Review: Anakana Schofield on Xiaolu Guo
In Xiaolu Guo’s 2014 novel I Am China, a Chinese man, upon his arrival in the UK, lands in a psychiatric ward in Lincolnshire and writes to the Queen to request her intervention. This is a strikingly hopeful gesture, sandwiched between optimism and insanity.
Guo’s work often presents us with a recent arrival from China. We are given what these travellers arrive to—displacement, loneliness, frugality, isolation, confusion—and what they may have left behind, another version of loneliness, not fitting in, oppression, and misery. Guo’s people are the never-quite-belonging, unable to be absolutely here or there, while trying to put down roots, or feel housed in places they aren’t always welcome and within systems that are suspicious of them and exclusionary.
In her sixth novel in English, A Lover’s Discourse, she returns to a conversation like the one that animated her first, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers of 2007. (Guo published seven books in Mandarin Chinese before her 2002 emigration to London.) The new novel shares its title with Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, and like Barthes’s book it takes a fragmented form, that of casual conversations, mostly between two lovers. More important than this nod to Barthes, though, is the novel’s own singular linguistic texture and the ongoing jolt of its political setting. Guo keenly inverts the anthropological gaze onto the British, their language and other cultural peculiarities. Her new arrival faces a society that cannot agree on its own boundaries or nature, apparently at war with itself. Within this she calmly considers the meaning of artistic authenticity in the age of mass production.
A Chinese woman arrives in London in the run-up to the 2015 Brexit referendum to study anthropology at King’s College, explaining that “I wanted to equip myself with an intellectual mind so that I could enter a foreign land and not be lost in it.” She swiftly finds herself perplexed by Brexit, her industrial landscape and environment, and, especially, the language around her. “Everyone was talking. And I was watching. Words didn’t come so naturally to my mouth. The English manner was something I found difficult to follow then.”
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A Lover’s Discourse examines what it is to be alone within language and burrowing into a new language, while reconciling it with your native tongue. It unfolds in her conversations with a man she meets, the novel’s “you,” a landscape architect, half Australian and half German, but the dialogue in the novel is as much with herself as with this man who becomes her lover: the different languages she encounters consider each other (why is the moon masculine in German, she reasonably inquires), stretching her mind to accommodate, blend, and resolve them all. Guo’s novel seems of a piece with other recent work—I think of Eimear McBride’s Strange Hotel—in which women are unapologetically in their minds and bodies for themselves and in dialogue with themselves.
Guo’s prose has a plain, precise, and somewhat documentary quality. This is what I did or was doing, or the conversation I was having, when I crashed into this strange experience with this new language is a major throughfare in each section of the book. Like I Am China, A Lover’s Discourse opens with blissful, slightly hilarious optimism. The lover has divulged that he does not believe in love at first sight, where our main speaker has thought all along that this is what transpired between them, one afternoon picking flowers, or some other time.
Guo’s work is strongly visual (she has made eleven films): the casual conversations of which it is composed appear as vignettes, headed by a signature exchange. They are often humorous and brusque. On attempting to make contact for the first time with her lover: “Then I called you. Because you hadn’t called me. Not even once.” (Her earlier novel Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth offers an even more absurd rendition of the hilarious pursuit of young passion.)
The main narrator’s blunt and mildly stern indictments of the ridiculousness she encounters in her new home are undercut by her tendency to speculate, rather tenderly and comedically, on the people and situations that confuse her or that she can’t yet fathom. “It is true that you Westerners are not able to be spontaneous in your day-to-day lives, and you are from a supposed free country.” The couple’s conversations oscillate, magnify, and amplify the “in-between” of culture and language, while the novel’s setting, the moment of Brexit, promises its impending erasure. The novel illustrates that it is what we do with our language that can be injurious and keep people out. Naturally, as Guo’s main character acquires and internalizes a new language, she experiences a sense loss of her first one.
—I am feeling wordless. I call it wu yu. It’s like I have lost my language.
—Why lost? If you have really lost one language, aren’t you gaining another?
Our main interlocutor travels back to China to undertake her PhD field work, interviewing and filming copycat artisans who reproduce classical paintings from around the world. “The mere fact of those workers selling their reproductions to anyone who could afford them, so the lower classes could enjoy some level of art too, was simply a good thing,” she considers, though her thesis is that the artisans “are acting like machines … They are reproducing machine-like behavior.” “Quite a negative, dehumanizing perspective on humans,” remarks her lover. Her research begs a question of the reader: are we more comfortable with humans reproducing endless irons, computers, plugs, and household items than works of art?
Broadly speaking, conversations between lovers do not tend to be startlingly insightful; they are mostly interesting to the two people having them. Intellectual fervor or discovery is more likely to take place solo, and that’s where the novel is at its most interesting. The narrator’s unfolding articulations, though drawn out of her in encounter with others, become an unfolding essay with and within herself. The lover’s literary purpose is to further her ongoing essay/argument. As the couple buys a houseboat and shacks up and continues on to have a baby, something contained, bobbing, and strangely hopeful enters the picture. In thinking through place, there’s a solidifying of where they have come from individually and where they are now, the labor of belonging almost accidentally creating a rootless sense of home. In Guo’s trapping of the humorous minutiae of language and loss, she opens her literary borders to a playful and nuanced meadow.
Anakana Schofield’s most recent novel, Bina: A Novel in Warnings, will be published in the US in February.
Book Notes
When I began thinking about starting Book Post, in 2017, the country seemed only to be beginning to sense some of the threats posed by the consolidation of technology. People in bookselling had certainly long challenged Amazon—startled that few noticed the predatory pricing, self-dealing, and favoritism that lurked beneath the shrugging no-one-can-help-the-march-of-e-commerce narrative. And people in journalism had learned, though successive disillusionments, that Facebook was in the business of repurposing their work to coopt their revenues—a strategy that, again, seemed cloaked by the apparent inevitability of information turning free on the internet. (Google likewise, but that was less obvious.) The vantage on technology, bringing us so many new conveniences and forms of encounter, seemed generally sunny, certainly in Washington. With Book Post we turned to the newsletter platform in part to step away from some of the distortions we saw big tech introducing to the world of letters: the drive to write for clickbait, social media’s lethal attraction to conflict. In a piece about our platform Substack in The New Yorker this week tech writer Anna Weiner noted that it’s hard completely to escape these enveloping forces. The election brought to light the underlying reality that the big tech firms shared in common a strategy of collecting and monetizing information about us that can be bought and mobilized by anyone, for good or ill, and that the algorithms that feed us delightful things can also feed us dangerous, addictive things.
In recent months this new suspicion of tech, whose keepers have enriched themselves by orders of magnitude during the pandemic, has coalesced around decisive action. Book Post covered the House Judiciary antritrust hearings that brought CEOs of the four tech giants—Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple—in virtually for questioning and anthologized so many of these concerns. Following the subcommittee’s report on October 6, the Justice Department, with eleven states’ attorneys general, accused Google of making deals with other tech giants to stifle competition. On December 9 more than thirty states joined the Federal Trade Commission in accusing Facebook of monopolistic practices. On December 15 eleven states filed a second suit against Google for manipulating the advertising markets it controls and on December 16 more than thirty states accused Google of rigging search results. Even China is turning against their own tech giants, however complicit the government may have been in their growth, intervening in recent weeks to curb the internet empire of tycoon Jack Ma after he challenged regulators at the end of October. On December 12 the European Union introduced proposals to pressure big tech to combat harmful content and piracy, open themselves to competition, and disclose the mechanisms behind targeted advertising. Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said, according to the Times, that “the global tech policy debate is a ‘different world’ compared to five years ago when she was criticized for taking action against Google and other American firms.”
It’s notable that independent women scholars have done much to contribute to these changes. A few weeks ago the Times profiled Dina Srinivasan, who left a job in digital advertising to write a 2019 paper, “The Antitrust Case Against Facebook,” that David Cicilline, chairman of the House antitrust subcommittee, was citing way back in March of 2019. She advised in both the New York and Texas suits. Lina Kahn, who could be seen in the background of the House hearings, wrote a paper as a law student in 2017, “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” that similarly laid out many of the issues that would come to be investigated and litigated. Outspoken women of color within tech have also been making themselves heard since earlier this month Google fired ethics researcher Timnit Gebru, who amazingly was actually studying discrimination in Google technology. The incident brought out a number of damning stories of the treatment of the (few) women and people of color in tech, including a much circulated Twitter thread by April Christina Curley detailing her termination after unsuccessful efforts to improve Google’s recruitment of engineers from historically Black colleges and universities.
It seems clear that 2021 will be a year of change in tech, which will have significant consequences for writing and ideas, marbled as the world of thinking has become with digital forms of communication. Curtailing the tech giants holds prospects for giving more air to non-dominant thinking and reasserting creators’ claims on their work, though empowering tech execs to distinguish good from bad speech holds dangers to which we in the world of letters should stay alert. The Authors Guild, in an August submission to Representative Cicilline about Amazon’s business practices, quoted Federal Trade Commissioner Rohit Chopra: “We will never know what damage has already been done. What books will never be written? What ideas will never see the light of day? Moving forward, we need to ask ourselves what these developments mean for our democratic values. We need to make sure that technology is propelling our democracy, not holding it back.”
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