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Le corps dans les littératures modernes d’Asie orientale : discours, représentation, intermédialité

 | 
Gérard Siary
, 
Toshio Takemoto
, 
Victor Vuilleumier
, 
et al.

3. Corps réaproppriés

From Subjects to Bodies: Ah Cheng’s The King of Children and Wang Gang’s Ying-ge-li-shi

Melinda Pirazzoli

Texte intégral

1What is a subject? What is a body? Does the fictional representation of a human body necessarily imply subjectivity? This study will argue that a comparison between Ah Cheng’s 阿城 (1949-) The King of Children / 孩子王 (1995) and Wang Gang’s 王剛 (1960-) 英格力士 (2005), a phonetic transliteration for “English”, is useful to understand that the notions of “subjects” and “bodies” do not coincide.

2It would appear that these two novels have so many narrative details in common, the reader cannot avoid the impression that when Wang Gang wrote his novel, he might as well have been relying on The King of Children to underscore the radical and dramatic changes that had occurred during the previous twenty years. Both stories are set during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) in remote areas of China, they are both coming-of-age novels that describe the ways in which a group of students relate to their teachers and parents, and both represent the ways in which the younger generation is affected by adults and by a dictionary. The earlier work, in line with the intellectual ferment of the “High culture fever” / 文化热 movement, describes the birth of a subject willing to emancipate himself from the Chinese Communist Party’s modalities of apprehending and producing knowledge. It therefore celebrates the birth of what we may define as a “new epistemic subject”. Wang Gang’s novel, on the other hand, does not ascribe any value to epistemology, but rather focuses on the ways in which a young group of students challenges the authoritarian powers of both institutions and adults in order to claim control over their own bodies and lives. In fact, the Bildung of the young protagonists in Ying-ge-li-shi is described in terms of experiential knowledge which is apprehended only at the level of the body and not at that of the mind. In other words, this novel celebrates the birth of a middle class habitus and lifestyle which gives rise to new concepts of privacy.

3The King of Children is a novella that describes the feats of a young and inexperienced “educated youth” / 知青 named Lao Gan 老杆. He is sent to Yunnan to teach a class of young students. When he sees that the textbook that he is forced to adopt contains nothing but political propaganda, he abandons it, and instead teaches his students how to write free compositions relying only on their personal experiences.

4One way to tackle this novel is to consider it as Ah Cheng’s attempt to deploy a discourse on subjectivity, because, as Rey Chow observes,

  • 1 Chow Rey, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema, New York, Colu (...)

[if we understand subjectivity] in terms of the material relationships among human beings as participants in a society — relationships that are in turn mediated by the collective cultural activities of speaking, reading and writing — then it is an issue that is forcefully present in modern Chinese literature and culture as it is in the West, even if it’s not named as such.1

5What is at stake in Ah Cheng’s novel is Lao Gan’s attempt at constructing a world centered around the production of written texts that can represent a diegetic space very distant and different from the one offered by narratives coercively imposed by cultural and political institutions.

6At the beginning of the novella, the inexperienced teacher puts himself in a subaltern condition:

  • 2 The passages quoted from Ah Cheng’s original text refer to the following edition: Ah Cheng 阿城, [The (...)
  • 3 The passages quoted from the translation of Ah Cheng’s novel refer to the following edition:

Are there any rules for teaching this class? I can see you can’t really make it up as you go along. Since the National Textbook Unification reform, textbooks for each subject have been the same throughout the whole country, but there should be also a unified standard for teaching or people won’t know if they are teaching properly. For example, how many sections should a text be divided into? What is the main idea of each section? What is the overall theme? What is the composition method? I might interpret these things one way, but another school might teach it another way. Language isn’t like math — one plus one makes two wherever you are in the world. Language courses should have rules so that we can be on firm ground.2 (p. 146)
这课的教法是不是有规定?恐怕还是不能乱教。课本既然是全国统一的那怎么教也应该有个准才好让人明白是教对了。比如说吧一篇文章应划几个段落?段落大意是什么?主题思想又是什么?写作方法是怎么个方法?我说是这样了别的学校又教是那样。这语文不比数学。一加一等于二世界上哪儿都是统一的。语文课应该有个规定才踏实。3 (p. 120)

7This complex and ambivalent passage raises some questions: does the opacity of language threaten the stability of mechanisms of power? Is there a unitary hermeneutic approach to propaganda? This emphasis on the lack of alternative discursive possibilities becomes a sort of obsession for the teacher, who gradually discovers the importance and usefulness of the dictionary which provides readers with etymological and epistemological grounds. The dictionary can transform his students from passive recipients of knowledge into writing subjects endowed with agency and capable of transcending the narrow boundaries imposed by Maoist rhetoric. After discovering its almost magical power, the formerly subaltern teacher polemically complains:

The teaching material is unified all right, I can’t even tell the difference between the Chinese lessons and the political lessons. My class is learning Chinese — what are they going to do when they return to their teams? Become party secretaries? (p. 164)
教材倒真是统一我都分不清语文课和政治课的区别。学生们学了语文将来回到队上是要当支书吗? (p. 131)

8Wang Fu 王福, the most diligent student of the class, is completely captivated by the dictionary. He tries first to obtain it by cheating Lao Gan, then he decides to copy it. In this regard, Rey Chow observes:

  • 4 Chow, Primiative passions…, op. cit., p. 119.

Wang Fu’s persistence in copying the dictionary and his eventual “success” in producing a system of coherent writing are the symptoms of a child who has been properly “interpellated” into the system of learning — to use the term from Althusser. Wang Fu’s perseverance, seriousness and ability to work hard are all part of the process by which the school as an apparatus of ideology solicits the voluntary cooperation of the participants.4

9What Chow fails to mention, however, is that the person who teaches Wang Fu to produce a system of coherent writing is also the one who has deliberately alienated himself from the school system by refusing to adopt the textbook. Furthermore, the teacher is eventually compelled to leave the school. Yet he has not only successfully performed his duty, he has also left an important trace. By the end of the novel, his student Wang Fu eventually writes a very moving free composition in which he declares that he is determined to speak out loud on behalf of his own mute and bullied father:

My father is one of the strongest men in the world. No one on our team can beat him at carrying sacks of rice. My father also eats more than anyone in the world. My mother lets him eat all the food we have. This is right, because my father has to work, and his wages support our whole family. But my father says: “I am not as strong as Wang Fu, because Wang Fu can read and write.” My father isn’t able to talk but I understand what he means. I know that people in the team bully him. Therefore, I want to study and learn how to speak for him… (p. 176)
我的父亲是世界中力气最大的人。他在队里扛麻袋别人都比不过他。我的父亲又是世界中吃饭最多的人。家里的饭都是母亲让他吃饱。这很对,因为父亲要做工,每月拿钱来养活一家人。但是父亲说:《我没有王福力气大,因为王福在识字。》 父亲是一个不能讲话的人,但我懂他的意思。队上有人欺负他,我明白。所以我要好好学文化,替他说话。父亲很辛苦,今天他病了,后来慢慢爬起来,还要去干活,不愿失去一天的钱。我要上学现在还替不了他。(p. 157)

10The Luxunian outcry to save the children at the end of his most famous short story, “A Madman’s Diary” / 狂人日记 (1918), is overturned. While in the modern story the author denounces the cannibalistic nature of Chinese society and urges his adult readers to spare the future generations of children from being cannibalized, Ah Cheng describes a devout son who wants to rescue his mute father from being bullied. The King of Children assesses the ethical mission of the filial son, who needs to fulfill his role in order not only to save his father from a cruel and senseless society, but also to “plant the seeds” of a fairer and more brilliant future. It is no accident that Lao Gan leaves the precious dictionary to Wang Fu, who will hopefully be able to emancipate himself from the dull rhetoric of the Chinese Communist Party’s political propaganda by transforming himself into a subject capable of producing new meanings.

11Written twenty years later, in 2005, Ying-ge-li-shi also describes the complex relationships between students, teachers and parents. This coming-of age novel describes Love Liu’s 刘爱 growth into adulthood. He is forced to cope with a dysfunctional family — indeed, his father and mother are far from exemplary in their conduct. While being successful in his career as an architect, his father is subservient to all forms of authority, and is cruel and despondent toward his own son and all people who occupy a lower social status. His mother, also an architect, betrays her husband with the school principal. Furthermore, instead of showering him with affection and love, she constantly monitors and controls the politically correctness of his behavior. His classmates, Garbage Li 李垃圾 and Sunrise Huang 黄旭升, are extremely evil. Garbage Li is outrageously violent and cruel. Sunrise Huang first accuses their English teacher of sexual harassment just because she discovers that he loves another woman, then persuades Garbage Li to kill his mother’s lover, and finally kills Garbage Li (though this is by accident). The political authorities, Director Fan 范主任 and Commander Shen 申总, are cruel impostors and sexual harassers, determined to reify the bodies of the women onto whom they wish to discharge their libidinal energies. The only characters endowed with gentleness or humanity are the English teacher, Second Prize Wang 王亚军, and the Uyghur teacher 阿吉太. Their role is underscored right at the beginning of the novel:

  • 5 The passages quoted from the translation of Wang Gang’s novel refer to the following edition: Wang (...)
  • 6 The passages quoted from Wang Gang’s original text refer to the following edition: Wang Gang 王刚, En (...)

We had stopped learning Russian the year before, and from that day we would not be learning Uyghur. We weren’t really interested in languages. We were interested only in women like Ahjitai. She might have been a teacher, but the curve of her neck and her tears were things I yearned for at dawn much more than the sun.5 (p. 1-2)
我门从去年开始就不学俄语了从今天开始就不学维语了。我们对任何语言都不感兴趣我们只对阿吉太这样的女人感兴趣尽管她是女老师可是她的脖子和她的眼泪都是我在黎明时比太阳还渴望的东西。6 (p. 2)

  • 7 Moi Toril, “Patriarchal Thought and the Drive for Knowledge”, in New Directions in Psychoanalysis a (...)

12There is a clear shift of focus from epistemology to both epistemophilia (investment of eroticism in the visual) and scopophilia (erotic pleasure in looking). As Toril Moi argues, “the body held in the field of vision is par excellence the object of both knowing and desire: knowing as desire, desire as knowing”.7

  • 8 Genette Gérard, Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method, Lewin Jane E. (trans.), Ithaca, Cornell U. (...)

13Anyone familiar with Wang Gang’s narrative technique well knows that he frequently relies on what Gérard Genette calls prolepses (anticipation of an event that will occur later in the story)8 and can thereby easily foresee the ending of the novel: that Love Liu will make love to Ahjitai.

14While both novels are set during the Cultural Revolution, the social space created by Wang Gang is completely different from the one created by Ah Cheng. It is clearly a hybrid and very unstable space where different ethnic groups and very different habitus meet (to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term). This notion which, among other things, include personal or social classes’ affective dispositions and dispositions of perceptions in relation to the urban space, is very helpful here because it allows us to grasp the intimate and emotional bond between the protagonist Love Liu and the urban space in which he lives. It is not a coincidence that both his mother and father are architects, and that his father in particular has created the very space in which his coming-of-age experience occurs: the school.

15This is Wang Gang’s quite telling description of Love Liu’s “learning environment”:

Our yellow school building, with its three-gabled roof, was also my father’s work. I still have the colored architectural drawings he made of it all these years ago. The steep, Russian-style roof was covered in green metal, making the building look like a man wearing a yellow overcoat and a green hat. In Chinese “wearing a green hat” means to be cuckolded, and our school stood there proudly, seemingly unaware that its wife was sleeping with someone else, as the sounds of our songs and laughter — and of course of students reciting — reverberated out of the windows where its eyes would be. (p. 14)
我们学校淡黄色的山字形的楼也是父亲设计的直到现在我还保留他当时画的彩色的效果图. 俄罗斯式的斜屋顶是用绿色的铁皮搭起来的有些像是一个穿着米黄色大衣的人戴了一顶绿帽子他的老婆跟别人睡了他不知道仍然神气活现地站在那儿让我们这些孩子的歌声和笑声对了还有读书的声音从他的像是眼睛一样的窗户里传出来。(p. 18)

16The school, a public space created by Love Liu’s father, is rhetorically transformed into something reminiscent of a “physical body” exposed to public ridicule. The laughter and songs of students completely indifferent to the disempowerment of previously recognizable forms of authority suggests that the school can no longer be read as a site for self-construction.

  • 9 Zhong Xueping, Masculinity Besieged: Issues of Modernity and Male Subjectivity in Chinese Literatur (...)

17In an important study entitled Masculinity Besieged, Zhong Xueping has observed how male protagonists of post-Maoist narratives often underwent a process of demasculinization, or in other terms a loss of manhood, that eventually entailed their sexual impotence.9 The group of narratives produced by the group of writers belonging to the “Late-born generation” / 晚生代 or “Rupture movement” / 断裂, which deal with the same issues and themes as Wang Gang, ridicules and demystifies everything and everyone that was formerly considered as an authority.

18In a third important prolepsis, which as we shall see at the end of this study foreshadows the conclusion of the novel, the Chinese author broadens his scope of analysis and links Love Liu’s father to the political leaders of Urumchi. Represented in the act of painting Chairman Mao’s profile, Love Liu’s father is first ridiculed and then attacked by Director Fan and Commander Shen for having (correctly) portrayed Chairman Mao’s profile with “only” one ear. Love Liu’s father tries in vain to explain the law of perspective to the political leaders. Yet since nobody, including his own son, is willing to listen to him, Love Liu’s father ends up betraying the law of perspective and adding a second ear to Chairman Mao’s profile. He ultimately has no alternative other than to abide by the political leaders’ orders and add an ear. What is at stake here is an expedient to address the ways the body of the most important Chinese leader, Chairman Mao, is transformed into a mere icon or, to use Baudrillard’s term, a simulacrum.

19The English teacher, Second Prize Wang, is the character that ushers Love Liu into a new sensual and sensory world. He seems to be the only counterpart to his own already disempowered father. The importance of bodily senses in this novel becomes evident in the description of Love Liu’s first meeting with his English teacher, which occurs in a bathroom. The first thing the young boy notices about him is his teacher’s long penis:

I couldn’t help peering over. I cringed in shock — it was enormous. I’d never seen a big one. When I was small I went with father to the bathhouse, and I saw that every man had one. The world is amazing, I thought. The image of those comfortably warmed symbols of manhood flopping about in the misty bathhouse became deeply engrained in my memory. (p. 17)
我忍不住地朝他那边一看吓得我一哆太大了。 从没有见过哪个男子长得像他那么大。 小的时候跟着爸爸走进男澡堂看到每一个男人长着一个这样的东西我就感到世界不可思议在室内的雾气中被熟得有些舒服的象征物们在晃动。 他们无数次地进入我的眼帘留在我的记忆深处。(p. 21)

20This depiction, which undeniably bears some sort of Proustian flavor, stands in sharp contrast with those familiar Freudian narratives that celebrate the castration complex. Its Proustian flavor is suggested by an all-too-clear reference to the non-temporal nature of the unconscious as well as to the movement of the unconscious from the past to the present, and then once again to the past.

  • 10 Brooks Peter, Body Work. Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative, Cambridge, Harvard U. P., 1993, p.  (...)

21As Peter Brooks reminds us in his Body Work, “the castration complex brings an end to the Œdipal stage by instituting the law with the superego as its representative”.10 In Ying-ge-li-shi, the figure of the destitute father is in no position to stand for either the law or for any form of authority. On the contrary, the English teacher and his long penis become the very foundation upon which Love Liu relies to construct his own self.

22In fact, the reference to the penis may be interpreted as an expedient to address Love Liu’s formation of self according the Lacanian tripartite schema of language (the real, the imaginary and the symbolic). Love Liu’s contemplation of penises allows the creation of a symbolic order which refers to the ways in which the self, its Other and the socio-historical world are configured and structured by the social and linguistic realm of law. By reading the penis as a sign, Love Liu is thus able to gain access to the “imaginary” which, as Lacan suggests, is the foundation of the subject’s relation to itself. The clear metonymical link as well as the comparison between the father’s and the English teacher’s penises may also be read as a way to configure a new social order. It should be clear by now that Ying-ge-li-shi focuses neither on subjectivity nor on epistemology. Love Liu’s coming-of-age experience is nothing but the Bildung of what we may define as “embodied consciousness”, or alternatively, a form of knowledge which relies on bodily perceptions (scopophilia and epistemophilia) rather than on the mind.

  • 11 Jay Martin, Downcast Eyes. The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, Berkeley, (...)

23The passage’s explicit references to “comfortably warmed symbols of manhood” compels readers to move away from the Lacanian notion of law (father’s law) to the laws of the phenomenological social world. Martin P. Jay, who in his Downcast Eyes has studied the sense of sight after the advent of positivism, has clearly shown that with advent of phenomenologists and existentialists such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre among others, there has been an increasing discomfort with ocularcentric perspectives (perspectives that privilege sight over the other perceptions).11 While on the one hand the sight of the size of his penis confirms in a very matter-of-fact way Second Prize Wang’s authoritarian position as well as his prestige, on the other, it is also undeniable that the English teacher is connected to the sense of sight only when the author needs to deal with the themes of scopophilia and epistemophilia. In one of Love Liu’s many descriptions of his English teacher, as well as in the passage that describes Love Liu’s father in the process of painting Mao’s icon, we understand that this novel also “fights” against ocularcentrism. This “fight” is configured by associating Second Prize Wang with the senses of sound and smell:

He smells so nice, I concluded, because he wants to attract girls like Sunrise Huang, girls who would never use Chinese characters as phonetic crutches. His scent must be irresistible to those girls, and just like little scraps of paper get caught up in the wind, they will end up in his room. The sound of English, again wafted from Second Prize Wang’s room. The corridor was quiet. Strange English words followed me as I walked. They were traces of Sunrise Huang. I don’t know why, but I started to miss even more the days when Ahjitai taught us Uyghur. (p. 27)
王亚军身上为什么那么香结论是他为了吸引女生, 像黄旭升这样的从来没有用汉语为英语注音的女生闻到了那种香气就会像风中的纸片儿一样地被吸进他的宿舍。
英语再次从宿舍传来过道里很安静我听着一个个陌生的单词从身后飘过来那是黄旭升的气息……
不知为什么我更加怀念阿吉太给我们教过维语的日子。(p. 32-33)

  • 12 Benjamin Walter, “The Mimetic Faculty”, Reflections. Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Essays, Ne (...)

24Passages like this enable as to understand why Wang Gang has chosen Ying-ge-li-shi as a title for his novel. Ying-ge-li-shi, unlike 英语 / english, is only a phonetic transliteration that carries no counterpart meaning; as Walter Benjamin observed in his essay “The Mimetic Faculty”, what distinguishes the spoken from the written language is its sensuous quality.12 Here the references to sound and smell suggest that the English teacher appeals to the students’ bodily senses rather than to their minds. Unlike in Ah Cheng’s novella, the reader has no clue about the content of Second Prize Wang’s lesson. The only thing he knows is that he resorts to Linguaphone English as a strategy to teach it and that he demands that students never use Chinese as phonetic crutches.

25“Linguaphone English” and the “French eau de cologne” should then be read as a portmanteau to represent what Bourdieu would define as the habitus. As Don Slater explains:

  • 13 Slater Don, Consumer Culture and Modernity, Cambridge, Polity Press, p. 162.

The habitus is a structure of dispositions, schemes of classification, rules, expectations and so on which predispose the individual to certain choices and actions […]. Habitus is unconscious but in a practical rather than a psychoanalytic sense. For example it is both learned and acted out through sensory and bodily experiences, the subtexts of encounters rather than explicit statements. Above all the habitus is embodied and learned and acted out at the level of the body.13

26Second Prize Wang proposes not only a very sensual and attractive lifestyle to his students, a lifestyle and habitus which was unknown to the Chinese during the Cultural Revolution, but also an alternative approach to knowledge, an approach which is exemplified through the English dictionary. While in Ah Cheng’s novel the dictionary provided students with an alternative access to knowledge, the English dictionary is here a diegetic element which semantically connects and decodes this new sensual world and the alien habitus into which Second Prize Wang is trying to usher his students:

[Second Prize Wang] guessed what I was drawn to. “Do you know that word? Dictionary?” “English dictionary?” I asked. He nodded. “Is it a comprehensive dictionary?” I asked. “When you know all the words in the dictionary, you will be able to live like a real English gentleman. You can even have a better life than ordinary folks in England because you will be educated.” “What does a gentleman look like?” I asked.
He thought for a moment and then said: “Like your father.”
His answer disappointed me. Like
my father? What kind of man is my father? I thought of the glasses he wore and the frightened expression that was always on his face. Sill I had to ask, “Do you know my father?” “[…] I chatted with your father when we were in line at the canteen. He was very polite and did not push and squeeze like the others.” (p. 47)
[王亚军] 似乎意识到了我的目光
《认识这个单词吗字典》
我说《英汉字典
他点头。
我说《是大字典
他说《这里的单词如果你都会了那就可以像一个地道英国绅士那样在那儿生活。 你甚至可以超过他们那儿一般的人、因为你水平很高》。
我说《绅士是什么样的人
他想了想《就是你爸爸那样的人》。
他的话让我失望像爸爸那样的人我爸爸是什么样的人我想起了他 戴眼镜以及经常显出恐惧的神情但是我还是说《你认识我爸爸
……我跟你爸爸说过话那是在食堂排队打饭的时候他很谦让不像他们那样拼命地挤。》 (p. 54-55)

  • 14 Brooks, Body Work…, op. cit., p. 28-30.

27Bourdieu’s notion of habitus is here evoked in two specific ways: in terms of style, taste and social class as well as in terms of lifestyles and manners, two aspects that Wang Gang’s narrative deploys in a meticulous way. Far from being depicted as a political colonial power, England becomes rather the site where narratives of privacy can be developed and cultivated. In fact, Peter Brooks, who links the increasing popularity of the novel in Europe to the upper middle class’s need for leisure, clearly shows the close interconnection between the increasing importance of private life (which is the object of the novel’s concern) and the process of privatization of the body.14 In other words, both the English teacher and the English dictionary teach and show these young students a very different world from the one to which the Chinese were accustomed during the Cultural Revolution. There is no longer a collective body, but personal and individual behaviors. The English teacher’s emphasis on middle class lifestyle, manners and habitus as well as the English dictionary’s reference to the term “masturbation” end up deploying a complex discourse about bodily perceptions and bodily behaviors.

  • 15 Bennet Andrew, “Language and the Body”, in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, Hillm (...)

28In fact, as Andrew Bennet suggests in his article “Language and the Body”, “self-touching, [according to Derrida’s On touching is] a dream of the reflexive or specular autonomy of the language of self-presence or self-consciousness”.15 The interdependence between self-eroticism and eroticism is articulated in this narrative via the English dictionary that Love Liu finds in Ahjitai’s room:

It was the dictionary I couldn’t find the night I broke into Second Prize Wang’s dormitory. I felt sad and a bit angry. Why did I break my leg? Because of that dictionary. Why did my parents hate me? Why did I want to run away from home? Because of that dictionary. But don’t think I hated it. On the contrary, I felt affection for it, so much that I forgot about Ahjitai, that she was the most beautiful woman in the world and that I was in her room. It was as if I were alone with a glittering treasure chest.
I walked over to it and flipped it open. The word “masturbate”
appeared again before my eyes.
I don’t know why, but I felt like crying. If I hadn’t noticed Ahjtai’s puzzled expression, I might have burst into tears. “What did you find in the dictionary?” she asked.
My eyes spoke “masturbate” but I said nothing. What did I see in the dictionary? That was a good question.
I held the dictionary close to my chest, stroking it as if it were a favorite pet I had lost […]. As I emerged from my reverie, I realized I was in Ahjitai’s room and that Ahjitai was standing next to me. I could feel her breath on my chest. (p. 227)
那天晚上我在王亚军的宿舍里没有偷上的这本词典。 它竟在这里我的心里有些难过也有些生气、我的腿是怎么断的因为这本词典。 我的母亲为什么恨我我为什么要离家出走就是因为这本词典。 不要以为在那时我会对词典仇视。没有恰恰相反我的内心对它长满了温情以至于我忘了阿吉太的存在忘记了她是一个世界上最美丽的女人就好像我没有在她的房间而是在无人之境那里金光闪闪有一个聚宝盆。
我超词典走过去抓起它来一翻开竟又看到自慰这个词。
不知道为什么我当是特别想哭如果不是意识到阿吉太正在奇怪地看我可能我真的会哭起来。
阿吉太说《你在词典里里看到了什么
我的眼晴里包含着自慰却说不出话来。 是呀我在词典里看到了什么这的确是个问题。
我把词典抱在怀里就好像它是我的一只宠物我来回地摸索它他就是一个失而复得的东西……我从梦幻里走出来头脑渐渐清楚了现在是在阿吉太的房子里他就站在我身边我的皮肤能够感到她的气息。(p. 285-286)

  • 16 Visser Robin, Cities Surround the Countryside. Urban Aesthetics in Post-Socialist China, Durham, Du (...)

29It is not the first time that Chinese readers run into “masturbation” as a theme. The most famous case is Yu Dafu’s 郁达夫 (1896-1945) [“Sinking”] / 沉沦 (1921), in which the protagonist watches his beloved while taking a shower, gets excited and then masturbates. Interestingly enough, in the modern novella “masturbation” gets a negative connotation as it is associated with the concept of sin. As Robin Visser shows in another case, in Liu Heng’s 刘恒 (1955-) novel Black Snow / 黑的雪 (1988) masturbation is associated with the protagonist’s sense of alienation from society, as well as with his inability to win his beloved’s affection.16 Here, as well as in other passages, it is clear that masturbation is Love Liu’s way to claim possession of his own body.

  • 17 Merleau-Ponty Maurice, The Visible and the Invisible, Evanston, Northwestern U. P., 1968, p. 130-15 (...)

30This passage becomes clearer if we consider Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “chiasmus” according to which the subject’s touching of his or her own body is the necessary condition for perceiving his or her own self as a living being. Furthermore, touching, unlike seeing, is always a reversible process because through “chiasm” one can simultaneously touch and be touched.17 Love Liu’s frequent visits to the public bathhouse, where Ahjitai was taking a bath, could be taken as Wang Gang’s deliberate attempt to emphasize the disjuncture between the quandries of the Chinese self in the past and the present. Masturbation, scopophilia and epistemophilia are all different expressions of compulsive physiological urges which need to be satisfied. Ahjitai’s absence at the beginning of the above-mentioned passage becomes a matter-of-fact presence as soon as Love Liu is done with his mental masturbation.

31In this novel, where multiple processes of signification coexist, there are distinct, gendered languages of desire. While Love Liu is consistently portrayed as a “sentient character”, his classmate and counterpart Sunrise Huang is definitely what we may call a “performative character”. She is the one who always takes the initiative. This becomes even clearer when comparing Love Liu’s and Sunrise Huang’s different relationships with Second Prize Wang.

32While Love Liu wants to learn the idioms of desire and style, Sunrise Wang wants to learn English and she secretly expects that he will reciprocate her love for him. To their utmost disappointment, both Love Liu and Sunrise Huang accidentally witness Second Prize Wang’s declaration of love to Ahjitai and the Uyighur teacher’s prompt and violent rebuttal. What was supposed to be a private affair becomes a nightmarish accident that foregrounds the demise of Second Prize Wang. Sunrise Huang’s decision to accuse her English teacher of sexually harassing her goes far beyond a mere act of jealousy. Now a desperate and orphaned daughter, Sunrise Huang sees in Second Prize Wang a surrogate masculine figure who can rescue her from her quandary. She does not immediately confess the truth, but does so only after Love Liu has accompanied her to the air-raid shelter site and she has gone into labor:

I walked toward the construction site, Sunrise Huang following close behind me. I walked fast, and she almost had to run to keep up with me. I saw beads of sweat on her forehead. She hid with me behind a tree not far from the construction site. We did not have to wait long.
Second Prize Wang came out in his muddy clothes. He did not look in our direction. Like a wise old man he just looked at the sky, as if something up there had caught his attention.
Sunrise Huang’s face immediately turned ashen. She ignored me and stared at her English teacher: “He is darker,” she murmured like a concerned mother. “And he’s slouching a little.”(p. 161)
我们超防空洞的工地走着 黄旭升一直跟在我后边。我走得很快 她几乎在瞎跑跑着。 我能看到他额上的汗。
它随着我一起脱在了不远处的一棵树的后边 我们只等一会儿。
王亚军就穿着一身沾满泥水的衣服出来 他没有朝我们这边看。 只是像一个做作的哲人那仰望天空 就仿佛他真的被天上的某种东西给吸引了。
黄旭升的脸色一下子就变得苍白 她没有看我 只是盯着英语老师 像是一个伟大的母亲那样说《他黑了 背也有一点驼。》 (p. 197-198)

33This is the beginning of Second Prize Wang’s demise and the beginning of these teenagers’ growth into adulthood. As is clear from Ying-ge-li-shi, Sunrise Huang’s confession that she has unfairly accused her teacher of a crime is not merely the product of her sense of guilt. It is rather an important step towards the beginning of the demystification of the imaginary and a first, albeit incomplete, step towards the “real”, the adult world. Her second murder, committed only by accident, leads her to a long period of detention during which, without any support from teachers or adults, she will prove herself able to master not only English but also her own life.

34However, the reader cannot but remark that Love Liu is far from being unsuccessful, since by eventually making love to Ahjitai, he will find his own sense of the meaning of his own name: “Love”. From the beginning of the novel, he constantly displays an obsessive curiosity about the real meaning of this term. Second Prize Wang is the first one willing to explain its meaning:

“Why are you called Love Liu?” “Cause my mother wished I was a girl.” “But it’s not necessarily a girl’s name.” “Yes, it is.” “Do you know what ‘love’ means?” “It means when boys and girls… No I don’t know.” “No, not any of that. It means compassion.” “What is ‘compassion’?” “It’s…it’s… how should I put it…? It means you can feel pain when you see others suffer.” “That’s impossible.” (p. 49)
《你为什么要叫刘爱
《因为我妈妈希望我是个女孩儿。》
《这个名字不一定就是个女儿的名字。》
《就是女孩儿的名字。》
《你知道 〈爱〉是什么意思吗
《爱不知道 就是男生和女生…… 还是不知道。》
《爱不是别的就是仁慈。》
《什么是仁慈?》
《就是, 就是, 怎么说, 就是看别人受难时,你自己心里也难过。》
《这不可能。》 (p. 37-38)

35Love clearly works as an ambivalent signifier and Love Liu stubbornly continues acting according to his personal interpretation of his name’s meaning. His refusal to acknowledge and accept Second Prize Wang’s alternative reading is also an important prolepsis which consistently accounts for Love Liu’s seemingly paradoxical behavior. If Second Prize Wang and his elegant manners still embody a world where ethics and aesthetics are reciprocally interdependent, it is up to Love Liu and his generation to break up such a linkage. In fact, it is Love Liu who convinces Second Prize Wang to go to the public bathhouse to contemplate Ahjitai’s naked body. Furthermore, Love Liu’s “indecent” proposal is bestowed as if it were Love Liu’s personal gift, the compensation for which would be his temporary possession of the English dictionary, which all his classmates longed for. There is a clear overturning of the teacher’s and student’s roles here: Second Prize Wang, blinded and fooled by his own unfulfilled desire, finds himself docilely following Love Liu. When they are both accused of indecent behavior, he behaves in the same way as he had behaved after Sunrise Huang’s charges, as an exceedingly responsible teacher, taking all the blame, and so he goes to prison.

  • 18 Analyses of nihilism in the “late-born generation writers” in Visser, Cities Surround the Countrysi (...)

36There is certainly a “nihilist” component in this novel — a component which, as many Sinologists have shown, is one of the principal characteristics of texts by the “late-born generation”.18 Yet this nihilism is a strategy to show that the world full of ethical values to which the former generation of Chinese had aspired is pathetic and meaningless. In a world where everything is a spectacle deprived of meaningful ethical values, there are only two “values” that are worth pursuing: worldly success (achieved by Sunrise Huang) and sexual pleasure (achieved by Love Liu).

37The air raid shelter in which Love Liu’s and Ahjitai’s lovemaking occurs is far from meaningless: it is not only the “masterpiece” of Love Liu’s mother, it is also a place of confinement for Ahjitai, who is “condemned” to work there as a form of punishment for refusing to comply with Director Fan’s offers of love. Ahjitai accepts to concede her body and her love — though only a short while, simply because she is afraid of dying there, as the shelter is on the verge of falling down. Love Liu’s lovemaking to Ahjitai transforms him into a winner. In fact, he has succeeded where his former exemplars of power and of value, Director Fan and Second Prize Wang respectively, had failed. The collapse of the air-raid shelter, which soon enough becomes a “blissful trap”, allows Love Liu to emancipate himself from his parents, to become an adult and to fulfill his dreams of love.

38The novel’s ending is, not surprisingly, the opposite of that in Ah Cheng’s: Second Prize Wang demands that Love Liu give him back the dictionary. This again confirms not only the impossibility of creating a world in which ethics and aesthetics are intrinsically linked, but also the disavowal of all residual forms of authority. Wang Gang’s novel is one of the first attempts in Chinese literature to describe the death of the epistemic subject and the birth of a new one which trespasses ethnic and cultural boundaries. Knowledge, here, cannot be anything but mere lived-through experience. This novel can therefore be considered as the first, necessary step toward the birth and evolution of a new way of representing the body.

Bibliographie

Ah Cheng 阿城, [The King of Chess, The King of Trees, The King of Children] / 棋王、树王、孩子王 / Qi wang, Shu Wang, Haizi Wang, Nanjing Shi, Jiangsu feng huang wen yi chu ban she, 2016.

Ah Cheng 阿城, The King of Children, in The King of Trees, McDougall Bonnie (trans.), New York, New Directions, 2010.

Benjamin Walter, “The Mimetic Faculty”, in Reflections. Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Essays, Demetz Peter (ed., trans.), New York, Schoken Books, 1986, p. 333-336.

Bennet Andrew, “Language and the Body”, in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, Hillman David and Maude Ulrika (ed.), New York, Cambridge U. P., 2015.

Brooks Peter, Body Work. Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative, Cambridge, Harvard U. P., 1993, p. 30.

Butler Judith, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, New York, Columbia U. P., 2000.

Butterfield Bradley, “The Baudrillardian Symbolic, 9/11 and the War of Good and Evil”, Postmodern Culture, vol. 13, 2002:3, http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/issue.902/13.1butterfield.html, consulted on 01/07/2021.

Chow Rey, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema, New York, Columbia U. P., 1995.

Genette Gérard, Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method, Lewin Jane E. (trans.), Ithaca, Cornell U. P., 1980.

Jay Martin, Downcast Eyes. The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, Berkeley, California U. P., 1993.

Keltner Stacey, Kristeva, New York, Miley, 2013.

Liu Na’ou 刘呐鸥, [“Etiquette and Hygiene”] / 礼仪和卫生 / Liyi he weisheng, in [Urban Scenic Horizon] / 都市风景线 / Dushi fengjing xian, Shanghai, Shuimo shudian, 1930, p. 107-142.

McGrath Jason, Post-socialist Modernity. Chinese Cinema, Literature and Criticism in the Market Age, Stanford, Stanford U. P., 2008.

Merleau-Ponty Maurice, The Visible and the Invisible, Evanston, Northwestern U. P., 1968, p. 130-155.

Moi Toril, “Patriarchal Thought and the Drive for Knowledge”, in New Directions in Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Brennan Teresa (ed.), London, Routledge, 1989, p. 189-205.

Shih Shu-Mei, The Lure of the Modern. Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China 1917-1937, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2001.

Slater Don, Consumer Culture and Modernity, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1997.

Visser Robin, Cities Surround the Countryside. Urban Aesthetics in Post-Socialist China, Durham, Duke U. P., 2010.

Wang Gang 王刚, English / 英格力士 / Ying-ge-li-shi, Beijing, Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2005.

Wang Gang 王刚, English, Merz Martin and Weizhen Pan Jane (trans.), New York, Penguin Group, 2009.

Zhong Xueping, Masculinity Besieged: Issues of Modernity and Male Subjectivity in Chinese Literature of the Late Twentieth Century, Durham, Duke U. P., 2000.

Notes

1 Chow Rey, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema, New York, Columbia U. P., 1995, p. 111-112.

2 The passages quoted from Ah Cheng’s original text refer to the following edition: Ah Cheng 阿城, [The King of Chess, The King of Trees, The King of Children] / 棋王、树王、孩子王, 2016.

3 The passages quoted from the translation of Ah Cheng’s novel refer to the following edition:

—, The King of Children, in The King of Trees, McDougall Bonnie (trans.), New York, New Directions, 2010.

4 Chow, Primiative passions…, op. cit., p. 119.

5 The passages quoted from the translation of Wang Gang’s novel refer to the following edition: Wang Gang 王刚, English, Merz Martin and Weizhen Pan Jane (trans.), New York, Penguin, 2009.

6 The passages quoted from Wang Gang’s original text refer to the following edition: Wang Gang 王刚, English / 英格力士, Beijing, Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2005.

7 Moi Toril, “Patriarchal Thought and the Drive for Knowledge”, in New Directions in Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Brennan Teresa (ed.), London, Routledge, 1989, p. 190.

8 Genette Gérard, Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method, Lewin Jane E. (trans.), Ithaca, Cornell U. P., 1980, p. 67.

9 Zhong Xueping, Masculinity Besieged: Issues of Modernity and Male Subjectivity in Chinese Literature of the Late Twentieth Century, Durham, Duke U. P., 2000.

10 Brooks Peter, Body Work. Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative, Cambridge, Harvard U. P., 1993, p. 30.

11 Jay Martin, Downcast Eyes. The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, Berkeley, California U. P., 1993.

12 Benjamin Walter, “The Mimetic Faculty”, Reflections. Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Essays, New York, Schoken Books, 1986, p. 333-336.

13 Slater Don, Consumer Culture and Modernity, Cambridge, Polity Press, p. 162.

14 Brooks, Body Work…, op. cit., p. 28-30.

15 Bennet Andrew, “Language and the Body”, in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, Hillman David and Maude Ulrika (ed.), New York, Cambridge U. P., 2015, p. 85.

16 Visser Robin, Cities Surround the Countryside. Urban Aesthetics in Post-Socialist China, Durham, Duke U. P., p. 229-233.

17 Merleau-Ponty Maurice, The Visible and the Invisible, Evanston, Northwestern U. P., 1968, p. 130-155.

18 Analyses of nihilism in the “late-born generation writers” in Visser, Cities Surround the Countryside…, op. cit., p. 255-286 and McGrath Jason, Post-socialist Modernity. Chinese Cinema, Literature and Criticism in the Market Age, Stanford, Stanford U. P., 2008, p. 59-94.

Auteur

Melinda Pirazzoli is Adjunct Professor of Chinese Literature at the University of Bologna. She has published a study on Classical Chinese poetry (Intenti Poetici, 2016, Ananke) and a history of modern and contemporary Chinese fiction cowritten with Nicoletta Pesaro (La narrativa cinese del Novecento, 2019, Carocci). She is working on a third volume about the representation of Chinese perceptions tentatively entitled: A Sense of Chinese Senses.

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