Melancholy against the Grain: Approaching Postmodernity in Wang Anyi's Tales of Sorrow

Abstract

ion, according to Freud, may be the cause for both mourning and melancholia. "The loss of a love-object," furthermore, "constitutes an excellent opportunity for the ambivalence in love-relationships to make itself felt and come to the fore." A Freudian explanation of melancholia depicts a mental economy wherein "countless single conflicts in which love and hate wrestle together are fought for the object.""11 The loss of his child is precisely such a traumatic experience that foregrounds the uncle's ambivalence toward the failure of his life, which becomes the origin of his sorrow and his melancholy grasp of truth. The same ambivalence also affects the narrator, who, through an "extremely personal incident," comes to the same revelation as the uncle in his grander drama. The failure of history, as the narrator now realizes, is ultimately a failure of human will, because enormous pain comes from living in historical truth. It is this revelation that puts in critical perspective his own postmodernist predilections: "We always 11. Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," Collected Papers, vol. 4 (New York: Basic Books, 1959), 161, 168. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.159 on Sun, 23 Oct 2016 04:29:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 188 boundary 2 / Fall 1997 seek depth and detest shallowness, and yet we have no courage to live a deep life. A deep life is too serious and too momentous for us; we simply cannot stand it" (Shushu, 77). 3. "The same sharp sorrow suddenly arose from the vast ocean" To draw a not entirely improbable comparison, Our Uncle's Story, in Wang Anyi's literary imagination, may occupy the same position as The Origin of the German Play of Mourning does in Walter Benjamin's historical thinking. In his study of the seventeenth-century baroque Trauerspiel as a historical structure of feeling, Benjamin develops his messianic hermeneutics and asserts that a theory of Trauer can only be secured "in the description of the world which emerges under the gaze of the melancholic."12 By reconstructing this mournful gaze, in the words of Max Pensky, Benjamin delineates a "melancholy subjectivity" that dialectically unifies insight and despair and thrives on a symbiotic connection between a contemplative subject and the desacralized world of objects.13 Central to this form of critical subjectivity is the resurrected notion of heroic melancholy, to which I will return at the end of this essay. With the completion of Our Uncle's Story, Wang Anyi seems to have discovered a passage to historical depth by way of sadness or melancholy. The unhappy tales that have ensued are intensely subjective and are often centered on intriguing anamnestic images. If Our Uncle's Story offers a self-conscious narrative of the origin of her melancholy writing, in her 1993 novella Sadness for the Pacific, Wang Anyi gives a global expression to melancholy subjectivity through revisiting a family history of sadness. Not so much a story about the genesis of melancholia, Sadness for the Pacific is instead an emotional exploration, set against a contemporary landscape of postmodernity, of the melancholy truth of the passion incited by modernity. It has the structure of retracing a family tree over time and space, and the first-person narrator, who now seeks to empathize with her ancestors, participates in the narrative by projecting a subjective mood of 12. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of the German Play of Mourning, quoted in Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 90. 13. Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics, 107; see chap. 2, "Trauerspiel and Melancholy Sub-