Reading literature in
translation I sometimes discover an element from the work’s culture of origin not
immediately apparent from the work itself - a cultural practice, historical
event, engagement with a literary precursor - which, once recognized, places
the work in a richer context.
In a bookstore in China last
year, I was drawn to a beguiling title, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio,
by 17th century writer Pu Songling. The book seemed too good to pass
up, especially since it also promised a treasure trove of Chinese ghost stories
of the sort I’d first encountered in Lafcadio Hearn’s Some Chinese Ghost
Stories (not realizing that several of Hearn’s tales came from Pu Songling).
Living up to its promise, Pu’s collection contained weird, captivating tales
filled with ghosts, superstitions, odd temporal shifts, physical transformations
and bizarre events of large and small magnitude, often pervaded by a sense of
foreboding and death.
Weeks later, as I began reading
contemporary Chinese author Can Xue, I was startled at the seamlessness of the
transition from Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio to Can’s Blue
Light in the Sky and Other Stories. For all of its contemporary
experimental qualities and relation to 20th century influences,
Can’s work of wild imagination, complex moods and delirious images clearly owed a
tremendous debt to Pu Songling and a long line of other explorers of the
supernatural and fantastic in Chinese literature.
Can has described
herself as a “neo-classical” writer (which should have been enough of a clue), but
without my having first stumbled onto Pu Songling and Hearn, I might have
missed this connection between her work and these old stories. As in those
tales, in Can’s stories the most bizarre of events unfold in an almost
matter-of-fact, reportorial way, with naturalistically flat emotion, at least
in the telling. If naturalist narratives stress the determined factuality of
the world, then Can’s narrative style might be called “supernaturalist” – a
similarly rooted approach in which reception to the supernatural and to the
merely natural are scarcely distinguishable, a continuum rather than a separate
realm. Strange phenomena and weird emanations from nature fill Can’s intricate,
dreamlike tales, which usually take place in and around a village (to the
extent that they can be said to “take place” anywhere other than some
indeterminate psychological terrain) and often feature a young person entangled
in some way with an older person or persons. They also usually involve ghosts
and superstition, the grotesque and the decadent, with death nearly always in
close proximity, and in this way resonate strongly with their classical precursors.
What sets Can’s tales
apart is the strongly modern sensibility and resistance to interpretation picked
up on by many of the reviews of her work that I’ve read, which often center on
one or both of two aspects of her work while (with notable exceptions[1])
saying little to nothing about her Chinese precedents. The first is to remark
upon Can’s striking originality and reference her more immediate Western influences,
including Borges, Kafka, Bruno Schulz, and Garcia Marquez (though in interviews
Can has been dismissive of both magical realism and Garcia Marquez). As regards
Borges and Kafka, the influences are obvious and acknowledged. Can has, in
fact, written a full length book on Kafka, and her debt to him comes across
through individuals mostly at the mercy of forces larger than themselves, of
obscure networks of restrictions, illegible codes and blindly-followed traditions,
of subjection to baffling human and natural phenomena that her characters
confront with a mixture of mystification, adaptation, and submission. They roll
with the situations they confront, but largely from a lack of alternatives. In
these tightly constructed, intensely concentrated tales, one feels the sense of
labyrinthine entrapment and abstractly directed activity as one finds, for
example, in Kafka’s knotty, claustrophobic masterpiece, “The Burrow.”
Many of the 14 pieces in
the Blue Light in the Sky interweave similar motifs, characters, and
tone. Regarding the last, there’s not much joy in these stories; rather, the
tone is slightly menacing, dark and disjointed, a shudder of horror behind a
calm and mostly acquiescent narrative voice whose mild protests, when they
occur, seem to dissipate into fog and echo back upon themselves. Unlike in the
work of surrealist writers whose images deliberately detach from reality, the
surrealistic elements here seem to serve as elaborate, two-handled, multi-sided
metaphors for structuring interior, psychological states in a manner that gives
them the plausibility of dreams despite their impossible, supernatural
qualities.
Despite this structuring
of interiority, another common tack in reviews is an attempt to place Can’s
work in a contemporary political context, awkwardly slotting her work into a
Western framework that gazes on China from a distance (sometimes with alarmingly
stereotypical assumptions). But there’s almost nothing explicitly recognizable
about modern China in Can’s tales, or even any sense that she’s a writer overtly
concerned with social or political issues. She herself has explicitly denied (perhaps
disingenuously) not only a political element, but also that her stories even deal
with the external world at all. The confusion may arise from the fact that the
conceits she presents, through the encompassing sweep of her prodigious imagination
(which seems to pick up something of everything it touches, like some literary katamari damacy), nonetheless manage to
reflect, usually metaphorically and at a severely oblique slant, a wide range
of problems with which contemporary China is wrestling: mass displacements from
the countryside to the cities, rapid modernization and construction,
environmental and cultural degradation and destruction, the fracturing of
tradition in confrontation with rapid change, and a panoply of psychiatric
pathologies (that China holds among the world’s highest rates of psychiatric
disorder seems amply if indirectly reflected in Can’s stories). In the story
“Snake Island,” for example (a title shared by one of Pu Songling’s tales), the
narrator - in a standard theme from the repertoire of Chinese literature - returns
to his native village after 30 years’ absence, but when he arrives, everything
looks “completely wrong.”
The
strange thing was that no matter how I combed through my memory, no matter how
I stared at the scenery, I couldn’t call back that old village. As soon as I
got off the bus, I thought I’d recognize the mountain road that went through
our village – that twisting cobblestone road that I’d taken countless times
from childhood to young adulthood. But – where was the road? Even the mountain
had disappeared. In the open country stretching to the horizon was a walled
community of bungalows in garish colors There weren’t even many trees near the
houses. Wondering if I’d come to the wrong place, I went to ask a farmer’s
wife. ‘Snake Island?’ She squinted, responding in the village dialect that I
hadn’t heard in ages. ‘This is it.’
Nothing in the story
fixes it in a precise time or explicitly alludes to particulars of modern
China. But one can recognize the obliterating sense of dislocation the story
depicts, a prominent feature of the psychological landscape in a country where
an estimated 1.5 million people were uprooted from the banks of the Yangtze to
accommodate the Three Gorges Dam, and where a vast, gleaming city like
Shenzhen, with a population of over 12 million, was, just 30 years ago, a
fishing village of a few hundred people.
But such oblique intimations
of China’s modern situation are incidental in Can’s fiction. One glimpses these
external elements as casual features of her literary landscapes, not as social
criticism, and only via the interstices in narratives that read in most other
ways like classical folk tales retooled to reflect the corrosive effects of the
modern world and given new form by Can’s fertile imagination.
“Scenes Inside the
Dilapidated Walls,” for example, seems to show off Can’s melding of the tone
and supernaturalism of Chinese ghost stories with her modern influences. The
young narrator and an isolated nameless old man, together beneath a stark sun
that grows colder each day, unwillingly keep a lonely watch over some
dilapidated walls (reminiscent of Borges’ “The Circular Ruins”) while waiting
for a particular old woman to pass by. They spend the interminable hours trying
out different ways to alleviate the boredom and increasing chill, including by telling
one another “dull stories.” Both are drawn to the dilapidated walls, the old
man with an addiction to sticking his head between its cracks, where he repeatedly makes startling discoveries, including, one day, beautiful flies
with wings “like a rainbow” – a surprising novelty under the constancy of “this
monotonous burning sun and clear sky.” As in most of Can’s tales, the action seems
to carry little of the significance of her story, which is borne instead by a
complex metaphorical language without clear referents. As the old man in the
story says of a metaphor that has suddenly occurred to him (in the way Can’s own
metaphors often seem like inspired conceits), “To tell the truth, this is a metaphor
I thought up on the spur of the moment. My life now is like a metaphor covering
a metaphor, or you could say a metaphor within another metaphor. This other
metaphor is concealed in an even bigger metaphor.” While it’s purposefully
unclear what the “bigger metaphor” of the story might be – and one strength of
Can’s stories is their defiance of interpretation while at the same time
magnifying the possibilities for interpretation – one could even see the tale
as a potent image of the state of contemporary literature and of the effort to
create something new and meaningful in a world where literary language, in its
relation to a dilapidated past marked by erasures, elisions and revisions,
offers traces of well-traveled, forking paths as well as new literary
figurations that bubble up from a seemingly endless and mysterious fount, but
where actual communication has become more difficult and assurance of meaning
more unstable. As the young narrator of the story says at one point, “I was
constantly bothered by the question: do
our voices reach the outside world?” In the end, these two persons, as suspended in
indeterminacy as Lucky and Pozzo at the end of Waiting for Godot, come
to see the absent old woman for whom they wait as their only “wisp of a
connection to the outside world…our only thread.” But where is she?
Can’s brief afterword, entitled
“A Particular Sort of Story,” presents an intriguing description of her
artistic process. In it, she insists again that her work deals not with the
external world but with the internal, arising through an almost shamanistic
process combining instinct and spiritual practice. Can describes a kind of
spiritual, dialectical poetics by which opposing elements get pushed to their
extreme limits as a way of generating maximum poetic effect and “strangeness”
via an “acceleration of mystery” (physicists take note). Can’s method seems to
be a rigidly devotional matter of opening herself up to impersonal, unmediated
eruptions from the subconscious; it’s telling that she frequently refers to
herself in the third person in interviews, as though she is merely a disparate
facet of or channel for some larger source of the collective unconscious, not
the active agent of her works. Her method resolutely opposes a strict
rationality, affirming the value of elements beyond the merely empirical. But
at the same time, there is a rigor in Can’s method that she asserts in a
provocative final sentence, in which she insists (with a frustrating lack of elaboration)
that her spiritual, creative “neo-classical” process stands in diametric
opposition to what gets translated here as “jungle culture.”
For all its undeniable
originality in process as well as in product, Can Xue’s work also clearly owes
as much of a debt to the “old dilapidated walls” of her Chinese literary
predecessors as to those of her acknowledged modern influences. But as an
artistic response to a complex world, Can’s work is as strangely resonant as
one is likely to find in contemporary literature. Reading Pu Songling and then
Can Xue in the wake of my own most recent visit to China left me thinking about
Susan Sontag’s comment when asked why she would put on Waiting for Godot
in such a challenging place as Sarajevo during the 1993 siege. Her reply has
stayed with me since, and seems fitting for Can Xue’s relation to modern China:
“There are more than a few people who feel strengthened and consoled by having
their sense of reality affirmed and transfigured by art.”[2]
If there is no intended or direct correspondence between Can’s stories and
contemporary China - where the rapidity of change, the violent upheavals of
progress and the contrasts and tensions between opposing elements reach
awe-inspiring extremes arguably unmatched anywhere else on the planet - one
might understandably claim that nothing illuminates the significance of Can
Xue’s stories more than the “sense of reality” one can experience in modern
China itself.
Much of the source material I consulted for this
review can be found at MIT’s Can Xue web site - http://web.mit.edu/ccw/can-xue - an
invaluable resource for information on the writer and her work).
