(Many thanks to Matt for a very helpful comment to the LS cross-posting of my Schmitt and Mao piece. Matt cites some issues which Rose raises in her 1996 posthumous study, Mourning Becomes the Law, and specifically her critique of Derrida and others for idealizing a kind of “baroque melancholia” and “avoiding the work of mourning.” While I am still pondering these issues, a preliminary response may be found in the following discussion of a deeply melancholic novel which is framed by two burials—the first, when the 12 year old narrator is buried behind the village school with textbooks and storybooks in his coffin, and the second, when the narrator is subsequently reburied in the family plot, in a coffin extravagantly inscribed with images of cityscapes, global landmarks, and Chinese financial institutions. The body of the novel, therefore, is situated in the indeterminate space [a space of mourning? or of melancholia?] between these two burials.)
This year, on the 25th anniversary of the first published report of AIDS, the 20th anniversary of China’s
recognition of its own emerging AIDS crisis (i.e., China’s Heath Ministry’s announcement of the creation of China’s first AIDS prevention team ), the 10th anniversary of China’s implementation of new regulations governing its blood supply (reflecting the growing awareness of the role played by blood donations in HIV transmission), and the 5th anniversary of the Chinese government’s first official acknowledgement that tainted blood collection made up a “significant percentage of infections” (estimated at the time to be more than half a million)—native Henan author Yan Lianke 阎连科 has published Ding Village Dream 丁庄梦, billed as “China’s first full-length novel describing matters related to AIDS.” (It was preceded by Gao Yaojie’s 高耀洁 1994 nonfictional work, Ten Thousand Letters 一万封信).
Unlike America and Europe, where the early AIDS epidemic was initially driven primarily by homosexual contact, in China the primary conduit of contamination was initially blood donations and blood transfusions. While contaminated needles were a significant problem, of even greater consequence was the practice, in some rural areas (particularly rural Henan province, where Yan Lianke himself was born), of collecting and pooling the blood from multiple donors, separating out the plasma, and then returning the blood back to the original donors. Consequently, whereas Western works about AIDS often tend to foreground tropes of sexual contact and sexual transgression, there appears to be an emerging tendency for Chinese works about AIDS to use the theme of blood donation as a starting point for exploring the dissolution and restructuring of social connections and networks. Ah Nian’s 阿年 2001 movie Call Me 呼我, for instance, features a dislocated migrant worker in Beijing who discovers that he is HIV positive, and then proceeds to attempt to track down the strangers who may have purchased his blood. Yan Lianke’s novel, meanwhile, similarly centers around a dissolution and restructuring of kinship and social bonds within Ding village, including an instance of virtual incest, a post-mortem marriage, and two cases of filicide (one indirect, and the other quite direct).
Yan Lianke, who is identified as a “realistic” 实力派 author, notes in a lengthy interview that the novel has its origins in a trip he made in 1996 to his home province of Henan, where he met a twelve year old boy who was dying of the disease and heard first-hand accounts of the disease from many villagers themselves. It was this initial trip that inspired Yan to write the novel that would become Ding Village Dream. Despite these concrete origins of his project, however, Yan describes in this interview how the novel is effectively caught between two moments of fantasy (my words, not his).
On the one hand, Yan had originally intended to write a different novel altogether—one set in an imaginary country where everyone spoke an imaginary language. Due to the country’s extreme poverty, a system was put in place whereby the entire country would sell its blood, and as a result of this blood-selling, the imaginary nation would come to achieve global prominence. On the other hand, Yan also notes that in his research he spoke with numerous “blood heads” 血头 (people who coordinate, and profit from, the sale and purchase of blood by members of their and neighboring communities) who told him tales so horrifying that he felt he could not possibly include them in the novel (such how they would dilute the donated blood with beer, or how they would store it in plastic vinegar and soy sauce bottles, etc.). Caught, therefore, between the opposing poles of a narrative which proved to be too fanciful, and another which Yan feared was ultimately too realistic, he ended up with Ding Village Dream.
The resulting novel is narrated in the voice of a dead boy by the name of Ding Qiang 丁强, who was poisoned by fellow villagers at the age of 12 in retribution for his father’s complicity in the village’s AIDS epidemic. The narrator’s family’s suggestively phallic surname, Ding 丁, literally means “adult man” or “population,” connoting both the adulthood which the narrator will never reach, as well the anonymous Chinese rural population who share the Ding family’s fate. Because Ding Qiang died while still a child, local custom dictated that he not be buried in the ancestral plot, and therefore he was buried first behind the local school. An assortment of textbooks, notebooks, writing utensils were placed in his coffin with him, to which his grandfather then added some story books, fables, and dictionaries—all ostensibly in order to allow him to continue his education from beyond the grave.
These dictionaries, textbooks, notebooks, etc. also presumably come in handy for Ding Qiang’s post-mortem description of the circumstances surrounding the AIDS epidemic in this remote Henan village, and in particular the role played by his extended family in this crisis. The narrator’s father, Ding Hui 丁辉, for instance, was the village’s earliest and most prominent “blood head” who, more than anyone else, was responsible for the spread of the HIV virus in the village. Like Xu Sanguan 许三观 in Yu Hua’s 余华 novel Chronicles of a Blood Merchant 许三观卖血记 (published in 1996, the same year Yan Lianke made his trip back to Henan) or the eponymous protagonist of Zhou Xiaowen’s 周晓文1994 film, Ermo 二嫫 (both of these mid-1990s works are critiques of the practice of selling one’s own blood for profit, but neither touches on the topic of AIDS), Ding Hui embodies the fantasy that the sale of blood can create wealth, vastly in excess of what could have been created through one’s labor alone.
Ding Hui’s own father, Ding Shuiyang 丁水阳, meanwhile, works at the local school, and is known throughout the village as “teacher Ding” 丁老师, although in reality his sole responsibility was ringing the school bell—which is to say, keeping time (钟, “bell,” also means “clock”). The novel opens with the grandfather having just traveled to the city where he learned about current scientific perspectives on the AIDS epidemic. He returns to the village determined both to share that knowledge, and also to demand that his son to beg forgiveness from the village for his role in the crisis. The grandfather, furthermore, hopes that his son, after begging forgiveness, will then die. (As 曾金燕 notes in an interesting discussion of the novel, as the legacy of the 1990s enthusiasm for blood selling has become increasingly evident, what has been notably lacking has been any expression of contrition or remorse on the part of the original “blood heads” themselves, many of whom, Jinyan claims, have become rich and currently hold prestigious government positions).
This conflicted relationship between the narrator’s father and grandfather represents in miniature the novel’s larger fascination with the deterretorialization and reterritorialization of existing kinship relationships. For instance, one of the narrator’s uncles, Ding Liang 丁亮, who is dying of AIDS and already has a wife of his own, marries the new wife (Xia Lingling 夏玲玲) of his own younger brother, Ding Xiaoming 丁小明, so that they can be buried together when they die (when Ding Liang first suggests this to Lingling, she protests that, if people were to find out, they would skin them alive). The young narrator himself is eventually disinterred and symbolically “married” to the photograph of the (crippled) daughter of the county magistrate—so that they, too, can then be buried together. Finally, the novel as a whole is framed by two acts of filicide—beginning with the poisoning of the narrator in retribution for his father’s blood-selling business, and concluding with the grandfather’s bludgeoning his own first-born son to death with a club.
With death comes a need for coffins, and coffins accordingly play a central role in Ding Village Dream. After his role in precipitating the epidemic in the first place, for instance, the narrator’s father is appointed Vice Chairman of the County Commission on AIDs, thereby allowing him to commandeer the free coffins supplied by the government and resell them to the villagers for a significant profit. At the end of the novel, however, the father attempts to use this ill-begotten wealth to expiate the multiple sins which stained its original acquisition. First, he attempts to assuage his guilt towards his younger brother, Ding Liang (who has died of AIDS as the result of tainted blood), by providing him and his new wife (Xia Lingling) with a pair of extravagant coffins. Made from gingko wood, the coffins are engraved with an array of spectacular cityscapes from throughout China and the world. Upon seeing the coffins, one villager remarks in awe that, “Emperors of the past didn’t even have such a coffin.” Another villager, carefully running his hand over the cityscape engraving, remarks that “the city is as resplendent as the face of a new bride.” The narrator further observes that
Most importantly, on the planks over my uncle’s feet, there was an engraving of a building, on which appeared the words “China People’s Bank.”
It was as if they were taking the wealth that the nation had created over the past several decades, and were burying it all with my uncle. All of the world’s wealth was being inserted into his coffin with him.
The irony, though, is that the wealth which is figuratively inscribed on the side of the coffin is more specifically the wealth which the father extracted from the villagers themselves, at the expense of their health and, ultimately, their very lives.
The villager’s comparison of the cityscape engraving to the “face of a new bride,” meanwhile, uncannily anticipates the father’s subsequent efforts to find his dead son, the narrator, an yinqin 阴亲—a surrogate wife whose photograph could then be placed in the boy’s coffin with him when his bones are reburied. Furthermore, the coffin which he then provides for his son’s reinterment is perhaps even more extravagant than that of his uncle, Ding Liang. The novel devote several pages to a detailed description of the coffin—how the outside is covered with images (engraved with real gold powder) of lively cityscapes from Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and other Chinese cities, as well as foreign cities such as New York, Paris and London. The inside of the coffin, meanwhile is engraved with a meticulously detailed scene containing a forest, river, and an old-fashioned Western house—with the words “Ding family mansion” carved on the roof. Through the doors and windows of this house, furthermore, it is possible to see
all sorts of electrical equipment and appliances, and the walls are full of hanging scrolls and musical instruments. Under the walls, Father had provided images of book cases, full of all sorts of story books.
What is the nature of the trajectory from the first coffin, which the narrator’s grandfather had filled with real storybooks, to the second, which the narrator’s father has had inscribed with miniature images of the same story books? Of the trajectory from the narrator’s initial death as the direct result of his father’s quest for wealth, to his reburial in a extravagantly expensive coffin, the base of which is inscribed with images of
all sorts of buildings, each of which had the name of a bank inscribed on the front: such as the Bank of China, the People’s Bank of China, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the Agricultural Bank of China, China Urban Credit Union, China Rural Credit Union, China Everbright Bank, China Minsheng Bank, etc. All of the banks of China have a building here, are all engraved on the baseboard of my coffin, as if all of China’s money, all of the world’s money was sleeping underneath my body.
These representations of worldly institutions suggest, perhaps, the father’s fantasy that, not only wealth, but also a new secular order may emerge out of the devastation wrought by the AIDS epidemic. At the same time, the very exorbitant excess of these representations suggests an overcompensatory dimension to this gesture, an implicit recognition (on the part of the narrator, if not of his father) that this fantasy represents a short-circuit of the mourning process, a failure to come to terms with his own direct complicity in his son’s death.
These images of the financial institutions, like the images of the cityscapes and other scenes, furthermore, represent a fantasy of mimetic affinity, wherein the image not only represents, but can even come to substitute for, its referent. A similar logic of mimetic affinity is played out most explicitly in the discussion, near the end of the work, of the grandfather’s trip to visit his nephew Jia Yuejin 贾跃进 to give him three pieces of ginseng root on behalf of his son, Ding Liang. Each piece of ginseng
resembled a baby’s head. The ginseng [literally, the ginseng’s “entire body” 满身) was covered with resplendent yellowish-white fur and whiskers, and as it reclined in that sheet of newspaper, it exuded a medicinal smell.
This anthropomorphic description (the ginseng’s “body” 身, covered with “whiskers” 须and “lying” 躺 on the newspaper) is not accidental, as Yuejin’s family immediately exclaim,
Oh, indeed, ginseng does indeed look human 人参果然长得和人一样. It has the appearance of a child 和孩娃一模样.
The correspondence asserted here operates on several levels. First, there is the common perception that the hairy ginseng root looks vaguely anthropomorphic, a suggestion which is then reinforced by the Chinese name of the plant, renshen 人参, which not only contains the character for “human” 人, but furthermore is a precise homophone of the word 人身, meaning the “living body of a human,” and is a close homophone of the word 人生 (rensheng), meaning “life.”
This explicit anthropomorphization of the ginseng root, in turn, is significant because the grandfather then assures Yuejin’s family that the root has the ability to “refill your empty body” 补你的虚身子. The ginseng, therefore, functions as a human effigy, and the act of consuming it constitutes an act of symbolic cannibalism, replicating, quite precisely, the cannibalistic blood transfusion which was responsible for the spread of HIV in Ding village in the first place).
[A similar gesture of figurative cannibalism is also implicit in the nephew’s name, Yuejin 跃进, which literally means “leap forward” and which presumably alludes to the Great Leap Forward 大跃进 (1958-1961)—China’s ill-conceived attempt to jumpstart its economy through a system of unrealistic quotas which ultimately resulted in the devastating cannibalization of the nation’s own resources.]
After Grandfather visits Yuejin, he then takes the remaining ginseng to his other nephew, Jia Genzhu 贾根柱, and finds Genzhu’s house full of furniture and other valuable that have been looted from the elementary school (another example of older generations consuming the resources of younger ones). At Genzhu’s house, the grandfather also
the bell that Grandfather had rung for half his life which at some point, it is not clear when, had also been brought over and placed behind Genzhu’s front door. I don’t know why Genzhu’s family wanted that bell. Because it was made of iron, they had simply deposited it behind the door.
The symbolism of this image is poignant—the bell, which the grandfather has used for half his life to mark the passage of time, is now found, stolen and hidden behind his nephew’s front door.
The grandfather, as bell-ringer for the village school, represents an institutionalized pedagogical orthodoxy, the orderly bequeathment of knowledge from one generation to the next. Unlike the regular teachers, who are paid a salary, the grandfather is instead repaid with, literally, excrement and urine from the school’s lavatories, which he then uses as fertilizer. This fascinating detail symbolizes both the natural cycle wherein waste and death helps provide the conditions for new life, but at the same time it potentially signals a critique of that pedagogical chronology itself, the same kind of inversion that we witness in the novel when the school is converted into a triage center for AIDS patients, and when the grandfather’s own relatives help plunder the school’s property for their personal use.
With the narrator reburied, his father dead at the hands of his own father, and the grandfather having just returned to Ding Village after being imprisoned (during which time he apparently recounted to the authorities much of the same tale we find in the novel itself), these questions of the grandfather’s status as a symbol of a potentially redemptive pedagogical orthodoxy, or merely its own travesty, come most sharply into focus in the very last line of the novel, when the grandfather, noting that Ding Village has become an desolate ghost town, describes what he sees as a “new, vivacious world.”
While, at one level, this remark is clearly meant to be ironic, might it perhaps also carry a Messianic valence? Or suggest a fundamental indeterminancy? Does it imply the death of the father will allow a productive mourning of the death of the narrator and the others who died as a result of his actions, or that these deaths are necessarily caught up in an aporia of melancholic denial?
Derrida, in his discussion of the AIDS crisis in “The Rhetoric of Drugs” takes the latter approach, suggesting that,
at the dawn of this very new and ever so ancient thing, we know that, even should humanity some day come to control the virus (it will take at least a generation), still, even in the most unconscious symbolic zones, the traumatism has irreversibly affected our experience of desire and of what we blithely call intersubjectivity, the relation to the alter ego, and so forth.
It is precisely this emphasis on “traumatism,” in turn, which Rose criticizes, in Mourning Becomes the Law, as a glorification of a sort of "aberrated mourning." As Matt quotes in his comment to my earlier post, Rose argues instead for the need for a process of true mourning, wherein a
dialectic of misrecognition between two self-consciousnesses yields the meaning of the law that is inseparable from the meaning of Bildung (education, formation, cultivation), inseparable from the process by which self-consciousness comes to learn its investment in denying the actuality of itself and other as always already engaged in some structure of recognition or misrecognition, in some triune (triple) relation to its own otherness and to the self-relating of the other.
Is the grandfather, and by implication the novel as a whole, locked in an arrested state of melancholia (which, according to Freud, characterized by an inability to reconcile oneself to the loss of t
he love object), or do we see here instead a mourning process leading to the establishment of new attachments and institutions? In other words, do the elaborate coffin engravings (together with the “yinqin” 阴亲 photograph) represent an inability to let go of earlier dreams an attachments, or do they represent the possibility of starting afresh, of creating new attachments and institutions out of the loss and devastation within which one finds oneself?
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