Chu T’ien-Wen, Notes of a Desolate Man. Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-Chun Lin, translators. Columbia University Press, 1994/1999.
As I have pulled books out of boxes and off shelves, I wondered if I would encounter a book which, at the time I bought it I considered contemporary realism but now seems a historical artifact. Chu T’ien-Wen is a Taiwanese writer, and Notes of a Desolate Man is an AIDS novel that takes place primarily in Taiwan and Tokyo. As I began reading, I was actually surprised–”Wow, an AIDS novel. I don’t think that I’ve read one of these before.”--and was curious how the novel would use AIDS. The narrator is Xiao Shao, a gay man who is writing about his friend Ah Yao, who is suffering from end stage AIDS at the beginning of the novel and dies in the second chapter. Shao’s narrative initially seems to be an exercise in nostalgia, as he uses the dying man’s diseased body as a memento mori for his once energetic, active, rule-breaking, sensual self, and who acted almost solely on his passions. Ah Yao is a lightning rod of authenticity that Shao admires yet about whom he clearly has doubts, given the outcome of his behavior.
Notes of a Desolate Man is a thesis novel in which Chu T’ien-Wen explores whether, in the age of AIDS, one can learn to live with raging desire and/or loneliness, whether one can act on the former or resign oneself to the latter. For Shao, AIDS is horrible but the price of loneliness is worse: solitude is as frightening as raging desire. Today, even though there is still no cure for AIDS, there are so many drug treatments that those with AIDS can live, go on living, live the lives they’ve chosen, and, given the ubiquity of the drug commercials on television and in the media, be mainstreamed rather than excluded. The inevitable sense of tragedy and loss of the 1980s and early 1990s, the period when this novel is set, is missing today. For Shao, writing allows him to cycle through considerations of desire, loneliness, and death, because to settle in any of those positions is dangerous, inviting tragedy. A tricky maneuver.
While Ah Yao is the ostensible reason for and center of the book, Shao moves away from him pretty quickly as he worries the desire/loneliness binary. It’s not surprising why, because Ah Yao is not bothered by Shao’s existential quandary. Ah Yao has chosen desire. He is a devoted sybarite who does not change his behavior or repent. Shao shares an image of Ya Hao in his sick bed, opening the bedroom window, grabbing flowers and stuffing them in his mouth to chew. He is too weak for sex or much of anything else, but Ya Hao still wants sensuous stimulation as substitute for sensual stimulation.
The book becomes more about Shao trying to understand himself within the desire/loneliness binary in a world shaped by AIDS. He admits to “being a helpless loner handicapped by my own body language.” ←The narrator’s trap, out from which he pursues analogies as well as historical and intellectual contexts. To that end, I’m surprised how quickly Shao not only lets go of Ah Yao as central subject but even AIDS as he attempts to understand the broader contexts of his binary in a dangerous world, which he does through an ever-increasing network of analogies: for example, Shao writes about signifiers of death–starvation, tombstones, a BBC documentary on the death of an elephant–and he includes a personal story of trying to keep alive an unwanted gift of a fish, which ultimately dies. Shao’s narrative cycles tirelessly between the personal and the general. He moves, he writes, he cycles.
Shao is also an academic, working on his doctorate than taking a teaching job. Even his intellectual and theoretical references seem to tie him to the eighties and early nineties. He speaks of Levi-Strauss’ Tristes Tropique and Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality. He also speaks of films–Fellini’s La Strada and David Cronenberg’s The Fly–as well as literature, Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, not a surprise. These sections of the book sound more like academic lectures than fiction, but I think that he is actually lecturing to himself. Shao reminds me of people I knew in graduate school back in the 1980s who used critical theory as a way to analyze not only texts but their own lives and life in general, since life too was textual. Other period specific references: the AIDS quilt, ACT UP, New Age music, Michael Jackson. Less period specific references: Buddhism, Chinese history, Cleopatra, Miles Davis, Greek mythology, the Queen of Sheba, Tennessee Williams trolling for sex in Santa Monica in WWII.
Whatever the reference, Shao returns to his fundamental concern/fear about desire and loneliness in the age of AIDS, which he then cycles back to his own life. He spends much time on his relationship with his long time lover, Yongjie, a relationship that ultimately fades, but on which Shao never quite gives up, because it provides him a thread of hope in a world dominated by loneliness and death. In a long chapter, Shao tells the story of hooking up with a much younger man who is from an affluent family, but lives a solitary, alienated, computer gaming life, reinforcing the narrator’s fears of solitude. Shao also hooks up with a lanky guy who desperately wants a relationship, but Shao walks away from it, and there is a bathroom encounter in a porn theater which just emphasizes Shao’s loneliness again. He then turns to the stories of friends who have failed to find love and are alone. It is interesting that as Shao builds his case for the dangers of solitude he almost seems to forget the threat of AIDS. He doesn’t, but solitude clearly weighs most heavily on his mind.
At the end of the book, Shao returns to death. He remains troubled by Yongjie’s lingering, perhaps permanent, absence. He recounts Ya Hao’s funeral and witnessing his desiccated, shriveled corpse before it is cremated. He then intercuts descriptions of Ya Hao’s body and the rituals surrounding it with descriptions of his subsequent pilgrimage to India. For Shao, India is important, because it expands the context of what he has experienced. It is where Buddhism was born and from where it vanished after Sakyamuni’s death, and at the Ganges he witnesses a sacred god-filled space and the funerary rituals for the dead. By expanding the context, searching for analogies, Shao fights off solitude and finds solace. He is not alone in the trauma he feels at the disappearance of Yongjie and the death of Ya Hao; instead,he is part of a long, historical tradition for making sense of trauma, loss, and death. In the end, Shao cannot choose between two options, cannot settle on one side of the passion/loneliness binary because those sides cannot be separated from one another and are bound together by AIDS. In the end, Shao simply chooses to understand the world in which he finds himself: “So my writing, it continues.”
Although I feared that Shao would die by the end of Notes of a Desolate Man, I am glad that he did not, for I think his death would have negated the intense experiences, reflections, and intellectual work that makes up his narrative. This is a novel about how to live with AIDS rather than how to die by it.