in his native Sichuan, Liu reflects upon the doomed love between Pavel and Tonya, the protagonists in How the Steel Was Tempered. For Liu, whereas revolution and eros both emphasize devotion, the devotions they demand are in completely opposite directions: Devotion to revolution and devotion to eros are different. The former requires the individual to submit himself to the telos or totality of the revolution, and allow the revolution to realize itself, while the devotion to eros only revolves around and substantiates the individual existence.37 Eros is purely an individual matter, is the lingering intimacy that happens when “this one” random body encounters another “this one” random individual. Conversely revolution is a collective matter. Social revolution and individual eros each has its own legitimacy, and these two should be mutually irrelevant.38

Ultimately eros and revolution are incompatible, and the former must be dissociated from its entanglement with the latter. Otherwise, eros will inevitably

156

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

suffer from being deprived of its autonomy and privateness and thus be repressed, distorted, or wrongfully sublimated in the name of revolution. While appearing to concur with Liu in principle, Wang Xiaobo nevertheless takes a far more ambivalent and nuanced perspective, as manifested in his own short preface to the novella, “Love in the Era of Revolution”: This is a book about erotic love. Erotic love is motivated by its own force, but sometimes such a self-motivated act is inhibited, which complicates everything … What I want to say is: people can indeed explain just about anything, erotic love included, in the most far-fetched way. Therefore erotic love could also have the most outlandish causes.39

In other words, Wang Xiaobo wants to show that this perverse entanglement of eros and revolution under the specific historical circumstance of the Cultural Revolution is in fact the norm, thus he challenges a humanistic, yet somewhat simplistic, perception of the two realms of social revolution and private eros as separate. Eros, according to him, does not constitute an autonomous or alternative haven for the individual ensnared in the revolution. This shows that Wang Xiaobo has further departed from his earlier utopian conception of sexuality and eros as presented in “The Golden Age.” In “Love in the Era of Revolution,” the first-person narrator, Wang Er, with a different physical stature and a slightly different life experience from that of the protagonist in The Golden Age trilogy, is what Wang Xiaobo would call one of the many “eponymous brothers” of Wang Er and the author himself.40 Situated in the 1990s, an engineer now, and with some years of studying overseas in the United States, Wang Er recounts two intersecting stories of his adventures during the Cultural Revolution. The primary story relates his experience as a worker in a street beancurd factory in Beijing in 1974, the waning days of the Cultural Revolution. Suspected of having drawn obscene graffiti in public toilet, he is interrogated and “helped” in daily sessions by a young and progressive female Youth League cadre, X Haiying, in an office at the factory. Eventually confined in this claustrophobic setting, he is coerced into a sexual relationship and a cat and mouse game between himself and X Haiying. In the story, there are other equally eccentric minor characters. Old Lu is a middle-aged woman, the head of the Party division in the factory, who always chases after Wang Er since she suspects that the obscene drawings in the toilet are actually modeled after her. In a sort of replay of “The Year of Independence,” Wang Er invariably climbs up to the factory’s tower in order to escape her. The other character, Zhanba or Prick, is a young coworker and friend of Wang Er’s, whom Wang Er often bullies, which serves as proof of a kind of homoerotic friendship. Prick loves

Wang Xiaobo

●

157

X Haiying, but X Haiying has an affair with Wang Er, although she later marries Prick instead of Wang Er. But there is still another story, which takes place in the years 1966–67, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, when it had escalated into a sequence of deadly armed factional battles. Wang Er is still a teenager and not only witnesses these fights, but also directly involves himself by inventing a stone-throwing machine and giving technical advice to one faction. His technical interventions and advice are eventually responsible for the deaths of several members from the rival faction. Alongside this militaristic adventure is his first sexual adventure with an older college girl named “Color.” These two different Cultural Revolution stories intersect each other as Wang Er’s first-person narrative unfolds. Furthermore, Wang Er narrates these two stories from the vantage point of his present life, freely adding both anecdotes from his childhood during the “steel tempering” campaign of the Great Leap Forward in 1958, as well as his observations from his studies abroad in the 1980s. It becomes apparent that by weaving all of these threads together, Wang Xiaobo wants to paint a panoramic picture that shows perversity as the norm of love and life in the era of revolution, which in turn, is just another manifestation of the perversity of history itself. This serves as further evidence that individuals are no more than victims of the machinations and domination of history. In the story of Wang Er and his first love, the college girl “Color,” there is a blend of Wang Er’s strong urge for revolution and his simultaneous sexual awakening and initiation, with the former decisively impairing and hindering the latter: I am a male, and my mind was full of concepts such as fire battle, bayonet charges, assaults, and building fortifications. Although I was also aroused when I was intimate with her, my heart was somewhat greasy, and I couldn’t act like a man. I was like someone with hepatitis, unable to eat fatty meat. The era of revolution had the same curbing effect on one’s sexual desire as hepatitis had on one’s appetite.41

This perversity of love and revolution looms large in his later erotic relationship with X Haiying as well, but in a different way: When X Haiying talked to me, her sentences grew terser and terser, and she even started to drop the subject of the sentence. For instance, when she wanted me to sit upright, she would just say: “Sit up;” when she wanted me to fetch a meal for her, she would say: “Fetch meal”! When she wanted me to go

158

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

somewhere with her, she would just say: “Go.” All these words were terse and no-nonsense, but gradually I no longer knew who I was … In front of her my mind became a total blank, and whenever something needed to be done I would simply do it. Through those simple drills I gradually found pleasure, which would last for a long time. I often dreamed of X Haiying, of hanging her up on a twisted tree, first kissing her, caressing her, then stripping her naked and raping her. This was my way of loving X Haiying, because I had no other choice.42

This sadomasochistic power relationship inherent in love in the era of revolution appears to be one of Wang Xiaobo’s major concerns. It reminds one of Susan Sontag’s analysis of the eroticization of Nazism and the relationship between fascination for fascism and sadomasochism in another context, namely, contemporary Western pop culture: Between sadomasochism and fascism there is a natural link. “Fascism is theater,” as Genet said. As is sadomasochistic sexuality: to be involved in sadomasochism is to take part in a sexual theater, a staging of sexuality … Sadomasochism is to sex what war is to civil life: the magnificent experience … The end to which all sexual experience tends, as Bataille insisted in a lifetime of writing, is defilement, blasphemy.43

Sontag’s statement that “Sadomasochism is to sex what war is to civil life: the magnificent experience” can be paraphrased in Wang Xiaobo’s case as “Sadomasochism is to sex what revolution is to love: the magnificent experience.” But another statement of hers, “Certainly, Nazism is ‘sexier’ than communism”44 may be contestable here, and we may say that in “Love in the Era of Revolution” the Cultural Revolution has also become, if not necessarily “sexier,” at least no less kinky or bizarre. And, when Sontag says that “The rituals of domination and enslavement … are perhaps only a logical extension of an affluent [Western] society’s tendency to turn every part of people’s lives into a taste, a choice,”45 Wang Xiaobo proves the opposite, although much more somberly, in the context of the Cultural Revolution. That is also to say, what is sadomasochistic and blasphemous is the revolution and history itself, and the erotic or sexual perversity only mirrors this larger picture. For instance, it turns out that X Haiying’s attraction to Wang Er is based upon a sexual fantasy acquired early on during her childhood exposure to the revolutionary education: When X Haiying was little, she watched those revolutionary movies in which the revolutionary soldiers were tied up by the enemies and made to suffer

Wang Xiaobo

●

159

harsh beatings and tortures, so she asked her little neighbor boy to tie her to a tree. In her eyes, I looked more than anyone else like an enemy, so later on she liked to have me pinch her nipples. Games like this, although they seem bizarre, are still better than nothing. She would start from here, seeking miracles. Underground work, whipping, torturing to death, all stimulated her imagination.46

Unwilling to participate in this sadomasochistic role-playing, Wang Er nonetheless finds himself caught in a fundamentally awkward situation: For the act I was going to commit, I indeed felt guilty, because that was in the era of revolution … In a way I shouldn’t have done it, but I also had to. Anyone who had had sexual intercourse would have felt such a dilemma. There was one type of wisdom: as long as there is a mutual amorous feeling between themselves, men and women should be allowed to have sexual intercourse, but this was the backward wisdom current in any previous eras of human history. There was also another type of wisdom: Men and women can only have sexual intercourse when they are full of hatred for one another. Whenever I made love with X Haiying, she would always say that I was a scum, a Jap monster, a bad element, cursing me to death. This was the advanced wisdom current in the era of revolution. I was caught between these two types of wisdom, and grew wan and sallow.47

And he parodies a psychoanalytic reading of the origins of this sadomasochism: Freud says that masochism is formed like this: when one is in an insurmountable pain, he will start to love this pain, and regard it as bliss. Based upon my personal experience, this saying is somewhat true. But regarding the cause of sadism, he is not quite correct. Inborn sadism aside, there is another kind of sadism that is provoked by masochism.48

Armed with the same biting Swiftian tone, Wang Er goes further and gives examples and explanations of this sadomasochism in a larger social and historical arena, particularly with regard to the Chinese intellectuals who had suffered various post-1949 social movements, from the 1957 AntiRightist campaign to the Cultural Revolution: If those examples are not convincing enough, then go ahead and ask why the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution wanted to shave the heads of those “cow ghosts and snake monsters” half bald and paint their faces red and green—had the latter not bent their heads and admitted their crimes? Why would those Red Guards come up with such marvelous ideas? Another example is some of the intellectuals in our country, originally just bunch of

160

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

pedants and blockheads, quite lovely. If you beat him once, he would say that it feels good, and wish for another beating some other time. How could the leaders resist such temptations? No wonder they were all labeled as “rightists.” When I saw Prick so pale and so meek, I also found him quite lovely, and it wouldn’t seem right if I didn’t give him a good beating. When I was receiving the so-called help and education from X Haiying, because of being nervous, I also looked totally dumb and like a big fool. No wonder she wanted to torment me too. It can actually be summed up in one sentence: if someone always wins negative lotteries, he will be a masochist. If someone always wins positive lotteries, she will be a sadist. Any other explanations are purely redundant.49

This dark and cynical interpretation of erotic and political sadomasochism hence offers a new angle to penetrate into the complex mechanisms of domination and coercion behind what the Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz, has called the “captive mind.”50 Therefore, unlike in “The Golden Age,” where sexuality is the embodiment of a hidden Arcadia or Eden resisting the external history, here the very concept of “love in the era of revolution” itself becomes contaminated, ironic, and impossible. Neither of Wang Er’s two relationships with women is fully consummated. While Wang Er thinks he loves the college girl named “Color,” at that time he is too obsessed with his stone-throwing machine and armed battles and is consequently unable to really consummate their relationship. On the other hand, even if he and X Haiying have sex, X Haiying will insist on claiming it as “rape” in a sadomasochistic fantasy. There is always a misstep in Wang Er’s quest for love and sex during the revolution: [For the college girl named “Color,”] making love to her would require tenderness. But at that time I was not tender at all. On the other hand, X Haiying was always wearing an old army uniform, and once waved a leather belt in front of her teachers during the Cultural Revolution … Making love to her would require some sort of cruelty and a murderous look. Unfortunately by then I no longer had that sense of cruelty or the murderous look. I felt I was like an incompetent farmer, always missing the season.51

No wonder Wang Er admits on an earlier occasion that “I am like anyone who was born during the era of revolution, half sadist, half masochist, depending upon who I was with.”52 Eros is perverted, as is everything else. Instead of helping Wang Er find his individual identity in any real sense, this perverted eros only endlessly frustrates and mocks this longing.

Wang Xiaobo

●

161

“Love in the Era of Revolution”: “Seeking Miracles” and “Negative Lotteries” Wang Er’s search for individual identity in the era of revolution takes place not just through pursuit of love and sex, but, more fundamentally, through “seeking miracles” (xunzhao shenqi), which is, for him, the key to transcending reality and history. In the same story, he says: “As you live in the world, no matter what you do you will get beaten up, so nothing is meaningful. The only meaningful thing is seeking miracles.”53 This is the recurring theme that we have seen in “The Golden Age” and “The Year of Independence,” where sexual love and poetry writing were, in turn, endowed with this transcendental and redemptive function. But, as also seen in “Years Like Flowing Water,” Wang Xiaobo, the author, shows increasing degrees of skepticism and pessimism about this idealistic and utopian prospect for individual development. That is why, at the end of “Love in Era of Revolution,” Wang Er finds that all his adventures of seeking miracles have ended in failure: If the events are arranged chronologically, they are as follows: it began in 1958, when I appeared on the school playground, watching others tempering steel and iron; then I went to elementary school, saw a chicken flying up onto a balcony, and myself was called a pig by the teacher; later on I went to junior high school, and the Cultural Revolution started. I ran back home and helped others stage armed battles, and got acquainted with the college girl named “Color.” When there were no more battles to fight, I went back to school again, and from there went to work at the beancurd factory; there I met X Haiying and was ensnared … Tempering steel and iron meant that I wanted to be an artist and paint a purple sky; the chicken flying up onto a balcony meant that I wanted to be an inventor and turn the world upside down; I wanted to have sex with the college girl named “Color,” and to rape X Haiying. These were all things that I wanted to do, but I failed in them all—I hadn’t become an artist, nor had I turned the world upside down; I didn’t have sex with the college girl named “Color,” and only had an illicit affair with X Haiying, which was also my failure … Now as I babble about all this, I’m rather like a headless fly. In fact, this might not be far from the truth.54

This conclusion further confirms and validates the one drawn earlier in “Years Like Flowing Water”: the revolution, itself an act of “great leap forward” and “seeking miracles,” has amounted to nothing other than wasted human lives, human intelligence and sexual drives included. It holds no exception for its individual subjects. The impulse to seek miracles is always met by its ironic opposite.

162

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

So when Wang Er contemplates the existential predicament of the individual in the revolution, he arrives at the following realization: After I grew up, I read books by Freud, in which I saw this sentence: in a sense we are all somewhat hysterical. Upon reading this, I paused, and pondered the word “hysterical” for quite a while … I recalled that when I was twelve I made myself a generator, which could generate direct and alternating currents of all different voltages; after that I caught many dragonflies, and electrified them to death with different voltages. As the voltages and alternating or direct currents vary, the ways of those dragonflies twitching and dying also vary: some stiffen when electrified, some twist, some flutter their wings, and some just remain motionless—in short, all sorts of strange permutations. Thus I thought, those who won big lotteries in the era of revolution were probably all dragonflies receiving electric currents. … Those dragonflies that hadn’t yet been electrified all looked rather indifferently toward the dying ones. Thus I thought: perhaps only when the electric currents were about to run through their own bodies would the dragonflies know that they had just won the top lotteries and would thus wake up from their dreams.55

Apparently the phrase “winning the top lotteries” (or “winning big lotteries”) is fully charged with dark irony, and it is directly related to the idea of seeking miracles, because “according to my experience, anyone who once won some kind of lottery would always go on to seek miracles,”56 and “now I know what ‘seeking miracles’ really means—that is, once someone won some kind of negative lottery, he would immediately get in his head the wild idea of trying to win a positive lottery.”57 However, such “positive lotteries” (zhengcai ) would always turn into misfortunes or “negative lotteries” ( fucai ), because “The era of revolution for me is an era of negative lotteries.”58 In fact, it is Wang Er’s contemplations of “negative lotteries,” rather than of love or sex that constitute the true nexus of the entire story. To give just two random examples: Throughout the first half of my life I’d been racking my brains and trying to solve one question: how to predict when and where the next negative lottery would fall?59 But one thing I knew for sure, that is, X Haiying absolutely was a negative lottery for me.60

That is to say, while the revolution for Wang Er started as both a personal and a collective act of seeking miracles and reviving a bygone heroic age,

Wang Xiaobo

●

163

what he ultimately gains from this revolution is a string of “negative lotteries.” The contrast between the intention and the outcome is so alarming that it renders ridiculous and futile any supposedly heroic act of overcoming one’s existential situation: Unless miracles happen, [in one’s life] there will always be more suffering than joy, and yet miracles never have happened. I’ve applied all my intelligence and strength, and yet have yet to find even one tiny miracle. In this world there are only negative lotteries, no positive lotteries. When I call myself a pessimist, I am referring to this kind of thinking.61

But it is also through these paradoxes and ironies that Wang Er seems to have mastered a kind of negative dialectic and developed a distinct capability to be a voyant or seer of the Cultural Revolution (as Duo Duo did in his early poetry). Such a voyant or seer has to be an insider in a distorted and inverted world, while at the same time preserving a peculiar kind of innocence and detachment: “So it can be said that I’ve preserved the simplicity and innocence of my six-year-old self. The only thing I could do was to observe the world, and try to calculate when I would win a negative lottery.”62 This role of voyant as played by Wang Er, yet again, reminds one of Grass’s Oskar Matzerath in The Tin Drum; they are both complex characters embodying simultaneous illumination and ignorance and, more importantly, good and evil. As actors in as well as spectators of history, their innocence is highly ambiguous and debatable. As a matter of fact, it was precisely Wang Er’s early participation in the armed battles and other hardly innocent deeds that had given him a foretaste of the dark side of human nature that would come back to haunt him in the later stages of the Cultural Revolution. While Wang Xiaobo seems to adopt a kind of classical Enlightenment position when exposing the irrationality and absurdity of the Cultural Revolution, such a position itself cannot prevent a fatalism and pessimism from contaminating the prospect of excluding inherent human paradoxes and absurdity from one’s being. One’s fate in the revolution is marvelously twisted by wrong logic at every turn, and one’s desire to be free and independent is at the same time conditioned and frustrated by the history that one is situated in or against. Here history plays the role of an omnipresent and omnipotent God. Under the gravity of history, any utopian or heroic attempt will become impossible. While one may be a voyant seeing into his historical predicament, he is at the same time doomed to be paralyzed not only by this historical predicament, but, most tellingly, by his clairvoyance.63

164

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

It is this melancholy sense of futility and doom that prevails in the story, such as when Wang Er reflects, after the end of his affair with X Haiying, upon all his wasted deeds: After the end of my relationship with X Haiying, I started to work hard on drawing, and was careful not to bring any charcoal crayons to the factory. I had spent much more energy on this than on anything else, but it hadn’t produced any result either. My older brother had spent about the same amount of energy on studying philosophy, but also hadn’t produced any result. During those years no matter how much energy you spent doing something, in the end you always came to producing no results, because that was an era of blooming yet no fruition.64

Therefore we, as readers, get the impression that despite all of his observations and speculations, Wang Er is utterly unable to offer any clear-cut conclusions about his situation in history, except for the term “negative lotteries.” While he has attempted to retrieve and preserve certain details and fragments of that history, he cannot guarantee the effectiveness of this attempt, simply because he cannot guarantee either the realness or legitimacy of his clairvoyance as an insider in that history. On a subliminal level, his clairvoyance risks being a symptom instead of a cure.65 This sense of intangibility and unreality is only enhanced in the final paragraph of the novella: Now I’m still working at that so-called “advanced artificial intelligence” research institute. Prick is a doctor at a nearby hospital, which coincidentally was once our contract hospital. The college girl named “Color” also lives on our street, and X Haiying is not far either. We’ve all converged again. I thought about this not without a bit of pride: this probably happened because of me, since none of them knows each other. Now I still go out jogging every morning, jogging into the gray fog of coal smoke and water vapor. It’s as if I’m already very old, yet I also seem very young. The era of revolution seems as if it’s already over, yet also as if it has not yet begun. Love seems as if it has already ended, yet also as if it has not yet arrived. It seems as if I have won the top lottery, yet it also seems as if the day of announcing the lottery has not yet come. Everything seems as if it has already ended, yet also as if it’s just begun.66

With this peculiar ending, the story comes full circle, to a standstill, enveloped in a claustrophobic atmosphere. It thus foreshadows The Silver Age, in which a dystopian future world waits to unfold in the shadow of the still-pervasive memories of the Cultural Revolution. As if seen through a

Wang Xiaobo

●

165

reversed telescope, “The era of revolution seems as if it is already over, yet also as if it has not yet begun.” The past, with all of its vivid and yet bizarre details, will continue evolving into the future via the seemingly mundane present, and utopia can very easily slide into dystopia without advance warning. No direction has been given: “The era of revolution is a forest, and it’s very easy to get lost while trying to get through it. Then it’s entirely up to oneself to find directions.”67 History, disguised as a new future and preparing its “negative lotteries,” has yet to conclude. As if still under the influence of its gravity and unable to wake up to new “miracles,” everything is still just “sticking there.” The Silver Age: Heat Death and a Dystopian Future World In “Love in the Era of Revolution,” there is yet another observation of the claustrophobic and stagnant state of individual existence: In the era of revolution all the people were just “sticking there,” like drops of water falling onto the ground, and immediately losing their shape, turning into spaces between thousands of tiny grains of dirt; or, turning into the fog attached to the surface of the coal smoke in the morning and evening. If one drop of water could still be able to think, then those water particles that had already been scattered into the dirt or were floating in the air would definitely not be able to do so. After a period of staying numb and dumb, they would be just blown away. “Sticking there” means waiting to win negative lotteries. All of my life I’ve been racking my brains and trying to figure out: how can I get out of this condition of “sticking there?”68

Such a condition of “sticking there” (shenzhe), as we will find out in Wang Xiaobo, is not just specific to the era of the revolution, but it also extends into the future, into a dystopian Silver Age. If miracles or positive lotteries are not to be found in the Golden Age, they are unlikely to be granted in the brave new world of the Silver Age either. The future, ironically, offers no hope of emancipation or deliverance from history, while the claustrophobic nightmare carries on dragging the world-weary, first-person protagonist along with it. It is this deeply rooted distrust of the future that fundamentally separates Wang Xiaobo from many of his contemporaries, who have greeted the prospect of a new post–Cultural Revolution grand march of history with cheers. Whereas others see a total break with the past and fresh beginnings, Wang Xiaobo sees only a continuous or almost eternally recurring state of “sticking there.” In the mid-1990s, China reached just such a sticking

166

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

state of “post-”ness—be it “post-1989,” “post–New Period,” “post-Mao” or “postsocialism”—unable to name itself without a reference to past history. If Wang Xiaobo’s previous observations of the Cultural Revolution are saturated with postmortem clairvoyance from the vantage of a foggy present and uncharted future, now his exploration of this future is screened through the lens of the Cultural Revolution. In other words, the future itself becomes just another mirage or exaggerated reflection of the Cultural Revolution. Between the Golden Age and the Silver Age, there seems to be neither a linear progress nor a clear break, but instead, an almost seamless and natural progression from one state of “sticking there” into another, in a kind of self-recycling process. With his trilogy, The Silver Age, Wang Xiaobo determinedly joins the twentieth-century dystopian tradition as manifested by Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and Orwell’s 1984. Wang Xiaobo’s own commentary stresses this connection: In 1980, at college I read George Orwell’s 1984, which was an unforgettable experience in my life. This book, together with A. L. Huxley’s Brave New World, and Y. I. Zamyatin’s We are called the “Trilogy of Dystopia.” But for me, they were no more dystopia than history. Nevertheless, there is still a difference between dystopia and history: the former hasn’t really happened, while we have already experienced the latter for ourselves. The former only resembles reality in form, while the latter has been happening over and over again, revolving around the same core.69

The Silver Age trilogy is comprised of three independent, but crossreferenced novellas: “The Silver Age,” “The Future World,” and “2015.” Interestingly enough, as the history and memories of the Cultural Revolution have provided a master narrative for this dystopian future world, these three novellas also, correspondingly, adopt the double narrative structure that was already developed and employed in The Golden Age trilogy. That is, Wang Xiaobo continues to allow his narrators to carry double identities as would-be writers or historians, granting them a posthistorical or transhistorical viewpoint. However, an even bleaker existential dilemma and prospect arises for his narrators now, namely, the posthistorical or transhistorical initial point of view becomes increasingly oppressed and dwindles away in the very stories they are narrating or writing, and finally is revoked by this future world. The individual subjectivity itself, in turn, becomes entirely unreal and a fiction. In other words, the dystopia as presented in The Silver Age is ever more totalistic and suffocating than the history in The Golden Age.

Wang Xiaobo

●

167

“The Silver Age,” the eponymous first work of this trilogy, is set in 2020. It opens with a riddle about the true meaning of such a Silver Age: In my sophomore year of college I took a class in thermodynamics, in which the teacher proclaimed: “The future world is silver” … The teacher said: the world is silver. A long meaningful silence followed. This sentence was without context, and was therefore a riddle … This riddle seemed as if it was prepared particularly for me, but I didn’t want to get into its answer at all.70

Only later on, in the middle of the story, does Wang Xiaobo give out the partial answer: In my novel, I encountered a riddle: the world is silver. I solved it: what you meant was a world after heat death … according to Greek mythology, the people living in the Silver Age, under the blessing of the gods, would never age throughout their lives and would not have to worry about making a living. They had no pain, no cares, and would resemble children in both appearance and psyche until their deaths … As you know, I have always been like one living in the Silver Age.71

Borrowing the term Silver Age from Greek mythology, Wang Xiaobo here is, even more importantly, invoking the famous second law of thermodynamics, which proclaims an inevitable degeneration of the universe into heat death as thermodynamic entropy ultimately reaches its maximum. Beneath, or, rather, in the very concept of progress and evolution, Wang Xiaobo sees only an irreversible degeneration and deterioration into a final end to both individual and cosmic histories: “After heat death the entire universe will be of the same temperature, like a piece of silver.”72 Compared to the Golden Age, this Silver Age is presented as an even more lifeless, cold, artificial, and bleak dystopian future world, highly homogenous and conformist, under total thought policing and surveillance. The first-person protagonist has now become a professional writer, working every day in the department of fiction at a writing company. He keeps on writing and rewriting a supposedly autobiographical novel about his love affair with his female teacher when he was a college student, because he is caught in a dilemma and oscillates between two versions of his story. The first version is the one he writes for the company. The other is what he really wants to write but cannot, because apparently it would never meet the criteria set by the company. The problem is not so much that such subjects as love or sex are still a taboo, but lies somewhere else: As for the sexual subject, I need to add a few words here: as you know, such things used to be prohibited in writing. Had I written about it, the bosses

168

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

would have censored those paragraphs and added a comment: too far removed from life. Nowadays not only is it allowed, but every novel about love has to have some of it, as long as they are not too off the mark. That is to say, tame descriptions of sex have already become life itself.73

In other words, sex is allowed as long as it remains shallow and formulaic, which eventually becomes, as the narrator says, a “skin-deep injection.” Thus the narrator again runs into an impossible situation: According to the current criteria, life is “skin-deep injection.” But this is not real life. What then is real life? I can’t remember either. I have already written eleven drafts of this story, and I can remember every sentence of it. But whether it’s real or false, I can no longer remember!74

So life itself in this Silver Age has become a totally coded, regulated, and almost virtual life: As I already mentioned, the word “life” has really bizarre usages. Inside the company, we have “organizational life,” “collective life.” Outside the company, we have “family life”, “couple’s life.” On top of that, you can also go to “experience life.” In fact, life is what you really don’t want to happen and yet it happens anyway … regardless whether it is real or unreal. When I first started writing this work of fiction, they always said that there was no life in my fiction, which means nothing but that this work of fiction still lies outside of that life, and that I really wanted to write it. Now they say that there is life in it, which means nothing but that it has already been completely integrated into the orbit of life, and that now I don’t want to write it anymore.75

This dizzying confusion and struggle over which life to write about and over the definition of fiction writing itself, once again, serves as proof of the protagonist’s Sisyphean fight with a double consciousness: Good or bad aside, there is no such as thing as real or false regarding fiction. As you know, fiction is allowed in a work of fiction, thus there is no such thing as real fiction. But there is a difference between the fiction that you really want to write and the one you don’t want to. There is another differentiation that is even more meaningful: if a man and a woman both want to, then they are really making love. If neither of them wants to, yet others are asking them to do it, then it’s not making love, but living a “couple’s life.” We sit in the offices, not writing fiction, but living a “writing life” … I know what the girl named “Brown” really wants to do: to really write fiction. In order to do that, you must run away from so-called life. In order to really write, you must go outside that life. But I dare not tell her this conclusion. I’m rather timid, and dare not make any mistakes.76

Wang Xiaobo

●

169

Here we can feel the palpably claustrophobic experience of total surveillance and regulated life in a closed and homogeneous society. But what is even worse is that in this regulated life, there is not even one glimpse of any utopian possibility for individual awakening or emancipation. Until the end of the story, like a dog chasing its own tail, the protagonist remains trapped, endlessly revising the metafictional love story between himself and his female college teacher: I’m now still working at the company, with nothing else to do besides “life.” Therefore, I can only return to the thermodynamics classroom of my sophomore year in college, planning to fall in love again with my teacher.77

The authorial “I” has been subsumed in a work of fiction that is supposedly his, but he himself has no control over it. There is no exit for any individual from this regulated life either as a “bastard,” the role Wang Er has acted out in both “The Golden Age” and “Love in the Era of Revolution,” or as a “poet” or “historian,” as Wang Er has dreamed of doing in “The Year of Independence” and “Years Like Flowing Water.” In “The Silver Age,” actions and dreams are rendered null and void and individual authenticity is denied. What happens here is not so much the total destruction of the individual subject as the total destruction of individual subjectivity. The individual himself is fundamentally unreal. And that is what makes the Silver Age a dystopian heat death. The same situation of total surveillance and utter destruction of individual subjectivity or authenticity is even more manifest in “The Future World,” which consists of two parts, “My Uncle” and “Myself.” These two parts mirror each other with their two discrete, yet interconnected protagonists, “my uncle” and “myself,” members of different generations, who nonetheless have shared the same fate of being held in an existential limbo. In “My Uncle,” the first-person narrator recounts the life story of his uncle, who is, once again, Wang Er, a novelist with a serious heart condition: Time progressed very fast … but his heart aged even faster. In 1999, he was already almost a person without heart, and was given to thinking sadly: most likely I will die before I achieve anything.78

Wang Er’s lethal heart condition and his premature end are symbolic, suggesting the individual’s ultimate failure to withstand the wear and tear of time or history. As a victim of the second law of thermodynamics, the individual has no way to win his race against increasing entropy. Death, on

170

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

the other hand, forecloses any ostensibly positive or optimistic prospects of the individual’s full development. Wang Er’s life-long aspiration for a “real life” or alternative life is bound to be in vain, whether in a past Golden Age, or in a foreseeable “future world.” The sense of doom and futility that has haunted Wang Er throughout his life has equally been inflicted upon the first-person narrator. The second part of “The Future World,” “Myself,” narrates, in an almost Chinese box style, the story of “I,” who, after having been discovered to have authored “The Story of My Uncle,” loses his licenses to practice as a historian and philosopher, and is reassigned by a company (“Comprehensive Management of Public Security Company”) to a new life under close observation. Living in a rundown apartment, he, who now is also given a Kafkaesque new identity as M (“Male”) is later assigned a young female companion who is referred to as F (“Female”). “I” suspects F of being a spy sent by the Company, and this suspicion later turns out to be correct. As the story progresses, “I” voluntarily makes a compromise and becomes a professional writer, or, “writing hand” (xieshou), working for the Company in order to support himself and F, with whom he eventually falls in love. Here, it seems for a moment that we are revisiting the familiarly claustrophobic and perverse world that we have already encountered in “The Silver Age” or “Love in the Era of Revolution.” But to be more accurate, this world is, in fact, a strange hybrid of a past revolutionary era and a future dystopia. On the one hand, there are regular rituals of thought reform and brainwashing at the Company: That kind of lecture was of course, totally boring, and half of it was about what they would do: the fine tradition of thought education would never be allowed to fail, to restrict people with tough disciplines, to reform people with hard life, to indoctrinate people with pure thoughts, etc.; the other half was about us: placement was for us a serious test, some could stand the trial and thus become good citizens again; some others would become rotten— while talking about “rotten,” it would be emphasized that this was not just an empty intimidation.79

This is a deliberately run-on, jargon-filled sentence. It could be seen as a direct allusion to and parody of the totalitarian program of “thought reform” current in the era of revolution. On the other hand, the job of many of these “writing hands” at the Company is, ironically, to write romantic dramas for commercial television: In those romantic TV dramas, we always live in the best houses, and the men are all handsome and the women all pretty, with nothing to do after being

Wang Xiaobo

●

171

well fed, and yet they still shed tears in various love entanglements. Had I wanted to be a “writing hand,” I would have been churning out such stuff right now. The Company churns out TV series like these, only for the sake of fooling the audience.80

Here the satire is targeted less at the Cultural Revolution or the propagandistic literature of socialist realism than it is at the current homogenization at the hands of capitalist commercialism and the entertainment industry. In this fashion, Wang Xiaobo constructs an allegory of the universal prison house or “iron house” of modernity and postmodernity. In other words, Wang Xiaobo has not found the postsocialist or capitalist future to be in any sense more positive. Homogenization, like heat death in “The Silver Age,” dominates so-called historical progress. The ending is starkly grim. “I” finds out that, as a price for his compromise with the Company, he, like everyone else, has to receive a monthly flogging session on payday. The following paragraph describes the narrator’s psychological breakdown after he goes through this utterly humiliating and demoralizing beating: I couldn’t recall at all how I had lain on that bed, but my ass now felt cool, as if the alcohol hadn’t yet entirely evaporated. There were eight gashes, and the pain was distinct. I was purposelessly wandering the streets, and it was already quite late. I should keep living, but it was a hard decision. But once I’d made this decision, then as an intellectual I would be regarded as successfully reformed. The beginning was always the hardest, one might feel ashamed and pained the first time, but as time went on who knew whether one might not start to like it—as long as it didn’t happen in front of strangers … My story was about to end. Now of course you know that I still went back home that night. Now I live with F, and she knows all about it, and can understand. In her words, you have no other choice, so you have to live like this. Now I’ve grown more or less accustomed to this way of life, and I’ve gotten to know the others around here pretty well … I also know one other thing, which is, I no longer have any energy or desire to commit “thought mistakes.”81

Just as in “Love in the Era of Revolution” and many of Wang Xiaobo’s previous works, the story has come full circle. Nothing has prevented the narrator “myself ” from repeating the same life that “my uncle,” Wang Er, used to live. The future world has offered neither emancipation nor escape from the claustrophobic nightmare of history, but, instead, precisely as the second law of thermodynamics dictates, has only progressed inexorably

172

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

toward death and annihilation. Neither Wang Er the novelist nor the historian-narrator has been able to escape this law of “negative lotteries”: As I related earlier, when I wrote “My Uncle,” I was a historian. At that time I had thought that the identity of a historian was good protection. Now I realize that in this world nothing can be my protection. If you are young and think that you are talented, you might think that this is horrible. But after having experienced all this, my conclusion is: once one thing has “started,” there will be nothing horrible in this world anymore. Now I’m only a bit afraid of death. Once death arrives I won’t be afraid of it either.82

As if in an application of a Nietzschean “eternal return,” the story of “2015” once again presents a triangular relationship between a first-person narrator, his Little Uncle (as a contrast to “my uncle” in “The Future World,” but whose name is, as ever, Wang Er), and the latter’s female labor camp guard who eventually becomes his lover, Little Aunt. The Wang Er of “2015,” instead of being a novelist like the other Wang Er in “The Future World,” is an independent artist. Charged with being an unlicensed artist and selling his abstract and obscure works to foreign collectors, he is at first sent to a holding center and eventually to a remote labor camp, where he and Little Aunt get involved in an intense sexual relationship.83 Here Wang Er again serves as a prototypical artist, who has attempted to defy the pressures of social conformity via his talent, imagination, and creativity. It seems we are again revisiting the eternal struggle of all the previous Wang Ers to defend their individual authenticity and uniqueness. But this time, the story ends on an even more pessimistic note. And the final blow comes not from the censorship and coercion that Wang Er has endured through all the previous trials, instead, it comes from another direction altogether. Finding an article on the Internet one day saying that Little Uncle’s work can now be easily simulated by anyone on the computer, the narrator is overcome with a sense of utter disappointment and disillusionment: Once one knows about this and then looks at Little Uncle’s paintings, he will not feel dizzy or have a hernia anymore. Obviously, once Little Aunt knows about this and looks at Little Uncle’s paintings again, she will no longer feel sexually aroused either. This article makes me start to develop a strange sense toward Little Uncle, Little Aunt, art, love, and the whole world. It’s like “holding your asshole wide open and then farting—the thrill is gone.”84

That is, once his art is no longer inimitable, and possesses no more singularity or individuality, Wang Er also loses his own reason to remain an artist,

Wang Xiaobo

●

173

thus, he is no longer viewed by the authority as subversive and dangerous. “Little Aunt and Little Uncle left the alkali field, got married, lived a normal life, and everything became ordinary and uneventful.”85 This ending immediately calls to mind, Walter Benjamin’s famous article “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” with regard to the loss of the aura of art works in the modern era.86 Yet more pointedly, it reminds one, again, of Lu Xun’s Madman in “A Madman’s Diary,” who is eventually cured and returns to the very “iron house” that he once aspired to break down. The story of “2015” or the entire The Silver Age trilogy thus finishes with the first-person narrator—one who might be called the second generation and a younger mirror image of Wang Er—pondering this final question: “The year is currently 2015, and I’m a writer. I’m still thinking about the true meaning of art. In the end, what is it?”87 Throughout the three novellas in The Silver Age, Wang Xiaobo delivers an invariably dark and pessimistic vision of the future world. For him, except for death or heat death, there is no real exit from or alternative to this world of moral capitulation and intellectual castration. This world, whether disguised as happening in the past or in the future, to “my uncle” or to “myself,” is ultimately and unfortunately “our” common world—an unnamed and unnamable China at the end of the twentieth century. The individual, either as a writer, a historian, or an artist, is like a sleepwalker at noon. While he may see into this world of heat death, he cannot really awaken from it. Even if he can, he will only find himself awakening into a larger dystopian nightmare, that is, his individuality and his existence might also be virtual. It is here that Wang Xiaobo’s answer to the riddle of the Silver Age lies. From The Bronze Age to The Iron Age : Metafiction, Metahistory, and Metaindividual Let us translate the final question posed at the end of “2015,” about “the true meaning of art,” into another one: “If there is no exit from or alternative to a future world determined by the law of heat death, then what is the meaning of Wang Xiaobo’s fiction?” The answer might be partially found in a key gesture of Wang Xiaobo as an author: rewriting. Wang Xiaobo has been obsessively rewriting some of the same stories about the various permutations of Wang Er, be it in The Golden Age or The Silver Age. This tendency of obsessive rewriting is a constant throughout his entire oeuvre, including The Bronze Age and The Iron Age, which we will only touch upon briefly here. The three novels collected in The Bronze Age are his rewritings of the Tang romances. The significance of The Bronze Age in terms of thematic and formal innovations

174

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

deserves a separate, full length study on its own. To say the very least, by juxtaposing these classical tales with the protagonist’s contemporary life experiences, these novels become allegorical representations of the Cultural Revolution and a post-Cultural Revolution world from an original angle. The works collected in The Iron Age attest even more directly to this striking variation of themes and perspectives of rewriting. These works only existed in manuscript form, with no definitive versions at the time of Wang Xiaobo’s sudden death. Ai Xiaoming, the editor of The Iron Age, divides these works into three different groups. The first group consists of a novella in its draft version titled “2010,” which is actually the source-text from which “The Future World” and “2015” were derived. The third group consists of early works from the 1970s and early 1980s, which never saw publication during his lifetime. But the most intriguing and extreme case is the second group, which, under the general title, The Iron Age, includes three incomplete draft versions or variations of apparently the same story, which is about an “iron apartment” in a futuristic virtual world. Furthermore, these three versions were chosen, at the editor’s discretion, out of nineteen extant files. In her editor’s note, Ai Xiaoming writes about the challenge she faced: On Wang Xiaobo’s computer, there were left nineteen files using “Iron Apartment” as the site where those stories take place, all were unfinished versions. He wrote and wrote, constantly rewriting and revising.88 These [editor’s] choices are not necessarily the best ones, but since all the files are incomplete … we cannot predict which of them leads to the final destiny. So it can only be said that the three files presented here represent three possible developments that had been germinating in the author’s mind.89

While the differences between these nondefinitive versions of the same story might at first glance appear purely editorial or stylistic, I would suggest that such a practice of rewriting and revising or variations on a recurring theme may actually epitomize one of Wang Xiaobo’s most serious aesthetic ambitions. That is: to approximate or exhaust the inexhaustible possibilities of knowing and writing about the existential conditions of a metaindividual in a metahistory that encompasses modern Chinese history in the second half of the twentieth century—in a form of metafiction. First of all, throughout all of Wang Xiaobo’s fictional works discussed above, we have seen that the relationship between the individual and history has been his primary concern. Faced with entrapment by history, Wang Xiaobo has purposefully chosen the identities of artist, writer, or historian for his first-person protagonists or narrators—Wang Er being the most

Wang Xiaobo

●

175

ubiquitous among all—as if such proliferation of multiple identities offers the individual’s sole chance of overcoming the gravity of history. In other words, as Wang Xiaobo’s alter ego, Wang Er acquires a certain transcendent and mythical status as a metaindividual engaged in endless struggles with various historical predicaments and gravities, forever questioning and requestioning modern Chinese history, whether it is embedded in a Golden Age, Era of Revolution, or Silver Age. Secondly, almost without exception, the archetype or main reference of the history under examination is the history of the Cultural Revolution itself. It is as if the Cultural Revolution has been our past, but it is also our present and future, and as such, constitutes a perpetual background and subtext for Wang Er, the metaindividual. Through this very act of writing and rewriting the same history from various angles, Wang Xiaobo also suggests that although there can be endless readings of the legacy of the Cultural Revolution, there will be no final or definitive reading of it. In this sense, Wang Xiaobo has created an alternative historiography that, in turn, has helped produce a metahistory of contemporary China.90 In this metahistory, while fiction can be more real than history or reality, history or reality can also be as unreal as fiction. As stated in “2010”: “The absurdity that I felt … was like this: the world before my eyes wasn’t real, it had nothing in it real at all, and was more like a story invented by someone—a utopia.”91 This again confirms Wang Xiaobo’s impression upon reading Orwell and other authors of modern dystopia: “But for me, they were no more dystopia than history.” For instance, in “2010,” the future is closely intertwined with the past, and the archetypal experience of the Cultural Revolution provides a template for the former: When my older brother was sent down to the countryside, he would come back every winter with a totally confused mind. To give one example: at that time there were only a few young people who could attend college; according to normal reasoning it should have been the smartest ones who would be selected to go, but in reality the people selected were a bunch of near-illiterate idiots. To give another example: when everyone was working in the fields, some smart guys needed to be selected to go to the county for some kind of convention, where they could stay in comfortable guest houses and eat well; but in reality again some irredeemable fools were selected and were sent there to talk retarded nonsense—even old pigs would laugh if they hear them. By the way, that sort of retarded nonsense was called “speaking about how to practice Mao Zedong thought.” I was only eight then, but I already felt that it was stupid beyond belief. He was always murmuring: what’s wrong with this world? … What my older brother had experienced when he was young still exists even today.92

176

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

Here Wang Xiaobo excels in his signature satiric touch and black humor by presenting the unbearable absurdity of life in a metaphorical dystopian history. Lastly, while critiquing the absurdity of an inverted world by depicting the interaction between fiction and history or reality, Wang Xiaobo, the author, self-consciously violates, transgresses, and subverts the line between these two on a fantastic level. In other words, in order to approximate a metahistory that mirrors universal and existential human conditions, Wang Xiaobo has resorted to a self-referential form of metafiction, which in turn, relies upon a narrative strategy of constantly rewriting and recreating differences. Only in this last resort can linear structures be broken down and a surreally twisted time-space be created that accommodates all of these impossible encounters between a metaindividual and a metahistory. So, through such aesthetics of rewriting and variations, Wang Xiaobo eventually leads us into his unfinished metafictional world of the Iron Age, which is neither a world of utopia or dystopia, but an uncanny virtual world, which experiments with an entirely new language and new methods of description, and dissolves temporal and spatial boundaries. This virtual world is most clearly delineated in the unfinished tale “The Iron Age,” which, unlike any of Wang Xiaobo’s previous works, “neither happens in the past, nor in the present. No one can tell where it happens.”93 The story itself, under its creator’s hand/mouse control, constantly risks transgressing the boundaries between not only fiction and reality, but also story and game: “As you have seen, this is neither a story nor a game.”94 Between the first-person “I” and the third-person “he,” there is no way to tell who is the real protagonist and narrator either. Nothing is certain: “Because this happens in a virtual world, these two possibilities have both occurred.”95 The following excerpt is most telling of this virtual world: There is certainly more freedom in a virtual world than in a real world … You may not believe it, but he lives in a virtual world of the seventeenth century, using quill pens and parchment in his work as a web designer. Believe it or not, but things are pretty much the same … I am now writing my own fiction on the web, and I’m probably in the black iron apartment, facing a computer screen, at this present moment living in the real world. It may also be possible that I’m sitting under a palm tree, and writing on papyrus with a reed pen. So, you’d best not ask where I am …96

Through such a metamorphosis and in a totally novelistic way, Wang Xiaobo, the author, has transformed history into metahistory, fiction into metafiction, and himself into a nearly invisible, but omnipresent metaindividual, who may also be an author of contemporary Chinese history. Whether past, present, or future, golden, silver, bronze, or iron, real or virtual,

Wang Xiaobo

●

177

historical or fictional, utopian or dystopian, this history and all its variations are, after all, all ours. An Inverted Utopian Ending : “My Verses Are Done” The self-referential author/cyber-writer quoted from the unfinished text of “The Iron Age” might well be in one of Escher’s virtual time-spaces or Italo Calvino’s fictional universe. It is about a metaindividual who is forever entrapped, yet eternally on the run. The passage thus may be read in a dystopian and, yet, also a utopian sense. It could suggest that, after all, there will always remain a seed of possibility for the individual to exit and transcend history, as Wang Xiaobo has attempted to do throughout his Trilogy of Our Time: to be not just homo sapiens but also homo scribens, a writing individual.97 Of course, this residual utopian flame always risks being extinguished; nevertheless, the seed of possibility remains alive. This ultimate faith in or hope for the individual’s victory over the gravity of history is thus reflected, not—according to the normal linear order—in his last works, but in one of Wang Xiaobo’s earliest writings, which happens to be the last piece in the collection of The Iron Age. This juvenile short piece was originally untitled and its current title is Ai Xiaoming’s addition: “I Welcome Dawn at a Deserted Island.” In it, Wang Xiaobo tells us of the primary motivations behind his early writing attempts as an educated youth sent down to Yunnan during the Cultural Revolution: Growing up with a habit of contemplation, I started liking poetry. I read many poems, and among them are some truly good ones … I really wished I could read like this forever, breaking the solitary sea. I wished I could also write poems like that. I wished I could also be a star. If I could shine, I wouldn’t have to fear the darkness. If I myself were beautiful, all my fears would disperse. Thus I started to hold onto a tiny grain of hope—if I could make it, I would overcome my solitary fate. … When I was seventeen I went down to the South as an educated youth … Under the moonlight, I wrote on a mirror with a fountain pen. The words I wrote were terribly juvenile. I wiped them off and wrote again, wrote and wiped again, until the mirror was coated in dark blue, until my fingers and palms were all covered in blue. Back in bed, I wept. This was like a more horrifying nightmare.98

That writing individual, or homo scribens, who desperately scrawls with blue ink on a mirror on a moonlit night in Yunnan, serves as a symbolic gesture of writing against the flow of time and death. And writing eventually

178

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

becomes the only means through which one can prove his own individual existence in the world. The story ends on a quasi-mythical and mystical note as the firstperson protagonist finally wrote his first true poem on a utopian deserted island: I felt proud of myself, because I had won my first victory, and I didn’t doubt that other victories would follow. I can overcome my fate, and reshape myself at my own will, so I’m a hero. I’ve accomplished the first impossible deed, and I can continue in this endeavor. I like my poem, because I know it is truly beautiful, and it shines with undeniable rays. I also like “myself ” which I have created myself. I’m now satisfied with him.99

Agony and melancholy are further sublimated into a haughty pronouncement: I don’t need to inscribe my name. Name doesn’t matter for me. I don’t hope people will know my name, because my triumph only belongs to me.100

As we can see, that metaindividual in his later and mature works was, at the very outset of Wang Xiaobo’s writing career, embedded in this figure of “I”—a defiant writing individual and the last remnant of a modern utopia. In the end, although premature death claimed him at the young age of forty-five, and although he left behind unfinished or nondefinitive versions of his metafictions mirroring our time and history, Wang Xiaobo should be seen as having completed his life’s work, or, his “leap,” not just as a fiction writer and essayist, but more importantly, as an existential poet. When he finished his first novel, Looking for Wu Shuang—a piece later included in The Bronze Age, Wang Xiaobo cited the epilogue of Ovid’s Metamorphoses to express the same sense of fulfillment at that moment: My verses are done. Neither the rage of gods, Nor earthquakes, Can render them to destruction!101

And this brings us back to these two lines of verse by Wang Xiaobo, cited from “The Year of Independence”: Walking in the silence, walking across the sky, And penis hanging upside down.

Wang Xiaobo

●

179

These two lines present a gesture of individual “independence” which is, at once, profane yet romantic.102 Even if acknowledging the inevitable pull of gravity with “penis hanging upside down,” it is nevertheless a total inversion of the normal vertical perspective and a most meaningful quest for a liberated and unexpected point of view. From such an up-side-down and moving point of view, the individual subject could, miraculously or fictitiously, restore a fuller and multi-dimensional picture of our current Lebenswelt or life-world, and regain his freedom and independence that have been long overdue from time and history. This profoundly defiant gesture thus serves as the final proof that Wang Xiaobo, a bastard of the Cultural Revolution, indeed has reached his year of independence, in spite of the irreversible linear process of entropy and against the gravity of history and time.103 But, let us not forget that this independence may just be an inverted gesture, like this deliberately inverted ending itself. From the Golden Age to the Iron Age, Wang Xiaobo, after all, shows himself to be one of the few contemporary Chinese writers who have constantly suspected—and with good reason—the virtual nature of the individual in history, which often has been taken by others as a positive reality beyond any doubt.

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 6

Epilogue: An Unfinished Bildungsroman

S

o, we have reached the end of the book. The End. But it is not finished. If the current book was originally perceived as a new bildungsroman of a generation of “new men,” “orphans of history,” and “cultural bastards” originating in the Cultural Revolution, in the end, we need to admit its unfinished nature. “Classification” or “Transformation”?

In his excellent study of the bildungsroman in European culture, Franco Moretti talks about two different principles of textual organization coexisting in the nineteenth-century bildungsroman. One is to seek a closed ending under the principle of “classification”; the other, to expose the impossibility of that closed ending under the principle of “transformation”: When classification is strongest—as in the English “family romance” and in the classical Bildungsroman—narrative transformations have meaning in so far as they lead to a particularly marked ending: one that establishes a classification different from the initial one but nonetheless perfectly clear and stable—definitive, in both senses this term has in English. This teleological rhetoric—the meaning of events lies in their finality—is the narrative equivalent of Hegelian thought, with which it shares a strong normative vocation: events acquire meaning when they le[a]d to one ending, and one only. Under the classification principle, in other words, a story is more meaningful the more truly it manages to suppress itself as story. Under the transformation principle—as in the trend represented by Stendhal and Pushkin, or in that from Balzac to Flaubert—the opposite is true: what makes a story meaningful is its narrativity, its being an open-ended process. Meaning is the result not of a fulfilled teleology, but rather, as for Darwin, of the total

182

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

rejection of such a solution. The ending, the privileged narrative moment of taxonomic mentality, becomes the most meaningless one here: … a story’s meaning resides precisely in the impossibility of “fixing” it.1

It is under the latter principle of transformation rather than of classification— since the two of them, according to Moretti, imply “very different value choices and even opposite attitudes toward modernity”2—that the openending of this book and “the impossibility of ‘fixing it’” lie. In wrestling with these four authors, I have attempted to unlock and illuminate some of the key ideological messages in their literary texts that have been quite often overlooked or misread: a bastardized and negative literary modernism that serves as a critique as well as an embodiment of the same ideology of the Cultural Revolution, as shown by Duo Duo; a vehement and traumatizing capitalist revolution in the reform era that could be understood as a recuperated second coming of the Cultural Revolution, as shown by Wang Shuo; a heretical attempt to articulate alternative national forms for Chinese modernity by aestheticizing and sublimating the legacy of the Cultural Revolution and socialism, as shown by Zhang Chengzhi; and, finally, a persistent quest for an independent individual subjectivity against the gravity of history and a simultaneously pessimistic representation of a dystopian, Orwellian world of both a past Golden Age and a future Silver or Iron Age—perceived through the lens of the Cultural Revolution, as shown by Wang Xiaobo. All these readings are conducted under the principle of transformation instead of classification. The legacy of the Cultural Revolution, then, is not really a closed one. Since the individual allegories that originated from it are still unfolding, any attempt to form a stable or conclusive picture of it, either from an official perspective as sponsored by the state or from a supposedly more personal or more detached one, is from its very outset a doomed fallacy. As a matter of fact, what we might have perceived—in all the four authors presented here—as inconsistencies or contradictions may turn out to be paradoxes or dilemmas that are inherent in the very fluid and ongoing Chinese modernity project itself, which define contemporary Chinese literature as a whole, defy any easy classification, and embrace a more nuanced transformation. How “Post-” Are We? Take the example of the “postmodern” in contemporary China. We may say that for contemporary China, the last three decades have been predominantly marked by a sequence of periodizing “post-”s: “post-Mao,” “post–Cultural

Epilogue

●

183

Revolution,” “post–New Period,” “post-Tiananmen,” “postmodern,” “postsocialism,” and so on. But I am not completely sure whether the issue of Chinese modernity can be truly subsumed by this series of “post-”s. Have we really entered a completely new (post)historical and postmodern time that is free from the spell of both revolution and modernity? Or, quite to the contrary, should we say that the postmodern itself is still possessed by modernity and is a negotiated continuation of the latter? Xiaobin Yang, in the postscript “Answering the Questions: What Is the Postmodern/Post-Mao-Deng?” to his The Chinese Postmodern, stresses this very connection and continuation between modernity and postmodernity in the contemporary Chinese context: Chinese postmodernism … has more to do with the historical reality of the modern politico-cultural paradigm (sociopolitical totality, grand national imagination, and the discourse of rigid historical teleology are among the most distinctive manifestations) than with the global postmodern civilization. The latter, ironically, has been increasingly utilized by the central authority and successfully integrated into the project of Chinese modernity.3

What Yang points out is precisely this condition: that postmodern or postmodernity is essentially inseparable from and inherent in the very concept and project of Chinese modernity itself. Yang further suggests that thus understood, the notion of the post-Mao-Deng refers to the politicocultural paradigm, rather than historical chronology … In what sense can we use the prefix post-? The post-Mao-Deng politico-cultural paradigm, I suggest, does not necessarily manifest itself chronologically after Mao’s and/or Deng’s reigns, just as the postmodern cultural paradigm does not come out after the modern age but indicates a deconstruction of the modern paradigm from within. If Lyotard’s claim that the postmodern exists in the modern is valid, we can also declare that the post-Mao-Deng must be located within the Mao-Deng paradigm. It is not far-fetched, therefore, to place the post-Mao-Deng on a par with the postmodern, for the post-Mao-Deng tendency in culture and literature to challenge the totality of political discourse corresponds to the postmodern subversion against the grand narrative of modernity.4

This series of equations, in turn, means nothing less than a collapse of the artificially defined historical discontinuity and an acknowledgment that the postmodern should be understood as “a cultural paradigm generated within and rebellious against the cultural paradigm of the modern.”5 One

184

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

might say, in this understanding, the postmodern only helps revise and re-envision a double-faced modernity: In the present lexicon of the master discourse, the old concepts such as revolution, emancipation, socialism, and international communism are not replaced by but find their new variations in the new key words of Chinese modernity such as commercialization, globalization, and transnational capitalism. I argue that the latter set of terms, far from having dissociated from the revolutionary idea, retains the logic of revolutionary modernity.6

Similarly, if we acknowledge the legitimacy of this vision and logic and replace the modern and Mao-Deng with the Cultural Revolution, we may also say that the post–Cultural Revolution must be located within and against the Cultural Revolution’s legacy at the same time. And the same can be said of any of these four authors studied here and their attempts to locate a transhistorical or posthistorical perspective. Instead of hinting at a utopian individual independence and autonomy, these attempts might end up illustrating the individual’s very embeddedness in this history and hence reveal their own historicity. Against Literary Labeling Each of these four authors, Duo Duo, Wang Shuo, Zhang Chengzhi, and Wang Xiaobo, has also posed an even greater challenge to those critics who are always pursuing handy literary labeling, in a fashion similar to the classification principle mentioned above. Indeed, the development of contemporary Chinese literature, along with critical studies of it for the last three decades, has in a very strange way voluntarily succumbed to the frenzy of labeling and periodization. Every two or three years there is a new literary trend or school popping out replacing the older ones. If only we could count all of those already-common markers: scar literature, educated-youth literature, roots-seeking literature, experimental fiction, neo-realist fiction, and so on. As a result, ironically, despite their continuous writing careers, most of the labeled writers are deemed to be short-lived ones. They either have to totally fade or totally reinvent themselves. Few seem aware or care to know that behind these frequent generational replacements lies the same old teleological belief in progress and absolutism.7 The four authors chosen in this book, each in his own way, have defied and challenged this crude practice of normative labeling and periodization,

Epilogue

●

185

if only simply by virtue of their anachronistic and misfit presences across and beyond these obsessive trend divisions. We have already discussed some of these characteristics in the individual chapters. For example, while Zhang Chengzhi was once hailed as and labeled a model representative writer of the educated-youth literature or roots-seeking literature, he has, on the other hand, provocatively stated that “If anyone asked me what my first creative work was, I would say ‘Red Guard,’”8 and has further refused to be aligned with any “‘pure literature’ or ‘serious literature’ or ‘elitist modernist literature.’”9 There has not been, and will not be, another singular and heretical presence like Zhang Chengzhi in Chinese literature in a foreseeable time. Where do we place Wang Shuo? He is also a one-man school and phenomenon with his hooligan literature, even if some critics have tried to classify him in the supposedly highbrow genre of experimental fiction. Other critics have tried to identify him with the so-called Jingpai or Beijing School literature and compare him with the famous modern writer, Lao She, whose work has been much acclaimed for preserving a traditional “Beijing flavor.” Wang Shuo declines bluntly in his typical hooligan tone: “This is rather stupid.” “My mentality, behavior, way of thinking and language habits were all influenced more by a new culture. You might call it ‘revolutionary culture.’… Weighing two equally bad labels, I would rather prefer ‘hooligan’ to the so-called ‘Beijing flavor.’”10 And, how do we categorize Wang Xiaobo, someone who might have clearly belonged to the category of all the schools and trends in the 1980s, and yet eschewed all of them in silence, only appearing on the literary horizon in the 1990s as, again, an idiosyncratic figure when there had been a minimal expectation of such a writer and such a style? As for Duo Duo, he is one of the most telling and dramatic cases of a radical misfit and anachronism in terms of literary labeling and categorization. In 2004, after fifteen years of exile in the West, Duo Duo went back to China and accepted a professorship at Hainan University. In an interview with a young poet and critic, Ling Yue, on being queried about his long absence and belated recognition as a Misty Poet by his contemporaries, he firmly disputes the title Misty Poet: Duo Duo: Age-wise, we belong to the same generation, but I definitely am not [a Misty Poet], and no call for self-categorization. At that time among all the selections of Misty Poetry, there was none of mine. Why today treat me as a Misty Poet? Who will be responsible? No one will be responsible. Ling Yue: At that time did you refuse it? Duo Duo: No one cared about me. At that time I was “nothing” [—Duo Duo’s English original], because I didn’t belong to the Today school … Then why would I want to categorize myself ?11

186

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

Behind this anachronism and sense of being a misfit regarding literary labeling, there stands, however, a major poet who has produced a body of highly original works throughout the last three decades that is only now slowly being recognized and assessed. Moreover, without any hesitation, Duo Duo admits his origins in and indebtedness to the Cultural Revolution, at the very beginning of the interview: Ling Yue: What kind of impact has the Cultural Revolution had upon you? Duo Duo: For myself in particular, I feel that the impact has been ineradicable.12

Duo Duo confesses and emphasizes his extremely entangled relationship with the Cultural Revolution. For instance, when the interviewer praises Duo Duo’s poetry for its critical thrust at the Cultural Revolution, Duo Duo immediately lays stress on the opposite side: You shouldn’t forget that Mao had cultivated our early beliefs, cultivated our courage, spirit of revolt and rebellion—[we were] a very tough generation, which was the result of this cultivation. So my personal feeling and personal reflection with regard to Mao is very complicated and multi-faceted. Until the late 1980s, with Bai Hua together what we talked about was our worship of Mao, because he is a great poet. Without Mao’s poetry, we wouldn’t have had some early, basic awakening to poetry on our own.13

He repeatedly refuses to acknowledge himself as political poet: “ … some call me a political poet. I don’t admit it, because my poetry has been aestheticized, and not at all just explicit politics, otherwise it wouldn’t have survived.”14 But he also says: I was only by chance born in China, writing during the Cultural Revolution, so I was not just symbolizing, giving the political stuff some kind of image processing, not at all. Politics was nothing but my existence, and that era only gave me politics, nothing else.15

So ultimately what Duo Duo presents is a diachronic as well as anachronistic self-portrait that might completely baffle the critical expectations as embedded in the questions raised by the young Chinese poet and critic in 2004. Duo Duo’s firm refusal to be labeled and categorized and his equally headstrong clinging to his origins in the Cultural Revolution, however, cannot be brushed off as a poet’s pure idiosyncrasy, eccentricity, or selfcontradiction. Rather, it should be recognized as a profoundly meaningful

Epilogue

●

187

gesture of defiance against and a challenge to any attempt to filter or encapsulate those bastardized individual developments and visions of history, or the legacy of the Cultural Revolution. “Silent Majority” and “Silent Individuals” In 1996, on the thirtieth anniversary of the Cultural Revolution, Liu Qingfeng, the famed Chinese scholar of modern intellectual history and the author of an underground novella influential during the Cultural Revolution, “The Public Love Letters,”16 edited a collection of interdisciplinary studies commemorating that historical occasion. In her editor’s preface, “Requestioning History,” Liu Qingfeng says: Any scholars who had experienced the Cultural Revolution and the Thought Emancipation movement will agree that any simplistically negative or affirmative discourses on the Cultural Revolution will be inevitably superficial. The same as all complex and soul-scorching historical movements, the Cultural Revolution has its multi-facetedness, with those seemingly positive values included. But it is precisely by pushing those seemingly unquestionable ideals and values to the very extremes that the Cultural Revolution had bred within its evils and barbarism. Thus, seen in the larger context of the evolution of modern Chinese intellectual history, the studies on the Cultural Revolution cannot depart from two basic points: First, don’t forget and ignore the silent majority that has yet to speak out; second, it must be party to historical reflections to be carried out by the entire Chinese nation.17

While acknowledging the complexity of the history of the Cultural Revolution and its entangledness with and embeddedness in the larger context of modern Chinese history, what catches my attention in this passage is this sentence: “don’t forget and ignore the silent majority that has yet to speak out.” This caution literally echoes Wang Xiaobo’s statement on the silent majority and his distrust of what he calls the “discursive forums,” as quoted in the previous chapter. That is to say, contemporary literature produced so far on the Cultural Revolution and its legacy is far from definitive, or even adequate, both in terms of depth and quality. Moreover, as for those works that have indeed taken alternative or idiosyncratic perspectives and moved beyond the narrow confines of literary periodization or critical categorization, many of them have remained neglected or misread, leaving their silence unread and unheard. So while invoking the silent majority, I also want to compound it with another term: “silent individuals.” Indeed, collective memories and individual narratives quite often feed each other in a complex way. That is also

188

●

Contemporary Chinese Literature

precisely why, instead of presenting a general survey of contemporary Chinese literature—as the book title might imply—I have taken the individual allegories that these four particular authors have constructed as mutually constituted and articulated by and with the social/cultural collective memories and interpretations. Contemporary Chinese literature, at least according to the four authors discussed here, has to be continually engaged and evaluated against the ongoing developments of the individuals from this generation of the Cultural Revolution.18 But either “silent majority” or “silent individuals” may still be, despite their usefulness, just a rhetorical figure. That is to say, instead of eagerly invoking such silent parties to speak, what we really need to register is the existence of an even larger, more fundamental silence itself that surrounds, resides underneath or in-between, and also conditions all the (re)visions that have been produced so far in contemporary Chinese literature on this subject in question. When we talk about the legacy of the Cultural Revolution and the individual allegories corresponding to it, ultimately, we need to discern this silence that has served as an existential shadow with a historical horizon in view. An Ever-Shifting Horizon This, in turn, proves that the Cultural Revolution is indeed one of the most crucial moments and experiences of Chinese modernity in the twentieth century, instead of—as many critics had previously believed—a total breakdown of or digression from the modernity project.19 In other words, it would be a fallacy to simply assume a discourse of a normative, rational Chinese modernity with a pure and uncontaminated origin. Accordingly, the post-Mao and post–Cultural Revolution literature, in both its utopian and dystopian form, via its apparently included individual allegories or excluded silence, has helped restore an ever-shifting horizon for a doublefaced Chinese modernity, which has connected our unexpired past, unstable present, and unknown future with a dialectic cord of historical cunning and fateful irony. Unless—we refuse to apprehend silence in this determinate fashion. A last, and final, suspense.

—The End—

Notes

Chapter 1 1. Cui Jian, “Balls under the Red Flag” [Hongqi xia de dan], in his album Balls under the Red Flag [Hongqi xia de dan] (Shenzhen: Shenzhenshi jiguang jiemu chuban faxing gongsi, 1994). For all citations from Cui Jian’s lyrics in this chapter, I have made my own translations. 2. See Duo Duo’s 1972 “ADDIO (Farewell)” [Zaihui], in Salute: 38 Poems [Xingli: shi 38 shou] (Guilin: Lijiang chubanshe, 1988), p. 1. 3. Needless to say, this “Ciao, Mao!” also immediately calls to mind the “Farewell, Revolution” called for by many influential Chinese intellectuals in the 1990s, as evidenced by Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu’s Farewell to Revolution: Twentieth Century China in Retrospect [Gaobie geming: huiwang ershi shiji zhongguo] (Hong Kong: Tiandi tushu youxian gongsi, 1997). 4. The fact that it is Mao instead of Deng Xiaoping, the supposed real godfather of contemporary Chinese postsocialist/capitalist “reform,” who has been appropriated for this commercial poster is telling. 5. There have been various definitions of Chinese modernity in the field. For a definition and discussion that I have found to be more pertinent to, and often coincides with, my own conception of modernity, see Xiaobin Yang’s “Modernity,” in The Chinese Postmodern: Trauma and Irony in Chinese AvantGarde Fiction (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), ch. 1, pp. 3–22. Yang makes a particularly keen observation: “The idea of Chinese modernity, like its Western counterpart, is based on the theory of historical progress in social and intellectual spheres. The fiascoes of the Qing Empire in the wars during the nineteenth century prompted many Chinese to believe that the only way to rescue the nation from decline was through modernization … Modernity, best expressed in the Enlightenment discourse (which was later boiled down to Marxism by the communists), came to be the redemptive force to push the nation forward on the globally progressive track of history, whether named socialism, communism, industrialism, commercialism, or transnational capitalism” (pp. 3–4). 6. Lu Xun, “A Madman’s Diary,” in Lu Xun: Selected Works, vol. 1, trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1980), p. 51.

190

●

Notes

7. See Mao’s “Marginal Notes to: Friedrich Paulsen, A System of Ethics”: “This is an individualism of the spirit, and may be called spiritual individualism.” In Mao’s Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings 1912–1949, vol. I, The Pre-Marxist Period, 1912–1920, ed. Stuart R. Schram (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1992), p. 208. 8. Ibid., p. 209. 9. For earlier, relevant studies in this regard, see, for instance, Frederic Wakeman’s History and Will: Philosophical Perspectives of Mao Tse-tung’s Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973). For a more recent and specific analysis of German influence upon Mao’s early thought, see Shan Shilian’s “Young Mao Zedong and German Culture” [Qingnian Mao Zedong he deguo wenhua], in Review of Scholarships and Thoughts [Xueshu sixiang pinglun], vol. 3, ed. He Zhaotian (Shenyang: liaoning daxue chubanshe, 1998). As mentioned in the text, Mao’s “spiritual individualism” also undoubtedly belies the traditional influence, particularly that of the Confucian concepts of self-cultivation, such as “sage within and king without” (neisheng waiwang) or “cultivating the self, regulating the family, governing the state, pacifying the world” (xiushen, qijia, zhiguo, pingtianxia). 10. See Mao Zedong, “On New Democracy,” in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, vol. II (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1965), pp. 339–82; particularly, sections XI–XV, pp. 369–82. 11. Liu Xinwu, “Some Characteristics of Chinese Literature during the Last Decade” [ Jin shinian zhongguo wenxue de ruogan texing], Literary Review [Wenxue pinglun], no. 1 (1989). 12. Joseph R. Levenson, Revolution and Cosmopolitanism: The Western Stage and the Chinese Stages (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), p. 1. 13. Ibid., p. 6. 14. Ibid., p. 47. 15. Ibid., p. 55. 16. Ibid., p. 26. 17. Ibid., pp. 26–27. 18. Ibid., p. 27. 19. See Jiwei Ci, “The Detour on the Road to Capitalism,” in Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution: From Utopianism to Hedonism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), chap. 1, pp. 25–61. 20. Ibid., p. 42. 21. Ibid., p. 42. 22. Ibid., p. 48. 23. Ibid., p. 49. 24. See Frantz Fanon, “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness” and “On National Culture,” in The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1981). As many other works of postcolonial studies also demonstrate, the co-emergence and convergence of the nation and the individual was the norm of Western modernity projects and their departure points. The most

Notes

25.

26.

27. 28.

29. 30.

31.

32.

●

191

typical example is probably the German bildungsroman in its relation to the German nationalism and modernity project. My usage of Chinese bilungsroman as a national form or genre, is, needless to say, deliberate, and is informed by a more specific bildungsroman, with its European and particularly German origin and history. I will discuss this further in connection with Zhang Chengzhi in chapter 4. Since the late 1990s there have been numerous new studies published in China on the educated-youth campaign and the rustication or sent-down movements before and during the Cultural Revolution, such as Ding Yizhuang’s History of Chinese Educated Youth: First Wave (1953–1968) [Zhongguo zhiqing shi: chulan (1953–1968 nian)] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1998) and Liu Xiaomeng’s History of Chinese Educated Youth: Big Tide (1966–1980) [Zhongguo zhiqing shi: dachao (1966–1980 nian)] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1998). Bei Dao, “The Answer,” in The August Sleepwalker, trans. Bonnie S. McDougall (New York: New Directions, 1990), p. 33. Duo Duo, “Buried Chinese Poets 1970–1978” [Bei maizang de zhongguo shiren 1970–1978], in Exploration [Kaituo], no. 3 (1988). This article was republished in Today [ Jintian], no.1 (1991), under a different title: “1970–1978: Underground Poetry in Beijing” [1970–1978 Beijing de dixia shitan], which was later reprinted in Messengers Holding Lamps [Chideng de shizhe], ed. Lydia. H. Liu (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2001). An English translation by John Cayley, under the title “Underground Poetry in Beijing 1970–1978,” appeared in Under-Sky Underground: Chinese Writing Today, vol. 1, eds. Henry Y. Zhao and John Cayley (London: Wellsweep, 1994). It is reprinted again, under a slightly different Chinese title “Beijing dixia shige (1970–1978)” in Duo Duo, Selected Poems of Duo Duo [Duo Duo shixuan] (Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe, 2005). In this book I use the version in Messengers Holding Lamps. Yang Jian, Underground Literature during the Cultural Revolution [Wenge zhong de dixia wenxue] (Beijing: Zhaohua chubanshe, 1993). Song Yongyi, “The Yellowcover Books and the Graycover Books in the Cultural Revolution” [Wenge zhong de huangpishu he huipishu], Twenty-First Century [Ershiyi shiji] (Hong Kong), no. 4 (1997). Liao Yiwu, ed., The Sunken Sacred Temple: A Portrait of Chinese Underground Poetry in the 1970s [Chenlun de shengdian: zhongguo ershi shiji qishi niandai dixia shige yizhao] (Urumuchi: Xinjiang qingshaonian chubanshe, 1999). Some first-hand material about “underground literature” was published in the two literary journals published in exile: Today [ Jintian] and Tendency [Qingxiang]. The articles published in the column, “Reminiscences of Today” [ Jintian jiuihua], in Today [ Jintian], were later collected in Liu, Messengers Holding Lamps. The articles published in the column “Underground Literature in China (1960s–1990s)” [Zhongguo de dixia wenxue (liushi niandai—jiushi niandai )] in Tendency equally deserve attention. In mainland China, there are increasing numbers of articles published on this subject in forums such as the journal of Poetry Exploration [Shi tanshuo]. The poet Zhong Ming’s three-volume memoir Spectator [Pangguanzhe]

192

33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

●

Notes

(Haikou: Hainan chubanshe, 1998) is also a valuable personal testimony in this regard. Some mainstream university textbooks on contemporary literature history have also started to include discussions on this subject. The most notable example is A Course in Contemporary Chinese Literary History [Dangdai zhongguo wenxueshi jiaocheng], ed. Chen Sihe (Shanghai: Fudandaxue chubanshe, 1999), in which an entire chapter is devoted to this period of history: “Literature during the Period of the Cultural Revolution” [“Wenhua dageming” shiqi de wenxue], pp. 162–88. In an interview conducted in 2004 upon his return to China after fifteen years of exile, Duo Duo sketches a zigzag trajectory of his own individual development, which has spanned the last three decades, and is also enveloped by the collective fate of a whole generation: “When the Cultural Revolution broke out I was not even fourteen years old, and then there were the revolutionary exchanges, and then there were the armed battles, the participation in the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guard movement, and then the sent-down movement, all the events, infused with a strong idealism, had changed your life and left indelible traces on you … and then [I] was very quickly engaged into a reflection upon the essence of the Cultural Revolution and became its opponent. At first a naïve kid, afterwards a self-conscious opponent, and afterwards changing from an opponent into an exile … My time of exile should be dated back to 1972—when my real writing career started … You can say that for me the real watershed was 1968–1969: after I went down to the countryside, another epoch started and I began to understand everything … Among us there were already people who awakened and began to reflect upon what we had been doing. Then during 1969–1970 there were a series of books coming out. They were the so-called “yellowcover books,” “graycover books” and “whitecover books” [that were translated] from the West. After having spent one year reading all of these books, [I] immediately started to write …, so the ten years of the Cultural Revolution were actually divided into many stages, not just one whole lump, and it was certainly not blank.” See Ling Yue and Duo Duo, “My University is in the Country Fields: An Interview with Duo Duo” [Wode daxue jiushi tianye: Duo Duo fangtan lu], in Duo Duo, Selected Poems of Duo Duo, pp. 267–68. For an earlier and more extended study of Cui Jian, see Andrew F. Jones, Like a Knife: Ideology and Genre in Contemporary Chinese Popular Music (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University East Asia Program, 1992). Cui Jian, Rock ‘n’ Roll on the New Long March [Xin changzheng lushang de yaogun] (Beijing: Zhongguo lüyou shengxiang chubanshe, 1989). Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 151. Cui Jian, Solution [ Jiejue] (Beijing: Zhonguo beiguang shengxiang chubangongsi, 1991). Compare this with Jiwei Ci: “In Mao Zedong’s China, political movements represented an exciting cessation of routine and afforded in an otherwise unbroken ascetic regime the only legitimate outlet for hedonistic and destructive impulses,

Notes

39.

40. 41. 42.

●

193

serving as the functional equivalent of wars, carnivals, and witch hunts in other times and places … In launching a political campaign every few years, Mao was not only manipulating the crowd, he was also keeping the crowd—as well as himself—entertained. The Cultural Revolution stood out from other political campaigns only in the length and excitement of the holiday.” Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution, pp. 77–78. Cui Jian, Balls under the Red Flag. On the liner notes, there is an image of a young Red Guard girl resembling the old Cultural Revolution poster style: with a Mao button pinned on the chest of her army jacket and a copy of Selected Works of Mao Zedong in her left hand. However, she is also holding an electric guitar. Mao Zedong, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, ed. Stuart R. Schram (New York: Bantam Books, 1967), p. 165. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 99. Ibid., p. 100.

Chapter 2 1. Duo Duo (sometimes spelled as Duoduo or DuoDuo), “Northern Nights” [Beifang de ye], in Milestones: Selected Poems of Duo Duo 1972–1988; Works by the First Winner of the Today Poetry Award [Licheng: Duo Duo shixuan 1972–1988: shoujie Jintian shige jiang huojiangzhe zuopin ji ] (Beijing: Jintian bianjibu, 1989), pp. 98–99. There is a double meaning of the Chinese word “zaihui” in the second line, which is rendered here as “reunite” and “reunion.” It, however, can also mean “farewell.” So that line can also be rendered as: “Farewell, farewell in the time of farewell.” Of the poems by Duo Duo cited in this chapter, I have used or consulted English translations in Looking Out From Death: From the Cultural Revolution to Tiananmen Square, trans. Gregory Lee and John Cayley (London: Bloomsbury Press, 1989); Maghiel van Crevel, Language Shattered: Contemporary Chinese Poetry and Duoduo (Research School CNWS: Leiden, The Netherlands, 1996); and Crossing the Sea, ed. Lee Robinson, trans. Lee Robinson and Yu Li Ming (Concord, Canada: House of Anansi Press, 1998), which I have often modified to varying degrees. The translation that I have used or consulted is specified in my endnote, in parentheses, by the initials of the translator(s): GL, JC, MC, LR, & YLM. Where no translators are specified, I have used my own translations. 2. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), pp. 257–58. 3 Duo Duo, Looking Out From Death. 4. This is an excerpt from a poem titled “Ode to the Red Sun” [Hong taiyang song], authored by a certain “Xiangri Kui” (which is obviously a pseudonym, meaning “sunflower”) from Beijing, in Written on the Fire-Red Battle Banner: Selection of Red Guard Poetry [Xiezai huohong de zhanqi shang: hong weibing shixuan] (Beijing, 1968), pp. 3–13.

194

●

Notes

5. Yang Jian actually came up with this term in Underground Literature during the Cultural Revolution [Wenge zhong de dixia wenxue] (Beijing: Zhaohua chubanshe, 1993), pp. 50–70. 6. See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). 7. Gregory Lee, introduction to Looking Out From Death, pp. 13–14. 8. Arthur Rimbaud, “A Season in Hell,” in Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, trans. Wallace Fowlie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), p. 307. 9. Ibid., p. 209. 10. Lu Xun, “A Madman’s Diary,” in Lu Xun: Selected Works, vol. 1, trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1980), p. 40. 11. Ibid., p. 42. 12. Duo Duo, “1970–1978: Underground Poetry in Beijing” [1970–1978 Beijing de dixia shitan], in Messengers Holding Lamps [Chideng de shizhe], ed. Lydia. H. Liu (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 117–25. 13. About Yi Qun and “The Centennial of the Paris Commune” ( Ji’nian bali gongshe yibai zhounian), see ibid., p. 119. Also see Yang, Underground Literature during the Cultural Revolution, pp. 95–96, and van Crevel, Language Shattered, p. 53. 14. Based upon my interviews with Duo Duo during 1997–1998. Van Crevel gives a similar account of this: “After more traveling and ‘revolutionary’ frenzy, 1968 was a year of relative calm. Duoduo read classical Chinese literature, orthodox PRC works, the writings of Marx, Mao Zedong and other authors from the political canon but also foreign literature in Chinese translation.” Language Shattered, p. 102. 15. Quoted from van Crevel, Language Shattered, pp. 42–43. 16. W. L. Chong, “Can Poetry Be Understood across Cultures? A Conversation between Rudy Kousbroek and Poet Duoduo,” China Information 6, no. 4 (1992): 37. In a letter addressed to me dated June 23, 1997, Duo Duo said: “At the beginning I was interested in political economy, philosophy and criticism, and never thought of becoming a poet. It could be said that my becoming a poet was totally by mistake. But it was my reading of nine poems of Baudelaire in translation (World Literature [Shijie wenxue] 1959) that had really inspired me to write poetry. My broad interests in various fields during the four years (from 1968 to 1972) had prepared me to understand Baudelaire instantly.” Translated by Chen Jingrong, the nine poems from The Flowers of Evil were published, in fact, in Literature in Translation [Yiwen] (renamed as World Literature in 1959) no. 7(1957): 133–43. 17. Duo Duo, “1970–1978: Underground Poetry in Beijing.” 18. Duo Duo, “ADDIO (Farewell)” [Zaihui], in Salute: 38 Poems [Xingli: shi 38 shou] (Guilin: Lijiang chubanshe, 1988), p. 1. 19. See note 1. Duo Duo’s debut poem may remind one of, say, Jean-François Millet’s painting Evening Prayer, a piece that was familiar to Duo Duo and many of his generation at that time. But more importantly, it reveals his own real life experience as a sent-down youth. See Duo Duo on the impact of such life experience on his work in general: “My university is in the country and the country fields. This [nature imagery] didn’t come out from imagination; it is a record

Notes

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

●

195

of my truest experience, like my watching Millet’s Evening Prayer—That scene was what I had experienced: I was someone like that, alone, in the field, watching the sun go down.” Ling Yue and Duo Duo, “My University is in the Country Fields: An Interview with Duo Duo” [Wode daxue jiushi tianye: Duo Duo fangtan lu], in Selected Poems of Duo Duo [Duo Duo shixuan] (Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe, 2005), p. 271. Duo Duo, “When the People Stand Up from the Hard Cheese” [Dang renmin cong ganlao shang zhanqi], in Milestones, p. 1 ( JC, p. 20, modified). Duo Duo, “Untitled” [Wuti], ibid., pp. 1–2 ( JC, p. 26, modified). Duo Duo, “Untitled” [Wuti], ibid., p. 3 ( JC, p. 25, modified). Mao Zedong, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, ed. Stuart R. Schram (New York: Bantam Books, 1967), p. 65. Mao Zedong, “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan,” in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, vol. I (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1965), p. 28. In fact, in one earlier version, the poem “When the People Stand Up from the Hard Cheese” was titled “Nightmare: To 1966” [Emeng: zhi 1966 ]. Copy of Duo Duo’s manuscript. Private archive. Duo Duo, “Blessings” [Zhufu], in Milestones, p. 2 (GL, p. 22, modified). See Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), pp. 160–76. Bei Dao, “Accomplices,” in The August Sleepwalker, trans. Bonnie S. McDougall (New York: New Directions, 1990), p. 89. See note 2. Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), p. 168. Duo Duo, “Ah, the Sun” [A, taiyang], in Collection of New Tide Poetry [Xin shichao shiji ] 1, ed. Lao Mu (Beijing: Beijing daxue wusi wenxue she, 1985), pp. 385–86 ( JC, p. 19, modified). Duo Duo, “Honeyweek” [Mizhou], in Milestones, pp. 4–8 (LR & YLM, p. 60, modified). Duo Duo, “Summer” [Xia], ibid., p. 13 (JC, p. 35, modified). Duo Duo, “To the Sun” [Zhi taiyang], ibid., p. 16 (GL, p. 43, modified). Duo Duo, “Untitled” [Wuti], in Collection of New Tide Poetry, pp. 389–90. Duo Duo, “At Parting” [Gaobie], ibid., pp. 386–87. They were actually grouped together by the author himself, under a different title: “Statements” [Chenshu], in Collection of New Tide Poetry. Duo Duo, “Ah, the Sun” [Ah, Taiyang], ibid., pp. 385–86 (JC, p. 19, modified). Duo Duo, “Night” [Ye], ibid., pp. 388–89. Ibid., p. 389. Rimbaud, Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, p. 307. Duo Duo, “Poet” [Shiren], in Milestones, pp. 11–12 (Section 1, LR & YLM, p. 49, modified). Duo Duo, “Dusk” [Huanghun], ibid., p. 13. Duo Duo, “Dusk” [Huanghun], in Collection of New Tide Poetry, pp. 393–94.

196

●

Notes

45. The inscription on the title page of Duo Duo’s 1973 notebook of poetry reads: “Dedicated to Marina Tsvetaeva.” Copy of Duo Duo’s manuscript. Private archive. 46. Duo Duo, “Handicraft” [Shouyi], in Milestones, p. 17. 47. Duo Duo, “Sad Marina” [Beiai de Malinna], in Salute, p. 20. 48. Duo Duo, “Doctor Zhivago” [Riwage yisheng], in Milestones, pp. 22–27. 49. The poem bears a subtitle in the original manuscript: “Dedicated to a Generation of Decadent Russian Poets.” Copy of Duo Duo’s manuscript. Private archive. What is peculiar about this poem is that, as Duo Duo later admitted in an interview with me in 1997, at the time he wrote this poem, he had not even read the novel Doctor Zhivago, since its Chinese translation was only published in the 1980s. Instead he drew his inspiration from what he read about it in the Soviet Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg’s memoir People, Years, Life (which was then translated into Chinese, titled: Ren, suiyue, shenghuo) and wielded his own imagination. 50. Duo Duo, “Kaleidoscope” [Wanxiang], in Salute, pp. 11–14. 51. Duo Duo, “The Travels of Marguerite with Me” [Mageli he wo de lüxing], in Milestones, pp. 18–21 (MC, pp. 142–44, modified). 52. In fact, “The Travels of Marguerite with Me” was just one of the poems Duo Duo wrote on the theme of love in 1974 and grouped under the general title “Marguerite” [Mageli]. On the front page of Duo Duo’s 1974 notebook of poetry, there is an inscription, reading: “Dedicated to the Love by My Side;” and the other inscription under the title “Marguerite” reads: “Dedicated to the Great Baudelaire: ‘—Oh, my so innocent, so cold Marguerite.’” The latter quotation is obviously from Chen Jingrong’s Chinese translation of Baudelaire’s “Autumn,” whose French original is: “Ô ma si blanche, ô ma si froide Marguerite.” Copy of Duo Duo’s manuscript. Private archive. 53. Van Crevel, Language Shattered, p. 145. 54. Peter Button, book review of Looking Out From Death: From the Cultural Revolution to Tiananmen Square, by Duo Duo, trans. Gregory Lee and John Cayley, in Modern Chinese Literature 6, nos. 1 & 2 (1992): 231–32. Button’s reading of this poem is extremely insightful, and on some points I have been influenced by it. 55. Van Crevel, Language Shattered, p. 146. 56. Bei Dao, “The Answer,” in The August Sleepwalker, p. 33. 57. Duo Duo, “Instructions” [ Jiaohui], in Milestones, pp. 28–30 (MC version, pp. 135–136, is mainly consulted, but has been greatly modified; GL version, pp. 58–59, has also been consulted). 58. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1977), pp. 177–78. 59. Gregory Lee, introduction to Looking Out From Death, p. 12. 60. Van Crevel, Language Shattered, p. 181. 61. Ibid., p. 174. 62. Ibid. 63. Duo Duo, “Fifteen Years Old” [Shiwu sui], in Salute, pp. 63–64 (I am quoting MC, version pp. 176–77, the first letter of all the lines has been changed to capital for the sake of stylistic consistence in this book).

Notes

●

197

64. Duo Duo, “Northern Voices” [Beifang de shengyin], in Milestones, pp. 97 (MC, pp. 197–98, modified). 65. Van Crevel, Language Shattered, p. 178. 66. Duo Duo, “Reform” [Gaizao], in Milestones, p. 115. 67. Van Crevel, Language Shattered, p. 179. 68. Ibid. 69. Duo Duo, “Milestones” [Licheng], in Milestones, pp. 100–1 (GL, p. 101, modified). 70. Duo Duo, “Looking Out from Death” [Cong siwang de fangxiang kan], ibid., p. 76. (GL, p. 81). 71. Duo Duo, “In One Story There Is All His Past” [Yige gushi zhong you ta quanbu de guoqu], ibid., pp. 73–75. 72. Duo Duo, “Wishful Thinking Is the Master of Reality” [Wangxiang shi zhenshi de zhuren], in Salute, p. 50. 73. Duo Duo, “The Making of Language Comes from the Kitchen” [Yuyan de zhizuo laizi chufang], in Collection of New Tide Poetry, pp. 432–33. (GL, p. 85, modified). 74. Duo Duo, “The Winter Night Woman” [Dongye nüren], in Milestones, p. 89. Here I have used the translation by Maghiel van Crevel (slightly modified with capital letters) as quoted in Chong, “Can Poetry Be Understood across Cultures?” p. 37. 75. Bai Hua, Left Side: The Lyric Poets in the Era of Mao Zedong [Zuobian: Mao Zedong shidai de shuqing shiren], in Tibetan Literature [Xizang wenxue] 1, no. 1 (1996): 94. 76. Ibid. 77. Duo Duo, “The Captured Savage Hearts Forever Turn toward the Sun” [Beifu de yeman de xin yongyuan xiangzhuo taiyang], in Salute, pp. 53–54. 78. Fredric Jameson has made a useful attempt to articulate this relationship between utopia and dystopia in the socialist cultural context in his reading of Andrei Platonov’s novel, Chevengur, in “Utopia, Modernism, and Death,” in The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

Chapter 3 1. Wang Shuo, “Nothing Real or Serious” [Yidian zhengjing meiyou], in Collected Works of Wang Shuo [Wang Shuo wenji], ed. Sun Bo and Du Jianlie, vol. 4 (Beijing: Huayi chubanshe, 1995), p. 115. 2. Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (New York: Humanities Press, 1965), pp. 168–69. 3. Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto. Here I am using the standard edition titled Manifesto of the Communist Party in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (second edition) (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), p. 476. 4. Wang Shuo, Playing for Thrills [Wande jiushi xintiao], trans. Howard Goldblatt (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), pp. 44–45. In citations from Playing for Thrills, I have used Howard Goldblatt’s translation, which I have occasionally modified in the direction of more literalism, in consultation with the Chinese

198

5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

●

Notes

edition included in Collected Works of Wang Shuo, vol. 2, pp. 214–441. The places of my modification are not separately specified. Page references are only to Goldblatt’s English version. All other citations from Wang Shuo’s fictional works discussed in this chapter, unless specified, are mine. This change of impression may, at least partially, be due to the publication of Li Zhisui’s The Private Life of Chairman Mao: The Memoirs of Mao’s Personal Physician, trans. Tai Hung-chao (New York: Random House, 1994). The latter especially merits attention because a large number of Wang Shuo’s literary creations, despite the lack of critical attention they have drawn, are detective or crime stories published in popular “law literature” [fazhi wenxue] magazines such as Woodpecker [Zhuomu niao]. Jing Wang, High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng’s China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 261–62. Ibid., p. 262. Wang Shuo, “Emerging from the Sea” [Fuchu haimian], in Collected Works of Wang Shuo, vol. 1, p. 200. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 597. Quoted from Wang Shuo: Master or Hooligan [Wang Shuo: dashi haishi pizi], ed. Gao Bo (Beijing: Beijing Yanshan chubanshe, 1993), p. 217. See Mao Zedong, “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan,” in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, vol. I (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1965), pp. 23–56; particularly, pp. 29–34. The novella, or zhongpian xiaoshuo, was one of the most popular fiction genres in China in the 1980s. Wang Shuo, “The Flight Attendant” [Kongzhong xiaojie], in Collected Works of Wang Shuo, vol. 1. Ibid., pp. 3–4. Ibid., p. 19. Wang Shuo, “Emerging from the Sea,” pp. 196–97. Ibid., p. 250. Ibid., p. 283. Ibid., p. 278. Ibid., p. 244. Wang Shuo, “Half Is Flame, Half Is Sea” [Yiban shi huoyan, yiban shi haishui ], in Collected Works of Wang Shuo, vol. 1. Ibid., pp. 121–22. Ibid., p. 123. Wang Shuo, “The Rubber Man” [Xiangpi ren], in Collected Works of Wang Shuo, vol. 2. Ibid., p. 3. Ibid., pp. 1–2. Ibid., p. 2. Ibid., p. 27. Ibid., pp. 40–42.

Notes

●

199

31. Ibid., p. 108. 32. This reminds us of Marshall Berman’s reading of The Communist Manifesto in the section “Nakedness: The Unaccommodated Man” from his All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982): “The bourgeois revolutions, in tearing away veils of ‘religious and political illusion,’ have left naked power and exploitation, cruelty and misery, exposed like open wounds; at the same time, they have uncovered and exposed new options and hopes. Unlike the common people of all ages, who have been endlessly betrayed and broken by their devotion to their ‘natural superiors,’ modern men, washed in ‘the icy water of egotistical calculation,’ are free from deference to masters who destroy them, animated rather than numbed by the cold” (p. 109). 33. Wang Shuo, “The Playing Masters” [Wanzhu], in Collected Works of Wang Shuo, vol. 4. 34. This is Jing Wang’s rendition. See Jing Wang, High Culture Fever, p. 274. 35. Wang Shuo, “Nothing Real or Serious,” in Collected Works of Wang Shuo, vol. 4. 36. Wang Shuo, “You Are Not a Vulgar Person” [Ni bushi yige suren], in Collected Works of Wang Shuo, vol. 4. 37. Wang Shuo, “The Playing Masters,” pp. 10–11. 38. Wang Shuo, “The Playing Masters,” p. 64. 39. Wang Shuo, “Nothing Real or Serious,” p. 82. 40. Ibid., p. 120. 41. Ibid., p. 126. 42. Ibid., p. 135. 43. Wang Shuo, “You Are Not a Vulgar Person,” p. 182. 44. Never Take Me as Human [Qianwan bieba wo dangren], written in real life by Wang Shuo himself, was published in 1989, and later included in Collected Works of Wang Shuo, vol. 4. It is also available in English translation as Please Don’t Call Me Human, trans. Howard Goldblatt (New York: Hyperion East, 2000). 45. Wang Shuo, “Nothing Real or Serious,” p. 134. 46. Wang Shuo, Playing for Thrills, p. 20. 47. Ibid., p. 106. 48. Ibid., pp. 75–76. 49. Ibid., pp. 87–88. 50. Ibid., pp. 90–91. 51. Ibid., pp. 217–18. 52. Ibid., pp. 170–71. 53. Ibid., p. 222. 54. Ibid., p. 223. 55. Ibid., p. 261. 56. Ibid., pp. 306–8. 57. Ibid., p. 320. 58. Ibid., p. 321. 59. Ibid., pp. 321–22. 60. Ibid., p. 322.

200

●

Notes

61. Ibid., pp. 322–23. 62. Quoted from Yang Jian, Underground Literature during the Cultural Revolution [Wenge zhong de dixia wenxue] (Beijing: Zhaohua chubanshe, 1993), p. 51. 63. Wang Shuo, Playing for Thrills, p. 324. 64. Ibid., pp. 324–25. 65. See Wang Shuo et al., I Am Wang Shuo [Woshi Wang Shuo] (Beijing: Guojiwenhua chubangongsi, 1992), pp. 63–64. 66. Also see Jianying Zha, “Yearnings,” in China Pop: How Soap Operas, Tabloids, and Bestsellers Are Transforming a Culture (New York: The New Press, 1995), pp. 25–53. 67. Wang Shuo, “Vicious Animals” [Dongwu xiongmeng], in Collected Works of Wang Shuo, vol. 1. 68. See Wang Shuo et al., I Am Wang Shuo, p. 57. 69. Wang Shuo, “Vicious Animals,” p. 409. 70. Ibid., 71. Ibid., p. 410. 72. Ibid., pp. 414–15. 73. The Song of Youth was authored by Yang Mo, the modern Chinese woman writer; How the Steel Was Tempered by the Soviet Russian writer Nikolai Ostrovsky; The Gadfly by the Irish woman writer Ethel Lilian Voynich. These three novels were all tremendously popular and influential among Chinese youth during the 1950 and 1960s before the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution. 74. Ibid., p. 420. Pavel and Tonya are the main characters in How the Steel Was Tempered. 75. Ibid., pp. 331–32. 76. Ibid., p. 406. 77. Here a further elaboration of this theme of “successful middle class” is obviously needed: the Cultural Revolution is a preparation school and laboratory for the future playing masters in the capitalist era. See Jiwei Ci, Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution: From Utopianism to Hedonism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). For a discussion on the contemporary phenomenon of “successful individuals” (chenggong renshi), also see “‘Market Ideology’ in Today’s China” [Dangxia zhongguo de “shichang yishi xingtai” ] by Wang Xiaoming et al., in Shanghai Literature [Shanghai wenxue], no. 4 (1999): 71–80. 78. Wang Shuo, “Vicious Animals,” p. 409. 79. Ibid., p. 421. 80. Ibid., p. 430. 81. Ibid., p. 481. 82. Ibid., p. 484. 83. See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 1–54; and, “On Magic Realism in Film,” in “Signatures of the Visible (New York & London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 128–52. 84. In fact, this sleight of hand is also clearly shown in his The Playing Masters trilogy. While most critics of Wang Shuo have emphasized the political or ideological

Notes

●

201

subversiveness and blasphemy underlying those carnivalesque stories, few of them have pointed out that those stories have also served as allegories of the rapid progress of a market economy in China. In this light, the seemingly mischievous schemes should not be viewed as purely satirical and parodic, but rather as serious and ambitious business attempts by the playing masters to ride the tide of the nascent, yet already triumphant, market economy. If in the 1980s the playing masters still lingered at the periphery of society, in the 1990s they have gradually moved to the center, claiming their own legitimacy and even superiority by becoming skillful and successful cultural dealers.

Chapter 4 1. Quoted from “Zhang Chengzhi: Not Like Other Writers,” in Morning Sun: Interviews with Chinese Writers of the Lost Generation, ed. Laifong Leung (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), pp. 217–28. For all other citations from Zhang Chengzhi’s works in this chapter, I have made my own translations. 2. Zhang Chengzhi, The Old Bridge [Laoqiao] (Beijing: Shiyue chubanshe, 1984), p. 306. 3. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 214–15. 4. Such a theme, of course, may also invite comparisons between Zhang Chengzhi and other canonical third world intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon, especially in relation to the relevance of postcolonial studies in today’s China. See also chapter 1, note 24. 5. See note 1. 6. Zhang Chengzhi, “Why Herdsmen Sing about ‘Mother’” [Qishou weishenme gechang muqin], in The Old Bridge, p. 146. 7. Zhang Chengzhi, “The Name Inscribed on the Heart” [Kezai xinshang de mingzi], in Representative Works of Zhang Chengzhi [Zhang Chengzhi daibiaozuo], ed. Zhang Caixin (Zhengzhou: Huanghe wenyi chubanshe, 1988). This short story is rarely mentioned by later critics and is often excluded from various later selections of his works, probably due to the obvious literary immaturity of the story itself. Nevertheless, it remains an important testimony to Zhang Chengzhi’s early thinking about the history of the Red Guards. 8. Ibid., pp. 35–36. 9. Ibid., pp. 38–39. 10. Zhang Chengzhi, “The Black Steed” [Hei junma], in Selected Literary Works of Zhang Chengzhi (volume of fiction) [Zhang Chengzhi wenxue zuopin xuanji: xiaoshuo juan] (Haikou: Hannan chubanshe, 1995). 11. Zhang Chengzhi, “The Northern Rivers” [Beifang de he], in Selected Literary Works of Zhang Chengzhi (volume of fiction). 12. Zhang Chengzhi, “The Black Steed,” p. 67. 13. Ibid., p. 34. 14. Ibid., p. 36.

202

●

Notes

15. Not purely by coincidence, Zhang Chengzhi, later in the 1990s, invokes the importance of “My Old Home” and Runtu for himself: “The more important work is ‘My Old Home,’ and Runtu is the most crucial character. … To have Runtu be treasured at the bottom of the heart with full tenderness, this is an invaluable ability for a great writer.” Zhang Chengzhi, “A Letter to Master Lu Xun” [Zhi xiansheng shu], in The Abandoned Road of Heroes: Essays by Zhang Chengzhi [Huangwu yingxiong lu: Zhang Chengzhi suibi ] (Shanghai: Zhishi chubanshe, 1994), p. 113. 16. Zhang Chengzhi, “The Black Steed,” pp. 68–69. 17. See, for example, Todd Kontje’s The German Bildungsroman: History of a National Genre (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1993). 18. Zhang Chengzhi, “The Northern Rivers,” p. 106. 19. Ibid., p. 134. 20. Ibid., pp. 175–76. 21. For a review of the general cultural debate on “subjectivity” in China in the 1980s, see Liu Kang, “Subjectivity, Marxism, and Cultural Theory in China,” in Politics, Ideology, and Literary Discourse in Modern China, ed. Liu Kang and Xiaobing Tang (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 23–55. 22. Liu Zaifu, “On the Subjectivity of Literature” [Lun wenxuede zhutixing], Literary Review [Wenxue pinglun], nos. 5 & 6 (1985). 23. Zhang Chengzhi, “The Northern Rivers,” p. 71. 24. Ibid., p. 13. 25. Zhang Chengzhi, postscript of The Old Bridge, p. 307. 26. Zhang Chengzhi, The Golden Pasture [ Jin muchang] (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 1987). 27. Zhang Chengzhi, The Golden Grassland [ Jin caodi] (second edition) (Haikou: Hannan chubanshe, 1997). 28. Zhang Chengzhi, The Golden Pasture, p. 506. 29. Li Jiefei and Zhang Ling, “The Golden Pasture: A Text That Belongs to a Past Epoch” [ Jin muchang: guoqu shidai de wenben], Shanghai Literary Review [Shanghai wenlun], no. 1 (1988). Another influential critic, Wu Liang, expressed a similar view in “The Spiritual Philosophy of The Golden Pasture” [ Jin muchang de jingshen zhexue], Shanghai Literature [Shanghai wenxue], no. 11 (1987). 30. Zhang Chengzhi, “A Summary at the End of the Year” [Suimo zongjie], in Selected Literary Works of Zhang Chengzhi (volume of prose), p. 348. 31. Zhang Chengzhi, preface to The Golden Grassland, p. 2. 32. Zhang Chengzhi, foreword to “The Northern Rivers,” in Journal of Selected Novellas [Zhongpian Xiaoshuo Xuankan], no. 1 (1985): 192. 33. Zhang Chengzhi, “The Desert of Belles-Lettres” [Meiwen de shamo], in Selected Literary Works of Zhang Chengzhi (volume of prose), pp. 35–40. 34. Ibid., p. 38. 35. Ibid., p. 37. 36. Ibid., p. 38. 37. Ibid., p. 39. 38. Zhang Chengzhi, preface to The Golden Grassland, p. 4.

Notes

●

203

39. Ibid. 40. Zhang Chengzhi, Heart History [Xinling shi ]. The edition I use here is the one in Selected Literary Works of Zhang Chengzhi (volume of Heart History ) [Zhang Chengzhi wenxue zuopin xuanji: Xinling shi juan] (Haikou: Hannan chubanshe, 1995). 41. Zhang Chengzhi, “History and Heart History” [Lishi yu xinshi ], in Selected Literary Works of Zhang Chengzhi. 42. Ibid., p. 175. 43. Zhang Chengzhi, preface to Heart History, p. 7. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., p. 10. 46. Ibid., pp. 11–12. 47. Zhang Chengzhi, preface to The Golden Grassland, p. 1. 48. Zhang Chengzhi, “A Summary at the End of the Year,” p. 349. 49. Zhang Chengzhi: Not Like Other Writers, p. 227. 50. Ibid., p. 8. 51. Zhang Chengzhi, Heart History, p. 245. 52. Ibid., p. 284. 53. Jian Xu, “Radical Ethnicity and Apocryphal History: Reading the Sublime Object of Humanism in Zhang Chengzhi’s Late Fictions,” Positions 3, no. 3 (2003): 525–46. 54. Ibid., p. 530. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., p. 538. 57. Zhang Chengzhi, Heart History, p. 212. 58. Xu indeed detects this reconciliation later on in his essay: “The religio-mystic dimension of the novel thus finally comes to function as an aesthetic-ideological effect … Like the idea of the destiny of the nation espoused by the May Fourth Movement, Zhang’s history places a part of its faith in unconti[n]gent knowledge of truth, social justice, and human freedom; both brands of humanism are premised on the all-powerful idea of reason” (p. 543). What perhaps needs to be further emphasized is that Zhang’s agenda, as Xu defines it, still comes down to a reinvention of a national form based upon a renewed “self-expression” or individual subjectivity. 59. Zhang Chengzhi, postscript to Selected Literary Works of Zhang Chengzhi (volume of Heart History), p. 330. 60. Zhang Chengzhi’s dissident rebelliousness was only strengthened by a brief official ban of Heart History right after its publication in 1991. 61. Zhang Chengzhi, postscript to The Clean Spirit [Qingjie de jingshen] (revised edition) (Hefei: Anhui wenyi chubanshe, 1996), pp. 274–75. 62. Ibid., 276. 63. Zhang Chengzhi, “Aidless Thoughts” [Wuyuan de sixiang], in The Clean Spirit, pp. 190–207. 64. Zhang Chengzhi, “A Letter to Master Lu Xun,” in The Abandoned Road of Heroes, pp. 97–104.

204

●

Notes

65. Zhang Chengzhi, “Take the Pen as Banner” [Yibi weiqi], in The Clean Spirit, pp. 239–41. 66. Zhang Chengzhi, “A Letter to Master Lu Xun,” p. 97. 67. Ibid., p. 100. 68. Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (Fall 1986): 65–88. 69. Lu Xun, “On the Power of Mara Poetry” [Moluo shili shuo], in The Complete Works of Lu Xun [Lu Xun Quanji ], vol. 1 (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1981), p. 234. Here I am for the most part quoting, but with slight modifications, Leo Ou-fan Lee’s translation of this passage in his Voices from the Iron House: A Study of Lu Xun (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 21. For further comprehensive and insightful readings focused upon Zhang Chengzhi’s encounter with Lu Xun as sampled by this essay, see Xinmin Liu’s two articles: “Self-Making in the Wilderness: Zhang Chengzhi’s Reinvention of Ethnic Identity,” American Journal of Chinese Studies 5, no. 1 (1998): 89–110; “Deciphering the Populist Gadfly: Cultural Polemic around Zhang Chengzhi’s ‘Religious Sublime,’” in The Modern Chinese Literary Essay: Defining the Chinese Self in the 20th Century, ed. Martin Woesler (Germany: Bochum University Press, 2000), pp. 227–37. Both Jian Xu (in his “Radical Ethnicity and Apocryphal History,” as previously quoted) and Liu have pointed out that Zhang Chengzhi’s appropriation of Lu Xun can be rather ambivalent and problematic. I particularly agree with Liu’s observation that “there is an illusive telos in his [Zhang’s] assertion to exalt spiritual transcendence as a way to ward off the crisis of the kind of intellectual vacuum prevalent in drastic social transformation” (“Self-Making in the Wilderness,” p. 107). But Lu Xun himself, particularly in his early works such as “On the Power of Mara Poetry,” had also espoused such an intellectual teleology in the form of a cultural nationalism by calling for the birth of “warriors in the field of spirit.” Furthermore, I would suggest that Zhang Chengzhi’s reading of Lu Xun is actually rather similar to or mediated by Mao Zedong’s eventual appropriation and canonization of Lu Xun as a national hero, which culminated during the Cultural Revolution, as discussed in Chapter 1. It is thus no wonder Zhang Chengzhi would invoke Mao and Lu Xun together in his essay and even emphasize such details as “I only have a thin copy of [Lu Xun’s] Wild Grass at hand. It is a separately issued edition beautifully printed in China in 1973, with a price of only two dimes … such a cheap price at that time, affordable to any poor people” (“A Letter to Master Lu Xun,” pp. 103–4). This again betrays Zhang Chengzhi’s own “bastard” imprint of the Cultural Revolution. 70. Zhang Chengzhi, “Take the Pen as Banner,” p. 239. 71. Ibid., p. 240. Actually, in the original published version in the journal October [Shiyue], no. 3 (1993), “my banner” (wode qi) was “the banner of Chinese literature” (zhongguo wenxue de qi), which tellingly points out Zhang Chengzhi’s almost militant gesture as a national subject.

Notes

●

205

72. Zhang Chengzhi, “Take the Pen as Banner,” pp. 240–41. 73. Zhang Chengzhi, “The Mode of Heart: Preface to Rashaha” [Xinling moshi: reshiha’er xu], in The Abandoned Road of Heroes, p. 201. 74. Zhang Chengzhi, The Red Guard Era [Koueihei no jidai ], trans. Kojima Shinji and Tadokoro Takehiko (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1992), pp. 203–4. 75. Zhang Chengzhi, “Three Unprinted Prefaces” [Sanpian meiyou yinzai shushang de xuyan], in Selected Literary Works of Zhang Chengzhi (volume of prose), pp. 328–29. 76. See Zhang Yiwu, “The Myth of Zhang Chengzhi: The Human Comedy of the Post-New Period” [Zhang Chengzhi shenhua: hou xinshiqi de renjian xiju], Literary Free Forum [Wenxue ziyou tan], no. 2 (1995); and “Neo-Theology: The Fear of Today” [Xin shenxue: duiyu jintian de kongju], Literary Free Forum, no. 3 (1995). 77. Zhang Chengzhi, “Words Disappear When the Ink Is Ready” [Monongshi jingwuyu], Twenty-First Century, [Ershiyi shiji ] (Hong Kong), no. 5 (1997). 78. See Zhang Chengzhi, Lands and Feelings [Dalu yu qinggan] ( Jinan: Shandong huabo chubanshe, 1998). 79. See, for example, Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 80. Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, trans. Linda Asher (New York: Grove Press, 1988), p. 15. 81. See Martin Jay: “If, as a number of observers have argued, new social movements can in large measure be understood as defensive reactions of a communicatively rationalized life-world against the incursions of an instrumentally rationalized state and market, then we can understand the socialist imaginary—even in its utopian form—as much in terms of preserving and expanding historical gains as in those of dreaming of a redeemed future.” Fin-de-Siècle Socialism (New York & London: Routledge, 1988), p. 13.

Chapter 5 1. Wang Xiaobo, “The Year of Independence” [Sanshi erli], in The Golden Age [Huangjin shidai] (Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe, 1997), p. 61. For all citations from Wang Xiaobo’s works in this chapter, I have made my own translations. 2. Bertrand Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship,” in Why I Am Not a Christian: And Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), pp. 106–7. This famous passage has been seen as Russell’s philosophical response to an inevitable universal heat death and its consequences as predicted by the second law of thermodynamics. 3. Wang Xiaobo, “The Silent Majority” [Chenmo de daoduoshu], in My Spiritual Homeland [Wode jingshen jiayuan] (Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe, 1997), p. 120. 4. Ibid., pp. 128–29. 5. Ibid., p. 130.

206

●

Notes

6. Quoted from Liu Xiaoyang, “As Long as Heaven and Earth” [Dijiu tianchang], in Romantic Knight: In Memory of Wang Xiaobo [Langman qishi: jiyi Wang Xiaobo], ed. Ai Xiaoming and Li Yinhe (Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe, 1997), p. 422. 7. Wang Yi, “Wang Xiaobo’s Approaches of Understanding the Cultural Revolution and Their Significances” [Wang Xiaobo dui wenhua dageming de renshi fangshi jiqi yiyi], in No Longer Silent: Humanity Scholars on Wang Xiaobo [Buzai chenmo: renwen xuezhe lun Wang Xiaobo] ed. Wang Yi (Beijing: Guangming ribao chubanshe, 1998), pp. 267–68. 8. Wang Xiaobo, “The Golden Age” [Huangjin shidai], in The Golden Age, pp. 45–46. 9. Ibid., pp. 49–50. 10. Ibid., p. 50. 11. This defense of natural rights had also been used by Marquis de Sade when he proclaimed that “nature” is the ultimate human reason, which reveals Sade himself as an offspring of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophy. See Maurice Blanchot’s “Sade”: “‘Nature’ is one of those words Sade, like so many eighteenth-century authors, delighted in writing. It is in the name of Nature that he wages his battle against God and against everything that God stands for, especially morality.” In Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings, trans. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 62. 12. Fredric Jameson, “Utopia, Modernism, and Death,” in The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 74. 13. Ibid., p. 86. 14. Ibid., pp. 89–90. 15. Wang Xiaobo, The Golden Age, pp. 6–7. 16. The subjectivity of Wang Xiaobo’s protagonist is formed then, ironically, in the very repression of the body under a totalitarian system as well as in the deliberate and willful acts of liberation from this repression. So the repression and the liberation are mutually constituted. Also see Karatani Kōjin: “It is through this repression, we must not forget, that the body as simply body, the ‘natural body,’ was discovered. No wonder, then, that Japanese who had become Christians in the 1890s and early 1900s soon turned to naturalism. The flesh and the sexual desire that they explored had been produced by the repression of the body.” “Shiga [Naoya] perceived that to become a subject in the Christian sense entailed violent repression. While Shiga’s literary colleagues were striving to ground their work in ‘self-consciousness,’ Shiga knew that that consciousness was at best ‘an impure mind.’” Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, trans. and ed. Brett de Barry (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 89, 91. 17. George Orwell, “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: Text, Sources, Criticism, ed. Irving Howe (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963), p. 55. 18. See also Erwin Panofsky, “Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), pp. 340–67.

Notes 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

36.

37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

●

207

Wang Xiaobo, “The Year of Independence,” p. 51. Ibid., p. 66. Ibid., p. 67. Ibid., p. 83. Ibid., p. 103. Wang Xiaobo, “Years Like Flowing Water” [Sishui liunian], in The Golden Age, p. 105. Here Wang Xiaobo deliberately sets his alter ego, Wang Er’s date of birth as 1950, one year after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, instead of 1952, his actual date of birth. Wang Xiaobo, “Years Like Flowing Water,” p. 112. Ibid., pp. 121–22. Ibid., p. 145. Ibid., p. 168. Ibid., p. 169. Ibid., pp. 169–70. Ibid., p. 170. Leo Ou-fan Lee, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973). Chen Jianhua, The Modernity of “Geming”: Textual Studies of Revolution Discourses in Modern China [“Geming” de xiandaixing: zhongguo geming huayu kaolun] (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2000). David Der-wei Wang, “Revolution Plus Love” [Geming jia lian’ai], in Ten Lectures on Modern Chinese Fiction [Xiandai zhongguo xiaoshuo shijiang] (Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe, 2003). Also, for a more recent book-length study on the subject, see Jianmei Liu’s Revolution Plus Love: Literary History, Women’s Bodies, and Thematic Repetition in Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003). Another example slightly later than the “scar literature” is Zhang Xianliang’s controversial series of works such as Half of Man Is Woman [Nanren de yiban shi nüren] in the mid-1980s. Liu Xiaofeng, “Remembering Tonya with Love” [ Jilian Dongniya], in The Fear and Love of This Generation [Zhe yidairen de pa he hai] (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1996), p. 54. Ibid., p. 59. Wang Xiaobo, “Love in the Era of Revolution” [Geming shiqi de aiqing], in The Golden Age, p. 173. Ibid. Ibid., p. 281. Ibid., p. 259. Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” in Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: The Noonday Press, 1980), pp. 103–4. Ibid., p. 102. Ibid. Wang Xiaobo, “Love in the Era of Revolution,” p. 309.

208 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

●

Notes

Ibid., p. 312. Ibid., p. 256. Ibid., pp. 256–57. See Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (New York: Vintage Books, 1981). Wang Xiaobo, “Love in the Era of Revolution,” p. 309. Ibid., p. 234. Ibid., p. 227. Ibid., pp. 316–17. Ibid., pp. 226–27. Ibid., p. 227. Ibid., p. 229. Ibid., p. 230. Ibid., p. 244. Ibid., p. 245. Ibid., p. 241. Ibid., p. 267. Of course, again, this also calls to mind Lu Xun’s “A Madman’s Diary.” Wang Xiaobo, “Love in the Era of Revolution,” p. 312. Wang Xiaobo, via Wang Er, also parodies and mocks Hegel’s teleology of reason and history at some point in the story: “Hegel once said, you must follow a stepby-step approach in order to understand an era of history, and this step-by-step approach is particularly important. But when it comes to the era of revolution, understanding is totally out of question, and the step-by-step approach can only make you feel that what is about to happen is not too abrupt … when you review a past event step by step, of course you might know what’s to happen at the next step. But if you’re experiencing a current event step by step, you will know nothing about the future … which is particularly the case in the era of revolution. Had Hegel lived step by step until 1957, he would have had no clue about why he himself would become a “rightist,” or whether in the future he would perish in exile in the wilderness of Manchuria, or if he would survive.” Ibid., pp. 252–54. Ibid., p. 318. Ibid., pp. 251–52. Ibid., pp. 288–89. Wang Xiaobo, “Preface to Trilogy of Skepticism” [Huaiyi sanbuqu zongxu], in Romantic Knight, p. 57. Wang Xiaobo, “The Silver Age” [Baiyin shidai ], in The Silver Age [Baiyin shidai ] (Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe, 1997), p. 3. Ibid., p. 45. Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., p. 41. Ibid., p. 50. Ibid., p. 51–52. Ibid., p. 53.

Notes 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85. 86.

87. 88.

89. 90.

91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

●

209

Ibid., p. 54. Wang Xiaobo, “The Future World” [Weilai shijie], in The Silver Age, p. 89. Ibid., p. 131. Ibid., p. 142. Ibid., pp. 153–54. Ibid., pp. 154–55. Here, Wang Xiaobo situates the latter two characters, Wang Er and Little Aunt, who is his jailor and lover, once again, in a parodic mouse-cat scheme of dominance/submission, as if he believes that a mouse-cat scheme between two sexes can provide the most telling prism/microcosm through which to examine the general social power relationship in such a dystopian system. Wang Xiaobo, “2015,” in The Silver Age, p. 207. Ibid., p. 208. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), pp. 217–51. Wang Xiaobo, “2015,” p. 208. Ai Xiaoming, “About The Iron Age and Other Wang Xiaobo’s Posthumous Manuscripts” [Guanyu heitie shidai ji qita xiaoshuo yigao], in The Iron Age [Heitie shitai ] (Changchun: Shidai wenyi chubanshe), p. 3. Ibid., p. 15. Dai Jinhua also comments upon the scope of Wang Xiaobo’s aesthetic ambition: “under Wang Xiaobo’s pen, gender scenes and sexual relationships are not a rebellious space or a personal, private space; on the contrary, it is a microcosm of power relations, an effective power practice … In the mode of S/M relationship, what Wang Xiaobo reveals, is less the secret of eros or unconscious than the secret of history and the game rules of power’s operation. If we can say that Wang Xiaobo’s writing has created a certain kind of ‘history’ writing, then it is not only about the history of the Cultural Revolution, or Chinese history, but also about history itself. In academic parlance, what Wang Xiaobo’s works refer to is ‘metahistory.’” See Dai Jinhua, “The Wise One Parodies” [Zhizhe xixue], in No Longer Silent, p. 146. Wang Xiaobo, “2010,” in The Iron Age, p. 105. Ibid., p. 67. Wang Xiaobo, “The Iron Age”, in The Iron Age, p. 163. Ibid., p. 164. Ibid., p. 163. Ibid., p. 167. Embedded in this writing individual is also a pursuit of “the pleasure of the text,” as Roland Barthes himself has seen in both Sade and Fourier, whom, by the way, I would view as founders of modern utopias in different ways: “The text is an object of pleasure. The bliss of the text is often stylistic: there are expressive felicities, and neither Sade nor Fourier lacks them.” See the preface to Sade/ Fourier/Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), p. 7.

210 98.

99. 100. 101.

102. 103.

●

Notes

Wang Xiaobo, “I Welcome Dawn at a Deserted Island” [Wo zai huangdaoshang yingjie liming], in The Iron Age, pp. 304–5. The episode of the young protagonist writing on a mirror with a fountain pen under the moonlight was later incorporated in one of his mature works, Hong Fu’s Night Flight [Hong Fu yeben] in The Bronze Age [Qingtong shidai] (Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe, 1997). Wang Xiaobo, “I Welcome Dawn at a Deserted Island,” p. 308. Ibid., pp. 308–9. This is a back translation from the Chinese translation originally quoted by Wang Xiaobo, in his preface to Looking for Wu Shuang [Xunzhao wushuang], in The Bronze Age, p. 473. In Rolfe Humphries’s English version, these lines are rendered as: “Now I have done my work. It will endure / I trust, beyond Jove’s anger, fire and sword, / Beyond Time’s hunger.” See Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), p. 392. This blasphemous short poem may also remind one of the French writer Georges Bataille’s erotic poems, which were written in a similar mold. The Chinese critic He Huaihong comments upon Wang Xiaobo’s creation of Wang Er: “In sum, in the ‘Wang Er’ series, we can always find a longing for uniqueness, beauty, exceptionality, miracles, and dreams of an independent and creative life. Further, not only the protagonists from the “Wang Er” series, but also the protagonists from Wang Xiaobo’s other fictional works, they all share such dreams. And characters with such qualities occupy central positions in his fiction, whether they are supposed to be situated in the present, the ancient past or the future.” See He Huaihong, “Inappropriate Man” [Buheshiyi de ren], in No Longer Silent, p. 99.

Chapter 6 1. Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (new edition) (London: Verso, 1987), p. 7. 2. Ibid., p. 8. 3. Xiaobin Yang, The Chinese Postmodern: Trauma and Irony in Chinese AvantGarde Fiction (Ann Abor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), p. 233. 4. Ibid., pp. 242–43. 5. Ibid., p. 243. 6. Ibid., p. 234. 7. While Xiaobin Yang acknowledges the trend of deconstructing the grand narrative of History implicit in the Chinese postmodernism and “experimental fiction” in the late 1980s, Jing Wang registers a different concern regarding the same phenomenon: “When the controversy over the experimentalists’ hypothetical relationship with Western postmodernism first broke out, the critics were far more concerned with catching up with the latest cultural logic in the West than with engaging themselves in the ideology of the politics of the local … For a short while in the late 1980s, almost every critical essay on the experimentalists duplicated the theoretical lingo of Western critics by harping on the theme

Notes

8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

●

211

of the deconstruction of meaning and the end of history.” “The pseudo-proposition of postmodernism in China is thus part of the syndrome of the Great Leap Forward myth.” High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng’s China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 235. Quoted from “Zhang Chengzhi: Not Like Other Writers,” in Morning Sun: Interviews with Chinese Writers of the Lost Generation, ed. Laifong Leung (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), pp. 217–28. Zhang Chengzhi, “Take the Pen as Banner,” in The Clean Spirit [Qingjie de jingshen] (revised edition) (Hefei: Anhui wenyi chubanshe, 1996), pp. 240–41. See Wang Shuo, “I Am Not the Only Flea That Is Jumping” [Bushi wo yige tiaozao zaitiao], in Ignorance Makes Bravery [Wuzhizhe wuwei] (Shenyang: Chunfeng chubanshe, 2000), pp. 110, 111. Ling Yue and Duo Duo, “My University is in the Country Fields: An Interview with Duo Duo” [Wode daxue jiushi tianye: Duo Duo fangtan lu], in Selected Poems of Duo Duo [Duo Duo shixuan] (Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe, 2005), pp. 283–84. Ibid., p. 265. Ibid., p. 268. Ibid. Ibid., p. 269. “The Public Love Letters” [Gongkai de qingshu] by Jin Fan (pseudonym of Jin Guantao) was first written in 1972 and then privately circulated and handcopied among acquaintances. It was revised and publicly published in 1980 in the literary periodical October [Shiyue], and stirred heated controversies. Liu Qingfeng, “Requestioning History” [Dui lishi de zai fawen], in The Cultural Revolution: Facts and Analyses [Wenhua dageming: shishi yu yanjiu], ed. Liu Qingfeng (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong: 1996), p. x. Xu Zidong’s recent studies in this direction can be said to be groundbreaking and extremely meaningful, as shown in his The Collective Memory to Disremember: An Interpretation of Fifty Works of Contemporary Chinese Fiction Related to the Cultural Revolution [Weile wangque de jiti jiyi: jiedu wushi pian wenge xiaoshuo] (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2000). Also see Chen Jianhua in “Postscript” [Houji ]: “I once disagreed with the saying of ‘Farewell, Revolution’ … Because I feel, if we do not know how we have been captured by ‘revolution’, it is then like leaving without saying goodbye, or saying goodbye without leaving … I also believe that currently China is still in the progress of revolution, even if not in the name of ‘revolution.’” The Modernity of “Geming”: Textual Studies of Revolution Discourses in Modern China [“Geming” de xiandaixing: zhongguo geming huayu kaolun] (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2000), p. 372. Chen Jianhua’s call for further in-depth studies on revolution and modernity in modern China merits serious attention in this context: “Emphasizing studies on ‘modernity’ and ‘revolution’ will help exorcise the simplicity and one-sidedness caused by the massive invasion of ‘postmodern’ and ‘postcolonial’ theories, and aid us to have a more sober understanding of the historical memories and living

212

●

Notes

conditions of the nation. Without further studies of ‘modernity’ and ‘revolution,’ there will be no profound understanding of the ‘postmodern.’ Here to break down the binarist mode of ‘revolution’ itself also requires breaking down the binarist thinking mode referring to ‘revolution’ versus ‘modernity.’” “About the Meaning and Usage of ‘Revolution’ and ‘Modernity’” [Guanyu “geming” he “xiandaixing” de yiyi he shiyong ], in The Modernity of “Geming,” p. 178.

Index

Ai Xiaoming, 174, 177 Aksyonov, Vasily, 24 allegory, 17, 39, 52– 4, 114, 119, 141, 171, 182, 188, 201n84 antirepresentation, 78, 80–2 Anti-Rightist campaign, 159 authenticity, 78–9, 103, 126, 169, 172

Berman, Marshall, 199n32 bildungsroman, 9–10, 17, 58, 99, 107, 114, 181, 191nn24–5 Blanchot, Maurice, 206n11 Blok, Alexander, 41 Bryusov, Valery, 42 Button, Peter, 47, 196n54

Bai Hua, 60 Balmont, Konstantin, 41 Balzac, Honoré de, 72, 78 Barthes, Roland, 209n97 bastard, 1–2, 4–5, 10, 13–14, 17, 22, 33, 64, 72, 135, 145, 169, 179, 204n69 bastard modernity, 2 cultural bastard, 1–2, 10–12, 17–18, 107, 181 See also bastardy; new man; orphan (of history) bastardy, 3–5, 11–12, 16–18, 59 Bataille, Georges, 210n102 Baudelaire, Charles, 23, 25, 30, 38–9, 41, 44–6, 48, 61, 70, 143, 194n16, 196n52 Bei Dao, 10, 19, 31, 50–2 works: “Accomplices” (Tongmou), 31; “The Answer” (Huida), 10, 50–2 See also Misty Poetry/Poet; Today Beijing School/Beijing flavor, 185 See also Lao She; Wang Shuo Benjamin, Walter, 19, 30–1, 45, 54, 173

Calinescu, Matei, 31–2 Calvino, Italo, 177 capitalism, 1–2, 7–8, 16, 45–6, 66–7, 70–1, 76–8, 91–5, 99–104, 106, 108, 124, 129–130, 133–5, 140, 171, 184, 189nn4–5, 200n77 capitalist manifesto, 83, 93–5 See also postsocialism; reform; revolution: capitalist revolution Chen Jianhua, 154, 211nn18–19 Chen Jingrong, 25, 194n16, 196n52 Chow, Rey, 12–13 Ci, Jiwei, 7–8, 192–3n38, 200n77 class struggle, 29, 58 Cold War, 11, 129 Confucianism, 3, 7, 148, 150, 190n9 cosmopolitanism, 5–7, 43, 46, 48–9 Cui Jian, 1, 11–17 songs: “Balls under the Red Flag” (Hongqi xia de dan), 1, 15–16; “It’s Not That I Don’t Understand” (Bushi wo bu mingbai), 11; “Nothing to My Name” (Yiwu suoyou), 11;

214

●

Index

Cui Jian—continued “A Piece of Red Cloth” (Yikuai hongbu), 14; “Rock ‘n’ Roll on the New Long March” (Xin changzheng lushang de yaogun), 12–13; “Solution” ( Jiejue), 13 cultural bastard. See under bastard Cultural Revolution, x, 1–2, 4–18, 20–2, 24, 26–30, 32–4, 38–40, 43, 45, 49–50, 52–8, 60–1, 64–70, 81, 83–4, 90–1, 93–104, 107–111, 113, 115, 118, 122, 129, 132–5, 137, 139–141, 143, 145–7, 149–152, 154–161, 163–6, 171, 174–5, 177, 179, 181–2, 184, 186–8, 191n26, 192n33, 193nn38–39, 200n73, 200n77, 204n69, 209n90 Dai Jinhua, 209n90 decadence, 21, 27, 29, 31–2, 38, 42–3, 51, 54, 146 Deng Xiaoping, 101, 183–4, 189n4 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 31 Duo Duo, ix, 1, 17, 19–61, 64, 97, 107, 138, 163, 182, 184–6, 192n33 poems: “ADDIO (Farewell)” (Zaihui), 1, 26–7, 35, 55; “Ah, the Sun” (A, taiyang) 32; “At Parting” (Gaobie), 34–5; “Blessings” (Zhufu), 29–31; “The Captured Savage Hearts Forever Turn toward the Sun” (Beifu de yeman de xin yongyuan xiangzhuo taiyang), 61; “Doctor Zhivago” (Riwage yisheng), 41–3, 45; “Dusk” (Huanghun) (“Following the green ray of the sun”), 37–8; “Dusk” (Huanghun) (“Loneliness is secretly awakening”), 37–8; “Fifteen Years Old” (Shiwu sui), 55–6; “Handicraft”

(Shouyi), 38–40, 45, 48–9; “Honeyweek” (Mizhou), 33; “In One Story There Is All His Past” (Yige gushi zhong you ta quanbu de guoqu), 59; “Instructions” ( Jiaohui), 50–5; “Kaleidoscope” (Wanxiang), 43–4; “Looking Out from Death” (Cong siwang de fangxiang kan), 59; “The Making of Language Comes from the Kitchen” (Yuyan de zhizuo laizi chufang), 59; “Milestones” (Licheng), 58–9; “Night” (Ye) (“In the night full of symbols”), 35; “Night” (Ye) (“It once lingered in a place of misery”), 36; “Northern Nights” (Beifang de ye), 19; “Northern Voices” (Beifang de shengyin), 56–7; “Poet” (Shiren), 36–8; “Reform” (Gaizao), 57–8; “Sad Marina” (Beiai de Malinna) 41, 45, 48–9; “Summer” (Xia), 33; “To the Sun” (Zhi taiyang), 33–4; “The Travels of Marguerite with Me” (Mageli he wo de lüxing ), 44–50; “When the People Stand Up from the Hard Cheese” (Dang renmin cong ganlao shang zhanqi), 27–9; “The Winter Night Woman” (Dongye nüren ), 60; “Wishful Thinking Is the Master of Reality” (Wangxiang shi zhenshi de zhuren), 59; “Untitled” (Wuti) (“All over the befuddled land”), 28–9; “Untitled” (Wuti) (“The blood of one class has drained away”), 28–9, 58; “Untitled” (Wuti ) (“The past sinks into silence without any reason”), 34 dystopia, 17–18, 61, 140, 146, 164–7, 169–70, 173, 175–7, 188, 197n78

Index Eagleton, Terry, 105 educated youth, 10, 24–5, 60, 108–10, 114, 118, 120, 137, 177, 141, 191n26 sent-down youth, 150, 194n19 See also Red Guard(s); reeducation; rustication movement; sent-down movement educated-youth literature, 97, 109, 138, 140–1, 184–5 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 196n49 Enlightenment, 2, 4, 8, 52, 54, 116, 143, 155, 163, 189n5, 206n11 Escher, M. C., 177 Esenin, Sergei, 42 experimental fiction, 64–5, 81, 138, 184–5, 210n7 Fanon, Frantz, 8, 201n4 Fourier, Charles, 209n97 Freud, Sigmund, 80, 147, 159, 162 Fukuyama, Francis, 21 Futurism, 21

●

215

master of the present, 67, 94 and philosophy, 72–3 playing master, 64, 79, 82, 94, 99, 101, 200n77, 200–1n84 and Red Guard, 66, 94, 101, 106 and reform/reformer, 66–7, 71, 77, 94–5, 101 and riffraff, 67, 71 and sentimentality, 66–79, 81, 95 vanguard, 67, 71, 82, 94 Huxley, Aldous, 166 internationalism, 7 Ionesco, Eugene, 24 Jahriyya, 106, 123–4, 126–7, 129, 132 Jameson, Fredric, 17, 102, 130, 135, 143–6, 197n78 Jay, Martin, 135, 205n79, 205n81 Jiang Wen, 14 Jones, Andrew F., 192n34 Joyce, James, ix June Fourth, 19–20, 22, 129 See also Tiananmen (incident)

Grass, Günter, 138, 140, 154, 163 Great Leap Forward, 8, 21, 152, 157, 210n7 Gu Cheng, 19 Guevara, Che, 2 Guo Lusheng (Shi Zhi), 24

Kafka, Franz, 84, 170 Karatani, Ko¯ jin, 206n16 Kong Jiesheng,155 Kontje, Todd, 201n17 Kundera, Milan, 136

He Huaihong, 210n103 Hegel, G. W. F., 3, 8, 20, 117, 125, 135, 181, 208n65 hooligan, 63, 65, 67, 68–9, 72, 84, 101, 106, 185 hooligan literature, 64, 185 hooligan metanarrative, 103 hooligan writer, 17, 82, 84 hooliganism, 64–5, 67, 72–4, 94 and Mao, 64, 67 master mentality, 70, 75, 88, 94 master of the future, 66 master of the nation, 70, 88, 92–4

Lacan, Jacques, 47 Lao She, 185 Lee, Gregory, 22–4, 54 Lee, Leo Ou-fan, 154 Levenson, Joseph R., 5–7 Li Jiefei, and Zhang Ling, 119 Li Zehou, 189n3 Liao Yiwu, 11 liberalism, 18 Liu, Jianmei, 207n35 Liu, Kang, 202n21 Liu Qingfeng (Jin Fan), 187, 211n16 Liu Xiaofeng, 155

216

●

Index

Liu, Xinmin, 204n69 Liu Xinwu, 4, 10 Liu Zaifu, 116, 189n3 Long March, 12–13, 118, 120, 122 Lu Xun, ix, 2–5, 23–4, 36, 84, 113, 130–2, 204n69 works: “A Madman’s Diary” (Kuangren riji), 2, 23–4, 36, 84, 173, 208n63; “My Old Home” (Guxiang) 113, 202n15; “On the Power of Mara Poetry” (Moluo shili shuo), 130–2, 04n69; “Preface to Call to Arms” (Nahan zixu), 130; Wild Grass (Yecao), ix, 130, 204n69 Lukács, Georg, 63, 135 Mandelstam, Osip, 28 Mang Ke, 24 Mao Zedong, 1–9, 12–16, 20–1, 25, 28–9, 32–4, 39, 50, 57–8, 60–1, 64, 67, 76, 94, 110, 113, 133, 153, 166, 182–4, 186, 188, 189nn3–4, 190n9, 192–3n38, 193n39, 194n14, 204n69 “Marginal Notes to: Friedrich Paulsen, A System of Ethics,” 3, 190n7 “On New Democracy,” 3 “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan,” 67, 195n24 Mao Zedong Thought, 22, 25, 60, 175 Maoism, 3–4, 6–9, 17, 22, 29, 57–8, 67, 70, 117, 135, 146 voluntarism, 3. 17, 60 Marx, Karl, 6, 54, 63, 66, 93, 103, 105 The Communist Manifesto, 63, 93, 103, 194n14, 199n32 Marxism, 6–8, 20–1, 105, 135, 189n5 May Fourth, 2–5, 20, 113, 127, 154, 203 metafiction, 96, 101, 169, 173–4, 176, 178

metahistory, 173–6, 209n90 metaindividual, 173–8 Millet, Jean-François, 194–5n19 Milosz, Czeslaw, 160 Misty Poetry/Poet, 10, 19, 50, 185 See also Today Mo Yan, 145 modernism, 4, 17, 19, 22, 25, 39, 41, 48, 50, 58, 61, 64, 182 modernity, 2–9, 17–18, 20, 22, 31–2, 38, 50, 52, 58, 61, 64, 106, 108, 130, 132–5, 154, 171, 182–4, 188, 189n5, 190–1n24, 211n19 Moretti, Franco, 181–2 national culture, 3, 9 national form, 9, 18, 105, 107, 114, 128–30, 132, 135–6, 182, 191n25, 203n58 national literature, 106, 126, 130, 135 national subject, 3, 8–9, 40, 127, 132, 135, 204n71 nationalism, 3, 6–7, 191n24, 204n69 new man, 2–4, 8–9, 17, 39, 70–1, 103, 113, 181 socialist new man, 4, 8–9, 70, 113 urban new man, 103 See also bastard; cultural bastard; orphan (of history) New Period, 4, 16, 65, 131, 166, 183 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 3, 61 orphan (of history), 2, 4–5, 10, 17, 29–30, 38, 40, 49, 107, 181 See also bastard; cultural bastard; new man Orwell, George, 139–40, 146, 166, 175, 182 Ostrovsky, Nikolai, 155, 200n73 Ovid, 178, 210n101 Panofsky, Erwin, 206n18 Pasternak, Boris, 42 Paulsen, Friedrich, 3

Index Platonov, Andrei, 143, 197n78 postmodern/postmodernism/ postmodernity, 4, 64, 102, 113, 133, 171, 182–4, 210n7, 211n19 postsocialism, 2, 13–16, 18, 108, 129, 133, 140, 166, 171, 183, 189n4 Pound, Ezra, 58 Proust, Marcel, 147 Red Guard(s), 9–10, 12, 15–17, 21, 24, 26, 29, 60, 66–7, 90, 93–4, 101, 105–6, 108–11, 114, 116–18, 120, 132–3, 185, 192n33, 201n7 reeducation, 9, 24, 106, 108, 110–11, 113 reform, 16, 63–8, 77–9, 84, 93–5, 101–4, 129, 132, 182, 189n4 language reform, 57–8 thought reform, 170–1 revolution, 5, 7–10, 15, 17, 19–23, 27–9, 31–2, 38–9, 42–3, 49, 54, 61, 64, 66–7, 72, 93, 95, 99, 102–3, 105, 111, 120, 122, 133–5, 140–1, 143, 153–65, 169–71, 175, 189n3, 199n32, 208n65, 211nn18–19 capitalist revolution, 2, 17, 96, 182–4 Chinese revolution, 2, 5, 7, 23, 38 continuous revolution, 21, 29, 58 French Revolution, 20, 32 revolution plus love, 154–5, 207n35 Russian Revolution, 20, 23, 38, 40–3 world revolution/global revolution, 6–7, 9, 20–1, 24, 70 See also Cultural Revolution Rimbaud, Arthur, 23, 25, 36, 59 roots-seeking literature, 64–5, 81, 138, 184–5 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 145

●

217

Russell, Bertrand, 137, 205n2 rustication movement, 9, 60, 106, 109, 120, 129, 191n26 sent-down movement, 9, 113, 146, 191n26, 192n33 See also educated youth; reeducation Sade, Marquis de, 206n11, 209n97 Salinger, J. D., 24, 98 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 24 scar literature, 4, 90, 97, 109, 138, 140, 155, 184, 207n36 seer, 22–3, 36, 163 seer-poet, 17, 23–4, 38 self-representation, 78, 81–2 sent-down movement. See under rustication movement sent-down youth. See under educated youth Shan Shilian, 190n9 socialism, 39, 66–7, 78, 80, 91, 103–6, 129, 134–5, 182, 184, 189n5 socialist realism, 80, 171 Song Yongyi, 11 Sontag, Susan, 158 subjectivity, 2–4, 8–9, 21–2, 30–1, 35, 38, 46–8, 50, 52–5, 58, 107–8, 113–18, 120–4, 127–8, 132, 134–5, 166, 169, 182, 202n21, 203n58, 206n16 Swift, Jonathan, 159 teleology, 3, 6–7, 9, 16, 18, 27–8, 49, 51, 67, 140, 181, 183–4, 204n69, 208n65 Thought Emancipation movement, 187 Tiananmen (incident), 12, 19–20, 50, 95, 129, 183 See also June Fourth Today (journal and literary school), 10, 60, 185, 191n32 totality, 135 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 38–44, 195n45

218

●

Index

underground, 9–10, 17, 22, 31–2, 36, 39, 45 underground literature/poetry, 10–11, 24, 97, 187, 191–2n32 utopia, 2, 13, 14, 21, 29, 40, 43, 47–50, 54–5, 58, 59, 60–1, 125, 127, 129, 140, 143–7, 156, 161, 163, 165, 169, 175–8, 184, 188, 197n78, 205n81, 209n97 Van Crevel, Maghiel, 47, 49, 55–7, 194n14 Voynich, Ethel Lilian, 155, 200n73 Wakeman, Frederic, 190n9 Wang, David Der-wei, 154 Wang, Jing, 65, 210n7 Wang Shuo, ix, 17, 63–104, 106–7, 138, 151, 155, 182, 184–5, 198n6, 200–1n84 works: “Emerging from the Sea” (Fuchu haimian), 66, 69–72; “The Flight Attendant” (Kongzhong xiaojie), 68–9, 77, 83; “Half Is Flame, Half Is Sea” (Yiban shi huoyan, yiban shi haishui), 72–4; Never Take Me as Human (Qianwan bieba wo dangren), 83, 199n4; “Nothing Real or Serious” (Yidian zhengjing meiyou), 63, 79, 82–3; “The Playing Masters” (Wanzhu), 79–81; The Playing Masters trilogy, 78–83, 85, 200–1n84; Playing for Thrills (Wande jiushi xintiao), 64, 83–97, 101, 103, 151; “The Rubber Man” (Xiangpi ren), 74–7; “Vicious Animals” (Dongwu xiongmeng), 95–104, 155; “You Are Not a Vulgar Person” (Ni bushi yige suren), 79, 82–3

Wang Xiaobo, 17–18, 137–79, 182, 184–5, 187, 206n16, 207n25, 208n65, 209n83, 209n90, 210n103 works: The Bronze Age (Qingtong shidai), 139, 173–4, 178; “The Future World” (Weilai shijie), 166, 169–72; The Golden Age (Huangjin shidai ), 139, 141, 147, 156, 166, 173; “The Golden Age,” 141–7; 154, 156, 160–1, 169; Hong Fu’s Night Flight (Hong Fu yeben), 210n98; “I Welcome Dawn at a Deserted Island” (Wo zai huangdaoshang yingjie liming), 177–8; The Iron Age (Heitie shidai ), 139, 173–7; “The Iron Age,” 176–7; Looking for Wu Shuang (Xunzhao Wu Shuang), 178; “Love in the Era of Revolution” (Geming shiqi de aiqing), 154–65, 169–71; “The Silent Majority” (Chenmo de daduoshu) 138–9; The Silver Age (Baiyin shidai), 139, 164–173; “The Silver Age,” 166–71; “2010,” 174–6; “2015,” 166, 172–4; “The Year of Independence” (Sanshi erli), 137, 147–50, 153–4, 156, 161, 169, 178–9; “Years Like Flowing Water” (Sishui liunian), 147, 149–154, 161, 169 Wang Xiaoming, 200n77 Wang Yi, 140 Wei Hui, 145 world literature, 4, 129 Wu Liang, 202n29 Xu, Jian, 127, 203n58, 204n69 Xu Zidong, 211n18

Index Yang Jian, 11, 194n5 Yang Lian, 19 Yang Mo, 155, 200n73 Yang, Xiaobin, 183–4, 189n5, 210n7 Yevtushenko, Yevgeny, 24 Yi Qun, 24, 194n13 youth culture/counterculture, 2, 14, 98 Yue Zhong (Gen Zi), 24 Zamyatin, Yevgeny, 166 Zha, Jianying, 200n66 Zhang Chengzhi, ix, 17–18, 105–36, 138, 182, 184–5, 191n5, 201n4, 201n7, 202n15, 204n69 works: The Abandoned Road of Heroes (Huangwu yingxiong lu), 130; “Aidless Thoughts” (Wuyuan de sixiang), 130; “The Black Steed” (Hei junma), 111–14, 117, 124; The Clean Spirit (Qingjie de jingshen), 130; “The Desert of Belles-Lettres” (Meiwen de shamo), 120–3; The Golden Grassland ( Jin caodi ), 118, 120, 122, 125, 133; The Golden Pasture ( Jin muchang), 118–120, 122, 125, 135; Heart History (Xinling shi), 123–130; “History and Heart History” (Lishi yu xinshi), 123; Lands and Feelings (Dalu yu qinggan), 134–5;

●

219

“A Letter to Master Lu Xun” (Zhi xiansheng shu), 130, 202n15; “The Mode of Heart: Preface to Rashaha” [Xinling moshi: reshiha’er xu], 204n73; “The Name Inscribed on the Heart” (Kezai xinshang de mingzi ), 110–11, 201n7; “The Northern Rivers” (Beifang de he), 111, 114–18, 120, 124, 136; The Old Bridge (Laoqiao), 105, 117; The Red Guard Era (in Japanese) (Koweibei no jidai ), 132–3; “A Summary at the End of the Year” [Suimo zongjie], 202n30; “Take the Pen as Banner” (Yibi weiqi), 130–2; “Three Unprinted Prefaces” [Sanpian meiyou yinzai shushang de xuyan], 205n75; “To Be the Son of the People” (Zuo renmin zhizi), 109; “Why Herdsmen Sing about ‘Mother’” (Qishou wenshenme gechang muqin), 109–10; “Words Disappear When the Ink Is Ready” (Monongshi jingwuyu), 134 Zhang Xian, 155 Zhang Xianliang, 207n36 Zhang Yiwu, 133 Zhong Ming, 191n32