Subjective Truth and Subjective History in Literature - Term Paper Example

ive Truth and ive History in Literature Introduction Truth and history are ive. At least, this is the perspective of many contemporary Chinese writers. The events of history, and the events surrounding our own lives are seen through a personal lens. This personal lens gives one a very personal view of what is happening. This is the theme of three of the stories that were studied – “The Brothers Shu,” “The Cure,” and “Sinking.” Part of this is because these stories are told either through the perspective of a child; or somebody who might not be an adult, but was a child during the events of the story; or somebody who is a young adult. This distortion might be a function of this, as a child has a different perspective, and might be more dispassionate telling the story because he or she is unaware of the contexts of the events. The distortion might be because the story is being told many years after the fact, therefore the memories are hazy, and perhaps the memories never were true in the first place. Or the distortion might be because the protagonist feels so bad about himself that he ascribes sinister motives to others that are not true at all, but are a reflection of how he feels about himself. Whatever the cause of the distortion, the perspective of the child or the young adult makes the truth and history subjective, and this is what is at the core of these three stories. Discussion The first story where this is true, where the child's perspective helped illuminate the differences in culture, history and truth, in that the child has a truthful perspective in which there is not an adult's obscuring of the truth is the story The Cure. Like the other stories that are described in this essay, in this story, the protagonist is a child, and he tells the story very matter-of-factly. If an adult were telling the story, the adult might shade the truth, or might have greater explanations for what was happening. In this story, however, this shading and explaining does not exist. The child simply tells it like it is, so to speak, so this is a way to reinterpret history and truth. In a historical analysis, there would be some kind of explanation for the action in this story. There might even be a kind of pseudo-excusing what was happening. The truth of what was happening, which would be the why of the story, is also missing. The audience does not know why. At any rate, the horror of this story, if told in the eyes of an adult, would be brought to bear with some kind of context. However, through the eyes of the child, there is no context. There is no explanation. There are no excuses. There is simply brutality, laid bare, and this is part of what gives the story its power. In this story, the child explains that there are public executions by the armed work detachment. There is never an explanation for this group – what they are, what they stand for, why they round up innocent civilians for execution. Nor is there an explanation for why attending these executions is mandatory for the citizens. The child does not know why it is that the four people have been condemned to die. The father doesn't seem to know, either. However, the child does not pass judgment on the actions at hand. He is mystified, but he does not seem scared, he does not seem angry, he does not rail against the injustice of it all. He simply watches the action without personal comment. What is interesting about this particular child is that he or she seems to have a kind of numbness inside for what is going on. The narrative implies that the child may not be telling the story so objectively just because he is a child, but because he is hardened by what was happening around him. This is because the child tells the story in coarse terms - he refers to somebody “pissing over the bridge,” and talks about “dog turds.” When the people are shot, he states that “things were simplified considerably.” There is detachment, but there is also a kind of crude way of thinking in this child. And there is evidence that this is the way that the child was brought up, because he was surrounded by people who were similarly detached from what was going on. For instance, the villagers witnessed the execution, then one of them said to the other that it was time to leave because “Old Guo's wife has fermented bean curd and oil fritters waiting for us.” Nor does the child recoil from his father's slashing open the corpses to find the gall bladder. The father has a reason for doing this, and the reason is that he believed that these gall bladders would help cure his mother, his son's grandmother. The son is a kind of accomplice for this, yet the son is bewildered by it. The father is obviously acting in a callous manner, having no respect for the dead, yet the father also acts sympathetically at the beginning. For instance, the father grumbles about why Ma Kuisan would be the victim here, so he seems to have some sort of feeling. However, with the child's narrative,none of this is explained. The audience does not know the truth of what the father was feeling, because the story was told so dispassionately from the point of view of the child. This is another way that the truth is obscured. And adult retelling this story would have been able to figure out the motivation and emotions of the father, at least to a certain extent, so the truth would be more illuminated. However, from the child's perspective, this is not known. Therefore, it seems that the father is callous and unfeeling. The father states towards the beginning that he hoped that the victims would be young, because he would get better results. Then he sounds sympathetic towards the victims once he finds out who they are. The truth of how he is feeling is simply not known, and this is because of the child's narration. Moreover, there is something ideological about the proceedings, but this is not known, either. The story seems to be about totalitarianism and a dystopia future, where people are executed for no good reason, and the villagers are forced to watch, lest they be the next ones in line. This is just an interpretation, however, because it really isn't known what kind of ideology informs these decisions. This could be a case where the people were dissidents, and the government was executing them for this. It could be a case where people are just executed randomly because the leader is sadistic. Whatever the reason, there is not a background or context to the proceedings, so the ideological truth is missing from this story, as is the proper history of the goings-on. This is in keeping with the contemporary Chinese author's efforts to reinterpret history and truth, in that these concepts are fluid and the meanings shift. Since the story is open to interpretation on the ideological foundations for the action, this would be in keeping with the ideals of letting the audience interpret historical events for themselves. It soon becomes clear that the father has an ulterior motive for doing what he is doing. His mother is sick, and he believes that the gall bladders will heal her. This is not questioned by the child, either. The child never wonders if the gall bladders would heal the mother, nor does the child question, even internally, why the father would want to slice open the bodies, and leave the entrails for the dogs. This is clearly a cultural belief, the belief that certain things, like gall bladders from animals or humans, would cure somebody. Whether or not this is a cultural truth is not addressed. This story simply stated that the father believed this, fervently, as he risked his life to get this organ out of the two men (the dogs could have attacked at any time, and one would think that, in a totalitarian society, people could get into real trouble if somebody was caught disturbing the recently deceased. Perhaps the father would be next). Once again, the truth is obscured from this event, because the child is a mere reporter. The child does not judge the father as an adult might, so the truth of whether this cultural practice is sound is not addressed. This is another way that this story is similar to the contemporary Chinese writer's vision of truth and history. Another story which is told in the point of view of a child is the story “The Brothers Shu.” This story is not as political or ideological as the other story, but is more personal. One can say that the purpose of this story is to analyze society and the social constructs that surround us all, as opposed to indict the government or the rulers, which was the subject of the other story told above. In a way, this story is a coming of age story that is pretty typical for a short story. Two brothers and two sisters live in a building together, in two different apartments. They live with their parents, but there is talk that the father of the brothers also fathered the sisters, and, indeed, it seems that it may be true, as the father of the brothers was sleeping with the mother of the sisters. Then, one of the sisters and one of the brothers end up sleeping together, as well, which means that this might very well be incestual, as these brothers are presumably the half siblings of the two sisters who live below. In addition to probable incest, the story also delves into abuse, and how abuse was commonplace and nobody cared about this. Infidelity, of course, is at the focus of this story. This story is similar to the other story, however, as the story is told through the eyes of a child, presumably, although this story seems to be a story where the narrator is actually an adult, telling the events of what happened when he or she is a child. The narrator is an objective narrator, and he or she is not a part of action. This perspective, like the story above, colors the narration and hides the horror of what is going on. Like the other story “The Cure,” the narrator is dispassionate. He talks about how Shu Gong is beaten by his father “first, Old Shu would pin him to the floor and gag him with a wet rag to keep him from screaming; then he would smack him across the face with his shoe until his arm tired. Old Shu would then drag himself off to bed and leave Shu Gong lying half-dead on the floor” (Tong, p. 4). Moreover, the young Shu, Shu Nong, also was beaten by the father, after Shu Nong found some of his father's condoms and confronted his father about it, stating that he, Shu Nong, knew that the condoms belonged to the father - “They're yours” (Tong, p. 6). To this, the narrator said that people passed beneath the window as the child was being beat, but this did not concern them “People living on Fragrant Cedar Street considered boys well raised if they were beaten often, so there was nothing unusual here” (Tong, p. 7). What was unusual to the people witnessing the beating was that the boy, Shu Nong, did not cry, but took his punishment silently. Moreover, they asked the father what the boy did, and the father made an excuse – he was beating his son for wetting the bed. The people witnessing the beating simply took this explanation and carried on about their business. Another example of abuse was when the older Shu, Shu Gong, was caught with cigarettes in his pocket. The cure for this was the father putting a lit cigarette into Shu Gong's mouth. This is simply astounding behavior to people in today's society. Beating children is not taken lightly. There are organizations designed to help abused children, and abused children are often put into foster care, taken away from their parents. People today are rightly sensitive to physical abuses of children. Yet, in this story, people simply didn't care. The narrator didn't seem to care, either, as he reports the abuse with the same kind of dispassionate narration that he would have reported anything else. Is this the truth? Did the people in this story really not care that Old Shu was a child abuser who strangled his children, beat them mercilessly, and put lit cigarettes into their mouths? Did the people really think that beating a child is just punishment for wetting the bed? It is difficult to imagine that this would be the truth. Therefore, it is entirely possible that the truth is either obscured because the narrator is a child, or what was going on was the opposite of what the child observed. Therefore, the social aspect of this story might not be what it appears to be, and this is the consequence of having a child narrate the story. This is particularly true because, as noted above, the story had the feel of somebody telling the story of something that happened a long time ago, and the story is being told by memory. The events that happen when one is a child is often put into a kind of funhouse mirror, where things are distorted or obscured. Memories are hazy, and some memories might even be created. The interpretation of events that happened long ago are going to be somewhat a product of illusion, simply because the memory is not perfect. Therefore, it is possible that the narrator remembered things very differently than what they actually were. This, too, would play into the contemporary Chinese writers' efforts to reinterpret history and truth, because many of the writers believe that truth is subjective, anyhow, and is subject to interpretation. It is similar to the classic Japanese movie Rashomon, in which Kurasawa, the director, explored the nature of truth, and showed that the truth is variable, according to who is telling the story. So, it might be the case here, as it is difficult to believe that everybody took child abuse so lightly. If this is the case, then it fits perfectly with the theory of the subjective nature of truth. Moreover, the narrator talks about the incest in a very matter-of-fact way. In fact, he never even calls the incest for what it is. He lets the reader come to his or her own conclusion about the affair between Shu Gong and his half-sister, Hanli. The two do not know that they are half-brother and sister, although there is a hint that they probably should know something. In other words, if they do not have their suspicions – when Hanli calls her mother a “whore,” and states that she knows what her mother is doing; when the women in the village are gossiping constantly about the situation, and the women in the village come right out and say that Old Shu fathered Hanli and her bratty sister, Hanzhen; when Shu Nong caught the father sneaking out of the house, and later caught him in bed with Hanli's mother; and when Hanli notices that her father and mother do not sleep in the same room - the clear implication is that, if Shu Gong and Hanli have no idea that they are half-brother and sister, they must surely be either willfully blind or stupid. Again, this might be a case of mis-remembered events, or a perception that has been clouded by time. Like the issue with the abuse, and the people not caring about the abuse, it is difficult to believe that Shu Gong and Hanli would sleep together and not even address the possibility that they are half-brother and sister. Therefore, it is difficult to know if this is the truth, or not. Perhaps it was the perception of the narrator, who stands back from the action, that the two slept together. Perhaps they really didn't. Perhaps they did, but acknowledged that they could very well be committing incest, but they really didn't care. Perhaps they really had no earthly idea that they were committing incest. Any one of these could be a possibility, but the truth of the situation cannot really be known. Because the events seem so unlikely, the audience may not trust the narrator, and the narrator become unreliable. Like the issue with abuse, the issue with the incest seems so unlikely that the audience could very well believe that very few of the recounted events actually happened. And this, too, fits into the overall idea that contemporary Chinese writers see truth as relative and subjective. One's perception is that person's reality, that person's truth, but it doesn't mean that it is the Truth. And, with this idea comes the fact that all of historical events have the same idea of subjectivity behind them. Events in history might have happened, or they might not have happened, it all depends upon who is explaining the historical events, and what kind of subjective lens they are using to explain the events. At any rate, the interpretation of the events come through different lenses, and different people would have very different explanations and interpretations for the same events. Therefore, history is suspect because of this same subjectivity. All of this is perfectly illustrated in the story “The Brothers Shu.” The same type of subjective interpretation of events is present in the third story that is told by a child, or at least by a young adult, in the story “Sinking.” The story of a Chinese man living in Japan, this is a story that is allegedly autobiographical for the author, Yu Da-Fu (Yin-I Chen, 2003). Like the protagonist in the story, Yu visited brothels, having a “pathological need for women” (Yin-I Chen, 2003, p. 10). The protagonist and Yu himself also grew up in a small village in Zhejiang, and both felt shame and melancholy upon alighting in Japan. The protagonist in this story feels shame and guilt, and his unable to talk to women, or have a relationship with women because he feels inferior. He feels that the girls that he looks at and likes are looking at him like he is inferior, because he is from China, and they think that he is inferior because his culture was inferior, in their eyes. Eventually, the protagonist decides to isolate himself from society, because he feels shame, and he needs to be rid of the shameful glances from others. Yin-I Chen (2003) theorizes that this story is virtually autobiographical for Yu himself, as Yu felt that the Chinese were backward, and the country of China has been victimized by the country of Japan. So, when the protagonist falls for women in Japan, and feels shame because of inferiority and because Japan is an oppressor of China, this is the feelings of Yu himself. This story has the same distortions of reality that the other two stories do, and the same unreliable narrator because of this. Once again, the truth is subjective, as is the historical analysis. Is Japan an oppressor of China, or this only the interpretation of some people and some historians? This is certainly one historical analysis, but there could be others who would not feel the same way. This is again an example of history and truth being subjective. The narrator's interpretation of the girls' reactions to him are similarly subjective, and not necessarily indicative of truth. Perhaps the girls thought him inferior, but this is never clear from the story. We only get the author's perception of how they feel, and they probably didn't feel that way at all. So, the feelings of the girls are presented as truth, are presented as fact, and they probably were not either. In the earlier story, “The Brothers Shu,” the problem was that the narrator was remember facts from a time that was apparently far in the past. In this story, the problem is that the narrator is interpreting facts and truth from others' reactions, and these may not be how they are feeling, at all. This story, once again, shows the fluidity and subjectivity of both truth and history, and this is in keeping with modern-day Chinese writing. These stories all have the same basic issue with truth and history, and that is that the truth and history in all of these stories are subjective and unreliable. These stories all have another thing in common, as well, and that is that they are either told by the point of view of an anti-hero, or the main character in the action is an anti-hero. An anti-hero is a protagonist, who would be considered the hero of the story, except that the protagonist lacks moral virtue. This would be the case of the father in the story about The Cure. The boy is not the anti-hero in this story – like in the “Brothers Shu,” he was a narrator that isn't a driver of the action, and only reports what he sees. The father would therefore be considered to be the protagonist, and the father is a suspect one. The father robs bodies for their gall bladder, states that he hopes that the victims of the execution are young, and is rather cold and bloodless about what he does. He has some moments of humanness – such as when he mutters that a certain victim didn't deserve his fate, or when he half-heartedly apologizes to the victims for mutilating them – but, overall, the father comes off as a mercenary who really couldn't care less that his fellow citizens are being ruthlessly executed for no good reason. In “The Brothers Shu,” the anti-hero is apparently Shu Nong, because much of the action centers around him and his antics. Most of what happens in the story is a result of something that Shu Nong sees or causes, so this would make him the main protagonist. Shu Nong really does not have any redeeming moral virtues. He is sneaky, bratty, and pulls stunts like peeing in his neighbor's rice. He spies on his father having sex with his neighbor, but does not make a judgment about this, and never thinks to tell his mother what is going on. He spies on his brother and half-sister having sex, and never thinks to tell them what is going on with her mother and his father, which means that, assuming that they do not know that they are committing incest, he is not anxious to tell them. He wants them to keep going so he can watch. There really isn't anything morally redeeming or good about Shu Nong, and this is perfect keeping with the anti-hero story. And, in the last story, the protagonist is the narrator himself. While he is more sympathetic than the father in the cure story, or Shu Nong in the story of “The Brothers Shu,” in that he does have feelings (unlike the father in the cure story), and he is not sneaky or manipulative (like Shu Nong), the protagonist in “Sinking” really does not have much moral virtue, either. He visits prostitutes, and has very low self-esteem. A hero is not supposed to feel perpetual shame and guilt, and this protagonist does. This makes him an anti-hero as well. Conclusion These stories help explain the subjectivity of truth and history. One never knows what the truth is about any given situation, because the truth is always filtered through a personal lens. There are personal biases that are inherent, and these biases are used to interpret the story. This is less true with children, but is no less true with regards to adults telling a child's story. This is why the narrators in all these stories are unreliable, because one does not know if what they are telling is the truth or the truth according to them. And, if one believes Kurosawa, the director of Rashomon, anybody's truth is as good as anybody else's, which means that there is not a real Truth anyhow. These stories illustrate this fact, and that makes these stories fit in with the canon of the current Chinese writers. Bibliography Dafu, Yu. “Sinking.” Available at: http://www3.wooster.edu/chinese/ chinese/reviews/sinking.gb.html Rashomon. Dir. Akira Kurosawa. Perf. Toshiro Mifune. Daiei Motion Picture Company, 1951. DVD. Tong, Su. “The Brothers Shu.” Available at: http://www.e- reading.org.ua/chapter.php/131242/4/Chairman_Mao_Would_Not_Be_Amused_- _Fiction_From_Todays_China.html Yan, Mo. “The Cure.” Available at: http://www.e- reading.org.ua/chapter.php/131242/22/Chairman_Mao_Would_Not_Be_Amused_- _Fiction_From_Todays_China.html Yin-I Chen, Eva. “Shame and Narcissistic Self in Yu Da-fu's Sinking.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature September-December (2003): 565-585. Print. Read More