Ce document sera publié en ligne en texte intégral le 1 juin 2009.
Résumé
Wang Wenxing's new novel Backed Against The Sea (Beihai de ren), was written over two different periods of time and took twenty-five years to complete1. It is different from his previous work, from his novel Family Catastrophe (Jiabian)2, which made him famous because of the moral scandal it caused, from his collection of stories, as well as from his recent publications, two collections of sanwen on various subjects3. This new text breaks away from a style of writing which, despite the carefully thought-out daring of his first novel, remained classical, and here becomes an experimental exploration of shifts of meaning within the framework of the novel4. This book has been compared to Joyce's Ulysses, but such a comparison is of no help in following the exhausting rhythmic shifts between words and sounds that govern this novel, which is in the form of a long monologue. It initiates a synthesis of the two literary movements of the 1960s and 1970s, modernist literature on the one hand, since it pursues a search for language which challenges understanding, and nativist literature on the other, in that it is set in a small fishing village and its characters are miserable wretches on the fringe of society. One can also perceive in this very combination the hybrid character peculiar to post-modern literature. It is a novel that prompts exegesis. It is more aimed at academic speculation than at the ordinary reader. However, it is not so much the writing of discontinuity, of the collapse which conforms to post-modern norms, as writing which, taking on the picaresque genre—the un-idealistic novel par excellence—not only describes a laughable world, but mocks itself as well. Moreover, in the author's own words, this book, which rejects any form of categorisation, is “a picture of the human condition with universal applicability”5.
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Référence électronique
Sandrine Marchand, « Wang Wenxing, “Back to Back” With the Present », China perspectives, n°65, 2006, [En ligne], mis en ligne le 1 juin 2009. URL : http://chinaperspectives.revues.org/document635.html. Consulté le 24 juillet 2008.