Review Written and Edited by Peter Buller
The bildungsroman goes back as far as the novel itself; but not necessarily for the homoerotically inclined. Academia has only just begun to accept the homoerotic subtext in Greek literature, to say nothing of the case of many modernist and turn-of-the-century writers. Along with the profound lack of explicit queer literature and stories, people growing up queer (or under any of its more specific identity markers) tend to find themselves thrusted into a world without role models. Combined with the general trappings of love, companionship, and mischief can make the queer journey to find one's place in the world somewhat difficult. It's this queer flexibility with cis- and hetero-normative societal structures, and the struggles of maintaining what others consider an unorthodox lifestyle, that makes Bonnie Huie recent translation of Qiu Miaojin's Notes of a Crocodile so fascinating. Its characters reach for their desires, defined as they are by their different worlds, for something besides affection and fulfillment, despite the consequences of their failures.
The novel takes the form of various notebooks that catalogue the lives of the narrator as well as of her misfit friends. The story progresses as Lazi, the narrator, and her friends suffer together, mourn together, fight one another, and then break up in order to pursue the unions they need to survive. Contained at the beginning of Lazi's every relationship is her tragic premonition of how present happiness won't last beyond the near future. Near the beginning Lazi says as much, referring to her ideal prototype of a woman as a hallucination seen "just as you were freezing to death atop an icy mountain, a legendary beauty from the furthest reaches of fantasy." Recording her thoughts in notebooks enables her to reflect on the various miseries that she and her friends go through, and enables her to quickly make out the warning posts: "DON'T BELIEVE THE FANTASY," "WIELD THE AX OF CRUELTY." The unsupervised hijinks shared between Lazi and her small group of friends wastes no time pretending that hatred imparts crucial power in any relationship.
Although it's common to joke how two people's bickering sounds like a married couple's, Qiu's prose points to the profundity of life's "small things." Romantic and sexual relationships further heighten the strain of even the slightest sleight, and all sides languish in the misery and mirth of the ensuing heartbreak. Lazi never ignores the melodrama of it all, frequently highlighting the strife of her own stricken romances before relishing in her own revenge upon the lovers "responsible" for the harm. Literary irony remains the only part of the relationships that she takes for granted. Several dramatic correspondences with her first girlfriend are treated with finality only for her girlfriend to reenter her life when Lazi least expects it. This informs the existential severity of Lazi's plight particularly, and perhaps carries over to the real world as well. An episode of one's life never closes with the dramatic climax as it does in a book or a film. Avoiding one's past is impossible, and reckoning with that informs a timeless struggle for people, queer, straight, or otherwise.
This doesn't stop Lazi from trying to do so. She lives in a book, after all, and many other books live in her. Although the entirety of her shelf is likely unknown to those outside Taiwan, some of the literary and cinematic references should remain clear.
When you visit, will you bring me some presents? the Crocodile wanted to know. Very well, I'll bring you new hand-sew lingerie, said Osamu Dazai. I'll give you the most beautiful picture frame on earth, would you like that? asked Yukio Mishima. I'll plaster your bathroom walls with copies of my Waseda degree, said Haruki Murakami.Numerous passages reference Murakami, the eponymous Crocodile at some point adopts the name of Jean Genet, and various passages drop names and works of other writers and film-makers. Although Lazi and her friends rarely make mention of their studies, they seem nevertheless hyperaware of their vitality, weaving the moments of dreary films and satirical comedies into their own lives. Lazi herself draws insight and inspiration from the art around her, at one point going so far as to break up with her girlfriend by replicating the ending of Chronicle of Death Foretold. Her attempt to do this, and the same at numerous other points, goes about as well as one would expect. One's imagination of desire often conflicts with pleasure's "real" origins. In lieu of the novel's looming metaphor, Qiu fashions the lives of her characters as existing in a self-aware magical realist world akin to one of Murakami's novels.
Lazi and her friends' journeys of self-discovery parallel a panic concerning Taiwan's endangered crocodile population; and the novel makes the metaphor between the crocodilian and queerness particularly blunt. Once Taiwanese officials start considering how to accommodate the new presence of crocodiles, everywhere from marriage prohibitions to forced sterilizations, it becomes impossible not to read this as anything but a mirror of oppressive legislation of queer identities in Taiwan, and elsewhere. If Crocodiles served only to fulfill this blunt metaphor in the story, Qiu would be successful; but as necessary as it is to understand this context to her novel, I think over-emphasizing the relevance of its effect diminishes the other crocodilian aspects Qiu ascribes to this particular queer experience. Equating queer romance, companionship, and sexuality to animalist lifestyles and habit will undoubtedly strike some as offensive; yet Qiu doubles into the metaphor so as to reveals some harsh truths concerning how we learn to both love and live. Survival means something else for an animal than for us, though it remains something both animals and humans are intimately familiar with. Certainly we don't need to wrestle our prey in the dirt as animals do daily, but we have other commitments that ruin us all the same. Without cruelty, the sharpened edge of hatred, we might find ourselves imperiled like a wild animal entrapped by fangs and claws.
Notes of a Crocodile picks at the scabs of bitter arguments, sour recollections of friendships and intimacies that fell apart thanks to melodramatic sleights that escalated beyond control. The novel dismisses nostalgia as naïve pessimism, instead opting for constant and progressive introspection that doubts, scrutinizes, criticizes oneself in order to become bolder, kinder, more impassioned. And for queer people growing up today, in a world of increasing segregation and single-mindedness, I can think of nothing more necessary than a text such as this.
