An Interview with Can Xue

Dylan Suher and Joan Hua

asymptotejournal.com

The Chinese avant-garde writer Can Xue aptly describes her fiction as a
performance. Reading her fiction is like watching modern dance: like an
unfolding gesture out of Merce Cunningham or Butoh (her favorite), her
sentences evolve towards unpredictable, pointed conclusions. Her stories often
suggest a hidden, underlying narrative—a logic of movement that dictates the
actions of the players on the stage. Her characters, with their constantly shifting
motives, are expressly not rounded. They are personae, masks made to articulate
whatever philosophical proposition or aspect of the psyche the performance
currently demands: the little boy who secretly breeds a brood of snakes in his
stomach in "The Child Who Raised Poisonous Snakes" or the wormlike
humanoid who lives underground and burrows up, towards the unknown surface,
in "Vertical Motion." Chief among all the personae is Can Xue, her nom de
plume. Can Xue (whose real name is Deng Xiaohua) frequently refers to herself
in the third person (as she does in the interview below) and even writes reviews
of her own novels, as if her protean, dreamlike visions originated outside of her.

Can Xue carries on with her individual performance indifferent to those critics
and readers who seek to classify and explain her. Her family was labeled
"Rightist" and persecuted intensely by the Communist government; her social
background barred her from any formal education. She nonetheless emerged
during the literary flowering of the 1980s known as the "High Culture Fever" as
a member of a pack of fiction writers (including Su Tong, Mo Yan, Yu Hua, to
name only a few) whose works challenged the orthodoxies of social realism
through formalist experimentation and vivid imagery of the body. But unlike her
contemporaries, who sought out an untainted primitive past or aimed to record
the traumas of the Cultural Revolution, Can Xue has no interest in Chinese
folklore or politics. The bold innovations of her oeuvre—executed in a colloquial
yet writerly style that emphasizes the rapid shifts in space and narrative logic—
surpass the experimentation of her Chinese contemporaries. In fact, her
creations are sometimes even more adventurous than those of the Western
modernist writers she so admires: a long list of stated influences that includes
Kafka, Borges, and Calvino. The literary journal Conjunctions has frequently
featured her work, and she has won the admiration of many Western writers—
Robert Coover called her "a world master" and Susan Sontag declared her the
one Chinese writer worthy of the Nobel Prize. She continues to stand apart from
her fellow Chinese writers. As others identified with the Chinese avant-garde
have since shifted towards more accessible forms of realism, Can Xue has
stubbornly, movingly continued her individual performance: composing
challenging experimental work.

In this sense, Can Xue's writing is nothing less than an existential struggle. The
high stakes of her gambits can be found on display in her short story, "Snake
Island," in which a man returns to his rural hometown after thirty years, to find
that he recognizes nothing and nobody and that his family is nowhere to be
found. Near the end, a villager summons him into battle. Snake Island, he
explains, is divided in two, between the living and the dead, and the living must
fight with the dead for territory. This is Can Xue's neverending struggle as well:
to write against the death of the soul, and to fight for an authentic life. The
struggle never ends; the performance continues.

The following interview with Can Xue was conducted in Chinese via email and
then translated into English.

—Dylan Suher

You've switched English translators over the course of your career: the first
three collections of yours translated into English were done by Ronald R.
Janssen and Jian Zhang, while the most recent three have been translated

2
by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping. What is your relationship with your
translators like: is there a collaborative process? What skills and qualities
are necessary, in your estimation, for someone to be able to translate a Can
Xue story?

I'm friends with all my English translators. Altogether, I have five English
translators: Ron Janssen and Jian Zhang (who translate collaboratively), Karen
Gernant and Chen Zeping (who translate collaboratively), and Annelise
[Finegan]. Starting in the 1990s, I put my all into studying English and managed
to achieve a certain level of skill with the language. Ever since Karen and Chen
Zeping took over translating my work, I've insisted on reading their translations
(and later, Annelise's translations) and offering the translators my opinions. Can
Xue's works are truly exceptional; I feel that the most important skill my
translators can have is to read the original intensively, thereby having a thorough
grasp of the deep underlying humor and general feel of the language in my
works. How precisely they express something in their translations is closely
connected with their power to feel and their ability to grasp logic, because these
kinds of fictions have already surpassed the profundity of philosophy. It is most
difficult to properly convert one language into another. Within Chinese,
meaning is buried deep, and the language emphasizes subtleties of feeling.
English is more direct and emphasizes clear distinctions. It's really difficult to
grasp that "degree" of translation.

You're a remarkably prolific writer, having written over a hundred short

stories and dozens of novellas and critical essays. Yet only a fraction of those
works have been translated into English. Are there any works of yours that
have not been translated that you would like to see translated?

At present, two of my full-length novels have already been translated. And it was
recently announced that the latest [translation] of my novella The Last Lover,
which is currently still being edited, will be published by Yale University Press
in the spring of 2014. Dozens of medium-length and shorter works have been
translated into English. I estimate that some 13 million Chinese characters of my
works have been translated—is that really a small amount? My output is very
consistent, and that's very difficult for a writer to do. My wildest dream is to get
all of my works published in the United States.

With regard to your writing process, you've said in interviews that your
writing comes from your subconscious, and that a good writer should not
know what he or she is writing. What do you think of when you begin a
story?

The subconscious by itself is actually not the deciding factor; every individual
has a subconscious. The key lies in whether you can unleash it to create. Here
there is a complicated mechanism, and I can only explain it from the vantage
point of philosophy and art. In five or six years, I plan to write a book,

3
Philosophy of Art. In that book, I'll elaborate my thoughts on these issues based
on my experience practicing art and the fruits of my intensive research into
Western philosophy. I've already been writing for over thirty years, and the
writing method I use is precisely the creative method of modern art: Reason
monitors from afar. Emotions are completely unleashed. I turn towards the dark
abyss of consciousness and plunge in, and in the tension between those two
forces, I build the fantastic, idealist plots of my stories. I think that people who
are able to write in the way I write must possess an immense primitive energy
and a strongly logical spirit. Only in this way can they maintain total creativity
amid a divided consciousness. In China, I have not seen a writer who is capable
of sustaining that kind of creativity for many years.

The structure in your work can be so difficult to discern—both in terms of

narrative structure and in the way the images connect to one another—that
it's hard to imagine just how you shape your stories. How do you edit a Can
Xue story?

I never edit my stories. I just grab a pen and write, and every day I write a
paragraph. For more than thirty years, it's always been like this. I believe that I
am surrounded by a powerful "aura," and that's the secret of my success.
Successful artists are all able to manipulate the "balance of forces"—they're that
kind of extraordinarily talented people.

When you say above that "every day I write a paragraph," do you mean you
write your stories sequentially, from beginning to end? Or that you write the
paragraphs and later arrange them together?

All my stories—my novels, my novellas, and my short stories—are written

sequentially, from beginning to end. I never arrange them together or put them in
a different sequence. My manuscripts are extremely clean—I very, very rarely
correct even a single word.

A few questions about images and themes that recur throughout your work.
The concept of space is always contested in your writing: your stories depict
impossible spaces (the apartment in "A Village in the Big City"), spaces that
shift dimension and physical realities over the course of the story (the
environs of the hut in "Homecoming"), and nebulous spaces (the darkness
in "In the Wilderness" or the underground in "Vertical Motion"). What
interests you about the manipulation of space in fiction?

Only a writer that possesses a high degree of rationality can break through
conventional space and enter into a primitive and purely fantastic landscape.
Dante, for example, is that kind of writer. The landscape of hell is suffused with
longing and power. Those mighty awakened souls win their own space through
the struggles of life and death. As soon as the struggle ceases, that space

4
immediately disappears. This is the creative mechanism that I spoke of in my
response above. A writer exhibits her vitality through unfamiliar space.

Your writing often depicts grotesqueries, bodily disfigurement, and outright

violence. This is a quality it seems to share with works by other writers
identified with China's avant-garde school of the 1980s. Specifically, the
imagery in some ways resembles the early works of Yu Hua, which you have
called "the first Chinese works that can truly be said to belong to
modernism and to have substance." How does your approach to writing
about violence compare with the approach taken by the other avant-garde
writers and how do you yourself feel about depicting violence in your work?

Writing violence for the sake of violence is vulgar and tasteless. I am not like
some Chinese writers, who get a thrill from the simple depiction of violence.
That's called acting out a perversion; there's no substance to it. In a select few of
Yu Hua's early works, he writes violence in a very remarkable manner, for
example, the works in his collection Mistakes by the Riverside. I even wrote a
review of that collection. But he has several stories where he writes violence and
there is no substance to it. His self-awareness when creating is not strong. A few
of Mo Yan's depictions of violence are really warped, of low character. What
does it mean to say something has substance? It is to say: your depictions of
violence must have form, must have a sense of metaphysics to them. Just like the
images in Dante's hell, they must depict the true struggles deep within the soul.
Readers read the terrifying images in Dante, but those images push those readers
to yearn for their purest ideals. Your question lumps my writing together with
other writers of the eighties, which shows that you haven't entered deeply into
Can Xue's works—you need to put more effort into reading!

You expect a real partnership with your readers. You have said that they
need to be well-read enough in modernism to understand your writing
technique, and willing to make the effort to understand the deep structure of
your work. Considering that you expect such a high level of engagement and
response on the part of your readers, what is your personal relationship
with your readers like? Do you notice a difference between the response of
your Chinese readers to your work and the response of foreign readers to
your work?

I often interact with my readers in China, and quite a few interviews with me
have been published. And I'm also on the Web, communicating with netizens. I
also frequently critique my colleagues—I've offended almost all my fellow
writers and critics. However, I still must persist in speaking reason and I must
maintain my critical position. China has more than a few Can Xue fans, but
overall, Can Xue's era still hasn't arrived, because her works are too ahead of the
curve, and don't conform to commonplace, habitual aesthetics. So I must
continue to do the steady work of bringing my writings into existence. Chinese
readers and foreign readers should have about the same reaction to my writing.

5
Because my subject matter is universal human nature—the original face of
nature.

What do you mean when you say "subject matter is universal human
nature—the original face of nature"? We see nature frequently appearing in
your stories as an adversarial force that drives self-discovery (the sea in
"The Lure of the Sea") or as the truth of life, hidden just below the surface
(the spring in "The Spring"). In your interpretation, what is the connection
between the images of nature in your stories and your feelings about nature?

According to my worldview, the relationship between man and nature is that of

having the same structures and sharing the same flesh. Nature is the highest form
of existence. At some periods, She inevitably gives birth to things that occupy
the same rank as mankind, so that through them, She may display her own
essence. But I am not a pantheist: I feel that this state of affairs is the result of
nature's structural function itself. Mankind shoulders the mission that Mother
Nature has endowed to it (that is to say, nature demands that mankind realize and
manifest her goals through creativity), and thus, we can conclude that mankind
presumably shares the same kind of structural function as nature. They can only
exist as the children of nature, with the same body as their mother. Because I
believe in nature (as a Chinese person, this is very natural), in my writings,
existence and nonexistence, the spiritual and the material, speculative and
material thought, this shore and the opposite shore—all are unified together as
they repulse each other. The opposing forces are locked in a life and death
struggle, yet in the midst of that struggle, they achieve a balance and a harmony.
In this aspect, my ideological system is very much opposed to Western culture.
Although, of course, my worldview was gradually formed through my own
exhaustive study of Western culture.

Next year, Yale University Press is putting out a translation of a critical

piece you wrote on Kafka, a writer about whom you've often written, and
with whom you have long been fascinated. Your view of Kafka strikes us as
unusual; you've said that Kafka's works "signify an incomparable tragedy,
but are also suffused with a pleasant freedom. This is like the whole of the
experiences of K, the protagonist of his novel The Trial. There is mystery,
terror, alienation, and yet his every action originates from a primitive
instinct and a sublime will." What experiences or influences have shaped
your views of Kafka?

My interpretation of Kafka is indeed unusual. The main reason why my critical

work on Kafka is a breath of fresh air to readers, I think, is that I have
incorporated Eastern elements into my understanding of Kafka's work. The
religiosity of Westerners caused Kafka unending misery and drove him to an
untimely death. I must say, to a certain degree, these living conditions
diminished his creativity. On the other hand, my worldview, which combines the
cultures of the East and West, enables me to regard the mundane world with an

6
open mind and to endure this profound black comedy. Therefore, when I
interpret The Castle and Amerika and other such acclaimed works, I emphasize
the vitality in them, the primitive, rebellious revelry, and, above all, the vigorous
meaning of life contained within. I believe I have in this respect surpassed
existentialism and am proposing an artistic philosophy with a Chinese color to it.
I can write this kind of criticism because I investigate the artistic philosophy
shared by Kafka, Dante, Calvino, and artists like them. I have only achieved my
current breakthroughs by applying my thirty-some years of creative experience to
writing critical essays. I have not only written books of critical work on Kafka,
but I have also analyzed Dante, Borges, Calvino, Goethe, Shakespeare, and other
such masters—altogether producing six books of criticism.

Could you speak a bit more about what you term "the religiosity of
Westerners"? What do you mean by "religiosity," and how did
this religiosity "diminish [Kafka's] creativity"?

Here I am referring mainly to a sense of "original sin." A sense of original sin

was in the background of both Kafka's personal life and his literary creativity, so
some people believe that one can use existentialism to explain his writings. My
critique seeks to pry him apart from existentialism; rather, I analyze and write
about Kafka's exuberant creativity, his passion for the mundane world, and about
his pagan rebellion against the religiosity that suppressed him. I write about his
strong individuality, which led him to bring his primitive creativity (squeezed
out by reason) to the fore. But Kafka's performance in real life was far weaker
than what he demonstrated in his creations. He was always on the edge of being
swallowed up by original sin, and he feared quotidian life, which he always
wanted to escape. On this point, actually, he is in line with existentialism. The
incessant guilt that came from his religious consciousness finally conquered his
primitive life force; the friction within his own soul dissipated all of his vitality.
His letters and diaries always show that he was a "germophobe"; a man who
could not bear the vulgarities of life; a man who strived every day to be a "good
person."

To shift to your influences: You have declared yourself as thoroughly

opposed to postmodernism, and prefer to describe yourself as a modernist
writer. What does the idea of modernism mean to you?

Postmodernism smashes structure, but establishes nothing. It therefore belongs to

a transitional phase of literature and philosophy. Now that phase has already
passed, and the things that were being advocated then are no longer relevant to
the present. The ultimate mission of mankind only consists of being constructive
and creative. As the children of nature, each one of us must exercise our own
creativity, so as not to fail to meet the expectations nature holds for mankind. In
this respect, modernist literature does a better job than postmodernism, and is
therefore more closely aligned with my worldview. Without exception,
modernism pursues the ideal, regards creation and invention as the most noble

7
values, and truly loves quotidian, mundane life. These are all essential elements
for constructing the future spiritual kingdom.

Are there contemporary artists working in other media whose work you
find inspiring or admire? What contemporary artworks most closely
parallel your own approach?

All modernist art (including literature) is performance art. These artworks are all
demonstrations of artists standing up to survive. I like many forms of art—
classical music, modernist painting, and modernist dance can all deeply move
me. Pieces of classical music—by Bizet, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Brahms,
Schubert, Mendelssohn, Bach, and others—are all true demonstrations of
modernist performance. The Bible and the Divine Comedy are also brimming
with modernist elements, and they are far more powerful than so-called
postmodernist literature. With respect to modernist painters and sculptors, my
favorites are Van Gogh, Dali, Munch, Miro, Bosch, and Giacometti. My favorite
dance is Japan's Butoh (the Ankoku-Butoh movement).

You have famously described your work as a "foreign plant growing in the
soil of five thousand years of history." You often talk about the "foreign
plant" but only very seldom discuss the "soil of five thousand years of
history." What are your Chinese influences? "Tales of the strange?"
Perhaps the poetry of Li He or Li Shangyin? How does the "soil of five
thousand years of history" nourish your work?

We must first clarify this idea—what is Chinese culture? The food we eat, the
clothes we wear, the way we interact with each other, romantic relationships,
sense of languages, ways of speaking—do these belong to culture? Are we
immersed in 5000 years of culture? As a purely modernist artist, would I have
more profound, more deeply felt feelings toward Chinese culture than the
ordinary person? I have read some of the pieces of Chinese literature that you
mentioned; nevertheless, with the exception of Dream of the Red Chamber and
some Tang poetry, the others cannot touch my soul. The essence of Chinese
culture that I contemplate is the potential force of ideas like "the unity of heaven
and man." In the past 5000 years, our people have not been conscious of this
power, because we have been isolated and closed to the world, and we lack a
spirit of independence. Yet we are supposed to have this power—an ethnic group
that has existed for thousands of years must possess some eternal elements. If
you don't develop these elements, however, then they will forever remain in
darkness and never see the light of day, which also means they will never be able
to truly exist. My method is to use Western culture as a hoe to unearth our
ancient culture, so we can realize its proper value. Western culture has been
"divided" for thousands of years. I want to now join the two shores—earth and
sky, the material and the immaterial—and combine them into one. And for that
task, I have some advantages: namely, the nourishment and enlightenment I
receive from 5000 years of history.

8
In the preface to your work Mind Report, you speak of "liberating the soul"
of your readers. You've also written that the artist should "give the reader
the possibility of unlocking the gates of their personal hell and freeing their
long-imprisoned spirits." Many of those ideas remind us of the discussions
around literary revolution and literary reform held by the writers and
thinkers associated with the New Culture Movement; your "gates of hell"
seem closely related to Lu Xun's "iron house." In what ways is the mission
of your work aligned with theirs, and in what ways does it depart?

I still take Mr. Lu Xun's attitude toward foreign culture as my model. That sort of
mentality—open to the world, but free from self-abasement—is exactly what we
Mainland literary figures lack. I have already spoken enough on this issue. I only
want to add this: Mainland China's literary climate today is far bleaker than it
was in the 1930s and '40s. My mission is precisely to fight against today's literary
circles, to carry forward the Lu Xun spirit, and to leave young writers a glimmer
of hope. China's present-day literary circle consists of a few self-interested
cabals. Young writers who show the slightest hint of gutsiness lose any chance of
advancement and are left to fend for themselves.

You grew up in a China that, influenced by Marxism and other radical

Western ideas, isolated itself from the outside world. During those decades
(the 1960s and '70s), you read a fair amount of foreign literature, Marxist
philosophy, and Western history, encouraged by your ostracized "Rightist"
parents, who had deep roots in the Chinese Communist movement. How
have you negotiated the ironies and discordances of your influences in your
writing?

I never base my writing on concepts; I base my writing on feelings. Obviously I

have concepts, and I am even willing to call my pattern of cognition "rational
intuition." This is because my sensibility eventually congeals into reason. As I
said above, what I portray are the contradictions and struggles in the depths of
the soul and the landscape of life of an artistically refined human. My starting
point is the impulse of life; the impulse for freedom in the depths of the mind. It
is just such a mechanism: you have an impulse, then, in the midst of tension, the
landscape takes shape. When you stop, then the landscape disappears. I have
sufficiently absorbed Western ideology during my many years of reading, yet my
creative mechanism is fundamentally a Chinese type of subversive mechanism.
Of course this is closely related to my life trajectory. I am a Chinese person in
love with Western culture.

At this point, you've had a very long writing career—you've been writing
for more than thirty years, a period in which China has changed
dramatically, and the market for writing in China has almost completely
transformed. And yet, your writing style seems to remain remarkably
consistent. How do you yourself feel your writing (or your writing process)
has changed over the past thirty years?

9
The small changes within Chinese literary circles in the past few decades can
hold no significance within the several thousand years of literary history; these
changes have had absolutely no influence on my writing. My writing shifts
gradually. What it obeys are the laws inherent in my creative process—an
evolution, a gradual, continuous revealing of new life. I whole-heartedly detest
writing to follow the crowd; I have always been incompatible with the Chinese
literary world.

You believe that your works can only be properly understood by each
reader as he or she struggles to find meaning in the process of reading, and
you often encourage readers to look harder and find their own answers to
the questions they have about your work. But judging from the volume of
interviews you've done alone, you're astoundingly generous with your time,
accessible to readers, and willing to receive questions. If interpretation of
your work is such an individual process, a process that requires an
investment of energy by a patient reader, where do you think the utility of
doing interviews lies?

My work belongs to an especially advanced kind of literature, far more ahead of

its time than Kafka was to his readers in his day. Furthermore, I myself believe
that I am a writer whose sense of reason and originality are equally,
extraordinarily strong—I have published many volumes of criticism. After I have
finished my novels, following an idle period, I come to grasp their essential
structure. Other writers are seldom equipped with this ability. Therefore I not
only critique other classic writers, but I also critique my own finished novels. To
think that writers cannot critique their own novels is an outdated belief. In the
development of contemporary literature, cutting-edge products are drawn into
experimentation. They tend to merge with philosophy, and can even achieve an
effect that philosophy cannot. As an experimental novelist with a strongly
philosophical temperament (my method being "experimenting on myself"), I
have the capacity to analyze my own work. I suppose there's no need for
controversy there? Everybody can present their own interpretation!

I believe that, in the coming era, all pioneering artists will become interpreters of
their own work, and in the wake of that wave, interpretation will become a
common practice. Won't that be good news for the wider audience? If the eyes of
the readers are open, and their curiosity is piqued, they may become eager to add
their own interpretation to the work they are reading, or even to the fiction that
they themselves write. In this way, every piece of writing would turn into a site
for experimentation, and—through the process of interpretation—people would
endeavor to create anew. I call this sort of interpretation the extension of writing.
The realist approach to reading—the passive admiration, standing at the outside
and uttering a few exclamations at the mystery of literature—is inadequate for
dealing with experimental works like Can Xue novels. Every reader must stand
up and perform in order to enter the realm of experimental literature.

10
Dylan Suher is a contributing editor at Asymptote. He was born and raised in Brooklyn.
He has published reviews, criticism, and essays in The Millions, The Review of
Contemporary Fiction, and The New York Times.

Joan Hua holds a B.A. in Music from University of Puget Sound and currently works
with world's traditional music recordings at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington,
D.C. Born in the United States, she has lived in Taipei, Taiwan, and later returned to
conduct ethnographic research on xiqu traditions. She has also studied French and
German and spent a semester in Vienna, Austria.

11