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The Enchanting Lives of Others is a tale of aspiring readers and writers, the most accessible work yet from the Chinese writer Can Xue. In this Q&A, Can Xue discusses emotion and desire, the essential and the worldly, and the deep power of words. “Our world becomes beautiful because of reading,” she says. “How can we not love a world that becomes so beautiful?”
Can Xue’s responses are translated by Annelise Finegan.
Since The Enchanting Lives of Others is so much about the experience of reading, of sharing reading, and of discussing reading, what emotions do you hope readers will feel in response to the novel? It also seems that reading is often described in your writing as solving riddles or enigmas. What is the deeper meaning behind what happens on the surface with the character’s lives and their book club?
Can Xue: I consider the greatest mystery within a mystery in human life to be the conflict of emotions and desires. It is in depicting this conflict that my experimental fiction often reaches its greatest heights. Reading is also solving riddles. And every reader should be solving the enigma of themselves. That is everything I hope for.
You read about the riddles of emotion and desire for the characters in the novel. You’re stimulated, and without realizing it you enter the world of the book as one of its characters. The instant you resonate with the other characters and interact with them, your body (the source of desire) will awake. You will begin to have reveries and then start to devote yourself, body and soul, to a state that is like the one you have been reading about—but it is your own state, and in that state you will deduce the emotions that your reading has aroused. This is the way of reading and the ideal reader that I anticipate.
Discussions that take place in a book club, as happens in The Enchanting Lives of Others, are even more lively and interesting. A number of people are reading a book at the same time, each of them stimulated by the same book. But every person has different riddles to solve in their lives and so is stimulated in different ways. The conversations among book friends not only broaden the perspectives of each reader but also expand the meaning of the original work.
I believe that a piece of writing is completed only through each reader’s unique ideas and deductions. If no one reads a book, that book has not been finished. All of my fiction is about emotional conflicts, and I hope that under the provocation of these writings my readers will charge their way into the depths of the desires within themselves and benefit from my method for solving such enigmas.
You have said that the characters in your writing are all aspects of yourself. How is this reflected by the characters in this book, who are all avid readers and writers?
CX: My writing is an outpouring from the core of my being, so that every character is my essential self. I’ve portrayed here the reading lives and love lives of all sorts of readers. These are my own most profound experiences and also possible ideal lives for myself. I’ve even portrayed the life of an author, the kind of life that could be an ideal life for myself. I’ve depicted the lives of some ordinary people as well, because I am myself an ordinary person, and I want to be as invigorated about my worldly existence as I am about my essential one. In this novel I write about the essential life of every character, but their essential lives are unified with their worldly lives, while the beauty of each permeates the other. The essential realizes the worldly. People long for the everyday; in their everyday lives, people also long for an essential elevation. This forms a circle.
There is a passage in the novel that reads, “While Xiao Sang was thinking of these unusual and fascinating events in her life, the plot of the book she’d just been reading kept flashing through her mind. These plots didn’t correspond to reality, but there always seemed to be some connection.” Later you write, about the character Han Ma, “The book became more and more engaging, and what was written in it seemed to be the same as her life now. Every time a plot appeared in the book, she could find correspondences in her life.” What is your perspective on the relationship between fiction and reality?
CX: This raises the fundamental question of my writing: the question of the relationship between worldly life and essential life. Narratives about this run through my entire work. The Enchanting Lives of Others realizes the unity and self-becoming of these two aspects of life in the most thoroughgoing way, which results in there being no chasm between the lives of others. The connection could be called seamless—it’s as though this were that, or that one thing has two sides.
Ever since I started writing I have created narratives about this (Five Spice Street, for example) in which I am trying to unify the essence of the depths of human nature (which is literature) with the surface phenomena of human nature (which is worldly), or to look upon both kinds of life as essence, to make them essential to each other. At the time of writing Five Spice Street, I chose a satirical method, and what I had my characters reveal was: even though people’s lives are divided this way, in opposition, the human or the self has in the end the grandest of structures, capable of applying the dialectics of contradiction to produce an unbelievable synthesis of these fissures and oppositions. I consider my experimental literature to have a surpassing technique that produces this “division within apperception, apperception within division.”
In most of my writing, I combine the two different lives through satire. The Enchanting Lives of Others was written in 2021, at a time when I’d reached old age and the state of my art made fully evident its pure, concordant side. I decided to make a new experiment, a utopian tale of “transforming the everyday into art, then restoring art to the everyday.” And thus I began the creation of this “imaginative” work. The experiment went so well that I didn’t even dare to believe it: I finished writing all 260,000 characters of the novel in ten months, so it was the quickest novel that I’ve written.
Since I was combining the two lives into one in a direct way, using the plainest language, my passions were more unrestrained and animated than ever before. I think it was because the texture of everyday life gave me direct stimulus. I am Chinese, and Chinese people consider worldly life important—clothing, food, housing, means of travel, and also sex. Our experience of the aesthetics of material life is no less than the aesthetics of spiritual life that Westerners experience. Besides, I believe that the beauty of the everyday that I see seems as essential as the beauty of the spirit, like the two sides of a coin Borges spoke of in “The Zahir.” I have deduced this kind of unified life, bringing the two extremes into contact, letting them change each other, offering the reader a new experience—namely, transforming phenomena into essences while also realizing the essential as a phenomenon.
Through my writing process I have come to think that Western people can surely understand these other (worldly) aesthetics, because they are the essence of the spirit. In this way, the life of worldly phenomena becomes essential life through the author’s eyes, and this is what “turning life into art” means. My readers must be “world-enterers” who love their everyday life, not “world-leavers” who belittle it. As to what I have said in the past about “negating the superficial worldly life,” this in fact was an intricate way of celebrating the beauty of everyday existence through the negation of satirical narratives. So for me, what my fiction deduces is how to make essential life worldly and make everyday life into art. I believe that I have done so in this novel.
What about the connection between literature and love? The novel contains many reflections by the characters such as “What is literature? It’s love,” or about how we’re “drawn into love with all our hearts, just like we long to read and write. The difference lies in how love’s outcome cannot be predicted, while reading and writing are sure to bring about happiness.” How does this dynamic between love and literary appreciation play out in The Enchanting Lives of Others?
CX: Literature depicts the essence of love. The essence of love is the same for each and every individual: a lofty spirit and physical passion. What literature deduces about essential love produces in all readers feelings of happiness. Even if the discovery is a tragedy, readers will still experience the joy and way of being moved that are human, which will arouse their lust for the pursuit of freedom and beauty. Although love in reality comes in all different kinds: there are comedies and there are tragedies, and the ones in love cannot predict which it will be. My perspective is that if you love literature, literature will cultivate your sensibilities. In this way, even if your love is tragic, you will become beautiful in the process, because you have a literary soul.
What makes literature fascinating is that it always reveals the sensibility of beauty, so that the reader feels that living is worthwhile, and is happy. Literature also can give people a love for everyday life, realizing the desires of the human heart through means of worldly beauty, which leads to feelings of happiness. Going further, experimental literature has a special element, in that it requires a reader to become one of the characters in the book, to take part in deduction and, in the midst of deduction, to demonstrate the creativity of the self, activating one’s desire to dream, to experience personally. It asks readers to become extremely familiar with the novel’s plots, to place the book nearby for reading whenever there’s time, to commit it to memory. Why should you do this? To arouse your lust, to give you the impulse to create. I hope that readers will try out this way of reading—there will be results.
The Enchanting Lives of Others takes place in three long parts, without chapters, and the third part loops back to the time before the first part takes place, and then retells the story of Xiao Sang and Heishi from a different perspective along with the story of Qiaozi. Could you share your thoughts about the form of The Enchanting Lives of Others and how it developed while you wrote the novel?
CX: What if I were to tell you that I have never worked out the plot of a piece of fiction carefully, or that when I write, I never deliberate, just immerse myself in passion, relying on intuition to express myself at will? You might not believe me. But in fact, that is how I write.
After I finished writing The Enchanting Lives of Others and went back to read it, my reaction was surprise. The novel contains numerous plotlines but leaves an impression of seamlessness. Yet I actually did not consider this at all, with the sentences and dialogues and plot coming readily to hand. You’ve mentioned Part Three, which wasn’t created by meticulous design but came about because I felt that the storylines that came before weren’t a completed vision, so I wanted to add to them slightly. Then it was a wonder: as soon as I picked up my pen, the plotline I was writing joined all of its own accord to the ones from before, so that my narrative became seamless. In fact, all of my writing tallies with the scenario I’m describing here. It’s just that most of my previous fiction has been obscure and difficult to understand, so no one noticed this feature.
The narrative of this novel is prosaic, even easy to understand, and readers may think that I planned the form. But actually I was following my usual rule of “automatic writing”: writing up to where I write to. What is automatic writing? It would take a long essay to explain. I will speak about it in simpler terms for now. Automatic writing depends not on composition but on practical intuition. The kind of intuition that comes into play in music, athletic competitions, and scientific inventions, or in the thinking of mathematical prodigies and military tacticians. This is a function of the body and not a function of logic, put into action by human desires and emotions, its essentiality demonstrated in intuitive diagrams and not shown through speculative language.
When practical intuition is at work, the one using it must hold in check the self’s inner desires and practical reason, to allow the rise and fall of regulated rhythm to squeeze passion, to build things new to the universe. While practical intuition is at work, the person is immersed in passion, and analytical reasoning recedes backstage. There is only practical reason accompanying intuition as it dashes forward. . . . What intuitive writing attends to isn’t how to come up with plots by thinking about them, but rather the mechanism of inner desires, and that’s enough.
The mechanism of our desires is the greatest mechanism of intelligence that Mother Nature endows us with. It is the source of creation, and so long as we are self-aware about this mechanism, and let it function spontaneously, we are building new things, while the human construct within these things is always seamless. This is nothing mysterious: in the practice of our daily lives we often come across situations like this. It’s just that since the intuition of the body cannot be directly explained with analytical language, as its pattern is both hidden and deep, most people attribute to the realm of mystery a function that is the most universal for humankind. This mechanism is actually a mechanism of spontaneous deduction, and the things that it creates all have this characteristic of seamlessness.
Finally, why didn’t I divide this long novel into chapters? I wanted to convey the crowding together of life in the city and the strength of passion.
There seems to be mysterious communication among the readers who gather at the Pigeon Book Club, along with an intense atmosphere that people find extraordinary. Perhaps it’s that you are conveying an elevated literary state. As readers we are drawn in, but it’s very difficult to “solve the riddles.” Could you offer any more clues?
CX: Whenever stepping onto the “path” to the Pigeon Book Club, the characters seem to be escaping their worldly lives and entering into the essential life of the self (or we could call it the life of art). They all long for communication, and the conversations in the book club are essential communication. Every character at the book club enters into a state where the soul seems to leave the body. On the evenings of the book club meetings, their psyches are stirred, their souls intimately mingling and interacting. No matter what the other person says, another person knows what is intended, since these are conversations of self-consciousness with itself. And the source of this passionate discussion is the glorious book that everyone is enjoying together.
There’s an enchanting young man who says that while he is doing chores around the house he experiences “that kind of state.” After Xiao Sang hears him say this, she all at once experiences “that kind of state” with him. What kind is it? Naturally it’s a state of happiness. When people read glorious works of literature, then afterward devote themselves in a grounded way to life, to labor, that state draws near. It is the meaning of our everyday existence. Our world becomes beautiful because of reading—how can we not love a world that becomes so beautiful?
There is also Xiao Sang first attending the book club, when she immediately tells her new book friends about a journey her soul has taken, using the language of lust. She is always expressing herself spontaneously, without fully understanding herself what she is saying. At the beginning she worries that the book friends won’t understand, but she’s wrong. Her speech provokes a strong response in each of them, so everyone returns to “that book” and becomes immersed in it. As for Xiao Sang, she is wild with joy at the excellence of what she has said. She has spoken enchanting words that she could never have imagined and is elevated anew. This is the atmosphere of the Pigeon Book Club.
Can Xue is the pseudonym of the Chinese writer Deng Xiaohua (b. 1953). Formerly a tailor, she began writing fiction in 1983. Her works include Barefoot Doctor, I Live in the Slums, Love in the New Millennium, The Last Lover, and Five Spice Street. Annelise Finegan is academic director and clinical associate professor of translation at New York University.
The post The Enchanting Lives of Others: A Conversation with Can Xue appeared first on Yale University Press.
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