Rhetorical Procedures in Chinese Literature

1 Introduction

The Cultural Revolution in China came to an end in 1976, with the death of Mao Zedong. Then, from the late 1970s and early ‘80s on, a string of literary works began to appear in China that were characterized as “Scar Literature” (伤痕文学: shānghén wénxué). The expression has also been translated as “Literature of the Wounded” or “Literature of Trauma.”

The outlines of Scar Literature are blurred, mixed and intertwined as they are with other literary trends that began to make forays into formal experimentation and new symbolic spaces of literary activity. Indeed, these works are part of a broader literary renewal, the so-called “New Era” (新时期: xīn shíqí) and the “Beijing Spring” (北京之春: Běijīng zhī chūn), under which there were various explorations leading to such trends as “Root-Seeking Literature” ( 寻根文学: xúngēn wénxué), “Literature of Reflection or Introspection” (反思文学: fǎnsī wénxué), “Avant-Garde Literature” (先锋文学: xiānfēng wénxué), “Experimental Literature” (实验文学: shíyàn wénxué), “Misty Poetry” (朦胧诗: ménglóng shī) and later “Neo-Realism” (新写实: xīn xiěshí). What distinguished these literary explorations was their break with the tradition of Socialist Realism, partially legitimized under the Fourth Congress of Writers and Artists in 1979.

While, according to Chinese literary criticism, Scar Literature was short-lived, its influences are still visible in works by contemporary authors.

What sets Scar Literature apart is, first and foremost, its subject matter and intention: it maps the injustices, mistreatment, and suffering experienced during the Cultural Revolution, focusing especially on the sufferings of intellectuals and political cadres. Its name is taken from Lu Xinhua’s novel The Scar (《伤痕》, also translated as The Wound), published in 1978 in the journal Wenhui Bao (文汇报). The plot was inspired by his girlfriend’s life and takes place during the Cultural Revolution. The young woman at the center of the novel breaks off relations with her mother after the latter has been denounced as a “traitor.” Nine years later, when she finds out the charges against her mother were false, she returns to look for her, but the mother has already died by then. Readers found the work deeply moving. Lu Xinhua, who was a student at Fudan University at the time, received praise and official support from the new leaders and even from Deng Xiaoping himself.

In fact, there were thousands of similar stories threaded together in a series of debates and literary statements about the injustices and abuses of power that occurred mainly during the period 1966–1976, giving rise to what has become known as “Exposure Literature” or “Protest Literature.” Many texts of this time deal with the persecutions and sufferings of those accused, in a veritable “witch-hunt,” of being enemies of the people, right-wingers, or followers of the Capitalist way, who were then condemned to disavowal, jail, or internal exile.

Most Scar Literature authors in those days were aged between thirty and forty. Biographical or autobiographical material and fictionalized life stories abound in many of their works. Writers in this movement included, on one hand, the “rehabilitated,” who had been persecuted during the campaign against the right in 1957–1958 (Zhang Xianliang, Liu Binyan, Lu Wenfu, Deng Youmei, Ai Qing, Ding Ling, Wang Zengqi, Wang Meng) and on the other, new writers from the generation of “educated youth” (^知青: zhīqīng), who had spent the Cultural Revolution working in the fields (Liu Xinwu, Wang Anyi, Feng Jicai, Jia Pingwa, Mo Yan). Some of them began to work as salaried writers and editors, and to publish their works in state-sponsored literary journals. They had a huge impact on the public and achieved great popularity.

There are three main features that identify scar literature in Chinese literary theory: the scar metaphor, present in one way or another in wounds or suffering; the emotional catharsis that occurs in the reprocessing or denunciation of what caused the suffering; and a hopeful ending – known in English as “bright tail” (光明的尾巴: guāngmíng de wěibā) – highlighting that the pain is over and an optimistic or reparatory outlook toward the future wins the day. Open as they are to different interpretations, the latter two criteria are ambiguous and are not always easy to recognize in every work.

Trauma itself should be seen not only as the result of physical and psychological wounds resulting from violence, harsh living conditions, fear, and constant threat, but also as the collapse of the unshakeable conviction and blind trust in the tenets and leadership of Mao Zedong: as the certainties and ideological foundations that had nourished an entire era crumbled away, there was a strong emotional and violent reaction. What Althusser (1984) defined as a "representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence," that is, ideology, went into crisis.

It is worth pointing out that, for the most part, the authors of this trend were not opposed to Communism. In a 1999 interview, the writer Mo Yan, who, thirteen years later, would receive the Nobel Prize, explained that, notwithstanding their critiques of the period of the Cultural Revolution, Wang Meng, Zhang Xianliang, and himself proclaimed their faith in a renewal of creative forces in post-Maoist China:

Wang Meng and Zhang Xianliang still want to express an ideal, follow a political line, and maintain a very strong sense of responsibility […]. In their view, writers have to be the spokesmen for the people: they have the responsibility to change society and are at the leading edge of the people. They have been accused of being right-wing and were criticized during the Cultural Revolution, but they continue to assert “We are children of the Party, we have been victims of injustice, our mother – the Party – has mistreated us, and we must help our mother to change.” (Dutrait 2002)

I reference the following works in this paper: Half of Man is Woman by Zhang Xianliang, “The Butterfly” by Wang Meng, and “The Tall Woman and Her Short Husband” by Feng Jicai. I shall refer briefly to each of the works and then focus on analyzing their rhetorical procedures.

2 Half of Man is Woman

Zhang Xianliang (张贤亮, also transcribed as Chang Hsien-Liang, Nanjing 1936–Yinchuan 2014), spent twenty-two years of his life in re-education or labor camps. He fashioned his experiences into two semi-autobiographical novels: Mimosa and Half of Man is Woman. He was rehabilitated in September 1979, aged forty-three. In 1981, he became a member of the National Association of Writers.

In the preface to the Spanish edition, La mitad del hombre es la mujer (的 一半 男人 女人 是), published in 1985, he wrote:

In 1957, following the Hundred Flowers movement, I was branded “right-wing” because of a poem I had written: “Gale Song.” I was condemned to three years’ forced labor for “reeducation” on a farm in Ningxia Province. After this period, I ought, theoretically, to have been rehabilitated. But, in those days, if you were branded “right-wing,” no matter what you did, you couldn’t get rid of the label and were still considered a threat to society. […] In ‘62, campaigns anti-this and anti-that grew more vocal. Any citizen was a potential enemy, depending on their occupation or social background. […] In ‘64, the Socialist Education Movement – a.k.a. the Four Cleanups Movement – emerged to destroy any type of class enemy. […] Again, at the end of the “control,” in ‘65, I was immediately condemned to forced labor for “reform,” almost the same as “reeducation” but deemed more heinous. The theoretical ending of this sentence, in 1968, caught me in mid-Cultural Revolution. I was condemned to “surveillance by the masses.” I had to work at least twelve hours a day. […] After Mao’s death, in’76, they began rehabilitating people but forgot about me, or maybe they still considered me a threat. Whatever, I stayed on at the reform farm till ‘79, first as a worker, then as a teacher. (Zhang 1992: 9–11, my translation)

In 1967, the protagonist of Half of Man is Woman, Zhang Yonglin, an alter ego of the author, works in a rural commune. One day he sees a young woman bathing naked in the river and is deeply moved. He encounters her again eight years later and marries her, but on their wedding night he discovers that he is impotent. Some time later, his wife embarks on a relationship with a lover. Later, when Zhang Yonglin acts heroically during a flood, he retrieves his sexual vigor.

As well as impotence, a metaphor for an entire generation of Chinese intellectuals deprived of the right to express their ideas and deploy their vitality, these years leave many other marks on the protagonist’s body in this work by Zhang Xianliang and shape the corporal/emotional narrative: the calluses on his hands, the hunger-weakened body, the extreme cold. It also reflects his psychic suffering (“the shadow the past has left in my heart”) and the feeling of shame: “How many times I thought about putting my experiences of that time into writing! Although ultimately, I would always end up laying aside my pen in remorse, or even shame, on discovering that, in my heart of hearts, I wanted to hide some of those experiences” (Zhang 1992: 15, my translation).

Here, the need for remembrance as a materialization of memory acts in tension with the desire to forget. Together they construct a representation of historical trauma.

3 “The Tall Woman and Her Short Husband”

Born in Tianjin in 1942, Feng Jicai (冯 骥 才) is another author who tackles the subject of the Cultural Revolution. In his work “The Tall Woman and Her Short Husband” (" 高女人和她的矮丈夫"), published in 1982, the couple’s conspicuous height difference becomes the subject of gossip, then suspicion, and finally leads to a formal denunciation of her husband and to his imprisonment. As the narrator tells us:

In 1966, disaster struck China. Great changes came into the lives of all the residents in the Unity Mansions, which was like a microcosm of the whole country. Mr. Short as chief engineer was the first to suffer. His flat was raided, his furniture moved out, he was struggled against and confined in his Institute. And worst was to come. He was accused of smuggling out the results of his research to write up at home in the evenings, with a view to fleeing the country to join a wealthy relative abroad. This preposterous charge of passing on scientific secrets to foreign capitalist was widely believed. In that period of lunacy people took leave of their senses and cruelly made up groundless in order to find some Hitler in their midst. The Institute kept a stranglehold on its chief engineer. He was threatened, beaten up, put under all kinds of pressure; his wife was ordered to hand over the manuscript which no one had ever seen. But all was to no effect. Someone proposed holding a struggle meeting against them both in the courtyard of Unity Mansions. As everyone dreads losing face in front of relatives and friends, this would put more pressure on them. Since all else had failed, it was at least worth trying. (Feng 1999: 29, trans. by Gladys Yang, my italics)

When the short husband is released, the marks on the couple’s bodies are mentioned:

But one day in autumn Mr. Short reappeared–thinly clad, his head shaven, and his whole appearance changed. He seemed to have shrunk and his skin no longer gleamed with health. […]

At the sound of his voice she sprang up to stare at him. After two years’ separation both were appalled by the change in the other. One was wrinkled, the other haggard; one looked taller than before, the other shorter. (30, my italics)

Shortly after, his wife dies and the short husband is rehabilitated, but the wound remains:

Since then several years have passed. Mr. Short is still a widower, but on Sundays he fetches his son home to keep him company. At the sight of his squat, lonely figure, his neighbors recall all that he has been through and have come to understand why he goes on living alone.

When it rains and he takes an umbrella to go to work, out of force or habit perhaps he still holds it high. The they have the strange sensation that there is a big empty space under that umbrella, a vacuum that nothing on earth can fill. (31, my italics)

In the eyes of the neighbors who remember “all that he has been through,” memory articulates the individual and the social very differently to the way the historian constructs a narrative. It is a private memory in which the void under the umbrella acts as a generator of meaning.

4 “The Butterfly”

Born in Beijing in 1934, a member of the Communist Party of China (CPC), Wang Meng (王蒙) published the story “The Young Newcomer in the Organizational Department” (组织部来了个年轻人) in 1956. Two years later he was accused of being right-wing because of it. He was partially rehabilitated in 1961 but was sent to Xinjiang Province to be “re-educated” through work in 1963. He was rehabilitated again in 1978 and appointed Minister of Culture in the period 1986–1989. His dismissal came after the Tian’anmen Square protests.

Wang Meng’s partially autobiographical story “The Butterfly” (蝴蝶), written between February and March 1980, deals with the contradictions between devotion to revolutionary ideals and the characters’ confusion, disillusionment, and frustrations. Referring to the main character, the narrator tells us:

When the Cultural Revolution began, just as the 16 May Circular was beginning to be circulated, he experienced joy and tension as he did at the previous movements. He knew this movement would be implacable, yet great and sacred. But he was left aghast at its violence. Still, he didn’t fear storms; he would ride out the swell and the gale. And he was firmly convinced that this struggle was to combat revisionism and stop it in its tracks. He believed wholeheartedly in the need to transform China and create a new history with revolutionary measures. (Wang 2013: 37–38, my italics)

The character then undergoes a terrible break in his identity:

The number of members of the Sinister Gang and disturbing elements that were reported kept growing. The more cadres that fell, the closer he came to the front row. His turn would finally come. He would be next. Yet everything came at him out of the blue. It was as if the man accused of being a leader who followed the Capitalist way, a traitor, an element opposed to Marxism, Socialism, and the party were a different Zhang Siyuan. (38, my italics)

This break leaves its mark on his body:

Is that me? […] Just two weeks ago I governed this city. And this hunched back, is it mine? This glue-stained coat, is it on my body? (The Red Guards had stuck a dazibao ^[1] on his back, and for good measure, had poured a full bucket of hot glue down his neck.) (39–40, my italics)

After a painful experience, the character salvages a valuable part of himself, shifting from an emotional catharsis to a hopeful outlook:

When he went up the mountains, he discovered his legs, which he had ignored for years. When he helped the peasants to winnow the grain, he discovered his arms. When he carried water, he discovered his shoulders. Heaving up the baskets acquainted him with his back and his waist. […] He even realized he was still attractive. If he wasn’t, why were the married communard women so eager to joke with him? […] There he also discovered his intelligence, his conscience, his self-respect. (52–53, my italics)

The open wound is still operative in the chapter “The Rehabilitation:” its epigraph reads “I wonder why / Sadness fills my heart. / I pray to heaven / To release my heart from this sorrow.” But the action of time lends a new aspect to the scar that is left, when pain and learning intertwine in a new balance:

Now he wasn’t afraid either of the bad weather or the rain, for there was no night in the city, it did not rain inside his car, and, in his heated office, there was no winter. But without the night there were no stars, without the rain there was no thrill after the storm, without winter there were no pristine snowflakes. When something is won, something else is lost. (61–62, my italics)

The breakdown of identity has its counterpart in a breakdown of temporality. From the opposition of the “now” and different moments in the past arises a new continuity, a suture: “There was a manifest link, a bridge between past, present, and future; […] between the ‘pebble,’ Zhang the instructor, Zhang the secretary, Zhang himself, Zhang the old man, and Zhang the deputy minister. Yes, that bridge linking life and death really did exist” (Wang Meng 2013: 96).

5 Rhetoric and argumentation: doxa and topics, passions and figurativization

Declercq states that “The oratory notion of common sense does not refer to a universal audience (the human race), but rather to doxa (opinions, common representations) of the audience faced by the orator” (Declercq 1992, my translation). In this sense, in all three works, we find topoi and cultural references that activate the period of the Cultural Revolution and its discursive scene in the Chinese reader’s memory:

1. Dazibao, wall periodicals or protest posters

2. Quotes (aphorizations) ^[2] and the figure of Mao Zedong

3. “Labels” (e.g. “intellectuals,” who were the Stinking Number Nine, 臭老九, among harmful elements)

4. Criticism and self-criticism as a regulated social exercise

5. Re-education, rehabilitation: laogai (劳改) or reform-through-labor and laojiao (劳教) or re-education-through-labor (administrative detention of a person not deemed an offender but who has committed minor offenses)

6. The May Seventh Cadre Schools (for re-education and working in the fields)

7. The Red Guards (红卫兵): a mass movement of university and secondary students (approaching eighty million strong)

8. Phraseology: for example, “the counter-revolutionary capitalist way” (资产阶级 反对革命路线) or “the bourgeois reactionary line” (资产阶级反动路线)

The activation of this discursive scene provides a framework for literary work on memory, in which pathos plays a particularly pronounced role. According to Herman Parret’s study of the role of passions in argumentation, a performativization occurs in the discursive use of passions, a passionate presence of the speaker in their discourse. By mobilizing empathy, and combining the subjective and the universal, passion plays an intersubjectivizing role: “The ‘noble’ passion of recognition is the passion of community: it is the passion motivated by the logically necessary character of intersubjectivity” (Parret 1995: 91, my translation).

In works of Scar Literature, the visibility of the dissolution of social ties is reiterated: in “The Scar,” the daughter disowns her mother; in “The Butterfly,” old Zhang is slapped in the street by his own son, and his wife commits suicide; in “The Tall Woman and Her Short Husband,” the tall woman is harassed by her neighbors and condemned to live apart from all; in Half of Man is Woman, the main character suffers from sexual impotence, and there is an irreparable breakdown of his relationship. Traumatic losses involve emotions like pain, guilt, regret, shame, resentment, and hatred, which, when not supported by the social, shift to a pathic sense of despair. In Parret’s words, “The obligation of the need for intersubjectivizing absence causes despair: this passion expresses a painful contradiction, the imperative of a motivation before the necessary absence of intersubjective or communal relations” (Parret 1995: 91, my translation).

In this sense, the impact of Scar Literature on Chinese society may be related to the persuasive power of a discourse that revives this rupture of intersubjectivity. But, it also plays an important intersubjectivizing role. The corporal/ emotional constructs the “proof” (Aristotle’s pisteis) using a reasoning that helps to look at individual experiences as part of a fabric.

So, by materializing memory, the trace that represents the historical trauma – the scar – is grounded in the private and the individual, but transcends to the public and the social, in the concatenation of narrative fabrics from one story to the next. An inductive reasoning is constructed in this fashion through the exemplum. The articulation of one story with another weaves a figurative network which traces a historiographic narration. In this narration, the individual becomes linked to the collective and structures the interpretation of experiences of the past and the collective memory by reconstructing a fragmented identity.

But passions have a particular language, and it is worth dwelling on the figure of the scar, and on the expressive, communicative, and persuasive function of the “figurativized” discourse. The figures establish an alliance of reason and passion. As Parret says, “The figures shed light on dark truths and make the spirit attentive: they serve to update a proposition, to develop and expand it. They force a listener to be attentive, they wake them up and hit them hard” (Parret 1995: 172, my translation). Declercq refers to figurative power in the same vein: “Fiction derives its argumentative function from its own essence, that is to say, its figurative power, which allows it to locate the argumentation in a mirror, and so amplify and multiply its effects” (Declercq 1992: 111, my translation).

Figurativity concentrates meaning. In the case in point, the central figure is the metaphor of the scar, emerging first from a work’s title, but resignified, continued, and reinforced by repetition in subsequent works. The figure of the scar interlinks the intersubjectivization of pathos and the materialization of memory. As an indicial sign of the wound and of what produced it, it refers to pathos because it is a trace of trauma on the body. It is a closed wound, but, at the same time, a trauma as a persisting condition. It is articulated with memory through the register of history, as a mark that authorizes and encourages us to read it.

6 Literature and historiography

The way Chinese official history judges the period of the Cultural Revolution can be seen in the content of the 1981 CPC resolution: “History has proven that the Cultural Revolution was erroneously launched by the leadership, was used by a counter-revolutionary group, and was an internal disturbance that brought severe suffering to the nation and to the people of all nationalities.” And later on: “[the Cultural Revolution] was responsible for the most severe setbacks and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the state, and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic” (quoted in Schweiger 2015: 347).

A historiographic reasoning crystallizes across the concatenation of works of Scar Literature, becoming more visible beyond each story. The semiotic and rhetorical dimensions of this reasoning are amenable to analysis. As Irmy Schweiger (2015) suggests, literature is a medium of memory: it fulfils mnemonic functions and completes the official historiography by integrating suppressed voices. This idea is brilliantly expressed in the preface to a collection of testimonies entitled Ten years of madness: Oral histories of China’s Cultural Revolution (一百个人的十年), published in 1996 by Feng Jicai: “With my own life on the line, I attempted to build a museum of hearts and souls for a whole generation of people, without the slightest thought of profit. Historians record the events of history, and writers record the hearts and souls of people” (Feng 1991: 4).

We must also keep in mind that the story arc delineated by scar literature essentially arises from the experience of intellectuals expelled from the Party, demoted, sent to faraway parts, or subjected to re-education through labor. These are the voices that have retraced an account of the experiences of the Cultural Revolution. There are different opinions about how far these works reflect historical reality (Liu 2011; Cong 1992; Bei 1993), about whether or not the collection exemplary cases releases power from responsibility or constructs a negating view of trauma (Yang 2012). Some argue that Scar Literature played a functional political role in Deng’s project by legitimizing a critical closure of the Maoist stage – the figure of the scar carrying an overtone of closure – and an opening up to a new political and social reality. It undoubtedly did contribute to a kind of social discursivity control on the Cultural Revolution. However, we must remember that Scar Literature was the work of a number of authors writing in a variety of styles and taking a variety of stances. And, finally, can we demand that literature shoulder the duty of explaining politics or the rigorousness of the historiographic construction? Certainly not. Symbolic work in the field of literature is qualitatively different from the work done by history and does not necessarily have to be grounded in a legitimacy that falls outside its scope.

An idea of Roland Barthes’s (1983: 463) will help to conceive this hiatus between history and literature: “Science is crude, life is subtle, and it is for the correction of this disparity that literature matters to us.”