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The Hut on the Mountain

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Can Xue (China)

Pronounce: www.pronouncekiwi.com/Can%20Xue

The Mysterious Frontiers of Can Xue

Can Xue has likened her writing to the pioneering dance of the choreographer Isadora Duncan”

the fresh unexpected ways in which one moment flows into the next.

Published in the June 8, 2017 edition of the New Yorker magazine, the following excerpts focus on a new novel (Frontier) by the Can Xue as well as her biography, whose short story, The Hut on the Mountain we examine in this class.

The author, whom the American novelist and editor Bradford Morrow has described as one of the most “innovative and important” in contemporary world literature, revels in … mysteries and entanglements. Can Xue is the genderless pen name of Deng Xiaohua…(which) in Chinese means “residual snow,” a phrase, Deng has explained, that is used to describe both “the dirty snow that refuses to melt” and “the purest snow at the top of a high mountain.” … She feels that China provides “no support for originality, which is sometimes even suppressed.” Questioned, she responds: “Why do young people matter so much for Can Xue? Because they are Can Xue’s hope.”

Mao’s Cultural Revolution played a catastrophic role in Deng’s childhood. Her parents, both of whom worked at the newspaper “ New Hunan Daily News”, were condemned as anti-rightists by the Communist Party and sent to the country for “reëducation” through labor. The family—Deng was one of eight children—suffered extreme deprivations, and Deng’s education ended after elementary school, though she later immersed herself in classics by Western writers. It was at the age of thirty, married and with a son, that Deng began to write… “I didn’t need to work out plots or a structure or anything beforehand. No matter, a short piece or a long piece, it was the same. I just sat down and wrote without thinking.”

… Can Xue takes pride in her total commitment to what some have described as “difficult” literature. “Everyone knows the experiment in fiction I have been conducting for over thirty years has been an experiment without an escape route.” http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-mysterious-frontiers-of-can-xue

Excerpts from An interview with Can Xue by Dylan Suher and Joan Hua

The Chinese avant-garde writer Can Xue aptly describes her fiction as a performance…. Her characters, with their constantly shifting motives, are expressly not rounded. They are personae, masks made to articulate whatever philosophical proposition or aspect of the psyche the performance currently demands…

…. Her family was labeled "Rightist" and persecuted intensely by the Communist government; her social background barred her from any formal education. She nonetheless emerged during the literary flowering of the 1980s known as the "High Culture Fever" as a member of a pack of fiction writers… whose works challenged the orthodoxies of social realism through formalist experimentation and vivid imagery of the body.

… Can Xue's writing is nothing less than an existential struggle…struggle as well: to write against the death of the soul, and to fight for an authentic life. The struggle never ends; the performance continues.

Alluding to the focus on space in her works, the author states: Only a writer that possesses a high degree of rationality can break through conventional space and enter into a primitive and purely fantastic landscape. Dante, for example, is that kind of writer. The landscape of hell is suffused with longing and power. Those mighty awakened souls win their own space through the struggles of life and death. As soon as the struggle ceases, that space immediately disappears. This is the creative mechanism that I spoke of in my response above. A writer exhibits her vitality through unfamiliar space. Regarding her desire for reader partnership, she notes: Chinese readers and foreign readers should have about the same reaction to my writing. Because my subject matter is universal human nature—the original face of nature…. Nature is the highest form of existence.

She describes her writing as a foreign plant growing in the soil of five thousand years of history. Can Xue incorporates what she regards as the essence of Chinese culture…is the potential force of ideas like the unity of heaven and man . In the past 5000 years, our people have not been conscious of this power, because we have been isolated and closed to the world, and we lack a spirit of independence. Yet we are supposed to have this power—an ethnic group that has existed for thousands of years must possess some eternal elements. If you don't develop these elements, however, then they will forever remain in darkness and never see the light of day, which also means they will never be able to truly exist. My method is to use Western culture as a hoe to unearth our ancient culture, so we can realize its proper value. Western culture has been "divided" for thousands of years. I want to now join the two shores—earth and sky, the material and the immaterial—and combine them into one. And for that task, I have some advantages: namely, the nourishment and enlightenment I receive from 5000 years of history.

http://www.asymptotejournal.com/interview/an-interview-with-can-xue/

A special kind of performance: Can Xue on the course of a Chinese writer

https://www.theguardian.com/books/the-writing-life-around-the-world-by-electric-literature/2015/oct/28/a-special-kind-of-performance-can-xue-on-the-course-of-a-chinese-writer

Yes, The Hut on the Mountain is confusing. Yes, it is almost unknowable. Almost. It is fair to expect a reader to “work a bit” at understanding some literature. It is also fair for the reader to be entitled to have a “take-away.”

· Characters, their traits, and their actions

· The landscape and general environment

· Political applications

· Scissors

· Sounds

· Drawers

· Nightly disturbances

· Cold sweats

· Fear

· Hiding

· Narrator’s point of view