Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel

Chapter 3. TEL QUEL

Chapter Three TEL QUEL In 1974, a traveler to China came back to Paris with the following description of the peasant village of Huxian: Forty kilometers from the former Chinese capital of Xi’an (the ‹rst capital of China after it was uni‹ed under the emperor Qin Shi Huangdi in the second century B.C., and the great capital of the Tang Dynasty [618–906]) is Huxian , the chief village of an agricultural region. The road we travel to get there is hot; the sun beats down on peasants in broad bamboo hats, on unsupervised children skipping about in quiet games, on a hearse drawn by some men while others, in two parallel lines alongside it, surround it with thin parallel poles carried across their shoulders. Everyone from the village is in the square where we are supposed to attend an exhibit of peasant painting in one of the nearby buildings. An enormous crowd is sitting in the sun: they wait for us wordlessly, perfectly still. Calm eyes, not even curious, but slightly amused or anxious: in any case, piercing, and certain of belonging to a community with which we will never have anything to do. They don’t distinguish among us man or woman, blonde or brunette, this or that feature of face or body. As though they were discovering some weird and peculiar animals , harmless but insane. Unaggressive, but on the far side of the abyss of time and space. “A species—what they see in us is a different species,” says one of our group. “You are the ‹rst foreigners to visit the village,” says the interpreter, always sensitive to the least of our tropisms. I don’t feel like a foreigner , the way I do in Baghdad or New York. I feel like an ape, a martian, an other. Three hours later, when the gates of the exhibit are opened to let our cars pass through, they are still there, sitting in the sun—amused or anxious ?—calm, distant, piercing, silent, gently releasing us into our strangeness . (11–12) This description takes place in two movements, in a vision that can only be called cinematic. First, the long shot of the dirt road, the hot day, the peasants, the children, the ritual of burial, the elaborate historical parenthesis : in these few images the countryside is imbued with all its rhetorical and cultural importance, its timelessness, its endless cycle of life (the children, the dead). Second, however, and more interestingly, the famil103 iar vision—familiar even in its unfamiliarity—acquires a shocking newness . The observing gaze ‹nds itself not simply reversed but in some sense refused. That refusal takes place in the author’s intense awareness of being looked at, not with an anthropomorphic curiosity but rather a dehumanizing silence: “As though they were discovering some weird and peculiar animals, harmless but insane.” Face to face with these strangers, she and her friends are animals, another species; she feels like an ape, a Martian, an other. Even as she remarks that the Chinese “don’t distinguish among us man or woman, blonde or brunette, this or that feature of face or body,” the author herself does not or perhaps cannot distinguish among the members of the crowd. Her description of the eyes—calm, amused or anxious, piercing—returns in the paragraph’s ‹nal sentence as a description of the crowd itself: “they are still there, sitting in the sun—amused or anxious?—calm, distant, piercing, silent, gently releasing us into our strangeness.” The look—frightening because of what it does not see— goes both ways. A page after this description, the author adds that the Chinese at Huxian “did nothing but return the look I gave them without letting them see it, moulded as I am by universalist humanism, proletarian brotherhood, and (why not?) false colonial civility” (13). Few of the traditional metaphors of the anthropological or colonizing gaze work here. Instead, the scene hints at an otherness that goes beyond the merely different or strange, an otherness that blocks all communication or commerce, and does so without anger or malice, hope or desire, or pride in their absence. The author ‹nds herself looked-at-but-not-seen, and in that experience recognizes her own gaze—hidden by “false colonial civility,” to be sure— as similarly insensate to that which it falls upon. The result is no civilizing drive, no traditionally exotic curiosity; the strangeness or foreignness the author ‹nds face-to-face with the Huxian...