MCLC: Translating Instability

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Translating Instability
MCLC and MCLC Resource Center are pleased to announce publication of Megan Evans’ essay “Translating Instability: Adapting and Staging Madam X and Mister Q (based on Can Xue’s Five Spice Street)” as part of our online publication series. The first few paragraphs appear below. To view the entire essay, with its many photographs from the stage production, go to:
http://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/evans/
Sincerely,
Kirk Denton, Editor
Translating Instability: Adapting and Staging Madam X
and Mister Q (based on Can Xue’s Five Spice Street)
By Megan Evans
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright March 2015)
Can Xue 残雪 is one of the most adventurous writers in China today. As the only woman among the cadre of “avant-garde” writers to emerge in 1980s post-Mao China, she offers work that intrigues and challenges, frustrates and delights in its resistance to conventional narrative expectations of cause and effect and coherent psychologies. Published in China in 1988, Five Spice Street (五香街) is Can Xue’s first full-length work to be translated into English (by Karen Gernant and Zeping Chen, Yale University Press, 2009). The book is slippery terrain for a reader. The comic, often bawdy and grotesque work viciously dissects the machinery of rumor and scandal on Five Spice Street as the identity, actions, and motivations of Madam X are debated from twenty-eight conflicting points of view.
While a writer can—and Can Xue does—readily destabilize narrative through manipulation of descriptive language, achieving a similar level of narrative disruption on stage presents unique challenges. In any dramatic adaptation, spectators are already charged with the duty of “suspending disbelief” and of engaging their imaginative faculties to fill in the blanks of the fictional world left by the physical limits of a stage. One actor taking several roles (role doubling) and tag-team portrayals of a single character by multiple actors are commonplace. At the same time, the spectator’s awareness that she or he shares the same physical space as the actors works to stabilize the spectator-actor relationship, which in turn frames the spectator’s reception of the fictional/dramatic elements. As a result, the narrative inconsistencies of Five Spice Street (Does Madam X exert supernatural powers? Is Madam X sexy or completely devoid of sex? Does Madam X even exist?) are difficult to achieve onstage. This essay considers some of the techniques we used to achieve a stage-worthy parallel of Can Xue’s innovative writing, including: use of puppetry; confusion of scale in design elements; role doubling; and, freely adapting the narrative to achieve a highly theatrical final scene.
The Yale University publication of Five Spice Street, part of its “Margellos World Republic of Letters” series, gives little historical or cultural context, not even the Chinese publication date is provided, let alone an introductory essay. The dust jacket, however, touts the book as:
an astonishing work of contemporary fiction. Exploring the collective consciousness of this little street of ordinary people, Can Xue penetrates the deepest existential anxieties of the present day—whether in China or in the West—where the impermanence of identity struggles with the narrative within which identity must compose itself.
The book centers around the mysterious Madam X who arrives on the utterly insular Five Spice Street where The Widow and The Writer lead the community to a ferocious level of obsession over Madam X’s arguable supernatural powers and alleged affair with heretofore-contented family man, Mister Q. Relying primarily on the English translation, the performers and I experimented with events from the book in several development workshops.[1] The resulting production was staged in February 2013 and tied for Best Theatre entry at the New Zealand Fringe Festival. . .
http://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/evans/
by denton.2 at osu.edu on March 27, 2015
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