From "I am!" to "What am I?": Bei Dao and Can Xue

After the death of Mao and the fall of the tyrannical Gang of Four in the mid-seventies, China felt the natural tremors of cultural change rumble to the surface after more than a decade of boundless repression. Maoism had demanded of the people a constant psychosomatic devotion to the communist party and its nationalist projects. After years of mental and physical conditioning in the methods of forfeiting their selves to and for the party, Chinese citizens seemed destined to remain passive to the eternal mandates of an external authority. Despite these strategies and tactics to vaccuum out its people individual essences, certain indominitable spirits survived. When Maoism and its ultra-militant champions were temporarily halted, intellectuals and artists who had sheltered their spark of individuality broke out to express themselves. During the 1980s, this frantic airing-out of individuality occured forcefully and moved briskly. From the simple, impassioned cries of affirmation of Bei Dao to the surreal, confounding explorations of the substance of subjectivity of Can Xue, Chinese writers rushed to articulate what it meant to exist individually in a post-Mao China.

Bei Dao 北島, Misty poet stand-out and co-founder of the controversial literary publication Jintian 今天 (1978-80; 1990-), is recognized as one of the first artists to break out after the collapse of Maoism to assert openly the possibility of assuming individuality in China. His poem "A Reply" 回答 demonstrates the forceful imposition of a singular voice against the colossal forces of history and reality that weigh down upon it: "I tell you, World! / I--Don't--Believe--You!"

From these initial outbursts of affirmation of post-Mao subjects, Chinese writers of prose moved quickly from the assertion of the "I" to explorations of its defintion in a new era of modernization/postmodernization. One of its most provocative and controversial writers, Can Xue 殘雪, originally a tailor, is an extreme example of how narratives have come to confront the meaning of subjectivity in Chinese literature. Her dizzying, Kafka-esque worlds of volatile identities and fluid personalities reveal the hyper-instability of the content of individuality. From a study of a selection of Bei Dao's and her work, we catch a glimpse of the frantic evolution of the search for subjectivity in late twentieth-century Chinese literature.

Readings:
*Selections from Bei Dao's poetry collections
*Selections from Can Xue's Old, Floating Clouds

Questions:
(1) What seems sure in Bei Dao's exclamations of individuality?
(2) How do the expository methods of Bei Dao and Can Xue contribute to their differing conceptions of individuality?
(3) What is stable in Can Xue's narrations?

Links:

*Hong King Bei Dao Archive

Supplementary references:
*Dian Li. The Chinese Poetry of Bei Dao: Resistance and Exile, 1978-2000. Edwin Mellen, 2006.