Contemporary
Chinese Literature
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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™
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PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the
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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 …
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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”
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
(…)
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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
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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
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“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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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—
(…)
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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
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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.”
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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
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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
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“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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
(…)
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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,
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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.
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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
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“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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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?”
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“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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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(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
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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,
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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,
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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
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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).
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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
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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
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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,
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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“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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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“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.
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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“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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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,
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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, Kōjin, 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