Organizer: Vivienne Shue, Cornell University
Chair: Richard W. Bodman, Saint Olaf's College
Against the Grain: Discursive Dissonance in Post-Mao Chinese Fiction
Mary Jacob, Princeton University
Since the mid-1980s, Chinese writers have been writing fiction that goes against conventions of language, narration and ideological character types as previously understood in 20th-century China. One manifestation of this is discursive dissonance, the presence of clashing language realms in a single story. Effects range from irony and satire to alienation, vertigo and a sense of the absurd. Taking into account the Foucauldian concept of discourse, this paper looks at discursive dissonance in experimental fiction by writers who came of age during, or just after, the Cultural Revolution. Selected stories are analyzed in detail.
The author proposes a model of nested linguistic spheres resembling layers of an onion. One typical structure is as follows: The outer layer is the dominant discourse, which surrounds and encloses the layer of individual social interactions. That layer, in turn, encloses the individual's innermost experiences (dreams, stream of consciousness). Usually these layers remain separate and distinct, and their contents are often radically divergent. When language from one realm erupts into another, discursive dissonance can occur. The resulting linguistic discordance and a sense of being cut off from one's moorings are common central themes in such stories. The creation of a new literary language, often including polyvocal discourse, is part of the project of these writers.
In conclusion, the author discusses the significance of literary discursive dissonance for Chinese society. It is one response to the disjunction between the Cultural Revolution and post-Mao reform periods.
Woman at the Rural-Urban Crossroad: Gender, Subjectivity, and Opposition in Tie
Ning's Fiction
Ming-yan Lai, Purdue University
Oppositional discourse in Chinese literature tended to center on the notion of subjectivity in the 1980s. In both creative and critical discussions of subjectivity, however, the issue of masculinity dominates and subjectivity is often implicitly equated with some forms of manhood. Against such masculinist conception of subjectivity and opposition, Tie Ning's fiction offers alternatives from a feminine/feminist position. Through a close reading of her Cunlu dai wo huijia (The village road takes me home), this paper argues that Tie Ning is critical of the masculinist model for grounding subjectivity on opposition to the power of the party/state and assuming responsibility over women's lives. This model is concretized in two male characters who both want to marry the female protagonist because they feel responsible for her earlier marriage to a peasant, which left her a widow and prevented her from returning to the city after the policy of sending educated youths to rural China ended. In her story of the female protagonist's choice between the two, which entails the significant and ideologically loaded choice between the city and the countryside, Tie Ning reveals the complicity of the masculinist model of subjectivity in the party/state's dominant ideology despite its apparent oppositional stance. In its place, this paper argues, she offers the protagonist's feminine understanding of subjectivity as determining one's life-course based on one's own needs, desires, and abilities rather than with reference to-either in opposition or compliance-the party-state and its ideology.
Appropriation and the Crisis of Representativity in Jia Pingwa's Ruined
Capital
Cai Rong, Colby College
Robert Weimann maintains that creating literature is a historical activity of appropriation, a representational attempt to "make things one's own." It involves the appropriation of both the "world in the book" and the "book in the world." This paper examines how self, text, and history interact in Jia Pingwa's controversial novel Ruined Capital (1993), focusing on the author's use of appropriation as a strategy of self-realization in the post-1989 period. It contends that the author's fictionalization of the "glorious" writer Zhuang Zhidie betrays a deep sense of loss and nostalgia, symptomatic of Chinese writers' awareness of their crisis of representativity since the late 1980s. This crisis is induced by the writer's changing relationship to his/her community in the market economy. A nationwide fortune hunt and an increasing public disinterest in politics and social issues threaten to make the writer's presumed role as spokesman for the national conscience obsolete. The entrance of literary productions as goods with exchange value in the market further erodes literature's authority and autonomy. Ruined Capital seeks to allay the writers' anxiety about their representativity and marginalization by centralizing its hero's legendary prestige and sexual appeal to his female admirers. However, the novel's portrayal of the figure of the artist, its classic style, and stereotyped gender relationship undermine its claim to representativeness of contemporary reality. Thus, the author's appropriation of the world in the novel constitutes a wishful self-projection built upon the self's apprehension of its incompetence in the world of real history.
Decoding the Invention of the Nation's History: Wang Shuo's Never Take Me for
Human
Huazhi Wang, Cornell University
When the myth of a great socialist nation was shattered by the profound reforms in post-Mao China, nationalist discourse was greatly challenged in Chinese society, especially by young people who had grown up with a powerful nationalist and patriotic education that was patronized by the socialist state. Inquiry into national identity became a crucial part of self-assertion and subject formation for these young people, and in the meantime, their deconstruction of nationalist ideologies and discourses was reshaping the nation in the contemporary global environment. This paper investigates the critique of Chinese nationalist discourse through an analysis of a provocative novel by Wang Shuo, who stirred up the sophisticated and controversial "Wang Shuo Phenomenon" by introducing a distinctive type of fictional characters, known as "wise guys," into the Chinese cultural scene in the late eighties.
Published in 1989, Wang Shuo's satirical novel Never Take Me for Human portrays a commercial company's profit-minded efforts to take advantage of Chinese nationalistic sentiments by constructing a national hero. This paper will particularly concentrate on the ways in which the novel questions the invention of the nation's history. The novel text tactfully plays with the official narrative of Chinese history and interrogates the power relations in the writing of history. Through decoding the mechanism of making a national tradition, the novel reveals that the Chinese nationalist discourse has wittingly or unwittingly become a tyrannical power against the individual subjectivity of many Chinese people.