One Kind of Chinese Reality: Reading Yu Hua

Author(s): Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg

Source: Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR), Vol. 18 (Dec., 1996), pp. 129-143
Published by: Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR)
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One Kind of Chinese Reality:

Reading Yu Hua
Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg
Universityof Aarhus
In mainland Chinese literature of the mid to late 1980s questions of individual
and national identity, already prominent since the early 1980s, became increasingly
mixed with issues of language and representation. One of the remarkable writers to
emerge at that time was Yu Hua * $, whose fiction, in my opinion, relates to those
questions and issues in a very distinctive way. In China he also seems to have acted as a
catalyst for bringing out differing attitudes to the general perception of aesthetic
modernity, and abroad, Western-based Chinese scholars such as Tang Xiaobing, Jing
Wang, and Zhao Yiheng have assigned a central role to Yu Hua in their reflections on
the existence or possibilities of modernism and postmodernism in Chinese literature.1
But what exactly is it that makes Yu Hua's writings appear as simultaneously
emblematic of a larger cultural problematic and of the predicament of the self? How
does his particular way of writing provoke a new aesthetic perception? In the present
essay I address these questions through a close analysis of one of Yu Hua's most controversial stories. I propose to read this text as an allegory-not in the traditional totalizing
sense-but in the modem heterogenous sense as conceived by theorists like Walter
Benjamin2 and Paul de Man3. While I shall not attempt to define the text as strictly
1

Tang Xiaobing, "Residual Modernism: Narratives of the Self in Contemporary Chinese Fiction",
Moder Chinese Literature7.1 (1993), pp. 7-32. Jing Wang, "The Mirage of 'Chinese Postmodernism': Ge Fei,
Self-Positioning, and the Avant-Garde Showcase," positions 1.2 (1993), pp. 349-388. Zhao Yiheng (Y. H. Zhao),
"Fiction as Subversion," WorldLiteratureToday,summer 1991, pp. 415-420.
2 The modem
re-interpretation and re-habilitation of allegory in the West is first of all associated
with the work of Walter Benjamin. Based on his studies of the baroque German Trauerspiel (1924), and
developed in his analysis of Charles Baudelaire he came to see the allegorical mode as dynamic and dialectical
and now as closely linked to the experience of modernity. See Walter Benjamin, The Origin of the GermanTragic
Drama, John Osbore trans.(London: New Left Books, 1977) and Walter Benjamin, CharlesBaudelaire:A Lyric
Poet in the Era of High Capitalism,Harry Zohn trans.(London: New Left Books, 1973). Benjamin holds that in
modem allegories the original divine relation between things and their proper meanings-their names-has
been sundered. Since there is no longer a common established world-view or a unified frame of reference
against which to interpret allegory, it can only have subjectivevalidity. The allegorical relationship is characterized by "obscurities in the connection between meaning and sign"-it is a broken and arbitrary language in
which "any person, any thing, any relationship can mean anything else". German Tragic Drama, p.175. In
contrast to the self-contained totality of the symbolic mode, allegory does point to something outside the text.
But that which it points to is no longer fixed and commonly recognized. That itself is just a another "signifier",
without absolute meaning in itself.
3 Paul de Man is
among those later literary theorists who have taken up the note of Benjamin and
reflected on the modem function of allegory. To de Man, allegory suggests the disjunction between the way in
which the world appears in reality and the way it appears in language. "The relationship between the allegorical sign and its meaning is not decreed by dogma .... Instead we have a relationship between signs in which
the reference to their respective meanings has become of secondary importance. But this relationship between

129

ChineseLiterature:Essays, Articles, Reviews 18 (1996)

130

moderist or postmodernist, I shall demonstrate that it contains elements of both and

that it is precisely from the interaction between these and the general allegorical
resonance that the story derives its specific impact.

1.
Yu Hua is a prolific writer. He was born in 1960, started publishing in 1984 and
his
breakthrough in 1987 with the short story "Shiba sui chumen yuanxing" +---~
got
'I:4;-j- (On the Road at Age Eighteen), written upon reading the Chinese translation
of Kafka's story "Ein Landarzt".4By the late 1980s Yu Hua was considered among the
most promising avant-garde or post-New Wave writers, regarded by many critics as
perhaps the best exponent of a kind of Chinese meta-fictional or postmodernist writing.5
He has continued to write in the 1990s and has published several short stories, novellas
and one long novel, in which he seems to have changed his style towards a slightly more
traditional "psychologized" narrative.6 Like much of the literature written in the late
1980s, Yu Hua's fiction of that period deeply problematizes and reflects the predicament
of identity-loss and cultural breakdown.7 But in contrast to the composite fragmented
, Yu Hua's
selves created by contemporaries such as Can Xue A X or Liu Suola jIJX
knife
cuts
and
the
connection
between
surgical
sign
meaning by presenting his
characters as nothing but signifiers for an absent self. Several of his early texts are
characterized by detailed descriptions of physical violence and bodily mutilation, and
evoke a cold and callous world of death and severed limbs.8

signs necessarily contains a constitutive temporal element. It remains necessary if there is to be allegory that
the allegorical sign refers to another sign that precedes it." In this way allegory comes to designate primarily a
distance in relation to its origin, and it establishes its language in the void of this temporal difference. See Paul
de Man, Blindnessand Insight. Essays in the Rhetoricof ContemporaryCriticism,(2nd rev. ed.; London: Methuen,
1983) p. 207.
4 See Yu Hua, "Chuanduan
Kangcheng [Kawabata Yasunari] yu Kafuka de yichan" Jl1lsJj

-f

, 1990, No.2, pp. 109-110.

, Waiguowenxuepinglun S[C[_tfW
5 See for example Wang Ning, "Hou xiandaizhuyi yu
Zhongguo wenxue" ]R-t :
_ $r-S~
, Dangdai dianying_, fi, j, 1990, No.6; and Y. H. Zhao, "The Rise of Metafiction in China," Bulletin of the
Schoolof Orientaland AfricanStudies55.1 (1992).
6 See "Huhan yu xi yu" OJI $
1991, No.6 (changpian
-i
]W(Shouts and Fine Rain), Shouhuo L
,t
xiaoshuo
*V4f,Mi) and "Huozhe" * (Living), Shouhuo1)JV1992, No.6 (zhongpianxiaoshuor:X'j'fi ).
7 For a discussion of Yu Hua's work and Chinese critics' evaluation of it in the context of the
relationship between modemity and nationalism, see Wendy Larson, "LiteraryModernism and Nationalism in
Post-Mao China" in Wendy Larson and Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg, eds., Inside Out: Modernismand Postmodernism in ChineseLiteraryCulture(Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1993).
8 In several of his stories the narration, or part of it, is carried on
through the subjectivist perceptions
of an insane person. In "Yijiubaliu nian" - tAJk,
(1986) it is a middle-school teacher who disappeared
without a trace during the Cultural Revolution, and who in the story suddenly turns up as a beggar in the
small town where he used to live. His wife has remarried and his daughter has taken a new name. The school
teacher has turned mad and become obsessed with his old hobby-methods of punishment and torture in
ancient China, from cutting off the nose and castration to being torn apart by five horses, all of which he
manages in the course of the story to inflict upon himself in a mixture of reality and fantasy. He also imagines
himself torturing people in the street. The narrative moves back and forth between the madman and his
former family, who do not recognize him but who are strangely affected by his presence. At the end of the
story when the madman has died, they feel an unexplained relief. In the final section, however, another
--f

I:ft

WEDELL-WEDELLSBORGReadingYu Hua

131

Yu Hua's most consistent demonstration of human alienation and absence or

eradication of an "individual self" is his long story "Xianshi yizhong" ! 3 - ft (One
Kind of Reality) from 1988.9 A family story presented as one long countdown from an
existential void to a physical zero. According to the critic Zeng Zhennan 4ji *1 it is to
some extent based on real events which took place in a small town in South China.10The
dramatic plot of death and revenge between two brothers could indeed be the stuff of
high tragedy: The four year old son of one of the brothers happens to kill his baby
cousin. The baby's father then kills the four year old, whose father in turn kills his
brother-in a very special manner. He is caught by the police and executed in a scene
reminiscent of the execution of Lu Xun's "Ah Q," after which his sister-in-law has his
body sold for dissection. In the meantime their senile old mother with whom they live
also dies without anybody noticing. The final section of the story is a detailed description of the dissection process from the first thrust of the scalpel to the final peeling of the
skeleton.
Despite the dramatic events fuelling the narrative dynamics, at no point are any
of the characters shown to feel the emotions one would normally associate with such
horrible events. On the contrary, throughout the story expressions of emotion, such as
smiling, crying and laughing are explicitly shown to be separated from the inner
motivations we would expect. This is most magnificently demonstrated in the scene
where one brother kills the other by tying him to a tree, smearing his feet with stew, and
letting a little dog lick them until he simply dies, choking with laughter.
Emotion and of moral reflection on the part of the characters (and the narrator)
are replaced by their attention to sounds and to surface detail-ants crawling in the
blood, the thuds of bodies falling to the ground, a leaf swaying in the wind-or to
physical phenomena: the old woman feeling her bones break like chopsticks, moss
growing inside of her, and her stomach rotting. They all seem to live in total alienation,
having lost touch with reality. Their actions are generated by some pre-existing pattern,
which simply is there, reducing these people to robots. Of course the Chinese reader
may see the driving force in the story as the underlying traditional idea of the necessity
of having male descendants. But this is never consciously part of considerations inside of
the characters, and not explicitly mentioned until the very end of the story, when we
learn that the testicles of the executed were transplanted on to a young man, who nine
months later became the father of a son.
The lives of the two brothers and their wives and children take place in an
emotional void, day in and day out according to a dull routine, eating meals and going
to work. There is very little dialogue. The presence of a great number of "interior" timemarkers, such as "now", "then", "at this moment", "last week" etc. is in stark contrast to
the total lack of "exterior" references connecting events to any specific social or historical
time. We are never told when or where this story might be taking place. Moreover, a
111zil Cfi '(Beijing:
madman is seen approaching the town. See Yu Hua, Shibasui chumenyuanxing, +AJ
Zuojia chubanshe, 1989), 28-80.
9 In Yu Hua, Shiba sui chumen
yuanxing, pp. 200-258. The story has been translated into English
twice: In Henry Y. H. Zhao ed., The Lost Boat:Avant-GardeFictionfrom China (London: Wellsweep Press, 1993),
pp. 145-184; and in David Der-wei Wang with Jeanne Tai ed., Running Wild:New Chinese Writers(New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 21-68. Longer quotations in this article are from Running Wild.
10 See
Zeng Zhennan, "'Xianshi yizhong' ji qita" tKt,,- ', Beijing wenxue At ,,_t
, 1988,
No. 2, pp.71-75

ChineseLiterature:Essays, Articles, Reviews 18 (1996)

132

strong sense of spatial enclosure is conveyed to the reader. This is not only caused by the
limited geographical space in which the plot is enacted, but also a result of the fact that
the characters never reflect beyond their immediate situation or instant sensual perceptions, thus creating a vacancy in the text where morality and reflection might have been.
This vacancy is very often "filled up" by attention to the visual surface of things. This
visual attention is nearly always that of the characters, not of the narrator. The reader is
made to follow the gazes of the persons as they move from one surface to another, often
calling forth other surfaces in a metonymical chain of associations. So although the story
is told by an omniscient narrator-whose tone of voice is sometimes merely that of a
detached recorder, sometimes brimming with low-key sarcasm-the central perspective
is frequently dislocated by means of what Gerard Genette has termed "internal focalization".11 The perspective moves from one character to the other until the very last scene
where, significantly, the narrator takes over completely.
The constant and monotonous repetition of the verb kandao ~J to see, to look
at, to watch, stresses the visual character of the text, and becomes emblematic of the
externality of the self's relation to reality. He or she sees, registers, but doesn't connect,
understand, feel, reflect on, or search for meaning. Even strictly physical sensations are
often experienced and conveyed in terms of visual images:
(The old lady said) "My stomach feels like there's moss growing inside."
The two brothers pictured the faintly luminiscent green moss, crisscrossed by
earthworms,that grew on the rims of wells and in the crevicesof dilapidatedwalls.12

*zR Wffl-ATit
*

7Bi,iLB
W

^ff

And a few paragraphs later:

(Pipi) was so short he had to lift his head high to look out. The rain beat against the
window and slithereddown the glass like earthworms.
By then breakfeastwas over. Shangangwatched as his wife wiped the table with
a rag, while Shanfeng watched his wife carrying their baby into the bedroom. The
door was left ajar, and soon she came out again and went into the kitchen. So
Shanfeng turned his gaze on his sister-in-law'shand as she cleaned the tabletop. On
the back of her hand were several veins that by turns came into and disappearedfrom
view. Shanfengstared at her hand for quite some time until he lifted his head, glanced
over at the raindropscrisscrossingthe windowpane, and said to Shangang,"Thisrain
feels like it's been coming down for a hundredyears."13

tiT
Es

W
atTEf
M

tt,

3
arrati

*
ir Ea

An

Methd
(Ithaca: Cell

ersity Pess, 190,

11 Gerard Genette, NarrativeDiscourse:An Essay in Method (Ithaca: Comell University Press, 1990),
pp. 192-193
12 Shibasui chumen
yuanxing, p. 199: Running Wild,p. 22
13 Shibasui chumen
yuanxing, p. 200: Running Wild,p. 23

WEDELL-WEDELLSBORGReadingYu Hua

133

Here the image of moving worms serves to link metonymically the bodily dissolution of
the old woman with the rain and with the wormlike veins on the hand of the sister-inlaw. At the opening of the story we were told that "It had been raining off and on for
more than a week, and Shangang and Shanfeng felt that sunny skies were far, far away,
as distant as their childhood",14 indicating the absence of any reflective memory, and
perhaps a subconscious sense of disintegration. The identical "thoughts" of the two also
point to the lack of individual personality. But the worm-image does not really "stand
for" anything, and neither, at this point, does the picture of the shiny green well which
pops up again in Shangang's mind when he sees his son kicked to death. If it has any
function it is to signify a hole, an absence of something-of feelings, perhaps, or
recognition of reality.
The gaze is important in this story not only to signify externality, but also to
show the lack of human contact. Despite the profusion of gazes, very rarely do two pairs
of eyes meet, and when they do, it mostly creates unease or implies a threat. In view of
the importance attached in Western psychological theory (Freud and Lacan) to the
"being seen" for identity formation, the Western reader can hardly avoid associating the
averted gazes and oblique glances with a state of incomplete identity-formation.15
But even more significant is the way the gaze or the visual movement is
employed to highlight the gap between object/event and the perception of it. In Yu
Hua's texts this gap exists as a virtual time-lag, which sometimes doesn't catch up. For
example when the mother of the baby first killed finds her son lying dead, she first
notices the blood which seems unreal, then looks at the glistening sky and finally goes
inside. Here her eyes start to search the room, finally coming to rest on the bassinet. Only
through the visual impression of the empty bassinet does she come to think of the child
lying outside:
Sitting in a chair, she began to scan the house. Her gaze skimmed over the closet she
had just opened, slid across the glass top of the round table,slanted onto the sofa that
could seat three across, then jumped out into the middle of the room. It as only then
that she saw the bassinet. Startled,she jumped to her feet. The bassinet was empty,
deserted;there was no trace of her son. Suddenly rememberingthe child lying in the
yard, she dashed madly out of the house, but when she reached the body she was
again at a loss. 16

iE--^fL?TT~T

' BEiff

MtSM*

? ~fiTfE

14 Shibasui chumen
yuanxing, p. 198: Running Wild,p. 21
15 Tang Xiaobing, in analyzing Yu Hua's short story "Shiba sui chumen yuanxing," explains the
perspective of the detached gaze as a result of the subject having been the object of violence without reason:
"When communication is violently suspended by an absence of reason or, shall we say, 'civilized barbarism',
and when violence reduces the human subject to his body and his body alone, the subject has to withdraw and
observe the goings-on from a distrustful distance. It is a detached 'gaze' that treats others as objects. The
objectifying 'gaze' the young man now directs toward things and people around him has been forced upon
him because he is the object of violence in the first place." See "Residual Modernism: Narratives of the Self in
Contemporary Chinese Fiction," ModernChineseLiterature7.1 (1993), p. 16. It is possible to see that short story,
which also has a strong allegorical resonance, as a kind of antecedent to "Xianshi yizhong", i.e. a progression
from a first encounter with inexplicable violence to a veritable explosion of internalized violence.
16 Shibasui chumen
yuanxing, p. 207: Running Wild,p.28-29

ChineseLiterature:Essays, Articles, Reviews 18 (1996)

134

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9

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The time-lag separating action/awareness/action is a recurring feature in the story. The

glance or gaze focused not on the "thing" or the face itself, but beside it-on the door
rather than the room, on the "seal print" of the wound on the pillow or on the ants
crawling rather than on the blood itself, on the blood rather than on the wound, and on
the wound rather than on the body-becomes emblematic of the subject's feeble and
distorted relation to reality. Or one might even say that the averted, unseeing gaze
becomes an allegory of the self lost in the abyss between sign and referent.
But the function of this narrative device can, by extention, be transposed to a
level.
If we regard the text as a projection of the narrator's gaze, then he too,
higher
the
text, could be said to focus "beside" the full human being, showing only
throughout
an external shell. Until finally, in the dissection scene, he redirects his gaze and-with
pitchblack nihilist irony-tells us in every detail what is inside. As I shall demonstrate
below, this interpretation may be taken even one step further.
The narrative structure is characterized by a number of repetitions. Repetitions
of verbs, the most conspicuous being as noted kandao,and of descriptive verb/adjectives,
such as shan N "glistening" (again a word associative of surface, repellent of penetrating
gazes) the glistening of blood, bodies, and of sunlight enhancing the impression of oppressive monotony, the blazing sun recalling Camus's L'ttranger, a classic of human
alienation, but also repetitions of images and situations. Hillis Miller in Fiction and
Repetition (1982) distinguishes between two forms of repetition, one of them closely
related to Walter Benjamin's concept of allegory. The first type is that in which the
repetition is "grounded" and, like the mimetic copy, establishes its validity by the truth
of its correspondence to what it copies. The second type of repetition, however, like the
modem allegory, is "ungrounded", based on differences and arises out of the interplay
between opaquely similar things (opaque in the sense of riddling). In the gap of the difference between two similar things a third thing which Benjamin calls "Bild",image, is
created. "The image is the meaning generated by the echoing of two dissimilar things in
the second form of repetition." 17
In "Xianshi yizhong" the inner bodily dissolution is vividly visualized in the old
grandmother's imagination as,
... a pile of broken bones of all lengths, shapes, and sizes, jostling recklessly against
each other. By then, perhaps, the bones from her feet would be jutting out from her
belly, while the bones of her armswould be boringinto her moss-filledstomach.18

f-m^MWM--W^W^9W^f

& ? MtM
~IW

and later,

17 Hillis

Miller, Fictionand Repetition:Seven EnglishNovels (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), pp. 8-9

18 Shibasui chumen
yuanxing, p. 205: Running Wild,p. 27

WEDELL-WEDELLSBORGReading Yu Hua

135

Her body would swell and finally explode, scraps of skin and flesh splattering,
clinging to the walls like posters, leaving her bones, most of which were already
broken,lying jumbledon the ground like a pile of firewood.19

This is repeated in the final scene where Shangang's body is being taken apart. In the
tension between these two descriptions, between the imagined and the real
disintegration, arises an allegorical image of a self reduced to pure physicality. The
licking of the baby's blood first by Pipi's mother and then by Pipi, both of them on all
fours relishing the blood, already signifies their animalistic nature, not to mention the
cannibalistic:
Pipi lay there staring at the puddle of blood gleaming in the sun. It reminded him of
bright red fruit jam. Sticking out his tongue, he took an exploratory lick, and
immediately a brand new taste coursed through his body. He relaxed and began to
lick away, though he found the cement a little coarse, for in no time at all his tongue
had begun to feel numb. Then a few tricklesof red began to run down the tip of his
tongue. It made everything taste even better,but he had no idea that it was his own
blood.20
4te*A

, ',,

S TAi*A

9 jffi
m<?rTr Airi^NAw^

m
9f,~;iJ~ks~
;--tE-^-t?t
OAt

m'A

5iA6r
,

A?_fft* ? aO-5TB-

A-

?mSef?fli&
EtA

The third repetition of licking, this time by the dog employed as an innocent tool for
killing, ironically stresses the lack of distinction, further underscored by the baby's
mother's desire to "bite to death" (yaosi) !EXPipi (218).
The image of a well appears already on the first page in the brothers' minds,
apparently without any meaning attached to it. But next time it occurs, as Shangang
watches his four year old son being kicked to death by his brother, it could be understood by the reader to be an ironic allegorical reference to Mengzi's famous argument in
favour of the inborn goodness of man: Whoever sees a child about to fall into a well is
bound to feel alarm and distress.21 Later on it is repeated several times, along with the
image of the wild grass as a mental picture blocking or substituting thoughts or feelings
at critical points in the text. In the scene of the execution, the grass image is repeated
again, this time in a different way, however. As Shangang approaches the execution
ground he sees the tangible green stretch of grass and also "the crowd of people
standing like wild grass". And just a few lines later he feels the actual wild grass tickling
inside his trouserlegs and discovers "the crowds on all sides like tall grass".22The crowd
19 Shibasui chumen
yuanxing, p. 219: Running Wild,p. 38
20 Shibasui chumen
yuanxing, pp. 217-218: Running Wild,p. 37
21
IIA.6.
Indeed
Yu Hua's characters are totally and conspicuously devoid of the xin i, of
Mengzi,
not only commiseration, but also of shame and dislike, of deference and compliance, and of right and
wrong,
the four beginnings of ren 2, yi 5L,daoj, and de 6. See also Lin Yu-sheng, TheCrisis of ChineseConsciousness:
RadicalAntitraditionalismin theMay FourthEra (Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), 41.
p.
22 Shibasui chumen
yuanxing, p. 246: Running Wild,p. 58

136

ChineseLiterature:Essays, Articles, Reviews 18 (1996)

of spectators, by metonymical displacement, have become the wild grass. And as Shangang realizes for a moment where he is, he also remembers that he himself used to be
among the spectators rushing to the front row every time a criminal was executed. So he
too is the crowd, the grass. This final and different repetition of the grass-image casts a
new light on its previous occurrences, and we come to see it as a metaphor of the lack of
subjectivity.
Thus what seems at first to be merely "empty" images, gradually, through
repetition and subtle variations in the context in which they appear, acquire a kind of
symbolic or allegorical significance. This new significance then retrospectively
influences the overall impact of the text.
The scene of the execution and its implications for the problematics of
subjectivity suggests another famous literary execution: the death of Lu Xun's Ah Q,
doubtlessly the most analysed scene in modem Chinese literature. Like Ah Q, Shangang
turns his gaze towards the crowd, but where Ah Q sees the "dull yet penetrating eyes"
of the crowd "more terrible even than the wolf",23Shangang's unfocused glance "floated
on past the hair of a short person, and on past the ears of a tall one". Lu Xun's shift in
narrative focus from criminal/victim to crowd noticed by Solomon, Anderson, Huang,
and others, and the narrator's "intervention" (Anderson) on behalf of Ah Q-the cry for
help-have no parallel here.24On the contrary, Shangang is mercilessly exposed in his
pathetic lack of self-awareness and dull incomprehension of the reality of the situation.
He even believes he will be taken to the hospital and saved when his ear is blown off by
the first shot. At least for a moment, Ah Q had the subjective intention to give the crowd
a good performance and act out the role of criminal. Shangang, by contrast, does
actually give a good show, but quite unintentionally, making the crowds laugh by his
ridiculous behavior: wanting to urinate and, his hands tied up, having to ask the guard
to take out his penis. The guard tells him to piss in his trousers, but nothing comes out.25
And later, after the first shot he keeps asking whether he is dead or alive. So this time the
crowds hadn't "followed him for nothing," in contrast to the crowds watching Ah Q. For
Ah Q the empty role was still there to enter, had he been able to. For Shangang not even
the theatrical role is available as substitute for individuality.
So in this story we may say, with Walter Benjamin, that the original divine
relation between things and their proper meaning has been sundered,26 just as the last
killing, the execution, in Shangang's mind is separated from its intended "meaning" and
completely dissociated from anything he has done. This discrepancy or gap not only
works on the epistemological level, but is, on the level of textuality, reflected in the
specific tension created by the peculiar combination of the highly subjectivist point of
view and the detached, cold, objective eye of the narrator. This narrative technique
23 SelectedStories Lu Hsun
(1956; rpt. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1978), p. 111.
of
24 Richard Solomon,
"Taking Tiger Mountain: Can Xue's Resistance and Cultural Critique," Modern
Chinese Literature 4.1-2 (1988), p. 246; Marston Anderson, The Limits of Realism: Chinese Fiction in the
RevolutionaryPeriod (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 80-85, and Martin Weizong Huang,
"The Inescapable Predicament. The Narrator and His Discourse in 'The True Story of Ah Q,"' Modern China
16.4 (1990), pp. 441-442.
25 This
episode is actually a kind of reversed repetition of a previous one in which, before he was
caught by the police, he also wasn't able to urinate, forgot to put his penis back into his trousers, and was
laughed at by the people in the street.
26 See note 2 above.

WEDELL-WEDELLSBORGReadingYu Hua

137

serves effectively to highlight the conspicuous absence of a voice or consciousness to

condemn, moralize, or at least become shocked. This is further underscored by the
contrast between the clear, straightforward, almost relentlessly unhesitating voice of the
narrator and the incomprehension and blurred perceptions of the characters.
As neither the implied author, nor the narrator, nor any of the characters seem
to react "normally" to events, this reaction is left entirely to the reader. Yet as I read the
story, the emotional repulsion one is left with after the execution scene, which might
well have been the last, is curiously sabotaged by the final dissection scene which
functions as an absurdly ironic "overkill". Here no gazes are averted but directed
straight at the process of bodily mutilation. Narrator and characters alike watch
unperturbed, and the reader is forced to join in, as Shangang's body is being "scattered"
(Ah Q again) through an act of extreme visual violence-taking an individual physically
apart-which is presented not as violence, but as just some people doing their job.
Thus read, "One Kind of Reality" can be interpreted as one long countdown to
this zero point, a depiction of the complete dehumanization, disintegration, and
dissolution of the individual subject. As Jing Wang has argued, in the context of Chinese
literature of the 1980s this amounts to a highly provocative and deconstructive act of
"breaking down, with sensual abandon and in total nonsensical style, a holistic subject
that theoreticians and modernist writers in the Post-Maoist era have just assembled".27
But we might be allowed to speculate a little further: in view of the
predominance of averted gazes throughout the text, we could perhaps by analogy
interpret this last gaze as also "averted", signifying that there is something absent that
we do not see in this story, something beyond mere physicality and violence, so that the
reader's attention is directed towards that individual subjectivity which is so conspicious
by its very absence that it ends up more visible than what is actually present in the text
(just like a classical painting showing only some rocks, a lake and a tiny monk carrying
water may be understood as depicting a temple in the mountains).
In my opinion Yu Hua's story cannot be unequivocally reduced to either of
these two interpretations. Even though the former, tending towards the postmodernist
end of the spectrum, does appear as the more obvious, Yu Hua's negative focus on individual consciousness by way of its absence is so provocative that we are nevertheless
strongly reminded of the ideology of modernism and its preoccupation with the
problematics of identity and subjectivity. This ambivalence, and the tension it generates
for the reader, comes to act as an integral part of the textual dynamics.

27
Jing Wang, "The Mirage of 'Chinese Postmodernism'," p.375. Furthermore, as also noted by Jing
Wang, the information about the transplanted testicles and the birth of a son might be more than just an ironic
postscript to the preceding drama, in which the desire for male descendants had been the driving force. It
could also be read as pointed comment on the recent reclaiming, in the literature of the late 1980s, of the
domain of sexuality as a constituent part of human existence. In this story the penis is referred to several times,
but only in rather ridiculous terms, and never connected with sexuality. The final irony of the fertile testicles
thus serves to disassociate reproduction from sexuality.

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ChineseLiterature:Essays, Articles, Reviews 18 (1996)

2.
Before further considerations as to the relevance of applying such epithets as
modernism/postmodemism to Yu Hua's story, I would like to take a closer look at the
levels at which the text can be seen to operate. We may consider it in terms of three
interacting levels. First, a mimetic,taking for granted the title's partial promise of reality.
Second, what we may call a critical level, one which consciously refers to/plays
on/deconstructs the expectations of the implicit Chinese reader with regard to the
contents, in other words one that breaks down conventions of explanation and context
with regard to themes and structures. And third, a textual,metafictional, self-referential
level, which at the same time as it subsumes and plays with the former two, also works
to destabilize them. Here the final scene of dissection takes on a special significance, and
the concept of allegory is seen to function on the vertical dimension as well.
1) If we try for a moment to read it as simply an attempt at a squarely mimetic
representation of reality conceived in the realist tradition, the story comes out as a
somewhat superficial description of the eruption of violence in a family of simpleminded and callous individuals, at a time and in a social context where the capacity for oral and emotional communication has broken down. After all, we do have a logically
progressing plot where one action leads to the next and the crimes are duly punished.
Strange and gruesome things do happen, in China and elsewhere, and in this case the
story is even said to have been based on real events, as noted by Zeng Zhennan. There
are recognizable scenery and objects, and the characters are imbued with perhaps just
about enough human traits so as to make the reader feel uncomfortable. But to maintain
such a purely one-dimensional mimetic perspective one would have to ignore not only
the irony lurking behind the narratorial tone of voice, but also the blatant lack of all the
psychological, social, or cultural explanations that have normally been built into a
narrative in order for it to qualify as "realist".28
2) However, viewed through the perspective of its critical dimension, its
subversion of reader expectations, it is precisely those things which are lacking that
become interesting. First of all, since there is a narrator who in varying degrees makes
his presence felt throughout the text, why, we might ask, does he not tell us what to
make of the horrors? And what is more, neither is it the case that the reader, by the
technical device of an unreliable narrator, is allowed to grasp a truth denied the fictional
characters as is often seen in the modem Western novel. (Or, as in some of Lu Xun's
stories, the narrative plot is undercut by the narrative voice of the first person narrator.)
In this story the interaction between narrator and characters lies entirely in the
heterogeneity of the narrator's tone of voice.
Moreover, as we have seen, Yu Hua's treatment of the central themes of family
relations and violence are equally striking. His way of representing family relations is by
totally depriving them of the ethical and social norms by which they, according to
28 Those lacks, as well as the similarities between the narrative
techniques of Yu Hua and RobbeGrillet pointed out below, have of course been noticed by other critics. See for example, Chen Xiaoming j i
UA,"Hou xinchao xiaoshuo de xushi bianzou" JVsi: J.ffSjt:,
Shanghaiwenxue?[ SjC , 1989, No.
7, pp. 66-73; and Andrew F. Jones, "The Violence of the Text: Reading Yu Hua's Experimental Fiction,"
unpublished MA thesis, University of California at Berkeley, 1993. Jones reads Yu Hua's works as a strategic
response to the crisis of representation that seeks to render the inherent violence of representation manifest to
the reader.

WEDELL-WEDELLSBORGReadingYu Hua

139

Chinese culture, should be governed. The depiction of violence in stark graphic detail
can be compared and contrasted with some of the more barbaric scenes in Shuihu Zhuan
7JC
:j f/. But in Shuihu the savagery and sadism of Song Jiang X Wand his band of
robbers is linked to a heroic code, and therefore implicitly endorsed in the novel. Such
code is of course as absent from Yu Hua's novel as is explicit condemnation. C.T. Hsia,
in his perceptive analysis of Shuihu, has noted in the character of Li Kui 3i the prime
symbol of a dark force, "the unleashed energy of the unconscious which every
civilization must hold in check if it is to survive."29 We could say that what Yu Hua
portrays is a world in which civilization has yielded to precisely those aggressive forces
of the unconscious. This is corroborated by Yu Hua's own words in the essay "Xuwei de
jnrfp (Hypocritical Works): "Confronted with violence and chaos, civilijJ
zuopin" j
zation is nothing but a slogan and order becomes a mere ornament."30 In this essay Yu
Hua puts forward his creative ideals and his views on the relationship between
literature and truth (zhenshi A 3). He repeatedly notes how preconceived ideas, as
embodied in the common language of the masses, preclude a true understanding of
reality, as well as the necessary freeing of the imagination. During his discussion, he
refers to Alain Robbe-Grillet (as well as to Proust and Isaac Bashevis Singer) and Yu's
break with traditional realist fiction-writing certainly recalls Robbe-Grillet's famous
argument in "A Future for the Novel" (1956):
At every moment, a continuous fringe of culture (psychology, ethics, metaphysics,
etc.) is added to things, giving them a less alien aspect, one that is more comprehensible, more reassuring . . . but the world is neither significantnor absurd. It is, quite
simply. That, in any case, is the most remarkablething about it. And suddenly the
obviousness of this strikes us with irresistibleforce. All at once the whole splendid
construction collapses; opening our eyes unexpectedly, we experienced, once too
often, the shock of this stubborn reality we were pretending to have mastered.
Around us, defying the noisy pack of our animisticor protectiveadjectives,things are
there.Their surfaces are distinct and smooth, intact,neither suspiciously brilliantnor
transparent.All our literaturehas not yet succeeded in eroding their smallest corner,
in flatteningtheir slightest curve.31
But Yu Hua does not restrict himself to simply showing us the objects as they are,
purged of animistic or protective adjectives. He exposes, relativizes, and destabilizes
them. Furthermore, a number of generally recognizable pairs of binary opposites, such
as life/death, physical/psychological, inner/outer, animalistic/human, substance/surface, heaviness/lightness appear strangely: either one is absent or the two sides
simply cancel each other out.

29 C.T.Hsia, The Classic Chinese Novel. A Critical Introduction

(New York and London: Columbia
University Press, 1968), p. 107.
30 Yu Hua, "Xuwei de
zuopin," Ouran shijian ffi A,
(Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe 1991),
pp. 307-324, 312. Interestingly the essay is dated June 1989. Yu Hua further describes how loss of confidence in
the order of civilization led him to stress violence in his writing: "Actually, up to and including 'Xianshi
yizhong' my reflections about truth was only a skepticism towards common wisdom. That is when I could no
longer trust common wisdom about real life, this distrust led me to stress another part of reality and consequently directly inspired my extremist thinking about chaos and violence," p. 313.
31 Alain Robbe-Grillet, "A Future for the
Novel," Fora New Novel: Essays on Fiction,Richard Howard
trans. (New York: Grove Press, 1965), pp. 18-19.

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ChineseLiterature:Essays, Articles, Reviews 18 (1996)

3) This takes us to the third level of reading, the textual or meta-fictional. Here
the dissection scene-placed as it is at the very end, (almost as a postscript), where one
will normally expect the final relevation of "meaning", the clue, so to speak, to the
preceding narrative-is of special importance.32 The mood of the text which until this
point has been characterized by frequent use of the method of internal focalization of the
characters now changes and the central perspective is fully reinstated at the same time as
the narrator makes his presence strongly felt. His tone of voice alternates between
clinical detachment, aesthetic pleasure, and grotesque humour as we follow the removal
of skin, tissue, eyeballs, kidneys, lungs, etc. and finally the testicles.33
What is to be made of this scene? It seems to lend itself to multiple
interpretations that all have some kind of allegorical resonance: In terms of content it
might be an allegory on the preceding plot, in which the basic structure has been to
systematically eliminate one element after another, until nothing is left. But at the same
time the doctors' totally detached and humorous attitude toward the body and to "their"
organs is strongly reminiscent of the narrator's (and the implied author's) relationship to
his characters. The doctors are precisely as cool and in control as the narrator in the
preceding sections of the story. The narrator also has been exposing, cutting, and slicing
his material the way we now see the doctors at work. Both are professionals in their
appropriation of "reality". So we may see this scene as an allegory of the narrative
technique of the very text itself. And more than that, we may even see it as a mocking
salute to the reader, who has been pulled through the text by a "desire of narrative",34
parallel to the revengeful kind of "desire" that has generated the actions of the fictional
characters, only to be dumped together, reader and character, on the dissection table.
The reader is not to be dissected, though, but to be allegorized, for is that not also what
we are doing right now, dissecting the "textual body"?35 In other words we are left with
a veritable Chinese-box-system of allegories and meta-allegories: the allegorical
dissection duplicates the preceding story, which in itself was an allegory, i.e. an allegory
of an allegory, and even, as the final ironical touch, an allegory that reaches out vertically
for the reader.

3.
Zhao Yiheng has called the story "a scathing satire on the Chinese myth of the
family".36And there is certainly an unmitigated subversive irony in this presentation of

32 See Peter Brooks,

Readingfor the Plot: Design and Intentionin Narrative(Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1984), p.52.
33 Jeanne Tai, the translator in
Running Wild,,has chosen to render this scene in the present tense in
contrast to the preceding text which is translated in the past tense, a strategy which effectfully marks the
change of tone. As also noted by Andrew Jones, this heteregeneity of voice prevents the reader from viewing
the text as one coherent interpretive whole, and consequently to make it "confess", and yield its secrets. "The
Violence of the Text," p. 27.
34 Cf. Peter Brooks,
Readingfor the Plot.
35 Since violence in this
story has replaced language as a means of communication, the dissection
can of course be regarded as a sophisticated and logical culmination of the previous sections.
36 Zhao, "Yu Hua: Fiction as Subversion," 418; see note 1.
p.

WEDELL-WEDELLSBORGReadingYu Hua

141

the traditional identity-forming structure-the family of several generations living

together (here in its reduced modem version where women go to work)-as bound
together by nothing but shared meals and indifference, an indifference whose other side
turns out to be eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth aggression. Lacking authority to guide
and suppress, aggressive violence erupts and becomes the external signifier of
vengeance, perhaps, but not really hatred or anger. The total absence of individual
identity and self-awareness forecloses any genuine human emotion.
Lin Yii-sheng, in analyzing "The True Story of Ah Q" PJ Q iE *, observes that
Ah Q's fundamental characteristic is the lack of an interior self, "making him almost
completely incapable of drawing inferences from experience" and, "[l]iving mostly by
instinct, he could not be inspired by external stimulation, even if it were available".37
This is certainly equally true of Shangang and the rest of the characters in Yu Hua's
story. However, Lin further notes in Ah Q a "sense of innocence" (even though Ah Q's
lack of self-awareness prevents him from being able to cultivate or develop this good
element in any way). This is perhaps the human trait which makes it possible for him, as
opposed to Yu Hua's character, to gain subjectivity at the last moment of his life; because
whereas Ah Q, however ludicrous and spineless, is still depicted as a kind of psychological character with particular features, Shangang and the others remain mechanized
"props" in the plot.
While Ah Q and his "true story" are given the grand role of allegorically
embodying no less than, in Lu Xun's own words, "the soul of the Chinese people,"38 no
such grandiose tasks have been assigned to Yu Hua's characters by their author.
Nevertheless, as already noted, "Xianshi yizhong" exudes a strong allegorical resonance,
not only in terms of "the uttered", i.e. what is stated literally and figuratively on the
horizontal level, but also, more remarkably, in terms of "the utterance", i.e. the
interaction between implied author, narrator, plot, and implied reader on the vertical
level. The first, horizontal, in my view has to do with Yu Hua's specific approach, his
method of stripping objects, characters, and individual relations of their normal,
generally accepted interpretive codes; this approach has clear affinities with Walter
Benjamin's notion of the modem allegory.39The second, vertical, may be explained by
reference to what Craig Owens has called "the allegorical impulse" in postmodernism
(about which, see below).
To Walter Benjamin, allegory is both a special way of looking at the world
which he describes as "a melancholy gaze," and an artistic procedure.40 What happens
to objects hit by the gaze of the allegorist is that they undergo a kind of "leakage of
meaning, an unhinging of signifier and signified".41 Purged of all mystifying immanen-

2*.*: :
p. 445.

37 Lin, TheCrisis ChineseConsciousness,p. 129, 134.

of
38 Lu
Xun, "Ewen yiben 'A Q zhengzhuan xu' ji zhuzhe zixu zhuanlue"*cij~ a "Q
J- }Q
E
Q,"
Lu Xun quanji #iB.#:
Jiwai ji Hl'[!,
t*B,
(Beijing:Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1973), Vol. 7,

39 Walter
,
Benjamin's theory of allegory was introduced in China by Zhang Xudong I )i
Wenxuepinglun _ft~
"Yuyan piping" ~j~t'iyf,
if; 1988, No. 4, pp. 149-157. I have no reason to believe
that Yu Hua knew of it when he wrote "Xianshi yizhong". However, when I talked to him in November 1990,
he told me he was reading Benjamin's writings on Baudelaire.
40
Benjamin, GermanTragicDrama,pp. 183-184.
41 This is Terry Eagleton's phrasing in The Ideology the Aesthetic(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990),
of
p.326.

142

ChineseLiterature:Essays, Articles, Reviews 18 (1996)

ce, the allegorical referent can then be redeemed into a multiplicity of uses; indeed, it can
be used by the allegorist in a completely subjective way. Yu Hua's explicit statement,
that he wishes to divest his images of their conventional meaning as conveyed in the
anonymous language of the masses,42 sounds very close to Benjamin's conception of the
"allegorical gaze". As I have shown above, objects, images, characters, and relations in
"Xianshi yizhong" appear bereft of their previous connotations and consequently open
to new meaning. This meaning is alluded to through the particular distribution of
"vacancies" in the text, but it still remains ambiguous and open for the reader to decide.
Craig Owens in his essay "The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of
Postmodernism" has argued that the modem concept of allegory is closely linked with
postmodemism. In modernism, he says, allegory is certainly a possibility, but it remains
in potentiaand is only actualized through the reading. Postmoderism by contrast is, as a
result of its built-in focus on the reading process, already characterized by an allegorical
impulse. Allegory can be defined as the rewriting of a primary text in terms of its figural
meaning, and in postmodernist texts this rewriting, this interaction between texts, takes
place within the literary work; it describes its structure, so to speak.43In my opinion, Yu
Hua's ironic narrator, his implicating of the reader, and the textual duplicity of the
dissection scene could all be seen as expressions of such an allegorical impulse.
I would suggest that "One Kind of Reality" contains elements associated with
both modernism and postmodernism. Perhaps we can describe its literary technique as a
kind of meta-modemism, i.e. a modernism that is no longer "innocent", which doesn't
quite believe in its own capacity to represent any, whether subjective or objective,
ontologically pre-existing "reality", a modernism which comments upon itself, or even
mocks itself-hence irony, self-reflexivity-yet, which, by this very gesture, attempts/pretends to be reflecting a more complex, multi-dimensional reality.
In sum, by the conscious efforts to remove moralizing and explanation from a
tale which cries out for precisely that, Yu Hua, whatever authorial intention was
involved, activates an allegorical reading to supply the absent "meaning".44 Written in
42 Ouran shijian,p.310.
43
Craig Owens, "The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism," Art after
Modernism:RethinkingRepresentation,ed. Brian Wallis (New York: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984),
pp. 203-235.
44 Several Chinese critics have also
interpreted this story as having allegorical connotations although
they do not always use the term yuyan. The different readings of Zhang Yiwu *IfEaand Zeng Zhennan, for
example, indicate the range within which an allegorical resonance can be perceived. Zhang Yiwu sees as the
most important thing in the text the break and disruption between language and meaning: "Behind the orderly
world of language raves the disorderly world of actuality and meaning" (p. 43). Thus Yu Hua's text
deconstructs itself, as language destroys and dissolves meaning, and meaning also destroys and dissolves
language. This shows man's desire to break the confines of the imposed order/language. In Yu Hua's work
violence is subversive as a way of mocking and opposing the rule of language, and it becomes an
of mankind. Zhang Yiwu interprets Yu
"omen"/"sign" of the fate and inescapable predicament (wunai i*)
Hua's fiction as allegories of a sort (though he does not use the word) for modem man's inability to "grasp
himself," submerged as he is in the dual oppressive forces of linguistic order and violence. The relationship
between form and content on the allegorical level here duplicates the relationship between power and the
individual human being. This, he argues, implies a criticism of traditional western and May Fourth humanism
and its view of "man" as the powerful center of the world. See Zhang Yiwu, "'Ren'de weiji" ' ,) ' 6J f; tl.,
Dushu :tf, 1988, No. 12, p. 46. Zhang Yiwu, who is to be counted among "avant-garde" critics, here posits
himself in a role characteristic of the ambivalence inherent in much literary criticism in the late 1980s: On the
one hand his analysis of Yu Hua's texts is obviously inspired by readings of "objectivist" poststructuralist and

WEDELL-WEDELLSBORGReadingYu Hua

143

a context in which the critical discourse was moving from debates of subjectivity and
ontology to questions of language and referentiality,45 and dealing with themes as
central to Chinese culture and national identity as the unity of the family, "Xianshi
yizhong" comes forth as a modem heterogeneous allegory of the predicament of the individual self in contemporary Chinese culture and of the problem of its representation in
the reality of the literary text.

deconstructionisttheoriesimportedfromthe West.On the otherhand he placeshis readingwithin an openly

prescriptiveframeworkof what is neededforChinain its presenthistoricalsituation.
Anothercriticsomewhatmore alignedwith the establishment,Zeng Zhennan, proposesa more
traditionalallegoricalreadingof "Xianshiyizhong". To him the allegoricalresonanceis not to be found on the
level of textualityin the allegoricalimplicationsof the tensionbetweenlanguageand violence,but ratherin the
way the plot functionsas a kind of moralizingfable,exposingman's creaturelyside. This,Zeng says, is how
senselessaggressionworks,and the storymightas well be aboutwars betweensocialclassesor nations.(72)By
showing us the unpleasantface of realityand truthfullyportrayingcrueltyas partof humannature,Yu Hua
helps us to recognizeourselvesand henceto improve.See Zeng Zhennan,"'Xianshiyizhong'ji qita",p.72.In
contrastto ZhangYiwu,ZengZhennanreadsthe plot of "Xianshiyizhong"as referringto somethingontologically pre-existing,and whereas Zhang Yiwu throughhis interpretationinscribesYu Hua into a conceptual
frameworkof modem Westerntheory, Zeng's allegoricalreading is much more in line with what Qian
Zhongshua4 r4in Tanyilu it J has definedas a Chineseallegory:in contrastto the (traditional)Western
allegorywhich "usesthingsto illustratetruths... we in Chinatakephenomenato illustrateevents." Quoted
fromTheodoreHuters,QianZhongshu(Boston:TwaynePublishers,1982),p. 66.
45 For a survey of trendsin Chineseliterarycriticismin the 1980s,see my article,"TheAmbivalent
Roleof the ChineseLiteraryCriticin the 1980s",WendyLarsonand AnneWedell-Wedellsborg
eds. InsideOut:
Modernismand Postmodernismin ChineseLiteraryCulture(Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1993), pp. 134-152.