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Friday, February 15, 2013

Time-Structure and Revolution in Southeast Flies the Peacock


Time-Structure and Revolution in Southeast Flies the Peacock
I. Introduction
As a constitutive factor of experience, and more fundamentally of the possibility of an ontology of process, time plays an important role in literature. This is even more the case for progressive or radical literature, in which the future and what to do about it is paramount. The play Southeast Flies the Peacock (1930), by Yuan Changying, is a particularly striking example of the importance of time, and more specifically of the overlaps, intersections, and disjunctions of dissimilar time-structures. I will attempt to show that these interactions are revolutionary in character, but that they are stifled by the historical conjuncture in which the play was written. The play is thus structurally a thought-experiment of a revolution, a revolution that fails profoundly, but due to circumstances.
II. Differing Time-Structures
There are three competing time-structures present in the play: the social-circular time of the endless reproduction of traditional relations (of which Zhong and Lan are a part before Mother Jiao interferes), the microcosmic-circular time of Mother Jiao (tangential to the social time), and the linear-progressive time of Mei (although this structure exists only in her hopes).
The social-circular time of tradition is the “default” or “standard” time in the play. It is what all characters are compared against. Specifically, it is the time of mothers giving birth to children, the raising of those children, the marrying off of those children, the birth of grandchildren, and so on. Importantly, this time is perpetuated in a culturally-specific manner, with roles determined by gender, age, and social status. Anomalies occur, however, such as widowing. Laolao appears to represent, in this context, the struggle of social-circular time perpetuation when the non-ordinary occurs—she states “Those of us fated as widows have no choice but to swallow our cup of bitterness to the last drop” (220). Zhong and Lan's life together promises to be just this social reproduction.
Mother Jiao's microcosmic-circular time is opposed to the social-circular time in that she halts the latter from running its course. Her time is circular, but it is a microcosmic circle, revolving not around social reproduction but around her relationship with her son. Being a widow, Mother Jiao struggles against the social-circular time as something that takes the object of her affection away from her, in that her son must marry, leaving her without a truly intimate male in her life. Thus, her time is a miniature circle, an empty perpetuation evidenced at the beginning of the play by Zhong's lines “Is this any way to spend my days? Is this all there is to life? Sickness! Sickness! Sick for three long months. It seems like there is nothing in the world but sickness” (214). Mother Jiao is not a radical, however, and her circular time shares some of its arc with the social-circular time.
Mei's radical “linear” time is, until the end of the play, the only non-circular time. Her lesbian affections for her cousin are extra-familial, taboo. She aims to break free from the cycle of social reproduction, creating a time that is eventful and future-oriented. However, as of the play this is only a thought, and is not acted upon.
III. The Present as Time-Disjunction
From the standpoint of Mother Jiao, the social-circular time of Zhong's marriage to Lan appears as a linear-temporal escape. It is as if one zoomed in very close on the arc of a circle and found that it approximates a straight line; Mother Jiao sees from just such a limited point-of-view. Laolao's role in this context is to attempt to convince her of the social-circularity of Zhong's marriage, and the necessity of allowing him to carry on social reproduction. In this sense, she is the arch-conservative. However, her role is transformed if we view it from a different angle—that of bringer-of-the-present.
Laolao is the personification of the current moment, which exists only due to the disjunction or rupture in Mother Jiao's experience of time. The past is the microcosmic-circular (her life with Zhong) and the future is the social-circular (his marriage), but what is the nature of the moment of disjunction, the transition from one to the other time-structure? In a self-identical circular time-structure, there is no “present”, strictly speaking, because all is empty repetition. It is as if the nature of reproduction had, through its continual wearing-down of events, reduced them to non-events and destroyed the singularity that made them meaningful; this is another way of saying that nothing happens in eternity. The present here is an event, namely the shifting of time-structures. Each structure by itself is supremely non-eventful. The interaction of the two structures, though, creates a violent reaction in all involved—depression, anger, and finally suicide and madness, in other words it destroys their roles in social reproduction. It is the creation of an event. Why is this so important?
The Self is constituted by an experience of time—this is me today or yesterday, that will be me tomorrow, that is barred from being me by virtue of its phenomenological occupation as a different time-flow. The present as time-disjunction is a departure of this temporal Self from the microcosmic-circular, forcibly channeled directly into the arch-conservatism of social-circular reproduction. This attempt of Laolao to be the present (a radical role to be sure) seems to be counteracted by her Confucian moral suggestions—chastity, social reproduction, women's suffering and degradation. However, reading Laolao as a conservative character is too simplistic; rather, her radicalism is only practically negated by the atmosphere of May 4th feminist struggle. The future of women in China is a void, the virtual being stifled by the social-circular. Laolao's advocacy of Confucian morality is the despair of women intellectuals; the unsolvability of the “woman question” is answered with perpetuation and without action. The doing that would affirm difference, however, is relegated to a future date—the future thus being conceived non-circularly.
Laolao is the embodiment of pessimistic revolutionary subjectivity, as both character and function within the play. She is the now, the biding-time, the “If there's a scene, don't get involved” and the “Oh, Mei, what are you rushing about here for?” (248). Her sobbing “Don't be sad. The ways of the world are inevitable” is evidence of the pain that came with the choking of her revolutionary flame, deprived of oxygen as it was (220). Her being-the-present is a historically-determined present, as it always must be, and this particular present is the despair of the feminist movement at the failure of its praxis. Thus, the historicity of the present does not destroy her revolutionary impulse—her knowing interactions with Mei about the latter's lesbianism (and consequently radical time-structure) make clear her progressiveness. And most imporantly, Laolao is the mediator of time-structures, the embodiment of the event, the true revolutionary, despite her despair and hence her failure.
The suicides of Zhong and Lan are departures from the social-circular; Mother Jiao's madness is her own permanent departure from it as well. The conflict of time-structures brought about a revolutionary failure due to the historical conjuncture of the present. The same condition of time-structures in conflict is the prerequisite of any revolution, and the possibilities opened up by them, by their potential as radically-reorienting forces, need not end so gruesomely—the play is far too sympathetic for that. Thus, Yuan Changying has penned a microcosmic revolution, one which has failed. This is her critique, a brutal denunciation of Chinese society.
IV. Conclusion
The time-structures in the play were shown to be in conflict, with the outcome of this conflict profoundly negative. In this case, the role of the present became extremely important, personified by Laolao. Laolao's mediation of the two structures was a failure, resulting in suicides and madness. She thus represents the despair and failure of the feminist movement in May 4th-era China. The play is a microcosm of a revolutionary situation, with Laolao playing the revolutionary. All characters are destroyed by her failure. Perhaps in this case the play's message is more positive than was previously thought, showing that revolutionary failure as what not to do.