The Three Leaps of Wang Lun

by Alfred Doblin

  The empire under Ch’ien-lung was larger and stronger than it had ever been. The learned, energetic Emperor—poet, patron of scholars, lover of the hunt—had done his duty to Heaven and his ancestors. Sinkiang had been conquered by the ruthless Chao Hui; Tibet was under Chinese control. But the Wang Lun uprising was a portent of the long decay that would last until 1911, and the Panchen Lama’s death from smallpox, during a visit to Peking of great significance, also rattled the Imperial government. Chao Hui, in the novel the prime instigator of violence, actually died ten years before Wang Lun’s hopeless venture, and the Panchen Lama’s fatal visit, described in such vivid, tender, horrific terms in Book Three, actually occurred six years later. Poetic licence allows the novel to draw from these events a coherent theme: the theme of earthly power against the power of the Way.

  Döblin gave an account of his conception of Wang Lun in a 1929 essay, “The Structure of the Epic Work”.20 “I have it in mind, for example,” he wrote,

  to depict a revolutionary ferment in a population, and as a start a harshly lit scene urges itself on me, an attack on a high official, a night scene. This is then felt entirely as an introduction, a kind of muffled drumroll, a single sharp report, then silence. Each individual point is fully worked out from the character of this violent, eerie prelude.… I began a Chinese novel with just such a drumbeat and just such a muffled roll of subterranean revolution.

  The German reader finds this passage puzzling, for the introductory scene outlined here was dropped from the first edition of the novel and has never been restored.21 Yet years later Döblin saw it as the indispensable starting point for the structure and the dynamic of the whole work. Why was it dropped? How does its absence affect the novel?

  The scene, included here as the Prologue, sets the theme firmly in a political context. The attack on Chao Lao-hsü is a political act; its consequence—the conspiring of civil and military authorities in further extortions on the population—provides specific cause for the rebellion of the downtrodden.

  Without this episode the theme is deflected into that generalized religious attitude, divorced from any particular social or political context, which is expressed early in Book One in the fable of the man and his shadow, and carried to its ghastly end with the fate of the Broken Melon in Book Two.

  Not only the theme is affected; the shape of the book suffers. The novel ends with Hai-t’ang on a pilgrimage to the shrine of the goddess Kuan-yin, seeking peace for the loss of her two children in the upheavals—a direct result of the deal with which her husband Chao Hui has tried to preserve his power in the world. In the published version, lacking the Prologue, this scene is arbitrary; the story stops, but it is not an ending. In the novel as written the end harks back to the beginning, poses again the problem with which the tragedy began, and so provides a satisfying close. (Formally, the introduction is a hsieh-tzu, the prefatory episode of a Chinese play or story22—further evidence of Döblin’s immersion in things Chinese.)

  We do not know why Döblin agreed to cut this scene. He had tried for nearly two years to find a publisher, and perhaps was ready to accept a suggestion (made, it is said, by Martin Buber23) which improved the chances of acceptance. It was a bad decision, and not the last time Döblin would have difficulties with German publishers.

  This initial scene must be followed by action on a gigantic scale, the essay continues,

  or else the proportions do not tally, and a particular dynamic is called for. I must begin slow and broad, perhaps with one character, in order to develop a massive crescendo. The proportions and the dynamic, these formative tendencies, are quite palpably felt, and now as imagination gets to work tirelessly hauling up material it is this formal law of broad, slow impetus which issues the directives.

  This abstract, symphonic structure then begins to be filled. “A start is made, for purely formal, I should say musical, reasons with a report on one man, a report which I spin out, and this man must become the red thread to which other threads attach themselves.” That man is Wang Lun. “Report” is an inadequate word for the marvellous depiction of this rogue, first in his home village with a father who develops talents as a shaman, then in the city, where his cunning is trapped by the greater cunning of the sly priest To Chin.24 “I group around him character after character, urge him on to actions so that more and more people gather round him, and so I make him the hero,” writes Döblin. The crucial act is Wang’s murder of a captain who has slain an innocent man. This is the first time Wang has acted for love of another, and it leads him not only to the mountains, but for the first time to a moral questioning.

  “A man struggling vainly, powerless against power: a weak hero, truly powerless.” Thus Döblin states his epic theme. In the mountains Wang encounters wretched outcasts, among them a runaway monk, Ma No, whose crystal Buddhas speak to Wang’s awakening conscience. Able now to articulate the plight of the outcasts he becomes their leader, preaching hope for them in the Western Paradise if they cease railing against fate, become Wu-wei, “Truly Powerless”. Thousands throng to join this new sect. Wang, concerned for their safety, leaves to seek support from the brotherhood of the White Waterlily.

  In his absence Ma No is thrust into the leadership, and makes fateful changes which lead at the end of Book Two to the destruction of his breakaway sect, the Broken Melon: destruction at the hands of Wang Lun, who cannot bear that they should be massacred by Imperial troops. Now, as in a symphony, contrasts are required. “I change my vantage point,” continues Döblin. “The revolutionary ferment in the land has reached a terrible level. The scenes are already coloured unbearably bright. Quiet, solemn tones are called for.” Wang Lun vanishes. “I have no use for my hero now. I have him make an about-turn, he leaves his sect.” The focus in Book Three turns to the Emperor and his guest the Panchen Lama:

  Characters and events must be found for these quiet, solemn tones. The Tibetan pope presents himself, a quite different, austere scenery is sought and depicted, monasteries, the icy land of Tibet and the stately train of the pope towards China and the great Manchu emperor. This structure underpins all the details of the episode. It provides the ground plan.

  This “ground plan” is filled with vivid depictions, not only of austere Tibetan scenery but also of Peking, rife with plots and witchcraft. Though Book Three is set in a very different milieu, the events surrounding the Broken Melon in Book Two are central to it, and there are numerous parallels in the two Books. The Emperor seeks the meaning of the unrest in his realm from the great wise Panchen Lama, the living spirit of Wu-wei. Though deeply disturbed by the Lama’s teaching, Ch’ien-lung is unwilling to escape the trap of his position, and after the Lama’s death self-doubt and sorcery bring about the Emperor’s near suicide. The Emperor and Ma No are both trapped in their self-centredness. Both seek immortality regardless of others, Ch’ien-lung in the gaze of his ancestors, Ma in the Western Paradise.

  The Three Leaps of Wang Lun grew from a fundamental spiritual experience, a symphonic conception of epic fiction and a matchless imagination. With the possible exception of Flaubert and his recreation of pagan Carthage in Salammbô, never had a European writer more convincingly depicted an alien world in its own terms.

  For all the vigour and narrative drive of individual episodes, the action of the novel often seems fragmentary, its chronology and motivation not always clear. The allegory of Wang Lun’s three leaps across a brook just before the end helps to provide a focus. The first leap is Wang’s spiritual awakening in the Nank’ou mountains, which leads to the founding of the outcast sect and its disastrous progress under Ma No. With the second leap Wang, who has turned his back on the movement and retired full of self-blame to the south and a domestic life, takes up the sword again, in political alliance with the White Waterlily. But his struggle is not just a political one. His third leap, following his encounter with the depraved and wretched robber that he, but for Wu-wei, might have become, leads him again to the meaning he found on Nank’ou. B
ut this time he knows that fate will allow the sect only one way out.

  The leaps are not simply from violence to quiescence and back to violence.25 Rather they symbolize a complex of transitions. “Who tries to conquer the world by action will fail. The world is of the spirit; it should not be disturbed. Who acts, loses it,” says the Tao Te Ching. But the world of men allows no simple scheme in which action is bad, inaction good, and this is the central tragedy worked out in the novel. Failure to see the complexity posed by Döblin—oppositions not only of action and inaction but of selfishness and compassion, the individual and the community, rage against fate and acceptance of fate—can lead to misreadings. For example, is Ma No, the failed priest through whom Wang Lun first discovers the healing power of Buddha, a truer representative of Wu-wei than Wang himself? Wang goes at the end of Book One to seek an alliance with violent men. Ma No by contrast does not lift a finger against attacks by bandits and troops. Should he not be the hero?26

  Of course he cannot be. His inaction and passivity are rooted in selfishness, in lust, in exploitation. He leads his breakaway sectarians in an orgy, plunging them deep into the fever of existence from which Wang had sought to extricate them. The conspirators of the White Waterlily from whom Wang seeks help are conscious volunteers in a dangerous game. But Ma No, coldly calculating, obtains protection against Imperial troops behind a living wall of peasants, innocent townsfolk. Wang Lun’s first leap takes him from vengeful isolation in his own misery to a sense of shared humanity, a profound compassion for his fellow outcasts. Ma No makes no such leap. The change from celibate vagrant to “king” of his doomed followers does not release him from his egotism, merely gives it greater scope. At the dreadful end of Book Two he reaches the Western Paradise not in bliss but in rage and horror. He has failed utterly to comprehend Wang’s teaching.

  Parables also help to crystallize the theme. The man in the first parable, at the start of Book One, could have freed himself of his anxieties simply by resting in the shade of a tree, by merging with the powers of nature, accepting his fate. The problem for Wang and his followers, as old Chu so eloquently explains in the hut on Nank’ou, is that Nature and Fate are not the only powers they must contend with. Some men, the powerful of society, usurp the role of these impersonal forces, fling themselves like natural disasters over the wretched land. “It was not granted to us to be Truly Powerless,” says Wang near the end. A Truly Powerless in a world where men set upon other men like wolves and tigers can only be a suicide. He fears that his first leap was a mistake, which has led to disaster those he meant to help.

  What redeems Wang is his compassion, as the parable in Book Four, of the peasant wife who importunes Buddha, makes clear. “Woman, you did not want to help your husband and yourself,” Buddha scolds her before banishing her to the abyss. She has thought only of herself, tried like Ch’ien-lung and Ma No to determine her own fate. With his first leap Wang discovers his humanity; but for that he would have ended souldead and depraved like the robber brought to him for judgement in Tungch’ang; would not have created a community out of those once isolated in their misery.

  The brook Wang leaps across he calls the Nai-ho, the Chinese Styx, whose name means literally, “There is no other way.” His third leap is towards armed revolt and death: death as a merging with the Way, not a martyrdom whose goal is immortality for one’s own self. Wang knows that talk of a Ming restoration is pure fantasy; he knows too that the State will never tolerate his heretical teaching. There is no other way for him but to help the tragedy to its end. His dream, just before the final slaughter, of the sycamore tree whose “inexhaustible growth” gives delight to those who pass, eases the bitterness of that end.

  The outline is grim, and there are many grim and horrifying scenes. But Döblin’s novel is remarkable for the variety of moods, the density and depth with which a teeming alien society is evoked: landscapes and city streets, low life in Chinan-fu and the splendours of the Imperial City, biographical vignettes of the most eccentric individuals and crowd scenes where individuals become mere physical forces or objects. There are episodes of great humour, of pathos, of skulduggery and witchcraft. Word and phrase and image, with great economy, make scene after scene almost palpable. The language is by turns harsh, lyrical, jagged, supple; the narrative, so “modern” in its disjointed chronology, ironical objectivity and abrupt transitions, only rarely fails to engage attention. “Without the Futurist elements of Döblin’s work from Wang Lun to Berlin Alexanderplatz,” writes Günter Grass,27 “my prose is inconceivable.”

  The imagery dissolves boundaries between man and the natural world. Rebellion is a disorder in the body of China, a “rheumatic discomfort in the arm, in the shoulder, over the feet, painful stabbing in a tooth, throbbing nerve above the left eye.” Trees suppress frantic laughter, watercourses in a drought are empty intestines. The sea looks balefully from rheumy eyes; men fight oblivious of “snorting and maneshaking grunts in the sky, the baring of teeth, whipping of tails” as a thunderstorm gathers. Many images are disturbingly visceral. The syntax, adopting some of Marinetti’s precepts, makes mini mal use of conjunctions; phrases are linked by commas, words chosen for their energy. At key points, especially in scenes of violence, the prose is as stark and verbless as Chinese poetry: “Breathless calm. Open stage. Screams from the trussed-up sisters, stripping of tender bodies, clubs ringing on the skulls of brothers, roaring, trampling horses, timid whimpering of the sick, empty plain, rain.”

  Dissolved too are the boundaries between speech and narrative. Whole conversations are given in indirect speech, and Döblin switches within a paragraph, even within a sentence, from mode to mode: “There had been a change since the mountains of Nank’ou: Wang Lun, the tall, dangerous fellow from Hunkang-ts’un has told amazing things of the golden Fo’s, he’ll help us, he knows magic, we’re going along with him. Now the crowd preached for itself.”—“The niece … suggested when they should run away. If only they didn’t have a good thrashing waiting for them at home. What if they were kicked out or sold. Chu saw her as she passed by …” External description merges with interior delirium: “Deep inside he was jealous of this guest who came out so casually with such a monstrous, unheard-of plan … He cursed Wang at length, lying on the prayer mat in front of the shelf, for Amithaba to hear: what wicked things that man had said, and how he was now controlling himself, suppressing himself, taking refuge in the Law, in the Teaching, in the great pious Fellowship, as the formula ran. He focussed, murmuring the name A-mi-to-fo without stopping, went over himself in rapture like a cat stalking over a path; he saw the path snaking thinly away, a thread that pulled him, over the first rises, then over the four steps of blessedness. Now caught by the current, now turning back, now never turning back, now Arhat, Lohan, sinless worthy regarding with the same eye gold and clay, catalpa and mimosa, sandalwood and the axe that will fell it.…”

  Amidst these alien landscapes the narrator injects from time to time a reminder that he is, after all, just a historian: “What else happened on the evening of this day in the Forbidden City is not known in detail.”—“Many myths evolved later around this journey of five simple brothers to the Lower Reaches.”—“This festival has been described many times; poems were composed about it; even Ch’ien-lung alluded to it in some later verses. Almost everything we have is a phantastical distortion of the event.” This is, of course, an ironical ploy. Irony is a subtle but constant element throughout the book. The fate of the misfits and the downtrodden who constitute the sect, detailed in a succession of ironical vignettes, is summed up in Book Two: “There is no need to report how she and others fared there. They did not find what they sought, and realized at last that they had achieved everything imaginable. None of their wishes was fulfilled; they were divested of every wish.” The perversity of the kingdom founded by Ma No becomes clear in the story of Nung and his beloved, condemned for their faithfulness by a society where all must belong to all.

  Chinese, Tibetan and
Buddhist expressions are introduced without explanation. This heightens the novel’s air of strangeness, but conceals the depth of Döblin’s study and cannot avoid alienating the reader to some degree. For the German reader, familiarity with the Orient may not help in elucidating the meaning of many such terms, whose spelling reflects the free-for-all of 19th century romanisation, exacerbated by misreadings from the manuscript (e.g. “Schim-mong” for “Schen-nung” = Shen Nung; “juch-kin” for “jueh-kin” = yüeh-ch’in).28 Sometimes Döblin simply made mistakes in his references. Wherever possible in the translation the original expression has been identified. Chinese terms have been converted to the Wade-Giles romanisation, though well-known place names have retained familiar spellings. Some obvious errors have been silently emended, as when a festival described in Book Two is named Ch’ing-ming when the context requires the Yü-lan festival; or references to the “(Yellow) Sand River” when the Yangtze rather than the Yellow River is intended. The geography of Tibet, however, has been left as Döblin gives it.

  “I see myself,” wrote Döblin,

  placed in front of a picture, shoved into landscapes and situations that emerged in me—I cannot say I thought them up or invented them. I could neither summon these phantasies, nor protect myself from them.… I never sat alone at my desk. I was always surrounded by a great company: of words, of language, dressed in a kind of spirit clothing … I never began writing until the ideas had reached a certain ripeness, and this occurred when they began to clothe themselves in words. Having obtained this image I set out with it in my pilot boat, out of the harbour, and there I would see a great ship which I would board and sail away and be in my element; voyaged and made discoveries and only months later returned home …29