Gao Laozhuang: Annotated Edition

Author: Jia Pingwa / Chen Ze Annotation
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-06-01
Features: "Zi Lu decided to return to Gao La Zhuang, a landslide occurred on Ji Jia Ling, five miles north of Gao La Zhuang." Integrating a person's subjective consciousness with a sudden natural mutation—this is the opening line of Gao La Zhuang. Reading it, one truly gets a sense of something out of the blue, easily reminding one of García Márquez and Borges. Gao La Zhuang, this strange village, is the hometown of Gao Zi Lu, a professor in the provincial capital. This time, he returns to his hometown with his remarried wife, Xi Xia, to pay a three-year anniversary offering for his father. In Gao La Zhuang, they will encounter Zi Lu's divorced but not separated ex-wife Ju Wa, the director of the flooring factory, Wang Wenlong, his disabled yet extraordinary son Shi Tou, as well as Cai Lao Hei, Su Hong, and countless inscriptions that stir Xi Xia's imagination. Life, death, birth, eating, drinking, defecating, urinating, the supernatural, and the mating of men and women—all ultimately converge into a chaotic rural battle in a changing era. On the surface, it seems quite lively, but the loose structure, ambiguous hints and metaphors, the artificiality of the characters' personalities, and the excessive focus on the of vulgar actions all make this liveliness largely feel and oppressive.
"Zi Lu decided to return to Gao La Zhuang, a landslide occurred on Ji Jia Ling, five miles north of Gao La Zhuang." Integrating a person's subjective consciousness with a sudden natural mutation—this is the opening line of Gao La Zhuang. Reading it, one truly gets a sense of something out of the blue, easily reminding one of García Márquez and Borges. Gao La Zhuang, this strange village, is the hometown of Gao Zi Lu, a professor in the provincial capital. This time, he returns to his hometown with his remarried wife, Xi Xia, to pay a three-year anniversary offering for his father. In Gao La Zhuang, they will encounter Zi Lu's divorced but not separated ex-wife Ju Wa, the director of the flooring factory, Wang Wenlong, his disabled yet extraordinary son Shi Tou, as well as Cai Lao Hei, Su Hong, and countless inscriptions that stir Xi Xia's imagination. Life, death, birth, eating, drinking, defecating, urinating, the supernatural, and the mating of men and women—all ultimately converge into a chaotic rural battle in a changing era. On the surface, it seems quite lively, but the loose structure, ambiguous hints and metaphors, the artificiality of the characters' personalities, and the excessive focus on the of vulgar actions all make this liveliness largely feel and oppressive.
As a symbolically significant Gao La Zhuang, it is the hometown where Zi Lu grew up. The people there are said to be the most pure Han Chinese, yet they are short, coarse, and vulgar, with each generation becoming less refined. Thus, Zi Lu, fortunate enough to leave Gao La Zhuang early in life, became a distinguished professor; but when he returned to this remote town many years later, the old culture, environment, and people there caused him to instantly regress to his old ways, regaining all his faults—conservatism, selfishness, vulgarity, internal strife, hypocrisy, and so on. On this level, Gao La Zhuang is like a mirror, reflecting the "decline of the old culture and the degeneration of the race" (Jia Pingwa's words). Such a theme naturally carries a profound reflective consciousness befitting the author's level. However, when reflected in the specific writing of the novel, we see more chaos, disorganization, artificiality, and forced allegory. For example, the novel repeatedly features UFOs, the mysterious Bai Yun Qiu, the disabled yet prophetic Shi Tou, and a hairpin said to be given by the dead. The author clearly intends to imbue them with symbolism and allegory, but the tangled descriptions of trivial matters and the strained symbolism themselves are so inadequate that they resemble a practitioner who, in an attempt to speed up, loses control—his nonsensical ramblings not only fail to reveal the true essence of the practice but also lead us to follow him into a state of delusion. (At the same time, these elements of magical realism easily remind us of the philosophical yet superfluous snake in Ru Du—a blunder!) And at the end of the novel, when the city dweller Xi Xia resolutely stays in Gao La Zhuang, while the rural Zi Lu has no choice but to return to the city alone, I can only read two fly-like words: artificiality!
It is undeniable that Jia Pingwa has always been a rarity in contemporary Chinese literature. The language of Gao La Zhuang still flows like clouds and water, maintaining his habitual style. But what is saddening is that in his postscript and conversations with Sun Jianxi, Jia Pingwa has repeatedly stated, "My effort is to break free from artificial arrangements—even the most brilliant writers, no matter how wonderful their stories may be, cannot match the great harmony and order of the real world arranged by heaven. This is the grandeur of history. I always want to sneakily approach this realm." Pursuing nature is right, but as seen in Gao La Zhuang, Jia Pingwa still lingers in the shadows of works like Ru Du, Bai Ye, and Tu Men, and he has yet to break free from the delusional realm of losing control. As Sun Jianxi jokingly put it in a Shaanxi dialect, it's "dyingly entangled at the beginning, and ghostly blowing fire at the end." Gao La Zhuang is Jia Pingwa's sixth long, and to evaluate the significance of this new work seems easy yet difficult to articulate. The reason lies in the fact that Jia Pingwa and some artists in Shaanxi, who constantly pursue artistic refinement, always achieve breakthroughs through continuous climbing. My duty is to guide readers in understanding this book, to feel the author's soul and thoughts through these. But my thoughts are often carried away by the changes in the characters and events in the book. I feel as if I am no longer reading a novel but truly experiencing a segment of real life. I am excited and moved by this, and the more I see the exquisite structure of the text, the deeper I sink, and the harder it becomes to write my annotations. I know that the author wrote this book with a calm and natural heart. In his excitement, he cannot truly convey the depth and meaning of the book to the readers, so I try to calm my mind and write with a sense of normalcy.