Borderless
Writing [1]
by Wang Hui (汪晖)
1
In 1993, Yu Hua (余華)
wrote in the preface of his "To Live"(《活着》)"A genuine writer writes
solely from the inner-most
heart. Only the inner-most heart can tell the
writer how evident are his selfishness and his loftiness." However, as he
remarks, all his works come from the "relation of tension or hostility to
a certain present stratum." He seems to be a writer who regards the inner-most heart as something of
great importance, and which is charged with a mission of criticism as well as
all the rest. The discussion as to whether a writer should regard the inner-most heart as something of
great importance, or reveal his own hostile attitude to reality, is not
something new. Those sentimental romanticists or realists would always claim
like this. The final destination of Yu
Hua's attempt
is neither wrath, cursing, sentimentalism nor lyricism. What he asks is to open
wide our inner-most heart when regarding
it as something of great importance and to consider the world with sympathy,
even when we show hostility toward reality. Yu Hua firmly believes that the world in which we are
living is much wider than our own attitude to it. There is no knowing whether
this results from the sarcastic attitude arising when we are not able to accept
any more tension, or from our discovery of the indefiniteness of the universe
or the profundity of art when we see it through the weakness of our inner-most heart.
Yu Hua himself gives an
answer to this in somewhat ambiguous and complicated terms. He adds,
"Humor becomes structure here," supplementing the relation between
writing and reality. In short, humor sometimes relieves tension and sometimes
preserves tension. Then, how can humor re-construct the relation to reality and
yet be a structure? Among Yu
Hua's
critical vocabulary we find the terms “writing,” “reality” (truth), “nihility”
(inner-most
heart). These are the most important concepts in terms of understanding the
relation between literature and life. Now, let's enter his critical world and
look into how he accepts and experiences the minute phrases of all sentences
and how he orders the relation between writing and reality, along with humor.
2
In Yu Hua's critical writings,
'writing' is a particular word. It is connected with "narration" but
it is not the same as narration. If narration is developed in a particular
direction, writing possesses an objective nature which reveals itself. It is a
process, just as the process in which a dentist operates with instruments, so a
writer writes with a pen. But nobody thinks that writing is only a matter of
technique. While the course of writing is a pursuit toward the unknown world,
narration is always aimed at realizing a fixed target. Yu Hua says that writing can
change a man into a writer and can make a tough spirit a delicate and soft one.
That is certainly quite true. Writing is merely the power with which the writer
is shaping himself. What is more important, however, is that writing is a way
in which the writers open themselves up and entrust themselves to time and to
fate. Writing is a struggle in which a writer is fighting against himself and
where happiness and gloominess coexist together. Writing unites a writer with
the world of fiction, brings oneness with reality. Accordingly, the rhythm and
the way of writing turn into a plot when the writer passes through the three
worlds: violence, slowness and discontinuity, and finally disappearing into
one, as the sentence repeated in Yu Huua’s collection, "just as water-drops vanish in
the water."
Yu Hua's criticism, making his
writing itself a plot, is a process of pursuing its movement, stillness,
circling and enlargement. This
process erases all the borderlines between the writer and character, life and
art, form and cast, the writer's individual feature and the contents of a
novel. His loves, grudges, admirations, contempts, and imaginings are scattered
in the process of borderless writing. This is a boundless vision of writing,
one which never establishes any particular standards for the sake of art
itself, because any standard which goes beyond the standards of judgement found
in the living environment do not exist, fundamentally.
One gray autumn day in
1996, while the dismal sunlight shone on a gray building, which does not exist
any more now, on an inside street of Chaoyangmen,
I was reading Yu Hua's
first essay at my desk. It was entitled "Bulgakov and 'Maestro and Margaret'," and had
been contributed to a magazine, "Reading." This work was very hard
for him to comprehend. If I had not kept exhorting him, the writing might have
lasted quite a long time. I remember that Yu
Hua
called me up shortly after he finished the piece. He told me that he was unable
to express Bulgakvo's delicacy. But to the
best of my knowledge, this essay is the most impressive among his critical
works. I could feel the pain, the luster of time, gloomy and shiny, a writer is
undergoing, and something hard to express from this essay. At the end, he
mentions humor in relation to the writer and reality, but it was not clear to
me. In his vagueness, Yu
Hua was
heading in a clear direction. But then, all of a sudden, he suspended his
writing and his essay spread all the wider through his suspension of it. His
unfinished writing impressed me deeply. At that time, I was really disappointed
in contemporary literary criticism. I was hoping that the writer who wrote,
"Worldly affairs are just like smoke"(《世事如烟》)would thoroughly break
some kinds of ploy by tracing back the course of other people's writing. And
this essay was just what I had been looking for. Yu Hua had sent the text of his work to me at my office
by fax. The printed characters were blurred. Static electricity seemed to flow on
the surface of the smooth fax paper and the density of the ink was uneven. But
after I had finished reading just a couple of sentences, I began to feel the
weight of his writing.
Bulgakov's writing was discussed
as a simple regression. Even though Bulgakov's simple writing was a
struggle to get out of the circuit of publication, presentation, reputation and
vanity, it was not a pure escape from this mundane world, either. It was,
rather, the result of violence. Pure writing brings into relief the political
power of writing. Now that the political power of writing is embodied by the
purity of writing, the purity of writing is not necessarily "pure
art" nor "pure writing." What I mean by "politics"
here is not an action in a narrow sense. That is a characteristic of human life
and it is this that becomes the origin of writing. How much does the simple
writing move people? There is no need for the writer to fight with his own fame.
There is no need for him to reflect on his words and deeds after he has boasted
in newspapers and magazines. What is most important is that there is no need to
force him to get out of worldly glory and to go back to writing, because he has
had no chance to get out of writing. He has grasped the meaning of himself
through the fiction of narration and has become extinct in the course of
writing. Now there are no marks of himself left any more. From this remark, I
thought of a writer as being perplexed at such times. When he made writing his
life, he was faced with himself alone. I felt the sincerity of the writer's inner-most heart. This writing
discloses the frailty and the pangs of the conscience of a man who is always
struggling against himself. What
is more important here is that writing liberates the writer from himself and removes
all traces of the writer by turning him into nothingness.
The writing which is
returned to itself can transparently express our feelings just like an embossed
carving. That causes immense joy by bringing fears, anxieties, grudges,
helplessness and love together into one. Yu
Hua, however, substitutes an interest in the number of pages for his concern
with joy. This was a surprising fact to me, because no critics full of
statecraft will want this kind of thing. The person who regards a work, not for
its result but for its course, might pay attention to the exact length of the
writing.
"This work includes two important characters. They are the Maestro and Margaret. They appear on the cover of this book for the first time. After they appear as the title of this book, they delay their second appearance until page 284, on which the Maestro silently appears again. On page 314 of this book, the beautiful Margaret appears on the stage. In a book of 580 pages, the Maestro and Margaret actually appear only in the middle part, which is a very easy point in the book in terms of narration."
Yu Hua was making progress,
when he wove together the plot, the characters and the number of pages of the
book, just as children count the numbers. The meeting at the Red Square in
Moscow which throws people into embarrassment develops in the course of time.
"Its narration discontinues when the narration begins to show its
borderless and endless front view." This is just when the love between the
Maestro and Margaret starts but the narration is interpreted and is made to
stop here.Yu Hua wakes us up
continually and clearly. Even when the narration has ceased, his marching never
stops, just as the conductor of a symphony orchestra continues his job in
silence even when the music pauses. "Here we turned over a leaf on page
283."
The discontinuance here means that a part of the
writing and the writing, as a whole, is a continuum which reveals itself
vividly in such a presentation. In this regard, Yu Hua shows that he comprehends the structure as an
experienced novelist. What is more
important is that he regards writing itself as the target of observation. In
consequence, the characters and plots along with the developing process of
emotion reveals the rhythem of writing, while Yu Hua may have hoped to peep into the mystery of writing
by making the narration a detour thereby leading to writing. In his writing of
this book, we can frequently find signs of Yu Hua's impulse to break the limit of the text and life
through the clue to his writing.Writer, character and critic are living in the
same world and writing determines a man's destiny. The criticism of a work is
the narration of the process of life.
“As soon as Margaret
appeared, the Maestro became tranquil in his inner-most heart and Bulgakov also found his
comfort beyond comparison . . . . The Maestro is nothing but a representative
created by Bulgakov in the fictitious
world. When Bulgakov thought of something,
it became a language. When Bulgakov spoke something, it
became a sound. When Bulgakov groped for something,
it became his hands. Therefore, we can conclude: The only ambiguous region
between Bulgakov's reality and writing
is Margaret. In this environment, Bulgakov can perfectly protect
his own conviction. This is, as many people say, the power of love and if he
pushes his conviction forward, he can probably move on, even though his life
comes to an end. The next path of his life is an endless one.”
This is what we mean by
writing. It not only goes beyond time and space between the writer and his
work, but it also liberates the inner-most heart of the writer
by jumping over grudges, poverty and deception. Bulgakov is not a pure "self." He could enter into the genuine writing
only when he liberated himself from himself. The process through which a writer
liberates himself is to open up to everything realistic, just like Faulkner at
the tip of Yu Hua's pen. He is one of the
unparalleled writers who has lived his life equally and who has proven that
literature can hardly be above life. As for writers such as this, we can say
that they did not choose writing, but writing chose them. In his essay, entitled "Mishima Yukio’s Writing and Life,"
Yu Hua
condemned Mishima to die by the tip of
his pen, because Mishima blended writing with
life. "At the last moment, Mishma Yukio was not describing 'Patriotism'
any more. 'Patriotism' was describing Mishima Yukio . . . . At the last
moment of his life, ‘death’ and ‘lifeblood’ in Mishima’s writing, jumped to
their feet and described Mishima
Yukio."
Mishima Yukio's death is an exquisite
meeting of art and life and it reveals life itself through individual nihility. Margaret's soaring up,
however, makes us peep into the true state of history.
3
Last of all, the person who
realizes that the process of writing is an objection to himself will understand
the consequence, that writing is just like destiny. Dostoevskii developed it in an
epic style and showed his confrontation in a complicated way. Bakhtin called this epic “polyphonic quality”. This polyphonic
quality is writing itself as well as the structural form. I think that Yu Hua firmly believes in
the excellence of Dostoevskii's writing, but his
literary criticism chose the transparent writing as its beginning. This means
the writing forces the writer to go back to writing. This has some similarity
to the ideas of Bakhtin,
that is, he understands writing as a form leaping over art and life, and not a
simple form.
Isaiah Berlin didn't relish
the notion that art and life are blended in Russian literature. This, he
thought, belonged to a silly imitation of the German spirit. In a certain book
of his, he summarized two kinds of attitudes in literary criticism:
"French attitude" and "Russian attitude." He did this in
order to demonstrate the organic way of thinking in Russian spiritual life.
What is called the "French attitude" shows a technical attitude.
According to this attitude, the only duty of intellectuals and artists is to produce
good works. Their moral life, everyday interest, does nothing to do with
whether or not they are a great artist. But so far as the "Russian
attitude" is concerned, the meaning is definitely different. This attitude
believes in the indivisible unity of man and will not tolerate the writer's
negligence, reckless remarks, self-indulgence or a lack in passion for truth.
Russian writers and the general public believe that writers are human and are
supposed to be responsible for their own behavior. This attitude gives a continual
shock to the European conscience. Mr. Berlin warns as follows: Such an organic
understanding of the world includes some factors of anti-modern and autocratic
romanticism.
The titles "Russian
attitude" or "French attitude" are nothing but a rough metaphor.
A genuinely talented writer thinks much of technical skill and is very
sensitive to life itself. The indication of a mature writer lies in the
expansion of artistic space. Through this expansion, the tension and
contradiction of both parts is expressed. But trends and fashions are never
like this. They always develop certain one-sidednesses in isolation.
Accordingly, Berlin's two attitudes cannot comprehend the creative writing of a
prominent writer. Such an approach can only comprehend the tradition assuming
an aspect of temper and trend. For instance, the "French attitude"
represents the modern trend and dominates the present world. This attitude has
produced a large number of theories and professional critics in the realm of
literature and literary criticism. The proposition "the author was
dead" includes the possibility leading to the living world. But to clumsy
critics, this proposition is nothing but the proclamation of the independence
of the work, neglecting the act of writing. This was how their criticisms,
lacking in talent and life, began to open their own way. As the arrangement was
in good order and the steps were in accord with each other, the noisy voice of
the mass of people changed literature in quality into “literature”--a field
which has nothing to do with our life. Weber thought that modernity was the
rational differentiation of the value validity. In real history, as time went
on, this differentiation was comprehended as technical process. In terms of the
philosophical foundation of the contemporary life style, all behavior is
changed into professional behavior and that professional behavior itself
constitutes the moral foundation of a man's social behavior. For example, any
lawyer can plead for a criminal but the lawyer doesn't care whether his
pleading is helpful in regard to the criminal clearing himself of the crime.
The professional ethics of a lawyer is provided with a moral foundation. In the
same sense, this logic can compare writing to a carpenter who shaves the wood or
to an entrepreneur who manages a company, or to a soldier who directs military
affairs, and to a president of a company who controls its property and to a
lawyer who pleads for a criminal.
Here only ability and technical skill exist. Nothing else is to be seen.
In my opinion, we'd better regard the "French attitude" not as a
national trait but as the value of modern society. Its social nature is
skillfully hidden under the "attitude." The rational decoration of
such an attitude is the rejection of meaning and the understanding of the
specialization of social life.
Yu Hua's criticism is a
challenge to the pure criticism of art. He did not make the text and author, or
even readers, the objects of his criticism. He put the act of writing in the
center of his interest. In the course of writing, the author's writing, his
destiny, the formation of a work, the production of criticism, art and life,
all compose an inseparable entity. Yu
Hua has
been regarded as one of the "avant-garde" from 1980s. In terms of Chinese
literature, the characteristic of a vanguard writer is purely literary writing.
Here, Yu Hua,
however, proves it by his own writing, that the research of a form is developed
in the course of writing, and that this writing is borderless.
This kind of criticism
reminds me of a tradition, namely, the modern literary tradition created by Lu
Xun. This tradition is deeply connected with that of 19th century Russian
intellectuals. The feature consciously leaps over the definite borderline
between life and art, and it announces the criticism of the course of art with
the same standard of judgment in life. This does not mean something like Mr.
Berlin's autocratic romanticism which regards the severe criticism of an
author's moral quality as its main duty, because writing in this tradition is
not a logic which organizes other things by force but an open process toward
the world and the writer himself. Here, writing is an earnest desire for
freedom. The social criticism of art originates from the interest in the course
of writing. This has no necessary relation to mechanical social criticism or
severe moral judgment. Art is the product of writing and the development of
destiny and it has no borderline. Berlin was fascinated with the principle of
"rational differentiation" which soaked in the "French
attitude." He thought it is a kind of tolerance. But, if the
"rational differentiation" rejects the relation between art and life,
then independence of art will only mean the shrinking of art. In the sphere of
art criticism, the professional file formed through the periodicals and college
education all over the world is based on the premise of this isolated domain.
They make a display of their influence by changing their emblem, by
establishing their position, by attempting to move a mountain aside and to turn
a sea over. They are degenerating literature and art into a technique. They are
degenerating literature and art into the same structural domain as this society
which grows more and more technical day by day. They consider the same
structure as the secession of society. Writing is no longer a question heading
for the unknown past. Writing is advancing from waiting to waiting by the
reasonable circulation between construction and deconstruction, and between
repulsion and obedience. Waiting does not exist any longer. As has been
perceived by Weber, modernity includes two mutually contradictory principles. One
is the principle of specialization and the other is that of popularization. As
these two principles are incompatible, they are seldom sutured. That is why
modernity becomes a project hard to accomplish. In this sense, the question of
the relation between art and life to which 19th century critics paid attention
is becoming an important factor for us to reflect upon as we reappraise the
problem of modernity.
Now, let's look into the
model of criticism created by Belinskii. Turgenev who had a fussy temper, was not to learn of Dobrolyubov's social criticism and
longed for Belinskii's criticism. Belinskii, who was the pioneer
in the field of social criticism, had surprising insight and mild-mannered
sympathy for the course of creative writing and he understood that the insight
into sociality was the insight into a writing course. The conflict between Turgenev and Dobrolyubov resulted from a
serious divergence of thought. We cannot interpret that such a divergence is
based on the criticism of an outstanding writer which leaps over the borderline
of art and life. His reverence of Belinskii showed that he admitted
a social criticism which is fully equipped with the insight of art. In this
respect, I absolutely trust Prof. Berlin's intuition and judgment. "Even
aesthetic Turgenev will firmly believe
that it is understandable only when the social and moral problems become the
central ones and when such problems are laid on the structure of specific
history and ideology."
4
With regard to "19th
century-styled fortitude" and Dostoevskii's clumsy and Bulgakov's simplicity, Yu Hua shows strong respect,
but the enviroment around his literary criticism is inclined to think much of
professional manufacturing skill as time goes on. The skill of text analysis is
becoming more precise, but such an analytical skill is eventually only hiding
the decline of insight into art. This process has a direct relation to the fact
that literature, as an independent sphere, is separated from social life. If we
can say that the rational diffenciations composes the characteristic of modern
society, the literature separated from society is nothing but the duplication
of a separated society. This is the conversion of history closely approaching
us like raging waves. Yu Hua's writing contains a
resistance which can be understood in a particular historic thread of connection.
This resistance with the form of careful and skillful text analysis makes us
feel that his writing comprises a refusal of the "Russian attitude." Yu Hua's criticism, like his
novels, is marked by holds an evident experimentation. He eagerly desires to
liberate the literary world "in the frame of reality." His many
beautiful criticisms are concentrated on the research of the organization of
technical skill, metaphor and vocal sounds, as well as the mystery of
narration. He brings all of these to the quest of reality. Within this quest, Yu Hua's reality and Borges' reality are responding
to each other. The historic reason for this tendency is obvious. In terms of
politics or literature, the "Russian attitude" has been distorted to
the irresistible reality and to justice, indulging in bravado and bluster. We
cannot say that Prof. Berlin's conclusion about such literary attitudes has
nothing to do with historic reasons. But this conclusion originates from the
reverse pursuit of the history of idealism, rather than from the literary
tradition itself. From the period of Stalin to that of Tolstoy, history was
covered with a continuum of ideals and the spirit of such a continuum is proven
by a lot of experience. Nobody asks whether there is any questionable portion
in such a continuum. Nevertheless, I want to ask: "What relation does Stalinism have to Tolstoy who
resisted dictatorship? Can we cover up the deep opposition between them by
talking of a 'Russian attitude'?"
Though Yu Hua's criticism is closely
bound up with the "Russian attitude," he is developing another trend,
namely, "French attitude," in the thread of history mentioned above.
The vocabulary I have used here is nothing but a metaphor.Yu Hua's writing and his
respect for technical skills must not be confused with the tendency to amputate
literature through the borrowing of a "pseudo French style." That is
a thorough cognition of literature in a writer who has been engaged in writing
for about twenty years. As there exist two different "Russian
attitudes," so there exist two different "French attitudes." Yu Hua's "reality"
is the world which is opposed to reality and the relation between them is
expressed in an inverted logic. He opposes character with desire and opposes
human subjectivity with the stream of river and the sunlight. He opposes the
grand stream of time with separated, duplicated and inverted logic. Such an
opposing relation describes the tension between Yu Hua and reality. What is
strange, we may say, is that tension and opposition are changed into writing
and the passion of writing, eventually changed into an opening toward the
unknown world. The violence in the casual world is doomed to be definitely
exposed in the cold description. A change begins to appear little by little in
the meaning of this cold description. The toleration of the world, the respect
for character's own voice, the pursuit of truth, the transcendence after a full
understanding of all things and the same approval of good and evil begin to be
included. He says that this means that we see the world with the sympathetic
eyes. This is a kind of
humanitarianism toward the world. There is no change in Yu Hua's search for the truth.
What has been changed is the conception of the truth, which changes forever.
"Strong imagination makes a fact." How can imagination be at a
standstill in the stable space?
The frequent use of the
word "reality" is one of the features of Yu Hua's literary criticism.
That reveals the covert connection between him and the "French
attitude." Reality is a casual world and it is also a true world organized
by many kinds of separated affairs. "All our effort is just to approach
nearer to the truth." This expression, in a sense, seems to be in a
typical Russian style, but, in fact, it gives off the flavor of France, of Robbe-Grillet and Borges. The conception of truth
is continually changing. It is a deeper conception which cannot be foreseen,
yet it suggests another world which might be meaningless.
This is the secession as
well as approach to the "Russian attitude." What is truth? The truth
is a betrayal to commonsense, a contention to judgment, an opening to fortuity,
and a new discovery of the wholeness of the world created by actual facts.
“When I wrote ‘Worldly affairs are just like smoke’, I chose the
structure of collocation and inversion” in order to reveal the troublesome
state of the world. This is one kind of approach. It is transformed suddenly
becoming more distant. In the article, named "Borges' reality," Yu
Hua finds
that a writer is struggling against himself. Yu Hua finds how the Borges who belongs to life complains to another Borges who belongs to
reputation. This struggle is transformed into two directions of the narration.
They are oppressing each other and liberating each other at the same time.
Here, fatigue, struggle and dissatisfaction are becoming writing itself, but
the strained emotion is all the more slackened. Once again the arrangement of
pages turns up. But the desire to follow, shown from Bulgakov, is not to be seen any
more. What is rekindling at the back of the narration is a mysterious
atmosphere and a philosophical quest as to whether reality is true or not.
Yu Hua is hesitating.
Otherwise, he would not have used such a title for this book. He rejects the
idea that Borges'
"unlimitedness, confusion and universe, pantheism and human nature, time
and eternity, idealism and other unrealistic styles are simple mysticism."
He believes that Borges’ world
is never a false, illusioned one. He clearly erases the "borderline
between thing-in-itself, analogy, and metaphorical word" by borrowing Borges' accurate and abstruse
metaphor. And this is not the "Russian attitude," because his effort
to erase the borderline was attempted, not between art and life but between the
substance and the figurative style. When his attention was transformed into a
language spreading indefinitely, his effort to go beyond the borderline became
technical. As a result, he came to approach the "French attitude,"
that is, the attitude stressing the need to pay attention to the unpredictable
change, in other words, a metaphorical ability which is irrelevant to our moral
life.
I heard Yu Hua murmuring the
following in a low tone repeatedly: "I was unable to get water to drink
for some days. Being thirsty and the fear of thirst under the burning sun made
it unbearable every day." Borges'
reality was deeply hidden by the fear of thirst behind being thirsty. That
requires sharpness to see into things and Yu Hua could feel the serious sense of reality through
it. This sense does not make us approach his reality, but makes us stay far
away from his reality. Accordingly, Borges'
struggle against himself was transformed into a profound thought of reality and
his mind had so much reserve that he did not respond to any conflict between
art and life. He rather responded to the serious demands of those contemporary
novels which admitted technical skills. Yu Hua asks a question last of all. "Did Borges himself want to be a
writer who hopes to stay out of literature?" "Out of literature"
means an indefinitely wide reality. If we cannot establish any boundary between
literature and life, the territory out of literature must be a reality
independent of writing and living. We can get there only through metaphor.
Among the contemporary
writers in China, Yuhua was an uncommon
professional writer who studied the technique and passion of novels and the
reality created by them. Yu
Hua
discussed Faulkner, Hemingway, Borges,
Mishima Yukio(三島由紀夫), Kawabata Yasunari(川端康成), Bulgakov, Kafka, Schwartz, Mo Yan and the like, but he
brings to writing a different and opposing appearance and a sympathetic
attitude. This is the empty inner-most heart of a writer who
is concerned about the writing process. This is what I am going to mention
below. He manifests a most peculiar set of characteristics in his language,
imagination and metaphor. We can easily figure out whether a certain sentence
is his or not, if only we have read one or two passages of his writing. The
piercing power of his sentences is very surprising. Even reality can exist only
in the space where the power of his writing reaches. Yu Hua is continually
getting stuck in it with a somewhat confusing but accurate and transparent
attitude. When people got intoxicated by a "new state" or
"individual writing," treacherous Yu Hua returns to classics. His understanding of classics
is, by no means, the repetition of anybody and everybody. As his finding of
Bruno Schwartz testifies, he is overthrowing the history of literature through
the reverse pursuit of the writing process and criticizing “all histories of
literature place the writers first and literature, next.” His article
"Literature and History of Literature" is a work in which he explores
the genius that people could not understand in the history of literature. This
exploration comes from his understanding of literary technique and, what is
more, from his constant asking questions about his concepts of reality.
Here, the reality becomes
the origin of writing politics. Here again, I found Yu Hua's eager desire from his
technique and in the joy of finding reality. I see a deeply hidden Russian
atmosphere distinct from the "French attitude." However, I know that Yu Hua understands this as
the attitude of sympathy and opening.
5
The "France
attitude" found in Yu
Hua's
writing never simply came from his resistance to the "Russian
attitude." On the contrary, it came from the understanding and the desire
for freedom and from the wish to liberate himself from himself. Such a desire
and wish are embodied in the expression, "An artist is writing a creative
work for nihility."
This expression of Yu Hua's
needs to be read by comparing it with what I quoted at the beginning of this
paper, that "writing was for one's inner-most heart." Nihility is one's inner-most heart liberated from
the self and the liberated inner-most heart is the
transparence of the world. One who is liberated from himself can look into the
truth of the universe. That's why nihility becomes the origin of
truth. Though the conception of nihility reminds people of
existentialism, the meaning of truth can possess the whole world and every
minute part of the world by making itself nihilistic. In other words, nihility is a humble attitude
to meet the world. Nihility is a covert desire
but it possesses all things.
Now, let's go back to the
humor which I mentioned at the beginning. What is humor? As far as I know,
humor is a conflict between the "Russian attitude" and the "French
attitude," and there is an attempt to resolve this conflict by its own nihility. Humor recognizes the
relation between art and life as a transcendental and technical attitude. This
is a recognition of art as art.
Such an artistic purity is recognized, coming from the truth of the
world. This self-contradiction leaves no mark behind, because “I” remain wide
open. This is, what is called, Yu Hua's nihility.
At the end of the Ming
dynasty, Wanglongxi
said, "Arriving at intuition means to empty one's mind, and to withdraw
one's own affection from things." That is a mind, writing from one's
inner-most
heart. "As a child's mind is innocent, it has neither falsehood nor
technique. It has enough vitality and wisdom in itself that talent grows
naturally. If an adult is to be a master of all things, he has to keep this
child's mind." In other words, a child's mind transcends technique. For Yu Hua, technique is important.
But technique is nothing but technique. It is the insight of the world's
mystery, available only when one's inner-most heart is wide open. Consequently, technique is, in
fact, just the size of one's inner-most heart. The object of
the empty mind is not only people, but also rivers, trees, streets and all
things. In the article, "Literature and the History of Literature," Yu Hua expressed freedom
like this: "Just like Kafka, Schwartz made his writing survive in an
unlimited freedom. He made his narration larger than reality, preparing his own
home, river and character in the imagination. The scenery he drew with his pen
always leaped over the place within his horizon, reaching the limits of his inner-most heart. Therefore, the
destiny of character was as eternal as memory and there was no way to measure life
and death. At this, aestheticism came to read a bountiful history, but was not
able to find a definite spot. Their works were at the mercy of the waves in the
river of time, just like people who have lost their own space."
Yu Hua tries to accept the
world through his empty inner-most heart. He accepts the
world rejected by "the frame of the world." He tries to accept the
reality attainable through only metaphor, experience and language. Though one
cannot deny that one's empty inner-most heart has limits,
these limits come not from one's inner-most heart but from
reality. In the Schwartz's imagination, houses, streets, rivers, character and
bountiful history are accepted but the definite spot is excluded. He found his
people drifting in the river of time. But those people lost their space. It is
closely connected with the grave history of the Jewish race. Once again I
thought of Bulgakov and the Russian
tradition in which he was living. In this tradition, neither the spot nor the
space can be neglected. A bountiful history means something concrete. This
tradition lets art and life communicate with each other across the borderline
between them, but it always asks: "Who can be happy and free, living in
Russia?" But Schwartz left no room for talking about spots and spaces. Nihility is endlessly wide but
what it means is not being huge or numerous but being boundless. Since nihility means a required
choosing, Sartre, who is now out of fashion, still has some meaning.
Indeed, who can be happy
and free while living in Russia? This has been an untimely question for the
past half century. And it is a
question that has been asked by the people of the whole generation before the
last half century. Though the voice asking this question came from the true inner-most heart, it got mixed
with the false justice and moral in the long river of time. Eventually, it
played a variation which meant compulsion, dogmatic futile argument and
reasoning. Prof. Berlin quoted Herzen and satirized a
"Russian attitude" and there was some truth to what he said, "We
were running toward the limit and went over the limit with fearless steps. Our
steps never went well with demonstrations or with the truth." But who can
deny the persistent questions asked by Dostoevskii,
Tolstoy, Chekhov and Bulgakov? And who can deny the great power of this
tradition? One of the general principles in history is that "the asking of
questions about a problem has passed. But the problem is eternal." The "Russian attitude" was
alienated. But the "Russian attitude" has not lost its meaning, yet.
This same logic can be applied to the "French attitude." Though the
empty inner-most
heart rejects the "Russian attitude" which was alienated from the
quest of another reality, we must not give up the "Russia attitude."
The empty inner-most heart embraces all
the world and calls our attention to sympathy for the streets, for rivers, for
nature and for man. It makes us perceive the fear of thirst after we experience
thirst and the oneness of water vanished in water. But we still remember the
spot and time, love and grudges, tenderness and betrayal in the scene of
history. Otherwise, drifting without space may be our destiny. Will this be our
reality? If the change of conception
of the spot and space is the basic mark of the contemporary world, the absence
of the spot and space in the artistic work might be an accurate description of
reality without spot and space.
6
This is why I cherish the
experiment which pierces the process of writing, clarified by Yu Hua in his article,
"Bulgakov and 'Maestro and
Margaret'." That is the writer's attitude of the world in terms of the
details of writing. That is a freedom which pierces the time and space of
literature and of reality. This paper filled with passion for the technique of
writing, contains, inwardly, respect for the "Russian attitude," but
this is not duplication. Within this figure calling a departed soul, the
betrayal of a kind of spiritual impulse and art movement has been adumbrated. I will take a line
from Marx. Here, "The reason we try to restore a dead man to life in the
revolution is just to admire a new struggle, not to imitate the old struggle by
force. It is in order to enhance a certain obligation in the imagination, not
to escape from the solution of our responsibility in reality. It is to restore
the revolutional spirit again, not to make the ghost of revolution wander
about."
In
this sense, the regression to nihility and to one's inner-most heart is not to
escape from the world but to enter the world. Yu
Hua's
world of criticism contains not only the confusion and richness of reality but
also the tension and confrontation of reality and it contains the collocation
and struggle of the "Russian attitude" and the "French
attitude" as well. He tries to embrace both of them as the means of
technique and he tries to make them get along with each other, but, after all,
the world, emerging from the tension of creation, is inevitably confronted with
its own contradiction. In my opinion, this contradiction is a necessary one. The
world is changing. One narration takes the place of another and one
dictatorship is changed into another. If there is no contradiction, there is no
chance of solution, either. When Yu
Hua is
asked what to write, he must mention how to write and when he answers the
question of how to write, he should talk about the truth of what to write. If
there appears a necessity for the "Russian attitude" in this world of
the "French attitude," they must provide us with creative tension. I
hope that Yu Hua will soar up and
clearly see it, just as Margaret did. Pontius Pilate desperately followed Jesus
Christ and cried out at the top of his voice, "It was not Pontius Pilate
who killed him!"
Nov. 19, 1998
Tr.
By Mi-Jung Kim
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[1] This text forms an
introduction to Yu
Hua's
collection of critical essays, entitled, "Can I believe in
myself?"