Luo Yijun's Fourth Person Singular Writing: A Cartography of Time

Luo Yijun's Fourth Person Singular Writing: A Cartography of Time

Building on my previous essay “Luo Yijun's Fourth Person Singular Writing: An Archeology of Space,” this essay analyzes the temporality and its related “horizons” in Luo Yijun's novels. First of all, the “I” which recurs in his novels, acting as the narrative voice or persona which links up disparate stories, is actually a “fourth person” or an “impersonal.” Because of the extreme fragmentation and delocalization of the narration, the “I” does not refer to any actual, particular individual; on the contrary, it is a patchwork of all kinds of gossips, memories, events, dreams, etc. Secondly, memory becomes a material with which Luo Yijun manipulates temporality in his novels. The reminiscence of memory and the forgetting of memory constitute in time a complicated series of difference and repetition. His novels body forth an “I-city” built with memories (or their remembering), a huge virtual city chartered by writing. Thirdly, time is regarded as equivalent to damage, life as a process of breaking down. After having suffered all kinds of injuries, the “I” writes to dispel grief in order to get through the remaining life. Fourthly, death forms the boundary of Luo Yijun's writing; however, he attempts constantly to transgress it or to redraw it. His works teem with extraordinary deaths. It seems that only at the frontier of life and death is the virtuality of writing opened up. What sustains such a singular writing, which dares to jam on mortality and grapple with death, is nevertheless the intensity of life, which gushes over the charged verbal plane. Writing, thus viewed, is a “prologue to transgression.”