Two Levels of Social Stasis in Wang Anyi's “Brothers”
I.
Introduction
In the short story “Brothers” by Wang Anyi, and again in “Woman”
by Chen Ying, there is a marked contrast between static and dynamic
characters (men being static in “Brothers” and dynamic in
“Woman”; women being dynamic in “Brothers” and more static or
staticized in “Woman”). These differences in character
development can be read as products of reification, especially in the
case of Old Two and her husband in “Brothers”. This reification
must be understood as emanating (though not necessarily causally)
from the economic “base”, but through an imperializing effect has
taken up residence within the so-called superstructure relating to
the base, and from there spreads dialectically and nearly
imperceptibly to other spheres. The interrelations of the multiple
levels of reification cause a number of problems of interpretation,
which trace back to the necessity of clearly delineating those
levels.
II.
Static and Dynamic Characters
In “Brothers”, the three brothers are dynamic characters. Their
deep-seated dissatisfaction with being placed into roles and pressed
into certain forms of interaction attests to this amply enough. For
example, on occasions they were “...increasingly unable to
recognize their true selves. They would resume a long period of
normal and mundane life. During such days, they would regularly eat,
sleep, go to classes, hand in homework, and write love letters to
their 'wives' at home” (95). In other words, the loss of self was
accompanied by being pressed into specific social roles. The message
is thus that the “true self” is dynamic, while the
bourgeois-social self is both untrue and static. However, if this
were the only point about their dynamism, what a static dynamism it
would be! Instead, as the story progresses, a number of
characteristics further clarifying the brothers' dynamism emerge.
First, the change of Old Three's attitude towards feminism and
towards her social role as wife emphasizes the power of the static
and of hypostasis, and its prominent role in society as it exists.
Another example of the same trend can be found in the ending of the
story, when all contact between the brothers is broken off, each
supposedly resigning to their allotted social roles. Second, the
dynamism of the brothers is expressed not as a focused emotional
response but as a diffuse and all-encompassing qualitative state of
consciousness, as shown by Old Two's existential crisis before
re-connecting with Old One. This means that, true to Bergson's essay
Time and Free Will, the
dynamism is experienced by static society as a Deleuzian
heterogeneous multiplicity, not a collection of “ones”, but an
anti-reductionist collection of “manys”. This
is a true virtual dynamism, and not simply
one of the type that is often expressed in stories through character
development over time. This
point will be especially important when we move on to study the
unique effects of reification, the generalized descendent of the
Marxian theory of commodity fetishism.
As
truly as the brothers are dynamic, the men in the story are static.
This is primarily evidenced by the part of the story that is told
almost from Old Two's husband's point of view. For
example, it is said that “[i]t was fine if she wanted to skip
breakfast and ruin her daily routine, but he would see to it that the
world around her remained as impeccably regulated as it was before”,
and that “[h]is aims in life were simple and clear unlike hers,
which were confused and chaotic” (108). In
other words, the husband represents the pure, supposed necessity of
the regularity and normalcy of bourgeois life—anything else, any
questioning of this necessity ought to make one “ashamed of her
absurd behavior” (108). While
this
theme of bourgeois normalization is a primary one in the text, the
analysis will continue with the prerequisites and underlying
overdetermined elements which give rise to this surface phenomenon.
In
contrast to these gendered roles in “Brothers”, the characters in
Chen Ying's “Woman” have altogether different compositions. The
man wavers between support and opposition to his wife's desire for an
abortion, invoking such widely differing reasoning as letting the
pregnancy run its 'natural course' and wanting to preserve his wife's
personal and intellectual freedom—in
other words, he is profoundly confused about what he wants for his
wife. In terms of the
static-dynamic divide, he appears to be on the dynamic side, but this
is only a surface-level effect. His dynamism is simply a cover for
his static core. This becomes clearer when we refer back to the
Bergsonian viewpoint
expressed above: his dynamism is expressed quantitatively, as
wavering between two given positions, and not as a truly qualitative
act of experiential consciousness, wherein positions
themselves evolve along with the self. Thus,
both of the stories under analysis involve static males. The case of
the wife in “Woman” is not very important for the present work,
the women in “Brother”s providing ample examples, but suffice it
to say that she appears to experience what we have identified as true
dynamism of the Bergsonian variety.
III.
Reification
So far we have been analyzing a superstructural phenomenon, not only
on the level of “appearance” but primarily on the level of
ideology. It is now important to connect dialectically the two levels
which, through various modes of interaction, produce true
understanding of the reality of the situation. In capitalist society,
as Marxism notes, there is a contradiction between private ownership
and social production. Productive activity becomes social only in the
exchange of commodities. In other words, the regulative aspects of
the economy are more or less monopolized by markets—what gets
produced, how much, and for whom are all questions decided by
markets, through the activity of markets1.
This activity, the act of
exchange, is therefore the social-synthesizing mechanism of the
entire commodity economy, and thus also more or less of people's
lives as they are lived.2
The abstraction of the
exchange relation occurs seemingly without the need for ideology (in
the sense of Althusser) to play even a minor role in
analysis. However, this view
is one sided for a number of reasons: it
ignores the effect of superstructural dominance during periods of
revolutionary upheaval as theorized by Mao Zedong in his essay On
Contradiction; it
ignores the more general case of dialectical
interaction between superstructure and base and
instead falls back on mechanical materialism;
it reduces the problem of
change on the individual level to that of the total combined level of
society and therefore becomes an argument for the impossibility of
change altogether; finally and most importantly, it ignores
the link between real abstraction and ideological abstraction. It
is this last point that will be the focus of the remainder of this
essay.
What
is the real social
phenomenon that (avoiding giving ontological precedence to this or
that sphere for the time being) changes with the ideological
phenomenon of reified thinking? At
first pass the answer seems obvious: the
perceived stasis of
Old Two's husband is supported and corroborated by his own
ideological explanation of the same phenomenon, when
the narration appears to be from his point of view (108). The
ideology of stasis is in fact
the reality of stasis, though
with some room for movement existing between the two concepts. The
jump from Old Two's to her husband's ideological makeup is
the very definition of the social, at least on a microcosmic level.
The connections and interpenetrations of these two spheres cohere
into a larger sphere that then reacts back upon them as individuals,
becoming semi-autonomous. So we have here two dialectical relations:
social and ideological
abstraction, which are shown to be equal
for purposes of the story
(the husband stands in for the real/social);
individual and social
ideological abstraction. These
three terms and two relationships, taken to be in the shape of a
semisolid chain,
each link most strongly related to the one nearest it but weakly
related to the other, are the
basic building blocks of a theory of ideology not unrelated to the
material basis of society, also avoiding mechanical materialism.
The
conclusion of the story, however, leaves the resolution of the
contradictions between the three chain-links open. Through
the negation of the possibility of renewal, as in the phrase “There
are some things that are extremely beautiful but very fragile. Once
broken they cannot be repaired”, the thing-ness of people becomes
even more explicit (141).
It is too late; Old Two has
already solidified once again, contrary to what we can assume are her
true desires. The figure of the husband, the embodiment of reified
social relations for Old Two, is here also a sexually dominant
opposition figure to the love between the two women—these
two roles are not so disparate as might appear. In any case, though,
the society that Old Two
experienced in her husband is now experienced by Old One in Old Two.
The expanded, resilient nature of the social abstraction comes in
this case even closer to the commodity-basis upon which it draws.
V.
Conclusion
The relation between base and superstructure is a prominent theme in
the short story Brothers by
Wang Anyi, albeit only
obliquely. Through the use of
static and dynamic characters and focus
on the conflicts between them
on that account, the process of reification is brought to the surface
of the work as a force contrary to the dynamism
of true conscious experience and therefore
of true love and desire. The
socially-synthetic role of commodity fetishism is apparent, and in
the development of the characters' consciousnesses it presses its
seemingly indelible mark. The
struggle for self-discovery and individual liberation undertaken by
the brothers contains in its very methodology—that of the
individual, of the bourgeois, of their embedding in social
reality—the assurance of defeat. The
superstructure may be semi-autonomous, but it is no more than semi-.
While there is not enough
space here to go into more detail, the importance of differences
in level of analysis and of solutions, and of their interrelations,
is seen to be
extremely important, for
there will never be a mechanical solution to ideological problems no
matter how hard it is sought.
1See
I.I. Rubin's excellent work Essays on Marx's Theory of Value
2See
Alfred Sohn-Rethel's book Intellectual and Manual Labour
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