Can Xue, Kafka, and Anti-realism
I reviewed Can Xue’s I Live in the Slums (2020) recently but not everything that struck me about the book made it into the review. Here is one of those loose thoughts: Can Xue’s use of the limited point of view.
I Live in the Slums is a collection of short stories. More than a third are told by first person narrators (“Story of the Slums”, “Our Human Neighbors”, “the Other side of the Partition”, “Shadow People”, “Crow Mountain”, “I am a Willow Tree”). The rest use the third (limited third, not omniscient).
In any first-person story, the narrative filters through the I as narrator. That’s a formal feature of the POV. But Can Xue’s “I”s are one of a kind. They are this strange combination of disrupted minds and intense hunger (sometimes actually for food, which is the case in “Shadow People”, other times not so literal). Because of their disrupted minds, they tend not to have explicit, articulate concepts or self-concepts. Adding to it, their desires are so consuming, their perceptions of the exterior world become completely bent to cater these inexplicable yearnings: to stay, to escape, to be satiated, to hunt or wound, to be safe. So, if we have an anxious protagonist, everyone around him or her would be equally anxious. If he or she is afraid, then every conversation he or she has is a cryptic message promising more trauma. And if he or she is dire to get out (of whatever situation they are in), a bunch of utterly bizarre obstacles would suddenly pop up in his world. It all reminds me a bit of Kafka’s a Little Fable:
the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I am running into.
I don’t recall a single story where characters other than the protagonist have personal histories. If at any point the protagonist wonders where other people come from, that curiosity quickly dissipates with a “it/he/she had always been there/this way” (30, 32, 40, 76, 165, 183, 196). (It’s mind-blowing how often variations of this phrase pop up.) It is as if they do not exist outside of their interactions with I. And they might as well not exist—because why would that matter to I!
What we have here is not, I think, a case of unreliable narrator, because to have an unreliable anything we must first assume the existence of an objective (read: constitutively-mind-independent) reality to serve as the benchmark. Can Xue does not make such an assumption.
What she goes for is a bit more exciting and ambitious: it is the denial that anything to the effect of a benchmark exists or can be known. It’s a philosophical statement, actually, to the effect of antirealism, expressed through watertight first-person POV delivered as matters of fact. The external world and the other people exist quite explicitly as the mind construes it and projects them, yet there is no getting behind the construal and projection. It’s quite a feat.
I wouldn’t lie and say reading Can Xue had been a blast: she is difficult and exhausting. I wouldn’t even hesitate to call her tyrannical. But, just like hitting a sweet spot in a demanding workout, moments like this make the experience worthwhile.
