Red Sorghum: Mixing Memory and Desire

Mixing Memory and Desire: Red Sorghum A Chinese Version of Masculinity and Femininity Yeujin Wang

East Asian Languages and Civilizations Department Harvard University

The film Red Sorghum (Dir. Zhang Yimou, 1987) is an event before it is a 'text'. It won the Golden Bear (Best Picture) Prize in the 1988 Berlin International Film Festival; it was honored to be the closing-night presenta- tion of the 1988 New York Film Festival. Slowly reviews followed. Donald Richie proclaimed that "Red Sorghum does for the Chinese cinema what Rashomon did for the Japanese ... it opens a whole world of myth and beauty;"' or rather, the world as appearance, culture as a surface, and the cinematic Other as an experience of 'palpable' and 'ravishing' exoticism.2 J. Hoberman, a less sensitive metropolitan voice noted: "Stunning foreign viewers with its (relatively) frank sex and immoderate violence, this lushly pictorial mishmash is half art, half pulp in its metaphoric cornfield and symbolic blood-red moonshine."3 Hoberman's position both confirms and 'deconstructs' Richie's prophecy. Red Sorghum opens a world of beauty while closing off, for the unwary, the world of myth - a world that cannot simply be 'opened' by the journalistic act of encapsulation and entombment. That is to say, the world of Red Sorghum, or of any other foreign film, not so much opens as invites the act of opening. When the receptive side fore- closes the Other with self-bred formulae and monological solipsism, how can the world open of its own accord?

The rhetoric of opening could be pursued further. First, Red Sorghum comes from a country that has only recently become willing to 'open' itself, a country [until TiananmenI4 well on its way to shedding the monochro- matic world image of 'Red China'. Second, the very theme of the film ad- dresses the problem of 'opening' both ideologically and aesthetically. Third and consequently, this essay hopes to accelerate that opening by looking at the reception of Red Sorghum in China.

For some Chinese, watching Red Sorghum could also be an experience of watching the Other. To Chinese taste, the film is strikingly rough,

The Village Voice, October 11, 1988, p. 62. The epithets in single quotes are commonly attached to the film. See, for instance,

J. Hoberman, "Berlin '88: Perestroika, While the Iron's Hot." The Village Voice,

This essay was written and submitted to Public Culture long before the Tiananmen

David Edelstein, 'The Corn Is Red," The Village Voice, October 11, 1988.

March 8, 1988.

massacre.

public Culture 31 Vol. 2. No. 1: Fall 1989

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forthright and unrestrained both stylistically and morally. It is a shocking affront to many cherished formulae of Chinese cultural praxis. Never before had Chinese cinema countenanced the containment of the unbridled nature of everyday life, and particularly through visual wantonness.

The dramatic and controversial reception of the film in China justifies the idea of there having been a 'Red Sorghum Phenomenon'.s The film was originally and modestly meant as a free dabbling in cinematic stylistic and aesthetic modes, but it has been taken more seriously than it was meant to be. Now the reception of the film has forced it to transcend itself and grow into a nationwide (and international) cultural phenomenon. Everyone finds himself or herself implicated in the cultural resonance of the film. But how does the film scandalize and offend the public's not-too-delicate taste? Or why do people find it hard to swallow and 'buy'? By measuring the critical response to the film against what the film shows, we will come to a better understanding of the power of the film, and will lay bare the way in which a regressive ideology masquerades as a self-righteous rhetoric that represses desire and against which desire seeks to fmd itself.

The film is based on Muo Yank already controversial novella of the same title. A voice-over narration tells the legends of his grandparents. Set in Northern China, the narrative begins with the arranged marriage of Jiuer (translated in the subtitles as 'Nine') - a young girl addressed by the voice- over as 'my grandma' - to a leper thirty years her senior, a winery boss. She is exchanged for a mule. The marriage procession breaks into a 'toss- of-palanquin dance' through which the mischievous palanquin-bearers want to have fun with the pathetic bride, who sobs and thereby silences the revelers. The team is unsuccessfully waylaid by a masked bandit, who is killed by the palanquin-bearers led by 'my grandpa-to-be'. It is elliptically suggested that the wedding night does not end with marital consummation, as the bride defends herself with a threatening pair of scissors. She spends three subsequent days at her parents' home, according to the local custom. On her journey back to her husband, she is kidnapped by 'my grandpa' and taken deep into a sorghum field. There, she happily acquiesces and they make love. Her return to the leper's winery is greeted by the news that the leper has mysteriously been killed. She recovers from the shock and per- suades the laborers to stay and help her run the winery. The narrator's grandpa returns, drunk, to claim Jiuer. His tipsy manner gets him beaten, and he is thrown into a vat where he stays groaning for three days. Mean- while, another local bandit kidnaps Jiuer, who is subsequently ransomed for 3,000 pieces of silver. Grandpa awakens and goes to seek revenge for the disgraceful kidnapping, only to be disgraced himself. The winery is now in full swing. Grandpa reappears in the winery. He defies the ensem- ble there by pissing into the vat and then by a powerful demonstration of

5 Film Art, the official journal of the China Film Association, contains a section called "Perspectives on the Red Sorghum Phenomenon." See Film Art, No. 192, Beijing, July 1988.

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Mixing Memory and Desire 33

strength, he claims Jiuer and nine years pass. The Japanese come, rounding up the local people to trample the sorghum field and to witness the skin- flaying of an anti-Japanese bandit and of Luohan, once a helper at Jiuer's winery. After the event, the furious group at the winery resolve to avenge Luohan's death by ambushing a Japanese truck. They succeed at the cost of almost all their lives. The narrator's grandfather and father - who appears on screen as a small child, whose chant for his dead mother ends the film - survive.

Red Sorghum is dismissed by its detractors in China as a piece of sensationalism, a libidinal gesture to 'the ugly', a regressive effort at 'the un- civilized and the savage' and a stylistic horror of moral and visual 'crudities'.6 The charges brought against the film cluster around its indul- gence in boorishness and forthrightness and its representation of a savage life in defiance of refinement, inwardness and civility - traditional Chinese virtues. Blatantly addressing issues of desire (not tender love) and sexuality (not marital bliss), the film transgresses a lot of boundaries and codes: the deep-rooted Confucian ethical and moral codes of sobriety and decorum, the ingrained artistic codes of representation favoring strategies of concealment and restraint and an aesthetic taste which exalts emotional delicacy and refinement. Surprisingly, the central antithesis around which much contro- versy has erupted simply implies a sexual diflerence: a difference between a set of values problematically attached to femininity and the antithetic values (equally questionably) derivative of masculinity. Gender becomes a figure embodying conflicting cultural values. The pejorative epithets attached to the film are almost exclusively connotative of male characteristics, while the attributes the detractors find lacking in the film for the most part have feminine overtones: restraint, introversion and refinement. The critique betrays a cultural privileging of femininity, a privileging embedded in an ideology which thus appears to be self-contradictory: in the feudally informed Chi- nese ideological hierarchy, women traditionally have been the lowest stra- tum. How does the traditional subordination of woman under a patriarchal order come to be reversed in the collective unconscious? By examining this contradiction, we will see how the masculine send-up of Red Sorghum transgresses ideological boundaries, and how this very validation of masculinity is paradoxically contained in a maternal discourse.

IN SEARCH OF MAN: THE POLITICS/AESTHETICS OF MASCULINITY

The problem of masculinity/femininity in the Chinese cultural context inevitably lends itself to the ancient Chinese metaphysical framework: yin and yang. These two fundamental metaphysical and ethereal forces, if in coordination and equilibrium, create and perfect the cosmic mode of exis-

For an illustrative example of the negative critical response, see Zhu Soutao, 'The Increasingly Ugly 'Savage' Sensationalism," and Zhong Youxun, "The Lack of 'Emotion','' in Film Arr, No. 192, Beijing, July 1988.

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tence - the essence of the world (referred to as taiji in I Jing or yuan by Dong Zhongshu).7 As with any other semantically ambiguous notions in Chinese thought, the dichotomy is amorphous and polysemous: its ultimate meaning seems to reside in the shifting dialectical relationships that project themselves onto diverse categories and spheres. Hence, there is a unani- mously accepted reluctance to pin these two words to specific English equivalents. Commonly accepted pairs of connotations attached to yang are: light, warmth, summer, daylight, masculinity, ascent and action. Attributes clustered around y in are the antithesis: darkness, coldness, winter, night, femininity, descent and inaction.* "The yang and strong becomes the male: the y in and smooth becomes the female."g In Dong's historical/interpretive text (probably the most comprehensive after the I Jing), y in and yang are rendered mutually exclusive: the presence of one means the absence of the other (e.g., as seen in seasonal change and temperature alternation). In his explication, the dichotomy enters the moral spectrum: "The yang is benign while the y i n is malign: the yang means birth while the y in means death. Therefore yang is mostly present and prominent: yin is constantly absent and marginal."lO From this isolated text alone, it would be too far-fetched to press for a conscious misogynic vision. Yet, since Dong is one of the most significant interpreters and disseminators of Confucian ethics, and in view of the Confucian ethical dictum 'the noble male and base female', it is easy to see how the very phrase 'yin and yang' allows for an easy equation with 'the noble male and base female'.

Dong is known for his disclaiming of the plurality of thought in favor of Confucianist ethics, which has since been officially privileged, hermeneuti- cally tamed and politically congealed to form the canonical bedrock of Chi- nese feudal ideology. The 'noble male and base female' not only becomes a feudal moral code and ethical value, but is also displaced into the feudalist social structure. The dichotomy of and tension between masculinity and femininity is no longer a matter of sexual difference; it begins to signify class difference. The hierarchical feudal order seeks to structure itself around the figure of gender: the ruler as the dominant male, the ruled as the submissive female.

Moreover, given the diverse alternatives to the dominant Confucianist ethics (e.g., Taoism and Buddhism), we can postulate two axioms of the

Dong Shongshu (179-104 B.C.), ancient Chinese philosopher and administrator known for establishing an elaborate correlative cosmology which provides the ontological basis of Confucian ethics. He is the pioneer in institutionalizing Confucianism as ethicopolitical principles for the use of centralized feudal bureaucracy.

8 Li Zehou, Zhongguo Gudai Shixiangshi Lun (Critique of Ancient Chinese Intellec- tual History) (Beijing: Renmin Press, 1985), pp. 161-162. 9 Bang Dainian, Zhongguo Zexue Dagang (An Outline of Chinese Philosophy)

(Beijing: China Social Sciences and Humanities Press), p. 34. lo Dong Zhongshu, "The Noble Yang and the Base Yin," Chunqiu Fanlu Yuyin,

quoted in Zhang, p. 31.

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Chinese mentality: the belief in internal stillness and passivity as a positive way to appropriate external reality and the belief that 'the soft and lithe' can conquer 'the solid and strong'.ll It is not surprising that Taoism has earned the name of 'Chinese feminine philosophy'.'2These beliefs have been af- firmed in various ways, and the ruling class appropriates them into an ideology to consolidate the existing class structure, which is based on dominance and submission. While the aspired-for stillness and passivity connote touches of femininity, femininity becomes a highly desirable condition. Castration anxiety seems irrelevant. The problem of the lack is quite reversed in the Chinese cultural context: it is the man who lacks. If anything, a 'femininity complex' would be a more appropriate figure of the male unconscious in the Chinese psyche. Historical figures, once mythicized or fictionalized into cultural archetypes, are frequently filtered through this gender refracture. Masculinity becomes equated with fatal tragic flaws, usually associated with braggadocio, bigotry and insolence. Even though these figures may be basically humane, they are always objects of ridicule, as for example Li Kui and Lu Zhisheng in On the Water Margins. Narra- tives of overblown masculine warriors outdone by feminine wits are worn- out subjects for historical/fictional cautionary tales. Historical and poetic narratives about Xiang Yu, the masculine warlord and the loser of the Chu- Han War, all seem to contain an implicit critique of his masculinity by cele- brating his final rare moment of tenderness (a touch of femininity so rare in him) shown to his mistress when they are hemmed in by the surrounding enemy troops.

'The beautiful woman and fragrant plant' is a clichkd classical poetic figure that ancient poets, mostly male, identified with to embody their yearning for spiritual purity and loyalty. It does not follow, however, that the feminization of the male would relieve women of their inferiority, nor is the curse of the 'lack' lifted from woman. Men usurp women's proper space so that women are marginalized, bracketed and exiled into the realm of the imaginary to become icons and absences. It is interesting to note the persistence of the Chinese poetic convention of a male poet, figured in his poems as a dramatic persona (i.e., a sentimental woman, who waits and longs for her lover's arrival after an overdue time or the return from a long journey). For instance, Chao Pei, an emperor of the Wei Dynasty, assumed in his poetry the role of a neglected woman pining away in her lonely chamber. Linked with this practice is the enduring moral value that 'for woman, being without learning is virtue'. Thus men not so much speak for women as stand in their place to speak, thereby replacing women's linguis- tic space, usurping their world of consciousness and depriving women of the right to speak. The denial of speech, according to Roland Barthes, is the

l1 See Lao Zhi, Dao De Jin, in Jingyin Wenyuan Ge Shiku Quanshu, eds. Gum Jijun

12 Chen Weili, "Lao Zhi and the Chinese 'Feminine Philosophy"' Fudan Journal, et al. (Taibei: Taiwan Shangwu Yinshu Gum, 1986), Vol. 1055, pp. 171, 183.

February 1988, 104-110.

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ultimate deprivation of existence, as speech is the final mode of proving one's existence. These speechless women have no way of articulating '1'. Worse still, they live in a limbo: they could not even inhabit the place of 'thou', as the 'thou' addressed in the poems is male when the speaker is a textual female.

Femininity is seen by Lin Yutang as an overriding descriptive figure that brings together a set of otherwise loosely associated characteristics of Chi- nese: the priority given to intuition and commonsensical ways of thinking and the tendency towards stability and non-aggre~si0n.l~

The feminization of men as a cultural form of collective unconscious has a residue in traditional modes of Chinese artistic representation. The ex- change of sexual identity is a conventional theatrical license. In Beijing opera, actors masquerade as women. In Shaoxin opera - an extremely popular genre among people around Shanghai, Zejiang and Jiangsu Provinces - male characters are played by women out of the generic imperative: the stock-in-trade subject matter of Shaoxin opera is love stories between young women and 'tender' male scholars or potential scholars good at poetry and painting. Tenderness is so essential that only women seem to be able to portray these roles. Yet by having women impersonating men, the convention creates a theatrical illusion that stands in for an illusion of reality: the desirable male prototypes fit for such romantic slots should be and are feminized men. The cultural praxis creates an ingrained aesthetic taste in the Chinese audience for the feminine male icon on stage, and consequently on screen.

In the early 1980s, the speculation on the past, on our cultural history and on the structure of Chinese mentality led to a radical change in taste. The intelligentsia awakened to the ideological implications of feminization, while the average theater-goer became fascinated by the charisma of the icon

13 Lin Yutang, My Country and My People (Taibei: Lin Bai Press, 1978), pp. 97- 101. This is echoed in Griffith's Broken Blossoms (1919), a Hollywood narrative about a feminized 'chink' and a 'chinkized' woman - an equation implicitly drawn by the Western colonial ideology that informed Hollywood cinematic discourse. Cheng, an idealistic young Chinese, comes to London with the hope of teaching "the Western white man of the peace and inner tranquility of the Buddha." The values Cheng embodies are already categories of yinlfemininity according to the classical Chinese taxonomy of yin and yang. Broken Blossoms is blatantly critical of the abusive and sadistic yanglmasculinity, and sympathetic with the oppressed yinlfeminine side, physically figured by Lucy, the Lillian Gish character, and metaphorically figured by Cheng, the 'chink'. Both of them are immature, fragile victims of male dominance and power. Battling Burrows, the masculine exemplar, is strong, militant, overpowering, menacing and tall; the girl and the 'chink' are fragile and vulnerable. Instead of facing up to Battling with an equal amount of masculine strength, Cheng is seen to be as femininely vulnerable as the girl. The 'chink' and Lucy become mirror images of each other. Therefore, his potential sexual inadequacy - as if he had been castrated - prevents him from becoming her suitor. By appropriating him into the female side, the film politicizes the sexual difference, a metaphorical site into which class difference and racial difference are collapsed.

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of 'tough guys' in Japanese and Western movies. Suddenly there was the excruciating realization of a fundamental 'lack'. There was a 'masculinity' anxiety which culminated in a stage play: In Search for Man. The once popular, delicate and 'creamy' male stars lost the audience's favor: they even became despicable.

In pre-Red Sorghum China, the 'dream factory' had been diligent in churning out new masculine icons to meet the new appetite for masculinity. These were usually rough-featured, lip-biting, stern-looking and brow- knitting guys. However, the overt and self-conscious cinematic evocation of masculinization betrays an essential lack, and an anxiety over that lack. A certain clumsiness also comes from the awkward imitation of Japanese or Western tough types that appear preposterous, hence unconvincing, in a Chinese milieu.

The film Red Sorghum is a cinematic milestone that proposes a powerful Chinese version of masculinity by way of cultural critique. Red Sorghum creates a masculine world rather unselfconsciously and cavalierly. Yet it is unmistakably a male world (though itself problematic as we shall see) with its boisterous swing and with a limited female presence on the screen: there is only one full-fledged female character in it. The intimidation, the subversive potential and the sense of cultural relevance in the creation of masculinity derive from its harking back to the under-represented genealogy of historical male archetypes and mythical prototypes (with a perennially historicized undesirability dogging their presence and absence in historical textuality) grounded in intertextuality. Given their incredibility, the pre-Red Sorghum self-conscious cinematic concoction of 'perfect male icons' posed no threat. The audience's consciousness of their imitativeness (i.e., 'foreignness' and fictionality) allowed these icons a harmless presence on the Chinese screen. Any immediate political consequences and cultural implications they may have had were comfortably suspended and bracketed. Yet once the unaffected, earthier version of masculinity took shape, the audience became frightened. For them, the experience of watching Japanese tough guys could safely lock them in an enclosed and distanced aesthetic pleasure. They were screened off from the culturally irrelevant world. Red Sorghum screens them in. The aversion to native masculinity stems from the fear of the return of the collectively repressed, or the recuperation of the historically exiled outlaws: the masculinity in Red Sorghum is a reiteration of the outlaws, drunkards and rebels that have been historically repressed, marginalized and expelled from official and historical documents, but that survive in folk tales, romances and historicized fictional narratives. These characters could be aesthetically enjoyed from a distanced perspective for the beauty they portray without having to face moral issues, though moral overtones are already built into them.

Red Sorghum is therefore a return of the collectively repressed, an evocation of the cultural unconscious, a remembrance of the forgotten and a tapping of intertextual memories.

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One historical/fictional narrative that is collapsed into the film is the well-known On the Water Margins. This is a seventeenth-century novel about outlaws and rebels based upon a real historical event, a peasant up- rising during the Song Dynasty. The fictional world is inhabited by a galaxy of 108 idiosyncratic outlaw warriors. Mostly male, they form a spectrum of masculinity with one end bordering on femininity (e.g., Yanching the Dandy) and the other end on masculine extremity (e.g., Li Kui and Lu Zhesheng). The spectrum is also a moral taxonomy. The group inhabiting the more feminine end are talented, brainy and clever, and the motley men clustered around the more masculine end share a certain lack: represented as boorish, crude in manner and speech and rash in action. They are amiable only when they are in folly, often unwittingly getting off through their very folly. They are iconologically represented as bare-bellied, shaven-headed and strutting around in ruffled slacks, They are boozers, most active and daring when they are tipsy. It is this extreme end of the spectrum that Red Sorghum subconsciously or unconsciously evokes. Grandpa is a continua- tion of the masculine outlaw type. He kidnaps a woman, drinks heavily, is dauntless in defying everything and is given to occasional mischief (e.g., pissing into the wine vat).

The problem of drinking, along with its reiteration of impulses with historical narrative implications, is foregrounded in Red Sorghum. The red sorghum, the central image, connotes both the awe-inspiring landscape of the wild sorghum field and the raw material used to ferment wine. In the Chinese historical memory heavy drinking could be a cultural practice associated with the transgression of decorum, an act of defying conventions and orthodoxy, a route to visionary intensity for transcendental possibilities and poetic ecstasy and a way of achieving autonomy; it also bears the burden of moral condemnation for spiritual degradation, overindulgence and social irresponsibility. Dialectically, the former derives its strength from the moral overtone of the latter.

The most memorable achievements of the masculine heroes in On the Water Margins are, in one way or another, the aftermath of drinking. The celebrated narrative about Wu Song bare-handedly killing a tiger persistently emphasizes the effect of the strong local liquor on him. Lu Zhisheng's dramatic beating of Zheng Guanxi, a bullying butcher, and his later mischievous and fearless defiance and blasphemy in the Buddhist temple are also shown to be side-effects of a drop too much.

It is interesting to note how drinking is closely associated in Chinese texts with the attainment of masculinity. This representation itself betrays an ideology. It presupposes a sober state of mind which is other than masculinity. It is as though masculine courage and defiance could not possibly be evinced in a 'right mind. Therefore, masculinity is a self-deluded state. Red Sorghum is both parasitical and critical of historical tradition.

The sorghum wine, named by Jiuer as 'Shibali Hong' ('The red that spreads over eighteen miles'), is the central constituent of the symbolic color scheme of the cinematic narrative. The film is ritualistically motivated,

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with the power of wine as a central dynamic. The drinking of the red wine derives its meaning from a network of motifs of red color: red wine, red marriage dress and decor, blood and the sun. They combine to evoke a world of visualized passion, a topology of fertility, a cinematically articulated life force, an iconographic presence of creativity and destruction and of death and rebirth. Placed within this system, the ritualistic celebration of the red wine radically transcends the traditional moral categories of the dichotomy of defiance and debauchery, which is attached to heavy drinking. In a way, the film appropriates certain Western values - the Nietzschean celebration of the Dionysian spirit - as the 1980s in China saw the revival of a Nietzschean wave.

The song of the sacrificial offering to the wine god, however, narrows down the meaning and returns to a familiar historical echo, politicizing and defining wine-drinking as an externalization of masculinity: a way of coming into one's own with a bold defiance of authority. 'Drink our wine, the yin and yang will be strengthened', 'one dares to walk through the Black Death Gorge; ... one does not kowtow even at the sight of the emperor'. This echoes the historical motif in which intoxication is a way of challeng- ing authority (e.g., Lu Zhisheng's one-man riot in the Buddhist temple in On the Water Margins).

The equation of drinking with masculinity in Red Sorghum points to an ideological taxonomy: masculinity means transgression, which in the Chi- nese political unconscious presupposes femininity as propriety. Masculinity is defined, therefore, as what Bakhtin calls 'carnival', which is 'sensuous', 'life turned inside out', suspension of "hierarchical structure, and all the forms of terror, reverence, piety, and etiquette connected with it"; "profanation: carnivalistic blasphemies, a whole system of carnivalistic debasings and bringings down to earth, carnivalistic obscenities linked with reproductive power of the earth and the body"; shifts and changes in the "joyful relativity of all structure and order," crowning and decrowning, birth and death, blessing and cursing, praise and abuse, face and backside, stupidity and wisdom, negation and affirmation.14

Red Sorghum is a cinematic carnival enacting almost every aspect of Bakhtin's scenario. As Bakhtin says of the carnival, it 'absolutizes nothing'. The potentially pathetic, opening exposition about the heroine's miser- able marriage to a leprous man immediately careens into the hilarious moment of the tossing-sedan dance. The solemn ritual of the sacrificial offering to the wine god is yoked to the comic scene of 'my grandpa', the intruder, pissing into the wine vat. The climactic moment of the tragic death of the heroine is matched on the soundtrack by a celebratory marriage tune. The more sustained carnival moment is an earlier sequence in the winery yard. The heroine, having recovered from the shock of her husband's death, per- suades the laborers to stay with the business. Disclaiming the title of

14 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 123-124.

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'Mistress' given her by her employees, she suspends the social-hierarchical structure of inequality. The moment she gives orders, she is 'crowned', while 'decrowning' the dead boss and his patriarchal order. At her wildly imaginative suggestion, which borders on perversion, the winery men glee- fully splatter the wine on the ground for three times and burn the wine to purge the curse on the winery. This is immediately followed by the intru- sion of the drunken grandpa - whose obscene account of Jiuer's ravishment in the sorghum field - disrupts the temporal reign of matriarchal order. Jiuer is thus as easily dethroned as she was casually crowned a moment before. Under the rapid alternation between crowning and decrowning, lies 'the core of the carnival sense of the world - the pathos of shifts and changes'. As it is put by Bakhtin:

Crowning/decrowning is a dualistic ambivalent ritual, expressing the inevitabil- ity and at the same time the creative power of the shift-and-renewal, the joyful relativity of all structure and order, of all order, of all authority and all (hierarchical) position. Crowning already contains the idea of immanent decrowning: it is ambivalent from the ve start. And he who is crowned is the antipode of a real king, a slave or a jester. 75

Soon grandpa is decrowned: at the embarrassed Jiuer's order, the newly crowned is, as in Bakhtin's scenario, 'ridiculed and beaten';16 while giving out a cry of joy and pain (itself a carnivalistic gesture), he is thrown into a big vat. The hero - who once bravely took the lead in counteracting the kidnapper (and later became a kidnapper himself, thereby accomplishing another carnivalistic shift of crowning/decrowning) - fulfills what the first kidnapper failed to do by carrying away and ravishing the woman. He is now rolling in the dust with his face masked with mud in the same way as he masked it with cloth to capture the woman. To use Bakhtin's term, the film "introduces the logic of mesalliances and profanatory debasings"17 of the hero in order to renew him. In keeping with the imperative of the carnival, nothing is absolute in the film, neither negation nor affirmation.

The decrowning of grandpa - the future boss of the winery - is replaced by the sudden menacing descent of a mob of local bandits. What ensues is "a striking combination of what would seem to be absolutely heterogeneous and incompatible elements,"l8 and a yoking together of generic narrative elements. The accelerated montage of the head gangster descending from the roof to surprise Jiuer clearly establishes a gripping gangster-genre, full of suspense. Yet it is soon relativized and temporally/partially negated in the following mise-en-scdne of juxtaposition between the gangster narrative and comic narrative: in the midground is the drunk who ridiculously keeps on

l5 Bakhtin, p. 124. l6 Ibid., p. 125. l7 Ibid., p. 124. l 8 Ibid., p. 134.

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groaning and grumbling; in the background, high on the surrounding hills are a line of gangsters hemming in the winery. As described by Bakhtin:

(C)arnivalization constantly assisted in the destruction of all barriers between genres, between self-enclosed systems of thought, between various styles, etc.; it destroyed any attempt on the part of genres and styles to isolate themselves or ignore one another; it brought closer what was distant and united what had been sundered. 19

The comic undermines the threat posed by the gangsters; the gangster presence negates the comic element. Out of the interplay - characterized by carnival levity and rapidity of change - emerges the fundamental impulse of defiance and transgression that underlies the film's vision and figures of masculinity.

A discourse about masculinity in the Chinese context is in a way a version of what Mary Ann Doane calls a 'medical discourse'. It is pitched against disease. Red Sorghum echoes certain motifs recurrent in the literary 'search for roots' that surged up in the early and mid-1980s. Set in an imagined far-away or long-ago world, where human existence is every bit as crude as it is unpretentious, one of the leitmotifs of the new literary genre is the poetic celebration of the beautiful power of masculine potency. D. H. Lawrence became a paradigmatic source of inspiration. Masculine potency is often not so much defined around physiology as it is dialectically posited against the aging, the disabled and diseased. The well-digging master in Jia Pinao's Tian Go ('The Heaven's Dog') is a disabled and impotent man confined to his deathbed, who pulls down a wall upon himself in order to give his wife away to his apprentice and son-figure. Masculine potency becomes a symbol of coming into one's own, for spiritual independence. As an antithesis to disease, masculinity is an ideologically charged critique of a past cultural psyche that has been afflicted with moral and spiritual diseases.

Red Sorghum also sets up its masculinity as an antithesis to disease. The diegetic setup is the potential victimization of the heroine by Big Head Li, who can only boast of his wealth. He 'generously' pays (in the form of a big mule) to acquire a beautiful young woman. Big Head Li is - both for- tunately and unfortunately - a leper. He is portrayed on screen as a lean, old and haggard sulk, whose whole action consists in smoking a water pipe - itself a culturally loaded signifier of addictive disease. The wedding does not seem to be consummated. Instead of approaching his bride with desire, the misfit bridegroom is seen yards away, enwrapped by the screen of his own smoke. One feels a lack and an implied impotence. Later (from the after-event and third-person narration) we learn that the heroine keeps herself virginal with a pair of scissors, which again suggests the man's cowardice. He is also ridiculed in the palanquin-carriers' song when they toss the bride by dancing along.

l9 Bakhtin, pp. 134-135.

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This medical discourse is also conducted at another level. The positing of masculinity as an antithesis to disease constitutes a cultural critique of essential lacks in the cultural body. In Chinese historical and cultural codes, insensitivity to the suffering of others - in the form of passivity, indiffer- ence and evasion - would be considered an 'unmanly' attitude. In the classical narrative of outlaws or legends of martial arts, 'real men' would 'pull out a knife at the mere sight of injustice on the road'. Yet that masculine spirit seems to have disappeared, remaining only in the realm of the imaginary and in narrative utopias. Instead in the period of semi-colonization, a 'national disease' of insensitivity and numbness developed, which points to an inward cowardice and weakness. Red Sorghum recuperates this. This recuperation through a melodramatic scene puts the presupposed spectatorial attitude under critique and proposes a cause for masculinity at the same time that it creates a self-critique.

A Japanese officer orders the butcher to skin two anti-Japanese heroes, one of whom happens to be the butcher's own gang leader. To do or not to do becomes the most suspenseful narrative dynamic that is deferred, and twisted. The butcher kills the gang leader to relieve him of pain and is himself killed immediately. The suspense resumes when a boy, his apprentice, is ordered to do what

is left undone. The torturing sequence ends with a prolonged shot of the boy approaching the hanged Luohan, once the leading man in the winery, and the reaction shots of the anxious spectators and a brief shot of the boy slicing Luo's eyelids.

This action may be meant as a form of visual stoicism to challenge the limit of human tolerance, to justify masculinity as a Darwinist imperative and to buttress the cinematic representation of the masculine mood. The sadistic reification of the cruel nature of reality may shatter any illusion of the feminine utopia of receptiveness, tenderness and harmony. The scene - however melodramatic - does have its cultural grounds: under the cultural surface of feminine tenderness and modesty, the Satanic and sadistic prac- tices of skinning, branding and frying living human bodies - possibly the cruelest forms of torture - were once a historical nightmare. The positive shock value may lie in the scene's potential impact, jolting the audience out of their self-delusion about a tranquil feminine utopia, and out of their collective and private insensitivity to various kinds of massive social horror - a deep-rooted collective stupor characterized by Lu Xun, a relentless twenti-

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eth-century cultural critic, as a 'rotten disease' of the Chinese cultural psyche.

Lu Xun is worthy of attention here not only because his writings are "nothing but the pursuit of one long, relentless, obsessive and painful in- quiry into the Chinese 'national characteristics',"20 but also because one of the motifs in his writings is generically significant. A number of his crucial narrative moments involve the problem of spectatorship. The turning point in Lu Xun's physician-turned-writer career was a movie-viewing experience. Lu Xun watched a film sequence showing Japanese soldiers slaying a Chinese charged with the crime of espionage for Russians. The spectators in the frame - mostly Chinese - witnessed the scene with absorbing numbness, motionless stupor and disinterested interest. Outraged, Lu Xun walked out of the theater with the painful documentary footage inscribed in his memory. The scene was to surface and resurface again in his literary imagination.2l Lu Xun resolved thereafter to cure the nation of its cultural disease with his scalpel-like pen. His best known fictional character, Ah Q, becomes "an immortal and sardonic incarnation of an entire nation."22 When he is sent to a public execution, we have the most ironic narrative in Chinese fiction. Ah Q s last visual impression is of 'the crowds of spectators thronging both sides of the street' to witness a breathtaking spectacle; his last auditory memory is the spectators' "Bravo!" that "sounded like wolves' howling."23 In "Medicine,'' one of his short stories, the spectators watch a revolutionary's head being chopped off, "their necks stretched as long as if they were a flock of ducks being gripped by an invisible hand and lifted upward.''% Lu Xun deplores not only the inhuman torpor attendant on such occasions but also the tragic mechanism that implicates all insensitive spectators: that the victim of their visual pleasure may actually be a mirror, a flash-forward version of their own future fate.

What we infer from these cultural narratives is the dichotomy of public moral insensitivity and private visual pleasure that lies at the heart of spectacle-watching as a deplorable cultural practice motivated by a diseased imagination. If we accept this as a cultural and historical given, we begin to see Zhang Yimou's critique of the contemporary Chinese mentality in his cinematic treatment of the spectacle of skin-peeling in Red Sorghum. The sequence is almost a cinematic transcription of the Japanese soldiers slaying a Chinese in Lu Xun's memory. There is a radical difference: the intra- diegetic spectators are not those numb creatures that outraged Lu Xun. They are shown to be angry, only they have to suppress their helpless rage and

2o Simon Leys, The Burning Forest - Essays on Chinese Culture and Politics (New York Henry Holt and Company, 1987), p. 104.

21 Lu Xun, "Preface to Ah Q," Completed Works of Lu Xun, I (Beijing: Remin Wenxue Press, 1981).

22 Leys, p. 103. 23 Lu Xun, I, p. 215. 24 Lu Xun, Ill, p. 382.

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defer an outburst to the narrative denouement. But for this sequence, the focus is not on the intra-diegetic spectators (though the main protagonists are among them), who are only given a few sporadic reaction shots. The cinematic interest here is showing the spectacle to us, the spectators outside the screen world.

Zhang has publicly announced his interest in trying to steer midway between the art cinema and the commercial blockbuster. He does not want to lose his audience. Therefore, Red Sorghum is motivated not only by a cultural urgency, a historical imperative and an aesthetic vision, but also by a desire to act out the audience's spectatorial desire. The two desires could only meet through a bond that is dependent on the film director's tapping the audience's unconscious. Zhang's generous attention to the prolonged and profuse cinematic elaboration of the skin-peeling as a privileged narrative moment betrays his awareness of the audience's private interest in violence. If violence is a universal and perennial stimuli that feeds on audience fantasies, then Zhang Yimou (while partially complicitous with that masochistic desire) politicizes and historicizes that violence so that the scene cannot be taken comfortably by a Chinese audience with a collective World War I1 trauma in their memory as a mere visual thrill. The violence is pushed to extremes to jolt the audience out of their cowardice and insensitivity.

This, however, presupposes the existence of the pervasive insensitivity and torpor lampooned by Lu Xun half a century ago. Zhang therefore both acquiesces in and challenges the spectators' private desire. But there is always the danger that the audience might bracket the political-racial-historical significance of the scene temporally to safeguard its vicarious sado- masochistic pleasure. Even if the jolting effect does exist, the cinematic elaboration may work in conspiracy with the audience's secret visual pleasure. In this way, the film both encourages and discourages insensitivity. Insensitivity has thus the possibility of being equated with passivity, and this equation could be problematically attributed to femininity. In light of the masculine utopia Zhang seeks to construct, the unconscious moral insensitivity of the audience in viewing violence may subvert Zhang's project. In other words, the mass-culture motivation of the film - the search for melodramatic and visual stimuli - may deconstruct the texture equally motivated by a consciousness of high culture.

THE AUTONOMOUS ECSTASY: A NEW VERSION OF FEMALE SEXUALITY

One of the central dynamics of Red Sorghum is the kidnapping, con- quering and ravishing of women, whether successful or not. Jiuer is carried off by men four times in the film: first as an unwilling bride carried by a group of lusty chair-bearers to the leprous bridegroom; a second time as a potential rape victim in the sorghum field; a third time as a willing mate on her second trip through the sorghum field; and finally in her kidnapping by the local bandit for ransom. Even when grandpa returns to assert his identity as her one-time lover, he does it by a ritualistic act of canying her off under

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Mixing Memoxy and Desire 45

his arms. As a regression and reversion to the ancient myth, like the Western myth about the carrying off of the Sabine women (described by Barthes as a masculine act in opposition to modem man's motionlessness which implies femininity), an impulse towards masculinity is unmistakable.25

Should we then dismiss the film as a blatant discourse privileging patriarchal order? Is female subjectivity jeopardized in this ostensibly masculine universe? A Barthesian dialectic is illuminating here. The subject/object paradigm in the problem of ravishment could well be reversed: "it is the object of capture who becomes the subject of love; and the subject of the con- quest moves into the class of loved object."2'j The traditional scenario of subjective/active/aggressive male versus the objective/receptive/passive female is appropriated into the diegetic body. Yet it is highly problematized, transfigured and subverted in the film. h e r has to wait for men to initiate her. Yet the passive waiting (traditionally the fate of women in Chinese narrative) attains a dialectic reversal in the film.

Red Sorghum transgresses the conventional Chi- nese melodramatic narrative pattern of the vulnerable woman intimidated by bullying men. As 'surprise' constitutes the heart of what Barthes calls 'the ancestral formality' of capture, the film subverts it by positing the woman as anything but a panic-stricken or surprised prey to male desire. Jiuer's first encounter with the masked kidnapper, or actually

with a man, is one of the most transgressive and ambiguous moments in Chinese cinema. The shot-and-reverse-shot structure establishes the woman's defiant confrontation with the unknown intimidating male presence, with diabolic male power. The filmic constraint of her explicit outward response signals her inner stability. The conqueror becomes the conquered. The frontal shot of Jiuer is held still correlating the stupefied daze/gaze of the spiritually daunted and overwhelmed kidnapper. The reverse shot of the man (which is Jiuer's point of view) allows the camera the leisure and ease of tilting down from the mask to his body. The camera, as is suggested by Christian Metz, could caress by tilting down the body, thus fetishizing the body. The camera that holds the bride could have

25 Roland Barthes, "from A Laver's Discourse," In A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Son- tag (New York Hill and Wang, 1986), p. 433.

26 Ibid.

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conformed to Metz's formula and it would have been diegetically appropriate though symbolically different. Now we have the reverse. It is the woman's point-of-view shot 'fetishizing' or rather exploring and sizing up the man, which is highly unexpected in such a situation. The bride's break into a smirk is the least expected. The giggle neutralizes the moral implica- tion of the situation: the kidnapper's identity is temporally bracketed; he is just an uncertain man desiring a woman who has equally an undiscovered and unchanneled desire.

Female sexuality is traditionally represented as a split identity caught between moral denunciation and stylistic enunciation in Chinese textuality. Women have been morally denounced as vamps, scapegoats bearing the historical burden of being roots of corruption and curses on imperial soli- darity: Tanji and Yang Guifei, to name only two. At the same time, they have been stylistically enunciated as objects of desire with their subjectivity at stake. This duality itself bespeaks the inner working of the Chinese ideology: the mechanism of putting desire under an incomplete erasure through which desire peeps.

Red Sorghum not only deletes that erasure, thereby unleashing that repressed desire, but also makes an attempt - very rare in Chinese cinema - to articulate an autonomous female sexuality/subjectivity. The film opens with a close-up of the bride. The ensuing shots (putting her amidst a group of undifferentiated males) vaguely establish an 'I-thou' relationship with the woman as 'I'.

The celebrated shots of the swinging of the palanquin in the opening sequence could superficially be taken as a scene of a vulnerable woman at the mercy of lusty men. Yet the womb-like interior of the sedan - a Freudian 'oceanic self where she floats as a result of the tossing - is symbolically self-sufficient and self-creative. The frontal close-up shot of her against a shrouding interior darkness not only frees her from the menacing male world, but also simulates the topology of interiority, an inner world. Its relationship with the outside world becomes tenuous. Her anxiety is indeed a response to the frightening picture of the ballad narrative of a feudal marriage awaiting her, sung out aloud by the outside chair-bearers. Yet, by registering the imagined ballad sung by the chair-bearers frequently as an offscreen auditory presence, and in view of the situation where she is the enunciated character - the 'I' placed amidst the undifferentiated male en- semble - it is easy to see that it is through her world of consciousness that the song enters.

But it is not an enclosure of narcissism. In this sequence, we are offered the interior view of the palanquin and the exterior view as well: a reiterated bride's-point-of-view shot through the slightly pushed-aside curtain as she looks at a sweating, half-naked, muscular male body swaying in the dust. The following shot is the heroine's faintly dazed desiring look. We may well accept that the female gaze in classical cinema is often undermined, de- flected, and erased by the male gaze catching the act of the female gazing, through a mise-en-sckne or editing, "a strategy which is a negation of her

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gaze, of her subjectivity in relation to vi~ion."2~ The bride's gaze here is undistracted and subjectively autonomous. The interior is almost a figurative extension or externalization of her subjectivity. Imprisoning as it is, it nev- ertheless resembles Kaspar's cave, corresponding to what Freud calls the 'oceanic self or what Lacan refers to as 'l'hommelette'.2* The slightly raised curtain offering the female heroine a keyhole-like or telescopic glimpse of the male body is almost a reversal of the classical formula of the male voyeuristic experience.

The group of chair-bearers tossing a bride, while loudly singing a lurid song of their own sexual fantasies, is a form of displacement of sexual en- ergy. The tossed woman panting and gasping is easily read as a sign of physical nausea and emotional discomposure with a mixture of fright and thrill. Yet the prolonged and repeated shots, cinematically rhetoricized here, are not sadistically motivated as a way of articulating a hitherto undiscovered female sexuality, both in the film and in its historical textuality. The ruffled and confused look, the heavy breathing, and her distractedness all suggest an overtone of intense sexual ecstasy, if not the orgasmic spasm.

The establishment of autonomous female ecstasy, though a cinematic illusion, is highly subversive politically. In the context of a Western Laca- nian algebra, this might be yet another proof of the female narcissism that impedes woman's stepping into subjectivity. In the Chinese scenario, however, posited against the deeply ingrained myth of female passivity and in- completeness, the twist in Red Sorghum is certainly a welcome cinematic gesture. It is not through the dramatization of the female's physical arousal into sexuality by man's contacvact; rather, we see her working herself into the ecstatic state through the agency of the structure of shot-and-reverse- shot editing. Rather than falling into the conventional scenario of female sexual dependence on male initiation, the film foregrounds an autonomous space for her subjective consciousness. Female sexuality is represented not through the frank sexual scenes which are kept off-screen, thus defying the male spectators' voyeuristic impulse, but rather by focusing on the female presence as the locus of discourse. Gong Li, who plays Jiuer, has a temperamental look of rapture and ecstasy that is always there. This as- sumes the most expressive form in the sequence of grandpa shoveling the distiller's grains out of the boiler. The grains fall on Jiuer's body; she remains where she is, bearing the pouring grains as if under a shower. She looks raptured and dazed. The shot implicitly carries strong sexual overtones, as sexual intercourse in traditional Chinese texts is euphemistically alluded to as 'clouds and rains'. This traditional allusion is visually captured here. What is important is that the shot concentrates on her while marginal- izing the male character.

27 Mary Ann Dome, The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s

28 Kaja Siverman, "Herzog's Kaspar Hauser," New German Critique, Summer 1982, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 100.

p. 14.

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The sequence of Jiuer being shot unawares by a machine gun from the approaching Japanese truck and her struggling on the verge of death is also stylistically transfigured and displaced into a non-diegetical moment of agony and dance. The slow motion plus the unexpected marriage music transforms the scene into a moment of death and transfiguration, of death as a form of ecstasy (as if unconsciously echoing the Elizabethan equation of death with sexual ecstasy). In this way, the film could again be seen as a narrative return of the historically/culturally repressed. The idea of female sexual autonomy, probably derivative of the primitive matriarchal imagination, has survived more as a fantasized construct of desire and defiance against feudal patriarchy in myths, romances and various (sub)cultural Chinese texts.

Mvtholoeical narratives abiut aut&omous female sexuality are diversely contained and reiterated in various historical/mythical narratives, such as Huai Nan Zhi, Shan Hai Jin, Dahuang Xi Jin, Shan Guo Zhi, Hou N a n Shu, Y i Yue Zhi. Though imaginatively perverse, they fall into two basic categories: the myth about self-creative maternity and the myth about female utopia. In these female utopias, women

get pregnant through immediate contact with nature (e.g., through naked exposure to the 'south wind',29 by dipping into the 'Yellow or by peeping into the divine welP1). There are even tales about the 'female tree' that gives birth to female babies every day.32 These fantastic constructs project utopian visions of imagined realities in which even mere male existence is not to be tolerated; the female sex, self-reproductive, reigns all by itself.

One may well argue that these narratives are products of the underlying Chinese feudal ideology and its privileging the homogeneity of the feminine as a figure for class identity, as well as a model for submissive consciousness. Yet, considering the imaginative perversity of these fantasies that

29 "The Female Kingdom," Yi Yue Zhi (The Exotic Places), quoted in Yuan Ke, Zhongguo Shenhua Cidian (Encyclopedia of Chinese Mythology) (Shanghai: Cishu Press, 1985), p. 45. 30 Guo Pu, Shun Hai Jin, VI: Jingyin Wenyuange Shiku Quanshu, Vol. 1042, eds.

Gum Jijun et al. (Taibei: Taiwan Shangwu Yinshu Guan, 1986), p. 57. 31 'Tales about the Eastern Kingdoms," Shan Guo Zhi: Wei Zhi. 32 "Bi Chen," Jiu Xiao Shuo, Shuji II , quoted in Yuan Ke, p. 43.

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transgresses the decorous mode of feudal discourse, the creative displacement of repressed desire is unmistakable.

These narratives also establish a scenario in which female sexuality and maternity are fused together. Red Sorghum, given its predominant male presence, articulates an all-embracing female subjectivity that, in the same mythic fashion, destroys the distinguishing line between female sexuality and maternity, a line that is usually drawn in classical cinematic narrative (e.g., King Vidor's Stella Dallas [ 19371).

The film Red Sorghum - ostensibly about the uninhibited manners of masculinity - is ironically and structurally contained in a discourse about the maternal which is narrated by a first-person voice-over.

(Voice-over) Let me tell you this story about my grandpa and grandma. In my home county up to this day people still keep talking about the episode. It has been a long time, so some believe it, some don't.

The opening dissolves into a close-up of a beautiful young woman and we hear the voice-over: "This is my grandma." The discrepancy between the connotations of the grandma and the actual iconographic figuration establishes a version of pre-oedipal attachment. The very first frontal shot of 'my grandma' thus could be seen as a mirror structure, the pre-Lacanian mirror- phase inviting the unseen 'I' - whose very absent gaze towards the scene of his dreamscape also implicates us, the spectators in the dark theater - towards a primary identification. "Knowledge of the maternal is constituted as immediacy (one has only to look and see)."33 At the cinema, as is suggested by Gaylyn Studlar, we all regress to the infantile, pre-oedipal phase, submitting ourselves to and identifying (fusing) with the overwhelming presence of the screen and the woman on it.34 Red Sorghum only accentu- ates that state of mind. The voice-over frequently punctuates the cinematic narrative and reminds us that the screen presences (i.e., the young man and young woman) are 'my grandpa' and 'my grandma'. The first-person narrator, however, is absent throughout; at best his screen presence is in the surrogate figure of a small child addressed as 'my father'.

This maternal discourse is, as it were, a framing structure and a strategy of containment: the film begins with the shot of grandmalbeautiful young woman, a fantasized image envisioned in the mind's eyelI' of the voice- over narrator, and ends with a child's incantation and evocation of the maternal soul. The whole narrative is thus enclosed in this maternal discourse. One may even argue that the narrative strategy could be seen as a cinematic variant on thefortlda game played by Freud's grandson, in an auditory form, experiencing the pain of the loss of the mother and evocation of her

33 Doane, p. 70. 34 Gaylyn Studlar, "Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures of the Cinema," Movies

and Methods, Vol. 2, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Califor- nia Press, 1985), p. 616.

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recovery. The very beginning frontal shot of 'my grandma', a beautiful young woman, a frontal shot that resembles a still picture - still pictures have an inherent pastness - can thus be seen as retrieved from the historical/cultural memory, evoked by the child's incantation towards the end of the film.

Hence it is a cinematic utopia, a dream narrative onto which the speculative male 'I' of the narrative projects his desire and wishfulness onto a female/maternal world and ends up being contained by the final silent maternity: the voice-over narrator becomes absent towards the end of the film, replaced - or figured, by his father, iconographically represented on the screen as a child who longingly chants after his dead mother. The narrative strategy holds the absent past in the cinematic present while at the same time punctuating the illusion of presentness with a sense of the historical past. Most interesting is that through 'my grandma'/young heroine's point of view that the past is mediated, reconstructed and totalized. In other words, it is through a feminine vision of totality that the masculine past is re-constructed and obtains coherence and meaning.

It follows that the death of Jiuer, the grandmalyoung heroine, means the loss of perception, consciousness and meaning, as she has hitherto been the pivotal point around which the cinematic universe revolves. That traumatic blackout is cinematically enacted: grandpa/young sedan-bearer, the sur- vivor, turns into a stone as if without the female character's gaze he is part of the living dead.

The climactic denouement is actually an internalization of Jiuer's subjective world of consciousness on the verge of extinction. The shrieking Suo Na (Chinese horn), playing the epithalamium, projects her inner flashback of her past. Agonized ecstasy and the ecstatic agony, sexuality and death, are all (con)fused. The death of the female's subjective consciousness means, therefore, a non-differentiation of everything, symbol- ized by the sweeping washout of the red color that dominates the screen - the dispersion of her entire being. Redness bespeaks desire, passion, blood (itself signifying birth and death), beauty and cruelty, destruction and con- struction (in that the homogeneous color scheme destroys the previous world of color and re-orders a new world). The eclipse of the sun and moon defies any verbal formulation here, yet it is at least an emblem of Jiuer's blackout, of a state of non-differentiation into which are collapsed the yin and yang, masculinity and femininity, day and night, self and other, warmth and coldness, war and peace. The haunting incantation praying for the soul of the mother is at once the echoes heard by the dying and the echoes that reverberate in the corridor of the historical memory, resonating with Qu Yuan's poetic evocation of the lost ancestral souls.

The ending of the film, therefore, is the moment of cinematic jouissance in which we experience the loss as well as the birth of an infinity of mean- ings. It is an orgasmic and maternal synthesis, a maternal enclosure and mastery of narrative that proposes to give birth to a masculine identity. Ma- ternity is closely related to the natural, the unquestionable. "Paternity and its

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interrogation, on the other hand, are articulated within the context of issues of identity, legality and inheritance - in short, social legitimacy. To generate questions about the existence of one's father is, therefore, to produce an in- sult of the highest order.''35 The maternity of my 'grandpa'hedan-bearer is narratively "mediated - it allows for gaps and invisibilities, of doubts in short." 36

'My grandpa' is often an intruder onto the scene, which positions him outside the maternal discourse to be recuperated. The primal scene of my grandma which admits the chair-bearer into the narrative as 'my grandpa' is suggested, but is only present in a narrative ellipsis. Ravished and sexually fulfilled, grandmdyoung bride resumes her journey on donkeyback, with 'my grandpa's' coarse song, a barbarous yelp, swelling in the soundtrack, thereby designating his screen absence and offscreen presence. The sexual encounter is thus internalized into the heroine's world of consciousness and becomes a blank in the memory of the first-person narrator, who has been denied the complete primal scene. This blank may call into question the encounter's actuality and credibility in a later sequence when grandpa appears from nowhere, drunk, and retells fragmentarily and crudely what has taken place between him and Jiuer. The narrative gap consequently puts the identity of the voice-over narrator at stake. Paternity in Red Sorghum is, therefore, frequently represented as absence, as the questionable, as the Other. The irreverent attitude - implied in the way the cinematic narrative comically contains him betrays not only an oedipal complex with which the narrator tries to evict the paternal -but also the anti-patriarchal mastery of the narrative by maternity.

Red Sorghum also rewrites the maternal discourse of Chinese textuality. Identified with the mother earth, the motherland and the mother Party,37 the mother as a figure of identification in socialist ideology is traditionally evoked to elicit absolute allegiance, just as maternity is related to the natural, the unquestionable. By positing the spectator vis-8-vis the sexuality of the maternal, the film not only pulls down all that is on the pedestal, but also revises history embodied in the dead grandma by setting free the repressed, figured as sexuality.

It is consequently tempting to fix Red Sorghum in a Freudian algebra as a narrative about the return of the repressed; or to water down the film into a

35 Doane, p. 70. 36 Ibid. 37 "Sing a Folk Song to the Party," a popular song widely circulated in the '60s in

China, explicitly equates Mother with the Party:

Sing a folk song to the Party, I liken the Party to the Mother.

This identification has been wholeheartedly embraced by the Chinese for the decades since 1949, and has become almost a cliched figure in various kinds of emotional rhetoric.

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Lacanian phraseology as the liberation of desire. Even director Zhang Yi- mou's own confessional statement seems to favor that formulation:

My personality is quite the contrary to the mood of the film. I have long been repressed, restrained, enclosed, and introspective. Now that I had the chance to make a film on my own, I wanted to make it liberated, abandoned.38

But there is also a difference. Red Sorghum is fundamentally a liberation of the repressed collective desire. Psychoanalytic categories, when placed in the Chinese context, cannot be embraced without some reorientation. The patterns of masculinity-femininity , dominance-submission and repression- desire are bound up with other forms of cultural praxis in the Chinese context and acquire new dimensions. In this way, Red Sorghum can be said to teeter on the borderline of Western psychoanalysis. Here we can see the relevance of Fredric Jameson's critique of Western psychoanalysis in cultural criticism:

v )he object of commentary is effectively transformed into an allegory whose master narrative is the story of desire itself, as it struggles against a repressive reality, convulsively breaking through the grids that were designed to hold it in place or, on the contrary, succumbing to repression and leaving the dreary wasteland off uphamsis behind it. At this level it is to be wondered whether we have to do with a mere interpretation any longer, whether it is not a question here of the production of whole new aesthetic object, a whole new mythic narrative.39

Western allegories of desire and wish-fulfillment, according to Jameson, are "locked into the category of the individual subject" and are, therefore, in need of expansion by transcending the individual categories and tapping the political unconscious in terms of the collective and associative. The strategy remains comparable to a psychoanalytic one only in the persistence of just such a valorization of desire.40 Also, the Western psychoanalytic characteri- zation of the male/female problem, given its social implications and collective relevance, is equally oriented to individual existence and is only realized in the private realm.

One distinction that marks the contemporary Chinese New Wave cinema is its sense of cultural urgency couched in the collective consciousness, and the impossibility of there being private isolation in this critical moment of historical transformation that will eventually implicate every individual. In this context, issues of masculinity and femininity acquire more social and symbolic resonances than they may in the West. The problem of sexual dif-

38 Li Tong, "The Red Sorghum: A Journey to the West," Remin Rebao (overseas ed.),

39 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconrcious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,

40 Ibid., p. 69.

March 14,1988.

1981), p. 67.

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ference is politically more displaced, more often figured as a signifier of social and ideological entities than of the immediate reality it denotes. There- fore, Jameson's critique of the individual-minded psychoanalytic paradigm seems especially relevant to the current cultural landscape in which Chinese cinema is situated. The strong repercussions Red Sorghum has provoked reinforces the Chinese public's insistence on the creation of a space in which the collective implications of cinematic narratives and the denial of individual categories can be realized.

It is here, however, that Jameson's instructive critique also appears problematic. Given its cultural and historical imperative, the very denial of individual categories, has been shown to be regressive, and especially so in the Chinese cultural context. The placement of private categories (psychoanalytic or other) - given their displacement in the collective-cultural landscape - can be seen as a politically positive arm of criticism. It affirms values that are absent or repressed. In this sense, the culturally irrelevant psychoanalytic formula can be politically relevant.

In the ideological circumstances and cultural context of China, the narrative of psychoanalysis itself needs rewriting. In the case of Red Sorghum, repression and revolt - two fundamental events of psychoanalytic narrative - meet each other only through a tension across the threshold of the screen. The cinematic absence of repression renders the revolt undirected and dis- persed into the ideological space outside the screen. The perennial offscreen reality as an antithesis to the screen world is presupposed and the cinematic world is an alternative to the offscreen world we inhabit. We see the impor- tance of presupposition - the presupposition of a cultural presence regis- tered on the screen as absence. Here we come to a critique of the simple- minded mimetic assumptions that sometimes go unquestioned in the rhetoric of cross-cultural studies (e.g., a culturally specific film is an iconographic representation of that culture). Red Sorghum and many other culturally specific texts do not reflect the appearances of a culture; they mirror what the actual cultural landscape lacks. They reflect fantasies and imagined memories - that which society expels. Any attempt to picture the Chinese cultural scene from this film requires an imaginative approach - in the same way one infers an image from a film negative.

Yuejin Wang is a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University who received his B.A. and M.A. de- grees from Fudan University, Shanghai, China. His publications include Imagery in Focus, which he edited, and a translation of Roland Barthes, Fragments d'un dbcours amoureux into Chinese. His most recent publication is "The Cinematic Other and the Cultural Self? De- Centering the Cultural Identity on Cinema," Wide Angle, Vol. 11, No. 2: 32-39.

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Red Sorghum: Mixing Memory and Desire