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Not "It happened to me," or "They did this to me," or "Fate
had it in store for me," but "I was," "I did," "I saw," "I
cried out."
— Fink 1995: 62
|
Li Ang's novel, The Strange Garden (1991), presents the story of Zhu Yinghong, a well educated woman who, having witnessed how her father was turned into a social invalid by political persecution under Chinese rule, is now charged with restoring place and pride to the family tradition and rescuing it from a long period of unfruitfulness. Yinghong lives up to that responsibility by falling in love with a real estate nouveau-riche who reminds her of her father, waging a protracted battle of love involving indulgence in sexual adventures and masochistic pleasures, a lot of feminine scheming, and an abortion, and finally securing a marriage with the man, who then provides the money to rebuild the dilapidated family garden, enabling Yinghong to donate it to a trust and open it to the public as an historic site.
It is clear that an attempt has be made here to effect a strange combination of attention to the decadent life style of late century Taipei on the one hand, and concern with the reconstitution of national memory on the other, both being correlated in a scheme tantalizingly resembling allegorical signification. What are we to make of this marriage of pedagogy and sensuality, culture and capital? Decadence, as the author herself expressly states, is an (amoral) state located between death and eros rather than one of "fallenness" (interview in Qiu 1998: 105), which inevitably brings up issues concerning the interconnections between jouissance and sublimation, the body and symbolic ordering. But such negativity, inevitably read as simply moral depravity and lack of positive uplift in the literalizing mentality of the largest part of its contemporary readership, became the source of many interpretative difficulties. Early negative responses to the novel did not fail to jump on Li's interest in what is taken to be morbid negativity and depict it as grossly incompatible with the more serious sides of the work, being either steeped in the "incorrect ideology" of vulgar capitalism (Lü 1991) or responsible for impoverishing the narrative and vitiating it with pathologically incoherent characterization (Jin 1993).
Defenses came mostly from feminist readers who explain the erotic adventures of the heroine as rites aiming to exorcize a diseased order of gender relations (Huang 1993) or as part of the maturing process women have to undergo either to achieve full sexuality or higher consciousness under dominant patriarchy (Chen 1996: 139ff; Lin 1997) or to become healed of the wounds left by its hardships (Peng 1995). Some, however, are still troubled by gaps vitiating the divided thematics of the work: erotic adventures undertaken in exchange for financial power and connected therefrom to the rebuilding of family pride and national heritage. Echoing one of the harsh early critics (Jin 1993), for example, Huang Yuxiu is unimpressed with the "political thread" which is asserted in flashbacks but unsubstantiated or even contradicted in the main sections dealing with the daughter's present life (1993: 98-101).
As if responding to doubters who claim that the two threads of the novel did not really cohere, Li Ang presents a breakdown of the thematics of the earlier novel in her recent collection of short stories, The North Port Incense Burner (1997). This time, the exchange of sexual gratification for political power, told in the third story which gives its title to the collection, is kept strictly separate from the higher discourse of dignified chastity and perseverance in face of political persecution, which is the theme of the concluding story, "The Makeup Artist's Deadly Offering." These two stories demonstrate what happens when the two threads are separated: on the one hand, the positioning of a woman at the place of the licentious father brings about an excessive privatization of public discourse; on the other hand, the elevation of a saintly woman to a sublime position deprives her and others of the productive vitality of the common body, eventually bringing about a series of tragic deaths. Both point to necessary moments of a civilized community, but each may lead to dangerous breakdown in symbolic ordering. To borrow terms from Renaissance neoplatonism, the protagonists of the last two stories of Incense Burner may be said to "unfold," to make more explicit, aspects of Zhu Yinghong of The Strange Garden (as the three Graces are said to "unfold" Venus into less "complicated" states). Conversely, the interpretative difficulties of the earlier novel may be said to lie in the fact that Zhu Yinghong signifies in the same way as a hybrid, an "infolded" image of estoreic meaning (see Wind 1967: 204-08).
Although the notoriety of the new collection of stories results mainly from the resemblance of some of the characters to real personalities and (once more) the self-indulgently lengthy presentation of terms and associations linked with genital organs (see Wang 1997: 37f), I will take a different approach here and read the third story, "The North Port Incense Burner," as one about the invasion of public signifiers by the voice, and the fourth story, "The Makeup Artist's Deadly Offering" as dominated by the gaze of the past. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, voice and gaze are objects of two of the "partial drives." To explain briefly, the gaze is a "blind spot" in what one sees that gives a vague sense of "returning the gaze," and the voice, likewise, is an empty point in the other that seems to be addressing one from beyond any actual words that are heard. These are instances of the objet petit a, which has to be excluded from consciousness, repressed, for the individual to maintain a sense of reality (Zizek 1996: 90ff). Without intending to bring in religious overtones, we may say that these objects mark the "infolding" of subjectivity.
Early on in The Strange Garden, there is an episode which indicates plainly that the voice is going to be an important part of the narrative: writing a composition as a third-grader, Zhu Yinghong begins with the sentence: "I was born in the late years of the Sino-Japanese war" (Li 1991: 15). She is laughed at by the teacher and the class because the time frame is at least half a century too early, and remembers that day ever since. But why did she write it if not because something sounds right to her, beyond the actual meaning of the words? Her father later rationalizes the sentence as "in a certain sense" connecting Yinghong to a turning point in the history of Taiwan (23f), but the words of his letter again embodies the "voice of history" by rising to sublimity without leaving the hackneyed style of history textbooks. On this level of meaning, the thematic thread of politics and history has never ceased to be engaged with the other thread and undo the passivity of textual spectacles of eroticism which, like their counterparts in film, tend to "freeze the flow of action" (Mulvey 1975: 27). The dimension of this motivating voice recurs in the various memories of the father which are primarily verbal memories, in the cultural signifiers and literary allusions inscribed all over the garden, in the ancient matriarch's curse forbidding the restoration of the patriarch to the family lineage, in the songs and noises of karaoke parlors, in the "auto-affective" musings of the heroine which "covers" the spectacles with meaning but at the same time reveals an anxiety pointing to an underlying voice of otherness.
"Incense Burner" continues and "explicates" this aspect of the novel. Lin Lizi, the heroine's insatiable desire for sexual stimulation is specifically linked to both pretended verbal utterances of pleasure (which most of her male partners enjoy) and involuntary groans, emitted during auto-erotic acts, which "surprise" the woman herself as strikingly similar to the false articulations (Li 1997: 134f). The scandal here, of course, lies in the fact that Lizi is said to have slept with politicians in exchange for political favors. But there is a more elusive level of meaning which involves a different kind of exchange. On the one hand, Lizi herself is an eloquent legislator; even the representatives of women's groups who despise her have to invite her to important meetings because of "her outstanding achievement and the power she wields" (152). Obviously Lizi has a way of turning her feminine voice of pain and pleasure into facility in symbolic transactions. The readiness with which she switches from flirtatious charm to verbal dexterity (152) signifies more than her qualifications for politics: it reveals that the symbolic ordering of public law and discursive reason is supported by, in constant exchange with, an underside filled with the jouissance of the body, a superegoic imperative to enjoy, of which phallic enjoyment, the "jouissance of the organ," is only a pale displacement into impossibility (see Lacan 1998: 6f; Zizek 1992: 124-28).
On the other hand, threatened by this embarrassing presence of feminine voice, the (male) public discourse is led to a countermove to maintain a sense of reality: it produces an endless flow of repetitious, empty gossip consisting both of metaphors linking the body to public or political language (the vagina as an incense burner that everyone can use, the shape of the labia as that of the Taiwan island, and so on) and of hyperbolic fantasies and grotesque, pseudoscientific itemizations of physical features, all associated with the sexual activities of the woman. Thus parallel to Lizi's sublimation into the political symbolic, there is a degradation of public discourse into the language of body parts. Lest there be any mistake, the author deflates this language of gossip (parenthesized in the text) by revealing its inconsistencies and deviations from the third-person narration. For example, after repeatedly speaking of the "forty or fifty penises" which have entered Lizi's body in her entire "career" with men of the opposition party, the counting becomes vague when, at one point, a reported rumor implicitly indicates that the figure should be "five or six" times ten (Li 1997: 139), and, at another point, when it is said that "at least forty or fifty different penises per day take turns in entering her" (140; emphasis added). To be precise, since, according the third-person narration, Lizi sleeps only with "one man at a time," trying to do "everything a wife should have done" for the men until they lose interest (141), and since at least some of the relationships last for "a few months" (134), much longer in the case of the last one whose wedding opens the story, it is unlikely that Lizi could have enlisted "forty or fifty" men in the "three or four years" (130) allotted to her. Since this discourse seems to take some pride in pondering the precision of its arithmetic (see especially 151), such shaky figures throws other, even less verifiable, details into doubt.
The literalizing fantasies of the gossipy crowd have, of course, less to do with conforming to facts than with hiding the object voice under literalized signifiers. And what could this troubling voice say except what they deplore and despise most but nonetheless wish to do, the licentious father's command: enjoy the woman? Who willingly become the "victims" (158) of this femme fatale if not the same people who confirm their positions in the symbolic by taking part in the circulation of the scandal and the condemnation of her as a whore? Through the conflation of the body and the symbolic, of public and private discourses, the body, having been "overwritten" by language (Fink 1995: 12), refuses the remain dead but "writes back" by literalizing the symbolic into its own replica. What begins as a conflict between two extremities turns out to be an auto-affective battle, one of "the voice against the voice":
| If the Law, the word, the logos, had to constantly fight the voice as the other, the senseless bearer of jouissance, feminine decadence, it could do so only by implicitly relying on that other voice, the voice of the Father accompanying the Law. (Dolar 1996: 27) |
| Is the voice of the Father an altogether different species from the feminine voice? Does the voice of the persecutor differ from the persecuted voice? The secret is maybe that they are both the same; that there are not two voices, but only one object voice, which cleaves and bars the Other in an ineradicable "extimacy" . . . (Dolar 1996: 27) |
Toward the end of the story, the feminine voice returns from the past in a more temperate form. Lizi remembers her grandma who not only heard the sound of her coming home but used to "hear" the voice of the family god. Now she tells the little girl: "Listen. Someone is digging, digging a well in the earth. If the digging goes too deep, one may dig through someone's roof. Then there would be big trouble" (Li 1997: 161). Here we encounter a point of stillness which not only lacks connection with the diegetic context in any obvious form (Lizi has being recalling early memories of "male gods") but, refusing to develop the obvious connotations of "digging," cuts short the flow of metaphoricity which has elsewhere created a plethora of phantasmogoric signifiers and textualized body parts. This is the wisdom object voice provides: the object supports the symbolic as its underside and one should respect it by listening to it, not by digging a hole on its roof. In the first part of the story, Lizi has been trying to be a "good" woman in her way, but the public discourse would not relinquish its pleasure in being a watchdog over the morality and the pleasure of her body, which prevents her from developing any "normal" relationship with the men. Eventually, the woman has her revenge, but public discourse pays the price by degenerating into idiotic babble which is incapable even of reporting Lizi's argument about women's strategy beyond the first sentence.
Voice, of course, is not the only dominant object in The Strange Garden. The "postmodern" image of the garden seen on a video wall in the introductory section is transformed into more objectal versions at various points of the text: the old photos of the garden which "smell of death"; the mechanical vision of the camera which reverses left and right, hiding the approaching fire from Yinghong and allowing her to take "the best pictures" of the fire; the family collection of hundreds of retired cameras which become defamiliarized when seen together (Li 1991: 190, 202f, 262). But the locus classicus is definitely the end of the massage episode. The lovers reach new heights of thrilling pleasure by playing with each other's body while taking care not to be heard by the blind woman who is massaging the man (245ff). This is often cited as a good example of the lengths Li Ang would go to indulge the senses, but any reading that ignores how vision works in this scene is bound to remain incomplete. At one point, Yinghong becomes aware that the blind woman keeps her empty eyes open, her shrunk irises making empty, jerky glances at various directions in keeping with the movement of her hands. Yinghong becomes disturbed and stops what she is doing, which prompts the man to dismiss the blind woman. Then the couple proceed to have intercourse. Yinghong is "terrified and disheartened, somehow captivated by a sense of the tangibility of death but responding to the man ever more shamelessly, ever more abandoned to desire." Here sex, death, and the gaze are fused together. But the next morning, an inner voice takes over, and Yinghong knows that "she would never stand losing him again" (247f).
Thus, if voice and gaze "relate to each other as life and death," if "death vivifies, whereas gaze mortifies" (Zizek 1996: 94), they are "infolded" in The Strange Garden: when the gaze is covered up (by dismissing the blind woman and returning to privacy in the massage episode in question, more generally by waking up from the defamiliarizing real), the invisible is subsumed by and reappear as the voice (the curse of the matriarch, the father's expectations, the inner deliberations of the subject, the mysterious life force of the garden). Conversely, when the voice of the past becomes rigid and stifling, the gaze of bodily excitation (materialist "decadence") would tend to reemerge, This recurring pattern may have started as a structural device, a convenient way to organize the narrative, but such a pattern proves to be particularly germane to the circulation and exchange of signifiers, facilitating the reciprocal transformations of voice and gaze. This is the formal feature that eventually saves the novel from breaking into two parts.
Thematically, such a structural pattern subsumes death within life without obviating its relevance. At the end of the novel, although there are details suggesting that the man would become impotent and the couple would be unable to bear children, partly fulfilling the matriarch's curse, the circular pattern of reciprocity would prevent such a reading from becoming conclusive. When the garden becomes uncanny and the superegoic father is going to take over, the gaze returns to save the subject. Thus we have counterevidence that the curse will not come true after all. When Yinghong realizes that "she may never be able to give birth to his children," she feels "distressed," indicating that such outcome would not be what she intended. Then, inexplicably, the text describes her as "wanting even more eagerly to have one more look at the garden right away, lest it has vanished, lest everything has, as it were, never happened, has never existed." This uncanny moment is returned to reality in the concluding paragraph of the novel which gives us the last instance of the gaze that visually saves Yinghong from the "distress": she regains a sense of the existence of "everything" by taking an overview of the garden from where she is sitting, and the garden is brightly lit, "burning in prosperity" (Li 1991: 312). If the garden has not vanished, why should the suspicion about barrenness become true?
We have discussed what happens when the circuit of exchange is broken and the power of the voice is given to unlimited escalation. "The Makeup Artist's Deadly Offering," the last story in The North Port Incense Burner, shows the other side of the coin: when the gaze is given absolute ascendancy, the world would be frozen in public law and the body would be mortified. The story is dominated by images, most prominently the "photos of death," taken of the tortured and butchered body of a victim of the February 28 massacre by his wife, rumored as about to be made public on the anniversary of the massacre some fifty years later but never actually seen on that day. Associated with these are the photographs of other victims, common early portraits not as gory but no less disconcerting, held by family members in the memorial procession, the dramatizations of events of the fatal day that started off the massacre, and the application of makeup first to the "woman writer" who is to speak to the crowd and to another dead body, that of the son of Mother Wang, a victim's wife known for chastity, integrity and political commitment in the opposition movement. Again, these instances of the gaze of the past are all associated with death: even the writer feels estranged from herself: unused to her "clean" face, she feels that she looks "definitely like herself, but also like a different person" (Li 1997: 174). Toward the end of the story, the writer learns from evening TV news that a fire in another part of the city has claimed the lives of more than sixty people, including the young woman who did her makeup earlier. The writer's face becomes contorted with terror; she feels that "the seal of death" has been left on her face (210f). At the end of the story, Mother Wang drowns herself in the water, presumably out of grief over her son's death and regret that she did not accept her son's transvestitism when she learned about it.
Why this persistent foregrounding of death? A nameless woman attributes the tragedies to the "resentment of the dead" who have been left unavenged and unconsoled for nearly fifty years (211). But why are the dead not appeased? Because their voices are not being heard, and when the gaze becomes unbearable, no signifierization into the invocatory will be possible, leaving the subject no recourse other than to disavow it. Early on, the story points to the cavalier attitude toward the meaning of history on the part of the young people who are to participate in the memorial activities. The young makeup artist makes it very clear that she is taking the "case" as a favor to a friend, not because she has any real interest in the "photos of death" or the memorial activities (168); similarly, the massacre "obviously means nothing" to one of the young actors who are going to perform in the street theater on the anniversary (166). The dramatizations themselves are described in detail and intercut with comments from a floating narrative voice revealing their lack of historical credibility. Although the historical events mean a lot to a certain group of people (including the woman writer), the general public, obviously, remains pragmatically aloof. As language overwrites the body in "Incense Burner," here material inertia freezes the discourse of historical justice into empty ideologies, fixations with an unrecoverable past. Again, as the body "writes back" in the earlier story, here the voice of the dead returns the freezing gaze, depriving events of causality and continuity, throwing the entire society into the throes of private catastrophe (Mother Wang's drowning) and fateful randomness (the fire).
A certain sense of expiation is achieved at the end of the story, which, not a point of stillness this time, but a fully symbolic image reintroducing time and opening out into movement: the small lotus lamp, released into the moving water when Mother Wang throws herself into it, moves forward in mysterious silence; the video director, on the scene to shoot the memorial activities, wishes to capture the scene with his betacam, but he discovers that "the flickering light of the lotus lamp will be recorded by the lens only as a place of blackness" (220). The simple but moving beauty of the description of this scene must have come from the momentary revelation that there is still hope in this disintegrating social imaginary, that it is still possible to envision the movement of signifiers and the return of the voice as speaking silence. Lin Lizi wages war against symbolic regimentation by trumping phallic power with the eloquence of the body. Mother Wang makes peace with a forgetful society by disappearing into darkness so that in the frozen visual field of the final scene, signifiers may be known to have started moving again in the watery beyond. Read together, the two stories form a circuit of complementarity.
That, however, does not release Mother Wang's story from negativity. Although hagiography is a more "palatable" genre than pornographic parody for upholders of public discourse, without the invocatory dimension of the earlier story the hope left by the saintly woman is mute and fragile. Mother Wang's suicide adumbrates the masochistic victimhood of an entire generation of Taiwan's political dissenters, which brings our discussion back to the masochism of Zhu Yinghong (definitively analyzed by Huang 1993) and its connection with postcoloniality. While masochistic sexuality is usually read as signifying submission to and collaboration with dominant powers, here we are reminded of another masochistic woman, Ada of Jane Campion's film The Piano. While Ada's falling in love with the person who forces her into objectifying exchange (parts of the body for piano keys) has caused heated debates, there is no doubt that it gives life, not death:
| Ada, indeed, 'opts out' of suicide: 'What a death! What a chance! What a surprise! My will has chosen life!'. The scene of Ada's death in effect refuses death even as it stages it, thereby making a 'taboo identification' with masochism, rendering speakable that taboo, and soliciting a possession of that masochistic voice — 'it is a weird lullaby, and so it is; it is mine'." (Gordon 1996: 205f) |
In retrospect, the divided thematics of The Strange Garden, somewhat like the split voice of The Piano, may be said to have pointed to a way to negotiate the double danger as presented in the two later stories discussed above, and to instance complementarity in one and the same character to positivize and highlight the circularity of exchange needed to survive and transcend psychical and historical trauma. Eventually one has to explain such necessary dialectization by referring it, not to the free play of heterogeneity and "postmodern nothingness" (Lin 1997: 293f), but to the "traversing of fantasy" which enables the subject to position itself at the place of the object, to "subjectify" its own cause and make it "one's own" (Fink 1995: 61ff). This object may appear as a point of stillness, as an opening out into space, or as a composite of the two as instanced by the enigmatic garden; its place is always a critical beyond "in which the subject is able to act (as cause, as desirousness), and is at least momentarily out of discourse, split off from discourse: free from the weight of the Other" (66).
The concept of exchange, therefore, must be rescued from its usual involvement with the Marxist problematic of commodity fetishism and reconnected with the more general form of the dilectization and mobilization of signifiers which would preserve an older layer of the concept based on "the ideal of free and just barter" (Adorno 1973: 147). The Strange Garden presents many forms of exchange. Beyond the much criticized exchange of sex for capital, we read further instances of exchange between past and present (the anachronistic reference to the "late years" of the Sino-Japanese war), between decadence and culture (the aura of the classical garden translating into sexual appeal when the couple first met), the invocatory and the scopic (gaze and voice yielding to each other). The fundamental form of these exchanges is the presence of an historical sensibility responsive to voices that eroticize the past and the distant (even the ancient pirate patriarch engaged in the exchange of his family for adventure in faraway places, which then translates into the matriarch's curse, which then translates into stories which so enamored the young Yinghong, and so on). The main point does not lie in what is exchanged or fetishized, but in the very form of exchange which implies a mimetic ability to divest and reinvest subjectivity similar to the ability to traverse fantasy and reach the object:
| what enhances the mimetic faculty is a protean self with multiple images (read "souls") of itself set in a natural environment whose animals, plants, and elements are spiritualized to the point that nature "speaks back" to humans, every material entity paired with an occasionally visible spirit-double — a mimetic double — of itself. (Taussig 1993: 97) |
This is brought out in the novel most clearly by the floating voice of the father which teaches the heroine that the fetishized gift of the past (the unofficial but still totalizing representation of the history of Taiwan) may yet transcend its surplus pleasure by entering exchange with private justice (the ancient matriarch's curse prohibiting the symbolic return of her man) and personal remembrance and loss (the voice of the victimized father). As content, for example, the ancient curse has no positive meaning except as a personal expression of and demand for poetic justice. But it is lifted at the end of the novel, as argued above, not by becoming forgotten or repressed as historical debris but by entering genuine reconciliation whereby the heiress of the family traverses mythical time to assume the matriarch's place, reactivating her subjectivity and making a decision on her own to end the curse, fully assured that injustice of the past will not be repeated in the present. In other words, it is the reintroduction of individual, subjective voices from the past (be they from liars or sages, pirates or chaste widows) into monumental history which ensures that the latter will be interrupted constantly by the free flow of signifiers exchanging places.
Voices from the past are, therefore, heard with the form of historical memory that Walter Benjamin calls Eingedenken:
| a remembering that does not just repeat or reiterate the past, but which illuminates what could have been. Perhaps only momentarily, this form of remembering redeems the potential for change buried in the past. . . . [Ingeborg Bachmann and Benjamin] consider the process of remembrance as a constant disrupting of the imposed continuum [of monumental history] and construct a conscious literary forum and place for the words and memories of the victims of history. The remembrance of the victims does not perpetuate suffering or reactivate it, but rather breaks down the continuity of a history that petrifies diverse experiences of pain into anonymous masses. (Remmler 1996: 32f) |
While it is always possible that historical memory may be distorted by public historicizing and monumentalized, the traversing of fantasy is meant to minimize that possibility by subjectifying the object, by constantly reminding the child to listen carefully, to refrain from digging holes on somebody else's roof. The strange insight of this form of remembrance points to what Michael Taussig discusses as the post-capitalist persistence of fetishism:
| Post-capitalist animism means that although the socioeconomic exploitative function of fetishism, as Marx used that term in Capital, will supposedly disappear with the overcoming of capitalism, fetishism as an active social force inherent in objects will remain. Indeed it must not disappear, for it is the animate quality of things in post-capitalist society without the 'banking' mode of perception that ensures what the young Marx envisaged as the humanization of the world. (1993: 99) |
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