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.