Tower of Babel

Author: Zhang Yuanshan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-02-01
Features: The Tower of Babel is a long fable that resembles a novel, and this description of its genre may be more accurate. The cradle of The Tower of Babel is so complex, encompassing the author's ultimate inquiries about the entire world and the human soul. Its material is diverse, including myths, legends, the Bible, Buddhist scriptures, the philosophies of the sages, Western philosophy, Chinese linguistic games, and the author's own imagination. It is utterly abstract, utterly structured, utterly imaginative, utterly narrative, and even the punctuation is utterly so. This long fable has been called a miracle of the Chinese spirit temple. With a boundless pen, the author enshrines the heavens and earth within its confines, fabricating a totalitarian world that is both absurd and teeming with wonders. Here, the king's power is supreme in the eternal chaos of the sun, and the ruler possesses absolute authority as well as absolute truth. A single word can rectify the customs and people, while a single thought can disrupt the order of all things. Here, the universe is boundless, and the ends of the heavens are infinite. The will of the ruler transcends everything blue, everything living, and everything evolving, without past or present, too void and too true. Thus, after a catastrophic population explosion, human behavior becomes uniform, human language is standardized, and human desires are aggregated. Here, indulgence is always encouraged, and it reaches its extreme without return. The essential life and spirit of the masses collapse, leaving only physiological impulses and primal desires, only terrible emptiness, blindness, ignorance, narcissism, shamelessness, madness, and stubbornness. At that time, the people painstakingly built the hierarchical Tower of Babel, which was filled with true power, cunning, and fantastical wonders. It took the forms of God, Confucius, Laozi, Socrates, Christ, Nietzsche, Cupid, Apollo, and others, drew on the strengths of both Eastern and Western styles, and then discarded them all. With sharp wit, insight, intellectual power, and a profound, incomprehensible compassion, it issues an ultimate challenge and foresight of the entire world and the human soul, compelling people to reflect and contemplate. Throughout the text, striking and eerie lines, bewildering imagery, and heart-stirring yet commonplace. After the completion of the work, it underwent 11 years of twists and turns before finally being published.