dimanche 4 mai 2008

Call of the Wild

By PANKAJ MISHRA
The New York Times : May 4, 2008


WOLF TOTEM
By Jiang Rong.
Translated by Howard Goldblatt.
527 pp. The Penguin Press. $26.95.




Lu Xun, China’s most revered modern writer, was a student of medicine in 1906 when he saw a lantern slide of Japanese soldiers decapitating a Chinese prisoner. It was a particularly low moment in China’s national self-esteem, and what appalled Lu Xun most was the passivity of the Chinese spectators. “The people,” he later wrote, “of a weak, backward country, even though they may enjoy sturdy health, can only serve as the senseless material of and audience for public executions.” Convinced that art could goad his compatriots toward “spiritual transformation,” he presented them in his first story, “The Diary of a Madman,” as hypocritical cannibals. His later work abounded in such pitiless depictions, inaugurating a modern Chinese literature marked by what the critic C. T. Hsia called “an obsessive concern with China as a nation afflicted with a spiritual disease and therefore unable to strengthen itself or change its set ways of inhumanity.”

Certainly history imposed this tormented self-reckoning on Chinese writers. For much of the 20th century, their country suffered prodigious violence and social trauma: millions were consumed by the civil war, the Japanese invasion and Maoist disasters like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. In comparison, China in the last decade has known extraordinary stability. The middle class in particular has enjoyed undreamed of affluence — so much so that the great popularity of Jiang Rong’s long, bleak novel about an obscure province inhabited by an ethnic minority is deeply intriguing.
Set during the Cultural Revolution, “Wolf Totem” describes the education of an intellectual from China’s majority Han community living with nomadic herders in the grasslands of Inner Mongolia. Not much was known about the pseudonymous author on the book’s first publication in 2004; only last year was Jiang Rong revealed as Lu Jiamin, a recently retired professor at one of Beijing’s most prestigious academic institutions. It is also now clear that he was one of the former Red Guards who, following Mao’s advice that urban intellectuals re-educate themselves in the countryside, traveled to Inner Mongolia in the late 1960s.
Jiang Rong, who invokes Lu Xun’s ambition to transform “national character,” clearly wishes to use a fictionalized account of his life with the nomads to advance an argument. But the author’s preoccupation with his Chinese audience may not be the only source of frustration for foreign readers of Howard Goldblatt’s generally fluent translation. Jiang Rong seems to have barely attempted to transmute his experiences and epiphanies into fiction; his book reads like an extended polemic about the superiority of nomadic people and the dangers of a triumphant but brutishly ignorant modernity.
The pastoral education of the protagonist, Chen Zhen, proceeds through an awkwardly paced narrative full of set-piece didacticism. Chen learns about the delicate balance of power between nomads and animals on the grasslands; he even raises a wolf cub. But he never assumes much complexity and density as a character. Unlike most memoirs of the Cultural Revolution, “Wolf Totem” omits significant emotional as well as political detail. Out in the Mongolian fastness, Chen scarcely remembers his past life.
Denied a populous human setting with its diversity of wills and motives, a narrative like this can be quickened by a feeling for mood and landscape. And, especially in its depictions of wolf hunts, Jiang Rong’s novel succeeds in conveying the romantic desolation of the Mongolian steppes. This seems, though, to be due more to his almost photographic memory than to any gift for evocative narration. In the end, “Wolf Totem” engages the foreign reader only in its attempts to diagnose the spiritual malaise of contemporary China.
The main line of inquiry is announced on the very first page when a suitably old and wise Mongol tells Chen: “You’re like a sheep. A fear of wolves is in your Chinese bones.” As if on cue, Chen is soon “saddened to have been born into a line of farmers” who have “become as timid as sheep after dozens, even hundreds, of generations of being raised on grains and greens, the products of farming communities; they had lost the virility of their nomadic ancestors.”

Jiang Rong tries to defuse Chinese pride in their splendid agrarian civilization, even disparaging Confucius, now belatedly embraced by the Communist Party. There are laments about how timid Chinese peasants fell prey to canny Westerners who, as “descendants of barbarian, nomadic tribes such as the Teutons and the Anglo-Saxons,” have the blood of wolves in their veins. Chen concludes that the Chinese “are in desperate need of a transfusion” of such “vigorous, unrestrained blood.” This sort of parade-ground bellicosity echoes the rhetoric of China’s neocon intellectuals, eager to see their country beat the West at its own game. Yet Jiang Rong, who was jailed as a democracy activist after the Tiananmen Square massacre, also mentions “freedom and popular elections” as among the salutary “traditions and habits” contemporary Westerners inherited from their nomadic ancestors.

As the novel glacially proceeds, however, paeans to the vigorous West are supplanted by warnings about China’s ecological balance, threatened by human greed and hubris. As the old Mongol puts it, “the grassland is a big life”; if it dies, “so will the cows and sheep and horses, as well as the wolves and the people, all the little lives. Then not even the Great Wall, not even Beijing will be protected.” The real heart of Jiang Rong’s vast pedagogical project comes into view as settlers arrive on the grassland. Chen, who has declared his opposition to Han chauvinism, is forced to accompany his compatriots on a wolf hunt. He also witnesses the casual brutality of men forcing marmots from their dens with firecrackers. Toward the end, he must kill his wounded pet wolf, and not even Jiang Rong’s intrusive commentary (“he felt he’d developed a spiritual and emotional dependence on the cub”) deprives the scene of a certain tragic power.
In an epilogue, Chen travels from Beijing to a grassland that, 30 years later, has been brutally cleansed of wolves. China’s swift and reckless modernization has fulfilled the old Mongol’s grim prophecies as dust storms from an encroaching desert periodically smother Beijing. Jiang Rong now uses Chen to make his strongest protest against Han Chinese treatment of other ethnic groups. “Current government policy has developed to the stage of ‘one country, two systems,’ ” he says, referring to Chinese control of capitalist Hong Kong, “but deeply rooted in the Han consciousness is still ‘many areas, one system.’ ”
It seems strange that the Chinese censors missed this indictment of Han imperialism. It’s even more remarkable that a novel so relentlessly gloomy and ponderously didactic has become a huge best seller, second in circulation only to Mao’s little red book. This success may be due, at least in part, to its exhortations to the Chinese to imitate the go-getting spirit of the West. However, “Wolf Totem” also captures a widespread Chinese anxiety about their country’s growing physical and moral squalor as millions abandon the countryside in search of a middle-class lifestyle that cannot be environmentally sustained. The novel’s literary claims are shaky; and Jiang Rong’s apparent wish to transform China’s national character through a benign conservationism is compromised by his boy-scoutish arguments for toughness. Yet few books about today’s China can match “Wolf Totem” as a guide to the troubled self-images of so many of its people as they stumble, grappling with some inconvenient truths of their own, into modernity.

Pankaj Mishra’s most recent book is “Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond.”

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