Making time for the absurd and finding that it is unavoidable
I just finished reading Yan Lianke’s The Explosion Chronicles, a novel often seen as part of China’s “ultra-unreal” or, in Yan Lianke’s own terminology, “mythorealism” genre. The genre is kind of like magical realism with Chinese characteristics — more on that below. The idea is that China’s reality has changed so incredibly rapidly — and here I am using “incredible” with its original meaning, i.e. not credible, beyond believable — over the past three or more decades, that realism simply cannot capture the experience of living through this process. Yan emphasises that his “mythorealism” blurs the causality found in realism, just as the rapid pace of growth, development, movement obscured any obvious cause and effect connections in everyday Chinese life.
“Incidents that at first glance appear utterly illogical and unreal have become increasingly common,” Yan writes in a postscript to the English edition of the novel, referencing examples such as the tens of thousands of pig carcasses that floated down the Huangpu River in Shanghai in 2013, the kind of phenomenon we would normally associate with Biblical prophecies of plague, doom and apocalypse. But this was reality.
“It was indeed China’s reality that spurred mytho-realism into existence,” Yan writes.
It’s a reality which, in the words of author Ning Ken, “exceeds our imagination” and leaves its participants “no time to digest, no way to assess”. And so we float into mythorealism, or in Ning Ken’s preferred term, “ultra-unrealism”, where causal links are broken and meaning is blurred or absent.
“It is magical? Not at all,” says Ning, “But is it unreal/fantastical [幻], absolutely.”
“魔吗？事实上一点儿也不是魔，但是幻，非常幻，太幻了，幻得像宇宙时间，让人失重、来不及消化、无法判断。”
Yan also places his “mythorealism” against the historical backdrop of the Great Leap Forward, which, as one of the PRC’s first mass mobilisations of people for development, was a founding and pivotal moment for the country. (As I write, the PRC is just a few weeks away from celebrating the 70th anniversary of its founding, 1st October 1949.) That mobilisation and the chasm between rhetoric and reality it generated set a solid foundation for a thoroughly “post-truth”, post-causality society. It was an era when half an acre of arid land could produce tens of thousands of jin of rice or grain, and pots and pans smelted over kindling could produce industrial revolution grade steel. Yan explored the mythorealism of this period in his earlier novel The Four Books.
But Yan emphasises that mythorealism isn’t simply about breaking down all narrative causality in order to reflect the absurdity of life in China since opening up and reform (the starting point of The Explosion Chronicles) or since the Great Leap Forward (the focus of The Four Books). He claims that this form of absurdism with Chinese characteristics “captures a hidden logic contained within China’s reality. It explodes reality, such that China’s absurdity, chaos and disorder…all become easily comprehensible.”
To me, none of this makes China’s complex, chaotic, “paradoxical” reality “easily comprehensible”, but it does highlight that there is indeed a logic and a causality to everything that is going on. It is simply one that from an individual perspective, based on what is understandable in one’s own life, what one learns from the news (bearing in mind that the most official of news in PRC, 新闻联播, is most certainly a contributor to the absurd), what one hears from friends, etc. will never be comprehendible.
Yan believes that what he calls the “internal causality contained within China’s reality” also escapes the grasp of such literary forms as the essay or non-fiction article, or perhaps even ofconversation as we commonly understand. He believes that it can only be truly perceived through the flexible form of literature. Fiction allows the author to indicate and the reader to sense what cannot be directly perceived and create new causal logics which more closely reflect reality.
“The Explosion Chronicles attempts to grasp the “most Chinese” cause, like a painter who attempts to paint the uneven contours of an invisible riverbed. Under these circumstances, what is the point of discussing whether or not the river’s water is tumultuous or peaceful? What mythorealism seeks is this invisible riverbed; it wants to reveal the nine tenths of an iceberg that lies hidden beneath the ocean waves, and demonstrate why the minute portion of the iceberg that people can see is the way that it is.”
Last week one of my favourite WeChat bloggers, Huang Wen 黄雯, published a piece entitled ‘Our absurd and diverse sphere of public opinion’ 《我们荒诞而多元化的舆论场》. It’s short and worth a read. Here I’ll translate (badly) a few snippets of it:
In this absurdist China, every sort of miscellaneous event occurs within the same space and at the same time… The noisy, diverse sphere of public discussion has unleashed our collective anxiety, an anxiety which takes collective joy as its end point, only to leave us waiting anxiously for the next incident to occur.
这是个荒诞的中国，各类杂七杂八的事件都在同一个时空进行着。。。多元化的舆论场，也释放出了集体焦虑，这种焦虑最终又以集体狂欢为终结，紧接着又等待着下一次事件的发生。
For someone who loves to concentrate and focus their mind, all this chaotic news is simply an enormous strain on the mind. But one’s life cannot just separate itself from the era that backgrounds it. In the midst of this torrent, to not be washed away, to stand for oneself is no easy task. Perhaps it is even impossible, unless one were to leave home and become a monk. All the interconnected things that happen in your own life cannot be separated from the mark of this era. No one can truly escape.
这些乱七八糟的新闻事件，对于一个热爱专注的人来讲，完全是场大规模的精神损耗。可在这个大时代面前，你又会感觉无能为力。你的个人生活离不开这个时代背景，在洪流之中，能不轻易被裹挟，独善其身已是相当不易。何况根本就不可能，除非你出家当和尚去。你身上所发生的千丝万缕的联系都离不开这个时代的烙印，谁也逃不掉。
Although, during the moment that I write these words, perhaps I am sustaining one short moment of peace and clarity.
也许，此刻我在写作的时候，才可以保持片刻的清醒。
“In the midst of the torrent”, absurd moments that washed across me this week. A list:
一 Friday was mid-autumn festival 中秋节. I went out onto my rooftop to see the round moon bringing in the late autumn and, not far behind, the darkness of winter. But I could barely see it. It was slightly obscured by clouds. What drowned out the moonlight even more, however, was the unnatural columns of light beaming into the sky from the southwest of my flat — Tiananmen. It looked like the dramatised version of a Hollywood movie premier. It looked like an alien landing. It looked like a company CEO was showing off their latest, brightest halogen bulbs.
It was the first of many practices for the 70th anniversary military parade.
海上生明月，天涯共此时. Not this year. This year the people shared in the light of military spotlights.
二 It was reported this week that China’s central bank is likely to approve coal power as an investment which can receive special bonds designated for environmentally friendly projects — “green bonds” for coal.
Coal is green. We must have been colourblind all along.
According to the government’s version of reality, gas is also renewable. Our physics textbooks must have been wrong all along.
三 Last night the 70th anniversary returned. From where I live I could hear the military drum beat of the army’s midnight practice along Changan Jie and at Tiananmen. If I could hear it from here, that must mean most of Dongcheng, most of Beijing inside the second ring road could hear it too. On a Saturday night, two million of us drifted off to sleep to the roar of a military dress rehearsal.
As Huang Wen says, there’s no escaping these absurdities. Albert Camus, one of the fathers of absurdism, is known for saying “the realisation that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.” The beginning of what exactly is not clear to me. But the point is, absurd as it is, we shouldn’t shirk from this reality into comfort zones divorced from reality — they would only be more absurd. Embrace this mythoreality.
Over the next three weeks I’m going to dive into books on the history of the founding of the PRC, as celebrations of its 70th birthday get under way. I wonder what causal, logical disconnects I’ll find between the history of that period based on primary source material and its presentation in 2019. An uneasy juxtaposition no doubt.
I’m also about to re-read The Master and Margarita. And I wonder what absurdist revelations I‘ll find there.
Postscript speculation:
Much of Yan Lianke’s brand of absurdism, “mythorealism”, focuses on the improbability of the pace of development. In The Four Books, one mu of land yields improbable quantities of grain. In The Explosion Chronicles, Asia’s biggest airport and a city-wide subway system is built over night.
This Belt and Road/China overseas nerd wonders how other countries’ cultural communities will respond to the arrival of similar improbabilities in their countries as Chinese construction firms move in to build power plants, rail lines, even whole cities at rapid and, in many places, unprecedented speed and scale.
Cultural responses to Belt and Road infrastructure projects… If anyone has any thoughts or leads, be in touch.
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Bibliography:
Huang Wen 黄雯，《我们荒诞而多元化的舆论场》，https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/sUiI30Fw7xMPSQLPVF1zzg
Ning Ken 宁肯，《超幻时代的写作》，https://www.keleyizhan.com/wwwroot/bjzjw/publish/article/657/53058.shtml
Ning Ken 宁肯，‘Modern China is So Crazy It Needs a New Literary Genre’，https://lithub.com/modern-china-is-so-crazy-it-needs-a-new-literary-genre/
Yan Lianke 阎连科, The Explosion Chronicles, 2013
Yan Lianke 阎连科, The Four Books, 2011
