'My Country and My People' Lin Yu Tang

March 11, 2015, 11:45 pm

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China is the greatest mystifying and stupefying fact in the modern world.

Written in 1935, Lin’s was the first major work by a Chinese to introduce China and her culture to the West. Lin was born in China, but was educated in the West, in the US and Europe. He was a key figure in the New Culture Movement of the 1920s, but after 1935 spent most of his life in the US. He was the compiler of a Chinese - English dictionary which is still one of the most widely used today, and the inventor of the first Chinese language typewriter – a kind of Renaissance Man. He is ideally suited, then, as a kind of insider-outsider to write about his own culture.

The Chinese observer has a distinct advantage over the foreign observer, for he is a Chinese, and as a Chinese he not only sees with his mind but he also feels with his heart… he writes of his mission to observe and explain his birth culture to his adopted culture.

Lin’s book covers subjects as diverse as the role of women, the Chinese mind, the importance of calligraphy as a way to understand Chinese culture; he gives potted histories of Chinese literature and painting; he teases out patterns of circularity and repetition within and across the various Dynasties; he discusses the importance for the Chinese of their houses and gardens, tea culture and The Golden Mean. In fact, the topics he chooses to enlarge upon are an indication of what is important for an understanding of the Chinese, as it might not have occurred to a Western commentator to give such weight to calligraphy, for example.

Lin is very clear sighted about the strengths and weaknesses of Chinese culture, especially the great influence of Confucianism, of which he is rightly highly critical. In this, of course, he follows other writers of the New Culture Movement such as Lu Xun and Lao She.

Of the Confucian ideal of the gentleman ruler  (junzi 君子),ruling by example through correct morality, Lin notes: it is a queer irony of fate that the good old school teacher Confucius should ever be called a political thinker, and that his moral molly-coddle stuff should ever be honored with the name of a political theory. He notes the difference between form and substance, or appearance and reality, one of the key tensions in Chinese life, between a political theory that emphasizes virtue and morality, and yet which gives rise to the most consistently corrupt and incompetent governments the world has ever seen, in any and all periods of history.  

Of the five relationships as defined by Confucius - ruler to ruled, father to son, husband to wife, elder brother to younger brother, friend to friend- Lin notes the omission of the relationship between stranger and stranger, and calls this a great and catastrophic omission, and one that partly accounts for the lack of a civic consciousness in Chinese life, the complete indifference to others outside ones own family circle, the lack of manners, the lack of what he calls a Samaritan spirit, and the all pervasive presence of nepotism and venality in public life. Another reason for the lack of public spirit is the Confucian emphasis on the family, of which he notes: family consciousness degenerates into a form of magnified selfishness at the cost of social integrity.

Lin is very good indeed on the special features of the language, and how these features restrict the ability of the Chinese to express themselves clearly and indeed to think clearly:one sometimes wonders whether the Chinese people as a whole would be so docile and so respectful to their superiors had they spoken an inflectional language and consequently used an alphabetic language.This is absolutely right, in my view. In a language that has no word for ‘no’, how do you refuse, or disagree with someone?

Mind is determined by language, and of the Chinese mind Lin notes the absence of real logic as Westerners understand it, and its replacement by, on the one hand, ‘common sense’, which he lauds, and on the other, a kind of Taoist epistemology which holds truth to be something above words, and impossible to be expressed by them. (Consider the opening lines of the Tao Te Ching: The Way that can be spoken of/ Is not the constant Way/The name that can be named/Is not the constant name.)  Lin writes: Anything like cogent reasoning is unknown in Chinese literature for the Chinese inherently disbelieve in it. Consequently, no dialectic has been evolved and the scientific treatise as literary form is unknown.

Lin is a wonderful guide to Chinese literature, and he presents a wealth of poems, excerpts from the histories, essayists and novelists from all dynasties. Among my favourites is this example of  the Chinese method of classification and naming, Lin is talking about the names given to the different styles of writing in Classical criticism:

the method of watching a fire across the river (detachment of style)

the method of dragon-flies skimming the water surface (lightness of touch)

the method of painting a dragon and dotting its eyes (bringing out the salient points)

the method of releasing a captive before capturing him (playing about a subject)

the method of showing the dragons head without its tail (freedom of movement and waywardness of thought)

the method of a sharp precipice overhanging a ten-thousand-feet ravine (abruptness of ending) (our cliff-hanger, I suppose)

the method of letting blood by one needle prick (direct epigrammatic jibe)

the method of going straight into the fray with one knife (direct opening)

the method of announcing a campaign on the east and marching to the west (surprise attack)

the method of side-stabs and flanking attacks (light raillery)

the method of light mist hanging over a grey lake (mellow and toned down style)

the method of layers of clouds and hilltops (accumulation)

the method of throwing lighted firecrackers at a horse's buttocks (final stab towards conclusion)

Much of what Lin writes is extraordinarily perceptive and confirms my own experience. He is at his best when he is explaining facts and teasing out their ramifications, for example the dialectic between Confucianism and the legalism of Han Feizi; or the importance of Face in the interactions that go to make up a culture and a society, or the special characteristics of the language. He is at his worst, however, when he is lauding those aspects of Chinese culture that he considers virtues, for example the emphasis he places on reasonableness and common sense. ("I have lived here for nigh on 20 years, and I’ve seen precious little evidence of common sense anywhere during that time", mutters the Old China Hand.) Lin seems to be unaware that common sense is as much a relative cultural construct as anything, and that it is completely incompatible with the notion of Face. When he is in this mode, Lin is no more than your usual Chinese chauvinist, although a highly articulate and learned one.

Lin’s book is dated; it contains many references to race, and the purity of Han blood or the necessity for its reinvigoration; and in this Lin shows how he is bounded by the limitations of the time of writing. ‘Race’ and ‘blood’ are common tropes of the sociology of the 1930s, and Lin spent much of the 30s in Germany, where this kind of writing was infected with notions of racial purity. He is also backward in his discussion of the role and nature of women in Chinese life. His solution for China’s ills is to shoot the officials, and he ends the book with an image of the Great Executioner cleansing out the stables of government. Well, Chiang Kai Shek, and the Japanese, and Mao, and Deng Xiao Ping tried that in one form or another; today’s leaders are also showing great enthusiasm for shooting officials, yet the fundamental problems Lin highlights in his book still persist. Perhaps Lin is merely being ironic, and rather too sanguine. Perhaps only when Confucianism has been eradicated and the Chinese language has evolved subject/object pronoun differences and created a word for ‘No’ will her problems – and her unique culture – be eliminated.

However, Lin has an engaging style, an energy and idiosyncrasy of vision (he is adept at the long sarcastic, rant) and can turn out pithy and memorable epigrams that extend beyond their immediate context:

Graft, or ‘squeeze’, may be a public vice, but it is always a family virtue

All Chinese are Confucianists when successful and Taoists when they are failures.

Buddhism is Taoism a little touched in its wits.

The Chinese are by nature greater Taoists than they are by culture Confucianists.

When people persist in talking of moral reforms as a solution for political evils, it is a sign of the puerility of their thinking and their inability to grasp the political problems as political problems.

Until everybody loses his face in this country, China will not become a truly democratic country.

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'Mr Selden’s Map of China' Timothy Brook

April 5, 2015, 6:13 am

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All Isles and Continents (which are indeed but greater Isles) are so seated, that there is none, but that, from some shore of it, another may be discovered.

John Selden

Historie of Tithes

In 2009 an ancient Chinese map came to light in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Timothy Brook, a well known authority on Ming China, was called in to investigate its provenance and history. Brook noticed that unlike other maps from Ming China, which usually focus on the land mass of China to the exclusion of the sea, this map depicted the South China Sea and the coast lines which surround it: the center of the map was not land, but the void of the empty sea. Brook also noticed the astonishing accuracy of the distribution and shape of the many islands in the area, and noticed also a fine tracery of lines connecting the islands to the mainland. Brook realized that what he was looking at was a map of trade routes connecting Ming China with the markets of Japan, the Dutch East Indies and the Spanish Philippines. The only thing known for sure about the map was that it had been bequeathed to the Bodleian by John Selden, who specifically mentioned the map in his will as having been given to him by an English commander who had obtained it ‘there’. The map was the only object in his vast bequest of documents to be named and described in detail in the will.

From this observation and slenderest of evidences, and undaunted by the lack of any other information about the map, Brook sets out to discover who made it, when, and how it came to be in Mr. Selden’s possession. Along the way he spins a tale that connects East to West and sheds light on the dawn of the modern global age. He unearths many interesting things, and gives to the reader a wealth of fascinating information concerning Mr. Selden, maps, and the interaction between Europe and China in the seventeenth century.

oooOOOooo

Mr Selden was the most important jurist of the age, at least in England. Bosom friend of Ben Jonson, student of James Ussher, Selden was also one of the most distinguished Orientalists of the age, able to read Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Syriac. We learn many other things about him. For example, it was Selden, in dialogue with the great Dutch jurist de Groot, who hammered out the first version of the international law of the sea. In 1609 de Groot published a book arguing that the sea was mare liberum, open to all, and that no nation could claim jurisdiction over it. Selden in 1635 published a riposte to de Groot, arguing that the sea was mare clausum and that nations could lay claim to it. The importance of this debate for the legality of trade (and the illegality of piracy) hardly needs emphasizing, and it was as important then as it is now.

Brook shows how both jurists’ positions were the result of specific economic and historical circumstances. De Groot was arguing for the Dutch East India company, who were trying to break into the market for spices and exotic woods in what later became the Dutch East Indies, a market that was exclusively claimed by the Portuguese. To argue that the seas were free was to argue that the Portuguese had no legal claim to their monopoly, and that the Dutch could therefore compete. Selden, on the other hand was arguing for the British government of Charles I, who was contesting lucrative fishing rights over the North Sea, rights which were also claimed by the Dutch. Selden, who had been in and out of prison on various political charges connected with the struggle between the Stuart dynasty and Parliament, was released from prison on condition that he could provide a legal argument for Charles’s claims. His book The Closed Sea was the result. Brook comments:

‘The Free Sea’ and ‘The Closed Sea’… were both lawyers briefs written for their clients… their difference had mostly to do with the interests they served rather than with the law each sought to uphold.

Although he shies away from coming to the conclusion that questions of legality are always determined by those who have the power to enforce it, that legality per se is simply a cloak to cover the exercise of power, he does quote de Groot’s famous maxim: Jurists who use their proficiency in the law to please those in power usually are deceived or themselves deceive.Given Selden’s interest in other cultures and his professional involvement in the law of the sea, it’s not surprising that a map from China which puts the sea at the center became one of the most valued items in his library.

oooOOOooo

Maps are at the center of this book. Brook gives a potted history of cartography, both European and Chinese. He is very good indeed on the problems of projecting a round surface onto a flat sheet of paper, and the various solutions to this problem that have been found throughout history; his technical descriptions are clear enough for the layperson to grasp without dumbing down the subject. Brook situates Mr. Selden’s map within the context of other maps from the period, including those published by Hondius in 1608, Purchas in 1625 and John Speed in 1627, some of the first writers and cartographers to depict China for Western eyes, and he draws out the associations between Selden and these other men. Brook gives detailed descriptions of these and other maps to highlight their similarities and differences and to arrive at conclusions about their origins; these descriptions are beautifully complemented by the lavish full-color illustrations and the diagrams included in the text. The book is beautifully produced, and for anyone who loves poring over old maps and documents, reading it is highly pleasurable.

We learn about rutters – pilot’s logbooks with compass directions and timings, used in the Medieval period in the absence of charts to help pilots navigate- and their relationships to maps. Rutters were used by the Dutch, the British, the Portuguese, and by the Chinese, and one of the most interesting aspects of the book is the space Brook gives to an important Chinese navigational guide compiled in 1617 by Zhang Xie from oral and other sources now lost. Zhang’s Study of the Eastern and Western Seas is an important addition to our understanding of early navigation techniques and trade routes in the South China Sea, and complements  the information found in an earlier Chinese rutter known as the Laud Rutter after Archbishop Laud – another associate of Selden’s – who donated it to the Bodleian. This Chinese rutter details the routes taken by the great Chinese navigator Zheng He in the fifteenth century. Brook profitably draws out the connections between the Laud Rutter, Zhang Xie’s compendium, and the dim tracery of sea routes on the Selden map. A fortuitous discovery leads him to the conclusion that the cartographer of the map used these sea routes as a starting point for his drawing of the coastlines, not the other way round, and this in part accounts for the amazing accuracy of Mr. Selden’s map.

oooOOOooo

China during the seventeenth century was, for Western eyes, a site of exotic  mystery. Westerners who went there had the impression that they were ‘opening up’ the country, ‘civilizing’ it, bringing it onto the world stage. Traditionally, Western historiography has confirmed this Eurocentric view. More accurate, however, is the view that puts China at the center of the world economy during this period. Ming Dynasty China drew in silver from Japan and from across the Pacific. This hunger for silver drove subsidiary trade among the Japanese, the Chinese diaspora among the archipelagos of the South China Sea, and early Europeans such as John Saris, who commanded the eighth voyage of the East India Company to the far east, and the man who is the most likely candidate for the ‘commander’ mentioned in Mr. Selden’s will. The increasing presence of Europeans in this theatre of operations had a huge impact on Europe and her culture, but less so on Chinese history and culture. China was the center, and Europe the periphery, in spite of Europeans’ assertions to the contrary. Whatever knowledge the Europeans possessed, the Chinese had it too; whatever technology the Europeans brought with them to China, they found Chinese versions of the same, often at a higher stage of development, including maps, rutters, compasses, atlases and compendia of knowledge.

It is Timothy Brook himself who has arguably done the most to correct our view of the relative importance of China and Europe during the early modern period, with four magisterial studies of the Ming. Brook as an academic historian combines detailed readings of source texts that owe much to the methods of the New Historicists, and the longue duree approach to economic history espoused by the Annales School: think Stephen Greenblatt meets Fernand Braudel and you get a fair idea of Brook’s approach to doing academic history. Here, in Mr Selden’s Map of China, he puts his unparalleled knowledge of Ming China to good use, focusing generally on the way China impacted Europe rather than on how Europe impacted China; and more especially on how new discoveries about China were changing European habits of thought.

As evidence of other ways of being and thinking came more insistently into view, some realized that the old ways were not the only ways and indeed might have to be revised or superseded. To be alive in John Selden’s day was to live through this shift in paradigms.

Two examples will suffice. Brook describes how James Ussher – Mr. Selden’s teacher of Hebrew – dated the creation of the world to 23^rdOctober 4004 BC by delving into ancient Hebrew texts. The discovery by the next generation of scholars of the great age of Chinese culture would invalidate this exercise in pious futility. Brook comments: The Biblical account of the creation of the world was only one casualty of the global enlargement of knowledge that inspired some thinkers to pry up the theological floorboards of European thought.  

The second example is the fascinating story of Michael Shen Fuzong, the first Chinese to ever visit Europe, a convert to Catholicism, and a protégé of the Jesuit missionary Philippe Couplet. Shen was presented at the court of King Louis XIV in 1684, and then later at the court of King James II in 1685, had his portrait painted by Kneller and was for a while the wonder of Europe. While in England he worked with Thomas Hyde, the Keeper of the Bodleian Library, and the man who had entered Mr. Selden’s map into the Library catalogue. Hyde was something of an enthusiast for Oriental languages, and for six weeks in 1685, Shen was his teacher. Shen and Hyde studied Mr. Selden’s map together, annotating it: Shen’s Romanisations of Chinese place names followed by Hyde’s Latin translations are still visible in the margins of the map. Shen and Hyde poring over maps and Chinese books together in the Library at Oxford is an enduring image of a fleeting historical moment when the encounter between East and West was fruitful and non-invasive. As Brook notes:

The nations and peoples of the world differed, but not in essentials. Saris could go to them to trade without conquest, Selden to delve into their documents in search of the common wellsprings of enlightened humanity. It would be another century before this sense of equality gave way to condescension and the East India Company concentrated its efforts on stripping the world of its assets and other peoples of their dignity.

There are countless tales of European travellers to China and the wonders they found there, but the tale of a Chinese traveller to Europe and the work he did there to increase European understanding of China is surely just as fascinating, and Brook does well to give this space.

oooOOOooo

Mr Selden’s Map of China is Timothy Brook’s second go at writing popular history, after his earlier prize winning Vermeer’s Hat. Vermeer’s Hat had its academic longeurs as a work of popular history written for the layperson; Mr Selden’s Map has no such, and is arguably a better exemplar of the genre. This is partly due to  the emphasis Brook places on why such an old map of the South China Sea and all its islands is important to our present historical moment, when the nations around that sea bitterly contest possession of some of those islands. It is also partly due to Brook’s sensible decision to foreground himself in the text. He includes personal anecdotes about his experiences in China as a historian there, and peoples his texts with pen portraits of his colleagues and his mentor the great Sinologist Joseph Needham. The book is as much a detective story as a work of history; Brook describes his elation when he discovers new evidence,  recounts his confusion when new evidence doesn’t fit his emerging picture of the background to the map, and his consternation when a particular line of enquiry reaches a dead end. This has the effect of drawing the reader in, making us part of the process of doing history; he walks with us along the fine line between speculation, imaginative reconstruction, and what can be established as historical fact. We learn as much here about how historians do history and of the importance of that history for our own times as we learn about the actual history of the map itself. This is surely how popular history should be written.

We never do learn, though, who made the map, or when, or how it came into Mr. Selden’s possession, so at the center of this book, then, just as at the center of Mr. Selden’s map of China, is an empty space, a void. But this doesn’t matter, because, like Brook, we are richer in our knowledge at the end than when we started.

This piece first appeared in Kyoto Journal 80 and is reposted here with kind permission.

'Kazuo Ohno’s World From Without and Within' Kazuo Ohno and Yoshito Ohno

April 29, 2015, 7:56 pm

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This is a compilation of two pieces: Workshop Words by Kazuo (Ohno pere) (1997) and Food for the Soul by Yoshito (Ohno fils) (1999) both appearing in English for the first time. The book is richly supplemented with stunning black and white photographs of Kazuo in performance and in the studio, and both Ohnos dancing together, many appearing here for the first time in book form: an absolute feast for lovers of dance and butoh.

Food for the Soul is a comprehensive analysis of the various elements of Kazuo Ohno’s art. The first part covers the dancing body: the face, the mouth, the voice, the eye, the ear, the hand, the back. The second part covers various aspects of performance such as: falling, standing, makeup, photographic subjects, twosome and so on.

On watching him perform this feat (falling) one has the distinct impression that an indissoluble bond beckons him to the dimension that unfolds “below the knees”. One senses that a close affinity exists with the lateral space “down there” In falling, he makes the transition from his ordinary, everyday world, where he stands firmly on his feet, to another “limitless” dimension.

Yoshito is writing about his father in particular but one can also read his remarks as a kind of manifesto of what butoh is: for butoh itself may be said to take place in a ‘limitless dimension below the knees.’

Yoshito’s unique position as both the son of one of the founding creators of butoh, and as a founding creator himself, allows him to open up fort the interested reader unique perspectives onto several aspects of butoh practice. Here he is, for example, on the vexed question of the relationship between choreography and improvisation, which is one of the central issues of butoh:

A dance borne of the moment is never static, it doesn’t end at a particular point, for, in being true to its spontaneous nature, it always needs to explore a little further. A ready–made dance, on the other hand, leaves me feeling limited by its built-in constraints.

Against this, however, must be set the knowledge that both Hijikata and the Ohnos rehearsed obsessively, and that in the last decade or so of his own life, Hijikata did not dance himself, but focused more on choreography, creating several of Ohnos most famous pieces.

Yoshito also gives a biography of his father, and a memoir of his own childhood and adolescence as the third major force in the creation of butoh. We are given glimpses of Hijikata, Mishima, Shibusawa, and the photographer Eikoh Hosoe, and other luminaries of the Japanese post-war avant-garde, and we learn more about Kazuo as husband, father, and human being.

It’s somewhat disappointing then, in the second half of the book to read Kazuo’s own workshop words. There is no doubt that in performance, the power of Kazuo Ohno’s art is overwhelming. However, the 154 aphorisms which make up Workshop Words reveal Ohno’s rather strange world view, a world view that has much of the Japanese kawaii  in it, and less of the darker European influences that make Hijikata’s utterances in language more compelling. Yoshito himself comes across as a much more sophisticated thinker about butoh, and a much better articulator in language of what butoh is. Kazuo’s workshop words are disappointingly banal, cutesy, and somewhat silly, one feels. But then, maybe it’s more the case that butoh itself is an art form which expresses the inexpressible beyond the reach of language, and that Ohno pere is able to express himself better through gestures than through words.

Unlike everyday speech, dance has the potential to release us from the chains of language and its specific meanings.

Kazuo Ohno

'Fortress Besieged' Qian Zhongshu

January 30, 2014, 9:02 pm

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Hell is a Chinese family, and the Devil is a Chinese woman.

Apocryphal saying

If this book had been written by a foreigner, the writer would have been accused of racism at worst, or cultural chauvinism at least. In reviewing it, I am conscious that I will lay myself open to the same charges because Qian Zhongshu sees many of the same features and voices many of the same criticisms that foreigners do about Chinese culture. Published in 1947 at the height of the civil war in China, Qian Zhongshu’s classic Chinese novel is an extended examination of Chinese mores and culture, in which that culture is subjected to a savage critique which is at once bitterly accurate and very funny.

After a few years in Europe studying, Fang Hung-chien returns home to China with a fake phd diploma in his pocket, no money and little prospects. It is 1937, the year the of the Japanese invasion of China, and Hung-chien’s homeland is in turmoil. After a spell in Shanghai making new friends and reuniting with old ones, he is offered a job in a new university in the interior. He travels there with some of his friends who have also been offered jobs there. Following a grueling journey, he finds the job was not everything he had believed it to be, and after his friend and colleague is fired following a scandal, he is bounced rather unwillingly into a marriage with another colleague. They leave the university and return to Shanghai to Hung-chien’s family to settle into a routine of family life of constant bickering between in-laws. This structure allows Qian Zhongshu to cast his satirical eye over several essential facets of Chinese life: the institution of marriage, family relationships and structures, the life of the literati/scholar, which has always been a staple of Chinese literature, the nature of the Chinese language. The many scenes of social interaction allow him to examine the way social relationships are formed and maintained, while the travel scenes provide an opportunity to look at life outside the enclaves of civilization in the cities, affording the reader a glimpse of the vast ignorance and poverty of the rural population.

Nastiness

The title of the novel refers to a French proverb which is the subject of a discussion among Hung-chien and his friends on the subject of marriage. Marriage is like a fortress besieged: those inside are trying to get out, while those outside are trying to get in. But the title has wider ramifications than just marriage, referring to the position of the individual within Chinese society in which the individual is crushed by the weight of 5000 years of culture, in which everything is ruled by precedent and tradition, in which the individual is imprisoned by formulas laid out for life choices and social interaction. This, of course, is a common view of China in the eyes of the Westerner, but here it is a Chinese (in fact two Chinese, Qian Zhongshu and his protagonist) who is articulating this view. “I still remember that time Chu Shen-ming or Miss Su said something about a ‘fortress besieged’. Lately I’ve been having that feeling about everything in life,” remarks Hung-chien to a friend. Most of us are not aware of the ideology restricting the choices and modes of being open to us; it takes a foreign eye (or a very great writer) to see what is invisible to the native. Hung-chien’s status as a returning student is important in this regard. The protagonist with Western experience allows the author to foreground a certain aspect of Chinese life which remains invisible to the Chinese, but which is often noted by Western observers, namely, nastiness. Nastiness appears in the novel in various forms, most obviously in the revolting descriptions of bodily fluids of which the book is full -the shitting and vomiting and spitting is relentless – but also in the deliberate nastiness that characterises most forms of social interaction depicted.

Two Chinese encounter one another in the park. One calls out to the other, “Eh, Ah Chow, long time no see! You are getting fatter and fatter! You must be getting richer and richer!” Greetings often take the form of extremely personal remarks broadcast out loud to the public at large in this way. Chinese social situations usually take the form of the group picking on one person and making fun of him, pointing out his thinning hair, his old shoes, his lack of children, his henpecking wife. Everyone laughs uproariously as witticism follows witticism – with the loudest and most appreciative laughter sycophantically reserved for the witticism of the most senior person present rather than the funniest remark. Meanwhile the victim, often compelled to stand while the others bully him, nods and smiles bashfully. It appears good natured fun only, but there is an undercurrent of real victimization: the struggle session is never far away from these kinds of social encounters. Episodes like these, which I have personally witnessed time and time again, are viciously lampooned in the novel’s scenes of social interactions, in which the characters engage in a form of small talk that appears to consist of non-sequitur and mundane generalisations but is in actuality full of one-upmanship, sycophancy, backstabbing, teasing and goading: they were talking as though expounding the truths of Zen with subtle jabs hidden underneath , which was enough to send one’s head reeling just listening to it…

One  of the virtues most esteemed by the Chinese is that of sincerity, a virtue that Westerners are more indifferent to because Western social interaction is not so two-faced as Chinese interaction is. Sincerity in Chinese culture is so highly prized because it is so rarely encountered, while the obverse is true of Western culture. This nasty two-facedness appears often in the novel, in scenes in which characters suddenly reveal their true selves, or in moments where Hung-chien suddenly realises that he has been the victim of double dealing.

This is most prominent in the scenes describing his marriage. Hung-chien marries Miss Sun, who up until this time has been merely a secondary character, a teaching assistant who accompanies Hung-chien and the others on their grueling journey to the interior, who remains in the background, blushing, bashful, and rather helpless. However, after her marriage she is revealed as a champion manipulator, one of the most memorable passive-aggressives in literature, rivaling only Martha Varden for her ability to reduce her husband to speechless anguish. This marriage has been called Nabokovian by Western critics of the novel, who seek thereby to cast it in the light of a distorted exaggeration, a kind of marital grand guignol. But it is actually an accurate, clinically realistic portrayal of most Chinese marriages I know of. There are moments during the courtship when Hung-chien has a suspicion of his future wife’s true character, but he dismisses it: Hung-chien’s suspicion flitted by without stopping, like a swallow over water. Miss Sun not only sought his advice, but was ready to follow his every word as well. This pleased him so much, it left no room in his mind for suspicion. And after the marriage, when Miss Sun has secured her man, she tells him: “After trying every ‘trick and scheme’ to get myself married to a husband like you, you think I wouldn’t look after him carefully? ….”

The Constraints of Language

It’s not that Chinese are incapable of anything other than nastiness – there are incidents of real kindness and genuinely sincere friendship in the novel. Hung-chien’s only true friend becomes his friend only after they have been bitter enemies and jealous rivals for the same woman, a woman who refuses both of them to marry someone more eligible. However, there is only a narrow range of formulas available for people to use as they navigate the minefields of social interaction. These formulas are so entrenched that they make genuine expression of self extremely problematic. Questions of status, seniority, precedence and family connections are more important than a true, equal meeting of individual selves. Part of the strength of these restrictive formulas lies in the very language the characters use:  characters (and narrator) are restricted by their language. Again, this judgment might be taken as simply a Westerner’s biased reading of Chinese culture. Consider for example this extract from Backhouse and Bland’s wildly popular Annals and Memoirs of the Court of Peking (1914), in which the authors are describing the language used by the annalists of the official histories: [they] all use the same stock phrases, metaphors and arguments derived one and all from the classical authors of antiquity…. Later they say: we find the same set phrases, the same artificial gestures and the ready made emotions….events become stereotyped in fixed grooves and rigid patterns… But in this novel, again, it is a Chinese making the same observation about his own culture.

Hung-chien reflects that it is impossible for him to truly communicate his feelings because the very words and phrases he is using are so old, so set, that they are incapable of expressing the newness and uniqueness of his individual experience:

I just wish I could invent a fresh and fleeting expression that only I could say, and only you could hear, so that after I’ve spoken it and you’ve heard it, it would vanish and in the past, present or future there would never be another man using the same expression to another woman. I’m so sorry that to you who are without equal in the whole world, I can only use clichés which have been worked to death for thousands of years to express my feelings. …

At another point in the novel, when Hung-chien is trying to write a letter to the woman he is courting, he reflects: he wished he could have written it in English, since the tone of a letter in literary style was so impersonal, while the tone of a letter in the colloquial style too easily turned into obnoxious familiarity. The range of choices, of voices, open to him when he writes in Chinese, and the range of interpretations of his writing, is highly restricted.

Qian Zhongshu is conscious as a writer of the great weight of tradition and encrusted meaning lying behind every word he uses, and he laments that fact that despite its great age, Chinese grammar is still immature and incapable of making clear distinctions, again, another criticism of Chinese laid against it by foreigners.

Kao Sung-nien was an old science scholar. The word’ old’ here is quite bothersome. It could describe science or it could just as well be describing a scientist. Unfortunately there is a world of difference between a scientist and science. A scientist is like wine. The older he gets, the more valuable he is, while science is like a woman. When she gets old she’s worthless.  Once Mandarin grammar reaches its full development, the time will come when ‘old science scholar’ can be clearly distinguished from ‘scholar of old science’, or one will say ‘science old scholar’ or ‘old science scholar’. But as it’s still too early for that yet, a general term of reference will have to do in the mean time.

Other modern Chinese writers have felt the same constraints about their medium, which is why, possibly, Qian Zhongshu’s great contemporary Zhang Ailing wrote her masterpiece The Rice Sprout Song in English rather than Chinese. Qian Zhongshu’s solution to the problem of the dead weight of Chinese is to enliven his text with quotations from Western sources and balance these with quotations from Chinese sources, so that the text is melangeof Western languages and references and Chinese references to classical sources. One would of course expect this, given that most of the novel’s characters are educated Chinese of the scholar class. But then Qian Zhongshu goes even further by parodying his solution. One of the female characters at a polite social gathering makes Hung-chien nauseous with her strong body odor for which there is an elegant expression in classical Chinese as well as an idiom in Latin, both using the goat as a comparison: yun-ti and olet hircum (smelling like a goat). Another character is a Chinese who loves to throw American idioms into his discourse; there is also a parody of a Chinese poet who wants to write in the style of Eliot’s Wasteland, with fragments of quotations put together to form a new poem (with footnotes, of course): “There’s not one word without a source”  remarks Hung-chien on reading it. Qian Zhongshu is aware that despite his efforts he cannot inject new life into old Chinese: what looks like an original solution is simply an old trick in a new guise: “It’s almost like what poets call ‘scholars poetry’. Isn’t that style neo classicism ?” (which it might be in Chinese, but in Western literature, it’s Modernism.) Qian Zhongshu underlies the irony of his failed attempts to invigorate Chinese by infusing it with Western languages by having one of his characters remark: “For some reason all the good things from abroad always go out of whack when they come to China.”  Which is a common complaint amongst ex pats in China, but one that is being made in this case, again, by a Chinese.

oooOOOooo

The novel is as much about Hung-chien’s awakening to the true character of Chinese life as it is an indictment and satire on it. After watching his wife interacting (nastily) with the wives of his two brothers in the family home, he suddenly realizes: he’d been too accustomed to his family all along to realize how much enmity and meanness lay underneath…“What I can’t figure out is why someone like you, who grew up in a big family, know nothing about all the scheming and plotting that go on there” Hung-chien’s wife tells him after a particular nasty exchange with her sister-in-laws. It’s this series of realizations that provide the character with growth and change manifested as an increasing sense of loneliness, an awareness of self separated off from those around him but always under unremitting pressure to submit to the rigid formulas of social exchange, a fortress besieged.

Man was created to be lonely. Each one has to keep to himself and never have anything to do with anyone else to his dying day.

'The French Revolution: A History' Thomas Carlyle

November 24, 2013, 8:48 pm

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In the opening chapter of his ground-defining book The Symbolist Movement in Literature, the Edwardian critic and poet Arthur Symonds quotes this dictum from Carlyle’s history of the French Revolution: It is in and through Symbols that man, consciously or unconsciously, lives, works and has his being. First published in 1837 – only 40 years after the events it depicts-  and around the same time that Ranke and Comte were trying to establish history as a more scientific discipline, with an underlying theory and a rigorous methodology, Carlyle’s History occupies an ambiguous position in historiography today.

On the one hand, Carlyle’s work is still cited as a source in the most up-to-date studies of the Revolution. It’s a must-go-to text for students of the period. On the other, there are those who argue that Carlyle’s methods and project are not empirical enough; that his high-flown, epic, symbolic style undermines any scientific contribution the work might make for an objective understanding of the Revolution. Modern academic historians have done much to lay open the economic causes of the Revolution, studying tax returns and harvest yields etc, while Marxists have given us a framework for understanding the underlying political and structural causes. Against this kind of academic, objective approach, Carlyle’s work reads more naively, more like a novel, or an epic of Revolution, and less like a serious scientific study.

But to hold this view is to miss the point Carlyle is trying to make about history, and to be blind to the very sophisticated awareness the work displays of the difficulties inherent in doing history. And not to read Carlyle is to miss out on the pleasure of encountering one of the greatest works in English of the 19^th century.

The French Revolution may be regarded as a prototype of Symbolist literature, a non-fictional Symbolist work avant la lettre. This Symbolism is present in the work in at least two ways: in the theory of history that underpins the text, and in the text itself, the historiography.

1. A symbolic theory of history

Men do what they were wont to do, and have immense irresolution and inertia; they obey him who has the symbols that claim obedience.

As Symonds noted, Carlyle sees man’s propensity to create and interpret symbols and signs as the defining essence of man and fact of history: Man, by nature of him, is definable as ‘an incarnated word’, or in other words, man is a symbol-making creature. His allegiance to or rejection of symbols is held by Carlyle to be a chief driving force of history because it’s man’s adherence to or rejection of symbols that provides the strongest and highest motivation for his actions: Of man's whole terrestrial possessions and attainments, unspeakably the noblest are his Symbols, divine or divine-seeming, under which he marches and fights, with victorious assurance, in this real life-battle: what we can call his Realised Ideals. Carlyle sees history as the operation of various forces, not economic or political as modern academic historians do, but symbolic forces. This is how, for example, Carlyle explains the astonishing victories of the French Revolutionary army against much stronger, much better supplied and organized forces of the Coalition; that the French were fighting for a symbol, for their Revolution, and that it was the motivating power of this symbol, greater than the motivating power of the enemy’s symbols – Monarchy, Order, Conservatism-  which led them to victory.

Carlyle describes the whole movement of the Revolution, from the early revolt against feudalism in the late 1780s to its capture by the reactionary and largely bourgeois Directory in 1795, in terms of a gradual movement between various symbols, a movement away from the symbols of Aristocracy of Feudal Parchment to an Aristocracy of the Moneybag. He comments:  Fleur de lys had become an insupportably bad marching banner, and needed to be torn and trampled, but Moneybag of Mammon (for that, in these times, is what the respectable Republic for the Middle Classes will signify) is a still worse, while it lasts, and he calls this last symbol: the worst and basest of all banners, and symbols of dominion among men.

At the same time Carlyle is aware of the internal growth and decay of symbols, both as entities in themselves, and of the waxing and waning power of symbols to motivate men and hold society together. Of the former he writes: The Truth that was yesterday a restless problem, has today grown a Belief burning to be uttered; on the morrow contradiction has exasperated it into mad Fanaticism, obstruction has dulled it into sick Inertness; it is sinking towards Silence, of satisfaction or of resignation, marking stages in a symbol’s evolution from an intellectual problem – a truth-, to a belief, to a fanaticism, to an inertness, to a silence. Of the latter he writes how symbols can be exhausted, becoming in effect empty lies or shams, which need to be overthrown. Indeed, he sees this overthrowing of empty symbols and the creation of new ones as another motivating factor in history generally, and in the French Revolution in particular, contrasting the lies of religion under the Old Regime, for example,  with the reality of hunger:Behold, ye appear to us to be altogether a Lie. Yet our Life is not a Lie, yet our Hunger and Misery is not a Lie! Symbols can also be emptied of their mysterious content and power to become mere ‘Formulas’, by which Carlyle means abstract ideas such as Constitution, Justice and so on. Carlyle sees history as the interaction between these formulas and reality: What strength, were it only of inertia, there is in established Formulas, what weakness in nascent Realities. In the text, Robespierre is the representative of such formulas, while Danton is the embodiment of reality: with what terror of feminine hatred the poor seagreen Formula looked at the monstrous colossal Reality, and grew greener to behold him. Symbols for Carlyle, then, can also operate in the realm of history as shams, lies, formulas.

Carlyle’s view of the importance of symbols in the processes of history is a corollary of his wider theory of history. Carlyle sees the universe as a chthonic ocean of forces, innumerable and ineluctable, internal and external.Our whole Universe is but an infinite Complex of Forces; thousandfold, from Gravitation up to Thought and Will. Every event in history is the result of an action, and an action is the product and expression of exerted Force. Similarly, each person is a nexus of such forces, so that when men come together to make history, as they did in the Constituent Assembly and the National Convention, the number of forces and the interactions between these forces become necessarily so complex that no objective science can hope to fathom them:

Every reunion of men, is it not, as we often say, a reunion of incalculable Influences; every unit of it a microcosm of Influences, of which how shall Science calculate or Prophesy! Science, which cannot, with all its calculuses, differential, integral and of variations, calculate the Problem of the Three gravitating Bodies, ought to hold her peace here, and say only: In this National Convention there are Seven Hundred and Forty Nine very singular Bodies, that gravitate and do much else, who probably in an amazing manner will work the appointment of Heaven.

For Carlyle, the enormous complexities of history are not something which a scientific, empirical method alone can deal with; they require, in addition, comprehension by a symbolic, historical imagination.

Space precludes us here from entering into a fuller discussion of the interaction between Carlyle’s view of history and his historical methods with those trends that were developing concurrently in Germany under von Ranke. We can say, however, that Carlyle, a student of German culture, was aware of them, and that his symbolic view of history, when contrasted with von Ranke’s more empirical view, is not so naïve as it sounds. Carlyle’s work, like von Ranke’s, was grounded in close readings of contemporary documents, including letters, diaries, contemporary newspaper articles, memoires – including those of Goethe’s, whom he quotes at length- , as well as trial transcripts, minutes of the proceedings of the Jacobin Club and the other various assemblies that met during the course of the Revolution.

Having looked at Carlyle’s symbolic theory of history, we turn now to symbolism in the text itself.

2. Symbolic historiography

Man is a born idol worshipper, sight worshipper.

In his text Carlyle uses various key words to stand for a particular nexus of historical forces. Von Ranke warned against this because he thought that the use of such key terms –leading ideas -  circumscribed the historical reality behind them; he believed that the complexities of an historical event cannot be characterized by the recurring use of only one term or idea. But Carlyle, by giving these words capital letters, in effect turns them into symbols, naming them, and thereby allowing the reader, a symbol loving creature, to see them. It is thus, however, that History and indeed all human Speech and Reason does yet, what Father Adam began life by doing: strive to name the Things it sees of Nature’s producing – often helplessly enough.

For example, the origin of the Revolution he sees as arising from the interaction of the two forces which he names ‘Prurience’, and ‘Effervescence’. The pre-Revolutionary scene was ripe with ‘Prurience’ – a word that in the 1830s meant a mental itching or craving, as well as propensity towards lewdness. He traces how this manifested itself both in the corrosive ideas of the Philosophes and Enlightenment thought; in the increased focus on pleasure in the life of the court, which created an unbridgeable gulf between rulers and ruled as well as putting an unsustainable strain on the nation’s finances; and in the scandal sheets and erotica which circulated freely in Paris in the late 18^th century, engravings featuring the Queen in lesbian orgies and so on. Acting as spark to this gunpowder is ‘Effervescence’, which he describes as the propensity in the Gallic character for the sudden eruption, for the passionate gesture, for noise and fuliginous fury. Carlyle ascribes the various revolts that happened throughout France in the terms of ‘Effervescence’, noting, in his account of the sugar riots in Paris in the summer of 1792, for example, how the secret courses of civic business and existence effervesce and effloresce, in this manner, as a concrete Phenomenon to the eye. In the text, ‘Prurience’ and ‘Effervescence’ become symbols of two forces whose interaction was the tinder and spark of the Revolution.

Symbolism in the discourse also appears in a number a recurring devices, such as the extended and repeated similes or metaphors Carlyle employs for the Revolution itself: a sand palace disappearing into a whirlwind, a fireship sinking with all hands. Another device is the repeated epithet,  which accompanies the names of the key figures of the Revolution -like Homer’s heroes - to remind the reader who they are: Robespierre is always seagreen, Huguenin ever has the tocsin in his heart, Maillard is always the famed leader of the Menads…

Carlyle knows that the reader is a person in history just as much under the influence of symbols as the personages in his history of the Revolution are. Man, with his singular imaginative faculties, can do little or nothing without signs, which is one of the reasons why he employs a symbolic, epic, novelistic mode of transmission of events, a mode that is intensely visual. Throughout the text there is a discourse field of words associated with light: vision, seeing, focus, shining as well as their antonyms: murk, shadow, obscurity. This discourse field forms the underlying metaphor of the whole work. Visualisation as a narrative strategy is constantly foregrounded and brought to the reader’s attention: In every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing. …. Let the reader here in this sick room of Louis, endeavor to look with the mind too. At other times, Carlyle will select one of the participants in a historical event, and use him as a focaliser for the reader to visualize what is going on:Let the Reader look with the eyes of Valet Clery, through these glass doors, where also the Municipality watches……Visualisation itself is even symbolized in the text. Carlyle’s term for the Court of the Ancien Regime is L’Oeil de Boeuf, which is a symbol of an eye, as well as a description of the shape of the window in the chamber in Versailles where the Court met.

This visual aspect of the work also applies to the wonderful verbal portraits Carlyle gives of the various personages of the Revolution; and it’s probably best to just give a selection here:

Mirabeau

Shining though such soil and tarnish, and now victorious effulgent and oftenest struggling, eclipsed, the light of genius itself is in this man, which was never yet base and hateful, but at worst was lamentable and loveable with pity.

Anacharsis Clootz

Him mark, judicious Reader. … hot metal, full of scoriae, which should and could have been smelted out, but which will not. He has wandered over the terraqueous planet seeking, one may say, the Paradise we lost long ago.

Marat

Marat is no phantasm of the brain, or mere lying impress of Printer’s Types, but a thing material, of joint and sinew, and a certain small stature: ye behold him there, in his blackness in his dingy squalor, a living fraction of Chaos and Old Night, visibly incarnate, desirous to speak…

Visualisation is not simply a narrative or discoursive strategy, however, but one that is closely allied to Carlyle’s method of selecting and analyzing material. He imagines himself as a kind of all-knowing historical Eye, which roams above the scenes and, like a camera, picks out salient ones for the reader to visualise:

Which event successively is the cardinal one; and from what point of vision it may best be surveyed; this is a problem. Which problem the best insight, seeking light from all possible sources, shifting its point of vision whithersoever vision or glimpse of vision can be had, may employ itself in solving; and be well content to solve in some tolerably approximate way.

3. Language and history

Men’s words are but a poor exponent of their thought; nay their thought itself is a poor exponent of the inward unnamed Mystery, wherefrom both thought and action have their birth. No man can explain himself, can get himself explained; men see not one another but distorted phantasms which they call one another.

Modern historiographers aspire towards a transparency of text, in which the information presented is not obscured by the means used to convey the information, i.e.: the language. They work under the assumption that language is capable of being a servant of meaning; this is the assumption underlying von Ranke’s famous dictum, that history must simply show wie es eigentlich gewesen ist – what actually happened. Carlyle’s historiography is entirely different, because Carlyle, as a supreme linguistic artist, is under no illusion that language is not also the creator of meaning, that it can ever be totally transparent and objective because words have subjective meanings as well as objective ones:   What these two words: French Revolution may mean; for, strictly considered, they may have as many meanings as there are speakers of them. Language has only an arbitrary, symbolic relationship to the things it denotes – here Carlyle follows Locke -, which means that pure objectivity of description is impossible. This extends even to the grammatical choices available to the historiographer. In a brilliant insight Carlyle writes how the use of the past simple tense radically impinges our view of what is being described by the way the tense omits certain factors present in reality: For indeed it is a most lying thing, that same Past Tense always: so beautiful, sad, almost Elysian-sacred, ‘in the moonlight of Memory’, it seems and seems only. For observe: always one most important element is surreptitiously (we not noticing it) withdrawn from the Past Time: the haggard element of Fear!

Because words have ultimately a symbolic relationship to the things they signify, the historical work au fond also has a symbolic relationship to the history it describes. Indeed the whole text is symbolically described as a tapestry, a tissue, a weaving; and this textual weaving is emblematic of the wider weaving of the symbolic forces operating in historical reality:  Story and tissue, faint ineffectual Emblem of that grand Miraculous Tissue and Living Tapestry named the French Revolution, which did weave itself then in very fact, ‘on the loud-sounding ‘Loom of Time’! As personages disappear from history, so they also disappear as characters from the text: The brave Bouille too, then vanishes from the tissue of our Story. The historical work is not only a description of history, but also a symbol of it.

3. Conclusion

One of the considerable pleasures of reading the book comes from Carlyle’s prose, which is at times lofty, at other times facetious. One of the very greatest prose stylists of the language, Carlyle’s sentences everywhere display an acute awareness of rhythm and sound: ‘Worn out with disgusts’ Captain after Captain in Royalist Moustachious, mounts his warhorse, or his Rozinante war-garron and rides minatory across the Rhine, till all have ridden, he writes of the first Emigration.He is the master of the dramatic scene, as well as the pithy historical epigram. Of Robespierre’s attempt to found a new religion in the Festival of the Supreme Being in June 1794, for example, he writes: Mumbo is mumbo, and Robespierre is his prophet. Wise wigs wag, he writes of the diplomatic storm in Europe created by the Declaration of the Rights of Man; Condorcet is described as mouton enrage, and of Mirabeau’s crucial decision to side with the Third Estate in the meeting of the Estates General with which the Revolution begins, he writes: Mirabeau stalks forth into the Third Estate.

Von Ranke wrote: To history has been assigned the office of judging the past. In his 1820 work Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, Carlyle wrote: History is as perfect as the Historian is wise and is gifted with an eye and a soul. Carlyle displays enormous wisdom and soul in the judgments he makes, not only of the personages and events of the French Revolution, but more generally about the unfolding processes of living history itself. An example of the former is the assessment he gives of the vacuous and phlegmatic King Louis XVI, surely one of the stupidest men to ever warm a throne with his buttocks:  Thy whole existence seems one hideous abortion and mistake of Nature; the use of meaning of thee not yet known.Of the latter, here are some examples of epigrams Carlyle turns out on a range of topics:

Money itself is a standing miracle.

All available Authority is mystic in its conditions and comes ‘by grace of God’.

How beautiful is noble sentiment, like gossamer gauze, beautiful and cheap; which will stand no tear and wear!

Famously, the first volume was put into the fire by a chambermaid, who thought it was simply waste paper, and Carlyle had to write the whole thing again from memory, which would have defeated lesser men. The French Revolution, thus, stands as a symbol of one man’s titanic endeavor, as well as a description of a people’s struggle to change their world for the better.

Man, symbol of Eternity imprisoned into Time! It is not thy works which are all mortal, infinitely little, and the greatest no greater than the least, but only the Spirit thou workest in, that can have worth or continuance.

Nietzsche on Christianity

December 6, 2013, 1:30 am

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Christianity is, essentially and fundamentally, the embodiment of disgust and antipathy for life, merely disguised, concealed, got up as the belief in an 'other' life, or a 'better' life. Hatred of the world, the condemnation of the emotions, the fear of beauty and sensuality, a transcendental world invented the better to slander this one, basically a yearning for non-existence, for repose until the 'sabbath of sabbaths' - all of this, along with Christianity's unconditional resolve to acknowledge only moral values, struck me as the most dangerous and sinister of all possible manifestations of a 'will to decline', at the very least, a sign of the most profound affliction, fatigue, sullenness, exhaustion, impoverishment of life. 

Schopenhauer on the urge to display one's stupidity on the internet

December 19, 2013, 7:54 pm

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There are very many thoughts which have value for him who thinks them, but only a few of them possess the power of engaging the interest of a reader after they have been written down.

"Hijikata: The Revolt of the Body" Stephen Barber

December 26, 2013, 8:42 pm

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I have recently become acquainted with a young Taiwanese butoh dancer, and I read this book to learn more about his art.

Butoh was started by the dancer Hijikata in the ruins of a bombed out Tokyo in the years immediately after WW2, although it only really came to prominence in the uneasy years of the 60’s when Tokyo was hit by student protests against Japan’s continued domination by American consumerism and militarism. As such, it is borne of death and carries the smell of revolt.

Hijikata speaks of his ideal audience as being composed of the dead, and his gestures arise from the gestures of the dying.

I would like to have a person who has already died, die over and over inside my body…I may not know death, but it knows me.

Butoh is paradox, because it aims to negate all the usual gestures of the body and all the usual parameters of dance and performance. It is a kind of anti dance, an anti performance because each performance was only given once, and Hijikata allowed very few records to be made of the performances. The first ever ‘performance’ of butoh was conducted in private with no audience. Butoh is as much meditation as dance.

This sounds like the most extreme kind of artistic masturbation, and in many ways it is. Butoh in its early days had strong links with the sex cabarets of Tokyo, and Hijikata and his collaboraters were regular performers in the porn movies and sex clubs of the Shinjuko district, largely as a means for financing his other butoh activities. One has to admire the total commitment with which Hijikata conducted his life long project to give birth to a new kind of dance; in a way his whole life was a kind of butoh performance, a revolt. Although Barber doesn’t make the comparison, I think of Andy Warhol, Hijikata’s contemporary, who epitomised the disposability and distraction of modern consumerist culture and its ghastly superficiality, while Hijikata rejected this and stood for something completely opposite: a commitment to intense concentration and total immersion. Like Warhol in his Studio surrounded by armies of assistants and hangers-on, Hijikata set up a dance studio in an old asbestos factory where he trained young dancers in the ideas and gestures of butoh. He withdrew into isolation into this Asbestos Hall just as butoh was beginning to attract attention, and rarely left it again for the last 12 years of his life.

Barber’s book gives a detailed account of the life of Hijikata, his influences (Mishima, Artaud, Genet and Lautreamont) and the various schisms that eventually took place within the world of butoh. For example, Kazuo Ohno, the other major butoh dancer of the period,  Hijikata’s student and eventual butoh master in his own right, regarded butoh as something impossible for Westerners to understand, while Hijikata held that anyone could do butoh because butoh is about death, and everyone dies. Anywhere there is culture in revolt or death, there butoh is possible.

Likewise, Hijikata rehearsed for hours and meticulously choreographed each gesture, allowing no place in his work for improvisation, while Ohno had a much freeer attitude towards improvisation. The only improvised performance Hijikata ever gave was right at the very moment of his death, when he assembled the fingers of both hands and formed the outline of a ball of paper within the empty space between those fingers, rolled the ball on his chest, and then wedged it delicately under his cheek. Barber movingly calls this improvisation Hijikata’s last gift to his friend and collaborator Ohno.

Barber is also very good in the collaboration of Hijikata and the various photographers and experimental film makers he worked with. There are very few surviving films of Hijikata’s performances, as he rejected the kind of narrative or documentary linear representation a filming of a performance would necessarily involve. Butoh is not a representation of something, but a thing in itself; it negates representation, linearity.

At a butoh performance and workshop I attended in Taipei, the only entirely filmed performance of one of Hijikata’s works was screened, and the power and strength of butoh was reinforced by the flickering, disjointed images of hand held16mm. Filmed in the later half of the 20^thcentury, the images and gestures looked infinitely older, atavistic, ur, like cave drawings come to life, something from the very dawn of human culture, but at the same time something suggestive of the total future death of that culture.

Hijikata’s last project involved a return to the deep north with the photographer Eikoh Hosoe, who captured images of Hijikata performing butoh amidst the rice paddies of the region, to an audience of hills, lowering clouds and birds.

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"Empire of Signs" Roland Barthes

December 29, 2013, 7:29 pm

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Barthes's book on Japan belongs to the same genre as Swift's Gullivers’ Travels, Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, Voltaire's Candide and as Barthes himself signals, Micheax's Garabagne. In this genre, travellers to a foreign country which is largely mythical, fictional, fantastic, reflect on that country's institutions, casting light on the writers' own.

This may seems a strange assertion. Japan is a real place, and Barthes really visited it. But this book is more an examination of Western thought about Japan, especially about Zen, and about Western thought itself, about how Western thought and language is ceaselessly spinning out sign systems, is in fact, an infinite supplement of supernumerary signifierswhich form the basis of Western consciousness. In Empire of Signs Barthes imagines the possibility of this ceaseless chatter ceasing, he imagines a system of emptiness, which he sees in Japanese/Zen culture.

The book is short, consisting of 26 very short chapters on different aspects of Japan: food, chopsticks, calligraphy, pachinko, the haiku, the eyelid and so on. Barthes's meditations are spot-on accurate, imaginative, fanciful, grounded in reality, and beautifully expressed.

The book is a kind of dialogue (between East and West), and this is reflected at sentence level; sentences seem to have two layers, the direct and the parenthetical:

A Frenchman (unless he is abroad) cannot classify French faces; doubtless he perceives faces in common, but the abstraction of these repeated faces (which is the class to which they belong) escapes him.

Barthes comments on his own comments. At the level of the discourse then, the book enacts that infinite supplement of supernumerary signifiers, nudging the reader into his own supernumerary signifiers.

I'm going to briefly summarize the four short chapters on haiku. Bold is chapter titles, italics are quotes from Barthes, parentheses are my comments.

It is evening, in autumn,

All I can think of

Is my parents

Buson

1. The Breach of Meaning

·      the deceptive easiness of haiku

·      it is intelligible but appears to mean nothing (nothing beyond itself)

·      it presents its meaning simply

·      in contrast with Western poetry which demands a chiselled thought, the haiku allows one to be trivial, short, ordinary

·      Western poetry has unavoidably two systems of meaning: the symbol, the metaphor; and reasoning, the syllogism

·      (for the Western reader) the haiku is attracted to one or other of these two signification systems

·      first: we assign the haiku a 'poetic' meaning - in Western lit, 'poetic' is a symbol of the ineffable, the inexpressible-

·      in this poetic meaning, everything in the haiku becomes symbolic

·      second: we see the three lines of the haiku as a syllogism: rise, suspense, conclusion

·      if we renounce both these systems, commentary becomes impossible: to comment on the haiku means simply to repeat it

·      Western methods of interpretation fail the haiku

The West moistens everything with meaning like an authoritarian religion which imposes baptism on entire peoples.

The work of reading which is attached to it is to suspend language, not to provoke it.

How admirable he is

Who does not think "Life is ephemeral"

When he sees a flash of lightning

Basho

 2. Exemption from Meaning

·      the Buddhist syllogism contains four propositions:

·      this is A

·      this is not A

·      this is both A and not-A

·      this is neither A nor not-A

·      this is the obstructed meaning, an impossible paradigm

·      in this way, Zen wages a war against meaning

·      for example, the Sixth Patriarch recommended his students to give the following answer: if questioning you, someone interrogates you about non-being, answer with being. If you are questioned about the ordinary man, answer by speaking about the master etc

·      (The Sixth Patriarch is one of the major figures of Zen/Chan Buddhism, a Chinese Scholar/monk 大鑒惠能 Dajien Huineng early 8th C BCE)

·      the patriarch's recommended response is designed to disrupt the paradigms of Q&A/language and therefore to imperil the search for meaning

·      Zen makes the mere mechanism of meaning apparent

·      the haiku is an attempt to attain a flat language, a language with no layers of meaning (Barthes calls this 'a lamination of meaning') - a first level signifier: a signifier which is matte

·      all we can do with this matte signifier is scrutinize it, not solve it

·      Zen and the haiku are a praxis designed to halt language

·      Satori (Nirbana, enlightenment) is a suspension of the constant inner language of consciousness

·      because language sums up other languages to penetrate meaning - secondary signifiers, thoughts of thoughts - Zen perceives of this a kind of jamming

·      the abolition of secondary thought is one of the aims of the haiku

·      the haiku attacks the symbol as a semantic operation (by refusing the possibility of a secondary language)

·      it does this by measuring language, a concept which is inconceivable to the Western mind

·      the Western mind always tries to make signifier and signified disproportionate (by saying a little with many words, or by saying a lot with few words)

·      the haiku, on the other hand is an adequation of signifier and signified, a suppression of margins, smudges and interstices

·      in the haiku, signified and signifier are measured ('get the measure' of something is also meant by this)

·      the practice of saying haiku twice:

·      saying it once is to give the meaning of surprise to its sudden, perfect appearance

·      saying it more than twice is to simulate profundity, to postulate that meaning can be discovered in it

·      saying it twice is an echo, neither singular, nor profound

There is a moment when language ceases and it is this echoless breach which institutes at once the truth of Zen and the form -brief and empty- of the haiku.

...perhaps what Zen calls 'satori' is no more than a panic suspension of language, the blank which erases in us the reign of the Codes, the breach of that internal recitation which constitutes our person...('Codes' is a Barthesian term, from S/Z, meaning the reference discourses which underlie Western literature. Basically, here he means any kind of secondary thoughts.)

The echo merely draws a line under the nullity of meaning.

I come by the mountain path.

Ah! this is exquisite!

A violet!

Basho

I saw the first snow

That morning I forgot

To wash my face

(unattr)

 3. The Incident

·      Western art transforms the 'impression' into a description

·      in the West description - A Western genre- is the equivalent of contemplation

·      two kinds of contemplation: forms of the divinity (Loyola), evangelical narrative episodes

·      in the haiku, there is no metaphysics centred around a subject or around a god

·      the haiku is centred around the Zen character Mu (nothing), an apprehension of the thing as an event, not as substance

·      the haiku is centred on what happens to language, rather than what happens to the subject producing/receiving the language

·      the haiku does not describe (this seems counter intuitive until one realises what Barthes means by ‘describe’, namely, the relationship between the sign and the signified. According to B this relationship doesn't exist in the haiku. In the haiku, language has no referent, is the essence of appearance, and an untenable moment. It is language degree Zero. Barthes calls this later in the essay an 'escheat of signification')

·      it presents language as a category, as a painting, a miniature picture

·      the order and dispersion of haiku, in anthologies and other texts

·      on the one hand there is plethora, on the other brevity

·      this creates a dust of fragmentary events with no direction or termination

·      the haiku and the self, the self is nothing but the site of reading, timeless

·      the haiku reflects the self

·      for example, in the Hua Yen doctrine (one of the key tenets of Mahayanna Buddhism, the Buddhism of China and East Asia, the origin, one can say, of Zen), a haiku is a jewel which reflects all the other jewels in a kind of irradiation, but one with no centre

·      in the West, the analogy of this is the dictionary, a play of reflections without origin

·      reflection: in the West, the mirror reflects the self, in the East, a mirror reflects nothingness, it is empty

·      this can be applied to everything which happens in the street in Japan

·      the streets are full of incidents, which a Westerner can only read in the way he reads a haiku

·      but the ability to create haiku is denied the Westerner (because of the way his consciousness is founded in language and his concept of language as a system generating secondary languages)

·      the incidents observed in the street do not have anything picturesque about them, nor do they have anything novelistic about them

·      novelistic: they do not contribute to the chatter which would make them descriptions or narratives

·      the incidents of the street present a rectitude of line, a stroke, a gesture

·      the graphic nature of Japanese life, writing alla prima

·      the line does not express, but causes to exist

·      there can be no hesitation, no regret, no trial and error in the stroke of the brush

·      these gestures do not refer back to the self, there is no self-sufficiency, only graphism

The haiku's time is without subject: reading has no other self than all the haikus of which this self, by infinite refraction, is never anything but the site of reading.

The haiku reminds us of what has never happened to us; in it we recognize a repetition without origin, an event without cause, a memory without person, a language without moorings.

The old pond:

A frog jumps in:

Oh! the sound of the water.

Basho

4. So

·      the purpose of haiku is to achieve exemption from meaning

·      this is impossible in Western lit, which contests meaning only by making it incomprehensible

·      the haiku resists commentary, and it's this commentary which is the most ordinary exercise of our consciousness

·      the haiku doesn't instruct, express, divert- it serves none of the purposes usually attributed to literature due to its insignificance and due to the way it resists finality

·      the haiku is written just to write

·      in Western lit there are two basic functions: description and definition (again Barthes is using ‘describe’ in a special sense here: embellish with significations, with moralities, committed as indices to the revelation of a truth or of a sentiment)

·      the haiku resists both of these

·      the haiku does not describe in the sense of giving meaning to reality

·      the haiku does not define except only in the sense of giving a gesture, but this gesture is only an efflorescence of the object

·      the haiku only designates, it has no vibration or recurrence

·      it says: 'it's that', or 'it's thus' or 'it's so', or even just 'so.'

·      it's like the flash of a photo one takes very very carefully, but with no film in the camera

·      the haiku is stripped of any mediation of knowledge, of possession, of nomination,

·      it's like a child pointing at something and saying 'That!'

The haiku's task is to achieve exemption from meaning within a perfectly readerly discourse (a contradiction denied to Western art, which can contest meaning only by rendering its discourse incomprehensible).

The haiku is a faint gash inscribed upon time.

Nothing special says the haiku, in accordance with the spirit of Zen...nothing special has been acquired, the word's stone has been cast for nothing; neither waves nor flow of meaning.

Full moon

And on the matting

The shadow of a pine tree

In the fisherman's house

The smell of dried fish

And heat

The winter wind blows

The cat's eyes

Blink

unattr.

How many people

Have crossed the Seta bridge

Through the autumn rain?

Joko

John Blofeld on Richard Wilhelm's translation of the I Ching

January 9, 2014, 5:46 pm

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Those readers who positively like their oracles to be couched in terms so obscure as to be inscrutable will prefer Wilhelm's version to mine, as parts of it are obscure enough to satisfy the most ardent devotees of mystery.

Fragment 2412014

January 23, 2014, 7:43 pm

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In Qian Zhongshu's classic Chinese novel of 1947 Fortress Besieged the protagonist Hung Chien is teaching at a brand new university in the interior of China, far from the fighting. The university, with its admin and various departments, faculty and students, stands as a symbol of the Republic of China under KMT rule, especially during the period when Madame Chiang’s New Life Movement was in effect. Hung Chien has been appointed the lowly position of lecturer in Logic.

According to the school regulations, students in the College of Letters and Law had to choose one course among Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Logic. Most of them swarmed like bees to Logic because it was the easiest. – “It’s all rubbish” and not only did they not conduct experiments, but when it was cold, they could stick their hands in their sleeves and not take notes. They chose it because it was easy, and because it was easy they looked down on it, the way men look down on easy-to-get women. Logic was “rubbish”. 

Chinese logic is parodied mercilessly in several places in the text, not just the peasant logic of old saws and sayings; but in other ways: the library has no books on logic; Hung Chien is preparing his course – he has never studied logic himself- from an old copy of An Outline in Logicanother faculty member has given him. But the text also gives examples of logic put forward to justify social behaviour. 

Han Hsueh Yu, head of the foreign languages department, is married to a White Russian émigré he bumped into in Shanghai; he also has a fake Phd diploma he bought from a mail order catalogue in the US. He anxious to give everyone the impression that his wife is American – a highly desirable commodity – and his fake certificate a secret.

On the evening of July fourth, the last day of the final examinations, Han threw a big party for his colleagues with his wife’s name appearing on the invitation. The occasion was American Independence Day. This of course proved that his wife was indeed a genuine full-fledged American; for otherwise, how could she be always thinking about her mother country? Patriotism is not something that can be simulated. If the wife’s nationality were real, could not the husband’s academic credentials then be fake?

Now, this may appear to be only a sharp satire on academic behaviour, but Qian Zhongshu is on to something much more subtle and deeply buried here. This is an example of what we can call a Chinese Syllogism, which looks formally like a perfectly reasonable syllogism, but which differs from its Western counterpart essentially in that the terms of the syllogism need not bear any relationship at all to each other, or to reality. What matters most is the appearance of a logical structure, its conformity to a linguistic formula, a syntax, rather than its content or any relationship to reality per se. 

One can see how this works by splitting the language horizontally into two layers and removing the lexical layer, leaving behind only traces of the syntactical. 

If X then Y
X of course proves Y, for otherwise how could Z happen?
If X, then couldn’t it also be Y?

One can then replace the integers with any random vocabulary:

If I sneeze, then someone is thinking about me.
The fact that all foreigners have big noses of course proves that they smell, for otherwise how could it not be that we can all smell them?
If you have been abroad as foreign student and returned to China, couldn’t it also be that you are a suspicious character?

Whether we do this in English or in Chinese matters not a jot to the underlying point which is that the formal syntactical structure of the utterance matters more than the viability of its content. Its air of authority and the declarative way with which it is uttered forestalls any attempt at disagreement, while the crafty use of negative interrogatives ensures a positive answer, a confirmation of the absurd bias of the syllogism. 

Normal, natural, observable causality is thus utterly traduced in favour of an arbitrary causality simply imposed upon it. It’s as if the Daoist mindset, with its steadfast refusal –inability- to form categories as it perceives the world, when faced with the demand to suddenly do so, out of sheer inexperience lumps a few hastily gleaned facts of reality together and announces a causal relationship between them.

Towards the end of his sane life, Nietzsche was playing with the idea of critiquing causality. What he means is not the underlying causality of physics per se, but the underlying concept of causality, the syntactic syllogisms, both articulated and silent, with which we make sense of cause and effect in the world. He suspected that the notion of causality was something that had to be learned first, a habit of mind, such as the habit of seeing the world in terms of space and time, concepts like causality which also at some point in the development of human consciousness had first to be learned:

This belief in causality is erroneous: purpose, motive, are means of making something that happens comprehensible, practicable. The generalisation, too, was erroneous and illogical.

Notebook 34 1885

Like a child taking its very first steps, the Chinese Syllogism shows perhaps the trial and error involved in forming a useful concept of causality. It’s all a bit hit and miss.

'Dream of Red Mansions' Cao Xueqin

December 29, 2015, 8:00 pm

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I live in town without all that racket

horses and carts stir up, and you wonder

how that could be. Wherever the mind

dwells apart is itself a distant place.

picking chrysanthemums at my east fence,

far off, I see South Mountain: mountain

air lovely at dusk, birds in flight

returning home. All this means something,

something absolute. Whenever I start

explaining it, I’ve forgotten the words.

Tao Qian

trans: David Hinton

This enormous novel occupies the same central place in the literary culture of the Chinese as the works of Shakespeare do in English, as Pushkin’s verse novel Eugene Onegin does in Russian, and as Dante’s Divine Comedy does in Italian literature. Like them, it creates a whole world that is at once very specific to a time and place (China in the middle of the 18^th century) and yet also universal. Like them it embodies the paradox of great art, best expressed by Matisse:All art bears the imprint of its historical epoch. Great art is that in which this imprint is most deeply marked.

And yet in the West the novel is hardly known at all. Reasons for this no doubt include unfamiliarity with the world the novel describes and creates, the vast number of characters (with names which are more than usually difficult for Western readers to remember) and its sheer length. It’s even difficult to arrive at a fixed title for the work, compounded by the fact that in Chinese it has many names, all of them given in the text itself. These titles include: The Story of the Stone, The Precious Mirror of Love, The Twelve Beauties of Jingling, and Dream of Red Mansions. The Penguin translation by David Hawkes uses the first of these titles. Dream of Red Mansions is the closest translation (by Yang Hsien Yi and Gladys Yang) of the most common Chinese title, but other translations of this title might also include A Dream of the Red Chamber, or Dreams in a Red Chamber. This plethora of titles and translations of titles neatly reflects the great difficulties of translating a work from a language in which ambiguity is prized and preserved, into language where it is not.

Given these difficulties for a Western reader, perhaps the best way to approach this work is to look closely at the three characters which make up the most common title in Chinese. In so doing, we shall see that each one loosely defines a category that might help us to orient ourselves in the multifarious world of the Hong Lou Meng.

oooOOOooo

紅/hong/ red

This character consists of two elements. On the left is the ‘silk’ radical /si/, on the right is the ‘work’ radical, /gong/, here to give a suggestion as to the correct way to pronounce this character.

Silk is of course the quintessentially Chinese product, and silk cultivation and production has been known in China since the Neolithic age. Silk is a signifier of wealth and patronage, and has been used since ancient times as an instrument of foreign policy. Sima Qian, the Grand Historian of the Han dynasty, records how the first Han emperor sent a specified quantity of silk floss and cloth, grain and other food stuffs each year to the Xiongnu, the ancient enemies of the Han, so that the two nations would live in peace and brotherhood. In the Hong Lou Meng, at weddings and festivals, the fabulously wealthy Jiafamily are presented with rolls of silk, and they lavish gifts of silk on their superiors. The early part of the novel especially is filled with descriptions of clothes and furnishings, all of them costly and beautiful.

The silk radical also appears in characters to do with ‘binding’, ‘braiding’, ‘roping’, and also in characters to do with ‘patterns’, ‘succession’ or ‘continuation’, ‘experience’, in other words, the underlying patterns of everyday life, familial associations and experiences, in which communities are bound together through work, ritual ceremony and festivals. Red is ubiquitous in the Chinese world to an extent that is not so in other cultures: a red light always burns before the family altar; a wedding is not a wedding without the presence of red; red lanterns adorn the temples and gifts of money are made in red envelopes. Likewise in the Hong Lou Meng, red is everywhere. Baoyu, the male protagonist, lives in a pavilion called ‘Happy Red Court’, and in Chapter 1, Cao Xueqin is described as having written the work in his studio called ‘Mourning-the-Red Studio’.  In its widest form, red always symbolizes festival. The novel is full of lavish and evocative descriptions of ceremonies and festivals, weddings, funerals, New Years Eve celebrations, the Lantern Festival celebration; Cao Xueqin writes with a painterly hand, creating images as unforgettable as the cinematic images of Zhang Yimou. In the novel, as in Chinese life, great prominence is given to rites and rituals, both on major state occasions and the minor rituals of dining at home with family. In Chapter 2, an official is impeached, and a list of the crimes against him is given; the second item on this list is ‘tampering with the rites’ which shows the importance given by the Chinese to rites and ceremony.

Red also symbolizes art and beauty. A white, black and grey ink painting is not considered beautiful until it is set off by the artist’s seal in red ink. One of the women in the family is a talented artist and she is painting a huge picture of the garden in which a great deal of the action of the novel takes place. Her picture becomes a symbol of the Hong Lou Meng itself.

The ‘silk’ radical which makes up the character ‘red’ also appears in the characters for ‘literary classic’, and ‘paper’. The Hong Lou Meng itself has given rise to a paper mountain of critical commentary, known as Redology紅學.  The Hong Lou Meng abounds with descriptions of people interacting with the classics, and creating art and literature of their own. Baoyu and his soulmate, the beautiful and doomed Daiyu, read the Romance of the West Chamber 西廂記 together, a Yuan dynasty play. In Chapter 37, the young people in the Jia family start a poetry club, in which they drink, eat and set each other subjects – and rhyme schemes -  for poetry.  At one autumn meeting of the club, the chrysanthemum is chosen as a subject, but someone objects that this is too hackneyed a subject for an autumn poem. Then someone has an idea that instead of writing about chrysanthemums, they will focus on the people looking at it and on their reactions to the flower. They come up with a list of subjects:

Thinking of the Chrysanthemum

Seeking out the Chrysanthemum

Visiting the Chrysanthemum

Planting the Chrysanthemum

Facing the Chrysanthemum

Displaying the Chrysanthemum

Writing about the Chrysanthemum

Painting the Chrysanthemum

Questioning the Chrysanthemum

Wearing the Chrysanthemum

The Chrysanthemum’s Shadow

A Dream of Chrysanthemum

The Withered Chrysanthemum

And then go on to create an album of chrysanthemum poems. This is a picture of the pastime of leisured, rich, educated, secluded women, but it’s also a picture of the age–old activity of the literati/scholar class. The novel is full of such scenes. There is a great deal of sophisticated wordplay, both by the narrator and by the characters and absolutely untranslatable jokes and puns. The characters (people) discuss the meaning of characters (words, symbols), and they seem able to make up poems according to a rhyme scheme proposed by someone else at the flick of a sleeve, quite an accomplishment, given that many of them are only teenagers. But what’s most interesting to note about this little scene is the tension, the dilemma it voices between following the traditional rules laid down by the masters (Confucian idea), and originality (Daoist idea), a tension that can be seen in the Hong Lou Meng as a whole.

Etiquette and manners are also presented with the full importance which they are given in real life; who sits where, who serves whom, who takes precedence over whom, who gives face to whom, an incredibly complex affair in a family as large and multi-generational as the Jia family with its army of 200 - 300 retainers, all with a pecking order of their own.

‘Red’, then, in the Hong Lou Meng represents the world of art and beauty, literature and scholarship, rite and ceremony, manners and etiquette, which bind the family and the wider society together.

oooOOOooo

樓/lou/ building

This character (pronounced ‘low’) consists of four elements. On the left is the ‘wood’ radical /mu/. The ‘wood’ radical is found in all characters describing objects made of wood, and in characters to do with constructed objects, such as machines and engines and buildings.

The right element consists of a character that can stand alone, independently, with the same pronunciation as the composite character, when it is the name of a constellation, and a common family name.

This character is composed of three elements. The top element used to be a slightly different character meaning something like ‘don’t’, and this character combined with the character for ‘woman’ meant ‘seclusion’, or the women’s quarters which were taboo to outsiders. The middle element is actually the same character for ‘middle’ /zhong/ and it’s the character which appears in ‘China’: ‘the Middle Kingdom’. The bottom element is the character for ‘woman’ /nu/.

The character has a range of meanings, most literally any building more than two stories high, and the floors in such a building. But the history of the character shows us that it was also associated with that part of a building that was reserved for the women, and to which outsiders were not permitted.

The action of the novel revolves around two huge mansions, the Rong mansion and the Ning mansion, and an enormous park or garden which lies between them. There are almost no glimpses of nature outside the compound walls. Most of the scenes take place in interiors, or in the carefully controlled ‘natural’ environment of the ornamental park, specially constructed for the visit home of an elder daughter of the family who is an Imperial Concubine. The two branches of the Jia family gain much of their social prestige and wealth from this daughter’s position in the Imperial household, and her death is one of several turning points in the fortunes of the family.

 

Women occupy a central place in the novel, just as they do in Chinese culture, which is and always has been a matriarchy. Power relationships in Chinese culture are predicated on the family, and in the family it is the oldest woman who rules the roost. The Lady Dowager rules her family with a rod of iron and even her eldest son – a minister in the Qing government – defers to her decisions. Her personal favourites achieve positions of prominence and privilege within the world of the family. Much of the action of the novel centres on the intrigues between the women of the family, the mothers, the mothers in law, the sisters, the wives, the concubines, the maids of the sisters and wives and concubines, the maids of the maids of the sisters and wives and concubines, and the lowly serving maids who serve all those maids. The novel is full of domestic detail:  a teacup is overturned; a handkerchief is lost; a precious cloak is spoilt by a burning ember. These incidents are not trivial for those concerned, however, as they result in an adjustment of power positions. Suicides and murders are often the result of these feminine intrigues, and in one sense the novel may be read as an examination of the politics of the harem.

This domestic world is the scene of operations of that archetypal figure in Chinese culture and history: the uberbitch. Jia Xifeng, the wife of one of the grandsons first achieves prominence through her exceptional organizational skills at the funeral of another woman in the family, and soon thereafter is given the overall management of the Ning mansion, a task that she manages with aplomb, maintaining everyone in the lavish lifestyle they are all accustomed to, while secretly putting aside silver and lending it out at interest, which activity eventually contributes to the downfall of the family. Her position is protected because her ready wit makes her a special favourite of the Lady Dowager. When she secretly discovers that her good-for-nothing husband has secretly taken a second wife and established her in a household of her own in a lane behind the family compound, Xifeng insists on having  the second wife brought into the mansion and installed as official concubine, treating her with fastidious kindness and correctness. She then poisons her, after months of physical and mental torture and calculated cruelty. Xifeng comes from a long line of Chinese uberbitches: the Han dynasty Empress Lu cut off her chief rival’s hands and feet, plucked out her eyes, burned her ears, gave her a potion to drink which made her dumb and had her thrown in to the privy, calling her ‘the human pig, Sima Qian tells us. Ironically, that 20^th century uberbitch Madame Mao- Jiang Qing- used Hong Lou Meng as a pretext to launch a political attack on an old rival from her sing-song girl days. But it is in the nature of uberbitches that they fall, and many pages and chapters later, Xifeng meets her own miserable end.

Over against this chambered world of the women, is the wider social world of the men. Baoyu is sent to school where he learns to interact with boys his own age after a lifetime spent only in the company of women. This incident is one of the main homosexual episodes in a novel that contains many homosexual characters and scenes. The men in the family have social obligations and political roles outside the family. The Lady Dowager’s two sons are active ministers in the Qing government, and the fortunes of the family are closely tied to their fortunes in the political world. It’s this aspect of the novel where Confucian ideology is most visible. Baoyu is sent to school to study the Four Classics of Confucian thought 四書; throughout the novel, incident after incident shows the workings of the Confucian concept of filial piety 孝, most notably in Baoyu’s relations with his father, and in everyone else’s relations with their parents. This is extended to include filial piety towards ones ancestors. Towards the end of the book, when the mansions are raided by the government, Baoyu’s father’s first worry is how to protect the ancestors from the fall from grace that this will entail for the family. There is a subplot involving a peripheral member of the family who is arrested for murder, which gives us a wealth of information about Qing legal procedures (and how they are corrupted as a matter of course). However, despite these occasional excursions to the world outside the mansion, the men are usually assigned to a peripheral role and serve most often as messengers – both literally and symbolically - from outside the walls of the mansion, or a means by which women can assert their dominance over other women through marriage, concubinage or sexual liaison.

Here, then,  in our reading of the Hong Lou Meng we let ‘building’ stand for the sequestered world of the women’s quarters, the constructed social order both within the mansion and without, and the Confucian ideals of social harmony and correct behaviour.

oooOOOooo

夢/meng/ dream

This character (pronounced as the first syllable in ‘mongrel’) consists of four elements from top to bottom. The top element is the ‘grass’ or ‘seedling’ radical /cao/; next comes a radical that can mean both ‘eye’ /mu/ and ‘net’ /wang/. Under this is the ‘roof’ radical, /mien/, with one small stroke missing. The bottom part of the character is the sign for ‘dusk’ /xi/, which is a representation of the moon. So we have a character highly evocative of the way dreams sprout from the imagination at dusk under a roof and are caught in the net of the mind’s eye.

The character for /meng/ contains a picture of the moon. 20th century Lao Tzu commentator Du Erwei draws a connection between the Dao and the moon; the Ying Yang symbol of the Dao is a picture of the waning and waxing moon. And so we let this character stand for the Ying side of the novel, for the many dreams, ghosts and hauntings, and the spirit of Daoism that pervades the book.

The novel contains many magnificent night scenes and moon sightings. Dreams abound. In the first chapter, an old scholar dreams of an encounter between a Buddhist and a Daoist monk, a dream in which the symbolic,  metaphysical meaning of the novel you are about to read is explained. Baoyu has a very significant dream in chapter 5, which he then dreams again in Chapter 116. These dreams are not so much dreams as Shamanistic spirit journeys of the kind described in the Li Sao, a famous poem from the3^rd Century BCanthology Songs of the South 楚辭. Such dream journeys are an intrinsic part of Daoist poetry and meditation practices. In the Hong Lou Meng, when characters die, or are about to die, they appear as ghosts or are seen by other characters in dreams. Indeed, the whole novel is seen as a dream, in the way that Daoist and Buddhist thought see reality as a dream.

Against reality and against the Confucian ideals of familial piety and obedience to your superior are set the more esoteric teachings of Daoism and Buddhism, which teach that all such ideals, -  and indeed, reality itself – are illusions. The novel can be understood as a site of interplay between these three great systems of Chinese thought, in which the author comes down heavily on the side of Daoism. Confucianism, it is carefully suggested, is null and does little to stop the corruption of officials or the debauchery of men. People pay lip service to it, and it creates hypocrisy. Buddhists are presented as charlatans who use planchettes and sand writing to foretell the future. The most significant Buddhist character in the novel – the beautiful maid Miaoyu - meets a highly unpleasant and tragic end. While plenty of Daoist texts are quoted verbatim in the novel – especially the Zhuangzi- (as far as I remember) not one Buddhist sutra is (although the famous Bodhi tree gathas of the contest between Shenxiu and Huineng are).

Dreams, ghosts, divination are all intrinsic to Daoist ideas and practice. The novel’s overriding theme and structure – the vicissitudes of change – is also a primary Daoist concern. Characters muse on their own fates and the fate of the family and wonder how change could come so suddenly. These meditations on change and destiny are limited to the effects of change in this life only (and the afterlife) but there is almost no appearance of a theme connected to repeated lives, no discussion of karma, a prime Buddhist concern.

The novel’s alignment with Daoist over Confucian and Buddhist ideologies is seen most clearly in the character of the protagonist. Although Baoyu in the early part of the novel is called ‘Little Bodhisattva’ by his nurses, this is no more than a standard term of endearment for a young child. As he grows up, Baoyu reads Zhuangzi when he should be studying Confucian classics. In chapter 21, he reads The Housebreaker text from the Zhuangzi, whose basic message is that out of destruction comes liberation and creativity. He is inspired to create his own commentary to it, adapting Zhuangzi to his own circumstances. Do away with affection,he writes, and in the inner chambers fair and foul will then be on an equal footing. Advice kept to oneself does away with the danger of discord; beauty marred obviates affection, intelligence dulled cuts out admiration for talents.  On another occasion, exasperated to his wits end by all the emotional demands  made on him by the women of his chambers, he is reminded of this passage in Zhuangzi:

The ingenious work hard, the wise are full of care, but those without ability have no ambition. They enjoy their food and wander at will like drifting boats freed from their moorings.

At the end, Baoyu rejects the Confucian world that has opened up to him by his brilliant performance in the examination, and goes off, not to shave his head and join a sangha as a Buddhist monk, but to roam the countryside as a Daoist bum.

It makes sense that a writer as sophisticated as Cao Xueqin should ultimately come down on the side of Daoism as a resolution for his protagonist’s fate, because the teachings of Daoism come closer to an understanding of the perennial concerns of the really great novelists, namely the nature of fiction and its relationship to reality. Daoism has a more, creative approach to illusion, allegory, and symbolism; at the same time it also has a thorough awareness of the difficulties of communicating these things through language than either Chan Buddhism or Confucianism.  The name that can be named is not the constant name, says the first line of the Dao Der Jing.  Zhuangzi writes: The Dao is not named/Great division is not spoken….who can understand division that is not spoken, or Dao that is not named? In chapter 102 the characters consult the Yi Jing, and the hexagrams the oracle gives them foretell the fates of the characters consulting them, in an example of sophisticated structural foreshadowing that the Chinese prize as one of the great literary innovations Cao Xueqin made in the novel as a literary genre.

Lin Yu Tang, an early 20^th century cultural commentator, wrote on the influence of Daoism in Chinese literature: All good Chinese literature, all Chinese literature that is worth while, that is readable and that pleases the human mind and soothes the human heart is essentially imbued with a Daoistic spirit.  

The Daoist underpinnings of the work result in an almost post-modernist awareness of itself as a work of fiction, an illusion. The very first named character in the novel is Zhen Shiying, which is a homophone for ‘true things disappear’; Jia, the family name of the main characters, is a homophone for ‘unreal’, ‘fake’, ‘false’. Jia Baoyu has a distant relative his own age, also called Baoyu, who is in effect his double, but his name is Zhen Baoyu, which means ‘real’ Baoyu. These two encounter one another in a dream, and when they awake, neither of them knows who the real Baoyu is. Zhuangzi, famously, dreamed he was a butterfly, but upon waking could not decide whether he had been Zhuangzi dreaming he was a butterfly, or if he was a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi. If reality is a dream, then a novel about reality is a dream within a dream, in which dreams about reality appear in a reality about dreams.

In chapter 1, as the reader is embarking on this sojourn into a fictional world,  a Daoist priest begins a journey into the Land of Illusion, passing through an archway on both pillars of which is inscribed the following couplet:

When false is taken for true, true becomes false

If non-being turns into being, being becomes non-being.

This of course is meant in a metaphysical sense, but what if we read it meta-fictionally, as Cao Xueqin seems to be asking us to do? As devoted readers, when we immerse ourselves into a fictional world, isn’t false taken for true? As we yearn to follow the fate of our favourite character, doesn’t being become non-being?  Near the very end, the narrator comments in another couplet:

A book not of this world records events not of this world.

A man with two lives reverts to his original form.

As we finish the novel - any totally absorbing novel - we revert to our original form, to ourselves.

The whole novel is set within a framing device which can, on the one hand, be seen as a Daoist metaphysics, and on the other, as a literary meta-fiction designed to forestall any possible political fall out for the author. The whole novel is revealed as having been engraved on a huge stone. This stone then reappears in the mouth of Baoyu at his birth (‘baoyu’ literally means ‘precious jade’). The whole engraving is copied down by a Daoist monk called Reverend Void and given to CXQ, who spends 10 years working it up…

oooOOOooo

The Hong Lou Meng, with its cast of hundreds of characters, its great length, and the timespan covered, is an epic novel. But to read it is to get an impression of intimacy rather than heroic size. Cao Xueqin’s emphasis on the inner life of the characters, on scenes of domesticity, on the economic and political sphere as it operates within one (huge) family make the novel a series of miniatures. The closest parallel to Western literature, stylistically and in terms of genre, I suppose, would be the novels of Jane Austen, or Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, or other novels which focus on women or family life and which use this as an allegory for a wider political view.

The novel is not an easy read: at first, the world of Qing dynasty China appears to have no relevance to the reader, and it does go on and on and on, demanding a large investment of time (and patience, it must be said). The first chapter is particularly taxing, which does Cao Xueqin no favours. But, inexorably, if you stick with it, you are drawn slowly in; the incidents are ones which reach across cultures and centuries to our own lives and remain imprinted in memory: a child’s temper tantrum, first love, a grandmother’s death in the bosom of her family, a birthday celebration, a sleepless night caused by anxiety over the future, the pangs of lust, the love of home.

Daniel Johnson wrote in his review of another long, modern novel, Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy words which might just as fittingly be applied to Hong Lou Meng: You should make time for it. It will keep you company for the rest of your life. 

'The Mad Patagonian' Javier Pedro Zabala

November 5, 2017, 6:12 pm

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It’s probably fair to say that Javier Pedro Zabala is the greatest Latin American writer you’ve never heard of, and his magnum opus The Mad Patagonian is the greatest novel in Spanish of the 21^st century that you’ve never read.

Zabala was born in the US in 1950, but lived most of his life in Cuba. Apart from two life-marking meetings with Roberto Bolano in 1975 and 1989 in Mexico City and Caracas respectively, Zabala seems to have passed under the radar as a writer. Largely unpublished during his life, he seems to have spent his time doing odd jobs and writing in his diary, and working on his huge novel. Written between 1983 and 2002, Zabala died two months after its completion. His daughter, ignoring her father’s last wish to have all his writings destroyed, passed on the manuscript to a publisher in Caracas, which soon after went out of business, leaving the novel unpublished. After many vicissitudes, the novel will finally be brought out in English in 2015 by Riverboat Books.

The facts of Zabala’s life and the creation and publication of his only novel read like the typical fantasy of those marginal types who spend years secretly slaving away on a book that they keep in the bottom drawer and which is only published after their death, finally vindicating all their years of unregarded effort and neglect with worldwide fame and recognition of genius, the familiar story arc of a Pessoa, a Kafka, an Emily Dickinson. What’s unusual in this case, though, is that the work in question had to be published in a translation in order for it to reach the light of day. It remains unpublished in Spanish and is presented to us in a miraculous translation by Tomas Garcia Guerrero.

The novel consists of nine interlocking novellas which together tell the story of two interrelated families over several generations, how they left the Old World and came to the New, chiefly to Cuba, and then to Miami. Each family has a clairvoyant sister, and this device allows the narrative to be aware of what is happening to both families. This device is obviously a nod to the multi-generational magical realism of One Hundred Years of Solitude, but the novel is more than a magical realistic romp through the history of Cuba, although magical realism does get a look in as being part of that history.

The nine novellas are related to each other in various ways: they grow out of each other, with a peripheral character in one becoming a central character in another; or the same event is viewed from different perspectives; or there might only be a tenuous relation that becomes clear when you have read another novella. This method allows for tales within tales, digressions within digressions and a great deal of sophisticated structural irony in which insignificant events appear later as much more significant, and vice versa. There is a great deal of anachronistic jumping around. Reality is always under threat of being replaced by just another version of reality, dreams, or yet another narrative, puppet show, slide show, family history, anecdote or memory, a letter, a postcard or a pornographic movie. Each novella is told in a different style, with nods (at least in this English translation) to Hemingway, Carver and other practitioners of the I’m-not-writing school of writing, Joyce, Borges, Bolano, film noir, an actual movie script, Andre Breton and the Surrealists, and a whole host of references to poets and philosophers, both in English and in Spanish.

The novel is fiercely erudite and thick with ideas discussed by the characters, or by the narrative voice, about history versus the fictionalization of history (Zabala seems to have lived his life through his diary, writing events as they should have happened, rather than as they did), the search for happiness, the eternal fight against Fascism, the Church, international crime, conspiracy theories, Communism, UFOs, Latin American politics and Latin American literature, The Struggle. Ultimately, these ideas crystalise into an epic enquiry into the nature of reality, and about the uses and inadequacies of language itself in creating, transcribing and fixing that reality. Zabala is acutely aware of the limitations of language, as aware as no other writer of his generation, except perhaps David Foster Wallace. He knows that language describes what is not as much as it describes what is: gun delineates a specific object as much as it rules out the possibility that the object is not something else, like nun or gum.  Zabala knows that when a writer writes something as apparently innocuous as a description of the night, he is also drawing a line through other possibilities: Outside the moon has set.can also just as well refuse to be: Outside the moon is glowing in the night sky. or even Outside it is twilight and the birds have stopped calling to each other. Zabala gives us all three descriptions, as if asking us to choose, or to understand them as a radically telescoped sequence, or to consider their possibilities as palimpsest. Either way, he is drawing attention to the very process of writing.

The prose itself acts as a vehicle for that enquiry, ranging from rapturously inspired word painting to the most coldly clinical, specs laden passages. At times, Zabala’s experiments threaten to topple over, but he always manages to pull it off by the sheer audacity of the undertaking. In one of the last novellas, it appears as if Zabala has simply taken advantage of his computer’s highlight-copy-and-paste functions to reproduce whole paragraphs and reassemble them in different orders. The repetitions, and juxtapositions of large chunks of text not only summons up a musical analogy, but on further reflection also seems to be making something quite concrete out of language, like bits of coloured glass arranged into a mosaic, or collage. The language has become so foregrounded through repetition that it becomes quite physical, which is something that one usually forgets in reading, as the eye flows across the page devouring meaning. 

At almost 1250 pages, the book is a daunting read. However Zabala’s imagination is a fount of fecundity; a multitudinous world envelopes the reader, crowded with vivid characters and events, a great deal of salt, genuine feeling, irony and humour, and a kind of unstoppable energy. Mahler said of the symphony that it should embrace the world, and the really great novels of the 20^th/21^stcenturies: Gravity’s Rainbow, Infinite Jest, Underworld, 2666, seem to have also embraced this view. Zabala’s novel should rightfully take its place alongside them.

'Diary of a Madman and Other Stories' Lu Xun

November 26, 2017, 11:33 pm

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Lu Xun’s two published collections of short stories, Cheering From the Sidelines, (1922) and Wondering Where to Turn (1925) reveal him as one of the supreme masters of the short story to rank alongside Chekhov and Maupassant, and the greatest writer of modern China, at once that country’s Dickens and Joyce.

Dickens because, like the great Victorian, Lu Xun creates characters who enter the folklore and become symbolic, mythological, and yet remain rooted in the contemporary. You can see Lu Xun’s characters all around you every day, but it took Lu Xun’s descriptions to make you notice they are there. Who can forget Ah Q once you have read his story, and not see him in all the louts, layabouts and betel nut chewers who hang around at taxi ranks and MRT station entrances of the poorer neighbourhoods? Like Dickens, Lu Xun is the master of realism and atmosphere, with Dickens’s same ability to delineate and capture character in one swift fleeting gesture. Like Dickens too, Lu Xun is motivated by a deep compassion for the suffering of the poor and disenfranchised and by the desire to achieve some kind of social change through his writing.

Joyce because, at the same time as being China’s greatest realist writer, Lu Xun is also its greatest innovator in linguistic and formal terms, its greatest Modernist. Lu Xun was the first writer to write serious literature in the speech of the common people, an innovation that seems less creative unless you know that for thousands of years the common speech was not regarded as being suitable for literature, and that literature was the domain of classical Chinese, a language that the common people could not read. In the way that Joyce wove classical references into the hidden fabric of his language, Lu Xun cites the classics, usually to satirise them and to expose what he sees as their nullity. In the story A Warning to the People, describing a public execution, the focus is on the crowd. The victim is there wearing the customary placard detailing his crimes, but none of the bystanders can read it. The crowd is ultimately distracted by a traffic accident and disperses to take an interest in other things. The decapitation is never described, but it is there nonetheless in all the opportunities the text takes to display the word ‘head’ in a myriad of different connections. This lifts the text out of the realm of mere reportage into the realm of great literature.

This translation, with excellent introduction and explanatory notes, really brings the text to life for a non-Chinese audience, and captures the blend of bitter cynicism and compassion that is Lu Xun’s unique voice.

'The Street of Crocodiles' Bruno Schulz

December 10, 2017, 5:45 pm

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It’s not often I find myself agreeing with Jonathan Safran Foer (it’s not often I find anything he says interesting enough to take issue with either way, but that’s beside the point), but when he says he loved this book but didn’t like it, I kind of know what he means.

There’s no doubt that Shulz could write: sentences of limpid beauty (miraculously translated by Celina Wieniewska) and insight follow each other down the street of crocodiles, and images are as startling and as unforgettable as a Chagall painting, but there’s a sense of disorientation about the whole thing, and one is simply unsure how to read it: as surrealism? As dream diary? As childhood reminiscences? As magical realism? As naïve art? This uncertainty is a mark of Schulz’s huge originality. There is nothing quite like him in Western literature and it’s hard to orient his work into some ready made genre. Bloom wrote that works of genius assimilate us by their strangeness, and perhaps that gives a key here. Undoubtedly strange and original, and quite possibly a work of genius, Schulz’s stories do not ultimately assimilate us.

Perhaps it’s the fact that they are all rather the same, and reading them is like seeing the same object again and again from only slightly different perspectives. There’s a feeling of claustrophobic entrapment in his world, but it’s a world where the borders are always melting away into uncertainty. Just at the edge of sight there’s a rather unsettling blur, as if the veil of reality has become threadbare at that point.

Perhaps it’s the way that one of his main themes is the often overwhelming boredom of childhood, especially on long, stultifying summer days. Schulz is a master at describing intangibles such as the way time sometimes just simply hangs; or the peculiar blend of nostalgia and renewed hope for the future which seems to permeate the atmosphere of an autumn landscape.

Perhaps it’s the overegging of the metaphors. Nothing is ever just simply itself. Schulz’s characteristic move is to mash two unrelated symbolic fields together. Here he describes his father’s haberdashery shop, combining the discourse of armies and logistics with a purely descriptive vocabulary:

My father walked along these arsenals of autumn goods and calmed and soothed the rising force of these masses of cloth, the power of the season. He wanted to keep intact for as long as possible those reserves of stored colour. He was afraid to break into that iron fund of autumn, to change it into cash.

Or perhaps it’s the way inanimate objects are symbolically brought to life (Dickens is Schulz great precursor here):

While he was opening the heavy ironclad door, the grumbling dusk took a step back from the entrance, moved a few inches deeper, changed position and lay down again inside… 

These things are all very well and good, and indeed contain much beauty and truth in them, and they are handled by Schulz to great effect. But, as the narrator remarks towards the end of the story Autumn:  

Finding no surcease in reality, you created a superstructure out of the figurative stuff of metaphor, you moved among associations and allusions, the imponderables between things. All things referred to other things, which in turn called further things to witness, and so on. In the end your honeyed words grew cloying...

And that there is exactly how I felt reading him. Reading Shulz is rather like being stuck in someone else’s dream. But as Auden so wisely warned, nothing is more boring than hearing about other people’s dreams. Schulz’s genius is perhaps best appreciated in very small, concentrated doses, like the raspberry syrup he adores. But a whole flagon of the stuff leaves one feeling slightly queasy and quailing at the idea of taking any more.

The Book is a myth in which we believe when we are young, but which we cease to take seriously as get older.

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'Renegade, or Halo2' Timothy Mo

February 2, 2018, 5:22 am

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Globalisation, an American dictionary informs us, is ‘the removal of barriers between national economies to encourage the flow of goods, services, capital, and labor’. Well, in practice, of course, it means the rich countries of the West exporting and imposing their norms on everyone else, whether through language, legal inequalities, superior marketing nous or the always present threat of violence. This is the great theme of this stupendous novel by the British/Hong Kong writer Timothy Mo, who tells the truth of globalization as seen from the other end, from the bottom, so to speak, by one of Frantz Fanon’s ‘wretched of the earth.’

Rey, Castro or Sugar (the fact that he has a plethora of names is significant in itself) is a member of the Philippine underclass, the illegitimate son of a prostitute and an African American serviceman. We follow him from his wretched childhood in a Philippine slum, his membership of a street gang, his rescue and education at the hands of the Jesuits; his enrollment in college to study law and his developing talent for basketball. Rey is possessed of a hugely powerful physique, which makes him ideal for basketball, a game he says the Filipinos had no sane reason to take up. How could a short, wiry –fathers and mentors let me not be mealy mouthed – teeny-weeny, itsy-bitsy, chronically malnourished, genetically-disadvantaged South-East Asian folk ever have chosen a less appropriate endeavor by which to be measured? He also has curiosity and a passion for reading, and forms a bond of intellectual friendship with one of the Fathers. Through his unwilling involvement in a crime he is forced into exile to escape the law; we follow his adventures as a chauffeur to a British expat family in Hong Kong, a travel-guide cum baby-sitter in Thailand; an indentured construction labourer in a fictional country on the Arabian peninsula, probably a composite of Kuwait, Saudi, Qatar or another of those appalling shitholes, a bodyguard on a business trip to Mumbai; a layabout in England, a layabout in Cuba, a long spell as a seaman on container ships on the high seas – the engine room of globalization - and after a brief spell in America, home again to the Philippines. Everywhere he goes in the underdeveloped world he is, as he says, a member of the international underclass who were the slaves of our century. And everywhere he goes he experiences himself as the outsider, the renegade, by virtue of the colour of his skin, his size and ability to handle himself, his intelligence and gift for observation, his peaceable temperament in the face of open hostility.

It’s through certain repeated images that Mo explores his themes of globalization, identity and aculturalisation. The most powerful appears in the first paragraph: the photographic negative. Isn’t the negative always more intriguing than the print? At one stage he encounters a group of Filipino albinos, at another, a group of coral divers, whose hair has been bleached and whose backs have been burnt black by the sunthey too looked like the precursors of a photograph, or shadow relics of a nuclear blast.This is the flipside of globalization, the negative to the print. Another image is the halo, a type of desert, a many hued and multi-textured confection of ice-cream, cereals, neon syrups, crystalized fruits, frosty shavings, leguminous preserves and bloated pulses that you can find in different names all over South Asia. Images of other kinds of composites abound. Rey makes friends with a master huntsman, and he shows Rey his prize possession: a composite bow made of leather on one side and horn on the other: you got antagonistic forces working together just for you! It gets its power from putting together a whole assembly of parts that ain’t worth diddly on their own. Rey himself is both a negative and a halo.

It’s significant that the protagonist of the novel is Filipino, because that country is at once the most obvious victim of globalization, and at the same time a potent symbol of racial, religious and linguistic diversity. Rey, in his encounters with the wide array of people he meets, seems to be saying the real strength of globalization is in the diversity with unity it can bring. He recognizes that people are formed as much by their context as by their essence. He learns from the Jesuits how to decode things he doesn’t at first understand from their context, and everyone he meets has been taken out of their context and placed in a new one. In such a decontextualized world, all values become relative:Commander Smith’s virtues, those absolutes I had been disposed to worship, I was starting to see as relatives, as part of my own Philippine family of vices. They were only successful in their own context, in a better society.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the linguistic energy of the novel, and this is its chief strength and originality. There are frequent puns (the word halo is tremendously fruitful in this regard) and meditations on language. I reckon Philipino would look a whole lot better than Filipino, a spelling demeaning in itself, while sounding just the same. I mean you’ve got Philosophy, Philology, Physiology (and I admit, Phlegm) as against Fuck, Fart and Fool. Rey tells his story himself, infusing his language with Filipino street slang in Cebuano, Visayan, Tagalog, themselves types of bastardised Spanish, one of the lingua francas of the developing world. He can veer from high literary English to curses and imprecations in Taglish (or Bislish if you like), and he knowingly and wittily references high European culture: happy ships were happy in different ways, di ba, but unhappy ships were unhappy in different ways, siguro.He also uses words like cunctatory (yes, I had to look it up too), and has read Dickens, Haklyutt, Hobbes, and the novel has obvious nods to Smollett and Conrad.

The great danger of globalisation, culturally, is that it imposes a ghastly kind of uniformity on everything, where everyone shares the values of the dominant culture, and smaller cultures are absorbed into what the cultural theorist Victor Segalen called the beige paste of entropy. You can see this process happening in the critical response to the novel. British critics accused Mo of peddling in stereotypes, but Mo and his alter ego Rey recognize that stereotypes play an important part in understanding how people operate out of their context: they work as a convenience, a first impression, as long as one is prepared to change ones mind on further acquaintance with reality. The novel preempts those critics who are more concerned with virtue-signaling their awareness of the stereotypes of racial prejudice than in squarely facing the fact that there does exist racial difference, and that cultures are relatively superior or inferior. I also believe the degree to which you discern or suspect prejudice against yourself or your kind is the measure of the prejudice in yourself. Those who inveigh the most vehemently are those who hate the most. An early but central scene involves a gang rape and murder, and Mo came under a lot of criticism for including this scene. But those who criticise the work for this are only shooting the messenger. Mo is describing the reality of the world that exists outside the context of the comfortable world of the literary critic or Western reader. In the East the placid poor lived in terror of the violent rich. In the West the rich lived in terror of the criminal poor.Unlike the critics, he is not mealy-mouthed about that reality. Unlike them he does not make the mistake of assuming that other parts of the world share the same values, and does not fall victim to the stultifying myth of cultural uniformity.

Mo has fallen off the radar a bit since his early high visibility with the Booker Prize nominated The Monkey King, Sour Sweet and his excellent historical novel about Hong Kong An Insular Possession, although rumours that he is ‘missing’ are surely exaggerated (the same exaggeration that Thomas Pynchon is a ‘recluse’). It’s just that he’s not attending literary cocktail parties in London. He reportedly turned down an advance from Random House in the mid 90s, not because it wasn’t big enough, as it has been unkindly suggested, but because one assumes he was chafing under the kind of editorial control that results in the usual, careful, anodyne, taupe prose that graduates of creative writing programs produce nowadays. By starting his own imprint, and publishing this work under it, Mo has escaped this kind of editorial interference, thankfully. It’s hard to believe that a novel of this linguistic scope, ambition and brilliance, and the taboo-breaking scenes of sex and violence that it contains would be accepted by one of the mainstream houses today. And yet there is nothing amateurish or ‘vanity published’ about this highly accomplished and finely-wrought novel. The only drawback is that by removing himself from the publishing industry in this way his novels have not had the coverage and distribution that would bring them to a wider readership, which is a tremendous shame, as this work in particular, 20 years after it first appeared, has a lot to teach complacent Western readers about the world outside their purview. With his kind of haloprose, and by moving the bildungsroman and picaresque away from the centres of tradition to marginal characters and the post-colonial world – the new centre, Mo has infused the English language and the English novel with new vigour and vitality.

'Existence: A Story' David Hinton

March 26, 2018, 1:07 am

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We are looking at a painting by the great Ming Dynasty landscape artist and Chan Master Shi Tao: a scholar (with attendant) on a promontory gazing out over a sea of mist to ridges of hazy mountains in the distance. On the right of the picture is a poem by Shi Tao’s friend and associate, the poet Huang Yanlu, in Shi Tao’s calligraphy. The poem describes a ruined city: images of razed walls, deserted orchards and abandoned houses, none of which can be seen in the picture. From this disjunct between painting and poem, David Hinton begins his investigation of the spiritual roots of Chinese landscape painting, calligraphy and poetry.

Hinton sees the white space and multiple perspectives of Chinese landscape painting as a visual expression of the perpetual movement between Absence and Presence which, according to the first verse of the Dao De Jing, gives rise to the ten thousand things of mental and material phenomena. He reveals how this tension operates within Chinese characters – strokes organized around a void, within the sweeping gestures of calligraphy - in which a balance is sought between the being-in-the-moment of the movement of the brush and the residue of that movement/moment in the ink stroke left on the page. He also shows how classical Chinese grammar itself – with its absence of pronouns, verb tenses and deliberate ambiguity of syntax and word class - is also a manifestation of this dynamic interchange.

Along the way he makes some fascinating observations about the differences between Western languages and Chinese. Western languages impose a barrier between the things of the world and descriptions of them; at the same time as they describe the world, they try to transcend it. The relationship between words and things is arbitrary and mimetic, as Saussure and the Structuralists noted. In our creation myth, language comes before the world and the world is somehow a creation of language: And God said: ‘Let there be light’ and there was light.In the beginning was the Word, and so on. Chinese creation myths, on the other hand, begin with the hexagrams of the Yi Jing which represent every possible combination of ying and yang, and which rather than describe the particulars of reality, embody the deeper forces and processes of reality, Hinton writes. The clear division into noun and verb of Western languages imposes a fixity on the world that blinds us to its real nature as a process of perpetual impermanence. Whereas Chinese, in which words can be both neither noun or verb and both noun and verb, retains that fluidity and that awareness of the underlying processes of change.

Moreover, Chinese poetry, calligraphy and painting represent an attempt on the part of the practitioner to get behind the false dualities of Absence and Presence, yingand yang, observer and world, language and reality, to the fundamental essence that lies behind them, represented by the mysterious character 玄xuan,  ‘dark enigma’ which also appears in the first verse of the Dao De Jing. Out of this dark enigma everything rises, and back into it everything sinks in a perpetual movement of becoming and passing. This is related to the Chan meditation practice of observing how thoughts come and go and in the process, stilling the everyday mind and letting the true mind 本心ben xin come forth. This true mind is our true nature, the true nature of reality, and which exists before all thoughts begin, and which precedes and underlies all duality, the true mind obscured by the fleeting dust of delusion, as the 5^th century First Chan Patriarch Bodhidharma puts it in the Essence of Mahayana.

The book is fascinating, with a wealth of ideas to contemplate about language, translation issues, Chinese art and culture, the relationship between Daoism and Chan, the evolution of the Chinese writing system and the meaning of individual characters, the practice of calligraphy, dragons, the tumultuous history of the transition between Ming and Qing, the biography of Shi Tao. Along the way, Hinton offers us different, provisional translations of the poem in the painting, based on his and our evolving understanding of the deeper issues involved in bridging two widely differing cultures. It’s rather like being part of a translators workshop. What lifts the book above mere cultural commentary, however, is Hinton’s brave decision to use a prose style that reflects as nearly as possible what happens in Chan meditation. It’s one thing to be told that a painting and poem is a meditative practice, and quite another to become a part of that process itself, to be drawn in to the process by means of a style which is circular, elliptic, recursive, and poetic rather than academic, and which never tries to impose (a delusory) clarity of expression onto something that is ultimately inexpressible by means of language and that must be experienced personally. Many readers might be put off by this indirectness, but a reader who is also a meditator will instantly grasp what Hinton is trying to do.

The book is lavishly and beautifully produced by Shambhala, with a full color pull-out of the painting under discussion, 9 more full color plates of some of the greatest paintings in the genre, and copious black and white illustrations of details from those paintings, and examples of calligraphy. A singular and unclassifiable masterpiece by the greatest translator of Chinese poetry and philosophy of our age.

'Notes of a Crocodile' Qiu Miaojin

April 6, 2018, 9:13 pm

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If I learned anything about life during college, it was to turn away from my shattered ego and move on.

Notes of a Crocodile describes the college years of a young gay Taiwanese woman, her various lovers and friends during the later 1980s and early 1990s in Taipei. Like most coming-of-age novels it describes the heartbreak of youth, the gaining of experience through the harsh blows of the world, the exaltations and despairs of first love, the gradual coming together of a sense of self, of a sense of destiny. And like most coming out novels it describes the sense of isolation from society as the first realisations of same sex desire dawn, the sense of an already fragile, fledgling egohood rendered even more precarious by the knowledge of an otherness, the knowledge that one is becoming an unwilling transgressor against society.

Lazi (pronounced lah-dze) and her friends spend their lives in the time honoured fashion of students everywhere: falling in and out of love, reading, attending classes, doing assignments, bickering, sleeping and earning pocket money, and analyzing every nuance of their relationships in midnight conversations. Their adventures are presented as a series of achronological entries in eight notebooks. The entries include reportage, love letters, records of conversations, sly vignettes and lyrical descriptions of Taipei, fragments, diary entries; the style ranges from the face-burningly personal – one or two of the love letters had me wincing – to the sardonic, from the wittily epigrammatic to a kind of freewheeling prose poetry. Imagine Haruki Murakami meets Banana Yoshimoto meets Rimbaud. Some sections appear to have been written right after the events, or even as those events unfold, giving them a rawness, an immediacy that can be quite unsettling, while others appear to have been written long after and come with the benefit of hindsight and reflection. The emotional intensity is relieved by satirical newsflashes about a plague of crocodiles that has overtaken the nation. Citizens are urged to exercise caution and be on the lookout for crocodiles wearing human suits and posing as real people. There is a hotline for callers to report sightings…

However, some of the entries often come across as being the mere rantings and bleatings of a rather self obsessed, overeducated but underloved overgrown child; a girl who has not yet learned the harsh truths about growing up,: that you are not as important and as unique as you think you are; an artist who has not yet learnt how to distance herself from her experiences to make them truly universal, (a kind of Taiwanese Sylvia Plath). At times, the novel seems to be little more than a ‘lightly fictionalized autobiographical account’ (words which must make many an editor’s heart sink) of growing up in Taipei.The fragmentary form of the novel only reinforces this impression of something half finished. One wonders, on first encounter with this text, what interest, what relevance, the half-baked descriptions of the trials of a college student from Taiwan can have for a reader with no knowledge of Taiwan or of Lazi’s milieu, beyond the obvious curiosity factor. One wonders also as to the book’s and the author’s cult status here in Taiwan.

Well. The narrator is highly intelligent, highly literate and highly self aware. There are references to Western literature and culture (but strangely, almost none to Chinese writers and culture). At one point when the narrator is torn between her desire for total solitude and her desire for social interaction, she wittily describes herself as clutching her copies of One Hundred Years of Solitude in one hand, and Lust for Life in the other. The form of the novel is said to have been inspired by the techniques of Derek Jarman and Genet. The translation is very good indeed: Bonnie Huie does an excellent job of capturing in English the Chinese speech patterns in the long stretches of dialogue, and even manages to convey some of the word play and puns that Lazi and her friends indulge in.

For Lazi’s is not only a queer coming of age, but a search for a self in existentialist terms that speaks directly to many (young) people in Taiwan, of whatever orientation. Lazi writes:

Most people go through life without ever living. They say you have to learn how to construct a self who remains free in spite of the system. And you have to get used to the idea that it’s every man for himself in this world. It requires a strange self-awareness, whereby everything down to the finest detail must be performed before the eyes of the world.

College in Taiwan represents the first time Taiwanese youngsters can take a breather from the utterly relentless round of examinations and cramming that has marked their childhood and early adolescence, and deal with the pleasures and the pains, the stresses and strains of growing up. This is not so much to say that Taiwanese are late developers in that sense, but more to note how the search for identity and a role in life preoccupies Western teens at a much earlier age when perhaps their ability to articulate their feelings has not caught up. Happening later, in their college years, Taiwanese are more able to articulate their dilemmas, to themselves and to their friends, and their diaries.

Reconciling the desire for self-determination and the need to meet parental and social expectations is a highly stressful and difficult balancing act that many highly educated young Taiwanese experience as an existentialist dilemma, as do the characters in the novel. One of Lazi’s friends articulates this as coming up against the wall of absurdity, a description that references both Sartre and Camus, and Dostoevsky. Another, marginal, character, a boy named Nothing by his friends, has scarred his face with a knife in episodes of self harm:

He vowed to cut through the other self that had been handed to him by other people. It wasn’t the real him. Then he traveled around the world with just a backpack and became his true self.

The existentialist dilemma is most particularly marked in two overlapping areas: family expectations, and gender roles. Lazi writes of her relationship with her family:

I let them form a new image of me. It’s been a constant struggle. I’ll always feel love for them and have basic needs to be met, so it takes courage to draw the line. But if I don’t, my love for them and my needs will become bargaining chips that I have to exchange for my independence.

Lazi is studying Gabriel Marcel, the French Christian existentialist, (who is also a key influence on Qiu Miaojin’s final book, Last Words from Montmartre) one of whose main concerns was how an individual can create and maintain loyalty (fidelite) to a group without compromising their existential selfhood. Marcel’s concept of fidelite can stand in for the Chinese concept of filial piety (xiàoshùn

孝順). It’s telling that Lazi and her friends turn to Western works rather than Chinese works to help them deal with their crises, presumably because the Chinese classics with their emphasis on xiàoshùn孝順will be no help to them.

Qiu Miaojin was writing in a time when Taiwan was only just beginning to make the transition from martial law, into what it is today: one of the most forward looking democracies in Asia, with a woman president, with firm and unquestioned rule of law, equal opportunities for both genders, the biggest Pride festival in Asia (an estimated 100,100 attended this year’s event) and a well-coordinated and vocal LGBT rights movement that has recently secured from the Supreme Court a ruling that will make same sex marriage constitutionally legal in two years, so far the only country in Asia to do so. However, back in the late 80s/early 90s, Lazi revolts when she considers the traditional gender roles that have been assigned to her. Human relationships and mutual attraction, she writes, are based on the gender binary, which stems from the duality of ying and yang, or some unspeakable evil. But humanity says it’s a biological construct: penis vs, vagina, chest hair vs,. breasts, beard vs. long hair…. Male plugs into female like the key into lock, and as a product of that coupling, babies get punched out. Those who don’t fit into the traditional gender categories are cast into the freezing cold waters outside the line of demarcation, into an even wider demarcated zone.

Against this negativity, however, Qiu Miaojin peoples her novel with characters who are gender fluid and who extend friendship to each other as they inhabit this wider demarcated zone, creating their own structures of love and loyalty, their own alternative queer family. The burgeoning gay scene of the period is described in terms that are remarkably prescient. When Lazi visits an underground club with a male friend, he tells her: Those people are all genderless. Or maybe I should say, they’re opposed to being bound by simplistic signifiers of gender….and in another conversation, one of the characters drunkenly proposes that they all try to establish post-gender relations with each other. Family and gender are aligned towards the end when Lazi’s friend Meng Sheng tells her: We come from a long line of deviants throughout history, a queer alternative to the ancestors that are an essential part of every Taiwanese family.

The form of the novel now starts to make more sense against this exploration of ‘existentialism with Chinese characteristics’ that is the main theme of the work. 手記 literally translates as ‘hand notes’. The book has all the appearance of having been written on the hoof, but this is merely an artifice, one that has been constructed to convey the impression of having being written on the hoof, a performance before the eyes of the world. In this it has much in common with European and American existentialist texts.

A close parallel in Western literature would be to that other great teeny angst bildungsroman, The Catcher in the Rye, with which Notes of a Crocodile shares a sense of outrage against the fakeness of an adult world, a sense of disgust against societal norms, and a similar freewheeling cynical style. Like death, college serves as a kind of escape hatch. But while death takes you straight to the morgue, college is a single rope dangling loose from the inescapable net of society. Like Notes of a Crocodile, Catcher in the Rye is a performance. Written by a thirty two year old man as an extended exercise in a literary technique known as skaz, this novel has often been mistaken for a cry of authenticity, and the unsophisticated (or simply the very young) often mistake Holden Caulfied’s rants as ‘the real thing’. Likewise, Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, and Sartre’s Nausea, both good examples in view of Lazi’s existentialism, also purport to be authentic cries of a tortured soul. But these novels are only posing as such; their real purpose is to render through artistic means a philosophical position. Their first person narrative and fragmentary form is literary Expressionism, not to be mistaken for the author’s voice and personal experience, but to be read as the expression of a fictional creation. It’s this quality of spurious authenticity that gives these works their great power and status as works of fiction, or in the words of Jean Cocteau, ‘the lie that tells the truth.’

But there are also parallels in modern Chinese literature for the performance of authenticity. Notes of a Crocodile has much in common with the famous story by Ding Ling, The Diary of Miss Sophie, which also poses as diary/notes, and of course Lu Xun’s Diary of a Madman is another example. Confucius in his commentary on the Five Chinese Classics praised the three hundred poems in the Book of Songs as having thoughts never twisty. Modern Chinese literature on the contrary has always valued twisty thoughts – or unconventionalised soul baring - as a sign of authenticity with which writers can confront the artifice of the classical tradition. Wang Dan, the Tiananmin dissident, reveals this when he writes of Qiu Maiaojin’s work that its excruciating revelation of the author’s innermost self […] is after all what makes the magic of literature. What makes the magic of this particular novel is that Notes of a Crocodileambiguates the boundary between authenticity and performance: it’s both notes and a novel about notes.

It’s this ambiguity, allowing us to read the novel as direct expression, and at the same as directed Expressionism, that has largely accounted for the status of Qiu Miaojin’s work on the Taiwanese cultural and literary scene. Winner of the Central Daily News Short Story Prize,the United Literature Association Award, and the China Times Honorary Prize for Literature, her work appears on college syllabuses, and is the subject of numerous dissertations. But amongst the general republic of readers she has inspired rock bands, pop songs, dance pieces, blog tributes, video tributes, internet discussion groups, and a feature length documentary. There is even a high school kid reading from her work on Youtube.

It’s hard to resist the temptation to allow the knowledge of her suicide at the age of 26 in Paris in 1995 to infect one’s reading of the text. In her last novel, Last Words from Montmartre, also published by NYRB Classics, the line between authenticity and performance is even more difficult to place. In that book the Rimbaud element is more to the fore, as translator Ali Larissa Heinrich notes in his excellent Afterword, and it’s virtually impossible to read it as anything other than as notes of a pathology, or as one long extended suicide note. Death and suicide does form a persistent minor whisper throughout the text of Notes of a Crocodile, but ultimately, Qiu Miaojin ends this work on a note of hope and uplift.

Admitting I have problems is a mode of optimism, since every problem has a solution. Unhappiness is a lot like bad weather; it’s out of your control. So if I encounter a problem that even death can’t solve, I shouldn’t care whether I’m happy or unhappy, thereby negating both the problem and the problem of a problem. And that is where happiness begins.

'Skulls of Istria' Rick Harsch

April 12, 2018, 11:45 pm

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Towards the end of Rick Harsch’s new novel the protagonist – an American historian on the lam in Europe, on the Croatian coast to be precise - falls into an underground crypt filled with skulls, a depository from the long wars of Venice against Turks and Uskoks? Or a more recent ossuary of the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans of the 90s? He emerges from this premature brush with death with all his illusions shattered, his plan for a history of the region as told though the biography of a certain Giordano Viezzoli abandoned, and with a new understanding of reality, of who the people around him really are, and the role that he has played in their lives, how he has been a victim of deception.

I looked out at the world from that skull and saw first myself inert, wounded, and worst of all, a mock historian - an historian to be mocked.

Told in the form of a tavern confessional, Harsch’s novel explores issues of deception and truth, and the fraught history of the Balkans. In Vino Veritas, as the saying goes. The problem with being accosted by the local drunk, as Harsch must know full well, is that it can either be a revelatory experience, if the man can talk (and, boy, how the narrator of this novel can talk!); or it can be an evening of utter boredom for the listener and maudlin self obsessed justification for the tale teller, in which how-it happened is (in)judiciously mixed up with how-it-should-have-happened. Harsch’s tale explores the ambiguities of fiction versus non-fiction, memoir versus history, truth versus lies in prose of sizzling energy, linguistic invention, and confidence, completely at odds with the anodyne beige prose of most contemporary American authors. Harsch is a novelist whose work deserves to be better known, a writer with a style of great originality, power and vision.

'Taipei People' Bai Xien Yong

April 25, 2018, 8:04 pm

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When I first arrived in Taiwan over 20 years ago and was looking for somewhere to live, one of the places I went to see was a room in the house of an elderly widow. Her house was one of those old one-story wooden Japanese structures that you could still see in Taipei in those days, before they were all pulled down to make way for department stores and high rises. Inside the house, except for the room to be let, were piled crates, trunks, boxes and old furniture: I had the impression the widow was at any time ready to move out. At that time my Chinese was non-existent, so I had a friend with me to do the talking. After our visit, my friend explained the luggage. The old woman was one of those who had come over from the Chinese mainland with her soldier husband in 1949 with the defeat of the Nationalists, and who had set up temporary base in Taipei. Many of them had never bothered to unpack, for they lived under the idea that one day soon they would retake the Motherland. 50 years later, even when it had become abundantly clear that this would never happen, many of these old Mainlanders had not really settled down in Taipei, and still cherished their dreams of returning to the places of their youth and of once more regaining their status in the world.

Taipei People is a collection of 14 short stories by the Taiwanese writer Bai Xien Yong describing people just like my landlady. Published separately during the 60s, and for the first time as a collection in 1971, the work is rightly regarded on both sides of the Taiwan Strait as a masterpiece of Chinese literature, a contemporary classic. The title is ironic, because the protagonists are not Taipei people at all, but waishengren, 外省人, those ‘born outside the province’, as the Taiwanese call Mainlanders, as opposed to those ‘originally born in the province, the ‘benshenren’ 本省人, as the Taiwanese call themselves. Nowadays, with the passing of the generations, these terms are losing their meanings and their bitterness, but for most of the last 50 years, Taiwanese society was divided along these lines, each side looking down on the other. Bei Xian Rong himself is waishengren, the son of a famous KMT general who formed part of the exodus at the end of the Civil War. The stories focus on those waishengren who fled with Chiang Kai Shek’s armies in 1949: the singsong girls, taxi dancers, prostitutes, Beijing Opera stars, cooks, batmen, industrialists, widows, airmen and soldiers, generals, scholars and minor government functionaries, all of whom are living out their last days in Taipei, victims of history, survivors of loss, nursing their reveries of bygone days, putting a brave face on grief, and coming to terms with exile and defeat.

Some of the stories are told by the protagonists themselves, others by an omniscient narrator. Bai makes judicious and expert use of free indirect narrative, blending reverie and memory with descriptions of current reality, using techniques taken from cinema, such as montage, and jump cutting. He is especially good on how a chance sight on the street, a random word overheard in a bar can spark a whole stream of memory and whisk off both reader and protagonist altogether elsewhere. His characters have a surface vivacity, but he also somehow manages to convey their secret loneliness and despair as they come to terms with the fact that they will never go back, that the past is irrecoverable. His dialogue is absolutely masterful, reproducing a whole range of different voices and accents from all over China, and conveying between the lines the things the characters would not dare to admit even to themselves. The text is a tapestry of styles in which ancient poems and songs from the Beijing Opera rub shoulders with colloquial proverbs and street slang. Bai is the master of the light touch, the telling detail, the miraculously well placed word which unleashes almost overwhelming emotion. I found myself frequently wiping away tears, and weeping openly especially at the tale called Winter Night, a story of two old university professors remembering the days of their youth as student rioters and activists at Beijing University in the heady days of the May the Fourth Movement, a study in failure, set in one of those old wooden Japanese houses smelling of damp tatami mats, mould and regret, with winter rain falling softly outside and the taxis wooshing past at the end of the alley.

The best stories set up a powerfully affecting contrast between nostalgia for the past and suggestions of a more optimistic future, a future in which divisions such as weishengren and benshengrenare no longer so important, in which memories are not so bitter, and in which a new generation is stepping up to really become Taipei people. What links all the stories is the city of Taipei itself, the city of exiles, which Bai describes in topographical detail, in all its weathers and moods.

By the time General P’u returned to the courtyard, a wintry evening breeze had

come up: the purple bamboos rustled and shivered. In the western sky a dab of the setting sun froze blood-red. The old soldier strolled to a corner of the courtyard and paused... for a long time, his hands clasped behind his back, his full silvery beard unfurling in the wind. Reminiscences of long-forgotten episodes from the Year of Hsin Hai half a century ago came floating back to him again, until his grandson Hsiao-hsien came and tugged at his sleeve. With his hand on the boy’s shoulder, the two of them, grandfather and grandson, went in to dinner together.