The Three Leaps of Wang Lun Read Free Page B

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. But 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