Flore Chevaillier  (Florida State University)
Misreading the Other: French Realism and the Cultural Revolution

My piece on Dai Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress compares the influence of French realism during the Chinese Cultural Revolution to the critical reception of the novel in the United States and in France. The novel tells the story of two boys, sent for re-education, who discover a stack of French books that help them during painful moments in the countryside. American and French critics emphasize the positive role of the books, but they fail to understand that the two boys also use the books to "civilize" the Little Chinese Seamstress who ironically ends up "educating" them. Critics and reviewers ignore the role of subaltern figures, the elusion of which discloses a misreading of the role of the native in the novel. I establish that the consuming of the fantasy of the "other" serves Western societies and values, and reveals that Dai Sijie's fictional concerns tie in with contemporary questions about national representations. My anaysis of the subaltern figures leads me to question Gayatri Spivak's statement, "the subaltern cannot speak," as the novel subtly tackles the Western values' paradox in its production of subaltern figures.