THE RIVER BELOW
By FRANCOIS CHENG
Translated by Julia Shirek Smith. New York: Welcome Rain, 2000. 288 pages, $24.95

Tony Giffone

Following on the heels of the awarding of the Nobel Prize in literature to Gao Xingjian, a Chinese writer who now lives in France, comes the English translation of Fran?ois Cheng's novel The River Below. Cheng, who was born in Nanjing in 1929 and settled in France in 1945, is a professor at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales in Paris. Unlike Gao, who writes in Chinese, Cheng composed his novel in French. He has previously published studies of Chinese painting and translations of Chinese poetry, as well as volumes of his own poems, and the novel is poetically charged, proceeding more through metaphoric images than through the traditional elements of fiction like plot and character.
The title of the English translation, The River Below, refers to the Yangtze River and the mythic importance it plays in the life of China and of the novel's protagonist. But the original French title, Le Dit de Tianyi, probably more accurately describes the book, which is a first-person narrative by Tianyi, as transcribed by an old friend who, after not having seen him for many years, meets Tianyi again in his old age. The narrative chronicles Tianyi's childhood in China, his journey to France in 1948 to study art, and his eventual return to China in 1957.
Tianyi thinks of himself as a cloud, a metaphor for a wanderer, one without roots, and some of the most beautiful passages in the novel are meditations on wandering and exile. Cheng writes:

What is a cloud, really? From whence does it come? Where does it go. . . . it was born in the valley, formed of mists; then it rose towards the heights, reaching the sky, where it could float in space and take on any number of forms . . . [it] was always somewhere, but it was from nowhere.

Since Cheng's previous publications include art criticism, it is not surprising that the most intellectually engaging moments in the novel are actually extended commentaries on art. An aunt who studied in Paris brings the young Tianyi postcards of studies of nudes from the Louvre; Tianyi's contrasting of these postcards with the newspaper photos of Chinese women raped and humiliated by invading Japanese soldiers at that time allows Cheng to digress on the nature of the representation of the nude. When, at the age of twenty-three, Tianyi finally does go to study in Europe, his encounters with Western art read like chapters in art criticism. His discussion of Rembrandt allows Cheng to function as art critic (allowing for insights into Rembrandt) as well as novelist (allowing us insights into Tianyi's character). It's a tour de force that allows us to see Rembrandt's work through Chinese eyes not conditioned to thinking about the role of light in painting. Likewise, a trip to Italy is an occasion for a digressive but stimulating comparison of the representation of religious figures during the Italian Renaissance with Buddhist art. Contrasting Western and Eastern art, Tianyi concludes that

the Far East, by even greater reduction, strives to reach an insipid essence in which the inward self meets the inward universe, while the Far West, by letting the physical abound, exalts matter, glorifies the visible, and in so doing glorifies its own most secret, most insane dreams.

If China opens to the outside world, does it lose its soul? This is the question that haunts Tianyi and his friends in their youth, and that continues to haunt China today. Tianyi's visit, circa 1945, to the fourth-century Dunhuang Caves in Gansu Province when they had just been rediscovered by the Chinese becomes a celebration of the absorption of Indian and Persian art into Chinese art. The fusion is a celebration, on Cheng's part, of the fruits of globalization, of the dynamic creativity that occurs when diverse cultures come into contact with one another. Cheng sees this process not as one of hegemony or homogenization but as one of creative energizing.

It is easier for Cheng to make the case that Tianyi's world is benefiting from encounters with the West when the Western culture in question involves Impressionist paintings and Dvorak's symphonies. Today, in China, the fascination with, and absorption of, Western culture is mostly centered on Western pop culture, and it might be harder to persuade readers of the benefit of cross-cultural encounters when they take the form of, say, a Madonna video.
Because Fran?ois Cheng is so well versed in the intellectual traditions of both China and the West (particularly France), he is especially insightful in the ways that cultures speak to each other across continents and oceans. For the Chinese, reading Gide inspired one "to draw on his inner resources, to regain his enthusiasm, to free himself from the bondage of social and familial traditions." As such, the Cultural Revolution becomes an experiment in heeding the existentialists' call. Tianyi's invisibility in Paris allows him to reverse the Sartre mantra that "hell is other people" to hell is always being the "other."
While the novel succeeds in delineating the interior life of Tianyi, it is less successful in delineating the world around him. One of its flaws is that the other characters (including the two women, one Chinese and one French, whom Tianyi loves) are never a vital presence, never as alive for the reader as Tianyi and his intellectual musings.
The novel covers an epic span of seventy-five years of Chinese history, including many turbulent times. For the most part, the historical events happen "offstage." Tianyi avoids some of the worst excesses of the Maoist purges against artists and intellectuals as he is living abroad. But, then, a letter from an old love beckons him to return to China, and he arrives just in time for the anti-rightist campaigns that took place in late 1957. These were soon followed by the Cultural Revolution. The last third of the book becomes less interesting as the horrors become more familiar. Tianyi virtually volunteers himself to be sent to a reeducation camp in the far northern provinces of China because he believes a long-lost friend is there. This pivotal turn in the plot is unexpected because, up until that point, Tianyi seems more like someone who drifts in and out of experience than someone who takes his destiny into his own hands.
Nevertheless, the elegance of Cheng's prose style-eloquently rendered into English by Julia Shirek Smith -makes this one of the few novels I've read of late where I wanted to linger over and reread passages the way one wants to linger over and reread powerful poems.

Tony Giffone, an associate professor at the State University of New York at Farmingdale, has taught English at Hebei University and is a consultant to the Chinese American Education Exchange.