The River Below by François Cheng
Lifting my gaze, I scan the
horizon:
The longed-for return, when will
it come?
The bird takes flight to regain
its nest:
And the fox, dying, turns to its
lair,
Upright and loyal, yet I live in
exile,
When shall I forget my fate, what
day what night?
Qu Yuan
“French writing continues
to emerge from unusual sources,” writes John Taylor in his 2008 essay on the
matter in the Michigan Quarterly Review, a fascinating piece in which he
introduces the reader to the work of three prominent Chinese-French writers,
Dai Sijie, Gao Xingjian, and François Cheng, whose extraordinary novel, The River Below, is the subject of this
post.
In The River Below Cheng “uses the conceit of the medieval dit to let one Tianyi, a Chinese artist,
tell the story of his life, as he travels from China (where he was born in
1925) to Paris (where he lived in the 1950’s) and then back to Communist
China.” The dit is a form of
storytelling believed to have originated in late 12th Century France
as a means of distinguishing allegorical tales, tales that concealed a truth
within a purely fictional story or conte,
from other more popular tales. Typically the dit signified a moral or instructive story, what soon proved to be a
successful compromise “between the heaviness of didactic treatises and the
lyricism of courtly poetry…”
No doubt this was
precisely what Cheng had in mind when he wrote The River Below. As one reviewer describes the novel: “It unrolls
like an allegorical scroll, its characters at once individuals and symbolic
figures, as in the I Ching, in which
the individual reflects the universal,” making the novel seem both ancient
(timeless) and distinctly, significantly modern.
In fact one of the most
remarkable characteristics of this layered, deeply sophisticated novel is the
constant interplay between these different narrative modes—that of allegory and
that of the anxious modern Bildungsroman. It is the nearly seamless interplay
of these different narrative styles that gives the novel its unusual resonance,
its force.
Early on in the story, the
protagonist, Tianyi, in a line straight out of a fairy tale, reflects upon his
discovery of the powers of traditional Chinese calligraphy: “…I was won over by
the magical power of brush and ink. I sensed it was to be a weapon for me.
Maybe the only one I would have to protect me from the overwhelming presence of
the Outside.” Now contrast this passage with the novel’s modern, distinctly Tristram
Shandy-like opening in which, with the same casual disregard with which Tristram’s
mother—at the very moment of Tristram’s conception—interrupts his father at his
business by asking him if he remembered to wind the clock, the young Tianyi
makes the foolish mistake one night of calling out to a grieving wid0w in the
voice of her dead husband, not knowing that “If by chance someone among the
living answers her cry with a yes, he loses his body, which is quickly entered
by the dead man’s wandering soul that then returns to the world of the living.
And the soul of the one thus losing is body becomes in turn the wanderer…” Near
the end of this opening section the elder Tianyi, looking back over his long
and rootless life, remarks, in words that Laurence Sterne himself might
have penned (if with no intended humor): “I was convinced that from then on
everything in me would be perpetually out of joint.”
And so it is, as we follow
young Tanyi in his wandering throughout China, to France, to Paris, then back
again to China, a nation torn asunder by the zealotry of Mao Tsé-Tung. Juxtaposing
an artist’s lyrical sensibility against the violent upheavals of revolutionary
China, The River Below is a subtle, broadly
challenging novel of ideas that is rich with rewards for the patient and
talented reader.
François Cheng Is a Chinese-born French
academician, novelist, poet, calligrapher, and translator.
Peter Adam Nash
