Last Words from Montmartre

by Qiu Miaojin

  I’m an artist, and what I really want is to excel in my art. . . . My goal is to experience the depths of life, to understand people and how they live, and to express this through my art. All my other accomplishments mean nothing to me. If I can only create a masterpiece that achieves the goal I’ve fixed my inward gaze upon during my creative journey, my life will not have been wasted. (Italics mine.)

  But as she tested the boundaries between fiction, literary autobiography, and lived practice, the line between life and art grew increasingly indistinguishable for Qiu, and her “narrator” began to spiral. Entries from Qiu’s actual diaries, which were published in Taiwan in two volumes in 2007, circle in on themselves, complicating the pathology in Last Words from Montmartre.

  June 12, 1995: I must vanquish my own interiority. I want to vanquish myself. If not there is only death. / Death sleeps by my pillow each day. Each day for me is an opportunity for death. / I must vanquish my own interiority and quit the mountain peaks I wish to quit. / God, let me distance myself from those things which harm me, or I’ll be killed. . . .

  Nearing the end, she seemed a graphomaniac, producing not just the manuscript for Last Words from Montmartre and the cryptic journal entries written in rows of careful script but scraps of poems, fragments of ideas, and countless letters home. Friends and family abroad began to worry. For a Taiwanese graduate student living on a budget in Europe in the mid-1990s, there were only phone cards and care packages and the long, slow intervals between written letters.

  Qiu’s suicide set off much debate in the Taiwanese media and literary circles. Did she kill herself for love? For art? Here it’s important for readers of this volume in English to remember that in East Asian societies, suicide has a different range of cultural meanings distinct from the familiar pathologized, criminalized, or theologically proscribed models in the West. Without going into too much detail, which could easily fill another book, suffice it to say that explaining her death purely in terms of failed romance or of underlying psychiatric problems—especially when her suicide was so deliberate, and so deliberately documented—would be a mistake. In the end we should try to understand Qiu’s death as she wanted it to be understood: as a kind of speech act, as the ultimate means of sealing the connection between art and life. Precedents for this kind of suicide place Qiu squarely in the lineage of her idols Osamu Dazai (1909–1948), who killed himself shortly after finishing his experimental novel No Longer Human (1948), and of course Yukio Mishima (1925–1970), who committed seppuku, leaving behind a manuscript with instructions to publish it.

  LAST WORDS FROM MONTMARTRE

  It’ll be operatic, melodramatic, prophetic, proscriptive, manic. It’ll be about everything, everything I would leave behind if I were writing a suicide note.

  Which I’m not, I don’t think.

  —Anna Joy Springer, The Vicious Red Relic, Love

  Readers from quite divergent backgrounds can appreciate the familiar structure of a coming-of-age story, told from the inside out, that deals with issues of sexual awakening, alienation, loss, and love. Last Words from Montmartre initially caught my attention because, like Qiu, I was a queer person of the same generation who had overlapped with her as a graduate student in Paris and Taipei (though we never met). I soon discovered that the power of the writing described an inner conflict that transcended the confines of identity politics, gender, race, nation, and age. As the prominent Chinese dissident Wang Dan comments in his essay “The Extremes of Life and Love: Rereading Last Words from Montmartre,”

  When you are in dire straits—weak, distraught, about to crack—you don’t want anyone to see you. But at the same time you want someone to confide in. At times like this, often only writing will do. Though it’s not face-to-face, only through writing can one have the kind of heart-to-heart exchange needed to endure the most difficult of times. . . . I felt a secret intimacy with Qiu Miaojin from the first page.

  Besides painting a portrait of an individual artist or writer, autobiography can sometimes capture a snapshot of a unique, collective emotional truth or zeitgeist where history and even fiction fail. Last Words is such a fictionalized artifact: The book captures an important moment in global queer literary culture of the mid-1990s that the existing language of postmodernism was still unable to describe, an odd moment somewhere between AIDS and the Internet that led both Qiu and me—and many other writers, punks, intellectuals, queers—on parallel journeys, both actual and metaphysical, from the dyke bars of Taipei to the cinemas of Paris (or from San Francisco to Prague, or from London to Tokyo), in search of a way to make sense of a world that had already begun its modest shifts and tremors toward new modes of communication, new ways of being.

  But more than its intimate voice, its archetypal themes, and its ability to capture the elusive concerns of a transitional generation, Last Words is very much a “trans-cultural product,” one that reaches past the linguistic and thematic limits often imposed on modern Chinese literature, both from outside and from within, or what the scholar C.T. Hsia once famously complained, perhaps unfairly, was a literature encumbered by an “obsession with China.” Although Qiu was celebrated in Taiwan as a national prodigy, she saw herself as part of an international community of writers and artists both living and dead and, crucially, as part of a community unconstrained by conventional labels and categories such as “lesbian,” “Chinese,” or even “woman.” Like the Japanese and French writers she revered, Qiu saw herself in dialogue with “classic,” albeit mostly avant-garde, world art and literature.

  None of this makes for a particularly light read. Relentlessly dark, with scattered moments of exuberance and humor, Last Words tells in a testimonial or confessional mode the story of the demise of a relationship between two women, and ultimately the unraveling of the narrator, in a voice that veers from self-deprecation to hubris, compulsive repetition to sublime reflection, reticence to vulnerability. The body of the text consists primarily of a series of letters, presented like chapters, from the author/narrator in Paris to her lover in Taipei and to family and friends in Taiwan and in Tokyo, opening with the death of a beloved pet rabbit and closing with a portentous expression of the narrator’s resolve to kill herself. We follow Qiu’s fictional narrator along the streets of Montmartre, read her descriptions of affairs with both men and women, French and Taiwanese, as well as her ecstatic musings on literature and art. She gives wrenching and clear-eyed outlines of what it means to exist not only between cultures but, to a certain extent, between genders. Readers may notice the book’s unique textuality or materiality. From the perspective of our quickly evolving digital age, there is a distinctly “slow tech” or analogue feel to the book. The narrative is densely populated with letters and stamps and stationary, phone booths, notebooks, handwritten cards, notes, messages, missing envelopes, photographs, tapes, documentary or material evidence of literary production and old-school communication. Yet even as Last Words draws repeated attention to its own textuality, one of its key innovations is actually its unique style, indeed its outright refusal of traditional formal textual structures. From its opening page Qiu’s book radically rejects a linear narrative and challenges readers in an epigraph to read the chapters in any order. The chapters themselves are broken up by a mix of quotes and epigraphs ranging from the existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel to the lyrics of “Fools Rush In.” In some chapters the narrator appears to be female, in others male, in still others, neither (the figure of Zoë is deliberately ambiguous through the story). In other chapters it’s not even clear who the narrator is. As much as the novel is framed as a kind of a suicide note, for us looking back on the eve of the age of the Internet, it is also a kind of farewell to letters.

  Further complicating any straightforward reading of the novel is that most readers of Last Words from Montmartre know beforehand that the author killed herself and left the text behind (the title can also be translated literally as “Last Testament from Montmartre”). Knowing that an author writi
ng about suicide has in fact committed suicide naturally complicates the reading of any book. If nothing else, it suggests that no matter what the author’s claims may be to artifice or character development, there is a degree of “realism” or autobiography to be accounted for that differs from the range of what usually may be called the “semiautobiographical.” The idea that Last Words was in fact literally the capstone work of Qiu’s career draws us in, while simultaneously confounding our attempts to assign a truth-value to the text. Is it a “true” story, or a fictionalized account? Is the narrator a constructed persona or just a transformation of Qiu? The relationship between the writer of memoir and the reader is a bond of trust. As an entry point into identification with a main character or narrator, these are dark waters indeed.

  As painful as this identification might be, however, it also yields one of the chief innovations of Last Words: the narrator/author’s fearless willingness to expose what is ugliest about herself, something “real” beyond real, something we rarely see in a memoir, or even in a published diary. Qiu doesn’t pander. She doesn’t try to anticipate the shifting sands of political correctness. She writes about domestic violence and about cheating; she takes us with her as she descends into obsessive loops and self-destructive reflection; we are with her in the phone booth when she beats her head so hard against the glass that it begins to bleed and the Paris police have to restrain her from doing worse damage, but also—in one of the most delicately impressionistic and erotic passages in the book—when she observes the body of a lover rising and falling beneath the surface of the Seine, marveling at the gold and green summer light. Qiu refuses to edit the ugliness out of a text that is also sublime in its sensitive portrayal of someone’s quests for truth. Her accomplishment is precisely that her novel does not shield us from ugliness; it is raw self-exposure and we are meant to see it, ride the awkwardness of it, feel the self-hatred and anger and ambivalence behind it even as we are invited to identify deeper into the novel. Perhaps no writer since Mishima has so mercilessly ripped the mask off the writer’s true self.

  A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION

  One of the biggest formal challenges to translating Last Words from Montmartre is the book’s experimental structure and language. Not unlike its prognosticatory distant cousin the I Ching, for example, Last Words is often treated by its original readers just as Qiu directs them in the epigraph: They pick it up and start anywhere. There is no guiding narrative that falls into a predictable rhythm or tone that a translator can follow, nor is the verb tense consistent. By the same token, individual sentences, in a microcosm of this directive, often loop in on themselves, unmoored from the usual referents of plot and argument so that only theme remains. The reader (and translator) must mindfully engage with the various meanings the text presents. Therefore a key challenge of translating Last Words lay not just in dealing with syntax and meaning but in trying to reproduce this collaborative reading process. Nested within that challenge, moreover, lay another and more essential one: that of trying as a reader to extrapolate the deeper structural meanings that Qiu intended—meanings themselves only tentatively articulate—knowing that a decision to disambiguate one part of a text will have a cascade of consequences for the rest.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Meeiyuan Fann, Yin Wang, and Ziqiao Lawrence Yang all lent their critical expertise to the first drafts of the translation. Lai Hsiang-yin patiently and proficiently shepherded the manuscript throughout the acquisition process. The literary agent Joanne Wang saw the potential in an early draft and took the novel under her wing. Jeffrey Yang’s editorial interventions improved the translation immeasurably (and brought me to a new understanding of my own language along the way). And the writer Anna Joy Springer read drafts of the book both as interlocutor and medium, seeming to channel Qiu’s intuition with minimal clues while suggesting how different parts of the work might fit more tightly together.

  —ARI LARISSA HEINRICH

  * See Fran Martin’s Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, Film, and Public Culture (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003), 225. The chapter “The Crocodile Unmasked: Toward a Theory of Xianshen” provides an excellent overview of the TTV News Incident, Qiu’s novel, and questions of outing and reception during this period.