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Overview
Western observers who were impressed by the bravery of the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square—and stunned at the harshness of their suppression—will learn from this book how that political movement led to changes in cultural conditions and production. Attending to all the major elements of this vast nation’s high and low culture at the end of a landmark decade, Huot’s discussion ranges from the cinematic works of Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, and others to emerging musical forms such as rock, punk, and rap. Other topics include television, theater, and avant-garde art, the new electronic media, and subversive trends in both literature and the visual arts.
With a comprehensive index of artists and works, as well as a glossary of Chinese words, China’s New Cultural Scene will enlighten students of Chinese culture and general readers interested in contemporary Asia.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822396314 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/16/2000 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Lexile: | 1300L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Claire Huot is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and East Asian Studies at the University of Montreal.
Read an Excerpt
China's New Cultural Scene
A Handbook of Changes
By Claire Huot
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2000 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9631-4
CHAPTER 1
Literary Experiments
Six Files
Setting right what has been spoiled by the father. Hexagram 18, "Work on what has been spoiled," Yijing
Literature is the least transitive medium. It is basically untranslatable because it is an assemblage of the words of a particular language, as spoken and read by people in a particular culture. (Even when the writers are following foreign models, such as Beckett, Borges, Duras, Kafka, and Robbe-Grillet) Chinese literature is a particularly indigenous, context-specific enterprise. Translations of Chinese literary works are of course possible (and they are increasingly available), but without linguistic commentary they don't yield much more than a storyline with a certain unfamiliar air. The nonreader of Chinese will necessarily turn the works into some form of out-of-the language interpretation, something akin to what Jameson called a "national allegory" reading. This opening chapter is to be taken as a linguistic commentary on some Chinese literary works that have rather slim storylines but heavy textuality.
Such literature is not a popular cultural phenomenon. Its production is a most private affair: between one writer to one reader, from one individual to other individuals. It is not only individualistic but elitist too, like it or not. Not everyone reads, and those who do don't necessarily want to read convoluted twists on their familiar words. Thus the reader of literary experiments is an intellectual who has a feel for words at large but who cannot be personified or clearly identified. She or he remains ex-centric and anonymous. My commentary attempts to highlight some of the possible positions of this reader.
I will give few details about the six authors' circumstances, because (literary) experiments are not translations of a single person's life, nor of his or her culture. The selections I have made, however, are guided by a desire to show various individual options which, taken together, constitute a certain sampling of literature. These files are to be read like documents found in a filing cabinet, where many more are waiting to be read.
The files are presented in a loose chronological order (Ma Yuan is the old hand, a sincere hippie, while Xu Kun is the newcomer, a mocking yuppie), but that's of little importance, since my aim is not to move historically from one school to another and since the works themselves shun realistic conventions of storytelling and of historical time. No cause and no crescendo will be found in the following pages: all cases are extremely different and point to different problematics, which are all crucial, whether they are writing another culture (Ma Yuan), writing today's culture (Xu Kun), writing a (woman's) point of view (Chen Ran), rewriting history etymologically (Ge Fei), personalizing the collective (Can Xue), or collectivizing the personal (Yu Hua).
Literature experiments with culture between the lines and is a refraction of it. The works under scrutiny here are like subtexts of what will be discussed in the following chapters. They render new, in their own idiosyncratic ways, language and representation. Words are questioned, discourses are doubted and rerouted. Referentiality is skewed and no assertions are made, except ironically. Reality is also a word, and it has different meanings for, say, Ma Yuan, who writes unreal things about the forsaken; Ge Fei, who demonstrates the unreal of the accepted concept of reality; or Xu Kun, who derealizes the idioms of today by repeating them out of sync.
The serious, deep question "why" leads nowhere. It is better to scrutinize the ordering of words.
Reality Bites: Ma Yuan
"Now I must give you this fictitious ending. I'll tell it to you under my breath. Here lies all my sorrow and satisfaction" ("Fabrication," 141). Ma Yuan writes in earnest. He is a fiction writer (or was, in the eighties), and he experienced extraordinary, hard-to-believe things while living in Tibet, between 1982 and 1989. Born in 1953, he is not Tibetan but of Han origin, and from the north of China, near Shenyang in Jinzhou.
Ma contends he is not a Hemingway type of writer; that is, one who contents himself with just imagining things and who can thus ease his pent-up feelings of sadness (103). Nor is he one to let his imagination roam like the proverbial "celestial horse wandering across the sky," which would be the typical and traditional Han Chinese way. But Ma needs the horse and the sky as prerequisites. Since leaving Tibet in 1989, he has written very little. He has been working since 1992 on a film project "Xuduo zhong shengyin — Zhongguo wenxuemeng" (Many different voices–China's literary dream), among other things. It consists of interviews with at least one hundred Chinese writers, from Ba Jin to Ge Fei. It's a serious project that attempts to trace this century's living writers and their work.
Ma Yuan's stories seem to be the far-fetched products of a fertile mind. His experience in a leper colony in the short story "Fabrication" ("Xu-gou") (1986) is a fine example. In "Fabrication," we are told repeatedly from the start that we are reading a "fiction." "Ma Yuan" is the name of the narrator; he is a writer who concocts the tale, who boasts about his literary masterpieces, offers a sensational denouement, and the ensuing "satisfaction."
But "Ma Yuan" might also be someone who actually lived the leper colony experience of the story. I say "might" because, if the ending is fictitious, that is, if it undoes the true narrative, then "Ma Yuan" never lived through this trauma. However, if the ending is just a fictional denouement for the sake of fiction, then chances are that "Ma Yuan" did love a leprous woman, did befriend a Loba sculptor, did become the old Guo-mindang soldier's confidant, and so on. And this presents us with a cruel reality, thus the ensuing "sorrow."
Ma Yuan has been hailed as the pioneer of experimental writing in whose footsteps have followed Yu Hua, Ge Fei, and many others. I suspect, however, that he might only accidentally be part of a literary trend. For Ma Yuan is not a trendsetter. He is, rather, very much a bohemian, for whom the expression "accidental tourist" might be more appropriate, since he stayed in Tibet for a long time by chance and to this day has no fixed address.
His short stories all take place in Tibet, where he was assigned to work as a journalist in 1982. Tibet overwhelmed him, but also bored him. Writing became a means if not of overcoming then at least of coping with both states of mind. His writing took the form of a personal diary, of a travelogue, of a newsletter to friends, as one can see from "More ways than one to make a kite" ("Die zhiyao de san zhong fangfa"). "But I have my own way to kill the boredom. Reading novels is one of them.... Or I draw the curtains (my own spare bed-sheet, that white-blue checkered one you all remember), shut the door, turn on the desk lamp, sit at my desk with the three drawers in a horizontal row, and make up stories for you" (246-47).
The aside to the reader is not necessarily a postmodern, Calvino-like game. Nor is giving the narrator his own name a willful crisscrossing of meganarrators with nanonarrators, an endless ludic mise-en-abyme. Yet the first sentence of Ma's short story "Fabrication" caused a great sensation when it was published: "I am that Han guy called Ma Yuan, I write novels" (101). This flouting of a basic convention of fiction propelled Ma Yuan's work into the category of experimental writing and opened up metafiction in China. Most of his works also have a narrator called Ma Yuan, which refers to Ma Yuan, the experiencing subject, the narrator, and the actual writer. As Wu Liang notes, the ambivalent reality effect relies heavily on "Ma Yuan."
This "Ma Yuan" the subject is a tall, bearded man (the real Ma Yuan is also tall and bearded) who carries a knapsack, a camera, a map, a pen, and sometimes a harmonica, and who encounters strange people in Tibet. These people —beggars, prostitutes, ex-highwaymen, lepers, and strays from the Guomindang (KMT) — all tell him their incredible stories. He, in turn, befriends them, and, if they are women, he makes love to them. He is a benevolent tourist. The writer side of "Ma Yuan" transcribes the stories and adds a little spice; for example, something to at least end those everlasting stories. He also comments on his own status as a writer of fiction, of what is called "creative writing."
"Ma Yuan" mocks himself constantly, either for his art or for his ways. He is never as sexually potent as the natives. He is the logical one, who asks questions where there are no answers to be had. He represents the predictability and pragmaticism (amiableness and hypocrisy) of the Han Chinese. He is a typical Han Chinese in Tibet, a subject who does not acknowledge that he is in culture shock. Ma Yuan recovers from this drawback in his art by putting his craft (his literary artfulness) to the fore: educated in the Han language and literature and also versed in foreign literature, he can remap things with both accuracy and imagination. In jest, he compares his ability to write (in Chinese characters) to the deities' faculty of creation. The epigraph he gives to "Fabrication" is a comment on the deities' styles. It reads that deities, forever self-confident, actually all narrate genesis in the same way: they all repeat the same fiction. Singular things may have occurred, but they are all recast in one mold.
The epigraph has an ambiguous status. If Ma Yuan the writer is like a god, then his narratives should also be uniformly the same. That is both true and false. Actually, Ma Yuan is extremely conscious of language, of the fact that he is transcribing events (and nonevents) into the Han language. His lexicon, unlike that of the complacent gods, is that of doubt. "What is left ruling the whole narrated world [of Ma Yuan] is the uncertainty principle.... So the true-false switch is subjective, depending on the acceptance of the receiver." I would add that Ma realizes the effects and the limitations of the Han language on Tibetan reality. He warns his readers, probably Han Chinese like himself, that he will use sparingly verbs of action such as "to occur, to take place" 'fasheng' and privilege verbs such as "to be, to have" 'you' along with the tentative "possibly" 'keneng' to yield a nonauthoritative, conditional mode. He also calls attention to his avoidance of terms used by anthropologists and adventurers referring to the discovery and observation of so-called natives.
The narrator figure, "Ma Yuan" is forever conscious that he does not speak the natives' language and so must rely on his own culture to understand them. He makes mistakes —"mistake" is a term highly recurrent in Ma's works (there is even a short story entitled "Mistakes" ["Cuowu"], 1987). His mistakes are caused by his desire to understand, to penetrate mysteries: he makes presumptions and asks too many questions. He relies too heavily on analytical logic and on his sense of sight. The fact that he wishes to take photographs is indicative of these traits. The following passage neatly exemplifies his mode of inquiry and interpretation:
"Hold the child," I said. "I'll take a picture of you." "I don't take pictures. I don't understand pictures." I took a photo album from my knapsack and showed her a color photograph of me. She said without flinching, "That's you." I explained to her that I could preserve her on a thing like that. She shook her head. She said, "I understand. I don't take pictures. I don't understand pictures." Her words were contradictory, but I sort of guessed what she was saying. What she was saying was that she knew (understood) what pictures were, but she didn't understand how pictures could move people onto a thing (paper) like that. She didn't want people to take her picture. I remember reading in a book that people who had not been exposed to modern civilization thought photography was a kind of soul-snatching; that their soul would be captured in the little box of the camera. I'd like this detail to appear in my next masterpiece. It seemed that she must have seen people taking pictures or shooting a film or a video. Time would show that I had made another error of presumption. I forgot that people here had seen movies. Photography was by no means beyond their understanding. When she said she didn't understand, she didn't want her picture taken, there were other reasons. But more of that later. ("Fabrication," 110, with modifications)
"Ma Yuan" is by turns an obnoxious tourist who wants to take pictures of every sensational thing or person, an understanding interpreter of the natives' peculiarities, and a dupe. He tells us at the very end of the story—when the tourist "Ma Yuan" attempts once again to photograph his prize trophy, the leper woman —that she didn't want to be photographed because of her devastated looks. "Suddenly I realized why she didn't want to be photographed; she knew that with this disease she was no longer good-looking. After all, she was a woman" ("Fabrication," 142). In the end, if there are realizations or understandings —can the comment "After all, she was a woman" be termed a "discovery"? They are limited to "Ma Yuan," both subject and interpreter. Because the reality out there, the people out there — the forsaken 'qi'er' — remain inaccessible ("Xugou," 88).
"Ma Yuan" gets to photograph only the usual tourist fare: women walking around sacred trees, a sculptor creating Buddhist statues. He returns from his stint in the leper colony with a statue in his backpack and this "sensational story" with a "knock-out subject matter" ("Fabrication," 102). But in confessing his fallibility, his inability to transcend his culture and improve anything out there, he makes his narration more effective. "I was nothing more than a Lhasa resident who wrote novels, inspired from time to time with excessively romantic notions.... No one could be more useless than I was" ("Fabrication," 137). And at the end of the story he reverts to an authoritative, rational voice —he asks for the date, he declares the old kmt officer "mad," he says he "loves" the (leper) woman's body. Especially given the array of sources for his tale — archeological, geological, medical, scientific literature — these features of the story defeat its "natural" purpose, which is to convince the reader that only a madman would have lived through this. When "Ma Yuan" claims that he is not crazy, although the story's facts point to the contrary (he claims he is institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital in Beijing), we tend to believe him. He may not be in such an institution at all (this may just be poetic license —"Ma Yuan" being so intimately connected to Ma Yuan that he could easily play such tricks), and he may be feebly taking a "rational" stance to end this damned story of the condemned. The dumping ground in Tibet that the Han Chinese use for its contagious, unwanted ones connects metonymically, therefore, to a very real situation. "They may share the same planet as we do, but our worlds don't connect — they are the forsaken" ("Xugou," 88).
Ma Yuan seems to have problems ending his narratives precisely because they are all interconnected fragments of life and heavily intra-textualized, like one never-ending story. "Fabrication" ends with the total disappearance of the leper colony in a mudslide — a deus ex ma-china finale — but that same village reappears, verbatim, as an epigraph to another short story, "Heart-to-heart tale" ("Qingshu," 323) : "The leper colony had no wall or fence of any kind. No patient could be prevented from leaving, and no outsider hindered from entering" ("Fabrication," 106). In other stories such as "An old Himalayan song" ("Ximalaya guge"), Ma starts by locating the place (in Tibet, naturally) where the story will occur, lest one should doubt the existence of such a place later on. In "A wandering spirit" ("Youshen"), the narrator says he won't deal much with one particular character's personality because he's already written about it elsewhere (275). Indeed, Ma's stories are closest to stories told to a live public with whom he would play tongue-in-cheek games and for whom uniqueness would be irrelevant: "Any of my readers who are interested can have a look at the Spring Wind literary collection, 1986. Remember my name is Ma Yuan — that's my magnum opus" ("A Wandering Spirit," 275). These authorial cross-references to the world out there undo the fictional self-containment.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from China's New Cultural Scene by Claire Huot. Copyright © 2000 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction
1 Literary Experiments: Six Files
2 Away from Literature I: Words Turned On
3 Away from Literature II: Words Acted Out
4 Colorful Fold in the Landscape: Fifth Generation Filmakers and Roots Searches
5 China's Avant-Garde Art: Differences in the Family
6 Rock Music from Mao to Nirvana: the West is the Best
Conclusion: A World Wide Web of Words
Glossary of Chinese Terms
Notes
Index