D Y N A S T I E S OF D E M O N S : C A N N I B A L I S M . F R O M LIJ X U N T O Y U H U A by J A M E S R O B I N S O N K E E P E R B . A . , The University of Victoria, 1990 M . . A . , The University of Victoria, 1992 A THESIS S U B M I T T E D IN P A R T I A L F U L F I L M E N T OF T H E R E Q U I R E M E N T S F O R T H E D E G R E E OF D O C T O R OF P H I L O S O P H Y in T H E F A C U L T Y OF G R A D U A T E STUDIES Department of Asian Studies We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard T H E U N I V E R S I T Y OF BRITISH C O L U M B I A December 2001 © James Robinson Reefer, 2001 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfillment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission Department of ^/L^LA^ /n'UoU^ The University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada 11 Abstract Dynasties of Demons: Cannibalism from Lu Xun to Yu Hua focuses on the issue of representations of the body in modern Chinese fiction. M y interest concerns the relationship, or correspondence between "textual" bodies and the physical "realities" they are meant to represent, particularly where those representations involve the body as a discursive site for the intersection of state ideology and the individual. The relationship between the body and the state has been a question of profound significance for modern Chinese literati dating back to the late Qing, but it was L u X u n who, with the publication of his short story "Kuangren riji" £E A H i S (Diary of a Madman), in 1918, initiated the literaty discourse on China's "apparent penchant for cannibalizing its own people. In the first chapter of my dissertation I discuss L u Xun ' s fiction by exploring two distinct, though not mutually exclusive issues: (1) his diagnosis of China's debilitating "spiritual illness," which he characterized as being cannibalistic; (2) his highly inventive, counter-intuitive narrative strategy for critiquing traditional Chinese culture without contributing to or stimulating his reader's prurient interests in violent spectacle. To my knowledge I am the first critic of modern Chinese literature to write about L u Xun 's erasure of the spectacle body. In Chapters II, III and IV, I discuss the writers Han Shaogong, M o Yan, and Y u Hua, respectively, to illustrate that sixty years after L u Xun ' s madman first "wrote" the prophetic words, chi ren A (eat people), a number of post-Mao writers took up their pens to announce that the human feast did not end with Confucianism; on the contrary, with the advent of Maoism the feasting began in earnest. Each of these post-Mao writers approaches the issue of China's "spiritual dysfunction" from quite different perspectives, which I have characterized in the following way: Han Shaogong (Atavism); M o Yan (Ambivalent-Nostalgia); and Y u Hua (Deconstruction). A s becomes evident through my analysis of selected texts, despite their very significant differences (personal, geographic, stylistic) all three writers come to oddly similar conclusions that are, in and of themselves, not dissimilar to the conclusion arrived at by L u Xun ' s madman. Ill Table of Contents Abstract i i Table of Content i i i Dedication iv Acknowledgments v Introduction 1 Chapter I L u X u n and the Erasure of the Body 12 Chapter II Han Shaogong and the Return of the Spectacle Body 39 Chapter III Ambivalence and Nostalgia in Honggaoliang jiazu 71 Chapter IV Y u Hua and the Deconstruction of the Body 112 Conclusion The End and the Beginning 157 Bibliography 166 Dedication This work is dedicated to Denise Le Blond Her presence is manifest on every page And her spirit lives forever in my heart Acknowledgments I would gratefully like to acknowledge the financial support of the University of British Columbia in awarding me a University Graduate Fellowship. I would also like to gratefully acknowledge the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for their generous award of a doctoral fellowship. On a more personal note I would like to acknowledge the great debt I owe to my supervisor Dr. Michael S. Duke, whose steady guidance, highly insightful critique, and infinite patience made the completion of this dissertation possible. I would also like to acknowledge, and to thank Dr. Catherine Swatek and Dr. Glen Peterson for agreeing to sit on my dissertation committee, and for taking time from their very busy schedules to read my work. I would like to acknowledge, and express my sincere thanks to the eminent scholar Dr. Wi l l i am Lye l l for agreeing act as my external reader. I have always held his work in the highest regard, and could not have asked for a better, more knowledgeable reader. I would also like to acknowledge Professor Graham Good and Dr. Nam-l in Hur for agreeing to serve at my oral defense as University Examiners. I thank them both for reading my work and participating in this process. I must express my heart-felt thanks to Dr. Helen Leung who gave me hours and hours of her precious time, and whose keen intelligence and demanding questions forced me to read more deeply and think more critically. I offer my thanks to Sylvia Chen who was always wil l ing to sit down and discuss Chinese literature with me. I also want to offer my thanks to L i Tianming and his gracious wife L i Ning, true friends who've been unfailingly supportive, and always there in times of need. Introduction 1 Introduction Traveling through the narrative landscapes of post-Mao fiction is often like stepping into the hellish world of Pieter Bruegel's The Triumph of Death; wherever one looks one sees scenes of violence, sexual perversion, and physical deformity. These textual geographies are troubled landscapes inhabited by characters trapped in a Chinese variant of the danse macabre. I use the idea of dance because it necessarily implies the kinetic presence of physical bodies — bodies in motion, bodies acting-out, bodies being acted upon. The macabre speaks for itself -— during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s millions of docile (and not so docile) Chinese bodies "danced" their way into torture, starvation, exile, and death. Given the horrible magnitude of the carnage it is not at all surprising that textual representations of the period are animated by violence. One does not walk blithely through the pages of post-Mao fiction. Throughout modern Chinese literary history, it is difficult to find a period in which [the literary scene] is people by so many bizarre characters invested with such complex symbolic meaning. The range of characters that emerge...include: the blind, the mute, the crippled, the humpbacked, the sexually impotent, the bound-feet fetishist..., the l iving dead, not to mention the mentally deranged and the psychotic. 1 Because graphic representations of violent spectacle are so prevalent in post-Mao fiction, my reading has focused on the body as the site where power is directly inscribed through the use of physical violence. It is an analytical approach that leads to questions about how the body is represented in text, how it is situated in narratives, and how it functions as a site of discourse. M y dissertation, then, is an experiment in reading the body in terms of the "representational economy 1 See David Der-Wei Wang, "Pantheon of the Deformed: The Bizarre Visage o f Life as Seen in Contemporary P R C Fiction," (Jirenxin: Dangdai dalu xiaoshuode zhongsheng 'guai'xiang ^ f t >'Cprtj /JNi^^ ik^.'i^' ffi), Zhongshengxuanhua (Heteroglossia, Taipei: Yuanliu, 1988) p. 209, as quoted in Joseph S . M . Lau, "Visitations of the Past in Han Shaogong's Post-1985 Fiction," in From May Fourth to June Fourth; Fiction and Film in Twentieth Century China, eds. Ellen Widmer and David Der-Wei Wong (Camabridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993), p.21. Introduction of violence" in post-Mao fiction. B y the phrase "representational economy of violence" I mean the value assigned to an act of violence through the nature of its representation in a text. The nature of a specific representation derives not only from its graphical depiction but from its contextualization, as well. For the purposes of the following dissertation I have chosen works from four Chinese writers: L u X u n (#;ifi), Han Shaogong ( f f M o Yan QHgf), and Y u H u a ( ^ ) . Why these four writers? In answering this question, which is, ultimately, the purpose of my dissertation, I have taken into account three distinct, though not mutually exclusive, contextualizations as the framework for my analysis. I imagine L u X u n standing on a promontory watching the cataclysmic wave of modernity about to break across China. I read post-Mao writers as the battered survivors of that spectacularly violent deluge; Han Shaogong, M o Yan, Y u Hua, and L u X u n are thus linked by China's ongoing confrontation with the "modern," which has from the outset been problematized by the issue (question) of national identity. A l l three of the post-Mao texts I have chosen to discuss engage the question of identity in its personal aspect and/or in the context of a national polity. It is in this sense that I regard Han Shaogong, M o Yan, and Y u Hua as being linked to L u X u n as inheritors of the short-lived May Fourth intellectual/literary tradition of exploration and experimentation. In bringing the work of Han Shaogong, M o Yan and Y u Hua together into a unified field of discourse that coheres beyond such general categories as "scar" literature (shanghen jft-lU X "roots-seeking" literature (xungen -If-fli), experimental (shiyan %?yk) and avant garde (xianfeng 9uW) fiction I reached back to L u Xun , who, with the publication of "Madman's Diary" (Kuangren reji £ E A 0 i S ) in 1918, penned the opening statement in the modern Chinese literary discourse on the "economy of violence" in Chinese society. Between the lines of all the great Introduction 3 Confucian Classics can be read the words "eat people" (chi ren P £ A ) , L u Xun ' s mad diarist declaimed. With this highly charged and potent phrase L u Xun , arguably, laid the literary foundation for the Chinese "national allegory" of cannibalism. 2 Little did he know at the time that the human feast had yet to begin in earnest. As I wi l l illustrate in the following analysis, Han Shaogong, M o Yan, and Y u Hua are linked to the idea of China's national allegory of cannibalism through textual invocations of the cannibalistic act. I want to stress that within this discursive frame my linkages are text specific and narrowly focused on how each author narrates the body viz-a-viz represented violence. The body itself serves as the third discursive link between L u X u n and the three post-Mao writers. In each of the texts I discuss the authors demonstrate a decided interest in the body as the site of spectacular violence. In this context the emphasis falls not on violence per se but on spectacle as an event, more specifically as an event that necessarily involves spectatorship; spectacle by its very nature demands a witness. In Han Shaogong's novella " B a B a B a " ( ^ ^ ^ ) the reader stands witness with the unidentified narrator at a carnival of grotesqueries, in M o Yan's novel Red Sorghum Clan (ilMW^MWd the reader stands witness with the unnamed grandson of Dai Fenglian (IIIJxijE) and Y u Zhan'ao (^c!? $0 as they act out their parts in a theatre of the macabre, and in Y u Hua's story "Classical Love" (T^jS^ ' f i f ) the reader stands witness with W i l l o w ($P), the seemingly hapless examination candidate, who watches the world See Gang Yue, The Mouth that Begs: Hunger, Cannibalism, and the Politics of Eating in Modern China, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 23; Fredric Jameson, "Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capital," Social Text 15 (Fall 1986) 65-88; Aijaz Ahmad, "Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the 'National Allegory,' in In Theory, (New York, Verso, 1992), pp. 95-122; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, (New York, Verso, 1983). Introduction 4 of spectacular events fluctuate between Utopian fantasy, unspeakable horror, and the oblivion of forgetfulness.3 Characterizing post-Mao writers as inheritors of the M a y Fourth literary tradition begs a question regarding the status of literature in China between the mid-1930s and the late 1970s. This is, of course, a highly complex question that begins with the strident polemic debates on the role of literature in society and the nature of literature in the service of revolution, and culminates in the radically politicized literary genre called "Revolutionary Realism-Revolutionary Romanticism." For the sake of argument I wi l l focus on the period between Mao Zedong's "Talks at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Ar t" in 1942, and the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s, roughly two decades which can be characterized as the "golden era" of Socialist Realist O f i ^ i j S C - M^KEESO literature.4 I have purposefully excluded the literature of this period from my dissertation because Socialist-Realism, by its cross-genre theoretical identity demands a separate analytical treatment — Socialist Realism is a literary genre born of political expediency rather than artistic need. This is not to say that post-Mao writers are free of political control, or that all Socialist-Realist fiction is bad. In fact, within the context of the genre itself there is a canon of "classic" texts5 whose narratives, despite rigid formulaic restrictions, are artfully effective in their textual representations of the body. Yet, the fact remains that in Socialist Realist fiction the "spectacle" cum "revolutionary" body functions as a paradigm of J The world that Wi l low watches is an allegorical representation of China just prior to, during, and after the Great Leap Forward CfciKift)-4 One of the best textual references for Mao Zedong's "Talks at the Yan 'an Forum on Literature and Ar t " is Bonnie S. McDougall ' s translation of the 1943 text with commentary. See Bonnie S. McDougal l , Mao Zedong's "Talks at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art" (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980). 5 The canon of Chinese Socialist Realism includes such classics as Zhou Libo ' s (JW)j7J/j£) novel Baofengzhouyu JUxUlM (^ 3fC = f r ^ J £ f t J & * ± , 1949); Ding Ling 's (T^) Taiyang zhao zai Sangganhe shang±m*M& H T M ± QtM : § f ^ ) £ &M±, 1952); Liang Bin ' s ( S O Hong qipu iWM (^ : ZYX &M±, 1961); and Qu Bo ' s Linhai xueyuan WMMW, • 9bX £BM±, 1962), to name just a few. Introduction 5 orthodox ideology, whereas May Fourth and post-Mao textual bodies are marked by ambiguity and function as sites of discursive contestation.6 This fundamental difference between body as paradigm and body as a site of contestation is clearly illustrated by comparing Zhao Y u l i n ( iHzE#) , the hero in Zhou Libo 's novel Hurricane, and Y u Zhan'ao, a hero in M o Yan's novel Red Sorghum. Because my dissertation jumps from modern Chinese literature at its inception (i.e., the publication of L u Xun ' s short-story "Madman's Diary,") to the post-Mao era, I felt it necessary to acknowledge the large body of fiction written during the three decades from Liberation to the rise of Deng Xiaoping, and to give a brief explanation as to why I have not included Socialist-Realist texts in my dissertation. Without getting bogged down in the polemics that attached to Andrey Zhdanov's hybrid theoretical doctrine of Socialist-Realism, I reiterate what I've said above — without exception heroes and heroines in Socialist-Realist fiction strive for an absolute, fixed identity that is defined by political orthodoxy; in sharp contrast to this certainty, the characters whose voices speak out from the texts of L u Xun , Han Shaogong, M o Yan, and Y u Hua are voices engaged in an ongoing dialogic relationship with the profoundly ambiguous nature of human identity, more specifically, the ambiguity of being Chinese following the collapse of the Imperial system, and again following the collapse of Mao Zedong's revolution. Interestingly, the intellectual trajectory of this dissertation is directly the result of a question I began asking when I first read L u Xun ' s "historic" short story "Madman's Diary." M y first undergraduate paper on modern Chinese literature focused on L u Xun ' s treatment of violence, and from that time until the present my primary interest in Chinese fiction has been in mapping the narrative topography of physical violence as it has been represented in the fiction of 6See Mark Elv in , "Tales of Shen and X i n : Body-Person and Heart-Mind in China during the Last 150 Years, in Self as Body in Asian Theory and Practice, ed. Thomas P. Kasulis (Albany: State University of N e w York Press, 1993), pp. 213-297. Introduction 6 the post-Mao period. I have chosen specific texts by Han Shaogong, M o Yan, and Y u Hua in which each of the authors revisits the "national allegory" of Chinese cannibalism. They return to this powerful M a y Fourth discourse from very different perspectives, and yet they are unified by first hand experiences and a sophisticated understanding of the subtle and not so subtle nuances of meaning to be found in the simple phrase, chi ren, when read in the context of Maoist China. It might seem somewhat ironic that I begin my analysis of the body and violence in post-Mao fiction with a discussion of L u Xun , but he was the first modern Chinese writer to understand, or at least intuit, the significance of the "spectacle body" in the traditional Chinese regime of power — all Chinese bodies were, potentially, discrete sites for the physical inscription of state/ideological power. While L u X u n did not have the late 20th century critical lexicon to draw upon, and, therefore, could not have conceptualized the issue in terms of "regimes of power," he clearly saw that physical bodies were used as sites for demonstrating state power through acts of spectacle violence, demonstrations which helped to maintain a population of docile bodies. Clearly, L u X u n was not the only May Fourth writer to concern himself with the the issue of the exercise of state power through acts of sanctioned violence; B a Jin's ( E ^ ) novel, Family ( ^ ) , and Mao Dun's (Ipjif) novel, Midnight (-ftfO are two very good examples. But L u X u n was unique among his contemporaries and proteges in that his interest lay not so much in the acts of spectacle violence, but in the "docile bodies" as spectators. The masses, especially in China, are always spectators at a drama. If the victim on the stage acts heroically, they are watching a tragedy; i f he shivers and shakes they are watching a comedy. Before the mutton shops in Beijing a few people often gather and gape, with evident enjoyment, at the skinning of the sheep. A n d this is all they get out of it i f a man lays down his life. Moreover, ' after walking a few steps away from the scene they forget even this modicum of enjoyment. 7 L u X u n , "What Happens After Nora Leaves Home?" in Lu Xun Selected Works, trans. Yang Xiany i and Gladys Yang (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1957), V o l . 1, p. 91 Introduction 7 A s I wi l l illustrate in Chapter One, L u Xun ' s narrative strategy for dealing with the issue of spectatorship and the "spectacle body," was brilliantly inventive, yet has remained largely unremarked upon. 8 After reading the stories in Na Han P f t ^ (Call to Arms) and Panghuang tfrtH (Wandering), along with a wide range of critiques on both L u X u n and his fictional oeuvre, I sensed that there was a deeper layer of discourse that I still could not access. I felt I was missing something important that was just out of reach. I did note that in stories, such as "Madman's Diary," "Kong Y i j i " ( ?L