The Dubious Toleration of Literary Sympathy (Abstract)

Ben Xu

 

    In Becoming Madame Mao, Anchee Min takes what is known of Jiang Qing's life and spins a tantalizing tale of how this most notorious woman in China was abandoned by her parents, swung from one romance to another, journeyed to Mao's power base, and finally, during the Cultural Revolution, sang her way into Mao's heart. The result is a disturbing but appealing book: it paints a sympathetic picture of someone who persecuted countless innocent people to death, someone who has become such a caricature of evil that it is interesting to see her sketched as a human being and introduced in an almost positive light.

    Becoming Madame Mao demonstrates an unusual toleration for Jiang Qing. Stylistically, its literary sympathy ("feeling-along-with") takes a turn in the direction of empathy ("feeling-into"). The book's narrative combines a third-person narrator and the first-person stream of consciousness of Jiang Qing. The third-person narrator, partly the writer herself, is constantly getting into the morass of Jiang Qing's mind, delving into her psyche, and thus strongly inviting identification with her. The transformation of Min's literary sympathy to empathy has raised many questions about the instability and dubiousness of literary toleration for Jiang Qing in particular, and tolerance for other "negative figures" in general, such as the first Emperor of Qin Dynasty portrayed by Zhang Yimu in his recent movie "Hero."

    In my paper I will discuss three such questions. The first question is how to keep the distinction between tolerance and acceptance when it comes to a sympathetic literary treatment of Jiang Qing during the Cultural Revolution. Such a treatment may serve as a counter move against demonization, but it should not lead to the other extreme of moral indifference, the acceptance of any other way of life or action because I acknowledge its legitimacy or because I simply do not care about it.

    The second question is how literary "understanding" as a form of tolerance must not weaken our commitment to certain moral principles or jeopardize our criticism of things that violate these principles. Literary characterizing involves the process of humanizing a character. However, in other contexts, such as historical and political reflection, we should ignore the individual agent and focus our attention on the actions and the reasons for curbing them. This might be called for when the actions or beliefs in question are particularly harmful or offensive (murder, persecution, tyranny, slavery, racism etc.). Unlike other forms of understanding human nature in literature, toleration for the evil has limits.

    The third question is why it should be the critic's business if some revisionist historian pushes tolerance to its limits by, for instance, denying that the Holocaust ever happened, or claims that the Chinese Cultural Revolution was, after all, not that bad. Regardless of the likelihood of harming "the freedom of speech," it seems right for each of us to be concerned about the dissemination of political nonsense, that, if believed, could be harmful. "Uttering falsehoods," as Geoge P. Fletcher rightly puts it, "is the closest we can come to creating falsehoods."