I would like to start this essay with a poem whose author I will not reveal until the end of the piece

Yu, Ouyang

English

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Kunapipi Volume 30 Issue 1 Article 9 2008 Against autobiography: Towards a self- fictionalisation Ouyang Yu Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi  Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Yu, Ouyang, Against autobiography: Towards a self- fictionalisation, Kunapipi, 30(1), 2008. Available at:https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol30/iss1/9 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library: research-pubs@uow.edu.au Against autobiography: Towards a self- fictionalisation Abstract I would like to start this essay with a poem whose author I will not reveal until the end of the piece: This journal article is available in Kunapipi: https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol30/iss1/9  97OUYANG YUAgainst Autobiography: Towards a Self-FictionalisationI would like to start this essay with a poem whose author I will not reveal until the end of the piece:AutobiographyVolume IWhy write it?Volume IIThere are a dozen namesakesIncluding a few fictional onesHow can I keep my uniqueness?Volume IIII am not a womanAnd I am hardly a manVolume IVNor am I from an extremely poor backgroundAs my mother said:You haven’t lived an interesting enough lifeVolume VI am not an Asian wo(e)Man and sufferingVolume VIWhat if everyone in the world knew meAfter I expose myselfon every page?Volume VIII don’t even know who I amCan I write an autobiographyFor someone elseLike I did beforeWriting a love letterFor a friend?98 Ouyang YuVolume VIIIWho knows?How about getting someone else to writeMy autobiography?Volume VIIIIMarket itSell yourselfVolume XOne in a billionA coupleOf billionsIt was in late 2005 in Wuhan when I was preparing a lecture on my own writing that I realised I was someone else or, in other words, someone else was me. It was almost as if my name ‘ouyang Yu’ had become a pen name or, worse, a fictional name. My internet search returned more than a dozen people that shared my name, word for word, or character for character. This came as a shock. My idea of self as a unique entity disintegrated. Was I this scholar by the name of ouyang Yu who had lived more than 100 years ago or was I this ‘cold male’ by the name of Ouyang Yu in an e-novel in which he is brandishing a sword against a magical sky? (Anon, Chapter 10) And if someone intends to name his daughter ouyang Yu (viewjinghua.qianlong.com), does this mean that a name, once given, can no longer be contained in a fixed identity and gender? When the owner of the name becomes plural, there seems little hope of ever retaining the self that makes the core of an autobiography. As far as I can recall, it was an Australian novelist who introduced the idea of autobiography to me. In the late 1980s in Shanghai, where I studied for an MA in Australian literature, I learnt from him that autobiography was quite a marketable thing in the West. The idea haunted me for some time before I ditched it, for a simple reason. I did not like the smell of market in literature nor did I like the fact that there was probably not much in my life worth writing about. I was also made uncomfortable by the thought that I might be left with nothing else to write about once I exhausted my own life in a book of autobiography. It would be nice if I succeeded in turning my life into a success but if I did not, my life, or my attempt, would be a failure. I now realise that there was a deeper reason for not pursuing this seemingly easy but potentially fraught option. From when I was a young child more than forty-five years ago, I had a feeling that I was being watched. I remember performing a babyish dance — I was a baby then — in bed feeling as if this was being recorded although there was no such word. I also remember bursting into tears seeing my own reflection in the window pane when I was about three; I could not possibly understand why there was someone else there looking at me Against Autobiography 99on a night when Mom was away at work. There always seems to be two, at least two, of me wherever I am. This came to a head in Hong Kong in 2002 where I was attending the Writers’ Festival. Something so strange happened that whenever I wrote a poem and keyed in the letter ‘I’ for I, two ‘I’s would appear, a big ‘I’ side by side with a small ‘i’, like this: ‘Ii’. This lasted the entire Festival before it disappeared although the impression remains to this day, becoming stronger after I went past the age of fifty, so strong that sometimes I think that I am this small ‘i’, keeping company with this big ‘I’, a total stranger whom it is my duty for the remainder of my life to follow and write about. but who is this ‘I’, this big ‘I’? Is he necessarily me? Who is he? can he be someone that contains me? or I? How many people are there in this ‘I’ person? Is he single or plural? or single and plural? To answer these questions or avoid answering them, let me refresh my memory with some incidents in my past life. At one stage, I fell passionately in love with Herman Hesse’s writings in chinese translation. I searched in vain for the particular ones I had read in my university days. The last impression left was this: that it was I, not Hesse, who had written them. The close I-dentification, also I-dent-I-fiction, with Hesse was achieved when I thought his thoughts were mine and his emotions were mine or he was I who had expressed them, in another age, another place, and another time. Likewise, a friend of mine had read Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Chinese translation and expressed a similar sentiment. He told me that Rousseau had said everything that he had ever wanted to say. Perhaps, as J.S. Mill once put it (from memory), only by focusing on the one ‘I’ could one individual hope to reach other ‘I’s, multiple ‘I’s. Now, I seem to defeat my own purpose by preaching the virtues of autobiography. Not so. While I admire Rousseau for his intellectual honesty and originality in introducing the genre of autobiography I do not wish to turn night into day by turning my life inside out. ‘ren yinggai you ziji de mimi’ [one should have one’s own secrets]. These words were said more than thirty years ago by a middle-school classmate of mine in my home. After he left, my dad commented that it was well said. I resented that because I did not like the boy much. As I am writing this I have come to see the worth of his words. one’s life is not a show, least of all a freak show, for the rest of the world. There are things in one’s life that one can never begin to tell anyone, let alone oneself, because one has to work hard to find out their meaning, instead of exhibiting them in book form. While a lived life is easier to write, it is limiting in that there is little room left for imagination; there is little possibility for other lives to be lived. Take Songs of the Last Chinese Poet, my second book of poetry written in English. When I wrote that book, I literally heard voices. I became multiple, multiplied, turning into a multitude of voices. After China, it seems, the original integrity of my soul could no longer hold together but must break into pieces of self at fissures of intense cross-cultural conflicts, speaking in a voice ringing 100 Ouyang Yuwith a chorus of other voices. Later, when some of these cantos were collected in my New and Selected (2004), a reviewer refused to review the collection, citing ‘dislike’ and believing that I as the poet had a hatred for Australian humanity (King 83). He had committed the sad mistake of taking the book literally as one of autobiography. He did not know, could not possibly have known, that as I wrote the book the I in me had somehow vacated, reaching the state where, as Chinese woman poet Wang Xiaoni says, zhiyou wo bu zai wo zhong (only I is not in I) (qtd in Huang & Jiang 114), a multiple orgasmic state in which the I became a tool employed in the act of writing. If it was entirely an Ouyang Yu thing, why would an Australian woman, a total stranger, write from South Australia and tell me that she was moved to tears while reading it in bed at night? Talking about books of autobiography, I find these examples of exhibitionism dressed in fanciful autobiographical colours hold less and less appeal for me, things like Wild Swans and Mao’s Last Cancer, sorry, I mean Mao’s Last Dancer.1 It may be personal but when the person does not even like his own image there is no help whatsoever. I once showed a video-recorded TV interview with me on ABC to a group of friends at home but had to hide myself in another room because I could not bear to watch myself moving in another form. I once tried to listen to my own reading on Radio National, only to find myself switching the radio off in disgust because I simply could not stand my own voice. I wish I could be as beautiful as Narcissus and love myself as no-one would, till I die and turn into a flower of the same name. Curiously, though, it is there that fiction is born, the fictional flower born of the death of self. There is a need, then, to fictionalise oneself, to bring out the woman in one, to depict the other embedded in the self, to live the death, if you like, to make history through self-realisation and to turn into a rose by any other name. At one stage in my life, lured by all its trappings, I came dangerously close to writing an autobiography. In that 700-odd-page novel (Loose: A Wild History), I begin with the story of a fictional character by the name of Ouyang Yu, who lives a parallel life to that of my own, only to find that it becomes increasingly untenable and unsustainable until the character becomes reduced to a simple letter, O, who is every bit unlike me, reaching a fictional height above what is a merely autobiographical existence, fictionalising the self to the degree of non-recognition. By Book III, for example, a fictional character has taken over from Ouyang Yu to write a biography of Ouyang as he states here:Today I have officially taken over the job of writing the ouyang Yu biography after the trial period in the second volume of this book. I know Ouyang has got someone writing about him but he has since said no to that someone although I have never got a chance to take a look at the manuscript to see how he or she approaches him. My idea is offer a comparison between that person’s biography or part biography and mine to give the reader a chance. We’ll see how we go but I think I shall follow the pattern set out before.Against Autobiography 101As a writer’s life resembles that of a chrysalis, s/he takes other lives and lives with them inside his or her cocoon. By the time s/he turns into a butterfly or a moth, his or her fiction is complete, the cocoon that is his or her autobiography abandoned like a shed skin. S/he becomes a new poem, as I did when I wrote the following poem: The Great Chinese LonelinessEarly morning, the empty door, the echoes somewhere upstairsThe walls with blind ears, the bare buildings in the rainNoseless ones, the silenced trees, the lake slowly gatheringTrickles of effluence of an affluent sity, the cold seepingInto the pores of one quietly living his lonelinessTo the hilt, the dark windows during the day, reminiscentOf a packed Hong Kong with its millions of nonentitiesof a Taipei reeking with hot airs of sewageOf a psychiatrically, classically MelbourneOf a Wuhan with a single cabdriver waiting all nightOutside a bath station for a client to finishHis business, the riverlets running down the panes, the voices of buyingAnd selling, the one who left for America the Beautiful CountryIn 1847, almost all alone, the one who openedFire on himself after an intense period of noCommunications and full force, the sense of solitarinessDescending on the Song Dynasty in Su’s poetry, the shroud of firecrackers bombarding the ears of the sity, the woman’s dementedFragments in castro’s novel, the one who seeks whitecomfort, no fruition, in the 40s New YorkChinatown, the one gone silent after ascending to the topSalary range, the one reading the bible in the 21st century, lonelinessbecome her, the one with a balding head and words that I’d goMental if continuing to live this way, the place fullOf people talking to each other at once, without understandingAnyone else, the one spending his nights reading writing wreading ritingListening to the wind in the empty door, the hollownessOf the century, the full fury of the incessant workingBeeings, the constipated weather with unrainableClouds, four fathoms deep, the heart divorcedThe bodies fragmented, far away, a lone voice sayingcoming, I’m coming, 5000 years and nowBasic living, from hand to mouth, from mouth to bumsFrom heart to non-heart, from mind to unmindedThe door again, slamming itself againstThe untouchable wind, celebrating the ideaOf one being no oneElseWhile the word ‘alter-ego’ means a second self, the chinese expression, zhiji [知己], is not exactly the same, as it means, word for word, ‘know self’. That is what is meant when they say ‘it takes one to know one’ although the chinese ‘know-102 Ouyang Yuself’ is an infinitely positive one because it is not a second self but a different self that knows this self. The self does not know itself but needs another self to know it; it needs no more than one other self to know it. Sometimes there is not even one other self to know it or that knows it. Hence the birth of need for poetry for me, as shown here below, in my self-translation from Chinese:I don’t have friendsI don’t have friendsAll my friends are far awayEven when they are far awayMy friends are not manyAmong these few friendsNot one is a know-heartEven if I count myself inI dare not say I know my heartClosest to meon the edge of the quilt beneath which I nestle against the cold winterAre my only two friends:A cup of hot tea and this poem that will soon be finished (Zong 2007)2 In this poem, you will notice a slight change from ‘know-self’ to ‘know-heart’; these two are basically the same thing according to Chinese lexicographical definitions. In my own understanding, though, the know-heart (zhixin) [知心] is more intimate than the know-self (zhiji) [知己]. An unfathomable thing as the chinese expression goes, ‘ren xin nan ce’ [人心难测], the heart defies any attempts to know it. I would be content if there were only one person in the whole world who could claim to know my heart if and when I let him or her know it. I would never hope to reach millions by exposing that heart to its full contents unless I wanted to become a transparent celebrity. In an age addicted to zilian (self-love) [自恋], autophilia or narcissism, it would sound anachronistic to say the above but, given a self that resists penetration by private eyes, a self that is satisfied with no more than one know-self or know-heart, and a self that is bent on knowing more about itself and others, it is fair to dissociate the self from any autobiographical attempts, merely to meet the market demands, and to fictionalise the self in myriad forms, in a perpetual effort to search for the ultimate truth, truths, personal and otherwise. As Mario Vargas Llosa once said, and I identify strongly with him, ‘Since childhood, I have always been beset by the temptation to turn into fiction everything that happens to me, to such a degree that, at times, I feel that everything I do and that is done to me — all of my life — is nothing more than a pretext for inventing stories’ (Llosa 12).In my recent attempts to fictionalise the self, I have aimed at the community at large by telling stories, reducing myself to the role of a cold observer and Against Autobiography 103combining my story with other stories in a fictional manner that do not limit them to an autobiographical level but elevate them above the market constraints in search of that lone know-self or know-heart that I am sure will lend his or her ears in a corner of this world. This has created an effect akin to czeslaw Milosz’s poetic description here: ‘as if my life had not been/as if not my heart, not my blood,/not my duration/had created words and songs/but an unknown, impersonal voice’ (Milosz 13). I shall end the piece with one of the poems from my collection Listening To by giving you a chance to listen to that ‘unknown, impersonal voice’:Listening to the poet talk about himselfSitting in his kitchen-washroom in Vauxhall, LondonUnder a sky of low cloudsI was amazed by the number of windows on the opposite buildingAcross a yard with a bicycle hanging, upside down, on an iron rackWhen he said:And the number of eyes behind those windows, mostly closedbut I won’t see them for I draw my curtainsAgainst a world of sane madnessI didn’t know who I was, English or chineseBut I go beyond that now, I rise aboveNationalities, I am bound by no boundariesMy father was murdered when I was sixHaving just woken up in a train station, in northern ChinaI have since adopted my mother’s surnameHell is London, not exactly the way you say Australia isFor you at least have sunshine which I’m sure will cure me of my diseaseHere my face is a sky that smiles no smilesMy face, if anything, is a history turned inside outWith wrongly written charactersNewly put down in English lettersI speak notTo the old world where my love can’t rootI speak toPoets onlySpender, porter, brodskyHave another glass of thisMarc XeroA lovely whiteWine from italyIn a little whileI’ll walk you to VictoriaWhere you can take the Victoria LineTo blackfriarsAnd see Tate ModernRight on the other side of the ThamesHopefully, one day when you come back againWe could meet for the pekin duck again104 Ouyang YuIn Vauxhall, of all the places, and I’m sure I’ll remain poorAnd love poetry as a most beautiful thingDespite what you sayAbout its fascinating uglinessBy the way, you have probably guessed it, and your guess is as good as mine, that the poem I quoted at the beginning of this essay was written by no other person than the fictional one by the penname of Ouyang Yu.NoTES1 It was in reading a friend’s email that I thought I saw an intriguing title of a book, Mao’s Last Cancer. On second looking, I realised it was Mao’s Last Dancer. Nevertheless, I recorded the incident as an example of ‘creative mistakes’ in my coinage.2 ouyang Yu’s English translation of his own chinese poem, titled, ‘wo meiyou pengyou’, written on 11/12/2005 in Wuhan and included in the Best Chinese Poetry 2006 (ed. Zong Renfa). WoRKS cITEDAnon, chapter 10, ‘mingyun zhi lun’ (The Wheels of Fate), Volume I, ‘chu sheng’ (First born),online, http://cul.news.tom.com/20051121-26718.html.Huang Lihai & Jiang Tao (eds) 2004, Ten Best Loved Chinese Women Poets, Shige Yuren, No. 10.King, Richard 2005, ‘Death, Description, Dislike’, Overland, 179, pp. 82–83.Llosa, Mario Vargas 1997 [1996], Making Waves, ed. and trans. John King, Faber and Faber, London.Milosz, czeslow 2001 [1988], New and Collected Poems 1931-2001, HarperCollins, New York.ouyang Yu [forthcoming] Loose: A Wild History, Bluechrome. viewjinghua.qianlong.com/00/04/14/40/4144, accessed 10th December, 2004.Zong, Renfa 2007, 2006 nian zhongguo zui jia shige [best chinese poetry in 2006], Liaoning people’s publishing House, Shenyang.

Against autobiography: Towards a self- fictionalisation

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Against autobiography: Towards a self- fictionalisation

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