Justin Chen
World Literatures (143)
Prof. Trumpener

The Consuming Narrative Flame in Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

Although we eventually come to understand Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress as a narrative largely concerned with the subject of narration itself, the novel does not immediately reveal its self-referential project. Instead, it begins in medias res, with a scene that epitomizes some of the crucial problems of the Cultural Revolution. Luo’s clever deception in renaming the violin sonata Mozart is Thinking of Chairman Mao demonstrates the power of titles within the new communist paradigm. “Anyone who bears the title of Count, regardless of his nationality, is by definition reactionary” (128), we discover—but anyone who is thinking of Chairman Mao must not be all that bad. Along with placing the story within its historical context, this scene also draws the reader’s attention to the meta- or frame-narrative that enfolds the novel, for it ends with a sudden switch in narrative tone almost cinematic in its panning-out effect: “This was our first taste of re-education. Luo was eighteen years old, I was seventeen” (6). Suddenly, the reader’s attention shifts from the problems of communism to concerns over the speaker’s identity and the emotional or chronological distance from which he utters these lines. Thus, the opening scene serves a dual function. It establishes important themes of performance, class, and China’s relationship to the West, but it also alerts the reader to the meta-narrative structure of this novel which, despite its realist historical context, is at heart very much a story about storytelling.

One meta-narrative theme with which the novel is concerned is that of transmission. When Four-Eyes has a crisis of creativity and spends a whole week “without coming up with a single songline worthy of publication in an official journal,” he turns to the narrator and Luo for help in uncovering examples of “popular ballads, that is to say sincere, authentic folk songs full of romantic realism” (64). These two characters then travel out to the Old Miller in an attempt to harvest examples of ancient folksongs. In some ways, this seemingly regressive move to the Chinese countryside parallels the journey of the narrator himself, whose banishment from an intellectual urban center to the remotest hinterlands has yielded the story that he now relates to us, the readers. Yet the narrative does not survive the journey unscathed—Four-Eyes deems the fruits of the two friends’ labors “useless garbage, which will only get me into trouble” (78), and he hastily amends several key words to transform the licentious folk song into insipid communist propaganda.

The notion that stories change during their retelling is evident throughout the novel, and represents a view that all transmission is also a form of transformation. The issue of the storyteller’s faithfulness to the original is vitally important in this novel precisely because the isolated regions in which the narrator and his friend Luo find themselves have not yet experienced the Age of Mechanical Reproduction that the literary critic Walter Benjamin suggests has extinguished art. There is no “definitive edition” for any of the tales that are told. In a novel that seems to revolve around the reception of stories—whether it be the four sorceresses weeping over the simplistic North Korean melodrama or the tailor accessing the Western literary treasures packed away in Four Eyes’ forbidden suitcase—the role of the narrator in either preserving or recreating a story naturally takes center stage.

Nowhere is this emphasis on transmission and reception more evident than in the character of the Little Chinese Seamstress herself. This once-wild creature seems to be tamed by the stories continually fed to her by the two young intellectuals who can’t seem to wait to share their new discoveries with her. In fact, after a long evening spent reading Balzac’s Ursula Mirouët from cover to cover, Luo rises at first light “to visit the Little Seamstress so he could tell her this wonderful tale” (57). In her first letter to Luo, the Seamstress even appends to his name the epithet “teller of films” (33) due to his wildly successful reproduction of a particular movie for the entire village. Yet the Seamstress is not merely captivated by the stories alone. Rather, she seems to be most impressed with the process of narration itself, as we discover later when she attends a showing of the movie The Little Flower Seller and whispers, unimpressed, into the narrator’s ear, “It’s so much better when it’s you telling the story” (82).

The fact that the film and narrative versions of The Little Flower Seller produce different effects on the Seamstress is important, and the question of precision in retelling is explored subtly throughout the novel, though not always in the context of storytelling. The headman of the village, for instance, demonstrates a bizarre fascination for precision and exactness, as symbolized by his obsession with the tiny mechanical alarm clock that the narrator brings with him to the countryside. The narrator observes, “We were surprised to see how the alarm clock seized the imagination of the peasants. It became an object of veneration, almost” (14). The simple introduction of time seems to revolutionize the daily life of the village, for the headman now depends on the clock to begin the day: “At nine o’clock sharp he would give a long piercing whistle to summon the villagers to work in the fields. ‘It’s time! Do you hear?’ he would shout, dead on cue, at the surrounding houses” (14).

Yet we also learn that Luo and the narrator soon learn to take advantage of their control over the sole timepiece in the village. They change the hands of the clock depending on their own mood, such that “in the end we had changed the position of the hands so many times that we had no idea what the time really was” (15). Just as the village’s lack of access to the original movie itself allows the narrator and Luo to spin their version of the film however they please, the clock allows them to sustain an elaborate temporal fiction to which even they eventually succumb. Indeed, one wonders just how precise the clock really would be, isolated from the other clocks of civilization. While the headman of the village commands Luo and the narrator to “relate the film from beginning to end to the headman and everyone else, and to make [their] story last exactly as long as the screen version” (19), once again expressing his bizarre fascination with precision, it is clear that such a feat is beyond the powers of any person, no matter how skilled. Each retelling creates the text anew, and it is from this unique interplay of text and narrator that storytelling derives its fascination and power.

The subtle balance described here is expressed by the narrator himself during his retelling of the Count of Monte Cristo to the eager tailor, when he observes, “The artistry of the great Dumas was so compelling that I forgot all about our guest, and the words poured from me. My sentences became more precise, more concrete, more compact as I went along” (125). Clearly, the narrator cannot present the story in exactly the same words as Dumas, short of reading the original word-for-word—and even then, he only possesses the work in translation, which represents another layer of narrative mediation. Yet such an exact retelling is unnecessary, for in the course of creating his own version, the narrator gradually comes “to see the narrative mechanism laid bare before [his] eyes” (125). That is, from an understanding of the basic story elements woven together by the French master, the narrator constructs his own story for the tailor—a feat that induces Luo to comment appreciatively, “Right now…you’re doing better than me. You should have been a writer” (125).

The narrator’s creative interaction with Dumas’s text seems to mirror his use of the alarm clock to fool the village headman. During the storytelling, the narrator says, “I lost all sense of time. How long had I been talking? An hour? Two?” (125). Yet while the narrator is engulfed within the very narrative that he recounts, the reader is increasingly forced to put distance between himself and the narrator as the novel progresses. One example of this is the repetition of certain narrative cues, such as the description of the town of Yong Jing as “so small that when the local canteen prepared a dish of beef and onions the smell reached the nose of every single inhabitant” (80). Later, the narrator says, “Although Yong Jing was the district capital, it was so small, as you no doubt remember, that whenever the canteen served beef and onions you could smell it all over town” (161). In one sense, this repetition demonstrates the variability of narrative, since the two descriptions do bear certain dissimilarities while retaining the same basic meaning. Yet it also suggests an almost Homeric insertion of identifiable detail that seems to stand as a marker for the narrator himself. The narrator’s inclusion of the phrase “as you no doubt remember” further emphasizes his role as the storyteller in conscious control of the details that he chooses to lay out for the reader.

An even more explicit demonstration that the novel is an externally constructed narrative can be seen in the introduction of three chapters near the end of the book, each of which is told from a different point of view, but all of which are similar in length and deal with the same basic story—a specific September afternoon tryst at a secluded pool. The three stories are strongly demarcated by chapter titles (the only ones in the book) that reveal the identity of each respective narrator. Here we notice that each story focuses on a very different aspect of the dive—the Miller’s on his own loss of youth, Luo’s on the symbolism of the key-ring, and the Seamstress’s on her fear of the snake at the bottom of the pool. While one could write an entire paper on the significance of the differences between these three narratives, the important point to take away is that through an almost Faulknerian shift in narrative voice, Dai Sijie introduces the possibility of an unreliable—or at least subjective—point of view to the story.

In fact, from here on out in the novel, the narrator’s tone undergoes a marked change. He begins to consider himself some sort of secret agent entrusted with the Little Seamstress’s welfare, and uses terminology appropriate to this new conceit. He also begins to include informal plural pronouns to include the reader in the action, making the feeling of the text much more immediate. The following passage captures the almost flippant style that results from these changes in narrative tone: “Did our undercover agent address the raven, did he offer it a crust of bread? I don’t suppose he did” (149). Whether the narrator simply does not know the truth or chooses not to disclose it, it is clear that his thoughts and actions are no longer being presented as simple facts. Thus, the novel takes on a much more fanciful—and therefore fictional—cast.

Shortly after this passage, the narrator says, “It is important to note that the bamboo hod, formerly carried by Luo, now rested on the back of our secret agent” (149). Earlier in the story, the narrator would not have singled out such a trivial detail to the reader, even if it were later to become important. Now, however, he explicitly informs the reader that it is important to make certain observations, thereby reducing the project of narration to a heavy-handed and almost structuralist undertaking. It is as if the narrative mechanism is being laid bare before our own eyes, and we are forced to understand the constructed fictionality of the work as it is laid out by the narrator and author.

The final external reference to the structure of the story itself comes near the novel’s conclusion, when the narrator says, “That’s the story. Now for the ending” (176). Again, the voice that is audible in this statement is not at all like that of the neutral narrator of Balzac’s Père Goriot, but instead demonstrates an external awareness of the story’s structure, placing it almost in the same category as the reader himself. Similarly, when the narrator questions in the final pages of the novel, “I wondered what was making me chase after Luo across this treacherous mountain slope? Was it friendship? Was it my affection for his girlfriend? Or was I merely an onlooker anxious not to miss the ending of a drama?” (181-2), the reader cannot help but identify with these statements. What causes us to keep turning the pages of the novel? Apparently these same concerns haunt the narrator as well, causing him to wonder whether in the process of telling the story, his status as narrator is being transformed into something entirely different. What is his relationship with the text he is creating? Can he be said to own it?

Thus, by Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress’s end, the distinction between characters and “real people,” between fiction and reality, reaches its most uncertain state—we are presented with a marked blurring of categories symbolized by the narrator’s statement that “we might well have taken [the village headman] for a character in a novel and burnt him alive” (178). Just as the narrator’s retelling of Dumas’s epic legend causes him to lose all sense of time and to forget his very audience, by the end of the novel he has cast off the characteristics that we are used to associating with an ordinary third-person narrator, and has instead assumed the role of a character within his own story.

To conclude, it might be interesting to consider the narrator’s fleeting thought of burning the village headman alive as more than just a simple aside. The analogy between fiction and a consuming flame is an apt one, for as the novel comes to an end, the reader comes to understand that every story flares momentarily with the fire of inspiration, but is ultimately consumed in the very act of its telling. After this burning out, one is left with only the ashes of the bare plot, symbolized by the movie that the Seamstress finds so dissatisfying precisely because it allows no room for innovative narration. In this way, then, the “insane auto-da-fé” at the story’s conclusion is not simply a drunken act of vengeance against the liberalizing influence of Western literature and its theft of the Little Seamstress. Rather, it could also be seen as a symbolic gesture by the narrator and Luo, who realize that the marvelous stories they have brought back to life must ultimately be extinguished. This is the only alternative to the fate of the Seamstress or the potential fate of the headman—that is, to become characters that are consumed by the power of narrative itself.