Arthur Miller's Global Theater

Traveling Man, Traveling Culture: Death of a Salesman and Post-Mao Chinese Theater

35 Belinda Kong Traveling Man,Traveling Culture Death of a Salesman and Post-Mao Chinese Theater That the 1983 Chinese production of Death of a Salesman, staged by the Beijing People’s Art Theater under the direction of Arthur Miller himself , marks a significant moment of Sino-American cross-cultural collaboration is not to be doubted. However, the nature and direction of significance do not always correspond with the way previous accounts (including Miller’s own) have imagined it. This episode of “crossing” is, first and foremost, not a triumph of American literature or evidence of some common human spirit, but a distinctly Chinese event: It cannot be understood apart from the specific historical struggle between Chinese artist-intellectuals and the Communist Party leadership.Toward this end, I will investigate Miller’s role in the episode within a larger narrative of Maoist and post-Mao China’s negotiations with Western cultural imports. My main focus is thus on the cultural-political dimensions of the Salesman production as they emerge within Chinese contexts. Methodologically, then, this essay aims to foreground the possible selfsufficiency of non-Western contexts and also the prospect that, within these discourses, the American reference can sometimes occupy only a place at the margin. Preludes: Of Texts and Contexts They’re really coming out of a cave and blinking their eyes.(Arthur Miller, in reference to the Chinese people)1 I sense something wild about the audience, something untamed, avid, and, for want of a better word, uncultivated. (Arthur Miller, in reference to the Chinese audience during the premiere of Death of a Salesman in Beijing)2 I’m relying upon my convictions that I have the right to ask of these Chinese actors that they be as Chinese as they know how and to feel as 36 Arthur Miller’sGlobalTheater Chinese as they feel. If their acting is profound enough in its rendering of human relations, you will have a reality up there that will transcend the national culture. (Arthur Miller, in reference to the cast in Beijing)3 But it suddenly seemed to me that with all their progress they were still being actors rather than humans who were privileged to express a poetic vision that lies within the play. (Arthur Miller, in reference to the Chinese actors staging Death of a Salesman)4 In this late age of our developed critical discourses, given the heterogeneous theoretical typographies over which we as critics necessarily traverse, it is perhaps thankfully impossible for us to read the previous lines without appreciating the relevance of a postcolonial critique.The resonant continuity of an imperialist discourse in Miller’s rhetoric brings only too readily to mind Edward Said’s argument about Orientalism, namely, that it is the West’s way of restructuring, knowing, and domesticating an entire hemispheric space summarily labeled“the Orient.”5 The metaphor of China as a cultural cave; the portrait of the Chinese people as “untamed” and “uncultivated” cultural barbarians, or alternately, as mindless mimics of a mode of being not their own; the belief that the Western artist turned cultural hero possesses the“poetic vision”of a transcendental and universal humanity that can liberate the simple-minded from their ideological delusions; and the rather too unsubtle colonialist trope of “getting China territory”—all these expressions find plentiful and uncomfortable echoes in Orientalism. In the same circumstance, however, there is always the task of negotiating a general theoretical framework on the one hand and the particularity of a cultural practice on the other, without wholly collapsing one under the other’s power. In this instance, the practice concerned is Miller’s 1983 production of Death of a Salesman in Beijing, mounted by the Beijing People’s Art Theater. Despite the remarkable traces of imperialist rhetoric previously noted, it is perhaps equally vital to recognize the lack of any imperialist designs on the writer’s part. Here we have a peculiar manifestation of the colonizing mentality, which continues to shape the narrativization of history even in the absence of colonizing impulses. To be sure, this ironic disjunction between language and intention throws into uneasy relief the immediate appropriateness of a postcolonial critique—that is, something along the line that Miller’s play serves as an ideological tool of American cultural hegemony over the Chinese mind. We have reached, maybe, a point of theoretical saturation and dubiety where it is neither intellectually obligatory nor revealing to read every cross-cultural venture between East and West as invariably [18...