Wolf Totem and the Post-Mao Utopian : A Chinese Perspective on Contemporary Western Scholarship [1 ed.] 9789004276734, 9789004276727

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Wolf Totem and the Post-Mao Utopian

East and West Culture, Diplomacy and Interactions

Edited by Chuxiong George Wei (University of Macau)

VOLUME 3

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ewcd

Wolf Totem and the Post-Mao Utopian A Chinese Perspective on Contemporary Western Scholarship

By

Li Xiaojiang Translated by

Edward Mansfield Gunn, Jr.

leiden | boston

This book is a result of the translation license agreement between Shanghai Century Literature P ­ ublishing Company and Koninklijke Brill NV. This book is translated into English from the original《后乌托邦批评： 〈狼图腾〉深度诠释（修正版）》(李小江, 2013) (Hou wutuobang piping: Langtuteng shendu quanshi [revised edition], by Li Xiaojiang) with financial support from Shanghai Century Literature Publishing Company and Shanghai Culture Development Foundation. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov lc record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2017057949

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2467-9704 isbn 978-90-04-27672-7 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-27673-4 (e-book) Copyright 2018 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Dedicated to the People of the Era of Mao Zedong -----those who died those who are gone but refuse to be forgotten -----those who were humiliated the victims and those who dream

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Contents Preface: ‘Allegorical Writing’ and ‘Post-Utopian Criticism’ ix

Part 1 Textual Analysis 1 What Kinds of Stories Does Wolf Totem Narrate? As Allegory: The Qualities and Characteristics of Wolf Totem 3 1.1 Allegory and Modern Allegory 4 1.2 Tracing the Wolf Motif 21 1.3 The Narrative Strategy of Wolf Totem 36 2 Why Was There Such a Wide Readership for Wolf Totem?  As Fiction: The Shift of Subject Position in the Context of Post-Modernism 50 2.1 Theme the Logic of the Grassland: Existence in Primal Nature 52 2.2 The Protagonist, the Grassland Wolf: The Spirit of Primal Freedom 65 2.3 Plot: The Story of the Wolf Cub and the Death of Freedom 81 2.4 Tragedy, the End of the Grassland: The Death of Nature 97 3 How Did Wolf Totem Captivate Readers? Aesthetics: A Model Text of Postmodernist Empathy 115 3.1 The Ecosystem 119 3.1.1 Structure: Emplacement and Heterotopias 120 3.1.2 Rhythm: Rotation and Reversal 132 3.2 The Language of Life 146 3.2.1 Scenery: Action Words 148 3.2.2 Details: Sensuous Vocabulary 161

Part 2 Allegorical Interpretation 4 How Many Allegories are Contained in Wolf Totem? The Utopian Boat: A Journey of Redemption Has a Nearly Inaccessible Destination 177

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4.1 In Terms of Semiotics: How Many Meanings Lie Hidden in Wolf Totem? 180 4.2 In Terms of Linguistics: Are ‘Translation’ and ‘Mediation’ Possible? 196 4.3 In Terms of Religious Studies: How Did the Wolf Become a Totem? 217 4.4 In Terms of Anthropology: Whence Human Nature? Whither Human Nature? 239 4.5 In Terms of Gender: ‘Asexual’ or ‘Sexual’? 258 4.6 In Terms of Ecology: How Much Space for Choice Do Humans Still Have? 277 4.7 In Terms of Cultural Studies: In the Contest of Civilizations, Who is the Winner? 291 4.8 In Terms of Economics: What is the Distance between Labor and Power? 310 4.9 In Terms of Political Science: What Weapon Do You Use to Conquer the Grassland? 349 4.10 In Terms of Historiography: Where Does the Story of ‘Nature’ End? 387 4.11 In Terms of Philosophy: What Lies ahead for ‘Freedom’? 414 4.12 In Terms of Folklore: Limited Use or Limited Survival? 439 5 How Could Wolf Totem Evoke Diametrically Opposed Moods and Opinions? Postcolonial Criticism: Allegory is in the Self-Dissolution of ‘Thinking’ 464 5.1 On Dialogue (a): War and Peace 465 5.2 On Dialogue (b): The Issue of National Character 483 5.3 On “The Lecture”: China and the World 506 5.4 The Author: A Farewell to Revolution? 517 6 A Brief Conclusion: The Discursive Space within and outside Wolf Totem In Terms of Criticism: Interpretation and Necessary “Over-interpretation” 533 6.1 ‘Post-’ Discourse Encounters Danger while Traveling 534 6.2 The Disappearance and Return of the Second World 541 6.3 Post-Utopian Criticism and the End of the ‘Post-’ 551 Postscript to the Revised Edition 561 Index 567

Preface

‘Allegorical Writing’ and ‘Post-Utopian Criticism’

Once, there were so many stories about wolves, they were common to every corner of the world. Aesop’s “The Wolf and the Lamb” depicted the wolf’s bloodthirsty nature and utter lack of compassion. “Little Red Riding Hood” told how wolves feign benevolence, warning of the danger in their cunning. “Master Dong Guo” ­offered an ancient homily on how the wolf of Zhongshan repaid kindness with viciousness, cautioning people to maintain vigilance toward their enemies … The fatal lesson of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” alerted people that to cry ‘wolf!’ is a solemn call to arms, a signal never to be uttered in jest under any circumstances. The wolf served countless myths, legends, and fables. It became almost without exception a byword for cruelty, craftiness, predation, and treachery. So it became the enemy of humans, an antonym for human nature, the opposite of goodness, a conclusion handed down from ancient times down to the present. Could it be there was anything about it to doubt? Wolf Totem1 challenged the judgment received from the past and sought to overturn that verdict. This raised some interesting questions: Who passed the verdict on wolves in the past? Why overturn this verdict now? Since Wolf Totem was published, legally printed copies have sold in the millions, pirated editions have sold in the tens of millions, and when online readership is added in, the number of readers has been countless. Commentaries have been countless as well, as divided in their praise and condemnation as they are numerous in their points of view.2 The book lacks a traditional plot, yet has had a widespread readership. There is neither a captivating love story nor sad characters or tragic personalities to wring tears from readers, yet many people have not been able to put the book down. The savagery of wild nature that fills the book, like a stiff wind 1 Jiang Rong 姜 戎 , Lang tuteng 狼 图 腾 (Wuchang: Changjiang wenyi chubanshe, 2004). 2 Wolf Totem became a search category. By the end of 2007 online websites with related information or criticism reached the tens of millions.

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blowing in from the wilderness, harsh and fresh, had a purifying effect on a turbid, ­dreary modern Chinese society promoting pretty boy actors and ‘­supergirl’ singers. From April 2004 to the end of 2005 Wolf Totem remained solidly at the top of the Beijing best-seller list for literature. Western mainstream media companies also reported on this book. At the start of 2005 an edition appeared in ­Taiwan in full-form traditional Chinese characters, followed by editions in Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, and French, and by 2008, an English edition and a ­German edition by Penguin Books and Goldmann Verlag respectively were in global distribution.3 But the academic world has had an entirely different reaction. For several years, apart from some debatable viewpoints published in book reviews,4 rarely did one see an article aimed at a penetrating analysis of the text.5 The Chinese literary field was stunned, and tacitly displayed the disdain of the mainstream literary community through its vast silence. The chilly reception from literary and scholarly fields was in clear contrast to the wild uproar in the marketplace and on the internet. For several years Wolf Totem continued to remain highly visible on the racks of best sellers and among the pirated books covering street vendors’ mats. Like some chance black horse, it unexpectedly broke through the barricades of mainstream discourse, crashed open the gates of contemporary Chinese literature, and took off into the world, leaving behind veteran writers in inexpressible pain. Across the media, from the internet to the newspapers, the clash of opposing views extended from China to countries overseas.6 Late in 2007, the world-renowned Man Booker 3 Peter Field of the Penguin Group stated: “… the Penguin Group has been looking for a novel in China that both features distinct Chinese culture and has a fascinating story to tell that can be shared with international readers who love China and need to understand the country. Fortunately, we have found Wolf Totem. As the first book Penguin purchased after it began its China operations, Wolf Totem marks just the beginning of a great project.” Zhonghua dushu bao 中 华 读 书 报 September 5, 2007. In Hui Yu, Reading in China, trans. Xianghua Ai (­Beijing: China Intercontinental Press, 2007), 61. 4 See Zhongguo tushu pinglun 中 国 图 书 评 论 2006 no. 2; Wenyi zhengming 文 艺 争 鸣 2005 Nos.2 and 3. 5 Ye Shuxian 叶 舒 宪 , “Lang tuteng, haishi xiong tuteng? 狼 图 腾 ，还 是 熊 图 腾 ? [Wolf ­totem or bear totem?]” and Cheng Yumei 程 玉 梅 , “Lang tuteng de duozhong jiedu 狼 图 腾 的 多 种 解 读 [Multiple readings of Wolf Totem],” Zhongguo shehui kexue yuan yuanbao, June 15, 2006, 3. For a response from the field of history, see Zhu Bing 朱 冰 , “Lang tuteng ­xugou le ‘langtuteng’ 狼 图 腾 》 虚 构 了 “狼 图 腾 ” [Wolf Totem fictionalized the wolf ­totem],” Zhonghua dushu bao, April 30, 2008, 11. 6 The Chongqing chen bao reported on December 11, 2006 that the German Sinologist Wolfgang Kubin, in an interview with Deutsche Welle, said that contemporary Chinese literature is

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Prize announced the inaugural Man Prize for Asian Literature, selecting Wolf Totem out of 243 titles: “The slowly developing narrative is rendered in vivid detail and has a powerful cumulative effect. A book like no other. Memorable.”7 Given that critical views remained as divided as ever, with no one altering their opinion, it was evident that there was a distinctive quality to this book, a discursive space for a great deal of discussion beyond the story that it conveyed. For large numbers of readers, their reading was not only an aesthetic one of empathy, but also a process of thought that raised questions: What were the issues in Wolf that evoked people’s thoughts? What did the story of Wolf imply that prompted such sustained debate? There are two ways that we can look for answers. One is through close reading, working out an avenue that leads to understanding. The other way is to ask the writer and have him offer straightforward answers. Unfortunately, neither of these approaches is without problems. First, this is not an easy book to read or to understand. It requires interest and patience, and even some common knowledge about history and some knowledge of philosophy and anthropology. Then what about the author? According to the introduction by the publishing planner, An Boshun, the author Jiang Rong is a native of Beijing who was sent down to the nomad pasturelands of Inner Mongolia in 1967. In 1978, he was admitted by examination to the Graduate School of the Academy of Social Sciences to study Political Economy. In 1971, Jiang Rong had begun working out a draft in his mind, and in 1998 began actual writing until he submitted a draft late in 2003, spending almost 6 years to complete Wolf Totem. Before submitting the draft he and the publisher agreed to three conditions: He would not take part in book release events or in marketing the book, and would not accept media interviews, and he would only respond in writing to discussions about the text itself. On the one hand there has been the clamor coming out of society; on the other hand the writer concealed his name and disappeared, answering the racket with a silent ‘no comment,’ and showing to all, admirers and detractors alike, a simple ‘disdain’—this piqued my curiosity.

“trash,” and that the novel Wolf Totem “is fascism according to us Germans. That book makes China lose face.” This reignited the debates over Wolf Totem. 7 Adrienne Clarkson, Chair of the judges for the inaugural prize, http://www.manasianliteraryprize.org/jiang-rong (accessed September 18, 2013).

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When I learned the writer’s real identity I lost any credence that this book was simply telling “a story about wolves.” When I had the opportunity to ask Jiang Rong questions face to face, this was my first question: LI Xiaojiang: Is what you wrote really a story about wolves? JIANG Rong: I have no interest in simply telling stories. In that case, is this fiction? At the press conference to release the book the news anchorman for China Central Television, Bai Yansong, expressed his intuition, saying, “This isn’t a novel, more like a study filled with philosophy and human interest.”8 That is exactly the question that a reporter put to the author over the Internet: Shushu: What do you think of that viewpoint? Does that quality influence the novel’s readability? JIANG Rong: I think it is a “study filled with philosophy and human interest,” and also a novel filled with imagery, personality, flesh and blood, emotions, imagination, fictiveness, details, conflicts, and turbulence. Which of the wolves in the book is as dry as a “thesis wolf”? A “theoretical wolf” could not bite the protagonist Chen Zhen and draw blood.9 How do I view this book? In terms of my own personal background and tastes, the gory descriptions in the book do not appeal to me, nor do I believe in worshipping the wolf’s nature, or endorse the author’s simplistic critique of agrarian peasant peoples or nomadic peoples. Still less do I find anything appealing about his standpoint that wolves can be taken as examples to carry out a critique of “national character,” and I have an instinctive revulsion against the bellicose atmosphere and clamor for competition. Yet, I cannot avoid it. Since my field is fundamentally literary research, no matter whether this book is fiction or scholarship, or whether I personally like it or not, it made its way uninvited into my normal work to the point of disrupting it. When I cried for the wolves the tears stung me so much that I was 8 At the conference on the publication of Wolf Totem held in Beijing on April 13, 2004, the cctv hosts Zhao Zhongxiang and Bai Yansong, and the literary critics Meng Fanhua and Bai Hua each offered comments. See Wenhua yanjiu wang 文 化 研 究 网 : http://www.culstudies .com. 9 Shushu 术 术 , “Jiang Rong: cong caoyuan huidao xuanxiao shehui 姜 戎 ：从 草 原 回 到 喧 嚣 社 会 [Jiang Rong: From the grassland back to clamorous society],” Xin jing bao, April 27, 2004.

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distressed, and what followed seemed inevitable: since by that time I could not put the book down, I set aside all the pressing work that seemed so important and started “wolf totem research:” Where did it come from? Why would it appear in this age so far removed from wolves? What story does it tell? And how could it spread through transcultural media in such a short time? What point was it trying to call attention to? Why did it stir people up so much? Faced with these questions, where should I begin? The first question was to define it: What sort of book is it? In terms of literature, the book does not have the sort of anthropocentric story so vital to traditional fiction according to the common understanding that “literature is the study of humankind.” It is something else. And because it is something else you might instinctively dismiss it as “without much literary value”10—but you would not be able to ignore its existence since it came out with all the appearances of a novel and every feature and basic quality of literature, so regardless of what members of the field and the academic community had to say about it, in terms of reception aesthetics, from another angle (mass readership and the market) it had already demonstrated its distinctive aesthetic value. But what kind of literature is it after all? Perhaps the answer to that is in a subconscious realization when I was reading: LI Xiaojiang: I know you haven’t read fiction for a long time, so what do you think of Wolf? FAN: This is not typical fiction. It’s an allegory. The death of the wolf cub suggests the unavoidable calamities that loom for humanity itself. He had explained it for me. This indeed was not simply fiction, but was allegory. Given that Wolf Totem is a vehicle for thought and an accomplished piece of storytelling, the only existing literary form to combine both qualities is 10

These are the words of Professor Xu Zidong 许 子 东 , Chinese Department, Hong Kong Lingnan University, on the Phoenix Satellite Television talk show “Qiangqiang sanrenxing 锵 锵 三 人 行 [Behind the headlines],” December 25, 2006.

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­allegory. Is it likely that Wolf Totem is modern allegory in the form of fiction? In this ‘post-’ era, could it be a postmodern allegory? Or, according to Arif Dirlik, would this be national allegory in the postcolonial sense?11 Then again, since it appeared in China in the post-Mao Zedong era, wouldn’t it typify a postutopian allegory? On the whole I agree with the position that it is allegory because at the moment when we become as involved in reading a story about wolves as we do reading a story about humans, and feel the empathy of the human soul in the world of wolves, when we begin growing concerned for all life and shed tears for the grassland and grassland wolves, when we overcome our terror of wolves and our awe towards them—at that moment allegory has already happened within us, and a new allegory—call it ‘post-allegory’ for now—has been born. From the angle of literary criticism I agree with Fredric Jameson that, no matter what the age, allegory has been ‘a mode of representation’: Even though we talk about holding on to the situation in its historical changeability, trying to break through old narratives of change and seeing fresh ones and perceiving contradictions, none of these targets were really objects to begin with. … Even if we believe in narrative, the perception of relationality is also not so easy. So the insistence on allegory is an insistence on the difficulty, or even impossibility, of the representation of these deeper and essentially relational realities.12 Jameson therefore concluded: “Allegory happens when you know you cannot represent something but you also cannot not do it.”13 Instead of regarding the special characteristic of allegory as “representing deeper realities” in a frame of mind in which “you know you cannot represent something but you also cannot not do it,” I think writers choose allegory as the concrete epitome of the frame of mind which sees no alternative left for narrative technique. Throughout history, apart from varied forms, all allegorical 11

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Arif Dirlik is quoted in Chinese: “postmodernism is concerned principally with the first world, the postcolonial principally involves the third world.” See Alifu Delike 阿 里 夫 ·德 里 克 , “Quanqiuhua, xiandaixing, yu Zhongguo 全 球 化 、 现 代 性 与 中 国 [Globalization, modernity, and China],” Dushu [Reading], 2007 no. 7: 7. Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism (Durham, nc: Duke, 2007), 195. The quotation is taken from an interview with Zhang Xudong 张 旭 东 , “Makesizhuyi yu lilun de lishixing 马 克 思 主 义 与 理 论 的 历 史 性 [Marxism and the historical nature of criticism],” Wanqi zibenzhuyi de wenhua luoji 晚 期 资 本 主 义 的 文 化 逻 辑 [The cultural logic of late capitalism], trans. Zhang Xudong (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1997), 37–38. Ibid, 196.

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­ riting has been forced out of individual circumstances that have been ‘hard w to put into words’ or social conditions that have been ‘difficult to write about openly.’ Wolf Totem was produced in the atmosphere of the ‘two posts’ (the post-Mao era and the postmodern age). From its text to its implied meanings, it bears obvious signs of being ‘post-’: It is neither didactic nor political satire, nor yet the voice of political correctness; the direction it points is not that of the ordinary wrongs and virtues of tradition, but to modern civilization as integrating evil and goodness in one entity. Narrative form follows traditional techniques of representation, but in content it is a series of major breakthroughs: with Revolutionary China as a narrative platform, it condenses into overlapping, complex meanings the most important issues of humanity since the advent of modernity, such as the growth and conflicts of civilization, the relationship of humans with nature and themselves, the environment, ecology, beliefs, and ultimately the limits of the survival of the human race. It takes both a modern position that subverts and challenges traditional knowledge and a postmodern position that questions and reflects on modernity itself. What we know as the history of civilization has been merely the human conquest of nature, aiming at wealth, in pursuit of realizing a vast, endless utopia of happiness. Seen from this angle, Wolf Totem offers a grand analytical platform. For people living in the present, this is a book that both reveals pain and expresses pain: it brings with it a wildness, crudeness, and bloodiness born in pain, longing for an ultimately virtually unattainable civilization, pursuing an ultimately unattainable freedom, loving nature but always abandoning, even losing, nature … It is in just this sense that Wolf Totem is post-allegory, and a prediction of doom. It was born in the post-Mao era after so many utopian practices, concealing a stubborn will to live within destroyed political ideals, trying to reconstruct a spiritual home in the ruins of a vanishing age. Because of this, I read it as more than a national allegory of Chinese characteristics. It is even more a post-allegory that is ominous. This study begins, therefore, with allegory, using Wolf Totem as a sample for deconstructing the double meaning of ‘post-allegory’: textual and implied meaning. And this study will attempt to establish an analytical category strange to scholarship but intimately related to our lives: post-utopian criticism. To be allegory there must be underlying, latent meaning. As Chen Puqing put it: “Allegory is an author’s sustaining another story.” It inherently “has a double structure: the surface is one story, called ‘the vehicle’; its inner layer contains the author’s ‘implied meaning.’”14 Since early modern times ­allegorical 14

Chen Puqing 陈 蒲 清 , Zhongguo jingdian yuyan 中 国 经 典 寓 言 [Classic Chinese allegories] (Changsha: Yuelu shushe, 2005), 1.

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works have adopted many forms, concealing thinking that was difficult to express openly in appealing stories. Abstruse and elaborately interwoven, the implied meanings have been hidden throughout every corner of the text, impenetrable without a critical method to reveal them. Nearly all modernist literature has possessed this feature, raising allegorical creativity to an entirely new level, and offering an abundant wellspring of literary criticism and aesthetics. Allegorical writing and the analysis of implied meaning formed a mutually supportive foundation, becoming instruments that thinkers with foresight or avant-garde thinkers have used with great skill, together forming the spiritual guide for the age. At the turn of this century allegorical writing became prominent in Chinese literature: gifted thinkers grafted the essence of allegory onto artistic and literary forms and tenaciously expanded the space of a very narrow discursive environment. Wolf Totem is an example of this: it moves along a very broad avenue of thought, opening onto a wealth of implied meaning. This is especially true of the narrative setting—the grassland during the Cultural Revolution era--linking the topic of China to the course of global postmodernism, and using the post-utopian qualities of Wolf Totem to provide an excellent analytical blueprint for post-utopian criticism. In recent years allegorical works have appeared in quantity, whether in clusters or circulating individually, between the lines of character dialogue, creative thought is everywhere; thought that has been difficult to convey has underlain serious or absurd representations, and allegorical discourse has waited in hiding for the season of allegorical criticism. Such criticism ought thus to be not only artistic or literary, e­ xperimenting with the proper interpretations of allegorical writing, but also at the same time it ought to be philosophical or political, opening up a new avenue for access to ‘thought.’ This study undertakes three important tasks. The first is textual analysis: to identify the literary attributes and aesthetic value of Wolf Totem, and under the name ‘post-allegory’ to synthesize the ‘three posts’ (postmodern, postcolonial, and post-utopian), to read their possibly innovative potential in contemporary literature and their fresh achievements in the field of aesthetics. The second is interpretation of the implied meanings: with the text of Wolf Totem as an introduction, to break through the method of ­reading ‘stories’ to enter the intellectual space of ‘talking substance,’ to look into what issues this ‘masterpiece’ that conquered so many readers and aroused such heated controversy actually engages, in what directions

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these implied meanings point, and to prompt reflection close to life itself on the situation of humankind now and in the future. The third task concerns post-utopian criticism. To state that I have had some success in my attempt to establish the new analytical category of ‘post-utopian criticism’ over the course of reading Wolf T ­ otem is less true than to state that there is no other choice. By ‘post-’ I imply at least two things. One is that the text appeared after the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of socialist China, so that as a category of analysis postutopian criticism has a timeliness and fit for this text, and without adopting new analytical tools it would be difficult to penetrate the representation and touch on the obscure, even hidden, meanings. A second is that Wolf Totem, produced in the process of globalization and appearing after the opening of China to globalization, circulated after the ‘two posts,’ so that its conceptualization and creative methods unavoidably have carried with them some elements of the ‘post-’ that could hardly have appeared without these ‘two posts.’ I have used post-utopian criticism as a new analytical category for critical practice in the hope that it is in concert with and fulfills what we have practiced in society and achieved in history, in order to find a respected and proper discursive platform for those explorations of utopia and experiences that have permanently been silenced. The historical roots of the postmodern are Western, and were originally irrelevant to the postcolonial, the postcolonial referring to societies that later became nation states—what Jameson termed the “Third World”—that originally had nothing to do with the postmodern. Yet under the circumstances of globalization the two have unexpectedly met: in the wave of globalization, postmodern discourse has swept into postcolonial nations, entering through the front door just as the third world has smoothly opened up to the world. Undergoing a series of ‘developmental issues,’ postcolonial discourse has entered the international field of vision, forcing the developed Western world to do an about face. This turn around has become the most graceful and timely stance among Western intellectuals. Wolf Totem appeared at the right time, putting a coat of the postmodern over a postcolonial torso. The thought and values in the text are oriented toward postmodernism, yet its implied meanings cannot extricate it from being sunk deep in a postcolonial identity crisis and post-utopian ideology, making it a “national allegory” (Jameson’s term),15 a ­utopian ­allegory, and a 15

See Fredric Jameson, Wanqi zibenzhuyi de wenhua luoji [The cultural logic of late capitalism], trans. Zhang Xudong (Beijing: Sanlian, 1997), 536.

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post-utopian allegory, departing from the author’s o­ riginal ­intention, and achieved in the readers’ identities themselves. So ­criticism steps forward and wittingly or unwittingly follows Walter Benjamin’s ideal16 and aim: “The origin is the goal.”17 That is, return to original issues at the level of actual life using the identity of the intellectual to return to the original site of discussion. As criticism, the ‘site’ is the work. In this overly ostentatious ‘post-’ era, criticism itself has decked itself out in fashionable excesses. So I think that the first rule of returning to the site is ‘­disenchantment,’ removing attraction:18 removing the attraction to ‘jargon’ discursively; removing the attraction to ‘post-’ intellectually. Only in this way can the text (that is still a work without criticism) be situated in its original state of self-clarification, so that criticism may proceed without heavy gear, and open up a path of understanding in the confusion of the present. As for methodology, I welcome and agree with the proposal of Tzvetan Todorov for dialogic criticism, believing: “Now criticism is dialogue … it is a meeting of two voices, author’s and critic’s, and neither has the advantage over the other.”19 In the era of open globalization, two voices are far from enough. As for “national allegory,” dialogic criticism is directed not only toward the work and (one’s own) nation/state, but also addresses a broad readership and overseas academia. Criticism may thus be a bridge linking ‘feeling’ and ‘thought,’ and together with the work and renewed criticism together construct a national ‘joint text’ or ‘co-text.’ On the platform of trans-cultural reading, it engages in dialogue with the world. 16

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Benjamin thought that in an age without deities, literature was a way of salvation that could carry ideals forward into the future. The works of Goethe and Dostoyevsky “strove to find human salvation,” “heroic acts of clarity and sorrow.” Qin Lu 秦 露 , Wenxue xingshi yu lishi jiushu: Lun Benyaming Deguo aidiao ju qiyuan 文 学 形 式 与 历 史 救 赎 :论 本 雅 明 〈 德 国 哀 悼 剧 起 源 〉 [Literary form and historical salvation: on Benjamin’s Origins of German Tragic Drama] (Beijing: Huaxia chubanshe, 2005), 117. Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (London: Fontana-Collins, 1973), 263. Max Weber first used the word “disenchantment” in the phrase “the disenchantment of the world,” referring to the dissolution of monolithic theocracy and a unitary system of value, which in literary criticism appeared as “multiplicity of interpretations.” For the onset and transformation of this in contemporary China, see Tao Dongfeng 陶 东 风 , “Wenxue de qumei 文 学 的 祛 魅 [The disenchantment of literature],” Wenyi zhengming 2006 No. 1. Tzvetan Todorov, Literature and Its Theorists, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1987), 161.

Part 1 Textual Analysis

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chapter 1

What Kinds of Stories Does Wolf Totem Narrate? As Allegory: The Qualities and Characteristics of Wolf Totem

To determine the nature of a work is to obtain a key that makes it possible to explore it in depth. It can lead us out of script that is a thicket of thorns onto a path that we can take to find a platform that links what follows to what has preceded it, and on the foundation of the explorations of earlier readers, excavate the aesthetic and intellectual value concealed in the work, or, perhaps, innovative literary theory that has been pulled from the literary work in the process of textual analysis. A good work always has latent value that has to be excavated. John Ruskin compared allegorical meaning in a work to gold that God secreted in mines, so that discovering allegorical meaning was like mining gold.1 Mario Vargas Llosa believed that literary criticism “can be a very valuable guide to the world and ways of an author, and sometimes a critical essay is itself a creative work, no less than a great novel or poem.”2 For example, the great modernity of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past might have remained obscured by its trivial, repetitive private discourse and uninteresting personal memories but for the research of so many scholars, especially Gerard Genette in Narrative Discourse. If the Chinese translators of James Joyce’s Ulysses had not added extensive, detailed annotations and at the same time released reading guides, this book would have remained almost indecipherably cryptic even to specialized readers in China. The fate of Dream of the Red Chamber [published in 1791] is also to the point. A century after it was written it was a best seller, but printed in the sloppiest fashion, imitated, and widely misread. Not until Wang Guowei’s “Commentary on the Dream of the Red Chamber” appeared in 1904 did it belatedly achieve the position in scholarship that has become known as the field of ‘Redology.’ Literary works by themselves rarely demonstrate their literary value to the fullest, and that is especially true of allegory. The birth of the work is most often “taking the first step on a Long March of three thousand miles” [Mao Zedong]. Without the continued pursuit of literary criticism the

1 “[T]he metal you are in search of being the author’s mind or meaning, his words are as the rock which you have to crush and smelt in order to get at it.” John Ruskin, Sesame and Lillies, http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1293/pg1293.html (accessed February 27, 2013). 2 Letters to a Young Novelist, trans. Natasha Wimmer (New York: Picador, 1997), 131–32.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004276734_002

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latent allegorical significance of a work might permanently never see the light of day. 1.1

Allegory and Modern Allegory What better way to contribute to the clarification of the meaning of a passage than to integrate it into broader and broader contexts—first of all that of the work, next that of the writer, then the epoch, finally the entire literary tradition? Tzvetan Todorov3

When they hear the word yùyán (寓 言 allegory; parable) most people in China think of Aesop, not their ancestor Zhuangzi.4 When they talk about wolves, most children will recite, “A lamb was drinking water next to a river…” Evidently modern education in China has not been overly sensitive to national identity or territorial borders. When it comes to domains of knowledge there has been no separation of East or West, and trans-cultural dissemination penetrated minds long ago. This has provided a broad cultural background for allegorical criticism that knows no boundaries in terms of its extraction of resources. Allegory constituted an important part of modern enlightenment education in China. Regrettably it has been almost permanently confined to enlightenment schoolbooks and rarely appeared in adult reading. Allegorical 3 Literature and Its Theorists, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1987), 162. 4 Aesop’s Fables was first translated into Chinese by Christian missionaries at the end of the Ming dynasty in 1625. A publication in Guangdong in 1840 included English text and Romanized Chinese transcription on opposite pages, and in 1888 the newspaper publisher, Tianjin shibao guan, came out with a translation under the title Hai guo miaoyu 海 国 妙 喻 . See the Introduction by Chen Hongwen 陈 洪 文 in Yisuo yuyan 伊 索 寓 言 [Aesop’s Fables], trans. Luo Niansheng 罗 念 生 et al. (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1981) and Chen Pingyuan 陈 平 原 , Zhongguo xiaoshuo xushi moshi de zhuanbian 中 国 小 说 叙 事 模 式 的 转 变 [The transformation of narrative method in Chinese fiction] (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2003), 6. The term yùyán 寓 言 first appeared in Zhuangzi 庄 子 , Chapter 27. Translator’s note: translators have variously glossed this as “metaphorical language,” “symbol,” “imputed words,” and “supposed words.” The term appears to carry the sense of fable, allegory or parable more unambiguously in the biographies of Laozi and Han Fei in Sima Qian 司 马 迁 , Shiji 史 记 [Records of the Historian], juan 63. See Shiji (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1972) vol. 7: 2143.

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criticism has nearly disappeared from mainstream publications. The memory of allegory is usually framed in childhood, and what are known as allegorical stories are conventionally placed in the category of children’s literature. That has made for some problems in my study. If this study begins with allegorical criticism that means there is no choice but to start at the beginning: it is necessary to clarify the development of ancient ‘fable’ into the literature of modern “allegory,” a requisite account for readers, the field of criticism, and my own subsequent study. The fable is an ancient, widespread literary form. Fables were generated from a number of cultural sources, and at the outset were generally the crystallization of collective wisdom. Many of the fables in the ancient Greek collection by Aesop were animal stories with a long history, widely disseminated, and leaving clear indications of collective creation.5 The earliest fables in India in the Panchatantra also gathered age-old wisdom into small stories that made use of animals, with important influence on the formation of Middle Eastern civilizations and Southeast Asian cultures. Many of the subjects had the character of motifs, stories with the same content constantly reappearing with innovations by different authors. For example, the ancient Roman fabulist Phaedrus inserted political allegory into Aesop’s classic stories to turn them into sharp criticisms of Roman affairs, strengthening the role of the fable as a vehicle of thought and a weapon of criticism, and providing an important source of inspiration for European writers down through history. The Spring and Autumn and Warring States eras were the golden age for fables in China.6 Zhuangzi “believed that the world was drowned in turbidness and that it was impossible to address it in sober language. So he used ‘goblet words’ to pour out endless changes, ‘repeated words’ to give a ring of truth, and ‘imputed words’ [yùyán ‘fable’] to impart greater breadth.”7 When he wrote, “he came and went alone with the pure spirit of Heaven and earth, yet he did not view the ten thousand things with arrogant eyes. He did not scold over ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ but lived with the age and its vulgarity,”8 he suggested the critical aim of a kind of transcendent humanist criticism. Compared with fables 5 Chen Hongwen noted that Aesop’s Fables (6th century bce) “were undoubtedly a compendium of ancient Greek fables, the collective creation of ancient Greeks over a historical period of considerable length.” Introduction, Yisuo yuyan, n.p. 6 Hundreds appear in the ancient texts Zhuangzi, Han Feizi, The Spring and Autumn Annals of Lü, and so forth. 7 The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu. trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 373. 8 Ibid.

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created in India and Greece, the fabulists of ancient China were largely literati, that is, early intellectuals. They had relatively high social status, and the reason for their works and the point of them were also apparent. They were either highly political parables primarily created for rulers, of an obviously didactic and hortatory nature, or philosophical reasoning for the self-examination and motivation of literati. As such, they virtually elevated the literary form of ‘fable’ to the spiritual level of self-cultivation, with far reaching influence among later Chinese writers, and not only fabulists. In the history of world literature there have been two high points of convergence in the style and content of allegorical works of different societies and regions. The first of these high points occurred in the early formative stages of civilizations when most were didactic fables of a highly philosophical quality, plain and direct reasoning on punishing evil and promoting good and on retribution for good or ill, aimed largely at individual behavior and social order. In the early modern era these characteristics changed demonstrably. The second high point occurred in modern Europe, primarily directed against feudalism in satirical political allegory. It was a great breakthrough in form, undertaken almost in step with innovations in narrative style. The appearance and development of early modern Western fiction occurred in the process of the ‘new allegory,’ breaking ground to establish ‘new literature.’ Gerald Gillespie carefully traced this in his lectures The Evolution of the European Novel, in which he argued that the power of the high Renaissance use of allegory and the power of combining the religious doctrine with the apparently contradictory literary legacy led to the creation of the two greatest allegorical novels of the early modern period, The Lives of Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais (mid-seventeenth century) and Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (early seventeenth century). Names of characters, places, and settings in Gargantua are all allegorical, while its structure, which was both encyclopedic in its topics and comedic in style, constituted a model of the combination of allegory with vast erudition, thus earning regard as the first great work in the tradition of humanist fiction and a classic of ‘legendary’ allegory. Cervantes took the multi-layered complexities of fiction as the theme of his novel, in which all characters, settings, and props became instruments for representing allegorical significance.9 There is allegorical significance in these two examples themselves: at the moment of the first transformation of an era, 9 See Jielade Jiliesibi 杰 拉 德 · 吉 列 斯 比 [Gerald Gillespie], Ouzhou xiaoshuo de yanhua 欧 洲 小 说 的 演 化 [Evolution of the European Novel], trans. Hu Jialuan 胡 家 峦 and Feng Guozhong 冯 国 忠 (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1987), esp. 13, 23, 80. This Chinese text is a translation of unpublished lectures delivered in English by Gerald Gillespie at Peking University in 1985.

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those with foresight selected allegory as the weapon to clear the way for new thought. This is a phenomenon that has historically recurred with regularity, something that may give meaning to our understanding ‘allegorical writing’ in contemporary China. Seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe was fertile ground for the resurgence and bountiful harvest of early modern allegory. The works of Gotthold Lessing in Germany, La Fontaine in France, and Ivan Krylov in Russia were all representative of the large number of political fables and allegories that satirized feudalism and responded distantly to the rise of capitalism as a force for the enlightenment movement. Numerous ‘philosophical allegories’ soon followed in the nineteenth century, beginning with Søren Kierkegaard,10 then fully developed in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In form and content they continued the tradition of allegory while using a variety of literary forms to represent their dissenting views, constructing a new historical platform for the birth of modernist literature and modern allegory. Throughout history, allegory and philosophy (thought, beliefs) have always maintained a close connection. By concealing abstruse philosophical theory or iconoclastic thought in simple stories that are easy to follow, allegory became the instrument of philosophers with literary talent to represent their thought. Among ancient philosophers, the works of Plato and Zhuangzi contain allegorical stories. “We know what single genre of poetry Socrates understood: the Aesopian fable…”11 There are large numbers of allegories and fables of universal appeal in the canons of the three great religions. This distinctive form, in which “the thought is in the story,” has played an extremely important role in disseminating religious teachings. The thought in such allegories may be abstract, with no intention of involving the realities of daily life or individuals’ feelings, intent on piercing reality to explore the essence and ultimate end of “being.” Rather than telling stories, they narrate thought. Since the early modern era, a fundamental quality of allegory, unlike other literary genres, is that it takes literary form only after it is first conceived as abstract thought. Many genres have served as no more than a vehicle for the writer’s thought, from Krylov’s verse fables to Saltykov-Shchedrin’s allegorical short stories, Bertolt Brecht’s allegorical dramas, and William Faulkner’s novel A Fable. To go from “image” to ‘symbol’ and then to ‘allegorical symbol’ is to enter self-consciously into a dead-end lane on the approach to art. The 10 See Parables of Kierkegaard, ed. Thomas C. Oden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). 11 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 76.

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characteristic­of the allegorical symbol is its one-to-one relationship, a word and what it symbolizes does not rely upon suggestion or variable association, but on fixed substitution, as when “[a]n idea, in the highest sense of that word, cannot be conveyed but by a symbol.”12 When literature becomes the instrument and even slave to expounding ideas then allegory is utterly discredited in the realm of literature, as Goethe argued: There is a great difference between a poet seeking the particular for the universal, and seeing the universal in the particular. The one gives rise to Allegory, where the particular serves only as instance or example of the general; but the other is the true nature of Poetry, namely, the expression of the particular without any thought of, or reference to, the general. If a man grasps the particular vividly, he also grasps the general, …13 Goethe’s judgment of allegory was lethal, and allegorical poetry in the field of aesthetics declined sharply. Subsequently, the reputation of allegory as fable suffered in Western literature, and became “the specific target of the romantic revolution of Wordsworth and Coleridge.”14 The awkwardness of the living environment for allegorical writers was unprecedented: they were nonconformists among philosophers and outliers among writers, like a herd of black horses collectively transgressing borders, inevitably put in the position of being misread. The allegorical significance within their texts was most often too difficult for readers to decipher, a distant shore that could never be reached as writers were unable to explicate it directly. Some scholars believe that, “for a long period allegory as a mode of literature has been treated with contempt,” finding that “its dual nature that ‘says one thing and means another’ was at the source of this attack from all sides.”15

12 13 14 15

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (London: Electric Books, 2001), vol. 1:165. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections of Goethe, trans. Bailey Saunders (New York: Macmillan, 1906), 159. Fredric Jameson, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text No. 15 (Autumn 1986): 73. Zhao Baisheng 赵 白 生 , “Minzu yuyan de neizai luoji 民 族 寓 言 的 内 在 逻 辑 [The internal logic of national allegory],” Waiguo wenxue pinglun [Foreign Literature Review] 1997 No. 2, cites Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964), 2. Zhao Baisheng’s article adduces several different definitions of the nature of allegory.

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From the nineteenth century until mid-twentieth century the plain style of allegory steadily lost its former ancient and revered literary status together with its epistemological function among thinkers and rulers until people (including authors) frequently took it for children’s lessons. On the other hand, creative methods in allegory (such as metaphor) advanced to become the most frequently used technique among the modernist writers of the intellectual avant garde. The Japanese scholar Hamada Masahide reached a new interpretation of fable while distinguishing various methods of symbolization (such as comparison, simile, metaphor) in explaining allegory: We call stories ‘fables’ which borrow from the animal and vegetable realm to symbolically present phenomena in human life and society for which concepts cannot substitute. Aesop’s Fables is the representative work. Kafka’s fiction also contains many such stories.16 Here Hamada introduces two “modern” phenomena. One is the complexity of the allegorical significance contained in the fable, far more than the conceptual inferences that philosophy employs. In other words, it is precisely because of its complexity that there is no alternative to adopting such a marginal, vague form of literature and expressing it through indistinct theory. The second confirms that the nature of modernist literature, as represented by Kafka, is allegory, and consequently that the field of research resumed a direct traditional link with Aesop’s Fables. In the process of translating (Japanese, English), he used “allegory” as equivalent to or even as a replacement for “fable,” moving allegory unobstructed into the frontier of modernist literature as its method of expression. When Zhang Longxi explained allegory as a key word in modern writing he preferred to translate the term as fěngyù 讽 喻 ,17 avoiding the terms yùyán and yùyì 寓 意 , perhaps out of concern for the issue of the status of traditional allegory. In fact, the original Greek word “allegory,” a compound of allos (other) and agoria (speaking), indicated a layer of meaning beyond surface 16

17

Bintian Zhengxiu 滨 田 正 秀 [Hamada Masahide], Wenyi xue gailun 文 艺 学 概 论 [Bungeigaku gairon], trans. Chen Qiufeng 陈 秋 峰 and Yang Guohua 杨 国 华 (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 1985), 55. See the entry for fěngyù 讽 喻 by Zhang Longxi 张 隆 溪 in Xifang wenlun guanjian ci 西 方 文 论 关 键 词 [Keywords in Western criticism], ed. Zhao Yifan 赵 一 凡 (Beijing: Waiyu jiaoxue yu yanjiu chubanshe, 2006), 126. Allegory [Romanzation in original text] was originally translated fěngyù as a method of literary expression, later translated as yùyán, until the term yùyán as the genre ‘fable’ [Romanization in original text] was gradually eclipsed in favor of ‘allegory’ yùyán.

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meaning.18 This demarcation of boundaries is completely consistent with allegory or fable, and neither what is signified within nor the signifier that extends beyond it necessarily contains anything satirical as implied in the Chinese word fěng, “satire, ridicule.” Zhang Longxi’s translation emphasizing the satirical implication of fěngyù is relevant to the direction that modern allegory has taken. From the twentieth century on, allegory has outstripped its satirical quality and become an element of literature rather than simply a mode, bearing the seeds of doubt or the sharp point of criticism, appearing throughout all genres. There is actually no clear definition for modern allegory. Shifting form as it concealed itself in allegorical-style works of various genres, at one time it constructed the subject of Western modernist literature. Such works shared a common allegorical significance: questioning modernity and reflecting on civilization. Almost all modern allegories transcended their time to have, in varying degrees, a “postmodernity.” Because of their foresight or their unusual behavior, writers of allegory were mostly nonconformists or political dissidents, abject or aloof, even subject to unusual treatment. Whether for reasons of politics, the social system, ideology, or purely individual personality, their individual circumstances were straitened and difficult, often deprived of a suitable representational space. Allegory arose to meet the occasion, becoming a convenient means for their authors to vent their feelings or mood. By creating allegory they could transcend the constraints of real society, using nature (whether wilderness, grassland, deserts, oceans, or the animal world) or fictive backgrounds, using personification or absurdist techniques, using literature as a weapon to reveal the pain of civilization, displaying what most often was an individual, postmodern resistance to modernity. Following the turn of the twentieth century, as the evils of modern civilization grew increasingly apparent, so did the frequency of allegorical-style works, which made great strides in significance and form, closer to allegory and not simply romance, so that some scholars even think that, “nearly all modernist literature in varying degrees has distinctly allegorized features.”19 The Metamorphosis (1915) is a representative founding text of modern allegory. Kafka’s works have two important features. One is its metaphorical quality, neither didactic nor doctrinaire, but “a form that uses irrationality and transcends time and space to convey the observations, feelings, representations, 18 Ibid. 19 See Li Yuntuan 李 运 抟 and Zhu Haixia 朱 海 霞 , “Xin shiji xiaoshuo yu yuyanhua xushu 新 世 纪 小 说 与 寓 言 化 叙 述 [Fiction of the new century and allegorized narrative],” Nanjing shifan daxue wenxueyuan xuebao 2006 No. 3.

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and even criticism of a modern person toward modern society.”20 The second feature is plurisignification: “description that through bizarre imagination, irrational ideas, elusive symbols, and illogic contains a richly enigmatic content, and consequently a multiplicity of meanings and receptions to the point of being ambiguous.”21 Walter Benjamin thought that Kafka “is incapable of imagining any single event that would not be distorted by the mere act of describing it—though by ‘description’ here we really mean ‘investigation.’ In other words, everything he describes makes statements about something other than itself.”22 As the alienation signified in the metaphor of metamorphosis increasingly became the core issue of modernist representation, the allegorical form of writing that Kafka practiced also reached the historical point at which it was revived. With the acceptance of The Metamorphosis by the mainstream literary field, allegorical-style works were integrated into all forms of social thought, and with the literary status of allegory confirmed under the name of ‘modernism’ it was divorced from traditional literary forms. The method by which such an ‘-ism’ became a category was simple, reducing complex ideas into one classification, grouping writers of completely disparate character under one and the same banner, tagging them with similar labels. Even if writers could not identify themselves with such a label, they could move about freely through the literary field. Literary criticism down to the present has wavered between two poles, either purely textual analysis, so that the term modernist is embodied in creative techniques (as in the subsequent studies of Remembrance of Things Past), or by defining them with labels, categorizing works under an ‘-ism,’ an ideological criticism that both cuts off an avenue to individualized study and sacrifices the opportunity to explore in depth the allegorical significance of a work through different angles of approach. Having been born into the era of modernist literature, Walter Benjamin was rediscovered during the 1960s as a witness to the modern and as a prophet of the “postmodern.” At a time when critics were clustered under the banners of different—isms, only he clearly pointed out and believed firmly that: “Allegory is the most meaningful pattern of thought of our age.”23 Benjamin believed 20

Gao Zhongfu 高 中 甫 , “Xu [Introduction],” in Kafuka 卡 夫 卡 [Franz Kafka], Bianxing ji 变 形 记 [The Metamorphosis] (Beijing: Beijing Yanshan chubanshe, 2005), 3. 21 Ibid. 22 Walter Benjamin, Selected Works, Volume ii, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, ma: Belknap, 1996), 496. 23 Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Theodor Adorno and G. Scholem (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972) Vol. 1: 301.

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that that the “symbol,” which expressed a unified relationship, was no longer suited to the malaise of modern society and that allegory better captured the features of social decline.24 Fredric Jameson promoted Benjamin’s ideas.25 Jameson perceived a change in twentieth-century critical theory: “In our critical and aesthetic values, I sense a trend to return to the allegorical.” In the atmosphere of postmodernism he urged academia to “respect the spirit of allegory,” and offered the timely observation that “allegorical rewriting can open up many levels of interpretation, essentially a rewriting of multiple themes.”26 Positioned at the core of Western culture, Fredric Jameson took into consideration the different standpoints of postmodernism and postcolonialism as the competitive interaction of the twin offspring of illegitimacy, criticizing the “loss of revolutionary ethos” in Western culture on one hand, and on the other heralding the coming of “postmodern cultural texts.”27 Taking a leftist political standpoint, he promoted a theoretical framework of “post-Marxism,” attempting to find innovative revolutionary strength in “third-world cultural texts.”28 He read third-world texts as “national allegories,” believing that the allegorical structure in Western texts was latent, requiring a hermeneutical procedure to decode. National allegory in third world texts was conscious and overt, the writers resisting first-world invasion by committing their nationalist sentiments to allegory, thereby constituting interrogation and criticism of capitalism.29 Jameson’s evaluation and the implied meaning that it anticipated were far reaching, and prepared the trans-cultural expectation of the birth of Wolf Totem. Wolf Totem arrived as if by invitation. In the discursive environment of the “third world” it fulfilled Jameson’s “national allegory.”30 In a textual setting that 24 25

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27 28 29 30

Zhao Baisheng, ibid. Jiemusun (Zhanmusun) 杰 姆 逊 (詹 姆 逊 ) [Fredric Jameson], Houxiandaizhuyi yu wenhua lilun 后 现 代 主 义 与 文 化 理 论 [Postmodernism and cultural theories], trans. Tang Xiaobing (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1997), 85. The text is a translation of lectures given by Jameson at Peking University in 1985. Zhan Mingxin 詹 明 信 [Fredric Jameson], “Faguo piping chuantong 法 国 批 评 传 统 [The French critical tradition],” trans. Liu Xiangyu 刘 象 愚 , in Wanqi zibenzhuyi de wenhua luoji [The cultural logic of late capitalism] (Beijing: Shenghuo, dushu, xinzhi sanlian shudian, 1997), 331. Marxism and Form: Twentieth-century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 7–8. See “Third-World Literature in the Era of Postmodernism,” Social Text 15 (Autumn, 1986): 69. Zhan Mingxin [Fredric Jameson], Wanqi zibenzhuyi de wenhua luoji, 536. For further discussion of Wolf Totem and national allegory, see Chapter 5.

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is pre-modern, it realized the aesthetic ideal of the postmodern,31 thereby ending the embarrassing circumstances of the longstanding absence of postmodern texts in the sense of ‘re-establishment,’ using allegorical writing to open up a road to redemption that Benjamin sought to build employing the idea of culture—which was also literary criticism. From the founding of New China in 1949 through the end of the 1970s, political movements were numerous, and in that monolithic ideological atmosphere allegorical works almost vanished. Chen Puqing borrowed a common expression when he used images to compare allegory to “a thorny rose among the blooming of a hundred flowers.” Its growth “required a more relaxed political environment, and so once a political movement got underway, it always was the first to fade.”32 Quite a few fabulists felt the same way, believing “for a long time after the founding of New China, writing fables was the easiest way to get into trouble. Because this style of writing relied on one thing to suggest another, the language of allegory easily aroused suspicions and spitefulness in the minds of the authorities and those bent on causing trouble.”33 With Reform and Openness in 1978, allegory reappeared in the “flower garden” of literature, and related literary groups and research organizations sprouted. But the quality of allegory disappointed readers, and “people felt they were uninspired for the most part, all the writing devoted to trivia and insignificant issues about thought and work style.”34 This was totally out of step with China’s great economic strides, and from another angle revealed internal ‘unease’ behind the economic prosperity: Literature (culture) as ideology still lacked a relaxed creative environment, as it struggled to survive amidst the systemic constraints of “relaxed toward the outside; tense internally.” Ma Da pointed out three important issues for the creation of allegories: one was the superficiality of allegories, hardly surpassing the mundane insights and lessons already widely known to readers. The second was a lack of feeling for the era, of a consciousness of concern for it, and a dearth of writing reflecting 31 32

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See Chapters 2 and 3. Chen Puqing 陈 蒲 清 , “Bupingfan de Zhongguo xiandai yuyan 不 平 凡 的 中 国 现 代 寓 言 [Uncommon modern Chinese allegories],” in Bainian Zhongguo yuyan jinghua 百 年 中 国 寓 言 精 华 [Selections from a century of Chinese allegory], ed. Ge Cheng 葛 成 (Zhengzhou: Daxiang chubanshe, 2001). Cong Cong 聪 聪 , “Yuyan he wo 寓 言 和 我 [Allegory and I],” Zhongguo yuyan wang 中 国 寓 言 网 [China fable net], http://chinafable.hj.cn/shownews.asp?NewsID=2567 October 31, 2005. Hai Daiquan 海 代 泉 , “Guanyu yuyan xiezuo 关 于 寓 言 写 作 [Writing allegory],” Zhongguo yuyan wang [China fable net], http://chinafable.hj.cn/shownews.asp?NewsID=2309 (accessed August 2, 2005).

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international topics. The third was unvarying form, predominantly short prose pieces. He proposed the conception of “grand allegory” that “should have the features of a grand topic, grand allegorical significance, grand focus, and a grand scale.”35 Ma Changshan advocated “the need for allegorical creativity to depart from the orthodox … only by grasping the broad definition ‘say one thing and mean another’ can we boldly break out of many narrow limits.”36 These circumstances did not necessarily directly influence the birth of Wolf Totem, but the appearance of Wolf Totem undoubtedly addressed these demands, a timely response to a yearning for its advent. Wolf Totem made its debut in spring 2004. Prior to this, the Shaanxi writer Jia Pingwa’s novel Huainian lang [Nostalgia for wolves] in 2000 had already awed readers with its “allegorical richness.”37 Also making use of the wolf as a theme and adopting the mode of allegorical writing, it was as if it summoned a quantity of works with animals as themes to appear in contemporary China. After Wolf Totem was published Yang Zhijun’s Zang’ao [Tibetan mastiff, 2005]38 and Guo Xuebo’s Yin hu [Silver fox, 2006]39 followed on its heels, each with wild animals as a theme and set respectively in grasslands, snow-covered mountains, and deserts. At the same time the retelling of myths became a global publishing project, and Binu, Hou Yi, and Chongshu Bai she zhuan came out one after the other,40 initiating a discussion of “realist allegory.”41 “Retelling” is nothing new in literary history.42 Works with exactly the same topic may suggest meanings that are totally different. Even if a work borrows from myth and legend, 35

Ma Da 马 达 , “Jianli xin yuyan guan 建 立 新 寓 言 观 [Establishing a new vision of allegory],” Zhongguo yuyan wenxue yanjiuhui huiyuan tongxun 中 国 寓 言 文 学 研 究 会 会 员 通 讯 [Bulletin of members of the Chinese allegory study association] No. 1, n.d. 36 Ma Changshan 马 长 山 , “Yuyuan chuangzuo xuyao li jing pan dao 寓 言 创 作 需 要 离 经 叛 道 [Allegorical writing needs to depart from orthodoxy],” Zhongguo yuyan wenxue yanjiuhui huiyuan tongxun [Bulletin of members of the Chinese allegory study association] No. 1, n.d. 37 Back cover text, Huainian lang 怀 念 狼 (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 2000). 38 (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2005). 39 (Guilin: Lijiang chubanshe, 2006). 40 Su Tong 苏 童 , Binu 碧 奴 (English title: Binu and the Great Wall, trans. Howard Goldblatt), retelling the legend of Meng Jiangnü, was commissioned by Canongate Books Ltd. as part of its worldwide Myth Series in 2006. Ye Zhaoyan 叶 兆 言 , Hou Yi 后 羿 [Archer Yi] (2006), and Li Rui 李 锐 and Jiang Yun 蒋 韵 , Renjian: Chongshu bai she zhuan 人 间 重 述 白 蛇 传 [Retelling the story of the White Snake] (2007) were among a spurt of novels recasting legends as modern-style fiction. 41 See Wenhui dushu zhoubao [The Standard reader’s weekly], September 22, 2006. 42 See Stephen Owen, Remembrances: The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1986).

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is set in the natural world or has animals for protagonists, it is not necessarily allegorical fiction. When Zang’ao [Tibetan mastiff] appeared, for example, it looked as though it was a competitor challenging Wolf Totem. It evoked warm support, won praise from many readers for its undoubtedly positive image, and morally was the unquestioned champion.43 However, it was far from allegory in terms of ideas and representational technique, not even in the same arena as Wolf Totem. According to Zhang Longxi’s explanation of allegory: If the meaning of a text is completely clear from the writing itself, with no possibility of misreading, then explanation is not necessary. If the meaning cannot be completely traced through the writing itself, and there is no place to set about understanding it, then explanation is impossible. The hermeneutical process arises in between these two extremes.44 In that case, what confirms that a work is allegorical? Is such a determination and such a classification necessary? For the writer, knowledge of the nature of allegory and the genre of allegory is immaterial. He does not have to be concerned with such distinctions, but can enjoy great freedom among forms to select his materials based on creative needs. However, for criticism the questions are unavoidable, because they are related to cognition: different analytical tools may uncover different allegorical meanings. Types of allegory, like types of style, have a tradition historically. It is evident that in Zhuangzi the discussion of yùyán implied a recognition of stylistic types. In Western culture the ancient Greek rhetorician Aphthonius (Fourth Century) first distinguished types of allegory, concerned with both characters in a story and implied meaning. The three types were rhetorical allegory (with human characters), moral fables (with animals, plants, or inorganic characters), and parables (mixing humans with animals and other forms of characters). Gotthold Lessing’s “Essays on Fable” (Abhandlungen über die Fabel, 1759) adopted this view, exercising great influence on later studies of allegory. From 43

44

The second annual Contemporary award for Best Novel in 2005 went to Zang’ao 藏 獒 [Tibetan mastiff] as the popular favorite for “powerful feeling” and “delightful reading.” Netizens wrote that Wolf Totem displayed wolf culture impressively, and while in reality the wolf and the Tibetan mastiff are opponents, in terms of cultural significance Zang’ao was “a spiritual banner following the ‘wolf.’” Wolf Totem paved the way for the popularity of Zang’ao. See online resource Xinhua wang [New China net] (Lanzhou), September 9, 2005. “Fengyu [Allegory],” in Xifang wenlun guanjian ci [Keywords in Western criticism], ed. Zhao Yifan (Beijing: Waiyu jiaoxue yu yanjiu, 2006), 131.

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the twentieth century on, criticism of allegory in all nations drew from the achievements of folklore studies on the basis of theories of “theme” and ‘archetype’ to refine typologies of allegory, adding new criteria for typing allegories, such as by literary genre, historical period, nationality, etc. and broadening the scope of allegory. Only two fundamental, essential elements remained unchanged: good stories have a popular origin, and allegorical significance leaves room for imagination and interpretation within and outside the story. Wolf Totem has both these features. Yet I do not intend to insist on the choice of features within the field of allegorical types in this study, but rather to submit to the form of the work itself as a novel and to read it as an ‘allegorical novel.’ The novel “is a relatively recent phenomenon, and its artistic form is still evolving, still surprising critics with unprecedented effects and completely new conceptions of structure and technical means.”45 Faced with the novel, criticism can relax its grip, give free rein to its wide range of thought and feeling, and also draw from its rich text to conduct penetrating interpretation. The novel is first and foremost good reading, and allegory only after that. Only after it makes people feel does thinking follow. Allegorical fiction in the form of novels has taken two great strides in terms of fundamental features. The first is the feature of historical period, its temporality. “The novel, traditionally, has to take the time dimension seriously.”46 Early Western literature regarded allegorical fiction as legendary romance chuánqí 传 奇 , but allegory actually does not amount to the same thing as legendary romance, especially in its length and the realism so often found in its depiction of details. The stories in traditional allegory could be without plot and timeless, just characters, a location, and some ‘small event’ would do. Allegorical novels have complete plots and obvious temporality. Even if modern literature “seeks to escape its destiny,”47 in the end it still dances in shackles, and no matter how innovative, time is still present. Even if Wolf Totem, for example, deliberately concealed the specific time period, people could still define it as the “era of the Cultural Revolution.”48 The allegorical novel makes full use of 45 46

Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), 289. René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York and London: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovitch, 1962), 191. 47 Ibid. 48 Adrienne Clarkson, chair of the judges for the inaugural Man Asian Literary awards in praising Wolf Totem stated that it is a “panoramic novel of life on the Mongolian grasslands during the Cultural Revolution.” http://www.manasianliteraryprize.org/jiang-rong/, accessed November 1,2013.

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a capacity for time that is considerable, but in an unusual manner, for it “can stop, move faster, or extend. It has its own realm, its world, and this world has its own means of measuring time.”49 It is highly abstract and allegorized. Next are ideas in an overlapping arrangement. Ideas in traditional allegories are simple or unitary, expressing one thematic argument. The theme is also very apparent through the use of symbolic signs that people were accustomed to, such as, wolf/cruelty, tiger/ruler, fox/cleverness, rabbit/goodness, dog/loyalty, sheep/timidity … The allegorical meaning is clear, anthropomorphic, taking a human viewpoint, with the only standard for judgment that of whether something benefits or harms humans. Traditional allegory almost without exception carry positive moral guidance, directly conveying human will or sentiment, such as justice, courage, honesty, love, and so forth. However, if the subject changes places, moves away from “I,” or from humans, judgment is difficult. In the process of exchanging standpoints, there are no longer absolute friends and enemies, and no absolute good or evil. Traditional signs lose their original significance. Modern allegories often commence from the inversion of these signs, so that modern consciousness often appears as the inversion of traditional allegorical meaning, and Wolf Totem is a typical example of this. The appearance of allegorical fiction gave allegory a chance to rejoin mainstream literature. It absorbed the tradition of allegory as a vehicle of ideas, and at the same time that it abandoned mechanical symbolism it ended the arbitrariness of lingual expression. Benjamin wrote: “Allegory is not mere illustrative technique, but a form of expression.”50 In the baroque imagery of German tragic drama he saw the core of modern allegorical thought: “Allegories are in the realm of thought what ruins are in the realm of things.”51 The fragmentary images convey ‘the fragmentation of meaning.’ To find the meaning of history and the meaning of totality it is necessary to look through fragments, and through the critical reflection on art to open the gate to salvation.52 Benjamin’s aesthetics of ‘redemption’ significantly illuminates the 49

50 51 52

Wei Shikeluofusiji 维 ·什 克 洛 夫 斯 基 [Viktor Shklovsky], “Wenyi shijian wenti 文 艺 时 间 问 题 [Questions of time in literature],” in Sanwen lilun 散 文 理 论 [Theory of Prose], trans. Liu Zongci 刘 宗 次 (Nanchang: Baihua wenyi chubanshe, 1994), 299. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (New York and London: Verso, 1998), 162. Ibid., 178. See Chen Yongguo 陈 永 国 , “Qianyan 前 言 [Introduction],” in Waerte Benyaming 瓦 尔 特 ·本 雅 明 [Walter Benjamin], Deguo beiju de qiyuan 德 国 悲 剧 的 起 源 [The Origin of German Tragic Drama], trans. Chen Yongguo 陈 永 国 (Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe, 2001).

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analysis of allegory, or allegoresis, in Wolf Totem. Starting with Benjamin, and looking back from the vantage point of this new century, modern allegory, like a cicada emerging from its cocoon, made audible the fragmented human ideals on the ruins of modern civilization, but after a century has now fallen silent. Post-allegory has turned from the modern toward its origins and, heading back toward tradition, reconstructed the utopian ideal. No matter when they appear, allegorical works themselves, compared with other works of the same period, have been prophetic, and being “a half-step ahead” has been their common intellectual feature. The modern bards who “knew a thing could not be done yet tried to do it” almost all went through the experience of being forced into muteness or of refusing to sing in conformity and spent long years with either no alternative but silence or a deliberate choice to stay quiet. Such a silence has “a definite influence on the explicit part of [a] story.”53 Hence, Llosa encourages fiction criticism to get underneath the surface: “The written part of any novel is just a piece or fragment of the story it tells: the fully developed story, embracing every element without exception—thoughts, gestures, objects, cultural coordinates, historical, psychological, and ideological material, and so on, that presupposes and contains the total story…” Only then can we see the deeper meaning that “covers infinitely more ground than is explicitly traveled in the text.”54 Tracing the circumstances surrounding the creations of allegorists since early modern times, among those that appeared for political reasons (such as ideological control and censorship), there has always been a group of remarkable political allegories that achieved breakthroughs (such as Krylov and Saltykov-Shchedrin in Russia) to become a source of strength in the Enlightenment of the time. They were less literature than daggers fashioned out of literature as an alternative to throwing away the pen altogether in favor of armed action. Those that emerged for social reasons, such as Kafka’s fiction, employed absurdist techniques to allude to life in absurd societies, deliberately rejecting mainstream forms of expression, and forming the modernist literary avant garde. On account of their social status, or political or personality problems, the living conditions of allegorists were relatively poor, and since channels for free expression were blocked they had no choice but speak indirectly. Several of the above reasons pertained to the generation of Wolf Totem, as a result of social factors, personality, and so forth. Among these was the unexpected role of a “necessary condition” mentioned above: the desire for indirection and a 53 54

Mario Vargas Llosa, Letters to a Young Novelist, trans. Natasha Wimmer (New York: Picador, 2003), 110. Ibid, 117.

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strategy of concealing the author’s identity put the author in a position of having no choice but allegory. After a long silence, devoting himself for a decade to sharpening this sword, he launched the book, and like the howl of the wolf, its power was in “producing a new form of allegory.”55 Wolf Totem is not traditional allegory and lacks the transparency of traditional allegory. Neither is it political allegory, having no purely political orientation. It is not even a modern allegory, since neither inside nor outside the text is that modern setting that a modern allegory must have. From whatever we see or hear in the story, from its form and content, everything typifies it as ‘post-’: a story filled with the air of the postmodern, yet which in its ‘dialogue’ and ‘lecturing’ displays the political orientation of postcolonial criticism. As ‘national allegory,’ its textual form transcends the ‘modern,’ that necessary stage of history. In the age of globalization it self-consciously assumes the burden of the humanist concerns of postmodernism, and in a setting of ‘primitive nature’ recovers aesthetic ideals lost among the multitudes of modern humans to restore the place of utopia that for so long has fallen into disfavor. Paradoxically, the endeavor to ‘reconstruct utopia’ happens to move in exactly the opposite direction from the postmodern: “The postmodern aesthetic, as it is associated with hegemonic literature in the United States after 1960, presses modernist skepticism to an extreme. While modernism understood narrative authority as conditional, postmodernism finds it a sham.”56 In that case, can one still define the allegorical nature of Wolf Totem? The postmodern critic Susan Lanser discovered such an ambiguous narrative strategy in the texts of “marginal groups.” In Fictions of Authority she wrote that she had discovered new forms of narratives that “avoid the extremes of ‘naïve’ realism and antimimetic experimentalism by attempting to create from ‘a world that is itself, as “text…”’”57 Quite unexpectedly, her words fit perfectly the narrative strategy of Wolf Totem. Alan Wilde had already designated this form of narrative “mid fiction.”58 He pointed out that some paradoxes that exist in this type of fiction are exposed in the postmodern consciousness that it displays. For example, subjectivity is fragmented but presents a singular existence, “freedom” does not always signify liberty, nor does “choice” provide 55 56 57 58

Zhang Yiwu 张 颐 武 , Yige ren de yuedu shi 一 个 人 的 阅 读 史 [The history of one person’s reading] (Shenyang: Liaoning renmin, 2008), 107. Susan Lanser, Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1992), 126. Ibid, 127. Alan Wilde, Middle Grounds: Studies in Contemporary American Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 4–5; cited in Susan Lanser, op. cit.

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room for choice. Susan Lanser thus notes that certain groups of writers are drawn to mid fiction as a postmodern form that is “enabling yet resisting.” For example, the postmodern paradoxes above are also the ultimate sense of the historical experience among African Americans, survivors of the Holocaust, colonial peoples and others who have been oppressed. In the realm of postmodern literature characterized by fragmentation, the voice that had once lost a sense of power began to have a role in the process of political change. Cornel West echoed this understanding, seeing in the combination of national allegories of the third world and American black culture “sites of a potentially enabling yet resisting postmodernism.”59 Mark Edmundson termed it “positive postmodernism.”60 As laudable as the all the efforts were to evaluate “third world texts” properly, the achievements were few. To scholars and critics who are part of the third world it was like a maze or trap that once entered would be difficult to find a way out of, so that one would not only lose a sense of direction, but also oneself, straining to find one’s own shadow while riding on the back of someone else. Such a seemingly positive promotion felt like trimming feet to fit shoes, and in the process of researching Wolf Totem I felt the pain of that, and could not help doubting: would people and texts of today only be understood in the framework of the ‘postmodern,’ before being recognized as valid texts in order to have any effect? Unfortunately, this is our situation today. The misery of aphasia has been the shared historical experience of women, Simone de Beauvoir’s “second sex,” and the shared humiliating condition of all Oriental peoples submerged in the context of the West, as Edward Said wrote, because “formerly un- or mis-represented human groups” lost the right “to speak for and represent themselves in domains defined, politically and intellectually, as normally excluding them, usurping their signifying and representing functions, overriding their historical reality.”61 This condition makes Western ‘discourse’ and one’s own ‘speech’ amount to the same thing, and puts those who experience it in a dilemma, left without a voice. Is there a way out of this? No—not unless you put on shoes that fit, find familiar signs on the road traveled, and speak yourself freely in your own language: at least, these are the necessary preparations before going out.

59 60 61

“Black Culture and Postmodernism,” in Remarking History, eds. Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987), 96; cited in Lanser, 128. Mark Edmundson, “Prophet of a New Postmodernism: The Greater Challenge of Salman Rushdie,” Harper’s (December 1989), 62–63; cited in Lanser, 127. Edward Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” Cultural Critique 1 (Autumn 1985): 91.

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To me these same questions exist in this study, so there is no other way but to face the text of Wolf Totem: where did it come from, where did it start from? 1.2

Tracing the Wolf Motif No one knows himself or herself [Niemand kennt sich selbst]. We always already have a certain character; no one is a blank sheet of paper. hans-georg gadamer62

To study a literary work about wolves it is necessary to start from the motif, because the wolf itself is a motif.63 It can stand alone as a symbol and also be combined with other elements to construct a plot, forming a story. The study of motifs, or motives, has been seen as part of modern scientific development, beginning with the discovery and organization of folk literature.64 Imbued with the atmosphere of positivism and the advocacy of science, scholars in the early nineteenth century brought to literary criticism the methods of classification in natural science and methods of textual criticism in historiography. Stith Thompson’s Motif Index of Folk Literature compiled the results, showing evidence for the sources of elements in literary works that have persisted to the present. Up to the present there has been ambiguity over the definition of motif. In general, a topic or animal or plant is recognized as a “motif” if it has the following common features. 1.

Symbolic significance as a sign, such as “wolf,” a cultural sign that long ago became associated with the negative attributes of evil, cruelty, violence, and treachery.

62

Gadamer in Conversation: Reflections and Commentary, ed. Richard E. Palmer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 43. “Motif” is a concept Finnish folklorists first used to analyze mythic tales and folk legends, later used widely in literary criticism. French motif and German motiv etymologically are dissimilar, and the English term should be “motive.” However, in literary criticism the word “motif” is commonly used. The German brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm systematically collected folk stories and classified them, publishing them in 1812–14 as Grimm’s Fairytales. At the end of the nineteenth century P.V. Vladimirov included detailed classification of folk stories in his Introduction to the History of Russian Literature (Kiev, 1896), inaugurating the birth of the study of motifs. In 1910 Antti Aarne, representing the “Finnish Group,” published the Index of Types of Folktales, establishing the theoretical basis for defining the content of the motif through plot elements.

63

64

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2.

Within a plot that is linked to its symbolic meaning to form a unique model for a story, as occurs in “The Wolf of Zhongshan,” [referring to a creature who repays kindness with evil.] On the basis of these two elements, it needs to be widespread, with universal analogs or variants, a household name, just as the wolf is in worldwide literature. Finally, it is a creation with a long history, stretching back to the myths of the distant past up to the present, tirelessly repeated, constantly adopted and renewed, the way that wolf stories reappear in the field of contemporary Chinese literature.

3. 4.

Tracing the origins of something designated a motif is done for two reasons. First, a story with a long history can become a sign having hegemonic tendencies, unconsciously governing people’s cognition. Even if you’ve never seen a wolf you will produce similar associations through the wolf in text or pictures. Second, it becomes sediment in the collective unconscious, entering narrative texts and producing a direct influence on writing. Wolf Totem is an example of collective unconscious undergoing change in the process of civilization, an ‘overturning of the verdict’ based on a conscious act. The earliest wolf fables began spreading from folk legends. Stories of wolves were most abundant among Mongols and Native Americans, who depicted wolves as merciless and cunning creatures. The most ferocious spirit in Western European myths is the wolf.65 The proper meaning of the Greek word for myth (mythos, muthos) is “fable,”66 and Xie Xuanjun believes that “it is pantheism that governed myth, but literary rhetorical technique that accomplished the fable. The former is an unconscious collective belief; the latter conscious literary creation.”67 Once myth became fable, thought was added to illusion, nature infused with a humanist psyche, which enable it to permeate minds and spread. “Perhaps the best proof of transmission is contained in the folklore of the tribes of the world. Nothing seems to travel as readily as fanciful tales.”68 Highly imaginative animal stories later became the object of attention

65 66 67 68

Zhou Guoxing 周 国 兴 , Langhai, xueren, huo de huashi 狼 孩 ·雪 人 ·火 的 化 石 [Wolf cub, snowman, fire fossils] (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 1979), 9. E. Keluote E·克 洛 特 , Shijie youzhi shidai 世 界 幼 稚 时 代 [The world in its infant age] (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1932), 81–82. Xie Xuanjun 谢 选 骏 , Shenhua yu minzu jingshen 神 话 与 民 族 精 神 [Myth and volksgeist] (Jinan: Shandong wenyi chubanshe, 1986), 4–5. Franz Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man (New York: Macmillan, 1921), 168.

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among the “typological index school” in Folk Literature Studies,69 foremost in the typing of motifs and ordering indexes.70 In light of their research we believe that primarily animals were the principal characters in early human literature (such as myths, legends, fables, and folk stories). From this angle it almost seems that Wolf Totem leaped past the entire history of civilization during which humans became masters of the world, its central characters, to directly echo the voice of ancestors in the distant past. In that case: How does Wolf Totem as an animal story perpetuate ancient tradition? In what way does it as post-allegory overturn the wolf motif of tradition? The making of the wolf into a motif in the stories of ancient legend and myth converged from two directions: one, images of ‘evil’; the second, plots about ‘incapacity.’ Together they formed stories that had broad appeal and circulated widely. These stories were almost all fables. The wolf established its particular qualities in fables about ‘rewarding good and punishing evil,’ and out of these was constructed the near homogeneous aesthetic judgment of the “wolf” among people of every society in the world. Textbooks offer a type of literary theory in which the relationship between fable and motif is a specialized topic, treating fable as “the sum of all the motifs,” “an abstraction from the ‘raw materials’ of fiction (the author’s experience, reading, etc.).”71 Turning to Wolf Totem, before textual analysis, it is necessary first to start from a position of clarifying our own tradition, considering the author’s own life, as well as relevant information that he may have encountered while growing up. What is surprising about ancient Chinese mythic and allegorical stories is how limited stories about wolves are in ancient ethnic Han writings. Even in fables few have wolves as main characters, while most are stories with dogs, sheep, horses, pigs, and poultry.72 The Han Feizi [circa 3rd century bce] contains 69 See Liu Kuili minsuxue lunwen ji 刘 魁 立 民 俗 学 论 文 集 [Studies in folklore by Liu Kuili] (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1998). 70 See the work of P.V. Vladimirov, Antti Aarne, and Stith Thompson op. cit. n. 59, as well as Seki Keigo 关 敬 吾 , et al., Nihon Mukashibanashi Shūsei 日 本 昔 话 大 成 [Compilation of Japanese folktales] (Tokyo, 1980). 71 René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York and London: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovitch, 1962), 218. 72 Chen Puqing, Zhongguo jingdian yuyan (Changsha:Yuelu shushe, 2005) selected 550 allegories from 138 books (from pre-Qin to the Qing dynasty), among which even those from the pre-Qin period rarely were related to wolves.

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hundreds of fables,73 the animals found within are mostly those with which humans had close contact, such as horses, pigs, sheep, poultry, and other livestock, as well as rabbits. Even insects, such as praying mantises, cicadas, and lice, are well represented, but there is no place for wolves. Of the 102 myths and fables in the 140 chapters of the Liezi, the animal fables are principally stories about sheep and horses.74 There are no animal fables among the three famous allegories in the Mengzi. Among the dozens of allegories in Spring and Autumn Annals there are only several animal fables (like “The good dog for catching mice”), and these include various types of deer and pigs—but no wolves as main characters. There are quite a few animal fables in the ­Strategies of the Warring States, such as “the fox assumes the fierceness of the tiger,” “painting a snake by adding legs,” “birds startled at the hint of a bow,” and so forth, thus there are mostly stories about humans and animals. Only “Mending the sheep pen after the sheep are gone” is somewhat related to wolves. Zhuangzi believed that his own work was “ninety percent allegorical,” but the animals in the Zhuangzi are mostly those close to humans: poultry, cicadas, sparrows, frogs, cattle, monkeys, eagles, and then the famous butterfly and fantastic creatures, such as the millenium turtle, the monoped, the hundred-legged worm … yet no such imaginative space is given to the wolf. The literary works of later centuries are also like this. Even in the fiction devoted to anomalies that mixed humans with animals (for example, Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West and Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from Liao Studio), wolves play only minor roles, not enough to leave a deep impression. During the 1920s the Chinese folklorist Zhong Jingwen composed The Forms of Chinese Folktales while introducing the basis for related theory from abroad, dividing Chinese folktales into 45 categories.75 There was no category identified by wolves. The absence of the wolf in the texts of early Chinese literati is perhaps evidence that the Han ethnicity prematurely entered agricultural civilization. From another angle it proves that Han society, early on, distanced itself from the natural environment on which wolves relied for survival. Consequently, wolves also distanced themselves from the common life of Han 73

74 75

Gong Mu 公 木 , Xian Qin yuyan gailun 先 秦 寓 言 概 论 [Introduction to allegory of the pre-Qin period] (Jinan: Qilu shushe, 1984) counted 340 fables, the most among the philosophers. See Wang Libo 王 力 波 , Liezi yi zhu 列 子 译 注 [Annotated Translation of Liezi] (Harbin: Heilongjiang renmin, 2003). Zhongguo mintan xingshi 中 国 民 谭 型 式 was first published serially during 1930–31 in the Hangzhou journal Minsu zhoukan 民 俗 周 刊 [Folklore Weekly], then collectively in a special issue of Kaizhan yuekan开 展 月 刊 (1931, issue 10–11). This was the first classification of Chinese folk literature.

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people. But that does not mean that the vast land of the Chinese lacked knowledge of the wolf. It was precisely there that stories about wolves multiplied and developed through oral transmission, down through the centuries, until they were condensed into numerous idioms equivalent to motifs: “the heart of a wolf, the lungs of a dog” (cold blooded), “wolfish ambition” (savage), “colluding like wolves and jackals” (treacherous), “white-eyed wolf” (treacherous ingrate). Virtually all those stories involving wolves, however, are negative images, of which the most famous may be “Scholar Dong Guo and the wolf.”76 The story is simple, and after undergoing historical embellishment and refinement as a lesson, it has come down to the present replete with allegorical significance: the evil nature of wolves is irredeemable; never show kindness to an enemy. In turn this reappeared in a couplet in the eighteenth-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber: “Paired with a brute like the wolf in the old fable, /Who on his saviour turned when he was able.”77 This compared the wolf to an ingrate. “Scholar Dong Guo” has also now become a recognized term in modern­Chinese, a sign for those people lacking moral discrimination and misallocating sympathy. On the surface, the plot of Wolf Totem does not overturn but, rather, goes one step further in confirming the cruelty and ingratitude of wolves. Chen Zhen painstakingly cares for the wolf cub, which then shows no gratitude toward its master, but like the wolf of Zhongshan savagely bites the master’s finger. Chen Zhen’s behavior is like a reprint of Scholar Dong Guo’s, and he deserves the suffering he brings on himself. In that case, how does Wolf Totem overturn the traditional image of the wolf? The inversion is achieved in the subtle process of reading, evoked in the heterogeneous information that some may be open to. What information is that? Since early modern times foreign literature has constantly poured into China. Information about wolves accompanying forceful, wolfish civilization entered mainstream Chinese culture through different channels, edited into teaching materials and permeating enlightenment reading matter that all influenced the maturation of several generations of young Chinese (among them Jiang Rong, author of Wolf Totem), and subtly transformed people’s thinking 76

77

From Ma Zhongxi 马 中 锡 , Dong tian ji 东 田 集 (13th century). During the Warring States period Zhao Jianzi caught a wolf, which appealed to a passerby, Scholar Dong Guo, to save him. Dong Guo hid the wolf in his book satchel and evaded Zhao Jianzi, only to be bitten by the wolf later. Cao Xueqin 曹 雪 芹 , Story of the Stone [Shitou ji 石 头 记 ; aka Hong lou meng 红 楼 梦 ] Chapter 5, trans. David Hawkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), vol. 1: 134.

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and concepts. Among the greatest of those influences have been allegory and fiction. First is allegory. In China prior to the Cultural Revolution in 1966 there were many translations of fables from every land. Taking Aesop’s Fables as representative, out of a total of 360 fables 29 are wolf stories. Those wolf stories seemed to echo past Chinese imagination of wolves, as basically negative, frequently appearing together with sheep and dogs, showing the greed and heartlessness of the wolf. Sometimes, comparisons of wolves to other wild animals (such as “wolf and lion” or “wolf and fox,” etc.) throw into prominence the wolf’s cruelty, coldness and self-aggrandizement. Widely known, “The Wolf and the Lamb” and “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” were included in teaching materials for elementary schools, taking a step further to strengthen the bad image of the wolf. The fable of the “wolf in sheep’s clothing” in the Bible, is known to almost everyone on the Mainland of China.78 Implying false prophets who ruin the teachings of the faith through wolfish cunning and hypocrisy, it served the same purpose as “the wolf of Zhongshan,” enlightening those looking forward to “peace on earth” that such prophets were no different than beasts in nature. While the stories of wolves in ancient Chinese fables were few and their image was uniform, relatively fixed, never departing from the connotation of evil. What the wolf connoted in European literature was less fixed, good as well as bad. The story of the she-wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus in ­Roman legend had a profound influence on European culture. “The Wolves and the Sheepdogs” in Aesop’s Fables satirizes the dogs’ servility and demonstrates the spiritual value of the wolf’s existence. Similar motifs in the context of different narratives may yield completely different meanings, so that with a shift of standpoint the evaluation of the wolf improves. In repeating the motif of the wolf, modern European allegory constantly revised it, gradually rounding out the total image of the wolf, constructing an engaging phenomenon in European political allegory. On one hand, those writers continued to depict the evil traits of the wolf, equating them to violent rulers of autocracies, effectively satirizing and deriding them (as in Lessing’s “The Martial Wolf,” alluding to a ruler’s self-glorification, and Krylov’s “The Wolf in the Kennel” mocking the attempts of the once victorious Napoleon to avoid

78

Matthew 7:15: “Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves.” The Holy Bible, New International Version (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1984).

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defeat by negotiating peace). On the other hand, there were rewritings of wolf motifs, such as Krylov’s “The Wolf and the Lamb,” which adopts the storyline of an Aesop fable, alluding to Napoleon’s indiscriminate action when he invaded Russia. When a lamb asks to be spared, the wolf finds an apt reason for eating him: “You all, your dogs, and all your shepherds, you wish me ill and hurt me any time and any way you are able.” Taking the wolf’s standpoint, who can say that he is incorrect? Krylov was a master at adapting motifs. His “The Wolf and the Hunter” follows Aesop’s “The Wolf and the Shepherd” closely, but puts it in verse form: A wolf passed by a hunter’s home Peered through the fence into the courtyard And saw the shepherd select the fattest sheep from the flock, Then calmly slaughter it, While the dog in the courtyard Lay quietly at one side. Angrily the wolf went away, Quietly growling as he went, “Friends, if I’d been the one to do that Who knows what a clamor you’d make!79 Krylov adds a dog to Aesop’s fable in a way that may change the meaning. The dog is not simply a witness, but made to be an accomplice of human’s evil actions. Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin carried forward this meaning to add completely new content to the motif of the dog, as well as offer new ways to reconstruct the motif of the wolf. Saltykov-Shchedrin was less given to moral instruction on punishing evil and rewarding good and more devoted to exposing czarist autocracy and the degradation of human nature under an autocratic system. In “The selfsacrificing rabbits” the object of criticism is rabbits rather than wolves, and the weakness of the rabbits satirizes the liberals of 1880s Russia, who have sunk to the level of hypocritical “moral slaves.” In “The Absent-minded Sheep,” he quoted the German Zoologist Alfred Edmund Brehm: “Domesticated sheep since time immemorial have been subservient to humans; their true ancestors are untraceable.” Directly ridiculing the servility of sheep, he wrote: “As to whether there was a period of ‘freedom’ prior to domestic sheep, history is

79

Translated from the Chinese. See Keleiluofu yuyan quanji 克 雷 洛 夫 寓 言 全 集 [Complete fables of Krylov], trans. Pei Jiajin 裴 家 勤 (Nanjing: Yilin chubanshe, 2000), n.p.

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silent.”80 The point of such criticism may well have influenced the author of Wolf Totem, since Russian literature was an important psychological wellspring along Jiang Rong’s path to maturity.81 Jiang Rong clearly expresses the influence of outside culture through the character Chen Zhen in Wolf Totem. The foreign texts bearing information on wolves had an important role in reshaping the author’s image of wolves: He’d read a Soviet story in elementary school about a hunter who rescued an injured wolf and returned it to the forest after nursing it back to health … It was the first story he’d read about friendships forged between wolves and humans, and the first to show a different side of wolves from all the books he’d read and all the movies he’d seen (216; 329).82 At that time the greatest influence on the depiction of wolves was the fiction of Jack London. London was one of the writers that Lenin, as founder of the Soviet Union, most enjoyed. It was on account of Lenin that London’s short story “Love of Life” and the novel The Iron Heel were well received in the Soviet Union, and in the 1950s exerted influence on Chinese readers. London’s work had a lasting impact on the traditional motif of the wolf, changing the way Jiang Rong’s generation saw the wolf during the era of Mao Zedong. In Wolf Totem the urban educated youth who have been relocated to the countryside mention London’s writing several times: The three big dogs were wagging their tails, showing their appreciation of how Chen Zhen divided up the food, something he’d learned from Jack 80 81

82

Cited in Xiedelin yuyan xuanji 谢 德 林 寓 言 选 集 [Selected fables of Saltykov-Schedrin] (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi, 1962), 147. “I recall the first two books were Russian folktales and Lithuanian folktales. After that, I can’t recollect, there were so many and so varied … I also loved literature as a youth.” Jiang Rong, in answer to a question by Yao Tingting 姚 婷 婷 during an interview, Bertelsmann Book Club. [Bertelsmann, the German media, services and education company, operated book stores and online book sales in China between 1995 and 2008, offering discounts to book buyers there who took membership in the Bertelsmann Book Club.] [Translator’s note.]. Lang tuteng (Wuhan: Changjiang wenyi, 2004), 216; trans. Howard Goldblatt (New York: The Penguin Press, 2008), 329. Hereafter, citations appear in parentheses in the text, referring to the page number in the Chinese edition, followed where applicable by the page number in the English-language translation by Goldblatt. Quotations that contain a partial translation by Goldblatt and supplementary original translation for this study are additionally marked “orig. trans.”

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London’s The Call of the Wild, a book he knew he’d never get back after lending it out, now that it was in circulation among students in two brigades (266; 393–94).83 Prior to the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 Jack London’s representative works were available in Chinese translation, a number of them relating­ to wolves. London’s wolves and wilderness are deeply significant as symbols of freedom and of nature. The comparisons of wilderness with the city and of wolves with dogs also allude to comparisons of nature and civilization. In his early novel The Call of the Wild (1903) he depicted a dog that has returned to the wilderness from civilized society: …running free in the open, the unpacked earth underfoot, the wide sky overhead … he may be seen running at the head of the pack through the pale moonlight or glimmering borealis, leaping gigantic above his fellows, his great throat a-bellow as he sings a song of the younger world, which is the song of the pack.84 Yet not long after this, in the 1906 novel White Fang, London told a story with the opposite meaning about a wolf tamed by civilization. Such contradictions may have depicted the development of his own psyche, a lifetime of painful struggle in worry over the wild and the civilized, freedom and institutions. People imagined he was a socialist, while his own descriptions of socialists are quite negative: “animals, beasts, cannibals,” not communist fighters kindly saving humanity.85 His life was like that of a wolf, filled with primal violence, stubborn and lonely struggle, fame, and success. Yet he finally chose to give it all up: his reported suicide became an unresolved issue in the history of proletarian literature, and to this day has left a cloud of doubt over his orientation. However, there is no doubt that the wilderness, the wolves, and the life he depicted influenced many people, including the author of Wolf Totem, Jiang Rong. Despite the number of London’s works that carried wolf in the title, he wrote more about dogs than about wolves. He employed the name wolf to 83 84 85

For other allusions to Jack London’s fiction, see Chapters 18 and 20. The Call of the Wild, http://london.sonoma.edu/Writings/CallOfTheWild/chapter7.html, (accessed November 22, 2013). For Jack London’s life, see the translator’s introduction to London’s novel Martin Eden 马 丁 ·伊 甸 [Mading Yidian], trans. Sun Fali 孙 法 理 (Nanjing: Yilin chubanshe, 1998).

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express the spirit of wolves: tough, cruel, tenacious, patient, and defiant. They fight to the end: “the brute retreated, raising a prolonged call to his brothers; and greedily they answered, … the panting brutes refused to scatter.”86 Such scenes occur many times in Wolf Totem, affirming the spirit of the wolf, and at the same time applying this spirit directly to understanding national character, as London did in “The Son of the Wolf”: He thought of the tender women of his own race and smiled grimly. Yet from the loins of some such tender woman had he sprung with a kingly inheritance—an inheritance which gave to him his dominance over the land and sea, over the animals and the peoples of all the zones.87 This is a declaration of white people as “civilized wolves,” filled with the excitement of conquest and blood lust. Native peoples called the white outsiders “wolves”: “The Wolves are ever hungry. Always do they take the choice meat at the killing.” “The son of the wolf” makes no apology for this judgment, wantonly justifying his ethnicity and threatening: Now will I tell you of my people, who are the mightiest of all the peoples, who rule in all the lands … Listen to the Law of the Wolf: Whoso taketh the life of one Wolf, the forfeit shall ten of his people pay.88 This is a discourse that is not out of place in Wolf Totem. History tells us that talk of “white human wolves” is absolutely not an empty expression. They truly wrote the “Law of the Wolf” into human history. It is necessary to point out the reason why the idea of the white wolf could cross the ocean and find a spokesman among the flocks of sheep born out of the yellow earth of China: It was not because it was carried over in the atmosphere of powerful Western civilization, but on account of the idea of socialism brought in from the Soviet homeland. Without the billows of smoke of the red wolves that followed the sound of gunfire in the “October Revolution” of 1917, without Lenin and his followers’ makeover of “white wolves” by adding red, the ‘revolutionary

86

“The Law of Life” (1901), The World of Jack London, http://www.jacklondons.net/lawoflife .html, (accessed November 23, 2013). 87 “The Son of the Wolf,” The Literature Network, http://www.online-literature.com/poe/95/, (accessed November 23, 2013). 88 Ibid.

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successors’ of Chinese socialism would never have forged any connection across the ocean with an imperialist American writer. Jack London’s white wolves changed color in a textual journey, entering China via Lenin and the red Soviet Union, surprisingly bloodier than before. That is the influence that we will examine more thoroughly in the textual analysis below. Obviously, the grassland wolf in Wolf Totem is not a brother of the white wolf in Jack London. The wolf is not merely textual, but even more so, natural; not only conceptual but also innate. Conceptual wolves pale in comparison to genuine grassland wolves: Chen Zhen nodded as he thought back to all the fairy tales he’d read as a child. The “gray wolves” were stupid creatures, greedy and cruel, while foxes were clever and likable. Not until coming to the grassland did he realize that in nature there is no wild animal that has evolved more highly or more perfectly than the gray wolf (30; 46–47). In the end, Wolf Totem is allegory, and its allegorical meaning is undoubtedly primary. Yet, before he had conceived of writing, let alone started, the real wolves of the grassland surely shadowed him in dreams he could not dispel, forcing him to seek shelter and find the right place to unload thoughts and feelings that stirred restlessly. It took thirty years to write this book, from conception to completion. That was a long process. Each time he relaxed the wolves rose up around him in an imposing array of honor, becoming a weapon in the author’s hand: he decided to use ‘truth’ as a weapon to declare war on all wolf motifs established since ancient times. Returning to the wolf motif, we can see something interesting in Wolf Totem: on the one hand its realism testifies to the wolf’s ‘cruelty’ (tenacious determination to survive) and ‘cunning’ (superior knowledge in survival skills); on the other hand it unreservedly defends the wolf’s nature and simultaneously conducts a merciless criticism of the qualities of sheep. On the surface it perpetuates tradition by intensifying the depiction of the wolf’s cruelty and cunning, yet it is less obviously making use of postmodern aesthetic effects, completing an exchange of values at the same time that it shifts where empathy is placed, implicitly introducing new content on behalf of the wolf and its negative implications. Its criticism is relatively restrained, less in order to respond to traditional Chinese aesthetic conceptions, and more to accommodate a contemporary discursive environment that is severely restricted. On this account its expressive techniques are also restrained, conventional by all appearances, depicting the state of existence for grassland wolves in realist terms,

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yet reflecting on the mainstream of Chinese culture from a marginalized cultural standpoint, from the outside in, deconstructing the origins and qualities of Chinese civilization. In the process of attacking from two directions, the author deliberately found strength in ‘minorities’ and ‘heterogeneous cultures,’ identifying them with wolves in the wild, and making of them tools that together ground up the traditional motif of the wolf, and with it Han Chinese civilization. The two methods of ‘inversion’ and ‘deconstruction’ are plainly postmodern features, and their timely appearance in Wolf Totem fortuitously happened to respond to the revival of wolf culture at the start of the twentyfirst century, while the (minority) national identity and (grassland) border setting closely corresponded to the political strategy of postcolonial criticism, by ingeniously conveying the significance of the ‘postmodern’ era through a story of ‘pre-civilization.’ Wolves in the post-era and Wolf Totem are fortunate. At least on a moral level they have been freed and have avoided the assaults of the well-meaning. In the propaganda uproar of ecologism and environmental protection “the wolf has become for many a symbol of wildness, and an icon in an emerging ethic of wildlife conservation.”89 Zoological research has demonstrated that wolves, once the most widespread predators in the world, their knowledge, strength, unity, and adaptability supreme, vanished in Europe several decades ago, and in Germany 150 years ago. Biologists and ­zoologists have been developing efforts to preserve the wolf under the slogan, “Human understanding is the wolf’s only hope of survival.”90 “The wolf once inspired nearly pathological hatred in humans,” but if we change our ideas and hope to dwell in harmony with animals then “wolves and other large predators will hopefully remain irreplaceable contributors to human language, intellect, story, myth, and connection with the living world.”91 Popular science author Zhou Guoxing believes that wolves are a common topic in daily life and in works of art “because of all wild animals wolves have had the closest relationship with humans.”92 Yet descriptions of this close relationship are few in traditional Chinese literature. Especially since 1949,

89 90 91 92

Stephen R. Kellert, The Value of Life: Biological Diversity and Human Society (Washington, dc: The Island Press, 1997), 110. “Tanxun lang tuteng 探 寻 狼 图 腾 [In search of the wolf totem],” Shijie dili pindao 世 界 地 理 频 道 [World geographic channel], cctv broadcast July 10, 2006. Kellert, 111. Zhou Guoxing, Langhai, xueren, huo de huashi [Wolf cub, snowman, fire fossils] (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 1979), 9.

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outstanding representations of wolves have been rare in literary works, even though they were still in mountainous regions (such as the Dabie Mountains, where I was sent) and the grasslands (such as Inner Mongolia, where Jiang Rong was sent). Grassland authors have written a considerable amount of fiction with animals as leading characters: Among the Mongolian authors, there have been Odsor’s “Chestnut horse” [Zaoliu ma de gushi, 1951] and Zhalagahu’s “White pony” [Xiao bai ma de gushi, 1955], the Hui author Zhang Chengzhi’s “Black steed” [Hei junma, 1986], and more, but almost no fiction with the wolf as a topic.93 The Mongolian writer Pengsike’s story “Hunting wolves” (Da lang, 1961)94 portrays members of a tractor unit in the Xing’an Mountains using their spare time to kill wolves. The scale of wolf packs at that time is evident, as is the threat that wolves posed to agricultural production in New China. After a long absence of wolf stories no one imagined that writers among the Han ethnicity that has been so far removed from wolf culture would launch the novel Nostalgia for wolves (Huainian lang, 2000) at the start of the new century, and single-handedly raise the “wolf totem” (2004) that even grassland peoples no longer believed in. Nostalgia for wolves preceded Wolf Totem, its author, Jia Pingwa, spending three years writing it and revising it extensively four times. In the story, three characters (a reporter, the leader of a wolf-hunting team, and a poacher) together witness and participate in the eradication of the fifteen remaining wolves in Shangzhou. The reporter’s identity and role is very similar to that of Chen Zhen in Wolf Totem. Both are educated outsiders, ethnic Han, and tired of life in the city. They participate in the process of the wolves’ disappearance as eyewitnesses. In speaking about his motive for writing, Jia Pingwa also had a similar explanation: “It was wolves that reawakened my feelings for Shangzhou and my passion for life. After that, the story just came to me inadvertently.”95 Why did he miss wolves? Because “wolves understand human nature” (196), “male wolves are faithful in love” (165), and because wolves refused to be tamed: “those that could be tamed, the ancients slowly turned into dogs” (157). The two books also reach the same conclusion about the extermination of wolves: “Once humans acquired firearms, the grim fate of the wolf, which had struggled with humans for thousands of years, was sealed” (229). Depicting 93

94 95

See Tuoya 托 娅 and Caina 彩 娜 , eds., Neimenggu dangdai wenxue gaiguan 内 蒙 古 当 代 文 学 概 观 [Survey of contemporary literature of Inner Mongolia] (Hohhot: Neimenggu daxue chubanshe, 1997). “Da lang 打 狼 [Hunting wolves],” Renmin wenxue [People’s literature] 1961, No.11: 36–41. Jia Pingwa 贾 平 凹 , Huainian lang 怀 念 狼 [Nostalgia for wolves] (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 2000), 2. Subsequent citations of this work are given in the text in parentheses.

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“the last wolf packs,” both books take pains to emphasize the existential relationship of the inter-connectedness of humans and wolves: Having fought with humans for thousands of years, the wolf is now on the verge of extinction. At this time the stars in the heavens too are falling. What catastrophe does this foretell? What hunters feel about the destruction of the wolf is first of all a sense of terror, whereas when there is a meteor shower most of us, and naturally that includes me, believe we’ve simply encountered a spectacle and just ooh and aah with excitement. (52) The two books differ in the ways they present the ‘relationship’: It is the vitality of wolves for which Wolf Totem strives to win recognition; sex is completely absent. However, the wolves that Jia Pingwa misses have strong sexual potency, and there is a lot in the story about visions of sexual potency: “If there were no female comrades in the drilling crew the men would not clean the latrine, or take care of their own looks, and would gradually lose even the impulse for sex, just living like pandas” (23). He tells us that the pandas’ desire and sexual energy had dissipated, and their birthrate is only 10 percent: “When I heard that I was shocked. At first I thought of the wolves, then I thought about humans. Would the human race someday fall into this condition?” (25). In this sense, Nostalgia for Wolves seems to confirm Fredric Jameson’s view: All third-world texts are necessarily, I want to argue, allegorical, and in a very specific way … Third-world texts, even those which are seemingly private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic—necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society.96 Following Jameson’s theory, if we read Nostalgia for wolves as also national allegory, it becomes readily apparent that on the moral question of the wolf’s nature, Jia Pingwa is not as optimistic as Jiang Rong. On the contrary, he sees clearly that in China today “there are no wolves, but there are human wolves,” and so “Shangzhou does not need to invest in breeding new wolves” (266).

96

“Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (Autumn, 1986): 69.

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In that case, why conclude the novel with the cry, “I need wolves! I need wolves!—” (268)? Obviously, once one moralizes wolves, issues of national character and even human nature become prominent, not only concerning the quality of libido and the fertility of the reproduction of the Chinese nation, but even more concerning the quality of existence for humanity itself. Looked at from this angle, these two wolf texts from China cannot simply be read as ‘national allegory,’ but more like human allegories in the ‘post-’ era—what I will call ‘post-allegory.’ Why have such allegories appeared in quantity today in China?  This has to do with a salvation complex that filled us for a long time and has lingered on up to the present. On the Chinese mainland, the slogan “liberate all humanity” was not just institutional ideology, but also an ideal that people may have internalized. Even if thwarted, it will definitely show itself in an odd or mutated form, like Kafka’s metamorphosis. For that reason a wolf motif or talk about grasslands will not simply be a story about one time or place. Instead, it continues that great dream of utopia that stubbornly persists in the Chinese nation. What is different is that although the techniques of Nostalgia for wolves continued the tradition of Chinese strange tales of anomalies, it primarily tells of people facing real life. In that sense it is more fiction than pure allegory. Wolf Totem is thoroughly steeped in traditional techniques at the same time that it adopts the traditional motif of the wolf. Concealing what it finds difficult to express behind a mask of kindness and sincerity, it is more allegorical than most fiction, and to access this fully requires a related form of critical approach. Postmodernist criticism proceeds “not by cancelling or excavating the surface of the text in search of deeper meanings, but by improvising on the material of the original text.”97 The postmodernist critic Gregory Ulmer believes that ­allegorical criticism (allegoresis) “favors the material of the signifier over the meanings of the signified.”98 It is such an approach that I favor for this study, turning away from what the author has signified and toward the material—the wolf motif—itself, in order to excavate from the text the rich allegory that it potentially conveys.

97 98

Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary (Malden, ma and Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 239. “Object of Postcriticism,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Townsend Bay: Bay Press, 1985), 95; cited in Steven Connor, 239.

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The Narrative Strategy of Wolf Totem99 Whoever wants to understand a text appropriately must ask for its principal intention, the central point of view. The grasp of the scopus forms the basis for the endless nuancing work involved in understanding.100 hans-georg gadamer

According to theories of narratology, a story must begin and develop around the main character(s). While the main character does not have to be the first narrator, s/he must be the most important actor; the plot of a story develops principally under the dominance of the main character. If we go into Wolf Totem following this logic we will be lost from the very beginning. Why? Because the actual main character in the book and the leading character present on the page are from first to last different characters. In other words, this book may have multiple main characters or multiple storylines developing simultaneously. In such narrative circumstances we are merely under the guidance of the one who is present, following him to read the story as it is inferred from events that he witnesses. Who is always present? Only Chen Zhen (and his educated youth companions). If Chen Zhen is not the true main character, who is? What is the function of his ‘presence’? That is the topic of this section, from which will be disclosed the ‘post-’ qualities that appear in the narrative strategy of this allegory. Turn first to the story. Chen Zhen as someone who is ‘present,’ is an outsider to the grassland. We (also outsiders) follow him into the grassland, guided by what he himself witnesses and experiences, sharing in events happening far from us in the grassland. These events construct three major storylines, three stories. The first line is the story of the grassland and the grassland wolves, centered from first to last on one question: what has made the grassland and the 99

My analysis draws on Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose (1925; 1990), Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse (1980) and Narrative Discourse Revisited (1983), and Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (1985). I attempt textual analysis using these sources and Yang Yi 杨 义 , Zhongguo xushixue 中 国 叙 事 学 [Chinese narratology] (1997) in a postmodern context. Modern narratology can be employed readily to analyze contemporary Chinese literature because after a century of experiment, Chinese literature has tacitly completed a shift from traditional to modern forms of narrative. See Chen Pingyuan, Zhongguo xushi moshi de zhuanbian [The tranformation of narrative modes in Chinese fiction] (Beijing: Beijing da xue chubanshe, 2003). 100 “Conversations with Carsten Dutt,” in Gadamer in Conversation: Reflections and Commentary, ed. Richard E. Palmer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 52.

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grassland­wolves disappear? This is the storyline that is the easiest for readers to understand, and the publishing business emphasized this facet: This is an epic on wolves, a novel with a unique interpretation of Chinese history, an original work that can shake the commercial world, cultural circles, and academia. Through the decline of the once flourishing wolf packs, the book depicts the last stages of the gradual disappearance of the Mongolian grassland.101 For this reason many people have read Wolf Totem as ecological fiction. The novel originally introduced chapters by numbers only without titles, but the online version divided the plot into five sections for the convenience of readers.102 The first section begins with Chen Zhen’s solitary encounter with the grassland wolves. It shows the original ecology of the grassland as Chen Zhen moves from fear of wolves to awe, and from the desire to raise a wolf pup to seizing a litter. The second part is composed of several brief stories, starting from the appearance of the wolf cub: the beauty of swans and the swan lake, the struggles of wolves and dogs, the battle of horses and wolves, all displaying the way of life in the grassland and the impressiveness of wolves. In the third section, while the grassland is threatened as settlers move in, the wolf cub begins to mature but his nature remains unaltered. In the fourth section as the encroachment of soldiers and settlers increases they shoot wolves. As more and more pastureland is turned into farmland the incursions of wolf packs increase, and sandstorms blow in. The fifth section is Chen Zhen’s ‘lecture,’ tracing the development of Han civilization and offering a reflective critique. If you believe that this outline is the entire book, then, seen as a whole, there is no reason why it should be titled “Wolf Totem.” When the story concludes, the vicious, tenacious grassland wolf is facing extinction, so why should such a defeated hero be a sacred totem for modern humans? It is evident that there is another story behind the story. That is a story about the spirit and about belief, within which the main character is the wolf totem, as if not quite present, appearing through discourse, filled with the flavor of intellectual speculation: “a speculative discourse about narrative conceived by its practitioners as a 101 Dushu wangzhan 读 书 网 站 : http://www.book.qq.com. 102 In addition to thirty-five numbered chapters, the original book also included an “Epilogue” and a “Reasoned Exploration.” The sections given here below are taken from the Dushu wangzhan online edition, in which chapter numbers are introduced by “No” [Number].

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virtuoso performance in postmodern theory.”103 Wolf Totem allows us to visually appreciate this performance: Chen Zhen witnesses it for himself and tells in detail how the wolf became a totem, the sight of this performance penetrating his psyche so that his spiritual connection with the grassland wolves goes from distance, misunderstanding and fear to intimacy, respect, and even ­reverence. In this sense, many readers understood Wolf Totem as a novel of belief. When this storyline develops into prominence in the narrative, the first line—the disappearance of the grassland and grassland wolves—quietly fades into the  background, becoming the stage supporting numerous brief anecdotes and minor characters. The main story in the book has many moving episodes. A childlike spirit of irrepressible liveliness and fun imparts a sense of goodness and beauty to stories like the snow rafts, the story of the flying wolves, of wolves surrounding gazelles, of roasting gazelle meat outdoors, Bayar as a child tunneling into a wolf den, humans and dogs surrounding wolves, ewes’ behavior towards their lambs … And then there are the vicious acts, murderous, foul, and degenerate, that repel and infuriate—a mood of ambivalence that minor characters are always producing in countless brief episodes: blasting wolves with firecrackers, suffocating a wolf with pepper smoke, poisoning wolves, burning them out of the reeds, hunting them in jeeps. With the grassland as their stage, the wolves are masterful “major characters.” There are, as well, many minor characters of all kinds, but none with a space for performance like Chen Zhen, and they remain at most just passive participants and bystanders. So who, after all, is the true main character, the protagonist? In terms of the novel as popular fiction only one story is told in full: the young wolf’s story. This is the third storyline, by all means the best and most traditionally meaningful. Indeed, in response to the demands of young readers, Little wolf, little wolf, at 180,000 Chinese characters, was published as its own book, abridged from the mother text, the 510,000-character Wolf Totem.104 From its surface to its essence this storyline is all about the result of human activity, a typical representative of ‘humanized nature.’ It remains distant from the world of primal nature and freedom, staying close to human life that people can understand. With its flavor of a 103 Marie-Laure Ryan, “Cyberage Narratology: Computers, Metaphor and Narrative,” in Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, ed. David Herman (Columbus: Ohio State, 1999), 114. 104 Xiao lang, xiao lang 小 狼 小 狼 [Little wolf, little wolf] (Wuhan: Changjiang wenyi chubanshe, 2005). The cover states: “This book of selected passages revised from Wolf Totem is the author Jiang Rong’s response to general readers, especially the requests of teachers and young readers.”

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traditional fable, it made a grand entrance into children’s literature. Quite unlike the fate of Wolf Totem, it enjoyed easy and overwhelming popularity. In this third storyline of the wolf cub, Chen Zhen emerges from the passive identity of an onlooker, and on account of the wolf cub takes on new roles. He is both narrator and an active participant; he is the wolf cub’s master, and also seems to become the main character. However, when he is with the wolf cub he actually does not go beyond the role of an onlooker, but simply exchanges a telescope for a magnifying glass, going from wolf packs at a distance to ‘this one’ little wolf observed close-up, day and night. On the other hand, from the moment it appears, the young wolf carries with it the pungent wild spirit of the grassland wolf, holding fast onto our sympathies and moods, and occupying the principal place in the mind of the reader from beginning to end. So at this point there seems to be an answer to the question of the main character: It’s not any person on the grasslands, but the grassland and the grassland wolf. This is somewhat unusual. “Literature is written by, for, and about people. That remains a truism so banal that we often tend to forget it and so problematic that we often repress it with the same ease.”105 Wolf Totem openly escapes that human story, shaking the traditional narrative model in numerous ways. To sum them up, its challenges to narratology are evident in at least three aspects. The first of these aspects is the shift of subject position. According to classic narrative theory, a story, no matter how big a circle it moves in, ultimately “is written by, for, and about people.” Yet Wolf Totem clearly escapes this, withdrawing from humanity to return to nature. This is not evading a given person or thing, but the complete withdrawal in the story of human society in its entirety. Consequently, it creates in an ontological sense a complete withdrawal of three great human relationships. One is the relationship of humans and society. The traditional story depicts human social life. We basically do not see that society in Wolf Totem. At most we only see (or hear about) some social information related to the grassland. A second is the relationships of humans with each other. The traditional narrative should show such relations: “Relations between people themselves and between people and the world will therefore almost always be of importance in fabulas.”106 Yet in Wolf Totem there is no action that is not connected with the grassland and wolves, and no complete human story. The third is the relation of people with self, the narrative that has usually been represented through stream of consciousness or 105 Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1985; Third edition, 2009), 113. 106 Ibid, 212.

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psychological description. For all the psychology, feelings, and thoughts of the character Chen Zhen in Wolf Totem and the feelings and thoughts that scenes evoke in him, none is aimed at a ‘self,’ but principally at a renewed understanding of the ‘Other’ (the grassland, wolves, two kinds of civilization). A second feature is counter-narrative. According to existing narrative theory, Chen Zhen, as the first narrator, should be the main character. However, from beginning to end Chen Zhen is principally a pair of eyes, a witness, a guide helping us to free ourselves from the bonds of civilization and enter the grassland. Through his eyes and his testimony we undergo a cognitive revolution, subconsciously inverting the traditional relationship between humans and nature. In texts of postmodern narrative “most narratological concepts conceal metaphors, including that of narrator.”107 Chen Zhen is just such a metaphor. In the term “metaphor” (yǐnyù 隐 喻 ) the syllable yǐn suggests “an implicitness or implicature that produces multiple meanings of comparison,” an important feature of classic Chinese narrative that can “profoundly evoke the expressive power and aesthetic resonance of Chinese lingual signs.”108 Wolf Totem employs the expressive power of Chinese ideographs and the metaphorical functions of counter-narrative “by illogical or supra-logical transpositions of words to intervene in existential or behavior systems and create variant meanings, as well as insert a mood or judgment to form implicit associations with multiple meanings”109 that greatly expand the boundaries of thought, based on the transformation of the motif. As the narrator, Chen Zhen presents the course of the grassland, the grassland wolves, and other grassland life dying out. Seen in this light, the narrative strategy of Wolf Totem conceals an analepsis or flashback structurally, narrating for us a story about the ‘cause’ within a ‘result’ that is commonly known. When we adjust ourselves to this unmarked analepsis as we read, we then see the ‘events’ as testimony, and the mission of being ‘present at the scene,’ is to relate facts, as the author said he wanted to do. Thus, Chen Zhen takes on two identities: I (the author) and we (the readers), and his presence at the scene is also our own. The author tries to make readers believe because they are moved, his reasoned appeal to empathy pushing readers to convert their standpoint. The readers’ response demonstrates one thing: empathy is not agreement. This is an important quality of postmodern narrative. 107 Marie-Laure Ryan, “Cyberage Narratology,” in Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Aanlysis, ed. David Herman (Columbus: Ohio State, 1999), 114; citing Harry Shaw, “Loose Narrators,” Narrative 3.2 (1995): 98. 108 Yang Yi, Zhongguo xushixue [Chinese narratology] (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1997), 18–19. 109 Ibid, 18.

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Readers do not easily believe ‘truth’ as it is given to them, but directly challenge the status of the informant and doubt the validity of his claims to truth, passing their own judgment instantly in the course of reading. Given that, the metaphorical shift is not simply an inversion, but also a construction. When you begin to doubt and reflect on the course of a story your own standpoint and viewpoints come into being, and the ‘setting out’ toward ‘the other shore’ of a better world actually begins here. The third aspect is ‘counter focalization.’ Following Gerard Genette’s theory of narrative focalization,110 the narrative strategy of Wolf Totem is close to classic works. What is revealed on the page is “unfocalized” or “zero focalization,” with the narrator omniscient, all-seeing, almost god-like. Yet it is apparent that Chen Zhen has no such supreme status in the story. He sees and tells a great deal, not out of knowledge, but out of ‘lack of knowledge.’ It is the result of his peering, observing, investigating, listening, and pondering. To be precise, the narrator’s voice is almost entirely composed of what he has seen and heard. Where does his information come from? The grassland and grassland life (including the wolves and people of the grassland) are the principal sources from which Chen Zhen gains knowledge of the truth, and are the objects of knowledge that he tries to understand. What would serve as background in a traditional narrative is now foregrounded downstage. Animals and plants that heretofore only had the status of imitating humans are now major characters, now subjects. What we may call “counter focalization” appears vividly on the basis of this shift of subject: once the position of the singular subject is dissolved, the narrative focus immediately diffuses and dissipates. With the grassland as a vast stage, minor roles in brief stories can become leading roles, each autonomous, performing itself freely. Even so, readers have not taken Wolf Totem for animal fiction, and ecologists have refused to place it within the field of ecological literature.111 In this twoway rejection we see the shadow of allegory. It happens to match the “grand 110 Genette changed the concept of “point of view” by separating it into “zero focalization,” “internal focalization,” and “external focalization.” In zero focalization the narrator’s knowledge is greater than any character’s, the traditional omniscient narrator. In internal focalization the narrator’s knowledge is equivalent to that of other characters, as in stream of consciousness, and in external focalization the narrator knows less than the characters. See Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1980). 111 Scholars dubbed the book “pseudo-ecology,” falsely drawing on ecological issues for political discourse. See the section on ecology in Chapter 4 below.

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narrative and little narratives” in postmodern narrative theory.112 Scholars believe, “narrative point of view is a composite index, a hub of the narrative strategy connecting who sees, who and what is seen, and the attitudes of viewers and viewed, that gives readers a particular ‘evoked vision’ or ‘evocative visual field.’ That is actually the question that affects everything in narrative theory.”113 The most prominent feature of Wolf Totem as a narrative text is that the shift of subject position is innovation in point of view. This is its most important narrative strategy. Other creative devices in this book are centered on this fundamental principle, which governs unusual emotive effects: human sympathies shift from humans themselves to nature. Yang Yi believes that successful innovation in point of view “can lead to innovation in narrative form,” and that a unique visual realm may reveal a “new plane of human life, a new sense of the world, and new aesthetic tastes.”114 As easy as it may be to say such things, it is not so easy in creative writing, which requires drawing on imagery, plot and story, vividness and drama, to achieve a subtle influence. In that case: What techniques does Wolf Totem draw upon to shift the subject position? What is the point of that? The author of a good literary work forms a distinctive style with original techniques. Wolf Totem establishes its own narrative style largely through ‘scenes’ and the ‘alternation of scenes.’ The most prominent features are ellipsis and pause: filling pauses with details and letting characters ‘exit the stage’ in place of ellipsis give the text its distinctiveness. First, an unusual number of pauses take place during descriptions of scenes, creating a halt to plot time. Events are constantly being suspended to allow the narration to create a story out of the scene that is being presented. Numerous battle spectacles and minor anecdotes occur ‘at the same time’ during a pause, the scene unfolding in ‘time’ that is suspended and transforms into vast ‘space,’ filled with highly realistic depictions of details. Vivid realism is the basic narrative strategy of Wolf Totem, displaying its power to move readers during the suspension of time and pause in plot. (This is the topic of Chapter 3.) There is a principle governing the realism, which is that it serves the grassland following­ 112 See Mark Currie, Postmodern Narrative Theories (New York: MacMillan, 1998), 11; cited in J. Hillis Miller, Reading Narrative (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998). JeanFrançois Lyotard introduced the terms grands récits (grand narratives) and petits récits (little narratives) in The Postmodern Condition (1979). 113 Yang Yi, Zhongguo xushixue, 135. 114 Ibid, 137.

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the shift of subject position, so that judgments about humans are laconic, and what concerns the grassland is lavished with detail. Its narrative strategy turns out to be an anti-fictive “anti-narrative.”115 The author was not necessarily being deliberately postmodern; rather, his narrative strategy simply fit that. Second, ellipsis is common in narrative, especially novel-length fiction. Frequently, “an ellipsis cannot be perceived,”116 like a singer taking a breath during a song. Gerard Genette regarded ellipsis as primarily related to time span, so that analysis of ellipsis always “comes down to considering the story time elided.”117 Mieke Bal has observed that an author uses ellipsis in order to remain silent about something: “he attempts to undo it. Thus, the ellipsis is used for magical purposes, as an exorcism,”118 as though it suggests the political strategy of some conspiracy. In most works, ellipsis is a neutral device. It is used in the course of keeping something developing on the same track, based on what is already known, on the supposition that after the reader has skipped over a large span of time (the ellipsis) the reader will still draw on the information already furnished, and through reasoned imagination maintain in terms of plot a sense of completion. In Wolf Totem, for example, throughout the first quarter of the novel the grassland wolf is the undisputed main character, its traces ubiquitous. In the succeeding chapters its presence gradually wanes, and information clearly decreases, until by the last chapters, the wolves have vanished completely: A leaden bleakness heavier than in the depths of autumn permeated the winter pastureland at the border region rarely visited by humans. Every blade of grass poking through the snow surface appeared withered. The brief season of green was finished. The migrating birds that had survived hunters were gone. And the wolf packs that once came and went so aggressively had departed, never to return. The quiet, dreary monotonous grassland looked even more lifeless than ever (346; 493). Long before the wolves disappear we have already lost sight of them. When this summary statement appears it is not surprising, since we will recover 115 See David Herman, ed. Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis (Columbus: Ohio State, 1999). 116 Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, Second Edition (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1997), 103. 117 Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse, 106. 118 Mieke Bal, Narratology; Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, Second Edition, 103.

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those plot elements from the stories we already know, and draw on our associations to complete the story. Ellipsis and ‘exiting the stage’ are the most important methods of presentation in Wolf Totem, but they are not quite identical in their significance. For everything in the book about the grassland, the author makes use of ellipsis; once the topic shifts to human activity, he uses the ‘stage exit’: he makes every effort to withdraw human society from the reader’s visual field in order to guarantee a natural ecological state of primordial nature. We come to know some people in the book, such as the elder Bilgee, the couple Batu and Gasmai, and their son Bayar. We know that Batu and Gasmai are Bilgee’s son and daughter-in-law, but we never see husband and wife alone together, nor hear the family discuss family affairs, and they appear simply as signifying embodiments of grassland humans: old person, man and woman, and child. Or consider, for example, Chen Zhen, Yang Ke, Gao Jianzhong, and Zhang Jiyuan: they are all educated youth from Beijing living together in a Mongolian yurt, each assigned to be a shepherd, herdsman, or groom. We can share their experience on the grassland from various aspects, yet we know nothing more about their backgrounds and never listen to them discuss their own futures. Their presence is simply to serve as additional eyes for Chen Zhen, to give as complete evidence as possible to the reader about the grassland. That is, whether they are educated youths or indigenous people, they are all simply props. Before the work was begun, their subject positions were fated to yield to the grassland. The author was quite frank about this: LI Xiaojiang: You remove humans to a secondary position, and turn the grassland wolf into the main character. JIANG Rong: There are many aspects to the wolf’s nature. If you want to capture its character, it’s like looking at a diamond: the more facets they have, the more dimensions there are to them. I am interested in writing about wolves, so humans are put to one side because they are supporting characters. In making humans the supporting characters for wolves, human society is also reduced to an optional ingredient. Since it matters little whether society enters or leaves the stage, the author chose to make it exit the stage in its entirety. The stage exit is a method of ellipsis, but the two have different aesthetic effects. Ellipsis evokes associations, established on the basis of what is already known. The stage exit is based on the premise that what is unknown is basically ‘unnoticed’—precisely because it is unnoticed, the reader can devote their thoughts and feelings entirely to the grassland and grassland wolves, transferring

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empathy for them all the more easily. Only then can we see the conditions of survival in primal nature untamed by humans (the topic of the next chapter): the flora and fauna, vast spaces and the change of seasons, while irrelevant human affairs, deemphasized, are always on the verge of exiting the stage. Only by making the human society that dominates the globe exit entirely can we leave behind distracting thoughts of society (including value judgments and moral concepts) and wholeheartedly enter into the grassland (nature), to learn anew, guided by empathy. What is the true purpose of this? Out of this emerges the most important allegorical meaning of Wolf Totem: renaming. Unlike Roman Jakobson’s “rewording,”119 it is not a sign of translation sought out in the realm of language, nor is it a conceptual shift at the level of meaning. Rather, it is attempting a new beginning by returning to origins prior to civilization: in returning to nature in its original state, drawing on the power of primal nature, to represent ‘truth’ through vivid realism. To this end, it provides a pair of eyes that are always on the scene throughout: Chen Zhen and other educated youth have perspective similar to the readers,’ use the same language, and all that they experience and witness constitutes evidence that readers can accept. Through this, the power of realism becomes prominent: “renamed” in the setting of ‘reality.’ The removal of society is a necessary condition. The exiting of society in its entirety is the premise for people to be able to rename ‘nature.’ This is contrary to the direction of postmodernity, which does not accept such a mission to ‘rename,’ and more precisely, has never accepted any mission. But all that which is involved with a mission parts ways with the postmodern and finds itself on an unknown path toward utopia. At this point we can see that the three main stories in Wolf Totem are actually arranged according to three different types of narrative strategies: In the first, the ecological novel with the grassland and grassland wolves as the theme, the narrative strategy is postmodern, and thorough analysis can be done in the framework of postmodernist narrative. This is the focus of discussion in Chapter 2 (fiction) and Chapter 3 (aesthetics).  In the second, the story of the wolf cub, which involves questions of freedom, servitude, and humanizing nature, involves conflicts between nomad and agrarian civilizations, and contradictions between people of the grasslands and outsider migrants. These are typical postcolonial issues (taken up in Chapters 4 and 5). The narrative strategy is close to 119 See “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” in On Translation, ed. Reuben Arthur Brower (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1959), 113–18.

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political strategy, commentary that finds catharsis easily in postcolonial theory.  In the third strategy, the most difficult, is the most important theme in Wolf Totem, as a book on belief. In the face of that, both postmodern theory and postcolonial critique are impotent. Under these circumstances, post-utopian criticism is brought on stage, corresponding to the ship of utopia—the wolf totem—that has quietly embarked, concealed behind the story of the grassland.  Is the “wolf totem” a symbol (fúhào 符 号 ) of utopia?  If so,  Is Wolf Totem a utopian allegory? “Wolf totem” is a symbol of utopia. Seen against the backdrop of ‘grassland/ cultural revolution,’ it is everywhere marked ‘post-’: whether seen from the perspective of nature or of society, it is a typical post-utopian allegory. Thirty years ago utopian works were nothing unusual here. Today, however, in the ‘post-’ era in which negative utopia and even anti-utopia thrive, it is no longer so simple. “The theme of utopia restricts the artistic content of the work itself.”120 If we read the novel as purely and simply utopian, then we might as well follow friends’ advice to avoid “using a hammer to swat a fly” and let the author go believe whatever it is he wants to believe in. We have grown tired of utopian works because “in most utopian works the portrayal of the protagonist is too superficial … existing as no more than a witness illustrating some concept or society.” In that case, how should we respond to the utopian atmosphere that wafts upon us in Wolf Totem? How can literary works in the utopian category obtain adequate interpretive space? The word “utopia” was first seen in Thomas Moore’s fictional book Utopia (1516) with the original meaning of “nowhere land.” Utopian works focus on forms of collective human existence, conveying humanity’s fervent “desire to establish an ideal society that is stable and unified.”121 After utopian theories flourished in the nineteenth century, various utopian theories were put into practice in the twentieth century, going from success to failure, from hope to dismay. Utopia not only preserved its original sense of being a ‘fantasy’ and ‘unrealistic,’ but also became for a time a synonym for ‘red empire’ and ‘collective violence.’ Experience has taught us that within the category of strictly

120 Cui Jingsheng and Wang Song, “Wutuobang [Utopia],” in Xifang wenlun guanjianci [Keywords in Western criticism] (Beijing: Waiyu jiaoxue yu yanjiu chubanshe, 2006), 620. 121 Ibid, 613.

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traditional utopia, “blueprint utopianism,”122 in which everything is standardized there is no room for criticism. However, given that following modernism there has been postmodernism, and in the wake of colonialism there is postcolonialism, in such a context, can there not be “post-utopian criticism” that correspondingly follows after the practice of utopianism and post-utopian texts? I here take up post-utopian criticism as an analytical tool because the strong utopian atmosphere of Wolf Totem is unavoidable. As sincere criticism, in this story of ‘defeat’ (of the grassland wolves) and ‘despair’ (of the grassland people), you cannot but see the humanist ideal that it actually attempts to convey. At the same time that it yields effortlessly to interpretation in the framework of post-utopian criticism it also drives us to pursue a contrary utopian question: How could the wolf become a totem? A totem is a sign of belief. That a wolf becomes a sign of belief is itself a challenge to utopian ideals and smacks of a counterattack. In a discursive shift it quietly overturns the traditional realm of utopia and turns its original allegory of goodness into fragments. At the same time as challenging traditional goodness (such as the lamb), it mocks traditional utopian ideals in typically postmodern style, from which it introduces postmodern criticism. The postmodern here no longer acts as the expert in destruction, but unusually for it, acts as a constructive element by exiting the stage together with the wolves in a positive role, simultaneously renaming the wolf and taking on the mission of ‘restoration.’ Hence, rather than the dissolution of the subject, what we see is the shift of subject position, from humanity to the grassland, the grassland wolves, and the living spirit of all nature. The subject here not only does not disappear, but rather its position is made even more stable. Unexpectedly, the postmodern arrives, and what is the end of the ‘post-’ is the redemption from the end that it meets. Seen from this angle, Wolf Totem follows closely the translation féngyù “satirical allegory” that Zhang Longxi offered for modern allegory,123 and on the basis of postmodernism, follows the logic of post-utopia perfectly. Seen from the perspective of satirical allegory, Wolf Totem is the epitome of “différance,”124 through chains of signifiers of difference, silently completing the overthrow of traditional 122 Russell Jacoby wrote, “I want to draw a distinction between two currents of utopian thought: the blueprint tradition and the iconoclastic tradition.” Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), xiv. 123 See the entry for “fěngyù” by Zhang Longxi in Xifang wenlun guanjian ci [Keywords in Western criticism], ed. Zhao Yifan (Beijing: Waiyu jiaoxue yu yanjiu chubanshe, 2006), 131. 124 See Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” trans. Alan Bass, Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1982), 3–27.

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utopian logocentrism, and over the course of time (that is, history) realizing self ‘variation.’ Hence we can see the third narrative strategy, that of the fiction of belief. Blending the fundamental elements of the postmodern/postcolonial, it draws on the strength of the two ‘post-’ categories, to complete the work in terms of the reestablishing of belief as a post-utopian proposition, using renaming as a transcendent method, and in the field of aesthetics completing redemption of the self. The narrative strategies of Wolf Totem are artful and complex, evidence of the author’s craft and effort that over decades fermented it to maturity. It introduces­utopian ideals into postmodern consciousness and postcolonial criticism, using realist technique to provide a faithful representation without gimmickry, following traditional representation. However, what is “post-” in the essential allegorical meaning sweeps across everything to an unprecedented level. For this, the updating of interpretation is necessary. Otherwise we would be distracted by the realism, unaware of falling into a wolf-style trap that the author has prepared, and in a confusion of feeling, leave the book without words to describe it. The final question is for myself: faced with such a text, what should my critical strategy be? The postmodern critic David Herman saw the difficulties of ‘post-’ criticism: “Traditionally, too, narratologists have devoted most of their attention to literary narratives. By contrast, a postclassical narratology needs to expand its focus to include natural-language data; it also needs to draw on the theoretical (ethnographic, linguistic, cognitive) models used to interpret such data and integrate them with other sociocultural practices.”125 This is a forbidding prospect. Over the past two to three hundred years, every branch of knowledge has accumulated a vast sea of terms, concepts, and theories, old and new, mountains of scholarship. To encompass even this writing, just one narrative and narratology are enough for one lifetime, let alone involving such large-scale projects as “ethnographic, linguistic, and cognitive models,” as well as “sociocultural practices.” How are we to deal with this? I view the question of scholarship today like the question Hemingway faced when he was writing. His method was simple: freeing the words from their subordination to a text, using a telegraphic style that “caused a literary revolution”: Hemingway was a man with an axe … he cut out a whole forest of verbosity. He got back to clean fundamental growth. He trimmed off explanation, discussion, even comment; he hacked off all metaphorical 125 David Herman, Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis (Columbus: Ohio State University, 1999), 21–22.

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floweriness; he pruned off the dead, sacred clichés; until finally, through the sparse trained words, there was a view.126 Criticism is not a monologue or a solo stage act. It cannot avoid ‘explanation.’ But it can attempt to release itself from the shackles of the many terms and theories that hermeneutics has created, and free terminology and theory from the bonds of different schools or individuals’ statements, to become an instrument that one can accept or reject at will. Criticism has no choice but to cite words and passages from original texts, and it must refer to the research results of colleagues in the field. Especially when introducing a theory, it is necessary to refer repeatedly to initial concepts in order to define one’s own standpoint. It surely appears on the surface to be a product of “patchwork, imitation, copying, and plagiarism,” as if deliberately demonstrating Jameson’s criticism of postmodern culture as “collage.”127 Collage means bringing different things or people together, homogeneous with the pluralistic global village. Dialogic criticism appeared in the course of globalization; its distinctive quality is bringing together multiple voices. Serious criticism requires sincerity and intensity. Penetrating the surface deep into the texture to reveal the thinking encased in words can only be done relying on the most appropriate analytical tools. Textual form is merely apparel and adornment that can be borrowed for use. Only in its thought does a text have life—yet all texts that contain thought have individuality that ultimately shows through the ranks of script and forests of citations. 126 Herbert Ernest Bates, “Hemingway’s Short Stories” [1943] in Hemingway and His Critics, ed. Carlos Baker (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961), 72–73. 127 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 371.

chapter 2

Why was There Such a Wide Readership for Wolf Totem? As Fiction: The Shift of Subject Position in the Context of Post-Modernism The seventeenth-century literary theorist Pierre Daniel Huet wrote: “we esteem nothing to be properly Romance but Fictions of Love Adventures, disposed into an Elegant Style in Prose, for the Delight and Instruction of the Reader.”1 That hardly fits our novel Wolf Totem, which has neither a love story nor an adventure tale, nor any very captivating characters. “Analytical criticism of the novel has customarily distinguished three constituents, plot, characterization, and setting [.]”2 If Wolf Totem is difficult to grasp in terms of these three aspects, that is related to the two qualities implied within it. One is its allegorical nature, breaking through the boundaries of the story that can be uttered and leaving the reader wandering between the surface plot and allegory. The other quality is the postmodern, confusing the identity of the subject among characters and other actors (such as living creatures on the grassland) and the relation to the setting, causing mistaken judgments about the ‘protagonist.’ These are the issues that concern this chapter, that is, the shift of subject position in the context of postmodernism. ‘Shift of subject position’ refers to displacement of the main character. If this is done among human characters it excites little attention, and it can be dealt with through traditional narrative theory, or following Jacques Lacan’s “mirror thesis,”3 misapprehending the subject in the process of self-reflection in an imaginary and later symbolic order. Yet, shifting away from humans to animals and even to all living things is not so simply explained. In the context of postmodernism the subject as a core category “has been discredited,” so “to say that the subject is dead seems to be a key to understanding the era in which 1 Traité de l’origine des Romans [The History of Romances], trans. Stephen Lewis (London, 1715), 2; in “Traitté de l’origine des romans,” Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitt% C3%A9_de_l%27origine_des_romans#What_is_a_Romance,3F (accessed December 31, 2013). 2 Wellek and Warren, 216. 3 The mirror thesis of Jacques Lacan, so influential in criticism during the second half of the twentieth century, followed the analytical basis of the mirror “gaze” and “narcissism” during early childhood of Freud’s psychoanalysis, in the belief that the reflected image of the self a priori contained the “object-other,” thus subverting a unified subjectivity.

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we find ourselves.”4 Obviously, however, the shift of subject position in Wolf Totem is not the same as the subject dying. It has just undergone a relocation, rather than being completely subverted or thoroughly fragmented. On the contrary, it is exactly in terms of subjectivity that it seems to expose the nature of the postmodern itself, as Peter Bürger has already seen it in Das Verschwinden des Subjekts: “The modern subject clearly cannot escape itself. As a vanished subject, it clearly remains in the field of subjectivity, and as radical critique of the subject, it time and again encounters its agents.”5 The grassland and the living things of the grassland in Wolf Totem are such agents, vessels that follow the current of the postmodern loaded with the contraband of utopia. Thus, “utterances on the disappearance of the subject are no more than new disguises for successful evidence of the self.”6 The displacement of the status of subject in Wolf Totem is not only from ­human society to nature, nor simply the total abdication of humans in an ­ontological sense, but symbolic division: it strips away moral features from the process of humanizing nature as the background for the story, and it ties together all the regional immigrant households as symbols of (agrarian) civilization colluding to enter the stage, while it makes all forms of grassland life (including grassland humans) represented by grassland wolves into symbols of nature and natural power, together resisting the encroachment from outside, that is, the civilization devouring them. Consider whether in a traditional text we would condemn people clearing farmland as greedy? They would be diligent! Or would we doubt the good intentions of people killing wolves? That would be a heroic undertaking in the mold of Wu Song slaying a tiger! Placed in the postmodern context, what formerly was commendable (modern people) represents evil, symbols of ruin and destruction, while the latter are ‘goodness,’ resisting to the death in the face of powerful evil forces, but unable to overcome them. And just as in traditional tragedy, the end brings down the curtain on a tragic conclusion. It is not difficult to complete the story with conceptual logic. For example, modernist criticism was usually satisfied with creating technical terms for use within its own textual circle, and following their logic on the basis of concepts, that is, abstract language. Wolf Totem overstepped the small circle of scholars and cultural elite, making use of literary methods to lead a mass readership—regardless of status, age, nationality, or gender—into the 4 Pide Bierge 彼 得 ·毕 尔 格 [Peter Bürger], Zhuti de tuiyin 主 体 的 退 隐 [Das Verschwinden des Subjekts (The disappearance of the subject)] (Frankfort: Suhrkamp, 1998); trans. Chen ­Liangmei 陈 良 梅 and Xia Qing 夏 清 (Nanjing: Nanjing daxue chuban she, 2004), 4. 5 Ibid., 220. 6 Ibid., 195–96.

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story, and in the aesthetic effects that allegory creates to pass over the “modern,” completing in a leap the transition from ‘premodern’ to ‘postmodern.’ Given the view that the study of literature is the study of humanity, since Wolf Totem does not have the human story with which we are familiar or a love story, what has seized readers to give it such a broad readership trans-culturally? That’s a question most easily answered if we grasp the basic principle of the ‘shift of subject position.’ The two chapters below use close reading7 and “reading in detail”8 as the basic methods of textual analysis, discussing in depth the narrative strategy of Wolf Totem in terms of literary criticism and aesthetic categories. For close reading I prefer to make use of the novel’s allegorical meaning in the language of its original text, sticking close to the text to excavate the historical significance of particular semantic signs.9 This goes counter to the elimination of meaning in classic narratology and exclusive attention to textual style. However, it is close to the direction that post-narratology tries to explore: tending toward attention to aspects of theme in narrative, reinforcing and revising traditional and classical narrative theory, and in an open structure of thought investigating the dynamic cognitive system in the process of reading.10 2.1

Theme the Logic of the Grassland: Existence in Primal Nature

Primal nature and primal freedom are two basic concepts for this book. Relative to ‘nature’ and ‘freedom’ as familiar to us, these are new concepts that are mutually related. New concepts go along with new objects of knowledge. Wolf Totem is a completely new text in the existing field of literature. It offers a 7

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Terry Eagleton discussed the critical method of close reading as emphasizing the subjectivity of the text itself as “an antidote to aestheticist chit-chat.” See Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 44. “Reading in detail” is a method advanced by the post-classical feminist narratologist Naomi Schor, examining writing for information that conveys gender consciousness. See Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York: Methuen, 1987). “Close reading” was represented by a critical group in the journal Scrutiny that F.R. Leavis and his wife [Queenie Leavis, née Roth] edited, as English literature was daily turning into “English-language literature.” With literature seen as an arena exploring human nature and the value of human life, critics sought through close reading to uncover moral values embedded in literature and to deepen political understanding of English history. Close reading caused cultural studies to become one of England’s most enduring achievements. See David Herman, Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999).

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totem, not in the historical or ethnic sense, but in conveying the spirit of primal freedom of postmodern consciousness, beyond modern civilization. Primal freedom, as I call it, can appear only when it returns to the state of primal nature on which it depends for its existence—such is the extraordinary analytical blueprint that Wolf Totem offers. The dedication page in Wolf Totem is interesting: Dedicated to: the extraordinary grassland wolves and grassland humans Dedicated to: the once beautiful Mongolian grassland Here the priority given to wolves ahead of humans distinguishes their unusual subject position. The “once” reveals the tragic tone of the book, announcing that the story is related to transience and death. The author’s attachment is not only to people, but even more to the grassland (and its forms of life). The “once beautiful” grassland is the main character that the author strains to recall and recover in script. There are numerous deeply emotional words in the book showing the grassland: calm, beautiful, and vibrant. The scenery that varies with the four seasons—it is these ‘four seasons’ and their varied scenery that forms the structure of the whole novel, supporting the living things in the state of existence in primal nature on the grassland. There is early winter: The subtle fragrance of tasty grass emerged from the hollow stalks and the cracks in the snow. The smell of grass drew starving gazelles across the border from the blizzard-ravaged neighbor to the north; to them the spot was a wintry oasis, and so taken by the fragrant grass that they were unwilling to move on (12; 16). There is deep winter: Kitchen smoke rose from the yurts like thin white birches, the tips of their highest branches boring into the heavens, into Tengger. The cows and sheep were ruminating leisurely; the sun had driven off the cold night air and frost on the animal hides was just then turning to dew, to eventually rise from their bodies as mist (22; 32). Spring appears: The ice was softening, the snow melting … spring runoff once again flowed in the streams, down from the mountains to saturate the marshes

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and create pools in which white clouds were reflected. The Olonbulag [grassland] seemed to dance in the air (140: 221). And summer begins: [The hills] looked like a green carpet manicured by Tengger; patterns of blue, white, yellow, and pink mountain flowers formed a seamless patchwork of color (153; 241). The author never makes use of the term ‘primal nature,’ and even a term like ‘nature’ is rarely used. He writes about the grassland as never having ­undergone the development of transition to civilization, undisturbed by ­outsiders, a state of existence in which all things live freely according to their nature. This state of existence does not completely exclude humans. On the contrary, it is filled with human spirit, embodying a harmonious realm in which humans live in peace with the grassland and grassland creatures (including other humans). Midsummer: The temperature continued its inexorable rise above the steaming ground, so hot that the basin was like a gargantuan iron cooking pot and the grass took on the appearance of dry tea leaves. The dogs lay sprawled in the narrow, crescent-shaped shadow north of the yurt, mouths open and tongues lolling as they panted to cool down, their bellies rising and falling rapidly (214; 326). Early autumn: Autumn grass had grown back on the lamb-birthing pasture, which had been grazed barren by livestock in the spring; the dense grass, roiling like waves, was dotted with swaying daisies. A strong fragrance typical of fine grass filled their noses…. The closer they got to the sandy pasture, the more wildlife they saw: sand swallows, sand grouses, desert foxes, and sand mice. Rusty red sand grouses were the most common; they flew in large flocks, their feathers making the sound of pigeon whistles (308–09; 440–42). Late autumn: In the fall seeds of wild wheat, clover, and peas were rich in fat and protein. The sheep would fatten up by eating the seeds right off the plants …

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(318; 453) The moon seemed cold on the frosty autumn night, the wolves’ tremulous howls were distant memories on the new pasture (320; 457). In most fiction, natural scenery is read as an element of setting. Setting is environment, a metonymic or metaphorical representation of characters. If the setting is a scene of nature then nature is a projection of human will, mostly symbolic, as in the moors of Wuthering Heights or the ocean in The Old Man and the Sea. It can also be read as an element of society, a deterministic force controlling human fate, such as Egdon Heath in the fiction of Thomas Hardy.11 “Landscape is more significantly the embodiment of a cultural heritage and of social values, rather than a form or surface provided by nature.”12 The grassland of Wolf Totem has all these functions. The grassland in the story is more than setting or background; it is the subject, the main character. With the withdrawal of human society it represents itself, rather than directly conveys any social value. It lives and dies together with all the living creatures of the grassland, sharing adversities, bound together with them for benefit and loss, together constructing a primal state of existence, and collectively painting a scroll of nature in its uncut, unpolished beauty before the incursion of civilization. Waterfowl: In the bright glare of white clouds reflected across the broad surface of the lake a flock of bold mallards flew back from the marsh to the north. The water birds flew through clouds and burst through mists reflected on the water, then settled onto the cushion of clouds floating on the surface of the water…. The lane within the reeds was deeply secluded, the quiet delivery room for waterfowl and the safe playground of their chicks (229). Swans: Through the lens of his telescope he saw a dozen white swans floating gracefully on water ringed by dense green reeds. The swans were surrounded by hundreds, perhaps thousands of wild geese, wild ducks and other nameless water birds. Five or six large swans flew up into the air, accompanied by a flurry of water birds. They circled the lake and the stream, crying out like a welcoming orchestra (153; 241).

11 12

Wellek and Warren, Theory of Literature, 221. P.T. Newby, “Towards an Understanding of Landscape Quality,” British Journal of Aesthetics 18.4 (Autumn 1978): 347.

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In the sequence presented above the four seasons of the year appear so that the time in which the story occurs is a complete cycle of the seasons (see Chapter 3 for a discussion of this). The natural time sequence creates a background for existence in primal nature, allowing the ‘logic of the grassland’ to correspond with the ‘logic of nature’ that it attempts to present as images. The seasons are strongly allegorical, with “spring,” for example, a symbol of a primal natural state of beauty and tranquility. The author goes to great lengths to give a detailed depiction of the grassland in springtime, making spring into a stage for living things to demonstrate ‘vitality’: Warm early-spring air floated above the landscape, turning to mist carried off by the wind. A covey of red and brown sand grouse flew out of a copse of bushes that resembled white coral, rustling the branches, shaking off velvety snow like dandelion down, and exposing the deep red ­color of the grassland willows. To the observer, it was like red coral in a bed of white—colorful, eye-catching (52; 64). Existence in primal nature, in the book, is that ‘freedom’ which has not been subjected to the excessive interference of modern civilization, shown in the grassland and the myriad living things that the grassland supports. The grassland wolves in the book are not the species canis lupus in the Zoological sense, but the embodiment of the spirit of primal freedom. Grassland people simply refers to those humans who have grown up in the grassland and whose life depends on it, rather than some specific historical or ethnic designation, such as Turkic or Mongol, and so forth. Primal nature in this text perpetuates an understanding of nature in traditional Chinese culture, and the ‘nature’ prefixed by ‘primal’ is different from ‘nature’ in Western languages, yet difficult to translate as ‘meta-nature.’ When a new concept is introduced in scientific research, “we can best introduce the fundamental concepts … by contrasting their basic features with some received notions of more traditional theories.”13 In transcultural reading this is not sufficient, and it is necessary to distinguish cultural disparities in ideas as well. For example, the implied meaning of ‘primal’ (元 yuán) in Chinese is not the same as the English-language prefix ‘meta-.’14 The original meaning of yuan was the human head,15 with the derived meanings of 13 14 15

Ervin László, Evolution: The General Theory (Cresskill, nj: Hampton Press, 1996), 22. The prefix “meta,” from Greek, is frequently translated into Chinese as yuan 元 , so that “metaphilosophy” is yuanzhexue, “metanarrative” is yuan xushi, and so on. Wang Guiyuan 王 贵 元 , Hanzi yu Wenhua 汉 字 与 文 化 [Chinese script and culture] (Beijing: Zhongguo renmin daxue chuban she, 2005), 14.

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“initial” and “beginning,” then “original,” “former,” “ruler,” “fundamental,” and so on. Among ancient philosophers it also designated the “origin of all things.”16 It is this meaning of ‘original’ that I borrow here for ‘primal nature,’ which is distinct from nature as we usually refer to it. It is not a generalized classification nor an abstract concept, but the natural spirit within nature. In the sense of a logic of the grassland, Wolf Totem attempts to show this spirit. It is the dependent relationship of the life of living things and the existence of nature, such as the ancient philosopher Laozi insightfully described: spontaneously oneself.17 Chen Guying has posited that “The text of Laozi … uses the expression ziran 自 然 (naturalness, nature) to explain a state of being a certain way without awareness of it, and being spontaneous without human effort.”18 Ye Xiushan has also held that, “in the thought of Laozi and Zhuangzi, “nature” [zìrán] is “freedom” [zìyóu 自 由 ], and “freedom” is “nature/naturalness.”19 Nature and freedom are inseparable, fundamental concepts intimately related in traditional Chinese culture: “What Daoists spoke of as ‘nature’ is not nature as we today call the natural world, nor is it Naturalism as spoken of in the West…. The nature that Daoist thinkers spoke of is naturalness, one’s own nature, spiritually independent. Such nature requires spiritual independence, hence it is a transcendent realm.”20 It is evident that in Chinese culture there is a unity of ‘primal nature’ and ‘primal freedom,’ and we can take them as an extension of the traditional view of nature/freedom. The reason why they were separated was primarily to enable cross-cultural dialogue, so that in their modern meanings they address the core concepts of ‘freedom’ and ‘nature’ in Western cultural traditions. Following the text of Wolf Totem, in the course of explaining and abstracting concepts, we can clearly distinguish the internal qualities of each and their 16

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Gujin Hanyu cidian 古 今 汉 语 词 典 [Historical dictionary of Chinese] (Shangwu yinshuguan, 2000), 1800. The citation quotes and translates from Chunqiu fanlu [Luxuriant dew of the annals], 2nd Century bce, expounding on yuan as “source” of all things. Hu Shi parsed zìrán (“nature” in modern Chinese) as it appeared in Laozi: zì (self, i) and rán (thus, this way, so): “I am thus.” There is a consensus among scholars favoring this gloss. See Zhongguo zhexue shi dagang 中 国 哲 学 史 大 纲 [Outline of the history of Chinese philosophy] (Beijing: Dongfang chubanshe, 1996), 46. Chen Guying 陈 鼓 应 , Laozi zhushi ji ping jia 老 子 注 释 及 评 价 [Laozi annotated with commentary] (Beijing: Zhongha shuju, 1999), 132. Ye Xiushan 叶 秀 山 , “Mantan Zhuangzi de ‘ziyou’ guan 漫 谈 庄 子 的 “自 由 ”观 ,” in Daojia wenhua yanjiu [Studies in the culture of Daoist thought] Vol. 8 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1995), 138. Mou Zongsan 牟 宗 三 , Zhongguo zhexue shijiu jiang 中 国 哲 学 十 九 讲 [Nineteen lectures on Chinese philosophy] (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1997), 86.

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mutually reliant relationship, and from this view some important distinctions at the cores of Chinese and Western cultures: ‘The spirit of primal freedom’ and the state of ‘primal natural existence,’ as mutually dependent, each within the other, spontaneous and of their own accord, together constructed an essence of Chinese culture.  The spirit of ‘freedom’ and state of ‘nature’ as contrary, established on the basis of human knowledge, will, and action surpassing and conquering nature, formed the core of Western civilization. Introducing ‘primal freedom’ and ‘primal nature’ is more a matter of recollection than innovation. Adopting these terms at the outset of textual analysis is done in order to distinguish them from ‘nature’ and ‘freedom,’ and give prominence to the particular geographic features of the text of Wolf Totem and its cultural setting. Enunciating this prior to critical engagement is done to emphasize it as a basic starting point in the study of Wolf Totem. In Wolf Totem, all life, whether human or not, is stripped of civilization, entering the grassland naked as natural entities, collectively constructing the state of primal natural existence with their own lives and existence: in the face of nature, everything is equal; in the face of life, each has dignity. Over the course of time every wild creature has been seen as the natural enemy of humans and nearly vanished from the story of humanity. But in the grassland, whether for good or ill, they display their resources to the full in a realm unhindered by human interference: Wild boars: They were fat, and with teeth of average length, they didn’t look particularly intimidating…. Fine grazing land now looked like a potato patch in which pigs had been let loose (181–82; 283–84). Foxes: The orange afternoon sun turned the fox’s white fur a soft yellow, making it indistinguishable from the grass tassels…. The beautiful, shy foxes were expert mice catchers (317: 452). Mosquitoes and flies, once among the greatest scourges of humankind, here also have a rightful space for existence: Mosquitoes: Suddenly a swarm of mosquitoes billowed up from the damp meadow like black smoke rising from an exploding oil tank and engulfed the horses. The most frenzied mosquito population of this year came on altogether in the millions, piercing the bodies of the horses (292).

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Flies: [M]aggot-born big-headed flies swarmed across the land and launched assaults on men and their livestock. They focused on the eyes or the nose, on chapped corners of mouths, or on bloody strips of raw lamb hanging inside yurts. Men, dogs, and wolves waved arms and swished tails in an unending and futile attempt to bear up under the assault (213; 326). Everything and every creature presented in Wolf Totem is related in one way or another to the grassland. No matter what that relationship is, it has nothing to do with ‘good/evil.’ Each thing lives as best it can, inferring and deducing according to its place the inescapable, ubiquitous logic of the grassland. The logic of the grassland is the inherent quality of the state of existence of primal nature. It is also the internal structure of the book that links the major and minor stories together and is the core idea of textual analysis and allegorical deconstruction. Yet, this is after all a novel rather than a thesis, so whatever its viewpoint, it must provide it through ‘images.’ Thus, the necessary question is: What image does Wolf Totem use to complete its own logical transformation? The logic of the grassland from the beginning is in close relation to the state of existence of primal nature. Whatever the image, it does not depart from the inferential track of formal logic. The living things of the grassland follow the development of natural logic in their spontaneous style of existence, ceaselessly performing the story of life on the biological chain of mutual relations, and carrying out ‘naturally’ the transformation from formal logic to natural logic. We can see clearly three stages in the story. (1) The first half, primarily presenting the state of the primal nature of the grassland. (2) From the middle toward the end, primarily showing the power of humanizing nature and its progression. (3) The final chapter, the state of primal nature and the grassland together on the verge of destruction, the spirit of freedom alone barely surviving, remaining deep in the memory of humanity, like the spirits sealed in Pandora’s box: what remains is hope; what has been released is evil. Such a plot arrangement is not merely the same as the three stages of Aristotelian tragedy (conflict, climax, resolution). It is not the development of one storyline, but a presentation of the three stages of Hegel’s logic in the ceaseless

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transformation of oppositions: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. At the same time that it deviates from forms of literary narrative, it perhaps becomes a text of images of the logic of “absolute mind.” The paradigm of logic in the book is acted out on the grand stage of the grassland that can be identified under the motif of ‘logic of the grassland.’ But its conclusion contains no ‘synthesis’ on the grassland. That is in the more transcendent, greater, logic of nature. Natural logic is like the palm of the Maitreya Buddha’s hand: let the monkey do whatever it wishes, it will still not escape. The slogan ‘Humanity will conquer nature’ is a failed prophecy, and together with the vanished greenery of the grassland, faces an ominous future. As the author has explained in detail, articulating the knowledge of grassland logic is no easy matter, but the result of long periods of careful observation: JIANG Rong: Without research, reflection, and analysis, you absolutely cannot grasp the logic behind the presentation. It is powerful logic. LI Xiaojiang: The logic that exceeds what humans can put together is natural logic. JIANG Rong: Yes, and from the beginning this book is ‘grassland logic.’ Take mosquitoes as an example: Once the weather turns cold, the otters disappear into their caves, where the mosquitoes follow them in and make a thieves lair out of the otters’ den. In spring, when the otters reappear, the mosquitoes emerge with them. As for wolves, they are the chief force preying on otters. In this way I bring out the logic of the grassland…. This relationship is known only to grassland people.21 It is because people of the grassland have grasped and followed the logic of the grassland that they have been able to prosper on the grassland using the natural resources, generation after generation down to the present. Promoting this logic is the central theme of the allegory in Wolf Totem: existence in primal nature. The term, existence in primal nature, is not the same as the general meaning of the ‘existence’ of nature. It is not only a form of ‘existence,’ but also contains the knowledge of life in itself toward the reason for existence. It comes from nature, but transcends nature, the natural law of conscious conformity on the basis that all things respect nature. Wolf Totem tells a story through images set on the grassland to present this law, showing us another form of existence at odds with modern civilization. It presents three features that differ from the ‘values’ of civilization with which we are familiar: 21

Author’s conversation with Jiang Rong, (April 3, 2006).

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One is equality. Nature gives the right of life to all living things, rather than the ‘survival of the fittest and extinction of the inferior’ as humans understand it. Superiority and inferiority are forever relative. Except for Tengger (Heaven), no human or living thing can take precedence over all others. As the character Old Man Bilgee observes, “Life on the grassland is hard for us all, and it’s sometimes important to spare lives…. Does that mean the grass doesn’t constitute life? That the grassland isn’t a life?” (29; 44–45). We can read the scenes below based on this idea that all living things are equal in the face of life: Prairie dogs are everywhere, always within a fifteen- to twenty-foot radius of any given yurt, where they stand outside their holes and squeak loudly…. They have big eyes, like squirrels, a fur coat of gray-green with yellowish spots and markings, as well as a bushy tail like a small brush (266; 394). Marmots: [Along the ridge] out they came, dozens of them big and small, filling the air with chirps. From every hole, it seemed, a female emerged to survey the area, and when they saw there were no predators nearby, they chirped a slow, rhythmic all-clear signal, following which hordes of young animals shot out of the holes and began eating clumps of grass as far as thirty or forty feet from the safety of their holes (207; 315). A second feature is struggle. All living things must struggle for ‘life’ and ‘existence.’ The vitality of life force is also the strength for struggle, and life energy grows stronger in the unceasing ‘struggle for life.’ To go against this is to atrophy. “Apart from sheep, every living thing on the Mongolian grassland, whether carnivore or herbivore, had a fierce spirit given by its grassland mother” (312). From the angle of ‘kind/race,’ it shows the principle of survival of the ‘powerful,’ to be not at all the same as the survival of the fittest in the theory of evolution. For humans this holds true as well. As Bilgee tells Chen Zhen, “If you plan to stay on the grassland, you’ll have to learn to be tougher than the wolves” (10; 12). Even meek rabbits find a way to use their weakness to overcome strength: The old rabbit carried the falcon clutching its back into a clump of rose willow trees. There the dense branches, like myriad whips, lashed the eagle, stripping its feathers. Quickly dazed by this punishment, the falcon could only release the rabbit from its grip. Then, with the demoralized air of a defeated fighting cock, it rested in the grass for a long time before flying off (300).

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The third feature is balance. The entire process of life and its entire meaning, as applied to each individual and each population, is without exception devoted to the life of the individual and the existence of the population. The survival of each population is predicated on the harm it does to others, and the tendency of each individual is to seek its own survival without regard to the long-term benefits of the group. The power of grassland logic is in its irreplaceable balancing function, promoting the continuity of all life in the cycle of ‘controlling the strong with the strong’ and ‘defeating the strong through the weak.’ As the spokesperson for the grassland, Bilgee sums it up through his discussion of wolves: “If there are too many of them, they lose their divine power and turn evil. It’s all right for people to kill evil creatures. If they killed all the cows and sheep, we could not go on living, and the grassland would be lost. We Mongols were also sent by Tengger to protect the grassland. Without it, there’d be no Mongols, and without Mongols, there’d be no grassland” (77; 123). Old Man Bilgee is always warning people: “Tengger is fair. Since wolves have eaten our sheep and horses, these are the reparations. Now Tengger has started the winds blowing, telling us to leave the remaining gazelles for the wolves” (35; 56). The term existence in primal nature is fundamentally distinct from what goes under either the modern term ‘nature,’ or the unity of heaven and human in Han culture: Mongolians believe not only in the unity of heaven and humanity, but also in the unity of heaven, animals, humanity, and vegetation; That is far more profound and more valuable than the unity of heaven and humanity in Chinese civilization (267). In literature, descriptions of natural scenery have been mostly quite favorable: “The unspoilable harmony of nature gains special meaning by being placed opposite the world’s distortions and murderous laws.”22 Hence, descriptions of nature became a technique in postmodernism for resisting modern civilization, widely employed in literature and art as visual imagery showing the enormous contrast between nature and civilization. It seems that nature was always reminding humans: “Nature here wants to remind us that another 22

Yvette Biro, Profane Mythology: Savage Mind of the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 83.

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order, that of beauty, also exists … while man is all frailty, blemished realization, a prisoner of inexact, distorted, and diseased instincts.”23 In Wolf Totem nature as endowed with special emotional significance does not exist. The grassland of the novel is stripped of any of the sentimentality that civilized humans might bring to it, and freely displays its own features, filled with life and death, devoid of morality. It is not necessarily in opposition to humans or civilization; on the contrary, the human race once upon a time within its embrace managed a simple civilization well suited to it: The seemingly pristine grassland was actually maintained through their efforts [grassland wolves and horse herders]. Both labored hard at their tasks. Whenever Chen heard the herdsmen singing folk songs that echoed wolf sounds, he was happy, knowing that through their songs the herdsmen were acknowledging their debt to the wolves for their part in preserving the winter pasture (315; 452). Just as that which in Greek tragedy is presented as “Greek serenity” is misunderstood as “cowardly complacency in comfortable pleasure,”24 so the beauty of harmony that primal nature displays does not mean it is undisturbed. For example, people once were also components of that “serenity” and “beauty,” the collective wisdom of the living things that exist together with the grassland steeped in apparently natural beauty and tranquility. Knowing that this is sublimation is, to Chen Zhen, an important turning point in his encounter with the soul of nature through his contact with the grassland. From this he can see that the myriad living things in different ways together follow “grassland logic” (164; 257–58); to use Martha Graham’s famous phrase, he listens to “ancestral footsteps.”25 In actual society, nature always appears via the concept of ‘nature.’ In people’s imagination the sparsely populated grassland conjures up the ‘distant past,’ primitive, uncivilized nature, and thus takes on a new meaning in modern society, surpassing modernity and modern civilization to become a natural vehicle for postmodern thought or natural technique for postmodern art. Whenever possible, civilized people who have fully enjoyed the results of the modern cry out to “return home.”26 The ‘primitive’ and the ‘natural’ rapidly 23 24 25 26

Ibid., 112. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 64. Walter Terry, The Dance in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 97. See Martin Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller (Amherst, ny: Humanity Books, 2000).

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dispel ignorance, promoting a dream of going back to a home, becoming a spiritual platform for a spiritual return. The rise in recent years of global travel in search of the past, the infatuation of the cultural elite with old villages, and the unearthing and protection of indigenous cultures in the artistic world all have a fixation on ghost worlds. It is the spiritual rumination of modern people surfeited on a banquet of civilization, seeking spiritual sublimation on the foundation of material wealth. According to the psychologist Abraham Maslow, it arises out of a pursuit of “self-actualization,” and with that a sense of the sublime and freedom.27 Actually, what we “view with such yearning, this unity of man with nature … is by no means a simple, self-evident, as it were unavoidable state, which is necessarily to be found at the gate of all cultures, as paradise for mankind.”28 People ultimately find that beauty and the sublime in nature are simply what “discovers to us a Technic of nature, which represents it as a system in accordance with laws, the principle of which we do not find in the whole of our faculty of Understanding.”29 Hence, Kant stated, “true sublimity must be sought only in the mind of the [subject] judging, (not in the natural Object).”30 When modern people look back in search of nature it is no more than a spiritual pretext; what s/he is truly looking for is still freedom, and not only political freedoms that can be employed in modern society (democracy, rights, the will of the people), but even more a spirit of primal freedom far removed from politics. It seems that it can appear only naturally in the state of primal nature. Kant was incisive on the relationship between “natural beauty” and “sense of freedom.” Like the ancient Chinese philosophers, he believed that the idea of “freedom is the only concept of the supersensible which (by means of the causality that is thought in it) proves its objective reality in nature by means of the effects it can produce there;….” (413). Hence, “the metaphysical natural concept (which presupposes no determinate experience) is therefore ontological” (414), nature that is unbound:

27

Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality (New York, ny: Harper, 1954) provides the most widely circulated source for his arguments of a hierarchy of human needs, ranging from physiological, safety, love and belonging, to esteem and, ultimately, selfactualization: “What a man can be, he must be.” (p. 91). 28 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 29. 29 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J.H. Bernard (London and New York: Macmillan, 1892), 103. 30 Ibid., 117. Page numbers for subsequent quotations appear in the text in parentheses.

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Nature has not taken him [humanity] for her special darling and favoured him with benefit above all animals. Rather, in her destructive operations, plague, hunger, perils of waters, frost, and assaults of other animals great and small, etc., in these things has she spared him as little as any other animal…. Man is then always only a link in the chain of natural purposes … (353–54). Such an understanding long ago became the common understanding of philosophers. What has differed is the choice, that is, the choice of different ways to go under the influence of varying thought and values—that is, consciousness. Once humans, the animal endowed with self-consciousness, set out on the path of a civilization of ‘self’ preservation driven by consciousness and developed without limit, compelling nature to become a humanized nature, he forever abandoned himself in the sense of existence in primal nature. This determined that humans would rarely have the freedom to return to nature, and finally, like Chen Zhen in the novel, to seek a visionary freedom in art or religion: What gave the grassland such a powerful magnetic field that the needle of his emotional compass was always pointing tremulously in that direction? Chen Zhen constantly sensed tremors and cries for help from within the grassland that resonated in his soul…. Some unknown place from deep within him summoned feelings from the most ancient past (316). 2.2

The Protagonist, the Grassland Wolf: The Spirit of Primal Freedom

The grassland wolf is without doubt the protagonist worthy of the name in Wolf Totem, and it is also the most important element in the state of primal nature. At the very start of the novel, even before we have had an opportunity to learn something about the people of the grassland, the grassland wolves make a riveting entrance: Chen turned to look down the ravine and was so terrified he nearly fell off the horse. There on a snow-covered slope not less than fifty yards away was a pack of gold-hued, murderous-looking Mongolian wolves, all watching him straight on or out of the corners of their eyes, their gazes boring into him like needles (4; 3).

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They are organized, following a leader: The alpha male, surrounded by the others, was a gray wolf whose nearly white neck, chest, and abdomen shone like white gold (5; 4). The common fighters among wolf pack await the attack in battle array: Their movements were slight and slow … the wolves flattened out and did not move; even the steam in their breath was light and gentle. … [One] lay there still as death, and even after what seemed like half a day incredibly he remained in the same pose (13, 17; 17). When forced to retreat they maintain their composure and good order: But the wolves withdrew in good order, and even while in full flight still retained the ancient military formation of the grassland wolves, the fiercest wolves spearheading the pack, accompanied by the alpha male, with the largest wolves to the rear, covering the retreat. There was never a trace of the panicked disorder that birds and other animals show (6). It is significant that the first time such an imposing array appears in the book is also the only instance of such a complete collective appearance, much like an army passing in review, displaying the most spectacular view of grassland wolves in the state of primal nature, and the most intimidating. From then on, their ranks are never again so orderly, as they fight to the death in mortal contest with outside forces, until abjection and then total disappearance (within China). Their departure is a sign signifying the end of the state of primal nature. In this light, the fate of the grassland wolves means they are not truly champions. However great in the past, like the other living things of the grassland, in the end they cannot escape the transformations of modern civilization. What distinguishes them under the coercion of outside civilization is that, like their ancestors in ancient times, they refuse to submit or accommodate, but resist to the death. On the vast stage of the grassland, they are not only protagonists, but also the true subjects. They not only embody a state of existence, but even more so a spirit: The wolf, a totem for the stubborn grassland people over the millennia, possessed spiritual power that would shame and inspire awe in humans. Few people could live according to that code without bending and

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compromising; fewer still would pit their lives against a nearly invincible external force (324; 462). This is the understanding that fills the book, a far cry from the image of wolves that we have been familiar with. For so long the wolf has been a sign linked to wicked deeds and evil qualities. In the face of such a heavy historical accumulation of resentment, overturning the verdict on wolves was no easy task. Changing the old vision that people have held for thousands of years, and subverting the motif of ‘evil,’ as Wolf Totem accomplished so decisively, was a source of pride for Jiang Rong: For so many people in this enormous nation of over a billion people, after this book [was published] the fear and hatred of wolves was replaced with a new understanding of them. Without Wolf Totem ninety-nine percent of people would have no understanding of the nature of wolves, nor would ninety percent of people have any understanding of nomadic life, any inkling of what nomadic spirit has been.31 What were his methods for revising the image of wolves and creating sympathy for what had been villains? The author’s unique instrument for this was his own experience raising a wolf. LI Xiaojiang: Were the scenes that you described something you witnessed for yourself? JIANG Rong: Yes. For example I saw for myself how the wolves killed ­gazelles. Rounding up sheep in the snow was something I took part in myself. There were some stories that I collected and combined, as well, and as long as they contained something extraordinary, I was keen to make use of such experiences. Given that people have usually understood wolves only through ancient tales and collectively constructed a unified understanding of them under the influence of things like the wolf motif, Jiang Rong’s eye-witnessing of the behavior of wolves on the grassland, hunting them, raiding their lair, and raising one have made his realism doubly powerful. First, there is the power of his personally acquired knowledge: the irrefutable strength of what he himself witnessed and experienced and its truthfulness have been sufficient to subvert traditional 31

This and succeeding quotations are from recorded conversations between the author and Jiang Rong (April 3, 2006).

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motifs built up over time in legends and texts. Second, is the aesthetic power of ‘defamiliarization’ or ‘enstrangement.’ In such realism, the more authentic it is, the more people are unfamiliar with it, and the more unfamiliar it is, the more it stimulates curiosity. The greater the distance from traditional understanding, the greater the aesthetic effect it can produce. Viktor Shklovsky, the first to introduce defamiliarization to the study of fiction, put forward two important concepts: fabula and syuzhet. When the fabula, as the basic material, undergoes specific shaping into the details of the syuzhet as the finished story, the material must undergo the author’s creative transformation of it, so that its language gives people a sense of the material as unfamiliar, and the syuzhet as a consequence produces something new. In his view, “[b]y ‘enstranging’ objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and ‘laborious.’ The perceptual process in art has a purpose all its own and ought to be extended to the fullest.”32 Shklovsky discovered numerous examples of defamiliarization in the fiction of Leo Tolstoy. Instead of employing the commonly used name for something, Tolstoy used ordinary language to describe it, such as writing “a small piece of colored paper” for a “decoration,” or “a small piece of bread” for “Holy Communion.” His strategy was popularization, to use everyday language that people were familiar with to replace the conventions of the educated elite. “In art ‘attracting attention’ is the creator’s purpose, so it is ‘artificially’ created to be this way,” and not accomplished with one stroke.”33 Defamiliarization in Wolf Totem is not deliberate but a natural effect: given the fact that modern readers are completely unfamiliar with the grassland and grassland wolves, the blunt techniques of realism themselves achieve the artistic effect of defamiliarization with surprising success. There are two bases for this defamiliarization. The first is that historically wolves long ago lost places to secret themselves within agricultural civilization, and people lost familiarity with them. The second is the sense of distance. Although wolf packs still existed in the grassland, people have had no means to be in proximity to them. Even for those living in the grassland the relation to wolves has been a distant one. Distance generates a sense of beauty. Zhu Guangqian applied Edmund Burke’s theory of “psychological distance” to analyze tragedy, and pointed out, “the reason an ordinary object becomes 32 33

Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Device,” in Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Elmwood Park, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), 6. Wei Shikeluofusiji 维 ·什 克 洛 夫 斯 基 [Viktor Shklovsky], “Shixue 诗 学 [Poetics],” in Shige yuyan lilun jikan [Collected essays on the theory of poetic language] (Petrogradsky, 1919), 112; translated in Xifang meixue tongshi: ershi shiji meixue 西 方 美 学 通 史 二 十 世 纪 美 学 [General history of Western poetics: twentieth-century poetics], ed. Zhu Liyuan 朱 立 元 et al. (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi, 1999) Vol. 1 [shang], 241.

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beautiful is because introducing distance causes a change in people’s vision.”34 If there is a safe distance between people and ugly or menacing things, then an even more powerful aesthetic feeling occurs involuntarily—the sense of the sublime. The postmodern philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard explored the generation of the sublime in terms of freedom, believing that the sublime is “in opposition to the standard,” involuntarily occurring in a state without freedom, in which traditional standards maintain distance: “The feeling of the sublime is manifested when the presentation of free forms is lacking. It is compatible with the form-less.”35 Mediated by the Idea of freedom, it consciously resists established rules. In Wolf Totem the lack of freedom is a priori and internal (Chapter 4 Section 11 discusses this issue). In the face of the unattainable wolf pack, the deep human yearning for freedom is assigned to the distant look to be transformed into the sublime, creating the condition for the spiritual elevation of the ‘superior’ qualities of the grassland wolf. The question is, in such contact at a distance what are the qualities of the grassland wolves that Chen Zhen observes that people fear and, hence, that inspire respect? In the book the grassland wolves as a group form an extremely cohesive whole. Their movements and evasiveness make it difficult to approach them. Once they appear they are like an arrow on a bowstring, always ready for battle and a fight to the death. The author’s depiction of the grassland wolves is always related to fighting. It is in their relentless fighting that they display their unusually excellent qualities. Foremost is their quality as a whole: When men charge the enemy they shout “Charge!” or “Kill!” Dog attacks are accompanied by frenzied barking to intimidate and instill fear. But when wolves attack, they do so in silence—no shouts, no wolfish howls. But across the world what filled the eyes and the minds, and turned the stomachs of humans and animals alike were the most primitive, cruel, and deservedly feared: “the wolves are coming!” (18; 26–27). Next is their team spirit: You should know that these wolves have a strong collective spirit; they stick together. It’s not in their nature to abandon one of their own. A wolf on the inside acted as a springboard for another one, which had eaten its 34 35

Zhu Guangqian 朱 光 潜 , Beiju xinlixue 悲 剧 心 理 学 [Psychology of tragedy], trans. Zhang Longxi 张 窿 溪 (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1983), 24. Francois Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 113.

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fill, to leap across the wall. Then it acted as a springboard for the hungry wolf to fly into the enclosure and eat its fill (38; 61). Whether in fighting or daily life, they have a strong will to survive: [A]rctic currents produced blizzards known locally as white-hair winds. Wolves, unmatched at climatological warfare, often launched lightning strikes during blizzard conditions … taking advantage of the rare early spring to come south, leap across fire breaks, and force [their] way past guarded public roads to return to the grassland (41; 66–67). They have a superior capacity for survival in extremely adverse environments: [Chen Zhen] could not believe that they could dig out such hard-packed dirt with their claws, and carve tunnels so deep. All the sharp edges had been rubbed smooth, like cobblestones, so this must have served countless wolves—male, female, adult, and newborn—for a century or more (93; 150; orig. trans.).36 Over a million years their genes have accumulated knowledge of group survival: The gazelles dragged out of the snow could have fed several large wolf packs; the ignored frozen carcasses were the wolf pack’s guaranteed fresh food, for they would keep till the spring thaw, when the wolves would return for more tasty meals (26; 40). “The customs of the grassland are understood by people, and by wolves.” (67; 106) Their sure grasp of the logic of the grassland makes them invincible: [A]s soon as the first snow settled on the ground, and the grassland turned from yellow to white, the wolves either crossed the northern border, went deep into the mountains to hunt gazelles and wild rabbits, or remained in the wild country once the snows had sealed up the mountains. They endured despite their hunger … Then, once the ground ­hardened, they 36

As noted above, citations of Wolf Totem appear in parentheses in the text, referring to the page number in the Chinese edition, followed where applicable by the page number in the English-language translation by Howard Goldblatt. Quotations that contain a partial translation by Goldblatt and supplementary original translation for this study are additionally marked “orig. trans.”

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b­ ecame fast runners again and, sensing that the people had lost their fighting spirit, returned to plunder and loot (40; 26). The author depicts the wolves with calm assurance, closely following the fundamental theme of ‘existence in primal nature,’ while the ‘spirit of primal freedom’ as the sanctity of life and the qualities of survival are epitomized one after the other in their combat. In their fight for survival, grassland wolves have accumulated many ‘ways of the wolf’ that even humans cannot begin to equal. The army officer, Bao Shungui, says, “Here’s some of what the wolves knew: weather, topography, opportunity, their and the enemy’s strengths, military strategy and tactics, close fighting, night fighting, guerrilla fighting, mobile fighting, long-range raids, ambushes, lightning raids, and concentrating their strength to annihilate the ­enemy. They made plans, they set goals, and they undertook a measured campaign of total annihilation” (61; 96–97). In Chen Zhen’s view, wolves are c­ apable of tunnel warfare and camouflage, and even combine them, prompting him to grudgingly admit, “wolves are the world’s finest soldiers” (89; 143). The wealth of description in this book has been enough to make many entrepreneurs and statesmen sigh with regret that they are no match. Waiting: But wolves are demonic fighters with incredible patience in locating and waiting for opportunities. And when those opportunities arrive, they squeeze them until there is nothing left but pulp. Now that they had set the stage and found the opportunity, they had to make it theirs, do whatever it took to not let a single horse slip through the net (47; 77). Surprise attack: Wolves can crawl like lizards. Without looking up they can locate their prey by smell and sound. The mares often call out to their foals, softly, which helps a wolf determine the location of the foals as they inch closer (251; 374). Long-range attack: The grassland wolves are known for long-range raids, for splitting up to scout a situation and then joining for an attack. As pack animals, they range far and wide while hunting, and this highly advanced system of communication is how they make contact across great ­distances (241; 359). Diversionary attack: Chen said, “I know the wolf pack surrounded the camp and howled all night long. But if they were here, how did they end up attacking the horses?” “That was their plan: an all-out attack from four sides, hitting the east to divert attention from the west, covering for each other, feigning an attack on one side while mounting a major assault on the other; they advanced when they could, and when they couldn’t, they

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tied us up so that we couldn’t cover both the head and the tail, or both east and west” (248; 369). In Chen Zhen’s view, “Wolves aren’t animals, but demons.” They come and go as mysteriously as spirits, fighting heaven, earth, and humans, wisely and bravely, and invincibly. Every part of their bodies—from their teeth to their feces to their howls—can be used for combat: “The wolf’s face was a weapon. The fangs of the wolf as a weapon were also their appearance. Many grassland animals were so frightened of the wolf’s weapons that they surrendered themselves to death without even putting up a fight” (271). During the day they disappear, while the night is theirs: “they steal and snatch at will. If they can’t do either, then they attack as a pack” (251; 374). Life is fighting for survival, and the theme of life is combat. Yet, although they have superior survival skills, they never surrender simply to live but go down fighting courageously: [T]he wolf sprang from the precipice onto a slope with loose rocks…. As the rocks pressed into its body, a cloud of gray sand quickly swallowed the wolf up, all but buried it (184; 287). Even the wolves’ mortal enemy, Bao Shungui, cannot help but praise them: “I tell you the truth: people are no match for a wolf. I’ve led soldiers into battle, and there’s never been any guarantee against desertion or rebellion in the ranks. But why would a wolf rather die …?” (185; 288). Chen Zhen abandons his preconceived notions about wolves, and after going from fear to respect and from curiosity to understanding, begins to reevaluate their qualities: “To him, the grassland wolves, with their hard bones, hard hearts, and survival skills, were tough as steel, and unflinching even in the face of death. In the wolves’ dictionary there was no word for weakness” (240; 358). [T]here on the ground was the wolf’s front leg, with tooth marks on the coat, the tendons, and the bone. “See there,” Batu said, “the wolf knew that his leg was slowing him down, dragging along on the ground, so he chewed it off.” Zhang felt his stomach lurch, as if raked by the wolf’s claws (145; 228). At this point, a fundamental change takes place in the human’s standpoint. He no longer stands in opposition to the wolf, as has been the human standpoint in the past, but pulls the wolf over to a place within reach of human feeling, lets the wolves as a whole enter the habitat of human survival, and makes ‘them’ into objects that ‘we’ can understand and sympathize with.

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As a consequence, that ancient, unchanging motif of the wolf as evil is unintentionally demolished. Given the reasoning that realist depiction of human life produces empathy, the author frequently employs ‘familiarity’ to achieve ‘sympathy.’ Here, in an unfamiliar environment, Chen Zhen and others undergo a re-acquaintance with what was once familiar—inadvertently ‘renaming.’ It is evident that the employment of defamiliarization in Wolf Totem is not through language, but the setting of the context. Given that the reason for the lack of familiarity with wolves among the Han ethnicity is due to the predominantly agrarian Han culture being long ago separated from contact with wolves and the environment that supports them, Wolf Totem makes use of this circumstance to turn the unfamiliarity of the environment into the premise for contextual defamiliarization. This accomplishes two transitions ­cognitively and aesthetically. One is the complete shift of the identity of the subject from humans to the grassland and the grassland wolf, so that what has been an oppositional ‘other’ becomes one of ‘us,’ and consequently crosses over the historical barrier that modern civilization interposed between humans and nature. The other transition is the movement of aesthetically generated sympathy from humanity toward what originally was the scorned and loathed ‘other,’ entirely breaking the boundaries of human concern, and in emphasizing the postmodern orientation to multiple ecologies, surpassing modernism (such as existentialism). Once the aesthetic empathy produced by sympathy is achieved, the shift of subject position may be imperceptibly completed during the reading process. This is not merely an emotional impulse, but is also a cognitive process: at the same time readers understand the view of grassland people toward the wolf, there is also an epistemological renovation of the traditional relationship of wolves and humans. Wolf Totem deliberately includes a large number of such scenes in an effort to rectify our past cognitive bias. For example, there is the relationship of wolves to communicating with heaven: Wolves are known for baying at the moon, which is their call to Tengger. If a halo appears around the moon, a wind will blow that night and the wolves will be on the move. They are better climatologists than we are. They make circles to mirror those in the sky. In other words, they are in perfect sync with the heavens (59; 94). Another example is their relationship with the earth: “Tengger sent wolves down to the grassland as protectors of the Bayan Uul sacred mountain and the Olonbulag. Tengger and the sacred

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mountain are angered anytime the grassland is endangered, and wolves are sent to kill and consume the offenders (59; 94). The wolves’ relationship with the grassland is also given: When it’s a matter of life or death, the grassland provides an avenue of escape; when they’re in peril, the grassland supplies wings for them to fly away like birds. It keeps them under its wing. The vast expanse of Mongolian grassland favors and protects its wolves (145; 228). There is also the relationship of wolves with the grassland people: [W]olves are sent by Tengger to safeguard the grassland. Without them, the grassland would vanish. And without wolves we Mongols would never be able to enter heaven…. If there are too many of them, they lose their divine power and turn evil. It’s all right for people to kill evil creatures (77; 123). Finally, there is the relationship of the wolf to the human psyche: We grassland people learned reverence for Tengger from the wolves. Before we Mongols came to the grassland, the wolves were already raising their voices to Tengger. It’s a hard life out here, especially for them. Oldtimers often shed tears of sadness when they hear wolves bay at night (245; 365). In traditional allegories, writers always made use of personification, making whatever animal (or plant) is in the leading role speak as a human and act as a human, together with hyperbolic or shape-altering depictions to highlight an allegorical meaning. Ultimately, these were all at the service of the human as the unshakeable subject. The wolf’s negative image was usually generated through ‘comparisons’: placed next to a lamb, the wolf eats it in a bloodthirsty spectacle; compared with dogs, wolves are untrustworthy, treacherous, and cunning. Always the viewpoint is human in the positive depictions of dogs and sheep: sheep are penned in and eaten by humans, as well as bought and sold; dogs are trained and disciplined by humans and serve them, guarding their dwellings, sheep, and human masters. We may suppose that humans long ago surely made attempts to domesticate wolves, hence the stories of the ‘disdainful wolf’ after so many failures—just as the wolf that Chen Zhen raises bites him in return. But from another angle, viewing the wolf as an equal and as standing

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at the origin of existence in primal nature to share our concept of values, the evaluation of wolves would be entirely different than the one above. Wolf Totem offers that possibility, to gain a fresh understanding of the wolf’s character viewed as an equal. In this story, wolves are wolves, they are themselves, not something representing humans or anything else. They do not establish any direct relationship with humans or morality, and only when forced by human incursions do they fight back or go on the attack when cornered. Living spontaneously, on their own, freely, outside human society, they are never ‘personified.’ On the contrary, it is humans who gain a wealth of knowledge from them. Because he raised a wolf, the author’s depiction is basically realistic. Because it is realistic, the evaluation of wolves may possibly be close to the truth. Of course, the result of ‘realism’ is not necessarily the true. What ultimately is the truth about wolves? No one can depict wolves with total accuracy, and even if one penetrates deep into a wolf’s den, it would be very difficult truly to understand them. Humans themselves cannot altogether grasp human nature or judge differences among people correctly. Nations, ethnicities, classes, and genders all erect walls among humans that are hard to scale, and truth is elusive. That is not the aim of Wolf Totem. By making the grassland wolf its protagonist and hanging an allegorical message on its story, Wolf Totem is attempting something different. JIANG Ming: The story of the grassland wolves is a display of freedom itself, and of vitality. JIANG Rong: This is original, primitive beauty. It gives an order to life. This is an aesthetics of life that is independent, free, bold, and contested, an aesthetics of happiness. According to the author, the early title for the novel was Grassland Logic. Why then finally select the wolf, instead of the grassland, and the title Wolf Totem? The answer seems to be entirely ‘freedom.’ Obviously, the freedom discussed here is completely different from the concept of “liberty” in the category of political science, the two types of freedom named by Isaiah Berlin.37 It is a spirit of primal freedom generated and developed in a state of existence in primal nature, unrelated to consciousness of self, power and subservience, or civilized order, and still less to political positions

37

Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958). The fourth chapter of this book on philosophy discusses the relevance of his concepts.

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of ‘positive’ or ‘negative.’ This is an a priori free spontaneity, life possessing and using to the greatest degree the survival space and mode that nature has given, without restriction or transgression. It is not the individual that is at the core; on the contrary, the possibility to realize it surely is premised on the ‘presence’ of the group, the survival and perpetuation of the group. Its purpose is not individual liberty; to the contrary, in freely displaying ‘spontaneity’ as a method, it becomes a necessary ingredient of the natural cycle, closely adhering to its role, tenaciously following each link in grassland logic, holding to the unlimited cycles of the state of primal nature as a whole. For example, the resistance of the grassland wolves as a whole is a virtually irreplaceable symbol. Once such a symbol is raised to a spiritual level it easily gives rise to a desire for the sublime in the human psyche, and sustains one’s dreams through faith— Wolf Totem arises out of such circumstances. Neither food nor killing was the purpose of the wolves’ existence; rather, it was their sacred, inviolable freedom, their independence, and their dignity. It was this principle that made it possible for all true believers among the herdsmen to willingly be delivered to the mystical sky-burial ground, in hopes that their souls would soar freely along with those of the wolves (324; 462). The spirit of primal freedom so powerfully presented in the book resides not only in grassland wolves, but also in the state of existence in primal nature of all grassland creatures (including the grassland and the people of the grassland). It is presented primarily through the medium of wild animals, and only rarely through the domesticated and farm animals familiar to most people. Chen Zhen, for example, is a sheepherder, but rarely describes the life of sheep. Dogs are the companions of grassland people day and night, yet the author’s attention is dominated only by the least tamed among them, Erlang. The author shows the different states of the spirit of primal freedom by the degree to which they have been tamed by humans and the level of difficulty that presents. In each case, animals that have been tamed, no matter how powerful physically, have forever lost their spirit of primal freedom to human will, much like the herd of gelding warhorses: … of noble bloodlines, famous as warhorses throughout Mongol history, they were known historically as Turks. Fine-looking steeds, they were able to endure hard, taxing work; they feared neither hunger nor thirst; and they held up well in boiling heat and bitter cold…. That said, the

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herd had a fatal flaw. Made up exclusively of geldings … clearly powerful, [they] lacked aggressiveness, which meant a less potent tendency to attack (44–45; 71–73). Wolves are completely different, refusing to be enlisted in human endeavors or tamed. Beautifully uniting active resistance for survival and extraordinary sagacity to survive, the wolf becomes the embodiment of the spirit of primal freedom: In the end, man has the capacity to kill a wolf, but not its spirit … [S]tanding on the grassland, that is, looking from the standpoint of the grassland, the wolf had wrenched justice and righteousness from the humans (145–46; 230). In an ontological sense, this spirit is priceless, either existing together with primal nature, or both together absent. In Wolf Totem it appears in images of the populations of wild animals and plants, each assenting to and taking its proper place in nature, strictly following the harsh and ordered logic of nature. ‘Primal’ is a state of spontaneity: ‘being I’ and ‘becoming I’ belong to two totally different realms. Here ‘self’ and ‘spontaneity’ are integrated, with neither freedom outside nature, nor self presence outside spontaneity. In this sense, the ‘freedom’ that is at the core of the individualism of modern civilization is deconstructed into the postmodern sense of survival in pluralist co-existence. Seen this way, what are termed ‘primal nature’ and ‘primal freedom’ have nothing to do with civilized humans, but have flourished among humans in the distant past or in the ‘simple’ life of indigenous peoples. To the degree that nature is humanized, they have faded away, gradually disappearing to the point of extinction in modern civilization. This is a truly unavoidable paradox. The consciousness of primal freedom has appeared only when humans have become products of society and no longer simply subordinate to nature, when primal nature punishes as a warning to people to protect nature in order to preserve sustainable development. It has brought people today to an examination of ‘free will’ at a time of achieving freedom. The stronger human civilization has become, the weaker human vitality; the freer life in society has become, the farther it has moved away from the state of primal freedom. The more the freedoms created for people by modern political systems, the closer the state of primal freedom has approached an end. But it will not die out entirely. Such an a priori, transcendent ‘primal’ gene has always perpetuated in the human population, waiting for resurrection:

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That driving force of life, that passion, is a priceless gem, rarer and rarer in modern life. People all over the world are seeking this thing, just like that ancient lotus, hidden in each person’s soul. Once given light, adequate warmth and moisture, she will bud.38 Jiang Rong believes that no matter how the age has progressed, we are still the descendants of pre-humans, and some of the ingredients among life’s genes have lived in a ‘primal’ state. As E.M. Forster said, “Human nature is the same in all ages. The primitive cave man lies deep in us all.”39 Even though the environment in which humans survived has changed after the coming of civilization, that lotus still remains sealed up within the psychic genes of humankind, waiting to bud. One of the author’s purposes in writing has been “to make the ancient lotus bud, and whether it buds or sprouts is fine.” This is thoroughly utopian, and the question is how it is related to the ‘postmodern.’ Wolf Totem subverts the classic wolf motif relying on postmodern criticism, but that is not its purpose. The author does not conceal that the same earth used for the funeral for an old concept contains a new belief. His story of wolves is offering a new enlightenment. The ‘wolf totem’ is a grand narrative after all. Whether enlightened or grand, all alike have been the target of the postmodern, but faced with the ‘wolf totem’ the postmodern has no effectiveness. When the image of the wolf rises in this story, postmodern criticism completely collapses inside a postmodern narrative. When the wolf in the textual sense becomes a totem, a new ideal is established on the Olonbulag grassland. Finally, here can be seen the traces of our generation, the era of Mao Zedong, in the text of the hidden ‘-ism,’ after all still with an unintended sign of the utopian. As the ‘successors of communism,’ everyone in our generation since the birth of New China was fated to grow up in a realm of utopian ideals and destined to undertake the mission of ‘liberating all humankind.’ Regrettably, at that time we did not take notice that the word ‘liberty’ in Chinese did not necessarily imply ‘freedom’; on the contrary, its price could be precisely freedom. Undertaking this for ‘all humankind’ as a collective concept did not necessarily entail freedom for the ‘individual’; to the contrary, it could call precisely for the sacrifice of the individual at any time. Small wonder that linguistic analysis was absent; in the presence of such idealism, discourse as a weapon was entirely devoted to promoting the good and castigating the bad. With no instruction in it, criticism as a tool of deconstruction was completely ineffective. In creating 38 39

Jiang Rong, interview with the author, recorded January 2007. Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1954), 172.

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utopia, historical experience told us that the power of the will of the group was irresistible. Then, on the ruins of post-utopia, only the strength of life itself could help us return to life. When ‘price’ and ‘sacrifice’ could not bring back the former sense of acceptance, when people in the days of ‘liberation’ lost the last bit of freedom to survive as individuals, the shattering of ‘faith’ was unavoidable. The sense of group [unity] shared the same fall, its destruction and dissolution also doomed to be total. We watched as these fragments took their course from ‘liberty’ turning to ‘freedom’; from ‘all humankind’ to ‘a single individual’; from an unrealized communism to real models of the “wolves of Western civilization”; straining to catch the ride to modernization, racing through underdevelopment to get to the ‘modern’…. At the same time, people faced a series of unbearable things: from the modern age on, as civilization strengthened, nature weakened; as the individual gained strength, society weakened. Science and technology developed steadily, while the humanistic spirit gradually collapsed. Simultaneously, nations and nation states grew more powerful, while the consciousness of humanity as a whole became marginalized, and in the tide of the postmodern turned into a new sign of utopia: ‘political correctness’ (pc). At this moment the world is such that the ‘principle of political correctness’ sustains the post-utopian psyche in the wake of revolution, pushing the wave in the direction of “ending” History. Fragmentation has reached the point of being a destructive force, turned into bullying by political correctness (as in our previous dictatorship of the proletariat); efforts to integrate and to construct may be crushed at any time under the judgment of ‘political incorrectness’ (as in our previous Cultural Revolution). If we really believe in the postmodern principle of political correctness, we will see in the face of such force and power the hand of the future reach out to the newly disadvantaged, and the scales of truth will lean toward them. That will not be on the basis of justice, but under the force of grassland logic. Those people (such as the author of Wolf Totem) who have testified to the mistaken results produced on the soil of ‘correctness’ will choose: the grassland over humanity, nature over society, the group over the individual … when nature has been completely despoiled and humans have had their way with it, survival in primal nature will become people’s dream. If systematic freedom becomes unattainable in reality, primal freedom will surely find a new vehicle, such as the grassland wolves. The author of Wolf Totem makes it clear that a state of existence in primal nature can no longer be restored. What can be revived is that metaphysical spirit of freedom. Therefore, what fills the novel and even the psyche is not a concept of freedom as found in political philosophy, but the spirit of primal freedom in the sense of survival in primal nature. In the chess game of ‘freedom’ and ‘primal freedom,’ that is, the protracted contest of humans and

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nature, the author’s standpoint is obviously with the latter, so he chose wolves— the untamable breed—as the representatives of the spirit of primal freedom, and by shifting subject positions, simultaneously completed two transformations: one was to shift sympathies entirely to other forms of life (including the grassland); the second was to convert the leading role, the protagonist, from something visible into a spirit. Every setting, plotline, and living thing, even natural scenery, is restored to its origin in an effort to represent, through the grassland and the living things of the grassland, the spirit of primal freedom that is produced in the state of primal nature, and to touch deeply the pain in the soul of civilized humans. Rousseau put it this way: Civil man is born, lives, and dies in slavery. At his birth he is sewed in swaddling clothes; at his death he is nailed in a coffin. So long as he keeps his human shape, he is enchained by our institutions.40 T.S. Eliot discussed the relationship of excellent works to beliefs: “what these beliefs are is less important than the fact that they are commonly shared.”41 Wolf Totem has had a worldwide readership because it speaks to the spiritual suffering of modern humanity and taps “commonly shared” beliefs. During a crisis of survival for humanity that is universal and deep, it finds shared spiritual needs: the yearning for primitive vitality and the spirit of primal freedom. In form, traditional; in conceptual level, modern; in narrative strategy, postmodern; yet in aesthetic taste, it is nostalgic. F.R. Leavis judged that a good work must have a form that unifies complex content and has “a reverent openness before life.”42 Wolf Totem is not lacking in this genuineness, and what is surprising is that these shared beliefs are presented through wolves, which humans have always so detested: Since becoming bewitched by the grassland wolves, Chen felt that his already listless, weary blood had weakened further and that what seemed to be alien wolf blood had begun to flow in his veins. His view of life had altered—he treasured it even as it became more vigorous and fulfilling (171; 267).

40

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 42. 41 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 51. 42 Ibid.

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As symbols of the spirit of primal freedom, the grassland wolves staunchly fulfill their role. Yet, without the wolf cub it would be hard for them to measure up to the identity of being the protagonists. There is actually no complete story of the grassland wolves. At most they would be grouped with the grassland, at most on a par with the grassland as part of the setting. Therefore, the wolf cub’s entrance is crucially important. It is on account of the wolf cub that the grassland wolves as a whole can assume the true role of protagonist in Wolf Totem. The wolf cub not only provides the well-developed image of the protagonist, but also completes a full human story in the course of its interaction with humans (Chen Zhen), which in turn makes the text a novel and not simply an allegory. In the next section we will analyze in detail the story of the wolf cub, examining how injury is inevitable when the spirit of primal freedom and freedom are linked to the same track and together become elements of a tragedy. 2.3

Plot: The Story of the Wolf Cub and the Death of Freedom

The story of the wolf cub is the only complete story in Wolf Totem, and an utterly tragic story. The protagonist is a wolf, but with the basic elements of a tragic character, greatly increasing the power of the novel. Can a novel make an animal its protagonist, not just a supporting character? Traditional fiction offers no ideal answer, and this is a direction that postmodern literature is exploring. E.M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel noted: “Since the actors in a story are usually human, it seemed convenient to entitle this aspect People.” The reason animals could not be leading characters was that “we know too little so far about their psychology. There may be, probably will be, an alteration here in the future, comparable to the alteration in the novelist’s rendering of savages in the past … and we shall have animals who are neither symbolic, nor little men disguised, nor as four-legged tables moving, nor as painted scraps of paper that fly. It is one of the ways where science may enlarge the novel, by giving it fresh subject matter.”43 Animals have appeared in the role of protagonist in modern literature, as noted in Kafka’s fiction: “Kafka frequently places animals at the center of his tales. The reader follows these animal tales for a fair distance without even noticing that they do not deal with human beings at all.”44 Yet, as flawless as Kafka’s personification techniques 43 44

Aspects of the Novel (London: Edward Arnold, 1927), 51. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings: 1931–1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone and others, ed. ­Michael W. Jennings, et al. (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2005) Vol. 2, Part 2: 497.

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may have been, in fact he was merely “borrowing a wolf’s mouth to present his own words…. These animals live undergound completely, or at least like the bug in Metamorphosis, crawling on the floor or living in the cracks.”45 There is little to compare between the natural, spontaneous grassland creatures of Wolf Totem and Kafka’s, which are simply the writer’s stage props for representing human ‘alienation.’ In recent years, in the efforts to save endangered animals, we have gained a greater understanding of animals, and works with animals as the main characters have appeared increasingly among all sorts of artistic works. The five major events of human life that fiction represents (birth, eating, sleeping, love, death) have also appeared in different degrees among animals. The wolf cub’s life, death, food, and shelter, as well as its feelings and its determination, are all vividly presented. Yet, obviously, the creative purpose of the novel is not purely the protection of the environment or animals, neither has it continued the form of the traditional allegory, nor catered to human tastes for personification. The wild animals in the novel do not exist as dependents of humans. They exist for themselves. And yet, the wolf cub is that exception, under human control from the moment it appears, and never truly free. The wolf cub’s entrance is not staged as produced by nature, but as a classic representative of humanized nature. The reason why it becomes a major plot element constructing the story is because of a human motive: the human desire to raise a wolf: Since [Chen Zhen’s] goal was to raise a cub, not kill it, he’d have to move quickly, not waiting until the cubs were weaned and had opened their eyes (82; 131). He must steal the cub and remove it from the wolves’ world into a human environment before it could see the world and could tell the difference between its enemies and its own kind (82). Raising a wolf on the grassland is rare, violating the will of heaven and humans. But set against the ideology that ‘humans are destined to conquer nature,’ it would be a great achievement. Since the onset of civilization, humanity has regarded itself as in a commanding position to dominate life, and been driven by belief in the righteousness of conquering nature, using every means to become the masters of the world. Since humans historically became the master of all creatures in the natural world, why should the wolf be an exception? There is a question that remains in the background throughout this story, unacknowledged, submerged in our psyches: in this vast, wild grassland, why have the ­nomads not raised wolves? Why have they not converted an enemy 45

Ibid., 498.

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into a friend, transformed a threat into a benefit, and brought wolves into the confines of being manipulated according to human will? The novel attempts an explanation. Perhaps in the distant past humans historically tried to tame wolves, just as they did sheep, horses, dogs and all other domestic animals and livestock. It seems that there was a sad contest between humans and animals over which would rule and which would be ruled. There are many negative depictions of wolves in the ancient fables that have come down into the present that testify to close contact between early humans and wolves. Human knowledge of the evil characteristics of wolves was perhaps gained from the lessons of humans’ raising wolves. The story of the wolves and the sheep dogs in Aesop’s fables arose from the deeply felt pain of herders raising wolves/dogs. The story of the wolf and the child in Aesop’s fables speaks to the sense of distance between wolves and humans. And the story “The wolf of Zhongshan” comes out of the painful lesson of the disastrous results of well-intentioned human nurturing of wolves…. In this pain there was a blessing for wolves, in that they won humans’ respect as adversaries in their contests, and in that they seized their own free domain far from humans. We might well view this result as an alternative to humanizing nature. Faced with irresistible or unmanageable natural force, humans would adopt another means to make use of nature: once it was known that the wolf could not be conquered, they would convert irresolvable enmity into respect ‘at a distance,’ and imagine the unconquerable to be unattainable spirits, as with the grassland wolves: Since wolves were the enemies of herdsmen, as well as their revered divinities, their totem (especially in the minds of the elders), their bridge to heaven, and as such, creatures to whom homage was paid, how could they be raised as pets, like domestic dogs? (104; 165). By the 1950s, when the power of revolution was spreading to every corner of China, and people were adapting to the revolutionary concept that ‘humans are destined to conquer nature’ with the aid of technology, people might be inclined to break the taboo against raising wolves. But when the urban educated youth went to the Olonbulag grassland, and people still refused to raise wolves, their political concerns, apart from elements of tradition, were even more important: [T]here would be resistance from the herdsmen, party officials, and fellow students. Raising a wolf cub was something only someone with an ulterior motive would consider. It not only flew in the face of politics,

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faith, religion, and ethnic relations but also adversely affected production, safety, and their state of mind…. Wouldn’t raising a wolf around flocks of sheep, herds of cattle, and packs of dogs be a public disavowal of separating friend and foe? Would he be seen as advocating the idea of considering one’s enemy as one’s friend? (103–4; 165). Given this situation, why does Chen Zhen still want to raise a wolf? The book emphasizes two reasons. The first is ‘fondness’: “Chen Zhen had loved animals since he was a small child, when he’d several times caught sparrows and raised them” (82). Fondness is one form of human desire, and at the source of the flow of the creatures in the natural world toward destruction. Nothing that people have liked has come to a good end. Using everything that can be used, dominating everything that can be dominated has led to invasive acts one after the other. The Western ‘discovery’ of China arose out of fondness; from there it went, as Benoit Vermander summed it up: “from admiration to invasion.”46 The progress of civilization, as it is called, usually moves forward step by step driven by fondness. Chen Zhen realizes he should not announce his fondness so openly. He understands that in a revolutionary age individual fondness is not a legitimate reason that he can openly offer at will. Therefore, he comes up with a more dignified pretext, which is his second reason for wanting to raise wolves: scientific knowledge. Even before finding the litter, after racking his brain for days, Chen had finally found an argument he thought they might find reasonable: raising a wolf would be a scientific experiment to create a new breed of wolfhound…. Since Mongolian wolves were considered the finest in the world, if his experiment was a success, he might well produce a breed superior to G­erman and Soviet army dogs, and might even be responsible for developing a new form of livestock farming (104; 165–66). It is such reasonable thinking: the purpose of scientific knowledge is to serve humankind, to develop production, and to strengthen the nation. Once integrated with the goals of these ‘political,’ ‘economic,’ and other practical values, raising wolves attains the legitimate premise of being ‘politically correct.’ It is a presentable pretext for public consumption. This noble diction cannot persuade Chen Zhen himself. He understands clearly the nature of his own 46

Wei Mingde 魏 明 德 [Benoit Vermander] Quanqiuhua yu Zhongguo 全 球 化 与 中 国 [Globalization and China] (Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 2002), 19.

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motives: curiosity, enjoyment, and desire for domination. So he finds an even nobler reason to exculpate himself: He felt an increasing sense of urgency to raise a cub owing to his deepseated respect for the Mongol people’s totem and his obsessive interest in the profound mysteries surrounding the wolves, the way they came and went like shadows (104; 165). If he could not himself raise a real, live wolf that he could see and touch for himself, his knowledge of wolves would stop at empty folk tales, or at the level of common knowledge that people in general shared, or even at the ethnic prejudices of the Han people’s hatred of wolves (104). The passage is classic, presenting incisively the moral hypocrisy of humanity. It is regrettable that without the death of the wolf cub we would not have such reflective awareness. On the contrary, we ourselves would take away just that subconscious desire for domination, and unquestioningly participate in the process of raising the wolf filled with the pleasure of domination. Would it really be otherwise? What makes this book good reading, the reason it attracted such a wide readership, is because it contains the story of the wolf cub. We not only share the pleasure in the story of dominating (the other) and appreciating (life), but also experience the aesthetic sense introduced by the curiosity that is driven by defamiliarization. Thank you, little wolf! The wolf cub in the book is a symbol conveying many desires. Still, it is not just a symbol, but something that has once lived. Its life has resulted in a great fabula; its death fulfills a complete syuzhet. E.M. Forster distinguished story (fabula) and plot (syuzhet), believing that the emphasis in plot/syuzhet is on cause and effect: “the final sense (if the plot has been a fine one) will not be of clues or chains, but of something aesthetically compact, something which might have been shown by the novelist straight away, only if he had shown it straight away would never have become beautiful.”47 Forster emphasized the  function of plot: “We noted when discussing the plot, that it added to ­itself the quality of beauty; beauty a little surprised at her own arrival.”48 The story of the wolf cub testifies to this point, integrating the plot with the course of a life, and the aesthetic effect of defamiliarization reaches a peak. A core concept of defamiliarization is plot. As a scholar, Viktor Shklovsky introduced the technique of defamiliarization that writers consciously use to arouse their readers’ curiosity to the maximum extent: “The more 47 48

E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 96. Ibid., 152.

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the writer makes conscious use of this technique, the higher the a­rtistic quality.”49 Jiang Rong was not aware of such literary theories, but in the course of writing happened to respond to the creative principle of the theory of ­defamiliarization. By introducing people to the strange world of the g­ rassland and grassland wolves, he only needed to use language familiar to people to present things that were strange to them. Indeed, defamiliarization may occur naturally: “It is because this novel keeps to the truth and is based on personal experience that it is so fresh and original.”50 Jiang Rong turned his unique experience into documentary language, employing what is cognitively ‘true’ as an artistic instrument. In a certain sense, this is contrary to the theory of defamiliarization. He did not create a composition that on its surface is formally defamiliarized, but employed clear, simple language and traditional modes of expression so that the readers could most easily pass through the forest of language and enter the ‘content’ (allegory). Alienation techniques in Wolf Totem appear primarily in its contents, which directly serve the allegory. Shklovsky believed that literary language that has undergone defamiliarization loses the social functions of language and has only a “poetic function.”51 This is unlike Wolf Totem, the language of which is both poetic and social. It preserves the tradition of allegory as popular and easy to understand, and also borrows the overcoat of tradition to pass through the formal screen of modernism and make the story of the wolf cub into a ‘source’ (benshi 本 事 ) of penetrating power, maintaining the plot of the entire book. What is the allegory that this ‘source’ is meant to communicate? Many readers believe it is freedom. But this is not actually a story of freedom, but the loss of freedom. Its entire allegory is contained in a state of not being free. In the fate of the wolf cub to be raised and consequently to lose freedom, it is apparent that there are two parallel story lines. One is Chen Zhen raises the wolf, making it possible for us to enter into the course of the wolf cub’s life and observe some source material on the state of survival in primal nature. The process of raising the wolf cub condenses the efforts to humanize nature over the course of civilized history, giving us a new awareness of ourselves through various acts of subduing the wolf cub. The other story line is the taming of 49 50

51

Cited in Xifang meixue tongshi: ershi shihji meixue [General history of western aesthetics: twentieth-century] Vol. 1: 241. Lu Xun’s comment on the eighteenth-century novel Hong lou meng [Dream of the Red Chamber]. See A Brief History of Chinese Fiction (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1959), 292. Cited in Xifang meixue tongshi: ershi shihji meixue [General history of western esthetics: twentieth-century esthetics] Vol. 1: 241.

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the wolf and the death of the wolf. There is deep meaning, ­allegorically, to the state of lost freedom, the wolf cub’s compromises, resistance, and finally being raised to death. It is not only a metaphor for the lack of freedom of people themselves, but also, in compelling us to feel sympathy/empathy, an analysis of the acts of humanity’s taming and changing nature. Turning to the first storyline, the principal character is human, represented by Chen Zhen, and its theme is conquest and domination. The wolf cub appears in Chapter 10 of 35 chapters (not including the Epilogue), and its taming begins in Chapter 11, extending to the Epilogue. However, matters relevant to the wolf cub begin in Chapter 1 and continue through Chapter 10, depicting the process of how people’s desire for domination is gradually transformed into acts of conquest. By the end of the first chapter Chen Zhen has begun to have the idea of raising a wolf and by Chapter 9 has captured several, demonstrating perfectly and completely the original purpose of civilization, symbolically representing the entire course of the history of human conquest from ‘consciousness’ to ‘action.’ It corresponds to the understanding of basic human nature that philosophers have had historically: Humans are animals with consciousness of self and pursue self-actualization. Kant wrote: “That man can have the I among his representations elevates him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. He is thereby a person….”52 Hegel wrote, “Man, it may be said, is distinguished from the animal world, and in that way from our nature altogether, by knowing himself as ‘I.’”53 Moreover, the story of the wolf cub further demonstrates that human action is the result of consciousness, that is, ‘thought.’ The first thought is related to desire. That bad action is always accompanied by a good excuse is the result of ‘thought.’ It is evident that thought follows desire, and from its appearance is fated to cast of shadow of hypocrisy and a halo of reason over all forms of self-serving human desire in the name of public good. This is foreshadowed in the book when Chen Zhen, faced with a wolf more powerful than himself, comes up with the idea of raising wolves: Chen Zhen hoped that we would be able to have more real contact with wolves (10). He even entertained the idea of stealing a cub from its den and raising it one day (10; 13)—and when that thought sprang into his mind it even gave him a start (10).

52 53

Lectures on Anthropology, 7:127; cited in Kant Yearbook: Metaphysics ed. Dietmar H. Heidemann (Berlin/New York: de Guyter 2010): 120. The Logic of Hegel, trans. William Wallace, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 96.

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The power of the wolves arouses human desire, and the confrontation with something “good” spurs the lust to dominate. Once an impulse becomes a thought it will be acted upon sooner or later, because it stays in a person’s mind. The entire course of the first ten chapters, which conceals this memory, does not miss an opportunity to tell us without the least rancor: how a pernicious thought is transformed into a good idea; how private desire is made into public benefit; and how, when a once unreasonable, futile desire emerges, it is given understanding, made safe, and converted from a dream into a reality. Usually, in the unfamiliar environment of a ‘strange land,’ acting on any idea first requires the approval of the local people. If the idea and the act do not fit convention, then the person has to offer an appropriate reason to win understanding and support in order to cover a self-serving notion with the halo of ‘benefiting others.’ Chen Zhen actually knows clearly that raising the wolf is “a blasphemy in the spiritual sense and consorting with the enemy in the physical realm. He had broken one of the grassland’s prohibitions, violated a cultural taboo….” (219; 333). If this had happened in the grassland of a previous age, he would have been viewed as a heretic, his head and limbs drawn by horses and his corpse fed to the dogs: “Even now, what he was doing ran counter to the national policy on ethnic minorities, an act that unavoidably incensed the grassland inhabitants” (173; 270). So he adopts psychological warfare, beginning with someone who represents the grassland, and attempts to persuade the old man Bilgee: Papa, the only reason I want to raise this wolf is to understand what they’re really like and how they behave. I want to figure out why they are so formidable, so smart, and why the people revere them. You can’t imagine how much the Chinese people hate wolves. We call the most malicious people wolves … (174; 271). The idea of raising a wolf assumes the additional, special missions of gaining more intimate understanding of grassland people’s beliefs and ‘persuasively’ correcting the ethnic Han people’s unhealthy understanding of wolves. Like any successful invader, Chen Zhen perfects his reason for raising wolves on the basis of thoroughly understanding the mentality of the local people. This reason easily persuades the old man Bilgee so well that he does not merely forgive Chen Zhen’s rebellious act, but also expects that Chen Zhen, a representative of mainstream culture, can truly understand the grassland and even become a spokesperson for the grassland. Such expectations empower Chen Zhen, thereafter, to raise the wolf with calmness and confidence.

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The sudden shift in the plotline of raising the wolf is significant. First, on account of the appearance of the wolf cub Chen Zhen alters his relationship with the grassland, no longer an outsider but a part of the grassland. Because he has the wolf cub he thereafter becomes a master. Second, from the idea to the act, the process of taming the wolf, that is, ‘humanizing nature,’ presents in minute detail the contest of civilization and barbarity, which introduces the second storyline: the death of the young wolf. In Critical Terms for Literary Study, J. Hillis Miller named the three basic elements of postmodern narrative as plot, personification, and trope. In particular, trope is displayed through the conclusion of the narrative, demonstrating that “narrative inevitably tropes over itself. That is, narrative develops some pattern or repetition of trope, and this patterning invariably generates fundamentally incongruous meanings or ‘narrative disjunctions that can never be brought back to unity.’”54 The death of the young wolf has this effect, creating a disjunction with the sense of ‘freedom,’ producing a ‘trope.’ The trope appears in the relationship between the wolf cub and the population of grassland wolves. Once the wolf and Chen Zhen are bound together, it can no longer convey the spirit of primal freedom that the author has made every effort to make it display, and unavoidably deprives the ‘wolf totem’ of its spiritual status. (The section on philosophy in Chapter 4 offers a discussion of this question.) What is termed disjunction appears in the division of the identity of the main character: the one, Chen Zhen, is the representative of civilization; the other, the wolf cub, is the representative of nature, and also the embodiment of savagery. As individual living beings, they originally are spontaneous, hence potentially free, but for being ‘raised.’ A qualitative difference occurs in their relationship, with the one taking the initiative, a benefactor; the other passive, a captive slave. At this point in the story, what is noteworthy is that our sympathy is not with the humans, nor is the object of our concern the person initiating the development of the story, but the young wolf, which has passively made a forced entrance. With the wolf cub’s entry into Chen Zhen’s life, it dominates Chen Zhen’s psyche and the reader’s feelings. Plot development, as well, shifts from Chen Zhen (human) to the young wolf. The wolf cub not only takes its master’s place, but also that of the grassland wolves as the main character of the story, becoming a concrete ‘protagonist,’ entering the human world together with

54

Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 77; cited in James Phelan, Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996), 9.

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its master (Chen Zhen), and even overstepping humans’ subject position— smoothly completing the shift of subject position in the storyline. The appearance of the strange always evokes two diametrically opposed ­reactions. One is indifference and inattention; the other is curiosity. Curiosity is a major source for what causes trouble in human nature, and also one of the basic motivating forces for readers. From this perspective, Wolf Totem succeeded, through its defamiliarization effect, in arousing the curiosity of readers. First is the wolf cub, a non-human. Who is it? To compare mentalities, to compare dogs that people are familiar with and wolves, to look for an channel by which to understand something through something that is familiar, is a shortcut out of the ‘strange’: [Chen Zhen] had seen puppies that close before, and was immediately aware of the differences between wild and domesticated canines. A puppy was born with a neat, glossy coat that people found endearing. But not a wolf cub, a wild animal…. Its eyes were only partially open, but its tiny fangs were fully formed, sticking out ferociously between the lips (101; 161–62). The author goes to great lengths to show the wild nature of the wolf: “Having been dug out of the ground, it carried the smells of dirt and wolf. No puppy ever smelled like that. But in the eyes of Chen Zhen this was the noblest, the most treasured, the most beautiful little creature anywhere” (101; 163). Chen Zhen’s regard for the wolf cub seems transcendent. On first seeing it, he “saw for himself a fearsome combative strength and savage tenacity in a cub just separated from its mother’s den, and dimly sensed in the wolf its ineradicable nature” (110). The book has many passages describing the relationship of the wolf with food, and depicts the wolf’s appetite: “He liked his meat fresh and bloody but did not mind when it was rotten and crawling with maggots, which he swallowed along with the meat” (295; 430). His appetite reveals his amorality: “This cub, though every meal was guaranteed, ate like a starving animal, as if the sky would fall if he didn’t bolt down every bite. Wolves eat without a thought for anyone else….” (168; 263). The young wolf’s manner is quite unlike humans: “When the cub was angry, Chen dared not look him in the eye, fearing its eyes might shoot a lethally poisonous sting” (270; 400; orig. trans). When Chen Zhen taps the fangs that grow sharper by the day, “they sounded like stainless steel, their hardness and resilience both very strong,” unsettling Chen (271). It is in this daily contact that Chen Zhen arrives at a deep understanding of the wolves’ will to survive, and even more the feeling of reverence that their extraordinary ability to survive inspires.

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Chen and Yang admired the cub’s ability to endure cold, heat, hunger, thirst, foul odors, filth, and germs. One had to be impressed by a species that had survived millions of years of selection in an unimaginably inhospitable environment. Unfortunately, Darwin had never come to the Inner Mongolian grassland of the Olonbulag; otherwise, the grassland wolves would have thoroughly fascinated him (296; 431; orig, trans.). Chen Zhen’s experience raising the wolf came from the author’s own. Jiang Rong led readers into the life of wolves with his own experience as resource and as lure, sparing no effort to show off his unusual knowledge, aiming to offer a setting that is utterly strange. With the grassland and grassland creatures as the setting, the wolves as the main characters, and a storyline of the fate of the wolf cub, we are drawn in from the broad sweep to the detailed, from the abstract to the concrete, and through vast space and boundless time to find a concrete ‘presence’: the wolf cub. And from this presence there is an attempt to lead readers to another shore they might arrive at. That distant shore remains not only in the memory of a state of existence in a dim past of primal nature, but even more in our yearning for a spirit of primal freedom that is forever lost. To that end, the author uses a comprehensively realist method, aiming through true circumstances to reduce the distance between humans and wolves, and in the basic aspects of daily life that resemble human society, bring us closer to the wolves so as to change the traditional understanding of wolves. The story of the wolf cub is throughout basically realistic. Since there are so many things about being in contact with the wolf all day, I had to ­condense the best parts to show readers…. It was dramatic in and of itself, so there is no fabrication. If it had been fabricated it would be fake, empty.55 What is termed ‘true’ or ‘authentic’ was established on the basis of the ­complete unfamiliarity of modern humans with the world of wolves, through realism driving the development of the story, and filling the plot with defamiliarization effects. The higher the degree of realism, the better the artistic result. As allegory, it has a dual function. First is aesthetic effect: the more authentic the description and the more meticulous the account of people’s feelings, the more engaging it is, and the production of empathy is fulfilled in sharing painful feelings. Then there is the cognitive effect: the more apposite the realism, the 55

Jiang Rong, conversation with the author, April 2006.

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more faithful, the easier it is to establish belief, and the more the reader can apprehend the unusual allegory in the course of being moved. These two effects run throughout, and reach a climax when the wolf cub and the wolf pack bay at each other. “The call of the wild was calling the wild, and the wolf cub by nature b­ elonged to the wild” (243). In order to return to the wolf pack and to the wild, the young wolf instinctively makes the greatest effort to find ‘its own’ voice, howling to heaven, to ‘its own people’ within a confinement from which it ­cannot see them, nor has ever seen them. The howling of the wolves in the w ­ ilderness forms one of the finest passages in the book. In the effort of the young wolf to seek its own kind and rejoin them in nature, the author fully integrates the affinity of the wild (primal nature) with wildness (primal freedom), perfectly combining aesthetic empathy with reflective knowledge: “Wu … ou …” the short sound lengthened, with the sound of an infant nursing, like that of the vertical bamboo flute, of reed instruments, small bells, horn, its sound trailing off, then hanging in the air … [the wolf cub’s] head raised higher and higher until its snout was pointed to Tengger. It was ever more confident and excited, its howling surer, more accurate, and even its posture was completely like a mature wolf’s … pushing the air up from its abdomen, expelling it evenly in a long sustained sound, it continued to use every ounce of excitement (258). The young wolf then waits quietly for an answer: There was a long, deep silence, and then a deep, somber howl arose on the western slope. Short and with distinct intonation, it was a sound with authority, probably an alpha male…. After lowering his head to breathe in, [the wolf cub] stopped, not knowing how to respond. So he tried imitating the sound he’d just heard (259; 385). However, the sound of authority from the alpha male that the wolf cub anticipates does not occur. The book gives two explanations. One comes from the personified imagination of the wolf pack: [T]hey were probably the first wolf pack in thousands of years to encounter such a cub, one living with humans, dogs, and sheep, a careless youngster who was full of nonsense. Was he really a wolf? If so, then what was his relationship to a wolf’s natural enemies—humans and dogs? … Since people and dogs were good to him, what was he up to? (260; 385–86).

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The conclusion that the wolves reach is harsh: “For millions of years on the grassland wolves were inherently hardened fighters that preferred death to surrender. Never before had there been such scum, so how could it be?” (262). Instinctively and collectively they are aware of a hidden threat, “deciding that this was something that Mongolian wolves had never before encountered that had quietly come to the grassland” (262). They therefore make the cruel ­decision “to avoid any further efforts to find out or to heed the pained cries of the wolf cub,” and withdraw silently without looking back. Another explanation comes from how the wolf cub uses body language: On the quiet grassland, there was only the howl of a chained cub whose throat was swollen and hoarse…. At dawn the cub finally stopped; sad and despairing, he slumped to the ground and stared wide-eyed at the misty slope in an attempt to see the dark shadows. The morning mist slowly dissipated, revealing a familiar grassy slope devoid of shadows, of any sound, or any of his own kind that he so yearned for (262; 388; orig. trans.). It is just this outcome that evokes Chen Zhen’s regret and reflection: “Chen rubbed him gently, his guilt mounting as he thought of the cub’s missed opportunity to rejoin his family” (262; 388). Sympathy and reflection are initiated in this passage in Chapter 22: “Wolves demand freedom, but we keep him shackled the whole time. Doesn’t that bother you?” (223; 339). Questions follow. Whose fault is this? If blame is attached to Chen Zhen, he is merely repeating the actions of all humanity since the start of civilization, so what fault is there? If this is in itself a mistake, then where did this mistake begin, unless one is prepared to make the claim that the source of civilization is the origin of ‘evil’? Such reflections occur throughout the entire course of Chen Zhen’s raising the wolf. We experience together with him such changes of feeling, gradually recognizing that the greater the love, the greater the harm. Chen Zhen loves the wolf more than his own kind. But the young wolf dies as a consequence: “He snipped the wolf’s fang’s with wire cutters, and used chains to deprive his short life of freedom.” The ‘most loved’ dies cruelly in the swaddling clothes of ‘love,’ and thereafter he is “tormented by this blood debt,” a lifelong unease (371; 521). His uneasiness stirs up ours, unexpectedly adding bitterness to the aesthetic enjoyment, and reflection in the midst of sympathizing—so thinking is produced unexpectedly in the course of empathizing, while allegorical meaning is implied in the aesthetic realm by hinging feeling to thought. At this point the wolf cub’s unusual functions in the book each become apparent. The wolf cub sustains the entire story through the course of its own

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life, and provides a complete plot for the novel, giving it an actual structure. Next, it is precisely because it has the wolf cub (just as we ourselves might have a child) that this story featuring a wolf as its main character is able to move people and leads to a human story aesthetically. Finally, again on account of the wolf cub, the work, using primarily realist techniques, exhibits the two elements necessary for a novel: the ‘basic material’ (event/s that move people) and ‘plot’ (with intriguing timing), letting what may have been a true event be turned into a fictive story. What is unusual about this story is not some amazing thing that the wolf cub does. On the contrary, its entire action is revealed in passive circumstances. The most important and moving parts of its life are all because of the resistance it shows to being ‘unfree’: The moment he left the pen, the cub pulled Chen toward the grassy slope like an ox pulling a cart…. Chen and Yang began to worry about how they’d manage to “walk” the cub once he grew to adulthood. If they weren’t careful, he might drag them into the middle of a wolf pack one day (271; 400). The unyielding spirit of the wolf is shown most vividly when the humans are moving camp, dragging him along behind an oxcart: [H]e was dragged backward, pulled along like a dead dog, the hard grass stubble scraping off a layer of his fur…. The puppy cocked her head to look at the cub sympathetically; she whimpered and raised her paws as if telling him to walk like her or he’d be dragged to his death. But, too haughty to act like a dog, the cub ignored her and continued to resist … (323; 461). While the wolf cub pits its life in resistance to being pulled along, chained to the oxcart, Chen Zhen realizes: “resistance marked the fundamental distinction between wolves and dogs; between wolves and lions, tigers, bears, and elephants; and between wolves and most humans. No grassland wolf would surrender to humans. Refusing to follow or even to be led was a core belief for a Mongolian wolf….” (323–24; 461). Hence a moving scene follows: After four or five li, the stubborn cub had lost about half of the fur around its neck, which was now bleeding. The thick pads on his paws were rubbed raw, exposing the flesh underneath. Finally, the exhausted cub could no longer roll over…. When drops of blood began to fall from his throat, Chen realized that the collar had opened a wound there (324; 462).

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Chen Zhen is overwhelmed with emotion that the wolf cub would sooner choke to death than be pulled on a leash by the oxcart: “You can tame a bear, a tiger, a lion, or an elephant, but you cannot tame a Mongolian wolf” (321; 458). Chen Zhen “thought he understood grassland wolves better than any ethnic Han person, even better than most young people of the grassland itself. But this wolf cub barely half a year old would teach him a serious lesson with its own blood and its life.”56 Chen Zhen dotes on the wolf as if he were raising his own child. But the wolf has no sense of gratitude for this care, but repeatedly displays its rejection of, disdain for, and resistance to being “provided for.” Although Chen Zhen experiences literally the nature of the wolf to bite the hand that feeds it, he remains uncontrite and continues to care for the wolf, and in his pity for the wolf enters into an intimate relationship without any expectation of reciprocation. Because of this we see not only the ‘disdainful wolf’ that evokes such hatred in humans, but also a naive ‘scholar Dong Guo’ that arouses anxiety for his behavior. In this asymmetrical nurturing relationship, Chen Zhen realizes: The word raise was absent in the relationship between Chen and the cub. The wolf was his prisoner for the time being, not his ward. A unique spirit of obstinacy underlay his territorial nature … (169; 264). Chen Zhen has an unconcealed appreciation for this spirit. It seems his determination to raise the wolf is in order to appreciate and even to dominate this spirit. The story has no moral about ingratitude; rather than blame, it endeavors to find a new explanation for such ‘thanklessness’: holding fast to one’s own nature, refusing to submit in the face of inducements, and resisting instinctively all represent a noble spirit. These involve two related, though possibly contradictory, fields: morality and politics. The judgment of ‘thanklessness’ belongs to the category of morality, while the evaluation of ‘resistance’ belongs to the category of politics. At the same time that the author sets aside moral judgment he also abandons traditional morality. In showing the resistance of the wolf cub he unmistakably leads us to think of the field of politics, and in 56

This passage appears in online editions of Wolf Totem. See, for example, http://www .caihongbook.com/28/28423/10463418.html, where it is placed in what would be Chapter 33, p. 324 l. 8 of the print edition. The passage reads: “草 原 狼 永 远 是 个 谜 , 它 们 有 着人类想像不到和高不可攀的境界。陈阵自以为他已经比任何汉人,甚 至比许多草原年轻人都更深地了解草原狼,可是这条只有半岁的小狼, 却 以 自 己 的 鲜 血 和 生 命 , 又 给 他 了 上 一 次 深 刻 的 教 程 .” [Translator’s note.]

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the face of the wolf’s nobility, forcing us to reflect on the character of the human spirit itself. At this point the novel departs entirely from the course of the ‘romance,’ rising to the heights of allegory: the wolf becomes a representative of grassland wolves, fully displaying the attraction of the spirit in pursuit of freedom. The wolf’s death before submission becomes a symbol representing the relationship of ‘nature’ and ‘freedom,’ its refusal to be provided for in essence simultaneously rejects civilization categorically. And what is the essence of civilization? In a word, it is submission. As John Stuart Mill so aptly put it, “the first lesson of civilization [is] that of obedience.”57 The wolf cub’s disobedience a priori determines its fate in civilized society: without question it must die. The plot follows this omen unswervingly in the direction of the death of the wolf cub. The book describes the death of the wolf cub in deeply moving style. But the death of the young wolf is neither the point nor the conclusion of the novel, but a new starting point to make people reflect. There is more than one reason for the wolf cub’s death, so it can have multiple explanations. On account of captivity, it might die peacefully: this is the socalled ‘good death.’ On account of refusing to be tamed, it might be eliminated by grassland people; this is the so-called ‘seeking death.’ Then again, ­different from its own kind, it could possibly be bitten to death by a wolf pack…. But its death occurs because it was biting Chen Zhen and it is beaten to death by its master; it actually died resisting! If the grassland wolf is to be taken as the embodiment of the spirit of freedom, this ‘death’ comes rather too late. From the time the wolf cub enters captivity its death has already arrived—the death of freedom. The death of freedom has never been a solitary act of autonomy. In the oppositional relations of dominating and dominated, capturing and captured, the death of freedom requires another to be buried with it. In the novel, “Chen had changed many of his habits once he’d taken on the responsibility of raising a wolf cub….” (166; 260). His carefree days are ended, and as he dominates the wolf cub he is simultaneously dominated by the wolf cub. The more energy and emotion he invests, the greater the degree to which he is dominated. It is inevitable that when the wolf cub dies on account of love, Chen Zhen’s heart also dies on account of pain: “Grief is the price we pay for

57

John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1865), 30; cited in Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Violence,” New York Review of Books February 27, 1969, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/­ archives/1969/feb/27/a-special-supplement-reflections-on-violence/?pagination=false# fn25-299240655 (accessed December 28, 2013).

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love.”58 A heart in exchange for a life is evidence of the high value of the price of freedom: since it is spiritual it demands spiritual remuneration. The story of the wolf cub in the sense of freedom is a story of two dying together. But the nature of the deaths on behalf of freedom is completely different. The death of the wolf cub is modern, related to enslavement, and it can elevate freedom as spirit through acts of resistance. However, the price that Chen Zhen pays is invisible, postmodern, “there is no sorrow greater than despair.” There is no way out of reflecting on only having himself to blame: Chen Zhen felt downcast and empty. He didn’t know how he was going to face the old man. By nighttime the wolves would come looking for their dead, and they’d find only bloodstains. The grassland would be filled with sad howls that night (313; 448). At this point, it is the reader who must be examined: when we shed tears of sympathy for the wolf cub and overlook Chen Zhen’s psychic wounds, it is evident that our aesthetic taste is quite traditional, far out of step with the postmodern or the postcolonial. 2.4

Tragedy, the End of the Grassland: The Death of Nature

Is Wolf Totem a tragic novel? According to the six major elements of tragedy given in Aristotle’s theory of tragedy (plot, character, thought, diction, melody, and spectacle), if seen from the fate of the wolf cub, the novel is undoubtedly tragic.59 “The most powerful elements of emotional interest in Tragedy— Peripeteia or Reversal of the Situation, and Recognition scenes—are parts of the plot.”60 The plot of the story of the wolf cub is primarily one of ‘confinement’ and ‘freedom,’ which are important to the aspects of discovery or recognition of character and reversal of fate. First, the wild and aggressive character of the wolf cub is related to resistance: 58

Queen Elizabeth ii, Message in Remembrance of Victims of Attack on September 11, 2001, The Telegraph, September 21, 2001, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/ northamerica/usa/1341155/Grief-is-price-of-love-says-the-Queen.html (accessed Dece­m­ ber 28, 2013). 59 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. S.H. Butcher, http://www2.cnr.edu/home/bmcmanus/poetics .html (accessed February 25, 2014). 60 Ibid., see http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.1.1.html#390 (accessed February 25, 2014).

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[A] metal chain kept the young wolf imprisoned, turning him into a crazed animal, like a high temperature boiler with a blocked steam vent, ready to explode at any time … he struggled in vain against the chain, roaring his anger over being denied the fight he sought … (238; 356; orig. trans.). The plot takes a direction in accordance with the theory that character determines fate: The instant his paws touched the ground, he took off as fast as he could, away from the puppies and the men … he wasn’t wandering aimlessly, but had a clear objective in mind: he was running away from the yurts, the camp, the pens, and the aura of humans, dogs, smoke, and livestock (138; 218–19). The young wolf wants to go completely opposite the direction of humans and of civilization; arising out of instinct, it is identical to the direction of primal freedom. The implied meaning is profound. The resistance and readiness to break out of confinement are innate, together elevated as the spirit of freedom in the state of man-made confinement: …. Chen felt that his instincts were telling him to train for speed, for the skill to escape…. As he grew stronger and more mature by the day, he stared out at the grassland with a longing in his eyes; he could almost reach out and touch the freedom, and that made him hate the chain even more (348; 495). “To let an inherently free wolf on the free grassland see freedom, but to withhold freedom from it may be the world’s cruelest form of punishment” (348). By Aristotle’s criteria, “The plot, then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy; Character holds the second place.”61 Judging by this, the ­confined wolf cub simultaneously has the two tragic elements of plot and character. The tragic plot of sharing life and death and the tragic character of preferring death to submission are woven together throughout, to the point of evoking, as ­Aristotle asserted, “pity and terror.” Chen Zhen’s Mongolian mentor, Bilgee, tells him: It’s no life for a wolf; not even dogs have it this bad. It’s worse than the ancient Mongolian slaves. Mongolian wolves would rather die than live like 61

Ibid., Part vi.

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this…. You need to kill him now, while he still looks like a wolf and has a true wolf spirit. That way he’ll die as if in battle, like a wild wolf. Don’t let him die an ignoble death, like a sick dog! Let his soul complete its cycle (350; 498–99). Here ‘death,’ when the young wolf is killed and stripped of its fur, becomes the necessary means to spiritual sublimation, testifying to Aristotle’s “catharsis”: The cub didn’t make a sound as he slumped to the ground, a true Mongolian grassland wolf till the very end…. At this moment the cub had been stripped of his battle garb and relieved of the chain; he could finally roam the vast grassland freely, just like members of the pack and all other grassland wolves that had died during the extermination (352; 501–02). Simultaneously, this death also fulfills the spirit of freedom and the author’s longing for freedom, as Chen Zhen gazes at the pelt drying in the wind: Suddenly the long, tubular body and bushy tail rolled a few times like a flying dragon, soaring in the swirling snow and drifting clouds. The wind howled and the white hair flew. The cub, like a golden flying dragon, rode the clouds and mist, traveling on snow and wind, soaring happily toward Tengger, to the star Sirius, to the free universe in space, to the place where all the souls of Mongolian wolves that had died in battles over the millennia congregated…. At that instant, Chen Zhen believed he saw his very own wolf totem (353; 502–03). The moment is described with great poignancy. According to Nietzsche’s ­explanation, “In the earlier tragedy one could feel the metaphysical consolation which can alone explain pleasure in tragedy.”62 Obviously, however, what is acted out here is not ancient tragedy, for there is no hero; neither is it modern tragedy, because it follows methods of representation in traditional tragedy. It is precisely ‘post-’ tragedy: given the postmodern sense of the disintegration of the subject, the tragic atmosphere is intensified, filling the entire Olonbulag, the grassland, as in this description of the Bayan Gobi: … an area of several dozen square li, where the moist sandy ground o­ ccasionally gave way to a variety of desert plants that had grown 62

The Birth of Tragedy, 95.

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a­ stonishingly tall in the rainy season. Here were no longer any signs that this had once been grazing land; rather, it looked like an abandoned ­construction site (288; 420). What Chen Zhen and his peers in Chapter 19 saw as a paradise of new grazing land is rapidly destroyed: “It had taken only one summer for people to turn the lovely swan lake area into a graveyard for swans, wild geese, wild ducks, and wolves” (330; 470). Now his mentor, Bilgee, “looked up at Tengger with a tear-streaked face and wailed like an old wolf” (330; 470). He weeps like a helpless child for the vanished wolf packs and the dead swans, Chen Zhen’s tears “joining the old man’s tears as they fell onto the ancient Olonbulag.” By the Epilogue the herds of sheep are vanishing, and the mode of existence of the ­grassland people has undergone transformation, no longer following the logic of the grassland, but beginning to follow the precepts of modern civilization. The death of Bilgee is a symbol of this end: The old man insisted on being sent to a place where wolves might still roam, so two of his cousins took his body to the no-man’s-land north of the border highway. The younger cousin said, “The wolves up north howled all night, and didn’t stop till daybreak” (354; 505–06). In Chen Zhen’s eyes, “Bilgee had suffered more than most but he was also the luckiest, the last Mongol to have a sky burial and return to Tengger” (354; 506). The word “last” in conjunction with a sky burial carries significant impact: thereafter, the inherent bond between humanity (of the grassland) and heaven (Tengger) is severed, giving prominence to the implied—and metaphysical— meaning: this is a tragedy of the soul, the death of the spirit, leaving the soul with no place to rest. Where can the defiant wolves go now? Bang! The biggest wolf fell, shot in the head. The pack scattered, but another shot brought down a second wolf … (311; 446) In less than an hour, the alpha male and lead wolf had been killed in a sort of attack they’d never encountered before. The rest had escaped across the border and might never return (313; 448). Already, attacked from all sides by settlers, “The wolves have fallen into the abyss of the people’s battle. Everywhere people are singing, ‘Kill the wolves! Generation after generation, we won’t stop fighting until all the jackals are dead’” (320; 456). Joined by armed soldiers, the outcome is assured: “The vast heroic spectacle that the grassland wolves had acted out over the millennia

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on the Mongolian plains was now largely over. Now the remnants of the wolf armies had been pushed up to the border region” (269). By comparison, the death of the wolf cub, however much a misfortune, is not disproportionately worse, and is even a blessing: it does not have to witness the disappearance of the grassland, nor go with its kind far from home into fugitive existence. On what once were green plains that stirred imagination, “the wolves had receded into legend, and the grassland was a distant memory. A nomadic herding society was now extinct; even the last trace left by wolves on the Inner Mongolian grassland—the ancient cave of the wolf cub—would be buried in yellow sand” (408; 524). Here it is evident that the structure of the tragedy in the novel has multiple layers, corresponding to Aristotle’s prescription that, “A perfect tragedy should, as we have seen, be arranged not on the simple but on the complex plan. It should, moreover, imitate actions which excite pity and fear, this being the distinctive mark of tragic imitation.”63 What is different is that in Wolf Totem there is no single tragic tone; it is not pure tragedy. A portion of its plot serves to intensify this trend, while another portion works against this, so that the tragedy of one portion is premised on the comedic development of another. Seen in terms of the grassland alone (that is, primal nature), the story is tragic. But from another angle, from the standpoint of civilization, it does not seem like tragedy and could even be a comedy. The confirmation of tragedy ultimately derives from the judgment at the conclusion. The story of the young wolf typifies tragedy. However, even if the young wolf dies, the wolf packs flee, and the grassland recedes, human life goes on, persistently writing human history on its own terms. From the human standpoint, another strand is visible throughout: the history of civilization moving step by step toward ‘triumph,’ guided by human will and marked by the conquest of nature. This thread suggests an allegory of ‘humanity destined to conquer nature,’ and it is obvious from its tone that it is a comedy. The story tells us at the very end (the Epilogue) that it concludes well for everyone who is human. The educated youth return to Beijing, “back in a place inhabited mostly by Chinese” (355; 506). Chen Zhen graduates from the Academy of Social Sciences and conducts research on systems reform at a university. After Yang Ke takes a degree in law he acquires a master’s degree and credentials as a lawyer. “By this time he was the founder of a highly regarded Beijing law firm” (355; 507). The people of the grassland have adopted wind-powered generators: “Hey, that’s bright. Now you herders no longer have to use sheep-oil lamps” (362; 519). At festival celebrations “each family 63

Theory of Tragedy, Part xiii, http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.2.2.html (accessed February 27, 2014).

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hosts drinking and singing each day,” with people coming from all over, “nearly everyone in Gasmai’s tribe driving jeeps or riding motorcycles”: “People would probably give up raising Mongolian horses if not for the difficulty of herding sheep on motorcycles during snowy winters” (362; 519–20). Old man Bilgee dies before he can see the spectacle of prosperity. Today his descendants live in “spacious brick and tile houses with television antennas and wind-powered generators.” The Mongolian-style living rooms are “over a hundred square feet, furnished with sofas and tea tables, a tv and vcr, a liquor cabinet, and drinking paraphernalia” (360; 515). The grassland has also changed with the times: “The twenty-li-wide military zone and no-man’s-land had … become a lively pasture,” with brick and tile houses, each surrounded by individually owned pastureland. The entire border area is filled with dozens of herds of cattle and flocks of sheep, the nomads now settled (359; 514). Such good days. The grassland that has not changed color for millennia now finally has taken on the tone of the yellow loess soil, and the primitive state that was close to savagery has crossed the threshold of civilization. Yet, we find it joyless. And why? As much as such human circumstances may dilute the tragedy that fills the novel, the story of the grassland and the young wolf still lingers everywhere, inexorably working against our enjoyment. Thus, calling the novel a tragedy or a comedy seems to fall short. Can we, perhaps, follow Susan Langer by calling it a tragicomedy? “Tragedy can rest squarely on a comic substructure, and yet be pure tragedy.”64 Such difficult propositions are exactly the perplexities that Wolf Totem creates for us. Perhaps it is in just the plot complexities of tragicomedy that we can find an answer to their mutual influence and interdependence, and simultaneously a solution. We can see in the novel that there is comedy through the might of human power and human triumph, displayed as invincible in transforming the grassland and defeating the grassland wolves. Susan Langer wrote, “Comic destiny is Fortune—what the world will bring, and the man will take or miss, encounter or escape; tragic destiny is what the man brings, and the world will demand of him. That is his Fate.”65 Wolf Totem integrates “Fortune” and “Fate,” playing out the comedy of civilization under the direction of human will, but demanding of nature the Fate of tragedy. In the tragic plot of the death of nature, humans embody ‘evil.’ What is so hypocritical is carrying out evil all the while contently under the guidance of doing ‘good,’ immersing laughter in tears, condensed into the distinctive aesthetic style of tragicomedy. ­Tragicomedy 64 65

Feeling and Form, 362–63. Ibid., 352.

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places ­complex plots and emotions within a single framework. The enormous tensions that lurk beneath the encounter between nature and civilization throughout the difficult contest show the reader laughter at one point and tears at another, giving the reader ample space to move back and forth between different standpoints. Susan Langer attempted to use life as a blueprint to explain the origins of tragicomedy: “Society is continuous though its members, even the strongest and fairest, live out their lives and die; and even while each individual fulfills the tragic pattern it participates also in the comic continuity.”66 Her theory of tragicomedy is based on natural belief, on two related inferences: the first is that the rhythm of tragedy is the rhythm of life and death, so art is simply imitation of rules of nature. The second is, given the continuity in life of all natural things, although an individual’s life comes to an end, the human race continues to live; even if the human race goes extinct, nature will continue its own course of existence. Such a proposition may hold for traditional artistic experience. Yet, in postmodern narrative, aesthetic standpoints are inverted, turning from the dominant to the vulnerable, from humans to nature or living things, and the terms and conclusions are different. In the novel, for example, nature is not only the background for the story but also an important participant. It is no longer the foundation of a reliable belief, but a tragic subject at the mercy of humans. Can this tragedy go on? Wolf Totem raises this question through the example of the swan lake and the death of the swans: the time for Susan Langer’s theory of tragicomedy has almost run out. In the grazing fields of the border region far from settled areas, Chen Zhen discovers the swan lake. An important setting in the novel, the essence of grassland beauty—the lake—and the most beautiful of living things—the swans— are concentrated here, and in the tragedy of the ‘death of nature’ the swan lake is a major scene. The swan lake is an asset exclusive to the grassland, fully displaying the beauty of primal nature, harmonious and tranquil. Chen Zhen laments: “This perhaps was the last primitive swan lake in China not yet disturbed by humans, and the last site of primitive beauty in the northern border grassland regions of China” (153). Just because it has been discovered by ­humans, its fate to be transgressed and even despoiled by humans is inevitable. Beauty is fragile, and once discovered by humans, a tragedy is certain to be enacted. Chen Zhen offers a timely expression of his fear that “once people and horses move in, its primitive beauty will disappear, and after that, Chinese will never have another opportunity to enjoy the beauty of such a naturally primitive spot” (153). 66

Ibid., 363.

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There is significance of another kind to the deaths of the swans in Wolf T ­ otem. Through its connection to the allegorical significance of the classic ballet “Swan Lake,” it is directly related to a metaphysical sense of beauty. In other words, it has passed beyond common enjoyment, the more basic level of aesthetic taste, and through a sense of beauty arrived at insight. Schopenhauer believed “the true meaning of tragedy is the more profound insight,”67 that the result of the aesthetic that it produces does not essentially belong to a feeling of beauty, but belongs to the sublime, even the sublime at its highest level, comparable to the sublime in the study of classical mechanics.68 In traditional tragedy a sense of the sublime is attained invariably through the death of the hero. Following Nietzsche’s assertion that god is dead there was no longer a ‘fate’ to trust to or a platform on which to make ‘character’ stand for an entire history, and together with these the hero also vanished. In the novel, for ex­ ample, the wolf cub and the swans under human control have historically lost the natural space to display fate or character. Vicious humans, like the sorcerer Rothbart in Swan Lake, when facing nature seem always to be victors. All because of human discovery, “a noble, pure, free soaring creature, a swan that had brought humans a vision of boundless beauty, had ended up like a common chicken, killed by man” (187; 291; orig. trans.). The swan’s death evokes ‘sadness’ and ‘pain.’ Pain is physiological. Someone in the pain of constant agony can find a way to free themselves. An ‘appropriate’ reason, such as Chen Zhen is always presenting, is enough to absolve oneself of all wrongdoing. ‘Sadness’ is of the spirit, and it is hard to overcome its entanglements. Despair and exaltation may turn on momentary mistakes. Nietzsche believed that death is an evil, and the lament it produces is heard “for the continual passing of mankind, like leaves in the wind, for the decline of the age of heroes.”69 In the face of death, people yearn all the more for eternal life: “So impetuously does the ‘will’ in its Apollonian form desire this existence, so at one does the Homeric man feel with it, that even lament becomes its hymn of praise.”70 Yang Ke’s admiration of the swans culminates in his vision to sculpt a tall regal bird’s nest on the plaza in front of the national ­theater, as a totem pole for people who deeply admire swans and the swan lake. The top of the totem pole would be a pair of sacred, pure swan mates, 67 68 69 70

Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation Vol. 1; cited in Walter Arnold Kaufmann, Tragedy and Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 57. Ibid., Vol. 2; cited in Kaufmann, 292. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 28. Ibid., 29.

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their wings spread in dance. They would become the totem for humans’ vision of love and beauty, living eternally (231). The author writes at length of the beauty of the swan and her death. With her, beauty dies, the grassland recedes, and nature dies. Rather, it is not nature that dies, but the primal state of nature on which the natural world (including humans) once relied for survival. While humans can change the appearance of the world, they cannot change the rhythms of nature. Even if the day comes when the grassland disappears and the human race becomes extinct, nature will not die out. How few among modern intelligent people understand this. On the grassland Olonbulag, “only the herdsmen and the wolves understand the rules set by Tengger” (336; 478). They understand that nature exacts a price sooner or later, cruel but just, and unforgiving. So, “no grassland Mongol would break the rules of our ancestors” (335; 477). Otherwise, as Bilgee predicts: What has the world come to … when a mouse is bold enough to bite a horse? If they keep killing wolves, the mice will start eating people … See, when there are fewer wolves on the grassland, the mice turn from thieves to bandits, no longer having to sneak around … (339; 484). With fewer wolves, the marmots are easily trapped. The wolves fatten themselves up with marmots in the fall; without the fat, they wouldn’t survive the winter (335; 478). Chen Zhen becomes convinced of the lesson of personal witness and experience: in the face of primal nature on the verge of death, the globe has no victors. This is one of the basic allegories of Wolf Totem. In this sense, the novel is undoubtedly a tragedy, evoking boundless sorrow, not only for the death of the wolf cub and the disappearance of the grassland, and not only because human survival faces a threat, but also over the meaning of human existence itself. When all the elements related to primal nature disappear together with it, is there value for humans to live? If humans are to go on living, how should they deal with the retribution of nature? As a tragedy, during the closing curtain, Wolf Totem admonishes: if ­humanity has cut off its exit route, it will ultimately be unable to escape destruction. Its postmodern character is obvious. It is evident from this that the ­postmodern tragedy contains two or more tragic threads: it fragments the tragic plot, ­scattering the fragments throughout the text among comic elements. Following the early modern era, tragedy began to emerge from the limits of its original dramatic form to become a feature widespread throughout literature, ‘changing elements of tragedy into objects of literature.’ As Balzac said

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of The Human Comedy, this ‘comedy’ contained more tragic significance than stories of real life tragedies. Tragedy also faced the same fate as fable in the modern period, as absurdist elements strengthened intellectual appeal but diminished tragic mood. The ‘tragic sadness’ in the classical sense was rarely found even in the greatest modern tragedies, such as Eugene O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon. However, in postmodern fiction, and especially the post-allegory treated here, the long-lost sadness has been restored to text as a fundamental feature that goes beyond the modern and resumes the traditional. Here, the conclusion is typically no longer a simple death nor is it intended to offer a conclusion, but more often advances questions. Hence it appears to revive the origins of tragedy: “Herein truly lies the reason why all great tragedies present a problem, but never give a solution. We are faced in them with terror, awe, nobility, suffering idealized; the problem is given to us, but the solution remains.”71 In Wolf Totem the author gives a very affecting interpretation of classical attributes of tragedy through the dying swans: But from among the inky green reeds, one swan after another glided onto the lake … Their graceful, curved necks looked like bright question marks, questioning heaven, questioning earth, questioning the water, questioning people, questioning all living creatures on earth. [The question marks] moved silently, then waited for answers. But none were forthcoming. The reflecting ripples on the surface shimmered slightly, transformed into their own question marks, until a breeze splintered them amid the light of tiny wavelets (183; 285–86). Faced with postmodern questions, no one can answer. In that case, what can we do? Literature can rarely offer clear, unmistakable answers in theoretical terms, but it can ask about causes. Such were the efforts of the playwright ­Christopher Marlowe, a founder of English tragedy, in such works as Tamburlaine, ­Doctor Faustus, and Edward ii. The protagonists of his tragedies are all heroic ­figures who are overly ambitious in their desire for knowledge or to dominate b­ oundless territory. Marlowe saw overweening ambition as a weakness of humanity, and in his tragedies ambition both makes the hero and leads to his destruction.72 In the nineteenth century Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1818) and George Gordon Byron’s Cain (1821) follow Marlowe’s tragic ­characters ­closely.73 71 Allardyce Nicoll, The Theory of Drama (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1931), 130. 72 See Allardyce Nicoll, The Theory of Tragedy, 102. 73 Ibid.

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Burning ambition is the common feature of heroic tragedy, and is also its cause. It was attributed to fate in ancient Greek drama, replaced by ‘character’ in Shakespeare. In the modern era ‘character’ has become blurred, and fate returned to center stage, but it is no longer concerned with one person or one thing, but with the shared fate of humankind. Therefore, in the tragedy of the fate of humankind as the species endowed with consciousness and choice, what has made him turn away from the joy of comedy to the tragic? One obvious cause in Wolf Totem comes from the grandiose aspiration that ‘humans are destined to conquer nature,’ that is, the ambition to dominate nature. Apart from this, there is greed. Chen Zhen observes it: At that moment he sensed how rapacious and vain humans can be. There would have been nothing wrong with picking the biggest and strongest of the seven cubs. So why had they brought the entire litter home?…. Bringing back the whole litter represented conquest, courage, reward, and glory; it won him the respect of others. Compared to that, those seven lives were like grains of sand (105; 167–68). Under the force of ambition, viciousness and victory, glory, courage, and other honored virtues are woven together to collectively form the causes of tragedy. There is no single cause of death in postmodern tragedy, neither does cause lie with an individual nor is it individualized. If we view the grassland wolf as the unyielding hero and follow the developmental thread of traditional tragedy to trace the cause for the ‘death of the hero,’ then we will find that the initiator of evil and the classic devil are far different. There is little relevance to an individual’s character or fate. Whether in terms of aim or motive, cause is far removed from individual desires and aversions, it is beyond individual profit, and uninvolved with individual frailties or benevolence—indeed, its origin is in the meritorious, not the despicable: for the benefit of all to live a better life. The receding of the grassland, for example, is because: There are too many of you Chinese, and not enough meat to feed you, so the country depends on the lamb and beef from Inner Mongolia. But to produce one ton of beef and lamb requires seventy or eighty tons of grass. When you people come demanding our meat, what you’re really asking us for is our grass, and if you keep it up, you’ll kill off the grassland (149; 233). The demands on the grassland that have caused it to recede are traced back to the early 1950s:

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The country had only been recently liberated, and there weren’t many motor vehicles. The army needed horses; so did farmers and the people who transport material, including loggers in the northeast. The whole country, it seemed, needed horses. Where were all these fine horses to come from? Inner Mongolia, of course. We were ordered to set aside the best grassland for horses (288; 419). The key phrase here is “the whole country,” and its subject position is unquestionable. In the name of “the whole country” all acts to destroy, subdue, and exploit nature are dressed up as ‘patriotism’ and ‘concern for the greater good.’ On the road to modernization the greed, aggression, and wantonness of human nature are given the red seal of approval. Once an individual’s ambition is attached to ‘national wealth and power’ there is no justifiable limit to it. It acts at will under the protection of the apparatus of the nation state, just as the story shows: powerful civilization sweeps all before it with the aid of authority and weaponry. Under these circumstances who is there who dares to speak up for the grassland of a ‘previous age.’ In the novel, the old man Bilgee is one such character who devotes himself to denying the ‘excellent situation,’ and in the present it appears that all the dissent is put in the mouth of Bilgee: He does not believe in the might of the mainstream ethnicity: “A fear of wolves is in your Chinese bones. That’s the only explanation for why you people have never won a fight out here” (3; 1). He is scornful of people taking credit for hunting wolves: “Youngsters and horse herders seem to be having a contest to see who can kill the most wolves. They don’t understand what they’re doing. All you hear on the radio is how heroic the wolf killers are. Having people from farming districts come here to manage grazing land is sheer meddling. Things are only going to get worse for us from here on out” (96; 154; orig. trans.). Only he is willing to tell the army representative directing the wolf hunts: “This cannot happen again. If there are any more hunts like this, the wolves will disappear, and the gazelles, the ground squirrels, the rabbits, and the marmots will rise up. That will be the end of the grassland, and will infuriate Tengger. We and our livestock will pay dearly” (125; 199). Faced with changes happening to the grassland, he rants: ‘People are just too greedy,’ Bilgee said, ‘and too many are ignorant. You can give these fools a hundred reasons to do the right thing, but you’re

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just wasting your time. Tengger understands that the only way to deal with those greedy fools is with wolves. Let the wolves control the livestock population, and the grassland will survive’ (149; 234). Only he resents the civilization that everyone else longs for: “In the past, even a blind old man could see the grassland’s beauty. It’s no longer beautiful. I wish I were blind so that I wouldn’t have to see how it’s being destroyed” (341; 487). Faced with the technology that modernization brings, only he can say: “In the old days … farmers’ hoes and fires were our greatest fear. Now it’s tractors” (288; 420). If we recall the reality of life for mainstream society at that time, all the sentences above were reactionary utterances. Fortunately, the setting is among a ‘backwards’ population (such as the people of the grassland) in a ‘late blooming’ region, such as the border, and the words were published only after the old man dies and thirty years after the despicable acts occurred. Crown the ‘post-.’ Past malfeasance and ‘political incorrectness’ have all been forgiven in the ‘post-’ era, together fulfilling ‘post-’ criticism—the post-utopian criticism that Wolf Totem undertakes in the work itself: the story constantly follows the skepticism and resentment that Bilgee relentlessly utters from beginning to end. It could be said that the gaze of post-utopian criticism follows the story of the revolution that occurred on the grassland without pause. By the end, soldiers have opened up the grassland, and the entire army of grassland wolves has been destroyed after being mowed down in a frenzy of rifle fire. “In just a little over a month, so many dreadful new people, new weapons, new things, new methods flooded onto the grassland, the old man was completely dazed” (341). When he has lost the energy to go on speaking out, his end has arrived: He swayed in the saddle as his horse plodded ahead. He closed his eyes. Old, guttural sounds emerged from his throat, infused with the aroma of green grass and fading daisies. To Chen, the lyrics sounded like simple nursery rhymes: Larks are singing, spring is here; marmots are chirping, orchids bloom; Gray cranes are calling, the rain is here; wolf cubs are baying, the moon is rising. He sang the same thing over and over, as the melody turned ever lower and the lyrics became indistinguishable, like a stream flowing from some faraway place, crisscrossing the vast grassland before disappearing in the undulating grass (341–42; 487–88).

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This is an elegy for the grassland, as well as an elegy for Bilgee, the last grassland person. When he dies he receives a sky burial. His death is an important symbol: as a stubborn conservative who takes the realm of the grassland as the full scope of life, when he dies all the survival modes, customs, and culture within the state of primal nature go with him. Thereafter there are no more guardians capable of listening to her, interpreting her, or speaking for her, and the conclusion to a great tragedy is inexorable. The main character in traditional tragedy is human, and there is a clear separation of good and bad. In the contest of good with evil, the power of the bad and the ineffectualness of the good form obvious contrasts, and arouse sympathy in people but also resentment that their expectations are left unfulfilled. In postmodern tragedy the displacement of the identity of the main character is a premise of the narrative. When the shift of subject position in the aesthetic process is complete, the scales of sympathy are tipped toward the living creatures in nature and away from humans, offering pity and sadness unreservedly to the grassland: In the sky above the lake, the sad plaints of swans carried on throughout the night…. Yang heard faint, distant, intermittent sounds of mourning— desolate, weathered, and stifling…. A swan’s lamentation over the death of its mate and the heartbreaking cries of the old wolf came together in pulsating waves of mourning, a “grassland symphony pathétique” sadder than Tchaikovsky’s (187; 292; orig. trans.). Looking further into who dies and how they die in this tragic story, there is special significance. If we take the death of the young wolf, the disappearance of the grassland, and the flight of the grassland wolves all as tragic, then who is the culprit? Chen Zhen states it is “a man-made disaster” (340; 485). “Evilness is a specifically human phenomenon … not only human, but tragic.”74 The evil that humans do is more often than not under the impetus of ‘good intentions.’ For example, killing wolves is because wolves eat people, and on the grassland they compete with humans for limited resources for survival. In the case of the wolf cub, Chen Zhen treats it very well, and it has a comfortable life in a c­ aring, even indulgent, environment. In the case of the changes to the grassland, turning from nomadic to settled life, the people of the grassland leave the toil of constant roaming far behind and enter the better life of civilization, surely

74

Eric Fromm, The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 148.

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a reward for good deeds. In reflecting on this, the spearhead of reflection is not only aimed at the results of civilization, but also fundamentally shakes the moral foundation of civilization: goodness. If goodness is cast into doubt and inverted, then the entire moral foundation of civilization merits doubt. Such is one of the allegorical meanings of Wolf Totem, and on this account it can be used as an exemplary reader for multi-directional deconstruction. The composite pattern of Wolf Totem shows the enormous load-bearing capacity of novel-length allegorical fiction. Benjamin wrote a comparison of novellas and full-length novels: “For if the novel, like a maelstrom, draws the reader irresistibly into its interior, the novella strives toward distance….”75 As he saw it, in the novella “the mystery is the catastrophe, which, as the animating principle of the story, is conducted into its center, while in the novel the significance of the catastrophe, the concluding event, remains phenomenal.”76 For characters in novels, “seclusion prevails, which completes the guaranteed freedom of their actions,” while “characters in the novella come forth closely surrounded on all sides by their human environment, their relatives.”77 In the course of love relationships, “while love guides the reconciled, only beauty, as a semblance of reconciliation, remains behind with the others.78…. This relation of semblance-like reconciliation to true reconciliation again evokes the opposition between novel and novella.”79 The most appealing attraction of the fulllength novel is the ample space that it has reserved for the survival of ‘freedom’ and ‘beauty.’ When traditional tragedy died out together with the ‘death of the hero,’ the novel continued the tradition of tragedy through allegory, healing in the comfort of beauty, while continuing to pursue the question of cause in the face of tragic conclusions. In the case of Wolf Totem, by the end of the story, the sorrow for the death of the young wolf, the old man, and the swan, the desertification of the grassland, and the disappearance of the wolf packs all leave us with a nameless unease and an unsettled loneliness that accompanies deep reflection: Whom do you detest? The settlers from outside? But we ourselves are ‘outsiders’ who never make an entrance. With whom do you sympathize? The grassland? The wolves? The wolf cub? At the same time that it overpowers them and creates prosperity, humanity itself sees a dead end. 75 “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 1: 330. 76 Ibid., 331. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid., 343. 79 Ibid., 342.

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The statement of ‘the death of nature’ presages the fate of humanity itself and has become a major proposition that constantly appears in postmodern narrative. Yet, while this postmodern allegory appears in a pre-modern setting, the causes of the tragedy do not necessarily arise out of the modern; for these, still other calamities remain to be explored. In the case of Wolf Totem, the setting of the story is far from modern, while the development of the tragedy goes beyond a single era: it takes only one year under the red flag to obliterate the grassland. That is more the result of revolution than modern civilization—it is exactly that grand revolution that added new content to traditional tragedy: apart from ‘fate,’ ‘character,’ and so forth, it brought on (cultural) revolution and (agrarian) civilization as causes of tragedy, and dyed death and dissolution the color of blood. Allegory is steeped in the color of blood. It has been in this blood-soaked tragic atmosphere that what is termed post-utopian criticism has been somberly undertaken…. Beyond the textual ‘signified,’ beyond national borders and eras with the aid of postmodern wings, its signifier points to ‘revolution’ and ‘civilization.’ Fundamentally, what is termed modern civilization is simply the enormous utopia that humanity created; what is termed ‘revolution’ was the most convenient means to reach this goal. What is regrettable is that it has not been until the postmodern era that the tragic nature of this became evident and allowed us to see the ‘limitations’ of civilization and the ‘price’ of revolution. Seen this way, postmodernism appears like a branch of post-utopian criticism; the latter could also be seen as a powerful force for postmodern criticism, confronting the tragedy of the fate of humanity in its entirety. Disenchantment and revelation make us aware: situated in the quandary of the death of primal nature and even the impending death of humanity, there is no one who can maintain moral integrity in the face of nature that has ‘lost its virginity,’ and no one who can achieve absolution for themselves under the banner of achieving ‘ideals’—the tragic in postmodern tragedy is concentrated in the protracted entanglement in a sense of crisis and self-reflection. As Schopenhauer wrote, the quality of the sublime in tragedy is “the dawning of the knowledge that the world and life can afford us no true satisfaction, and are therefore not worth our attachment to them. In this the tragic spirit consists; accordingly it leads to resignation.”80 But resign and go where? Wolf Totem attempts to offer some inspiration through the reflections of Chen Zhen on his mentor:

80

Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Volume ii, translated by E.F.J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1966), 433–34.

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It’s hard on Bilgee, trying to lead the people, too much pressure. He has to endure the sadness of wolves slaughtering the livestock, while feeling the pangs of having to kill wolves. But for the sake of the grassland and the people, he has to do whatever’s necessary to preserve the balance of interdependent relationships (256; 381). “Balance” was a traditional topic, so commonplace as to be a platitude. Now it has become important content in postmodern narrative. Since early modern times ‘civilized people’ have plundered the wealth of underdeveloped ‘barbarians’ and so entered modernity and even postmodernity. Now only by plundering nature can the former ‘barbarians’ stride forward onto the highway to modernization. It is evident that the road to salvation in the real world is obstructed. ‘Development’ and ‘sustainable development’ are not only two stages in modern history, but also a contest of two forms of political power. Hence, the emergence of tragedy is not simply artistic and aesthetic, but even more it is real and bloody. Nietzsche wrote, “art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but rather a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, set alongside for the purpose of overcoming it.”81 Once, sensitive intellectuals with foresight spontaneously gathered under the banner of art, seeking an ideal world in the realm of poetry. Today, in the regions where art and thought intertwine they have restored allegory, opening a road back to a spiritual home. Benjamin discovered this trend, writing, “Allegory is the most meaningful mode of thought in our age.”82 Fredric Jameson, unearthing the cognitive function of allegory from the standpoint of modern discourse, believes, “Allegory happens when you know you cannot represent something but you also cannot not do it.”83 I identify with their views, putting them into practice to continue their efforts in the form of criticism. As for the ‘mode of thought’ of allegory, I think of allegorical criticism as also a ‘metaphysical supplement,’ to use Nietzsche’s phrase, offering a philosophical home for thinkers who cannot return to what is native. Like the tragic quality of Jameson’s knowing something cannot be done, yet also cannot not be done, I see a tragic quality in post-allegorical criticism 81 82

83

The Birth of Tragedy, 127. Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Theodor Adorno and G. Scholem (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972) Vol. 1: 301; cited in Feng Xianguang, Xifang makesizhuyi meixue yanjiu (Chongqing: Chongqing chuban she, 1997), 292. Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 196.

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as well, attempting to use thought to build a utopian-style spiritual garden. In regard to “resignation” from the world and life, as Schopenhauer wrote, I think of ‘post-utopian criticism’ as a final line. If there is no such criticism, if any effort toward benevolence ends up in tragedy, then will there be any place left for ‘truth’ or ‘beauty’?

chapter 3

How Did Wolf Totem Captivate Readers? Aesthetics: A Model Text of Postmodernist Empathy

The Beautiful belongs to the imagery of liberation. herbert marcuse 1

∵ As I see it, aesthetics is a form of decoding “imagery” to seek liberation. Art or the artistic life tends toward seeking release through aesthetic acts. Aesthetics, however, is not so unrestrained. It creates its own ­shackles and institutes rules for itself. In a landscape that appears free it looks for evidence of what determines beauty, attempting to expand the ­cognitive space of human psychic activity in the field of beauty. In this sense I agree with Gadamer’s argument that “aesthetics must be swallowed up in hermeneutics,”2 and ­experiment with expanding the borders of the aesthetic in critical practice. “Empathy” [enfühlung] in aesthetic theory is seen as a major premise of aesthetic acts. According to the classic statement of Theodor Lipps: “Once I ­project my own strength and energy onto something in nature, I also project onto nature the feelings that this strength and energy have stirred. That is to say, my feelings of pride, courage, tenacity, my levity, humor, self-confidence, contentment, and so forth are also shifted into nature. Only when feelings towards nature are shifted into it do they become genuine aesthetic empathy.”3 This extroverted “projection” originated from humans’ distinctive sense of sympathy. Some researchers believe that the ‘concept of sympathy’ established the basis for the theory of empathy. In aesthetic contemplation of objects, ­people

1 The Aesthetic Dimension (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 65. 2 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gadamer in Conversation: Reflections and Commentary, ed. Richard E. Palmer (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 69. 3 Theodor Lipps, Ästhetik (Berlin, 1907), 359; cited in Teng Shouyao 滕 守 尧 , Shenmei xinli miaoshu 审 美 心 理 描 述 [An account of aesthetic psychology] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1985), 67.

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transpose their own feelings to the object, that is, shift ‘self’ to ‘non-self,’ and consequently achieve an identity between object and self.4 Given that Wolf Totem has had the capacity to attract legions of readers and make them shed tears for wolves, that is also moving people to sympathy in the most extreme display of the power of aesthetic empathy. “Rather, the cause of esthetic enjoyment is myself, or the ego…. I do not feel vigorously active and so forth, in view of the object or opposite it, but I feel thus in it.”5 If we go by such theories, Wolf Totem is an exception. No matter how much we may sympathize with the wolf cub, or even wolves as a whole, in this novel wolves and humans are placed in opposition throughout. “Taste is the faculty of judging of an object or a method of representing it by an entirely disinterested satisfaction or dissatisfaction. The object of such satisfaction is called beautiful.”6 Given that there is a life or death relationship between humans and wolves throughout the novel, how could it produce sympathy between such antagonists and, consequently, aesthetic empathy? The answer is quite simple. In the postmodern context, once the displacement of the identity of the protagonist through the shift of subject position makes human society as a whole recede, the reader is able to abandon all humanistic ‘media’ (such as society, history, self-consciousness, etc.), and, while reading, make the contact between humans and nature at zero distance, ­feeling in their individual life the sense of touching living things in a state of existence in primal nature: stiff, rough, sanguine, full of vitality. As easy as it may sound, it is quite difficult to put into practice, and examples the like of Wolf Totem are virtually nonexistent in literature today. For this reason, the primary questions that criticism faces are what artistic experiments does Wolf Totem represent in the field of aesthetics; and in what sense can it be seen as a model text useful for reference. This chapter is devoted to an extensive analysis of Wolf Totem in the c­ ategory of aesthetics, following the basic features of postmodern empathetic effects that are revealed in the novel. First is a thorough analysis in aesthetic terms of the subject position of humans and their actions, through the many aspects of structure, setting, and plot, shifting the questions of birth, aging, sickness, and death among humans to concern for the state of nature, and the unlimited 4 Wu Lifu 伍 蠡 甫 , ed. Xiandai xifang wenlun xuan 现 代 西 方 文 论 选 [Selections from modern Western literary theory] (Shanghai: Shanghai yiwen chubanshe, 1983), 1. 5 Theodor Lipps, “Empathy, Inner Imitation, and Sense-Feelings,” in A Modern Book of Esthetics: An Anthology, ed. Melvin M. Rader (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1935), 292. Italics in the original text. 6 Immanuel Kant, Kant’s Critique of Judgment (London: Macmillan, 1914), 55.

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extension of ‘sympathy’ that the shift of subject position creates, transferred from human society to nature (the grassland). Second is the contribution to artistic creativity by directly transforming a sense of life from ‘words’ into literary genes. Life experience is shattered and dissolved between the lines of script, and represented in the mode of expression of linguistic script, from the broad setting to the detailed descriptions, forms the distinctive ‘language of life’ in the novel. These two features appear in allegorical writing; two other points remain implied. One is that in extending subjectivity to nature, the realms of humans and animals are blurred, without distinctions of higher or lower orders of life. Grammatical subjects in the novel frequently combine humans and animals: “humans and horses,” “humans and dogs,” “humans, horses, and dogs” (see Chapter 12); “humans, dogs, and wolves” (see Chapter 1), and so forth. At the same time that the subject position is shifted or humans and animals mingled, the subject’s position of precedence is dissolved. Another point is the return to traditions of artistic form and aesthetic taste, using traditional ­representational techniques, such as plainly-worded description, realism and defamiliarization, bringing into play the potential of every artistic technique (including modernism) in order to convey allegory, intellectually elegant but perhaps artistically vulgar. These two points do not fit with the way in which modernist literature developed. Modernism aimed at depicting people’s alienation, whereas in this novel what is ‘alienated’ is nature (rather than society) and the premise for humanizing nature (rather than its results). The deliberate innovation in m ­ odernist representational techniques, whether absurd or bizarre, while ­challenging rationality, emphasized the rational nature of the text itself. M ­ ethods of ­representation in Wolf Totem are quite traditional, the writing filled with passionate intensity, its thought conveyed through its feeling. Empathy, ­however, does not stop at sympathy, but proceeds from sympathy to return to critical self-reflection. Hence, its critical point is introverted. This is a major point in how postmodernism differs from modern aesthetic empathy. At this point we have to face a discouraging question: the context of the postmodern. Today it is not fashionable to discuss the ‘postmodern’; in recent years, doubt and criticism of it have, rather, become the scholarly fashion.7 The author of Wolf Totem himself would hardly have anything to do with putting a 7 Arif Dirlik noted that recently American and European scholarly reflections on and criticism of theories of modernity and postmodernity have gradually increased…. For various reasons, people’s interest in postmodern and postcolonial theories has waned. See “Quanqiuhua, xiandaixing yu Zhongguo [Globalization, modernity, and China],” Dushu [Reading] 2007 No. 7: 7.

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‘post-’ label on it, neither would it win applause in scholarly circles. This is simply the choice I am left with, given that while I was analyzing the text I realized that the premise for the starting point and background of the story is the shift of subject position. So the postmodern arrives uninvited as an attention-­getting marker: that is its destiny and its mission. It cannot help but dance wearing the shackles of the ‘post-.’ No matter how innovative, it will be constrained within postmodern theory. What is interesting is that it is precisely within the framework of postmodern theory that the unnamed r­epresentational techniques that it has created have the opportunity to be renamed, opening up space for postmodern art to continue to move forward in the twin senses of ‘cognition’ and ‘aesthetics.’ In classical aesthetics, sympathy is the basis for the theory of empathy, that is, transposing ‘self’ to ‘non-self.’ In that case, following the shift of subject position, what is the fundamental premise for postmodern empathy? I believe that it is abandonment. Wolf Totem offers examples of at least two forms of abandonment that have the nature of premises. The first is abandoning the subject position of humans in aesthetic terms. Traditional empathy theory juxtaposes two aesthetic subjects: humanity and self. Thus, the orientation of empathy is extroverted, even exclusive. In terms of humanity, other living things in the natural world are ‘other’; in terms of the individual, all other humans are ‘alien.’ The classic representation of this feeling is Sartre’s statement, “Hell is other people.”8 However, in the postmodern context the status of people is ontologically shaken, the boundaries of the subject blur, and there are no insurmountable borders between living things and humans or the self. There is no eternal subject in postmodern texts, the shift of subject positions is a narrative premise, and directly influences aesthetic effect. Another form of abandonment is discarding anthropocentric ethical judgment. Traditional aesthetics emphasizes: “We should not forget to distinguish between positive and negative ­empathy. For example, to feel empathy with a pose showing a noble pride is positive, while to feel empathy with a pose showing a stupid vanity is negative.”9 According to such a judgment, wolves that eat lambs and eat people are to be nailed to the execution post, while settlers and soldiers who kill wolves should be grassland heroes, and cannot be objects of our doubt and criticism. It is evident that the moral standpoint and logical sense of Wolf T ­ otem are the opposite. The novel emotions expressed toward the grassland and 8 “L’enfer, c’est les Autres.” Jean-Paul Sartre, Huis clos: suivi de Les mouches (“No Exit,” and “The Flies”) (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 92. 9 Theodor Lipps, “Weiteres zur Einfühlung [More on empathy],” Archiv für die gesamte P­ sychologie (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1905) 4 (4): 465–519.

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grassland wolves are not only sympathetic, but even more completely identify with them. The ultimate influence of postmodern empathy on the readers is to make us gradually, through the course of reading, abandon the human standpoint and ­customary ethical judgment, to undergo a change of heart, shorn of previous bias and concepts, and step into the state of existence in primal nature that the Olonbulag shows us, sharing in the spirit of primal nature that the wolves embody. These are the two forms of ‘abandonment’ that Wolf Totem employs as its narrative premises. Given these narrative premises, we can also view ‘abandonment’ as a critical premise, seriously examining its creative methods during textual analysis, observing what new elements it attracts at the same time that it discards, and through what methods it successfully achieves the aesthetic effects of ‘postutopian allegory.’ This chapter borrows Susan Langer’s concept of “feeling and form,” deconstructing text in terms of feeling and form, to see how the “form” of Wolf Totem creates feeling to move readers. The discussion proceeds in the following order: What structure is employed to guide us into the reading; What rhythms are employed to moderate mood; What settings are employed to create breathtaking tension; What details are employed to arouse the reader. 3.1

The Ecosystem

This section discusses primarily the structure and rhythm of Wolf Totem. The Austrian-born theorist Franz K. Stanzel has pointed out that there are three aesthetic characteristics of modern fiction: “First, the external world composed of objective things and events is no longer of importance, unless these things can be elevated to a symbolic level, rendered transparent to present thought, or used as the background for the process of what happens in consciousness. Second, authors focused entirely on the topic of time. Third is experimentation with narrative techniques and methods.”10

10

Fulanci Sitance’er 弗 兰 茨 · 斯 坦 策 尔 [Franz Stanzel], “Xiandai xiaoshuo de meixue tezheng 现 代 小 说 的 美 学 特 征 [Aesthetic characteristics of modern fiction],” in Jijin de meixue fengmang 激 进 的 美 学 锋 芒 [The cutting edge of radical aesthetics], edited and translated by Zhou Xian 周 宪 (Beijing: Zhongguo renmin daxue chubanshe, 2003), 230.

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Postmodern fiction has made major breakthroughs in these three areas: The first is that the external world openly broke into fiction in the form of  ­environmental issues, surging into human life as an important object of ­representation, and even as a theme in postmodern literature and art, as in the case of the theme of Wolf Totem. The second is that the sense of space became an important characteristic of postmodern art. Hence, ‘structure’ was elevated to a means of representing subjectivity. The structure of Wolf Totem, for ­example, conforms tightly to natural ecology, directly turning natural structure into artistic structure (as will be discussed below). The third is striving for a return to simplicity in narrative methods, deemphasizing and even c­ ompletely abandoning “experiments in narrative techniques and methods, basing narrative on life that is familiar to people and bodies perceptible to the senses, creating living language, that is, a return to the origins of discursive life. (See below on the language of life). 3.1.1 Structure: Emplacement and Heterotopias11 ‘Structure’ is established on the foundation of the diversity of all things in the world, and is most directly related to ‘space’ and ‘order.’ The structures within our understanding may be of two utterly different kinds. One is the structure of objective things, that is, structures of nature: “The infinite variety we see in the world around us is a result of complexity … structure largely determines the ways in which complex matter behaves.”12 Living things live according to regularities with the order of structures, and to study structures is to explore the modes of existence and rules for functioning of different things. Another type of structure is artistic. Artistic works “are constructed from mutually supporting and mutually negating structures and systems,” from which are produced different aesthetic effects. Structure “is the construction of something and its position among other things that produce associations with it and are linked in origin.”13 Two core concepts within ‘construction’ and ‘position’ are ‘set’ and ‘element.’ Set determines the homogeneity of the entire construction; element marks the concrete location of something within the 11

12

13

Heterotopia is a term used in medicine that Michel Foucault borrowed to indicate a structural change in spatial “emplacement.” See “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16 (Spring 1986), 22–27. Alan H. Cottrell and David G. Pettifor, “Models of Structures,” in Structure: In Science and Art, eds. Wendy Pullan and Harshad Bhadeshia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 33. Wei Shikeluofusiji [Viktor Shklovsky], Sanwen lilun [Theory of Prose] trans. Liu Zongci, 148–49.

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whole. “The position in which a character or event is placed within a structure has deep significance, and if position shifts, meaning undergoes substantial change.”14 There is regularly disagreement over artistic structures, given that it is necessary to use analytical tools. Different analytical methods may yield different results, and researchers with disparate standpoints will also reach completely different conclusions. Given this situation, I believe that researchers not only must constantly clarify the analytical methods that they are using during the course of their research, but also must openly declare their own standpoints. This study, based on close reading, analyzes Wolf Totem aiming at ‘integration.’ Integration is premised on totality, on the same theoretical basis as set theory. The Art Symbol “is a single organic composition, which means that its elements are not independent constituents.”15 An entire novel may form an ­artistic symbol, especially allegorical works, in order to convey allegorical significance. Hence, faced with the work, my standpoint is to abandon my standpoint, enter the text unconditionally, and pursue the structural tendencies of the object of study itself. That is the only way that I can set aside my own revulsion to all scenes of combat and my fear of all types of animals, clear away my own subjective factors as much as possible, and conduct relatively objective analysis in an intellectual environment that is as ‘uncontaminated’ as I can make it. In the practice of criticism “describing a structure alone is not enough; there must still be study of its origin.”16 Tracing sources is the starting point of research, and also a goal. It is not difficult for us to discover in a particular work that for the author “in the process of writing, the first undertaking is the structure, and it also the final undertaking. The first words to be written down are done with concern for structure, and the last words to be written down are the completion of that pursuit of structure.”17 So, as Roland Barthes asked, “Where then we should look for the structure of narrative?” His answer was, “No doubt in the narratives themselves.”18 To that end, Barthes adopted the interpretive method most commonly used in Linguistics: “conceive, first, a hypothetical model of description (which American linguists call a theory), and then to proceed gradually from that model down, towards the species, which at the same 14 15 16 17 18

Yang Yi, Zhongguo xushixue (Chinese narratology), 27. Susanne Langer, Problems of Art (New York: Scribner’s, 1957), 134. Wei Shikeluofusiji [Shklovsky], Sanwen lilun [Theory of prose], 148. Yang Yi, Zhongguo xushixue, 24. Roland Barthes, “An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative,” New Literary History, Vol. 6 No. 2 (Winter 1975): 238.

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time partake in and deviate from the model.”19 He continues by proposing a “two step” method: First, in a modeled synthesis, find a homogeneous set and confirm its quality as a totality. Second, guided by the model, that is, the theory, enter the text and analyze sequentially. I agree with this procedure. But putting it into practice in Wolf Totem is not a simple matter. First, there are some preliminary questions. For example, is there a narrative model that would be similar to the one for this novel? If so, what is it? If not, what is it by which this whole story was structured? Next is the question of the structure: the structure of this novel is not unitary, and there are at least three different story structures intertwined, each of the three stories with its own structural tendencies. The “story of the wolf cub” has a very traditional method of narration that corresponds to Franz Stanzel’s ­observation: “The structure of early stories was largely determined by the lives of the important characters, the course of which can be traced through ­chronologically narrated events. The focal point of the structure is formed through the alternation of fully narrated story and condensed plot.”20 The “story of the wolf cub” follows a developmental track from immaturity to maturity, from birth to death, forming a clearly apparent linear structure, and every relevant event adheres to the account of the wolf cub’s maturation. However, seen as ‘ecological ­fiction,’ it becomes apparent that the nature of its structure differs from both the story of the wolf cub and the linear structure of early traditional fiction. The abstract term ‘ecology’ indicates the abstract style of its structure, as Stanzel wrote: “When an author borrows from a model of an abstract form of writing the form of the structure that is natural or that the story tells is probably abandoned entirely.” In such fiction, “the basic unit of structure is not the continuation of an extended plot but episodes, frequently relatively brief episodes that are abruptly inserted and just as abruptly concluded.”21 As ecological fiction, Wolf Totem has a structure that completely conforms to the characteristic that Stanzel notes. Through detailed analysis we can observe the occurrence of many instances of ‘abruptness.’ In the patterning of plot and structure, the novel has a distribution of emplacement perfectly suited to each of the different stories. The story of the wolf cub is the only human story that is complete, its linear structure being an important thread for the development of the tragic plot; whereas its structure in terms of an ecological novel is reticular, exactly matched with the structure of natural ecology. The reticular structure modeled on nature is sustained 19 Ibid., 239. 20 Stanzel, 235. 21 Ibid.

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throughout the entire novel, forming a foundational structure, extending into the grassland throughout the cycle of the seasons, both a symbol of nature as boundless time and space, as well as an environment of real survival for living things. In such a structure, ‘society’ completely disappears, and nature takes center stage as the protagonist—of what relevance to the aesthetic acts of humans? When the temporal spatial environment on which humans rely for survival undergoes fundamental change, aesthetic consciousness will not remain unaffected; rather, aesthetic tastes will also undergo change of one kind or another. The environment of human existence in real life is actually something very concrete. Space amounts to living quarters, homes, or nation states … usually with borders, and with clearly evident ‘society.’ What is termed ‘time’ can be precisely represented in terms of years, months, and days, reflecting particular periods’ life styles, and thereby a sense of ‘history.’ Yet in Wolf Totem human society and family relations are fragmented, and its space is not enclosed, but is rather nature as the wide-open grassland, and it is not only humans who ­survive in it, but also countless living things. Its time also jumps out of the linear narrative model of chronological history, instead revolving around a sense of the four seasons. Its pages are bereft of a specific historical period, only sunset and sunrise, the change of seasons, and then the repetitions of these again and again. A harsh, and even cruel, biological chain links all living things together, including humans and wolves. Among these, the small c­ reatures of numerous brief stories have value as much as the survival of wolves and humans, conveying each a different course of life, shown one after another during the seasonal cycle of the grassland. Jiang Rong has expressed himself clearly on this point: Speaking of the framework of this novel, I adopted an intertwined structure, the biological chain on the one hand, and the seasons on the other. The relations along the biological chain are complex. You could say this is a very ‘materialist’ structure. It is a natural structure, with no sense of historical period, just endless cycles.22 In the novel the seasons are the principal medium for time, a linear form, but unlike human chronological history, with no sense of direction, no suggestion of progress or regression. The structure of itself forms a circle, in the sense of cycle, and from this forms countless aspects of spontaneity, showing the unbounded power of nature in space and time. The novel begins in winter, 22

Author’s recorded interview with Jiang Rong, April 3, 2006.

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and after completing an entire year in the sense of the period of heavenly cycles, concludes with winter again. Given this, there are at least two directions that can be interpreted: one is using the repeating cycles of nature to show the ­permanence of time and space. This is itself allegorical, or it is a display of the permanent force of nature that the ambitious human race cannot subdue. Another allegory provokes thought: the movement from winter is not only part of a cycle, but also of a contrast. We see in the winter with which the story commences the appearance of the grassland in a state of existence in primal nature: Measuring roughly twenty square miles, it was a large mountain pastureland where, protected from the wind and relatively free of snow, fine grass grew tall and thick…. The smell of grass drew starving gazelles across the border from the blizzard-ravaged neighbor to the north; to them the spot was a wintry oasis—they ate until their rounded bellies looked like drums, making running all but impossible (11–12; 14–16). Then, winter at the end of the novel shows the change on the grassland: Those migratory birds that had survived the hunters’ rifles had flown off, and the once bold and clamorous wolf packs that came and went like ­demons had left, never to return. The quiet, dreary, monotonous grassland looked even more lifeless than ever (346; 493; orig. trans.). As to why in the short span of one year the changes to the grassland are so terrible, the answer in the story is the arrival of settlers from outside. Agrarian civilization and people dressed in army uniforms, aided by modern weapons and revolutionary thought, completely conquer the grassland. Behind the ‘human destiny to conquer nature’ is the disappearance of the state of existence in ­primal nature. Subsequently, in a tragic scene, the grassland thoroughly loses its power to enchant, no longer capable of holding the author’s dreams, returning to a geographic phenomenon like desert, forests, and plains. The sky was still a clear blue … but anyone who had spent a long time there knew that Tengger was not the same. The sky was dry and cloudless; the Tengger of the grassland was now the Tengger of the desert (355; 508). Sky and earth are still there, the four seasons, life and death. But the question becomes what dies and what lives. In the novel, these are specific facts; outside the story, it is an abstract philosophical question. It is the ambition of Wolf

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Totem to attempt to use specific facts as images to answer an ultimate philosophical question: that of life and death. Given that living and dying are undertakings that the entire biological world of the novel must assume, the novel employs their lives and deaths to address the question. An invisible biological chain forms a boundless net, firmly binding all living things together, showing the ‘logic of the grassland’ in the novel, that is, nature’s rules of survival. Thus, we see an interesting structure that is changing. The ‘chain,’ that source, is a linear logical development, extending limitlessly across that ‘surface,’ the grassland. The appearance of Tengger, heaven, forms a limitless three-dimensional space. Within it countless living things ceaselessly generate, perpetuating the natural cycles of this chain, giving life to and constraining each other, joined to each other, and together structuring the ecological system of nature. The fundamental structure of Wolf Totem fits perfectly the ecological system of nature. Living things, including humans, follow the course of the seasons, of daily life, of weather … different settings appear one by one, each displaying its own vigor in ordered space and time. The internal time of their structures is the seasons; their spaces are quite limited, a grotto, a lake, a pasture, what ­Michel Foucault termed “emplacement.”23 Emplacement “is defined by relations of proximity between points or elements.”24 All living things are emplaced, humans as well, each person an emplacement, that is, a prisoner of the age and place in which they are situated. Life should be content within its emplacement, spontaneously and freely following the ceaseless logic of the grassland. Gazelles, for example, with no important role in the plot, keep on appearing, whether dead or alive, becoming important ‘material’ linking ­several minor stories. A few more herds [of gazelles] like this, and the grass will be gone. The snows have been heavy this year, and a blizzard is always a possibility. Without this pastureland in reserve, we’d probably not survive—neither us nor our animals. Luckily, there’s the wolf pack. Within days this herd will be driven off, those that aren’t killed, that is (13; 17). The people of the grassland know that gazelles are “a scourge”: “the damage done by the gazelles far outstrips any done by the wolves. The yellow ­gazelles

23

24

‘Emplacement’ (weisuo 位 所 ) is used here instead of ‘position’ (weizhi 位 置 ) because the former suggests a fixed order of ranks or formation, stressing its metaphysical, ‘transcendent’ significance in the order of nature. “Different Spaces,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault Volume 2, ed. J.D. Faubion (London: Penguin, 1998), 176.

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are the deadliest, for they can end the lives of the people here” (29; 45). ­However, Chen Zhen also observes his mentor Bilgee rescue gazelles. As Bilgee explains, “Gazelles attract wolves,” the old man said. “Wolves hunt the gazelles, and that makes for fewer losses of cows, sheep, and horses. The gazelles also provide extra income for the herdsman. In fact, many Mongols rely on what they earn from hunting gazelles to build their yurts, get married, and have children.” (30; 46) Evidently, grassland logic is not identical to the logic of nature, and does not entirely obey the commands of nature, but is, rather, the rational understanding of nature and the conscious actions of humans that follow natural laws. This is the sort of understanding that appeared in the Guanzi: “Harmony ­between humans and Heaven brings about the beauty of Heaven and Earth.”25 This was once the orientation of ancient society, not peculiar to the grassland. Humans in early history regarded the harmony of humans with Heaven as a tenet: “Social activities followed natural laws, in other words, taking laws of nature as social regulation placed natural periods and human activities into corresponding order and harmony.”26 In terms of historiography it may be unfair for Wolf Totem to deliberately give such prominence to the fascination of the grassland, but it is not without reason in the field of anthropology. Even today, grassland is still a word that can directly indicate nature, whereas ‘agriculture’ or ‘farmland’ point clearly to civilization, a concept in opposition to nature. It is regrettable that in the novel the ironclad logic of the grassland does not exert a gentler enchantment, but is expressed through death, cruel and bloody. In some ways it resembles Rudyard Kipling‘s “literature of violence.” Kipling presented the cruelty of human-made, artificial ‘heterotopia’ under colonialism.27 For the most part, the scenes of violence in Wolf Totem arise out of survival instinct and show fidelity to the ‘emplacement’ of living things in nature. Those minor protagonists in the highly readable anecdotes display the vitality of survival in primal nature through their tenacious life force while their inevitable deaths show the indomitable natural laws of life and death. 25

26 27

Guan Zhong 管 仲 , Guanzi: Political, Economic, and Philosophical Essays from Early China, Volume 2 [Guanzi 管 子 , Chapter 41 (Wu Xing), Section 3], trans. W Allyn Rickett (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 123–24. Ge Zhiyi 葛 志 毅 , Tanshizhai lungao xubian 谭 史 斋 论 稿 续 编 (Heilongjiang renmin, 2004), 272. See Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (New York and London: Verso, 1997). Moore-Gilbert includes extended discussion of critical writing on Kipling and of violence in Kipling’s fiction.

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Without fat and thick fur, the wolves cannot survive the winter, when most of the scrawny, old, sick, and wounded are killed off. That is also why mosquitoes must take advantage of the short growing season to suck as much blood as possible; the crazed attacks are their way of saving their own lives. The wolves too must engage in bloody battles to prepare for the winter and possible famine in the following spring (295; 430). There is no single subject here, only cycles of interdependence; there are no living things that do not die, only an ironclad logic of nature that never ends. The structure of the biological chain that forms a net extending without limit not only escapes the linear orientation of the written language itself, but also breaks out of the model of linear time that the ‘four seasons’ construct. This allows the originally flat grassland to rise up in three dimensions, taking on multidimensional spatial form, that is, what is termed the ecosystem. The entrance of ecology into the field of aesthetics has been viewed as a postmodern phenomenon. It will not end on account of the end of the ‘post-’. On the contrary, the postmodern is its origin. Postmodern thought has been the ideal incubator for the gestation of ecological awareness. The author of Wolf Totem was not necessarily responding to the tide of European and American ecological literature.28 Rather than characterize him as writing literature or cultural criticism, it would be more accurate to say in terms of humanistic concern for society and politics, in arranging a reticular structure, the novel echoes Michel Foucault’s view of the trend of human social development: We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein. One could perhaps say that certain ideological conflicts animating present-day polemics oppose the pious descendants of time and the determined inhabitants of space.29 The emergence of ecology as cultural criticism within the field of the arts, and the use of the ecosystem as a structural mode to write fiction have indeed ­enriched creative methods in literature, but made interpreting narrative even more difficult. Although postmodern criticism has continued deconstructing

28 29

For this topic, see Wang Nuo 王 诺 , Oumei shengtai wenxue 欧 美 生 态 文 学 [European and American ecoliterature] (Beijing: Beijing daxue chuban she, 2003). “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics: 22.

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texts that are already fragmented enough, postmodern ecological literature, such as Wolf Totem, has begun to return to ‘grand’ development, unexpectedly increasing the difficulty of criticism. ‘Post-’ critics introduced postmodern and postcolonial theory into ­structural analysis. As one believed, “In a complex narrative, the relation of constituents may follow two syntactic patterns: an iterative one, comparable to paratax in the sentence, and a more properly recursive one, similar to h ­ ypotax…. While iterative structures respect the forward movement of time, recursive embedding typically sets the narrative clock back to some point in the prehistory of the current situation.”30 The former syntactic pattern occurs mostly in third world and postcolonial literature, depicted as politically ‘un- progressive’ or ‘undeveloped.’ According to this view, Wolf Totem is from the third world and belongs to postcolonial literature. Its narrative structure, superficially, is constantly repeated, and all the minor stories have a quality “comparable to paratax in the sentence.” Fortunately, beyond the ‘individual fates’ that the minor stories present, there is also a ‘grand fate.’ Not only that, there is  the extraordinary story of the grassland wolves and the wolf totem that takes the work beyond sheer repetition and, in terms of allegory, beyond postcolonial predicaments. Soon after the beginning of the novel, a wolf pack attacks gazelles, and Chen Zhen says of the hapless gazelle herd: “These gazelles are such pitiful creatures. Wolves are evil, killing the innocent, oblivious to the value of a life. They deserve to be caught and skinned.” The expression on the face of his mentor, Bilgee, ­quickly changes, and he angrily shouts out the reasoning of “little life” and “big life”: Out here the grass and the grassland are the life, the big life. All else is little life that depends on the big life for survival…. For us Mongols, there’s nothing more deserving of pity than the grass. If you want to talk about killing, then the gazelles kill more grass than any mowing machine could. When they graze the land, isn’t that killing? Isn’t that taking the big life of the grassland? When you kill off the big life of the grassland, all the little lives are doomed. (29; 45) 30

Marie-Laure Ryan, “Cyberage Narratology: Computers, Metaphor, and Narrative” in Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, ed. David Herman (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), 122. [“In parataxis, the sentences, clauses and phrases are not coordinated or subordinated. Such as, ‘Veni, vidi, vici’ or, ‘I came, I saw, I conquered.’ (Life of Caesar by Plutarch). However, in hypotaxis, the phrases, clauses or sentences are coordinated or subordinated.” https://literarydevices.net/hypotaxis/, accessed September 28, 2017. Translator’s note.]

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The great importance of this passage is that it states the harsh logic of the grassland and the rules that all things must strictly abide by. Bilgee says, “­Mongolians hunt also to preserve the big life of the grassland, Mongolians kill creatures that eat the grass, eight times more than they kill meat eaters,” because “there’s nothing more deserving of pity than the grass.” Siding with the weak conforms to human sympathy for ‘crushing oppressors and assisting the weak.’ Yet, obviously, the weak here are not those defeated in a contest of strength, but the primal state of nature, which remains passive when confronted by any effort. Chen Zhen understands this reasoning: “little life” means specific, individual lives, which in terms of existence and survival have equal value. The right to life that Heaven confers is higher than the rights that Heaven confers on ‘humans’: to Tengger all life is of equal value. The concept of “big life” is a higher level, blending the human element, giving guidance according to circumstances on the basis of laws of nature. Through so many minor stories we see what typifies conformity to ‘logic,’ on account of human efforts living freely and spontaneously: Stud bulls, called buhe, are the freest, most carefree, and most respected male steers on the grassland. Selected by experienced cowherds as breeding animals…. They emit a sacred air, symbols of strength, power, virility, courage, freedom, and good fortune (132; 211). The stud bull is the existence of a heterotopia in the ecological structure, for he is a product of humans. This heterotopia is a symbol, meant to tell us: only when human effort conforms to nature can it attain the sublime. The result is invariably on a higher plane than ‘the natural,’ displaying an extraordinarily high level of status and spirituality—a level that because of this is prominent, a result of its being heterotopia. In structural theory hierarchy is necessary. It provides order among a mass of things, a shortcut to knowledge, and a space of ‘freedom’ for things to be known. According to scientific explanation, “We have seen that at each step from one hierarchical level to the next … [there is] a greatly increased number of elementary particles and then individual degrees of freedom. To keep the problem manageable it is then necessary at each step to compensate for this by ‘filtering out’ the more fine-scale degrees of freedom, leaving only a few grosser features to serve as units of structure at the next level.”31 In the ecological 31

Alan H. Cottrell and David G. Pettifor, “Models of Structures” in Structure: In Science and Art, eds. Wendy Pullan, Harshad Bhadeshia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 38.

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­structural model Wolf Totem uses ‘iteration’ to display the m ­ ultiplicity of things, but employs a ‘big life’ to deconstruct the iteration, raising the ‘postcolonial’ to the level of the ‘postmodern,’ and giving it new allegorical significance. At this point, the ‘wolf totem’ in the novel is neither like the linear structure of the story of the wolf cub, nor placed within the reticular structure of the ecological novel, but emplaced as heterotopia, its structure fluid. It weaves its way between the two, organically linking the stories/structures of disparate qualities, making ‘nature’ and ‘freedom’ echo each other and complement each other. “This kind of unstructured structure is a hidden structure. They echo each other and use a symbolic method to develop a philosophical significance to the entire plot.”32 It carries a transcendent utopian message, defying any logic and logical structure, freely passing inside and outside the text, ­stirring imagination, arousing dreams, breaking down dreary canonical forms of structure, and steadily sowing seeds of faith. This is not simply the heterotopia ( yìwèi 异 位 ) of emplacement (wèisǔo 位 所 ), but also calculated transgression ( yùewèi 越 位 ), a crossing of boundaries, becoming an instrument of belief in the process of transgression, “presenting a special schema of the world in the form of language, and speaking to the world as a whole living being.” As Yang Yi wrote: Structure governs the order of the narrative internally, while externally directing the human experiences and philosophy that the author learns through his practice, and also directing the structure existing in the history of narrative literature…. It is through the composite or synthesis of these that we are able to completely unearth the meaning of ‘structure’ as a verb.33 It is precisely the meaning of structure itself as a verb that offers possibilities for heterotopia. Foucault discussed two types of heterotopia: utopia and ­colony.34 Unfortunately, both types are relevant to the intrinsic qualities of Wolf Totem. In the novel, utopia (such as the wolf totem) as a site ‘with no real place,’ pervades the rows of typescript, “with a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society,” acting on the life of the entire grassland and humans. It is significant that a root of the word heterotopia is very close to “utopia.” Foucault believed: “There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real spaces … which are something like c­ ounter-sites, 32 33 34

Yang Yi, Zhongguo xushixue, 34. Ibid., 29. “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics, 24–25.

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a kind of effectively enacted utopia….”35 Even though heterotopias are products of illusion (or ideals), once known by people, they may transcend natural emplacement and become a part of humanized nature, turning into reality, just as in the novel, when beliefs enter the structure, they become ‘reality.’ This utopian element of heterotopia, so difficult to establish in reality, is a richly creative ingredient in literature. It bears many dreams, like active chemical molecules, moving without hindrance through the aesthetic world to become an important source of imagination.36 In studying the structures of the premodern novels, San guo yanyi [Three kingdoms] and Shui hu zhuan [Outlaws of the marshes, aka Water Margin], Yang Yi pointed out: “in the historical development of structural forms, the revolutionary significance of changing unitary structures into compound structures to make epic works” was a deep adjustment in understanding the philosophy of history, and aided in broad, panoramic depictions of society and human life.37 If there is a shift of subject position from human society toward the grassland in nature, then the “panoramic” compound structure is no longer just historical, but also natural, established on the foundation of a strict biological chain in nature. As Fichte noted, “what exists in nature is necessarily as it is, and it is simply impossible that it be any different.”38 Everyone and everything enters “into an unbroken chain of appearances, since each link is determined by the one preceding it and determines the one following it.”39 This chain links the laws of nature tightly, possibly constricting the space for human spiritual activity. Loathe to be limited by nature, humanity, as per ­Fichte and those like him, attempts to escape the restraints of nature. Fichte wrote: “I want to be the master of nature and it is to be my servant. I want to have an influence on nature proportional to my power but nature is to have none on me.”40 In that case, totems like those of the wolf and tiger—signs of utopia—emerge in response. Such a totem assumes what Fichte called “the vocation of man,” rising above all creatures of nature, and in the words of Bilgee describing the way of heaven, carrying out “a sacred cleansing of the grassland, 35 36

Ibid., 24. Russell Jacoby, in defending the utopian spirit, believed that “imagination” is one of its most creative values: “If imagination sustains utopian thinking, what sustains imagination?” Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 23. 37 Yang Yi, Zhongguo xushixue, 65. 38 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Vocation of Man, trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis and London: Hackett, 1987), 7. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., 21–22.

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a good and benevolent deed” (19; 28). It breaks through the formal structure of the text, soaring freely at a spiritual level to put into practice the aesthetic ideal of ‘a significant structure.’ The ‘significant structure’ was the discovery of the structuralist aesthetician Lucien Goldmann. Drawing on the important category of ‘totality’ from Georg Lukacs, he believed that a meaningful structure that comes from a worldview of a collective consciousness held by social classes, groups, ethnicities or nations is a means of entering history that transcends the individual subject. Its important characteristic is “the insertion of the studied significant s­ tructures … into wider structures of which they are a part, a procedure that presumes a permanent va et vient [coming and going] from the part to the whole, and vice versa.”41 The creations of great writers offer a “significant structure toward which the thought, feelings, and behavior of individuals are directed.”42 Seen this way, Wolf Totem is a model: its original intention emerged from the collective consciousness related to ethnicity, and every portion without exception is connected with grassland logic as a totality. The different structures in the novel each have their own realm. Under the status of “meaningful” they open up to different directions of allegory, and during the aesthetic process produce different effects. The ‘ecological structure,’ firm and stable, is rigid, assuming the mission of nature, employing the Olonbulag grassland as its stage. It supports the myriad forms of life with iron discipline (the grassland logic), and upholds the grand narrative of epic-like history, so that the work can stand as a novel-length allegory. The story of the wolf cub is pure and simple, popular and easily understood. Its linear structure precisely suits the linear orientation of aesthetic empathy, and its emotiveness can be torrential, winning people over. The ‘wolf totem’ is of great interest as a vivid spiritual factor, that is, as the structural form that exists as a heterotopia. It effectively connects the aforementioned stories, activating the rigid, mechanistic ‘logic’ of the grassland and also injecting fresh life into the entire work. On the border grassland, far from mainstream society, it unexpectedly sends out a wolf howl of long suffering utopian ideals. 3.1.2 Rhythm: Rotation and Reversal Rhythm is “a common heritage; it strikes deep at primeval and general instincts of mankind. It is, moreover, not confined to man; it is universal to the whole

41 42

Lucien Goldmann, Essays on Method in the Sociology of Literature, ed. William Q. Boelhower (New York: Telos Press, 1980), 83. Ibid., 76.

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of nature.”43 A good artistic work assuredly has a sense of rhythm. Historically, in the course of literary creation, every rhythm that could be used, whether natural or human, has possibly been used by writers to make their works moving and as an important means to increase artistic appeal. In terms of the natural and the human, the rhythms of Wolf Totem have two prominent features: one is full use of natural methods, the four seasons, as the fundamental rhythm for the story in the sense of ecology. The second is at the level of narratology, where in the chronological order and arrangement of chapters, the combination of varying degrees of intensity and tension, construct a narrative rhythm that is closely compatible with seasonal rhythms of nature, going from spring, to summer, autumn, and winter. The seasons are hardly new or different material and are an important element in the content of literary representation, usually filling landscapes. “Landscape is far from being a natural object. Throughout much of the world, landscape has been considerably modified and is now essentially man-made. It has been termed a ‘palimpsest’ in which successive cultures have all but erased evidence of their predecessors.”44 I agree with Newby’s statement about landscape. Instead of simply natural scenery, landscape may have different meanings in different works. “At one level the landscape is subject to seasonal change and within this broad pattern of change weather types are important. Weather conditions can highlight landscape awareness.”45 The four seasons of one year constitute the presentation of seasons in Wolf Totem. ‘One year’ and ‘four seasons’ are two different concepts. One year suggests chronology, not only a sign of nature, but also of human culture and history. ‘Four seasons’ is definitely natural. When it is combined with ‘one year’ there is some variance with seasons of nature: it uses ‘four’ to disrupt the integrity of ‘one,’ injecting the rhythm of life into time measured by months and years. At this point the landscape that it presents is not just a series of postcards, but may possibly become “an unfolding panorama.”46 At the same time it implies both space and time since from the start it is unfolding “not only in space but also in time.”47 Hence, by employing the four seasons of the grassland for the temporal order of the narrative, Wolf Totem, whether deliberately or unintentionally, simultaneously endows the landscapes of these four seasons with two effects. There is 43 44

Allardyce Nicoll, The Theory of Drama (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1931), 93. P.T. Newby, “Towards an Understanding of Landscape Quality,” British Journal of Aesthetics 18.4 (Autumn 1978): 350. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid.

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a structural form that appears in time to be oriented to linear development, in a self-determined rotation through endless cycles. Simultaneously it is rhythm that, under the effect of the four seasons, produces variation, creating the ­Aristotelian peripeteia, the ‘reversal’ in the plot to complete the story as tragedy. Rhythm is a natural phenomenon that exists widely, and its definitions are diverse, with no less than ten of them. Wolfgang Kayser thought: “A connection happens between rhythm and times that are the most broadly meaningful.”48 In art, “rhythm requires a foundation that is sensory and develops in time. The sensuality of rhythm in particular is built upon the senses of hearing and touch, and the sensations of muscles.”49 In distinguishing between poetry and prose, he believed that in poetry “rhythm only achieves its full effect through semantic connections,”50 and that rhythm in prose (including fiction) is principally displayed in terms of methods of organization, such as vocabulary, p ­ assages, pauses, chapters, or tone.51 Different rhythms create different aesthetic effects, and in individualized creativity there is unlimited space for development.52 The ‘meaning’ of a work is usually apparent in its writing, it is overt. Rhythm is the converse, concealed within structure, manipulating behind the scenes. As they begin writing, authors must consider plot carefully, for once plot movement commences, the writer will unconsciously pursue the development of the plot without knowing where it ends. This force that leads the writer on is rhythm. The rhythm of masterpieces comes from a priori aesthetic responses to natural phenomena. Artistic rhythms essentially are imitations of nature. Melting natural rhythms into works is an important technique that increases the aesthetic sensibility that people find moving.53 For example, the four seasons in the novel is a natural rhythm that does not need to be deliberately presented. Combined with the grassland, it ‘naturally’ varies colors, temperatures, ­scenery, and so forth. The development of the story within the course of the 48

49 50 51 52 53

Woerfugang Kaise’er 沃 尔 夫 冈 · 凯 塞 尔 [Wolfgang Kayser], Yuyan de yishu zuopin— wenyixue yinlun 语 言 的 艺 术 作 品 ——文 艺 学 引 论 [Das sprachliche Kunstwerk: Eine Einführung in die Literaturwissenschaft; The lingual work of art: an introduction to the study of literature], Berne, 1948), trans. Chen Quan (Shanghai: Shanghai yiwen, 1984), 316. Ibid., 339. Ibid., 346. Ibid., 342. Ibid., 354. Liu Xiaochun 刘 骁 纯 , Cong dongwu kuaigan dao ren de meigan 从 动 物 快 感 到 人 的 美 感 [From animal pleasure to human aesthetic sensibility) (Jinan: Shandong wenyi chubanshe, 1983), 206–08.

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seasons presents a backdrop of natural change, while the creatures on the biological chain naturally act out through life and death that inviolable grassland logic that resists change. The most important rhythm in Wolf Totem is the rhythm of life. It seeks to demonstrate the rhythmic connection between life and art through the “little lives” of countless grassland creatures. As Susanne Langer wrote, “Every ­organism is always both growing and decaying54…. A rhythmic pattern arises whenever the completion of one distinct event appears as the beginning of another…. The result is a rhythmical series.”55 The expansion, survival, or loss of one given population is always related to the growth or collapse of another population; the life of a living organism is always predicated on the death of another. A few more herds like this [of gazelles], and the grass will be gone…. Without this pastureland in reserve, we’d probably not survive—neither us, nor our animals. Luckily, there’s the wolf pack. Within days this herd will be driven off, those that aren’t killed, that is (13; 17). Bilgee repeatedly warns others to show moderation in shooting wolves: “If there are any more hunts like this, the wolves will disappear, and the gazelles, the ground squirrels, the rabbits, and the marmot will rise up. That will be the end of the grassland….” (125; 199). ‘Moderation’ is an expression of rhythm in the lives and actions of humans, and using restraint as a method is demonstrated in the relations of populations among each other: When winter comes, marmots and field mice close up their burrows and hibernate, but rabbits never stop looking for food. Still, they feed the wolves during winter and thereby keep the wolves from killing our sheep. Wolves can’t eat all the rabbits, but they eat enough so that we’re not stepping in a rabbit hole every three paces (96; 155). There is no single overlord on the grassland, and even the imposing grassland wolves have opponents that are a strong challenge: Once the rains come and the mosquitoes emerge, wolves no longer go after marmots. Why? Because they are afraid of the mosquitoes, who attack their noses, eyes, and ears, making them jump into the air and give 54 55

Susanne Langer, Problems of Art (New York: Scribner’s, 1957), 49. Ibid., 51.

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themselves away, which sends the marmots scurrying back into their holes (208; 317). Under such circumstances, who can reach the hand of god for the heavenly power to alter the balance? Only those grassland people who survive or die with the grassland. The old man Bilgee says: “We Mongols were also sent by Tengger to protect the grassland. Without it, there’d be no Mongols, and without Mongols, there’d be no grassland” (77; 123). Such origins also foretell their end: “We grasslanders eat meat all our lives, for which we kill many creatures. After we die, we donate our meat back to the grassland. To us, it only seems fair….” (79; 125). At this point his words not only complete a cycle, but also complete a breakthrough: they once again break through the anthropomorphic narrative structure of tradition. This makes the rhythmic pace accompany natural cycles of life and death, scattering it among the living things of the grassland, and restoring it to the postmodern context on the foundation of the shift of subject position. According to Susanne Langer’s theory, for a form to become a living form it must meet three conditions. It must be a dynamic form. Also, its structure must be organic, its elements interrelated and interdependent via a center. “Thirdly, the whole system is held together by rhythmic processes; that is the characteristic unity of life. If its major rhythms are greatly disturbed, or suspended for more than a few moments, the organism collapses….”56 The life and vitality within Wolf Totem are intimately connected to what Susanne Langer stressed as the fundamental traits: “dynamism, inviolable unity, organization, rhythmic continuity, and growth.”57 However, there are differences in issues of life and death, and the novel does not only praise life or simply emphasize the positive meaning of life; rather, it raises death and withering to an equal level and gives them particular aesthetic value: The rotting remains of weak animals that had frozen to death over the long winter, along with those of livestock killed by wolves, were exposed on the grass, which was stained with dark blood. Yellow and black fouled water oozed from decaying autumn vegetation. Liquefying animal dung discolored the grassland (147; 231).

56

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Problems of Art, 52–53. Translator’s note: the Chinese translation that “elements of a structure are interrelated and interdependent via a center” varies somewhat from the English text, in which the elements themselves are “interrelated, interdependent centers of ­activity.” (52). Ibid., 53.

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Such depictions are rarely found in literary works of the past. We are used to deliberate beautification of nature from the standpoint of aesthetics or reflection on civilization, as if nature is shown as beautiful simply in order to gratify humans. Not so here, where filth, stench, putrefaction, death, and other things that are not beautiful have the same value as beauty and life: “Foul water was necessary on the grassland. The human and animal excrement of the winter season, the decaying meat, putrid blood, and splintered bones left over from the savage battles between humans and wolves added a valuable layer of humus, organic matter, calcium and phosphates to the thin grass” (147). Hence, the people of the grassland have their own distinctive aesthetic experience, as Uljii states: Inspection teams and poets from the cities like the smell of spring flowers on the grassland, … but I prefer the spring stench. One sheep expels fifteen hundred catties of dung and urine each year. Do you know how much grass that feeds? Cow manure is cold, horse manure is hot, but sheep manure equals two years of manual labor (147; 213). The dead in the story are given an affecting strength as if making a pilgrimage: The old man lay there looking peaceful and innocent, supine, his body blanketed by a thin layer of powder, a look of devotion on his smooth, seemingly veiled face…. The dead man exhibited no sign of someone meeting death, but of someone attending a feast in Tengger, a second baptism, a rebirth (39; 63–64). The rhythm of Wolf Totem in depicting life and death, beauty and ugliness is balanced, just as each season has its own appealing qualities and value. Only on a stage built on such equilibrium can all things have an equal opportunity to display their vitality, and provide more representational space for deeper development of the plot. Fiction tells stories. The story “is a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence.”58 There is very little of time as measured by civilizations, such as chronologically arranged years, just time as marked by nature (day and night, the seasons), or numerical order such as, “Two years earlier, in late November [the eleventh month], he had arrived in the border-region pasture as a ­production team member from Beijing” (4; 2). So we know that it was the beginning of winter, but not exactly what year, since the novel does not identify an era. ­Consider this: “This was Chen’s second encounter with a wolf pack since 58

E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 22.

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coming to the grassland. A palpitating fear from his first encounter coursed through his veins” (4; 2). We learn that the events have happened twice, but not exactly the time that the events have happened. Unlike the indifference to civilized time order, the author invests considerable thought and ink in marking natural time order, so as to make it the fundamental rhythm of the story. The novel is composed of 35 chapters, apart from the epilogue. The chapters are linked following the method of the classic Chinese novel, so that each chapter follows tightly on the previous one throughout the narrative, constructing the principal melodic strain of the entire novel. This would become unbearable for the reader without some slackening of pace, so the author must find suitable means to allow readers to catch their breath in order to finish reading. These more relaxed passages that allow taking a breather become the fundamental feature of the narrative rhythm. Based on the natural rhythm, I  ­indicate four different degrees of tension with four different font styles to indicate leisure, slow pace, tension, and intensity: Bold (quiet; grassland people’s customs); Bold italics (human activities, cultural competition); oblique italic (tense atmosphere of anticipation), and small caps (violent struggle and bloodshed). These are woven together over the course of one year, as follows: Deep Winter Chapter 1: A wolf pack appears and prepares for a vicious struggle Chapter 2: The course of the wolves’ encircling and hunting down gazelles Chapter 3: Cleaning up the battlefield; sheepherding Chapter 4: Grassland people’s customs; the legend of the flying wolves/ Migrant workers; reward offered for stealing wolf cubs Chapters 1 and 4 (bracketing the wolves’ slaughtering gazelles) extend for two days. Spring Chapter 5: A hungry grassland wolf pack encircles and slaughters army horses Chapter 6: Scene of carnage of horses; arguments over wolves’ nature and practices Chapter 7: Chen Zhen is stirred by thought of raising wolf cubs Chapters 5 through 7 occur over three days, centered on the annihilation of the horse herd by wolves. Chapter 8: Grassland people’s customs; dialogue of questions and answers

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Chapter 9: Raiding a wolf den, matching wits, and losing Chapter 10: Migrant Mongols from the Northeast; finally stealing wolf cubs Chapter 11: Issues of raising wolves; the wolf cub appears Chapter 12: Large-scale encirclement and hunt; wolf pack defeated Chapter 13: Burning out pack remnants; stud bulls burned to death Chapter 14: The wolf qualities of the wolf cub Chapter 15: Matching wits and courage with wolves at close range Chapters 8 through 15 extend for 4 to 5 days, centered on raiding and encircling wolves. Chapter 16: The grassland in spring and creatures of the grassland Chapter 17: Power on the grassland shifts: natural ecology and human management Chapter 18: Conflict over raising wolves; doubts about “civilization” Chapter 19: An old wolf dies; the death of swans The death of the swans in Chapter 19 is also the end of the stories of springtime. Summer Chapter 20: Grassland culture related to horses Chapter 21: Grassland scenery and customs; wolves eat marmots; wolves eat sheep Chapter 22: Customs of the grassland in summer; nurturing the wolf cub; issues of raising it Chapter 23: Workers settle on the grassland; Yang Ke explores the swan lake; Workers slaughter the swans Chapter 24: The wolf cub on the eve of battle; wolf howls Chapter 25: Horses, horse herders and “horse culture” Chapter 26: Baiting wolves with a wolf; humans fail to outwit the wolves Chapter 27: The wolf cub’s growth Chapter 28: Burning mugwort to repel mosquitoes; related customs Chapter 29: Horse herd encounters thunderstorms, attacks by mosquitoes and wolf packs, suffering severe losses Autumn Chapter 30: The wolf cub matures; Chen Zhen reflects; Large army unit prepares to move in; the end of the wolves approaches Chapter 31: The storm approaches; an advance party of soldiers kills wolves

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Chapter 32: Pastureland in autumn, riders in jeeps hunt wolves, death of the great wolf Chapter 33: The wolf cub’s gums become infected; new grazing land at the swan lake becomes a burial ground for grassland creatures Chapter 34: Bilgee passes on customs, sings his last dirge Early Winter Chapter 35: The grassland is emptied, the wolves fleeing across the border; the death of the wolf cub In this long story the elements of the writing are entirely different: In the first four chapters, centered on wolves slaughtering gazelles, the time span is two days. Chapters 5 through 7, centered on the battle between horses and wolves and the deaths of the army horses, concentrates on three days. Chapters 8 through 15, developing around the raid on wolf dens and the encircling attack on wolves, cover no more than four to five days. Taking up more than 100,000 characters, this portion of the novel amounts to a small novel itself. The transition of winter to spring, which amounts to nearly half the narrative, is concentrated into only ten days. Each chapter and section has its variations in tone, inserting depictions of customs or mental acts as if to provide a r­ espite during the violent struggles. A considerable amount of dialogue seems like introductory comments before showing a film, and when employed in a­ llegory has a distinct meaning. (Chapter 5 is devoted to this topic.) While linking the chapters follows the form of classic Chinese novels, Wolf Totem does not make use of their narrative conventions. There is no omniscient narrator, only ‘spectators’ through whom we absorb the flavor of the grassland with the seasons as backdrop. If we believe that “[t]here is a certain natural melody in passion of any kind, and tragedy, in dealing with the passions, will therefore find its true utterance in rhythmical words,”59 then it will not escape us that the melody of Wolf Totem is precisely its distinctive narrative rhythm. If we regard the indications above as a kind of rhythmic form, and seriously consider the transitions of tone from relaxed to intense, then we will observe that there is an underlay for everything in the novel that is like the slopes of the grassland rather than steep mountain ridges. There is commotion, and also quiet stillness, undulating according to the topography and the wind. There is no battle without a c­ onclusion, nor performance without the final curtain dropping. All living things, whether large or small, appear at birth and depart at death to be replaced. 59

Allardyce Nicoll, An Introduction to Dramatic Theory, 92.

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While the story follows the seasons, the depictions of the seasons are not equally distributed. The majority of chapters are devoted to spring and summer. The transition from spring to summer is an important turning point in the story of the wolves. First, there is political misfortune in Chapter 17 when power to manage grazing lands changes hands from the local cadre Uljii to the army representative Bao Shungui. Next is the plot reversal in Chapter 19, in which the death of the old wolf is juxtaposed with the deaths of the swans. These two chapters are situated midway through the novel, and the transition from spring into summer becomes a watershed. The previous chapters are the story of spring, that is, the story of existence in primal nature, and the principal characters are the wolf pack, swans, and grassland people. The succeeding chapters tell of outsiders occupying the grassland, and the process of humanizing nature. The story of the wolf cub runs through them, brimming with human tragedy during the grassland apocalypse. The entire story begins and ends in winter, a profoundly allegorical arrangement, culminating with death in an atmosphere that is ‘deathly still’ in a ‘season of death’ that in its mood and thought leaves no room for life. In tragedy, “rhythm—perpetually is movement. It seems like a moving between two walls, walls of contradiction, moving back and forth while touching each wall”60 to try to keep balance. In Wolf Totem there is the encroachment of civilization on one side, and the destruction of the grassland on the other, so that the narrative struggles to keep its balance rhythmically, while the tragedy unfolds unavoidably. One cannot help asking: Where is the essential ‘reversal,’ the Aristotelian peripeteia? What means does the author employ to carry out the reversal in the midst of a balanced rhythm? It is the seasons, the winds that bring on the change of seasons. The northern grassland, where the variation of the seasons is clearly visible, performs a natural rhythm. The rhythm of the seasons is self-regulating, covertly colluding with the spontaneous ecological structure, in a silent place changing the cadence of nature and life. Adopting the seasons as an artistic rhythm is not altogether the same as the rhythm of life that Susanne Langer discussed. There is more urgency to it by comparison, entirely discarding elements of individual fate and stripping off its symbolic significance, more directly projecting a vested interest in the collective survival of humans: The circular course of the seasons affects almost every human interest. When man became agricultural, the rhythmic march of the seasons was of necessity identified with the destiny of the community. The cycle of 60

Wei Shikeluofusiji [Viktor Shklovsky], Sanwen lilun [Theory of Prose], 137.

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i­rregular regularities in the shape and behavior of the moon seemed fraught with mysterious import for the welfare of man, beast, and crops, and inextricably bound up with the mystery of generation. With these larger rhythms were bound up those of the ever-recurring cycles of growth from seed to a maturity that reproduced the seed; the reproduction of animals, the relations of male and female, the never-ceasing round of births and deaths.61 Taking inherent relationships of ‘necessity’ as rhythm produces remarkable effects in aesthetic representation that leverage its power. The tragic story within Wolf Totem employs the power of nature through the movement of the seasons in order to carry out the plot reversal ‘naturally.’ The story begins in winter. In the dead of winter the grassland wolves take advantage of the ice and snow to attack a gazelle herd, while the people of the grassland make preparations to get through winter before the blizzards arrive. Hence, “livestock made it through the latter half of winter without incident. The Olon wolf pack followed the gazelles far away, where it dispersed. The great blizzard did not come” (36–37; 58). Spring should be the season regenerating life, but as settlers from outside enter the grassland they launch a largescale campaign to kill wolves, turning spring into a season of slaughter. The sections on the onset of spring begin with an unseasonable cold snap bringing in a tormenting blizzard that gives an omen of the reversal of fortunes at the transition of the seasons: Lake water poured onto the grassland, and livestock began breaking out of their pens. Yurts set up along wind tunnels were blown upside down, turned into huge bowls that tumbled briefly before falling to pieces. Carts heading into the wind lost their felt canopies, which flew off into the sky…. The snow stung like buckshot, whistling through the air as it tore millions of white scars across the sky (42; 68). This is the prelude to a vicious battle, and it is also a reversal. The might of the wind is a symbol of the power of nature and the driving force of the plot reversal. There is only this one “white-hair blizzard” in the novel, set in the spring when the settlers from outside betray providence through their lethal intentions. What follows is warfare between humans and wolves, and between wolves and horses…. When it is concluded: 61

John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Penguin, 2005), 153–54.

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Sun weakly shone through the thin dark cloud, and drifting snow powder fell on the vast Olonbulag. After the two murderous days and nights of the white-hair blizzard, the sky had lost its power to send any more snow; no pellets, no flakes. A pair of eagles glided leisurely below the clouds…. Peace had returned to the ancient Olonbulag (52; 84). This description, at the opening of Chapter 6, is a coda following the battle of wolves and horses, and it is a reversal, turning from the fast tempo to the slow. Other passages shift from slow to fast tempo. All appear at the openings of chapters, and shifts of seasonal winds that blow through leaving no traces: On the highlands, the early-summer sun lit up an archipelago of floating clouds above the basin, so bright the people below could barely open their eyes. The air was filled with the smell of mountain onions and wild garlic as sheep and their lambs grazed the land, heavy and acrid. The people had to blink to moisten their burning eyes (188; 293). In mid-summer, heat and calm are seasonal flavors. The acts of killing in the midst of tranquility fully reveal the ruthlessness of survival in the grassland: The mosquito scourge hadn’t yet begun, but maggot-born big-headed flies swarmed across the land and launched assaults on men and their livestock…. The temperature continued its inexorable rise above the steaming ground…. The dogs lay sprawled in the narrow crescent-shaped shadow north of the yurt, mouths open and tongues lolling as they panted to cool down, their bellies rising and falling rapidly (213–14; 326). What follows is a rainstorm. Where it is windless and hot, wind and rain are a reversal, and the clear sky following the rain is another. But do the clearing skies bring good days? Not at all: Following several large rains, the streams of the Olonbulag were swollen, and the lake at the new grazing land expanded, its grassy banks now turned to wetland, a paradise for millions of ducklings practicing flying and looking for food. At the same time, a rare and terrifying swarm of mosquitoes suddenly descended on the border grassland (275). People living on the grassland both look forward to rain and fear rain, for it may generate more swarms of mosquitoes, turning the grassland into a “hell on earth” (287; 419). It is no wonder that Dewey elevated “natural rhythms”

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to the level of epistemology, believing: “The larger rhythms of nature are so bound up with the condition of even elementary human subsistence, that they cannot have escaped the notice of man as soon as he became conscious of his occupations and the conditions that rendered them effective. Dawn and sunset, day and night, rain and sunshine, are in their alternation factors that directly concern human beings.”62 No one living on the grassland is indifferent to the weather. “How venerable heaven looks on us determines how we live” is the natural attitude of people of the grassland who must respect nature to survive in an extremely harsh environment. Prior to the battle between wolves and humans, Batu and Zhang Jiyuan simultaneously think about the ­weather and each on his own looks up to a heavily overcast, starless sky in the northwest: Sometime after midnight, strong gusts of wind were followed by the explosive crackles of thunder. The ground shook and the mountains swayed, sending all the horses into the start of a panicky stampede (290; 423). In such circumstances, “the participation of man in nature’s rhythms, [is] a partnership much more intimate than is any observation of them for purposes of knowledge….”63 If natural rhythm is consciously used for artistic rhythm it may strengthen the prepared aesthetic effects without leaving a mark. At the same time, it can move ‘season’ itself into the category of motif, and be given broader interpretive space based on the theory of archetypes. The founder of archetypal criticism, Northrop Frye, used the recurring order of the natural world to explain literary form, associating spring, summer, autumn, and winter with comedy, romance, tragedy, and satire respectively. In Wolf Totem the seasons seem to follow the four stages of birth, life, struggle, and death, touching upon the meaning of life through rhythms of nature. The variations, driven by the seasons, begin to dance on their own in the contest of life and death. Frye proposed that criticism adopt the method of a broad or distant view, to “stand back” as much as possible to keep proper distance from the narrative and its events or characters: I mean by an archetype a symbol which connects one poem with another and thereby helps to unify and integrate our literary experience. And as the archetype is the communicable symbol, archetypal criticism

62 63

Art as Experience, 153. Ibid., 154.

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is primarily concerned with literature as a social fact and as a mode of communication. By the study of conventions and genres, it attempts to fit poems into the body of poetry as a whole.64 Jiang Rong’s method is just the opposite, to “stand here”: Why do people see this book as fresh? Why do they read it through without putting it down? The seasons in the grassland are not the same; once the season changes, the scenery changes completely, now verdant, now desert. The seasons are mutable, cruel, and all threads are lines of fate, like the lines on the palm of a hand.65 In the grassland, the seasons are visible everywhere: sunlight, stars, day and night, wind direction and strength, lightning, thunderstorms, blizzards…. ­People of the grassland do not dare to neglect them for a moment, and incorporate them into their customs with great ceremony (discussed in the final section of Chapter 4). Rhythms of nature become rhythms that they can understand. “The principle of recurrence in the rhythm of art seems to be derived from the repetitions in nature that make time intelligible to us”; once absorbed into works, it “would be automatic and unconscious repetition,”66 and so form an ultra-stable and harmonious relation with the ecological system. In Wolf Totem the relationship of the seasons (time/rhythm) with the grassland (space/structure) is complementary. Structurally the grassland is bounded, its ecological system relatively enclosed. This closure produces a particular aesthetic effect, forming a gas field under pressure, creating a stressful dynamic that fulfills the warlike atmosphere in the line, “as the mountain rains approach wind fills the pavilion.”67 The seasons are an effective way to break through the spatial sense of closure, stirring up the ultra-stable structure and showing kinetic life force in the recurrent temporal cycle. It is logical, whether for the story of the grassland or humanity. Such dynamism coincidentally fits the “verb-like nature of structure” in Chinese narrative texts, “an important proposition of the wisdom with which Chinese narratology has endowed itself.”68 64 Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 97. 65 Interview with the author, April 4, 2006. 66 Frye, Anatomy, 104. 67 Xu Hun 许 浑 (ninth century), “Xianyang cheng dong lou 咸 阳 城 东 楼 [Eastern pavilion of Xianyang].” [Translator’s note.] 68 Yang Yi, Zhongguo xushixue, 25.

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The Language of Life

A good work of literature has its own style. Susanne Langer believed that literary language conveys semiotic function: “there is a literal meaning (sometimes more than one) connoted by the symbol that occurs in art.”69 Typically there are two tendencies in research. One emphasizes the appearance of the words themselves, “investigating the aesthetic effects of language.”70 The other stresses digging out inherent meaning in the language, including the researcher’s subjective understanding in the analysis, and attaching numerous meanings to the text while overlooking the ‘voice’ of the work itself. Such is allegorical research, when placing weight on allegorical significance and invariably ignoring the artistic value of the allegorical vehicle itself.71 Study of Wolf Totem must start from textual analysis. This novel conveying a superabundance of meanings won over readers primarily on account of the vehicle of the allegory before any perception of meanings and consideration of them. Reading, itself, is a means of social acceptance, whether the work is vulgar or refined. The vulgar does not necessarily attract mass readership, and the refined is not necessarily without readers. If refined significance is introduced to a vulgar text (like Wolf Totem) the result is an interesting one, listening to the voice and chewing on meaning together, both directed toward the following questions: How is voice dealt with in Wolf Totem? What is distinctive about its style? What language does it use to move readers? In this way the train of thought pursues the emotiveness, making dry textual analysis into something interesting. Using a ‘language of life forms’ is a distinctive technique of Wolf Totem, and its most prominent style. It makes use of nearly all the bodily organs that humans can bring into play in aesthetic acts, exhausting the vitality that the language of the text can offer to arouse the readers’ aesthetic response as living creatures themselves. Utterly unlike the free and spontaneous atmosphere of the surface, the internal structure and use of language in Wolf Totem are strictly disciplined. It employs a distinctive language of life that rhythmically and structurally responds to/echoes the self-regulating, spontaneous ecological system inside and out, together displaying an ironclad natural logic. The ecological system is invisible, while the language of life is visible and figurative, 69 70 71

Susanne Langer, Problems of Art, 137. Wellek and Warren, Theory of Literature, 176–77. Here “allegorical vehicle” is used to translate the term yùtǐ 寓 体 , on the model of metaphorical vehicle yùtǐ 喻 体 , the vehicle being the thing/s whose attributes are described and borrowed. [Translator’s note.]

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readily apparent at two extremes. One is the panoramic description of scenery. The grassland is one vast landscape. The author arranges various spectacles on this grand stage, showing us superb performances of living creatures displaying their vitality. The actions of life forms bring out a vocabulary of verbs, constructing scenes one after the other and making the two-dimensional grassland of the text into three dimensions. The second extreme is minute description of detail. What Chen Zhen offers are mainly eyes and ears, and his action is mainly to watch and listen. Because of this a large quantity of vocabulary appears in the text related to vision and hearing. These infuse the black and white pages with elements of life in profusion that make the silent script clamor. The narrative language of Wolf Totem has its obvious distinctive aura: Like the solid mastery of sketching in painting, the forms and lines are solid and accurate, in a realistic style that is sure and clear, extremely vivid, with dynamic comparisons that are original…. In the words of the grassland artist Yang Gang, “The author completes a marathon with the speed and skill of a hundred meter sprint.” Every sentence in the ­novel is like a coiled spring, leaving readers gasping.72 The “solid mastery of sketching” in the novel mainly appears in the description of detail, and that sense of “leaving readers gasping” comes to the fore almost entirely in large-scale scenes, in the language of bodies in movement. The author fully utilizes the characteristics of Chinese script, pouring in the elements of life, making the latent power of representation in the script display an inexhaustible attraction in the distinctive ‘language of life’ that gives full expression to the signifying function of pictographs. This involves a very important and sensitive issue, the issue of the disparity between Chinese and Western languages and writing. There is no intention in this text to discuss the important but difficult issue of disparities in languages and scripts, only to emphasize a fact: up to the present linguistics and semiotics have been founded on Western languages and script, which have numerous differences in formal means of expression and semantic understanding with Han Chinese script and language. Western languages have a double structure (word order and sentence types), and use letters for signifying signs. The letters themselves do not directly convey s­ ignification, but must 72

Kang Zhuang 康 庄 , “Du Lang tuteng: Lang shi renlei shehui jinbu de fadongji 读 《 狼 图 腾 》 : 狼 是 人 类 社 会 进 步 的 发 动 机 [Reading Wolf Totem: wolves are the engines of progress for human societies],” Xishu shuwu, May 22, 2004; reprinted http://www.cnhubei .com/200508/ca856693.htm, August 31, 2005 (accessed May 18, 2014).

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be placed in context in order to signify. The subordinate clauses of Western languages are like trailer trucks, and when allegorical m ­ eaning is complex, the allegorical vehicle can hardly be made simple and concise. Han Chinese language is a triple structure, simultaneously having three functional features of “pictographic, ideographic, and pictophonographic.”73 These elements of the script themselves are meaningful signs, which are capable of directly conveying allegorical meaning. The history of the origins and development of Chinese script is already so long, and the script that has been reused continuously has “accumulated layers of rich meaning” so that even the characters themselves can evoke “people’s associations across wide expanses of time and space.”74 Subordinate clauses were rare in traditional Chinese usage, the characters themselves can constitute sentences, each can signify on its own, determine order, combine and change combinations endlessly…. These major disparities are widespread and visible everywhere, and have undoubtedly influenced theoretical innovations in linguistics and semiotics, and must be taken into consideration in textual analysis. In the discussion below, the use of linguistics represented by Ferdinand Saussure or semiology represented by Roland Barthes is for reference purposes only, not as conclusive statements. Even though the methods and concepts of traditional Western aesthetics and classic literary theory are being used, that does not mean applying these analytical models mechanically. 3.2.1 Scenery: Action Words The depiction of atmosphere in particular environments carries the reader into a particular aura. Whether sad or excited, it is related to the different kinds of atmosphere the author creates in different settings. Going into Wolf Totem, the initial feeling is one of tension. In the passage below, from the beginning of the novel, verbs are indicated by bold type and adjectives or adverbs by ­italicized type: As Chen Zhen looked through the telescope from his hiding place in the snow cave, he saw [literally “caught” taozhule] the steely gaze of a Mongolian grassland wolf. The fine hairs on his body rose up like porcupine quills, virtually pulling his shirt away from his skin … sweat oozed from his pores … his misty breath quivering in the air (3; 1).

73 74

Tang Lan 唐 兰 , Zhongguo wenzixue 中 国 文 字 学 [Chinese philology] (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1979), 76. Yang Yi, Zhongguo xushixue, 187.

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Chen Zhen and Bilgee lie in a snow cave for the entirety of Chapter 1. “Not daring to move, Chen felt frozen in place, like an ice sculpture.” When he can’t bear it any longer, Bilgee tells him, “You’ll see that this was worth the wait. As I said, patience is the key to a good hunt” (10; 13). By the end of this chapter we know that they have lain still “most of the day.” Thus, the novel opens with time at a standstill in an exceedingly small, narrow environment (the snow cave), with the characters motionless in time and space as well. Such inaction is not out of desire, but out of fear. Life and death hang by a thread between ‘action’ and ‘inaction.’ This description generates a gripping atmosphere through the motionless time and space and suspense over fate; the aesthetic effect that it creates is tension. The air of tension runs throughout the novel, turning into a permanent atmosphere filling the novel, linked to two elements. One is foreshadowing combat, just as in this example, lying still in wait is immediately followed by the elaborate depiction of fighting in Chapter 2. A second element is linked with life and death, such as “not daring to move” when giving in to moving is throwing away one’s life. In terms of methods of aesthetic presentation, Wolf Totem is a successful experiment in effectively creating a tense atmosphere. Teng Shouyao has made a specialized study of this method: a well-made gestalt (form) is essentially a “model of tensions”: “Whether a model can produce tension, apart from its own shape, is up to the background it is placed against or is linked to preceding or following it.”75 The background for the story in Wolf Totem is the grassland. The atmosphere is not fictive, but a genuine setting, an atmosphere spread ceaselessly by the seasons, filling every corner of the grassland, simultaneously full of life and full of death. Words expressing actions appear in large numbers, and the tense atmosphere linked to life and death situations remains throughout the novel. For example, when the wolves make their entrance it is without a sound, and it is done totally through the wolves’ movements and humans’ perception of movement: Chen turned to look down the ravine and was so terrified he nearly fell off his horse. There on the snow covered slope not less than fifty yards away was a pack of golden-hued, murderous-looking Mongolian wolves, all watching him straight on or out of the corners of their eyes, their gazes boring into him like needles…. All dozen or so of the larger wolves had been sitting on the snowy ground, but they immediately stood up, their

75

Teng Shouyao 滕 守 尧 , Shenmei xinli miaoshu 审 美 心 理 描 述 [Aesthetic psychological description] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1985), 114.

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tails stretched out straight, like swords about to be unsheathed, or arrows on a taut bowstring. They were poised to pounce (4; 3). Through the language of physical acts or senses, experience transitions directly to empathy. In tense moments of danger, anyone may have reactions such as “eyes like awls,” “hair standing on end virtually pulling the shirt from the body,” or “misty breath quivering in the air.” The shift from the strange to the familiar is carried out through the senses, not knowledge. It is important to understand this point because it is a significant method that Wolf Totem does not employ. Chen Zhen’s “big, dark mount” senses the hidden danger of an ambush by wolves: Just before they reached a ravine, the horse stopped, pointing toward a spot down the ravine. It tossed its head and snorted, its pace no longer steady … the agitated horse, its nostrils flaring, its eyes wide, turned to head away from what lay in front of them…. Its gait grew increasingly jerky, an erratic combination of walking, trotting, and jolting, as if the animal might bolt at any moment. As if frustrated that its warning signals were not being heeded, the horse turned and nipped its rider’s felt boot (4; 3). The horse’s actions do not imitate humans, but are completely autonomous acts, yet the description of the horse contains personification. Here it is the horse that possesses awareness and judgment, not the human. Chen Zhen riding the horse is oblivious to the danger close by and the horse’s warnings. What the horse conveys to the person is not simply sensation, but also information, which is not accepted. Description like this is not without risk of ­exaggeration, but it is a method that is common in artistic fields. Research has shown that simple structures make people feel comfortable and calm. However, in aesthetic fields, people tend to “appreciate patterns that are slightly unconventional and a bit complicated,” because this “incompleteness that is created can furnish the  necessary aesthetic tension.”76 When this tension fills the  page, it ­becomes the style. Style in fiction is conveyed through language: “the story a novel tells can be incoherent, but the language that shapes it must be ­coherent….”77 When this language is coherent throughout the entire novel, its style is not about autonomy; rather, it finds a discursive home for the s­ eemingly ­chaotic anecdotes and minor characters, and a spiritual resting point for the broad grassland that endures so much seasonal change and uncertainty. 76 77

Teng Shouyao, 107–14. Mario Vargas Llosa, Letters to a Young Novelist, 32.

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Two prominent features of scenic description in Wolf Totem are paradoxical. One is the internal, psychological scene, the sense of tension naturally generated in an atmosphere of pressure. Another is the broad ‘spatial sense,’ connected with the natural changes of season on the grassland, which supports the tumultuous scenes of fighting. The descriptions of battle scenes have a certain kinship with the long-established literature of warfare and these can be seen as a new kind of war literature. In war literature the most important representational method is describing scenes with scope, and the aesthetic power that it creates is also one of imposing scope that has strong impact. Consider Forster’s comments on Tolstoy: “Why is War and Peace not depressing? Probably because it has extended over space as well as over time, and the sense of space until it terrifies us is exhilarating, and leaves behind it an effect like music”: After one has read War and Peace for a bit, great chords begin to sound…. They do not come from the story…. They do not come from the episodes nor yet from the characters. They come from the immense area of Russia, over which episodes and characters have been scattered, from the sumtotal of bridges and frozen rivers, forests, roads, gardens, fields, which have accumulated grandeur and sonority after we have passed them.78 Forster concluded: “Many novelists have the feeling for place…. Very few have the sense of space, and the possession of it ranks high in Tolstoy’s divine equipment. Space is the lord of War and Peace, not time.”79 Reading the fighting scenes in Wolf Totem I was reminded of War and Peace many times. Given that they are essentially completely different as novels, what caused this association? I believe it was precisely because of the descriptions of scenes of ­imposing scope. Both authors created atmospheres that, in the impact on readers, employ different approaches to achieve equal results. The expansive land of War and Peace belongs to the ‘fatherland,’ whereas the grassland that Wolf Totem attempts to present is sui generis part of nature. The subject in Tolstoy’s novel is human, and therefore contains a great deal of psychological activity. The subject in Wolf Totem is the grassland and the living things of the grassland, its normal state is fighting, not serenity, and the frequent scenes of fighting are flooded with action words, and only rarely psychological description. Wilderness such as this broad natural space becomes the invited guest of the author, creating a ‘sense of space,’ and the result is aesthetically increased value. 78 79

E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 39. Ibid., 39–40.

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The story of Wolf Totem is actually one scene of fighting after another, in accord with the grassland adage written in blood: “peace does not follow peace, but danger always follows danger” (42; 69). From the battle of wits between Chen Zhen’s horse and the wolf pack in Chapter 1 to the army’s organizing a campaign to kill wolves in Chapter 32, there are nearly twenty major fighting scenes, not including uncounted minor episodes, and all of them distinct. How can the atmosphere of tension be maintained without repeating scene descriptions? This is a difficult question. The author makes full use of the natural physical and sensory reactions of humans, bringing physical senses into play through relevant action words. Simultaneously, he skillfully employs distraction as a method, avoiding the psychological fatigue that visual overload can induce, completing the passage by managing an aesthetic psychology of equilibrium. For example, among the scenes of humans fighting wolves, the best passage is Batu’s solitary fight with a wolf pack while guarding army horses. Each sentence contains action words, and bodily language directly presents the action even more clearly and powerfully: The moment [Batu] stepped out of the yurt, he could smell the coming blizzard, and when he saw the direction of the wind, his broad ruddy face turned purple and his eyes glowed with fear. He rushed back into the yurt and nudged his sleeping comrade, Laasurung. Then, in rapid order, he picked up his flashlight, loaded his rifle, looped his herding club over his wrist, put on his fur deel, doused the fire in the stove, and picked up fur jackets for the men watching the horses. He and his comrade, rifles slung over their backs and carrying long flashlights, mounted up and galloped north to where the herd was grazing (42; 69). It is unusual to find such sentences, a short sentence with two verbs and no prepositions, conjunctions, or punctuated segments, and a long sentence in which several action phrases appear without modifying adverbs. The description of attacking dogs “barking madly as each tried to outcharge the others” (116; 185), contains five verbs in just nine Chinese characters. Rarely seen in modern Han Chinese writing, such a clause owes little to grammatical standards but perhaps more to the form and usage of pre-modern Han Chinese language, and it is well suited to the description of a battle. Aristotle’s Organon contains numerous passages on the characteristics of verbs, emphasizing, “verbs in and by themselves are substantival and have significance, for he who uses such expressions arrests the hearer’s mind, and fixes his attention….”80 80

Organon ii—On Interpretation, trans. E.M. Edgehill,49. Online resource: http://www .constitution.org/ari/aristotle-organon+physics.pdfc (accessed April 23, 2014).

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A method like the one above has great latent power to be dug out, for it allows us to see the effect of the added value of elision or ellipsis in terms of aesthetic sensations: under the guidance of a single subject, several verbs, either together or independently, form sentences, condensing the contents and at the same time increasing the content of time. It allows each act the possibility to become an event and in a limited time greatly expand the representational power of space. Numerous actions are instantly compressed into one field and the sense of tension wells up. Such representational methods are not only used for humans, but even more for animals, and humans and animals equally, without bias: Batu’s big, dark horse snorted, its eyes glared and it ferociously stomped, kicked, bucked, and bit, heedless of their biting and clawing as it fought on for its life. More wolves closed in around them, lunging in front and rushing in from behind, their fangs focused viciously on attacking the dark horse … (48). A white horse took the lead, raising its head and whinnying loudly as a sign that it was assuming leadership of the herd. With this leader the horse herd took on courage … shoulder to shoulder, stomachs brushing against stomachs, so closely wedged that even wind could not pass through, hundreds of horse hooves struck with great force, stomping, crushing, kicking (44; 72). With time at a relative standstill, the numerous swift, excited acts of stomping, crushing, kicking, bucking, biting, and so forth, increase the quality of space and the depth of the atmosphere. This also is a kind of rhythm: the static and the active happening in the same space at the same time, obviously not natural behavior, but the result of artistic creativity. Marx commented: “the forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present.”81 Here it takes on another meaning and makes us take a new look at the irreplaceable role of art in the humanization of nature, which is also the ‘humanization of [natural] humans.’ It is worth noting that in this novel the scenes complementary to battle ­action are not peace, but scenes of those ‘killed in action.’ After the fighting commences there are always heroic scenes of sacrifice, as when the horses flee the wolf pack:

81

Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1988), 109.

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Now hopelessly mired in the bog, they hesitated briefly before mustering the strength to plow into the deepest part, choosing self-inflicted death and burial in the bog over letting the wolves feed on their flesh and prevail in their quest for vengeance (50; 81). Such heroic description is also used to describe the grassland wolves, as when men and dogs corner an old wolf: … the wolf sprang from the precipice onto a slope with loose rocks, digging in with its claws and flattening out against the rocky ground to slide down the mountain, carried by the flow of rocks. As the rocks pressed into its body, a cloud of gray sand quickly swallowed the wolf up, all but buried it (184; 287). In response to this act, “Yang Ke stood silently with lowered head, recalling a film he had seen in middle school, ‘Five Fighters of Wolf Fang Mountain [Langya shan wu zhuangshi]’” (184). Bao Shungui, the soldier devoted to killing wolves, is also deeply moved: “people are no match for a wolf” (185; 288). Such profound respect among adversaries is always moving, such is its heart shaking power. To be heart shaking or soul stirring is the writer’s strategy and his goal. The story is a means, a gimmick, to induce people to read and only afterward to think. The description deliberately appeals to a low common denominator, like street acrobats banging on drums and gongs to gather onlookers before their graceful display of dazzling skill. It is very consistent with Constantin Stanislavski’s “art experience,” something Russian in style and traditional that was familiar to the author and close to him. The author completely immersed himself passionately in his creativity in order to stir himself. Jiang Rong believed: If you cannot stir yourself you certainly can’t move anyone else…. When I was writing I was like a nuclear reactor undergoing fission! That heat, that elevated psyche and emotional explosion had to be conveyed to readers to be certain of giving them a powerful emotional experience.82 Passion ignited forms enormous tension, and combined with the expansive sense of space, the description of each scene is lively. One of the most moving of these scenes is set at night when the young wolf howls all night attempting to return to its pack: 82

Interview with the author, April 3, 2006.

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“Wu … ou …” the short sound lengthened, with the sound of an infant nursing, like that of the vertical bamboo flute, of reed instruments, small bells, horns, its sound trailing off, then hanging in the air … pushing the air up from its abdomen, expelling it evenly in a long sustained sound, [the wolf] continued to use every ounce of excitement (258). In the depth of the night only the sound of wolf howls fills the grassland. No one appears, although Chen Zhen is present. He can see nothing in the night, yet still he bears witness, using his identity as someone present and a sympathy that compares his feelings with the wolf’s, shifting human ­psychological activity entirely to the wolf’s life, and using associations of personification to complete his role as witness. Throughout the entire process there are only the howls of the wolves, no words and no action, except that the sound of the howling is also an act, deeply meaningful, moving, and prompting questions. Is speech a form of action? Is vocalizing a form of action? In the grassland, in the face of a myriad of creatures, this question is unavoidable. For animals that cannot speak making use of one’s own voice is not only a form of action, but also the way that they express wishes or declare feelings, and an important means to look out for each other in order to survive. When voices are massed together it can be spectacular: The caravan of carts and horses went along with drinking and singing…. Music filled the air: Mongol folk songs, songs of praise, war chants, drinking songs, and love songs—the dam had broken. The forty or fifty furry Mongol dogs were acting like children, giddily showing off on this rare and happy occasion, running around the carts, rolling in the dirt, playfighting and flirting (24; 35). Honoré de Balzac’s techniques for describing sounds charmed Maxim Gorky who said that he, “just by using some disconnected phrases of idle conversation painted a strikingly clear depiction of different characters and their personalities.”83 After reading the novel La Peau de chagrin, Gorky “was astonished that I still seem to hear so many different voices. Yet what is most important was that I not only hear but also see who is talking, see their eyes, their smiles and gestures, even though Balzac did not describe the faces or ­appearance of these clients of the banker.”84 The artistic appeal of sound is 83 Gaoerji 高 尔 基 [Maxim Gorky], Lun wenxue xubian 论 文 学 续 编 [On literature: the continuation], trans. Bingyi 冰 夷 et al. (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1979), 174. 84 Gaoerji 高 尔 基 [Maxim Gorky], Lun wenxue 论 文 学 [On literature], trans. Meng Chang 孟 昌 et al. (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1978), 183.

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e­ vident. The aesthetic effect of deliberately using and properly employing sound will produce double the result for half the effort, to great effect in setting off the atmosphere of a scene and the personalities of characters. In Wolf Totem sound is a major component second only to color (discussed in the ­following chapter), performing an indispensable role in the depiction of largescale battle scenes. But unlike Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine, it comes from the creatures of nature, bearing two features. The first is that the clamor is not necessarily human voices: A crisp, ear-splitting clang, like a hammer on an anvil, tore through the silent air of the grassland and straight into the ears and the seats of courage of every wolf in the pack, like a sword. Nonnatural metallic noises frighten wolves more than any thunderstorms; they produce a sound that has a greater and more devastating impact on them than the snap of a hunter’s trap. The wolves trembled when the first clangs from Chen’s stirrups resonated in the air (6; 6). The other feature is silence, the ‘sound’ with the greatest expressive force in the novel. In Chapter 1, when the big dark horse that Chen Zhen rides senses the threat from a wolf pack “its ears suddenly stopped moving, pointing straight back toward the ravine”; then, “the horse turned its ears to the rear, nervously monitoring the scout wolf’s movements” (6; 5). There is no sound at all, only the movements of ears, yet it produces the effect of being ‘louder than sound.’ Here, listening is a necessary means of staying alive, and not just a (politic) attitude. When the ‘monitoring’ of eyes is used with ears, extending the distance of eyesight where hearing reaches, sound becomes a visible witness, greatly expanding the realm of what is witnessed and the effectiveness of testimony. Whether there is sound or silence, the aim is to create a gripping atmosphere to prepare for the fighting. Once the fighting is underway, the vocabulary of the novel is mobilized like humans in war time, bringing in a large amount of sensual vocabulary, humans and animals together, stillness and movement combined, language and touch reaching into every space, with affecting details and sweeping spectacle mixed together. As the hunting party moves through the night to encircle wolves in ­Chapter 12, ­everything is in motion, but what is prominent in the darkness is the quietness: Winds from the northwest hit them full in the face, neither softly nor with excessive force (112; 178).

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The hunting party of mounted riders and dogs moved quietly through the night (112; 178). The main party followed closely behind, advancing quietly and q­ uickly, with no tittering among the women and children (113). The night was getting darker, and colder. The oppressive frigid air and encompassing darkness nearly took their breath away (114; 180). Once the fighting begins the clamor and light create an obvious contrast with the quiet and darkness, sound and light suddenly becoming important weapons in the fight. Then the old man’s dry, shrill voice broke the silence: “Wu—hu—” The sound echoed and splintered, and within seconds was answered: “Wu—hu—” “Yi—hu—” “Ah—hu—” Male voices, female voices, old voices, youthful voices, all merging together … the sound rumbled through the night, wave after wave pressing toward the northwest. At the same time more than a hundred dogs strained at their leashes and filled the air with frenzied barking, thundering through the sky. In the wake of the sound war, the opening salvos of a light war commenced, with beams from all sorts of flashlights sweeping the northwestern darkness. The inky-black, snow-covered ground suddenly reflected countless beams of cold light, creating a scene more awesome and more fearsome than a flash of swords slicing through the frigid air. Waves of sound and beams of light filled the gaps between the people and the dogs. The humans, the horses, the dogs, the sounds, and the lights formed a loose but effective, powerful, and dynamic net spreading over the wolf pack (114; 181). Description such as this is rare in war literature, and although people conduct the fighting, the nature of the fighting is different in at least two ways: One is that there is nothing called righteousness or justice and no injustice, only a contest of force. Second, there is nothing called victory or defeat, only a normal production activity. But for the fear factor, there would be a festival air about it, far from the life or death situations previously presented. Why is there this ­distinction? Ferdinand Saussure provides an answer when he points out: “A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas; but the pairing of a certain number of acoustical signs with as many cuts made from the mass of thought engenders a system of ­values; and

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this system serves as the effective link between the phonic and psychological elements within each sign.”85 In Wolf Totem this system is created centered on survival in primal nature, and no matter what distance is travelled, it always returns to this point of origin. Starting again from this point, it has its own basis for interpretation as described above: obviously, the scene described above is not modern warfare or mutual slaughter among humans, but one method of basic survival of early humans (and animals). Therefore, what we observe in this is not only bloodshed, but also the air of a game. What we hear are not only weeping and groans, but even more the courage and catharsis that arise from the foundation of life. This method of representing nature by fully using natural elements is related to the shift of subject position, addressing the fundamental demand for “the pairing of a certain number of acoustical signs with as many cuts made from the mass of thought” (as Saussure put it). This gives prominence to the spiritual power of the system of values of self-construction, so that we experience the power of attraction of ‘arbitrary’ linguistic signs combined with the spirit of ‘freedom’: Signs that are wholly arbitrary realize better than the others the ideal of the semiological process; that is why language, the most complex and universal of all systems of expression, is also the most characteristic; in this sense linguistics can become the master-pattern for all ­branches of ­semiology although language is only one particular semiological system.86 The linguistic system of Wolf Totem forms its own style, bringing multiple elements of nature into play and fully utilizing the pure, or ‘singular’ power of nature itself. A snowy lake in Chapter 3 typifies this distinctiveness: The crusty surface sparkled like ice, beautiful yet treacherous and ­cruel…. The winds that sweep across the land are like winnowing machines, removing the powdery snow and leaving a dense carpet of pellets that make up the snowy landscape…. After several blizzards have blown across the landscape, a three-inch crust, a mixture of ice and snow that is harder than snow alone but softer more brittle than ice, remains smooth and slippery…. There are few places that can withstand the sharp hooves of the Mongolian gazelles (26; 39).

85 86

Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: ­ hilosophical Library, 1959), 120. P Ibid., 68.

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The snowy landscape above is rife with killing, the force of a gigantic covering turning the landscape into “a deadly hidden weapon” (26; 39). Its singular nature gives exceptional prominence to its nature as “treacherous and cruel.” I was deeply moved by this. For a long time I had a phobic physical reaction to things and colors that were homogeneous. Whether watching “Travelling Among the Glaciers” or living on the Yellow Earth plateau, anything completely covered in white or yellow, or ubiquitous geometric land forms would inspire a nameless dread in me. I also did not like the ocean, living next to the ocean always made me want to run away. Why? I often asked myself, and here I found an answer: What is unbearable psychologically is not the physical thing itself, but a uniform color or shape. ‘Singleness’ can produce an authoritarian force seemingly close to a ‘homogenization,’ that silently and without opposition, can in a moment swallow and digest everything that is unlike it. Consider the colors black and white in Chapter 5: Dense dark clouds raced over from the northern horizon, tumbling and roiling their way through the blue sky, ferocious as dense smoke or a black fire. In a matter of seconds, clouds swallowed up many miles of mountain ranges, like a colossal black hand pressing down on the pastureland (41; 66). The snow stung like buckshot, whistling through the air as it tore millions of white scars across the sky…. The fur of each wolf was inlaid with snow driven there by the wind, turning it a spectral white. The wolves’ bodies appeared larger than usual, terrifyingly large, and so white it made the men’s skin crawl. A white wolf pack, a ghostly wolf pack, an evil wolf pack that frightened the herders half to death (42–43; 68–71). The dark ‘blackness’ of the night, the vast ‘whiteness’ of the snow create an extreme contrast, giving rise to an extreme atmosphere, the function of which is to add tension prior to the fight. As the colors of night and snow respectively, black and white are joined by red on account of the bloodshed: The grassland was transformed into an abbatoir. Horse after horse, gutted by its own hooves, lay writhing in the snow, wracked by spasms. In seconds, chests in which hot blood had flowed only moments before were now filled with ice. Surging horses blood stained the whirling snow with the spray of a million drops of blood … the ever bloodier snow and wind kept on hurrying them toward their ultimate death (50; 81). Thinking of the era and the place in which the story takes place, it was precisely the revolutionary period when red was the dominant color. Scholars of

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color have noted the eye-catching qualities of red: “Goethe finds in the pure red a high dignity and seriousness…. A bright landscape observed through a red glass impressed him as ‘awe-inspiring,’ remindful of the light that would spread over heaven and earth on the Day of Judgment.”87 But beyond these reasons, the worship of bloodshed and longing for sacrifice have become heroic sentiments among patriots of the Chinese national revolution ever since the late Qing dynasty. “Revolution required bloodshed, and so bloodshed took on a sense of the sacred.”88 Wolf Totem comprehensively represents that fundamental feature: its revolutionary ardor and its bloodthirsty romance. In the memoirs of those who experienced it, it has been called “blood-red sunset” or “blood-red romance.”89 Blood red retains the key note of red, while rubbing in the tone of life, as Wassily Kandinsky put it, A warm red tone will materially alter in inner value when it is no longer considered as an isolated colour, as something abstract, but is applied as an element of some other object, and combined with natural form. The variety of natural forms will create a variety of spiritual values, all of which will harmonize with that of the original isolated red. Suppose we combine red with sky, flowers, a garment, a face, a horse, a tree.90 Blood red as the dominant color staining a white snow-covered plain surges over one’s vision, and in a moment coagulates into a powerful force that is choking, conquering you, swallowing you, before you are even aware of it. Solid color is the image of uniformity. Among a hundred colors you can be yourself, existing in difference in a world of rich colors. Inside a single color you become someone else, in the singularity with no means to resist dissolving into no thing. 87 88

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Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954), 280. Arnheim cites Johann Goethe’s Theory of Colors. Chen Pingyuan 陈 平 原 , Zhongguo xiandai xueshu zhi jianli 中 国 现 代 学 术 之 建 立 [The establishment of modern Chinese scholarship] (Beijing: Beijing Daxue chubanshe, 1998), 223. Lao Gui 老 鬼 (Ma Bo马 波 ) Xuese huanghun 血 色 黄 昏 [Blood-red sunset] (Beijing: Gongren chubanshe, 1987), also a novel about educated youth from Beijing sent to ­Mongolia, was the first to adopt “blood-red.” Du Liang 都 梁 , Xuese langman 血 色 浪 漫 [Blood-red romance] (Wuchang: Changjiang wenyi chubanshe, 2004), about educated youth in Beijing, appeared as a 26-episode television drama, directed by Teng Wenji 滕 文 骥 . Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. Michael T.H. Sadler (New York: Dover, 1977), 48.

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That is how I unexpectedly came to know myself: my liberal tendencies were probably innate, not out of political ardor or enlightenment, but an instinctive refusal of life itself toward singleness. 3.2.2 Details: Sensuous Vocabulary In an artistic work the individuation and vitality of people, animals, or plants are, for the most part, conveyed through well-placed details. Details are not minor; the quality of a work is determined by details: “In fact, nothing is without importance in the formal domain, and it is the sum of these tiny details that decides the excellence or lack of merit in a work of art.”91 The accomplished depiction of detail in Wolf Totem is readily apparent. In appealing to the senses, the author’s attention to detail creates a number of new expressions, such as “the ice blue beauty of the heavens” (6; 5), “cold blue evening dress” (183; 286), “intoxicatingly beautiful” (316). This usage applies the language of life to nature and simultaneously projects the ‘feelings’ of nature onto humans. Such depiction displays the capacity of Han Chinese for nimble usage: independent sentences without subject or without predicate, words and expressions compounded at will, linguistic conditions supplying deep power for creating feelings. Han Chinese script has two important characteristics for conveying allegorical meaning. For most Han Chinese characters each independently has implied meaning, that is, they are not empty at the semantic level. There is great flexibility in using Han Chinese characters; they can individually provide meaning, can form a style, and may completely discard meaning. According to Kant, something may be fully “felt” only when “meaning” is discarded.92 Wolf Totem uses the autonomy and simplicity of Chinese script in an effort to provide a sense of ‘return to origins,’ while at the same time also using the semantic qualities of the script to create meaning deliberately conveying allegory. The depiction of details in the novel is primarily revealed in the selection and creative use of the characters and words, allowing life to infuse those same characters and words and to rename things in terms of the origins of each character. There are a large numbers of words in the novel for what can be strongly felt or sensed in body and mind, and these convey the countless lives of the grassland, showing each being’s life and vitality as much as possible within the space of vibrant language. Hence we see a ‘language of life’ related to the creatures of the grassland that echoes the ‘ecological structure’ of the entire novel and that together with it forms a whole signifying system. ­Knowing 91 92

Mario Vargas Llosa, Letters to a Young Novelist, 56. See Kant, Critique of Judgment, First Division: §5, §9; Appendix §84.

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this system is extremely important for criticism. “Words can be analyzed only in association with their surrounding environment.”93 In analyzing details it is necessary to “take each separate thing as part of a whole and the docking of a steamship as a part of its voyage”94 in order to avoid going off course in the process of analyzing fragments. What is this course? In the novel, the course of the text follows the logic of the grassland—in opposition to the logic of civilization and human culture— in order to rename. ‘Witnessing’ is therefore important, determining a priori the nature of the vocabulary relevant to the visual: it is the testimony of ‘presence,’ directly affecting the words of the testimony. Aristotle studied human cognition and the senses: All men by nature are actuated with the desire of knowledge, and an indication of this is the love of the senses; for even irrespective of their ­utility, they are loved for their own sake, and pre-eminently above the rest, the sense of sight. For not only for practical purposes, but also when not intent on doing anything, we choose the power of vision in preference, so to say, to all the rest of the senses. And a cause of this is the following,— that this one of the senses particularly enables us to apprehend whatever knowledge it is the inlet of, and that it makes many distinctive qualities manifest.95 Modern science demonstrates, “the dominant role played by vision in the sensory world of humans. A majority of the environmental information to which we respond is relayed to the brain by the visual system.”96 In genetic studies of groups and individuals, sight is the quickest sense to initiate response, and compared with other animals, when receiving conflicting information, human “vision is dominant,” while this is not entirely so in other animals. Experiments with infants discovered that hearing and touch appear earliest, while sight is the sensory system that is the last to mature. In studies of the dominance of and preference for vision, infants prefer complex figures97 and bright colors; the preference for simple figures and muted tones may be the result of h ­ uman 93 94 95 96 97

Wei Shikeluofusiji [Viktor Shklovsky], Sanwen lilun [Theory of prose], 148. Ibid., 148. The Metaphysics of Aristotle, trans. John H. M’Mahon (London: George Bell and Sonds, 1896), 1–2. Thomas Bennett, The Sensory World: An Introduction to Sensation and Perception (Pacific Grove, ca: Brooks/Cole Publishing Co, 1978), 47. Ibid., 206.

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cultural development. The descriptive methods in Wolf Totem, in such a ­genetic sense, are close to nature and the natural, somewhat primitive and immature, its scenes mostly filled with action, and the colors tending to bright red, yellow, and green. It extends visual function to every corner of every setting; whether day or night, ‘eyes’ are always present, while details in this wordless gaze are exhaustively revealed. Wherever Chen Zhen’s eyes are not only determines plot but also the ­selection of detail. The stories of nearly all the things, people, and animals are shown through his eyes. “As Chen Zhen looked through the telescope from his hiding place in the snow cave, he saw the steely gaze of a Mongolian grassland wolf” (1; 3). From this, the first sentence of the novel, Chen is reminded of being watched by the wolves: “all watching him straight on or out of the corners of their eyes, their gazes boring into him like needles” (3; 4). Thereafter, “nearly every night he spotted ghostly wolf outlines, especially during the frigid winter; two or three, perhaps five or six, and as many as a dozen pairs of glittering green lights moving around the perimeter of the grazing land, as far as hundred li or more distant. One night he and Bilgee’s daughter-in-law Gasmai, aided by flashlights, counted twenty-five of them” (7; 8). Such description is realistic: Wolves’ eyes are largely the same as humans’ and are ‘windows of the soul.’ Nomads say that if you encounter a wolf in the mountains, be sure never to return its glare. The ghostly blue green of their eyes is terrifying. Just to look into them is unforgettable.98 Chen Zhen has a particular interest in eyes. All one-on-one, face-to-face contact includes his distinctive response to the other’s eyes. Bilgee, for example, while out in the snow, has “light brown eyes, which gave off a heavy sheen, like pieces of amber” (11; 14). Encounters between animals are the same; all who look at each other are certain to have a reaction: “the rabbit dropped to the ground and curled into a ball, as if frightened to the core, … but its two big round eyes remained methodically fixed on the young wolf’s every move” (301). An exchange of looks occurs frequently in the novel, one method of direct communication between humans and animals, and the most important method of communicating among animals. The most frequently depicted exchanges, and the most unforgettable, are between Chen Zhen and the young wolf: 98

Wang Zu 王 族 , Lang jie: yu lang duishi ershiba tian de biji 狼 界 : 与 狼 对 视 28天 的 笔 记 [The world of wolves: notes on 28 days face to face with wolves] (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 2007), 158.

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The cub had small irises, dark and forbidding, like the tiny opening in the blowpipe used by the black man in Sherlock Holmes’s stories. When the cub was angry, Chen dared not look him in the eye, for fear that its eyes would shoot poison darts … The eyes alone could send chills down his spine (270–71; 399–400). Another pair of eyes together with the wolf cub’s becomes the eyes behind Chen Zhen’s throughout the novel. These are the eyes of nature, the wild and the free, in opposition to the civilized society that Chen Zhen has occupied. “Look at me; heal me.”99 Chen Zhen’s transformation from fearing wolves to respecting them is ­accomplished through protracted exchanges of looks and observation. It is a process of constant healing, and only by completing this ‘cure’ can he overcome traditional knowledge, find spiritual inspiration in the age-old enemy, the grassland wolf, and see the colorful exuberance of the poor and backward grassland: Mountains of many colors—dark and light green, brown, deep red, ­ urple—rose in waves as far as one could see, to merge with an ocean p of pink clouds…. The basin itself looked like a green carpet manicured by Tengger; patterns of blue, white, yellow, and pink mountain flowers formed a seamless patchwork of color (153; 240–41). In his youth Jiang Rong received artistic training, reminiscent of the childhood experience of the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky. Kandinsky put his early love of music into his painting to make direct use of musical sound and melody in painting, for which he gained the reputation of “painting music.”100 Applied to Jiang Rong the expression is apt, for the presentation of detail in Wolf Totem is like ‘writing painting.’ Applying artistic experience to literary creativity was probably something he could not help, so that it was by chance that he was innovative, a distinct style reminding us that ‘all roads lead to Rome.’ Applying the expressiveness of color in literary creativity and turning this into a style makes Wolf Totem one of a kind in contemporary Chinese literature. “The fact that color conveys strong expression is undisputed.”101 What

99 From the cover text of Wang Zu, Lang jie, citing a dictionary of Turkic language. 100 Translator’s Introduction in Concerning the Spiritual in Art by Wassily Kandinsky, trans. Michael T.H. Sadler (New York: Dover, 1977), xix. 101 Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, 326.

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the psychologist confirms here, the artist long asserted: “to a more sensitive soul the effect of colours is deeper and intensely moving.”102 In his application of colors, Jiang Rong has been thoughtful and avoided self-indulgence; whether cool or warm tones, matching them to the particular atmosphere of specific scenes, always shifting. In order to add to the tense atmosphere prior to fighting, he has used pure monochromatic dark and light colors, while in the passage cited below, we are given a lighter shade of green for obvious contrast with the bloodiness following fighting, in order to convey tranquility and peace: … they were mesmerized by the vast emerald grassland arrayed before them. Yang Ke felt as if the sight had turned his eyes green, and when he looked at the others, he saw the same color in theirs, like the beautiful yet terrifying eyes of a wolf on a winter night. As they made their way down the green mountain slope … [t]he horses’ hooves and the carts’ wheels were stained green, as were the ends of the lasso poles that scraped along the ground (178; 278). He employs yellow to represent the vitality of primal nature: Chen felt his eyes fill with the golden luster of daylilies, which had just bloomed on the mountainside. Tens of thousands of bushes, two feet tall, offered up large, trumpet-shaped yellow flowers, with long, thin new buds dotting the branches below, ready to open soon. Chen Zhen sat among the wild daylilies and rape flowers as if in a field of rape flowers far to the south in the Jiangnan region (202; 312; orig. trans.). Yang Ke also recounts his response to monochrome color, the “monochromatic green panorama” (178; 278), in comparison to which he prefers the rich coloration of his beloved swan lake: Ripples appeared on the lake surface, those in the west mirroring the cold blueness of the night sky, while those in the east reflected the warm colors of sunset. The ripples spread slowly, concentric circles of agate red, emerald green, translucent yellow; then came crystal purple, sapphire blue, and pearl white, alternating cool and warm, the tones of noble ­quality…. Tengger had sent down the precious lights as a prelude to the parting of its beloved swans from the clear waters (183; 285). 102 Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 24.

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It will not escape our observation of the words here that the colors of this passage are not monochromatic, but are combinations of gemstones, producing a very strong sense of the material. Grammatically the passage inverts the normal positions of substantive and modifier: normally color should serve as an adjective modifying a nominal of physical substance. Here, rather, verifiably physical objects (agate, emerald, crystal, sapphire, pearl) become adjectives modifying colors. They are combined cleanly and neatly, with a natural aptness, challenging modern Han Chinese grammatical standards while demonstrating the capacity for expressiveness in Han Chinese literature. Here, the characters used are not just signs, but also symbols, even ‘objects’ or ‘things’ in themselves. Jiang Rong understood that “admixtures [of different colors] enhance expression by introducing a strong dynamic quality.”103 He deftly employed the “­syntax of mixtures”104 in a literary work, consciously fashioning strong aesthetic impact. Where admixtures in painting observe closely the mixing of similar or identical hues, the author crossed the boundaries to experiment with synesthesia, mixing the senses of sight and touch, as in “cold blue sky,” or mixing touch and smell, as in “a chilled fragrance” (114; 180). Skill in color appears in “their faces were drained of color, like the dirty snow alongside the yurt” (106; 169). Sound is represented in the way wolves “set up a quivering buzz like wind whistling past electric wires, a sound filled with deathly terror and agitation” (49; 80). Viktor Shklovsky believed, “Chinese literature is not only expressed in characters, in pictographs. It simultaneously is also founded on a unique pictographic thought … In this literature objects dominate over action, over verbs. Such a literature is essentially visual.”105 Wolf Totem is an example of this. It not only puts into play the potential of Han Chinese script for visual language, but also fully displays its function of ‘cleaning up’ ( jìnghùa 净 化 ). Sartre was one of the writers who clearly recognized the cleansing function of sight. Through the character Roquentin in the novel Nausea, he wrote: “sight is an abstract invention, a [cleaned up] simplified idea, one of man’s ideas.”106 It is what functions best between ‘me’ and the world. The function referred to here is communication, and is also knowledge. The ‘exchange of looks’ is a 103 Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, 333. 104 Ibid., 334. 105 Wei Shikeluofusiji [Viktor Shklovsky], Sanwen lilun [Theory of prose], 179. 106 Jean Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Directions, 1964), 131. “… la vue, c’est une invention abstraite, une idée nettoyée, simplifiée, une idée d’homme.” La nausée (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), 186. A variant translation reads, “sight is an abstract invention, an idea that has been cleaned up, simplified, one of man’s ideas.” See http:// www.luc.edu/faculty/twren/phil120/ch10/nausea.htm [Translator’s note].

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means of communication, one that may increase or reduce hatred. ‘Observing’ is also a means of knowing the world, and can aid humans in simplifying or cleansing their spirit in the course of understanding. Remarkable depiction of detail is based on serious observation over a long period of time. On this point the author stated, “capturing detail is a matter of observation. Each detail is something that has come out of observation, study, and turning it over in my mind.” Taking the description of the “snow cavities” as an example, he continued: When there is a crust of snow on the grassland, each stalk of grass protrudes through the crust, and below each tip there is a small hollow the size of a finger. So why is there a tiny pit beneath the stalk?…. Later on I discovered that when the wind blows and shakes the grass, a few grains of sand will fall down into a hollow, so this hollow is created by the shaking!107 As a result, a new word, yáomó (摇 磨 ), appears in Chapter 3: The surface [of the snow] was peppered with holes about the thickness of a chopstick tip. A dry yellow stalk of grass stood rigidly in the middle of each hole. The small holes were from the wind shaking and rubbing [yáomó 摇 磨 ] the grass tips. Bilgee said, “Tengger gave those air holes to the wolves. Without them, how could they detect the smell of their dead victims in snow this deep?’ (25; 38; orig. trans.). The captivating quality of the details comes from real life. However, critics have historically never dwelt overly much on detail or realism in allegorical works. Whether an allegory has borrowed from the past to criticize the present or ‘pointed at a mulberry bush while cursing an ash tree,’ it is whether its point has been credible that has been of concern. Especially in the case of Wolf Totem, the theme has given the author considerable freedom and enormous space to follow his imagination. Whether as allegory or the topic of a totem, the author could give full rein to his imagination and write freely. Yet he has done the opposite, to write realistically and “to root fiction in the real world.”108

107 Jiang Rong’s comments during interview with the author, April 3, 2006. 108 Roland Barthes, “An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative,” New Literary History, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Winter 1975): 249.

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Isn’t this allegory? What need is there to be so authentic in the details? If it really is allegory, what is the purpose of such realistic details? The point of being realistic is to stir genuine feelings. It is through encountering one life after another that the reader comes to know and feel and be touched. And the author, through one realistic detail after another lures the reader toward ‘truth’—a process that is highly abstract, drawing on the story to connect to allegory, and through genuine feelings raise serious thought. The closer the story is to truth, the more profoundly we are drawn to the allegory to which the story leads and accept what the author wants to say as true. As the Swiss painter Jean Etienne Liotard once wrote, “Painting is the most astounding sorceress. She can persuade us through the most evident falsehoods that she is pure Truth.”109 Introducing elements of painting into text strengthens its credibility; applied to allegorical creation, it provides a place to hide the effects of the utmost in pretense. “The most frequently used method of sensory abstraction, of creating concrete concepts, is the emphasis and enlargement of details.”110 Enlarged details have two important functions: to direct our attention, and to deliberately conceal other parts. Such a detail “is the part that is responsible for and summons to our imagination the whole.”111 The techniques of Wolf Totem are, to be sure, ordinary, without a sign of the formal rebelliousness of modernist literature. It seeks to draw on accepted traditional methods to win over the reader. In description of detail it consciously enlarges the sensory functions and deploys every possible element to attract the reader’s attention in order to serve aesthetic effects that are ‘appealing’ and ‘easily understood,’ as well as those ­having audial and emotive appeal. Hence, apart from colors that satisfy visual pleasure, the novel also contains various sounds that have audial appeal. There are the sounds of dogs: “Bilgee’s five or six hunting dogs, together with their neighbors’ dogs, were fighting other wolves east of the pen. The barks, the howls, and the agonizing cries of dogs shook heaven and earth” (8; 9). Sheep are heard: “Nearly two thousand grown sheep and ewes baa’ed and meh’ed to their lambs, and the lambs responded, so that the sounds of bleating shook heaven and earth as if wolves were attacking the flock” (139). In the torments of extreme circumstances, humans and animals weep together: “Cows, and sheep, and horses, all half dead from 109 Jean Etienne Liotard, cited in Ernst Hans Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (London: Phaidon, 1977), 29. 110 Yvette Biró, Profane Mythology: The Savage Mind of the Cinema, 46. 111 Ibid., 47.

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cold and hunger, made a dash for [the grass] as soon as it came into view, all of them making desperate sounds of their own kind. As for the people, they threw themselves down onto the snow and wept …” (12; 15). When better days arrive, humans and animals raise their voices in celebration together in sheer delight: [W]hat had been virgin land only the day before was now a pasture on which the sounds of singing, whinnying, bleating, and lowing were carried on the wind; joy was in the air, emanating from the people, the horses, the sheep and goats, and the cows (188; 293). Nearly everything, whether animal or plant, makes whatever sound it can: the sound of wind, sand, grass, trees, even the crust of snow under the felt boats that “cracked and crunched” (28; 43). Sounds, here, are even more important than in a novel set entirely among humans. The creatures of the grassland, endowed with senses but not human language, make sounds their major form of communicating. Given the shift of subject position, it is understandable that they also need to be understood, be recorded, and have their existence communicated. When we are able to listen with a normal state of mind, to record and display their sounds, that is also giving them equal rights of ‘speech.’ The discursive power of forms of life on the grassland appears through making sounds. Making the sounds, however, is only one aspect; who is listening? You write what you hear! You hear what you read! “In humans, the sense of audition, or hearing, is secondary in importance to vision. For many animals, however—particularly subprimate mammals that hunt at night—audition is the dominant sensory modality.”112 On the primitive grassland, Mongol warriors also used to convey orders through sounds, and based on that they developed numerous tunes and melodies.113 Therefore, we will not find it strange to note why Wolf Totem contains so many ‘significant’ sounds: 112 Thomas L. Bennett, The Sensory World: Introduction to Sense Perception, 81. 113 “For the Mongols … even the officers were illiterate. All communication at every level had to be oral, not written…. To ensure accurate memorization, the officers composed their orders in rhyme, using a standard system known to every soldier.” Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Broadway Books, 2005), 88.

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Before long they heard the chirps and squeaks of marmots…. From every hole, it seemed, a female emerged to survey the area, and when they saw there were no predators nearby, they chirped a slow, rhythmic all-clear signal, following which hordes of young animals shot out of the holes and began eating clumps of grass as far as thirty or forty feet from the safety of their holes … If their winged natural enemies descended, the marmot mothers chirped a frantic warning … (207; 315). Here, making noise does not only signify the democratic appeal to speak, and listening is assuredly not a condescending attitude of political correctness; rather, the two are basic means of survival for creatures living in nature. In the evening, from far away, there is a symphony of wolf calls in a place forbidding to humans: … he heard the mournful baying of a wolf—Ow … ow … ow—trailing off slowly, with only the briefest of pauses between each pure, resonant trill, a sound mellow yet sharp-edged, simultaneously seeping into and boring through the consciousness. Before the sound had died out, low echoes rebounded from the mountains on three sides—north, south, and east— and swirled in the valleys and in the basin, as well as along the lakeshore, where they merged with the rustling of reeds in the gentle breezes to create a chorus of wolf, reed, and wind (237; 354). Next, we hear the battle of sounds unique to the grassland: Once the dogs stopped barking, the grassland became so quiet one could hear the rustling of reeds. The wolf leader began baying again; the answering calls of more wolves, like three walls of sound beating down on the camps, were so loud that they drowned out the dogs, whose barks had a flustered, surging quality. All the night-watch women … cried out: Ah-he … wu-he … yi-he … wave after wave of shrill cries pressing down on the wolf pack. Taking their cue from their human masters, the dogs set up a ferocious storm of noise: a mixture of barks, howls, roars, provocations, intimidations, and jeers produced a cacophonous drumbeat (237; 355). At this point we have to accept Susanne Langer’s lofty summation, her belief that once the “framework” of a work of art is established, the whole realm of sense perception furnishes symbolic material … ­Surfaces, colors, textures and lights and shadows. Tones of every pitch

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and quality, vowels and consonants, swift or heavy motions—all things that exhibit definite qualities—are potential symbols of feeling, and out of these the illusion of organic structure is made.114 Wolf Totem is this way, bringing into play fully all sorts of sensory elements, from “surfaces, colors, textures and lights and shadows” to “tones of every pitch and quality, vowels and consonants, swift or heavy motions.” Beyond colors and sounds, there are also tastes and smells. Scientifically, the sense of smell is one of the senses that humans currently understand the least, because “in comparison with many other animal species, the sense of smell is almost rudimentary.”115 This is not so for the novel, where smells and tastes of the grassland are everywhere among its details: In the sunshine, “[t]he air was filled with the smell of mountain onions and wild garlic as sheep and their lambs grazed the land, heavy and acrid” (188; 293). As wolves slaughter gazelles, “[t]he frigid air suddenly filled with the heavy stink of blood” (19; 28). When people use dead horses to prepare a trap, “only the smell of horsemeat, horse grease, and horse dung hung in the air—no human or metal odors,” and even the crafty wolves are fooled (80; 128). Cultural historians have pointed out, “smell holds a deep, important place within steppe culture.”116 Living in the harsh environment of the primitive grassland, people and animals alike develop an uncommon sense of smell: “The moment he stepped out of the yurt, he could smell the coming blizzard…. Two horses seemed to smell something, throwing their heads up in a desperate attempt to turn and flee from the wind” (42–43; 69; orig. trans.). Such description comes from the author’s own experience and from his love of the grassland creatures. Here, every sensory organ or sense is not only aesthetic, but also an important means of staying alive or fighting, and is a mark of identity: [The wolf cub] sniffed his way to a clump of cogon grass, and, all of a sudden, the hair on his back stood up like quills. His eyes lit up in surprise and joy, while he continued to sniff at the clump of grass as if wanting to bury his head in it…. Erlang and Yellow sniffed at the grass … it dawned on Chen that the cub and the dogs had detected the smell of wolf urine (272; 401). Using a large quantity of terms for sensory organs is a major feature of modernist literature. Kafka’s The Metamorphosis shows the change in the visual 114 Susanne Langer, Problems of Art, 179–80. 115 Thomas L. Bennett, The Sensory World: Introduction to Sense Perception, 109. 116 Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, 12.

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world, for example; Marcel Proust gave the classic description of taste through the madeleine in Remembrance of Things Past; and Sartre introduced Nausea through three sensations of touch. Sartre believed that “the sense of touch, in everyday life, produces a much more intimate feeling,” while “smell is already more suspect: it implies a penetration of the body by the unknown thing.”117 Experiments with animals have demonstrated that “touch—one of the somesthetic senses—is certainly a source of a great deal of sensory experiences,”118 and is an important source of human feeling. Wolf Totem provides a generous amount of terms for the sense of touch, but not the same as Sartre’s. They arise, not from ideas, but from close contact over a long period of time with all manner of grassland animals. There is Chen Zhen’s contact with the wolf cub: He frequently opened the cub’s mouth and tapped his fingers against the fangs, making a sound dang-dang like stainless steel. They were strong and tough, the tips sharper than an awl. The enamel was much harder than that on the teeth of humans (271; 400; orig. trans.). The numerous references to the sense of touch are not necessarily deliberate artistic technique, but are a means of representing the association of humans with animals. This is an important mode of mutual understanding in an environment shared by humans and animals: ever present, yet not apparent; extremely natural, yet easily overlooked. This method of representing the union of ‘object/self’ is one of the aesthetic effects that the novel deliberately pursues. The author describes them with a human sense of life. Hence, “the sun shivered from the deepening cold before retreating to the horizon and slipping from view” (4; 3); “several puffs of white clouds brushed the sky clean” (12; 16; orig. trans.). Such expressions of personification fill the whole grassland with images of the subject: Early morning. Clouds darkened the sky and pressed down on the distant mountains, shaving off the peaks. The Olonbulag seemed flatter than ever, and gloomier. Snow swirled lightly; the wind barely blew. ­Metal chimneys poking through the tops of yurts were like asthma victims struggling to breath, releasing an occasional cough and sending puffs of smoke to settle on the ground around the snow-covered barracks that was dotted by animal droppings, patches of hair, and tufts of dying grass (68; 108). 117 Alain Robe Grillet, “Nature, Humanism, and Tragedy,” New Left Review I.31 (May-June 1965): 73–74. 118 Thomas L. Bennett, The Sensory World: Introduction to Sense Perception, 105.

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The remarkable description of detail in the novel has strong aesthetic appeal. Through vivid detail we are shown that the term shift of subject position is predicated on the complete withdrawal of human society. It is only on this premise that life forms can appear before us as equals, fully displaying their own natures, free of human interference. Their behavior is not fictive personification, but spontaneous and autonomous, neither subordinated to human will nor destined to serve humankind. An inherent biological chain is linked together, combining realistic awareness of existence with a sense of crisis of the ­moment, brilliantly presented in language of the senses. What is termed empathy is fully achieved through a language of life that obliterates self and object, not only through the shift of subject position, but even more in the depiction of detail. With the story over, this textual analysis also concludes. Yet the questions have not ended. The author’s initial purpose was not to write a story, so why put such effort into literary form and language? The appealing stories seem to be only gimmickry. As a painstakingly crafted full-length allegorical novel, the vehicle of this allegory may be loaded with an excess of allegorical significance, requiring criticism to go deeper and continue to pursue questions: what is it saying? What does it mean to say? And there are some questions left for the reader and for myself: what do we hear in this, and what does that lead us to think? Bearing these questions, we emerge from the confines of the allegorical vehicle, and make our own way toward the allegory. Criticism is also like a cicada emerging from its shell, released from the bonds of text and language, moving calmly toward interpretation in depth.

Part 2 Allegorical Interpretation

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How Many Allegories are Contained in Wolf Totem? The Utopian Boat: A Journey of Redemption Has a Nearly Inaccessible Destination The body is the fable; the soul the moral.

jean de la fontaine, Preface to The Fables

∵ In the eyes of critics, literature can be a form of philosophy, thought packaged in pictographic signs, and the purpose of literary research is to acquire the core thought. But then, as Hans Georg Gadamer argues, “In philosophy what we are trying by ever renewed seeking to attain in our thinking is the greatest possible closeness to what is in question.”1 Today critics in open discourse have inaugurated a plural ‘post-’ era, in which the method of deliberately seeking the core is outdated, and the aim of criticism has drawn ever closer to the ultimate goal of philosophy: to know oneself—to understand from various angles a world of plurality and a human life of complexity. Roland Barthes in S/Z: An Essay personally set the example for a model of post-criticism in order to demonstrate that: “To interpret a text is not to give it a (more or less justified, more or less free) meaning, but on the contrary to appreciate what plural constitutes it.”2 Serious critics have thus emphasized that in literature, “[t]hese fantastic card palaces should not, of course, obscure the real problem of a general history of mankind.”3 And these critics have further clarified the task of literary scholarship: “Instead of speculating on such large-scale problems as the philosophy of history and the ultimate integral of civilization, the literary student should turn his attention to the concrete problem not yet solved or even adequately discussed: the question of how ideas actually enter into literature.”4 Walter Benjamin believed that a truly superb literary work has siblings in philosophy. Criticism has the task of understanding them in order to reveal 1 Gadamer in Conversation, 62–63. 2 S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Macmillan, 1975), 5. 3 Wellek and Warren, 122. 4 Ibid.

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secrets in the works, discover questions, and try to seek answers. When settling questions, new questions will emerge, and the questioning and answering, together with the entanglement of answers may push understanding deeper. Good art “enters into the most precise relation to philosophy,” establishing with philosophy “an affinity with the ideal of the problem.”5 Wolf Totem is such a work. Its author was not a member of the literary profession, but a scholar and teacher. His work involved scholarly fields relevant to his experience, such as history, philosophy, anthropology, economics, political science, and so forth. In that way the novel produces an affinity with the ideal of problems in a ­number of academic disciplines: “the ideal can represent itself solely in a multiplicity.” The writing of Wolf Totem—regardless whether one agrees with its viewpoint—displays this multiplicity. “The ideal of the problem … lies buried in a manifold of works, and its excavation is the business of critique.”6 Turning to the interpretation of allegory, I think first of the British prose writer John Ruskin, whose presentations of literary criticism are like maxims and have remained fresh each time I have encountered them in my scholarly career: “his words are as the rock which you have to crush and smelt in order to get at it … Do not hope to get at any good author’s meaning without those tools and that fire.”7 That is to say, if a scholar wants a comprehensive understanding of a work, then relying on enthusiasm or one’s point of view is inadequate, and other tools to assist analysis are needed. Turning to Wolf Totem, where are my analytical tools? Since the novel involves a number of disciplines, making use of the analytical methods of the relevant disciplines and reviewing the results of existing research are necessary if we want to clarify its line of reasoning. This study also aims at deconstructing or revising traditional theory, and therefore cannot be limited to one method. More than a selection of methods, it is an attitude: 1.

For the allegory that Wolf Totem may convey in the deconstruction of methods in related scholarly fields, I use the work as the essential text, to confirm or revise theory, without deliberately conforming to the tenets of any scholarly group. Although close reading and deconstruction are the methods that I use most in analyzing texts, being the most fundamental methods, it is not necessary to adhere rigidly to the category of purely

5 “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” in Walter Benjamin Selected Writings: 1913–1926, Volume 1, 334. 6 Ibid. 7 John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies (London: George Allen, 1894); Online resource: Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1293/pg1293.html.

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textual formalism; historical and lived experience are for me the most important elements for stimulating thought. Respecting the scholarly achievements of traditional aesthetics in China and abroad still does not limit me to one particular framework of aesthetic theory. Using different methods of analysis for different objects of analysis allows the discourse of the text itself to enjoy freely moving space. I make use of semiology and postmodern theory, but not necessarily to confirm existing theory or follow its implied orientation. Its orientation and the conclusions drawn here may be just the opposite of each other.

In employing these methods I agree with Gadamer’s view that method cannot determine truth: “As tools, methods are always good to have. But one must understand where these can be fruitfully used.”8 Asking whether productive scholarship is defined by method, Gadamer states: “No, it is not their mastery of methods but their hermeneutical imagination that distinguishes truly productive researchers. And what is hermeneutical imagination? It is a sense of the questionableness of something and what this requires of us. …. As Kant has said: There is no rule for how one learns to apply the rules correctly.”9 All the topics in this study begin with questions; questions are the keys to opening up a train of thought. We come to the question: “How do we come to pose our questions? When we pose them, how do we go about answering them?”10 Here I also follow Gadamer: “In order to come up with an answer, the person then begins asking questions. But no one asks questions von sich aus [just from oneself]—apropos of nothing.”11 Thus, this chapter consists largely of two things. One is posing questions, the premise of hermeneutics, exploring as much as possible the questions that the text of Wolf Totem poses explicitly or implicitly. The other is offering responses, conducting probing interdisciplinary allegorical interpretations with the “open” thought advocated by Umberto Eco that deconstructs the text from various angles.12 8

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gadamer in Conversation: Reflections and Commentary (New ­ aven: Yale, 2001), 41. H 9 Ibid., 42. 10 Ibid., 50. 11 Ibid. 12 Umberto Eco, The Open Work (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1989). Eco, a founder of modern interpretation, published this study in 1962, opening the door to postmodern ‘open hermeneutics.’

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Being confronted with so many conflicting criticisms of Wolf Totem, I still think of Ruskin. In his magnificent collection of critical writings Sesame and Lilies, Ruskin admonished scholars: “the first thing you have to do for them, and yourself, is eagerly and scornfully to set fire to this; burn all the jungle into wholesome ash-heaps, and then plough and sow. All the true literary work before you, for life, must begin with obedience to that order, ‘Break up your fallow ground, and sow not among thorns.”13 Therefore, the method of allegorical interpretation that I have selected consistent with textual analysis begins with Wolf Totem. If one says that it is allegorical, then it is necessary to explain: How many allegorical meanings does it contain, and what kind of allegorical meanings? The former involves quantity and classification; the latter its qualities as allegory. These questions can only be answered through specific analysis and interpretation of allegorical meaning. 4.1

In Terms of Semiotics: How Many Meanings Lie Hidden in Wolf Totem? The Text is plural. This does not mean just that is has several meanings, but rather that it achieves plurality of meaning, an irreducible plurality. roland barthes14

To start with reader-response theory, the literary critic Wolfgang Iser believed that four perspectives appear simultaneously during the process of reading: the perspectives of narrator, characters, plot, and fictitious reader.15 These four perspectives may all convey allegorical significance in an allegorical work, being the goal that the scholar must deliberately uncover. Discovering the moral in traditional allegories is not difficult. The vehicle of the allegory, the story itself, for the most part has a relatively fixed symbolism, and good and evil are obvious. The modern allegory, however, is different, with innovative styles and metamorphosing characters that may all have ‘significance,’ and meanings that often are images or even the form itself. Formalist criticism became the

13 14 15

http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1293/pg1293.html. Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” in Josue V. Harari, ed., Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Poststructuralist Criticism (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1979), 76. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 96.

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mainstream that once dominated literary theory, intimately related to the allegorical nature of modernist literature and allegorical style.16 Wolf Totem clearly blurs the boundaries between tradition and the modern. It makes use of the traditional to question the modern, uses ‘old’ and ‘natural’ images, and employs traditional artistic creative methods. In its moral it also seems like the venerable wise man of traditional fable, given to lecturing on the ingrained habits of Chinese intellectuals. The intellectuals’ sincerity in offering words of advice for the nation’s welfare fill the pages, giving vent to the resentments of the colonizers and the colonized, so that when conflict comes they become the targets. So there are two markers and two avenues of analysis for this allegorical interpretation. One is to uncover the author’s original intention. To go in this direction, besides textual analysis, it is necessary to carry out research on the author and his creative background, uncovering the things behind the text that influenced his motives for writing. I made the necessary preparations before setting out to write, and had probing, candid conversations with the author … All these were helpful to analyzing the allegorical meaning, but were not the purpose of the interpretation. For what I needed to uncover was thinking and allegorical meaning inside and outside the text, not anything to do with the author’s private life. The second is to uncover the implied allegorical meaning through textual analysis, which is the task of this chapter. The allegorical meaning of a work is related to its artistic quality and intellectual content. This indicates the advantage of Wolf Totem as a full-length novel. Over the long period of experimentation by authors, historically, the novel form gradually developed into maturity, so that now “its form is elastic, and allows of practically limitless complication or simplification, because its structural resources are immensely varied and rich.”17 Hence, the novel offers an excellent vehicle for allegorical writing. Fiction and allegory may be put together, but neither is subordinate to the other. As an art, allegory has had a history of success and failure and has ­gradually gone from a rigid didacticism with a simple symbolic text to an ‘open’ artistic category that can contain all kinds of artistic genres and creative ­methods. “All species of literature may, in fact, intersect, because their separateness is never absolute.”18 Fiction is thinking in images; its subject is human. Allegory, however much it makes use of images, has ‘thinking’ for its 16 17 18

See the first section of Chapter 1 for the discourse of Walter Benjamin and Fredric Jameson on allegory. Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form, 287. Ibid., 304.

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subject, not the ­images themselves. The logic of fiction serves the ­development of its characters’ personalities, with the author usually led along by the fate of the protagonist (like Leo Tolstoy and his Anna Karenina); the soul of allegory is thought, and all the characters and events are marionettes in the author’s hands, abstractions that through a semiotic process are artistically completed as images used to express thought. The Danish director Carl Dreyer spoke incisively on abstraction in art: “The shortest way to abstraction is the s­ implification that transforms thought into symbol.”19 The symbol is what, for Wolfgang Iser, “has significance.” Wolf Totem adopts this method, turning the entire story into a complete ­symbolic system, all description carrying significance, all things to varying degrees a­ bstracted from their original individual (social/­natural) ­relations, and becoming vehicles of thought, meaningful ­symbols. This provides convenience for the scholar: through things in the story that have sig­ nificance, it is possible to uncover the allegorical significance in the text within the category of semiology—this is the task of this section, and the basis for analysis and deconstruction in the succeeding sections. Semiology is a shortcut to studying Wolf Totem. In the field of archetypal criticism, ‘wolf’ and ‘totem’ are significant things, two important traditional topics in the study of motifs. The ‘wolf totem’ itself is a symbol, a typical utopian symbol, which makes evident the basic orientation of the story and the redemptive significance that it seeks to convey. The scholar of mythology Ye Shuxian was the first in the scholarly community to respond to Wolf Totem, initially taking a semiotic approach to place it against the background of global dissemination and look at its trans-cultural significance.20 This was an approach close to hermeneutics and was one that was able to find ample interpretative space in comparative cross-cultural study. Regrettably, he soon switched to empirical historical criticism in an attempt “to treat the wolf totem seriously as scholarship in order to avoid being misguided by the understanding that the novel’s fictitiousness leads to.”21 From 19 20

21

Cited in Yvette Biró, Profane Mythology, 31. Ye Shuxian 叶 舒 宪 , “Renleixue rechao beihou qianyinzhe wenhua fansi yu pipan jingshen 人 类 学 热 潮 背 后 潜 隐 着 文 化 反 思 与 批 判 精 神 [The spirit of cultural reflection and criticism behind the enthusiasm for anthropology],” Wenyi bao March 25, 2006. Through his semiotic study, Ye believed that the sales of Harry Potter, The Da Vinci Code, and Wolf Totem were related to their subversion or use of major cultural symbols in history. Ye Shuxian, “Lang tuteng, haishi xiong tuteng? Guanyu Zhonghua zuxian tuteng de bianxi yu fansi 狼 图 腾 ， 还 是 熊 图 腾 ﹖ 关 于 中 华 祖 先 图 腾 的 辨 析 与 反 思 ­ [Wolf ­totem or bear totem? An analysis and reflection on totems of Chinese ancestors],” ­Zhongguo shehuikexue yuan yuanbao, June 15, 2006.

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there on the study veered far away from literary criticism and departed from semiotic study as well, becoming devoted to distinguishing the true from the false in the question of ethnic totems.22 On such questions involving ‘truth’ I always defer to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s method: “What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.”23 Logical judgment takes truth (or untruth) as a premise and also as a goal, something that in itself is a paradox. Judgment is accomplished via language: “The essential business of language is to assert or deny facts.”24 In order to distinguish truth from falsehood effectively, to make a judgment of ‘yes’ or ‘no’ about a proposition, the analysis must be premised on “categories.” Aristotle made “Categories” Book 1 of his Organon before presenting “Interpretation” as Book 2, clarifying this reasoning formally.25 Applying this reasoning to the study of Wolf Totem, the preliminary judgment must start from the question: do you view the book as (fictive) literature or a scholarly work (seeking truth)? If it is a scholarly study then it has no place for the fictive. In the face of what “one cannot speak,” the answer ought to be “be silent.” Yet, if one maintains that it is literature – the allegorical novel – it can tell a story through images, and no matter how truthful they appear or how much effort is expended to persuade people it is true, it is not true by any reasoned judgment, and any entanglement in questions of truth and falsehood is a waste of effort. Apart from that, “what can be said at all can be said clearly,” as Wittgenstein put it, and criticism should rise to the challenge. Criticism thus has two orientations. As Northrop Frye described them, one is judgmental, aimed at revealing “untruth” or lack of virtue. Another is scholarly, to “classify objectively and as meticulously as possible, [to] comb through and systematically describe, and thereby assist in the accumulation of knowledge and the expansion of literary experience.”26 If we select the latter—and that is my choice—the orientation of scholarly criticism, it can only follow 22

23 24 25

26

See Ye’s Xiong tuteng: Zhonghua zuxian shenhua tanyuan 熊 图 腾 ： 中 华 祖 先 神 话 探 源 [The bear totem: legends of Chinese ancestors] (Shanghai: Shanghai huabao chubanshe, 2007). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner; New York: ­Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922), 23. Bertrand Russell, “Introduction” in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein, 8. “Yet every sentence is not a proposition; only such are propositions as have in them either truth or falsity.” The Works of Aristotle Volume i, edited by W.D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon, 1928), 50. Xifang meixue tongshi [General history of western aesthetics] by Zhu Liyuan, Zhang ­Dexing, et al., (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1999) Volume 7: 32.

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the course of interpretation, not judgmental criticism. As I see it, the value of Wolf Totem is not in totems, still less in verification in the historical sense; it is only fiction, no more, and even though its author may declare an intention to cross boundaries in search of truth, its wording and storyline are not so true. Similarly for criticism, if it acknowledges the allegorical nature of the novel and deals with it as literature, it will no longer be caught up in issues of veracity. “The artistic representation of an idea is possible only when the idea is posed in terms beyond affirmation and repudiation …”27 So, given what is academically the pseudo-topic of a ‘wolf totem,’ criticism should pursue the converse questions: Why did the author falsely make a totem out of the wolf? How does the wolf become a totem in the story? What does the wolf totem actually consist of? What sort of followers does it attempt to interpellate? These are the questions that this chapter attempts to address. The most convenient approach to analysis is to begin with semiotics, which I take to be the premise for “categorizing.” As allegory, Wolf Totem is constructed from a set of significant symbols (fúhào 符 号 ). In the course of analysis I use the concept of semiotics, but without intending to pursue its direction. That is to say that in abstracting symbols from various images—the goal of semiotics—I do not intend to remain within the interpretive framework of semiotics. In the composite structure of the novel, symbols themselves are merely images and not allegorical meanings. Once all the people/things of the novel become symbols they actually lose the relatively stable original symbolic meaning (xiàngzhēng yìyì 象 征 意 义 ) of such symbols, and in different story structures reform to become repeatedly used props. The subversion of old meaning or renaming is carried out in the process of the disintegration of ‘old symbols’ and being ‘re-signified.’ The difficulty for postallegorical study is evident, for it must twice strip away recognition of symbols. It first strips away the original nature of the image to make it into a ‘symbol.’ This is the process of signifying. The second is to strip away the symbolic meaning (xiàngzhēng yìyì) that the symbol (fúhào) may produce so as to remove its quality, now in the original state of the word. Only through the process of being continuously signified can it convey different allegorical meaning. Thus, Wolf Totem has space for multiple interpretations, through different dominant orientations revealing different allegorical systems (‘categories’

27

Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 80; cited in Tzvetan Todorov, Literature and Its T ­ heorists (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1987), 76.

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and ‘combinations’) and series of symbols (the ‘emplacement’ of ‘elements’). The series of symbols is subordinate to the allegorical systems. Their self-­ presentation at each position together holds up the allegorical meaning in a particular system. As post-allegory, Wolf Totem has several allegorical systems of different kinds. Thus, series of symbols with different meanings exist simultaneously. And, as a symbol, the same person or thing has different content, that is, different symbolic significance (xiàngzhēng yìyì), in different ­allegorical systems. As these involve different disciplines, they will be discussed separately within the categories of the different disciplines. In terms of semiotic analysis, we can clearly see two allegorical systems in the novel. The first is related to the grassland, that is, nature. All signs are linked to the state of existence in primal nature, directly conveying the meaning of ‘wolf’ and ‘totem.’ The second is related to the incursion of migrant settlers, that is, agrarian civilization. All humans involved in the story together form what is termed ‘civilized society.’ The first allegorical system, starting with the theme of existence in primal nature, has two corresponding series of symbols. The first appears through the characters, animals, and other life forms in the story that can be told. This can be called the imaged symbol series, symbols that iconically represent the course of the state of primal nature and humanized nature. The second series of symbols remains among things in the background: the grassland, the seasons, weather, and the skies, as well as the grassland wolves beyond humans’ reach. As a totality they are the bearers of grassland logic and representatives of the spirit of primal freedom, and can be seen as a series of symbolic symbols (xiàngzhēngxìng fúhào). In this system all image symbols, regardless of moral status, are equally challenged in mortal competition. In this competition there are two groups that are essentially in opposition. One group is the grassland people represented by Bilgee together with living creatures (including the grassland wolves), which the author names “nomadic civilization” and “grassland culture,” and are symbols of ‘existence in primal nature.’ Another group represents the force of ‘humanized nature,’ the settlers from outside (including the students from Beijing and the representatives of the military). While there are differences in their behavior and ideas, their orientation toward destroying the grassland is similar, and taken as a whole they form a symbol of ‘agrarian civilization’ or ‘the culture of the yellow earth.’ These all clearly form one system, and it is just at this level that the author tells his story of the grassland, delivers his lectures, stirs up the confrontation of the ‘nomadic’ and the ‘agrarian,’ thereby initiating the cultural warfare among ‘the green’ (grassland), ‘the yellow’ (farmland), and ‘the blue’ (ocean) that has raged down to the present.

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Another set of symbol series is ‘the symbolic’ (xiàngzhēngxìng), soaring above the mass of living things or secreted beneath: heaven (Tengger) and earth (the grassland) envelope all life, driving the seasonal winds, an endless cycle. Only the grassland wolf is an exception. Together with Tengger and the grassland, the wolves construct a bastion of natural will, and together they become the symbol of the spirit of primal freedom. You may destroy the g­ rassland, but can you destroy heaven or earth? You can destroy the grassland wolf, but can you make it submit? Where you are powerless, they achieve. In the novel they are integrated, as when Bilgee says, “Tengger is the father, the grassland is the mother, and the wolves kill only animals that harm the grassland. How could Tengger not bestow its favor on wolves?” (16; 22) Only at this point can we touch the nerve of the story of the grassland and understand why the novel takes the title ‘wolf totem.’ This series of signs conveys a profound religious significance and philosophical reflection, which requires another s­ ection to discuss (see Section 3). Because of its unalterable symbolic significance, the grassland in this allegorical system serves as a background for the story. Hence it withdraws as a whole from the story to become an independent allegorical message: nature. In the system, all individual entities under the sway of the biological chain constantly interact, form groups, and together act out the allegory of the logic of the grassland. Given that, signs themselves are freed from symbolic restraints, and depart from the restrictions of modernism, taking on great imaginative space in the context of the ‘post-.’ Scholars have sought things that govern the symbolic meanings of signification, and commonly recognize that relations among the real, the fictive, and the imaginary are the basis for literary texts.28 Wolfgang Iser discussed the functions of signs (fúhào) among this triad of relations, pointing out that each time real images are “transposed into the text, they turn into signs for something else. Thus they are made to outstrip their original determinacy.”29 The reason for emphasizing this point here is that it is a necessary premise for understanding the concrete images in the novel. The semiotic systems in the book overlap, and the ‘original determinacy’ of a sign is constantly deconstructed in the conversion among different systems, loses its relationship to the story, and consequently enters into genuine allegory, becoming a sign with the character of allegorical meaning. Out of this comes the second approach

28 29

See Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (­ Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 1–2. Ibid., 3.

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to interpreting Wolf Totem, a second system justly termed allegorical (civilized society symbolized by the settlers). In this second allegorical system, having dealt with signification, we can approach the human realm calmly and bring back the “human society” which has been completely removed. In the postmodern context, Roland Barthes saw symbols as signs [biāozhì 标 志 ] (that stand for something else) d­ istinct from indices, (signs that point toward something else): “The index has an origin, the sign does not: to shift from index to sign is to abolish the last (or first) limit, the origin, the basis, the prop, to enter into the limitless process of e­ quivalences, representations that nothing will ever stop, orient, fix, sanction.”30 This is to say that once a symbol is named it will automatically take on a function in the process of reading or analysis, like living images in the text, independent of the author’s will. Even though the author creates figurative symbols [xíngxiànghuà fúhào 形 象 化 符 号 ], he has no way to control the fate of these symbols. This is a secret contest. Which uses which? The author or the symbol? Which controls which? The symbol or the name? Roland Barthes wrote of the name: “It [the name] is an instrument of exchange: it allows the substitution of a nominal unit for a collection of characteristics by establishing an equivalent relationship between sign and sum: it is a bookkeeping method in which, the price being equal, condensed merchandise is preferable to voluminous merchandise … Whence the variety of patronymic codes.”31 Once these codes take on a life of their own, we may read their various different meanings behind the “name.” Returning to Wolf Totem, in the human story with little human warmth, we might look at what mission people undertake with those names—the patronymic codes. People are divided into groups. There are largely three groups in the story, existing in three different symbolic series. The first of these series is the students, represented by Chen Zhen. The code ‘Chen Zhen’ is loaded with all the rich implications related to ‘Beijing’ and ‘students’: outsiders, Han ethnicity, city dwellers, the educated. There is also their particular identity in the grassland: learners, participants, observers, and listeners. Yang Ke, listener of the listener Chen Zhen, is witness to the witnessing of Chen Zhen. Chen Zhen and the other students are assigned to live with nomads, each learning different nomadic skills. Since Chen Zhen and Yang Ke’s identities are both sheepherders, this gives them ample opportunity for daily conversations in the life 30 31

Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay (New York: Macmillan, 1975), 40. Ibid., 95.

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they share day and night. Two other students are each assigned duties herding horses and herding livestock. Arranging different work for them is deliberate, allowing the students to witness and to participate fully in the productive life of the grassland. Taken together, they have a common background: The four students in Chen Zhen’s yurt had been classmates at a Beijing high school; three of them were sons of “black-gang capitalist roaders” or “reactionary academic authorities.” They shared similar circumstances, ideology, and disgust for the radical and ignorant Red Guards; and so, in the early winter of 1967, they said goodbye to the clamor of Beijing and traveled to the grassland in search of a peaceful life, where they maintained their friendship (14; 20). This is one of the very few accounts of the backgrounds of the students in the novel, and it offers some important information: First, they have a strong sense of social identity, coming from the middle and upper levels of mainstream society. Next, they are independent individuals with their own views, and are not conformists. Third, they have all volunteered to come to the grassland in an effort to distance themselves from the political clamor, “in search of a peaceful life.” Hence, for Chen Zhen, Bilgee’s yurt is “a safe and intimate refuge” (14; 20). The students are outsiders to the grassland, and so from this distance observe, think, criticize, and reflect. It is precisely because of their identity as outsiders that they are able to behave in ways that go against the traditions of the grassland (such a raise a wolf), and speak out of turn (as in cursing wolves), yet avoid retribution or condemnation. The only narrator in the story is from this group—and the importance of this needs explanation. As noted above, there is the postmodern argument that “most narratological concepts conceal metaphors, including that of the narrator.”32 The narrator’s identity is related to discursive power: “In fact, power produces, it produces reality, it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth.”33 If we believe that discourse transcends all power and is a means of empowerment that influences power, then we can see the meaning of the narrator as metaphor: these sojourners on the grassland, these abject youth, homeless, powerless, and penniless, are on the distant border grassland between past and future; a major function is secreted in 32

33

Marie-Laure Ryan, “Cyberage Narratology: Computers, Metaphor and Narrative,” in Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, ed. David Herman (Columbus: Ohio State, 1999), 114. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Pantheon, 1977), 194; cited in Alan Sheridan, Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth (London, New York: Tavistock, 1990), 163.

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them—cognitive capacity; in their hands they hold power that could at any time produce gigantic effects—discursive power. Hence, wherever they have gone, whatever they have seen or heard, no matter whose reeducation they have received and whatever they finally accept, all these no longer count for much. It is that they, thirty years later, have still not abandoned the grassland, but have perpetually preserved the Olonbulag discursively, and introduced us to the nomads in a state of existence in primal nature and the grassland people as represented by Bilgee. The second series is the grassland people, whose leader is Bilgee. In Mongolian “Bilgee” means “wise.” He is known as the boldest and wisest hunter of the Olonbulag, the representative of grassland culture and the spokesperson for Tengger [heaven]. “Bilgee” and “old man” are a pair of mutually associated “patronymic codes,” implying omniscient understanding of the primitive grassland together with all customs and practices related to it. Held in high regard by his people, he is the spiritual leader of grassland people, as well as foremost in production and life in the grassland: “At each year’s encirclement hunt, if he wasn’t in charge, hunters did not feel like participating” (116; 185). There are two groups associated with him that sometimes appear. One is his son Batu and daughter-in-law Gasmai. This couple by themselves suggests a gender code of natural identity, together they combine to form a generational code, and in general they function by inference to stand for other such couples. The other group is the grassland people such as Uljii, living in actual contemporary society, unlike Bilgee, who stubbornly clings to a traditional state of existence in primal nature in both thought and deed. Uljii is one of the few grassland people who can speak within the mainstream, as spokesperson and example of grassland culture. He is ‘removed from office’ and therefore serves as an allegorical figure signifying the ultimate ‘absence’ of grassland people in the power system. The representative of the third series is the army representative, with a very particular name: Bao Shungui, a patronymic code of some significance. ‘Army representative’ is the result of a combination of weaponry and power. The meaning of the name “Bao Shungui” is: “take over all” (Bao), “smoothly without hindrance” (Shun), and “noble identity” (gui). Such a patronymic code not only conveys authority and prestige, but also brings with it massive ranks of outside migrants, field workers, and soldiers—a genuine army! And Bao Shungui’s unit occupies the grassland mounted in jeeps and carrying loaded rifles. He has a formidable force capable of sweeping aside anything in its path, the most important actors in the story, and its most powerful. Let us consider what they do. To take Bao Shungui first, as army representative moving onto the grassland, he is, from the outset, an allegorical figure in himself. Uljii notes of him quite

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clearly: “Old Bao charges ahead on everything he does, … and he’s usually up there on the front line. There’d be no one better in a farming area. But out here he’s a danger to the grassland” (164; 257). He is the symbol of mainstream culture and agrarian civilization, the greatest power in the Olonbulag. After arriving in the grassland he has two important achievements: killing wolves and reclaiming land for farming. His appearance spells doom for the grassland and grassland wolves. Turning to examine the members of Bao Shungui’s group, it consists of three teams. The first are “the workers who are constantly in the nomad districts for long-term and seasonal work, flocking to the grassland like migratory birds. Even before Bao Shungui has assumed power they have appeared in substantial numbers on the grassland, occupying the grassland as an ‘advance party’ for a great many outside settlers (including the educated youth). Outsiders have frequently relied on their guidance to make it possible for them to move successfully into the grassland: Within days two dozen more laborers were driven up on trucks … the workers had brought their wives and children, even domestic geese from northeastern China, as if they were putting down roots in the grassland … most of these batches of workers came from Bao Shungui’s hometown, and he only regretted that he could not move half the village to the grassland (225; 342). From then on the ancient grassland is emptied of the sounds of grassland ­people and the sight of grassland wolves, while outsiders’ accents fill the area. Settling down on the Olonbulag and turning it into their home, the outsiders give every appearance of reasonableness to their colonizing. Chen Zhen witnesses this situation: with a few loads of adobe bricks the workers can lay one story, so that “outer walls for a row of adobe houses appeared on what had been a vacant lot only the day before.” (225; 342) The third team is the armed soldiers themselves whom Bao Shungui has asked to come extirpate the wolves. As Bao Shungui tells the Mongolian herders, “if you won’t kill off the wolves, I’ll ask them to do it. It’ll be easy with their trucks, jeeps, and machine guns” (235; 429). He proves as good as his word, leading an army unit into the grassland to chase down the wolves at gunpoint: It was already foaming at the mouth. What should have been a tense battle between man and wolf now became nothing more than entertainment for humans. It was the first time since his arrival on the grassland that Chen saw the tremendous edge humans had over the wolves. The

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Mongolian wolves, having dominated the grassland for thousands of years, were now more pathetic than the rabbits (318; 454). Such words are enough to stir hatred. Even though the behavior recounted above could be our own behavior after going to the grassland, and the view above could be our own view, when such inexcusable acts are written down here as if on a criminal charge sheet each word stirs anger and hatred. In this way the author achieves his purpose, and the mission of the third symbolic series is fulfilled: they collectively bring themselves into a moral court. In that case, do we hate these people? Will we remember who Bao Shungui is, who Lao Wang is, and so on, in order to investigate their criminal responsibility? No one thinks this way. How soon we forget them—who they are is unimportant; what is important is the allegorical significance that the “patronymic code” conveys. At this point there is little difficulty in discovering what the characters above have in common—regardless of which group they come from. That is, the encoding, the simplifying is on a completely different course than the development of the novel. “The early novelists, however, made an extremely significant break with tradition, and named their characters in such a way as to suggest that they were to be regarded as particular individuals in the contemporary social environment.”34 Since the early modern period fiction has been concerned with individuality, searching for what has been termed the full, three-dimensional quality of the ‘well rounded character.’ The depiction of characters in Wolf Totem violates this principle and, fearing that the significance of its symbolic coding is not thorough enough, the characters have been deliberately flattened: [Flat characters] are constructed around a single idea or quality … One great advantage of flat characters is that they are easily recognized when they come in—recognized by the reader’s emotional eye, not by the visual eye, which merely notes the recurrence of a proper name… A second advantage is that they are easily remembered by the reader afterwards. They remain in his mind as unalterable for the reason that they were not changed by circumstances …35

34 35

Ian P. Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley: ­ niversity of California Press, 2001), 19. U E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 48–49; (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1954), 68–69.

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The author intended to let the flat characters turn into the patronymic code, never intending from the outset to let them live; their appearance has been discarded. “What is obsolescent in today’s novel is not the novelistic, it is the character; what can no longer be written is the Proper Name.”36 When the meaning of characters themselves has been discarded, the proper names associated with them become symbolic: “One characteristic of the symbol is that it is never wholly arbitrary; it is not empty, for there is the rudiment of a natural bond between the signifier and the signified.”37 This bond is fragile, human made. Once this bond (the signifying nature of the sign) is disturbed, the sign’s symbolic meaning may be rewritten, renaming is initiated—such perhaps is where the real intentions of Wolf Totem lie. Renaming, in the semiotic sense, is the important accomplishment of Wolf Totem and its important contribution. On account of this story of the grassland, the relationships of humans with nature, with flora and fauna, and with the civilization we have ourselves created and all cultural relations, must be reconsidered as placed on a new footing. This is an origin that conceptually is  postmodern, after thought has entered a postmodern context; its standpoint is post-utopian, after the destruction of revolutionary ideals; its ­setting is backward, the location for the story being the grassland that lags so far ­behind modern civilization. Yet, from the perspective of the main character Chen Zhen, it is modern, and everywhere reveals admiration and longing for ‘modernity.’ At the same time that it takes the modern as the standard and the goal, it also takes it as the opposite, so that at the same time that it uses it, pursues it, reviles it and criticizes it, it places itself in an inextricable dilemma. This dilemma is embodied in Chen Zhen, giving him no peace of mind in the contest between two civilizations. According to Hegel’s proposition: “Since each of the opposed sides contains the other within itself and neither can be thought without the other, it follows that neither of these determinations, taken alone, has truth; this belongs only to their unity.”38 An idea like this may work epistemologically, but not for Chen Zhen. He is merely a student undergoing ‘­reeducation,’ with no means to unify two opposing sides within his own understanding. He is left in the end with no alternative but that of finding the wolf, and because of this the wolf becomes a symbolic ‘totem’ of the ultimate. After the destruction of the (grassland) utopia he seeks a utopia in heaven 36 37 38

Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, 95. Ferdinand Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), 68. Georg Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller (New York: Prometheus Books, 1991), 197.

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(Tengger), and the only thing that can link these is the wolf totem. Seen this way, the wolf totem is merely a small boat of self-forgiveness—can we call it the boat of utopia—intended to give him passage out of his dilemma. In the story, the process of renaming is a process of reflection and awakening. In the three groups mentioned above, we see that the driving force is  Bao Shungui and his ilk who wield power, while the opposite of these is the ­grassland, its people and the grassland wolves. They are the weak—and the students from Beijing caught in the middle. In their actions they abet  evil ­(actively participating in the movement to kill wolves) and even commit evil (raising the wolf cub), revealed as part of the force from outside and accomplices of an evil power. Yet their sympathies are clearly on the side of the grassland, in the course of doing ill they recognize their wrongdoing, and in their sympathy they begin to reflect. Hence it becomes evident that, whether outsiders or grasslanders, all are a patronymic code that has been collectively designated to act as a school for the students’ reflection and to press them from different directions to complete a transformation: to re-conceive and even to rename the ‘modern’ and ‘civilization.’ Chen Zhen himself explains: … he was saddened to have been born into a line of farmers. Farmers had become as timid as sheep after dozens, even hundreds, of generations of being raised on grains and greens, the products of farming communities; they had lost the virility of their nomadic ancestors, going back to the legendary Yellow Emperor. No longer hunters, they had become the hunted (17; 23). Characterization in Wolf Totem has not departed very far from traditional allegory. Characters in traditional allegory are flat and usually employ symbols that people have accepted as ‘code,’ with the qualities of the characters fixed and simple so that they will not produce any ambiguity or misunderstanding. For instance, there is the tiger for ruler, the fox for craftiness, the rabbit for goodness, the dog for loyalty, sheep for timidity, and wolf for cruelty. These meanings were attached to them based on two things: one is that they are anthropocentric, determining their positive or negative quality through their relations with humans; the second is paying attention to their nature within the biological world and using that to draw an analogy in human society. Right and wrong are clear in traditional allegory, and fauna and flora always convey the will or sentiments of human society, such as justice, courage, goodness, and so forth. However, if subject position changes, questions arise, as what is positive for one may well be negative for the other, goodness for one and evil for another. After a change of standpoints, ‘heroes’ are no longer universal signs

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of honor … Whereupon, there are no more absolute friends nor absolute enemies, traditional symbols completely lose their original meanings in the postmodern context, and we encounter the ‘magical’ techniques of postmodern art in the field of semiotics. The displacement of standpoint may also be the displacement of the cultural field, the symbol in the transformation of the field limitlessly extends its ‘signifier,’ and in the expanded domain carelessly distorts the content of its original ‘signified.’ And in this carelessness the traditional symbolic meaning is thoroughly subverted! The reason that post-allegory may also be postmodern is because it everywhere goes hand in hand with postmodern factors, always beginning from the subversion of the symbolic significance of traditional signs. In the case of Wolf Totem, it employs symbolized means to script the story and the form of the novel to write allegory; it puts complex thoughts into visual code, and turns allegorical meaning into the starting point of thought rather than its end point. Such an unguarded disorder coincides precisely with the postmodern wave, and persuades people that allegory “has at its best a delicacy and complexity of aptitudes showing a range of mind and genius of association beyond that required for the similes and metaphors of other poetic compositions.”39 At this point in the analysis the symbolic value of the character Dorji stands out. Dorji is the descendent of grassland people, a Mongol, but he appears to be a thorough traitor to the Mongols with his relations throughout the novel drifting among the three types of people. If seen from the perspective of the grassland, he is the image of extremely destructive force—but in the book he is not a bad person. From a different angle, he is even very likable. He is forthright, smart and capable, and takes pleasure in helping others. It is only with his help that Chen Zhen and the other students are able to catch wolf cubs: Dorji, a cowherd with Team Three, was a clever and experienced man of twenty-four or twenty-five who had come back to herd cattle after graduating from middle school. He doubled as the brigade’s bookkeeper and was a hunter of renown … He was a cautious hunter, one who never loosed his hawk until he saw a rabbit, and his presence greatly enhanced the chance of getting the cubs (97–98; 157). Dorji has been of help to the students in many ways, “the first translator and teacher of Mongolian for the students” and “a consultant and bodyguard” (98). Without him the students’ lives would be much harder and less cheerful. As 39

A.T. Cadoux, The Parables of Jesus (London: James Clark, 1930), 13; cited in Søren Kierkegaard, Parables of Kierkegaard (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), xi.

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anyone who was a student sent down to the countryside in those years knows, nearly every village had someone like Dorji, a medium between city and countryside, having encountered urban civilization, and being thoroughly familiar with rural customs. In the eyes of students who have just arrived in the grassland or the village, he is a trustworthy and useful friend, and makes the students feel at home in a strange region. Dorji is an indispensable person in this novel, the only ‘well-rounded character,’ who approximates life, has a history, and a sense of reality. He always conscientiously responds to the call of his superiors, is the production brigade’s model hunter, is contemptuous of the ‘bad customs’ of the grassland people, and completely disagrees with the ‘reverence for wolves’ that Bilgee represents: “If they were that good, I’d have been eaten long ago” (98; 157). In Dorji’s eyes “the Mongols here are too backward,” and because of this he initiates the approach to the students, his mind set on ‘progress’ and ‘civilization,’ and actively pursuing them. He criticizes Han Chinese as well: “You Han Chinese have no guts … You hate wolves, but you can’t even bring yourself to kill a cub. How do you expect to fight a war?” (106–7; 170). Yet he will always help them at any time with no thought of gain for himself. He has no political baggage and does not believe in traditional rules. He is truly a non-believer. Hence he can move freely among the three groups of Han Chinese: the army representatives see him as a model, the students as a friend, and the settlers as an example. Only the venerable Bilgee holds him in contempt: Dorji is a northeastern Mongol … [who has] forgotten the Mongol gods and their own origins. When someone in their family dies, they put him in a box and bury him in the ground, instead of feeding him to the wolves, so of course they don’t see anything wrong with using wolf pelts as chaps. … Out here a Mongol would freeze to death before he slept on a wolf pelt, since doing so would offend the Mongol gods, and their souls would never go to Tengger (15–16; 22). What Dorji says is true; what Bilgee says is legend. Contrasting the two, which do you believe? As readers, this is our dilemma. This is also the dilemma of the postmodern and the post-utopian: claiming truth, but sending you in pursuit of dreams; speaking reason, but without a way to access salvation. As post-allegory, it vaguely illuminates a direction, but places you in a predicament; compelling you under the guidance of faith to board a boat, but then sending the boat into exile—just as the grassland wolves flaunt the ‘totem’ banner in the wind, then vanish with barely a trace, permanently exiling its followers.

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At this point in the discussion it is unimportant what kind of allegory the book is, or whether it is allegory. It is merely a small boat in the vastness of thought and poetry. To onlookers it is not the starting point but curiosity that is important: What goods is it carrying? Where is it headed? 4.2

In Terms of Linguistics: Are ‘Translation’ and ‘Mediation’ Possible? Mediators are fundamental. Creation’s all about mediators. Without them nothing happens. They can be people—for a philosopher, artists or scientists; for a scientist, philosophers or artists—but things too, even plants, or ­animals … gilles deleuze, “Mediators”40

Looking from the perspective of linguistics, several questions arise simultaneously. What is the language of Wolf Totem, and what story does it tell? This is a novel in Chinese about the grassland of Inner Mongolia. Who is the principal storyteller? Chen Zhen is, a Han Chinese, a student from Beijing. Why does a Han Chinese tell a story about Mongolians? What does a Beijing person have to say about the grassland? If it is told in Chinese, for whom does he intend this story? If this is about grassland people, who has empowered him to act as mediator? No one can answer these questions in one sentence. They not only involve questions about language within the scope of linguistics, but unintentionally have also crashed into sensitive zones and touched on the foundations of linguistics. Can we climb the Tower of Babel to reach heaven?41 That is, can translation? And there are some questions about translation: Is it possible to ‘mediate’ or ‘interpret’? Under what circumstances is this “possible”?

40 41

Negotiations 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 125. Genesis 11:8–9: “So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel.” The Bible, New International Version (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1984). “Babel” became the origin of confusion. In the field of translation the Tower of Babel is a metaphor for the plurality of languages, their complexity and incompleteness (Jacques Derrida), and climbing the Tower of Babel is seen as the effort to seek understanding in a unity of language.

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The British linguist Leonard R. Palmer asserted that language is ‘significant’ sound, that is, sound symbols.42 Ferdinand De Saussure wrote: “Language is a system of signs that expresses ideas … the laws discovered by semiology will be applicable to linguistics …”43 Analyzing literary work from the perspective of linguistics using established semiotic theory can have a generative function in understanding the work. Of course, it is human language that is under discussion, not sound in the general sense. Therefore, it is necessary to make use of the results of the semiotic analysis from the section above and make direct use of the second allegorical system, the human setting, as the basis for the analytical discussion in this section. In weighing the two civilizations in the section above we saw three symbolic series of completely different nature, each indicating three disparate groups of people. In a simple textual interpretation, each of them can convey its own allegorical meaning with very little problem, and each represent different views intellectually. However, in terms of linguistics, three symbolic series become three language series, and that is where the problems begin: what are the three different languages? If each is of a different nature, different culture, and even different language, then how do they have a dialogue? Even though everyone is human, the story provides no relatively whole social setting, only different groups, each with a very different civilization. The book does not contain the romantic story of traditional fiction, only people and events—around which different groups make different sounds, and according to the degree and intensity with which they make sound, they are ordered sequentially. First are the sounds of the outside force represented by Bao Shungui, disseminated or transmitted in the form of high-pitched bugles, announcements at meetings, and documents. Second are the students from Beijing represented by Chen Zhen, their sounds rarely public, but mostly communicated inside the students’ Mongol yurts or through thoughts and reflections that appear in writing. Third are the grasslanders, represented by Bilgee and Uljii, who each represent the sounds of the people unofficially and as managers. Besides these, Bilgee’s family basically represents seniority and wisdom of the grassland in its primal state, males and females, scattered in every corner of life and production. These three groups of sounds can be summed up as three different types of strength: “command,” “testimony,” and “speech.” The first is the strength of civilization, embodied in the ‘headquarters’ and the ‘army representative,’ and conveying the sounds that the power mechanism makes, admitting no misunderstanding or accommodation. Carrying all 42 43

Leonard R. Palmer, Introduction to Modern Linguistics (London: Macmillan, 1936), 15. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 16.

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before it, invincible, it is the real master of all characters and the fate of all living things, and the entire grassland is thoroughly transformed under its effect. The second, the strength of ‘witnessing,’ is represented principally by Chen Zhen and the other Beijing students. They drift between two types of civilization and two types of power, and they are few in number, but sizable in influence because they come from Beijing. “Beijing” is a significant symbol that represents the mainstream orientation of society—a priori it has a function of transmission from top to bottom and an intangible strength of great magnitude. What the students see or hear is witnessing, of a type that might at any time become testimony to be included in trials or hearings, making it an important strength for changing people’s outlook. The third is the strength of ‘nature’ (the grassland)—how powerless it appears in the story—with Bilgee as its representative and its mediator. It is weak, overpowered, and vulnerable. Yet from another perspective, that of nature, the circumstances are not at all the same. Because “Tengger” and “grassland logic” support it, it appears according to the seasons, wandering among the living things of heaven and earth, capable of anything, unpredictable, endlessly reproducing. Judging from the speech of individual characters in the story, Bilgee speaks the most and the most profoundly, sustained throughout the novel, and fully demonstrating the strengths of mediation and interpretation. Compared with visual symbols, symbols in the linguistic sense are more abstract. In language “the relation between the sound and the thing symbolized is wholly arbitrary, and there is no natural or necessary connection between them.”44 If characters in the book are no more than patronymic code, the same as any person, place, or thing, then the sounds that they make are not those of individuals, but mediation. Almost all the discourse in the novel to one degree or another is in the nature of mediation. The social identity of everyone is repeatedly abstracted, and after being ‘dematerialized’ in the sense of reality, it becomes sound, without the strict boundaries of heaven and earth, human and animal, so the life forms of the grassland achieve an equal opportunity to be heard and understood. From this the allegorical meaning appears bit by bit in the form of questions: What sound can be shared among different human groups and things? From what direction does the most powerful sound come? Whose sound in the end can remain down through the ages?

44

Leonard R. Palmer, Introduction to Modern Linguistics (London: Macmillan, 1936), 7.

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The first question is one to which Wolf Totem offers a clear answer: without translation there is no sound that can be shared among heaven, earth, humans and beasts. Translation is crucial to this story of boundary crossing, as an absolutely necessary condition for communication between humans and beasts, the responses between heaven and humanity, and dialogue among humans, and such translation conforms precisely to the “boundary crossing” nature of translation itself.45 The novel does not provide firm answers to the last two questions. Judging from the conclusion of the story, the first sound set is the most resonant, it matches achievements, and is unequaled in turning language into fact. But you could hardly applaud it, perhaps even feel distraught over its lack of ­concern. And why? Because the story of the grassland is a type of t­ ragedy: the ­grassland  ruined, the grassland wolves driven into flight, and the last of the grassland people, Bilgee, is dead. Yet the old man’s voice remains, spread by the Beijing student Chen Zhen and Wolf Totem. It is precisely this old man’s voice that reaches up to heaven and extends down to the earth, in concert with all living things, omnipresent, and enduring. What is it that he says? Bilgee’s words are all about the grassland, and each sentence about the grassland is never far from “Tengger.” What does “Tengger” mean?46 The release and circulation of Wolf Totem was accompanied by numerous empirical verifications or falsifications related to it and endless disputes over questions about ‘wolves’ and ‘totems.’ Yet, discussions of “Tengger” were rare, as if universally acknowledging the meanings of ‘heaven,’ ‘heavenly will,’ ‘the firmament,’ etc., and tacitly acknowledging the original significance in ethnic religious sources. But the story takes place in the modern world, and the ­“Tengger” that people speak of actually has nothing to do with primitive religion or with wolves elevated to totems or even ascending to heaven; it is just an oral folk custom. In the novel Bilgee is always and everywhere speaking of “Tengger,” but that is not simply the expression used in daily life; it is a supreme symbol, conveying the profound basis for the folk belief in a state of existence 45

46

See Chen Yongguo 陈 永 国 , ed., “Fanyi zhong de jiexian he yuejie 翻 译 中 的 界 限 和 越 界 [Boundaries and boundary crossing in translation],” in Fanyi yu houxiandaixing 翻 译 与 后 现 代 性 [Translation and postmodernity] (Beijing: Zhongguo renmin daxue chubanshe, 2005), 5–8. Heaven is called Menghe tengger in Mongolian, referring to the highest spirit in Mongolian shamanism. The shaman belief is that heaven has mysterious power that governs all things on earth. See “Menggu fengqing 蒙 古 风 情 ,” in Menggu mishi (xiandai Hanyu ban) 蒙 古 秘 史 （ 现 代 汉 语 版 ） [Secret History of the Mongols, modern Chinese language edition], ed. T. Ġombojab 特 ･ 官 布 扎 布 and Asigang 阿 斯 刚 (Beijing: Xinhua chubanshe, 2006), 17.

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in primal nature that is beyond question among people of the grassland. Once it enters a different cultural context it must be translated before it can be understood. “If the process of translation is the process of reading, and the process of reading is the process of interpretation, then mistakes of ‘misreading’ and variance are unavoidable.”47 Things related to the misreading of Wolf Totem and the misinterpretation of “Tengger” regularly occur in the process of translation. George Steiner wrote, “Whatever treatise on the art of translation we look at, the same dichotomy is stated: as between ‘letter’ and ‘spirit,’ ‘word’ and ‘sense.’”48 This phenomenon also exists in the understanding of Wolf Totem. Scholars are always eager to disprove it at the level of history, while readers, once genuinely moved, readily elevate it to the spiritual, directly grafting it onto it the level of ‘heaven/the firmament’ that Tengger implies. Actually, among the people of the grassland the ‘wolf totem’ and ‘Tengger’ are irrelevant; they are merely ‘one man’s belief’ played out in Chen Zhen’s own mind (discussed in the section below). To ­Bilgee, Tengger is heaven, symbolizing the will of nature, not something a person can claim for himself, and not something wolves can keep pace with. The once abundant and beautiful Olonbulag “is a gift to the Olonbulag people and animals from Tengger, our sustenance” (12; 15). “Tengger sent wolves down to the grassland as protectors of the Bayan Uul sacred mountain and the Olonbulag” (59; 94). Bilgee often invokes the name of Tengger, heaven, to warn people who would arbitrarily enter the grassland: “Tengger and the sacred mountain are angered anytime the grassland is endangered, and wolves are sent to kill and consume the offenders” (59; 94). Although Tengger and the spirit of Bayan Uul Mountain are personified, they soar above the wolf pack. How can the grassland have the survival space for both Tengger and the ‘wolf totem’? The old adage is that two tigers cannot share one mountain. ­Given that Bilgee believes in Tengger, he cannot also be a believer in a ‘wolf totem.’ For him, there is a clear distinction in the status of heaven and of wolves, and wolves are no more than Tengger’s henchmen. It is evident that even on the grassland, translation and interpretation are extremely important. When Bilgee discourses he has to do three things at once: ‘translate’ the sounds of the grassland, nature, into human language so that people understand; ‘mediate’ on behalf of Tengger (heaven) and on behalf of the grassland (earth); ‘interpret’ while translating and mediating, and thereby add to people’s understanding of their immediate environment. What is termed the logic of the grassland

47 48

Chen Yongguo, Fanyi yu houxiandaixing, 5. After Babel, 262.

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is produced through interpretation during this process. This introduces three questions: 1. 2.

Can the sounds of nature be translated? What are the conditions for mediation? From whom does it acquire power? 3. Given that translation is interpretation, is it largely faithful to the ‘original’? Unfortunately, these are three prominent questions that are the most intractable and vexing in contemporary postmodern linguistics, involving discursive power, ethnic identity, geographical distinctions, cultural capital and other politically correct or incorrect judgments. This is not the key point of the present discussion, but it undoubtedly has constructed the background to the thinking in the discussion below, appearing now and then in the analysis, making the text below into a ‘mirror image’ responding to current theoretical explorations. Let us analyze the three questions one at a time. First, can the sounds of nature be translated? “… [N]o translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original.”49 Therefore, one of the tasks of the translator “consists in finding the particular intention toward the target language which produces in that language the echo of the original.”50 Since the birth of language humans have acted as translators of nature, not only with human language as the target language, but also interpreting nature with the intention that tends to favor human gain, and the “logic of the grassland” is one such product. In Wolf Totem, Bilgee and the grassland represent humanity and nature respectively. Their mutually reliant ‘relationship’ forms a symbolic sign that, in the book, is an inseparable entity: grassland human. From this relationship the fundamental distinction between ‘speaker’ and ‘mediator’ is distinguishable. The sound that the former makes and its identity are integrated, taking the subject pronouns ‘I’ or ‘we.’ There is a distance between the identity and the sound of the latter, which must be authorized before he can speak for ‘him,’ the subject being the ‘he’ that is spoken of. Bilgee was born on the grassland and makes it his space of existence. The word ‘born’ a priori determines the unifying blood relationship between him and the grassland, from which the compound patronymic code, ‘grassland human,’ is born. 49 50

Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913–1926 (Cambridge, ma: Belknap Press, 1994), 256. Ibid., 258.

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‘Grassland human’ is a border-crossing appellation, between the ‘grassland’ and ‘human,’ blurring the identities and boundaries of both. Once the proper name of ‘Bilgee’ is joined with ‘grassland human’ it becomes a universal designation: “Proper names bring to mind one thing only; universals recall any one of many.”51 Thus, between ‘human’ and ‘grassland,’ Bilgee can freely change identity anywhere at any time. Hence, the answer to the question above is selfevident: Bilgee does not need to mediate for the grassland; his voice can be viewed as the utterance of the grassland itself, the voice of the ‘grassland human’ himself. What does Bilgee say? What does he want to say? Half of what he thinks about is the grassland. He speaks for it: “Out here, the grass and the grassland are the life, the big life. All else is little life that depends on the big life for survival … For us Mongols, there’s nothing more deserving of pity than the grass” (29; 45). The other half of his thoughts are with the wolves, morally defending them in everything, even when they eat the gazelles: “In Bilgee’s view, this was a sacred cleansing of the grassland, a good and benevolent deed” (19; 28). “Wolves won’t bother people and their animals as long as they have food to eat” (12; 26). He explains the bloodthirsty behavior of grassland people: “Have you forgotten that the grassland is a battlefield, and that no one who’s afraid of blood can call himself a warrior?” (81; 129). “Half of a Mongol is hunter. If we could not hunt, our lives would be like meat with no salt, tasteless” (30; 46). These words carry weight because of their proverbial quality: If you plan to stay on the grassland, you’ll have to learn to be tougher than the wolves (10; 12). If we killed [the wolves] off, the grassland would perish, and then how could we survive? (13; 17). Life on the grassland is hard for us all, and it’s sometimes important to spare lives (28; 44). Adages like these are steeped in the history of the grassland, the crystallization of the collective wisdom of grassland people. Small wonder that Chen Zhen concludes that Bilgee is the “boldest and wisest veteran hunter on the grassland” (15). Bilgee’s every word and act has symbolic significance. When he speaks, it is on behalf of the grassland. In his thinking he is the embodiment of grassland 51

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651) Part 1, Ch. 4; cited in Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 18.

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logic. His life is a link in the biological chain of nature. His work is consciously protecting the sustainability of the natural ecology—he is a bridge joining heaven and earth as well as human culture and nature. In the context of people of the grassland, he is like a tribal chief, a shaman: “The eyes of sorcerers are brilliant. The greater the shine, the more ruthless the sorcerer is.”52 He continuously warns people to respect the heaven and earth of the grassland, to preserve the grassland is to live, and to destroy it is to perish. “The place of no pity is the site of ruthlessness.”53 It is precisely through his ‘ruthless’ explanations that Chen Zhen is able to explore the mysteries of heaven and earth in life on the grassland and realize the essence of the severe logic of nature. Thus Bilgee’s speech, in its totality, constitutes a symbol conveying allegorical meaning, the sound of survival in the primal nature of the grassland. In the tribal and clan communities of early humans, people like Bilgee were widespread, the earliest teachers and translators. In certain locations folk culture likely “needed something like an ‘interpreter’ representing them to ­translate for everyone. Moreover, this ‘interpreter’ naturally became the representative who asked questions on everyone’s behalf, taking on the tasks of both ‘questioner’ and ‘interpreter,’ gradually becoming an important position … Such people had uncommon skill at mediation, and once able to communicate the language of spirits most faithfully, most closely, and most movingly, they received people’s respect and support.”54 Their discourse varied from person to person and place to place, and the more “the person is familiar with the legend and finds it credible, then invariably the less likely they are to speak. If no one asks searching questions of them, few of them would venture any detailed introduction.”55 Conversely, when an outsider becomes involved, the function of translation and interpretation becomes prominent. Outsiders arrive: Army representatives, workers, Beijing students, and Chen Zhen all arrive. Fortunately, some of the outsiders are educated, and not all of them are workers and soldiers. Consequently, when grassland people speak there are more listeners, more questions, and more translation and explanation. Thus, two other functions of Bilgee’s speech emerge and come into full play when he is talking with Chen Zhen, confirming Wittgenstein’s o­ bservation

52

Carlos Castaneda, The Power of Silence: Further Lessons of Don Juan (New York: Washington Square Press, 1991), 124. 53 Ibid. 54 Liutian Guonan 柳 田 国 男 [Yanagita Kunio], Chuanshuo lun 传 说 论 [On legends], trans. Lian Xiang 连 湘 (Beijing: Zhongguo minjian wenyi chubanshe, 1985), 89. 55 Ibid., 27.

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that there is no private language,56 and conforming to Gadamer’s hermeneutic theory of dialogue: “Language is not something assigned by individual human subjects. Language is a we, in that we are assigned our place in relation to each other, and in which the individual has no fixed borders … All living together in community is living together in language, and language exists only in conversation.”57 Bilgee rarely speaks out on public occasions, and rather is always muttering to himself. Even though he does speak to others, it almost seems it is for one person (Chen Zhen) to hear, for the most part forced out of him when Chen Zhen asks questions. The old man’s speech, like his action, is passive, ultimately understood and disseminated only through Chen Zhen. Our gradual understanding of the grassland and renewed knowledge of grassland wolves at the least undergoes two processes of transmission, that is, translation: one is the old man’s speaking on behalf of heaven, intending to convey the sound from primal nature to humans; the second is Chen Zhen’s listening, recording, and writing, attempting to transmit the voice from grassland humans to civilized society. ‘Convey’ and ‘transmit’ refer respectively to ‘presenting’ and ‘mediating,’ from which we return again to those unavoidable important questions: Can there be translation between two different cultures? Is mediation feasible? After arriving on ‘the other shore,’ can they return home by the original road? The making and circulation of Wolf Totem has already surpassed these questions. Through its story it tells us that translation and mediation are possible, and therefore arriving is not a dream—but to return home is not easy: that is closely related to the point of origin, that is, the actual practice of translation. Translation is a method, the aim being to achieve understanding on the premise of fidelity to the original work. In the process of communicating, people of different languages need translation, and “any model of communication is at the same time a model of trans-lation [sic],” as George Steiner argued: No two historical epochs, no two social classes, no two localities use words and syntax to signify exactly the same things, to send identical signals of valuation and inference. Neither do two human beings … Thus a human being performs an act of translation, in the full sense of the word, when receiving a speech message from any other human being. Time,

56 See The Collected Works of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Electronic Edition. Philosophical Investigations (Charlottesville, va: InteLex Corporation, 1998) Part 1, Sections 243–315, pp. 88–104. 57 Hans Georg Gadamer, Gadamer in Conversation, 56.

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distance, disparities in outlook or assumed reference, make this act more or less difficult.58 Even in the same language, people of different cultural backgrounds or class need to translate when they communicate in order to avoid misunderstandings. Misunderstandings are so common and occur so easily that even when people are communicating in the same language it is easiest to lose alertness to misunderstandings. The difficulties in understanding are not in “time, distance, disparities in outlook or assumed reference,” but in identity. “Speaking a language fluently is very different from understanding it … Native and missionary are using the same words but the connotations are different, they carry different loads of meaning”59 Great gaps among identities became an obstacle to collectively building a tower reaching heaven (the Tower of Babel), and even sever the hopes of people trying to reach heaven. Theoretically, we have no doubt believed that “a common humanity made translation possible,”60 but experience has told us that the premise for translation does not simply rely on a common humanity, but also on people’s cognizance of difference, forbearance, and awareness of confiding between different groups of people. Wolf Totem offers us such a model. First is Chen Zhen, the young student from Beijing, son of a high-ranking cadre, Han Chinese, urban intellectual, willing to understand the grassland and listen to it. Next, there is Bilgee, the old man, nomad on this border grassland, Mongol, aged, conservative, not completely literate. In almost every respect, these two are totally different— ethnicity, language, age, thought, culture, customs, family environment, social background, and so forth. Yet, “rather than keeping this Mongol secret from an outsider, Bilgee was teaching the Beijing student how to use it” (28; 43). He takes it on himself to pass the skills of the grassland to Chen Zhen, and to correct Chen Zhen’s biases toward the grassland, and even toward life itself: There are so many things you Chinese don’t understand. You read books  but what you find in them is false reasoning. Chinese write their books to advocate Chinese causes. The Mongols suffer because they can’t write books. If you could turn into a Mongol and write books for us, that would be wonderful (30; 46). 58 59 60

After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 45–46. Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 7. George Steiner, After Babel, 259.

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‘You’ Han Chinese and ‘we’ Mongols rigorously separates two cultures, two languages, and two peoples, separating the two characters on opposite shores. When Bilgee speaks to Chen of writing books, the word he uses for ‘for’ is tì (替 ) not wèi (为 ), revealing the two different roles of mediation: tì is a high standard, requiring that you completely change identity when writing; wèi is relatively less demanding; you are still yourself, switching standpoints only when speaking. Here the old man sets his pride aside to express openly his yearning to speak and to be written down. This is a wish that the old man finds difficult to express, yet is the only one he confides to an outsider, and surprisingly is conveyed to us through Chen Zhen. Consequently it brings out two questions: What is writing? How is empowerment granted? Writing as a method of language is seen as a more civilized means of expression than speech, able to express meanings immediately and to convey them permanently. Aristotle began the discussion of the disparities and progressive relationship of the two: “Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words.”61 Saussure in his Course on General Linguistics also described the superiority of writing: “the graphic form of words strikes us as being something permanent and stable, better suited than sound to account for the unity of language throughout time. … Most people pay more attention to visual impressions simply because these are sharper and more lasting than aural impressions; that is why they show a preference for the former. The graphic form manages to force itself upon them at the expense of sound.”62 Historically, all peoples who formed strong civilizations have had their own script, and it has been an important means for national historic heritage. “Mongols, being illiterate, they have orally transmitted the names of their ancestors and events of their history.”63 Nomads have historically had a glorious record of warfare, but in terms of cultural record have been inferior, as Bilgee notes, “The Mongols suffer because they can’t write books”64 (30; 46). Scholars have pointed out: 61

“Book 1: On Interpretation,” in The Organon: The Works of Aristotle on Logic, trans. Roger Bishop Jones, 37. 62 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 25. 63 Duosang 多 桑 [Constantin d’Ohsson], Duosang Menggu shi 多 桑 蒙 古 史 [Histoire des Mongols] (Amsterdam: Frederik Muller, 1852), trans. Feng Chengjun 冯 承 钧 (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 2003), 31. 64 The earliest script used by Mongols was a Uighur-style Mongolian script that most scholars believe was created in 1204. See the appendix on Mongol customs in the Menggu mishi [Secret history of the Mongols, modern Chinese edition], 115–116. Khubilai Khan “founded the Mongolian Language School in 1269, and then the Mongolian National University at Khanbalik in 1271. He added new departments and commissioned scholars to record

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Nomads live a hard life, moving frequently in search of water and grass, and have little time for civilized pursuits or recording history … Nomad peoples have had to rely on the records of agrarian peoples to preserve their history for posterity. The records of the agrarian peoples invariably idealize themselves and demonize others, praise themselves and fault others. Between this “praise” and “fault” the fundamental vision of history is lost, giving rise to many misperceptions among later generations about the material and spiritual life of nomads.65 It is no wonder that Bilgee remarks, “You read books but what you find in them is false reasoning. Chinese write their books to advocate Chinese causes.” His sense of injustice is not for himself alone, but a great regret for an ethnicity. Neither is his wish to be recorded, to be written about, for himself as an individual, but a dream for an ethnicity. That he tells Chen Zhen this regret and this dream, that he clearly expresses his expectation that Chen Zhen “will write books for us” is a form of empowerment. Chen Zhen thus becomes the only person who is empowered—faced with such expectations and even such empowerment, how does Chen Zhen choose? Chen Zhen makes no promises in the book, nor ultimately does he become one of the grassland people. He later returns to Beijing without the least change in his ethnic identity; worse yet, he becomes a legitimate spokesperson for the Han-centered culture that the old man has been so extreme in denigrating. The old man has died, so there is no longer anyone giving him pressure to mediate through ‘writing.’ It is just at this time that Chen Zhen empowers himself to presume to return in the form of the ‘wolf totem.’ On the grassland he has learned to present himself in good conscience and with morality as an ordinary person, and not to become carried away with a pose of ‘speaking out’ and its consequences.66 To realize Bilgee’s wish, he begins lecturing, openly defending grassland wolves, speaking tì ‘for’ the grassland—this is genuinely tì ‘in place of,’ given that what is spoken of fundamentally cannot speak in human discourse. Thus, Chen Zhen not only has once been witness to grassland culture, but even more a mediator, even though he does not actually belong to the grassland. Once this situation has

65 66

c­ ontemporary events, edit and reprint old texts, and tend the archives.” Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, 205. Xiang Yingjie 项 英 杰 , et al., Zhong ya: mabei shang de wenhua 中 亚 ： 马 背 上 的 文 化 [Central Asia: culture on horseback] (Hangzhou: Zhejiang renmin chubanshe, 1993), 216. Chen Pingyuan 陈 平 原 , Introduction in Xuezhe de renjian qinghuai: kuashiji de wenhua xuanze 学 者 的 人 间 情 怀 ： 跨 世 纪 的 文 化 选 择 [Human emotions of a scholar: cultural choice at the turn of the century] (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2007).

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become reality, a question arrives uninvited, running into the hot topic of the present academic world: Is mediation possible between groups of two different societies? Even if it is possible, then, like anthropologists claiming to mediate for native peoples, intellectuals boasting of mediating on behalf of the weak, or the communist party mediating for the laboring masses, to what degree can he avoid being self-serving, avoid dishonesty, distortion, or misrepresentation? Even if he requires himself to be truthful and to set an example through his own practice, given the limits of identity, how far will ‘truthfulness’ be from ‘reality’? These are standard postcolonial issues. I recall that at an annual Chinese Studies meeting at the University of ­California, Berkeley, in fall 1991 someone asked the literary critic Li Tuo his feelings about being a member of an ethnic minority in China. He replied as a member of the Daur minority: “The worst thing about being a member of a minority is being unable to hear your own voice, and letting others explain things as they feel like.” It was just at that meeting, after three days, that I, far from my native China, felt alienated by all sorts of voices concerning China, and I wondered: Who are they talking about? Who are they? That has made me suspicious about ‘mediating’ ever since. Mediation is not dialogue. It can originate from two completely different backgrounds. One is a representative chosen by one’s ‘own people,’ speaking out among foreigners in other lands as an individual on behalf of the group. The other for the most part is an outsider who has assumed this role on his own, such as early anthropologists representing ‘indigenous peoples’ by writing scholarly works. Cultural imperialism was initiated at precisely this time, through the medium of language, chickens speaking in place of ducks, imposing one’s own methods, standpoint, and viewpoint on others at the same time as mediating. Or they made the ducks speak in the language of chickens, imparting knowledge or disseminating beliefs, and in consequence thoroughly subverting or reforming the fundamentals of the others’ language, weakening, distorting, and even completely castrating the voice of the other. ­“Columbus ‘baptized’ [natives], giving them names that were Spanish and Christian. And to give someone a name is to take possession of it. The same can be said about the prohibition and suppression of the languages of ‘the discovered peoples.’”67 Compared to the bone crushing of armed invasion, cultural invasion is soft blade, using re-naming to sever the historical memory of indigenous peoples and consequently strip them of will to survive spiritually free and 67

Jürgen Moltmann, God for a Secular Society: The Public Relevance of Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999), 7.

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i­ ndependent. Cultural ‘aphasia’ occurs through just this process. Henry Head, a specialist in aphasia, discussed the connection between names and concepts, such as color, as a kind of string, and described aphasia thus: “in those cases of aphasia where the word is forgotten the piece of string, as it were, [is] broken and the world falls apart into a limitless diversity of unrelated colours.”68 On account of this they are unable to use their own language to explain the world, and are even without means to manage their daily life in an orderly fashion. Down to the present, lingual communication between different identities may be undertaken according to following categories: the first is between elites and commoners, involving disparities of class status; the second is between different ethnicities, involving differences of ethnic culture; the third is between colonizers and colonized, involving postcolonial issues of social strata, ethnicity, and race taken together. All these disparities are pre-existing, hence difficult to overcome. Unfortunately, these issues all exist in Wolf Totem, and not only these. Gender, generation, age, and individual differences, as well as disparities of identity created by society: local, regional, urban-rural, occupational, and so forth. All these exist in Wolf Totem as embedded issues that linguistics and political science cannot avoid, that were rarely raised in the past. I believe that they are questions that postmodern translation theory must face. And this is one allegory implied in Wolf Totem. The novel does not answer the questions directly, or even raise the questions directly. Great gaps are implied throughout the entire story, awaiting discovery. Even though they are not issues within the story, they will appear one by one during a linguistic critical interpretation. As allegory, Wolf Totem adopts the cleverness of ‘crossing boundaries’: making use of the primitive power of nature to fulfill transcendence over ­civilization, avoiding the unsurpassable, gradual development of historical representation and the deductive procedure that logical inference must go through. It dumps all the questions under debate into the depths of history, and settles the matter on its own in one step through crossing boundaries in an imagined world. This did not originate with Wolf Totem. Charles Darwin long before discovered that the disparity between Indians of the Argentine province of Tierra del Fuego and civilized humans “is greater than between a wild and domesticated animal.”69 Linguists have pointed out that what is most distant from us linguistically and culturally sometimes moves us the most, is most capable of evoking resonance. Although the thought processes that are contained in the forms of expression of primitive languages may be utterly 68 69

Sir Henry Head, Aphasia and Kindred Disorders of Speech cited in Leonard Robert Palmer, An Introduction to Modern Linguistics (London: Macmillan, 1936), 176. Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (Knoxville: Wordsworth Classics, 1997), 196.

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different, we may still “without much difficulty appreciate their imaginative and emotional strength, we can even feel something of their strictly poetical appeal.”70 When borrowing the power of primitive nature it is only necessary to turn around and exchange positions as a bridge to understanding, and simultaneously ‘aesthetics’ and ‘knowledge’ can successfully transcend (history) without leaving a mark. In Wolf Totem, the border crossing is established on the basis of shift of subject position, heaven and earth are linked, there are no boundaries between human and animal, and humans, wolves, heaven, earth all respond to each other with deep understanding, as Bilgee’s remarks on wolves suggest: … when they’re in trouble, they look up and howl so that Tengger will come to their aid … When people run into trouble out here, they look up to the sky and ask for Tengger’s help, just like the wolves … It’s a hard life out here, especially for them. Old-timers often shed tears of sadness when they hear wolves bay at night (245; 365). Chen Zhen learns that trying to live on the beautiful but lean grassland is hard, and with nothing to distract them, they must often pour out their feelings to heaven. Viewed scientifically, wolves howl to heaven in order for the messages in their sounds to carry farther and wider. But emotionally, Chen Zhen is more ready to accept Bilgee’s explanation, using divinity to sustain a hopeless life, and at this point “Chen felt tears filling his eyes” (245; 366). In this passage, humans’ understanding of sound is not through language, but heartfelt sympathy: the communication and understanding among psyches, humans toward wolves, wolves toward heaven, the old man toward the grassland, Chen Zhen toward the old man. This is the mediation of crossing boundaries and the basis for translation in Wolf Totem, transcending the barriers of language from the start. “All understanding, and the demonstrative statement of understanding which is translation, starts with an act of trust.”71 Trust may appear as self-confidence, as in the case of Bilgee’s mediation of the grassland and grassland wolves. His connection with nature is not through human language, but through the practice of living, in his words, “risk my life in exchange for it.” He and Chen Zhen are like father and son, freely confiding in each other, although one is Han Chinese and the other Mongol. But we do not know what language they actually use, Mongolian or Chinese? It seems that here the question is not

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C.M. Bowra, Primitive Song (New York: Mentor Books, 1963), 36. George Steiner, After Babel, 296.

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important. Yet this dismissal of language is itself a challenge, a challenge to the entire meaning of “Babel”: God used language to sow confusion among humans, to cause humans to abandon their opportunity to ascend to heaven and live instead in division and misunderstanding. Wolf Totem puts no credence in this, and its lingual boundary crossing not only subverts the implications of ‘Babel,’ but also surpasses the ‘Tower of Babel.’ The communication between humans and nature and among humans in Wolf Totem is unconcerned with choice of language; what is important is the capacity to listen and the desire to mediate. So we may ask: How does Chen Zhen gain trust? Why does Bilgee choose him? These involve the preconditions for ‘mediation’: between two different cultures, how is identification established? Ethnic pride is a hidden premise for individual self-respect, especially for those who are relatively weak, and there is a close relationship between the degree of sensitivity toward ethnic culture (including language) and the degree of selfidentification. Saussure believed: It is also worth noting that each nation believes in the superiority of its own idiom and is quick to regard the man who uses a different language as incapable of speaking. For instance, Greek bárbaros apparently meant ‘one who stammers’ and was related to Latin balbus; in Russian, Germans are called Nêmtsy ‘mutes.’72 So it is with Bilgee, who from the very first chapter has no qualms about making disparaging remarks to Chen Zhen about his Han identity: “A fear of wolves is in your Chinese bones” (3; 1). His manner never varies, running through their private conversations on any occasion. For people who are relatively culturally weak, this is an opportunity for self-affirmation; for members of a strong culture, listening is a way to find knowledge, but giving tacit consent is a kind of attitude. ‘Communication’ or ‘mediation’ is no longer an academic question, but more a political posture, related to ‘political correctness.’ More precisely, its premise is political correctness, with one party (the weak and marginal) sounding off at will, and the other party (the strong and mainstream) listening intently. In language communication, listening is relatively more important than speaking; it is the foundation of communication. 72

Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 191.

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The laws that govern the spread of linguistic phenomena are the same as those that govern any custom whatsoever, e.g. fashion. In every human collectivity two forces are always working simultaneously and in opposing directions: individualism or provincialism [esprit de clocher] on the one hand and intercourse—communications among men—on the other.73 These two forces can appear simultaneously only given mutual understanding. Note the passage on Chen Zhen in Bilgee’s yurt: “There he was treated as a member of the family; the two cartons of books he’d brought from Beijing, especially those dealing with Mongol history, in Chinese and in English, had established a close bond between him, a Han Chinese, and his Mongol host, who often entertained guests” (14; 20). Chen Zhen is always listening, for even though the old man already treats him as his own child, he “did not dare tell the old man the prejudice and e­ nmity toward the Mongols among ancient Chinese and some Western historians” (14). Now on the grassland, he does not dare to intone Yue Fei’s “Full River Red,” or to “talk and jest” while “drinking.”74 Such is the necessary restraint adopted by outsiders entering others’ territory. Once there, the original attitude of curiosity changes. Chen Zhen, for example, is at first simply curious about grassland wolves and about everything in the grassland. Bilgee says he’s “never seen a Chinese so fixated on wolves” (7; 8). Further on, Chen Zhen wants to trace the cause for the grievances between the agrarian peoples and nomadic peoples historically. “Where had the tiny race of people who had swept across Asia and Europe and created the Great Mongol Empire, the largest landholding in the history of the world, learned their military secrets?” (19; 27). Curiosity turns into a conscious search for knowledge, and with it their discursive relationship undergoes a fundamental change, from condescending to listening to an openminded quest for learning, so that the old man completely opens up to him: With his limited Chinese, he took every opportunity to teach Mongolian to Chen, wanting to have everything in the books explained to him; he 73 74

Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 205. “Full River Red” [Man jiang hong 满 江 红 ] is the tune title of a patriotic lyric attributed to the twelfth-century Chinese general Yue Fei, who resisted invasion of the Southern Song dynasty by the northern Jurchen (Jin) forces. In the poem, a line refers to “talking and jesting while drinking the blood of the Xiongnu.” Han Chinese historically viewed Jurchen and Xiongnu as nomadic barbarian invaders, akin to the Mongols, who later conquered the Southern Song. [Translator’s note].

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reciprocated by telling Mongol stories to Chen. Over the two years, these conversations in Mongolian and Chinese between the two men—one old, the other young—had progressed smoothly (14; 20). What we see here is communication, not simply instruction. Ultimately the author gives a vague report on the languages of communication, “conversations in Mongolian and Chinese,” not ducks listening to chickens talking, hence, things “progressed smoothly.” Communication between different cultures should be reciprocal; even though two are conversing, there is also always ‘a third’ present, that is, in the reflection of words to oneself based on a “side link of speech.” “… the speech chain has an important side link because speakers not only speak, but also listen to their own voice. In listening, they continuously compare the quality of the sounds they produce with the sound qualities they intended to produce and make the adjustments necessary to match the results with their intentions.”75 For example, at the same time that Chen Zhen is listening intently he is also continuously reflecting. And as the representative of the weak, Bilgee knows how to introduce his own culture under dignified circumstances: “He was always happy when his apprentices came loaded with curiosity and doubts, to learn the knowledge and skills that he wished to impart” (15; 21). The vast majority of things on the grassland are what the old man alone imparts, ‘translating’ and ‘interpreting’ especially for Chen Zhen. “To understand is to explain, and to explain is to justify.”76 During the 1960s in a small desert town the American anthropologist Carlos Castaneda became acquainted with a local Yaqui shaman, Don Juan Matus, and spent more than a decade with him, later publishing nine books in succession on this experience, which stirred up and intense response in the United States. Among these books, The Power of Silence: Further Lessons of Don Juan is a collection of conversations between the shaman-sorcerer and the anthropologist, with one asking questions and the other answering. Like the conversations between Chen Zhen and the old man, one party asks questions, while the other guides and preaches while answering. Bilgee and Don Juan alike express their desires clearly in the process of giving answers: desiring to be heard, understood, recorded, and even transmitted. They hope to address another. This ‘other’ is not an unknown traveler, but a symbol and representative of mainstream culture: for Don Juan, the ‘other’ is a white American ­intellectual 75 76

Peter B. Denes & Elliot N. Pinson, The Speech Chain: The Physics and Biology Of Spoken Language (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 4. Isaiah Berlin, Liberty: Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty (New York, London: Oxford University Press, 2002), 131.

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named Castaneda; for Bilgee the other is a Han Chinese youth from Beijing, named Chen Zhen. In Wolf Totem, Chen Zhen consciously drops his identity to listen closely to the voice of the grasslander, what he sees is ‘witnessing,’ what he hears and smells is ‘testimony,’ mediating through writing for the old man and indirectly for the grassland. There the population that has sound but no voice, the grassland and its life forms, finally emerges to the level of discourse, using mediated means to sound throughout mainstream society. Whether this sound is true, false, or some more or less impure mixture is not important. What is important is in whose name, from whose standpoint this sound ­arises—before right or wrong, true or false, ‘sound’ in the name of a proper name is crucially important, arising out of nothing, on a long march, of which this is the true first step. Summarizing the text above, we see the mediation that spans so much in this book has crossed at least three boundaries: the grasslander Bilgee’s crossing natural boundaries; the Han Chinese student Chen Zhen crossing the boundaries of grassland people; the popular book Wolf Totem crossing the boundaries of traditional popular or mass culture. Thus, because the book must cross three mountains, three processes of translation are necessary. Once read, read to the end, its ‘mediation’ and ­‘translation’—regardless of what it is—ends in silence. Next comes the fourth translation, the ensuing interpretation of the reader’s understanding and criticism; the varied opinions are irrelevant to Wolf Totem. Regardless of its strengths and weaknesses, it is ‘here,’ like a symbolic Tower of Babel, confusing people, yet itself serene; or has it really surpassed ‘Babel’ and reached the summit? It is through the entire story that Wolf Totem attempts to answer this question. Its method is actually simple: read to the end; or, don’t read to the end. If you finish it, it reaches the summit; this is what it has expected. Once you add your own view, then this is yet another result, one that it has not expected. Ultimately, this is still the question in the city of Babel. Jacques Derrida rather pessimistically opened up the paradoxical question of the ‘translation’ or the ‘untranslatability’ between the metropolitan areas of different civilizations, but offered no way out of the dilemma.77 Kafka also stressed the obstacles of language, believing that it is nearly impossible for humanity to engage in true communication and understanding. He frequently brought up the ‘Tower of Babel’ and wrote this in his notes: “Had it been possible to build the Tower of

77

See “Des Tours de Babel,” in Difference in Translation, ed. Joseph Graham (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1985), 170–72.

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Babel without ascending it, that would have been allowed.”78 Bilgee has also recognized this problem in Wolf Totem: I know you Chinese aren’t religious and that the soul means nothing to you. You’ve really taken to our wolves over the past couple of years, I know that, but you don’t know what’s in my heart. I’m old and getting frailer by the day. The grassland is a hard, cold place to live in, and we Mongols spend our whole lives here doing battle, like savages. Sickness takes its toll, and we don’t live long lives. How can you think of keeping a wolf … ? That would mean that I’d committed a sin and Tengger might not accept my soul … If everyone out here treated wolves like slaves, the way you do, the souls of Mongols would be lost (173; 270; orig. trans.). The passage gives pause for thought, telling of the sadness of being ‘untranslatable,’ ‘untransmittable,’ ‘unreproducible,’ and of the old man’s piercing sense of resignation. To take it a bit further, there are at least three meanings. First is the question of body and soul, such as in the lament: “You’ve really taken to our wolves … but you don’t know what’s in my heart.” What is evident is the difficulty of transmitting the essence of two different cultures. Second is whether the fate of the indigenous people is to be assimilated or to disappear. If they are not assimilated, then their disappearance is virtually inevitable: “Sickness takes its toll, and we don’t live long lives.” Even though the voice or sound may be disseminated, if its source has disappeared, then what meaning is left to this ‘sound’? Third is whether the fate of the soul requires a ceremony that is accepted. The old man says, “If everyone out here treated wolves like slaves, the way you do, the souls of Mongols would be lost.” If ceremonies are preserved, like the revival of ancestral rites in China today, and the soul truly returns to the earth and finds its place there, would it find peace? Remaining here, there are only questions, no answers. All the listening and transmission in the book seem to be in one direction, especially in the case of the old man’s speech, which is never contradicted (save by Bao Shungui). In front of the old man, Chen Zhen is even more subservient. Is this a fair arrangement? Unfairness is actually arranged in advance. The powerful modern civilization has swallowed the sound of the grassland, so the ‘one way’ is a political standpoint: to give sound to the silenced, to mediate for the muted, to let people hear a different voice through a good story. Kierkegaard once offered a theory of “indirect communication.” “If anyone is 78

Quoted in George Steiner, After Babel, 67.

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to profit by this sort of communication, he must undo the knot for himself,”79 because “truth exists only in the process of becoming.”80 This is what Chen Zhen undertakes: he attempts to undo the knot of the wisdom of the grassland and participate himself in “indirect communication.” This is a slow process over many years, during which the transformation of his thought is gradually completed in this process. This is what the author Jiang Rong has undertaken, its result here after thirty years, and in this sense the ‘wolf totem’ has been set free and communicated. Of all the many sounds discussed, the sounds of wind and rain, wolf howls and dog barks, there is actually only one that is most important, from the grassland, representing the grassland, that is, the sound in the state of survival in primal nature. From that we see the point of the book, very clearly, from beginning to end: to make use of all the sounds from the grassland in primal nature to subvert the existing power of discourse and signifieds, aimed at re-naming the world order. What is termed renaming, in the categories of the postmodern or the postutopian, is not to enthrone or give new meaning to some symbol or patronymic code, but rather to undermine its foundations, to totally subvert its original value system. Through subversion it urges naming, giving the power to name to those who have begun to reflect, in the words of Walter Benjamin: Every critical understanding of an artistic entity is, as reflection in the entity, nothing other than a higher, self-actively originated degree of this entity’s consciousness. Such intensification of consciousness in criticism is in principle infinite; criticism is therefore the medium in which the restriction of the individual work refers methodically to the infinitude of art and finally [endlich] is transformed into that infinitude [Unendlichkeit].81 “Reflection is the originary and constructive factor in art, as in everything spiritual.”82 When reflection enters into thinking, language breaks out of its encirclement. So how would Bilgee view Wolf Totem? Castaneda, the anthropolgist who 79 80 81 82

Søren Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, trans. Walter Lowrie (New York: Vintage, 2004), 117–18. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944), 72. Walter Benjamin, “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” in Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913–1926 (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2004), 152. Ibid., 151.

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claimed to listen and record a shaman’s discourse, had this experience: “Don Juan, naturally, laughed uproariously every time I expounded my theories.”83 Bilgee is also chuckling in cold blue Tengger. 4.3

In Terms of Religious Studies: How Did the Wolf Become a Totem? It is not enough to define morality as fidelity to one’s own convictions. One must continually pose oneself the question: are my convictions true? dostoevsky84

The totem is a primitive religious concept. Using it for the title of a book is itself allegorical: this novel seeks to tell a story related to beliefs. There can be two levels to the study of religious beliefs. The first is the study of the faith or doctrine. Historical research on a particular group or doctrine, as well as totem worship, belongs to this category. In this book, the matter at hand is studying the wolf totem. After the novel was published there was an outpouring of critical debate at this level, resulting in two diverging opinions: one concerned primitive beliefs among Mongols and whether there ever really was a wolf totem.85 The second concerned the primitive belief and religious symbol of the Chinese people, and whether it was the wolf totem, dragon totem, bear or phoenix totem,86 about which a follow-up study by Ye Shuxian achieved results.87 And this also prompted the question whether the Chinese people 83 84 85

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Carlos Castaneda, The Power of Silence: Further Lessons of Don Juan (New York: Washington Square Press, 1991), 198. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, cited in Tzvetan Todorov, Literature and Its Theorists, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1987), 78. T Ġombojab and Asigang revised the theory of the wolf totem: “Besides the wolf, Mongols worshipped dragon, horse, and falcon totems. Because the opening passages of The Secret History of the Mongols record the traces of the wolf totem it has been firmly planted in the minds of people. In fact, the wolf totem was only the totem of the Kiyan (Qiyan) clan.” See Menggu mishi xiandai xiandai Hanyu ban [Secret History of the Mongols, modern Chinese language edition], eds. T Ġombojab and Asigang (Beijing: Xinhua chubanshe, 2006), 6–7. An Boshun 安 波 舜 , “Women shi long de chuanren haishi lang de chuanren 我 们 是 龙 的 传 人 还 是 狼 的 传 人 [Are we descendents of dragons or wolves?],” http://www .culstudies.com/rendanews. See Ye Shuxian 叶 舒 宪 , “Lang tuteng, haishi xiong tuteng? 狼 图 腾 ， 还 是 熊 图 腾 ? [Wolf totem, or bear totem],” Zhongguo shehui kexue yuan yuanbao, June 15, 2006: 3; also, Xiong tuteng: Zhonghua zuxian shenhua tanyuan 熊 图 腾 ： 中 华 祖 先 神 话 探 源 [Bear totem: origins of Chinese ancestral legends] (Shanghai: Shanghai huabao chubanshe, 2007).

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should accept this wolf totem with an open and receptive mind.88 This struck a nation’s raw nerve and brought on a deluge of opinions and denunciations. A second level of research is on the reception of a doctrine among its followers. What this study attempts is textual analysis of this aspect. Hence, the verification of a wolf totem and what connections the Mongol people’s beliefs had with wolves are not the objects of this study. The reason for this is simple: as an allegory, the meaning of Wolf Totem is not in a return to origins in a religious sense. In the end it is merely making use of wolves to tell a story. The contemporary philosopher of religion John Hick made a lofty generalization about these two directions for research. The former he dubbed ­“dogmatic theology,” the latter “problematic theology”: Problematic theology … takes place at the interfaces between the tradition and the world—both the secular world and the wider religious world—and is concerned to create new theology in the light of new situations … The first kind of theological thinking provides the ballast and the second the sails of the ship of faith … the one to keep the vessel upright and the other so that it may be carried onward before the winds of history.89 The beliefs in Wolf Totem obviously do not involve doctrine or dogma, but are quite close to the concerns and the starting point of “problematic theology.” What is different is that the totem in the novel is not theology, and less belief than a kind of thinking, one that happens to coincide with problematic theology in the sense of sailing the ship of faith. Wolf Totem is involved with a multitude of issues, all of which are linked to elevating the ‘national character’ of the Chinese people. Elevating the grassland wolf to a totem is a kind of expectation, a dream, a boat of utopia attempting to set out anew on a long voyage. This book discusses the issue of national character in the second section of Chapter 5. The focus of attention at this point is neither “dogmatics” nor “problematics,” but an attempt to answer a question through analyzing the course of how the wolf in this story becomes a totem, that is, “the concrete problem not yet solved or even adequately discussed: the question of how ideas actually enter into literature.”90 88

89 90

Zhang Yiwu 张 颐 武 , “Cong ‘ying’ de bianjie jinru: Lang tuteng de jiazhi 从 “ 硬 ＂ 的 边 界 进 入 ： 〈 狼 图 腾 〉 的 价 值 [Entering from the ‘hard’ border: the value of Wolf Totem],” in Yige ren de yuedu shi [The history of one person’s reading] (Shenyang: ­Liaoning renmin chubanshe, 2008). John Hick, God Has Many Names (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1982), 13. Wellek and Warren, Theory of Literature, 122.

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The process of believing is a psychological process, yet there is no intention here of delving too deeply into the category of the psychological: “Everything that the critics think of as a psychological problem is in reality its very opposite … Criticism can justify its right to approach works of art only by respecting their territory and taking care not to trespass on that forbidden soil.”91 Therefore, this study will stay close to the events of the novel, relying on textual analysis to explore how this story about belief transformed from ‘belief’ into ‘story.’ First is an introduction to the concept of ‘totem.’ The Englishman John Long first used the concept of “totem” at the end of the eighteenth century.92 Since then quite a number of anthropologists, ethnologists, and even the fields of law and politics have studied totems, and reached a common understanding of the fundamental attributes of totems, confirming a definite relationship between totem worship and early human beliefs. A scholar of the former Soviet Union Aleksandr Mikhaĭlovich Zolotarev believed that totem worship was the belief that an object in nature, usually an animal, had an intimate link with a clan. It is a form of religion that is “an ideology that correlates with the social structure of the first stage of gens development.”93 More scholars share James G. Frazer’s conclusion that totem worship is a system that is part social and part superstition: “This reverence toward totems is always explained as a form of faith.”94 Wolf Totem is far from the accounts above, given that it is simply a novel, not a scholarly monograph. Even though we read it as related to religion, it is completely different in kind from religion. In pursuing beliefs of early humans, the theory of Yang Xuezheng on “animal worship” is quite close to its depiction of the relations of humans and wolves. With years of research on site in Yunnan, Yang Xuezheng has offered an original view:

91 92

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Walter Benjamin, “Dostoevsky’s The Idiot,” in Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913–1926, 78–9. The term “totem” first appeared in John Long’s Voyages and Travels of an Indian Interpreter and Trader (1791), derived from the term “his kin” in Ojibwa (Chippewa, Anishinabe). The core of totem worship is the belief in a blood relation between one’s kin and a given animal or plant as the original ancestor and family member of one’s clan, and consequently revered as symbol and guardian deity of one’s clan. Scholars universally believe that many peoples around the world once engaged in totem worship, remnants of which still can be seen among some peoples in modern times. A.M. Zuoluotaliaofu A.M. 佐 洛 塔 廖 夫 [Aleksandr Mikhaĭlovich Zolotarev], Xiboliya ge minzu de tuteng chongbai canyu 西 伯 利 亚 各 民 族 的 图 腾 崇 拜 残 余 (Leningrad, 1934), cited in E. Haitong E. 海 通 [D.E. Khaitun], Tuteng chongbai 图 腾 崇 拜 [Totemizm ego sushchnost i proiskhozhdenie, Stalinabad, 1958], trans. He Xingliang 何 星 亮 (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chuban she, 2004), 4. James G. Frazer, Les origines de la famille et du clan, trans. Jean de Pange (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1922); cited in D.E. Khaitun, 2.

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During the infancy of humanity, primitive ancestors thought of themselves as animal clans, without distinguishing between humans and animals, even viewing animals as more intelligent than people, admiring animals for abilities to adapt to natural environments and survive that were greater than humans,’ so that humans in many regards were the inferiors of animals.95 The principal reason that humans worshipped animals, he believed, was that they “were grateful for all the help that animals gave humans to survive,” and this worship, for the most part, arose out of this practical consideration.96 The traces of this appear often in Wolf Totem, as in the statements, “We Mongols learned from them how to hunt, how to encircle, even how to fight a war” (18; 26); “How can humans compare with wolves?” (113). For Bilgee, such utterances are practically commonplace. Related research has demonstrated the observation that there indeed were “wolf children” on the primitive grassland: “There is no doubt about the Tujue Turks taking the wolf as a totem, based on the analysis of the legend of the original ancestor of the Ashina patrilineage and its so-called grotto of ancestral sacrifice, the silver wolf’s head banner, and other material.”97 The bodyguard of the Tujue khan was called Fuli, or “wolf.” “Because of strength that heaven has given, the army of our khan is like wolves; our enemies like sheep.”98 The wolf was a symbol of fierceness among the ­Tujue. Yet, obviously, the information about wolves that Chen Zhen gathers from grassland people in Wolf Totem is centuries removed from such beliefs, so these are not of great relevance. Since early modern times there have been two major shifts in the religion of the Mongolian grassland. The first occurred within the alliance of Mongols and Manchus after they invaded China in the seventeenth century, when the people of the grassland unanimously adopted the Yellow Hat sect of Buddhism.99

95 96 97

98 99

Yang Xuezheng 杨 学 政 , Yuanshi zongjiao lun 原 始 宗 教 论 [Primitive religion] (Guilin: Yunnan renmin chubanshe, 1991), 87. Ibid., 88. Jiangshang Bofu 江 上 波 夫 [Egami Namio], Qima minzu guojia 骑 马 民 族 国 家 [Kiba minzoku kokka; (Equestrian nation)], trans. Zhang Chengzhi 张 承 志 (Beijing: Guangming ribao she, 1988), 59. Ibid., 62. In 1260, when Khubilai Khan took the throne he appointed Drogön Chögyal Phagpa of the Red Hat sect of Tibetan Buddhism as spiritual advisor, after which doctrines of Tibetan Lamaism spread widely throughout Mongol territories. In the late sixteenth century, the Yellow Hat sects of Tibetan Buddhism entered the grassland, and in 1640 the Mongol elite

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The second followed the founding of the People’s Republic of China when the Mongolian grassland underwent its baptism in revolution and completed thought reform. By the time Chen Zhen and the other students arrived in the grassland it was so totally under the red flag that no hiding place remained for any other religion. Thus, although there was a tradition of reverence toward wolves among people of the region, that was no longer a matter of a ‘wolf totem.’ Then what kind of information does Chen Zhen receive on the Olonbulag? The new knowledge that he acquires about wolves comes principally from legends. Determining that the information in the novel derives from legend and not religious beliefs is important to textual analysis for providing an epistemological basis for a search.100 Yanagita Kunio, author of On Legends, believed that the importance of legends lies in people’s believing: “like vegetation, the roots are ancient, but they grow and flourish profusely,” giving people the inspiration of something to believe in.101 Many stories about wolves have been passed down on the grassland that indeed have some links with early beliefs. Belief in the wolf as a totem was present around the world among the peoples of ancient gens societies, such as the Tujue: In front of the entrance to the long tent of the khan stood a wolf’s head banner to signify that he had not forgotten his origin born of a wolf. Not only among the Tujue, the Gaoche tribe from Lake Baykal also had a legend of being born of a wolf. The legend of a founding ancestor suckled by a wolf existed among the Wusun of the Gansu region. This shows that

headed by Altan Khan declared Yellow Hat doctrines state religion. See Menggu mishi xiandai Hanyu ban, 59–61. 100 In connection with the view of the influence of the wolf totem, the translators of the modern Chinese edition of The Secret History of the Mongols corrected the Ming dynasty translation (“the first human ancestors of the Yuan dynasty were a gray wolf born of heaven mating with a white deer”). They explained, “Although the Han Chinese equivalents for the two Mongol epithets Beierdiechina and Huoaimalanle were gray wolf and white deer, translating them instead as human names, meant that the legend of the origins of the Mongols as a gray wolf and a white deer was converted into something that was no longer a legend.” See Menggu mishi xiandai xiandai Hanyu ban. Legends are the most important part of folk spirituality, conveying historical information about pre-history and are an important source for the study of prehistoric culture. Denying legends not only limits the space of imagination, but also may cut off the spiritual origins of a people in the writing of traditional Chinese histories. 101 Liutian Guonan [Yanagita Kunio], Chuanshuo lun [Densetsu ron; (On legends)], 9.

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taking the wolf as a totem was widespread long ago among the Tujue (Turkic) peoples.102 In the process of historic change and ethnic mixing, totem worship gradually disappeared, while stories connected with totems evolved into legends and were passed down to the present. Yanagita Kunio believed that one aspect of legends was close to history, another to literature: “in the current of time, forces largely pulled the two poles of legend apart more and more, the bonds that linked them were stretched ever thinner. Moreover, the literary element as they seeped out took on sharper outlines and deeper colors.”103 The legends of wolves, like those in Wolf Totem, are clearly severed from history and assume their validity in an imaginary cosmos. “As historical knowledge developed, people could not be satisfied with the same old explanations, so if legends were to continue to be told, they had to be revised. Driven by these circumstances, people accordingly began to revise legends.”104 Wolf Totem exemplifies this revision; what is different is that it has not aimed at retelling legend, but sought to return legend to the totem. “With the passage of time and the advance of the ages, the state of legends and their content changed and evolved.”105 Yanagita Kunio informs us, “To say that people believe legends actually happened, and that they do not doubt facts recorded in history are basically two different things.”106 Readers remain suspended as much as possible between belief and disbelief, their feelings during reading in search of fulfillment. It is critics who take ‘disbelief’ as a premise of study. When literary criticism shifts into empirical verification of history it may “shamefully” (Benjamin’s words) cross over into discarding “the right to approach works of art.”107 Wolf Totem is strewn with legends of wolves, for the most part of two kinds. One kind is stories of wolves that have a beginning and an end, which can be traced to their origin. For example, “the belief that wolves could fly to Tengger, taking the human soul back with them” (37; 58) comes from a legend of “flying wolves”: Known throughout the Olonbulag, it had recent origins, and, as it happened, was set in the area of Chen’s production brigade. He was 102 103 104 105 106 107

Jiangshang Bofu [Egami Namio], Qima minzu guojia [Kiba minzoku kokka], 60. Liutian Guonan [Yanagita Kunio], 30–31. Ibid., 40. Ibid., 46. Ibid., 52. Walter Benjamin, op. cit., 79.

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d­ etermined to get at the bottom of the legend and satisfy his curiosity as to how wolves were able to “fly” on the Olonbulag. Soon after their arrival, the students had been told by herdsmen that Tengger had sent the wolves down to Earth, which meant they could fly (37; 58). The result of Chen Zhen’s desire to clarify just how wolves could fly leads to his on-site investigation, which not only does not erase the fantastic colorfulness of the legend, but rather increases his respect for wolves and confirms for him that this is the crystallization of the grassland wolves’ collective wisdom. In another kind of legend there is no apparently complete story, but like the molecules filling the air, or more like cells that permeate the body, it is ubiquitous, very close to totem worship, forming an important part of the grassland people’s daily life: A people who worship the wolf totem will go to the greatest lengths to study and imitate everything about wolves, such as hunting methods, sound signals, military arts, strategy, combative nature, spirit of collective organization, discipline and patience, leadership awarded competitively through trial by combat, obedience to authority, dedication to protecting clan and kind, dedication to preserving the grassland … and more (259). The grassland passed down legends of Genghis Khan: “Tradition reports Jenghiz Khan as saying: “In daylight, watch with the vigilance of an old wolf, at night with the eyes of the raven. In battle, fall upon the enemy like a falcon.”108 Chen Zhen believes, “The music and song of Mongols must have been influenced by the howling of wolves, even to the point of deliberately studying and imitating it” (258).109 All human affairs on the grassland are connected with wolves, from living to production, folk customs to mores. In the novel, these legends are largely recounted by Bilgee. Following the old man’s silence and death, legends like those detailed above will most likely be passed on as folk stories. The ever-present totem worship that is always on his lips is forever gone. So it is surprising that it is revived in the mind of a modern person such as Chen Zhen and even acted on, inevitably raising doubts. 108 René Grousset, The Empire of the Steppes: A History of Central Asia (Piscataway Township, nj: Rutgers University Press, 1970), 224. 109 “A wolf clan in Texas used to dress up in wolf skins and run about on all fours, howling and mimicking wolves; at last they scratched up a living clansman, who had been buried on purpose, and, putting a bow and arrows in his hands, bade him do as the wolves do— rob, kill, and murder.” James G. Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy (New York: Cosimo, 2010) Vol. 1: 44.

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On such a vast grassland why should it be the wolf totem and not another? This is related to the ‘spirit of the wolf,’ that is, the spirit of freedom. Are ‘freedom’ and ‘spirit’ two concepts used separately, or one inseparable “lexeme” (cizu 词 组 )?110 This of itself is a question taken up in the section of this chapter on philosophy. The next question: How did the wolf become a totem? This was a process of transforming beliefs. Whether you accept the view of the novel, as you imperceptibly change from the traditional view of wolves while reading it, this process is completed, and it thus becomes a real question that the researcher must face. It is actually not difficult to study this question, being a topic that the author goes to the greatest lengths to present. He made Chen Zhen stand in for him (and also the readers) in making an example of himself as an apprentice in the field, so that we would begin at the same starting line with a modern, educated Han Chinese, and so reach the other side of this experience together. The novel begins in the most unfamiliar and frightening of circumstances with Chen Zhen bringing us close to wolves. He recalls his first encounter with a wolf pack: “Shivers of fear rippled over his entire body. He believed that any  Chinese who experienced such an encounter could not keep their gall ­intact.” (4) Maybe it was the horse’s extraordinary courage that summoned back Chen’s departed soul. Or perhaps it was the gentle spiritual touch of Tengger (heaven), which restored confidence and determination to his soul that had prematurely leaped to heaven, but when that spirit, which had hovered in the frigid air for a moment, returned to his body, he felt reborn and was extraordinarily tranquil (5; 4; orig. trans.). He lets us experience personally how, in this moment of mortal peril, he begins to have a new understanding of wolves: Having escaped from the wolf’s maw, he became an immediate convert to the devotion paid to Tengger, just like his Mongol hosts. He also developed a complex attitude of fear, reverence, and infatuation toward the Mongol wolf. It had touched his soul. How could it possess such a powerful attraction? (7; 7)

110 The term “lexeme” is here used to translate the Chinese word cizu 词 组 “word cluster,” a term used to suggest the free combination of Chinese characters to form words in a unbounded manner, unlike English morphemes and words. [Translator’s note.]

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Chen Zhen’s awakening can be seen as the source for a “conversion of faith,” faintly suggesting a religious source: “Man makes religion, religion does not make man.”111 The movement from ‘faith’ to religion proceeds by stages. In the first stage, religion is always “a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature …”112 In this story, for example, Chen Zhen’s awakening is based on the most superficial layer of survival consciousness, ­emphasizing its practical nature. Helpless as he is, surrounded by wolves, he involuntarily, “like the shepherd he was supposed to be, appealed to Tengger, Mongol heaven, in a moment of peril: Wise and powerful heaven, ­Tengger, reach out and give me your hand.” (6; 5) At the moment of his epiphany based on gratitude for being snatched from the maw of the wolves, he accepts two beliefs: Tengger and wolves. The former comes out of belief in nature, like Feuerbach’s “dream of the human mind.”113 The latter comes out of reverence, close to the psychological basis of totem worship among primitive humans.114 The two very much resemble the sources of proletarian mass religions, for the most part because there are nearly irresolvable problems in real life in the effort to dispel the fear of either illness or death. Today, the effort to satisfy the desire for official promotion or wealth, worshipping Buddha for a medical cure, burning incense to make wishes, and hoping for rewards in this life all belong to the lowest level of belief, exactly conforming to the earliest anthropologists’ understanding of religion, “a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life.”115 However, Chen Zhen’s spirituality quickly enters a new level, proceeding from the individual to the ethnic, and from the basis for survival (living) toward the will to survive (fighting). Together with this, his thought also undergoes a change: from his fear and enmity as an individual toward wolves, towards

111 Karl Marx, Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1844) (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm), ­accessed September 28, 2017. Translator’s note. 112 Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, 7 & 10 February 1844. https://www.marxists.org/archive/ marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm (accessed August 1, 2014). 113 “Religion is the dream of the human mind.” Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (1841), https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/ essence/ec00.htm (accessed August 1, 2014). 114 See Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo. 115 James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion: A New Abridgement from the Second and Third Editions (New York & London: Oxford University Press, 2009), 46.

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r­ eflection on his own ethnicity. Hence, his level of faith is raised, abandoning the individual’s terror, and aiming to suck the blood of the strong as the medicine to treat his own “anemic” ethnicity. This stage is gradually completed in his conversations with Yang Ke: We Han worship the Dragon King, the one in charge of our agrarian l­ ifeline—our dragon totem, the one we pay homage to, the one to whom we meekly submit. How can you expect people like that to learn from wolves, to protect them, to worship and yet kill them, like the Mongols. Only a people’s totem can truly rouse their ethnic spirit and character, whether it’s a dragon or a wolf (23; 33–4). Here there is no trace of the individual human or wolf, and what we see are two symbolic systems, dragon totem and wolf totem, alluding to two different cultures, agrarian civilization and grassland civilization, indicating two different populations, farming people and nomadic people. No matter whether triumphant or defeated, weak or strong, they are elevated as totalities. Here faith is raised from the individual’s ‘dream of the mind’ toward paving the road to religion. “Religions are founded by people who feel a need for religion themselves and have a feeling for the religious needs of the masses.”116 Belief may be an individual’s, but a religion definitely belongs to a population. A doctrine becomes a sect or school only when it achieves a ‘mass’ of followers. Given that the founding and dissemination of religion has followers as its base and its goal, a question arises: Chen Zhen is merely an ordinary person, so even if he wants to, how could he make his thoughts carry the ideals of a mass of people? If what Chen Zhen longs for the most is freedom, then one wolf cub is sufficient to serve that. Why elevate grassland wolves as a group to a totem. The totem is the sign of a group, not the ideal of an individual. Why does Chen Zhen graft the will of a collective such as ‘China,’ ‘Han Chinese,’ and ‘agrarian ethnicity’ onto the ideals of an individual? Everyone who has been involved in religious issues, whether scholars or politicians, has always taken care in word and deed, as Evans-Pritchard has said, of the need to be familiar with the language of believers, to understand their living environment, “and also an awareness of the entire system of ideas of which any particular belief is a part, …”117 This is how we can follow what Chen Zhen does: Out of what system of ideas does the ‘wolf totem’ as he believes in it 116 Friedrich Engels, “Bruno Bauer and Early Christianity,” https://www.marxists.org/archive/ marx/works/1882/05/bauer.htm (accessed August 1, 2014). 117 Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion, 7.

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come? What awaits revelation under the wolf banner, and what sort of people could that bring together as a group? The story does not directly answer these questions, but it does give us some important clues. There is a people, an ethnicity, sharing the same ancestry as the author, that has undergone much suffering and is trepid and submissive, like lambs led to the slaughter, a leaderless flock of sheep, desperately poor and weak … unless a new exemplar with a new force brings together this dish of loose sands to form a Great Wall—starting out with such hopes, from the valor of the grassland wolves he thinks back to the armored cavalry of the wolf banner of the ancient grassland people, and the link between the ‘wolves of Western civilization’ and the global hegemony of the ‘wolves of modern civilization.’ In the wolf he sees the ‘new force’ and aims to convert it into the ‘new exemplar.’ The force of the exemplar is limitless! On behalf of the revival of the ethnicity, he acclaims the ‘wolf totem.’ If the story stopped here, simply reviving an ancient totem to proclaim a new teaching, criticism could conclude. There is no religion that permits criticism to exist, nor any doctrine that promotes thought. “The relation of thought to religion as object is first, last, and necessarily a study and interpretation of the latter, while in the eyes of religion—at least of theology—it is rather a relation that dilutes and destroys the latter.”118 Fortunately, the novel does not aim for this. It does not intend truly to convert to belief in wolves, but rather attempts to find a road to strength for the narrator’s own ethnicity. In other words, the soul here is oriented toward life, not immortality; it pursues power, not goodness. Chen Zhen is not receptive to existing doctrines and religions, nor do the sermons of this world have any effect on his spirit, but it is in the grassland wolves “who treasure freedom and prize life” that he sees another road to life: A captured wolf ate and slept as always. Instead of fasting, it gorged itself and slept as much as possible to store up energy. Then it escaped at the first opportunity in a quest for renewed freedom… A people who adopted the wolf’s temperament and made it their totem—beastly ancestor, god of war, and sage—would always be a victorious people (139; 219). For Chen Zhen, in the process of taming the wolf cub, this is a new discovery, and because of it, “Chen was grateful to the cub, whose sturdy little body had 118 Ludwig Feuerbach, “Vorwort [Preface to the First Edition],” in Das Wesen des Christentums [The essence of Chistianity] (Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1841), vi.

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the power of transporting him all the way to the heart of a mystery” (139; 219). What is the mystery? Of all things in the world, what does it take most seriously? The wolf cub’s answer is life. What is the heart of this mystery? The story of the wolf cub tells us it is freedom. Wolf cub (individual)/wolf pack (group); freedom/life; spirit/totem; human/divinity … Why are such paradoxical propositions mutually dependent, oxymorons? The suffering of a people is surely entwined with this, containing a secret of the age, something very unusual. A member of the Han ethnicity living in the modern age, Chen Zhen is burdened by this, racking his brains until he says, “I really see it now.” This is strange logic, but it contains the profound logic of the grassland … Grassland wolves have never been tamed, while the wolves’ nature and their skills are things that people haven’t learned after thousands of years. In truth, wolves rule all, and occupy the commanding position over every complex relationship in the grassland (253). Chen Zhen elevates the unconquered ‘wolf spirit’ to ‘pure spirit’—from this we encounter its core: “the wolf totem is a spiritual system with a scant written record”: The wolf totem has a much longer history than Han Confucianism, … with greater continuity and vitality… the central spirit of the wolf totem remains vital and young, since it’s been passed down by the most advanced races in the world. It should be considered one of the most valuable spiritual heritages of all of humanity (253; 377). No simple passage, in three sentences it completes three great leaps. First, when Chen Zhen contrasts the wolf totem with Confucian civilization, the ­former in one step crosses over from the wild grassland into the mainstream society of China. Following this he grafts it directly onto “the most advanced races in the world,” boldly striding into modern society, equating it with the ‘first world.’ Finally there is Chen Zhen’s logic, conforming to the view ‘the more nationally distinctive, the more globally accepted,’ a view that recommends it to “all humanity.” I am stunned. Today I would immediately associate this pathologically with communism. There was no such ready-made lexical item in traditional Chinese, and on the yellow earth where Han Chinese live today few harbor the communist ideal to ‘liberate all humanity.’ A leap this grand could only find a place to land in

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literature, and in the realm of beauty dream of becoming reality. Next, Chen Zhen, like a bait and switch artist, shifts appellations without explanation by substituting “Chinese people” (中 国 人 ) for his own Han ethnicity, so that the prescription for restoration is now no longer just for an ethnicity (the Han), but for the entire nation state of China: There’d be hope for China if [Chinese people could rebuild] our national character by cutting away the decaying parts of Confucianism and grafting a wolf totem sapling onto it. It could be combined with such Confucian traditions as pacifism, and emphasis on education, and devotion to study. That would remold national character, and then China would have hope (253; 377). Nurtured in ‘liberating all humanity’ and ‘serving the people,’ our generation has become all too accustomed to using collective nouns to enthrone an individual. Just because the ideals of that time set out collectively bearing utopian blueprints, it has been hard to avoid cherishing a sense of mission of collective salvation: when one person is saved, he wants to save others. However, true religion is instituted for “the regulating of Mens Lives according to the Rules of Vertue and Piety.”119 It is forever oriented toward the individual, not the collective, because he “must in the first place, and above all things, make War upon his own Lusts and Vices.”120 On this point, John Locke was particularly acerbic in one remark: “It would indeed be very hard for one that appears careless about his own Salvation, to persuade me that he were extremely concern’d for mine.”121 He stressed repeatedly, “The principal and chief care of every one ought to be of his own Soul first, and in the next place of the publick Peace …”122 Hence, we must return to the source of wolf totem worship to see how Chen Zhen saves his own soul—unfortunately, guess what he is doing. He is raising a wolf! Does it make sense that a ‘totem’ can be kept and fed? He says it is in order to study and understand it. To a believer does it make sense that their faith can be studied and understood? To return to Chen Zhen at this point in the story: a smuggler of contraband on the boat of utopia, he raises a wolf cub. Fortunately, with this c­ ontraband, the 119 John Locke and James Tully, A Letter Concerning Religious Toleration (Indianapolis, ia: Hackett, 1983), 23. 120 Ibid. 121 Ibid. 122 Ibid., 49.

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mystery in the dark place in his soul is opened up, allowing us to see in the private space he shares with the wolf cub the true pursuit of ‘a person’s’ heart: the spirit of freedom—here an indivisible phrase, for without ‘spirit,’ ‘freedom’ has no place to hide. Since the early modern era the trend to introduce individuality into the writing of the epic, and the tendency to bring the private into the creation of fiction have combined to conform subconsciously to the value judgments of postmodern philosophy, moving from the collective to the individual. Scholarship has taken note of the phenomenon that the modern writer of the epic has been in a quandary because the premise on which he relied (widely believed legends and myths) had evaporated, and his world as ‘reality understood according to experience’ had changed into one without myths or miracles. The poet no longer has an audience that gathers to listen, but needs rather to write for readers: Since the narrator now no longer occupied the exalted position of someone reciting an epic, but spoke in the status of an individual narrator, and since the audience changed from a group of listeners to individual, private readers, the entire world of narration turned into a world of ­individuals. Readers adopted identities as individuals; what the author narrated were matters of individual experience.123 Wolf Totem is an example of this. It presents the panoramic setting of an epic creation, but it has to proceed from individual experience and offer a moving story in one-on-one adversarial dramas, such as the story of the wolf cub. “Chen had changed many of his habits once he’d taken on the responsibility of raising a wolf cub” (166; 260). He deepens his knowledge of the wolf cub through close contact, consequently completing spiritual self-elevation: The wolf showed no gratitude [for its being nurtured yǎngyù 养 育 ], for he did not consider himself as being raised [huànyǎng 豢 养 ] by a human and was incapable of reacting slavishly just because he saw his master coming with his food … The word raise [yǎngyù] was absent in the relationship between Chen and the cub. The wolf was his prisoner for the time being, not his ward (169; 264). 123 Woerfugang Kaise’er 沃 尔 夫 冈 ･ 凯 塞 尔 [Wolfgang Kayser], Yuyan de yishu zuopin— wenyixue yinlun 语 言 的 艺 术 作 品 － － 文 艺 学 引 论 [Das sprachliche Kunstwerk: Eine Einführung in die Literaturwissenschaft (The lingual work of art: an introduction to the study of literature)] (Berne, 1948), trans. Chen Quan 陈 铨 (Shanghai: Shanghai yiwen chubanshe, 1984), 473.

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What is the difference between ‘raise’ huànyǎng and ‘raise’ yǎngyù? The former is used for relationships between humans and animals; the latter is used for human relationships. The actual content of the two words is not so distinct. What is the difference between huànyǎng ‘raise, keep’ and qiújìn 囚 禁 ‘capture, imprison’? There is a great difference: the former is consensual, the latter coercive. Applied to the relationship between the wolf cub and Chen Zhen, they involve two promotions: promoting the wolf to being raised [yǎngyù] by a human involves a humanizing elevation; being a “prisoner” carves a nearly insurmountable boundary between the wolf and Chen Zhen—criminal and prison guard. This links any misdeed by the wolf to the struggle for freedom, turning it into a heroic deed in the name of resistance. Every image of the evil wolf in the traditional sense and every evil trait are conveniently reformed into ‘goodness’ in this anagram of word choices. Chen Zhen has never been a conformist. Before going to the grassland he has raised various small animals, even a sparrow, so that nurturing a wolf for him is simply an extension of his individual interests, not a great new accomplishment. The carefree game encounters so many unexpected difficulties. He has never expected “raising such a rambunctious wolf cub would be like guarding a keg of gunpowder, every day spent fearfully” (167). The cub’s existence completely contradicts Chen’s previous experience raising pets, overthrows the master/slave relationship between them, and results in a great blow to his psyche, to the point that he self-consciously controls his desire to playfully pet the cub, and changes his condescending attitude: Chen Zhen abandoned the desire to pet the wolf while he was eating and respected his noble natural instincts. He continued to crouch down a few paces away and observe the cub quietly, grateful for the lessons in wolf behavior (169; 265). Several words here are worth elaboration. Words such as the ones in italics above (“respected,” “noble,” “crouch down,” “grateful,” and “lessons”) in Chinese have a distinct consciousness of status, and utilize diction used by servants towards masters, believers towards deities, the earth-bound toward the heavenly. In the relationship between Chen Zhen and the wolf cub there is a distinct sense of inversion. This transformation of attitude takes place quietly in just the pure play of anagrams without excessive explanation. Although it has no sense of the postmodern, it is equally subversive, outside even the modern. It is binary opposition, an updated version of the life or death politics of monarchism: I am your superior, I dominate you; or, I follow you, I obey you— gestures that are very traditional and utterly without a place in postmodern society. But this inversion may have combined with ‘modernization’ to form

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a real circumstance in the structure of postcolonialism. That circumstance could be called a classic situation in the process of modernizing among newly developing countries, historically covering the modern history of the entire world, and creating national soul that certain nations—such as Japan and ­Germany—fervently pursued and that was highly successful on the road of revitalizing nations. It did not require the warming up period and momentum of an enlightenment movement or a renaissance. It just needed actual possession (autonomy) or occupation (expansion) to be enough to resolve the question of people’s faith. Its demands were few, just a national flag that could be waved high overhead (no matter what totem hung on the banner) and the growth of strength beneath it. Once the contest of strength became a reality then it had all the power of ‘truth,’ so that people followed it en masse. During the modern era, under the dual promotion of ideology and science and technology, achieving ‘truth’ entered the technological manipulation of controlling people in three stages: first was the control of power, followed by publicity campaigns, and then there was ‘belief that it was true.’ Such a process appeared in texts, like a mirror, images on one side, physical form on the other. The truth of details could produce components of what were the same as historical truth, and once ‘image’ was true, then believers followed. For example, in Wolf Totem “everything in the story is true except the whole of it.”124 This is close to the essence of religion: every small thing receives meticulous attention, true in its particulars, but neither true in essence, nor real. It is precisely  the illusion that the articulation of the fictive and the real combined generate that which can overpower people and cause followers in their imagination of the fictive or the real to put into practice their own ‘dream of the spirit.’ In the name of religious fiction, the role in the novel is to restore each thing to its place: Tengger is heaven is god; old man Bilgee is the wise man who reveals the secrets of heaven and humanity; the wolf cub is the disciple of god, guiding lost sheep—like Chen Zhen—out of their confusion, corresponding to Yanagita Kunio’s theory: “At the core of legends there must be a monument.”125 Here the wolf is that monument. What is regrettable is that no matter how much this novel appears to be religious fiction, it and religion or doctrine are two different things. As seen from the field of Religious Studies, no matter how supernatural the grassland wolf appears, this is still far from totem worship. However spiritual it once was, 124 Wilson Follett, The Modern Novel (New York, 1918), 29; quoted in Wellek and Warren, ­Theory of Literature, 213. 125 Liutian Guonan [Yanagita Kunio], 26.

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when it ran away it did not leave behind much concern among humans. As for the wolf cub, it comes from the grassland, but belongs to no population (including wolf packs). To grassland wolves it is a degenerate alien creature— how can it be given a name? Its situation is difficult because it has no home, no identity, nothing more than that of a pet that has been captured, nurtured, and never been out of sight of humans, something between an amusement and a doll. Under Chen Zhen’s observation, it has no privacy, is unhappy, without freedom, and humiliated by living with dogs, yet never takes its own life to end its humiliating fate and upholds respect for life. Why does Chen Zhen’s respect for him increase, to the point of dutiful submission? It is a difficult question. The answer that the author gives is “freedom.” Dragging out an ignoble existence as a prisoner deprived of freedom, how does the wolf cub show his freedom? What the story shows is moving, that is, the author’s focus, ‘resistance’—the premise for resisting is that one must live, which becomes the reason the wolf cub must live. This is the same reasoning so many fervent idealists of our generation had when they sought to survive in order to carry out ‘continuing revolution.’ It is precisely because the wolf cub does not submit to the circumstances of lacking freedom that such a spiritual thing can become the only vehicle on the road to salvation, ascending to heaven, entering the heart … It can run anywhere, except in the human world, where there is no longer a place for it to survive. In support of the belief that leads to freedom, the story inserts two premises that are untrue. One is that the wolf’s resistance may well be merely for the sake of staying alive and is not conveying a mission related to freedom. Another is that the status of Chen Zhen and his peers is uncertain. To the wolf he is the master who offers nurturing. But in that society in the grassland he is also a prisoner, who neither has freedom nor dares to resist. How can one say he reveres the wolf cub, rather than believing the grassland wolf deserves pity for sharing his fate, and borrows its body to restore his own life? In the end, the wolf pack flees, the believer (the old man) dies, the audience (Beijing students) leaves, and the people of the grassland all believe in modernization, even the wolf cub acting out ‘resistance’ ascends to heaven … With ‘wolves’ and ‘totems’ turned into distant legends, irrelevant to reality, is it still necessary to deliberately subvert something? True, on the face of it, the story has left no place for the wolf totem to exist, yet at the end of the text or even after reading it, it comes back to life. Many readers ‘remained awake all night’ and could not resist writing something to express their feelings, whether praising it or condemning it. They have continued to spread the story—and this brings us to the final question for this section:

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What is it that makes it so difficult to forget Wolf Totem so long after we have read it? In Chinese the two characters that make up the word for ‘religion’ (zōngjiào 宗 教 ) may be used separately or together. They first formed a compound word in Buddhism: what the Buddha said is ‘jiào,’ ‘instruct,’ and what the Buddha’s followers said is ‘zōng,’ ‘school’ or ‘sect,’ the two combined to form the word for ‘religion.’126 In the world today the three great religions have a long history, countless followers, and a deep influence on daily life, while there is a constant stream of new religious sects spreading through every corner of the globe. Among the Chinese who were relatively indifferent to religious consciousness, conversion to ideological religion has a history of a hundred years, trying out every beautiful word and magnificent vision of humanity or heaven. Is there still a need to appeal to followers to establish a new doctrine or faith—such as that of the wolf totem? Faith here is idealist, not earthly. In terms of national or ethnic character, its goal is salvation for oneself, not saving the world. If we truly believe in the ‘wolf totem,’ then we must answer the question: What thing about it is new? If we do not really see it as a faith, we still need to answer: what is this story of pseudofaith attempting to convey? Roland Barthes answered this question in Mythologies. Barthes “accuses mythical language of theft and appropriation, for it is always adorned with strange feathers. It can build only on something already made … The reason for modern myth’s pervasiveness and aggressive presence lies precisely in the fact that natural, interpersonal relationships have been replaced by external, institutionalized forms of communication, and these mediators—our modern myths—could not remain innocent. They carry purposes, convey manipulative action between input and output; they are responsible for essential modifications; their special interpretation and expedient reporting serve well-defined ideals.”127 In modern myth, Barthes was “looking for a common denominator, a common structure behind the various narcissistic façades.”128 The common element in Wolf Totem is the wolf, and the novel constructs a story about belief in the name of the grassland wolves, borrowing the appearance of the wolf to 126 Zhuo Xinping 卓 新 平 , Zongjiao yu wenhua 宗 教 与 文 化 [Religion and culture] ­(Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1988), 10. 127 Yvette Biró, Profane Mythology, 105. 128 Ibid., 76.

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decorate itself. My questions are: what aspects of appearance does it borrow? What sort of ‘self’ does it decorate? We introduced the ‘superior’ qualities of the grassland wolves in the previous chapter, so here we can summarize them. First is their will to survive, which they show not only in combat, but also display in the daily activities of eating, drinking, defecating, urinating, and sleeping. They are disciplined, patient, valiant fighters, unyielding and merciless, “as intimidating dead as it had been alive” (9; 11), terrifying sheep, and shaming Han people. Next is their superhuman knowledge of survival. “Wolves out here really know how to live. We’re no match” (26; 40). Many times their knowledge has been an inspiration to humans, who learned from wolves how to preserve food by freezing it. And after a major battle, “the main body of the wolf pack leaves the area, since they know we’ll retaliate” (67; 106). Third is their uncommon ability to survive. They are ingenious, making astronomical observations: “If a halo appears around the moon, a wind will blow that night and the wolves will be on the move” (59; 94). Their “ability to endure cold, heat, hunger, thirst, foul odors, filth, and germs” evokes Chen Zhen and his friends’ boundless respect: “One had to be impressed with a species that had survived millions of years of selection in an unimaginably inhospitable environment” (59; 94). Strategies of concealment pervade the behavior of the wolves in the novel as they appear and vanish like magic, winning success through surprise, all comparable to the finest political strategies, and capable of giving a spiritual transfusion to the undertakings of entrepreneurs. Although in dire circumstances they flee, the wolves are following the best plan in Sunzi’s Art of War (“When Retreat Is Best” among the Thirty-six Strategems), trading the humiliation of temporarily turning their backs for a later opportunity to return and strike again. The wolves’ characteristics, including their baying with snouts raised, “helped make it possible for them to survive on the grassland” (242; 360–1). The legend of the half-blind wolf that killed Wang Ye’s horse is widely known throughout the grassland (113). The spirit of death before surrender in an old wolf shows even better the respect for life at its extreme: The wolf struggled to its feet and sat down, listing to one side, yellow sand stuck to its bloody chest. Defiantly, it stared at its enemies, not for one second forgetting its dignity … Zhang Jiyuan lacked the courage to look into the wolf’s eyes; standing on the ancient grassland, that is, looking from the standpoint of the grassland, the wolf had wrenched justice and righteousness from the humans (146; 229–30).

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Here “justice and righteousness” appear as quite satirical. In the mortal struggle of the grassland, are there justice and righteousness? Who presides over justice and righteousness? All value judgments have been subverted. On the grassland where wolves feed on sheep, why are the scales of justice and righteousness tipped in favor of the strong? The way history is written, the scales of justice are frequently overturned. Previously there have been genuinely strong elements—such as the Russian Decembrists of 1825—that on their own sought to crush the powerful and help the weak, but there have also been weak elements that reached for p ­ ower— as once in Japan—and that revered the strong and exploited the weak. Small wonder then that Chen Zhen’s adoration of the heroic spirit of grassland wolves venerates the power of the strong. The way the novel depicts the valor of ‘heroes’ in adversity (the courage of the old male wolf in the face of death, the female wolf’s refusal to leave behind the corpse of her prey, the refusal of the wolf cub to be led on a leash), it sets off the strength of the strong: After [being dragged] four or five li, the stubborn cub had lost about half of the fur around his neck, which was now bleeding … Seemingly close to death, the cub continued to bleed; he scratched Chen’s hands with paws whose claws had been blunted from his ordeal and were now a bloody mess. Chen’s tears merged with the wolf’s blood (324; 462). For a human to shed tears over a wolf, for a person’s tears to mix with the blood of a wolf, is actually abnormal. Accompanied by the preceding elaboration of the situation, it here seems reasonable. The reader at this point might see in the wolf cub, as Chen Zhen does, “a realm past human imagination and beyond its reach”: … it was their sacred, inviolable freedom, their independence, and their dignity. It was this principle that made it possible for all true believers among the herdsmen to willingly be delivered to the mystical sky-burial ground, in hopes that their souls would soar freely along with those of the wolves (324; 462). In the sense of the ‘sacred,’ thoughts at this point encounter religion. According to the definition of the German scholar of religion, Gustav Mensching, ­“religion is experiential encounter with the holy.”129 Chen Zhen at this time not 129 Cited in Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart [Religion in history and the present], Third edition, ed. Kurt Galling (Tübingen: Mohr, 1961) vol. 5: 961.

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only has an encounter with the sacred, but also a profound experience in response to the sacred. The process of generating faith is smoothly accomplished here, and the wolf also logically enters the ranks of totems, once again restored to human worship. The scholar of religions Jürgen Moltmann, especially in this ‘post-’ era, directed his gaze more and more towards “God for a Secular Society,” and open-mindedly reinterpreted theology.130 Scholars such as Don Cupitt believe that religion and religious doctrines can be understood anew by placing them in the category of mythology, in which “religious doctrine should be seen simply as providing us with a language to live by, and a set of model narratives for us to draw upon in building our own life stories.”131 He points out a potential avenue for the restoration of the wolf totem from the standpoint of post-mysticism: “‘If you really want it all to be true, then it is entirely up to you to make it all true, in your own way and in your own life!’ A religious faith is a project; we can make it all come true by the way we execute it.”132 This argument has met with strong criticism, but it does find an echo in canonical doctrine, to quote Saint James: “faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.”133 In this sense, a faith or a totem basically does not require a congregation of followers; if you believe, act on it, and faith will be established. In this light, whatever is said about the question of the truth of Wolf Totem is not wrong, for the story already exists here, and it restores belief through this act. What is old is not necessarily archaic; what once was need not be obsolete. Perhaps it is just the opposite, that the older something is the more self-­evident is the nature of its truth. The more often it has been repeated, in reality the more it could be fashionable. In conversation/dialogue with the p ­ hilosophies of persons of the past I am overwhelmed by their profound knowledge, and often smile to myself at their inimitable sharpness. Freud, for example, during his research on totems discovered: “There is an intellectual function in us which demands unity, connection and intelligibility from any material, whether of perception or thought, that comes within its grasp; and if, as a result of special circumstances, it is unable to establish a true connection, it does not hesitate to fabricate a false one.”134 The wolf totem clearly belongs to ­‘fabrication’ to 130 See Jürgen Moltmann, God for a Secular Society: The Public Relevance of Theology ­(Minneapolis, mn: Fortress Press, 1999). 131 Don Cupitt, Mysticism After Modernity (Oxford and Malden, ma: Wiley-Blackwell, 1997), 2. 132 Ibid. Cupitt places his paraphrase of the argument for “active non-realism” in religious belief in quotation marks. 133 The Epistle of Saint James 2:17, in The Bible, New International Version. 134 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (New York: Psychology Press, 1999), 95.

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address a need. But unlike the wolf totem of primitive humanity, this one is quite modern: Chen Zhen got down on his hands and knees to watch more closely, feeling not so much that he was raising a pet as facilitating the growth of a young teacher who commanded his respect and admiration. He was convinced that there would be more lessons from the wolf in the days to come: courage, wisdom, endurance, patience, love for living, love for life, insatiability, defiance, disdain for harsh environment, building a strong self. He thought how much better it would be if the people of China, besides their dragon totem, had also a wolf totem. Then would they still suffer so many national humiliations? Would they still worry whether China could have a great revival of democracy, freedom, and power? (220–1; 335–6; orig. trans.) The riddle is finally solved. Beneath the fluttering wolf banner sounds the trumpet call of nationalism. The weight of national revival heading toward democracy, freedom, and power rests on “a young teacher” who commands “respect and admiration.” Why not? “In the study of religion we see a close connection between religion and the development of all peoples. In a sense, issues of religion are substantially the issues of nations.”135 The campaigns of Christian crusaders drenched Eurasia in blood; missionaries once heralded imperialism, and their traces covered the globe. Why not use a simple wolf totem for the Chinese nation that has suffered a century of humiliation, heavy burdens, and countless sacrifices in blood? At the political level, everything is reasonable. However, in my view, once religion is allied with one nation or interest group, faith can turn into a weapon to kill people (of other religions) and kill one’s own (as martyrs). As great as the self-image is, when freedom vanishes, whose ‘spiritual dream’ will it be then? Under such a ‘progressive’ banner I want to return home. As we move down the highway of modernization, I still believe, “When a scholar of the old culture swears to have nothing more to do with people who believe in progress he is right. For the old culture has its goods and greatness behind it …”136 Can this also be seen as a kind of faith? If it is a faith it is surely tragic: It is from here that Wolf Totem started, and this is precisely the starting 135 Zhuo Xinping, Zongjiao yu wenhua, 55. 136 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge ­University Press, 1996), 24.

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point that it aims to break loose from. Yet, to stay at this point evokes a voice: “Abide, you are so fair!”137 Life then is over, like the end of Faust. 4.4

In Terms of Anthropology: Whence Human Nature? Whither Human Nature? This shows hidden springs of humanity in spots which look dead and barren. rabindranath tagore138

What is human nature? This is one of the important questions raised in Wolf Totem, arising spontaneously out of the ruthless mortal contests. Looking at the remains of army horses in the snow, Chen Zhen thinks: Surely the bestial practices of humans cutting other humans to shreds, ripping out tendons and flaying each other were not learned from wolves? Perhaps the animal in humans and the wolfish nature in animals had a common source? What people have put into practice openly or covertly during the struggles of the human race over the course of history has indeed been the code of the wolf (55). From that he produces this association: Chen discovered that by considering wolves’ behavior from a human perspective, some of the puzzling behaviors could be reasoned out logically. Dogs display human characteristics, men display wolf characteristics, or vice versa … Perhaps the study of humans needs to start from wolves, or the study of wolves needs to start from humans; the study of wolves may be a large topic that involves the study of humans (59; 94). From Chapter 6 on, the issue of the ‘national character’ that the author broods over becomes bound up with human nature, gradually strips away the c­ oating 137 Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Goethe’s Faust, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Anchor Books, 1990), 469. In Part ii, Dr. Faust, in contemplating his effort to build a utopian kingdom of free men (from reclaimed land), thinks of its completion as “the highest moment” in the realm of aesthetics, and calls out, “Then, to the moment I might say:/Abide, you are so fair!” He then falls dead. 138 Nationalism (New York: Macmillan, 1917), 109.

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of national allegory and, drifting among human/wolf and human nature/wolf nature, draws close to a postmodern proposition: reflecting on the nature of human survival, doubting the contents and boundaries of human nature. What can be termed the allegory also has its own logic in the story, for no matter how far the comparisons with animals go, no matter what the conclusions about the strengths or weaknesses of national character, they must in the end find a foothold in the ‘human,’ forcing criticism to begin with anthropology, and re-examining the issue of human nature. There are two perpetual propositions regarding humans. One is consciousness, arising from Socrates’ famous dictum, “know yourself,” establishing the ultimate aim for philosophy to regard the human as fundamental and central.139 The other is regarding the origin and destination of the human race: Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?140 That is, the past, present, and future—punctuated with question marks—have for ages remained eternally ultimate questions without answers. The first topic belongs to the category of philosophy, the premise of which is to convert a supposition into an axiom that humans are a species with consciousness, unlike other animals. “But what is this essential difference between man and the brute? The most simple, general, and also the most popular answer to this question is—consciousness …”141 Having posed this question, ­Ludwig Feuerbach answered it: “Consciousness in the strictest sense is ­present only in a being to whom his species, his essential nature, is an object of thought.”142 Many philosophers have restricted ‘consciousness’ to the fundamental stipulation of ‘self.’ Immanuel Kant wrote, “The fact that man is aware of an ego-­concept raises him infinitely above all other creatures living on earth. Because of this, he is a person.”143 Hegel wrote, “When man goes beyond his natural b­ eing he thereby distinguishes his self-conscious world

139 The maxim gnōthi seauton (know yourself) carved in the Temple of Apollo in Delphi inspired Socrates. Ernest Cassirer stated, “‘Know thyself’ is regarded as a categorical imperative, as an ultimate moral and religious law.” Ernest Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 3. 140 The three questions form the title of a painting by Paul Gauguin (1848–1903). The colors in Gauguin’s painting are intense, and it is filled with the significance of the wild and primitive, expressing life, death, and desire, urging people to question the meaning of life. 141 Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York: Dover, 2008), 1. 142 Ibid. 143 Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Victor Lyle Dowdell (Carbondale, il: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), 9.

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from an ­external one.”144 Cassirer stated, “self-knowledge is the highest aim of philosophical inquiry.”145 The study of human nature entered philosophy in a ­reasoned fashion, becoming in the reasoning of formal logic a series of interrelated concepts, so that discussing the issue of the human could depart from the human ‘actual’ and reach fulfillment directly from the conceptual. This shifted the study of human nature in the field of philosophy to knowledge of the ‘species,’ and it steadily took on scientific norms. “Science is the cognizance of species. In practical life we have to do with individuals; in science with species.”146 Based on the species, philosophers could draw conclusions about questions of humanity. Feuerbach addressed the questions: “What then is the nature of man, of which he is conscious, or what constitutes the specific distinction, the proper humanity of man?” His answer was: “Reason, Will, Affection.”147 There were no suppositions, no analogies, because the conclusion was the result of “what constitutes the specific distinction,” established on a self-evident axiom, which was that the confidence that the superior status of the human species was unquestionable. This was human self-entitlement and self-empowerment, arbitrary, but rarely questioned. Because it had no substantive content it could become a conceptually constructed abstract truth, and moreover, in a philosophical sense become absolute truth. The second topic is related to anthropology. For more than a century numerous scholars have spent their lives studying how to classify variations among humans on the basis of field research (not conceptual); searched for the origins of the human race in the sense of genetics, i.e. synchronically; pursued historical research in ethnology to trace the roots of human social phenomena, while empirical and analogue studies supplied a large quantity of persuasive evidence. In just the study of human nature only little has been published down to the present, and so there has been no choice but to cede this enclave to philosophy. Anthropology stepped back in the face of human nature, not because it lacked intellectual resources, but because of the difficulties of selecting samples. Concepts alone are not enough in anthropology; it is necessary to speak from ‘facts’ or ‘cases.’ The difficulty of definition is because delimiting its meaning is so difficult; delimiting meaning is difficult because there is a lack of persuasive examples taken from observations made at zero distance. These

144 Georg Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic [Lesser Logic], trans. T.F. Geraets, et al. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1991), 63. 145 Ernest Cassirer, An Essay on Man, 1. 146 Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, 1. 147 Ibid.

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samples must be obtained in comparisons that have relevance (such as animal nature). In Chen Zhen’s words: It was really too difficult for anyone to genuinely understand wolves. People are out in the light; wolves stay back in the dark. The baying of wolves can usually only be heard from a distance. An idea that was never far from Chen’s thoughts had grown stronger in recent days: he was determined to find a wolf cub and raise it in his yurt, watching it day and night as it matured, hoping that familiarity would lead to greater understanding (74; 117). Whatever Chen Zhen’s motive, his idea of “watching it day and night as it matured, hoping that familiarity would lead to greater understanding” has indeed been the most important method in anthropological research. “The baying of wolves can usually only be heard from a distance.” Raising a wolf fortunately offers a rare opportunity for close observation and even participation. Chen reacts to finding his wolf cub: “‘I’ve been looking for you for a very long time,’ he said silently, ‘and now here you are’” (100; 161). This is like the perpetual wish of the anthropologist. Finally he is rewarded: “I’ve only been at it a little more than a month so far and, and already I’ve seen incredible things I never saw before” (174; 272). We cannot help but be moved, since his observation and knowledge are what the anthropologist strives for but cannot achieve. Here we see an important result related to the policy of sending educated youth [students] to rural peasant villages,148 a result that undoubtedly had ­positive value in terms of epistemology and practice. This group of ‘young intellectuals’ came to learn and experience another culture (countryside/­ grassland/mountains) before engaging in careers. In general they spent over two years in the unfamiliar environment, far longer than the one year of field research for actual anthropologists. What is the significance of this? Different fields will have different conclusions. In terms of the political (which was how many people were then), if some of them later entered government and became high-ranking officials, their understanding of the 148 At the end of 1966 Mao Zedong announced sending “educated youth [students] to the countryside,” launching the massive “up to the mountains and down to the countryside movement” for 20 million young people, lasting 14 years. See Ding Yizhuang 定 宜 庄 , Zhongguo zhiqing shi—chulan (1953–1968) 中 国 知 青 史 －初 谰 (1953–1968) [A ­history of Chinese educated youth—the first wave (1953–68] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue ­chubanshe, 1998).

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hardships of peasants and life in the lower strata would be helpful to them, the better to ‘serve the people.’ From a cultural perspective (as the facts have ­demonstrated), if someone among the students later engaged in creative writing they would certainly be able to draw on rich creative material from this experience and offer a remarkable work. From the perspective of anthropology, all students sent down to the countryside, after so many years of real ‘field’ research, could be the most distinguished anthropologists or folklorists. Small wonder that Jiang Rong is as familiar with using anthropological methods as a fish is with water, since the ‘water’ was completely natural, all that is needed was for the fish—the consciousness to write—to jump in. Below let us look into the environment that ‘nature has blessed’: What is it that those students from Beijing who joined collectives on the Olonbulag do? What do they say? Can what they say and do be used as samples for anthropological research? It must be admitted that much of what the students in those years do is what anthropologists routinely do. Chen Zhen, for example, can “find a wolf cub and raise it in his yurt, watching it day and night as it matured,” something that is completely unimaginable in the city or at school, but would be normal for an anthropologist or zoologist. Wolf Totem is adept in drawing on anthropological methods: participating, observing, listening, recording, and so forth, almost everything. On the foundation of the shift of subject position, “Chen discovered that by considering wolves’ behavior from a human perspective, some of the puzzling behaviors could be reasoned out logically” (59; 94). This is the comparative method that anthropologists most commonly use. Therefore, from an anthropological orientation, the source material in the story has strengths that continue to be discovered, and among these none has more value than in pursuing the question of the origins of human nature. Where does it come from? Where is it going? The characters in the novel express a deep interest in these questions. Yang Ke tells Chen Zhen: “I think raising this wolf will be good for more than just studying wolves. We can also study human nature, wolf nature, and domestication. It’s a condition you can’t find in the city or in farming areas, other than people perhaps and their pets” (109; 174). Chen Zhen responds: “But if you don’t study them in tandem with wolf nature, you’ll never come up with anything worthwhile.” (109; 174) Why do this comparative study?

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Chen nodded as he thought back to all the fairy tales he’d read as a child. The “gray wolves” were stupid creatures, greedy and cruel, while foxes were clever and likable. Not until coming to the grassland did he realize that in nature there is no wild animal that has evolved more highly or more perfectly than the gray wolf. (30; 46–7) Desire for knowledge arises out of doubts about past experience and cognition. The hearsay knowledge—never actually experienced—about wolves, foxes, and people are all products of being told. Confronted by fact, they are all suspected of being fictive. In genuine circumstances of personal experience, Chen Zhen re-acquaints himself with the wolves and extends this to human nature: Seeing for the first time with his own eyes such large-scale butchery, Chen Zhen also felt an involuntary surge of animal ferocity. He genuinely longed to catch a wolf, rip out its tendons and flay it. Would it be possible that someone would turn wolfish after more encounters with them, or that they would take on a bit more of the wolfish animal nature? (55) Face to face in a life or death contest, boundaries that separate humans from animals, such as hierarchy and identity, are thrown aside, creating a leap in Chen Zhen’s understanding of human nature. In truth, it is an inversion, attempting to understand human nature anew from the perspective of wolf nature. Thus, it is not a simple shift of subject position, but the new subject ‘wolf’s’ usurpation of the human after the shift: Heaven, earth, and man are a unity; it’s impossible to categorically separate men, dogs, and wolves. Otherwise, how does one explain the fact that there were so many overlapping latent human traces found at the site of this horrible carnage, including Japanese, Chinese, Mongols, and those Westerners who discovered that “humans are wolves towards other humans” and took that as an article of faith? (59; 94; orig. trans.) If an understanding of wolf nature can be directly applied to humans, then all previous definitions of human nature need to be revisited comparatively. Wolf Totem employs numerous apparently authentic anecdotes that aim at demonstrating the conclusions of zoologists, namely, that all the characteristics of animals can be seen in humans. No matter whether we define these as good or bad, they may develop to extremes in humans, to varying degrees among

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different people. As Batu says: “‘People differ from one another,’ Batu said, ‘but wolves are all alike’” (145; 228). As characteristics of the species, what fundamentally differentiates human nature and animal nature? Kant believed that it is morality: “it is only as a moral being that man can be a final purpose of creation.”149 And that final purpose “can be nothing else than man under moral laws.”150 Only in this sense did Darwin reluctantly agree with Kant’s view: “I fully subscribe to the judgment of those writers who maintain that of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important.”151 Then what is conscience? Freud believed, “According to linguistic testimony it belongs to what we know most surely; in some languages its meaning is hardly to be distinguished from consciousness. Conscience is the inner perception of objections to definite wish impulses that exist in us; but the emphasis is put upon the fact that this rejection does not have to depend on anything else, that it is sure of itself.”152 In the novel, those who most lack ‘consciousness’ and who most lack ‘conscience’ are humans: the influx of short-term laborers “just about killed off the grassland population of wild dogs, which wasn’t all that big to begin with. They lure them into adobe houses, where they hang them up and drown them by pouring water down their throats. Then they skin and eat them” (69; 110). The swans of the grassland ultimately cannot escape their fate as sacrifices to human depravity and unscrupulousness: Obviously [the dead bird] was the female swan who, to protect her precious eggs, had not flown away from the lake in time and had ended up like her mate … She had died on top of her unborn cygnets, giving them the last bit of warmth from her own blood (234; 351). Confronted with the sight of this, only the grassland people sharing the spirit of the grassland are moved to pity, their “bewildered and angry glare” showing they could not understand why the laborers “could be so cruel to sacred grassland birds.” (234; 351) “In a holiday mood, the workers carried their loot back to the kitchen.” (234; 351) “Old Wang reeked of liquor and garlic, his mouth shone with grease, and he kept saying how good swan meat tastes” (233). After 149 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, Part ii, Appendix 86, 371. 150 Ibid., 374. 151 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 70. 152 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, 58.

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reading this, do you think of passing moral judgment on the laborers? General readers cannot help but do this, while critics, on the other hand, remain unmoved. For criticism, any direct moral judgment is transgression, perhaps cutting off avenues of criticism and even all ‘thought.’ This is something criticism must guard against. The author deliberately has led the reader in a moralizing direction, aimed at blurring the baseline of human nature on the question of good and evil, and shifting sympathy away from humans. At the same time, it misleads criticism—why? Because the author’s goal is not anthropological, only making use of the research attitude in anthropology that is serious, lifelike, and comparatively true. It attempts to shake off criticism and induce readers to follow him where he wants to go. When he says, “I’ve come more and more to feel that wolves are truly extraordinary animals” (174; 272), he has gone over to the wolves and away from humans. The nature of the wolf is deified as a totem, while humans are failures, ever more unspeakable. It is evident that close observation does not necessarily result in objective conclusions, because of the lack of a relatively constant or stable frame of reference with which to conduct comparisons and definitions. This is a difficulty that exists throughout research in the humanities. In criticism especially, when you read fiction, besides a good story and noting narrative technique, what can you ask of it? Criticism of allegory makes other demands. It requires depth of allegorical meaning and sincerity of ‘thought.’ These are the most basic premises of allegorical criticism, and an important condition of post-criticism. Facing questions of feeling, love, conscience, instinct, and even human nature, “in what we tend to feel is without history,”153 there are at least two viable methods. One is to draw on the basic concept of ‘experience’ in analytic philosophy, using H. Gene Blocker’s research as an example, “The basis of all scientific knowledge, the truth of all scientific propositions is ultimately determined by the truth of basic propositions, and the truth of basic propositions can only be validated or falsified by experience.”154 Chen Zhen’s experiential observation can serve as material for verification, overturning the past motifs of the wolf and even renewing understanding. In this sense we may say that Wolf Totem fulfills this goal comprehensively. The other method is Foucault’s genealogy. This is a comparatively scientific method. In noting events, such a method “must be sensitive to their r­ ecurrence, 153 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D.F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 139. 154 Buluoke 布 洛 克 [H. Gene Blocker], cited in Xifang meixue tongshi Vol. 7, ed. Zhu Liyuan, Zhang Dexing, et al. (Shanghai: Shanghai Wenyi chubanshe, 1999), 199.

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not in order to trace the gradual curve of their evolution, but to isolate the different scenes where they engaged in different roles.”155 Foucault repeatedly emphasized that “patience and a knowledge of details”156 are the only channels to understanding. If we use this method to analyze human nature, we can temporarily set aside plot and characters or animals to look for in the novel: asking instead, what details repeatedly appear to challenge the baseline of human nature; what aspects provoke us into questioning human nature? As the term implies, human nature is what is distinctive of humans. ­Obviously, however, not all people have ‘human nature’ such as it is customarily understood, otherwise epithets such as ‘worse than an animal’ would not exist. How to confirm or distinguish human nature is a difficult question. The greatest difficulty is not in determining connotation and denotation, but in who determines these. Who has the authority to put themselves above humanity to name human nature? Only god, heaven, Tengger … Since there is no god on this earth there are two expedients to which we may turn, namely two basic methods in anthropological research: “observing a society as a whole” to examine its elements and how they fit together; or, examining a society in relation to others “to find similarities and differences and account for them.”157 The first is analogy. “[T]o study man, one must extend the range of one’s vision. One must first observe the differences in order to discover the properties.”158 Employing this method, the observer’s cultural standpoint directly influences his value judgments. From the standpoint of modern Western civilization you would say that people of color, peasants, and other ethnicities are in the comparatively lower stages of human evolution and their ‘human nature’ has not fully developed. But if one occupies the standpoint of postmodern or post-colonial criticism, you would reach the opposite conclusion, viewing with disdain “the common alienation of human nature”159 in modern Western civilization, and regarding populations that have still not completely 155 Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 140. 156 Ibid. 157 Alan Barnard, History and Theory in Anthropology (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 6. 158 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Origin of Language, trans. John H. Moran and Alexander Gode (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 31. 159 “By alienation, Marxists mean separation or distancing of yourself from (i) the results or products of your own activity, (ii) the rest of nature, (iii) other human beings, (iv) ­yourself.” A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, ed. Tom Bottomore (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 159; cited in David Pepper, Eco-Socialism: From Deep Ecology to Social Justice (Routledge, 1993), 85.

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developed or are in undeveloped locations as holding on to an innocence. Chen Zhen in Wolf Totem, for example, attempts to place his ideals on the grassland wolf existing in primal nature. This method is premised on an a priori set of values with value judgment as the result, and, with a premise of such exclusivity, one most often becomes intoxicated with a sense that ‘I alone am noble.’ The second method is comparative, employing the close observation style in anthropology, through detailed comparison identifying people’s distinct qualities. Wolf Totem primarily employs this method. Its premise is precisely that there is none, no standard of values that must be adhered to, and no constraints arising from ethical rules. There is no moral judgment of persons or events, only defining the differences between humans and other living things in terms of attributes of the ‘species’ (including differences among humans). What is termed human nature no longer enjoys innate authority over what is ‘politically correct’ or ‘morally flawless.’ It may be evil or unscrupulous, just as other species or animals may be ‘good’ or ‘decent.’ The results of comparisons always disappoint people: the hegemonic status of humans is thoroughly subverted, and what is revealed is a world of plural co-existence, as Engels once so incisively observed: [A]nimals turned up that made a mockery of all previous classification, and finally organisms were encountered of which it was not possible to say whether they belonged to the plant or the animal kingdom … all rigidity was dissolved, all fixity dissipated, all particularity that had been regarded as eternal became transient, the whole of nature shown as moving in eternal flux and cyclical course … The more deeply and exactly this research was carried on, the more did the rigid system of an immutable, fixed organic nature crumble away at its touch.160 This second method is close to the narrative mode of Wolf Totem. Realism— creating a vivid record based on close observation—is the typical method of anthropological research. The results of recent anthropological study and the perspective of multiculturalism have greatly expanded the vision of humans’ self-understanding and provided new resources for a fresh understanding of ‘human nature’ or ‘animal nature.’ Once Chen Zhen has begun to raise the wolf cub, for example, human and wolf are together night and day, creating the conditions for comparison of a series of authentic details. Drawing on Chen Zhen’s 160 Frederick Engels, “Introduction,” in Dialectics of Nature, trans. Clemens Dutt, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works, vol. 25, 326. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1883/don/ch01.htm (5 and 6 of 11), (accessed August 28, 2014).

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observations, we discover that these valuable details give prominence to hardto-believe resemblances between human and animal nature, and constantly challenge human beings’ understanding of ourselves. As such, they very much approximate Darwin’s explorations,161 but with different orientations. Darwin strove to demonstrate that animals have faculties that are almost the same as humans,’ that animal nature is manifested in the same way as human nature, and that ‘humans’ and ‘human nature’ a priori have a certain positive significance. Wolf Totem, however, is always making clear that humans are inferior to wolves, that the fundamental qualities and tendencies of human nature show they are incapable, weak, and degenerate; in Bilgee’s words, “People are no match for a wolf” (185; 288). The valor of grassland people is a result of constantly learning from wolves in the process of matching wits and courage with them. People have normally provided positive explanations of human nature, and literary works have added to this, assuming the goodness of human nature and the badness of animals from ancient legends all the way down to the beginnings of early modern literature of ‘evil.’162 Engels also wrote that it is “inherent in the descent of man from the animal world that he can never entirely rid himself of animal characteristics, so that it is always only a question of more or less, of a difference in the degree of bestiality or of humanity.”163 Chen Zhen’s conclusion is the opposite: next to the excellent qualities of wolves, he sees humans as evil, in keeping with Xunzi’s dictum: “Human nature is evil; any good in humans is acquired by conscious exertion.”164 If we accept Xunzi’s dicta, “inborn nature embraces what is spontaneous from Nature, what cannot be learned, and what requires no application to master.”165 This not only blurs the distinctions between humans and animals, but also unsettles the demarcation of good and evil, pulling out the cornerstone that posits human nature as decent. Involuntarily we still come to this point: on goodness. ‘Goodness’ and ‘morality’ are unavoidable questions in the study of human nature. Hence, we 161 In his studies Darwin repeatedly emphasized the identity of humans with animals, even believing that “some animals extremely low in the scale apparently display a certain amount of reason.” The Descent of Man, 96. 162 In his discussion of European literature beginning in the late eighteenth century, Georges Bataille argued that “Evil” is embedded in the creative process. See Literature and Evil (La littérature et le Mal, 1957). 163 Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science, trans. Emile Burns (New York: International Publishers, 1966), 116. 164 Xunzi: A Translation and Study of the Complete Works, Books 17–32, by John Knoblock (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 1994) (Book 23.1a), 150. 165 Ibid., (Book 23.1c), 152.

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­return to that important question that is virtually impossible for literary criticism to avoid: the relation of literature to human nature. Is literature a platform for displaying human nature, or acting out moral retribution? Is literature best suited to expressing exhortations to decency, or digging into the depths of human nature? These questions are not only related to the allegory of Wolf Totem, but also involve fundamental judgments about the qualities of this work, and determine the direction for criticism to take: remain at the level of story to develop judgment of the ‘moral’ and the ‘immoral,’ or draw on ‘wolf nature’ to penetrate beneath the story and unearth the depths of ‘human nature’? Literature is an important platform for displaying human nature, moral retribution is a traditional theme, and the work altogether has its own moral orientation. Criticism is not the same, however, and it maintains a necessary distance with ethics: “the fictional character is always too poor and too rich to come under ethical judgment … And what is crucial in the case of fictional characters is not to make ethical findings but rather to understand morally what happens.”166 At present, morality itself has become an issue, judged without waiting for a trial by post-modernity, entangled in a dispute over the authority of discourse of ‘morality’ and dominance that has placed what were once moral actions into doubt in the context of postmodern and postcolonial circumstances. Especially in addressing the topic of seeing the wolf as evil in its nature, there would be no ground to stand on if it were simply a matter of moral judgment. Absent morality, what are the distinctive characteristics of humans that this animal does not have? Wolf Totem seeks to address this question through comparison with two human populations. One group is the settlers. They have strengths that no animals have (technology, weapons, and ideology), and these undoubtedly show the preemptive power of human supremacy, and the orientation of human nature: like a prostitute dressed in a maiden’s clothing, greed under the banner of ‘progress’ is invincible. At least, as of the time that we read this story, the development of human nature neither offered satisfaction nor allowed for optimism, and was basically unscrupulous: rapacious, lascivious … the powerful hand of civilization has been the dark strength behind humans, has always abetted evil, and through every modern means has encouraged plunder and rewarded slaughter. Note that the more thoroughgoing modern institutions and laws are, the more that space for the survival of conscience has been stifled. Wherever ‘law’ has gone, ‘morality’ has yielded its seat. 166 Walter Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” in Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913–1926, 304.

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­ odern civilization founded on legislation has not directly led to morality, M while the decline of human nature and the spread of the system of law have paralleled each other. So what lies ahead of human nature and even humanity? That draws us into considering a question like this: Were there ever in the past creatures with intellect like humans that were destroyed because of plunder? Is that past the future that humans are headed toward? The other group is the people of the grassland, representing the force in human nature that respects and serves nature. What is termed the logic of the grassland is not simply the result of grassland people understanding nature, but also the discipline of their self-restraint. In this logic, human beings have no superior privilege; just the opposite, they can survive over time only by adapting to nature and consciously preserving it. On the one hand, they respect wolves and learn from the survival skills of wolves. On the other hand, they fear wolves and kill them, consciously making use of wolves, and displaying the source of human nature and what it should be, its method of ­survival that adjusts to nature: “If you plan to stay on the grassland, you’ll have to learn to be tougher than the wolves” (10; 12). We cannot help but be led back to ­Bilgee’s startling pronouncement on “big life”: For us Mongols, there’s nothing more deserving of pity than the grass. If you want to talk about killing, then the gazelles kill more grass than any  mowing machine could … The damage done by gazelles far outstrips any done by the wolves … Wolves hunt the gazelles, and that makes for fewer losses of cows, sheep, and horses … We Mongols go crazy if we can’t hunt, partly because that safeguards the big life of the grassland (29–30; 45–6). The passage is a contradictory conclusion, a paradox. “Big life,” as it is called, is the basis for all life, and it is actually abstract reasoning, namely, grassland logic. It endows logic with life to transform this invisible and intangible reasoning into something that can feel and can sense pain. It thereby becomes something that can be loved and pitied, transcends life and death and the judgment of good or evil, directly related to the Buddhist-inspired, unintelligible Chan (Zen) awakening, ‘great goodness is evil,’ and thrusts its way into primal nature. There, nature supports life, but also death, and the function of grassland people there is to maintain equilibrium. Hence, Bilgee’s words, in holding to a ­balance, concentrate the true understanding of the people of the grassland toward survival and a true grasp of life and death. No wonder that “Chen Zhen was deeply moved by the old man’s monologue; it beat on his heart like a war drum,

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­ ersistent and painful” (29; 45). And small wonder that he follows this line of p reasoning to extend it to a general rule of the development of human history: He’d always considered these actions to be backward, regressive and barbaric … The agrarian people’s large-scale burning of wilderness to reclaim it and their exploiting virgin soil along the borders destroyed the grassland and the “big life” of nature, threatening the “little lives” of human beings. Was this not more barbaric than the barbarians? (30; 46) According to Foucault’s genealogical method, without following the “the gradual curve of the evolution” of rights and wrongs between agrarians and nomads, we may “isolate the different scenes where they engaged in different roles” to reach an understanding of the ‘big life’ and see that the acts that Chen Zhen calls into question have not characterized one ethnicity or nationality, but are the acts of humankind as a whole consistently throughout the course of civilization. It is humankind that has plowed furrows and dug channels into the breasts of mother earth, put up walls and buildings …167 Cultures and even civilizations that have created different modes have, to use Chen Zhen’s words, “safeguarded little lives” at the expense of the big life, each of them without exception the result of ‘self-consciousness,’ that is, human nature. If we believe that self-consciousness is the basic attribute of humans, then human nature derives from this; hence, self-destruction is also naturally the result of self-­ consciousness. It follows that Chen Zhen calls human nature into question and interrogates civilization: “Both Easterners and Westerners all refer to the land as the mother of humanity. How then can anyone who does injury to Mother Earth be considered civilized?” (30; 46) Who can answer a question as piercing as this? Benjamin wrote: “humanity can be arrived at only through a catastrophic process of self-destruction.”168 Or perhaps, human nature begins to turn toward goodness in the self-destruction of committing evil? Consciousness controls human behavior, and it can change the course and direction of nature or society. If one says that human beings once, under the duress of ‘survival consciousness,’ could not but take the path of heroes conquering nature, then today, facing an approaching apocalypse, will humans return to nature under the guidance of ‘crisis consciousness’? The question is, return to which kind of nature? An article on the Internet about “Human Nature, Wolf Nature, and Common Nature,” believes that 167 See Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper Collins, 1990). 168 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913–1926, 81.

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­human beings will ultimately return to their origin, “setting aside all boundaries to view the whole world with the points in common with the spirit of humanity … returning to nature is returning to human nature.”169 And there are scholars who have argued that human nature is part of nature, so it is of course natural or innate: “All that belongs to human nature is reasonably a natural right, and humans have by nature a right to enjoy all that is part of human nature—this inference is logically and politically natural, in other words, is self-evident, and goes without saying.”170 True as these views may be, when examined more closely, they may be modern humans’ miss-readings of nature and even of human nature. Human nature does have all the qualities of nature (including animal nature), but its essence is rather quite unnatural: In the sphere that we can control, humans have constantly posed limited challenges to the ‘self’ (and nature), persistently carrying out self-fashioning (and reform) according to our own needs within the category of the ‘species.’ These challenges and reforms have arisen out of highly sensitive, advanced cognizance of dependence on nature, in the sense of the ‘sustainable,’ trying to transcend the moment in an attempt to mitigate the deep internal concerns for survival and perpetuation of the species. Given this, some old-school intellectuals and I have extremely similar views. On the issue of ‘sexual emancipation,’ for example, I have always agreed with the standpoint of Toynbee and others and the orientation that they have held fast to: I admire the nineteenth-century West’s postponing the age of sexual awakening, sexual experience, and sexual infatuation far beyond the age of puberty. You may tell me that this was against nature, but to be human consists precisely in transcending nature—in overcoming biological limitations that we have inherited from our prehuman ancestors.171 Much of the animal nature in humans—such as selfishness, ­shortsightedness— is also a display of natural qualities. Kant warned humanity to understand clearly its own situation: “Nature has not taken him [humanity] for her s­ pecial 169 Pei Youqing 裴 有 青 , “Renxing, langxing yu gongxing, yige shidai de sikao 人 性 、 狼 性 与 共 性 ， 一 个 时 代 的 思 考 [Human nature, wolf nature, and common nature: thoughts on an era],” Borui guanli zaixian 博 锐 管 理 在 线 , http://www.boraid.com; ­reposted at http://tieba.baidu.com/p/126233448, (accessed September 2, 2014). 170 He Zhaowu 何 兆 武 , Xifang zhexue jingshen 西 方 哲 学 精 神 [The spirit of Western p­ hilosophy] (Beijing: Qinghua University Press, 2002), 158–9. 171 Arnold J. Toynbee, “Why I Dislike Western Civilization,” New York Times Magazine, May 18, 1964. Italics added by author.

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darling and favoured him with benefit above all animals … Man is then always only a link in the chain of natural purposes.”172 Human beings have consciously beautified nature, and continued to use it based on new technologies. ­Relative to modern plundering, this is more civilized, more refined, more spiritual and more benign. Especially in the postmodern age, nature has become a convenient instrument for calling civilization into question and for self-­reflection, and another expropriation of nature has begun in invisibility. Before it was material; this time it is spiritual. Before nature was degraded to serve as a prostitute; this time it is raised to sainthood—like Marguerite in the novel by ­Alexandre Dumas, fils. Once an entertainer becomes a Lady of the Camelias, patron and prostitute may find absolution on the road to redemption. But that is only art, neither moral nor historical. The scales of justice are still in the control of human hands, and nature is no more than a prop. Let us look at this clearly: we see that down to the present, humanity has progressed materially and seems to own everything. Yet seen from nature, humanity has not gone very far and, wrapped in the embrace of civilization, steadily displays the natural orientation that a state of survival that is ‘neither death nor life’ leads to: ‘comfort’ suffocates the drive to fight for survival, vitality is unnecessary; the force of ‘equality’ erases all disparities, so individuality is unnecessary; fraternal love pardons all evil deeds, so human nature is unnecessary … The author of Wolf Totem saw this clearly, and it pained his heart: It is difficult for humans as a group to evoke in me a sense of esteem … The wolves of the Mongolian grassland, whether male or female, old, young, or infirm, are all indomitable grassland heroes, so that I couldn’t help being impressed. For humans, heroes are individualized, but among wolves heroes are common among all. Spiritually and in terms of character, humans as a group can only feel ashamed in the face of wolves.173 In the author’s eyes, humans are less than wolves, ending all thoughts about people. Yet, as great as this sorrow is, it is still not despair. At least he demands benevolence from himself, and still harbors a fantasy and hope that people will redeem themselves. Otherwise, why write a prescription such as ‘grassland logic’? What is termed the logic of the grassland is Bilgee’s understanding of ‘big life,’ founded on cognizance of its ‘comprehensiveness [整 体 性 ].’ What 172 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, 353–4. 173 Jiang Rong, Internet interview by Zhonghua dushu bao reporter Shu Jinyu 舒 晋 瑜 . N.d.

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d­ ifferentiates humans from other animals is that ‘ego’ and ‘self-interest’ are not just of the moment, but a search for eternal life down through the ages. ­Self-consciousness can guide the desires of human beings into limitless plundering, but it can also lead people toward benevolence, beyond the interests of oneself, family, ethnicity, or nation, to pursue stability and peace on the basis of ‘symbiosis.’ Compared with animals, human self-interest has foresight. The ability to see far into the future is an important measure that distinguishes people one from another, people and animals, high-ranking and low-ranking animals. Thus, the story contains this description: The seemingly pristine grassland was actually maintained through the blood and sweat of horse herders and wolves. The beautiful, the natural, and the primitive embodied the untold labor of humans and wolves (315; 452). The ‘labor of wolves’ is natural behavior; the ‘labor of humans’ is the result of self-consciousness. In many scenes in the novel, behind almost every detail, one can detect the thoughtful mentality of the grassland people. There is not an exclusive love, but a feeling for all the living creatures of the grassland, including wolves. “‘Actually,’ the old man said, ‘wolves are afraid of people, since we’re their only predators’” (84; 135). That human hand hidden behind the curtain lightly smoothes the scars that imbalance has created because of the struggle of ‘little lives.’ For countless eons only when humans have joined with Nietzsche’s poetry in chanting, “Man is a rope tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss,”174 has human nature revealed a ray of light, establishing its irreplaceable position in the harmonious realm guided by the ‘Mean’ (zhōngyōng 中 庸 ). The ‘Mean,’ moderation, is a major topic in Han culture. “Harmony” (héxié 和 谐 ) is the ultimate ideal state in traditional Chinese civilization. Long ago in their lengthy history the Chinese already had the theory and practice. Moderation, and therefore what is altogether human nature, balanced good and evil while carefully moving forward at a crawl. To survive on the vast yellow earth the population multiplied, something natural and hence something that is very much human nature. So over thousands of years it has had the good with the bad within it. Why then reform her national character? She should now be a model that humanity emulates and studies.

174 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (New York: The ­Modern Library, 1995), 14.

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The path of research has gone in a great circle to return to its starting point, from anthropology back to philosophy. This is not by coincidence of writing style, but rather the inevitable destination of anthropological study. Anthropology has roots and they are in philosophy. Ultimately, through philosophical reflection, anthropology has gone beyond science to return to its humanistic basis, and through enduring field research has persisted in exploring its “philosophical roots.”175 In terms of criticism, I see the novel as the field for research. Drawing on the Olonbulag in Wolf Totem, I walk along the journey of seeking roots, returning to philosophy from anthropology. I agree without reservation with Ernst Cassirer’s conclusions on the past and future of human nature, the belief that the true value of human life exists in self-examination, that is, “in a critical attitude toward human life”: “A life which is unexamined,” says Socrates in his Apology, “is not worth living.” … Both his knowledge and his morality are comprehended in this circle. It is by this fundamental faculty, by this faculty of giving a response to himself and to others, that man becomes a “responsible” being, a moral subject.176 Morality here goes beyond interested judgments of one right and one wrong, petty rights and wrongs, and “I am right, you are wrong,” to indicate self-­ reflection as a whole, the power of self-restraint and self-control, that is, “man becomes all the truer, the more he realizes himself in others.”177 I believe that only this orientation is a guarantee of human nature that no other thing possesses: There are no natural humans in the world, for the origin of human nature lies in accepting the molding of culture. Although distinctions among each culture may be great, there are many points of similarity among them … The more we understand the commonalities beneath the distinctions, the more we can infer trends of social progress and provide some practical guidance for human affairs.178

175 See William Adams, The Philosophical Roots of Anthropology (Chicago: University of ­Chicago Press, 1998). 176 An Essay on Man, 6. 177 Tagore, Nationalism, 97. 178 Malinnuofusiji 马 林 诺 夫 斯 基 [Bronislaw Malinowski], Wenhua lun 文 化 论 [English title: What is Culture?], trans. Fei Xiaotong 费 孝 通 (Beijing: Zhongguo minjian wenyi chubanshe, 1987), 97.

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With human nature defined this way, its function is prominent: humans are the spirits or demons of nature, goodness and evil are human nature. “­ Precisely because evil is human, because it is the potential of regression and the loss of our humanity, it is inside every one of us.”179 Relatively speaking, goodness is the symbol of ‘truth,’ and ‘beauty,’ and is what ought to be the orientation of human endeavor. After eons, human nature has matured in its decline, human understanding of human nature has been lost and constantly adjusted its orientation. Today in the ‘post-’ era, when the unconscious and subconscious have risen to the level of consciousness and are seen as all the same, when animals, animal behavior, and even animal nature can rise to the human realm and be viewed as equal to it, when the boundaries between people and animals have been blurred, when the boundaries of sexuality, of good and evil have been blurred … when all borders, boundaries, privacy, and the nether world have opened up to the point that all possibilities have been opened up, I view human nature as a choice, a wise or foolish choice made on the basis self-understanding (or lack of understanding). From ancient times to the present, human nature has been the same and interlinked. What is different is people’s individual character, which is obviously different in its orientation toward good and evil. Human nature, as I see it, has several preset agreements. First, the ‘self’ is the species, not a single individual. Therefore, individual choice assumes responsibility for the species; hence, there is a division of the superior and inferior, the high and the low. As this was in the past, so it will be in the future. Second, ‘knowing’ is different than consciousness; it not only ‘feels’ but also ‘thinks’ and even anticipates the consequences of choice. Different choices lead to different futures. As this was in the past, so it is today. Third (and most important), choice assumes giving something up. I believe that this is the foundation of human nature and what makes humans human. Its sign is self-control and benevolence, whether in the past or today. True, as Hegel wrote of humans, “prima facie he is like the things of nature, but in the second place just as really is for himself, perceives himself, has ideas of himself, thinks himself, and only thus is active self-realizedness.”180 In the 179 Erich Fromm, The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil (Riverdale, ny: American Mental Health Foundation, 2010), 145. 180 Georg Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, trans. Bernard Bosanquet (London and New York: Penguin Classics, 1993), 35.

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sense of spirit or “self-realizedness,” if we say “darkness, darkness was what wolves love the most, for darkness represented coolness, security, and happiness” (220), then the place for wolf nature is the night. So I believe that benevolent people are the sunlight of the human heart, making people think of and endorse Goethe’s final words, “More light!” So long as there is a ray of light, all dark nights can be brightened. At least it can brighten my life, no matter many dark nights are within my life. 4.5

In Terms of Gender: ‘Asexual’ or ‘Sexual’? … matters of the ger [tent homes] should be decided within the ger and matters of the steppe decided on the steppe. jack weatherford181

Considering the plotting, sex is absent from Wolf Totem. For a novel this is unthinkable. There are just a few suggestive and lyrical descriptions in the novel: Over the next several nights, the horse herders heard the plaintive, angry howls of hungry wolves echo up and down the valley. They grew tense, keeping close watch over their horses, never letting them stray from their sight. The lovers they’d left behind in yurts, knowing that there would be a high price to pay for the wolves’ hunger, beat their livestock out of anger and sang sad songs, bitter melodies of frustration (40; 65). Given the absence of sex, gender is also vague, a great challenge to my theory of gender. Given the long history of disdain in philosophy towards the female, ignoring the elements of gender, I proposed ‘gendering the human’ in an attempt to confirm the place of gender among the basic determinants of humans. Whether as a whole or as individuals, in terms of human embryology or social development, humans have sex, and history has sexuality. Thus, there are three mutually related, fundamental features among the determinants of humans: humans are relatively independent biological individuals; humans have sexuality; humans are a product of social relations. These three determinants exist interwoven, mutually constraining each other, and developing together. We are not human without biological existence; we would not be called human without being biological individuals with social attributes; we all are endowed with 181 Jack Weatherford, citing Genghis Khan’s dictum, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, 68.

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sexuality. Humans’ biological attributes are the premise of the survival of the human race, forming a sub-family of nature, and a part of the natural world. Humans’ social attributes are essential attributes for the survival of the human race and are humans’ transcendence of nature. ‘Sex’ is a medium between ­nature and society, a bridge linking humans’ natural attributes and social attributes. Life is based on natural sexuality, and human life begins with the definition of gender, each person living as a particular ‘being’ in human ­society according to a specific gender identity. So-called asexuality, the absence of sex, can exist only intellectually or conceptually, not in reality; only historically and historiographically, not in the present. The absence of sex is a flaw of historical scholarship and a symptom of illness in philosophy, and is distorted in literature. In this way reading literature as based on sexuality and love seems like taking the road of moderation and equilibrium, the supplement for history and historiography, and the remedy for philosophy and philosophers. However, Wolf Totem does not take the route well-travelled and is not oriented around sexuality and love. On the contrary, it follows the old traditions of historical and philosophical study, deliberately avoiding sex, females, and gender, and with that dispenses with all intimate topics related to these. In the process of symbolization, it achieves the abstraction of the image in literature and the undoing of the author’s own gender identity. It inadvertently joins the ranks of the philosophers—male, without sexual love or marriage, without nurturing a child—leaving behind an obscure shadow, forcing me to face a question: if sex is absent, how to define the ‘sexual’ person? Turning to Wolf Totem for an answer produces at least three results. First, it cuts off orientation to the individual, in the sense of the ‘human.’ The characters in the novel are without exception code for ‘species’: a human race relative to animals; a racial type in relation to other humans, without individuality, a past or a future, whether male or female, mother or child, all symbols of a race. This facilitates nicely the blurring of boundaries between animal and human that the author tries to show, and makes the change of subject position into something quite simple. Next, the novel abandons sex as a medium, imperceptibly demolishing the bridge that connects nature and society with each other. Given the absence of sex, nature (the grassland) and society can be divorced from each other and each isolated. Superficially, the humans and animals in the book are mixed together, relegating humans in terms of subject status to the level of living things in general. Yet, essentially, in the sense of species, nature and the human race belong to different realms, the boundaries clearly marked, in mutual opposition. Because of the lack of the medium of sex, what originally was a human race both natural and social is peremptorily split into two realms cut off from

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each other: as a specific ‘species’ humanity is part of nature, the same as living things in general; as abstract ‘humanity,’ he is placed in society, wholly a part of civilization, no longer with a road that can carry him into nature. Conversely, natural humans (such as the people of the grassland), in the same way, are almost completely cut off from modern civilized society—although they also created their own civilization—and are made into extremes of opposition or of correspondence that give prominence to the contest of civilization and nature, and either/or construction. Finally, without sex there is of course no love story based on sexual love. Indeed there is no erotic relationship in the book at all, and it would be difficult to find even a trace of a suggestion of it. Yet the book is brimming with strong ‘feelings’ and ‘love,’ whence questions arise: In the absence of sex, who upholds feeling and love? Maternal instinct. What is the relevance of maternal instinct to sex? Maternal instinct may not be equated with sex, but ‘she’ is certainly the result of sex, and she is relevant to gender, most frequently a reference to the female. Although the female also exists among animals, when we use a pronoun we always select ‘she’ (the human female) rather than ‘it’ (non-human) to designate the maternal. Maternal instinct is a derivative of maternal identity, mothers—whether wolves or dogs—all assuming the responsibilities of bearing offspring. Whether or not in social relationships such as married families, bearing young will occur. Under the circumstances in which modern technology has not yet been introduced, giving birth is certainly the natural result of sex. In this way sex is indistinctly presented in Wolf Totem, suggesting two very important meanings and emotional orientations. First, the identity of ‘mother’ that maternal instinct brings out is common to humans and animals, bringing humans who regard themselves as transcending nature back down to this lower world, leaving no opportunity even to look back. Second, the gender identity that is an extension of maternal instinct is renamed. It is this issue that this section primarily discusses. Writing about maternal instinct, the author did not stint on words, taking pains with depicting detail, openly lavishing praise and fondness for affection between parent and offspring. Of course, he was writing primarily about grassland mother wolves: There were many stories about the love of a mother wolf for her cubs. In order to teach them to hunt, she’d take great risks to catch a live lamb under daunting circumstances; in order to protect her cubs in the den, she’d fight hunters to the death; for the cubs’ safety she’d carry them to a different place each night; and to feed them, she’d gorge herself to the point of

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bursting, and then empty the contents for them. And, in the interest of the pack, females who had lost their cubs nursed others’ cubs (257; 383). The name Checheg appears for the first and only time to inform us that Bilgee’s daughter-in-law, Gasmai, has a 5-year-old daughter (76; 121). Her son Bayar does not appear in this scene. Interestingly, each time Bayar does appear it is always in scenes of ‘quasi-combat’: the night strike on wolves, pulling antelope from the snow, stealing the wolf cubs, and so forth. In the end we never see scenes which show mother and child relationships among humans by themselves, as concern for one other. The human mother Gasmai is always lavishing her maternal affection on animals, such as the sheepherding dog, Bar: She bent down to pat the big dog’s head and said, “Sain Bar” (Good Bar), over and over. Bar dropped the bone he was chewing and raised his head to nudge his mistress’s hand, then stuck his nose up her sleeve, happily wagging his tail and sending out little eddies of air. Chen Zhen discovered that the hungry Bar appreciated his mistress’s sentimental rewards all the more in the cold wind. (10; 12; orig. trans.) The studied descriptions of maternal instinct among animals form a vivid contrast with the sparse depictions of parental affections among humans: The stud horses called out to the mothers in the herd, for they were the only other animals who had the courage and the composure to protect their offspring, which they did with all the weapons available to them as they made their way toward their mates, their foals alongside (291; 424). Even though the author holds the herds of sheep in such contempt, he does not spare words to depict maternal instinct among them: Nearly two thousand rams and ewes baaed and their lambs bleated, and the bleating and baaing of ewes and lambs reached such a din it was as if wolves were attacking them … ewes and lambs were paired up to go through the check point funnel. Once through the checkpoint the lambs would kneel down on their front legs beneath their mothers’ stomachs and raise their heads to nurse, the ewes lovingly turning their heads to gaze on their own precious offspring (139). In the face of maternal instinct, people and animals are equals, with no boundaries between them; for maternal love, people and animals are i­ nterconnected,

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with no divisions among them. Gasmai, the only grassland woman in Wolf T ­ otem, releases from the snow a half-grown gazelle that survived wolves. When a young wolf mother’s first litter is stolen by humans, “There was no smile on Gasmai’s face. Her eyes glistened from a layer of tears” (84; 135). Tenderness is the keynote of the author’s depicting maternal instinct, embodied in all female animals, particularly mother wolves: They’re good mothers. No stoves, no fires, no pots, so they can’t make meaty porridge for their young. But their mouths are better than the pots we use. They turn the squirrels and marmots into a soft, warm meaty mix with their teeth, their saliva, and their stomachs, just what their cubs need and like (166; 260). The author writes at great length, approaching sentimentality to portray the courageous acts of mother wolves in all sorts of circumstances. A mother guards her cubs at the entrance to their den, tricking and misleading the malefactors who have come to snatch them. To protect their offspring they fight to the death, and take revenge for their dead offspring: “A larger number [of wolf cubs] had been found that year than usual, more than a hundred from at least a dozen dens, and grieving mothers whose cubs had been taken joined the pack, turning it especially frenzied and cruel” (42; 68). Revenge is the converse side of maternal love, and appears repeatedly throughout the novel, mixing love with hatred, in an impressive surge of unparalleled cruelty that forms a clear contrast with the kind of sentimental tenderness that Bing Xin wrote of: Most of the wolves who brought down horses at the cost of their own lives were female … They offered up their lives, obsessed with vengeance, s­ taring death calmly in the face, devoted to the cause, merging blood and milk. They faced the danger of fatal wounds to belly, chest, organs, and teats with a willingness to die alongside the horses they killed (49; 80). In the struggles mixing human and animal realms, the author shows us the superb performances of mother wolves’ revenge that shakes the baseline of human benevolence. Faced with a similar torment among humans, it allows us to associate it with women who have suffered the pain of losing children, since the ancient past, from the avenging goddesses of ancient Greek myth down to the ‘black widows’ of the present,182 abruptly changing the tradition 182 A portion of the female members among Chechen fighters in Russia who lost husbands, fathers, or sons, joined in organizing the ‘Black Widows,’ a suicide terrorist organization,

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of ­associating women with peace.183 Given their revenge, do they evoke pity or are they detestable? Were they born guardians of peace or callous killers engaged in warfare? In the face of such unbounded grief and selfless vengeance, how can the fist of justice grasp what is truly ‘just’? As grassland people know, “stealing a wolf cub isn’t child’s play” (75; 119). As one character recounts, a friend “smoked a female wolf out of a den when they were trying to steal a cub, and she nearly tore his arm off …” (75; 119). Faced with maternal instinct, even the most avaricious hunters practice self-control and show some mercy: Bilgee had told them that hunters and horse herders never took every cub in a den after a kill. The remaining cubs would have plenty of wet nurses and would grow strong with all that milk, which is why Mongolian wolves were the biggest, the strongest, and the smartest of all the wolves on earth (257; 383). This appears rather odd: why would orphaned cubs fortunate enough to survive have so many ‘adoptive mothers’ and ‘wet nurses’? Can there really be a maternal instinct beyond one’s own children, one higher than one’s own bloodline? “A mother wolf’s love can extend to human orphans even though humans are their chief enemies” (257; 384). Is such a saying legend or fact? If it is only legend, then why is it only about wolves? And if it is fact, more than anything else it makes people feel ashamed. No mother in this world is willing to be wet nurse to another person’s child unless they are paid to do that. And few women are ready to adopt an orphan, unless in the name of good deeds. Just as money is a form of compensation, charity may also have its rewards; they are motivating forces that move human nature or human maternal instinct. So, in the case of wolves what is their motivation? There is no lack of stories about wolves raising other animals. In the G ­ erman Black Forest in 1344, a child was discovered being nurtured by wolves. In 1920 in India northwest of Kolkata, there was a sensation when two female wolf children were discovered. In an article titled “Why would wolves raise human children?” Zhou Guoxing raised an interesting question: “Are wolves truly

to seek vengeance, resulting in the Beslan school hostage massacre that killed hundreds of teachers and students in September 2004. 183 See Zhanzheng yu xingbie—Riben shijue 战 争 与 性 别 －－日 本 视 角 [Gender in war—Japanese perspectives], eds. Akiyama Yōkō 秋 山 洋 子 , Kanō Mikiyo 加 纳 实 纪 (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2007).

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that ‘bad’?” He informed us: mother wolves not only show love to their own ­voffspring, but also will raise wolf cubs that have lost their own mothers, and even adopt dog pups. Some literary works have called this intense maternal instinct a “wolfish maternal love.”184 Chen Zhen, who knows something about this, tells the other students with him, “The ancestors of the Huns, the Gaoju, and the Turks were wolf children, all raised by wolf mothers” (63; 100). People commonly have two assessments of maternal love. If it is their own families, sons speak of ‘selfless mother love.’ If the matron is a neighbor, she is for the most part usually ‘partial,’ ‘narrow minded,’ ‘self-justifying,’ and so forth. Grassland wolves are an exception to this, and the written records and oral accounts are entirely about ‘selfless’ maternal love. It is neither the result of morality nor the self-promotion of motherhood among people, but the superior quality that wolf mothers are born with, something approaching the meaning of ‘heaven’ (tian) and that gives rise to the most direct connection with the ‘greater gender concept’ that fills the universe of heaven and earth in Wolf Totem. The term ‘greater gender conception’ or perspective, based on an understanding of sexual difference and tacit consent to the division of labor in society, is related to the absence of ‘sex.’ Therefore, maintaining distance with private life and the individual (the specific person), it can unhesitatingly veer toward two extremes: one is the elevation of gender identity; the other is utilization of gender roles. Elevation of gender identity is based on natural sex differences, but extended to a spiritual plane. As Bilgee says, “Tengger is the father, the grassland is the mother, and the wolves kill only animals that harm the grassland” (16; 22). This way a conceptual family is formed with heaven as the father, earth as the mother, and grassland wolves as loyal guards protecting mother. Small wonder that in this family no sex is to be seen. The members of this family have no blood relations. The reason that this has been accepted is because it fits a distant, universal, and deeply felt legend about the earth mother. Many nations have mythic tales of the ‘corn-mother’ that have been handed down to the present. In the maize-producing regions of the Americas, Native Americans believed that the earth, as a mother, has the power to produce and propagate maize.185 The belief that “heaven and earth is the parent of all creatures” also existed

184 See Zhou Guoxing 周 国 兴 , Langhai, xueren, huo de huashi 狼 孩 ･ 雪 人 ･ 火 的 化 石 [Wolf cub, snowman, fire fossils] (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 1979), 3–11. 185 See Chapter 46, “Corn-Mother in Many Lands,” in James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (Sioux Falls: Nuvision Publications, 2006), 231–36. [“Corn” here refers to grain in general. Translator’s note.].

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in ancient China.186 The scholar of New Confucianism, Tu Wei-ming, quoted the words of Wang Gen (王 艮 ) of the Ming dynasty: “if we came into being through transformation (hua-sheng), then heaven and earth are our father and mother to us; if we came into being through reproduction (hsing-sheng), then our father and mother are heaven and earth to us.”187 Chapter 32 of Wolf Totem contains the following passage: The cruel and beautiful grassland was not only the ancestral land of the Chinese race, but also the ancestral land and cradle of the entire human race. The grassland was the starting point for humans to stand erect and go out across the globe. The great grassland was the most ancient primogenitor of the human race. Chen Zhen sensed an old, tender feeling of intimacy emanating from the blades of grass and every grain of sand and dust on the grassland, tightly enfolding and swathing him (317). The effect of Wolf Totem making use of legends known to every household results in two things: first is that the grassland is elevated to “the ancestral land and cradle of the entire human race” that then sets up the role of the ‘grassland wolf.’ If the grassland is the earth mother of the entire human race, then the grassland wolf is promoted to the guardian of the mother of the entire human race. What is interesting is that while intense love and praise for maternal instinct fills the text, in the plot of the story itself no complete scene is devoted to the role of a mother. There are few descriptions of life in the household (the Mongolian yurt), and virtually all the episodes, whether minor or major, unfold and conclude in the open air. This means that the book is not intended to give space to human mothers or traditional female life, but gives the stage entirely to wild animals, and also human males. It is no wonder that everyone reading the novel is struck by a powerful masculine force. The book is filled with a wild flavor, those who set out on the hunt are all male, and even production labor is divided along these lines: “While the courage and daring of Mongolian women commonly outstripped that of Han men, still on the Olonbulag there were no female horse herders.” (143) A reporter, Shushu, asked the author: 186 See “Tai shi (shang) 泰 誓 （ 上 ） [Great Declaration, i],” in the Shang shu 尚 书 [Book of Documents], trans. James Legge, in The Chinese Classics (Beijing: Asiatic Edition, 1939), Vol. iii, Part 2: 283. 187 Tu Wei-ming, “The Continuity of Being: Chinese Visions of Nature,” in Tu Wei-ming, Confucian Thought: Selfhood as Creative Transformation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), 45.

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Shushu: Some people think that your novel is a kind of masculine (雄 性 ) writing. What do you think of that view? JIANG Rong: I wrote numerous episodes conveying deep feelings and praise for female wolves and mother wolves … The book is not ‘masculine writing,’ but lupine writing, including the masculine and the feminine (雌 性 ) nature of wolves.188 Why was the term xióngxìng (雄 性 )for ‘masculine’ used here, instead of nánxìng (男 性 ) [human masculine]? In the story, ‘maternal instinct’ and ‘feminine’ cíxìng (雌 性 ) [not human nüxìng (女 性 )] are set in opposition to xíongxìng, not [human] nánxìng. True, there are clear traces of ‘lupine writing’ in the book, based on ‘wolfish nature.’ Yet within the specific life of humans or wolf packs, whether human or animal, male or female, without exception there are specific gender roles and divisions of labor. There is no depiction of human relationships between males and females in the book, nothing erotic, but there is a gendered division of labor with distinct boundaries, showing the second extreme orientation of the ‘greater gender conception’: the utility of gendered division of labor. In the book among the human social groups that divide men and women into two different kinds of production there is mutual reliance in the sense of ‘livelihood’ and preservation of the ‘species’ that is completely utilitarian: Men are the horse herders, cattle herders, and sheep herders who work in wilderness, constantly intermingled with animals, and they are still part of the grassland in its natural state. Women remain busy centered on the yurts, acting the role of quartermaster and handling logistics dealing with the basic necessities of food, shelter, clothing, and transport. Historians have held different views about the gendered division of labor among people of the grassland. One position holds that “in nations of equestrian peoples, gender differences are not serious in that basically rights and labor are shared equally among men and women, an obvious difference with nations of agrarian peoples. Men and women even participate together in hunting and warfare.”189 Others have held that “[h]unting, trading, herding, and fighting formed a seamless web of subsistence activities in the lives of the early Mongol tribes. From the time that he could rise, every male began to learn the skills for each of these pursuits, and 188 “Jiang Rong: cong caoyuan huidao xuanxiao shehui 姜 戎 ： 从 草 原 回 到 喧 嚣 社 会 [Jiang Rong: From the grassland returning to clamorous society],” Guangming shuping 光 明 书 评 , http://www.gmw.cn/03pindao/shuping/2004-04/26/content_17842.htm ­(accessed October 14, 2014). 189 Jiangshang Bofu [Egami Namio], Qima minzu guojia [Kiba minzoku kokka (Equestrian n­ ation)], trans. Zhang Chengzhi (Beijing: Guangming ribao she, 1988), 151.

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no family could live off only one activity without the others.”190 The description in Wolf Totem falls in between these two positions, but the author’s vision clearly tends toward the latter. No matter whether in daily life or productive activities, there is a prominent and unclouded division of labor between males and females, and this is obviously significant. The novel shows the division of labor and cooperation among men and women through their customs, each taking on responsibilities. In their daily life, women assume responsibility for preparing food: “On the open ground women from each family piled up broken boards, wooden axles, and the like as kindling. Then old felt was spread around and piled high with insulated bottles of milk tea and liquor, wooden utensils, and salt cellars” (33; 51–52). Before members of the production brigade retrieve gazelles from deep snow, “women had unloaded the carts and dug paths to the deep snow by clearing out troughs the wolves had made when dragging the gazelle carcasses through the snow …” (27; 41). In the evening the hunters rest, but the women still have tasks, including night watches to guard the flocks: Night watches were an important job for women on the Mongolian grassland. They stayed up all night watching the flock, then took care of their domestic chores during the day, which meant they seldom enjoyed a good night’s sleep. The people worked during the day; the wolves came out at night. The people were tired and sleepy; the wolves were energetic and well rested. The wolves turned the people’s days upside down, beating down the women in one family after another, generation after generation. That was why the women in many yurts were often sick and died young, although the system also produced strong women who were not easily beaten down (73; 116). Historically, “while the Mongol men stayed busy on the battlefield conquering foreign countries, women managed the empire. Among the herding tribes, women traditionally managed the affairs at home while men went off to herd, hunt, or fight … although the war campaigns now [the thirteenth century] ­lasted for years rather than months and the home consisted of not merely a collection of ger camps but a vast empire, women continued to rule.”191 With no warfare on the Olonbulag, only household tasks, women are still managers. What they manage is no longer the grand empire, but the daily life of ­family, modest and trivial, constantly day and night. The depictions in the 190 Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, 17. 191 Ibid., 160.

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book typify women as a whole, and what comes out of this is also sympathy for a type. Chen Zhen, for example, as a young man, witnesses himself the toil of grassland women and sighs, “Wolves multiplied quickly, while the number of ­grasslanders ­increased only slightly.” (73; 116) The harsh living environment and onerous production labor takes a toll of women’s health so that they are “often sick and died young.” There is also a direct influence on their capacity to give birth and raise children. Human females are inferior to animals in the capacity to give birth, and only in their survival skills do women match both men and other living creatures on the grassland. When wolves attack “[n] one of the women, including Gasmai, blanched in the face of the attack,” but without any weapons in hand, “they flailed their arms and shouted at the top of their lungs, as if prepared to block the way with their arms alone” (116; 184). When the struggle is over, People rested on the now quiet site of the hunt. Women had the most unpleasant work—patching up the injured dogs. Most of the women tended to dressing the wounds of their own families’ dogs. Men used dogs during a hunt,but women relied on them for watching the livestock at night. And it was they who raised them, almost as if they were their children. When dogs were hurt, or when they died, it was the women who grieved (122; 195; orig. trans.). Here, still, it is maternal responsibility and maternal love that are shown, and once again the boundaries between humans and animals are blurred. On the grassland, to make use of Gasmai again, it seems as if human mothers are always engaged in a competition with animal mothers, not only in their capacity for giving birth, but even more in the process of nurturing and raising the young. Nurture has another meaning in Wolf Totem. Because of the relationship between Chen Zhen and the wolf cub, nurturing is elevated beyond the status of giving birth, and becomes a very important if unstated topic in the novel. It is unrelated to sex, and therefore moves outside the arenas of ‘sexual behavior’ and ‘gender consciousness,’ an a priori breakaway from the constraints of a ‘gender stereotype.’ It is precisely in terms of nurture that the author subconsciously also blurs his own gender attributes, obscuring the boundaries of gender on the basis of obscuring the boundaries of the human and the animal, leading to total obscurity of social relations of gender and status based on age. What is signified in this is the wildness of the new and the rough that permeates the state of existence in primal nature: its freedom and simplicity, evoking

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the sense of an array of flavors that we can peel off one at a time and ruminate on slowly. First, on account of nurturing, the author brings scenes of human life d­ irectly into the realm of animals. In the words of Gasmai, “After puppies are weaned, a contest develops between women and wolf mothers” (165; 259). Training in survival skills is presented a number of times in the novel. The preparation that all mothers, whether human or animal, give their children takes two forms: one is eating, which is training largely out of maternal instinct; another is seizing food, which is masculine training at the site of struggle, but is actually first initiated under mother’s guidance: Before the young ones are weaned the mothers teach them how to hunt, beginning with ground squirrels … the female will take her young as far from human habitation as possible, where they’re safe. First she can teach her young how to catch living animals; second this can fill the hungry cubs’ stomachs (162; 254; orig. trans.). It is obvious why Chen Zhen would say, “Except for sheep, all creatures of the grassland, whether carnivores or herbivores, have a spirit of ferocity and tenacity that grassland mothers have given them” (302). In this context ‘woman’ vanishes and merges with the role of mother, naturally entering the category of maternal nature, as do all female creatures. The relationship of the two human sexes is freed from the male/female nan/nü 男 女 relations that romance created and restores relations that correspond to the male/female cí/xióng of the natural world, something that echoes the perception of anthropologists: “Women are alike so far as nature is concerned, and can be regarded as different only from the cultural angle.”192 Under such conditions, sexual ability or social identity do not matter much, and what is most important is only natural capacity (for birth/nurturing). Sexual prowess is not simply the bedroom skills that modern people dwell on with such pleasure, but is its result: it is either the capacity for birth and nurture that the female assumes, or it is the ability in warfare to which the male devotes all his strength in order to survive. From this perspective, calling the novel ‘masculine writing’ is not unreasonable. The characters are mostly males, and their relevance is that the scenes in the story are primarily battle scenes. The life or death field of battle is not the warm bed of lovemaking, and what we see are not men relative to women, but masculine xióngxìng people. 192 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 124.

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The instability of the categorical distinction between masculine and feminine as xióng/cí and nán/nü enables us to remark on the unique appeal of the exquisiteness of Chinese language and script. Chinese language has several pairs of words for gender: xióng/cí, nán/nü, and gōng/mǔ 公 /母 , They can be combined to stand for the term gender and also taken apart and used with other nouns to provide new meanings to indicate the gender of those nouns. Nán/ nü applies strictly to humans, and xióng/cí to non-human animals. Only gōng/ mǔ can be used indiscriminately for humans and animals, terms centered on acts of birth and nurturing to create gender, and narrowing the distance between humans and animals: in the face of the result of sex (birth and nurture), humans and animals are equals. This is the way that Wolf Totem returns humans’ own gender identity to nature and shows to us that the invisible force of ‘sex’ has no boundaries: whether human or animal, the natural function of animal gender (xióng/cí) not only brings into fruition one life after another, but also constructs humans’ most basic state of existence, morally compelling it to follow the will of heaven. Sex is absent from the narrative, but there are numerous passages on eating. What relation does eating have to sex? “Appetite for food and sex is nature.”193 That food ranks first of the two is amply displayed in the novel: what to eat, how to eat it … whether human, wolf, or another animal will all fight and exhaust every idea over the issue of eating, confirming the view of anthropologists: “Before the arrival of farming, everyone who was going to eat had to do their share of food-finding …”194 This applies even more to animals: “grassland wolves held many sacred articles of faith where survival was concerned, of which the fight for food and independence were among the most fundamental” (169; 264). Eating and food are extremely important to the novel, driving events and involved throughout the novel. Food and sex, the two most primitive and most real requirements for survival are like a two-man show, one explicit, the other implicit: ‘food’ takes downstage in front of the obscured figure of ‘sex,’ each contained within the other, tightening the biological chain even more. In such a linkage, the gender division of labor is even more apparent: whereas the battlefield is the stage for masculinity to display its talents, nurturing and feeding is the warm bed of maternal instinct and nurtures maternal love. Chen Zhen’s affection and admiration for Gasmai often goes together with ‘feeding.’ 193 Mencius, trans. D.C. Lau and Irene Bloom (New York: Penguin, 2005), 123. Kao Tzu [Gaozi] 4.1: “Appetite for food and sex is nature. Benevolence is internal, not external; rightness is external, not internal.” 194 Desmond Morris, The Human Zoo: A Zoologist’s Study of the Urban Animal (New York: Kodansha Globe, 1996), 6.

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Gasmai “preferred guests who wolfed their food down,” and picks up a large length of sheep intestine with her knife point, saying to Chen, “I cooked two lengths of intestine. One’s for you” (83; 132–133). Like spring breeze melting snow, this gesture warms Chen Zhen: In the two years he’d been there, Chen Zhen had still not figured out what sort of relationship he should have with Gasmai. Elder sister-inlaw seemed most appropriate, but sometimes he felt she was more like his own big sister, while at other times she was like a kindly old aunt or a perky younger one. Her happy nature was like the grassland itself—­ bighearted and innocent (83; 133). Chen Zhen’s unqualified admiration for Gasmai, to the point of overlooking her relative seniority, arises from his seeing her friendly sentiment as maternal love. Moreover, he goes on to credit the warmth of grassland mothers to the grassland, moving, profound, sincerely felt: Chen Zhen could sense trembling and distress calls from the core of the grassland that made him feel a deeply spiritual resonance with the grassland, even more intimate than the spiritual resonance of mother and child, and more profound. It was a distant spiritual response that stretched back beyond mother, grandmother, great grandmother, or great, great grandmother, back even further to the ancestral mother, the primogenitor (316). “The essential power of sentiment [qíng] is to move and to influence or reform.” Kang Zhengguo, who has carried out extensive research on erotic literature, believes: “the weaker and humbler one is, the more one holds fast to one’s duty and strives to strengthen and elevate oneself on the basis of that weakness and humble position.”195 Making a weapon out of ‘sentiment’ and ‘love’ to elevate oneself is something that females’ bodies have demonstrated many times, yet in this novel it is something that is demonstrated in the relationship of the wolf cub and Chen Zhen, a young male student undergoing ‘re-education.’

195 Kang Zhengguo 康 正 果 , “Daowang he huiyi—lun Qingdai yiyuti sanwen de xushi 悼 亡 和 回 忆 － － 论 清 代 忆 语 体 散 文 的 叙 事 [Mourning and reminiscence: on the ­narrative art in Qing dynasty memoirs],” Zhonghua wenshi luncong 中 华 文 史 论 丛 2008 No. 1: 363.

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The people who were students at that time know that students sent down to the countryside were a completely alien, marginal group in regions unfamiliar to them. In these places they had no power, no capital, and no social resources, totally reliant on government policy and on the local people to support their living, the weakest of the weak, with no control over anyone or anything. Chen Zhen is different in that he raises a wolf cub and thus becomes a supporter of another’s life, a person with some control, yet not through acts on the battlefield, but in the domestic environment, actually a mortifying situation for a young, unwed male. During the course of raising the wolf, a sense of pity and also of reflection, completely different feelings, parallel each other, entangle him so that he does not have a moment of peace. As a man, his gender identity undergoes a subtle change on account of the arrival of the wolf cub: Chen had changed many of his habits once he had taken on the responsibility of raising a wolf cub, and Zhang Jiyuan teased him by wondering when he had become so industrious, so motherly. In fact, Chen felt that he took more care than either a wolf mother or Gasmai. By increasing the number of daily chores he did, he was given the go-ahead by Gao Jianzhong to take some cow’s milk, which he supplemented with a meat pulp … He’d even gone to the medical clinic at the pasture headquarters to get some calcium tablets, which he ground up and mixed into the meat, something that neither the wolf mother nor Gasmai could have thought of (166; 260). The significance of this passage is profound. First is “changed”: to change one’s own living habits on account of a newborn, to abandon a lifestyle in which oneself is at the center, is something that only a mother who has given birth can do. Again, to look at his behavior: feeding milk, preparing food, providing calcium supplements are all the daily tasks of a mother when she is nursing. He thinks of himself not in comparison to fighters on the battlefield, but to wolf mothers and Gasmai. From the day he begins to raise the cub he suddenly becomes “so industrious, so motherly” and so caring. On behalf of the cub he consciously improves his social relations, so that by “increasing the number of daily chores he did, he was given the go ahead by Gao Jianzhong to take some cow’s milk.” The finagling common to women’s circles has become part of his daily life. What he calls being a “foster father” has nothing to do with the traditional role of a father and everything to do with being a mother: “After finishing his breakfast, Chen dumped the remainder into the wolf’s bowl” (215; 328). The

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sheep fat that he adds to the cub’s bowl is the remaining two pots used every evening as lamp oil for reading, but “the wolf cub was just at the critical stage of growing, so he could only accept the sacrifice and cut back on reading time” (312). In the summer heat, he “could not shake the fear that the cub would get sick, or lose too much weight, maybe even die in the cruel summer heat” (218; 321). When Chen has to go out to tend sheep and tethers the wolf cub at home, he has only to think of the cub and “a warm current coursed through his heart, as if a nursing baby were waiting for him at home” (319; 433). And, just like a mother, he even hopes his child will become great: Half his dreams were almost fulfilled, but he didn’t dare dream on about the other half. After the cub matured he would leave behind a litter of wolf dogs before returning to the grassland and the wolf pack … Then, in the dim sunset, a wolf king gray as steel and strong as a tiger, leading a wolf pack, raced toward him, howling with excitement to see him again after a long separation (216). This kind of behavior and state of mind are not part of being a foster father. In the nurturing process the father has a virtual existence, indirectly fulfilled by supplying food and clothing and such. This is unlike Chen Zhen, for whom no matter is too great or small, who does everything himself, at the young one’s side day and night caring for him, and also dragging Yang Ke into the situation: Chen Zhen and Yang Ke had always loathed petty household chores … But ever since they began raising the cub the never-ending chores each became a key link in raising the wolf. Now household chores were suddenly elevated to responsibilities of logistical planning that decided victory or defeat in battle. The two of them thereupon began to throw themselves into the “great task” of procuring the essentials of daily life: firewood, rice, cooking oil, salt, meat, dung, and tea (281). From behavior to state of mind, from concern to caring love … this man fully carries out, and hence genuinely experiences, the process of a mother raising a child, to the point that Chen Zhen “often found himself thinking that when the day came that he married and started a family, he’d probably not be as fond of his own children as he was of the young wolf” (216; 329). Not only does he establish a line of defense resembling maternal life in his own psyche, but also draws out an unusual thread of feeling in the reader: maternal love replaces erotic love, substituting it in a situation approaching true maternal love for

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the love theme in romantic fiction. This both subverts the mechanical model of traditional ‘biological gender’ based on sex, and destabilizes the modern theory of ‘social gender’ as gender, so that the gender wars that have raged for over two hundred years are temporarily deprived of an opponent. What is interesting is that it also disturbs the author’s own ideas about gender. Never having paid attention to females, Chen Zhen unintentionally makes an example of one out of himself, living out the very model of a traditional maternal role. The obscuring of gender boundaries is visible on his body, demonstrating Margaret Mead’s celebrated statement: I shared the general belief of our society that there was a natural sex-­ temperament which could at the most only be distorted or diverted from normal expression. I was innocent of any suspicion that the temperaments which we regard as native to one sex might instead be mere variations of human temperament, to which members of either or both sexes may, with more or less success in the case of different individuals, be educated to approximate.196 Chen Zhen’s raising the wolf cub as ‘foster mother’ replicates the role of traditional maternity, and also subverts traditional gender identity. In terms of behavior, it copies that ‘mechanical model of gender’ that feminism has rabidly condemned and becomes immersed in it. Conceptually, however, it far transcends the centuries-old struggle for victory in the ‘battle of the sexes,’ restoring to maternity its natural value. Associating maternity with nurture and divorcing it from sexual love/love making, qualitatively purer, brings it closer to maternal love in the aesthetic sense. Reading the novel in this way, sex is not absent from it, but obscured, given the greatest wandering space to be transformational, transsexual, and to appear at any time. Nature and society in the novel are set apart, and only that invisible ‘sex’ freely moves between the natural grassland and human life and is omnipresent: staunch masculinity on the battlefield, maternal nature settling under household eaves. In terms of scene description, the force of virile energy is striking, while maternal love that is invisible in the lines of print is soul stirring. Gender such as this can not only relieve millennia of sadness (such as sexual repression), and a century of resentment (as in feminism), but also transcend Freudian libido, and dissolves

196 Margaret Mead, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (New York: Harper ­Perennial, 2001), xxxix–xl.

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the boundaries of ‘self’ and ‘non-self.’ Ultimately, what the novel truly lacks is not sex or gender, but precisely Freud’s libido, and in this sense the consciousness of sex is more ‘post-’ than the postmodern. For more than a century the concept of sexuality that Freud introduced ­followed its own path, ‘sex’ became a free ion that when united with sexual liberation achieved one’s ideal or fulfilled one’s dream. Wolf Totem takes a road home, attempting to restore the primitive value of ‘sex’ in its origins of nurture and survival, finding a symbol of its ideal on the grassland in the stud bulls: They emit a sacred air, symbols of strength, power, virility, courage, freedom, and good fortune. Mongolian wrestlers, called buhe, are named for them. Mongolian men greatly admire stud bulls, for stud bulls have multiple mates and are masters without domestic obligations, living happily as bachelors (132; 211; orig. trans.). The author states “stud bulls” are “the grassland spirits of freedom.” In Chen Zhen’s eyes, it is stallions that evoke people’s admiration, as the closest to an admirable man in human society: They have two functions on the grassland: stand at stud and defend the herd. Possessing a strong sense of family responsibility, they never shy from danger; they are mean and tenacious. Stud bulls are idlers that move on after mating, but stallions are great heads of grassland households (193; 299–300). While refusing to admit to “masculine writing,” the author still reveals the attributes of his gender, as Susan Lanser argued: “gender is a fundamental feature of all types of narrator, even when the text does not specify any such property.”197 It also reveals evidence of a male-centered consciousness: what is “great” about the stallions comes not only from a sense of responsibility toward the family, but even more from invincible sexual prowess. Compared with that, ‘good women’ are mothers with the capacity to give birth and to nurture the young. The feminine in a cultural sense is a sheet of blank paper, and as a ‘classification’ can be unconditionally elevated as selfless—thus the birth of the ‘good woman.’

197 “Sexing the Narrative: Propriety, Desire, and the Engendering of Narratology,” Narrative 3 (1995); cited in David Herman, Narratologies, 136.

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As for human sexuality and females, there is only one passage in the novel, a conversation among men following several rounds of drinking: Batu, giddily drunk, slapped Chen on the back and said, “You … you are only half a Mongol, wh … when you marry a Mongol girl … a woman, and father, a … a Mongol brat, then you’ll be a true Mongol. You, you’re on the weak side, no good, not good, not good enough. Mongol women under … under the bedcovers, make you work, worse than wolf … wolves. Mongol men, most of us, are scared of them, like sheep. “At night,” Sanjai piped in, “men are sheep, women are wolves. ­Especially Gasmai.” (34; 53) Sex here is conversation, not action, avoiding a direct depiction of sex. The sex that is indirectly involved in the dialogue is the statement of a ‘category’— males, and the dissemination of categorical behavior. It tells us that, however impressive outdoors, men of the grassland in the face of grassland women are all “sheep.” Suddenly inverting the gender relations of society that honor men and humble women leaves us with another view of grassland women such as Gasmai, one that is awed. However, if you believe that the author has exchanged the gender standpoints consciously on behalf of females you are fooling yourself. This is an affirmation of the feminine/maternal and even natural sexual drive in the sense of a ‘category,’ and has nothing to do with women. There is only one woman in the book, the grassland woman Gasmai, and she is viewed more as the cultural sign of a type than a woman, the symbol of a primitive mother/maternal instinct. Gasmai comes on stage impressively at the start of the narrative. Her entrance is during a mortal struggle with a wolf: A panther-like glare flashed in her Mongol eyes, and she refused to let go of the tail … [Afterward] Gasmai wiped the wolf’s blood from her face and panted. To Chen Zhen, her face, red from the bitter cold, looked as if rouge made of wolf’s blood had been smeared over it. She struck him as the picture of prehistoric woman—brave, strong, and beautiful (8–9; 9–11). Words such as “panther-like” and “prehistoric woman” draw a clear demarcation between Gasmai and modern women. “Brave” and “beautiful” are enticing, inducing us to go learn firsthand for ourselves the unadorned attraction of sexuality and wildness in the state of survival in primal nature. Is that attractive? Without having experienced it, how can you know?

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In Terms of Ecology: How Much Space for Choice Do Humans Still Have? As Man proceeds toward his announced goal of the conquest of nature, he has written a depressing record of destruction. rachel carson198

“It has been variously claimed that ecological thought is postmodern thought in that it enjoins us to imagine the relations between culture and nature as relations neither of identity nor of subordination and antagonism, but as dynamic, differential relations of exchange.”199 Wolf Totem contains a great deal of ecologically related description and exposition that happens to coincide with postmodern ecological consciousness. Internet discussion confirmed that its position does not diverge much from ‘ecological fiction.’ Critical circles did not agree. The spiritual ecologist Lu Shuyuan has had a different view of Wolf Totem, regarding its intellectual orientation as “pseudoecological writing.”200 Just as Richard Dorson found “fakelore” in literary “folklore,”201 Lu Shuyuan perceived the allegorical quality of the novel as borrowing from one thing to discuss another. He gave me inspiration. Hence, my criticism frequently has been accompanied by the psychological suggestion of the “pseudo-ecological,” and in pursuing the question put by Dundes during his study of fakelore (“By making the unconscious or unselfconscious conscious, we may raise levels of consciousness”),202 I discovered the ecological awareness and related issues in the novel. In terms of environmental protection, the aims of the novel are mixed. True, it does make use of the grassland environment to discuss human affairs. But the story is truly concerned with ecology qua ecology. Wolf Totem may be called an ecological novel in allegorical form. If we read it as only an ecological novel, however, there is not much space for criticism. All the criticism that ‘ought’ to be made is exhausted in the plot and structural pattern, the dialogue and lectures, and the conclusion is already reached in advance: 198 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 85. 199 Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1997), 278. 200 Lu Shuyuan 鲁 枢 元 launched eco-literary studies in Mainland China during the 1990s and is editor-in-chief of Jingshen shengtai tongxun 精 神 生 态 通 讯 [Bulletin of spiritual ecology]. 201 Richard Dorson, American Folklore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 214–16. 202 Alan Dundes, Interpreting Folklore (Bloomington, in: University of Indiana Press, 1980), 175.

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[There was] an area of several dozen square li, where the moist sandy ground occasionally gave way to a variety of desert plants that had grown astonishingly tall in the rainy season. There were no longer any signs that this had once been grazing land; rather, it looked like an abandoned construction site (288; 420). The story, however, is not over. In the Epilogue the grassland has nearly disappeared, while the people of the grassland remain. Their standard of living has not deteriorated together with the deterioration of the grassland. On the contrary, everyone is well off. The human presence has not simply been for the worst, but also made ‘improvements,’ covering the grassland in a coat of civilization. Humans are not simpleminded, and whenever the punishment of nature falls on our heads, needless to say, people will respond instinctively to save their lives. As environmental issues directly threaten the quality of people’s lives and even their very existence itself, improving the natural environment is most natural and most pressing. With the ‘green revolution’ in Israel, good farming grew up in the desert, and at the start of the century the clamor over the dust storms in the B ­ eijing region promoted ‘returning farmland to forest and grazing land to grass,’ so that after several years blue skies and green land were again evident … So how much room is left for criticism? The criticism is directed toward the text. In the text of Wolf Totem there is the following dialogue: Bilgee: Have you forgotten that the grassland is a battlefield, and that no one who’s afraid of blood can call himself a warrior? Doesn’t it bother you that those wolves wiped out an entire herd of horses? If we don’t use violent means, how will we ever beat them? (81; 129) Chen Zhen: Are you saying that besides letting the wolves eat the body so that the soul can go to Tengger, [the Mongolian sky burial] is also to save trees? There are no trees out here. Bilgee: Even more than saving trees, it’s important to turn meat-eaters into eaten meat … We grasslanders eat meat all our lives, for which we kill many creatures. After we die we donate our meat back to the grassland. To us it only seems fair … (78–9; 125). Given how much is devoted to ecology in the novel, you can’t avoid it. The story is rooted in ecological relations of mutual dependence, intertwining, and the mixing of human and animal worlds. It has grandeur, it has temperature, retribution and reaction. It drives you to ask after all: what is this term ‘ecology’? What after all is its relation to human society?

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Digging through the numerous works on ecology at hand, I am disappointed. The scholarship in these books reads like sermons, discussing the mutual interests of humans and nature. Even environmental ethics is from a human perspective and fills every corner of the globe with anthropocentric feelings. The Western term ‘environment’ is often used interchangeably with ‘ecology,’ and anthropocentrism is presupposed. As expressed in Chinese, shēngtài (生 态 ) (ecology) has different meaning: the shēng (life) and tài (state) and even the shēngtài of different environments have different meanings. It is constantly going beyond borders in the form of diaspora, making the tài (state) of shēng (life) in different environments mean different things. Wolf Totem is an example of this in that it shows fully a variety of meanings of shēngtài, opening multiple avenues for criticism. The word shēngtài, meaning ecology, is not used in the story. Ecology is the framework of the novel, its structure, its cells, the ingredients of its plot. From the grassland to the grassland wolves, from all living things to people of the grassland, the ecological awareness is like countless monads and nomads drifting throughout different symbolic systems, crossing boundaries throughout the novel, letting us see the different ways in which it ‘signifies.’ If, like Gilles Deleuze, we “open up words and things,”203 we can see that the ingredients of ecology may be separated into elements of different qualities, constructing different meanings of self “différance” in different systems. For example, shēng (life) simultaneously suggests the three meanings of shēngcún 生 存 (survival), shēngmìng 生 命 (life), and shēngmìnglì 生 命 力 (vitality). The word tài appears in three distinct layers as zhuàngtài 状 态 (state or condition), zītài 姿 态 (stance), tàidù 态 度 (attitude), three elements of the three layers together constructing shēngtài, but with different orientations allegorically. All the contradictions, conflicts, and the paradoxes that they give rise to in the novel are presented naturally in this mutual entanglement, so unobtrusively that they are always overlooked. This section analyzes the issue of ecology in Wolf Totem from the perspective of diaspora (fēisǎn 飞 散 ), grafting the postcolonial meaning of ‘diaspora’ onto this postcolonial body, combining the primitive habitat of nomad people with the modern ‘nomadic thinking’ of Gilles Deleuze in order to set up an open interpretive platform for criticism. Here diaspora is written in lower case for two reasons. One is that as the meaning in ecology has been universalized it has moved away from referring to a particular ethnicity (the Jewish people), and also has kept distance from postcolonialism, referring to the diasporic phenomenon of crossing boundaries in texts or going offside. It is both h ­ umanistic 203 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. S. Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 65.

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and natural. The second reason is the liberation of the nature of the word, converted from a noun to a verb, with the meaning of impacting and shattering. In ecology, what is to be impacted primarily is people’s own savior mentality, piercing the existing cognitive structure, bringing back together the fragments of the diasporic scattering, and understanding the ecological phenomena of a different vision in the changing structure. Four ecological systems are woven together in the novel, forming the source of trouble for conflicts. The first is the ecological system of primal nature, presented through all aspects of the grassland and living creatures, the seasons, landscapes, and matters of folklore. The French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who saw this system from a perspective of natural science, pointed out: The existence of ‘system’ in the world is at once obvious to every observer of nature, no matter whom. The arrangement of the parts of the universe has always been a source of amazement to men … Each element of the cosmos is positively woven from all the others … It is impossible to cut into this network, to isolate a portion without it becoming frayed and unraveled at all its edges.204 Teilhard de Chardin put forward the concept of the “tree of life,” believing that all living things were “born from their concrescence in a common genesis,”205 and placing humans at the top of his tree of life. In Wolf Totem the tree of life is replaced with a “great biological chain.” As Jiang Rong explains, “The great biological chain of the Inner Mongolian grassland is exceedingly complex. It has not only ecological value, but also cultural value.”206 There is no overlord in this; humans do not enjoy a lofty position in that treetop. Like all other creatures, humans are only an ordinary link in the great chain. The novel offers no new view of the meaning of a biological chain; what is new is the form of presentation, in terms of primal nature. The state or condition of life that it presents is the biological chain; the stance that it presents is that of the spirit 204 The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 43–4. 205 Ibid., 218. 206 Jiang Rong, e-mail message interview with Ms. Yao Ting 姚 婷 of Bertelsmann, n. d. The relation of the concept of the “great chain of being,” inaugurated by Plato and Plotinus, to modern scientific thought was discussed by Arthur Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1936). Its relation to ecology is noted in David Pepper, Eco-Socialism: From Deep Ecology to Social Justice (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 165.

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of primal freedom as represented by the grassland wolves; the author’s attitude is very evident: the logic of the grassland that strictly abides by order. If the book stopped at this point there would be no suspicion of it as a pseudo work, and it could be forthrightly viewed as ecological literature. Yet it is obvious that the author did not intend to stop at this point. His concern is like Chen Zhen’s: the topic is nature, but the concern is with humans. So we see vaguely a second ecological system, one totally unlike primal nature. What is presented in the second system is social ecology, and its core topic is humanizing nature. At this level it is quite close to the standpoint of ecologism: the condition of life that it presents is civilization; its principal stance is the occupation represented by outsiders; the author’s attitude toward this is critical: The vibrant grassland and grassland wolves act as a frame of reference and coordinates that let us see that serious questions have arisen with sustainable human development. They are the wellsprings of human life; to destroy nature, the grassland and wild animals is to destroy ourselves.207 The entirety of the history of civilization is the history of humans conquering nature. Wherever there are people, natural conditions “do not exist in their own right for they are a function of the techniques and way of life of the people who define them and give them a meaning by developing them in a particular direction.”208 Social ecology does not co-exist with the ecology of primal nature. In the words of Levi-Strauss: “Nature is not in itself contradictory. It can become so only in terms of some specific human activity which takes part in it.”209 The continued existence of a system is always premised on harming or suppressing the survival of another system. The immediate benefits obtained are often at the expense of long-term benefits. What we call human history has from the beginning been entangled with nature in an ecological relationship of mutual dependence for survival: how to live? This is a matter of conforming to nature. How to live better? This is a skill related to the means to transform nature. Is life worth living and why? These questions belong to philosophy, related to self-consciousness. What follows below is: can the human race live on permanently?

207 Jiang Rong, in answer to Jiang Ming 姜 鸣 , reporter for the Xinxilan jingbao 新 西 兰 镜 报 [New Zealand Mirror, Christchurch], by e-mail message, n. d. 208 Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 94–95. 209 Ibid., 95.

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Crisis consciousness hastened the birth of ecologism, based on humans exploiting nature, and it once again elevated humans to the position of saviors. What is termed environmental protection has been to make nature continue its cycles naturally like a perpetual motion machine. The core concept in the novel of the ‘logic of the grassland’ is an attempt to overlay two ecological systems, primal nature and humanized nature, together, self-consciously maintaining the “big life,” in order to ensure the continued survival of the human race. In his study, Evolution: The General Theory, Ervin Laszlo remarked, “As long as all cycles are sustainable, the system can buffer out minor perturbations and continue to operate. But when some cycles are interrupted or c­ ollapse, major fluctuations shake the entire system, which must then transform, or perish.”210 Section 10 of this chapter, on history, will go into this question in depth. The third system is human ecology, internal in its nature, embedded within the system of social ecology. A matrix of culture (nomadic/agrarian) and ­ethnicity (Mongol/Han), its theme is warfare. From the perspective of ecology, the condition of life that it presents is colonial; its stance as represented by nomads is conquest; the author’s attitude is to support the strong over the weak, unreservedly favoring the grassland wolves and grassland hunters for their valor and skill in fighting: Since he had come from the capital, the most advanced city in China, to the most primitive, the grassland, he might as well make the best of it learning the ways of primitive life and get a taste of the most primitive role in the human race … These hunting instincts had awakened too late in his life, he felt, and he was saddened to have been born into a line of farmers (16–17; 29; orig. trans.). Dominating the weak became a mainstream of Western civilization early in its history. In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes viewed humans in a state of nature as solely devoted to self-interest at the expense of others and made this the basis for his arguments for establishing national governments. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith saw the selfishness of homo economicus as a monad that was the originating hand pushing market economics. Immanuel Kant, using his “philosophy of critique,” made “moral persons” out of the “selfish humans” of Smith’s homo economicus and the “jackal and wolf men” of Hobbes’ political human.211 Read in this light, Wolf Totem is similar in discourse and identical in purpose, but it abandoned a modern form of narration, and sought instead to 210 Ervin Laszlo, Evolution: The General Theory (Cresskill, nj: Hampton Press, 1996), 113. 211 See He Zhaowu, Xifang zexue jingshen [The spirit of western philosophy], 167.

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achieve its own theoretical contribution in the framework of going back to the ‘logic of the grassland,’ consciously or unconsciously revealing the appearance of the postmodern. The postmodern view of a ‘natural society’ is the ‘hunter-gatherer society,’ which fits perfectly with Chen Zhen’s ideal of promoting the wild, returning to primitive origins, and attempting to “get a taste of the most primitive role in the human race” on the natural grassland of the original ecology.212 Some suspect its pseudo-benevolence, unloading onto nature a responsibility that humans should assume, to be classic anarchist ecological views.213 This question also exists in the novel, which we have an opportunity to discuss below in Sections 7 and 10. The fourth ecological system, which I consider to have the most inspiring meaning, is the life ecology of people. This is a new topic. All lives, whether human or animal, are independent subjects, living together in the perilous ecology of primal nature: [T]he inhabitants of the grassland, the nomads, were never far from being surrounded by wolves. Nearly every night he spotted ghostly wolf outlines, especially during the frigid winter; two or three, perhaps five or six, and as many as a dozen pairs of glittering green lights moving around the perimeter of the grazing land, as far as a hundred li or more distant. One night, he and Bilgee’s daughter-in-law Gasmai, aided by flashlights, counted twenty-five of them (7; 8). Living in an environment filled with dangers, the people of the grassland have a capacity to survive that is as tenacious as wolves. The so-called life ­ecology here is a contest in which the strong prey on the weak, and the strong are the victors. The stance of this life is fighting, and on the battlefield of life and death, the strong live: [T]his is a battlefield, and we Mongols are warriors who are born to fight. People who need peace and quiet to sleep make poor soldiers. You must learn how to fall asleep as soon as your head hits the pillow and wake up the minute you hear a dog bark. Wolves sleep with their ears pricked, and at the first sign of danger, they’re up and away. You have to be like that too if you’re going to fight them (78; 124). 212 See Murray Bookchin, “Ecologising the Dialectic,” in Renewing the Earth, edited by John Clark (London: Green Print, 1990), 202–19; cited in David Pepper, Eco-Socialism. 213 David Pepper, Eco-Socialism, 77–8.

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The author’s attitude toward this is clear: transfuse wolf’s blood to strengthen the psyche of the people: I hope to tell readers through fiction what the lush, primitive grassland is; what a superior species the wolves that Han Chinese have so hated and despised actually are. I want to tell readers how important that spirit of the wolf totem is for people today. Even more, I hope that Han people will understand that we are the descendants of nomad ancestors Emperors Yan and Huang.214 “The merciless grassland was once again a backdrop to ruthlessness, as it had been for thousands of years” (46; 76). The story displays “ruthlessness” and the “merciless” from different angles.215 The aim is to state a fact: “The true grassland was altogether too cruel, and the spirit of the grassland actually was in the wolf” (136). Konrad Lorenz, the founder of the modern study of animal behavior, placed a high value on the function of “aggressive drive”: “What is certain is that, with the elimination of aggression, the ‘aggrèdi’ in the original and widest sense, the tackling of a task or problem, the self-respect without which everything that a man does from morning until evening, from the morning shave to the sublimest artistic or scientific creations, would lose all impetus; everything associated with ambition, ranking order, and countless other equally indispensable behavior patterns would probably also disappear from human life.”216 What is new in the novel is its showing this issue in terms of images: on one hand, it foregrounds the tenacious vitality of wild animals; on the other hand, it also shows how vitality is lost or how it is stripped away. The British anthropologist Desmond Morris regarded cities as “human zoos,” believing that human regression began with cities: “Under normal conditions, in their natural habitats, wild animals do not mutilate themselves, masturbate, attack their offspring, develop stomach ulcers, become fetishists, suffer from obesity, form homosexual pair bonds, or commit murder. Among human city-dwellers, needless to say, all of these things occur.”217 Jiang Rong has the same concerns: 214 Written interview with Jiang Rong by Ying Ni 应 妮 , reporter for Zhongguo xinwen zhoukan (China news weekly magazine), n. d. 215 See Long Xingjian 龙 行 健 , Lang tuteng pipan 狼 图 腾 批 判 [Critique of Wolf Totem] (Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe, 2008), 132. This study drew up statistics for the occurrence of related characters or morphemes (zi) in the novel: “wolf nature” (lángxìng), 150 times; “vicious” (xiōng), 198 times; “kill” (shā), 451 times; “blood” (xǐe), 507 times; “dead” (sǐ), 790 times; “strike/hunt/attack” (dǎ), 1,076 times. 216 Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression (New York: Mariner Books, 1974), 278. 217 Desmond Morris, The Human Zoo: A Zoologist’s Study of the Urban Animal (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969), 8.

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If humans at the same time that they abandon animal nature also abandon vitality, they will develop into ‘one dimensional humans,’ ‘robots,’ ‘human clones,’ ‘cybermen,’ even ‘human vegetables.’ Once the vitality of life is lost, what true pleasure or happiness will these alienated humans still have to speak of?218 In the novel the army horses are impressive, but they are geldings, lacking the ferocity of enjoying struggle, the initiative to attack, and the drive to pit oneself against ten in mortal combat. The sheepherding dog Yellow is “bold and fearless around rabbits, foxes, and gazelles. But with wolves he took care to size up the situation” (90; 144). The wolf cub enjoys idleness, with no care for food or shelter, day by day in its cozy environment losing the tenacious capacity for survival: The wolf was the fighter of the grassland. Its life of freedom and tenacity relied upon its life or death struggles with fierce stallions, cruel grassland wolf dogs, merciless outside wolf packs, and malevolent grassland hunters in order to continue to survive. Could a wolf that had not experienced such battles, but still displayed such smooth, well-shaped ears still be considered a wolf? (297) “Should he secretly set the cub free, returning him to the cruel but open grassland and giving him back the life of a wolf?” The idea torments Chen Zhen, but in the end he does not dare to release him, because “the cub had lost the weapon he needed to survive on the grassland when Chen snipped off the tips of his fangs” (297; 432). Human history has not lacked for examples of something like this. Over 5,000 natives of the island of Tasmania were entirely wiped out at the end of the nineteenth century during the British colonial era. Half of them were slaughtered; the other half died of disease and debility. The British governor’s plan to “transplant civilization” turned the once sturdy native people into “despairing ghosts” in this comfortable environment, finally crushing them into extinction.219 Unfortunately, such situations have today become the normal state of human survival, constructing our everyday lives. Only people of wisdom and integrity are concerned and turn compassion for nature toward humanity itself: 218 Jiang Rong, in answer to Jiang Ming, reporter for the Xinxilan jingbao [New Zealand M ­ irror, Christchurch], by e-mail message, n. d. 219 “Zhongzuzhuyi daqidi 种 族 主 义 大 起 底 [Probing racism],” Fenghuang dianshitai [Phoenix ­Television], August 23, 2007.

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In the last 15 years, we have fax machines, email, Internet—and they have transformed communication. Our minds will certainly be changed by this, but don’t forget, they have been changed before. When the printing press was invented, in the course of two or three centuries, we lost our memories. Before we kept things in our minds.220 The harm that civilization does to humans is a subtle influence that only great wisdom can see into. This wisdom appears in the simple knowledge of people of the grassland. In Bilgee’s words: “Half of a Mongol is hunter. If we could not hunt, our lives would be like meat with no salt, tasteless. We Mongols go crazy if we can’t hunt …” (30; 46). It was a student sent down to a rural community, Lao Gui (real name Ma Bo), who got into difficulties and was attacked and ostracized, but commented later: “Those were the most difficult years of my life, and the most filled with vitality. I miss that vitality.”221 The primitive grassland plays a decisive role in the transformation of Chen Zhen’s thinking. He discovers the vitality of life from the grassland wolf, and hears the wolves’ baying, “so sad, so desolate-sounding, like a mournful lament, a long drawn-out torment” (240; 358). He believes, as did Aldo Leopold: “In wildness is the salvation of the world. Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men.”222 Thus, the significance of the birth of Wolf Totem is profound, a ‘post-’ era book of revelations, and a dirge for primitive vitality. People would rather seek fantasized spiritual sustenance in virtual worlds than give up a cozy modern life to truly return to the simplicity of one’s original nature. Entering the narrative structure of Wolf Totem, the atmosphere that rows of script and even the words generate as we move among different ecological systems may give us unexpected revelations. Sensing the ruminations of the novel requires not only the nomad spirit of Deleuze, but also the wolves’ skill in chewing, as though roaming on the open grassland, and looking for, then discovering, a way out during a walk across the border. The different qualities among the four ecological systems lead to different directions of thought. First, the ‘ecological system of primal nature’ is the fundamental structure for the story, and the part that people find the most moving. On account of this 220 Barnes and Noble Author Chat Transcript, Wednesday, January 20, 1999—7 pm et. Doris Lessing: A Retrospective http://www.dorislessing.org/chat-mara.html. 221 Interview with Ma Bo 马 波 on “Lengnuan rensheng” 冷 暖 人 生 [English Title: Secret Documentary]” by Chen Xiaonan 陈 晓 楠 , Phoenix Satellite Television, December 18, 2007. 222 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 141.

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the novel has been taken to be ‘green fiction.’ “Green politics are ­postmodern politics,”223 currently fashionable, and the model of ‘political correctness.’ However, in terms of the author’s creative view, there is some suspicion that the grassland and grassland wolves have been used. The so-called ecology of primal nature is actually only a virtual model, an idea that people can see but never reach when they ‘look back.’ It is aesthetic, not real, as Walter Benjamin wrote: “Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”224 What is different is that, in the novel, humans play a debased role, altogether ceding the realm of beauty entirely to the grassland. Second, the ‘social ecological system’ spanning the novel is based on monism. There is only one story throughout the novel: humanizing nature and usurping nature has resulted in malign consequences. The basis for this system is political, like a call to war, responding to ancient appeals, accusing civilization for its guilt: “The Earth does not belong to man; man belongs to Earth. All things share the same breath—the beast, the tree, the man. The air shares its spirit with all the life it supports. Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.”225 Third is the system of human ecology, shown in the competition of nomadic and agrarian civilizations. The author’s standpoint on the side of grassland civilization and the nomadic spirit is itself ‘anti-ecological,’ and can be seen as another version of Social Darwinism. Used in the context here of the Chinese people who have suffered a century of humiliation, it precisely illustrates the wise man Don Juan’s view: “modern man [is] a homicidal egotist, a being totally involved with his self-image. Having lost hope of ever returning to the source of everything, man sought solace in his selfishness.”226

223 David Pepper, Eco-Socialism, 55. 224 “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Art in Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts, ed. Francis Frascina and Jonathan Harris (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 306. 225 From a purported letter attributed to Chief Seattle of the Duwamish in 1854, addressed to President Franklin Pierce. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Chief_Seattle (accessed ­November 9, 2014). For authorship, see Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature, edited by Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 512ff. 226 Carlos Castenada, The Power of Silence: Further Lessons of Don Juan (New York: Washington Square Press, 1991), 150.

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Finally, in the ‘system of life ecology’ the author addresses the questions of the perpetuation of humans’ own life and the quality of survival. Humans in the cage of civilization steadily lose primitive vitality, so the author believes, and if it is possible, the first to be returned to the environment of the wild and primitive combat are humans ourselves. In the novel, “Since becoming bewitched by the grassland wolves, Chen felt that his already listless, weary blood had weakened further and that what seemed to be alien wolf blood had begun to flow in his veins. His view of life had altered—he treasured it even as it became more vigorous and fulfilling” (171; 267). He suddenly feels: The meaning of life was not in the motions but in struggle. For lactating animals life began with the millions of sperm in the fighting spirit of a life or death struggle surrounding an egg in swarms … Only the most tenacious fighter among the sperm, struggling fearlessly over the corpses of millions of its fellows found its way into the egg, combining to form the embryo of a new human life (171). The author’s adage is: “Life comes out of struggle; struggle is the essence of life and its blood.” This is contrary to humanity’s search for peace and the current of civilized development. So my questions are these: In the peaceful environment of civilization does human vitality wither or strengthen? Faced with all sorts of almost unavoidable ecological disasters, does humanity have any alternatives? If people seek salvation (such as environmental protection), can we find it? If humanity ‘withdraws,’ is that a benefit or misfortune for the world? His worry was not the disappearance of humanity, but what will become of nature after humans vanish?227 Human intrusion, humanized nature, has already planted the roots of disaster (such as nuclear power stations, etc.), and once humans pass on, catastrophes will at once break out. One irreversible malign consequence of humanizing nature is the dependence of nature on humans. Hence, Jiang Xiaoyuan has lamented: “From the standpoint of the globe, there is no choice but to pray that humans do not pass away.”228 What has been alienated since the coming of civilization is not only humanity, but also includes nature. Is it possible for humanity to create a new ecology on the platform of modern civilization? The optimistic view is: humanity is in the process of maturing, 227 See Alan Weisman, The World Without Us (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007). 228 Jiang Xiaoyuan 江 晓 原 and Liu Bing 刘 兵 , “Women nenggou you yige yongyuan de ­jiayuan ma? 我 们 能 够 有 一 个 永 远 的 家 园 吗 [Can we have an eternal home?],” Wenhui dushu zhoukan 文 汇 读 书 周 报 January 4, 2008: 11.

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and if primitive society was childhood, and the years of warfare in the age of civilization have been adolescence, then entering into the twenty-first century, humans have stepped into the era of maturity and are beginning to face global human issues, comprehensively fashioning ‘controls’ (such as planned parenthood, energy conservation, environmental protection) in order to preserve the perpetuation of the human race. People no longer just make schemes for the self-interest of families and clans, tribes, ethnic groups or nation states. Hence, there is the United Nations, there is dialogue, the reports of the Club Of Rome, and cooperative planning for ‘sustainable development’ … On the road to restoring nature, saving the globe, and even saving ourselves, humans may achieve something. The pessimistic view is: history has demonstrated that in dealing with isolated and localized natural things, people have the upper hand, but ultimately cannot escape the web of nature. In their hopes for a better life, people attempt to dominate everything, so fight and kill, and seek immortality, yet are still unable to evade an ending in death. All human effort has only meant choosing different times and means, and avoiding death is futile. At bottom, ecology is also only a new ideology, the utopian dream of the new century, as Lu Shuyuan wrote: “The ecological utopia is almost always something in the minds of poets, an idea, a lingering mood and wish to ‘return home.’”229 It is as easy to have the idea as it is hard to achieve. Hence, there is the third attitude, to find balance in spirit and belief: “I have come to believe in the value of a kind of inner ecology that relies on the same principles of balance and holism that characterize a healthy [natural] environment.”230 Balance is the eulogy of the wise, but the elegy of natural ecology. In its efforts at “balance,” humanity is gasping at death’s door, spreading seeds of hope in the name of ecology—and Wolf Totem is an example of this, that hope begins with belief: “Faith … is akin to a kind of spiritual gyroscope that spins in its own circumference in a stabilizing harmony with what is inside and what is out.”231 It is regrettable that my own position is not among these three prospects. I have the most deeply pessimistic view of humanity’s ultimate fate and powers of self-control, and advocate being-toward-death. For a living organism, life is 229 Lu Shuyuan, “Shengtai meixue yu shengtai wutuobang 生 态 美 学 与 生 态 乌 托 邦 [Ecological aesthetics and ecological utopia],” Jingshen shengtai tongxun [Bulletin of s­ piritual ecology], 2008 No. 1. 230 Albert Gore, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (New York: Plume, 1993), 367. 231 Ibid., 368.

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true; relative to death, life is real, juxtaposing life and death extends ‘being’ into every possible field. Death is the end result of nature, fate, shrouding. Life is open, belongs to the category of humans, the only path by which humans can experience ‘being.’ Jean Paul Sartre once explained this with an entire (existential)–ism, while I have become accustomed to Deleuzian nomadic thought, taking ‘exile’ as a mode of survival, letting transgressive thought constantly destroy balance, searching for sympathetic resonance along the road I travel. I have seen my life in Romain Rolland’s “the soul enchanted,” I have entrusted my ideals to Leo Tolstoy’s “unrealizable ideal,” and I have read of my own pain in Kierkegaard’s text: “I think the world will come to an end amid the general applause from all the wits who believe that it is a joke.”232 Speaking of end results, I admire the choice of grassland people: .

Over the centuries the herdsmen and hunters of the grassland returned to Tengger with no burial and no markers, and definitely no mausoleums. Men and wolves were born on the grassland, lived there, fought there, and died there. They left the grassland exactly as they found it … It was precisely through the grassland wolves that the people of the grassland achieved death lighter than a feather, in the end returning completely to nature (203; 314; orig, trans.). I once asked a friend in the scientific community about the deep concerns shown above. He dismissed my fears as groundless and demonstrated with a great quantity of data that changes in the heavens or on earth are measured in light years or centuries. What we call environmental protection does not affect what goes on in the heavens or on earth. It is humans ourselves that we should truly be concerned for. Even without any change of generations, we have seen in our own lifetime an unstoppable trend of decline. From the time we were students and could handle anything to today when we are so listless; from the simple, healthy lifestyle during the years of difficulty to today when necessities are plentiful but we are restless and anxious … What can you do? He asked me: Are you going to throw away being surrounded by comfort and convenience and really go live in the mountains? I had made a choice to return to the mountains, and finally gone back to the city, like those peasants who can’t go home, who go to the city to work and never return home. Seeing the steadily declining vitality over the years of ease,

232 Søren Kierkegaard, Parables of Kierkegaard (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 3.

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all one can do, like taking a daily dose of medicine, is silently chant the song of ‘balance’: The key is indeed balance—balance between contemplation and action, individual concerns and commitment to the community, love for the natural world and love for our wondrous civilization. This is the balance I seek in my own life.233 4.7

In Terms of Cultural Studies: In the Contest of Civilizations, Who is the Winner? And thus shall wait the East till her time comes. rabindranath tagore234

Contemplation of civilization is the main thread of thought in the novel, entangling the Beijing student Chen Zhen’s psyche day and night, from start to finish. Yet it is the people and the wolves of the grassland that initiate this. When he is encircled by a wolf pack, Chen Zhen’s ‘soul leaves his body,’ he shakes involuntarily, and the old man Bilgee criticizes him: “You’re going to need more courage than that,” Bilgee said softly. “You’re like a sheep. A fear of wolves is in your Chinese bones. That’s the only explanation for why you people have never won a fight out here.” … “If you plan to stay on the grassland, you’ll have to learn to be tougher than the wolves” (3, 10; 1, 12). From the beginning the story involves the relationship of Chinese and wolves, so its weight in the novel is evident. Immediately thereafter Bilgee lectures Chen on the relationship of the “big life” (of the grassland) and the “small life” (of creatures), and links the two ethnicities of Han Chinese and people of the grassland to two essentially different cultures of survival, the agrarian and  the nomadic. As a Han Chinese and descendant of farmers, Chen is so moved by the lecture that “it beat on his heart like a war drum, persistent and painful” (29; 45). It is in his painful realization of being in danger that Chen begins to consider seriously the relationship of ethnic culture to civilization:

233 Albert Gore, Earth in the Balance, 367. 234 Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism, 82.

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The inhabitants of the grassland were far ahead of any race of farmers not only in terms of battle strategies and strength of character but in their modes of thought as well … Much of his world view, based on the Han agrarian culture, crumbled in the face of the logic and the culture of the grassland (29; 45–46). The questions and reflections begin from this point. The nomadic mode of survival that is associated with being backward, primitive, and barbaric, therefore is given a cognitive platform for reconsideration: He felt that he really could not simply define this behavior as barbaric because this ‘barbarity’ contained a profound civilization founded on preserving the survival of the human race … By burning out and cultivating wasteland on a grand scale, settling the frontiers, agrarian peoples destroyed the grassland and the big life of nature, once again imperiling the small life of humanity. Wasn’t that more barbaric than the barbarian? Both Easterners and Westerners all refer to the land as the mother of humanity. How then can anyone who does injury to Mother Earth be considered civilized? (30; 46). Civilization makes an entry in the story as something obviously not the same as the historical periods of historiography. More precisely, it is cultural rather than historical, something that can be taken out at any time and observed independently or studied comparatively. For over a century, the definitions of ‘civilization’ and ‘culture’ have not been settled. Fernand Braudel wrote: “The vocabulary of the social sciences, unfortunately, scarcely permits decisive definitions. Not that everything is uncertain or in flux: but most expressions, far from being fixed forever, vary from one author to another, and continue to evolve before our eyes.”235 Following the separations one after another of anthropology, ethnology, folklore studies, and cultural studies, as well as the intervention of differing ethnic standpoints, any unified understanding has become even more difficult. There is no intention in this text to dwell at length on defining concepts, but to find a path of understanding among a consensus of compatible views in order to apprehend the question of civilization that Wolf Totem has introduced. In A Study of History, Arnold Toynbee was the first to bring up different types of civilizations, a breakthrough out of the monolithic model of development that regarded the West as the subject. His showing us civilizations from 235 A History of Civilizations (London and New York: Penguin, 1993), 3.

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a ­pluralistic perspective and from varied ethnic standpoints set a positive example. In Toynbee’s view, all civilizations pass through four stages (genesis, growth, time of troubles, and disintegration), and ontologically are equivalents.236 The thinking in Wolf Totem is different: in cultural difference it sees resistance, not convergence; the basis for its thought is conquest, not reconciliation. It does not follow the British gentleman Toynbee’s peaceful thought, but happens to coincide with the American scholar Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations.” In Jiang Rong’s view, there is a hierarchy to civilizations, the advanced as distinct from the backward, and “all advanced civilizations have been driven to it” (135), that is, civilization is the result of clashes: The forest wolves of the West were driven by the Eastern grassland wolves across inland seas, onto deep seas and out onto the great oceans, where they became even more ferocious sea wolves … The result was that the sea wolves gained such strength they became the giant wolves of the world, wolves of capital, wolves of industry, wolves of technology, and wolves of culture until they struck back at the East (135). Employing the story of wolves, the author aimed at showing readers an illustrated historical scroll of civilization, which is the victorious history of “­ Western sea wolves.” This view was widely held for a time in Chinese scholarly circles of the 1980s. Chinese scholars carried out numerous self-criticisms of and reflections on the ‘yellow civilization’ that the ‘backward’ yellow earth had created. The ‘advanced’ Western wolves seemed to have such new models and new orientations that they were called the ‘blue civilization.’ When the Cold War between West and East ended in the 1990s, Samuel Huntington reintroduced types of civilizations, using seven or eight civilizations to replace the model of one or two worlds: “It does not sacrifice reality to parsimony as do the oneand two- world paradigms; yet it also does not sacrifice parsimony to reality as the statist and chaos paradigms do.”237 As he saw it, “The most dramatic and significant contacts between civilizations were when people from one civilization conquered and eliminated or subjugated the people of another.”238 Early modern history demonstrated that when the “people from one civilization conquered and eliminated or subjugated the people of another” it was always 236 See Toynbee on Toynbee: A Conversation between Arnold J. Toynbee and G.R. Urban (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). 237 Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 36. 238 Ibid., p. 50.

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Western people, something that readily fits Chen Zhen’s theory of “Western sea wolves.” There is an observation by Huntington on this point: Alone among civilizations the West has had a major and at times devastating impact on every other civilization. The relation between the power and culture of the West and the power and culture of other civilizations is, as a result, the most pervasive characteristic of the world of civilizations.239 From the above we may perhaps understand the origins of the totem worship in the novel: it tells a story of the grassland, but what that involves are modern Western wolves. In a remote corner of the East that still belongs to wilderness, several students from Beijing gather to congratulate themselves on “the opportunity to witness the last stages of nomadic existence on the Mongolian grassland” (195; 304). They speculate with the mindset of hunting treasure while matching wits with grassland wolves: In the West, primitive nomadic life was their childhood, and if we look at primitive nomads now, we are given access to Westerners at three and seven, their childhood, and if we take this further, we get a clear understanding of why they occupy a high position … What’s hard to learn are the militancy and aggressiveness, the courage and willingness to take risks that flow in nomadic veins (195; 303). Through Chen Zhen’s train of thought, the nature of wolves and Western peoples become almost the same concept, drawing a distinct boundary with the ‘agrarian’ and the ‘East.’ He unreservedly looks toward the West as the direction that is civilization. So what does this have to do with culture? In Western languages, culture is the root of the word civilization, according to the detailed analysis by Zhuo Xinping of the origins and meanings of these words.240 ‘Culture’ was derived from Latin ‘cultus,’ with two pairs of meanings: to worship and sacrifice; to farm and to enlighten. As Braudel wrote, it is an “ancient word,”241 with two sources, one a mode of production, the other a spiritual 239 Ibid., 183. 240 See Zhuo Xinping 卓 新 平 , Zongjiao yu wenhua 宗 教 与 文 化 [Religion and culture] (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1988), 18f. 241 In a section of the introductory chapter, “Changing Vocabulary,” Braudel explains: “Since the year 1874, when E.B. Taylor published Primitive Culture, British and American anthropologists have tended more and more to use the word ‘culture’ to describe the primitive

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activity. By coincidence, this is quite close to culture as Wolf Totem displays it. Moreover, the novel and Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” could each serve as a footnote to the other. The clash is not only between agrarian and nomad cultures, but also within the plot of the story—who wins and who loses? As the dramatic action in the novel unfolds, there are two battlefields in the novel. There are the victors conceptually and the losers historically; the true winners in actual society, however, are the politically not so correct. The modern themes of the attributes of two civilizations and ethnicities are intertwined, spanning the length of the novel, and clarity requires they be pulled apart. Yet, in order to undertake deconstruction, analysis is quite difficult, leaving people at a loss for how to proceed in the face of ethnicity and culture. “Culture thus produces individuals whose behavior cannot be understood by the study of anatomy and physiology alone, but has to be studied through the analysis of cultural determinism—that is, the processes of conditioning and molding.”242 Again by coincidence, the novel presents the story of the grassland with this cultural view, displaying in the name of the ‘wolf totem’ the mortal contest between agrarian and nomadic civilizations. If we look first at the two battlegrounds, one is the grassland, where the primitive contest over survival knowledge and natural physical ability is ubiquitous, and the winner is the grassland wolf. “‘In war,’ the old man said, ‘wolves are smarter than men. We Mongols learned from them how to hunt, how to encircle, even how to fight a war’” (18; 26). On the great, wild grassland, “Chen Zhen was witness to the wolves’ intelligence and patience, their organization and discipline. Faced with a combat opportunity that came around only once every few years, they were still able to wait patiently, keeping their hunger and their appetite in check, then disarm the enemy—the herd of gazelles—with ease” (19; 27). Hence, Chen Zhen … understood how the great, unlettered military genius Genghis Khan, as well as the illiterate or semiliterate leaders of peoples such as the Quanrong, the Huns, the Tungus, the Turks, the Mongols, and the Jurchens, were able to bring the Chinese (whose great military sage Sun-tzu had produced his universally acclaimed treatise The Art of War) to their knees, to run roughshod over their territory, and to interrupt their dynastic cycles. They had the greatest of all teachers in military strategy; they societies they studied, as against the word ‘civilization,’ which in English is normally applied to modern societies.” A History of Civilizations, 6. 242 Bronislaw Malinowski, “The Group and the Individual in Functional Analysis,” American Journal of Sociology 44.6 (1939): 947.

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had an excellent and remarkably clear model of actual combat; and they had a long history of struggle with crack lupine troops (19; 27). Here, the word “great” modifying military “leaders” and “unlettered” associated with “military genius”243 is quite evidently mocking not only Sunzi and his treatise, but also the ethnic culture to which he belonged. The text praises not only the wolves of the grassland, but also the people of the grassland who “rode roughshod over their territory.” Morality and the position of the person judging it carry strong elements of subjectivity that can form their own logic in their associations. It is beginning from these associations that (nomadic) ethnicity and (grassland) culture produce inseparable internal bonds, and the question revolving for years in the mind of Chen Zhen seems to find its ultimate answer: Where had the tiny race of people who had swept across Asia and E ­ urope and created the Great Mongol Empire, the largest landholding in the history of the world, learned their military secrets? He had asked that question of Bilgee more than once, and this old man, whose educational level was low but whose erudition was broad, had gradually answered all his questions by enlightening him on the combat methods of wolves (19; 27–28). Regrettably, in the story the author only brings up how they conquered and triumphed and does not pursue why these one-time victors were defeated, how after only a century they disintegrated and dispersed. Like a traditional comedy with a grand reunion at the finale we only see how a lover finally becomes a family dependent, not the ensuing squabbling, fights, and even separations. Obviously, the story is not about history, but an idea concerned with the grassland and with grassland wolves: The remarkable military skills of nomad peoples came out of the ­grassland people’s long-term, cruel, and unceasing war of survival with grassland wolf packs… Although there are wolves nearly everywhere on earth, they are concentrated on the Mongolian grassland, where there are no moats or ramparts, common to advanced agrarian societies, or great walls and ancient fortresses; it is the spot on earth where the 243 Jack Weatherford seems to agree with this view: “In American terms, the accomplishment of Genghis Khan might be understood if the United States, instead of being created by a group of educated merchants or wealthy planters, had been founded by one of its illiterate slaves.” Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, xviii.

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l­ongest-­lasting ­struggle between wise and brave combatants—men and wolves—has taken place (62; 98–99; orig. trans.). The author deliberately emphasizes the influence of the (grassland) geographic environment on people and wolves, but does not think to extend this idea equally and fairly to other types of culture. Every culture has learned rules and wisdom from nature—the land, rivers, forests, and associated animals: the Japanese from forests and hills, Eskimos from snow and ice and polar bears, fishermen from the ocean and whales, and the Han Chinese from the seasonal solar cycles of the earth and the growth of plants and animals. Every culture has learned skills that are different but not inferior to what the people of the grassland learned from wolves, forming other civilizations different from nomads but not inferior to them. So why do wolves have to be a cut above everything else? “All particular civilization is the interpretation of particular human experience.”244 Judgments of the achievements and failures of civilizations differ, and there are great disparities. Fukuzawa Yukichi pointed out in his Introduction to An Outline of a Theory of Civilization (1875) in discussing Newton’s establishing universal laws of motion: “there would be no single fundamental law upon which they all would rest; without some one ultimate principle, nothing could be established with any certitude.”245 Hence, if there is to be any objectivity “it is necessary to clear away the non-essentials and get back to their source.”246 So what principle or standard does Wolf Totem use to discern what is superior and what is inferior? The clues in the novel all concern fighting. First, there is the tactic of “appearing like spirits and disappearing like demons.” Bilgee declares that the credit for the invincibility of grassland people in the past goes primarily to the grassland wolves: “If you add up all the major battles involving Mongols, more than half were fought with skills learned from the wolves” (21; 31). Chen Zhen added a chorus: “So true! … With well under 100,000 cavalrymen, Tolui actually carried out a huge encirclement, something Chinese texts on warfare state should never be attempted without more than ten times that number. Mongol cavalry was as formidable as a wolf pack,

244 Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism, 90. 245 An Outline of a Theory of Civilization [Bunmeiron no gairyaku], trans. David A. Dilworth et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 8. 246 Ibid., 7.

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each of them worth a hundred of the enemy. I truly look up to them, and in those days the entire world had no choice but to do the same (21; 31). Next is ferocious valor, the source of which was in the merciless contest fought to the death with grassland wolves. Dorji mocks the Beijing students: “‘You Han Chinese have no guts,’ Dorji said with a laugh. ‘You hate wolves but you can’t even bring yourself to kill a cub. How do you expect to fight a war?’” (106; 170). As the words still hang in the air and Dorji throws another cub into the sky, Chen Zhen sighs: He felt a huge gap psychologically between agrarian and nomadic peoples. People who used knives for slaughter were naturally more adjusted to blood and steel than people who used sickles on plants … the brutal boldness of the grassland ethnic groups was drilled into them year after year in a harsh environment like this one (107). Third is cruelty, retribution in blood. While Chen Zhen is setting wolf traps he … felt his heart clutch and his hair stand on end … If retribution between humans and wolves was so malevolent, and if, as the saying goes, those who stay close to vermillion turn red, and those who stay close to wolves must become vicious, then would his heart turn to stone and his feelings grow cold? (80; 128; orig. trans.). Bilgee laughs at him: “‘A little soft in the heart, I take it. Have you forgotten that the grassland is a battlefield, and that no one who’s afraid of blood can call himself a warrior? … If we don’t use violent means, how will we ever beat them?’” (81; 129) In the course of matching wits and physical courage with wolves, Chen … tried to come to grips with the ruthlessness of the war between man and wolf. Both sides used cruelty to attack cruelty and cunning to thwart cunning … The true defenders of the grassland had employed military prowess and wisdom learned from the wolves to protect their territory against the fire and steel, the hoes and plows lined up behind attacking Han armies (81; 128–29). In all the above, everything without exception is connected with the field of battle and with warfare, and savagery is pervasive. The methods are primitive close-quarters combat; the moral principle is victory or defeat. As history ­records, the history of the Mongol empire was an epic, and in the leading role

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was “the Mongol warrior, the hero of this epic.”247 The people of the grassland borrowed from the wolves’ expertise in night fighting and encirclement in order to deal with the wolves’ far superior hearing and sense of smell. The result was that the grassland people trained by the grassland wolves, themselves masterful fighters, are superior to their teachers: [I]n fact they were a ragtag group brought together at a moment’ notice, one that included some of the old, the weak, women, and children (113; 179). … Chen Zhen truly sensed how widespread was the superior military quality and genius among grassland people. “All the people are soldiers” was just a slogan or an ideal in the central plains of China itself, but on the Mongolian grassland thousands of years before it had already become a “reality” (113). “All the people are soldiers” was a slogan of the war years and the Cultural Revolution, and here it is an ideal that has been realized. Hence, in reading the about the clash of civilizations in the novel, it seems to verify Fukuzawa Yukichi’s view: “Now civilization is a relative thing, and it has no limits. It is a gradual progression from the primitive level.”248 The word “civilization” in ­English appeared relatively recently, derived from the Latin adjective “civilis,” pertaining to public life, citizenship, and formed from French “civilisé” (civilized) and civiliser (to civilize). Then, “in its new sense, civilization meant broadly the opposite of barbarism.”249 In the sense of ‘culture’ rather than ‘civilization,’ Wolf Totem elaborates on the relationship of the people and wolves of the grassland by binding culture firmly to the survival environment in the sincere belief that “social environment is culture,” a viewpoint closely matching that of B.F. Skinner: A given culture evolves as new practices arise, possibly for irrelevant reasons, and are selected by their contribution to the strength of the culture as it “competes” with the physical environment and with other cultures.250

247 René Grousset, The Empire of the Steppes, trans. Naomi Walford (New Brunswick, nj: ­Rutgers University Press, 1970), 223. 248 An Outline of a Theory of Civilization [Bunmeiron no gairyaku], 45. 249 Fernand Braudel, A History of Civilizations, 4. 250 B.F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (Indianapolis and Cambridge, ma: Hackett ­Publishing, 2002), 143.

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Zhang Jiyuan, the student horse herder, discovers that the courage and skill in battle of the Mongolian horses are the results of their lethal struggles with grassland wolves. “Such formidable horses were like wings for people who already possessed exceptional character and wisdom.” (251; 373) Whether horses, people, or wolves, all are products of the ‘natural-cultural’ environment of the grassland. Chen Zhen concludes: The wolves have given the Mongols their ferocious combat nature, the wisdom of sophisticated warfare, and the best warhorses. These three military advantages led to their stunning conquests (250–51; 373). Here “‘wild’ takes on a new interpretation, elevating wolves’ nature to the level of a belief. The author believes that if the Chinese people had a transfusion of wolves’ blood and turned the wolf totem into a ‘new practice’ they could have invincible ferocity. The anthropologist Franz Boas had a different view: “environment has an important effect upon the customs and beliefs of man, but only insofar as it helps to determine the special forms of customs and beliefs. These are, however, based primarily on cultural conditions, which themselves are due to other causes.”251 If we pursue this historically we see another battleground: it pervades the entire course of human history, appearing as contests of power, ideology, and science and technology—contests in the sense of civilization. On this battleground the wolves and people of the grassland suffer catastrophic defeat, which the agrarian civilization of settlers as the subject wins without a fight: “More and more Mongols had given up herding for farming” (145). In the face of the crushing defeat of wolves/humans, Bilgee cannot help but answer the question he finds unbearable: what had happened to the majesty of the ­Mongol cavalry that had once swept all before them?252 Back in the time of Genghis Khan, that’s when the Mongols really learned from wolves. Every tribe came together, like spokes on a wheel, or a quiver 251 Franz Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1938), 192. The Chinese translation here inserts the clause, “these conditions themselves are created by historical causes.” See Yuanshi ren de xinzhi 原 始 人 的 心 智 , trans. Xiang Long 项 龙 and Wang Xing 王 星 (Beijing: Guoji wenhua chuban she gongsi, 1989), 89. 252 After the death of Genghis Khan his grandsons were in contention over the succession to the position of the Great Khan and returned to Mongolia to fight each other. “The struggle among the lineages would last another ten years—and for at least this decade, the rest of the world would be safe from Mongol invasion.” Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, 158.

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of arrows… How else were they able to conquer the world? Our downfall came when we lost that sense of unity. Now it’s tribe against tribe, individual arrows fired in anger, but easily deflected and broken (157; 247). This is the only time that the book directly addresses the defeat of the people of the grassland. It attributes this to lack of unity,253 but does not take up the reasons for the defeat and retreat of the wolves, which have maintained steadfast unity to the death. Bilgee deliberately avoids this question: “But that’s enough—just talking about it is painful” (157; 247). Chen Zhen is persistent: “Who is more fearsome, people or wolves?” (113). Bilgee contradicts himself, sometimes admitting that “wolves are afraid of people, since we’re their only predators” (84; 135). More often, however, he asserts, “How can humans compare to wolves” (113). Hence, Chen Zhen draws this conclusion: “In the end, man has the capacity to kill a wolf, but not its spirit” (145; 229). So what, after all, does defeat the grassland wolves? The story tells us that it is agrarian civilization, and Chen Zhen turns out to be its most immediate accomplice. After a wolf pack is burned out in Chapter 13 the wolves make no further impressive appearance. Thereafter, we see the power of agrarian civilization, more brutish and overbearing than barbarity, more powerful than violence, until in the end the army arrives. Guided by Chen Zhen, they easily penetrate the depths of the grassland and locate the wolf dens, revealing the hypocrisy of so many pronouncements about the ‘wolf totem’ in the light of his complicity in invading and exterminating them with the help of modern science and technology, such as rifles, jeeps, and the rest. Faced with this hideous spectacle, “Chen’s face was a ghostly white; he wanted to say something but held his tongue … wishing he could find a place to have a good cry” (313; 449). The nomadic life he praises he now sees is coming to an end at the muzzles of their rifles, with his participation. Holding his speech in check, he empties a cup of liquor in one swallow: Instinctively, he picked up a raw cucumber and began eating … [It was something] he hadn’t tasted in more than two years. Maybe all Han Chinese were born to be farmers. Otherwise, why had he picked out a

253 In the latter part of the 6th century, “the forceful Sui dynasty had resumed the grand politics of the Han in regard to Central Asia, encouraged Tardu in his rebellion, which broke the Turkic power in two… Thus, at a time when China was reuniting, the Turks were disintegrating.” See René Grousset, The Empire of the Steppes, 88.

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cucumber, of all things? Its light succulence turned to bitter juice in his mouth (313; 449). After reading so many weighty pronouncements, it is this that touches on the core of culture: living and how to go about living, these are the most important questions. To speak plainly, what is eaten and how it acquired concern the cultural psyche of a people, it is the final checkpoint verifying a people’s ‘identity.’ Research in biology has demonstrated: Most of the anatomy and physiology of a species is concerned with breathing, feeding, maintaining a suitable temperature, surviving danger, fighting infection, procreating, and so on … Similarly, most of the ­practices which compose a culture are concerned with sustenance and safety …254 In the novel, no matter how much Chen Zhen’s thoughts and feelings are wrapped up in the grassland, ultimately, when it comes to the question of eating, he is unable to overcome the acquired traits of Han Chinese. There is no shame in this, for the warrior of the grassland whom Chen Zhen so reveres was the same in the history of raiding: “On the threshold of these forays, where the steppes ended and cultivation began, he glimpsed a way of life very different from his own, one which was bound to arouse his greed.” Yet this was not for love of cultivation: “Not that he had any taste for cultivated land as such; when he took possession of it, he instinctively allowed it to relapse into a fallow, unproductive state, and fields reverted to steppe, to yield grass for his sheep and horses.”255 Only on the question of food does culture revert to its true state: “A culture survives if those who carry it survive, and this depends in part upon certain genetic susceptibilities to reinforcement, as the result of which behavior making for survival in a given environment is shaped and maintained.”256 The genetic susceptibilities here, almost without exception, are primarily revealed through taste and appetite.257 At this point, the strength of culture and the cultural standpoint of the narrator appear to be ambiguous. With a change of perspective, triumph and ­defeat

254 255 256 257

B.F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, 132–33. René Grousset, Empire of the Steppes, xxvi. B.F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, 135. New émigrés living in unfamiliar lands will generally identify with this point. Often what is more ‘patriotic’ and ‘homesick’ than thoughts and feelings are ‘taste’ and ‘appetite.’

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are hard to judge; a change of battleground inverts strength and weakness. Once faith encounters issues of food, false sanctimony crumbles ­instantly.258 The most thoroughgoing falsifier is none other than he who is always engaged in reflection, Chen Zhen: thinking one thing, saying another, and doing something else, much like George Bernard Shaw’s English gentleman, and also Jack London’s “Son of the Wolf,” always finding a justification for malevolent acts whenever one is needed, or a pretext of good intentions to avoid responsibility for guilt. People cannot avoid inadvertently directing their suspicion toward Chen Zhen. The son of Asians and farmers, how can he speak so confidently on behalf of “Western wolves”? As the promoter of the ‘wolf totem,’ how can he without the least resistance lead soldiers into the interior of the grassland and participate in the slaughter of the wolves? The first question involves the aim of the author’s writing. By making use of Chen Zhen’s path of thought, the author thought through an important question that had long tormented him: why did an equestrian people not take the horse as their totem, but instead made a totem out of the enemy of horses, the wolf? Here is his answer: Mongolian horses were ‘students’ that grassland wolves and people together had trained; how could ‘students’ become totems and spiritual masters worshipped by their teachers? Grassland wolves had never been tamed, and people for thousands of years had studied their nature and their many skills without ever being able to learn them. Wolves truly dominated everything on the grassland, occupying the commanding position among all the interlocking, complex relations of the grassland (253). The second question concerns rules of literary creation. In the course of writing fiction it is common for a ‘contrary’ conclusion to occur. A classic example of Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina: the author loves Anna and hopes she will become happy through love, so why does his writing kill her off? The question in Wolf Totem is: given that Chen Zhen reveres wolves, why did the author make them lose and hand victory to the settlers he so despises? Where Anna’s end embodies the power of artistic logic, what Wolf Totem presents is the innate power of culture, that is, of Chinese civilization itself. This touches on

258 Li Zehou 李 泽 厚 also viewed food as an important philosophical topic. See Chapter 1 “Practical reason and food philosophy” in his Lishi bentilun 历 史 本 体 论 [Historical ontology] (Beijing: Sanlian, 2002).

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“a basic principle of narrative in China: opposites may be isomorphic; the nonisomorphic may be interconnected.”259 For a long time scholars have conducted probing studies into the differences between agrarian peoples and equestrian peoples. Agrarian nations “absolutely cannot allow foreign groups to move in and maintain their existence over a long period. This is because agrarian peoples in general have an ethnic consciousness that reveres themselves and a habit of viewing other ethnicities as barbarian, while lacking a psychic basis to accept foreigners entering the interior of their boundaries.”260 Western nations arose as equestrian, and being the offspring of nomads, they “have a passionate desire to conquer nature.”261 Culture is the human fruit that the geographic environment produces. Its internal core is based on ancestral identification with the connection of the soil and blood; its external manifestations are customs in the broadest sense. Civilization has an entire set of a system of rules, which at its core is identification with values rather than purely identification with ethnicity. When a civilization loses the conditions for survival (such as in war, border or regional crises, inability to sustain the system), culture becomes the social resource by which a group turns to the power of nature for collective survival. Culture has elements that are innately natural, and the result of forcing change is always destructive for both. “Why does it have to be like that?” Yang asked. “They’re born of the same roots, so why are they so quick to fight? Why can’t both the nomads and the farmers stick to their own lifestyle?” Chen said coldly, “It’s a small world, and everyone wants the good life. Human history is essentially a chronicle of fighting over and safeguarding living space. The small farmers of China have devoted their lives to taking care of the tiny piece of land they farm, making them narrow-minded individuals with tunnel vision” (233; 350).

259 See Yang Yi, Zhongguo xushixue [Chinese narratology] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2006): “The aesthetic pursuit and philosophical realm of the phrase ‘states of equilibrium and harmony exist in perfection’ (zhi zhong he) is ‘equilibrium and harmony internally and polarization externally.’ This is the deep, underpinning principle of many Chinese narrative principles. Without equilibrium and harmony, the two poles would be exposed and break apart; without the two poles, the equilibrium and harmony would congeal and settle.” Yang Yi, 15. 260 Jiangshang Bofu [Egami Namio], Qima minzu guojia [Kiba minzoku kokka (Equestrian nation)], trans. Zhang Chengzhi (Beijing: Guangming ribao she, 1988), 135. 261 Jin Yuelin 金 岳 霖 , Dao, ziran yu ren 道 、 自 然 与 人 [Dao, nature, and man] (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2005), 55.

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There is no victor in either group. Chen Zhen sees this clearly: “With no more wolves, there were just horses, and with no more horses there are just cattle and sheep. A people on horseback are now a people on motorcycles. Maybe later on they will be a race of ecological refugees” (357). They say, when the clam contends with the snipe, it is the fisherman who profits. “Chen Zhen felt that he was like the fisherman in the adage about the snipe and the clam,” (15) and he thanks the boldest and wisest hunter on the Olonbulag for bringing him deep into the midst of the wolf pack where he can play the fisherman as the wolves hunt gazelles. What is implied here by the fisherman’s profit? It is the wolf totem. The power of faith surpasses ethnic identities and cultural differences, and it transcends clashes of civilizations as well. Under the banner of the wolf totem all people may wishfully imagine their own salvation: all that is necessary is to believe in wolves, and all contradictions immediately disintegrate. In Chapter 20 several students from Beijing share experiences sitting in a Mongolian yurt and, as if in an immigration interview, find transcendence in ritualistic fashion through conversation: “Ever since I prostrated myself at the feet of the wolf totem,” Yang said, “I’ve been a Mongol … If fighting breaks out I will take my stand on the side of the grassland, serve Heaven’s morality, serve Tengger, and serve the grassland.” Chen said, “Farmers and shepherds have been doing that throughout history, stopping only long enough to intermarry and live together peacefully for a while. Truth is, we’re all descendants of unions between people on the Central Plain and those on the grassland … What worries me is whether [Uljii] and Bilgee have the power to overcome the forces that want to make the grassland theirs” (189; 294–95; orig. trans.). When Yang Ke laughs at Chen for being a “dyed-in-the-wool Utopian,” Chen Zhen taunts him in return, “Apparently, you don’t see the wolf as a real ­totem after all.” (189; 295) In this dialogue the author simultaneously reveals two important allegories that are interrelated: one is the straightforward explanation of the ‘wolf totem’; the second is the hint about ‘utopia.’ What is the wolf totem? It’s the spiritual power of one to ten, or a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand. It’s what protects the big life of the grassland … If you truly revere the wolf totem, then you need to stand by heaven and earth, by nature, by the big life of the grassland, and you must struggle as long as a single wolf exists (189; 295).

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In calling each other into question, the wolf totem and utopia are organically linked, completely removed from food, allowing what is spiritual to return finally to the spiritual. This is Chen Zhen’s ideal destination, and it goes to the heart of the author’s writing this book, abruptly awakening through personal experience by way of the barbaric after a permanent ‘collective forgetting’: Chen Zhen discovered that his own veins seemed to surge with the blood of nomads … Unlike the offspring of purely agrarian people, unlike the practical, solid, earthly-minded Confucians and peasants of Han China, who looked with hostility on dreams, fantasy, and imagination … Chen Zhen hoped that the grassland could awaken in him even more the dreams and spirit of adventure that he had so long suppressed (216). Such dreams, to transcend history and cultural disparities, are achieved in the name of faith, whatever it may be—Christianity, Communism, Wolf Totem, or some other belief: “Out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances, spring narratives.”262 Benedict Anderson put it this way: “As with modern persons, so it is with nations. Awareness of being embedded in secular, serial time … engenders the need for narratives of ‘identity.’”263 Under these circumstances, utopia happens to be a common direction. When the environments in which human populations exist deteriorate thinkers and writers who have a strong sense of responsibility toward society facing deep disaster will express a desire to “save the world.” ­Dystopian works are the same. Writers are the “watchmen” of humanity, pointing out the prospect of disaster to people in order to put them on the alert. The designers of utopias and dystopias invariably have sublime love and grand minds.264 Utopian works are not only the products of ideals, but also a form of political criticism. It is just in this sense of critiquing reality that it coincides with the origins of Western philosophy. Gadamer pointed out in “Plato’s Thought in

262 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (Revised Edition) (London and New York: Verso, 2006), 208. 263 Gadamer in Conversation, 209. 264 Cui Jingsheng 崔 竞 生 and Wang Song 王 岚 , “Wutuobang 乌 托 邦 [Utopia],” in Xifang wenlun guanjian ci 西 方 文 论 关 键 词 [Keywords in Western literary criticism], ed. Zhao Yifan 赵 一 凡 , et al. (Beijing: Waiyu jiaoyan chubanshe, 2006), 613–14.

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Utopia”: “it is totally impossible to talk about Plato if one does not understand how to talk appropriately about utopias.” He emphasized the political background that produced utopian works: “Where no freedom of speech prevails, one can only practice critique in such indirect forms. Indeed, this is precisely its primary function: critique of the present, not the construction of whatever project is being described in the work.”265 The production of dystopian works is a rethinking and reaction against utopian ideals. It is “concerned with individual benefit against the coercive unity of the whole.”266 Read this way, Wolf Totem is insufficiently thorough in what it is against. The wolf nature and their packs are symbols of collectivism; the orientation of its ideals is not the happiness and satisfaction of individual interiors, but external militancy and expansion: “flags gilded with wolf heads that ancient horsemen carried into battle, galloping across the grassland, wolf blood coursing through their veins, filled with the courage, ferocity, and wisdom they’d learned from those very wolves, to become conquerors of the world” (135; 205). From a ‘post-’ perspective, one is struck by new significance. When humans cede subject status to the creatures of nature, when all human society steps back from the foreground of the story, then the will of nations or collectives silently disappears, completely giving way to the omnipresent and invincible “logic of the grassland.” In this way, the ‘post-’ is sufficiently thorough: not only post- Chinese revolution, but also post- modern civilization; not only directed against socialist utopian practice and against modernism and Western civilization, but even more against the mode of survival of humanity in its entirety and the self-centered position of the human race. In the ‘post-’ era today, even though there is reflection, it may not be of the same kind or in the same direction. Among Western intellectuals, reflection is also self-reflection, directed against modern civilization. “while the spirit of the West marches under its banner of freedom, the Nation of the West forges its iron chains of organization which are the most relentless and unbreakable that have ever been manufactured in the whole history of man.”267 While Western scholars have sought to fragment ‘grand narratives’ and once and for all dispel the ‘heroic’ and ‘sublime,’ Chinese scholars have gone in the opposite direction, not only creating grand narratives like Wolf Totem, but also hoisting the banner of ‘defend the sublime’ especially against the efforts to ‘dispel the

265 Ibid., 84. 266 Cui Jingsheng and Wang Song, “Wutuobang [Utopia],” in Xifang wenlun guanjian ci ­[Keywords in Western literary criticism], 619. 267 Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism, 37.

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sublime,’ and they have viewed national heroes as the soul of the nation.268 These disparities give us the genuine experience that “things of nature are only immediate and single, but man as mind reduplicates himself, inasmuch as prima facie he is like the things of nature, but in the second place just as really for himself, perceives himself, has ideas of himself, and only thus is active self-realizedness. [That is to say, he] is mind or spirit only in virtue of this active being-for-self.”269 By the same reasoning, the spirit is also the human, the evidence and measure of civilization. Changes of place, of people, and of culture simply change the content. In that case, what after all is the relation of the Chinese nation or people and Chinese civilization? Today, under the impact of outside civilizations, is its inclusiveness heading toward completion or disintegration? The Chinese writer Gao Jianqun has for many years probed the ‘site’ of ­Chinese civilization, examining on the spot the interweaving of the nomadic and the agrarian. He believes that Eastern civilization (agrarian) and Western civilization (nomadic) are completely different, nor is there any need for them to seek to be identical.270 The possibility for blending among peoples exists once there has been communication or warfare. The Xiongnu, Tujue, and Mongols, as ancient Turkic peoples, all had engaged in worship of the wolf totem,271 used Han Chinese dating, and believed they were descendants of the Yellow Emperor, with the same ancestors and origins as the agrarian people of China. As an equestrian people, they were nomads given to warfare, launching campaigns in cycles of roughly 80 years, until they became the invincible cavalry that conquered the world. These nomad peoples who, from their rise to their downfall had a history of some 3,800 years, were by coincidence destroyed in the mid-fifth century. Gao Jianqun believes that the persistent survival of the Chinese people benefited from being mutually complementary. On the surface, nomad culture disappeared, but its restless, aggressive spirit had already entered the blood of the Chinese. In the veins of every member of the Chinese people flows the “blood of the barbarians,” (Chen Yinke’s phrase) so 268 Gao Jianqun 高 建 群 , “Youmu wenhua yu Zhonghua wenhua 游 牧 文 化 与 中 华 文 明 [Nomad culture and Chinese civilization],” on Shiji dajiangtang 世 纪 大 讲 堂 [Century Forum], Fenghuang dianshitai [Phoenix Television], February 10, 2008. 269 Georg Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, 35. The final sentence of the quotation is taken from the variant reading (p. 120 n. 5) that is closer to the Chinese reading. 270 Gao Jianqun, “Youmu wenhua yu Zhonghua wenhua [Nomad culture and Chinese civilization],” on Shiji dajiangtang [Century Forum], Phoenix Television, February 10, 2008. 271 The one-eared wolf of the Xiongnu chief Batur (Modu), the gray wolf of the Tujue people, and the gray wolf who fathered Genghis Khan all had the same origins.

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that the spirit of nomads was blended into the superficially agrarian culture.272 It can be said that Chinese civilization is one state of survival, intimately linked with the primal question of the existence of people. What stands in opposition to that is indeed the ‘savage’ in its original sense: The savage is unrestrained, wanton; it is bloodlust and warfare. Civilization is control, self-discipline, and peaceful coexistence. The core values of Chinese civilization are not only for people to live in peace with each other, but also in harmony with nature. ‘The unity of heaven and humanity’ is a plain truth across China that pervades everyday life, neither a totem, nor particularly mysterious. Yet it has taken Western peoples the long history of (false) civilization until today in the ‘post-’ era to reflect and become aware. So one cannot help but wonder why the author of the novel has traveled such a long distance to look far away from what is close at hand, turn away from such a source to look among Western wolves in order to find the power to stir the nation? Perhaps the author’s point is not about civilization or culture, nor about the grassland and wolves, but only about reform of the national character, on account of which he has spoken through the wolves? Perhaps on this land that we find ourselves, the signs of ‘aphasia’ are not in the text but in all the modern discourse about current events? In the face of civilization, criticism is without answers. Whether east, north, south, or west, the road leading to universal civilization is still long. In the West in the wake of modernity there is still the deluge of postmodern ‘fragments’ and ‘chicken feathers.’ Looking north and south, next to prosperous societies colossal issues of poverty and hunger are visible that are every bit as ferocious as wolves and tigers. In China, the road of modernization has not been smooth; the appearance of Wolf Totem bears testimony to that. So I would like to borrow the words of Li Shenzhi to conclude this section, a form of encouragement and of remembrance: I am an idealist myself, and I believe that universal civilization will emerge, but a few decades, a century or two, are just a moment in the history of human civilization. Will humanity have to shed more blood 272 The Shaanxi writer Gao Jianqun, who prides himself on being “the last Xiongnu,” went on foot to visit the region that is the crossroads of the two major cultures and visit researchers. In “Chengjisi Han de shangdi zhi bian [Genghis Khan’s whip of god]” he reevaluated Genghis Khan’s historical acts (destroying restricted domains and integrating territories were contributions to the world), and has met with criticism. See Gao Jianqun, “Youmu wenhua yu Zhonghua wenhua [Nomad culture and Chinese civilization].”

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and tears traveling down a path strewn with thorns before it can arrive in fields of roses?273 Unless history reveals itself, no one can answer this question. Those who do try to answer it first are indeed the offspring of The Republic and Utopia. 4.8

In Terms of Economics: What is the Distance between Labor and Power? We have become impoverished. We have given up one portion of the human heritage after another, and have often left it at the pawnbroker’s for a hundredth of its true value, in exchange for the small value of ‘the contemporary.’ walter benjamin274

According to economics, all wealth derives from labor. Adam Smith wrote, “Labour, therefore, is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities.”275 Engels supplemented this by writing: Labour is the source of all wealth, the political economists assert. And it really is the source—next to nature, which supplies it with the material that it converts into wealth. But it is even infinitely more than this. It is the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself.276 Given that labor creates humans and creates wealth, it can be inferred that the accumulation of labor should lead to prosperity, and the distance between 273 Li Shenzhi 李 慎 之 (1923–2003), “Shuliang youshi xia de kongju: ping Hengtingdun di san pian guanyu wenming chongtulun de wenzhan 数 量 优 势 下 的 恐 惧 － － 评 亨 廷 顿 第 三 篇 关 于 文 明 冲 突 论 的 文 章 [The terror of superior numbers: a criticism of Huntington’s third article on the clash of civilizations],” Dushu 1996 No. 2. This quotation is in memory of the fifth anniversary of Li Shenzhi’s death. 274 “Experience and Poverty,” in Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934, 735. 275 The Wealth of Nations (New York: Bantam Classics, 2003), 36. 276 “Dialectics of Nature—Articles and chapters” by Frederick Engels, in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, vol. 25, Frederick Engels: Anti-Dühring, Dialects of Nature [by] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels and translated by Emile Burns and Clemens Dutt. (International Publishers, New York, ny, 1987), 452.

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them is merely a matter of the amount of labor input. But what we read in Wolf Totem is a different picture: the people of the grassland toil but are not prosperous, and their courage has not helped them duly to convert wealth into capital. Still less has the arduous toil of agrarian folk provided much, if any, gain, and faced with ‘civilized wolves,’ what they had to show for thousands of years could not withstand a single attack. Faced with the realities he witnesses and the wounds of history, it is difficult for a Beijing student like Chen Zhen to avoid arriving at this skepticism: I think that the way labor was exalted in our education was too extreme. Labor has created humans, labor has created everything. Chinese work so hard they love to hear that. In reality, labor alone cannot create humans (197). The student horse herder, Zhang Jiyuan, thinks, “Horses belonging to the ­Chinese … are animal coolies” (196; 305). Hence they were no match for ­Mongol fighters and their warhorses. Zhang agrees with Chen Zhen’s argument for fighting: “A fighting spirit is more important than a peaceful laboring spirit. The world’s greatest engineering feat, in terms of labor output, our Great Wall, could not keep out the mounted warriors of one of the smallest races in the world”277 (196; 305). For this reason, Chen believes: Labor cannot accomplish everything and is not without harm. Labor includes things like slave labor, indentured labor, conscripted labor, reform through labor, laboring like a horse or an ox … Slave owners and feudal despots liked more than anything to praise this kind of labor. People who have not worked themselves but even exploited other people’s labor have also sung the praises of labor (197). His skepticism clearly points to two things: One is the effectiveness of labor: what kind of labor is truly of value and worthwhile? The second is reverence for labor: what kind of labor is ‘glorious’ and ‘sacred’? Both doubts arise from the painfulness related to labor, and have a special significance in New C ­ hina: 277 It was not Han Chinese alone who built the Great Wall. From the Qin dynasty down to the Ming and Qing dynasties two-thirds of the wall was built in succession by minority peoples based on their own needs.” “Wenhua daguanyuan 文 化 大 观 园 [Cultural grand view garden],” Phoenix Satellite Television, April 13, 2008.) See Lou Zhewen changcheng wen ji 罗 哲 文 长 城 文 集 [Collected articles of Luo Zhewen on the Great Wall] (Beijing: Waiwen chubanshe, 1996.)

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the reform of intellectuals and the political punishment of ‘rightists’ was physical labor. The fundamental feature in the re-education of educated youth was also physical labor. Criminals have had to be reformed through labor, and people who have erred have also been sentenced to labor reform. The author of Wolf Totem spent long years incarcerated in labor reform. Chen Zhen’s life as a herder perhaps is a true depiction of the author’s anguished mental state: “The forlorn loneliness of each day was reminiscent of when the statesman Su Wu was forced to herd sheep in captivity back in 100 bce. The sense that one’s life was reduced to grassy wasteland was a knot in his stomach that could not be dispelled” (73). None of the labor cited above could improve people’s lives or create wealth, nor could it bring anyone freedom. That kind of labor is even a symbol of freedom deprived. So Chen Zhen says, “None of the most important things in the world can be created by labor. Labor can’t create peace, security, or strong national defense, for example. Labor can’t create freedom, democracy, equality, or their systems” (197). Here he returns to the topic of national character to emphasize: Labor can’t create a national character that passionately demands putting freedom, democracy, and equality into practice. Laborers who cannot fight are just coolies, docile conformists, domestic animals, so many cattle and horses. Freedom, democracy, and equality can never become their rallying cry, their fighting motto (197). If this is as far as the issue goes, it is unrelated to economics, and just uses that to pose difficult questions and express sentiments that are completely political. But if this is where the issue stops, then the views below are unsettling: The Chinese people, with the world’s largest population, the most industrious, and with the longest history of labor that has never been ­interrupted could not create a civilization as advanced as the one that Western peoples created with a much shorter history of labor (197). This train of thought returns to the track of economics, and, in a line of reasoning that is close to absurd, forces us to respond with the following questions: What is the measure of what is ‘advanced’? Is it the amount of wealth? Who decides what is to be called ‘labor’? How is what is ‘labor’ decided? In the course of his interrogating labor, Chen Zhen distinguishes categories of “slave labor, indentured labor, conscripted labor, reform through labor, and laboring like a horse or an ox” (197). Who can tell us what difference there is between these and Adam Smith’s “useful labor”? What element turns labor that

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makes people prosperous in the original text into the instrument of servitude? Does labor in different cultural conditions indicate different civilizations, such as distinctions of superiority and inferiority, wealth and poverty between nomad and agrarian civilizations? Labor has lasted ten thousand years on this vast yellow earth; the laborers have toiled without a moment’s idleness, their labor output has accumulated for thousands of years without interruption … down to today, they have experienced wars and disasters, been resurrected, and continued to work. On the new map of the world, the people of China no longer simply face the yellow earth; when they look up into the blue sky, facing tomorrow, they cannot help asking: After all the effort of toil, how much distance remains to the ‘wealth of the nation and power of the people’ among Western peoples? If labor cannot close that distance, what should the instrument of closing that distance be? ‘Progress’ is a modern concept, related to Western civilization, capitalism, and the market economy, founded on the basis of instrumental reason with the individual as the subject and material accumulation as the goal: “Instrumental reason therefore tends to reduce that which is good for humankind to that which increases productivity.”278 Jorge Larrain therefore pointed out: “The spirit of modernity was imbued with these ideas: progress was material progress; it was growth in the production of material goods.”279 Knowing this starting point is very important; it brings us back to the source of ‘progress,’ viewing clearly the value judgments and humanistic orientation it contains. There are two obviously modern features: the first of these is the commanding position of the ‘human’ and the status of subject that it claims over all other life. ‘­Nature’ has no status or identity in the definition of progress, and in its totality it becomes an instrument at the service of humans. Next is that ‘things,’ that is, accumulation and continual creation of wealth, become the sole measure of progress. Once on the march of progress, life for the sake of accumulating wealth replaces the original goal of laboring for the sake of survival, and irrevocably rushes toward prosperity, no longer content with ‘staying alive.’ In the name of progress, people have achieved a comfortable material life, simultaneously fulfilling and absolving themselves morally as they have given the green light to violent acts to conquer nature and plunder in the name of ‘benevolence.’ It is only necessary to wave the banner of ‘progress’ and all invasions, occupations, and colonies, together with the wars, revolutions, and reactions that have accompanied them can change from ‘blood red’ to a golden 278 Jorge Larrain, Ideology and Cultural Identity: Modernity and the Third World Presence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 10. 279 Ibid.

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color symbolizing wealth or the red of initiative in texts of civilized history. On the map of the civilized world, ‘progress’ and ‘wealth’ are linked, and wealthy people (or societies) become the markers of progress and civilization (gdp, for example). Seen from that perspective, the Olonbulag is a far distance from ‘progress.’ People there are always at work, and none is idle, but none is wealthy either. So the question that we need to answer first is this: what kind of labor does the novel show? Faced with wealth, have the people of the grassland lacked initiative, or has some other colossal obstruction blocked them from the path to prosperity? The labor on the grassland belongs to the category of nature, showing the hybrid natural economic state of the early period of humanity. It has a certain internal connection that lacks distinctions with what we can call ‘fighting,’ as in the hunt by encirclement: Early-winter wolf hunts were the primary source of income, outside of work points, for livestock herders, and an excellent opportunity for young hunters to display military skills and courage; they honed their scouting abilities, choosing the right place and time to fight. In the past, early-­ winter wolf hunts were used by tribal heads, barbarian leaders, khans, and Great Khans to train and drill their people. This tradition, passed down over the millennia, has been followed in modern times (66; 105). The hunts were usually carried out on domestic land, as a method of survival that was both productive and defensive in nature. René Grousset combined the two, believing that “Mongol tactics were a perfected form of the old methods used by the Hsiung-nu and T’u-chüeh: the eternal nomadic tactics, evolved from continual raids on the fringe of cultivation and from great hunting drives on the steppes.”280 This is labor, given that it is the necessary means of seeking a living for grassland people, and it displays essential features of humans different from the activities of animals in general, as Marx defined it: “At the end of every labour process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally. Man effects not only a change of form in the materials of nature; he also realizes [verwirklicht] his own purpose in those materials.”281 Engels explained: “the animal merely uses its environment, and brings about changes in it simply by its presence; man by his changes makes it 280 René Grousset, The Empire of the Steppes, 224. 281 Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy (New York: Dover, 2011), 284.

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serve his ends, masters it. This is the final, essential distinction between man and other animals, and once again it is labour that brings about this distinction.”282 Nomadic herding, for example, appears natural, yet is not entirely natural, but conscious human behavior: Nomadic herding rotates use of pastures, so that the thin turf undergoes the least harm, and the cattle and sheep re-fertilize it with their urine and excrement. The people of the grassland have preserved the Mongolian grassland for millennia by using these most primitive and yet possibly most scientific methods of production (308). The author had emphasized an important feature of early human production: the primitive is also the scientific; in the name of the logic of the grassland, natural cycles and the ‘rotations’ of natural economics are linked. Rotation is based on respecting laws of nature. Early agriculture, like nomadic herding, also rotated crops and fields. Fu Zhufu’s study points out: “Prior to the Western Zhou dynasty ancient peoples followed the custom of herders and traveled from one field to another. That is, an entire people would move far away to select another field in order to settle the contradiction of soil exhaustion.”283 The ‘three-field system’ that was then at its height in ancient China also u ­ nderwent a transformation in Europe during the middle ages.284 The anthropologist Lewis Morgan, analyzing the vocabulary used in Homer’s epics, determined the four major events of ancient Greek life (feeding domestic animals, the discovery of grains, architecture using stone, smelting iron ore). He cited an argument by the philologist August Fick about primitive society: “The material existence of the people rested in no way upon agriculture. This becomes entirely clear from the small number of primitive words which have reference to agriculture.”285 Guo Moruo, based on his research on oracle bone script, pointed out: “Three or four thousand years ago, there were still many areas

282 Frederick Engels, “Dialectics of Nature,” 460. 283 Fu Zhufu 傅 筑 夫 , Zhongguo gudai jingji shi gailun 中 国 古 代 经 济 史 概 论 [Survey of the history of ancient Chinese economy] (Beijing: Zongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1981), 41. 284 Ibid., 32–33. Based on a free hold estate, the ‘well-field system’ systematized the ‘threefield system’ that was at its height during the Western Zhou. Because population increase made it impossible to provide for a corresponding amount of fallow land, the limited land required developing agricultural technology, resulting in man-made fertilization and irrigation. See pp. 39–42. 285 August Fick, Die Ehemalige Spracheinheit der Indogermanen Europas [Primitive Unity of Indo-European Languages] (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1873), 280; cited in Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1877), 285.

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that had not been cleared in the central portion of the Yellow River valley.”286 The people living along the river hunted fox, deer, wild horses, wild sheep, wild pigs, and wild elephants, as well as fished. It is evident that the forms that natural economies took were quite varied and not strictly in a stereotype of nomad herding or the grassland. Regardless of what kind of terrain or material resources,­“every necessary, convenience, and comfort of life, is obtained by human labour.”287 The difference is that other civilizations later evolved or ‘progressed,’ and only on this grassland did the nomadic way of life for the Mongols remain very traditional down into the 1960s: “Animal husbandry that relied on the weather corresponded with cycles of nature, and nutrition and production also varied periodically.”288 Therefore, two questions stand out: What sort of labor leads to prosperity? Why didn’t the labor of the people of the grassland lead to prosperity? These questions are answered in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, where he argues that the principal reason that the efficiency of labor increases is the division of labor: It is the great multiplication of the productions of all the different arts, in consequence of the division of labour, which occasions, in a well-­ governed society, that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people … and a general plenty diffuses itself through all the different ranks of the society.289 To Smith, poverty or prosperity are unrelated to spiritual activity and completely founded on the basis of material life. Once someone has established the division of labor, “he must be rich or poor according to the quantity of that labour which he can command, or which he can afford to purchase.”290 The division of labor originated in the human propensity to “truck, barter, or exchange,” a propensity that “is common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals … so it is this same trucking disposition which originally gives 286 Guo Moruo, “Bu ci zhong de gudai shehui [Ancient society in oracle inscriptions],” in Zhongguo gudai shehui yanjiu (Studies in ancient Chinese society) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1954), 178. 287 John Gray, A Lecture on Human Happiness (1826; reprint ed. New York: Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, 1971), 11. 288 Wang Jian’ge 王 建 革 , Nong mu shengtai yu chuantong Menggu shehui 农 牧 生 态 与 传 统 蒙 古 社 会 [The state of agriculture and herding and traditional Mongol society] ­( Jinan: Shandong renmin chubanshe, 2066), 21. 289 The Wealth of Nations, 18. 290 Ibid., 36.

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occasion to the division of labour.”291 The division of labor leads to trade, and that creates a market economy. Here, “the most dissimilar geniuses are of use to one another; the different produces of their respective talents, by the general disposition to truck, barter, and exchange, being brought, as it were, into a common stock, where every man may purchase whatever part of the produce of other men’s talents he has occasion for.”292 In comparison, on the grassland in the novel there is no lack of division of labor, but it does not necessarily lead to a market; rather, it shows the original nature of labor as seeking to survive: “On the Olonbulag the nomads partly herded and partly hunted. Although their chief occupation was herding, the principal income for many of them came from hunting” (333). Wildlife on the grassland is no different from fruit trees in other parts of China; there are good years and bad years, determined by weather, growth of grass, and natural disasters. But the herders on the Olonbulag knew how to control the scale of their hunting and never set a growth rate for each year. They would hunt often if there were many animals, less often if there were fewer, and stop altogether when there were none. It had gone on like that for thousands of years, which was why there were always animals to hunt (333; 474). It is apparent that increasing production was not the aim of people of the grassland, nor was hunting necessary labor for herding production activities, but it was important for exchange activities. The book notes that marmot oil and marmot pelts were herders’ important sideline sources of income that could be traded for articles of everyday use of all kinds at the purchasing station and could also be exchanged for money: “The income from a hundred marmots in one fall season could be five to six hundred yuan, more than a sheep herder’s income from work points for an entire year” (333). As work, the labor and costs for hunting are far less than for herding, but can bring in more money—given that, can labor that is put into productivity or creativity show greater surplus value? Smith emphasized the fundamental position of labor in the value sphere, believing that “labour was the first price”293 for all things. The degree of prosperity can also be measured by labor, wealth for people “is the quantity of

291 Ibid., 21. 292 Ibid., 25. 293 Ibid., 36.

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­labour which it can enable them to purchase or demand.”294 When purchasing proceeds in the market, trading proceeds after the value of all material goods is established. “But though labour be the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities, it is not that by which their value is commonly estimated. It is often difficult to ascertain the proportion between two different quantities of labour.”295 When products enter the market as commodities labor vanishes, replaced by money and capital, which become in one leap the dominant market factors of ‘fair’ value. To market manipulators and economists this is no secret. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith revealed the secret by which exchange evades labor and rapidly achieves prosperity, while Marx’s Capital made public the secret of what goes on behind the scenes of this exchange. Consequently, we see a paradox. Scholars, on the one hand, have placed labor in a lofty position, and have agreed that “labour is the exclusive foundation of property.”296 Yet, on the other hand, as Chen Zhen says, “I think that the way labor was exalted in our education was too extreme” (197). What looks like fair market economics is founded precisely on not-so-fair activities of financial exchange. Chen Zhen’s situation is far removed from such exchange, and so it is also far from all sorts of opportunities, whether open or concealed. Just as he is coming of age, he is stuck in a near primitive border region grassland. “During the day, Chen Zhen spent most of the time ruminating and meditating” (73). His thoughts take us in another direction: Could it be possible that the wolves were related to the way the grassland preserved its original features undeveloped and the way the people of the grassland found it so difficult to develop into a great people? It was possible, he thought. At the least, the attacks by wolves created losses that were incalculably beyond what could be counted, making primitive accumulation impossible for both herding and people themselves … ­leaving them permanently at a simple level of reproduction, sustaining their original state and primitiveness (74). Doubts about wolves are unusual in this book; rarely does the author link wolves to such negative evaluations as “sustaining their original state” and “undeveloped.” This suspicion of the people being undermined is as much as to say the savagery of grassland wolves kept the people of the grassland from ‘trade, commerce, agriculture, and industry’ to the point that they could not 294 Ibid., 37. 295 Ibid. 296 John Gray, A Lecture on Human Happiness, 30.

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achieve the road to prosperity.297 Chen Zhen cannot be blamed, given that he is working on the grassland and has a deep knowledge of its harshness, and that the Han Chinese to whom he belongs are themselves living with the same questions. It can be said that his thinking about this question is representative, for it condenses an important obsession that Chinese intellectuals have had for a century in the face of ‘poverty’: Whose fault is it that labor did not result in wealth? What is the reason for profit and even wealth without labor? The research of Joseph Needham was not far from Chen Zhen’s speculation. He pointed out that China was one of the nations with the most natural disasters in the world, insofar as to be known as the “land of famine.”298 Wang Jian’ge’s research has explored the grassland, where, besides the destructiveness of wolves, there is damage from snow and ice to one degree or another every year, compelling grassland people to ‘start all over again’ every spring.299 Fu Zhufu demonstrated that the rate of natural disasters was an important reason for generating central collective authority, and that over the long history of ­Chinese civilization, disaster relief was always a major responsibility of government authority.300 Yet he believed that natural calamities, while many, were not true disasters, and that the people’s livelihoods and wealth had the most 297 He Yangling 贺 扬 灵 believed that during the end of the Qing dynasty and the Republican era the chief reason for the poverty of nomads in general was the cruel exploitation and oppression of ranking Mongolian princes and lamas. Merchants’ oppression was also severe. See “Menggu ren de jiating jingji yu shenghuo 蒙 古 人 的 家 庭 经 济 与 生 活 [Household economy and life of Mongolians],” Menggu [Mongolia] Showa Year 14 (1939) No. 12 (December): 72; cited in Wang Jian’ge, Nong mu shengtai yu chuantong Menggu shehui, 18. 298 In a lecture at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, April 25, 1974, Joseph Needham was quoted as saying: “In China there is a crop failure every six years, and a famine every twelve years. In the past 2,200 years China has recorded more than 1,600 major floods, 1,300 major droughts, many times with flooding and drought occurring simultaneously in different locations.” Dagong bao (Hong Kong), May 29, 1974. 299 In the snow damage of 1925 in central Mongolia, for example, 30% to 50% of herds died. See Wang Jian’ge, Nong mu shengtai yu chuantong Mennggu shehui, 34. 300 In early 2008 the largest snowstorm south of the Yellow River ever recorded in history occurred, followed by the May earthquake in Sichuan. In both cases the central government directly mobilized the strength of the entire nation, the entire military and the entire citizenry, to rescue people and provide relief, as if to confirm this conclusion through heaven’s will.

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direct relation with the collapse of governments.301 At the beginning of the Han dynasty [206 bce], by governing through inactivity, in just a few decades of leaving the people undisturbed, society recovered its vitality.302 Large-scale land seizures that occurred in the early period of China did not become the basis for the accumulation of capital. A major reason was the inheritance system whereby sons divided the inheritance equally. “From the ancient period to the early modern era the land occupied by peasants who tilled the soil themselves was generally from seven or eight mu to at most twenty or thirty mu, and never more than one hundred mu at the very highest limit.”303 Ge Zhiyi regarded this thinking in terms of averages as “at first no more than concepts of justice and equality that ancient philosophers drew from laws or principles of nature, thereafter, however, becoming a guiding consciousness of policy that the state used to regulate social relationships of property.”304 From the perspective of The Wealth of Nations, “averaging poverty and wealth” led to the inheritance system of dividing estates equally and severely restricted the primitive accumulation of capital. Yet if the standpoint is shifted to a humanist one, its foresight becomes apparent: placing hearts above property nurtured a primitive, simple spirit of communism, the ideal realm in which everyone shares social property. The ideal of an average is actually one of the wisest and most perfect fundamental principles that the ancient Chinese sages worked out when planning the principles of the operations of society and culture, because its objective is the broadest and most fundamental question of guaranteeing the survival of the members of this society.305 The precocious Chinese nation set up for itself an ultimate goal of benevolence and put it into practice. When material desires were just appearing and beginning to conquer people’s hearts, the sages intervened on behalf of the future, making ‘average’ and ‘equilibrium’ the ideal realm uniting heaven and humanity. At this point the answer seems to be quite clear: the disparity of poverty and wealth is not a question of labor itself; it is most directly and most broadly linked to survival in the natural environment, the distribution system of society, and people’s intellectual concepts. As John Gray summed it up: “it is certain that there is no reason in nature, why 301 Fu Zhufu, Zhongguo gudai jingji shi gailun, 111–114. 302 Ibid., 119. Prior to the founding of the Han dynasty, society had endured decades of internecine warfare, the conquest and harsh central control by the short-lived Qin dynasty, and more war following the collapse of its authority. 303 Ibid., 88–91, 93. 304 Ge Zhiyi 葛 志 毅 , Tan shi zhai lun gao xubian 谭 史 斋 论 稿 续 编 [Continuation of ­treatise drafts of Tanshi Studio], (Harbin: Heilongjiang renmin chubanshe, 2004), 140. 305 Ibid., 146.

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any man should be exposed to poverty and want. The reason why so many are poor, must therefore be sought in the institutions of society …”306 Then what is the system that impoverishes workers and legally profits the idle? Examining this in terms of economics, Marx offered the theory of surplus value. Historians making observations outside economics have pointed out that predatory wars of invasion and the colonial system have been major causes: The massive flow of wealth into Europe from colonial accumulation in America and later in Asia and Africa was the one basic force that explains the fact that Europe became transformed rapidly into a capitalist society … Many processes internal to Europe were important causes of change, of development, in that continent, but the one basic process, which ignited and then continuously fueled the transformation, was the wealth from colonialism.307 A chapter titled “Colonialism and the Rise of Europe, 1492–1688” in James ­Morris Blaut’s The Colonizer’s Model of the World discusses the inherent relationship: “colonialism gave Europeans the power both to develop their own society and to prevent development from occurring elsewhere.”308 This allowed colonizers to be idle legitimately. What has been called the “European miracle” appeared only with “the immense wealth obtained by Europeans in America and later in Asia and Africa” during their predatory occupation.309 Economists would not easily endorse this conclusion, but ask (just as Chen Zhen asks): why did these countries (that is, what Chen Zhen calls the “Western wolves” and “civilized wolves”) take the initiative, go abroad to explore, and seize wealth from other peoples’ territories? To take the question one step further: what were the factors that allowed the people who ‘got rich first’ to obtain the secret of how to convert labor into capital and then into wealth? If there really was such a secret formula, what were its key ingredients? This has been the topic that has typified modernity, accompanying the process of modernization. Economists have sought the answers through various approaches, trying to put an explanation into a single package that would ultimately settle these important questions that involve the happiness and well being of humanity. 306 Lecture on Human Happiness, 49. 307 James Morris Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and E­ urocentric History (New York: Guilford Press, 1993), 152–153. 308 Ibid., 206. 309 Ibid.

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Adam Smith’s answer to the questions above was the distribution of labor: “The distribution of labor emerged and developed as a force that was ­totally impersonal, and because division of labor was an immense driving force for economic progress, economic progress also became depersonalized.”310 Karl Marx’s conclusion was completely different; he believed it was capital exploitation: But capital has one sole driving force, the drive to valorize itself, to create surplus-value, to make its constant part, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus labour. Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.311 Marx reduced people’s productive activities to social relations: “Capital presupposes wage labour; wage labour presupposes capital. They reciprocally condition the existence of each other; they reciprocally bring forth each other.”312 Out of this arose the theory of class struggle and the socialist ­movement— we, the people of the Maoist era, had the good fortune to pursue such theory and personally experience this movement—but, none of these, whether (class) struggle or (social) movement, led directly to prosperity. What history told us was that these were negative examples. According to Chen Zhen’s understanding: So many great civilizations of agrarian peoples throughout the world had perished because agriculture was basically peaceful labor. Hunting and herding, seafaring and commerce, though, at every moment were faced with the competitive struggles of cruel hunts and battles, whether on land or at sea. Today, the advanced and developed nations are the descendants of nomadic, seafaring, and commercial peoples (171). Chen attempts fundamentally to alter the Marxist view of labor by grafting Marx’s theory of “struggle” directly onto his own view of “fighting”: 310 “Diyi pian daodu 第 一 篇 导 读 [Introduction to the first part],” in Guofu lun 国 富 论 [The wealth of nations] by Adam Smith, trans. Yang Jingnian 杨 敬 年 (Xi’an: Shaanxi renmin chubanshe, 2001), 6. 311 Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 (Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin, 1976), 342. 312 Karl Marx, Wage-Labor and Capital (New York: New York Labor News Co., 1902), 40; cited in Jorge Larrain, Ideology and Cultural Identity, 15.

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Primitive humans holding stone axes and torches stood erect as a posture for fighting. The stone axe was primarily a weapon for fighting in struggles with wild beasts before it became a tool of production to obtain food. It was fighting that provided survival, and labor came only after survival. It was not only standing erect and labor that created humans; what truly created humans was also fighting countless times in causing humans to stand erect. (317) The will to fight and the spirit of struggle appear to be more worthy of praise than dutiful labor, and the significance of freedom in life far above the value of survival itself. However, the champion of liberalism, Ludwig von Mises, obviously did not support this interpretation but held to the direction in which Adam Smith pointed, believing that the ultimate purpose of freedom for humans is “advancement of their outward, material welfare and does not concern itself directly with their inner, spiritual and metaphysical needs. It does not promise men happiness and contentment, but only the most abundant possible satisfaction of all those desires that can be satisfied by the things of the outer world.”313 This is materialist, but does not seek to reduce it to ‘labor,’ which was the starting point of materialist history, nor dwell much on the all too grave historical issues of war and peace. On the one hand, like Adam Smith, he opposed colonial government and predatory warfare, believing: “No chapter of history is steeped further in blood than the history of colonialism.”314 On the other hand, he was convinced that the European civilization that liberalism introduced created wealth for humanity in the most limited way: “It seeks to give men only one thing, the peaceful, undisturbed development of material well-being for all, in order thereby to shield them from the external causes of pain and suffering as far as it lies within the power of social institutions to do so at all. To diminish suffering, to increase happiness: that is its aim.”315 This passage contains an important presupposition, what it terms “social institutions.” What are these? Freely speaking, they are (imperialist) nation states. It is interesting that, like Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, von Mises’s Liberalism is devoted within its text to the well being of the “people,” while the cover

313 Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism: The Classical Tradition (Indianapolis, in: Liberty Fund, 2005), xix. 314 Ibid., 125. 315 Ibid., 193.

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title is about “nations.”316 Given that they were clearly aware of the important role of the nation, why did they avoid discussing the function of its pre-existent nature. Why did the bourgeoisie, who were the earliest to create the ideology of ‘liberalism’ stubbornly define the first mission of government as rebuilding the nation-state and thereby introduce the first wave of nationalism?317 By raising these questions, I do not mean to support state intervention or praise nationalism; I am only curious why they would offer such partial accounts of the course of their own history. If they did not want to acknowledge publicly what they were already well aware of, then what made them openly choose a double standard in the face of a just academic standpoint? As the faithful guardian of liberalism, why could von Mises write openly of the issue of servitude contained within freedom and feel comfortable with its ­conclusion without asking why it existed in the first place? It allows us to see the advantage that “division of labor” brought academically: Western ­scholastics—whether von Mises or any other—were not bothered at all by the price of ‘freedom,’ and after the division of academic labor held to their position, fully enjoying freedom while refusing to yield an inch to the territories in their possession calling for freedom. Although von Mises, for example, wrote between the two world wars and personally witnessed some nation states— just the ones that he praised for “freedom and prosperity”—openly invade, occupy, plunder, and enslave other nation states, he still steadfastly believed that only “completely free, open” market economies could create “free and prosperous nations.” To him, just because “[o]nly under a system of complete free trade, capital and labor would be employed wherever conditions are most favorable for production,”318 theoretically a green light to all free trade (including by military force) was given, to strive to convert all lands (including others’) into the free market of one’s own management. At this point there is another ‘but’ worth noting: But the migration of capital and labor presupposes not only complete freedom of trade but also the complete absence of obstacles to their movement from one country to another. This was far from being the case at the time the classical free-trade doctrine was first developed. A whole 316 The Chinese title of Liberalism: The Classical Tradition is “Nations of freedom and prosperity” [Ziyou yu fanrong de guodu 自 由 与 繁 荣 的 国 度 ], trans. Han Guangming 韩 光 明 , et al. (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1994). 317 A detailed introduction to this topic follows in Chapter 5 Section 2 on “The Issue of ­National Character.” 318 Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism, 131.

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series of obstacles stood in the way of the free movement of both capital and labor.319 However—and this is my ‘however’—he did not answer: how could the doctrine of free trade that was “far from being the case” have been created at a time when it lacked the nations that were its premise? What role did this doctrine play (together with a complete ideology of liberalism) on the path that ­Western nations took toward prosperity? Undoubtedly, at that place and time, thought assumed the role of the forerunner. The awareness that precedes social enactment that typifies the modern era began with the ‘market economy’ under the guidance of instrumental reason. Free-trade is not premised on an already open market, but on liberalist doctrine and the (imperialist) national acts that accompany it. After the division of academic labor, von Mises and his like could frankly evade the political questions above. They did not need to answer when asked: What means did those Western countries that ‘lacked the premise’ use to sweep aside all obstacles within a century and become not only the wealthiest and the guiding hands of global economic integration, but also the manipulators of ideology and judges of what is or is not politically correct? The answer is already history, and abundantly clear: advanced weaponry and invasive warfare, together with a set of self-serving game rules dignified as ‘justice’ and created for colonial lands. Thus, it is no wonder to us that the British empire on which ‘the sun never sets’ produced so many prominent economists and why liberalist scholars appeared in such numbers in England. These doctrines were filled with the overtones of instrumental reason,320 like the character of the munitions manufacturer in George Bernard Shaw’s play Major Barbara, whose refinement conceals explosive intent to kill. In the history and doctrine above, the internal relationship between free markets and liberalist ideology is not only the premise for understanding global economic activity today, but also is the clear epistemological premise that is needed in trans-cultural scholarly communication. Given the narrow and biased scholarly orientation of neoclassical economics, the American scholar Douglass C. North sought a corrective, turning to 319 Ibid. 320 Adam Smith wrote: “As it is the power of exchanging that gives occasion to the division of labour, so the extent of this division must always be limited by the extent of that power, or, in other words, by the extent of the market. When the market is very small, no person can have any encouragement to dedicate himself to one employment …” The Wealth of Nations, 26.

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the real world (and not only Western societies). He offered a “new economic history,”321 excavating from the roots up the important role of ‘nations’ in the process of Western social prosperity. North proposed viewing political organization and ideology as fundamental components explaining structural change,322 and sought comprehensively to explore “the political and economic institutions, technology, demography, and ideology of a society.”323 Unlike the way that neoclassical economics deliberately evaded the function of nations, North believed, “the existence of a state is essential for economic growth; the state, however, is the source of man-made economic decline.”324 At this point, we can turn back to Wolf Totem to witness the important function of this single feature determining success or failure within the story. In the professionalization, specialization, social class stratification, and division of town and countryside North pointed out that, “the diverse ideologies which have persisted from ethnic (geographic) differences were augmented by ideological diversity that evolved from occupational specialization.”325 Ideological differences emerged primarily from the diverse geographical experiences of groups contending with their environment and evolved into different languages, religions, customs, and traditions; these in turn formed another basis for conflict in addition to the persistent tension over the distributions of wealth and income within states and between states.326 I very much admire North’s research. Beginning with his study,327 I no longer regarded ideology as purely the product of subjective will or a scheme that some interest group concocted behind the scenes, and it was not entirely a 321 See Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 322 See the “Xuyan 序 言 [Introduction to the Chinese translation],” Daogelasi C. Nuosi 道 格 拉 斯 C. 诺 斯 [Douglass C. North], Jingji shi shang de jiegou he biange 经 济 史 上 的 结 构 和 变 革 [Structure and change in economic history], trans. Li Yiping 厉 以 平 ­(Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 2005). 323 Douglass North, Structure and Change in Economic History, (New York: Norton, 1981), 3. 324 Ibid., 20. 325 Ibid., 209. 326 Ibid. 327 As some have argued, the “first great twentieth-century economist to do this [i.e. explain the relationships between the form of government and the fortunes of the economy] was Joseph Schumpeter.” See Mancur Lloyd Olson, Power and Prosperity: Outgrowing Communist and Capitalist Dictatorships (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), xxviii.

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­political tool that some party or state was proficient at using, nor was it simply the target of some moral criticism or dispute over ‘political correctness.’ Whether you like it or whether the consciousness that it promotes is correct, it is ‘being’ here, one of the means of survival of humans’ being in today’s world. A given ideology in some nation fixes history concerning its survival environment and the lives of the people, acting as an orientation for drawing up blueprints for ‘a better life’ for the people, bringing together the hearts and minds of the people, and clarifying ‘ideals.’ True, it is indeed a weapon at the service of rulers, but at the same time it is also a necessary platform for stabilizing social order in order to ensure that economic activity proceeds normally. Understood this way, the vision of “new economic history” from the United States suddenly is a close match for the historical experience of the Mongols,328 and brings the light of explication to economic questions in Wolf Totem. Because of this, we can come to terms with the grassland, and on the two different epistemological platforms of Smith’s “wealth of nations” and North’s “national theory,” pursue the longstanding question that has perplexed people: what were the elements that made the hard working and brave people of the grassland “labor yet fail to prosper”? Consider first division of labor. There is a clear division of labor in the productive activities of the people of the Olonbulag, primarily of two types: one was division of labor by gender,329 already discussed in a section above. The second is production activity on the grassland that is centered on herding as a means of survival, forming a reciprocal division of labor. The author assigns Beijing students living in the same yurt to different jobs, allowing us to understand from different perspectives the division of labor of grassland people and what they experience.

328 From the middle of the Qing dynasty the number of Mongolian monks rose daily because of the Qing government promotion of Lamaism, while the Mongol population declined. By 1799 lamas among the Eighteenth Banner of the Northwestern Mongols reached 2,003 men, or 24.5% of the male population. By 1918 the number of lamas among the Khalkha reached 105,557, making up 44.6% of the male population. This underscores the influence of ideology and the role of government in the economy. See Shantian Mao 山 田 茂 [Tayama Shigeru], Qingdai Menggu shehui zhidu 清 代 蒙 古 社 会 制 度 [Shindai ni okeru Mōko no shakai seido (The Mongol social system during the Qing dynasty)], trans. Pan ­Shixian 潘 世 宪 (Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1987), 147. 329 “While Mongol men stayed busy on the battlefield conquering foreign countries, women managed the empire. Among the herding tribes, women traditionally managed the affairs at home while men went off to herd, hunt, or fight …” Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, 160.

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Eager and capable, Zhang Jiyuan is a horse herder working with Batu and Lamjav tending close to five hundred horses. Because their appetites were so large, the horses were taken into the mountains so that there would be no competition with the cows or sheep [and risk] over grazing land … It was a primitive, dangerous, and exhausting life with heavy responsibilities, which is why their status among the herdsmen was so high. It was the proudest occupation among people who spent so much time on horseback (70; 111–12). Another student, Gao Jianzhong, is a cowherd who by himself tends more than one hundred forty head of cattle. No yurt could get by without cows. They pulled wagons and moved belongings, the people drank and cooked with their milk, burned their dung, skinned them for their hides, and ate their flesh. All domestic matters were tied to cows (72; 114). Chen Zhen and Yang Ke together tend a flock of over 1700 sheep. One of them grazes the flock, and the other takes the night watch. Tending grazing was paid ten work points, night watch eight points. Nearly all the sheep are the Olonbulag bush-tailed variety, well known in China, which “is on the menu when national leaders hold banquets for Arab Muslim dignitaries at the Great Hall of the People” (72; 114). Another type of sheep is the “improved sheep from Xinjiang” that produce “great quantities of excellent wool” fetching three or four times the price of the local sheep. The goats are valued for the high price of their wool and for their daring, after castration, to fight wolves. Usually several dozen goats take the responsibility of leading Mongolian flocks. Although the selections and numbers of different types of sheep and goats seem natural, they are all the result of human calculation. So Chen Zhen admires Mongol herdsmen as “experts at striking a balance, weighing the pros and cons of each animal, and accommodating them in the calibration so that the least harm and greatest benefits were achieved” (73; 115). Sheep were the foundation of livestock farming in the grassland. They supplied meat for food, hides for clothing, dung for cook fires, and two sets of work points. They ensured the continuation of a nomadic lifestyle. But tending sheep was boring, wearisome work that tied people down. From morning to night, out on the green or snow-blanketed wilds, a man had only a flock of sheep to keep him company (73; 116).

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The author wrote, “People who spent so much of their lives on horseback needed cows for the family. Cowherds, shepherds, horse herders, they all had their duties and were linked together, each indispensable to the others” (72; 114). The division of labor among the four Beijing students covers the range of different jobs on the grassland and also shows the amount of work. “Herding Mongolian grassland sheep is the most prevalent [work] … shepherds in general tend 150–200 sheep. If they tend them mounted, the scale can increase to 500 or even 1,000 head.”330 Given that the principal productive activity of grassland people was herding, the size of herds symbolized the amount of wealth.331 It did not stop with herds, for historically, “[w]ar for the nomadic people was a sort of production. For the warriors it meant success and riches.”332 Warfare in Wolf Totem is limited to hunting wolves, which preserves the primitive form of labor in the primitive natural environment. In terms of the division of labor that concerned Adam Smith, labor on the Olonbulag is still natural and primitive; from Douglass North’s perspective of social structure as a broader analytical platform, we discover that division of labor on the grassland is quite modern. There is one job placed above all laborers: national cadres (such as the likes of Bao Shungui), people appointed by the nation, representing the national will, and speaking and assuming responsibility for the nation. They are not simply managers of social groups, but also the most immediate directors of total economic activity. On account of their involvement, the primitive seeming grassland in one step leaps into the modern. Under the will of the nation, ‘natural economy’ in any form is made to fit onto the tracks of ‘planned economy.’ Hence, looking once again at economic activity on the grassland, however traditional it may seem in appearance, it is undergoing a series of gigantic changes peacefully and smoothly. In terms of exchange and distribution, the elder Bilgee is made to say, “In the past, the gazelles that wolves killed went to the herd owners, and the ­aristocracy and princes. Since the Liberation they’ve all gone to the herding 330 Mantie shezhangshi diaochake 满 铁 社 长 室 调 查 课 [Mantetsu shachōshitsu chōsaka; Research department of the office of the president of the South Manchurian railway], Manmō zensho 满 蒙 全 书 [Manmeng quanshu (Complete book of Manchuria and M ­ ongolia)] (Manmō bunka shakai, 1923), Vol. 3: 726–27; cited in Wang Jian’ge, Nong mu shengtai yu chuantong Menggu she hui, 20. 331 Grassland in Mongolian society was shared, and the sign of what distinguished social classes was not size of pastureland, but the size of herds. The man who owns larger herds has a corresponding social status. See Wang Jian’ge, Nong mu shengtai yu chuantong Menggu she hui, 11. 332 Sechen Jagchid, Essays in Mongolian Studies; cited in Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, 108.

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folk”333 (20). After the wolf pack has finished their hunt, the people make an effort to cooperate in collecting gazelles, because “[e]ach gazelle hooked and brought up meant six or seven bricks of Sichuan tea or a dozen or so cartons of Haihe cigarettes from Tianjin, or fifteen or sixteen bottles of Mongolian clear liquor” (35; 55). Bilgee thoughtfully tells Chen Zhen, “We’ll take a few extra gazelles back with us this time and trade them at the purchasing center for some felt. That way the four of you will be a bit warmer this winter” (13; 18). At the same time he praises the fighting spirit of grassland wolves, the author never forgets the economic benefits that the wolves bring to the people of the grassland: [By early winter] the wolves have new winter coats, supple, unmarked, bright, and thick. Pelts from this season command the highest prices. Early-winter wolf hunts were the primary source of income, outside of work points (66; 105). People’s enthusiasm for hunting wolves has always been high, and this year it is unusually so: Soon after, a formal notice arrived from headquarters reinstating the once annual tradition of stealing wolf cubs. The rewards were to be higher than in previous years … Word had it that the wolf cub pelts would bring in a better price than ever. Those pelts, soft and shiny, rare and expensive, were used for women’s leather jackets … they also provided hard currency for lower-ranking officials willing to do business out the back door (40; 65). Some important concepts appear in the passages above: first, who established “purchasing centers”? Second, who fixed prices at purchasing centers? Third, “supply and marketing cooperatives”334 not only purchased, but also sold 333 Prior to the reign of Genghis Khan officials accepted taxes in goods, such as fur, arrows, oil, etc. Mongol rulers encouraged trade and opened up trade routes. From the mid-­ thirteenth century “Mongols allowed each nation under its control to continue minting coins in the denominations and weight they had traditionally used, but they established a universal measure based on the sukhe, a silver ingot divided into five hundred parts …” See Jack Weatherford, 176. 334 Supply and marketing cooperatives were a product of the era of planned economy in ­China, controlling the purchase and sale of agricultural (also livestock and fishing) products in order to strictly control the direction and quantity of their flow. In July 1954, the “National Federation of Cooperatives of China” was officially renamed the “National ­Supply

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s­ upplies for pre-determined prices, far from Adam Smith’s theory of prices. The determination came from higher authorities, so functionaries could receive the earliest information through official channels and make some preparations in advance. This ‘going through the back door’ was the most natural outgrowth of this, as well as an indispensable lubricant in the activity of a rigidly planned economy. Again, what were “work points”?335 What did “sidelines” mean?336 These are some of the numerous incongruities with Adam Smith’s distribution of labor, exchange, market, pricing, and currency. But they could indeed perform, each according to its place and functioning normally along a pre-determined track, operating with greater stability than a free market economy, and more rationally. Even more interesting were two policies related to labor: one was that even the traditional activity of the annual abduction of wolf cubs was also subject to planning, requiring authorization from headquarters and ‘formal notice’ before having legality. The second is the inducement of ‘rewards,’ something quite close to the definition in The Wealth of Nations, used here perfectly. Evidently, the function of ‘higher authority’—whether capitalist or national—is equally effective for the worker. The means of punishment, however, are quite different. When Bao Shungui orders wolf cubs to be snatched, he “wants wolf dens across the entire grazing land completely cleaned out” (63). People of the grassland cannot bear to exterminate them, and so passively resist, which enrages the leader, who then threatens: “Every two families will be responsible for one wolf-cub and Marketing Cooperative of China,” with branch organizations extending throughout the countryside. The primary mission was to “promote communication between cities and countryside,” “support national industrialization,” and “guide the integration of small-scale farming and household handicrafts onto the track of national ­planning.” See Zhonghua renmin gongheguo guoshi da cidian 中 华 人 民 共 和 国 国 史 大 辞 典 [Grand dictionary of the national history of the People’s Republic of China] ­(Harbin: Heilongjiang renmin chuban she, 1992), 171. 335 At that time of collective ownership, money was not used to pay labor engaged in ­production activities. Rather, work points were calculated based on each person’s degree of natural labor (such as recording ten points per diem for male labor, eight for f­emale, and eight for students, whether male or female). At year’s end persons were paid in grain and other goods, as well as a small amount of currency, by dividing up the total amount of production. 336 Agricultural production activities in the era of the planned economy were divided into principal and sideline production. The principal production was cultivating crops or livestock according to quotas, some delivered as tax, and some goods distributed as the basic means of survival. People received little in the way of currency, which was received principally for home garden plots, raising fowl or pigs, or hunting wild animals.

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pelt, and if they can’t manage that, they can substitute an adult pelt. Otherwise I’ll deduct work points” (63; 100). Such punishment is simultaneously both economic and political, enough to make it astonishing for the stipulations of rewards and punishments for any contractual agreement. The pricing system is also opaque, having nothing in common with either new or old classical economic theory, but corresponding to Joan Robinson’s view that “Economic analysis can help us examine the consequences of these various types of price systems, but the reasons for them must be found in political history.”337 The natural economics of the novel are quite evidently not purely so, and beneath the appearance of the ‘natural’ the traces of the ‘state’ are everywhere: In the winter of that year, great quantities of gazelles had streamed across the border, creating excitement among leaders of the various Mongolian banners. Purchasing stations made space in their storerooms for the carcasses. Officials, hunters, and herdsmen were like fishermen who had been told the fish were schooling (13; 18). On the Olonbulag “a full-grown frozen gazelle, meat and hide, sold for twenty yuan, equivalent to a herder’s wages for two weeks” (13; 18). The wild animals found only in nature by the herders who hunt them, bring not only material goods and money from state exchange, but even more the ‘modern’ news and information that the grassland does not produce. As Lamjav boasts: For a few days of hunting he had earned nearly as much as a horse herder made in three months. Proudly he told Chen that he’d already taken in enough to supply himself with liquor and cigarettes for a year. After a few more days out on the grassland, he planned to buy a Red Lantern transistor radio, leaving the new one at home and taking the old one to the herders’ mobile yurt (14; 19). As the other state in the exchange, it used the grassland to make up for its material shortages. Even the place of origin and person credited with production are allowed to buy only limited amounts according to the ‘rationing cards’ of the national planning. [T]he gazelle hides produced in Inner Mongolia were for export only, a commodity to be exchanged with the Soviet Union and Eastern ­European 337 Joan Robinson and John Eatwell, An Introduction to Modern Economics (New York: ­McGraw Hill, 1974), 318.

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countries for steel, automobiles, and munitions. The choice meat cuts were canned and exported. The remaining meat and the bones were targeted for domestic consumption but only occasionally appeared in butcher shops in the Mongolian banner territories, where ration coupons were required (13; 18). At this point, you might ask, what are the factors cutting labor off from the road to prosperity? It is the planned economy under the guidance of the will of the state. More precisely, it is command economy under state power, something quite different from state intervention in market economies. Just the opposite, the market is merely one means to show national will and exercise state power. To say that there was no market on the Olonbulag would not be objective. Its market was sealed off, monopolized by the state. Exchange and communication were underway, but the flow of wealth was in one direction. Just as in the era when the wealth that colonialists plundered flowed Westward, ever Westward … so wealth in the novel flows toward national coffers and into the cities. The results are quite similar, as Blaut puts it “colonialism gave Europeans the power both to develop their own society and to prevent development from occurring elsewhere.”338 Patriotism gave the state a special power to make the entire nation willing to sacrifice for the sake of national identity and the desire for a powerful country, and to give priority to developing the cities and establishing the foundation for the nation, thereby maximally preventing the countryside (and the grassland, etc.) as well as all individuals from accessing the road to prosperity. There may not have been a single transaction in the colonial markets that was fair, and the same holds true for us here. Yet people here did not question the reasoning or the results, no matter when or how the state lowered the prices it would pay or what it extracted for free (such as labor). The questions that follow are: Who gave the state the right, legally, to create such unfairness in the face of labor? Why did those people from ‘elsewhere’ accept being ‘prevented’ as a group? As is commonly known, in economic activity, trade is premised on fairness, but few realize that the basis of fair trade is not what is ‘true,’ but what is agreed to by consensus. That is the tacit understanding of the principle of what is called ‘fair trade.’ In a free market economy unfairness is pre-established. It is the basis of capital accumulation and financial exchange, guided by traders for profit maximization, not by what we would call fairness and justice. Marx made an 338 James Morris Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and E­ urocentric History (New York: Guilford Press, 1993), 206.

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unparalleled revelation of the process of manipulation, comparing capital to the “vampire” that “lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”339 It begins precisely from the accumulation of capital: “the working individual alienates himself; relates to the conditions brought out of him by his labour as those not of his own but of an alien wealth and of his own poverty.”340 Smith and the scholars of new classicism were well aware of this, yet held to the principles of completely free trade as always, regardless of the price—including war—in order to clear roads to open up markets. “Competing explanations tend to have a heavy ideological cast. Marxists write economic history as a story of class struggle; free market ideologists write it as the development of efficient markets.”341 Marx believed that it was necessary, fundamentally, to reform the social system, that is, to change the foundation of the unjust exchange. Nietzsche echoed this view, pointing out rather caustically with his accustomed honesty: The feeling of guilt, of personal obligation, to pursue our train of inquiry again, originated, as we saw, in the oldest and most primitive relationships there are, in the relationship of buyer and seller, creditor and ­debtor: here person met person for the first time, and measured himself person against person. No form of civilization has been discovered which is so low that it did not display something of this relationship.342 Nietzsche viewed humans as “a being that values,”343 on account of which trade became civilized. In Smith’s view, however, it was division of labor that led to the cause of economic progress. Just by using division of labor one could explain why “oppressive inequality” existed even in civilized society, yet account “for the superior affluence and abundance commonly possessed even by [the] lowest and most despised members of Civilized society, compared with what the most respected and active savage can attain to.”344 Ludwig von Mises extended this argument: “Historically, liberalism was the first ­political ­movement 339 Karl Marx, Capital, 342. 340 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin ­Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), 459. 341 Douglass North, Structure and Change in Economic History, 52. 342 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morality and Other Writings, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 78. 343 Ibid., 15. 344 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations; cited in Joseph Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, 187.

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that aimed at promoting the welfare of all, not that of special groups. Liberalism is distinguished from socialism, which likewise professes to strive for the good of all, not by the goal at which it aims, but by the means that it chooses to attain that goal.”345 Smith viewed “self-interest” as the invisible hand that drives economic development and social progress, and in the name of the free market the new classical group made (imperialist) nations disappear.346 Since they did not mention them, they also did not need to ­address another major question: In the social structure of economic circulation, “Whether the state originated as a predatory group attacking and exploiting a peasant village (a predatory origin of the state) or developed out of communal needs for organization of the peasant village (a contractual origin of the state) … ”347 In raising this question, North revealed the supporting role of the “massive life of the nation state” behind the “invisible hand” in free economic activity, placing the question of the nation state in planning economy on the table, and thus approaching the economic activity displayed in Wolf Totem. Fortunately or unfortunately, it was the life experience of ‘people of the Maoist era.’ Hence, North’s question becomes one that we must face: “Why would the People submit to social regulations at a time when the social regulations prevented them from making a profit for themselves?” Marxism and neoclassical theory have not offered answers; North’s answer is this: Individuals may also obey customs, rules, and laws because of an equally deep-seated conviction that they are legitimate. Change and stability in history require a theory of ideology to account for these deviations from the individualistic national calculus of neoclassical theory.348 North proposed the “theory of systemic change” on the basis of a theory of the state, the core of which was no longer division of labor and exchange, but property rights and ideological orientation. As he saw it, a “theory of the state is essential because it is the state that specifies the property rights structure. Ultimately it is the state that is responsible for the efficiency of the property 345 Liberalism in the Classical Tradition, 7–8. 346 “Though Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and some other great economists in prior centuries included government and politics as well as firms and markets in their analyses, economists in the twentieth century have not, until rather recently, recovered this grand ambition.” Mancur Olson, Power and Prosperity, xxviii. 347 Douglass North, Structure and Change in Economic History, 64. 348 Ibid., 12.

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rights structure, which causes growth or stagnation or economic decline.”349 North offers criticism of different theories of the state, including the predatory theory: “The predatory or exploitation theory of the state is held by a remarkably varied collection of social scientists, including Marxists (at least in their analysis of the capitalist state) and some neoclassical economists.”350 They have overemphasized the opposition of the state to free markets and even the prosperity of the people: “The predatory state would specify a set of property rights that maximized the revenue of the group in power, regardless of its impact on the wealth of the society as a whole.”351 His criticism cuts two ways: on the one hand indicating socialist countries, so-called authoritarian systems, and on the other hand related economic theory and economists. This triggers two mutually related suppositional questions. Is North’s theory universal and valid anywhere and everywhere, or is it aimed only toward the outside like “positive freedom,” purely at the third world and “predatory” socialist nations? If this theory is indeed universal (as the conferring of the Nobel Prize seems to demonstrate), then how does it explain the leading role of Western ‘nations’ in ‘free’ trade today? We are indebted to North’s painstaking study of history in this regard.352 It is only regrettable that the gaze of his self-criticism was focused too much on history and lacks the same kind of patient and forthright analysis of the present. As he wrote, the “First Economic Revolution produced the state, the political constraints necessary to establish order, and the expansion of specialization and division of labor beyond the primitive requirements of tribal hunting and gathering units.”353 Taken together, it seems bland enough. Actually, the relationship of the global open market and Western nations is strikingly similar in terms of the unfair accumulations of wealth among predatory states. However, the former were more conscious, more veiled, and ideologized earlier, hence historically avoided the attacks of ‘political (in)correctness.’ Here [in China] we were always calling on people to be selfless in the name of ‘liberating all humanity,’ and so have had too many selfless contributions and too much 349 Ibid., 17. 350 Ibid., 22. 351 Ibid. 352 Douglass North and Robert Paul Thomas in The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History detailed the basis for the massive accumulation of wealth in the West over a 200year period. They pointed out that 1,000 years ago, China was the most prosperous state in the world, while 2,000 years ago Rome was the center of power and wealth in Europe. What, then, were the causes influencing the rise and fall of states? Today the living standards for all levels of most nations of the West have risen greatly—how did this begin, why did it begin, and other basic questions. 353 Ibid., 208.

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­ ncompensated labor. There [in the West] ‘individualism’ was crowned in the u glow of the enlightenment of ‘natural rights,’ and so could ‘legitimately’ invade other lands or ‘freely’ criticize others’ morality. Unlike the newly emerged nation states of today, Western states plundered foreign realms, not their homelands, the others of ‘other places,’ rather than their own citizens. Their “wealth of nations” (Adam Smith’s words) indeed embodied “the prosperity spread among all citizens,” their “well-being” (von Mises’s word) established on the foundation of other places completely looted, and not only the result of trustworthy, legal, and proper productive labor and equal exchange. I once believed in the myth of ‘wealth for the people’ followed by ‘power for the nation,’ with the West as the model. But the true appearance of history is the other way around. The reason that the first wave of nationalism that drove the founding of the modern nations occurred earliest in Europe was because Western states not only offered (military) technological support for Western people to freely open up land using advanced weaponry, but also offered systemic guarantees (of property rights) for the wealth that they plundered around the world and raked into their own homes. Unfortunately, these two advantages were ‘historical’; nations that arose later had already forever lost the historic opportunity, while each and every one of them had historically been plundered. At the same time that I could see through the myths above, I also easily solved what had puzzled me about Adam Smith.354 Clearly what Smith discussed in The Wealth of Nations was free economy based on private ownership in opposition to state intervention. So why is his book titled The Wealth of ­Nations and not “The Wealth of People”? Here, his ‘nation’ arose in response to the needs of the market, and should help the people become the controlling hand that opens up the market, guaranteeing that wealth easily flows into and accumulates in their own country. Wealth stays within the family. That invisible support that has truly promoted practical results has not only been ­people’s sense of self-interest, but even more the nation state that has been filled to capacity with material desires. At this point we can look again at what Chen Zhen, Zhang Jiyuan and others say in Chapter 20: If you can work but you can’t fight, what are you? You’re like a gelding, you work for people, you take abuse from them, and you give them rides (196; 305–306).

354 Adam Smith is known for two important works. One is The Wealth of Nations, the core value of which is self-interest; the other is The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which promoted altruism. The inconsistency of these two standpoints is famous in economic history as the paradox of Adam Smith.

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People who do not work themselves and even exploit other people’s labor will also sing songs praising labor (197). The Chinese people, with the world’s largest population, the most industrious, and with the longest uninterrupted history of labor could not create a civilization as advanced as the one that Western peoples created with a much shorter history of labor (197). Half is sardonic, half proverbial. North pointed out: “Major developments in military technology led to growth in the size of states (and consequent growth of territorial specialization and exchange.)”355 This is a euphemism, as though deliberately inverting cause and effect. A more precise wording should read: expansion in the area of market exchange as well as unlimited longing for wealth in resources led to major developments in military technology; predatory wars fulfilled prosperous and powerful imperialist nations. The United Kingdom and the United States of America were both among such results. The difference was that the former was the model of the old-fashioned imperialism employing external invasion as its basic means, while with the intrusions, slaughter, and colonialstyle occupation of native peoples of the latter, migrants became the model for postcolonialism. In contrast, the establishment of contemporary, newly emerged nation states have not fared so illustriously in the free market. The old-fashioned capitalist state upholding standards of division of labor and fair exchange, usually only concerned itself with warfare, and did not intervene directly in the market. It indirectly benefitted (through taxes) from the high profits of capitalists, who employed methods of trade in constantly expanding territories (markets). The nation states that appeared later truly lacked the consciousness of division of labor under a gentlemen’s agreement. The hand of the state was no longer invisible, but reached into the market without hesitation to exert direct control of everything connected with profit.356 In places where traditional natural economy was combined with state-directed economy (such as the Olonbulag), this control was quite abrupt, startling, and theoretically untenable, but in practice worked flawlessly: The order was given that no one was to hunt wolves north of the grazing land without headquarters permission, especially with rifles, which 355 Douglass North, Structure and Change in Economic History, 208. 356 David Sneath, Changing Inner Mongolia: Pastoral Mongolian Society and the Chinese State (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2000) analyzes in detail the changes in Mongolian society and the relationship with the authority of the Chinese Communist Party.

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would frighten them off. Everyone was told to be ready to set out on a wolf extermination campaign at a moment’s notice. People began choosing their horses, feeding their dogs, repairing lasso poles, sharpening knives, cleaning rifles, and readying ammunition. Everything progressed with a quiet rhythm, as if they were preparing to tend to birthing stock around the Qingming Festival, or to shear sheep in midsummer, or to bale straw at midautumn, or to slaughter animals in early winter (67–68; 107). The passage above is a natural segment in the original text, the upper portion referring to ‘command economy’ and the lower portion to ‘customary economy.’ The customary economy is quite primitive, antedating agrarian civilization, and preserving the most intimate relationship with nature, as shown in productive activities and in many aspects of daily life as well. For example, marmots are endowed with high economic value: marmot oil “was a grassland specialty found in the homes of all herders” (333; 473). Every autumn herders went into the hills to hunt marmots, “keeping the meat for themselves and sending the skins and oil to the purchasing station …” (333; 474). A herder’s income from killing a large marmot, excluding meat, could be five or six yuan. The income for the autumn season of five or six hundred for some one hundred marmots was more than the annual work point income for a sheepherder. So while herders partly tended animals and partly hunted and their chief occupation was herding, for many, their principal income was from hunting. (333) The information for economists’ conceptions of customary economy are usually borrowed from the descriptions of “historians and (especially) anthropologists,”357 with almost all coming from the observations of ‘outsiders.’ Wolf Totem places us in the production activities reliant on nature, revealing large amounts of information about customary economy, yet it fits that in its entirety within a typical model of command economy. Command ­economies are products of contemporary political systems, and Wolf Totem simultaneously shows both economic formations, so that one cannot help but be curious: how are these ancient and modern systems combined? The British economist John Hicks deconstructed the customary and ­command economic organizations in detail, believing that both belong to “non-market economic models,” their differences being in what era they 357 John Richard Hicks, A Theory of Economic History (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), 13.

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b­ elong. “The economies of a Neolithic or early medieval village, as well as of the tribal communities which have survived until lately in many parts of the world, was not organized by its Ruler (if such existed); it was based upon a corpus of tradition… . It is important to emphasize that the ‘head’ (King or Chief or High Priest or Council of Elders) would himself be a part of the traditional structure. He would also have prescribed functions, together with appropriate rights that would go with them.”358 There is an example of this in Wolf Totem. Traditions have continued to exist on the grassland down to the arrival of the students from Beijing. After the encirclement hunt is over, a “layer of heat had settled over the hunting ground; steam rose from the wolf carcasses, the horses’ bodies, the dogs’ mouths, and the people’s foreheads” (122; 194) as people … separated into family units and skinned the dead animals. Tradition was followed in dividing up the spoils of battle. There were no arguments … A few words might pass between two men who had both gotten their nooses around a single animal, but Bilgee settled the matter with a single comment: Sell the pelt, buy a crock of liquor, and split it (122; 194). A review of them shows that almost all productive activities on the grassland follow traditions. These traditions of “customary organization, established (no doubt) in the first place by slow degrees, can persist for long periods almost undisturbed.”359 Chen Zhen sighs: “Time in the Olonbulag was a petrified clock from which not so much as a second was leaked. What was it that immobilized the grassland and forever preserved its appearance since ancient times?” (73). He witnesses that for himself in the ancient customary economic order: “Consider … the case of a people who are not much disturbed in their ancient ways by external pressures. Their economy can function … overriding decisions ‘from the centre’ will scarcely ever have to be made. Once such a system has attained such an equilibrium, it can continue for long ages without the need for reorganization—without the needs for new decisions of an organizational character.”360 Nomads have little awareness of any ‘center’; since ancient times their realm has been the green grassland that nature has provided. In 1609, when Russian authorities in Tara called on Oirat Mongols who had crossed into their area to pay taxes in kind, they met with resistance. These grassland people stated their conviction: “We are nomadic, not settled. We roam where we want to.” Only they had the daring to tell the state, “We have never paid taxes 358 Ibid., 13–14. 359 Ibid., 14. 360 Ibid., 13.

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to anyone, and we do not intend to in future.”361 However, while the people of the Olonbulag may still be nomads as they were in the past, they have for some time been under massive ‘external pressures,’ as Uljii states: “The quotas we’ve been given over the past few years have got me to where I can hardly breathe” (156; 245). That ‘higher authority’ never rests but is always making all sorts of decisions: from snatching wolf cubs to encirclement hunts, from tending herds to buying commodities from the wild, ubiquitous and thorough. Such an arrangement not only challenges the classic economic thesis of the ‘division of labor,’ but also ignores the neoclassical theory of ‘boundaries.’ The problem that it poses for us is that when nomads encounter the modern state and even enter into the state system, what happens on the grassland? When “customary economy” combines with “command economy” do the people prosper or are they even more impoverished? The answers that Wolf Totem gives are two completely opposite results. Turning first to poverty, all things are planned and everything is controlled. Together with people, clothing, food, and housing are all in the grip of the massive hand of the state. This includes the students from Beijing, who may have no worries for food and clothing, but also have no opportunities to move towards prosperity: The four people in Chen’s yurt were allocated six sheep each for the ­winter, twenty-four in all. They also were given one cow. Their grain ­allotment remained the same, thirty jin each a month, while the herdsmen, though given the same amount of meat, received only nineteen jin of grain (345; 492). In the end, thirty years later, when Chen Zhen and Yang Ke return to the grassland they witness for themselves the momentous changes in the lives of the grassland people, giving us a look at the dawn of a life of greater comfort for the people of China. Now Batu has become the owner of a pasture, raising 3,800 sheep. Yang Ke sighs: If they bring in an average of a hundred and fifty yuan or more, you’re talking about nearly seven hundred thousand yuan for the sheep alone. 361 I. IA Zlatkin, Istoriia Dzhungarskogo khanstv, 1635–1758 [A history of the Dzungar Khanate] (Moscow: Nauka, 1964), 127; cited in Ma Ruxing 马 汝 珩 and Ma Dazheng 马 大 正 , Piaoluo yiyu de minzu—17 zhi 18 shiji de tuerhute Menggu 飘 落 异 域 的 民 族 －－17至 18 世 纪 的 土 尔 扈 特 蒙 古 [Drifting through strange lands: Torghut Mongols of the 17th and 18th centuries] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1991), 41.

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Add in the cows, the houses, the cars, and the motorcycles, and you’re a millionaire (361; 516–17). The “pasture employees and retired soldiers from the corps who stayed behind were all given land and livestock after the grassland system was changed. They became Han-style herders, adding an additional 30 percent of Han ­settlement pastureland to the Olonbulag”362 (358; 511–12). With the grassland partitioned and the sheep divided, some local Mongolian drunks “trade all the sheep they were allocated by the government for liquor. Then when their wives run away and their children go astray, they live off the rent they collect from leasing the pasture, about ten or twenty thousand yuan a year” (361; 517). It is at this point that we finally touch upon the issues of Adam Smith’s “rent” and Douglass North’s “property rights,” and see the massive might of policy and its cold indifference, all decided by “higher authority.” Higher authority has intervened without explanation in productive labor and allocated benefits, creating poverty but also prosperity, silently answering that gripping, old question: why have the people of the Olonbulag and the people living in authoritarian states accepted ‘laboring without prosperity.’ The answer is already written down as history. The state, pledged in the name of the ‘nation’ to provide ‘happiness’ for all its citizens, was established on the basis of a high degree of centralized authority intervening as a whole in the economy. Its superiority was not in the degree of prosperity but in its speed. The reason that it could concentrate the will and the power of people was not in truly ‘surpassing England and catching up with America,’ but in placing a historic opportunity that the nation had lost back into the hands of the nation so that the dream of wealth and power that seemed impossible to fulfill had become entirely possible. The principal representative—I am glad to see she was a woman—of the New Cambridge group among Western economists, Joan Robinson, advocated state intervention to achieve income equalization, believing, the “most interesting and important questions raised by the existence of socialist economies in the world today are concerned with politics and morality.”363 This scholar, dubbed among colleagues in the field as ‘Keynesian left wing’ of the 1970s, provided a very ‘left’ explanation for the economic issues in Wolf Totem: “The Chinese early discovered the secret of controlling production at the wholesale 362 For analysis of Han Chinese agricultural penetration and its ecological consequences in the Hulunbuir region, see Burton Pasternak and Janet W. Salaff, Cowboys and Cultivators: The Chinese of Inner Mongolia (Boulder, co: Westview Press, 1993). 363 Joan Robinson, An Introduction to Modern Economics (New York: McGraw Hill, 1974), 313.

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stage.”364 Under state control a monopoly of purchasing and marketing was established, such that the “whole supply of consumption goods is organized on this system.”365 However, this “system is not controlled by profitability or by any one-dimensional criterion of success, but by self-respect, or as the Chinese put it, by the high level of political consciousness of the workers.”366 Was it really this way? If it really was, what was the consciousness? Go ask the people who experienced it. Whoever experienced it will give the same answer: accepting poverty was on behalf of wealth and power for the nation. This is completely at odds with the orientation of The Wealth of Nations, yet it is the truth, not a falsehood. According to Adam Smith’s reasoning, the nation is strong only after the people have wealth, and on the Olonbulag this is inverted: only after the nation is strong will the people possibly have a prosperous life. A prominent feature distinguishing this state (Chen Zhen’s China) from that state (Adam Smith’s England) is that it made known the ‘state’ identity of (this) nation, pledging to give all citizens a future of prosperity and strength, without humiliation, without enslavement, unlike Smith and von Mises, who deliberately conceal the spatter of blood left by the ‘empire’ opening up markets, and scrubbing clean the guilt of the individual that benefitted from empire. To cite North’s view of The Wealth of Nations, it was an ideology, and its core—like the creation of the first wave of early modern states—was indeed nationalism! The role of nationalism as an element of economy has been no less than the division of labor. Whereas self-interest has been seen as the concealed hand driving free trade, nationalism can be viewed as the primary impetus for all state economic activity. For some years now people have become accustomed to focus on trends in material capital inventory, while few have seriously considered the economic activity of ideology. The British economist Arthur Lewis reminded us that, the “consistency of institutions with each other is a problem of special interest in the analysis of social change.”367 He pointed out that reasons that are at odds with or consistent with economic growth are numerous, and most are social and cultural rather than purely economic in nature: ­“Economic growth depends on attitudes to work, to wealth, to thrift, to having children, to invention, to strangers, to adventure, and so on, and all these attitudes flow from deep springs in the human mind.”368 Although Lewis cited 364 Ibid., 320. 365 Ibid. 366 Ibid., 321. 367 William Arthur Lewis, The Theory of Economic Growth (Homewood, il: Richard D. Irwin, 1955), 14. 368 Ibid.

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numerous aspects constraining economic activity—such as will, systems, knowledge, capital, population, government—he never directly answered the question above, and it was not answered until Douglass North wrote: “Secular economic change has occurred not only because of the changing relative prices stressed in neoclassical models but also because of evolving ideological perspectives …”369 Hence, the background to the story of Wolf Totem appears like a living fossil of economic history, in the short span of thirty years between the 1960s and the 1990s, completing the transformation from customary economy to command economy and then again to market economy. The people and events in the book correspond to this period as a collective display of three distinctly different forms of economy over the course of human development. It is worth reflection that these were achieved entirely through the manipulations of the (nation) state and ideology, a condensation of the basic living conditions of the Chinese people over the past fifty years. Here the inquiry can return to the question that Arthur Lewis put forward: In an environment of such extreme barrenness, absent freedom, and in destitute living conditions, what do the people of the grassland believe in, and “why do people maintain their faith”? Needless to say, it is the nation/state! In that case, how were the nation/state and even the ideology related to it here produced? This question most directly concerns and surrounds the distance of ‘labor’ from ‘wealth and power.’ Since early modern times there have been two large-scale national movements in the world that have been two massive peaks in the waves of nationalism.370 The first accompanied the export of capital and expansion of markets, represented the capitalist class together with the entire West as the beneficiaries of capital, and in the momentum of wars of invasion produced powerful empires. The second was the product of those who were invaded, signifying the will to survive of national salvation, forming national elites under the banner of patriotism, and resulting in socialist states (such as China) or in ethno-nationalism (the third world). The difference is that the nation/ state in the former was concealed behind the banner of equality for all, such as in pursuing the well-being ‘all humankind,’ while the latter hoisted the flag of the nation state to indicate openly that its purpose was liberating, enriching, and strengthening (that) nation. The helping hand for the former was the free market based on ‘self-interest,’ while side by side with the selfishness of The

369 Douglass North, Structure and Change in Economic History, 58. 370 On the complexity and varieties of nationalism, see Will Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

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Wealth of Nations there was altruism of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The latter made ideology the instrument to lead people, produced a great quantity of frothy spiritual sustenance based on poverty, and headed toward worshipping one individual (as in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution) or national self-strengthening (as in Reform and Openness), always tied to the tastes of one party or one person. Whether the former or the latter, now they are all members of The World Trade Organization or the United Nations, speak in the name of the state—as if it were a big household—participate in world economics through fixed rules of the game (whether fair or not), speak, decide, form systems, and represent problems of vital interest that sharpen contests among different nations in the globally integrated market. Under these new circumstances, the American scholar Jack Weatherford re-evaluated the historical role of Genghis Khan: “The commercial influence of the Mongols spread much farther than their army …”371 To be sure, at that time the Mongols opened up trade routes not because they truly placed such importance on commerce and communications, but primarily on account of the deeply rooted system of property sharing within the tribes at the time of ­Genghis Khan: “the constant movement of shares gradually transformed the Mongol war routes into commercial arteries.”372 After the empire of Genghis Khan disappeared, people only remembered it for the political deed of conquering the world and overlooked its economic contribution of opening trade routes. When Western capitalism triumphed, people saw its “freedom and prosperity” (von Mises’s words) while completely forgetting its wars of invasion for profit. Were they not entangled in national profits, the deeds above could be seen as essential elements of the development of human society. This attitude has been the mainstream in the field of economics, dominant for a century, while in the name of ‘freedom’ keeping weapons aimed at newly emerging nation states (such as socialist China to which the Olonbulag belongs). Whatever involved these nations, Western academic circles showed a surprising unity: either they ignored them and left them to their own devices, or they just converted economic discourse into moral judgments, allowing blame for ‘political incorrectness’ to block the path to seeking the truth in objective analysis. It was Douglass North who worked against this one-sided attitude, strove to strip ideology away from the category of morality, and sought in terms of the understanding of economic activity to bring it back to the massive performance that objectively existed:

371 Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, 220. 372 Ibid., 222.

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Ideology is not the same as morality since it both encompasses a comprehensive way of perceiving the world and acts to economize on the costs information; ideology does, nevertheless, incorporate a judgment about the justice or fairness of institutions and specifically of exchange relationships.373 Many people believed that it is nations, political parties, systems and even ideologies themselves (such as Marxism) that make ideologies, scarcely realizing that ideology is actually a comprehensive historical product, a whole spiritual mode of being that no individual or group can master alone. There are no people today (whether in the East, the West, or any state) who do not live ‘being’ in ideology, and economic activity naturally cannot be an exception to this. Speaking plainly, what is called ideology is something quite close to what is termed culture. What is different is that ideology is trans-regional, transnational, and (for the individual) elective. Culture has a political character that is geographic, rather more dependent on natural environment; the consciousness implied in ideology emphasizes the human element, the product of ­humanizing nature. Different ideologies each have their own course of development, forming varied discursive systems. The second wave of nationalism, for example, arose on the foundations of the massive triumphs of the first wave. The modern democracies that were the first to mature were a concrete result of what nationalism initiated, and today the newly emerged nation states have taken them as their models to learn from, and are the most important (sometimes the only) social resources for the latter to rebuild their homelands on poor ancestral soil. Marx once wrote: “Hegel says somewhere that the great historic facts of personages recur twice. He forgot to add: ‘Once as tragedy, and again as farce.’”374 We may borrow Marx’s words to interpret the strangeness of what has taken place: The first wave of nationalism was expansive, globalizing imperialism/colonialism, like an uninterrupted comedy. So, how will the momentous second wave ultimately play out? The description in Wolf Totem might perhaps give us an idea. After 30 years Chen Zhen and Yang Ke return to the grassland, where: … they could look down on the seemingly unending border, a sight that made them stare wide-eyed. The twenty-li-wide military zone and

373 Douglass North, Structure and Change in Economic History, 205. 374 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International ­Publishers, 1994), 1.

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­ o-man’s-land had been breached by growing human and livestock n ­populations and had become a lively pasture … There were redbrick houses with tiled roofs, each the center of an individual’s contract to operate on the grassland … Dozens of flocks of sheep and herds of cows were grazing … Nomadic herding had clearly been replaced by settlement grazing …” (359; 513; orig. trans.). This is a typical instance of the internal colony, where the theory of the ‘predatory state’ originated: making demands on its own land and people, endlessly expanding internal demands, on the one hand; on the other hand, pushing into the virgin land of nature until there was nothing left that was virgin. This has been the sorrow and the lack of any alternative among the more recently developed state: if not into its own interior, where could it go to open up space for survival? The founding of nation states was even more expansive, so that without exception they all drew on nationalistic ideology and assumed the basic mission of opening up markets and preserving property rights (whether private or state-owned). In its early years, the wealth of the West was premised on plundering colonies and enslaving indigenous peoples, while the development of the newly emergent nation states has most often been at the price of sacrificing their own environment and the long-term benefits of the people. No matter how Dongshi winced, she could never become the beautiful Xishi.375 A reasoned depiction should read this way: In our days, everything seems pregnant with its contrary: Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it; The newfangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of want; The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character … All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force.376 375 “The beautiful Hsi-shih [Xishi], troubled with heartburn, frowned at her neighbors. An ugly woman of the neighborhood [Dongshi], seeing that Hsi-shih was beautiful, went home and likewise pounded her breast and frowned at her neighbors. But at the sight of her the rich men of the neighborhood shut tight their gates … The woman understood that someone frowning could be beautiful, but she did not understand where the beauty of the frown came from.” Zhuangzi [The Complete Works of Chuang-tzu], trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 115. 376 Karl Marx, “Speech at the Anniversary of The People’s Paper,” (1856), https://www .marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1856/04/14.htm (accessed January 13, 2015).

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This is not strange. We have never believed that sowing the seeds of pure selfbenefit or utter lack of self-benefit could result in healthy gain. Still less have we believed that the beautiful flowers of ‘liberating all humanity’ or ‘saving the world’ could really bloom on barren soil. Mature living should be done with planning, responsible government with programs, and if humankind wants to continue to survive in this world, it must do so with self-restraint and coordinated development. How can ‘markets’ be an exception? If the invisible hand behind free economy were entirely that of self-interest, its purpose would be unrestricted growth of wealth377 and limitless expansion of material desire,378 and who then could guarantee that it would produce the moral sentiments that Smith advocated? “Like everything else, economic growth has its costs.”379 Arthur Lewis testified to the acquisitiveness of affluent Western societies, and in analyzing the costs of growth put forward the question: “Is economic growth desirable?”380 Two hundred years ago saying this would be like self-criticism; at present it seems like a curse laid upon the heads of the more recent nations, leaving no easy choice whether to pursue growth or not. Given this, Mancur Olson set out the idea of market-augmenting government to assist newly emerged nation states balance the contradiction of the “free” and the “dictatorial.”381 Joan Robinson, on the other hand, proposed that third-world ethnic elites work out a different solution: “A different approach to economic analysis may enable the intelligentsia of the Third World to see their problems in a clearer light but economics alone cannot tell them where to find the answers.382 377 For Adam Smith (classical economics), the measure for assessing the level of a country’s affluence was the average material productive output of each person. The criterion of economic efficiency that he obtained from this (“Smith’s criterion of efficiency” in welfare economics) was to maximize per capita material production capacity. This criterion seeks economic development to take increasing the quantity of per capita material products as its goal. 378 Neoclassical economics pursues the standard of “Pareto efficiency,” in which the measure of welfare is individuals’ degree of satisfaction, and consequently tries to achieve as much as possible the greatest degree of welfare that objective conditions permit, i.e. maximize the degree of individual satisfaction. 379 W. Arthur Lewis, The Theory of Economic Growth, 420. 380 Ibid. 381 See Mancur Olson, Power and Prosperity (2000), Chapter 10, “The Kind of Markets Needed for Prosperity.” 382 See Joan Robinson and John Eatwell, An Introduction to Modern Economics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), 336.

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As third world intellectuals ourselves, what should we do? In a quandary we always turn to Marx—as people of the Maoist era, we are all too familiar with that venerable voice—who took an adage from Dante to encourage himself in his youth: “Follow your own path, and let others talk.” Today China has opened up another path, and in its rise it is no longer so distant from wealth and power—yet, who can tell us what its own ‘Smith’s paradox’ is? As we witness it advance with great strides toward ‘national wealth’ at a pace unprecedented in history, who can tell us when it will also be able to consecrate “moral sentiments” once again on the altar of our heritage for all to worship? 4.9

In Terms of Political Science: What Weapon Do You Use to Conquer the Grassland? Every work of art is born of a project both aesthetic and ideological. … it therefore maintains far closer relations with ideology than any other object … louis althusser383

The fate of the grassland past and present has depended upon its masters. Who are its masters? After the Beijing students have come to the grassland and shaken off the restraints of the concept of civilization, they encounter the might of the “heroes of the grassland” (141) in the state of existence in primal nature, believing “wolves had ruled the grassland much earlier than humans” (141; 223). Bilgee has obviously influenced this belief: Do you know why tigers and such can’t survive out here? And why wolves dominate the grassland? … A wolf takes care of the pack, and the pack takes care of each wolf. They stick together, which is what makes them such formidable foes … there used to be tigers out here, but they were all driven off by wolves (157; 246). On the grassland of primitive nature, wolves were overlords. The author uses the word “ruled” to produce an unexpected, close connection between grassland wolves and politics, human culture, and human history. The rulers of the

383 Louis Althusser, “Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 241.

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grassland who succeeded the wolves were the Mongol horsemen.384 Chen Zhen explains: “the blood of wolves flowed in the veins of these powerful peoples” (138; 218). The Mongol cavalry controlling the grassland for so long relied on strictly respecting the ‘rules of the grassland’ as well as ‘Tengger,’ the name never far from the lips of the venerable Bilgee. The former followed a primitive, plain natural science; the latter was faith, ideology. “For the steppe tribes, political, worldly power was inseparable from supernatural power since both sprang from the same source, the Eternal Blue Sky.”385 Such spiritual ideology emerged almost at the same time as human society,386 merging the ideal realm of the unity of heaven and humanity with the logic of the grassland, the rule of moderation and the goal of equilibrium living on continuously until the 1960s: At the time we arrived in the grassland as students it still had preserved its primitive state as lush pasture. The herdsmen on the grassland had an awareness of preserving the environment and methods for maintaining a balance that were natural and primitive but consistent with scientific rules. For example, they were keenly aware of the irreplaceable role of wolves in protecting the grassland, for which they worshipped wolves and never exterminated them.387 A year later the grassland has changed masters, and so, too, its appearance, utterly. What has happened there? We cannot avoid several questions filled with contradictions. How is it that the nomadic spirit the author praises so highly and the wolf totem in which he believes are so vulnerable in the story? Why did the grassland cavalry that, in the eyes of the author, was so powerful and valiant disappear quietly into the history of an agrarian civilization?388 And why 384 Constantin Mouradgea d’ Ohsson, Duosang Menggu shi [History of the Mongols], trans. Feng Chengjun (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 2003), 29. 385 Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, 33. 386 Each society has its own ideology that appears in everyday life as a basis for forming ‘mass thinking’ or consensus. Ideology in primitive societies appeared as pantheism (including totem worship), but in contemporary times generally shows features of intellectual social science or political science, such as the ‘Marxist thesis,’ ‘scientific socialism,’ ‘Mao Zedong Thought,’ ‘Deng Xiaoping Theory,’ and ‘scientific development’ that have appeared one after the other at turning points of contemporary Chinese history. 387 Jiang Rong in a written interview by Ying Ni, reporter for Zhongguo xinwen zhoukan [China news weekly], n. p. n. d. 388 In 1937 Genghis Khan’s Spirit Banner (sulde) disappeared from a Mongolian temple. In 1920 his last reigning descendant, Sayid Alim Khan, fled from Soviet Communist Party

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have those people of the grassland, so brave, tenacious, and skilled in fighting, today fallen silent and willingly ceded sovereignty over the grassland? These are typically political questions. From the perspective of politics it is quite clear that in the story neither the grassland, nor the grassland wolves, nor the people of the grassland and their culture, are in a position to be assertive. They are far removed from political power and have little political authority to make decisions for themselves or to help themselves. So the next questions are somewhat awkward. If this is only an allegorical story, what is its meaning? If it is not only a fictive story but is also a real one, then what terrible thing happened on the grassland to humiliate the staunch grassland wolves, to break the intrepid, fighting spirit of the people of the grassland, and drain the color from the captivatingly beautiful green grassland? The Mongols historically had different forms of totem worship. Until the sixteenth century many grassland people basically believed in shamanism.389 The supreme deity in Mongol shamanism was “Immortal Heaven” (Changsheng tian 长 生 天 ), which is the deity Tengger that is always on the lips of the venerable Bilgee. In all undertakings, Mongols would say, “trust in the strength of Tengger.”390 Even though they had long had a variety of contacts with the agrarian people to the south, the Confucianism of the Han Chinese had never penetrated the grassland. Scholars believe that “Confucianism is a culture based on agricultural economy, and its dissemination in general required a social environment of agricultural economy corresponding to it.”391 Tibetan Lamaism spread widely among the Mongols in the latter part of the sixteenth century. The Mongolian scholar Baolige believes: “It took less than a century for Lamaism to go from dissemination to religious control among all Mongols.”392 There were two major reasons for the extremely strong

­authorities in Bukhara and sought refuge in Afghanistan, where he lived out the remainder of his life. See Jack Weatherford, 263–65. From 1975 on, Chinese horse cavalry units were officially retired and no longer served as independent units. 389 See Suluge 苏 鲁 格 , Mengguzu zongjiao shi 蒙 古 族 宗 教 史 [History of Mongols’ religion] (Shenyang: Liaoning minzu chubanshe, 2006). 390 Ibid., 26. 391 Baolige 宝 力 格 , Mengguzu jinxiandai sixiang shi lun 蒙 古 族 近 现 代 思 想 史 论 [On the history of thought of Mongolians in early-modern and modern times] (Shenyang: ­Liaoning minzu chubanshe, 2005), 17. 392 Ibid., 19.

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­compatibility that it displayed on the grassland. One was that its dissemination first attracted the support of the Mongol aristocracy, in particular the supreme secular ruler A ­ ltan Khan. The second was that people were weary of the many years of expeditionary warfare. “Followers of Lamaism did not shrink from hardship, but waved the sacred banner ‘Let the rivers of surging blood turn into pure seas overflowing with mothers’ milk,’ and went throughout Mongol territories” to comfort people. “Lamaist missionary monks at first appeared as physicians, healing illnesses and saving lives, exhorting people to do good, without living in luxurious quarters, or wearing silk clothes, or eating rich food. Consequently, they won the admiration and respect of people.”393 Then they “urged abandoning the existing system of burial, uprooted the custom of sacrificial offerings of slaughtered animals, and changed items of worship from blood sacrifices to fruit wine and cheese.”394 As for their followers on the grassland, “lacking any philosophical qualities, they derived nothing from their new religion but bigotry and clericalism. They who at the end of the fifteenth century had set forth to repeat the Jenghiz-Khanite epic now abruptly stopped and sank into pious inertia with no other concern than to feed their ­lamas on the fat of the land.”395 For nearly 300 years the Qing dynasty “exercised absolute control over Lamaism, and monopolized the education, culture and other ideological fields of the Mongols. By the end of the Qing dynasty, over one thousand temples and monasteries had been established in Inner Mongolia alone. A once mighty people, the strength of whose ethnicity had changed the course of world history, now rose toward ‘heaven’ with the formlessly drifting incense of the temples.”396 There is almost no trace of this history in Wolf Totem, and this again for two reasons that Jiang Rong mentioned briefly. When a reporter asked him what he thought were the shortcomings in his writing, he responded that by the late 1960s when the students went to the grassland there were no longer many old people who knew much about traditional culture. Such was the first reason: that is, much of traditional culture was no longer being transmitted among the native people, and stories about the wolf totem and wolves were merely legendary tales that might or might not be believed. The second reason concerned the author’s own store of knowledge: “Since I was just catching the tail 393 Ibid., 17. Note that Lamaism entered the grassland just when bubonic plague had spread through Europe and Asia infecting them for nearly a century. See Jack Weatherford, 242–47. 394 Ibid., 18. 395 Rene Grousset, The Empire of the Steppes, 514–15. 396 Baolige, Mengguzu jinxiandai sixiangshi lun, 19.

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end of nomadic life on the primitive grassland that was about to vanish, my research remained incomplete. For example, I never did understand the relation between Lamaism and wolf totem culture, something I deeply regret.”397 There is next to no information about Lamaism in the novel, only in a conversation in Chapter 11 during which Chen Zhen wonders, “How come the herdsmen out here aren’t enthusiastic about looking for wolf cubs?” The Mongol youth Dorji, from outside the grassland, answers: “The local herdsmen are Lamaists,” Dorji replied. “In the past, nearly every family had to send one member out to become a lama. Lamaists believe in doing good deeds, so they forbid random killing. Killing lots of wolf cubs, they believe, will shorten their own lives. Since I’m not a Lamaist, I’m not afraid of shortening my own life. Manchurian Mongols don’t feed their dead to the wolves … Once we learned how to plant crops, we began following the Han custom of burying our dead in the ground” (103; 164). There are some debatable points in this answer. Manchurian Mongols did not necessarily learn how to plant crops from the Han Chinese, and not believing in Lamaism does not necessarily mean that one does not fear shortening one’s life … Most important are the historical mistakes in his understanding: as the story tells it, the weakening of the people of the grassland and even the grassland itself is primarily on account of the influence of migrants and agrarian civilization: The ability of these migrants to survive and to wreak havoc is considerable, Yang was thinking. They have no guns, so they make a bow and ­arrow; they have no boat, so they make a raft … Their ancestors were herders, but after they were conquered and assimilated, they became enemies of the Mongolian grassland (228; 347). The reasons that history gives us are entirely different. From the time that Lamaism replaced shamanism and became the dominant ideology on the grassland, followers of Mongolian religion all accepted the guidance to “let the rivers of surging blood turn into pure seas overflowing with mothers’ milk,” to abandon the custom of sacrificial offerings of slaughtered animals, and to replace blood sacrifices with fruit wine and cheese, until almost imperceptibly in the minutiae of their daily lives they transformed 397 Written interview with Shu Jinyu 舒 晋 瑜 , reporter for Zhonghua dushu bao [China R ­ eading Weekly], n. p. n. d.

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the bloodthirsty ethnic character. For a time, the temples and monasteries of the lamas covered the grassland, turning the warlike, hard fighting, conquering people of the grassland, as resilient as wolves, into seekers of peace and conformity, a “people as docile and obedient as a flock of sheep.”398 Besides the need that the plague created to cure people, the more important reason that these fundamental changes took place is because of resistance to the strong Han culture: “In their new efforts to be as un-Chinese as possible, the Mongols dropped the traditional evenhanded approach to diverse religion and granted ever more favor and power to Buddhism, particularly to its Tibetan variation, which contrasted most strongly with the Confucian ideals of the Chinese.”399 Why did the people of the grassland prefer Buddhism to the Han Chinese? This is another topic altogether, relevant to identifying with ethnicity, and so will be discussed later. It offers a persuasive case that faith is an ideologically transformative power, far more than a cultural gap such as between the agrarian and the nomadic. Long before the red ideological revolution arrived, transformations of ethnic character and even ethnic beliefs had occurred ­historically, constituting another important ethnic cultural resource succeeding the ‘wolfish nature.’ This supernatural assimilative power, this irresistible transgressive strength of dissemination is the subtext of the political questions that we are about to discuss. Taking up their essentials, these questions are as follows: Why does ideology have this great integrative power of conformity? Does it attempt to resolve (or touch on) the most fundamental, the most universal questions in human nature? What ‘consciousness’ replaces traditional religion and permeates people on the Olonbulag as described in the novel? How did it conquer people and change the grassland? This text uses the concept of ideology in the broad sense, that is, the neutral sense,400 to attempt to review the ideological questions in the novel on the basis of Karl Mannheim’s proposal for a sociology of knowledge and the British professor John Thompson’s study of “modern culture.” 398 Baolige, Mengguzu jinxiandai sixiangshi lun, 19. 399 Jack Weatherford, 249. 400 John B. Thompson in the Introduction to Ideology and Modern Culture (1990) points out that in works of social and political theory over the previous twenty years one response was to find ways to make the concept of ideology more bland, to attempt to eliminate the negative meanings of this concept, and integrate it into the descriptive concepts that social science employs, so that ideology has appeared as a neutral concept. Based on this concept, ideology can be viewed as a “system of thought,” “a system of belief,” or a “symbolic system” in social activity or political practice.

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It is primitive and natural, yet also modern and contemporary; it is conscious and literary, also intellectual and cultural. Given its allegorical quality, the entire book forms a meaningful symbolic system, all of it indicating the concealed political question: what weapon do you use to conquer the grassland? The word ‘ideology’ was first coined by the French philosopher Destutt de Tracy to describe a new discipline concerning a system of ideas and sensations, but it rapidly became ‘a weapon of the lips and tongue in political struggle.’ ­After Marx and Engels published The German Ideology in 1845–46 this term emphasized a judgmental coloration and often “became a term of abuse.” From the sprouts of capitalism in the eighteenth century down through the rise of postmodern thought in the 1960s, “for two centuries the concept of ideology has occupied a central, if at times inglorious, place in the development of social and political thought.”401 Capital and labor formed a relationship in early modern Europe in the market dominated by free economies, and classic liberalism arose in response as the earliest modern ideology. It formed a value system constructing homo economicus at its core, emerging in the form of the sociology of knowledge through the cooperative efforts of many economists, thinkers, and politicians.402 It could be stated that the concept of ideology itself is a product of modernity that appeared in the historical era when the bourgeoisie were resisting traditional aristocratic society. Its fundamental nature was political, and only afterwards was it scientific and intellectual. It was an indispensable political weapon for the early European capitalist nations taking the road to modernity. It was under the guidance of ‘modern’ consciousness that people began gradually to accept a new concept of values. To them, “contact through the market appears perfectly fair and equitable, for capital and labour exchange equivalent values. So the process of production and extraction of surplus value is concealed by the operation of the market, which becomes the source of ideological representations such as the idea of 401 John B. Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture: Critical Social Theory in the Era of Mass Communication (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 28. Karl Mannheim noted: “The modern conception of ideology was born when Napoleon, finding that this group of philosophers was opposing his imperial ambitions, contemptuously labeled them ‘ideologists.’ Thereby the word took on a derogatory meaning which, like the word ‘doctrinaire,’ it has retained to the present day.” Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1954), 64. 402 Adam Smith’s views on homo economicus appear in The Wealth of Nations; see He Zhaowu, Xifang zhexue jingshen [The spirit of Western philosophy] (Beijing: Qinghua daxue chubandshe, 2002), 166–68.

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a ‘fair wage,’ equality, freedom, and so on.”403 Accompanying global integration, this system was adopted to serve as universal values under the impetus of market economics. Jorge Larrain was unsparing in the amusing style of his ­scholarship, repeatedly revealing the inglorious historical record of these ­values—freedom, ­democracy, equality, etc.—as they spread across the world: the exchange of equivalents “naturally tends to be reproduced in the minds of both capitalists and labourers as equality and freedom, the linchpins of capitalist ideology.”404 This interpretation helps us understand why Marx held a critical attitude toward ‘ideology’ at a time when it had just appeared, because the earliest modern ideology was indeed a product of ‘capital’ and directly served ‘capitalists.’ The cutting edge of Marx’s criticism was aimed not solely at core values established around the role of capital, but even more at the theoretical base on which these values were established, such as the Young ­Hegelians’ historical idealism. Given that these phenomena, regardless of how they are judged, were produced only in the modern realm and were questioned at the level of modernity, what then do they have to do with the primitive grassland of the Wolf Totem? Ideology in Wolf Totem was introduced by Jiang Rong in an interview: The Olonbulag is located in the northern border of the East Ujimqin ­ anner region, a dead space for traffic. And the Olon is a jointly managed B state-private pasture, so relatively speaking there are quite a few owners, wealthy herders and their families, along with the hired hands. The traditional educational level there was quite a bit higher than other communes, and they preserved more of the grassland in its primitive state and the culture of the wolf totem as well.405 In general, “literary works are often precisely the ones that present the richest and most nuanced picture of an ideology, so much so that what one learns from other sources is finally less important than what can be learned from literature itself.”406 For example, what Jiang Rong has written is history and not a fictive story, as in the important information he gives further below.

403 Jorge Larrain, Ideology and Cultural Identity: Modernity and the Third World Presence (Cambridge, uk: Polity Press, 1994), 13. 404 Ibid. 405 Jiang Rong, print interview by Shu Jinyu, reporter for Zhonghua dushu bao, n. p. n. d. 406 Tzvetan Todorov, Literature and Its Theorists, 133.

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(1) “Border” is a geopolitical concept that culturally can have another sense, one that can be understood as “marginal.”407 Such regions are often ­multicultural. The story of Wolf Totem takes place in such a special ­environment, offering a relatively open space for the political interpretation of culture. (2) “Dead space” is a human concept with a specific value (there is no “dead space” in nature); it means sparsely inhabited with relatively few signs of culture. By giving birth to Wolf Totem in such a “dead space” it becomes an evaluative standard presenting a great challenge to ideological politics. (3) “Joint state-private management” is an institutional term, both economic and political. In the ‘state ownership’ system of socialism in the society of New China, it is a special noun with symbolic meaning. It means that on the grassland the ‘state’ is not so thoroughly omnipresent, hence it is possible to preserve traditional culture and legends of wolves. (4) “Owners” and “wealthy herdsmen” correspond to ‘landlords’ and ‘rich peasants.’ In mainstream political districts they were class enemies and targets of dictatorship [of the proletariat], while the grassland was relatively peaceful. The novel suggests that people in the class of wealthy herders were relatively numerous on the Olonbulag and that the level of culture there was correspondingly quite high. (5) The “primitive appearance” of the grassland is the state of existence in primal nature, preserved through the effects of the elements discussed above. Following the settlement of Beijing students, the migrant workers and the army, “primitive” nature and “traditional” grassland culture vanished forever. This introduced a development worth attention: the grassland changed masters. Traditional beliefs disappeared from view, the past masters of the grassland became the ‘silent majority,’ and they maintained a high level of vigilance, psychologically, towards everyone and everything from outside. This was the experience of Jiang Rong: even though he lived with herders night and day, living with them for many years, they remained wary when he was collecting material:

407 The Taiwan scholar Wang Minghe 王 明 珂 defined “border” and “margin” from multiple perspectives of natural ecology, culture, and politics. See Huaxia bianyuan: lishi jiyi yu zuchun rentong 华 夏 边 缘 ﹕ 历 史 记 忆 与 族 群 认 同 [The margins of China: historical memory and cultural identity] (Shanghai: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2006).

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Old herdsmen like Bilgee who truly believed in the wolf totem were never forthcoming to Han Chinese students about their stories and views of things connected with the wolf totem. Only when it was apparent to them that you genuinely were fascinated with grassland wolves and felt respect for grassland wolves would they then open up to talk about traditional beliefs and culture of the Mongols.408 This points out two important things to us. The first is that even if one ideology dominated everywhere, ethnic identity did not disappear. Just the opposite, like so many atoms awaiting a thermonuclear reaction, it lies concealed in “traditional beliefs” waiting for its moment to emerge. In the view of the scholar of Cultural Studies, Stuart Hall: “the more profound the universalizing tendencies are, the more particular peoples, ethnic groups or sections of society seek to reaffirm their difference and the more they become attached to their locality.”409 Chapter 23 of Wolf Totem, centered on the episode of outsiders killing swans, fully demonstrates this gap and the cultural conflict it has given rise to. The second important thing is that traditional culture has no place to shelter under the effects of other ideologies except for the mutual reliance upon old people who have traditional beliefs. The Japanese folklorist Seki Keigo pointed out that an ethnic group and its own culture form a “community,” and the lore that has been passed down over long periods of time lives on or dies together with its “supporters,” and vice versa.410 From this we can understand why the people of the grassland in the novel so vehemently disagree with something like hunting swans. Let us look at this dispute. It is the only time in the book when there is an open conflict between different ethnicities, collectively, bringing to the fore human events concealed behind the story of wolves. In the confrontation and contest of discourses the invisible hand that controls the fate of the people of the grassland and even conquers the grassland is revealed. The story goes that outside migrant workers take swans that they have just killed back to their kitchen. They are also Mongols whose ancestors lived by herding on the grassland, respected wolves, and loved swans, but are now 408 Jiang Rong in published interview by Shu Jinyu, reporter for Zhonghua dushu bao, n. p. n. d. 409 Stuart Hall, “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity,” in Culture, Globalization, and the World System, ed. Anthony D. King (St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 33; cited in Jorge Larrain, Ideology and Cultural Identity, 154. 410 Guan Jingwu 关 敬 吾 [Seki Keigo], Minsuxue 民 俗 学 [Minzokugaku; Folklore studies], trans. Wang Rulan 王 汝 澜 and Gong Yishan 龚 益 善 (Bejing: Zhonggguo minjian wenyi chubanshe, 1986), 23.

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hunting swans to cook for themselves. The herders are furious, because they “could not understand why these Mongols, who dressed like Chinese, could be so cruel to sacred grassland birds. How did they have the nerve to kill and eat creatures that could fly up to Tengger?” (234; 351). Bilgee, who had never witnessed anything like this before, was so angry his goatee quivered. He cursed Wang for the slaughter, for being ­disrespectful to a shaman, the sacred bird, and for forgetting his Mongol roots … Wang dismissed this as ranting, and shouted, “What’s all this about shamans. Even bodhisattvas and the Buddha have been smashed, ­ and  you’re still ranting about shamans! They all belong to the ‘Four Olds,’ and they all need to be smashed!” Seeing that the heavenly commandments of the Mongol grassland had no effect on Wang, Bilgee quickly took out the Mongolian text of the Little Red Book of quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, urgently asking Chen Zhen, “Which quotation should I read out to stop these bandits?” Chen Zhen and Yang Ke thought about this for some time, actually unable to think of what quotation from among these supreme directives could suppress hunting precious fowl (234). The contradiction is centered on ‘belief,’ involving three sensitive questions. One is identity. Bilgee shouts, “You have shown disrespect to the sacred shaman birds and forgotten your Mongol roots! Are you a Mongol or not!” In the eyes of people of the grassland, outside settlers like Wang are insincere in their beliefs, their ethnic identity is questionable. In the course of ethnicities mixing and even changing customs, the only definable identity is ‘traditional beliefs,’ the ultimate among customs, and also the roots of ethnicity. The second is the revolution in beliefs that is ongoing. Through Wang’s ­justification we learn that the revolution in beliefs in the mainstream areas is already complete: “Even bodhisattvas and the Buddha have been smashed, and you’re still ranting about shamans! They all belong to the ‘Four Olds,’ and they all need to be smashed!” This makes it obvious that the target of this revolution is not simply the grassland and shamans, but rather all the “Four Olds” (old thought, old culture, old customs, old habits), the epitome of revolutionary discourse.411 411 Destroying the “Four Olds” originated in 1966 with the “May Eighteenth” Speech of Lin Biao, and was openly promoted for the first time in the editorial “Sweep away all ­demons and spirits,” Renmin ribao (People’s Daily), June 1, 1966. See Wang Nianyi 王 年 一 , W ­ enhua

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The third is the new belief, the supreme directives surmounting other beliefs, on the grassland replacing Tengger. Previously everything was referred to the judgment of immortal heaven;412 now all things must be found in the Mongolian edition of The Little Red Book of the Quotations of Chairman Mao. It is regrettable that the Red Quotations that speak to all human affairs have nothing about nature. All that everyone remembers is the one passage, “To struggle with Heaven, the joy is boundless! To struggle with Earth, the joy is boundless!”413 Such a quotation is no help to the people of the grassland. On the contrary, it could only be an aid to inflicting more damage. In a deadlock, the argument escalates: “Outnumbering their opponents and tacitly backed by the authorities, the migrant workers dared to dispute with Bilgee using fluent Mongolian. The migrant workers crowded forward shouting angrily. Yang Ke, Chen Zhen and some of the other students joined the ranks of those dressed in Mongolian deels swearing back at the migrant workers in Han Chinese clothing. The abuse grew stronger on both sides, and they faced each other almost nose to nose. With the look of the ferocity of wolves, several of the horse herders were about to use their horsewhips …” (234) At this moment, Bao Shungui charged over to the men on his horse, swung his horsewhip fiercely above his head several times, and shouted, “Silence, all of you! Anyone who starts anything I’ll have the Dictatorship Group arrest you. Throw the whole lot of you into study class. Everyone fell silent (234). Bao Shungui’s arrival is significant. His arrival also saves the situation, with a look that silences those who were about to strike out. Who is this person who can rush in single-handedly and control enraged opponents with a few sentences? His is an excellent example of winning a victory without bloodshed. Bao is complex, formerly an army representative, now managing a farm, both a Party member and a soldier, and really the supreme ruler on the Olonbulag, representing the full authority of the ‘higher authority’ that sent him. His name has multiple symbolic significances that in the political arena can

da geming shinian shi “ 文 化 大 革 命 ” 十 年 史 [History of the ten years of the cultural revolution)] (Zhengzhou: Henan renmin chubanshe, 2005), 56. 412 Sulugu, Mengguzu zongjiao shi, 26. 413 The quotation typically ends with the additional clause, “To struggle with people, the joy is boundless!” Mao Zedong, “Diary as a Teacher in Hunan in 1916,” Zhonggong zhongyang wenxian yanjiushi, ed., Mao Zedong nianpu (1893–1949) [Chronicle of Mao Zedong (1893–1949)] (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1993); cited in A Critical Introduction to Mao, ed. Timothy Cheek (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 337.

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be understood­this way: Bao (包 ) has the meaning it takes on in phrases like “assume full responsibility” (bāobàn yīqìe 包 办 一 切 ) and “take control of ­everything” (bāolǎn tīanxìa 包 揽 天 下 ); Shun suggests the double meanings of  ‘obedient’ (shùncóng 顺 ) and ‘successful’ (shùnlì 顺 利 ); that is, he can ­accomplish his tasks on the grassland, whether for good or for ill, only if he is obedient to the leaders who are his superiors. The final syllable gui (贵 )is a status, one that is high above all the ethnicities and classes, as well as having undoubted power to constrain the students from Beijing. The arrival of Bao Shungui is the arrival of authority. So what is the weapon that he uses to settle the dispute? It is the “supreme directive,” that is, ideology. And there are the instruments of ideology that he speaks of, the “Dictatorship Group” (zhūanzhèng xiǎozǔ 专 政 小 组 ) and the “study class” (学 习 班 ). In most circumstances the ideology in literary works is not openly revealed. Taking abstract painting as an ­example, Althusser wrote that for abstract artists … it is possible, through their objects, to “paint” visible connexions that depict by their disposition, the determinate absence which governs them. The structure which controls the concrete existence of men, i.e. which informs the lived ideology of the relations between men and objects and between objects and men, this structure, as a structure, can never be depicted by its presence in person, positively, in relief, but only by traces and effects, negatively, by indices of absence in intaglio (en creux).414 Only through the deep structure of “absence” can works break through the constraints of ideology and reveal the true relations in reality. This is a function that allegorical fiction also has together with the paintings of such artists as Cremonini: “We cannot ‘recognize’ ourselves (ideologically) in his pictures. And it is because we cannot ‘recognize’ ourselves in them that we can know ourselves in them …”415 Ideology is concealed throughout Wolf Totem, set back within the colorless human stories, emerging only when Bao Shungui arrives at a moment of crisis, and showing us something of its true face. What sort of face is it? Bao Shungui leapt off his horse, walked over to Bilgee, and said, “Something like these swans are the sort of thing the Soviet Revisionists like. Beijing has already denounced performing that barbarian show 414 Louis Althusser, “Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, 237. 415 Ibid., 240.

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about the swan, banned it, and the lead has been struggled against. Now if we’re still protecting swans and word gets out the problem could get serious and become a political issue.” Bao then turned to the crowd and said, “There’s a lot to get done this time of year. So what are you doing standing around here? Go on and get back to work.” Everyone sighed and glared, one by one walking off and dispersing. Yang Ke could not take Bao’s tone, and got on his horse to return to the yurt, took out three large firecrackers to set them off on the lake … Bao Shungui was so angry he charged down the slope, pointed his horsewhip in Yang Ke’s face and swore at him, “You have it in mind to put a stop to what I eat with my liquor? You’d better think first how many heads you can afford to lose. Don’t forget your old man, the reactionary, is still in labor reform with the black political offenders! You’d better catch on to your reeducation from the poor and lower middle ­peasants—and those workers, and I, are all poor and lower middle peasants!” Yang Ke glared back defiantly and said, “My unit on the grassland is with herders, and my reeducation first and foremost is from these poor and lower middle herders!” Bilgee and some horse herders clapped Yang Ke on the shoulders and they walked down the slope (234). We can analyze the significance of this passage. Primarily it is a matter of power relations. The powerbroker on this border grassland, Bao Shungui, is no more than a functionary, and thus is always concerned with and listening to the voice of Beijing. Next, it is an ideological issue. Just because the sacred swans of the grassland have some imagined connection with Soviet revisionism, the news of protecting swans could become a political problem. One mention of politics and everyone becomes as silent as cicadas in winter, just huffing as they disperse. As for “Soviet revisionism,”416 it was at the time a more frightening phrase than “American imperialism,” for it was not only an opponent of the nation/state,

416 The Chinese term “Soviet revisionism” comes from “Open Letters from the Central Committee on Nine Criticisms of Soviet Revisionism” published in People’s Daily in 1963 during the Sino-Soviet rift. During the 1880s the German Social Democrat Eduard Bernstein proposed revisions to Marxism, and claimed to be a “revisionist.” Lenin first used the term “modern revisionism” in 1908. By the 1960s it had become a concept of disparagement within the socialist camp.

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but also a traitor ideologically. No one associated with it could come to any good end. Third are class relations. From the founding of the People’s Republic of ­China until the end of the Cultural Revolution no one on the mainland of China (including the grassland) avoided a class designation or involvement in class struggle. Especially during the Cultural Revolution period, when the ­attitude toward class struggle was that “we must talk about this every year, every month, every day,”417 Bao Shungui’s remarking, “Don’t forget your old man, the ­reactionary, is still in labor reform with the black political offenders!” is an ominous political message. Like the warning to consider “how many heads you have to lose,” it had a crippling effect in those years that was pervasive and powerful, for just as the father’s social class standing directly influenced the child’s future, the child’s negative performance would without doubt add further misery to the misfortunes of the father’s political fate. Further, when Bao Shungui states with righteous self-confidence, “those workers, and I, are all poor and lower middle peasants,” he also makes clear that the class that gives him authority itself, together with the quality of the ideology in which it is steeped, come out of lower levels, that is, “oppressed people.” This quality is clearly written down in guiding political principles establishing the new nation,418 openly announcing that “ideology is present in every political programme and is a feature of every organized political movement.”419 This fundamental feature of modern power shows us in concrete terms that, “Whenever there are asymmetrical relations of power there is a situation of domination, and therefore ideology helps sustain not only class domination but also a variety of relations of domination between ethnic groups, between nation-states, between sexes, and so forth.”420 Given that, what more is there to add? For understanding ideology from a neutral standpoint, there is nothing that can be said. Yet here we sense a paradox in the righteous self-confidence above, 417 Mao Zedong, “Speech At The Tenth Plenum Of The Eighth Central Committee,” 24 September 1962. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/ volume-8/mswv8_63.htm (accessed January 29, 2015). 418 At the first meeting of the first National People’s Congress on September 15, 1954 in the opening address by Mao Zedong he stated, “The force at the core leading our cause forward is the Chinese Communist Party. The theoretical basis guiding our thinking is ­Marxism-Leninism.” This thought was the basic political creed for the founding of New China, and it appeared as the first passage in the Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung [aka: The Little Red Book] (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1966), 5. 419 John B. Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture, 5. 420 Jorge Larrain, Ideology and Cultural Identity, 14.

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which derives entirely from the great ideal to ‘liberate all humanity’ that happens to come directly from the early Marx who undertook the “critique of ideology” and the Marxist doctrine that the core value is class analysis. Why are these inconsistent? Is it a falsity humans have created or is it the paradox of history? “Marx is undoubtedly the most important figure in the history of the concept of ideology.”421 The German Ideology that he wrote with Engels employs the term ideology in an argument against the historical idealism that the Young Hegelians promoted, which was also aimed at the theoretical foundations of liberal thought and even the ideological system of capitalism as a whole. Through Marx, the concept of ideology “acquired a new status as a critical tool and as an integral component of a new theoretical system.”422 Now “the weapon of criticism” truly did become “the criticism of the weapon.”423 Marx did not realize that at the same time that he was exposing the features of capitalist ideology a new ideology was being constructed as he wrote. If so, he was correct when he wrote below: The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.424 So turning to today, it was through the socialist movement guided by Marxism that the course of our history underwent a transformation: The construction of ruling force no longer underwent primitive materialist relations with “materialist force.” The important force driving transformation was a new ideological system, namely the Communist Manifesto and the doctrine of class struggle derived from it—that “spectre, the spectre of communism” no longer haunted only Europe, but spread across borders to be the important weapon to unite the proletariat of the world to change it. The ideology of revolution itself underwent a qualitative change, from darkness toward light and even becoming ‘the sun,’ radiant, shining into every corner, and shining into that distant borderland, the Olonbulag. 421 John B. Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture, 29. 422 Ibid., 33. 423 Translator’s note: The phrases in quotation marks appear in Karl Marx, Introduction to “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” https://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm (accessed January 31, 2015). 424 The German Ideology, Including Theses on Feuerbach and Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy (New York: Prometheus Books, 1998), 67.

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Where revolution shone, the ‘Four Olds’ were destroyed, the poor were rescued, and a new society was founded. As a product of ideology, its foundation was primarily in ideas. All social wealth, whether material or immaterial, was legitimately reassembled under the control of ‘legitimate’ ideology. Thereafter, ideology became an instrument of sustaining oneself, one that had to be fully committed to maintaining (this) consciousness while it no longer permitted producing (other) ideas. All new ideas might become determining factors of change in consciousness (ideology). Thus, in all countries with a modern ideology, the ideology assuming the leading position had the function of protecting the consciousness and corresponding to it. It was not simply necessary to safeguard social stability, but also to bear the weight of a legitimate foundation stone for elite groups to maintain political rule. At this point, matters had already gone beyond the historical expectations of Marx, but it was in a specific direction that Marxism as a whole had labored toward historically.425 Marx had opposed ideologizing any thought, and viewed this trend as “the symptom of an illness, not the normal trait of a healthy society.”426 But it was unpreventable that “[a]fter Marx the concept of ideology assumed a major role both within Marxism and within the emerging disciplines of the social sciences.”427 Marxism “offered a systematic, totalizing vision of the social-historical world. It predicated a future which would be radically different from the present, and which could only be realized through the dedicated action of individuals who believed unflinchingly in their cause.”428 Thus, Thompson concluded: “These were the characteristics of ideology: totalizing, utopian, impassioned, dogmatic.”429 He saw how Marxism closely connected constructing the self with the sociology of knowledge to form a ‘doctrine,’ but overlooked the even more important historical fact that Marxism in the name of ‘ism’ combined with a political party to become the political weapon that changed the world. No wonder that Thompson believed that he lacked personal experience. Jiang Rong, however, is the spiritual product of this system.430 Whether he c­ onforms to it or rebels against it, he still bears its birthmark; whether he writes in the name of grassland people or grassland wolves, he repeats its discourse in 425 Lenin’s state doctrine and the founding of the Soviet Socialist state can be seen as results representative of this direction. 426 John B. Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture, 45. 427 Ibid., 44. 428 Ibid., 81. 429 Ibid. 430 Jiang Rong’s field is Marxist political economy. His family background is the same. More detailed discussion of this appears below in Chapter 5.4.

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­disguise. That ideological discourse that vanishes and reappears on the Olonbulag is waking historical memory from a ‘collective forgetting,’ forcing us to look squarely at the wrenching question that we have silently endured for so long, unwilling to discuss openly: Why have we, as intellectuals, maintained silence for so long while harboring other ideas? What, after all, is this consciousness within ideology? How is it produced, disseminated, and received by people (including us)? Let us turn back to Wolf Totem and see what suggestions it offers us. The novel does not employ the concept of ideology, nor did its author intend much suggestion of its specific content. On the contrary, it seems intentionally avoided. Why? The answer is in the title: the wolf totem—a new ideological symbol—attempts to replace other, existing symbols. Under the wolf banner all other consciousness or thought is insignificant, and thus no longer the aim of what the author deliberately depicts. Such effort is no cause for serious criticism. ‘[I]deology is ubiquitous, not confined to any class,”431 so that the educated are influenced by it as much as others. When individual experience is not congruent with ideology, people may attempt to put forward new criteria that better fit their experience, as Douglass North wrote: “inconsistencies between experience and ideologies must accumulate before individuals alter their ideology.”432 Given this, we can understand the creative purpose of the novel: it intends cook up something else, to fashion a more fitting ideology. This is a classic utopian act, and for intellectuals who have matured through the acculturation of revolutionary ideology and then seek to achieve something that will make a difference, it is the most natural, easiest, and reasonable place to go. Given this feature, the question that we pursue appears in the novel as an answer. The genuine knowledge and truth that we hope to acquire is exactly the object of the author’s skeptical criticism buried in the story. The social foundation of ideology is the first object of criticism. This foundation is termed ‘national character,’ indicating in the background the nation state. Jorge Larrain has an excellent, incisive description of this: “Marx’s concept [of ideology] was designed to operate, on the one hand, as a critical weapon in the context of class oppression and the main contradiction between capital and labour, and, on the other, as an analytical tool within the boundaries of nation-states, where class domination typically takes place.”433 We can see the effectiveness of combining these in the novel, employing the name of the ‘entire nation’ to dissolve all differences and boundaries between 431 Douglass C. North, Structure and Change in Economic History, 49. 432 Ibid. 433 Jorge Larrain, Ideology and Cultural Identity, 13.

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the urban and the rural, and among ethnicities, social classes, and genders, to make the state into a tool covering all different forms of human behavior in the light of ideology. The use of the term “higher up” 上 面 (not ‘higher level’ 上 级 ) multiple times in the novel suggests not simply a leader or a political party. It is extremely abstract, ubiquitous, and capable of pointing from any angle toward the nation/state, while its core value is indeed ‘the people of the nation’ and ‘the state.’ The border in the novel is the national border. The army is not established solely to conquer the grassland; its setting is the state, and its duty is to protect the state, including the homeland of the grassland people. In the name of the state, everyone could understand and accept yielding up local interest. There is, for example, this description of the difficulties of the 1960s: There are too many of you Chinese, and not enough meat to feed you, so the country depends on the lamb and beef from Inner Mongolia. But to produce one ton of beef and lamb requires seventy or eighty tons of grass. When you people come demanding our meat, what you’re really asking us for is our grass, and if you keep it up, you’ll kill of the grassland. The pressure from government [shangmian 上 面 “higher up”] quotas has nearly turned several banners in the southeast into desert (149; 233–34). Uljii speaks the concerns of the grassland people with a full sense of its painfulness but without any sense of resistance or rebellion. Bilgee is even more aware of what is happening to the grassland, yet also with a sense of helplessness: [There were] seventy or eighty Ujimchin warhorses, the treasure of a dozen herds and dozens of horse herders; of noble bloodlines, famous as warhorses throughout Mongol history, they were known historically as Turks … Now that they were being allocated to the militia cavalry division for war preparedness, the pastureland was suffering an inexpressible loss (44; 71). The hides of the gazelle that the Olonbulag produces are the material for superior leather jackets: “the gazelle hides produced in Inner Mongolia were for export only, a commodity of exchange with the Soviet Union and Eastern ­European countries for steel, automobiles, and munitions. The choice meat cuts were canned and exported.” (13; 18) The people of the grassland silently made their contribution when the nation state faced its worst difficulties. In the voice of commendation for ‘willingness’ it was the role of ideology, or ‘correct thought’ that became the priority. Given that, I do not believe that the

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nature of ideology “is given by its form and not by its content.”434 On the contrary, it is precisely what is in ‘consciousness’ that determines the form that it can take. New ideologies may borrow value systems with which people easily identify, “disarticulating ideological elements from other ideological discourses and rearticulating them into a new discourse, so that, in acquiring a new meaning within a new totality, they help to reconstitute subjects for different political objectives and actions.”435 The same elements of consciousness in different ideological frameworks may produce completely different results. ­Nationalism, for example, most easily produces a massive, integrative force when the nation is in difficulties, but with different developmental directions. In the 1930s, for example, the fascist ideology effectively combined the popular traditions of nationalism and anti-plutocracy with racism, aiming at genocidal wars of aggression. In the 1980s the new liberalist ideology of Margaret Thatcher’s clique combined the public’s mood of resistance towards wage controls and high taxes with market forces, aiming at national restoration of free capital. “Thus the bourgeoisie can articulate nationalism against the regionalism of feudalism but the proletariat can also articulate nationalism against imperialism. Liberalism was the ideology of the European bourgeoisie, but it was also the ideology of semi-feudal landowners in Latin America.”436 Today it has become an ideology widely accepted among Chinese intellectuals. Nation states became realms of ideology one after the other; national borders were not the boundaries of states alone, but also the boundaries of ‘ideas.’ Within these boundaries, uniting thought became a fundamental process for reestablishing the nation state. So, in the era in which the novel is set, on the Olonbulag with ‘Soviet revisionism’ just across the border, there could be dialogue like this: Yang Ke roared, “All Chinese know that ugly toads love to eat swans. Are you Chinese or aren’t you?” Old Wang sneered. “No Chinese would let a swan fly over to the ­Russians. How about you? Do you want to deliver the swans to them?” Yang had learned that the migrants could argue with the best them, and he didn’t know what to say. (227; 345) For a ‘migrant’ ‘outsider’ like Old Wang to have such political awareness shows the power of ideological control. In only a few years the people of the grassland­ 434 Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (London: New Left Books, 1977), 160; cited in Jorge Larrain, 75. 435 Jorge Larrain, 75. 436 Ibid.

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have come to believe the new thought. Even though Bilgee, for example, reveres Tengger in his heart, he still must call on Quotations from Chairman Mao to address problems. Bilgee’s son Batu also invokes old and new together: “‘I swear to Chairman Mao,’ he said under the pressure of questioning, ‘and to Tengger’” (132; 210). When Bao Shungui kills swans to satisfy a craving for good food, Yang Ke speaks up: “If you need to kill something, kill me.” Bao Shungui is incensed: He glared at Yang, his enthusiasm dampened. “Swan Lake—what the hell is that all about? Capitalist hogwash. You’re a high school graduate, and you think that makes you better than me? We can’t stage The Red Detachment of Women till we drive Swan Lake off the stage” (180; 281). Issues of class struggle continuously rise to the surface. Yet here, unlike the period of Land Reform when the basis for distinctions was economic conditions, it is the intellectual and cultural elements, one’s curriculum vitae, and the form of ‘thought’ that propels the life-or-death struggle between ideologies onstage. The Marxist aesthetician Louis Althusser pointed out that art is a human activity saturated with ideology, an instrument directly in the service of the state apparatus. Besides military and police, the state apparatus includes churches, schools, artistic groups, and so forth. They are the consciously created state apparatus for producing ideology. The former rely on force and intimidation for effect, while the latter achieve their effect through ideology.437 Bao Shungui’s reference to on stage and off stage instantly arouses people’s class awareness and our extreme wariness of the ideological issues in the novel. That wariness can make us pick up the scent of class issues that fill the grassland everywhere in the text. For example, the neighbor of the Beijing students, Gombu, had been a herd owner, for which he “was kept under surveillance, and his right to tend sheep had been taken away from him; but the four Beijing students asked him to watch their animals whenever they could.” (22; 32) The students are ‘petit-bourgeois intellectuals’ undergoing re-education, and next to more serious class enemies can forgive themselves. When Yang Ke sees Ershun cooking swan meat, however, he does not dare to reveal how angry he is: “Ershun, after all, was a peasant, while he was one of the ‘mongrel bastards’ sent ‘up the mountains and down to the countryside’ for reeducation” (231; 350). Compared with the Han-settled territories to the south and to Beijing, the people of the grassland do not have a strong awareness of social class and are distracted by all 437 See Louis Althusser, For Marx [Pour Marx], trans. Ben Brewtser (London: Allen Lane, 1969).

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sorts of traditional concepts: when Gombu tends sheep for the students, Gasmai records work points under his name fairly. And when swearing to Chairman Mao, Batu does not forget to swear to Tengger. Relatively speaking, it is the Beijing students whose sensitivity to class is unusual. Several students debate stubbornly about whether to hunt wolves. A minor leader of Red Guards, Li Hongwei, becomes quite agitated: Wolves are the true class enemies. Reactionaries throughout the world are all ambitious wolves. Wolves are cruel. Putting aside their slaughter of people’s property—our horses, cows, and sheep—they even slaughter their own. We need to organize the masses to hunt them down and apply the proletarian dictatorship against all wolves… . We must also subject all old ideas, customs, and habits—such as sympathy for wolves, ­appeasement of wolves, and feeding wolves with the corpses of our dead—to severe criticism (65; 103). Hence, we see the resulting spectacle, once the brigade’s wolf extermination campaign begins, “everyone’s gone mad about killing” (320; 456). With the arrival of military units, “The wolves have fallen into the abyss of the people’s battle. Everywhere people are singing, ‘Kill the wolves! Generation after generation, we won’t stop fighting until all the jackals are dead’” (320; 456). Where, at this point, is Bilgee, the man who best understands and is the most protective of wolves? Unfortunately, the identity of the man whom we have, in our view, defined as the representative of grassland people in their existence in primal nature is neither primitive nor so natural. In the revolutionary decade of ‘take class struggle as the guiding principle’ Bilgee is himself the representative typifying the revolutionary classes. As Chen Zhen tells him, “you, as a representative of the poor herdsmen, a member of the revolutionary committee, and someone everyone listens to, ought to have the last word” (53; 86). So we see that, far from a chief or an elder in a conventional society, Bilgee after all is a poor person, a member of the lower level of society. Why would he command respect on this grassland? It is not because he protects the grassland representing the interests of the people of the grassland, but because he is an important link in the iron chain of the state, joining in the new power/benefit group of the ‘United Front’ through the special ethnic status of the people of the grassland. Here, all doubts seem to be dispelled, pointing in a common direction: revolution. After a revolution the redistribution of power leads to redistributing benefits. This was not original to New China, nor was it an achievement of the Cultural Revolution. “The change from early capitalism to a situation where

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the state intervened to regulate the economic process and provide general welfare invalidated in practice the ideology of equal exchange and called for a new form of legitimation for political power.”438 Whichever class wields political power, the redistribution of power and benefits is a matter of course, achieved through ideological manipulation. Jürgen Habermas pointed out, “This new kind of ideology stems from technology and science, which have become fused and increasingly manipulative … [and] also taken on functions of legitimating political power.”439 Placed in the Western context, such knowledge is profound; placed in Wolf Totem it appears shallow. The story of the novel presents more vividly and concretely the operations of modern ideology, and like a magnifying glass or a distorting mirror at a fairground, it shows the spiritual journey of personal experience during an era, the era of Mao Zedong. “The main feature of the ideological phenomenon is the fact that its ­operation cannot be easily recognized by the participants …”440 So the consciousness of people within an ideology is like being covered under a ­canopy. Ideology silently remolds people, it can bring traditional ideas that have ­persisted a thousand years to a sudden stop without a trace of disturbance: Mongols in Inner Mongolia now won’t admit that their folk songs are derived from wolf howls … It’s no wonder that with songs like the one in the revolutionary opera The Red Lantern singing about “The prison guards howl like wolves,” who is going to say wolves are the source of Mongol folk music? Otherwise, that Mongol song, the “Paean,” that Hu Songhua sings praising Chairman Mao should be banned (259). As much as the wolf receives such high praise at the spiritual level, it is not easy to be optimistic about its political status in reality. Designated a class enemy, it can hardly avoid the fate of extermination. Politics and class in the book are closely combined and everywhere lethally dangerous and powerful. In a state that controls consciousness directly, everything related to class and politics is placed on a high plane of principle and struggle, and a priori branded guilty: During the early years of the Cultural Revolution, the Beijing Zoo attendants had kept an orphaned tiger cub and a canine surrogate mother in the same cage, and that had turned into a serious political incident,

438 Jurgen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (London: Heinemann, 1971), 99–101; cited in Jorge Larrain, 120. 439 Ibid. 440 Jorge Larrain, 123.

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viewed as extolling the virtues of the reactionary theory of class harmony, for which the attendants were subjected to strident criticism (103; 165). How could there have been such bizarre results everywhere? The explanations in political science usually resort to the role of power. History has demonstrated that because of the insertion of power, within a short period of time the lama sect conquered hearts and minds and put down roots in the grassland. However, history has also demonstrated that sheer power was not enough. In the same way, in the early years of the thirteenth century, Genghis Khan appointed Qiu Chuji,441 a Shandong Daoist, as a military advisor. Qiu taught him, avoid bloodlust in war, revere heaven and show love to people, cleanse your heart and curb desire.442 After the founding of his state, Genghis Khan did not use official power to promote the spread of Daoism, nor did he mobilize the apparatus of the state to propagate Daoism—although ‘propaganda’ and ‘popularization’ are fundamental features of ideological society. In the field of modern politics, especially in ideological states, ‘propaganda’ is an extremely important and sensitive word, not altogether the same as the purely instrumental concepts of ‘communication’ and ‘media.’ It is usually manipulated directly by the state apparatus, implying ‘transmit down messages from above,’ a top-down type of manipulation. What it conveys is not only news of whatever is encountered randomly, but also a type of ‘thought’ that is designed, unified, and prescriptive. Whenever any discourse is enlisted in propaganda it becomes an ideological weapon and no longer an instrument for expressing thought. In the novel we are always encountering what ‘comes down’ (directives from higher authority) and ‘propaganda’ (exemplary acts), constantly seeing the special role that a set of perfected ideological mechanisms plays in organizing and guiding masses of people. Everything related to wolf hunting is endowed with special political significance; ‘heroes’ and ‘examples’ are not only given widely publicized commendations, but also 441 Qiu Chuji 丘 处 机 (1148–1227), also Qiu Changchun, with the Daoist appellation Changchunzi, was one of the creators of the Quanzhen Daoist sect. In 1220 when he was over 70 years old he responded to an imperial summons, leading eighteen disciples thousands of miles into present-day Afghanistan. Li Zhichang 李 志 常 , a disciple, and others later wrote Changchun zhenren xiyouji 长 春 真 人 西 游 记 as a record of this event. 442 Genghis Khan’s interest in summoning Qiu was not lessons in statecraft or war, but longevity. Qiu exhorted Genghis Khan to adopt Daoist principles of “purity and inaction,” and “revering heaven, showing love to the people, and avoiding all killing.” Genghis Khan honored Qiu with the title Qiu Shenxian 丘 神 仙 . See Zhongguo daojiao shi 中 国 道 教 史 [History of Daoist Religion], ed. Ren Jiyu 任 继 愈 (Shanghai: Shanghai Renmin ­chubanshe, 1990), 523–34.

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­ aterially rewarded: “The next day, the story of how Dorji traded a sheep for a m wolf spread through the brigade. After Bao Shungui received the wolf pelt, he couldn’t praise Dorji enough; he circulated a commendation throughout the brigade and rewarded him with thirty bullets” (212; 324). After the retaliation against the wolves for slaughtering horses, Bao Shungui tells the hunters, “As representative of the Banner Revolutionary Committee … and commander of the military district, I thank you all! You are heroes of the wolf hunt, and your pictures will be in the papers in a few days” (126; 200–01). All measures for publicity are without exception transmitted from ‘above’; all doubts or individual views can only be conveyed in a low voice in private conversations. Once the ideological system begins operation it can raise a voice to any level and ultimately stifle others. This is without doubt a struggle in which the victor both masters public sentiment and controls the instruments that run public sentiment. Bloodless victory is manifested precisely at the level of ‘consciousness’ and even ‘sentiment.’ It is no wonder that Bilgee’s discontent is not directly aimed at the herdsmen who hunt wolves, but towards the overpowering propaganda apparatus. Privately he reveals his resentment to Chen Zhen: Youngsters and horse herders seem to be having a contest to see who can kill the most wolves. They don’t understand what they’re doing. All you hear on the radio is how heroic the wolf killers are. Things are only going to get worse for us from here on out (96; 154). When Bilgee hears on a radio broadcast how Lamjav is being praised for killing wolves, he urgently seeks out the young horse herder to ask him: Let me ask you how many wolves do you have to kill to catch up with Buhe, the great hunter of the Bayan Gobi Commune? You want to see your name in the newspaper, hear it on the radio, win a prize, don’t you? If you hunt the wolves to extinction, where do you think your soul will go after you die? (24; 36). The newspapers, broadcasts, and radio that Bilgee repeatedly speaks of were the most important propaganda tools of that era. They absolutely were not media in the ordinary sense, but in every respect the weapons of the rulers. The difficulty for the novel is to make us relive the story and through the intense suffering of Bilgee to give us an understanding of the power of ‘technology’ in the ideological apparatus. As Herbert Marcuse wrote, “Today, domination perpetuates and extends itself not only through technology but as ­technology,

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and the latter provides the great legitimation of the expanding political power, which absorbs all spheres of culture.”443 Whoever grasps this weapon can dominate public opinion, guide public sentiment, change the color of the grassland, and even alter (or distort) history. Bilgee sees this clearly and privately tells Chen Zhen: Bilgee said that in olden days, Han armies would come to the grassland and start killing and eating dogs, infuriating the herdsmen and inciting armed resistance. Even now, shepherds’ dogs were often stolen by ­outsiders, who killed and ate them. Their coats were secretly sent to the Northeast and to China proper … The old man commented angrily, “But you’ll never find that mentioned in books written by Chinese!” (123; 196). ‘Speaking’ is taken very seriously in the novel. It is what is ‘higher up’ that carries weight for all of what to say and how to say it. The duty of the other side (lower down) is to listen. It takes two hands to clap, so if those ‘lower down’ do not listen as they are supposed to, whatever those ‘higher up’ say is futile. In that special era, ‘speaking’ was a symbol of power, and listening was the duty of the masses. Not listening, therefore, became a potential means of political resistance. There is a description in Chapter 30 of ‘ears’ and ‘defiance’ that is interesting. In the course of raising the wolf, Chen Zhen discovers that the wolf’s ears stand upright and their hearing is very sensitive. He speculates that the ancestors of dogs may have had upright ears as well, until humans tamed the dogs and their ears drooped. “Humans in the distant past may have disliked dogs’ wild spirit and so were constantly folding their ears down … over a long period of time dogs’ ears were worn soft by humans. Once the ears lost their stiffness, the dogs’ defiance went out of them as well, and dogs ultimately turned into subdued servants of humans” (296). His train of thought leads him to consider how “Mongol horse herders tame wild horses by first tweaking their ears, lowering the horse’s head, before the herders can saddle and mount them. Chinese landlord matrons also liked to twist the ears of servant girls. Once the ears were twisted the status of slave or servant was confirmed.” (296) This reasoning then extends to national character: The nomads used the technique of ‘controlling ears’ to twist the ears of wild cattle, horses, sheep, and dogs until they were soft, turning them 443 Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), 158.

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into slaves and servants. Later, the tough nomad peoples applied this successful experience to other tribes and ethnicities, twisting the ears of conquered peoples. Groups that occupied dominant status tweaked the ears of peoples under their rule (296). At this point, what originally might send thoughts racing in the direction of ‘listening,’ makes ‘not listening’ into a means by which Chen Zhen gains freedom and enjoys freedom. Regrettably, he obviously turns ‘controlling ears’ to his own specific purpose, and abandons the path of accomplishing something in the realm of inaction that opens up through not listening—that is the direction of freedom. What Chen Zhen does is the opposite: he listens intently to the voice of the grassland, but he also violates the will of its people by raising the wolf cub, while at the same time paying attention to the voice of higher authority, obeying the military directive to turn firearms on the heart of the grassland. The court of moral judgment is always in session. In that era, when moral judgment was such a luxury, judgment after the fact is not necessarily just. Within such an extreme—one could say tyrannical—ideological apparatus, not listening is the start of resistance, an alternative expression of rebellion, and its price was unusual. When Bao Shungui in Chapter 29 rides out to inspect the situation on the sandy hill and pasture he is so angry he swears: Didn’t I tell you that eliminating wolves was our highest priority in setting up the new pasture? … But you people wouldn’t listen. Well, look around—this is your punishment for not heeding my warning! From now on, anyone who speaks up for the wolves will lose his job and be sent to attend a study session. And make restitution for our losses! (294; 428). Bilgee knows that this is not an empty threat and has a premonition of ­looming disaster, looking with a sense of desolation at the heavens, his lips trembling. Chen Zhen is moved to sympathy and whispers to Zhang Jiyuan, “Mastering the grassland is too hard on a man … and anyone who tries will likely wind up as a scapegoat for failures” (294; 428). Such appears to be the case in Chapter 17: The final disposition of the case involving the warhorse massacre came down from higher authorities. A major administrative demerit was recorded for Uljii, who was responsible for all production; he was dismissed from the three-in-one leadership body and was sent down to a grassroots unit to toughen himself up through manual labor. Similar demerits were

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also recorded for the herders—Batu, Laasurung, and the two others— and Batu was replaced as militia company commander (158; 248). Cadres were dismissed, ordinary citizens placed in ‘political study classes,’ and fines were imposed on top of the political punishments. In that difficult era, when even small mistakes could affect grandchildren, making examples of people as offenders intimidated everyone. Consider the scene in which people crowd around to seize some loot after killing wolves, and Bao Shungui waves his whip, shouting, “Anything you find has to be handed over to the state! ­Whoever disobeys this goes to political study class!” (60; 85). The clamor instantly ­subsides, evidence of the momentous power of discourse and the ‘weapon of discourse’ (the study class). Where once blood was shed for mastery of the grassland, now merely ‘speaking’ can control the world, evidence that the ­political power hovering over ‘consciousness’ is far superior to military contests on the battlefield. Those who experienced it all know that in that special era ‘study class’ was an extremely widespread form of punishment. It brought together collections of people who were ‘politically incorrect’ for criticism and struggle, denunciations, and brain washing. Once someone entered ‘study class,’ whoever they were, they became political outcasts, as if marked with a ‘scarlet letter’ or the Star of David stitched on one’s clothing, a mark of filth that a ‘whole country that is totally red’ must clean. Under these circumstances, everyone felt threatened and behaved cautiously. Anyone who voiced any disagreement immediately received a warning: “Watch what you’re saying, or the next criticism session will be for you” (58; 92). The power and effectiveness of ideology is evident: “Ideologies are not really produced by individual consciousness; rather, individuals formulate their beliefs within positions already fixed by ideology, as if they were their true producers.”444 Once ‘consciousness’ becomes social consensus, the boundary between listening and not listening is blurred, the way a machine on inertial operation can continue running on its own. John Thompson described in detail five modes of ideological operation: legitimation, dissimulation, unification, fragmentation, and reification, which “may overlap and reinforce one another.”445 Examining the novel with these in mind, it is most interesting that these five modes are ubiquitous: For legitimation the strategy is universalization: “By means of this strategy, institutional arrangements which serve the interests of some individuals are represented as serving the interests of all,” as well as open to all (61). This is a 444 Jorge Larrain, Ideology and Cultural Identity, 74. 445 John Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture, 60.

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fundamental feature of the ideological apparatus, and is also its foundation.446 In the novel, its name is the entire ‘nation.’ For dissimulation the chief strategy is euphemism. Through this, rulers conceal or deny their political character by which they reap benefits in order to sustain the legitimacy of their holding power. Dissimulation “may be expressed in symbolic forms by means of a variety of different strategies.”447 Like the ‘wolf hunting heroes’ portrayed as eliminating threats on behalf of the people in Wolf Totem, “actions, institutions, or social relations are described or redescribed in terms which elicit a positive valuation.”448 For unification the typical strategy is standardization, that “embraces individuals in a collective identity”449 (such as within the borders of a state), using a national language, and symbols that construct the nation and integrate ethnic groups through national flags, symbols, anthems, and so forth, so that different groups adopt a collective allegiance and sense of identity that is shared. Fragmentation means fragmenting “those individuals and groups that might be capable of mounting an effective challenge to dominant groups”450 through typical strategies such as division and exclusion. Division is emphasizing difference among people (such as class divisions), while exclusion requires constructing an enemy (such as grassland wolves) in order to exclude the other. Through propaganda mechanisms, the constructed enemy is used for “orienting forces of potential opposition towards a target which is projected as evil, harmful, or threatening.”451 Thompson cited the examples of Nazis persecuting Jews in 1930s Germany and of Stalin’s massive political purges. We can understand the measures of exclusion in the novel by citing Yang Ke: Over the past two decades, vast numbers of peasants have gone to work in factories, moved into cities, and started school, and then they’ve done all they can to drive the intellectuals into the countryside to become second-class peasants. They forced millions of students like us out of the cities (189; 295).

446 Ibid., 61. Thompson here follows Chapter 3 of Max Weber, Economy and Society: Outline of Interpretive Sociology. 447 Ibid., 62. 448 Ibid. 449 Ibid., 64. 450 Ibid., 65. 451 Ibid.

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Reification usually appears in word construction by eliding sentences that contain a special ideological significance and nominalizing them, that is, eliding a course of events through eliminating actors and agents, and collapsing their meaning into a totalizing noun or an abbreviation.452 There are numerous examples of this in the novel, such as how the phrase “Sovrev” (Soviet revisionism) is enough to convict people, and the mere mention of “study class” sufficient to quell disorder without raising a hand. Thompson pointed out that from the eighteenth century to the present, ideology is understood as a particular kind of belief system characteristic of the modern age … conceptualized as a cluster of values and beliefs which are produced and diffused by agencies of the state, and which serve to reproduce the social order by securing the adherence of individuals to it.453 Althusser distinguished in detail the differences between “repressive state apparatus” and “ideological state apparatus.”454 As a Marxist theorist, he tended toward a positive, that is, with a perspective of historical progress, affirmation of the positive role of ideology in establishing nations and even in literary art. If we place the Olonbulag in the analytical framework of the latter, the “production and diffusion of the dominant ideology is one of the tasks of the state, or of particular agencies and officials of the state. In carrying out this task, the state acts in the long-term interests of the class or classes which benefit most from existing social relations.”455 Under the control of ideology, the state apparatus smoothly and effectively plays its omnipresent role, functioning harmoniously through regular mechanisms, providing as much (or more) order and strength as in a democratic political system. Wolf Totem may be read as an example showing how the government of an ideological state was formed and functioned. First is the symbiosis and collusion of interest groups, that which, in the name of the nation/state, are always organizations of power that national elites form, that is to say, “the class or classes which benefit most from ­existing 452 Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, 94ff. The author is citing Marcuse’s discussion of abbreviations and abridgements as related to Thompson’s discussion of the effect of nominalization on eliding information. 453 John Thompson, 78. 454 See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, 135–40. 455 John Thompson, 88.

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social relations.” This works at three levels of society simultaneously. The first is the leadership that wields power at the managerial level, which in the novel  is the invisible but ever present ‘higher up,’ selected by organization departments or removed by them. They are called upon as the products of (this) ideological apparatus to be recognized at the same time as its firm protectors and inheritors. The second are the representatives of the various social groups (such as Bilgee and Uljii) enlisted at a level of special privilege to participate in administering and discussing government affairs. Together with those who hold power, they form a new interest group, those who benefit from the ideological apparatus. The third level is that of social identity and survival. They use the standards of political distinctions and the rationing system to divide groups in order to break down the strength of ordinary people and ameliorate social contradictions. These are always specific arrangements of various ­policies announced on the spot. Because they are on the spot, they are quite effective. In the novel, Old Wang, the migrant outsider, voices his complaint: You students from Beijing have been given local household registration. How about speaking up for us outsiders when you get a chance? That way the local Mongols won’t drive us away … There are forty or fifty of us involved in backbreaking labor, and we have to pay black market prices for the grain to go along with the wild vegetables we pick, all without a drop of oil. But you use it in your lanterns (228; 348). Even though the students and the migrants are outsiders to the border region grassland and share the same harsh environment, their political treatment and living conditions are completely different. This has nothing to do with individual effort, and is entirely decided by state policy. In that era state policy was a concept that was all too important and familiar to our society. It had the effect of law, but did not require legislation. It was extremely flexible and arbitrary, like a special unit of the power system, the state apparatus, and could always put out the flames of any crisis the moment one threatened to flare up. We are given a glimpse of its power when a mere ‘student policy’ enlists the force in ­society that consciously and spiritually is the most subversive—the students— into the level of special interest. Although students and migrants alike are on the same grassland and in the same border district, policy demarcates a clear boundary between the social status and benefits of students and migrants, the greatest destructive force and the most numerous. Next is the reciprocal follow up of the organization system and the propaganda system. The former is responsible for selecting people of ability, choosing suitable people from among those who are ‘advanced’ in all fields and at

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all levels of society to enter organizations of power in order to guarantee the normal functioning and sustainable development of the ideological apparatus. Consciousness has features of individual distinctions that indeed transcend class, ethnicity, gender, age, etc., and so has massive potential that transcends class origins, ethnic make-up and gender identity. The latter, the propaganda system, runs the state propaganda apparatus, and is tightly organized with people specially assigned exclusively to disseminate (this) thought and eliminate (other) ideas, in order to guarantee the cohesive force and legitimacy of the ideology. If we take the former, the organization system, as the hardware guaranteeing the normal functioning of the apparatus of power, then the latter is the software that guides public opinion in order to preserve social stability. It is only by being so soft that it can enter any opening, penetrate text, and ­penetrate public sentiment. All rights and wrongs and questions of benefit can be explained in the sense of the ‘normal’ and ‘stability.’ Thompson believed that the arrival of the ‘post-’ era has signified “not only the end of the age of ideologies, but the end of ideologies as such.”456 In Western academic circles this view is quite representative, but I cannot agree. I believe that since the worldwide spread of Marxism, humanity has even more consciously transcended differences of nationality, race, and gender, working together to put ‘consciousness’ into social practice, to make it into a decisive force to influence the fate of humanity and transform the world. Blueprints for building utopias were a hallmark of nineteenth-century Europe, resulting in a host of ideas. Then in the twentieth century, as groups in different societies throughout the world strove to turn many blueprints into reality, the age of ­ideology appeared.457 Thompson believed the “decline of religion and magic prepared the ground for the emergence of secular belief systems or ‘ideologies’ … which served to mobilize political action in a world stripped of tradition.”458 When people abandoned the countryside to enter modern urban life, when social groups abandoned kinship relations for different interest groups, when human understanding abandoned superstition to believe in science and technology, ideology became an important force for bringing together groups of ‘strangers’ and societies of ‘economic humans.’ Today ideologization 456 John Thompson, 77. 457 In advancing this concept, Thompson believed that the radical revolutionary movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the apogee. The secularization of social life and political power created the conditions for the rise and spread of “ideology.” John Thompson, 77 ff. For the internal connections between utopia and ideology, see the classic work of Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia. 458 John Thompson, 76.

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­(yìshíxíngtaìhuà 意 识 形 态 化 ) is a fundamental feature not only of socialist states, but also capitalist states as well. What is different is the form of operation. The latter accomplishes its ideological transformation in the operation of the ‘free’ market, so that the ideas of civilization and progress permeate all the bits of daily life and even public sentiment. The former conceals the state apparatus behind ‘consciousness,’ entering peacefully into every field (whether human or material, conscious or collective unconscious). The difference between the ‘democratic’ and the ‘authoritarian’ is not whether they are linked to ideology but in the mode of linkage, manifested in basic attitudes in things related to consciousness, such as thought, speech, dissemination, the right to know, and so forth. In democratic societies ‘consciousness’ is superficially pluralistic and free; an individual’s ideology is subject to change and choice. In ­authoritarian societies ‘consciousness’ is an instrument of the authoritarian government, manifested not only as monistic and unified, but also established and fixed; in such a society the asphyxiation of ‘thought’ throughout the entire society is more commonplace than the death penalty. Living in the world today, “we look in vain in the modern world for the serenity and calm that seemed to characterize the atmosphere in which some thinkers of ages past lived. The world no longer has a common faith and our professed ‘community of interest’ is scarcely more than a figure of speech.”459 In terms of the field of economics, “ideology is an economizing device by which individuals come to terms with their environment and are provided with a ‘world view’ so that the decision-making process is simplified.”460 The view of political science is that ideology is understood primarily as a secular belief system with the function of mobilizing masses of people and consolidating national power. Thompson pointed out that the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth marked the beginning of the “age of ideology,” and the French and American revolutions as well as the spread of numerous ‘isms’ (from socialism and communism to liberalism, conservatism, and nationalism, together with the reestablishment of nation states) were all achieved under the guidance of ideology.461 The ideology of early capitalism took the independent homo economicus as its starting point, and affirmed ­“liberty, equality, and democracy” as its core values. Its social foundation was indeed the market economy brought on by capital. The balance of values in the twentieth century was inverted. Its basic unit was the “nation/state” or a social 459 Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1954), xxiv. 460 Douglass North, Structure and Change in Economic History, 49. 461 John Thompson, 77.

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group in the name of the “people.” Its method of operation was (class) struggle, (national) revolution, and (women’s) liberation.462 Its ultimate aim was consistent with the former, but exchanged the “individual” for the “collective,” attempting to liberate “humankind” from the oppression of capital and capitalism, empires and imperialism, so that the whole world could share equally in the modern fruits of “progress.” All these undertakings could acquire reasonable explanation and space for survival/existence in Marxist ideology and socialist movements. History has demonstrated that, given the ­preconditions of independence and sufficiency, ‘human rights’ of the individual as the basic unit have become universal values that contemporary human societies have sought in common. Given this, why was communist ideology historically produced, together with the socialist revolutions that it set in motion? The evident feature of capitalist ideology is the premise of sufficiency. What could provide a life of such abundance and dignity for all humankind across the globe without invading and pillaging like the ‘Western wolves’? That is the important question. Marx tried to answer this question, and the socialist movement sought to resolve it. As a result the entire twentieth century was filled with the new states that Marxist ideology and socialist revolutions produced. They have been known as ‘communist countries’—needless to say, New China is one—and their revolutions and reforms, their practice and experiments have all had one basic point, ‘eliminate poverty.’ Even their victims and opponents can point out in fairness: The true poisonous weed is poverty and hatred, shown most typically on the mainland of China. Communist ideals promised poor people a prosperous future that attracted a following among the poor. Yet its egalitarianism reinforced the resentment of the poor, the humble, the weak, and the base toward the wealthy, the elite, the strong, and the superior, and drove their vengeful movement to an extreme of frenzied revolution.463 Socialist revolution was a typical ideological act, reflected in the social system rather than national character, a product of human ‘consciousness.’ So was this 462 Herbert Marcuse in One Dimensional Man analyzed closely terms such as “liberty,” “equality,” “democracy,” and “freedom,” and discourses of “class,” “revolution,” “authoritarian,” “liberation,” and “happiness,” distinguishing the function of “propaganda” in capitalist and communist ideological systems. 463 Kang Zhengguo 康 正 果 , “1945 nian yilai Taiwan de wenhua puxi 一 九 四 五 年 以 来 台 湾 的 文 化 谱 系 [Cultural Genealogy of Taiwan Since 1945: A Mainlander’s Overseas Perspective],” paper presented at the International Conference: Taiwan and Its Contexts, Yale University, New Haven, April 28, 2007.

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a man-made historical mistake, or as Marx said, the force to ‘push history forward’? The answer is contained in the question: a century later, is it the victor or the vanquished? The Soviet Union disintegrated, a picture of failure, but I affirm Fredric Jameson’s view: The collapse of the Soviet Union was not due to the failure of communism but rather to the success of communism, provided one understands this last, as the West generally does, as a mere strategy of modernization. For it is by way of rapid modernization that the Soviet Union was thought, even fifteen years ago, virtually to have caught up with the West …464 There is evidence of this in the novel. Escaping deprivation is a hope that people of the grassland share in common. “The students and young herders, as well as most of the women and children, looked forward to the arrival of the [army] corps, anticipating the beautiful future described by Bao Shungui and the corps cadres” (298; 433). Even Bilgee says, “We’ve always wanted a school for our children, and hoped we no longer had to take our sick to the banner hospital by oxcart or horse-drawn wagon” (298; 433). Years later, when the former students revisit the grassland, they have “heard that sheepherders now use motorcycles” (357; 510). The speed with which the people of the grassland have moved toward modernization has not only outstripped the hundred-year history of Western civilization, but also the level of development in the former Soviet Union. The change in public sentiment and even the improvements to the living environment are evidence of ‘success.’ The twenty-li-wide military zone and no-man’s-land had been breached by growing human and livestock populations and had become a lively pasture … The houses were all built on higher ground, clearly the center of the pasture settled by each family. Dozens of flocks of sheep and herds of cows were grazing. What amazed the two men was the size of the sheep flocks, likely three thousand in each, some reaching four thousand. Nomadic herding had clearly been replaced by settlement grazing to have flocks that big (359; 513–14). The herders have escaped deprivation and now have assets of their own. ­Bilgee’s descendants live in

464 Fredric Jameson, “Five Theses on Actually Existing Marxism,” Monthly Review 47.11 (April 1996).

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a row of spacious new houses, equipped with tv antennae and windpowered generators. Beneath a window was an old Beijing Jeep with a faded canvas top … the Mongolian-style living room, which was over a hundred square feet, furnished with sofas, tea tables, a tv and vcr, a liquor cabinet, and drinking paraphernalia. In the middle of the wall hung a large yellow tapestry showing Genghis Khan from the waist up. The Great Khan’s slanting eyes seemed to be observing his Mongol descendants and their guests with a tender look (360; 515). Together with the abundance and prosperity is a string of voices expressing doubts. When Chen Zhen notices the tapestry of Genghis Khan, Gasmai says, “A relative of Papa’s brought that over from Outer Mongolia when he visited the Olonbulag. He said we were doing well over here, but our education and pasture weren’t as good as theirs. In the future our prosperity will turn out to be fake” (360; 516). About their youthful encounters with wolves that Chen writes about, ­Gasmai protests, “No, no. Our Outer Mongolian relative said that they have a special preserve for the wolves and have banned wolf hunting. So why do you keep telling people about the bad thing I did?” (361; 516). Batu comments on the desertification of the pasture: “Assets on sandy land are not reliable… . If this pasture turns into a desert, like those of the outsiders, then we’ll be poor herders again” (361; 517). The sharp rise in population is also a concern: “Mongols should also practice birth control,” Gasmai continued. “The grassland can’t support too many children… . But the size of the pastureland doesn’t grow. The grass will be crushed if a few more houses are built on this tiny piece of land” (362; 518). These voices are no longer secretive, and speaking out this way does not bring on a political label or disaster. Instead, there is no audience for them. The doubts are not about the socialist practice of shared wealth, but about the modern society for which everyone has yearned and frantically struggled. This, in the meantime and for better or worse, once again happens to coincide with the postmodern: When the jeep passed Mongol yurts … even the barking was devoid of the ferocity that had been so effective in repelling wolves. Yang said, “Now that the wolves are gone, the dogs will disappear, and when they’re gone, there’ll be no more battles. Without battles, only sloth and inertia remain (358; 512). The small mounds of earth that rose around the marmot dens were still spread out over the hills … but even after more than ten miles not a

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single marmot was to be seen. Yang Ke said, “Now that even children have small caliber rifles can you expect to find any marmots? (358). Without wolves … the fierce dogs had become pets; warhorses had become tourist transport and props for photographs. Perhaps the Mongols should become a desert people. The most dreadful thing was that the Mongolian grassland was turning into desert, and was already more than halfway there (359). These are all typical postmodern issues, and as they relate to wolves, dogs, horses, and marmots, who can provide answers? Chen Zhen attempts to give one person’s answer. He obstinately believes that it is a question of national character brought on by the inferiority of agrarian people. Yang Ke asks him, “You’ve spent twenty years studying systems models, economic politics, and urban and rural issues in China and abroad. Why in the end did you return to the topic of national character?” (359; 513). Chen Zhen offers a rhetorical ­question in response: “Do you think other problems can be solved if that one can’t be?” (359; 513). After it thinking over Yang Ke responds, I guess you’re right. We haven’t found a solution to this problem since Lu Xun brought it up more than half a century ago. We Chinese seem incapable of ridding ourselves of that flaw. It’s been twenty years since the launching of the reforms, and we’ve made quite a bit of progress, but we’re still on shaky legs. Find some time now to talk to me about it all (359; 513). So there is the ‘lecture’ at the end of the book, in addition to the Wolf Totem that draws on wolves to write its prescription. “[T]he grassland could no longer feed the horses, which disappeared after the wolves. The cows and sheep will soon follow, I’m sure. Horseback races have turned into motorcycle races, and may one day evolve into a race of ecological refugees” (357; 510). Chen Zhen longs for wolves, Jiang Rong replanted the wolf banner and hawked the ‘wolf totem’—unfortunately, the totem is also an ideology that once again runs up against the backside of the postmodern. Postmodernism seeks to undo modern grand narratives, but it becomes, itself, a grand ideology, the ideology of globalization. Jorge Larrain has revealed that the superficial postmodern ‘fragmentation’ is actually a form of the ‘grand,’ and as such shown its internal nature as an ideology. Ultimately postmodernist conceptions are themselves ideological in that they help to mask the real contradictions of the global capitalist system

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… no other ideological form seems to be better suited than postmodernism to defend the system as a whole, because it makes chaos, bewildering change and endless fragmentation the normal and natural state of society.465 The same sort of problem exists in Wolf Totem: it questions the unified ideology and authoritarian form of government but offers no alternative that is any more ideal. It makes full use of the social role of art, adopting a critical pose to ‘stand in opposition to society.’ However, it cannot, as Theodor Adorno put it, maintain throughout an artistically autonomous form of expression. It cannot avoid a contradiction between its aesthetic consciousness and social responsibility. Adorno believed that artistic form itself has a social and political nature: “through form art participates in the civilization that it criticizes by its very existence.”466 Politics has blended into autonomous art, “and nowhere more so than where it seems to be politically dead. An example is Kafka’s allegory of toy guns, in which an idea of non-violence is fused with a dawning awareness of the approaching paralysis of politics.”467 The ‘wolf totem’ like the water pistol holds the wolf’s blood to transfuse it in a perfect demonstration of the quality of post-utopia, yet the lectures in the epilogue are counter examples, and all allegory may have vanished in the self-expression of thought. History tells us that after the utopian society introduced by ideological revolution has been put into practice dystopian criticism and post-­utopian criticism are certain to follow. If knowledge contains “ideological errors and deceptions,”468 whereas ideology itself is merely a tool “used to dissemble and deceive others, to defend oneself and to conquer” and “‘employs every ­immoral means at the service of the will to power,”469 then my question is: Is there any government on earth that could exist to ‘serve the people’? This is a question with no answer. In the present world there are no political entities that do not hang out the banner of a ‘republic’ in the name of ‘the people.’ Just as in the past, all regimes obey and directly serve groups with vested interests that hold power. Like me, people have constantly pitched questions about ‘the people’ but have never expected that anyone can offer an ideal 465 Jorge Larrain, Ideology and Cultural Identity, 118. 466 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Criticism (University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 143. 467 Theodor Adorno, “Adorno on Brecht” in Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Fredric Jameson (New York: Verso, 1980), 194. 468 Jorge Larrain discussing Nietzsche’s vision in The Will to Power, in Ideology and Cultural Identity, 41. 469 Ibid., 41–42.

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a­ nswer. Like tops that can spin without being struck, we have been caught in the massive invisible hand of ideology without being aware of it. What is it? 4.10

In Terms of Historiography: Where Does the Story of ‘Nature’ End? History: Is it not like the wolf in the fable, putting on false clothing stolen from other social sciences? fernand braudel470

From the perspective of Western historians human history is a paradox. On the one hand, it conforms itself to the principle of modern life to be ‘politically correct’ by acknowledging the plurality existing in history and recognizing that “in about 1819 the word ‘civilization,’ hitherto singular, began to be used in the plural.”471 History therefore no longer had a single face, but took on “a new and quite different meaning.”472 Western historians are, it can be said, leaving behind the Eurocentric vision of history and recognizing that in the contexts of different civilizations different populations may possess entirely different tracks of autonomous development. On the other hand, in the wave of globalization, “each civilization has kept its own original character. It must be admitted, however, that now is the first time when one decisive aspect of a particular civilization has been adopted willingly by all the civilizations in the world … what we call ‘industrial civilization’ is in the process of joining the collective civilization of the world.”473 Industrial civilization is Western civilization, one that has not only controlled the course of world history since early modern times, but also determined its nature and direction, steadily making the entire world homogeneous, i.e. Westernized. Its principal forms of manipulation have been war, not peace, and pillaging through invasion, not sharing. Since the eighteenth century, Capitalism arose as a world-scale process: as a world system. Capitalism became concentrated in Europe because colonialism gave Europeans the

470 Fernand Braudel, A History of Civilization, trans. Richard Mayne (London: Penguin, 1995), xxxviii. 471 Ibid., 6. 472 Ibid. 473 Ibid., 8.

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power both to develop their own society and to prevent development from occurring elsewhere.474 Contemplating this historical phenomenon could induce different historiographic attitudes. It may produce reflection and self-criticism, and could become capital for pride among Western peoples. In the occupied colonies it could provoke resistance, and evoke admiration and emulation. The historical vision that Wolf Totem reveals is an example of that. Chen Zhen, as the major character, sees in the “tyrannical nature of the wolf” the “the primitive wildness and brutish nature of Westerners” (109; 173), and a microcosm of world history in the dog pen taken over by the wolf cub: “Wolves are scary,” Yang remarked. “This little bastard’s eyes aren’t even open and he’s already a tyrant … Chen Zhen, mesmerized by the sight, was deep in thought. “We’ll have to study him closely,” he said finally. There is a lot we can learn from this. Our dog pen is a microcosm of world history” (109; 173). Chen Zhen is convinced that “[f]or the most part, Westerners are descendants of barbarian, nomadic tribes such as the Teutons and the Anglo-Saxons” (109; 173). From the standpoint of Western civilization, he evaluates the ‘barbarity’ of the West: They burst out of the primeval forest like wild animals after a couple of thousand years of Greek and Roman civilization, and sacked ancient Rome. They eat steak, cheese, and butter with knives and forks, which is how they’ve retained more primitive wildness and brutish nature than the traditional farming races (109; 173). Here the daily implements (knives and forks) and the food (steak and so forth) reveal the bloodiness and lethality of what Chen Zhen has designated as the “highest civilization”—civilization and primitive wildness combined perfectly in Westerners. What sort of logic is this? Do not blame Chen Zhen, for this is the logic of history: “A distinguishing feature of the ancient world is that war often paid off for the victor.”475 By the early modern era world history was increasingly dominated by Western civilization, using warfare as its means 474 James Morris Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (New York: Guilford Press, 1993), 206. 475 Douglass North, Structure and Change in Economic History, 114.

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to achieve its aims of conquest and occupation to construct “the colonizer’s model of the world” of which the basic features were invasion and pillage.476 Such has been what we call civilization that the more ‘wild and brutish’ the character of a people the more likely they are to become the manipulators of ‘progress.’ Thus there is nothing strange about Chen Zhen’s view of history: The Westerners who fought their way back to the East were all descendants of nomads … and the blood of wolves ran in their veins. The ­Chinese, with their weak dispositions, are in desperate need of a transfusion of that vigorous, unrestrained blood. Had there been no wolves, the history of the world would have been written much differently (138; 218). With the blood of wolves in the veins of the victors, they created world history, and their core value was conquest. This was conquest in all aspects, as they appear in Wolf Totem one by one on the symbolic Olonbulag. First is the occupation of the land. Accompanying invasion and occupation are the victor’s pillaging of all resources and wealth of the new land, and the transformation of the natural environment. In the New World of the American continent, forests and fields were transformed into plantations. In Wolf Totem it is pasture turned into farmland: Yang Ke complains that with the settling of migrant workers on the grassland, “pristine pasture will soon become a dirty little farming village, and the swan lake will become a pond for domestic geese” (225; 342). The workers begin “plowing the land near their houses. Four deep furrows formed a large vegetable garden, and within a few days, vegetables began to sprout … Beijing students were already lining up to place orders for ­Chinese vegetables that were unavailable on the grassland” (225; 343). With the occupation comes the governance and management of the indigenous people. Foremost in these is ideological transformation. The practice of European colonialism was that missionaries and churches followed immediately after the shooting; in Wolf Totem, “[p]eople had gotten so caught up in the Cultural Revolution over the past couple of years that the traditional life of the grassland—a mixture of tending sheep and hunting wild animals—had been turned upside down, like a flock of sheep scattered in a blizzard.” (10; 13) “In the past, herdsmen made an annual trek to the top of that mountain to worship Tengger and the Mountain God. But with the current political situation, no one has dared go up for a couple of years” (12; 15). The value concepts of Han Chinese culture have quietly transformed public sentiment: 476 See the section in Chapter 4, “Colonialism and the Rise of Europe,” in Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World.

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Now no Mongol from Inner Mongolia is going to admit that their songs are derived from wolf howls. I’ve asked a number of herders. Some say no, and some just equivocate. It’s no wonder that with songs like the one in the revolutionary opera The Red Lantern singing about how “The prison guards howl like wolves,” who is going to say wolves are the source of Mongol folk music? (259). After occupation and ideology, there are large-scale immigration and acculturation. Acculturation is qualitatively different than Fernand Braudel’s cultural borrowing (emprunts) and cultural transference (transferts culturels) in which perspectives are not shared. In the words of Douwe Fokkema and Elrud Ibsch, acculturation occurs when people “adopt some conventions of a culture which is not their own,”477 to the point that “at present all major c­ ultures are an interesting mixture.”478 In the Epilogue of Wolf Totem the grassland and its people become such a mixture, only not so interesting. A Mongol teenager on a motorcycle rides toward Chen Zhen and Yang Ke: Chen was shocked to see a small-caliber rifle slung over the youth’s shoulder and a medium-sized hawk tied to the seat, dripping blood … He had never imagined even a Mongol child possessing such a weapon or using it while riding an advanced, imported two-wheel vehicle (357; 511). In the course of this encounter we see faintly on the Olonbulag a microcosm of the ‘history of world civilization,’ and in the clash and contest of civilizations what it also shows is a contradiction, the contradiction of the era of total globalization: the blending and clash of ‘indigenous culture’ with ‘modern civilization’ in the process of complete Westernization. The Canadian historian Leften Stavrianos has tried to resolve the contradiction by addressing the scholarly idea that “a new world requires a new historiography” with the “global historical view.” By revising the tripartite history centered on the West (ancient, medieval, modern) to a bipartite pluralist perspective, the course of world development is seen as two basic stages. The first stage is divided by natural geography with an obvious geopolitical c­ haracter: 477 D. Fokema 佛 克 马 [Douwe Fokkema] and E. Yibusi 蚁 布 思 [Elrud Ibsch], Wenxue yanjiu yu wenhua canyu 文 学 研 究 与 文 化 参 与 [The study of literature and cultural participation], (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1996), 142. This volume is a Chinese translation of lectures by the authors at Peking University in 1993. For a later version of Ibsch’s writings in this volume, see her monograph Knowledge and Commitment: A ­Problem-oriented Approach to Literary Studies (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000). 478 Ibid., 152.

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different peoples in different environments created different civilizations, which formed the histories of various states of varying content. The second stage belongs to the modern world of Western domination. By means of military power, ideology, and science and technology, the West gradually achieved the globalization of modern civilization during the process of colonization, resulting in the ‘global village’ and A Global History.479 Standing on the elevation of the new history, the British historian A.G. Hopkins called the colonial stage the period of “proto-globalization.” The American scholar Arif Dirlik believes “globalization is the ultimate realization of colonialism.”480 In terms of a global perspective, I agree with Stavrianos’s historical view of a bipartite division. Read this way, Wolf Totem tells an allegorical tale that compresses history, its plot based on bipartite division in which clear boundaries dividing the fate of the Olonbulag in two are evident everywhere. When the story begins we see the grassland in a state of primal nature. When the author was interviewed he spoke of the time when the first group of students from Beijing arrived on the Olonbulag: The grassland still retained the natural appearance of primitive beauty, just as it had been centuries before. This demonstrated that the herdsmen did understand how to preserve the natural environment and protect the ecological balance. The destruction of the grassland ecology occurred only after Han Chinese policy and massive migration into the grassland.481 The relationship between history and nature in Wolf Totem is an important metaphor that suggests that the nature of the history of civilization is essentially the relationship of humans and nature, in which a bipartite history is apparent. The first historical period was one in which the constraints of nature on humans and the respect of humanity for nature showed: “History itself is a real part of natural history—of nature’s coming to be man.”482 Its highest stage 479 The British scholar Geoffrey Barraclough, History in a Changing World (1956) first proposed ideas for what became a global historical view. The Canadian scholar Marshall McLuhan first termed the world a “global village” in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964). Leften Stavrianos published The World Since 1500: A Global History (1966) and The World to 1500: A Global History (1970), various editions of which are seen as representative work of this theory. 480 Alifu Delike [Arif Dirlik], “Quanqiuhua, xiandaixing yu Zhongguo [Globalization, modernity, and China],” Dushu 2007 No. 7: 12. 481 Jiang Rong, interview with Ms. Yao Ting of Bertelsmann by letter, n. p. n. d. 482 Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan (Amherst, ny: Prometheus Books, 1988), 111.

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of development was agrarian civilization, corresponding as a whole to Stavrianos’s first stage of global history. The latter stage is that of humanity using various means (primarily technological) for the conquest of nature and the alienation of nature, to the point that “at present nature that humans have left untouched no longer exists on the globe.”483 Beginning with the great geographic discoveries and the industrial revolution, history entered the second stage of global history, in which modern Western civilization became its representative and displayed its highest form of development. Unlike historiography, the historical issues that Wolf Totem reveals contain elements of nature. The history that it presents is not about humans only, but even more is about humans and nature; given a setting in which society exits the stage, the historical relationship of humans and nature is exceptionally pronounced. This relation is not limited by ethnicities or locations; it transcends cultural differences, approaching aspects of the essence of human history, pressing us to ask on the basis of the bipartite division: Can the transformation of the relationship of humans and nature be regarded as an ‘event’? What would be the internal connection(s) of this history and human history or world history? This study aims to uncover the allegory of historiography implied in Wolf Totem through the historical relationship of humans and nature. According to the bipartite division, the rise of Western civilization and the start of globalization can be fixed around 1500—the major geographic discoveries and the beginning of colonialism: “1492 was the beginning of the European seizure of power over the other peoples and continents, and according to Hegel this was the hour when modern times were born.”484 The spread of Western values also began at this time, and its special characteristic was ‘conquest.’ This was a gradual process without a strict chronological marker, but with a very clear historical demarcation: for all those territories that the West conquered, occupied, or colonized, it meant the end of the story of ‘nature.’ Every land in the world has had a history of expansion, warfare, and even colonization. One basic thing never changed: a mode of existence in which natural economy dominated remained fundamentally unchanged. Whether nomadic or agrarian, these economies all had to follow the logic of nature 483 Shengtai renleixue 生 态 人 类 学 [Seitai jinruigaku; Ecological anthropology], ed. Qiudao Zhini 秋 道 智 弥 [Akimichi Tomoya] et al., trans. Fan Guangrong 范 广 融 (Kunming: Yunnan Daxue chubanshe, 2006), 27. 484 Jürgen Moltmann, God for a Secular Society: The Public Relevance of Theology (Fortress Press, 1999), 6. The quotation from Georg Hegel is from his Reason in History.

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strictly. Early agriculture included the practice of crop rotation based on reasoning similar to herding. “In the first stages of cultivation and rearing livestock, a sparse human population spread out across a vast nature. At that time one could say that humans were merely one member of the natural biological world.”485 Farming was human’s selective use of nature, creating durable agrarian civilizations, and “their durability was due mainly to the durability of the land on which they were built.”486 With proper care of this land, if Western civilization had not forced an entry, a social organization could have maintained itself indefinitely on the autonomous track of the ‘unity of heaven and humanity.’ Chinese civilization is an example of this: “Heaven does not alter its seasons for anything. The sage does not bend his laws for anyone. Heaven carries out its functions, and all things are benefited. The sage also carries out his functions, and the hundred surnames are benefited. For this reason, all things are treated equally and the hundred surnames proliferate.”487 The idea of equality has a balancing function that conforms to nature and constrains material desire, something that can even be seen as a strategy for sustainable survival. From the time of Western civilization, that is industrial civilization, an overbearing posture of conquering nature replaced the humble attitude of conforming to nature, beginning early on with the occupation of land: “Many historians point out the fact that most wars and colonizing movements were started because someone wanted more land. But seldom do they note that the conquerors or colonizers had often ruined their own land before they started to take that of their neighbors.”488 There is evidence for this in Wolf Totem: The three dozen or so laborers from the farming areas of Inner Mongolia … had spent years engaged in full-time or seasonal work in pasturelands, but their grandparents had been herders and their parents had spent half their time farming and the other half herding in areas where Mongols lived alongside Han Chinese. Most of that grassland had turned into poor, sandy farmland in their time, and it could no longer provide for them. So, like migratory birds, they came out here (224; 341).

485 Shengtai renleixue, 27. 486 Vernon G. Carter and Tom Dale, Topsoil and Civilization (Norman, ok: University of ­Oklahoma Press, 1955), 14. 487 Guanzi: Political, Economic, and Philosophical Essays from Early China, Volume ii xiii. 38 [ii] trans. W. Allyn Rickett (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 86–7. 488 Vernon G. Carter and Tom Dale, Topsoil and Civilization, 7.

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“The mass migrations of man over the face of the earth were mainly to obtain richer natural resources. Regardless of whether you call such migrations colonization, conquest, or emigration, the objectives were much the same. The migrators … [most often] were trying to dispossess a neighbor who had richer land or more wealth.”489 People go to higher positions. The aim of conquest or migration was certainly a place more bountiful than where the conquerors came from, the garden of the ‘other’ that others had labored to create. On others’ land plunder replaced labor as the most convenient method of gaining prosperity. The appearance of the natural state of society also completely vanished following the forcible entry of the outsiders, the ‘heterogeneous,’ elements. “Civilized man has marched across the face of the earth and left a desert in his footprints.”490 Prior to this, each plot of land had its own history; none was exactly like another.491 After this, “virtually every space in the world is explored, charted, and finally brought under control. For the native, the history of colonial servitude is inaugurated by loss of the locality to the outsider … [W]herever they went Europeans immediately began to change the local habitat; their conscious aim was to transform territories into images of what they had left behind.”492 In Wolf Totem there is this passage: It’s crazy to promote settlements on the grassland. People from farming areas know nothing about it. They like to settle down, and that’s fine. Why force others to do the same? Everyone knows that life would be easier if we didn’t keep moving. But we’ve been doing that for generations … The whole point of nomadic herding is to avoid the downsides [of a location] and make good use of the advantage (334; 476). Like the European colonists, the Han Chinese settlers on others’ land do not care that “soil and the living things in and upon it exist in a relation of interdependence and mutual benefit.”493 Bilgee repeatedly voices his resentment: “When you Chinese came to the grassland, you broke down our established rules” (263; 390). It is interesting that previously when land changed flags there had always been bloodshed, but the Olonbulag had been an exception. Why? 489 Ibid., 20–21. 490 Ibid., 14. 491 See Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), especially Chapter 5 and Chapter 6. 492 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 225. 493 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 78.

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The corps’ grand design had already incorporated the ancient Olonbulag. The main idea was to quickly end the primitive nomadic herding style of production that had dominated the area for thousands of years … The corps would supply money and equipment, along with engineering teams to build brick houses with tiled roofs and sturdy animal pens made of concrete and stone; it would also dig wells, pave highways, and build schools, hospitals, post offices, auditoriums, shops, and movie theaters … They would strengthen the grassland’s ability to fight commonly occurring natural disasters. They wanted to ensure that herders, who had lived for thousands of years under the most inhospitable and difficult conditions, could gradually settle down and lead stable, happy lives (298; 433). Thus, the people of the grassland do not resist. Rather, “students and young herders, as well as most of the women and children, looked forward to the arrival of the corps, anticipating the beautiful future described by Bao Shungui and the corps cadres” (298; 433). In the name of ‘happiness’ all changes proceed in an orderly fashion with no need for violence. Such is the advantage of the postcolonial; it is established on the basis that civilization has already entered public sentiment to become a universal value. Under the banner of civilization, things were renamed, and the arrogation of power to nations/states on the basis of conquest steadily turned into the state of normality for human societies. Scholars have been incisive on this point: at the same time that Europeans and European civilization set out militarily “to subjugate weaker peoples, to rob them of their property, and to enslave them,” they found the excuse that the “sole object was to make it possible for primitive peoples to share in the blessings of European civilization.”494 It is in images that Wolf Totem represents this scene: Once the worker corps went in, the swan peonies in this pasture were completely dug out, stems, roots, and all. These people, who cared nothing for their own homelands certainly did not put any value on others.’ Once in another land they began pillaging it even more ruthlessly (232). What is discussed here is a matter internal to the nation state, revealing a significant issue: internal colonies. In the past not many Chinese ever came to the Olonbulag. The seven or eight hundred inhabitants of the one hundred and thirty or forty yurts 494 Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism in the Classical Tradition, 125.

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were all Mongols. Then came the Cultural Revolution and a hundred of you students arrived from Beijing. You’ve been followed by soldiers and big wagons, with drivers, and now they’re putting up buildings (79; 126). Here the “Cultural Revolution” is an historical event, and the question that it leads to is: What is the nature of this revolution? How could it summon an army to occupy and conquer the grassland without shedding blood? The next questions are: in what ways was it different from white men’s colonialism? In what ways was it the same? By comparison, did it fall short of or exceed Western civilization? There are two important reasons for the creation of an ‘internal colony’ in Wolf Totem. One is indigenous, arising from the need for survival of the people of the grassland themselves. “At the northeast corner of the brigade territory stood some forty square miles of barren, hilly land … Within a few years [this] unusable tract of wild land would become an excellent summer field for grazing, providing a new seasonal pasture” (148; 232–33). They respect and consciously adhere to the ‘logic of the grassland,’ and uphold the harmonious relation of humans and nature on the basis of mutual identification with the grassland ecology. The other cause is the ‘outside settlers.’ Such a flow is politically in the nature of exile, from the center to the periphery, either to ease internal political pressures or to garrison border regions. Victor Lee Burke in his study, The Clash of Civilizations, broached this topic: “It is important to identify whether the civilization is in fact an emanating core civilization or a peripheral c­ ivilization. The economic systems of the Byzantine empire and the Islamic empire had trade routes and power that allowed them to develop magnificent trade ­centers and urban areas, whereas the peripheral European state system was austere and rural.”495 When these observations are extended to the relations between mainstream Han Chinese culture and the sites of minority nationalities they appear quite apt. As he confronts the grassland steadily being swallowed, Chen Zhen is constantly reminded of the ancient border garrisons of army agricultural colonies and migrations to strengthen border defenses, as well as the policy of land reclamation for agriculture at the end of the Qing dynasty: These policies that encroached on the grassland and squeezed the herders had persisted all along down to the present. Yang Ke could not understand how newspapers and broadcasts condemned Khrushchev in the Soviet Union for destructive waste of grassland that created large areas of 495 Victor Lee Burke, The Clash of Civilizations: War-making and State Formation in Europe (Cambridge: Polity, 1997), 175.

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desertification and brought untold hardship on the people of the grassland, while leaving the same activities unchecked within China. Rather, the sound of the ‘battle hymn’ of the army reclamation units over the past several years was growing ever more insistent (224). Historians have sought to explain these situations through various approaches. The wave of migration during the Yongjia reign period of the early fourth century changed the distribution of ethnicities in north China and brought deep population shifts from the Changjiang south. “This means that prior to the founding of the Qing dynasty in 1644, although very few of the ethnicities invading from the north had crossed the Changjiang, the blood of the Xiongnu, Tongusic, and Qiang peoples had already been flowing in the veins of people in the south of China for centuries.”496 Unlike the colonial peoples on the periphery, the result was not genocidal or a clash of civilizations, but an ethnic mixture that cultural saturation precipitated. The research of Chen Yinke demonstrated that in the history of the formation of the Chinese people, “racial division was largely a matter of the culture that one accepted, rather than one’s bloodline.”497 Li Ji concluded: “Modern Chinese people are constituted by the propagation of the descendants of the Yellow Emperor, who since 722 bce have worn silk, eaten rice, and built city walls. They were our earliest ancestors.” From the first century, the ranks of modern Chinese people have been expanded through the Xiongnu, who adopted horseback riding, drank koumiss, and ate raw meat, the Qiang, who raised yaks, the Tongus, who raised pigs, and the Mongols, who harnessed horses. At the same time, in the course of our people’s expansion south of the C ­ hangjiang, they absorbed and integrated the tattooed Shan-speaking peoples, the ­Tibet-Burmese-speaking peoples who cremated their dead, and the ­Mon-Khmer-speaking peoples living in pile dwellings.498 496 Li Ji 李 济 , Zhongguo minzu de xingcheng 中 国 民 族 的 形 成 [The formation of the ­Chinese people] (Nanjing: Jiangsu jiaoyu chuband she, 2005), 297. 497 Chen Yinke 陈 寅 恪 , Yuan Bai shi jian zheng gao 元 白 诗 笺 证 稿 [Preliminary study of the poetry of Yuan Zhen and Bai Juyi) (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1978), 308. Elsewhere, Chen wrote, “During the northern dynasties, culture was more important than bloodline in distinguishing Han people from Hu people. Those who adopted Han culture were viewed as Han people, while those who adopted Hu culture were seen as Hu people. Bloodlines did not matter.” See Tang dai zhengzhi shi lun shu gao 唐 代 政 治 史 述 论 稿 [A preliminary introduction to the political history of the Tang dynasty] (Taipei: Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan, 1994), 19. 498 Li Ji, Zhengguo minzu de xingcheng, 298.

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Once they had become one of ‘us’ there was no need for bloodshed, which is the greatest difference with colonialism beyond borders. On the basis of interdependence, their weapons are all aimed outward. Unfortunately, what is ‘outward’ is the external environment, that is, the land and the corresponding natural environment. In terms of ruthlessly pillaging nature and destroying the environment, internal migration and external colonialism are different terms for the same effects: It was like opening a treasure box that attracted migrants from the farming areas; their northeastern-accented, Mongolian-influenced Chinese was heard deep in the grassland. “The agrarian Han civilization assimilated the Manchus of the Qing dynasty,” Chen said to Yang … “That sort of assimilation isn’t such a big problem. But if they attempt that here, we’ll be looking at a true ‘yellow peril’” (225–25; 343). The Han culture of a predominantly agrarian civilization triumphed on the grassland without a fight. It “generated certain cultural patterns, repressed others, and influenced the degrees of difference within a civilization.”499 Massive changes occurred, from the color of the earth to popular attitudes, as they steadily became ‘China’ (civilization) and not just the (natural) grassland.” As He Bingdi put it, agricultural development led to settled living and densely concentrated villages: “Only generations of living, dying, and being buried in this, the richest region of the yellow earth, could produce the most highly ­developed kinship system and ancestor worship in human history. Only the most highly developed ancestor worship could lead to a culture that was the most oriented toward revering the ancient past.”500 Reverence for the ancient past and attachment to history are divorced from nature. There is no place in ancestor worship for nature, and no space for the existence of the wolf totem. It is evident that in the transformation and plundering of nature, indigenous migration could well exceed colonialism and in no way fall short. Whether it exceeded or fell short depends entirely upon whether the cultural orientation of the dominant people was the natural or the civilized:

499 Victor Lee Burke, The Clash of Civilizations, 166. 500 He Bingdi 何 炳 棣 [Ho Ping-ti], Du shi yue shi liushi nian 读 史 阅 世 六 十 年 [Sixty years of reading history and experience] (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 2005), 442.

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The record of civilized peoples is even worse then that of barbarians, largely because they usually had better implements of war … And they generally called it “colonization” when they took land away from more primitive peoples, although sometimes they frankly called it conquest.501 This passage conveys the core of Western civilization, to conquer nature and at the same time to transform thoroughly the environment in which humans have survived and their mode of survival. As of the twentieth century, there “have been from ten to thirty different civilizations that have followed this road to ruin (the number depends on who classifies the civilizations).”502 In the trend of global Westernization it is possible that all non-Western civilization is close to extinction. It can be said that on the whole one result of Western civilization’s globalizing is the end of the natural state of society and the course of autonomous development for different peoples. It has been called “the end of history,” but not entirely the way Francis Fukuyama asserted. What Wolf Totem shows is not “the global triumph of liberalism” as found in Fukuyama’s study, but the end of the story of nature. What has ended it is not modern Western civilization, but precisely Chinese civilization dominated by natural, agrarian economy—where did the problem arise? If the point about the ‘bipartite division’ is taken as the origin of the end, we can ask: What is the boundary in the novel between the two parts? What is its watershed in the plot of the story? The relation of humans and nature in the novel is shown concretely in the relations of humans and grassland wolves. In terms of a bipartite division, there is a clear demarcation: how to hunt wolves. Whether to continue traditional methods of encirclement or make use of non-natural means becomes the watershed on which the plot turns. In Chapter 12 the theme is encircling the wolves. This is the last time in the story that wolves are killed by traditional means, which engages the wisdom and courage of the grassland people and fully brings into play the role of the hunting dogs. These show us natural competition for survival in the natural environment and scenes of production activity in primitive nature. The theme in Chapter 13 of burning out wolves, linking it to blowing up wolves with firecrackers in Chapter 10, is filled with the odor of gunpowder. Gunpowder was one of the four great inventions of the Han Chinese, but for the nomadic grassland “it has epoch-making lethality” (96). The introduction of firecrackers “could threaten the survival of the wolves, which have dominated the 501 Vernon G. Carter and Tom Dale, Topsoil and Civilization, 21. 502 Ibid., 8.

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g­ rassland for thousands of years”503 (96; 154). Before adopting ‘burning,’ there were strong disagreements among social groups over how to hunt wolves. The army representative promotes using fire because it “will take a relatively small expenditure of energy” (129; 205). All technical innovations are related to ‘saving energy.’ The herdsmen and hunters were shocked. For them grassfires were taboo… “A grassfire violates heavenly laws,” Bilgee said. “It blackens the face of Tengger … Shamanism and Lamaism do not permit fires out here. In the past, the Great Khans would kill the entire family of anyone who lit a fire on the grassland” (129; 205). Gasmai is so angry she yells that fire is the grassland’s greatest scourge. Lamjav shouts that now the Han Chinese don’t dare, so how could Mongols set fire to the Mongolian grassland on their own initiative? Sanjai says, “And it will singe the wolves’ coats and ruin their pelts” (129; 205). Laasurung says, “Who pays when the fire kills our livestock? The stench will fill the air and could cause an epidemic” (129; 205). Bilgee observes the expanse of reeds where the wolves are: This is their territory in the winter and spring, their refuge. Olonbulag wolves have seen their share of natural fires, but fires set by humans are alien to them. Nothing like this has ever happened before.504 You outsiders have all sorts of ideas, but this one is especially cruel. This pack of wolves is doomed (130; 207). Burning out wolf packs typifies population extinction, an act unanimously opposed by people of the grassland, but supported by all outsiders (including the students from Beijing). With the weak unable to oppose the strong, the 503 In the era of Genghis Khan, “the Mongols encountered the Jurched use of the firelance” developed from firecrackers and “would adapt it for many more military purposes.” See Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, 95. 504 Fire was generally not permitted in grassland areas because fire would deprive herders of grass for livestock. However, inhabitants of some districts in eastern Mongolia set fires to prevent the growth of scrub, and sometimes to hinder wolves and wild dogs. See Mantie diaochabu 满 铁 调 查 部 [Mantetsu chōsabu; Research bureau of the South Manchurian railway), Bei Shina xuchan diaocha ziliao 北 支 那 畜 产 调 查 资 料 [Hoku Shina chikusan chōsa shiryō; Research materials of animal by-products in north China] (1937), 294–95; cited in Wang Jian’ge, Nong mu shengtai yu chuantong Menggu shehui [The state of agriculture and herding and traditional Mongol society], 23.

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g­ rassland wolves and even grassland people share the fate of all indigenous peoples in the movement to globalize. Even if they raise their voices in protest and even if they take action to resist, it is ineffective. Bilgee for some time has had another concern. He says, “What concerns me is this: now that Bao has burned off the reeds, he’ll start thinking about opening up the area to farming” (131; 209). The dense smoke of an agricultural people burning wasteland gradually has extended to the grassland, and in the eyes of the people of the grassland, “This was a form of gunpowder for a war more dreadful than that signaled by wolf smoke,505 a suicidal war even more moronic than if the Chinese had destroyed their own Great Wall” (205). A year later farmers settle on the grassland and it is turned into farmland. This historic change introduces important questions for historiography. The first of these is the definition of ‘event.’ In the history of the relations of people with nature, what can be viewed as ‘historical events’? The major events in the novel do not involve time and relations among people, but are only related to the introduction of ‘heterogeneous’ elements. In the opening of the story when the wolves make their appearance they collectively demonstrate their sensitivity toward heterogeneous elements: Nonnatural metallic noises frighten wolves more than any thunder-storm … The wolves trembled when the first clangs from Chen’s stirrups resonated in the air. The next burst sent them turning away; led by the alpha wolf, they fled into the mountains like a yellow storm, their ears pinned against their heads and their necks pulled into their shoulders (6; 6). Here the heterogeneous in relation to primal nature appears a number of times in the novel. Faced with the wolf cub being raised in captivity in the dogs’ den, “The dogs were so bewildered they couldn’t tell if they should kill the cub or just get him to stop howling. The arrival of a mortal enemy in their midst had thrown the sheepherding dogs into total confusion” (242; 360). ­Prior to the Beijing students’ arrival on the grassland, the army representatives and outside settlers had made their entrance, and there was also that unseen ‘higher up’—and it arranged for the students from Beijing, summoned the soldiers, and ordered in military units and migrant workers on a large scale. The makeup of these heterogeneous elements is complex, and their impressiveness, dominated by revolutionary slogans and red flags, is a force difficult to resist. 505 ‘Wolf smoke’ was supposed to be thick, black smoke used for alarms. It was often believed to be fueled by wolf droppings, something Chen Zhen decides is erroneous in Chapter 21 of the Chinese text.

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However, we don’t see any resistance from the people of the grassland displaying the unparalleled attraction of ‘internal colonists,’ that is to say, the massive strength of peaceful assimilation. So where is the ‘event’? How could there be no ‘event’? Has history been easy to revise in the silence? Jack Weatherford explained, “great historical events, particularly those that erupt suddenly and violently, build up slowly, and once having begun, never end. Their effects linger long after the action faded from view.”506 Victor Lee Burke pointed out: “The glacial pace of movement in the rise of civilizations and state systems is often striking. A specific event, be it the revolutionary overthrow of the landed aristocracy in Marx, or the overthrow of Catholic belief systems during the Reformation in Weber, may be placed more meaningfully as the turning point of humanity in the context of the transformation and interactions of civilizations.”507 Their viewpoint is quite close to the circumstances in the novel: “The conflict among civilizations, often centuries old, was the furnace that forged the Western state system and hence the events that Marx and Weber emphasized.”508 If we shift our field of vision from modern civilization to humanized nature, we might continue to ask: In the face of humanized nature, what are the events that should particularly concern us? Ervin Laszlo asked this question about “social dynamics”: What is “the motive force behind the observed general progression in history?”509 When modern civilization in Europe had just begun, in the seventeenth century, Frances Bacon pointed out “printing, gunpowder, and the compass as three technological innovations on which the modern world was built,” and concluded “that no empire, sect, or star, appears to have exercised a greater power and influence on human affairs then these mechanical discoveries.”510 Ervin Laszlo has been more direct. He believes that a “major technological breakthrough makes the supernatural natural—as, for example, with the mastery of fire and then of flight—and renders the abnormal and unthinkable normal and even commonplace—as with a nuclear reactor or the instantaneous transmission of image and sound. It challenges people’s values and practices and shakes the foundations of established institutions.”511 Hence, they define ‘progress’ and ‘development’ in human history: “They denote an ineluctable advance of society along an evolutionary axis, sparked by technology.”512 506 507 508 509 510 511 512

Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the making of the Modern World, 267. Victor Lee Burke, The Clash of Civilizations, 179–80. Ibid., 180. Ervin Laszlo, Evolution: The General Theory (Cresskill, nj: Hampton Press, 1996), 100. Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, 236. Ervin Laszlo, Evolution, 101. Ibid., 106.

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In the novel, the people of the grassland also have an instinctive love for technology that surpasses the force of nature: Nearly all the old herders owned Russian or Japanese bayonets, canteens, spades, helmets, binoculars, and other military equipment. The long chain Gasmai used to tether calves came from a Russian army truck. But of all the military equipment left behind by the Russians and the Japanese, binoculars were the herders’ favorite and had become an important tool for production (16; 23). All sorts of technological products entering the grassland are fully used in the natural sense by the people of the grassland. Once these appear in the form of technology as a whole the situation is not so optimistic and historic transformation is inevitable: People and tractors were about to appear in large numbers on the grassland. “In the old days,” the old man continued, “the farmers’ hoes and fires were our greatest fear. Now it’s tractors… .” A silent moan arose in Zhang’s heart. Now that the age of tractors had arrived, a conflict between those who lived off the grassland and those who lived by leveling it was nearing its end game (288; 420). Can the arrival of tractors be considered a historic event? For the people of the grassland, it is an epoch-making event. What would historians say about this? Wilhelm Dilthey believed that historians understood events through psychological experience and understanding.513 New History believed: “In its amplest meaning History includes every trace and vestige of everything that man has done or thought since he first appeared on the earth.”514 For postmodern historians influenced by a pluralistic view of history, the challenge not only is understanding and defining ‘events,’ but also and even more the attitude toward history itself. This prompts us to ask: How should we, who find ourselves in the process of humanizing nature, record and explain history? From the information offered in Wolf Totem there are at least two readings of history. One arises from the necessity of historical research, digging out genuine historical information. Set in the Mongolian grassland during the Cultural Revolution era, the story contains bits of h ­ istorical 513 See Xin dalu vs jiu dalu 新 大 陆 vs 旧 大 陆 [New world versus old world], ed. Lu ­Xianggan 陆 象 淦 (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2006), 11. 514 James Harvey Robinson, The New History (New York: Macmillan, 1912), 1; cited in Lu ­Xianggan, 11.

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information scattered throughout the events of the plot. For example, there is the diet of the students from Beijing: [Their] monthly ration of grain, which was based on a Beijing standard— thirty jin a month per person: three of “fried rice” (cooked corn millet), ten of flour, and the remaining seventeen in millet. Most of the millet went to feed [the dog] Yir, so the students had to model themselves after the Mongols by making meat the foundation of each meal. The herdsmen were given only nineteen jin of grain a month, all of it millet (68; 109). Information such as this on the daily life of participants is rare in mainstream records, but ubiquitous in the novel. Yet the purpose of such description is obviously not for the sake of any specific person or thing, but to reveal the historical relationship of mutual reliance of people and the grassland (nature). Situated as he is among them, the author narrates in realist form a story about people and nature to allow us to explore from the perspective of the grassland where the story of nature ends, and the historical allegorical significance of that end. That introduces the second method of reading. The second reading arises from the perspective of innovation in historiography, fitting the relationship between people and nature into the course of history. Wolf Totem can thereby be taken as an analytic sample, offering a new and different resource for the philosophy of history. The British historian W.H. Walsh employed “speculative philosophy of history and “critical philosophy of history” to summarize the philosophical study of history. The former discusses theoretical questions about history itself, as represented by Hegel, Spengler, Toynbee, and others; the latter is devoted to theoretical questions of historiography, such as the research of Dilthey and others.515 They both appear to be empirical philosophies of history: their object is human circumstances that can be traced, searching for the ‘true’ and the ‘factual,’ that is ‘truth,’ based on a high level of generalization. The rule of ‘progress’ in the search for the movement of time cannot be reversed. Therefore, nature cannot be the object of study (it does not progress), neither can the activities of the psyche (jingshen 精 神 ; not true) nor the spirit (xinling 心 灵 ; not fact) be in the field of vision. Although the former undergirds h ­ uman history, and the latter is the essence and the sublime of the life of human society, ‘really and truly’ existing, yet they are not within the scope of historical research. Given such a severe lack, a ‘symbolic philosophy of h ­ istory’ emerges, 515 William Henry Walsh, Philosophy of History: An Introduction (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960), 13 passim.

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appealing to the needs of people’s psyche, born to replenish the lack. With its sources in literary arts and its method of interpretive criticism, it uncovers the historical course of the human psyche in texts of the fictive and imagination, discusses the form of the ‘presence’ of the spirit and its historical value, and from different approaches (modern or postmodern, postcolonial or post-­ utopian criticism) engages “interpretive historiography.” Seen from this perspective, the value of Wolf Totem for historiography becomes pronounced. Wolf Totem represents, iconically, the end of the story of primal nature and presents, symbolically, the process of civilization conquering nature: humanity has gone from a state of society that conforms to nature toward a modern civilization that transcends nature through both technological means developed for warfare as well as the ‘globalization’ that colonial peoples or migrant peoples have carried out in the wake of that technology. From the perspective of nature, migrant peoples have perhaps signified more of an ‘event’ than colonial peoples. Migration has happened in a manner all too concrete and normal, subtly blurring people’s identities and moral distinctions of right and wrong. By silently changing the face of the land and people’s modes of existence, turning grassland into farmland or farmland into cities, migration has been a more profound historical event than simple ‘plunder.’ It is interesting that the descriptions of this historical process were not at first initiated by historians but the scientific community. Before ‘global history’ texts appeared scientists (such as the geologists Vernon Carter and Tom Dale, the marine biologist Rachel Carson, and others) from various orientations were warning: “If we steadfastly refuse to make the change and continue in our colonizing ways, destroying everything in our path, we may find ourselves without a choice in the future.”516 Another interpretation is that the relationship of the end of history and the story of nature points especially toward the disappearance of the state of existence of primal nature, something totally unlike Francis Fukuyama’s view of history. With his high regard for the core of Western civilization as liberalism, ­Fukuyama saw the result of global Westernization as “the end of history.”517 If we see history as one particular after another, then all histories have an end. The sign of the untroubled death of a course of history is the most limited universalization: class struggle concluded with a mature and stable ­democratic 516 Jeremy Rifkin with Ted Howard, Entropy: A New World View (London: Paladin Books, 1985), 79. 517 See the Introduction in Francis Fukuyama, The End of History (New York: Free Press, 2006). Fukuyama believed that history has a “coherent direction” and follows a “universal and directional history,” which is Western capitalism and liberal democracy. (338).

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political institution, colonialism resulted in the founding of new nation states, and post-colonialism flourished. The histories of minorities ended with the origins of ‘political correctness,’ and the histories of peoples are ending in ‘globalization.’ Then there is this ‘post-’ era, in which insignificant fragments rather than a grand narrative can be seen as the cultural characteristic in which all traditional civilizations end: nationalism ends in the communist movement, racism ends in nations of legal migrants, feminism ends in women’s ­liberation—about that I can say that when women’s liberation achieves gender equality in the legal sense then the history of feminism comes to an end, and society no longer faces an –ism but countless specific women’s issues. By the same reasoning, when Westernization becomes the basic trend of the entire world, then the unavoidable paradox presents itself: the symbolic significance of ‘universalize’ and ‘globalize’—unfortunately—comes to an end. The place where the history of a people ends is the time when the story of an individual begins—time and space are in this way so closely and indiscriminately interwoven. The end of the history of conquering nature comes out of people’s longing to return to nature. Humanity has begun to elevate protecting nature as a whole to the level of history, focusing anew on the origins of the land, and making a concerted effort to restore forests, grasslands, the seas, and the air. I believe this is homing: Homing—the ability to find the way back to the nest—is another behavior that depends on perception of environmental cues. Homing is much more difficult than migration, because it requires true navigation; that is, it requires that the animal be able to orient itself toward home, which may be in any direction, in the absence of recognizable landmarks.518 Do humans have such a capability? There is a marvelous passage in the novel touching on this topic. On a dark night in which there is only the sound of wind, people follow Bilgee in the dark, and Chen Zhen asks him, “can you really lead us to the appointed spot by hearing alone?” The old man’s answer is classic, telling the mystery of searching out the way home: [Just hearing won’t work.] Memory is the other factor. I listen to my horse’s hooves to see what kind of ground we’re on, if it’s sandy or rocky 518 Thomas L. Bennett, The Sensory World (Monterey, ca: Brooks/Cole Publishing, 1978), 135. “Many species of fish show long-distance migration and homing that serve to enhance their survival prospects.” (137).

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under the snow, and I can tell where we are. And to keep from losing my way, I feel how the wind is hitting my face. I also smell things. In other words, I travel with the wind and the smells. The wind carries smells of snow, grass, sand, saltpeter, alkali, wolves, foxes, horse dung, and the camp. Sometimes there are no odors at all, and then I have to rely on my ears and my memory. Your Papa [Bilgee] could find the way if the night turned even darker (113; 179). Obviously, the capacity to do this not only requires daring, but even more, superior memory. History is memory, an instrument that we can make use of to return home. Viewing the end from this perspective, it signifies the beginning of a new journey. This is the journey home. On that road, the role of memory is foremost. History not only carries memory but also thought to provide ‘correct navigation’ for humanity seeking the way to return home. Interpreting historiography in terms of the need for ‘homing’ (unlike progress and development) comes in response to the times, to speak for all the voiceless (including ­nature and all living things in the natural world), and to find a platform for history that can continue and inherit for the sake of the psyche and the spirit. Its primary task is to return to the classics—conceptual and philosophic, literary and ­artistic—to clarify and rectify names. “Interpretation is not translation. The past is not a text that has to be translated into narrative historiography; it has to be interpreted.”519 Hence, I am partial to Paul Crowther’s effort to reintegrate the fragments and clean up the waste of the ‘post-’ through returning to classics. He pointed out: “in post-modern times, reality is no longer simply perceived in terms of substantive, self-contained, material surfaces. It is, rather, deciphered as the intersection of various complex levels of meaning.”520 History does indeed rely on truth and facts, yet it has never been founded on ‘truth,’ but on ‘interpretation’: History therefore consists not of facts but of historians’ opinions of what happened, and of why it happened … But their opinions of why it happened are usually not more than a reflection of their personal theories of social causation, which determine which facts they select as important.521

519 Frank Ankersmit, History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 33. 520 Paul Crowther, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism (Oxford and New York: Oxford ­University Press, 2003), 163. 521 Arthur Lewis, The Theory of Economic Growth (Homewood, il: R.D. Irwin, 1955), 15.

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Historiography like history is always in motion and never settled. Like a good legal scholar, a good historian confronting history should be even-handed in considering all things, not just believing in the events recorded in historical texts and documents, but also considering and showing respect for spiritual or natural voices in oral or allegorical texts. They genuinely happened as much as what we call ‘historical events’ did, but with a different kind of veil concealing their true appearance. In the society that we are in today, for example, the truth may not be what is recorded in mainstream documents, and possibly is precisely what may not be permitted to be recorded. What is recorded are true events, but not necessarily in the true voice of people’s sentiments. The ­importance of interpreting history is not in its being the final word, but in the exploratory process that creates space in historiography that ‘respects interpretation’ and allows for constant interpretation. Given this, to read Wolf Totem through interpretation points toward a new view of historiography: the human historical view of nature. By introducing elements of nature, its core is the relationship of people and the land. Changes in landforms signify alterations in the environment of human survival and mode of survival. Since early modern times such changes have been closely related to indigenous people’s loss of land, the insidious result of colonization. Prior to this, the indigenous people were the guardian spirits of their own land. In Uljii’s words, “The grassland wolves have their own territory, and those without territory leave sooner or later. Territory is more important than their lives” (263; 389). Bilgee also says, “A pack without its territory is worse than a dog that has lost its owner” (313; 448). “The very achievements of civilized man have been the most important factors in the downfall of civilizations … Man’s relation to the land from which he lives is an important field of historical study that has been sadly neglected.”522 Why has there been such an omission? It originated in the concept of historiography. In traditional historiography, ‘history’ referred to the course of human events and was unrelated to nature; of course, it was even less related to wolves. Chen Zhen feels resentment for the wolves: “the historical impact of wolves has been written off by historians. If Tengger had recorded events, wolves on the Mongolian grasslands would have had their place in the annals of history” (36; 57). The novel conveys a deep historical message that condenses the course of civilized history, yet takes place within merely the four seasons of one year. Through the state of existence of living things on the grassland the relationship between civilization and nature is suggested. What is the relationship? 522 Vernon G. Carter and Tom Dale, Topsoil and Civilization, viii.

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Wolf Totem reveals three types of relations, leading toward one fact: the history of human civilization is the history of humanizing nature. It also leads toward the fate of grassland wolves, showing three historical stages on the basis of the three relationships below. The first relationship is that between humans and the land. Being what supports human life, the land is the external embodiment of the relationship of humans and nature, and over the course of civilization has, all told, been passive. From the perspective of the land and indigenous peoples, what we call early modern Western civilization began with ‘alien’ occupation and transformation of ‘native soil.’ In the novel its inauguration is blasting wolves with gunpowder and is shown in the relationship of the grassland wolves with people: Youngsters and horse herders seem to be having a contest to see who can kill the most wolves. They don’t understand what they’re doing. All you hear on the radio is how heroic the wolf killers are. Things are only going to get worse for us from here on out (96; 154). The second relationship is that between the state of natural society and modern civilization. Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote that after entering civilization, people were separated from “the calm and innocent days they spent.”523 ­Instead, he observed of the “human soul” that “ instead of acting always according to certain and invariable principles, instead of that celestial and majestic simplicity with which its author had endowed it, one no longer finds anything except the ugly contrast of passion which presumes to reason and understanding in a state of delirium.”524 Following the course of globalization of Western civilization, all social systems directly connected with the ecological environment of the native soil weakened to the point of collapse under the intrusion of science and technology or military force. This is fully depicted in the closing portions of the novel. Once army jeeps enter the interior of the grassland and advanced weapons are trained on the giant wolf, “[w]hat should have been a tense battle between man and wolf now became nothing more than entertainment for humans” (318; 454). The Mongolian wolves, having dominated the grassland for thousands of years, were now more pathetic than the rabbits … The saying that “those who are backward are struck down; those who are advanced strike” 523 Jean Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality, trans. ­Helena Rosenblatt (Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011), 123. 524 Ibid., 36.

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­suddenly flashed through Chen Zhen’s mind525 … The giant wolf could neither fly nor find a cave. Confronted with the equipment of advanced technology, the legend of the grassland wolves was run to ground (318; 454). Next we look at the third relationship: that of natural humans and civilization, the revenge of nature. In the novel, when people of the grassland abandon a mode of living in nature we see what is most concealed and unbearable behind the curtain of civilization. Modern civilization “constrains not only his societal but also his biological existence, not only parts of the human being but his instinctual structure itself.”526 This change occurs most often in the transformation of the identity of natural humans, displaying historical allegory at its most satirical: The ancestors of the Mongols from farming regions were herders, but after they were conquered and assimilated, they became enemies of the Mongolian grassland (228; 347). When most of the pasture and communes on the Olonbulag are converted into farming units, even the Majuzi River area, famous for producing Ujimchin warhorses, is turned into large-scale farmland. “The grassland inhabitants were waiting anxiously for the arrival of the Inner Mongolian Production and Construction Corps” (298; 432–33). The trend of human progress cannot be reversed, so what of the wolves? What worried Chen the most was the future of the wolves. Once the farmers came, the swans, ducks, and wild geese would either be eaten or fly away. But wolves aren’t birds. Would they, after generations on the grassland, be exterminated or chased out of China, their home? In the frigid heights of Outer Mongolia grass was sparse, people and animals few, and the impoverished wolves there fiercer than the wolves of the richer Olonbulag. Once there, they would become the despised “migrants” among wolf packs (298; 433–34; orig. trans.).

525 The saying is attributed to a speech by Joseph Stalin made in 1931. See Sidalin xuanji 斯 大 林 选 集 [Selected works of Stalin] (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1979) vol. 2: 272–74. 526 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974), 1.

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Thanks be to Wolf Totem! As the story of ‘nature’ concludes it gives us a final thought. And more thanks to the grassland wolves, for through their flight they have given us a rare cultural inspiration! The novel mentions ‘national borders’ a number of times. How can national things be bound up with wolves? National borders are also cultural boundaries. In the novel they are a genuine symbol that separates nature and civilization: Marmot holes on the Olonbulag were especially deep, and marmots could even remove the ore inside the hills to the surface. Some herders had collected amethyst and copper ore from the ridges around the entrances to the holes. This had so startled state geological prospecting teams that if it had not been the Olonbulag borderland, the area might have been turned into a mining field (207). It is out of military concerns that the Olonbulag borderland is deemed unsuited for development, thereby delaying the introduction of civilization. For this reason the students from Beijing have the good fortune to observe the last of the fierce wolf packs. Once burned out of their lair, the defeated grassland wolves escape across the national border. With the campaign to exterminate wolves, it appears that there is no longer a place left in all China for the grassland wolves to hide: The last wolf-fighting unit still organized as it had been in the distant past, a wolf-fighting unit that was a living fossil still preserving the skills of the ancient eras of the Xiongnu, the Tujue, the Xianbei, and Genghis Khan, now was to be totally destroyed in the encirclement of modern military units … expelled from the land of the Chinese who had benefitted from them, and driven off the stage of history (307). In the story, the remnants of the wolf pack do not exit from the stage of history; their method of survival is actually quite simple: they cross over the border. The border region is primitive grassland, and any place that has grass provides the basis for them to survive. Even though it is a frigid land of sparse grass and few people or animals, it is the last refuge for survival of the grassland wolves: When it’s a matter of life or death, the grassland provides an avenue of escape; when they’re in peril, the grassland provides wings for them to fly away like birds. It keeps them under its wing. The vast expanse of

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­ ongolian grassland favors and protects its wolves. They are like an old M couple devoted to one another for life (145; 228). In which case, who will protect the grassland? In the novel, it is the national border. In the words of Yang Ke, “Mongolian wolves, … the end is near for you. The situation has changed; the age of heroes is over. Hurry and flee to Outer Mongolia” (303; 434). What would be the result if people were as uninhibited and unfettered as wolves, crossing borders at will without needing passports or the like? Considering Wolf Totem, we give thanks for national borders! It is precisely the flight of the wolves that shows us the function of the modern nation state. In the trend of global Westernization, the state has become the national culture (mínzú wénhùa), the last refuge of cultural pluralism. State borders prevent a culture (and a power) from unlimited expansion, simultaneously protecting the basis of survival of another culture (and its people). If the world is a global village, then because of borders the world can contain numerous families with clear boundaries: the nation state, to its citizens, is their home. In the pressure of the tide of global Westernization, each national culture (including literature and art) can only draw unlimited natural resources on its own soil, and preserve a final line of defense for its perpetuation and development. Hence, the character of the nation state is not only political, but even more so, cultural. ‘Boundary’ in the cultural sense becomes an intriguing concept, an important window through which to view the cultures of different nationalities. For a long time I have enjoyed riding trains, buses, or ships crossing borders and examining Chinese border regions in different locations, closely observing how the color of a culture follows the topography (and its distance from the border), changing from deep to light until it vanishes, and how another culture goes from the marginal to the central. This sort of information in the novel made me sensitive. The exodus of the grassland wolves being surrounded and annihilated by gunfire recalls the endless movement across borders, beginning in the twentieth century: the exile of White Russian aristocrats, the diaspora of the Jews, the escapes across the ocean of Liang Qichao, Kang Youwei, Sun Yatsen, and other revolutionaries … Then there was the manmade “Berlin Wall” of the Cold War, the wire strung across the boundary of the grassland in the novel. Each successful crossing of borders is not only life-saving, but also signifies hope for renewed life, reminding me of friends in the authoritarian era forced to go abroad, when leaving by any means was good. Crossing borders, when it is based on preserving life, is also by chance preserving the seed of the ‘thought’ of human dignity and freedom.

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It is evident that states and borders are not such cold-blooded entities as political scientists portray them. They are not only instruments for protecting private property rights or weapons to manage populations and suppress uprisings; they are also homes in which peoples may live in peace and security. And that there are many such nations/homes that can exist together is cause for rejoicing. The reasonable, orderly division of family property is also not necessarily a bad thing, and can bring greater choice to people. Depending upon the affairs of each state, they will not look the same and, hence, will not follow the same pattern or model.527 ‘Each decides for itself’ is not just historical but also the final barrier for the present survival of a people’s culture, a national culture. The future of nations will not necessarily be the kind of inevitable “withering away” that early communist theorists predicted.528 Perhaps preservation and persistence would be a more beneficial option. In the global village of today, nations are restraints and shackles that makes you long to escape, like the home in Ba Jin’s novel Jia [Family]. Yet they can also become mild and safe refuges on which small and weak peoples and vulnerable cultures rely in order to survive and continue: [D]uring the three difficult years in the 1960s, soldiers from northern military regions had come in vehicles and mowed down vast numbers of gazelles with machine guns to supply food to their troops; as a result they drove the surviving gazelles out of the area. But in recent years, given the tense military situation in the border regions, large-scale hunts had ceased, and the Olonbulag had witnessed the return of gazelles in spectacular numbers (12; 16). In this sense, it is only the existence of states with varied qualities and systems that allows different peoples and national cultures to have homes to which they wish to return. Only on a globe with borders and where any civilization 527 Robert Reich, The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992). Reich’s “nations” consist only of the United States. 528 Karl Marx in The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) and The Civil War in France (1871), and Frederick Engels in The Development of Socialism from Utopia to Science and The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884) brought up this idea. Lenin in The State and Revolution (1917) went a step further by pointing out that by the time the state has withered away social classes will have already disappeared, together with class oppression. See Liening quanji 列 宁 全 集 [Complete works of Lenin] (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1958) Vol. 25: 454.

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has a place at which it comes to a halt will the story of nature have hope for renewal.529 In the novel, the firebreak serves as a symbol: The firebreak was a wide tractor-leveled lane parallel with the border, a hundred or more yards across. Replowed once every year, it was nothing but sand, without a blade of grass anywhere, and was intended to stop the spread of wildfires from the other side of the border and small fires from this side. It was the only plowed land on the Olonbulag tolerated by the herdsmen. Old-timers said it constituted the only benefit farming brought to their land (146; 230). Such is the border, harsh to look at, but with its own dignity and value. In this world in which the flames of war burn perpetually, civilizations clash without cease, and power seeks to unite ‘all under heaven,’ in varied guises—ideological, discursive or scientific, financial—the novel shows us the special value of ‘survival by crossing borders’ and its distinctive political appeal: it is not simply the only possible choice of refugees but also of the natural grassland (wolves) seeking to perpetuate life and posterity. Hence, so long as borders exist, we see that the global village today or in the future may be an empty myth. Innovation is necessary for concepts of historiography, but is not workable anywhere in reality. The history of a given nation is not just what is written about its politics, but is also the record of a people’s cultural identity. It is precisely on the basis of national history that the story of humans and nature (such as this story about wolves) may be perpetuated through writing and through song to become the most direct and important testimony to the diversity of human history. 4.11

In Terms of Philosophy: What Lies ahead for ‘Freedom’? Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Many a one believes himself the master of others, and yet he is a greater slave than they. jean-jacques rousseau530

Freedom is the most important topic in Wolf Totem. In the story ‘freedom’ is an abstract concept that is used the most, everywhere between the lines, in the

529 Literally “nirvana rebirth” [niepan chongsheng] [translator’s note]. 530 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1998), 5.

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wind and snow, the wail of wolves and barking of dogs … Yet you would be hard pressed to present an accurate definition of it. It is elusive, following its own course, always everywhere … and yet you cannot say just where. Does it exist within the wolf cub? In truth, the wolf cub is never free for even a moment. Was it among the grassland wolf packs? The wolf packs have long before lost their might, and they merely flee ‘freely’ from the border region. Even so, freedom is still present. When you close the book freedom still persists. It remains within you. This is puzzling, and prompts the question: what sort of freedom does Wolf Totem present? First, look at the circumstances in which the story employs the concept of freedom. Freedom in the novel is not of uniform weight or quality, it is not consistent, and is even in totally different categories. For example, freedom as it first appears, before the introduction of the wolf cub, is related entirely to Chen Zhen’s individual socio-political status (a student who has voluntarily left the city as the child of the abject ‘black gang’ political offenders), as in the three passages below. First, the freedom within nature is primal freedom, which Chen Zhen encounters when wild gazelles race past him: Chen frequently encountered large herds when he tended his flock, a vast sea of yellow close to the ground, passing by his sheep, relaxed and carefree, but causing his animals to huddle together in fear, watching bugeyed with a mixture of alarm and envy as their wild cousins raced past, free as the wind. Mongolian gazelles ignore unarmed humans … He could only watch in awe (12; 16). Here freedom is not an issue, but a condition. Freedom in nature is based on strict adherence to emplacement and full adaptation to emplacement. If one views emplacement as shackles, such as seeing a riverbed as shackling the flow of a river, then there is an explanation: freedom within emplacement is the most spontaneous and complete freedom that living things can have; it is primal freedom. Second, leaving behind the city and abandoning civilization has a long tradition among the educated elite of China. Tao Yuanming’s utopian “Peach ­Blossom Spring” was an ideal that closely linked human sentiment with nature.531 “The lines ‘For so long I have lived in a cage, and now I can return to 531 See Lu Shuyuan 鲁 枢 元 , Tao Yuanming de youling 陶 渊 明 的 幽 灵 [The specter of Tao Yuanming] (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chuban she, 2012) for a detailed discussion.

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nature’ should be understood this way. Inside a cage there is neither nature nor freedom; only by returning to the fields can nature and freedom be restored.”532 As a student who grew up on Soviet literature, Chen Zhen, once weary of revolution, naturally thought of the grassland, for the “grassland contains the most extensive primitivism and freedom anywhere” (23; 34). Mikhail Sholokhov’s novel The Quiet Don was also one of the primitive driving forces behind Chen Zhen’s coming to the grassland. Chen’s attraction to the grassland region of the Don River was because of people with a passion for freedom, like Sholokhov’s characters Grigori, Natalya, and Aksinia. And Chen’s infatuation with the Mongolian grassland was on account of the wolves and the people of the grassland, who loved freedom and would fight to the death to protect it (316). Escaping the city also signifies escaping modern civilization, at that time because he had no alternative; seen in terms of the present, it appears quite postmodern. Desmond Morris compared urban life to prison: “The modern human animal is no longer living in conditions natural for his species. Trapped, not by a zoo collector, but by his own brainy brilliance, he has set himself up in a huge, restless menagerie …”533 To young people during the Cultural Revolution like Chen Zhen, the city is not only a symbol of civilization, but also, even more, a political symbol. Going to the grassland was an act of deliberately evading political imprisonment, more so than escaping the city and civilization. Third, therefore, and also most important, is distancing oneself from mainstream society in order to escape political persecution, seeking a measure of freedom for the psyche on the grassland where ‘heaven is high up and the emperor far away’; that is, the free existence that is ‘depoliticized.’ The four students in Chen’s yurt had been classmates at a Beijing high school; three of them were sons of “black-gang capitalist roaders” or ­“reactionary academic authorities.” They shared similar circumstances, ideology, and disgust for the radical and ignorant Red Guards; and so, in the early winter of 1967, they said goodbye to the clamor of Beijing and traveled to the grassland in search of a peaceful life, where they maintained their friendship (14; 20).

532 Yuan Xingpei 袁 行 霈 , Tao Yuanming yanjiu 陶 渊 明 研 究 [Studies of Tao Yuanming] (Beijing: Beijing daxue chuban she, 1997), 6. 533 Desmond Morris, The Human Zoo: A Zoologist’s Study of the Urban Animal, 7.

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Going to the grassland, for Chen Zhen and his peers, was not simply a matter of being sent down, but instead, to a certain degree, it was self-exile. In Yang Ke’s careful terms, “Out here dogs are needed and are loved, unlike places like Beijing where all you hear is people talking about ‘smashing someone’s dog head.’ For a ‘reactionary academic authority’ like me, a ‘damned cur,’ there’s no place better to put down roots and start a family than the grassland” (189; 294). As only experience could tell, in that era when ‘bloodlines’ meant so much, ‘children of the black gang’ were like Jews in the 1930s identified with badges, and there was no escape except to sneak across borders. Fortunately there was the Olonbulag along the border where people, like Chen Zhen, with no other way to break out of confinement could go. Whether out of self-consciousness or as an act of autonomy, such a choice is remarkably close to the “negative liberty” that Isaiah Berlin made famous. In the field of philosophy today, who does not know Isaiah Berlin? His essay “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958) has dominated the topic of ‘freedom’ for over half a century to the point that, regardless of whether it is to support or oppose, once the topic is political philosophy the starting point is his essay. Nevertheless, it is not on account of his political philosophy that Berlin is included here, but because the origin of ‘freedom’ in Wolf Totem and Berlin’s starting point as a scholar happen to coincide. Beginning with Berlin offers a lofty theoretical starting point for understanding the issue of freedom in Wolf Totem and an appropriate basis for dialogue. Isaiah Berlin was born into a Jewish family in Riga, Latvia (then Russia) in 1909, and went to England with his parents in 1921, following the Soviet October Revolution of 1917. In 1928, he entered Oxford University to read literature and philosophy, and from then on kept a lifelong academic tie with Oxford. During the Second World War, he worked for the British diplomatic service in New York, Washington, and Moscow until 1946 when he returned to teaching at Oxford. From 1966 to 1975 he was Dean of Wolfson College, Oxford. There were three key features to Berlin as a political thinker: first, the influence of Jewish ethnic identity; second, the influence of Russia and the former Soviet Union as his birthplace; three, the predominance and constraint of the “emplacement” of Oxford. Together these three were his fate, playing an a priori role in his “two concepts of liberty” and his philosophical standpoint. Can philosophy have standpoints? To begin with, philosophy has no standpoint, no orientation; it is here, perpetually addressing the question of ‘being.’ Philosophers, though, do have standpoints, and however objective they declare themselves to be, once involved in the political, their standpoint is there. Berlin’s political standpoint, for example, already existed before he named the concept of “positive/negative” liberty. What is the relevance of this to Wolf

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T ­ otem? I think that the relevance is not in any conclusion, but in a starting point; that is, in the sense of freedom, Berlin and Chen Zhen are very close to having the same beginnings, but that the conclusions are completely different. They begin alike from “negative liberty,” but choose different directions. If even the choice of directions is also fated and therefore negative, then the revelation that this provides us is not only an understanding of the two, but even more of freedom itself. What is “negative liberty” and “positive liberty”? Berlin believed that positive liberty addresses the question “Who is master”; negative liberty attempts to answer, “Over what area am I master?”534 Positive liberty acts freely on the premise of clarifying the purpose; it implies unlimited possibility. Negative liberty chooses autonomously or does not choose on the premise of understanding one’s “emplacement.” The former concerns the idealism under collective will; the latter, though, is close to the cynicism of inaction. To Berlin, “negative liberty and positive liberty are not the same thing. Both are ends in themselves. These ends may clash irreconcilably.”535 Given this clash, Berlin stood unreservedly on the side of the “negative,” and pointed out: “The extent of a man’s negative freedom is, as it were, a function of what doors, and how many, are open to him; upon what prospects they open; and how open they are.”536 Half a century later, the academic world had numerous explanations for the concept of two types of liberty and the political philosophy derived from them. Berlin never varied, but constantly reiterated the view above and clearly stated that negative freedom “is opportunity for action, rather than action itself. If, although I enjoy the right to walk through open doors, I prefer not to do so, but to sit still and vegetate, I am not thereby rendered less free.”537 Those unfamiliar with the background cannot avoid asking why he divided freedom, opened up a battleground about an ideal that humanity has collectively sought, and stirred up even mass political conflict out of a bloodless debate among scholars? Freedom was something that Berlin had experienced in acute pain. His experience of his time was to discover that under the banner of liberty completely different ranks of supporters were moving in opposite directions, so that his individual fate was destined to be cast into two completely different circumstances: freedom or servitude; utopia or hell. Distancing himself from the

534 535 536 537

Liberty: Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 36. Ibid., 42. Ibid., 41. Ibid., 35.

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“positive,” he alerted people to maintain a political vigilance towards “higher” attitudes: The higher self duly became identified with institutions, Churches, nations, races, states, classes, cultures, parties, and with vaguer entities, such as the general will, the common good, the enlightened forces of society, the vanguard of the most progressive class, Manifest Destiny. My thesis is that, in the course of this, something that had begun as a doctrine of freedom turned into a doctrine of authority and, at times, of oppression, and became the favoured weapon of despotism, a phenomenon all too familiar in our own day.538 Although by openly favoring the “negative” Berlin encountered strong criticism, he made no attempt to balance this, but pointed out that “the notion of ‘negative’ liberty … has not historically been twisted by its theorists as often or as effectively into anything so darkly metaphysical or socially sinister or remote from its original meaning as its ‘positive’ counterpart… . Hence, the greater need, it seems to me, to expose the aberrations of positive liberty than those of its negative brother.”539 Insight such as this comes close to our doctrine of ‘left and right.’ Contrary to what we have all along been encouraged, ‘rather be on the left than the right,’ Berlin chose ‘rather right than left.’ In this sense, it is post-utopian criticism more than choice of political philosophies, encouraging the individual to preserve himself through benevolence and avoid harming others under the banner of ‘political correctness.’ Berlin’s lifelong mentality was consistent with his ethnic identity and birthplace (just as Chen Zhen’s mind-set remains with Beijing, even though he lives on the grassland, and is persistently entangled in the ethnicity to which he belongs). His literary preference and political philosophy remained Russian-­ oriented. Jewish identity and Russia as homeland became the political ­complex of dual ‘origins’ that stayed with him throughout his life.540 When he entered Oxford it was just the time of the high tide of fascist persecution of Jews and of 538 Liberty, 37. 539 Ibid., 39–40. 540 Berlin recalled that witnessing scenes of the Soviet revolution in his childhood “gave me a lifelong horror of physical violence.” He acknowledged that his choice of the history of political thought at Oxford was because “I couldn’t help being affected by the existence of the Soviet Union.” Nazis, in 1941, killed both his grandfathers, in addition to “a great uncle, a great-aunt, an uncle, an aunt and a cousin.” See Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (London: Halban, 2013).

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mass political purges in the former Soviet Union. The former under the slogan in Germany of ‘national autonomy and freedom’ and the latter under the communist banner of ‘free and full development of all people’ were momentous national movements. Either environment would undoubtedly have been lethal for Berlin. So it is understandable why Berlin at Oxford still kept his eye on the world and his mind-set on freedom, summarily bundling German fascism together with Soviet communism and very nearly without distinction, calling them authoritarianism. Given his circumstances, Berlin was completely reasonable. But in terms of history, this sort of undemonstrated linkage did not match his status as a scholar. Anyone with a bit of historical common knowledge is aware that, whatever their superficial resemblance, German fascism and Soviet communism were of different qualities in their origins and end results. The former was nationalistic and radically xenophobic in form; the latter was a matter of ideology, transcending nationalism in concepts and action. Under either authoritarian or totalitarian oppression there are exiles (like the Jews) or fugitives (like Chen Zhen), but the result is not the same. The former comes to a relatively complete conclusion, with few survivors remaining after the slaughter; the latter, however, persists historically, with many followers or believers down to the present … there is no intention here of elaborating on the similarities and differences between the virtues and faults of the two, only to explain that it is just this kind of judgment that results in Berlin and Chen Zhen’s diverging and following a different course. What, after all, is the relevance of Chen Zhen and Berlin to each other? Chen Zhen and Berlin have very similar starting points in the sense of ‘fleeing’: For Berlin it seems to have been a comedy, fleeing revolutionary and authoritarian persecution together with his family. For Chen Zhen it is tragic, in that he consciously has made a choice of self-exile, close not only to Berlin’s negative freedom, but also to the thinking common to liberal scholars like Berlin: to live in another place, and in that other land to discuss one’s homeland, make sweeping pronouncements, and freely deliberate: For Chen Zhen there was one distinct advantage in tending sheep. Being alone gave him time to let his thoughts roam. The two cartons of books he’d brought from Beijing, plus the histories Yang Ke had brought, were just what he needed to mull over, like sheep chewing their cud, slowly digesting their contents (73; 117). Both fugitives, immersed alike in stacks of venerable writings, nevertheless are unlike in their thinking. On the grassland, Chen Zhen’s mind is on the Han people; Berlin was discoursing in Oxford as the cradle of liberalism on the

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­ on-freedom under authoritarianism. Because they fled or escaped, the two n have new emplacement, and make full use of that emplacement, but with different qualities and orientations. Berlin is oriented toward modern Western civilization, and with a legitimate position in the world’s loftiest academy, he could save the world with discourse on the platform of discursive dominance. This is the backdrop for the appearance of “Two Concepts of Liberty.” The door was open for Berlin; he could freely choose means that were free or not, engage in constructing political thought, profess pluralism, and “make multiple doors open simultaneously,” while conceding nothing to the other kind of freedom (positive) and remain unyielding. Such contradiction—between social identity and political standpoint, intellectual persuasion and individual behavior—is common to all liberal thinkers ‘living in another place,’541 and it is so of Chen Zhen. However, Chen Zhen is not so fortunate; he has no external resources from which he can draw, and is within internally placed shackles, so that he flees to the even humbler and more marginal grassland, toward a place where heaven is high and the emperor far away. As Rousseau noted, “long distances make administration more difficult, just as a weight becomes heavier at the end of a longer lever.”542 On the surface, Chen Zhen appears to make a choice that is negative, but in its nature does not actually belong to negative freedom. In a state of captivity with no doors ahead and no path of retreat behind, the only choice of freedom is the positive one that breaks down doors to come out and struggle for freedom. That is to say, the reason that either Berlin at Oxford or Chen Zhen on the grassland could freely make grand pronouncements and ‘negatively’ enjoy freedom is the condition that they undertook the positive action of ‘fleeing.’ Although ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ in English may be used interchangeably, they differ in different contexts. Langston Hughes in his poems “Words Like Freedom” wrote vividly of the different circumstances of these two words: There are words like Freedom Sweet and wonderful to say. On my heart-strings freedom sings All day everyday. There are words like Liberty That almost make me cry. 541 The Chinese phrase is shēnghúo zài bíechù, the title of the Chinese translation of Milan Kundera’s novel La vie est ailleurs [Life is elsewhere] (1973). 542 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (Boston: Digireads.com, 2006), 30.

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If you had known what I knew You would know why.543 ‘Freedom’ (unrestrained, spontaneous) is generally used in philosophy, in the same way that Berlin discussed the state of his life and the nature of freedom. ‘Liberty’ (independence, liberation) tends to be used in political and legal circumstances, intimately related to Chen Zhen’s situation and to the tragic nature of the wolf cub. This is the lack of an alternative for Chen Zhen, and also for freedom. In social history, having freedom ‘negatively’ is definitely conditional on having ‘positively’ won liberty. Given that Berlin’s expertise was the history of political thought, it is regrettable that when he discussed the two types of freedom he juxtaposed them and emptied them of their historical contents. So it is not surprising that his thesis on freedom is ineffectual in Chen Zhen’s case, capable neither of being understood nor offering lessons. The backgrounds to Chen Zhen’s fugitive journey and Berlin’s exile have similar preconditions but totally dissimilar prospects. Although Chen Zhen harbors aspirations to ­‘liberate all humanity,’ his own survival is a predicament, and what he needs to undertake first is self-preservation. The truth that Berlin uttered as merely a figure of speech, “Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep,” (38) is for Chen Zhen his real life. Chen Zhen also makes full use of the advantages that his emplacement affords him to make the choice of the ‘positive’ that anyone with ideals might make under these circumstances: realize his own freedom through serving others—raising a wolf cub. On the grassland, where people raise sheep, dogs, and horses, why raise wolves? The long-term act of raising a wolf on the grassland is a symbol of liberation, based psychologically on respect for, fear, and admiration of the wolf as conqueror of the grassland. Raising the wolf is not only an act of possession, but also conquest. The moment of stealing the wolf cubs, the conquest of the conquerors, stirred unmatched pleasure within Chen Zhen: To him, this was more exciting than digging up a Han dynasty tomb site, and brought a greater sense of accomplishment … “Wolf cubs! Wolf cubs!” all three students shouted after a moment of disbelief … Those very Mongolian wolves that came and went like demons, who had mastered the strategies of deception and cunning and dominated the grassland, now let their den be carried away by these students from Beijing. The result made the students wild with joy (100; 161). 543 The Collected Works of Langston Hughes: The Poems, 1951–1967, Volume 3, by Langston Hughes (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), 154.

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From the time the wolf cub appears, freedom in the story and even Chen Zhen’s identity undergo an essential change. In taking possession of the wolf cub, Chen Zhen finds temporary deliverance. This deliverance has dual significance. One is the easing of a psychic predicament; as the servant of the other he achieves pleasure as master of his own affairs (Chapter 18). The other is health. Monotonous physical labor in this sealed-off environment has made him (them) unbearably depressed. Yang Ke exclaims: “I can’t believe how great it is to hunt on the grassland. Shepherding is so boring. As soon as wolves entered the picture, our lives got a lot more interesting and a lot more exciting.” “This is a vast, sparsely populated territory,” Chen said. “Sometimes there isn’t a yurt within miles. Without the wolves and the hunt, life out here would be stultifying” (33; 52). “Throughout this bleak time for students, Chen Zhen was fortunate that the wolf cub with him remained untamed.” (347) When the wolf cub appears, so does a real issue of freedom. The wolf cub’s appearance is a watershed: prior to this, freedom has been lack of restraint (zìzài 自 在 ); after this, under conditions of slavery, freedom becomes a question. From the time Chen Zhen begins to raise the wolf cub the seeds of freedom as ‘discourse’ and ‘thought’ are everywhere between the lines, tormenting the wolf cub, Chen Zhen, and the reader. We remain attached to this story in its sustained, unresolved struggle of ‘slavery and resistance’ ‘confinement and freedom,’ but it is starting at this point that Berlin is no longer relevant to us. In other words, his theory of freedom is of no use. When genuine questions of freedom appear why are modern theories of freedom so useless? Since early modern times, freedom is a concept that has been discussed so much that it is often necessary to define. Concerning this, the political philosopher Quentin Skinner long ago counseled that the best way to understand it should be to clarify what the common meaning is when we use the word ‘freedom,’ and how it has been defined through different stages in the course of history.544 544 Kunting Sijinna [Quentin Skinner], Ziyouzhuyi zhi qian de ziyou 自 由 主 义 之 前 的 自 由 [Liberty Before Liberalism], trans. Li Hongtu 李 宏 图 (Shanghai: Sanlian shudian, 2003), 141; cited in Xiaoji ziyou you shenma cuo 消 极 自 由 有 什 么 错 [What’s wrong with negative liberty], ed. Da Wei 达 巍 et al. (Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe, 2001), 97. [Translator’s note: The Chinese sentence appears as a quotation from Skinner. However, such a sentence was not seen in the English-language text itself.].

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Thus my questions are: when the wolf cub appears in the novel what sorts of ‘freedom’ are involved? And what questions about freedom does it convey? When the nature of freedom changes after the appearance of the wolf cub, it is no longer the primal freedom discussed above nor the negative freedom that Chen Zhen enjoys as a fugitive. It breaks out of concepts of freedom in modern civilization and even political philosophy, returning directly to that most primitive, most widespread, and truest starting point to make us confront anew that most basic question in the field of freedom, ‘slavery.’ Hence, we have to return to the starting point of Quentin Skinner’s research, “liberty before liberalism.” “The concept of liberty is always defined in the Digest [of Roman law] by contrast with the condition of slavery, while the predicament of the slave is defined as that of ‘someone who, contrary to nature, is made into the property of someone else.”545 The moment that Chen Zhen stole the wolf cub he opened the door to ‘freedom’: After having had no contact with wolves in the city, he was now the master of seven cubs … If not for his obsession, the tiny creatures would have grown to adulthood and become intrepid fighters. But his arrival changed their fate … (103; 164). Conquest is the precondition for possession, and one’s own freedom usually begins with the enslavement of the other. In the story of Chen Zhen raising the wolf cub we see a trilogy that is difficult to avoid on the road to freedom. First comes killing, the conquest; next is confinement, enslavement and resistance; finally comes death, or elevation to the sublime. These three stage acts are performed entirely following this order in Wolf Totem. Unlike political philosophy, the civilized explanations, in essence it is even inverted. When Chen Zhen’s group snatches the wolf cubs, how do they deal with them? Like picking out slaves and jesters as spoils of war, he selects the “biggest and brawniest” cub among the litter, while the rest are all put to death: The female cub was tossed up into the sky … Chen Zhen seemed to see the blue-gray membrane over the cubs eyes suddenly break open in terror, revealing two blood-filled, dark, red eyes. The poor wolf cub had actually opened its eyes in mid-air, but still could not see the bright blue of Tengger, for clouds covered the blue sky, and the blood in its eyes ­concealed them (106). 545 Quetin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 39.

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In the face of killing and bloodshed, “Chen’s heart slipped back into his chest from his throat, the pain moving beyond consciousness” (106; 169). This is a lesson in bloodlust, and the starting point of conquest. “Five pitiful little cubs had flown through the air; five bloody corpses now lay on the ground” (107; 170). Chen Zhen looks into the clouds, hoping that Tengger will receive their souls, and praying that Heaven can absolve him of his own sin. ­Simultaneously with his conquest another feeling of crisis stirs within him, a presentiment that at the same time that he has enslaved an other it is the start of another enslavement: “He was leaving the den of the stolen wolves farther and farther [behind], but Chen felt as if an ill wind were following him, stirring up a deep-seated fear in his soul” (103; 164; orig. trans.). This passage is quite important, commencing at the same time as the story of the wolf cub, and sustained throughout the narrative, making us pay great heed to the price of conquest. Immediately following this is confinement—the second act in the performance, its theme ‘slavery and resistance.’ As in the history of civilizations past, in the midst of slavery writing on freedom entirely fills the tomes of history. During his confinement, the wolf cub’s instinct is to run away; just as Chen Zhen is a fugitive of political movements and Berlin’s family were refugees from the former Soviet Union, the wolf cub also wants to flee: He crawled several yards over ground covered with patches of snow and dry grass … it wasn’t until they’d followed him several hundred feet that they realized he wasn’t wandering aimlessly, but had a clear objective in mind: he was running away from the yurts, the camps, the pens, and the aura of humans, dogs, smoke, and livestock (138; 219). The wolf cub’s attempt to escape does not succeed, but does offer Chen Zhen a memorable lesson in freedom. He recalls catching sparrows as a child: “as soon as they were in captivity, they stopped eating and drinking, refusing to adapt to their new surroundings. Their answer to the loss of freedom was death every time” (139; 219). The wolf cub, although confined, does not submit: “they cherished their freedom, but they cherished their life as well … Instead of fasting, it gorged itself and slept as much as possible to store up energy. Then it escaped at the first opportunity in a quest for renewed freedom and a new life” (139; 219). This tenacity when caught in a predicament is what Chen Zhen admires most. In his view, choosing to live in humiliation in order to struggle for freedom, to seek life over death, is the higher aspiration. Hence, it plants the roots of freedom deep in the soil of slavery, delivering to us the full weight of the epigram, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”

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Rousseau’s next sentence is: “Many a one believes himself the master of others, and yet he is a greater slave than they.” Rousseau summarizes at a high level the unusual allegory of the question of freedom: in the civilized world, every freedom must be repaid; the death of one freedom is certain to mean the funeral of another. For example, once Chen Zhen undertakes raising the wolf cub, He would forever be linked to all the wolves on the grassland, their eternal enemy. Wolf families on the Olonbulag, led by the implacable mother wolf, would come to him in the dark of night to demand retribution, forever nipping at the edges of his soul. He sensed that he may have committed a terrible sin (103; 164). This introduces the third act, the conclusion: escape or death. Since the wolf cub cannot flee, his death is inevitable: A fierce northwestern wind sent the cub’s pelt soaring, combing through his battle garb and making him appear to be dressed formally for a banquet in heaven. Pale smoke rising from the yurt’s chimney wafted under the pelt, making it seem as if the cub were riding the clouds, roiling and dancing freely and happily in the misty smoke. At that moment, there was no chain around his neck and no narrow, confining prison under his feet (353; 502). For the body in confinement, death is a thorough release. For Chen Zhen, however, there are two different results. One result is sublime, the death of the body fulfilling the freedom of the spirit. The other result is grave, one death in exchange for another; the first being the body, the second being the soul. At the moment the wolf cub dies, Chen Zhen looks up into heaven, calling out to the wolf, “come bite me in my dreams, bite me savagely …” (353). The ellipses at the end of this utterance are significant, having no stopping point, no reference, innate, and a symbol of life imprisonment. It is evident that confinement does not necessarily take the form of chains and prisons, but is even more a state of the psyche. In the words of Michel Foucault, there is a soul that possesses him: “the soul is the prison of the body.” His conclusion is that “In this central and centralized humanity, the effect and instrument of complex power relations, bodies and forces subjected by multiple mechanisms of ‘incarceration,’ objects for discourses that are in themselves elements for this strategy, we must hear the distant roar of battle.”546 That is to say, once confinement or 546 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 30 and 308.

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slavery occurs, no matter where (the grassland, Beijing, Oxford), and no matter when (premodern, modern, postmodern), the end is similar: acts induce retribution that ‘conquest’ or ‘flight’ cannot escape. Understanding this is important, for it is relevant to our lives and to the world that we live in. Once Chen Zhen conquers the wolf cub, for example, he becomes a violator of freedom. Or when Berlin entered into “political freedom”—the only form of freedom that concerned him—and set it up as “two concepts of liberty,” he not only reduced the scope of freedom, but also placed himself in a virtually inescapable predicament over how to think about freedom. Whenever freedom is made into an occupation, ‘thinking’ and ‘thought’ may be truly imprisoned, leaving the thinker without a moment’s peace of mind: As to the occupations themselves, they are perfect slavery. In manufacturing and wholesale trades, it is true, the employers do not, in general, make use of much personal exertion; but their minds are in a state of continual anxiety … These may, indeed, cast an envious eye towards the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air … these men are the greatest slaves in existence.547 Rousseau’s explanation for this is: “if the chains are simply rules the very obedience to which is the most free, the strongest, most spontaneous expression of your inner nature, then the chains no longer bind you—since self-control is not control. Self-control is freedom.”548 This confinement is conscious and voluntary submission to ‘great’ ideals or the sense of mission of a ‘great man.’ Experience tells us that, more than any visible prison, confinement mentally is extreme and absolute, for even if those such as fugitives, liberal thinkers, refugees are released into a land of freedom, with freedom of speech, there is not a moment without the chains of the psyche that confine thought firmly in ideological shackles. Only onlookers can see clearly: during prolonged warfare opposing sides either bear or come to bear a striking resemblance to each other in policies, strategies, means, methods, and even character and conduct. The back of the hand and the palm require each other for their existence; no matter how many battles are fought, the result is ultimately a draw. By comparison, Rousseau is free, at least free in his premises: he thinks ­freely. Berlin is not this way. Berlin has enemies: philosophically, there is ­Rousseau; 547 John Gray, A Lecture on Human Happiness (New York: Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, 1971), 36–37. 548 Isaiah Berlin wrote this summary of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s thought. See Isaiah Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 44.

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politically, there is extreme freedom. Berlin alleged: “Rousseau was one of the most sinister and most formidable enemies of liberty in the whole history of modern thought … the most untrammeled freedom coincides with the most rigorous and enslaving authority. For this great perversion Rousseau is more responsible than any thinker who ever lived.”549 Unfortunately it is at this point, when Berlin lashes out at Rousseau in a declaration of war, that he and the likes of Chen Zhen part company. His theory wounds them deeply without resolving the issues of freedom that Rousseau faced and Chen Zhen faces. All alike aspire to freedom, yet because their emplacement following their ‘escape’ is not the same, they move in opposite directions in the face of freedom. What is the nature of the issue of freedom that Chen Zhen faces? Yang Ke in Chapter 22 says to Chen Zhen of the wolf cub: It’s just that seeing him chained up all day like a prisoner is heartbreaking. Wolves demand freedom, but we keep him shackled the whole time.550 Doesn’t that bother you? … I can see why Papa doesn’t want you to raise the cub. He considers it blasphemy. Chen Zhen responds: Do you think I’ve never thought of setting him free? But not yet—there are still lots of things I need to know. If the cub is freed, that makes for one free wolf, but if one day there are no wolves on the grassland at all, what sort of freedom is that? You’d feel more remorse than anyone (223; 339). At this point, are you not curious what it is that Chen Zhen’s plans to get from ‘wolves’ freedom’ that will not end in regret? Can wolves attain their sense of freedom through the categories of human philosophy? Freedom is an early modern political concept. Montesquieu divided it clearly into two categories: philosophical and political. “Philosophic liberty consists of the free exercise of the will; or at least … in an opinion that we have the free exercise of our will. Political liberty consists in security, or, at least, in

549 Isaiah Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal, 49. 550 Literally: “Wolves are the animals that most love freedom, yet now are never without shackles.” [Translator’s note].

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the opinion that we enjoy security.”551 The freedom of the wolf is unrelated to these types of liberty; it is a primal freedom in primal nature, coming from and going into wilderness, taking wilderness as its emplacement. Chen Zhen has no interest in this, for what he hopes for is to be able to carry out his own will, namely, freedom of will in the philosophical sense. Unfortunately, such freedom is usually based on possessing or conquering others: What then? Is liberty maintained only by the help of slavery? … There are some unhappy circumstances in which we can only keep our liberty at others’ expense, and where the citizen can be perfectly free only when the slave is most a slave.552 The circumstances above depict an ancient society, Sparta. So what about modern times? As for you, modern peoples, you have no slaves, but you are slaves yourselves; you pay for their liberty with your own. It is in vain that you boast of this preference; I find in it more cowardice than humanity.553 Rousseau’s prose is acerbic. Unfortunately, he addresses the vital point of the ‘difficulty of freedom,’ and reveals the essence of ‘freedom’ in the philosophical sense. Here might lie the answer to the question of freedom in Wolf Totem, or philosophically provide its own answer. For example, the relationship between Chen Zhen and the wolf cub simultaneously represents precisely these two states: the physical confinement of the wolf cub belongs to the slave system, requires the participation of others, and is passive; Chen’s Zhen’s mental enslavement is modern, driven by desire that places him in a state of slavery. It is particularly interesting that when Montesquieu and Rousseau discuss freedom they coincidentally dismiss the first kind of freedom, freedom in the philosophical sense, in favor of insisting upon the second, aiming at political 551 Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Book xii, Chapter 12.2 “Of the Liberty of the Subject,” Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library, http://web.archive .org/web/20110216192931/http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=MonLaws .xml&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part= 152&division=div2 (accessed April 9, 2015). 552 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract (Mineola, ny: Dover Publications, 2003), 66. 553 Ibid.

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and legal orientation, upward toward authority, those who hold power and power itself. That most basic of human freedoms, however, is dismissed, like the fate of Chen Zhen, and remains permanently silenced together with the ‘silent majority.’ This makes me think of Frederick Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) in which he presents two types of production, then drops the first kind, namely “the production of human beings themselves,” to focus entirely on “material production.” It almost seems to be in a historical conspiracy with the choice made by liberal philosophy. Scholars have pointed out: “Speaking of the term freedom in the general sense, when we talk about freedom it always refers to political or social freedom, rather than philosophical or ethical freedom.”554 In the opening passage to John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, for example, he explains that the freedom that he is discussing is not “Liberty of the Will,” but “Civil, or Social Liberty.”555 Berlin goes further in this direction by completely dismissing the first kind of freedom, which Rousseau emphasized, at the same time that he criticizes Rousseau, using “political philosophy” to conceal philosophical freedom. In the same way that using ‘man’ for ‘human’ conceals ‘woman,’ this masking in the name of freedom can appear ostentatiously dignified. Even down to the present in the ‘post-’ era filled with deconstruction, when all that was ‘great’ has been shaken, only ‘freedom’ has remained inviolable: Regardless how profound or how absurd is the slogan “‘political’ not ‘metaphysical,’”556 there is no fundamental concept in political Philosophy more inextricably linked to traditions of metaphysics and metaphysical questions than “freedom.” Freedom is the highest deity enshrined in the cosmos of metaphysics and the crown on the throne of theory in political philosophy.557 Since the 1990s the “third freedom,” derived from “two concepts of liberty,” has followed the modern tradition of being devoted to the prescriptions of ­politicians. We can see, therefore, that in this ‘post-’ era, ‘free’ thinkers still hold 554 Li Hongtu, “Zai lishi zhong zhaoxun ziyou de yiyi [Searching for the definition of freedom in history],” in Ziyouzhuyi zhi qian de ziyou [Liberty before liberalism] (Shanghai: Sanlian shudian, 2003), 134. 555 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Dover, 2002), 1. 556 John Rawls, “Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 14.3 (Summer 1985): 223–251. 557 Ying Qi 应 奇 , Di san zhong ziyou 第 三 种 自 由 [The third kind of freedom] (Beijing: Dongfang chubanshe, 2006).

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to the traditional domain and traditional mode of narration, far removed from the age and most people. People are disorientated and even losing freedom in the course of fully possessing and practicing political freedom, while scholars still stroll along the beach of history occupied with searching for their lost eyeglasses. Understanding this point is not easy; the price it requires is ‘confinement.’ Just as Chen Zhen comes to comprehend freedom through the wolf cub’s confinement, so scholars like us for the most part are gradually awakening to the longing to return to freedom through the ‘philosophy of freedom’ that has been confined. Confinement itself bears no relation to freedom, but it is the birthing table that produces the ‘mentality of freedom’—unfortunately, just about the only one. Viewing the degree of its bleeding and pain, even the struggle with consciousness, to say it is the birthing table is both iconic and logical. In the novel, the wolf cub is not punished after its resistance, but rather moves Chen Zhen to reflect. As he reflects, Chen Zhen tries to free himself, to turn the wolf cub’s resistance into the cradle that nurtures spiritual freedom. Faced with the wolf cub’s bloody resistance: His feelings for the young wolf were growing stronger by the day, yet he could not deny that he was the one who had destroyed the cub’s free and happy family. If not for him, all those young wolves would now be off fighting wars with their father and mother … Lamentably, his and their brilliant future had been forfeited by a Han Chinese from a faraway place (221; 336). Unlike Berlin’s concept of freedom, the issue of freedom in the novel not only transcends the constraints of systems, but also transcends humanity. Because it involves wolves, involves nature, it is pluralist and it is postmodern. Once it involves humans it is a gyre, a return to origin: resisting in confinement, achieving freedom in resisting. The novel contains at least two forms of resistance that correspond to Berlin’s two concepts of liberty, and these appear to be “positive” and “negative” as well. “For the past two days the wolf cub had bled and pitted his life against being pulled along and then confined, and in its struggling for freedom it had not even spared its own fangs, gnawing and biting until they were destroyed” (331). With the mindset and behavior that all prisoners share in a state of confinement, it tries to break out and escape: The cub, seemingly engaged in a prison battle, cherished every inch added to the chain. As soon as it was lengthened, he’d run madly in circles, rejoicing over the new inches of freedom he’d gained (347; 494).

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Chen Zhen understands, “on the free, wide grassland, to show freedom to a wolf, by nature free, but to withhold that freedom from the wolf, was perhaps the cruelest punishment on earth” (348). Yet, since he is stubbornly unwilling to free it, the wolf cub “stared out at the grassland with longing in his eyes” (348; 495). Chen felt his own throat tighten whenever he looked at the cub. All he could do was check the chain, the collar, and the post more often to prevent the cub from running away into the land of freedom and death before his own eyes (348; 495). Whether escaping imprisonment or being confined, the result of positive resistance for the most part is death. As a self-conscious and thoroughly intelligent person from Beijing, Chen Zhen is sufficiently aware of this, and therefore is always timely in expressing his ‘negative resistance.’ Because of his status as a ‘child of the black gang’ he chooses the grassland where heaven is high and the emperor far away. Faced with unavoidable re-education, he chooses active listening. Situated in the desolate wilderness, he chooses to read. In the stultifying life of tending sheep, he finds enjoyment in raising the wolf cub. Among all the possible forms of resistance, he commits no positive act, but takes furtive joy in a negative stand during various types of confinement. This pleasure preserves his life and his reputation, even his sense of aspiration and dignity, but it cannot fulfill his psyche, because the condition for such life and pleasure is ceding freedom, and the price is conciliation and humiliation. Fortunately, he has a wolf cub, and it is in the positive resistance of the wolf cub that Chen sees the spirit of freedom: The desolation vanished from Chen’s heart each time he sat down by  the  cub, as if he’d received a transfusion of roiling wolf blood. Sparked  by the wolf cub’s high-speed engine, the generator of Chen Zhen’s morale now surged humming into life, making him feel enthusiastic and fulfilled (347; 494; orig. trans.). Facing slavery and conquest, Chen Zhen loses some of his vanity and gains a measure of reflection, something rare among colonials and conquerors. In his own cynical state he reveres the wolf’s freedom, and in his own involuntary compromising, he has high praise for the wolf cub’s unbending spirit of resistance: In this barren, uninhabited land, he enjoyed the company of a young wolf whose life generator created the power to help him through the

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s­ eemingly endless winter … He worshipped and admired the wolves. Had it really been necessary to imprison the cub and deprive him of his freedom and happiness so he could overcome Han ignorance and prejudice and succeed in his study of the wolves? (348; 495). At this point a beautiful about-face is evident. It fixes the meaning firmly at the point of origin, shifting freedom back to its origins, from political philosophy returning to philosophy of freedom in the broad sense. For a long time now in the scholarly world, discussion of freedom has moved further and further away from freedom itself. Eric Fromm pointed out that among philosophers, “[o]ne error lies in the habit of speaking of the freedom of choice of man rather than that of a specific individual.”558 Since the early modern era, in the face of the affairs of humanity, freedom in the name of ‘political philosophy’ has been ever more socialized, institutionalized, and specified, until it appears to be a “betrayal of freedom,” as Isaiah Berlin argued. Such betrayal is not apparent, but is doubly deceitful. First, placed within the scope of politics and law, freedom is itself is no longer free. Superficially, it is elevated, but in reality becomes the tool of dialogue with those in power. Second, when the scholar places ‘thinking’ within the framework of ‘two (or several) concepts’ he is himself no longer free at any time, but becomes the slave of ‘freedom.’ When freedom is allied with politics or becomes political, it parts company with philosophy. The fundamental element of philosophy is free thought, the capacity to remove itself from politics, and if it becomes political philosophy it forever forfeits the possibility of free choice in its essential sense, a true catastrophe for ‘freedom.’ After our Cultural Revolution and countless political movements, we can speak from experience about the significance of political philosophy and make the allegorical novels To Live [Huozhe]559 and Wolf Totem serve as reference texts for ‘not free’ and ‘free’ respectively. To return now to the origins of freedom, we can only go back to Rousseau: Every free action is produced by the concurrence of two causes; one moral, i.e., the will which determines the act; the other physical; i.e., the power which executes it. When I walk towards an object, it is necessary first that I should will to go there, and, in the second place, that my feet should carry me there.560 558 Eric Fromm, The Heart of Man (New York: Lantern Books, 2011), 123. 559 Yu Hua 余 华 , Huozhe 活 着 (Wuhan: Changjiang wenyi chubanshe, 1993); English translation To Live, trans. Michael Berry (New York: Anchor, 2003). 560 On the Social Contract (Dover, 2003), 37.

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In addressing freedom, the psyche is primary, that is, the recognition of being ‘not free,’ which is the result of self-consciousness. In the novel, freedom is an issue that appears only after the wolf cub: prior to this, there is freedom without the issue of freedom. In the novel the issue of freedom accompanies confinement from the first to the last as the by-product of confinement, and what is ­necessary to sustain the psyche during confinement. If there is no ­consciousness of confinement, or if being resigned to what one can enjoy in confinement is satisfactory, then ‘life’ stagnates into alienation from one’s kind: Chen could not tell if the cub knew why he had become a prisoner, but the hateful glare in his eyes was unmistakable, as if he were saying, “The puppies get to run free; why can’t I?” … Depriving him of his freedom by tethering him to a chain removed both the conditions and opportunity for his personality to develop naturally. Would a wolf raised under such conditions still be a real wolf?” (190; 296). For the one confined, slavery is one form that directly constrains mind and body. The goal of freedom is therefore liberation, taking off chains and removing the slave system; or, in the name of dignity, to die. As Bilgee tells Chen Zhen: It’s no life for a wolf; not even dogs have it this bad. It’s worse than the ancient Mongolian slaves. Mongolian wolves would rather die than live like this … You need to kill him now while he still looks like a wolf and has a true wolf spirit. That way he’ll die as if in battle, like a wild wolf. Don’t let him die an ignoble death, like a sick dog! Let his soul complete its cycle (350; 498). The jailor watching over the prisoner is actually confined in a dual sense. Portraying this is a bright spot in Wolf Totem, for although the prisoner is in a passive state without freedom he can still demonstrate freedom through resistance, while the jailor’s state of confinement is self-inflicted. Chen Zhen’s defense is not at all a pretext: “Papa,” Chen said, quietly defending himself, “I’m not treating this wolf cub like a slave. If anything, I’ve become its slave. I wait on it like I would a Mongol king or a prince … I haven’t been sleeping well lately, and Gao Jianzhong has begun calling me the wolf’s slave” (173; 271). Bilgee believes that Chen is speaking in earnest, but that poses a problem for him: “If Chen waited on the little wolf the way he would a deity or a king, then

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was that offending the gods or revering them?” (173; 271). In a dilemma over form and spirit, over rules and human sentiment, the choice that people of the grassland make inclines to the spirit: “Even though Chen Zhen’s methods ran counter to traditional Mongol customs, he had a good heart, and there was nothing the grassland Mongols valued more” (173–74; 271). But does Chen Zhen really need this sort of approval to be pardoned or given freedom of action? No, on the grassland the freedom of people like Chen Zhen is a given. Reading the story closely you will discover that over its entire length what truly enjoys freedom of action on the grassland is neither grassland spirits, nor grassland wolves, still less the people of the grassland. At the same time as losing territorial autonomy, the people of the grassland are the group most lacking freedom in the novel. As unbearable as it is to say, freedom in the social sense is given over almost without reservation entirely to the outsiders in the novel, like the army representatives and the migrant workers. They easily occupy others’ land and destroy the homeland of the grassland people. Or like Chen Zhen, who knows that raising a wolf cub is a serious taboo, but willfully disregards this anyway. Bilgee is incisive on this point: “When you Chinese came to the grassland, you broke down our established rules” (263; 390). Every freedom that outsiders have has been achieved on the condition of transgression. That is very near civilization and civilized people. Let us look at the invincible force and irresistible seductiveness of ‘transgression’: it achieves a dual purpose, both creating civilization and, thereby, gaining freedom. Now consider Hegel’s guidance on this point: “This is the transfiguration of necessity into freedom, and freedom now is not just the freedom of abstract negation, but concrete and positive freedom instead. To be sure, necessity as such is not yet freedom; but freedom presupposes necessity and contains it sublated within itself.”561 Freedom is essentially concrete; it forever determines itself; hence, at the same time, it is necessity. How pedantically studied this appears. At the level of epistemology, that is, of philosophy, freedom in this book is questionable, everything linked so closely that it all ends where it begins in chains or enslavement. The only exception is aesthetics: everything related to freedom, whether enslavement or confinement, resistance or escape, has a special tension, awakening in the heart of the reader the passion of pure, simple longing for freedom. It is regrettable that freedom in the realm of aesthetics shares no common ground with the concept of freedom or political philosophy on freedom; they do not connect or understand each other, but each follows its own reasoning. Issues of freedom, politically, are related to social systems. Freedom in the novel breaks through law and politics to return to what people and individuals may privately possess or may be privately 561 Georg Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, 232–33.

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c­ ollected. Even in a state of slavery in which freedom has been utterly lost it can survive tenaciously and even beautifully, be aestheticized and be beautiful. In this sense it can be said, “Art challenges the monopoly of the established reality to determine what is ‘real,’ and it does so by creating a fictitious world which is nevertheless ‘more real than reality itself.’”562 Marcuse summarized this by writing, “art represents the ultimate goal of all revolutions: the freedom and happiness of the individual.”563 Hence, these questions follow: Outside art, is individual freedom and happiness possible? If possible, where are they? If not possible, what is the goal of political philosophy? For half a century, with Isaiah Berlin and a group of exiled liberal thinkers providing the impetus, freedom has become the core concept in political philosophy. Berlin believed, “New concepts do get born: [because] new ideals arise.”564 After Red Russia and Nazi Germany in the twentieth century, the predicament of institutional freedom prompted the “two concepts of liberty” to coalesce into political philosophy. Not only could freedom be discussed abstractly, but it also could be a concrete indicator, and a political goal that can be manipulated. ‘Freedom’ was promoted, like an official, above any direct relationship with ordinary people and their lives. Since then we have had political philosophy devoted to discussing freedom, but no longer possess free philosophy that discusses freedom. This result is probably far from what Berlin intended. Berlin advocated pluralism in opposition to monism or dualism in any form because politically they are oriented respectively toward dictatorship and revolution: “I think that the concept of positive liberty, which is of course essential to a decent existence, has been more often abused or perverted than that of negative liberty… And the answers to them determine the nature of a given society—whether it is liberal or authoritarian, democratic or despotic, … and so on.”565 It is evident that his train of thought is actually based on dualistic opposition, entering into a ‘monistic’ explanation via metaphysical abstraction, then a form of ideology of freedom, inadvertently reaching the opposite of freedom. I have the same sensitivity and dread of “positive freedom” that I do of words and actions that begin with ‘good’ and end in ‘sham.’ Once freedom becomes political it is divorced entirely from that spirit of freedom in 562 Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension, trans. Erica Sherover (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), 22. 563 Ibid., 56. 564 Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (New York: Scribner’s, 1991), 42. The author quotes the Chinese translation as reading, “The reason new concepts are born is because new ideas arise.” 565 Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin, 41.

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the novel in its myriad features that can be felt and known, lamentable and laughable. The original features of freedom are lost in institutional and ideological norms. Hence, a “third kind of freedom,” a fourth, or even a fifth derived from this situation all follow Berlin’s thinking and strive to direct thoughts of freedom into the ‘ideal’ political system—a classic grand narrative. In this age, already well into the ‘post-’ era, only political philosophy persists in the ‘grand’ and continually expands its territory, yet few people rise up in revolt. Why? Because of the illumination of ‘political correctness,’ political philosophy is invincible. The object of its study is not freedom (in the philosophical sense), but is institutions, prisons, that is, what sort of prison is the most reasonable or most accords with human nature. It is thought out as conduct in prisons especially for establishing prisons. It serves philosophy or freedom less than its serves politics or politicians. It is the instrument of power and of authorities that directly serves the establishment of national institutions, and no matter whether right or wrong, deliberately increases the distance from free thought and the spirit of freedom in people. Berlin specifically, in rejecting and even spurning Rousseau, also cast aside Rousseau’s important premise that “man is born free.” This is a classic ‘anti-utopian’ act: throwing the baby out with the bathwater, throwing away life in order to avoid death. Because of this it is also rejecting freedom, for freedom is always the premise of ‘living.’ At this point we actually encounter a paradox. Alfred North Whitehead once said, “Systems scientific and philosophic come and go. Each method of limited understanding is at length exhausted. In its prime each system is a triumphant success; in its decay it is an obstructive nuisance.”566 It is as though the intent of all new ideas is to ‘turn daughtersin-law into mothers-in-law.’ Only mothers-in-law will not turn back into daughters-in-law. This irreversible trend foretells the direction of freedom: if the future of the daughter-in-law is a mother-in-law, the future of freedom is surely to struggle for freedom. It merely means changing objective and content before starting over again as a daughter-in-law. Sadly, in the face of the strength of the stirring freedom in the novel, daughters-in-law and mothers-in-law are for the moment completely useless. But more than this, it is just in abandoning notions like “two concepts” or “the third kind” of freedom and returning to the text of Wolf Totem that there is a feeling of relaxation and ease—that is the feeling of recovering freedom. In terms of philosophy, freedom in Wolf Totem is a cycle, striving at the level of the spirit of primal freedom to return freedom to its origin. The ­spirit of ­ primal freedom—represented by the grassland wolves—also appears 566 Cited in Ervin Laszlo, Evolution: The General Theory, 11.

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to be an allegory, one that gradually sorts out some lines of reasoning from the entangled  story of freedom. “Born free” is an attribute of primal freedom, the product of primal nature; it is based on emplacement, and content with its e­ mplacement. Emplacement is “dwelling,”567 and also constraint. Endowed with consciousness, once people are aware of its bonds, emplacement becomes imprisonment, and immediately the only choice becomes to break out and struggle for freedom. It can be said that all freedoms in the human world are related to displacement; concretely for the individual it is the act of escaping from the prison of one’s own emplacement. It is not related to any institution; it is a spiritual state of human existence. The novel shows us this state in its fundamental sense and the myriad variations of ‘freedom,’ and gives us the flavor of many kinds of freedom in conditions that are free or not so free. Confinement does not necessarily signify lack of freedom. Heavy chains may indeed be the birthing table of the spirit of freedom. A free environment does not necessarily produce freedom but rather the “unbearable lightness of being” within the freedom of a life of too much ease where ubiquitous freedom indeed has no emplacement with a firm footing— however temporary that may be. True, freedom is forcing doors open, setting out, displacement. Once the door is forced open and the fundamental emplacement left behind, the person is spiritually free. At the same time, he begins the journey in search of emplacement, always traveling, never finding rest. Hence it can be said that freedom is a limited choice. Social institutions or government systems are different receptacles. Freedom is like water, with different flows in different containers, but inevitably filling every crevice: too cold, it will freeze; too hot, it will distil or evaporate. No matter how you determine its nature or attempt to define its form, it is always itself ‘free’ and spontaneous. There is no salvation of ‘the other shore’ in freedom. It drifts among different emplacements, settling on the peak of one desire after another … then escapes. The saying “It is always the other mountain that looks higher” expresses this dissatisfaction. The Indian thinker Jiddu Krishnamurti offers an insightful depiction of this in The First and Last Freedom: Having tired of one desire, I automatically want to fulfil myself in another … Being bored with a particular sensation, I seek a new sensation … The objects I pursue are the projections of the mind as symbols from which 567 It has similarities to Martin Heidegger’s “poetic dwelling” as an ultimate expression of dasein [existence]. “The poetic is the basic capacity for human dwelling.” See Martin Heidegger, “… Poetically Man Dwells …” in Poetry, Language, Thought trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Perennial Library, 1975), 226.

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it derives sensations. The word ‘God,’ the word ‘love,’ the word ‘communism,’ the word ‘democracy,’ the word ‘nationalism’—these are all symbols which give sensations to the mind, and therefore the mind clings to them … and in that process we are caught.568 Here you may ask what is ahead for freedom? As I see it, what lies ahead for freedom is struggling for freedom, only the direction will always change. 4.12

In Terms of Folklore: Limited Use or Limited Survival? [P]hilosophy is deeply embedded in all the humanities and social sciences … [We] live better and survive better than if we just confronted a nature that is indifferent to us. hans-georg gadamer569

The text that forms the background in Wolf Totem together with much of its source material read less as ecological fiction than folklore fiction. Placing oneself in the ‘realm of folklore’ while in the state of mind of reading folklore, it seems as if the years roll back, and we have returned to the rural grassland of those years and walk on the green grass under the blue sky among the fields and streams. Free from the cares of identity and hard work, stepping into ‘nature’ and the ‘primitive’ are cleansing and restful for the soul. Just before nightfall, Yang Ke went alone to a spot where he could observe what was happening on his swan lake. He sat down, elbows on his knees, and, through his telescope, drank in a sight that could well disappear before long. Ripples appeared on the lake surface, those in the west mirroring the cold blueness of the night sky, while those in the east reflected the warm colors of sunset (183; 285). On the rural grassland students of our generation had this experience, alone in peaceful nature, at ease, relaxed, unblemished, and innocent … That moment of being oblivious to oneself was enough to dissolve all cares and became a spiritual treasure that one could not exhaust in a lifetime. In such a realm of 568 Jiddu Krishnamurti, The First and Last Freedom (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 100–01. 569 Gadamer in Conversation, ed. Richard E. Palmer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 41.

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folklore I want to let go of myself and follow the traces of Yang Ke, leaving criticism behind in the realm of beauty—can I? The view that spread out before Yang Ke seemed to [stage] the sad yet enchanting death of the swans. Tengger had sent down the precious lights as a prelude to the parting of its beloved swans from the clear waters (183; “To stage”—what does that mean? One word is enough to make us fully alert and suddenly bring us back to the current state of research on folklore. “Performance”570 by chance happens to coincide with the materials in ethnic studies, so popular in recent years: The ripples continued their slow march, like the overture to a tragic drama … Yang wished that the ballet about to unfold would have a natural background and that the lead actor would never appear. But from among the inky green reeds, one swan after another glided out onto the lake, its multicolored surface and the canopy of the sky above creating an enormous stage (183; 283–84). This is obviously a tragedy, with the swans carrying the allegory,571 and the “stage” as a symbol as well. What do they signify? Whose drama do they stage? Which ethnicity’s folklore do they perform? What is the point that these folkloric performances and this “ethnographic allegory” attempt to relate? This is a story of the grassland, ethnography that attempts to represent the people of the grassland through folklore. Everything in the novel on life and production among the grassland people is folklore. It is precisely in the sense of folklore that the allegorical significance of post-allegory follows the ­allegorical vehicle and is clearly evident. However, when it is superimposed 570 “Performance” as an important term in post-folklore studies was first introduced by Richard Bauman, Verbal Art as Performance (Rowley, ma: Newbury House Publishers, 1978). See Minsuxue de lishi, lilun yu fangfa 民 俗 学 的 历 史 、 理 论 与 方 法 [History, theory, and methods of folklore studies], ed. Zhou Xing 周 星 (Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 2006), vol. 2: 569–609. See also Zhou Fuyan 周 福 岩 , “Biaoyan lilun yu minjian gushi yanjiu 表 演 理 论 与 民 间 故 事 研 究 [Performance theory and the study of folk stories],” Anshan shifan xueyuan bao 2001 No. 1 (January). 571 Mongolians’ worship of swans has extended from the Neolithic age to the present. Numerous beautiful legends have been passed down among the people, among which swans were a totem in the shamanism of northern nomads, who revered them as a symbol of purity. See Menggu mishi [Secret history of the Mongols, modern Chinese edition] (Beijing: Xinhua chubanshe, 2006), 50–51.

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with ‘­ethnographic allegory’ the situation is not so straightforward. Is it seeking to use post-allegorical method to record the ethnography that has no written record? Or is it attempting to borrow the material of this ethnography to continue to enrich the significance of the allegory? The people of the grassland here are highly abstract, no longer a particular people in the ethnographic sense, but humanity in a state of existence in primal nature. The so-called ethnography is not a chronicle in the sense of historiography either, but rather typifies ethnographic allegory: “Embodied in written reports, these stories simultaneously describe real cultural events and make additional, moral, ideological, and even cosmological statements. Ethnographic writing is allegorical in both content (what it says about cultures and their histories) and form (what is implied by its mode of textualization).”572 In his “Ethnographic Allegory,” James Clifford cited Northrop Frye’s definition: “Within the boundaries of literature we find a kind of sliding scale, ranging from the most explicitly allegorical, consistent with being literature at all, at one extreme, to the most elusive, anti-explicit and anti-allegorical at the other.”573 From the aspect of folklore, Wolf Totem contains features of both allegory and anti-allegory, and we may therefore make use of performance theory in the sense of ethnographic allegory to explore this. What is the allegorical import of the rich folkloric realm in Wolf Totem? What material does it offer that can be drawn from for understanding folklore and for the study of folklore? Folklore is a concept that was first used by the British scholar W.J. Thomas in the nineteenth century, linking it to cultural “remains.”574 The American folklorist Archer Taylor believed: “Folklore is the material that is handed on by tradition, either by word of mouth or by custom and practice.”575 Jan Harold Brunvand, on the basis of his predecessors’ research, pointed out: “folklore may be defined as those materials in culture that circulate traditionally among members of any group in different versions, whether in oral form or by means of customary example, as well as the processes of traditional performance and

572 James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Allegory,” in Writing Culture, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkley: University of California Press, 1986), 98–121. 573 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 91; cited in James Clifford, Writing Culture, 98. 574 Cited in Jan Harold Brunvand, The Study of American Folklore (New York: Norton, 1998), 5. 575 Ibid.

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communication.”576 By bringing the field of folklore studies out of the primitive to things at hand, he expanded the scope of folklore research. Folklore studies emphasize field research, something that coincides well with the on-location experience of Chen Zhen and his peers. There have been scholars who criticized desk-bound researchers (J.G. Frazier, author of The Golden Bough, among them): “It is a remarkable fact that none of the anthropologists whose theories about primitive religion have been most influential had ever been near a primitive people. It is as though a chemist had never thought it necessary to enter a laboratory.”577 The presence of Chen Zhen and his like on the scene luckily avoids this common failing, and their lowly student status ensures their total immersion in defining folkloric events: To Chen Zhen, these hours of exemplary combat tactics had proven more enlightening than years of reading Sun-tzu or Clausewitz … this old man [Bilgee], whose educational level was low but whose erudition was broad, had gradually answered all his questions by enlightening him on the combat methods of wolves, using the most primitive yet most advanced teaching methods, gradually removing his doubts (19; 27–8; orig. trans.). Folkloric information in the novel includes oral transmission, customs, and practices, all of which typify “cultural remains” to people today. The British scholar Robert Marett maintained that “the survivals of culture within folklore studies” implied a shared human essence: “The folklorist ought as far as possible to be versed in the actual practice of that which he would sympathetically understand.”578 He viewed folklore as not only relics of the past but also as matters of humanity in the present. Hence, Zhong Jingwen made a point of emphasizing that folklore studies is a form of knowledge that belongs to the present rather than to history: “the two are different in the same way that biology differs from paleontology.”579 At the same time, the folkloric information in the novel contains both kinds: to the characters in the story, it belongs to the immediate present; to the readers, it is historical or primitive. As fiction, the folkloric events undoubtedly “are literary or popular, but not ‘folk,’” what

576 577 578 579

Ibid., 15. E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1965), 6. Robert R. Marett, Psychology and Folklore (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1920), 2. Zhong Jingwen 钟 敬 文 , Minsuxue rumen 民 俗 学 入 门 [Introduction to folklore studies] (Beijing: Zhongguo minjian wenyi chubanshe, 1984).

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Richard Dorson termed “fakelore.”580 However, the folklore material the novel depicts is not necessarily the result of deliberate performance, and its primary material is produced spontaneously or unconsciously.581 The material comes directly from “the grassland herdsmen’s ecological consciousness of protecting the environment that is primitive, plain, and natural, but also consistent with scientific rules”: You can only sense the nature of the weight that the mode of production of primitive herding gives to ecological balance by penetrating deeply into the nomadic mode of living. At least in 1967, when we arrived on the Olonbulag as the first group of students from Beijing, the grassland still preserved the natural appearance of primitive beauty, exactly as it had appeared hundreds and thousands of years before.582 To readers today the folkloric events in the novel are strange. Even on the grassland today the stories passed down for thousands of years are rarities and have become genuine legends. Wolf Totem fully brings into play the power of legends and combines that with events of ‘living’ folklore, together constructing poetry. Post-ethnography is poetic, “not in its textual form, but in its return to the original context and function of poetry, which, by means of its performative break with everyday speech, evoked memories of the ethos of the community and thereby provoked hearers to act ethically.”583 The “ethos,” as it is named here, has a major allegorical significance in Wolf Totem in its constantly provoking a state of action. What is it? We might well return to the folkloric realm of the story to address the folklore that fills the novel one element at a time. How are antiquated “survivals of culture” turned into aesthetic features that move readers? What allegorical significance do these distant events in folklore have that they live on in the present? The ‘realm of folklore’ and the ‘ethos of folklore’ are new concepts for use in this section. “Any concept is bound to be a paradox.”584 Here is no exception, 580 American Folklore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 4. 581 See Alan Dundes, Interpreting Folklore (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 33 passim. 582 Jiang Rong, interview with Ms. Yao Ting of Bertelsmann by e-mail, n.d. n.p. 583 Stephen Tyler, “Postmodern Ethnography” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford, George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 125–126. 584 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 136.

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the premise being a view of folklore in systems theory and not reality. Reality and ideas may well deviate from each other. It is precisely in the sense of idea rather than reality that they happen to coincide with William Graham Sumner’s theory of folklore. In Sumner’s view, what he called folkways is “a great mass of usages, of all degrees of importance, covering all the interests of life …”585 I agree with this proposition. The folklore features that fill the novel are like varied elements in a mass (primal nature), blurring the boundaries of human and animal. Each item of folklore, folk implements, or animal customs can be seen as ordinary stuff after removing their essential content, and they can only be explained within the entire system. Every ‘worn-out strip of cloth’—to borrow from my experience creating the Women’s Museum—has significance only within the entire system; otherwise, they are truly just a pile of rags that people view as survivals of culture and rarely see their cultural value. The realm of folklore is the aesthetic experience obtained through total immersion in the folklore environment. That may be through physical presence or vicariously through performance. The ethos of folklore is respect and identification with the essence of folklore culture, that is, the discipline of existence, shown in the restraint and discipline of the individual in daily life. “New concepts … should have a necessity, as well as an unfamiliarity, and they have both to the extent they’re a response to real problems.”586 The reason for using these two new concepts is because more suitable concepts cannot be found in existing folklore theory to deconstruct the phenomena of folklore that fill the novel. The novel is replete with the stuff of folklore, but is not simply depicting the stuff. Before engaging in analysis we need to proceed with the abstract as a premise, placing the grassland and all living things on the grassland in a whole environment of f­ olklore—the state of existence in primal nature—before we can see the allegorical meaning that the ‘stuff’ contains. Stuff (súshì 俗 事 ) is the third new concept that I employ here, directed at the theme and the shift of subject position in Wolf Totem. On the Olonbulag, where boundaries between humans and animals blur, this is a fittingly postmodern concept. It also comes with a condition: to delete the ‘folk’ in the traditional concept of folklore. In other words, by implication it overturns what traditionally signifies ‘folk’: first, what is implied in ‘folk’ is not limited to humans; second, ‘folklore’ also includes animal lore, and therefore a general term for the ‘stuff’ of living things on the grassland. Only through careful study does 585 William Graham Sumner, Folkways: A Study of Mores, Manners, Customs, and Morals (1906; reprint ed. New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007), 37. 586 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 136.

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it become apparent that folklore has never been unique to humans. It is the relationship of humans coordinating with nature in given environments to work out a collective of shared life, as described below: But humans and their livestock needed the cooperation of wolves when they launched their autumn battles … Humans had their livestock finish off the grass while the wolves were a deterrent to the mice from cutting down grass at will. For thousands of years wolves and humans, along with their livestock, worked together to effectively control the population of mice The grass they gathered delayed the process of yellowing, which in turn supplied the livestock with green grass for about ten days, extra time to store up fat. And so, the battle waged jointly by men and wolves achieved many purposes (340; 485). This is a complete system because the biological chain is linked together, conforming to the ubiquitous logic of the grassland. The folklore is established on the basis of thorough knowledge of the natural logic: “The folkways are the right ways to satisfy all interests,” and this “notion of right is in the folkways. It is not outside of them.”587 Establishing a system of folklore means that, within conditions that all life shares, people as a whole find their own stable and secure emplacement. Emplacement, as Foucault stated, “is defined by relations of proximity between points or elements,”588 unrelated to social hierarchy, status, or value judgments. It recalls a time when “Nature was a drama in which each thing played its part,”589 and a place for Man “in which he could follow his instincts with impunity and do or not do whatever he pleased” in “the security provided by his well-adapted instincts.”590 Recognition of and identification with emplacement is the premise of folklore thought; conscious adherence to emplacement is the core of the ethos of folklore. As Sumner wrote, what people have chosen as the “most suitable” way of doing things is shown in folklore.591 Wolf Totem attempts to show this “most suitable” way on the Olonbulag. It takes matters of folklore as the background of the story, with u­ ncommon 587 Sumner, Folkways, 17. 588 “Different Spaces,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault Volume 2, ed. J.D. Faubion (London: Penguin, 1998), 176. 589 Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 8. 590 Conrad Lorenz, On Aggression (New York: Harvest Book, 1974), 238. 591 “Ways of doing things” is one of the most basic concepts in Sumner’s theoretical system. He believed that “ways of doing things were selected, which were expedient. They a­ nswered the purpose better than other ways, or with less toil and pain.” Sumner, ­Folkways, 2.

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d­isplays aesthetically and cognitively. On the level of understanding, it ­effectively rouses the ethos of folklore deep within people, and through environmental protection and ecological awareness injects the disciplinary ­consciousness of self-restraint. On the aesthetic level it converts the ‘stuff’ as a whole into the source material of fiction, effectively creating a dense realm of folklore, bringing what was dead back to life through the conception of the beautiful. Starting with the ‘stuff,’ the novel contains depictions of a great quantity of stuff in bits and pieces. Yet they do not strike one as stale or out of place, because as a whole they transcend history while without exception appearing in concrete instances of real life. Folklore enters straight into the structure of the fiction, all the major and minor stories are tied to elements of folklore, and enter the plot through instances of folklore. First is structure. The change of seasons on the grassland forms the natural ecological structure; the flesh and blood that make it so plentiful are the instances of folklore driven by the seasons. The story begins in winter with the grassland wolves encircling the herd of gazelles, and the novel displays for us a major instance of folklore on the grassland in winter—digging gazelles out of the snow. [E]ight carts were loaded with felt, ropes, hoes, kindling, and woodenhandled hooks. Everyone was wearing grimy old clothing for the dirty, tiring work ahead—so grimy it shone, so old it was black, and dotted with sheepskin patches. But the people and the dogs were as cheerful as the tribes that had followed the ancient Mongol hordes in sweeping up battlefields to claim the spoils of war (23–24; 35). Here, in Chapter 3, the author introduces information on grassland folklore related to productive activities in winter. Because of the shift of subject position it shows not only the lore of ‘folk,’ but even more the performance that heaven, earth, humans, and animals share in together on the snowy plain: The blue sky turned white, as did the dry grass; the surface of the snow began to melt, forming a glittery mirror. Humans, dogs, and carts had a spectral quality. The men put on their sunglasses, while women and children covered their eyes with their flapped sleeves. … As they neared the site of the encirclement, the dogs discovered something new on the slope and raced over, leaving frenzied barks in their wakes. Those that were still hungry tore into gazelle carcasses the wolves had left behind (24–25; 36–37).

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In this scene of primitive nature we see what sets humans apart from other animals, namely, the ‘grassland arks’ that have been created by ‘folk’ of the ‘lore.’ Each of these “was like a gigantic skateboard” made using two pieces of felt: The felt easily withstood the weight of two men … Once they were steady, they dragged the second roll of felt and laid it out in front of the one they were standing on. They squared the two pieces and then stepped onto the second piece. After laying down the hooked pole, they repeated the process, moving the first piece out in front of the second. They did this over and over, as if piloting a pair of felt boats, gliding toward a living gazelle (27–28; 42). The event comes to a close when, “[a]t last, Chen Zhen was aboard one of those marvelous creations” (28; 42). However, for the demands of folklore studies that is still not enough. There is still “the equally necessary and important task of collecting the meaning(s) of folklore. One must distinguish use and meaning, … and folklorists must actively seek to elicit the meaning of folklore from the folk.”592 That gave me the realization in the practice of collecting c­ ultural artifacts: if there is no on-site investigation of the environment, if there is no authoritative explanation by the users of the objects, then all the stuff of folk implements are truly just worn-out strips of cloth, colorful enough when displayed, but after the display lacking any value. The “performance” here is rare for containing everything, from collection to description to explanation, and meets the necessary conditions when folklore studies and ethnographic research have materials. Through Chen Zhen’s being on location the narrative not only sets out the scene of retrieving the gazelles, but also interprets the use value of the ‘grassland arks,’ the meaning of the felt snow carpets That grassland inhabitants had devised to transport themselves across the snow and avoid calamitous blizzards. Countless Mongol herdsmen had ridden these boats over the millennia, escaping the snowy abyss and rescuing vast numbers of sheep and dogs. It had also allowed them to drag out victims of hunts by wolves and humans and to claim spoils of war abandoned on snow lakes (28; 43). Exacting folklorists have demanded a further step: “I would ask the folk-lorist, then, when he reports a piece of rustic custom, not to neglect the emotions that are hidden behind the superficial sayings and doings, since the former 592 Alan Dundes, Analytic Essays in Folklore (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), 51.

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b­ elong not to the mere context and atmosphere, but to the very essence, of what he has to study; and, standing as they do for the principle of vital continuity, afford a truer measure of human evolution.”593 The novel echoes this: Eight felt boats, sixteen flying carpets, converged on the snow lake as if chasing one another, raising clouds of powdery snow and sprays of ice. Dogs barked, people shouted, Tengger smiled … The men took off their sunglasses, opened their eyes wide, and looked up into the sky. “Tengger!” they shouted joyfully. “Tengger!” Now the boats picked up speed, their pilots emboldened (28; 43). This kind of description is just the part that studies in folklore are most apt to overlook, and is the folklore content that is the hardest to capture during the stage of collection. It demands that the collectors be there and feel for themselves, perfectly merging folklore with life, life with the hearts of people, the hearts of people with feeling, feeling with the cosmos, and the cosmos with living things: It took three days and nights to reach this pastureland in safety … Cows and sheep and horses, all half dead from the cold and hunger, made a dash for it as soon as it came into view. As for the people, they threw themselves down onto the snow and wept, then banged their heads on the ground in thanks to Tengger, until their faces were covered with snow (12; 15). Whether the things described above still survive today or not, they are displayed vividly to us through artistic text: life returns to the springtime grassland; people encircle the wolves to destroy them (Chapter 12). In summer when the vitality of life is at its peak the culture of horses, of dogs, of marmots, and of mosquitoes and flies all emerge as one, closely woven together with all aspects of grassland folklore, driving the contest of life and death to its extreme (Chapter 28). Once into fall the pastureland is switched (Chapter 33), and during this major activity of the grassland the author relates only the wolf cub’s refusal to be pulled along—is that folklore? If the subject has shifted to the wolf cub, no one can say it is not a performance that typifies ‘wolflore.’ The novel is lavish in depicting the stuff of a great number of animals. Apart from wolves, there is the lore of horses, as well as the lore of gazelles, marmots, mosquitoes, and flies, and among all these, the depiction of dog lore is 593 Robert R. Marett, Psychology and Folklore (London: Methuen, 1920), 20.

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­distinctive. Throughout the story wolves, dogs, and humans are bound together, and even after the grassland wolves disappear dogs still remain inseparably by the side of the people of the grassland. It is precisely in the sense of grassland folklore that the author seeks to remedy the bias of people toward dogs, telling us unmistakably, “Every yurt has someone whose life has been saved by the family dog” (123; 196). In the life and lore of the people of the grassland there is assuredly a place for the life and lore of dogs: Yang had fed both dogs about half full before setting out; on a hunt a dog must not be too full or overly hungry. Too much food deadens the dog’s fighting spirit; too little saps its strength (85; 137). Erlang was trying to stanch the flow of blood from his chest with his tongue; the wolf had torn off a chunk of flesh the size of two fingers … all they could do was watch Erlang employ the traditional healing method of sterilizing the wound, stopping the bleeding, and lessening the pain with his own saliva (88; 142). A few of the dogs lay dead on the ground. Where they lay was where their souls had flown up to Tengger; what had sent them on their way was their mortal enemy—the wolf (122; 195). The author praises wolves, but not at the expense of dogs: “The dead dogs lay undisturbed, for no grassland Mongol would give a second thought to the lush, beautiful coats. Dogs were their comrades-in-arms, their best friends, their brothers” (122; 195). “[E]ating dog meat, skinning a dog, or sleeping under a dog skin were considered acts of unforgivable betrayal” (123; 196). In the eyes of the people of the grassland, whereas the wolf is free and lacks integrity, the dog is autonomous and virtuous, the helpers and companions of humans. Compared to livestock, dogs’ “relationship to the humans was closer; they helped to dispel the loneliness of the wildwood” (122; 196). As the author portrays it, wolves and dogs are comparable, in a position of esteem that is difficult to rank. People are more reverent and fearful toward wolves, more sympathetic and closer with dogs: A young boy lay prone on the ground, his arms wrapped tightly around the body of his dog. Adults tried to get him to leave, but he wailed mournfully, his tears falling on the lifeless body of his beloved dog. His wails hung in the air for a very long time, and all Chen Zhen could see was a blur (124; 198). He lets us understand that “animals and plants are not known as a result of their usefulness; they are deemed to be useful or interesting because they are first of

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all known.”594 The relationship of grassland people and dogs has nothing to do with the negative implications of the traditional ‘dog motif.’ In a masterstroke the author transforms the motif of the dog at the same time that he overturns the motif of the wolf. It is precisely in their attitudes towards dogs that the grassland herdsmen turn irreconcilably hostile towards the migrant workers and Han Chinese. Bilgee’s family is at a loss to understand the Han’s malicious contempt for dogs, and often ask Chen Zhen, “Why do the Han despise and deride dogs?” (123). Chen Zhen’s answer typifies comparative method: “There are no nomads among the Han and few hunters … so we Han don’t know the value of dogs. With our dense population, it’s hard for Chinese to be lonely, so we don’t need dogs to keep us company … Most importantly, dogs don’t follow Chinese rules” (123; 196–97). Chen Zhen’s answer is subversive: “Not until I came here,” Chen said, “did I realize that dogs and humans are so much alike, that dogs are truly man’s best friend. It’s only the impoverished, backward farming peoples who will eat anything, including dogs. One day, maybe, when all Chinese are well off, when there’s enough food for everyone, they’ll make friends with their dogs and stop hating and eating them” (124; 197). Linking Han hostility toward dogs with poverty is obviously incomplete as an explanation, but it does serve to introduce the power of folkloric performance, the belief that “the aesthetic tradition of the folk, which is the last home of many decadent interests of a practical kind, can furnish material on which the literary genius may profitably draw.”595 Chen Zhen’s ability to put himself in others’ place confirms the effectiveness and the limitations of folklore, that what song you sing depends upon what mountain peak you are standing on. In the introduction to his study on Mongolian folklore, Blo bzang chos ldan [pr, Losang Chodan] emphasized, “the environment in which people grow up is crucial.”596 Different environments can produce different understandings and feelings toward the same things. It is not enough simply to present these disparities; it is ‘performance’ that does them justice. In this way, we can see the different roles of ‘presentation’ and ‘performance’ in folklore research. The former tends toward objective description, used for the most part in relatively 594 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966), 9. 595 Robert R. Marett, Psychology and Folklore, 100. 596 Blo bzang chos ldan 罗 布 桑 却 丹 [Han Chinese: Luo Zizhen 罗 子 珍 ], Mengggu fengsu jian 蒙 古 风 俗 鉴 [Examination of Mongol customs] (Shenyang: Liaoning minzu ­chubanshe, 1988), 15.

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simple matters of folklore, such as skinning wolf pelts, boiling wolf traps, and so forth. The latter is dynamic, such as encircling the wolves, retrieving the gazelles, or smoking out mosquitoes, etc. Positioned among all these, Chen Zhen can offer trans-cultural comparisons and offer a means of showing understanding of difference. In terms of folklore studies, performing and presenting indicate comparative and realistic writing respectively, the two methods that the novel employs by turns in different circumstances. Comparative: The observations and records of an outsider written here go through selection and refinement in the course of comparison. Therefore, we cannot completely equate the depictions in the novel with folklore; here ‘performance’ would be a more accurate representation. Performance theory is different from the past concern with ‘folklore as phenomena.’ Rather, it concerns the interaction of text and context, stresses immediacy and creativity, and places importance on situated practice (qíngjìng shíjiàn 情 境 实 践 ) against the backdrop of ethnography. The depiction of folkloric material in Wolf ­Totem is plainly performative rather than objective presentation, and it would be ­excessive to grant it too much truthfulness. Realist: The realist writing based on comparison in the novel is the result of selectivity. While the author is immersed in ‘lore,’ what is selected for presentation varies in emphasis. The collection of folklore is influenced by the individual personality, interests and psychological factors of the researcher.597 This point is quite evident in Wolf Totem. Provided with a history of the Mongol ethnicity or a volume on their folklore, it is easy to see that, by contrast, the grassland folklore in the novel is relatively distant from what is ‘true.’ Everything about this realist writing is the author’s deliberate ‘presentation’ of all life and death serving the logic of the grassland: I only faithfully recorded the grassland people’s consciousness and acts of primitive, natural environmental protection. In order to have a true understanding of the biological chain on the grassland I did indeed do a lot of investigating and study. For example, concrete details about the biological chain, such as that grassland mosquitoes wintered inside rat burrows and that wolves were the chief means to control the rat population, these are for the most part what old herdsmen and cadres told me themselves.598

597 See “On The Psychology of Collecting Folklore,” The Meaning of Folklore: Analytical Essays of Alan Dundes, ed. Simon J. Bronner (Logan, ut: Utah State University, 2007), 210–221. 598 Jiang Rong, e-mail interview by Ms. Yao Ting of Bertelsmann, n. p. n. d.

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Phrases like “faithfully recorded,” “true understanding,” “indeed,” and “told me themselves” are reflections of one approach in folklore studies. The author picked the grassland not only because it was primitive, but even more because he had lived with that ‘lore’ for eleven years, teaching himself the most important method for adeptly grasping ethnographic study: field research. Folklore is a living cultural phenomenon, and any written account, or even modern audiovisual recording, is imperfect … It can be sensed only by being there. Fieldwork is the most reliable method in folklore studies. It can result in reliable material and revise or supplement the inadequacies in the investigative materials of predecessors.599 The author did not achieve the ambitions of folklorists, but is just someone who had experience, faced life frankly, and wrote intently about his own. With a mind-set of ‘writing about life,’ the author wrote folklore. In the style of ­reminiscence he returned to the scene to understand afresh the joys and sorrows of the grassland people in the state of primal nature, where the folklore contains two important features: conforming to nature to avoid death; employing nature in order to survive. ‘Avoiding death’ and ‘surviving’ are two different concepts. The former has the urgency of reality; the latter is a state or condition which is everyday life. “It is therefore proved that nature alone inspires us with useful ideas, which precede all our reflections.”600 Folklore is a set of practical life skills that people created in order to ‘live on.’ One aspect of it is nature; another is human sentiment. In the Zuo zhuan an advisor urges his ruler to go into combat using horses that are “natives of the climate, and knowing the minds of the people.”601 Literally, the horses are born and live on its waters and soil, representing the environment, while the minds of the people come from their lives, based on people’s knowledge of nurturing the land effectively and limited use of it. “In ancient China, when people explained the rationale for something they always attributed it to the display of a law of nature.”602 In 599 Tao Lifan 陶 立 璠 , Minsuxue 民 俗 学 [Folklore studies] (Beijing: Xueyuan chubanshe, 2003), 7. 600 Voltaire, The Philosophy of History, trans. Henry Wood Gandell (London: Thomas North, 1829), 41. 601 The Tso Chuen [Zuo zhuan 左 传 ; Commentary of Zuo Book v: Xi gong Year 15], in The Chinese Classics, trans. James Legge (Beijing: Asiatic Edition, 1940), vol. 5: 167. 602 Ge Zhiyi, Tanshizhai lun gao xubian [Continuation of draft discourse of the Tanshi studio] (Harbin: Heilongjiang renmin chubanshe, 2004), 146.

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the novel, for example, “The rules the old herdsmen talk about are the natural laws of the grassland, Chen was thinking, set by heaven, that is, the universe” (264–65;  392). The people of the grassland watch for celestial phenomena, wind and snow, thunder and lightening, prepare in advance for bad times, and keep track of the seasons. ­Everyone reveres heaven, and all understand their folklore. “Once the folk-lorist has learned amongst familiar conditions to lay his finger on the l­iving pulse of the simple life, he may venture further afield” into new environments.603 The “big life” that Bilgee introduces in Chapter 4 of the novel is a new conception. Such an idea is totalizing; its core concept is restraint, and it strives to maintain a high level of unison with natural logic. It must be cautious, requires considering one’s own circumstances broadly, and draws on the total knowledge of the natural to protect life:604 “They were not endowed with greater reason, but they were more restrained, not as given as we are to fantasizing about and believing in new discoveries … Their science was evident in their daily lives … making fire, weaving baskets, creating stone utensils, boiling water, making mats, cooking, and all the common activities of daily life. No matter how important it was, they never included the magical.”605 This passage is extremely important, pointing out the significant distinction between primitive science and magic: even within the same folkloric system they occur separately, each with its own function. Science has priority over magic and plays a role on its own. The “natural, in the sense of the primitive, man”606 of the early anthropologists and the natural environment were interdependent: Among island fisherman, “where man can rely completely on his knowledge and skill, magic does not exist, while in the open-sea fishing, full of danger and uncertainty, there is extensive magical ritual to secure safety and good results.”607 This method of progressive understanding and ordered classification is very effective for analyzing the stuff of Wolf Totem: the real place of ‘totems’ is rarely evident in daily life and productive activities. But in circumstances “full of danger and uncertainty” the status of wolves (or other animals or plants) may be elevated to the level of spiritual folklore, converting fear of the ‘unknown’ into an attitude of survival that is reverent and restrained. Folklore occurs throughout everyday life, like water and air, so integrated into normal activities that people are blind to it. So it is in reading, with ­readers 603 Robert R. Marett, Psychology and Folklore, 16–17. 604 See Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind. 605 Malinnuofusiji [Bronislaw Malinowski], Wenhua lun [English title: What is Culture], trans. Fei Xiaotong, et al. (Beijing; Zhongguo minjian wenyi chuban she, 1987), 52–53. 606 Marett, 49. 607 Malinowski, Wenhualun, 53; Magic, Science, and Religion, 31.

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absorbed in the development of the plot and largely driven by emotions, so that they are not necessarily mindful of the details of life that are revealed. ­Given the near fragmentation of the quotidian, how can their actual role be analyzed for even more significance? This requires methodology. So we might as well borrow the classification scheme in folklore studies and take a look.608 In what ways does Wolf Totem offer folkloric information of special significance? What sort of allegory does this information attempt to present? Following Tao Lifan’s scheme, we will pursue the traces of folklore in the novel one by one, classifying them as “material folklore,” “social folklore,” ­“spiritual folklore,” or “orally transmitted verbal folklore.” First take material folklore, such as dwellings. “Like guerrilla fighters, nomads strive for simplicity. During the winter, sheep pens are semicircles formed by wagons and mobile fencing, with large felt rugs that serve as a windbreak but cannot keep out the wolves” (7; 8). For ease of herding and relocating, the people of the grassland make use of the Mongol yurt.609 In the summer Chen Zhen “opened the felt covering the yurt all the way to the top. Mongol yurts are open to the air on eight sides, like a pavilion or an oversized birdcage” (217; 330). When winter comes families spend day and night inside the Mongol yurt, it being the warmest location: Chen often went to visit Bilgee, whose yurt was larger, nicer, and much warmer. The walls were hung with Mongol-Tibetan religious tapestries, and the floor was covered with a rug that had a white deer design; the tray and silver bowls on the squat table and the bronze bowls and aluminum teapot in the cupboard were polished to a shine. In this remote area, … “heaven is high and the emperor far away” … Old Man Bilgee’s yurt was like a tribal chief’s headquarters where he [Chen] benefited from his host’s guidance and concern; it was a safe and intimate refuge (14; 19–20).

608 Classification in folklore studies first appeared in the Handbook of Folklore edited by Laurence Gomme (London, 1890). Scholars in each country devised their own methods of classification, among them the French and the British having the greatest influence on the field of folklore studies in China. Tao Lifan, Minsuxue [Folklore studies], 57–58, takes up classification methodology, based on which he considers the actual circumstances of the “folklore activities of each nationality in China.” 609 Anthropologists have pointed out that for the Mongols from forest tribes, going from crude wooden huts in the forest to felt tents that were easy to dismantle during the course of herding was a very great step forward. The felt tent (mistakenly termed yurt) of Genghis Khan in the thirteenth century was “a real traveling palace.” René Grousset, Empire of the Steppes, 196.

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The passage provides several types of important information. First, for  the changes of season, the felt sides of the yurt are the choice that suits the Mongols. Second, religious and folkloric information are component parts of the living environment. Third, utensils are durable and easy to move. Fourth is the political information that, even though it is the Cultural Revolution era, traditional folklore remains alive and well. There is a relationship between the form of dwellings and social organization: “The stand-alone dwelling, at some remove from other dwellings, will create a cohesive and self-sufficient independent household economically and morally.”610 As the passage above shows, Bilgee’s dwelling shows this independence. Conversely, the adobe building of the migrant workers is a symbol of fixed dwellings and agriculture: The bricks were laid with the grassy side down, showing the roots … the builders were able to complete walls in only two days. Roofs and beams would be added once the walls were completely dry. The grassy marshland from which the bricks were taken was transformed into a muddy pool looking like a rice paddy before planting, forcing the livestock to skirt the area on their way to the lake (225; 342). Malinowski observed, “If we want fully to understand the cultural significance of interior furnishings we should pay attention to their parallel and interrelated material and spiritual circumstances.”611 The dwellings in the novel are obviously not simply housing. They are combined with the ecology to merge with the author’s emotions and cognition: the former (the yurt) is “warm” and “attractive,” making people feel “safe and intimate.” The latter (adobe buildings) is hard, destructive, a convenience for humans “forcing the livestock to skirt the area on their way to the lake.” The space for people’s housing is based on destroying grassland and limiting the survival space of other animals. The stuff in the novel does not exist independently. The daily necessities and related taboos, always appearing in the various seasons and different circumstances, contain the ‘lore’ in daily domesticity and the scenery of the seasons. What is unlike most folklore is the political implications. Clothing, for example, does not only protect the body, but is also the symbol of ethnic identity and has important symbolic meaning. A highly charged quarrel breaks out over hunting swans: The migrant workers had superiority of numbers and support behind the scenes, so they were not afraid of quarreling with Bilgee in their ­fluent 610 Malinowski, Wenhua lun, 40. 611 Ibid.

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Mongolian. The herders surged forward screaming … Yang Ke, Chen Zhen, and some of the other students joined the ranks of those dressed in Mongolian deels, hurling insults in return at the workers dressed in Han clothing. The verbal abuse escalated on both sides until they were standing opposite each other practically nose to nose (234). What are we to make of the Mongolian-speaking migrant workers wearing “Han clothing,” and the Han students dressed in “Mongolian deels”? Who has been assimilated and consciously accepted assimilation is tacitly shown by means of the clothing. In the process of acculturation, language clearly lags behind clothing, and so it can be said that in crossing boundaries, clothing is the first thing to change. Clothing becomes a symbol of identity, with people in different attire just like different camps. This is a performance. When the R ­ oman Catholic missionary Matteo Ricci first arrived in the East and studied Indian Buddhism he wore monk’s robes, and later changed into the robe and cap of a Chinese scholar. So, too, the Beijing students’ donning Mongolian dress is a kind of ritual performance of ‘joining the ranks.’ In his study Examination of Mongol customs, Blo bzang chos ldan (Luo Zizhen) described in detail changes in types of dwellings and clothing in districts where Mongols and Han had lived intermixed since early modern times.612 What he stressed was peaceful evolution, which is also shown in the novel. The people of the grassland have not entirely rejected things from outside; on the contrary, whatever is useful they have immediately turned to good account.613 Soviet-style high-power military binoculars were collected from an old battlefield of the Russo-Japanese war, and for decades “were the herders’ favorite and had become an important tool for production” (16; 23). During their contact with the students from Beijing, the herders have also selectively accepted a number of things, such as mosquito netting: [T]he Chinese students feared mosquitoes more than they did wolves. Eventually, [Chen] got his family to send mosquito netting from Beijing, and he began sleeping through the night. The herdsmen thought the netting was a wonderful thing, and it quickly became an essential part of the Mongol yurts. They called the nets “mosquito houses” (151; 298).

612 Blo bzang chos ldan (Chinese: Luo Zizhen), Mengggu fengsu jian, 15, 12. 613 The Mongols had a “traditional ability to improvise and use whatever material presented itself as a possible weapon,” including learning new technology from enemies and using new materials, such as changing the formula of gunpowder. See Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, 182.

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Turning to food and drink, there is a great deal in the novel, as has been discussed above. Most memorable is the first time that the Beijing students “eat wolves’ food”:614 Freshly roasted gazelle is a delicacy of the Mongolian grassland, especially after a hunt, when the meat is roasted and eaten on the spot. ­Historically, it was a favorite of the khans and royalty, and an essential component of gatherings of ordinary hunters. As newly acknowledged hunters, Chen Zhen and Yang Ke were invited to participate in the feast (33; 52). The water and soil of a region nourishes people distinctive to that region. The earliest dictionary in China notes, “The people of Taiping [East] are benevolent; the people of Danxue [South] are wise; the people of Dameng [West] are trustworthy; the people of Kongtong [North] are warlike.”615 The boldness of the people of the grassland almost seems connected to “eating wolves’ food”: [I]t was an outdoor feast for humans following an outdoor feast by a pack of wild wolves. Chen and Yang, who at that moment felt as free and powerful as any Mongol, impulsively grabbed flasks from the hands of fellow hunters who were drinking and eating and singing with fervor and passion, and gulped down great mouthfuls of liquor (33–34; 52). “Anyone who doesn’t eat wolves’ food is not a true grassland Mongol. There would probably be no Mongols without it” (35; 55). At this point we cannot fail to note that the folklore in the novel is not purely realistic; it is understood through an outsider’s involvement, seen through an outsider’s eyes, and ultimately presented in the feelings and understanding of an outsider. It is a variant. Variation is a key concept in folklore studies. Alan Dundes observed a “striking example of the conscious interference with folklore is the revival. Folklore revivals are distinct from folklore survivals.” Whereas a survival is the result of “an unbroken historical chain in time,” the revival is a product of a 614 During the Five Dynasties the grassland contained “numerous oxen, deer, and wild dogs. The human inhabitants “did not have fixed dwellings, but carried their things on oxen.” The nomads “frequently used deer calls to lure out deer, shoot them, and eat their meat. … They like nothing more than hunting.” Xin wudai shi: juan 73 新 五 代 史 卷 73, cited in Zhu Ruixi 朱 瑞 熙 et al. Song Liao Xixia Jin shehui shenghuo shi 宋 辽 西 夏 金 社 会 生 活 史 [History of life in the societies of the Song, Liao, Xixia, and Jin dynasties] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chuban she, 2005), 65 passim. 615 The ancient dictionary Erya 尔 雅 [Approaching correctness], entry for “Shi di” [Explaining land].

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break, “a conscious, artificial phenomenon.”616 In the novel, for instance, Chen Zhen twice eats wolf’s food; for him, the first time is directly presenting experience, the second time is ‘performance’ of experience: One after another, Chen polished off strips of meat with peppers and leeks, washing them down with gulps of liquor from the old man’s flask. “This is the second time I’ve been fed by wolves,” he said, “and I’ve never tasted anything better, especially eating it at the site of the hunt.” (155; 244) The exaggeration here is unquestionably not from the psyche of grassland people, but the self performance that Chen Zhen acts out, openly revealing features of the stuff selected by Chen: (1) Difference from Han folklore. Against the cultural background of disparity, the author emphasizes selecting elements that are unlike Han culture, giving prominence to depicting its wildness and primitiveness. The nature of this tendency is an issue that has concerned research in folklore studies: “Different ethnicities, ages, genders, religions and psychological qualities determine the selective reception, selective understanding, and selective memories of recipients toward the dissemination of folklore culture.”617 When missionaries entered China, their record of Chinese folklore and the character of Chinese people had this feature, and their selection of similarities, disparities, and level of detail was done in comparison with Western civilization. The novel is also this way, simply with somewhat different criteria for value judgments. (2) Difference from human folklore. All the stuff of the novel is intertwined with life in nature in an effort to show the relationship of humans and all living things as mutually reliant and the discipline that must be maintained. So much stuff is shown through taboos, such as: “The hunters only ate ground creatures, since they revered anything that could fly up to Tengger” (182; 285). Or such as hanging up wolf pelts: “That’s how you dry them, … and at the same time announce to passersby that successful hunters live in this yurt. In olden days, pelts like those would keep robbers and bandits away” (135; 215). Books of folklore studies are easy enough to read, but few read them since there are no stories in them, nothing that comes alive, nothing very i­ nteresting. 616 Alan Dundes, Analytic Essays in Folklore (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), 8–9. 617 Tao Lifan, Minsuxue, 50–51.

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The folklore information in Wolf Totem is interesting to read, and is moving, and this is because the folklore material in it is not lifeless remnants, but a fresh experience of life. Folklore constitutes source material that enters into the story and permeates every corner of the plot. “[T]his is indeed living and surviving in a deeper sense that is at first sight obvious. For the life of the folk, being rooted in nature, like the wild plant that it is, would seem hardier and more fit to endure than any form of cultivated life.”618 Hence, it is necessary to penetrate it before we can discover how it works, and all the ways in which it works point directly to human life. “Even if, as we must all hope, the life of man be no mere process, but a progress involving increase and betterment in the long run, it is in the life of the folk that we must seek the principle of growth.”619 What is termed the spirit of folklore is the spiritual grasp of this principle, shown early on through simple ‘trust’ and ‘assurance’: On the grassland, a man’s word counts for everything. It is one of the covenants bequeathed by the great khans.620 The word “promise” carries great weight, and within the tribes of the grassland there was trust in a promise. Sometimes when Mongols are drunk they agree to something, and as a result lose a good dog, horse, knife, or lasso pole, sometimes even their lover (96). The stuff related to trust is the principle in spirit, based on the full knowledge of the natural environment. “On the Mongolian grassland, peace does not follow peace, but danger always follows danger” (42; 69). Grassland people know, “the ability to hold onto savings accumulated over years of labor was often tested in the space of a single day or night” (42; 68). “To be a just Mongol, one had to live in a just community.”621 The harsh environment taught the people of the grassland to coexist: to live in harmony with nature, to provide mutual assistance in a collective, and together to obey the strict discipline of survival. These are things that I learned from experience. Forty years ago as an urban student, I also was sent down to the countryside. The countryside at that time was also like the grassland in the novel, natural and simple, with a scarcity of 618 Robert Marett, Psychology and Folklore, 26. 619 Ibid. 620 Temujin Khan’s Baljuna Covenant or toast of loyalty represented “the Mongol people based on mutual commitment and loyalty that transcended kinship, ethnicity, and religion.” See Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, 58. 621 Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, 70.

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technology and an abundance of folklore. It made me understand: folklore was absolutely not some cultural “remnants,” but the most basic commonsense that we students and the local peasants had to grasp to ‘go on living’ in the countryside. It made all of us students who came from the cities fully understand the truth that in the natural environment “war was the natural state for a warrior, that peace was an anomaly.”622 Last summer, in order to write this chapter, I returned to the countryside to go back over life in the mountains. From the moment I set foot there, the folklore followed me like a shadow. Weather, flora and fauna, the seasons, the ­necessities of life … all this folkloric awareness came back to life in a moment, as though I had gone back forty years or even much farther in a time tunnel. It placed you, moment by moment, in these things: seeing the tranquil stars in the night sky, listening to all the sounds underneath this tranquil heaven; awakening the tenacious awareness of survival in the assault of thunderstorms, drawing on the wisdom of survival from everywhere, summoning all over again that long-slumbering capacity for survival. Yet, what I wanted to do there was not rewrite folklore or judge the veracity of the things in the story. As criticism, in the sense of folklore, the final question was what kind of allegory do the things in Wolf Totem convey, after all? What kind of spirit, after all, is the ‘spirit of folklore’ that fills the book and is so stirring? I believe that it is discipline and restraint. Discipline here is not the “real, corporal disciplines” of Foucault.623 It is not the discovery of the Enlightenment; just the opposite, it ruled the human world prior to the Enlightenment, with no major relation to contractual law and political power. It was not the result of “techniques of coercion,” but the consciousness, and capacity for self-­restraint and self-discipline that people in the environment of survival in nature spontaneously produced. Discipline and restraint, two very common concepts, have uncommon significance in the realm of folklore. Discipline appears in action, that is, mores (to borrow from William Sumner); restraint is an attitude, a cultivated or well-bred lifestyle. Soon after the students arrived in the grassland, Bilgee has cautioned them: “You’re citizens of the ­grassland too. So learn 622 Carlos Castaneda, The Power of Silence (New York: Washington Square Press, 1991), 150. 623 “The real, corporal disciplines constituted the foundation of the formal, juridical liberties. The contract may have been regarded as the ideal foundation of law and political power; panopticism constituted the technique, universally widespread, of coercion. It continued to work in depth on the juridical structures of society, in order to make the effective mechanisms of power function in opposition to the formal framework that it had acquired. The ‘Enlightenment,’ which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.” Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 222.

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our customs and stick to them. Mongols risk their lives for these grassland customs. If you destroy the grassland customs, you destroy the grassland”624 (32; 50; orig. trans.). What he calls the customs of the grassland are its folklore. The sociologist William Sumner long ago noted “with what coercive and inhibitive force the folkways have always grasped the members of a society.”625 All the battle-tested Mongol hunters had an instinctive grasp of the situation and a perfect understanding of their responsibilities; no one fought to gain personal glory. Although the hunters in the outer ring guarding the encirclement watched wide-eyed as hunters and dogs in the center of the circle gained glory taking down their prey, still no one abandoned his post (118; 188; orig. trans.). In the face of temptation, the restraint among countless generations of grassland people, who have risked their life’s blood, is exceptional: There are plenty of frozen gazelles at the bottom of the snow, so don’t get greedy. When you’re out there, first free the surviving animals. All of them, before coming back to dig out the frozen ones. … Mongols have fought like that for centuries, and the reason we can have these hunts year after year is that, like the wolves, we don’t kill off all the prey (27; 41–42). The difficulty of restraint is not in greed or vanity, but in the effective cognition of taking ‘inaction.’ This conduct is silent, a place in which the spirit of folklore is generated and matures, as the sage Don Juan said, “‘Impeccability, as I have told you so many times, is not morality,’ he said. ‘It only resembles morality. Impeccability is simply the best use of our energy level. Naturally, it calls for frugality, thoughtfulness, simplicity, innocence, and above all, it calls for lack of self-reflection.’”626 The spirit of folklore is ‘silent knowledge.’ It is a state that allows us to understand that all living things are perpetuated and develop ­reconciled with their customs, their ‘lore.’ Those things that superficially 624 The second sentence cited in this quotation does not appear in the printed edition of the novel. The online editions read: 草 原 规 矩 是 蒙 古 人 用 命 换 来 的 ， 破 了 草 原 规 矩就破了草原. 625 William Graham Sumner, Folkways (Ginn, 1906) (Section 73), 67. “The folkways create status. Membership in the group, kin, family, neighborhood, rank, or class are cases of status.” Ibid. 626 Carlos Castaneda, The Power of Silence, 228.

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­appear free are simply following their customs in their own emplacement. Given the difficulty we have to enter this, we see the semblance of their freedom. Once we do enter, we see everywhere within is restraint and discipline. Hence, an undoubted value of Wolf Totem is evident: By telling a story it leads us deep within, where in a feast of the ‘folkloric realm’ sufficient to satiate us, it allows us encounter the boundless attractiveness of the ‘spirit of folklore.’ As I see folklore in the state of survival in primal nature, it the ‘common knowledge’ of the chǎngmín, or “ordinary people,”627 without the systematic restraints of law or the introduction of modern technology. With the introduction of science and technology, people break away from folklore, and become indifferent to or even completely lose the spirit of folklore. At the end of the novel, electricity arrives, and night disappears; motorcycles and automobiles increase, and horses and horse herders nearly vanish. ‘Going back to origins’ is simple as well: once electricity and water are shut off, once people return to the forests and wilderness, once people leave behind the support of systematic restraints and technological means, and are thrown into the environment of survival in nature … Just as when I went back to live in the mountain village forty years later, it took only a moment to revive folkloric awareness. In the still night, under the starry sky, when I looked around it seemed like a performance: in this human world, whenever science and technology are in place, folklore withdraws; conversely, whenever science and technology have not arrived or have withdrawn, folklore is the first to respond and stage a comeback. Whether this is a modern or postmodern age, once it is plunged into the environment without running water or electric and gas service, or natural disaster, or the predicament of war … on the last day of civilization, folklore will immediately show its inimitable courage, wisdom, and strength: “the folkways take on a philosophy of right living and a life policy for welfare.”628 It may be said that, in essence, folklore is counter to history. It shows itself in dire circumstances and in the face of disaster bears with it the last opportunity for humanity to live on. As I see folklore, it is like a relay station, with the laws of nature at one end, and the individual at the other. Folkloric consciousness in modern society is a means of dialogue between the individual and nature, shown in the attitude of autonomous living. When we no longer discuss or even care at all about 627 Chǎngmín 常 民 [Japanese: jōmin], the concept of Yanagita Kunio, the father of folklore studies in Japan, “refers to the social stratum preserving folk transmission.” At first it referred to rice farmers, then common people. See Wang Xiaokui 王 晓 葵 , “Riben minsuxue de xin shiye 日 本 民 俗 学 的 新 视 野 [New horizons in Japanese folklore],” Minsuxue kan Vol. 4 2003 No. 6. Here the term has been borrowed to refer to people in the state of survival in primal nature. 628 William Sumner, Folkways, Section 39, p. 34.

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f­olklore, do not look at celestial phenomena, ask about the direction of the wind, remember the twenty-four divisions of the calendar, or sense the seasons … we have lost sensitivity to nature, and lost natural adaptability as well. Most important, it causes us to give up the discipline of survival in the natural world that all living things must abide by without being aware of it. I believe that retribution is coming: when a family lacks discipline it disintegrates; when a society lacks discipline, it is replaced with another; when a nation, a people, lacks discipline, it is doomed to destruction; when the entire human race lacks discipline, the last day is not far off. In this world of shared survival, discipline is important, and far more than law, discipline is a kind if breeding, conveying the folklore spirit that survives the ages, revealing the level of humans’ place among all forms of life. This passage is the last section devoted to allegorical analysis, and it is also an allegory. As I see it, the allegory of Wolf Totem that is the most important, the most complete, and with the most enduring value is in this passage. For the sake of enduring order, security, and sustainable development, each person in the world today should have a folkloric consciousness of shared existence with all living things in heaven and earth, and let every drop of the simple and noble spirit of folklore infuse daily life, appearing in the survival discipline of self restraint. In the words of Jin Yuelin: In the present age we are more or less accustomed to believing that contentment is stagnation, spiritual laxness, and casual hedonism. This modern point of view essentially calls on us to rebel against ourselves, and its by-products are psychological torment and inability to live life in peace. … A quotation from F.R. Bradley reads, everyone has their “place and life,” within which there is natural dignity all its own.629 At this point, criticism should offer an explanation. Prior to this, it appeared as an entirely open form, with endless choice for innumerable people, and thus could take innumerable directions. But at this point, it is completely ­post-utopian. If you say that criticism smuggles contraband, then I can openly declare that this utopian boat during its clandestine voyage is filled with the spirit of folklore, a lifestyle of discipline and an attitude toward living with restraint. And if the direction is toward the free realm of breeding, then that is the direction of beauty.

629 Jin Yuelin 金 岳 霖 , Dao, ziran yu ren 道 、 自 然 与 人 [Dao, nature, and humans] ­(Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2005), 56.

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How Could Wolf Totem Evoke Diametrically Opposed Moods and Opinions? Postcolonial Criticism: Allegory is in the Self-Dissolution of ‘Thinking’ Criticism will always have two aspects, one turned toward the structure of literature and one turned toward the other cultural phenomena that form the social environment of literature. Together, they balance each other; when one is worked on to the exclusion of the other, the critical perspective goes out of focus. northrop frye1

∵ The first two sections of this chapter discuss ‘dialogue.’ The first emphasizes form, that is, analysis of dialogue in literary theory; the second ­emphasizes one important topic that involves dialogue: criticism of ­national character. The final two sections (on the concluding lecture and on the  ­author) depart from the text to focus on seeking information behind the text, such as the author’s intellectual viewpoint, motive and creative environment. “Only ­ when we u ­ nderstand the backdrop to the creation of this work, the soil on  which it relies  … can we correctly approach apprehending its unity.”2 When we emerge from the story of the wolf and enter into the concluding ‘dialogue’ and ‘lecture’ the atmosphere of postcolonialism that greets us leaves us at a loss, just as once the gate of ‘national allegory’ in Jameson’s textual castle is smashed open we no longer can find the road out of the city back to the countryside. Completely different responses from readers pose a problem for scholars: what are your standpoint and your viewpoint—this deserves an explanation. An introductory verse to Norwegian folk and fairytales evaluates that collection in this way:

1 The Critical Path, 25; cited in Tzvetan Todorov, Literature and its Theorists, 103. 2 Wei Shikeluofusiji (Viktor Shklovsky), Sanwen lilun [Theory of prose], 165.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004276734_006

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Whether they are fictive or true All remain within the aura of Norway. The rhythmic essence of nature, its passing clouds and flowing waters Running through to merge them.3 This is not only a very apt depiction of Wolf Totem, but also helpful to understanding the standpoint of the scholarship and the origin of this text: as a tool of representation, it is also Han Chinese characters that are used here; as a scholar, I belong the same ethnicity as the author of the novel, graduated from high school during the Cultural Revolution years, 1966–68, and was sent down to the countryside. Living in that era, you would also be accustomed to thinking in that ideological framework; born in an underdeveloped nation of the third world, you could hardly avoid giving voice to the postcolonial or ­opposing postcolonialism. All these things could well be seen as components of the background for the scholarship. Of course, this does not mean that I affirm the viewpoint of Wolf Totem. Frankly, there is much in the views that appear in the novel that I do not approve of and even find objectionable. But in literary criticism this is not important; what is important is the free form of Wolf Totem and the vast discursive space that it has opened up, together with the author’s tenacious exploration and its rare results. My respect for that exploration and the results, my attempt to be responsive to them through my scholarship, are for an unforgettable memorial to an age—the age of Mao Zedong—that is about to vanish. 5.1

On Dialogue (a): War and Peace Negotiations sometimes last so long you don’t know whether they’re still part of the war or the beginning of peace. gilles deleuze4

Allegory belongs to literature. Theoretically, literature only needs to tell stories and there is no need to expound thoughts directly. Themes with a wealth of educational benefit or truths implied in plots can reveal thoughts ‘naturally’ through the story. Yet in actual writing, allegorical writers have not had that much faith in readers or the media, and for the most part have pointed out 3 Norske Folkeeventyr [Norwegian folk and fairytales] ed. Peter Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe (Christiania: Johan Dahl, 1841). 4 Negotiations, 1972–1990, vii.

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the theme directly at the opening or conclusion of the story, and stated plainly what is on their minds. Early allegories typically reveal the secrets at the conclusion of the story, where the author himself articulates them. This tradition can be traced back to Aesop. However, by the modern age allegory was employed as a form that conveys allegorical meaning. The author was merely ‘writing literature,’ and the allegorical thought in the text clearly dispensed with the traces of didacticism. The scholar of Chinese allegory Ma Da concluded: Modern allegory does not for the most part adopt the method of distinctly dividing story and allegory into two portions. Rather, it employs suggestion, implying allegorical meaning in the story and letting readers reach an understanding of it on their own. Successful allegories not only can lead readers to an accurate understanding of the allegory that the author has provided in the story, but also bring the readers to appreciate even more things.5 Read this way, Wolf Totem is neither purely traditional nor altogether modern. It tells a story, a novel-length story conveying an overabundance of allegorical significance; at the same time, it also has a thesis, and the ‘excavation by reasoning’ running to tens of thousands of words at the end does not exhaust it, but seems excessive. Why? Because what we can call the allegory and the viewpoint that the author presents in this lecture are already thoroughly revealed through the dialogue in the story. Dialogue in Wolf Totem is entrusted with a special mission. Dialogue is not simply an artistic form, but also an important field of study. Through the ­remarkable explorations of Mikhail Bakhtin, dialogic criticism became a frequently used instrument of textual analysis and cultural studies, consistent with the structures of a diverse world. “Dialogism is the life of narrative art.”6 Prominent writers will bring this common means of communication into their texts directly, so that the “dialogic” runs through the entire story. 5 Ma Da 马 达 , “Yuyan de tezheng 寓 言 的 特 征 [Features of allegory],” online source: Zhongguo yuyan wang [China fable net], http://chinafable.hj.cn/, n.d. 6 Bahejin 巴 赫 金 [Mikhail Bakhtin], “Lun Tuosituoyefusiji yi shu de gaixie 论 陀 思 妥 耶 夫 斯 基 一 书 的 改 写 [Notes on reworking a book on Dostoevsky],” Huayu chuangzuo meixue 话 语 创 作 美 学 [Creative aesthetics of discourse] (Moscow, 1979), 309; cited in Dong Xiaoying 董 小 英 , Zaideng babilun ta—Bahejin yu duihua lilun 再 登 巴 比 伦 塔 — — 巴 赫 金 与 对 话 理 论 [Re-ascending the Tower of Babel—Bakhtin and dialogism] (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1994), 18.

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Bakhtin’s dialogism arose in his study of Dostoevsky’s fiction. In comparing it with the works of Tolstoy he discovered that Tolstoy’s works excelled in psychological description, as monologic fiction, while Dostoevsky’s works are “multivocal” “total dialogue”; that is, polyphonic fiction. In comparing the two, he admired and gave his undivided praise to the latter. The author of Wolf T ­ otem was not necessarily aware of Bakhtin’s theory, but employed the method of dialogue fully, and formally there is enough and some to spare in his writing. There are at least seven forms of dialogue in the novel, with varied qualities, in relatively equal weight, spanning the entire the work. They not only reveal allegorical significance and expound ideas, but also play important roles in ­advancing the plot. Let us take them one at a time. The first kind consists of the dialogues between Chen Zhen and the old man Bilgee. These are unidirectional, almost all question and answer, in which Chen Zhen asks and Bilgee answers. The two parties in the dialogue are heterogeneous, with their different ethnicities, different cultures, different ages, and even different languages, and in the question and answer form, dialogue enter into an asymmetrical relationship. This ‘question and answer form’ of dialogue is frequently encountered in ancient fables and Greek drama, ­always determining the inherent relationship of reading to the work with an obvious  didactic intent. According to Hans-Georg Gadamer, the fundamental structure of ­dialogue is question and answer, based on the aesthetic relationship of the reader and the work. As the reader begins to read, he begins a dialogue with the work, and his first question is always: “what is this literary text telling me after all?” What the work strives to show the reader is the answer to the question that the other party has posed. Gadamer believes that this dialogue is t­ wo-way, since artistic works, traces of culture and so forth themselves, also pose questions, placing the meaning of dialogue “in openness.”7 Actually, however, whenever dialogue is determined within the scope of ‘question and answer’ the discursive signifier may well be unidirectional, open only in one given direction. The bidirectional identity of dialogue often loses balance in the process of ‘question and answer’ or ‘answer and question.’ Through transmission, one party (the speaker) imparts knowledge to the other (the listener). When the story begins Chen Zhen and Bilgee have been lying still in a snow cave, freezing for hours, while Chen Zhen fills with questions: “Are they [the wolves] going to close the circle now?” “Not quite yet,” Bilgee replied softly. “The alpha male is waiting for the right moment. Wolves are more meticulous about their encirclement 7 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 357.

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f­ormations than we are. See if you can figure out what he’s waiting for” (11; 14). “Are they going to complete the encirclement today?” he asked. “Are they waiting until it gets dark to attack?” “War demands patience,” the old man replied softly. “Opportunities present themselves only to the patient, man and beast, and only they take advantage of these opportunities …. You are always saying you want to get an understanding of wolves and of Genghis Khan. Well, then, lie there and be patient” (17; 24). “Then I don’t understand what they’re doing.” “In war,” the old man said, “wolves are smarter than men. We Mongols learned from them how to hunt, how to encircle, even how to fight a war …. You can’t win a war just because you have lots of land and people. No, it depends on whether you’re a wolf or a sheep” (18; 26). The question and answer dialogue above forms a pattern that continues throughout the entire course of Chen Zhen’s association with Bilgee. The so-called secrets of the grassland are brought out through this question and answer. Gasmai shows up to answer whatever involves nursing and rearing; Batu arrives to address production and combat; Uljii and others speak for whatever involves aspects of management. It is less dialogue than exposition, the ­utterances of the grassland people as a whole to the outside, a­ lways ­using ‘we,’ and almost never the individualized language in which ‘I’ is the core. This e­xpository discourse conveys the knowledge of the grassland, the  collectively constructed voice of the grassland, like an encyclopedia of the ­grassland, written out in the form of question and answer dialogues. This kind of dialogue is concentrated in the first four chapters, involving questions of translation and speaking on behalf of others. It is unidirectional, with little interpretation or argumentation in the reverse direction. Between different cultures, this is unfair. But if the unfairness is pre-established, as Edward Said wrote of the Orient, it was “not Europe’s interlocutor, but its silent Other.”8 For the silent one to find its own voice might constitute one means of rectification. Such is the case with the Olonbulag, long mute and overlooked or misperceived by mainstream culture. In that light its unidirectional question and answer has the uncommon quality of being a means of leading to understanding. Gadamer believed that “understanding is achieved through dialogue,” that every genuine dialogue is an opening of one person to another. Dialogue 8 “Orientalism Reconsidered,” Cultural Critique, No. 1 (Autumn 1985): 93.

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­predetermines a shared language.9 In his research on ancient societies, Lewis Morgan discovered the relationship between language and war or peace: “The multiplication of tribes and dialects has been the fruitful source of the i­ ncessant warfare of the aborigines upon each other. As a rule the most persistent warfare has been waged between tribes speaking different stock l­anguages ….”10 On the other hand, “tribes speaking dialects of the same stock language are able to communicate orally and thus compose their differences.”11 Shared language is a bridge that leads toward understanding and searching for peaceful resolution. Wolf Totem does not directly give an account of lingual issues, so that its ‘understanding’ seems pre-arranged: it is one party (such as Chen Zhen) who consciously seeks to understand. However, if we were to abstract this problem, placing it among different stock languages in the polyglot global village, we would have to face an unbearable question: does a ‘shared language’ exist in the present world? In the process of globalization (i.e. Westernization) today, we cannot but employ a ‘shared language’ (American English or other Western language), the scholarly world cannot but adhere to a set of scholarly standards (following the course of Western scholarly development and using Western languages), and in the political world and all international communication, people cannot but accept the standard of Western values and the use of primarily Western languages (arising from Western history and culture) …. ‘Shared language’ has the preconditions of military conquest and a ‘great unity’ politically, as in the time that Qin Shihuang unified China. Under such circumstances all human resources from the West, including disadvantaged Western cultures (such as feminism) and disadvantaged groups (such as women), can become mainstream during the trend to Westernization; all the dominant cultures of the non-Western world (such as Chinese culture) may sink as a whole into disadvantaged groups, usually unable to give voice to themselves ‘correctly.’ Nativization and a set of postcolonial issues related to voice and dialogue thereupon emerge. Unfortunately, the premise of these issues is founded precisely on the basis of employing a ‘shared language,’ so that the guidance of ‘political ­correctness’ leads to different groups and individuals finding their own voices: Few words are as resonant to contemporary feminists as “voice.” …. O ­ ther silenced communities—peoples of color, peoples struggling against 9 10 11

Zhu Liyuan, et al., Xifang meixue tongshi [An introductory history of Western aesthetics], Vol. 7: 251. Ancient Society (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1877), 111–12. Ibid., 112.

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c­ olonial rule, gay men and lesbians—have also written and spoken about the urgency of “coming to voice.” Despite compelling interrogations of “voice” as a humanist fiction, for the collectively and personally silenced the term has become a trope of identity and power: as Luce Irigaray suggests, to find a voice (voix) is to find a way (voie).12 When there is a shared language, no matter what it is, giving voice is not only fitting but also possible. In the world today everyone can have a voice (using Western languages and Western discourse) in the United Nations, at international conferences, in the field of foreign relations, at the forums of ngos, and so on, bypassing the issues of the identity of those who speak on behalf of others and transcending the nearly unavoidable misunderstandings of translation. Yet, does that really resolve issues? No. The next questions are: when you speak, who listens? When you pose questions, who answers? Over the past twenty years I have participated in a variety of forums, symposia, and conferences of different kinds and categories, from government organizations to ngos, from academia to the grassroots, and from domestic to ­foreign, especially in the ‘melting pot’ of the us, and the ‘hodgepodge’ of the un. Everywhere there are voices, everyone has a mouth, but ‘ears’ are rare. Everyone has issues and poses questions, but there are no answers, and people cannot help returning to Bakhtin’s starting point: simply having ‘shared language’ is insufficient, and simply ‘speaking out’ is not the point; only when there are responsive ‘answers’ is there the true beginning of dialogue. Dialogue without response cannot lead to understanding; on the contrary, it can result in despair. There is an instance of this in Wolf Totem when the wolf cub strains to howl into the wilderness, calling the wolf pack and attempting to return to the fold: On the quiet grassland, there was only the howl of a chained cub whose throat was swollen and hoarse…. At dawn the cub finally stopped howling; sad and despairing, he slumped to the ground and stared wide-eyed at the misty slope in an ­attempt to see the dark shadows. The morning mist slowly dissipated, revealing a familiar grassy slope devoid of shadows. There was no sound, nor the kindred that he wished for. Exhaustion finally overtook him, like a completely abandoned orphan. The cub closed his eyes as if falling into a deathlike despair (262; 387–88; orig. trans.). 12

Susan Lanser, Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1992), 3; citing Luce Irigaray, The Sex Which is Not One (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 209.

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Why has the wolf pack not responded? “They can tell that his howl is different from the mother wolf’s.” He seemed to have focused on imitating the sad, plaintive voice. But his voice lacked power, and since he couldn’t sustain a long howl, the pack went silent (261; 387). The depiction is intriguing. It is just because the accent is not sufficiently ­authentic that the lingual deviation is great enough for the wolf pack to be ­suspicious of the cub’s being a bastard of uncertain pedigree, deciding to ­ignore him and leave. Voice announces identity. If one’s voice is not ­adequately correct, even if it is one’s own kind (such as humans), one may be forever ­ostracized by the group (such as mainstream society). The novel comments, “The dialogue between the wolf cub and the wolf pack had failed irretrievably.” (262) Note the use of the word ‘dialogue’ (dùihùa 对 话 ). It is evident that dialogue is conditional, and it is not dependent on having a voice but mutual responsiveness on the condition of acknowledging identity and ­mutual recognition. Dialogue without response not only creates despair, it also creates humiliation. Bakhtin wrote: “To some extent, primacy belongs to the ­response, as the activating principle: it creates the ground for understanding, it prepares the  ground for an active and engaged understanding. Understanding and ­response are dialectically merged and mutually condition each other; one is impossible without the other.”13 Under normal circumstances the status of the two parties engaged in questions and answers is not equal or symmetrical. The one asking questions is u ­ sually in the inferior position of seeking knowledge, the one giving  the ­answers in a superior position with actual dominance in his hands. In the ­novel, for example, (serious) ‘question and answer’ is not spontaneous, but the ­result of (sincere) questions. What makes it unusual is the inversion of social status and identity; that is, the ones giving answers actually compose a relatively dominated group, while a fictive superiority emerges in the questioner’s self-conscious condescension. Chen Zhen asks questions on his own initiative, consciously seeking knowledge from an ‘alien’ culture, while the people of the grassland long to be understood, always providing timely explanations when they are needed, so that communication between the two parties is established on the basis of mutual trust. At such times, responses are not simply the transmissions of knowledge, but even more are also the only 13

Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1982), 282.

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open route to understanding. The precondition for dialogue does not actually involve language, but a kind of attitude. Based on trust, it is less ‘discursive’ than ‘spiritual.’ After more than a century of national wars and colonial liberation movements, over two hundred nations and territories together with several ­thousand languages have achieved the legitimate right to speak at the level of international society. Authentic dialogue contains “elements of ‘conflict,’” as ­Gadamer put it.14 Different voices represent different interest groups, bearing pride and prejudice, humiliation and suffering, political schemes and dealings. The ­unavoidable questions that we must ask these different voices: who is ­listening and how are they listening? Who wants to answer and how? Wolf Totem attempts to answer these questions. Listening comes first, the way Chen Zhen, for example, is always listening. Hence, there is response that shows us the second type of dialogue related to question-answer dialogue: ‘r­eflective’ dialogue. Reflective dialogue occurs primarily among the students from Beijing. As Bakhtin wrote: truth “is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction.”15 Chen Zhen acquires new knowledge of the grassland wolves, yet cannot think it through completely and needs others to participate, whether to disagree, affirm, or supplement it. “A single voice ends nothing and resolves nothing. Two voices is the minimum for life, the minimum for existence.”16 This is the role of the dialogue between Chen Zhen and Yang Ke. They are alike, students from Beijing, Han Chinese, and children of the intellectual and political elite, two sides of the same identity. Their dialogue takes place within the same culture, and if merely founded on what they already know and identify with, quite possibly homogeneous, either meaningless or uninteresting. It is by introducing heterogeneous ingredients to give rise to transmutation that interest and meaning are doubly magnified. The grassland provides the heterogeneous ingredients for them. Their first ­dialogue is after Chen Zhen witnesses the wolf pack attacking gazelles: Yang Ke: “What you said could be a pattern. Living on the grassland over the long haul as a nomad, it makes no difference which ethnic group you belong to, since sooner or later you’ll start worshipping wolves and treating them as mentors …” 14 15 16

Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 266, n. 173. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics trans. Caryl Emerson (St. Paul, mn: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 110. Ibid., 252.

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Chen Zhen: “…. The wolves have won me over in a little more than two years.” Yang Ke: “… coming out here has made the inherent weaknesses of our farming background obvious. Sure, my father was a renowned professor, but his grandfather and my mother’s grandmother were peasants.” Chen Zhen: “We built the Great Wall and crowed about what an achievement it was, considering ourselves to be the center of the world. But in the eyes of early Western people, China was only a ‘silk country,’ a ‘­ceramic country,’ a ‘tea country’” (23; 33–34). Here there are no actual questions and responses. Each person has his say, responding to each other in the course of reflecting, like stirring waves in flowing water. Each time fresh information enters his (their) field of vision, it stirs his (their) thoughts, and initiates dialogue. As their life on the grassland grows more familiar and their understanding of the grassland deepens day by day, their dialogues also become more frequent, and the depth of their reflection increases in the course of echoing each other. In the second half of the story the dialogues between Chen Zhen and Bilgee clearly lessen. As the old man approaches death the question and answer form of dialogue ends and thereafter dialogue of reflection fills the entire epilogue. This, too, is allegorical: only as the story of grassland wolves concludes does reflection on modern civilization just begin. The question and answer form of dialogue is unidirectional, signifying teaching and explanation. Reflective dialogue is also unidirectional—reverse, filled with reflection and the spirit of criticism. It is both an echo and an answer to the former, and the combination of the two voice parts is precisely a perfect harmony. It is through patient explanation, ­attentive listening and reflective response that connection, c­ ommunication, and understanding between heterogeneous cultures is achieved. Dialogue is one of the most distinctive features of Wolf Totem. The variety of dialogues in the story is numerous, yet it does not use quotation marks and rarely employs colons to introduce speech, so that stylistically it completely erases the border between human language and the ‘voices’ of the grassland and mutes the disparity among biological and non-biological entities (features of landscape, the sound of wind and of rain). This is a stylistic elision that has a special significance for dialogue. Elision is a major creative method, commonly employed in plot construction. Used with punctuation, it seems like an inspired way of portraying the shift of subject position. Eliding quotation marks in dialogues, blurring subject position and the boundaries of thought, and making it all too easy to cross boundaries facilitate the author’s intention exactly: to make the shift of s­ ubject

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position nearly imperceptible in its process and without leaving a trace behind. The style of writing dialogue in itself shows as much as possible the ­allegory of the subject. Together with the shift of subject position the novel creates two distinctive forms of dialogue: the dialogue among non-human populations in n ­ ature (the  third kind of dialogue) and the dialogue between humans and animals (the fourth kind of dialogue). These two forms are rare in literary works, and common in the story of the wolves. In previous textual analysis above we have ­discussed ‘voice’ and how it involves the issue of the discursive power of non-humans. Placed within the theory of dialogue, its quality and role are further clarified: Before long, they heard the chirps and squeaks of marmots, exploratory noises made by animals before they emerge from their holes …. From every hole, it seemed, a female emerged to survey the area, and when they saw there were no predators nearby, they chirped a slow, rhythmic all-clear signal, following which hordes of young animals shot out of the holes and began eating clumps of grass as far as thirty or forty feet from the safety of their holes …. If their winged enemies descended, the marmot mothers chirped a frantic warning, which sent the young animals scurrying back to the safety of their holes, where they waited for the ­danger to pass (207; 315). Note the onomatopoeic words of the Chinese text here in different sounds and rhythms: “dídí,” and “gǎgǎ” are the exploratory; “dí, dí, dí” is the all-clear; “dídídídí” is the warning—of serious significance for life and death. Such ­depictions abound in the story, helping to deepen our appreciation of sound, and at the least offer a few important revelations. First is that non-human living things can, like humans, make contact and communicate through sounds and other body language. ‘Giving voice’ is frequent and normal. “We do not need just to hear one another but to listen to one another. Only when this happens is there understanding.”17 If we are not inclined to listen, then we just won’t hear. Next, the reason for not hearing is because many sounds are frequently made in an environment that humans have not disturbed. Human withdrawal, or concealment (such as Chen Zhen’s silent vigil and surreptitious listening in), is the necessary precondition for the non-human to give voice. In order to 17

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gadamer in Conversation: Reflections and Commentary (New ­ aven: Yale University Press, 2001), 39. H

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listen to the voices of different groups or different people what is most important is to take the initiative to yield subject position, to let ducks quack. Every effort must be made to avoid speakers quacking in an atmosphere of coercion or pandering. In the animal world, listening is not the special power of those who ­condescend to pacify living things, but a necessity of survival. In the first chapter, the description of the big dark horse notes, “its ears pricked for sounds around them suddenly stopped moving and pointed straight toward the ­recesses of the ravine … (4). It hears sounds of danger, while Chen Zhen has not heard, and thus “had no inkling of the danger ahead” (4; 3). The lesson in life and death s­ ituations makes the student from Beijing learn to listen with full concentration to the sounds of the grassland, and these ‘voices’ therefore manifest a wealth of meaning far greater than his ‘giving voice.’ The people, wolves, dogs, horses, and others have their separate voices in the story, leading to the question of ‘discursive power’ in the dialogues—a question that typifies postcolonial issues. Discursive power, to put it plainly, is the power to explain, and has two important components: who explains? With what do they offer explanations? On the grassland, it is a native like Bilgee who has the qualifications to offer an explanation of grassland culture. His qualifications come from his subject status that is so intimately related to the grassland, and even more from the heartfelt understanding of his knowledge of the background of grassland ­history and culture and its ethos, beliefs, and so forth. His explanations do not fit the standard of values for mainstream society, but arise from the necessity for survival (including spiritual survival): dispelling misconceptions, warding off invasion (including cultural invasion), maintaining the dignity of the self, protecting one’s own environment of survival. The language that they employ is certainly their own language or a ‘localized’ discourse. But what about non-­ human life? How do we—humans—listen to their voice? It is on account of this that there is a fourth form of dialogue in the novel: dialogue between h ­ umans and animals. Such dialogue recurs so often in the story that we become used to it. It happens in the moments when humans make eye contact with dogs, horses, or the small animals encountered unexpectedly on the grassland: A small herd of horses, having drunk their fill, was standing in the w ­ ater, resting with their eyes closed, unwilling to return to dry land. Wild ducks and a variety of waterbirds were swimming on the lake, a few of them actually sporting around the horses, flitting beneath their bellies and ­between their legs. The horses gave them a friendly look, without so much as a swish of their tails (201; 311; orig. trans.).

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The waterbirds ‘see’ the friendly gaze of the horses, and hence have no fear of the large animals. There is a special significance to eyes in the novel, not just an extension of voice, but also an important channel of spiritual communication. When brought together here as dialogue, the instances of eye ­contact mentioned in previous passages carry an unusual weight. Martin Buber, the ­philosopher of religion, put it this way: “An animal’s eyes have the power to speak a great language. Independently, without needing co-operation of sounds and gestures, most forcibly when they rely on their glance, the eyes express the mystery in its natural prison, the anxiety of becoming.”18 Such unutterable sadness fills the novel, forming a major means of building tragic momentum: Chen approached the gazelle slowly and looked into its eyes. He didn’t see a gazelle; he saw a docile deer about to become a mother. She possessed motherly beauty in her big, tender eyes. He rubbed the top of her head; she opened her eyes wide, now seeming to beg for mercy. Chen stroked the helpless, feeble creature kneeling at his feet and felt his heart shudder (29; 44). At the same time as it evokes sympathy, Wolf Totem achieves an important breakthrough in the theory of dialogue through its textual practice: transgression. It overthrows humans’ possession and control of discourse. Together with the shift of subject position, it simultaneously disperses ‘discursive power’ across the entire land (the grassland) to the cosmos (Tengger) and among all living things. More importantly, it breaks through the values associated with dialogue (understanding, democracy, peace) and in postcolonial conditions highlights another significance: the shift of the battlefield—something that signifies that a new (moral) value truly begins to play a role. Hence, it is evident that the fifth form of dialogue in the novel is large-scale dialogue with inclusive participation. This large-scale dialogue is polyphony (fùdiào 复 调 ), very much like the ­polyphony (dūoshēngbù 多 声 部 ) in the work of Dostoevsky. Groups discuss, or offer opinions, or oppose each other; there is neither conclusive agreement nor final judgment, expressing without omissions an irreconcilably pluralist standpoint. There is a ‘common language,’ but there may be entirely different standpoints. Such dialogue of confrontation occurs in benign daylight, usually collective, never violent, but never conceding so much as one word. There is a great deal of such dialogue in the novel, on the issues of raising a wolf cub, burning wolves, killing wolves, and so on. Various forces speak out one after 18

Martin Buber, I and Thou (New York: Scribner, 1958), 96.

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the other, never reaching a unified view. Especially on the issue of hunting swans, the different powers do not yield to each other: Laasurung: “Swans are a sacred bird, given to us by Mongol shamans. You can’t shoot them, you can’t”19 (181; 281–82). Bao Shungui: “This must be the easiest place anywhere to hunt swans. All you need is a slingshot. They’re the emperors of birds. One bite of their flesh makes life worth living” (181; 282). Yang Ke: “These swans are national treasures, international treasures, so why won’t you protect them?” (181; 282). Narrative voice “is the site of crisis, contradiction, or challenge that is manifested in and sometimes resolved through ideologically charged technical practices.”20 The herders of the grassland together with the students “wearing Mongol deels” and the migrant workers form opposing camps, clamoring for a fight, but remaining verbal: Bilgee … was so angry his goatee quivered. He cursed Wang for the s­ laughter, for being disrespectful to a shaman, the sacred bird, and for forgetting his Mongolian roots (234; 351). Wang: “What’s this about shamans. Back home we even smashed the bodhisattvas and the Buddha himself, but you’re still talking about shamans! All the ‘four olds’ must be smashed!” (234). The migrant workers had the strength of numbers and they had backing, so they were not afraid to curse Bilgee in their fluent Mongolian. The herders surged forward screaming. Yang Ke, Chen Zhen, and some of the students dressed in Mongolian robes joined the herders and began swearing back at the migrants dressed in Han Chinese clothing. The cursing on both sides grew more vehement as they stood almost noseto-nose. Seeing that Lamjav and other horse herders, looking fierce as wolves, were on the verge of using their whips, Bao Shungui quickly rode over (234). 19

20

In both the Liao shi [History of the Liao dynasty] (juan 32) and Xin wudai shi [New history of the five dynasties] (juan 72) there are accounts of Khitan Tartars hunting and eating swans as a delicacy. See Zhu Ruixi, et al., Song, Liao, Xixia, Jin shehui shenghuo shi [History of social life during the Song, Liao, Xixia, and Jin dynasties] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2005), 61. Susan Lanser, Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1992), 7–8.

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Bao Shungui: Trifles like these swans are something the Soviet R ­ evisionists enjoy …. If we protect the swans then that will turn into something serious and become a political question …. We have to grasp the revolution and advance production (234). Ultimately, it makes little difference what is said, when Bao Shungui threatens: “From now on, anyone who speaks up for the wolves will lose his job and be sent to attend a study session. And make restitution for our losses!” (294; 428). The contradictions and struggles being “ideologically charged,” in the end they are resolved through the same “technical practices.” Under the control of ideology, whatever is said, the result is irrefutably a foregone conclusion, so what meaning can dialogue have? It seems to be nothing more than interweaving a carnival of styles, voices, and registers, each sharing the joy of catharsis in the noise that is constructed by heterotopias of mutually conflicting discourses and arrangements with no commonality.21 Just as in postmodern art, it is enough simply to express oneself, for no one assumes responsibility for consequences, since the consequences have already been anticipated: Zhang Jiyuan: All of us herders did everything we could. Some were injured, but not one deserted (294). Lamjav: If we herders go to jail, you won’t keep your post as chairman (294). Batu: Every year half the foals are lost, and we did not lose that many this time (294). Bao Shungui: “The corps commanders have spent the last few days at brigade headquarters. If they saw all these dead horses, they’d demote me in a heartbeat …. The corps is getting ready to move into our pasture, and if you won’t kill off the wolves, I’ll ask them to do it. It’ll be easy with their trucks, jeeps, and machine guns” (294; 429). Faced with such power, “with one hand cupped over the other, Bilgee looked up into the sky; his lips were moving” (294; 428). He wants to speak, but r­ emains silent. Only the Beijing students present “had a good idea what he was saying.” Here you cannot put the blame on Bao Shungui, since he is doing the work for the “corps commanders” above him. Under such ­circumstances, even if there were more opposing views, they would matter little in the face of machine guns. The wolves will still have to die, just as the swans still are hunted and killed in the end. We hear only “a genuine polyphony of fully ­valid voices,” ­presenting 21

See Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987).

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a “plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses.”22 This is not only a characteristic of polyphonic novels, but also a fundamental feature of post-colonial criticism. According to Bakhtin’s theory, polyphonic fiction may have three different levels. One is the appearance of a double voice in discourse; in the second the hero will produce a clash of different ideas; in the third the consciousnesses of many protagonists of equal value appear simultaneously in one event. The ­dialogue in Wolf Totem moves among these three levels as though smuggling. To move its contraband ideas it ranges freely along the border regions of ­language and script, showing us the unconventional attraction of ­allegorical literature. The author of The Parables of Jesus, A.T. Cadoux saw them as “a weapon of controversy.”23 Unlike most forms of narrative, allegory is “improvised in conflict to meet an unpremeditated situation.”24 If the contraband of allegory fails to reach its destination, the author himself can leap out to speak. Hence, we find the sixth type of dialogue in the novel: the thoughts and monologues of Chen Zhen. The author can elucidate his viewpoint through dialogue, something f­ully expressed in this novel. Chen Zhen’s interior monologues in the story are elaborated in the ‘lecture’ at the end of the book, conveying an important ­allegorical meaning, the question of beliefs suggested in the fiction: how did the wolf become a totem? We have discussed this question in terms of religion. Considered in terms of the theory of dialogue, we discover that, no matter how many the stories, large or small, Chen Zhen’s thoughts are concentrated on two things. One is the question of beliefs related to the ‘wolf totem’; the second is reforming the ‘national character’ of the Chinese people. So my question is: why are these expressed in the form of ‘internal dialogue’? Bakhtin believed that “when the consciousness of others in society enters a consciousness of one’s own and cannot be reconciled with it this will produce two voices, the discourse of the other and the discourse of the self, and a ­dialogue will occur.”25 In the case of Chen Zhen, information from the grassland continuously enters his vision and even his soul, challenging the convictions of his original culture, gradually altering his thought and gradually changing 22 23 24 25

Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 6. Arthur Temple Cadoux, The Parables of Jesus: Their Art and Use (London: James Clarke & Co, 1930), 13. Ibid; cited in Søren Kierkegaard, Parables of Kierkegaard, ed. Thomas Oden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), xi. Dong Xiaoying, Zaideng babilun ta, 31.

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what at first has been the discourse of the ‘other’ (the grassland) into the major resource for his deep reflection. Chen Zhen’s monologue begins with questioning until by the epilogue it is his solitary preaching and no longer monologue, so that Yang Ke is transformed from being the participant in a dialogue into an audience pure and simple. So what does he preach? The answer is apparent, that being the sole, actual theme of Wolf Totem: ­reforming the national character. The final lecture is also the words of one person, Chen Zhen’s pronouncements. Hence, we encounter the seventh form of dialogue suggested in the novel: the dialogue of the author with the protagonist. Under normal circumstances one does not see the author in the dialogue that exists between the protagonist and the author. Allegory is different. ­Authors are for the most part unwilling to stay backstage while their message is incomplete, and so rush onstage to enter directly into the dialogue. “If the author commences from the position of a hypothetical protagonist and constructs an other using the social discourse that the protagonist should use in his social position, then dialogue between the author and the protagonist is not only possible,” but also is a natural phenomenon in the course of writing.26 In “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity”27 Bakhtin divided the situation above into three categories: Sign of Person 1. “The hero takes possession of the author” (18). You, ‘I’ of the Other 2. “The author takes possession of the hero” (20). He 3. “The hero himself is his own author” (21)    I The first of these three is the most challenging, either the work of a novice or a masterpiece, such as Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. The third is relatively common, being the merger of ‘I’ and the author. Wolf Totem appears to belong to the second category, since it uses the third person. Yet, actually, it lies between the second and the third categories. If we take Chen Zhen to be the most important protagonist in the human story we discover that the author’s projection is entirely on Chen Zhen: “The author’s field of vision nowhere intersects or collides dialogically with the characters’ fields of vision or attitudes.”28 26 27

28

Dong Xiaoying, Zaideng babilun ta, 18. In Mikhail Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, trans. Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas, 1990). Page numbers for citations from this source are given in parentheses in the text. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 71.

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Chen Zhen’s monologue is the author’s internal monologue, his doubt and hesitation ­ reflecting the author’s bewilderment and tireless exploration. That he u ­ ltimately believes in wolves is because the author restores to wholeness his shattered faith under the guidance of the logic of the grassland, and once his mind is set the ‘wolf totem’ is born. When thought is elevated to faith the story ends. When the allegorical meaning becomes the totem, thought concludes. Once the ‘­essential elements of debate’ vanish, how can new dialogue be ­produced? When Chen Zhen lays his reflections on national issues on the table ­attempting to forge a “pure” national character from “the fiery, primordial gas of a nation,”29 the allegory ends, and the literary quality is also lost—a ­perfectly good post-allegory is thrown out into the great basket of Jameson’s ‘national allegory,’ into the third world, and even farther from the ‘world.’ Whenever allegory is preceded by ‘national’ or suggests moral judgment ­exclusivity emerges, and discourse of the self may become a barb to wound others. Whenever dialogue becomes a label for a culture or a code for judgment, dialogue turns into a contentious battleground. This is far from its original political ideal—peace. Hence, no one who experienced the Cultural Revolution in China would find this strange. In the clamor of debate, vicious language wounds people, gun smoke fills the air, and everyone goes down to crushing defeat. In the face of this result, how should we understand what the author has done? I try to understand because I am in this position: With a people’s faith shattered, it is no wonder the author devoted the remaining years of his life to the effort to restore belief. When they face everything littered with chicken feathers, people ­cannot be blamed for yearning for the day that the rooster heralds. Finally, returning to the text, we can draw a brief conclusion about the c­ oncrete role of ‘dialogue’ in Wolf Totem. The weight of dialogue in this story is quite heavy. It not only offers a platform that allows different humans and animals to have different voices, but also in many aspects such as structure and allegorical meaning has multiple functions. First, dialogue plays a special role in the structure of the text. During or after every major scene of battle or tension, lengthy dialogue is always present. In ­itself it constitutes a kind of rhythm, retarding or twisting the course of the plot. 29

Walter Benjamin, “Dostoevsky’s The Idiot,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913–1926 ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, 78.

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Next, in terms of allegory, the author frequently cannot resist appearing within the dialogue to speak out, giving the dialogue the ‘expository’ quality of traditional allegory. Whenever ‘exposition’ is uttered in post-allegorical texts it becomes a target. If one believes it and pursues it, thought then counteracts itself in following it. If it is not believed, if one attacks it, then no place is left for the allegory, and the ‘baby’ may well go out together with the bath water. It is in just such a paradox that dialogue reveals its quality as ‘post.’ Thirdly, after taking its course through the grassland, dialogue is a path back to the human, so that the human society that has receded can reappear. In the context of the postmodern it articulates in a timely way the postcolonial circumstances of the third world. Hence, it has a counteractive function in two aspects: because excessive dialogue counteracts the story, and using postcolonial criticism smashes the allegorical significance that lies within the ­postmodern context. Dialogue in literary works is the genie within plot, often functioning to create ‘variation’ within the standard rhythm. Hence, it is also of interest not only in showing variety in the world, but also in holding the possibility of ­unlimited change. A fundamental condition of dialogue is the prior existence of ‘multiplicity.’ If one desires that dialogue continue to develop in a ‘peaceful’ ­atmosphere it is necessary to ensure a discursive space that continues to open up. The course of dialogue is directly guided by dialogue itself: “No one knows in advance what will ‘come out’ of a conversation.”30 This is primarily because, in dialogue, the contents of artistic texts are unlimited. If we ­accept Gadamer’s theory and see the relationship between the reader (including the critic) and the reading of a work as a form of dialogue (the eighth kind of ­dialogue), then we should believe that in different eras, different occasions, and even different conversations, the artistic text continuously makes new a­ spects of itself understood. It surpasses the dilemmas of discourse itself with a space that far ­surpasses what the author offered, and lets us enjoy Roland Barthes’ ­intoxicating pleasure of reading on the stage (píngtái 平 台 ) of open thought, and in “texts of bliss” understand the experience of free jouissance (bliss): Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.31 30 31

Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 385. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 14; cited in Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (Berkeley: University of

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Scholars have offered a necessary interpretation: From a purely sensual angle it gives the reader an experience of discomfort. Yet, it is just this experience that can expand the spiritual realm of the reader. Like a silkworm emerging from its cocoon, there is a kind of jouissance of new life …. It can offer a challenge to any existing framework of understanding.32 I agree with this interpretation, fully experiencing the pleasure of jouissance in the free practice of reading. “Meaning is freedom and interpretation is its exercise.”33 As Tzvetan Todorov noted, this was Bakhtin’s final precept, and the direction in which I have striven. I have viewed Wolf Totem as a platform for ­dialogue among varied voices, in an effort, in the clamor that “gives the reader an ­experience of discomfort,” to peel away one by one the voices like “a silkworm e­ merging from its cocoon,” to restore its continuity in its pure quality. The sensation of jouissance, as it is called, is that of entering a serene state of mind on the road toward understanding and even peace. 5.2

On Dialogue (b): The Issue of National Character Great China, rich with her ancient wisdom and social ethics, her discipline of industry and self-control, is like a whale awakening the lust of spoil in the heart of the Nation. rabindranath tagore34

Wolf Totem does not directly employ the concept ‘national character (guómínxìng 国 民 性 ).’ What it addresses is ethnic character (mínzúxìnggé 民 族 性 格 ), based on the nomadic and agrarian civilizations, involving the ­ethnicities of ‘grassland people’ and ‘Han people.’ Yet Chinese civilization

32 33 34

California Press, 1977), 115. Barthes divided the “pleasure” of the text into two kinds. One is enjoying the pleasure of finding meaning in a work and belongs to consumer reading. The other is breaking down the text as a creative “game.” He believed that the latter was worth pursuing in order freely to experience jouissance. Xifang meixue tongshi, Vol. 7, 159. Tzvetan Todorov, Literature and Its Theorists trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1987), 88. Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (1917), 43.

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a­ ctually includes elements of multiple civilizations (among them nomadic and agrarian civilizations), and the grassland people and Han people in the novel historically are included as Chinese people. Viewing the measure of ­civilization presented in the novel as the premise for the issue of national character is not supported historically. However, given that the novel is allegorical fiction, without being overcritical on questions of truth and falsity, criticism may go beyond such judgments, moving through contradictions, relying on tools of analysis, to excavate among fragments and assemblages of elements the allegorical significance that the text potentially conveys. Why go to the trouble of doing this? Because this mood interweaving contradictions pervades the entire book, involving two genuine issues. One is the author’s original creative intention; the other is the readers’ emotional reaction. The two both involve the wrenching issue of national character: Quite a number of netizens left messages, and it was precisely on the question of national character and ethnic character that debate was most heated, smelled the most of gunpowder. It appears that the exploration and debate that I wanted to introduce among our compatriots over national character has begun. The question of national character is one of the fundamental questions about the future fate of the nation. There is absolutely no getting around it.35 Jiang Rong believed that “China’s reforms face the internal obstacle that ethnic character has insufficient forcefulness, and if the national character continues to be weak, there is the possibility that reform in China will die an early death.” The author’s actual motive for writing this book is apparent. What he wrote is a story about the grassland in primitive nature; what occupied his thoughts was the here and now, the human world and the political, still more the ethnic, and even nationalism. In China, nationalism (mínzúzhǔyì 民 族 主 义 ) and patriotism (aìgúozhǔyì 爱 国 主 义 ) are almost synonyms, completely out of touch with the negative comments related to this in the Western academic world. Since the early ­modern era the ‘national’ consciousness of the people of China has awakened in the patriotic feelings aroused under the oppression of imperialist/colonial power, raising the banner of revolt as the twins of anti-imperialism and anticolonialism. Liang Qichao was the first to employ the concepts of the ‘Chinese people’ and ‘nationalism,’ and it was his belief that ‘nationalism’ is the most enlightened, just, honorable, and equitable doctrine in the world. It does not let 35

Jiang Rong, interview in writing with Shu Jinyu, reporter for Dushu bao, n. p., n. d.

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other peoples (tāzú 他 族 ) invade our freedom, nor let us invade the freedom of other peoples.”36 Associating such noble qualities as enlightenment, justice, honor, equity, and freedom with such a high evaluation of nationalism is rarely found among Western intellectuals, making it a distinctively Chinese vision. Jiang Rong’s argument is no different, and the weakness of ethnic character that he criticizes comes precisely out of comparisons with the forcefulness of foreign powers. Actually, however, ‘nationalism’ and ‘national character’ are concepts with two different qualities and orientations. The former is exogenous, the ­outgrowth of colonialism/imperialism and racism, arising, in the words of Benedict Anderson from “imagined community,”37 which can be summoned by a slogan, a flag, even a symbol, to assemble in ranks united against the outside. The latter is a question of the endogenous, produced under the premise of identification with ‘nation/state’ (mínzú 民 族 /gúojīa 国 家 ). It may be said that it is the real product of that ‘imagined community.’ Wolf Totem integrates ­national character with a people’s means of survival, conveying a weighty meditation aimed at reflecting on and criticizing the weak points of agrarian people. Yet the highly praised ‘grassland civilization’ and ‘nomadic people,’ which on the surface appear so superior, play merely a supporting role at the service of a s­ o-called ‘reform of national character’ of which agrarian culture is the subject. As easy as it is to articulate this, to shape it in images through a story demands painstaking thought. In the novel this thought is ‘told’ in the form of dialogue; otherwise, it could not be thoroughgoing. To ‘tell’ (not describe) is the principal method of presenting national character in the novel. Hence, ‘dialogue’ repeatedly pushes its way to the front of the stage, converting a perfectly good story into a platform for lecturing or a forum for endless wrangling: “When the course of the narration has been fixed according to time … narration actually becomes an important topic. In these novels, the narrator’s guiding role is evident at any point.”38 36

37

38

“Guojia sixiang bianqian yitong lun 国 家 思 想 变 迁 异 同 论 [Disparities and similarities in shifts of ideas of the nation-state],” Yinbingshi heji: wenji zhi liu 饮 冰 室 合 集 · 文 集 之 六 [Collection of ice-eater studio: prose, volume 6] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1989), 20. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983) is viewed as one of the two most important classics on the study of ­nationalism in the twentieth century. The other is Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (1983). Fulanci Sitance’er [Franz K. Stanzel], “Xiandai xiaoshuo de meixue tezheng [Aesthetic features of modern fiction],” in Jijinde meixue fengmang, ed. Zhou Xian (Zhongguo renmin daxue chubanshe, 2003), 237.

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In that case, what does criticism do here? In the face of judgments of truth, veracity, and achievement, criticism takes no sides. Its task is precisely to rise above the arguments, penetrate the text beyond the ‘referents,’ pursuing the source of the contradictions and paradoxes, to discover the ‘signifiers.’ Wolf Totem opens with the elderly Bilgee, representative of nomadic culture, rudely criticizing Han Chinese. Encircled by a wolf pack, he whispers to Chen Zhen, “You’re going to need more courage than that …. You’re like a sheep. A fear of wolves is in your Chinese bones. That’s the only explanation for why you people have never won a fight out here” (3; 1). Chen Zhen does not object; on the contrary, after a fierce fight he also disparages himself: “I’m worse than useless … Gutless as a sheep” (9; 11). Thus, it is no surprise to read the following dialogue: JIANG Ming: You are a scholar, not a [fiction] writer. How did you think of using literary means to present your ‘theory of wolf nature’? Were you making use of it to expound something? JIANG Rong: Without literature to give it wings, a serious theory of ‘wolf nature’ is something a wider number of readers could not understand. It would have no way to fly into the imaginations of a wide C ­ hinese readership. The wolf spirit of freedom, independence, tenacity, and ­initiative that I introduced so forcefully is primarily targeting the Chinese national character of weakness and mediocrity.39 On the topic of wolves and sheep, from ancient times on down, one approach, seems stale and hackneyed, no matter how it is evaluated. In his The Heart of Man, Eric Fromm gave the first chapter the eye-catching title “Man—Wolf or Sheep?”40 From the loftiness of philosophy, he proceeded to raise one e­ xample after another of what is called the ‘wolf nature’ and the ‘sheep nature’ in h ­ uman nature. The argument for humans as sheep points out: … men are easily influenced to do whatever they are told, even if it is harmful to themselves; that they have followed their leaders into wars 39

40

Jiang Ming 姜 鸣 , “Toushi Lang tuteng de xinling huayu 透 视 《 狼 图 腾 》 的 心 灵 话 语 [Inside the spiritual discourse of Wolf Totem],” Xinxilan jingbao [The New Zealand mirror] (Christchurch), n.d. Eric Fromm, The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 13. Page numbers for subsequent citations from this source are given in parentheses in the text.

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which brought them nothing but destruction; that they have believed any kind of nonsense if it was only presented with sufficient vigor and supported by power … It is on this assumption—that men are sheep—that the Great Inquisitors and the dictators have built their systems (13). The view of humans as wolves reminds us that … history has been written in blood; it is a history of continuous violence, in which almost invariably force has been used to bend [man’s] will …. All these facts have led thinkers like Hobbes to the conclusion that homo homini lupus (man is a wolf to his fellow man); they have led many of us today to the assumption that man is vicious and destructive by nature … (14). Taking a view that is diametrically opposite, Fromm notes, “Our assumption regarding wolves and sheep may not be tenable” (15). The reason for repeating this theme of sheep and wolves is because of the surge of wolf nature in the contemporary world: “nations contemplate the use of the most destructive forces for the extinction of their ‘enemies,’ and seem not to be deterred even by the possibility that they themselves may be extinguished in the holocaust” (15). Not without a sense of the tragic, he jibes, “Why resist the wolves when we are all wolves, although some more so than others?” (15). In comparing the opposites of this dichotomy, Jiang Rong has not the least intention of mockery. Although he defines the group that he himself belongs to as ‘sheep,’ he stands on the side of the wolves. It is as though he admits simply to losing a contest of strength. He does not intend to inquire into the moral responsibility of the victor. On the contrary, his reflection is introverted, taking the powerful enemy as a model in order to urge self-strengthening of his compatriots: Speaking of my intention in writing this book, I promote the nomadic spirit and wolf spirit of freedom and independence, staunchness and ­tenacity, in order to attack the sheep character of the Chinese people that has weakened them for so long, so that we can raise the national character of the Han people …. A democratic form of government cannot be founded on weak national character.41 The author’s mind is not on grassland or nature, but feelings that are typically modern. Whether they are sheep or wolves, on the platform of h ­ uman 41

Jiang Ming, “Toushi Lang tuteng de xinling huayu.”

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i­nterpretation they are all alike passive. The difference is that today when Westerners say ‘wolf’ it is mostly in reviews that are anti-fascist, just as when ­Chinese say ‘sheep’ it is mostly in reflection, angry over their unwillingness to assert themselves. It is necessary to point out that the wolf nature that the novel praises is not the same thing as fascism that invades abroad, but the opposite: it is the result of being invaded by wolves. The elderly Bilgee has an explanation for this: [Chen Zhen] saw fascists and saw the Japanese devils in wolf nature …. Wolves were too vicious and hateful, more vicious and hateful than the Japanese devils. They truly deserved to be sliced to ribbons. The old man … said assertively, “The fascism of the Japanese devils came out of bones of the Japanese themselves, not anything that they learned from wolves. I fought the Japanese, and I know. Japan doesn’t have a great grassland, they don’t have wolf packs. Have they even seen a wolf? But they slaughtered people in the blink of an eye.” (56) Separating wolf nature and fascist aggressiveness but combining them with national character is not Jiang Rong’s sole invention, for its has a tradition in modern Chinese history. Along with foreign invasion, the question of r­ eform of the national character grew to such immense proportions that during the modern era it became the topic of the common hatred shared by Chinese intellectuals and people with vision.42 Jiang Rong believes that Lu Xun was the first to raise the issue of the “domesticated animality” of the Chinese people.43 ­Jiang Rong himself “merely supported Lu Xun’s diagnosis of China’s ­illness from the standpoint of the grassland, with the aim of arousing people to ­seriously consider curing this illness.”44 Actually, this voice has been constant since the Boxer Uprising. Chen Duxiu was the first to raise the issue in ­intellectual circles, criticizing compatriots, especially the educated: “Whenever I look at our 42

43

44

See Tao Dongfeng 陶 东 风 and Xu Yanlei 徐 艳 蕊 , Dangdai Zhongguo de wenhua ­piping 当 代 中 国 的 文 化 批 评 [Cultural criticism in contemporary China] (Beijing: Beijing daxue chuban she, 2006), especially Chapter 3 on the debate over ‘national character’ in “Contemporary Chinese postcolonial criticism.” The authors present criticism of the “­de-essentializing” of the theory of national character that some overseas Chinese scholars have pursued. See Lu Xun 鲁 迅 , “Lüelun Zhongguoren de lian 略 论 中 国 人 的 脸 [A brief discussion of Chinese people’s ‘face’],” in Lu Xun quanji [Collected works of Lu Xun] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1981), vol. 3. The article was originally included in the volume Eryi ji 而 已 集 [And that’s that, 1927]. Jiang Ming, “Toushi Lang tuteng de xinling huayu.”

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country’s educated youth, they are too weak to truss a chicken and without courage. Their pale faces and slim waists are as charming as maidens, afraid of heat and cold, frail as the ill. What challenges and ambitions are such puny minds and bodies fit for?” He went on to urge education in “animalism” for his countrymen: Among strong peoples, human and animal natures develop simultaneously …. What are the strong points of animal nature? These are tenacious will and fighting spirit, strength of body and spirit to survive in ­nature; ­reliance on instinct and not others for survival; innate forthrightness without dissembling. The reason that fair-skinned people have established colonies everywhere is solely due to this animal nature; the reason for the hegemony of Japan in Asia is solely due to this animal nature.45 Jiang Rong has also emphasized the role of education, but he has not ­intended to suck the blood from the enemy—the Western wolves—and rather has sought to return to the land that has been the source of wolf nature—the grassland—to seek primitive motive force, linking the reform of national ­character with natural and social environment and its cultural orientation. The Japanese environmental archeologist Yasuda Yoshinori believes that there is an interdependent relationship between the Japanese people and forests. Forests “are the spiritual home of the Japanese people and the site of their peaceful and ­contented dwellings.” The cultures of the grassland and agriculture that Jiang Rong views as diametrically opposed are, in Yasuda’s eyes, ­integrated: “One is the agrarian culture that is based on the great dry grasslands of the Eurasian continent, organized to grow wheat and raise goats and sheep. The other is agrarian culture based in areas bordering the humid forests and wet lands, organized to grow rice, hunt and fish.”46 Yasuda painstakingly distinguishes agrarian and forest cultures, just as Jiang Rong endlessly analyzes the distinctions between nomadic and agrarian cultures. To Yasuda it is these two ­cultures that “developed urban civilization and gave birth to civilizations in which humans are masters, which destroyed forests, and thus generated “livestock people” and “forest people”: 45

46

Chen Duxiu 陈 独 秀 , “Jinri zhi jiaoyu fangzhen 今 日 之 教 育 方 针 [Educational policy at present],” Xin qingnian [New Youth] 1.2 (October 15, 1915); reprint ed. Chen Duxiu wenzhang xuanpian (shang) 陈 独 秀 文 章 选 编 》 ( 上 ) [Selected writings of Chen Duxiu] (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1984) vol. 1: 89. Antian Xixian 安 田 喜 宪 [Yasuda Yoshinori], Senlin—Riben wenhua zhi mu 森 林 — — 日 本 文 化 之 母 [Forests—the mother of Japanese culture], trans. Cai Dunda 蔡 敦 达 and Wu Liming 邬 利 明 (Shanghai: Shanghai keji chubanshe, 2002), 59.

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The former is a vision of nature and worldview of a system of exploitation among nature and humanity. The latter is a vision of nature and worldview of a system of circulation among nature-humanity. America and Russia have inherited the tradition of the culture of livestock people, and the world at present is under the rule of livestock people. In a certain sense the history of the world is a history of the invasions of livestock peoples.47 Hence, Yasuda wrote, “The civilizations on this earth that have disappeared were all destroyed during the invasions of livestock peoples.” This is quite ­different from Jiang Rong’s conclusions, and inadvertently shows us how a ­diverse world can produce multiple cognitive systems. It also gives us a different understanding of the relationship between ‘invasiveness’ and ‘wolf nature’: wolf nature is not necessarily prone to carrying out invasions; well-fed wolves do not generally eat people, nor disturb other living creatures. Sheep nature, on the other hand, does not necessarily signify lack of invasiveness, nor harmlessness. Bilgee says: Gazelles are a scourge on the grassland …. They run like the wind and eat all the time. Just look how much good forage they’ve already gone through. The brigade has done everything it can to keep this pastureland in good shape, but the gazelles will have destroyed nearly half of it in days. A few more herds like this, and the grass will be gone (13; 17). In Wolf Totem the wolf does not appear as an invader, and in the face of the mostly peasant settlers and soldiers, it is a victim and a refugee. We hear, in the  novel, eulogies praising the indomitable courage of the grassland wolf on  the one hand, and on the other hand watch helplessly as it flees and is ­haplessly destroyed. The stories interwoven throughout all cruelly play out the victory of what Yasuda terms “the livestock people” with vivid realism, demonstrating that world history is ultimately a “history of the invasions by livestock peoples” and not the history of the triumph of the wolf. Extending this to the issue of national character and changing perspective and standpoint, the criteria for judgment and the conclusions will not be the same. In terms of conquest and plunder, the Western wolves are bad, and the Chinese sheep are good. In contests of strength, sheep are always the losers. But seen from another perspective, there have been elements of social stability in the character of the Chinese people, as well as benevolent 47

Ibid., 59, 153.

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e­ducation, ­generating myriad things, and even internal strength to intermingle, ­assimilate, and silently absorb, for otherwise how could her ancient ­civilization endure and continue to expand? The character Yang Ke laments more than once: “I used to think that the agrarian civilization of China was always being invaded and bullied by Western powers, and never gave a thought to how agrarian civilization destroyed nomadic civilization with the same ­cruelty and s­ avagery” (235). It is evident, then, that there is no necessary connection or lack of ­connection ­between being a wolf or a sheep and carrying out ­invasions. If prejudice is shorn there will be objective evaluation. For example, in comparing ­national character, Chen Duxiu listed three major differences between Western and Eastern  peoples. First, Western peoples regard war as the norm; Eastern peoples regard peace as the norm. Second, Western peoples regard the individual as the norm; Eastern peoples regard the clan as the norm. Third, Western peoples regard rule of law and material profit as norms; Eastern peoples regard feelings and formalities as norms.48 Here no value judgments are set up, no conclusions about right or wrong. Not so for Jiang Rong, who believes that the weakness of the sheep nature that Chinese people have is not only a matter of inferiority, but also fatal. It leads to “weak democratic consciousness and demands, weak rule of law and enforcement of law, weak ­supervision through public opinion, weak state enterprise, weak markets, weak soccer, weak competitiveness and innovativeness, weak only-children and children’s reading, etc.” Hence, he chose an extreme method of indirection intending to “attack the inertia, weakness, and numbness of Chinese people’s traditional ways of thinking.”49 This is fully expressed in the conversations of the students from Beijing: “Since I’ve been herding horses,” Zhang said, “I’ve felt the difference in temperament between the Chinese and the Mongols. Back in school I was at the top in just about everything, but out here I’m weak as a ­kitten. I did everything I could think of to make myself strong, and now I find that there’s something [innately] lacking in us…” Chen sighed again. “That’s it exactly,” he said. “China’s small-scale peasant economy cannot tolerate competitive peaceful labor …. China’s small- scale peasant economy and Confucian culture have weakened the people’s nature, and even though Chinese created a brilliant ancient 48

49

Chen Duxiu, “Dong xi minzu genben sixiang zhi chayi 东 西 民 族 根 本 思 想 之 差 异 [Fundamental differences of ideas between Eastern and Western peoples]” [1915], in Chen Duxiu wenzhang xuanbian, vol. 1, 97–100. Jiang Rong, written interview with Shu Jinyu, n.d.

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c­ ivilization, it came about at the cost of the race’s character and has led to the sacrifice of our ability to develop.” (195; 303–04) This method of representation has not lacked for precedents in the literature of socialism and utopianism, its combination of a solitary idea and e­ xtreme representational technique related to the purposes of propaganda and ­indoctrination. When criticizing Bertolt Brecht’s plays, Walter Benjamin pointedly wrote: “Anyone who wants to define the crucial features of Brecht in a few words could do worse than confine himself to the comment that Brecht’s subject is poverty.” He goes on to write somewhat acerbically, “This Brechtian poverty is more like a uniform and is calculated to confer a high rank on anyone who wears it. It is, in short, the physiological and economic poverty of man in the machine age.”50 Read in a corresponding fashion, the subject that Wolf Totem represents is weakness. It is precisely on the issue of ‘weakness’ that the question of the reform of national character is introduced and the grassland wolf erected as a model and even a belief, to reappear again and again in the dialogue: [Yang Ke said,] “I guarantee you, we Chinese could live out here for generations without worshipping a wolf totem.” “Maybe, maybe not,” Chen said as he reined in his horse. “Take me, for instance. The wolves have won me over in a little more than two years.” “…. We Han worship the Dragon King, the one in charge of our agrarian lifeline—our dragon totem, the one we pay homage to, the one to whom we meekly submit. How can you expect people like that to learn from wolves, to protect them, to worship yet kill them, like the Mongols?” (23; 33–34) No matter what sort of debate the praise of wolves stirs up, we should recognize that within the story all discussions of wolves are domestic or internal, unrelated to incursions and having nothing to do with fascism. It would be better to say post-fascism than fascism. Just as postcolonial discourse presupposes a priori colonialism, the production of post-fascism is simply an intuitive inverted image of fascism. The representation that we see, like irony, is a nonviolent form of following up or reacting. Looking back on the source by Benedict Anderson on the issue of nationalism, it was indeed something imagined, not to be taken too seriously. Anderson wrote: “In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an 50

“Bertolt Brecht,” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2, 1927–1934, 370.

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i­ magined p ­ olitical ­community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign …. What, in a positive sense, made the new communities imaginable was a half-­fortuitous, but explosive, interaction between a system of production and productive relations (capitalism), a technology of communications (print), and the fatality of human linguistic diversity.”51 In Western societies this ideological imagination also had a tradition in the monopoly of imperialism. It is of the will and spiritual, global and exclusive, its classic expression in Fichte’s ‘German spirit’: [W]hoever believes in spirituality and in the freedom of this spirituality, and who wills the eternal development of this spirituality by freedom, wherever he may have been born and whatever language he speaks, is of our blood; he is one of us and will come over to our side. Whoever believes in stagnation, retrogression, and the round dance of which we spoke, or who sets a dead nature at the helm of the world’s government, wherever he may have been born and whatever language he speaks, is non-German and a stranger to us.52 Yet seen from another perspective, that of the invaded and the conquered, ­nations and nationalism are not imagined, nor are they born out of imagination. Peoples exist together with their land, real and concrete, and the ­experience of being invaded, occupied, and colonized is virtually the only birthplace of ‘nationalism.’ Those peoples who have undergone the experience of invasion and humiliation like those peoples who have conquered and ­invaded others will generally have similar views and choices. For example, during the entire twentieth century what Anderson called the “last wave” of nationalism (­occurring primarily among the colonies of Asia and Africa) was a reaction to the global imperialism that industrialism created. As Marx wrote: “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe.”53 This “last wave” of nationalism had a quality entirely unlike the “first wave” of nationalism. It was the product of the arrival of imperialism and the bourgeoisie, the byproduct of plunder and conquest. It was born out of spiritual torment and psychic humiliation.

51 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 5–6, 42–43. 52 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, trans. R.F. Jones and G.H. ­Turnbull (Chicago and London: The Open Court Publishing Co., 1922), 126–27. 53 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 6.

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It indeed had the quality of imagination, imaginations that were completely different for this nation and that one. Where there was no oppression from imperialism and capital, the extreme or radical forms of nationalism and class struggle could hardly happen. In an environment without wolves, the Chinese peasant, for example, was neither a sheep nor endowed with a ‘sheep nature.’ Historically, the Chinese e­ mperor was the representative and ‘lead sheep’ of agrarian society, not a wolf. He built and repaired the Great Wall for defense, not offense. He managed s­ ociety through the administration of officials and the landlord stratum, and did not directly ‘eat the sheep.’ Given that the emperor was a distant figure, ­peasants generally were not directly oppressed by imperial power, but rather by the codes and restrictions of kinship society. Chinese peasants did not resort to ­occupation through bloodshed to win, but conquered hearts and minds through peaceful, contented living, to resolve contradictions, and blur boundaries.54 The close connections of ethnic awareness and bloodlines, kinship and land that derived from it were the product of the blending of peoples and even the intermingling of ethnic identities—the Chinese people were just such a concrete result. Hence, the ‘Chinese sheep’ that we read about in the novel cannot be equated with the peasants and agricultural civilization of traditional society, but arise instead out of the historical fact of the humiliation and exploitation that the Chinese people have undergone in the modern era. The so-called sheep nature is produced out of the contrast with Western wolves, also a product of imagination. This is not Jiang Rong’s discovery. From the May Fourth movement through the New Enlightenment movement of the 1980s, there was consistently criticism of the ‘spirit of the Great Wall’ and ‘long term peace and stability,’ and an ineradicable complex in the collective self-image of Chinese intellectuals. So my question is this: Does Wolf Totem convey any new thought? Why does it go on endlessly about the old topic of ‘national character’ that has been repeated for a century? The author answers the question figuratively through the story by always ­impatiently throwing out an answer following the question of his own p ­ osition.

54

Historically, emperors of China were not necessarily Han Chinese, and so long as they carried out Chinese ways were regarded as the masters of China, such as the rulers of the Liao, Jin, and Yuan dynasties. See René Grousset, The Empire of the Steppes: A History of Central Asia.

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When stealing the wolf cubs, the family dog Yellow retreats, and because of this Chen Zhen prefers the dog Erlang, whose wild nature is still intact: Erlang’s brutish nature was intense and he didn’t seem to respond to the human world. In a world of cruel competition what a people needs before all else is brutish courage and character. Absent this condition, knowledge and culture have nothing on which they can stand. Once the character of a people declines, it can only live on ignobly by arranging intermarriages, building great walls, surrendering as docile folk, and exceeding the reproductive capacities of rats and rabbits (90). Stated so baldly, there is no more need for us to entangle ourselves in pseudo-issues of whether “wolves are right and sheep wrong.” We may just as well pursue the author’s train of thought directly, conduct interpretation in depth of the national character on the issues of ‘brutish nature’ and ‘wolf nature,’ tracing the root source of two important related questions brought out in the novel. One, what is the underlying structure for generating national ethnic character Two, what are the driving force and resources for reforming national character? In a literal sense the author has already openly addressed these two questions, so there is no need for superfluous repetition. But if they are extended to ‘national character’ and not purely ethnic character, then the question is not so simple, because it involves the two modern concepts of ‘nation state’ and ‘citizen.’ Some analysis shows us that the concrete contents are quite far from theories of the modern nation state and classic theories of nationalism. What is interesting is its re-designation or renaming in a subversive sense. The British sociologist Anthony Giddens maintained that the formation of nations gives rise to nationalism; the nation state (mínzú gúojīa 民 族 国 家 ) is a product social history.55 Ernest Gellner, however, believes that nationalism created nations, and that nations and even national character are the result of i­deology.56 Anderson is obviously an extension of the latter line of thought, moving from ‘consciousness’ to ‘imagination.’ Under the impetus of ­imaginative power, he lumped together national independence movements and ­colonial movements brought on by imperialist invasions as “stretching the short, tight skin of the nation over the gigantic body of the empire” and defined

55 56

See Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). See Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1983).

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them “official nationalism,”57 dropping people into labyrinths of imagination, forgetting its ‘real’ meaning. As a scholar holding a Western passport whereby he could travel the world unimpeded, he could, of course, in practice and in conceptualization be unconcerned with ‘real’ national borders and the related systems of restrictive power over the people in these states; whereas, those peoples in the third world, especially autocratic nation states, have had a completely different sense—no one there would see (national) identity and the ‘community’ within the borders (of the nation state) as products of ‘imagination.’ In the present world, nations and their territories outside the West have, almost without exception, become refuges on which the people of a nation rely for their living or prisons in which they are incarcerated, real and concrete, and crossing those borders, whether in practice or conceptually in thought, is difficult. This gap is so great that Xu Xun, after reading numerous works on ­nationalism, spoke rather sarcastically of his response: “Imagination is necessary when studying issues of ‘nations’ and ‘nationalism.’” On the issue of the nation, “imagination is either unrealistic hopes or an object of ridicule. Browsing through the classics containing definitions of ‘nationalism,’ one discovers that nationalism is basically something pejorative, branded as bourgeois.”58 This is so unlike the understanding that Chinese have; it is as if the view from two train cars is two different landscapes.59 Praise or disparagement of an idea or practice has to do with the standpoint and identity of the persons praising or disparaging. The ‘sympathy’60 of people like Anderson is condescending, lacking the visceral pain of someone involved. Hence, the reappearance of wolves—or tigers or panthers—is s­ omething that would happen sooner or later. It presents a counter-discourse, something that may sound like fascism, but in fact is a tooth for a tooth, a renaming: 57 58

59

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Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 86. Xu Xun 徐 迅 , Minzuzhuyi 民 族 主 义 [Nationalism] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1998), 164. The term nationalism appeared in print in 1844. It fundamentally signifies loyalty and devotion to a people. Exceptionalist nationalism (exceptionalism) believes in the superiority of one’s own nation over others, “emphatically encouraging the culture of one’s own ethnicity and benefitting it in order to resist the culture and rewards of other nations.” See p. 40. See “Guanyu ‘Zhongguo jindai shi shang de minzuzhuyi’ de duihua 关 于 “ 中 国 近 代 史 上 的 民 族 主 义 ” 的 对 话 [Conversation on nationalism in modern Chinese history],” Guangming ribao, March 28, 2006, 11. Wu Ruiren 吴 叡 人 , “Rentong de zhongliang: Xiangxiang de gongtongti daodu 认 同 的 重 量 想 象 的 共 同 体 导 读 [The weight of identity: Introduction to Imagined Communities],” in Bennidike Andesen 本 尼 迪 克 特 安 德 森 [Benedict Anderson], Xiangxiang de gongtongti 想 象 的 共 同 体 [Imagined Communities] (Beijing: Shibao wenhua chubanshe, 2010).

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In the present era we need first of all to redefine what ‘wolf nature,’ after all, is. Han people always associate ‘wolf nature’ with savagery and greed. Wolf Totem seeks to ‘overturn’ this extremely superficial misunderstanding, and show everyone the ‘wolf’s’ freedom and independence, boldness and assertiveness, wisdom and tenacity, and spirit of collective cooperation.61 The figure of the wolf that has always been seen as an invader here becomes a model for self-strengthening and internal renovation. It is evident that the issue of wolf nature is not a simple one. Tagore wrote, “If [man’s] nature were not as complex as it is, if it were as simple as that of a pack of hungry wolves, then, by this time, those hordes of marauders would have overrun the whole earth.”62 There have always existed two choices for the value orientation t­oward wolf nature: one is an externalized association with imperialism, bloodlust, plunder, and immorality; the other is internal, its premise the reestablishment of morality closely associated with the reform of national character (国 民 性 ). It is in terms of this latter choice that Wolf Totem re-evaluates wolf nature. The evaluation of sheep nature, hence, also varies from the usual, and besides ‘submissiveness,’ has another meaning. In the novel, when the topic is sheep, Chen Zhen—a temporary sheepherder—not only lacks the tender, protective feelings that being together with them night and day might produce, but on the contrary expresses an extreme disdain and disgust beyond words: Sheep are truly stupid animals. When the wolf knocked the unfortunate  sheep to the ground, the other sheep scattered in fright. But the entire flock soon calmed down, and there were even a few animals that timidly drew closer to watch the wolf eat a member of their flock. As they looked on, more joined them, until at least a hundred sheep had virtually penned the wolf and its bloody victim in; they pushed and shoved and craned their necks to get a better look. Their expressions seemed to say, “Well, the wolf is eating you and not me!” (209; 319) Those who have read Lu Xun’s short story “Medicine” [Yao 药 ] would not find this description strange. It resembles the crowd of spectators gathered at the execution ground to eat buns soaked in the blood of the martyr. The passage above typifies ‘retelling,’ to evoke a response to something similar.

61 62

Jiang Rong, “Wo xie Lang tuteng 我 写 《 狼 图 腾 》 [How I wrote Wolf Totem],” n. p., n. d. Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism, 13–14.

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For ­example, Chen Zhen “was reminded of the writer Lu Xun, who had written about a crowd of dull-witted Chinese looking on as a Japanese swordsman was about to lop off the head of a Chinese prisoner.” He concludes: “A wolf eating a sheep may be abhorrent, but far more loathsome were cowardly people who acted like sheep.” (209; 319) Chen Zhen’s critical barb is not aimed at the Japanese rōnin thug for being cruel as a wolf, but at the Chinese crowd for being as timid as sheep: The facts demonstrate that animals are endowed with so many skills and qualities that humans cannot match, wolves even more so. The most prominent of these is that the wolf spirit has a ‘national character,’ (qúanmínxìng 全 民 性 ) that is, a ‘national spirit’(qúanmínjīngshén 全 民 精 神 )—every wolf is a hero who will fight to the end for freedom.63 It still comes down to “fight to the end,” so it is evident that the idea of killing is still behind the reform of national character (国 民 性 ), and Western scholars cannot be blamed for catching the scent of blood in it. However, unlike ­externally oriented nationalism (民 族 主 义 ), the barb here is introspective. However much it defends wolves, it is only using the wolf as a model at the service of strengthening the people of a nation. Hence, we find this conversation in the Epilogue: [Yang Ke:] “In the West there is an appropriate outlet for wolf nature, and the system of democracy is established, so Western peoples have been the first to go out into the world (401) …. Sheep are so afraid of freedom and independence that without an “official government herder” they are food for wolves. The weak agrarian peoples willingly choose autocratic government. Agrarian populations are what centralized autocratic systems rely on for their very existence.” [Chen Zhen:] “Peoples of nations without a strong wolf nature will never fight for democracy or put it into practice. Actually, democracy is the result of valiant people resisting rulers and negotiating with them.” (402) The truth emerges: the wolves’ appearance here is not aimed at imperialism, but the current political situation for the Chinese people. In Yang Ke’s words, “The existence of the people (mínzú 民 族 ) of the Chinese nation (húaxìa mínzú 华 夏 民 族 ) and the national character (gúomín xìnggé 国 民 性 格 ) is ­unchanging, and there will be no end to the autocratic system of China. The 63

Jiang Rong, written interview for Dangdai jingliren (Contemporary executive), n. d.

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wolf is elevated to the status of totem because there is the real model of ‘Western wolves.’ The conclusion is to take the path of the West and struggle for democracy with the wolves as models! At this point, what direction should criticism take? In the history of critical commentary, “nothing marks the break with earlier views better than Spinoza’s demand … that the search for the truth of texts be abandoned in favor of concern for their meaning alone.”64 In the context of postmodernism, the space for interpretation and questioning is open, no longer rigidly adhering to the text or limited to the signified, and it is especially inappropriate to judge its correctness from the questions of truth and falsity that the text raises. “If the commentary were concerned with truth, it would be situated at the same level as the work being commented upon and the two would bear upon the same object.”65 This is to say the critical orientation must transcend judging correctness to strip away the allegorical significance from the textual cover, and within the cordon of ‘allegorical meaning’ use open ­interpretation to clear a new space of thought. As is evident from the analysis above, the allegory of the novel is neither the primitive nor the ecological, but concentrated on weighty realistic c­ oncerns. It is in precisely this sense that it happens to coincide with postmodern concerns. Postmodern fiction raises questions such as these: “What is a world? What kinds of worlds are there, how are they constituted, and how do they differ? What happens when different kinds of worlds are placed in confrontation, or when boundaries between worlds are violated?”66 Wolf Totem not only presents a new view of the world, it also tries to use the ‘spirit of the wolf’ to reform the world. Like its antecedents, it persistently looks toward an ideal land of utopia, so that it is better read as post-utopian than postmodern. But if, from a modern perspective, it is not genuinely ‘post-’ and is filled with premodern dreams, what it promotes is a modernist ideal. Hence, its turning back is thorough, not just introspection, but an about-face. It turns back from its modern result toward its origin, attempting to start from the beginning. At that point of departure to begin again there is no imperialism, no nationalism, just a faded banner: total Westernization. At this point, Westerners, including

64 65 66

Tzvetan Todorov, Literature and Its Theorists, 6. Ibid., 7. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Routledge, 1987), 10; cited in Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary (Hoboken, nj: Wiley-Blackwell, 1997), 130.

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­Wolfgang Kubin,67 can relax, because there nothing that signifies opposing Western wolves; on the contrary, it is always using them as models! If the role of models is not to oppose imperialism, what is it? Although little mentioned in the story, the role is clear: to oppose autocracy. To the people of China and the people in the novel, this seems quite ­natural. Arising from the experience of the present environment and five thousand years of history, their political awakening comes directly from autocratic rule and not colonial oppression. Historically, the survival of the Chinese ­nation and its culture has been in the process of expanding the assimilation of m ­ igrants, and the boundaries of identity between locals and outsiders have been quite unclear. The awakening of a consciousness of ‘nation’ and a spirit of ­nationalism began only in the modern era when foreign enemies ­invaded. “Identity only becomes an issue when it is in crisis.”68 It can be said that ­Chinese national self-understanding clarified gradually during the course of the founding and completion of the modern nation state. Whenever we speak of the people of the nation as minzu (民 族 ) it also refers to the people of the nation as guomin (国 民 ); when we speak of the issue of national character ( guominxing 国 民 性 ) it mostly arises in comparisons with Westerners. Hence, the ­reform of national character addressed in the novel is not entirely the same thing as the “animalist” education that Chen Duxiu wrote of, or Lu Xun’s criticism of “domesticated animality.” Perhaps out of concern for the censorship of books and magazines, perhaps also because of the restrictions on fictional form, there is little discussion in the story about autocracy and authoritarianism. Only in the concluding “­Lecture and Dialogue” is there explicit reference: “The character of Western peoples is too tough for autocratic government to suppress the people. It is very ­difficult for a centralized authoritarian system like China’s to gain a foothold in the West, and even when it has won a foothold, it has not lasted for long. So these people have ultimately only accepted a democratic system” (402). The story has prepared at great length for this conclusion; a good story leads only to such a conclusion: 67 The Chongqing chen bao reported on December 11, 2006 that the German Sinologist ­Wolfgang Kubin, in an interview with Deutsche Welle, said that contemporary Chinese literature is “trash,” and that the novel Wolf Totem “is fascism according to us Germans. That book makes China lose face.” 68 Kobena Mercer, “Welcome to the Jungle: Identity and Diversity in Postmodern Politics,” in Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 43; cited in Jorge Larrain, Ideology and Cultural Identity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 143.

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In human societies, if the force of autocratic repression is too great for too long a time, the population will also gradually lose the animal nature in human character, and they will slowly turn into a submissive people exactly like the nature of domestic animals. … Once they encounter ­invasion from a powerful external force, such a people loses the capacity to resist and they either surrender themselves to being submissive to another people, or they are annihilated (110). At this point the issue of national character (国 民 性 ) is hooked to nationalism (民 族 主 义 ). Thus we see that the thinking at the core of national c­ haracter is intertwined, enmeshed simultaneously in three inseparable and equal things: One is nationalism, pointing out the people’s weakness, vulnerability, and humiliation, thus the need to learn ‘fighting spirit’ from the invaders, the wolf-like Westerners. Two is democracy, indicating that the weakness of the mass of people, docile and obedient as sheep, is the incubator of autocracy, hence the need to “transfuse wolf’s blood” in order to toughen national character ( 国 民 性 格 ) to struggle for democracy. Three is self-criticism, aimed at the weakness of the intellectuals of China for being too timid to speak or to show anger, for lacking independent will and free spirit, on account of which is held up the ‘wolf totem’: The spirit of grassland wolves, their freedom and independence, boldness and tenacity, is the basis for their unrivalled power and ability. ­Humans are this way, as well. If a people (民 族 ) do not have a high level of ability, if their character is not strong, then all thoughts of independence and freedom, of democracy, wealth, and power are empty. Chen Zhen could not help sighing to himself: wolves of consummate skill are daring, and the more daring the greater their skills. There is truly no end to what wolves can teach humans and the inspiration they can offer (241). At this point the relationship of humans/wolves, national character (国 民 性 ) and national or ethnic character (民 族 性 格 ), etc. appears altogether coherent, agreeable and reasonable. However, I cannot leave it there, for so many questions loaded with paradoxes emerge unexpectedly. First, when the author unhesitatingly took the side of the grassland wolves he overlooked an important fact in his own flowing prose: precisely that on his beloved Olonbulag wolves are the weak, not the strong. Under the dual

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­ ressures of cruel nature and human civilization, if one neither submits p nor ­intends to perish, then simply a tenacious will to live and superior survival skills are not enough; strict discipline and group spirit are virtually the only possible choices. The collectivism of grassland wolves that commands ­humans’ respect is fundamental, based on a survival mode in harsh living conditions and lack of choice. It is also the necessary choice of weak groups (such as Japan in the past) in predicaments where there is no other alternative. It is no wonder that Fukuzawa Yukichi viewed ‘national polity’ as ‘collective’: “It refers to a structure in which things are collected together, made one, and distinguished from other entities. The ‘national polity’ refers to the grouping together of a race of people of similar feelings, the creation of a distinction between fellow countrymen and foreigners, the fostering of more cordial and stronger bonds with one’s countrymen than with foreigners.”69 This is no different than the historical choices that all weak groups in modern times leaning toward socialism or communitarianism (from the Revolution of the Third Estate in ­eighteenth-century France, the nineteenth-century ­workers movement in England and the abolitionist movement in America, and the ­twentieth-century wars of national l­iberation, to the feminist movement, the human rights movement, and so on). Eric J. Hobsbawn was sensitive to this phenomenon, pointing out that after 1945 all national struggles for independence and anti-colonial movements “became one with the anti-­imperialist movements of socialism and communism.”70 This tendency ran counter to liberalism and almost without exception led to autocracy. This has left me perplexed over how the collectivism of grassland wolves can serve as the seeds to cultivate freedom or democracy? Freedom and democracy are two distinctly different concepts. Given that free grassland wolves do not convey ideas of democracy, how does that demonstrate that the ‘bold’ spirit of the wolf will necessarily lead to ‘democracy, wealth, and power’?

69

70

Fukuzawa Yukichi, An Outline of a Theory of Civilization [Bunmeiron no Gairyaku (1875)], trans. David A. Dillworth and G. Cameron Hurst (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 30. Li Yang, “Jiuwang yadao qimeng: dui 80 niandai yizhong lishi yuanxushi de jiegou fenxi” 救 亡 压 倒 启 蒙 :对 80年 代 一 种 历 史 元 叙 事 的 解 沟 分 析 [Salvation suppresses enlightenment: a deconstructive analysis of historical metanarrative for the 1980s],” in ­Ziyouzhuyi yu Zhongguo xiandaixing de sikao: Zhongguo jinxiandai sixiang de yanbian yantaohui lunwenji, erji 自 由 主 義 與 中 國 現 代 性 的 思 考 「 中 國 近 現 代 思 想 的 演 變 」 研 討 會 論 文 集 ( 二 集 ) [Reflections on liberalism and C ­ hinese modernity: transformations of modern thought in China, Volume 2], ed. Liu Ji 劉 擎 , Guan Xiaochun 關 小 春 (Hong Kong: Xiangggang Zhongwen daxue chubanshe, 2002), 140.

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Next, the novel constantly reiterates a tale of history in which ‘wolves are strong; sheep are weak’ in an effort to return to origins in a primitive state of survival, eating and struggling to survive. Yet, throughout its criticism of ­national character and the qualities of the educated elite, it deliberately avoids this most important, indeed fatal, issue of eating. How have the people of China eaten for the past half-century? What issues are involved in the form and nature of how the Chinese people have eaten? The novel devotes considerable prose to the topics of grazing sheep and feeding dogs in order to suggest that Chinese are unwilling to struggle, but it overlooks the historical fact Chinese confronted with foreign invasions for over a century fought to resist them and ultimately triumphed over them. The ­author attributes the complete lack of people’s displaying ideals of integrity  and benevolence since Liberation in 1949 to a sheep-like national character (国 民 性 格 ). Again, just when it should return to the issue of ‘eating’ the novel elides this fundamental question: when a person’s choice of life or death involves the welfare of an entire family and its descendants, character and ­integrity are luxuries; no one faced with authority openly ignores others to go their own way; no one can choose to throw away the future prospects of their descendants to do just what they want. For over half a century now the successes and failures of socialist China have been closely bound to the issues of adequate food and clothing. It is no wonder that the government of China has stated over and over that issues of human rights and democracy cannot be separated from having enough to eat. From the perspective of Westerners there is no connection. Unfortunately that indeed hits the crucial point, the Eastern stance confirming the view shared among Western scholars: “When resources become so depleted that there is not enough wealth for all, the weak usually surrender their liberty to the strong. Often the masses follow a demagogue who promises to take wealth from the rich and give it to the poor. Sometimes they submit to a dictator who promises to lead them to victory over neighboring lands. Sometimes they fight civil wars.”71 Any nation on earth, whether Western or Eastern, must face this fact: True democracy cannot survive in a country where a large part of the people are hungry. The inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness cannot be enjoyed by a people unless there is enough food, clothing, and shelter for all. In other words, we must have resources

71

Tom Dale and Vernon Carter, Topsoil and Civilization (Norman, ok: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955), 25.

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s­ ufficient to maintain a reasonably high standard of living in order to have true democracy.72 The precondition for democracy is enough to eat, not war. Even in ancient times, “victory on the battlefield alone did not confer legitimacy of rule ­until it was publicly acclaimed at a khuriltai [council] of representatives from every part of the territory.”73 Democracy is not the necessary outcome of an armed contest; shared planning for sustained existence is the basis of democracy. Hence for over half a century the Chinese people, on the basis of self-reliance (not plundering others), have stressed ‘enough food for everyone’ and ‘going on the road to shared wealth.’ These were not only two extremely close slogans raised during the two different stages of ‘establishing the nation’ and ‘strengthening the nation,’ but also the shared ideals of all the nation’s elite: “to have enough to eat, to eat well, has been the course of daily life for people who have struggled for basic necessities and become the basic content of ­human history.”74 Its establishment was not because it seemed like socialism, but ­because it addressed the most basic needs for survival of the entire nation. Its successes and failures are now clear: in its initial steps it did indeed resolve the question of survival that for so long plagued Chinese, ‘independence in the forest of the peoples of the world,’ and fundamentally provided enough to eat for everyone. Yet, at the same time, it left the whole society permanently at the level of subsistence, and used the power of the nation state to turn every citizen with the potential for independent will into ‘a person with enough to eat’—from which arose the issue of national character (国 民 性 ). It is quite apparent that this involved something other than Lu Xun’s “domesticated animality,” and a different origin. Seen this way, Lu Xun’s disdain was not so insightful, even for his own time, because he did not trace the fundamental problem of people’s livelihood and their character to having ‘enough to eat.’ In the words of Bronislaw Malinowski, “Although the human does not rely on his stomach to develop his culture, culture surely must rely on real ground—on its material apparatus.”75 Finally, there is the generation and reform of national/ethnic character (民 族 性 ). 72 Ibid. 73 Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, 64. “If a group chose not to send anyone, then they rejected the rule of the khan who called it. The khan could not claim to rule them, and, more important, they could not claim his protection” (65). 74 Li Zehou, Lishi bentilun [Historical ontology] (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2002), 26. 75 Malinnuofusiji [Bronislaw Malinowski], Wenhua lun [What is culture], trans. Fei Xiaotong, et al. (Beijing: Zhongguo minjian wenyi chubanshe, 1987), 43.

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If the author is convinced that national character is the product of social/ natural environment, then he should believe that the theory of ‘oriental despotism’ is reasonable—it was originally deeply rooted in this land, the basis of the traditional political culture of the Chinese, so why promote the  group spirit of grassland wolves? Even if the toughness of grassland wolves could ­entirely reform Chinese character, who could ensure that what those superior citizens (such as the Western wolves) bring would be ‘democracy, f­ reedom, wealth, and power, and not war? Eastern or submissive nations, such as India, are not necessarily undemocratic; Western, or tough nations,  such as Russia, are also not necessarily anti-autocratic. Japan offers us an example in the East of ­nursing a democratic system within a national group spirit. India offers a different kind of example achieving a sublime state of ultranationalism within a national spirit of submissiveness. Rabindanath Tagore long ago saw that the enemies of democracy were not only dictators, but even more so nationalism, hence he declared “the Nation is the greatest evil for the Nation.”76 At the same time, he pointed out, “True modernism is freedom of mind, not slavery of taste. It is independence of thought and action, not tutelage under European schoolmasters.”77 The lesson of history and present circumstances both tell us: If nationalism (under whatever banner) dominates the world there can be no refuge for democratic government and individual freedom. Hence, my question is this: almost all nations that developed after being confronted with conquest or occupation by Western powers have undertaken self-evaluation and even raised the issue of reform of the national character, so why has it been so rare for Western nations to pose such a issue? Even though there is ‘postmodern’ reflection, the reflection has only been about the ‘modernity’ of which it is the result, not some ‘wolfish’ national character. Is this because Europe “believes only in modification of systems, and not in change of heart,”78 and therefore is basically unconcerned with questions of national character? Or is it because the national character of European ­nations soared beyond their borders on the giant wings of imperialism and on a globalizing scale revealed the flaws of the entire human race? If a national character with the toughness of wolves was the precondition for Western civilization, then what will be the consequences of the globalization of Western civilization?

76 77 78

Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism, 42. Ibid., 94. Ibid., 104.

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Jean Jacques Rousseau viewed nationalism as a “religion of the citizen,” “­codified in a single country,” which “gives it its gods, its own tutelary patrons.”79 He foresaw the latent threat that “the result is to place such a people in a ­natural state of war with all others, so that its security is deeply endangered.”80 ­History has demonstrated that his concern was not excessive. The issue has arisen repeatedly in literature, becoming a frequent topic in modern times. In the fields of literature and the arts, nationalism has been a doubleedged sword. On the one hand, it allows the work to produce enormous spiritual e­ nergy. As Walter Benjamin wrote, “pure humanity is produced from the ­fiery, primordial gas of a nation,”81 reflecting “the metaphysical identity of the ­national and the human.”82 However, on the other hand, once national will becomes a mission that enters literature, it is an obstacle to ‘beauty.’ Literary works in the true sense can be produced only when language is extricated from the restraints upon its greatest mission. Such literary works do not descend to earth from God, but arise from the inexhaustibility of the soul; they are a part of our deepest selves. In this sense, the achievements and failures of Wolf Totem are part of discussing the issue of national character. 5.3

On “The Lecture”: China and the World … models of nation, nation-ness, and nationalism distilled from the turbulent, chaotic experiences of more than a century of American and ­European history … helped to give shape to a thousand inchoate dreams. benedict anderson83

Supposing you have never read Wolf Totem, could you imagine that at the end of this story of over 400,000 Chinese characters a ‘thesis’ of some 50,000 ­characters is appended? If you have read it, I am curious whether you have had the patience or the interest after reading a good story to finish this tedious “lecture”?

79 80 81 82 83

Jean-Jacques Rouusseau, The Social Contract, trans. G.D.H. Cole (New York: Dutton, 1950), 117. Ibid., 118. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913–1926, 78. Ibid., 79. Imagined Communities, 140.

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Lei Da commented on this: “The main body of Wolf Totem is excellent. However, the treatment of society, ecology, and culture is not balanced. ­Especially the “Excavation by Reasoning—Lecture and Dialogue on Wolf Totem” tagged on at the end is relatively poor.”84 Lei Da’s criticism points out two narrative modes in the novel, “correct writing” and “incorrect writing.” From the perspective of traditional fiction, the “rational exploration” appended to the end of the book not only fails to enhance the story, but also “deconstructs the thought in the main part” (Lei Da’s words). To say that the story is for the author a means of ‘telling things’ unintentionally reveals its actual allegorical quality: the grandmother wolf who visits ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ with such malicious intent, has just knocked down the door of literature and uninhibitedly revealed its great wolf’s tail, driving off some readers and scaring away critics. I once asked the author about this: LI Xiaojiang: The lecture is something of an imposition on readers, it’s unfair to the readers, who want to read a story. JIANG Rong: Someone who knows about these things also said that if he’d read it first he definitely would have pressured me to cut out the end part. Almost everyone at that time proposed that I drop it, but I wouldn’t agree to that. LI Xiaojiang: Is that because in that part you were adding on what you really wanted to say? JIANG Rong: Yes. Why did this book take me such a long time? The complexity here went far beyond my imagination. I felt I had something I wanted to write, and there were too many things that I wanted to write. How can a work of fiction simply indulge in pouring out all the things on the author’s mind? Grafting a scholarly article onto a story and putting a lecture  into literary territory is a transgression, even for allegorical fiction. The lecture in the novel is unusual, given that the author sets up his own podium to say what he wants. And unlike the usual academic presentation, it is loquacious, ­arbitrary and subjective. Unavoidably, some people listening to it wouldn’t want to read the story, and some who read the story would not be willing to listen to it. Or there are examples of the opposite, some people inclined  to  ­malicious criticism head directly for this lecture and overlook the beauty of the story. So many readers online look for a way to vent their 84

Lei Da, “Lang tuteng de zaipingjia yu wenhua fenxi [Re-evaluation and cultural analysis of Wolf Totem],” Guangming ribao August 12, 2005: 6.

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f­eelings—and it is fortunate there is an Internet where Wolf Totem became a hot item, stirring public opinion to a clamor. What is it about the lecture that upset people to the point they would not let go of the topic? The author’s purpose in writing the novel as revealed in the lecture is quite simple: to strengthen and enrich China, to overcome poverty and weakness. After profound deliberation, he became convinced that, “If China is to surpass the West it must make painstaking efforts to change the existence of agrarian peoples and the character of farm folk.” He wanted to “erect in people’s minds the totem pole of the wolf totem,” and through the inspiration of the wolf totem truly awaken the ‘sleeping lion of the East.’ Within the story the idea is suggested through clues, but not expressed so directly. It is evident that the author’s intent in presenting the lecture was to overcome the constraints of the story completely in an effort to be explicit, using concepts (not images) to return to the solemn face of reason and argumentation (not plot) in order to gather together the fragments of thought scattered throughout the story. In his view “this struggle of thought over the fate of China” had already been going on for over half a century. “Addressing the problem in piecemeal fashion would not work, and adopting Lu Xun’s ‘daggers’ and ‘javelins’ [short, satirical essays] would not win success either …. It was necessary to make use of a spiritual weapon of nomads, older than the history of farming, more vital and with greater fighting power,” and that was the wolf nature that the author spared no effort to represent. What is the “nomadic spirit”? How should “wolf nature” be interpreted? The author’s answer was, “The nomadic spirit that I am speaking of is a great nomadic spirit …. It is a spirit of endeavor that has never stopped forging ahead from the distant past into the present and still strides forward to its marching song in the modern world.” He believed that this spirit was originally the primitive spirit of the Chinese, one that could be traced back directly to worship of the wolf totem: There are two early Confucian adages that can best sum up the spirit of the Chinese people: “The movement of Heaven is full of power. Thus the superior man makes himself strong and untiring.”85 “He remains incorruptible when wealthy and honored, unswerving when poor and ­obscure, and unsubdued before superior force.”86 Untiring, incorruptible, 85 86

The I Ching or Book of Changes, trans. Richard Wilhelm and Cary Baynes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) Third edition, 6. Mencius, adapted from the translation by D.C. Lau (London: Penguin, 2005), 66.

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unswerving, unsubdued: In those four words is the essence of the wolf spirit and the spirit of the wolf totem. At this point the author breathed a sigh of relief: “In the end I use this comb that is the wolf totem of the nomadic people to comb out and untangle the history that the Confucian spirit of China’s historians has purposely tangled.” But my questions rapidly followed. First, did the lecture achieve the purpose that he had intended? In other words, what was the actual result? After Wolf Totem was released, the story and the lecture at the end of the book provoked strong controversy, and a fight broke out among readers over wolves/dogs in diametrical opposition. The combination of noise and heat in the media discouraged the research of cooler, serious scholarship. Even though  the lecture put on an academic face, the response of the academic world ­remained silence. I believe that if this were literary criticism and had not been placed at the end of a narrative text the silence of the academic circles would have been permanent. The reason is simple. Since the book was basically fiction and not a scholarly text, without such a worthwhile story about grassland wolves, the lecture itself would never have been published. This has nothing to do with whether the viewpoint of the lecture is correct, but because it is completely unconcerned about current academic standards and therefore would not have passed peer academic review to be given an opportunity for formal publication. The primary question is that the basic concepts lack definition. The core concepts that the author regularly employs involve the major categories of ‘nation,’ ‘state,’ and so forth. Using them indiscriminately without definitions deprives the conclusion of a supporting foundation. For example, the phrase “Chinese nation” was first used by Liang Qichao,87 and was later given a complete formulation by Fei Xiaotong: The Chinese nation (中 华 民 族 ) as a conscious national entity ­appeared within the past century during the confrontation of China with the Western powers, but as a natural (zìzài 自 在 ) national entity in itself was 87

Liang Qichao, “Lun Zhongguo xueshu sixiang bianqian zhi dashi” 论 中 国 学 术 思 想 变 迁 之 大 势 [On trends in the transformation of Chinese scholarly thought], Xinmin congbao, 1902; cited in Li Xisuo 李 喜 所 , “Zhongguo xiandai minzu guannian chubu queli de lishi kaocha 中 国 现 代 民 族 观 念 初 步 确 立 的 历 史 考 察 [A historical perspective on the preliminary establishment of the idea of the modern nation in China],” Xueshu yuekan 学 术 月 刊 [Academic Monthly] 38.2 (February 2006): 139–43.

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formed over the course of several thousand years of history. … Three thousand years ago its core appeared gradually along the middle reaches of the Yellow River, merging as the amalgamation of several peoples, and it was called Huaxia (华 夏 ) …. After it took possession of the plain of East Asia along the lower reaches of the Yellow River and the Changjiang, it was called the Han people by other peoples. The Han continued constantly absorbing elements of other peoples and growing in strength, penetrating the settled districts of other peoples to construct a network that gave them cohesion and communications, and laying the base for an indivisible unity composed of the many peoples within this region. This formed a natural national entity, which through national consciousness is called the Chinese nation (中 华 民 族 ).88 The definition above has been widely accepted; it offers clear explanations of core concepts in the novel, such as Han people, Han nation, Mongolian ­minority and other ethnicities, as well as geographic concepts like Central Plain, grassland, and so forth. It is necessary to add that the “conscious” ­national entity formed in modern times is not the same as the past “natural” one: it has well-defined borders. In Wolf Totem, the basic concepts are indistinct, used at will, and the logic of the narrative contradictory: Taking the clash, that the author repeatedly emphasizes, of the core c­ ategories of nomadic and agrarian civilizations, if we follow the a­ uthor’s line of thinking, believing that “in the savage contest for survival on the grassland … it is the grassland wolf and the people of the grassland that I most respect and admire,” and agreeing conceptually that nomadic ­culture is stronger than agrarian civilization, then there is no way to ­explain the ‘actual’ flight and extinction of the grassland wolves and nomadic ­civilization at the conclusion of the story, or to explain why the wolf totem that the author so highly recommends has lost its last believers. If we accept the author’s criticism of the sheep-like nature of the Chinese nation, believe that the acculturation of an agricultural base over a thousand years “filled the lower strata of China (Huaxia) with honest, simple, ­subservient 88

Fei Xiaotong 费 孝 通 , et alia, Zhonghua minzu duoyuan yiti de geju 中 华 民 族 多 元 一 体 格 局 [The pattern of pluralistic integration of the Chinese nation] (Beijing: Zhongyang minzu xueyuan chubanshe, 1989), 1–2.

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people” and simplify the complex, multi-faceted twenty-four dynastic histories into the history of the defeat of ‘sheep,’ then there is no way to understand how the sheep-like Han people in the novel are triumphant. What this represents is the author’s extreme prejudice toward agricultural civilization. No matter how skewed the scales of justice may be, this agrarian civilization actually has carried out the incursion and occupation of the grassland. If we agree with the author’s national standpoint, understanding that the aim of the novel is to awaken the populace, and believe that “once agrarian civilization gained a firm foothold, the result … was a lack of a spirit of ­endeavor, and the wolf nature within the character of the people of China (Huaxia) ­faded while the sheep nature deepened, until the entire nation came to a standstill for over a thousand years,” then there is no way to classify the identity of the people of the grassland: what is their relationship to the people of China (Huaxia)? Why doesn’t the ‘national/ethnic character’ (民 族 性 ) that the ­author criticizes include them? If we sympathize with the people of the grassland, detest the invaders and all forms of colonialism and imperialism, then there is no way to understand why the author heroically declares, “Mongol cavalrymen armed with the spirit of the wolf totem created one of the wonders of the world, a Mongol empire with the largest territory in world history.” I believe that the author read such books as Constantin d’Ohsson’s Histoire des Mongols and René Grousset’s ­Empire of the Steppes, but in setting out the celebrated record of Mongol cavalry in war, he omitted their excesses and flaws: “Where the Mongols left their footprints skeletons littered the ground, cities lay in ruins, and their savagery ­exceeded that of the most barbaric peoples, killing men, women, and children in the lands that they invaded, burning cities and villages, destroying crops, and turning flourishing territories into wasteland.”89 Chen Zhen’s high evaluation of Genghis Khan is also not reassuring: just because his conquests “gave China greater territory than it historically had ever had,” can this justify acquitting the Mongols? If we identify with the author’s righteous indignation toward the atrocities of the “Japanese devils,” and endure pain that will not go away toward a history of wolf nature, then we cannot accept such an evolutionary theory as “moving from ‘ancient savage wolves’ to ‘ancient civilized wolves,” thence to ‘modern civilized wolves, now evolving toward truly great ‘civilized people’ facing the future.” The German scholar Wolfgang Kubin smelled a once-familiar odor 89 Duosang 多 桑 [Constantin Moradgea d’Ohsson], Duosang Menggu shi 多 桑 蒙 古 史 [d’Ohsson’s history of the Mongols], trans. Feng Chengjun 冯 承 钧 (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 2003), 3.

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in the novel—an atmosphere of misfortune that permeated the book, like a ­double-edged dagger that both reveals the cruelty of imperialism and deconstructs the moral force of nationalism in its anti-imperialist aspect. Readers could not follow the tangled threads of logic in the items above, and even if they wanted to they did not know which ones to follow. This goes without saying for the scholarly circles, where no response was probably the best response. If we read the novel as fiction, however, and not a scholarly treatise, the discursive space immediately opens up. In the words of Alfred North Whitehead, “In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of a defeat; but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress towards a victory. This is one great reason for the utmost toleration of variety of opinion.”90 When the novel is read this way, the questions that, in a scholarly sense, are irresolvable now seem to find a new basis for interpretation. First, the contradictions and paradoxes involved in the narrative logic can be explained in terms of post-narrative theory. Placed in what Alan Wilde termed “midfiction,” all contradictions and paradoxes may go beyond the referents on the textual surface and in the disorder of the postmodern indicate anything (or nothing) that it might lead to.91 Wolf Totem was born out of the yellow earth where ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ are densely interwoven, situated in a process of modernization filled with contradictions and paradoxes, bereft of norms and order, where ‘normal’ representation that conforms too closely to logic would leave people feeling a lack of authenticity. Situated in such an age as this and such a society, Wolf Totem combines various aspects of the ‘post-’: the entry of the postmodern into late-developing areas in a discursive space where postcolonial criticism allied with post-socialism showed us the myriad sights of the postmodern. Second, it is no mistake to place the national standpoint in the category of postcolonial analysis; on the contrary, it fits nicely with political correctness. Its discursive background is not simply the biased mood of one person, but more the historical fact of a century of national humiliation. Because ­China was backward it was attacked and colonized, and that occupation is not a myth from the distant past, but the most painful traumatic memory of the modern age. As a pain not lightly touched upon, it is always being stirred up anywhere at any time: whether working in the West or studying overseas, on ­international platforms and forums, or in communicating or negotiating with 90 91

Science and the Modern World (New York: Free Press, 1997), 187. See Alan Wilde, Middle Grounds: Studies in Contemporary American Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987).

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the outside world … once stirred, a member of the Chinese nation of whatever status, age, gender, or class immediately awakens national consciousness from its unconscious state, and by borrowing post-colonial criticism, can ­smoothly transcend the modern age and cross borders, at the same time displacing ­ideology and national identity to be on equal terms with the postmodern. To borrow Edward Said’s words, it is precisely because of previously losing “the right … to speak for and represent themselves,” and because of Western discourse “excluding them, usurping their signifying and representing function, overriding their ­historical reality.”92 Hence, as national allegory, regardless of how confused the narrative logic, politically it will be altogether correct. ­Indeed, the more e­ xtreme the ­representation, the more it may manifest distinctive artistic appeal. Third, placed in the context of the two observations above, the ­spiritual reference of the totem worship ubiquitous throughout the novel can be ­rationally explained. For example, “the wolf’s tough, fearless spirit of endeavor, its ­unsubmissive spirit of competition, its team spirit of resolute tenacity, as well  as its spirit of sacrifice in combat, impetuously disregarding its own safety” are all viewed by the author as weapons for the Chinese nation to continuously strengthen itself. At this point, relapsing into an intractable illness, the giant tail of utopia shoots out behind the ‘wolf’—a symbol that typifies ‘­national utopia.’ Unlike national allegory in the context of postcolonialism, it is not ­national identity that is emphasized here, nor a demand for simple equality, but a loftier, greater goal: wealth and power for the Chinese nation. Here it takes on the appearance of the ‘nation-state’ of China, with a will and capacity far beyond national consciousness (民 族 意 识 ). On the path of socialism ‘with Chinese characteristics,’ it not only conveys the messianic concept of ‘liberating all humankind,” but also assumes the legacy of the traditional ­Chinese psychological complex over ‘world harmonious unity (shìjìe dàtóng 世 界 大 同 ),’ and for these the point of origin and sense of mission far exceeds the simple scope of the national. It is worth noting that this utopian complex that contains within it a nationalist complex is not some suppositional idea, but a real banner: All members of the Chinese nation of whatever ­ethnicity, in whatever place, at whatever time, and under whatever circumstances are poised to awaken immediately and set out at any time without any command to gather together under the banner of ‘democracy, freedom, wealth, and  power.’93 ‘­Democracy, freedom, wealth, and power’ is modern language 92 93

Edward Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” Cultural Critique No. 1 (Autumn 1985): 91. In spring 2008 during the global relay of the Olympic torch for the Beijing Olympics, in retort to the proposed boycott of the Beijing Olympics in Western societies over the

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that appears multiple times in the novel. When linked to totem worship, that has less to do with believing in wolves than attempting to recover national confidence through the fighting spirit of wolves, an effort to try again to ‘reestablish belief’ following the failures to achieve utopias in practice and the breakdown of belief in public feeling. Why does it have to be wolves? We can see a clear thread of logic from the story and the author’s explication. The power and prestige of the Chinese nation once flourished under the banner of the wolf totem, while its former glory was ended under the butcher knives of the Western wolves. Such a cruel history of triumph and defeat tells people a pitiless truth: the more amoral, the more bloodthirsty, and the more plunder taken in the past, the more such people today are the victors, the strong, who have suddenly transformed themselves into ‘civilization,’ ‘civilized people,’ and even the goal that all humanity pursues and the model that everyone strives to emulate, conforming exactly to the poet Bei Dao’s lines: “Baseness is the password of the base,/Honor is the epitaph of the honorable.”94 Contemporary China was jolted out of a failed traditional morality and lost communist ideals into alertness that “Western wolves” offered a remarkable model close at hand and believable. This made people like Jiang Rong see clearly; modern China was too weak, beaten into a semi-colony by the Western powers and made to suffer humiliation. “If we hope to change the pattern of backwardness and passiveness in China, it is necessary to reform and to transform the national existence of the Chinese nation and national character (民 族 性 格 ), by taking the route of the modern Western wolves.” It was more that Jiang Rong was telling a belated truth than making a choice. Faced with the bitter lesson of history, can you still accuse the novel of bias and amorality? Better the bad than the hypocritical: if I had to make a choice between the two, I imagine I myself would make the choice of supporting the bad and eliminating the hypocritical as well.

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‘Tibetan Independence’ incident and cnn reporters’ remarks publicly demeaning China, a Chinese person launched the “I heart China” movement on the Internet, with ten million netizen responses in half a day, according to Microsoft network statistics (“News Early Bus,” Phoenix Satellite Television, April 18, 2008). On April 15, 2008, nearly five thousand overseas students and other Chinese demonstrated in Australia, and on April 19 tens of thousands of Chinese students and scholars in France, Germany, and England spontaneously assembled, voicing support for the Olympics and protesting erroneous news ­reporting on China by some mainstream media. Bei Dao 北 岛 , “Huida 回 答 [The Answer],” in Notes From the City of the Sun, trans. Bonnie S. McDougall (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University East Asia Papers, 1983), 38.

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Yet in this land, now as in the past, not many people will agree with the choice in favor of the ‘wolf.’ This does not arise from a moral judgment of good or bad, but because from the ‘post-’ standpoint it is really an outdated symbol, entangled with modern identity, unable to see the bright prospect of sustainable development. As an historical factor, it actually is not civilization but the product of a lack of civilization: not only limited by lack of resources, lack of material, and lack of land, but even more, because of a lack spiritually and ­intellectually, as well as a lack of historical experience and lessons, it fundamentally could not become the informed choice of an intelligent people in this age of increasing lack. Here on this yellow earth, even if you are willing to struggle to the death, the populace will lack people willing to die; even if you want to plunder, there is no longer any space in this world that can be plundered. A crueler reality is that even if you promoted wolf nature, the world long ago lacked the land that wolf nature produced. Even though you may want to protect wolves, the wolves are no more than ‘protected’ objects, and like h ­ umans themselves in this world of diversity can only search together—­humans with nature, humans with wolves, wolves with other creatures, humans with other humans—for modes of survival that are consensual. Undoubtedly the Chinese nation (中 华 民 族 ) should have its place in the world: [the nation state] China (中 国 ). China is just China, no more than a nation state, and there is no need to enlarge it into the world, nor can it necessarily by itself assume the mission of leading the world. If we follow the train of thought in Wolf Totem and believe that ubiquitous logic of the grassland, then we should also believe that there is no single victor in this world: sheep submit to wolves, wolves to guns, and guns obey people. In turn, people cannot but submit to Heaven, Heaven unleashes all living things, which include wild boars, cows, rabbits, marmots, mosquitoes, flies … This is the logic that that is so clearly visible on the grassland after it is stripped of its nature, but is lost in the “Lecture” elucidating the national standpoint. At this point there is no more need to make an issue of the “Lecture.” There is no problem reading discourse dressed up to look like scholarship as an ­extension of the dialogues and monologues in the story—and placing this in the story would be fine. Once it is transformed into a lecture indulging in such a lack of restraint it may become superfluous prose. It is evident that the dignity of literature and art is no less than objective scientific research. Since it belongs under ‘fiction,’ it seems necessary to consider tacit rules of writers in the field. LI Xiaojiang: In terms of literature itself, the story is enough, and the stuff at the end is unnecessary.

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JIANG Rong: But this was the only way I had to address the public directly. LI Xiaojiang: It is at the expense of the integrity of literature itself. JIANG Rong: Literature is something that includes everything. Traditional forms must be broken. Why can’t it include putting in these ideas? When the author writes a good story it stimulates your desire for knowledge. When you’ve finished the story you need to ponder it quietly, and it seems there are still many questions left unresolved, driving you to read the things at the end. Some readers have said that Jiang Rong is clever, using a persuasive, moving, beautiful and powerful story to get you to understand what is on his mind. Through the lecture we can be sure of ‘what is on his mind,’ and that, in a word, is: enlightenment. The author did not mince words about this, but ­affirmed, “this book is not aimed at a few academic courts of ‘scholarly standards,’ but at enlightenment of the public.”95 Yet we are reminded that the “radical ­Enlightenment declared war on all prejudgments whatsoever,”96 and that would include the prejudices within our own concepts. What we should be able to expect is not the pallid writing of abstemious ‘pure scholarship,’ but a scholarly attitude of inclusiveness and openness. Through reading or dialogue, that is, “through an encounter with the other,” we attempt to surpass “the narrow confines of our own knowledge.” Gadamer viewed writing and reading and even sincere criticism as “genuine conversation.” It is precisely in the course of conversation that a “new horizon is disclosed that opens onto what was unknown to us. … We come closer to the truth because we do not ­exist by ourselves.”97 Using literature as an instrument of enlightenment is not Jiang Rong’s invention; allegorical works have always had this function. The difficulty is with a form such as this ‘lecture,’ on account of which the awkward position of scholarly circles becomes evident. There is a sadly helpless sorrow within the human story that is less the sorrows of the scholars than the sorrows of culture. At the same time bewildering readers or scholars it is hard to avoid implicating literature. If we truly accept the idea of freedom, for ourselves and for others, for poetry and for prose, we should maintain the same attitude:

95 96 97

Jiang Rong, written exchange with the author, May 2008. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gadamer in Conversation, ed. Richard E. Palmer (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 43. Ibid., 49.

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If it is prose, let it dance in shackles—that is also a form of beauty. If it is poetry, then let it fly freely … 5.4

The Author: A Farewell to Revolution? The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one. j.d. salinger98

“The most obvious cause of a work of art is its creator, the author; and hence an explanation in terms of the personality and the life of the writer has been one of the oldest and best-established methods of literary study.”99 What do we know about the author? One type of information comes from the publisher: The author, Jiang Rong, was born in Beijing in 1946 and volunteered in 1967 to join a production brigade and settle in the Olonbulag District of Inner Mongolia. In 1978 he was admitted by examination to study political economy in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Like Chen Zhen, the ­protagonist in the novel, Jiang Rong lived many years on the grassland, raided a wolf den, and raised a wolf cub … he began working out a draft in his mind in 1971, started writing in 1998, and submitted a draft in 2003. Before the book was released he said, “I will not participate in commercial publicity or accept interviews with the media, only write in response to discussions about the writing itself.”100 Another type of information has come from the author himself. Quite a number of well-known cultural figures attended the meeting to announce the release of Wolf Totem in April, 2004, but the author refused to put in an appearance. Jiang Rong explained afterwards: After finishing Wolf Totem I constantly felt weighed down. After submitting a draft one ought to feel carefree, but I was still immersed in the tragedy of the destruction of the ancient grassland and the wolves of the Mongolian grassland …. I worry that people will ask me about those 98 99

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1991), 244. René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1977), 75. 100 An Boshun 安 波 舜 , “Langtuteng bianji cihua de jingyan he tihui 狼 图 腾 编 辑 策 划 的 经 验 和 体 会 [Experience and learning in editorial planning for Wolf Totem],” Chuban kexue 出 版 科 学 [Publication science] No. 1 2006.

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interesting stories about wolves—I dread falling into the arena of the ‘interesting.’ Deliberately avoiding being ‘interesting,’ is itself an interesting topic. Aside from this, he also avoided clamor, refusing public interviews. When the New Zealand Mirror (Xinxilan jingbao) reporter Jiang Ming requested a face-to-face interview, Jiang Rong responded: Don’t concern yourself with me, just read the book. I could not be more unknown as an author, but my book has the biggest brand name—the wolf. I believe in it, so there is no need to introduce the author, just read the book itself. It is powerful.101 The information that we get is quite concentrated on the writing of Wolf Totem and the rights and wrongs of ‘wolves.’ Altogether there are three aspects to it: the question of ‘authenticity’ concerning the relationship of the author to the character Chen Zhen; the creation of Wolf Totem in terms of why and how it was written; the relationship of the author and the wolf and his understanding of the wolf. Our discussion will start with these three questions. Authenticity is a major topic in the field of criticism, and whenever there is a story there will always be questions about its ‘truth/fictiveness.’ Theory of Literature sums this up: “Even when there is a close relationship between the work of art and the life of an author, this must never be construed as meaning that the work of art is a mere copy of life.”102 Thoreau did not see it this way: “In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained … Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land.”103 Jiang Rong is frank that this was his approach: The central character of the novel, Chen Zhen, truly incorporates a portion of my life experience. Most of the stories in the book are real, as well 101 Jiang Ming 姜 鸣 , “Toushi Lang tuteng de xinling huayu 透 视 《 狼 图 腾 》 的 心 灵 话 语 [Grasping the essence of the spiritual discourse in Wolf Totem],” Xinxilan jingbao 新 西 兰 镜 报 [New Zealand Mirror] July 3, 2004. 102 Wellek and Warren, 78. 103 Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods (Mineola, ny: Dover Publications, 1995), 1.

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as there being some that I collected …. The gradual development of Chen Zhen’s thoughts and understanding in Wolf Totem are my experience of psychological maturation at that time.104 Actually, once the ‘real’ enters art it is quite unlike the historically ‘true.’ Literary art has its own demand for authenticity: the story may not be true, but must be ‘real,’ must speak through concrete imagery (not concepts). A ­ llegory is no exception. The authenticity of detail is even more important as the foundation for the reader and the key to allowing the reader to accept it as true. Writers will often cloud the reader’s line of sight with details and real events to erect one fictive idea after another, allegory even more so: it brings details onstage to perform with a credible face, while secreting ineluctable creative meaning within fictive stories. What leads the reader’s mind on is not an understanding of the truth, but agonizingly serious contemplation. For e­ xample, in Wolf ­Totem a story that is not true is submerged in a great quantity of ­authentic detail, like a successful smuggling operation under cover of a fictive story, as if nightfall, using wolves as carriers to smuggle in weapons and ­ammunition that at some unexpected point open fire in a surprise attack. It is reminiscent of Turgenev’s situation and Viktor Shklovsky’s remarkable analysis: “There are two secrets hidden in A Sportsman’s Sketches. The first of these secrets is that the omniscient, omnipresent narrator links and explains the fate of each character, while at the same time never revealing himself … and relies on ­description in masterful detail that is truly unforgettable …. In this way, the quiet writer Turgenev drives a carriage of excellent writing describing the Russia of serfdom, and fords the great river of censorship.”105 Similar situations offer similar choices; it is the names and settings that are different: There it was forests; here it is grassland; there it was hunters; here it is Chen Zhen; there it was notes used to report; here it is borrowing allegory to speak … both alike endow nature with their feelings and entrust feelings to animals; both alike ‘do not reveal themselves,’ and safely cross the river, from one shore (of political restrictions) to the other shore—the temple of free art. The question is: how great is the capacity of art to assume a weighty political mission? Fiction does not have to offer an answer, but do as it pleases, banish ­political ideals and become intoxicated in the individual’s realm of the senses, like the

104 Jiang Rong, e-mail correspondence with Yao Ting for Bertelsmann. 105 Wei Shikeluofusiji (Viktor Shklovsky), Sanwen lilun [Theory of prose], trans. Liu Zongci (Nanchang: Baihuazhou wenyi chubanshe, 1994), 222–23.

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kind of writer that Benjamin alleged “secluded himself” in fiction: “To write a novel is to take that which is incommensurable in the representation of ­human existence to the extreme.”106 Whether commensurable or not, as long as it is representation, as writing and life it can go where it pleases. ­Allegory, however, is not so free; from its ancient origin on, it has assumed social ­responsibility and individual ideals, and has had to dance in shackles—but who can say that dancing in shackles lacks steps and rhythm? Who can say that art is the darling of freedom alone and not the product of oppression and constraint? Perhaps it is precisely that oppressed psyches are forced to find an outlet in art (like Kafka and nearly all modernist writers and artists), gather from different directions and different places under the banner of ‘allegory,’ and show us another kind of literary and artistic appeal. It requires no verification or any assent from authority, only to mount the stage to speak for itself. Wolf Totem, for example, did not follow some script within literary circles, or play its cards according to some rules, yet still it hit the jackpot, and showed us the revival of allegory, like a phoenix rising from the ashes, brilliant and vibrant. Otherwise, How is it that the author chose it among ten thousand possibilities? How is it that readers decided to read it, among countless texts in the information explosion, all the way through? Literary creation is not the same as scholarly writing; no matter what the circumstances of the writer, writing itself is spontaneous and free. Writing is a sort of state of survival that, in the words of Michel Foucault, abandons the ‘daily life’ of the living for an indissoluble bond with death: “Where an oeuvre had the duty of creating immortality, it now attains the right to kill, to become the murderer of its author.”107 To apply such a depiction to the author of Wolf Totem would be quite apt. Jiang Rong gave up scholarship to undertake fiction writing, in itself a topic worth pursuing: Why did he do that? Was he compelled to do that, or did he choose to freely? Having never entered the literary field, what ideals was he entrusting to literature? 106 Walter Benjamin, “The Crisis of the Novel,” in Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934, 299. 107 “What is an Author?” cited in Alan Sheridan, Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth (London: Routledge, 1991), 224.

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“The very being of writing (the meaning of the labor that it constitutes) is to keep the question Who is speaking? from ever being answered.”108 This is ­because “[u]ltimately, the narrative has no object: the narrative concerns only itself: the narration tells itself.”109 Jiang Rong is an example: I do theoretical research and never before wrote fiction. To master this novel extending over 500,000 characters was truly a massive challenge. I had to spend more time than a professional writer, and I had to write and revise again and again before it was acceptable. This book is the result of my irrepressible urge and compulsion to write, and during the process of writing I often forgot (and could not think about) for whom I was writing.110 The author admitted that writing Wolf Totem was an effort that cost him the better part of his life. Beginning with his fourth year as a student worker in Mongolia, the entire process of creation went through three stages.111 The first stage was gathering materials. “So many of the stories and details in the novel were from what I collected and arranged 30 years ago in the Olonbulag. The materials on the wolf cub, for example, were life that I experienced and ‘created’ myself. During the course of collecting materials and the creative process I kept introducing my observations and ideas.” The accumulation of materials was not a premeditated plan but the result of living itself, gradually undertaken in the course of ‘recollection.’ The second stage was what the author termed “the process of fermentation,” lasting close to twenty years. Over the course of the writer’s life the spirit of the wolf kept looking for an outlet as it fermented. During this time, life itself was important: Carrying the memory of grassland wolves and the seeds of the wolf totem, the author perhaps also had the experience of being the ‘wolf king.’ Like the fleeing wolf pack in Wolf Totem, only when the wolf king reached an a­ bject state and all other avenues were cut off did the final choice that snatched life from the jaws of death happen. That was the third stage, “entering into the creativity of serious writing”: As my understanding of the problems of China grew more profound, I i­ncreasingly felt the compulsion to write Wolf Totem …. I wrote while at 108 Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 140. 109 Ibid., 213. 110 Jiang Rong, written interview with Yingni 应 妮 , reporter for Zhongguo xinwen zhoukan 中 国 新 闻 周 刊 [China Newsweek], n. p., n. d. 111 Jiang Rong, interview through e-mail by Ms. Yao Ting 姚 婷 女 士 of Bertelsmann.

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the same time reading and researching, then repeatedly revising. I cannot recall clearly during those years how many times I went back and ­rewrote before deciding on a finished draft. Now the sword that I had been sharpening for over thirty years finally came out of its sheath.112 At this point we can return to the third question, the author’s relationship with the wolf and his understanding of it. Did he really want to promote the ­so-called ‘wolf nature’ in order to convey the issue of reforming national character (国 民 性 )? While public discussion of this was animated, a great deal of it critical, even malicious, the author did not deviate from his original intent, openly admitting the reason that he wrote Wolf Totem: It was because the spirit of the grassland wolves conquered me. In my youth the grassland wolves taught me, affected me, and inspired me … Had I not been baptized and molded in the spirit of the wolf totem I could have never finished this work on the ‘divinity’ of the wolf. This was a process of constant recollection. “The form that recalling past events may take can be letters, diaries, poetry or fiction, as well as familiar essays and scholarly accounts … every scholar who writes autobiography is writing the ‘scholarly history’ of his mind’s eye, and these are destined to be ‘incomplete.’”113 Stephen Owen believed that the compulsion to “repeat” leads to the birth of literary works, but it is not a necessary condition of an excellent work, because “one measure of a writer’s greatness may be the degree of opposed force between the struggle” to repeat the past and the need to create something new; unable to remain entangled in the past, s/he must deliberately escape repeating it in order to attain something new.114 In the second stage of creating Wolf Totem the author vacillated between the urges to “repeat” and to “escape repeating.” Past memories that come out of life and not hearsay are hard to escape. Ruskin saw the author’s absorbed concentration as the necessary condition for generating a superior work: “In the sum of his life he finds this to be the thing, or group of things, manifest to him;—this, the piece of true knowledge, or sight which his share of sunshine and earth has permitted 112 Jiang Rong, e-mail exchange with Ms. Yao Ting of Bertelsmann. 113 Chen Pingyuan 陈 平 原 , Zhongguo xiandai xueshu zhi jianli 中 国 现 代 学 术 之 建 立 [The founding of modern Chinese scholarship] (Beijing: Beijing Daxue chubanshe, 1998), 308, 325. 114 Stephen Owen, Remembrances: The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 100.

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him to seize. He would fain set it down for ever.”115 Fortunately, in the ‘post-’ era, when people no longer easily believe in ‘truth’ or ‘reason’ and do not know what to believe, when classic works and classic criticism by writers like Ruskin have been stored away on the top shelf and forgotten, Wolf Totem obstinately echoes the classics and tradition, in an effort that attempts to cut and polish “precious rarities” to return to ‘truth’: The more I studied wolves, the grassland and its people, the more I discovered that what I faced is a global topic. I felt that I could not hurriedly smelt and process the ‘precious metals’ that I had collected … that would truly ruin a precious rarity.116 The author admitted, “I am part wolf nature and part sheep nature, so I ­admire wolves.”117 Facing the past and his experience, he was reticent, while in the name of the wolf and the ‘wolf totem’ he was fearless, worried only that the  world would not be stirred up. The Beijing qingnian bao (Beijing youth news) once reported on the clamor and negative responses while sales were high. After only five days on the market Wolf Totem rose to top the lists of all major bookstores. The newspaper reporter summed it up: “The grand view of history and of values that the author has set out has provoked more and more people to say that they ‘can’t agree with it,’ and even some who think, ‘these ideas probably just satisfy a need in the public for a simple, popular view of history. You can call it impassioned junk.’” The reporter did have face-to-face contact with Jiang Rong,118 which he described this way: The Jiang Rong who stood before this reporter at 10 am on May 17, 2004 was one meter seventy-eight centimeters in height, a 58-year-old man who gave off a sense of cleanliness, even though he needed to smoke while we conversed. It was my impression that his hair was graying, his face pale, and his denim vest faded. He wore glasses, behind which a pair 115 John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies (New York: American Book Company, 1916), 40. 116 Jiang Rong, e-mail interview with Yao Ting of Bertelsmann. 117 Jiang Rong, written interview with Yingni, reporter for Zhongguo xinwen zhoukan, n. p., n. d. 118 “Why did I give you the only opportunity to do a face-to-face interview … because of my sense of familiarity after keeping my subscription to Beijing qingnian bao for eighteen years.” See “Jiang Rong: Yinshen zuozhe rengran shenmi; yong ban ming zhu Lang tuteng 姜 戎 : 隐 身 作 者 仍 然 神 秘 用 半 条 命 著 《 狼 图 腾 》 [Jiang Rong: Reclusive ­author remains mysterious; spent half his life writing Wolf Totem],” Beijing qingnian bao, n d.

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of narrow eyes slanted upward at the edges. After looking at them for two hours, I could not help but think of those green eyes on the cover of Wolf Totem—those were wolf’s eyes. The reporter sighed: “I have done interviews for some years, but this is the first time I encountered circumstances like these. ‘I am rather special.’ My impression was that Jiang Rong said something like this many times that day, his tone apologetic and proud, equal parts both, it seemed.” REPORTER: Why did it take so long to write this book? JIANG Rong: You could say that the wave of students sent down to the Olonbulag in 1967 were the first group of Han people to arrive in that area on a large scale. That era was a time that still preserved the grassland in its primitive appearance, so beautiful, so large, with every sort of scenery and landscape, and the most numerous and ferocious wolf packs. REPORTER: How old were you when you went there? JIANG Rong: Twenty-one, I had just graduated from high school. I spent eleven years there, my entire youth from twenty-one to thirty-three …. I came from an administrative cadre family, and my father had always let me read Cankao xiaoxi [Reference news]119 … At that time I pored over books daily, and had a considerable reading capacity. Russian culture was a comparatively deep influence on me, I loved the grassland, and read Sholokov’s The Quiet Don no less than three or four times …. We could read not only the books ‘deserving criticism’ and banned books, but also could listen to all the foreign radio broadcasts like Voice of America and Deutsche Welle. On the grassland we could receive them more clearly than the Chinese Central People’s Radio …. Our ideas then were pretty heterodox. The face-to-face conversation is so different from the Internet question-andanswer—mellower in everything from tone to identity—that it makes us ­wonder over the oddity that the author chose written questions and answers. 119 After the founding of New China Jiang Rong’s father was appointed Director of the Department of Traditional Chinese Medicine in the Ministry of Health (1956). See the documentary program “Panghuang—huimou bainian Zhongyi 彷 徨 — — 回 眸 百 年 中 医 [Vacillation—looking back on a century of Traditional Chinese medicine],” Phoenix Satellite Television, May 29–June 3, 2006. Cankao xiaoxi [Reference news] is a daily newspaper with restricted access, circulated internally within the Communist Party of China. [Translator’s note].

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Saussure once wrote about the superiority of “writing,” pointing out that script is “better suited than sound to account for the unity of language throughout time … Most people pay more attention to visual impressions simply because these are sharper and more lasting than aural impressions.”120 For the one writing this superiority is established; for the intended recipient, however, it may be a disadvantage. During a live conversation, the roles of ‘person’ and ‘voice’ are fully engaged, and the position of leader may be overturned: ­facing an i­nterviewer, the interviewee’s status is usually lowered, given that it is ­difficult to choose one’s own questions for oneself, and out of politeness the ­interviewee cannot easily say ‘no,’ and more less has to give an explanation or some vague answer. In written questions and answers he can completely avoid questions that he does not want to answer. Most important, in face-toface questions and answers it is an ‘I’ who speaks, and the interviewee cannot conceal his individual world behind collective discourse. Thus, in face-to-face private conversations we gain important information about the individual: My father and mother were dedicated young people who joined the New Fourth Army early in the War of Resistance Against Japan [1937–1945]. They risked themselves on the battlefield, shed blood, and suffered ­severe wounds. They had strong character and determination. I grew up listening to war stories, and to some extent inherited my parents’ character. Besides that, my mother went into teaching after the founding of the nation. She loved literature and books, and when I was small she took me to see foreign movies, bought me Russian children’s stories, folktales, and fiction …. The elements of my innate character were what my parents gave me, and the grassland and grassland wolves strengthened the innate sense of freedom, curiosity, and adventure. First is his family background. When Jiang Rong’s mother and father committed themselves to the revolution early in the War of Resistance Against Japan, they both had come from good families, had received traditional educations, were cultivated and idealistic. Yet they joined the New Fourth Army under the Communist Party instead of the army under the command of the N ­ ationalist government of that time. Such a choice implied two related p ­ ­olitical ­standpoints: one was nationalism and patriotism; the other was the ­communist ideal of revolution and ‘liberating all humankind’—we cannot discern which was their most fundamental priority, just as in modern ­Chinese history it is 120 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in general Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), 25.

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difficult to distinguish whether nationalism or socialism has been more important. These two elements (nationalism and revolution) as the given makeup of the family functioned directly as the foundational background to Jiang Rong’s life and the writing of Wolf Totem. Jiang Rong’s parents, h ­ aving risked their lives for national liberation and shed their blood for socialist revolution, after 1949 ­became high-ranking leadership cadres, masters of New China. For Jiang Rong to be born into such a revolutionary family, in an era in which family background was particularly sensitive, meant that he would by all rights become a legitimate heir to this new nation. It was in just such a household that he received two related revolutionary beliefs and ­social ­missions: to be the successor to his parents and ‘successor to the cause of communism.’ At the same time as establishing socialist New China, it was necessary to harbor the revolutionary ideal of ‘liberating all humankind.’ Feelings of patriotism and communist ideals merged like water and mother’s milk, and blended together under the banner of ‘continuous revolution,’ giving the youthful post-revolutionary generation aspirations and determination to ‘­carry out revolution to the end.’ Such ideals that seem hard to understand today were normal social ideas at that time, embodied almost without exception in the families of all revolutionary cadres, and formed a deep political complex in the minds of almost all ‘people of the era of Mao Zedong’: it was conceptual, and also idealistic; it was thought, and also action; it was political, and also living—looking back on it this way, we can understand why Chen Zhen, when sent down to adverse ­circumstances on the grassland, was unwilling to succumb, why he would still read so assiduously and keep so many books in an era when seeking an education was not possible, why as an anonymous pawn in the border grassland far from the center of power he still concerned himself with the state of the nation and the world … in terms of the writing of the historical backdrop, the author also wrote realistically. Just as writing realistically about wolves is strange to modern people and thus becomes an alternative a­ venue to ‘making strange,’ writing realistically about the era of Mao Zedong can produce the same e­ ffect on people t­ oday. It is the result that is different: the ­former produces an aesthetic effect of something curious; the latter of doubt and remoteness. This happens not only to members of the post-Cultural Revolution generation, but also to people of the same generation as the author’s—why? Because the ­forgetfulness that the system fosters may effectively create collective loss of memory. An example of this is in the Japanese film Manhunt, when the character Yokomichi Keiji is forced to take drugs.121 We, on the other hand, breathing 121 Kimi yo Fundo no Kawa o Watare (1976), directed by Sato Junya, was released in China in 1978 under the title Zhuibu [Manhunt] as the first new foreign film authorized for general

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air, have seemed entirely willing. History is as unfeeling as life. After any sane and honest person has suffered loss of speech for an extended period of time they may lose their memory. ‘Repeating the past’ is thus good medicine for preserving memory, and in the course of remembering becoming continual reflection, holding on to a final battle front of ideals through the realm of ideas or art. The second is the influence of his mother and Russian literature. The ­former—the mother’s influence—is concentrated in the deep maternal love filling the pages of Wolf Totem. The latter has a double significance, one being political, coming from the Russian October Revolution that played a role as model and edification for several generations of Chinese youth. The other is artistic, from nineteenth-century Russian literature and twentieth-century ­Soviet literature, which together condensed into feelings of revolutionary ­romanticism, and combined with communist ideals to become the realm of ideals that almost all revolutionary young people in that era fervently pursued. So we can hardly be surprised over why events happening to Chinese within China have such a close connection with Russia, “Swan Lake,” Lenin and other people and events that came out of another country and another nation. Given that at that time the world was still in a state of Cold War, and the socialist camp was alive and well, these influences could be seen as the historical record of an era, which will have its special value for research in the field of spiritual history. When studying a writer it is usually comparatively easy to collect m ­ aterials on his life, “but harder to interpret them.”122 Does a writer’s social background determine his social awareness and political standpoint? The answer may be to the contrary, as in the cases of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and the novelist Leo Tolstoy and many others who were all examples that typify ­rebels against their own social class. “Outside of Russia most Communist writers are not proletarian in origin.”123 In that case, would Jiang Rong, born into a ­revolutionary family and receiving revolutionary ideas, rebel against his own family ­background and even the revolution in a deeply troubled world when the revolutionary cause was still unfinished? The next questions are practical. As a descendent of the revolution, following the victory of socialist revolution, how could he ‘continue the revolution’? If the idea of revolution had audiences following the Cultural Revolution. The film features “a corporate brainwashing plot,” in which Yokomichi Keiji is a victim. Online source: http://letterboxd.com/colone lmortimer/film/kimi-yo-fundo-no-kawa-o-watare/, (accessed September 2, 2015). 122 Wellek and Warren, Theory of Literature, 96. 123 Ibid.

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already been overthrown and the revolutionary republic had already changed direction, even if he did not alter his devotion, how could he carry out the legacy of the previous generation to wage ‘permanent revolution’?124 For more than half a century China changed course several times, and each person from the Maoist era saw their beliefs and even their lives overturned. Specifically, did the author ever distance himself from or rebel against that revolutionary family and that era? The novel offers a clue. It tells us that change did exist, not as rebellion, but as transformation: from communism to nationalism, and from ‘liberating all humankind’ to reform of national character (国 民 性 ). As for my basic intention in writing this book, my espousing freedom and independence, the indomitable spirit of the nomads and wolves, was in order to attack the sheep character of weakness that has existed for so long among our compatriots and to elevate the national character of the Han people.125 Compared to the ideals of communism, the political ideas are more concrete, more practical. It looks more like the product of post-colonialism against the backdrop of globalization than the result of the disintegration of the socialist camp. Confronted by the entire globe and not the solitary Soviet Union, situated in the world and not one socialist camp, the Chinese people saw their own ‘weakness’ and the ‘emptiness’ of their former ideals, and how ‘backward’ they looked in the face of the West where modern civilization was developed. Faced with reality, if one hoped to go on to achieve something without throwing away one’s ideals, naturally one would bring those excessively grand ideals down to the basis for practicing nationalism, and convert the great aspirations for ‘liberating all humankind’ into ‘wealth and power for the Chinese nation.’ For Jiang Rong writing was a means of fighting on: “only writing, by assuming the largest possible complexity in its own task, can oppose without appeal to force the imperialism of each language.”126 We see 124 “Permanent revolution” was a major theory espoused by Leon Trotsky that had great influence on young students in China in the early stage of the Cultural Revolution. See Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution [Buduan geming] (1930–1931), translated into Chinese by Zi Jinru for restricted ‘internal’ circulation (Beijing: San Lian shudian, 1966). 125 Jiang Rong quoted in Jiang Ming, “Toushi Lang tuteng de xinling huayu [Grasping the ­essence of the spiritual discourse in Wolf Totem], Xinxilan jingbao [New Zealand Mirror] July 3, 2004. 126 Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, 206.

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this opposition in Wolf Totem: no matter how the era has changed, ideas are revised, or hearts are weighed down … there are still those who persist, like the invulnerable Siegfried in the Song of the Nibelungs, wanting to be the last piece on the chessboard of revolutionary idealism, holding firm to what may be the last space for that piece: What is it about the legend of Siegfried that affects us so powerfully? Not the plot of the story itself … it is the deep significance which is ­expressed  through his person … we loathe with all our soul continual ­reflection and the philistine fear of vigorous action; we want to get out into the free world; we want to overrun the barriers of prudence and fight for the crown of life, action.127 Obviously, writing Wolf Totem was not a pastime for Jiang Rong, but “an allencompassing, all-excluding occupation, an urgent priority, a freely chosen servitude….”128 Jiang Rong is not a professional writer, not someone who lives solely for writing or sees writing as his life. But in writing Wolf Totem he has devoted to it all that he has to devote: half of his life. Mario Vargas Llosa believed that the origin of the writer’s sense of vocation is in rebellion. He was convinced that “those who immerse themselves in the lucubration of lives different from their own demonstrate indirectly their rejection and criticism of life as it is, of the real world, and manifest their desire to substitute for it the creations of their imagination and dreams.”129 Such is Jiang Rong, someone who once committed himself completely to politics, a scholar of ­political economy, and then turned fiction into a weapon to revive thought and ­single-handedly broke out of a closed ideology. Throughout this long time, he has had no colleagues or assistants, no social activities, no visits or lectures abroad, but appeared totally submerged, sunk in the world of wolves, because he understood: “Opportunities present themselves only to the patient, man and beast, and only they take advantage of those opportunities …. Without p ­ atience, you are not a wolf, not a hunter, not Genghis Khan….”

127 Frederick Engels, “Siegfried’s Native Town” (1840). Online resource: Marx Engels Archive https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1840/12/siegfried.htm (accessed September 4, 2015). 128 Mario Vargas Llosa, Letters to a Young Novelist, 11. 129 Ibid., 7.

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So Chen Zhen tried to cultivate a bit of patience. He trained his telescope on a wolf he’d observed several times already. It lay there as is if dead (17; 24). He has written about wolves in great detail and considerable length, on their perseverance, collective spirit, and discipline, but the deepest impression he has given me is of their ‘patience.’ Turning such patience into stoic waiting may be a force for certain victory and reveal hope to a nearly hopeless life. Even though today is ‘warmed’ under ‘sunlight,’ the author has still remained hidden backstage, rejecting the interesting, not joining in the chorus, but stubbornly holding on to a solitary lifestyle—is that, perhaps, allegorical? When Goethe was discussing his novella Elective Affinities he wrote, “I have put many things in it … [more] than anyone would be capable of a­ ssimilating at a single reading.”130 Jiang Rong seems to have had similar thoughts. He did not seem to take the novel’s being a best seller to heart, and even though he received a number of literary awards, he still defined Wolf Totem as ­theoretical: “My theory aims at overturning the historical views and value concepts of thousands of years of tradition, and affirming the contributions of nomad ­peoples for the salvation of Chinese civilization.”131 In turning to literary form to present theory, he had no choice but to use allegory. This was not Jiang Rong’s choice only, for many thinkers and intellectual literary writers in modern times have made the same choice. The ancient literary medium of allegory inadvertently became the home that many forbidden or indefinable ‘thoughts’ relied upon for survival, the home of spiritual ’vagabonds.’ Because superior works appeared one after another, allegory revived in the modern and postmodern times, with no borders, transcending lingual barriers, and through ­allegorical criticism, lifeless philosophy received a transfusion, and the doors of fragmented fields of study opened to restore communication with each ­other. In 2007 the newly established Asian literary award of the Man Booker Prize of Britain went solely to Wolf Totem, out of the 243 novels considered. When an invitation to the awards ceremony in Hong Kong went to Jiang Rong he still tactfully declined: Freedom and independence are my life. Solitude is the spotless workplace of philosophical contemplation and literary creation. Once I ­become a public figure I will not have the free space of privacy and will waste much 130 Johann Goethe, letter to Carl Zelter; cited in Walter Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” in Selected Writings, Volume 1, 313. 131 Jiang Rong, interviewed by Dai Ping, reporter for Ming Bao (Hong Kong), n. d.

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precious time, so that I will have no way to continue learning and thinking in peace and quiet.132 I still recall the example of Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot that Walter Benjamin wrote of: “his individuality is secondary to his life, just as a flower’s is to its perfume, or a star’s to its light. Immortal life is ­unforgettable … even though it has no monument or memorial, or perhaps even any ­testimony. It simply cannot be forgotten.”133 It is not only the main character in the work who is unforgettable, but also the author himself behind the scenes. In the age that is all too given over to clamor and the nation that is all too restless and fickle, I can understand the writer’s choice and take it with c­ omplete seriousness—I see it as a choice in ‘kind’: shunning clamor and fickleness is because of there being a goal that has not yet been reached, and that is t­ oward a place of ‘thought.’ As I see it, he is more a ‘free thinker’ (in Nietzsche’s words) than a literary writer. When they keep their distance from the life of common ­customs, they consciously choose that necessary ‘peace and quiet’ that ­Nietzsche emphasized: There is in his way of living and thinking a refined heroism which disdains to offer itself to the veneration of the great masses, as his coarser brother does, and tends to go silently through the world and out of the world. Whatever labyrinths he may stray through, among whatever rocks his stream may make its tortuous way—if he merges into the open air he will travel his road bright, light and almost soundlessly and let the sunshine play down into his very depths.134 Whether keeping to themselves or living anonymously it is assuredly not out of ‘cynicism’ nor does it signify living as a recluse or genuinely bidding ‘farewell to revolution.’135 In the China and the world of today, those who speak out may not be positive or authentic; those who maintain silence are not necessarily forsaking the world or negative—they may simply be adjusting their 132 Ibid. 133 Selected Writings, Volume 1, 80. 134 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. Helen Zimmen (Amherst, ny: ­Prometheus Books, 2009), 134. 135 The title of the theme of a dialogue between the philosophers Li Zehou 李 泽 厚 and Liu Zaifu 刘 再 复 . See Gaobie geming: huiwang ershi shiji Zhongguo 告 别 革 命 : 回 望 二 十 世 纪 中 国 [Farewell to revolution: a retrospective of twentieth-century China] (Hong Kong: Tiandi tushu gongsi, 2004).

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direction and in the silence quietly shifting the battleground. Jiang Rong, for example, after more than a decade in silence suddenly “emerged in broad daylight.’ ­Making use of wolves he staged a return, leading to Wolf Totem, together with the gun smoke, dust, and melee that accompanies all revolutionary acts. The cycle repeats itself, when after the passions of revolution burn out people are altogether confused and weary. This was not only among readers, but also from deep within the author. Time for the curtain call! The stage seems to stretch on without limit, from China to the world, and from the world toward China. The curtain call is difficult; it should end, but will not. The road is still there, and one can go on silently and without rest, but it is not so carefree and not so bright. The sunlight cannot penetrate the layers of cloud, for gun smoke still fills the air, not only from the ‘modern’ or ‘modernization,’ but even more from this age of the ‘post-’ that the postmodern era has dragged out.

chapter 6

A Brief Conclusion: The Discursive Space within and outside Wolf Totem In Terms of Criticism: Interpretation and Necessary “Over-interpretation” In 1962, China had just emerged from three years of disaster. At that time China had not opened up, nor had we opened our minds. Within a closed social environment, reading and literary criticism as an individual was difficult. It was different in the West. It was also in 1962 that the Italian scholar Umberto Eco published The Open Work, a thorough affirmation of the positive role of criticism, revising interpretation by bringing reading into “the age of the reader.”1 What followed was a boom, a deluge even, of interpretive studies, causing Eco, twenty-eight years later, to have to clarify: “the open-ended reading I was supporting was an activity elicited by (and aimed at interpreting) a work. In other words, I was ­studying the dialectics between the rights of texts and the rights of their interpreters. I have the impression that, in the course of the last decades, the rights of the interpreters have been overstressed.”2 He used Christianity as an example to pose the problem of “overinterpretation” in 1990, pointing out: “If there is something to be interpreted, the interpretation must speak of something to be interpreted, the interpretation must speak of something which must be found somewhere, and in some way respected.”3 The present study might well be taken as a Chinese textbook of hermeneutics. According to basic principles of interpretation, in the analysis of works, one is concerned as much as possible with the rights of the text. Whether deconstructing writing or interpreting allegory, one does not give rein to the horse and dare to leave the work. But when one arrives at the point where one can reach conclusions, I believe that it is somewhat appropriate to indulge in the rights of the interpreter, to offer a necessary explanation for the criticism that this text below may incur. As far as Wolf Totem is concerned, the following text 1 As Eco pointed out, in 1957 J.M. Castillet published the study titled La Hora Del Lector (The hour of the reader), the title translated in Chinese as Duzhe de shidai (The age of the reader). 2 Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 23. 3 Ibid., 43.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004276734_007

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will contain the excesses of overinterpretation. But without the text below, people will find it difficult to understand the ground that Wolf Totem has produced, nor will they understand the category of ‘post-utopian’ analysis that I have espoused in this study, together with a series of questions related to the ‘post-.’ I am quite sure that these are issues that “must be found somewhere, and in some way respected.” 6.1

‘Post-’ Discourse Encounters Danger while Traveling

Why should a novel from China written in Chinese be labeled ‘post-’?4 “How can a relatively poor, third world, developing nation that is just carrying out building modernization, with modernization still not completed, suddenly leap into the age of postmodernity?”5 This question about the scope of ‘post-’ discourse usage involves discursive rights. Being a Chinese scholar, I need to examine myself: to what degree can you ‘legitimately’ and ‘reasonably’ employ ‘post-’ discourse? Faced with a Chinese-language text, I originally hoped to be able to throw off the shackles of the ‘post-’ and write spontaneously. However, during the course of research, the ‘post-’ came in of its own, and this made me aware that whatever the language, it is there, and we are within it, that we are, as the theologian Don Cupitt wrote, “living in a ‘postmodern’ period—a term that we use not by way of signifying that we have successfully completed the transition to a new understanding of the human condition. We do see that our new leaders are stripping out all the old content from liberalism, socialism, and the other typically Modern faiths …We have lost an old world-view, but we do not yet see very clearly what will replace it.”6 I term the ambiguous phenomena above ‘post-’ as a convenience and an approach that is somewhat evasive, preserving the historical vein of things 4 See Zhang Xudong’s 张 旭 东 criticism: “Phenomena of any kind in China today can only be explained within others’ conceptual framework, as though if we abandoned others’ system of naming, we would have no way to understand what we are doing. The meaning of our lives comes from others’ definitions. These are very serious questions for the individual and the collective. If the price that Chinese have paid for ‘modernity’ is to know ‘modernity’ but not China, this is something sad and ridiculous.” “Quanqiuhua shidai de Zhongguo wenhua fansi “全 球 化 ” 时 代 的 中 国 文 化 反 思 [Reflections on Chinese culture in an age of globalization],” Zhonghua dushu bao September 17, 2002. 5 Wang Ning 王 宁 , Houxiandaizhuyi zhi hou 后 现 代 主 义 之 后 [After postmodernism] (Beijing: Zhongguo wenxue chubanshe, 1998), 193. 6 Don Cupitt, Mysticism After Modernity (Malden, ma: Blackwell, 1997), 1.

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while leaving open space for renaming. In such circumstances, texts or discourses can hardly escape fate, and whatever the belief, whether from the East or the West, fall into the mire of the ‘post-’ (postmodern, postcolonial, postdevelopment, post-socialist, even post-utopian) and face difficulty extricating themselves. This ‘post-’ is far from the single orientation of the Western ‘post-’ (meaning “following” in time), and is close to three meanings in Chinese: Besides ‘after,’ there are ‘behind,’ ‘back,’ and ‘backward,’ as well as ‘offspring’ (hòugǔo 后 果 ), these meanings all condensed in the symbol hòu (后 ). The face of ‘post-’ (hòu) is an end, facing a new beginning: After the full development of Western societies and Western civilization, after nation-states have shaken off their colonized fates, after the triumph of socialist revolutions and the disintegration of the socialist camp, after the East-West Cold War and the globalization of the ‘modern’ … all people after the end of the path of autonomous history are gathering in a ‘global village,’ facing a future with a shared fate. ‘After’ globalization is the beginning of the global village. In the global village, all autonomously evolving traditional civilizations are at an end. The result of the globalization of Western civilization is the end of the expansion of colonialism. Hence, the orientation of the ‘post-’ is retrospective. Edward Said believed that returning has been “part of that twentieth-century experience.”7 This is aimed not only at those who have experienced “dispossession, exile, migration,” but also those who turned away from their homeland, and at those Western scholars and intellectuals who have experience in occupation, conquest, and colonies. The intent of returning is to ‘return home.’ Wherever people have come from they need to stand at a new starting point— a global village—“so that we understand what exactly happened, why it happened and who we are.”8 The collective pronoun “we,” as Fredric Jameson asserted, was once the most commonly used form of address among third world scholars and writers, reflecting the anxiety of national identity.9 This “we” was originally unrelated to the postmodern. Coerced by globalization in the world of discourse, we cannot but face the question of the ‘postmodern’: To be unable openly to face it, is to have no means to transcend the discursive blockade and to enter into 7 Edward Said, Power, Politics, and Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), 429. 8 Ibid. 9 See “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (Fall 1986): 65–87.

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dialogue, but become aphasic in international society and to disappear. The cause of aphasia is not only because you do not have status similar to those who have discursive power, but even more because you lack that discourse and language that can be understood everywhere. Whether chickens speak duck talk or ducks speak chicken talk depends entirely upon whose hands hold intellectual copyright for creating discourse—an extension of Michel Foucault’s structure of power on a worldwide scale. What is to be done? For scholars whose language is non-Western, if we do not wish to be silent internationally, we must be the ducks who sound like chickens. Given that the chickens have already entered ‘post- situations,’ the ducks cannot but follow them in the discursive world into ‘post- contexts.’ What is different is that in our actual trajectory, we are still mostly ‘going forward’ rather than turning back. Our confrontation with Western civilization seems more like ‘accommodation’ rather than opposition, our communication with Western scholars more like ‘learning’ than rebellion. During the travel of post- discourse into such circumstances,10 the attitude of ‘accommodation’ and ‘learning’ eliminates its most revolutionary significance, its most valuable cutting edge. Cultural communication in such circumstances is a one-way street. There have been numerous troubles for scholars in this situation for many years now, and in the same way the path of scholarship has become long and tortuous. Regardless of who speaks what language, and wearied by pointless non-academic questions, in the midst of discursive predicaments, nationalist sentiment accompanying nativist consciousness abruptly emerges. The critical edge thus usually shifts from texts or allegory within texts directly toward that ubiquitous ‘discursive hegemony.’ Not until I did this research did I discover that a scholar of the East schooled in Western studies actually has a tremendous advantage over Western ­discourse in trans-cultural studies. In just over a decade or several decades I surpassed centuries of Western academic history to stand on the shoulders of giants, shoulder to shoulder with the post- era, all because of that ubiquitous ‘discourse’ that could be understood anywhere. Once you grasp it and become 10

This refers to the global dissemination of Western discourse. Edward Said in Traveling Theory (1983) pointed out that a theory that was originally rebellious (such as the ­postmodern) is always transformed during the dissemination of trans-cultural ‘travel,’ losing the original force. This viewpoint became an important theme in postcolonial criticism. L.R. Palmer discussed linguistic geography and the issue that dialects are without boundaries: “The barriers that check the expansion of a certain form of speech … are often ­entirely artificial and man-made.” An Introduction to Modern Linguistics (London: ­Macmillan, 1936), 138.

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familiar with employing it, it becomes an instrument in your hands. No matter what the society—pre-modern or modernizing—in which it is situated, it can convey thought, overcome geopolitics and cultural disparities, to help your thought or to change your status. The flourishing of post-colonial theory and the transformation of the status of post-colonial critics are persuasive ­evidence of this.11 Even though the discourse or the language is from the West, it is no longer the special privilege of Westerners. In the course of colonization it has absorbed colonial color and been drawn into the fate of being colonized itself.12 In the tide of globalization, ‘hegemonic discourse’ is the first to be liberated in worldwide pluralistic culture, emerging out from the symbolic significance of nations, regions, and identities, and leaving the ‘shattered’ discursive power scattered everywhere. Wang Ning has studied this: “As soon as coloniality was born, its opposite in postcoloniality also came into existence … Understanding of the postcolonial, to a large extent, should be situated in the context of the colonial.”13 Discursive opposition in the postcolonial context is two-way, for the instruments of the colonizers typically may become weapons that the colonized seize to counterattack. The standard bearers of postcolonial theory, from the Palestinian descendant Edward Said to the Indian descendants Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, had the same distinguished ­accomplishments in language, discourse, and transformation of status. No matter which language or theory, whether one sees it as confining shackles or the instrument of supreme accomplishment is up to the thoughtful choice of the scholars themselves. For this study I chose the context of the ‘post-’ because I see the ‘post-’ as a state of survival. When solitary civilizations come to an end, when pluralist culture enters into the daily life of each person, then as a scholar, no matter how one sticks to one’s bottom line, one cannot be overly attached to one’s own national identity, and one has to blur the borders of the country conceptually, consciously exchanging the attitude of saving the world for striving to find dialogue, and letting once familiar things have new interpretations in the new 11

12 13

When mainstream academia first recognized Gayatri Spivak as an important person in the humanities she said: “It is the structures of cultural imperialism that has [sic] enabled me.” Quoted in Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (­London and New York: Verso, 1997), 76. See especially the Preface in Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1999). Wang Ning 王 宁 , “Quanqiuhua shidai de houzhimin piping ji qi dui women de qishi 全 球 化 时 代 的 后 殖 民 批 评 及 其 对 我 们 的 启 示 [Postcolonial criticism in the age of globalization and its enlightenment of us],” in Wenxue lilun qianyan 文 学 理 论 前 沿 [Frontiers of literary theory] Vol. 1 (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2004), 58.

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world structures. Situated in the same global village, scholars should have new epistemological starting points and a more open mind: calmly face ‘posts’ of different meaning, let thought follow individual experience, develop dialogue in the context of openness, seek the roads to the tower of knowledge to solve the allegory of Babel. It is not one road, but many, some grand, others small. What then? “Each element speaks in its own terms. When brought together the result is a Tower of Babel … clamor, cacophony.”14 S/Z: An Essay by Roland Barthes15 is a practice that embodies this, employing a limited text to show the shifts and limitless possibilities of ‘signifiers,’ from which criticism itself derived multiple allegories, conveying the different experiences of different orientations. Hence, in this study I have had no misgivings about employing ‘post-’ concepts over ‘ism’s,’ deliberately depolitizing ‘hou,’ and de-ideologizing, in the belief that only in this way could I free myself of shackles, make the text that is sunk in a whirlpool of ideology provide a space for extending myself, and in temporarily setting identity aside, find a way home—I have believed that should be the route toward ‘poetry.’ Regrettably, this is only my wishful thinking. On the surface of the text the ‘ism’ is hidden; in Wolf Totem, for example, it is completely silent. It is, however, present everywhere between the lines. Precisely because it is absent from the world of discourse I maintain watchfulness for the moment that it appears. Who is it? Where does it come from? Its power inspires awe everywhere, so why is it so hard to find its traces here? When I say that it is hard to find I am definitely not being abstruse. If you think so, then you can go look through Wolf Totem and see that in over 500,000 Chinese characters there is not a single ‘ism.’ Knowing the author’s background in a revolutionary family, and his communist education, seeing that his scholarly writings and specialization are all associated with Marxist theory, the Soviet 14 15

Zhu Liyuan, Zhang Dexing, et al., Xifang meixue tongshi [General history of Western aesthetics] Volume 7, 153–54. In a little over 200 pages, Barthes’ S/Z: An Essay analyzes the thirty-page novella “Sarrasine” by Honoré de Balzac. S/Z focuses on the plurality of meanings in this novella, the text of which constitutes a field of signifiers, the signifieds not entirely adhering to the text. It isolates 561 ‘lexical units’ in the book, indicating that the signifiers are governed by five different codes. Barthes takes these five codes as the power that analyzes the text. They form a network, simultaneously segmenting the text, fracturing it. He espouses “rereading,” through which to see different aspects of the work. His reading analysis does not explain a unity internal to the text, but on the contrary, shows the dispersion, fragmentation, multivalence, interweaving, penetration, incursion, and even deconstruction. What remains is the inexhaustible, endless signifying process itself. My study here works at the same process through different means, and what is different is the ‘signification.’

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revolution and socialist political economics, probably you also are aware of the significance of the hidden, absent ‘ism.’ Truly that is a profound significance. What ‘ism’ is that? There is no need to avoid mentioning that it is the Marxism that everyone here knows, the ubiquitous ‘theoretical weapon that guides our thinking’ and the socialism ‘with Chinese characteristics’ in which we find ourselves—the ‘ism’ addressed here is not the same as the interpretation in Western texts and the understanding of it in the Western world, not a symbol on the page, nor all-or-nothing thought that one may criticize or champion at will. In the land where Wolf Totem began, socialism has been an actual social system (not simply a ‘movement’), and Marxism has been a systematized ideology (not purely a ‘school of thought’). Like the body and the brain, they together structure ‘presence (zài 在 ),’ not only ‘presence somewhere (zàichǎng 在 场 ),’ but also the ‘somewhere (chǎng 场 )’ of ‘presence (zài 在 ),’ the site of life for nearly one-quarter of the population on this globe. Honestly speaking, they are not just the site, but also the history; not only the social system, but also the experience of life itself; for over half a century they have not just determined the fate of hundreds of millions of people, but also in the future will influence a vast number of lives for a long time to come. So, in the context of the ‘post-,’ can we refer to them as ‘post-socialism’ and ‘post-Marxism’? Following the end of the East-West Cold War, when China opened its doors and took the route of reform, when it confirmed that the direction of its own development was ‘heading toward the world,’ and information from outside fully entered China, this ‘post-’ had begun. That it emerged from a single socialist path and from within a sealed-off ideological fence, consciously linking up with Western civilization under the impetus of market economics, could truly be seen as ‘post one socialism’ and ‘post one Marxism.’ The significance of the ‘one’ here is profound, indicating the continuation of ‘isms,’ rather than after the ‘end of their history.’ Standing on a highpoint of history, energy filled these ‘posts,’ fully bringing the strength of systems and ideology into play, integrating the resources of the ‘posts,’ and rapidly moving onto the route of modernization. For the sake of a rapid pace, it united the will of many, and thus continued to unify the land politically; in order to catch up, it had no time for retrospection, and consequently in terms of thought, catalyzed forgetting. With its unprecedented openness to the outside, all the characteristics and symptoms of ‘post-’ that the world has displayed have performed on the stage of socialist China: chaotic complexity, the good with the bad. In all the deluge of information, the discourse of ‘post-’ awed and intimidated, surpassing tradition and transcending the development of modernization. It dumped Chinese scholars as a whole into the context of ‘post-,’ as if banished to a land within another

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territory, no matter what discourse they used to speak or what language they used overseas. Domestically, though, there was still one set discourse, one voice—such a China, as it has increasingly grown into a giant dragon on the world stage, has also become an aberration, of dubious identity. As scholars from China speaking at international forums, the first thing that we have to do is to clarify our identity, to find language that suits us within the existing system of discourse. China is a developing country; it cannot enter ‘the West’ and the ‘modern.’ The writing, texts, and literati related to these can only hesitate at the border regions of the discursive symbol, ‘postmodern.’ It is a given that China belongs to the East, with a history of being colonized and semi-colonized, and was once brought into the ‘third world’ by Mao Zedong— thank god that there has been the good fortune to have the position of third world in which to excoriate the discursive world of the hegemony of the West. Its name is ‘postcolonial criticism.’ On this discursive platform any Chinese scholar may speak without permission from above, consciously complete the transformation of identity, and keep up with postcolonial theory. It is only in post-colonial criticism that we can see, somewhat, images of what we used to know, and after the fashion of ducks trying to sound like chickens, discover our own voices. For a long time now ‘voice’ has travelled magically inside and outside the country, as Bart Moore-Gilbert has described: “the voyage in” [of the third world intellectual to the metropolis] is in a distracted state, so survival in “border crossing” [to metropolitan discourse to deconstruct Western dominance] is being a duck speaking like a chicken, yet no matter how many times one speaks in international meetings and what one’s academic status, in the end one is still seen as someone who is “unhoused.”16 ‘Identity’ typifies modern issues. What is so unbearable about identity and status not only arises from such political issues as oppression or equality; a deeper cause lies in culture. In the field of culture its most extreme manifestation is aphasia. For scholars who are Chinese the clamor over modernity and postmodernism for half a century is something we felt detached from and do not feel a sense of pain. There is actually still a great distance between us and the postcolonial theory that is currently so popular. This presents no difficulty for us when situated in the circumstances of the ‘post-’, as chickens speaking like ducks or ducks like chickens, in texts or on lecture platforms. It is in facing our own land that there is difficulty: you are speaking postmodern theory while situated in a state of proceeding into ‘modernization,’ even stopped at a ‘pre-modern’ state. You have joined the ranks of postcolonial criticism when your society actually long ago 16

Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics, 65.

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emerged from colonial and postcolonial predicaments. Hence, under these ­circumstances, it is difficult to find a position suited both to your own country, domestically, and outside it, internationally. It places one’s own identity and newly stolen discourse under suspicion. Whether postmodernism or postcolonialism, these are both simply timely new editions of the historical development of Western ideology. Like the two sides of a coin, they are opposites that complement each other, fulfilling new positions for individual identity during rival performances of hissing and applause. Following revolutions or coup d’états, there is certain to be posturing among the upstarts, banners of greater ‘justice’ will surely be waving around—only this way will people firmly believe that the ‘two posts’ are the mainstream of the world today and that the real situations that they reveal indicate the ‘correct’ direction in which contemporary thinking is developing. This is what I used to believe was true. Once I also entered these ranks and joined the chorus. Until one day, when I had to face writers here and enter texts here, I realized: this ‘post-’ was not that ‘post-.’ Even though they share the same ‘post-’ historical era, perhaps because my identity was different, our understanding is much different. For example, the socialist route that we took is something that postmodern or postcolonial theory cannot account for. Packing it into the framework of the ‘two posts’ is like using a horse’s trough to hold seawater. What is lost in the overflow is precious experience in human history that is virtually impossible to replicate. In Wolf Totem the stamp of the postmodern or the postcolonial is everywhere, and there are even numerous traces of the premodern, the classical, and the modern. Faced with text, criticism can begin with ease, smoothly setting out by assembling various analytical methods. But I cannot say that the going is all so easy: when you are faced not only with text but also living people, things begin to break down, and you cannot use ready-made concepts to brush off the difficulty. This ‘road’ is not at all familiar, because what we encounter is actually no road at all. To be without a road is also a choice; or, rather, it forces you to make a choice. My choice has been to return home: recover criticism in the sense of ‘primal origins’ to go back to the site of discussion. 6.2

The Disappearance and Return of the Second World

Who are ‘we’? This has nothing to do with national identity, but is empirical inquiry concerning the spiritual direction in the discursive world. ‘We’ refers specifically to individuals or groups who have had similar encounters in a

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­certain historical period and therefore have shared memories. It refers narrowly to scholars in New China; more broadly, it is the producers of what Jameson called “third world texts,” from outside the West and the modern, yet following the route of Western-style ‘modernization,’ confirming in the ‘third’ symbolic order the status of the intellectual and the voice of moral authority. The postmodern scholar Arif Dirlik offered the following explanations of modernization, modernity, and modernism: “Modernization refers to industrialization, urbanization, and so forth. Modernity refers to the conditions that modernization can produce. Modernism refers to people’s response to modernity, a response that may be against modernity.” He believed, “postmodernity is actually still modernity. Fundamentally, it is the basic premise for affirming the universality of modernity.” He saw the relationship between the postmodern and the postcolonial, pointing out: “Postmodern theory primarily involves the First World, while the postcolonial primarily involves the Third World. A contradiction exists between the framework of postcolonial theory itself and changing reality.”17 In that case, what about the second world? Dirlik did not discuss this question, nor has this been his oversight alone. Numerous pronouncements of the post-Marxist scholar Fredric Jameson over the course of his career have involved the third world, but few discussed the second world. In the work of the broad-minded German theologian Jürgen Moltmann, we find precisely that “[o]nly a third of the modern world is what we now call Western civilization—the so-called First World. Two-thirds of it are the modern Third World.”18 These two seem to cover the entire globe. So where is the second world?19 The division of the three worlds and the first person to put forward the concept of the ‘third world’ was Mao Zedong. When Mao Zedong met K ­ enneth Kaunda, 17 18

19

Alifu Delike [Arif Dirlik], “Quanqiuhua, xiandaixing yu Zhongguo [Globalization, modernity, and China],” Dushu 2007 No. 7: 6–7. Jürgen Moltmann, God for a Secular Society: The Public Relevance of Theology trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999), 12. “Modern times—the ‘new time’—have called forth both modernity and sub-modernity. But because some live in the light, and others in darkness, the people in the light do not see the people who are forced to vegetate in darkness. The memories of the perpetrators are always short, while the memories of the victims are long … for the exploited and silenced earth, the messianism of modern times has never been anything but the apocalypse of their annihilation.” (12). A book in Chinese with the same title, Di er shijie 第 二 世 界 [The second world] by Cao Wenxuan 曹 文 轩 (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 2003), sees the material and objective world as “the first world,” and literature, art, and spiritual life as “the second world,” and is unrelated to the theory of the three worlds.

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President of Zambia, at a meeting in February 1974, he called on the peoples of the third world to unite against hegemonism. He said, “I see the us and the Soviet Union as the First World. The group in the middle, J­apan, ­Europe, and Canada are the Second World. We are the Third World  … Apart  from Japan, all of Asia is Third World. The whole of Africa is Third World, ­ and Latin America is Third World.”20 From then on, “Peoples of Asia, ­Africa, and Latin America, unite” quietly replaced “Proletarians of the world, unite”—­recalling the appearance and creation of this theory has profound ­significance. It was proposed by the leader of China, with deep allegorical significance. Putting the head of the socialist camp, the Soviet Union, together with ­American imperialism meant at least two things: (1) subverting the myth of a ‘Red Empire’21 that had spread around the world for over half a century; (2) conceptually achieving splitting off, pulling the rug out from underneath a unified socialist camp. No one saw that this political policy aimed especially at the ‘Red Empire’ would someday become an important point in cultural criticism. In March of the same year, Deng Xiaoping gave a full account of the theory of three worlds at the United Nations, declaring: China is a socialist ­nation and a developing nation. China belongs to the third world. Members of the third world come from undeveloped nations and all the weak peoples and marginal groups. There are none that have not suffered a humiliating history of oppression, enslavement, or colonization. The leaders of New China with a new leadership stance call on the third world to unite politically to oppose the imperialism, hegemonism, and colonialism of the first world.22 It is interesting that these ‘isms’ were originally the monopoly of old school capitalist nations of Europe, now clearly separated from this strategically. One cannot help wondering:

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Lingxiu renwu ziliaoku 领 袖 人 物 资 料 库 [Archive of leading personages], Renminwang, http://www.people.com.cn/GB/shizheng/8198/30446/30452/2195383.html (accessed September 12, 2015). The former warlord Zhang Xueliang recalled that in December 1924, when Sun Yatsen was discussing the national situation, he said, “Those of you in the Northeast are between the two imperialist powers, Japan and Russia, the red and the white. You are dealing with a difficult situation.” Interviewed by Tang Degang 唐 德 刚 [Tong Tekong] in Koushu shilu: Zhang Xueliang shiji chuanqi 口 述 实 录 :张 学 良 世 纪 传 奇 [Oral record: legend of the century, Zhang Xueliang] Volume 1 (Jinan: Shandong youyi chubanshe, 2002), 125. See “Deng Xiaoping General Assembly Speech,” United Nations AudioVisual Library ­Radio Classics, http://www.unmultimedia.org/classics/asset/C817/C817/ (accessed September 12, 2015).

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What is the meaning of the ‘second world’? What is it doing in this hidden state? Following the conclusion of World War ii, two great camps appeared that separated human societies into the two worlds of the (socialist) East and the (capitalist) West. During the 1950s, on the one hand, the trend of hegemonism and new colonizing appeared within the socialist camp headed by the Soviet Union, prompting a resurgence of national consciousness (as in China) and leading to splits in the camp. On the other hand, in the lands from which the old European colonizers withdrew, nation states one after the other independently established themselves, and the territories of imperialism rapidly shrank, leading to changes in the internal structure of the capitalist camp. Following Mao Zedong’s assertion, members of the ‘second world,’ such as Japan, (West) Europe, and Canada were politically a ‘group in the middle.’ The former Japanese empire (and imperialism) withdrew to become a single nation state, healed their war trauma and poured their efforts into nation building, while they hid behind the political contest between the two great camps, struggling to expand their own space of development within the so-called region in the middle. Until the break-up of the Soviet Union and the socialist camp, ‘recovery’ and ‘development’ were the goals for which nations situated in the ­middle—the so-called second world—struggled. In the later part of the twentieth century the second world emerged on the horizon and found a powerful voice: the postmodern and postcolonial ­theories that prevailed at the time were culture products of the second world: Western Europe (France and other countries) was the birthplace of postmodernism; nations states, like India, that had a history of being colonized provided the soil for postcolonial criticism. What was called the second world was not a geo-political concept, but a reality with its own specific meaning, referring to sovereign nations that independently sought well-being and self-­ determination in the fissures of the great powers or hegemonies, as well as all peoples, groups, and individuals who steadfastly maintained their intention to develop independently and autonomously. They had no ambition to rule the world, or ­manipulate the desires of others, or even a unified identity or name, just one point in common, independence and autonomy, and one shared wish, freedom and prosperity. Just as the progress and stability of a society relies on the strength of the middle class, I see the progress of human societies in their entirety relying entirely on the growth and strength of the second world. The so-called third world actually never really existed. But as a category of analysis, it has played a momentous role. The two camps, two opposing ideologies, both had obvious expansionist ideas, and to different degrees displayed ‘­imperial’

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and ‘hegemonic’ tendencies, creating monopolistic voices in international society. It was because of this that there was the third voice of “opposing imperialism, hegemonism, and colonialism” (in Deng Xiaoping’s words). Where there was hegemony, there would be resistance to hegemony. This conformed entirely to historical logic. What strikes one as intriguing is why China was the first to find this voice of resistance. The question of the identity of China takes on prominence. The modern history of China began with imperialist incursion. A century of warfare fixed past humiliations in the position of a ‘semi-colony.’ The contemporary history of China began with establishing the socialist nation. After New China was founded, administrators on the one hand wanted to deal with sanctions that the Western world imposed, and on the other, respond to the colonial threat within the socialist camp. The debate during the 1960s over the Soviet Union may be seen as the first utterance of postcolonial rebellion.23 On this foundation Mao Zedong presented the theory of ‘three worlds’ and clearly positioned China in the ‘third world’: taking the nation state as its basic unit cleverly tore the ‘iron curtain’ (Churchill’s term), helping China to break out of the sealed-off ‘camp.’ Simultaneously the theory of the ‘third world’ became an effective weapon of anti-­ imperialism and anti-colonialism that was widely adopted on the i­ nternational political stage and in cultural criticism. Around 1990, the socialist camp and the Soviet Union broke up—and with this break-up of the ‘Red Empire’ signifying the break-up of the former ‘first world,’ what were the consequences? One consequence is well known to everyone: the break-up of the ‘first world’ secured the hegemonic status of the United States. Western culture dominated by the United States through the medium of economic integration spread its values and scholarly standards to every corner of the world. Another consequence was one that we did not anticipate: the disappearance of the Soviet Union not only meant the break-up of the socialist camp, but also meant the disintegration of the system of ideological ‘discourse’ that it used to consolidate social will. Hence, the former socialist nations and their citizens were completely silenced internationally, while their historical experience and mode of existence in reality became suspect in the eyes of the ‘world.’ Especially China, which was the earliest to struggle free of the fetters of the camp and boldly join the ‘third world’ in order to secure space for 23

The Chinese Communist Party Central Committee’s “Nine Commentaries” on the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee, published between July 1963 and September 1964, may be seen as the earliest classic reader in postcolonial criticism.

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i­ndependent discourse, but which, following the disintegration of the Soviet Union—­particularly after 1989—clearly declared it would continue to take the route of socialism, now lost the discursive right of ‘political correctness’ internationally. Twenty years later it still could not find an appropriate discourse whereby it could truly represent itself and had no choice in the eyes of others but to search with great difficulty for its own form. Then, when postcolonial theory took off, Chinese scholars consciously joined in, believing that among the voices of the third world there would be a place for us—not so. Strictly speaking, China as a sovereign state, was never completely colonized. A century of wars and political movements had never changed its fundamental nature as a ‘nation state.’ Something that had originally been a source of pride in the context of the postcolonial took on a different flavor. One Indian scholar somewhat sarcastically noted: “What is sadder than being colonized is that you never were completely colonized.” Unfortunately (or fortunately), this is the ‘sorrow’ that Chinese scholars encounter when they turn to the world. For a long time China had its own discourse, just as it formed its own system in its long and once glorious history. Today, because the system and its power intervene, domestically it still employs the ideological discourse used inside the ‘camp’ with no obstruction. As it encounters the world, however, speaking is not so simple. In the fissures between the ‘two post’ discourses, the voice of China sounds abnormal, one internal, another external. It always sounds incorrect, leading to the complete silence of a nation state on the world stage. In the words of Li Ling, On all real issues, China has become aphasic.24 This has been the national situation for China from the 1990s on, and it has put Chinese scholars into an unprecedented predicament, having to switch roles constantly and learn two sets of discourse, one domestically and one internationally. False speech, incorrect speech, empty speech … insincere words and gibberish always appear in this ‘haplessly unavoidable’ switch of identities and shift of discourse. There are two real reasons for this issue of this aphasia of China. One is the burden of the internal system that is built-in, for which the ­necessary cleaning up has not yet truly begun. The second is an external source, the entry of the ‘post-‘ discourse that we have treated as some precious treasure, particularly postcolonial theory, and made us think we had found a 24 Li Ling 李 零 , “Huanqiu tong ci liang re: wode Zhongguoguan he Meiguoguan 寰 球 同 此 凉 热 :我 的 中 国 观 和 美 国 观 [The same warmth and cold throughout the globe: my views of China and America],” Address to the Central Committee of the Jiusan Society, October 12, 2011. Hong Kong: Sunny Research Ltd. “See the Document” No. 2012-18.

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new platform—that is, until encountering the arrogance,25 which made Chinese scholars who had never tasted colonization themselves realize their own circumstances: no matter whether it is the postmodern or postcolonial, others have already reserved it for themselves, and there is always an awareness of feeling hollow when we borrow the words. The discursive nature of the socalled third world has always been parasitic on the ideological flesh of the ‘first world,’ and never truly independent of it.26 It may be said that the division of ‘three worlds’ from the beginning had obvious ideological features, primarily political, and only later cultural and discursive. If we see ‘three worlds’ theory as a discursive platform, we may easily discover: at the same time as the mute decline of the third world, what was steadily increasing in strength was precisely the second world that for so long had lost its voice. The ‘second world’ is not a regional concept, but composed of symbionts of an environment of political ecology. Its members are in every corner of the world, with varied histories and an indistinct identity. Yet within the scope of each nation/state, each identity is distinct, its own experience or lessons may be openly examined, and its own voice may freely be found. Even internationally they also have a platform to speak out or to represent others, such as the people of Western societies, who can speak with the aid of the modern or the postmodern. The nation states or people of the so-called third world may borrow from postcolonial discourse to speak out. Given that, we never realized that those in true difficulty were our Chinese scholars: as the third world dissolved and matured into one independent state after another that could speak for itself, what ‘world’ is left that you can speak on behalf of? When socialist 25

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Yang Naiqiao 杨 乃 乔 wrote in “Houzhiminzhuyi huayu de beilun 后 殖 民 主 义 话 语 的 悖 论 [The paradox of postcolonialism]”: “The attitude of Said, Spivak, and Bhabha toward the Orient of the Chinese Mainland has been even more arrogant than the Westerners. Whereas Fredric Jameson, Douwe Fokkema, and other Western scholars came several times to lecture in China and promote their academic interests in order to gain the attention of Chinese scholars, those three descendants of Indian or Middle Eastern peoples could feel completely assured of their own academic power in the West, and were dismissive of the Far East.” See Quanqiuhua yu houzhimin piping 全 球 化 与 后 殖 民 批 评 [Globalization and postcolonial criticism], ed. Wang Ning 王 宁 , Xue Xiaoyuan 薛 晓 源 (Beijing: Zhongyang bianyi chubanshe, 1998), 183. See Howard Wiarda, Political Development in Emerging Nations: Is There Still a Third World? (Belmont, ca: Wadsworth Publishing, 2003). Arif Dirlik is even more thorough in his rejection: “Besides being an irrelevant category, the Third World perhaps never had any meaning, and following the current shift of conditions, it may be meaningless.” Kuaguo zibenzhuyi shidai de houzhimin piping 跨 国 资 本 主 义 时 代 的 后 殖 民 批 评 [Postcolonial criticism in the era of transnational capitalism], trans. Wang Ning 王 宁 , et al. (Beijing: Beijing Daxue chubanshe, 2004), 58.

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discourse and its camp have disintegrated but the Chinese nation still wants to continue advancing in this disintegrating domain, how are you to face the discursive environment in which you yourself are situated? If the Chinese nation can also drop the attitude of saving the (third) world and peacefully become ordinary members of the global village, how are you as intellectuals in this organism to address your land, your people, and your shared historical experience? Most important, what discourse will you use? Frankly, regarding the chasteness of the discourse and the virtue of the speaker, whether at home or abroad, under the circumstances described above, words that are true and genuine are rare. This arises not only out of strategies of survival, but even more out of ‘thought’ being at a loss for words. When all the changes are happening, not as historical documents, but to us right now, and we are situated, ourselves, among the momentous shifts, participating in the changes, whatever we say or whatever discourse we employ may well be incorrect—and for that it is no wonder when, for a time, silence or even disappearance becomes the conscious choice of all Chinese scholars who persist in language that is true and genuine. The somberness of the academic world is in obvious contrast to the clamor in literary circles. In the hundred years from the end of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century creativity in Chinese literature remained resilient, persistently developing in discursive environments bereft of thought, expanding, and soundlessly achieving the transformation from indigenous, traditional narrative forms to ‘modern narrative modes.’ As Chen Pingyuan put it, this has been an “undeclared revolution”: The transformation of modes of Chinese narrative has always proceeded quietly—this has been an artistic revolution in which the objective has been the aesthetic tastes of readers and of writers themselves. There has been no smoke and flame of battle, nor has it stirred up great waves of controversy, not because there has been no ‘opponent,’ but because for a long time no one on either side consciously realized the importance of this ‘transformation’ or found the theoretical language that addressed it.27 The problem of theoretical aphasia has persisted for a hundred years. As the hundred years have gone by, literature as always revolutionized itself in 27

Chen Pingyuan, Zhongguo xiaoshuo xushi moshi de zhuanbian [The transformation of narrative method in Chinese fiction], 31.

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the ­silence, quietly shouldering the cultural undertaking of a nation that had in its entirety lost its language, going its own way courageously to forge ahead. From the 1990s, all sorts of literature that had briefly fallen silent suddenly came to life. The literature of private, intimate life and allegorical-style fiction appeared together, offering the truth of private life, telling the truth through absurd stories. At the end of the century works about the ‘private’ were rapidly commercialized, and ‘allegorical-style writing’ became the chief mode for telling the truth in the public sphere. Contrary to the way in which Western c­ ulture has developed, here our grand narrative crumbled, not through the postmodern, but in the market economy, that is, ‘while modernity was underway.’ From Yu Hua’s Huozhe [To Live, 1994] to Jia Pingwa’s Huainian lang [­Nostalgia for wolves, 2000] and Lang tuteng [Wolf Totem, 2004], a form of novel-length allegorical fiction appeared, continuing most recently in the ‘­reconstructed myths.’ The writers have commonly used metaphorical tropes and worldoriented national allegorical form to expand the domestically sealed-off discursive space. Viktor Shklovsky wrote, “art sees tomorrow, but speaks in the language of today.”28 Contemporary Chinese allegorical writing has been different, persistently focused on the past—that is a collectively forgotten place—­borrowing from the historical lessons with which people are familiar in order to suggest current events. Even though not so rational in the postmodern context (such as Wang Shuo’s works) or moral under the postcolonial ­banner (like Wolf Totem), they still place thought under the firmament of ‘utopia,’ and struggle along the road to redemption. Over the past thirty years literature and art have moved ahead by breaking ice, and the achievements have steadily become apparent. It is criticism that is an embarrassment, an ‘aphasia’ that has become chronic.29 The German scholar Wolfgang Kubin has viewed numerous contemporary works as “rubbish,” and alleged that young writers are being misled by criticism into producing rubbish.30 All this is highly satirical criticism of the Chinese academic world and intellectuals’ chronic loss of language. “Every form of aphasic disturbance consists in some impairment, more or less severe, of the faculty either for selection and substitution or for 28 29

30

Wei Shikeluofusiji [Viktor Shklovsky], Sanwen lilun [Theory of prose], 379. For a study of this, see Cao Shunqing 曹 顺 庆 , “Wenlun shiyuzheng yu wenhua bingtai 文 论 失 语 症 与 文 化 病 态 [The aphasia of theory and cultural disease],” Wenyi zhengming 1996 No. 2; also “Zai shuo ‘shiyuzheng’ 再 说 “失 语 症 ” [More on ‘aphasia’],” Zhejiang daxue xuebao 2006 No. 1. Interview on “Zhenhai ting feng lu 震 海 听 风 录 [Peter Qiu’s Talk],” Phoenix Satellite Television, November 20, 2007.

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c­ ombination and contexture. The former affliction involves a deterioration of metalinguistic operations, while the latter damages the capacity for maintaining the hierarchy of linguistic units.”31 Needless to say, those in this condition suffer a great deal. When I faced Wolf Totem the problem of aphasia existed in the same way; while I was studying Wolf Totem, calling it ‘fascist’ was quickly followed by calling it ‘rubbish.’ In that case, Faced with aphasia, how do we cure ourselves? Since we know it is a mire, why still build our base camp on a rubbish pile? Wolf Totem came out when discursive space was extremely narrow, presenting criticism with a difficult problem. The primary question was: what language do you use as the instrument of criticism? It was created on the mainland of China, which means you must use language that people here can understand. It employs the grassland of the era of Mao Zedong as the background to the narrative, which means you cannot avoid this time period just as it is being collectively forgotten. You cannot make excessive demands from the outside world, because this experience is unique to you, impossible for those who have not gone through it themselves, unless you are able to find a new analytical tool to build a discursive platform that the world can share. In the end I got this far. Here there is land that nourished me. The land of shattered beliefs is still covered in blueprints,32 as if it had never been shattered. On roads strewn with bitterness pleasurable memories and thoughts are few. The domain of memory has been wiped clean so that people stride onto the broad road toward the bright and the promising—now called ‘modernization’ and ‘globalization.’ I have been swept along, so that I also position myself in the brightness. But there is something about me that is different: because of experiencing, being disillusioned, seeing into, being shattered … knowledge has followed ­exploring and lessons, and completing the pursuit of the postmodern and the postcolonial …. So I can live in this ‘shattered’ land, clean up the fragments, and pan through the grains of sand for gold. 31 32

Roman Jakobson, “The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles,” in On Language (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1990), 129. Russell Jacoby dubbed traditional mainstream utopian thinking as the “blue-print school.” He discussed in detail another tradition of utopian thought, “iconoclastic” utopianism, in Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

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This is how I set out on my own initiative: returning to the site, like returning home; starting over once more with criticism that had been discarded for a long time. I attempted to hold on to the baby while throwing out the bath water. No doubt, this was a typical utopian act: it occurred after the break up of the ‘camp,’ the disillusionment with beliefs, ‘the fragmentation of ‘blueprints.’ Can I call it ‘post-utopian criticism’? 6.3

Post-Utopian Criticism and the End of the ‘Post-’

Can postmodern theory appear in developing China? This question involves the universality of ‘post-’ discourse. Its criteria are one-way, measured by the ‘West’ and the ‘modern,’ and depend on whether the developing country meets the conditions for borrowing it. Yet, considered in terms of the converse, this standard should be challenged, and it must respond to this pluralistic world: What are the things that postmodern discourse cannot explain? How large is the proportion of these elements that it cannot explain in the present world? Are they questions of structures in whole or in part? Such serious questions not only concern whether existing discursive systems apply to us, but also the discernment and appraisal of ‘post-’ discourse itself. In China today the evidence of the ‘postindustrial’ and ‘postmodern’ is appearing in more and more locations,33 so that borrowing postmodern discourse makes for suitable analysis. And for the semicolonial historical experience postcolonial theory can serve as a relevant critical approach. The question does not lie there. However, for former socialist practice and Marxist ideology that continue to be in use, are the ‘two posts’ adequate? They are inadequate—such is my personal response. And they are unusable— this is the rational judgment of the researcher. These are the two questions that I often encountered in past scholarly approaches, and in studying Wolf Totem they were particularly prominent. When you use writing instead of speech, 33

“Together with the development of cultural ‘globalization,’ many Eastern and third world nations and regions that are still pre-modern, modern, or high modern have taken on the marks of the ‘postindustrial’ and the ‘postmodern.’” Wang Ning, Houxiandaizhuyi zhi hou [After postmodernism], 193.

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and go deeply into the allegorical meaning of text instead of deconstructing the surface of it, then you must directly confront the questions of ‘adequacy’ and ‘feasibility.’ When your interpretation is not only for colleagues in the field or simply for ease of trans-cultural communication, but rather is directed toward the land in which you exist and the people of your surroundings, you might well make this choice: find an analytical category that is suitable for the society that we are in and our own actual lives. To address the historical experience that the ‘two posts’ cover over but is inseparable from our lives, it can only be utopian criticism that is intimately connected to socialist practice—in the postmodern era the most fitting name is post-utopian criticism. Post-utopian criticism is not the same as anti-utopian.34 The former is an analytical category; the latter a political standpoint. As a tool of analysis, post-utopia is internalized, unlike the ‘separation’ to which ‘anti’ leads, body and mind are within it, and the criticism is also selfcriticism. So I agree with Russell Jacoby’s summation of the content of utopian thought (worldliness, imagination, and the search for the good), and I admire his untiring effort to “save the utopian spirit.” Whether it is the tradition of the “blueprint school” or the spirit of anti-utopian criticism, post-utopian criticism treats them equally: when examining fragments of history we must take even greater care, and use a scalpel, not an excavator. In sorting through them and criticizing, what is to be avoided most of all is to ‘throw the baby out with the bath water.’35 ‘Throw out the bath water and save the baby’ are the two related tasks of the post-utopian analytical category. The bath water is revealing the truth of utopian practices or frauds in media campaigns. The baby to be saved is discovering experience through lessons, and striving tirelessly to restore and reestablish utopian ideals. In terms of social practice, the post-utopian is ‘after’ and ‘delayed,’ but intellectually it is ahead of its time, hence an alert. It cannot indicate what should be the orientation, but it can indeed tell what should 34

35

“Anti-utopia” can be traced back to Thomas More’s Utopia. In modern Western societies it has become a leading tide of political thinking, represented in theory by Karl Popper, Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), and Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty (1951). Representative works in literature include Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932), George Orwell, 1984 (1949), and Yevgeny Zamyatin, We (1920–21). Exiled liberal scholars in the West in the 1950s equated ‘modern utopia’ with socialist practice and became the mainstay of ‘anti-utopianism,’ influential down to the present. In “Anti-Dühring,” Friedrich Engels, criticizing Eugen Dühring’s attempt to reject Hegel and Kant in their entirety, used the phrase ‘throw the baby out with the bath water.’ Later, Lenin and others used the expression multiple times.

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not have been the direction. Alfred North Whitehead believed, “Importance depends on endurance.”36 I also think that it is only through post-utopian criticism and analysis that past utopian practice can receive (new) “importance” through enduring recognition, that past lessons may become experiences that are shared with people of later eras, and that past losses and sacrifices may be ‘deaths’ that are truly meaningful. Post-utopian criticism appears after the ‘postmodern/postcolonial,’ and naturally, it can only define its own position in relative terms at the same time that it demarcates the boundary with the two existing ‘post’ theories. Postmodernism is the result of the highly developed modern material civilization of the West, or in ordinary terms, the spiritual display of ostentatious family wealth of rich and powerful people. In the next generation there will be wastrels and also rebellious spiritual aristocrats, who will not miss dumping the family possessions for the sake of freedom. The reason that they can be so self-possessed is because they not only still live off inherited wealth, but also by relying on their ancestors materially and spiritually, they have no need to humble themselves. This is fundamentally rebellion, and their goal is simple, not to save the world, but to liberate themselves. Its core has never diverged from the ‘individual’ (of individualism), and it is aimed at the ‘enlightenment’ of the ancestral rules of authority in the family. Postmodernism began with counter-enlightenment, and like all the grandsons in Ba Jin’s novel Jia (Family), everyone harbors destructive intentions, trying to break free of the bonds of old rules. Fredric Jameson believes the montage of modernism and the collage of postmodernism “are projections culturally of the logic of multinational capitalism and vitality departing from the center.”37 The instrument of postmodernism is deconstruction, aimed at grand narrative, to do only one thing: ­shatter it, and in the process of shattering to create and reproduce ‘­multiplicity.’ Needless to say, postmodern scholars are all alike members of mainstream ­societies in the West whose commentaries have complained as much as possible about their own ‘modernity.’ To address the ‘Orient’ and the pursuits and criticisms of disciples outside the ‘family,’ they looked back and returned to modernity from the Western standpoint; hence, they derived another post discourse: postcolonial criticism. 36

Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 194. 37 Zhanmingsun 詹 明 信 [Fredric Jameson], “Xianshizhuyi, xiandaizhuyi, houxiandaizhuyi 现 实 主 义 、 现 代 主 义 、 后 现 代 主 义 [Realism, modernism, postmodernism],” trans. Liu Xiangsi 刘 象 愚 in Wanqi zibenzhuyi de wenhua luoji 晚 期 资 本 主 义 的 文 化 逻 辑 [The cultural logic of late capitalism], ed. Zhang Xudong (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1997), 292.

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Postcolonial theory was the product of postcolonialism. As a critical tool what it aimed at was biased postmodernism in Western societies. Its representative figures all had national backgrounds that were influenced by the colonial or the postcolonial. In a sense, they were integrated with the West, and could conveniently receive or borrow the weapons from the system, language, and discourse of the colonizers. Like the postmodern, the postcolonial rebelled as much as possible from within. From the perspective of colonizers, postcolonial theory fully displayed the accomplishment of the colonizers; it was an achievement of cultural imperialism. From the perspective of the colonized, it was entry among the colonizers and won approval in response. Among ‘troublemakers’ in Western white ethnicity and culture it was like a Trojan horse—ultimately it still was an appendage of colonialism, from its discourse to its identity. The core of postcolonialism is nationalism, its criticism directed at none other than the colonizers and all components or signs of hegemonism. It has sought to accomplish just two things: one is to say ‘no’ to colonial elements. With Edward Said as their representative in the leading role to accomplish this task, they have all had Western-approved educational backgrounds and scholarly status that eased their way onto the Western podium to give themselves voice. The second thing, after speaking out themselves to say no, has been to show the cards they are holding: Who are you? That brought on quite a few debates, not about the colonizers, but over doubts about the identity of the postcolonial theorists themselves—which prompted even more voices (including voices of China), and unprecedented expansion of the postcolonial field, continually multiplying until it became the voice of the shadow of the vanishing ‘third world.’ Culturally, the postcolonial has both echoed and resisted the postmodern. Politically it has been allied with the postmodern, in the sense of a contribution to subverting the ‘modern.’ Western leftist scholars’ strong approval of scholars with colonial heritage has given postmodern scholarship the label of ‘political correctness.’ The more postcolonial scholars said ‘no’ to Western modernity the more they have appeared to give themselves a voice. As representations of opposition, the ‘two posts’ together have collaborated marvelously to form a discursive community in which their fortunes are linked. Whatever the two have encountered they have defeated: when the postmodern that had swept all before it came up against the postcolonial it was as if it had been struck by the arrow of justice and instantly lost its ferocity, while the postcolonial that had regarded critique as its mission was transformed into a mother-in-law under the asylum of ‘political correctness,’ flaunting to an extreme the intimidating authority of the mother-in-law of the past—it is evident that its gains were also possibly losses in two senses, dismaying its blind followers (such as

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Chinese scholars), who then inevitably began quietly calculating whether they should desert and head home. I am one of those who headed home. On the way back, I encountered post-utopia—I think those who began with ideals and turned back out of dismay sooner or later will gather here, regardless of ethnicity, nation, political party, social class, gender, or age … Those who set out on behalf of ideals that were ‘destroyed’ yet have persistently pursued a dream, those who have seen through the evils of the modern, of civilization, and even of human nature, yet refuse to abandon seeking good … in the end will gather in ‘post-utopia’ (whatever its name), re-conceive right and wrong, share lessons, and devote the modest strength of the individual’s life to perpetuating ‘meaning’ for human history. Post-utopian criticism is the spiritual offspring of utopian practice, and it is a cultural phenomenon of the postmodern. It draws on the enormous critical strength of postmodernism and its orientation: shattering the ‘grand,’ deconstructing ‘enlightenment,’ and breaking out of a collectivity of a different form, to return to every ordinary person’s hands the seeds that sow ideals. In a sense, it also draws on postcolonial theory by saying ‘no’ to all hegemony. At the same time, it challenges the basis and the aim of the postcolonial, ultimately parting ways with it on the issues of ‘antecedents’ and ‘identities.’ So long as there is still the soil in which utopia revives, I believe that in this world, and even in the world to come, post-utopian criticism will indeed respond to the times and be a part of it. In addressing the hypocritical acts in the name of benevolence, its duty first and last is: on the basis of disenchantment expose obfuscation, and engage in reflection on the premise of removing obfuscation, summarize lessons, and start out again. People have dreams. Disenchantment is waking from dreaming, and removing obfuscation is the specific act of waking from dreaming. Whereas both are conditioned on dreaming, to turn stubbornly toward dreaming after being awakened—that is idealism. Different people have different dreams, but thoughts directed toward the good and away from the bad and a ‘better life’ should be everyone’s shared dream. So long as this dream still exists for a day, the boat bound for utopia will not vanish. Post-utopian criticism is thus, like the practice of utopia, forever ‘on its way.’ Since ancient times, the ideal destination has been ‘the other shore.’ However, the other shore cannot be reached. As the Talmud warns the Jews against uttering the name of God: “Whosoever pronounces the Name, loses his share in the world to come.”38 This typifies the paradox of utopias, and like the ‘liar 38

Cited in Russell Jacoby, Picture Imperfect, xvii.

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paradox’ and the ‘barber paradox,’ it can never be resolved. The difference is that what the liar paradox is ultimately about is ‘truth,’ what the barber paradox is ultimately about is ‘self,’ and what the utopian paradox is ultimately about is ‘ideals.’ Theoretically, Pandora’s Box cannot be opened, otherwise, havoc will be unleashed. In real life, however, no one can resist the temptation to open the box. For ages people have been setting out, but there has been no one who returned, nor anyone to inform us of news of the other shore. The mission of post-utopian criticism is to inform: it tells stories of what is witnessed along the way, it reveals antecedents and their actual significance, it posts landmarks, warning signs, at the entrance to the route teeming with temptations—‘landmarks’ also have allegorical significance, and with distinctive historical significance, a mark of the defeated.39 Knowing it cannot be done and yet doing it is because the criticism and the critics are also on the way to utopia. More than warning others, it is self-satire, self-encouragement, and self-discipline. Modern society arose in the market competition of capitalism, appealing to and putting into play the evil of human nature. The utopian ideal has unfurled the banner of goodness, yet every time has slipped into the mire of abetting evil and found it nearly impossible to pull itself out. Post-utopian criticism was born out of this evil, using the landmark ‘indicating evil’ to expose hypocritical dreams in order to rally people to the ideal of benevolence. I believe that no matter to what degree material civilization develops, as long as the world fails people’s expectations or the seeds of inequality sprout, it is certain that the banner of utopia will wave again, and a land of silence will echo Fredric Jameson’s prophecy that traditional Marxism … must necessarily become true again when the dreary realities of exploitation, extraction of surplus value, proletarianization and the resistance to it in the form of class struggle, all slowly reassert themselves on a new and expanded world scale, as they seem currently in the process of doing.40 39

40

“Landmarks” [warning signs] is the title of a collection of essays, Vekhi (Moscow, 1909), referring to cultural conservatism that appeared among Russian intellectuals at the beginning of the twentieth century. It refers specifically to the defeat of the 1905 Revolution in Russia, analyzing and criticizing spiritual deficiencies among Russian intellectuals and the consequences from the perspective of intellectual history, playing a role similar to our “Farewell to revolution.” The baby that they wanted to save was the principle of “individual responsibility toward society” and the essence of humanism in the Russian cultural tradition. [See Nikolai Berdiaev, Sergei Bulgakov, Vekhi: Landmarks: A Collection of Articles about the Russian Intelligentsia (Armonk, ny: M.E. Sharpe, 1994).] Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s,” Social Text 9/10 (Spring-summer, 1984): 209.

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However, post-utopian criticism is not the same as Marxism. It is not ideology, does not have a particular theoretical system, or look to assemble ranks, nor is it bound by ethnic, class, or gender identities. Nor is it the same as socialist movements, and has no links with systems or parties. What it is, is no more than a category of analysis, a discursive stage that anyone (including anti-­ utopians) may make use of. As criticism, it has no specialized tools, always working together with what will falsify, examine and distinguish, and in terms of epistemology and method displaying a state of openness: a road where there are mountains, a bridge where there is water … all for one purpose: to throw out the bath water and preserve the baby, continuing forward along the route to goodness. As a category of analysis, in the world today, post-utopian criticism can accomplish three things: (1) Establish a discursive platform and open up interpretive space for the historical experience of nearly half the people in the world today. (2) Repair the damaged boat of utopia, and construct a bridge connecting to ideals where ideals have been destroyed. (3) Together with the ‘postmodern/postcolonial’ complete the postmodern cognitive paradigm. This third achievement is an unexpected gain. According to Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigms: “To be scientific a theory need be falsifiable only by an observation statement, not by actual observation. The relation between statements, unlike that between a statement and an observation, could be the conclusive disproof familiar from logic and mathematics.”41 That is to say, only logical “observational statements” within an analytical category—empirical discourse, not direct experience—can undertake to falsify other categories. Theory that has not been subjected to falsification is questionable and may be challenged. Applied to the postmodern and postcolonial, ever since they emerged, the scholarly world has been explaining or demonstrating ‘what it is,’ and few have said ‘what it is not,’ so that in the process of globalization, the two are suspected of unjustified claims and transgressions. The appearance of post-utopian criticism is falsification that demonstrates the geopolitical features and cultural attributes of the ‘two posts,’ and demarcates their boundaries and content. Ultimately, this book takes the title ‘post-utopian criticism’ for one purpose: to combine the issues about the ‘posts,’ define their qualities in relation to each other, and clarify the signifieds and signifiers of each. In the course of studying Wolf Totem, I found a new companion for the discourse of 41

Thomas S. Kuhn, The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 282–83.

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the ‘two posts’: riding this troika along its unobstructed way I came to understand the joy of criticism and let criticism in time transcend itself in the borderlands of interpretation and ‘over-interpretation.’ Like the postmodern and the postcolonial, the post-utopian is not simply a tool of criticism, but also a category of thought and culture that had already appeared on the mainland of China. Especially in the twenty years following 1989, its appearance was remarkable, in three, not altogether similar guises. One has been a large group of ‘old-school leftists’ who, having lost their ­language after the destruction of former utopian ideals, has turned to liberalism, refused to be the chorus of anything systematic, and in their reflections bidding farewell to revolution, drawn close to the anti-utopian camp. Another, a ‘new left’ group has sprouted to ‘continue the revolution’ on a battlefield that has not yet been defined, rallying against all injustice and inequality under the banner of justice and equality. A third form has appeared among the public at large (百 姓 大 众 ), spiritually empty, amoral, demoralized, degraded to the lowest level of what is human … Such is the extreme display of ‘post-utopian’ desperation in their feelings of hopelessness. As presented in the field of literature, though, it is allegorical writing that is the weapon, and whether absurd or mundane, hyperbole or realism, open or intimate, diverting or not … no matter what the representations, whether trash or lingual play, all need timely criticism. I located Wolf Totem in the open space of commentary that is ‘post-­ allegorical,’ that also likely has allegorical meaning: ‘post-allegory’ is fundamentally a form of allegory that forecasts the imminent end of the p ­ ostmodern. I believe that a new ‘departure’—as Nietzsche prophesied—is certain to feature the “retrograde”: One certainly very high level of culture has been attained when a man emerges from superstitious and religious concepts …. Then, however, he needs to take a retrograde step: he has to grasp the historical justification that resides in such ideas, likewise the psychological; he has to recognize that they have been most responsible for the advancement of mankind and that without such a retrograde step he will deprive himself of the best that mankind has hitherto produced.42 The ‘post-’ era is just now coming to its own end, and I think that its cultural legacy will be these three ‘posts’:

42

Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 22–23.

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‘Postmodernism’ addresses material civilization above all; ‘Postcolonialism’ addresses enslavement, conquest, and transgression; ‘Post-utopian criticism’ addresses all the lessons of the routes to utopia. I believe that now and even from now on, where grand narratives spread recklessly, the ‘postmodern’ will surely intervene. Where hegemonism appears, the ‘postcolonial’ will surely give voice to resistance. And, wherever a ‘­blueprint school’ or ‘iconoclasts’ raise their banners in the name of the people and close ranks to set out toward utopia, post-utopian criticism will surely shadow them. Utopias, as ideals in all, announce a beautiful future and promise ‘fairness’ and ‘justice.’ Post-utopian criticism conveys bloodshed and lessons, pouring cold water on heated enthusiasm, and flaying the painted skin of hypocrisy. The practices of former utopias were almost all collective acts; post-utopian criticism is an individual act with obvious individual traits. It may be the individual’s historical testimony, and may be confessions of individual experience—voices that cannot change history, but may help people during the course of falsifying and selection to achieve truer understanding, greater alertness and wiser choices in pursuing dreams. What do we do after the ‘post-’? I think that, regardless of which ‘post-’ standpoint they started from, scholars must return to the site of discussion. The site of discussion is the here and now. Returning to the situation brings an end to the drifting state of “life is elsewhere,”43 making thought pursue life, and in a timely way follow ‘facts,’ not just discourse and text. Two dominant fields of the twentieth century— the development of psychology led to absolute and pure ‘self,’ and the flourishing of linguistics led scholarly criticism to symbolizing ‘texts’—remove us from the public, society, and history. Reflecting on the route that scholarship has taken for several decades now, it has led in a direction far from life and ultimately diverging from the original goals of scholarship into a loss of 43

The title of a novel by Milan Kundera, published in Czech in 1969 and in French translation in 1973 depicting a hack poet devoted to writing for the communist state, insulated from any awareness of his mediocrity. Arthur Rimbaud wrote the line, “What a life! True life is elsewhere. We are not in the world.” See Arthur Rimbaud: Collected P­ oems ed. Oliver Bernard (London: Penguin, 1997), 319. André Breton cited Rimbaud, “Rimbaud was Surrealist in the way he lived, and elsewhere.” See Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 27.

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­understanding. So I endorse and echo Li Zehou’s remark: “Return from language to fundamentals.”44 The changing world pattern demands changing scholarship; new matters in the global village press upon scholars as well: to return to the situation of life, restore anthropology and anthropological method, through ‘on site’ observation return to the most ancient, most enduring, most essential need of human existence and survival—know yourself! Only on the foundation of knowledge can we have wisdom. Only under the guidance of wisdom can we have viable plans. Only on a planned route can we live on in confidence. Only in a state of confidence can limited life attain the dignity it deserves. Undoubtedly, the sign of the end of the ‘post-’ era is precisely the revival of the utopian ideal. What is it? What it is, is not important; what is important is the return of ideals: to give the dream to humanity. 44

Li Zehou, Lishi bentilun [Historical ontology], 11.

Postscript to the Revised Edition

The Restrictions on Utopia

The character for ‘restriction’ 困 is quite graphic. That it means a person on a cross, confined inside an enclosure, comes through clearly. Three years ago, when this book first appeared under the title Post-Allegory,1 it was relevant to the restrictions on utopia. This edition has reverted to the original title and deleted a large amount of text so that the “criticism” could proceed less encumbered down the path of interpretation. What does confinement have to do with utopia? As an idea, utopia is the product of a spirit of freedom, with an attitude favoring freedom it turns toward the ‘ideal society’ and the ‘life of happiness.’ The idea of utopia was already evident in early civilizations, from Plato’s The Republic in the West to the Confucian Datong or world of ‘Grand Harmony’ in the East.2 The doctrines of all religions throughout the world condensed the ideal of a utopia in the past or in the future, instilling in humanity the belief that “the future could fundamentally surpass the present,”3 a belief persisting to this day. Yet once the idea becomes a blueprint for social reform and is put into practice, utopia is no longer the word “nowhere” from which it was coined,4 nor is it any longer an emblem of freedom. On the contrary, it is imprisoned by ‘freedom,’ becoming a clear goal, an ideology that the ideal rigorously ­standardizes—the socialist revolutions that swept across the globe during the twentieth century are a typical case. The standard of value was not any party charter or outline for establishing a nation, but the principle of political correctness that all leftists and pseudo-leftists really belonging to the right sought 1 Houyuyan: Lang tuteng shendu quanshi 后 寓 言 : 〈 狼 图 腾 〉 深 度 诠 释 [Post-­allegory: an in-depth interpretation of Wolf Totem] (Wuchang: Changjiang wenyi chubanshe, 2010). 2 The “Li yun” 礼 运 section of the Li ji 礼 记 (Part 1, Book 7, Section 1) [The Book of Rites] introduces the term dàtóng, most often glossed “grand harmony.” 3 Russell Jacoby, The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy (New York: Basic Books, 1999), xi–xii. 4 The word “utopia” was formed from the ancient Greek words for “without” and “place,” first used in Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). Yan Fu’s translation of the word as Wutuobang in Tian yan lun (Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics) implies both the senses of “ideal land” and “nowhere.”

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004276734_008

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to apply everywhere. Marx stated,” we shall develop for the world new principles from the existing principles of the world.”5 It is the fundamental quality of all utopias that principle outstrips actuality, and is a collective feature of all modern social movements (such as the ­labor movement, women’s liberation, national revolution, and the human rights movement). The “new principles” seen on the pages of Marxist scholarship became the dominant ideology of socialist states. This was part of the same age as ‘modernity,’ but it was totally different in nature. Modernity is a product of the capitalist market economy, which fully displayed its distinctively modern appeal at the level of individual rights. Socialist “new principles” ran counter to capitalist operating procedures but demonstrated power and achievement alike. The core value was equality, not freedom. The fundamental element was the group, not the individual. They moved away from ‘instrumental reason’ and were drawn more to the spiritual realm of ‘pure reason.’ These principles first appeared in fledgling form in the theory of Saint-Simon and in the concrete practice of the utopian socialist Robert Owen, spreading across the globe after the success of the October Revolution in Russia, and the major result was the founding of the Soviet regime (the party-state system). There was an intricate relationship between the practice of founding a soviet state and the principles of socialism. It employed a high level of authority as the counterpart of democratic government, thought control as the counterpart to freedom of speech, and the nation state as the unit to demonstrate the administrative strength of the unification of state and religion. But in the specific case of China, such principles were nothing new.6 For thousands of years the Chinese people 5 Letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge (September 1843), Marx Engels Internet Archive, http:// www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09-alt.htm, (accessed September 20, 2013). Also translated: “We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles.” Cited in Jerome Grieder, Intellectuals and the State in Modern China (New York, ny Free Press, 1981). 6 The traditional political culture of China regarded li (propriety, or ritual etiquette) as jiao “religion”: “It is propriety which governs states and clans, gives settlement to the tutelary altars, secures the order of the people, and provides for the good of one’s future heirs.” Zuo zhuan “Yin gong shiyi nian,” trans. James Legge, The Chinese Classics (Hong Kong: Lane, Crawford & Co., 1872), vol. 5 Part 1 Section ii, 33. The Li ji [The Book of Rites] “Yue ji” Section states: “Ritual etiquette (li), music, punishments, administration: their ends are all the same.” Li Zehou 李 泽 厚 believes: “The religious nature of Confucianism was not to administer human spirit via an anthropomorphic god, but to construct an ideology and system of state-religion principally through ethics (the human) and nature (Heaven) in order to govern the activities of people’s bodies and minds.” Lunyu jin du 论 语 今 读 [Reading the Analects today] (Hefei: Anhui wenyi chubanshe, 1998), 277, 7.

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s­ urvived and thrived with the highest state being “all things in equilibrium and the common people regulated” (Guanzi, “Purifying the Mind”), a tradition of “cooperation-ism” fit seamlessly with socialism,7 and the idea of “harmony” effectively approximated the socialist ideal.8 It is undeniable, indeed there is no need to deny that the idea of equality in Mao Zedong Thought, as the leading ideology, happened to coincide with principles of socialism and in spiritual quality belonged to the category of utopia.9 Utopia is not a product of the modern, and it has a history as long and entangled as humanity. The twentieth century provided a historic stage for practicing utopianism on a grand scale, and China was an important actor on that stage. When so many utopian projects ended in failure or loss of power, China still stood center stage, evidence that China’s utopian project was not entirely tied to communist blueprints, that its modern appearance and its own history were continuous, and that it happened to conform to the direction taken by the entirety of the human spirit. For China, socialist revolution was an integral part of Marxism, and was its result. New China drew on socialist revolution to consolidate national strength. This once was something to take pride in. Regrettably, in the wave of ­anti-utopian thought that covered the globe following the dissolution of the former Soviet Union, the negative significance of ‘socialism’ and ‘utopia’ were linked as false prophecies, driving the ‘politically correct’ cultural elite into retreat—a retreat that could mean to flee, as in fleeing the plague, and could mean a strategic avoidance, as seen in the field of mainstream ideology: talking about the ‘China Dream’ and practicing ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics,’ but in the discursive realm drawing a strict boundary around the term ‘utopia,’ severing all ties with the disentangled experience and lessons that emerged from the standpoint of ‘post-utopia’ and all access to continuing the legitimate legacy of the utopian spirit. The ordeal of bringing Post-Utopian Criticism into the world is evidence of this.

7 “Cooperationism” (kyōjosugi) is Mizoguchi Yūzō’s 沟 口 雄 三 term. See Chūgoku no Shisō 中 国 の 思 想 [Chinese thought] (Tokyo: Hoso daigaku kyoiku shinkokai, 1991); Zhongguo de sixiang shijie 中 国 的 思 维 世 界 [The world of Chinese thought], trans. Li Changli 李 长 莉 (Nanjing: Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 2006), 636. 8 The legal scholar René David noted the similarity in the prophetic words of Marxist philosophy and the ideal society in Chinese minds. See Michael E. Tigar, with the assistance of Madeline R. Levy, Law and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977) in Falü yu zibenzhuyi de xingqi 法 律 与 资 本 主 义 的 兴 起 [Law and the rise of capitalism], trans. Ji Kun 纪 琨 (Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe, 1996), 269. 9 See Maurice Meisner, Marxism, Maoism, and Utopianism: Eight Essays (Madison, wi: ­University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 2.

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The first attempt to publish Post-Utopian Criticism was under the title PostAllegory. When the manuscript was submitted in 2008 the plan was to have the Academy of Social Sciences publish it. The proofs were delayed for over a year, waiting for an opportune moment to print. However, because of the word “utopia” it could never pass censorship, and there was no alternative but submit it to a literature publishing house as ‘literary criticism’ before it would see the light of day. I knew that in ideological countries, confining thought is more urgent than imprisoning people, but I never imagined that “utopia” would be a forbidden word, that even in academic fields it would become a threshold that could not be crossed. Evidently, what I term the restrictions on utopia were not merely in political promises that are difficult to keep, but even more so in the ideological environment that confines thought. There are usually two methods for confining thought. One is compulsory censorship, for which investigative systems are established. The second is through ideological control, so that after a time, the cultural elite internalizes ‘self censorship’ collectively, and for these people, unwittingly, it becomes voluntary, self-constraining, and self-­investigative, and only in the process of writing is it quietly completed. We have been inside this confinement for so many years that it is difficult to break out of it. Post-Utopian Criticism is an attempt to break out. In the Introduction and Brief Conclusion to this book there are distinct boundaries to the category of post-utopian criticism. As much as it may be literary criticism it is even more aimed at historical reflection and social awareness; in the “age of apathy” that Russell Jacoby wrote of, in which a belief in the end of utopian thinking prevails, it is an effective way to overcome modern predicaments in order to renew the legacy of utopia. This study has attempted to develop directions in epistemology and methodology: In terms of epistemology to open up a new field of vision in humanity’s steadily diminishing spiritual world; in terms of methodology, borrowing from the analytical blueprint for Wolf Totem, to attempt to apply post-utopian criticism directly as an instrument of practical criticism, analyzing major issues in the present world and scholarship through a synthesis of postmodern and postcolonial discourse. The book unfolds in the historical circumstances of the Maoist era, setting out universal questions in the situation of China, as what we might call a reader for China synthesizing ‘hermeneutics’ and ‘dialogic criticism.’ Hermeneutics is understanding and explanation, premised on asking and answering questions.10 10

“Hermeneutics is primarily practice, the art of understanding and making things understandable for others … in hermeneutics the question has precedence over the answer.”

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Dialogic criticism is one method of interpretation, its discursive space open.11 As a hermeneutical reader, the book poses many questions that are not necessarily judgmental questions, not aimed at finding ‘correct’ answers, but at stimulating thought. New ways of thought are free and open, breaking out of the field of bureaucratized knowledge and the constraints of ideology, forever pushing forward in the pursuit of questions. The answers to questions vary from person to person, displaying the appeal of ‘post-utopian criticism’ in the open space of thought. In my view, utopia is many idealized social visions, it is a mode of human spiritual existence, the spiritual da-sein [being; existence] that Heidegger spoke of. As long as there are people, there are dreams of utopia; so long as human society exists for one day, utopian blueprints are being drawn up. Especially today, when all nation states are drawing up blueprints on the tracks of ‘national’ culture, when all these blueprints close ranks under the banner of ‘ideals,’ the creation of utopian ideology is unavoidable, the new world tide that will undoubtedly appear when the ‘postmodern’ era ends. The “end of utopia” that Russell Jacoby asserted is in step with and of the same nature as the materialist age of apathy, and like a post-allegory, announces the end of postmodern society modeled on the West. With that, in the East, the renewal of the ‘Chinese dream’ (and the Russian dream, the Indian dream, the Korean dream, the Japanese dream …) foretells the revival of utopian discourse. In just this sense, post-utopian criticism is not only a method of historical interpretation, but also an instrument for recognizing present society. In the Brief Conclusion I discuss how post-utopian criticism is aimed at all acts and utterances of hypocrisy, at disenchantment, and at the transparency of Heidegger’s aletheia, immediately upon the attainment of utopian s­ ocieties, “throwing out the bath water, but saving the baby.” Yet it is not a political ­weapon. It is not at the same level as ‘utopia’ and ‘dystopia,’ nor in the same period of time. It lags behind social practice, less a weapon of social criticism than an instrument of knowledge. In the example of Wolf Totem the narrative background is the grassland of China during the Cultural Revolution period of the 1960s, but its point is not particularly aimed at the Maoist era. Its discursive platform concerns the distinctive ideology of New China, but its main topic is not entirely about the social practice of New China, and more aimed at the scholarly direction that daily grows more biased in the global tide of Westernization. In precise terms, the emphasis of this study is not social criticism but explanation. Its objects of knowledge are not only the historical faults of Hans George Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. W. Glen-Doepel (New York: Bloomsbury Academic; 2 Revised edition, 2004), 391. 11 Ibid.

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socialist revolution, but even more the present spiritual decline brought on by all the theories of ‘the end’ and chronic ideological malaise that are so difficult to treat. The first part of this book, “Textual Analysis,” from a literary and aesthetic approach, strives to remove ideology from the controversies stirred up by Wolf Totem and restore the muse to poetics. The second part, “Allegorical Interpretation,” enters in-depth into specific questions from the viewpoints of different disciplines and engages in direct dialogue with sophisticated theories that have influenced trends in world development: Walter Benjamin’s “allegory,” Tzvetan Todorov’s “dialogue,” Roland Barthes’ “signs,” Gilles Deleuze’s “nomad,” Edward Said’s “Orient,” Samuel P. Huntington’s “clash of civilizations,” Douglass North’s “state intervention,” Fredric Jameson’s “third world,” L. S. Stavrianos’s “global history,” Isaiah Berlin’s “two concepts of liberty,” John B. Thompson and Karl Mannheim’s “ideology,” and others. I take them to be discursive realms each erecting barriers as rival camps in the academic world. The aim of this dialogue is to cross borders, to breach the confinement of thought, and to reflect in multidisciplinary terms on leading scholarly questions of today’s world. The specific modus operandi has already appeared in the process of ‘interpretation’ in this book, and does not need elaboration here. Sources and citations are given is follows: 1.

2. 3.

Readers who have reflected on Wolf Totem have not been limited to the academic world, so for the benefit of readers who are non-specialists there are notes introducing major scholars, scholarly groups, and theories. The book uses footnotes throughout for the convenience of readers checking sources cited; sources cited are repeatedly given full annotation in each chapter and section. The book cites a large number of translated sources. For any translated text that has undergone proofreading or altered the existing translated text, citations of the original text are included. Conversations with Jiang Rong, author of Wolf Totem, are from audio ­recordings made in April 2006 and January 2007. The portions of the recordings used in this book have been verified by Jiang Rong. All answers to questions appearing in this book were provided by Jiang Rong.

Index Adorno, Theodor 11n23, 113n82, 386 Aesop ix, 4, 5, 7, 9, 26, 27, 83, 466 Aesthetics xi, xiii, xvi, 3, 8, 12, 13, 17, 19, 23, 31, 40, 42, 44, 45, 48, 52, 68, 69, 73, 75, 80, 85, 86n49, 91–94, 97, 102–104, 110, 113, 115–173, 179, 180n15, 183n26, 210, 239n137, 257n180, 274, 287, 289n229, 304n259, 308n269, 349, 369, 386, 407n520, 435, 436, 443, 444, 445n588, 446, 450, 466n6, 467, 469n9, 480, 485n38, 526, 538n14, 548, 566 Age xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, xviii, 5, 11, 19, 47n122, 51, 78, 79, 84, 88, 104, 108, 113, 125, 164, 205, 209, 228, 253, 254, 268, 287, 289, 318, 378, 380, 381, 403, 412, 431, 437, 440n571, 462, 463, 465, 466, 492, 512, 513, 515, 531–534, 537n13, 550n32, 555, 561n3, 562, 564, 565 Agrarian xii, 73, 185, 207, 212, 226, 252, 266, 282, 291, 292, 294–296, 298, 304, 306, 308, 309, 311, 313, 322, 339, 350, 351, 353, 354, 385, 392, 393, 398, 399, 485, 489, 492, 494, 498, 508 Agrarian civilization 45, 51, 112, 124, 185, 190, 226, 287, 300, 301, 313, 339, 350, 392, 393, 398, 483, 484, 491, 510, 511 Allegory xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, xviii, 3–50, 52, 60, 81, 82, 86, 91, 92, 96, 101, 106, 111–113, 117, 119, 124, 128, 132, 140, 146, 161, 167, 168, 173, 178, 180–182, 184–186, 193–196, 209, 218, 240, 246, 250, 386, 392, 410, 426, 438, 440, 441, 454, 460, 463–533, 536, 538, 558, 561, 564, 565, 566 Althusser, Louis 349, 361, 369, 378 Anderson, Benedict 306, 485, 492, 493, 495, 496, 506 Anthropocentric xiii, 3, 193, 279 Anthropocentrism 279 Anthropology xi, 87n52, 126, 178, 182n20, 186n28, 239–258, 292, 392n483, 560 Anthropomorphic 17, 136, 562n6 Anti-utopian 46, 47n122, 131n36, 437, 550n32, 552, 557, 558, 563 Aphasia 20, 209, 309, 536, 540, 546, 548–550 Aphthonius 15

Aristotelian 59, 134, 141 Aristotle 97–99, 101, 152, 162, 183, 206 Art of War 235, 295 Autocracy 26, 27, 500–502 Autocratic 27, 496, 498, 500, 501 Bacon, Frances 402 Bakhtin, Mikhail 184n27, 466, 467, 470–472, 479, 480, 483 Bal, Mieke 36n99, 39n105, 43 Barthes, Roland 121, 148, 167n108, 177, 180, 187, 192n36, 234, 482, 483n31, 521n108, 528n126, 538, 566 Bei Dao 514 Benjamin, Walter xviii, 11–13, 17, 18, 68n32, 81n44, 111, 113, 177, 178n5, 181n16, 201n49, 216, 219n91, 222, 250n166, 252, 287, 310, 481n29, 492, 506, 520, 530n130, 531, 566 Berlin, Isaiah 75, 213n76, 417, 419n540, 427n548, 428n549, 433, 436, 552n34, 566 Bhabha, Homi 537, 547n25 Bing Xin 262 Biological chain 59, 123, 125, 127, 131, 135, 173, 186, 203, 270, 280, 445, 451 Bipartite division 391, 392, 399 Bipartite history 391 Blaut, James Morris 321, 333n338, 388n474 Blocker, H. Gene 246 Boas, Franz 22n68, 300 Braudel, Fernand 292, 299n249, 387, 390 Brecht, Bertolt 7, 492 Brehm, Alfred Edmund 27 Brunvand, Jan Harold 441 Buber, Martin 476 Bürger, Peter 51 Burke, Edmund 68 Burke, Victor Lee 396, 398n499, 402 Cadoux, A. T. 194n39, 479 Cao Shunqing 549n29 Carson, Rachel 277, 394n491, 394n493, 405 Carter, Vernon G. 393n486, 393n488, 399n501, 405, 408n522, 503n71 Cassirer, Ernst 240n139, 241, 256

568 Castaneda, Carlos 203n52, 213, 214, 216, 217n83, 460n622, 461n626 Chen Du Xiu 488, 489n45, 491, 500 Chen Guying 57 Chen Pingyuan 4n4, 36n99, 160n88, 207n66, 522n113, 548 Chen Puqing xv, 13, 23n72 Chen Yinke 308, 397 Chinese nation 35, 160, 238, 308, 320, 486, 498, 500, 509, 510, 513–515, 528, 548 Civilized 29, 30, 63, 75, 77, 80, 86, 96, 113, 138, 164, 185, 187, 204, 206, 207, 209, 252, 254, 260, 288, 292, 299, 311, 314, 321, 334, 394, 398, 399, 408, 424, 426, 435, 511, 514 Clifford, James 441, 443n583 Colonialism 47, 126, 321, 323, 333, 346, 387, 389, 391, 392, 396, 398, 406, 485, 492, 511, 535, 543, 545, 554 Colonization 391, 392, 394, 399, 408, 537, 543, 547 Comedy 6, 101, 102, 106, 107, 144, 296, 346, 420 Confucian 228, 229, 354, 491, 508, 509, 561 Confucianism 228, 229, 265, 351, 562 Crowther, Paul 407 Cultural revolution xvi, xvii, 16, 26, 29, 46, 79, 112, 299, 345, 360n411, 363, 370, 371, 389, 396, 403, 416, 433, 455, 465, 481, 526, 527n121, 528n124, 565 studies 52, 182, 291–310, 358, 466, 536 Cupitt, Don 237, 534 Dale, Tom 393n486, 393n488, 399n501, 405, 408n522, 503n71 Dante 349 Darwin, Charles 91, 209, 245, 249 de Balzac, Honoré 105, 155, 156, 538n15 de Beauvoir, Simone 20 de Chardin, Pierre Teilhard 280 de Montesquieu, Baron 428, 429 de Saussure, Ferdinand 158n85, 197, 206n62, 211n72, 212n73, 525n120 de Tracy, Destutt 355 Deconstructed 77, 186, 339 Deleuze, Gilles 196, 279, 286, 290, 443n584, 444n586, 465, 566 Deng Xiaoping 350n386, 543, 545

Index Derrida, Jacques 47n124, 196n41, 214 Dewey, John 142n61, 143 Dialogue xvi, xviii, 19, 57, 197, 199, 204, 208, 237, 277, 278, 305, 417, 462, 464–483, 485, 486, 492, 500, 507, 515, 516, 531n135, 536–538, 566 Dilthey, Wilhelm 403, 404 Dirlik, Arif xiv, 117n7, 391, 542, 547n26 Discourse x, xvi, xvii, 3, 20, 30, 37, 41n110, 43n117, 78, 113, 177, 179, 181n16, 188, 198, 200, 203, 207, 214, 216, 217, 250, 282, 309, 345, 358, 359, 365, 366, 368, 372, 376, 382n462, 409n523, 421, 423, 426, 452n602, 466n6, 468, 470, 471n13, 475, 476, 478–482, 486n39, 492, 496, 513, 515, 518n101, 525, 528n125, 534–541, 545–548, 551, 553, 554, 557, 559, 564, 565 Discursive xi, xvi, xvii, xviii, 12, 31, 47, 120, 150, 169, 188, 189, 201, 212, 346, 414, 421, 465, 467, 472, 474–476, 482, 512, 533–560, 563, 565, 566 d’Ohsson, Constantin 206n63, 350n384, 511 Dorson, Richard 277, 443 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 217n84, xviiin16 Dreyer, Carl 182 Dundes, Alan 277, 277n202, 433n581, 443n581, 447n592, 451n597, 457, 458n616 Dystopian 306, 307 Dystopian criticism 386 Ecological 37, 41, 44, 45, 122, 125, 127–130, 132, 141, 145, 146, 161, 277–283, 286–289, 305, 342n362, 385, 391, 392n483, 409, 439, 443, 446, 499 Ecologism 32, 281, 282 Ecology xv, 37, 41n111, 73, 120, 122, 127, 133, 203, 277–291, 357n407, 391, 396, 455, 507, 547 Economy xi, 178, 282, 310–349, 351, 356, 364n424, 365n430, 377n446, 381, 392, 399, 491, 517, 529, 539, 549, 562 Eco, Umberto 179, 533 Edmundson, Mark 20 Eliot, T. S. 80 Empathy xi, xiv, 31, 40, 45, 73, 87, 91, 92, 115–173

Index Emplacement 120–132, 185, 415, 417, 418, 421, 422, 428, 429, 438, 445, 462 Engels, Frederick 248n160, 310n276, 315n282, 413n528, 430, 529n127 Environment xv, xvi, 8, 12, 13, 24, 31, 32, 55, 70, 73, 78, 82, 88, 91, 110, 111, 120, 121, 123, 144, 148, 149, 162, 171, 172, 191, 200, 205, 220, 226, 235, 238, 242, 243, 268, 272, 277–279, 282, 283, 285, 288–290, 297–300, 302, 304, 306, 314, 320, 326, 327, 329, 344, 346, 347, 350, 351, 357, 379, 381, 383, 389, 391, 398, 399, 406, 408, 409, 420, 423, 438, 443–447, 450–453, 455, 459, 460, 462, 464, 474, 475, 489, 494, 500, 505, 533, 547, 548, 564 Esthetics 116 Ethnic character 234, 354, 483–485, 495, 501, 504, 511 culture 209, 211, 291, 296 Ethnicity/ies 24, 30, 33, 73, 75, 108, 132, 187, 205, 207, 209, 226–229, 247, 252, 255, 279, 282, 291, 295, 296, 304, 352, 354, 358, 358n409, 359, 361, 367, 375, 380, 392, 397, 419, 440, 451, 458, 459n620, 465, 467, 483, 496n58, 510, 513, 554, 555 Ethnographic 48, 440, 441, 447, 452 Ethnographic allegory 440, 441 Ethnography 440, 441, 443, 451 Ethnology 241, 292 Ethno-nationalism 344 Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan 205n59, 226, 442n577 Fables 4n4, 5–10, 13, 15, 22–27, 28n80, 39, 83, 106, 177–463, 466, 467 Fei Xiaotong 256n178, 453n605, 504n75, 509, 510n88 Feuerbach, Ludwig 225, 227n118, 240, 241, 364n424 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 131, 493 Fick, August 315 Fokkema, Douwe 390, 547n25 Folklore 16, 22, 23n69, 24n75, 277, 280, 292, 358n410, 439–463 Folklore studies 16, 292, 358n410, 440n570, 442, 447, 451, 452, 454, 457, 458, 462n627

569 Forster, E. M. 78, 81, 85, 137n58, 151, 191n35 Foucault, Michel 120n11, 125, 127, 130, 188n33, 246, 247, 252, 279n203, 426, 445, 460, 520, 536 Frazer, James G. 219, 223n109, 225n115, 264n185 Frazier, J. G. 442 Freud, Sigmund 50n3, 225n114, 237, 245, 275 Fromm, Eric 110n74, 257n179, 433, 486 Frye, Northrop 144, 145n66, 183, 441, 464 Fu Zhufu 315, 319, 320n301 Fukuyama, Francis 399, 405 Fukuzawa Yukichi 297, 299, 502 Gadamer, Hans Georg 21, 36, 115n2, 177, 179n8, 204n57, 439, 467, 472n14, 474n17, 482n30, 516n96 Gao Jianqun 308, 309n272 Ge Zhiyi 126n26, 320, 452n602 Gellner, Ernest 485n37, 495 Genders 51, 52n8, 75, 189, 209, 258–276, 306, 327, 367, 380, 406, 458, 513, 555, 557 Genette, Gerard 3, 36n99, 41, 43 Genghis Khan 169n113, 171n116, 207n64, 223, 258n181, 267n190, 295, 296n243, 300, 308n271, 309n272, 327n329, 329n332, 330n333, 345, 350n385, 350n388, 372, 384, 400n503, 402n506, 402n510, 411, 454n609, 456n613, 459n620, 468, 504n73, 511, 529 Giddens, Anthony 495 Gillespie, Gerald 6 Globalization xiv, xvii, xviii, 19, 49, 84n46, 117n7, 358n409, 385, 387, 390–392, 405, 406, 409, 469, 505, 528, 534n4, 535, 537, 542n17, 547n25, 550, 551n33, 557 Globalize 401, 406 Globalizing 346, 399, 505 Goldmann, Lucien x, 132 Gorky, Maxim 155 Grassland logic 60, 62, 63, 75, 76, 79, 126, 132, 135, 185, 198, 251, 254 Gray, John 316n287, 318n296, 320, 427n547 Green fiction 287 Grousset, René 223n108, 299n247, 301n253, 302n255, 314, 352n395, 454n609, 494n54, 511

570 Guanzi 126, 393n487, 563 Guo Moruo 315, 316n286 Guo Xuebo 14 Habermas, Jürgen 371 Hall, Stuart 358 Hamada Masahide 9 He, Bingdi 398 Head, Henry 209 Hegel, Georg 192n38, 241n144, 257n180, 308n269, 392n484, 435n561 Heidegger, Martin 63n26, 438n567, 565 Hemingway 48, 49n126 Herman, David 38n103, 40n107, 43n115, 48, 52n10, 128n30, 188n32, 275n197 Heterotopias 120–132, 478 Hicks, John 339 Historiography 21, 126, 259, 292, 387–414, 441 Hobbes, Thomas 202n51, 282, 487 Hobsbawn, Eric J. 502 Hopkins, A. G. 391 Hughes, Langston 421, 422n543 Huntington, Samuel P. 293–295, 310n273, 566 Ibsch, Elrud 390 Ideologically 354, 361, 363, 477, 478 Ideology xvii, 10, 13, 35, 82, 89n54, 188, 219, 232, 250, 289, 300, 322n321, 324–327, 335, 343–347, 349, 350, 353–356, 358, 361, 363–369, 371, 374, 376, 378, 380–382, 385–387, 390, 391, 416, 420, 436, 478, 495, 513, 529, 538, 539, 541, 551, 557, 561, 562, 563, 565, 566 Internal colonists 402 Internal colony 347, 395, 396 Irigaray, Luce 470 Iser, Wolfgang 180, 182, 186 Jacoby, Russell xiii, 19n3, 21n64, 47n122, 131n36, 550n32, 552, 555n38, 564 Jakobson, Roman 45, 550n31 Jameson, Fredric xiv, xvii, 8n14, 12, 34, 49n127, 113, 383, 386n467, 535, 542, 547n25, 553, 556, 566 James, Saint 237 Jia Pingwa 14, 33, 34, 549

Index Jiang Xiaoyuan 288 Jin Yuelin 304n261, 463 Kafka, Franz 9–11, 18, 35, 81, 82, 171, 214, 386, 520 Kandinsky, Wassily 160, 164, 165n102 Kang Zhengguo 271, 382n463 Kant, Immanuel 64, 87, 116n6, 161, 179, 240, 245, 253, 254n172, 282, 552n35 Kayser, Wolfgang 134, 230n123 Kierkegaard, Søren 7, 194n39, 215, 216n79, 216n80, 290, 479n24 Kipling, Rudyard 126 Krishnamurti, Jiddu 438, 439n568 Krylov, Ivan 7, 18, 26, 27 Kubin, Wolfgang x, 500, 511, 549 Kuhn, Thomas 557 Labor 137, 153, 255, 264–268, 270, 310–349, 355, 362, 363, 375, 379, 394, 423, 459, 491, 521, 562 Labour 310, 314–318, 322, 325n320, 334, 347, 355, 356, 366 Lacan, Jacques 50 Lama 353, 372 Lamaism, Tibetan 220n99, 327n328, 351–353, 400 Lamaists 353 Langer, Susanne 16n45, 102, 103, 119, 121n15, 135, 136, 141, 146, 170, 171n114, 181n17 Lanser, Susan 19, 20, 275, 470n12, 477n20 Laozi 4, 57 Larrain, Jorge 313, 322n312, 356, 358n409, 363n420, 366, 368n434, 368n435, 371n438, 371n440, 376n444, 385, 386n465, 386n468, 500n68 Laszlo, Ervin 56n13, 282, 402, 437n566 Leavis, F. R. 52n9, 80 Lei Da 507 Leopold, Aldo 286 Lessing, Gotthold 7, 15, 26 Levi-Strauss, Claude 269n192, 281, 450n594, 453n604 Lewis, Arthur 343, 344, 348, 407 Li Ling 546 Li Shenzhi 309, 310n273 Li Zehou 303n258, 504n74, 531n135, 560, 562n6 Liang Qichao 412, 484, 509

571

Index Linguistics 45n119, 48, 78, 117, 121, 147, 148, 157, 158, 161, 192n37, 196–217, 245, 493, 525n120, 536n10, 550, 559 Linguistically 209 Liotard, Jean Etienne 168 Lipps, Theodor 115, 116n5, 118n9 Llosa, Mario Vargas 3, 18, 150n77, 161n91, 529 Locke, John 229 Logic of the grassland 52–65, 70, 100, 125, 126, 129, 132, 162, 186, 200, 201, 228, 251, 254, 281–283, 307, 315, 350, 396, 445, 451, 481, 515 London, Jack 28, 29, 30n86, 31, 303 Lorenz, Konrad 284 Lu Shuyuan 277, 289, 415n531 Lu Xun 385, 488, 498 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 42n112, 69 Ma, Changshan 14 Ma Da 13, 14n35, 466 Malinowski, Bronislaw 256n178, 295n242, 453n605, 453n607, 455, 504 Mannheim, Karl 354, 355n401, 380n457, 381n459, 566 Mao, Chairman. See Mao Zedong Mao Zedong xiv, 3, 28, 78, 242n148, 350n386, 359, 360n413, 363n417, 363n418, 369–371, 465, 526, 540, 542, 544, 545, 550, 563 Marcuse, Herbert 115–173, 373, 374n443, 378n452, 382n462, 410n526, 436n562 Marett, Robert 442, 448n593, 450n595, 453n603, 453n606, 459n618 Marx, Karl 153n81, 225n111, 225n112, 310n276, 314n281, 322, 334n339, 334n340, 346n374, 347n376, 364n423, 391n482, 413n528, 493n53, 562 Maslow, Abraham 64 Maternal instinct 260–266, 269, 270, 276 Matus, Don Juan 203n52, 213, 217, 287, 461 Mead, Margaret 274 Mediate 196, 200, 202, 207, 208, 211, 215 Mediating 200, 204, 208, 214 Mediation 196–217 Mediator 196, 198, 201, 207, 234 Mensching, Gustav 236 Metaphor 9, 11, 38n103, 40, 41, 48, 55, 87, 128n30, 146n71, 188, 194, 196n41, 391, 407n519, 549, 550n31 Miller, J. Hillis 42n112, 89

Mill, John Stuart 96, 335n346, 430 Modernism 11, 19, 47, 73, 86, 117, 186, 307, 505, 542, 553 Moltmann, Jürgen 208n67, 237, 392n484, 542 Moore, Thomas 46 Moore-Gilbert, Bart 126n27, 537n11, 540 Morgan, Lewis 315, 469 Morris, Desmond 270n194, 284, 416 Narratology 36, 38n103, 39, 40, 43n115, 43n116, 43n118, 48, 52, 121n14, 128n30, 133, 188, 275n197, 304n259 National character xii, 30, 35, 218, 229, 239, 240, 255, 309, 312, 324n317, 366, 374, 382, 385, 464, 479–481, 483–506, 514, 522, 528 Nationalism 238, 239n138, 256n177, 291n234, 297n244, 307n267, 324, 337, 343, 344, 346, 368, 381, 406, 420, 439, 483n34, 484, 485, 492–496, 497n62, 498–501, 505, 506, 512, 525, 526, 528, 554 Nationalist 12, 513, 525, 536 Nationality 16, 51, 252, 380, 454n608 Nation states xvii, xviii, 79, 108, 123, 229, 289, 323, 324, 335, 337, 338, 344–348, 362, 363, 366–368, 378, 381, 395, 406, 412, 485, 495, 496, 500, 504, 513, 515, 535, 544–547, 562, 565 Nations/states xviii, 344, 362, 367, 378, 381, 395, 485, 547 Needham, Joseph 319 Negative freedom 418, 420, 421, 424 Negative liberty 417–419, 423, 436 Newby, P.T. 55n12, 133 Newton 297 Nietzsche, Friedrich 7, 63, 64n28, 99, 104, 113, 238n136, 246n153, 247n155, 255, 334, 386n468, 531, 558 Nomadic xii, 67, 101, 110, 185, 187, 193, 212, 226, 279, 282, 287, 290–292, 294–296, 298, 301, 308, 314–316, 322, 328, 329, 340, 347, 350, 353, 354, 383, 388, 392, 394, 395, 399, 443, 483–487, 489, 491, 508–510 North, Douglass C. 325, 326n321–326n323, 329, 334n341, 335n347, 336n352, 338n355, 342, 344, 345, 346n373, 366, 366n431, 381n460, 388n475, 566 Nostalgia for wolves 14, 33–35, 549

572 Olson, Mancur 335n346, 348 Owen, Stephen 14n42, 522 Palmer, Leonard R. 197, 198n44, 209n68, 536n10 Patronymic codes 187, 189, 192, 193, 198, 201, 216 Performance 38, 140, 147, 262, 345, 363, 425, 440, 441, 443, 444, 446–448, 450, 451, 456, 458, 462, 541 Performative 443, 451 Phaedrus 5 Philosophy xi, xii, xxin8, 7, 9, 47n124, 57n17, 75n37, 79, 89, 104n67, 130, 131, 177, 178, 224, 225n111, 230, 240, 241, 246, 253n170, 256, 258, 259, 281, 282, 303n258, 306, 349n383, 355n402, 361n414, 364n423, 378n454, 404, 413n528, 414–439, 452n600, 462, 486, 530 Plato 7, 280n206, 306, 307 Post-allegory xiv, xv, xvi, 18, 23, 35, 106, 113, 185, 194, 195, 440, 441, 481, 482, 558, 564, 565 Postcolonial criticism 19, 32, 48, 464–532, 536, 537n13, 540, 544, 545n23, 547n25, 547n26, 553 Postcolonialism 12, 47, 232, 279, 338, 406, 464, 465, 513, 528, 541, 547n25, 554, 559 Postcolonial theory 46, 117n7, 126n27, 128, 537, 540–542, 544, 546, 551, 554, 555 Postcriticism 35n98, 109, 177, 246 Postethnography 443 Postmodernism xiv, xvi, xvii, 12, 19, 20, 47, 49n127, 50–114, 117, 385, 386, 407n520, 499, 534n4, 540, 541, 544, 551n33, 553–555, 559 Postmodernity 10, 45, 113, 117n7, 199n45, 250, 534, 542 Postmodern/postcolonial 48, 553, 557 Postsocialism 512, 539 Postutopian allegory xviii, 46, 119 criticism ix–xviii, 46, 47, 109, 112, 114, 386, 405, 419, 551–560, 563, 564, 565 Primal freedom 52, 53, 56–58, 64–81, 89, 91, 92, 98, 185, 186, 281, 415, 424, 429, 437, 438

Index Primal nature 38, 45, 52–66, 71, 75–77, 79, 80, 86, 91, 92, 101, 103, 105, 110, 112, 116, 119, 124, 126, 141, 158, 165, 185, 189, 200, 203, 204, 216, 248, 251, 268, 276, 280–283, 286, 287, 349, 357, 370, 391, 401, 405, 429, 438, 441, 444, 452, 462 Primal state of nature 105, 129 Property rights 335–337, 342, 347, 413 Proust, Marcel 3, 172 Race xv, 30, 34, 61, 63, 103, 105, 124, 209, 212, 239–241, 259, 265, 281–283, 289, 292, 296, 305, 307, 316, 380, 385, 415, 463, 502, 505 Religious studies 217–239 Rename 45, 161, 162, 193 Renaming 45, 47, 48, 73, 184, 192, 193, 216, 495, 496, 535 Revolution xv, xvi, xvii, 8, 12, 16, 26, 29, 30, 40, 46, 48, 79, 83, 84, 109, 112, 124, 131, 159, 160, 192, 221, 233, 249n163, 252n167, 278, 299, 307, 313, 336, 345, 354, 359, 360, 363–366, 370, 371, 373, 380–382, 386, 389, 390, 392, 396, 401–403, 412, 413n528, 416, 417, 419n540, 420, 433, 436, 455, 465, 478, 481, 502, 517–532, 535, 536, 538, 539, 541, 548, 556n39, 558, 561, 562, 563, 565 Revolutionary xv, 12, 30, 83, 84, 124, 131, 159, 160, 192, 359, 366, 370, 371, 373, 380n457, 390, 401, 402, 420, 526–529, 532, 536, 538 Rhythm 61, 103, 105, 119, 132–146, 153, 170, 339, 465, 474, 481, 482, 520 Robinson, Joan 332, 342, 348 Rolland, Romain 290 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 80, 247n158, 409, 414, 421, 426–430, 433, 437, 506 Ruskin, John 3, 178, 180, 522, 523 Said, Edward 20, 394n492, 468, 513, 535, 536n10, 537, 554, 566 Salinger, J. D. 517 Saltykov-Shchedrin, Mikhail 7, 18, 27 Sartre, Jean Paul 118, 166, 172, 290 Saussure, Ferdinand 148, 157, 192n37 Schopenhauer, Arthur 104, 112, 114 Self-consciousness 65, 116, 252, 255, 281, 417, 434

Index Semiological 158 Semiology 148, 158, 179, 182, 197 Semiotics 146–148, 180–197, 482n31 Sex 20, 34, 245n151, 258–260, 264, 268, 270, 274–276, 470n12 Shaman 199n46, 203, 213, 359, 477 Shamanism 199n46, 351, 353, 400, 440n571 Shaw, George Bernard 303, 325 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 106, 527 Shklovsky, Viktor 17n49, 36n99, 68, 85, 86, 120n13, 121n16, 141n60, 162n93, 166n105, 464n2, 519, 549 Sholokhov, Mikhail 416, 524 Signifiers 10, 35, 47, 112, 192, 194, 467, 486, 538, 557 Signs  xv, 17, 20–22, 25, 40, 45, 47, 52, 66, 67, 78, 79, 100, 131, 133, 137, 147, 148, 153, 157, 158, 166, 168, 177, 185–187, 192–194, 197, 201, 226, 257, 276, 278, 283, 309, 329n331, 357, 405, 554, 556, 560, 566 Skinner, B. F. 299, 302n254, 302n256 Skinner, Quentin 423, 424 Smith, Adam 282, 310, 312, 316, 322, 323, 325n320, 329, 331, 334n344, 335n346, 337, 342, 343, 348n377, 355n402 Socrates 7, 240, 256 Spengler 404 Spinoza 499 Spivak, Gayatri 537, 547n25 Stanislavski, Constantin 154 Stanzel, Franz K. 119, 122, 485n38 Stavrianos, Leften 390–392, 566 Steiner, George 200, 204, 205n60, 210n71, 215n78 Structural 40, 120n11, 121, 122, 127–132, 134, 145, 146, 167n108, 181, 277, 326 Stuff 444, 446–448, 453, 455, 458, 459, 515 Subjects 5, 10, 17, 39, 41–44, 47, 50–53, 55, 64, 66, 73, 74, 80, 81, 90, 99, 103, 108, 110, 116, 117, 127, 131–133, 136, 151, 153, 158, 161, 169, 172, 173, 181, 182, 193, 201, 204, 210, 243, 244, 256, 259, 283, 292, 300, 307, 313, 331, 368, 370, 381, 429n551, 444, 446, 448, 473–476, 485, 492 Subject position 39, 42–44, 47, 50–114, 116–118, 131, 136, 158, 169, 173, 193, 210, 243, 244, 259, 444, 446, 473–476

573 Sublime 64, 69, 76, 104, 112, 129, 284, 306–308, 404, 424, 426, 505 Sumner, William Graham 444, 445, 460, 461, 462n628 Sunzi 235, 296 Symbol 4, 7, 8, 11, 12, 21, 29, 32, 46, 51, 56, 76, 81, 85, 96, 100, 110, 121, 123, 129, 142, 144, 146, 166, 171, 182, 184–187, 190, 192–194, 197–199, 203, 206, 213, 216, 217, 219n92, 220, 257, 259, 275, 276, 307, 312, 366, 374, 377, 411, 414, 416, 422, 426, 438–440, 455, 456, 485, 513, 515, 535, 539, 540 Symbolic 8n15, 17, 21, 22, 50, 51, 55, 81, 119, 130, 141, 170, 181, 182, 184–187, 191, 192, 194, 197, 201, 202, 214, 226, 279, 354n400, 355, 357, 360, 377, 389, 404, 406, 455, 537, 542 Tagore, Rabindranath 239, 256n177, 291, 297n244, 307n267, 483, 497, 505 Tao Lifan 452n599, 454, 458n617 Taylor, Archer 441 Teng Shouyao 115n3, 149, 150n76 Third world xivn11, xvii, 8n14, 12, 20, 34, 128, 313n278, 336, 344, 348, 349, 356n403, 465, 481, 482, 496, 534, 535, 540, 542–548, 551n33, 554, 566 Thomas, W. J. 441 Thompson, John B. 354, 354n400, 355n401, 363n419, 364n421, 365n426, 376, 378n453, 378n455, 380n456–380n458, 381n461, 566 Thompson, Stith 21, 23n70 Thoreau, Henry David 518 Todorov, Tzvetan xviii, 4, 184n27, 217n84, 356n406, 464n1, 483, 499n64, 566 Tolstoy, Leo 68, 151, 182, 290, 303, 467, 480, 527 Toynbee, Arnold J. 253, 292, 293, 404 Tragedy 7n11, 51, 59, 63, 64n28, 68, 69n34, 81, 97–114, 134, 140, 141, 144, 172n117, 199, 346, 440, 517 Tragic 17, 51, 53, 81, 97–99, 101–103, 105–107, 110–113, 122, 124, 142, 238, 420, 422, 440, 476, 487, xviiin16 Tragicomedy 102, 103 Transcultural xiii, 4, 12, 52, 56, 182, 325, 451, 536, 552

574 Transgression 76, 130, 246, 435, 476, 507, 557, 559 Translating 9, 200, 213, 221n100 Translation 4n4, 6n9, 10, 12n25, 24n74, 26, 28n82, 29, 45, 47, 70n36, 136n56, 166n106, 196–217, 221n100, 249n163, 300n251, 326n326, 390n477, 407, 421n541, 433n559, 436n564, 468, 470, 508n86, 559n43, 561n4 Transnational 346, 547n26 Tu Wei-ming 84n46, 265 Turgenev 519 Ulmer, Gregory 35 Utopia xv, xvii, 19, 35, 45–47, 51, 79, 112, 130, 131, 192, 193, 218, 229, 289, 305–307, 310, 355n401, 380n457, 381n459, 413n528, 418, 499, 513, 549, 552, 555–557, 559, 561–566 Utopian xv, xvii, 8, 46–48, 78, 130–132, 177–463, 513, 550n32, 551–553, 555, 556, 558, 560, 562–565 von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang xviii, 8, 111n75, 160, 178n5, 239n137, 250n166, 258, 530 von Mises, Ludwig 323–325, 334, 337, 343, 345, 395n494 Walsh, W. H. 404 Wang Gen 265 Wang Jian’ge 316n288, 319, 329n330, 329n331, 400n504 Wang Ning 534n5, 537, 547n25, 547n26, 551n33

Index Weatherford, Jack 169n113, 171n116, 207n64, 258, 267n190, 296n243, 300n252, 327n329, 329n332, 330n333, 345, 350n385, 351n388, 352n393, 354n399, 400n503, 402, 456n613, 459n620, 459n621, 504n73 Weber, Max 377, 402, xviin18 West, Cornel 20 Whitehead, Alfred North 437, 512, 553 Wilde, Alan 19, 512 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 183, 203, 204n56 Xie Xuanjun 22 Xu Xun 496 Xunzi 249 Yanagita Kunio 203n54, 221, 222, 232, 462n627 Yang Xuezheng 219, 220n95 Yang Yi 36n99, 40n108, 42, 121n14, 121n17, 130, 131, 145n68, 148n74, 304n259 Yang Zhijun 14 Yasuda Yoshinori 489 Ye Shuxian 182, 217, xn5 Ye Xiushan 57 Zhang Longxi 9, 10, 15, 47, 69n34 Zhong Jingwen 24, 442 Zhou Guoxing 22n65, 32, 263, 264n184 Zhu Guangqian 68, 69n34 Zhuangzi 4, 5, 7, 15, 24, 57, 347n375 Zhuo Xinping 234n126, 238n135, 294 Zolotarev, Aleksandr Mikhailovich 219 Zuo zhuan 452, 562n6