Mindanao State University

Iligan Institute of Technology

College of Arts and Social Sciences
Department of English

English 175

Survey of American Literature

Knowing One’s Identity by Knowing Others’ Culture and Literature

A Critical Analysis
On the Novel
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
by Dai Sijie

Submitted to
Prof. Nelia Balgoa

Submitted by
Mr. Rabindranath S. Polito

October 14, 2005

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 The story of Balzac and The Little Seamstress is that at the height of Mao's

infamous Cultural Revolution, two boys are among hundreds of thousands exiled to the

countryside for “re-education.” The narrator and his best friend, Luo, guilty of being the

sons of doctors, find themselves in a remote village where, among the peasants of the

Phoenix mountains, they are made to cart buckets of excrement up and down the

precipitous winding paths. Their meager distractions include a violin and, before long, the

beautiful daughter of the local tailor. However, it is when the two discover a hidden stash

of Western classics in Chinese translation that their re-education takes its most surprising

turn. While ingeniously concealing their forbidden treasure, the boys find transit to

worlds they had thought lost forever. In addition, after listening to their dangerously

seductive retellings of Balzac, even the Little Seamstress will be forever transformed.

The historical background of this novel was Mao's Cultural Revolution, which

began in 1966 and continued until the dictator's death a decade later. It was intended to

get rid of the educated class and directed specifically against the “Four Olds”: (1) old

ideas, (2) old culture, (3) old customs and (4) old habits. The urban bourgeoisie were

deemed enemies of the people, and so-called young intellectuals, youths who had

attended secondary school, were sent to the country to be “re-educated” by the

supposedly virtuous peasantry. Between 1968 and 1975, some 12 million youths were

thus “rusticated.”

Born in China in 1954, Dai Sijie is a filmmaker who was re-educated during the

Cultural Revolution. In 1984, he left China for France, where he has lived and worked

ever since “Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress,” his first novel, was an overnight

sensation when it was published in France in 2000, becoming an immediate bestseller and

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winning five prizes. Rights to the novel have been sold in nineteen countries, and it is

soon to be made into a film. I think the author is able to write this award-wining novel

because he is first, Chinese author and filmmaker. Then, has lived and worked in France

since 1984. Finally and most importantly, was one of these young intellectual men. He

spent the years between 1971 and 1974 in the mountains of Sichuan Province. Thus,

turned his experiences into a poetic and affecting novel “Balzac and the Little Chinese

Seamstress” which was first published in France a year ago, to huge acclaim.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is more like a fable with a theme of

hope. Moreover, this novel is saying that if we keep ourselves only in our very own

literature and culture, we will makes ignorant, impotent, and illiterate of who really we

are, and the way for us to achieve a total understanding of ourselves is through learning

and embracing the Western Ideologies. We know our identity by knowing others’, so to

speak. Ironically, the seamstress is only enlightened of her identity by knowing the

Western culture and literature.

To analyze and prove these statements, I used the thematic analysis (in a way of

trying to bring forth the theme of the novel) and characterization (in a way of studying

and analyzing the motivation and actions of the characters). Along with this analysis are

some of the literary criticism approaches like post-colonialism, in general, and the

theories of post-colonialism by Homi K. Bhaha.

Post-colonialism is an approach to literary analysis that concerns itself with

literature in formerly colonized countries. This theory (1) looks at the canon and (2)

rejects the universal Western canon, (3) points out colonization, (3) deals with hybridity,

(4) depicts ethnic differences and perspectives, and (5) exposes “the other”. In this study,

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side-by-side with Bhabha’s theories, from the Post-colonialism, I would only use

numbers three (3) and four (4). The term ‘post-colonial’ is used to cover all the culture

affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day. This

is because there is a continuity of preoccupations throughout the historical process

initiated by European imperial aggression.

Bhabha is a leading voice in postcolonial studies and is highly influenced by

Western poststructuralist theorists, notably Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel

Foucault. In Nation and Narration, he argues against the tendency to essentialize Third

World countries into a homogenous identity. Instead, he claims that all sense of

nationhood is narrativized. He has also made a major contribution to postcolonial studies

by pointing out how there is always ambivalence (fluctuating choice whether to accept

Western Ideologies or not) at the site of colonial dominance. In the Location of Culture,

Bhabha uses concepts such as mimicry (tendency of the Third World countries to imitate

the Westerns), interstice (the overlap and displacement of domains of difference),

hybridity (the national identity being not pure but a mixture), and liminality (the in-

betweeness, the middle of two conflicting and competing cultures). All of these are

influenced by semiotics and Lacanian psychoanalysis to argue that cultural production is

always most productive where it is most ambivalent.

I have three major objectives in this paper. First, I would present the bird’s-eye

view of the novel, to prove that it is more like a fable. Then, a thematic analysis would be

presented to extract only one theme from the novel and that is hope. Finally, I would have

critical analysis using the post-colonial approach and the theories of Post-colonialsm by

Homi K. Bhabha to prove that the novel is saying that if we keep ourselves only in our

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very own literature and culture, we will makes ignorant, impotent, and illiterate of who

really we are, and the way for us to achieve a total understanding of ourselves is through

learning and embracing the Western Ideologies.

“Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress” is a worthwhile book, but in many

ways an unsatisfactory one. Its problem is that the tale is more interesting than the telling.

The author has elected to present his story as a fable rather than a realistic novel, a

perfectly respectable choice except that the descriptions of life in this strangest of times

and places are so fascinating that the reader longs for more. His decision to streamline his

narrative, withholding all but the most significant details and his coy habit of giving his

characters epithets rather than names, work against the very real power of his material.

However, he delivers an important message: “Any system that fears knowledge and

education, any system that closes the mind to moral and intellectual truth, is evil and will

prove in the end to be impotent.” This message will be discussed further in the latter part

of the paper. This is brought beautifully home to us when the narrator meets a doctor who

has also read Balzac. Their brief conversation makes the narrator weep, and it takes him a

moment to understand why “It was hearing the name of Fu Lei, Balzac's translator --

someone I had never even met. It is hard to imagine a more moving tribute to the gift

bestowed by an intellectual on mankind.” Somewhere along the line, as mainstream

Western culture “matured,” we seem to have determined that the fable is a lesser form of

literature. Like children, we have outgrown “fairy tales” and, indeed, think of fables

merely as kiddie lit. In other cultures, however, the fable remains a respected literary

form, and in the hands of artists who understand that its simplicity can be provocatively

deceptive, the fable can be both vital and compelling, even for contemporary Western

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audiences. The dictionary defines fable as “a narrative designed to enforce a useful

truth.” Yet, in literature, we generally prefer either that our useful truths be sublimated in

three-dimensional characters and realistic plot development, or, heavier in the truth

department than useful. Our general disregard of the fable in literature is not only

misplaced but can cause us to lose out on the chance to experience thrilling and

occasionally truly great novel just like this one that is even award-wining.

The theme of this novel is hope. Nonetheless, hope is not always a positive force.

If we think Sijie is going to tell us how the books give the boys hope, which in turn

empowers their salvation, we find that his “useful truth” is more complicated and,

accordingly, more challenging. The narrator begins to learn that hope can be not only

cruel but also corrupting. When Four-Eyes receives a letter from his mother telling him

that she has secured a job for him with a revolutionary journal if he can give the editor

the lyrics to authentic mountain songs, Luo and the narrator strike a deal to get the lyrics

from a hermetic miller in exchange for more books. Nevertheless, when they return with

less-than-satisfactory material, Four-Eyes lashes out at them, “The change he had

undergone since receiving his mother's letter was truly remarkable. A few days before it

would have been unthinkable for him to snap at us like this. I hadn't suspected that a tiny

glimmer of hope for the future could transform someone so utterly.”

Moreover, this novel is post-colonial and thus, can be analyzed using post-

colonialism. This is how it goes. The novel’s narrator is the son of hard-working doctors.

“Their crime”, he states blandly, “was that they were ‘stinking scientific authorities’ who

enjoyed a modest reputation on a provincial scale.” His friend Luo, who shares his

adventures in the countryside, is the son of someone altogether more dangerous – Mao’s

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personal dentist who actually had the nerve to tell his friends about his exalted patient.

For this, the narrator says, “Here was an eminent dentist stating publicly that the Great

Helmsman of the Revolution had been fitted with new teeth, just like that. It was beyond

belief, an unpardonable, insane crime, worse than revealing a secret of national

security.” Luo and the nameless narrator are packed off to the damp, remote mountain

known as the Phoenix of the Sky, whose vistas will be recognizable to anyone familiar

with the stylized landscape painting of pre-Revolutionary China. Their re-education is

entrusted to a group of illiterate former opium farmers, whose wisdom is guaranteed by

their peasant status. No books, except for scientific works and those by Mao and his

cronies, are allowed in their village, nor any ideas that do not come from the ruling

Communists, nor any Western music. This is the major concept presented in the novel

that the government is trying to get rid of, going away from, eradicate and terminate the

other cultures that have been mixed into their very own. For this reason, the government

decided to “re-educate” the intellectuals. The irony of it all is that the one who is

educating them are the ignorant in the peasantry. Obviously, the government is against the

Western ideologies and culture. However, according to Bhabha, no one can really

“essentialize” a nation once it is being mixed. Moreover, cultural identities cannot be

ascribed to pre-given, irreducible, scripted, ahistorical cultural traits that define the

conventions of ethnicity. Nor can “colonizer” and “colonized” be viewed as separate

entities that define themselves independently. Instead, he suggests that the negotiation of

cultural identity involves the continual interface and exchange of cultural performances

that in turn produce a mutual and mutable recognition (or representation) of cultural

difference because it is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural

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hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation. Thus, their national

identity and their education, ideologies and knowledge are and will always be hybrid.

With this, it is predictable that later or at the end of this novel, the government’s plan and

purpose might not be fulfilled for it seems to be impossible.

Later, the two young men are given backbreaking and exhausting work in a

coalmine. Meanwhile, one of their fellow laborers is the son of a well-known poet, and in

his hut, he has hidden a suitcase filled with Western classics (the covers of Balzac,

Dumas and Romain Rolland, and with knowledge of the world beyond their mountain

comes hope for the future) because all these are forbidden and are not allowed to be read.

After much nagging, bullying and barter, they manage to get their hands on one of these

books, Balzac’s “Ursule Mirouët.” The effect is revolutionary in the true sense of the

word – even in their home city, the only Western literature in the bookshops had been the

complete works of the Albanian Communist leader Enver Hoxha. “Picture,” the narrator

says, “a boy of 19, still slumbering in the limbo of adolescence, having heard nothing but

revolutionary blather about patriotism, Communism, ideology and propaganda all his

life, falling headlong into a story of awakening desire, passion, impulsive action, love, of

all the subjects that had, until then, been hidden from me.” As a means of restricting

people from being educated with the Western Ideologies, the government has forbidden

people from reading Western books and things to erase completely the West cultures.

Indeed, what I have predicted from the start (that the plan or purpose of the government

might not be fulfilled) are true because obviously, the unnamed narrator and his friend,

Lou, have found and even read these Western classics by Balzac, Dumas and Romain

Rolland. After reading, they seem to be saying that “why are these forbidden when in the

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first place, this is good, educating, and enlightening us with love, rights and many other

things?” I believe that as they see and read the books, ambivalence started to creep into

their minds if they would accept the truths they learned or not. This also is a picture of the

liminal space where the two major characters are caught in the middle – they are now in

the middle of the competing and conflicting Chinese and Western cultures.

Then, the two young men share their new-found riches with a local beauty, the

daughter of an itinerant tailor. Luo will carry the books in his stinking hood to the nearby

village to enlighten the little seamstress and thereby woo her. Like the narrator, she

remains nameless and is referred to only as the “Little Seamstress”. She and Luo fall in

love, and although the narrator acts as their mediator, he too lusts after the girl. The three

young people’s discovery of sensual and romantic love – a subject studiously ignored by

Communist propaganda – is intensified and justified by Balzac and by the suitcase’s other

forbidden authors. So is their understanding of real, as opposed to ideologically correct,

personal choice. The narrator’s own favorite book, for example, is Romain Rolland’s

“Jean-Christophe.” “Without him,” he explains, “I would never have understood the

splendor of taking free and independent action as an individual.” This part of the story is

where we can see the interstice in the context of Bhabha’s theories. He defines interstice

as the overlap and displacement of domains of difference. I can say that they are in the

interstice because they not only accumulate the western culture in them but also applied it

in their lives with the former life they have. They do not, of course, fully leave behind

their Chinese culture. They still live it up yet mixed with the new truths and knowledge

they gained from their reading with the seamstress. This is a clear picture that the Chinese

and Western cultures are overlapping, competing and conflicting within the characters

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and dispositions of the two boys and the little seamstress. According to Bhabha, the Third

World countries tend to imitate the Western Cultures – the theory on mimicry. This is true

to this novel. After the narrator, Lou and the little seamstress have learned something

from their reading of the Western books, they imitate. They imitate love relationships and

even lovemaking, which these things have been forbidden in their culture and yet present

in the other culture. They still have with them their original culture yet with the new

culture learned. Nevertheless what dominates or what is mostly manifested in them is the

strong and dominant culture, the West. This is proven in the activities they do and the

things they talk about.

In the end, Luo and the narrator discover the true potency of imaginative literature

and why it is hated and feared by those who wish to control others, for the Little

Seamstress, transformed by her contact with Balzac, comes to understand her own sexual

power and leaves the Phoenix of the Sky for the city. “Had we ourselves,” the narrator

asks, “failed to grasp the essence of the novels we had read to her?” Thus, the seamstress

who started ignorant now becomes more intelligent than the two boys who supposed to

be educated. Because the two boys are restricted and limited from the truth and in

learning Western culture and literature, what happens to them is really bad (evil) because

they are left by the woman they both love. It really is not good being ignorant and all that.

For the side of the little seamstress, she has gained a lot more knowledge and ideology

that makes her see her rights, freedom and self-consciousness, which is very much

impossible if she did not embrace and be influenced by the Western culture and literature.

For this, her life turns better compared to the two boys.

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 Therefore, the novel brilliantly reflects Chinese upbringing and the more recent

understanding of Western culture and literature. As a product of China’s re-education

program from 1971-1974, the author knows first-hand the evils of repression. However, if

he had written only from that viewpoint, “Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress”

would not have been the richly complex fable that it is. The boys have learned bitter

lessons by the end of this very small gem, lessons that they could have only learned

through the loss of something very precious. Does their new knowledge, which led

directly to that loss, leave them better off? Nevertheless, the plot really turns on Western

books, not music. Though all books are forbidden, the boys manage to unearth some

Western classics translated into Chinese, and fall in love with a landscape of reading they

had not known existed. They also fall in love with the tailor's exquisite daughter, whom

Luo seduces by reading Balzac to her. Dai Sijie, in his novel, shows himself out of touch

with his country, rendering it through an excessively precious literary optic. Hopelessly

out of place in the mountain’s peasant culture, both young men find clever ways to bend

the rules made against Western influences. In one particularly funny moment at the

beginning of the book, the protagonist entertains the locals with a violin piece by the

forbidden Mozart, because Luo convinces the audience the piece is entitled Mozart is

Thinking of Chairman Mao. When not doing hard labor, the two also entertain the people

of the village with storytelling. One of their most ardent listeners is the little seamstress in

the town, a lovely young countrywoman. The two teenagers come to learn that another

intellectual young man, Four-Eyes, has a suitcase filled with forbidden books. They

manage to borrow Four-Eyes’ copy of Balzac’s Ursule Mirouet, and find an enchanting

new tale to use to attempt to woo the little seamstress. When Four-Eyes will not lend

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them any more books, they resolve to steal the suitcase. It seems that the author wanted to

show how much impact culture could have on an isolated mountain village, and

especially for the seamstress. It was a revelation of freedom, of self-consciousness. The

little seamstress had seen more in Balzac learned that men could flirt with women, that it

is natural. This is what she had never learned during her days of being instructed that life

could be filled with many nice things. Obviously, the author is against this repression and

stopping people from learning others’ culture and literature, especially the Western. For

him, this lack of freedom and individualism is the essence of his generation. As to how a

young woman could suddenly be changed through foreign literature – the part of the story

most criticized by Chinese authorities and the main reason the story was not released in

China – he has an apolitical answer, “The influence of literature is universal. The story

was not only an ode to the literature we had read, but also simply to show that in a

difficult situation the youth had a yearning to learn, to see new things and nice things.”

In this paper I have presented first, that this novel is more like a fable and no

matter how “fable” it is, it gives entertainment and pleasure to the readers and audience

as manifested in the numerous awards and marvelous remarks received worldwide. Then,

to give a complete picture and to scrutinize both sides, its theme is hope, not only on the

positive side but also on the negative side. Finally and most importantly, using Homi K.

Bhabha’s theories of post-colonialism, I have seen that to restrict and keep ourselves from

the Western cultures and literature are but an evil for it will just make us more and more

illiterate and ignorant. More especially, I have proven that we can define ourselves, know

our freedom, rights and achieve self-consciousness not only by our culture and literature

but also by learning, understanding, accumulating and being influenced by the Western

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culture and literature because we are but a hybrid. Therefore, we know our identity by

knowing others’ culture and literature.

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 Bibliography

Bergesen, Hunter, et. al. (1984). Cultural Analysis. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul

plc.

Bressler, Charles E. (1999). “Post-Colonialism”. Literary Criticism: An Introduction to

Theory and Practice, Second Edition. New Jersey: Prentice Hall Inc.

Eugenio, Parcelli and Romero, Perlita. (1997).An Approach to Literature. Philippines:

Katha Publishing Company, Inc.

http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/Literary_Criticism/postcolonism/postcolonial_link.htm

http://www. prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/bhabha/index.html

http://www.readinggroupchoices.com/book%20entries/2003%20LIST/balzac.htm

http://www.readinggroupguides.com/guides3/balzac_and_the_seamstress1.asp

http://www.scholars.nus.edu.sg/landow/post/poldiscourse/bhabha/bhabha1.html

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