Author | Frederic Tuten |
---|---|
Cover artist | Roy Lichtenstein |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Genre | Postmodern, Collage, Parody novel |
Publisher | Citadel Press |
Publication date | 1971 |
Media type | Print (Hardcover and Paperback) |
Pages | 121 pp |
ISBN | 0-8065-0248-7 |
OCLC | 257332 |
951.04/2/0924 B | |
LC Class | PZ4.T9663 Ad PS3570.U78 |
The Adventures of Mao on the Long March is Frederic Tuten's first published novel. The novel is a fictionalized account of Chairman Mao's rise to power, and is highly experimental in nature, including extensive use of parody and collage.
The novel has no linear plot, and is mostly composed of an elaborate arrangement of disparate elements. The novel presents a seemingly straightforward history of the Long March, as well as a fictionalized interview with Mao and several more conventional "novelistic" scenes with Mao as the main character. The novel also includes a large selection of unattributed quotes from various sources and parodies of certain writers, including Faulkner, Hemingway, and Kerouac.
The story first appeared in 1969 in a 39-page condensed form in the magazine Artist Slain. In 1970 the completed book was sent to various publishers and rejected as it was not considered a novel. Tuten considered self-publication and asked his friend Roy Lichtenstein to do the cover. Eventually, he was offered a publication deal by Citadel Press, on the condition that Lichtenstein make a lithograph of Mao for a deluxe edition (Lichtenstein's "Head of Mao" precedes Andy Warhol's Mao series by two years). The lithograph and book were published in an edition of 150 signed copies. However, the special edition was then disassembled by the publisher and very few of the original box editions remain intact. The novel was finally printed in 1971 and received a favorable review in The New York Times by Thomas Lask; this was followed by several other positive reviews and comments by writers, including Susan Sontag, Iris Murdoch and John Updike. In 1977 Marion Boyers reprinted the novel in England and the U.S., making sure to keep it in print as long as she was alive. The novel was re-released in 2005 by New Directions and is currently still in print. [1]
The cover of Mao features original artwork by painter Roy Lichtenstein, Tuten's close friend. It is a bold, smiling depiction of Mao, rendered in Lichtenstein's trademark benday dot style. Tuten himself was actually used as a model for the drawing, which Lichtenstein altered accordingly to resemble Mao.
The font used in the book intentionally resembles that of an informational pamphlet.
I'm an old man who wants to dream the remaining days away. Yet I can't take a nice healthy crap without some fanatic bowing to the stool and singing: "Oh, our great Chairman Mao has again fertilized the world." What was all my hard work for, if I can't fill my last hours with serenity and nonproductive contemplation? [2]
Mao's wife sighs. "Come to bed, my sweet man; you need to dream."
"Not tonight. Tonight I would like to love you alone."
"Oh! Mao, the world is too tired for that."
"We must stir it to life then. The sexual act is a revolutionary act." [3]
Satire must never be directed against the class whose aspirations you share - only against the enemy. [4]
The book is loaded with references to writers and literary texts, in the form of direct quotes, parodies, and allusions:
In the fictional interview with Mao, over fifty books and publications, as well as several artists and filmmakers, are mentioned in passing. The following list includes only those who were discussed at length by Mao:
Earl Rovit describes the novel as:
an artful pastiche of parody, surprising quotations, startling juxtaposition, teasing incongruity, and shrewd illumination of the knotted contradictoriness of the Western aesthetic tradition. Tuten makes subtle and productive use of the strategies of focus and composition which are traditionally the property of the visual arts. [5]
According to Robert Detweiler, Tuten's handling of history as fantasy "enables the reader to grasp immediately the distortion of history and contrast it to the actual structure of past events." By transforming Mao into an insecure buffoon and the march into a mad and chaotic journey, the novel comically deflates the mythical status Mao had at the time. [6]
John Updike's essay on the novel, "Satire without Serifs," originally appeared in the New Yorker. It was reprinted as an introduction in the 2005 New Direction edition, along with an introductory essay and postscript by Tuten himself.
John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once, Updike published more than twenty novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism and children's books during his career.
A Farewell to Arms is a novel by American writer Ernest Hemingway, set during the Italian campaign of World War I. First published in 1929, it is a first-person account of an American, Frederic Henry, serving as a lieutenant in the ambulance corps of the Italian Army. The novel describes a love affair between the expatriate from America and an English nurse, Catherine Barkley.
On the Road is a 1957 novel by American writer Jack Kerouac, based on the travels of Kerouac and his friends across the United States. It is considered a defining work of the postwar Beat and Counterculture generations, with its protagonists living life against a backdrop of jazz, poetry, and drug use. The novel is a roman à clef, with many key figures of the Beat movement, such as William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Neal Cassady represented by characters in the book, including Kerouac himself as the narrator Sal Paradise.
Visions of Cody is an experimental novel by Jack Kerouac. It was written in 1951–1952, and though not published in its entirety until 1972, it had by then achieved an underground reputation. Since its first printing, Visions of Cody has been published with an introduction by Beat poet Allen Ginsberg titled "The Visions of the Great Rememberer."
Pierre Ryckmans, better known by his pen name Simon Leys, was a Belgian-Australian writer, essayist and literary critic, translator, art historian, sinologist, and university professor, who lived in Australia from 1970. His work particularly focused on the politics and traditional culture of China, calligraphy, French and English literature, the commercialization of universities, and nautical fiction. Through the publication of his trilogy Les Habits neufs du président Mao (1971), Ombres chinoises (1974) and Images brisées (1976), he was one of the first intellectuals to denounce the Cultural Revolution in China and the idolizing of Mao in the West.
Rabbit Is Rich is a 1981 novel by John Updike. It is the third novel of the tetralogy that begins with Rabbit, Run, continues with Rabbit Redux, and concludes with Rabbit at Rest. There is also a related novella, Rabbit Remembered (2001). Rabbit Is Rich was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction in 1982, as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1981. The first-edition hardcover "rainbow" dust jacket for the novel was designed by the author and is significantly different from the horizontal-stripe designs deployed on the other three Rabbit novel covers. Subsequent printings, however, including trade paperbacks, feature the stripe motif with stock images of a set of car keys or an image of a late-1970s Japanese automobile.
La Chinoise, ou plutôt à la Chinoise: un film en train de se faire, commonly referred to simply as La Chinoise, is a 1967 French political docufiction film directed by Jean-Luc Godard about a group of young Maoist activists in Paris.
Frederic Tuten is an American novelist, short story writer and essayist. He has written five novels – The Adventures of Mao on the Long March (1971), Tallien: A Brief Romance (1988), Tintin in the New World: A Romance (1993), Van Gogh's Bad Café (1997) and The Green Hour (2002) – as well as one book of inter-related short stories, Self-Portraits: Fictions (2010), and essays, many of the latter being about contemporary art. His memoir My Young Life (2019) was published by Simon & Schuster. Tuten received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction and was given the Award for Distinguished Writing from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was awarded three Pushcart Prizes and one O. Henry Prize.
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"Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast" is an essay by Tom Wolfe that appeared in the November 1989 issue of Harper's Magazine criticizing the American literary establishment for retreating from realism.
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