China Note:
Mao Turns in His Grave
14 October 2014
Here is a mystery of literature: why, within five minutes of picking up Colm Tóibín’s new novel, Nora Webster, did I feel that I had entered a new moment of life? I wasn’t just reading a book. When I lifted my eyes from the text to attend to something else, I remained in a bubble that there would be no leaving anytime soon. This wasn’t like the magnetic field that books of crime and suspense create. It was far more immediate, as if I had swallowed a sense-altering drug that took instant effect. I only appeared to be here in my Yorkville apartment. In fact, I had stepped out of a noisy, crowded street and into a hushed, scrubbed interior, stern and repressive in appearance but lambent and expressive in feeling. Leaving only the husk of myself in cosmopolitan Manhattan, my spirit had traveled back fifty years or so, to a provincial town behind the Cassock Curtain, where the mere admission of an emotion is a declaration of depravity. This bygone world ought to repel me; I ought to be fighting to escape it. Instead, I am flooded with the deepest satisfaction. The air crackles and smoulders with the author’s titanic rage, refracted in the vessel of one of his mutinous women. Nora Webster is a good person, but there is nothing that she might not be driven to do.
It doesn’t matter that I’m deeply perplexed by a sense of déjà vu. The reference to Brooklyn near the beginning is clear, but where else have I read about the farming out of children to relatives while a healthy parent gives her undivided attention to caring for a dying one? I have the feeling that I’ve read that story, in different guises, several times in Tóibín’s work, in fiction and in memoir. I’m not going to try to track those stories down now. Not being sure where I’ve read them before heightens the intensity of the dream. If Nora Webster was a minor character in Brooklyn, or some other book, I’ll find out later.
Where else have I read about doctors who won’t prescribe enough pain medicine to comfort their dying patients, precisely because, behind the Cassock Curtain, suffering is good for immortal souls? It doesn’t matter. Here is Nora, months after her husband’s death, in her banked fury:
This was what no one had told her about. She could not have ordinary feelings, ordinary desires. Catherine [her sister] saw this, she thought, and she had no idea how to deal with it, and this made things worse. As Nora walked down the drive towards the road she felt a rage that she could not control. But she would have to control it, she knew. It made no sense to think that she would not come back here again, to feel a rage against her sister that up to now she had directed solely at the doctor who controlled the ward where Maurice lay in the last days of his life, a rage that caused her to write letters to him in her mind, letters she imagined herself signing and posting, letters that were abusive or coldly factual, letters threatening him that she would let people who wherever he went what he had done when her husband was dying, that he had refused to deal with the pain that caused Maurice to moan. She had sought out the doctor several times, having asked the nurses over and over if they could do anything. All of the nurses had come back with her to the bed and nodded and agreed with her that something would have to be done. But the doctor — the very thought of him made her walk faster and become even more indifferent to the clouds that were gathering overhead — had not come with her to the bed, but had told her that her husband was very sick, that his heart was weak, and so he did not want to prescribe anything to alleviate pain that might affect his heart.
This passage is a tour de force. The doctor’s heartless judgment is reserved for the final word, where it only confirms the coruscatingly impatient anger that fills the preceding sentences. Controlled the ward. Abusive or coldly factual. What he had done when her husband was dying. Over and over. The very thought of him. The outrage is contagious, because Tóibín convinces us that Nora’s rage must have a reasonable explanation, as indeed, in the last lines, we find out that it does. He prepares us to learn that the doctor’s inhumanity embodies the fascist otherworldliness that controlled all of the Irish Republic in those days.
The death of Maurice Webster was an atrocity. How does his widow live with that?
All this scribbling is premature, because I haven’t quite reached the midpoint of Nora Webster. But that is my husk speaking. The novel has in fact no midpoint, neither beginning nor end. It is an eternity of righteous, silently screaming witness, a hurricane of rectitude that howls beyond the divine.
***
Something else that I can’t be bothered to look up is the number of occasions on which I have rather loosely asserted that the leaders of today’s China are refashioning the foundations of their power in harmony with the traditions of Chinese political culture — the very culture that Mao Zedong sought tirelessly but vainly to eradicate. Over the weekend, there appeared an article in the Times that seems all but designed to give support to my statements. I knew that I was right, but now I don’t have to leave it at that. According to Chris Buckley (an Australian journalist who has been denied entry into China, always a badge of distinction), Party leader Xi Jinping is engaged in a “restoration of tradition” that serves “to inoculate citizens against Western liberal ideas, which are deemed a decadent recipe for chaos.” It is not hard to imagine that Marxist-Leninism itself, already more a matter of style than one of dogma, might one day be included in the portfolio of dangerous Western ideas. What makes China incomparable, as I think I wrote the other day, is its integral longevity. Confucius has been at the heart of Chinese thought, setting not only its propositions but its very rhythms, for two and a half millennia, a matchless span of influence.
Chinese political culture has a conception of human rights that will never be reconciled with that of the liberal West, because its linchpin is the elimination of dissidence. Here, in the late Simon Leys’s rendering, is the heart of the matter (note how civil order is envisioned in terms of musical (and possibly choreographic) harmony):
If the names are not correct, language is without an object. When language is without an object, no affair can be effected. When no affair can be effected, rites and music wither. When rites and music wither, punishments and penalties miss their target. Then punishments and penalties miss their target, the people do not know where they stand.
When you understand that dissidence is the practice of calling things by incorrect names (eg, claiming that Party leaders are tyrants), the cascade of disorder makes great internal sense. When the people do not know where they stand, there ensues the chaos that Chinese rulers have rightly dreaded for thousands of years. It is easy to understand that, from a Chinese viewpoint, nothing justifies running the risk of unleashing this chaos.
Neither the continuity of Chinese tradition nor the violence of China’s periodic upheavals has, as I say, any counterpart in the history of the modern Western nations or their medieval and classical forebears. Without counterpart in China is the West’s habit of judging itself by its elite achievements — its triumphs in the arts and sciences, the power of its literature, the glories of its courts, and the ever-finer dispassion of its justice. In Chinese eyes, these are trifles in comparison to the welfare of the people. Truth be told, the West has only recently — the day before yesterday, on a Chinese scale — taken an interest in the welfare of the people. Even the gospels of Jesus were distorted by an aristocratic establishment that ruled the Roman Church for the better part of two thousand years.
In Chinese eyes — and I can only surmise here — the value that Western liberalism places on outspoken, individualistic critics of authority might well seem like yet another idle frivolity.
From a Chinese viewpoint, it may well seem that Americans and Europeans have no business whatever talking about human rights. They don’t seem to know the first thing about it.
Do I agree with the Chinese? No. But I cannot quite disagree with them, either. They have too much to teach us about our own failings. Such is the weakmindedness of the Western intellectual.