| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Yomi Braester. Witness against History: Literature, Film, and Public Discourse in Twentieth-Century China. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2003. Pp. xii, 264. $60.00.

"All Cretans are liars," said a Cretan in the old Greek brain teaser. Yomi Braester's study of modern Chinese authors and filmmakers reminds one of the riddle, since the Chinese, while seeming to act as witnesses to history and propagandists for progress, were often surreptitiously sowing seeds of doubt about their own statements and the very possibility of testimony. Surveying twentieth-century works through a number of case studies, Braester argues that from Lu Xun on, Chinese authors commented on their times precisely by throwing doubts on their own veracity and, indeed, the very possibility of public discourse. Lu is a clear case, since his famous "iron chamber" metaphor insists on the futility, even the cruelty of enlightenment. The madman in Lu's short story of 1918, like the Cretan, simply cannot be telling the truth all the time, in which case the entire narrative is unreliable. Lu thus expresses his "ambivalance about his position as a witness" (p. 31) and implies "an unbridgeable gap between him [or any witness] and the event" (p. 40).

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