Two Levels of Social Stasis in Wang Anyi's "Brothers"

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

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 4^th 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 4^th-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.