(Many thanks to Danwei for the gracious reposting of my discussion of Yu Hua's Brothers and Beijing's Olympics preparations. Building on the questions of sexual purity and and defilement eplored in that earlier post, I turn now to a cluster of related issues in Dung Kai Chueng's "virginal work" 处女作, "Cecilia."）
“Cecilia,” croon Simon and Garfunkel in their famous 1970 ballad, “you're breaking my heart, you're shaking my confidence daily. Oh Cecilia, I'm down on my knees, I'm begging you please to come home.” The second stanza of the chorus, meanwhile, specifies the cause of the singer’s anxiety: 
Making love in the afternoon with Cecilia
Up in my bedroom,
I got up to wash my face
When I come back to bed,
Someone's taken my place.
These uncharacteristically ribald lyrics (what sort of “love-making” would lead the man to abruptly leave the bed to wash his face…?) mark a crisis of substitution and betrayal, wherein it is precisely at the moment of greatest intimacy that the singer finds himself abruptly displaced, substituted by another.
“Cecilia” 西西利亚 also happens to be the title of a short story by Hong Kong author Dung Kai Cheung 董启章 (his first, written when he was 24), which similarly revolves around a (presumably) male protagonist’s obsession with a “Cecilia,” whom he perceives to be slipping away from him, betraying him, at precisely what should be their moment of greatest intimacy. The story begins at that moment of alienated encounter with the ostensible object of desire:
Regarding Cecilia, what more is there for me to say? Now, Cecilia is finally in front of me, but she has become so silent, and her body has become so cold, making me almost not recognize her.
Being cold and silent, furthermore, are not the only qualities about Cecilia which now inspire in the narrator an uncanny sense of “strange familiarity” 奇怪地熟悉—it turns out that she is also bald, naked, and armless....
The reason for Cecilia’s rather peculiar appearance, it gradually becomes clear, is that she is actually a display window mannequin (假人—literally, a “fake person”). The narrator, it is explained, is an accountant at a large department store who becomes infatuated with a clothing store mannequin across the street from a coffee shop he frequents, and to whom he writes passionate letters in an attempt grant her sentience (he receives one letter from her in return, which it turns out was actually written by an employee of the clothing store). The narrator emphasizes that his infatuation with the mannequin is neither an act of desperation (he has a female coworker, Angela 安琪利亚, who appears interested in him), nor a failure to comprehend that she is an inanimate object. Instead, his infatuation with her (as an inanimate ideal?) appears to have convinced him that it would be possible to give her a personality and awareness through a combination of sheer force of will and textual production.
Although the connection between the Simon song and the Dung story is admittedly a somewhat arbitrary one, contingent on a coincidence of naming, this theme of semiotic contingency is explicitly foregrounded within Dung’s story itself. The eponymous object of desire in the story, for instance, is not merely “Cecilia,” but rather is repeatedly referred to as “the Cecilia who is named Cecilia” 名为西西利亚的西西利亚. This emphasis on her name, it turns out, derives from the narrator’s conviction that her name potentially supercedes the identity which it ostensibly denotes:
And poor Cecilia, in addition to having lost her arm, has also lost everything, including even her name. No, she has not lost her name—her name is still exists, but what has been lost is herself as the referent of that name. An empty name and a disfigured body—together what do they amount to?
The story subsequently returns to this rhetorical question, effectively answering it from Cecilia’s own point of view, suggesting that it was precisely the act of being named which helped grant Cecilia a “consciousness like that of a real person”:
This is all because of a name, Cecilia, a name which a mannequin shouldn’t have in the first place, and which made it possible for a consciousness like that of a real person entered my body. A physical object and a name—together, they constitute a person.
Cecilia’s name, therefore, comes to function as a transcendental signifier, actively creating (and giving life to) its own referent—even when that referent is figured as a space of falsity (“a mannequin” 假人) and lack (“disfigured body” 残缺的身躯).
This contingency of signification is further suggested in the story by the similarity between the names of the mannequin, Cecilia 西西利亚, and the name of the narrator’s co-worker, Angela 安琪利亚. The relationship between these two female characters is rather complex, insofar as they each function, at various points, as doubles or substitutes of each other. This paradox is developed most explicitly when the narrator notes that Cecilia is beginning to resemble, in terms of her clothing, Angela herself:
But, this is the strange thing: there is nothing unseemly in Angela’s resembling Angela, but what is untenable is for Cecilia to come to resemble Angela. Doesn’t Cecilia, like Angela, work at a store? Why do I need to give up a real quality already in my possession in order to pursue an alluring beauty existing at the level of mere appearance?
The uncanny feeling which this perceived doubling of Cecilia in Angela precipitates in the narrator is apparently due to the fact that, while Angela represents the conjunction of presence and appearance, signifier and signified/referent, Cecilia, by contrast, exists merely at the level of appearance, at the level of pure signifier.
Shortly after the discussion of Cecilia’s clothing coming to resemble Angela’s, Angela gives the narrator a volume of photographs by Eugène Atget’s (1857-1927) (she mentions that she had originally intended to buy him a volume by Ansel Adams, for the purely contingent reason that Adams was at the head of the alphabet, but when she got to the bookstore found his work boring and therefore bought the Atget instead). The narrator opens the volume, and the first image he sees is a photograph of a shop window:
In the display window there was a neat row of fabric and price tags, as well a male mannequin (男人像模特儿) wearing a three piece suit with white wing collared shirt and bowtie. It could almost see him smiling and stepping out of the display window.
The photograph is, of course, Atget’s famous 1925 photograph “Avenue des Gobelins” (reproduced below), which not only features several strikingly life-like mannequins, but furthermore suggestively juxtaposes the scene inside the store with the street scene as reflected in the glass window, effectively blurring the distinction between reality and representation (Taiwan director Edward Yang uses this technique in several of his films, most famously in his 2000 film A One and a Two [一一]).
Dung’s story ends with four separate “conclusions,” of which the second is, in some ways, the most intriguing. This second ending is narrated in Cecilia’s voice, as she ironically laments the fact that she has no voice with which to inform the narrator that she is not real:
About myself, Cecilia, what have I ever been able to say? When I stand here, in front of him, without arms, without clothing, without hair—all of this, however, is not important, because, in the end, of what value are all of these things for me? However, what I don’t have is a voice, and therefore can’t tell him that I fundamentally don’t exist. But, isn’t it true that I have a very powerful voice, to tell him and her that they can not doubt my existence? But, is this not because I, myself, I lifeless mannequin, created this voice capable of causing someone to have a mental breakdown?
This passage articulates particularly clearly one of the central paradoxes of the story as a whole: Cecilia, as a figure for lack and absence, is precisely the central presence in the work. Similarly, her “voice” is loudest and paradoxically most powerful precisely when she is speaking about her own voicelessness.
Bald, naked and armless (and putatively voiceless), Cecilia is a quintessential figure of the castrated subject. However, in the passage immediately following the one cited above, she makes clear that she feels no shame in her denuded condition: “To tell the truth, being naked doesn’t make me feel at all ashamed, because I am inherently nothing more than a mannequin.” (“However,” she continues, “precisely because I am a mannequin, clothing is therefore an absolute necessity for me, because I exist precisely in order to serve as a tool for displaying clothing”). In The Parallax View, Zizek identifies a similar paradox, wherein shame (e.g., of castration) is actually located with the observer, rather than with the ostensibly “castrated” subject:
While shamelessness resides in openly displaying one’s castration, shame enacts a desperate attempt to keep up the appearance: although I know the truth (about castration), let us pretend that it hasn’t happened… This is way, when I see my crippled neighbor “shamelessly” pushing his disfigured limb toward me, it is I, not he, who is overwhelmed with shame.
The process by which Dung’s narrator comes to vicariously shoulder the “shame” which Cecilia herself “lacks,” meanwhile, is precisely mirrored in Cecilia’s own gradual assumption of the consciousness and desire which the narrator projects onto her.
Dung Kai Cheung’s story is about imitations and simulacra, and therefore it is appropriate that the story itself imitates, and borrows from, a rich tradition of literary works about inanimate doubles being granted life though the force of desire and mimetic verisimilitude. For instance, the narrator at one point compares himself to Pygmalion, and at another point he alludes to the Tang dynasty story of the painter who painted a dragon and then, when he had the finishing touches to the eyes, the eye come to life and flew away (c.f. the well-known aphorism, 画龙点睛).
This theme of uncanny “strange familiarity,” meanwhile, is also an integral component of the contemporary consumer culture which is the setting for “Cecilia.” For instance, instead of inanimate mannequins, some upscale stores have begun using live mannequins (which is to say, models impersonating mannequins who are themselves modeled on real people). A similar blurring of model (“One serving as an example to be imitated or compared”) and model (“representation of something”), furthermore can be found in the disturbing parallel between, on the one hand, the increasing popularity of dolls that are exact replicas of children (as with the Baby Me brand “photo doll”), on the one hand, and the life-like “love dolls” (as with the Real Doll brand “sex dolls”), on the other. (Meghan Laslocky had an interesting article in Salon last year on the latter phenomenon. See also Elena Dorfman’s photo-collection, Still Lovers [2005]).
What is it about contemporary, consumer culture which makes this sorts of mannequins and dolls particularly attractive? Susan Nelson, in Secret Life of Puppets, suggests that the perverse attraction of these human simulacra can be related to a general process of desacralization in modern society, whereby "the transcendental has been forced underground, where it has found a distorted outlet outside the recognized boundaries of religious expression." Sakiya Hanafi, in The Monster in the Machine, meanwhile, makes a similar point with respect to automatons and other machines, suggesting that "the sacred monster did not die out; it transmuted and migrated into mechanical contrivances." The fetishization of human simulacra, Nelson and Hanfi both argue, can be seen as a return of a certain kind of repressed religiosity, wherein the doubling which is at the heart of secular consumer culture becomes cathected with the feelings of awe and reverence once reserved for the sacred and transcendental.
This theme of the return of religiosity, in turn, returns us to Paul Simon’s “Cecilia.” While one might assume Simon’s song is about a fickle girlfriend or perhaps a prostitute, a more intriguing possibility is that the song actually refers to St. Cecilia, the patron saint of (church) music (another Simon song, "The Coast," begins with the line, “A family of musicians took shelter for the night in the little harbor church of St. Cecilia"). Read as an paradoxical lament about the song-writer’s figurative loss of his “muse” (paradoxical because, like a novel about writer’s block, the initial loss of inspiration becomes a source of inspiration in its own right), the not-so-subtle reference to oral sex (“I got up to wash my face…) comes to assume a startling significance, insofar as it is precisely at the moment of most intimate contact with the muse that the narrator is rendered quite literally mute.
If St. Cecilia’s status as the patron saint of music enriches our understanding of Paul Simon’s song, the alleged circumstances of her life and death provide an interesting counterpoint to Dung Kai Cheung’s story. After her marriage to a youth named Valerianus, she informed him that “she was betrothed to an angel who jealously guarded her body; therefore Valerianus must take care not to violate her virginity.” Later, condemned to death for her faith, she was ordered
to be suffocated in the bath of her own house. But as she remained unhurt in the overheated room, the prefect had her decapitated in that place. The executioner let his sword fall three times without
separating the head from the trunk, and fled, leaving the virgin bathed in her own blood.
Does not St. Cecilia’s combination of virginity and disfigurement not mirror the mannequin Cecilia’s combination of idealization and dismemberment? And, does not the triangular relationship between Cecilia, Valerianus and the angel not mirror the relationship between Cecilia, the narrator, and Angela in Dung’s story (with Valerianus corresponding roughly to Angela, and the angel corresponding to Dung’s Cecilia)?
Comments