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Keen to test its power, they set out to charm the Little
Seamstress, a lovely but unrefined village girl, and turn her
into a lady. Balzac’s magic works — the girl’s
metamorphosis takes place — but it works rather too well. I
won’t reveal it all, for the ending is quite unexpected,
giving an ironic twist to the story.
A revolution
synonymous with violence and repression can’t have a funny
side — or can it? Take this episode: To impress the powers
that be, a folk-song which goes like this: An old louse/ What
does it fear?/ It fears boiling water/ Boiling bubbling water,
is cleverly "revolutionised" by Four-Eyes as: Little
bourgeois lice,/ What do they fear?/ They fear the boiling wave
of the proletariat. Similarly, the narrator, while reading out
novels to the Little Seamstress, introduces little inventions of
his own when he feels that "good old Balzac is running out
of steam." The satire is dead on target in the scene where
some village bumpkins, on seeing a portrait of Balzac, wonder
whether he is Marx, Lenin or Stalin!
Had this novel
only been about the ravages of the (un)Cultural Revolution, it
wouldn’t have been of much interest or significance. It is
basically a parable about the futility of exercising control in
the face of man’s eternal desire for freedom. What further
elevates it to the level of a potential classic is its playful
exploration of the relationship between life and literature. It
reminds one of Goethe’s words: "Man can find no better
retreat from the world than art, and man can find no stronger
link with the world than art." At the end of the day,
Balzac influences the actions of the protagonists much more
crucially than the other heavyweight.
It is undoubtedly
a remarkable debut novel by filmmaker Dai Sijie, who was among
one of the youths whose formal education was disrupted by the
revolution in the late 1960s. Re-education proved to be a
blessing in disguise for him and his peers as it broadened their
experience and increased their awareness of the socio-political
forces at work. Those troubled times have had a profound
influence on their art.
The novel’s
transatlantic success bears testimony to the West’s increasing
recognition of Chinese literature and cinema. In the past decade
or so, we have seen Gao Xingjian becoming the first Chinese
writer to win the Nobel Prize, Ha Jin bagging the US National
Book Award, and filmmakers like Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou
mesmerising international audiences. The beneficiaries of this
"Sinomania" have mostly been the émigrés —
Xingjian and Sijie are based in France, Ha Jin in the USA —
while those living in China have been enjoying some creative
freedom but undeservedly, no worldwide fame. It would be good if
the latter also get a place in the sun, for a voice that goes
unheard is no better than a voice silenced.
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TWO
heavyweights figure prominently in this novel, one of them being the
legendary novelist mentioned in the title. The other is Chairman Mao’s
brainchild, bearing a name long enough to rival the Great Wall of
China — the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Now what has a
19th century French writer got to do with a 20th century Chinese
revolution? Ask the Red Guards, an army of nasty nursemaids eager to
bring up Mao’s baby by fair means or foul and protect it from the
"evil influence" of the West. Forget about freedom of
expression, you are not even free to read literature of your choice.
Books of Western writers are seized and set on fire in public
because these are supposed to be, pardon the pun, inflammable.
