BOOK REVIEWS

Leung Ping-kwan, Iles et continents et autres nouvelles

Translator, writer, poet, artist, essayist, the multifaceted Leung Ping-kwan wears many hats; he is indeed, as he is nicknamed in Hong Kong, a “King of dialogue”. A runner between languages, a courier between cultures and genres, Leung Ping-kwan is also a restless passer-by who wanders through the labyrinth of the big cities, a tormented passenger who comes and goes from one continent to another, bestriding frontiers, traversing the oceans. Native of a “marginal city with a hybrid culture”, at the crossroads of multiple influences, Leung Ping-kwan is a man born of cross-breeding, nourished both on Chinese tradition and Western literature and philosophy. This inhabitant of a “small eccentric island” at the borders of the Middle Kingdom is a writer possessed by the need to pose questions about the centre and the periphery, distance and proximity. Under very varied conditions and tonalities, this interrogation haunts the narratives of Iles et continents, selected and translated by Annie Curien, who is responsible for introducing the works of Leung Ping-kwan to France. The identifying problem, which underlies each of the six texts of this collection always stumbles across the theme of communication—communication between spaces, between subjectivities, between the individual and society.

The short stories that unfold within the splintered territory of the voyage (Frontières, Iles et continents and Cartes postales de Prague) are allied to interior monologues conducted by a subject in crisis, a voyager obsessed by the search for a focal point that would allow him to order the world. These monologues intermingle with the writing of letters addressed to a “you” that is not always identified and place centre stage a globetrotting narrator who never ceases to interrogate himself on the significance of his changes of location, of his comings and goings between the Orient and the Occident.

Wandering from Washington to New York by way of Toronto or Buffalo, finally to return to Hong Kong following a detour via Eastern Europe, the narrator of Frontières also conjures up previous trips to Berlin, Paris and Tokyo, which reinforce the scrambling of the space-time framework. This search, of the utmost aberration, is illustrated in symbolic manner from the very beginning of the novella: the narrator finds himself alone, lost in the night, at the exit of a theatre in a Washington suburb that does not figure on any map of the city: “With my desire to see a new play in a distant place, one more time, I went too far; I lost my way in an unknown land […] often, in the hope of seeing more things, to undertake I know not what research, I adventure into uncharted territory, beyond spheres with which I am familiar, I place myself in perilous situations, totally gratuitously”. This readiness to be thrown off-centre, to lose one’s bearings, is both the driver of the voyage, of the writing and of the introspection. It is necessary to become “a solitary soul, without attachments”, in order to try and find a place, a point of equilibrium in oneself and in the world. To try to bring order, it is first necessary to drown oneself in disorder. To find a place where one can settle, one has to drift for a long time. But after the years of wandering, after having packed and unpacked an incalculable number of times suitcases filled with unfinished letters, sketches of short stories, bits and pieces of texts, the man who aspires “to enter what may be a native country” understands that he will never find one again. Odysseus remains a myth, the voyage never runs out into the triumphant experience of any return, no more than it allows one to “overcome the demons of the spirit”. But “from one side [you can] see the other side”. Thanks to his writing, distance brings him close to the place that he has already left. In Washington, the narrator of Frontières writes about New York, in New York he writes about Berlin. Returning to Hong Kong, he relates a story from Paris. And it was years before, in Berlin, that he managed to write about Hong Kong. He remains, however, condemned to permanent displacement: “I run to the right and to the left, I cross multiple frontiers, I penetrate numerous territories, but I am always writing a story of a preceding place, replying to a letter received from my previous address, I remain forever behind the present.”

In Iles et Continents, the novella of this collection’s title that contains numerous autobiographical elements, a multiplicity of places and times never cease to telescope into each other: the United States, Shenzhen or Hong Kong; memories of a solitary childhood in Aberdeen or first steps on the Chinese mainland at the end of the Cultural Revolution; a portrait of a virtuous mother, of a grandfather, guardian of traditional customs; the recurring apparition of a couple on a boat contemplating temples where incense is being burned; letters written from who knows where to a mysterious lady or a friend who “hides his ego in a cave”. The splintering of the space-time reference and of the narrative structure reaches a paroxysm. And so does the confusion of the subject. Immediately, the narrator, who no longer feels able to write, confesses to being “incapable of maintaining relations with others in real life”. “A wounded animal” who “needs time to lick its wounds”, he plunges himself into obscurity, he is no more than “contortion and chaos without name”. “The total impossibility of conducting any exchange with the world” installs itself, the bitter and gnarled thickness of what is real solidifies, no longer offering any chinks that enable you to perceive it, nor cracks to slip through. Language itself slips way.

In the other three stories, this existential uncertainty, this feeling of strangeness and lack of connection that defines the human condition of Leung Ping-kwan’s anti-heroes is objectified in the social maladjustment of the characters. In a tragicomic way that contrasts with the novellas of the voyager, Eléphants, Papillon de nuit (Moth), Transcendance et machine fax take place in the circumscribed space of Hong Kong. With a wealth of humour and imagination, they put the spotlight on men lost in the agitation of the city, without anchorage in the incessant whirlwind of the urban turbulence, temporarily unable to breathe in a society of appearances, of hustling and bustling activity, of standardised desire. Whether it is a photographer working for a socialite-type magazine who observes with sadness the over-excitement of journalists about insipid and trivial subjects, an office clerk surrounded by old and narrow-minded colleagues who moan the whole day long, or even a failed intellectual who is now an assistant at a cultural research institute, all these characters are misfits in their social environment, strangers to the universe in which they are evolving. Single, solitary, with no family ties or sentimental attachments, they will come to know, however, each in their own way, a fleeting moment of happiness, of communion with the outside world: the first while contemplating a group of elephants from Thailand withering away on some vacant wasteland; the second with a tame moth; the third with a fax machine that has become a comforting friend. But these brief moments of fullness end badly. Returning to see the elephants, the photographer fails to rediscover the intense joy experienced the first time and later learns that one of them has died. Accompanying his new master to his job, a moth is savagely killed by the workers in the office. Finally, the fax machine to which the specialist in Anglo-Saxon literature badly in need of recognition has entrusted his life and his thoughts, gets all worked up and goes mad.

Social maladjustment and incessant wanderings, vertigo when faced with what is real and the impossibility of being able to relate to others, there is, to paraphrase a famous work, discomfort in communication. It is therefore necessary to eliminate distances, to cross frontiers, those that separate spaces, people, the subject and the object, the individual and society. Always ill at ease, the characters of Leung Ping-kwan seem condemned to wander—emotionally, socially, geographically. These eternal strangers on a quest for a motherland, for a space where they can become complete in a way that is true to their being, wander across the infinite continent of questioning, across the boundless territory of the search for meaning. Writing, like travelling, weaves an Ariane’s thread that allows one to progress in the labyrinth of a splintered world, to find one’s bearings in the maze of a scrambled reality, to connect the scattered fragments of a puzzle with an infinite number of solutions.

Translated from the French original by Nick Oates