How Wang-Fô was saved

“How Wang-Fô was saved” is the first Nouvelle collection Eastern Nouvelles of Marguerite Yourcenar.

Summary of the news

On the roads of the empire of Han, two men rove: Wang-Fô, worthy old man, is a Master in painting; Ling, its disciple, carries works and the brushes. Since their meeting, one evening in a tavern, their destinies are braided: the Master showed how to see the world through the filter of art and the disciple the family home left to follow that which made him become aware of the beauty of the flash and the grace of the ant. Wang-Fô paints the wife of Ling of a perfect beauty so that Ling his wife painted by the hand of its Master rather than his wife itself prefers. It survived not this pure inaccuracy; Wang-Fô painted its lifeless body suspended on the branch of a plum tree. Of village in village, these new father and sons seek landscapes to paint.

One day, the guards of the emperor stop the two men. There, they learn from the mouth of the Son of the Sky which its childhood known for only decoration only the fabrics of the old painter, but that their beauty modified the perception of the child: when old sixteen years, it left the palate, it could not support the commonplace of the real-world. To be avenged to be the impotent emperor of an imperfect world, it decided to make mutilate the painter. Ling springs to stab the Celestial Dragon; a guard intercepts it in its fatal dash and decapitates Ling.

Saddened, Wang-Fô is put at the task. It paints a stretch of water sumontée of clouds to which it adds a small key of pink. It paints a boat which occupies from now on all the foreground. Water becomes little by little real but Wang-Fô does not realize that it paints already sitted in water… But Ling appears in the boat and…

At the end of the news he flees, with his Ling disciple, on a blue jade sea. The word " disparurent" has to underline.

Style analyzes

Marguerite Yourcenar tells the history of a painter whose life is devoted to its art, which leads it to adapt its writing to make it correspond to a new form of artistic expression. Painting and literature are combined in the news. Pictorial environment influences the descriptive proportion of the account. The narration is suspended with rare adventures and is spread, in most of the text, in the form of a description: the meeting in the tavern, the body of the hung wife, the palate of the emperor, his youth, unfinished painting, as many elements which are characterized in a way precise and coloured by many adjectives, in particular relating to the color.

However, the shimmer of the text does not reach with the exubérance; on the contrary, the writing is sober, rigorous syntax and the emotions of the characters contained. There it is necessary to see the traditional elegance of the writing yourcenarienne, which by its concision and its density seems to be “natural”. Like paintings of Wang-Fô, the style of the author gives the illusion of reality by the extreme control of the pictorial or literary technique.

The multiplication of the comparisons and the metaphors still add to the grace of the text and ensure a poetic dimension to him some. The prose of Marguerite Yourcenar is detached from the only narrative role to be forwarded gradually to the pure pleasure of expressing the artistic beauty. Finally, the rules of the simple reality are surbedded and poetry carries the account, as painting carries the old painter.

Interpretation of the direction

To include/understand “How Wang-Fô was saved”, it is to be able to give a direction to an account whose fantastic end does not seem not announced by the more realistic beginning.

As the characters who rove on the roads of the empire before fleeing on a painted sea, the reader follows a course of which it must learn a lesson. Following the example Ling, the reader discovers how to look at the world differently, without posing on him the daily glance of the practice. The disciple of Wang-Fô is the representation, in the news, of the reader: it forms its spirit to detect the graces of unimportant during an account which can be defined like “initiatory”.

Moreover, the news can be regarded as an apologue, insofar as the narration is short, allegorical and carrying a teaching. If the brevity appears easily, the allegory, by definition, is more discrete; it is only by interpreting the disappearance of Wang-Fô that the implicit one appears: is there a esthetisation of death? or rather a reflection on the need for the withdrawal of the artist so that a work is completed?

Thus, the significance of new remains dubious, but the text is not impoverished by it, because it remains available and interpretable by each reader. This last, if it is engaged to carry on the world a glance of esthète, is especially requested to form its own opinion on the text: if the direction is never ensured, its research reassures the man on his capacity to be thought.

Adaptation

The new one inspired a short-measuring of the same title of Rene Laloux on drawings of Caza in 1987.

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