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.