Can Xue, The Last Lover, Trans. by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen. Yale Margellos, 2014.
The best descriptor for Can Xue’s latest novel, The Last Lover, is that it is unlike, well, anything else.
The Beijing-based author calls her fiction “soul literature.” It
probably sounds audacious; it’s more audacious than it sounds. Nor does
she shy away from what the term implies about the stakes of the numerous
short stories and several novels she has published since the 1980s. Her
“stereoscopic stories” are not just one more postmodernist innovation
in narrative; the cognitive adjustment they require from readers, she
says in a 2010 interview, is nothing short of an epistemological
revolution: “Every reader of modernist literature,” if the reader is
qualified, “must do what
Copernicus did in his time, which is turn one’s direction of thinking
around by looking for the structure of time and space in one’s soul when
you are reading a work. Only in this way can you enter into the work
and grasp the structure.” The turn made, however, is away rather than
toward the truth-assessing standards of the scientific revolution, the
self-verifying principles of rationality and scientific method, logic
that “covers the deeper logic in the works and induces obstructions.”
Like the narrating beastie of the title story in her 2011 collection Vertical Motion,
she has found not just a new direction but a new dimension to move in, a
realm where conscious beings experience space, time, and each other
unbound from the old rules. Can
Xue moves through this new world as guide; she offers it to the reader
as an aesthetic event. Properly received, she says, her work opens
readers up to affect and intuition. With this otherwise dormant
aesthetic logic “activate[d],” each reader can “find the structure
inside himself and facilitate the structure to be in an agreement with
the work—gradually.” Such roles
are perhaps not unusual for revolutionary writers. Gordon Teskey argues
that John Milton’s work anticipated a new role for the poet as
“shamanic” visionary, a channel for the spiritual in an increasingly
“post-theological” society, and it would seem that Can Xue has taken up a
similar function in an era become, as John McClure has called it,
post-secular. The vocabulary of secular humanism and dogmatic religion
alike prove inadequate in writerly attempts to say something about
reality; the previous century saw the explosion of magic realist
fiction, texts where daily life and the fantastic filter through each
other. The continued development of a genre that
steps away from straight realism seems not just likely but,
paradoxically, necessary for effective artistic representations of the
real and the human. The Last Lover, at once alien and familiar
in its casual miracles, its people and things that blink in and out of
solid existence, and its radical reconsideration of subjectivity, reads
like an inaugural, or at least transformative, text. Call it magic
virtual realism.
We
are perhaps overdue for a literary approach to this new form of human
experience. Most of us now live substantial portions of our lives within
a cyber-sphere of kaleidoscoping stories, dialogue, and images. We waft
in from all parts of the analog world to hold either infinitesimal or
prolonged intercourse with people who appear, like us, out of nowhere;
we friend them, fight them, not infrequently doubt their existence or
aspects thereof. During the day, wherever we are present in body, many
of us take every free moment to browse on phones, effectively stepping
out; in the evenings we ignore our spouses to check our devices, to don
other personas and perhaps foster curious intimacies and enmities with
faraway usernames. We share moments of feeling we don’t understand, we
slide into oblivion or obliviousness with a click. We have come perhaps
closer than ever to something that resembles a dreamscape in sober
waking life, a communal unconscious that is, improbably, woven tight
with the world of technology, the allegedly objective scientific “real,”
and all that the words evoke for us—our sacred secular narratives of
rationality, progress, and the individual. The practical, commonsense
experience of reality has become tenuous. With distilled reports beamed
from half a planet away and made flat and unreal, frequently taken in
via favored recreational devices and abandoned with a click or a button
for more diverting content, the casual news consumer has regular use for
the questions that theorist Tzvetan Todorov associates with readers of
fantastic narratives: Did that really happen? Did I understand it right?
The Last Lover renders
something like this new dimension of conflated physical and
metaphysical experience, in all its volatility and, indeed, its
frustration. It is arguably a singular accomplishment; most authorial
comparisons will seem, to those who read the novel, laughably off. Can
Xue perhaps sits best with other literary loners—Kafka and Calvino (she
has written criticism on both), Borges; a more contemporary resemblance
might be seen in the work of Nigeria novelist Ben Okri, whose Famished Road moves similarly through an existentially unstable, spirit-permeated landscape. The Last Lover’s non-sequitur conversations, muddled etiologies, and dissolving identities also recall Samuel Beckett’s Molloy trilogy:
“I
think,” she directed her words to Reagan. “I think Martin is like my
sister. Someday he will swim into the sea wearing your clothes . . . Mr.
Reagan, have you noticed that everyone on the farm looks the same? Only
people harboring the same thoughts come here.”
“There are two crows in the pockets of my hunting gear,” Martin shrugged, and began to whistle.
Rest
assured that it makes only slightly more sense in context. Plenty will
find this wearisome; scrupulous attempts to track character history or
match problems and mysteries to logical resolutions won’t reward readers
here. Conventional narrative promises are seldom delivered upon—if
there’s a Chekhovian gun on the wall in the first act, it may be fired
in the third, but it will probably (to take an example from The Last Lover)
be fired into the leg of its mysterious owner by his cook, at the
owner’s own never-explained behest, as he approaches his house across
vast grasslands, riding a leopard. This ostentatious arrival is business
as usual in the novel, and a flailing Joe says as much to the
owner moments before witnessing it: “Whenever you grasp hold of some
object, other objects all change into unreal things.” Apparent seconds
later, after his interlocutor has somehow managed to transport himself
far from the house for his self-arranged shooting, Joe finds that “the
scene from a moment ago . . . dissolve[s] like a hallucination.” Scenes
may be linked, but the transitions are as unapologetically discontinuous
as a film montage, or a sudden browsing redirect from one webpage to
another; the reader is no more privileged here than Joe himself.
The
novel begins in a never-named city of a never-named but apparently
Western country. The barely-named Joe is the closest thing the novel has
to a protagonist, though the point of view shifts around, flicking
through characters who feel like variously shaded versions of one
another. Their daily lives are almost parodically humdrum, with
interspersed moments of lurid horror all the more striking for the fact
that they sometimes seem intended to slip by on the first pass. The
shocking, the absurd, and the luminous are set off by a scrupulously
controlled style and diction, steady throughout Annelise Finegan
Wasmoen’s stark, resonant translation. This is what we have come to
expect of Can Xue: an unwaveringly lucid, reasonable voice delivering
fever dreams. Joe is a longtime manager at the Rose Clothing Company,
though his real life is in the “kingdom of his stories” built from the
books he reads during work hours. This reading has become a project “to
reread all the novels and stories he’d ever read in his life, so that
the stories would be connected together” in order to allow him, as if
hyperlinked, to “simply pick up any book and move without interruption
from one story to another,” and to blot out the “outer world.” When we
meet him he has recently acquired the ability to “remain immersed in his
stories” even while dealing with customers. The story kingdom has even
attained a degree of spatial reality in the form of a treed square,
across which wander the characters of Joe’s books, frequently
kimono-clad Easterners, but also occasionally the “real” people that Joe
knows; though he creates it as a retreat, it has the capacity to become
a communal space where narratives intersect with readers, and isolated
readers approach each other through narratives.
This
power is ambivalent, however, given that it has also divided Joe from
his wife Maria, moving them apart “little by little onto different
paths,” though a “subtle communication”—never quite specified—persists
between them. Like a reimagined Penelope, Maria presides faithfully over
the house Joe often leaves on business, though the tapestries she
weaves are not part of a ploy to fend off suitors but an end in
themselves, sublime designs that repel and draw customers, one of whom
says a tapestry “gave him a feeling ‘like dropping into an abyss’” but
buys it anyway: “Evidently he wished to experience what is was like to
drop into an abyss.” Later, when Joe embarks on an uncertain journey
toward “ancient eastern” Country C—for which it is of course tempting to
read China, though China is mentioned elsewhere in the novel by
name—Maria’s weaving becomes a material telepathy between them where
Joe’s travels register cryptically, though this read on his progress is
muddled at best. Attended by two beloved and vaguely sinister African
cats and her son and confidant Daniel—a kind of homebody Telemachus who,
unbeknownst at first to Joe, has returned from boarding school to
secretly live with a neighbor—Maria administers a domestic space that
seems to constitute its own miraculous ecosystem. Roses bloom year-round
in a garden tended daily by Daniel, the cats conduct enough electricity
to give possibly dangerous shocks, and an awareness runs through the
house as if through a living thing:
[Maria]
was pleased with [Joe’s] frequently leaving home for a few days at a
time [ . . . because of] a thirst for change. Every time Joe went away
for a spell, the house grew clamorous, on the brink of something
happening. For example, at this moment she heard the two cats in the
backyard shrieking in a frenzy; a large flock of sparrows followed them
onto the steps; and in the southern wind there was a cloth flapping with
a pa pa sound. Even her tapestry loom downstairs began making a rhythmic noise.
Like Joe’s, her hobby has become so mesmerizing that she has recently cultivated a knack for stepping out metaphysically:
She
was . . . often able to enter an unusually intense, approximately
hallucinatory state. At first this state only occurred when she was
weaving tapestries, but slowly things became more complex. In the past
two years, she suspected she’d become like her husband, sinking into the
snare of “mental journeys” while this son, her house, and her son
Daniel accompanied her . . . Sometimes Maria was so frustrated by this
feeling of unreality she wanted to scream. Sometimes, instead, she was
extremely content.
As
in Joe’s square, there is the possibility of communality here, with the
present, corporeal living and also with entities whose provenance and
being is less sure: ancestors come to scold and advise Maria. Like
Joe’s, Maria’s personal world is pronouncedly ambivalent: private and
public, controlled and overwhelming, social and isolating.
“Mental
journeys,” half pilgrimage and half chase, have all the solidity of the
novel’s actual removes, and easily become confused with or implicated
in its many episodes of “real” travel. Space is disconcertingly passable
in the novel’s physical world as well, and characters can slip—at times
imperceptibly—between the “real” world and their various virtual ones.
No one involved seems surprised or perturbed by this everyday spatial
flux. Walking to work, Joe sees “an abyss open in the sidewalk ahead of
him, and he walked toward it, thinking perhaps it would lead him into
the web of the story he had recently constructed.” This particular
capacity to pass through to other places by subterranean means repeats
over and over in a novel full of mysterious digging, excavating, coring
the permeable earth—at one point Lisa, the wife of Joe’s boss Vincent,
tells her husband that she is “a drilling crew.” Easy enough to read
these surface mutilations as attempts to access some kind of common
underground, an unknown cavern where people can truly share
consciousness, though it is not always successful: “Vincent, are you
still excavating that gully?” Lisa teases. “There are more and more
little fish, little shrimp.” There are also suggestions that perhaps a
cultural solidarity or reclamation can be achieved through descents like
this, as when migrant worker Ida, a perhaps Filipina employee of the
southern rubber tree plantation run by Joe’s client Reagan, finds a way,
with the help of a compatriot, to escape Reagan’s ambiguously predatory
attentions:
The
place where she wanted to return was her old home. In her imagination
it was a vague shadow. Actually, she didn’t want to take a train there,
either. She wanted to take a shortcut, and the shortcut was one of those
dark holes in the bar that Jade had told her about.
One
day, when music reverberated through the bar, Jade guided her into a
dark hole . . . Ida’s feet slid, then she fell with Jade into a hole . .
. Jade was not in the same hole as she, but in one next to her. When
Ida called, she made a muddled echo, as if she were almost asleep.
Surely Ida stood on the mud of her hometown. That softness could not be
forgotten in a lifetime.
Place
is, needless to say, uncertain as well; characters hail from a vast
array of countries, real and fictional, evoked in terms that are, by
turns, matter-of-fact and romantic. The East rears up again and again in
the minds and experiences of inhabitants of Joe’s Country A, figured as
both an unbridgeably far Other and an inextricable immanence, occupying
the West and occupied by it. The former version works on Joe when he
feels a pull toward the aestheticized East—”red palace walls and amber
tiles”—but he also becomes gradually aware of the latter through his
books, sensing that “the story he’d been reading, set in the East, and
the West, where he was in person, were converging on each other to form a
separate, alternative space.” As an idea and as a place, “East” is
monolithic here but multiple elsewhere, differentiated into regions and
countries, broken into individuals of varying depth. Against the
depiction of Ida as an exploited laborer in some sort of colonized
south—an ambivalent echo, perhaps, of gritty Marxist-minded
realism—other Easterners stand at the fringes of The Last Lover,
often veiled (occasionally literally as well) by what seems to be a
pall of orientalist Easternness projected onto them by the central
characters: they are inscrutable, passive, seductive. They remain, too,
somehow only virtual, separate even in presence, as Joe discovers during
an encounter with a captivating “white-haired Eastern woman” who
appears across a dry river from him. Dressed in clothing “a bit like a
kimono [and] a bit like the short dresses of ancient China,” she gives
Joe the feeling that his “soul [is] spirited away from his body,” but he
is told that she is, as it were, off the playable map:
“The person over on that side isn’t real.” The bookstore owner knit his brow, spitting out the sentence as if it hurt him.
“I had also sensed this. What a pity. Where is she from?”
“She is my former wife.” . . .
“Why isn’t she a real person?” Joe asked the bookstore owner, his voice revealing his tender thoughts.
“Because whichever way you go, you still can’t reach her.”
Joe
defies this warning and manages a conversation, during which the woman
tells him that his ethereal Korean business associate Kim “is not a real
person,” but gives another explanation for her ex-husband’s similar
account of her:
“Some
people are an unsolvable mystery to other people. If he lives with that
sort of person, he will gradually disappear. Have I answered your
question? If you go to Ito’s bookstore late at night, you will hear him
wrestling inside and the books falling from the shelves.” . . .
The
owner of the bookshop was named Ito. Joe had never noticed this before.
So he was Japanese? His wife, this woman before him, was Japanese? They
came here from the distant East to start a business, then they
separated? Human hearts are frightful.
The
scene swerves suddenly from masque-like tableau into middle-class
domestic drama, with Joe surprised at the Easternness that hides within
his own unremarkable associates. The East-West gulf telescopes down into
the gulf between marriage partners, the unavoidable gulf between two
people—equally pedestrian, equally exotic experiences of an Other.
The
marriage dyad emerges subtly over the course of the novel as a constant
point of interest in Can Xue’s meditations. The move is an amusing one;
it might be read as a send-up of realist preoccupation with the theme,
from Austen to Franzen. Couples proliferate in The Last Lover,
repeating, with differences, the incommensurabilities of Joe and Maria
but like them suggesting, too, the possibility of numinous communion.
Much has been made, in critical work, of Can Xue’s dissipation of the
subject, a breaking-down of the individual often read as liberating.
Certainly, identity often proves bizarrely interchangeable in this
novel—Maria only recognizes a taxi driver as Joe at the end of the ride;
the Eastern woman who tantalizes Vincent and Reagan is alternately
“Arab,” “Chinese,” and male; Kim surfaces several times to live
different lives, or perhaps there are simply several different people
named Kim—but subjectivity seems not so much to fall apart as to be
distributed differently. Pairs of what we might otherwise call
individual subjects move it between them, like stars pulling mass from
each other in a companion system. Thought and feeling do not always map
neatly to bodies, which seem sometimes to have been left elsewhere,
beside the point as they often are in virtual spaces. “People here don’t
have bodily suffering,” a beautiful African street-sweeper—identical
sister to a street-sweeper in City B—tells Vincent when he comes to the
“gambling city” where Lisa’s parents live, parents he has hitherto
believed dead, only to be told by his wife that they in fact were but
apparently had a few more lives in store: “Even I have died many times .
. . You’ll get used to this sort of thing.” Bodies are porous,
ill-guarded—the teeming snakes of Reagan’s plantation do not just bite
but slither in and out of the bodies of its inmates, and Reagan’s cook
shrugs off her telepathic understanding of another farm worker: “In my
hometown, there are many people like this . . . They absorb a few things
from your body, and they pour a few things into your body.”
Nowhere
is this slightly sinister dynamic more at work than between the spouses
and other close partners of the novel: a volatile economy of affect
circulates, sometimes salutary but also overwhelming, no guarantee of
sympathy. Desire swells and ebbs, disembodied, through the text to
create unions of bodies and separate them, a terrain of Deleuzian
intensities. Two lovers on Reagan’s plantation follow Reagan into his
room and blithely become amorous in front of him; the cook complains
that “a new round of desire” must have risen in the house. Joe avoids
Maria’s bedroom because he fears “the abyss of her desire,” though
unaired desire outs in other intersubjective ways: a version of Kim
later explains a terrible scream to Joe as the result of “sexual
repression” among locals: “For a year already, everyone has suppressed
their desire.” Private mental worlds allow seemingly estranged couples
to make startling connections, proving that the boundary between minds
is not insurmountable, though it is often too daunting to breach.
Vincent’s understandings of Lisa come mediated through a fantasy of the
alluring Chinese woman, inventing a mind that lies open to his in a way
that Lisa’s, to his consternation, doesn’t: “Vincent imagined the
Chinese woman telling him that he should visit the gambling city to
figure out a few things about his wife, Lisa. The Chinese woman sat with
her back to him. She hadn’t opened her mouth, but Vincent heard her
thoughts. They came toward him as a language, and so he formed this
statement from her present thought.” Meanwhile, Lisa is “a stoppered
bottle” to him even after the visit, the two of them unresolvable into
one flesh: “‘Lisa. Oh Lisa, how come I can’t understand even a little of
what is in your heart?’ . . . Maybe she was born deep underground!”
Moreover, partners are sometimes more inclined to step laterally, to
connect affectively with friends rather than lovers—Maria with Daniel;
Lisa with Maria, when the two share a nightly “long march” with a
spectral Red Army, tugging Lisa away from Vincent: “[H]is wife could
communicate with Maria, without their actually meeting. Everything was
changing. Even this morning, he could no longer enjoy that strange
territory with Lisa through the intercourse of their bodies.” The
virtual space sustained between them blinks out.
Reviewers
and critics will inevitably ask who the last lover is, and all
interpretations will of course only be so many muddy bulwarks to be
modified or ignored as the battle moves. Unto the breach, then: Held
within the novel’s title seems to be a question that haunts every
romance in a world—and an untold host of storytelling traditions as
well—infatuated by the theory of the pair marriage bond. Valorized or
sneered at, doubted or longed for, ontological or gloomily economic, the
enactment of this two-into-one synthesis is what the stories we tell
ourselves aim at, turn around, avoid. Permanent communion,
intersubjectivity that is no longer intersubjectivity but a kind of dual
subjectivity, life shared—we are born into narratives that organize our
lives by this marker, the finding of the mate. Who, then, is your last
lover? Can it truly be decided in advance? To pick a companion for life
is to provide an answer to this question, however unwittingly, to brush
consciously or unconsciously against the thought of one’s—utterly
singular, as far as we know—death. Have we chosen our last chance at
communion—need we have only one, and need it be a spouse? We ask it of
each other—am I the last one?
Jeri Griffith, “Navigator,” 18” x 24”, acrylic on canvas, from Odyssey. Used for the cover of one volume of Can Xue's five-volume 残雪短篇全集 / The Complete Short Stories of Can Xue (2014)
It’s
a question of bourgeois banality and cosmic moment. The thought seeps
in at the end of the novel, during Maria’s and Lisa’s nocturnal search
for their husbands through a phantasmal graveyard in a shared dream.
Maria finds Lisa, who is introduced to the novel in a jealous panic over
Vincent’s dalliance with the Eastern woman, sitting on Vincent’s grave,
though he is not buried there: “‘Not yet, he is still roaming outside. I
sit on top of the grave and my heart is at peace.’” The graveyard fills
with neighbors, who seem to have to come to confirm their own lastness:
“Casting her eyes into the distance, Maria saw them squatting one by
one on the grave mounds, placing their lanterns on the tombstones. The
graveyard seemed vast and limitless. Lisa said that each one squatted on
the grave of his or her ‘beloved.’” Maria shies away from such a
resolution, and is left the next night, with Joe still gone on his trip
to Country C, with the sense of a tentative union, a kind of
companionable neighboring:
She
felt that Joe was nearby, sitting behind a book, beside a little
stream. He had taken off his shoes and stretched his bare feet into the
black water. Maria thought, Joe would not leave her again. How good. In
the house built on the foundations made by her ancestors she, Daniel,
and Joe, this family, were starting their own long march. They were
going to bring back to life those long ago stories. This would be a fine
thing! But she feared her husband’s body was forever disappearing from
their home.
Does
the introduction of the child compromise the lovers? Does the body slip
perilously away, subordinated to imposed narratives of family? Maria
seems to conclude that the “strange territory” of the physical can hold
its own: “After so many years, she experienced for the first time the
way blood kept relatives together.” Imagined, virtual, narrative worlds
settle against the concrete and animal, finally, as Maria walks into the
“forest” Joe has raised “over several decades of uninterrupted
reading”: “In the su su rustling sound made by the pages, a
world of writing appeared in her mind. She realized that for many years
everything she’d woven was this writing. So familiar, so pleasing—was
this happiness?” So we often ask ourselves, when we consider taking a
last lover. Imposed, conventional narrative and unmoored feeling,
unmoored being, are perhaps impossibly mixed in us—we take one for the
other. We try futilely to sequence maelstroms of cause-effect that rise
stereoscopic around us, to declare a first, a last.
Jeri Griffith, “Metamorphosis,” 36” x 60”, acrylic on canvas, from Regions of Identity. Used for the cover of one volume of Can Xue's five-volume 残雪短篇全集 / The Complete Short Stories of Can Xue (2014)
If
such a reading seems on its face disappointingly pedestrian for a novel
shot through with the mystical and the sublime, it matches the equally
commonplace enigma that it serves to probe. At the core of a spousal
relationship lies that most ubiquitous and mysterious of binaries: the
self-other divide. “A spouse or a
lover is your mirror: you see yourself in them, but the two of you are
independent,” Can Xue says in an interview with Wasmoen about the novel.
“In a certain sense your understanding of him and his understanding of
you is imperfect, very imperfect, and this is the inevitable result of
your being two free beings. This is the perpetual contradiction of a
free world. The lovers become mystified and each has the impulse to
explore him or herself.” The possibility of a last lover propels us,
dramatically, inward and outward at once, as if inward and outward are
interchangeable. Do we want, ultimately, to dissolve or maintain our selves as bounded individuals? At
a lower intensity level, our contemporary (virtual) reality exercises
the same alternating tidal pulls on us, on the I and you that seem more
arbitrary even as we become able to know and say more of ourselves and
of each other. In the midst of these rip currents Can Xue gives us, to
mix metaphors, a kind of homeopathic cure: a world of writing that gets
close to our world of living, a real-unreal where self-other separate
but can be said to neighbor each other rather than stand in simple
opposition—where even in moments of distinction, the other, or the self,
is felt to be near. - Nell Pach
In Can Xue’s prickly and surreal novel
The Last Lover,
the reader encounters a dizzying array of characters who could all, in
theory, be the titular last lover. The characters — pale-eyed
businessmen, mystic wives, demonic corporate clients, a beautiful
refugee girl with extremely long arms — are tossed around the book’s
interconnected stories like colored beads in a kaleidoscope, all roiling
with a sexual desire that seems to come out of some dark abyss, much
like Can Xue’s writing itself. None of it makes sense: there are
writhing snakes and screaming cooks, grotesquely swollen limbs and boys
stung repeatedly by bees, and rosebushes that bloom, inexplicably,
throughout the year. Yet listing these images does not accurately
describe the way the novel unfolds as a performance unfolds; my writing
them down will not make the novel happen as, when reading, it happens to
you.
The Last Lover is not an easy read. But it is incandescent and
engrossing if you are okay with losing your sense of self for a few
hours. Here is how I experienced it.
Hour one: I sit in a coffee shop with a paperback copy and a cup of
ginger tea. The prose is dense, peculiar. The characters are given to
sudden declarations.
Hour two: I am astonished to realize that I have only read less than fifty pages.
Hour three: My head hurts. I feel like I have been translating. I have stopped tweeting.
Hour four: I succumb to the book. I let it carry me. My cup is empty.
I do not question anything that happens in the novel: wolfish faces;
floating couples; inexplicable transformations; the motif of heads
separating from bodies and hovering there, as if still connected. Nor do
I question the characters’ reactions, who take all of these surreal
developments gamely, as they must, as we accept the eerie faces we
sometimes see in the periphery of our vision.
Hour five: I sit up and feel as though I have emerged from dreaming. I
look around myself surreptitiously, suspicious that the world has
flipped over while I was reading. It seems impossible that I could crawl
so deep within this novel and have everything remain the same. I feel
betrayed. There is a scene in
The Last Lover in which the characters enter a
gambling
city, which is both under- and aboveground. The tunnels underground are
full of smoke, which all the residents of the gambling city are used to
breathing. Where is my smoke? Where are my slot machines?
Hour ???: My thoughts are beginning to reflect the structure of Can
Xue’s prose. That is, they are starting to disintegrate almost entirely.
I catch myself thinking about the hectic flapping of bird wings. I
dream about snakes wriggling and showing off their stripes. One
character, spending the night on an enormous farm in some nonspecific
jungle, dreams of fabulously horny snakes, of small amorous creatures
slithering up his pants. The image remains in my memory on a kind of
stretchy loop. I cannot even fathom desire as coming from any other
place, though in
The Last Lover desire seems to spring inexplicably from all kinds of places.
Throughout the novel the only constant sensation is that of sex:
heavy, disorienting, thick as mud or syrup, wrapping around arms and
legs. Well — there is also the energy that runs, alternatively electric
and demonic, through the domestic spaces which populate the novel,
strange interiors where cats walk around with bristling fur. The novel
crackles with these odd undercurrents, which lie below the characters,
their interactions, and any notion of plot, which is already worn thin
by both the declarative nature of the dialogue and the surreality of its
events. It feels very distinctly as though there are many novels
beneath the surface of the novel, some too large and unborn to clearly
describe.
Each character in
The Last Lover seems arbitrarily named; it
seems like they happen to be placed in the story according to
convenience and each could be swapped out, depending on allegory. They
behave as actors or dancers, given unto the roiling moods of the novel
itself, and its unruly belly of desire. Perhaps
The Last Lover is
a deceptive title. I am not certain that there is any last lover, or
any lover at all, or that the novel really ends and that there can be a
last definitive anything. It’s still with me, in all its kaleidoscopic
pieces, not entirely yielding to interpretation, like a puzzling dream
one returns to again and again. -
Larissa Pham
Can Xue, Five Spice Street, Trans. By Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping, Yale Press, 2009.
"No one and nothing may be trusted in
Five Spice Street, the first of Can Xue’s full-length novels to be translated into English. In the neighborhood where the story is set—a three-mile-long street actually—nothing is certain. There is no one truth. Doubt overshadows everything. In this story, a dissonant chorus of voices argues, interrupts, disrupts, contradicts, and gossips, forcing everything into flux. Static, distortion, and noise rule here. As “the writer” suggests:
The crowds on Five Spice Street always had to think everything through every which way: they never reached a verdict lightly, and would never give up on a riddle just because they were temporarily stumped: they had to give it hard thought; if they couldn’t solve it, they would keep their eyes open. Sometimes, a small matter could trigger their thoughts for a long time, and another small matter could suddenly enlighten them.Parsing out who said what and why within this cacophonous polyphony is challenging, as Xue’s story is filled with parenthetical intrusions and asides and even the simplest statements are placed in quotes. Rumor and gossip amplified to the nth degree: this is what awaits readers in
Five Spice Street. Surrendering to the novel’s style, however, is just the beginning. Beyond lie the fabulist and hyper-erotic elements in the story, the many clues found deep within the narrative, and the novel’s “innumerable nested boxes,” as one character puts it. But once the challenge has been met, you just might burst out into hysterics at the wonderful insanity of it all. You have been forewarned.
Five Spice Street is divided into two sections. The first, “Preliminaries,” is an overview of the major characters, among them Madam X, the Widow, Mr. Q, the lame woman, and the young coal worker. “Preliminaries” depicts their intertwining stories, conflicts, and dilemmas, all of which are obscured by the numerous conflicting accounts. The main character, Madam X, brings to mind John Singer Sargent’s painting of the same name, a portrait of Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, a Parisian socialite, who, after rejecting numerous proposals to be painted, finally agreed to Sargent’s request after realizing it would serve as an opportunity to advance in Parisian society.
The painting, like Madam X, is a study in contrasts, Gautreau’s ivory white skin and her black satin dress, the light from her skin emanating against the russet background, her voluptuous figure and her angular face, the painting’s play of revelation and concealment, control and abandon. The Madam X in Five Spice Street is also a mysterious bundle of contradictions, and surely Xue, like Sargent, employed the name as a way of expressing both anonymity and mystery, as well as raising her own character to the stature of myth, symbol, and archetype. It certainly helps that her namesake was rumored to have been guilty of numerous infidelities. And I wonder if Madam X is also a pseudonym for Can Xue, already a pseudonym of Deng Xiaohua, which means “dirty snow.”
There are at least twenty-eight views on Madam X’s age—at one end of the spectrum she’s as young as twenty-two and about fifty at the other—and at least five opinions on Mr. Q’s looks. But there is much more to Madam X than what meets the eye—for instance, her eye. The first time
“Mr. Q looked at X’s whole face, he saw only one immense continuously flickering saffron-colored eyeball.” And through the course of their affair the
“light waves in her senseless eyes,” whose “intensity can illuminate everything in the universe,” was all he could see. Other fantastic rumors abound about X: She’s suffering from a disease. She has supernatural powers to manipulate people and events at whim. She can force people to their grave. She makes dynamite with the intention of destroying a public toilet. She raises scorpions. There are accounts of her using countless mirrors as a kind of magical portal toward achieving cosmic transcendence. But of course doubts are raised about all of these reports. As for Mr. Q’s looks, he is either ugly, or not, that is, if one subscribes to the Chinese proverb
“There’s no such thing as an ugly man.” The consensus, if one may call it that, is that Q is
“a large man, either ugly or handsome, or with nothing remarkable about him, with a broad square face, and an odd expression, a little like a catfish.”The rivalry between Madam X and the Widow is one of the novel’s primary plot devices as is the “sex research” they both practice. Madam X’s “dispel boredom movement” (her mysterious system where “spare-time recreation,” one of the many comical euphemisms for sex in this book, is used as a transcendental act) leads to a series of bizarre escapades. One afternoon when “the sky was that kind of sentimental color, without a cloud to be seen, and the edge of the sun is filled with sharp triangles,” Madam X,
“lying alone on the beach at the riverside... felt the reality of carnal intimacy.” Aroused, she undressed and then
“flew in the burning heat, running around wantonly, wildly.” A few women in the town were “inspired” to mirror her. This leads to the entire town
“hugging and kissing everyone they saw, touching everyone all over their bodies. One or two even ‘got on with it’ on the spot. It was a noisy, rollicking scene. Everyone was sweating profusely and breathing hot and heavy like oxen.”Madam X, while largely despised and feared, is often approached for advice, for guidance. Especially in the chapter
“Madam X Talks Abstractly of Her Experiences with Men,” we find her in philosophical mode. After laying out her thoughts about the importance of having a mind free of conventional considerations, she says:
Language is also a way of hinting at feelings, because try as hard as you can to communicate your ardor and your dreams to the other, you can’t just show your feelings through action—that isn’t enough. And so you use language. At this time language doesn’t have just the everyday meanings—perhaps it is some simple syllables, some little sounds that have sprouted wings. I can elicit that kind of special language.
The novel’s second section, “The Way Things Are Done,” casts doubt on everything that transpired in section one. The disorientation is extreme, as the first section was itself a shifting kaleidoscope of stories, images, and memories, so disorientating that it’s almost as if a giant reset button had been pressed. The lame woman, in her “official account,” perhaps best reveals the character of
Five Spice Street’s second half:
“I must tell you again: your imaginary experiences don’t exist. They don’t even have a foreword. All the beginnings you’ve imagined are subjectively trumped up: they’ve resulted from sloppy romantic sentiments spilling over. The real beginning is lost, never to return.”Can Five Spice Street, with its multiplicity of voices, reportage, affidavits, shifting points of view, be termed a “novel”? Conceiving
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf knew that she wanted to draw directly from her own memories and that the work would not correspond to conventional narrative form. In her diary, she wrote:
“I have an idea that I will invent a new name for my books to supplant ‘novel.’ ...But what? Elegy?” So what is
Five Spice Street? A remarkable prose object? Mirrorbox? Or simply call it “novel,” understanding it to mean “fresh” and “new” as in: Can Xue’s novel approach to writing fiction in Five Spice Street offers the reader a delightful puzzle whose pieces constantly change shape and shatter into ever smaller fragments.
The book is challenging, and deciphering its conclusion, having something to do with “a beautiful wave of the future,” is a task in itself. But the fainthearted may use something the young coal worker said as a guide to understanding the book, or any other “difficult” work of fiction, for that matter:
“Sometimes, we have to change our way of thinking and look with brand-new eyes before we can enter into the essence of something. This seems difficult and troublesome, but with hard struggle you can make it.” -
John Madera
"There’s an old Chinese fable that goes like this: A weapons vendor at market touts his unbelievable spear (mao)—it can pierce shield (dun)! Then he turns around and talks up his amazing shield—it can withstand any spear! But then a child asks,
“What happens if you use your own spear against your own shield?”That tale spawned a noun in Mandarin: maodun—whose meaning falls somewhere between irony and paradox, and implies getting pulled in opposite directions. It’s a pretty good word for what’s been going on with Can Xue (pen name for 55-year-old Chinese writer Deng Xiaohua): The more vigorously she protests that her fiction isn’t political commentary, the firmer the consensus grows among Western critics that it’s a massive indictment of her homeland. Can Xue has had four books of surrealistic, sometimes grotesque short stories translated into English, each volume further cementing her reputation as a radical who offers, in the words of a 1991
New York Times review, “nightmare images of life under a punishing regime.” But Can Xue continues to insist she writes only of her inner world. “Real literature faces the soul,” she tells me, when I interview her with the aid of a translator at Manhattan’s Yale Club during her recent visit to the United States.
What’s going on here? Maybe the American view of China has become so politicized that we inevitably find critique where there is none. Or maybe a writer like Can Xue has to downplay her political themes to placate Beijing, which has suppressed her work in the past. But which is it? The new release of
Five Spice Street,written in 1988 and her first full-length novel to be translated in English, is unlikely to resolve the issue.
A reader today might be forgiven for seeing the book as a dead-on portrayal of late-’80s anomie in the People’s Republic of China. With its excavation of rampant mistrust, spying, and carnal jealousy in a tight-knit rural community,
Five Spice Street seems to peer through a magnifying glass at the disintegration of Mao’s utopian socialist order. The novel revolves around the ethereal Madam X, a transplant to the eponymous street—she and her husband run a fruit stand there, although it’s said they used to be party officials somewhere. (Is this a veiled reference to the decline in the prestige of the Maoist old guard?) Speculations about Madam X consume her neighbors, and her essential qualities change depending on whom you ask: Perhaps she’s a potent sexual sorceress, but perhaps her private life is completely banal. The denizens of Five Spice Street, who both despise and adulate her, can’t even collectively determine whether she’s 22 or 50 years old. She’s a temptress and a tease, driving the men and women alike wild, although they don’t know if she could even deliver the goods if they managed to possess her. Could Madam X represent that elusive Social Ideal, whether communism or democracy?
Way off, if you ask the Can Xue, who claims she’s operating on a different plane entirely. Calling
Five Spice Street her “spiritual biography,” she tells me, the characters all represent her own desires and dissatisfactions, and that Madam X embodies the author’s personal idealized life. According to her, the story has nothing to do with the real world: Naturally she borrows details from daily existence, she says, but these are just “materials for her factory,” where she
“weighs down everyday feelings to a deep place, and then retrieves them.” This method is responsible, she says, for the “strange feel” of her prose.
It’s certainly true that the novel is far from naturalistic, although it paints a more concrete, less dreamlike realm than her other translated work so far (
Dialogues in Paradise, Blue Light in the Sky and Other Stories, Old Floating Cloud: Two Novellas,and
The Embroidered Shoes: Stories). But its atmosphere is still an uncanny one of occultism, portents, and metamorphoses. Characters’ eyes in particular are sites of magic—perhaps apt in a neighborhood consumed by voyeurism and rumor.
“Flickering waves of light” are said to
“radiate from Madam X’s eyes, turning people into grotesque shapes.” Meanwhile Old Woman Jin, a rival of Madam X, looks out of “two fluctuating red orbs, at once bulging out of her eye sockets, and all at once drawing back in.”
With her flair for supernatural-tinged farce, Can Xue is incessantly likened to Franz Kafka. But
Five Spice Street even more recalls the output of another Eastern European modernist: the Polish short-story writer Bruno Schulz, whose fabulist tales of rural boyhood are cast in the same lush, earthy tones that resonate in Xue’s novel. Some of her anthropomorphic descriptions—
“a puff of fog from a green meteor on the horizon startled the hill” — strike with Schulz’s dark beauty. And both writers’ power lies in their shaman-like ability to animate hyper-local superstitions and fears.
Schulz’s stories also took place against a significant historical backdrop—namely the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And while themes of social decay are ever-present beneath his writing, they never overpower the specificity of his imaginative universe. Perhaps there’s a lesson in this for reading Can Xue—her political context shouldn’t be ignored, but neither should it get in the way of appreciating her work for what it is—world-class art." -
Eli Epstein-Deutsch
"Who is Madam X? Madam X sells peanuts at the stand with the red-painted sign. Madam X is an occultist, a collector of mirrors and corrupter of neighborhood children. Madam X is a home wrecker. Madam X is a threat to communal harmony and morality. Madam X is a sexual deviant. Madam X is a virgin. Madam X is fifty years old. Madam X is twenty-two. Madam X is having an affair with Mr. Q. Madam X wishes to be famous. Madam X hopes to be forgotten. Madam X is the elected representative of the people of
Five Spice Street. Madam X is the wave of the future.
The question of Madam X's identity is at the center of Can Xue's
Five Spice Street, a novel that is by turns confounding, comic, and sharp in its portrayal of communal life on a small street in an unnamed country (but which bears an unmistakable resemblance to China). It is a question that is not so much answered as it is endlessly speculated upon by the street's residents, who observe Madam X's activities (Madam X doesn't say much, so they must watch her vigilantly) and then provide their own explanations. As a result, Madam X at first becomes a repository for the people's biases and prejudices. She is thought to be having an affair with a certain Mr. Q, and despite the fact that other residents engage in similarly shady sexual behavior, Madam X is shunned as a degenerate. But by the novel's end, after the people of
Five Spice Street have exhausted their speculations, Madam X is honored as a visionary who "represents a society of the future," and she is elected representative of the street.
A tidy plot summary does not begin to capture the novel's tangled versions of reality. The reader sinks into a cacophony of street voices and their competing narratives like a castaway falling into quicksand. An unnamed writer narrates the story, and he reports diligently on the "facts" of the case, trying to reconcile each variation he hears from the residents of Five Spice Street. The first lines are a clue to what follows:
"When it comes to Madam X's age, opinions differ here on Five Spice Street. One person's guess is as good as another's. There are at least twenty-eight points of view. At one extreme, she's about fifty (for now, let's fix it at fifty); at the other, she's twenty-two." Consider yourself warned: it only gets foggier from there.
The spark that sets off this fuse of speculation about Madam X is her alleged affair with Mr. Q. A widow notices Mr. Q's comings-and-goings and soon the whole neighborhood is talking about it. Both have spouses who are "childlike," devoted, and don't seem to care much at all about the rumored affair. Madam X says that she "never laid eyes" on Mr. Q, and one of the neighbors, "a female colleague" of X, explains that
"X didn't look at people with her eyes… After she bought the mirrors and microscope from the junk shop, she even announced that her eyes ‘had retired.' That is, except for things in the mirror, she looked at nothing." Euphemisms, such as "spare time recreation" used in place of "sex," are deployed by all residents of Five Spice Street. Everyday conversations are beset with the uneasiness of Orwellian doublespeak.
Mirrors and microscopes, spare time recreation, a main character who can only see reflections in a mirror, and a plot that is riddled with random events and characters who flit in and out of the novel seemingly without purpose (a partial list of such events and characters: the collapse of Madam X's house, Mr. Q's discovery of a bouncing ball, Old Woman Jin's affair with a young mining worker, Old Meng's affairs with various women, a widow's neighbor shitting on her front steps, a lame woman recounting a twenty-three-minute staring contest)—this is dangerous territory.
Five Spice Street is a novel about the meanings and sources of identity, about the relationship between the individual and the community, about the gap between public and private selves; it is a critique of narrative storytelling, of relationships of cause and effect, of the idea that anything that springs from the human mind can be called truth. It is a novel that rejects the senses, building its fictional universe by subtracting them. What little the reader can hear, see, touch, smell, or taste on Five Spice Street is ultimately uncertain, ephemeral, subjective. The reader, on this arduous journey with an author who isn't explaining or taking questions, is bewildered.
All of this makes
Five Spice Street a challenging, frustrating read, but, as with quicksand, it helps if you don't struggle. The rampant gossip, the maligning of character, the elaborate explanations for mysterious behavior, all bring to mind pre-capitalist-reform China, when even the most innocuous behavior could be taken as subversion and lead to public denunciation by friends, neighbors, or colleagues, followed by a trip to a "reeducation" camp. Although the book is set in an unknown city in an unknown year, it is easy to imagine Madam X's neighbors reporting her to the police or some party apparatus that deals with dissenters and social misfits. But instead of a reeducation camp, Xue devises a hilariously backwards ending. After years of denouncing her, the people of
Five Spice Street decide that Madam X is really "ahead of her time," and they elect her the people's representative, a job she does not want. By now her husband has left her and her house is literally falling down, but when she appeals to the government committee in charge of house renovation and construction to have her crumbling house fixed, her applications are taken as a kind of statement on the political system and ignored. Two weeks later the house collapses. The temptation for the reader is to interpret the collapse as symbolic of something—its occurrence is so random, so unaccounted for, it would be hard not to—but it isn't symbolic, it's meaningless. The collapse is the culmination of the trick that
Five Spice Street has been playing on the reader all along: on Five Spice Street, nothing means anything." -
Brendan Patrick Hughes
In 1988, the final year of China’s
post-Mao, pre-Tiananmen “Culture Fever,” the Shanghai Literature
and Art Publishing House organized a conference in honor of two women
writers. One was the realist Wang Anyi; the other was the
unclassifiable Can Xue, whose first full-length novel had just been
published to the same controversial reception as her earlier short
work. Her oblique, nightmarish fictions had quickly gained notoriety,
and once it became known that a woman was writing behind the
pseudonym, criticism had turned personal. The author was said to be
too individualistic, or simply too deranged, for significant
achievement; her work was called neurotic and scopophilic, “the
delirium of a paranoid woman.”¹ Against such charges any author
might have taken a conference as an opportunity for self-defense, but
it is a mark of Can Xue’s slyness that she chose to do so in the
form of a fiction. Addressing her audience, she announced the happy
news that in preparation for her lecture, a “male colleague” had
given her guidance and even chosen her topic: she would be speaking
on “Masculinity and the Golden Age of Literary Criticism.”²
The colleague, in her telling, is
affronted not to be giving the lecture himself: “Those people in
Shanghai are really blind. How could they invite you there? What does
a woman have to say? Such questions should be answered by men. And
not any kind of men, but those who have deep philosophical knowledge
about things and who have also maintained their masculinity.” In
his pique, he kicks apart Can Xue’s tea table—a gesture she finds
“well done”—and storms out. She is left to explain his
masculine philosophy, which turns out to originate from his childhood
in a bandit village where “eight hundred strong men and bewitching
women with bound feet” are ruled by a sexually formidable
grandfather. By this point in the lecture, the audience would have
recognized that they were hearing a parody of Mo Yan’s recent novel
Red Sorghum, and by extension an attack on the dominant literary
school of the day. All participants in the Culture Fever debates
agreed that Chinese literature required a positive program, and one
leading view was that it should emulate the rural mythmaking of
Gabriel García Márquez, “seeking its roots” in order to “march
toward the world.”³ In such an era of slogans, Can Xue’s work
could not but cause distress; whatever else it was doing, it was not
marching toward anything at all.
The most immediate effect of this
lecture was probably to offend the establishment. But for those of us
now reading her first novel in translation, twenty-five years later,
it makes a good key; for Five Spice Street is among other things an
author’s reflection on her newfound public position. The book was
originally published as Breakthrough Performance (突围表演),
a purposely self-conscious title for a debut novel. At the same time,
突围 suggests breaking free,
an escape from entrapment or other immediate danger, and this raises
the possibility that the escape itself constitutes the performance,
that a kind of Houdini act is being staged. The plot follows a
community’s reaction to an outsider, an enigmatic woman whose
so-called “performances”—scholarly, sexual, perhaps
supernatural—are sometimes threatening, sometimes laughable, and
never well understood. Whether they constitute any kind of escape,
and whether they have anything in common with Can Xue’s writing
itself (which she often calls 表演,
“performance”), are questions that the novel keeps in the
foreground while deferring anything that looks like an answer. While
it might be a fiction about writing fiction, its integrity depends on
offering no positive program, nothing that could collapse into the
kind of sloganeering that Can Xue mocks in her lecture. This
imperative motivates its hazy narrative form, in which the
protagonist is always seen obscurely and indirectly, and permits
nothing—not even her bare existence—to be verified as fact.
Madam X is a stranger with a shadowy
past. She has opened a snack shop on Five Spice Street (五香街),
but otherwise holds back from the street’s communal life. She shuts
herself indoors to pursue activities variously called “performances,”
“research,” or “miracles”; whatever these practices are, they
are solitary and admit no clear description. Rumors abound concerning
her: that she is a former government official in disgrace, that she
exerts an occult influence on the people of the street, that she is
having an affair with a Mr. Q under the nose of her complaisant
husband. None of this is precisely proved or disproved over the
course of the book, which holds itself to a collective, external
narrative compiled from the observations, conjectures, and outright
fabrications of the prying neighbors. Five-spice powder is a common
ingredient in the kitchen, but as narrative it makes a less
harmonious mélange; every part of it is contradicted by some other.
Like Yellow Mud Street (黄泥街)
in Can Xue’s earlier novella of that title, Five Spice Street is
nominally part of a larger city but acts as a closed space. Apart
from the initial irruption of Madam X and her family, hardly anyone
arrives or leaves. The insular setting might recall the rural
villages of Cultural Revolution “scar literature,” though the
cruelty and famine that appear naturalistically in that genre, and
obliquely in Yellow Mud Street as decay and infestation, are absent
here. What persists is a paranoid social structure of spyings and
denunciations, meetings in dark rooms, insinuation in every speech.
“In our discussions, we used to squeeze together…we lowered our
voices, making them fainter than the buzzing of mosquitos. It was as
if we weren’t talking at all, just moving our lips. We could only
guess what the others were saying… Only the in-group could
understand the profound meaning of these movements.” The subject of
these meetings is invariably X, who has been branded a social problem
in need of solving, a “dissident element,” a “slut,” a
“counterfeit,” a “loathsome spotted mosquito” sucking the
community’s blood. Yet over the course of the book, very little
direct action is taken against her. The longer the vilification goes
on, the more it comes to seem the obverse of the fascination—even
desire—that so many characters covertly profess for her. “On Five
Spice Street we all knew: whenever someone expressed contempt for a
certain thing, that thing was what he or she secretly desired.”
Yellow Mud Street is often taken as an
allegory of life under the Cultural Revolution; certainly its
juxtaposition of Maoist slogans with images of vermin and disease
earned it heavy censorship on its first publication. Can Xue, who
discourages political readings of her work, has described that
novella as “not very mature,” incorporating too much of the
outside world.⁴ The breakthrough (突围)
that she attempted in Five Spice Street was to break free (突出)
from the quagmire (or “mud-pit,” 泥潭)
of language and culture.4 One way to gloss this would be to say that
historical China—the squalid, dissolving landscape of Yellow Mud
Street—is no longer her topic, not even allegorically. Five Spice
Street places its questions of public and private identity at a more
abstract level, and when snippets of historical language do
intrude—whether as Cultural Revolution propaganda or Culture
Fever’s utopian pronouncements—they are made to play a more
general role. When the officious Dr. A says that “in considering
problems, one must not look at the surface, but must pierce to the
essence with blade-like eyes,” he expresses a recognizably Maoist
thought.⁵ Yet it is not only Mao’s but any such overconfident
method that founders on X’s basic unknowability. If she has an
essence, it is not graspable in the way that Dr. A imagines. What can
be known is no more than what the novel shows us, a layering of
incongruous surfaces.
Apart from Dr. A, the book offers two
representatives of the public world as foils to Madam X. The first is
the “much-admired widow,” a matriarch who plays the same
authoritarian role as the mothers in Can Xue’s short fiction. The
prime mover of Five Spice Street’s public life, she takes it on
herself to direct the “struggle” against the “adversary.”
Much of the evidence against X comes by way of her “unique powers
of observation,” which include breaking into X’s house and
opening her mail, and she administers ideological corrections to
those who admit a prurient fascination with X, as well as to those
who consider the X affair not worth their time. Her invective
contradicts itself in the usual way of propaganda against
adversaries: on the one hand X is dangerous, an immediate threat to
be opposed by all means available; on the other hand X is powerless,
negligible, beneath consideration.
The second foil is the actual narrator
of the book, who does not immediately emerge as a distinct character
since his duty to the collective forbids him to use the first person
singular. For the street exclusive of Madam X he writes “we”;
when he means himself, he writes “the writer”; after an early
scene in which he is attacked for artistic pretensions, he humbles
himself to “the stenographer.” His task is to assemble the
contradictory accounts of the X affair into what becomes the book’s
text, a “precious historical record.” He glosses over
difficulties with sheer propagandistic brio: “On our flourishing,
colorful street, each resident enjoys full freedom to the best of his
ability. Like a duck taking to water, everyone is relaxed and happy.
Vehicles full of wonderful foodstuffs roll past…” In his telling,
even the sinister nocturnal meetings acquire a nostalgic glow: “Many
still sigh and say they wish time could reverse itself—if only it
could stop in that moment filled with mysterious conviviality…they
wouldn’t mind having their lives cut short by a decade or two.”
The writer’s aim is to “draw a diagram of the maze,” “to
string these diverse viewpoints together like pearls, bring them into
focus, and achieve a static view, like the way the sun—before it
sets—grasps the whole of the universe.” Yet he recognizes the
impediments to his task; for every question the “answers were
maddeningly endless. Where one person saw a wild boar, another saw a
dove, and perhaps a third person saw a broom.” Before long he finds
himself plaintively asking: “Is Madam X even a real person, or is
she a figment of our imaginations?”
The absent center of Yellow Mud Street
is one Wang Ziguang, a Godot-like figure of vague promise who was
much discussed but never encountered. Madam X is a touch more
substantial than this, but only a touch; from beginning to end she
remains the unknown entity signaled by her name. The writer and his
informants are chary of physical description, preferring to pass
immediate judgment, and the profusion of direct quotations hardly
provides the intended journalistic grounding since any one account of
X will be immediately contradicted by some other. The book’s first
public meeting takes place with the simple object of determining her
age and looks. She is said to be skinny, as befits so ghostly a
figure (and contrasts with the widow’s much-remarked breasts and
buttocks), but beyond that nothing is agreed upon, and the
disagreement soon provokes physical violence—not for the last time.
The writer is left to give an ostentatiously contentless summary of
X’s qualities: “skin that’s either smooth or rough, a voice
that’s either melodious or wild, and a body that’s either sexy or
devoid of sex.” With the same specious precision he calculates
that, since her age lies somewhere between twenty-two and fifty,
there must be “at least twenty-eight points of view” on the
matter.
In the presence of X vision is a
barrier rather than a portal. A letter intercepted by the widow
recounts that “The first time Mr. Q looked at X’s face, he saw
only one immense continuously flickering saffron-colored eyeball.
Then he swooned and couldn’t see a thing. To the very end of the
scandal, he never got a good look at Madam X. He didn’t because he
couldn’t. When Madam X was in front of him, all he could see was
one saffron-colored eyeball.” Even when X’s eyes do not
obliterate the rest of her form, they are usually obscured in some
way: lacking pupils, or else clouded by tears. Early on it is
asserted that “she didn’t look at people with her eyes,” that
her eyes “had retired”; though she perceives physical objects,
people are obscure to her. When the public intrudes into her house,
she complains that oxen are wrecking her research—“There’s
always something coming in. Damn it!”—and her husband, who
repeatedly serves as mediator, can only mollify her by reducing
people to things. One intruder, he says, is “merely a rag drying on
the clothesline”; another is a “dust rag…in the wrong place,
and that bothered you. I threw it into the garbage.”
Yet with mundane blindness comes
otherworldly vision. Madam X’s private activities are thick with
mirrors and microscopes, trained on vistas of which the writer can
catch only hints: “If you close your eyes, you’ll see the
spectacle of spaceships and the Earth colliding”; “a twig poked
through a red heart and a blue heart and hanging in midair”; “she
concluded that she was standing on a huge, creaking sheet of thin
ice.” The sexual affair with Q, if such it is, is conceived by X in
purely mystical terms. Unable to see him, she employs a faculty “ten
thousand times truer than seeing” to perceive a Q who has little in
common with the Q seen by everyone else. In her vision he becomes a
“peddler from afar,” wearing a baize overcoat, with eyes of “at
least five different colors.”
The writer dismisses these descriptions
as “double-talk.” Yet they are one of the few points where the
novel approaches the lyric quality of Can Xue’s short fiction. In
her stories, women often shut themselves inside houses; Xu Ruhua in
“Old Floating Cloud” ends her adulterous affair by blocking her
doors and windows and turning into a bundle of dry bamboo, while the
nameless “I” of “The Things That Happened to Me in That World”
secludes herself for an ecstatic encounter in an imaginary landscape
of ice. The glacial scenery of X’s own visions, as well as their
ambiguous sexual content, certainly follow from this, but the point
of view has changed. Five Spice Street inverts the visionary short
fiction by restricting itself to externals, and showing only the
reaction to a visionary whose visions are unknowable. Much of the
opacity in the stories derives from the characters’ inability to
communicate; a barrier stands between them, and only allows them to
soliloquize their obsessions at each other. In Five Spice Street, the
barrier has contracted to surround X alone. Communication is possible
in the public world, though it mostly consists of sloganeering and
abuse; but when language encroaches on Madam X’s private sphere it
finds itself silenced.
Whatever the true extent of X’s
sexuality, the street’s obsession with it testifies to much
repressed desire. The most obvious satirical target is the widow, who
boasts of keeping herself “pure as jade” although she makes
clumsy seduction attempts on both X’s husband and the writer. She
vents her jealousy by calling X a “skinny monkey” without the
sexuality of a “real woman,” but this does not at all diminish
the street’s appetite for an adulterous affair, every detail of
which they have invented. Having posited (and confirmed through
“high-level telepathy”) that X and Q’s tryst took place in a
granary, they spend an entire chapter on competing retellings which
all turn out to be opportunities for sloganeering: one character is
masculinist, one feminist, a third simply hopes to establish himself
as a genius. Others are inspired to action over words. Various sex
farces interrupt the main drama, often between comically mismatched
parties (an old woman, a young coal worker), at one point drawing the
entire street into an outdoor bacchanal, “sweating profusely and
breathing hot and heavy like oxen.” To the extent that X notices
this, she finds it incomprehensible. “What the hell?” she asks
her husband. “Did I ever give a lecture to those guys?” She is
the catalyst for every event in the book, but always at a remove; she
cannot be affected as others are, for she is not a person as they
are.
A different kind of book would have us
reject the writer’s narrative, and the communal viewpoint he
represents, as simply unreliable. Yet amid all his partiality and
conjecture, the writer does display genuine insight: for one, he
understands that Madam X cannot be imagined separately from the
desires that the street has foisted upon her. She is “an assumption
that might not be true—like a tree with massive foliage but shaky
roots”; the “only true existence is the illusion, the foggy mist
that aroused our enormous interest.” It is only natural, then, that
the street’s tactics of surveillance, confrontation, and
denunciation get no purchase on her. Only at the end of the book do
they hit on an alternate plan, and instead of repressing her begin to
acknowledge and even celebrate her. As a means of neutralizing her
power, this turns out to be far more effective. In a political
context, we would call such a move a co-optation; in a psychoanalytic
context, we would call it a cure.
In a late attempt to draw his “diagram
of the maze,” the writer hits on the dialectical insight that X and
the street are interdependent. “Without Five Spice Street, X would
not have existed…We molded her…it was because of X that our good
character and our noble sentiments had the chance to be revealed.”
Recast as a necessary stage in the street’s historic development, X
becomes explicable through rhetoric: “A mother can’t casually
abandon her child, even if that child is a rascal or a traitor.”
The figure of the mother heralds the most nightmarish moments in Can
Xue’s fiction, and the insidious talk of forgiveness sounds much
like a dissident’s forced confession. This essentially comic novel
dispenses no such grim fate to X, but from this point forward her
influence is seen to wane. It becomes possible to imagine her
dissolving as she appeared, fading to a symbol and finally vanishing
altogether, “returned to the womb.” The first thing to go is the
never-sturdy adultery plot, which abruptly resolves through the
simple disappearance of both men. X’s husband is said to have left
her, while Q sticks himself in the crack of a tree and dries into a
insect-like husk. Neither returns; but then, as the writer
acknowledges, they were never substantial characters in the first
place, “mere shadows—X’s shadows, two parasitic vines.”⁶
As it turns out, the easiest way to
integrate Madam X into the community is to hang a slogan on her. The
chosen phrase, “the wave of the future,” is conveniently utopian;
it acknowledges the fascination that X exerts (“everything she did
is something we had been longing to do”) but places her at a safe
remove: “what Madam X does and is today is not at all related to
real life. It’s an artificial performance… To transplant her
style into the context of present life would only create jokes.”
The supposed honor of electing her people’s representative has no
practical consequences, other than requiring her to turn two
somersaults in public and have her picture taken, an imposition she
had avoided as a pariah. In her last talk with the writer, she
recognizes her incommensurability with the public world: “Her
greatest wish was that the people would ‘forget’ her… she had
come to understand that she was different from others. She wasn’t a
person but only the embodiment of a desire. Because it could never be
actualized, this kind of desire could only upset people.” It is a
quiet irony that in confessing her lack of personhood, she comes to
seem like a recognizable person for the first time.
In her disempowerment, X is driven at
last to appeal to the community. When she applies for funds to keep
her house from collapsing, her application is treated as an art
object, universally praised, and set aside until her wall falls down.
Subsequent applications are less comprehensible, “monotonous and
dull, absolutely different from her earlier sexual exploits. Who had
the patience to watch her doodling.” Fortunately, the “wave of
the future” requires little attention for the present. “Let
posterity deal with it. Our responsibility is only to provide her
with space, protect her work, and leave it for future generations.”
The conclusion presents a fable on the
dangers of canonization: while a counterculture may thrive on
opposition, nothing is more deadly to it than indifference.
Historical circumstances were not slow to bear out this lesson;
within a few months of the novel’s first publication and the
author’s bridge-burning Shanghai speech, the Tiananmen crackdown
took place and Culture Fever came to an end. The most immediate
changes may have been provoked by authoritarian pressure, but
accounts of Chinese literature in the 1990s tend to agree that most
of the avant-garde writers either turned to more lucrative realist
fiction, or gave up writing altogether, because of their perceived
irrelevance in the new mercantile order.⁷ For her part, Can Xue
simply continued to write, waiting out a period of obscurity in which
Chinese journals rejected her work and many of her stories made their
debut in Japanese or English translation. “Lots of them hate me,”
she said of Chinese critics in 2001, “or at least they just keep
silent, hoping I’ll disappear. No one discusses my works, either
because they disagree or don’t understand.” Five Spice Street was
not reissued under its present title until 2002.
Notwithstanding the utopian language
deployed at the end of this book, it is a story of diminishment and
dashed expectations. Yet it concludes with a gentle, even wistful
tone, as Madam X walks to the edge of the city and recalls a long-ago
sexual encounter that never quite took place. If this unconsummated
tryst is indeed what inspired the entire chain of rumor, then we have
at last traced it back to its starting point in the imagination, a
state of pure potentiality. Can Xue’s own comment on the ending is
that “although everybody seems to have failed in the story, I think
that in a certain sense they have made it—in their discussions
about sex; in their vulgar pursuing; and in their warm imaginations
about Madam X.” Warmth lies in the inner world. Having followed the
many-sided tale of X’s scandal and rehabilitation, a reader able to
rest in the inner world may find that warmth as well. - Paul Kerschen
Other books by Can Xue:
"Can Xue is one of my favorite living writers, in any language, although (as well as because) I do not think I really understand her. It would seem obvious to say that Can Xue’s fiction is “dreamlike” and “surreal,” but words like these don’t get us very far. The stories contain lots of description, and are vividly poetic, and preternaturally clear, in their details. Yet these details are often highly irrational, or impossible; and they refuse to coalesce into anything like a linear narrative. There are obsessively repeated (but continually varying) images of disease and decay, of insects and other vermin, of flowers blooming and withering, of twisted family dynamics and unpleasant altercations with neighbors.
There’s something unique, too, about the tone of the stories: their everydayness. None of the narrators or characters find their “surreal” circumstances to be in the least unusual or strange. They describe a man who has suction cups on his hands, allowing him to hang from the ceiling, or a boy who raises poisonous snakes, or a woman who spends all her time in a glass cupboard, as if these were the sorts of people you met every day. They evoke metamorphoses of the landscape, so that familiar landmarks disappear, or abysses open up at their feet, as if they were merely talking about changes in the weather.
Most of these images are harsh and troubling. The stories are also filled with that dreamlike sense of never being quite able to reach a goal that nonetheless always seems to be imminent, just beyond one’s grasp. But I wouldn’t describe Can Xue’s stories as nightmarish or despairing. For they are filled with a certain wonder of metamorphosis: a sense of ongoing change that is more important than any of the goals that are never reached (for to reach them would bring the metamorphoses to an end). These stories are about loss, suffering, and mortality, but in them such events have a kind of quite beauty to them, since they are more about living on or going on, than they are about finitude and finality. There’s no finality here, and hence no narrative closure; but a kind of impersonal, insomniac vigilance that ever renews itself.
And in the end, I am not sure that anything I have just written about Can Xue’s fiction makes any sense. But what I love about this fiction is the way it continually, delicately evades whatever constructions one would want to place upon it." -
Steven Shaviro
Steven Wells, Tits Out Teenage Terror Totty (Attack! Books, 1999)
