New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. xvi, 285 pp. US$45.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-231-16768-0.
There is a generation of Chinese novelists, now in their fifties and sixties, whose careers began in the early years of reform and opening after the death of Mao, and who have enjoyed uninterrupted literary careers of three decades, a span denied to almost all their predecessors in China’s tempestuous twentieth century. Members of this group, which includes Mo Yan, Su Tong, Yu Hua, Ge Fei, and Han Shaogong, and has Wang Anyi as its only female representative, rode the wave of “high-culture fever” in the 1980s, and transitioned in subsequent decades from the “avant-garde Boom to post-avant-garde Post-Boom” (29). In recent years, their works have been extensively translated and honoured with international awards, most notably Mo Yan’s 2012 Nobel Prize, even as younger and less earnest writers have begun to outsell them at home.
In Visions of Dystopia, Jeffrey C. Kinkley introduces an extensive selection of the fiction of this generation of writers; the works combine to present a history of modern China which contradicts previous state narratives of triumph and human perfectibility. For these authors, “[h]unger, desire, gangsters, and prostitutes are universals in Chinese history” (42), and their novels are replete with violence, tyranny, betrayal, absurdity, and collective madness. Rather than a steady march towards enlightenment and liberation, the reader is presented with stories that generally end badly for the characters that populate them. Writing of Mo Yan’s Life and Death are Wearing Me Out, Kinkley concludes that “the overall direction of history … is one of decadence, decline, and injustice” (90).
In his reading of these new historical novels, Kinkley acknowledges, but does not allow himself to be directed by, two established ways of reading modern Chinese fiction: C.T. Hsia’s proposal that writers share an “obsession with China” and Frederic Jameson’s generalization that third-world literatures can be read as “national allegories” on themes such as liberation from colonialism and nation-building. Rather, the novels are seen here as dystopian, and compared to a global literature of grand visions gone terribly wrong for those who have to live them, a list that includes Anglo-American works such as George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. A reading of these works offers valuable insights into the writing of this generation of Chinese writers, but for literary influence, Kinkley rightly ascribes greater importance to Latin American authors, most notably Gabriel García Márquez, whose masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude was widely circulated and much admired by young writers emerging from the confines of socialist realism in the 1980s. That novel’s vision of an unpredictable world seen through the microcosm of a locality, and its blending of the realistic and the fantastic, appealed to writers searching for the elemental and the primitive in the Chinese soul rather than charting progress towards communist utopia. A further reason to emulate Márquez in the late twentieth century was his 1982 Nobel Prize, at a time when Chinese authors were convinced that their long wait for the honour would soon be over; the “hallucinatory realism” cited in the announcement of Mo Yan’s award recalls the “magic realism” for which Márquez is celebrated.
The post-Mao generation of authors did not only look for inspiration in translated fiction: Kinkley draws attention to their veneration of Dream of the Red Chamber/ Story of the Stone; Cao Xueqin’s Qing-dynasty masterwork records the decline of a great family through the microcosm of a complex of residences contained in a large compound, with periodic visits from supernatural realms into the world of official intrigue and family discord. In many of the new historical novels, family is likewise the microcosm for twentieth-century China: Su Tong’s Wives and Concubines(filmed by Zhang Yimou as Raise the Red Lantern) is set in the toxic environment of a rich man’s compound, and dysfunctional families people Yu Hua’s sagas of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century China.
Yu Hua’s Brothers is a recent example of the new historical novel: the lives of two utterly dissimilar men rendered brothers by their parents’ marriage are charted from the unspeakable cruelty of the revolutionary past to the unspeakable vulgarity of the mercenary present. Kinkley writes of the novel that “the relationship of the brothers is perpetually symbiotic and mutually self-destructive” (152); he also sees in it the signs that the genre itself may be in decline, becoming “over-the-top, slapdash, and repetitious” (200), and predicts that readers may lose enthusiasm for dystopian critiques of their consumerist goals.
This is a masterful study of a major genre in recent Chinese literature; it is erudite but readable, strongly comparative, and with both historical and literary perspective. A relish for the material is evident throughout, and the book is studded with passages of translation that convey the flavour of the originals.
Richard King
University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada