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hardcover $35.00
Columbia University Press
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More reviews by Peter Gordon
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A Dictionary of Maqiao by Han Shaogong
A DICTIONARY OF MAQIAO, a literary experience unlike any other I can put my finger on, is constructed in the form in the form of discourses on the words and phrases of the dialect of Maqiao, a small village to which the narrator, an "Educated Youth", was sent during the Cultural Revolution. These sections take the form of interlinked short stories, essays, character sketches and vignettes.
There is very little in the way of plot; rather HAN SHAOGONG builds up a picture of the village, its (eccentric) inhabitants and their daily life piece by overlapping piece. The process is both fascinating and masterful as is HAN SHAOGONG's ability to include his own (or the narrator's) musings on philosophy, sociology, history and any number of other topics without disrupting the narrative -- yes, there is narrative in spite of the lack of an explicit plot.
Han paints a detailed, intriguing and amusing picture of what happens when Marxism collides with entrenched village beliefs, and how traditional China coexists with modernity. The book is filled with peculiar, beguiling, tragic characters and scenery so real you can touch it.
However, this is no country bumpkin vs city slicker account: Han explores Maqiao through its use of language, the way that words in Maqiao often mean the complete opposite of what they mean elsewhere, and how this difference in the use of language embeds itself in the pysche of the village and each of its inhabitants.
This a world where a rose by any other name would not smell as sweet, where "scientific" is a synonym for "lazy", where "awakened" means "stupid", where village get "streetsick" in the city.
I am not able to evaluate the translation on the basis of a comparison with the original, but translator Julia Lovell seems not to have put a word in the wrong place: the best translations, like the best windows, are perhaps those that one doesn't notice because they don't impede the view.
This is an intelligent, amusing, clever, fascinating and well-written view of a China most of us never see, or don't recognize when we do.
I hesitate to even mention that the novel is also most decidedly "experimental", because it's the sort of comment that might put people off. So, if "ethnolinguistics" is the sort of term that is going to turn you away from a very enjoyable and interesting book, then please stop reading the review now.
While time does pass in A DICTIONARY OF MAQIAO, there is very little sense of it. Just as a painting compresses three dimensions into two, Han seems to have compressed his work along the fourth dimension so that it hardly exists. The effect is highly unusual: the only way I can describe it is that is like watching a fresco being painted: each piece is prepared and painted separately (one cannot go back and correct frescoes) -- and it is only when considerable portion has been completed that one is able to discern what the work might be about.
HAN SHAOGONG is very interested in language and A DICTIONARY OF MAQIAO also explores the way that language affects culture and thought. That language should affect culture and thought (and vice versa) will, of course, come as no surprise to anthropologists and linguists -- and there are large parts of A DICTIONARY OF MAQIAO that are laid out as a work of ethnolinguistics. In fact, Maqiao reminds me rather more of one of the more readable anthropological classics (e.g Clifford Geertz or Napoleon Chagnon) that any other novel I can think of.
Indeed, I find the ethnolinguistics so interesting, and so well presented, that I rather wish we knew how much of it is actually true and accurately described -- quite a lot, I presume.
But A DICTIONARY OF MAQIAO's discussion of the peculiarities of the Maqiao dialect is not merely esoteric (as Han explains in an Afterword) -- many of the book sections are mirrored in the daily interplay between Cantonese and Mandarin that those of us who live in Hong Kong encounter every day.
Does the book have any drawbacks at all? Well, I doubt that the explicit technique of exploring a place through its vocabulary and structuring a novel as work of ethnolinguistics (a more accurate description than "dictionary") can be repeated without the result being entirely derivative, which rather limits the value of the experiment: I think A DICTIONARY OF MAQIAO might be a one-off.
Oh, and the cover is rather dull, making the book appear like it might be an actual academic dictionary: that's taking illusion one step too far.
Peter Gordon
16/09/2003
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Peter Gordon is editor of The Asian Review of Books. |
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