Five
Romancing the Subject
Utopian Moments in the Chinese Aesthetics of the 1980s

The dictum "less is more" is an apt paradox for the aesthetics of classical Chinese poetry and prose, in which the frequent absence of a grammatical subject—the pronoun "I"—seems to evoke and extend rather than attenuate the boundless horizon of the authentic self. This is the self whose interior landscape is indistinguishable from the exterior one on which the poet-writer's eye lingers.

Much has been written, especially by poet-critics abroad, about the well-trodden ground of the continuum of the subject and object in traditional Chinese poetics.^[1] The Western fascination with this aesthetic subjectless self has come a long way since Fenollosa's idiosyncratic interpretation of Chinese ideograms and Gary Snyder's experiments with the aesthetics of the Dao and Zen. A theoretical proposal such as the "non-Cartesian subject" still continues, to a certain extent, the saga of the Western appropriation of the romance with the holistic and immediate self.^[2] The West has yet to learn (perhaps it would be with mixed reactions) that the "Oriental" holistic self, in an ironic reversal, is receding further and further away from the social and cultural imaginary of post-Mao China.

History alone holds the key to the making and interpretation of such dramatic reversals. After being subjugated to the collective—whether encoded in Confucian familial superstructure for thousands of years in imperial China or reincarnated in the party apparatus of Chinese Maoism-Marxism-Leninism during the revolutionary years—Chinese writers and intellectuals have emerged as the fervent advocates of what the

theoretical agenda of the non-Cartesian subject hopes to redress: a subjectivity marked and authenticated by its inward turn. Whereas the elite trumpeted various theories of subjectivity (zhuti ) during the early and mid-1980s, the common folks on the streets were genuine practitioners of individualism à la mode. Who could have predicted that China would turn out to be a late bloomer of this sort?

Mao Zedong certainly was no clairvoyant when he set out to tame Chinese writers and intellectuals at the 1942 Yan'an Forum Talks, which nipped in the bud any individualistic and aesthetic turn of post-May Fourth literature. Nor could the party ideologues foresee at the climax of their 1950s campaign against the Marxist literary critic Hu Feng (1902–1985) that his famous slogan "the subjective fighting spirit" would reemerge with a vengeance in various incarnations four decades later. And for millions and millions of Chinese who surrendered themselves with such fanaticism to the utopian longings of the Cultural Revolution, disillusionment was soon followed by deep-seated suspicions of all forms of polity (the archsymbol of the public and the collective) and a simultaneous construction of a fetishism of the subject.

The 1980s witnessed the widening of the chasm between the private and the public. The agonistic relationship between these two realms escalated until the cataclysmic outburst of discontent at the Tian'anmen Square in the early summer of 1989. It seemed only natural that the demise of the cult of a single god in the late 1970s precipitated the rediscovery of humanism. The specter that haunted the Chinese earth was not only the "specter of the human,"^[3] but also that of the individual subject. The Chinese Marxists' debate over Marxist humanism and socialist alienation in 1983, on the centennial of Marx's death, not only opened the floodgate of postrevolutionary inquiry into the new problematic of human nature (as opposed to class nature), but also swept in its wake Chinese intellectuals' decade-long fascination with the theme of subjectivity.

The Historical Entry Of The Triple Players: Liu Zaifu, The Root-Searching School, And The Experimentalists

Power depends upon Yesterday,
Literature always stands facing Today;
it is not necessary to compare its longevity with Power,
for Literature is obliged to command from Today's horizon

a panoramic vista of Yesterday
and in that very act blots out the vestiges of Power
                                                        Bei Dao

Bei Dao's poetic manifesto, which appears on the cover of a recent issue of Jintian (Today),^[4] a literary journal in exile published by post-June Fourth expatriates, tells us worlds about the antagonistic and agonistic relationship between political "Power" and "Literature" and about how Chinese literati are constantly engaged in mapping out, consciously or unconsciously, their own positionality against a rival who is both real and imaginary, a stable, identifiable, and unified entity in the name of capitalized Power.

The postmodern notion of power that disseminates into an anonymous structural activity for which no totalized subject is responsible remains a First-World myth that is of theoretical interest but of little explanatory value to Chinese theorists wrestling with indigenous cultural politics. Given the visibility and centrality of the power to contest and the underlying binary structure that defines such highly ritualized contestation (yesterday versus today, longevity versus short life, resistance versus domination), Chinese literati are forever intrigued by the possibility of a total abrogation of the other term in the binary pair. With a naivete that characterizes both martyrs and victors alike, they revel in the reversibility of the subject-positions of Power and Literature in China's existing power structure.

Bei Dao's imaginary evocation of the urgency of the single act of reversal—the blotting out of "the vestiges of Power"—is an unambiguous vision that disciples of Foucault and Western postmodernists would hardly deign to invoke. Although such a binary mode of thinking might appear barbarous in an age of poststructuralist dissolution into the amorphous, the Chinese have a large stake in the continual validity of such binary epistemology insofar as it enables contestatory categories such as "resistance" and "agency" to emerge. Indeed, if the power one resists has a source and center to speak of, the construction of an equally efficacious and empowering subject worthy of its opponent is a theoretical imperative.

In this chapter, I deliver the Chinese postrevolutionary narrative of subjectivity. It is a story of resistance and conflict, a story about insurgent, albeit self-deceptive, strategies of depoliticization and interiorization that theorists and writers adopted to position themselves against the

autocratic Father at home. But this confrontational culture of resistance underwent a subtle transformation in dealing with the opponent of a different persona, i.e., the West, identified as both the tutor and opponent of contemporary Chinese elite. In the face of cultural imperialism, the charting of post-Mao China's own cultural territory called for the reverse strategies of the politicization of local culture and the exterior projection of the image of China's cultural subject. How Chinese writers and theorists characterized their complex relationship with the foreign Father—one that incorporated their desire to copy, appropriate his image, and resist and exorcize it in turn—formed part of the Chinese discourse of subject formation, a decade-long narrative about the post-revolutionary subject caught in the act of making and imagining a subjective space hitherto alien to the Chinese ethos.

The incentive for making such a space was already unwittingly programmed into the movement for the "emancipation of the mind," which the Party launched in 1979 after the fall of the Gang of Four. By 1984, the stage was well set for the dramatic appearance of the catchword zhuti (the subject) that would resonate throughout the utopian decade of the 1980s. Liu Zaifu, the master theorist of the discourse of subjectivity, human beings as the subject of history and resistance. To combat the enclosure of politics and unfreedom, Liu theorized the aesthetic subject as the privileged site where the ultimate realization of a total human being is to take place—an imaginary site previously prescribed to the proletariat in the Marxist tradition. The debate over the ideological correctness of Liu's theory, whose landmark significance was acknowledged in the coining of the "Liu Zaifu phenomenon," continued during 1985 and 1986 when the school of root-searching literature emerged to usurp attention and carry the burden of reinventing China's cultural subject.

1985 and 1986 marked both the acme and the beginning of the decline of post-Mao China's utopianism. In 1987, escalating socioeconomic and political depression found its repercussions in various circles of artists and writers. It soon became a vogue for critics to harp on the "depression of creativity" and to mourn the loss of the "sensational impact" that postrevolutionary literature used to deliver. The emergence of the experimentalists in 1987 seemed a timely response to the exhaustion of the utopian motif of the early 1980s. Paradoxically, it was on the premise of sociopolitical and cultural dystopianism that the linguistic utopia of the experimentalists was constructed. This is a dehistoricized and dehumanized utopia created and dissolved instantaneously with the inauguration and termination of each discursive act. With a pseudo-

nihilist sneer, the experimentalists proclaimed that the humanist subject is but an imaginary construct. To those who desire China's entry into global culture at all costs, the seemingly antihumanist impulse of the experimentalists is a welcome sign of a leap into postmodernism. But whether China's avant-gardists have indeed deconstructed the subject remains a controversy. It is one of the aims of this chapter to continue the debate and frame it in terms of the epochal discourse of subjectivity, which has come a long way since Liu Zaifu's modest call for an aesthetics of the humanist subject.

Although overseas critics of mainland China tend to be all too conscious of the belatedness of the Chinese theory of subjectivity in the face of contemporary Western antihumanist outcry, I have little intention of making apologies for the two primary foci of this chapter, Liu Zaifu and the practitioners of the genre of root-searching literature. Their respective immersion in the problematic of the aesthetic and cultural subject should be examined in the broader context of the imaginary landscape evoked in Bei Dao's poem—the perennial battle between Literature and Power. At the risk of simplifying the phenomenon of Liu Zaifu's theory of subjectivity and that of the emergence of xungen writers' fascination with the will-o'-the-wisp of "cultural subject," I extrapolate that whereas it is the indigenous power against which Liu pits his autonomous aesthetic subject, the power discourse that xungen writers confront is the twin discourse of the Han majority from within (zhongxin huayu ) and the First-World neocolonial discourse from without. The writers' construction of China's cultural subjectivity therefore is a doubly marginal discourse (bianyuan huayu ).

This preamble should serve to illustrate that much of the creative potency of Chinese theorists and writers during the 1980s was derived from the momentum of resistance and struggle. Were they deprived of their real or imaginary rival—the autocratic regime at home or the cultural imperialists abroad—Chinese intellectuals and writers might confront a scenario that is as threatening as the postmodern spectacle of "open and total availability."^[5] The disappearance of constraints and grounding might mean something much worse than mere anarchy to those who are accustomed to living on confrontational reality and on the compulsion to resist. How would the grief-stricken Chinese intellectuals shape their own identity if they were bereft of their original sin—the pangs of sociopolitical conscience?

The binary epistemology of A versus B (a favorite formula that creates many enabling manifestations in Chinese cultural politics, among them

Gan Yang's proposition of the "contestation between tradition and modernity") enables the Chinese subject to position him or herself and to struggle against the oppressive public space. It is important to note that such an oppressive space is identified with either end of the spatial scale: the repressive Mao Style on one end that leaves no room for creative innovation, and the pluralistic space on the other—the new reality of a depoliticized dystopia, whose total space is paradoxically tantamount to anonymity.^[6] The invasion of pluralistic Western logic into the indigenous cultural landscape of post-Mao China—a cultural milieu fervently saluted by those Chinese critics who mistook the domination of contingent content for sovereign freedom^[7] —signifies the beginning of the dissolution of the natives' individuality. Little did those critics suspect that the mark of the plural is instantaneously turned into an ominous sign of "the depersonalization of the colonized" inasmuch as it breaks down the mechanism of binary discrimination and renders their political project of subject formation superfluous.^[8]

This brief excursion about the binary scheme brings us closer to the Chinese geography of resistance that evolves around Liu Zaifu's theory of subjectivity and the cultural ideologies of root-searching literature. One cannot begin to appreciate the deep structural compulsion underlying the construction of the narrative of the subject in either case until one constructs the total plot of insurgency: the target of subversion, the means of resistance, and the objectives of struggle. The different personae of the imaginary rival(s) in each narrative of resistance (the indigenous despot, the foreign devil, or even the merging of both evils) overdetermine the nature of how the subject is aestheticized. Liu Zaifu's absolute autonomous subject parades triumphantly, in contrast to the opaque subject in xungen literature, which is harder to fathom and stabilize primarily because its discursive agonist has no single identity.

But the story of resistance in the Chinese narrative of subjectivity does not simply end with the fading popularity of Liu Zaifu and the root-searching literature. My account of that story continues beyond Liu Zaifu and the xungen writers, for failure to do so would not only mirror scandalously the binarism characteristic of Chinese literary and critical discourses in general, but also fall short of tracing the sacrilegious sequel to the once-canonical project of subject formation. The sequel in question revolves around the catchy posthumanist and postmodernist problematic of "Is the subject liquidated?"—a problematic of considerable theoretical interest to contemporary critics who either endorse or condemn the emergence circa 1987 of the so-called xianfeng xiaoshuo

(avant-garde fiction) or shiyan xiaoshuo (experimental fiction). Until one reckons with the controversy over this new genre of fiction—is it merely a case of deconstruction (or even postmodernism)?—one cannot hope to delineate the subtle response of the new generation of Chinese fiction writers to the increasingly fuzzy logic of resistance at the threshold of an epistemic break in the late 1980s.

Translating the subtlety in question is difficult given the fact that the discursive hegemony of the First World is no longer seen as an evil to be withstood. For the first time in modern and contemporary Chinese literary circles, there has emerged a school of experimentalists who imagine themselves to be partners with rather than contenders against the First-World authors. This is a transcolonial subject, an imaginary tabula rasa free of inferiority complex and old ideological hang-ups, defiant and vainglorious enough to master and appropriate the language of the First World and to reinscribe him or herself with an unmistakably idiosyncratic signature in a text of self-possessed subject-position.^[9] The revolution of the experimentalists is far too complex to be summarized in a few introductory remarks. It suffices to say that one of their most risky and yet most memorable feats is a premeditated dismissal of the familiar paradigm of power versus resistance and the exaltation of the performativity of language games in its place. Uprooting the deeply ingrained national habit that compelled readers to locate the site of power struggle and patterns of resistance in all discursive practices, the experimentalists sneer at the critics and the reading public by leaving them both in an interpretive vacuum.

Despite its disingenuous flirtation with the linguistic medium (and indeed, with everything else), the narrative tableau of the experimentalists foregrounds the utopian moment of a radically different order from the humanistic vision that characterized the utopian discourse of Liu Zaifu's theory as well as of the root-searching literature. Theirs is a linguistic utopia (an order of authenticity possibly higher than Liu's politico-aesthetic mythology and xungen literature's cultural-aesthetic utopia) born, paradoxically, at the very moment of their proclamation that language is artifice. The subject, concluded the daredevils, is nothing more than a mere effect of language.

Liu Zaifu: The Master Grammarian Of The Subject

To strike a novelistic posture such as the experimentalists' requires sardonic audacity and, on many occasions, a penchant for the shameless

display of a repressed libidinal drive that has not yet evolved beyond adolescence. However, it depends most of all upon the passing of an age whose energy was thoroughly spent on the agenda of the "awakening of humanity" (rende juexing ). The experimentalists' seemingly blatant antihumanist heresy would indeed have been out of the question in Liu Zaifu's time.

Liu's major theoretical writings—among them, "On the Subjectivity of Literature" ("Lun wenxue de zhutixing") (1985-1986), "Literary Studies Should Take Humanity as Its Cognitive Center" ("Wenxue yanjiu yingyi ren wei siwei zhongxin") (1985), and On The Composition of [Literary] Personality (Xingge zuhe lun) (1986)—were all written and published between 1984 and 1986, a period still very much preoccupied with the postrevolutionary binary mode of "bestial nature" (shouxing ) and "human nature" (renxing ), and on the deep structural level, with that of "alienation" and the "retrieval of the original nature" (huigui ).^[10] Unmistakably incorporated into the subtext of Liu's insurgent writings is the short-lived debate over socialist alienation and Marxist humanism in 1983, a taboo topic that Chinese critics at home preferred to elide in the wake of the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign (1983), which sealed the controversy by stigmatizing the concept of alienation as ideologically suspect. Little has been said about the political subtext of alienation (and by implication, the entire Chinese apparatus of orthodox Marxism-Leninism) in the critiques of Liu's work, both at home and abroad;^[11] yet it is not difficult to identify the agonistic text that bears the brunt of Liu Zaifu's theory of subjectivity as none other than the historical materialism that denies the human subject its self-presence and subjugates it to politics and economic determinism. To put Liu Zaifu's case succinctly, it is clearly humanity (ren ) rather than textuality (wen ) or the subject that forms the cognitive center of his epistemic project of subjectivity.^[12]

That is to say, no matter how radical he may sound for a fleeting moment, he remains susceptible to the constraints inherent in the generation of Chinese Marxists who still cherish a faith in romantic voluntarism—human beings as the principal subject of history and resistance—and, no less fervently, in the ultimate realization of freedom from ideology as the telos of history. Liu Zaifu's implied antagonist bears the categorical imprint of what Bei Dao refers to in his poetic battle cry as the stark presence of political Power. To combat such a domineering power, Liu constructs a sovereign and determining subject

who bears all the familiar trademarks of the Cartesian cogito, the Kantian constituting consciousness that confronts a chaotic empirical world, and the unified and self-present Hegelian subject. The subject is, in short, "dynamic," "creative," "self-regulating," "endowed with will power," "enabling capacity," and so on.^[13] Liu is not totally unaware of the implications of a less autonomous subject who may submit to a higher authority; he speaks of guishu dongji , the subject's "incentive for dependency," on one occasion.^[14] But the Althusserian model of a subject completely embedded in and subjugated to unidentifiable ideologies remains undesirable to the Chinese theoretician: Liu Zaifu is preoccupied with the efficacy of resistance, warranted only by a potent subject-position locked in a single combat against a capitalized Ideology, which, because of its unambiguous identification with political Power, can be located, named, targeted, and counteracted in the end.

Herein resides the dilemma of Liu Zaifu's theory. This subject, the outgrowth of the postrevolutionary antipathy to ideology, is given all the attributes of a depoliticized being; it is first and foremost an aesthetic subject for which the "whole process of its aesthetic reception is exactly the selfsame process of its return to humanity." Such an apolitical entity, however, is of no practical value to the project of resistance. Here Liu has little choice but to instill an old ideological content into his new subject: "The subjectivity of a writer can be realized not only by means of his or her consciousness of freedom, but also by a heightened sense of mission," which is later specified by him as nothing less than the traditional elite's youhuan yishi (anxiety and crisis consciousness) impregnated with unmistakable sociopolitical overtones.^[15] This subject is furthermore empowered with a potency that "manifests itself not only in the creation of culture, but also in the resistance to culture."^[16] Ironically, the portrait of Liu Zaifu's subject of mastery now relapses into a haunting, albeit a much more refined, combined version of the traditional Confucian scholar and the proletarian hero.

This is not to say that Liu's subject is simply another static and empty ideological vessel to be filled anew. For one thing, this postrevolutionary subject, unlike the Confucianist and the proletarian hero who are characterized by perfect equilibrium, seems rife and ripe with contradictions. But a closer look at them—predictable binary opposites that await and anticipate reconciliation^[17] —reveals Liu Zaifu's subject as merely another utopian site for the realization of the complete and total human being, the subject of mastery and the ultimate solution to all conflicts.

Such utopianism, to be perceived in the structural equilibrium of the subject, finds its culminating moment in Liu Zaifu's explication of the final stage of the subject's evolution— "self-dissolution" (wuwo )—a contemporary rewriting of "the unity of Heaven and (hu)man" (tianren heyi ).^[18] Liu's theoretical alliance with the Western philosophy of subjectivity expires at the moment when he cites traditional Chinese philosophy as a sovereign metaphor for his theoretical privileging of identity over contradiction. Contrary to the Western thinking subject that is pitted against the object (material or biological nature), Liu Zaifu posits an aesthetic subject whose telos is realized only through its holistic and total identification with Nature.^[19] The moment of identification occurs when the subject completes its linear progression from self-assertion (ziwo ) to self-transcendence (chaowo ), and finally to self-dissolution [into Nature itself] (wuwo ).^[20] The process prescribed here is highly paradoxical, since one can imagine that nothing short of a spontaneous implosion of the boundary between subject and object can achieve the perfect harmony propounded in the conceptual nirvana of tianren heyi. Yet the threefold evolution of the subject not only betrays the elaborate process of a purely logical and hierarchical dialectic (the Hegelian influence is perceivable) that is opposite to the traceless continuum of the subject-object-less communion, but it also says nothing of how the subject is warranted to know its end in its beginning—in other words, how it overcomes the contradictions inherent in its three subject-positions and inaugurates the perfect subject who already knows the end of its own evolution.

To compound the quandary, the emphasis on self-dissolution, and by extension the "forgetting of the self," runs the risk of effacing the subject that Liu Zaifu takes such pains to construct. Although the subject in Liu's discourse is aesthetic and its sole function is defined by its textual praxis (its self-dissolution enacts the ultimate practice of aesthetic liberation), Liu Zaifu's agenda is by no means consistently aesthetic. In fact, one might even say that it is unavoidably inconsistent. The commitment of a contemporary literary critic, if I am allowed to reiterate this cliché, like that of his Confucian and Marxist predecessors in traditional and modern Chinese history, is almost always divided between aesthetics and politics. The construction of a merely aesthetic subject eventually proves insufficient for a project that derives its momentum from the inquiry into agency. In the lingo of resistance, one could of course revalorize Liu Zaifu's aesthetic subject as a political signifier: The ideal portrait of the aesthetic subject's pure openness to things and its unlimited access to freedom is not merely an illusion but an agonistic text, the rhetorical victory of the

defeated and impotent empirical subject that remains a sociopolitical reality of his time. However, such a subject, metaphorically empowered, remains a linguistic sign. To a theorist who is still very much a historical materialist at heart, such a sign seems empty without the grace and presence of a historical agent endowed with ethico-political consciousness.

Here Liu Zaifu cannot help stumbling into a dilemma. But strange to say, the theoretical interest that informs his theory of subjectivity lies exactly in his dual discourse of the aesthetic subject and the ethico-political subject. The former, depoliticized, the end product of resistance to the Maoist-Marxist subject, is paradoxically deprived of its agency to act and to resist. This perfectly poised subject is self-enclosed in an imaginary wholeness that cancels the possibilities of gaps and moves toward structural closure. To rescue this aesthetic subject from the undesirable paralysis in the praxis, Liu has no recourse but to commit himself to conflicting propositions: "Aesthetics is the ethics of Future" or "it is the general sense of mission, specifically identical to 'anxiety and crisis consciousness,' that makes up the innermost core of the consciousness of subjectivity that the best writers of all ages and all countries are endowed with."^[21] These propositions eventually conjure up the image of an ethico-political subject that he resisted at the start. Such a discourse of subjectivity reveals itself as nothing other than an enabling machine in the political sense.

It is Liu Zaifu's implicit emphasis on the praxis of resistance that brings us back to the nebulous subtext of humanism and alienation in his theory of subjectivity. Humanism presupposes an immutable human essence and predicts the return of fallen and fragmented human nature to its original state of purity and totality. According to the humanist version of Marxism, the process of the degradation of the original is marked by the process of alienation (by social structures). And the retrieval of its lack or loss begins with the assertion and recovery of the free subject as the core of moral and political action. The impetus underlying Liu Zaifu's theory of subjectivity resides exactly in this lengthy process of the return to humanity: "The movement of society and history begins on the day when humankind was born. It undergoes the winding and painful journey of the 'negation of humanity,' and finally returns to (wo)man him/herself. . . . It is only at this particular moment that the value of humanity finds its full embodiment, and the authentic history of humankind really begins."^[22] Although Liu is politically too seasoned to adopt the term "alienation," the description of the recovery in question is none other than an unequivocal summary of the central thesis of Marxian humanism; in so summarizing, he evokes the entire repressed subtext of the

Chinese Marxists' debate over socialist alienation and Marxist humanism in the early 1980s.

In place of the metaphysical question addressed to the ontological subject, Who am I? he thus privileges a question of a slightly different order: Who is human? The subject thrown out of existence during the revolutionary era is nothing more than an empty, albeit free, human subject of rudimentary instincts unadorned by trappings of metaphysical self-questioning. The auto-positioning of a Chinese postrevolutionary subject presents itself to itself not as a consciousness that questions itself "in such a way as to appropriate the alterity or obscurity that troubles it, either from 'without' or from 'within'" in the Hegelian sense.^[23] The problem that the Chinese subject must confront is not existential anxiety, or "man's ontological position."^[24] Instead, it is engaged in the task of resisting the notorious annexation by the "without" of a "within" that has not yet been clearly defined, nor is it capable of efficacious self-questioning. The issue here is hardly one of subtle appropriation of, but rather blatant resistance to, an alien, or rather, an alienating public sphere. In fact, the terms of overdetermined antagonism between the "within" and the "without" characterizes Liu Zaifu's theory as a philosophy of humanity in disguise rather than a discourse of subjectivity. In Western philosophy, "there can be no concept at all of subjectivity without a partaking in the metaphysics of [self-] presence"^[25] and in an act of its simultaneous self-enclosure and disclosure; in Liu's theory, there can be no concept of subjectivity without its automatic reference to the political allegory of dehumanization. Thus the problematic of subjectivity in Liu's theory always risks being upstaged by that of humanity.

Serenading The Cultural Subject: Theories And Practice

Liu Zaifu's theory of the subjectivity of literature exposes and reinforces yet another unique orientation of Chinese literature since the May Fourth period: It was literature rather than philosophy that constituted the strategic site of cultural self-introspection in an age submerged in its own epistemic anxiety over its dramatic transition from tradition to modernity. Why the quest of a new cultural ideology fell upon the literati and critics rather than philosophers goes beyond the immediate objective of my present inquiry. It is worth noting that circa 1985, the apex of China's Cul-

ture Fever, it was the literary circle that responded to the debate of zhongxi zhi zheng (China versus the West) in the most creative manner. While the circle of philosophers initiated a precarious attempt to revitalize Confucianism in the spirit of modernity to combat the infiltration of various systems of imported cultural philosophies, the literati looked elsewhere for a way out of this predictable and sterile mode of discussion. Inspired by Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "magic realism," they presented an agenda articulated in two slogans: "root-searching" (1985–1986), and "Chinese literature marching toward the world" (Zhongguo wenxue zouxiang shijie ) (1987–1988).^[26] Although what was at stake in both slogans was still the thorny issue of China's cultural identity, with the emergence of xungen literature, the site of contestation could no longer be solely identified as culture or ideology, but as one traversed by the new problematic of language as well.

Both Liu Zaifu and Li Tuo provide the theoretical justification for this new orientation toward language. They locate the site of the potential structural change of Chinese ultrastable ideological consciousness in the theatrical transformation of the existing system of signification. Liu deciphers the postrevolutionary ritual of removing one's political stigma (zhai maozi ) in terms of linguistic liberation: Political de-stigmatization "is an issue of liberation from the prison house of biased classification, and in short, an issue of [exposing] the distortion that language imposes upon human beings."^[27] Li Tuo is even more explicit in connecting the revolution of language with that of ideological consciousness.^[28]

Fiction writing as a pure discursive practice opposed to the ideological one, an undercurrent already visible in xungen literature, will eventually surface with experimental fiction (shiyan xiaoshuo ) in high tide. Indeed, one must agree with Li Tuo's observation that xungen literature paves the way for the emergence of experimental fiction precisely in that the former heralds the arrival of a genuine aesthetic revolution that finds the fulfillment of its most radical implications in the latter.^[29] The problematic of the linguistic subject (yuyan zhuti )—of how language evolves from its age-old subaltern position into the subject-position of Chinese literary texts—is a topic on which I dwell at length in the final section of this chapter. Here, I focus on the responses that philosophers (Gan Yang) and critics (Huang Ziping) made on the one hand and the xungen school (both theorists and writers) made on the other to issues of cultural modernity, and more specifically, to the debate of "sinification versus westernization." All three parties, as we shall see, were

preoccupied with the task of empowering China's cultural subject, whose claim to sovereignty was endangered as the result of the identity crisis intensified by this debate.

Paradigm I: China Versus The West Or Tradition Versus Modernity?

The opposition between China and the West, "sinification versus westernization," evokes the familiar vista of resistance whose complexity is compounded when the antagonistic binary terms, formerly purely indigenous and local, now expand themselves toward the global. They immediately invite a series of dubious propositions and controversies cast in postcolonial idiom from Western sinologists—"Can we speak of China's subalternity as we do of India's?"—and from the home front—"Do we have an 'authentic' or a 'pseudo' modernism and postmodernism?" I have argued elsewhere that China can never be placed against the West, as India was positioned against Europe, in the ready-made Manichean allegory of opposition of the colonized and colonizer, inferiority and superiority, savagery and civilization, object and subject.^[30] There is much to be said about why Edward Said's Orientalism (the victimization of the "Orient" by the "Occident") did not strike a chord in the Chinese sensibility, and yet why books about futurology were promoted and translated at such a furious pace. The decision to import one particular theoretical model rather than another is never fortuitous but dependent upon how the Chinese position themselves in the global map in the first place and how efficiently, according to their own assessment, the model in question functions in consolidating or substantiating that position—whether it is a tangible or a merely imaginary position. I do not intend to reiterate here what I demonstrated elsewhere: Chinese intellectuals are acutely aware of China's positional superiority vis-à-vis the West, which however indubitably it poses itself as the conqueror in the last few centuries, has a historical subject that is nonetheless raw and depthless according to the Chinese standard. China's obsession with the future and subsequently with futurology—the science of the future—is symptomatic of a subject-position that authorizes itself not by looking back in anger nor by too deeply engaging itself in the self-reflection of a present riddled with anxieties and unfulfilled dreams. It is only the "looking forward" stance that enables the Chinese subject-position fully to articulate and reinvigorate itself. This is a stance unambiguously intertwined with the "leaping forward" mentality that invests the future with

a premium to be paid in one installment at a recoverable utopian moment of empowerment.

The voicing of such a sentiment—that "we may yet become the master of the future"—has indeed become part of the quotidian reality too familiar to an average Chinese citizen to attract much attention. But to those who are eager to relegate China to the postcolonial category of the subaltern, a typical quotation from a typical critic may yet raise a few eyebrows: "Toynbee, the most far-sighted historian in the West . . . was positive that the sun of the twenty-first century will absolutely not arise from the West. The future . . . will choose China eventually. . . . Of course this unification should not be seen as China's political or military conquest of the world, nor understood as the domination of the Eastern over the Western hemisphere. It should be taken as the choice made by the entire world to identify with Chinese culture. This is the sinification of global culture, the return of History itself."^[31] Simplistic as such a high-minded proclamation may sound, the conviction of the observer is not to be trifled with. Here the explicit alignment of the future with China and a cultural hegemony that haunts those who have not forgotten the bygone glories of Imperial China displays the Chinese historical imagination for a utopia that seems once again well within their reach.

Gan Yang's refutation of the binary paradigm "sinification versus westernization" represents one such attempt to envision and theorize that hegemonic moment. Gan's strategy is to discover the agency of change from within and redefine the terms of resistance as tradition (gu ) against modernity (jin )—gujin zhi zheng . He would thus deprive the West of its power to dictate the pace and agenda of China's modernization and move the entire arena from the global (zhong versus xi ) back to the local again.^[32] For those Chinese intellectuals whose "subjugation" to Western influences is perceived by themselves in purely technical terms at best, the compelling issue is not how to cancel out its subaltern position (it never sank into a colonial subject as such) but rather how to retrieve its earlier subject-position of the "dynasty of Heaven" (tianchao ).^[33] One can indeed denounce such a position as purely imaginary and empty. In fact, its hidden agenda of a sinocentric return seems to guarantee its quick reversal and retranslation into new terms of domination and subalternity (for instance, the agenda of the "Greater China" promises exactly such a configuration).^[34]

China's refusal to take up the position of colonial subject presents an intriguing problematic that cannot simply be dismissed in terms

of its cultural spokespeople's inadequate understanding of the theoretical and political radicalism set loose by Said's onslaught on "Orientalism."^[35] The examination of the routine practice of "colonialism under erasure" as a repressed problematic in China Studies^[36] therefore is doubly poignant if we include among its practitioners not only Western sinologists but also indigenous Chinese critics. The necessity of adopting different interpretive strategies in treating each phenomenon is compelling, for there is a danger of confusing the defensive gesture adopted by the real aggressor (Western sinologists: we are not colonizers) with that voiced by the imaginary victim (indigenous critics: we are not the colonized). The latter speaks from a subject-position that cannot be readily appropriated into the standard discourse of colonialism.

Given the contradictory agenda of postcolonialism—to cancel the subjectivity of the "Third World" by naming it as such—it is no accident that a small constellation of Chinese cultural and literary theorists have fought against it as hard, yet perhaps not as consciously, as they did against the flagrant infiltration of neocolonial discourses. They realized the urgency of retrieving the problematic of subjectivity from postcolonial discourse. Invariably, the binary paradigm of resistance (China versus the West) still retains its viability. But the terms of resistance are now transferred from the spatial and geopolitical to the temporal and historical. The struggle is no longer seen as the Orient versus the Occident, nor socialism versus capitalism. It is tradition rather than the West that is now perceived as the real opponent to China's emergent subjectivity. To better appreciate the insurgency of this new geocultural politics written against the discourse of postcolonialism, I need to quote Gan Yang at some length.

The geographico-cultural differences between Chinese and Western culture were often exaggerated indefinitely at the expense of eclipsing the much more real and fundamental problematic of the cultural difference between "tradition" and "modernity," an issue about the necessary self -transformation of Chinese culture from its traditional phase to modern phase. It is exactly this conceptual exaggeration that contributed to our putting the cart before the horse, a syndrome that recurred in our cultural discussions throughout recent history. . . . That is, we always unconsciously resorted to the generalized comparison and sweeping discrimination between an abstract Chinese culture (which is, in fact, traditional Chinese culture, and to put it bluntly, Confucian culture in the main) and an abstract Western culture (which is actually the incarnation of a modern Western culture after its "epistemological break") as a means to evade, to overshadow, to displace, and even to obliterate, the more

concrete issue of the distinction between the Chinese traditional mode of culture and its modern counterpart. At the same time, we ignored the fact that within Western culture itself there exists a distinction between the traditional and modern modes.^[37]

By redefining China's modernization as the inevitable process of self-transformation rather than a reaction against colonialism, Gan Yang breaks the familiar equation between modernization and westernization and instills into an otherwise static subject—China locked into the fixed position of the victim—the drive and agency for change.

Gan Yang's proposal crystallizes and predicts the coming of a utopian moment in contemporary Chinese history when the empowerment of native discourse emerges as the new agenda that supersedes the vulnerable plea made by the veteran theorist Liu Zaifu to "walk out of the shadow" of Western fathers.^[38] The crucial question to address is the racial identity of the real oppressor that triggers this Oedipal rebellion. Is he, as Liu suggests, of foreign identity, or as Huang Ziping daringly announces, nobody else but the "'Father of Revolution' who has been constructed step by step during each historical movement staged throughout modern Chinese history"?^[39] The identity of the agonist—the allusion to Mao Zedong and the Maoist ideologues is unmistakably blatant—leads Huang to argue against the theoretical position that "attributes all of China's sufferings and misfortunes to the invasion of Western imperialism, while at the same time ignores the crises of tradition in Chinese history itself."^[40] The political implications of Huang's attempt to energize the indigenous discourse are apparent when he goes on to speak of the "historical desires" of China as a sovereign subject, while paring down the intrusive capacity of "Western discourse" to a mere "participatory" (canyu ) status in the construction of the authentic "Chinese story." To Zhang Xudong, the plot of this Chinese story consists of nothing other than the excursion of a "premodern subject" (qianxiandai zhuti ) set free at the postmodern juncture of the total linguistic liberation.^[41] A closer look at this enfranchised premodern subject reveals that it delivers a subject-position that is not only representable but overdetermined from within, a position that finds its cogent footnote in Zhang Xudong's account of the genesis of contemporary Chinese literature as the belated yet irrepressible self-expression of China's historical subject—metaphorically represented as the sum total of "national self-consciousness," "a non-Western logic of 'the imaginary' and system of signs," and "a mechanism of self -projection and self -disclosure" generated in "the context of global culture."^[42]

One can of course adopt a metacritical position of recontaining the subversive act of those Chinese theorists by unmasking their strategy of privileging the temporal paradigm of resistance (tradition versus modernity) over the spatial one (China versus the West) as the camouflage of an ominous return to sinocentrism. The seductive pull of a relapse into that ideological position must be enormous. It seems to present, at least to the Chinese insurgents, the only ready-made alternative to the post-colonial paralogic that, by bestowing upon the colonialist an absolutely unitary subject-position, paradoxically guarantees its continual dominance over the colonial subject who is sometimes seen as unpresentable on the discursive level and at other times merely "a subject-effect."^[43] It goes without saying, then, that at this particular historical juncture, mired in the antagonistic pressure from within and from without, advocates of the new paradigm cannot but choose to adopt a sinocentric posture that serves as a political metaphor while maintaining a radicalized intellectual position that can best be characterized as a metonymical relationship between the local and the global.

This nativist romanticization about the cultural subject as a fixed space of its own, from which it can speak in a sovereign voice, is rendered problematic by the increasing alacrity and ravenous appetite with which the program of global modernity swallows up space. The utilization of this shifting analytic language of the local and the global characterizes the approach of all three theorists to China as a discursive form under permutation rather than some recoverable emotive content. Thus we can say that theorists such as Gan Yang, Huang Ziping, and Zhang Xudong are not unaware of the danger that their very act of attributing China's cultural agency (selfsame and autonomous, an identity-in-itself) to the indigenous is open to essentialist recuperation. In contrast, the xungen school (both theorists and writers alike) see the symbolic violation of the Chinese grammar by the discourse of modernity as a threat that breaks down cultural identity rather than as a catalyst for discursive break-through. Thus for those root-searching advocates, the theoretical construction of the agency of China's cultural subject is considered inefficacious without a simultaneous reconstruction of an authentic and essentialist China. This is a China that could ultimately be retrieved through the xungen school's grand project of identity searching and structure formation. Theoretical distancing (as practiced by Gan, Huang, and Zhang) was no longer feasible. We now turn to the imaginary geography of a China that hems in both its depictors and spectators.

Paradigm 2: Inscribing The Rooted Cultural And Aesthetic Subject

Why do we want to search for our own roots?—Well,
it's because we want to march toward the world!
                                                        Li Tuo

"Marching toward the world" (the First World undoubtedly, or at least that part of the periphery—such as Latin America—that partook in the making of modern Western canon) is a tortuously complicated slogan that accommodates both the repressed complexes of superiority and inferiority that Chinese intellectuals have endured since at least the early twentieth century.^[44] At first glimpse, Li Tuo's self-questioning and ad-lib answer seems to map out the conventional spatial configuration of modern Chinese history—the West versus China—as the primary geography of action and counteraction within which the xungen "heat wave" took place in the mid-1980s. The inward drawn and defensive search for "national literature" seems the most logical salvation in the face of the aggressive marching of "world literature" into Chinese territory.^[45] Yet on the other hand, one cannot dismiss the equally significant centrifugal and offensive drive of the root-searching slogan, a daring act of self-exposure and challenge to the First World. However, although symptomatic of the emotional ambivalence with which xungen writers view their self-positioning in the postcolonial world, Li Tuo's glib monologue tells only half of the story.

An undue attention to the desire for dialogues and the spatial logic of the literature ("We [zhong ] 'search our roots' in order to have a dialogue with the world [xi ]")^[46] runs the risk of displacing the deeper structural contradiction that empowers the root-searching literature to serve both as the metaphor for a new cultural ideology and as the vanguard of a new aesthetics. The contradiction in question—the other half of the untold story of resistance—is what Gan Yang identifies as the temporal paradigm of gu (tradition) versus jin (modernity) or, put in the vocabulary of the xungen movement, the cultural unconscious versus modern consciousness. I emphasize that it is on this binary axis of conflict that one can begin to map out the dual attributes of the subject inscribed in the literature as being cultural and aesthetic at once.

To attempt a sweeping generalization about the poetics of xungen literature is tantalizing but self-defeating. Not only do authors give shifting valorizations of the symbolic presence of modernity and tradition in

their discourses, but the theorists themselves (some of them are xungen authors at the same time, such as A Cheng and Han Shaogong) often construct in retrospect a cultural politics of root-searching that finds little echo in the literary genre itself.^[47]

Most theorists would concur that this literature represents not simply an innocent return to Nature (such as the wilderness outside of the Central Plains) and Culture (such as traditional myths and forms), but a besieged embryonic modern consciousness that struggles to come to terms with itself, or more specifically, with its inability (sometimes, a refusal) to map itself on the new modern space. Although primitivism and a profound nostalgia for a bygone agrarian society can be found in a large number of works, it is a movement that emerged from and responded to the quick waxing and waning in the mid-1980s of Chinese xiandai pai modernism on the one hand^[48] and to the larger philosophical debate of tradition versus modernity on the other. In examining xungen literature, one has to keep in mind that it serves simultaneously as a metaphor for and as an actual enactment of the formulaic drama that the debate can only conceive in the most abstract terms.

The trope of modernity that underlies the literature becomes even more evident when we consider the new genre's intricate relationship with Western modernism. Never has it rung truer that "it is necessary to return to the ancients in order to go beyond modernism."^[49] The historical contribution of the xungen movement to contemporary Chinese literature resides precisely in its simultaneous challenge to and containment of modernism. At a juncture when the creative potency of Liu Suola and Xu Xing's xiandai pai was nearly spent and the controversy over pseudomodernism revived the question of Western influence and Chinese mimicry (and thus relentlessly touched the nerve of a nationwide inferiority complex), the emergence of root-searching literature provided a therapeutic solution. It presented an immense emotional appeal to many critics like Xu Zidong whose prescription revealed much of the deep emotional ambiguity with which the xungen writers related to modernism: "Planting our 'roots' deeply into the 'yellow soul' is the broadest possible path in China for modernism."^[50] The resistance to the modern always and already risks being recontained by the tacit "emotional wish-making" that an outlandish modernism could "redeem and rejuvenate Chinese [literary] culture (most preferably overnight)"^[51] —wishful thinking that gives the lie to the conventional argument that "'root-searching' represents a backward-looking consciousness."^[52]

Paradoxically, however, the metaphor of modernity and modernism appears as the missing term in a vista crisscrossed by the literature's seemingly anachronistic desires for homecoming. Only by understanding that the missing term is not absent but repressed in this literature can we characterize the xungen movement as the burgeoning of a new aesthetic that reveals itself as the genuine descendant of modernity precisely in its implicit solicitation and critique of Western modernism.

Even though it seems impossible to leave aside the aesthetic question that is deeply implicated in the cultural politics of xungen literature, I shall attempt to focus my discussion by first examining the point at which the issue of root-searching surpasses aesthetics and becomes a cultural issue instead. This point is found in Li Qingxi's (a xungen writer-theorist's) perceptive comments on the literature: "Western modernists broadened the aesthetic horizon of Chinese writers. However, they failed to deliver to them an authentic awareness of their own subjectivity. Modernism cannot resolve the soul problem of Chinese people."^[53] It is Li Qingxi's identification of this "soul problem" that opens up an entirely different horizon of polemics and strategies of resolution. To put the complicated problem simply, the site of contestation is cultural subjectivity, a seemingly empty vessel that is defined by whatever form of Western cultural ideology is being poured into it at a given moment. How to redress such a provisional, hence empty identity of the cultural subject (wenhua zhuti ) preoccupies cultural theorists in China today.

One can almost predict their strategy of resistance: the installation of a subject that is interpellated by and subjugated to a higher authority—spelled out specifically by A Cheng as "cultural constraints" (wenhua zhiyue ). To combat the empty subject, the xungen theorists revalorize a subject who is saturated with meanings and determinations of indigenous categories. This is a subject constrained by its parasitic dependence upon the object (namely culture) and whose self-governing capacity and "dynamic drive" (nengdong xing ) is put into question—a theory of subjectivity that runs counter to Liu Zaifu's imaginary subject of absolute autonomy.

But the task of the xungen theorists has just begun with their positing of a tamed subject—a mere effect of the cultural unconscious—who stares blankly into a predetermined space. To deliver the subject from the spiritual paralysis that a total immersion in culture dictates, they have to recover the creative potency of the subject and provide the workings of a dialectics between subjection and subjectivity. Somehow and from somewhere a critical and self-reflexive subjectivity has to emerge, which

can examine culture and tradition in such a light that a transcendence of its own constraints may appear as a theoretical possibility.

Many theorists have indeed dwelled on the capability and necessity of the subject's self-transcending movement. The conflict, however, must be tremendous for those who have to turn the subject inward to indigenous culture for inspiration to withstand its continual conquest by the alien, yet who at the same time feel compelled to plead that "today, our search for cultural roots has to face the world's cultural course. . . . We have to endow it [our root-searching] with a kind of self-transcending capacity. . . . Cushioned itself against [our own] history and culture, it faces toward the world and toward the future."^[54] One can perceive a double edge to this call for the implantation of a global and futurist perspective in xungen literature. The vision of an imaginary readerly feast that extends its invitation to global readership serves as a reminder that the automatic submission to culture and to the past only produces a self-enclosed subject that is incapable of speaking to the world and to the future.

Thus while emphasizing the importance of return to and reacquaintance with traditional culture in its multifarious guises—whether as some exotic spiritual landscape of Han Shaogong's Chu culture, the Zen and Daoist philosophy of sublimation beautified in A Cheng's "The King of Chess," or cultural archetypes that ethnic minorities enact in esoteric rituals—root-searching theorists place a high premium on the rediscovery of the individual subject as a private field of givenness seriously engaged in self-critique and self-reflection.^[55] The body is culturally inscribed but the mind and heart are free. Once we understand this subtext for the seemingly contradictory call for self-transcendence, Li Qingxi's following statements are transparent.

We may say that the artistic value of some of the representative works of "root-searching" literature consists in their manifestation of how the subject sublimates itself. Take A Cheng's "The King of Chess" for instance. What we witness in the story is not [the author's] explication of objective reality . . . but rather his entry into the subject's experience of its own subjectivity by means of his other-worldly narrating attitude. . . . What is emphasized is his [the hero's] transcendence of the real and of his existential condition.

They [Han Shaogong, Li Hangyu, and A Cheng] themselves do not view "transcendence" as a nihilist posture. Transcendence by itself means the consummation of critique and self-reflection.^[56]

It is this built-in capacity for self-reflexivity that empowers an otherwise passive subject enclosed by cultural trappings. The self-critical ori-

entation of such a cultural subject belies the cliché repeated by literary historians and critics of lesser caliber, namely, that the objective of the xungen school is to "rejuvenate the Han culture wholesale" and to "close up the gaps brought about by the cultural break [initiated by the May Fourth Movement] that took place on the vertical axis."^[57] One needs to be reminded that cultural conservation is a superficial trademark by which the slogan "root-searching" is stigmatized. It tells more about what triggers the movement than what the movement produces in the end. As we have seen, the imaginary function of the cultural subject in xungen theories always transcends the role that is originally and immediately assigned to it. Despite its liaison with the cultural, the subject is self-conscious of its repressed desires and the forms of self-distortion as a result of this liaison. At such moments the retroactive look at cultural roots is fraught with ambiguities. The cup it holds up to toast tradition is always half empty. But just as one is tempted to conclude that the xungen writers' critique of tradition derives its drive from the historical agenda of modernity, one is confronted with an equally noticeable "collective motion" defined by Li Tuo as the writers' unconscious questioning of modernity.^[58] The shifting critique of tradition and modernity can perhaps best account for the intriguing appeal of xungen literature to readers of different ideological bent. Most importantly, it supports the thesis that cultural or ideological constraints function not only to limit subjectivity but also to enable it.

The double bind in which those writers find themselves (are they traditionalists or modernists?) can thus be easily inverted into a dual critique of tradition and modernity.^[59] If one can speak of a utopian drive underlying the root-searching consciousness, that drive is nothing other than its open-ended capacity—or more precisely, its instinctual resistance to the norm (whether tradition or modernity, a habitual mode of perception, or prescribed political consciousness) at a given moment. It is this much-trumpeted theoretical openness that enables the root-searching writers to adopt high-minded rhetoric such as "cultural reconstruction" and envision the prospect of China strutting onto the stage of world literature.^[60]

Such an enabling discourse, one has to assume, cannot be envisioned without the appearance of an equally empowered discursive subject. The question remains: by what concrete means and in what visible form does the empowerment come into being? Invariably, the quest for roots takes the xungen writers back to savage uncharted territories, far from the Central Plains. Despite their different experiences with the wilderness, it

is nature and nature alone that electrifies and explodes the human subject out of its fragile earthly frame and recharges it with inexhaustible virility that transcends any worldly confinement.

The theoretical construct of the subject that is potent but retrogressive thus finally gets written into the root-searching literature as a kind of pristine subject inscribed in nature, a subject not too radically different from Marcuse's pre-Freudian subject who shares the same instinctual constitution that promises an unrepressed existential condition and a plenitude of prehistorical energy.^[61] Yet the notion of primordial happiness, even when it is realized at the final climactic moment in the narrative fiction (for instance, Wang Yisheng's mock-heroic victory in the chess championship game, or the fisherman Fukui's willful immersion in his symbiotic relationship with the river), is only partially applicable to the psychic makeup of a xungen subject who often mistakes its last act of resistance to an imaginary rival—an act staking all on a single throw of the dice—for an effortless unfolding of a harmonious continuum. Wang Yisheng's free-flowing style (daizai qilishufu ) and Fukui's cool and cozy posture (daizai jianglizizai ) may be taken as metaphors for transcendence into a state of mind that liquidates the concept of the subject engaging in rivalry with what constrains and confronts him (without exception, the root-searching hero is a male). Yet I want to suggest a different interpretation: such a mood and posture echoes, however subtly and imperceptibly, the tragic pathos of the last hero, as the title of Li Hangyu's story "The Last Fisherman" ("Zuihou yige yulaoer") spells out. It should certainly not be confused with the romantic innocence of prehistorical freedom.^[62]

Nonetheless, the belief in that freedom persists. That is what makes the xungen heroes larger than life itself. What culture constrains, nature sets free. The contradiction in the xungen movement between the theory (the constrained subject) and literature (humans as the embodiment of unfettered instincts) foregrounds once again the dilemma of a dislocated cultural subject in search of self-regeneration and of a new enabling ethics for its enervated subjectivity. The theme of return to nature in a large corpus of this literature—to cite a few examples, Zheng Yi's novels, A Cheng's "Shuwang" (Tree king), Zhang Chengzhi's "Beifang de he" (The river of the north)—delivers collectively a new hero of raw masculinity and spiritual cornucopia. He is, in fact, the very personification of nature itself.

The xungen writers' experience of nature is, of course, far from being homogeneous. For Zheng Wanlong, who was born in a secluded

mountain village near the Heilong River in northeastern China, nature brought back childhood memories of the legends of pioneers, their dreams, expeditions, and creative energy.^[63] The rough landscape tells different stories to other "reeducated youth" (zhiqing ) such as Zhang Chengzhi, Zheng Yi, Han Shaogong, Kong Jiesheng, and A Cheng, who were sent to China's remote countryside or its barbarous frontiers when they were adolescents during the Cultural Revolution. For Han Shaogong, Zhang Chengzhi, and Kong Jiesheng, the landscape projects a raw emotional valence that echoes the intensity of their conviction and labor in making the political utopia of Mao's China. Nature awakens less passion, on the other hand, in A Cheng, a lone alienated Han youth among the minorities, whose exile brought him to the remote frontier from inner Mongolia to Yun'nan.^[64]

One can extrapolate endlessly from the nature cult in many orthodox xungen works. Perhaps this romantic syndrome is a manifestation of the displaced historical desire of the cultural subject denied its agency. In this light, the craving for the sublime may be nothing more than an allegory of the reconstructed National Subject in search of metaphorical means of empowerment. Or perhaps nature as a trope simply opens up the enclosed and oppressive sociopolitical space of quotidian reality in which the postrevolutionary subject still finds him- or herself help-lessly fixed. The liberation of human beings from the politics of abstinence invariably begins with the celebration of the elemental forces in human nature. Or the worship of nature as a new religion or ethics may simply inform the imaginary filling of the nation's spiritual vacuum as it arises anew from the ashes of ideological and religious atheism at the bankruptcy of Maoism-Marxism. And finally, how can we make sense of the inherent clichés of which the root-searching romanticism is suspected—"the village is created by God, the city by human beings"—except by attributing that romanticism not to simple primitivism, as Cao Wenxuan suggests, but to the political unconscious of the bygone Yan'an idealism?

When Zhang Chengzhi spoke of the metaphor of a weather-beaten bridge that used to carry the traffic of "an idealism that the generation of our younger brothers and sons would ridicule," a bridge that "linked the past and future, the starting point of our renewed passionate quest," he was inviting the political interpretation of the romantic vision of the xungen literature.^[65] Such an interpretation is even more tantalizing in the case of Han Shaogong, who served the cause of the Revolution as a Red Guard, went to Western Hunan as a reeducated youth, and who,

according to Wang Xiaoming, clung to a keen sense of sociopolitical mission at the earlier stages of his writing career.^[66]

Yet nature certainly appeared as more than just a political symbol to those xungen authors whose exiles, whether voluntarily or involuntarily executed in the secluded and distant backwoods and hinterlands, enabled them to have a close encounter with a force that was both savage and nurturing at the same time. The hard material life in the village "molded their souls anew," but it also provided those adolescents an "ideal environment that enabled them to release their libidinal impulses."^[67] As the adopted children of nature, those homeless youths were able to find redemption in the boundless resources that a glorious sunset or a single blade of grass can provide. But the imaginary revisiting of wilderness is not simply a mindless nostalgia for an idyllic prehistorical happiness or for some bygone adolescent growing pains. Their retrospective reveling in an innocuously heroic nature is simultaneously accompanied by their disquieting memory of an aborted utopia and of their betrayal by the Revolution. On another figurative level, then, the carnivalesque return to nature is a laborious self-reflection and a poignant testimony of historical guilt. Although disguised beyond immediate recognition, this heavy-handed confessional fervor accounts for the sentimentality of some xungen works. Oftentimes their indulgence in the spiritual quest sounds as tedious and onerous as their description of the luscious landscape.

For those xungen writers of zhiqing origin, especially those who participated in the Revolution as Red Guards, the remembrance of their earlier political incarnation serves to multiply the root meaning of the term gen . The roots that they take such pains to excavate include political and aesthetic roots as well as cultural roots identifiable with the "subject of the Nation" or the "archetypal subconscious inherent in the strengthened subjective spirit of the Chinese race."^[68] What makes the discharge of the memory of Cultural Revolution in this literature different from that in the earlier genre of wounded literature is the aestheticization of the political. Paradoxically, in the case of Han Shaogong in particular, so long as political connotations of the term gen remain repressed in the literature, root-searching cannot but be turned into a contradictory sign of "uprooting." Instead of looking back at and examining the political culture that molded their utopian vision, the journey backwards leads them to ahistorical cultural myths and aesthetics. Anything but their own political roots is reckoned with in all sincerity. Once depoliticized, memory is desensitized. It is reconstructed into an

aesthetic imaginary that runs the gamut from the precarious touch of a thinned Daoist style to the episodic and miscellaneous configuration of traditional narrative (biji ti ).^[69]

Although this strategy smacked of escapism for some authors, the aestheticization of the political is considered by many as an unprecedented formal revolution to be celebrated rather than problematicized. Furthermore, one can still—indeed, one should—speak of a cultural politics underlying such a new aesthetics. That is to say, one should attribute the emergent "language consciousness" (yuyan zijue ) of the aesthetic subject as a by-product of China's postcolonial self-awareness. And yet this desire to prevail over its discursive subalternity and, in Zhang Yiwu's words, to "undermine the object-position of the Third World,"^[70] however strong, cannot trigger the making of a new aesthetic consciousness without going hand in hand with the profound national repulsion against the politicization of literature. What is thrown into the dust bin by the xungen school is not only the revolutionary rhetoric of socialist realism, but in fact, realism per se. In its place, root-searching writers make various epistemological propositions to construct a new imaginary. Li Yue calls for the return from the noumenal to the phenomenal itself (benxiang ). Li Qingxi's aesthetic self undergoes the process of self-recovery (huanyuan ) and returns to the experiential realm of immediacy: only through instantaneous communion with phenomena can cultural time and space be restored to aesthetic time and space—the zero degree, the ontological origin, which is one and the same as the void.^[71]

The xungen school's emphasis on the aesthetics of "intuition," "transcendence," "the experiential," "the immanent," and "the act of imagination" reflects the influence of the poetics of Zen and phenomenology.^[72] Ji Hongzhen characterizes such a holistic approach to literature as deeply mythological, a total rebellion against the reflectionist and even the representational poetics of realism.^[73] What emerges out of this valorization of mythopoetic truth is a new possibility for linguistic experimentation, hitherto only half accomplished by the menglong school of poetry (Misty poetry) in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It is no small wonder that Li Tuo should arrive at the insightful assessment that xungen literature is not only a successor of menglong poetry but also the immediate predecessor of experimental fiction—the consummation of the youngest generation's eventual vengeance upon the Mao Style. The intensification of xungen writers' experiment with language delivers nothing short of an enriched lyrical subject (shuqing zhuti ), which knows and can speak of

its own truth content.^[74] This subject was first assembled by the Misty poets and fully articulated by the root-searching writers, only to be dissolved again in the avant-gardist rage of the experimentalists.

This discussion of the quest for aesthetic roots brings us back to where we started: In what terms can the xungen school of writers present itself proudly as the Chinese counterpart of the magic realism of Garcia Marquez—the very avatar of the "world literature" to which all the xungen authors consciously aspire?^[75] Between Garcia Marquez and Western modernism, the choice seems clear. A return to indigenous sensibility holds the key to a simple logic at work: Discursive distinctiveness is one and the same as discursive distinction. The example of magic realism unloads many other half-truths for the Chinese writer desperately seeking for a global laureate, among which the least problematic is the prescriptive turning away from the center toward the margin—the discarding of orthodox cultural ideologies, the metaphoric foregrounding of Zen and the Dao, the staging of the mythologies of the minorities, and in short, the making of a literary discourse characterized by Li Tuo as bianyuan huayu (the discourse of the margin) posing a challenge to zhongxin huayu (the discourse of the center).^[76]

The mere recognition that the quintessence of Chinese culture can only be found "outside the norm of [China's] Central Plains" is radical enough to characterize the discourse of root-searching as marginal by intention.^[77] However, the revolt against the master narrative that xungen literature promises remains incomplete and sometimes even refined out of existence, precisely because the utopian moment of fertile self-reflection that this literature inaugurates often creates another self-sufficient cycle that recaptures the subject into a mastering theory of Nature and Culture that encircles and delimits.

Regardless of its potential to provide a critique of tradition, the xungen writers' preoccupation with reconstructing cultural myths, the "collective unconscious," and the "consciousness of a communal moral character" continually flirts with a metanarrative that privileges a cultural subject that is not only holistic but capable of appropriating the alien and the deviant.^[78] The hero inscribed in such an all-encompassing narrative is rarely genuinely intractable. Both Nature and Culture have the capacity to domesticate him (Yang Wanniu in Yuancun [The village afar]), to devour him relentlessly (Liu Cheng in Shangzhou [The Shang District]), or to incapacitate and ridicule him (Binzai in "Ba-ba-ba").^[79] The root-searching discourse is one that, in Han Shaogong's words, "can only accomplish its own self-recognition and self-consolidation through

its discovery of the referential system of the Other and by means of its subsequent appropriation and absorption of such alien elements."^[80] Contrary to what Han insists—that such a discourse does not signify self-enclosure—I want to suggest that the presence of the alien, especially when it is assimilated without a trace into the master narrative, can hardly serve as the index to the latter's open-ended nature. In fact, the tremendous appetite of xungen literature for attracting the alien and then hemming it in only reveals its invincible encircling instinct. What the literary discourse presents is nothing short of the self-enclosure of a secondary order.

Our earlier discussion of the emphasis of the xungen aesthetics on self-transcendence, namely the return to origin, further reinforces the writers' orientation to escape (or to procrastinate indefinitely about) the subject's confrontation with the real and hence to debilitate its will to resist. What root-searching literature provides in the end is an aestheticized version of the textual politics of resistance—what Li Qingxi characterizes as the transcendence of the subject beyond the confrontation of tradition and modernity.^[81] Whether the tragic hero chooses to reconcile himself or continue his battle with Nature or Culture, he emerges as a holistic subject, saturated culturally and aesthetically; but in his very susceptibility to sublimation and self-renewal, he is emptied out into an enclosed narrative space reminiscent of comic epic, where the outbound quest almost always brings the hero back unscathed to where he started. Such a discursive (as well as existential) enclosure, even though it reveals a human subject less capable of determining the course of his own life and less reliable as a "repository for ultimate epistemic authority,"^[82] continues to sustain the humanist faith in the notion of a retrievable original nature endowed with a stable core of constituting consciousness.

The norm of this subject—that it can still identify itself as the subject of a history self-conscious of its own telos—can of course be seen as arising from a utopian moment in Chinese history. The mid-1980s witnessed the apex of Chinese optimism, the catching-up craze about the Four Modernizations, and the ruling elite's rhetorical faith in political reform before the setback of Hu Yaobang's ouster in early 1987. I have no intention to rely on mechanistic causality to account for the complex sociopsychological formation of the subject in the xungen movement. One cannot, however, avoid paying attention to the intense utopian longing—the distinct epochal marker of the first half decade of the 1980s—in the discursive construction of an epistemologically centered

subject capable of remembering history (be it personal or cultural) and anticipating the future.

Experimental Fiction: The Subject Under Erasure?

This hypothesis about epochal logic directs one's interpretive gaze in an equally suggestive fashion toward the more subtle correspondence between the onset of a pessimistic mood about the much-vaunted possibility of a deep structural change in China's political and economic sectors and the theatrical entry into China's literary stage around 1987 of a group of experimentalists who smashed China's age-old humanist tradition of textual practice by exposing the subject as a fictitious construct incapable of purposeful self-narration and stripped of historical agency. Whether one interprets the experimentalists' dissolution of the stable and self-centered subject of the xungen genre as a welcome breakthrough or a cataclysmic breakdown, the new subject is neither cultural nor historical. In fact, one cannot even assume that it is human, for it is pared down to the pure position of the subject, or one might say, a mere discursive effect of the narrator. The question one is tempted to address then is, How and for what sake does this seemingly empty subject come into being?

The greatest difficulty for critics, especially for mainland Chinese critics, who wish to decipher the experimental fiction in the same way as any other literary product of the past is not their frustration with a linguistic medium stripped of all representational signs. It is their disorientation in confronting a text that removes from its practice the moment of critique and, by implication, its resistance to an external imaginary agonist.

As noted at the beginning of this chapter, the binary paradigm of resistance predetermines and is reinforced in turn by a critical exercise characteristic of modern and contemporary Chinese intellectuals and critics—a critique programmed, consciously or unconsciously, to seek for the site of contestation in a given text. It is too tantalizing for critics such as Li Tuo and Bei Dao, for whom the allegory of resistance has always formed the core of literary revolutions (or evolutions), not to interpret the emergence of the experimentalists in the same vein. Li Tuo's frequent criticism of the tyranny of the Mao Style suggests, however subtly, his belief in the revolution at the level of the signifier. He is the first literary critic who perceived the experimentalists' effort to "avoid [falling into] the prior system of signification" (xian jiegou ).^[83] Underlying Li's formula is his acute awareness of the complicity of language in

making ideology. Indeed, the struggle against Maoist ideology, and in fact, that against any ideological consciousness, be it capitalist or socialist, is to be conducted by delegitimizing the orthodox style of hegemony (the Mao Style in this case) or, put in theoretical terms, "by changing the signifier, or altering existing practices of representation."^[84]

This logic of resistance does apply to the discursive practice of the experimentalists. To a certain extent, the making of their novel textual strategy can be seen as an unconscious maneuver to inaugurate a new subjectivity that subverts the fixed and unitary subject (Liu Zaifu's aesthetic subject and the humanist xungen hero) that had emerged out of previous social and political conditions. But the subject in experimental fiction serves as an agent of praxis only in the most allegorical sense. The subject, a mere chimera in itself, is only conscious of its revolutionary form, not of its own intentions and content. A subject of intentions is indeed a far cry from what the experimentalists actually delivered: a linguistic subject-position that is fascinated with its own desire for that part of itself that language simultaneously arouses and deconstructs.

Such subjectivity, by the very fact that it is linguistic and provisional, elicits a theoretical position that finally transcends the simple logic inherent in the old-timers' critical agenda of resistance. A small cluster of avant-garde criticism with strong Lacanian overtones emerged in the late 1980s to legitimize the new fiction as a linguistic maze, a pure "energy" field and an "aesthetic game of narration" implemented by young literati devoid of the self-glorifying anxiety and crisis consciousness.^[85]

That the new subject can be emptied of any sociopolitical and historical substance and lingo poses different challenges to old-fashioned and young critics. To the former, the new subject's aphasia is symptomatic of an age that is losing its conscience to the temptations of modernization and capitalism. Insisting that the impetus of literary creativity comes from repressed sociopolitical conscience, both Liu Zaifu and Li Zehou deplore the blasphemous attempts of young writers to turn literature into "a playful game."^[86] One can imagine that a subject bare of any "sense of mission," reduced to form, and "whose meaning is canceled out" would appear inconceivably irreverent to the revolutionary generation.^[87] But the selfsame subject, who continues to subsist in the "representation of its lack,"^[88] triggers an equally disquieting crisis and raises questions of a different contestatory edge for the majority of younger theoreticians as well.

The cardinal question, Who comes after the subject is de-positioned? never really emerges from the theoreticians' ill-defined and hurried in-

quiry into the epochal classification of this alien subject. Taking the crisis of the subject as the only index to postmodernism, young critics in particular are intrigued by the imaginary spectacle of a China finally catching up with the West's most ostentatious cultural logic. The crux of the matter is thus captured in a different set of questions: is this fading subject, in one critic's words, unambiguously postmodern, or is it, as another argues, nothing more than a premodern subject-position liberated by dint of the postmodern linguistic cave-in in post-Mao China?^[89]

The controversy over Chinese postmodernism is a topic that indigenous critics feel less inclined, and arguably less theoretically equipped, to pursue than their counterparts abroad. Even as late as in 1989, the issue of postmodernism did not acquire the aura of emergency that had earlier accompanied the epochal debate over the Chinese pseudomodernists (wei xiandai pai ). Perhaps because critics and writers were still deeply engaged in the problematic of modernism, or perhaps because of the Chinese mentality of leaping forward—a self-propelling evolutionary impulse intensified by their indifference to the issues that postcolonialism addresses—the proposals and counterproposals about Chinese postmodernism in the late 1980s did not attract adequate attention or evolve into a full-fledged controversy. My own position on this subject, which I shall elaborate in the following chapter, was spelled out in reformulating the problematic of Chinese postmodernism as a pseudoproposition.

The spuriousness of such a proposition tells us much about the perverse tendency of a cultural scene that has been accustomed to privileging theory over creative writing since Mao Zedong's talks at the Yan'an Forum in 1942. The impulse to theorize in revolutionary China, even in the post-Mao era, is never innocent. It is self-conscious of its own agenda. The vanguard position that theorists have long occupied in guiding and regulating artistic activities remained in effect until the emergence of the experimentalists, whose preemptive strike against the "prioritizing of theory over literature and art" caught critics and theoreticians in disarray.^[90] For the first time in the history of modern Chinese literature, creative writers usurped the position of theorists as trendsetters. In face of this usurpation, the pseudoproposition of Chinese postmodernism cannot be taken merely as an epiphenomenon of the Chinese "leaping forward" mentality, but should also be interpreted as a strategy that theorists adopt to regain their lost ground. The label of postmodernism, however, proves to be too outlandish and unsettling even for the theorists themselves. Most critics who impose the epochal logic upon the new fiction can hardly grasp what they wish to propagate. When Zhang Yiwu

and Wang Ning, and even a theoretically-informed overseas critic such as Tang Xiaobing, speak of the relevance of postmodernity in the Chinese context, they either bypass the definition of the term altogether,^[91] bestow upon the phenomenon an exaggerated rival consciousness against modernism,^[92] or else conjure up something that is nearly indistinguishable from the poststructuralist predilection for pluralism.^[93]

I suggest that the most productive way of examining contemporary Chinese cultural logic is to retrieve the issues hidden beneath the camouflage of pseudopropositions such as postmodernism, Orientalism, or civil society. The one problematic that twentieth-century China has been preoccupied with, albeit with inadequate theoretical awareness, is that of its own historical and cultural subjectivity. This is the subtext of the debate over Chinese modernism and the inquiry made by the young proponents of postmodernism. The terms of debate over the experimental fiction should thus be reformulated. The issue at hand is certainly not whether China is capable of producing postmodernist aesthetics, but rather how the subject (if there is one) is reinscribed in the new fiction.

To those Chinese critics who insist that the experimentalists deliver a subject that is decentered and disseminated into a postmodern simulacrum, Zhang Xudong's one-liner—"This linguistic maze delivers not the end, but rather the inauguration of the self"—poses a defiant challenge.^[94] It calls into question the very proposition that Chinese literature has now crossed the threshold of postmodernism that is marked by the liquidation of the subject. The ideological implications underlying Zhang Xudong's position are manifold. It introduces a conscious effort on the part of the young generation of elite critics to reconstruct a cultural subjectivity of China that can stand on its own ground and on its own terms. Zhang's anxiety to locate the agency of change from within by returning China from the global to its local context, a problematic crystallized in Gan Yang's proposal of modernity versus tradition, provides us with a different explanatory paradigm when we examine the new fiction.^[95]

The role of memory, history, and temporality (issues that postmodern theory shoves aside), which forms the relatively stable core of the subject, are indigenous categories with which the experimentalists love to toy with deceptive lightheartedness. Each of the three leading experimentalists—Ge Fei, Yu Hua, and Su Tong—eventually offers his own storytelling of history as the "textual unconscious" (wenbenzhong de wuyishi ),^[96] following upon their sardonic attempt to discredit the authenticity of historical consciousness. Although it is fair to say that all

experimentalists share the conviction that subjectivity is always a product of the symbolic in an instance of discourse (here the Lacanian comparison seems irresistible), Ge Fei's experiment with the chimerical reconstruction of memory, Yu Hua's laborious reproduction of the simulacrum of fictive time, and the Su Tong narrator's compulsive urge to fill up the lacuna at catalytic discursive points of departure (for example, "I am the son of my father") all contradict the Chinese "post-modernist" critics' hypothesis that history has given way to poetry and time to space in the new fiction.^[97] In Su Tong in particular we witness the intensification of the spatial memory that root-searching writers explore with such nostalgia. The difference lies in the shifting of emphasis from the temporality that has been traditionally interpreted as rooted in the subject to a temporality that is no longer materialized as flow but self-conscious of its own artificiality because it is now reconstructed by the narrator as a pure storytelling device.

What is at issue here is not whether the experimentalists have scattered history to the winds, but how they rewrote the terms by which the previous generation of revolutionaries inscribed the history of the Cultural Revolution.^[98] The young generation's challenge to their predecessors' simple binary paradigm of history and fiction certainly unnerved those in whose memories the symbolism of the Revolution still held a religious, if painful, place. The experimentalists' reinvention of the Cultural Revolution desacralizes it as an ambivalent construct that is both historical and fictional, tragic and absurd, profound and superficial. This is an insight that the actual participants of the Revolution and its victims—including writers of the wounded literature and literature of retrospection—were incapable of generating. The experimentalists are able to desensitize the Revolution and turn it into an innocuous, albeit conflict-ridden, signifier all the more easily insofar as they are being swallowed up in an existential dilemma of a different order. It is here that the importance of generational logic has to be taken into account when one discusses the experimentalists vis-à-vis the xungen, xiandai pai , and even the writers during the early post-Mao era. The dilemma that the experimentalists (and the heroes they depict) faced on the eve of the Tian'anmen Square crackdown—"Perhaps we have nothing, and perhaps we have everything"—is less an epochal attitude than an emotional plight characteristic of the postrevolutionary generation.^[99]

This dilemma leads to a schizophrenic split between desire and action and between the imaginary and the real. A "tremendous chasm" opens up between the "condition of [one's material] existence and spiritual

quest": "On the one hand, they [the experimentalists] indulge in the making of transcendental visions and fiction; yet they cannot but lead an extremely mundane existence on the other. The highest degree of spiritual fulfillment in contrast to extreme material deprivation often pushes them to the brink of self-fragmentation."^[100]

This is a generation that "gallops freely in the realm of ideas but feels constrained and paralyzed in action"—a subject-position that is not only saturated with but also inaugurated by chimerical desires ("we have everything").^[101] This position is at the same time constructed by and made available only at the moment of its accession to the language of desire. It experiences its own emptiness ("we have nothing"), or perhaps even more precisely its own impotence, before its entry into the linguistic order and shortly after initial penetration is accomplished. Perhaps we can recapitulate the narrator-subject's simultaneous self-empowerment and paradoxical atrophy in sociopolitical reality by inverting Fredric Jameson's logic: In the late eighties in China, there has been a mutation in the subject unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent mutation in the object.^[102] China on the eve of June 4, 1989, certainly provided a powerful illustration of an indulgence in the mutation of the imaginary. But the first shot fired at the square should revitalize the cliché—the real can be upstaged only for a fleeting moment before it returns to annihilate the imaginary with a vengeance.

The mutation of the subject in the late 1980s took various twists and turns before the climactic intervention from above. Not the least treacherous and insinuating was the experimentalists' carnivalesque self-exile in the imaginary, a realm indistinguishable from the dream state and mirage (Ge Fei and Sun Ganlu), the hallucinatory (Yu Hua), the psychic ward (Can Xue), or the fabulous and fantastic (Ma Yuan). The solipsistic space mapped out in the new fiction canceled out any possible contact with the real and the intersubjective. But paradoxically, this space of pure fiction could brag shamelessly of being "more authentic than the real."^[103] Or one might qualify this statement by saying that "readers can certainly be sure that this [fiction] is fictional, but they have no way of proving that it is fictitious."^[104] It is thus truly appropriate for one critic to claim that the greatest achievement of the experimentalists resides in their separation of "language" from "reality" and in their bestowing upon each other its own separate poetic jurisdiction.^[105]

However, the collapse of the old metonymic formula of "language-representation-reality" in the new fiction does not mean that the subject that emerged out of the new imaginary is nothing but a linguistic

scarecrow. Although the experimentalists privilege the new fictional subject as a linguistic construct free of content, the new fiction forms a genre not merely as a result of the writers' shared discursive practice.^[106] One can enumerate common thematic interests that all experimentalists share such as the legendary, "the dilapidated spectacle of History," violent death, an unresolved emotional complex involving the father, the paralogic of coincidence, and, not the least important, a sadistic urge to disembowel the human body (especially a beautiful female body).^[107] The emergence of this thematic cluster is partially accounted for by the experimentalists' access to, and perhaps their conscious or unconscious imitation of, each other's works. This self-referential quality of the new fiction tends to coagulate its generic logic irrevocably and appears as an ominous sign of reification to which the experimentalists are no less prone than their less adventurous literary predecessors.

Whatever our verdict on whether the experimentalists' subject has been dismissed, retained, or simply disappeared into a potent signifier in the new fiction, this fuzzy subject bears little resemblance to Liu Zaifu's autonomous subject. What we have here are two extreme attempts to romance and authenticate a subject that has been embedded in false consciousness. For Liu Zaifu, the retrieval of lost innocence from the deceitful (and self-delusive?) and irrational political subject is guaranteed by the enthroning of an aesthetically flawless subject, for whom truth and rationality are not only identical but fully intelligible and transparent. In contrast, the experimentalists' quest of authenticity seems effortless but no less earnest. The romance of Liu Zaifu's wholesome subject is replaced by that of a subject without consciousness and sometimes even without voice. But precisely because of its unstable position in the adventitious chain of discourse, and because of the breakdown of its capacity for retrospective totalization, this subject—only a moment in discourse—is better equipped to withstand the enclosure of reification. Perhaps it is on this ground that one can justify Yu Hua's claim that all his writings are "made to come closer to authenticity."^[108] The call for authenticity from an experimentalist, however, should not be confused with Liu Zaifu's search for the truth content of the subject. Liu, at any rate, is incapable of appreciating the paralogic that one can only enter the door of authenticity through the "deceptive form" (xuwei de xingshi ).^[109] The authenticity with which the experimentalists are captivated is a form without content, completely unpredictable and unintentional before its momentary materialization in the discursive act. And what better corresponds to such a form of authenticity than an unstructured subject free

of all references (except for self-references), constraints, and commitments, who is, not surprisingly, an ultimate flirt perpetually available for romance?

But, one may ask, who is truly capable of writing in the name of romance but the xungen writers who denounce such triflings as a sham and shame? Who better deserves the designation of romantic hero than those who are in search of "the soul of the nation" (minzu zhi hun )?^[110] This is the crowning romance of all romances, the high-minded affair with the cultural subject. "Where did I come from? Whither would I go? And who am I?"^[111] The "I" in Zheng Yi's pious invocation to the mythical land in his reveries is no longer a simple human incarnation but the invincible and omniscient cultural and national subject, or one might say, a self-conscious subject narrating the epic of the nation and its history. So intense is the epic consciousness that the xungen writers are doomed to cultivate, that the literature truly deserves the designation of metafiction (yuanxiaoshuo ) much more than its impious successor, the experimental fiction.^[112]

Eventually, it is the emergence of this problematic of the cultural subject that distinguishes the decade of the 1980s from the May Fourth period of the 1920s and 1930s. The reenactment of the debate of tradition versus modernity during the 1980s can no longer be easily appropriated into the sociopolitical agenda aimed at bailing China out of "semi-feudalism and semi-colonialism" that Mao Zedong and the May Fourth generation once propagated with such compelling passion.^[113] The new problematic of cultural subjectivity predictably calls for the revisiting of the earlier debate. But the terms of the debate are reformulated in such a fashion that what is at stake now is no longer simpleminded patriotism or even the ever elusive agenda of enlightenment. The drive for reinventing China that underlies the rationale of the xungen literature is symptomatic of an epistemological reorientation that neither endorses nor condemns tradition or modernity.

The epistemological turn toward a hermeneutic understanding of the claims of the present upon the cultural past (or vice versa) is a vision growing out of a more leisurely paced cultural introspection than that which the previous revolutionary generation could afford. What seemed unthinkable during the May Fourth period looms large during the 1980s in a utopian vision of a different order—the palpable possibility of an alternative modern, not a mere reproduction of Western modernity. It is only in this context of utopianism that one can comprehend the defiant accent in Zhang Xudong's statement: "It is the natural-historical langue

of Chinese society that is determining the cultural parole of any invading discourses."^[114] There is, of course, much to critique about the Chinese project of subject formation cast in terms of a potentially sinocentric (re)turn. However, notwithstanding its susceptibility to reverse Orientalism, nativist romanticization remains one of the most effective, albeit dangerous, means of resisting the infiltration of postcolonial discourse.

To conclude this exhibition of romantic impulses that characterize projects of subject formation, I note that all three specimens—Liu Zaifu's theory of the subject, the root-searching literature, and the experimental fiction—have underscored with various depths of sincerity the zeitgeist of the 1980s in post-Mao China. In the 1990s, the ideological labor of subject formation has increasingly lost its aura of urgent appeal in the domain of public culture and has receded further into the enclave of elite culture, as a professional activity monopolized by academics. A once potent issue is now undergoing reification. One may also add that there is in all three romances something that the materialist post-Tian'anmen generation of the nineties would want to ridicule. Neither the heroic (Liu Zaifu and xungen literature) nor the mock-heroic (the experimentalists) are able to seduce a generation for whom lifestyle rather than sentiment counts. Eventually it is not authoritarianism but commodity fetishism that can kill romance with a sneer and use its corpse for a sales pitch. All the blood shed at the square and all the king's men cannot reverse the course of history. Perhaps China is now entering the age of postmodernity after all. The irony of it!