In the 1990s, literary works, be they poetry or even prose fiction, are patently confronted with a readership which has become complex in its thinking and richly creative. This has made what we call "reading," whether in theory or in practice, into another level of "creative writing" activity.

Author:David Wang Publisher:Rye Field Price:NT$320.

Reading is writing in the soul:

There is no doubt that for the Chinese novel, David Wang is an interpretative reader/writer with characteristically "complex thinkirg." Looking at his string of works on the Chinese novel from his first collection of critical articles--From Liu E to Wang Chen-he--to Novel China, David Wang is also a researcher/critic of Chinese fiction with "great ambitions."

David Wang's "complex thinking" as a reader/ writer and his "great ambitions" as a researcher/ critic are displayed to the full in this new book entitled Novel China, which discusses the Chinese language novel from the late Ching Dynasty to the present day. The title itself shows something of the flexibility of the Chinese language, particularly of its word classes, and its potential within and without the established rules of grammar for expressing "ambiguity" and subtle shifts of implication whose meaning is hard to pin down. And this is the theoretical basis behind the "complex thinking" with which this book interprets the works it discusses. This is why just for the four Chinese characters of the title, David Wang devotes three pages of his preface to pointing out at least three levels of meaning, and if we ourselves follow on a little in the same vein, it is not hard to find a fourth, a fifth, or even more possible shades of meaning.

For instance, Wang takes pains to stress how "Novel" stands above "China," placing "Novel" "higher" than "China" (or "before" it, depending on whether the characters are written vertically or horizontally). But just as is the case in the [Chinese] title of the present review, the two characters hsiao shuo ("novel"--literally "small speak") can also become a verb phrase ("speak about on a small scale"), thus losing their integrity as an independent term, and what they then seem to highlight is "China's" unshakable and sacrosanct ontological status, thereby reflecting how Wang as a researcher/critic of fiction is not willing to be limited to the narrow field of the novel, but cherishes the great ambition of showing concern for "China"!

Of course this kind of title with its paradoxical twists of meaning is not just a word game for the sake of being different. In fact, it not only reflects a high degree of awareness of language's intrinsic power to denote meaning, but actually also betrays a deep understanding of the cognitive "insight and blindness" inevitably inherent in all discourse and all linguistic expression. This is why in one and the same text, a reader possessed of "complex thinking" will not only experience "insight" into the author's implicit meaning but will also read into the explicit text other implicit meanings to which the author is "blind." This is what makes it possible to read/write such resounding symphonies of overt and covert complex meaning and humor not only into poetry and fiction, which make use of "abstract" expressive techniques such as form and sound or people and events (whose meaning is so hard to clearly define), but even into works of literary criticism.

Reading in many shades of meaning:

Perhaps it is the essays in the fifth section of this book, New Vistas for Criticism, which as well as each presenting its overall view and thesis, also most clearly display, in their comments on isolated words and phrases from the individual works discussed, the distinctive "complex thinking" of the reader which runs through the whole book. For instance, in the article The Jeerers at the New Westernism, the author compares two issues of the magazine Literary Criticism (published by mainland China's Academy of Social Sciences) which appeared before and after the June 4th Tiananmen Square massacre, saying "but the two articles I find most interesting are Chen Hui's On Decadence in Western Modernism and Jiang Kongyang's On Ugliness." In Chen's article, writes Wang, "the main point is the modernists' (and post-modernists') inevitable decadence" and "Chen further analyzes the causes of the modernists' decadence as: 1) the death of God, which gives rise to 'a crisis of religion'; 2) the renunciation of history, with creates a 'dehumanizing' tendency; and 3) the 'amorality' and 'antipoetics' following the decline of ethics and aesthetics." But apart from this summary, David Wang presents the following interpretative reading:

"But the real paradox of the article is that Chen Hui's description of the modernists' decadence, far from accurately reflecting the real face of modernism, actually strikes straight to the heart of Maoist literature and art. For the growth of modern consciousness in contemporary Chinese literature is undoubtedly influenced by the eastward spread of Western thought, yet looking back on the history of China itself we have to say that the Chinese Communists" god--Mao Zedong--is dead, and it is this that has thrown the cult of Mao into crisis; it is the Communists' totalitarianism which has renounced history, creating a dehumanizing trend; and it is the decline in the Chinese Communists' exposition of ethics and aesthetics which is the main cause behind society's 'amorality' and literature and art's' antipoetics.'" He then also states that "through his investigation of the Western tradition of the aesthetics of ugliness, Jiang reminds us that there is also a somewhat comparable element in Chinese literature," and points out that "a person who can describe ugliness is not an ugly person, but a person doing battle with ugliness." His final comment is:

"When describing the uncanny, terror and suffering, the author who walks in the company of ugliness is looking for chances to redeem beauty, not predicting beauty's inevitable capitulation. Is the aesthetics of modernism one which proclaims ugliness? If it really is, how should we respond? Jiang's discussion is cautious, but today, when Mao Zedong's idea of 'beauty' has dominated mainland China for forty years, the time really is ripe for promoting a little 'ugliness.'"

This commentary not only pithily illuminates the author's meaning, its echoes long reverberate, and the commentator's deep concern for China brims out from his words.

In the two examples quoted above, it is mainly by bringing the meaning constructed using language into the broader context arising out of the discourse that this kind of "complex thinking" by the reader forces into the open another level (or levels) of meaning within this special context, and makes these two (or more) levels of meaning surge up in turn, sounding both in competition and in chorus.

Combining traditional Eastern research with Western theory:

This style of interpretative reading imbues David Wang's criticism with originality, insight, rich subtlety and the ability to startle; especially when directly discussing individual works, his writing is full of unexpected twists and turns, wit and humor. But even more importantly, it provides a space it which his many years of research into the tradition of Chinese contemporary fiction and his rich knowledge of contemporary Western literary and cultural theory can be intimately combined and fully developed. For apart from the historical space-time and special political and social circumstances constituted by the discourse, the "special context" which he has chosen is on the one hand inherent in the very phylogeny of the sub-genres within modern fiction, and on the other hand is a basic turning point in the development of Chinese and Western culture, highlighted by all the theories of contemporary culture and literature.

For this reason the many arguments expounded in Novel China are mainly presented through analogy and dialogue between large numbers of works, and concentrate on probing the emergence, development and current state of several genre traditions within recent and modern Chinese fiction, including political, local-flavor, overseas student life, science fiction, erotic, feminine consciousness, and others, along with these genres' aesthetic, social, and cultural implications.

In his choice of these genres, and by defining his period of investigation at the late Ching to the present day, David Wang not only objectively grasps how the basic distinctive essence of the contemporary and modern Chinese novel is in the emergence and evolution of the modern consciousness which is unfolded within its pages; in fact he also displays how his subjective concern is the entire flood torrent of China's headlong progress toward modernization.

Faced with a historical and culturat situation of apparent "change and decay in all around," his section title From Fin-de-siecle to Fin-de-siecle, and the Four Predictions which he goes so far as to put forward, are actually a sign of his deep sense of sympathy for the time and concern for his faraway country, although this is not necessarily expressed in gloomy, sorrowful language.

Predictions of chaos for the turn of the century:

In his book Wang unequivocally points out how just as in the chaos towards the end of the Han dynasty, when barbarian invaders rode through the land with "men's heads swinging from their bridles and women riding behind," the tossing aside of men's heads and the control and exploitation of the female body are the veiled cultural tokens with which in novels (and even films) modern consciousness faces the influx of Western thought and visualizes "China." This not only proclaims the repeated shattering over the last hundred years of the myth reconstructed through reform and revolution, and tolls the final death-knell of traditional rational Confucian culture; it also announces the rise of, and man's slide into, an all-embracing new sensualist culture.

"Opening the book to read under the flying eaves," one wonders whether, if we find only such strange utterances, such a lyric history, we can do no more than force a smile at the "flirtation with China"? Or even abandon ourselves to the pleasures of "erotica" old and new? Are Wang's four predictions words to mark the end of the world, or words to shake the world awake? What David Wang has thrown out to present-day novelists and to the people of present-day "China" is a string of enormous "question marks." But perhaps this is just where his "great ambition" and the motivation for his great efforts lie.

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Author:David Wang

Publisher:Rye Field

Price:NT$320