.
.
.
.
.
.
.
This phenomenon, and my affective responses to it, sooner or later, will become a memory for me to savour, though little did I know that it had never been there in the first place (qtd. in Chang, “Wangran,” 4).
Most people would probably translate the words “wangran” (惘然) as “[something that has] already disappeared.” I do not agree with this translation in this particular case, for the words “dangshi” (當時) can be understood as “at the time when it is/was happening.” In this sense, the phrase “dangshi yi wangran” (當時已惘然) would probably mean “at the time it is/was happening, it has not been there.” This seemingly oxymoronic (the incongruence between the “it is/was” and “it has not been”) phrase is, read in this light, the poet’s attempt to capture the “present” that language can never capture: what language refers to, and as a result, what one imagines as, the “now” is merely a tension between the “present” that is impossible to capture, and the “present” that has already passed (see, for example, Guillaume).
“Se, jie” (Lust, Caution), one of the novellas within the collection (made familiar to the Euro-American audience by Ang Lee’s 2007 adaptation) fascinates the public as it is often read as Chang’s attempt to superimpose her autobiographical sketch on top of the fictionalised experience of Zheng Pingru (1918-39; see Chen). In the short story, Wang Jiazhi (supposedly the fictional substitute of Zheng Pingru), a patriotic stage actress who works for the Kuomintang (KMT) Chunking government during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, is sent by the Zhongtongju (The KMT Central Council of Intelligence) to romantically seduce a man who works for the Japanese-controlled Nanking government, Mr. Yi. One day, Mr. Yi proposes to buy Jiazhi a ring made of a gem that is almost impossible to find during the occupation. Here, Chang’s autobiographical touch enters, as Chang suggests that Jiazhi has probably fallen in love with Mr. Yi while carrying out her work (in life, Chang was married to the intellectual playboy Hu Lancheng, who worked for the Nanking government). As a result, at the last minute, in the jewellery store, Jiazhi warns Mr. Yi of the assassins outside. Because of her warning, Mr. Yi escapes, while Jaizhi, on her way to find refuge in a relative’s home (at the time, she has been “renting” a room from Mrs. Yi), finds herself in the middle of a blockade in downtown Shanghai. We later on see Mr. Yi arriving home safely, and he confesses to the readers that it was he who called the municipal office to set up the blockade, in an attempt to capture Jiazhi and execute her that evening.
I happened to read “Se, jie” only recently. The moment I put down the book, I thought: “中國人的道德觀往往是從八卦週刊的框框裡養出來的” (Ethics, in the eyes of many Chinese, is something that one nurtures out of the weekly tabloids).
By reading “Se, jie” as an autobiographical sketch, one treats the novella as a piece of material for ethical masturbation: one derives pleasure from peeking through the text as a window into the world of Chang’s political or sexual “perversion” (as defined by the dominant standard), and even more pleasure by publicly condemning it. In fact, a contemporary critic Yuwai Ren describes his reaction to the text as “毛骨悚然” (mao gu songran; chilled to the bone; qtd. in Chang, “Tan”). Nevertheless, as we know, being chilled to the bone is a symptom of the symptom, a reaction towards and against the uncanny: familiarity/unfamiliarity, attraction/abjection, pleasure/displeasure. Soaked within the public jouissance of this public discourse, nobody seems to pay attention to the récit of the text--the true site of the uncanny that everybody has avoided probably because it is too painful to touch.
Those of us who are familiar with the novellas of Eileen Chang written during the occupation could probably point out her reliance on the popular novel from the Republican period (especially the Yuanyang hudie pai, or the Butterfly School of melodramatic writing) as her immediate model, though as Rey Chow suggests, the merit of her work lies in the defamiliarisation of the trivials, which offers new sensations for the readers towards what would otherwise be considered as social or cultural stereotypes or melodramatic narrative elements (see Chow, 85). “Se, jie” carries on some of these, though in addition, the novella gives its readers a sensation of temporal dissonance, something that Chang inherits probably more from a combination of the European modernists from the beginning of the century, or the Xin ganjue pai (New Sensationalist) movement in Shanghai from the early 1930s.
By temporal dissonance, I do not mean only temporal discontinuity, a feature that Chang employs by leaping from one temporal unit to another between paragraphs, or even within a paragraph, without any form of transition. What creates the dissonance is that this apparent structure of temporal discontinuity between narrative fragments is framed within a stagnant time bubble. In other words, despite jumping relentlessly between different times and spaces, the entire story, at least up to the point when Jiazhi is temporally (or even physically) arrested in the city centre by the blockade, takes place within approximately two hours, in a temporal, highly personal, yet political ennui (literally, a drag, or a state of boredom) that defies the flow of time. In fact, the ennui is exceptionally similar to that Chang creates in her earlier novella, “Fengsuo” (Blockade), a story about a woman, within a period of twenty minutes, finding herself trapped in a crowded tram and falling in love with a stranger, only realising later that life would go on after the blockade as though nothing had ever happened (Chang, “Fengsuo”).
What “Se, jie” dramatises is therefore this tension in time: the juxtaposition between a collection of irreconcilable, discreet, and un-capturable temporal fragments, and the seemingly endless, almost unrealistically boring chronological drag. Nevertheless, juxtaposition may not be the best word to describe the temporal relationships between these narrative fragments; rather, these seemingly dissonant elements are superimposed on top of each other as though language were a crystal that separates what the human perception fails to distinct in time. For example, on her way to the coffee shop in which Jiazhi would wait for his private limousine, she thinks about the difficulty of maintaining Mr. Yi’s attention:
他是實在誘惑太多，顧不過來，一個眼不見，就會丟在腦後。還非得釘著他，簡直需要提溜著兩隻乳房在他眼前晃。
“兩年前也沒有這樣嚜，”他捫著吻著她的時候輕聲說。
他頭偎在她胸前，沒看見她臉上一紅。
就連現在想起來，也還像給針扎了一下……
He has in fact too many seductions around him, so many that he can hardly look back at her. Having not noticed her for a moment, he would put her behind his back. She must nail him; she must bare her breasts and shake them in front of his eyes in order to remind him of her existence.
“They weren’t that big two years ago, were they?” he whispered as he caressed her and kissed her.
He rested his head on her chest, so he missed her blushing.
Thinking about this now, she feels her being pinched by a needle (Chang, “Se,” 16).
Who is “he?” At first glance, this little fragment appears to be a flashback of her lovemaking with Mr. Yi. Nonetheless, contextualised within the larger narrative framework, it is uncertain who he really is. Through subsequent flashbacks, we would soon understand that this young woman has been sent on a mission before. In this mission, Jiazhi acted as a married woman in company with a classmate from the university she attended Liang Runsheng. Not only did this mission fail, as a result of her “play-acting,” Jiazhi (being a virgin of the time) slept with Liang Runsheng. The rumour about her “fall” was spread among her classmates really quickly, who often looked at her askance in their social gatherings, including a man whom she probably loved genuinely, Kuang Yumin (who also acts as her contact through the Zhongtongju network). This subplot is not told by Eileen Chang in one single stroke; rather, fragments of it emerge between the gaps of the present, often in the form of isolated gestures (a blink of an eye, the lights of neon signs of Hong Kong reflected from the puddles on the street, a burst of pride as she looked herself into the mirror after a successful stage performance), as though she saw her present mission as a displacement of her frustration, of her loss. In this light, “he” can be any man, anywhere, and each man is only a substitute, a symptom of her ennui.
In a an article about the novella (“Tan 'Se, Jie'”; On “Love, Caution”), Eileen Chang explains that whenever Jiazhi walks on the street with Mr. Yi, she feels a sense of satisfaction:
每次跟老易在一起都像洗了一個熱水澡，把積鬱都沖掉了，因為一切都有了個目的。
Every time she gets together with good old Mr. Yi, she feels like she has taken a hot bath, which washed away all the frustration that has accumulated inside her, somehow because she now has an objective for everything (Chang, “Se,” 21; qtd. in “Tan”).
In her article, Eileen Chang “translates” this into: “因為她沒白犧牲了童貞” (because she has not lost her virginity for nothing; Chang, “Tan”). Virginity, I argue, is only a symptom. This tentative satisfaction in fact comes from Jiazhi’s submission to the dominant moral standard around her: to feel like a bourgeois wife shopping for a ring with her socially powerful “husband” (in the eyes of the other/Other), to be a woman who enjoys materialistic pleasure, to be a commodity of exchange between men, and to embrace her superficiality as is—all bourgeois values being tightly packed and figured in her hymen, i.e. the eternal ennui of being a “woman” as imagined by the domoinant heternormative order.
Jiazhi’s willingness to seek relief in the Law of the Father is an interesting riddle for those of us who are willing to to seek in Eileen Chang’s work a form of feminist resistance. In fact, women who succumb to the patriarchy are not entirely new in her work (Bai Liusu in “Qincheng zhi lian” (Love in a Fallen City); Ch’i-ch’iao in “Jin Suoji” (“The Golden Cangue”), to name two well-known examples; see these respective works). Jiazhi’s surrender to the Law illustrates a subjective passivity, a reliance on the Other as a belief system; similarly, Mr. Yi, who later on confesses that he betrays Jiazhi in order to fulfil his responsibility to the authority expresses his equal belief in the Other—a concept that Žižek calls “interpassivity” (see Žižek). In this sense, it is perhaps easy for us to see that Jiazhi has succumbed to the power of a man (and all patriarchal and political powers he represents), but what Eileen Chang tells us in this secret confession of Jiazhi is her comfort to know that she and Mr. Yi are both interpassively connected through the Other: to unveil what other people around her have misrecognised—the misrecognition of Mr. Yi, an objet petit a, as the Other. In this light, her hymen, the conflicting national flags under which they serve, their gender differences are merely displacements of a deeper crisis in the Real, the actual condition of one’s state of being whose phenomena (se) are merely displacements of what the Other has forbidden (jie) us to see.
With this in mind, the moment at which the narrator releases us from this cycle between se and jie is the moment the narrator turns around and follows Mr. Yi. The point of this coda is not so much about showing Mr. Yi’s regret as he sits down in his living room; rather, framed within the “autobiographical” text, Eileen Chang as the narrator imagines Mr. Yi’s momentary regret:
她臨終一定恨他。不過“無毒不丈父。“不是這樣的男子漢，她也不會愛他。
She must hate him before she dies. Nonetheless, “one can’t be a man without cruelty.” If he were not such a man, she would have never fallen in love with him (Chang, ”Se,“ 34).
In this sense, the Myth of the Other can only be fabricated with the mutual passivity between those men and women who are willing to believe wholeheartedly through it. Here, Mr. Yi’s ontological integrity is dependent upon his belief (through the Other) that Jiazhi relies on his being a “man” (as defined by the heteronormative patriarchy), to the extent that her giving up of her body is solely done for the cause of maintaining the consistency of the Myth. It is in this light that we can understand the way he rearticulates his own being:
他覺得她的影子會永遠依傍他，安慰他。……他們是原始的獵人與獵物的關係，虎與倀的關係，最終極的佔有。她這才生是他的人，死是他的鬼。
He feels that her shadow will forever lean against him, comfort him…. Their relationship has always been a primitive one: one between the hunter and the hunted, the tiger and the spirit of a human being who died as its prey—the ultimate form of belonging. Only in this sense can she live as his woman, and die as his ghost (Chang, ibid.).
The relationship between a tiger and the spirit of a human being who died as its prey is a powerful metaphor. In it, Jiazhi is compared with the already hunted, the already dead. What Eileen Chang unveils is the a priori condition by which a woman enters a heteronormative relationship not only from a man’s perspective, but from a woman’s imagination of a man’s perspective: the self-surrendering on the part of the woman to be the spirit of the one who has already been born into death as a man’s prey—a variant of Antigone’s até, the state of being caught between two deaths.
Can gender relationship be unbound by the Law when the process of gendering is in itself a form of interpassivity? The underlying struggle of the text is Jiazhi’s wish to say “I desire,” but this very “I” is already articulated in the passive form. The way Eileen Chang usurps the opportunity to retort is to imagine Mr. Yi’s imagination, i.e. to make sensible to the readers that the active “I,” as imagined by the the male voice, is merely imagined through the Other, something that would otherwise be impossible without the other as its agency of imagination.
The temporal fragments (from the past) that surface to the manifest fabric of the present are therefore system glitches--moments of self-defense and resistance that allow Jiazhi and us to rethink what it means to say ”I“ desire.
We are more than welcomed to reapply this idea to Eileen Chang’s private life, but is not her private life, superimposed by one passive “I” upon another, is merely an endless deferral of the origin that our discourse has always put under erasure?
Works Cited
Chang, Eileen 張愛玲. ”Fengsuo“ 〈封鎖〉 (Blockade). In Zhang Ailing xiaoshuo ji 《張愛玲小說集》 (Collection of Novellas by Eileen Chang). Taipei: Crown, 1988, 486-99.
---. ”Jinsuo ji“ 〈金鎖記〉 (”The Golden Cangue). In Zhang Ailing, 150-202.
---. “Qingcheng zhi lian” 〈傾城之戀〉 (Love in a Fallen City). In Zhang Ailing, 203-51.
---. “Se, jie” 〈色，戒〉 (Lust, Caution). In Wangran ji 《惘然記》 (Collection of What Have Never Been There). Taipei: Crown, 2007, 10-36.
---. “Tan 'Se, jie,'” 〈談〈色，戒〉〉 (On “Lust, Caution”). In Su Weizhen 蘇偉貞, ed., Yu wang yan fan: Zhang Ailing de shuxin yinyuan 《魚往雁返：張愛玲的書信因緣》(The Letters of Eileen Chang). Taipei: Yunchen wenhua 允晨文化, 2007.
---. “Wangran ji.” In Wangran ji, 3-5.
Chen Lin, “The Real Story Behind Lust, Caution Revealed,” in China.org.cn. (14 September 2007), http://www.china.org.cn/english/entertainment/224552.htm, 18 May 2009.
Chow, Rey. Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between West and East. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 1991.
Guillaume, Gustave. Temps et verbe. Théorie des aspects, des modes et des temps. Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1929.
Žižek, Slavoj. “The Interpassive Subject” (1998), http://www.lacan.com/zizek-pompidou.htm, 18 May 2009.
Printculture members can review, edit, and delete their comments, create a member page, and don't have to fill in the silly form below. Sign up or log in.
