Idea Transcript
WORDS ABOUT NOTHING: WRITING THE INEFFABLE iN CALVINO AND MA YUAN by EVELYNE TEICHERT B.A., The University of Victoria, 1985 MA., The University of British Columbia, 1988 A THESIS SUBMITTED iN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Program in Comparative Literature) We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard
THE
OF BRITISH COLUMBIA February 1994
© Evelyne Teichert, 1994
In
presenting
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thesis
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partial fulfilment of the
requirements
for an
advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission.
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Abstract
The thesis links the writings of the Italian Italo Calvino and the Chinese Ma Yuan through the Taoist symbol of the Tao and the Borgesian concept of the Aleph, an imaginary point in space containing all points in space and time. Based on Zhuangzi’s parable of the Emperor Hun tun (Chaos) who lost his original state of chaos when he had sensory openings poked into him, the vision of the Aleph/Tao represents the return to that chaotic state of undifferentiated
knowledge one experiences when one closes all sensory perceptions. This unnameable vision allows one to transcend all apparent conceptual dichotomies as it lies in the realm of intuition rather than language. Calvino, like Borges, posits that the chaos of the universe cannot be represented through the sequential language system, but nevertheless demonstrates this ineffability through language. Ma Yuan celebrates the chaos of life by writing about a mythological Tibet, upholding the uniqueness of that culture as a subtle subversion to the Chinese political and territorial takeover. Chapter One and Two, respectively, discuss the “Overlapping Conceptual Spaces” in Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Ma Yuan’s ‘The Temptation of the Gangdisi’. Chapter Three looks in greater detail at the images of the Aleph and the Tao in the two main texts against the backdrop of Borgesian thought. In accordance with the concept of the AlephlTao whose definition is continuously unsettled by contradictory conjectures, the fourth chapter undoes the conclusions reached in the previous chapters. This chapter discusses Calvino’s Cosmicomics and Ma Yuan’s shorter Tibetan stories in the light of comic parody. That which was earlier posited as the ineffable in these stories is elaborated in a profhsion of words. The Conclusion discusses from a Taoist point of view the predominantly male voice in the writings of the two authors. While both advocate the spiritual sameness of all phenomena in an undifferentiated knowledge of the world, they nevertheless write from the male perspective of the yang pursuing and wanting to possess theyin.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract
ii
Table of Contents
iii
Acknowledgments
iv
INTRODUCTION
The Borges Connection
1
CHAPTER ONE
Overlapping Conceptual Spaces in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities
32
Overlapping Conceptual Spaces in Ma Yuan’s ‘The Temptation of the Gangdisi’
75
CHAPTER THREE
The Aleph and the Tao
116
CHAPTER FOUR
Tongue-in-Cheek: Myth speaks the Unspeakable 1. Introduction 2. Images of the Aleph 3. Narrative Strategies for representing the ineffable Aleph/Tao 4. Cosmological Parodies 5. Narrative Parallels 6. Telling the Stories contained in the Cosmic and the Tibetan Aleph 7. Conclusion: The Universe is an Aleph
CHAPTER TWO
CONCLUSION
Tao: The Unattainable Woman
209 217 238 252 275 277 292
WORKS CITED APPENDIX
173 191
A Translation of Stories by Ma Yuan ‘The Temptation of the Gangdisi’ ‘Black Road’ ‘A Wall Covered with Strange Patterns’ ‘Wandering Spirit’ ‘The Lhasa River Goddess’ ‘Three Kinds of Time in the Life of Lhasa’ ‘Three Ways of Folding a Kite’
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306 342 351 362 376 386 397
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the members of my supervisory committee, Dr. Richard King, Dr. Carlo Testa, and especially my supervisor Dr. Patricia Merivale, for their kind support during the writing of this thesis. I would also like to thank Rukshana Engineer, Bill Pechet and Dr. Mario Pinho for proofreading the translations, as well as Dr. Chai Huiting for his patient help in locating material by and about Ma Yuan in China. E.T. February 1994
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Introduction
The Borges Connection
Será (me digo entonces) que de un modo Secreto y suficiente el alma sabe Que es inmorta! y que su vasto y grave Circulo abarca todo y puede todo. Más allá de este afan y de este verso Me aguarda inagotable el universo.
Then I tell myseif it must be that the soul has some secret, sufficient way of knowing that it is immortal, that its vast, encompassing circle can take in all, can accomplish alL Beyond my anxiety, beyond this writing, the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting.
(Borges, ‘Composición escrita en un ejemplar de la gesta de Beowuif, OC II, 280)1
(Borges, Poem Written in a Copy of Beowuif, PersonalAnthology, 202)
The three authors chosen for this thesis, the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), the Italian Italo Calvino (1923-1985) and the Chinese Ma Yuan (born in 1953), are all concerned with the knowledge of the world and the process of writing in the pursuit of that knowledge. Imagining the world in all possible temporal and spatial dimensions and writing about these is a delight all three share. They see the world as infinitely chaotic and impossible to condense into words, but words can give a sense of the vast complexity of the universe. While the thesis itself deals foremost with Ma Yuan’s and Italo Calvino’s fiction, and in particular with a selection of Ma Yuan’s Tibetan stories (1984-1988) and Calvino’s later fantastic work (1963-1983), the importance of their shared allegiance to Borges cannot be overlooked. Borges is a writer who has influenced much of twentieth-century literature and thought, so that writers like Calvino and Ma Yuan who are interested in expanding the concept of reality to include the imaginary and the mythical find a ready complicity with the Argentine writer. It is not surprising, therefore, that Ma
1
Unless otherwise noted, Borges’ work in the original is quoted from his Obras ompletas I complete Vols. 1, II, Ill.
Worksj
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2 Yuan’s and Italo Calvino’s critics often mention these two writers in connection with Borges. The thesis discusses the work by the two authors against the backdrop of Borgesian thought, while at the same time drawing on some concepts from early Taoism as elaborated in N. J. Girardot’s book Myth and Meaning in Early Taoism: The Theme of Chaos (hun-tun). Chapter I and II respectively look at Calvino’s book Le città invisibili [The Invisible Cities] and Ma Yuan’s novella
‘
Ij J Jj l’3
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[‘The Temptation of the Gangdisi’]
in their own textual context of overlapping conceptual spaces. The third chapter connects the two master texts in the framework of the Borgesian image of the Aleph and the Taoist concept of the Tao. Finally, in accordance with the nature of these two concepts that defy any definite description, the fourth chapter deconstructs the conclusions reached in the foregoing chapters. The chapter discusses the parodic verbalizing of the ineffable Aleph and the unnamable Tao with a look at Calvino’s Cosmicomiche vecchie e nuove [Cosmicomics Old and New] and Ma Yuan’s shorter Tibetan stories. Jorge Luis Borges’ work is characterized by the “conviction that the world is a chaos impossible to reduce to any law.” Since he experiences this “madness of the universe” he cannot help but search for some meaning in it (Barrenechea, 50). Borges discusses the possible nature of the universe in his stories and essays by presenting various philosophical hypotheses and by placing contradictory theorjes side by side, thus positing that all are plausible and none is conclusive. He does not uphold any particular school of thought but places them all on the same level as mental stimuli. Carlos Navarro points out the resistance of Borges’ work to any conclusive interpretation as his writing seems to be dealing with the entire universe in all possible dimensions. Borges’ manner of observing things through the prism of eternity and infinity clearly indicates that his stories are not meant to be interpreted on one or several levels, but as an endless proliferation of all possible levels. This sheer endlessness is what constitutes the central theme in Borges’ fiction, but only in a figurative sense, for his version of endlessness would be
In fact, quoting Hans Robert Jauss, Beno Weiss calls Calvino “Borges’ most important successor” (Understanding Italo Calvino, 201). Michael Wood places Calvino, “architect of scrupulously imagined, apparently fantastic, insidiously plausible words,” in a “literary space somewhere east of Borges and west of Nabokov” (‘Romance of the Reader’, 7). 2
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misconstrued if approached in such finite terms as ‘central theme’. The endlessness Borges depicts is the endlessness of endlessness of endlessness ad infInitum. Borges’ subject matter is literally everything, and his stage, the time-space continuum of the entire universe. (‘The Endlessness of Borges’ Fiction’, 3 95)3
Anything the human mind can conceive of is, possibly, true, and Borges’ work abounds with the imaginary. In his mapping of the universe he includes the unseen, the fantastic and parallel worlds existing next to or inside the visible world. Any finding of a possible truth is unsettled somewhere else, so that the end of the search is always the same as the beginning, knowing nothing. In his introduction to Borges’ collection of essays Other Inquisitions, James Irby writes that the Argentine writer does not subscribe to any of his own hypotheses and that “the alternative of infinite chaos is always about to emerge”. More specifically the critic writes that [a]ny theme set forth by Borges will be refuted by him somewhere else: the concept of autonomous pure form espoused in ‘The Wall and the Books’ [‘La muralla y los libros’] and ‘Quevedo’ is rejected in the first paragraphs of the essay on Bernard Shaw. (‘Introduction’, xiv) In a similar vein Elizabeth Dipple notes that [a]ny statement apparently connected to belief is immediately countered or its impact withheld by contextual skepticism. But it is nevertheless true that Borges equates the real, the vertiginous, the mysterious, the infinite, the unnamable and the unknowable with the divine; he also indicates that he does not know what this equation might mean. (The Unresolvable Plot, 59)
As in Borges’ universal library where for every book a counter book exists, every proposition concerning the map of the universe has its counter proposition, so that one never attains certainty as to the ‘real’ nature of the universe. Italo Calvino uses this same strategy in his book Le città invisibili, in which contradictory cities unsettle any conclusive map of the universe. Many of the sections in his book Palomar end with the protagonist’s even greater sense of uncertainty about particular aspects of his world from when he started in his deliberations. Like Borges’, Italo Calvino’s name is associated with the imaginary tale that attempts to incorporate the whole universe. One gets the sense with Borges and Calvino that they want to cover and discuss the entire world, while at the same time being aware that the world cannot be
In a similar vein, Ian Thomson notes that Calvino is quite content that his work defies definitive interpretation. Thomson quotes the writer: ‘I agree to my books being read as existential or as structural
works, as Marxist or neo-Kantian, Freudianly or Jungiangly: but above all I am glad when I see that no single key will turn the lock’ (‘In the Heat of the Moment’, 63). 3
known conceptually but only intuited. Their universe is vast, infinite, and repetitive; it instills a sense of vertigo in both authors. Beno Weiss writes about Calvino that he was a seeker of knowledge, and like Ariosto a visionaiy in a sublime and absurd world. His quest was to grasp the entire universe, to gain a cosmic sense of hannony and inner tranquillity for himself and for his readers all this through a continuous interplay between fantasy and reality and a language that never changed. (Understanding Italo Calvino, 7) -
Calvino states that he recognizes himself in the inclusion of the imaginary in his work: [C]’ un’altra definizione in cm mi riconosco pienainente ed è l’immaginazione come repertorio del potenziale, dell’ipotetico, di ciô che non è né è stato né forse sara ma che avrebbe potuto essere. (‘Visibilitâ’, Lezioni Americane, 91) [There is another definition in which I recognize myself fully, and that is the imagination as a repertoiy of what is potential, what is hypothetical, of what does not exist and has never existed, and perhaps will never exist but might have existed.] (‘Visibility’, Six Memos, 91) Ma Yuan writes about a mythical Tibet, an imaginary world he creates as a subtle subversion of the Chinese status quo. His Tibet of forkings in time and space allows for metaphysical possibilities to exist in place of scientific, linear explanations of the world. The possibility of simultaneous solutions to a mystery taking place in Tibet stands against the monolithic world view of the Communist regime in China. Ma Yuan’s work could therefore be defined as more political than that of the other two writers if only by the fact that he is writing under a regime that maintains restrictive policies toward its artists, His Tibetan stories, in their inclusion of the unknowable, are markedly different from his earlier realist stories (dealing mostly with the intricacies of love and with the adventures of educated youth sent to the countryside) written in China proper. This shift in thematic concern allows one to conclude that the geographical distance from the administrative center of China gave Ma Yuan the space to write of concerns more fantastic than worldly, a strategy he uses as a way to make his political views 4 known.
Both Ma Yuan and Italo Calvino are familiar with and write about having been influenced by Jorge Luis Borges. In an interview with Francine Du Plessis Gray, Calvino states that among his favorite twentieth-century authors are, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov and Raymond
l4 nterestingly, the shift from neo-realistic to mostly fantastic literature occurred in Calvino when he severed his ties with the Italian Communist Party in 1956 as a result of the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Artistically he held that politics should not dictate the content of literature (Cannon [1981], 20). 4
Queneau (‘Visiting Italo Calvino’, 23). In an essay on Borges in his book Perché leggere I classici [Why Classics Ought to be Read], Calvino mentions the high regard he holds for the Argentine author: Borges ê un maestro dello scrivere bene. Egli nesce a condensare in testi sempre di pochissime pagine una ricchezza straordinaria di suggestioni poetiche e di pensiero: fatti narrati o suggeriti, aperture vertiginose sull’infinito, e idee, idee, idee. (Perché leggere, 294) [Borges is a master of good writing. He is able to condense into texts always of only a few pages an extraordinaiy richness of poetic notions and thought: narrated or suggested facts, vertiginous openings on the infinite, and ideas, ideas, ideas.] (My translation) In his lecture on ‘Molteplicità’ [‘Multiplicity’] he writes that he “loves Jorge Luis Borges’ work” because ogni suo testo contiene un modello dell’universo o d’un attributo dell’universo: l’infinito, l’innumerabile, ii tempo, eterno, compresente o ciclico; perché sono sempre testi contenuti in poche pagine, con una esemplare economia d’espressione; perché spesso I suoi racconti adottano la forma esteriore d’un qualche genere della letteratura popolare, forme collaudate da un lungo uso, che ne fa quasi delle strutture mitiche. (Lezioni Americane, 115) [every one of his pieces contains a model of the universe or of an attribute of the universe (infinity, the innumerable, time eternal or present or cyclic); because they are always texts contained in only a few pages, with an exemplary economy of expression; because his stories often take the outer form of some genre from popular literature, a form proved by long usage, which creates almost mythical structures.] (Six Memos, 119) Ma Yuan’s allegiance to Borges is not so much stated in his essays as it is apparent in his fiction.
In a conversation about his novella ‘The Temptation of the Gangdisi’ he denies that Borges’ “magic realism” influenced his indeterminate Tibetan stories by arguing that Borges is not representative of that genre. He mentions Garcia Marquez and Varga Llosa as being more typical authors of magic realism and excludes Borges from their midst, “because he is not a realist but simply an intelligent and erudite author who writes metaphysical stories” (‘A Dialogue’, 94). Some of Ma Yuan’s short stories have an epigraph quoted from and attributed to Borges’ work. The epigraph to his story ‘Black Road’, for example, which states that “mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply the number of people,” appears in two Borges’ stories ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ and ‘El tintorero enmascarado Hákim de Merv’ [‘The Masked
5
5 The epigraph to Ma Yuan’s Dyer, Hakim of Merv’], each time attributed to a different source. story ‘Wandering Spirit’ quotes a sentence from Borges’ story ‘Las ruinas circulares’ [‘The Circular Ruin’]:
—Jp
4.--tM:
(4)
[He knew that his immediate obligation was to dream. Towards midnight he was awakened by the disconsolate cry of a bird. Borges J (Labyrinths, 45 46)6
In Ma Yuan’s story ‘A Wall Covered With Strange Patterns’ the narrator describes the narrative style of a discovered manuscript by comparing it to the chaotic page numbering of Borges’ ‘Book of Sand’.
(44) this manuscript was extremely similar to another book he was realized Gao finally that Lu called of Sand>