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Steve’s Bookers – One that got away! Madeleine Thien DO NOT SAY WE HAVE NOTHING

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Edited by Steve Bamlett, Thursday, 18 Aug 2016, 14:03

An admission before I start. I promised myself to opine (for my own sake mainly) on each book on the longlist but I could not finish this one. This may say more about me than it, but here are the impressions that led me to that conclusion.

This is a ‘thoughtful’ narrative – perhaps for me too thoughtful so that reading it feels like a cognitive test. I don’t mind that in great literature because so much is being offered along the way besides that immersion into the thought patterns that make it legible as well as great (Dickens, Tolstoy, Coetzee).

The parts of Thien’s background thought I liked I felt too indulgently expanded upon and too keen to point themselves out. This is not again, because I dislike the thought or some of the functions they seem to serve. Similar points are made with great grace and concentration of language in Sarah Howe’s wonderful poems in The Loop of Jade.

In a beautiful poem about the relation between the semantics and shape of written (drawn or panted) Chinese characters, Howe sings:

A hand, a brush, its inclination –

involved in an anchoring of sign to thing

so artful that we, like Jesuits, might forget

 

                                words’ tenuous moorings

Those lines link to a critique of Jesuit artistry. In fact I don’t fully understand the Jesuits place herein (I blame myself) but I read them (possibly with bias) as the intelligent weft and woof of meta-fictions in the service of an ideology. They could equally link to Ezra Pound who also tried to idealise the relation of word and thing in Chinese script as a ‘gold standard’ on which to base poetry.

Howe knows, post-Saussure, that signs have more arbitrary relationships to ‘signifieds’ in languages including Chinese.

Thien also plays intellectually with attempts to simply the relation of signs to meaning in the ‘real’ political contexts of her characters. Thien uses verbal and graphic signs. She notices the attempts in Mao’s Cultural Revolution to change the means of ‘writing’ music using ‘jianpu, a notation using numbers, lines and dots’ (33) – which Thien then reproduces. The tendency of the book in parts is to emphasise the importance of signs and meanings by the multimodal forms of graphic drawing or painting, words and numbers (even mathematics and the relations of its symbols to the reader participate). 

Chines characters are often transcribed – experienced, for instance, as only partly legible (p. 5), as a formalised system of meaning (p. 11) or as a system of accidental pairings of word to arbitrary meanings that play together, both to creatively confound but also shade and deepen human connections into perceptible meanings (p. 41).

The use of classical Western musical notation is here too, together with creations of language of hand gesture to complicate the attempts of cultural reformers to see accessibility as more important than meanings that individualise persons and their relationships (p. 14).

Amidst this intellectual play comes the function of story, where persons relate to each other – their narrators – us very differently. As symbols of personal persistence and inheritance and of political intransigence and resistance to oppression, sometimes even at the level of archetypes (Big Mother).

It is highly intellectual but, at some level, the narrative seems to serve myths of ethnicity that are purely political in their function – to stand against Communism or social engineering. This is no doubt necessary but it kept grating on me as if it were art with a ‘palpable purpose on me’ in Keats’ terms. In the end I found the myths and legends unappealing – as they stand up with faux simplicity against what is after all a complex history of oppression in Chines culture – all the more complex now that China is a capitalist – imperialist super-power. Big Mother, a symbol of that individuality in persons able to use the language and tropes of the oppressor (in a beautifully comic exchange with local officialdom (p.80f)) but also able to undermine it in humour is for me a very false note – so much so, that I lost interest in the book as a whole while admiring its parts. It had no narrative pull for me. Here is an example of Big Mother at what I find her most gratingly ideological:

Big Mother said she’d been back to an old teahouse where they used to sing, the Purple Mountain Teahouse. “They’ve changed the name,” she said. “It’s now the Red Mountain People’s Refreshment house,” Swirl giggled. … There are even singers who perform the new repertoire, ‘The East is Red,’ … and all that. It’s stirring, who can argue! Even I want to overthrow something when I hear it. But revolutionary music hurts the ears after a while. There’s no nostalgia in it, no place for people to share their sorrows. …”

All I hear here is the simplification of two political positions at cultural war, one weighted with the humour and faux humanity of ‘Big Mother’ is as equally ideological as the other – wearing common sorrows in family as its badge. This has little of the ‘richness’ that Thien appears to want to claim for the culturally old.

In the end I think the book too often (as far as I got before being tired of the many pages ahead of me) over-simplifies both leftist and rightist ideological positions because it situates itself too often in the realm of the merely ideological. In a novel that wears its richness and complexity on its sleeve, I felt a bit cheated by it. Books that make me feel that don’t last long in my hands.

I moved on. Of course, I cannot therefore judge it. I may have missed out but ‘life is short and the Booker longlist long.’

All the best

Steve

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