In general dialogical textuality can be seen as an important mechanism
in the various levels of writing. However, the question of how dialogism
is produced through the contestation of female, personal memory and male,
pedagogical history calls for attention. Julia Kristeva's
influential essay on women's time is useful here in forming the distinction
between the two discursive texts in relation to history. Kristeva identifies
the time of the history as linear time: time as project. It is characterized
by an organic course organized by the tropes of departure, progression
and arrival. Feminine time is characterized as cyclical and monumental
time, and associated with repetition, reproduction and eternity.
Kristeva's conception can be applied to two representations of history
in City of Sadness. The masculine, patriarchal voice is coded
through the rhetoric of grand speech and delivered in public spaces; the
feminine voice, on the other hand, is written in diary form to sustain
a desire to speak in a private space. The speech represented in the public
sphere punctuates historical change and regulates discursive knowledge
about history. The broadcast of the Japanese emperor's speech announcing
the end of World War II in the film's opening sequence, the Mandarin lesson
conducted in the hospital, and the three instances of broadcast speech
made by Chen Yi serve the same function in the narrative. Moreover, the
ordering of each pedagogical speech contain a consciously written periodization
forming the linear chronology of the nation's history from 1945 to 1949.
On the other hand, Hinomi's diary appears fairly fragmented in relation
to this version of history. As critic Li Shangren rightfully points out,
Hinomi's time is never saturated into the linear course of the national
historical project except for the occasions when she is narrating a man's
story. Li's argument is based upon one of the film's posters (see above),
which features an image of Wen-ching and Hinomi sitting on the futon with
their baby when they receive a message informing them of Hinoe's fate.
In the image, Wen-ching holds Hinomi in his arms and looks out into off-screen
space, while Hinomi leans against him, looking down towards the futon,
indulging in her mourning for the loss of her brother. Li argues that Wen-ching's
off-screen look indicates his association with the linear project of history,
i. e., worrying about the consequence of their relation with the anti-Nationalist
compatriots. Hinomi, on the contrary, being unable to respond to the cruel
reality as immediately as her husband does, is primarily associated with
her feelings towards the shocking news.
We would argue that although her writing does not necessarily provide
an overview of history, neither does it attempt to construct a total description
of the political restructuring, it does provide a micro version of the
history written in the broadest of strokes. Besides telling men's stories,
Hinomi's interference with the history is also made perceptible by inserting
her fragmentary writing into the diegesis. Here Hou Hsiao-hsien provides
an aperture in the narrative space for the spectator to project his/her
own readerly text construed out of the traces of a woman's mundane documentation
of her life against the larger social and political backdrop. (see A:14:09-14:42;
B:27:20-28:58; C: 26: 40- 29:15)
II. Wenching is arrested. (C: 35:51-36:57)
If we put the political incident aside and concentrate more on her
enunciation of the event, it is not difficult to find that the main part
of her diary is all about her experience with the rituals of a woman's
life in traditional patriarchal society --- romance, marriage, reproduction,
nourishing, and the housewife's role in the daily life of the nuclear family.
Her occupation of cyclical time is especially articulated in the letter
to her niece-in-law, where she writes about the arrest of Wen-ching. The
letter ends with the description of seasonable change and beautiful scenery.
Once again, the enclosure of a political incident in a natural and cyclic
parameter can be too evident to be conceived in an ironic tone. However,
it is by injecting the personal into the political or vice versa that the
representation of history and memory becomes more dynamic and complex.
In this case, female subjectivity and feminine time represent an alternative
modularity of temporality known throughout the history of civilization
and hence, provides a powerful antithesis to contest the linear, hegemonic
discourse of the nation's narration of its history.
