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Family Fugue
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20461 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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5 / 1992 |
3,119 Words |
| Author
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Michael S. Duke
Michael S. Duke is professor and head of the Department of
Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. |
QI QIE CHENGQUN (A profusion of wives and concubines)
Su Tong
Taipei: Yuanliu, 1990 230 pp.
My father was perhaps a fetal mute. His uncommunicative reticence caused my family to be shrouded over by a misty grey miasma for fully half a century; during this half a century I was born came to maturity flourished and grew old and decrepit. The vital blood and semen of father's Maple Village continues to circulate in my body; perhaps I'm a fetal mute too. I am also reticent and uncommunicative. I was born under the sign of the tiger; I left home and came to the city the year I was nineteen; thinking back on the past years of my youth, how like a tiger cub I was, crouched under the eaves of father's house, my whole body glowing with a dim blue sheen as I gazed into the penumbra of that family miasma which grew ever thicker the longer it floated along on the revolutions of the sun and moon: living under that miasmic penumbra were the last eight surviving relatives of my clan.
In this surprisingly original fashion begins a remarkable trilogy of novellas by one of China's most experimental writers. Su Tong was born in 1963 in Suzhou, a small city renowned for its literary culture and located in Jiangsu Province, a short train ride west of Shanghai. He graduated from Peking Normal University and is now an editor at Zhongshan, a prestigious literary magazine in Nanjing. Only in his late twenties, he already has established himself as a mature stylist and a powerfully imaginative storyteller. As the following statement from the introduction to Qi qie chengqun demonstrates, he is primarily concerned with writing artistically about the life of the past:
My own particular failing is that I am always buried in the minor details of the life of the past but lack any plans for the future. The realm of art is a kind of light; it may be bright or it may be dark; it may exist or it may not. The world that I hope to attain has several elements; I hope for naturalness, simplicity, peacefulness, and breadth; I also hope for abundance, complication, and multiple changes. All these elements have one aspect in common: they must be purely artistic.
As a stylist, his main desire is to use language artistically, and thus to share in the ongoing development of a genuinely modern Chinese language. Such a language, created by a number of practitioners of misty (or obscure) poetry and nativist and experimental fiction since the mideighties, is intended to
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