James Pangilinan
ALIT 233
The literature of Chen Ran has been deemed by many critics as experimental, feminist, exploratory of human nature and marginal psychological states (bianyuan xinli), avant-garde. Her works often are polysemous, multivocal, practicing their own multivalence, and open to external criticism from all sources- state, professional literary, academic, and moralist. Formally, her work reflects influences from western modernists such as Kafka and Woolf. Ideal-wise, her text’s thoughts draw from classical Chinese philosophy to Freud to contemporary critical theory, particularly feminist and gender theories. Needless to say, her works exhibit complexity and depth that play nicely to particular tastes but perplex many, critics and censures included.
This leaves the task of understanding her writings to critics of the moment who stay open to transnational, panhistoric trends. As a critic herself, she actively engages in discourses regarding her own work. Prominent in her critical project and literary work is her theory of gender-transcendent consciousness (chaoxingbie yishi), which she outlined in her 1994 talk in
Her definition… in fact straddles two distinct notions. One is the notion of transcending gender, which refers specifically to the ability to choose a partner of one’s own biological sex instead of being limited by the social imperative to procreate and hence, to choose a partner of the opposite sex. The other is the notion of a radical indifference to anatomical sex and social gender that downplays sex/gender altogether” (203).
For her, heterosexuality in its “always already” praxis and consciousness restricts the individual too greatly to the point of infelicitous disharmony, resulting from socialization’s production of negative normative masculinity. This latter premise leads her to idealize lesbianism for its offerings of “real communication” and “mutual understanding,” ideals often more significant than the “essential utilitarianism” of normative reproductive economies (203). In other words, what she values most greatly is love irrespective of sex or gender, just as she claims (her) art exists as and articulates.
In addition to her autocriticism, which grants insights to some extent, others have been busied by her writing. Wendy Larson has argues Chen Ran, while a professed writer in modernist traditions, still engages in contemporary postmodern literary discourses. This should come to no surprise upon considering that some of her masters such as Kafka and Borges, who wrote in experimental ways, as did Joyce, could be defined as antecedents and innovators in postmodernity. However, even accounting this, interpretation of their works as well as Chen Ran’s remain central to this claim. And looking at Chen’s case more closely, as Larson claims, her version merely fashions an awkward postmodernism (i.e., a Chinese simulacrum of western-originating postmodernity, where “Chinese culture still finds itself trapped in interpretations that impose on it older ideas of cultural essence and authenticity,” thereby making pure assimilation of that Other doctrine unfeasible). In practice, Chen’s work is “aware of the imported nature” and its consequent distance from totalization. Instead, it parades “before us semiparodic references to the contexts and paradigms of postmodernity, often to the point of absurdity” (Larson 213). Following suit, Chen creates narratives, which often include (quasi-) postmodern tropes and techniques, uniquely acknowledge and participate in the literary present.
“Breaking Open” offers a pivotal point in her oeuvre, because of its departure from her usual prior “intensely melancholic” thematics. As an exception it voices more optimism and ends more affirmatively, but like her other work this piece is equally experimental, actively pursuing of her theory, and awkwardly postmodern. While critics have commented on this particular story’s importance regarding gender-transcendent consciousness, they by this tendentious reading miss many of its highlights in form and ideas. In its special handling of space, time, and ideas, “Breaking Open” articulates in awkward postmodern fashion its author’s problematic theoretical vision, and thereby signifying more than even former interpretations.
A straight reading founded along lines of Chen’s gender-transcendent consciousness claims that the story’s couple of
In addition to the representational and its epistemological space, Chen’s text explores the diasporic sense of home- or homelessness. Of its many experimental features, its story space, neither solely representational nor transcendent, is composed as restricted and abstracted. Directly accountable, the female couple only occupies four physical spaces: the airport waiting room,
However, space does accrue significance, particularly in relation to historical narratives (discourses) and the postmodern present. The story’s formal exposition can be limited to the first few paragraphs. Space-wise, characterization of the airport’s waiting room immediately addresses the main couple’s alienation from the babble and crowd (i.e., their need for their own space), the prevalence of cross-gender dissatisfaction, socialization’s capitalist material basis, and a concept of time- to be returned to later. This room is revisited throughout the text, to the points of doubling, tripling… over its significances of dislocation and existential space’s uniformity, therefore space’s banality.
An important dichotomy between
Chen, through the narrator’s view, offers a surreal, postmodern perception of urban space. In order for her to experience the city of N, she must expose herself to the surges of frenetic energy, noise oppressively set in harmony by a “male rhythm that has become a public standard,” architecture in the extreme, white noise- or- in a word, a labyrinth of “contradictory feeling in which there is ambiguity and resistance at the same time” (70). As a result, she lacks deep feelings for her hometown. To her, N like its signifier is empty and could only be lived as a consumer experience: “It is a bottle of perfume, brand Love, stored away for the longest time, which, with increased age and experience, has completely lost its potency. It is a person waiting without hope” (61). Yet, against her better judgment, despite absence of feeling, she resolves, in facticity, to attempt to inhabit this superficial space by carving out their third space: “My mother is always awaiting for me with her door ajar. It is decreed by fate that I cannot sever my ties with this city” (71). Like in preceding narratives, the city becomes common signifier or discursive metaphor for explaining
Beyond the historical dichotomy of rural-urban space, this diasporic sense of home finds its greatest signifier in the airplane’s metaphoric space. In accordance with the early twentieth century modernizing discourse, this transportation technology and physical mechanism embodied
As traveling requires traversable space, it also assumes time expenditure and change. The plane not only invariably imposes an infinite, differential configuration of space but also it implies resetting temporal ordering, in a similar historical (or social) manner as well as existentially (or as an individual). Again the first paragraph offers pan-narrative input; besides purchasing amnesty, the crowd engages in a mad rush to board, in a manner that contrasts distinctively from the main couple (49). This first instance signals the variability of time. Three times exist in this passage: the crowd’s, the plane’s and the couple’s. As well as these, historical time, namely that of
Time is less philosophically dealt with throughout its narrative. Preoccupation with the historical present, with its urgency, and its potential- thematically set in the story’s exposition- combines with a consciousness of the relatively recent history through Chen’s frequent use of situational encountering. This technique, where the couple seek out or chance upon situations with implicit historical references or explicit allusion, enables her narrative to participate in generational, retrospective discourses, and this inscribed consciousness that usually includes critiques, thereby qualifying her writing as actively responsible. Concretely, one situation of this form is born out of the couple’s impulse to visit Zhazidong Prison, the place where Sister Jiang, an idealist fighter against the Nationalists, was incarcerated. This occasion that resonates deeply with nationalistic as well as state feminist sentiments is commented on as not just through a pure expositional account, rather the situation’s light is refracted through feminist concerns, spatio-temporal distance manifest as disgust, and the couple’s romantic cares; making the situation an encounter. In other words, both the discursive experience and immediate situation qualify the experiential totality. For example, they become befuddled by the question of justice:
“With all our acute intelligence, we could not grasp the dialectical relationship between human nature and justice. We could not understand how two words like ‘honorable’ and ‘ridiculous’…could now come within an inch of each other” (63).
What they question are the Maoist nationalistic narratives that before seized hold of Chinese citizenry but now must cope with the past. Those narratives, now discredited, perplex persons of the present; that is, personal narratives play into experiencing past narratives. Furthermore, they are reinscribed in these personal ones but in ways productive of a historical account. This strikes an (awkward) postmodern chord, where history no longer is a total account, rather it reads as a totalizing metanarrative, a representation framed by/in the situational circumstance.
Personal situational encountering reoccurs throughout “Breaking Open”; there are talks of qipaos, Mei Yanfeng and bodily skylines, Neil Armstrong, and President Nixon. This latter example offers another striking example of an awkward, playful postmodernity present in Chen’s writing. Humorous shock value is composed through withholdedly telling an anecdote about Nixon. First mention comes before the narrator’s expressed intention of creating “Breaking Open,” their women’s association, and continues after this brief but important diegetic information. Chen’s narration cuts back to this semihistorical turned personal account of her relation to a generation. Besides its comedy, what is interesting is Chen’s use of celebrity as point of departure for her addressing history. One receives the feeling that while not modernist in future orientation- “An old clock hangs on the wall. She [Yunnan] is reluctant as usual to wind it up, as if she did not believe in time and in the future”- an apprehension, and therefore critical distance, in perceiving the past exists (56). For her, which Chen executes through a shift to third-person narration, looking at the past, both with its oppressive childhood home setting and its revolutionary ideological excess, requires associative use of the present-day signifier of celebrity. Effectually, the meaning and value of the signified is lost to semiotic play: in sum, this use of surface replaces deep involvement with the past.
Engagement with the past, an ineluctable factor or a priori in all cultural production, manifests itself in the gender-transcendent dream sequence through its inclusion of Yunnan’s mother. A special relationship is shared between the narrator and this maternal figure. Regarding history, it maintains partial linear continuity by allowing an intimacy and exchange across generational gaps of experience. This bond, according to Sieber, furthermore produces and constitutes maternal approval between mother and daughter, thus dissolving any psychological hang-ups or complexes that posit conflicting interests (21). She also proposes that maternal wholehearted approval contrasts with former narratives’ aggrieved breaking of mother-daughter links experienced during the Republican period. The product of this emotionally, intellectually, historically reconstructed bond is gender transcendent female self-determination; mothers and daughters and lesbian lovers unite.
With maternal sanction, Chen’s concept of gender-transcendent consciousness is not yet fully a carving out from former of a new ideal, actual, temporal space. This (re)configured space finds again ample articulation in the airplane. In a comic compromise, reflecting a deferral of meaning and distance of idea systems (awkward postmodernism), the narrator invokes an ideal of gender illusion in relation to sexual difference:
“I am not using the restroom in the sky. Up there one is too close to God; earthly matters- regardless whether they concern us women or them men, especially everything connected to the sex organs- are best taken care of on the ground, because God has no sex, and we should not disturb such a being” (58).
Chen uses this to express her ideal of gender/sex difference erasure, or irrelevance. She continues when she discusses the Edenic myth of human origin. In the former, actual spatial elevation, mechanically enabled by the plane- a sort of existential metaphor- suggests the earthliness of sexual/gender difference. And in the latter, in the narrator’s reflection on origin as a representation, she denies reproductive economy, the procreation drive. Both in Christian and existentialist terms, this escape from the fall in the worldly (or) quotidian affords for self-determinacy/ salvation. These concurrent soundings, applied by Chen Ran, afford gender-transcendent consciousness.
As Sieber and Sang argue, this theory that Chen puts forth in her criticism and fiction, possesses its own theoretical limitations through irremediable self-contradiction. Simultaneous to advocating genderless love and downplaying of the social imperative to procreate she idealizes lesbian sexuality and love. In “Breaking Open” her characters frequently recall or meditate on masculinity, proffering negative examples, such as their assessments of murderous male poets, false male intellectuals, and -most facetiously- punctuation-mark-named dogs engaged in power contestation embodied in their romantic intrigue. As concomitant to this, idealization of their self-constructed space, love, and sisterhood, reiterated in their affirmations of love, is inscribed plentifully throughout the text’s body. Herein lies the paradox of Chen’s theory, as Sieber words it: “a desire to transcend gender difference and desire to imprint that transcendence with female specificity” (21). Additionally as problematic as this contradiction, Sang points out the theory’s “uneasy relation to the logic of transgenderism” (206). While her theorized consciousness claims the gender/sexual unimportance, this consciousness takes gender/sexual differences as always already identities, thus threatening more peripheral identities and neglecting variable genders and sexualities.
These criticisms cast gender-transcendent consciousness as contradictory, limited, and productive of its own issues. In the end, she must as in the story invoke, albeit attended with critiques, so-called universals or transcendent principles like love and humanity, which as she considers them are like art: apolitical or depoliticized. Following this reasoning, perpetuates the invocation of ideals, leading to questionable claims upon further questionable claims; in other words, leading to infinite regression, of sorts. If this is not the case, then in the least the author by offering her own theory merely contributes her own personal myth (ex, of love)[2] or vision to broader social and cultural discourses. This proposition conforms nicely with her avowed modernism, which as argued above, actually performs itself as engaged in and reflective of an awkward postmodernism.
In conclusion, Chen Ran’s “Breaking Open” truly works multivocally, multisemously, and multivalently within itself. To read it is to experience a representational play of space and time and ideas themselves. As experimentation it demands extended representational boundaries; boundaries that create, crush and cave in on themselves. In story form it mediates in an existentially timed manner on the very present historical moment, rife with its conflictions and ambiguities.
Chen, Ran. “Breaking Open.” Trans. Paola Zamperini. Red Is Not The Only Color Contemporary Chinese Fiction on Love and Sex between Women, Collected Stories. Ed. Patricia Sieber. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield pub., 2001. 49-71.
Chodorow, Nancy. “Heterosexuality as a Compromise Formation.” Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities. UP of Kentucky, 1994. Rpt. In Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell pub., 1998. 769-774.
Larson, Wendy. “Women and the Discourse of Desire in Postrevolutionary China: The Awkward Postmodernism of Chen Ran.” Boundary 2 24, no. 3 (fall 1997): 201-223.
Lauretis, Teresa de. “Technologies of Gender.” Rpt. In Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell pub., 1998. 713-721
Sang, Tze-lan D.. The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China. U of Chicago P., 2003. 163-174 & 200-222.
Sieber, Patricia. Introduction. Red Is Not The Only Color Contemporary Chinese Fiction on Love and Sex between Women, Collected Stories. Ed. Patricia Sieber. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Inc., 2001. 21-22.
Inwood, Michael. Heidegger: A Very Short Introduction, New York: Oxford UP, 1997.
[1] Germane to Chen’s usage: Kafka’s allegories and parables also feature spacelessness that makes them (seemingly) unbeholden to particulars while still proffering significance of both universal and larger specificity.
[2] This idea of “personal myth,” culturally producing and performing of usually compulsory heterosexuality but also sexualities in general, refers to an idea used in Chodorow’s “Heterosexuality as a Compromise Formation” (771).
