La longue attente

Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu." Like a fairy tale, Ha Jin's masterful novel of love and politics begins with a formula--and like a fairy tale, Waiting uses its slight, deceptively simple framework to encompass a wide range of truths about the human heart. Lin Kong is a Chinese army doctor trapped in an arranged marriage that embarrasses and repels him. (Shuyu has country ways, a withered face, and most humiliating of all, bound feet.) Nevertheless, he's content with his tidy military life, at least until he falls in love with Manna, a nurse at his hospital. Regulations forbid an army officer to divorce without his wife's consent--until 18 years have passed, that is, after which he is free to marry again. So, year after year Lin asks his wife for his freedom, and year after year he returns from the provincial courthouse: still married, still unable to consummate his relationship with Manna. Nothing feeds love like obstacles placed in its way--right? But Jin's novel answers the question of what might have happened to Romeo and Juliet had their romance been stretched out for several decades. In the initial confusion of his chaste love affair, Lin longs for the peace and quiet of his "old rut." Then killing time becomes its own kind of rut, and in the end, he is forced to conclude that he "waited eighteen years just for the sake of waiting."There's a political allegory here, of course, but it grows naturally from these characters"hearts. Neither Lin nor Manna is especially ideological, and the tumultuous events occurring around them go mostly unnoticed. They meet during a forced military march, and have their first tender moment during an opera about a naval battle. (While the audience shouts,"Down with Japanese Imperialism!"the couple holds hands and gazes dreamily into each other's eyes.) When Lin is in Goose Village one summer, a mutual acquaintance rapes Manna; years later, the rapist appears on a TV report titled"To Get Rich Is Glorious,"after having made thousands in construction. Jin resists hammering ideological ironies like these home, but totalitarianism's effects on Lin are clear: Let me tell you what really happened, the voice said. All those years you waited torpidly, like a sleepwalker, pulled and pushed about by others" opinions, by external pressure, by your illusions, by the official rules you internalized. You were misled by your own frustration and passivity, believing that what you were not allowed to have was what your heart was destined to embrace. Ha Jin himself served in the People's Liberation Army, and in fact left his native country for the U.S. only in 1985. That a non-native speaker can produce English of such translucence and power is truly remarkable--but really, his prose is the least of the miracles here. Improbably, Jin makes an unconsummated 18-year love affair loom as urgent as political terror or war, while history-changing events gain the immediacy of a domestic dilemma. Gracefully phrased, impeccably paced, Waiting is the kind of realist novel you thought was no longer being written. --Mary Park

Résumé : Le périple de Ha Jin est riche de questions fascinantes sur le langage, l'immigration et la place de la littérature, au sein de nos sociétés en proie à une mondialisation galopante, toutes questions qui occupent une place prépondérante dans L'Ecrivain comme migrant, sa première oeuvre non romanesque. Composé de trois essais, ce livre place la vie et l'ceuvre de Ha Jin en parallèle de celles d'autres exilés littéraires, faisant ainsi naître une conversation entre les cultures et les époques. Il fait référence aux cas d'Alexandre Soljenitsyne et du romancier chinois Lin Yutang, afin d'illustrer la loyauté de l'écrivain envers le pays qui l'a vu naître, tandis que Joseph Conrad et Vladimir Nabokov, qui ont, comme Ha Jin, choisi d'écrire en anglais, sont mis à contribution lors de l'examen du choix conscient d'une langue d'écriture par l'écrivain immigré. Un dernier essai fait appel à V. S. Naipaul et Milan Kundera, afin d'étudier de quelles manières notre époque en perpétuel changement pousse un écrivain immigré à repenser le concept même de patrie. Au fil de la plume, Ha Jin invite d'autres figures littéraires à rejoindre la conversation, comme W. G. Sebald, C. P. Cavafy et Salman Rushdie, altérant et affinant le concept même de littérature d'immigration. A la fois réflexion sur un thème essentiel à l'époque de la mondialisation et fascinant aperçu des écrivains qui peuplent la bibliothèque mentale de Ha Jin, L'Ecrivain comme migrant est une oeuvre critique passionnément engagée, puisant ses racines dans l'exil, mais lui ouvrant également de nouveaux horizons.

Né en Chine en 1956, Ha Jin a servi six ans dans l'armée populaire de libération avant de quitter sa Chine natale pour les Etats-Unis en 1985 grâce à une bourse. Fait remarquable: après des études à Brandeis University, il a choisi la langue anglaise pour écrire deux volumes de poèmes, trois recueils de nouvelles et trois romans remarqués. Le deuxième, La longue attente (Seuil, 2002), couronné par le National Book Award, le PEN/Faulkner Award, finaliste du Pulitzer Prize, fait l'objet d'une adaptation cinématographique par Peter Chan (cf Tigre et Dragon et Le roi et moi). Le Seuil publie simultanément son premier roman, La mare, et son troisième, La démence du sage. Ha Jin vit dans le Massachusetts et enseigne l'anglais à l'université de Boston.