Melancholy against the grain: approaching postmodernity in Wang Anyi's tales of sorrow(Tang xiaobing)

in Postmodernism and China edited by Arif Dirlik and Zhang Xudong (Duke 2000)

Tang starts with Julia Kristeva's Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia: Postmodern erects an "artifice of seeming" and offers the "heartrending distraction of parody," both of which promise to act as antidepressants for literary obsession with the illness of modernity. Tang wants to see the dialects between melancholy in Wang anyi's works and postmodern lightheartedness: Wang's "postmodern melancholy," "in which the longing for modern long causes the deepest sorrow and ambivalend, gathers its historical content and relevance only in an age that deems itself 'post' and beyond all ideologies of the modern."

Wang's "melancholy" stories always explore the dynamic between a young postmodern writer and his/her moderin(ist) predecessor(uncle, father). The young narrator feels a woeful sense of loss and inconsequentiality that filters her/him vision of the youthful enthusiasm of her/his fahter's generation. At the same time, there is an anxiety over the absence of comparable passion in her/his own life. The narrating subject indulges in intense nostalgia, which, by widening the gap between a vividly remembered past world and an increasingly standardized present life, serves to defamiliarize the present as having failed its own historical potential.

A deep historical ambivalence is expressed in the form of melancholy subjectivity- who simultaneously longs for and fears the passion of her father's generation. The melancholy occurs at a moment when the modern project of collectively determining human destiny seems to be universally disavowed and when capital claims a global hegemony. Amid the spreading postmodern euphoria, melancholy alone reveals negativity as indispensable to dialectical truth.

Tang reiterates Wong's inscription of moods that leads toward a modality of significance that precedes any meaningful articulation. In this sense, Tang's idea about melancholy is similar to Ray williams' "structure of feeling," which means that, literature and art might capture certain social forces even before they emerge.

To me, the most interesting part is the question: could lighthearted postmodern parody at the same time melancholy? when camp, kitsch render melancholy sentimental, how do we account for the spreading nostalgia and melancholy(even if it is in the form of kitsch melodrama)? kristeva's phrases "heartrending distraction of parody" implies a more complex spectrum of emotions in postmodernism.