Speaking in Severed Tongues

Ma Jian’s collection of stories “Stick Out Your Tongue”. The title itself is a little provocative and maybe off-putting. One wonders what it refers to. A suggestion to offer childlike resistance? A doctor’s request?
It is a collection of stories set in Tibet. Ma Jian is Chinese (currently living in exile in Europe) and he travelled in Tibet for several months where, as he writes in a very disillusioned but still inspired preface, he wanted to see the “true Tibet”. He quickly and rather mercilessly deals with all the preconceptions that people in the West have of Tibet, offering that there is very little romanticism to a poor and downtrodden country, one that is as filled with cruelty and corruption as any other country. Curiously enough his stories belie his sober preface, for they are filled with mysteries and with a sense of divinity. The divine, in Ma Jian’s stories, mostly takes on threatening and terrible forms. His protagonists are haunted by specters of loneliness or guilt or ill-handled sexual desires. Tibet creeps into his stories as something spiritually overpowering and frightful. One gets a clear sense of someone who has wandered into a country of unfriendly ghosts. A country that wants to see him gone. And so the preface and the disillusionment take on the form of personal disappointment – albeit the disappointment of an intelligent man – the grumblings of someone who finds only closed doors. It is not hard to imagine that the Tibetans would treat a Chinese traveler with less than kindness.
The stories are very dark. They are filled with death. A minute description of the dismemberment of a woman before a sky burial that is almost as cleansing as it is cruel. A man searching for his family, which might be long dead, and crossing into the realm of spirits through his exhaustion. A woman monk who dies after ritual rape. They are a fascinating look at rituals and superstitions from a completely unromantic set of eyes. But the rationality that we Westerners usually pair with lack of romanticism is absolutely lacking, so there is no attempt to defuse the mystic and divine aspect of Tibet which explodes into the text from time to time. Ma Jian’s dreamlike language does not question, it describes and meanders from one reality into the next, leaving the reader as baffled and willing a follower to the strange powers evoked as the protagonists.
Some of the stories almost read like supernatural horror. The story about the man who dissolves during the search for his family shows man at the supreme mercy of a cruel nature and the people often seem like the landscape. Barren, with hidden and treacherous depths. Most impressive, though, is the tale of the female monk. It is a mixture of wild superstition and spiritual reality – a woman, after long study to take up a high rank in the monastic hierarchy has to undergo a ritual sexual union with a senior monk. After the ritual she is required to sit in freezing water for a period of several days, to confirm that her nature has gone past the human. Her yogic powers, though, desert her and she freezes to death. It is too easy and convenient to see it as a condemnation of spiritual practices, I think. The author has no interest in condemnation. There is the beautiful inevitability of myth in this story, alongside an all too real cruelty and inhumanity. Both exist side by side, without denying each other or intervening with each others powerful effect. The idea to go past the human into the reality of angels is as real in Tibetan spirituality as the idea to go past the human into the reality of dogs.

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The Light Heart of Darkness

After finally watching the magnificent Apocalypse Now I found myself correcting one of the many holes in my literary knowledge and picked up J. Conrad's Heart of Darkness (my school curriculum of books was limited to Goethe, Gerhard Hauptmann and Bert Brecht). One of the characters that struck me most - in both film and book - was the Harlequin...

Maybe even more than the meeting with Kurtz, Marlowe’s meeting with the young Russian that he calls the Harlequin is the part of Heart of Darkness that holds the most fascination for me. He seems a strange and oblique mirror image of the narrator. Marlowe is driven by an unalterable and undeniable internal world – he, too, is a kind of fanatic and more than anyone else’s heart his own is filled by the eponymous darkness. He is introduced to the reader as an almost Buddha-like figure and as such he exemplifies a man who makes sense out of the world through his suffering. The fever of his trip to the heart of the jungle almost always borders on the edge of what can be borne, yet he remains, even through his anger, impassive, unattached to everything but his aim. The world is a horror only to be met by resistance and contempt and supreme thought.

Now enters the Harlequin. The holes in his clothes patched up by mismatched coloured rags, exalted and – to Marlowe – almost admirable, insane and dangerous, he seems like a clown saint, someone who has come to terms with his own fundamental ridiculousness and fickleness. Marlowe sees his devotion to and exaltation of Kurtz as the most dangerous part of him – yet it is what makes him seem invincible to the primal world around him, just as Marlowe’s own dark exultation drives him all the way to Kurtz’s camp. Marlowe seeks invincibility in his fear and the heightened sense it brings to him, and so someone who ignores fear almost entirely or uses it merely to fuel his sense of devotion, can only arouse suspicion in him.

But, in fact, those two have come here in the same manner and for the same reason. One could even say that Marlowe is the more devoted of the two, since his entire voyage is steered by thoughts of Kurtz, while the Harlequin was brought here completely by chance and simply took up the devotion where he found it.

To me the Harlequin is Marlowe turned inside out. Marlowe fearfully guards his human core against the primal assault of the river and the jungle and the Harlequin nervously, thoughtlessly spills this core in order to be able to go on. He is Marlowe without a fear of death. A mad mystic, half swallowed by wilderness, in stark contrast to the sad thinker who strongly clings to his sense of civilization and contempt.

The Harlequin does not have Marlowe’s staunch and almost fanatic moral convictions. He leaves with a few cartridges and his book on sailing in his mismatched pockets – a wandering fool, a strange breath of thoughtlessness and optimism in the dark tale.

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