Review
First, let us review. In this course we are looking at ways in which Westerners see the East, whether it is Persia, China, India, or Japan—and I am introducing techniques to analyze how Westerners see the East. I am avoiding criticizing these ways on various moral grounds and focusing instead on what Westerners actually say, think, and believe about the East. Look at it this way:
1- What Is.
2- What people say What Is.
3- The Truth of What Is.
4- The Truth of Why people say that What Is really Is.
I am interested mostly in #s 2 and 4. We have discussed ideology, projection, psychoanalysis, and cliché as being partly conscious, partly unconscious reasons for Why people say What Is really Is. Sometimes, if Freud and Lacan are right, the Truth of What Is is the very opposite of what people say What Is. Remember the Wittgenstein joke. Two people look at the exact same phenomenon, the same What Is. One person says that obviously the sun is revolving around the earth because that’s what it looks like when the sun revolves around the earth. The other person says that obviously the earth is turning on its axis and revolving around the sun because that is exactly what it looks like when one body revolves around another while turning on it axis.
Another way to understand #s 2 and 4 is to say that what people may say is obvious, or natural, or just how things are may be consciously or unconsciously constructed. I bring this word to your attention because our film, M Butterfly, is based on a play of the same title and the play is often described as a deconstruction of Western attitudes toward the East, and of male attitudes toward women, or of Western men’s attitudes toward Eastern women. In the simplest possible terms, ‘deconstruction’ (a term coined by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida) means the revealing of the constructed-ness of anything that appears “obvious” or “natural”. Derrida’s entire career in philosophy was to take terms that seemed just as obvious as can be—terms like ‘presence’—and show that they may in fact be artificial constructions, that they may in fact not be completely natural. Derrida had no problem saying “There is no present”, which drove many of his critics just crazy and still does. (At an online forum recently I just mentioned his name and out of the blue I received dozens and dozens of responses accusing Derrida of ruining literature and philosophy, or destroying universities, that everything he wrote was completely worthless, and so on and so on…I was really astonished at the animosity [hatred] directed at him—or me for even mentioning him. To me, that irrational animosity indicates that Derrida maybe really had touched on something worth thinking about.) Anyways, in addition to ideology, psychoanalysis, projection, and cliché, we now have deconstruction as a possible tool to examine reasons Why people say What Is really Is and maybe get to the truth about why they say these things. What is more, just as Derrida had no problem saying “there is no present”, Jacques Lacan (whom we discussed in the film Black Narcissus) had no trouble saying “Woman does not exist” and “Woman is a symptom of Man”, which drove many of his critics (including, naturally, many women) just crazy! But notice Lacan’s grammar; he does not say women do not exist, only Woman does not exist, which has to mean something like: there is no one Idea or Ideal of Woman; that any Idea or Ideal of Woman is some kind of artificial construction of desire or fantasy or repression or some other unconscious motive—an artificial construction which is built from, or around, or is added to a naturally occurring difference: men and women are not biologically the same. In the same way, deconstruction does not care only about the difference between what is natural and what is artificial; it examines both at the same time and as the same phenomenon. Thus, deconstruction deconstructs the very difference between natural and artificial to expose powerful constraints to human thought and beliefs. For example: Let’s go back to the people who just naturally saw that the sun is revolving around the earth. They “see” that the earth does not move; the sun revolves around us, and not only the sun, all the other stars and planets revolve around us. From that “obvious” and “natural” observation was then constructed the belief that the earth is the very center of the entire universe, and not only that, since the central point in a system is the unique point, we on earth are unique in the universe; and from that we cannot help but conclude that we must be the most important thing in the entire universe. In these terms we may say that, in deconstruction, the natural revolves around the artificial and at the same time the artificial revolves around the natural. Neither one is more ‘present’ or more central than the other; and yet they are not the same thing.
We have seen that one characteristic way in which Chinese people appear to Westerners is as “servile”. We have Hegel who is not just plain stupid and who says that Chinese “equality […] testifies to a servile consciousness—one which has not yet matured itself …” and we have a popular film, Keys of the Kingdom, in which Joseph, a humble man, says he wishes only to “serve God”, and Mr. Chia, a well-educated Mandarin, for most of the film keeps trying to be of service to Father Chisholm. What is more, just last year I read in the Taipei Times that film star Jackie Chan said: “I’m not sure if it’s good to have freedom or not […] If you’re too free you’re like the way Hong Kong is now. It’s very chaotic. Taiwan is also chaotic.” He adds later: “I’m gradually beginning to feel that we Chinese need to be controlled. If we’re not being controlled, we’ll just do what we want [italics mine].”
So, what’s going on here? I guess we could blame it all on Hegel. But I doubt that the makers of Keys of the Kingdom or Jackie Chan have ever read Hegel’s Philosophy of History. I think most philosophers have not even read it, and, anyways, I doubt Hegel was the first to say it. Or we could say that, well, it’s true! It’s obvious! Chinese people really are servile! But now, what would that mean? Isn’t everybody servile? I do not think of myself as servile, and I do not think I have ever been described as servile. But, I pay my taxes even when I dislike the government, I cross the street only when the light tells me to, I get to class on time even when I don’t feel like it, and so on and so on. I certainly don’t know the reality, but I’ll bet that the Chinese people are no more or less servile than Americans, or Westerners, or Northerners, or Southerners, or any other bunch of people. What is more interesting is that Chinese people are being ‘constructed’ as “servile”—even by a Chinese guy named Jackie Chan! It is possible that the Taipei Times misquoted Chan. Their newspaper tends to adopt DPP political views, and they are always suspicious of China. But, even if that’s true, they misquote him in a way that continues to advance this characteristic construction, cliché, lie, untruth, prejudice, stereotype, myth—call it whatever you think it is—of Chinese servility. I’ll call it a construction, a fairly neutral term, since our film has been discussed in terms of constructions and deconstructions. There may be some truth to a cliché (there usually is because a cliché is usually vaguely formulated, like a big flexible fisherman’s net which is bound to catch at least some fish), but as a construction, a cliché is artificial, man-made, not natural. It becomes a kind of collective cultural unconscious (another term to remember) whose artificiality needs to be interrogated [questioned, looked at closely] before any kind of cross-cultural communication can begin to take place.
For example (and this example is very often repressed in America): Americans very often characterize themselves as a “freedom loving people” as if by nature. But, before the revolution about 1/3rd of Americans wanted independence from Gr. Britain, about 1/3rd wanted to remain a colony, and 1/3rd didn’t care either way. After the revolution, those loyal to Gr. Britain were either killed or robbed of their property and driven out of the country. Now, this is not to deny the significance of the revolution and all the intelligence, planning, and effort that went into making it happen, setting up a new type of government, and so on. But it certainly didn’t happen because Americans are just naturally a freedom-loving people.
M Butterfly
This exquisite film, directed by the great Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg, did not do well either at the box office or critically. The play on which the film is based did do well on Broadway and elsewhere, won a Tony Award, and has been studied widely at universities all over the world. The film, I suspect, is simply too weird, too complicated and too unbelievable which is ironic since it is based both on a popular opera and short story and on historical truth. In addition, films with gay themes often have a difficult time in America. The film is based on the play by David Henry Hwang (an American born Chinese) who also wrote the screenplay for the film; his play is based on the extremely well-know Italian opera by Puccini; Puccini’s opera is based on a short story by an American author; and the short story is based on a French novel written in 1887. What is more, the award-winning Broadway play Miss Saigon from a few years ago, has basically the same simple plot: Asian woman falls in love with visiting American/They have an affair/American leaves, marries an American, returns to Asia/Asian woman realizes she has been deceived and kills herself. Simple and stupid, right? Well, something about this plot is really is captivating since it has been retold for over a hundred years. What is more, the play and film—but not the opera, short story or novel—are based on fact! I emphasize this because it may mean that in this case life has imitated art and not art imitates life (as is supposed to be the case).
In 1986, in Paris, there was widely publicized espionage [means: involves spying] trial. A French diplomat named Mr. Bouriscot was found guilty of passing secret state documents to a Chinese spy named Mr. Shi with whom Mr. Bouriscot had been having an affair for 20 years during which time, he declared at the trial, he believed that Mr. Shi was a woman! In real life, Mr. Bouriscot did not commit suicide, served his sentence and even recently maintained in an interview that he indeed believed Mr. Shi to have been a woman! Hwang’s play was written in 1988. I prefer the film version to the stage play and in fact the film is one of my all-time favorite films, but I am still not exactly sure why…it is a very complex film where reality revolves around fantasy, and at the same time fantasy revolves around reality: a deconstruction. It is something like the famous paradox from China that Westerners love to quote: I dreamed I was a butterfly last night, and the dream was so real that today I do not know if I am a man who dreamed he was a butterfly, or if I am now a butterfly dreaming that I was once a man.
Hwang has stated that he sees the Butterfly story in this political way. He writes:
M. Butterfly has sometimes been regarded as an anti-American play, a diatribe against the stereotyping of the East by the West, of women by men. Quite to the contrary, I consider it a plea to all sides to cut through our respective layers of cultural and sexual misperception, to deal with one another truthfully for our mutual good, from the common and equal ground we share as human beings…For the myths of the East, the myths of the West, the myths of men and the myths of woman—these have so saturated our consciousness that truthful contact between nations and lovers can only be the result of heroic effort.
His understanding of his own play is what is called humanism: briefly, the belief that East and West, men and women are all human beings and thus in principle we can and should and perhaps must perceive each other as we really are: common and human. We can get to the Truth of What Is if we work hard enough like heroes, andthen we can then live as What Is. But I ask: Is this heroism not also a myth? Is humanism a myth? Can we live without artifice? Without paradox? Is the Truth really desirable? Is the Truth exactly what we do not want? This is the question the Cronenberg film poses.
M Butterfly quotes [with analysis]:
Gallimard [near the end at his prison performance]: There is a dream of the Orient that I have. Of slender women in kimonos who die for the love of unworthy foreign devils […] of women who have been born and raised to be perfect women, who take whatever punishment we give them and bounce back, strengthened by love, unconditionally.
Gallimard does not desire the Truth; he desires the dream. Humanism presupposes that we want and desire the Truth. That is what makes this film and his character to fascinating. Gallimard knows perfectly well that his vision of the East is cliché, stereotype, etc.—but he experiences the clichés as beautiful.
[at their first meeting]
Gallimard: You made me see the beauty of the story, of her death. It’s pure sacrifice. He’s not worthy of it, but what can she do? She loves him so much. It’s very beautiful
Song: Yes, to a Westerner […] It’s one of your favorite fantasies, isn’t it? The submissive Oriental woman and the cruel white man. Consider it this way: what would you say if a blonde homecoming queen fell in love with a short Japanese businessman? He treats her cruelly, then goes home for three years, during which time she prays to his picture and turns down marriage from a young Kennedy. Then when she learns he has remarried, she kills herself. Now, I believe you would consider this girl a deranged idiot, correct? But because it is an Oriental who kills herself for a Westerner—ah! You find it beautiful!
Yes, exactly! And the whole tragedy should rationally have been avoided right there. Song goes on to say that “it’s the music, not the story” that is beautiful. Right off the bat, Song gets to the Truth of why Gallimard says What Is really Is. True, Puccini’s music is beautiful, but actually the story has endured through a novel, short story, an opera, two plays and a film…so, we cannot believe Song, something else is going on. Rationally, yes, the story is stupid. And yet… We learn that Gallimard is a low-level bureaucrat, an accountant, he is not “cultured”, and he’s really a little bit stupid. In fact, he is servile. “I’m just doing my job” he says at one point. This means, ‘I do not think; I have no inner life; I do what I am told’. Is this not exactly what Hegel and Jackie Chan say is the Truth of the Chinese people? I think that the film shows that when Westerners condemn the East for being servile, there is at least an element of projection, as we have discussed previously (except that it is inverted; here I repress something I do not want on to the Other even though it is true of me too). However, the camera shows that Gallimard is struck by the beauty of the music, by Song herself, and by the story—all at once. It is all a new experience and he gives himself to it, even though he says, rationally, “well, yes, I see your point.” On the other hand, he has discovered a new inner life in himself; that’s what makes him a poignant character. He now has an “inner life”, which is important to Hegel; but also he is now a “slave” to the story, the beauty of the story, the music, the lie, the cliché, the stereotype—and to Song her/himself. He is slavish in his outer life (as an accountant) and in his inner life.
[later]
Song: Education has always been undervalued in the West, hasn’t it?
Gallimard: I wouldn’t say that.
Song: No, of course you wouldn’t. After all, how can you objectively judge your own values?
Gallimard: I think it’s possible to achieve some distance.
Song: Do you?
That is something we are looking at in this course: Is it possible to see oneself and others objectively, scientifically? Without any artifice, constructions, etc.? Many people think so—both scientists and humanists—many others do not and search for other than objective ways to approach each other.
Song: The Oriental woman has always held a certain fascination for you Caucasian men. Is that not true?
Gallimard: Yes, but that fascination is imperialist, or so you tell me.
Song: Yes, it is always imperialist. Sometimes…sometimes it is also mutual.
Gallimard is willing to take “lessons” in ‘political correctness’ from Song and at the same time Song is gradually seducing him. Here, she is quietly implying: Go ahead! Be an Imperialist! I’m Oriental! We like it sometimes! We need to be controlled (just as Jackie Cahn says)!
Song: I am slightly afraid of scandal.
Gallimard: What are we doing that’s scandalous?
Song: I’m entertaining you in my parlor.
Gallimard: Where I come from, that would hardly be construed [i.e. constructed] as—
Song: You come from France. France is a country living in the modern era, perhaps even ahead of it. China is a nation whose soul is firmly rooted 2000 yeas in the past. What I do—even pouring tea for you now—it has implications. Please go…
We have mentioned this before. Song is well aware of how Westerners view the East, and as part of her seduction she is “feeding” these stereotypes to Gallimard: The East, bound by tradition, old, full of mysterious signs/the West, new, modern, progressive, revolutionary…
Song: Please come back. May audiences miss the white devil in their midst.
Gallimard is a nobody, not very bright, a low-level accountant, but now he is exalted: he is the “devil”; he is a somebody, he is special! He loves the feeling! He is NOT a nobody after all! He is EVIL, and maybe she loves him!
Song: Now that we embark on the most forbidden of loves, I’m so afraid of my destiny.
Gallimard: There is no destiny except the one we make for ourselves.
Again, as we have discussed before: the Oriental is trapped in tradition, but the Westerner is free—free to make his own destiny, his own history. And, there is an irony here. Gallimard is making a destiny for himself, but not the destiny he thinks. He thinks he can become the “evil” white devil from the opera and story Madame Butterfly.
Gallimard: Are you my butterfly?
Song: Don’t you know already?
Gallimard: I want you to say it.
Song: I don’t want to say it.
Song: Modesty is so important to the Chinese […] The Chinese are an ancient people. We cling to the old ways of life and love.
Again, same as before. Gallimard loves it…now he thinks that he is her teacher. He will teach her modern love; teach her to be free. This was also a Hegelian theme which we saw in the previous class. The Chinese people are equal and equally servile. In response to a question from Gallimard Song says that even in the “new order” the Chinese are kept equally ignorant.
Gallimard [speaking to the French Consul about the defeat of the French in Vietnam]: Deep down, they’re attracted to us. They find our ways exciting […] They will always submit to the greater force […] Sir, do you really believe that these little men could defeat us without our unconscious consent?
Again… “they” (Chinese, Orientals in general) are passive, “we” (Westerners) are active. “They” are weak, servile; “we” are strong and masterful.
Comrade Chin: Don’t you understand how degrading those images are to woman? And why do you behave this way when he is not even here?
Song: Comrade, in order to better serve the great Proletarian State, I practice my deception as often as possible. I despise this costume, yet for the sake of our Great Helmsman, I will endure it, along with other bourgeois Western perversions.
Comrade Chin: I’m not convinced that this will be enough to redeem you in the eyes of the party.
Song: I’m trying my best to become someone else.
This complicates things. I am not sure (and the film and play do not make clear) if Song really has fallen in love with Gallimard. If she has then she/he must play a role (spy) within a role (woman) within a role (man who cannot show he loves a man. Gallimard is also trapped in a role. He must become the Evil American of the story, and so what does he do? He has an affair with Frau Baden. Is he attracted to her? No, of course not. This is merely, he says, an “extra-extra marital affair”. (Importantly, she immediately strips naked to “get down to business” like a good, real, western woman!) In order to fulfill the ‘Butterfly’ fantasy Gallimard must be unfaithful to his wife and to Song, and eventually to his own country, otherwise he will never have the experience of being the completely “worthless” man who is nonetheless loved by the beautiful “Oriental Woman” of his dream!
Song: I don’t know how to change my body into the body of another.
Gallimard: Oh! Butterfly! I have betrayed you in so many ways!
IF Song really loves Gallimard, then we now see that (s)he is becoming trapped. (S)he is not a woman, yet may wish to have the body of a woman for Gallimard who wants to love a woman. But, that is impossible. Am I wrong or is Cronenberg subtly disagreeing with the humanism of Hwang? After all, near the end of the film, Song strips and shows Gallimard objectively that she/he is a man and that in fact Gallimard loved that body, that body which is now nakedly present to him. Is truth the solution to our cross-cultural, cross-gender problems?
Song: Comrade…Why in Beijing Opera are women’s roles traditionally played by men?
Comrade Chin: I don’t know. Most probably a remnant of the reactionary and patriarchial social structure…
Song: No. It’s because only a man knows how a woman is supposed to act.
Lacan: “Woman does not exist”; “Woman is a symptom of Man”.
[after she meets him with their “son”]
Song: The days I spent with you were the only days I ever truly existed.
This is very poignant. Indeed Song, or “Song” is/was a fiction, an artifice, a construction who, like any fiction, only exists in the fiction. Yet, Song may really want to be the fiction in reality because of her/his love for Gallimard.
[at the trial]
Song: He was very responsive to my ancient Oriental ways of love—all of which I invented myself, just for him.
Again, she/he played into Gallimard’s Orientalist fantasies. Westerners are sexually repressed Christians, but in Asia—Ahh! There, in Asia, sex—a very natural and ordinary thing like the egg salad sandwich I mentioned in the Keys lecture—is transformed into an art, into something perfect! (We will see this cliché again when we watch Memoirs of a Geisha].
[in the police wagon after the trial and after Song is naked showing Gallimard the truth]
Song: Look at me!
Gallimard: I just think that it’s ridiculously funny that I’ve wasted all this time to trust a man.
Song: It was always me! Tell me that you love me!
Gallimard: You’ve shown me your true self—but what I loved was the lie.
Song: Underneath the robes, beneath everything, it was always me. Tell me you adore me.
Gallimard: How could you, who understood me so well, make such a mistake? You’ve shown me your true self, and what I loved was the lie, the perfect lie, that’s been destroyed.
Song: You never really loved me.
Gallimard: I’m a man who loved a woman created by a man. Anything else simply falls short.
This is the key passage in Cronenberg’s version of the story and Hwang’s new screenplay for it, one of the most perfect plots since Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (in my opinion). In Sophocles’ play everything Oedipus does to find the murderer of his father only proves that he himself is the murderer; in this film, everything that Gallimard does to win the love of “Butterfly” proves that he himself is “Butterfly” and that Song is the “worthless” one. Also, it conforms to the Lacanian view that what a man loves in Woman is what Man (Gallimard and Song) himself constructs, thus, in another notorious quote, Lacan says that “the sexual relationship does not exist”, by which he means that we all exist within own fantasies, constructions, stereotypes of the other, and we can never escape them; we can only talk about them.
[final speech]
Gallimard: For I, Rene Gallimard, have been known, have been loved by—a perfect woman […] my mistake was simple and absolute: The man I loved was not worthy. He didn’t deserve even a second glance. Instead, I gave my love, all my love […] My name is Gallimard; also known as Madame Butterfly!
Gallimard indeed loved the perfect woman; Gallimard loved Woman; but this Woman did not really exist. This Woman was his fantasy. But also not his fantasy. This Woman was created by both a man—the Chinese spy—and also Gallimard’s fantasy of the Orient, or, by a classically male fantasy of the Orient and of Woman. At the same time, the Woman Gallimard loved really did exist: this Woman was Gallimard himself who was loved by and betrayed by a worthless man! The ‘Butterfly’ story deconstructs itself before our eyes.
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