Visions of dystopia in China's new historical novels

Abstract

Visions of Dystopia in China's New Historical Novels, by Jeffrey C. Kinkley. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Pp. xvi + 285. $50.00 (hardcover)Written with rare fusion of erudition, subtlety, and clarity, Jeffrey C. Kinkley's Visions of Dystopia in China's New Historical Novels is groundbreaking study in modern Chinese and comparative literature. Kinkley treats seventeen novels by several of China's preeminent contemporary authors-Mo Yan, Su Tong, Yu Hua, Zhang Wei, Li Rui, Han Shaogong, Wang Anyi, and Ge Fei-and performs double interpretive move by arguing that these works exhibit characteristics of two global literary forms-the new historical novel (nueva novella historica) of the Latin American Boom in the 1960s and 1970s commonly associated with Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa, and the dystopian novel whose canonical examples may include George Orwell's 1984, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and other Anglophone and Slavic works from lineage that can be traced back to Thomas More and Edward Bellamy. Kinkley posits that the new historical novel is type of fiction that denies and defies previous national historical narrative, typically with political edge that bears heavy implications for the present and future (7) with multi--- era epics that unfold across generations . . . [to critically] reinterpret the past from vantage point in later times (2). The dystopian novel, meanwhile, conveys inexorable and unbounded social---moral decline, particularly if that decline was engendered by would---be utopian social schemes (20), whether the author's dystopian visions explore the dangers of totalitarianism in science---fictional, post--- apocalyptic setting (as is more common in the classic Anglophone and Slavic traditions) or the rise and fall of mythic town in realist, surrealist, or magical realist setting (as is more common in the Latin American, Caribbean, and Chinese streams). Kinkley's provocative thesis is not simply that the masterpieces of contemporary Chinese literature intersect with these two global traditions, but rather that in the Chinese case the new historical novel and the dystopian novel are one and the same.After recasting China's new historical novels as significant contributors to global discourse of dystopia, in the second chapter Kinkley develops detailed analysis of the use of temporal ambiguity in China's new historical novels. Through combination of close reading and formal analysis, Kinkley identifies the chronological reference points and temporal logics in each of his key examples in this chapter-Su Tong's The Gardener's Act, My Life as Emperor, and Nineteen Thirty---Four Escapes, Yu Hua's Cries in the Drizzle, To Live, and Chronicle of Blood Merchant, Mo Yan's Red Sorghum, and Zhang Wei's September's Fable. He analyzes instances in which the author withholds information about the novel's historical setting from the reader, creates intentional gaps in time, or allows anachronistic phenomena (servants and rickshaw pullers, for example) to surface. Distinguishing parody and anachronism in this phase of Chinese creativity from the same group of authors' uses of chronological paradoxes and non---sequiturs in 1980s avant---garde fiction, Kinkley argues that the new historical novels deliberately deny the reader clear chronological bearings to accomplish several goals. Some do so to articulate pessimistic view of history, social change, and human nature, while others question the validity of historical judgments, including the competence of the narrator's personal memories or of the narrative's own viewpoint in metafictional terms. Above all, Kinkley argues that the blurring of events before and after the Communist revolution controverts the standard conceptions of progress in official historiography in order to create a sense of anomie and discomfort with Maoist myths of utopia.Chapter three, Projections of Historical Repetition, examines the depiction of dystopia as historical circularity. …