The Dragon's Village

...JAMESR...

...Worgul attempts (largely successfully) to bring together these divergent strands of contemporary reflection on the sacraments...

...But few would deny he was a changed person after Dallas, however unwilling they might be to share Wofford's judgment that Robert Kennedy was, by 1968, "one of the most appealing and promising men in the history of American politics...

...Louis University.individuals and societies...

...It was a movement thatbrought new hope to China's millions, for the first time trying to fulfill Sun Yat-sen's old promise of "land to the tiller," and yet a movement at the same time bloody and destructive...

...She wakes, and tries desperately to burn her diary, only to catch sight 10 October 1980:571 of the flames consuming a favorite passage...

...Joseph Powers TO MY KNOWLEDGE,Worgurs book represents the first attempt to pull together in some sort of systematic fashion trends which have been developing in the understanding of the sacraments in the midst of the confusion of the postVatican II era...

...A Commonweal: 572...

...This is an exploration into a general theology of the sacraments informed and criticized by the findings from personality and social sciences which precede...

...Something died in him--as in many of us--in 1968, in April in Memphis, June in Los Angeles, Chicago in August, and with the election in November...

...This then, is a very human picture of a very small part of an enormous social movement...

...It deals with the first stages of land reform under the Chinese Communists, one of the most momentous acts of the new regime and one which, it seems safe to say, marks a genuinely secular change in what many used to imagine to be the endlessly cyclical pattern of history in China...

...Picking upWhether or not Chen went through such an episode herself is beside the point...

...Ling-ling's own realization of these tendencies in herself is one of the most poignant and yet horrifying facets of the book...

...Most who read it will be grateful he did...

...The reforms that were set in motion by the Land Law of June 1950, sought to bring a new order (already established in those parts of China where the Communists had earlier won control) to the eighty percent of the population made up of peasants...

...We see her first in Shanghai, helping a friend from her American convent school distribute radical literature before the entry of the Red Army, making the decision to stay on while her fianc~ and family prepare to leave for Hongkong or Taiwan...

...This serves as foundation for understanding the Christian ritual of the sacraments...

...He then moves through Geertz's analysis of patterns of behavior and Durand's theory of structured imagination into Brinkman's four modes of sacramental structure...

...Longxiang's peasants live in what Marx described as a condition of rural idiocy, conscious only of the old ways, and indeed they ignore Peking as the source of political authority, looking rather to Xian, the site of ancient Changan that was the capital of Han and Tang China...

...After a brief philosophical note on the philosophy of transcendence (Rahner) and the "co-existential" character of human existence (Levinas), Worgul moves into his exploration of the theological dimensions of the sacraments...

...Theologians and liturgists alike have been searching for a way out of the theological and ecumenical impasse inherited from the counterreformation versions of a medieval theology of the sacraments...

...01oi.,~ R. Cl.IJq~RDis chairman of the history department at Middlebury College in Vermont...

...Paulist, $8.95, 232 pp...

...it is their task to make friends with the peasants, identify their common interests, seek out those who might become activists...

...Using Erikson's analysis of the role of ritual in the development of human personality and Bro's analysis of the function of ritual in the reconciliation of "binary oppositions," Worgul concludes to the psychological necessity of ritual for the healthy maturation of human personality and the resolution of fragmentation which codefines human experience...

...Concluding the theological section, Worgul returns to an existential method to present the sacraments as bearers of "ecclesial root metaphors," with all the power that this process involves...

...We have seen studies on the significance of ritual for the patterns of human development, the power of civil religious ritual in a so-called "secular" society, the prescriptive and performative power of language, the reality of transcendence as a human process as well as a divine prerogative and the critical and creative character of the "limit" or marginal situation in human experience...

...There is an extremely sharp contrast between this modern world of Shanghai, and the world of Longxiang in the northCommonweal:570 west...

...After the senior cadresuggests that keeping a diary may be dangerous, she has a dreadful nightmare in which nameless men search her room...

...The second section of the book surveys the insights of psychology, the sociology of religion, anthropology, language philosophy, theory of imagination and the philosophy of co-existence and transcendence to find "lines of convergence" on the meaning of ritual for REVIEWERS 9 ROBERTHASSENGERis coordinator ofStructured Programs at Empire State College, State University of New York...

...Ling-ling wants to be a writer, and must make the decision not to allow herself to be frightened away from this calling by either the landlords or her Communist superiors...

...RONALDDiLORENZOteaches in the English department at St...

...Finally, he moves through the sociology of religion from Parsons to Luckmann, Berger and Bellah, to the anthropological studies of Victor Turner in order to demonstrate "ritual's indisputable role in cultural and social existence...

...Wofford believes Kennedy felt responsible for his brother's death...

...it is commonly estimated that several millions of the Chinese people~lost their lives in the terror of the early fifties, a terror heightened by the emergency following the outbreak of the Korean war...

...His work has appeared in The Village Voice and Review...

...Later, of course, it would become clear that "land to the tiller" was only the first stage of the reform...

...But the studies have been occasionaland scattered...

...Chen's narrator is Guan Ling-ling, a young girl who -- like Chen -- was born to wealth and privilege in Shanghai, and who -- like .Chert -- threw in her lot with the new regime after the Communist victory...

...this book is presumably built in large part on her memories of those years in the Northwest...

...But there is an individual triumph too...

...And Dallas...

...that his brother had a liaison with mobster Sam Giancana's girl...

...II|l the fragments FRON NAEICTO NETAPHOR A VAHDATIONOF CHRISTIANSACRAMENTS George S.Wm~ul, Jr...

...that his support for the drive to topple Castro helped generate the unholy alliance between the CIA and the mob, resulting in at least eight attempts to kill Castro--who knew it...

...Drawing heavily on his own experience, the 1964 oral history interviews with RFK (which became available only in 1979), and the Congressional investigations of the King and John Kennedy assassinations, Wofford attempts to account for "Bobby's" metamorphosis...

...In his survey of social sciences,Worgul moves from Austin's analysis of the "speech act" to Brinkman's analysis of ritual language to show that ritual is essential for the introduction of people into a social reality as well as for a community's sense of identity and survival in the world...

...Yet there is little doubt that most readers who turn to Yuan-tsung Chen's The Dragon'sI Village will do so not so much because of their interest in its literary merits, but rather because they are interested in the subject...

...It was ten years before he could begin this book...

...I take this in Gilkey's sense of the distinction between "meaning" and "validity" in which "meaning" can be discovered within human experience but "validity" needs a cultural referent beyond the structures and interests of believing communities...

...There is a happy ending -- the land reform team holds a successful election, and the land is parceled out to the peasants...

...Above all, they are to show the peasants that it is possible to break out of the cycle of poverty, show them they are not doomed to the life into which they were born, show them that they can take into their own hands control of the social order...

...Her education draws her at first into the world of art and literature, and there are bri+efglimpses of men and women like Mao Dun, Ba Jin, Ding Ling, and others of that brilliant group of leftist writers of the twenties and thirties, who had worked in or on the fringes of the Communist movement, and would now have to come to terms with a victorious Communism in their art...

...Or so it should have been, to accord with the Maoist vision, and indeed perhaps for many it was this way...

...A small, human part of a large movement I THE DBAWN'S VILLAGE Yuan-Tsung Chen Pantheon, $10.00 (285 pp...

...and more...

...As he points out, the confusion stems partially from the "helterskelter" pattern of the release of the reformed rites and partially from the paradigm shifts which have finally invaded the understanding of the church and its functions both in the mind of the theological "experts" and the theological "laity...

...But his heart isn't in it...

...Many resent the interference of the cadres from the outside, and like the peasants in Lu Xun's stories of the twenties, they are even willing to defend the system that victimizes them...

...FATHERJOtEI~IM.POWERS,S.J..teacherand author on sacramental theology, is professor of systematic theology at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley...

...it is rather as if Dickens and Trollope were the province of historians like Kitson Clark, or Hemingway and Faulkner the province of Arthur Schlesinger...

...KELLYteaches in the sociology department at Fordham University...

...John's development had been steady, from the "political dilettante" of his Congressional and early Senate years to the "statesman" Wofford sees Kennedy becoming in his last twoyears.Robertgrew"by epiphanies": the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis, the violence he saw directed against blacks and civil rights workers, the power and corruption he found in the FBI and CIA...

...His Epilogue begins to suggest some similarities and differences between John Kennedy and Jimmy Carter, to speculate on how post-Camelot antipolitics has made the presidency more demanding, and to muse about the fate of "the last Kennedy," as the primaries and caucuses were about to begin...

...We have since learned some of the things he knew in 1963, and kept from the Warren Commission and other investigations: that in encouraging FBI infiltration of the KKKandorganizedcrime,he strengthened a monster whose head hated the Kennedys and King...

...He is right, of course...

...that John Kennedy's withdrawal of air IIIIIcover at the Bay of Pigs bitterly disappointed the anti-Castro forces we had armed and trained, who blamed him for the fiasco...

...We see how the reform was carded out in one particular comer of China, the Dragon's Village (Longxiang) of Gansu province, a desperately poor region of the northwest, which had been a border outpost under the Han and Tang dynasties, and which remains a cultural and economic backwater today...

...indeed the name of Mao seemsnever to be mentionedin Longxiang, and there is more pragmatism than Marxism in the cadre's ap-proach to the problems of the village...

...the primacy of "sacrament," stresses the ecclesial reality of the medieval theory of the "res et sacramentum," and breaks through the disputes about sacramental causality by moving from a matrix of "causality" to one of "encounter" and "presence...

...His subtitle uses the expression "validation" of Christian sacraments...

...She finds herself wondering how to curry favor during a self-criticism session, or using the death of a child -beaten to death by his idiot brother -- as an opportunity to impress the senior cadre to whom she is attracted...

...There is much more to Wofford's book...

...they are driven not only by idealism and revolutionary zeal, but also by a kind of revolutionary opportunism that sometimes leads them to ignore their ideals while advancing their personal stature within the movement...

...I could not care less what they called themselves,"she writes of them, "Guomindang or Communist, rightist or leftist, counterrevolutionary or revolutionary.Theywere the same people...

...Clifford ONE of my colleagues, a scholar of modem Chinese literature, has deplored the capture of that writing by social scientists in the West, scholars who judge it by socio-political rather than literary standards...

...Chen, however, shows a more human side of land reform...

...He redefines "sacrament" (in the light of the Baltimore catechism!--I suppose that we must all still deal with that), shows the inappropriatenessofthepostreformation debate over the primacy of "word" vs...

...NicholasR...

...Chen's peasants are not the smiling, Mao-quoting farmers of the China Pictorial...

...Accordingly the book divides into an "existential" section in which "an attempt will be made to uncover those areas of human existence which could be labeled 'religious' and 'sacramental,' " and a theological section, constructing a system which will allow an integration between the theological dements and the anthropological resuits...

...It is then that she saves the rest of the pages from the fire, sitshersdf down, and spends the rest of the night writing down her experiences in Longxiang...

...The cadres, too, are human...

...Wofford does not suggest which, if any, of these demons with whom RFK trafficked (as Mailer put it) might have been responsible for John Kennedy's death, or what Robert thought he should have done...

...The names of Geertz, Turner, Erikson, Fowler, Austin and Bdlah, among others, have i~een heard more and more often among sacramental and liturgical theologians alongside those of Rahner, Schillebeeckx, AUaincourt, Gdineau and other more traditional experts in the history and theory of sacramental life...

...As, I think, would Robert, Martin, and John...

...They need not believe that peasants must always be at the mercy of their landlords, or women at the mercy of their men...

...Yet it was this reform of the early fifties that finally did away with the remnants of China's gentry, that "feudal class" (in Marxist parlance) that for more than a millennium had dominated not only life in the Chinese countryside, but the positions of power in the government as well...

...N.E.CONDINIis a freelance writer and critic...

...by the end of the decade, the private ownership of land by the peasants had given way to the cooperatives of the mid-fifties and the communes of the Great Leap Forward...

...Into the hopelessness and deprivation of Gansu come the young cadres from the city, led by a few who had some experience of land reform elsewhere...