Da Chen’s “Sounds of the River”

Da Chen’s Sounds of the River limns the author’s student days in the prestigious Beijing Language Institute, providing a personal vista of a China resuscitated from the spell of the Cultural Revolution. Mao Zedong is still revered by some authority figures, while others, like Da’s friend Abdullah, are daring and irreverent enough to take a shirtless picture with his likeness. Indeed, Da’s generation ushers in a new era when wizened grownups lament that respect for elders is no longer inculcated in disaffected youths. Ultimately, the mellifluous memoir is as much a journey to a foreign world of profligate city slickers as it is an introspective odyssey.

Many leitmotifs salt the narrative, but perhaps the most prominent one is the metamorphosis of one’s identity. Many things factor into the formation of a composite character, such as: the influence of family, friends, and foreigners, the ephemeral and the permanent, the true and the false. Da Chen learns early on that one must make allowances for the vicissitudes of life. In anticipation of his departure from home, he had practiced wiping histrionic tears from his eyes in farewell to his parents. But this is not what happens on the actual day. He doesn’t have a vision of his parents becoming diminutive dolls, with each blast of steam, on the horizon. When Da first sees the behemoth Beijing-Fujian Express, it seems like an anachronism, this breathing locomotive that comes rushing into his little provincial town. Or, equally plausible, perhaps it is the farming boy, who is out of place – an oddity in a crowd of people assimilated with the modern world. The train comes to signify the theme of social change, of the pastoral diaspora to urban cities.

No matter Da’s bucolic-outsider status, from the outset, he proves himself to be an extraordinarily hard-working student. Another immutable quality is his pride, not in himself, but in his ancestors and heritage. Da Chen comes from a line of scholars, but that fact alone, he gleans, does not guarantee his academic prowess. He knows that there is no magical formula for success, and he never takes a chance, not even when numerous fortunes portend an enviable future, by slacking off. Furthermore, he refuses to let other people deride him on the basis of his background, and is rightly outraged by the undeserved attention paid to the progeny of blueblood parents – attention that could send a wealthy child to America or land him a cushy job. And the worst part is that Da, for all his abhorrence of corruption and gross fealty, is helpless to do anything about it.

Da Chen’s mandarin prose poetically encapsulates his feelings towards his teachers, peers, family and friends. His masterly evocation of the past is a testament to both his talent as a writer and his diligence to master the English language. At times, however, the dialogue between his friends and him smacks of contrivance – almost too lyrical to pass for the colloquial conversation that occurs between friends or strained by an overdose of comity. Also, the fleeting descriptions of Da’s encounters with other students seem to intimate that the few times he mingles with his peers are the outcomes of totally fortuitous events, such as the playing of his Chinese flute enticing (or rather, summoning) a foreigner. While many of the university’s professors are myopic about the concept of interacting with strangers from strange lands, Da becomes an outlier of this group-think mentality, forsaking his belief in the dominating social construct as if it was a burdensome overcoat. Where his teachers see a parlous influence, Da lionizes a fascinating specimen of refined culture, taste, and values. Secretly, he scorns the risible shibboleth that all foreigners are to be avoided. Perhaps this is one of his subtle ways of rebelling against those proponents of the social hierarchy, but his admiration of foreigners most likely stems from a desire to live the American Dream, indelibly incarnated by his friend Bob.

Another minor drawback of Sounds of the River is Da’s heavy reliance on alliterations and adjectives. A laconic list of the ingredients in a dish of messy noodles, for instance, is certainly more apposite than Da’s list that describes each ingredient separately (in this case, he sacrifices authenticity for artistry, for the palate doesn’t distinguish amongst different components, but appreciates a sapid dish for its overall taste). Also, Da’s commentary, at certain points, serves only to stifle the flow of the narrative rather than evince his tenets, rendering the book less copacetic than it otherwise might have been. For instance, early on, Da alludes to his future career path: “The interpreter pulled out a business card and gave me a snappy handshake before he disappeared into the throng. In four years I would have my own cards and be able to drop names like he did” (Chen 12). Though the last sentence does highlight the theme of the present as an illimitable process of repetition, would it not have been better to leave it out, letting the reader ponder the nuanced significance of the cards of fate?

The story Da has to tell is redolent of the bildungsroman; we witness him grow piecemeal from a naïf into a cerebral and supremely ambitious young man. In retrospect, he provides a spate of vivid recollections both within the classroom and without. Where hedonists slack off, peruse dirty magazines or go on louche excursions, Da always has his head in a book, rolling words off his tongue like a waterfall spouting liquid into a foamy phenomenon. For him, books are apertures into other worlds; disinterred conduits to Jack London’s Yukon Territory or Shakespeare’s Venice. Comrade Chen is uniquely fueled by his love of the English language, which eclipses the pressure to perform at his absolute best. Furthermore, his descriptions of his familial gatherings are not overly maudlin or saccharine. It is clear to see how proud everyone is of Chen’s successes – first of being accepted to Beijing Language Institute, then graduating on top of his class, and eventually venturing to America all on his own. One truly feels, at the end of the book, that any “lucky breaks” Da got were well-deserved and if anything, that he should have been rewarded more serendipitous opportunities. As the saying goes, however, a man creates his own luck, of which, amidst a land of food rations and limited shower times, Da Chen, at last, had a surfeit.

Science fiction

“I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth. The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.”

- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

Buoyed by Ivan Panin’s THOUGHTS

“To recognize the vanity of this life is the first step towards the true life. To perceive our ignorance is the first step toward true knowledge; to acknowledge our folly is the first step to true wisdom; to behold our misery is the first step toward true happiness.”

- Ivan Panin, Thoughts

Ivan Panin was born in Russia on December 12, 1855. In his youth, he was a Nihilist and plotted against the Czar and his regime. At an early age he was banished from Russia. After passing much time in Germany furthering his schooling, he came to the United States, where he enrolled in Harvard University. After his college days, Panin became a distinguished literary docent. He lectured on Carlyle, Emerson, Tolstoy, and on Russian literature. During this time Panin garnered attention as a fervid agnostic – so well known that when he abjured his agnosticism and accepted the Christian faith, newspapers carried headlines reporting of his conversion. What follows is an account of how Panin labored assiduously to disinter sevens in the Bible:

“Mr. Panin was casually reading the first verse of the Gospel of John in the Greek – ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with (the) God, and the Word was God.’ The question came to his mind, Why does the Greek word for the precede the word God in one case, but not in the other? Therefore in one column he made a list of all the New Testament passages in which the word God occurs with the article the, and in another column he made a list of all the passages in which the word God occurs without the article. On comparing the two sums he was struck with the numeric relation between them. He then followed the same procedure on the word Christ and on other words, and found amazing numeric facts. This was the beginning of the profound numerical discoveries which are now called the Science of Bible Numerics.

“Since discovering that first feature in 1890 Mr. Panin earnestly devoted his entire life to one definite and specific purpose. He devoted himself so persistently to counting letters and words, figuring numeric values, making concordances, and working out mathematical problems, that on several occasions his health completely failed. Regardless of the tremendous mental and physical strain he has labored faithfully and diligently for the past fifty years. The original manuscripts of his work consist of approximately 40,000 pages. The sevens are strangely out of sight of ordinary Hebrew and Greek readers. [They] are so deeply concealed that special searching and investigation and special counting are necessary in order to find them. Some of the sevens are strangely concealed in the unusual system of numbers – in the ‘numeric values’ of the Hebrew and Greek letters, words, sentences, paragraphs and passages of the text, while other sevens are hidden in other remarkable and peculiar ways. The numerical facts enable us to see before our very eyes an actual scientific demonstration of the divine verbal inspiration of the Bible.

“The sevens were discovered by gematria, using the usual Greek and Hebrew alphabetical system with no variations, and by counting. The sum of the values of ‘God,’ ‘heavens,’ and ‘earth’ is 86 + 395 + 296 = 777, a value which is an exact multiple of seven” (Dudley 104-106).

The pith of sevens, however, is not exclusively confined to mathematics. A signal of King Lear’s madness, for instance, is his failure to appreciate sevens: (King Lear, Act 1, Scene 5):

Fool.     The reason why the seven stars are no more than seven is a pretty reason.

Lear.     Because they are not eight?

Fool.     Yes, indeed.

Upon discoursing with Edgar, disguised as bedlam beggar Tom, Lear forsakes his identification with the almighty: “Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.” Instead of identifying himself with the gods, Lear now identifies with the “unaccommodated man”; the omnipotent king donned in resplendent garb of scene one has become a naked, unprotected man. This metamorphosis brings about the dissolution of his old identity. As Lear attempts to forge a new composite identity, he becomes aware of the decay of society, whose symbol he was as king. Lear’s maturing consciousness of his identity as both king and the “bare, forked animal” endows him with a new perspective on royal power and the human condition. He believes that life is characterized by adversity, inconsistency, and brevity. Man is only entitled to have the sympathy of other men. With the wisdom gained in madness, Lear is fully transformed. His lunatic ravings often make more sense than the behests he made in his saner moments. When Lear exalts, at his apotheosis, “Ay, every inch a king,” he wears the crown figuratively.

Reference

1. Dudley, Underwood. Numerology, or, What Pythagoras Wrought. Washington, DC: Mathematical Association of America, 1997.

Review of HEART OF DARKNESS by Joseph Conrad

Just as the methods of civilization are as unequivocally manifest as the power of nature, so in humans there can be a capacity for restraint that is just as immanent as the impulses toward avarice and aggression. Societies reinforce the restraints they sanction in numerous ways, but when such external supports are eliminated, civilized men easily regress towards an atavistic primitivism. In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Marlow’s journey up the Congo introduces him to the foreign world of unbridled nature and into the nature of humans. It is a trip backward in time, to a primordial phase in social development, as well as a journey within, to what lies obscured under the veneer in civilized men. Marlow learns that although humankind has ostensibly moved far beyond its primeval origins, human beings revert to the primitive when they are removed from their cultural milieu and are no longer subjected to various sanctions.

When Marlow journeys to Africa, he departs a familiar setting and arrives in a world which becomes progressively more foreign and tenebrous. However, Marlow is not disconcerted by Africa but by the actions of his fellow Europeans, which he thought would make sense (“For a time I would feel I belonged still to a world of straightforward facts” (Conrad 79)), and when they do not, he feels that he is losing touch with the real world. He is prepared for the natives, but not prepared for the spectacle of a French man-of-war “firing into a continent” where “there wasn’t even a shed” (79). Also, he had not expected the barbarous profiteering and exploitation of the natives he finds in the Congo. In an African setting European mores have mutated into something inane; and Marlow identifies with the natives, who are likewise languishing from the unfamiliarity and unintelligibility of the fractious world into which they have been conveyed. The dissolution of civilized morals is best evinced by the station’s manager and his uncle, the chieftain of the Eldorado Exploring Expedition. The manager has attained his station of authority even though he has no wisdom, no intellect, no gumption, and no managerial instincts. What he has is “triumphant health in the general rout of constitutions” (89). While those around him sicken and expire, he is never unwell. His clout originates from his animal health and his depravity, from the fact that he is one of the vacuous men. The manager’s uncle is equally unscrupulous. The members of the Eldorado Exploring Expedition are “sordid buccaneers” whose desire “to tear treasure out of the bowels of the land” has “no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe” (101).

The journey to the Central Station heightens Marlow’s sense of the disarray into which the Europeans have fallen and the disorder they have instigated. Marlow meets a white man flanked by an armed escort, who claims that he is “looking after the upkeep of the road” (87). The discovery of a negro with a bullet hole in his forehead three miles yonder makes a mockery of this statement. Marlow ponders if the cadaver is to be considered “a permanent improvement” (87). The frailty of civilization and its liability to disintegrate are on full display at the Central Station. The steamer Marlow has come to command has been carelessly fractured, and it is impossible to procure the rivets needed for its repair. A copious supply of rivets was scattered about in the first station where they idly lay without being used; but all that can be acquired from that station is a spate of flimsy wares to be bargained for ivory. When a hut full of the wares conflagrates, a man tells Marlow that everyone is acting excellently, as he ladles river water into a pail with a porous bottom. Marlow had received a similar assurance about everyone’s behavior when the steamer was sunk. There is a brickmaker who, lacking a crucial ingredient, has not been able to make bricks. Finally, there are the plotting agents (“the pilgrims”) who make a “philanthropic pretense” and a “show of work” (93) while being guided exclusively by rapacity and never lifting a finger effectually.

Review of ALL THE PRETTY HORSES by Cormac McCarthy

When characters are forced to confront the vagaries and consummate powers of nature, they are galvanized by an elegiac yen to repeat the entrenched patterns and plots of the past. The present is essentially an illimitable process of repetition. In All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy, as John Grady Cole gradually starts to realize the frailty and hypocrisy of his life, he attempts to return to the imagined innocence of the consecrated cowboy of the mythic past, only to find out that such a return is unfeasible.

John Grady’s life on his family’s Texas ranch is a romantic fiction, a façade barely concealing the falseness at its core. From the outset, John Grady is an idealist who believes in an imagined code of justice and honor in a universe founded upon iniquity and immorality. Like the peasants in Alfonsa’s parable who try to sell things no one wants, John Grady embraces the values of a myth that obscures the true nature of the world. He does not realize that the falsity of the sacrosanct cowboy is tantamount to the broken pieces of machinery the peasants collect from the roads. The peasants’ belief in a myth (that all things of the industrialized world have value) yoked with an abysmal ignorance of the true nature of that world both fortifies them and dooms them. Duena Alfonsa advises our protagonist to view the world sans ignorance and sentiments, however alluring they may be. What John Grady and Rawlins encounter in Mexico is similar to what they left behind in Texas – cowboys, horses and grullos, ranches and haciendas. Mexico illumines the phoniness of the American myth. Like the young Alfonsa, Alejandra and John Grady both view the world through a rosy filter, from the privileged stations of their social status, insulated in their ranches where the descendants of the people their ancestors conquered and whose land they purloined are now servants and pariahs. Alejandra and John Grady are like the peasants of the countryside who cling to bolts and “wornout part[s] of a machine that no one could even know the use of” (McCarthy 231). In their fragile paradises, neither of them realizes that what may appear innocuous or true may be unsound and defective; an illusion. Alejandra ultimately recognizes the futility of refusing to choose “between the dream and the reality.”

After his odyssey in Mexico and his conversations with Duena Alfonsa, John Grady concludes that the individual is alone in a callous world. He must forsake his blind belief in a mythic construct that conceals the true nature of the universe as well as the knowledge of his rightful place in it. By the end of All the Pretty Horses, John Grady starts to see the inanity of the myths into which he has poured his faith, as he becomes imprisoned after the knife fight and feels a child’s anguish surfacing within him “but it brought with it such pain that he stopped it cold and began at once his new life and the living of it breath to breath” (203). Duena Alfonsa tells John Grady that to discern what is true from what is convenient to believe is to abandon all the myths of one’s culture, and to lead a solitary life, countering hopeless bitterness with courage.