The Three Leaps of Wang Lun (2 page)
Read The Three Leaps of Wang Lun Online
Authors: Alfred Doblin
doubtless in every society, only a little of us is expressed. We sleep for the most part, a large number of questions are never asked, life plays itself along in a prescribed circle. People curl themselves up like hedgehogs.… Once hunger and cold, love and a place to live and perhaps ambition are taken care of, what is left? Over the remainder of existence—what a vast remainder—a veil is drawn.
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While political upheavals in China—the Boxer uprising in 1900, the downfall of the Manchus in 1912—must have nudged Döblin towards this choice, in the novel there is no overt reference to contemporary events, apart perhaps from one phrase in the Dedication (“In this Earth’s life two thousand years are as one year”). Döblin was no sinologist, and after
Wang Lun
his only work relating to China was an introduction to a selection from Confucius, published in America in 1940. He had not even prepared the ground with extensive reading before embarking on
Wang Lun
. He began to visit the Museum of Ethnology in Berlin and to read travelogues and descriptions of Chinese customs only in the summer of 1912, and in October was still writing to Martin Buber for guidance on source materials. The reading, the writing and the working out of the problem were simultaneous processes. “I went through so many books on China at that time,” he wrote,
but if anyone had asked me an hour after the reading what was in the book I could not have answered. I had more to do then than busy myself with Chinese porcelain, with the role of lamaism, with the woman question in China. When I’ve finished my novel, I used to tell myself, I’ll go into such and such a subject that seems really interesting; didn’t get around to it.
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Döblin’s novel attests to his extraordinary ability to absorb names and ideas and impressions and transmute them into literature. The Afterword to the modern German edition of
Wang Lun
describes how he worked:
His immersion in the Chinese world is reflected in the partially preserved notes of his readings in the relevant literature, recorded in pencil, indelible pencil or ink on multifarious sheets of paper, sometimes even on torn off hospital or library slips, or on envelopes. Döblin took notes, pedantically enough, of animals, plants, precious stones, landscapes, towns, usages of the Confucian religion, priests’ clothing, ritual objects, civil and military costume, dances, games, musical instruments, medicines, technical expressions from the medical and military spheres. He excerpted descriptions of temples and festivals, religious customs and ideas, noted details of the political administration of provinces, of offices and titles, academic examinations and ranks, of eunuchs at the Emperor’s court. We even have a collection of little maps, copied out in ink. Historical and geographical works, individual numbers of orientalist and ethnographic journals as sources for theatrical productions, weapons etc. are named or noticed. One four-page document contains nothing but columns of Chinese personal names, another proverbs, a third sayings from Laotzu, together with quotations from Li Po, Chuangtzu and other Chinese classics. On another sheet we find the poem written by Ch’ien-lung on a teacup and the poem by Tu Fu quoted in Book Three. From an unknown source he excerpted descriptions, complete with sketch plans, of Imperial costume and of the monastery town of Tashilunpo, residence of the Dalai Lama. Döblin collected much more than he eventually used.…
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He was not just adding local colour to a work of fantasy. “So much of the Orient has been assimilated in Döblin’s art,” writes the only Chinese critic to have studied the novel in depth, “that no clear boundary can be drawn between his sinological learning and his poetic imagination.”
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The book brings to vivid life an alien imagined world—China, the Flowering Middle—during the reign of Ch’ien-lung (1760–1799), one of its greatest emperors. The uprising of the historical Wang Lun in 1774, an obscure episode that Döblin found in de Groot’s
Sectarianism and Religious Persecution in China
, provided only the germ for this story of a fictional Wang Lun, this working out of a problem of meekness against force, spiritual yearning against material existence, a mystical sense of the world against the realities of power. Today the truths which motivate the novel can still shake empires.
Rebellions were endemic in North China. Some were political, seeking the overthrow of the ruling dynasty, others had a religious, millenarian origin. The reigns of Ch’ien-lung and his son Chia-ch’ing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw periodic sectarian uprisings which displayed both patriotic anti-Manchu sentiment and strong millenarian tendencies. Any sect professing unorthodox beliefs came under State suspicion and risked violent suppression, even if not obviously subversive. The Wu-wei sect, the model for the “Truly Powerless”, set tablets to the Emperor in its meeting places, but was still persecuted by the Ming (1368–1644) and proscribed in the Ch’ing (1644–1911).
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The teachings of this sect, expounded by the prophet Lo Huai (1563–1647) and recalled by an aged sectarian early in Book Four, drew on both the ancient tradition of the
Tao Te Ching
and the Buddhist idea of Nirvana. The sect had no saints or deities, no priests or temples, sought perfection and bliss solely in “words of truth uttered by heaven and earth”.
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They did not proselytize, called one another Brother and Sister.
By its nature the Wu-wei sect was not inclined to political action. Quite otherwise the White Lotus sects, or Pailien-chiao, whose protection the Wang Lun of the novel seeks at the end of Book One. These were salvationist and Messianic movements that became widespread in the sixteenth century, but whose origins can perhaps be traced back a thousand years earlier, to a Buddhist group that cultivated religious perfection in order to reach the Western Paradise. The sect was active in resistance to the Mongol Yüan dynasty (1280–1368), proclaiming the outbreak of great disturbances and the coming of Maitreya, the Future Buddha. The founder of the Ming, Chu Yuan-chang, was helped to his throne by the White Lotus (a legend is told of him in Book Four), but at the end of his reign included even this sect in his severe measures against Buddhists, Taoists and other “exotic” religions. Suppression led to disturbances in the late Ming, but for the first century of the alien Ch’ing dynasty the sect busied itself with sutra reading and other devotional activities rather than rebellion. Then in 1774, with the uprising of Wang Lun, millenarian tendencies again erupted which were to continue sporadically throughout the nineteenth century, one strand evolving into the Boxer movement and the secret societies that helped Sun Yat-sen to topple the Ch’ing dynasty.
The historical Wang Lun was a short, stocky martial arts adept from western Shantung, who taught therapeutic yoga and meditation as well as boxing, and became regarded by his disciples as a White Lotus sect teacher.
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His 26 direct pupils had pupils of their own, totalling perhaps two or three hundred; they included a travelling actress, peddlars, Buddhist monks, minor yamen employees, possibly salt smugglers. The actress (a detail unknown to Döblin but in keeping with the atmosphere of the novel) was a pretty and accomplished acrobat, who was cured by Wang Lun of a skin infection. Widowed, she was taken by Wang as his “daughter”, mistress in fact; later she brought a dozen women, former associates, into the movement. (During the rebels’ final stand she put superstitious fear into the Imperial troops, whose bullets and arrows left her unscathed. Only when the soldiers fired the severed genitals of a captured rebel at her was she killed.) In 1771 Wang began to talk of “manifesting the Way” and to plot rebellion. His motivation is unclear: perhaps an Imperial tour of the district brought home the contrast between ruler and ruled; perhaps Government action from 1768 onwards against kindred sects, resulting in executions and banishments, led to a stark choice between rebellion or arrest. Millenarian preaching had its own dynamic, as vague predictions became ever more definite preparations for the arrival of the Future Buddha.
Forced to premature action by the leak of their plans, Wang and his followers rose in the autumn of 1774, attacking several towns in western Shantung before gathering in the city of Linch’ing, where Imperial troops besieged them. Within a month the rebels were defeated, Wang dead. They had numbered just a few thousand. Other sectarian revolts occurred in 1786, 1796–1803, and 1813, the latter far more bloody and widespread.
The empire under Ch’ien-lung was larger and stronger than it had ever been. The learned, energetic Emperor—poet, patron of scholars, lover of the hunt—had done his duty to Heaven and his ancestors. Sinkiang had been conquered by the ruthless Chao Hui; Tibet was under Chinese control. But the Wang Lun uprising was a portent of the long decay that would last until 1911, and the Panchen Lama’s death from smallpox, during a visit to Peking of great significance, also rattled the Imperial government. Chao Hui, in the novel the prime instigator of violence, actually died ten years before Wang Lun’s hopeless venture, and the Panchen Lama’s fatal visit, described in such vivid, tender, horrific terms in Book Three, actually occurred six years later. Poetic licence allows the novel to draw from these events a coherent theme: the theme of earthly power against the power of the Way.
Döblin gave an account of his conception of
Wang Lun
in a 1929 essay, “The Structure of the Epic Work”.
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“I have it in mind, for example,” he wrote,
to depict a revolutionary ferment in a population, and as a start a harshly lit scene urges itself on me, an attack on a high official, a night scene. This is then felt entirely as an introduction, a kind of muffled drumroll, a single sharp report, then silence. Each individual point is fully worked out from the character of this violent, eerie prelude.… I began a Chinese novel with just such a drumbeat and just such a muffled roll of subterranean revolution.
The German reader finds this passage puzzling, for the introductory scene outlined here was dropped from the first edition of the novel and has never been restored.
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Yet years later Döblin saw it as the indispensable starting point for the structure and the dynamic of the whole work. Why was it dropped? How does its absence affect the novel?
The scene, included here as the Prologue, sets the theme firmly in a political context. The attack on Chao Lao-hsü is a political act; its consequence—the conspiring of civil and military authorities in further extortions on the population—provides specific cause for the rebellion of the downtrodden.
Without this episode the theme is deflected into that generalized religious attitude, divorced from any particular social or political context, which is expressed early in Book One in the fable of the man and his shadow, and carried to its ghastly end with the fate of the Broken Melon in Book Two.
Not only the theme is affected; the shape of the book suffers. The novel ends with Hai-t’ang on a pilgrimage to the shrine of the goddess Kuan-yin, seeking peace for the loss of her two children in the upheavals—a direct result of the deal with which her husband Chao Hui has tried to preserve his power in the world. In the published version, lacking the Prologue, this scene is arbitrary; the story stops, but it is not an ending. In the novel as written the end harks back to the beginning, poses again the problem with which the tragedy began, and so provides a satisfying close. (Formally, the introduction is a
hsieh-tzu
, the prefatory episode of a Chinese play or story
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—further evidence of Döblin’s immersion in things Chinese.)
We do not know why Döblin agreed to cut this scene. He had tried for nearly two years to find a publisher, and perhaps was ready to accept a suggestion (made, it is said, by Martin Buber
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) which improved the chances of acceptance. It was a bad decision, and not the last time Döblin would have difficulties with German publishers.
This initial scene must be followed by action on a gigantic scale, the essay continues,
or else the proportions do not tally, and a particular dynamic is called for. I must begin slow and broad, perhaps with one character, in order to develop a massive crescendo. The proportions and the dynamic, these formative tendencies, are quite palpably felt, and now as imagination gets to work tirelessly hauling up material it is this formal law of broad, slow impetus which issues the directives.
This abstract, symphonic structure then begins to be filled. “A start is made, for purely formal, I should say musical, reasons with a report on one man, a report which I spin out, and this man must become the red thread to which other threads attach themselves.” That man is Wang Lun. “Report” is an inadequate word for the marvellous depiction of this rogue, first in his home village with a father who develops talents as a shaman, then in the city, where his cunning is trapped by the greater cunning of the sly priest To Chin.
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“I group around him character after character, urge him on to actions so that more and more people gather round him, and so I make him the hero,” writes Döblin. The crucial act is Wang’s murder of a captain who has slain an innocent man. This is the first time Wang has acted for love of another, and it leads him not only to the mountains, but for the first time to a moral questioning.
“A man struggling vainly, powerless against power: a weak hero, truly powerless.” Thus Döblin states his epic theme. In the mountains Wang encounters wretched outcasts, among them a runaway monk, Ma No, whose crystal Buddhas speak to Wang’s awakening conscience. Able now to articulate the plight of the outcasts he becomes their leader, preaching hope for them in the Western Paradise if they cease railing against fate, become Wu-wei, “Truly Powerless”. Thousands throng to join this new sect. Wang, concerned for their safety, leaves to seek support from the brotherhood of the White Waterlily.
