I have begun to read Ma Jian’s novel Beijing Coma. It is famous – it has been I would like to read the Book of Mountains and Seas, but not reading Chinese, I cannot. Yet I know of it. See how interesting it is.
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Ma Jian’s narrator is in a coma. Yet he can hear, and sift his memories. At the beginning he remembers his father’s arrival home from a reeducation camp and the celebratory supper the family had that night. “My mother climbed onto a stool to change the low wattage bulb to a 40 watt one. It was so bright that you could see the spider’s web in the corner of the room.” (5) Do you see the comparative brightness of that bulb? I see it perfectly.
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Reeducation did not work on the father. The father knew it was his enemy.
Reeducation. As the educated child of an intellectual you are genetically predisposed to power. You must learn to doubt your perceptions and question yourself constantly. You must accept Party instruction so as to learn that “God knows what He is doing” and “everything is as it is supposed to be.” The fact that you call that attitude Panglossian only proves our point. You must counter this by relinquishing control of your life and placing the Party at its center. Your international interests are a form of bourgeois escapism if not also treason, and must be renounced.
Those were the main principles of my Reeducation, although it took a long time to see them since they were so cleverly presented. Had they been presented this directly, they would not have taken so long to decipher. I keep writing them down in these increasingly telegraphic forms so that I can recognize them when they arise in sheep’s clothing.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
One allows oneself to be ‘reeducated’ so as to be in tune with the new reality. In writing my acerbic version of an autobiography, I have come to realise how scary it really is to be out of touch with social and political mores in a genuine sense. Writing in this way brought the whole trauma of it back for me and I emotionally regressed — something I did not expect. However, I have now snapped out of it, back into my older powerful rolls royce mind.
Still, one embraces ideals more readily when one is uncertain what is what. Any ideal will do, so long as it gives order and meaning. (Once more, as I write this, I realise how true it was for me, and my gut starts churning frantically.)
Yes – I see that perfectly, and I see why the emotional regression and gut churning.
Not to understand what is happening, what peoples’ attitudes and motivations are – YES. This is the thing about the characters in Ma Jian’s novel so far: a lot of them *do* understand at least to a large degree what is happening so although they have to suffer it, they are not entirely lost.
It is very irritating to be subjected to people’s authority while not knowing what their program is. (We have a new administrator here who keeps telling us what he is doing, what changes he is making, “so we can know, make our own plans, and make suggestions” and it is totally novel.) This is of course also the basis of mental abuse – all of these arbitrary changes of orders and one still does not know what the program is – and Ma Jian speaks of course of Kafka. Characters subjected to an irrational system and so on.
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The Cultural Revolution was a Horror. But on the Human Poverty Index China is #80 and Peru #81, so I gather there is a reason the Peruvians, who are also trying to further industrialize, keep comparing themselves to China.
http://hdrstats.undp.org/countries/country_fact_sheets/cty_fs_PER.html
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The Cultural Revolution was a Horror and/but abuse tactics are always so similar / so much the same, no matter what. I always think I am being melodramatic when I say I have been through Reeducation since it wasn’t also in a camp. But the structure really is EXACTLY the same.
It’s interesting that the structure is the same, although the structure of the human mind is the same, so it figures.
Well I’ve been through similar things, of course. Especially when I worked for the finance sector union. It was like, “You are on notice. We find many, many things wrong with you. The verdict is you need to change fast or the axe will fall!”
But change HOW? Change in what way? And how much change will be acceptable even?
Yes – well my mother’s example of this is always Kafka, and THE CASTLE is one of the texts to which Ma Jian’s novel repeatedly refers!
your mother’s example?
Yes, she cites THE CASTLE as a good representation of the phenomenon.
Weird. I would think she was the minotaur inside the labyrinth.
And Ariadne as well. (N.B. In Jungian dream interpretation one is all the characters.)
(N.B. In Jungian dream interpretation one is all the characters.)
This might relate to the ‘magical’ pre-oedipal field, wherein identity is not individuated yet.
What I’m wondering, beyond this, is whether all forms of intersubjectivity really do call upon pre-Oedipal ways of relating. Intersubjective dynamics — whereby one’s persons emotions and perspectives are experienced as a relation to some other person’s emotions and perspectives — are very common indeed, at all levels of society. They are based upon the way we learned to relate to our mothers before we knew she was a separate person from us. It’s an emotional level of relating that is oriented towards us getting our emotional and physiological needs filled.
Anyway, if we never really grow out of the pre-Oedipal stage completely, but always have it as a facet of our sociability, I wonder if that is a problem or not?
I’m not sure if it is pre-Oedipal, I think it’s another system. I don’t think it’s bad – I think it’s in the realm of premonitions and spirits and things like that, the original world.
Hurricane Ike is in the vicinity and we can feel it, the trees are moving and the air is oppressive and still. The eye is due south of us now, but the storm is very broad. Irritating.
Aha! This map shows that it is TRUE, the outer bands are here. That is why everything is so strange.
http://www.wunderground.com/tropical/tracking/at200809_sat.html#a_topad
It’s huge. A monster. I suppose the low barometric pressure makes things feel strange, too.
Yes, dreams may not be pre-Oedipal in their construction. I really don’t know about them. The pre-Oedipal dynamics are probably quite limited in terms of their simplicity (but stronger, subtler) than the imaginative range of dreams.
J – Yes, dreams. Pre-Oedipal, it’s different and more primitive. Pre-Oedipal, that is when I got my psychological problems, because my mother was particularly suicidal then. (She thinks that’s the only rational response to life and looks down on those of use who disagree, which made it rather frightening to be under her power.)
H – Yes. Now hours later it feels a little more normal – storm is to the west of us now – but that low pressure must explain a lot. Also I am just irritated. I knew we’d end up with school cancelled and all and I was going to just leave this weekend. Instead they do it at the last minute and we have storm prep and anxiety and it’s too late to escape. BLEAH.
Well I would wish you to have a good storm but…
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They are cutting off my electricity again, and I have to go up to my parents’ place to do the Japanese. And my head hurts.