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Escape
as protest
By
Dominic Regester (London UK) - dregester@hotmail.com
In
Zhang Xianliang's 1989 novel Getting Used to Dying there is a scene
in which the protagonist has to address a literary conference in
New York. He rejects his prepared and translated notes, replaces
his female translator with a male one and decides to ad lib, mainly
because an earlier European feminist had called on women to reject
men and "masturbate if they felt horny", the effect that
this had had on the audience prompting the move from the dry dissertation
style speech to the one that was finally given, which includes the
following passage;
"Anyone
reading my novels, reading one love story after another, would think
that in the midst of these disasters I must have been warmed by
a considerable amount of love. The reality is quite the opposite.
Until I was thirty-nine I was as pure as a virgin boy. I hope that
you men sitting in front of me never have to experience that kind
of sexual repression. The subject matter of my novels is the product
of my imagination.
"Realise that I would wake up every morning in a primitive
town, with the frost thick outside when the cocks started crowing.
Over me would be a worn sliver of a blanket that was as cold as
steel. Think how easily I could imagine that next to me lay this
or that woman: I caressed her and she caressed me, and in her loneliness
she found things to comfort me in mine.
"My solitude was peopled by the company of imagined lovers.
By the time I had been given the right to write, and even the right
to publish I simply dropped their images one by one onto a sheet
of paper.
" As a result, I feel that I began to understand what literature
is. Literature expresses the dreams of mankind, dreams that in themselves
are a revolt against reality."
There are certain
trends that are becoming increasingly common in modern Chinese literature,
one of the more dominant but neglected in terms of study is escapism.
Zhang Xianliang's protagonist's escape into erotic fantasy and the
fact that this revelation was triggered by a female character's
allusion to sex are representative of the kind of multi-layered
escapism discussed in this essay. Firstly, the protagonist reacts
strongly to the earlier reference to sex by a woman and makes this
revelation to a packed lecture hall. Secondly, assuming that the
revelation is true, and it is entirely in keeping with the behaviour
of the protagonist throughout the book, sex, be it real or imagined
is his preferred form of escape from, what for convenience's sake,
can be termed "the reality" of the novel. Thirdly, the
description of literature and dreams in a work of literature, coming
after a description of a dream or fantasy is clearly important for
placing the character, himself an author, in the context of the
book. His dreams, or his revolt against reality, or his escape from
reality into dreams, clearly manifest themselves erotically. The
character, throughout the book, spends much of his time thinking
about or having sex, depending on his circumstances. Therefore,
in this instance, which is by no means isolated, Zhang Xianliang
could be seen to be offering sex as a key way to escape from reality,
be it the reality described within the novel, or the reality of
modern China, Getting used to Dying being a work of literature from
modern China. He is by no means alone here; a lot of contemporary
Chinese literature seems to be offering some form of escape.
The need to
escape implies a complete rejection of whatever is being escaped
from and is therefore a form of protest against it. This essay will
argue that there are multiple layers of escapism taking place in
Chinese literature at the moment and that all of these contain some
element of political rejection of the realities of the last twenty
years in China. These different manifestations of escapism can be
taken together to show a new kind of multi-layered literary protest.
The four books looked at here all contain elements of myth, dreams,
surrealism or horror and as such could all come under the broad
rubric of "fantasy" which has been described as "an
obdurate refusal of prevailing definitions of the "real"
or "possible" and by extension a subversion of the rules
and conventions taken to be normative. This is not to imply that
all literature containing fantastical elements is subversive, but
it is an important departure from Mao Zedong's prescriptions for
socialist literature in China. Fantasy is an escape from reality
and whilst literary protest in China is nothing new the ways in
which escapism is being represented and the different forms of escapism
taking place are an innovative and important new form of protest.
Sartre wrote a defence of fantasy coming into its own in the secularised,
materialistic world of modern capitalism, only in a secular culture
can fantasy invert the natural world order into something "other",
in a religious culture fantasy is a leap into another realm. This
would seem to hold true for the books being looked at here since
they were all written in the 1980's after Deng Xiaoping had initiated
China's change of direction and the cult of Mao began to decline.
In an essay
of this length some only some of the varied manifestations of escapism
can be discussed. In the four books looked at sex and travel are
the two most common though death (surely the most drastic form of
escape), religion, immersion in myth or local ethnic culture and
alcohol all feature prominently as well. The examples are taken
from four works of reasonably contemporary literature; Zhang Xianlian's
Getting Used to Dying; Ma Jian's Red Dust; Mo Yan's The Republic
of Wine and Gao Xingjian's Soul Mountain. Of the four only Red Dust
uses a conventional linear narrative, escapism is not necessarily
the dominant theme of any of them, it does however connect them.
Each book has already generated much literature and will no doubt
continue to do so, the aim of this essay is to draw out some of
the examples of escapism and try to understand how they function
and what is being escaped from, not to compare and contrast the
four boks. Red Dust is an autobiographical travelogue, Soul Mountain
stems from similar origins but its complex and innovative narrative
structure brings it closer to fiction, Getting used to Dying is
a work of fiction with a similar narrative structure (a division
of the protagonist into different personae) clearly stemming from
the author's own experiences. The Republic of Wine's main plot is
pure fiction but Mo Yan's use of a metanarrative of correspondence
between Mo Yan the narrator of the main plot (as opposed to Mo Yan
the author of the entire novel) and a Ph.D. student from a university
in the Republic of Wine called Li Yiduo, who wants to embark on
a career as a writer and sends Mo Yan examples of his short stories,
which along with the correspondence, are printed in alternate chapters
to the main plot. Mo Yan, the narrator, eventually enters the novel,
travels to the Republic and ends up getting drunk with many of the
less savoury characters from his main plot. This intratextual relationship
between the Republic of Wine as a fictional place created by Mo
Yan and the real place where Li Yidou lives is one of several ingenious
ways in which Mo Yan sets up his critique of the corruption and
decadence in China today. It is also, with regards to this essay,
the most ingenious of all the forms of escape.
Despite their
obvious differences in genre and style the four books share certain
common traits. They are all by male authors, feature male protagonists
all of whom are either depictions of or very similar to the authors
themselves. Female characters get fairly short shrift in all of
the books, often going unnamed or identified only by an initial.
The majority of the women who pass through the pages of the four
books in question seem to exist to either arouse or satisfy the
protagonist's desires, arousal is sometimes intentional but usually
not, breast-feeding being the most common and recurrent example
of this form of titillation. All four books have the protagonist
travelling outside of his natural environment and the freedom that
this generates is an important aspect of the escapism. They all
have an ambiguous relationship, for a variety of reasons, with the
real world. They have also all been banned in China.
Since sex or
sexual fantasy is the most common form of escapism for the protagonists
of the four books and especially in Getting used to Dying, it seems
like a reasonable place to start. However, the position of sex in
modern Chinese literature underwent various shifts during Deng Xiaoping's
reforms and a brief word on this is necessary before looking specifically
at the books. From the mid-1980's an increasing number of Chinese
critics railed against the "collective impotence" of the
Han Chinese. This resulted in a resurgence of tough male protagonists
in film and literature such as Jiang Wen's character in the film
of the Mo Yan novel Red Sorghum , a huge increase in the popularity
of Kung Fu novels that saw Jin Yong become the most popular author
in mainland China and a general resurgence of sex as a predominant
concern of male writers. This probably reached its climax with the
publication of Jia Pingwa's The Abandoned City in 1993, which was
widely described as "the most salacious sex story since…Jinpingmei".
The protagonist, a middle-aged literary star, works his way through
a remarkable number of fawning women. Many intellectuals attacked
Jia Pingwa for descending into pornography and although others hailed
it as a modern day The Story of the Stone the novel was banned in
1994. Back in the early 1980's, which is when both Ma Jian and Gao
Xingjian made the journeys that were to lead to their books such
things were unimaginable. The CCP had always seen sexual liberation
as directly related to the broader struggle for increased political
and personal freedom and during each of the key post-Mao periods
of mass protest there have been calls for sexual freedom, such as
the poem written on Democracy Wall in February 1979, which contained
the following stanza;
1979, it will be Open Sex Year
If we take a figure of speech:
This year is a girl,
"Open Sex" is the little wool hat on her head,
If you do not put it on,
You are not modern at all.
One writer has
seen China's post-Mao changing attitude towards sex as "denoting
a new sexual culture in China's towns and cities" and this
is reflected in the literature of the last two decades and a possible
relaxing of the official stance. Julia Lovell makes the point that
The Abandoned Capital was not banned until 1994 and that Jia Pingwa
himself was never prosecuted. This then is the ever-changing cultural
background to the four books being looked at here, whatever might
be going on in real China, sex is incredibly important for the characters,
it defines them, it drives them and it provides one of the few true
means of escape from the reality of the book.
For Zhang Xianliang's
unnamed protagonist sex allows him to "return to a primeval
state…to [smell] the wetness of caves and the forest…to
move from civilisation to barbarity…to travel back ten thousand
years in one night" despite the fact that at the time he is
in Brooklyn. The protagonist sleeps with five women in the book
as well as remembering his first lover and his current wife, he
is at great pains to prove his potency throughout. Zhang Xianliang
used impotency as a metaphor for political persecution in his previous
book Half of Man is Woman and the same image is used in the latter
part of Getting used to Dying. This is a different variation on
the impotency of the Han Chinese as discussed in the mid-eighties
and mentioned above, but it is clear that Zhang's protagonist, almost
certainly the impotent protagonist in Half of Man is Woman, is escaping
from this through his many sexual encounters. However every time
he has sex he is haunted afterwards by some terrible image of death.
Death as a means of escape exists in the book from the opening chapter
with its failed suicide attempt in prison and death and sex are
linked throughout. Following the first failed suicide attempt the
protagonist divides into "I" (the present) and "he"(the
past) and the past must be killed off or escaped from in order to
survive in the present.
The attempted
suicide here should not be seen as a form of protest, as it has
been many times in China's past from Qu Yuan through to the cultural
revolution but as a desperate attempt to escape from the life he
is being forced to lead. The correlation of sex and death represent
two strands of his escapism from the past and come together in his
pleasure of the present. In the past he has used sexual fantasies
to escape from loneliness and fear and on occasion attempted suicide
to escape from the hell of the prison camp. His rampant sexual appetite
in the present represents freedom from relative political persecution
(and therefore impotency) as well as an escape from the metaphorical
impotency seen to be crippling China at that time.
Mo Yan's protagonist,
Ding Gou'er, also tries to use sex as a brief escape from the bizarre
reality he finds himself in, however each time he does his situation
becomes more compromised. Ding Gou'er is a special investigator
sent to the Republic of Wine because of rumours of cannibalism.
However the special investigator spends much of his time there drunk
or trying to seduce the wife of one of the main suspects, and he
eventually drowns in a pit of manure, a fugitive on the run who
has failed to solve the case and prevent the future breeding of
meat-boys. At this juncture Mo Yan the narrator of the Ding Gou'er
story and correspondent of Li Yidou, enters the story and travels
down to the Republic of Wine, for a liquor festival. Here are three
of the most common forms of escapism, sex, alcohol and travel, playing
a pivotal role in the novel. The Republic of Wine is a fictitious
province in China, hideously debauched, decadent and corrupt, which
has taken Lu Xun's cannibalistic description of Chinese society
all too literally. When Mo Yan, having killed off Ding Gou'er because
he was becoming uncontrollable, enters the novel, his journey mirrors
that of his characters. He meets the same people and gets even drunker
than Ding Gou'er. In a long and detailed study of the book on the
internet Xiaobin Yang draws a comparison between Ding Gou'er and
Yang Zirong, the detective hero of Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy,
a "model drama" from the 1960's. Yang Zirong is the saviour
from the Communist party who brings emancipation to an oppressed
people and is thus used as a symbolic rendering of the ascension
of history; Ding Gou'er is the antithesis of this and invalidates
this symbolic ascension. Mo Yan ends the book as drunk as Ding Gou'er
implying that their respective projects are equally depraved. This
is the most important aspect of escape in Mo Yan's book since it
is an escape from the monologic, totalistic "narrative paradigm
of modern Chinese fiction". The sex, alcohol and travel within
the novel are the tools by which he is able to achieve this.
For Ma Jian
and Gao Xingjian sex, travel and religion/myth are the key forms
of escape from political persecution during the Campaign Against
Spiritual Pollution of 1983-4. Ma Jian describes in some detail
a world almost as corrupt and morally bankrupt as Mo Yan's Republic
of Wine. Both his and Gao's is initially a very literal escape,
a flight from Beijing to avoid arrest. Both spend a lot of time
in China's southwest minority regions and become increasingly interested
in minority customs and culture, which offer them the chance of
escaping yet further from "the centre of things", Beijing.
However both ultimately felt the need to return to the capital.
There are an enormous number of parallels between these two books
and the others discussed here, both thematically and structurally.
Considerations of space make it very difficult to do a full comparison
of the different forms of escape, which include Buddhism, myth and
history, alcohol, isolation, and exploration of both the inner and
the outer world. Travel and sex seem to be the preferred means of
escape for the protagonists; the very nature of their journeys and
the prominence they both give to the sexual encounters had along
the way is evidence enough of this.
The episodic
structure of both books also gives them a picaresque feel, which
in itself can be seen as both a form of escape and a form of protest.
Chinese literature does not have a picaresque tradition; back in
1924 Zhou Zuoren lamented that aside from the classic The Water
Margin there had been no such novels written in China. It was not
until the 1980's that this began to change, Wang Shuo's Please Don't
Call Me Human is probably the most famous example of this. Red Dust
and Soul Mountain are also very much of this ilk. The picaresque
novel has long been used as a form of protest; this is especially
true in China of The Water Margin and the structure and themes of
both Ma and Gao's books continue this. The two journeys enable the
writers to present various snapshots of China at a chaotic stage
of transition. For example Gao's visits to the different nature
reserves show the harsh reality of two major transformations that
had taken place under the CCP. On the one hand he shows the devastation
caused by Mao's attempts to move China from an agrarian country
into an industrial society and on the other the even more alarming
chaos caused by Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms and the effects
of the move towards a market-orientated economy. A comparable example
from Red Dust is Ma's description of the CCP's spiritual corruption
of Buddhist monks in Tibet by paying them the same wage as local
cadres. Having taken lay vows before setting off on the journey,
Tibet has long been the ultimate goal but his arrival there ultimately
leads him to reject the religion and to the conclusion that you
can only strive to save yourself as "man is beyond salvation".
The journey, the initial escape, has led to this conclusion, the
ultimate rejection and escape from all of China's communist ideology
and rhetoric and the final protest of the book.
The emphasis here has been entirely on male protagonists in books
by male authors for the simple fact of space. The manifestations
of escapism in a book such as Wei Hui's Shanghai Baby would make
for an interesting point of comparison. There are as many similarities
as there are differences in the ways in which both the male and
female characters look to escape with the forms of escape preferred
by the protagonists in the four books discussed here. Escape in
Chinese literature is a form of protest, be it escape into sexual
fantasy or endless random seduction as a protest against the CCP's
restrictions on individual freedom, be it a complete rejection of
the conventions of socialist literature through structural innovation
and themes or be it an account of a real escape and the journey
and the things that were seen on it. This essay could easily have
been ten times as long because of the incredible diversity and innovative
forms of escape that are currently being represented in Chinese
literature. This must surely be a good thing for China in the long
run and as with the example of Jia Pingwa's The Abandoned Capital
the scope for artistic expression and freedom from prosecution are
growing each year.
Dominic Regester
- e-mail author
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