BOOK REVIEWS

Wang Xiaobo, L’Age d’or

Here is another story, but different, of the educated young being sent to the frontier provinces to be educated/reformed among the poor and medium lower peasantry by the exhaustive virtues of manual labour. Wang Er is one of them: his work, somewhere in deepest, hottest China, is herding buffalo (easy because castration has made angels of them), feeding pigs (they eat all the time, itís exhausting), and clearing the land (the worst bit, for our hero has had his ribs broken). For his labour, the locals show no gratitude: they hate the parasitic intruders from the cities. Wang Erís only aim is not to wind up as an ox, castrated with a mallet, submissive unto death. To help him in this aim he has in his possession a fabulous instrument, a giant penis, which, as he begins the story as a virgin, he aspires to put to work. (Wang Er is 21, it is his golden age, as the Cultural Revolution will, willy-nilly, be the golden age of a whole generation). The penis is an attribute that the author openly makes fun of: its enormous size (a foot high, why not a li!), sometimes a skinned rabbit, sometimes a furious cobra, sometimes bedecked with a large-size natural rubber condom, its monumental erections set off by the sun or the moon, in the presence as well as in the absence of the female species, in short as LautrÈamont said, constantly offering the dismal spectacle of turgescence. Having said that, each reader will debate within himself, according to his own views, as to whether sexual liberation leads to a new alienation, or whether the phallus is the golden key to the doors of freedom. Nevertheless, in the ultra puritanical China of the Cultural Revolution, to mount an assault on a great wall of hypocrisy with that particular weapon in hand, was an act of bravery, an enriching form of disobedience. Halberd of joyful struggle rather than tool of sensual delight, physical as well as metaphysical proof of the existence of its possessor, the little bonze has, as a metaphorical double, the double-barrelled shotgun, a fearsome weapon in the hands of this odd, educated young sharpshooter. For disobedience is indeed Wang Erís great strength (there is no other thought than that of disobedience, of the refusal to submit, says the French philosopher Alain): in a time when each man is nailed to the spot, under house arrest wherever the Great Helmsman so desires, to leave is the supreme disobedience. Wang Er departs, as if all the roads were his, and thus celebrates his union with Nature, the Mother of all sensations, who brings his soul to high tide: a departure one would qualify as Rimbaldian, had the word not been so debasedóa wild union with trees and wind, with streams and fire. As another form of saving disobedience in those desperate times, when recitation, repetition and chanting substitute for speech, the educated young man says nothing, choosing the gold of silence over the lead of slogans. He is so obstinately silent as to pass, in the eyes of an all-powerful military leader, for an authentic deaf mute! But since he is silent, when the practice of self-criticism is obligatory, Wang Er learns to write: the opening words of his confession are the authentic beginning of a novel: That night, we left the mountains for the scene of the crime, which promises great adventures and lyrical outpourings. Yet the great strength of this little book, is that as soon as lyricism shows its snotty nose, as soon as self-pity looms (however justifiable it might be: the educated young are exiled, starved and insulted, their ribs are broken by the blows from stools) Wang Xiaobo wrings their necks! Make way for derision, which, coupled with disobedience and the free exercise of sexuality, is the most effective stiletto in the insurgentís rack of weapons. But what of the wife and partneróChen Qingyang by nameóin all this? She doesnít come off best in the situation: whether as accomplice or stooge, she never has the initiative: she goes along with, flees with, comes with, encircles the majestic male member with exotic embraces, allows her anatomy to be studied She manages to adapt, and reappears, twenty years later, her breasts sagging, now deputy head of a hospital, and duly permed. Good-natured, innocent, made for love (for she falls in love with Wang Er, who has other things on his mind and remains a lout and a highwayman, even after becoming a teacher), she is, no doubt, an embodiment of the Chinese masses and their inexhaustible powers of passive resistance, their Schweyk and Mother Courage side There is in this story a tone of healthy off-handedness which sublimates its documentary value: the opening words of the self-criticism keep their promise, and the experience is well worth the telling

Translated from the French original by Michael Black