Contemporary Chinese Literature: Han Shaogong
In the post-Mao China, ‘Root Seeking Literature’ project emerged antinomically: on the one hand it had to demolish the old fort of Cultural Revolution, while procreate new cultural subject from the bottom of the fort, on the other hand. Han Shaogong’s stories and novellas produced in this period teem with schizophrenic symptoms, with positive and negative narrative entangled each other, which is caused by the dilemma of the ’Root Seeking’ project. Concerning this dilemma, I explored the equivocality of the subject in “Pa, Pa, Pa”, especially focusing on the issue of language. [unique_solution]The main argument of this article unfolds through my critical reading of Rong Cai’s analysis of “Pa, Pa, Pa”. She, employing Lacan’s language theory, insists that the lack of voice ultimately denies Bing Zai passage into the Symbolic, which consequently equals a denial of subjectivity. In my views, however, she failed to notice the split of subjectivity in Lacan’s theory. In other words, although a subject is able to acquire the subjectivity by entering the language order of the Symbolic, at the very moment it loses its own being because it is to be subjected to the language system of the Symbolic. Here comes the paradox that the speaking subject is also the spoken subject. Subject is schizophrenic, split up from its own being. More important thing is that the pre-verbal or pre-Symbolic stage is not likely a pejorative term in Han’s works. To the contrary, he warns that once the relation between the words and the meaning becomes rigid and inflexible, frenzy is prone to occur, which is the salient sign in the age of civilization. For him, the pre-verbal language is the repository in which the divine nature of words before its degeneration is cherished. It is the departure spot where Han’s writing began. Disturbing the stiff relation between the signifier and the signified embedded in the normal language, and seizing a glimmer of words from the crack: this is the long literary design Han Shaogong has projected. “Pa, Pa, Pa” keeps the despair in the era when the sacred light disappeared, and the desperation for grabbing the faint memory for it. Bing Zai is not only a symbol of the decline of language, but also a cryptic evidence of the pre-verbal words. And, it is the profound water vein, that is, the root of culture which Han wanted to search for. It is an established fact that the ‘root-seeking’ literature, aroused in the mid-1980s, serves as an important chapter in Chinese Contemporary Literature. Although, despite in such established position, it’s meaning is still debated to this day as; an ‘enlightening’ narrative declaring the individual’s salvation and the liberation of reason that is also a post-modern narrative showing the infinite germination of symbol; an ethnic narrative that confirms the potential of Chinese culture, that also serves as a critical narrative that reveals their lag and under-development; anti-Communist narratives that points out to the evil of Socialism and the Cultural Revolution, that also portray the inner conspiracy between the individual and the state through skeptical modern narratives. Han Shaogong ‘s ‘root-seeking’ narratives, as such, have created continued discourse — a prism of broad ranged interpretations. Such interpretations are mainly due to the complexity in Han’s work. His early works and novellas are especially experimental. Chronologically, his work that experiments on imagination of Chinese myths, magical realism, and ‘flow of consciousness’, lies in between the discourse of scar/mirror literature’s thin politicism and the structure of avant-garde literature. If scar/mirror literature returned as a Cultural Revolution rejecting party-ideology by accusing the Cultural Revolution for scarring the individual, complex literary techniques ambushed in Han’s novels block his statement on the Cultural Revolution from becoming an ideology.