disarming creativity

Communist ideology, so it seems, has one thing deeply intrinsic to human thought: the search for universal themes, truths that pierce human reason to the extent that we cease to live actively, save for within our beliefs. Sounds poetic? Well, at least that should be the ideal case. Reading the material construed in the name of any ideology, the only truth we usually face is that of human lack of originality. The problem with ideological texts such as those I am currently perusing (the anti-Hu Shi-campaign texts of the mid-1950s) is that they manage to rhetorically destroy the myth they try to create before it reaches its destined receiver. And they do that - as they themselves would point out, insisting eternally on a separation of the two - not only on the level of form, but also on the level of content.

Let us first talk about language, i.e. the level of form. The style of these essays is, to say the least, repetitive. After a while it seems I only have to look at a page and my schooled x-ray vision almost immediately makes out an average of 15 references to the struggle of the proletariat against the evil bourgeoisie, 10 to Hu Shi, the slave of imperialism and about another 5 to China's rich and famous revolutionary tradition per page. Apart from the fact that 600 pages of unrelenting average do not make this a pleasant reading, the real problem begins with the actual argument, of which, as far as I can see, there isn't much. The logic of it runs somewhat as follows: "Bourgeois subjective idealism is bad, and proletarian objective materialism is good, therefore bourgeois subjective idealism is bad and proletarian objective materialism is good." Is it just me, or was that a bit circular? Anyways, I could go on about the language and general rhetorics of these texts, and I will, but not now and in this forum. For the moment, I would like to return to what I referred to earlier as "universal myths", thus to the level of content.

The beauty of these Communist presumptions is certainly their self-ascribed moral superiority. Any belief that claims exclusivity demands something which in Chinese tradition was always regarded a prime virtue: absolute loyalty. Now, principally I cannot say of myself to be opposed to virtue and heroism. Loyalty is great, and there have been many examples of this particular virtue that have gone down in literary history as true tear-streakers. There is a certain universality, for instance, in the story of the lost son. The father whose son is neglected until he is lost and it is too late to repent. And the anti-Hu Shi texts definitely provide the story line: Hu, the lost son to mother China. To mourn hin, to grieve for his lost soul could have been a great narrative angle... But unfortunately, the myth is deadened in its attempt: despite the dramatic extreme inherent in ideological thinking, their language and argument doesn't allow for much original narrative. And seeing that bellicose rhetorics alone can't provide for much of a story, we are left with formulaic sterility. 600 plus pages of it.

And so it is sad, but true, and maybe the only truth to be found in these texts: they are boring. End of story. No curtain calls.