Xue Yiwei’s “King Lear”

In this essay Lin Gang argues that Xue Yiwei’s “King Lear” and Nineteen Seventy-Nine (“Lier Wang” yu 1979) is the first Chinese novel to truly follow in the footsteps of Western modernism, specifically Joyce’s Ulysses. The relationship between Xue’s novel and Shakespeare’s King Lear mirrors that between Ulysses and Homer’s The Odyssey, which sees the narrative structure of a previous text repurposed in a modern context. Xue’s novel makes use of this literary technique to reflect on Chinese modern history, using the notion of fate as a metaphor for the powerful forces of history to which ordinary people find themselves helplessly subject. By focusing on the protagonist’s spirit of defiance, Lin argues, “King Lear” and Nineteen Seventy-Nine distinguishes itself from most Chinese literature set in the same period.