Frontier. Can Xue

In 2010, I was teaching a World Literature intro class at an arts college in Santa Fe. I had chosen Daniel Halpern’s international reader The Art of the Story (2000) as one of my principal texts. Most of the writers I had heard of, but there were a few I didn’t know so I went about reading those carefully. One was Can Xue, whose story “The Child Who Raised Poisonous Snakes” was definitely the most bizarre story I had ever read. This is saying something—I have a big appetite for the bizarre. When I taught it a few students got the bug like me, but most were confused and traumatized by it. I was secretly happy about that—I wanted her to myself. I imagined a weird cult all around the world of her admirers, her allure completely lost on normals. Occasionally I’d ask people about her and nine times out of ten they had no idea who I was talking about. But when they did, it was instant cult camaraderie.

      In 2015 I got to know her. I was on the jury for the Neustadt Prize for Literature—some call this “the American Nobel,” and it comes with a hefty award—and it was obvious to me who I’d pick for my nominee. The best part was we had to inform the person we were nominating. It happened that I was writer-in-residence at Bard College, where Bradford Morrow first published Can Xue in the States, in Bard’s journal Conjunctions. All I had to do was write the managing editor, my colleague, and ask her for Can Xue’s email, and there we were, emailing all the way until now. Can Xue was honored by the nomination and especially by the invitation to the States which came with the award—so much so that when she did not win (she was close), we decided she should still come. And so we schemed, and indeed she is due to come to the States in October 2016, not far from the American publication date of Frontier, in fact.

      Every time Can Xue has a book out in English translation, it’s yet another opportunity to see if that cult of Can Xue can expand. And one expects it won’t, but I’ve seen it with my own eyes: those chosen ones really bite and can’t let go.

      And so how does one introduce her? I always begin with her name. Can Xue’s name is a pseudonym that means both “the dirty snow that refuses to melt” and “the purest snow at the top of a high mountain”—and it happens to be synonymous with Chinese experimental literature. She is the author of six novels, fifty novellas, 120 short stories, and six book-length commentaries, with only a half a dozen of her works published in English (she has had five English translators, all of whom she refers to like they are close collaborators and even friends). Robert Coover called her a “new world master,” Susan Sontag believed she was worthy of a Nobel, and Eileen Myles has been a longtime fan.

      Then there is her self, the transmission of her writer persona through interviews. Here is the writer as true iconoclast, the uncompromising original. A choice quote on her process: “I never edit my stories. I just grab a pen and write, and every day I write a paragraph. For more than thirty years, it’s always been like this. I believe that I am surrounded by a powerful ‘aura,’ and that’s the secret of my success. Successful artists are all able to manipulate the ‘balance of forces’—they’re that kind of extraordinarily talented people.” Of course.

      As I mentioned she refers to herself in third person, describes fiction as a performance, and claims that all of her works are from the experiments in which she takes herself as the subject. In this sense Can Xue is almost more medium than artist, a vessel rather than a generator, creation being relegated to its perhaps most logical state: the mystical. “In my mind, my ideal readers are these: those who have read some works by the modernist writers, and who love metaphysical thinking and material thinking—both capabilities are needed for the reading of Can Xue.” Of course.

      She is also of the late bloomer species, one who came to her work well into adulthood, a story I don’t relate to but now wish I did: “I decided to become a writer when I was thirty years old. But I think before that I had been preparing for this, actually, since I was three years old . . . After the situation in China changed, all the literary things happened to me naturally. I have been like an erupting volcano ever since.” She began writing in 1983 and now is 63—at her peak, it feels like, though it’s hard to say when she wasn’t at a peak.

      Her last novel The Last Lover (Yale University Press) won a big translation award in 2015, the Best Translated Book Award, and got her more attention. One might say Can Xue has never quite “broken out” in the U.S., or even China, or anywhere for that matter.

      I always say the same thing when a book of hers is about to come out: it will be interesting what people make of this one. I’m not even sure who I’m talking about—perhaps my ideal reader—but here I go again with Frontier: It will be interesting what people make of this one.

      •

      Can Xue’s Frontier refers to a place called Pebble Town, the main location of the novel, a sort of dreamlike realm at the base of Snow Mountain, where reality constantly mingles with some other dimension. Through a dozen different characters, we dip in and out of the region, and it’s hard to know if we are also going in and out of the worlds of the living or the dead, the dreamlife or the waking life.

      Animals abound here, more than in any other Can Xue tale. You have geckos, wolves, eagles, black cats, snakes, black birds, butterflies, parrots, frogs, snow leopards, centipedes, turtles, crows, worms, sheep, pangolins, and cicadas, and probably many more that I lost track of. These animals sometimes operate like humans, other times like all-knowing deities, sometimes as demonic antagonists, other times as saints, occasionally as real entities and often as symbols. Pebble Town, as stony as it might seem, is alive with poplars and wind and all sorts of flora, and it is also quite brimming with fauna. (And sometimes flora and fauna seem like one: “The other poplars were so beautiful and vivacious that they seemed on the verge of speaking.”) The humans are never quite alone, always being witnessed or witnessing some other species who is on this ride with them. You are never ever quite alone in Pebble Town. The frontier, as free and expansive and limitless, is always populated just enough. Before you can fully let go and lose yourself, something, some being, something with a pulse, is there to remind you, you exist.

      The nature of your existence, though, might be up for debate (“Nancy looked bewildered, and—as though discussing a problem with an invisible person—said, ‘Hunh. I’m puzzled by lots of things here; they’re mixed up. Still, this place is magnetic. Look at that eagle, flying and stopping . . . Everything’s in doubt.’”). You could be an abandoned child, you could be the Director of Pebble Town’s Design Institute—the region’s Kafka-esque Castle of Dubious Employment—who goes in and out of death, you could be the one black man originally from Africa but adapted to this presumably Eastern land, you could be a couple trying to find your footing in a new land. Time is not quite clear and as some characters note, people don’t age in quite the same way.

      The beauty of Pebble Town is that everyone expects its lawlessness—or at least the fact that its laws and properties are not to be known. Can Xue very casually writes of its wonders, as if it were as banal as dust: “She sank into memories and told José that she was in an accident in the interior several years ago and was taken to the hospital, where she was pronounced dead. But after a day in the morgue, she came back to life. She was moved into an ordinary room. A young person went to her room every day and chatted with her. As they chatted, the institute director sensed that she’d seen him somewhere before, but couldn’t remember where. The young person said he was a vagrant and constantly on the move. He was currently helping out in the hospital. Not until the day she was discharged did he tell the truth: he said he had talked with her an entire night in the morgue and had almost frozen to death. She suddenly found this young person really annoying.”

      In another section, an anecdote also takes a strangely pragmatic turn, as if Can Xue wants to transform anything mythic, mystical or magical here into something more folkloric, simple, mundane: “Grace’s legs gave way and she sat on the floor. She propped herself up with her hands and then grabbed hold of a little feathered thing. It appeared to be a dead bird. This whole room seemed full of dead birds. She saw Lee standing against the wall, afraid of stepping on them. Oh, he was moving away from the wall, apparently intending to exit. Grace said silently, ‘Coward—what a coward!’ Lee exited, and Grace lay down. Dead birds kept dropping from above. Although she couldn’t see them, she could smell the