On Pearl Buck and Her Autobiographical Cameos in The Good Earth
In an article—provocatively titled “Is there a case for foreign missions?”—published in the January 1933 issue of Harper’s, Pearl Buck questions the state of missionary work in China and relays to an American audience the anxieties of satisfying the “real need of the people [of China]” (“Foreign Missions” 154). Buck criticises missionary work that focuses primarily on quantifying success based on attendance and church sizes (“those who keep the missionaries in terror over their statistics of church members, so that numbers come to mean to them the sole criterion whereby they judge their success” (149)), while arguing that true missions work is not built upon relations of moral superiority (“preaching to” (154)) but rather of community and dialogue (“sharing a life with them” (154, emphases in original)). For Buck, the central problem of missions is the concern for “word” over “deed,” a dichotomy that repeats familiar debates: the metaphysical and the physical, faith and works, the intangible and the tangible, statistical abstractions and contingent particularities. Not only, as she observes, do churches fail to engage with the lived realities of their target audience in China, their American congregations also fail to disengage from standard church rhetoric, which oversimplify and erase any lines of national, cultural or linguistic difference: “to be good and act as far as possible in a Christian way and to believe in one God and in Jesus Christ as His Son” (149). These repetitious and self-justifying speech-acts, which constitute a discourse of moral authority under the sign of American Evangelical Protestantism, disguise themselves as “words [that] melt away in the heat of life like snow under the sun” (149). The analogy here assumes that language and reality are separable: words are distracting accretions that have to be discarded (“melted”) to reach the essence of things. In other words, despite her strong reservations about the conduct and organisation of missionary work, Buck continues to believe that the text relays an essential message that can be retrieved.
Buck’s multifaceted anxieties, however, are suggestive of a larger textual unconscious that not only undergirds her Harper’s article and her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Good Earth. In fact, these anxieties—expressed as a compulsion to condemn moral superiority and an empty spirituality that overlooks its material ground—also constitute the framework of these texts. In other words, the message inheres completely in the text. The language of Buck’s writing, as I argue in this paper, inscribes an ambivalence that positions her as a redoubled figure both inside and outside a historically-determined “Chinese” culture—one which was by then vacillating between the two persuasions of Republicanism and Communism. Her repeated avowals of identification with Chinese culture (“by the years of my life, by sympathy and feeling, I am Chinese” (“Foreign missions” 155)) reinforces her commitment to examining the material needs of Chinese society and rendering her experiences intelligible to the eyes of the American public. At this point, Gayatri Spivak’s conceptualisation of the native informant advances a frame of reading that complicates Buck’s own understanding of her position as emissary between two civilisations. Buck does not unproblematically reflect Chinese society, but is “generative of a text of cultural identity that only the West . . . could inscribe” (Spivak 6). It is through Buck, in other words, that the idea of “China” becomes a legible cultural text that can be read and circulated across national, continental and maritime boundaries. On the other hand, the figures of the foreign missionaries in The Good Earth, a kind of autobiographical shorthand or an authorial “cameo,” enters the novel as a disruptive force in the narrative and in the text. These glimpses the non-native cite the almost-mythical figure of the Christian Missionary in China (one is reminded of the Jesuit missions to China in the 16th century), while also attempting to redeem the place of the missionary by rendering these figures as marginal and feminine, and therefore powerless and absolvable of historical, cultural or symbolic violence.
These scenes of disruption, as it appears in The Good Earth, are written into the text as compressed autobiographical details that approach the horizon of self-portraiture. For Wang Lung, the protagonist of the novel, one of the figures appears as
a creature the like of whom he had never seen before. He had no idea of whether it was male or female, but it was tall and dressed in a straight black robe of some rough harsh material and there was the skin of dead animal wrapped about its neck. (Buck, TGE 112)
Not only is this completely alien figure androgynous; the presentation of gender stands outside of culture and comprehensibility. The “straight black robe” constructed out of “rough harsh material” and the “skin of dead animal” positions the figure in close, if not overdetermined, proximity to death—the alienating effect of describing an expensive fur coat as an abjection, a corpse rather than a commodity, is heightened when considering the mourning rites associated with the “rough harsh material,” presaging the “coarse” (TGH 278) bands of fabric used at the funerals of Wang’s wife Olan and his father. Still, the identity of the figure is withheld but only refracted through the frantic speech of a passerby (“A foreigner—a female from America—you are rich—” (TGH 112)). The fragmentation of the dialogue, marked typographically by em-dashes visually interrupting the longer lines of prose in the scene, immediately appears as a disruption that also departs from the narrative pace and spatial logic of the passage. While the narrative unfolds within the limits of the city, starting at “the street of the silk markets” and winding its way down to the “Street of Bridges” (TGE 111–112), the dialogue breaks out from such a spatiality by the intrusion of “America” as an indexical sign of foreignness, marked by “broken accents” and “light hair and light eyes” (TGE 112–113). This signifies, in both uttered language and physical embodiment, the radical alterity presented by the figure.
But insofar as the otherness of the figure is so thoroughly marked, the metalepsis of authorial intrusion—of the writer writing herself back into the text—inflicts the same alterity back onto the novel. If the deliberate figuration of the author in the text is presented as a complete strangeness, marked visually in an almost self-ethnographical mode, Buck opens up a Self-Other dialectic that operates through a commutative logic. In other words, if the Other in the text is the white female Westerner, then the Other for the typically Western reader of The Good Earth is the novel’s protagonist. She remains quite firmly in the position of an objectified figure in the ethnographical imagination, despite Buck’s claims to a sympathetic representation, her desire to write “about average people in China” (“Foreign missions” 153). Yet, if the use of an omniscient third person narrator is suggestive of an attempt to present “China” in an objective and balanced way, it is also one that objectivises and consolidates a vision of China that places its protagonist within a kind of hermetically-sealed cinematic world. While Wang Lung’s first appearance in the novel begins with “opening his eyes in the blackness of the curtains about his bed” (Buck, TGE 3), as if to focalise the narrative through his point of view, the “blackness of the curtains” and the “small square hole of the window” (Buck, TGE 3) recalls the voyeuristic pleasures associated with the kinetoscope, an early precursor to the cinema, which operates on the principle of the individual viewer and the focalisation of the frame of reference through light and darkness. The same visual language is used to describe Wang Lung’s encounter with the figure of the white lady: the scene begins with a long “establishing shot” of “the little village of sheds [that] never became a part of the city or of the countryside which stretched beyond” (Buck, TGE 111), before zooming-in to the figure of Wang Lung, who “was alarmed and shrunk away” (TGE 111) before wandering the streets for a passenger. The same cinematic logic guides the intercutting of dialogue with action, in which Wang Lung “ran as fast as he could” (TGE 112) after the frantic conversation with a fellow puller. The same language that attempts to create an objective sense of the narrative becomes one that objectivises by limiting the focalisation to the single protagonist, whose point of view is constantly filtered through the detachment of Buck’s narrative decisions, a combination of conscious sympathetic portrayal with an inherently voyeuristic eye.
Similar currents of sympathy and cultural voyeurism are on display in Buck’s articles, particularly where she tries to evaluate the role of “Christlikeness” in societies. In “Is there a case for foreign missions?” Buck states:
I am more moved to my conviction that belief in what Jesus Christ personifies has a direct ratio to high quality of social and individual character when I see in my own race certain weaknesses now beginning to appear which are faults of other races which have not had Christ as part of their heritage. (“Foreign missions” 152, emphasis mine)
Inasmuch as Buck attacks the moral superiority displayed by several missionaries to China, she nevertheless succumbs to racialising—as opposed to religious—discourses to explain difference and demarcate the Other from the Anglo-Christian Self. The observational mode she argues in (“when I see”) appeals to a pseudo-empiricism of anecdotal confirmation, in which various tendencies are enumerated and then unquestionably accepted as general principles (“in nations where the figure of Christ has been perceived […] the sick are cared for, the weak and defective are housed and cared for with tenderness […] people do struggle for goodness” (“Foreign missions” 151). The cynicism of human nature is prefigured again in the ambiguous ending of The Good Earth: Wang Lung’s sons hover over their father’s deathbed and promise never to sell the land, while “they looked at each other and smiled” (375). Readers become suspicious that the words of Wang Lung’s sons no longer cohere with their intentions, and at the end of the narrative, the loss of fidelity between word and deed, coupled with the looming threat of eventual landlessness, suggests that “goodness” (Buck’s term) is elusive not only in the world at large, but most predominantly and most dramatically in the world of the Chinese Other.
The politics of Buck’s representations are complicated further by her self-identification with the Chinese—a performative act that casts Buck herself as a kind of “native informant,” even if it is one complicated by a duality of nativeness. In her Nobel lecture, Buck begins with an apologia:
When I came to consider what I should say today it seemed that it would be wrong not to speak of China. And this is none the less true because I am an American by birth and by ancestry and though I live now in my own country and shall live there, since there I belong. But it is the Chinese and not the American novel which has shaped my own efforts in writing. (“Nobel lecture”)
The same self-consciousness is presented in the Harper’s article, in which she emphasises that "[b]y birth and ancestry I am American; by choice and belief I am a Christian; but by the years of my life, by sympathy and feeling, I am Chinese" (“Foreign missions” 155). That she clarifies questions of a personal nature—religious and national affiliations on the level of affect (“belong[ing] and “sympathy and feeling”)—on public platforms presents us with a figure that goes beyond the missionary-in-China. Buck does not only point out the flaws in missionary work in China to public and intellectual consciousness by attempting to speak for the average Chinese subject. In fact, she also attempts to make a case for the Chinese novel by framing it within the terms of American liberal democracy—as a form of non-elite literature, focusing on individual characters rather than the sprawling historical narrative (“Nobel lecture”)—and thereby engages in the activities of the native informant, which for Spivak is the same “blank” figure who generates a cultural text for the consumption of the imperial center, which allows for notions of the indigenous Other to circulate within an economy of imperial knowledges. Texts such as The Good Earth and the Pulitzer and Novel speeches all generate a consolidated vision of China, which Buck takes plenty of precaution to frame as “culturally advanced.”
Buck, however, fails to erase herself from the cultural texts she produces in print media, insofar as her repeated disavowals of moral imperialism can be read as attempts at literary absolution. If Spivak’s native informant is precisely the absence in colonial epistemology, of the figure who evacuates from the text that he generates, Buck’s status as the native informant is made complicated by her re-insertion of herself into the text—a re-presentation rather than an erasure. The very presence of the redoubled autobiographical cameo—first as the “strange creature” with “light hair and light eyes” and then as the male missionary who passes Wang Lung an image on paper depicting a “white-skinned” man (Buck, TGE 128)—thoroughly described in terms of differentiating physical appearances, makes Buck an informant of a culture who is very much present in the text.
Ultimately, the text’s brief authorial intrusion, read in light of Buck’s own attitudes towards missions in China, complicates the straightforward reading of the passage as simply a lighthearted authorial joke. Instead, it reveals the anxieties of positioning oneself between two cultures marked by racial and religious differences, which are in themselves vastly heterogeneous entities that constitute a discursive field that exceeds Buck’s consolidating eye. The discourses of the Self and Other, in the Evangelical Christian imagination, are textualised, circulated and consumed in the The Good Earth, positioning Buck as a kind of conscientious informant who, having generated a cultural text of a foreign landscape, has to return back continually to defend it.
Works Cited
Buck, Pearl S. “Is there a case for foreign missions?” Harper’s January 1933: 143–55. Print.
——. The Good Earth. New York: The John Day Company, 1931. Print.
——. “The Nobel Prize in Literature 1938 – Nobel Lecture – The Chinese Novel.” 1938. Web. 14
December 2015.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing
Present. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London: Harvard University Press, 1999. Print.
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