Uneven Contrast and Causality in Zhang Ailing's "Love in a Fallen City"

Uneven Contrast and Causality in Zhang Ailing's Love in a Fallen City

I. Introduction

Zhang Ailing's novella Love in a Fallen City is a powerful attack on homogeneous cause-and-effect as a model for human emancipatory subjectivity. Through the technique of uneven contrast, Zhang refutes same-level interpretations of relational elements, and thus refutes, in this context, cause-and-effect. Through this critique, a systemic view of individual human freedom emerges, with a prominent positive and substantial component, contrary to its “desolate” appearances.

II. Uneven Contrast

Zhang Ailing herself places great emphasis on the technique of uneven contrast, writing “...I still use the method of uneven contrast to show the reality in the empitness, the simplicity in the ornamentation, of contemporary people” (Zhang, “My Writing” 439). Uneven contrast is defined not by the binary opposition of two ideas (that might be “even contrast”), but by the juxtaposition of multiple levels of difference, of heterogeneous elements. As a prime example of uneven contrast, Zhang writes “Countless thousands of people dead, countless thousands of people suffering, after that an earth-shaking revolution... Liusu didn't feel there was anything subtle about her place in history. She stood up, smiling, and kicked the pan of mosquito-repellant incense under the table” (Zhang, Love 167). The unevenness of the opposition is striking—death and suffering contrasted with something so heterogeneous as kicking mosquito-repellant incense. While able to be framed in terms of same-level differences, the opposition would then not communicate the extent of the lived difference between the terms, but would rather substitute an artificial homogeneity which is clearly not there. In other words, framed as an even contrast, each term would be mediated symmetrically by the other.

Speaking of the subject-object relationship, Theodor Adorno wrote that “Due to the inequality inherent in the concept of mediation, the subject enters into the object altogether differently from the way the object enters into the subject” (Adorno 183). Mediation, whether it be of subject-object, concept-object, or concept-concept, is thus inherently asymmetrical, though we may try to force a symmetry out of it. Uneven contrast can thus be thought of as the “realist”, or at least unforced, form of contrast, that which corresponds to the real movement of concepts against each other. The question then comes up regarding the various representative models we have of these two concepts of mediation. It will be shown that, philosophically regarded, the cause-and-effect relationship is just this kind of forcing into symmetry.

III. Repudiation of Cause and Effect

The schema cause-and-effect presents two opposed elements in their abstract relationship. On the one side is cause, the supposed ground or reason of the effect; on the other side is effect, the supposed made-explicit of what was implicit in the cause, as a Hegelian definition of the mechanistic process might state (it is predictable that this kind of definition could not be made from within the mechanistic system because of its aversion to reaching beyond itself, which is in turn a marked feature of dialectics). This externality of cause to effect does not mean they exist on multiple levels, but rather that they are, as wholly abstract opposites, on the same level, and thus there exists and “evenness” in their interaction that Zhang attempts to deny or subvert with her use of uneven contrast. Further, each cause must equally be an effect in another moment, and vice versa, so that there is a reproducible or reversible character to things so construed. The implication pointed to by uneven contrast is that cause-and-effect is in any case not a fully adequate model of reality. Thus, Love in a Fallen City is the substance counterpart of the form of uneven contrast—I am here referring to the lines “Hong Kong's defeat had brought Liusu victory. But in this unreasonable world, who can distinguish cause from effect?” (Zhang, Love 167). The critique of homogeneity has, in this story, reached quite a full articulation, and not only one of form, which would be the case if cause-and-effect was not explicitly repudiated.

IV. Freedom

But what can come after the model of cause-and-effect, that which has dominated scientific, intellectual, and everyday discourse so powerfully, and that has ever masqueraded as “common-sense”, like a law of logic that could not be broken? On this point, the text is not clear. However, something may be deduced from the nature of uneven contrast and the way the narrative proceeds.

It is initially tempting to interpret the events of the story, especially given its refutation of cause-and-effect, as a support of Jungian synchronicity. However, given the self-proclaimed importance of uneven contrast, this interpretation leaves something to be desired, as it relies on a psychical injection of meaning into probabilistically unthinkable events. Rather, in Zhang's narrative something more is at stake; it is not simply a matter of “meaning” that she points to, although that is important. Uneven contrast is present not just in the ideological or conscious interactions of the characters, but is put forth as something objective as well—the scene with the mosquito-repellant incense is instructive in this regard. The out-thereness of unevenness is thus not simply a case of synchronicity. But what is it?

In a universe without cause-and-effect, strictly speaking, there is (or may be) freedom. Subjectivity, in emancipating itself from the mechanistic universe in which it had been situated, is through the model of uneven contrast embedded in a complex web of interactions and interpenetrations. The “effects” of consciousness, being no longer purely reducible to their antecedents (see Bergson's Time and Free Will), open up a space of “within-me” from which conscious action may spring. As multi-level phenomena, these “effects” have a constitutive function towards the subject. Instead of being totally explained by external and pre-existing factors, there is something more going on in the black box of the mind.

Again, why does a multi-level view of phenomena lead one to posit a space for freedom? First, mechanistic determinism (abstract cause-and-effect) is specifically repudiated by multi-level interactions; second, what lies in its place is a system that, although embedded in the larger world-context, has some degree of autonomy; third, and this is perhaps the most important implication of the foregoing, the asymmetrical/uneven character creates not simply a rigid structure of negatively-defined interactions, but one of positive substance. Without this there could be no talk of freedom. This new positive substance, of which the previously-noted substance in the substance/form distinction is a symptom, is predicated on the uneven, and on the  durée that is simultaneously opened up by it. Finally, freedom is explicit in the text in the destruction of Hong Kong, the old relations, to make room for the (more) emancipatory relations of love between Liusu and Liuyuan.

V. Conclusion

The importance of uneven contrast for Zhang Ailing's story Love in a Fallen City is two-fold: first, it opens a space for the critique of cause-and-effect through asymmetrical mediation; second, through this critique it points the way towards a concept of individual freedom existing through the necessarily positive aspects of those asymmetrical structures. This fits well with the substance of the narrative, with the destruction of the old oppressive space of Hong Kong, and its replacement by love with Liuyuan. However, taken on its own, without social freedom as its counterpart, Liusu's prognosis is bleak, as has been pointed to by some scholars (Wang 9). Perhaps the criticism of Zhang by the CCP has something to do with this lack of attention to the “social” aspect of emancipation. In any case, the complex relation between form and content, tied together by the concept of uneven contrast, unmistakably points towards freedom. The supposed “desolation” of the writing is undermined by its own form—the positive emerges as a powerful counterweight. Against this, there can strictly speaking be no “desolation”. Its revelation, then, exists formally in a quite different way than was imagined by the author (Zhang, “My Writing” 438).

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. Seabury Press, 1973. Print.

Wang, Xiaoping. "Eileen Chang's Cross-Cultural Writing and Rewriting in Love in a Fallen City (《 倾 城之恋》)." Comparative Literature Studies 49.4 (2012): 565-584. Project MUSE. Web. 4 Mar. 2013. <http://muse.jhu.edu/>.

Zhang, Ailing. “My Writing.” Modern Chinese Literary Thought : Writings on Literature, 1893-1945. Ed. Kirk A. Denton. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996. 436-442. Print.

Zhang, Ailing. Love in a Fallen City. New York: New York Review Books, 2007. Print.