Can Art Redeem Life?

Novel from China can't find relief from everyday horrors

By LOGAN BROWNING

The Noodle Maker: A Novel
By Ma Jian
Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 181 pp. $21

Every thinking American would do well to read Ma Jian's provocative novel, originally published in China in 1993 and now available in this country in a translation that appeared in England last year.

Though it is a slim book — and may be a great book — it is not an easy read. Many conventional narrative markers are missing. And the continuing paucity of information about life inside China as it emerged from the Cultural Revolution to the "New Openness" before lapsing into post-Tiananmen Square hopelessness means most readers will struggle to distinguish extreme satire from descriptions of the real horrors of the times. Even so, those who consider book-reading more than a comforting narcotic (as all of us at least some of the time should) will find this a richly rewarding, though challenging, novel.

The Noodle Maker's main plot device — a writer miserably paid to produce propaganda struggles outside of work to write a novel and describes to a friend during a long night of eating and drinking what he has come up with so far — is certainly not unfamiliar.

But the particular manner in which Ma Jian manipulates the device is a tour de force. I felt as though I were eavesdropping on a writer being subjected to a grim behavioral science experiment involving sensory deprivation or even surgical removal of parts of the brain to see what impulses survive and what mechanisms sustain human identity and value.

Although one of my principles as a reviewer has been to avoid the overworked term "Kafkaesque," no apter word describes this book. Kafka's story The Hunger Artist, the tale of an artist whose medium is public fasting, comes most vividly to mind.

In Ma Jian's novel, too, we encounter a variety of "arts" that demand physical detriment or depletion. We encounter a professional blood donor who grows rich (or comparatively so) through his vocation, an actress whose culminating performance is a self-scripted suicide by tiger and a young man who converts a pottery kiln into the incinerator for a crematorium, at which he offers for an additional charge "appropriate" music played on a cassette tape recorder as the body turns to ashes.

Search for beauty

Given Ma Jian's family's own persecution by the Chinese authorities during the Cultural Revolution (his grandfather, a tea connoisseur, was killed by being denied anything to drink), you might assume the novel would be an allegory of the irrepressible imagination, nearly snuffed out by the abuses of that terrible period, triumphantly leading the Chinese people through the gradual loosening of restrictions on individual liberties.

Certainly, something of the sort is represented here. But it is also true that almost every encounter with things "Western" — the first signs of free enterprise, the stirrings of romantic love — leads to outcomes as horrifically absurd as any in the book.

This novel chips away at all easy presumptions about social, political and moral life. The presiding consciousness of the writer waits in a kind of painful alertness for a character or a set of events that deserves his recounting. Again and again he pounces hungrily on the first sign that here may be something beautiful or true or an illumination of the human spirit.

But the book ends in exhausted dissatisfaction, without any assertion that writing, painting, acting, editing or opening a crematorium can redeem life from its hopelessness and its fearfulness.

None of the many relationships sketched in the book offers adequate compensation, either, whether between girlfriend and boyfriend, adulterous lovers, mother and father, abandoned child and abandoning parent, woman and her own body, man and dog (complete with reincarnated human spirit) or man and his own body.

The question that remains at the end of the tale is whether the flickering lyricism of the writer's prose suffices to validate the creative imagination's work, the production of art. Not since the high modernist eloquence of T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound has that question been put so powerfully in English (thanks to the translation of Flora Drew, now Ma Jian's partner and mother with him of a son), nor have all of our smug assumptions about the value of art been so challenged to defend themselves.

Logan Browning is managing editor of SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 and lecturer in English and the humanities at Rice University.

Last updated: March 30, 2005