Bravura Performance: Checking Out Tang Xiaobing

Wang Anyi, whose chinaculture.org profile proclaims "has written more than five million Chinese characters, winning important awards from both home and abroad dozens of times." My favorite Anyi quote at the moment: "An infinite number of misfortunes weighs us down every day."

Finally, as if I've been searching all this time without really even knowing it, I find some academic writing that I'm willing to say, "OK, I should imitate this. For my dissertation, and right now. This is the way to write." But I shouldn't have been surprised -- it's an essay on contemporary Chinese literature by Tang Xiaobing.

Xiaobing, Tang. "Melancholy Against the Grain: Approaching Postmodernity in Wang Anyi's Tales of Sorrow." boundary 2: Vol. 24, No. 3, Postmodernism and China (Autumn, 1997), pp. 177-99. Tang Xiaobing interprets the short fiction and autobiographical essays of Wang Anyi as postmodern reflections on the melancholic subject. Chinese literature is largely feeling sad, and Wang Anyi is singularly good at saying so, and why.

I'll be reading his essay analytically, but I'd like to leave just a few notes from my first, inspectional reading, here:


Skipping the opening gambit and main narration of Wang Anyi's early short story "Our Uncle's Story," we must mention that the third section requests a conceit that is notable as I search for similar ways to apply literary theory in English, preferably originally in German:

3. "The same sharp sorrow suddenly arose
from the vast ocean"

To draw a not entirely improbable comparison, Our Uncle's Story, in Wang Anyi's literary imagination, may occupy the same position as The Origin of the German Play of Mourning does in Walter Benjamin's historical thinking. In his study of the seventeenth-century baroque Trauerspiel as a historical structure of feeling, Benjamin develops his messianic hermeneutics and asserts that a theory of Trauer can only be secured "in the description of the world which emerges under the gaze of the melancholic." By reconstructing this mournful gaze, in the words of Max Pensky, Benjamin delineates a "melancholy subjectivity" that dialectically unifies insight and despair and thrives on a symbiotic connection between a contemplative subject and the desacralized world of objects. Central to this form of critical subjectivity is the resurrected notion of heroic melancholy, to which I will return at the end of this essay. With the completion of Our Uncle's Story, Wang Anyi seems to have discovered a passage to historical depth by way of sadness or melancholy. The unhappy tales that have ensued are intensely subjective and are often centered on intriguing anamnestic images. If Our Uncle's Story offers a self-conscious narrative of the origin of her melancholy writing, in her 1993 novella Sadness for the Pacific, Wang Anyi gives a global expression to melancholy subjectivity through revisiting a family history of sadness.

Note that Tang's application of a theoretical conceit in the work of Walter Benjamin is actually presented via a secondary work: there is no evidence that Tang consulted Benjamin in toto.

12. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of the German Play of Mourning, quoted in Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 90.
13. Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics, 107; see chap. 2, "Trauerspiel and Melancholy Subjectivity," 60-107.

The essay climaxes in a grand summary of two main currents in Chinese literature of the 1980s:

The pathos of the 1993 "patrilineal myth" seems to have drawn on two narrative modes that best define Chinese literature of the 1980s. One is the earlier and widely influential movement of cultural root seeking, which helped establish an anthropological concept of tradition and naturalistic vitality as critical antidotes to turbulent state politics as well as to the ills of modernization. The other development, loosely called either experimental, or even avant-garde, is one in which writers such as Mo Yan and Su Tong, by pursuing family genealogy as a personal and often redemptive project, push further the same intellectual and emotional concern with historical representation that underlies root-seeking literature. To these literary movements Wang Anyi has been an attentive and contributing contemporary. In Our Uncle's Story, the narrator makes a point of presenting the root-seeking movement as an intellectual watershed between the uncle's generation and that of younger, more cosmopolitan writers (Shushu, 38-39). On another occasion, Wang Anyi singles out Su Tong's novella Nineteen Thirty-Four Escapes (1988) as a pivotal text in the experiment of fictionalizing family genealogy. The title alone is fascinating enough, she writes, for the word escapes already evokes a concrete mode of existence and suggests a perennial human condition of fleeing flood, war, and famine. This fascination with desperate flight leads Wang Anyi to rediscover her family genealogy in light of the turn-of-the-century Chinese diaspora over the South Pacific. A broadened cultural geography in her narrative consequently helps reveal the historicity of such formations as the nation-state and national identity.

This is largely a bibliography of imaginative literature -- the literary equivalent of a scale. This is not to subtract it from the powerful analysis it makes here, just an effort to summarize the structure of the prose. This is a closely-spaced scale, scattering at the shape of recent works; Tang is also capable of broader strokes:

Throughout the centuries, especially in the wake of great social upheaval, continual heroic encounters with melancholia have generated different legends, memories, and images. More often than not, the melancholy figure emerges as the mournful and profound, bitter but compassionate individual endowed with an artist's sensitivity and imagination. For with the onset of melancholia, not unlike in the liminal experience of madness, insight and darkness are fused together, and the afflicted individual gains access to the ultimate truth only to compound his or her incapacitating sadness and pain. This brings about such an intensely private suffering that any effort to ease it through externalization is bound to result in ever greater despair. Hence the "abyss of sorrow,"the "noncommunicable grief" that constitutes Kristeva's melancholia.

This simple statement performs logically exactly what I want the first chapter of my dissertation to do (all I shall add to this is an example or two of memories and images). It also broaches a type of subject, one that is presumed to cross cultures via the postmodern ether, a subject that is at least similar in both Kristeva and Wang Anyi. Here the postmodern is the daughter of the modern, as Kristeva is the daughter of Freud, so Wang Anyi is the daughter of the story of her uncle, her father, and other elders, at least as she tells it.

What the narrator reassembles, from the unfamiliar tropical landscape, is the same central bildungsroman of the generation of Chinese who, as the spiritual
offspring of the May Fourth era, turned into the revolutionaries of the 1940s. It has the universal modern plot of an individual actively seeking to participate in a greater national historical enterprise. Her father's passionate longing for the mainland is first expressed as the indefatigable enthusiasm with which he joins the Malay Chinese theater troupe and its tour of the peninsula to promote the cause of the Resistance. Eventually, it will lead him to Shanghai and, after many self-doubts and
trepidations, to the Communist base in southern Jiangsu. By then, he has consciously overcome his initial uneasiness with a crude communal life and matures into a "true soldier" (Shangxin, 371). He welcomes and enjoys the trip to the barren hinterland
as a peaceful return to the warm interior of a maternal body.

Here Tang elaborates very generally on a fragment of narrative from a literary work about a particular character, to suggest that the particulars of this created subject are generalizable and comparable. The written subject of Wang Anyi crafts something that we can all understand, finally, in its truth content as well as its craftedness:

From British colonialism to Lee Kuan-yew's successful rule in postcolonial Singapore, from the modern rubber industry to the worldwide Great Depression, from the course of World War II to the Comintern's determination to prevent the Japanese from attacking the Soviet Union, her multifocal narrative explores the tension between textbook knowledge on the one hand and concrete images and personal stories on the other.

I can certainly see that the tension between textbook knowledge and concrete images and personal stories is one that crucially offers the potential for new stories. And this is a general rule, not just something about China. I would not, I admit, have taken this tension to such a negative end, as it seems many in the postmodern world do:

The ever deepening gap between a conceptual history and anamnestic concentrations makes unavoidable the question of historical failure and success, which proves to be a determining question for a melancholy subjectivity.

In fact, I'm not at all sure that I dare to face up to this deduction that some have apparently made.

The melancholic subject is of broad interest to the postmodern culture critic because such a critic is necessarily mourning, feeling the loss of the modern grand narrative. The postmodern culture critic identifies with this feeling of loss, a feeling vaguely associated with urbanization and the growth of the market. Tang somewhat lamely asserts in his conclusion that surely this melancholic mind usefully protests when contemporary cultural politics begins to outlaw melancholy. This does remind me of my (also lame) metaphor of Yang Jiang as a sprout, a leaf amidst rubble. But I'll have to do better. This just isn't clear enough, nor punchy enough:

Historical
melancholy, as I have tried to show here, is the origin and content of Wang Anyi's recent tales of sorrow. It expresses the profound ambivalence that the writer, conscious of the approaching end of a century, sustains toward the course of twentieth-century Chinese history, in particular its human dimension. Utopian longings, generated by grand historical visions that are brought into focus at moments of collective action, inevitably turn into traumatic experiences for the individual,
but the rapid dissipation of idealistic passion in a postrevolutionary contemporary world also seems vastly depressing. The loss of genuine excitement, therefore,
becomes the historical moment in which Wang Anyi, through a discourse of melancholy, examines the dialectics of success and failure. This structure of feeling generates the central plot of her late genealogical "myths": a melancholic individual in the contemporary world trying to recall and reconcile herself with historical failures as human triumphs. For this reason, my claim that Wang Anyi's recent fiction articulates a "postmodern melancholy" does not mean that melancholy itself becomes postmodernist sentiment. Rather, it acknowledges the postmodern condition that Wang Anyi's melancholic writings critically reveal and even interrupt. We may even conclude that her melancholy, in which the longing for a modern longing causes the deepest sorrow and ambivalence, gathers its historical content and relevance only in an age that deems itself "post" and beyond all ideologies of the modern. In other words, Wang Anyi's postmodern melancholy may be read as a critique of a transnational postmodernism that, in the words of Ross Chambers, is nonmelancholic, "a kind of modernism without its pathos of lack." Melancholy against the grain: This may explain why in contemporary Chinese literature there is an increasingly pronounced mood of sorrow, particularly among a new generation of women writers. This latest development raises complicated issues of gender, aesthetics, and subjectivity that ought to be engaged at greater length. It also adds renewed urgency to a famous question, posed by Gustave Flaubert in 1853, about historical necessity: "Whence come these fits of historical melancholia, these affinities from century to century, etc.?"31 To begin answering this inquiry, we will have to enter the mournful and searching gaze that a melancholic directs at the world.

There is a real humanism -- "history, in particular its human dimension" -- but it is too buried here, as is the utility of "Melancholy against the Grain." Just what that utility is will have me thinking -- and going over this essay again.

Further Reading List (Partial, but I'll update):

Anyi, Wang; Michael Berry (Translator), Susan Chan Egan (Translator) (January 30, 2008). The Song of Everlasting Sorrow. Columbia University Press. Wang Anyi's most important novel, translated by the film critic!

Years of Sadness: Autobiographical Writings of Wang Anyi. Translated by Lingzhen WANG & Mary Ann O'DONNELL. With an introduction by Wang Lingzhen. Another new translation, though I still don't see the Chinese texts that Tang Xiaobing mentioned.

"Shushu de gushi" [Our uncle's story] in Xianggang de qing yu ai. Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 1996.The story of Wang's 1980s and 1990s writing becomes a little chaotic in the midsection of Tang's paper:

15. Wang Anyi, Shangxin Taipingyang (Sadness for the Pacific), in Wang, Xianggang de qing yu ai, 306. I translate shangtong as "sharp sorrow." The Chinese conveys both a physical sensation and a mental state, evoking what Freud
once described as Schmerz-unlust in his essay "Mourning and Melancholia." Hereafter,
this work is cited parenthetically as Shangxin.

16. Wang Anyi, "Wo de laili" (My origins), in Xiao Baozhuang (Baotown) (Shanghai: Shanghai Wenyi Chubanshe, 1986), 100-30. Wang Anyi has another loving portrait of her father in the essay "Huashuo fuqin Wang Xiaoping" (About my father Wang Xiaoping), in Pugongying (Dandelions) (Shanghai: Shanghai Wenyi Chubanshe, 1988), 78-86.

17. Wang, "Wo de laili," 121-22.

18. See Wang Anyi, Fuxi yu muxi de shenhua (Patrilineal and matrilineal myths) (Hangzhou: Zhejiang Wenyi Chubanshe, 1994). Both parts of this book, Sadness for the Pacific and Jishi yu xugou (Records and fictions), were first published separately in the journal Shouhuo (Harvest) in 1993. An unabridged version of Records and Fictions was also published as an independent novel in 1993 (see note 20). 19. Wang's 1985 story "Baotown," for example, is often regarded as a representative work in the mode of critical root seeking. See "Xiao Baozhuang" (Baotown), in Wang, Xiao Baozhuang, 243-339. An English translation of this story is available in Wang Anyi, Baotown, trans. Martha Avery (New York: Penguin, 1989).

Like all Chinese authors, Wang Anyi repackages material often. This kind of publication history is something I really neglect to write when it comes to writers of my own interest.