"Revolutionary Consumption"
William David Scott

Agnes Smedley--an American radical novelist and journalist whose regular
reports from China, detailing her experiences among that country's
fledgling communist fighters, were widely read throughout the 1930s--had a
gift, as a writer, for portraying the subtly nuanced contradictions that
shaped the lives of despairing, disheartened, or disillusioned
revolutionaries, as the following excerpt reveals:

"This daughter [domestically imprisoned, against her will, by her father],
whose name is Chi-yueh, did not always smoke opium, did not always wander
through these drug-soaked rooms and enclosed garden like a disembodied
soul.  For once she was a revolutionist--a Communist--and waged war on
opium, on concubinage, and on all the decadent old ideas that recognize
age or calligraphy as statesmanship or scholarship.  That was over five
years ago when she, a tall, vital girl, in military uniform, marched with
the revolutionary army from Canton to Yangtze.  Now she is a woman in
lovely, flowered silk gowns that fall from her shoulders to her ankles
over a form so emaciated that it resembles a formless bamboo."  (Agnes
Smedley, "Portraits of Chinese Women in Revolution," p. 41)

In this passage, the loss of revolutionary ideals--a loss implying,
indeed, the wholesale breakdown of the Utopian imagination--is held
directly accountable for producing a condition of "emaciated" existence;
not simply a drug-induced stupor devoid of every trace of real desire, but
a consumption, a cannibalism directed against oneself, to the point of
(virtual) disappearance.  This description is part of a study of three
such characters, entitled "The Living Dead," which portrays individuals
haunted by their own physical, spiritual, and socio-political
disintegration as a result of a deeper, more pervasive disintegration of
revolutionary desire; a kind of political entropy which, in this context,
one might characterize as a determinate structural despair.

My essay will be concerned to explain how, through detailing precisely
such moments of decay in revolutionary subjects, Smedley manages both to
convey the complex nature of the limits of the Utopian imagination, as
well as, more positively, to narrate the conditions for the production of
an incipient revolutionary desire within the very structure of apparent
hopelessness.   To this end, I will examine five stories drawn from her
"Portraits of Chinese Women in Revolution," each of which narrates the
process, among five different individuals, of what I am here calling
revolutionary "consumption."  Ultimately, I will ask what we can learn
from these portraits about the deceptive and contradictory nature of
"despair," and thus, in turn, I will ask how one can begin to reconceive
moments of widespread political indifference as themselves implying
(however unaware) a transformational force of hope.