Dismantling Time: Chinese Literature in the Age of Globalization (review)

Deng Xiaoping's reforms resulted in tremendous sociocultural change in China, not least in the realm of historiography. Perhaps the most remarkable cultural change wrought by the past quarter century of market reforms is occurring in relation to China's unique historical experience of modernity—in particular, that governed by the ubiquitous question "Whither China?" This question, which has plagued Chinese intellectuals since the mid-nineteenth century, appears less and less relevant. Not in the real sense—as an epistemological inquiry the question of China's fate is more pressing than ever—but as a philosophical hermeneutic guiding everyday life. "Fictions of the nation" continue to circulate but are becoming less cohesive. In fact, some scholars consider the rejection of metaphors of the nation-state, the main literary strategy from the May Fourth period until the 1980s, to be one of the key distinctions of post-Mao urban fiction.¹

Jie Lu's study provides insights into how and why this cultural paradigm shift is occurring. In Dismantling Time Jie Lu examines fiction written during the crucial decade spanning the "cultural fever" intellectual movements of the mid-1980s and the rising consumerism of the mid-1990s, arguing that the unique temporal strategies of these works undo prevalent domestic and global hermeneutic paradigms. Lu revisits a number of the avant-garde texts that she first analyzed in her doctoral dissertation, Time, Space and Language in Contemporary Chinese Avantgarde Fiction (Stanford University, 1996), but narrows her thesis and broadens her scope of textual and theoretical inquiry.

Each chapter explores one temporal attribute of post-Mao Chinese fiction by contextualizing it within global literary trends while also historicizing it in relation to Chinese literary aesthetics. Thus a chapter on posthistory first examines a gamut of theories, spanning negative formulations by Lutz Niethammer and Baudrillard to celebratory proclamations by Fukuyama, before turning to the question of "how History has gone wrong in China" (p. 16) and the narrative strategies Chinese avant-garde writers have adopted to convey this. In a chapter on spatial representations of time, Lu describes the emphasis on spatial form in Western modernist literature (later devoured by post-Mao writers), where narrative sequence is preempted by a sense of mythic simultaneity and disjunctive syntax. She adds that the Chinese avant-garde also drew their inspiration from Chinese classical poetry, where spatial effects are rendered far less artificially than in narrative fiction. Three additional chapters feature boredom as the female experience of time, mnemonic representations of history, and fiction that, ironically, conveys nostalgia without memory.

To some extent Lu understates the import of her ambitious project-delineating how contemporary Chinese writers radically alter representations of time in relation to History, that most sacred meaning-maker and repository of truth in Chinese political and moral culture. Although her close readings, informed by sophisticated theoretical analysis, build ample evidence for the radical undermining of a hermeneutical tradition based on sanctioned interpretations of the past, she hesitates to integrate her findings into a coherent claim. Perhaps this is a natural reaction, a refusal to write the form of master narrative that has dominated so much literary analysis in China and elsewhere. Nonetheless, it can leave the reader at a loss as to the broader significance of her study. A more focused introduction and conclusion could tie the disparate ideas together.

The ideas themselves are powerful, intensifying with each chapter. In her introduction and first two chapters, "Narrative and the Chinese Posthistorical Experience of Time" and "Mnemonic Representations of History," Lu interprets the highly idiosyncratic and contingent representations of history in 1980s avant-garde fiction. The third chapter, "Boredom: The Female Experience of Time," presents one of the most perceptive readings to date of Wang Anyi's Song of Everlasting Sorrow. Coupled with an equally incisive analysis of Liu Yan's "Dreaming of Visiting My Parent's Home," Lu, rather than scrutinizing plot, instead dissects the...