Chinese Postmodernism Analysis

Chinese postmodernism in the 90s moves towards spiritual exploration, very much realist when it’s twisted with history and rather expressionist when it’s a process of self-discovery. The transaction from fragmentation, which is man’s identity exploited by the experience of impersonal collectivism, to individualism, which is the post-Mao discourse over history and self of de-construction and reconstruction, generates a tale of sorrows and disenchantment, desperate characters seeking for definition. Narrative produces protagonist looking for the inner-self, what they were or what they had before chaos took the shape of modernity, but more often than not, it’s the dramatic awareness of man’s loneliness what accompanies their journey through life

Chinese identity is defined by a past of injured and scars, this is up to now the most evident message lingering behind whatever narrative style post-Tiananmen has produced. The experience of loneliness that all the protagonists suffer cannot be read as personal experience or the vicissitudes of a family saga but as a national allegory and the matrix of China as whole. There is a deep feeling of desolation for a plot that, save few occasions, offers details of a life of humiliation and hardship, describes inevitable loss, condemns its heroes to a bitter and solitary ending. Our guess is that the anti-Confucianism and anti-intellectualism of the past decades have emptied China of any residual of humanism, the roots-seeking experience acknowledges that the roots are dry, the reality they have to face is chaotic but turning back is no help for its chaos again. Tradition eroded, role models come loose, fathers are cruel and mothers are missing, life remains unfulfilled stuck between man’s aspiration and the existential need to survive, and those characters discovered themselves alienated from their family, their village, the whole community and the sense of history, frozen between life and death. They lose in silence facing the wasteland of their life and an unaccomplished bildungsroman, they learnt and make the reader feel the inconsolability for a time

Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as Young Man again shifts between moralities, in this case the tension between rationality and irrationality is given by religion inquietude and sensual pleasure. Life coincides with the heaviness of his sins, the sense of guilt, the redemption behind punishment, the fear of hell and the eternal damnation. Along with it shame brings forgiveness, confessing is repenting, for those who have sincere sorrow, faith is a lap into grace. But then the young man doubts, an aesthetic epiphany ‘a long pink grown’ forced him to surrender to the beauty of a woman, darker than a sin softer than a sound, because of lust the holiness of the sacrament crumbles into corruption. I tried to love God but I failed, Stephen confessed, his bildungsroman is interrupted or to be found somewhere else beyond the story, intellectual, sexual, and spiritual discoveries pushed him towards an artistic alienation until the final exile and his promise of return. However we must notice that we bid Torless and Dedalus goodbye, not at the end of their process of discovery and evolution but at the beginning, the novel ends while their journey, physical and spiritual, starts, they are both about to go somewhere else, implying that rather than an interrupted bildungsroman we shall refer to