Literary Analysis Of Madwoman On The Bridge

interested in making accounts, impersonality is a limit imposed on them not by realism, but by history. There is very few of fiction and much of reality, the narrative of the last Yu Hua and Su Tong in Madwoman on the Bridge or The Boat to Redemption to name some, is a political fable with realistic mode registering the movements outside as crucial elements of human experience. Narrative captures the transient through the eyes of the witnesses, the eyes flashing upon the image of what they just saw. The tragedy of Chinese history borders the happenings of protagonist’s broken life, the tone of the narration alternates between the indifference of history and subjective elements of compassion, similar to historical fiction, but different because

Drama, collective and individual, covers the whole plot, we are offered a detailed description of tortures inflicted by the madness of the Cultural Revolution, we record the broken lives of those who survived, and we are given an insight of the destructive consequences of economic developments. But it’s not tragedy yet, there are fundamental conceptual elements missing. There is no catharsis for the protagonists, they are not allowed to receive final purification, even if at some stage of the narration their fate seem taking a positive turn in the end they always lose: Su Tong’s Madwoman is taken away to a sanatorium, Fugui and Dongliang are left alone with a pile of memories and mistakes to decode, Sun Guanglin kneels down at the side of life, Lin Hongs whose natural beauty motivates her innocence, ends up opening a bordello, Song Gangs -the pure face of time- is ultimately a victim of the market economy and his weaknesses . This is realism without salvation, a crude ostentation of that desolation that, we will see later, is one of the main traits of Chinese postmodern literature. Unlike in the European version of realism, there is not the intervention of a Deus ex machina to appeal when all else fails, as a plot device, that comes from nowhere to untangle the dramatic

Wang Er’s confessions, in Wang Xiaobo’s The Golden Years, specifically describe his sexual intercourse with Chen Qingyang, very far in terms of content and terminology from the political context of the Cultural Revolution and so are the leaders reading it:

When I turn in this confession, the leaders really liked it (…) our task in the future was to confess our illicit love affair. If we confessed well, they would allow us to get married. But we didn’t want to get married. So later they said if we confessed well, they would let me go back to civilization, and then Chen Qingyang would get to work in a bigger hospital. So I stayed in my hotel room and I wrote confessions for over a