Sinographies: Writing China

s i n o g r a p h i e s

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s i n o g r a p h i e s

w r i t i n g c h i n a

Eric Hayot, Haun Saussy, and Steven G. Yao, Editors University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis  •  London

Portions of an early version of chapter 4 were previously published as “Jesuit Fish in Chinese Nets: Athanasius Kircher and the Translation of the Nestorian Tablet,” Representations 87 (Summer 2004); copyright 2004 by the Regents of the University of California; reprinted with permission. An early version of chapter 6 originally appeared in Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 37, no. 2 (June 2004): 41–58; reprinted with permission. Chapter 8 was previously published by Fremantle Arts Centre Press; copyright 2005 by Curtin University Books; reprinted with permission. Chapter 14 previously appeared in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 11, no. 2 (1999): 153–76; copyright 1999 Brown University and differences; reprinted with permission. Copyright 2008 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sinographies : writing China / Eric Hayot, Haun Saussy, and Steven G. Yao, editors.        p. cm.   Includes bibliographical references.   ISBN: 978-0-8166-4724-8 (alk. paper)   ISBN-10: 0-8166-4724-0 (alk. paper)   ISBN: 978-0-8166-4725-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)   ISBN-10: 0-8166-4725-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)  1.  Chinese language—Writing—History.  I. Hayot, Eric, 1972– II. Saussy, Haun, 1960– III. Yao, Steven G., 1965–   PL1171.S56 2008   495.1’11—dc22 2007019080 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08

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Produced by Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services Copyediting by Rachel Bernstein Text design and composition by Tag Savage

Contents

Sinographies: An Introduction Eric Hayot, Haun Saussy, and Steven G. Yao

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part one.  The Language and Rhetoric of “China” 1. Chineseness: A Prehistory of Its Future Eric Hayot 2. Reading and Difference: Image, Allegory, and the Invention of Chinese Christopher Bush 3. Impressions de Chine; or, How to Translate from a Nonexistent Original Haun Saussy

3

34

64

part two.  Early-Modern Cultural Production 4. Untranslation Theory: The Nestorian Stele and the Jesuit Illustration of China Timothy Billings 5. China, India, and the Empire of Commerce in Milton’s Paradise Lost Walter S. H. Lim 6. “Beyond the Bounds of Truth”: Cultural Translation and William Chambers’s Chinese Garden David Porter

89

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part three.  Testimony, Reportage, Meddling 7. Tom Dooley and the Cold War American Revision of “Indochina” Danielle Glassmeyer 8. “Torture—and Loving Care—in China”: Captivity and the Fiction of Oriental Despotism Timothy Kendall 9. Boundary Crossings: Fieldwork, the Hidden Self, and the Invisible Spirit Lucien Miller

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part four.  Minority Discourses and Immigration 10. Museifying Formosa: George Mackay’s From Far Formosa Henk Vynckier 11. Signifying on China: African-American Literary Theory and Tibetan Discourse Steven J. Venturino 12. Transplantation and Modernity: The Chinese/American Poems of Angel Island Steven G. Yao

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part five.  Mediated Externalities 13. Western Journeys of Journey to the West Carlos Rojas 14. Seminal Dispersal, Fecal Retention, and Related Narrative Matters: Eileen Chang’s Tale of Roses in the Problematic of Modern Writing Rey Chow Contributors

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1 

Sinographies: An Introduction Eric Hayot, Haun Saussy, and Steven G. Yao

Every text bears the traces of ethnocentrism;1 translations always need reexamining; travelers’ reports are notoriously exaggerated. None of these observations is in dispute here, although this book begins from, rather than concludes with, the problems they point to. The contributors to this volume discuss (among other things) ethnocentrism, the distortion wrought by translations, the exoticism that is the travel writer’s stock in trade, but they do not presume to correct the misperceptions by asserting that their own perceptions are authentic. (Indeed the question of authenticity—and the claims we and others might make for it—will be one of the major subjects of the book.) Rather they explore the particular forms of writing that produce and convey (within China as well as without it) the meanings of China; they try to understand those writings analytically, symptomatically, and historically, in relation to multiple determinants. Sinography would be to sinology (a debated discipline in its own right) as historiography is to history, a reflection on the conditions, assumptions, and logic of a set of disciplinary and cultural practices.2 Although attention never strays far from the “narrative present” of the textual construction of the many Chinas these essays examine, they do not forget their dependence on that other great signifying chain: the specific history of China, a composite narrative of thousands of years of successive civilizations on a large part of the Eurasian landmass. That the contributors to this volume are not principally conducting referential arguments (disputing facts, correcting misidentifications, and the like) does not mean [ vii  ]

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that they have chosen to ignore reference. Reference and signification, fact and discourse, are not opposites. The intricacies of the relationship between various written Chinas—the texts—and the nation/culture known simply as “China”—their main shared context—are so complex as to be nearly unspeakable. These essays are attempts to work out a “bilingual” form of scholarship, one that can engage its “targets” as “sources” and vice versa, that might speak those intricacies in multiple tongues. Those voices, if we have been successful in eliciting them, should not be easily reduced or paraphrased. “China” is spoken in many idioms, at times overlapping and at times mutually hostile ones: as a preliminary, one might single out the dialects of geography, epistemology, translation and translatability, visuality, poetics, ethics, testimony, politics, and false consciousness. These dialects attempt, in the works, careers, and discourses scrutinized here, to “speak” China, to give it a finally persuasive articulation, and in each case the contributors work through the asserted simplicity toward a more satisfyingly complex description of the relation between object and argument. Epistemologically speaking, China is classically an object, a theme of study defined by longitudes and latitudes. You may not know much about it (and what you know may be mostly folklore), but you know where it is. As part of the “far” East, as the classic end point for a hole dug through the middle of the globe, as the other side of the world, geography (Western geography) marks China by the fact of its physical distance from the West. No less, geography (Chinese geography) marks off the rest of the world with another statement of the same fact (“external” countries and peoples). In both cases, distance corresponds via metaphor to a felt difference, so that discussions of China take place in the mode of the faraway (as Roland Barthes says of his invented Japan), with the distance serving to explain the difference, and vice versa.3 Some measure of the depth with which this difference might be felt appears in Julia Kristeva’s description of her 1974 visit to the peasant village of Huxian: Forty kilometers from the former Chinese capital of Xi’an (the first capital of China after it was unified under the emperor Qin Shi Huangdi in the second century BC, and the great capital of the Tang Dynasty [618–906]) is Huxian, the chief village of an agricultural region. The road we travel to get there is hot; the sun beats down on peasants in broad bamboo hats, on unsupervised children skipping about in quiet games, on a hearse drawn by some men while others, in two parallel

sinographies: an introduction  [ ix  ] lines alongside it, surround it with thin parallel poles carried across their shoulders. Everyone from the village is in the square where we are supposed to attend an exhibit of peasant painting in one of the nearby buildings. An enormous crowd is sitting in the sun: they wait for us wordlessly, perfectly still. Calm eyes, not even curious, but slightly amused or anxious: in any case, piercing, and certain of belonging to a community with which we will never have anything to do. They don’t distinguish among us man or woman, blonde or brunette, this or that feature of face or body. As though they were discovering some weird and peculiar animals, harmless but insane. Unaggressive, but on the far side of the abyss of time and space. “A species—what they see in us is a different species,” says one of our group. “You are the first foreigners to visit the village,” says the interpreter, always sensitive to the least of our tropisms. I don’t feel like a foreigner, the way I do in Baghdad or New York. I feel like an ape, a Martian, an other. Three hours later, when the gates of the exhibit are opened to let our cars pass through, they are still there, sitting in the sun—amused or anxious?—calm, distant, piercing, silent, gently releasing us into our strangeness.4

Forty kilometers from the former Chinese capital of Xi’an, Kristeva feels like “an ape, a Martian, an other.” Impassive, incurious, the wordless Chinese crowd mirrors and returns her gaze without adding anything to it, and the piercing neutrality of that look leads Kristeva to theorize the condition of a general otherness, the universal derived from the particularity of a look that does not particulate. Forty kilometers from Xi’an, thousands more from Paris, the village of Huxian exists for Kristeva at the crossroads of geologic historicity (the Tang Dynasty, the first Qin emperor) and local time (three hours in the sun), and that chiasmus, the old made present in the now, the now justified and given value by its structuring relation to an ancient past, marks the spot of China’s most insistent emergence into the Western imagination in modernity. “When the dragon awakes” what you get is the past—a past whose slumber has merely suffered what the West calls “history” to take place—waking up to a present that has for a long time dreamed its own destruction. That this experience of distance teaches Kristeva nothing about the Chinese but a bit about herself is, as Gayatri Spivak has remarked, simply a larger function of the Western gaze as it faces the other.5 But Kristeva’s gaze is only one of many gazes, her regard (and even love) for the Chinese only one way of looking. Even in her text the “interpreter, always sensitive to

[   ]  sinographies: an introduction

the least of our tropisms,” wields a gaze too, mediating both the foreigners’ feeling of foreignness and the locals’ quiet observation with the explanation, surely exaggerated, that makes the French party “the first foreigners to visit the village”; whether the interpreter was a truthful witness or not, her triangular position as observer of observation gives her reply a mediating power that seems, for the time of Kristeva’s writing at least, to exempt it from factual verification. Let us not use the interpreter as a mere convenience, a pass-through; let us remember that interpreters are actors too. One of the fundamental premises of Sinographies is that there can be no singular version of the look, and the volume demonstrates a concomitant attentiveness to the ways in which different looks see differently—whether those looks come from within China or without. Geography, in such a formulation, is simply another way of seeing, a realistic nominalism, a way of resolving patterns in the real into an ideology whose major value, in China’s case, is not simply the map’s deft and totalizing place-fixing, but more: a paradigm of the “faraway” in general. Even as that distance has now, via any number of modes of physical and temporal foreshortening, radically diminished (we are thinking here not only of faster transportation and telecommunication but also immigration, trade, intermarriage, diplomatic arrangements, and the like), the presumptive difference remains, and the distance comes to describe something like the internal geography of the species rather than anything of the surface of the planet. “China” outside China thus comes to name not simply a place but a state or a set of (im)possibilities, its exaggerated remoteness always bearing some responsibility for China’s perceived authenticity. Set as far as possible from the interfering West, China stands in not simply for an authentic otherness but for the very possibility of authenticity itself (as it has indeed done for many European travelers), an otherness without compromise. Or, tuned to a different political program, China’s distance can come, as it did for Marx or Hegel or Adam Smith, to mark a different kind of authenticity, an authenticity of brute positivity marked by absolute stagnation. In either case the mental geography testifies to the presence of another culture sealed up in the amber of time, its (temporal) difference preserved once again by its (spatial) distance, and the reverse. However one takes the distance, it is clear that the manner of China’s geographical conception—and even its self-conception as a geopolitical entity—is very much tied up with how one wants to know it. Any description of China, however modest in its ambitions, participates to some degree in the writing of “China,” in the construction of a written subject whose

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meaning reflects certain aspects of the real but also frames the process of knowing that motivates it and gives it life. Sinographies acknowledges the fact that China is written. It attends, however, not to the end result but to the writing process, and to the ways in which that process (style, trope, plot, figure, vocabulary, pidgin, example) does not simply reflect thought but is the stuff of thought itself. “China” is not something one thinks about but something one thinks through; it is a provocation; it realizes itself variously as subject, process, and end of articulate thinking. Making such a case always involves a negotiation with reference, with the real or the alleged real, locating the moments at which it is no longer useful or accurate to separate the “reality” from its “images” or “interpretations.” Those are also the moments at which noting the discrepancy between reality and representation, as it applies to particular objects of discourse, no longer works as critique. The Odyssey makes sense even if Ogygia and Thrinakria cannot be located on the map. The business of critique has to consider representations systematically, syntactically, from the point of view of their internal organization and only then assess their sense for what are called “real-world applications.” In short, critique has to acknowledge imagination as something more than a distorter of fact: the measure of an argument’s efficacy, of the meaning of a text, or the value of an object that refers in some way to geopolitical China cannot simply be reduced to the accuracy of that reference. Untruths have referential effects, too, as presidential elections teach us; and what’s more, every untruth (or story, or representation) will contain within itself, and express in each of its dimensions, the theory of reference through which it comes to speak. The metalanguage of reference is just more language; the ontologically grounding “stuff” of any given story is also the “stuff” of its expression. This is not pie-in-the-sky “textualism”; Sinographies simply depends on a healthy respect for the power of texts to shape realities both backward and forward, to create or foreclose possibilities not just of interpretation but of experience. And not only at home but abroad, not only in relation to the expression of a colonialist or racist imperialism that claims to make statements about a nation or a civilization “out there” but also as a form of selfexpression and self-production the necessity of whose expression testifies to the felt gap between what you think is and what you wish it would be. Thus we offer neither an analysis (outraged or indulgent) of “Western images” of China nor a plea for the restoration of Eastern identity. For us, it is not a novelty to remark that China is “invented” (by the West, by itself, by modernity, by postmodernity . . .); it does not satisfy us to discover, at

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the end of a long day, that once again someone else has gotten it wrong. “Wrong in what way?” would be a better starting point; “wrong in what sense of ‘new’?” It is with that newness in mind that this collection, while proposing a mode or manner of approach to a set of texts that refer (biologically, literarily, politically, religiously, digitally) to China, has not policed its theoretical boundaries too cleanly. While this introduction attempts to establish a particular sense of what “sinography” might be, the collection’s title is plural for a reason: the theoretical differences in approach among the essays (personal/experiential narrative, cultural studies, historicisms of various stripes, deconstructive close readings) reflect the status of the collection itself as an essay, a trying or attempt that clears new and unexpected ground for comparative work. It would be a waste of a good topic to take China as simply a marginal example of larger trends in humanistic research (a “field” to which “theories” can be “applied”). Instead, Sinographies treats China as central to, as even (re)defining, many of the crucial problems of contemporary thought: problems of translation, of subaltern subjectivity, of the uni­versal human, of the value of writing. That is, the essays in this collection see those problems as constituted, multiply or partially, by the sinographies they read and available for reformulation by attentive, questioning, broadly contextual analysis. None of these problems stands still, like an empty container waiting for an infill of determinate “content”; rather, the particular examples affect the shape of the problem in the same way that, say, a nationality is transformed by the immigrants who come to populate it. Our sense of the most interesting problems addressed by these essays drives the organization of the book: the language and rhetoric of “China,” early modern cultural production, testimony/reportage/meddling, minority discourses and immigration. But these should be taken only as possible instances of potential structuration and limitation; other configurations would have highlighted different connections, different potentialities. For instance:

reference, fidelity, transformation “The processes by which one culture finds meaning in another . . . entail adaptive strategies that are themselves potentially transformative,” says David Porter in his study of eighteenth-century British sinophilia, “ ‘Beyond the Bounds of Truth’: Cultural Translation and William Chambers’s Chinese Garden.” Each of the essays included in this book seeks to capture

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a set of “adaptive strategies” and to chart its eventual outcomes (never simply those predicted). In the language of translation theory, these essays could be described as “target-oriented”: they are less preoccupied by fidelity to originals and more interested in what cultural translations do when they arrive at their destination.6 The power of translations and adaptations to break free of their sources cannot be underestimated. Thus Haun Saus­ sy’s essay, “Impressions de Chine; or, How to Translate from a Nonexistent Original,” considers a body of poetry usually said to be “about” China, Victor Segalen’s Stèles. While largely dependent on Chinese texts and objects for their thematic material, the poems handle that material in an un­ usually antagonistic way, so that the poetry emerges from the suppression and incorporation of genuinely Chinese materials, or in linguistic terms, of reference. Analogously, in “Western Journeys of Journey to the West,” Carlos Rojas traces the career of traditional Chinese source material (the tale of the Monkey King) through a multiplicity of media. Japan, the United States, cyberspace: each has its way of coming to “know” the Xiyouji. The goal is not to verify the legitimate descent of the Xiyouji’s countless progeny but to plot a continuum of transformations that, collectively, make up the “authenticity” or selfsameness of the traditional wonder tale. Steven J. Venturino’s subject in “Signifying on China: African-American Literary Theory and Tibetan Discourse” is the complexity of translation between Tibetan and Chinese discourses, whether these are expressed in Chinese, Tibetan, or even a third language such as English. If differentials of power or authority are implicit in the texts (readable only by an eye trained to recognize Signifying), interpretation brings the struggles out into the open, as critics work to outflank political expressions they do not wish to admit. A process of mediation is thus shown to have a transforming effect on the poles mediated between.

translation and literary institutions Beyond national literatures or literary genres, this collection also argues for a more general relevance of “China” to theoretical and literary issues— not, as it so often is, as simply a marker of comparison or “other” perspective but rather as part and parcel of a necessarily global thinking through of such issues as translation and cross-cultural influence. In “Transplantation and Modernity: The Chinese/American Poems of Angel Island,” Steven G. Yao elucidates a body of writing that began as a by-product of confinement. The poetry carved on the walls of Angel Island (the Immigration and Natu-

[ xiv  ]  sinographies: an introduction

ralization Service’s holding facility in San Francisco Bay) is a marvelous example of disciplinary in-betweenness. These poems of impeccable Chinese provenance, composed by and for subjects of the Qing Dynasty who had not yet actually entered the United States, nonetheless respond to a wholly American situation; retrospectively, they have come to take a major place in the history of Asian American expression. But to house them under the rubrics of either “Chinese literature” or “Chinese American studies” deprives them of much of their specificity, a dilemma with its own implications not simply for the disciplinary institutions under which the Angel Island poems might be taught but for a more general understanding of how ethnicity and identity come to be defined and spoken. Timothy Billings’s contribution, “Untranslation Theory: The Nestorian Stele and the Jesuit Illustration of China,” demonstrates that that stone inscription from the eighth century, disinterred and translated into European languages in the early 1600s, is a dissensual, multiple, and ambiguous text in all its forms, the primitive original included; but it is a text that was always sponsored by readers and institutions that needed it to be univocal. Billings reads the text in all its glorious incompleteness and contradiction, a feat perhaps unthinkable until now. As for identities at “home,” studies in Anglo-American modernism have for a long time had to deal with the long, sinophilic shadow cast by Ezra Pound’s and Ernest Fenollosa’s own fantastic knowledge of China; Pound’s translations of Chinese poems and his frequent use of Chinese characters in the later Cantos, coupled with his editing and publication of Fenollosa’s “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” have been a major subject not only of Pound studies but also of other critical work on modernism’s Orientalism. But French modernism exhibits another relation to China. As Christopher Bush shows in “Reading and Difference: Image, Allegory, and the Invention of Chinese,” both the ideographic Fenollosan tradition and Claudel’s allegorical one allow for a reading of the Chinese sign as simultaneously material and immaterial, the two readings implying vastly different relations to the aesthetic. Whereas the materiality, the blood and soil, of the Chinese character in Fenollosa make it impossible for meaning and expression to be two entirely separable things, in Claudel the character’s materiality “says one thing and means another,” serving simply as a jumping-off point for a gesture toward theological revelation. So much for the singularity of the ideograph.

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the politics of imperialism Colonialism and migration are two modes of mediation that reduce the claims of difference that so often define the Chineseness of China and that therefore constitute an opportunity for questioning simple, tautological expressions of authenticity. Representing, in a human context, is always intervening.7 Though many of the arguments in Sinographies are not referential—that is, they take their geographic locations as subjects of writing rather than as objects of knowledge—at the end of the day, as any number of the essays show, any description returns at one point or another to exert its effects in the real world. Descriptions may be couched in the third person (“the Chinese are . . .”), but sooner or later they encounter a reader who takes the third person in the second person (“you Chinese are . . .”); the apparent problems of knowledge were ethical problems all along. This is the place of politics, and the place where the Western author, writing about the East, comes face to face with the late twentieth century’s most convincing attack on the ethics of third-person representation across cultures, Edward Said’s 1978 Orientalism. Milton’s “Plains / Of Sericana, where Chineses drive / With Sails and Wind thir cany Waggons light” are no casual exoticism, according to Walter S. H. Lim’s “China, India, and the Empire of Commerce in Milton’s Para- dise Lost,” but derive from a century-long English effort to frame in words the Far East. Reading these “orientalist” texts in the twenty-first century, we are inevitably tempted to see in them a nascent colonial impulse taking the form of verbal mastery; but history is not so simple or teleologically driven, as Lim points out. In another context, as Danielle Glassmeyer argues, the historical teleologies turn out to be familial. Witness the medical doctor Tom Dooley, whose speeches and memoirs consistently framed his relationship with the people of Southeast Asia in parental terms. As Glassmeyer writes in “Tom Dooley and the Cold War American Revision of ‘Indochina,’ ” Dooley sought to secure “the domestic sphere against the ‘masculine’ threat of communism by nurturing nascent democracy in Asia through a ‘maternal’ relationship.” This general ideological trope, which Glassmeyer reads under the rubric of “sentimental Orientalism,” finds itself worked out in Dooley’s memoirs in a variety of descriptions and practices, including the habit of referring to all Laotian men as “boys,” but also in his attempts to teach Laotian women how to engage in safe childbirth. As Glassmeyer ultimately shows, the ethics of such a scenario depended

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on a faith in the ability of scientific knowledge to erase not only historical contingency (the possibility of “disease” of all types) but also cultural difference. Henk Vynckier, in “Museifying Formosa: George Mackay’s From Far Formosa,” discusses another ambiguous case of culture-making, in which a Canadian missionary established the conditions (museum collections, exportation of artifacts, publication of texts) by which a local culture could become international and later reflect on itself through borrowing back its own erstwhile possessions. Mackay’s “love” for Formosa becomes, in the course of events, a means for a certain Taiwan to recognize itself as existing in a worldwide context—to recognize its own recognition by others, finding its own “native” culture through Mackay’s originary displacement. To “displaced natives” correspond, antithetically, “captive outsiders,” the legendary mark of a literary genre and species of intercultural communication scrutinized by Timothy Kendall in “ ‘Torture—and Loving Care— in China’: Captivity and the Fiction of Oriental Despotism.” Kendall draws out the connections between captivity narratives (a type of writing intertwined with the whole history of British exploration and colonization) and the Cold War fear of brainwashing.8 What could be more fearsome than a psychological technique for breaking down the will that preserves, if anything can, the distinction between self and other? Captivity narratives are moral dramas: they use the contact with the hostile milieu to voice anxieties about constancy, compromise, and the maintenance of identity. A concern with bodies (imagined and fleshly) and demarcations of selfhood is also at the center of Lucien Miller’s memoir of folklore collecting and accidents in the field, “Boundary Crossings: Fieldwork, the Hidden Self, and the Invisible Spirit.” Miller sets international or interethnic boundaries (those that might be thought most salient for an American ethnographer working with Chinese “national minorities”) within a group of structuring limits: the bounds of the divine and the human, life and death, the normal and the extraordinary.

the politics of fiction In the division of labor, writers load their texts with contradictory implications and deliberately underdetermine their meanings, and critics, like subcontract workers, overdetermine and codify their readings. It is precisely because of underdetermination that the reading is never done. Re-

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reading Eileen Chang’s “Red Rose and White Rose” (also known as “Tale of Roses”), for instance, Rey Chow discovers in the dance between metaphor and metonymy something more than a literary elaboration of modernist theories of description and narration. The metonymized objectifications of female characters, she writes in “Seminal Dispersal, Fecal Retention, and Related Narrative Matters: Eileen Chang’s Tale of Roses in the Problematic of Modern Writing,” dramatize “the issue of cultural dislocation at a point in Chinese history when contacts with foreign peoples and things have made it necessary more than ever to reimagine what it means to be ‘Chinese.’” If Chang manages, by attending to the bodies of her female characters, to reconceptualize “the practice of narration from within,” it is because female characters, as privileged sites for the articulation of metaphor, can—perhaps especially in a diasporic or transnational context—serve as figures for a politics of difference that resists the closure of finished readings. Sinographies hopes to follow Chang’s example. Rather than insist that factors outside the text or local history (ideologies or master narratives of any stripe) overdetermine the meaning of the texts they read—a gesture that always puts an end to reading—these essays read neverendingly; they all stop, of course, at one point or another, but none do so with the sense that the final word has been spoken, preferring instead to remain aware of the “play” that is left in the text. And lest “play” be here understood as the merely ludic or aesthetic surplus in which the luckier among us are able to indulge after the serious work has been done, let Eric Hayot’s essay, “Chineseness: A Prehistory of Its Future,” stand as a reminder that the job of simulation games is, precisely, to prepare for and meld with “realworld applications.” The folklore of the United States’s “coming conflict with China,” carefully developed and maintained over decades, comes in and out of focus in response to (largely American) needs and priorities that have little to do with China per se. Science-fiction portrayals of China, in the form of books or video games, reassure the reader that although the Chinese may get richer and may exercise their power beyond their own borders, they are essentially still “the Chinese,” a Borg or Hive acting in obedience to scripts laid down by “ancient strategists.” Such wishful thinking testifies to a withered imaginative faculty no longer interested in learning from experience. This book seeks to show that, where experience is concerned—indeed, whenever the meaning of “China” intersects with the referential, the lived, the real—the clock is still running. ◊  ◊  ◊

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To end with two representative anecdotes: in early 2003, perhaps the most visible calls to “sinographical” analysis were provided by an NBA rookie and a retired submarine captain with a thesis to prove. Yao Ming, sevenfoot-five center from Shanghai and first-round choice of the Houston Rockets, economically disproved some of the safest generalizations in existence about the population of China: that Chinese tend to be short and that basketball is not their thing. National and ethnic mythologies being essentially reciprocal in nature, the definition reposes on conceptions that Americans have of their own properties: that they are physically larger than other people, good at sports (particularly sports invented in America), and that sports offer the conflict-free space where Americans, both black and white—for only these two colors emerge as relevant—have an equal opportunity to excel and be admired.9 The potential danger that Yao Ming represents to such a stable set of antitheses played itself out in a drama of threatened exclusion, test, and incorporation, when Shaquille O’Neal (speaking in “American” as he put it) attempted to insult Yao, was bested on the court and in public opinion, and had to withdraw his remarks in public. If Yao Ming represents a paradox, he must be resolved into the existing system of representations or reorder them into a new one; fortunately enough, the story conforms to the comic paradigm of reintegration, at least so far, with the racial patterning of basketball raised to a new level of complexity. A similar revisionist logic appears in the contention of the amateur historian Gavin Menzies, a retired Royal Navy officer, that the Chinese discovered America in 1421, two generations before Columbus.10 The evidence offered in Menzies’s book is doubtful, often inaccurately sourced, and presented with self-congratulatory tendentiousness, but its questionable status as history simply confirms its polemical force as a counternarrative about cultural identity. As Menzies tells it, both Columbus and Magellan calmed mutinies in the course of their voyages by telling their crews of a chart glimpsed in the archives of the Portuguese royal court that showed the outlines of an unfamiliar land, what we now know as the two Americas and the Straits of Magellan. According to Menzies, the Portuguese map must have been based on a Chinese record of the exploits of Admiral Zheng He, whose fleet of “treasure ships” rounded the coasts of India and Africa in the years around 1421. Menzies’s story corresponds fairly closely to elements of the traditional story about Columbus. As we learn it from schoolbooks, Columbus’s men refused to believe his claim that by sailing due west they would arrive in the Indies; they began to mutiny and were barely

sinographies: an introduction  [ xix  ]

persuaded to give the experiment another day; and by luck more than by calculation, the ships sailed within sighting distance of the New World before the time had expired. In schoolroom history, Columbus’s courage in sailing into the unknown, his trust in a model of the world that could not be shown to the physical eye directly but only through models, his Odyssean superiority to the fearful and superstitious crew, all serve as anecdotal metaphors for what it means to be “American.” (Columbus, who could be listed as an American only in the most intensely ideological version of history, might be thought the perfect American in the same way that Jesus of Nazareth is, impossibly, the model Christian.11) Menzies’s narrative subverts all these connotations: Columbus’s bravery in adventuring due west without a map becomes no more than craftiness in appropriating, without acknowledgment, the fruits of others’ labors (an accusation by no means unprecedented in the colonial and postcolonial histories of the Americas). And those from whom he steals the crucial map are, reversal again, the very people who have so often been described as incapable of inventing anything, the backward, immobile, precedent-bound Chinese, whose maps (a theme of much early missionary comment) represent only their immediate neighborhood and betray no curiosity about the world beyond their famous Wall. Menzies’s countermyth adeptly restages the invention (in two senses: discovery and first creation) of (in two senses: belonging to and happening to) China. Such a restaging, even if it proved to have no historical basis at all, would still bear a surplus of cultural, contemporary, and thus in a derived sense historical, meaning. Its career in print and on television floats entirely on that meaning, on the wishes or fears its scenario evokes. Without citing P. T. Barnum, the sinographical observer registers the emergence of yet another China, premised on the desires of its public. Yao Ming’s cultural integration, on the other hand, is so complete as to be of little interest to the imagination: in 2007 he averaged 25.1 points a game for an above-average Houston Rockets team. It’s as if he had always been there, inventing himself as nothing especially new. The essays we have collected for this volume stage, each in its way, an “invention of China.” While a suspension of disbelief is not necessary for the essays to take effect, the centers of their arguments are situated “beyond true and false,” so to speak: in a China of meanings rather than a China of facts. And they show—again, each in its own way—that the road to the China of fact passes through, not around, the China of meaning. No collection of this sort gets put together without the assistance of

[ xx  ]  sinographies: an introduction

friends and colleagues. The editors would like to express their particular gratitude to Keith Baker, Dean of Humanities at Stanford University, for sponsoring the conference that led to this volume; to Jack Skeffington, for editorial help; to Hamilton College, which provided a grant to support the publication of images; and to Richard Morrison of the University of Minnesota Press, whose wit and intelligence made this project so much better.

notes 1. We mean by this claim simply that all texts, no matter the language, stem from a particular set of historical and cultural circumstances to which they establish a specific ideological relationship. That relationship, in turn, defines a hierarchy of values to which readers have their own differential relationships. Even at the basic level of language, texts present varying degrees of accessibility to different readers, a situation that creates an uneven distribution of cultural privilege. 2. The analogy depends on a reading of “sinology” not as academic discipline but as “knowledge about China.” The term “sinography” first arose as a possible description of a certain kind of work during discussions held at Stanford University in May 1999 among several scholars interested in East/West comparative study: Christopher Bush, Timothy Billings, Steven Yao, Haun Saussy, Eric Hayot, Robert Batchelor, Roger Hart, Ming Xie, and David Porter. For an explicit elaboration of one particular theory of “sinography,” see Eric J. Hayot, Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), 185–87. 3. Roland Barthes, L’Empire des signes, in Barthes, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 2:747–48. 4. Julia Kristeva, About Chinese Women, trans. Anita Barrows (London: M. Boyars, 1977), 11–12. 5. Gayatri Spivak, In Other Worlds (London: Routledge, 1988), 137. 6. On this approach, see Gideon Toury, In Search of a Theory of Translation (Tel Aviv: Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, 1980). 7. Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 8. See Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600–1850 (New York: Pantheon, 2003). 9. See George Devereux and Edwin M. Loeb, “Antagonistic Acculturation,” American Sociological Review 8 (1943): 133–47. Yao Ming is not the first NBA draftee of Chinese origin: that honor goes to Wang Zhizhi of the Los Angeles Clippers. 10. Gavin Menzies, 1421: The Year China Discovered America (New York: Morrow, 2003). 11. But see Walt Whitman’s poem “Prayer of Columbus,” where the Admiral, near death, addresses God:

sinographies: an introduction  [ xxi  ] What do I know of life? what of myself? I know not even my own work past or present, Dim ever-shifting guesses of it spread before me, Of newer better worlds, their mighty parturition, Mocking, perplexing me. And these things I see suddenly, what mean they? As if some miracle, some hand divine unseal’d my eyes, Shadowy vast shapes smile through the air and sky, And on the distant waves sail countless ships, And anthems in new tongues I hear saluting me. (Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, March 1874, 524–25)

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p a r t

 

p o a n r e t o n e

The Language and Rhetoric of “China”

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1 

Chineseness: A Prehistory of Its Future Eric Hayot

Just as the events of September 11, 2001, constituted, in whatever way, the end of a certain American innocence in relation to domestic terrorism, they also marked the beginning of a new present: the time in which we now live is marked by the occurrence of every political, cultural, and economic gesture under the inflexible shadow of violence, the offices and officers of “Homeland Security,” mandatory patriotism, and the ongoing “war” on terror. One of the major effects of this new beginning has been to encourage a reconception of September 11’s past, so that whatever one had been imagining on September 10 to be the macrohistorical story of the post–Cold War era was revealed, once the smoke cleared, to have been a mere sideshow to what was really going on. The drive, for instance, to critique the FBI for focusing too much on the war on drugs at the expense of the war on terrorism involved a correction to the FBI’s own sense of what mattered, in the 1990s and the new century: it thought the present was about illegal drugs. It turns out, after September 11, that the present of the 1990s was really about the coming attack on the World Trade Center towers. This rewriting of the past had the effect of excising from most political and journalistic discourse an issue that had seemed, in the early part of 2001, to constitute the major future threat to the security of the United States: the possibility of war with China. In April 2001, a U.S. EP-3 spy plane flying off the coast of the People’s Republic above waters claimed by the PRC collided with a Chinese jet fighter. The fighter crashed into the ocean, killing its pilot, and the American plane was forced to make [   ]

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an emergency landing on Hainan Island, off the coast of China. Following massive anti-American demonstrations in Beijing and attacks on the U.S. embassy there, and saber-rattling from both governments, the most serious diplomatic conflict between the two nations since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 was resolved, and the plane eventually returned to the United States in pieces. Its crew, having come home earlier in what the military called “Operation Valiant Return,” received a hero’s welcome. So by the end of April 2001 the possibility of a U.S.–Chinese war was very much in the air, and was performing many of the same functions, in relation to national history, that September 11 has now come to enact. That is, while the “coming conflict with China”1 constituted a potentially horrifying source of genuine concern, formally, it functioned as an organizing principle of the post–Cold War period, a political or cultural framework that not only gave direction and shape to U.S. foreign policy, but also, in helping Americans see who they were against, described in passing what they were for. Whereas the years after the Second World War had been defined by the facing off of two great powers over Europe, the China threat allowed one to imagine that the period after 1989 would be understood as a face-off across the Pacific—and to gain both fear and comfort from that imagination.2 That the spy plane crisis was at least partly produced as a crisis by U.S. president George W. Bush and his foreign policy team is undeniable (though the impact of plane against plane could not have been foreseen as such). Against the policy of “strategic partnership” with China established by the Clinton administration from 1992 to 2000, Bush and national security advisor Condoleezza Rice argued during the 2000 campaign for a move to “strategic rivalry.” In its attitude toward China the new Bush administration has thus adopted a policy something like the doctrine Ronald Reagan and his vice president, George Bush Sr., directed toward the Soviet Union (that Rice, like many members of George W. Bush’s administration, advised both Reagan and the elder Bush surely had something to do with this carryover).3 But September 11 has radically altered that view. Indeed one of the discoveries the United States has made since then is that China has a “terrorist” problem, too, with Muslim separatists in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region and anti-Chinese activity in Tibet giving the two nations a real opportunity to redefine their relationship. And so this essay, which reads the literary and political prehistory of April 2001 as part of Sinographies’ project to think through the meanings of “China,” has come to seem not so

chineseness: a prehistory of its future  [   ]

much about contemporary culture as about its prehistory. Whatever their status in their own present, the texts that participated in the articulation of a China threat in the mid-1990s now carelessly exhale the odor of the past, the musty smell of the archive.

resistance, futility, and the borg Even at the time—in those seemingly dangerous days of April 2001—many people on both sides of the Pacific would have been surprised to hear that the war between the United States and China was not so much on the verge of beginning as already begun. But such was the argument made throughout the late 1990s by various right-wing commentators and journalists. Among these was Kenneth Timmerman, a reporter for Time magazine and the conservative monthly The American Spectator whose essays for the latter consistently argued that the administration of President Bill Clinton had systematically strengthened the People’s Republic of China at the expense of the safety and economic well-being of the United States. Timmerman’s essays were published as a collection called Selling Out America in 2000; in the book’s preface Timmerman tells his readers that Selling Out America marks the continuation of his efforts to protect the security of “our Republic.” It ends with this rousing line: “Resistance is not futile.”4 “Resistance is not futile” gets its rhetorical punch via its reference to another phrase prevalent in popular culture at the time, this one uttered as part of the science-fictional universe of Star Trek: The Next Generation. In the show, the phrase “resistance is futile” is spoken by the Borg, a partly organic, partly artificial cybernetic life form thousands of years old who frequently tell the humans and humanoids of the Federation, the show’s main characters, that “resistance is futile.” The Borg—whose major species-level goal is the integration of all other races and technologies into the so-called Borg collective—function as a hive mind in which the members of the Borg are not aware of themselves as separate individuals; Borg “drones” operate essentially as parallel processors in an organic computing machine. Timmerman’s “resistance is not futile” thus explicitly connects his own global agenda of anti-Chinese nationalism to a familiar, post-global narrative that makes resistance a matter of species-level survival. Resistance to the Borg is, most of the time, actually futile: various episodes of the Star Trek spin-offs have the Federation meeting the scattered remnants of races almost entirely destroyed by the Borg, or the ruins of civilizations already assimilated into the collectivity. For the main charac-

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ters of the show, however, resistance to the Borg is not especially futile, as they manage to resist the Borg consistently over the course of many episodes. But even when resisting the Borg turns out not to be futile, the Borg, against all evidence to the contrary, keep announcing that it is; that is, they never say, as Timmerman does, that “Resistance is not futile.” The phrase is therefore not so much something the Borg would say as something one might say to the Borg—or to those who might imagine, faced with the Borg, that they can’t be resisted. The claim that resistance is not futile thus retroactively constructs the past that produces it, acting as a response that calls to mind the original phrase that must have motivated it. As a statement in the present, “resistance is not futile” works backwards, as it were, presenting itself as a (defensive) answer to an (aggressive) declaration made in the past. As with September 11, the present shapes the past to its own needs, producing with its retrospective vision the history it (logically, narratively) requires. And so the Chinese are made into the Borg. Timmerman’s implicit comparison between the Borg and China readily figures a particular set of assumptions about the People’s Republic and the Chinese, connected not simply to the absolute leveling of individuality in someone’s version of “Communism,” but also to the old “joke” about the single face of 1.3 billion people who all look alike. The exhortation to resistance allows us to read the Borg as the communists of future’s outer space.5 More than that, however, it turns the Chinese into the terrifying, inhuman threat of shackled collectivity. In Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Borg’s other major catch phrase, usually uttered right after “Resistance is futile,” is “Prepare to be assimilated.” In October 1997, Timmerman published an article in The American Spectator in which he argued that much Chinese investment around Los Angeles and San Diego fronts for the PRC government in general and the People’s Liberation Army in particular. The article opens with this extraordinary paragraph: “California, which has been known to Americans for many things, may soon come to be viewed as well as the 22nd province of the People’s Republic of China. Certainly that’s the way China has begun to treat the state” (170). These sentences present us simultaneously with a fait accompli and a prophecy. Timmerman says China has already begun to treat California as a province; he suggests that others—Americans—“may soon come” to view California the same way.6 In the event of a publicly announced conflict between the United States and China, Timmerman writes, “the Chinese communists might choose to simply activate the thousands of sleeping agents already in place to peacefully transform California

chineseness: a prehistory of its future  [   ]

into China’s 22nd province” (169).7 What this suggests, of course, is that China is already at war with the United States—that the preparations for assimilation effectively constitute an act of war, though not one that most Americans can easily recognize.8 Whereas the Borg assimilate through violence, the Chinese—even more insidiously, perhaps—assimilate via capital (the PLA’s investments in California real estate)9 and immigration, and do so without resistance. Though Timmerman never explicitly says so, it seems fairly clear that the list of “sleeping agents” potentially includes every single Chinese-American living in the United States.10 The list of agents also included, for Timmerman, then-President Bill Clinton, whose ties to the Chinese business community and campaign finance scandals suggested that in his case, unlike California’s, the assimilation had already happened. The clearest visual articulation of this argument appears on the cover of Selling Out America, which shows a photograph, taken from the side, of a line of Chinese soldiers in a parade march, rifles and bayonets forward. All of the Chinese soldiers face forward and seem to be shouting something. Digitally superimposed on the face of the soldier closest to the camera is the face of Bill Clinton who, unlike the rest of the Chinese soldiers, faces the camera, tight-lipped (with the hat of the Chinese soldier he replaces, bizarrely, still pointing forward).11 Timmerman’s fears regarding assimilation—of which Clinton’s photograph is merely the oddest or most extreme expression—are matched by his reading of Chinese history and culture, which he uses to explain why exactly the Chinese want to challenge the United States, and why assimilation is their weapon of choice. In the preface to an article on Chinese investments in the U.S. stock market,12 Timmerman quotes the Chinese writer Sun-Tzu as saying that “To fight and conquer is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting” (340; my emphasis). Logically, the quotation sustains an argument about war with China by suggesting that the absence of signs pointing to a Chinese desire for war is precisely the evidence one needs to conclude that the Chinese have been at war with the United States for quite some time. But what quoting from Sun-Tzu adds—and what a reference to the Borg cannot—is a sense that the Chinese have been like this all along, that this latest iteration in the form of the PRC is simply another articulation of a Chinese mentality as old and venerable as Sun-Tzu himself. In other words, China is a place that has for a long time—and in its most original expressions of self—understood the highest military technology as one

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in which you win by “breaking . . . resistance without fighting”; the future of the United States depends on its recognizing this fact. Timmerman’s sense that China is already waging war against the United States is metaphorized in his reference to the Borg. But it is justified, finally, by his reference to Sun-Tzu, who grounds the metaphor firmly in a foundation of “knowledge” about China and gives voice to the racial genotype; Timmerman’s argument is thus held together by an entire discourse of China’s mythologized past, with Sun-Tzu acting as its preferred metonym. The reference to the Borg and Sun-Tzu together thus undergird a general theory of Chineseness that is Timmerman’s most profound rationale for the conclusions he draws in Selling Out America. That general theory—a catachrestic combination of China’s “ancient” past and its future military threat—allows for the reading of the present as a time of war, a war whose footsteps only the most alert listeners, ears tuned resolutely to the intensities of the Chinese past, can hear coming.

popular science fictions Remembering that, as Ernst Bloch has written in a radically different context, one of the functions of estrangement in literature is “the provision of a shocking and distancing mirror above the all too familiar reality,”13 one might begin to think of Selling Out America not simply in terms of its nonfictional presentation of history, but as a narrative representation of the present, as a fictional gesture designed to move the reader away from an era in which nothing seemed to be going on. Timmerman’s text defamiliarizes reality by remaking it in the image of a future (or even present) war with China; in such a context the photo of Clinton-as-Chinese-soldier on the book’s front cover takes on a Brechtian, alienating dimension. One way to think about the text then—or texts like it—would be in terms of a relationship to fictional genres. And if the text can be read as literature, then what the reference to the Borg suggests, finally, if only via a certain displacement, is that the generic codes within which Timmerman works are not just fictional but science fictional. What I mean by “science fictional” is something like what Fredric Jameson means when he writes that the apparent realism, or representationality, of SF has concealed another, far more complex temporal structure: not to give us “images” of the future . . . but rather to defamiliarize and restructure our expe-

chineseness: a prehistory of its future  [   ] rience of our own present. . . . [science fiction’s] simple mock futures serve the . . . function of transforming our own present into the determinate past of something yet to come.14

In saying that science fiction works to transform “our own present into the determinate past of something yet to come,” Jameson argues that science fiction responds to what he calls “the disappearance of historicity from consumer society”15 by allowing its readers to imagine the present not as some Fukuyaman end of history but as an active and actionable space, given scope and meaning by the possibility of a future that differs in some way from the present. In science fiction, the idea that we might have to get “there” from “here,” or rather, “then” from “now,” makes malleable a present whose apparent eternity is otherwise crippling (after all, why work for change when history is over?). Timmerman’s project is, to be sure, not so utopian, but its motivations are similar. In the face of a certain satisfied complacency (produced at least partly by the general assumption of U.S. world dominance after the Cold War), he is the boy who cries “Borg!,” rousing the global villagers from their dreamless, never-ending sleep. The vision of the future Timmerman provides (in which China digests California) does indeed transform the present into a moment of crisis and potential meaningfulness. Doing Jameson one better, however, Timmerman’s newly energized present turns backwards, as it were, to make its own past into the determinate cause of the present that has come to be; Selling Out America not only gives us a new present but also a new past (in which various opportunities to keep this present from happening have not been seized). And so historicity in Selling Out America folds in on itself, doubles its surface area by imagining simultaneously a future that remakes the present and a present that reconceives the past as one in which we did not know, but should have known, about the present that has come to be. In this it engages something like a Freudian Nachträglichkeit, the deferred action that reformulates the past retroactively through new memories. The resistance that Timmerman urges his readers to share directs itself therefore not simply against the Chinese, but also against the very possibility of the future itself. What the readers ought to resist—and perhaps this defines the book’s dystopianism—is the future Timmerman ­imagines; through action (rather than complacency) in the present, one can defer forever that horrifying future, protecting the status quo in which the United States remains the only superpower and the democratic values of the Re-

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public fix themselves in history, “preserving our nation’s pre-eminence in world affairs and . . . holding up a shining example of freedom and democracy in a world ruled by corruption and greed” ( 22). Timmerman’s critique of the Clinton administration and of American businesses that sell weapons technology to China indicates the degree to which he feels like the U.S. relationship to China has already damaged the United States’s claim to being a “shining example of freedom and democracy”—the present once again contrasted with an idyllic, pre-Chinese past that has to some extent already been lost. Selling Out America is thus “science fictional” twice over: once in its form, the manner in which it works to transform its “present into the determinate past of something yet to come,” if only to encourage readers to keep that new future from occurring by resisting it, and once in its metaphors, via the reference to the Borg and to assimilation. In this the book is nothing if not typical of the 1990s in American popular culture, a period of time during which the drive toward science fiction in both form and content would be tied with an obsessive attention to the possibilities of war and China. In what follows I review some of the crucial forms that this attention took in order to suggest that Timmerman’s Selling Out America takes part in a much more general kind of cultural work whose major function was to articulate (and sometimes resolve) anxiety about the American present through imaginings of Chinese futures. Among the relevant texts are seven science-fictional novels written throughout the 1990s by David Wingrove. The first of these, Chung Kuo: The Middle Kingdom (1990) established the basic imaginative and narrative framework for the entire series: set in 2190, the books envision an Earth ruled entirely by China, a rule so complete that almost no evidence exists that the world was ever not ruled by China—Chung Kuo’s textbooks credit Chinese inventors with such modern technologies as the television and radio, and characters wishing to resist the government in one way or another are reduced to the odd discovery of technological artifacts or texts that only obliquely suggest another history (references to a powerful American named “Kennedy,” for instance).16 These textbooks and the erasure of non-Chinese history seem typical of an American imagination about the ways “communists” distort history, and so gesture toward the People’s Republic. But elsewhere the provenance of this twenty-second-century China seems less clear: characters referring to Mao Tse-tung remember him as an “emperor,” erasing the brief history of the PRC by integrating it into the much longer history of Chinese civilization.17 Chung Kuo’s Chinese civilization thus stages contemporary Chinese mil-

chineseness: a prehistory of its future  [ 11  ]

itarist communism and cultural-historical Chineseness together, a pairing whose slightly uncanny strangeness becomes perhaps most clearly visible in Wingrove’s decision to use the Wade-Giles system to represent Chinese sounds in alphabetic English. In Wade-Giles, China’s name for itself, represented by the two characters 中国，is written Chung Kuo; in the pinyin romanization system used in the People’s Republic of China, those same characters are written as Zhongguo. There are significant historical differences between the two systems. Wade-Giles is based on Herbert Giles’s modifications of Thomas F. Wade’s 1867 romanization scheme and has been in use since the late nineteenth century, mainly in English-language publications on China; it continues to be used widely in Taiwan (the Republic of China).18 Pinyin, on the other hand, dates from 1958, when it was developed in the PRC partly on the basis of a Russian romanization system.19 In 1979, the International Standards Organization, in a move that reflected the growing political strength of the People’s Republic, passed a resolution adopting pinyin as the official standard for Chinese language transliteration.20 The choice of pinyin over Wade-Giles is necessarily ideological. Using Wade-Giles in the contemporary context gestures toward two things simultaneously: first, a political rejection of the PRC, and second, and perhaps more important, the vast background of English-language studies of Chinese literature and history that has grounded much of the West’s knowledge about China. Herbert Giles, who gave his name to the system, published in his career tens of books on Chinese history, literature, and philosophy, including, for instance, A History of Chinese Literature (1901), The Religions of Ancient China (1906), Confucianism and Its Rivals (1915), and Gems of Chinese Literature (1922). The choice of Wade-Giles thus recalls the history of a China that is both pre-communist and substantially more literary than the China bodied forth in pinyin, a prejudice that Wingrove confirms in his “author’s note” at the end of the book: “I have chosen to use the older, and to my mind, far more elegant transcription system. . . . [whose] effect is, I hope, to render the softer, more poetic side of the original Mandarin, ill-served, I feel, by modern pinyin.”21 If Chung Kuo is realist on its own terms—that is, if its world holds together, if characters with the same name are assumed to be identical with themselves, and so on—then its Chinese characters have at some point decided to use Wade-Giles instead of pinyin. But rather than present readers with an explanation for that choice within the novel’s frame, Wingrove’s unambiguously authorial gesture marks his future China as shaped

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not simply by SF realism (“this might happen”) but also by a desire to see China get past the trappings and Mao suits of the People’s Republic and back to something like “real” Chineseness (as expressed via a nostalgia for the elegance of Wade-Giles over and against pinyin’s “hardness”). Given the chance to rule the world, Chung Kuo’s Chinese revert to “type,” melding future technology with the ideological and cultural accoutrements of a China as it existed before it gained enough geopolitical power to impose a romanization system on the world (that is, before Westernization and modernization in any number of senses) and thereby distort the “softer, more poetic” feel of “original” Mandarin Chinese. While clearly the PRC’s current geopolitical power can motivate, in Wingrove, the fantasy that it might come to rule the world, it is telling that when that happens it does so within the frame of a pre-Western Chineseness. That same structure appears in Alpha Centauri, an award-winning computer game published in 1999.22 The game puts its players in control of one of eight factions responsible for colonizing a new planet, a process that requires them to develop technologies, make war or trade with other factions, and deal with the emerging consciousness of what turns out to be a planetary mind. Four of Alpha Centauri’s factions are explicitly tied to national stereotypes: The “University of Planet” is controlled by a Russian scientist, the “Peacekeeping Forces” by an Indian doctor, the “Fundamentalists” by an American chaplain from Georgia, and “The Hive” by a Chinese military historian named Sheng-ji Yang. Yang’s biography, posted on the game’s website, presents its readers with a startling version of the near future: Born 1999, Wuhan, China; father a prominent Chinese lit scholar. Master of the Five Excellences: calligraphy, poetry, painting, traditional medicine, and martial arts (including martial t’ai-chi, wushu, and others). Studied Chinese Literature and Military History at Beijing University, later acquired a PhD in Psychology from same. Taught joint lock techniques to Chinese military during the Second Golden Revolution, then commanded Golden Emperor’s personal security force. Vanished for several years following the Crimson Succession, to resurface in United Nations security training force. Selected Chief of Security, U.N. Alpha Centauri Mission.23

Once again we have the prospect of a return to China’s imperium, combined with the sorts of “traditionally” Chinese details (the calligraphy, poetry, martial arts, and so on) that survive whatever history throws at them.

chineseness: a prehistory of its future  [ 13  ]

As in Chung Kuo, the essential aspects of Chinese culture—emperors, the “five excellences”—remain impermeable to the slow drip of time.24 But enough of the PRC survives to make this China recognizable as the twentieth century’s: not only can cities belonging to the Hive accommodate higher populations than those of other factions, but, of the various government types available, the Hive gains a special bonus for choosing the one labeled “Police State.” That Yang’s faction is called “The Hive” is in such a scenario only the most explicitly racist expression of a more general stereotypology (directed, incidentally, with equal opportunity against Indians, Russians, and Christian fundamentalists). In making the Chinese into insects it reproduces something of Selling Out America’s comparison between the Chinese and the Borg (individual Borg are called “drones,” large groups of which are organized under Borg Queens). This combination of old China and new China, pagodas and police states, in an SF-based discussion of future war infects literally every major discussion of the “coming conflict” that appeared in the late 1990s. These include texts explicitly nonfictional—Richard Bernstein and Ross Munro’s The Coming Conflict with China (1998) and Stephen W. Mosher’s Hegemon: China’s Plan to Dominate Asia and the World (2000)—and fictional—Strategic Simulations’ wargame People’s General (1995), Dragon Strike: A Novel of the Coming War with China, by Humphrey Hawksley and Simon Holberton (1997), and Tom Clancy’s The Bear and the Dragon (2000).25 These texts have enough in common with Selling Out America to not be worth going on about at length. Though levels of anxiety differ, they essentially all make the same argument, namely that a war between U.S. and Chinese forces is likely in the near future, and will be produced, when it comes, by a combination of China’s current political regime and longstanding aspects of Chineseness (tied to its “ancient” history). In this they frequently draw on the work of Samuel Huntington, whose 1996 The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, with its theory of irreconcilable cultural differences among the world’s major “civilizations,” leads inevitably to predictions of future war. Attentive, as were Wingrove and Alpha Centauri, to the pairing of ancient Chinese genotype and modern Chinese military power, Huntington suggests that China cannot (and does not want to) escape the motivations of its geopolitical essence: “For two thousand years China was the preeminent power in East Asia. Chinese now increasingly assert their intention to resume that historic role and to bring to an end the overlong century of humiliation and subordination to the West and Japan that began with the British imposition of the Treaty of

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Nanking in 1842.”26 Such a point of view is explicitly reproduced in Mosher, who writes that Chinese politicians are driven by the concept of 霸 ba, hegemony, which was first developed “by ancient Chinese strategists 2,800 years ago” (my emphasis).27 By explicitly establishing themselves as warnings about the future (Mosher: “on this hinges our future”; Hawksley and Holberton: “This book has been written as a warning of what might happen”28), or, in the case of Clancy’s The Bear and the Dragon and People’s General,29 inviting readers (or game-players) to identify with a simulated30 war between U.S. forces and the PLA, these texts stake a claim to an especially vraisemblable near-term science fiction, the science fiction of years rather than centuries from now. That characters in The Bear and the Dragon on at least two occasions refer to the Chinese as “Klingons,”31 thus matching Timmerman’s Borg reference with one to another of Star Trek’s non-human races, I take to be simply the icing on the science-fictional cake.32

backstory The claim that these texts adopt generic conventions of science fiction should not be taken to suggest that these texts are “just” fiction; they may well turn out to be right about war with China, or about the degree to which a war with China is likely given a certain set of historical conditions.33 Beyond the question of facticity, this essay aims to read the forms of narration in which possible facts are embedded (and thus argue, by implication, that such readings can and ought to take place even when the facts are not in dispute). The texts remain worth reading, in literary terms, because they outline the terms of a certain story about what Chineseness is and how it works. That story about Chineseness did not spring, fully formed, from the particular geopolitical circumstance of the 1990s. Though surely all the “China Threat” texts respond to those geopolitics—China’s economic development (and its implicit threat to U.S. global dominance), the end of the Cold War, statements made by its military and political leaders, increased immigration and integration of earlier Chinese immigrants into the U.S. mainstream—the trilogy of science fiction, China, and war has a history that extends and gives meaning to the “coming war with China” trope of the last century’s final decade. In other words, the Chineseness here has a history.34

chineseness: a prehistory of its future  [ 15  ]

I want to begin by looking briefly at two instances of that history, one from eighteenth-century England, and one from the first half the American twentieth century, before spending some time on a short story by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. All three examples testify to a general Euro-American interest in Chinese technology in the eighteenth century and beyond (two of the most prominent being the garden and the Chinese written character, both of which are discussed extensively in Sinographies and elsewhere35). But I intend for the comparison here to work in both directions: while on the one hand these examples bear witness to the prehistory of a certain Chineseness, their role as witnesses for that Chineseness is clarified, put into relief, by the reading of Timmerman and company as the future of their past. These examples are called to the stand, as it were, only by virtue of an association they did not know to make. In a recent essay on Robinson Crusoe, Lydia Liu argues that the West has long had trouble articulating or narrativizing the problem of China’s perceived technological superiority.36 In the novel, Crusoe’s accidental firing of an “earthenware pot” while stranded on an island leads to his “invention” of a material very much like porcelain—in a historical moment when the West, and Dafoe himself in particular, was attempting to reproduce the kind of “true” porcelain only available in China. As Liu points out, Crusoe’s “solitary experiment” anchors the novel’s “ceramic realism” in a larger, collective enterprise that enabled the scientists and novelists to fantasize collectively about a goal and an object in the manner of science fiction. . . . Whereas the [Western] scientists unabashedly relied on industrial espionage or stolen specimens brought to Europe by sea merchants, Crusoe’s solitary experiment requires no external help. Was porcelain not a type of earthenware that a British man could have invented all by himself?37

Working through the connections between Jules Verne, the acknowledged inventor of modern science fiction, and the Crusoe narrative, Liu shows that realism in Robinson Crusoe might be thought of as a “process of becoming, whereby one must learn to overlook the traces of science fiction a priori in order to imagine the work as a realist novel.”38 That overlooking is made easier by time, which has removed us far enough from the conditions of Dafoe’s age and Europe’s anxiety over Chinese porcelain to make Crusoe’s accidental firing simply another (slightly unbelievable) episode of his realist narrative adventure. But if Liu is right, Crusoe’s realism itself depends

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on its deployment of technological detail and a narrative process whose Edenic inventions continually ask the reader to forget that those details were in fact both contested and historical. The fascination with China’s relationship to science and technology has remained more or less constant, even as the West’s relative technological advantage has waxed and waned. Between 1913 and 1959, Sax Rohmer published thirteen novels, three short stories, and one novelette featuring the dastardly Chinese villain, Fu Manchu. Sheng-mei Ma writes: “Fu Manchu was most significant as a literary figure in that he provided a heretofore missing ruler image for all the negative stereotypes of the Chinese,” as against the caricature of the Chinese as ignorant and bumbling.39 Fu Manchu, educated at a Western university, had not only, Rohmer wrote, a “brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan,” but also “all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect,” as well as access to “all the resources of science past and present.”40 Ma reads Fu Manchu as an instance of a more generalized Asian-American Orientalism, arguing that the “Oriental other . . . turned out to be projections of the Euro-American self.”41 But what seems useful here is not simply the label “Orientalist” but the degree to which the Orientalism can be particularized: though the “cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race” is not, given negative stereotypes, especially surprising, it is Fu Manchu’s access to the “resources of science” in combination with that Eastern cunning that makes him such a powerful figure.42 Rohmer’s attribution to Fu Manchu of both cunning and technological prowess thus inverts Dafoe’s treatment of Crusoe and Friday. While we have in Robinson Crusoe, as Peter Hulme has remarked,43 Crusoe teaching Friday how to use a canoe, when it was precisely from people like Friday that Europeans got the word “canoe” and its attendant technologies, Fu Manchu’s superior access to science means that his Western antagonists must resist him on the basis of their own civilizational or moral virtue (both of which Friday could only get from Crusoe). Thus between Robinson Crusoe (1719) and the early twentieth century, Western anxiety about China and its technology finds itself rather neatly reversed.44 Approximately halfway through Fu Manchu’s run, and shortly after the American comic strip Flash Gordon debuted in 1937 featuring a prehistoric space-age villain named Ming the Merciless,45 Borges published “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941). In “Garden,” Chinese national and German spy Dr. Yu Tsun spends the final hours of his life communicating to his masters the location of a British artillery park. Trapped in England, knowing that his capture is only moments away, Yu Tsun must find a way to get

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his message back to Germany. Unable, for reasons Borges never explains, to resort to radio, telegraph, or telephone, Yu Tsun laments that he cannot shout his news from the rooftops: “But my human voice was so terribly inadequate. How was I to make it reach the Leader’s ear? . . .  I vaguely reflected that a pistol shot can be heard at a considerable distance.”46 To carry out his plan, Yu Tsun must kill a man with the last name Albert—the same name as the town containing the artillery park. And yet the only Albert within reach is the sinologist Stephen Albert, who has, coincidentally, uncovered the secret truth of The Garden of Forking Paths, a novel written by Yu Tsun’s great-grandfather Ts’ui Pên—a text whose seemingly incomprehensible logic had been the downfall of Ts’ui Pên’s reputation. The novel’s message has thus been received for the first time by an Englishman; its nonsense becomes intelligible once one understands that it organizes itself around the possibility of each moment leading to myriad different futures—according to Albert, the novel articulates, simply enough, the problem of time.47 Grief-stricken at losing the opportunity to redeem his great-grandfather, Yu Tsun nonetheless shoots and kills Albert; his Leader in Berlin reads about the shooting in the newspaper and orders the artillery park destroyed. As Zhang Longxi has remarked, for Borges, “China” often works as a metaphor for spectacular otherness, not so much a national location but a metaphysical one, a site for the potential presence of an invitingly exotic relation to signification and meaning.48 In such a context the meaning of Yu Tsun’s message becomes clear. For what is Yu Tsun’s ingenious messagesending but the image of a complication, a gesture toward a communicational metaphysics simultaneously subtle and magnificent? The triumph of cunning over technology (the radio and telephone are unavailable) allows the reader vicariously to enjoy not so much Yu Tsun’s Chineseness as the “Chinese” logic of the message he sends.49 That Yu Tsun sends his message within the context of the First World War connects “The Garden of Forking Paths” firmly to the tripartite logic of Chineseness, war, and science fiction (here slightly deflected, but present in a relation to both technology and, as I am about to argue, a message regarding the future of the Chinese race). At the end of the story Yu Tsun faces a difficult choice: he can kill Albert, alerting his Chief to the artillery’s location, or he can let Albert live, allowing Albert’s reading of Ts’ui Pên’s novel to return to China and redeem Yu Tsun’s family. But the story makes it clear that Yu Tsun’s choice is not so much personal as racial. Yu Tsun explains:

[ 18  ]  eric hayot I did not do it for Germany. What do I care for a barbaric country that has forced me to the ignominy of spying! . . . I did it because I sensed that the Leader somehow looked down on the people of my race—the countless ancestors whose blood flows through my veins. I wanted to prove to him that a yellow man could save his armies.50

The Leader’s fear of Chinese people, metonymized in the figure of Yu Tsun and his innumerable ancestors, calls to mind that other longstanding Western worry: that the sheer number of Chinese people in the world represent a threat, racial or military, to the West’s recent domination of the globe (that is, fear of the “Yellow Peril”51). As a response to that fear, Yu Tsun’s delivery of his message hardly soothes: if a yellow man can save the Chief’s armies, he can also not save them. In the context of Germany’s historical treatment of China (it is one of the “eight foreign armies” that Chinese schools teach took part in China’s humiliation during the nineteenth century), the implied threat of the narrative is unmistakable.52 Whereas Chinese “modernity” in Borges takes the form of explicit science fictionalization (via the threat of war, the imagination of a “Chinese” future), “ancient” Chineseness demonstrates over and over again that whatever the future holds for China will be determined absolutely by (a particular version of) the Chinese past, a past that marks the Chinese as absolutely alien. Thus Yu Tsun’s participation in World War I—and whatever power he obtains over the Leader and his armies—depends not on his manipulation of modern technology but on the uniquely “Chinese” pattern of his solution to the problem of communicating with Germany.53

what to do after you say no to this chineseness What initially therefore appeared to be two problems—the odd habit of science fiction in all these texts, and their reading of Chineseness as ancient and immutable—might now be best understood as the same problem, the Chineseness giving rise to anxieties about purely non-Western relationships to politics, to culture, to technology, and the science fiction articulating those anxieties specifically around narratives about Chinese futures. But if science fiction is one way out of the cage of the eternal present, if it transforms that present “into the determinate past of something yet to come,” then the 1990s texts on China, with their apparent deployment of

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SF’s generic codes and their odd obsession with aliens and Star Trek, seem to be not so much interested in escaping the eternal present as in reveling in it. Whereas SF in Jameson’s definition allows readers to imagine, perhaps for the first time, the present as historical and mobile, these fictions, nonfictions, and games about China insist that when mobility comes, it is more or less unchangeable: the future looks exactly like things we already know (that the Chinese resemble insects, that they have the “resources of science past and present,” that they are cunning and even cruel). To some extent this is inevitable; unimaginable futures can’t be imagined, and so we invent out of the present that we have at hand. But with these texts it remains a question, also, of a lack of imagination, a resolutely pessimistic and history-destroying take on the future, produced by the insistence on the absolutely immutable alien-ness of the Chinese. That this tendency participates in a longstanding Western belief that China is stagnant or unchangeable simply makes things more depressing; it is a position whose racism is perhaps most eloquently spoken by Tom Clancy, who gets the last word on the subject: Some of the world’s most vicious tortures had been invented in this country, where the value of human life was a far less important thing than in the nation of his origin, Chet [a Japanese-American who is a U.S. spy] reminded himself. China was an ancient land with an ancient culture, but in many ways these people might as well have been Klingons as fellow human beings, so detached were their societal values from what Chester Nomuri had grown up with.54

For Clancy to put these words in the mouth of a Japanese-American (whose hybrid ethnicity thus acts as a prophylactic against the idea’s racism, modeling as it does the ideal narrative of immigrant assimilation) highlights once again the intensity of the anxiety that China can provoke about the West and its future. To notice the history of this anxiety is to begin to understand why—as many of the essays in this volume will argue—reading “China” ought not to be the limited province of some simple “area studies.” It is not, either, a question of differentiating between China the geopolitical nation and “China” the Westernized trope, as though one of those ought to be studied as historical and political (sinology) and the other read in literary terms (sinography). The argument of Sinographies in general depends on refusing to make that distinction, to acknowledge the realness of both the referential and the discursive, to understand that both count as

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dimensions of the human experience and to focus on the manner of their interactions. Applied here, one might extend this analysis toward the factual by remarking that one major source for the tendency to unite SF and China is the ongoing difficulty we have (anyone, Borges and Timmerman included) in figuring out the relationship between “China” and modernity, where modernity most often means something like Westernization.55 The question of how to remain authentically Chinese in the face of modernization has been a subject of discourse in China since at least the May Fourth period in the early twentieth century, when many Chinese intellectuals argued that only wholesale Westernization (including, for some, a shift to an alphabetic writing system) would allow China to have commerce with the rest of the world. Others inside and outside China have argued that China needs to selectively modernize/Westernize, taking those things that will not substantially affect the core values that make China Chinese (as, for instance, Deng Xiaoping’s invention of “capitalism with Chinese characteristics”). Framed this way, “China” names not so much a nation-state as a problematic relationship to history, a relationship worried endlessly by Westerners who wonder when China will finally “awaken,”56 and by the kind of people who ask when China will have “its own literary theory,” its own Nobel laureate, or its own cola beverage,57 as though China’s future can only happen on terms that are authentically Chinese. Those who insist on that authenticity in the United States, China, or elsewhere will find strange bedfellows in Timmerman and the other “China Threat” writers, for whom Chinese authenticity, understood as an inescapable genotype, frames and narrates the fear of a Chinese future.58 On the other side of the coin, Timmerman and others would presumably be angered to discover that many people in China, who believe as strongly as they do in the “strategic rivalry” line, read the destruction of the World Trade Center towers as a shorthand for the general decline of U.S. power and the concomitant move toward a “Chinese” twenty-first century. This is what is called the mutuality of interpretation: interpretation is not subjective, but has effects on people who interpret you back. How the rest of this century looks from this perspective will continue to depend not only on definitions of “Chineseness” that return to an essentially prehistoric China, but on how one thinks about the ethnic decentering of the ongoing Chinese diaspora. In a recent essay Ien Ang argues that the Chinese diaspora has radically altered the world’s understanding of what “China” and “Chineseness” are:

chineseness: a prehistory of its future  [ 21  ] “China” can no longer be limited to the more or less fixed area of its ­official spatial and cultural boundaries nor can it be held up as providing the authentic, authoritative, and uncontested standard for all things Chinese. Instead, how to determine what is and what is not Chinese has become the necessary preliminary question to ask, and an increasingly urgent one at that.59

Ang goes on to read Tu Wei-Ming’s 1994 collection The Living Tree, in which Tu argues for a notion of cultural Chineseness designed to break with the stereotypical definitions of Chinese as “belonging to the Han race, being born in China proper, speaking Mandarin, and observing the ‘patriotic’ code of ethics.”60 Though Ang applauds Tu for doing away with many of the most rigid and essentialist notions of Chineseness, she ultimately finds his notion of cultural Chineseness no less ethnocentric than the one it aims to replace. She writes: “while the aim would seem to be to rescue Chineseness from China, to de-hegemonize geopolitical China . . . the rescue operation implies the projection of a new, alternative center, a de-centered center, whose name is cultural China, but China nevertheless” (287). Ang goes on to suggest that “An overwhelming desire—bordering, indeed, on obsession—to somehow maintain, redeem, and revitalize the notion of Chineseness as a marker of common culture and identity in a rapidly postmodernizing world is the driving force behind Tu’s conception of cultural China” (288). If there is any commerce between books like Timmerman’s Selling Out America and Tu’s The Living Tree, it is in their take on the Chinese diaspora,61 whose members Timmerman suggests may already be “agents in place.” Though Tu would disagree with the idea that Chinese abroad are necessarily secret agents of the PRC, there is no question in The Living Tree that they might be agents (in the philosophical sense) of Chineseness, carrying with them values or traditions, if not political programs. If it is, as Tu puts it, a question of whether “modernization may enhance rather than weaken Chineseness,”62 then we are right back in the problematic—namely, the understanding of modernization and Chineseness as absolutely alienated historical forces—that grounds Timmerman and company. Ang attributes the desire to “modernize” Chineseness in The Living Tree not simply to a “rapidly postmodernizing world,” but also to the presence of what she calls “dispersed, discontinuous, fractal cultural formations” that give the lie to any singular definition of what Chineseness is (290). Similarly, one might ascribe Timmerman’s definition of Chineseness in

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Selling Out America not only to the Chinese diaspora but also to the dispersal, discontinuity, and fracturing of the singular enemy that such postmodernization creates. As Warren Cohen has remarked, “Asian culture, most obviously food and art, permeates the culture of the United States. AsianAmericans constitute a new intellectual elite in American society and have become increasingly active politically.”63 It’s precisely in the face of the permeation of American culture (which in turn testifies to its general permeability) that one might be tempted by the trappings of cultural Chineseness, that one might define Chineseness precisely as that which permeates, that which assimilates without announcing itself, that which conquers without fighting. Timmerman’s gesture toward Sun-Tzu might then be understood as an attempt to combat this “postmodern” China by reattaching it to the solid mythological markers of five thousand years of history, Sun-Tzu’s The Art of War, the original “yellow emperor,” and so on. At the end of her essay, Ang asks, “Can one say no to Chineseness?” By this she means not just, Can one reject Chinese identity, but Can one think outside the category of Chineseness when others—on both sides of the Pacific, on both sides of the political spectrum—continually make that category real for us? Ang takes such a question as vital for people of ethnically Chinese descent, who choose, or are forced to, negotiate their relationship to China and Chineseness as part of their negotiation of self. But “Chineseness” and its violence, it turns out, belong epistemologically to Timmerman and company as well, where they approach along various vectors the well-meaning cultural Chineseness of Tu’s The Living Tree or the more traditional Chineseness of Confucius, the middle kingdom, and “the myth of consanguinity,”64 with its fundamentalist faith in the power of Chinese blood to unite individuals politically, linguistically, and culturally. Whether texts like Selling Out America will continue to be produced after September 11, 2001, at least with reference to China, remains to be seen; perhaps one way to understand them now is as a product of a hysteria that no longer matters to the present. At the same time, however, I intended to suggest via the references to Crusoe and Fu Manchu and the reading of “The Garden of Forking Paths” something of the SF/war/China trilogy’s relentlessness and malleability. Though it has disappeared at moments—as Chinese villain Ming the Merciless did from Flash Gordon once the United States allied itself with Chinese nationalists against the Japanese during World War II—the insistence on Chineseness as a particularly odd combination of ancient past and scientific future has clearly demonstrated its ability to resurface when needed. Should the geopolitics change

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again, we will find ourselves right back in the middle of more “coming conflict” literature, perhaps this time forced to work against it in the face of events that will make its predictions seem all the more prescient. In their broader implications, these “China Threat” texts are not simply about anti-Chinese racism. Rather they use that racism to unite a series of arguments—an absolute faith in the (American) present, a reading of the future as catastrophe and the (Chinese) past as destiny—that anyone who believes the world should be different than it is ought to resist as much as possible. In their explicit racism, of course, in their ongoing associations of China with a certain magical ability to act without traces or communicate without signifying as such (which is where, it seems to me, Yu Tsun’s gunshot65 and Sun-Tzu’s “breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting” come together), in their cynical manipulation of SF convention to produce an immobile history, these texts, and the “Chineseness” they believe in, ought to be easy enough to say no to. But the question remains: what positive project follows that refusal? That is, in the name of what complexity—limited in various ways by our choice of rhetorical genre, and the inevitable idealism of the idea—might we speak as we face the inexorable rhetorical certainties of a coming conflict with China? To ask this question is to begin to think about articulating an epistemologically positive, non-totalizing vision of Chineseness, and even of cultural identity more generally. If, as the introduction to this volume argues, meaning is underdetermined as often as it is overdetermined, then the process of creating any such vision must become an ongoing process of determination and redetermination in a world whose meanings are continually understood as mobile. Sinographies is, at some level, an attempt at providing just such a set of determinations, but the endless project of thinking through identity must happen in places likely to reach other audiences: classrooms, coffee shops, family gatherings, and the like. One place such conversations might concentrate is the relationship between Westernization and modernization in the Chinese context, as that relationship gives life to the fixed and troubling version of Chineseness one sees in the “China Threat” texts and in Chinese culturalism. And part of what produces the (perceived) unhappy relation between modernization and Chineseness is a persistent differentiation between cultural and technological change. Whereas technological change has often been understood as culturally neutral (and leading to modernization), most cultural changes have been seen as leading to the corruption of a pre-Western Chinese identity (and thus to Westernization). That is, the relative danger

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posed by, say, Western literary theory or fast food appears, in China, to call for either a Chinese response (as in China’s own cola beverage) or certain forms of resistance. And yet, when it comes to objects that appear culturally neutral—electricity, for instance, or submarines, or computers—advocates of pure Chineseness do not call for “Chinese” forms of, say, power delivery, or ocean-going, underwater vehicles. These technological forms are taken to be value-neutral, their national identity created by their use rather than their simple existence. If the People’s Republic ever uses modern submarines purchased from Russia to attack Taiwan, no one in Beijing will complain that this is yet another form of Westernization. But the obvious thing to say is that of course it is a form of Westernization. Technologies are cultural, in that they express all sorts of cultureshaping values and exert a number of forces on lived experience (the telephone, for instance, reshapes the way people think of communication and distance just as much in China as it does in Europe and the United States). Presumably this is true of submarines and electricity as well. At the same time, however, once one sees that electricity and submarines are able to exist in China and not substantially interfere with whatever one thinks of as “Chineseness,” one ought to be able to at least begin to wonder whether that might be true of hamburgers or deconstruction as well. (Peanuts, a New World legume, were introduced to China from the West; today, kung pao chicken, which includes peanuts, is a staple of Chinese restaurants worldwide.) The flip side of understanding that technologies are more cultural than we think they are involves realizing that cultural forms are much less powerful than we imagine them to be. However Chineseness gets defined, it has “survived” the introduction over many thousands of years of any number of “foreign” influences that have been included in some definition of “China,” and these influences include not only American food or European philosophy, but also the bicycle, or any number of Mongol cultural forms that crossed over during the Yuan dynasty, not to mention Buddhism. That is, Chineseness, like all forms of identity, is mobile. It adjusts and changes, takes in new influences and sheds older ones, all the while continuing to remain conscious of itself as itself. China has never been purely Chinese, just as France has never been purely French (the Franks, after all, were Germanic), England never purely English, and so on; these national names, which leak into race and culture, fabricate political power by framing a false purity. The rhetoric of identity, especially national, racial, or cultural iden-

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tity, thus mirrors the conservatism of Timmerman’s Selling Out America, since it must present itself always as the potential victim of future change, and relies for its authority of its alleged purity on an absent past. But it is only by arbitrarily stopping the clock of history and measuring from a new calendar (before/after Buddhism; before/after the West; before/after the Internet) that one ever can make claims for a lost purity, usually while developing a good case of historical amnesia designed to forget all those other earlier moments of interaction. That purity has always just gone missing, always just slipped out of one’s grasp. It’s a question of perspective; if China (or Chinese people) can feel culturally “Chinese” and still have telephones, electricity, and the internal combustion engine, then clearly whatever purity anyone imagined was there in the first place cannot have been so important, or so pure, and, by correlation, the difference those things make cannot be so enormous. That’s why when Tu Wei-ming writes about whether “modernization may enhance rather than weaken Chineseness,”66 he imagines a problem that doesn’t exist. It only makes sense to wonder about what modernization can “do” to Chineseness if you believe that they are totally different things (that is, that Chineseness somehow lies outside of modernization, or that the latter occurs fully independently from Chineseness). If you understand modernization and Chineseness as processes that interact with one another in cultural space—as processes that are already part of each other—then thinking of either category as pure or free from the other’s influence leads to an intellectual dead end; nor will it prove fruitful to think of one category as technological and the other as cultural. Modernization itself is already an ethnic concept, and ethnicity is already a modern one.67 To turn this back, now, to the American context, one might say that the “combination of exotic appearance and superlative technical efficiency suggests that the Asiatic is modernization rendered visible.”68 What one sees in the “China Threat” texts of Timmerman and company is precisely the insistence on absolute stability and purity that ground a vision of China as irrevocably opposed to modernization; anything a Chinese person touches (be it weapons or capital) is in danger of being assimilated, of turning “Chinese,” of being used for Chinese purposes that have not changed for thousands of years. By continually reading Chineseness as premodern, these writers establish a racial and cultural opposition between China and the West that can never be overcome; any technological or cultural change will always be superficial, simply laid on top of an eternally fixed Chinese identity. At the end of the day what makes Timmerman and others so frustrated,

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beyond the odd fascination with Chineseness and modernity, is that the Chinese government does not want the same thing that the U.S. government wants. By separating the Chinese fully from modernity, these writers are able to read that difference not as a difference of opinion (which would then require discussion, convincing, or possibly simply an agreement to disagree about how people should live) but as an ontological, racial difference that makes the Chinese into aliens. By more closely connecting culture and technology—by refusing to make distinctions of kind between things like languages, gardens, food, forms of power transmission, philosophies, and military hardware—one can take the process of cross-cultural interaction (including commerce and trade) both more and less seriously: yes it matters, always, but since it always matters, no individual moment or transaction matters too much to the forms of identity that anyone chooses; a notion of identity that precludes the possibility of change and difference is, in such a conception, impoverished indeed. A Chineseness built in a newer mold would have to refuse all forms of strict unification—racial (thereby excluding non-Han Chinese), national (excluding members of the diaspora), or cultural (excluding those who do not speak Chinese, do not do calligraphy, and so on)—while remaining open to the individual choice of inclusion or exclusion (some people who may seem Chinese to you may simply not “feel” Chinese, not want to be identified with it as such). A theory of Chineseness that takes such ideas seriously may grant few of the satisfactions of the explicitly racist or nationalist formulations of Chinese identity that we see in the China texts; indeed, it may be something of a burden, requiring as it does ongoing vigilance against all forms of idealism that would seek to make it pure. And it will not—it cannot—prevent war between the United States and China, any more than the narrations of that war’s inevitability could simply produce it, like Dorian Gray’s picture. But it might allow for different forms of narrative, for discussions about cultural futures and pasts which, by seeing Chineseness and modernization as a dialogue (a dialogue that resembles in all the important ways the dialogue between the United States and modernization and, what’s more, includes it and is included by it), might actually give us something like an actionable and living present. In its insistence on the inevitability and meaningfulness of cultural/technological change and its refusal to be crippled by the absence of purity, such a Chineseness would retain a sense of identity’s malleability and the future’s difference, two ideas that might allow us to tell better stories about who we are and where we’re going.

chineseness: a prehistory of its future  [ 27  ]

notes 1. This phrase is the title of Richard Bernstein and Ross H. Munro’s The Coming Conflict with China (New York: Vintage, 1998). “The coming war with China” is the subtitle of a novel by Humphrey Hawksley and Simon Holberton, Dragon Strike: A Novel of the Coming War with China (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). 2. It may well be, in fact, by the middle of 2006, that even the brief interlude created by September 11 has run its course; in the last six months my local newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, has been full of articles wondering about the impending economic threat posed by China, as well as its diplomatic differences from the United States on such issues as Iran’s access to nuclear weapons. On the eve of Chinese president Hu Jintao’s visit to Washington in April 2006, for instance, one can find claims that the visit is part of a “Chinese effort to reduce, or at least to deflect, American anxiety about the country’s growing economic, political and military power.” New York Times, “In Candor from China, Efforts to Ease Anxiety,” April 17, 2006. 3. Rice on foreign policy in the new Bush administration: “The United States under President George W. Bush is not going to pull any punches. I think we learned all the way back with Ronald Reagan that you don’t soften the edges. You call out a threat when you see it.” http://www.theglobalist.com/DBWeb/ StoryId.aspx?StoryId=2547 4. Selling Out America (self-published, 2000), 14. 5. Perhaps in this it simply makes explicit something already present in Star Trek: The Next Generation. In the original show, which aired in the late 1960s, the Communist threat seemed to be embodied in the Romulans. 6. The strangest part of this paragraph is the claim that California “has been known to Americans for many things.” Presumably Timmerman’s things include heavy doses of drug use and liberal sexual politics, and not so much Ronald Reagan. California’s liberalism—sex, politics, families, drugs—thus takes some of the blame for China’s success in assimilating it. 7. The evocation of “sleeping agents” comes from the same ideology that justified putting Japanese-Americans into internment camps during the Second World War. The notion of “ideology” here can be extended to include a broader perception of the late-century Chinese and the mid-century Japanese as economic threats, not just political ones. For more on the interaction between globalizing economies and Asians in America, see Colleen Lye’s excellent America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), especially 141–74. For a discussion of fantasies of a Chinese invasion of California in late-nineteenth-century periodicals and during the Cold War, see Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 92, 153. 8. Presumably, the United States’s use of planes and satellites to eavesdrop on China also constitutes, in some way, an act of war, but at a technological distance that removes the human threat of assimilation.

[ 28  ]  eric hayot 9. Buried in Timmerman’s argument is thus a critique of the malleability of capital. Clinton sells out America because Chinese dollars are just as good as American ones; investigations following the 1996 presidential race to determine to what degree the PLA and the Chinese government had donated money to the Clinton campaign focused inevitably on pinning capital to its national origins. The investigations, led by Representative Christopher Cox (R-Calif.), resulted in the publication of a lengthy report. 10. In December 1999, two years after Timmerman’s essay appeared in the Spectator but before the publication of Selling Out America, the FBI arrested TaiwaneseAmerican scientist Wen Ho Lee, and eventually charged him with fifty-eight counts of breaching national security at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Lee was eventually released in September 2000 after pleading guilty to one count of mishandling nuclear secrets. The notion than an Asian immigrant population would act as agents or soldiers in the event of an international war has a history whose most shocking expression is the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Colleen Lye quotes a letter sent to the California State Department of Agriculture that worries that “it is not . . . beyond the realm of possibility that at least 25,000 of these Japanese, in the event of invasion, by exchanging civilian clothing for uniforms are full fledged members of the Japanese armed forces” (107). 11. This act of yellowface was mirrored by the cover of the March 1997 issue of National Review, which featured a cartoon of Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Vice President Al Gore as a houseboy, Red Guard, and Buddhist priest. See Lee, 1–2. 12. Again here capital’s malleability stands in for a more general weakness and loss of fixed value; just as Clinton’s lack of any fixed moral principles allows him to go over to the Chinese side, the fact that anyone can invest in the stock market suggests a lack of foundational stability that renders America vulnerable to Chinese assimilation. 13. Quoted in Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), 44. 14. Fredric Jameson, “Progress vs. Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?” Science-Fiction Studies 9 (1982): 151–52. 15. Ibid., 150. 16. For some reason this has always reminded me of the moment in Planet of the Apes in which Charlton Heston finds the Statue of Liberty, the difference being that in this case the readers already know that the world of Chung Kuo is their own. 17. That this idea of the history of Chinese civilization is itself an ideological figure produced around a certain racist or nationalist notion of what counts as Chinese is something I take for granted. The drive to move between that long prehistory and the PRC, or to use it to give depth and expression to aspects of contemporary Chinese culture, is of course not limited to Americans. In China,

chineseness: a prehistory of its future  [ 29  ] the state-owned Great Wall Industry Corporation produces ballistic missiles for the Chinese military. 18. Both Wade and Giles spent time in China as representatives of the British empire. Wade came over first as a naval officer in 1842; Giles was a British consular officer in the late nineteenth century. 19. Reflecting the close relationship between the Soviet Union and the PRC in the 1950s, some of pinyin’s sounds are based on Cyrillic letters. Pinyin’s “zh,” for instance, is the usual transliteration for the Cyrillic letter employed for the unaspirated alveolar affricate, Ж. 20. The ensuing adoption of the pinyin system by most media outlets explains why, in the 1980s, the PRC’s capital city seemed to change its name from “Peking” (the remnant of yet another romanization, stemming from a dialect of Mandarin spoken in Nanjing) to “Beijing” (pinyin). The city’s name in Chinese characters never changed. 21. Wingrove, Chung Kuo: The Middle Kingdom (New York: Dell, 1990), 641–42. 22. Firaxis Games, Alpha Centauri (computer software), 1999. 23. Firaxis Games Web site, http://www.firaxis.com/smac/yang.cfm, June 26, 2002. 24. Yang is also something of a Taoist, as this quotation from his Essays on Mind and Matter suggests: “Learn to overcome the crass demands of flesh and bone, for they warp the matrix through which we perceive the world. Extend your awareness outwards, beyond the self of body, to embrace the self of group and the self of humanity. The goals of the group and the greater race are transcendent, and to embrace them is to achieve enlightenment.” The final sentence gives Yang’s Taoism a “communist” twist, once again doubling traditional China and the PRC. 25. The importance of Sun-Tzu to these texts ought not to be underestimated; Mosher quotes him eight times (“When seeking power, make it appear that you are not doing so”), and the same Sun-Tzu quotation that appears in Timmerman appears as a chapter heading in Munro and Bernstein’s The Coming Conflict with China (41). Stephen W. Mosher, Hegemon: China’s Plan to Dominate Asia and the World (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000); Strategic Simulations, Inc., People’s General (computer software), 1998; Clancy, The Bear and the Dragon (New York: Gardners, 2001). 26. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 229. For more on Huntington in this context see Lee, 206–8. 27. Mosher, 1. 28. Mosher, 160; Hawksley and Holberton, xiv. 29. And, appropriately, a chapter of The Coming War with China is titled, “China Versus America: A War Game.” 30. Simulated, of course, literally, in the case of the computer game, but also in the sense Jean Baudrillard uses it in Simulations, where he argues that “genetic miniaturization is the dimension of simulation.” In Clancy and People’s General this

[ 30  ]  eric hayot miniaturization takes the form of detailed descriptions of military technology, which the player (in the computer game) directly manipulates, and the reader of The Bear and the Dragon employs via identification with its heroes. Baudrillard: “The real is produced from miniaturized units . . . and with these it can be reproduced an infinite number of times.” Simulations (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983), 2. 31. I am not able to say much about why Clancy compares the Chinese to Klingons (rather than some other Star Trek race). In the original Star Trek series, the Klingons are at war with the human-led Federation. But by Star Trek: The Next Generation in the late 1980s (set eighty-five years after the original series), the Klingons and the Federation are allied; indeed a Klingon officer serves aboard the starship Enterprise. The Klingons are larger than most humans, and are barbaric, warlike, and given to uncontrollable fits of anger. The racism here thus does not correspond to any Chineseness I recognize (indeed, many Klingons are played by African-American actors, suggesting another form of racism entirely). 32. This brings up one of the most bizarre habits of Clancy’s writing, which is to repeat himself without remarking that repetition in the text. For instance, in The Bear and the Dragon, American spy Chet Nomuri thinks to himself the Chinese “might as well have been Klingons as fellow human beings” (116); some thirty pages later, U.S. president Jack Ryan, who has had no contact, personal or written, with Nomuri, says that the Chinese “culture is so different in so many ways that they might as well be Klingons” (148). In the hands of Italo Calvino or Raymond Queneau, this habit would be an amusing disruption of the notion of character, a witty revelation of the authorial sleight-of-hand. It seems unlikely that Clancy is up to anything similar; assuming the books are being edited, one can only imagine that the repetition is either obsessional or pedagogical. 33. Near-term science fiction—like any prediction about the future—eventually presents its readers with an interesting problem: at some point the years the text refers to come and go, and the text’s predictive accuracy can be measured against the real. One need only think of the general interest in 1984 around the George Orwell novel (whose film version appeared that same year) to get some sense of what that might be like; more recently, the events of September 11, 2001, have been used to demonstrate Tom Clancy’s own powers of prediction—in his 1994 Debt of Honor a Japanese pilot crashes a 747 into the U.S. Capitol building, incinerating most of the Congress. Each of the texts this essay has looked at so far makes some claim, strong or weak, for its own relation to the future it imagines, running from the “what would it be like if this happened?” of Alpha Centauri to the “this will happen . . . unless” of Timmerman, Mosher, and Huntington. 34. Two recent excavations of that history in the American context are Lye’s America’s Asia and Christina Klein’s Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Klein con-

chineseness: a prehistory of its future  [ 31  ] centrates on American relationships to southeast Asia, but her analysis turns usefully to China at several points (see especially 174–90). 35. On the garden, see David Porter’s essay in this volume, as well as Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001). On the history of the West’s relation to the Chinese character, see Haun Saussy’s The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993). 36. For another take on Crusoe, see Henk Vynckier’s essay in this volume. 37. “Robinson Crusoe’s Earthenware Pot,” Critical Inquiry (Summer 1999): 738. 38. Liu, 737. 39. Ma, Sheng-mei, The Deathly Embrace: Orientalism and Asian American Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 8. 40. Quoted in Ma, 8–9. 41. Ma, 9. 42. As Robert G. Lee puts it, “His Chinese racial identification is decentered by the fact that much is made of his scientific Western education and his sophistication” (116). 43. Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (New York: Methuen, 1986), 210–11. 44. Reversed, but not undone; as Colleen Lye shows, the ethnic or foreign stereo­ type is a capacious one, capable of assuming differing or even contradictory positions over time without being substantially disrupted by the difference. Following Lye, one might consider “Chinese” or “Asian” as figures that are designed to contain or erase historicity (economic, political, or cultural) by suggesting that any number of different relations can be gathered under one ontological, racial roof. Presumably this is true of most ethnic and national identifiers. 45. Ming—who inhabited a world replete with both spaceships and dinosaurs— first appeared in 1937. Later in the century, Ma finds reprises of the Fu Manchu stereotype in two films: Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan (1982), and General Chan in 1991’s Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (Ma, 20). Oddly enough, Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan was briefly titled, before its release, Star Trek II: The Undiscovered Country. 46. Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1999), 120. 47. Carl Malmgren writes that science fiction “is predicated upon a world-view which takes for granted that the future will be different from the present, that there exists a spectrum of possible futures all with their germs in the present, and that articulation of one of those possibilities can be of real value.” Worlds Apart: Narratology of Science Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 5. 48. See the chapter called “The Myth of the Other,” in Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), 19–24 passim.

[ 32  ]  eric hayot 49. Haun Saussy writes, in an email to me, that Yu Tsun’s name and some of the background come from Borges’s reading of a Franz Kuhn translation of the Chinese classic, Dream of the Red Chamber (Hong lou meng), in whose first chapter one finds Jia Yucun (Chia Yu-ts’un) and Zhen Shiyin (Chen Shih-yin). In both those characters one has already the idea of people and actions serving as the cover for another kind of information, as Jia Yucun is interpreted by the commentators as a pun on “false words retained,” and Zhen Shiyin as “real facts hidden.” 50. Borges, 121. 51. On the Yellow Peril in American fiction, see William Wu, The Yellow Peril: Chinese Americans in American Fiction, 1850–1940 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Publishing, 1982). 52. Yu Tsun, the text notes, had taught English at the Hochschule in Qingdao. Qingdao, a coastal city, was Germany’s main treaty port in China prior to World War I. In 1915, German soldiers there were attacked and killed by Japanese forces, who had entered the war on the side of England and France. 53. This contrasts oddly with the major form of actual Chinese participation in the war, which was as a source of manual laborers (who worked in both France and England), whose presence in the fields and factories allowed more French and English young men to go off to war. 54. Clancy, 116. 55. For an extended critique of the sense of modernization as Westernization in treatments of China, see Paul Cohen’s Discovering History in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 56. This is a trope as old as Napoleon, who famously said that “when China wakes, it will shake the world.” The quotation appears in both The Coming Conflict with China and a book I have not discussed, Nicholas D. Kristoff and Sheryl Wudunn’s China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power (New York: Vintage, 1995). The quotation is given as “If China wakes, the sleeping lion will shake the world” in a People’s Daily article dated September 9, 1999. “China Culture Week to Open with Boom in Paris,” http://english.peopledaily.com. cn/199909/02/enc_19990902001001_TopNews.html. See also Christopher Hibbert, The Dragon Wakes: China and the West, 1793–1911 (New York: Penguin, 1989). 57. During the soccer World Cup in 1998, Chinese viewers were endlessly barraged with advertisements for Feichang Cola (非常可乐), which the announcer declared was “China’s own cola!” (“中国自己的可乐”). 58. The theory that understanding China is a way of understanding the future may explain the following remark, made by California congressman Christopher Cox (who chaired the committee that issued The Cox Report on Chinese spying in the United States) in the preface to Timmerman’s book: “Those warning of the growing military might of the communist People’s Liberation Army, and the help they were getting from the Clinton-Gore administration, were treated as pesky Cassandras by Clinton allies in the media” (9). In Greek mythology, Cas-

chineseness: a prehistory of its future  [ 33  ] sandra, daughter of Hecuba, is granted by Apollo the power of prophecy; when she refuses to sleep with the god, as she had promised, he avenges himself by ensuring that no one will listen to her. The idea of Timmerman as one of these many Cassandras, giving us messages about the future, jibes well with the science-fictional glow of the “China Threat” enterprise. 59. Ien Ang, “Can One Say No to Chineseness? Pushing the Limits of the Diasporic Paradigm,” in Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field, ed. Rey Chow (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 282. 60. Tu Wei-Ming, The Living Tree: The Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), vii. 61. A word not without its own ideological content, as Ang notes. 62. Tu, 8. 63. Cohen, 240. 64. Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1993), 24. 65. Yu Tsun does in fact signify, rather inexorably, via his murder; but the murder is not readable as a sign by the British officer who arrests him. In a short paragraph that precedes Yu Tsun’s first-person story, a narrator explains that the discovery of Yu Tsun’s narrative “throws unexpected light” on the delay of a British artillery attack in 1916. 66. Tu, 8. 67. On this latter point, see Rey Chow: “[E]thnicity is not simply a static space occupied by ethnics who are, somehow, always already there but, more important, also a relation of cultural politics that is regularly being enacted by a Westernized, Americanized audience with regard to those who are perceived and labeled as ethnic” (The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism [New York: Columbia University Press, 2002], 22). 68. Lye, 94.

2 

Reading and Difference: Image, Allegory, and the Invention of Chinese Christopher Bush

le tout sans nouveauté qu’un espacement de la lecture [the whole without novelty except for a spacing of the reading] mallarmé, Preface to “Un coup de dés”

In his introduction to Ezra Pound’s Selected Poems (1928), T. S. Eliot refers to Pound as “the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time,” a phrase that has been quoted frequently since. By reconsidering the phrase in its original context, such critics as Robert Kern and Eric Hayot have shown it to be not only a gesture of pure praise or admiration but also a qualification of the achievements of even the most successful translators.1 Pound’s translations are better than Legge’s, for example, not because they better convey “the matter an sich, which is unknowable,” but because they better effect the illusion of providing access to an original, “an illusion,” Eliot adds, “that is not altogether an illusion either.”2 Eliot’s account of Pound as translator raises a set of interrelated problems whose interactions go some way toward explaining the enduring fascination of his relatively sparse remarks. First, there are the literary historical questions of evaluating Pound’s translations, Cathay in particular, and more generally the status of things Chinese in Anglo-American modernism. Second, as Hayot discusses, Eliot’s introduction raises broader epistemological questions about what might anachronistically be called the virtual reality of cultural and historical understanding, a strange realm in [ 34  ]

reading and difference  [ 35  ]

which something can be an illusion and yet not altogether. Last, I would add, these questions in turn reflect a deep ambivalence about the very notion of invention, an ambivalence embodied in the word’s range of meanings—from the etymological sense of coming upon and hence discovering, to creation and production, falsification, plotting, bringing into use by authority, and so on. This ambivalence can be found, as they say, from Plato to postmodernism, but in our time it is perhaps most acutely felt as a tension between indignation at misrepresentation of other cultures, on the one hand, and a general suspicion of all claims to authenticity or objectivity, on the other. In sum, more is at stake in Eliot’s remarks than just one poet’s opinion of another poet’s skinny book of translations. As Hayot writes: “Making Eliot’s declaration on Pound the representative statement of Modernism turns the pairing Orientalism/Modernism into less of a binary and more of a vaguely disturbed equivalence.”3 To put it another way, Pound not only invented Chinese poetry for our time, but invented our time as one in part defined by its relations to things Chinese. If the 1915 publication of Cathay does not provide an indisputable date for when “our time” began, it does indicate when its fate came to be understood in terms of a certain relationship to China and to Chinese. The sinophilic legacies of the Pound Era are well represented in a number of recent studies, studies that have enriched our understanding of the role of ideas about the Chinese language in modernist poetics.4 At the same time that the place of China in Anglo American modernism has undergone reevaluation in modernist studies, Asian American and East Asian studies have similarly been compelled to reconsider their boundaries—cultural, geographic, disciplinary, and imaginary, among others. A number of these works have used the history of cultural exchange between China and the West to engage issues of importance beyond Sinology or even the problem of a Western “image” of China.5 What these various works might be said to have in common is less a concern with the veracity of Western representations of the East (or the converse) than a desire to rethink East and West in non-essentialist terms. These works move beyond simply debunking essentialism by studying the material, cultural, and rhetorical mechanisms by which “East” and “West” are produced in and as cultural discourse: invented, dreamed, displaced, manufactured, constructed, translated, transplanted, written. If putting China in quotation marks gives this signifier a degree of independence from its ostensible referent, such a gesture does not make the

[ 36  ]  christopher bush

determination of its significations capricious; on the contrary, it calls for greater attention to the cultural, historical, and linguistic particulars of how, for example, a given set of “translations seem to be [. . .] translucencies.”6 Translation, transplantation, translingual practice, transpacific displacement, and other tropes of circulation and exchange have proven historically appropriate and theoretically productive to this project because they both qualify any presumed innate unity of language, culture, and geography, and because they make more apparent the often essential role of mediation and interpretation. Lydia Liu’s Translingual Practice, for example, emphasizes the role of Japanese in the introduction of modern Western lexical items into Chinese, while Yunte Huang’s Transpacific Displacement, inspired by Paul Gilroy’s concept of a Black Atlantic, argues for the notion of a transpacific textual field that would be able to move beyond the basic Chinese/American dichotomy and account for the plurality of Asian, American, and Asian-American cultures.7 I would add that Europe has been a historically important layover in the global travels of the signifier “China.” The following essay seeks both to supplement and to modify the recent work on Orientalism/modernism by focusing on a French vision of Chinese writing that runs counter both to the nineteenth-century Orientalist and Idealist condemnations of Chinese as a fossilized language (more on this below), and to the modernist Fenollosa-Pound tradition, which inverted the former condemnation by viewing alphabetic and European writing as the “corpse language,” and Oriental writing as vivid and vital.8 My subject, then, is a different modernity, a different modernism, a different Chinese. While Imagism is, at least ostensibly, a poetics of presence and immediacy, I will be exploring a poetics of absence and allegory, one perhaps best identified with the name of Mallarmé.9 Gerald Bruns’s Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language provides one way of situating these poetics at opposite poles of modernism, poles he calls Orphic and hermetic. Bruns describes Mallarmé’s poetics precisely in terms of the powers of absence: “the power of language is no longer to call up the presence of an object but rather to return it to its original absence. The very act of speech is thus an act of dissociation, whereby the word is split off from the world and isolated in vacant space.”10 While there are some tangential links between Mallarmé and East Asia,11 it was Victor Segalen and Paul Claudel who would most extensively develop the implications of Mallarmé’s poetics in terms of invented Oriental languages. My focus here will be on the works of Paul Claudel (1870–1955). Why Claudel? In contrast to Segalen, who has served as a direct inspira-

reading and difference  [ 37  ]

tion for a number of post-colonial writers, Claudel’s politics make him an unsympathetic case: ardently Catholic, a direct participant in French colonialism, a nationalist, politically reactionary, often aesthetically bombastic, sexist (the list could go on), Claudel’s work tends be treated as beneath contempt or, by his devotees, above reproach.12 The fact remains, however, that, historically parallel to Anglo-American modernist sinophilia, Claudel produced an extensive body of East Asia–inspired essays, plays, poems, poetic theories, prose poems, and lectures over the course of four decades. As part of what I am broadly calling a Mallarméan poetic tradition, this work represents an important counterexample of a modernist invention of Chinese. If Claudel shows us another way of inventing Chinese, he can also serve to remind us that the Image is not a translucency discovered but an invention, in the sense that the OED defines the “chief current sense” of to invent as “to find out or produce by mental activity” and “to create, produce, or construct by original thought or ingenuity; to devise first, originate (a new method of action, kind of instrument, etc.)” (my emphasis). Beyond providing an additional and different case, a different method of action and a different instrument, Claudel’s Chinese, I will argue, changes our understanding of Anglo-American sinophilia in two distinct senses. First, while a transpacific intertextual field is a healthy enrichment of the rather anemic paradigm of an East/West binarism, this field itself belongs to a much broader cultural circulation.13 The second sense bears on the heuristic distinction I am positing between image and allegory; in my conclusion I will make a case for an allegorical mode in the Pound-Fenollosa tradition.

the chinese underworld I begin with Claudel’s first “Chinese” work, also the earliest instance of his discussing Chinese writing.14 Written shortly after his arrival in China, Claudel’s 1895 play Le Repos du septième jour (The Rest on the Seventh Day) is part Aquinian ontology, part neo-Baroque chinoiserie; it is of great interest to anyone concerned about French imaginings of China, but it is difficult to disagree with Victor Segalen’s assessment that it is “a chaos without consistency that is, worst of all, a very boring work.”15 However weak the aesthetic pleasures or sinological accuracy of the play may be, it is nonetheless a good starting point for a reconsideration of modernist figurations of Chinese because of its clear opposition to Imagism, and because of the insight it offers into Claudel’s later, more subtle, more aesthetically

[ 38  ]  christopher bush

ap­pealing, and more recognizably modernist Orientalism in Cent phrases pour éventails (1927; translated as A Hundred Movements for a Fan). Loosely set in the court of an ancient Chinese emperor, Repos presents an empire in crisis. The mandate of heaven has been lost or the rites are not being properly performed, for the boundary between life and death has become blurred and the dead walk the earth. The Emperor futilely seeks counsel from his advisors before descending into the underworld. Through various confrontations and conversations, the well-intentioned pagan Emperor comes to understand, in an approximate form, the truth of the one God. The play’s great ideographic, and ideological, moment comes with the transformation of the character + shí (“ten; complete, perfect”) into a symbol of Christ after the emperor’s return from the underworld.16 Finding the appropriative and Eurocentric impulses here is hardly a day’s work; more compelling is Claudel’s overt difference from more familiar Imagist characterizations of Chinese. Repos opposes this portrait without simply returning to earlier Orientalist and Idealist condemnations of Chinese as a static, ossified language that merely preserves sense impressions. A word is in order here about what I have been calling the “Idealist” vision of Chinese. As key textual witnesses for such a tradition I would cite Herder, Hegel, and Friedrich Schlegel, each of whom assumes a homologous relationship between the forms of Oriental writing, the mentality of Asian peoples, and the broader cultural and historical destinies of each. This logic of homology is most extensively laid out by Hegel, who asserts that the (allegedly) pictographic nature of Chinese (and Egyptian) reflects and reinforces an Oriental inability to move beyond the sensuous particular toward universal ideas and concepts. While the Orient lives under the reign of the Symbol, which is tied to the sensuous and therefore essentially unfree and unhistorical, the alphabetic West employs the Sign, arbitrary and therefore a freer and more spiritual/intellectual medium.17 If the Idealist and Imagist portraits of Chinese writing can be understood as a contrast between the merely sensuous and immediate and the wondrously sensuous and immediate, Claudel’s allegorical reading of ideographs as secretly Christian symbols presents us with a mode of reading that is clearly misleading but that also substantially reframes the status of sensuous immediacy. The sign + is not a picture of ten; it does not say “ten” to the knowing eye of the Poundian poet, but neither does it fail Hegel’s test of arbitrariness. More important for my purposes—and again in contrast to both the Idealist and Imagist portraits—its meaning is shown to be open to change; more specifically, it varies with the cultural and historical per-

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spective of the reader. In opposition to the proposed timeless universality of Imagist Chinese, in Claudel’s play the ideograph signifies differently for Oriental and Occidental, before and after the Word is heard. This allegorical mode of reading also brings out an element common to Idealist condemnation, Imagist praise, and Figuralist appropriation alike, namely—to overstate the matter a bit—the necessity of not knowing Chinese to be able to understand both the meaning of particular signs and the broader cultural and epistemological importance of the ideographic form. This commonality then reflects the fact that these modes of (not) reading Chinese are, for Imagism and Claudel, as for Claudel’s imaginary emperor, responses to a perceived need to redefine the signs of one’s own culture in order to renew it. Praised or blamed, Chinese writing is in all these cases the other of the reader’s own language, and its figurations are therefore symptomatic. As Robert Kern writes of the American tradition: the issue here is not the direct or indirect influence of Chinese on American writing but a romantic or mythologized—and Western—conception of language that is imposed upon Chinese and then appropriated as a model—one that embodies values, authorizes procedures, and represents possibilities seemingly unavailable in Western languages, but one that also suggests ways of manipulating these languages so that they might be restored to some putative original poetic status or capacity.18

While the procedures, possibilities, and poetic capacities of Chinese are substantially different for Claudel than for the poets Kern studies, the structure of appropriated projection remains the same. To anticipate my conclusion a bit, what is at stake is not so much new signs, but new ways of reading the ones one already has—making it new through the mediation of another culture. The diversity of Western modernist inventions of Chinese then indicates less the arbitrariness of divergent fantasies than variations within a consistent tradition of using Chinese to work out tensions inherent in the notion of the natural sign and its implications for cultural vitality. Understood in terms of this broader problematic, Claudel’s perhaps unappealingly Catholic vision of Chinese can also be read as a critique of Imagism’s implicit assertion of the universality of the Image, a universality that rests on a unity of knowledge and sensuous perception more broadly identifiable as the aesthetic. By asserting the discontinuity of knowledge and perception, then, Claudel’s play is deliberately anti-aesthetic and therefore also seems anachronistic, pre-aesthetic, “baroque.”19 While Claudel’s later versions of Oriental writing, with their graphic play, haiku-like evocative-

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ness, and celebration of Asian aesthetics, are considerably more appealing (both ethically and aesthetically), I will argue that they not only repeat the appropriative gestures of Repos, but that this repetition helps make apparent the aesthetic ideology of Imagism. At the same time, I will argue that beyond the specifically Figuralist model of Repos, Claudel’s Chinese belongs to a broader allegorical modernism. To make a case for these claims, I must explicate some of the other ways in which Claudel invents Chinese.

claudel’s religions of the sign Claudel’s brief prose poem “Religion du signe” first appeared in the July 1897 issue of La Revue Blanche before its frequent republication, beginning in 1900, in the numerous editions of what is probably Claudel’s bestknown East Asia–inspired work, the prose poem collection Connaissance de l’Est. Of the sixty-odd texts to appear in this collection, “Religion” has a special status not only because it was one of the first to appear and because Claudel would reproduce the text in its entirety, almost thirty years later, in the published 1925 lecture “The Philosophy of the Book,” but because it represents an early effort to articulate a theme central to his entire work: the ambivalent role of the letter as a vehicle of religious messages. While the title of the prose poem refers to the text’s account of a visit to a Confucian temple, it is also very much the case that Claudel’s own religion is a religion of the sign. But in what sense? And why involve East Asia? The later lecture brings together more explicitly the various factors that feed into Claudel’s peculiar formulation of a modernist Catholic ideography: (1) Claudel’s understanding of Oriental writing; (2) the concerns he inherits from Mallarmé’s late poetics; (3) his own typographic experiments; and (4) his religious ontology. This conjunction will be the subject of much of what follows.20 Claudel’s understanding of Oriental writing was worked out in various texts written over several decades, and, despite systematizing gestures, never assumed a final form. At times he seems to replicate the Idealist condemnation of Chinese as “the conservatory of all the ideas of humanity in its primitive state,” the result of which is that “the Chinese is struck with a certain incapacity, to which his bizarre writing bears witness, to represent ideas to himself other than in a concrete and sensible form.”21 Claudel also, however, provides a more nuanced and complex vision when, for example, he divides Chinese characters into three types: (1) the purely descriptive

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or pictographic; (2) those that represent a fixed movement or gesture; and (3) composite characters based on juxtaposition, which he calls “an interlacing of the logical plane and the representative plane.”22 Despite such heterogeneity both within and among his various portraits, Claudel continues to generalize about Chinese writing as a whole, contrasting the succession, sounds, and sequence of the alphabet with the simultaneity, ideality, and “emanation of relations” of the ideograph.23 The dichotomies proliferate: Chinese is vertical, the alphabet horizontal; Chinese synthetic, the alphabet analytic; Chinese is immobile, Western writing leaves a “persistent wake,” and so on.24 But if the ideograph often seems essentially opposed to Western writing, it is also true that after falling in love with Japanese culture during his 1919–24 ambassadorship Claudel developed at least two ways of bringing out what he considered the ideographic qualities of the alphabet: “Western ideographs” and the fan-poem. The former is a relatively straightforward if outrageous interpretation of the alphabet as mimetic. The word toît (“roof”), for example, is said to represent two supporting outer walls with beams, between which are seen a man (“i”) and a woman (“o”); the circumflex (which is enlarged in the manuscript) covers the structure like a roof.25 Because it speaks to broader issues in Claudel’s poetics and ontology, the fan-poems of Cent phrases pour éventails are of greater importance here. These vaguely haiku-like poems often incorporate Japanese motifs, but also engage in formal experimentation inspired, at least in part, by Mallarmé’s “Un coup de dés.”26 I like this verse ncen I write se h alf ash and half s mok e

L’ comme ce vers encen que j’écris s m



oitié cendre et moitié f umé e27

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To explicate the full stakes of Claudel’s combining the influence of Mallarmé with a formal and thematic Orientalism, I must now turn to Claudel’s ontology and its influence on his vision of the Orient. For Claudel, God is Being, the prime mover, himself unmoved. All of existence is, by contrast, movement generated by mere beings’ difference from, and lack of, Being. Everything that exists, then, has a sens, both a direction and a meaning. The things of this world are both objects set in motion by the unmoving prime mover, and signs that point to the Being they lack. What we might call physics and semiotics are simply two modes of describing the same events: any theory of the sign that does not include the whole of the physical world is as impoverished as a non-Christian physics.28 Not surprisingly, this ontological framework informs Claudel’s contrast of East and West. While in the West, according to Claudel, Christ on the cross raises his eyes to heaven, providing an emblem of humanity, and indeed all that exists, as bound to this world but striving for the next, in the East the Buddha sits passive, negates desire, and “participates in his own immobility.”29 Claudel reproaches him: “you do not hesitate, Buddha, to embrace Nothingness [. . .] And there is the ultimate and satanic mystery, the silence of the creature entrenched in its total refusal, the incestuous quietude of the soul seated on its essential difference.”30 The Buddha is “satanic” because not only does he not strive for the beyond, but his immobility is a mocking imitation of God’s, the temporal imitating the eternal, Nothingness travestying Being. Claudel reports of his experiences reading Indian philosophy as a student: “I too once read Indian poems and Buddhist books. They contain the radical blasphemy that is the love and pursuit of Nothingness. Man differs from God by the degree of being he lacks: the ultimate satanic inversion is to love the absence of all being.”31 (Because it will be important later, I would emphasize that here Nothingness is synonymous with an affirmation of the transitory world of beings.) Such a portrait of the East of course corresponds to an array of Orientalist clichés: the immobile Empire, Oriental nihilism and materialism, a history that lacks meaning and direction and therefore is no history at all, etc. As with Hegel, the Oriental mistake is to confuse means and ends, specifically for Claudel: believing the world to be divine rather than created by and pointing toward the divine. The traditional distinction between a stagnant Orient and a dynamic Occident therefore acquires an ontological and theological meaning, one apparent in the particulars of its cultures. In the East, writes Claudel, “art itself has been devised to oblige the soul not

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to wander towards those cardinal points defended by ineluctable guardians.”32 The Orient is, for Claudel, “a mystical prison” in which “everything is devised to hinder humanity’s moving from where it is.”33 If Oriental materialism and immobility imply, for Idealism and Orientalism, a lack of cultural or historical progress, for Claudel these qualities speak directly of its need for salvation. While Hegel’s ontology and philosophy of history correlate an unhistorical Orient with the sensuous Symbol, and a spiritual West with the freedom of the sign, Claudel more explicitly draws on an older Christian tradition of relating types of signs and modes of reading to states of spiritual progress. In On Christian Doctrine, for example, Augustine asserts that the things of this world are not to be enjoyed for their own sake, but to be used as vehicles of grace. This general tenet has particular implications for the interpretation of texts: Nor can anything more appropriately be called the death of the soul than that condition in which the thing which distinguishes us from the beasts, which is the understanding, is subjected to the flesh in the pursuit of the letter. He who follows the letter takes figurative expressions as though they were literal and does not refer the things signified to anything else [. . .] There is a miserable servitude of the spirit in this habit of taking signs for things, so that one is not able to raise the eye of the mind above things that are corporeal and created to drink in eternal light.34

Claudel’s acceptance of such a paradigm helps explain his seeming complicity with the Hegelian condemnation of the Oriental letter, but it would also seem to leave little room for a Christian ideography. The seemingly confident linguistic and ontological oppositions that permit this complicity would, however, remain in flux throughout Claudel’s career as he faced a problem common to much religious art: if this world is merely a means to an end, a letter pointing to a spirit, what can be done about the fact that art tends to traffic in the sensuous?35 From such a perspective, a properly religious work might be literally unimaginable and yet Claudel not only produced works but, as we have seen, would go so far as to bring out the ideographic qualities of alphabetic writing in the name of his always Christian poetics. Strangely enough, the ideograph and the Orient not only escape censure but help provide solutions to the problem of a Christian art. The East’s taking on such a surprising role in Claudel’s thought became possible through the confluence of three factors: (1) East Asian landscape, painting, and writing facilitat-

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ing Claudel’s imagining a poetics of composition and juxtaposition rather than of representation; (2) his eventual revision of the value of Oriental Nothingness; and (3) his synthesis of these factors into a poetics based not on Aristotelian/Aquinian physics and metaphysics, but on the Mallarméan tropes of the letter, the margin, and the white space of the page. As an exercise in transforming the representation of the visible into something meaningful, Claudel’s efforts to write about Chinese landscape helped pave the way for a valorization of the ideographic. In his Mémoires improvisées, a series of interviews given in 1952, Claudel says of Connaissance de l’Est, written at the same time as Repos: It is not a question of pure and simple description, it is a question of knowledge [connaissance], it is a question of comprehension. When I speak of the pine, when I speak of the banyan, when I speak of Chinese villages, it always begins with a kind of interior definition, bearing consequences, and with the place the object occupies from the point of view of a composition in an ensemble, in a tableau.36

Although he elsewhere complains of the texts being uncomfortably close to the naturalism he detested, this passage suggests the extent to which Claudel sought, with Connaissance de l’Est, to transform description into meaning, to ask the question he says Mallarmé taught him to ask of everything: “What does this mean?”37 One of the ways in which this transformation of landscape was achieved was through the effects of height, which serve to transform the visible world into a “readable,” meaningful tableau. In “Conversations in the Loiret-Cher,” Claudel writes of the experience of looking down from an airplane: “From on high one sees more things simultaneously [. . .] An entire living and readable map rises up around us and is opened page by page [. . .] It is more than a question of a point of view. Everything has taken on a meaning [un sens], a design, a composition.”38 The perspective afforded by height does not merely transform one’s sense of spatial relations but makes one aware that the visible world, even when it seems most immobile, has a sens. Claudel clearly states: “One must walk to learn [apprendre] and soar to understand [comprendre].”39 More specifically, soaring allows for a perception of simultaneity that involves something like the cessation of time. One of the fan-poems reads:

On I have come to high look

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in the less at the sea mountain than the cessation of everything En je suis venu haut   regarder de la moins la mer montagne que la cessation de tout (708) Grasped as juxtaposed elements escaping the flow of worldly time, landscape does not focus us on earthly existence but points beyond it. For the same reason, the seemingly sensuous art of painting becomes important in Claudel’s late thought to the extent that “the goal of painting is not the spectacle of time, it is not a certain moment of duration, it is the gathering as in a bouquet of a certain number of decorative elements, contemplated and drawn for themselves [. . . ] These are figures, characters; treated in themselves by choosing the most significant features, color or design.”40 As his diction makes explicit here, Claudel converts the visible world into a text, images into characters. If for Fenollosa language is essentially image, for Claudel images are, if not linguistic, then characterized by the opacity and need for interpretation usually definitive of the linguistic sign.41 Just as what matters with painting is not what is represented but what is pointed to by juxtaposed elements, so too with the ideograph. “Religion du signe” opens with the statement: “Let others find in the array of Chinese Characters the head of a sheep, or hands, or the leg of a man, a sun rising behind a tree. I pursue in them, for my part, a more tangled net.”42 While Fenollosa’s Chinese characters represent, Claudel’s are what they signify: “The letter, with an imperious downstroke, affirms that the thing is such; the character is entirely the thing it signifies.”43 For Claudel, not only is the ideograph not pictographic, even pictures, including sense perceptions, are not pictures in any conventional sense. Both writers use the ideograph to up the ontological status of writing, but while Fenollosa does so by recovering what he believes to be language’s lost mimetic capabilities, for Claudel writing is valuable only to the extent that it transcends immediacy and mimesis. To put it another way: while for Fenollosa poetic energy travels only certain intra-worldly mimetic channels, for Claudel

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all energy (both poetic and physical) comes from the potential energy of ontological difference.44 Claudel, Fenollosa, and Pound nonetheless share a characteristically modernist desire to overhaul what they consider a stagnant and abstract Western ontologic, specifically to loosen its grip on poetic language.45 At times, Claudel’s language would seem to parallel Fenollosa’s, as when “the Poet” of “The Poet and the Shamisen” complains: “Weary of producing ideas I wanted to produce beings”46 or when Claudel states that the Chinese character is “a schematic being.”47 Such claims would seem to identify Chinese with precisely the worldliness for which Claudel had earlier condemned the Orient, with the poet playing the satanic role of usurper; this is why a precise understanding of Claudel’s ontology is necessary. If the ideograph were to represent a being, as with Fenollosa, it would be engaging in what we might call a kind of secondary mimesis, putting yet another sensuous barrier between the soul and Being. Because the Chinese character is itself a being, however, it implies the lack of Being that characterizes all beings. Understood in this manner, the ideograph does not travesty Being but rather, by achieving the status of a being, points to the divine as does, for Claudel, any other mere being. This point will become clearer in light of the next key element of Claudel’s reevaluation of the Orient and its writing: his recuperation of the Void. While he had previously seen some form of Nothingness as characteristic of all “Oriental” religions and had viewed this Nothingness as essentially nihilistic, in September of 1921 he writes of: “An idea for the first time of a possible accord between the Hindu conception and the Christian truth,”48 the former “not Hinduism in the strict sense of the word, but Indian thought in general,” which, for Claudel, includes Buddhism.49 Claudel specifically considers the possibility that “nothingness for India is not only a negation, it is something positive. Thus scholastic philosophy only allows us to say of God what he is not.”50 Rather than being a satanic denial of Being, then, Oriental Nothingness is a kind of placeholder for the Catholic God. We could hardly ask for a clearer sign of a shifting evaluation of Oriental culture than a direct comparison between the God of Aquinas and Oriental Nothingness! This reevaluation of the Void allows Claudel to conclude that although traditional Japanese culture lacks a positive conception of the Christian God, it can still indicate the power that is the beginning and end of this world; if Japanese art doesn’t know what it is pointing to, it does at least point. In Claudel’s terms, both followers of Asian religions and their West-

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ern interpreters have misunderstood Nothingness as reducing this world to a veil of illusion; it is, rather, as to the knowing Christian, a world of allusion. This world is less a temptation to be avoided than a text to be read; transitory and lacking Being, yes, but not lacking in meaning: “Every thing that is, in all its parts, designates that without which it could not have been. That, indeed, without which nothing could be.”51 According to Claudel, then: while the West figures being as a concrete particular straining toward the universal, the Orient figures the world as floating over the Being it can understand only in the negative form of Nothingness. This understanding is made explicit in “The Poet and the Shamisen,” in which the latter tells the Poet: “Everything is an island in Japan, everything emerges from something.”52 But this “something” is precisely nothing, a sea of white space; “the Poet” explains in “Jules ou l’homme-aux-deux-cravates”: I speak of a poem that would be obtained through a sort of decantation, a draining of the site. Nothing but a little word from time to time such that these islands would no longer be resting on the sea but on a kind of radiant matter and intellectual void. Behold! Things have not changed but through a kind of mysterious operation, without one seeing any of it, the materiality, let us rather say the actuality, has been extracted from beneath them [. . .] Just a moment ago there were villages, rocks, trees, boats—and over there a smoking volcano—nothing has changed and in the place of all that there is no longer anything but words. Everything is now held together only by this secret word, by this elementary communication, everything is suspended in the heart of the spirit. There is no longer weight; there is now between things only this tacit convention, this secret intelligence.53

We have here an explicitly Christological and Orientalist staging of Mallarmé’s description of the syntactic blanks of “Un coup de dés”: “le tout sans nouveauté qu’un espacement de la lecture.”54 Mallarmé’s wording is significant here: it is reading rather than words or letters that are spaced out. The reading that for Mallarmé emphasized the fictive, the power of the spirit, perhaps the power of invention, for Claudel becomes a “mysterious operation” that drains away the actuality of the visible world. As Gadoffre concisely explains: “in the Mallarméan world,” as understood by Claudel, “signs correspond to things only by virtue of the fictions of our mind [esprit], whereas for the poet who moves in a harmonious and created universe, everything becomes an allusion to the reality of Order.”55

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Claudel’s emphasis on reading rather than seeing ideographs therefore implies the whole of his religious worldview. And yet if the essential thing is not signs per se but rather the way in which they are interpreted, we should not lose sight of the linguistic and cultural particulars through which Claudel articulates his ontological claims. In a surprising cultural reversal, he specifies in “The Philosophy of the Book”: “It is not on Western papers that the word, the intelligible majuscule on white space, achieves its full glory, its radiant and stable signification.”56 It is precisely here that the Orient has something salutary to offer: concentration on the letter, once figured as a sinful enjoyment, now becomes an appreciation of the being of the letter. The Oriental letter thus provides a scriptural version of the simultaneity of the tableau or the landscape seen from above. In the preface to Cent phrases pour éventails Claudel writes: “Let us allow each word [. . .] the space—the time—necessary for its full sonority, its full dilation in white space [le blanc].”57 In typographic play, theme, and in the trope of the fan itself, the fan-poem represents an attempt to produce a poetic form that allows for “full dilation.” Despite the particularity of Claudel’s Christian poetics, such a project is in many ways consonant with broader trends in modernist poetics; as Bruns asks: “has it not always been the business of the poet to retard this process by which language effaces itself, that is, to deflect meaning in order to keep language resonating in the foreground?”58 Claudel’s experiments in ideography might therefore be seen as part of a modernist trend toward understanding poetic language not as representational but as having its own being. In The Order of Things, Foucault argues that modern literature can be understood as a kind of counter-discourse to the exclusivity of representation in the classical episteme.59 With Mallarmé no doubt in mind, he goes on to add that this return of the being of language is not simply a return to the pre-classical regime of resemblance because “there is no longer that first, absolutely initial word through which the infinite movement of discourse was founded and limited; henceforth language will grow without a point of departure, without end and without promise.”60 For Claudel, of course, there is both an absolute, initial word, and a promise to be kept; correspondingly, unlike a modernist poetics that strives to produce autotelic works, in Claudel’s universe nothing is autotelic, nothing except “Nothing,” which is, secretly, Being. In other words, Claudel’s modernity involves a return of the being of language, but this being is characterized by an essential lack. The trope Claudel develops most extensively to figure the empty poem is more ex-

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plicitly East Asian (and Mallarméan) than the famous well-wrought urn: the fan. Citing his readings in Taoism, Claudel focuses on the empty space inside the urn, the spaces between the spokes of the wheel, writing already in his 1905 “Exile Verses”: “If you look for what I have made, my hands are empty.”61 The fan presents a model of an art that is empty without being meaningless. Like the soul, the fan points and stirs the air. It folds and unfolds, opens up, and yet reveals no content:62 Fan space itself folding back on itself absorbing this bird immobile with fluttering wing s Éventail c’est l’espace lui-même en se repliant qui absorbe cet oiseau immobile à tire d’aile s (733) The white spaces of the page, the parts of the poem that are not parts of the poem, become essential and are in a sense its final and only meaning. Accordingly, typography and spacing take on not only a poetic but an ontological and theological significance. Bruns’s Blanchot-informed remarks about Mallarmé seem almost better suited to Claudel: “‘all that is physical [in language] plays a premier role: the rhythm, the weight, the mass, the figure, then [in the manner of Mallarmé] the paper on which one writes, the trace of the ink, the book. For when the poet, by building up what Blanchot calls ‘the materiality of language,’ makes us aware of the ‘irreality’ or nothingness of his speech, it is then that he is most creative.”63 Referring to Foucault’s previously mentioned discussion of Mallarmé in The Order of Things, Bruns writes: We are brought, by this allusion to the word silently deposed upon the whiteness of the paper, to the threshold of our next chapter: to Mallarmé, for whom language is similarly a mythic creature, whose mode of existence (or mode of expression—the terms become interchange-

[ 50  ]  christopher bush able) is a kind of magic alphabet.64 Indeed, in the next three chapters our subject will be language as it takes possession of literature, thus to speak nothing but itself, in order to “shine in the brightness of its being.”65

Claudel’s poetics similarly offers “a negative discourse which returns us to a world of existents by abolishing the world of signifieds,” but unlike for Mallarmé, for Claudel this world is merely a way station.66 If, as Bruns writes, “From the structuralist point of view,” which he associates with Mallarmé, “the sign is a negative entity: its being lies in what it is not, that is, in the systematic way in which it signifies its opposition to other words in the language,” this applies to Claudel as well. But Bruns’s next remark that such a sign when “Removed from the system [. . .] ceases to be anything at all”67 would have to be modified slightly; we might say that for Claudel the sign is revealed to have been nothing all along, earthly vanity. Mallarmé famously declared that his work was “created by elimination [. . .] Destruction was my Beatrice”68; in Claudel’s Comedy we mustn’t get too distracted by Beatrice. Blanchot, although very much in a Mallarméan tradition, perhaps comes somewhat closer to Claudel’s vision in La Part du feu: “my language wants to say that this person here, who is here, now, can be detached from himself, abstracted from his existence and from his presence and plunged suddenly into a negation [un néant] of existence and of presence; my language signifies essentially the possibility of this destruction; it is, at every moment, a resolute allusion to such an event.”69 And finally, a pronouncement that seems to come straight from Claudel’s Art poétique: “Language perceives that it owes its meaning, not to what exists, but to its recoil before existence.”70 One final example: The cuckoo localizes the place where we are no t

Le coucou l’endroit

localise

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où nous ne sommes p as (713)

While it may be a bit heavy-handed to read this cuckoo as a sign of the Christian God, nonetheless the song (or silence?) of this most traditional Japanese poetic bird shows how far Claudel goes in interweaving Orientalist and Christian themes. In contrast to the famous Swan [cygne/signe] of Mallarmé’s “Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui,” Claudel’s bird is ecumenical rather than absolute, and reliant on a distinctly ethnographic appeal. In sum, then, the fan-poems are easier to place on a literary-historical map of modernism when that map includes France. Claudel’s unique vision of Chinese can be more readily understood in the context of Mallarmé’s poetics, but ultimately has different ontological—not to mention theological—commitments. And like Fenollosa, Claudel uses his understanding of the alterity of Chinese writing to re-imagine and revive Western ontology, logic, and poetics, revising in his own way the Orientalist themes of spatial simultaneity (Hegel calls China “the Empire of Space”), emptiness, and the materiality of the letter. What of the cultural politics of all this? According to some critics, Claudel, had, by the twenties, overcome his earlier outright hostility to the Orient and his accompanying dynamic/stagnant dualism, converting to a more tempered view of the Orient by seeking “to define its place and function in the history of humanity [. . .] in place of the idea of opposition, Claudel substitutes that of complementarity.”71 While the fan-poems might indeed represent Claudel’s most sympathetic engagement with an Asian culture, they are also at bottom Christian and allegorical; they say or show one thing and mean another (more on this below). But rather than correlating particular signifiers to particular signifieds (as is generally the case with Jesuit figuralism), all point to the same thing: Nothing—or, for the right reader, Being. The fan-poems are, then, essentially a continuation of the allegorical mode of Repos. If Claudel might apply to the Japanese Augustine’s loophole for the ancient Hebrews “he who does not know what a sign means, but does know that it is a sign, is not in servitude,”72 it should quickly be added that Japanese Buddhism does not go far enough for Claudel: it has not understood Catholic truth. As a fellow Catholic writer of the 1890s, J. K. Huysmans, writes: “The Old Testament is a proleptic translation of the events re-

[ 52  ]  christopher bush

counted in the New Testament; the Mosaic religion contains, in allegories, what the Christian religion shows us in reality [. . .] everything comes to the Hebrews as figure.”73 Such an attitude of course hardly originated with Huysmans, but he reminds us that it was alive and well in modern French Catholic literature. Claudel’s view of Japan parallels such a conventional view of Hebrew scripture not only in its allegoresis but in its cultural asymmetry. Moses might be a figure of Jesus, but never the other way around. The terms of figuralism are united not by a synonymy but by a unidirectional teleological narrative. Japan and its culture point to a truth that is universal and eternal for Claudel, but no doubt culturally and historically specific for those who don’t view Buddhism as a form of Christianity manqué. Like Hegel’s Egyptians or Augustine’s Jews, Claudel’s Orientals make no positive contribution to religion. All are peoples of the letter, “saved,” and so condemned, by allegory.74 Accordingly, the late Claudel’s seemingly sympathetic approach to the Orient is not devoid of its own ominous implications. In his “Conversations in the Loir-et-Cher” we are presented with an image of the cross as a symbol of the world uniting into one temple. “East” and “West” are here less important than the universal text that underlies them both: “what will be necessary therefore will be not so much to complete nature, as you were saying, but rather, through an ingenious and patient cleaning or restoration, to recover the primitive text on the fundamental parchment” common to all people.75 While Claudel’s own work is a kind of palimpsest of Christian, Mallarméan, and Orientalist discourses, their peaceful coexistence is always provisional. Even Claudel’s richest palimpsests dream of the white page they once were and will again become. Although I doubt that Claudel would have supported its historical implications, a turn of this parchment trope suggests that his allegorizing sympathy, with its roots in Christian allegorization of Jewish scripture, is at least as ethically problematic as his outright condemnation of the Orient. The metaphor that makes of the earth and its peoples a universal text prompts him to speculate of the potentially confusing palimpsest: “And certainly on the day when the whole earth is organized as a single temple, the first task will be a general cleansing [un nettoyage general].”76 Such diction adds new meaning to Huang’s comment that the significance of Fenollosa’s essay “lies less in the essay’s immediate ideological content than in its mediating, palimpsestical form.”77

reading and difference  [ 53  ]

allegories of modernism In concluding I would like to suggest two ways in which Claudel’s seemingly idiosyncratic allegorical poetics might be related to broader issues in modern poetics, the first broad and more conventional, the second more specific to the Image and calling for a redefinition of its relationship to allegory. Arguably the single most important modern presentation of allegory, Walter Benjamin’s On the Origins of the German Tragic Drama, was written and published between 1924 and 1926, the years of Claudel’s “Occidental Ideographs,” “The Poet and the Shamisen,” “The Philosophy of the Book” and Cent phrases pour éventails. While in part a literary-historical study of the German Mourning Play in its Counter-Reformation context, it is also a polemic for the contemporary relevance of allegory, in part because of the emergence of Expressionist theater. Indeed, one of the most striking features of Claudel’s theater, from Repos to Le Soulier de satin is its evocation of the Baroque, especially the theater of the Spanish Golden Age. I would also add that there are historical and rhetorical connections between European imaginings of Oriental writing and the development of modern (here in the German sense of die Neuzeit, i.e. roughly post-1500) allegory. Following scholarly tradition, Benjamin himself asserts that early modern allegorical reading stems at least in part from European efforts to read Egyptian hieroglyphs (to the extent that “hieroglyph” is sometimes treated as a kind of synonym for emblem),78 and he even makes passing reference to China, where the word-image is “not only a sign of what is to be known but is itself an object worthy of knowledge.”79 More compelling in conjunction with Claudel, however, is Benjamin’s influential reorienting of our understanding of allegory away from medieval and neo-classical confidence in interpretability and toward a post-Reformation vision of the world as fragment and remnant.80 This kind of allegory is characterized less by its richness of meaning, as in the multi-leveled reading associated with Dante, than by a rhetoric of emptying-out that recalls Claudel’s image of Japan: “Allegory empties out. Evil as such, which harbors it as enduring depth, exists only in it, is singularly and only allegory, means something other than what it is. And indeed it means precisely the non-being of that which it represents.”81 The ultimate subject of such an allegory is not Virtue, Vanity, or any other particular concept, but the very contrast between the earthly and transitory (either represented or understood as representation itself) and the eternal and divine: “Transitoriness

[ 54  ]  christopher bush

is in it not so much signified, allegorically presented, than, signifying itself, presented as allegory—as the allegory of the resurrection.”82 Claudel’s allegories are something like allegories of what makes allegory possible and indeed necessary for him, a dramatization of the difference that underlies all differences: that between Being and beings. Benjamin similarly claims that “Allegory has most permanently settled there where transitoriness and eternity most closely confront one another.”83 In the case of Japan, Claudel imagines this confrontation as a relationship between figure and ground, with the worldliness of the Orient providing the former, Christian allegoresis providing the latter. Again, Benjamin’s account of allegory seems to fit Claudel’s vision: “The image is in the context of allegory only a signature, a monogram of the essence, not the essence in its wrapping. Hence the letter [die Schrift] is not in itself servile, does not fall away, upon reading, like dross. It enters into the read as its ‘figure.’”84 At these ontological heights (or depths?) it is easy to lose track of another kind of difference, the one that is the ultimate subject of this essay: cultural difference. The Orient is for Claudel not just different but essentially so, providing “a new method of action” and “a kind of instrument” for thinking and writing about the Difference that mattered most to him. Just as the Emperor of Repos had first to pass through the land of the dead to perceive the significance of his own language, Claudel revises the Western tradition of viewing the ideograph as a dead letter in order to reinvent his own language, redefining nothingness along the way. The figure of the Emperor is therefore a kind of culturally inverted allegory of Claudel’s own Chinese allegoresis, an inversion that allows Claudel’s inability to read Chinese (in any conventional sense) to become a virtue. More than the humorous by-product of Claudel’s contorted synthesis of Catholicism, poetic modernism and chinoiserie, the Emperor enacts the practice by which the “ideograph” is constituted: a Western writer invents an Oriental reader who reads Oriental writing from a perspective that is the projection of the writer himself. If the character of the Emperor discovers the temporality of figuralist history, as a character he nonetheless embodies the same structure of re-appropriated projection found in the alleged immediacy of Imagism, with the Emperor functioning much like the (non-)reader—in all his or her abstract universality—for Fenollosa. Lastly, then, I would like to return to my earlier claim that Claudel’s Chinese represents not simply an additional case of a modern Western sinophilic poetics by suggesting that at both the imagist and allegorical poles of modernist poetics (to paraphrase Bruns), the language of “the im-

reading and difference  [ 55  ]

mobile empire” serves to articulate modernism’s ambivalent relation to its own perceived stagnancy and its consequent desire for cultural and aesthetic regeneration. While Fenollosa’s Chinese is certainly not allegorical in the same sense as the figuralist example from Repos, it does demonstrate a number of the same features as Claudel’s. Just as the allegorical sign is traditionally defined as one that says one thing but means another, Fenollosa explicitly tells us that when translating Chinese into English “one must follow closely what is said, not merely what is abstractly meant.”85 While most discussions of allegory tend to prioritize the meant over the said, I would argue that the fact of this distinction—rather than the emphasis on one element of it—is what is definitive of allegory. There is no reason why, without structural alteration, the said could not be emphasized at the expense of the meant. Such a comparison is, to say the least, broad, but this breadth does, if nothing else, introduce some needed complexity into our understanding of modernist figurations of Chinese, an understanding that should not be based exclusively on the example of Imagism, much less Imagism on its own terms. If describing Fenollosa’s Chinese in terms of allegory seems bizarre it is because the Imagist ideograph embodies in miniature the most ambitious claims of aesthetic ideology: the isomorphism of words, ideas, and cultures, an isomorphism that would reflect an immediacy and universality apparent to the unmediated and universal reader, but these are harder and harder to come by these days. What is so irksome for us about Claudel’s reading is not that it fails to encounter native meanings and therefore imposes an alien, ideological meaning, but that it does so so blatantly, and in the name of an ideology perhaps less palatable to a contemporary Anglo-American critical audience than that of a universally available sensuous immediacy. Recognizing this does not make Claudel’s ideography more honest, but it does help put into perspective a modernist poetics that is still in many ways alive and well today, not just in poetic production but in criticism as well. In more general terms, I would add that arguments for the natural sign always protest too much. If, to take a prominent example from Fenollosa, a Chinese character representing the sun rising behind a tree is indeed immediate, present, and universal, then there is no need for Fenollosa to tell us so; one would just have to look at it to see “East.” And one might ask how, for example, we know that do¯ng 東 does not represent a sun setting behind a tree. Fenollosa’s reading assumes an orientation inherent in the sign itself, and, emblematically, allegorically, a ready ability to distinguish

[ 56  ]  christopher bush

between east and west. It should be less surprising, then, that, like Claudel, Fenollosa valorizes particular cultural positions as those best suited for a true reading of Chinese, and being a native speaker of Chinese is not one of them. Fenollosa is quite explicit about the claim that the Chinese themselves have forgotten how to read, really read, that is to say not read but see, their own writing: “Several centuries ago China lost much of her creative self, and of her insight into the causes of her own life; but her original spirit lives, grows, interprets, transferred to Japan in all its original freshness.”86 If, as Benjamin remarks, “only for the knowing [den Wissenden] can something be allegorically presented,”87 the case of the ideograph reveals the contingency of the ways in which acts of reading constitute knower, known, and the various others in relation to which they are defined. If allegory seems a bit remote from contemporary cross-cultural concerns, I would recall the heated responses (not least of all in East Asian studies) to Fredric Jameson’s notion of Third World literature as “national allegory.”88 Ultimately, the alterity definitive of modernist allegory is located less in the gap between what is said and what is meant than in the gap produced by conflicting readings and readers —and indeed as conflicted readings and readers. The invention of a language antipodal to “ours” must, therefore, entail the invention of readers—which is perhaps why, if modernist “Chinese” is an illusion, it is not altogether an illusion either.

notes 1. See Robert Kern, Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and Eric Hayot, Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). 2. Thomas Stearns Eliot, introduction to Ezra Pound: Selected Poems (London: Farber and Gwyer, 1928), 14. 3. Hayot, 8. 4. In addition to Kern and Hayot, see Ming Xie, Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry (New York: Garland, 1999), Yunte Huang, Transpacific Displacement: Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), and Steve Yao, Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender, Politics, Language (New York: Palgrave, 2002). 5. In addition to the works already cited, see for example Zhang Longxi, The Tao and the Logos (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994) and Mighty Opposites (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998); Lydia Liu’s Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900– 1937 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995) and her edited volume

reading and difference  [ 57  ] Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999); Lionel Jensen’s Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civilization (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997); Rolf Goebel’s Constructing China: Kafka’s Orientalist Discourse (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1997); Rey Chow’s Ethics after Idealism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); and Haun Saussy’s The Problem of Chinese Aesthetic (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993) and Great Walls of Discourse (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). 6. Eliot, 15; my emphasis. 7. See also Steve Yao in this collection. 8. Throughout, the term “Oriental” should be understood as referring to not an actual geographic or cultural region, but to the historical product of Orientalist discourse, in terms of which the invention of Chinese must be situated. My occasional slippage between “Chinese” and “Oriental” will reflect the claims of the writers under discussion. Western imaginings of Egyptian hieroglyphics and Japanese, for example, overlap but are not synonymous with those of Chinese. While the hieroglyph has been an important trope in modernism, I have found that unlike the ideograph it is less frequently correlated with claims about the culture from which it ostensibly originated. For discussions of hieroglyphs in the Western imagination, see Liselotte Dieckmann, Hieroglyphs: The History of a Literary Symbol (St. Louis, Mo.: Washington University Press, 1970), John T. Irwin, American Hieroglyphs (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), and Erik Iversen, The Myth of Egypt and Its Hieroglyphics in European Tradition (Copenhagen: Gec Gad, 1961). 9. The best source on Fenollosa remains Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (San Francisco: City Lights, 1968); see also chapter 3 of Saussy, 2001. For the classic formulations of Imagist poetics, see the preface to Some Imagist Poets (1915) and Pound’s “A Retrospect” (1918), both reprinted in Vassiliki Koloctroni et al., ed., Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). For a reading of the Poundian Image influenced by Blanchot and emphasizing the importance of absence, see Daniel Tiffany, Radio Corpse: Imagism and the Crypaesthetic of Ezra Pound (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995). 10. Gerald Bruns, Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974), 191. For an important discussion of Mallarmé as a poet of absence, see Maurice Blanchot, L’espace littéraire (Gallimard, 1992); for a more general introduction to specific Mallarmé poems, see Robert Greer Cohn, Towards the Poems of Mallarmé (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). While it is accurate to call Claudel “Mallarméan” for poetic reasons as well as because of their personal connections, it will also be important to differentiate them. The limits of the similarities between the two poets will be discussed below. 11. See Charles Mauron, “Mallarmé et le Tao,” in Introduction à la psychoanalyse de

[ 58  ]  christopher bush Mallarmé (Neuchâtel: Baconnière, 1968) and Richard Serrano, “Fans, Silk, and Ptyx: Mallarmé and Classical Chinese Poetry,” Comparative Literature 50, no. 3 (1998): 220–40. 12. This is not to say that Segalen’s politics are not themselves deeply problematic, simply that his theories of exoticism and diversity have proven to be at least in part sympathetic to post-colonial concerns whereas it is difficult to imagine this being the case with Claudel. For an excellent recent discussion of Segalen’s work in relation to post-colonial literature and theory, see Charles Forsdick, Victor Segalen and the Aesthetics of Diversity: Journeys between Cultures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 13. A few examples should suffice to make this point. Ming Xie’s meticulously detailed account of Pound’s access to East Asian material suggests that much of Pound’s “Chinese” aesthetic was in place prior to his “discovery” of the East, and Théophile Gautier’s lapidary poems and the French Parnassian tradition are cited as important precursors. Gautier’s poetics were in turn shaped by, if not Chinese poetry and poetics, then by an imaginary version of them. Similarly, Liu’s and Huang’s studies emphasize the mediating role of Japan in Chinese-Western cultural exchange. Fenollosa’s readings of Chinese poetry, for example, are very much influenced by Japanese scholarship, but this Japanese scholarship was itself already shaped by the importation of French and German aesthetics and philosophies of history (see Stefan Tanaka, Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) and the Michele Marra–edited volumes Modern Japanese Aesthetics: A Reader (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001) and A History of Modern Japanese Aesthetics (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001). Similarly, while Huang traces the implicit linguistic relativism of Imagism back to Boas, it might also be found at least as early as Humboldt, Hegel, or Herder. These examples are in the spirit of the recent works I have been discussing and are intended to build on their conclusions. In some sense the point of such work is to prevent nostalgia for an origin, specifically a pure national or cultural origin. My understanding is that for these critics Gautier and Japan, for example, are not pure sites outside of the hybridities they explore, but simply useful narrative stopping points. My own additions are then not intended to refute their work but rather to supplement the scope of our vision of “East-West” textual travel. 14. For general accounts of Claudel’s relationship to China, see Gilbert Gadoffre, “Claudel et l’univers chinois,” Cahiers Paul Claudel 8 (Gallimard, 1968), and Bernard Hue, Littératures et arts de l’Orient dans l’œuvre de Claudel (Klincksieck, 1978). 15. Victor Segalen, Œuvres complètes (Robert Laffont, 1995), vol. 2, 643. For the text of Repos I have relied primarily on the standard Pléiade edition in Paul Claudel, Théâtre (Gallimard, 1948), vol. 1, but have also referred to the critical editions and commentaries of Jacque Houriez, Le Repos du septième jour de Paul Claudel: Introduction, variantes et notes (Les Belles-Lettres, 1987), and Zoèl Saulnier and

reading and difference  [ 59  ] Eugène Roberto, “Le Repos du septième jour. Sources et orientations,” Cahier canadien Claudel 7 (1973). Except for citations from Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine, all translations are my own. 16. Claudel’s Christological reading of Chinese characters is in part inspired by Jesuit figuralist traditions, themselves a sequel to the foundational Christian gesture of allegorizing Hebrew, Greek, and Roman texts to reveal their Christian truths. On Jesuit figuralism in China, see Paul Rule, “Moses or China?” in Images de la Chine: Le contexte occidental de la sinologie naissante. Variétés sinologiques. Nouvelle série, vol. 78 (1995). 17. On the position of China in Hegel’s philosophy of history, see Saussy (1993) and in this collection. For analyses of Hegel’s semiotics, see Jacques Derrida, Marges de la philosophie (Minuit, 1972), and Paul De Man, “Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics,” in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 18. Kern, 6. 19. For a consideration of Claudel’s work as part of a broader modernist medievalism, see Carole Lambert, The Empty Cross: Medieval Hopes, Modern Futility in the Theater of Maurice Maeterlinck, Paul Claudel, August Strindberg, and Georg Kaiser (New York: Garland, 1990). 20. Gadoffre’s valuable “Les trois sources de l’analogie claudélienne” presents a roughly similar set of factors, but I find it limited in three respects: (1) the term “analogy,” while often appropriate and in part derived from Claudel himself, is too general to specify what Claudel does with Oriental writing; (2) Gadoffre doesn’t account for the inventedness of Claudel’s Chinese, writing, for example, that Claudel’s familiarity with French Jesuit writings “permitted him to recognize in the Chinese a logic different from ours, but equally valid, and tied to their language as ours can be to Western languages,” in French Studies, vol. xiii, no. 2 (April 1959), 142; my emphasis; (3) and, correspondingly, Gadoffre does not take what I would consider a sufficiently critical view of the cultural politics implicit in the poetic issues. 21. Paul Claudel, Œuvres en prose (Gallimard, 1965), 1080–81. 22. Ibid., Supplément aux œuvres complètes (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1990), vol. 1, 189–91. 23. Ibid., 188. 24. Ibid., 186. 25. Ibid., Œuvres en prose, 83–84. For a discussion of the semiotic aspects of this experiment, see Gérard Genette, Mimologiques (Seuil, 1999). For a facsimile of the handwritten manuscript, see Michel Truffet, ed., Edition critique et commentée de Cent phrases pour éventails (Les Belles-lettres, 1985). 26. Although originally published in 1897, Mallarmé’s poem became more widely available after its 1914 republication in the Nouvelle Revue Française. In January of 1913, Claudel, who owned a copy of the poem, had written to André Gide to encourage its publication in that journal; Claudel’s “Notes sur Mallarmé”

[ 60  ]  christopher bush appeared the same year and his other major Mallarmé essay, “La Catastrophe d’Igitur,” appeared in the NRF in 1926, a year after the publication of Igitur (written 1869). “La Philosophie du livre” also dates from 1925. 27. Paul Claudel, Œuvre poétique (Gallimard, 1957), 703. All references to Cent phrases are to this edition, but Truffet’s Edition critique has been an invaluable resource and offers an excellent Introduction. Each poem is accompanied by two calligraphic kanji; the French text itself was originally printed in a facsimile of Claudel’s handwriting, enhancing the potential for “Western ideographs.” 28. The main source for Claudel’s ontology and poetics remains the Art poétique (1907), which collects Connaissance du temps (composed in 1903, published in Fuzhou in 1904), Traité de la connaissance au monde et de soi-même (composed in Fuzhou in 1904, first published as part of the Art poétique), and Développement de l’église (composed in France 1900, first published in Le Mercure de France, 1903). 29. Claudel, Œuvres poétiques, 28. 30. Ibid., 90. 31. Quoted in Hue, 189. 32. Claudel, Œuvres en prose, 786. 33. Ibid., 785. 34. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson Jr. (Upper Saddle, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1958), 84. 35. Lyotard describes the problem in the following terms: “This is the imaginary: to have the front and the back. This is sin and pride: to have the text and the illustration. This hesitation is that of Christianity itself, of the Christianity that occupies the basement of our problematics, for we Westerners: hearing a Word, but a philosophy of creation. The former demands one liberate oneself from the palpable flesh, close one’s eyes, be all ear; according to the latter it is necessary that the resistance of things (which constitutes them in the world), that their mirroring, that the appearance and the depth that permits it, be absolved in some manner, if it is true that they proceed from he who can do anything and who can love everything.” Jean-François Lyotard, Discours figure (Klincksieck, 1978), 10. For a study of Claudel’s vocational conflict, see Richard Berchan, The Inner Stage: An Essay on the Conflict of Vocations in the Early Works of Paul Claudel (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1966). 36. Paul Claudel, Memoires improvisées (Gallimard, 1954), 155. 37. Ibid., Œuvres en prose, 1396. 38. Ibid., 781. 39. Ibid., 782. Malicet writes of Claudel’s mountain walks in China: “Let us specify that the idea of a high-up position, proper to the nature and the art of the Orient, an idea Claudel will develop often subsequently, finds here, it seems, its first expression and unfolding.” Michel Malicet, ed., Le Poète et le shamisen (Les Belles-lettres, 1970), 59. 40. Paul Claudel, Journal intime (Gallimard, 1968), vol. 1, 546; emphasis in original.

reading and difference  [ 61  ] On Sesshu and Wang Wei as sources for Claudel’s understanding of East Asian painting and painting in general, see Hue. 41. For a classic discussion of the ways in which word and image are distinguished as conventional or natural signs, see W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 42. Claudel, Œuvres poétiques, 46. 43. Ibid., 46. It is perhaps unfair to say that Fenollosa’s ideographs represent, in that at least in their syntactic relations they are caused by and reflect psychophysical forces that are anything but arbitrary. Nonetheless, his characters are essentially pictographs, if lively ones. Even to the extent that they are not pictographic, the forces they embody are decidedly this-worldly. Fenollosa’s notion of the idea is broad enough to include the psycho-dynamics of syntax both between words, but also between the elements of a given character. In this sense, his Chinese characters are properly ideographic rather than pictographic, but in many ways the whole point is to conflate image and idea. Claudel’s characters might, by contrast, be called ontographic. 44. The “nothingness” in beings gives them an inner tension and makes words “a sort of spiritual engine” (Claudel, Œuvres en prose, 103): “The color and flavor of words have often been spoken about. But nothing has been said about their tension, the state of tension of the mind that proffers them—of which they are the sign and index [l’indice et l’index]—of their charge. In order to make ourselves aware of it, it suffices to suddenly interrupt a sentence [. . .] from this results a sort of hemorrhaging of the contained meaning” (6). 45. Claudel’s notions of a “second logic” and a “creative syllogism” are important to a fuller consideration of these ambitions; see the Art poétique. 46. Claudel, Œuvres en prose, 860. In this too he learns from Mallarmé: “Verse for Mallarmé was the means par excellence to make reality pass from the domain of the sensible to that of the intelligible [. . .] to imitate the thing in making it” (ibid., 511). 47. Ibid., Œuvres poétiques, 46. 48. Ibid., Journal, 519. 49. Hue, 180. 50. Claudel, Journal, 519. 51. Ibid., Œuvres poétiques, 150. 52. Ibid., Œuvres en prose, 824. 53. Ibid., 852. 54. Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres completes (Gallimard, 1945), 455. 55. Gadoffre, “Trois sources,” 137. 56. Claudel, Œuvres en prose, 72. 57. Ibid., Œuvres poétiques, 693. 58. Bruns, 13. 59. Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses (Gallimard, 1966), 58–59. 60. Ibid., 59.

[ 62  ]  christopher bush 61. Claudel, Œuvres poétiques, 19. Similarly, he describes the bunraku puppeteers as “envelops emptied of themselves [. . .] faceless vestiges,” their spectacle supported by “a kind of center never attained” (Œuvres en prose, 821). Here as elsewhere Claudel’s description of Japanese theater foreshadows Barthes’s passages on the bunraku in L’Empire des signes. 62. One might also imagine the poems as being written on fans rather than being fans themselves, but in the context of Claudel’s poetics these don’t seem mutually exclusive. For more on the fan in relation to French poetry and to Mallarmé in particular, see Serrano. 63. Bruns, 201; citing Blanchot. Brackets in original. 64. Such an equation of expression and existence is tempting to Claudel, who writes, for example, that in his ontology “Everything is movement, or, which comes down to the same thing, everything is expressed by it” (Œuvres poétiques, 153). Such equations tend to be accompanied by hesitation or ambivalence. In one passage in Repos, the Demon, instructing the Emperor about the Supreme Being, states: “He is, and being in him is no different than existence” (Théâtre, 203). This is not good Aquinian ontology, a fact of which Claudel was himself apparently aware, for in the manuscript version of the play he crossed out “existence” and replaced it with “essence” (Saulnier, 64). There are two obvious ways to interpret this hesitation. Either Claudel corrected the le Démon’s pronouncement, putting in the fictional character’s mouth a theological truth with which the author would agree, or, perhaps, Claudel deliberately has him make a mistake, indeed the mistake of the Oriental world, which is to confound worldly existence with true Being. Similarly, while Claudel generally says that Chinese characters are beings, he also writes: “The Chinese character is nothing other than the translation of a being, of an idea [. . .] of an action, let us say an ensemble of these characters, juxtaposed and separated by white space, a sort of flock, no longer of white swans [. . .] but of black wings, establishing points of orientation in the invisible” (Œuvres en prose, 1040; my emphasis). 65. Bruns, 100. 66. Ibid., 206. 67. Ibid., 233–34. 68. Quoted in Bruns, 191–92. 69. Quoted in Bruns, 281, n. 18; my translation. 70. Blanchot, quoted in Bruns, 200. Claudel writes, for example, that the movement that is existence, that generates its sens, is “above all an escape, a recoil, a flight, a distancing imposed by a greater exterior force. It is the effect of an intolerance, the impossibility of remaining in the same place, of being there, of subsisting” (Œuvres poétiques, 137). 71. Hue, 23. 72. Augustine, 87. 73. Quoted in Gadoffre, “Trois sources,” 139. Gadoffre argues that Claudel’s reading of Huysmans was an important factor in the former’s switching from a Thom-

reading and difference  [ 63  ] astic to a Bonaventurian Catholicism. In any event, Claudel was familiar with Huysmans’s work. 74. Despite such humanistic generalizations as “God created all the peoples different not to hate one another but to provide the complement to one another” (Œuvres en prose, 1391), the functions assigned to different peoples are decidedly unequal: “Humanity needs something to assure continuity. That is what Asia is charged with; with its enormous roots it never ceases to be attached to the very origin of the race, raising its eyes toward eternity” (ibid., 786). 75. Claudel, Œuvres en prose, 798. 76. Ibid., 797. In addition to its extension to include “ethnic cleansing,” the word “nettoyage” has as one of its two standard meanings a specifically military sense: “Action de débrasser un lieu d’ennemis. Nettoyage d’une position, d’un village occupé par l’ennemi” (Robert). 77. Huang, 22. 78. “From the allegorical interpretation of Egyptian hieroglyphics [. . .] the literati progressed toward the construction of the new way of writing.” Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, Ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), 345. 79. Ibid., 360. 80. Ibid., 409. 81. Ibid., 406; my emphasis. In the case of Claudel, the non-being of the represented and the Being it signifies are mutually implicated. 82. Ibid., 406. 83. Ibid., 397. 84. Ibid., 388. 85. Fenollosa, 16. 86. Ibid., 6. Original freshness and spirit are of course precisely what are at stake in Fenollosa’s essay. The message of his method of reading Chinese is that our own dead English can be brought back to life through rectified reading and writing practices. It is not the words that are dead, then, but the way they are read, and this is not only something that can change over time (today’s shocking catachresis is tomorrow’s tired cliché), but also something that can be affected and effected by cultural position—hence precisely the regenerative value of the example of Chinese. 87. Benjamin, 403. 88. For a recent reconsideration of the value of “national allegory” for post-colonial theory, see Imre Szeman, “Who’s Afraid of National Allegory? Jameson, Literary Criticism, Globalization,” South Atlantic Quarterly 100, no. 3 (Summer 2001): 803–27.

3 

Impressions de Chine; or, How to Translate from a Nonexistent Original Haun Saussy

If you know—or think you know—the language of the original, reading a translation becomes a double or triple experience: you are always conscious of two texts at once and the difference between them. For historical reasons that the first part of this essay will attempt to lay out, reading translations of Chinese texts in European languages is a particularly charged instance of split consciousness. Some such writings (Victor Segalen’s interlingual Stèles, for example) anticipate this response and construct a muffled eloquence around the expectation that the text read and the text read through that text will never coincide. They can be read, even by monolingual readers (or readers approaching the poems in a third language such as English), as double texts, if only we know where to look for the false bottoms and multiple entendres. The split between versions remains open, and not necessarily as a gap to be filled in one day by a more successful translation but as an object in its own right, the exemplary by-product of translation: a parallax or interlanguage produced by the encounter of two semiotic systems. Segalen’s quasi-translations read like an attempt to capture this new realm of poetic material, this language between the languages. But because these texts involve so many dimensions of translation, each one bristling with unresolved problems, it will be necessary to step back and see them in broader perspective.

[ 64  ]

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the materiality and immateriality of language Every page of Stèles contains both a reproduction and a translation of a piece of Chinese writing (see Figure 3.1). In its apparent even-handed openness, this traditional scholarly genre—the facing-text translation, the diplomatic edition—draws together considerable tensions that it takes the history of histories of writing to unravel. Since the early nineteenth century, it has been habitual to refer to the Chinese writing system as ideographic and alphabetic writing systems as phonetic, the latter relating sign and sound in an almost wholly arbitrary manner, the former associating, in the fashion of a rebus, a concept with a skeletal picture or combination of vestigial pictures. “Arbitrary” is a word with a double valence. When we talk about the arbitrary character of the sign—as students of language have done for centuries, in one way or anfigure 3.1  “Empreinte,” from Victor Segalen, Stèles (Peking, 1914), pages 12–13. Private collection; reproduced with permission.

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other—we are talking about freedom. Although it occurs within nature, human language in all its variety is not a predictable outcome of natural processes (or at least it will take a great deal more arguing to show that the purported universals of human language are universal and do derive from physically specifiable constraints). From the physicists’ side: “The practice and study of semiotics does not appear to have any necessary relation whatsoever to physical laws. . . . It is generally accepted that ‘No natural law restricts the possibility-space of a written (or spoken) text,’ or . . . ‘Semiotic interactions do not take place of physical necessity.’”1 Or as Hegel put it in his step-by-step account of the emergence of spirit: the intelligence that designates [i.e., uses signs] shows a freer arbitrariness and mastery in its use of intuition than that which symbolizes . . . [with the sign] the intelligence . . . now gives of itself a determinate existence to its independent representations, and cancels the immediate and proper content of filled time and space, giving to them another content which will be their meaning and soul.2

This underdetermination of language by natural law explains the close ties between theories of language and theories of subjectivity, between accounts of cultural variability and accounts of humanity as the species that adapts to and refashions nature. The other sense of arbitrariness in language implies a kind of blockage, an artificial regime of signs that have a merely historical, material, effective presence. It is arbitrary, for example—motivated by no extra-linguistic causality—that inanimate nouns always have grammatical gender in many Indo-European languages, and if we were to take this merely positive fact as supplying information about the objects discussed, we would be mythologizing, helpless in the grip of an arbitrary grammatical category. One form of critique of language (whose titular figures would include Hobbes, Max Müller, Nietzsche, Mauthner, Korzybski, Whorf) argues that speech is our tacit mythology, a false Olympus that must be discredited. “Nature it self cannot erre: and as men abound in copiousness of language; so they become more wise, or more mad than ordinary. . . . For words are wise mens counters, they do but reckon by them: but they are the mony of fooles . . .”3 Arbitrariness, then, is a question of “which is to be master,” as Humpty Dumpty put it: a good thing, an indication of freedom when it is mind that disposes sovereignly, through signs, of matter, and a bad thing, an indication of mental darkness, when it is the other way round. And where the representation of language as free play of the intellect

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no longer explains everything, where a certain relation to particular signifiers is the point where speech starts, in poetry, to be brief (using the term somewhat broadly), the obstacle becomes the path and the path the obstacle. Having arrived at this classic antithesis of the philosopher and the poet, it is our job to think of mixed cases and interminglings of argument that will not reduce to the usual alternative.

thick inscription When speaking of China, even Hegel becomes aware of the materiality of language. Signifiers there are not transparent, but thick. That is the trouble with them: it takes effort to inscribe or pronounce them. Merely to learn their shapes and pronunciations requires years of diligent reciting, copying and recopying—so great an effort that, in Hegel’s view, it cripples the mind for higher things. Chinese is an image of what can go wrong with language when it is not adequately released from its debt to materiality. Even the form of their written language is a great obstacle for the development of learning . . . Instead of some 25 [alphabetical] signs, the Chinese must learn many thousands . . . As far as learning itself is concerned, the history of the Chinese encompasses only determinate and isolated facts, entirely deprived of judgment and reasoning . . . As for printing, the Chinese never got beyond carving letters onto wooden tablets and using these to make impressions on paper; movable letters are to them completely unknown.4

The ideogram is a necessary (though historically situated) element in Hegel’s story of the emergence of human freedom and the language proper to it—the language of a “romantic” form of art that is able to present an image and at the same time suggest a content that goes far beyond, is actually incommensurable with, the image presented.5 Hegel’s ideogram is the pitfall on the way to subjective spirit, and the unlucky Chinese are still its captives. (How many proposals for “modernizing” China have begun and continue to begin with alphabetization!) That is to say, Chinese writing and the making of narratives about world history are persistently intertwined. The connection between these two topics is only reinforced by their involvement with a set of major Hegelian arguments—to wit, that freedom originates in the later stages of a world history that goes from east to west, from despotism through democracy

[ 68  ]  haun saussy

and on to law-based monarchy; and that the history of the various forms of art symptomatizes the degree of freedom to which its makers lay claim. So Chinese writing, as a semiological art form, announces a failure specific to despotic regimes: failure to analyze or synthesize the givens of experience, to separate responsibility from accident, to distinguish the individual from the family or the realm, to use intelligence rather than memory (Gedächtnis). An adequate history, one not subject to these failings, can only be written from the perspective of the “movable letter.” We know this story (it is still being told, and by influential persons), but it is harder to counter than one might think: often enough the antidote to Hegel’s account of China in world history amounts to accepting all the charges, but trying to redefine them as virtues. That is, to confirming the idea of poetry as the negative of philosophy. Compare Julia Kristeva on Hegel’s pitfall: In any case, in China the function of naming, the symbolic function, is never isolated as such, it is immanent in writing and takes shape in the rigor of gesture and brushstroke, in the precision of the spaces articulating the strokes, in the concision of the document which does not express, but transfers a speech into a body and into a social, historical, natural space. In other terms, writing restores the “semiotics” of language but at the same time generalizes, and thereby socializes, the individuality of gesture and voice.6

To isolate the semiotic function would be to divorce communication from its material conditions. A written language “immanent” to the movements of brush and ink, on the contrary, enacts meaning as a “transference” from body to body in three-dimensional space. Ernest Fenollosa’s enthusiasm for the graphic character of the Chinese signifier, in his view a cinematic art combining the virtues of poetry and painting, is another example of this kind of answer. For Fenollosa, the beauty of Chinese as a poetic language is not restricted to its signifiers, but is also realized in its (lack of) logical structure. When, through Ezra Pound’s advocacy, Fenollosa’s The Chinese Written Character as a Medium of Poetry became a breviary of Imagist poetics, one form of the aesthetic response to Hegel’s narrative of world history became canonical: the archaic language of China replaying immediate experiences of nature through its vast inventory of quasi-photographic signs, and “resisting the intellect” even more successfully than a modernist poem. Extensions of this model are to be found in other monuments of the East-West encounter.7

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Marcel Granet, in a 1920 article putting forth in sharper terms some of the ideas that would later emerge in his La Pensée chinoise of 1929, describes the prodigiously concrete character of Chinese concepts: almost all the words connote singular ideas, express modalities of being perceived under as particular an aspect as possible. This vocabulary indicates, not the needs of an intellect that classifies, abstracts, and generalizes, which wishes to operate on a clear and distinct subject that has been prepared for logical organization, but quite the contrary: a dominant need for specification, for particularization, for picturesqueness; the impression given is that the Chinese mind moves by essentially synthetic operations, by concrete intuitions and not by analysis; not by classifying, but by describing. . . . Almost all [the words used in the Shi jing 詩經] correspond to a synthetic representation, a complex and particular representation. Some examples follow. To render ideas which in French would require the use of the word “mountain” followed by one or more epithets, the Shi jing employs the following: qi, bald mountain; kang, ridged mountain; qu, mountain whose rocks are covered by sand; hu, mountain covered with vegetation; an, mountain next to a river; qiu, mound; zu, high mountain; cui, high and vast mountain; duo, narrow and long mountain; dian, mountain peak; qiong, hill; fu, foothill; fan, sharply ascending slope; e, hill higher at one end than at the other; ling, mound; liu, raised area; yao, sacred mountain. And for horses, we have: [23 distinct terms for horses of different sizes and coats] . . .8

This drive to specificity, in turn, is explained by a particular origin of language, an origin that conjoins language with extra-linguistic movements. We will surely never know whether gestural language exerted a direct influence on the invention of Chinese characters, but it is beyond doubt that the disposition of gestural language to render concrete impressions with visual figures is at the root of the prodigious development of the Chinese language, achieved, so to speak, wholly by graphic means. . . . In sum, we can say, I believe, that the Chinese vocabulary is basically made up of vocal imitations that were very early connected to a graphic figuration. Through their onomatopoetic character these words were from the origin subject to a kind of phonetic immobility that impeded the creation of grammatical forms and of new derivations. This de-

[ 70  ]  haun saussy velopment became impossible when picturesque monosyllables were associated with immutable ideograms. . . . This primacy of the role of writing in the expression of thought led to a deep separation between spoken and written language. . . . (122–23)

Granet was aware of the controversies, allied with a critique of traditional Chinese values, that had arisen in the spring of 1919 at Peking University around the use of vernacular language in literary writing (the “May Fourth Movement”). His essay is meant as an unsparing critique of both the logographic character system and the semantics of classical Chinese word-classes. It attempts to get to the bottom of what is wrong with both, and to characterize the pressure of history on contemporary Chinese minds as a material weight of outmoded signifiers—the lingering impression of gestures first made when the Lord of Men inhabited a palace of stamped earth and thatch. No movable letters; not only that, but no letters have ever moved in China. The only dynamic available is one of repetition, stock phrases stamping themselves on top of other stock phrases. Unable, in Granet’s view, to forget their past in all its particularity, the Chinese are condemned to copy it over endlessly: The fixation [of invariable vocal images by means of determined graphic images] had the result that in China, the immense descriptive material left behind by the ancestral past did not diminish, but grew, over the course of the centuries. While other languages modified their expressive materials . . . and gradually became instruments of analysis, Chinese, thanks to its characteristic linkage of monosyllables to ideograms, kept intact its power of picturesque expression, sought in fact to enlarge it and did so through the system of literary allusions . . . thus remaining an essentially descriptive language in which thought was encouraged to proceed only by intuitions both concrete and traditional. . . . (127) Whereas our languages transmit to us a whole heritage of thought, but leave us remarkably free to register our own sensations, that of the Chinese imposes on them an immense variety of ready-made images with which they are forced to represent things; far from starting with their personal perceptions, they start from very particular intuitive givens that have been sharply determined by the tradition . . . What sincerity can be found in a way of thinking that finds its principle, not in lived experience, but in tradition? (194–95)

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As Eliot Weinberger has observed, the literary exchanges between China and the West in the twentieth century are based on mutual misrecognition—the Westerners finding in China the formula for their modernism, the Chinese finding in the West the formula for theirs.9 Both modernisms are legible as the trace of a translated original slightly perturbing the syntax of the national tradition. Granet’s point of departure is “Chinese”: he speaks in one voice with many May Fourth modernists and rejects precisely those properties that Pound and Fenollosa found laudable in the Chinese character. Its particularity of vision, the “intuitions both concrete and traditional” it retains, preclude thinking in adequately universalizable logical categories: the language is a material brake on the progress of thought. Just what Fenollosa came to think about European languages: “the tyranny of medieval logic” shielding science from the reality of things. These excerpts (ranging from the 1820s to the 1970s) hardly exhaust the problem, but they demonstrate at least the tenacity with which models of language (as technique, as alibi for consciousness, as metaphor for culture) shape the discussion of history. This relation between language and history, variously developed and interpreted, stands in the background of all translation from and into Chinese over the past two hundred years. When it appears that the most important feature of language is its freedom from outside determination, its immediate relation to meaning and in­tellect, Chinese shows up as a faulty exception. And where the autonomy, the materiality, the “thickness” of language (and of the language we use to talk about language) is at issue, Chinese examples are prooftexts, exemplary symptoms of a relation to material inscription found in all language though denied in many intralinguistic practices, such as philosophy.

words in stone Exemplary materiality: that is what the French writer and archaeologist Victor Segalen sought in his attempts to transcribe the resonances of Chinese historical language. Few readers will have held in their hands a copy of the first or second editions of Segalen’s collection of prose poems Stèles (1912–14), with their deliberately chosen page size (tailored to evoke the Nestorian stele of Xi’an), their careful disposition of Chinese and roman type, their exquisite Korean paper, their Chinese-style thread bindings.10 Most of us will have consulted a low-cost reprint such as the Gallimard/Folio paperback or the

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thin-paper Œuvres complètes volumes from Laffont. The work’s popularity entails an impoverishment of its sensory dimensions for all but a few readers lucky enough to own or have entry to a rare-books collection. But although many dimensions of touch, smell, color, and typography fall out of most readers’ experience, some qualities of textual materiality remain as properties of information, reception, and technical reproducibility. Each page is a “stele” of its own, a visual composition on a plane surface with edges and further outlined with a thin black border. At the top of the page, next to the French title of the poem, are a few Chinese characters with the look of epigraphs or alternate titles: these usually give the generative kernel of the poem in a quotation from Chinese inscriptions, histories, or classical literary works, and are untranslated in Segalen’s original editions (later editions supply approximate glosses in French at the bottom of the page, outside the hairline border). In the transformation of Stèles into a mass-market book, a technological distinction preserves the difference between Chinese and French text, for the French text of any later copy may have been set in various typefaces under differing technical dispensations (metal type, photo offset, digital page design), but the Chinese text will have been reproduced as a picture, that is, as a visual bloc without undergoing analysis and restitution at the hands of a typist or proofer. The technological division of the page between areas of word and “image” (of course, the “image” is merely an uncomprehended foreign writing) corresponds to a division of intellectual labor in the minds of the book’s most likely potential readers. For many, the Chinese characters at the head of each poem are fine-looking decorations and signs of “Chineseness,” to be glanced at rather than read. The monolingual reader’s eye “transcribes” them as mere visual form, just as lithographic or photographic technology reproduces them as a pattern of black and white patches, while the same eye “translates” the alphabetic characters of the remainder of the page into content.11 The part of the poem that remains most unchanged by the successive editions and interpretations that may overlay it is the part that is, for most of Segalen’s audience, unreadable. The Chinese text-block is “material” in the medieval logicians’ sense of the word (“suppositio materialis”), that is, as a quotation taken over without interpretation.12 “Movable type” and immovable image coexist without addressing one another, except in the eyes of a small group of readers able to see their relation. This would be inconsequential, except that the very materiality of this unread—merely looked-at—species of text seems to be the standard to which Segalen’s lyricism aspires. The preface to Stèles describes writing as

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inscription, as object. In the China Segalen knew from his travels in the early years of the twentieth century, steles—upright, inscribed tablets of stone—were familiar monuments, commemorating places and events with appropriately classical language, official signatures, and dynastic dates. The poem collection Stèles is modeled on Chinese anthologies of monumental writing, as its rather conventional Chinese subtitle indicates: Gu jin bei lu 古今碑錄 (Transcriptions of steles, ancient and modern). If movable type is the vehicle of speedy, daily renewed, ephemeral communication, the characters in which steles (or Stèles) ought to be written are, for Segalen, anything but mobile. They aspire to the solidity of natural facts. From the moment of their incrustation in the tablet—which they lace with intelligence—here they are, shedding the forms of human intellect in movement, become the thought of the stone whose grain they adopt. Hence their resistant composition, their density, their internal balance and their angles, properties as necessary to them as are geometrical outlines to a crystal. Hence their challenge to whoever will make them utter what they hold fast. They disdain being read. They desire neither voice nor music. They scorn the mutable tones and the syllables affixed to them from province to province. They do not express; they signify; they are.13

Segalen’s written steles will emerge from an evocation, perhaps an emulation, of these stones. His preface gives him a program: if what he is writing is truly going to be “stele-like,” he will have to refuse precisely those helps to understanding that had enabled Hegel to read, however biliously, the East. The light of day that times world history is not his light. The voice-giving trope of prosopopoeia, always active in phonetic reading, is “disdained” by the “thinking of the stone.” Segalen finds his poetic in the properties of static materiality that had furnished the basis for Hegel’s critique of Chinese letters and civilization. You would have a hard time persuading these steles that there is anything in world history that they will have to measure up to, whether it be a political order, a means of inscription, a way of understanding events—because they are absolute writing (in the sense that music considered apart from a program or a social function is called absolute). Charles Sanders Peirce said of the sign: “It addresses somebody.”14 These marks are just a little too self-absorbed to fit Peirce’s description. One may certainly read them, but not make them speak: reading is an observer’s addition—a perfectly superfluous and negligible one—of muta-

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ble, momentary pronunciation to their stony presence. History is a shadow projected from them, but adheres to them no more than reading does: “the stele of stone . . . still measures a moment; but no longer a moment of the daytime sun projecting its finger of shadow. The light that marks it neither falls from the Cruel Satellite nor turns with its movements.” 15 As if to reverse Hegel’s historical narratives, Segalen defines the absolute writing of the stele through a series of negations: it is not temporal writing, not voiced writing, not information. Receiving light from some other source than the sun and indicating a moment measured otherwise than in days and months, the stele is a kind of absolutization of matter in space (and thus a refusal of the march of topics in Hegel’s Logic and Encyclopedia, where time emerges as a necessary consequence of the finite/ infinite nature of space, and of the History, where the Orient is held back from participation in the major human story by its reductive definition as “empires of space,” “Reiche des Raumes”).16 It is perhaps for this reason that steles can be categorized, as Segalen proposes, by their directionality (each cardinal point corresponding to a thematic “orientation”: rulership facing the South, friendship toward the North, etc.). That this writing can be addressed toward various directions and locations does not compromise its absoluteness. A stele always faces the same direction and readers must turn toward it. And yet Segalen also sets up a class of “Steles of the center,” “Stèles du milieu,” one that breaks with the established pattern, despite the good qualifications of the Center as a traditional member of the five Chinese cardinal directions. The direction he has established for the other steles involves a “facing”: a relation. One might face a center located to the north or west, etc., of oneself, but one cannot face the center as such. To face the center per se would involve an escape from the whole two-dimensional arrangement of directions. Indeed the Chinese part-titles bearing the directional signals say: Nan mian 南面, Bei mian北面, etc., but at the last, merely and absolutely, Zhong中. The steles of the Center then are the most perfect representatives of the writing Segalen seeks to emulate. Of these last steles, Segalen says: “Like inverted paving stones or vaults hewn in the invisible rockface, they offer their signs to the earth that they compress, seal-fashion. These are the decrees of another and singular empire. One endures or rejects them, without useless gloss and commentary—and in any case without ever confronting the veritable text: only the prints taken away from it.” The four geographical directions associated with the other groups of steles share the quality of designating areas of land

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surface: they can all be plotted in two-dimensional space. The center, addressing itself to the regions under the earth, introduces a new dimension, depth. This group of steles would be the steles par excellence, affirming in a new register the refusal to let the light that illuminates the stele be confused with the rays of the sun (the light of history, parading from east to west, and the light of appearances, including visual ones). Indeed, one doesn’t read the steles of the Center themselves; what is carved on them is the negative of the message to be passed on; what one reads is the impression they leave in a more yielding medium. Absolute language, then—a language that does not need readers or hearers, and that does not therefore entail a distinction between its physical and its hermeneutic realizations—occupies the center. (It is both a point of utter stability and a land of the dead.) This center needs to be carefully marked for the reading of Segalen’s steles: it may be that none of his stele-poems are actually written from the linguistic position of the Center, but all depart in variously calculable ways from its perfect and unattainable model. If the Center is the standard of stele-writing, most of the Stèles will show how it is necessary to fall short of it. The first stele of the collection, “Sans marque de règne” (Without reignmark) writes itself against the commemorative inscriptions usually found on stone tablets. Classically, an inscription presents itself as having been issued “in the name of” and “in the time of” some authority, established in date and place like a sealed contract. But the speaker of “Sans marque de règne” describes himself as “Attentive to what has not been spoken; submissive to what has not been promulgated; kneeling towards what has not yet come into being,” a cultivator of potential and forgotten things that occur (if “occur” is the word) outside the roster of dynasties. His negation of particular times, eras, and events redounds to the credit of a project of personal autonomy, to be dated “from that singular era, without date and without end . . . which every man establishes in himself and hails, / In the dawn which sees him become Sage and Regent of the throne of his heart.” “Without signature or date” means “without any particular signature or date,” i.e., “always and everywhere.” The poem’s writing proceeds through enumeration of the externals that it proposes to negate, to their reinscription as metaphorical constituents in an allegorical scenario, the coronation of the self as a consciousness outside of time. Segalen’s writing here is based on a reading: the reading of signs that are rejected as uninteresting (chronicles, names, dates) fashions autonomy by negation of their specificity, historicity, limitedness. Imagined China

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(the interior throne room) is superior to the real one, present though the real one may be as descriptive detail or quoted vestige (“that era . . . which every man establishes”; “the throne of his heart”). The narrator of Segalen’s steles can say, like Jesus before Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world.”17 Translation produces not an equivalent, but a transformed, message.18 To put it as a case in sociolinguistics: Exploiting the unequal situation of translations from Chinese into French, at his time, for his audience, Segalen tests the complicity of the French reading public with a lyric program that declares them the superior understanders, the philosophical internalizers of that all too empirical China. The triumph of the translation would be to become, if there is any sense in saying so, absolute: to show that the original on which it is based has never existed, is not a part of the reality that counts. It appears, then, that Segalen’s practice takes away what his preface had promised. Reading matters: the Chinese graphs that had supposedly “become the thought of the stone whose grain they adopt” are, in the end, objects for a conscious subject. The stele’s message can move from stone to paper to the reader, from history to symbolism, from the spatial China to the mental one, only on condition of being read, and the poem enacts the movement of that reading (the transformation of matter into information). Whatever happened to the stele that simply “is,” that doesn’t care to be read? If the inscribed stone is not concerned about reading, then, symmetrically, this reading discards all empirical stones in its founding of a new interior realm. If anything, “Sans marque de règne” confirms the Hegelian story of the reading of the East as inadequate history by an observer who has benefited from the historical processes, including the formation of independent subjectivity, which can only happen in Hegel’s West. Although, says Hegel, “the outward physical sun rises in the East, and sinks in the West, yet the inner sun of self-consciousness rises here and sends forth a higher brilliance.”19 To generalize: If the plot of a poem (as in “Sans marque de règne”) is the internalization, via metaphor, of a Chinese pretext, then the “translation” tells the story of the emergence of consciousness from materiality (the materiality of the stone, of the letter, of the empirical history so sovereignly rejected, of China in sum). The narrator—who is a reader—performs the translation of the Chinese stone, and the reader, in scanning the narrator’s words, repeats the drama. The other of inscription is consciousness. And consciousness is inscription’s “own other,” its mate.20 A stele-poem is an ironic, self-aware citation of an object without consciousness. It per-

impressions de chine  [ 77  ]

forms an absolutization of its translating work, freeing the product from its source, rendering the source non-existent. “Material writing”—the Chinese writing on the stones—would then be only a stage to the surpassing of materiality. This seems to leave Stèles looking very much like a poetic transformation of the great Hegelian plot, and its preface a mere gesture without consequences. If there is a difference between Hegel’s and Segalen’s Oriental imaginations, it needs to be clarified on the level of process, not of overt statement. To read Stèles rightly we must observe the contrary pull of its component rhetorics, the stony rhetoric of inscription and the ricocheting movement of consciousness. Segalen’s writing emerges from a process of reading, translation, appropriation. A “stele” is a variation on a given theme, most often the fragment of Chinese text given up at the top near the title, but sometimes just a topos (as here: the topos of commemoration that underlies all normal steles). It emerges from that given by saying No to some of its implications, and fashioning a new statement out of this refusal. To mark the difference with Hegelian world history, though, Segalen’s steles are not a chain of developments but a collection of reversals, one major thematic reversal generally providing the basis of a single poem, even if the dimension in which the surpassing occurs is not time (which would result in world history, a sequence of moments each of which negates its predecessor) but meaning (which results in allegory, a complex of incompatible meanings attached to the same terms). In allegory the inadequate vehicle of meaning (for example, the fussy protocol of reign-titles and dynastic authority) is not left behind, but maintained in an ironic relation with a more adequate one (the self crowning itself over itself). Irony takes the place of a horizon of modernity or Absolute Spirit that the mind could cross in order to consecrate a final reading. Without the time factor to push the narrative from A to B, irony is symmetrical and bidirectional: A reflects B and B reflects A. It takes a long-established hierarchy of meanings, such as that in which consciousness outranks externals, to cause the logical movement of a poem, like “Sans marque de règne,” to go in one direction only. If the negations, the takings-of-exception, that generate a Segalen poem often situate matter in the “East” and consciousness in the “West,” an organization that seems to give the victory far too quickly to Hegel, an honest reading must recognize that the directionality of Segalen’s writing process is not always fixed; the situations are not always calculated (as Hegel’s

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situations quite monotonously are) to leave the “Western” consciousness in command. That is, Segalen accommodates an imagined “Eastern” consciousness as the author of certain stele-poems, as when he narrates the Christian nativity story in the language of the Shi jing (reversing thereby an old Jesuit practice of appropriating the Chinese classics), recounts in official Chinese phraseology the Nestorian variant of Christianity with its improbable theology, or carps at the strange beliefs and odors of Central Asian Manichaeans (“Eloge d’une vierge occidentale,” “Religion lumineuse,” “Les gens de Mani”21). All these steles are suitably lodged in the section of “Steles facing the south,” positioned to view the world from an imperial perspective. There is, then, a cultural experiment going on here, where the contrastive or selective reading process adopts the imaginary equipment of China to read the rest of the world, and transmit the conclusions to a Frenchspeaking readership. When this happens, the self-reinforcing plot of lyric reading—the transformation of materiality into consciousness, and of letters into thematic meaning—becomes endangered. A different form of consciousness is necessitated, by chiasmus: the historical consciousness that would take the customs of Europe as the opaque beginning and translate them into civilized usages. World history as known to Hegel and others here flows backwards. It is significant that at these points the French editors supply a commentary that warns the reader of “ironie” (despite the cognate, a tone more akin to sarcasm than to what we know in English as “irony”): if the text reverses the plot of the East’s subjection to the West, the notes must help the reader reverse the reversal by marking it as a trope, and not to be taken too seriously. On the contrary: the irony (in the English sense) requires the reversals to be equally probable whether it is A that supplants B or B that supplants A. Translation gives European readers a glimpse of themselves as others, as objects, as marks to be read.

or, how victor segalen wrote certain of his poems Although the distinction between materiality and ideality—for example, sound and sense—is supposed to be self-evident in a well-regulated semiotic economy like that of ordinary language, experimental writing in the twentieth century has tried repeatedly to abolish it. One of the ways of doing so has been the destruction of content through its transformation into material. For instance, Raymond Roussel, in his artistic confessions,

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Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres (How I wrote certain of my books), tells of beginning a novel by writing the words: les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard (the letters of chalk on the edges of the old billard table). Then writing: les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard (the white man’s dispatches about the hordes of an old bandit).22 None of this preparatory work actually finds a place in Impressions d’Afrique, a narrative that nonetheless connects the two sentences: it tells a story of shipwreck and imprisonment, of resourceful explorers who put on a show to distract their captors, of their eventual rescue and return home. We can, of course, reconstruct an imaginative origin for the novel, envisioning an old man in a billiard parlor who, asked about his travels to far lands, begins by tracing alphabetic characters with a piece of chalk on the green felt borders of the game table. Pointing to one letter after another, he recounts the tale of his dealings with the subordinates of an African warlord, which forms the substance of the novel. But such an imaginative reconstruction is gratuitous or at least secondary. After all, the whole novel emerges from a contingent, material fact about the French language: the difference between voiced and unvoiced forms of a labial consonant (b/p) discriminates between two letters, which distinguish two parallel statements, between which the plot of the novel takes place. Once the reader has discovered the secret of this passably automatic writing process, the assumed hierarchy of linguistic structures in the text is reversed: themes are here created to serve the dictates of phonetic material rather than words serving to articulate themes (Roussel did not necessarily set out to write a story about bandits, but the alternation of billard/pillard obliged him to do so); certain chunks of content in the novel are revealed to be the sequences of material from which other bits of content are extracted; the author is the servant of language and content is a side-effect of form. Material and content are now no longer distinguishable a priori, but intertwined and relative: being “material” is a position, not a quality. Any unit of content may become the material precondition for another unit of content, though it takes an archaeological dig to discover the relation of the two. In this sense, Chinese inscriptions are the generative core of Segalen’s Stèles (so nearly contemporary with Roussel’s Impressions d’Afrique), which is not the same as saying that they are the subject, the meaning, or the source of Stèles. The stone inscriptions can be seen as the pre-texts or inputs of an automatic writing that outputs effects of subjectivity in a calculable way. Taken in themselves, content; taken in relation to the new thematic complexes Segalen will generate out of them in French, mate-

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rial; they found an unheralded avant-garde. Roussel’s Impressions d’Afrique brought the idea of fiction to a kind of perfection: its “Africa” arises from pure language, not memory or imagination, and delivers “impressions” that are as much typographical (black marks pressed on white paper) as perceptual. What about Segalen’s “China”? How do the referential and the self-generating aspects of his poetic combine? Are Segalen’s Stèles translations? (To what degree, in what ways, with what reservations?) French-speaking readers have been content for an astonishingly long time to let the question abide, as if the originals had never existed, since no edition since the author’s death in 1919 has been prepared with more than a second-hand acquaintance with Chinese. A thoroughly annotated edition will show Segalen embroidering on Chinese precedents and allusions in almost every line of the poems, not just in their titles and pretexts. The rewriting happens in a Chinese mode—the citation/recitation of precedents, as if the vast intertextual stuff of Chinese literary writing were part of the linguistic subconscious of every French reader. Indeed, the method of reuse and citation adopted by Segalen is precisely the materiality that caused Granet to despair of Chinese intellectuals ever reaching modern consciousness in their own language. Within that rewriting, translation occurs multiply: interlinguistic translation (where the ordinary understanding of a Chinese text is represented in French), tropological translation (where, for example, a new sense is mapped onto a traditional topos), translation between (and ironizing among) points of view (for example, the historical metanarratives that seek to overcome one another, and Segalen’s play with them). It is after the many determinations—thematic, rhetorical, historical, allusive, exegetical, and so on—that affect the transformation of an original into its translated avatar have been accounted for that we can begin to read a stele.

potlatch The title of the collection—Stèles, standing stones, inscribed tablets—warns us that architecture is always looming in the background: temples, courts, gateways. And so it is. Segalen reads many of his steles as abbreviated architecture, walls without roofs, stones without surrounds. Hegel, touring Egypt in his imagination, made architecture the prime example of a “symbolic” art, the art of matter trying to build a house for an alien spirit to inhabit. And so its character as monument and ruin was indispensable to its

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meaning (the monument endures, bearing witness; the ruin announces the death of what it signified).23 Segalen’s narrator evokes the pride of the “barbares” (Greeks and Romans, surely, but also Persians, Egyptians, Franks, Goths, and so on) who “build in stone in order to build for eternity.” “They boast that their cement hardens with the passing suns; moons perish in rubbing smooth their stones; there are no joints in the duration they claim for themselves, these ignorant barbarians!”24 The Chinese observer sees this architectural zeal as a mere “méprise,” misconception. “Changelessness does not live in your walls, but in yourselves, you slow men, continual men.” So: build not for eternity, but for time, build in the anticipation that your work will be destroyed and have to be renewed by a generation yet to come—a generation whose coming is at least certain. Set foundations on the sand. Wet your clay copiously. Erect wooden frames for the sacrifice; soon enough the sand will give, the clay will swell, the double roof will pock the ground with its scales: The whole offering has been accepted!25

So much for the warning not to build one’s house on the sand, but on the rock: Segalen has here, just as with his Chinese pre-texts, a particular phrase and context in mind.26 A building should be seen, argues the poem, not as a permanent shelter, but as a sacrificial victim delivered up to time, which is never satisfied. “No revolt: let us honor the ages in their successive collapses and time in its voracity.”27 Time here reappears amid the mirrorplay of ironies. But this is not the progressive time of linear development or the timelessness of self-preservation; rather it is decay, entropy, informational noise, becoming-other. If an inscription is meant to endure and remain legible forever, the message of this stele cancels out its own generic function as inscription. A more anti-architectural poem could hardly be devised. This thematic potlatch forswears the very idea of a linguistic (or other) monumentum aere perennius. A similar destruction of wealth, a kindred betrayal of the traditional interests of poetry, occurs in the short poem “Nom caché” (Hidden name), which takes its ethnographic point of departure from the practice of avoiding words and names as a means of showing respect (諱名). With an obvious echo of the beginning of the Daode jing, Segalen informs us that whatever we read on a slab of stone is not the “true name”: “The true Name is not the name gilded on porticoes, renowned in chronicle; nor that which

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the commoners gnaw in disappointment.”28 The true name is hidden—in this case (Segalen is thinking of a particular stone in Beijing, the only dynastic inscription in the pre-1911 capital to bear the city’s official name) under a watercourse, and visible only in times of drought. Indeed the true name is (because it is special, sacred, set apart) not to be pronounced, ideally not even to be known. “But let the hard waters break up,” says Segalen, “may life overflow its banks, let us have the devastating torrent instead of Knowledge!”29 Knowledge would void the unspoken word of its power, make it no longer the “true name” but an ordinary vulgar designation. So knowledge has to be warded off. The poem leads to the praise of the avoidance of perception, reading, knowledge—even the avoidance of praise. Is this a clever turn (trope) turned against the value of understanding? Has Segalen finally rejoined that “refusal to be read” that he programmatically ascribed to the stones? What is not to be written is also, in a certain sense, inscribed everywhere, since the awareness that it may not be written has to preside over everything that is written. Just as information scientists have defined the blanks in and around relevant data as “exformation,” the correlate of “information,” so we might have to call the taboo word, when it occurs on a stone, an “exscription.” As Segalen says of the mysterious “steles of the center,” we don’t read them, we take away negative impressions of them (“les empreintes qu’on [leur] dérobe”). Every permitted inscription is, in some sense, a negative of the forbidden inscription. As the last poem of the collection, “Nom caché” looks back on all the inscriptions and redefines their content as non-naming and “exscription,” the proper noun that people avoid uttering as the price of their belonging to the legitimate speech community. And, of course, Segalen does not utter it either. Nonutterance is the destination of these counter-lyrical lyrics. The whole of Stèles can therefore be read as exhibiting a double plot of negation and materiality: thematic and athematic responses to a lyric tradition that would have the poet be a namer and caller into presence. Through both these plot strands, the collection of poems unceasingly recites and works over the Chinese pre-texts it pretends to translate. Pretends to translate, because the whole collection makes visible the ways in which translation is inescapably a new production rather than a reproduction, a deformation (in the mathematical sense) of a given original. If the lesson is familiar, the ways in which it is carried out are not. Segalen’s experiment with translation reaches in several directions that should be integrated into the ordinary description of cultural contact. For reading between civilizations occurs in just this way, on multiple planes of

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form and content, intersecting via misprision, antipathy, and rivalry, in any case never adding up to recognition, equivalency, reduplication, or what some would term “intercultural understanding.” Decades before the philosophical ladders of deconstruction were laid against that particular wall, Segalen is led through his program of unfaithful translations to explore the athematic or asemantic dimensions of writing and to confront the ways in which poetic writing is “Chinese” (in the senses memorably elaborated by Hegel, Granet, and many another critic) rather than “movable.” Like Raymond Roussel or Georges Perec, Segalen releases language from service to meaning through procedures of constraint. Such a language would resist “reading” even by those of us who think we know how to read Chinese.

notes 1. Howard H. Pattee, “The Physics of Symbols: Bridging the Epistemic Cut,” Biosystems 60 (2001): 12. The internal citations refer to J. Hoffmeyer and C. Emmeche, “Code Duality and the Semiotics of Nature,” in On Semiotic Modeling, ed. M. Anderson and F. Merrell (Berlin: Mouton/de Gruyter, 1991), 117–66; and K. Kull, “On Semiosis, Umwelt, and Semiosphere,” Semiotica 120 (1998): 299–310. 2. G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, par. 458 Zusatz, in Werke (20 vols., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), 10:270. Translations are mine unless otherwise specified. 3. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929), 29. “Mythology . . . is in truth a disease of language.” Max Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language (New York: Scribners, 1884), 1:21; “I fear we shall never be rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Götzendämmerung, in Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studien­ausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (13 vols., Munich: DTV/de Gruyter, 1988), 6:78. For similar aims see also Fritz Mauthner, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (3 vols., Leipzig: Meiner, 1923); Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1956); and Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (Lancaster, Penn.: The International Non-Aristotelian Library, 1933). 4. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, in Werke, 12:169–72. Hegel’s comments on non-alphabetic writing meet with a detailed reading in Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967) and Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972). 5. On the history of the concept “ideogram,” see Saussy, Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001), 35–90. On Hegel’s romanticism, see Stephen Bungay,

[ 84  ]  haun saussy Beauty and Truth: A Study of Hegel’s Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 6. Julia Kristeva, “Remarques sur le ‘Mode de production asiatique,’ ” in La Traversée des signes, ed. Kristeva (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 37–38. 7. Roland Barthes, L’Empire des signes (Geneva: Skira, 1970); Kristeva, Des Chinoises (Paris: des femmes, 1974), 60–62. On the currents of ideas from which these imaginings of Asia take their bearings, see Saussy, Great Walls, 146–82. 8. Marcel Granet, “Quelques particularités de la langue et de la pensée chinoises,” Revue philosophique 89–90 (1920): 98–128, 161–95; here, 104–5. 9. Eliot Weinberger, in Weinberger et al., “Panel on Translation. Acts of Change: The Work and Act of Translation,” Mantis 2 (2002): 85–103, here 102. On language reform and translation in twentieth-century China, see especially Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995). 10. For the first thorough study of Stèles in all its physical particularity, see Timothy Billings, “Illustrating China” (PhD dissertation, Cornell University, 1997). 11. John von Neumann hypothesized, before the discovery of DNA, that in order to reproduce itself a cell had to contain some instructions to be executed in context (“translation”) and some information to be blindly copied (“transcription”): von Neumann, The Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, ed. Arthur W. Burks (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966), 289–90. A more easily understood discussion is in Pattee, “The Physics of Symbols.” 12. An example: “Dog is a noun.” For this usage, see William of Shyreswood, Introductiones in Logicam, as cited by William Kneale and Martha Kneale, The Development of Logic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 253–54. 13. Victor Segalen, Stèles, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Henry Bouiller (2 vols., Paris: Laffont, 1995), 2:37. Compare Roger Caillois, L’Ecriture des pierres (Geneva: Skira, 1970). 14. Cited in Claude Lévi-Strauss, La Pensée sauvage (Paris: Plon, 1962), 30. 15. Stèles, 37. 16. Hegel, Philosophie der Geschichte, in Werke, 12:136. 17. John 18:36. For the parallel between Christian interpretations of Jewish texts and Western interpretations of Chinese texts, see Zhang Longxi, Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1998), 84–116. 18. For the exemplary case of this pattern, see Oscar Wilde’s remarks on the nonexistence of Japan in The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 315. 19. Hegel, Philosophie der Geschichte, in Werke, 12:134. 20. Compare Paul de Man’s discussion of Victor Hugo’s “Ecrit sur une vitre flamande”: “Hypogram and Inscription,” The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 27–53. 21. Stèles, 46, 47, 50.

impressions de chine  [ 85  ] 22. Raymond Roussel, Impressions d’Afrique (1910; Paris: Pauvert, 1963); Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres (1933; Paris: Pauvert, 1965), 4–6. I thank Inez Hedges for introducing me, many years ago, to Roussel’s writings. 23. I paraphrase Walter Benjamin’s observations on allegory as ruin in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1985), 166, 178. Hegel has his Benjaminian moments. 24. Segalen, “Dix mille années,” Stèles, 52. 25. Ibid. 26. Matthew 7:24–27. 27. Ibid. 28. Segalen, “Nom caché,” Stèles, 124. 29. Ibid.

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Early-Modern Cultural Production

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4 

Untranslation Theory: The Nestorian Stele and the Jesuit Illustration of China Timothy Billings

a cornerstone of sinography Once upon a time in a land far from Rome (Xi’an, 1625), Chinese workers were digging a trench to lay the foundation for a wall when their tools clunked against a slab of black granite about nine feet high and weighing about two tons, whose one-thousand-year-old inscription told an amazing story about all-but-forgotten Christian missionaries in China that would launch more than three hundred years of almost obsessive translation, interpretation, invective, and even some scholarship among (mostly Christian) sinologists, sinophiles, and sinophobes the world over. What made that discovery so astonishing is that ever since Matteo Ricci’s arrival decades earlier, the Jesuits had been resolutely seeking some evidence of lost Christians in China, inspired largely by legends that St. Thomas the Apostle had evangelized there, and by the many sightings of Nestorian Christians reported by Marco Polo; yet all that they had been able to uncover were little more than rumors. Then, as if in response to their prayers, a perfectly preserved Tang Dynasty monument rose from the ground, engraved with an ornamented cross and describing the earliest Christian missionaries in China in beautiful Chinese rendered in exquisite calligraphy. The Jesuits hailed it as a providential sign in favor of their mission in the East and immediately set about translating it to spread the news. Others, thinking it too good to be true, hooted it as so much Jesuitical salami.1 [ 89  ]

[ 90  ]  timothy billings

Now commonly known as the Nestorian stele (or “tablet” or “monument”), this famous stone is properly called by the nine large characters at the top, which are set in a typical crown of entwined dragons: 大秦景 教流行中國碑, or “Stele on the Introduction of the Luminous Religion of Daqin into China.” Daqin refers vaguely to the eastern Roman Empire; and “Luminous Religion” refers to Christianity as propagated by the Nestorians, who split from the orthodox church in the fifth century over a doctrinal matter and who distinguished themselves for spreading Christianity throughout Asia. Although the Nestorian stele is as well known to educated Chinese as the Rosetta stone, a brief summary may be helpful. The inscription consists of about thirty columns of about sixty characters each, which sinologists traditionally divide into three sections: a doxology, a history, and a eulogy. The short doxology (roughly 300 characters) includes a brief genesis, the fall from paradise, the birth and assumption of Christ, and a few points of contemporary doctrine and worship. The history (roughly 1,000 characters) recounts the arrival of Christian missionaries in China in 635 led by a priest called Aluoben 阿羅本 and describes their favorable reception by various emperors, beginning most notably with the famously tolerant, early Tang emperor Tai Zong 太 宗 (627–649 ce), who issued an imperial decree in 638 (quoted on the monument) granting permission for Christians to establish churches and to preach in China. At the end of the history, in what should perhaps be considered a separate section, there appears a secular eulogy (about 200 characters) giving extensive praise for the charitable deeds of a contemporary high-ranking official called Yisi 伊斯, a foreigner originally from the Magadha capital of Rajagriha in India whose extraordinary accomplishments, virtue, and generosity to the Church prove him to be a man (in the words of the inscription) more excellent than any found among the pure and self-denying Buddhists. The final hymn or eulogy (roughly 300 characters), written in formal verse, briefly recapitulates the preceding text with two sets of verses devoted to praising each of the following: the creation, the incarnation, the spread of the gospel in China, and then each of the five Tang emperors previously named. The stele also bears a short inscription of about a dozen lines in Syriac (a branch of Aramaic still used at that time by the Nestorians as a clerical language) and the names of about seventy people associated with the churches in China ranking from bishop to deacon in both Chinese and Syriac.2 In the years since its discovery, generations of scholars have squabbled over its once-supposed inauthenticity and quibbled over its precise interpretation, making it one of the most re-translated of all Chinese texts. The

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aim of this essay, however, is not to offer yet another study of the stele, but rather to articulate a mode of translation through a sinographic critique of its first bilingual “critical edition”—the first such edition of any Chinese text, in fact, to be published in Europe for European readers. That text was conceived by the famous polyhistor of the Jesuit Society, Athanasius Kircher, for his monumental Latin work China Illustrated by Monuments both Sacred and Profane, as well as by Various Spectacles of Nature and Art, and by Descriptions of Other Memorable Things (1667), otherwise known as China Illustrata.3 Aside from its obvious charm, I stress the full title of Kircher’s China Illustrata in order to suggest that it thematizes how unabashedly it is first and foremost by means of this Christian-Chinese monument (“both sacred and profane”) that “China” is “illustrated.” In fact, the discussion of the monument comprises the first twenty percent of the book, and is (as Kircher explicitly states in his Preface to the Reader) his very reason for undertaking the project. In this sense, this spectacle-filled compendium of Jesuit writings on all sorts of memorable things is chiefly a project of self-illustration—the great saga of carrying the gospel into Asia and its most recent Jesuit heroes—as represented by the sacred and profane monument that the Jesuits were in a unique position to interpret as the putative masters of an unparalleled combination of linguistic, cultural, and doctrinal understanding. Even the emblematic frontispiece of the book displays this rhetoric of self-promotion in its Hall of Fame genealogy of the China mission: (clockwise from the top) St. Ignatius Loyola, St. Francis Xavier, Matteo Ricci, and Adam Schall von Bell surround a map of China (supported by an angel) which is labeled with the hotspots of Jesuit activity—most notably the site of the providentially discovered stele itself (“Siganfu”). The result is thus an emblem, not of an illustrated China, but rather of Jesuits illustrating themselves illustrating China (Figure 4.1). What was at stake for the Jesuits in editing, translating, and interpreting the text of the monument with absolute sinological credibility was nothing less than defending the authority of the Roman Catholic Church and the legitimacy of the Jesuit missions at home and abroad. The stele was valuable to the Jesuits on two fronts. As tangible evidence of the antiquity of Christianity (not least for its impressive chronicle of gospel-friendly Tang emperors), the monument was the ideal prop for converting the people of China who would generally be less likely to revere a teaching that could be considered a novelty. In Europe, if properly explicated, the stele could be appropriated as a providential sign in a counter-reformation polemic in the

figure 4.1  Frontispiece to Athanasius Kircher, China Illustrata (Amsterdam, 1667). Matteo Ricci is misidentified in this copy as “Kircherus.” Collection of the author.

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face of increasingly controversial and even endangered missions in both India and China during the seventeenth century. (As hardly needs to be said, the monument did not belong to the Jesuits any more than it is about them.) By associating the monument simultaneously with the Society of Jesus and with the church of St. Thomas the Apostle in India, the Jesuits could suggest that the situation overseas was not quite as dire as it seemed since the discovery of the stone itself augured eventual success. All of this assumes, of course, that the monument in question is a Catholic monument and not, say, a Nestorian monument, the stone legacy of that heretical fifth-century schism whose missionaries were so active in Asia. Kircher’s edition “translates” the stele, I shall argue, into a Jesuit monument avant la charactère by “untranslating” everything that does not conform to the Jesuit identity that is positively projected onto it. In short, I would describe Kircher’s sinographic project here as the attempted reconstitution of a whole Self from an Other’s Other. By “untranslation” I mean something like both an “undoing” and an “un-cola”—a representation that radically transforms a text into another a priori discourse that simultaneously masks and justifies that transformation in terms of the authority of the discourse over the particulars of the text (but not the play of différance). An untranslation attempts to reconstruct a phantasmatic originary text along tendentious discursive lines like an overdetermined form of those lost Greek classics or Sanskrit sutras that are speculatively reconstructed by linguists from their only extant versions in Arabic and Chinese. An untranslation, for better or for worse, is predicated on the non-originary status of every ostensibly original text by treating it as a translation of something else, which the logocentric untranslation presumes to know better than the text itself. Far from asserting the impossibility or inevitable inadequacy of translation, therefore, the theory and practice of untranslation necessitates translation by assuming that, in some sense, it has already been done and must be undone. At the risk of putting it too reductively, an untranslation renders what a text ought to say rather than what it actually says, and yet also makes no such distinction. Whereas it is usually assumed that something will always be lost in translation, the aim of untranslation is to recover what is lost in the original. Untranslation is thus a mode of translation that encompasses many kinds of translingual moves from willful misreading to the honest mistakes of broad epistemological aporias and may include nonlinguistic forms of representation. Untranslation differs from the very similar notion of dynamic equivalence theory (which might be described as reproducing the essential

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effect of a text rather than what it actually or literally says in an attempt to create a significative functional equivalence of meaning) insofar as untranslation usually maintains the pretense of rendering the particulars of the text. In this admittedly playful conceptualization, to say that a text is “untranslatable” would not be to say that it cannot be translated, but rather that it is profoundly capable only of being untranslated. What makes the so-called Nestorian stele the ideal case study for this particular problematic of sinographic translation—or untranslation—is that it is obviously already an intercultural text, already, in some sense, an “originary translation.” This quality is undoubtedly what appealed to Victor Segalen when he first conceived of the project for Stèles as a series of imaginary translinguistic, transcultural monuments all modeled on the proportions of the Nestorian stele.4 Indeed, what is most fascinating about the so-called Nestorian stele itself is that it is, strictly speaking, not a Nestorian stele at all, but rather a Daoist-Confucian-Buddhist-Nestorian stele whose hybridity resists the sort of appropriative reading that the Jesuits brought to it. The inscription is composed in the pianti 駢體 or “paired style,” a series of allusive parallel couplets of varying lengths whose ideal was to create an artful and authoritative pastiche of allusions to classical texts. The style enjoyed great popularity during the Tang Dynasty, especially in the composition of Buddhist texts that cited Confucian classics for authority and often drew on Daoist texts for crucial mystical terms. To a reader attentive to such intertextuality, the Daoist and Buddhist diction of the inscription is particularly striking. Moreover, the inscription is apparently modeled on that of a famous Buddhist temple stele of the late fifth century that was much admired for its literary style and widely circulated in the sixth-century Wenxuan 文選 (Literature Anthology).5 The author of the Nestorian stele, who is called Jingjing 景淨 or “Adam” in the Syriac, is identified as a seng 僧 or “priest” (originally a Buddhist term) and was surely at least a Christian; but he also seems to have been something of a freelancer since he has been identified as the collaborator with another scholar on the translation of at least one, and perhaps several, Buddhist sutras.6 In short, the inscription left by this Adam 景淨 is a densely polysemous, synthetic composition that resists literal translation. The very impossibility of rendering the culturally specific connotations of that text in a language that has separate lines of relation to those intersecting discourses reminds us that “equivalences” must always be either thickly layered or sought in radically relative terms lest we fall into the pre-Saussurean fallacy of absolute referentiality. When, for ex-

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ample, “Christ” is “translated” on the monument as a sort of Tang Dynasty bodhisattva and is then re-translated into another Christian discourse in, say, neo-Latin or Victorian English, he cannot “faithfully” re-emerge there simply as “Christ” except by a tendentious rendering, by an untranslation. Of course, the temptation to do so, from a devotional or doctrinal standpoint, would be very great—as it certainly was for the Jesuits—since one may appeal “faithfully” to the ultimate transcendental signified, quite literally in this case the divine Logos itself. The imperative of translatability is manifested in untranslation. It is in all these senses that the inscription on the so-called Nestorian stele is a radically “untranslatable” text. For the rest of this essay I will articulate a few of the ways in which Kircher’s edition continually effects such an untranslation, from a broad consideration of the critical apparatus and its graphic rhetoric to a few close readings of the Latin text, with particular emphasis on the treatment of the imperial rescript quoted in the inscription. First, I argue that the elaborate critical apparatus is a conflation of representational discourses conceived to guarantee the accuracy of the translation of this sacred-andprofane monument, after which I demonstrate how it works rather better for untranslation in the sensitive matter of biblical cosmogony. Then I ­examine the rescript to show how the Jesuits have interpolated themselves into the emperor’s interpellation. Finally, I look briefly at one of the trickier graphic arguments of the edition before touching on the famous controversy over whether the heretical tenet of the Nestorians is represented on the monument. With these few examples, I thus hope to situate the Nestorian stele as one of the foundation stones of what Haun Saussy has shrewdly called the “Great Walls of Discourse”: the inevitable mediation of discourses affecting all “East/West” cultural encounters, whose forces move backwards and forwards like transference and counter-transference in the scene of analysis, creating objects of understanding on both sides as imaginary as the “long wall” of China—which is, in fact, many walls built of many stones by many people in many places over the centuries with many gaps along its sprawling form.7

transparency and the sinographic “tableau” What makes the presentation of the Nestorian monument in China Illus­ trata unique is its four-fold critical apparatus of reproducing, analyzing, and explicating the inscription, which consists of a representation of the original text and three “interpretations,” as follows:

[ 96  ]  timothy billings A. a transcription of the Chinese text, by “Mattheus,” a Chinese convert: a large, foldout engraving of the inscription showing a grid of numbered characters arranged in numbered columns, which presents an image of the tablet (Figure 4.2); B. a pronunciation table, by Michel Boym, Kircher’s chief informant on the inscription: a table of romanized spellings for the Chinese arranged in columns and numbered according to the grid; C. a verbatim translation, also by Boym: an awkward, word-for-word rendering of the Chinese with numbers from the grid placed directly over each corresponding Latin word; D. a paraphrase, by Kircher (from an earlier Italian translation) first printed alone in his Prodromus Coptus of 1636: a readable idiomatic Latin version with occasional glosses on the text.

As if describing one of the marvelous polygraphic language machines in his Polygraphia Nova et Universalis (1663), Kircher boasts that his ingenious device of tables allows any “Lector curiosus” to cross-reference any particular Chinese character in (A) the transcription grid with (B) its pronunciation, (C) its literal meaning, and (D) its contextual sense in the idiomatic “paraphrase.” Any reader of Chinese, however, who actually tries to use Kircher’s apparatus for close reading soon discovers that it is a frustrating tangle of errors and inefficiency, even though it creates the general impression of great transparency and utility to the most discriminating of “curious readers” among those who do not read Chinese. To my mind, the true genius of Kircher’s critical apparatus is that it so persuasively fused two of the most compelling contemporary modes of textual representation—the interlinear verbatim translation and the tableau or “table/picture” of knowledge—in order to take full advantage of the gridlike appearance of the Chinese text on the monument, in addition to two sinographic curiosities that the Jesuits had to their credit: the tonally marked romanization of Chinese first developed in the 1590s by Lazzaro Cattaneo and Diego Pantoja, and the coordinated numbering system more recently invented by Boym himself as a novelty for the bilingual commendatory verses that preface Kircher’s Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652). In St. Jerome’s well-known letter to Pammachius (LVII) in which he defends his paraphrastic method of translation, he famously preferred to render sensus de sensu or “sense for sense” (to be what Cicero had called an “orator” rather than a mere “interpreter”) and to reserve verbum e verbo or “word for

figure 4.2  The foldout transcription of the text of the monument from China Illustrata, 12f. Collection of the author.

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word” translation for the rendering of sacred texts, of “mysteries.”8 By providing both verbum e verbo and sensus de sensu versions, Kircher thus treats the monument as “both sacred and profane,” strategically authenticating the monument and its providential status while determining how we are to understand it. (He has his words for word and eats them, too.) But Kircher also boasts that even his “paraphrase” is a “word-for-word” translation, where the chain of languages through which it has passed, far from generating doubt about distortions along the way, actually seems to thematize the links of equivalency that enable unproblematic literal translation itself: “A Paraphrastical Declaration of the Chinese Inscription, Translated word for word [de verbo ad verbum] first out of the Chinese Language into the Portuguese, out of that into Italian, and from the Italian into the Latine Tongue.”9 Moreover, by arranging these transcriptions and translations into “tables” (Kircher himself uses the word tabula) the goal seems to be what Michel Foucault calls the creation of the tableau—of graphically structuring the display of knowledge for the effect of transparency, of complete comprehensibility, without the troublesome mediation of argument or language.10 As Kircher says of his paraphrase, as if it were simply a supplement to the essential apparatus: “I have also adjoined another Exposition . . . avoiding of the Chinesian Phrase, not so accustomed unto our Ears, and that for the more suitable apprehending of the Genuine sense of the Table [ad genuinos Tabulae sensus].11 In his commentaries Kircher always quotes the paraphrase, while only rarely referring to an individual word in the verbatim version in the midst of a concentrated polemic, giving the system the feel of great utility and authority whenever he does. Thus, even though the verbatim version ensures the accuracy of the translation through its coordinated text, the very “Chinesian Phrase” in which it must appear is the measure of its inferiority to a properly nuanced version in the European phrase for conveying the “Genuine sense” of the inscription. The word “tabula” that Ogilby renders here as “table” might best be understood as an irreducible tablet-table-tableau, suggesting that the patent, monumental, lapidary truth of the text as tabula may “receive the greater Illustration” of other tabulae. In sum, Kircher has created a sort of three-dimensional interlinear edition that refracts the model of original interlaced with translation into a series of ostensibly superimposed tableaux.

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in the beginning was the word for word Let’s consider an example in some detail. There is not much sport to be had in debunking Kircher, who knew no Chinese, for his obvious and predictable mistakes in the redaction of the work of his fellow Jesuits or for his eccentric sinographic forays into Chinese philology. As anyone who knows even only a smattering of Chinese would immediately see, all three of the examples that Kircher gives in his explanation for how to use the critical apparatus are embarrassingly wrong—such as giving instituit (“founded”) as the translation for da 大 (large), slipping a notch on the grid to misread 18:8 for 18:9. Such mistakes nicely demonstrate just how difficult it would be for someone who does not know Chinese to use the four-fold system, including Kircher himself, despite his claims about the utility and transparency of the apparatus. Boym, however, who did know Chinese, introduces turns of untranslation that are less obvious and much more interesting. Not recognizing that the inscription is written in parallel couplets, for example, Boym twice mistakes a break between columns as a break between clauses. The first of these happens at the very first column break, during the cosmogony, where the following couplet appears, which Boym translates as below (the numbers over the Latin words in the original are printed here in superscript at the start of each word, and the “/” marks the column break): [主. . .] 鼓元風而生 / 二氣 暗空易而天地開

[41Dominus . . .] 46 commovit 50originis 51spiritum 52& 53produxit. / 2. 1Duas 2mutationum causas (Sinicè dicuntur ym & yam, hoc est materia & forma) 3 obscurum 4vacuum 5mutavit, 6& 7coelum 8terram 9aperuit. Chinese: [the Lord . . .] Drummed up the primordial wind and created / the two qi; The dark emptiness transformed, and the heaven and earth separated. Latin: [the Lord . . .] 46 moved 50of origin 51the spirit 52and 53brought forth. / 2. 1The two

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causes of changes (called by the Chinese ym & yam, that is, matter and form) 3dark 4void, [He] 5changed; and heaven earth, [He] revealed.12 2

The comparison is admittedly rather dizzying to make, but what is important to note is that the configuration of the Chinese allows “Dominus” in the Latin to act elliptically as the subject, not just of the first verb (as in the Chinese), but of all three verbs. In effect, Boym’s rendering transfers agency “back” to the Christian god for the changes wrought by “dark emptiness” and “heaven [and] earth”—which, at least grammatically, work on their own in the inscription, and both syntactically and philosophically work as a result of the two forms of qi 氣 (material energy), if not actually as those two forms of qi 氣, which are reduced in the gloss to “materia & forma.” Indeed, Kircher’s final paraphrase not only confirms this reading, but also completes the transfer of agency from qi 氣 to the Christian god, where it is thematized by a proliferation of active verbs: “[our Lord] moved Chaos, he made the two Kis (that is, the two virtues, or two qualities called Inyam ; as the Commentator has it, two principles) he made changes in the abyss, that is, he changed the darkness, he formed heaven & earth” (emphasis added).13 Thus, in quietly reconstituting an acceptably orthodox genesis by sifting out the Daoist or Neo-Confucian cosmological assumptions and associations of the Chinese, Boym untranslates the text. And he does so without altering the value or the placement of a single word. I will say more about this point in a moment, but first I want to stress that as far as the Jesuits were concerned, this question of agency in the Creation was a serious matter, as Boym surely knew. Indeed, Jacques Gernet has observed that the two most troublesome and widely held beliefs that the Jesuits were actively engaged in refuting about the creation and the nature of the universe were the related notions: (1) that the universe was created by the uncreated, omnipresent material energy qi 氣; and (2) that all created things were the products of natural processes involving the interaction of yin and yang in qi 氣.14 The Christian idea of a deliberate act of divine creation ex nihilo was so far from these accepted Chinese notions that the Jesuits struggled to make the doctrine convincing. To this end, Ricci had explicitly raised and refuted these notions as early as the mid-1590s in his Tianzhu shiyi 天主實義 (True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven), where he argues that qi 氣 is simply one of the four elements (air); that yin and yang are but accidental principles of being; and, most saliently, that “Heaven and earth cannot have created themselves, but must certainly have been pro-

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duced by a creator, who is the one we call the Lord of Heaven” (天地不能自 成定有所為制作者即吾所謂天主也).15 Furthermore, just three years after the discovery of the monument, in 1628, Giulio Aleni wrote a new pamphlet entirely devoted to the matter, the Wanwu zhenyuan 萬物真原 (The True Origin of All Things), whose fourth section—“The Primordial Energy Cannot Have Divided Heaven and Earth by Itself” (論元氣不能自分天地)—specifically addresses the point raised by the inscription.16 Since Aleni seems to have based his work on Ricci’s treatise, it is all the more interesting that his language actually echoes the inscription at this point more closely than it does Ricci. In another even bolder move, when Boym translates the act of divine creation in the opening lines of the cosmogony immediately before the passage discussed above, he renders the Daoist term “24造化” ([he] created) as “24fecit” (he made), but then slips in two more unnumbered words so that it reads: “24fecit ex nihilo” (24he made from nothing).17 An “ex nihilo” ex nihilo. Kircher’s paraphrase follows suit with “ex nihilo creavit res omnes” (from nothing he created all things).18 It would thus seem that Adam 景淨 found what was to him an acceptable concession to the concept of an immanent mechanistic material energy by letting the Christian god initiate the process—or, indeed, that he himself genuinely understood it that way—and that the Jesuits were at pains in their translations and commentaries to untranslate that concession nearly a thousand years later. Let’s linger on this point for just a moment longer. What is at issue here is not that the Jesuits may have at times strategically manipulated their translation of this semisacred and semiprofane text in order that it render a more doctrinally accurate meaning (which seems clear enough from my reading); but rather that, whereas the authors of the monument forged an expression of Christian ideas in what Saussy has called the “workshop of equivalences”—where provisionally functional agreements of meaning are hammered out of radically different materials—the Jesuits, for their part, may have appropriated the monument in order that it may express as fully as possible what they understood to be its “true meaning.”19 One thinks, of course, of Benjamin’s idealizing theorization cited above of the infinite translatability of sacred writing, of trying to let the “pure language” (die reine Sprache) shine through a translation regardless of the meaning of the original simply by rendering the language so literally that sense is sacrificed to the mysterious workings of syntax. Yet we should bear in mind, as Saussy reminds us in another critique, that syntax is not merely an order, but “a combination of parts into a whole.”20 The inflections of Latin can re-determine the syntactical combi-

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nation of the words in the original text with relatively little regard for their order. Breaking the sentence after sheng 生 “produxit” thus allows Boym, in the example above, to alter the syntax from what is typical in Chinese (subject-verb-object) to what is typical in classical Latin (subject-object-verb) while at the same time maintaining precisely the same word order. (“Not a Confucian, but a Ciceronian, indeed!”) This flexibility of syntax and word order in a highly inflected language like Latin is precisely what makes such a verbatim translation possible. Even though the word-for-word translation reads very awkwardly in Latin, it is all but unreadable in most vernaculars (as my translation of Boym’s version above shows). John Ogilby does not even try to translate this section into English; and François-Savinien Dalquié’s French version of La Chine illustrée (1670) must supply many supplementary unnumbered words so that, in fact, it reads more like a “paraphrase” than a verbatim translation—and he follows suit by making his version of the paraphrase even more embellished with explication, as we will see. Moreover, as I have already suggested, the gap between the protopidgin of the verbum e verbo (“the Chinesian Phrase, not so accustomed unto our Ears”) and the more “natural” sensus de sensu versions both authenticates and necessitates the latter by alienating the Chinese idiom so much that we are propelled into Kircher’s elaborated paraphrase.21 Latin itself thus emerges as an essential technology in the illustration of this sacred Chinese object, just as it would continue to be used with tacit assumptions about its precision and universality as a sinological tool up through the nineteenth century.

rescript rescripted 荃者所以在魚 得魚而忘荃 蹄者所以在兔 得兔而忘蹄 言者所以在意 得意而忘言

The aim of the net is the fish: when you get the fish, you forget the net. The aim of the snare is the rabbit: when you get the rabbit, you forget the snare. The aim of language is the idea: when you get the idea, you forget the language. zhuangzi  莊子22

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About a third of the way into the inscription appears what has long been considered its most important passage: the rescript of an imperial edict issued by the Tang Emperor Tai Zong 太宗 (627–649 ce) in 638 that both praises Christianity as a doctrine and also grants permission for its teachings to be spread throughout the kingdom. Nothing like it had been known to exist since the Jesuits had been in China, and they immediately seized upon it by translating it before any other part of the inscription. The imperial rescript begins thus: 道無常名聖無常體 隨方設教密濟群生

The Way has no constant name; the Sage has no constant mode. In accordance with the place, they establish teachings, which mysteriously save the people.23

The passage is difficult to translate succinctly, but the general sense of the opening lines is clearly an expression of religio-philosophic tolerance that serves as prelude to the proclamation on Christianity, which is specified only in the following lines with the mention of the missionary Aluoben 阿 羅本. In other words, the emperor says, just as we have our good doctrines, so other places have theirs. As many readers will no doubt have observed already, the phrase that opens the imperial rescript—道無常名 (dao has no everlasting name)—alludes unmistakably to the famous opening lines of the Daode jing 道德經 (Classic of the Way and Virtue): “There is a way to speak the Way, but not the Everlasting Way; here is a name that can be named, but not the Everlasting Name” (道可道非常道 名可名非常名). Thus, with an allusion that would have been as recognizable to the Jesuits working in China as it is to any reader of Chinese today, the emperor seems to be suggesting, in his tolerance, that all such teachings as Christianity are merely modalities of the everlasting Dao 道. The first word of the rescript has also been translated as “Systems” (Legge) and “Right principles” (Wylie) since dao 道 can also be used more generally in the sense of a teaching or a proper way of doing something, but that choice effaces the Daoist specificity of the term, which is very strikingly reinforced by the rest of the phrase.24 Both of the Latin versions in China Illustrata take this strategy a step further by rendering this dao 道 as “Lex” (in the verbatim version) and “Lex vera” (in the paraphrase), not only effacing all Daoist associations from the word, but also rendering it specifically, if implicitly, as the Christian doctrine. In sum, whereas Tai Zong 太宗 commences his decree with an allusion to a

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Daoist classic as part of his self-fashioning as an erudite and tolerant ruler, the Jesuits untranslate—or unenDao—the dao. One could imagine from looking at only this much of the text that Adam 景淨 might have felt similar reservations about the emperor’s phrasing when composing the inscription, and yet could do nothing but quote the rescript as he received it. But in fact, he has very cleverly set up the rescript by troping on the language of the Daode jing immediately before the quotation in order to recuperate the emperor’s potentially Daoist language as more specifically Christian. In the brief introduction to Tai Zong 太宗, he writes: “The true, everlasting dao is mysterious and difficult to name; but in order for its merits and operations to be illuminated, we strain and call it the luminous religion” (真常之道 妙而難名 功用照彰 強稱景教).25 (Laozi famously strained for something to call the Dao in chapter 25 of the Daode jing and came up with “Great.”) Here Adam 景淨 seems to be trying to reverse the Daoist subsumption of the Nestorian teaching: Illuminating the Luminous Religion may reveal it to be but a variety of the Dao; but it may also reveal that what we talk about when we talk about the true and everlasting Dao is, in fact, the Luminous Religion. This introduction continues, with another nod to Laozi: “But dao without the Sage does not flourish; and the Sage without dao is not great. When dao and the Sage fit together like a tally, all the world becomes civilized and enlightened” (惟道非聖不弘 聖非 道不大 道聖符契 天下文明). But this is an introduction to an emperor, not a missionary or a hermit; and, indeed, the word sheng 聖, which I have been translating as “Sage,” is often used to refer to the emperor, as is certainly the case here. All religious systems, including Christianity, need the aid of emperors in order to thrive, just as emperors need some kind of dao to succeed. Adam 景淨 tropes on this diction even further in the midst of his celebratory catalogue of gospel-loving Tang rulers: “There is nothing that is not possible for the dao, and whatever is possible can be named; there is nothing that cannot be done by a Sage/Emperor, and whatever can be done can be narrated” (道無不可 所可可名 聖無不作 所作客述). (Then the praise of emperors continues.) Although the Jesuits themselves also made much use of the pun on dao 道 as “The Way” for expressing the idea of the gospel, the pun cannot be said to work the same way in Ricci’s Tianzhu shiyi 天主實義, for example, as it does on the monument—either when Adam 景 淨 is quoting an emperor or writing on his own—except insofar as they all clear bench space in the workshop of equivalences for the translinguistic, transcultural production of meaning.

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Recall that in Kircher’s explanation of how to use the four-fold ap­ paratus, the imagined “lector curiosus” would begin by reading the Latin paraphrase: Lex vera non habet nomen determinatum, nec sancti locum habent, ubi consistant, determinatum: excurrunt ad omnes partes, ut Mundum doceant, ad Mundo laboranti succurrendum, velis, remis, ad utilitatem afferendam intenti. The true Law hath no determinate name, nor have the Saints any limited place where they remain; they run to all Parts that they may instruct the World, being intent with might and main to do good and succour the inflicted people.26

Far from a general sense of the value of religious systems in different lands, the overwhelming impression that these opening lines make is that the Chinese emperor, with an ideal clarity of inspiration, seems to have understood the “true Law” of Christianity and the nature of missionary work some one thousand years ago. Such a curious reader might then turn back one tabula, to the verbatim translation, where the passage surprisingly appears in a patch of unnumbered single-spaced text amidst the rest of the double-spaced text required for the numbering over the words: Lex non habet ordinarium nomen, sancti non habent semper eundem locum, decurrunt Mundum proponendo Legem, creberrimè succurrentes multitudini populorum. . . The Law has no ordinary name; the holy ones do not always have the same place; they run through the World propagating the Law, frequently succoring the multitudes of people . . .27

The sense here is more or less the same as the paraphrase, but the very point of having a numbering system to cross-reference the characters has been defeated. Notably, of the two sizable quotations of other Chinese sources on the monument—the imperial rescript and a description of Daqin taken from an ancient chronicle (which most Christian sinologists have found disquietingly fantastic)—both are printed without superscripted numbers as though it were unnecessary to provide the complete verbum e verbo apparatus for “profane” text, i.e., for the parts of the inscription that were not originally written by an early Christian. Nevertheless, aside from noting that this version conforms awkwardly to the “Chinesian phrase,” a seven-

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teenth-century reader could make the following observations: (1) according to Boym, the Chinese text does not actually say “true Law,” but rather simply “Lex” (but both are singular, so it must mean Christianity); (2) the two versions disagree about whether the emperor finds the name of that law “ordinarium” or “determinatum” (but that is a small matter); (3) where Boym gives “they do not have a determined place,” Kircher adds the emphasis “where they stay” (ubi consistant); and (4) whereas Boym gives simply four words, “frequently succoring [the] multitudes [of] people” (creberrimè succurrentes multitudini populorum), Kircher embellishes the work of these “saints” as “laboring to give succor to the world, with all their power [with sails, with oars], intent upon aiding the afflicted” (ad Mundo laboranti succurrendum, velis, remis, ad utilitatem afferendam intenti). As for the critical apparatus, the breakdown in the superscripted numbering here would make it impossible for someone who does not already know Chinese to go any further. Even if one were exceptionally industrious, one’s efforts would be thwarted in two ways. First, the characters in the transcription are misnumbered at the start of the column, just when the rescript begins: 1秋 2七 3月 4設 4曰 5道 5無 6長 7名. (It doesn’t take a philosophical skeptic to see that a sequence that runs 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5, 6, 7 is just the sort of thing you do not want in your proto-Cartesian grid.) Second, the numbering of the verbatim version does not even correspond to the confused numbers of the transcription before it breaks off. For the three characters: “4設 4曰 5道” (4proclaimed, 4saying: 5dao . . .), Boym gives: “4edictum Regis positum 5inquit Lex . . .” (the 4edict of the King issued 5said The Law . . .). In other words, edict in Latin is paired with proclaimed in Chinese; and saying in Latin is paired with dao 道—which is, in fact, one of the possible meanings of that word, but not here: dao 道 is the first word of the imperial rescript (as we have just seen), introduced by the preceding word yue 曰 (saying) which is customarily used to open a quotation. So much for Kircher’s tables. In sum, what a seventeenth-century reader of Kircher’s edition who does not know Chinese could never see is that the opening lines of the imperial rescript have been transformed from a declaration of proto-relativistic tolerance expressed in distinctly Daoist terms into a celebration of model missionaries carrying Christianity overseas. In Kircher’s paraphrase, we no longer have “sages” (sheng 聖) with no constant “mode” (ti 體), but rather “holy ones” (sancti) with no constant “place” (locus). Indeed, everything in the untranslation of this passage pivots on the rendering of ti 體 (mode, substance, form) as locus (place). To be sure, in the emperor’s

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description of these sheng 聖 as wu chang ti 無常體 (without constant ti), the suggestion of “inconstancy” does not sound much like a Christian virtue, nor was it intended to be. Quite understandably, therefore, the radical untranslation of Kircher’s critical edition thus seems to insist something like: “The text may say ti 體, but the only thing inconstant about us sheng 聖 is our locus.”28 Similarly, for that final phrase mi ji qun sheng 密濟群生 (mysteriously save the living), although the Latin translations are roughly accurate, nevertheless the frame of reference and the subject have both shifted so that the doctrines established in each place no longer “mysteriously save the living” of that place, but rather these holy ones “mysteriously save the living” of other places and all places. For the word mi 密 (mysteriously), whereas Boym describes these holy ones as giving succor “creberrime,” or “frequently,” Kircher describes them as giving succor “velis, remis”—literally, “by means of sails and oars,” a Latin idiom for “going all out” (Ogilby renders it as “with might and main”). Kircher's elaboration metonymically underscores the sense of sea travel that both the paraphrase and Boym's version contribute to the passage. We should recall that the long and grueling sea voyage from Lisbon to Goa on the way to China was a memorably unpleasant trial for most Jesuits, who often remark upon it in their letters. Dalquié’s French translation of Kircher further emphasizes precisely this sense, as if intentionally elaborating on the elaboration in the paraphrase by construing it both figuratively and literally: “Their occupation is to follow all parts of the world in order to instruct souls and succor the miserable and the afflicted: and it is for this reason that they employ sails and oars happily to realize their aims and in order effectively to serve the people.”29 In the same vein, the paraphrase first introduces Aluoben 阿羅本 as a sort of seafarer in the lines immediately preceding the rescript: instead of “divining from the azure clouds and carrying the true scriptures, auguring from the wind in order to journey through difficulties and dangers” (占青雲而載 真經 望風律以馳難險), the paraphrase states that Aluoben 阿羅本 “brought as it were from the Clouds this true Doctrine: Driven by the winds, & by the help of Hydrographical Maps [chartas hydrographicas], he sustained many dangers and much labour” (emphasis added).30 By adding these “Hydrographical Maps” where there is nothing in the Chinese, Kircher’s version restyles Aluoben 阿羅本 as a seachart-toting missionary-sailor from afar who emblematizes the everlasting form (ti 體) of the “orthodox” missionary that was still maintained by the Jesuits. Thus, all of these translations (or untranslations) ravel (or unravel)

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what Zhuangzi would call the fishnet of the text in order to catch what ­Polonious would call the carp of truth. In this perfectly sinographic reading, the etymological affiliation of textus with 文 as interwoven lines weaves together an interlingual pun on the text as net; and the fish flops from abundance and the knowledge of happiness to an anagram of salvation and back again. As it happens, the imperial rescript also alludes to the passage quoted above from Zhuangzi in the climax of the emperor's praise for the Luminous Religion: “Its language contains no troublesome speech; the principles remain when the fishnet is forgotten” (詞無繁說 理有忘筌).31 Snatching the hook from one of Zhuangzi’s lines, the rescript thus inscribes within the text itself a model for the Jesuit practice of untranslation: When you already know the dogma-fish that you are casting for, you can forget the web of words in which it is caught. In the emperor’s mind at least, Christianity apparently meets Zhuangzi’s standards for a good Daoist teaching. One wonders whether Kircher’s critical edition would, too.

pure untranslation, or how to translate without changing the words As intriguing as the syntactical twists and turns of the Latin translations may be, surely the most astonishing feature of Kircher’s presentation involves the transcription of the Chinese text itself and functions by means of an entirely graphic, nonlinguistic semiology. In order to understand it, we must first observe that the transcription actually fails to conform to the ideal of the Cartesian grid despite its convincing appearance of orderliness. Instead of numbering both columns and rows, and then methodically plotting the individual characters at the intersecting coordinates, Mattheus the transcriber numbers only the columns and then uses his own judgment in the numbering of discrete words or terms (sometimes pairing characters into binomes with a single number, grouping multicharacter names and titles under one number, and occasionally dropping grammatical particles from the numbering altogether). This approach makes perfect sense since even classical Chinese is not, after all, a purely monosyllabic or monologographic language, despite the many sinophilic fantasies to the contrary. The result, however, is that even though the columns are sequential, the rows are wildly uneven. This method of numbering the words on the grid instead of numbering the grid itself has the advantage of avoiding the introduction of any of the dozen blank squares in the Chinese transcription into either of the two translations. At least as much as the difficulty of

untranslation theory  [ 109  ]

deciding how to combine characters into words and terms, these blank spaces are what throw the Cartesian grid into chaotic disarray, since one must either number the blanks, and therefore leave numbered empty spaces in the verbatim translation, or skip over the spaces and resume numbering with the next character, and therefore dislocate the rows (which is what happens). Moreover, the transcription actually reduces by two-thirds the number of these blank spaces from a total of about three dozen blanks on the actual monument, so that the characters gradually begin to shift into new columns. Indeed, by the end of the transcription, the grid of characters no longer corresponds to the arrangement of characters on the monument at all, but has slipped by about twenty positions! Of course, no reader in Europe without a rubbing of the monument at hand could know that. (Kircher, incidentally, did possess one.) What is crucial about the erasure of space in the transcription is that these blanks are inscribed uninscribed spaces, signifiers of respect known as quezi 闕字 (missing characters) traditionally placed before the names of former emperors; on the stele, these spaces are also used for most but not all references to the Christian god.32 The Jesuits, who clearly understood this convention, routinely use the same honorific spaces in their Chinese writings (as do Ricci and Aleni in both of the treatises cited in this essay). Furthermore, both the Christian god and also all the Tang emperors equally receive the customary two honorific spaces. We might attribute this spacing to Adam 景淨, but it would seem more likely to be the work of Lü Xiuyan 呂秀巖, the titled state secretary who is identified on the monument as its superb calligrapher, and who is not identified in any way as a Christian. There are only three exceptions to the twenty instances, where only one space is used instead of two, twice for emperors (who are not named in that spot) and once for the Christian god. The truly remarkable feature of Kircher’s grid in China Illustrata is that it turns the tables on the tablet, so to speak, so that the Christian god systematically receives two honorific spaces and the emperors only one. Mattheus has even expanded the place where the Christian god receives only one space on the monument to two honorific spaces on the transcription while also removing the spaces in nine of the remaining sixteen references to emperors altogether! Thus, without altering a single character, but simply by modifying the disposition of the characters on the grid, the transcription has irrefutably altered the sense of the text, bringing all of those “Sons of Heaven” (天子) down one notch in relation to the “Son of God.” The transcription is thus both faithful and unfaithful at the same time. By translating (“carrying over”) without seem-

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ing to translate (“change into a different but equivalent form”), what passes as the “original text” in Kircher’s edition emerges as an untranslation itself and emblematizes how a change of locus entails a change of ti 體 (mode, substance, form). The transcription untranslates the inscription.33

the fenshen function, or dividing the pun By far the most hotly debated question of the inscription is whether the two-character term fenshen 分身 (literally “divide” and “body”) explicitly refers to the specific point of doctrine that came to define the Nestorians after the Chalcedon Council in the fifth century. Over what may have been largely the result of political rivalries and a confusion of terms, Nestorius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, was accused of preaching that the divine and the human in the incarnation were not merely two different natures, but actually two different persons, as though the second person of the trinity had simply entered a human body rather than having actually become human.34 The doctrinal debate is not important here. What matters to us is that the use of the term fenshen 分身 for Jesus has appeared to many commentators to be suspiciously emphatic in its suggestion of a “divided body,” as though it were meant to inscribe precisely what distinguished the Nestorian creed as heretical by the orthodox church, thereby branding the monument also as unorthodox. As early as the eighteenth century, when the first commentaries after Kircher appeared, every scholar of the monument has wrangled over the term as a crux. (Indeed, the tablet is just as much of a fetish for sinologists who insist on the positive identification of it as Nestorian as it is for devotional writers who want to appropriate the monument for sectarian purposes.) The famous sinologist and protestant missionary James Legge, for example, optimistically claims in a published lecture, “The great crux of the Nestorian doctrine was avoided, and very wisely avoided by those who composed the Inscription”; but then he writes in the notes to his bilingual edition of the text, “The peculiar dogma of Nestorius underlies the expression [分身],—the dogma of ‘two persons in Christ’; one of the many vain attempts to fathom 'the great mystery of godliness.’ ”35 (One is tempted to see the divided person of missionary and sinologist here.) Indeed, what would not be understood among European scholars until the late nineteenth century is that fenshen 分身 is also a Buddhist term for the simultaneous, multiple manifestations of a bodhisattva, used particularly for both Shakyamuni and Maitreya.36 What is important for us here is that, whether or not the Jesuits be-

untranslation theory  [ 111  ]

lieved that there might be a suggestion of Nestorian dogma in the term (and it seems probable that they would suspect it), they invariably avoided it in their translations. For “our three-in-one fenshen” (我三一分身), Boym gives “17of the persons 18triple 19one 20he communicated 16himself” (17personarum 18trium 19una 20communicavit 16seipsam); and for the second occurrence of the term, “the fenshen appeared among men” (分身出代), Boym gives “communicating himself, he brought forth in the world . . .” (37communicando 38seipsum, 39prodit in 40mundum).37 As we have seen before, the declensions allow Boym to change the syntax without altering the word order. The paraphrase, however, simply dispenses with the theologically troubling expression altogether in both cases. For the first occurrence, 我 三一分身 (our three-in-one fenshen), Kircher gives “una de Divinis personis sanctissimae Trinitatis” (one of the divine Persons of the most Holy Trinity); and for the second, 分身出代 (the fenshen appeared among men), Kircher offers a compensatory flourish as “Una ex personis pro aeterna mortalium salute factus est homo” (One of the Persons for the eternal Salvation of Mankind was made Man).38 (How fenshen 分身 becomes one of the persons for the eternal salvation of mankind could be a textbook example of untranslation.) All four of these versions suggest that the division implied in fenshen 分身 is the division inherent in the holy trinity rather than a division within Jesus himself. In sum, whenever the Jesuits encountered the term that could have referred to the specific heretical tenet of Nestorianism, they untranslated it. Considering the context in which the inscription was written, fenshen 分身 may well be the perfect term (the mot juste, the 正名) precisely because it ambiguously indicates a miraculous bodhisattva-like multilocational manifestation and a godhead divided into three and an incarnation whose divine and human natures are divided in a single body—all at the same time for different audiences without actually meaning any one of them to the exclusion of the others. Saussy warns us, however, that just because such a term can signify all of these things we should not conclude that they are essentially the same, as he adroitly shows in his discussion of how the Neo-Confucian convert Yang Tingyun and the (neo-)Catholic Matteo Ricci seemed to agree about certain fundamental points of Catholicism, even though each had very different interests at stake: “When we see Yang Tingyun [appropriating Christian concepts], we should put out of mind the notion of an identity or compatibility between Confucianism and Catholicism and think, instead, of the model of the pun—that instant of ambiguity whereby two meanings are suspended in a single signifier

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and two speech communities can coincide in their language, although not in their frames of reference.”39 In other words, to insist that fenshen 分身 is the smoking gun of Nestorianism or the fingerprint of Buddhism or the perfectly law-abiding Logos is to miss the point that it is all of these things and, in a sense, none of them. For to divide any one of these meanings from the body of the expression is to cut loose the fishnet of the text, to separate speech communities—in short, to lose the pun in untranslation—as most readers, unfortunately, will find it necessary to do.

notes 1. The fiercely anti-Jesuit Voltaire was the most famous of the later conspiracy theorists, who criticized the supposed hoax in his Essay sur l’histoire générale et sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations (Genève, 1756). 2. For backgrounds on the stele, see Paul Pelliot, L’inscription nestorienne de Singan-fou, ed. Antonio Forte (Kyoto, 1996); and Henri Havret, La Stèle chrétienne de Si-ngan-fou, 3 vols., in Variétés sinologiques 7, 12, 20 (Shanghai, 1895, 1897, 1902). Excellent short introductions in English may be found in the indispensable Handbook of Christianity in China: Volume One, 635–1800, ed. Nicholas Standaert (Leiden, 2001), 1–42, esp. 3, 12–15; David Mungello, Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989), 164–72; and James Legge, The Nestorian Monument of Hsi-an Fu in Shen-Hsi, China (1888; New York, 1966). Citations of the stele (hereafter 景教碑) are taken from a rubbing in my collection. 3. Athanasius Kircher, China Monumentis, qua Sacris qua Profanis, Nec non variis Naturae & Artis Spectaculis, Aliarumque rerum memorabilium Argumentis Illustrata (Amsterdam, 1667). Whenever possible, I use John Ogilby’s translated selections of Kircher (hereafter Several Remarks) to give the quotations a period flavor, which are appended to his translation of Johannes Nieuhof et al., An Embassy from the East-India Company. . . With Several Remarks Taken out of Father Athanasivs Kircher, trans. John Ogilby (London, 1669). 4. See Saussy, “Impressions de Chine,” in this volume, and also the translation and critical edition of Victor Segalen’s French and Chinese prose poems, Stèles (Beijing, 1914), coedited by myself and Christopher Bush (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2007). 5. See Forte’s appendix, “A Literary Model for Adam: The Dhu ¯ta Monastery Inscription,” in Pelliot, L’inscription nestorienne, 473–87. 6. See Junjiro¯ Takakusu’s note in T’oung-pao, vol. 7 (December 1896): 589–91. I refer to Adam 景淨 as the author only for convenience, whereas he probably had collaborators. 7. See Haun Saussy, Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001), esp. 7–11.

untranslation theory  [ 113  ] 8. For a translation see St. Jerome, Letters, trans. and ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (New York: The Christian Literature Co., 1890–1900). Consider also Walter Benjamin’s famous comments to a similar effect: “A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully. This may be achieved, above all, by a literal rendering of the syntax which proves words rather than sentences to be the primary element of the translator. . . . Where a text is identical with truth or dogma, where it is supposed to be ‘the true language’ in all its literalness and without the mediation of meaning, this text is unconditionally translatable. . . . The interlinear version of the Scriptures is the prototype or ideal of all translation”; Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1985), 79, 82. 9. Ogilby, Several Remarks, 11; Kircher, China Illustrata, 29. 10. “The profound vocation of Classical language has always been to make a ‘tableau’: whether it be as natural discourse, collection of truth, description of things, or encyclopedic dictionary. It thus exists only to be transparent”; Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 322. 11. Ogilby, Several Remarks, 2; Kircher, China Illustrata, 2. 12. 景教碑, cols. 1–2; Kircher, China Illustrata, 29. 13. Ogilby, Several Remarks, 11; Kircher, China Illustrata, 29. 14. Jacques Gernet, China and the Christian Impact, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 208; see also Standaert, Handbook, 646– 47. 15. Matteo Ricci (利瑪竇), The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven (T’ien-chu shih-i), trans. Douglas Lancashire and Peter Kuo-chen Hu (Taipei: The Ricci Institute, 1985), 198–201, 76. 16. Giulio Aleni (艾瑞略), Wanwu zhenyuan 萬物真原 (The True Origin of All Things) (1628), 3rd ed. (Zi-ka-wei, 1791), 9–12. 17. 景教碑, col. 1; Kircher, China Illustrata, 22. 18. Ibid., 29. 19. See Saussy, “In the Workshop of Equivalences,” Great Walls, 15–34. 20. See Saussy, “The Prestige of Writing,” Great Walls, 37. 21. See Saussy, “Always Multiple Translation,” Great Walls, 75–90. 22. Zhuangzi 莊子. Sibu beiyao 四部備要 (Song facsimile edition). 4 vols., 10 juan. Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, [1936]. (雜篇外物第二十六), 4:6a. 23. 景教碑, col. 10. 24. Legge, The Nestorian Monument, 11; Alexander Wylie, “The Nestorian Tablet of Se-gan Foo,” Journal of the American Oriental Society (1856), 282. 25. 景教碑, col. 8. 26. Kircher, China Illustrata, 30; Ogilby, Several Remarks, 12. 27. Kircher, China Illustrata, 24. 28. For more nuanced readings, see my “Jesuit Fish in Chinese Nets,” esp. 28–30.

[ 114  ]  timothy billings 29. Kircher, La Chine D’athanase Kirchere de la Companie de Jesus : Illustrée De Plusieurs Monuments Tant Sacrés Que Profanes Et De Quantité De Recherchés De La Nature & De L’art, trans. François-Savinien Dalquié (Genève, 1670), 40. 30. Ogilby, Several Remarks (emended), 12; Kircher, China Illustrata, 30. 31. 景教碑, col. 10 32. Those for the Christian god appear in cols. 1, 4, 5, and 24. 33. For a similar argument about the physical qualities of the stele and its representation in Kircher, see my “Jesuit Fish in Chinese Nets,” esp. 19–22. 34. See Samuel Moffett, A History of Christianity in Asia (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1998), 169–215. 35. Legge, The Nestorian Monument, 42 and 5n. 36. Havret, La Stèle chrétienne, 3:35–39. 37. 景教碑, cols. 4 and 24; Kircher, China Illustrata 23, 27. 38. Ogilby, 11 and 15; Kircher, China Illustrata, 29, 33. 39. Saussy, “In the Workshop of Equivalences,” Great Walls, 32.

5 

China, India, and the Empire of Commerce in Milton’s Paradise Lost Walter S. H. Lim

High on a Throne of Royal State, which far Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind, Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand Show’rs on her Kings Barbaric Pearl and Gold, Satan exalted sat, by merit rais’d. Paradise Lost 2.1–51

In Paradise Lost Satan is the archetypal tyrant characterized by his associations with the Orient. Elevated on a throne in parody of Godhead, Satan is defined by the splendor of the East. Signifying within a theological framework, the spectacle of this splendor forges an implied association between Satan’s theatrical(ized) authority and the vast riches of the Orient. To the early modern English imagination, China is an important kingdom that has come to be associated with immense wealth and ancient historicity. Reinforced by missionary accounts and travel writings, stories of the wealth of China generated fantasies on accessing this wealth, making space at the same time for a consideration of exotic cultural difference. Inflamed by the recent records of the Jesuit missionaries, the fascination with China in early modern England can be traced all the way back to Marco Polo’s Travels and The Travels of Sir John Mandeville.2 Whatever problems of veracity might have presented themselves for the reader of the Travels—and its initial reception was marked by much skepticism—Marco Polo’s text [ 115  ]

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had left a deep impression of the wealth of Cathay and the might of the Mongol Dynasty on the European cultural imagination. Although fabulist in genre, or maybe because of it, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville enjoyed vast popularity throughout Europe during and after the late Middle Ages, with editions available in most European languages. It was in Elizabethan England that the topos of the wealth of China found itself brought into especially sharp focus. At this time, important personages such as Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Martin Frobisher had been particularly passionate about seeking out a northwest passage that would lead to the East Indies and the Orient.3 Undertaken with a license and financial backing provided by the Muscovy Company, Frobisher’s very first expedition sought the elusive passage to the Orient, also known more popularly as Cathay. Gilbert and Frobisher cherished the grand dream of European explorers of the time. The quest for a water route around or through the great obstacle of the continental landmass of the New World constituted a monumental practical challenge and irresistible cultural idea. The desire to tap the wealth of China in the early modern period reveals an emerging spirit of contestation generated out of England’s particular sense of its own cultural belatedness vis-à-vis the capabilities and advancements of the larger European world. Stimulated by Marco Polo’s highly romanticized Travels, European adventurers, which included Christopher Columbus, had early on dreamt of finding at the other end of the world an Oriental land of stately pleasure domes and unsurpassed wealth. The desire for Ming porcelains and silk, which fetched extraordinary prices in Europe, fed directly into the generation of European projects to chart routes across the world in the hope of cutting import costs. The recognition of the importance for England’s participation in the conditions of European modernity is, however, far from straightforward, marked by deep ambivalences concerning the soundness and logic of launching into the seas in mercantile ventures. It was in Elizabethan England that readers found themselves given a view of China in the form of Robert Parke’s 1588 translation of Juan González de Mendoza’s Historia de las cosas mas notables, ritos y costumbres del gran reyno do la China. In his “Epistle Dedicatory” to Thomas Cavendish at the start of The Historie of the Great and Mightie Kingdome of China, the first detailed work on China available in the English language, Parke gives his reasons for undertaking this project of translation.4 Wanting to obtain support for discovering the Northwest Passage to the Orient, Parke highlights

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various trade ventures engaged in by the English and stresses the importance of the spice trade. He desires—and this is what Thomas Cavendish is celebrated as having done—“to employ the merchants of England in trade, to increase our Navy, to benefit our Clothiers, and . . . to relieve more of the poorer sort, than all the hospitals and alms houses can or may, that have been built in this realm, since the first inhabiting thereof.”5 Recognizing that knowledge of the Orient has been made available through the observations afforded by the Portuguese and the Spanish, he wants to set out to “increase . . . the knowledge of the subjects of England, and specially for the illuminating of the minds of those, that are to take the voyage next in hand to Japan, China, and the Philippines.”6 Important to this project is the aim of undercutting Spain’s preeminence as the great imperial power that exercises virtually uncontestable hegemony in the high seas. In conjunction with Cavendish’s attempt to open “the gate to the spoil of the great and late mighty, universal, and infested enemy of this realm, & of all countries that profess true religion,”7 Parke’s translation would make directly accessible to his reader knowledge of Spanish ambitions and designs to tap the wealth of the Orient. Trade and merchandising activities are posited as requisite conditions for an England ambitious to assert a political identity demanding attention and recognition. The Historie of the Great and Mightie Kingdome of China contains significant sections that elaborate on the immeasurable natural wealth blessing the land. In chapters 3 and 4, for example, the reader is given a vision brimming with cultural imagings of Edenic plenitude. In this land are fruits, herbs, flowers, and beasts that exceed even Spain’s very own abundance and variety. The plenty of the natural world associated with China reinforces the totality of its wealth, which includes material objects of desire such as “velvets, damasks, satins, and other sorts of webs”8 as well as silver and gold. Indeed, the inventory of goods purchased by the Spanish from China is staggering, as attested to by one Antonio de Morga, president of the audiencia at Manila: Raw silk in bundles, of the fineness of two strands, and other silk of coarser quality; fine untwisted silk, white and of all colors, wound in small skeins; quantities of velvets, some plain and some embroidered in all sorts of figures, colors and fashions, others with body of gold and embroidered with gold; woven stuffs and brocades, of gold and silver upon silk of various colors and patterns; quantities of gold and silver

[ 118  ]  walter s. h. lim thread in skeins; damasks, satins, taffetas, and other cloths of all colors; linen made from grass, called lençesuelo; and white cotton cloth of different kinds and quantities.9

The narratives of China collected in Hakluyt and Purchas also highlight England’s deep cultural and economic interest in the rumored plenitude of the Middle Kingdom’s material wealth. In the early seventeenth century, the recording of the Jesuit experience in China in the historically important Italian journals of the brilliant Mateo Ricci contributed directly to a rekindling of European interest in Asia. Especially well known for his attempts to work out what David Mungello has characterized as the project of forging a Confucian-Christian synthesis, the controversial theological accommodation aimed finally at securing a foothold for the Society of Jesus in China, Ricci brought China to the notice of Europe by sparking off debates on the precise place of the Middle Kingdom in the larger theological and cultural scheme of things.10 Indeed, in England itself, all the published accounts of the Jesuit missionaries that later made their way into Purchas’s 1625 five-volume compendia of trade missions dealt with China or the Far East.11 If missionary accounts and travel writings brought China to the attention of early modern English culture, so did objects like chinaware, which facilitated “material” contact with Otherness. Early modern England reacted to these material objects with a sense of awe. Marveled as a sign of the cultural superiority of the Middle Kingdom, chinaware had not yet been defined by the slightly later Orientalist framings of chinoiserie, with its inflections of triviality, ostentation, and excess.12 Prospects of accessing the wealth popularly associated with China are not the sole emphasis in the early modern English reading and writing of the Middle Kingdom. The much embellished information on China that reached the average reader through popular literature and travel writings generated not only fascination but degrees of anxiety. In The Discovery of a New World (1608), Joseph Hall had posed the question: “who ever expected such wit, such government in China? Such arts, such practice of all cunning [i.e. skill]? We thought learning had dwelled in our part of the world; they laugh at us for it, and well may, avouching that they of all the earth are two-eyed men, the Egyptians the one-eyed, and all the world else, stark blind.”13 In his New Atlantis —an unfinished work that presents the vision of a scientific utopia in the Far West, situated paradoxically east of the Far East—Francis Bacon reveals his fascination with the Middle Kingdom by

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observing various cultural practices, from the laws that prohibit “the admission of strangers without license” to the notation that “the Chineses sail where they will or can; which sheweth that their law of keeping out strangers is a law of pusillanimity and fear.”14 Enraptured by various scientific experiments and practices, Bacon also alludes to the unknown material that went into the composition of Chinese porcelain (known in England since 1506) when commenting on the “several earths” and “divers cements” in which the Bensalemites immerse substances.15 If Bacon’s Bensalem is a kind of utopia tied to the vision of a scientific society, its distinctive identity as a Christian society suggests its author’s encouragement of the formation of a scientific priesthood in England. The promulgation of a scientifically minded society and culture in New Atlantis may in fact mark an anxiety pertaining to China’s perceived technological culture, a culture tantalizingly embodied in the sign of the porcelain ware’s mysterious materiality. The text’s quieter dream may have to do with converting the Orient and the “East” to “Christian” rule via a rivalry of scientific achievements.16 Early modern England also marveled at China’s political organization, social order, and economic prosperity. As David Porter remarks of early modern European perceptions of the Middle Kingdom: “In marked contrast to the ‘primitive’ cultures of sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas or to the legendary fallen empires of Egypt, Mexico, and Peru, China was acknowledged the seat of a great and ancient civilization whose cultural achievements not only reached back four thousand years but also continued to rival those of Europe into the current age.”17 In Milton’s Revolutionary England, one finds an added dimension to this interest in the question of how China could possibly contribute to the volatile political debates on monarchical authority and the different forms of government. More specifically, when China’s political order was observed in Revolutionary England, questions were raised about how and whether an absolutist system of government centered on the controlling figure of the emperor had indeed contributed toward the creation of a powerful and prosperous kingdom. Robert Markley has noted that Royalist ideologues in Stuart and Interregnum England saw in the Middle Kingdom a potential model that gave credence to their particular sociopolitical views. If economic hardships and sociopolitical turmoil—two distinctive markers of postlapsarian existence—did not appear (at least in idealized narratives) to characterize the order of things in the Middle Kingdom, this could very well have to do with China’s monarchy and its philosophical traditions. The prosperity and venerable age of Chinese civilization also generated wonder and an impulse

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for emulation, but with an attendant anxiety hinged upon how it was that a heathen land could have obtained the benefits believed dispensed only to God’s own faithful. Even theoretically positing the longevity of Chinese civilization itself proved potentially unsettling because it appeared to contradict orthodox readings of Judeo-Christian historiography, especially as defined in relation to the account of creation and the genealogy of the human race recorded in the Pentateuch.18 If China resonated positively for some because it appeared to represent a sociopolitical order in alignment with certain ideologies in early modern England, it did not, on the whole, stand for any sustained or definable political and cultural discourse that could be readily appropriated and applied. Often references made to China in the period are marked by generality and characterized by a prevailing sense of metaphorical import, which points to a distance that needed traversing as a cultural imagination expanded energies to narrow the gap between what’s being read and what’s out there. When references to Asian geopolitical and cultural spaces enter Milton’s writings, they tend to assume metaphorical significance owing to a general absence of the familiarity that comes from sustained literal encounters. Despite the difficulties involved in producing a solid understanding of Asian societies and cultures, Milton nevertheless showed a deep interest in the matter of the East. In the case of Milton, we find faraway Asian places exerting pressure on the Puritan and republican imagination because of the obvious significance accorded them by rival European nations deeply interested in their economic potential. If representing the satanic enterprise in Paradise Lost provided Milton with the opportunity to express his interest in early modern English activities in the New World and the projects of European expansionism, it also enabled him to mark his increasing fascination with such Asian cultural spaces as China and India. Milton reveals his own fascination with China in the expository travel narrative, A Brief History of Moscovia. In this work he sidetracks from his Russian itinerary at one point to offer a description of different routes into Cathay. In chapter 3 of Moscovia, with its wealth of glimpses of sites in and about Cathay, mention is specifically made of the Middle Kingdom’s overflowing wealth through the invocation of the familiar trope of Oriental(ized) plenitude: “The City abounds with rich Merchandize, Velvets, Damasks, Cloth of Gold and Tissue, with many sorts of sugars” (Prose Works, 8:509). In the preface to Moscovia, Milton mentions how he had been drawn “with some delight” by various authors “from the eastern Bounds of Russia, to the Walls of Cathay” (8:475). In Areopagitica, he writes about

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the unavoidable rapidity and permeability with which “the contagion [of] foreine books” (2:518) makes it readily accessible to readers, culture, and society by invoking the world of ocean travel for metaphorical contextualization. Infusion of ideas from books “will finde a passage to the people farre easier and shorter then an Indian voyage, though it could be sail’d either by the North of Cataio Eastward, or of Canada Westward” (2:518–19). Alertness to the difficulties encountered in ocean travel to reach new lands and chart sea routes to access the reputed wealth of the Orient informs Milton’s epic imagination and polemical structuration. In Book 10 of Paradise Lost, Sin and Death are discovered to perform their own epic journeying to claim the space colonized by Satan on behalf of hell’s denizens:

Then [Sin and Death] from out Hell Gates into the waste Wide Anarchy of Chaos damp and dark Flew diverse, and with Power (thir Power was great) Hovering upon the Waters; what they met Solid or slimy, as in raging Sea Tost up and down, together crowded drove From each side shoaling towards the mouth of Hell. As when two Polar Winds blowing adverse Upon the Cronian Sea, together drive Mountains of Ice, that stop th’ imagin’d way Beyond Petsora Eastward, to the rich Cathaian Coast. (10.282–93)

Obtaining a telepathic affirmation of Satan’s success in Eden, Sin and Death venture forth into Chaos in a diabolic parody of God’s creative act as described at the beginning of the Book of Genesis. Chaos is depicted with reference to similes obtained from the world of contemporary ocean travel. In his epic simile, the “Mountains of Ice” that get thrown in the way by polar winds “blowing adverse” upon the Arctic Ocean inhibit the discovery of the northeast passage (as sought after, for example, by Hudson in 1608) to “the rich / Cathaian Coast.” Asian geographical spaces are characteristically invoked to frame Satan’s hazardous journey to Eden. In Book 3 of Paradise Lost, Milton tells us that along the way the devil “lights on the barren Plains / Of Sericana, where Chineses drive / With Sails and Wind thir cany Waggons light” (3.437– 39). The place where Satan takes a pause is “Sericana,” a region in North-

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west China and an appellative that can also designate the Gobi Desert over which the Chinese are said to travel in sail-powered wagons. Satan’s journey is framed in part by the cartographic coordinates found in the atlases making up Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (which includes in its repertoire such maps of Asia as the Asiae Nova Descriptio) and exoticized through reference to the traveling habits of the Chinese on their wind-wagons, first introduced to England via Parke’s translation of Mendoza. In Book 11 of Paradise Lost, Milton makes China a central place in Michael’s vision afforded Adam of “all Earth’s Kingdoms and thir Glory” (11.384). Marked by conceptual and geographical distance as well as its status as a superior cultural and civilizational kingdom, China becomes one other symbolic site for seventeenth-century England’s conception of its political status vis-à-vis other societies and nations. Before moving westward, Michael’s catalog of the world’s kingdoms and glory begins in the Far East: the Seat Of mightiest Empire, from the destin’d Walls Of Cambalu, seat of Cathaian Can, And Samarchand by Oxus, Temir’s Throne, To Paquin of Sinœan Kings, and thence To Agra and Lahor of great Mogul Down to the golden Chersonese. (11.386-92) From “Cambalu,” the royal residence of the Mongol rulers and chief city of Cathay, the empires of the world open up to include “Samarchand,” which, in Mercator’s Atlas of 1636, referred to a province of Tartary. Samarkand was the capital famously ruled by Tamerlane the Great, the subject of Christopher Marlowe’s powerful play on the insatiable appetite of tyrannical rule and imperial ambition. It was from Samarkand that Tamerlane, who had fashioned his political identity as a dynastic founder built upon both the Islamic and Turkic traditions, extended his rule to encompass India and Anatolia. If Tamerlane had accepted Islam and traced his pedigree to none other than Genghis Khan himself, Babur, the first Mughal emperor who invaded India, claimed descent from both Genghis and Tamerlane. In 1618, Thomas Coryate had indicated that one of his reasons for wanting to visit India was to see the Gur-e-Amir, the great architectural monument of Tamerlane’s tomb located in Samarkand; his other reasons were to be-

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hold the countenance of Jahangir, view his elephants, and see the River Ganges.19 The third reference in Michael’s catalog, “Paquin” or Peking, was sometimes associated for the seventeenth-century reader with Samarkand itself. Michael’s visionary eye sweeps over to the great Mughal Empire, as designated by “Agra” and “Lahor,” and then onward to the Turkish Ottoman Empire and the African continent. Indeed, from the time that Babur inaugurated the Mughal Dynasty in 1526 and established himself in Agra until Shah Jahan’s resituation of its capital seat to Delhi, Agra was the famed repository of the wealth of one of the most extensive empires of the medieval world. Michael’s cataloging of the postlapsarian kingdoms of the world, beginning distinctively, as we said, with Asian ones, is predicated upon a powerful sense of the East’s great empires, culture, and civilization. Even though Paradise Lost specifically invokes the greatness of the East to make a theological comment on the fragility of humankind’s postlapsarian ambition, that greatness nevertheless holds contemporary fascination and topical resonance for Milton’s seventeenth-century reader. Interestingly, the mixed response of cultural anxiety and fascination toward Asian geographical spaces suggested in Paradise Lost is located in the epic representation of the devil’s journeying toward Eden. When Milton itemizes one place name after another in his tracking of Satan’s itinerary, he not only portrays the devil as history’s archetypal “globetrotter,” but deploys him as a literary vehicle for conveying his own curiosity about foreign lands and cultures. For the reader, identifying Milton’s interest in various geographical locations does not mean easy and ready access to particular significances that are attached (implicitly or explicitly) to those spaces. With Paradise Lost’s allusions to China, for instance, specific authorial and cultural denotations are less readily available than larger connotative resonances tied to the representation of fallen human ambitions and the conditions of postlapsarian reality. This thematic focus on the conditions of the fallen world shows that, at some level, the allusions to geographical locations and exotic cultural spaces are deployed to convey the epic poet’s theological view of the world. Milton’s theological reading of political and historical processes cannot finally be separated from interest in the “secular” activities of overseas mercantile ventures and international relations. His interest in faraway lands like China helps bring some focus to the intersection of a republican consciousness with the pragmatic recognition that encounters between lands and cultures constitute an important and unavoidable aspect of seventeenth-century modernity. For all of Milton’s

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republican politics and his focus on inaugurating God’s great Christian Commonwealth in England, he could not escape the impact of a modernity characterized by “an irremediable human pluralism.”20 Returning to Michael’s catalog of the kingdoms of the world, the presence of China as one important manifestation of empire coexists with another important presence—India. If Ormuz, a rich trading city situated at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, is invoked very early on by Milton to describe Satan’s throne, so is India: we recall “the wealth of Ormus and of Ind.” Satan’s flight toward the gates of hell, described in Book 2, lines 629 to 642, is also closely associated with the activities of merchant traders in the Indian Ocean world and Southeast Asia:

Meanwhile the Adversary of God and Man, Satan with thoughts inflam’d of highest design, Puts on swift wings, and towards the Gates of Hell Explores his solitary flight; sometimes He scours the right hand coast, sometimes the left, Now shaves with level wing the Deep, then soars Up to the fiery concave tow’ring high. As when far off at Sea a Fleet descri’d Hangs in the Clouds, by Equinoctial Winds Close sailing from Bengala, or the Isles Of Ternate and Tidore, whence Merchants bring Their spicy Drugs: they on the Trading Flood Through the wide Ethiopian to the Cape Ply stemming nightly toward the Pole.

On the symbolic level, the distinctive deployment of sailing imagery, with its allusions to such works as the Odyssey, the Aeneid, the Argonautica, and the Lusiads, establishes Satan’s ontological status as a fallen being. In classical mythology, the loss of the Golden Age necessitated the building of the first boat, Jason’s Argo, launched in search of the Golden Fleece. According to David Quint, Satan’s identity is also marked by his deep association with a boat of romance sailing through the seas of Fortune; managing to accomplish only temporal needs and ends, Satan is locked into the circles and errancies of the romance narrative.21 One may also identify in Milton’s figurative representation of Satan as a merchant trader the influence of a biblical tradition that associates sea-going vessels and merchandising activities with the prosperity of the heathen kingdoms of the world. Northrop Frye comments on this tradition:

china, india, and paradise lost  [ 125  ] The water imagery of the parody-demonic includes the Nile, Euphrates, and Tigris of history, the rivers giving life and strength to Egypt, Babylon, and Assyria respectively, as well as the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf with all their heathen shipping and commerce. It was particularly the Phoenicians who were sea traders; and as Tyre, the chief city of Phoenicia, is one of Ezekiel’s denunciatory targets, we hear a good deal about the eventual downfall of its prosperity and its turning into a barren rock (the words “Tyre” and “rock” are close enough together in Hebrew to make a pun). Similarly the Great Whore of Babylon and Rome will lose her shipping trade (Revelation 18:19).22

In Milton’s England any religiously inflected distrust of commerce and trading activities is generally unsustainable for long. In the Fifth Monarchist prophetess Anna Trapnel’s The Cry of a Stone, for example, we come across an interesting hymn exhorting merchants to place their faith in Christ, who is immune to economic losses and shipwrecks. This spiritualized exhortation not to prioritize the enticements of economic gain cannot, however, quite manage to cancel out Trapnel’s enjoyment of the condiments and delicacies that come from Asia. If Christ is described by Trapnel as the source of “true gold” and “sweet preserves,” her conception of the “candied ginger” and “preserved nutmegs” that “made your mouths overflow” derives from a familiarity with “those foreign parts, / Which are made up by those Indians / That are so full of arts.”23 We know that by the latter half of the sixteenth century, English merchant companies had pursued trading profit in an entirely secular commercial context, even engaging in economic activities with the Ottoman Empire.24 Milton appears to be fully aware of this context, making express reference to Bengal (“Bengala”) and the Spice Islands of Ternate and Tidore. The reference to the Cape of Good Hope would have resonated for the seventeenth-century reader because it alluded to Vasco da Gama’s successful navigation round the Cape to reach the west coast of India in May 1498. In Book 4 of Paradise Lost, Milton once again deploys the epic simile of the Indian Ocean world to describe the efforts expanded by Satan to enter the Garden of Eden: As when to them who sail Beyond the Cape of Hope, and now are past Mozambic, off at Sea North-East winds blow Sabean Odors from the spicy shore

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Of Araby the blest, with such delay Well pleas’d they slack thir course, and many a League Cheer’d with the grateful smell old Ocean smiles. (4.159–65)

In Paradise Lost, Chaos itself is depicted with reference to similes obtained from the world of contemporary ocean travel. Its conditions are tumultuous, no different from those experienced by Satan when he first launched off from the gates of hell in search of God’s new-created world. When Milton thinks of ocean travel made familiar to his contemporary reader through Hakluyt and Purchas’s culturally momentous compilations, he imagines the hazards that are involved. Such imagination informs his epic description of Satan’s flight toward the gates of hell and also of Beelzebub’s daunting account of what any devil planning to undertake the task of destroying Eden must be prepared to undergo. Milton’s allusions to the Cape of Good Hope in Books 2 and 4 of his epic poem have been read as constituting a literary and ideological engagement with Camões’s The Lusiads, made available in the English translation of the Royalist Sir Richard Fanshawe in 1655. Paradise Lost is found to carry structural and thematic allusions to the great Portuguese epic of empire. Satan’s inquiring of Uriel on how to find his way to God’s new-created world may suggest the wise men’s encounter with Herod, but it also recalls da Gama’s stop at the court of the king of Malindi asking for directions to India. The historically famous account of the difficulties involved in negotiating the Cape of Good Hope alluded to by Milton also finds its epic equivalent in Adamastor’s promise to the Portuguese sailors who must travel round the Cape. Camões’s emphasis that only the experience of dire hazards and excruciating toils can bring immortal honor and esteem also appears to frame Milton’s representation of Satan’s parodic sacrifice to undertake the harrowing journey to Eden. In The Lusiads, the epic poem that links Portuguese imperial might to the control over mercantile commerce, India is a land marked by its liberal possession of spices and the gold and precious stones of the courts. Calicut, the very last city visited by da Gama in India and the chief emporium of Arab trade on the Malabar Coast, was, as Lisa Jardine reminds us, a thriving international trading center with clients including Europeans who came overland via the countries of the Ottoman Empire as well as Muslim and Jewish merchants from such diverse places as North Africa, Turkey, Persia, and Egypt.25 Indeed, in The Lusiads, the whole of India is exuberantly de-

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scribed as “bursting with merchandise of every kind, thanks to its maritime traffic with other lands from China to the Nile.”26 Critique of covetousness and desire for material wealth, directly associated with this epic poem’s religiously inflected focus, never manages, however, to sustain itself for any prolonged stretch of narrative time. The end of Canto 8 may offer a litany of the ills that love of gold can bring but almost immediately after that, shortly into Canto 9, we read of da Gama’s success in obtaining for the Portuguese the precious spices of the East: pepper, mace, nutmegs, cloves, and cinnamon. Camões was clearly excited by the fact that da Gama’s historic voyage to India had helped open up knowledge of such places as Ceylon and the Moluccas, where more spices could be found. In Paradise Lost the figuration of Satan as a merchant adventurer reveals Milton’s interest in matters of international commerce at the same time that it registers a certain spiritual distrust of the implications of being caught up in a world of economic pursuit. Another interesting and unexpected narrative location highlights Milton’s preoccupation with the world of economic activities—Eve proceeding to “pluck” from nature “such choice” of the best fruits (Paradise Lost, 5.327) to prepare a repast for the visiting Raphael: with dispatchful looks in haste She turns, on hospitable thoughts intent What choice to choose for delicacy best, What order, so contriv’d as not to mix Tastes, not well join’d, inelegant, but bring Taste after taste upheld with kindliest change; Bestirs her then, and from each tender stalk Whatever Earth all-bearing Mother yields In India East or West, or middle shore In Pontus or the Punic Coast, or where Alcinoüs reign’d, fruit of all kinds, in coat, Rough, or smooth rin’d, or bearded husk, or shell She gathers, Tribute large. (5.331–43) Milton’s Eve is portrayed here as a connoisseur of the produce that nature yields with exuberant generosity, overlaying the immediate domestic space of Eden with a globalized dimension. In this passage, Milton alludes to different regions of the world to describe Eve’s hospitality—Asia, the Americas, the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Even the act of collecting

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fruits and plants draws attention to the early modern pursuit of economic interest, particularly in the reference made to the East and the West Indies. John Archer has observed that “Eve’s hospitality is oddly global and domestic at the same time, a primordial anticipation of world economic exchange.”27 In Paradise Lost, it is not only Satan but also Eve who gets associated with ocean travel and the spice trade. We find this association already present in the familiar narrative moment of Eve’s appreciation of her own image in “the wat’ry gleam” (4.461) in Book 4. Eve’s controversial encounter with her image in water suggests a vanity that is both theological and economic in import. In admiring her reflection, she anticipates Pope’s Belinda in The Rape of the Lock, the young coquette surrounded by the paraphernalia of conspicuous consumption. Milton’s specific deployment of imagery associated with the earth’s abundance to describe Eve’s homely gathering of edibles disrupts the insularity of prelapsarian pastoral through references to the larger contemporary world of conspicuous consumption and commercial activities. Where Milton’s earlier forging of associations between the devil and the spice trade might have lent a negative value to the cultural logic of such activities, his association of Eve with nature’s plenty linked to the wealth of the East and West Indies indicates a deep fascination with the economic potentiality of these activities. Milton’s interest in India as a site that brings into focus European activities in international trade and imperial ambitions finds expression in an epic poem that also represents the East through theologically inflected lenses. Eden, it has been noted, carries allusions to the Indian subcontinent. In a compendious simile deployed to contextualize the alighting of the devil on the outer shell of this “pendant world” (Paradise Lost, 2.1052), India is linked to Paradise, which is the destination of the satanic journey, an association that has the effect of infernalizing Asia as well as rendering it the victim of the satanic enterprise.28 In Book 3 of Paradise Lost, Milton describes Satan’s flight from hell to earth by alluding to Asian geographical coordinates:

Here walk’d the Fiend at large in spacious field. As when a Vultur on Imaus bred, Whose snowy ridge the roving Tartar bounds, Dislodging from a Region scarce of prey To gorge the flesh of Lambs or yearling Kids On Hills where Flocks are fed, flies toward the Springs Of Ganges or Hydaspes, Indian streams. (3.430–36)

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Like a “Vultur on Imaus bred,” Satan “flies toward the Springs / Of Ganges or Hydaspes, Indian streams.” Like a bird of prey bred in “Imaus,” a mountain range stretching roughly northeast from Afghanistan to the Arctic Ocean and separating Tartary (roughly Siberia) from Mongolia and the Gobi Desert, Satan proceeds from physically rugged terrain to an Eden-like Kashmir, where the Hydaspes (modern Jhelum) River rises. The interest in India in Paradise Lost is part of the exhilarating sense Milton inherited that contemporary society existed at a privileged moment owing to its possession of a highly sophisticated level of cartographical and navigational knowledge. Milton’s interest in India is captured in his invocation of aspects of its landscape (such as the rivers “Ganges and Indus” [Paradise Lost, 9.82]) to describe Satan’s itinerary to Eden, and also to serve symbolic functions like describing the condition of the postlapsarian world. When Adam and Eve desperately sought out some form of modest covering for the shame of “Those middle parts” (9.1097) after their lustful lovemaking following the fall, they found it in the foliage afforded by The Figtree, not that kind for Fruit renown’d, But such as at this day to Indians known In Malabar or Decan spreads her Arms Branching so broad and long, that in the ground The bended Twigs take root, and Daughters grow About the Mother Tree, a Pillar’d shade High overarch’t, and echoing Walks between; There oft the Indian Herdsman shunning heat Shelters in cool, and tends his pasturing Herds At Loopholes cut through thickest shade. (9.1101–110)

The ability of Adam and Eve to avail themselves of the leaves of the East Indian banyan tree—documented in Gerard’s Herball (1597) and other contemporary encyclopedias—forges a direct associative link between India’s natural landscape and the conditions of postlapsarian reality. If the experience of postlapsarian shame signifies within an Eastern and Asian setting, it also does so in relation to the context of the New World. The leaves gathered by Adam and Eve are said to be as “broad as Amazonian Targe [shield]” (Paradise Lost, 9.1111): the flora of India has merged seamlessly with a reference associated with the Americas. And then to complete the shift from the East Indian world to a New World setting, Adam and Eve are analogized with “th’ American so girt / With feather’d Cincture, naked else and wild /

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Among the Trees on Isles and woody Shores” (9.1116–118). “India” and “Indian”—Paradise Lost superimposes these two nouns for place and person to obtain its controlling figure for the designation of shame and postlapsarian reality. The representational ease with which Milton’s allusions to the Asian subcontinent slide into allusions to the New World native is culturally facilitated by an already entrenched conflation of the image of “India” with the “Indies” in the early modern European imagination. Jyotsna Singh has noted that “images of India did not converge on a single geographic entity, but proliferated in a range of associations drawn from Columbus’s misnaming of the Americas as the ‘Indies’ to the ‘wonderfull fame’ of the Mogul king, Jehangir, and his ancestors, who were the descendants of the fabled conquerer [sic], Tamburlaine.”29 According to the logic of Milton’s literary deployment of this figure, South Asia and the Amerindian both constitute signifiers of fallenness. In having to use banyan leaves that are as broad as Amazonian shields to hide their shame, Adam and Eve have radically departed from the condition when “Godlike erect, with native Honor clad,” they had “In naked Majesty seem’d Lords of all” (Paradise Lost, 4.289–90). In Paradise Lost shame is partially and ineffectually hidden by the skimpy covering afforded by a tropical fig leaf from India. It is through the disturbing recognition of their nakedness that Adam and Eve obtain for the first time a powerfully disturbing awareness of what the fall really entails: overwhelming shame and guilt directly ensuing from the loss of innocence. When we consider Milton’s handling of the matter of India in Paradise Lost, we find him reading the significance of this Asian subcontinent through theologically inflected lenses even as he shows deep recognition of the political and economic implications of contemporary trading activities. Alluding to the ambitions of the seafaring Portuguese for supremacy over the Indian Ocean, Paradise Lost registers alertness to the imperial ambitions of early modern Europe and to the importance of various economic and trade practices for the welfare of the English nation. Recognizing the supreme importance of dominating the spice trade, the Portuguese had historically set out to control and monopolize the commerce of the Indian Ocean with the express purpose of squeezing out Muslim traders currently trading there and other European competitors like the Venetians and Spaniards. Fully aware that any Portuguese ambition to establish commercial supremacy over the Indian Ocean necessitated seizure and control of important geopolitical sites in South and Southeast Asia, the famous Don Alfonse de Albuquerque captured Goa in 1510. Albuquerque wanted to wrest

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from the Moors their trade monopoly in the region; this active design to gain uncontestable control over the spice trade was part of a larger political ambition to hit at the heart of the mighty Ottoman Empire. The conquest of Malacca one year after the capture of Goa marked the scope of Portuguese imperial ambitions. Portugal’s political and economic engagements in the region also involved islands that formed part of the Maluku Archipelago. Exerting important influence in the Sultanate of Ternate, the Portuguese found themselves engaged in frictions with the Spanish, allied with Tidore. Conflict did not transpire only between the Portuguese and the Spanish, for the first two decades of the seventeenth century saw the Dutch muscling their way into the region to consolidate a near monopoly of the spice trade to Europe. Not only did the Dutch force the Portuguese out of Ternate and Tidore, the original homes of the clove tree, they posed formidable obstacles to English efforts to access the lucrative clove and nutmeg markets of Asia. Deeply aware of European ambitions in Asia, early modern England had identified “India/Indies” as “both a site of ‘treasures’ or ‘commodities,’ which have generated price wars among European merchants, and a crucial signifier in the formation of England’s emerging identity as a ‘nation,’ significant to its later claims of imperial power.”30 Within the context of Restoration politics, Satan, Blair Hoxby argues, can be read as a figure of the East India merchant. The significance of such a figure resides in an implied interrogation of the growing clout, influence, and political presence of the East India Company in the articulation and definition of Restoration England’s national and political identity as an empire of trade and commerce. Hoxby highlights that part of Charles II’s royal progress from the Tower of London to Whitehall entailed stopping at the East India House: “While it was not unusual for foreign merchants to present a tableau in a royal entry, this appears to have been the first time that an English monarch stopped at a merchant house. Here the East India Company expressed its ‘dutiful Affections to His Majesty.’ . . . It certainly had an incentive to do so, for while the company had finally been granted a charter by Oliver Cromwell in 1657, it had judged it best to suppress the document at the Restoration, and it had not yet secured a royal charter in its place. . . . If the East India Company made a discreet claim to the king’s political gratitude, it granted the king a far more explicit and laudable role in the restoration of trade.”31 Hand in hand and hoping to benefit from one another, both the king and the East India Company strategically worked toward consolidating the identity of the Restoration political economy as an empire of trade.

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With the return of the monarchy in 1660 Milton had to come to grips with the designs of the Restoration regime to define Charles II’s rule as inextricably linked to consolidating England’s national identity as an empire built on commerce and trade. Read as a response and reaction to the controlling theme of London’s displacement of Amsterdam as the entrepôt of world trade in John Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis, which vividly registers a Royalist perspective in its reimagining of empire in terms of trade rather than dominion, Satan in Paradise Lost signifies within the controlling context of the restored monarch’s political identification of England as an empire of commercial expansion.32 Even the cartographic vision that comes toward the end of Paradise Lost can be read with reference to Milton’s interrogation of the political impulse to empire in favor of cultivating the paradise within replete with all its embracement of the Christian virtues of faith, patience, temperance, and love. This critique of the political motivations and impulse to empire cannot finally be dissociated from his interrogation of the authority of the Restoration regime built upon the conception of an empire of commerce meant at an important level to contest the United Provinces and in particular Holland for primacy in engaging the world’s trade. Hoxby tells us that Michael’s roll-call of cartographic place names—“Mombaza,” “Quiloa,” “Melind,” “Sofala,” etc.—can be traced directly to contemporary Dutch atlases, the point being that these areas of the world are ­implicated in Restoration England’s design to etch its identity as a commercial and trade empire overtaking Dutch supremacy in international trade and Holland’s obvious imperial ambitions.33 In the seventeenth century such atlases, marked by careful topographical and hydrographical information, were produced under the auspices of such commercial companies as the Dutch East India Company (established in 1602), marking a historically important shift away from the earlier production of geographical knowledge and commodities underwritten by imperial patronage. Geographers now served directly the seventeenth-century joint-stock company, whose primary aim was “to incorporate the entire trading network of the Indian and Pacific Oceans into one enormous monopoly.”34 In Milton’s day, the Dutch had foregrounded its distinctive political and commercial presence by dominating trading activities in New Guinea, Borneo, Sumatra, and Java as well as settled and traded in the Caribbean, Brazil, and North America. It must be noted that by the time Milton began writing Paradise Lost in earnest about 1658, the general situation of English merchandising activities was markedly different from the conditions existing under James I

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and Charles I. Under these first two Stuart monarchs, England was only beginning to participate in mercantile activities in the oceans with some degree of enthusiasm. And even so, in the reign of Charles I, royal approval had already been granted for one Sir William Courteen and others “to undertake a voyage to Goa, the parts of Mallahar, and coast of China and Japan, there to trade,”35 an authorization that effectively ignored the British East India Company’s monopoly of the Eastern trade. In the Stuart period, the Dutch had become the Europeans with express imperial ambitions. Although latecomers to the East, having arrived some thirty years after the Spaniards and some ninety years behind the Portuguese, they arrived in China in 1604 propelled by nationalistic sentiments and the evangelical spirit of the Protestant Reformation. Indeed, two years before the Dutch arrival in China, the Netherlands East India Company was officially established and granted authority to maintain troops, colonize overseas territories, declare war, and conclude peace with countries in the East.36 The Dutch then became fairly active in Asia, seizing Sumatra, Java, and the Moluccas as well as winning the right to trade with Tokugawa Japan. The significance of such activities, undertaken by other European nations, was not lost on the English.37 In the 1640s, much effort was therefore expanded to transform London into an entrêpot for the re-export of colonial produce. The passing of the Navigation Acts of 1650 and 1651 showed an England making moves to challenge the Dutch in fighting for the world’s trade. Over two hundred ships added to the British navy between 1651 and 1660 built a substantial fleet employed deliberately to obtain commercial advantages.38 The English republicans themselves had brought considerable focus to bear on working out the terms of the relationship between commerce, expansionism, and national identity. The pursuit of economic interest in trading activities constituted an important point of consideration in the debates waged on the relationship between liberty and expansionist ambition. To the vexing question of how to resolve the classical tensions between liberty and empire, republican thinkers had considered that a solution of sorts might perhaps be found in the foregrounding of commerce as a major reason of state. For all his admiration for classical republics, Algernon Sidney had embraced the idea that trade provided the sinews of war. While Charles Davenant, eldest son of Sir William Davenant and an economist who strongly supported mercantile theory, showed concern that commerce would bring in luxury and an attendant moral debility, he nevertheless accepted trade as a necessary evil. The distrust of luxury is moral at one

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level, but for Davenant moral considerations needed to be subordinated to pragmatic realities and even ideological convictions. Building a maritime power may circumvent the problematic of desiring to preserve liberty while enjoying at the same time the glories brought by a commonwealth for expansion, since empire can now be defined as maritime and commercial rather than territorial and military. In this regard, important lessons are afforded by republics like Florence, Venice, and the Dutch Republic, all of which had been economically vibrant in the early modern period.39 The presence of China and India in Milton’s Paradise Lost is significant not only because of what it reveals about the shape of nascent English imperial desire but also because of its adjustment of the recognizable structures and narratives of this desire in the acts of settling plantations in the New World and colonization of Ireland. It is also significant because it registers Milton’s recognition that England’s full participation in the contemporary ethos of commercial expansionism is requisite to the consolidation of a powerful nation. When Milton set out to engage with the implications of what it meant for England to be an empire of commerce, the very terms deployed by Charles II to define the political character of his rule, he brought into play the impinging structures of republican thinking, Puritan spirituality, European literatures of empire, and even the restored monarch’s conception of English national identity. In the process of this engagement, he found himself invoking Asian referents to give expression to his thoughts on English national identity as it signifies within the context of contemporary economic realities and international politics. China and India find their significance in Paradise Lost’s mapmindedness, its deploying of a “Lordly eye” (3.578) that exercises a “globe-consuming gaze.”40 This particular characteristic of the poem’s fascination with geographical sweeps has been read as indicating the controlling presence of an imperial temper, one that cannot finally be separated from a theological vision tied to the proselytizing mandate. Specifically speaking, Milton’s epic references to the kingdoms of the world have less to do with a missionizing temper and more with a reading of what various world empires can reveal about God’s workings in human history and the conditions of postlapsarian existence. In Milton’s theological and political economy, the (Southwest) Asian spaces associated with Old Testament history—that part of the world generally referred to as the Middle East today—powerfully capture the unbreakable pattern of the historical rise and fall of empires as well as offer an account of the controlling patterns of economic and cultural decline. Embracing such political entities as Mesopotamia,

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Assyria, Babylon, and Baghdad, this ancient Asian world of the Old Testament is central to the scriptural account of the creation of the world, Eden, and humankind’s fall from the condition of innocence. John Archer has argued that, for Milton, “the twisted family romances of the Greek pantheon have the same demonic origin as the idol worship of Asia. . . . Milton viewed classical civilization as part of a greater antiquity, and like Boemus, Stafford, and Lloyd he saw Graeco-Roman and even Egyptian culture as deriving from the culture of biblical Asia.”41 Asian geopolitical and cultural spaces, especially contemporarily significant sites like China and India, indeed serve in Milton’s writings to facilitate meditations on the nature and character of political tyranny. Robert Thomas Fallon has observed that Michael’s vision toward the end of Paradise Lost presents an interesting overview of “the empires of Asia and Africa, ruled over by Chinese kings, Indian moguls, Russian czars, Byzantine sultans, and the khans of Cathay,”42 glancing only furtively at the European world and historically important Roman Empire. In Paradise Regained, by contrast, contemporary Rome signifies as the greatest empire that ever existed in human history and is set in contrast with the superior character of Jesus’s spiritual kingdom. Specifically underwriting the entirety of the Roman Empire’s ostensible historical and political greatness is the impermanence of all human ambition, a postlapsarian dimension that also frames Milton’s portrayal of the world’s ancient and Asian empires in Paradise Lost. Finally, Milton’s fascination with Asia reveals the distinctiveness of his theologically inflected vision of historical process and God’s workings in time. While this theological focus may suggest a political temper defined by a certain insularity—associated with a Puritan mindset tied to the convictions of classical and biblical republicanism—it shows itself to be affected also by such contemporary activities as overseas commercial ventures and contestation with Europe for political presence in Asia. If alluding to China and India enables Milton to think about the fragility of world empires, it also facilitates meditation upon the political implications of tapping the wealth of the Orient. Given the defining context of Charles II’s vision of England as an empire of commerce, any reference to China or India in a poem like Paradise Lost would have resonated for a post-Restoration reader not only for its informing theological vision but also for its engagement with a culture’s emerging recognition that the future of England’s greatness must be predicated upon imprinting a powerful political presence upon foreign shores.

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notes This essay began as a paper, “Representing China: English Travel Narratives, Epic, and the Archeology of Desire,” presented at the conference, “Between Empires: Orientalism Before 1600,” held at Trinity College, Cambridge, in July 2001. Since then it has been substantially revised, thanks to the continuing faith and sustained encouragement of the editors of this book. Finally, to my wife Rebecca who has stood by me unflinchingly in all my projects, this essay is affectionately dedicated. 1. John Milton, Paradise Lost, in The Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1957). References to Milton’s prose works are to Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don Wolfe et al., 8 vols. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1953–82). 2. For a reading of Marco Polo’s Travels as a seminal text in the history of travel writing that contributed toward shaping Europe’s relations with the Orient, see Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), esp. 87–112. Marco Polo’s Travels offers an account of the strangeness of the East that is familiar to his reader by virtue of a shared understanding of topoi and aspects of representation predicated upon readings of prior travel literature. Polo’s “familiar strangeness” (88) must, however, be read against a shift in the relative position of Cathay vis-à-vis the European world, one tied to a much more concrete and heightened sense of the East’s dangerous palpability. For a commentary on the appeal of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville and also on its cultural significance as a collection of unrelated scraps of bric-a-brac, see Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), esp. 239–58. Heng argues that much of the appeal of The Travels as a travel romance is tied to “a spectacular planetary survey that interconnects time, space, and culture” (242). Readerly pleasure is generated in response to the text’s compilation of exotica and the thrilling sense it communicates of commanding the world in all its variety and complexity. 3. For selected writings of representative explorers, including Gilbert’s and Frobisher’s, see Robin Hanbury-Tenison, ed., The Oxford Book of Exploration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). For an interesting reading of the three attempts made in the 1570s by Martin Frobisher to locate the Northwest Passage and the resultant cultural encounter between the English and the Eskimos inhabiting that large island now known as Baffin Island, see Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 4. Robert Parke, The Historie of the Great and Mightie Kingdome of China, and the Situation Thereof: Togither with the Great Riches, Hugh Citties, Politike Governement, and Rare Inventions in the Same (London: 1588); see “The Epistle Dedicatory.” 5. Ibid., 2.

china, india, and paradise lost  [ 137  ] 6. Ibid., 3. 7. Ibid., 2. 8. Ibid., 7. 9. Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 205. 10. See D. E. Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–1800 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), and Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985). 11. Robert Markley, “‘The Destin’d Walls / Of Cambalu’: Milton, China, and the Ambiguities of the East,” in Milton and the Imperial Vision, ed. Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999), 191–213; see especially 203. For an important book-length study of the significance of attitudes toward the wealth and power of East Asia in seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century England, see Robert Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Unfortunately, this book appeared after the writing of my article and I was unable to take into account its insights in framing my consideration of the subject. 12. I am indebted here to Jane Degenhardt’s reading of the place of material culture in early modern English receptions of China in “Importing China: The Chinaware Trade and Renaissance England,” presented at the conference, “Between Empires: Orientalism Before 1600,” held at Trinity College, Cambridge, in July 2001. 13. John Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (London: Fontana, 1993), 42. 14. Francis Bacon, The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 470. 15. Ibid., 481. 16. I wish to express my thanks to Gwee Li Sui for suggesting the idea that Bacon’s New Atlantis may be read as registering English cultural anxieties concerning perceived Chinese technological advancements. 17. David Porter, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), 2–3. 18. See Markley, “The Destin’d Walls,” 191–213. 19. Jyotsna Singh, Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: “Discoveries” of India in the Language of Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1996), 1; see citation from Mr Thomas Coriate to his friends in England sendeth greeting. For a discussion of Thomas Coryate and Sir Thomas Roe’s experiences in Mughal India, and their significance for a reading of early modern English encounters with the East, see Richmond Barbour, Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East, 1576–1626 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 115–93. 20. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 69. 21. David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 253–67. Quint also provides an

[ 138  ]  walter s. h. lim interesting discussion of the relationship between the writing of epic poetry and class prejudice. Linked to the ethos of aristocratic hauteur and ethics of martial heroism, the epic poem typically casts merchandising and trading activities in a negative light. Different epic poems like the Odyssey, the Liberata, and the Lusiads address the often ambivalent signification of merchant adventuring in relation to the epic narrative of martial heroics: see 248–67. 22. Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (Toronto: Academic Press Canada, 1981), 145–46. 23. Anna Trapnel, The Cry of a Stone, ed. Hilary Hinds (Tempe, Ariz.: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2000), 30. 24. Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods (London: Macmillan, 1996), 376. 25. Ibid., 289. 26. Luis Vaz de Camões, The Lusiads, trans. William C. Atkinson (London: Penguin, 1952), 169. 27. John Archer, Old Worlds: Egypt, Southwest Asia, India, and Russia in Early Modern English Writing (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), 87. 28. Balachandra Rajan, Under Western Eyes: From Milton to Macaulay (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 50–66. In Rajan’s study, the subject of Asia surfaces as an important locus of critical consideration of Milton’s relation to the colonial and imperial theme. Central to Rajan’s study is the place of India in Milton’s literary imagination and ideological context. It posits that the presence of this South Asian geopolitical and cultural site in Paradise Lost marks the recognizable emergence of early modern English imperial desire, one that influenced future imperial expressions in the developing English literary tradition. Milton’s epic functions as a kind of controlling and originary text that sets the inescapable terms of reference for future readings of and political engagements with India. Rajan’s critical strategy involves conflating the historical details of Europe’s trade engagements with and colonial interests in the Asian world with Milton’s identifiable allusions to India. This leads to the general presupposition that Paradise Lost is imperial by virtue of its epic genre and its monumental place within a canonical tradition. In Rajan’s reading, the epic poem is associated with the imperial partly because of the controlling presence of an imperial or “arrogant” attitude, encapsulated in the encyclopedic sweep with which the epic eye surveys the nations of the world. It is also imperial because of the West’s possession of the prerogative of (textual) representation, which writes the East in the light of its own cultural assumptions, predicated upon a sense of innate superiority. This premise comes close to Edward Said’s definition of “Orientalism,” where part of what is going on involves the textual project of describing, defining, and narrativizing the Orient. Applied to early modern England, the systematic pulling together of travel narratives registers the English people’s sense of themselves as a nation, which often enough is conflated with a culture’s awakening sense of its imperial potential. The idea here is that any project to bring different regions of the world to the familiarity and

china, india, and paradise lost  [ 139  ] knowledge of the English reader facilitates the apprehension of cultural alterity through the mediation of England’s defining gaze. 29. Singh, Colonial Narratives, 19. 30. Ibid., 26. 31. Blair Hoxby, Mammon’s Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), 98–99. 32. Ibid., esp. 129–77. 33. Ibid., 160–77. 34. Jerry Brotton, Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 181. 35. Immanuel C. Y. Hsü, The Rise of Modern China (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1975), 135. 36. Ibid., 133. 37. For a reading of how early modern England in general, and the British East India Company in particular, jostled for trading privileges especially in Southeast Asia, see Robert Markley, “Riches, Power, Trade and Religion: The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1720,” Renaissance Studies 17 (2003): 494–516. 38. Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution: 1603–1714 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 145–61. 39. David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp. 141–45. 40. Bruce McLeod, The Geography of Empire in English Literature, 1580–1745 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 134. 41. Archer, Old Worlds, 84. 42. Robert Thomas Fallon, Divided Empire: Milton’s Political Imagery (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 106.

6 

“Beyond the Bounds of Truth”: Cultural Translation and William Chambers’s Chinese Garden David Porter

The most abundant harvest within eighteenth-century studies of recent developments in literary and cultural theory has occurred at the margins of the literary and historical disciplines as they have been traditionally ­constituted. Feminist scholarship has restored dozens of neglected women writers to a prominent place in the literary canon and foregrounded a series of historical and theoretical concerns that have become mainstays of early modern cultural studies. The field of postcolonial criticism that has emerged in the thirty years since Said’s Orientalism has, meanwhile, shifted renewed attention toward the history of cross-cultural encounter in the century preceding Napoleon’s conquests. The formation of modern national identities in the eighteenth century appears increasingly to have occurred through a process mediated in profound and complex ways by contacts with the foreign. Within British literary studies, interest in travel writing from the Grand Tour and beyond (Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Turkey, Johnson and Boswell in Scotland, Mary Wollstonecraft in Sweden), along with renewed assessments of colonialist dynamics in India and the Caribbean, have brought geographical peripheries into the center of the historical stage and prompted investigations of the role of foreignness even in works that evince little explicit interest in the foreign. If both feminism and postcolonialism have contributed to the range and vitality of scholarship on “the new eighteenth century,” there remains, of course, a crucial distinction in the applicability of their methodologies and [ 140  ]

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paradigms for work in this period. The central questions raised by feminist scholarship—questions about the cultural constitution of sexual identity, for example, and the social mechanisms of gender hierarchy—although configured differently in different periods, are broadly applicable across cultural and historical boundaries. The questions central to postcolonial studies, in contrast, questions of cultural identity in the once-colonized Third World, by definition presuppose a historical context subsequent both to colonial occupation and, often, to certain epistemological foundations in Enlightenment thought. While scholars have occasionally applied concepts borrowed from postcolonialism to the analysis of pre-colonialist or non-colonialist encounters, the history of such contacts in the early modern period remains relatively under-theorized in recent work. We are well positioned now to scrutinize the preconditions of British hegemony in India in the second half of the eighteenth century or the hybridization of cultural forms on early Caribbean sugar plantations, but recent work has equipped us less well, I would argue, to take an equally full and nuanced accounting of cross-cultural contacts mediated less predominantly, if at all, by an underlying ethos of violence and coercion. Analyses of Europe’s non-colonialist encounters with distant peoples— those that recent cultural criticism, in other words, has tended to overlook—typically define their significance in terms of one of several distinct modes of cultural translation. The first mode consists of the construction of imaginary geographies, the emergence of sensualized images of the East, for example, in the wake of Antoine Galland’s translation of The Thousand and One Nights (1704–17), or of the wise eastern sage embodied in Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (1721) or Oliver Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World (1762). The second form is more distinctly mimetic, involving the imitation or adaptation of alien practices in Europe, such as we find in garden structures modeled after mosques and pagodas or in the British adoption of the Turkish practice of smallpox inoculation promoted by Mary Wortley Montagu. The third, and perhaps most frequently invoked, category of cross-cultural translation is that of less direct forms of influence, which are, of course, notoriously tempting to posit and difficult to prove. We might cite here debates over the degree of Chinese influence on the development of the economic theories of Quesnay and the physiocrats in France, or indeed on the emergence of the natural style of landscape gardening, arguably one of the most important aesthetic innovations in eighteenthcentury England.1 Images, imitations, influences: these are the familiar terms in which we

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are most accustomed to thinking about cross-cultural perception and response, and yet as paradigms for grappling with the translative com­ponent of encounter, I would argue, they often prove inadequate. Our attention is directed in each case primarily toward the cultural products of encounter, the “translation” of foreignness, as it were, as it appears in the target language. This translation may be compared and contrasted, on occasion, with its source, and discrepancies duly noted and accounted for, but even so, the emphasis remains with the product, rather than the underlying cultural process of translation. The work of cultural translators, however, is never entirely disinterested, or fully removed, from the two worlds they are attempting to bridge. Their representations of the foreign must always arise, first of all, from distinct subject positions whose historical and cultural particularities lend themselves to certain limited and limiting ways of seeing the world. But beyond this widely acknowledged phenomenon of epistemological lens warping, we should also take account of the psychological impact of the moment of cross-cultural perception and its effects on the very process of conceiving and representing the culturally foreign. The act of “translation,” even in the metaphorical sense used here, always produces a degree of that “split consciousness” that Haun Saussy, in the third chapter of this volume, associates with specifically textual translation and the jarring juxtaposition of disparate semiotic systems it entails. This cognitive dissonance may be experienced at the moment of encounter as surprise, self-alienation, perplexity, or delight, but it seems safe to assume that its effects deeply color enduring memories of that moment and leave their traces upon its subsequent representation. The question I wish to raise is how the artifacts of encounter—the products of translation—are themselves mediated by the cognitive and affective dislocation implicit in any confrontation with radical otherness. How does the elemental experience of foreignness itself, in other words, figure in the naturalization of the foreign? ◊  ◊  ◊

William Chambers, the architect of Somerset House in London and the Royal Gardens at Kew, stands out as one of the most prominent and influential practitioners of cross-cultural translation in eighteenth-century Britain. He spent his formative years studying the architectural marvels of Rome and Paris, and has always been best known for his role, as the first academy-trained British architect, in transmitting the foundational design principles of Neoclassicism to England. He left his mark not only in

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his many prominent commissions, but also in the hugely influential Treatise on Civil Architecture (1759), the first systematic textbook on the subject in the English language. His preeminence as an architect, however, and identification with the style of Roman antiquity has never obscured a secondary affiliation with the aesthetic culture of the Chinese. Prior to settling on an architectural vocation and undertaking his studies on the Continent, Chambers had journeyed twice to the port city of Canton, in 1743– 44 and 1748–49, as an agent of the Swedish East India Company, returning with copious notes, drawings, and first-hand impressions of a country that Englishmen would not visit in large numbers for another hundred years. Though little is known about the details of these trips, apart from the fact that he visited temples and gardens in and around the city, his youthful travels clearly left an indelible mark on his subsequent career. His first publication on his return to England in the mid-1750s brought together a series of designs of Chinese buildings, furnishings, and costumes, along with an essay “On the Art of Laying Out Gardens among the Chinese” (1757), which was widely reprinted and commented upon. The next several years gave him the opportunity to bring the ideas in his book to life at Kew Gardens, where a House of Confucius and glittering ten-story pagoda soon bore witness to his facility as a transmitter of the exotic design motifs much in fashion during the heyday of chinoiserie. His final gesture of cross-cultural translation in this vein came in 1772 and 1773 with a pair of extended treatises on oriental gardening that expanded on the principles elaborated in his earlier essay in the service of a polemical attack on the natural landscaping style promulgated with exasperating success by Chambers’s rival Capability Brown.2 The Chinese thread running conspicuously through the life and work of this co-founder of the Royal Academy and patriarch of the late eighteenth-century architectural establishment has proven a source of considerable perplexity for Chambers’s biographers and critics over the past two hundred fifty years. Rome and Canton have always seemed unlikely bedfellows as sources of inspiration for an eighteenth-century Man of Taste, and Chambers’s own reputation as a man as sober and conservative in his personal bearing as in the academic style he championed has never sat easily with a seemingly whimsical interest in fashionable exotica, let alone the outrageous gothicisms and quasi-pornographic fantasies of his Dissertation on Oriental Gardening. Horace Walpole’s contrasting assessment of the manifestos Chambers produced in support of each of the two styles provides some indication of the striking dissonance between them. Of the

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Treatise on Civil Architecture, Walpole wrote that it was “the most sensible book and the most exempt from prejudice that ever was written in that science;” on reading the gardening book when it appeared in the spring of 1772, however, he found it “more extravagant than the worst Chinese paper,” and later complained that it “tended to bring back all manner of bad and whimsical taste.”3 Chambers himself, in a chapter of his Treatise devoted to Corinthian columns, warned aspiring architects against the dangers of novelty and excess in ornamentation this most decadent of orders seemed to invite. In a harsh condemnation of “crude momentary effusions of a vitiated fancy,” he cautions against “deviating from the origin or reason of things . . . as it opens a wide door to whim and extravagance, and leaves a latitude to the composer, which often betrays, and hurries him into ridiculous absurdities.”4 How are we to reconcile the seemingly conflicting credos of the Treatise and the Dissertation, and to interpret Chambers’s wholesale capitulation in the latter to the aesthetic exuberance he warned so vehemently against? Chambers continually wavered in his expressions of commitment to the Chinese style, a fact that suggests he was acutely aware of the problems posed by his divided aesthetic loyalties, but which also makes it difficult to assess the true nature and depth of his interest in Chinese models. This ambivalence first appears in the introduction to his Designs of Chinese Buildings. On the one hand, he seems genuinely to admire Chinese architects for their originality and for the “singularity, justness, simplicity, and beauty” of their creations, going so far as to note certain resemblances with structures of classical antiquity. Yet on the other hand, he feels compelled, at least in part by concerns for his reputation, to disclaim any intent “to promote a taste so much inferior to the antique,” and ultimately dismisses the Chinese buildings whose designs fill his volume as mere curiosities and “toys in architecture.”5 This equivocation reflects, in part, a contemporary ambivalence in Britain toward the much vaunted achievements of Chinese civilization. The Chinese, celebrated in countless Jesuit-inspired accounts for the justice and efficiency of their civil administration and the wisdom of their rationalist moral code, were increasingly, by mid-century, coming under fire for their alleged dishonesty in business dealings and for the worthlessness, by classical standards, of their aesthetic productions.6 Chambers was stepping out on a limb, in this climate, in his defense of Chinese design, and it is not at all surprising that he felt obliged to temper his praise. A similar tension between admiration and disavowal appears in the col-

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lection of plans and panoramas from Kew Garden that Chambers published on completing his work there. The centerpiece of the volume is a fold-out depiction of the Great Pagoda that, even now, towers over the garden in incontrovertibly oriental splendor. His lavish description of this plate and its three accompanying illustrations of the pagoda in various sections and stages suggest considerable pride in the accomplishment, and the textual reminder that an engraving of the Chinese original had first appeared in the Designs volume six years before seems intended to reaffirm his own authority in the realm of Chinese architecture. Oddly, however, the one other important Chinese building in the garden, the House of Confucius, warrants only a single illustration and a summary description. John Harris has demonstrated persuasively that Chambers originally designed this two-story octagonal structure as well, and yet Chambers himself disowns the creation, vaguely asserting that it was “built a good many years ago, I believe from the designs of Mr Goupy,” a contemporary craftsman in the rococo style.7 Signs of pronounced ambivalence regarding his own indebtedness to the Chinese influence accompany even Chambers’s boldest contribution to eighteenth-century chinoiserie, the Dissertation on Oriental Gardening. He was sufficiently proud of his production to ship off copies soon after its publication to a host of European notables, including the King of Sweden and Voltaire, and to boast in at least one letter of the period that it had “met with a very favorable reception” in England, though this seems not actually to have been the case. At the same time, other letters introducing the work to his correspondents describe it as so much “coglionerie,” or foolishness, and “a piece of nonsense,” gestures of dismissal considerably harsher than conventions of authorial humility would normally require.8 In the Explanatory Discourse that accompanied the second edition of the Dissertation in 1773 as a response to the criticisms the first edition had provoked, Chambers initially repudiates any Chinese inspiration behind his ideas, describing their oriental setting in the earlier work as a mere ruse, a failed attempt to “[clothe] truth in the garb of fashion, to secure it a patient hearing” (112). And yet the main body of the Discourse, which is presented as the words of a Chinese sculptor recently resident in London, both reaffirms the controversial claim to the superiority of the Chinese style of gardening over the English, and prominently asserts its authentic Chineseness by providing the full transliteration and lengthy prose translation of a poem on tea drinking by the current Chinese emperor in a footnote that extends over the first four pages of the text.

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The paradoxical disjuncture between Chambers’s aesthetic affinities together with his endless equivocations concerning his own allegiance to the Chinese style have rendered the interpretation of his Chinese writings, and the Dissertation on Oriental Gardening in particular, a bewildering task, and a critical consensus has remained elusive. Certain readers, on confronting his descriptions of the horrid and enchanted scenes found in Chinese gardens, with their imported tigers, elephants, implements of torture, and bolts of artificial lightning, have been inclined to dismiss his more extravagant recommendations as nonsensical absurdities, playful diversions, or proto-romantic flights of fantasy, while others have confessed to ambivalence about the seriousness with which they are intended. At least one garden historian has demonstrated that Chambers’s central ideas about gardening derive from earlier English sources, while another has shown, equally persuasively, that they are firmly rooted in Chinese theories of gardening. Some critics have seen the jealous attack on Capability Brown as the chief raison d’être for the work, while others have stressed the prophetic importance of its original contribution to the theory of landscape design. One of the few points of agreement among students of Chambers’s work is that his presentation of the Dissertation as a work of cross-cultural translation complicates its reading considerably, in that the substance of his ideas on gardening is distorted beneath the “fashionable garb” of chinoiserie.9 But what if this fashionable garb itself, in all its confounding ambiguity, is the substance we are looking for? What if we were to evaluate the act of translation not as a more or less accurate means of transmitting a set of ideas across cultural boundaries, but rather as an intimate process of engagement with foreignness that itself conditions the emergence of these ideas within their new cultural context? How might we read the traces of the primal drama of encounter within the naturalized, domesticated spectacle of exoticism? Chambers himself, no doubt, would have objected to such an approach to his work. The Chinese setting of the Dissertation was a necessary artifice, he protests, a mere vehicle to be separated from the substance it contained, a mask that, for want of perspicuity in the writer, careless readers have tended to mistake for the reality.10 But Sir William, I would maintain, doth protest too much. We have seen how his considerable Chinese oeuvre is rent through with a dizzying ambivalence toward the foreign object of his regard, even to the point of prompting a disingenuous disavowal of his own artistic progeny. He deeply admired the Chinese model, but simultaneously despised it. This ambivalence, while making

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it impossible to take as definitive any one of his pronouncements on the subject, may provide in itself a point of departure for more adequately addressing the various conundrums posed by his work. ◊  ◊  ◊

Chambers’s architectural career, it is worth remembering, was entirely devoted to the task of cultural translation. Quite apart from his instrumental role as the only eighteenth-century European architect of any note to have visited China, his extensive travels and systematic studies in France and Italy positioned him as a crucial conduit for the foreign ideas that sustained architectural innovation in Neoclassical Britain. Architectural historians acclaim his contribution, in both his writings and his designs, as that of a master borrower and synthesizer, rather than as a creative genius in his own right. For all the success enjoyed by his Treatise, its author made no claim to originality in the work. The role he saw for himself, rather, was that of a compiler and an adjudicator of taste, as he set out “to collect from the works of writings of others, or from his own observations, in all parts of Europe, famed for taste; such particulars, as seemed most interesting; or properest to give a just idea of so very useful, and truly noble an art” (Treatise, iv). It is worth noting that Chambers’s early volume of Chinese designs with its accompanying essay on gardening was premised on a similar methodology, grounded in the fastidious observation and unbiased evaluation of foreign aesthetic models. This systematic procedure might justly be considered, then, as a habitual modus operandi, and the cornerstone of his essentially mimetic approach to the work of cultural translation. To the extent that the Dissertation recycles the basic account of Chinese gardening Chambers had presented in the earlier essay, it remains in keeping with this approach. But the text is more obviously characterized by the extravagant polemics and hyperbolic exoticisms that have perplexed and beguiled generations of subsequent readers. A more nuanced understanding of the latent workings and myriad possibilities of cultural translation is called for, I would suggest, in digesting passages like the following: Their summer scenes compose the richest and most studied parts of their Gardens. They abound with lakes, rivers, and water-works of every contrivance; and with vessels of every construction. . . . In the center of these summer plantations, there is generally a large tract of ground set aside for more secret and voluptuous enjoy-

[ 148  ]  david porter ments; which is laid out in a great number of close walks, colonnades and ­passages, turned with many intricate windings, so as to confuse and lead the passenger astray. . . . The whole is a wilderness of sweets, adorned with all sorts of fragrant and gaudy productions: gold and silver pheasants, pea-fowls, partridges, bantam hens, quails, and game of every kind, swarm in the woods; doves, nightingales, and a thousand melodious birds, perch upon the branches; deer, antelopes, spotted buffaloes, sheep, and Tartarean horses, frisk upon the plains. (Dissertation, 25–26)

Clearly there are elements here that recall the three familiar modes of ­processing the spectacle of otherness briefly outlined in the introduction to this essay. Chambers draws heavily on both the clichéd eighteenth-century image of a richly sensual and eroticized East and the early modern image of China as a land of immeasurable wealth, described by Walter Lim in an earlier essay in this volume. He imitates the Chinese more directly in his carefully assembled menagerie of exotic species. The prominence of water in his fantasy garden, and of “close walks” and “intricate windings,” suggest meanwhile a more generalized influence of Chinese gardening principles. The distinct aura of a traveler’s tale, however, the Marco Polo–like wonder that suffuses the account, points to a mode of engagement with the foreign that transcends the analytic categories of imaginary projection, imitation, and influence. The Dissertation frequently reads, in fact, like an allegorical narrative of voyage and discovery, with its visitor described repeatedly as a “traveler” or “passenger” as he makes his way among the garden’s seemingly endless labyrinthine passages. The magnificence of the vistas he encounters fully justifies the use of such terms: these are not backyard arrangements of rock gardens and goldfish ponds, but seemingly full-scale depictions of natural wonders that transport the “visitor” into a compellingly “real” virtual world. This allegorical component of the Dissertation seems particularly significant in light of Chambers’s extended remarks on the benefits of travel in another context. Reflecting, no doubt, on the importance of his own youthful travels to his later professional success, he urges the aspiring architect who reads his Treatise to spend time on the road before presuming to set up practice at home. “An architect cannot aspire to superiority in the profession without having travelled . . . Travelling to an artist, is as the university to a man of letters, the last stage of a regular education.” Although the purpose of this education in the artist’s case is in part to cultivate his

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taste, sharpen his critical faculties, and fill notebooks with sketches for later study and imitation, there is a distinct romantic component as well to Chambers’s pedagogical prescription. Not only does travel “[set] the reasoning faculties in motion” and “[open] the mind to a more liberal and extensive train of thinking,” it also, crucially, “rouses the imagination; the sight of great, new, or uncommon objects, elevates the mind to sublime conception; enriches the fancy with numerous ideas” (Treatise, 14–15). Read alongside Chambers’s paean to the Grand Tour, the allegory of travel in the descriptive passages of the Dissertation begins to appear less an incidental literary motif and more a vivid dramatization of a deeply held credo and its nostalgic underpinnings in his own youthful experience. Indeed, a close analysis of the argument of the work reveals three fundamental claims that each bear the mark of Chambers’s own confrontation with Chinese otherness. Briefly, these claims concern the importance of proper training and genius in the landscape gardener, the role of contrast and variety in structuring a pleasurable garden experience, and the place of extraordinary scenes and artifices in achieving the desired psychological effect in the mind and imagination of the viewer. Each of these concerns, I will argue, is inscribed with the imaginative trauma of encounter, suggesting that the dissonance and ambiguity that characterize Chambers’s Chinese work might be fruitfully reinterpreted from within a model attuned to the affective dimension of the process of cultural translation. ◊  ◊  ◊

Chambers’s depiction of the genius of Chinese gardeners in the Dissertation is directed at two polemical aims. The author intends, most conspicuously, to paint an unflattering contrast between the exalted abilities of landscape artists in China and those of their English counterparts, and especially of his nemesis Capability Brown. But he also hopes, more constructively, to elevate the status of this art in England to that which architecture—owing largely to his own exertions—now enjoyed. In the final version of the Treatise he would quote approvingly the bold claim of French architect MarcAntoine Laugier that “there is perhaps as much genius, good sense, and taste requisite, to constitute a great architect, as to form a painter or poet of the first class” (7). The Dissertation, from its chiding opening lines, seems calculated to promote the art of ornamental gardening in much the same way: “Amongst the Chinese, Gardening is held in much higher esteem, than it is in Europe; they rank a perfect work in that Art, with the great productions of the human understanding . . . Their Gardeners are not only

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Botanists, but also Painters and Philosophers, having a thorough knowledge of the human mind, and of the arts by which its strongest feelings are excited” (11). The Treatise, to extend the comparison, defines the requisite genius of the architect as “a strong inclination and bias of mind towards the pursuit in question,” that enables the artist “to comprehend, and to perform certain things, with much ease” and fills his imagination with “ideas, combinations and improvements, equally new, striking and agreeable” (9–10). A corresponding passage in the Dissertation indicates that Chinese gardeners, likewise, express their genius through new and striking improvements. “Poets and painters soar above the pitch of nature, when they would give energy to their compositions. The same privilege, therefore, should be allowed to Gardeners . . . [who], like poets, should give a loose to their imagination, and even fly beyond the bounds of truth, whenever it is necessary to elevate, to embellish, to enliven, or to add novelty to their subject” (18–19). One senses, however, a marked difference in emphasis between these two passages. While the great architect is noted for his facility in innovation and the performance of his craft, the Chinese gardener seems to achieve an altogether more liberating imaginative transcendence that resonates tellingly with Chambers’s account of the salutary effects of travel on the impressionable mind. To soar beyond nature and fly beyond truth would seem, indeed, precisely the prerogative of an imagination roused from quotidian slumbers by the intrinsic sublimity of the foreign. Chambers’s conception of Chinese genius as transcending the realm of familiar orthodoxies emerges, then, as a consequence of his own recollected experience of alienation and radical unfamiliarity in China as a young man. The impression of striking novelty that often accompanies an encounter with the truly foreign, after all, bears close comparison with the effects of genius. In Chambers’s case, I am suggesting, the overwhelming impression of strangeness he must have received wandering the streets and gardens of Canton was ultimately transformed into a programmatic projection of imaginative virtuosity onto a favored class of Chinese artists. The disjunctive experience of the foreign sublime anchors his boldly original conception of Chinese aesthetic sensibility. As a cross-cultural translation, then, the Dissertation should be read not as a more or less accurate rendering of “authentic” Chinese practice than as a narrative mapping of the experience of Chinese difference. One might object to this interpretation on the grounds that the sagacious and often disdainful oriental visitors to Europe that had been stock characters in French and English fiction

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since Montesquieu would provide a more obvious source for Chambers’s supercilious Chinese gardener. While granting the validity of the comparison, I would respond that the eighteenth-century archetype of the visiting Eastern sage was itself in large measure a similarly constituted product of the period’s rapt fascination with the novelty of the cultures that Jesuit accounts and Arabian tales were rapidly bringing into view. The genius of Chinese gardening expressed itself, for Chambers, through an aesthetic of contrast, variety, and surprise. While the modern English landscape park numbed the viewer with its monotonous repetition of formulaic conventions—the serpentine walks, clumps of trees, and vast expanses of lawn that were the hallmarks of Brown’s style—the Chinese garden spurred the imagination with a splendid panoply of riveting scenes, calculated to lead the viewer through a succession of intense emotional catharses. The psychological premise of the experience lay in its very unpredictability; suspense, confusion, bewilderment, and awe were the necessary catalysts of the “strong sensations” and “uncommon degree of pleasure” it set out to achieve. The basic components of the aesthetic vision Chambers ascribed to Chinese gardeners had more obvious precedents not only in Burke’s conception of the sublime but also in the English gardening theory of the previous half century. Alexander Pope had famously advocated a topography of “pleasing intricacies” in his Epistle to Burlington (1731):

Let not each beauty everywhere be spied, Where half the skill is decently to hide. He gains all points who pleasingly confounds, Surprises, varies and conceals the bounds.

Thomas Whately, whose more recent Observations on Modern Gardening (1770) Chambers had carefully read and annotated, had likewise emphasized the importance of variety and contrast, and of the effects of “surprise and astonishment” produced by the “singularity” of a landscape scene.11 John Dixon Hunt has shown that the theatricality of the garden setting, with its changing scenes, spectacles, and illusions, was an established trope of both Italian garden art and the countless pleasure gardens it inspired in early eighteenth-century England.12 The difference in Chambers lies in the centrality of the experience of foreignness in his conception of an aesthetic of novelty and surprise. Not only does he include distinctly “Chinese” elements in many of his scenes, he

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repeatedly stresses the usefulness of “transplanting the peculiarities of one country to another” in achieving the requisite variety of sensory impressions in gardens anywhere. The well-traveled gardener has no need of the vain extravagancies of topiary to realize the desired effect: “if the planter be a traveller, and a man of observation, he can want no such helps to variety, as he will recollect a thousand beautiful effects along the common roads of the countries through which he has passed, that may be introduced with much better success” (Dissertation, 43–44). Chambers reinforces this implicit identification of the aesthetic of novelty with the personal experience of cultural difference in his treatment of the lavish scenes that distinguish the Chinese garden. While certain of these scenes he describes as staged spectacles to be admired from a distance, in other cases his voice shifts from the mode of dramaturgy to that of travel writing, transforming the passive spectator into an intrepid explorer thoroughly immersed in a fantastic, all-consuming narrative of rapturous exoticism. Sometimes the traveller, after having wandered in the dusk of the forest, finds himself on the edge of precipices, in the glare of day-light, with cataracts falling from the mountains around, and torrents raging in the depths beneath him; or at the foot of impending rocks, in gloomy vallies, overhung with woods, on the banks of dull moving rivers, whose shores are covered with sepulchral monuments, under the shade of willows, laurels, and other plants, sacred to Manchew, the genius of sorrow . . . [S]ometimes, in this romantic excursion, the passenger finds himself in extensive recesses, surrounded with arbors of jessamine, vine and roses, where beauteous Tartarean damsels, in loose transparent robes, that flutter in the air, present him with rich wines, mangostans, ananas, and fruits of Quangsi; crown him with garlands of flowers, and invite him to taste the sweets of retirement, on Persian carpets, and beds of camusathkin down. (Dissertation, 25–27, 38–40)

Chambers’s fantasy transcends the illusionistic theatricality of the European pleasure garden to recreate the essential experience of unadulterated wonder in the traveler’s encounter with the unknown. While its celebration of an aesthetic of variety and novelty is indebted in its conceptual foundations to Addison, Pope, and others, the Dissertation infuses these terms with an unfamiliar power by aligning them incontrovertibly with what surely, for the eighteenth century, was the paradigmatic occasion of aesthetic éclat. For as well-traveled a man as William Chambers, the ab-

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stractions of aesthetic theory could not be separated from their epistemological origins in the psychology of the voyage. The passage just quoted points to the final facet of the Dissertation’s argument that I will take up here, namely the implicit claim that a successful garden requires not only genius and variety, but also a pronounced excess or extravagance in its scenery. The seeming outrageousness of many of Chambers’s prescriptions—the wolves, tigers, African giants, monstrous birds, impetuous cataracts, artificial lightning bolts, and dancing con­cubines in magnificently furnished seraglios—seriously undermined the credibility of his scheme among his readers, and occasioned a blistering satire by William Mason, whose great success rendered Chambers something of a laughingstock, especially among his Whiggish adversaries. A number of critics, as I have mentioned earlier, have been inclined to dismiss the less plausible aspects of his account either as romantic flights of fancy or as so much unaccountable nonsense. Chambers himself gives support to such a reading in a letter to an unidentified correspondent who had objected to the “whimsical productions” in his plan. These little sportive Episodes are introduced, & are only to be considered as Episodes in a poem or Interludes in a Drama, which serve to relieve the fatigued mind, and prepare it for something of Greater Consequence. They are chiefly contrived to amuse the curious, the vulgar, or the childish.13

The defensive attitude here is one we have seen before, and the precedents, as I have argued, justify a certain skepticism on the reader’s part. If the author had genuinely intended his whimsical interludes as comic relief for the vulgar and childish among his readers, surely he would have had the foresight to anticipate the bewildered reaction of the mature readership he hoped to impress with the seriousness of his underlying design. Chambers admits in the Explanatory Discourse to a “want of perspicuity” in writing the Dissertation, and indeed it would seem, on the whole, a less calculated enterprise than shamefaced rationalization might have suggested to him after the fact. Capability Brown’s landscape gardens were characterized by their unassuming simplicity: a typical vista took in expanses of gently rolling turf punctuated only by strategically placed clusters of trees. In its embrace of “unadorned” nature, the Brownian revolution inaugurated a thoroughgoing shift from an emblematic to an expressive mode of representation

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in the English garden. The statues, grottoes, engraved obelisks, and other visual exhibits arranged strategically about the grounds at Stowe and Pope’s Twickenham estate had offered up intricately coded meanings to those viewers with the necessary wit and erudition to read the elaborate iconography of their literary and historical allusions. The seemingly artless panoramas of the naturalistic garden, in contrast, required no studied examination to grasp, but rather seemed to speak immediately to the emotions, with all “the force of a metaphor,” in Whately’s words, “free from the detail of an allegory.”14 The Chinese garden, in Chambers’s account, includes elements of both these modes. In addition to scattering ancient inscriptions, verses, and memento mori about their grounds, the Chinese layer their gardens with emblematic meanings by introducing statues, busts, bas-reliefs, and every production of the chisel . . . observing, that they are not only ornamental, but that by commemorating past events, and celebrated personages, they awaken the mind to pleasing contemplation, hurrying our reflections up into the remotest ages of antiquity.

At the same time, Chinese gardeners are attentive to the expressive quality of their plantings, surrounding rustic garden structures with wild scenery, for example, and complementing gay buildings with luxuriant foliage (Dissertation, 16–17). But there is a third, rather more quixotic mode of representation in Chambers’s Chinese garden, and one that subverts the underlying premise of the first two. Emblematic statues and expressive scenes both operate on the presumption of a degree of legibility, the presence of a definable and ultimately communicable idea or emotion that the creator sets out to convey and the viewer to absorb. And yet we find features in Chambers’s garden that steadfastly resist and even parody this familiar economy of meaning and interpretation. The colossal dragons that lurk in certain dark passages cut in the rock, for example, “hold in their monstrous talons, mysterious, cabalistical sentences, inscribed on tables of brass; with preparations that yield a constant flame; serving at once to guide and to astonish the passenger” (Dissertation, 39). The steady illumination and bold lettering hold out the promise of moral or spiritual guidance, only to snuff it out in the mocking obscurity of a forgotten, esoteric language. Certain pathways are designed, as we have seen, “so as to confuse and lead the passenger astray,” while any number of compositions tend to evoke incertitude, anxiety, and a perpetual sense of mystery. Chambers extends the traditional garden motif

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of the labyrinth, in other words, into a dizzying phantasmagoria of perplexity and doubt, a “magnificent confusion” of conflicting impressions that cannot, finally, be resolved in the certainty of a single interpretive response (Dissertation, 25, 46–49, 73). If the cabalistic writing and the air of mystery in the Chinese garden signal its resistance to interpretation, the sheer extravagance of Chambers’s descriptions evokes the traveler’s response to the radical illegibility of the foreign. The excess implied in all that is monstrous or fantastical points to a realm of experience that cannot be schematized, ordered, or contained, to the unassimilability of an object of interpretation within familiar structures of meaning. All that is wondrous and magical in Chambers’s account may well be, as he rather peremptorily called it, “nonsense,” and yet it is an emblematic nonsense in that it points precisely to that residue of translation that is beyond the reach of sense and that emerges into consciousness in the likeness of a dream. As he nears the end of the Dissertation, Chambers cautions that “European artists must not hope to rival [the] Oriental splendor” he has portrayed. His depictions, it turns out, may be less well suited as models for imitation than as sources of inspiration, a reminder of the infinite possibilities entailed in the imagination’s encounter with the foreign. To the generality of Europeans many of the foregoing descriptions may seem improbable; and the execution of what has been described, in some measure impracticable: but those who are better acquainted with the East, know that nothing is too great for Eastern magnificence to attempt; and there can be few impossibilities, where treasures are inexhaustible, where power is unlimited, and where munificence has no bounds. (92–93)

By way of justifying the extraordinary flights of imagination his hazy reminiscences of China had induced, he extends the boundless wonder he has ascribed to the Chinese garden to the topos of the East as a whole, reverting, without a doubt, to a clichéd orientalist fantasy, but reaffirming, in the process, the evocative potentiality of the illegible sign. Ironically, the most extravagant of all Chambers’s recommendations turned out to be the most prescient in the subsequent history of garden design. Not content to confine his wild schemes within the limits of the country estate, he envisaged the transformation of the entire surrounding landscape in accordance with the principles he had set forth. “Any tract of land,” he writes in the Explanatory Discourse, “whose characteristick ex-

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pressions have been strengthened by art, and in which the spontaneous arrangements of nature have been corrected, improved and adorned by the hand of taste, ought to be considered as a Garden” (125). The possibilities for such improvement are far more than meet the untrained eye. Fields covered with corn, turnips, and beans, he suggests, if tastefully ­interspersed with country churches and cottages, require little modification to be more picturesque than a Brownian expanse of lawn “curiously dotted with clumps” (128). The dismal sight of collieries, brick kilns, and glass works might be artfully blended with “gloomy plantations” to create a poignant landscape of desolation. Stone quarries might be transformed into amphitheaters, chalk pits into rustic arcades, and mines into grottos, which, with the addition of some planting, “might be converted into the most romantic scenery imaginable,” and eventually “by these means the whole kingdom might soon become one magnificent vast Garden, bounded only by the sea” (132–33). If the achievement of the eighteenth century, according to a modern garden historian, was to bring the landscape into garden planning, the task facing the twentieth was, very much in accordance with Chambers’s vision, to “bring the garden into the landscape.”15 Although in Chambers’s work this extension of his theories is less obviously a chinoiserie production than some of his more detailed descriptions, his utopian contribution to the evolution of landscape theory bears the distinct imprint of his aesthetic engagement with the Far East. If the Chinese garden, for Chambers, embodies the essence of his impressions of China in its genius, variety, and wondrous indecipherability, the dream of transforming the kingdom into a garden represents the transposition of an enthralling imaginative response to foreignness back to his more immediate surroundings. The dream is Chinese not in its specific content, in other words, but rather in the derivation of its aesthetic vision from a subjective confrontation with Chinese difference. ◊  ◊  ◊

A reading of Chambers’s work that remains attentive to the complex and conflicted processes of cross-cultural translation begins to resolve certain of the perplexities that an exclusive attention to its products has tended to foreground. The apparent dissonance within his own aesthetic sensibility fades from significance once we recognize that his simultaneous attraction to both Roman and Chinese models stemmed not only from their particular merits, but also from the rich and unfamiliar stimulation each provided to his imagination and critical faculties. His life-long ambivalence toward

“beyond the bounds of truth”  [ 157  ]

the Chinese style appears less maddeningly equivocal once we are able to distinguish his aesthetic judgment of particular instantiations of the style from the invigorating source of aesthetic insight and imaginative inspiration he found there. And finally, the unaccountable indulgence of whimsical fancy that colors the horticultural ruminations of a conservative Tory architect may appear somewhat less bewildering once we grasp the significance of fancy as an inevitable component of an earnest eighteenthcentury Englishman’s contemplation of a largely unintelligible East. But the most far-reaching conclusion suggested by such a reading is that the experience of encounter, in the end, cannot be understood solely in terms either of power and mastery or of reciprocal influence and projected fantasies. The processes by which one culture finds meaning in another, rather, entail adaptive strategies that are themselves potentially transformative. To read the artifacts of a moment of contact is to confront testimony to variously motivated acts of translation and response, but it means also to bear witness to the imaginative epiphany engendered by the recognition of difference.

notes 1. The degree of Chinese influence on the development of the English landscape garden is a topic that has long interested scholars and that remains the subject of lively debate. Important sources include Ch’ên Shou-Yi, “The Chinese Garden in Eighteenth-Century England,” T’ien Hsia Monthly 2 (1936): 321–39; Patrick Conner, “China and the Landscape Garden: Reports, Engravings and Misconceptions,” Art History 2 (1979): 430–40; and Ge Liangyan, “On the Eighteenth-Century English Misreading of the Chinese Garden,” Comparative Civilizations Review 27 (1992): 106–26. 2. On finding that his Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (London, 1772) met with a less favorable response than he had hoped for, Chambers appended An Explanatory Discourse by Tan Chet-qua to the second edition of the Dissertation, published in London in 1773. Subsequent textual references to the Dissertation and the Explanatory Discourse will be to these two editions, respectively. 3. Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England (London, 1765), 1:xiii; Walpole to Mason, May 25, 1772, The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1937–83), 28:34; Anecdotes of Painting in England, ed. Frederick W. Hilles and Philip B. Daghlian (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1937), 185. 4. William Chambers, Treatise on the Decorative Part of Civil Architecture (London, 1791), 62–63. This is the third and final edition of the Treatise that Chambers prepared. Apart from changing the title to reflect more accurately the book’s

[ 158  ]  david porter contents, he revised the preface and some parts of the main text and added a new introduction. Subsequent textual references will be to this edition. 5. William Chambers, preface to Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines, and Utensils (London, 1757). 6. This shift in the prevailing responses to Chinese culture in early modern Europe is the subject of my book, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001). 7. William Chambers, Plans, Elevations, Sections, and Perspective Views of the Gardens and Buildings at Kew, in Surrey (London, 1763), 4–6; John Harris, ed., Sir William Chambers: Knight of the Polar Star (London: A. Zwemmer, 1970), 33– 34. 8. Chambers to Frederick Chapman, July 28, 1771, British Library Add. MS 41133 f. 78; Chambers to the Earl of Charlemont, June 13, 1772, BL Add. MS 41133 f. 75; Chambers to J. Leake, March 24, 1773, BL Add. MS 41134 f. 19. 9. For representative earlier readings of the Dissertation, see R.C. Bald, “Sir William Chambers and the Chinese Garden,” in Discovering China: European Interpretations in the Enlightenment, ed. Julia Ching and Willard G. Oxtoby (Rochester, N. Y.: University of Rochester Press, 1992); Isabel Chase, “William Mason and Sir William Chambers’ Dissertation on Oriental Gardening,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 35 (1936): 517–29; Eileen Harris, “Designs of Chinese Buildings and Dissertation on Oriental Gardening,” in Sir William Chambers: Knight of the Polar Star, ed. John Harris (London: A. Zwemmer, 1970); Nikolaus Pevsner, “The Other Chambers,” Architectural Review 101 (1947): 195–98; and R. B. Reaves, Jr., “Sir William Chambers: A Study of Georgian Taste,” PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1971. 10. Chambers, preface to Explanatory Discourse. 11. Harris, “Designs,” 154; Thomas Whately, Observations on Modern Gardening (London, 1770), 15, 21–22. 12. John Dixon Hunt, Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture (London: MIT Press, 1992), chapter 2. 13. “Letter of Sir William Chambers to a Gentleman who had objected to certain parts of his Treatise on Oriental Gardening,” in Harris, 192. 14. Hunt, chapter 3; Whately, 76. 15. Christopher Tunnard, Gardens in the Modern Landscape (London: Architectural Press, 1938), 166. See also Bald, 175.

p a r t

p a r t t h r e e

t h r e e

Testimony, Reportage, Meddling

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7 

Tom Dooley and the Cold War American Revision of “Indochina” Danielle Glassmeyer

Tom Dooley’s memoir, Deliver Us from Evil: Viet Nam’s Flight to Freedom (1956), recounts his work as a U.S. Navy doctor during Passage to Freedom, the 1954 evacuation of primarily Catholic North Vietnamese to the South Vietnam, led by Catholic President Diem, that had been cobbled together (or carved out) by the Geneva Conference. In his memoir, Dooley suggests that his writings may provide the first inklings for many Americans that there might be proto-democrats to be found on Asian soil, despite the overwhelming belief that, with America’s “loss” of China to communism, the Asian mainland was, for all intents and purposes, wholly lost, if not to communism, then to a pervasive tribalism and a pernicious colonial legacy that was nearly as bad. In Deliver Us from Evil, and in two later memoirs about his work under the auspices of MEDICO in Laos, The Edge of Tomorrow (1958), and The Night They Burned the Mountain (1960), Dooley’s putative topic is the need for American intervention to defend “Indochina” against communism. His more specific concern, however, is to see to it that Indochina should not be “lost” as China had been. Dooley wants America to take responsibility for the health, education, and political growth—the maturation of—the fledgling nations of Southeast Asia.1 Dooley, like dozens of other “Asia Firsters”—that Cold War lobby that held that America’s foreign affairs focus should be on Asia, rather than Europe—would have been working in and writing about China if he could have.2 He gets as close as he can. In Northern Laos Dooley is aware, and makes readers aware, of the threatening presence of China quite literally [ 161  ]

[ 162  ]  danielle glassmeyer

on the other side of the mountain range. The formidable mountains seem sufficient to police the scantly patrolled border, yet neither the real impediments of geology nor the invisible lines of national borders can contain China sufficiently to keep it from encroaching on Dooley’s world. Corrupting cadres surreptitiously infiltrate Lao communities and indoctrinate their inhabitants; like the Viet Minh in 1954, Mao’s forces in the last years of the decade send embodied evidence of their work in the maimed victims of torture who, in flight from Chinese cruelty, brave the mountains to find solace and healing—along with solid role-modeling of the ideals of American democracy—with Dooley, a solace the past colonial masters were unwilling, perhaps even unable, to provide. French and other European colonizers earn Dooley’s disparagement as he attempts to articulate how America’s intervention in Asia will differ from European predecessors, but the villain on whom Dooley’s drama hinges is China—or, to borrow from Eric Hayot’s thinking, the villain in Dooley’s piece may be better expressed as “Chineseness,” for what threatens Indochina is not China per se, but a mindset imputed to the Chinese.3 Dooley’s narrative suggests that China’s threat to Indochina lies in its relentless assimilation of Asian uniqueness to a future of communist sameness. Thus, Dooley urges readers to treasure the historical cultural diverseness of the Indochinese through descriptive passages that borrow a page from the travelogue, even as he disparages the types of modernization promised by communism as ill-advised for the Lao. Nonetheless he finds danger in allowing Asian peoples to remain mired in what he considers the superstitious darkness of tradition that makes them susceptible to the cunning ways of the Chinese communists. A carefully measured middle ground must be found, Dooley urges, by considering the best interests of the Indochinese. Dooley evokes American compassion and care as the best yardstick by which to measure Indochinese interests. Dooley’s emphasis on care and compassion—I will shorthand these as “love”—as a basis for foreign relations is not idiosyncratic, although his approach to activating Americans on behalf of Asians was ephemeral and remains under-studied. As I argue elsewhere, Dooley is only one of many writers and activists in the 1950s who propound a sentimental path as the best alternative to hard-line methods like militarism, or even modernization, in the simultaneous goals of winning Asians to democracy and defeating the global spread of communism.4 As part of this sentimental strategy, Dooley turns his readers’ attention away from communist powers and toward interactions with the Asians at risk to communism, a move that chal-

tom dooley and “indochina”  [ 163  ]

lenges, even as it asserts, the power of communist “evil.” Dooley’s readers are taught how to recognize that evil, and instructed that the best way to stop it is to preempt it by filling a void in Asian hearts. As do the science fictions that Hayot details, Dooley draws the problems of “Chineseness” as its timelessness, its relentlessness, and its proleptic assumption of triumph, a combination that makes it appear undefeatable. Perhaps it is not not in keeping with science fiction that Dooley’s strategy asserts that the American good will triumph only if it plays to its own strength, a strength located in the fundamentally human power of love. Dooley’s strategy of love, then, is geared toward making both American readers and America’s global clients recognize that communism has not yet won and can be stopped by challenging it with an American identity that he is eagerly involved in crafting. Yet it is clear that Dooley’s work is not science fiction. As I already indicated and will further argue, Dooley deals in sentiment, and he uses sentiment to activate Americans on behalf of others. Indeed, this may be one profitable way of thinking about the link between Hayot’s work and the story I am telling here. Where Hayot details scenarios in which the potential victim is “us,” Dooley posits a victim that is not “us” and strives to activate the American “us” on “their” behalf. Hayot demonstrates that recent science fictions about China “produce an immobile history” that posit an impossible future as already present and thus strike fear into their readers, a fear that oscillates between poles of fixed Chinese identity. On the one hand, the Chinese are threatening because they have rushed into modernity and, according to the fictions, mindlessly serve their modernity; on the other hand, the Chinese have always been cunning, cold, heartless and have always served some technology, albeit the more cultural forms such as calligraphy; together the two threads suggest that technological and cultural change is superficial, an overlay or veneer over the ancient, fixed Chineseness. Even as perceptions oscillate, betraying mobility, the general perception is one of frozen time—the Chinese always have been and always will be, and will take in whatever is in their path—the American “us” is their next victim. In contrast, Dooley’s sentimental “facticity,” while as consciously shaped as any science fiction, locates the “problem” not in the interstices between the Chinese “them” and an “American us”. That “them” is relatively speaking sidelined—the lost China energizes Dooley’s narrative, motivates readers to take action before others can be lost. But the focus is on saving those who remain to us. Depicting the erstwhile victim, rather than the victim-

[ 164  ]  danielle glassmeyer

izer, and showing Americans the urgent need for their embrace of defenseless innocents who lie within communism’s reach, Dooley shares a strategy not uncommon in discourse about Southeast Asia in the mid to late 1950s. What’s more to the point, Dooley himself responds to a discourse of frozen time, and employs sentiment as the tool to set time in motion. Frustrated about America’s “loss” of China to communism, apparently convinced of the validity of the domino theory that sees communism’s triumph in China as precursor to its ascendancy in post-colonial Indochina, but fearful of nuclear reprisal for aggressive action, thinkers like Dooley seek a medium through which to make the outcome in Southeast Asia matter to Americans. In the 1959 novel and 1962 film, The Manchurian Candidate would make the Chinese threat to America seem plausible enough; brainwashing, the film’s “hook,” hovered somewhere in American imagination between science fiction and legitimate psychological science and offered a way in which “Chineseness” could, invisibly, invade America.5 But in the half-decade between a series of convincing demonstrations of China’s power and Frank Sinatra’s quelling of the Chinese threat in America, the threat to America was distant and tenuous: a half-dozen small nations that Americans had barely heard of had to fall before the American domino could possibly topple. To make that threat more immediate and to concretize America’s obligations, Dooley first humanizes the situation: the abstraction of “dominoes” gives place to the human faces of Indochinese as Dooley centers his books around a core of thirty-two pages of photographs. But human faces— faces that challenge the tenet of Asian interchangeability by portraying individuals—are not enough to stimulate the intervention that Dooley desires, a lesson that he may have learned by tracking the inconclusive results of Edward Steichen’s Family of Man exhibition.6 It is through narrative, carefully shaped and constructed in the sentimental tradition, that Dooley re-imagines the web of national alliances that connect the United States with its global counterparts and clients within the discourse of family feeling. Dooley familiarizes the political and economic issues that link Asia to America by recasting the Indochinese for his readers as innocent Vietnamese and Lao “children” who have been abused and abandoned by colonialist paternalism, and harassed and persecuted by a communism embodied by China. Indeed, Dooley’s narratives consciously tug at readers’ heartstrings, unabashedly engaging the trope of the endangered child as a way to evoke a sentimental response—a stark challenge to Chinese communism’s cold-

tom dooley and “indochina”  [ 165  ]

ness—from readers. These children, Dooley’s discourse suggests, desperately need to be in the custody of a good American mother. As I will be arguing, it is a maternal position that Dooley creates and asks men to fulfill. Practices in a masculinist tradition had been called into question by a series of stunning losses. Because paternalism had alienated and insulted Asian nations like China and North Vietnam, Dooley suggests, the inchoate Asian democrats who remained could only be won by a different practice. Dooley recommends that Americans consciously and strategically adopt a mode of behavior toward their Asian “clients” that is fused together from both sentimentalist and orientalist discourses: based on love and nurture, yet supported by rigorous education and American democratic morality, and, most important, modeled after the type of therapeutic reform—in the best interests of Asians as children—that domestic social workers instigated in dysfunctional American families. Dooley’s program self-consciously offers itself as an exercise culled from the social sciences. American orientalist practice in “the Orient” since World War II, as Said provocatively observes, has been a “social science specialty.”7 To capture the particularity of the practice that Dooley embraces and espouses, I use the term “sentimental orientalism.” Sentimental orientalism invokes a maternity rationalized by the practices of modern medicine, psychology, and social work, as a model to promote and sustain American intervention in Asia at a time of isolationism. Dooley entered the medical profession in the midst of a sea-change in psychoanalytic theory that suggested that the function of the “disinterested” mother (one who denies self-interest) was the crucial element in assuring that the American polity would be psychologically strong and able to withstand the lure of communism, even as advice columns and how-to books were suggesting that maternity was learnable. Simultaneously, the medicalization of motherhood’s first moments via “twilight-sleep” anesthesia and formula feeding suggested that women’s bodies were only incidental to the practice of motherhood. Dooley’s discursive innovation is enabled by this simultaneous displacement of women’s bodies and analysis of their minds and practices. In this milieu, Dooley forges a new, rigorous type of maternal behavior—a “tough motherhood” that brings together the intellectual demands on the Orientalist with an exercise of affection for one’s fellow man that emanates from Dooley’s understanding of the power of love.

[ 166  ]  danielle glassmeyer

assertions which escape history On June 1, 1956, Senator John F. Kennedy, Dr. Tom Dooley, and many others whose names are associated with that group of boosters identified as the Vietnam Lobby, addressed the gathered American Friends of Vietnam about “America’s Stake in Vietnam.”8 Many of those gathered there that day would have, only seven years earlier, been counted among the ranks of the China Lobby, a group that had promoted nationalist China’s interests as preeminent for Americans. On this occasion, rather than extolling China’s “special relation” with America (a relation that had been underscored by the Chiangs’ American sojourns), these “Asia Firsters” were being re­ directed to embrace the importance to America of Vietnam. Repeatedly, they were told that Vietnam, already partitioned, needed American support to avoid China’s fate. In Kennedy’s restyling of Vietnam, the vaguely articulated “special relationship” that the United States had enjoyed with China has been particularized. As his keynote address avers, “If we are not the parents of little Vietnam, then surely we are the godparents. We presided at its birth, we gave assistance to its life, we have shaped its future . . . It is our offspring— we cannot abandon it, we cannot ignore its needs.”9 Moments before bringing Vietnam into the family, however, Kennedy had employed similes of building: “Vietnam represents the cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia, the keystone to the arch.” Slightly more human, Vietnam next became “the finger in the dike” that would stem the “red tide of Communism.”10 Shifting from images of engineering to those of family relationship, Kennedy enacts a complex reconfiguration of the question of America’s role on the world stage, doubly displacing Harry Truman’s authoritarian conception of the United States as the “world’s policeman.” First, America plays architect or engineer to a useful Vietnam imagined as inert building materials. Next Vietnam is figured metonymically, as a finger, a useful but not fully sentient body part, a prosthetic extension of American interests in Asia. Finally, in an image that augurs Cold War America’s growing application of the social sciences to international relations, America and Vietnam are construed as an elder and “the youngest member of the family of nations”; moreover, Kennedy urges listeners, America owes this needy child something.11 Among the many promoters of this familial discourse, few were more avid than Tom Dooley. Dooley’s brief career as founder of MEDICO and medical missionary garnered him worldwide attention, replete with cyni-

tom dooley and “indochina”  [ 167  ]

cism, but even more with adulation.12 For many Americans, Dooley epitomized the best potential of Americans—an identity he strove to articulate throughout his career. Yet, the practice and behavior that he promoted are, I argue, far outside the parameters that might be expected from an avatar of an era popularly associated with conformity and consensus. Dooley diverges both from dominant scripts of gender, and from popular thinking on strategic engagement with communism, suggesting first that Americans need to celebrate their abilities to love and nurture their Asian “others” and second, that their concern in the war against communism should not be the Soviet Union, or European politics, but China and the small, fledgling nations within China’s reach. The “facts” of Dooley’s person—that he was gay, that he may have been working covertly for the CIA in Indochina, for instance—are no doubt relevant to understanding his impact on the American public, no less than his motives in embracing the practices that he does. I am invoking Dooley, however, as a register of a powerful but under-examined current in popular American thought about America’s role on the world stage in the 1950s. Best-selling book sales and publication of all three of his memoirs in Reader’s Digest suggest that his message was well received by a waiting audience of “average Americans.” The long-lasting impact of his re-imagining of American foreign relations may be plumbed in the history of the Peace Corps, founded by John Kennedy after Dooley’s death, for which some assert MEDICO was the prototype.13 To appreciate Dooley’s importance as an arbiter of popular thought, both his wide acceptance and his studied self-placement as spokesman of an oppositional discourse must be appreciated. Dooley’s re-imagining of American national identity is energized by cultural contradictions that Americans in the early Cold War had in some measure to resolve. For instance, Americans found themselves poised as a superpower in a post-atomic world and terrified at the prospect of annihilation, faced with postwar economic shifts that attempted to contain the threat posed to white masculinity by corporate culture, no less than the empowerment of previously subjugated classes—especially women and African Americans—during the wartime economy, and shaken by the whirlwind paranoia of the era of McCarthy, no less than his disgrace. Perhaps most difficult, stunned by defeats of Western military interventions in Asia, military and monetary efforts to “contain” communism appeared to be untenable.14 Mao’s victory and Chiang’s 1949 retreat occurred despite millions of dollars of American support in armature and aid, and dem-

[ 168  ]  danielle glassmeyer

onstrated for fearful Americans the power, both ideological and military, of communism to grip a people and a country. Similarly, the negotiated end to the Korean War underscored the futility of traditional methods of battling communism, a lesson reinforced by the decisive defeat of French colonial troops at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam in 1954. Renewed skirmishes between Chinese nationalist and communist forces in 1955 elicited, at best, lukewarm support from American spokespersons, who represented the popular desire to avoid “U.S. involvement in an Asian war.”15 In short, Americans who were convinced of the need for American intervention to “contain” communism in Asia found themselves hamstrung by overwhelming isolationist sentiment and distrust of military solutions.16 A text that marks a turning point in the search for a viable alternative against communism is Edward Steichen’s photographic exhibition The Family of Man, which opened at the Museum of Modern Art in January 1955, toured the United States and Europe under the auspices of the United States Information Agency, and was published as a best-selling book that summer. Interestingly, Steichen’s tenure as Director of Photography at MOMA is remembered by contemporary critics for two tributes to American military force, The Road to Victory and Power in the Pacific.17 His turn to the rhetoric of family is explicitly offered as a gesture to stave off nuclear holocaust. While many reviews extol The Family of Man’s message, a significant and vocal group of critics are troubled by the exhibition’s lack of efficacy: in her review for The Atlantic Monthly, Phoebe Adams calls the show an exercise in “sympathetic magic”—filled with good intentions, but ultimately impotent.18 Other critics’ reactions suggest that this “impotence” might be better understood as the exhibit’s refusal to tell viewers what to do. Indeed, Steichen’s explicit goal for the exhibit was to offer a “mirror” for human universals; the exhibition aimed to show “basic human consciousness rather than social consciousness.”19 But American critic Hilton Kramer and French critic Roland Barthes share the conviction that the exhibition’s turn away from social consciousness—a turn they connect with the sentimentality of the exhibit—is a failure, rather than a fulfilled goal. Kramer is troubled by the show’s embrace of “all that is most facile, abstract, sentimental, and rhetorical in liberal ideology.”20 Barthes notes that the photos, like the quotations that frame the exhibition’s story into chapters, are “a class of assertions which escape History” by way of a process that he identifies with sentimentality:

tom dooley and “indochina”  [ 169  ] Everything here, the content and appeal of the pictures, the discourse which justifies them, aims to suppress the determining weight of History: we are held back at the surface of an identity, prevented precisely by sentimentality from penetrating into this ulterior zone of human behavior where historical alienation introduces some “differences” which we shall here quite simply call “injustices.”21

In other words, as the exhibition suppresses historical specificity, socially determined injustices—the political and economic realms—come to appear as natural as birth or death. Naturalized, they move from the register of things that need to have things done about them to the register of things that need simply to be felt about because there is nothing that can be done about them. The “natural facts” presented by the exhibition, Barthes argues, must be “inserted into a category of knowledge which means postulating that one can transform them, and precisely subject their naturalness to our human criticism” (101). Yet, it seems clear that the kind of critical apprehension that Barthes is calling for is precisely what Steichen did not want—and, as I will demonstrate shortly, a critical apprehension of the situation in Indochina and America’s usefulness there is not precisely what Dooley wanted either. When Barthes links sentiment, lack of identity, and inaction, he, like his American contemporary New Critics, indicates that sentiment—the realm of affect—somehow sells us short, diminishes us, stops us from righting the world’s wrongs, perhaps because it seems to (as has often been averred) allow us to feel, and having felt, to think we have done something. Barthes does not comprehend the logic that Dooley and other sentimental orientalists will pursue. Deeply rooted in a sentimental tradition that I trace to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s sentimental masterpiece, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Dooley’s text hinges on sentiment’s foundational assumption that the transformation of the viewer/reader into a feeling subject is a necessary—and perhaps the sufficient—step in eliciting action. Sentiment’s primary injunction is to see oneself “mirrored” in a person one thinks of as “other,” and so to feel their plight. Yet, for Barthes, this show’s injunction to feel without directing those feelings is alarming. David Damrosch suggests that, as a French man viewing an exhibit that is squarely located in an American idiom, Barthes just didn’t get it. Damrosch argues that Barthes’s critique, which focuses more on the scanty text (quotations largely drawn from classical religious texts), misses the

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impact of the photos themselves, which “promot[e] an activist agenda of social change, aimed squarely against the forces of political and economic oppression around the world.” He continues, “The Norman Rockwell framing of the exhibit was a calculated ploy, intended to tug the Americans’ heartstrings strongly enough to pull their wallets right out of the pockets.”22 Certainly sentiment could be idiomatic—there’s no evidence that Norman Rockwell’s brand of sentiment (or Steichen’s), say, is more universal than American. Yet the failure of Steichen’s “utterance” is not simply a problem of national belonging, because the exhibition didn’t speak to several American critics either, while it apparently did speak to the tens of thousands who lined up at American museums to see the show here, tens of thousands more who paid the price of admission in Europe, and tens of thousands worldwide who bought the book, voting approval of its ideas with their dollars. In his thoughtful tracking of the progress of his own critical imagination, Damrosch ultimately comes to the conclusion that “The reason the exhibit’s progressive political purposes failed to register with [Barthes] was probably that the feel-good universalist frame was already being used to very different effect by the French government, which was trying to hold onto its colonial possession in the name of ‘universal’ values.”23 In other words, Barthes putatively sees what American viewers cannot, which is that the American international position, frozen in the sentimental leveling of the exhibition’s assertion of family likeness, and the position of the French empire that America is supplanting, are no different. Steichen employs for his purposes the same sentimental strategy that France has used to try to keep its empire from falling apart. Thus, what might look progressive to an America-centric viewer looks more like stasis or even decay to Barthes. For Barthes then, The Family of Man suppresses “history” in the name of obscuring the sameness—the identity—of America and its imperialist others, which, if realized, would reveal that America’s actions are indeed incipient imperialism thinly disguised in the register of a dehistoricized and de-politicized family unit. When history is suppressed, difference, the very basis of identity, cannot be realized, action is stymied, and American difference from colonialism is revealed to be protestation, not fact—the very opposite to the outcome that Steichen seems to have desired, and a damning indictment of the usefulness of sentiment to evoke agency. Sentiment, then, short-circuits analysis and thus stymies the very change its critics suggest it seeks. This, at any rate, is the formula that Damrosch— and I—extract from Barthes, and it is a formula that I think it is fair to say

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was rife among the New Critical policemen of middle-brow culture in the 1950s. While, as I’ve already briefly suggested and will demonstrate in the readings of Dooley that follow, this New Critical formula locates action in a public forum, whereas sentiment gives interior change primacy, I will concede that action is dependent upon time, and that only in time—in the medium of narrative rather than that of spectacle—can identity find the action that elicits it. I contend that the “failure” of The Family of Man lies in its spectacle. The spectacle of The Family of Man appears fixed and unchanging, and allows little place for Americans amid images of their “others”; Americans are frozen in the same synchronic moment, not as their imperial predecessors, but as global sufferers and protestors. In narrative, Dooley strategically sets international time in motion, delineates action, and models a renewed American identity, one that is formed, ironically, by eliding differences within the American “nation.” At heart, Dooley insists Americans are all alike: all Americans, he avers in Deliver Us from Evil, simply want to “help people ‘who didn’t have it so good.’”24 In this utterance, however, he occludes a fault line of class that is consistently sidelined in his narrative. The original speaker, “big, hardboiled” Boatswain’s Mate Norman Baker, when asked why he was willing to give up his home comforts to help Asians, had blurted, “Aw, hell, sir, we just want to do what we can for people who ain’t got it so good!”25 Baker is invoked as the embodiment of “average America,” but he also embodies a masculinity associated with a working-class ethos of brawn and bodily strength that troubles the grounds justifying Dooley’s intervention. As Dooley corrects the grammar of the utterance, he tacitly acknowledges his discomfort with the differences that belie American inequities of racialized class, gender, and education, such as are signaled by Baker’s “ain’t.” His narrative, positioned explicitly as autonomous and oppositional, ultimately depends upon domestic conformity to polarize Asian need and American benevolence. Dooley’s Americans are “assertions which escape History,” but this for a very historical reason: to set history in motion and to change its course. To jumpstart history, Dooley refigures the political and historical within a register resolutely imagined as private and ahistorical—that of the mother-child bond. Against the nuclear apocalypse threatened by progress, and politics, Dooley offers an ahistorical future of love and family feeling. Dooley’s new family is, however, anything but “natural”: in place of blood ties and tribal and racial loyalties, Dooley offers a cross-racial family, constituted in the absence of female bodies. Conditions in Vietnam were conducive to imagining motherless or un-

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dermothered children. Two generations of nationalist struggle, first against the Japanese and later against the reinstated French, had fundamentally disrupted traditional family structures in Vietnam, and the refugee experience cut the remaining loyalties of place, suggestively making “orphans” of all who fled south. Certainly not all of the refugee children who were processed by Dooley were literally orphans, but few could be found who were not emotionally starved, craving stability. Dooley’s memoirs suggest that even the best of Vietnamese mothers, when they happened to be alive and present, were poorly suited to the task of proper nurture: in native mothers’ care, children are underfed, dirty, and have heinous infections preventable by simple washing. In photographs, these children are dulleyed, scabrous, and listless. Yet, the Asian children he depicts, without exception, blossom under the love and care of American sailors, a point I’ll return to shortly. It seems clear that children who are loved are able to love, and that they are able to love when someone is able to teach them. According to mid-century wisdom, children learned how to love, or failed to, due to the presence, or conversely the absence, of their mothers; children who suffered from “maternal deprivation” were unable to love.26 Maternal deprivation, identified in a World Health Organization report and a popular publication by John Bowlby, was perceived as the scourge of the time, and the deleterious effects upon children of depriving, selfinvolved mothers explained what was “wrong” with Western societies. Depriving mothers are those who are unable to give sufficient love to their children through emotional, if not physical, absence.27 This dysfunction is cyclical and recurrent: deprived children would be, in turn, depriving mothers. Of the many signs and symptoms of this problem, juvenile delinquency was just the most overt. Equally pernicious was lack of emotional capacity in otherwise law-abiding persons. It is noteworthy that the core of the malady that Bowlby traces is lack of love, one of the fundamental differences asserted to distinguish com­ munism from the democratic tendencies of the free world. Maternal deprivation might be extrapolated as nothing less than the start of democracy’s demise and communism’s triumph. The problem could be fixed, however, through timely and assiduous intervention by specially trained, and in Bowlby’s formulation, always female, social workers. These women, he suggests, could temporarily provide the nurture that the deficient mother fails to give her children, even as she teaches the deficient mother how to attach to her children. Bowlby’s theory has been roundly challenged. However, the influence

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of his theory determined what good mothering meant for the generation of experts who gave popular advice throughout the 1950s, and his theory still holds sway among child-care experts.28 Most important, Bowlby’s theory contributed significantly to the idea that functions and practices of maternity did not inhere in female bodies, but were learned and learnable practices. If failed mothers could be taught to mother, failed families could be fixed and troubled nations healed. Dooley, I argue, invokes the maternal model of the therapeutic social worker to “fix” the Asian part of the family.

the wonderful kingdom of kids Dooley’s description of the Navy’s work in Vietnam is a paean to the good and gentle nature below the rough and ready exterior of the American armed forces. His observations during Passage to Freedom, the operation in which the Navy evacuated North Vietnamese refugees to South Vietnam just prior to the Geneva-mandated split of the country in 1954, are the ground for his design for MEDICO.29 While the tenets and operations of MEDICO were firmly rooted in science, the watchword for its practices was love. Through love, kindness, and gentleness, all imagined as natural attributes of average Americans, the United States would teach Asians how to love, and the rest of the democratic package would naturally follow—if not naturally, then as a matter of common sense. Dooley speaks of his Navy experience but is introduced as the head of MEDICO, when he addresses the American Friends of Vietnam on the same day and from the same podium and about the same family as had John Kennedy. Dooley demurs from Kennedy’s metaphorical stylings, insisting that he “won’t speak . . . about anything very high level.”30 He is there as the spokesperson for Average America and thus tells what he “observed” as he assisted in Passage to Freedom, and, he is quick to assert, “it isn’t very pretty” (36). What he relates in his speech, “Delivering the Refugees,” are stories of bodies in extremity, and most often the bodies belong to “children.” I put this word in quotes because Dooley’s definition of “child” seems a bit hard to pin down. A group of “children,” each with his “hand bound behind his back and then tied up to his neck,” are presented by a Viet Minh soldier who identifies them as “traitors” because they pray “The Lord’s Prayer.” Dooley claims that as punishment for past, and prevention against future, treason, “the guards had rammed into each child’s ear a chopstick.”31 Even for the academic skeptic of today, sympathy wells up for these “children”

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—innocents who knew only that they were saying their prayers. But next Dooley offers a tale of a “young boy, fifteen or sixteen years old,” whose attempt to escape into the refugee camp was likewise met with atrocity: Dooley explains that his death from gangrene was the result of Viet Minh troops beating his legs to a pulp with their guns.32 A fifteen- or sixteenyear-old may not be precisely a man, but to call him a “young boy” seems a strategic choice, rather than an observation from a medical perspective. The category “child” is not applied as an index of age, nor even of race. Dooley calls Navy sailors and later his MEDICO corpsmen “boys” as well. What it indicates in Dooley’s narrative is maturity measured as the relative mastery of and distance from bodies. “Boys” cease being “boys” when they discipline themselves to the point that the function and well-being of their bodies are mooted. In Dooley’s narrative, Asians rarely, and women never, can do this. Females, as medical and psychological science of the day suggested, were narcissistic, self-involved, and unable to transcend the interests of their bodies. As is the case in his speech, in Deliver Us from Evil (1956) Dooley identifies himself as witness to communist atrocity.33 Avowedly Irish Catholic, Dooley suggests that Catholics may be targets of communist hostility because they are, like him, “natural” democrats. As democrats, Dooley assures readers, Vietnamese refugees are like “us,” his audience at home, and so deserve American aid. Yet, Dooley recognizes that if the Vietnamese are too much like “us” there is no need for American commitment to them. Accordingly, Dooley activates a historical discourse that underscores difference between Vietnamese and Americans even as it calls into question the functioning of the Vietnamese family. Vietnamese primitivism meets American modernity in nearly ethnographic descriptions that focus on Asian clothing and customs, and mirth-filled tales that carry punch lines that reveal the irretrievable “Asianness” of the refugees. Anecdotes, many of them relating to Asian toilet habits, focus upon Asian mothers’ inept efforts to care for their children, masking with humor an aggressive disqualification of Asians as mothers that peppers Dooley’s texts. For instance, Dooley humorously describes the proclivity of refugee mothers, uninitiated in the wonders of twentieth-century gender-specific plumbing, to wash their babies in the urinals they find aboard Navy evacuation ships (Deliver, 37). These tales shift questions of Asian and American difference from the register of race to that of development. As Dooley was eager to assert, Asians don’t need roads, power plants, or even twentieth-century medicine34; he explains that, as denizens of the fifteenth century, his Asian clients may

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reach the eighteenth or nineteenth century under his guidance.35 But dams and power plants are, in Dooley’s perspective, foolish frills for people who still need to be taught things like sanitation, bathing, love, and democracy. Thus, overwhelmingly, Dooley’s “good” Asians are constructed as children who must be rescued from barbaric primitive conditions on the one hand, and communist seduction on the other. In contrast, tales that construct the cross-racial, cross-national, American-Vietnamese family tend to be consciously constructed as outside of history. There is no difference, for instance, between Asian children and other children: all naturally blossom and respond with love when they are shown kindness, and this availability to affection is what marks Asians as salvageable. On the basis of affection, education will proceed and, later, international political bonds will be forged. As Dooley insists, however, both sides of this contact will benefit, for American “boys” will thus become, not men, but exemplary Americans. American “boys” are called upon to discipline their bodies and deny their bodily desires, not least in that, when faced with the needs of Asian children, American “boys” forgo the requirements of domestic gender scripts, to think, in the best maternal mode, only of the needs of the children. Both transformations require the presence of their other, and the reaction produces a new type of family. Thus, in Deliver Us from Evil, Dooley gives the weight of the narrative to recounting the relationship between his “boys” (the sailors) and orphaned Vietnamese children. When The Night They Burned the Mountain is published in Reader’s Digest in 1960, Dooley’s focus on Asian children has become a fixation on Asians as children. There, a photo caption informs readers that Laos is the “wonderful ‘Kingdom of Kids’”36; the rest of the photo spread is curiously deficient in images of adult Laotians. After five years of selling Laos to America, Dooley has emptied his narrative Laos of its adult population.37 By infantilizing the native population, Dooley authorizes himself and his American helpers to take them into “protection.” Dooley does not articulate the role of protector in the orientalist/imperialist idiom as a paternal figure; instead, he assures us that American men like him are anything but paternal. Contradicting the expected gender association that would have men be cold, reasonable, and unemotional, Dooley assures us American sailors are not “creatures of cold logic but . . . boys of emotion and charity” (Deliver, 35). Ironically, the sign of the disembodiment that Dooley commends for men is their embrace of the register of feelings. Nowhere is this more clearly articulated than in Dooley’s narration of the sentimental conversion of Ensign Potts.

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Ensign Potts, “a spit-and-polish young officer five months out of Annapolis” (Deliver, 6), who always salutes and avoids any non-official conversation with Dooley, is assigned to assist Dooley on a Navy-sponsored tour to lecture about Dooley’s experiences during Passage to Freedom. When Dooley pushes him to speak, Potts voices a distinctly pro-military mindset: You talk of love, about how we must not fight Communist lust with hate, must not oppose tyrannical violence with more violence, nor Communist destruction with atomic war. You preach of love, understanding and helpfulness . . . That’s not the Navy’s job. We’ve got military responsibility in this cockeyed world. We’ve got to perform our duties sternly and without sentiment. That’s what we’ve been trained for . . . I believe the only answer is preventive war. (My emphasis, 8)

Potts is unable to sustain his position, however. As Dooley and Potts move through the Hickham Airfield terminal toward one of Dooley’s lectures, Dooley is enthusiastically embraced by two dozen sixteen-year-old Vietnamese Air Force cadets who dissolve in tears as they greet “Bac Sy My,” or “American doctor” (9). Dooley explains he won their loyalty when he healed them after the communist cadre in their town amputated their ears because they were Roman Catholic (10). Dooley gives an impromptu lecture on conditions in communist-held Vietnam to the gathering crowd. As he declaims about communist atrocity and the courage of the cadets, Dooley and audience are moved by emotion: “I suspect I did not succeed in keeping the tears out of my voice,” Dooley states. “Soon many of those who had been staring at us and who now understood began to find their vision clouding up, just as mine was clouded. Not in many a year had that number of tears hit the deck at Hickham” (12). Like the rest of the crowd, Potts “wept and did not bother to hide it” (12). Seeing an opportunity to drive his point home, Dooley asks Potts, “Don’t you think these kids would do anything, even at the risk of their lives, because of the way they feel about one American?” Potts replies, “Yes, Doctor, I think they would. Perhaps you are right. Perhaps there is a special power in love” (13). Ensign Potts does far more than change his mind. As Dooley tells it, every aspect of Potts experiences transformation. Where once Potts found Dooley’s message suspect, now he understands all. Where once Potts believed in force, now he believes in love. Where once his feelings were obscured by his impassive military bearing, Potts now so inhabits feeling that

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he weeps openly. His unashamed weeping, out of keeping with his previous actions, authenticates Potts’s conversion from rank-and-file Navy officer to Dooley follower. Relinquishing himself to feeling—to embodied weeping—is to Dooley, paradoxically, a sign of self-abnegation that augurs the move from boyhood to maturity. These elements—the unifying language of emotion, conversion authenticated by tears, the theme of rescue—are borrowed by Dooley from the discourse of sentiment. Feelings, which paradoxically locate men within their bodies, even as they free them spiritually to transcend the bodily differences that sentiment insists are more apparent than real, make military men into nurturers willing to spend hours below decks in “the nauseous holds trying to ease the anxieties of Vietnamese minds and the ache of Vietnamese bodies” (35). Dooley is pleased to depict these “tough” Americans acting tenderly and compassionately. In the presence of the Asian children who need them, sailors become maternal surrogates. Extolling the change that overcomes sailors on an evacuation ship filled with refugee children, Dooley crows, “I have never seen anything funnier—or more inspiring— than red-necked American sailors seriously performing the duties of babysitters and maids-of-all-work” (38). They play with the children, dry their tears, and, transformed into “Milk Maidens,” the “biggest and toughest sailors aboard” distribute milk complete with homemade rubber nipples (35). Approvingly, Dooley states, “It would have pleased their mothers, as it pleased me to see their sailor sons caring for this shipload” (39). Dooley assures readers that actions like those of the sailors of Passage to Freedom “show that we Americans possess an instrument not too well developed, more powerful than any bomb yet devised. It is the force that can relieve ugliness and tragedy. It is the force of gentleness” (Edge, 199). Gentleness, kindness, and love will win Asian souls from communism without aggression throughout Indochina. Speaking of a Lao “boy” healed by his mission, Dooley claims, “The force of kindness and love exhibited by my boys . . . redeemed Nai from ugliness and tragedy . . . You will never find this boy nor his brothers fighting against an American. They will remember us, with love” (136). Dooley overdetermines “love,” “tenderness,” and “gentleness” as American traits. In contrast, in his speech, communism is “an evil, driving, malicious ogre.”38 Communism is cold, calculating, manipulative, and treacherous; it is also identified specifically with masculine figures: Ho Chi Minh, Mao, torturers, and spies. Surprisingly, Dooley genders Asia itself male. The “old folks” of Indochina, those who are less trusting of Americans,

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seem to Dooley to be “Father Asia personified” (Edge, 200). In the simplest of terms, if old Asia and communism are masculine “Father” figures, then America and democracy must be feminine “Mother” forces. Like the good mothers of sentimental fiction, Dooley and his men know no limits to their efforts to protect their charges from the dangers and evils of the cold world of men, and to nurture them as they grow to adulthood. Dooley never explicitly claims for himself or his mission a parental relationship such as that evoked by Kennedy. Instead, in Dooley’s early rendition of the relationship that he forges between the Indochinese and himself, he eschews claims of family relationship in favor of religious kinship; soon, however, the structural logic of his self-construction in his memoirs will place him, and by extension, all American men, in a radically disembodied maternal relationship with Asia. The entrée to that position, was, ironically, his role as a doctor, at mid-century, that ultimate figure of masculine science, authority, and expertise.

the family of man Among the “fifteenth-century” medical practices that Dooley found in Laos was the practice of midwifery, performed by an aged, local woman whom Dooley insists on identifying as a “snag-tooth sorceress” (Edge, 91).39 While Dooley’s association of midwifery with witchcraft is meant humorously, his suggestion that midwifery was a vestige of a more primitive culture (and therefore at least potentially pernicious), works ultimately to remove the laboring mother, no less than the midwife, from the American public eye. As did the medical profession in American history, Dooley secures his professional foothold in Asia, and concretizes his authority for American audiences, by refocusing birthing from the parturient woman to the scientific doctor. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the pre­ dominantly male medical community had gradually consolidated its control over the previously female-governed practice of childbirth.40 Doctors offered knowledge accrued in formal education, but more important for most women, they could dispense drugs and use specialized equipment denied to midwives to ameliorate the vagaries of the birth process. While doctor-attended births were still in the minority at the turn of the century, by 1955, Leavitt reports, ninety-five percent of all births were performed in a hospital by a doctor.41 As childbirth was medicalized, the physiologi-

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cal processes of childbirth were pathologized, and procedures to contain pathology proliferated: anesthetics, interventions such as forceps deliveries and episiotomies to accommodate the forceps, and neonatal protocols such as segregating infants into newborn nurseries and bottle-feeding with formula so mothers could recover from anesthesia became the rule in hospital birthing.42 The body of the laboring woman, with all of its embodied functions, became passive, if not inert: anesthesia could slow or stop the labor process, and the unconscious mother was often unable to push the baby or the placenta out; instead the doctor delivered the child. Childbirth had traditionally been a female bonding event at which the midwife, trusted female friends, and experienced older women gathered to lend the laboring woman their social, physical, and emotional support. Pathologized, it became an event that required segregation from the social body—removal from history, if you will. Birthing women were isolated from friends and family and hidden from public view in, ironically enough, the very public space of the hospital. Thus women’s agency was multiply obscured as female labor became invisible, even to the laboring woman. While the doctor brings science to bear to rescue the child from the mother’s pathological body, the parturient woman slumbers, sometimes under the sway of the amnesiac drug scopolamine combined with morphine to produce “twilight sleep.” From this anesthetic, which erased memory, but left the body tossing and restless and requiring restraint, the mother “awakes in smiles, a mother with no recollection of having become one.”43 Lacking agency, robbed of memory, stripped of choice and control, the birthing woman becomes another of the instruments used by men to bring children into the world, absent from the inaugural scene of the mother-child relationship.44 Maternity became a practice rather than an embodied identity, and birthing an activity for men, in much the way that child-rearing had become a subject for male expertise. The cultural acceptance of the centrality of the doctor’s practice to what had long been considered the defining moment in female identity is eloquently demonstrated in Steichen’s The Family of Man, which proposes to tell the story of universal human life at mid-century, from courtship through marriage, pregnancy, and beyond. A montage of photos of pregnant women early in the book culminates in an image of a bespectacled, gowned, masked, and gloved doctor holding a newborn boy by his foot. The mother’s legs can be deciphered upon closer inspection; her face is not in

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the photograph, which is shot from her perspective, or what would be her perspective were she conscious.45 In The Family of Man, at the moment of birth, the doctor rather than the mother is the key player. As the essay continues its narrative, we see images of children nursing, playing, learning, singing, maturing, working, aging, and dying, organized around the complicating action of inhumanity, yet the essay rather blithely ends with a montage of happy children. The Family of Man has survived attempted genocide in several varieties to come full circle. But what produces these happy children is not a “birth” in any conventional sense. Rather, after a quote from Bertrand Russell threatens us with nuclear destruction as the ultimate in the series of inhumane actions, a series of images of malefemale, middle-aged to aged adult couples lead, not to pregnancy and a birthing scene, but to a two-page image of the United Nations, and then to the images of the happy children.46 This is the point that The Family of Man has been leading us to, this is its climax—that this new “family of man,” that international family formed in despite of blood ties and conceived by Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, will step beyond the ties that bind bodies together. Instead of messy, variable, and arbitrary family loyalties constructed via the exchange of women’s bodies and their subsequent embodied labor, this new, wholly rational, wholly compassionate—and I might add, wholly spectacular—family will be constituted through the disembodied labor of men and the power of the photograph.47 Where The Family of Man allows us a glimpse at the cultural work required to sever attributes of maternity from women’s bodies so that maternity may be reformed and reclaimed by male practitioners as a set of scientific, yet heartfelt, practices, Dooley’s memoirs cannot fully hide the messy revision, the scrambling—indeed the aggression—that must be engaged to realize this transformation. Dooley encourages readers to identify with him, not as a doctor, but as a maternal, life-giving practitioner. Yet, as Dooley asks his readers to “push” along with him and the laboring mother, his narrative persona reveals his slippage from practitioner to parturient mother. For Dooley, the more infant democrats who successfully enter the world, the better, in what often sounds like a numbers game prescient of the body counts of Vietnam. To counter the four hundred million potential democrats “lost” to communism in China, Dooley’s intervention seeks to assure that Indochinese infants will thrive. To this end, in a country where there was only one trained physician, Dooley recognized the need for and quickly established a midwife-training program in which young

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native women learned Western sterilization protocols, and were provided a doctor-approved midwife kit (Edge, 117). Given MEDICO’s emphasis on this program, it is at first glance surprising that Dooley chooses to relate as “typical” a Laotian childbirth in which he is not assisted by any of his Lao midwife-trainees. Instead of advertising the success of this program, Dooley in this scene is concerned to claim for American men competence, if not proficiency, in the skills of labor and delivery of infants even as he disqualifies the embodied maternity, and questionable practices, of Lao women. In this scene of childbirth, Dooley constructs an improved, disembodied maternity for American men to practice. Indeed, while we hear little about the success of his Lao midwife-trainees, we do hear that “All of my boys [his corpsmen] became good midwives, for them a talent of debatable value” (89). Dooley starts with a general rule: “in all primitive societies[,] the birth of a baby is . . . surrounded by a great deal of necromancy and custom,” a “combination [that] makes very difficult any advancement into a more modern world” (88). Given this contention, it is not surprising that for Dooley the typical Laotian childbirth is a scene of undifferentiated chaos. In a room filled with smoke from an indoor fire and burning candles and reeking of years of sweating bodies and cooking, the laboring woman squats on a stool while holding to a rope that hangs from the ceiling. She is attended by the “snag-tooth sorceress,” who acts as midwife, and the room is crowded with “sorcerers” beating on drums, family members, and “all the neighboring women [who] came and sat in one part of the house chatting, and occasionally moaning, groaning, grunting and gasping, in order to help the poor mother” (91, 93, 92). Dooley minutely details the customs and superstitions surrounding the birth process, but the laboring woman, the midwife, family, and neighbors gathered for the birth remain anonymous. Only Dooley and, to a lesser extent, his Laotian interpreter, Chai, have particular identities, foregrounding them in readers’ reconstruction of the scene. The ruses devised by Dooley in order to introduce medicines and sanitary procedures are the core of the brilliant plot of a drama in which Dooley is director and star performer, supported by trusty native sidekick and backed by an ever-changing cast of Laotian extras. More important to the successful delivery of the child than the mother, Dooley ultimately gives birth to his own ingenious, common-sense-American methods for helping Asians in spite of themselves. After emptying the house of neighbors, Dooley makes the woman lie down, because “it was absolutely impossible for me to lie on the floor to deliver

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a child.” The explanation given to the Lao, however, is that “having a baby while lying down is the American way, and much less painful.” In an aside to his American audience, Dooley adds, “(It is [less painful] because we have given the woman a Demerol tablet)” (93). Having made the mother lie down for his convenience and sedated her without her consent, Dooley appeases the attending “sorceress” by allowing her to sprinkle oils and dirt on the woman’s belly as a traditional help for her labor (94). Dooley quickly cleans off the mother-to-be with soap and water “with as much splashing and commenting as possible. I pointed out that because the dirt of the centuries was the more important, it was sprinkled on first. Then my soap” (94). His actions smack of condescension, but Dooley claims that the Lao accept them as deference, and maintaining the appearance of respect is important because “we could bring all hell down upon us if we made them [the sorcerers and sorceresses] lose face” (93). While maintaining Lao face by allowing certain customs to continue, Dooley sneaks in vitamin tablets, iron pills, and penicillin to improve the mother’s postpartum health, as well as sterile dressings for wrapping the baby. As Dooley relates, during the last few minutes of labor, everyone in the hut, including him, groans, grunts, and shouts, “ ‘Bing bing bing!’ And the woman bings and bings, ‘pushing’ as hard as she can. The child was born, to the great relief of the family, doctor, husband and oh, yes, mother too” (95). Allowing selected necromancy, Dooley has participated in sympathetic labor. Dooley’s next step is to fully displace the mother, whose value is expended after the baby is pushed out, at the center of the drama. He does so by identifying an egregious oversight in Lao custom, explaining, “In Laos it is felt that after the baby is delivered, all is finished . . . The placenta is ignored. As a consequence, hemorrhage is extremely common” (my emphasis, 95). Dooley continues, “We explained the error in this, and demonstrated the proper delivery of the placenta ‘a l’americaine’” (95). Oddly, though Dooley claims the placenta is ignored, he describes a Lao custom of placing the placenta in bamboo and burying it under the front steps of the house “to bring brothers and sisters for the newborn” (95–96). The effectiveness of Dooley’s narrative about pushing the Lao into a more modern mode of childbirth hinges upon their “ignorance” of the placenta. While they are burying the placenta in a traditional and rule-governed custom, Dooley buries their attendance to the placenta within his narrative in order to create a difference of greater scale between Lao practices and his own. Dooley invests the handling of the placenta with disproportionate significance because this issue validates his intervention in Lao

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childbirth—and, by extension, his entire intervention in Asia. This is an issue of life and death: for if the mother hemorrhages, as could happen if the placenta is not removed, she will likely die, in which case the child is almost surely doomed. His intervention here saves two potentially lost lives, demonstrating with some force the value of his mission to push the Lao out of the mud of necromancy and custom and closer to his modern world. If customs and superstitions threaten the lives of mother and child, creating a vicious cycle of mortality, Dooley suggests that they also threaten the people as a whole by making them susceptible to communism. Left alone, the Lao would be caught in an ever-repeating cycle, mired in the primitive past, or they would have to accept communism, which appears in Dooley’s memoirs only to maim and torture, as a desperate alternative. When Dooley steps in to deliver the placenta “a l’americaine,” he rescues more than an individual child. Dooley metaphorically delivers to his American readers the Lao people, no longer primitive. The Lao are transformed by the miracle of Dooley’s labor into modern infant democrats and offered to America for nurture and care. When the Lao woman “pushes,” she delivers a baby, no more; when Dooley “pushes,” he delivers an entire nation from communism and the primitivism that leads to it. Dooley sees his narratives as a portal through which his Asia and his America communicate; burying the placenta within his narrative, he invites more infant democrats to the nations where he has labored. Dooley’s fantasy of himself as the laboring woman who gives birth to a modern, democratic Asia dominates the narrative that he constructs about his mission. Indeed, parturition becomes the watchword for Dooley’s recommended protocols for American action in Asia, one of the only positive actions in a complex formulation that is largely driven by negation. Dooley rants, “I don’t want you standing on some immaculate American pedestal reaching down to pull up the poor dirty Asian. You take off your nice white suit, understand? You get off the pedestal and you get down in the mud with them, knee-deep in the mud with them. Then you push.”48 Dooley’s Americans must “bing” along with Asians, just as he does. Before doing so, however, they must negate all that holds them separate from Asians. Denying pretensions toward superiority is as simple as stepping down; erasing the inequities of a colonial past requires no more than shedding the white suit that is the virtual uniform of the Western colonizer in the tropics. After these negations, Dooley’s followers find themselves in a singular spot: naked, mired in mud, engaged in a physical action—pushing—that, like the Lao woman’s labor, appears to be its own goal and end.

[ 184  ]  danielle glassmeyer

Negating difference, destroying boundaries, Dooley’s encouragement to American men to embrace Asia runs by abjection. Dooley’s inducement to help Asians celebrates the mud, the mire, the feces, the afterbirth, the archaic tropical diseases—the offal that sanitized Western culture has removed from view, erased from consciousness, or made into curious entries in medical school textbooks. He revels in this evidence of the authenticity of his Asia, the sign that he has disciplined himself and his body to proceed without disgust, to treat with compassion. Yet, while he embraces abjection, his goal and purpose is to negate the abject, to show his readers that he and America are cleaning up the vile mess, laboring in the birth of a new modern Asia. It is the abject, imagined as radically embodied femininity in the form of the self-involved pregnant female body, that Dooley’s narrative recoils from, as evidenced by its reaction to Priscilla Baker’s pregnant body.49 Priscilla is the wife of Norman Baker, the sailor and corpsman to whom Dooley had attributed the “just-folks” sentiment that he asserts typifies most Americans and spurs MEDICO’s mission. Early in the narrative that Dooley’s memoirs construct, Baker also helps to guarantee that, although maternal, his corpsmen are still feverishly men. In fact, through his depiction of Baker, Dooley avers that it is really only the manliest of men who can perform the maternal function that he requires. A photograph in Deliver Us from Evil pictures a laughing Baker on the deck of one of the ships that participated in Passage to Freedom. Baker is gazing upward at a Vietnamese child he has lifted over his head. Another child is close to his knee, and a boatload of refugees is visible in the background. Dooley’s caption, “Norman Baker, a fine sailor, a good American, my constant companion, my helping hand, and my friend,” eliminates all but Baker from the story the picture tells (unnumbered page 31 of 32 in photo insert). Here, Baker epitomizes Dooley’s dreams for Americans in Asia. Baker’s physicality—his body—is inseparable from his maternal care for Asian children. Moreover, Dooley’s phrasing reveals that he imagines Baker as an extension of himself—his helping hand. Baker is the physical realization of Dooley’s imaginary; Baker represents the “real,” the authentic, American. Early in The Edge of Tomorrow, Baker’s embodiedness is even more pointed. The “200-pound barrel-chested” Norman Baker enters “flexing his muscles, as always,” and, readers discover in a narrative aside, having just impregnated his wife (Edge, 12–13). Of Dooley’s corpsmen, only Baker completely lacks college education. He is hard working, full of bluster and bravado. Baker constantly performs stunning physical feats: for in-

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stance, on movie night Baker single-handedly totes the one-hundred-andthirty-pound generator while two other corpsmen hang a screen (53). Yet, the photograph of Baker in The Edge of Tomorrow shows that Dooley’s attitude toward Baker’s embodiedness has shifted. Here, Baker is poised over a dead tiger, looking straight into the camera. Scattered in the background, several Laotian men along with Chai, his Lao helper from the childbirth episode, regard Baker with the tiger. Dooley’s caption directs us to focus on Chai, a native helper, rather than on Baker: “Norman Baker with a very dead jungle prowler. Notice Chai on his right, surveying the situation, wondering if he dare suggest that the Americans try a tiger rump steak” (unnumbered page 4 of 32 in photo insert). Pictured among native men rather than among children, and posed as a predator, Baker’s gaze meets the camera, whereas earlier it had been absorbed in the child he held. Baker is aggression—the Great White Hunter. Most important in gauging the change in Dooley’s attitude toward Baker’s embodied masculinity, the caption directs us to attend to Chai, rather than Baker. Chai is credited with interiority that Dooley voices. Baker, who had been offered as the voice of the American desire to “help people who ain’t got it so good,” is silenced. It may seem contradictory to claim that Dooley would silence a figure whose presence in his narrative is as a body: radical embodiment—when bodies are in pain, or extremity, for instance—so often precludes speech. Dooley indicates, however, that Baker’s body and his voice are one and the same. Baker says what he thinks, without dissembling, and what he thinks is what he feels, directly and immediately, with his body. In short, Baker’s body speaks. But what Baker’s body says is not what Dooley would have it say. Baker voices physical concerns about Dooley’s mission to northern Laos, responding to Dooley’s idealism with worries about “living on C-rations” and “holding 24-hour sick call” (12). More than bad diet or tough working conditions, Baker is concerned about the threat of captivity: “I never did like the sound of those Chinese prison camps!” (13). As Dooley presents them, Baker’s worries for his own bodily comfort are inseparable from his wife’s embodied maternity. Baker’s objections are punctuated with references to his wife. As if to indicate that his objections are not his own, Baker explains, “Fact is, Priscilla’s going to have a baby” (13), a fact that he brings up with persistence. Dooley believes his benevolent mission will run on self-abnegation verging on ascetic denial of the body’s interest, and that American bodies are valuable insofar as they make concrete to Asians inherently American com-

[ 186  ]  danielle glassmeyer

passion by “showing American face to a lot of Asians who had been told that American white-men didn’t give a damn” (13). Baker’s body insists it doesn’t give a damn if its interests must be compromised. Its primary interest is Priscilla’s maternal body.50 Baker’s embodied masculinity is inseparably linked to, and a constant reminder of, an embodied femininity Dooley wants to exclude from his vision of American-Asian relations. Thus, while photo and caption signal Dooley’s will to silence Baker’s recalcitrant body, his stronger desire is to silence Baker’s wife’s body, speaking through Baker. Pregnant Priscilla Baker looms over the narrative like a bad conscience, giving the lie to Dooley’s pretensions toward masculine maternity. Whatever good Baker does the narrative as a representation of ordinary America, his presence damages sentimental orientalism’s mother-child conceit. When Dooley narrates the Lao childbirth, only pages after Baker’s exit from the narrative, his rational practice resonates as almost an exorcism of embodied maternity. With American maternity excised, the narrative can empty maternity of its “real” content and rearticulate it as a metaphor for American nation-building in Asia, reconstructing the maternal not as an identity, or as the result of an inevitable physiological process, but as a practice that can be performed, or not, according to the will of American men. The family that is constituted around Dooley’s maternal practice is free of women. His corpsmen gather at the nightly “family Rosary” (Edge, 46), and Asian children with brothers and sisters but curiously detached from fretting parents seem to drift in and out of the compound at will. While some may wish to attribute Dooley’s images as linked to his homosexuality, my argument means to suggest that getting away from bodies in general and sexuality in particular is precisely the point for Dooley, and for sentimental orientalists as such, as it was for a larger community that posited that world conflict was premised on differences that were more imagined than real. Dooley articulates difference as a product of disparity in maturity, rather than essence, that could be grown out of, given the proper nurture. But women’s bodies, especially when pregnant and parturient, blatantly exposed a difference that, prior to our era of fertility therapies, registered as irreducible. In a discourse seeking to level difference, such evidence cannot be ignored, and must therefore be repressed or displaced. Thus, like Steichen’s Family of Man, that depoliticized version of Kennedy’s “family of nations,” Dooley’s interracial, intercultural family in Indochina imagines itself as best operating without women. Indeed, at midcentury medical, psychological, and sociological, along with popular, wisdom had combined to suggest that women, no less than denizens of the

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Third World, could not be trusted to make the right decisions, and most often exercised power arbitrarily. And whether good mothers or bad, they were altogether too likely to deprive their children of their love, if not through pathological self-absorption then through the mortality of their earth-bound bodies. In the American mid-century, childbirth, no less than the women’s bodies through which childbirth is accomplished, whether Asian or American, is figured as pathology in need of containment and reform. As science distilled away the pathological vagaries of domestic childbirth over time, sentimental orientalists promise to reform Asia’s primitive birth practices, domestic organization, and political structures, to make them rational, and rule-governed and endlessly repeatable, and thus to usher in a communistfree era of peace based on globally realized maturity. A first step is offered in Dooley’s narrative, where, when he and his fellows boil birth down to its purest, disembodied essence, it is revealed that blood and body connections do not a family make, and that “birth” in its purest form (with all the blood, sweat, and groans carefully hidden from view) is, indeed, a human universal. Saving this world from China’s fate means rewriting Indochina as Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia; that revision requires a rewriting of the whole of history—or at least the history of gender.

notes 1. See Thomas A. Dooley, Deliver Us from Evil (New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1956); The Edge of Tomorrow (New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1958); The Night They Burned the Mountain (New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1960). Dooley’s memoirs were published simultaneously by Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, and in condensed form by Reader’s Digest. I will refer to the book publications unless otherwise noted. 2. Dooley’s mother, Agnes Dooley, and a long-time secretary for MEDICO, Teresa Gallagher, each wrote a memoir after Dooley’s death, in efforts to gather funds to keep the Dooley Foundation going. The Tibet project is mentioned by Gallagher in Give Joy to My Youth: A Memoir of Dr. Tom Dooley (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965). 3. See Eric Hayot’s essay, “Chineseness: A Prehistory of Its Future,” in this volume. 4. In my book-length work-in-progress, Sentimental Orientalism and American Intervention in Vietnam, I trace the American historical roots of this discourse in abolitionist rhetoric of the mid-nineteenth century, as well as in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I and Lederer and Burdick’s The Ugly American, and in social programs, like the Peace Corps, Pearl Buck’s Welcome House and the

[ 188  ]  danielle glassmeyer Pearl S. Buck Foundation. See also Christina Klein’s book Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1941–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), which brilliantly links the middle-brow American discourse to efforts to promote cold-war internationalism. 5. In novel and film, American soldiers in Korea are kidnapped and brainwashed by communist Chinese military psychologists. One particularly susceptible (due to bad mothering) soldier who has always been reviled by the squad is recreated as an assassin and the remainder are brainwashed to call him a great hero. Richard Condon’s novel (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2004; originally published in 1959) was made into the film, directed by John Frankenheimer and starring Frank Sinatra (United Artists, 1962) that I am referring to. The 2004 version (Paramount), directed by Jonathan Demme and starring Denzel Washington, is set after the Gulf War. Brainwashing had captured Americans’ imagination at the end of the Korean War, as Eugene Kinkead explains, when it was offered as the explanation for the reluctance of some American POWs held by the Chinese to be repatriated. See Kinkead’s In Every War But One (New York: Norton, 1959). 6. Edward Steichen, The Family of Man: The Greatest Photographic Exhibition of All Time—503 Pictures from 68 Countries—Created by Edward Steichen for the Museum of Modern Art, Prologue by Carl Sandburg (New York: Maco Magazine Corporation, 1955). 7. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 290. 8. See James T. Fisher’s cultural biography of Dooley, Dr. America: The Lives of Thomas A. Dooley, 1927–1961 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), for in-depth discussion of factual and historical information about Dooley and the organizations and individuals with whom he had contact and sympathies. 9. See “America’s Stake in Vietnam” in proceedings of the eponymous June 1, 1956, symposium held in Washington, D.C. (New York: American Friends of Vietnam, 1956). Here I have cited pages 11 and 13. Kennedy’s speech was also printed in Vital Speeches, which is where it gained fame. I am referring to the original symposium publication. 10. Kennedy, 10. 11. Ibid., 13. Of course, there had been suggestive invocations of a “family of nations” or “the family of man” before, most powerfully in the Victorian scientific racism that consolidated white racial ascendancy via implementation of this ideology to support the Darwin-inspired “Family Tree of Man.” In this formulation, less-white and non-white “branches” of the “family” are depicted as the lower, atavistic, and vestigial limbs, curiosities on their way to extinction, whose economic and political subjugation was rationalized by appealing to “natural” selection. See Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York: Routledge, 1995) for analysis of the function of this metaphor in British imperial discourse. 12. Dooley was twice voted to “10 most important men” lists in popular magazines, decorated by the governments of Vietnam and Laos, and he received numerous

tom dooley and “indochina”  [ 189  ] honorary degrees and memberships; his death in 1961 from melanoma at age thirty-four prompted a small but vocal group to nominate him for sainthood. Research for the process of sainthood revealed an extensive CIA file on Dooley, which suggested that he acted covertly for the CIA. See Fisher, Dr. America, or reference “Medicine in the Jungle: Dr. Thomas Dooley and Earl Rhine in Laos,” a Web site maintained by the University of Missouri at Saint Louis, at http:// www.umsl.edu/~whmc/exhibits/dooley/index.html. (Accessed July 12, 2007.) 13. This is suggested in Promises to Keep, Agnes Dooley’s memoir about her son (New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1962). 14. There is and was a tendency to construe the Cold War in binary terms of USSR against United States. The China Lobby and later the Vietnam Lobby, and more generally, “Asia Firsters,” resisted this tendency, arguing that the sheer population of Asia made its fate far more important to America than Europe’s. Indeed for China alone, the numerical titles proliferate. To name just two: Carl Crow’s 1937 400 Million Customers: The Experiences—Some Happy, Some Sad—of an American in China and What They Taught Him (Norwalk, Conn.: Eastbridge, 2003), and Robert Guillain’s 600 Million Chinese (New York: Criterion, 1957). Guillain’s book was more tellingly titled in its London edition, brought out the same year by Secker and Warburg as The Blue Ants: 600 Million Chinese under the Red Flag. The tendency to characterize Asians as insectlike is found in much of this discourse, and supports the China Lobby’s other usual contention that Asians’ racial difference made their loyalty to America uncertain. Although agreeing that Asia should be America’s first concern, members of these groups, formal and informal, vary widely in their recommendations for action in Asia; some, like Kennedy, clearly change their positions over time. While not the majority, a significant portion of the “Asia Firsters” do endorse practices and programs like Dooley’s. See Robert Newman’s Owen Lattimore and the “Loss” of China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) for a perspective on adherents to “Asia First.” 15. “The Periscope,” Newsweek (January 31, 1955), 17. The shift from military might to a more nurturing role for America that began in the late 1940s but gained momentum throughout the first half of the decade is beautifully captured in Christina Klein’s reading of the final image of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific (1958). There, the American fleet retreats into the distance as Nellie, the American stepmother, and Emile, the French colonial father, join hands across a dinner table to nurture Emile’s half-French, half-Polynesian children, signaling, as Klein notes, the end of the military era and a new day of political obligations to feed and care for the half-Europeanized “orphans” abandoned by collapsing empire. See Klein, “Family Ties and Political Obligations: The Discourse of Adoption and the Cold War Commitment to Asia,” in Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945–1966, ed. Christian G. Appy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), 35– 66. 16. George Kennan is the anonymous author of the 1947 essay that first offered the

[ 190  ]  danielle glassmeyer theory of “containment.” See “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs (July 1947). 17. Hilton Kramer’s review of the MOMA exhibit includes this information. The review is titled, “Exhibiting the Family of Man: ‘The World’s Most Talked About Photographs,’” Commentary 20 (1955): 364–67. 18. Phoebe Lou Adams, “Through a Lens Darkly,” Review of The Family of Man exhibition, The Atlantic Monthly 195 (April 1955): 69–72. 19. Steichen, The Family of Man, 4–5. 20. Kramer, “Exhibiting,” 365. 21. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, selected and trans. Annette Lavers (Paris: Editions Du Seuil, 1957; New York: Noonday Press/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973). Further reference will be given parenthetically in the text. 22. David Damrosch, Meetings of the Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 58, 59. 23. Ibid., 60. 24. Dooley, Deliver Us from Evil, 211. Future citations will be given parenthetically in the text as Deliver. 25. Dooley, The Edge of Tomorrow, 5. Future citations will be given parenthetically in the text as Edge. 26. For detailed examinations of the scope and effects of the burgeoning industries of psychology, child guidance, and magazines in Cold War America see Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women (New York: Anchor Books, 1979) and Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War (New York: Basic Books, 1988). 27. Bowlby’s WHO report, Maternal Care and Mental Health (1951), was reprinted in abridgement as Child Care and the Growth of Love (Baltimore, Md.: Penguin, 1953; reprints in 1955, 1957, and 1959, 1961 and 1963; second edition 1965; reprinted in 1966 and 1967), and advances his theory, laying the groundwork for a sea-change in social work practices. Among the changes that may be attributed to Bowlby’s theory: the notion that families should be kept together as much as possible and the concept that social workers should intervene therapeutically in families replaced an older mode of child rescue. Bowlby’s contribution to the professional preference for foster care over orphanages as interim placement for children orphaned or removed from the home was solidified in the 1950s. 28. Scientists question Bowlby’s research model as inconclusive and anecdotal; what’s more, his research subjects were primarily children who had been deprived of mother, father, home, and any sense of security during the wartime evacuations of London. Feminists excoriate Bowlby’s theory for making women de facto hostages to the demands of children. Despite these critiques, Bowlby’s theories were, and are, widely influential. Indeed, the present-day school of “attachment parenting” derives directly from Bowlby, and is the mode of the three most influential living child-care “experts,” British Penelope Leach, and Americans T. Berry Brazelton and William Sears. 29. Eschewing the inefficacy of government and other bureaucracy-bound pro-

tom dooley and “indochina”  [ 191  ] grams, Dooley extolled instead small efforts and person-to-person contact focused on projects that were geared toward the local people’s developmental needs. Dooley calls attention to his program’s fit with Eisenhower’s “People to People Program,” inaugurated in September 1956 as a program for winning friendship for America through individual efforts. Eisenhower does not refer to it again in The White House Years: Volume 2; Waging Peace, 1956–1961 (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1963–65), 410; nor do historians. Yet, similar programs, official and ad hoc, pop up at times of crisis in the nation’s identity. In the previous Bush administration, the Thousand Points of Light program shared the People to People Program’s convictions about the efficacy of individual benevolence and volunteerism. 30. Thomas A. Dooley, “Delivering the Refugees,” A Symposium on America’s Stake in Vietnam (New York: American Friends of Vietnam, 1956), 36. 31. Ibid, 37. 32. Ibid. 33. Diana Shaw calls these atrocities “completely unsubstantiated.” For details, see Shaw’s “The Temptation of Tom Dooley,” Los Angeles Times Magazine (December 15, 1991), 43ff. 34. For the intersection of notions such as these with “modernization theory” in foreign affairs, see Jonathan Nashel, “The Road to Vietnam: Modernization Theory in Fact and Fiction,” in Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945–1966, ed. Christian G. Appy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), 132–56. 35. Dooley claims that he was criticized for not building state-of-the-art hospitals. He proudly retorts, “In America doctors run 20th-century hospitals. In Asia I run a 19th-century hospital. Upon my departure the hospital may drop to the 18th century. This is fine, because previously the tribes in the high valleys lived, medically speaking, in the 15th century.” See The Night They Burned the Mountain, 105. Frequent repetition of this reasoning betrays his anxiety on this point; for example, see Edge of Tomorrow, 54. 36. Tom Dooley, “The Night They Burned the Mountain,” Reader’s Digest 76 (May 1960): 93–99. 37. Indeed, a description of the “Dooley kits” assembled by a women’s aid society for shipment to Dooley’s mission illustrates the Asia that Dooley’s readers come to envision. A Dooley kit is “a small cloth draw-string bag, [which] contains a bar of soap, a face-cloth, a comb, a tube of toothpaste, some tissue, a balloon, a small light toy, a lollypop and some socks.” See Teresa Gallagher, Give Joy to My Youth: A Memoir of Dr. Tom Dooley, 8. Americans imagine Dooley, and themselves by Dooley’s proxy, as a maternal force caring for a continent filled with needy children. 38. Dooley, “Delivering,” 41. 39. Midwives, skilled and knowledgeable in an area that even educated men knew little about, and most without access to formal education, were sometimes burned as witches in the middle ages. See the Malleus Maleficarum or Witch

[ 192  ]  danielle glassmeyer Hammer (1486) online at http://www.malleusmaleficarum.org (accessed April 10, 2005). Dooley uses “sorcerer/sorceress” and “witch doctor” interchangeably. This scene is from a chapter called “The Story of Ion: Witch Doctors,” which shows Dooley working with and around witch doctors. Native medicine people are derogated by Dooley, but they also change him. For example, in The Edge of Tomorrow he jokes about fee-splitting after “consultations” in which he eloquently describes a course of treatment and the witch doctor “grunts” in approval; see page 93. Dooley entered Laos assuming the value of his medicine, but as shown in the passages in which he accommodates witch doctors’ techniques so that he may practice his own, it is clear that witch doctors’ resistance to his methods has at least made Dooley rethink his approach in order to reach their patients. 40. In “‘Science’ Enters the Birthing Room: Obstetrics in America since the Eighteenth Century,” Judith Walzer Leavitt indicates that specialized training in obstetrics was first offered to male medical students and medical apprentices in the United States starting in 1762. The author suggests that the overwhelming shift from home childbirth with a midwife to hospital childbirth attended by a physician can be traced to a 1930s article in the premier issue of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology by Chicago doctor Joseph DeLee, who argued that systematized routines were required to control the vagaries of childbirth. She suggests that DeLee refigured childbirth as pathology and argued forcefully for numerous interventions “to make obstetrics scientific, systematic, and predictable.” See her article in The Journal of American History 70, no. 2 (September 1983): 281–304, especially 282, 298. 41. Walzer Leavitt, 301. 42. Ibid. See also Catherine M. Scholten, “‘On the Importance of the Obstetrick Art’: Changing Customs of Childbirth in America, 1760–1825,” in History of Women in the United States, Vol. 11: Women’s Health and Childbirth, ed. Nancy F. Cott (New Providence, N.J.: K. G. Saur, 1993), 13–22, for a slightly different summary and analysis of changes in typical birthing practices with the shift from midwife- to doctor-attended births. 43. Walzer Leavitt, 297. 44. In “Birthing and Anesthesia: The Debate over Twilight Sleep,” Judith Walzer Leavitt argues, contra my suggestion here, that “twilight sleep” was introduced to the United States due to the protest of feminists who elected unconsciousness rather than painful labor, thereby exerting agency by choosing not to experience pain. See Walzer Leavitt’s article in History of Women, 195–212. 45. Steichen, Family of Man, 45. 46. Ibid., 179, 184–85, 189–92. 47. I have in mind Gayle Rubin’s groundbreaking essay “The Traffic in Women,” in which she traces the resonances of Levi-Strauss’s suggestion of woman’s function as an exchange item between men through its permutations in the economic and psychoanalytic theory. See “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the

tom dooley and “indochina”  [ 193  ] Political Economy of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna P. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157–77. 48. Emphasis added. See Lawrence Elliott, The Legacy of Tom Dooley (New York: World Pub. Co., 1969), 2. 49. In The Powers of Horror, Kristeva links the modern revulsion with the body’s excretions to the fear of being re-engulfed by the maternal body. The process of negation, rather than repression or suppression, is used to manage abjection— one covers one’s eyes, or puts the abject at arm’s length, but the abject cannot be “forgotten,” even conditionally, as can the repressed (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 50. In contrast, in Edge of Tomorrow, Denny Shepard, Baker’s fellow corpsman, is constructed as a model of repression: according to Dooley, Shepard never mentions his wife; see 10, 13. Shepard’s control extends far beyond his service: Dooley asserts that Shepard would return to university upon leaving Laos, while Baker “was anxious to get back to his wife and baby” (55).

8 

“Torture—and Loving Care— in China”: Captivity and the Fiction of Oriental Despotism Timothy Kendall

On January 16, 1973, the Australian High Commissioner to Hong Kong was called to the border of the People’s Republic of China to escort a fiftyfour-year-old Australian journalist into British Hong Kong. The figure was wrapped in a large green People’s Liberation Army jacket and had shrunken cheeks and close-cropped hair. Anemic, gaunt, and unable to walk without support, he clutched at the High Commissioner’s arm as they slowly crossed the bridge at Lo Wu. Once they completed the 450-foot journey, the Australian journalist stumbled and collapsed. He was then fitted with a life jacket, placed in a helicopter, and transferred to Hong Kong’s Matilda Hospital. More than three years earlier, Alfred Francis Phillip James had been detained when attempting to cross the same international border. James had been taken to an office within the Shumchun Railway Station, where he was searched, questioned, and subsequently arrested by China’s security police. He was then transferred to the Guangdong Public Security Bureau and accused of spying on the Chinese secret nuclear testing facility at Lop Nor. The Chinese alleged that James had visited prohibited regions near the Sino-Mongolian and Sino-Soviet borders, and believed that he was in possession of detailed information about Chinese defense preparations in Lanzhou and Xinjiang. For the next 1,169 days, Francis James was held in various locations in Guangdong, Shanghai, and Urumqi. While he was never formally charged with any crime, Chinese officials claimed that [ 194  ]

“torture—and loving care—in china”  [ 195  ]

James had been found guilty of espionage. The Chinese insisted that James had breached public security and that he had been acting as an operative for an unnamed foreign power. James was accused of trying to exit China with film that was considered to compromise China’s national security and of having had “illicit relations” with Chinese political and religious elements. From the moment Francis James staggered across the Hong Kong border, a press battle began. Journalists in Hong Kong quickly assembled at the Matilda Hospital, while in Australia the media staked out the James family home in the Sydney suburb of Wahroonga. In the days that followed, and as public interest in the James case grew, various newspapers competed for the rights to publish James’s account of his captivity. Newspaper bosses had been waving their checkbooks, and James had sold the rights to his story to the Fairfax papers, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Age, and to the Sunday Times of London. During the two weeks that it took James to prepare his account, the Sydney Morning Herald presented interviews with James’s wife, background reports by Margaret Jones in Sydney, and on-the-spot updates from Creighton Burns in Hong Kong. The paper also revisited the story of Anthony Grey (the British journalist who was detained in China at the outset of the Cultural Revolution), reprinting excerpts from his recently published Hostage in Peking. In the final days before the release of the story, the Sydney Morning Herald began running full-page promotional photo-advertisements. Then, after two weeks of preliminaries, James’s story finally began to appear—serialized, published in daily installments, introduced on page one and spread across pages 6 and 7: “I Am Stripped and Searched at the Chinese Border,” “Torture—and Loving Care—in China,” “Grilling Follows Mao’s Thoughts,” “I’m Put into Canton’s Main Jail,” “My First Real Bath in Three Years,” “Seven Weeks of Questions,” and “I Make Escape Bid on Stolen Bicycle.”1 In the account, James documents the trauma he experienced during captivity. He offers an explanation of the circumstances that led to his detention; he provides a description of the conditions under which he was held and elaborates upon the anxieties he endured as a captive: his isolation and loneliness, his interrogations by Torquemada, Tomcat, Fatso, and the Dominican, and his persistent fear of being tortured or even killed. The series then concludes with examples of James’s resistance—his persistent refusal to sign a confession and his three foiled escape attempts. Throughout, James represents himself as an eccentric Western adventurer who, in

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crossing the totalitarian frontier, became exposed to the sinister, paranoid and xenophobic manipulations of the Chinese state. The publication of James’s story coincided with a substantial repositioning of China within the Australian political order: the newly elected Whitlam Labor Government had just granted diplomatic recognition to the People’s Republic. In light of this, the first-hand account of an Australian who had experienced the wrath of Chinese communism provided a site where anxieties about the recognition of China could find expression. James’s highly conventional and formulaic narrative of captivity operated allegorically, symbolizing the incommensurability of the two political systems and validating Orientalist stereotypes about Eastern communist dictatorships.

captivity and oriental despotism Having emerged as a feature of British empire-making from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century, the captivity narrative later resurfaced in the settler colonies of Australia and the United States. The storytelling convention was utilized by white settlers to narrate the experience of being taken and held by indigenous populations.2 Since that time, the captivity narrative has continued to develop as an important storytelling practice. Yet, despite the fact that the captivity narrative has come to function in a variety of contexts and temporalities, its generic and discursive features have remained largely unchanged. A series of dominant tropes and archetypal themes have emerged and the captivity narrative has become formulaic in both its expectations and exclusions. Common to each narrative of captivity is an anxiety about engaging with racial and cultural difference. Captivity narratives are almost always recounted from the perspective of a white person and are usually told to white audiences. The characters in the narratives always represent clear, oppositional, and racialized identities. The action of the story frequently takes place in a culturally alien or hostile place that is considered to be governed by different rules, and in many cases, no rules at all. Whether given an autobiographical or fictional form, the captivity narrative is mobilized to address contemporary racial and cultural anxieties and is invoked or staged on frontiers where territorial, political, and racial conflicts can be seen to have taken place. In the year following the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), Alain Grosrichard published The Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of the East. This text offers a genealogy of the notion of “despotism”

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and identifies the way that this concept was developed to discredit the legitimacy of non-European powers. Focusing on the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a period when the Ottoman Empire had “set itself down at the gates of Europe,” Grosrichard’s text analyzes the way in which the rise of Turkish power was represented by the French authors Voltaire, Montesquieu, Baudier, and Chardin.3 While Grosrichard’s The Sultan’s Court differs from Said’s Orientalism both in subject matter and context (Said focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, critiques the voyages of Napoleon, the writings of Lamartine, Nerval, Flaubert, et al., and the representations of the Islamic and Arab world), they both elucidate the same central thesis: that Orientalist systems of representation have been developed to advance Western hegemony over the East. Mladen Dolar, who introduces a recent edition of Grosrichard’s work, adds that the two texts met with very different fates: Said’s was immediately successful and has continued to be a major scholarly reference, while Grosrichard’s text gained only a limited number of readers.4 While Orient- alism does not elaborate at any length on the trope of despotism, the notion is central to the paradigm Said explicates. Despotism, along with notions of the Oriental character or atmosphere and the concepts of Oriental splendor, sensuality, and cruelty, represent many of the essentialized characteristics that Europeans use to identify or fictionalize the Orient. Throughout The Sultan’s Court, Grosrichard identifies the way in which the concept of despotism developed, from a term used to distinguish a specific form of non-European, or “undemocratic,” government (despotic regimes were considered to be controlled by an autocrat who was said to rule arbitrarily, illegitimately, and without a codified system of law) into a comprehensive fiction that detailed all aspects of the Asiatic world: governmental, political, social, moral, and sexual. This fiction reinforced the belief that while Europeans were active and reflective, non-Europeans were passive and apathetic. It was this innate passivity and listlessness, therefore, that made it possible for undemocratic regimes to maintain power throughout the Asiatic world. Appearing as morally neutral and objectively valid, this system of representation sought to reinforce the differences between Europeans and non-Europeans, while propagating the fantasy that non-Europeans inhabited a world characterized by all forms of excess, irrationality, and immorality—cruelty, greed, lust, caprice, slavery, and torture. Throughout the twentieth century, the characteristics that Grosrichard identifies in the work of French authors of the seventeenth and eighteenth

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century were redeployed, in new forms, both fictional and nonfictional, to describe a new form of Oriental governmentality. During the Cold War the concept of despotism that Grosrichard describes came to overlap with the notion of totalitarianism.5 “Despotism” and “totalitarianism” were used interchangeably, and somewhat arbitrarily, to refer to a broad range of social and governmental characteristics that were believed to exist throughout the communist world. Not altogether surprisingly, these characteristics were believed to be most concentrated in the communist countries in Asia. It was widely believed that the communists held power in China because the Chinese people were incapable of change: they were passive, torpid, and accustomed to living under the tyranny of totalitarian regimes. This theory was advanced in spite of the fact that China had recently experienced massive social upheaval and a comprehensive agrarian revolution. A new frontier was considered to have emerged, one dividing the democratic world from communism. This frontier, which became represented by the metaphor of a curtain, be it iron or bamboo, continued to represent the boundary where the civilized bordered the uncivilized. The Cold War provided fertile ground for various tales of captivity, and as citizens of the free world began to emerge from behind the totalitarian frontier they adopted the storytelling convention to convey their experience of detention. The captivity narrative soon became inextricably linked to the way that the People’s Republic was imagined in countries like Britain, France, Canada, the United States, and Australia. A series of fictional works exploited the fantasy of Oriental despotism to serve as an ideological weapon in the war against Chinese communism. Fu Manchu, after featuring in fourteen crime novels early in the century, re-emerged during the Cold War in five British films: The Face of Fu-Manchu (1965), The Brides of Fu-Manchu (1966), The Vengeance of Fu-Manchu (1968), The Blood of Fu-Manchu (1968) and The Castle of Fu-Manchu (1968). Fu’s return was significant, for he had come to be recognized as the fictional prototype for the despotic Oriental, the “yellow peril incarnate.”6 Other prominent subjects of Cold War fear and enmity included Ian Fleming’s Dr. No (1958) and Richard Condon’s Dr. Yen Lo, who appeared in the novel, The Manchurian Candidate (1960). Dr. No, The Manchurian Candidate, and many of the novels featuring Fu Manchu are structured around scenes of captivity, and each text draws on the fantasy of Oriental despotism to expose the tyrannical nature of Chinese leadership. Dr. No imprisons James Bond and Honeychile Ryder on his island fortress, Dr. Yen Lo subjects American

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prisoners of war to intensive brainwashing, and Fu Manchu is frequently found capturing, drugging, and torturing his enemies.7 Validating and informing one another, these texts form a larger cross-referenced archive. In The Manchurian Candidate, Major Marco claims that the psychologist Yen Lo not only smiles like Fu Manchu but, like Fu, commits acts so terrible that they cannot be mentioned. Fu, No, and Lo each confuse leadership with autocratic control. They use ideology as an instrument of persuasion, and their power manifests in various acts of coercion and sublimation. Fu, No, and Lo are considered to embody the immorality and cruelty of the entire Chinese race, with each character indulging in various forms of excess: greed, lust, irrationality, caprice, slavery, and torture. Common to each representation is the presumption that while the West uses science to advance the human condition, the East uses science to infiltrate and subvert Western culture and duplicitously gain power over the people of the free world. In the 1962 film version of Dr. No, the evil doctor works for the criminal organization SPECTRE (the Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion) and has produced sufficient atomic energy to destroy the world; Dr. Yen Lo has established a Research Pavilion where he and his implantation teams reconstruct the personalities of American POWs, while Fu uses his menace and uncanny intelligence (which is advanced by his understanding of the mysteries of the occult) to push drugs, seduce women, stymie adversaries, and ultimately develop a Yellow Empire. Bound by what Sheng-mei Ma describes as “the common thread of ignorance and discursive violence running through all the literature on the ‘Yellow Peril,’” the popular cultural figures of Fu, No, and Lo embody the threat that China represented to the West during the Cold War.8 Dr. No provides an example of how fictional scenes of captivity act as a metonym for the social, political, or racial conflict of the day. It is not at all coincidental that in 1958, the year Fleming’s novel was published, various colonies throughout the West Indies sought separation from the British Empire. Within such a context, Bond’s activities—those of a new frontierman—become closely associated with the activities of Empire. In reasserting the legitimacy of British colonial power, the text suggests that Jamaican independence will result in anarchy, miscegenation, warlordism, and racial violence. In Fleming’s text, the captivity narrative operates allegorically, corroborating British colonial power at its moment of crisis.

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brainwashing, thought reform, and the korean war During the Cold War it was widely believed that those who had been detained behind the bamboo curtain had been exposed not only to the communist evils, Marxist-Leninist ideology and Maoist propaganda, but also to a range of sinister communist manipulations, such as indoctrination or brainwashing. By the time The Manchurian Candidate was published in 1960 the fear of being “brainwashed” had become an indispensable feature of the Cold War captivity narrative. The protagonist of the novel, Sergeant Raymond Shaw, is captured during the Korean War and subjected to three days of intensive brainwashing in Manchuria. The term “brainwashing” first appeared in 1950 when the American journalist and propaganda specialist Edward Hunter translated the Chinese colloquialism “xi nao” (“wash brain”), an expression that he claims was used by the Chinese informants he had interviewed following the communist takeover in 1949. Hunter used the expression in an article in the Miami News (September 1950); thereafter, he went on to reuse the term in the New Leader (October 1950) and in his Brain-washing in Red China (New York: Vanguard Press, 1951). Hunter employed the term to explain the reeducation techniques used to coerce Chinese citizens, and noncompliant nationalists, into the Chinese Communist Party.9 The expression did not enter into popular usage until the end of the Korean War, when it was believed that North Korean and Chinese armies were using a practice enabling them to achieve total control over the minds of American POWs.10 It was alleged that the Chinese had employed a series of psychological procedures that attacked a prisoner’s belief system and made them vulnerable to conversion to communism. Following the Korean War the U.S. Army undertook a five-year study to determine what psychological conditioning American POWs had been exposed to in Chinese and North Korean prison camps. It was believed that such a study would explain why one out of three repatriated U.S. POWs was guilty of having been involved in some degree of collaboration with the enemy. It would also explain why twenty-one American servicemen refused repatriation to the United States after the war.11 During August 1953, in the operation known as the “Big Switch,” large teams of psychiatrists were aboard the troop-ships that were repatriating American POWs. Once in the United States, the 4,500 former captives were required to write a biography and answer a seventy-seven-page booklet of questions about their

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captivity. Those considered most affected were sent to the Valley Forge psychiatric hospital in Philadelphia for analysis and de-brainwashing. Abbott Gleason, the author of Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War, claims that these POWs went on to become one of the most extensively studied groups of people in United States history. A body of pseudo-scientific texts began to emerge about brainwashing (Hunter, Lifton, Kinkead, Segal, Bauer, and Schein) and in September 1956 the American Psychological Association held a symposium to address the practice. Later published in a volume of the Journal of Social Issues, the papers suggested that many POWs were confused by the attitude of their captors. Often, the POWs were welcomed into captivity as the Chinese would offer their congratulations—“You’ve been liberated.”12 Mao maintained a policy of converting rather than punishing POWs and believed that captives should be given a revolutionary education. The Chinese did not reproach the ordinary soldier for the United Nations intervention; they considered the POW a student and would try and teach him the truth about the war. The Australian POW experience in Korea would, by and large, corroborate this tactic. During 1953 two separate groups of Australian POWs were released from captivity. The first group consisted of wounded prisoners released from POW camps as part of the Little Switch. Five injured men, who had spent three months “in Chinese hands,” were exchanged at Panmunjon on April 23, 1953. T. K. Critchley, an Australian government official in Seoul, interviewed the five Australians: John Mackay, Brian Davoren, Eric Donelly, John Davis, and Glenn Brown. In his report Critchley claims that there was no organized attempt to indoctrinate them, and warns that some of the stories told by Americans POWs about their mistreatment “must . . . be treated with caution.”13 In later interviews it would become clear that while there were no formal attempts at communist indoctrination, the five Australians attended screenings of Chinese and Russian films; they found Maoist, Marxist and Leninist reading material widely available; and they spoke of the prevalence of anti-American wall posters. The interviewees explained that their Chinese captors generally found it incomprehensible that the Australians were “volunteers for American capitalism” and therefore educated them about the dangers of U.S. imperialism.14 A second group of Australian POWs was repatriated during August 1953 as part of the Big Switch. Lieutenant J. H. Humphrey interviewed fifteen Australians in Japan shortly after their release from Korea. Humphrey’s report explains that POWs captured during 1951 had been subjected to

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compulsory “indoctrination.” This took the form of lectures that dealt with the United States’s use of germ warfare and the suggestion that the United States was the real aggressor in the war. For those captured in 1952 there was no compulsory indoctrination, and instead, study and discussion groups were run in the camp; no attempt was made to indoctrinate POWs captured in 1953. Humphrey summaries the treatment of Australian POWs like this: On the whole, treatment received from the Chinese by Australian PW was good. This applied particularly to PW captured later than 1951, who were treated reasonably well, particularly by the average Chinese front line soldier. However, during one interrogation, Lt. YACOPETTI did have his wounded ankle twisted by a high ranking Chinese officer, but this was stopped by the political officer present.15

These records of captivity seem not to have played a part in the Australian memorialization of the Korean War. A recent editorial in the Australian newspaper described a commemorative ceremony marking fifty years since the beginning of the war as “a belated reminder of the sacrifice that was made, not only by those who fought and died but by those captured and subjected to absolute brutality in captivity.”16 It is possible that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency popularized the concept of brainwashing in an attempt to explain the high incidents of collaboration, dissent, and desertion among American servicemen and to justify the conversion of American POWs to communism. Such a claim is further supported by the fact that Edward Hunter—the journalist to first use the word—was employed by the U.S. Department of Defense as a psychological warfare specialist when the term first appeared.17 As the Cold War continued, the term brainwashing, which began as a reference to Chinese techniques of indoctrination (or, in many cases, a form of Oriental witchcraft), came to encompass almost all the activities of all communist regimes. Yet, in spite of this sweeping application, “brainwashing” actually referred to the Chinese principle of thought reform, which had evolved from the philosophies of Marx and Mao. In On Practice and On Contradiction (1937) Mao offers some explanation of what he means by thought reform. Mao suggests that one of the central contradictions that existed within the old society concerned the directives made by the ruling classes—that members of the society ought to adhere to the moral virtues of thrift, hard work, and decency. Mao argued that the ruling classes failed to observe these values and had built up a series of rationalizations

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in order to justify this hypocrisy. These rationalizations, therefore, needed to be challenged or criticized if this double standard or contradiction was to be resolved. Thought reform was not only applied to Western “captives” but took place across China and was practiced in schools, universities, and revolutionary colleges, and in labor and peasant organizations. Mao writes of using criticism and self-criticism both to expose these contradictions and to foster personal honesty and social responsibility. He borrows from Marxism’s founding premise, that people are products of their environments: both from the point of view of the class to which they belong and the historical period into which they are born. He suggests that it is only through identifying the ideologies that reflect peoples’ historical and material surroundings that self-knowledge becomes possible. Thought reform, therefore, requires an individual to analyze and identify the way that their personal background has influenced their patterns of behavior. These newly identified behaviors would then be exposed to criticism and self-criticism. Finally, a new set of socialist or utilitarian values would be proposed and put into positive action. In principle, the concept is little different from other consciousness-raising activities employed in many cultures, or, in fact, from the processes of Western psychotherapy. The missionaries, journalists, and businessmen arrested during the 1951 campaign for the suppression of counterrevolutionaries were the Westerners most comprehensively exposed to the processes of thought reform, for it was within the prison system that the principles were applied most systematically. Each “counter-revolutionary” was placed in a small cell with between five and seven Chinese prisoners. Most of these prisoners would have been well advanced in terms of their own personal reform. This was essential, as cellmates were considered central to the reform program. Each cell would have a chief, and the chief was responsible for conducting study or re-education sessions with the group. He or she would read from communist papers, pamphlets, or texts and each prisoner in turn would be required to express an opinion; all participants would then “criticize” the opinions expressed by others. These study sessions provided a model for decision-making, which was based on socialist morality. Interrogation and confession sessions were regularly conducted elsewhere, outside the communal cell and by prison staff. Descriptions of how thought reform affected some of these Western “counter-revolutionaries” can be found in Allyn and Adele Rickett’s Prisoners of Liberation (1957) and in Robert Jay Lifton’s Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China (1961).

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The notion of brainwashing combined the concept of thought reform with a range of Orientalist myths in order to produce a more expansive and sinister fantasy about Oriental despotism. The brainwashing concept originated in the United States, at the start of the Cold War, and was propagated by the U.S. military, its intelligence agencies, and the psychiatric profession. Thereafter, the word brainwashing became a discursive norm that operated throughout a specific genealogy or archive of texts. That the notion became central to Australia’s Cold War experience bears witness to the capacity of U.S. institutional discourses to proliferate and pervade the Western imaginary.

resisting the oriental despot The vast majority of Cold War captives emerge from behind the communist frontier to publicly denounce their captors and elaborate a tale of resistance. The former captive details the conditions of imprisonment and the experience of interrogation before proceeding to condemn the captor, deny the allegations leveled against them, and offer examples of resistance—refusal to sign confessions, the failure to cooperate in the interrogation process, and the foiled escape attempts. Less commonly, the former captive emerges to explain that the experience of captivity has resulted in a personal liberation. In Prisoners of Liberation, Allyn and Adele Rickett describe their own transformation resulting from personal realizations encountered during confession and selfcriticism sessions, and the liberating experience of thought reform. However, despite refusing to act as an ideological accompaniment to the nar­ rative of Oriental despotism, the experience of transformation was frequently used by the Western media (and psychiatric establishment) to identify the effectiveness of communist techniques of indoctrination—behavior modification, thought reform, brainwashing. In so doing, the narrative of transformation became neutralized by a more sinister myth about Oriental despotism. Adele Rickett describes how, upon her release, her attitude provoked a hostile response from the American media, who claimed that she was “hopelessly brainwashed,” filled with “communist jargon,” and that her “mind had been twisted out of recognition.”18 In an alternative to the narratives of resistance and transformation, we find former captives so traumatized by the experience that they are deemed to have an uncertain understanding of their own identity and a tenuous relationship to the world at large. This experience of captivity (typically

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related by either the journalist or medical practitioner) is considered to have eroded the victim’s sense of national, political, and personal identity and resulted in a physical and mental disintegration. During the 1950s and 1960s, this state of isolation and inaccessibility came to be characterized by the euphemism, “the thousand-mile stare.”19 In the reports that were published in the days leading up to the release of Francis James’s account, the Sydney Morning Herald produced a profile of the man who had been held in detention in China for over three years. James is presented as a larger-than-life character who frequently threw caution to the wind. James, it seems, had spent twenty months as a POW during the Second World War, he had enjoyed a career as a fisheries tycoon in Western Australia and had become the publisher of the Anglican newspaper (running the paper from the backseat of his 1936 Phantom II Rolls-Royce). We learn that James visited Vietnam, where he traveled secretly under a false name to interview Ho Chi Minh, and we hear that he had “improbable adventures” in Indonesia, Cambodia, Russia, Poland, and Afghanistan. Having established the profile of this eccentric Australian adventurer to whom improbable things keep happening, the Sydney Morning Herald began to focus upon James’s captivity. Readers are informed that after having been mistaken for a spy, Francis James was unlawfully detained in China. On-the-spot interviews from the Matilda Hospital in Hong Kong claim that James had been constantly interrogated, persistently humiliated and subjected to the “mindless cruelty” of his captors.20 Francis James’s captivity narrative draws on the fiction of Oriental despotism first through the suggestion of unlawful detention and second through the allegation of gross mistreatment. In seeking to expose the inherent lawlessness of the Chinese regime, James claims that he was held unlawfully without being charged. James’s account opens by explaining: “On the instructions of the Ministry of Public Security of the People’s Republic of China in Peking, I was held prisoner, strictly incommunicado, in sundry places in China . . . (for) three years, two months and two days.” He then adds, “No formal, specific, written charges were ever preferred against me in this time, as they would have been preferred in England, Russia or most other countries. At no stage was I ever taken before a court—even a Chinese court.”21 Over the course of his account, James elaborates upon the capricious and autocratic nature of the Chinese state, reiterating that it operates without a transparent or codified system of law. He uses the suggestion of lawlessness, an allegation central to all captivity narratives, to obscure his acts of dissemblance: his deliberate attempt to provoke and antagonize

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the Chinese, his claim of entering China with a false passport in April 1969, his masquerading as Anton Pavlov, and, above all, his suggestion that he had visited and photographed the nuclear testing facility at Lop Nor. In further drawing upon the fiction of Oriental despotism, he describes the mindless cruelty of his captors. James documents at length the degradations he experienced during his captivity: the years of abuse, deprivation, starvation, and mental and physical torture. “I was kicked and beaten, spat upon, threatened with death and made to undergo personal humiliations and indignities of the crudest and most odious kind, usually for no apparent reason.”22 He describes how he was punished by months of solitary confinement in a damp and filthy underground cell, from which he never saw daylight. He explains that he was fed on a diet of water and two small bread rolls and that he was subjected to the “refined forms of half-scientific torture-treatment”—acupuncture and moxibustion.23 Beyond the physical deprivations, much of James’s story is concerned with recounting his experience of constant interrogation. In so doing, he establishes the love-hate relationship that was formed between him and his principal interrogators: the Dominican, Tomcat, Fatso, and, in particular, Torquemada—he who could be “merciful and compassionate . . . and capable of the most diabolical cruelty.”24 The struggle between James and his interrogators emerges as a subtext in which James claims that his stubborn resistance (which included three failed escape attempts) resulted in an uncomfortable and protracted sentence.25 James explains that he continually refused to sign a confession, that he toyed with his interrogators by citing the teachings of Mao, that he accused his captors of being modern revisionists, running dogs of the cultural imperialists and hidden agents of the renegade traitor and scab, Liu Shaoqi. During January 1970, after three days of particularly intense interrogation, James claims, “Finally . . . I wore them down by raising the conversation to the philosophical differences between the Chinese and the classical Greco-European approaches, respectively to natural science . . .”26 While James does not use the word “brainwashing,” he does make reference to ideological remolding. He explains that the Chinese wanted to change his world outlook and remold him through constant interrogations and exposure to the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao. Each interrogation session was opened and closed with Mao’s teachings, and James claims to have read the Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, cover to cover, some fifty times, annotating the work extensively. Throughout James’s account in the Sydney Morning Herald, his claims of

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abuse and deprivation are destabilized by the suggestion that he drove his interrogators “up the wall.” He suggests, “No one need worry in the least about me, it was not I who had a rough time but my captors,” and later, “Waste no time sympathizing with me. If you have sympathy to spare then please lavish it on the poor Chinese—all seven teams of them—whom I drove up the wall.”27 Such comments are central to James’s suggestion that he was resistant to the coercive practices of his captors. The Chinese could degrade his body, but they were unable to twist or transform his mind.

francis james and the fiction of oriental despotism James’s experiential account—which draws its authority from its status as nonfiction—is intensely reliant upon a range of literary conventions: the stories of resistance, the three failed escape attempts, the battle with his interrogators, and so on. In fact, the narrative framework is so compelling and the literary conventions so central to the strategies of the text that it is difficult to read James’s account as strictly reportage.28 This has parallel effects. These literary conventions could be considered to challenge or destabilize the verity of the account, thus locating James’s story somewhere between fact and fiction, or, simultaneously, the seductive and compelling nature of the narrative formula could be considered to help transform the account into something authentic and authoritative, or even, a form of truth. James’s account, and here I borrow James Hevia’s comment about the way in which the Fu Manchu stories interacted with the drug panic that gripped early twentieth-century Britain, “invite(s) analysis of the relation between the real and the fictional as categories mutually implicated and dependant upon each other.”29 It could be argued that James employs the formal and fictional properties of the captivity narrative as a means of resolving a complex and conflicting series of events. The formal features and binary structure of the captivity narrative offer James and his readers a clear and unambiguous way of interpreting his experiences. The narrative formula resolves contradictions and obscures any ambiguities that may exist within James’s story. It is not the ambiguities and irregularities of such stories that are committed to a reader’s memory, but rather the formulaic features of the narrative. Once James narrativizes these events, the seams that connect the constitutive parts are removed; the links are covered up and the contradictions are cloaked.

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A number of the paradoxes and contradictions that exist in James’s story are neutralized by the simple linearity of the captivity narrative. For example, while it is necessary for Francis James to be considered an honest and reliable narrator, there are numerous instances where he has misled, deceived, and committed, what he calls, “indiscretions.” Moreover, while the newspapers are determined to promote the cruelty of the Chinese (through their use of editing and headline and the reports received from their correspondents), James oscillates between condemning the Chinese and expressing his “love” for them. At moments James’s narrative unwittingly carries its ideological opposite within itself. In his first installment James claims, “. . . the object of the exercise is not just to rattle off a lot of sensational facts about my treatment in China, but to do my best to build a bridge of understanding and love between China and the rest of the world which can’t be constructed with concrete and steel but only with knowledge and truth.”30 James’s various performative identities come into open conflict as his altruism eventually becomes unstuck by his desire for self-inscription and self-promotion. This results in his sense of forgiveness becoming replaced by open hostility. James’s contradictory agenda threatens to subvert the uncomplicated and binary narrative formula, and these contradictions help to suggest that the narrative is more determining of the experience than the experience is of the narrative. James could have presented his story in a number of different ways. On January 16, 1973, the day of his release from China, an editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald claimed, “If diplomatic relations had not been established (between Australia and China) . . . Mr. James might have been obliged to go on languishing in captivity.” Such a claim suggests that it is quite possible that Francis James’s story could have been presented as a narrative about Australia’s engagement with China. This possibility is re­ inforced by the fact that James’s release was clearly linked to the election of the Whitlam Labor Government. Whitlam had claimed that the Chinese were allowing James to leave as a “friendly gesture” now that diplomatic relations between Australia and China had been established.31 Such a recasting would merely have had to link, omit, preserve, isolate, and foreground different features of the story. The story was told in yet another way at the time. Two weeks after the Francis James saga appeared in the daily newspapers, the Australian Women’s Weekly published their exclusive: “Life with Francis James: The Story of Joyce James.”32 Interspersed between information on how to cook fabulous fritters and prognostications about this year’s most popular au-

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tumn casuals, Joyce James presents her story of the woman-in-waiting. In a tale told over two weeks, Joyce James explains how she endured more than three years of uncertainty. The mass-market formula contains all the gendered discourses associated with the traditional women’s magazine. Joyce James is represented as a paradigm of early 1970s Australian female virtue—gentle wife and dedicated mother. We hear the story of Francis and Joyce’s courtship, we see the snaps from their postwar London wedding, and, throughout the two-week exclusive, Joyce is photographed with her smiling family clustered around her. Unlike the newspaper articles, which concentrate on the details of James’s China experience, the Women’s Weekly focuses on the family, elaborating what might best be described as a narrative of family trauma. In contrasting the representations in the Sydney Morning Herald with those in the Women’s Weekly, it becomes clear that this material could have been organized in several different ways; the content of the story could have taken numerous different forms. The distinction between form and content is critical. It is not just what makes up the story that is important, but also the way in which it is constituted, for form, like content, provides meaning. The captivity narrative clearly has a performative, or transformative, function; it offers a means of structuring experience while permitting meaning to operate clearly, unambiguously, and even synecdochically. It is this capacity to fix meaning that renders James’s narrative ideological. James appears to be motivated by (authorial) self-interest and reliant upon an ideological position that seeks to produce itself in relation to an Orientalized other. In so doing, a series of fictional texts appear to ventriloquize through James, effectively determining how his China experience is narrated. While his tale becomes expressive of Australia’s Cold War struggle, it simultaneously borrows from, and contributes to, the vast archive of Western captivity narrative.

the confucius enigma Francis James’s story—a story that reaffirms stereotypes about Chinese communism and represents James as some type of national hero who embodies the lawless and indomitable spirit of Australian individualism—has come to be considered as a type of foundational national narrative. The foundational status of this story is supported by the way in which the experiences of Francis James and Anthony Grey were reinvigorated in Margaret Jones’s fictional work, The Confucius Enigma (1979).

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Margaret Jones, who had covered the Francis James story for the Sydney Morning Herald in early 1973, went on to become the Sydney Morning Herald’s China correspondent from 1973 to 1975. In 1979, she released a political thriller about the community of foreigners living in Peking during the early 1970s. In a number of instances, the protagonist’s experience of captivity appears to be a fictionalization of the experiences of Francis James. Throughout the novel, Jones quite deliberately brings together the fictional and the real: In real life, international politics provide more melodrama than a fiction writer could possibly devise. I have therefore, in this book, drawn heavily on real occurrences and real experiences, my own and other people’s. However improbable many of the events appear, they are founded solidly in fact. Most of my characters are fictional, but the things which happen to them are taken from life.33

Throughout the text, historical documents, personages, and events interact with the fictional and the imagined. In reinforcing the way that captivity has become grafted onto the Western experience of China, we hear that something of a cult has developed around a number of “real life” Western journalists held captive in China: Even in recent times, three journalists had been imprisoned: Anthony Grey, of Reuter, under house arrest for two years, Norman Barrymaine, who drew 19 months solitary confinement, and . . . the Australian Francis James, held for three years without even any admission that he was in China. Like all other correspondents in Peking, Brock had made a pilgrimage to see the house in which Anthony Grey had been imprisoned, victim of Cultural Revolution politics, for two interminable years.34

This act of pilgrimage acts as a furtive warning that the novel’s protagonist, the journalist Alan Brock, may come to be similarly held. The hard-drinking and impetuous Brock becomes unwittingly involved in a coup contrived by a faction of Peking hard-liners. The language teacher, Wu, involves Brock in a plan to escort a man that he believes to be Marshal Lin Biao, Mao’s one-time heir, via train from Beijing to Russia. (In Wu’s scheme, Brock is told that Lin Biao did not die in the plane crash that followed his attempt to assassinate Mao but remained in China.) When Brock and the man he believes to be Lin Biao arrive at the Sino-Mongolia border, their train compartment is raided by Public Security Bureau officials. Brock attacks the man he believes to have betrayed him (Wu) and

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is then arrested and detained. It is only later that we learn that Brock has become implicated in one of Peking’s factional power struggles. The hardliners had deliberately involved Brock in this operation in an attempt to provoke anti-foreign sentiment at a time when the “Peking pragmatists” were speaking about joint ventures with foreign companies, establishing relations with the United States and calling for an end to confrontation with the Soviet Union. On the morning following his arrest, Brock wakes to find his right arm manacled to the bed frame; his filthy body aches and he is disoriented. Brock soon learns that he is not in a jail but in an infectious diseases hospital on the outskirts of Peking; in fact, Brock is sharing a room with a man infected with meningitis. Having not eaten for three days, Brock struggles to think clearly. He drifts off to sleep thinking of the Reuters man, Anthony Grey, and of how he was held for two years in a confined space, with nothing to read but the People’s Daily. Upon waking, Brock is taken from the room and interrogated. When he refuses to cooperate and sign a confession he is threatened with the prospect of being returned to the room where the infected man lies. Thereafter, Brock is taken to a dark, damp cell where rats scurry about him. His fellow expatriate, Jake Meisner, appears with a six-pack of Budweiser and a packet of Brock’s favorite cigarillos. (In a correspondingly unexpected and capricious act, Francis James claims to have been given red caviar.) Jake Meisner is an American who has abandoned his nationality and pledged himself to China. Meisner recounts his experience of being struggled during the Cultural Revolution. (Struggling refers to a form of psychological and sometimes physical persecution that was used during the Cultural Revolution to wear down adversaries.) Unnerved by what Meisner has related, Brock escapes though a small manhole discovered under his bed. After being discovered roaming around the Ming Tombs, he is paraded through a gymnasium and struggled. Then, in an inexplicable twist, the former villain Wu helps Brock escape. Brock is reunited with his friends, and his departure from China is quickly arranged. After telling the tale of his captivity, Brock flees China for Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, Brock is contacted by Mrs. Lee (Wu’s sister) and the mysteries of the past weeks are explained. It appears that Wu agreed to involve Brock in the operation in exchange for a visa for his ailing father. Wu’s father, the most eminent (and now discredited) Confucian scholar in the world, suffers from Parkinson’s disease and requires treatment unavailable in China! Jones claims that while her characters are fictional, “the things which

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happen to them are taken from life.” She therefore deploys the captivity narrative within her “fiction” as a means of describing and interpreting the “real” experience of China. However, in spite of the novel’s claims of realistic representation, the entire plot of The Confucius Enigma relies upon the elucidation of an enduring cultural stereotype, that of Oriental inscrutability. Wu’s inscrutability acts as the lynchpin to the intricate plot. The two twists that take place in the novel do so because we are never entirely sure who or what Wu represents. Wu can go from being friend to foe to friend again because we can never really know his true nature. One of the first works of Australian fiction to explore the unfamiliar setting of the People’s Republic, The Confucius Enigma continued to produce Australian national identity in relation to an essentialized and Orientalized other. Margaret Jones’s appropriation of the experiences of Grey, Barrymaine, and James illustrates the way that real-life and fictional accounts of captivity interact, or coalesce, to produce a certain kind of truth. In addition, Jones’s commandeering of these experiences reveals the process through which a specific collection of texts can acquire a particular referential power within a culture. Her novel completes or closes the discursive loop as James’s China experience becomes integral to Australia’s China experience.

notes 1. A report written by or about James appeared in the Fairfax papers each day from January 16, 1973, to February 9, 1973. 2. In Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850 (London: Plimco, 2003), Linda Colley depicts the process that saw English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish stories of captivity become inextricably bound to Britain’s imperial experience. 3. Grosrichard claims that after Mehmet II took Byzantium in 1453 the Turk was considered to represent a constant source of terror to both Europe and Europeans. 4. Mladen Dolar, introduction to Alain Grosrichard, The Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of the East, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1998). 5. This can be observed, for example, in the publication of Karl Wittfogel’s Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957). Wittfogel claims that the notion of Oriental despotism was a precursor to communist totalitarianism. 6. Fu Manchu was created by Sax Rohmer (a pseudonym for the British novelist Arthur Sarsfield Ward) and first appeared in 1913. 7. The blurb on the 1960 Pan edition of Dr. No (London: Pan Books, 1958) reads: “Dr. No: ruthless power-crazed Chinaman who devised fiendish tortures to

“torture—and loving care—in china”  [ 213  ] guard the secrets of his Caribbean island fortress”—“In his steel claws lay the fate of the West.” No has a thin smile, his skin is deep translucent yellow, and his face shows no signs of aging; he has slanting jet black eyes that operate like two revolvers; he appears to glide rather than take steps, wears a gunmetal sheen kimono, and Bond describes him as “a giant venomous worm wrapped in grey tin-foil.” In October 1962, Dr. No became the first Fleming novel to be made into a James Bond film. The mysterious and inscrutable Dr. No (played in the film by Joseph Wiseman) shares Fu Manchu’s prodigious intellect and understanding of science. Yet, in contrast to Rohmer’s villain, Dr. No, while identified as Chinese, is in fact racially ambiguous or “impure,” a “Chinese-German misfit,” the unwanted son of a German (Methodist) missionary and a Chinese girl of “good family.” It becomes clear that Dr. No’s racial ambiguity has caused a crisis of identity that is manifest in his evil and pernicious ways. Within Fleming’s schema, Bond’s cultural purity and moral authority contrasts Dr. No’s hybridity and profligacy. To reinforce this division we find that many of Dr. No’s staff are estranged and disaffected “Chigroes” (Chinese Negroes). 8. Sheng-mei Ma, The Deathly Embrace: Orientalism and Asian American Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 4. 9. However, it should be noted that Eleutherius Winance, a French Roman Catholic missionary who underwent and observed the experience of thought reform between 1949 and 1952, claimed that the original terms were xiao xi or guan shu (indoctrinate) or xue xi (study wash). The Communist Persuasion (New York: Kenedy, 1958). 10. During the Korean War 7,190 American servicemen became POWs. Of these, some 2,730, or thirty-eight percent, died in captivity. By comparison, 29 Australians were taken prisoner and one died in captivity. 11. Some had adopted communist viewpoints, some had written anti-American propaganda, while others had informed on (and in one case killed) American officers. Both the Journal of Social Issues and Eugene Kinkead’s Why They Collaborated (London: Longmans, 1959) focus on why it was that so many American servicemen failed to resist the enemy. Brainwashing was used to explain why several POWs claimed that the United States had used germ warfare in Korea. The U.S. government insisted that, through extending combat into the prison camps, the Chinese and North Koreans had acted in direct contravention of the rules of warfare as outlined by the Geneva Convention (1949). 12. See interviews conducted with American POWs, in particular, Edgar Schein, “Reaction Patterns to Severe, Chronic Stress in American Army Prisoners of War of the Chinese,” Journal of Social Issues 13, no. 3 (1957), 21–24. Schein’s study of Chinese thought reform was funded by the CIA; see Alan W. Scheflin and Edward M. Opton, Jr., The Mind Manipulators: A Non-fiction Account (New York: Paddington Press, 1978), 96. 13. “Korea–Korean War–Prisoners of War,” National Archives of Australia: A1838, 3123/5/7, Part 4. The Australian media’s coverage of the release of these POWs varied. An article in the Argus (April 24, 1953) ran with the headline: “Freed

[ 214  ]  timothy kendall Digger Wasn’t Impressed by Red ‘Pep’ Talk,” quoting Private John Davis: “Those commo indoctrination schools aren’t fair dinkum, and we weren’t impressed a bit.” The paper reports: “None of our boys came back indoctrinated” and that Davis said that “the prisoners’ treatment by the Chinese was ‘all right—as far as it went.’” The Canberra Times read: “Freed Australians ‘Cannot Grumble’ At Reds’ POW treatment” (April 24, 1953). 14. “Prisoners of War and Internees—Examinations and Interrogations: Interrogation of repatriated Australian POWs, in connection with the circumstances of capture, fate of patrol members, and treatment of enemy whilst in captivity,” Australian War Memorial: 114, 799/3/96. 15. “Prisoners of War and Internees.” The interviewees explain that POWs were identified and incarcerated according to nationality; this makes it possible that Australians may have been treated differently than Americans. Those Australians repatriated in the Little and Big Switches represented twenty of a total of twenty-nine Australian POWs. 16. Editorial, Australian, April 19, 2000. 17. Denise Winn, The Manipulated Mind: Brainwashing, Conditioning and Indoctrination (London: Octagon Press, 1983), 2. 18. Allyn and Adele Rickett, Prisoners of Liberation (1957; San Francisco: China Books, 1981), 307, 322. 19. This expression is used by Robert Jay Lifton when describing Charles Vincent, a Frenchman who was detained in China for three and a half years during this period. Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Studying of “Brainwashing” in China (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 19–37. 20. Creighton Burns, “The spring-loaded Francis James,” Sydney Morning Herald, January 20, 1973; also see Margaret Jones’s “Francis James—A Life Story of Adventure,” Sydney Morning Herald, January 16, 1973. Burns uses the phrases “constant interrogation,” “persistent humiliation,” and “mindless cruelty.” 21. Both this and the previous quotation are from Francis James, “Torture–and Loving Care–in China,” Sydney Morning Herald, January 27, 1973. 22. Ibid. 23. Francis James, “My First Real Bath in Three Years,” Sydney Morning Herald, February 1, 1973. Moxibustion is a technique used in traditional Chinese medicine in which a stick or cone of burning mugwort is placed over an inflamed or affected area on the body. The cone is removed before burning the skin. The purpose is to stimulate and strengthen the blood and the life energy, or qi, of the body. 24. James, “I Am Stripped and Searched at the Chinese Border,” Sydney Morning Herald, January 30, 1973. James is obviously aligning the interrogator with Tomás de Torquemada, the director of the Spanish Inquisition. Torquemada was responsible for the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 and was notorious for his heartless cruelty. 25. James, “Torture—and Loving Care.” 26. James, “Seven Weeks of Questions,” Sydney Morning Herald, February 5, 1973.

“torture—and loving care—in china”  [ 215  ] 2 7. James, “Torture—and Loving Care.” 28. This comment is informed by Eric Michaels’s critique of Sally Morgan’s My Place, in which Michaels claims: “The narrative frame is so strong and the literary conventions so central to the strategies of the text that My Place cannot be said to exist in the world of documentary . . .” Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media, and Technological Horizons (St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1993), 165. 29. James L. Hevia, “The Archive State and the Fear of Pollution: From the Opium Wars to Fu-Manchu,” Cultural Studies 12, no. 2 (1998), 236. 30. James, “Torture—and Loving Care.” 31. On the day of James’s release, Gough Whitlam claimed that the Chinese were allowing James to leave as a “friendly gesture” now that diplomatic relations between Australia and China had been established. Editorial, Sydney Morning Herald, January 16, 1973. 32. Joyce James, “Life with Francis James,” Australian Women’s Weekly, February 21–28, 1973. 33. Margaret Jones, The Confucius Enigma (Sydney: McGraw-Hill, 1979), Author’s Note. 34. Ibid., 45. Bill Green’s political satire, Compulsively Murdering Mao (Sydney: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989) is another fictional text in which an Australian journalist attempts to understand his experience of China through reference to Anthony Grey (109, 114).

9 

Boundary Crossings: Fieldwork, the Hidden Self, and the Invisible Spirit Lucien Miller

In this essay I wish to explore a keen sense of self-discovery and alterity (even divine alterity) experienced in relation to two modalities of boundary crossing: travel and ethnography. Dennis Porter writes in his superb study of travel literature, Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing, that one of the truths of all travel and, perhaps he might add, one of its graces, is the subversion of identity and the experience of the profound ambivalence of self, noting that Foucault proposed dialogic engagement with alien modes of life not simply to explore the other, but as a way to self-understanding and self-transformation.1 The traveling self experiences the tensions between transgression and desire, guilt and duty, and positive and negative transferences, which are released or repressed in relation to countries and peoples who are other. It is a fundamentally ambiguous enterprise, he writes, a political-aesthetic-cognitive act whereby you represent both your divided self and the alien other in language accessible to folks back home.2 I should like to extend Porter’s insights regarding travel literature and consider their ramifications in terms of my own ethno-autobiography, as it were: my experience of fieldwork in China, collecting the oral tales of the Bai national minority in the Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture, in western Yunnan Province, in 1991 and 1992. My method will be to describe my experiences of China as “participant-observer,” that wonderfully contradic[ 216  ]

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tory anthropological term guilty ethnographers use at their own peril, and to juxtapose these experiences and descriptions with those of some wellknown twentieth-century travelers to Asia: the Jesuit paleontologist and theorist of the evolution of consciousness, Teilhard de Chardin; the writer and monk, Thomas Merton; and the French novelist and travel writer, Victor Segalen. I reflect on these juxtapositions with the help of a number of anthropologists who have amplified my understanding of cross-cultural encounter: Zora Neale Hurston, Bronislaw Malinowski, Joseph Rock, Claude Lévi-Strauss, James Clifford, Clifford Geertz, and Alma Gottlieb. The whole enterprise of boundary crossing is problematical, yet productive, in ways I should like to explore. It seems obvious to me that what LéviStrauss, Geertz, and Clifford are saying is essentially true, for of course the relation between “being there” and writing about it (whether as ethnography, travel literature, theological treatise, laboratory report, psychological analysis, translation, or fiction) is problematical, complex, and ambiguous, and to assume identity of experience and presentation is naive, or even misleading.3 Is there any “out,” so to speak, any promise or saving grace in the experience-versus-writing impasse? I think there is, and here is where boundary crossing changes consciousness. If we shift grounds with literary theorists such as Mikhail Bakhtin and look for the creative activity that is possible when self meets other, we no longer seek replication of the other through representation, but the creation or discovery of new selves and worlds. As Mary Louise Pratt notes, personal narrative “mediates a contradiction within the discipline between personal and scientific authority,” the engagement of the self in fieldwork and self-effacement in formal ethnographic description, “by inserting the authority of the personal experience.”4 The creative role of mediation, which unfolds new selves and new worlds, is recognized clearly in the claim of some contemporary revisionist anthropologists, such as James Clifford, that ethnography is serious fiction, and the discovery we shall encounter below, that to study the other is to change self and other. Ethnographic texts, Clifford observes, are constructed, multivocal exchanges that take place in politically charged situations. The anthropologist Malinowski, like his older contemporary whom he knew and much admired, the novelist Joseph Conrad, fashions a self in a world where culture and language are viewed as “constructs, achieved fictions, containing and domesticating heteroglossia.”5

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the attraction of otherness Taking “serious fiction” as my cue, I want now to construct a Yunnan travelogue, exploring personal experiences and narration in a kind of ethnoautobiography (synonymous terms are “I-witnessing,” “participant descrip­ tion,” “reflective ethnography”), a genre that Paul Rabinow defines as “the comprehension of the self by the detour of the other.”6 What lies ahead through the encounter with Yunnan landscape are discoveries about human mutability and personal vocation unfolded in glimpses of fieldwork and becoming Bai. My initial visit to Yunnan was not a matter of attraction to “otherness” —differences in language, foods, and territory, together with a personal sense of destiny. These I only later discovered to be the hidden attractions of minority cultures in China for me, and of the Bai culture in particular. My beginning was an accident, so to speak, which turned out to be providential. An administrator at the University of Massachusetts had visited Kunming, Yunnan Province, happened to hear a minority folktale she liked (in English), and was asked to inquire whether someone from her institution would be interested in translating other tales. By chance I was contacted and, out of curiosity more than anything else, whimsically agreed to translate a few stories. My whim eventually evolved into a later fieldtrip to Yunnan, a faculty exchange with Kunming colleagues visiting my university, and a joint translation, South of the Clouds: Yunnan Tales, published by the University of Washington Press in 1994. Linked to minority attractiveness is Han disaffection. For some students of China, like myself, a certain weariness sets in, a sense of overfamiliarity and disillusionment with the dominant Han culture, which acts as a springboard from which one dives into the pool of minority traditions. One works too long with mainline classical Chinese literature or pre-modern fiction, or perhaps contemporary writing loses its aesthetic appeal, appearing reactionary or politically determined. Experiencing Han prejudice against minorities in China, you find yourself rooting for the underdog, like Joseph Rock, pioneer ethnologist of the Naxi in Yunnan for more than twenty years (he lived among the Naxi off and on between 1922 and 1949).7 Back at home, in academia, Chinese studies becomes a realm of power politics for some, of ego aggrandizement and territorial acquisition. Such realities can wilt scholarly idealism. Yet the foreign researcher drawn to minority studies is not immune from the ambiguities of identity and self-motivation. There is the irony of

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being forever other. There is the possible onus of being an “anthros” (see my discussion in “The Ethnic Chameleon”8), and the certain weight of colonialism. While formal colonialism in China is a thing of the past, it facilitated previous research, and its heritage in the form of grant funding and political clout empowers present research, enabling the Western scholar to travel, hire native assistants, and publish. One may be able to let go of false guilt over past research tainted with colonialism, for which one is not responsible, but this does not obviate present misgivings about conducting research in an appallingly oppressive “most favored nation.” Among the students of ethnic minorities in China today whom I have encountered—foreign researchers, travelers, ethnographers—I often witness the excitement of recovering a lost authenticity, or at least the hope for the discovery of a contemporary sort of primitivism (even though anthropologists decry the term “primitive,” the hope remains). “All the beautiful, primitive places are ruined,” writes James Clifford, voicing the laments of twentieth-century students of culture over the disappearance of some putative essence.9 Remarking upon poet William Carlos Williams’s sense of our careening era, a world in which “pure products” such as received tradition, privileged authority, simple folk, and virgin forest are lost, Clifford notes that, in place of lost authenticity, the postmodern individual transmigrates into “a plurality of emergent subjects,” like Elsie, the ungainly kitchen maid in Williams’s Spring and All, with her native-white ancestry, her suburban-pastoral lifestyle, and her repulsive-attractive body. Identity becomes mixed, relational, inventive, hybrid, discontinuous, and conjunctural, “an ongoing process, politically contested and historically unfinished.”10 But, many foreign others respond, while purity and essence may be lost in Han China, perhaps they remain in some sense among the ethnic minorities so long hidden from our eyes. Joining these others, I must confess, I have watched for clear ethnic markers in Dali, searching for the cultural essence of Bailand. In actuality, what is generally fascinating about minorities in contemporary China, and about the Bai in particular it seems to me, is their surreal essence, their in-process mixing of pure and impure features, ancient and modern, Asian and western. Perhaps in the future minority cultures in China may be the delight of what Clifford terms ethnographic surrealists— who relish the joining of the beautiful and the ugly, bits and fragments, unexpected juxtapositions, and “lunes mortes” (pale moons) in the “firmament of reason” (Marcel Mauss’s terminology).11 For the present, we can

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recognize that the Bai are an ethnic hybrid of neighboring cultures, something like their Beng counterparts in Côte d’Ivoire, West Africa, whom Alma Gottlieb describes as an ethnic chameleon that preserves ethnic differentiation by “blending into the colors of the local ethnic foliage.”12 Realizing that Beng dances, sculptural styles, jewelry, and ritual events such as weddings, funerals, and trials are influenced by neighboring Ando, Baule, Jimini, and Jula peoples, she writes, initially made her “wonder nervously if Beng culture as such existed at all. But expanding the notion of culture to include open borders, and the possibility of absorption or transformation of cultural influences, soon put my mind to rest on this score.”13 The Bai, who are sometimes erroneously thought to be indistinguishable from the Han majority, were never isolated from neighboring cultures during their long history, and have retained a fluid identity by their ability to assimilate features of Naxi, Tibetan, Yi, and other ethnic groups, as well as Han.14 Again, like the Beng, the Bai seem to play with and get entangled by their own ideas of identity and difference, of what is peculiarly “Bai” and what distinguishes them from others, as evidenced in oral folktales I have collected, as well as interviews I have conducted.15 While in the case of commodities or artifacts, other minorities, the Han, or currently, Western cultures, may be the donor society to the recipient Bai, the tide often goes in the opposite direction. The Bai, like the Beng, may alter or claim foreign objects, or create their own, influencing majority and minority cultures. Presently, they are commodifying aspects of Bai culture, such as batik and tie-dying, wood carving, house construction, and mountain song festivals, and thereby reaping significant profits.16

fieldwork: self through other In going into the world of the Bai other for fieldwork, I found myself alternately elated, disoriented, suspicious, or filled with gratitude. There is a toll to be paid in crossing bridges, a loss and gain in identity once one reaches the other side. In fact, I discovered many others, and several selves. What was personally important to me was the experience of facing, in St. Paul the Apostle’s terms, the “old man,” or “Adam,” within, and the push brought about by cross-cultural encounter to dislodge that encrusted interior being, safely ensconced in its familiar world. Describing L. V. Helms’s personal witness of human sacrifice in Bali in the nineteenth century, Clifford Geertz writes that encounter with the other “comes only at the ex-

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pense of its [the self’s] inward ease.”17 Speaking of the many dimensions of immersion in the culture of the other, Geertz observes that much more is at stake than simply understanding native life: There is the landscape. There is the isolation. There is the local European population. There is the memory of home and what one has left. There is the sense of vocation and where one is going. And, most shaking, there is the capriciousness of one’s passions, the weakness of one’s constitution, and the vagrancies of one’s thoughts: that nigrescent thing, the self. It is not a question of going native. . . . it is a question of living a multiplex life: sailing at once in several seas.18

For a foreign fieldworker in Yunnan, living a multiplex life and sailing several seas means accepting a sense of interior disorientation while negotiating several cultural and ethnic worlds. For one thing, one must mediate between culture and Party—the native and political dimensions of the “H factor,” a graphic term coined by John Deeney for conducting research in the People’s Republic.19 In order to carry out my project, I was required continually to negotiate a bridge linking two units: on the one hand, Bai storytellers and local Bai village intellectuals, and, on the other, Party and provincial officials. Most especially, in my relations with my native Bai informant and guide (peitong), Duan Shoutao, the dynamics of boundary crossing were revealed, sometimes creating their own sense of unease and self-discovery. As peitong, he sometimes exhibited the infantilizing tendency often experienced by foreigners in research relations in China, that is, a tendency to take responsibility and make decisions for foreign guests, out of concern that they might hurt themselves, get wrong impressions, or cause trouble. Such overseeing is disturbing to the independent, autonomous, Western self, which wants to resist. Uncharacteristically for me, while I felt babied at times, I found myself generally welcoming and appreciating Duan Shoutao’s help. I suppose that with his firm, authoritative guidance, he proved himself trustworthy, and I was subconsciously moved. I never encountered in him the disinformation one runs into in China, as, for example, when I climbed Cock Foot Mountain on the east side of Erhai Lake and was given a guide map full of nonexistent trails, or heard from a Taoist priest there the claim of a two-thousand-year lineage for a statue built after the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). In the field, working with Duan

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Shoutao, my ethnographic self lacked the authority of knowledge and experience, and I was vulnerable.20 One of the deepest forms of subversion of self I experienced in Bailand was engendered by the contrast I experienced between external aesthetics and personal discomfort, natural scenery and landscapes of the mind. Dali is one of the loveliest areas in China, an old city of white stucco walls and cobbled streets, with pagodas dating from the Tang Dynasty. The city itself, and several of the Bai villages in the area, are situated beneath a tremendous mountain range on a fertile sloping plain next to the broad expanse of Erhai Lake. In villages such as Xizhou and Zhoucheng, I was entranced by traditional two-story Bai homes with their enormous stone foundations, white stucco walls decorated with paintings of birds and flowers, and heavy post and beam construction. The three wings of a house are built in a “U” shape around an enclosed private garden. With their red-tiled roofs and whitewashed walls, Bai homes remind me of the Spanish architecture I grew up with in Santa Barbara, California. Alas, except for water pipes, there is little indoor plumbing. I was intrigued too by the intricately carved wooden architecture in Bai village temples, with their many statues of local gods (benzhu), which I examined with a mixed sense of awakening and repulsion. Commenting on Chinese sculpture, Teilhard de Chardin said disparagingly: “The most massive and intricately carved statues are revolting anatomically.”21 Anatomy in Bai benzhu folk art often seems exaggerated or grotesque for dramatic impact—a multiarmed, grimacing blue-bodied god of the plague, for instance, or simplistically realistic—a queen mother with bare upper torso, nursing her baby at the breast. Such carved wooden images painted in vivid colors are wonderfully homely, scary, or humorous, evidence that the Bai have borrowed Indian or Han figures and made them their own. While much of the sculpture at the ancient Stone Caves (Shibao shan) near Jianchuan was stolen years ago for sale to Chinese and foreign markets, or ransacked during the Cultural Revolution, fascinating rock carvings are still extant, indicating cross-cultural subversions and transgressions. In one cave there is an image of the vagina of a female goddess, a sign of the influence of Indian religion that came to the region from India through Burma during the Nanzhao Kingdom (seventh and eighth centuries AD), and possibly even earlier. For years, Han puritanism prohibited public knowledge of this image, but local minority peasant women desiring to become pregnant have always come to the caves to worship or touch the carving. Such facts are so other, so contrary to Han prurience or sexual embar-

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rassment, that I found myself wondering about the transformations of self that might have taken place in Dali in bygone eras. I was reminded of my moving experience in seeing the massive figure of Buddha at Leshan in Sichuan Province, which helped me understand the personal illumination of the Western monk-poet Thomas Merton upon visiting the Buddhist carvings at Polonnaruwa, Sri Lanka (Ceylon), shortly before he died: Looking at these figures I was suddenly, almost forcibly, jerked clean out of the habitual, half-tied vision of things, and an inner clearness, clarity, as if exploding from the rocks themselves, became evident and obvious. . . . I don’t know when in my life I have ever had such a sense of beauty and spiritual validity running together in one aesthetic illumination.22

For the traveler or ethnographer, reality factors can be painful, subverting such aesthetic discoveries. Often I found the erosion and deforestation in the midst of majestic mountain landscapes overwhelming, reminders of an interior emptiness. China’s antiquity makes its erosion understandable, but nonetheless depressing. Earlier in this century Victor Segalen protested, claiming everything erodes in China, a place of barely stopped motion, or “erosion fixe.”23 The flat, gray, dusty landscape of Mongolia made Teilhard de Chardin abstracted and withdrawn, writes Pierre Leroy, S.J., causing him to lose his self-confidence.24 Speaking of that landscape, Teilhard himself writes: “These immense expanses . . . and these completely bare and rocky mountains, provide no moral hand-hold.”25 His comment on the process of deforestation in the mountains of the southwest Gobi Desert might well be applied to northwest Yunnan, Sichuan, and Burma, where massive clear-cutting has been carried on for years: “But what is really heart-breaking to see is the stupid, wicked deforestation the country has suffered at the hands of the Chinese settlers, so that what less than a century ago was heavily wooded is now completely bare.”26 In the stripped Bai mountains of Dali, I frequently recalled C. P. Fitzgerald’s ebullient descriptions of the same area thickly forested with conifers and bamboo, prior to World War II.27 On the other hand, despite the ennui caused by erosion, when I saw the present-day wood gathering in Bailand and areas to the north, I found myself realizing it was only partly wicked. There is an ongoing effort on the part of the Bai community and the local and national government to promote reforestation. One day Duan Shoutao told me we would have to skip our next translation session because he was going with his danwei (work

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unit) to plant trees. In several Yunnan mountain areas, aerial reforestation projects have been successful. Government agencies and work units regularly sponsor tree-planting days. The problem is the basic need the peasantry have for fuel—traveling along a roadway, I often saw the lower trunks of trees stripped bare of branches. Then there is the perennial Bai cultural requirement of large timbers for building post and beam homes, together with the Chinese government’s economic need to cater to the enormous foreign appetite for hardwoods. Interestingly, contrasting to my pain over clear-cutting, another part of me found itself marveling over the majestic and beautiful sight of great mule trains coming down from the mountains, crossing the Dali plain, bearing timber or firewood, or more frequently, wondering at the enormous loads of kindling groups of women were carrying on their backs, returning late in the day after a long hike into the hills. I never lost my self-confidence because of the sight of bald mountains, but it was depressing, and Teilhard’s other comment about losing his moral hand-hold rang true for me: I sometimes lacked a moral grip. I did not know why until I realized that my boundary crossing in fieldwork meant I was always face-to-face with contradiction. Describing the beauty of an island near New Guinea, Bronislaw Malinowski remarks upon the “contradiction between the picturesque landscape, the poetic quality of the island set on the ocean, and the wretchedness of life here.”28 My wife accompanied me on the fieldtrip. One persistent example of the wretchedness in daily existence we faced was the contrast between external aesthetics and hygiene. Daily experience seemed bent on testing us as a couple, a fact about fieldwork that I had not anticipated.29 (I had yet to read Alma Gottlieb’s Parallel Worlds, in which she describes her initial anxieties in Africa.30) My wife became very sick in the course of our adventure. Though the cultivated landscapes in Bailand were lovely, pleasant scenery could not obviate her personal isolation as an English speaker, make up for the lack of English books, nor dismiss hygiene worries, flies, and latrine filth. She contracted some flu-like illness, and I feared dehydration. On top of everything else, on two separate occasions she broke a tooth on tiny stones hidden in rice, and we were hundreds of miles from modern dentistry. Although we were not faced with the host of illnesses the obsessively neurotic Malinowski recounts—abscesses, black urine, sleeping sickness, persecution complex, and fear of the dark—we did get dangerously close to the sort of moment where Malinowski says: “I awoke feeling as if just

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taken down from a cross—just wasn’t functioning.”31 Fieldwork rouses the neurotic self. Relief was hard to come by. Needing to take a break for healing, we returned from Eryuan to Xiaguan. We had to wait six hours in the lobby of the Xiaguan Hotel for a room to clear. Our quarters turned out to be a prison-style, one-room cement cell on the third floor, filthy dirty. Our Bai colleagues said it looked “very clean,” trying to cheer us, I suppose, but I noticed that Duan Shoutao opted to stay with a friend in town. Layers of dust covered the two beds, table and lamp, curtains, linens, and floor. A feeling of hopelessness filled the room. That evening, attuned to our complaints, Duan Shoutao kindly arranged with a friend, head of a local teacher’s college, to put us up in a guest apartment on campus, to which we were transported by special bus. There we had clean, quiet, spacious rooms, and a lovely view of the Cang mountains to the west and Xiaguan to the south. And we had our own (Chinese style) toilet. Heaven! After several days of rest my wife recovered, and we resumed recording village folktales. Toileting on the fieldtrip was often an experience in contradiction and wretchedness. At the Eryuan Hotel, my wife and I used a spittoon at night, as the hotel’s only toilet was a latrine outside, three floors below. Growing boldly obnoxious or perhaps desperate, I would sneak a pee in the tiled trough of a not-completed facility at the end of our floor. During the day, I hauled buckets of water from the fishpond at the hotel entrance to the hotel toilet outside to wash down the feces and maggots that built up from the guests, who somehow ignored the filth. At such moments, I wondered if I wasn’t coming down with some sort of sinophobia, or Baiphobia, for I caught myself thinking wild thoughts, generalizing about the backwardness of Chinese and the local Bai, disgusted, as I was, by filthy latrines and the custom of spitting. Malinowski’s rude comment comes to mind: “On the whole my feelings toward the natives are decidedly tending to ‘Exterminate the brutes,’” he writes, quoting Kurtz’s phrase from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. At a relatively early stage of his fieldwork, Malinowski reveals pent-up frustration and perhaps racial prejudice.32 There were times when, amazingly to naive me, the people whose culture I came to study and whose folktales I had come to record turned repugnant, and in such a mood, I felt tempted to drop my project. “As for ethnology,” Malinowski remarks in the same vein, well along in his fieldwork two years later, “I see the life of the natives as utterly devoid of interest or importance, something as remote from me as the life of a dog.”33

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In my case, the disgust I felt was hardly due to hygiene alone, but a whole complex of feelings having to do with treeless, dry hills, peitong infantilization, and my own inadequacies as amateur folklorist and ethnographer. As I shall explain, personal issues also lay under the surface of consciousness—my mother’s debilitating illness, midlife mutability, and questions of religious identity. Yet, despite the trials of fieldwork, somehow I did not succumb, finding I had the will to carry on but not knowing why until much later, when I began to become aware of my narrow vision and of an otherness both more profound than, and brought about by, Bai difference. Oddly, I only began to make a kind of sense of my persistence when I returned to the Dali area a year later. One day after lunch with a Bai farmer and his family, who lived in one of the incredibly beautiful Bai farm homes in Xizhou, I used their toilet facility, passing through the gate of a magnificent stone wall enclosing their home and proceeding to a shed behind the house. It was an open area with stone slabs over a pit with a slit between the slabs. As I squatted, I gazed at the cesspool water just under the stones, inches away, swarming and boiling with maggots in a feeding frenzy. In that moment, as I contemplated the maggots, my own mutability hit home, the horrid awareness of the natural end of physical life. In that same instant, I also sensed my ethnocentricity, my culturally determined notions of plumbing, landscape, autonomy, and identity, and wondered what was beyond the critical, picky self. The cesspool incident was the nadir of my encounter with the Bai world, a culminating sense of personal horror. But it was also a moment of awakening, an acute sense of personal limits coupled with an almost palpable sense of something yonder. This intuition subsequently concretized through a series of culminating experiences. Gradually, over the course of four or five years, first studying abroad and conducting fieldwork in Yunnan, then later, giving papers at conferences and teaching Bai folk literature, I began to realize that something that was significant to me in the study of the Bai other was the play of selfin-relation-to-other, which, given the particularities of time and context— interfaith encounters in the autumn of my life, a sudden catastrophic accident, the naming of a Bai child, my mother fading with dementia—meant a deepening of spiritual identity. This nexus of experiences coalesced. It was my Bai beginning. One place of deepening that took me by surprise was the encounter with religious faith of self and other. It began, I suppose, with a sense of difference regarding my Catholic identity, especially in regards to the Eu-

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charist. Through a foreign priest-visitor who knew I was a Catholic deacon, I was able to make special arrangements in Kunming to carry hosts on the fieldtrip beyond Dali to the villages of Bailand, where Mass was unavailable. Every morning my wife and I received the Body of Christ. It was a tremendous source of grace, strengthening us, helping us to get through an especially difficult day, and enabling us to put self and other in a transcendent context. This daily experience of divine otherness in 1991 contrasted markedly to my first encounter with Catholicism in Dali, in the summer of 1985, which had been painful. As an American intellectual, I was used to the last kosher prejudice (anti-Catholicism) in academia, and was accustomed to keeping certain moral aspects of my beliefs hidden under a bushel basket. To be “pro-life” (anti-abortion, anti-euthanasia), for example, means instant intellectual death on the UMass campus. Walking one evening with my Chinese hosts in Dali, I noticed a sign in Chinese giving directions to the local Catholic church. What to do? Was it as impossible to “come out” before Communist friends as it was democratic ones? I took the risk, suggesting that I would visit this foreign church, and they might head back without me to our hotel. Instead, as cordial hosts eager to show their open-mindedness, they accompanied me. Perhaps my visiting the Dali church was an excuse for my Chinese colleagues to “come out” too, so to speak, just as it was for me. Probably they never would have gone on their own, both because it would have been politically unwise and also because Christian religion is officially considered superstitious and backward in government and Communist Party circles. We knocked for some time on the door of the priest’s quarters, adjacent to the Catholic church. The pastor, the former Bishop of Dali, a broken man in his eighties, was taken aback to discover both a foreigner and Chinese officials at his door, but he invited us into his faintly lit room. I believe he was a member of the Yi ethnic minority. He spoke simply and frankly about the confiscation of church property by local government and Party persons, his contempt for current seminary training in the Catholic Patriotic Church of China, and of his persecution and near-starvation during the Cultural Revolution. Amazingly, the lovely church, built by the local people and French missionaries, its architecture a blend of Buddhist and French features, had not been damaged during the revolution. The bishop was not afraid of talking, probably because he was too old to have anything to lose. He laughed when my colleagues insisted that he could get church property

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back by petitioning the government. “When I die,” he said, acknowledging the truth, “there will be no one to replace me.” Years later, in 1991 and 1992, I went to see two clergymen in Kunming, a bishop and priest who were part of the underground Catholic church. I visited at night, as foreign visitors would have been especially noted, bringing unwanted attention to the two clergymen. They too were fearless old men who had suffered years of imprisonment and hard labor in mines. They attended to the pastoral needs of their former parishioners openly, disregarding possible consequences. I discovered that the underground church was strong, though small in numbers, and that many within the Patriotic Church were also keen about orthodoxy. When the bishop of the Patriotic Church of Kunming, lauded by the Communist Party, married and expressed doubts about the divinity of Christ, the people would no longer let him into church to celebrate Mass. During fieldwork in 1991, my visits to a village would begin with meetings with local Bai officials. When these government, Party, and cultural leaders learned that I was Catholic, they would always take pains to tell me that they “did not believe” (buxin) in Christianity. Old men storytellers said the same thing. It seemed there was a prevailing anti-Christian and anti-Catholic34 prejudice among intellectuals and leaders. I found myself thinking of what Teilhard de Chardin said of Hu Shih, a leading twentiethcentury Chinese intellectual and student of John Dewey: his understanding of Christianity was childishly immature, said Teilhard de Chardin.35 Though Bai understanding was shallow, Bai folktales I heard sometimes alluded to a different reality. One popular Bai story about the burning of a Catholic church in the Xishan area tells of a French Catholic missionary murdered by Bai peasants, who accused him of molesting women and stealing land.36 I knew this tale had originated in the late nineteenth century, a period of widespread xenophobia in China, when rumors were spread that nunneries and Catholic hospitals were places where missionaries experimented on Chinese children, gouging out eyes and using body parts for alchemical purposes. Such stories were preposterous, but I wondered about the reality behind them, and why they were still popular. When I queried Duan Shoutao about the appropriateness of the story for children—he had collected and published a current oral version for a special children’s edition of the Bai folklore magazine, Shancha (Camellia)—he responded that he believed it was true. I thought it a ridiculous piece of anti-foreign sentiment typical of the flagrant propaganda produced during the Cultural Revolution. Again,

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an impasse in understanding between us, until I recalled another comment of Teilhard de Chardin’s regarding the church in north China, suggesting a different perspective: “In these parts the missionaries are large-scale landowners, and the Christians are, in fact, the Church’s tenants.”37 Aside from the influence of Communist propaganda, animosity toward foreign religions seen in current Bai folklore is not only characteristically Bai, but rooted in a memory of the church as colonialist. Despite official stance, latent prejudice, and stale remnants of colonialism and anti-colonialism, I came across pockets of faith that touched me. At the French Catholic church in Dali, an educated layman would write prayers and weekly readings in Chinese, Latin, and French on huge blackboards outside the church. A poor man, once ostracized by the government and Party for his faith, he lived on the upper floor of a rickety wood-framed hut, his walls lined with newspapers for warmth and pasted with images of Mary and the saints. In Eryuan, elderly Protestant believers sought me out, learning of my interest in their faith, and tenderly told me about their house-church meetings attended by Catholics. In their common political plight, they had discovered the common ground of faith. Still another kind of alterity that proved to be a source of spiritual awakening for me were fellow foreign others—not other at all but “the same,” I suppose, from the point of view of my Chinese hosts. Writing how irritated his ethnographic self was with the presence of fellow whites in the Trobriand Islands, Malinowski comments nastily: At 4:30 Wilkes and Izod appeared on the horizon. I was decidedly displeased, they bothered me. In fact, they spoiled my afternoon walk. I showed them Inuvakyla’tu’s kwila [phallic symbol?] in Kwabulo. What is terrible is that I am unable to free myself completely from the atmosphere created by foreign bodies: their presence takes away from the scientific value and personal pleasure of my walk. I saw and felt the utter drabness of the Kiriwina villages: I saw them through their eyes (it’s fine to have this ability), but I forgot to look at them with my own.38

The mere presence of other foreigners did not bother me, as it did Malinowski, but an area of resistance that revealed my self to me was my reaction to Protestant fundamentalist missionaries. Perhaps eighty percent of the foreigners at the Yunnan University Guest House in Kunming (the “Pink Palace”) were Protestant missionaries, fundamentalist or evangelical Christians, causing me to rename the Pink Palace, known in Chinese as the “Teachers Guest House” (zhaodai suo), the “Jesus Teachers [Christian]

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House” (Jidujiao suo). The missionaries were mostly from the American south. They were extremely tight-lipped and secretive about being missionaries, and always spoke of their “organization”—a business company or teaching institution—which was in reality a mechanism sponsored by their church for carrying out missionary work. Perhaps the pretending went both ways: their pretending not to be missionaries, the government pretending not to know they were. I think the Chinese government was glad enough to go along with the missionaries’ secret, so they could make good use of their English teaching and technology, and acquire foreign exchange. I was both annoyed and impressed by them. I found them down-home and foursquare, wary of immersion in Chinese culture, horrific in their unwillingness to take Chinese religion seriously, dismissing it as idolatry. Few would visit a Buddhist or Taoist temple, and none would join my wife and me in exploring Chinese meditation practices such as qigong. There were several I termed to myself “hurting units,” neurotic, insecure, and thinly educated, unable to make it back in the States and enamored of the good life abroad, where they could employ cooks, baby-sitters, and housekeepers. But I think I understood their hunger for an alternative to American materialism and eroticized culture, which they held to be a denial of God and a deification of sex, and that it felt good to be devoted to a religious cause and welcomed by friendly Chinese. The missionaries were also very admirable. They came to China as Christian families of deep faith, parents and children together, with a commitment to stay for several years, enduring the challenges of local hospitals and schools. They brought with them expertise in technology, computers, linguistics, and English as a second language. And while usually naive about Chinese politics and culture, they loved the Chinese people—which is more than can be said for many secular sinologists. Their openness to faith was exceptional. Other visiting Western scholars replicated the traditional hostility and suspicion toward missionaries that had always pained me—the hostility one picks up in offhanded remarks of anthropologists whose benchmark seems to be disbelief in Western religion, and high honors for native mythologies. During their stay with the Beng people in Africa, for example, the anthropologist Alma Gottlieb and her husband, the writer Philip Graham, needed to store life-saving serum. Visiting the quarters of a Catholic missionary in order to make use of his refrigerator, Graham reveals his bias:

boundary crossings  [ 231  ] Our vial safely ensconced in the cold clutches of the refrigerator, we sat at the table and greedily spooned out the tart, delicious yogurt. Then we all introduced ourselves further, but this conversation between writer, anthropologist, and priest was marked by a strained politeness. I suspected this was because we were in opposing camps: Alma was there to study African culture; Father Denis surely was here to change it.39

This “surely” flows from way back, I would guess, a flotsam ever riding the stream of anthropology, a discipline that has but recently discovered what, in my view, religion has always known: to study the other is to change self and other. A dramatic example of cultural ambivalence and spiritual transformation happened one night at the Pink Palace. I was reading in the bathtub, relishing the evening hour and a half when hot water was turned on, when I heard a crash. At first I listened intently, wondering what was happening. I was enjoying my bath so much, I tried convincing myself that I had been imagining things, but my conscience got the best of me. I put on a robe and peeked down the hallway. There was a great commotion one floor below, people running back and forth and shouting. I ran downstairs and found a crowd surrounding a middle-aged woman with a bloody towel wrapped around her arm. The bathtub was splattered with blood, and there were pools of blood on the floor. I learned that she was a new American teacher, having arrived that afternoon from a southern state to teach English at the summer school. After taking a bath, she had leaned on the adjacent wash basin to steady herself getting out. The basin fell from the wall, shattering, and a shard of razor sharp porcelain slit her right arm to the bone, from elbow to wrist, severing all five tendons. In the Pink Palace, one would find plumbing fixtures not attached securely, and exposed wires. I found myself cursing “the Chinese,” blaming China for the accident. I quickly dressed, then went outside to join one of my Protestant soul mates, Jeff Book, to meet the ambulance. Since we spoke Chinese, we took upon ourselves the role of translators. An ugly incident was threatening. The ambulance driver insisted on unwrapping the makeshift bandage and tourniquet in order to pack the wound properly, but the woman was screaming in terror, afraid she would bleed to death. The crowd, mostly foreigners, began shouting at the ambulance driver to leave her alone and get her to the hospital. They did not believe the Chinese medical personnel knew what they were doing. Recognizing foreign suspicions over the in-

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adequacies of Chinese medical care, and the dangerous surfacing of prejudice, Jeff deftly intervened, admonishing the crowd to trust the attendant to do his job, and they backed off. At the hospital, awaiting midnight surgery, the woman was absolutely terrified. She had just arrived in China and knew no one except the person who had sat next to her on the plane. She could not speak Chinese. She was afraid of being treated by Chinese doctors, of Chinese medicine, of not being able to communicate, and of her death, which appeared imminent. “Pray with me,” she pleaded. “Lord, help me.” Jeff prayed earnestly, soothing her, and I joined in. We convinced the doctors, who were professional, well-focused, and caring, to let us be with the American teacher during the surgery. Donning masks, caps, gowns, and slippers, Jeff and I lifted her from a gurney to the operating table. Conditions were not altogether hygienic during surgery, with Jeff and I touching the patient without being required to wear rubber gloves. I found myself holding a basin to catch blood, or else gripping the woman’s hand firmly so she could not move her arm while the surgeons worked. While the doctors found and reknit the severed tendons and arteries we stood by her through the tedious operation, translating her questions and anxieties and the surgeon’s explanations and doing our best to field her raw suspicions and shield both sides from insult. After the surgery, Jeff and I wheeled her on a gurney to her room, which was in a separate building. We had to go outside and carry her across a deep trench cut to lay pipelines. There was no lighting and it was hard to find our way in the dark. When we got to the other building, the door was locked. We signaled to the nurse in the nursing station to use her key and let us in, but she kept shouting, “Mada, mada!,” the Yunnanese expression for “there isn’t any.” We had to push the gurney around to the other side of the building before finding the room. Again I found myself cursing China. Within a few days, the Chinese government had made special arrangements to fly the woman to Hong Kong, where she was met by her husband and underwent further surgery. Months later, I called her when I got back to the States, and we wept together. She was grateful, feeling Jeff and I had saved her life (Jeff had with a tourniquet but I, certainly, had not). Ultimately, as Jeff and I both knew, the Chinese ambulance driver and hospital surgeons had saved her. She seemed unaware of the fact. For her, she said, her life-and-death experience was a turning point in her life. She had felt the presence of God. I shared that sense of presence in the face of human mutability. I also

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experienced self-breakthroughs: the surfacing of suppressed anger and a glimpse of possibly latent Chinese prejudice revealed in a moment of crisis, and the overcoming of a Catholic-fundamentalist boundary. Jeff and I had talked about the Catholic understanding of the Passion of Christ, his salvific healing through suffering (this was my sense of the surgery), and we had prayed together. I witnessed in him the simple art of direct, Protestant-evangelical “God-talk.” It would seem that this boundary crossing of faiths was occasioned by being in China, and was dependent on the Chinese context. Could it have happened elsewhere? Perhaps. Surely my anger was contextual, a culmination of experiences shared by other foreign researchers. There was frustration over the legacy of Tiananmen, the thought control that required one’s Chinese visitors to register at the Pink Palace desk, the ubiquitous presence of patriotic music and CCP speeches over campus loudspeakers between classes, or the secret attendance of cadre or Party folk in classes taught by foreigners. The “H” factor referred to earlier irritated me with the attendant need to square research activities and fieldwork with Party and provincial government officials. Research costs were often exorbitant. On my second fieldtrip to Dali, I was required not only to pay for the peitong who accompanied me, but also to give a stipend to each of his unit workers who remained at home in Kunming. I refused and went alone to Dali. The release of pent-up anger over the fall of a porcelain wash basin or a nurse who refuses to open a hospital door was not rational, but it was understandable as the termination of culminating experiences. In contrast, my glimmer of subliminal prejudice remained faint and unaccountable, possibly related to the foreign researcher’s bias for minorities and the underdog mentioned previously, and more probably born from an ignorance about the complexity of economic, medical, and political realities in both the foreign Pink Palace and the Chinese hospital. Certainly negative emotions had nothing to do with the decent and caring treatment of the patient. What was distinctive for me about this Chinese experience was that it pointed to an “inner” angry other and beckoned to a divine Other, an awareness to which I shall return. Such pain and joy in crossing borders was transformed into near ecstasy among the Bai, when I attained a long-cherished goal of climbing Cock Foot Mountain, an ancient site of Buddhist pilgrimages, visited for over a thousand years by pilgrims from India, Burma, Tibet, and China.40 When I arrived by bus in the village at the base of Cock Foot Mountain, I received a map of trails with my entrance ticket. Being a person ever fond of “the road less traveled,” I picked an appealing sortie off from the main

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trail. The trail in fact did not yet exist, and an hour or so later I ended up at a Buddhist nunnery. While talking to a sister in the courtyard, two Bai women came walking by, headed up the mountain, and they told me to follow behind, as they could lead me to the main trail. When we reached their small farmhouse, they asked me to stay for tea. It was not until then that I realized the older woman, a grandmother, had been carrying a newborn baby tucked in a blanket on her back, and that the young woman, her daughter, was its mother. As I was sitting on the verandah sipping tea, the grandmother said something to her daughter, and suddenly the girl stood up and began bowing up and down at my feet, touching her head to the floor. I wondered what on earth was going on. “Do they think I am the Buddha returned to the mountain?” I rather vainly asked myself. “You must name the baby,” declared the grandmother. “Name the baby?” I stammered, speechless for more words. “Yes, please name the baby,” she affirmed. “But I can’t,” I said, lamely. “Foreigners don’t know how to name Bai babies.” “You must,” the grandmother insisted. “Name the baby.” Put on the spot, I struggled, trying to think of a name, but could not think of anything appropriate. “What is the family name?” I asked, trying to buy time. “Peng,” she smiled. “Peng Guangrong!” I blurted out. “Glorious Peng!” hardly knowing what I was saying. Grandmother and daughter were ecstatic. “Wonderful! Wonderful!” they exclaimed. “It’s a perfect name!” I was unaware at that moment that “guangrong,” meaning “glorious,” is a CCP epithet for heroes. Perhaps the Bai family did know this association. In any case, as I soon discovered, what mattered was the act of naming. I took photographs of grandmother, mother, and baby and exchanged addresses, then left them, not knowing what had happened and feeling like a fool. When I got back to Xiaguan and described my experience to my Bai friend Zhang Xilu, research fellow at the Dali Prefecture Museum, he was overjoyed, explaining that I had become a gandie, a “dry father,” or Bai godfather, a real member of the Bai. The Bai custom is for the family to wait one month following the birth of a baby, then ask the first person they meet to name the child. As a foreigner from America, I was an especially auspicious stranger. My obligation was to send the baby a pair of pants and

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something to eat, which I later did. “One other thing,” Zhang Xilu grinned. “If the little boy comes to the States to find you one day, you’ll have to pay his college tuition!” I realized that sometimes, when the self crosses borders without knowing it, access to the other may be easy. Probably it would have taken years to build sufficient trust to become a Bai relative. In this instance, Bai custom and sheer chance necessitated it. The ecstasy continued that long summer weekend at Cock Foot. After leaving the Bai family I hiked to a Buddhist temple where I spent the night. Rising early before dawn on what was my last full day, I climbed the final reaches of the mountain in the dark, ascending to the topmost balcony of the pagoda above the Tibetan lamasery, which overlooked the surrounding mountains, just as dawn broke. While sitting cross-legged and praying, I noticed a Tibetan monk watching me respectfully from the corner of the balcony as I read the Morning Office (Catholic Liturgy of the Hours) and celebrated an agape (thanksgiving without consecrated bread), using a crust of bread. When I pointed to an icon of the Blessed Mother and Child I had before me, he pulled out a picture of the Dalai Lama, and beamed, smiling deeply. It was a moment of encounter for us both, a recognition of transcendence in the cultural other. Malinowski writes of such joys in the field as follows: “I felt that to live in this world was worth all the trouble involved.”41 He terms the experiences I knew on Cock Foot Mountain, living a free existence in a fabulous landscape, “a real picnic based on actual work.”42 The danger to the self of such work picnics is egomania. We travel with some difficulty toward the other, crossing borders, risking transgression and self-discovery. When I was accepted by the other in the other’s territory, however briefly, or when recording or translating oral tales, I was tempted to claim the Bai as my own. “Feeling of ownership,” Malinowski says, adding, rather madly, “It is I who will describe them or create them.”43 The temptation to possess through language seems a real one for the traveler, ethnographer, or writer. I own because I see, and because I witness, you own it too, vicariously. Seeing and creating the other also may balance or reduce the risk of self-discovery. For myself, the tonic for this temptation, the virtue that scotched the vice, came later, not through a sheer act of will to let go of false claims of ownership, but through a transformation of grief and my own fear of death, sparked by the minuscule but loving experience of crossing over, of Bai acceptance of me as a gandie. “Zhongguo ren bupa si,” a Yunnanese Catholic friend told me, speaking

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of his army experience in Vietnam: “Chinese do not fear death.” Of course, on its face value, the statement is a silly exaggeration. My friend meant it comparatively. He had seen Vietnamese kill captured American G.I.s and was emphatic that Chinese soldiers did not show any fear of dying in battle, while Americans did. Be that as it may, going abroad for war, or travel, or fieldwork has as its backdrop the tapestry of death. While one may be ecstatically free of immediate responsibilities, wandering in supposedly exotic landscapes the traveler often has an acute sense of mutability. Speaking of autumn, his favorite season, Teilhard de Chardin writes: I feel it all as I never have before; but also in a rather different way: with a certain melancholy, for autumn is upon my own life, too, and yet with much greater clarity and peace, for now I am better able to discern what it was that vaguely called to me across the deep and enigmatic charm of those hours in which one feels nearer to, more enveloped in, the world.44

Teilhard De Chardin wrote these autumnal reflections when he was fortytwo years old. While I was in China in 1991 and 1992, rather more disconcerted than Teilhard de Chardin about the “enigmatic charm” of my fast approaching high middle age, I was grieving for my mother. For several years she had suffered immeasurably from Alzheimer’s disease. Once during a visit to my home, we took a walk one crisp and sunny October day—de Chardin’s autumn season of a man’s life—and she turned to me and asked, the street behind her a shower of red and yellow leaves: “Who are you?” “I’m your son, Mom,” I replied, deeply wounded. “Oh,” she exclaimed. “I always wanted you to be my son. But no one ever told me!” She was very happy. When I was in China, we used to have semi-sane conversations over the telephone. It seemed we communicated one another’s presence through nonsensical words, glimmers of conversation, jabberwocky, and free association. Despite the comfort, it was one long grief. Once I found myself on my bed, weeping inconsolably, not altogether knowing why. Among the Bai there were epiphanies that cheered me, instants of small kindnesses and hospitality. In Jianchuan, for example, after a jog each morning I would go to the bridge next to the public school, on the northeast side of the village, and buy a delicious “Dali baba,” a flat, round roll roasted on an outdoor grill. One day, knowing I was soon to leave the village, the Bai

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woman cooking the Dali baba handed me one, refusing to accept payment. It was a gesture of gratitude, I guessed, a “thank you” for my interest in Bai culture perhaps, and a token of friendship. In Dali, following my gandie moment on Cock Foot Mountain, I boarded a bus to return to Kunming, ten hours away. All of a sudden, I burst into an old Catholic hymn, Anima Christi, one I had not sung since grammar school: Soul of my Savior sanctify my breast Body of Christ be thou my saving guest Blood of my Savior bathe me in thy tide Wash me ye waters flowing from his side Strength and protection may thy Passion be Oh blessed Jesus hear and answer me Deep in thy wounds, Lord hide and shelter me So shall I never never part from thee45 The gift of the Dali baba and the gandie initiation seem to have nudged the self—what Thomas Merton calls that thingish, egoistic substance— away from mundane egocentricity. Being affirmed gently on the other side of the border helped me through grief. My mother’s passion, and the passion of a stranger facing death, were met in a song of the Passion of Christ, triggered, perhaps, by the internal gathering of my experiences abroad among the Bai and foreign friends. The mutability and vulnerability experienced in the outdoor plumbing of Bai villages, the horror of seething maggots in a farmhouse cesspool and the mutilated, bloody limbs of a foreign teacher, were moments that connected with yet contrasted to the autumn of my life as traveler. Facing my mother’s penultimate separation, I encountered Bai hospitality and adoption and was thrust away from possessiveness and toward ultimacy. At one point, Teilhard de Chardin speaks of getting over the illusion

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that travel brings us closer to the truth,46 but his own experience belied his claims. Exiled from France by his Catholic superiors for his controversial views on the evolution of consciousness, his ultimate hope in coming to China, he writes, was in becoming “better able to speak about the ‘great Christ’ in Paris. I feel more and more intensely that this ‘great Christ’ alone can animate my life.”47 Speaking about the erosion in China that once so upset him, he says: But, basically, I feel oddly indifferent to this devastation. . . . It is the Other that I now seek, the Thing across the gap, the Thing on the other side. Is this no more than an effect of age? Or have I really broken through some barrier?48

In a similar metaphysical hope, Thomas Merton records his aspirations as he sets out from San Francisco on his terminal voyage to Asia: We left the ground—I with Christian mantras and a great sense of destiny, of being at last on my true way after years of waiting and wondering and fooling around. May I not come back without having settled the great affair. And found also the great compassion, mahakaruna.

And on the next page of his diary he writes: “I am going home, to the home where I have never been in this body.”49 When I compare my “accidental” visit to Yunnan with the aspirations of travelers to Asia such as Teilhard de Chardin and Thomas Merton, it seems clear to me that not only were my real motivations and attractions to the other hidden, but so were the workings of providential guidance, which could only be discovered in the process of being placed in the alien world of fieldwork and Bailand. The problem for myself, and perhaps even for Teilhard de Chardin and Thomas Merton, is an age-old one. In the context of an alien other, especially in experiencing what is culturally traumatic, disgusting, or disheartening, we may project our felt need and imagine a providence in which we have always believed. Or we may be reductive, reading foreign worlds imperialistically, while believing we are seeing the self through the other. The counter to this real possibility may be a return to the paradigms of James Clifford and Bronislaw Malinowski, but also to the radical otherness of revelation. James Clifford talks about a newfound authenticity, of “paths through modernity,” in the form of new beginnings, invention, and creativity, which may take the place of “pure products” forever lost.50 While they cannot be reviewed here, the Bai oral tales that Duan Shoutao and I collected and translated from Bai storytellers in the Dali

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region of Yunnan will hopefully exemplify at least a small byway through modernity. In the dialogic process of translating from the Bai to Chinese to English, the “pure product” of ancient oral art may be lost, but new worlds are created. I believe it is fair to say that through translation and its creative role of mediation, Duan Shoutao and I experienced language and culture as what might be termed, after Malinowski, constructs, or, in Clifford’s sense, we created “serious fiction,” that is, studies of the other that change both self and other.51 As for the radical otherness of revelation, whether biblical, mystical, or personal, it is both experiential and ineffable, touching culture and self. On a personal level, there is indeed a profound element of self-discovery in my amateur fieldwork among the Bai—my first and only experience—which may be redeemed and redemptive because of its religious content. For myself, the encounter with surreal Bai culture and tale became a path through modernity. But the modality of my effort is hardly or merely self-discovery alone, without general value, application, and usefulness. There is the remaining phenomenon of changed self and changed other: the translations. And there is the hint of revelation, which is more than personal, and not limited to Western metaphors of private individual experience (the Thing across the gap, the great affair, the ultimate home), if one is receptive and open to transcendent dimensions of alterity in cultural encounter. Witness the ethical possibility for scholars, the tonic to egocentricity and possessiveness, in a reawakened reverence for accident and chance, which some call providence. Most of us probably do not want to engage in such work, and certainly this sinographer’s individual form of sinography, reflecting particular experiences in a minority world that opened onto the sacred, will never constitute a fraction of the China enterprise. But to my mind, such border crossing is a necessity if one is to discover self and experience alterity and its transcendent possibilities.

notes 1. Dennis Porter, Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 6. 2. Ibid., 8–15. 3. The reason there is guilt among ethnographers writing ethnographies, says James Clifford, is that after the self-awakening of indigenous peoples following World War II, the voice of the authoritative self speaking for the other loses its power and falls on deaf ears. It was no longer possible for participant-observers

[ 240  ]  lucien miller to represent or speak for the other. James Clifford, introduction to The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 6–7. When addressing the reader in regard to the other, the claims of personal experience—“You are there . . . because I was there,” “my people” equals “my experience”—appear extravagant, because the time has come for the other to speak for herself through taletelling, letter, conversation, or PhD dissertation. Clifford, “On Ethnographic Authority,” in The Predicament of Culture, 22, 37. Furthermore, the “predicament of culture,” Clifford writes, is that, today, cultures are mélanges in flux, there are no “pure products” such as cultural artifacts or isolated ethnic groups awaiting the researcher’s pristine gaze. Introduction to The Predicament of Culture, 9. Moreover, participant observation, says Clifford Geertz, is “a wish not a method.” “I-Witnessing: Malinowski’s Children,” Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988), 84. Describing Lévi-Strauss’s critique of the “being there” problem, Geertz writes: “To put it brutally, but not inaccurately, Lévi-Strauss argues that the sort of immediate, in-person ‘being there’ one associates with the bulk of recent American and British anthropology is essentially impossible: it is either outright fraud or fatuous self-deception. The notion of a continuity between experience and reality, he says early on in Tristes Tropiques, is false.” “The World in a Text: How to Read Tristes Tropiques,” Works and Lives (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988), 46. 4. Mary Louise Pratt, “Fieldwork in Common Places,” in Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 32–33. 5. Clifford, “On Ethnographic Self-Fashioning: Conrad and Malinowski,” The Predicament of Culture, 95. 6. Paul Rabinow, Reflections on Fieldwork (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 5. I might note, parenthetically, that while Clifford Geertz speaks disdainfully of “confessionalism” (“Being Here: Whose Life Is It Anyway?” Works and Lives, 145), he also praises diary writing as perhaps the most ideal form of “I-witness” style ethnography: “The most direct way to bring field work as personal encounter and ethnography as reliable account together is to make the diary form, which Malinowski used to sequester his impure thoughts in scribbled Polish, into an ordered and public genre—something for the world to read.” “I-Witnessing: Malinowski’s Children,” Works and Lives, 84; see also 89 and 91. 7. “The longer he stayed in China, the more Rock grew to despise the Chinese. . . . Rock attributed his loathing for the Chinese to his love for the Nakhi [Naxi] and other mountain tribesmen whom the Chinese had oppressed for centuries.” S. B. Sutton, In China’s Border Provinces: The Turbulent Career of Joseph Rock, Botanist-Explorer (New York: Hastings House, 1974), 115. 8. Anthros: “The foreign researcher and field worker who struggles to overcome ethnocentricity, and beguiles himself or herself with the notion that the con-

boundary crossings  [ 241  ] temporary attitude of self criticism and self doubt—how can I be a participant observer without being a thief?—may counter anthropological imperialism. ‘Anthros’ is my term for the foreign scholar who romanticizes minorities in China, at the expense of the Han, a tendency to which I confess.” Lucien Miller, “The Ethnic Chameleon: Bakhtin and the Bai,” Comparative Civilizations Review 32 (Spring 1995): 29. 9. Clifford, introduction to The Predicament of Culture, 4. 10. Ibid., 4, 7, 10–11. 11. Clifford, “On Ethnographic Surrealism,” The Predicament of Culture, 128–29, 131. 12. Alma Gottlieb, Under the Kapok Tree: Identity and Difference in Beng Thought (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1993), 2, 4. For a model ethno-autobiography that should be read alongside this ethnography, see Parallel Worlds: An Anthropologist and a Writer Encounter Africa (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1993), which she and her husband, Philip Graham, coauthored. 13. Ibid., 120. 14. Gottlieb notes that ethnic groups in Africa have fluid identities, and that, generally speaking, Third World populations have not been isolated from one another, as Europeans commonly assume. Ibid., 1. 15. Gottlieb discusses the play between identity and difference among the Beng in her introduction to Under the Kapok Tree, xi. 16. For the relation between Western commodities and native cultures, see Gottlieb, 120–21. 17. Geertz, “Found in Translation: On the Social History of the Moral Imagination,” Local Knowledge: Further Essays In Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1983), 45. 18. Geertz, “I-Witnessing,”, 77. 19. Professor John Deeney (retired), pioneer comparatist and specialist in EastWest literary relations, Chinese University of Hong Kong. For discussion of “H factor,” see Miller, “The Ethnic Chameleon,” 30. 20. Clifford discusses such issues as the imperfect control of informant and knowledge, and the ruptures of fieldwork in “On Ethnographic Authority,” 43. 21. Letter to Claude Aragonnes, December 17, 1926, in Teilhard de Chardin, Letters from a Traveller, trans. Bernard Wall, ed. Claude Aragonnes (Bernard Grasset, 1956, 1957; London: Collins, 1962), 136. Contains Lettres de Voyage, 1923–1939 and Nouvelles Lettres de Voyage, 1939–1955. 22. The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions, 1973), 233–35. Visiting Polonnaruwa in January 1995, I was similarly moved, touched probably by a subjective desire to experience what Merton did, and by a sense of objective presence in the statues of Buddha. 23. See James Clifford, “A Poetics of Displacement: Victor Segalen,” in Predicament of Culture, 158. 24. Pierre Leroy, S.J., “The Man,” in Letters from a Traveller, 28. 25. Letter to Abbé Breuil, May 15, 1923, in Letters from a Traveller, 74.

[ 242  ]  lucien miller 26. Letter to Claude Aragonnes, June 11, 1927, in Letters from a Traveller, 140. 2 7. See C. P. Fitzgerald, The Tower of Five Glories: A Study of the Min Chia of Ta Li, Yunnan (London: The Cresset Press, 1941). 28. Bronislaw Malinowski, A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, diary entry, November 11, 1917 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989), 112. 29. Joseph Rock felt this difference much more strongly seventy years ago, when economic conditions were abysmal. He abhorred all western Chinese towns. “From Mongolia to Burma the differences were academic . . . filth was the ubiquitous common denominator, afflicting Shan, Chinese, Tibetan, Moslem, and Mongol without distinction and offending Rock’s fastidious senses.” S. B. Sutton, In China’s Border Provinces, 123. 30. “I nervously recalled my advisor’s wife, who, having spent a year and a half in the Amazonian jungle, once remarked to me that fieldwork could make or break a marriage.” Gottlieb, Parallel Worlds, 5. 31. Malinowski, A Diary, diary entry, December 13, 1914, 153. 32. Ibid., diary entry, January 21, 1915, 69. 33. Ibid., December 26, 1917, 167. 34. The words for “Christian” (Jidujiao) and “Catholic” (Tianzhujiao) are different in Chinese, causing the widespread misunderstanding that Catholicism is distinct from Christianity. 35. Letter to Chaude Aragonnes, May 4, 1931, Letters from a Traveller, 177. 36. The story is first reported in the Eryuan Gazetteer, late nineteenth century. 37. Teilhard approved, saying: “It’s all a very intelligently-run organization. . . .” Letter to Claude Aragonnes, July 14, 1923, Letters from a Traveller, 79. 38. Malinowski, A Diary, diary entry, December 24, 1917, 163. 39. Gottlieb, Parallel Worlds, 21. 40. See Miller, “The Ethnic Chameleon,” for a different perspective on the same experience. 41. Malinowski, A Diary, diary entry, March 20, 1918, 227. 42. Ibid., April 20, 1918, 257. 43. Ibid., December 1, 1917, 140. 44. Letter to Claude Aragonnes, September 30, 1923, Letters from a Traveller, 90. 45. Text attributed to Pope John XXII, 1249–1334; translation anonymous, possibly by Edward Caswall, 1814–1878. 46. Leroy, “The Man,” Letters from a Traveller, 29. 47. Letter to Claude Aragonnes, September 12, 1923, Letters from a Traveller, 88. 48. Letter to Claude Aragonnes, June 11, 1927, Letters from a Traveller, 140. 49. Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, 4–5. In his last address, “Marxism and Monastic Perspective,” delivered minutes before his accidental electrocution in Bangkok, Thailand, December 10, 1968, Merton too speaks of ultimate hope: “The combination of the natural techniques and the graces and the other things that have been manifested in Asia and the Christian liberty of the gospel should bring us all at last to that full and transcendent liberty which is beyond mere cultural differences and mere externals. . . .” Ibid., Appendix VII, 343.

boundary crossings  [ 243  ] 50. Clifford, introduction to The Predicament of Culture, 5. 5 1. The volume of “Bai tales” translated by Duan Shoutao and Lucien Miller is unpublished. For examples, see “A Legendary Sword River Carpenter,” and “WowWow the Bean Baby,” Renditions No. 51 (Spring 1999): 122–130.

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Minority Discourses and Immigration

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10 

Museifying Formosa: George Mackay’s From Far Formosa Henk Vynckier

2001: a taipei odyssey? “Mackay really loved Taiwan,” declared the lady behind the reception desk at the Shung Ye Museum of Formosan Aborigines (順益) in Taipei when I visited the special exhibition, The Dr. Mackay Collection of Formosan Aboriginal Artifacts: Treasures Preserved Abroad in late August 2001. She continued, “That’s why many people have come to see this exhibit.” For Taiwan, an island of stifled voices and repressed histories after fifty years of colonization by the Japanese and another forty or so years under Mainland Chinese KMT dictators, this was, indeed, a memorable event. Exactly one hundred years after the death of George Mackay, the Canadian missionary who had founded the North Formosa Mission of the Presbyterian Church of Canada in 1872 and donated a sizable collection of Formosan artifacts and natural history specimens to his alma mater, Knox College in Toronto, in 1893, 202 artifacts from this same collection had now temporarily returned to Taiwan as part of the centennial commemoration of Mackay’s death.1 To Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, the year 2001 had held the promise of a new dawn for humanity and, while nothing as galactically important as that was expected from the return of these artifacts to Taiwan, this nevertheless seemed a useful opportunity not just to honor a pioneering missionary, but also to further the debate regarding Taiwan’s identity and its place in a changing world. Another, more modest Mackay exhibit, entitled Dr. Mackay’s Love for Taiwan: A Pictorial Exhibition, held concurrently at the Taiwan [ 247  ]

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Museum in the 2-28 Memorial Park in downtown Taipei, confirmed the notion that Mackay’s legacy as an admirer and preserver of Taiwanese culture could be a significant locus for such an investigation. The situation was not without some ironies. Mackay had been a devoted amateur scientist and proud owner of a collection of artifacts and natural history specimens in his house in Tamsui in Northern Formosa, which, as was recognized in a display at the Shung Ye Museum, little by little grew into Taiwan’s first museum of Formosan natural history and ethnology. It would take another fourteen years following Mackay’s death before the Japanese colonial government gave Taiwan its second such museum with the founding in 1915 of the Taipei Museum. This latter museum, impressively housed in a large Victorian neoclassical building modeled after similar institutions in the West, is now the Taiwan Museum—the same museum that hosted Dr. Mackay’s Love for Taiwan: a Pictorial Exhibition from June 1 to December 30, 2001.2 Yet, while there was little doubt that Mackay should be credited with having been the creator of Taiwan’s first museum,3 now the dynamic between the collector and his captive subjects had been reversed; Mackay was being put on display and the Taiwanese were looking in. Salman Rushdie once famously declared that in the post-colonial literatures of the English-speaking world the Empire was writing back; this then was a case of the museum looking back. And it kept looking back throughout 2001. For months now the coverage in both the local Chinese and English language press of the various exhibits and other activities in commemoration of the centennial anniversary of Mackay’s death had highlighted Mackay’s special place in contemporary Taiwanese culture. There had been lectures, sports competitions, prayer meetings, and other commemorative events involving local cultural, educational, and religious groups and Canadian visitors (including various academics, descendants of Mackay, and the mayor of Zorra, Mackay’s hometown). Special Mackay Web sites were created; Taiwan’s Public Television Station aired a documentary about Mackay on the eve of the anniversary of his death on June 1; and now two major Mackay exhibits had opened on June 1 (at the Taiwan Museum) and June 2 (at the Shung Ye Museum of Formosan Aborigines). The Canadian Trade Office in Taipei, meanwhile, had been promoting Mackay as an enduring symbol of Canadian-Taiwanese friendship, co-organized the exhibit at the Shung Ye Museum and assisted with various other commemorative activities. While it had generally stayed away from exploiting the Mackay centennial too overtly for promotional purposes, the placement of an Air Canada advertisement at the entrance to the Mackay exhibition hall at the Shung

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Ye Museum seemed one unfortunate lapse. One of the more lighthearted activities, reported as early as March 13, had been a tug-of-war competition at the Mackay Junior College of Nursing involving Canadian students from Zorra and local Taiwanese students. Another, less boisterous event took place on June 1 when the Directorate General of Posts of the Republic of China issued a special set of stamps to commemorate the centennial of Mackay’s death. The commemorative set had been introduced at a public event at the Mackay Memorial Hospital in Taipei attended by Dr. John Ross Mackay, Reverend George Mackay’s grandson, who had come over from Canada for the occasion. One photograph of the event had shown a close-up of a smiling Dr. John Ross Mackay holding up a set of stamps; another had the grandson shaking hands with a very lifelike Grandfather Mackay impersonator. The latter had been suitably attired for the occasion with several attributes of the historical Reverend Mackay: an impressive black beard (one of Mackay’s monikers among the Taiwanese had been “the black-bearded barbarian”) and a Chinese gentleman’s long robe and skullcap similar to the robe and skullcap that Mackay can be seen wearing in several photographs. The happy smiles on the faces of many bystanders witnessing this touching piece of historical mise en scène unanimously conveyed the point: this, indeed, was the real Mackay. It was clear, therefore, by August 2001 that George Mackay, though a foreigner by birth and education, had been embraced as a true son of Taiwan. Some of the reasons for this can be readily understood from the missionary’s curriculum vitae. Mackay had been offered an assignment at a mission station in mainland China but had opted instead for lifelong service in Taiwan. Once he arrived in Taiwan in 1872, moreover, he quickly acquired fluent Taiwanese and became greatly acculturated to Taiwanese culture in general. He traveled tirelessly throughout Northern Formosa; collected many mineral, zoological, and botanical specimens and cultural artifacts; and established some eighty churches in both Han Chinese and aboriginal communities. He provided medical care to many thousands of Taiwanese and established the first Western hospital and educational institutions in Northern Taiwan. He married a Taiwanese woman from a prominent family of early converts, which was a matter of no slight consequence at a time when public opinion back home in Canada still firmly disapproved of interracial marriages. He also believed strongly in the need to train a native ministry and empower the new Taiwanese Christians in their own church. When he became very ill, he refused to leave his post and return to Canada, and he died and was buried in the Taiwan he loved so

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much and had served for twenty-nine years. His descendants and disciples, moreover, had followed in his footsteps and continued to build churches, schools, and hospitals throughout Northern Taiwan. The facts of Mackay’s life, therefore, tell a compelling story. Yet these facts have remained the same for the last hundred years and are not sufficient in themselves to explain the new wave of admiration for the Canadian missionary. For a fuller explanation, one must turn to the contemporary societal context and consider that the Mackay Junior College of Nursing is not the only setting in Taiwan where tug-of-war competitions take place. In the ongoing political and cultural debates of the post–martial law democratic Taiwan between the pro–Taiwan independence and pro–unification with China forces, Mackay is seen by many as a pro-local, i.e., pro-Taiwan, modernizer. According to this body of opinion, years before first the Japanese and later the KMT dictatorship started building their unauthentic, colonial versions of Taiwan, Mackay pragmatically went about the business of developing this island with respect and love for its diverse people and without concerning himself too much about the larger Chinese world that claimed so much of the energy of other nineteenth-century Western missionaries, diplomats, and scholars. It is this record that has led many Taiwanese to embrace Mackay. The receptionist at the Shung Ye Museum whom I quoted earlier was not the first, nor the most prominent, Taiwanese to speak of Mackay’s love for Taiwan. As far back as 1997, no one less than then Republic of China President Lee Teng-hui had spoken of his “deepest gratitude for the selflessness Dr. Mackay exhibited toward our land and the people of Taiwan” during a public event in celebration of the one-hundredtwenty-fifth anniversary of Mackay’s arrival in Taiwan.4 Four years later, the Taipei Times, a newspaper that has consistently defended a Taiwan independence platform since its founding in the late 1990s, hailed Mackay in an editorial in its June 20, 2001, edition as someone who, though not born and brought up in Taiwan, is nevertheless a true example of “Taiwan consciousness.” The editorial further suggests that such consciousness is not dependent on one’s ethnic background and holds up Mackay, together with several prominent academics and government officials of mainland Chinese origin, as models for various contemporary Taiwanese politicians who seem to be lacking in love and appreciation of Taiwan and “sound more like Beijing’s puppets than representatives of the people of Taiwan.”5 While not all Taiwanese would appreciate the latter sneer in the direction of pro-unification politicians, Mackay himself is not a contested figure, and his image has now become familiar to many thousands of Taiwan-

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ese teenagers from Ministry of Education–approved middle school history textbooks that appeared on the market in the years following the Mackay commemoration.

stocking the museum: mackay’s from far formosa It is doubtful that the original Mackay, while no mean historicist himself (a quality he shared with many fin de siècle contemporaries), could have foreseen the new role as Taiwan consciousness hero and ethnic conciliator that he would be assigned at the dawn of another century. To see Mackay, though, as he saw himself, his personal memoir From Far Formosa: The Island, Its People and Missions, compiled while he was on furlough in Canada in 1895 and published in 1896, remains indispensable. His decades-long residence in the treaty-port of Tamsui in Northern Taiwan offered Mackay a privileged position as an observer of and participant in the life of the Taiwan of the late Qing era, and From Far Formosa provides a fascinating account of Mackay’s encounter with cultural differences that forced him to define his identity as an Anglo-Saxon and his personal goals as a Christian missionary. Mackay himself sums up his project in the last paragraph of his book: These chapters are but a fragment. Not today or tomorrow can the story be written. The real story is not finished; it has only begun. There are chapters to be added from the yet unread pages of the book of God. Formosa is rooted in God’s purpose as surely as Orion and the Pleiades. That purpose will “ripen fast, unfolding every hour.” To help on its fulfilment this snatch from the history of the past is broken off and sent out to the churches at home, while we go out again to far Formosa, stretching forward to the things which are before us.6

Such, of course, has been the voice of Christian apologists and historians ever since the fathers of the Christian Church in antiquity. Mackay’s masculine, expansionist rhetoric, moreover—which suggests open-ended pioneering, the rooting of Formosa within a divinely ordered universe, and the breaking off of snatches of history from the flow of time—marks the Canadian missionary as a representative of the Victorian ideal of muscular Christianity. Yet, it is striking that throughout this progressive, future-oriented memoir, which intends to sketch a bold vision of a coming Christian For-

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mosa, numerous other narratives or, to use Mackay’s words, “fragments” or “snatches” of history, call for attention and are woven into Mackay’s unfolding story. No doubt, some of the bricolage of From Far Formosa must be ascribed to the fact that it is a compilation of lecture notes and journal materials put together fairly hastily while Mackay was on furlough. At the same time, the suspicion arises that some of the inchoateness is due to the relative weakness of Western writings about Taiwan up to that point. Though Western travelers and colonizers had intermittently frequented Taiwan for at least two hundred and fifty years, Taiwan still remained a distant and only dimly visible place and could not be mapped in a simple, straightforward narrative. Others had hit upon this problem before. One of the most prominent texts of the earliest era of Western colonial pioneering in Taiwan, the 1675 memoir Neglected Formosa by Frederik Coyett, the last Dutch governor of Taiwan, was intended as a detailed public defense of Coyett’s actions as governor.7 In view of this, the body of the text consists of a detailed description of the diplomatic maneuvers and military campaigns that led to the defeat of the Dutch. Yet before he begins this story, Coyett offers a preliminary ten-page survey of the geography, climate, agriculture, animal life, and aboriginal inhabitants of the island. Then, as during Mackay’s time, prefaces, footnotes, excursions, and other textual detours were required to picture this far Formosa. Yet another destabilizing factor affecting Mackay’s narrative posture was the reality of life in a non-Western cultural domain that was continuing its history as a frontier of intercultural encounter. Indeed, in spite of Mackay’s quest to outline a new Formosa shimmering on the horizon for the benefit of his Presbyterian readers in North America, the dominant image of Taiwan that emerges in From Far Formosa remains that of the complex contemporary Taiwan he inhabited. To borrow a term from Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, the Taiwan of Mackay’s memoir is a prime example of an intercultural “contact zone,” i.e., a “space of colonial encounters, [a] space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict.”8 Thus, however much Mackay hammered away at his eschatological perspective, it was difficult to impose a simple literary shape on this land that existed at the crossroads of multiple historical and cultural narratives. Indeed, by the time Mackay arrived in Taiwan in late December 1871, Taiwan had already inherited a significant colonial history dating back to the seventeenth century, when the Span-

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ish, Dutch, and Ming Dynasty loyalists struggled for control of the island. Mackay himself soon witnessed the events of the French military campaigns in and around Taiwan during 1884–85 and of the first years of the Japanese military occupation of the island following the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95. Meanwhile, throughout his years in Taiwan, Mackay also notes the coming and going of British, American, and other Western merchants, diplomatic officials, military men, scientists, missionaries, and travelers. All of this, moreover, is superimposed on another, perhaps even more dramatic narrative of Formosan intercultural contact and struggle, that between Han Chinese immigrants and their descendants and the aboriginal inhabitants of Taiwan.9 Very little of this being known to his readers, Mackay finds it necessary time and again to sketch in the picture and expand his narrative scope beyond the parameters of autobiography and mission history as such. Mackay’s memoir thus freely mixes a variety of genres: introductory sketches of his early years and education in Canada; summaries of Taiwan’s history; detailed surveys of the island’s geography, natural history and ethnography; travelogue (including an interesting arrival and first contact narrative in chapter 29 in which Mackay seems to pose as a tour guide); eyewitness reports regarding the French military campaigns in Taiwan; stories and anecdotes regarding the history of the mission; reflections on Christian dogma; and prayers and quotations from Scripture. This expansionist dynamic of the text, which tries to map as much as possible of this as-yet insufficiently known land, is enhanced by other production features of the book, such as its front cover with Art Nouveau–type drawings of Formosan farmers, ears of rice, the flowers of the rice plant, and palm trees; the inclusion of four maps (three of which were produced from maps drawn by Mackay himself); and the use of seventeen photographs featuring the missionary and the natural and societal environment within which his work took place. One of the most striking examples of the kind of detours that Mackay finds himself forced to undertake in From Far Formosa is found in a section entitled “The Island,” which comprises chapters 5 to 9. In these chapters, Mackay prefaces the main body of his tale of action in the Formosan field with a sixty-page topographic mapping of the island, including fairly detailed descriptions of Taiwan’s geography, history, geology, botany, zoology, and the ethnology of the Chinese and aboriginal inhabitants. He also vividly depicts the methods of travel he employed as he toured the island with his native students and other companions, and he occasionally corrects Western misconceptions about Chinese culture (e.g., regarding the

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wearing of the queue or the position of women in Chinese society). Much of Mackay’s catalogue of observations, classifications, experiments, and other scientific interventions in the landscape in these chapters makes for lively reading, and his style reveals the author’s familiarity with the conventions of the travelogue and Victorian nature writing. Picturesque and exotic details, humorous touches, and clever turns of phrase can be gleaned time and again from Mackay’s descriptions of Formosan plants, animals, landscapes, and society. Formosan orchids, for example, “are pretty when seen in conservatories, but to be viewed to advantage they must be met in their home in the dense forests” where, with their fragrance, beautiful colors, and curious resemblance to “spiders, birds, and butterflies,” they will make the traveler feel as if he stands “on enchanted ground” and make him “for a while oblivious to all things else” (75). The hermit crab, meanwhile, is “a kind of sea ‘tramp,’” which, when in possession of a suitable shell, will “march off, its house on its back, as lordly as if it had a legal right to undisturbed possession” (90). A similar effort to convey couleur locale is found in a later passage when Mackay describes the houses of headhunting aborigines and offers the following observation: “The brave who has the longest row of skulls is the envy of the tribe. Every house has this decoration, and the chief’s looks like the museum of an anatomy specialist” (274). The passage is especially interesting in that it illustrates how Mackay’s dynamic gaze mixes two forms of vision, that of the seasoned traveler and the scientific collector. As a seasoned traveler with a limited but mobile gaze, Mackay knows it is important not to flinch when facing otherness, and he seizes every opportunity to bring graphic examples of this otherness to the attention of his readers. As a scientific collector with a panoptic gaze, he continually museifies Formosa, perceiving it as a proliferation of eminently collectible objects that are suitable for display in a museum panoply. The urge to museify is illustrated time and again during Mackay’s reports on his empiricist fieldwork.10 Virgil may have sung of “arms and the man,” but Mackay sings of “artefacts and the man.” His discourse is triumphant and heroic; he travels far and wide and brings back, collects, secures, procures, and preserves anything that is valuable, rare, difficult to catch, beautiful, and exquisite for his museum. Having noted that “the natural history of Formosa is as yet an unwritten book,” he observes that “the subject was too interesting to be neglected, and so in all our travels, establishing churches and exploring in the savage territory, I carried with me my geological hammer, chisel, and lens, and brought back on nearly every occasion some valuable contribution to my museum at Tamsui” (48). Mackay’s

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students, too, were encouraged to conduct such fieldwork: “It was the daily habit of each one, when on the road, to collect specimens of some kind— plants, flowers, seeds, insects, mud, clay—and then to examine them at the first halting-place” (288). There is a touch of Robinson Crusoe, that other famous Protestant island adventurer, in the manner in which Mackay evokes the pleasures of discovery and accumulation. Whereas Defoe’s hero documents with great clarity the resources he salvaged from his ship and the “general Magazine of all Necessary things”11 that he organized in his cave, Mackay similarly serves up numerous anecdotes regarding the stocking of his museum. In his chapter on the geology of Taiwan he discusses the presence of petroleum in the underground and adds, “I took up a bottleful and kept it for ten years” (51). He describes the camphor tree in his section on forest trees and adds: “There is in my possession a plank which a hundred years ago was the end of a native chief’s house. It is a single piece of more than eight feet square, and on it are many aboriginal carvings” (56). Mackay also refers to his collection of snake specimens in his museum in chapter 30, and obliges with several amusing snake stories in chapter 8 regarding “animal life” in Formosa. He tells, for example, how one day he entered a small shed, was confronted by “a snake which resembled the hoop-snake,” and then succeeded in “securing this rare specimen for my museum” (81). Similarly, having once almost been bitten by a “green snake of the Dryophis fulgida species,” he notes that this reptile “is now preserved in alcohol in my museum at Tamsui” (82). He also points out his interest in less fierce creatures. There is a fish in his museum by the name of Periophtalmus that is extremely agile and difficult to catch—“It was years before I succeeded in securing a specimen” (84)—and he recalls with delight a beautiful Atlas moth in his collection: “I procured one which measured from tip to tip of its wings nine and three quarter inches, and of exquisite beauty” (88). Finally, he also describes the correct method for securing perfect specimens of mollusks: “To secure the glassy, shiny appearance of shells we place them when alive in the ground. In a few days they are removed and thoroughly washed”(89). Much of this frenzy of the collectible fits Jean Baudrillard’s critique of the collector in his “The System of Collecting” as a sort of delirious fondler: “The quintessence of the collection is qualitative, while its material organization is quantitative. For if possession entails a certain intimate delirium as one fondles and scrutinizes the privileged piece, it equally involves activities of seeking out, categorizing, gathering and disposing.” And pushing this notion a bit further, Baudrillard observes that “there is a strong whiff of

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the harem about all this, in the sense that the whole charm of the harem lies in its being at once a series bounded by intimacy (with always a privileged term) and an intimacy bounded by seriality.”12 While Mackay would have resented the harem imagery, Baudrillard’s dialectic of intimacy and seriality is appropriate in that Mackay is portrayed in From Far Formosa as a dapper and indefatigable man residing at the center of a continually expanding domain. When he returned to Canada on furlough in 1880–81, he obtained funding to found a Christian college at Tamsui, to be named Oxford College, and he equipped the college during its first stage of development with “accommodation for fifty students, two teachers, and their families,” as well as “two lecture-rooms, a museum and library, bath-room, and kitchen” (291). No further details are offered regarding this second museum, but its location in a school building suggests that it was mainly intended for pedagogical purposes. Mackay’s personal museum in the mission bungalow and the teaching museum in the college building, moreover, are associated with two other institutions that he maintained in the mission grounds, a small menagerie with half a dozen Formosan pouched monkeys and a black bear, and an experimental botanical garden. In his survey of Taiwan’s “Trees, Plants, and Flowers” in chapter 7 he mentions that he experimented unsuccessfully with imported oat seeds from Canada (66), and he also refers to his fruitless efforts to have the Formosans include the tomato in their diet. Mackay’s many travels and active interventions in the landscape thus seem to have led not only to the creation of Taiwan’s first museum, but quite possibly also its first specialized teaching museum, first zoological garden (be it a very small one) and first experimental botanical garden.

formosa museified As the above examples indicate, Mackay’s introductory description of Formosan natural history and his scientific and curatorial interventions remain interesting reading. The fact that the missionary seems ideologically more restrained in these pages and generally refrains from some of the overt preaching and proselytizing that characterize many other parts of From Far Formosa contributes to this impression of quality. Yet, natural history and museum-making, as practiced by Western scientists traveling overseas during the age of colonialism, were rarely disinterested pure science. Stamford Raffles, the distinguished employee of the English East

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India Company who founded Singapore in 1819, was also a respected linguist, historian, and naturalist. He put together a vast collection of Southeast Asian cultural artifacts and natural specimens, discovered the largest flower in the world (the Rafflesia arnoldii), and served as the first president of the English Zoological Society upon its founding in 1826.13 Even Alfred Russell Wallace, widely admired for his humble background and refusal to accept Victorian racial science, acknowledges in the preface of his classic The Malay Archipelago (1869) that he “obtained important aid from our own Government and from that of Holland”14 with the help of the Royal Geographical Society, an institution with a formidable record in the financing of overseas explorations during the age of empire. Creative writers of the colonial experience, from Joseph Conrad onward, did not fail to pick up on this link between science and empire building and soon developed it into a commonplace. Conrad’s Lord Jim (1899) offers one striking picture of a nineteenth-century naturalist, the German Stein, a “merchant, adventurer and sometime adviser of a Malay sultan,” who also achieved considerable fame as “a naturalist of some distinction” and “a learned collector.”15 Some twenty years later, William Somerset Maugham pointed out the irony in the meek public image of naturalists in his short story “Neil MacAdam.” An English curator of a natural history museum in colonial Borneo is described by his assistant as “a man who would never hurt a fly,” and the curator’s wife responds, “What makes you think he would never hurt a fly? Why, all those bottles and cases are full of the harmless animals he’s killed.”16 Paul Scott, finally, a belated narrator of the colonial experience, in his novel The Love Pavilion (1960), presents an adventurer by the name of Saxby, an English botanist and secret agent who descends into insanity in the jungles of 1940s Malaysia.17 Nothing so dramatically Conradian can be observed in From Far Formosa. Yet Mackay, too, had other than purely scientific motives for much of the busy scientific footwork he performed as he strove ceaselessly to take inventory of his Formosan island home, and these motives can be understood most clearly from the detailed description of the “study and museum” in his mission bungalow in chapter 30, “Training a Native Ministry.” This museum received the notebooks, natural history specimens, and Chinese and aboriginal artifacts he brought back from his travels around North Formosa and also contained the scientific instruments, books, globes, and other scholarly resources he imported from the West. The relevant passage in chapter 30 is remarkable and worth quoting in its entirety:

[ 258  ]  henk vynckier My own study and museum in Tamsui are open to the students, and good use has been made of their resources. After twenty-three years of accumulation the study is well furnished, having books, maps, globes, drawings, microscopes, telescope, kaleidoscope, stereoscope, camera, magnets, galvanic batteries and other chemical apparatus, as well as innumerable specimens illustrative of geology, mineralogy, botany, and zoölogy. What would be otherwise a parlor is in our house a museum. In this room is a vast collection of every conceivable kind of article of use or interest to Chinese, Pe-po-hoan, or savage. There are collections of marine shells, sponges, and corals of various kinds, classified and labeled. All sorts of serpents, worms, and insects are preserved. There are idols enough to stock a temple, ancestral tablets and religious curios, musical instruments, priests’ garments, and all the stock in trade of Chinese idolatry, as well as models of implements of agriculture and weapons of war. The various savage tribes in the mountains are well represented. There is one idol ten feet high, different from any other I ever saw, and a complete collection of relics representing every aspect of savage life. Some things are quaint enough, others suggestive of sad thoughts, others gruesome and repulsive, because indicative of ferocity and savage cruelty. Keeping watch and ward over the whole scene are four life-size figures representing four sides of life in Formosa. In one corner is a Tauist priest, arrayed in his official long red robe, with a bell in one hand to arouse the devils possessing any man, and a whip in the other to drive them out. In the next corner is a bare-pated Buddhist priest, robed in drab, one hand holding his sacred scroll, the other counting his string of beads. Opposite to him is a fierce-looking headhunter from the mountains, his forehead and chin tattooed, his spear at his side, bows and arrows strapped across his shoulders, a long knife at his girdle, and his left hand clutching the cue of some unfortunate victim. In the fourth corner is a savage woman, rudely attired, and working with her “spinning-jenny,” as they may be seen in their mountain home. (288–89)

As Carla Yanni notes in her 1999 study, Nature’s Museums: Victorian Science and the Architecture of Display, “museums present themselves as neutral, when in fact they are politicized.”18 The critique eminently fits Mackay’s museum, which—with its emphasis on the scientific principles of accumulation and classification, on the rhetorical trope of enumeration, on didacticism, and with its manifest scorn for “Chinese idolatry”

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and the placement of four figures of Formosan social types in the corners of the room—is clearly a culturally constructed and politicized spectacle. On one level the museum is intended as an objective, scientific, and educational display of the real Formosa that Mackay encountered daily during his travels around the island. On another level it is also a contrived intercultural spectacle staged by Mackay to suggest an imaginary alternative Formosa, that is, a visually transparent and domesticated land that would allow Christianization and other Western forces to proceed apace. Mackay’s yoked concept “study and museum” indicates that his museum always remained a hybrid. Though it was located in the parlor of the missionary’s home and, as such, served as a personal space for, in the words of Baudrillard, intimacy and fondling, it also served a public function and was accessible to other men of science, students, and other visitors. Thus the museum shares some characteristics with one of the earliest traditions of “the three-dimensional display of the world of natural fact,”19 that of the cabinet of curiosities (also known as Kunst- und Wunderkammer), which developed in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a by-product of the Renaissance program of scientific inquiry and overseas exploration. Such cabinets of curiosities were generally arranged in a scholar’s or collector’s private study and typically exhibited a wide range of books, works of art, natural history specimens, and ethnographic and archaeological artifacts in a more or less ordered and generally stunning visual display. The cabinet of the Italian apothecary Ferrante Imperato is one of the earliest and best known examples, but such cabinets soon proliferated throughout Europe, with Ole Worm’s Museum in Copenhagen, Athanasius Kirchner’s Museum in Rome, and Elias Ashmole’s Museum in Oxford being some prominent seventeenth-century examples.20 Certain aspects of Mackay’s museum seem related to this tradition, and it therefore emerges in some ways as a nineteenth-century update of the cabinet of curiosities. This may seem contradictory at first sight, in that the Renaissance cabinets of curiosities and nineteenth-century musea proceeded from very different intellectual paradigms. While the cabinet of curiosities delighted in what was marvelous, exceptional, and bizarre in nature and culture, Victorian scientists generally searched out what was typical and representative for inclusion in their collections. Mackay reveals this latter preoccupation when he refers to his extensive collection of the “stock in trade” of Chinese religion. Yet the sheer jumble of objects enumerated; his use of words such as “curios,” “quaint,” “gruesome,” and “repulsive”; the special mention of the aboriginal idol that is ten feet high

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and “different from any other I ever saw”; as well as his rather loose juxtaposition “of serpents, worms, and insects”—serpents being vertebrates and worms and insects invertebrates—seem to indicate an effort to achieve other than purely scientific effects. As Norbert Schneider states in a discussion of the use of cabinets of curiosities in still-life paintings, the impression generated by such cabinets was mainly “pleasurable terror.”21 Curios entertain more than enlighten; ten-feet-high idols amaze; and snakes in glass jars amuse or frighten depending on the constitution of the viewers who visited Mackay’s mission at Tamsui. Mackay, moreover, reserves the most eye-catching features of his “study and museum” for the climax of his description and, in doing so, turns this collection of Formosiana into an even more hybrid space with the emergence of a third function, that of a theater of otherness. Four wondrous figures, which are supposed to represent “four sides of life in Formosa,” a red-robed Taoist priest, a bare-pated Buddhist priest, a fierce tattooed headhunter clutching the cue of a Chinese victim, and a rudely attired savage woman, are strategically located in the corners of the museum, which has been redefined as a “scene” over which the four figures “keep watch and ward.” Such figures are similar to the native life scenes found in many of the ethnographic museums of the time but are also reminiscent of the knights-in-armor, Greco-Roman statues, painted lifelike dolls, automata, and other figures in cabinets of curiosities.22 It is striking that Mackay specifically selected these four Formosan social types to be the spirits presiding over this space, rather than some others that also were well represented in the contemporary iconography of Taiwan, such as government officials, farmers, merchants, fishermen, coolies carrying heavy burdens, or women with children. Since Mackay repeatedly expresses in From Far Formosa his belief that Chinese paganism and aboriginal savagery were the biggest obstacles standing in the missionary’s way, one may surmise that the two Chinese monks and the aboriginal headhunter and woman represent these two opposing forces that are to be exorcised. Thus, though these formidable Formosans may have been a source of anxiety in real life, in this form they are but the defenseless targets of the spectator’s visual inspection. The presentation invites the viewer to travel some distance, spend some time circling around and conversing with the denizens of this netherworld, and then emerge convinced of his own superiority as the centrally positioned party in this intercultural encounter. The mental process is not unlike that of many medieval world maps, which invited Europeans to examine with fear and wonder the cyclopes, pygmies, dog-headed cannibals, one-footed

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Sciapods, and other so-called monstrous races at the outer edges of the world and then comforted them with the presence of Jerusalem at the center of the map. Aware that there were those in the Presbyterian Church in Canada who might feel that this man of God seemed to be spending more time saving artifacts than souls, Mackay works hard both in chapter 30 and elsewhere to affirm his earnestness and orthodoxy, and he repeatedly calls attention to the moral and religious agenda underlying his museum-making. His detailed description of the museum is followed by a forceful concluding paragraph that reminds any “good people in Christian lands” who might possibly “read these pages with painful astonishment, horrified that a missionary should spend time collecting and studying such things” of all the good that is achieved by this work: “could they conceive the reflex influence of all this study on mission work, in humbling the proud graduate, conciliating the haughty mandarin, and attracting the best and brightest of the officials, both native and foreign, they would not so readily write across these paragraphs their ignorant and supercilious ‘Cui bono?’” (289–90). Mackay thus concludes the chapter with a commonplace of Victorian science and culture, which held that what is scientific and useful may be equated with what is morally good and beneficial to the salvation of the soul.23 Similar reassuring comments abound throughout From Far Formosa. Mackay notes that the museum functions as a useful scholarly resource and public relations tool for visiting scientists and other interested travelers from the West and therefore generates more interest in and support for the mission: “Scientists from various countries have visited us at Tamsui, and an hour or two in my museum secured for the mission their sympathy and interest. They saw there what would take them years to discover for themselves, and not infrequently have they been made friends of foreign missions by accompanying us on a tour of the chapels” (320). One example of such a Western visitor is the American scientist J. B. Steere of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, who “was making a tour through the tropics, collecting specimens for the museum of his college” (320) and was Mackay’s guest at the college for about a month. He also mentions another scientist who drew upon his expertise, the German naturalist Dr. Warburg from Hamburg, who joined Mackay for a tour to collect specimens for his college in 1888 and “procured many plants and flowers, and many relics and weapons belonging to the aborigines” (225). The museum, however, not only helps to foster the external relations of the mission with various

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Western interests, it also performs a key role in the work of conversion in the Formosan field. Mackay notes with pleasure, for example in the passage quoted above regarding his museum, that the Chinese students of the college make good use of its resources, and as early as chapter 23 he relates how ten young aboriginal women, who had become interested in “the way of salvation” following the preacher’s visit to their village, traveled to Tamsui “to see the Girls’ School, Oxford College, and the museum” (224). In so far as there might still have been contemporaries who were not entirely convinced by this textual defense of his record, the collection at Knox College in Toronto, which Mackay donated to his alma mater shortly before the publication of From Far Formosa, also affirmed his politically correct views as an upright missionary. Though it is impossible to reconstruct a comprehensive image of Mackay’s museum at a distance of more than a hundred years and working with the incomplete sampling of artifacts exhibited at the Shung Ye Museum, one can still observe Mackay’s definition of many of the objects displayed there as being of “savage” origin. Time and again, Mackay’s own handwriting on the original labels affixed to the textiles, caps, cigars, powder flasks, deer skulls, wild boar’s skulls, and other skulls and statues spells out the message that these are “savage” objects and “idols worshipped by savages.” The same terms, which were standard fare in Victorian colonial ethnography, already figured prominently in the description of the museum in From Far Formosa. Other museum pieces described in From Far Formosa further reveal Mackay’s ideological program in that they illustrate episodes from the history of the Presbyterian mission in Formosa, with Mackay enumerating trophies won in the war against heathendom. Mackay narrates how one day during the early years of his missionary work he and his student found themselves surrounded by an angry mob. When a large stone was flung at them from nearby and grazed the top of his head, he did not flinch but turned around and picked up the three pieces of the broken stone as “mementos of the day.” He also reports that one of the pieces weighed three pounds and that another piece was “brought as a contribution to the museum in Knox College, Toronto” (160). The two remaining pieces, one may assume, were still in his possession at Tamsui. On another occasion, Mackay remembers his conversation with a seventy-four-year-old “hillman” during a trip deep into the mountains. The old man “spoke a great deal about the folly of idolatry, and offered me his god of the north pole, god of the kitchen, and god of war, before which he had been bowing himself for seventy long years. This offer was made good, and on our return we car-

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ried them with us as contribution to my museum at Tamsui” (176). A few pages later, a fifty-eight-year-old man seeks Mackay’s help in overcoming his opium addiction, and Mackay agrees to help: “The pipe was placed in my museum, and then the struggle began” (179).

the politics of collecting Passages that highlight the museum’s use as a display case of church history lead to the most disturbing dimension of Mackay’s cultural interventions: his systematic destruction of religious artifacts. The central thesis of the Mackay exhibit at the Shung Ye Museum had been that Mackay was a preserver of Formosan culture. Indeed, when looked at from the vantage point of Taiwan in the year 2001, it seems reasonable to emphasize those aspects of Mackay’s work that resulted in the preservation of valuable aboriginal artifacts, considering how Taiwan’s aboriginal cultures have been impacted by centuries of conflict with both Chinese and Japanese administrations. Yet, as Mackay’s own From Far Formosa documents, a more complex view is revealed when one examines the missionary’s record within its historical context. Mackay’s firm rule for converts was that acceptance of the Christian faith meant surrendering one’s gods and ancestral tablets either for inclusion in his museum or for swift destruction, and he provides several examples of such casting away of the idols. He recalls how in one particular village he slept in a low, musty room and would dry his clothes before fires fueled with religious artifacts: “To that place the cast-off machinery of idolatry was brought, and more than once I dried my clothes before fires made of idolatrous paper, idols, and ancestral tablets” (219). He also notes that some “other paraphernalia of idol-worship” (219) from this same village were saved and carried to the museum in Tamsui. The most striking example of Mackay’s destruction of religious artifacts occurs in chapter 24, when Mackay narrates how a village of aborigines, which had been recently brought under the control of the Chinese military authorities, is converted to Christianity. Baskets are carried from house to house to collect “idolatrous paraphernalia” and “a large pile of mock-money, idols, tablets, incense-sticks, and flags” is burned in public. Mackay, moreover, notes with delight that during this victory fire many showed their contempt for “the dirty, dusty, greasy old idols” and that “roars of derisive laughter followed the pulling out and holding up of a blazing ‘goddess of mercy’” (231). The fact that these aboriginal villagers probably had little love for these artifacts, which they had been forced to accept by the Chinese authorities

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as a sign of their recent cultural assimilation, may explain the starkness of the image but does not mitigate its impact. As Mackay knew very well, this Goddess of Mercy was Kuan Yin (Guanyin), a divinity who occupies a central position in Chinese culture and whose spiritual significance may be compared to that of the Virgin Mary in the Christian tradition. Mackay was not the only one who lit such ceremonial bonfires; they seem to have been a standard practice for many foreign missionaries in Taiwan. William Campbell records in his Sketches from Formosa an event involving “the open destruction of the idols, ancestral tablets, and idolatrous pictures, belonging to a number of people who had resolved to cast in their lot with the disciples of Jesus.”24 Though it seems likely that Campbell, too, may have occasionally selected a few such artifacts as souvenirs during these burnings, he does not mention this here or anywhere else in his memoir. The museifying Mackay, in contrast, is always ready to examine the idolatrous artifacts more closely and pick out those that seem worthy to be included in his museum. Such interventions may make Mackay appear as a gentler sort of missionary, and yet they also remove whatever ambiguity may still exist regarding his intentions. While it is true that he made it possible for many artifacts to survive the ravages of time, his main purpose in having them conveyed to his museum was to neutralize them and celebrate his victory in a culture war. Those artifacts that have survived, moreover, stand for numerous similar objects that did not survive because they were burned to dry clothes or celebrate conversions. Thus, in the collector’s historicizing vision, the surviving artifacts would one day represent a vanished way of life and evoke a pagan phase in the history of Taiwan that was swept away by the coming of Christianity, Westernization, foreign trade, and other Eurocentric historical narratives. It is another irony of the exhibit at the Shung Ye Museum that Mackay’s vision has largely come true and that, now that the pluralistic Taiwan of the twenty-first century is ready to embrace its aboriginal cultural heritage, it has few other choices but to turn to historical figures such as Mackay and salvage whatever it can from the missionary’s vision of a vanished Formosa. Mackay’s Eurocentric museum and its attempt to stage the spectacle of a capitulating pagan world leave no room for a native voice to speak out in opposition to this work of destruction. A striking passage in V.S. Naipaul’s 1979 novel A Bend in the River offers some cues, however, as to what an empowered native response to such a work of destruction can be like in a similar intercultural contact zone. A Bend in the River is set in the post-colonial Congolese city of Kisangani, which was also the location of Conrad’s

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interior station in Heart of Darkness. It features a Belgian Catholic missionary, Father Huismans, who shares with Reverend Mackay a keen interest in native culture. Father Huismans, though an agent of Westernization himself, regrets the disappearance of many African traditions and often travels deep into the jungle to collect African carvings, masks, and other artifacts. These artifacts are then brought back to his school in the city and displayed, oddly enough, in what used to be the gun room of the school during colonial times: “What he had collected from that dying Africa lay in the gun room of the lycée, where the antiquated rifles of the school cadet corps used to be kept in the old days.”25 Though Father Huismans may have prized these masks highly, their placement in this room only manages to degrade them; the masks lie “flat on the shelves, looking up not at forest or sky but at the underside of other shelves. They were masks that had been laid low, in more than one way, and had lost their power.”26 The cultural tensions and potential for violence implicit in this school museum, which used to be a gun room, are fully revealed later when Father Huismans—despite his reputation as a lover of Africa—is killed, mutilated, and decapitated during a trip in the jungle. The novel then notes that “some of the boys at the lycée were embarrassed and ashamed. Some were aggressive.”27 The aggressive group is represented by a young man named Ferdinand, who states: “It is a thing of Europeans, a museum. Here it is going against the god of Africans. We have masks in our houses and we know what they are for. We don’t have to go to Huismans’ museum.”28 Naipaul thus provides the kind of aggressive native answer to the colonial museum maker which is missing from Mackay’s From Far Formosa. A few concluding reflections may be offered at this point regarding the politics of Mackay’s museum. Western visitors clearly find their own intellectual and religious heritage reflected in the museum and applied vigorously in the context of a contested intercultural frontier, which in reality resisted incorporation in their world order. This, in turn, may have helped to confirm in their minds the viability of various Western agendas, such as the further opening up of Taiwan to foreign trade, the exploitation of Taiwan’s natural resources, the Christianization of Taiwan, the systematic study of the island’s aborigines within the larger project of Victorian racial science, etc.29 Native visitors, meanwhile, are exposed to a way of looking at their island home and the world that is radically different from their own, causing wonder and disrupting their own cultural parameters. This, in turn, might then lead to an interest in the civilization and religion that had caused this marvelous display case of another culture to materialize

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in Northern Taiwan. Mackay recalls the intellectual vertigo experienced by his very first student when he introduced him to a Western map of the world: “It was amusing to watch him as his eye took in the vastness of other countries than China. His Chinese notions about geography were upset, and he soon began to have thoughts about the wide world outside the Chinese wall and beyond the broad Pacific” (144). As for Mackay himself, the museum, as well as the other institutions that surround it, are, first of all, the visible manifestation of his decades-long presence in Taiwan and thus offer solid proof in the eyes of natives and foreigners alike of his staying power, the vitality of his missionary project, and his fruitful use of the financial support of the Presbyterian Church, which sent him overseas. They also validate his Janus-faced way of seeing Formosa as a missionary and collector and, ultimately, confer authority and enshrine power—the power of the masculine, white, Christian, Victorian museum-maker whose gaze converts the other into an aspect of his curatorial spectatorship.

mackay’s museum: another palace of memory It is interesting to consider, finally, that, while Mackay’s museum may have been the first museum in Taiwan, three centuries before Mackay there was another Western missionary in the China field who proposed to the Chinese something similar to Mackay’s museum: a palace of memory of the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci. As Jonathan Spence discusses in his classic study The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, Ricci wrote a book in Chinese in 1596, exactly 300 years before the publication of Mackay’s From Far Formosa, on the art of memory in the Western intellectual tradition, and he offered this book as a present to the Governor of Jiangxi and his three sons. As was well documented at the time, Ricci’s memory was phenomenal, and the main purpose of his book was to sketch the European educational program that enabled scholars and students to develop such powerful mental faculties. The basic idea, which dated back to antiquity, was for the practitioners of the art of memory (ars memoria) to create imaginary palaces or other architectural structures in their minds and to fill these with objects and images that would function as storage spaces for human knowledge systems. As Spence points out, Ricci clearly had ulterior motives when he shared this Western intellectual construct with his Chinese audience: “By Ricci’s time it had become a way for ordering all one’s knowledge of secular and religious subjects, and since he himself was a Catholic missionary

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Ricci hoped that once the Chinese learned to value his mnemonic powers they would be drawn to ask him about the religion that made such wonders possible.”30 One particularly striking feature of the palace of memory which Ricci described in his book is that at one point he proposes four specific images, each of which is placed in a precise position within the memory palace and described in sequence: “The first image was two warriors grappling, the second a tribeswoman from the west, the third a peasant cutting grain, the fourth a maidservant holding a child in her arms.”31 Ricci, moreover, “chose to place these images in the four corners of one specific room. This room was a reception hall, a fairly formal space supported by pillars,” and the idea was for the governor or any other Chinese readers of the book to follow Ricci on “this first mental memory stroll” by “entering the hall, and, turning to their right, perusing the images one by one.”32 The similarities between Ricci’s four Chinese images placed in the corners of a reception hall and Mackay’s four Formosan figures in the corners of his museum, which formerly was the parlor of his house, are noteworthy. Ricci visualizes China as a land of warfare (grappling warriors), ethnic diversity (a tribeswoman from China’s borderlands in Central Asia), age-old work rhythms (a peasant cutting grain), and domestic life (a maidservant holding a child). Mackay’s Formosa, meanwhile, is a land devoted to Chinese cultural and religious traditions (a Taoist priest, a Buddhist priest), intercultural hostility (a headhunter clutching the cue of a Chinese victim), and village life (an aboriginal woman at her spinning jenny). Intriguing as some of the similarities may be, the differences are even more striking. Ricci participated in one of the first efforts of the Europe of the Renaissance to bring its civilization to what was still a confident Chinese empire. Not having any of the advantages of treaty ports, access to consular services, judicial protection, the might of British cannon boats, the corrupting influence of opium, the eroding leadership of the Qing Dynasty, and all the other historical factors that followed the unequal treaties between China and the Western powers, the tentative Ricci could only proceed on his missionary journey with infinite patience and with an almost complete acculturation to Chinese culture. The space he obtained for himself within Chinese culture was that of the tour guide of a memory palace, i.e., an imaginary cultural site, which—though anchored firmly in the civilization of Europe and intended as a tool for the conversion of China—was bound to remain an entirely verbal construct. Mackay, however, appears in the guise of a very different kind of threshold figure, that of the man of sci-

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ence, educator, and museum builder, who presides over the construction of a very real cultural site. Ricci’s palace of memory has now been made real, as it were, by means of a church, a college, landscaped gardens, a menagerie, a hospital, a museum, and all the other structures and images created by the Canadian missionary, and—as in Ricci’s palace—each one of the elements of this visual domain stands for specific aspects of the missionary’s cultural roots: learning, experience, and faith. Thus, Mackay’s museum, coming three hundred years after Ricci’s memory palace, also stands as a remarkable testimonial regarding the power play Western nations had pursued in their contacts with Chinese civilization.

notes 1. In 1915 Knox College relocated to a new campus, and the Mackay collection was transferred to the Royal Ontario Museum. The artifacts at the Shung Ye Museum were, therefore, on loan from the Royal Ontario Museum. A catalogue of the exhibit was issued: The Dr. Mackay Collection of Formosan Aboriginal Artifacts: Treasures Preserved Abroad (Taipei: Shung Ye Museum of Formosan Aborigines, 2001). 2. Owen Rutter, a popular British travel writer of the first half of the twentieth century, includes a photograph of the Taipei Museum in his 1923 travelogue Through Formosa: An Account of Japan’s Island Colony (Taipei: SMC Publishing, 1990), 151, and offers the following comment regarding its contents: “We visited the Museum, where there was an excellent collection of the weapons, utensils, and arts and crafts of the aborigines, on whom Mr. Mori, the curator, is an authority. There were also many exhibits from what the Japanese call the South Sea Islands and what we call the East Indies and Malaya.” Lauri Underwood’s article “Museum Metamorphoses,” in Free China Review (March 1992: 68–77), surveys the Taiwan Museum’s adaptation to the new demands made of museums in the democratizing Taiwan of the eighties and nineties. 3. The British missionary William Campbell, who arrived in Taiwan in November 1871, about a year before Mackay, and was the first ordained missionary assigned to Tainan in southern Taiwan, also was an amateur scientist and historian, and avid collector. His Sketches from Formosa of 1915 (Taipei: SMC Publishing, 1996) clearly reflects his knowledge of Taiwan’s natural history and ethnography. He also mentions in chapter 16 of that book that he sent aboriginal artifacts to the Imperial Ethnological Museum in Berlin, and in chapter 17 he notes that he provided the British Museum with collections of dried plants. Yet, while Campbell also may have arranged his collections in Tainan into a more or less systematic collection, he does not describe any sort of museum. 4. Quoted in Ian Bartholomew, “Creating a Local Hero from a Missionary,” Taipei Times (May 27, 2001), 17.

museifying formosa  [ 269  ] 5. Editorial, “No One to Blame But Themselves,” Taipei Times (June 20, 2001). 6. George L. Mackay, From Far Formosa: The Island, Its People and Missions (1896; Taipei: SMC Publishing, 1991), 339. 7. Inez de Beauclair, ed., Neglected Formosa: A Translation from the Dutch of Frederic Coyett’s ‘t Verwaerloosde Formosa (San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, 1975). 8. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 6. 9. A detailed study of the Chinese–aboriginal encounter is offered in Emma Jinhua Teng, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683–1895 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004). 10. Mackay, as most Victorians, adhered to what Nélia Dias calls “the empiricist canon of natural history, with its emphasis on collecting and classifying.” “Looking at Objects: Memory, Knowledge in Nineteenth Century Ethnographic Displays,” in Traveller’s Tales: Narratives of Home and Displacement, ed. George Robertson et al. (London: Routledge, 1994), 166. 11. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (New York: Norton, 1975), 56. 12. Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting,” in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), 10. 13. Nigel Barley, The Duke of Puddle Dock: Travels in the Footsteps of Stamford Raffles (New York: Henry Holt, 1991), 262. 14. Alfred R. Wallace, The Malay Archipelago (1869; Stenhouse, Scotland: Tynron Press, 1989), xvii. 15. Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (New York: Signet, 1981), 152. 16. William Somerset Maugham, “Neil MacAdam,” in Far Eastern Tales, ed. John Whitehead (London: Mandarin Paperbacks, 1993), 230. 17. Paul Scott, The Love Pavilion (1960; New York: Carroll and Graf, 1985). 18. Carla Yanni, Nature’s Museums: Victorian Science and the Architecture of Display (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 159. 19. Anthony Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992), 220. 20. The cabinet of curiosities is discussed in Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts, 217–21; Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Yanni, Nature’s Museums, 14–24; and Patrick Mauriès, Cabinets of Curiosities (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002). 21. Norbert Schneider, The Art of the Still Life: Still Life Painting in the Early Modern Period (Cologne: Taschen, 1990), 158. 22. The Danish collector Ole Worm featured a life-sized figure of a helmeted warrior clutching a spear in the back of his room; the Italian Francesco Calzolari had facing statues of Hercules and Pallas Athena positioned strategically on the left and right walls of his cabinet; and his compatriot Ferdinando Cospi employed a dwarf to guide visitors around his cabinet. Cospi’s dwarf is portrayed in

[ 270  ]  henk vynckier an engraving of his cabinet as standing in front of an impressive display of artifacts arranged along the back wall. His presence in this space seems intended to incorporate him into his employer’s collection. For reproductions see Mauriès, 18–19, 14–15, 146–47. 23. Yanni, 160–61. 24. Campbell, Sketches from Formosa, 90. 25. V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River (New York: Vintage, 1980), 64. 26. Ibid., 65. 27. Ibid., 82. 28. Ibid., 83. 29. These agendas echo those of what Fa-ti Fan, in his British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), describes as “British scientific imperialism.” As Fan notes, “British scientific imperialism did not stop at the colonial boundaries, but expanded along the legal, political, and economic apparatuses of the informal empire, in whose shadow Victorian naturalists in China developed information technologies and carried out their research” (90). 30. Jonathan Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1985), 3. 31. Ibid., 10. 32. Ibid.

11 

Signifying on China: African-American Literary Theory and Tibetan Discourse Steven J. Venturino

I don’t think Tibet has any political problems. Those so-called problems have been fabricated by foreign countries like the United States. lobsang dradul 1

Actually, Americans don’t have a so-called “nationality” or “color.” They are a group of people who are all supposed to be called Americans gathered together from all sorts of directions. zhu wen, “America, America”2

The emergence, growth, and withering away of [minority] nationalities take a long time, so the nationality problem will exist over a long historical period. ye xiaowen 3

What does Tibet signify in narratives of China? Asking this question means asking what Tibet signifies in global narratives as well, since “Tibet,” like “China,” designates conflicting political entities in the world. Philip Glass and the Beastie Boys raise funds for a “Free Tibet” in concerts in the United States and Europe, while local festivals and television variety shows in China depict Tibetans as happily participating in each new Beijing-based social campaign. Dance and theater groups organized by Tibetan exiles in Dharamsala square off in international performances against officially sanctioned groups sent from Tibet to cities around the world. The Dalai [ 271  ]

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Lama visits government officials in Australia, despite official Chinese opposition, just as China’s official Chairman of the Tibetan Autonomous Region visits political leaders in California to plan for a possible “sister state” relationship. Even Tibet’s natural environment is a contested landscape, offering for some an image of spiritual belonging and promise, and for others a façade behind which China hides nuclear waste, political prison camps, and wasteful mineral exploitation. Yet, despite Tibet’s high profile worldwide and the region’s central importance to policymakers in China, existing debates over “Chineseness” rarely engage the Tibetan dimensions of China’s national identity. In considering Tibet’s significance in narratives of China, this essay makes two principal claims. The first is simply that narratives of China and Chinese national identity are not solely domestic creations, but positions that arise and circulate through a global dialogue dependent on the engagement of transnational critical discourse with national political policies. Second, what I describe as instances of Tibet’s “absent presence” within narratives of Chineseness actually serve as destabilizing supplements to these narratives. My strategy of exploring these claims with an eye to African-American literary criticism is not based on any intention to develop a parallel “Tibetan-Chinese” theoretical perspective, but rather to emphasize the interrelated discursive and political aspects of investigating ethnic identity. In the context of “writing China,” it seems to me very appropriate to examine how African-American literary theory, the product of specific historical conditions and distinct institutional struggles, insists on the need to craft approaches to minority literary production that acknowledge the ambivalent yet subversive engagement of literature with dominant narratives of political, historical, and institutional belonging.

“china’s tibet ” The much-discussed skepticism toward the Chinese Communist Party, building in China since at least the mid-1980s, has not led to a true decentralization of political power, since “the traditional concept of a political center . . . remains deeply embedded in China’s political culture.”4 In fact, as critics have pointed out, the gradual delegitimizing of the Chinese Communist Party as a site of economic and political stability only serves to highlight for party officials the need to transform overtly political narratives into more naturalized narratives of the Chinese nation. In this way, “Chineseness” is employed in official Chinese policy in order to

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emphasize the overall unity of the PRC’s multicultural population, while simultaneously promoting a more specific, exclusionary view of Chinese identity. Narratives that reflect the interests of single-party control and a Han-based ethnic center continue to be advanced by such official policies, particularly those restricting debate on the restive nature of China’s heterogeneous population or on the questionable transformation of China’s imperial territories into the current nation-state. The Chinese Communist Party’s national Sange Daibiao (Three Represents) campaign, for example, emphasizes the CCP’s task of serving as the sole representative of advanced productivity, advanced culture, and the fundamental interests of all people living in China.5 “Three Represents” was promoted with particular vigor during the 50th anniversary of China’s “peaceful liberation” of Tibet in 2001. Then– vice president Hu Jintao and other high-ranking officials personally visited Tibet to emphasize the campaign’s message that the party is the only legitimate representative of productivity, culture, and social concerns in Tibet. During the weeks before the anniversary, party officials required writers and scholars from academic institutions in Tibet to participate in meetings and workshops promoting the need for Tibetan intellectuals to follow Beijing’s lead in preserving national unity: In a speech made yesterday . . . in Lhasa, Hu Jintao said that it is only under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party that Tibet can enjoy “prosperity and progress.” He said: “[The peaceful liberation] symbolized that Tibet once and for all cast off the yoke of imperialist aggression and that the great unity of the Chinese nation and its great reunification cause have entered a new period of development. It ushered in a new era in which Tibet would turn from darkness to light, from backwardness to progress, from poverty to affluence and from seclusion to openness” (Xinhua, 19 July). Hu warned that the struggle against the “separatist and disruptive activities of the Dalai clique and anti-China forces” would continue.6

Central government oversight of Tibetan intellectuals has actually increased over the past decade, even as such control of the activities at other institutions in China has been relaxed. The cultural sphere generally, and transnational scholarly exchange in particular, now serve as primary targets of China’s official policies and narratives of national cultural unity.7 The old enemies of religion, Western interference, and fenlie zhuyi (splittism) are being fought with renewed vigor, both within China and in sites

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around the world. Continuing attacks on “splittists” at home and abroad mark significant exceptions to the much-touted rise in critique of official corruption and the growing opportunities for experimentation in literary expression.8 As humanists discuss the improving or declining conditions for “Chinese intellectuals” as such, I would argue that the conditions facing Tibetan scholars—and those scholars interacting with them—must be considered with an awareness of the distinctive theoretical, institutional, and political factors involved. For humanists in the United States, the “culture wars” featured—and continue to feature—the interrogation by minority discourses of traditional narratives of American literature and culture. Battles in these wars have transformed traditional views, reorganized departments, injured feelings, and even ended careers.9 By comparison, cultural critique of Tibetan issues in China today is more than an exercise in questioning “dominant narratives”—as dangerous as that may be in American contexts—but a confrontation with carefully constructed party-state policies operating as cultural narratives in concert with economic and political interests. The losses incurred by Tibetan writers in such culture wars include imprisonment, exile, and execution. Merle Goldman, writing in 1967 about literary dissent and literary form in the Mao era, noted that “a literary tradition that includes the great writers of nineteenth-century Russia and even Soviet literature of the 1950s is subversive to a cultural revolution trying to eliminate Western culture.”10 Today, it is not Western literary form as such that is seen as subversive, but literary criticism, global in its reach, and critical of hegemonic narratives of national identity. Studies adopting such oppositional perspectives cannot help but seem subversive to national policies intent on promoting the illusion of peaceful coexistence of China’s ethnic groups and the legitimacy of centralized authority. The national narratives with which I am most concerned in this essay serve to perpetuate a vision of China’s unity and totality with regard to Tibet and Tibetans. These are not static narratives, and they certainly do not reflect unchanging notions of the Chinese nation. Instead, they are narratives strategically employed by policymakers and institutions to transpose China’s longstanding territorial claims to Tibet into the intellectual-cultural register in which so many of us conduct our own studies. The most commonly voiced official line is one of condescending exclusion, warning that matters of Tibet should not be taken up at all, since Tibet is simply another part of the motherland, notwithstanding the incomplete and false reports circulated by foreigners. Indeed, when matters of Tibet

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are raised by non-Chinese, the often-repeated charge is of “interfering with China’s domestic sphere.”11 Another narrative insists that China’s minority ethnic groups, particularly Tibetans, coexist peacefully with the Han unless stirred up by the Dalai Lama and anti-Chinese forces. Still another frequently articulated line explains that Tibet simply belongs to China. It is, in the words of the title of a glossy, photo-filled, official periodical designed for a Western readership, China’s Tibet. Despite this insistence on the natural status of Tibet’s place, and despite the polite reminder (offered in response to my own choice of topics at conferences held in China) that talking about “China and Tibet” creates “logical confusion” akin to referring to “the United States and California,” the fact remains that commentators on both sides continually struggle with “placing” Tibet within China. Tibet and Tibetans are depicted simultaneously as both Chinese and non-Chinese, and this essay explores how this uneasy merging of Tibet and China illustrates the logic of the supplement, calling into question any perspective whereby “China” operates as a unified sign in literary and political studies.12 Specifically, narratives of China that are engineered to block discussion of Tibet carry within themselves a kind of restive logic that begs the very questions they seek to obscure. These narratives, particularly when asserting that Tibet is not a matter for foreigners to raise, are revealed to be irreducibly international and transnational in nature.13 It is simply not possible to articulate or interpret these narratives solely from a domestic Chinese perspective, since they rely on global discourses of identity and nationhood to exist. Whether promoted by political think tanks or literary critics, international exchanges that confine debate to “domestic” perspectives actively ignore key questions raised by China’s official circumscription of debate and reinforce the barriers to understanding Tibet’s absent presence in global dialogue. My intent, then, is to sketch out the field of opportunities afforded by perspectives of African-American literary criticism—politically engaged from its inception—for (re)addressing the tensions of minority discourse inherent in narratives of a “Chinese” actor on the global stage. It is a theoretical orientation, rather than any complete theory or even a set of theories, that develops when we examine the interplay of Tibetan discourse against its own global backdrop dominated by the political interests and ethnic chauvinism of both China and the West. I do not intend to develop a full-scale theory of “Tibetanness within Chineseness,” even as I argue that Tibet’s absent presence serves as a kind of “dangerous supplement” to China, ironically redefining what it is called upon to reinforce. Likewise,

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this is not an exercise in simply “applying” African-American literary criticism to Sino-Tibetan texts and contexts. Instead, I want to urge the possibility of adapting and mobilizing the necessarily political frameworks for interpretation developed in African-American discourse in order to examine Tibet’s challenge to studies of Chineseness. In the following sections, I first consider how African-American literary criticism elaborates the logic of the supplement by focusing attention on the differing discursive strategies of minority and majority groups. I then consider the supplement with regard to recent work in Chinese studies addressing minority issues. What emerges in this paper, therefore, is a view of literary and cultural criticism in which Tibet and China highlight the transnational dimensions of minority criticism and the Signifying nature of global dialogue.

the supplement of minority representation Novelist and critic Toni Morrison writes that the study of American literature bears a long history of constructing an “Americanness” that purposefully ignores the fundamental presence of Africans and African-Americans. False “knowledge” of a traditionally coherent American literary identity “assumes that the characteristics of our national literature emanate from a particular ‘Americanness’ that is separate from and unaccountable to this [Africanist] presence.”14 Morrison develops a comprehensive argument for the indisputable presence of Africa in a nation defined by its totalizing white “Americanness,” insisting that “it is important to see how inextricable Africanism is or ought to be from the deliberations of literary criticism and the wanton, elaborate strategies undertaken to erase its presence from view.”15 Such an approach, I believe, speaks directly to current comparative work involving critics who identify themselves with challenges to politicocultural hegemony yet find themselves complying with demands that such interrogations ignore Tibet. In fact, critics living outside China who otherwise associate themselves with criticism of ethnic and political oppression often fall disappointingly silent when participating in conferences or published dialogues on Chineseness, calling to mind the “willed scholarly indifference” to the Africanist presence in American literature that itself recalls the “centuries-long, hysterical blindness to feminist discourse.”16 Certainly, the nature of the “careful invention” of the Africanist absence in American literary studies differs greatly from literary and cultural history in China. Yet it remains that there have been and continue to be

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conscious, motivated strategies for the erasure of Tibet from “Chineseness” (to say nothing of its erasure from “Chinese literature”), and these strategies implicate Chinese and non-Chinese critics alike. Like the destabilizing Africanist presence in American literature, this constructed (non)presence for Tibet in global dialogue may serve as the object of interpretive counterstrategies for revealing the fault lines in narratives of ethnic hegemony. Reevaluation of Tibetanness amid Chineseness becomes, therefore, an ongoing project involving the reading of current fiction and criticism, the rereading of earlier studies, and the promotion of open-minded future debate. Indeed, as notions of “Chineseness” are examined, in forms ranging from the contingent to the essentialist, scholarly and political rigor call for consideration of the accompanying forms of “Tibetanness” that stand in contrast or in dialogue. Even when we accept that there is no single, stable notion of Chineseness (a position actually at odds with official PRC policies), we are left to consider contingent notions, and even these each interact in their own ways with interdependent notions of “non-Chineseness.” In this regard, the provocative dynamic that Henry Louis Gates, Jr. calls the “signifying relationship between black text and white critical context” may be considered alongside China’s narratives of Tibet.17 Gates advocates the interpretation and theorizing of discursive strategies developed by African-Americans living in a politically and culturally antagonistic United States. In comparison, the signifying relationship between Tibetan texts and their dominant critical context is now defined, not by national (Chinese) circumstances alone, but by the two overlapping phenomena of domestic Chinese studies and transnational dialogue, which shape the ways in which political, institutional, and literary readings of Tibetan discourse are identified, developed, and discussed. African-American literature, according to Gates, confronts readers with rhetorical and narrative structures that “Signify upon,” or play on, the ambiguities and contradictions of the dominant discourses to which minorities are often forced to respond. Signifying then creates “an extended engagement between two separate and distinct yet profoundly—even inextricably—related orders of meaning dependent precisely as much for their confrontation on relations of identity, manifested in the signifier, as on their relations of difference, manifested at the level of the signified.”18 With regard to the importance of theorizing unequal modes of discourse, Gates argues that “what we are privileged to witness here is the (political, semantic) confrontation between two parallel discursive universes: the black American linguistic circle and the white.”19 Following Saussur-

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ean linguistics, Gates explains that “traditional” signification stabilizes the meaning of a term by way of a standardized relationship between signifier and signified. For at least two centuries, however, African-American discourse has made use of “Signifyin(g),” by which signifiers are interrupted, deferred, or relocated on their way to shoring up “standard” signified concepts. In this way, the African-American vernacular, which seems to share the same discourse as standard white discourse, actually articulates a profound challenge to the rules of correspondence between signifier and signified, rules that shape social and political realities as much as linguistic structures. “The relationship,” writes Gates, “that black ‘Signification’ bears to the English ‘signification’ is, paradoxically, a relation of difference inscribed within a relation of identity.”20 Adopting a similar perspective for Tibetan discourse means remaining alert to the possibility that Tibetan literature’s Signified meanings arise from signifiers (images, texts, forms) that appear identical to those employed by dominant discourses—such as the variously deployed narratives of China and Chineseness—but in fact call into question the self-integrity of these narratives. While this suggests a project only fully engaged through studies of Tibetan and Chinese publications and conducted by specialists in the respective areas, I want to insist on the importance of focusing on the already existing dialogue that currently reaches out to non-specialists in literary and cultural studies. Through largely Western academic publications in English, the reach of China’s traditional discourse on Tibet becomes truly global and interdisciplinary in scope, and it is in this context that “international” literary criticism becomes implicated in China’s “domestic” political policies. One narrative that continues to dominate discussions of ethnicity and Chineseness, for example, contrasts China with what Rey Chow has called its “preferred other”—the West in general and the United States in particular.21 Given such a dichotomy, debates are logically limited to an overdetermined “China” continually resisting, reacting to, or transforming “Western” narratives of modernity, colonialism, humanism, and so on, without also examining “China’s own cultural dominance, chauvinism, indeed imperialism.”22 In an oft-quoted call to critical arms, Chow asserts that “any discussion of cultural studies and China would be inadequate without some attempt to address . . . the scarcely touched issue of China’s relation to those whom it deems politically and culturally subordinate. . . . specifically, Tibet, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.”23 Here, the argument to supplement studies of “China and the West” with China’s relation to “itself” valuably suggests any number of Signifying investigations in which identical signifiers—“ethnic-

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ity,” “minority,” “dominance,” “chauvinism,” or “imperial”—are shown to operate differently among “unequal modes of discourse.” As Haun Saussy points out, however, China’s “other others” have been largely ignored as targets of criticism, since “to discuss them would be to infringe on the Four Great Principles that currently mark the boundaries of permitted debate within China.”24 This is certainly the case with matters of Tibet both within China and in other countries, where Chinese pressure has successfully silenced Tibetan exiles and their supporters. Even in scholarly work the omission is apparent. In an important essay, Michelle Yeh quotes Chow’s admonition to address “Tibet, Taiwan, and Hong Kong,” but then removes Tibet from her list as her argument advances: “the cultural hegemony that Chow critiques is unfortunately evident in the transnational field of Chinese literary and cultural studies, anywhere from college curricula to scholarly publications having to do with modern China. The absence, in most cases, of Taiwan and Hong Kong is simply taken for granted.”25 Rey Chow herself addresses Tibet only in passing, as a guest editor of a special issue of boundary 2 devoted to “reimagining the field of modern Chinese literary and cultural studies,” as she elaborates on the notion of an “ethnic supplement.” While Chow’s main focus is on the ethnic supplement of China to the West (or to the putatively universalist character of Western thought), she also directly addresses the challenge of ethnic supplements within Chineseness itself. On the latter point, Chow begins her discussion by pointing to the increasing presence of “alternative” studies in the field of sinology: In recent years, as various alternative forces are gathering momentum, we are beginning to see a gradual epistemic shift that seeks to modify the claim of a homogeneously unified, univocal China. Among such alternative forces are studies of China’s minority populations (e.g., the Huis, or Chinese Muslims), continual demands for the liberation of Tibet, intermittent protests from Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, repeated assertions of political and national autonomy by Taiwan, and concerted efforts for democratic government and rule of law in postBritish Hong Kong.26

Citing Stuart Hall’s theorizing of the black presence in British cinema, Chow then argues that the forces she lists are contributing to the “‘splitting’ of the notion of ethnicity that will, I believe, be instrumental to the reimagining of a field such as modern Chinese studies.”27 Unfortunately, however, the cover of the boundary 2 issue in which

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Chow’s article originally appeared features a photograph of the Dalai Lama shaking hands with the ultra-conservative U.S. senator Jesse Helms. It is unfortunate not only because Tibetan issues as such are effectively ignored by the volume, but also because this image seems to fall in line with the dominant discourse of Chinese state narratives by illustrating the “splittist conspiracy” between Tibetans and “anti-China” Western forces intent on fragmenting a unified, univocal China. The image also graphically Signifies on Chinese studies by illustrating the true ethnic supplement of a Tibetanness that is present (as an image or remark) yet absent in published discussions of “modern Chinese literary and cultural studies.” The cover photo’s caption even states that the meeting took place at a speaking engagement during which the Dalai Lama spoke “about his quest for Tibet’s freedom from China,” echoing Chow’s own remark above regarding “continual demands for the liberation of Tibet.” In fact, while the Chinese government continues to insist that Tibetan protests pose an unequivocal threat to China’s sovereignty, the Dalai Lama’s public and private statements—since 1987—explicitly renounce political independence and instead advocate for Tibet’s self-determination within China. In this, the Dalai Lama is himself at odds with other Tibetans who do in fact demand a complete break with China. This challenge to the official Chinese line on the Tibetan question is also a challenge to the image of a univocal Tibet perpetuated by Chinese propaganda and Western supporters alike, and it should prompt further consideration of how “Chineseness” itself emerges from the colonial nature of China’s control of Tibet and from the multicultural power politics of the contemporary Chinese nation-state. For example, Chow’s distinction between the colonial spread of English and the internationalizing of an institutional predisposition to Mandarin as “standard” Chinese invites critique of the significant “ethnic supplement” of China’s language policies in Tibet: Despite its currency among nonnative speakers, Mandarin is not a straightforward parallel to a language such as English. Whereas the adoption of English in non-Western countries is a sign of Britain’s colonial legacy, the enforcement of Mandarin in China and in the West is rather a sign of the systematic codification and management of ethnicity that is typical of modernity.28

Chow argues that this ethnic management is “part of the system of value production that arises with the postcolonized ascriptions of cultural and ethnic identities,” since it can be traced to the colonial presence of Britain

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in China.29 However, while Chow’s main point that the enforcement of Mandarin in areas of China where Cantonese is prevalent may be argued as “a sign of the codification and management of ethnicity that is typical of modernity,” such enforcement, and indeed, the very “codification and management that is typical of modernity” clearly suggest aspects of present-day Chinese colonialism in Tibet, where the spread of the Chinese language, necessary for engagement with the Chinese/modern world, is also leading to the decline of the Tibetan language, which is itself condemned by Chinese officials as a “tool of separatists.”30 With regard to twentieth-century literature, Chow asserts that China’s dangerous ethnic supplement to the Western-dominated modern world has been “regimented” or “disciplined” by adopting mimetic “national” narratives (reflective, in part, of the West’s preconceptions) in order to fit in: Third-world nations such as China have actually been coerced into a kind of mimeticism, into a kind of linguistic/stylistic mandate under which writing has to be reflectionist, has to be an authentic copy of the nation’s reality. From the standpoint of the Chinese state, it was as if Chineseness had, in the twentieth century, become the burden of an ethnicity that was marginalized to the point of unintelligibility—and the only way to be intelligible, to regain recognition in a world perpetually ignorant of and indifferent to Chinese history, was by going realist and mimetic: to institute, officially, that writing correspond faithfully to the life of the Chinese nation as an ethnic unit.31

Read from the position of China’s Tibetan other, however, such an argument is interrupted by the Signifying proposition that Tibetanness has currently “become the burden of an ethnicity” that is “marginalized to the point of unintelligibility” in a world of China studies that is “perpetually ignorant of and indifferent to” Tibetan history. Moreover, Tibetan writers, operating within this sinocized literary context, may not in fact “go realist and mimetic,” but instead craft a postmodern or “magical realist” self-representation from the fragments of language and history available in Tibetan and Chinese narratives, as I will discuss below. In another essay from the same boundary 2 volume, Ian Ang offers an analysis of what Chineseness means “in what is loosely termed the Chinese diaspora.”32 After investigating the limits of paradigms of diaspora and developing a critique of a transnational, cultural Chineseness as actually “driven, and motivated by, another kind of centrism, this time along notionally cultural lines,” Ang concludes by asking whether “the significant

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question is not only, Can one say no to China? but also, Can one, when called for, say no to Chineseness?”33 Despite Ang’s interesting investigation into these questions, it seems to me that significant aspects of political and colonial identification are being sidestepped. Many Tibetans are in a true diaspora of enforced exile (as opposed to migration) as well as being politically “Chinese” and therefore vulnerable to detention and imprisonment when returning to Tibet. For Tibetans attempting to “say no to Chineseness,” therefore, the consequences of theoretical as well as political resistance develop in parallel but unequal ways when compared to most other Chinese citizens. The central figure of Gates’s theory of politico-discursive strategies of resistance is the “Signifying monkey,” a character emerging from American slavery as an adaptation of earlier African trickster figures. The trope of Signifying had been employed by slaves in order to avoid punishment and hide subversive feelings or expressions. Gates cites Frederick Douglass, who wrote that slaves would compose songs with seemingly “unmeaning jargon, but which, nevertheless, were full of meaning to themselves.”34 In fact, the subtlety of the subversion was so successful that people would mistake a slave’s Signifying songs as evidence of a slave’s contentment. Gates explains that “this great mistake of interpretation occurred because the blacks were using antiphonal structures to reverse their apparent meaning, as a mode of encoding for self-preservation.”35 Strategies of Signifying misdirection can be identified in any number of social situations around the world, and the use of these forms by Tibetans living in China is no exception. In a controversial essay published in New Left Review, the Chinese writer and critic Wang Lixiong argues that during the Cultural Revolution, most Tibetans were willing participants in the destruction of Tibetan buildings, religious art, and other signs of “feudal culture.” Asserting that the child-like Tibetans were long used to submissive acquiescence to a charismatic leader, Wang then explains the Tibetans’ change of heart as they traded Buddhism for Maoism: If the actual ceremonies of Mao worship were slightly different, their spiritual essence was close enough to lamaism to make it an easy switch. To hang Mao’s picture in a cottage and bow to it daily, to recite his “highest instructions” while clasping the Little Red Book, was not so far removed from the accustomed daily prayers and prostrations before the household image of the Dalai Lama. . . . The prayer-stone piles by the roadsides and on mountain passes were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, and stone or cement billboards with Mao’s quota-

signifying on china  [ 283  ] tions erected in their place: the peasants circled them as they passed by, just as they had with the prayer piles. In the traditional Ongkor festival at the start of the harvest season, they used to carry Buddhist images, chant scripts, and sing Buddhist songs. During the Cultural Revolution, they carried Mao’s picture, recited his quotations and sang “The East Is Red.”36

In his response to Wang’s essay, the Tibetologist Tsering Shakya identifies several key supplements to Wang’s construction of Chineseness, as well as instances of Tibetan Signification upon “Chinese” narratives. With questions that force us to recognize the unstable nature of dominant narratives aimed at defining the minority other, Shakya simply asks, Didn’t everyone in China sport a badge of Mao? Didn’t the Chinese peasant labor in the paddy field with a banner of Mao fluttering in the wind, and didn’t the Chinese, too, recite quotations from Mao when they jumped out of bed every morning? Such behavior was to be found throughout the People’s Republic, carefully choreographed by the CCP. . . . Wang’s argument that the Tibetans were attracted to Mao’s totalitarianism because they were, by nature, submissive, is identical to that used by Western Sinologists when they explain Mao’s sway by essentializing the Chinese peasantry as, again, naturally obedient and submissive to authority.37

And as for Wang’s assertions that the outward signs of Tibetan behavior should be taken at face value, Shakya quotes an Urdu-Hindi novel to note that “when one is being trampled by a giant tyrant, there is not much one can do except tickle his foot”: The mass adoration for Mao in both China and Tibet was the product of a frenzied fervour, generated by the Party and ritually reinforced by its propaganda machine. Besides the coercion from above, there was overwhelming group and social pressure to conform, coupled with a dismissal of any individual sentiments. A similar, uniform outward loyalty can be found among all those who endure life under a totalitarian regime—it is a form of foot-tickling. . . . Visiting temples and monasteries in Tibet today, one often finds old statues and paintings reinstalled in their altars with notes that indicate which ones survived the Gang of Four’s destruction because the local people had hidden them away. In other words, the outward display of compliance concealed strongly held values and strategic decisions.38

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In another discussion that reveals a Signifying perspective, the Tibetan literary critic Pema Bhum describes his own experiences in Tibet during the Cultural Revolution. Bhum recalls, for example, that Tibetan schoolchildren devised ways of preserving, through misdirection, traditional forms of la-gzhas (love poetry): La-gzhas was banned not only in the schools, but for all practical purposes it was banned in the villages as well. Nevertheless, Tibetan villagers found a way to keep their la-gzhas by changing the lyrics so that songs took on a revolutionary meaning. A young man might court his sweetheart with the following: You are a member of the Young Communist League, And I am a member of the Communist Party, This feeling we share is for Socialism.39

Bhum adds that “after the Cultural Revolution, so-called ‘Tibetologists’ in China, such as Wang Yinuan and Geng Yufang, cited the revolutionized lyrics of la-gzhas and glu [songs sung at celebrations] from that period as examples of Tibetan literary development.”40 In this instance of Signifying revision, as in many others, the overseer of the dominant narrative both misses the intended subversion and then attempts to rehabilitate the Signifying practice as simply another, now pacified, aspect of “multiethnic Chineseness.” Bhum also points out that when he was a child, the very title of Mao’s Little Red Book was multiply transformed into playfully subversive signifiers, prompted by the phonetic translation of Chinese into Tibetan: It had a Chinese name: Mao Zhuxi Yulu. Not knowing what this was, some Tibetans pronounced it “Ma’o-kru’u-zhi re’u-lo” which in Tibetan means “Chairman Mao’s Baby Goat.” Others had their own pronunciations: “Ma’o-kru’-u-zhi ye-lo” or “Ma’o-kru’u-zhi ri-lug.” Still others . . . [original ellipses] In many places throughout Amdo, the book was called “Nanny Goat’s Baby” or simply “Baby Goat.” As a child, I used to love playing with the kid goats my family kept and these goats were fond of me, as well. They would follow me everywhere, prancing along behind. Perhaps this is why I myself preferred to call the book “Chairman Mao’s Baby Goat.”41

Pema Bhum’s entire memoir, in fact, is a particularly poignant and wellcrafted expression of Signifying practices in modern Tibetan discourse. It

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seems likely that studies of earlier Tibetan literature will discover other opportunities for comparison by specialists, not least in the stories surrounding the most familiar Tibetan trickster figure, Aku Tonpa (Uncle Tomba), who delights in misdirection, disguise, and self-preservation.42 Where Gates identifies the “black vernacular tradition” as such43 as the basis for developing a theory, I want to emphasize that when Tibetan literature and criticism is made available in Western languages, these works exist in the very “transnational vernacular” in which scholars and others articulate global theories of Tibetan discourse. Just as theories of Chi­neseness and Americanness draw on transnational dialogues as well as discourses arising from a multiethnic domestic sphere, notions of Tibetanness develop and circulate in a similar way. Tibetan discourse, like Chinese discourse, is not coterminous with a single language, but arises in several languages and crosses several national borders.44 While, as Henry Zhao points out, “Tibetan writers have made a signal mark on Chinese literature,”45 so too have Tibetan writers become a part of literary debates around the world, particularly in the West and in India. Tibetan Signification, then, is being articulated and disseminated in current theoretical structures through the bibliographies and studies of Western critics and their students, and, as noted above, official Chinese policies are increasingly promoting the translation and publication of Tibetan fiction and Tibetological research specifically for foreign consumption.

china and its own signifying “west” By degrees, comparative studies of “China and the West” are being productively supplemented with investigations into “China and its west,” those historically non-Han regions of Tibet and Muslim Xinjiang that had at times comprised Chinese imperial territories before being recognized as part of the PRC. Critiques of minority representation in Chinese literature and film increase in number and expand in scope, yet there remain opportunities for recognizing that Tibetan discourses in China may Signify on a univocal Chineseness in ways that further destabilize attempts to place minority ethnicity in any totalizing ethnic or political narrative. Dru Gladney’s studies of Chinese minority ethnicity have examined the ways in which “the objectified portrayal of minorities as exoticized, and even eroticized, is essential to the construction of the Han Chinese ma­jority, the very formulation of the Chinese ‘nation’ itself.”46 Gladney’s

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central argument interestingly reflects Toni Morrison’s primary interest in the readings she examines in Playing in the Dark. Morrison focuses on the function of a literary tradition of whiteness in which Africanist (non)representation plays such an important role: What Africanism became for, and how it functioned in, the literary imagination is of paramount interest because it may be possible to discover, through a close look at literary “blackness,” the nature—even the cause—of literary “whiteness.” What is it for? What parts do the invention and development of whiteness play in the construction of what is loosely described as “American”?47

Gladney’s examination of what he calls the “National Geographic style” of minority representation is directed toward revealing the usefulness of such representations to the project of maintaining a superior Han culture. In this regard, Morrison’s argument concurs by suggesting that exoticizing and eroticizing African-Americans has contributed to “the Eurocentric tradition that American education favors, both as a way of talking about and a way of policing matters of class, sexual license, and repression, formations and exercises of power, and meditations on ethics and accountability.”48 Yet Morrison is also concerned with the effects of codified, objectified, and commodified minority representations on minorities themselves, on members of an audience or readership not addressed by the hegemonic discourse. Morrison points out that, as a black woman, she does “not have quite the same access to these traditionally useful constructs of blackness” as those for whom the “metaphorical shortcuts” of Africanist (non)representation lead so effortlessly to coherent narratives.49 When minority representation in China is under scrutiny in much current critical work, a similar form of elision often occurs. Left unasked in many otherwise insightful studies are deferring, Signifying questions about the reception and use by a minority group of discursive strategies not intended for them. Esther Yau’s study of the depiction of minority women in Chinese film is a case in point. Her study valuably contributes to the proposition that “there is not one single Chinese identity, but many that are subdued into one.”50 A primary aim of minority representation in China, therefore, is to reinforce Han ethnicity and cultural traditions as central to national development, while relying on non-Han figures, particularly women, to signify exoticism, sexual liberty, transcendental national tradition, and other features that are “appropriated” by Han narratives of self-identity.51

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Yau emphasizes that the blunt appropriation of cultural signifiers that served communist propaganda in earlier periods of modern Chinese history do not disappear over time, but become transformed into images and narratives intended to serve new interests of nationalized Han-based identity. For example, in Qingchun ji (Sacrificed Youth), a 1985 film that follows a Han woman sent to the southern province of Yunnan during the Cultural Revolution, the central character’s immersion into the exotic and primal environment of the Dai minority is at once a celebration of minority ethnicity and an evasion of the actual lived experience of minorities: Here, this poetic fiction made in the name of cultural introspection that appeals to the viewers precisely because of its (non-socialist) humanist concerns . . . is regrettably out of touch with the very modern problems of economic colonization and deprivation of its filmed objects, and by choosing to look only for the latter’s primitive virtues and friendliness. Thus, when the ideology of artistic reconstruction has replaced that of political reconstruction in the post–Cultural Revolution era, the objectifying processes are not automatically removed.52

It is a familiar story of cultural appropriation, allowing “a single Han body to take up and sustain two different cultural discourses” owing to the presence of a minority subject.53 Yau points out, however, that unlike earlier representations of awkward and forced ethnic unity, the Han woman is presented as offering a (re)new(ed), humanistic, and even multicultural perspective for Han viewers, prompted by the “ideology of artistic reconstruction.” Still, Yau argues, despite the appearance of an open, multicultural narrative, what remains is an objectified minority ethnicity, enlisted to support a new, more fashionable narrative of Han civilization and leadership. I would go even further to emphasize that this “artistic reconstruction” of a largely ethno-cultural narrative is also intended to support contemporary political reconstructions in which the Chinese leadership asserts the “natural” legitimacy of the country’s borders, imperial in origin yet now described by the discourses of modern nation-state governance. Minority representations in general—and representations of Tibet in particular—are clearly intended for international consumption as much as for the domestic audience, further contributing to China’s globalized presence as the legitimate central political and cultural authority for all regions of the country. From the perspective of the Dai minority itself, the message and even the objectification of Sacrificed Youth would demand a different kind of

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decoding. Details of life in the Yunnan village and nuances of Dai lifestyles and bodies would not serve as the same clear “metaphorical shortcuts” to a new narrative of Han superiority for many non-Han viewers. Instead, while local residents may recognize the dominant, intended message of this narrative, they may also supplement and subvert this message with their heightened sense of the fabricated nature of the film and even of inaccuracies in the representation of local culture, all of which call into question the coherence of the narrative itself and the cultural hegemony that it supports. Yingjin Zhang approaches his analysis of New Chinese Film with just such a perspective, calling attention to the ambiguity that suggests alternative interpretive frameworks for minority representation. In one study, Zhang elaborates on the use of cinema in post-1949 China in which “the concept of ‘nationhood’ was increasingly identified with the ‘nation-state’ (guojia), which, through its ideological state apparatuses, brought in ‘ethnicity’ as one of the key categories in its state-building project.”54 Zhang begins by arguing that despite changes in the political orientation of China’s leadership, minority representation in film has never signaled “a restoration of ‘minority’ cultures to a ‘majority’ status but always a legitimation of minority peoples as part of the ‘solidarity’ of the Chinese nation.”55 In such films as Nongnu (Serfs), Daoma zei (Horse Thief), Wuduo jinhua (Five Golden Flowers), as well as Sacrificed Youth, Zhang sees the representation of minority groups as a strategic component of Han-centered national identity: The Han cultural hegemony that ensues from state discourse thus reinforces the existing structure of power and knowledge . . . placing remote alien territories and exotic cultural practices under constant surveillance. The bottom line in such cinematic representation is that the object (in this case ethnic minorities) would never become a full-fledged subject of knowledge. . . . Instead of acting as agents of change in their own right, minority people are always directed to pay their homage to the nation-state.56

At this point Zhang goes beyond the critical perspective reflected in Yau’s essay by finding in recent Chinese cinema a kind of Signifying ambivalence. Representations of minority groups may serve to reinforce majority narratives, he agrees, but they also stand to unsettle those narratives. There is in the new cinema, Zhang argues,

signifying on china  [ 289  ] a profound complexity and ambivalence, by means of which it not only interrogates—at a national level—the “grand myths” perpetuated in the previous films (e.g., the glorified revolutionary wars, the celebrated ethnic solidarity, and the exaggerated achievements of the socialist construction) but also problematizes—at a local or localized level—its own position as a knowing subject, an oftentimes individualized subject burdened with the task of reassessing a culture of the nation and rewriting its history.57

As an example, Zhang discusses Chen Kaige’s film Da yuebing (Military Parade), which offers a quasi-documentary look at the preparations for a parade in celebration of the thirty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the PRC. While at one level the film may seem a narrative of militaristic, patriotic propaganda, Zhang argues that a significant “subtext” emerges to unsettle this reading and emphasize instead the constructed nature of propaganda, patriotism, and national identity itself: What is remarkable in Da yuebing, however, is its structuring of a subtext underneath the glorified surface of a national celebration, a subtext that comes to the fore if one disregards the rhetoric of the state discourse and follows instead the individual participants in the military training. By shifting voice-over from one individual to another, Chen Kaige in effect constructs the people as the “performative subject,” whose very act of performing in the state-sponsored events inevitably splits the unified subjectivity . . . into various fragmented pieces.58

The critical perspective by which one “disregards the rhetoric of state discourse and follows instead the individual participants” may indeed highlight a narrative’s polyvocal discourse, revealing at once the attempt to control narrative/social meaning and the strategies employed to subvert this meaning. However, such a perspective depends upon an often ignored vanishing point for cultural analysis, in that disregarding or challenging certain official state discourses, namely, those involving Tibet, will lead to censorship, punishment, or academic reprisal. It is still not possible to openly “disregard the rhetoric of state discourse” and address the resisting individual when the issue at stake is an official narrative of specifically Tibetan participation in China’s official celebrations or political forums. The artistic and critical strategies for revealing how Tibetans may be “performative subjects” with putatively “unified subjectivities” split by political con-

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tingencies differ from the subtexts elaborated by Zhang and more closely resemble the irreducible intertexts of Signification. Outside of China, images of Tibet have increasingly become the objects of analysis with regard to their function as Orientalist, exoticized fantasies. In one important study, Donald S. Lopez Jr. suggests that Tibetans in exile have had to inhabit identities already prepared for them by dominant narratives of “Shangri-la”: Introduced by Western supporters to the notion of culture, Tibetan refugees could look back at what Tibet had been. But this gaze, at least as it would be represented to the West, saw the Land of Snows only as it was reflected in the elaborately framed mirror of Western fantasies about Tibet. . . . In this sense, the Tibetans stepped into a world in which they were already present, and since their belated arrival—often encouraged by the devotees of Tibet, missionaries of a different stripe—they have merged seamfully into a double that had long been standing.59

Western myths of Tibet, in all their strength and longevity, have been researched, interrogated, and deconstructed, with the result that much of the current discourse involving Tibetan culture exhibits a self-conscious awareness of the forces that influence cultural narratives and their reception.60 Tibetan exile Jamyang Norbu’s groundbreaking novel, The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes, written in English, directly addresses the multilingual, multinational, and polyhistorical nature of the “Tibetan reader” and the “Tibetan nation.” The novel juxtaposes historical figures of the British Raj and Tibetan history with literary characters from Doyle, Kipling, and Tibetan literature, emphasizing the complex composite narrative that emerges from contemporary Tibet’s engagement with history, politics, and literature.61 The challenges facing criticism of Tibetan images in dominant Chinese narratives, on the other hand, can be illustrated in the conflicting receptions of contemporary Tibetan fiction. Emerging from Tibet and written in Chinese, the stories of Tashi Dawa have been compared to the magical realist literature of Jorge Luis Borges or Gabriel García Márquez, and the significance of “Tibetan magical realism” has become, in Tashi Dawa’s case, a political question. European and American critics often point to the possibility that the magical realism of Borges or García Márquez serves as a critique of a dominant Western “reality” in which the experiences and expressions of minority writers cannot comfortably reside.62 The challenge

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of the magical realist form, therefore, is in its insistence that dominant narratives of Western reality must be confronted and supplemented by other ways of being and speaking in order to reflect the actual lived experience of the West’s own “others.” However, when Tashi Dawa’s stories were first made available to English readers by a Chinese publisher, an editorial preface assured readers that the magical and mysterious nature of Tibet, as well as of Tashi Dawa’s stories, actually “stems from ignorance” and, “once it is understood, it is no longer mysterious.”63 Echoing the insistent official Chinese charge that Western criticism of Tibet’s occupation is based on ignorance and lack of “first-hand experience,” the critic’s approach to Tashi Dawa’s magical realism dismisses any interpretive perspective that would facilitate a critique of the operations of dominant discourses. The magical character of Tashi Dawa’s works, he explains, should not lead us to investigate the contradictions within the forced realism of Chinese national narratives regarding Tibet; instead, this literary mystery, arising from “ignorance,” should be addressed by appealing to the already approved standards of knowledge, by accepting what is officially presented as “true” about Tibet.64 While for Borges or García Márquez the epistemological layering of modern and premodern or traditional culture broadly signifies a regional concern in which the West is forced to recognize the instability of “its own history,” recent commentary has emphasized that for Asians in general— and Chinese writers in particular—this kind of clash arises from geopolitical and “civilizational” significance. As charged by heads of state such as Lee Kuan Yew and Mahatir Mohamed, the “Western import” of modernity is at odds with, if not in direct competition with, “Asian values,” and Western modernity as such is simply another form of Western neo-imperialism. I would argue that as depicted in Tashi Dawa’s stories, however, Tibet’s (post)modernity actually reveals that the modern is primarily a matter of Chinese, rather than Western, intervention. In Tashi Dawa’s stories, modern images from around the world may appear—Italian shoes, the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games—yet the modern products most prominent in the everyday lives of his characters emerge from commerce with China, including motorcycles, helicopters, and the now iconic yak-substitute, the diesel-powered tractor. Arjun Appadurai suggests that the significance of strictly “American” influence can be overstated in many instances in which communities are also concerned with the politics of a nearby country:

[ 292  ]  steven j. venturino It is worth noticing that for the people of Iran Jaya, Indonesianization may be more worrisome than Americanization, as Japanization may be for Koreans, Indianization for Sri Lankans, Vietnamization for the Cambodians, Russianization for the people of Soviet Armenia and the Baltic Republics. Such a list of alternative fears to Americanization could be greatly expanded, but it is not a shapeless inventory: for the politics of smaller scale, there is always a fear of cultural absorption by politics of a larger scale, especially those that are nearby. One man’s imagined community is another man’s political prison.65

Add Tibet to the picture, and we are urged to recognize that “modernity” is as much a Chinese project as a Western one. That is, in order to adequately theorize global aspects of modernity, “the politics of smaller scale” demand attention to regional and localized forces at work in constructing lived modern worlds. In this regard, theorizing about Chinese modernity— particularly in the face of official narratives of that modernity—calls for a cultural criticism that acknowledges Tibet’s unsettled position in those narratives. It is clearly not easy to articulate such criticism within China, and it is not clear how far scholars may go in explicating Tibet’s own (post)modernity as a hybrid, polyvocal, and complex condition in which, to again borrow Yingjin Zhang’s phrase, a “‘performative subject’. . . splits the unified subjectivity.” The rise of Tibetan works in translation may add urgency to the questions that this essay attempts to address. Alai’s Chen’ai Luoding (The Dust Settles, published in English as Red Poppies), for example, appeared in a context that foregrounds the operations of critical pre-positioning.66 The novel, written in Chinese by a Tibetan, was one of four books to receive the Mao Dun Prize, China’s highest literary award, in 2000. After the announcement of the award and the news that the novel would be published in English in the United States, China’s official People’s Daily noted that the novel “tells about the rise and fall of a Tibetan landlord’s family, and the relationship between Tibet and other parts of China,” and quoted the author as saying that “Chinese literature has recently caused greater attention worldwide and it is progressing rapidly; however, a few Westerners lack basic knowledge about the advancement of Chinese literature and always eye Chinese literature as an unchanged pattern.”67 Houghton Mifflin’s American press release for the novel explained that the Tibetan leaders depicted in the novel, “although they look to Lhasa and the Dalai

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Lama for spiritual guidance, turn to Beijing and the Han Chinese for political power.”68 Reviews of the novel have charged that Alai simply reaffirms China’s official line on Tibet, reflecting only the pre-approved place for Tibet in Chinese history and literature. In the New York Times, Barbara Crossette asks whether the novel may not be “a parable about the superior civilization of the Communist Han Chinese, who put an end to a brutal Tibetan warlord society wallowing in decadence and living on the backs of abject serfs,” while Isabel Hilton claims that the novel is “not Tibetan,” in that “such novels read strangely to Tibetans, as though they were written for outsiders,” and she reminds us to keep in mind that “no novel written in any of China’s ‘minority’ languages—including Tibetan—is eligible” for the Mao Dun Prize.69 It may be true that Red Poppies “reads strangely”—in Chinese as well as in translation—yet should not such “strangeness” lead to further critical analysis of its possible Signifying functions? Moreover, the idea that a work of Tibetan literature may be “written for outsiders” begs the very question of a contemporary Tibetan readership. In a world where Tibetans read and write in Chinese, English, Hindi, German, and French, among other languages, as well as Tibetan, and live in dozens of countries, who is inside and who is outside? I do not pose this as a rhetorical question, since very definite answers arise in different situations. Can Tibetan literature be limited to, or even directed toward, a single “Tibetanness” when Tibetans today follow the laws of different states, watch movies from Hollywood, Bollywood, and Beijing, and listen to Chinese, Western, and Indian pop music?70 Under such circumstances, how is “Tibetan literature” defined, and who defines it? With specific regard to how current literature and scholarly debate “write China,” Tibetan discourse inevitably expresses the complex, transnational consequences of colonialism as well as globalization. Henry Zhao concludes a review of recent Tibetan literature by noting that such works “encourage diversified readings, political as well as any other,” and it is now the case that new readings of Tibetan literature are beginning to emerge.71 From one perspective, Tsering Shakya writes of the Tibetan aspects and legacies of the “cultural fever” (wenhua re) that swept China in the 1980s, emphasizing the “colonial” nature of works produced by Chinese and Tibetan writers at that time.72 From another angle, Herbert Batt emphasizes the Tibetan writer’s rejection of Western materialism and depiction of a “Tibet where the spirituality of the East endures.”73 Positions such as these will be productively complicated by the supplement that the

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strategic ambiguities of Tibetan Signification provides. The global spread of Chinese literature and debates over Chineseness inevitably give rise to critical perspectives that stand to conflict with official Chinese cultural policies, cherished Western fantasies, and Tibetan sensibilities alike.

conclusion In the mid-1980s, Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd sought to define “minority discourse” by exploring how “cultures designated as minorities have certain shared experiences by virtue of their similar antagonistic relationship to the dominant [Western] culture, which seeks to marginalize them all.”74 Since that time, studies of Chineseness have expanded JanMohamed and Lloyd’s project with critical perspectives on non-Western hegemony and complex forms of neo-imperialist power. The current essay has attempted to further supplement these perspectives by arguing that “Chineseness ” as well as “minority culture” are terms intimately related to domestic Chinese policies articulated through transnational dialogue, and that theorizing this dialogue means questioning the totalizing operations of the dominant narratives in circulation. Today, those in business, policymaking, and the academy are often united by their interest in working as unselfconsciously as possible with the power holders in China rather than looking for ways to advance new approaches to multiethnicity in the global China they are in fact creating together. What is needed, instead, are solutions pursued not only in a discursive register, but in an institutional one as well. Theoretical strategies elaborated in African-American literary criticism model individual as well as institutional opportunities for critics to consider how they themselves Signify in transnational dialogue: Gates’s suggestion that “minority criticism can become a site for larger contestations” is both a promise and a threat for matters of Tibetan discourse.75 Toni Morrison has remarked that in many traditionally defined “American” novels, “one can see that a real or fabricated Africanist presence was crucial to their sense of Americanness.”76 Likewise, in our critiques of the domestic and transnational narratives that articulate Chineseness, we can discern the varieties of Tibetan presence instrumental in representing and revising contemporary China.

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notes 1. Lobsang Dradul, Inside China Today (May 24, 2001), quoted in TIN, “Propaganda and the West: China’s Struggle to Sway International Opinion on the ‘Tibet Issue,’ ” TIN Special Report (July 16, 2001). 2. Zhu Wen, “America America,” trans. Zheng Haiyao and Jos Gamble, in Abandoned Wine: Chinese Writing Today II, ed. Henry Y. H. Zhao and John Cayley (London: Wellsweep, 1996). 3. Ye Xiaowen, “Reflections on Solving the Nationality Problem in the New Situation,” Social Sciences in China 17, no. 2 (1996). 4. Merle Goldman, Perry Link, and Su Wei, “China’s Intellectuals in the Deng Era: Loss of Identity with the State,” in China’s Quest for National Identity, ed. Lowell Dittmer and Samuel S. Kim (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 153. See also Yongnian Zheng, Discovering Chinese Nationalism in China: Modernization, Identity, and International Relations (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 35–45. 5. See “Hu Jintao Visits Tibet, Discusses Panchen Lama,” World Tibet News (July 24, 2001), www.tibet.ca/en/wtnarchive/2001/7/24_4.html. The party’s other national campaigns, “Patriotic Education,” “Spiritual Civilization,” and “Strike Hard, Sever Repression,” have also been conducted with particular emphasis in Tibet since the 1980s: see TIN, Background Briefing Papers (30): Documents and Statements from Tibet, 1996–1997. Political Campaigns: Patriotic Education, Spiritual Civilisation, Strike Hard (London: Tibet Information Network, 1998). 6. TIN, “China’s Vice-President in Lhasa,” TIN News Update (July 20, 2001). 7. A Chinese commentator argues, for example, that “culture is the focus of current debates on the Tibetan issue. Responding to world criticism, the Chinese government enumerates its efforts to protect Tibetan culture,” Wang Lixiong, “Tibet Facing Imperialism of Two Kinds: An Analysis of the Woeser Incident,” New Century Net, www.ncn.org/asp/zwginfo/da-KAY.asp?ID=60694&ad=11/16 /2004. English translation at the World Tibet Network News archive: www.tibet. ca/en/wtnarchive/2004/12/20_1.html. 8. Ibid. 9. See Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 10. Merle Goldman, Literary Dissent in Communist China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 277–78. 11. Party officials were particularly concerned about discussions of Tibet during the Dalai Lama’s meeting with U.S. president George W. Bush in 2001: “The meeting between the Dalai Lama and U.S. President George Bush today (23 May) has a particular political significance for Beijing as the official meeting at the White House is being held on the same day that the Chinese authorities mark the 50th anniversary of their ‘peaceful liberation’ of Tibet. . . . The Chinese authorities have intensified their attacks on the Dalai Lama in the buildup to the 50th anniversary of the signing of the 17-Point Agreement between

[ 296  ]  steven j. venturino Tibet and China, which according to Beijing legitimized the incorporation of what is now the Tibet Autonomous Region into China, as well as entry of the People’s Liberation Army into the area and the subsequent implementation of policies devised by Beijing over the past 50 years. The Chinese media coverage reflects Beijing’s continued frustration at the loyalty among Tibetans to the Dalai Lama, and in particular the welcome he receives from Western governments and world leaders. Editorials in the Chinese press over the past few days have warned the United States that Tibet ‘is a purely internal affair of China’s.’ ” TIN, “China to Strengthen Tibet Policy as Dalai Lama Meets U.S. President,” TIN News Update (May 23, 2001). 12. Jacques Derrida describes the supplement as a feature of representation in which something “added” also “intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of,” forcing a reconsideration of the “original.” Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 145, emphasis in original. 13. The term international denotes those relations between nations, that is, between agents identified with respect to recognized sovereign nations, while transnational can also denote relations across national boundaries involving the “others of the nation-state” who cannot be politically identified as national, such as Tibetans in exile and Palestinians. See Khachig Tölölyan, “The NationState and Its Others: In Lieu of a Preface,” Diaspora 1, no. 1 (1991): 3–7. Leslie Sklair defines transnational practices as those “that cross state boundaries but do not necessarily originate with state agencies or actors.” Leslie Sklair, “Social Movements and Global Capitalism,” in The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 296. 14. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (New York: Vintage, 1993), 5. 15. Ibid., 9. 16. Ibid., 14. On this point, see Steven J. Venturino, “Inquiring after Theory in China,” boundary 2 33, no. 2 (2006). 17. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), xxxii. 18. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 45. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Rey Chow, “Can One Say No to China?” New Literary History 28, no. 1 (1997): 151. 22. Ibid., 150. 23. Ibid., 151, emphasis in original. 24. Haun Saussy, “Postmodernism in China: A Sketch and Some Queries,” in CrossCultural Readings of Chineseness: Narratives, Images, and Interpretations of the 1990s, ed. Wen-hsin Yeh (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 2000), 132. 25. Michelle Yeh, “International Theory and the Transnational Critic: China in

signifying on china  [ 297  ] an Age of Multiculturalism,” boundary 2 25, no. 3 (1998): 218, 219, emphasis added. 26. Rey Chow, “On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem,” boundary 2 25, no. 3 (1998): 8. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 11, emphasis in original. 29. Ibid. 30. Catriona Bass, Education in Tibet: Policy and Practice since 1950 (London: TIN/ Zed 1998), 243. 31. Chow, “On Chineseness,” 19. 32. Ian Ang, “Can One Say No to Chineseness? Pushing the Limits of the Diasporic Paradigm,” boundary 2 25, no. 3 (1998), 224, emphasis in original. 33. Ibid., 230, 242. 34. Gates, Signifying Monkey, 67. 35. Ibid. 36. Wang Lixiong, “Reflections on Tibet,” New Left Review 14 (March/April 2002): 95–96. 37. Tsering Shakya, “Blood in the Snows: Reply to Wang Lixiong,” New Left Review 15 (May/June 2002): 47. 38. Ibid., 49–50. 39. Pema Bhum, Six Stars with a Crooked Neck: Tibetan Memoirs of the Cultural Revolution, trans. Lauran R. Hartley (Dharamsala: Tibet Times, 2001), 115. 40. Ibid., 116. 41. Ibid., 87. 42. See Rinjing Dorje, Tales of Uncle Tompa, The Legendary Rascal of Tibet (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Arts, 1997). 43. Gates, Figures in Black, xxix. 44. This, however, does not preclude advocacy of a specifically national agency for Tibetan literature: see Steven J. Venturino, “Where Is Tibet in World Literature?” World Literature Today 78, no. 1 (2004): 51–56. 45. Henry Zhao, “Forms on the Roof of the World,” New Left Review 13 (January/ February 2002): 147. 46. Dru C. Gladney, “Representing Nationality in China: Refiguring Majority/Minority Identities,” The Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 1 (February 1994), 94. 47. Morrison, Playing, 9, original emphasis. 48. Ibid., 7. 49. Ibid., x. 50. Esther Yau, “Is China the End of Hermeneutics? Or, Political and Cultural Usage of Non-Han Women in Mainland Chinese Films,” Discourse 11, no. 2 (1989): 117. 51. Ibid., 126. 52. Ibid., 130. 53. Ibid., 132. 54. Yingjin Zhang, “From ‘Minority Film’ to ‘Minority Discourse’: Questions of Na-

[ 298  ]  steven j. venturino tionhood and Ethnicity in Chinese Cinema,” Cinema Journal 36, no. 3 (1997): 79. 55. Ibid., 79–80. 56. Ibid., 80. 57. Ibid., 82. 58. Ibid., 83, emphasis added. 59. Donald S. Lopez Jr., Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998): 200. 60. See Thierry Dodin and Heinz Räther, ed., Imagining Tibet: Perceptions, Projections, and Fantasies (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2001); and Frank J. Korom, ed., Constructing Tibetan Culture: Contemporary Perspectives (Quebec: World Heritage Press, 1997). 61. See Steven J. Venturino, “Placing Tibetan Fiction in a World of Literary Studies: Jamyang Norbu’s The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes,” in Writing Tibet: Modern Tibetan Literature and Social Change, ed. Lauran R. Hartley and Patricia Schiaffini-Vendani (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). 62. See, for example, Theo D’haen, “Postmodernism: From Fantastic to Magic Realist,” in International Postmodernism: Theory and Literary Practice, ed. Hans Bertens and Douwe Fokkema (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1997). 63. Dondrup Wangbum, preface to A Soul in Bondage: Stories from Tibet, by Tashi Dawa (Beijing: Panda Books, 1992), 11. 64. For a further discussion of Tashi Dawa’s work, see Patricia Schiaffini, “Changing Identities: The Creation of ‘Tibetan’ Literary Voices in the PRC,” in Proceedings of the Tenth Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, 2003: Contemporary Tibetan Literary Studies, ed. Steven J. Venturino (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2007). 65. Quoted in Gates, Loose Canons, 191. 66. Alai, Red Poppies, trans. Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chin Lin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002). 67. “U.S. Publisher Buys Copyright of China’s Best Novel,” People’s Daily (October 21, 2000). 68. Red Poppies press release, 2002. 69. Barbara Crossette, “Red Poppies: The Fall of a Tibetan Warlord,” review of Red Poppies by Alai, New York Times (May 12, 2002). Isabel Hilton, “Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom,” review of Red Poppies by Alai, Los Angeles Times (April 7, 2002). 70. For a discussion of pop music in Tibetan communities in India, see Keila Diehl, Echoes from Dharamsala: Music in the Life of a Tibetan Refugee Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). For a discussion of music in the PRC, see TIN, Unity and Discord: Music and Politics in Contemporary Tibet (London: Tibet Information Network, 2004). 71. Zhao, 151. 72. Tsering Shakya, “Foreword: Language, Literature, and Representation in Tibet,” in Tales of Tibet: Sky Burials, Prayer Wheels, and Wind Horses, ed. Herbert J. Batt

signifying on china  [ 299  ] (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), xx. See also Tsering Shakya, “The Waterfall and Fragrant Flowers: The Development of Tibetan Literature since 1950,” Manoa 12, no. 2 (2000), as well as this special issue of Manoa devoted to recent Tibetan literature. 73. Herbert J. Batt, introduction to Tales of Tibet: Sky Burials, Prayer Wheels, and Wind Horses, ed. Herbert J. Batt (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 4. 74. Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd, “Introduction: Toward a Theory of Minority Discourse; What Is to Be Done?” in The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse, ed. Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 1. 75. Gates, Loose Canons, 182. 76. Morrison, Playing, 6.

12 

Transplantation and Modernity: The Chinese/American Poems of Angel Island Steven G. Yao

i Composed in almost total anonymity between 1910 and 1940 mainly by Chinese commoners attempting to enter the United States (mostly unsuccessfully it seems), the poems written and carved into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station detention building have occupied a place at once central and obscure amid the wide range of efforts to “write” China and Chinese culture that together comprise the “sinographic” history of the West. Particularly within the emergent domain of Asian American Studies, these poems have been central because, as one of the earliest feats of expressly literary cultural production by people of Asian descent in the United States, they have constituted a crucial milestone for the ongoing attempt to establish a canon of Asian American literature that can boast the authority of historical depth. At the same time, however, they remain somewhat obscure because, in their operative medium of written Chinese, they fall neatly between the methodological predispositions of two generations of Asian Americanists. On the one hand, those with the ability to read the poems in their original language have tended to ignore developments in literary and cultural theory that might help to clarify their broader significance; while on the other, more recent, theoretically inclined scholars have simply lacked the necessary linguistic skills to read them at all. Comparably, though for an entirely different set of aesthetic and ideological, rather than methodological, reasons, scholars of modern Chinese litera[ 300  ]

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ture, as well as sinologists in general, have completely ignored these works of written Chinese cultural production. Understandably, perhaps, exhibiting typically at best a strained adherence to classical Chinese poetic principles, these poems have garnered attention primarily for their sociological and historical, rather than literary or cultural, significance. As the editors and translators of the first group of these poems in the collection Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910–1940 tellingly declare: “The poems are a vivid fragment of Chinese American history and a mirror capturing an image of that past.”1 Similarly, in his renowned history of Asian Americans, Strangers from a Different Shore, Ronald Takaki quotes extensively from these poems as a way to give articulate voice to the experiences of the middle wave of Chinese immigrants entering the United States between 1910 and 1940. Indeed, even a new effort to uncover and preserve a host of undocumented poems recently rediscovered on the barrack walls has emphasized historical thematic considerations over formalist ones, with a corresponding approach to the issue of language as an undistorted mirror of reality, or as a transparent medium for the conveyance of emotion. Thus, as one of the scholars involved with this undertaking emphasizes, “the poems are a part of the historical piece of Angel Island. Our responsibility is to impart the history of the immigrants and their feelings and their hardships.”2 To be sure, such an approach to the Island poems has much to offer, and we can learn a great deal from many of these poems simply by attending to them as sources of important, and often even productively surprising, historical information. Take for example the poem printed as the cover illustration to the volume Island, and which was actually carved into the walls of the detention building with a clearly skilled, if not exactly masterful, hand (see Figure 12.1): Detained in this wooden house for several tens of days, It is all because of the Mexican exclusion law, which implicates me. It’s a pity heroes have no way of exercising their prowess. I can only await the word so that I can snap Zu’s whip. From now on, I am departing far from this building. All of my fellow villagers are rejoicing with me. Don’t say that everything within is Western styled. Even if it is built of jade, it has turned into a cage. (Island, poem 69, 134)

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Now, a few things of genuinely historical significance that stand out in this poem include the second line, which underscores that the United States was not the only Western country to enact racist exclusion laws against Asian immigrants in a benighted attempt to curtail the entry of cheap labor into their country. It also reminds us that Chinese, as well as other Asians, went on to emigrate to and eventually settle in various countries throughout the Americas, including those in Central and South America. In broader disciplinary terms, then, this line points to the need to expand the focus of Asian American Studies beyond the strict boundaries of the United States in order to address the experiences and expressions of  people of Asian descent throughout the Western hemisphere, and possibly  even elsewhere across the globe. Such a challenge not only represents an enormous area for potential future research, but it also constitutes an opportunity to build bridges with other fields of ethnic, and even area, studies based on the solid intellectual foundation of demonstrable historical interfigure 12.1  Poem carved into the wall of Angel Island Immigration   Station detention building (poem 69 in Island). Courtesy of Chris Huie.

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action in other places, rather than just the shared experience of oppression here in the United States, as fundamentally important as that common experience remains for people of color even today. Other revealing details include line 4, which alludes to a Chinese historical figure, Zu Di, from the period of the Western Jin Dynasty (AD 265–316), who gained renown as a fierce, ambitious, and dedicated military strategist.3 This line tells us something, perhaps, about the levels of culture and education of at least some of the Chinese immigrants from this period, as well as about how they saw themselves undertaking a journey of heroic proportions. One estimate posits “at least four to five years of private tutoring”4 as an average, though, as we shall see, both the range in quality of the poems as a whole and the various lexical mistakes they contain would seem to complicate this figure somewhat. Finally, the irony expressed in the last two lines of the poem attests to the bitterness of having one’s dreams snuffed out by the cold reality of a racist national immigration policy that sanctioned the imprisonment of a select group of people based primarily on their ethnicity and country of origin. At the same time that they provide a glimpse into the experiences and emotions of Chinese immigrants attempting to enter the United States, however, the Island poems also coincide in an almost uncanny way with the period of traditional Anglo-American High Modernism—the period of writers like Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, Amy Lowell, Gertrude Stein, and William Faulkner, among others, who helped to constitute literature in English specifically through an engagement with other world cultures and especially languages, most notably Asian traditions such as Chinese poetry and Japanese Noh drama. In doing so, these works reflect a still largely unremarked dimension of the explicit internationalism shaping “American” culture at the time, a period that saw not only the entry of “Americans” onto an expressly global stage, but also the emergence of a distinctly “American” “hybrid” musical form, namely jazz. Like the Island poems, jazz in particular has its roots both in the experiences of an oppressed people and in the cultural traditions and practices they brought with them in their movements around the world, as well as in the interactions between these people and traditions with others in the United States.5 More specifically, in their very difference from canonical works of “mainstream” English-language Modernism, as well as from the more renowned achievements of African American cultural expression during the period, the Island poems dramatize a traumatic encounter with modernity by Chinese commoners that issues in a painful discovery of the social condition of

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ethnicity in the United States. And precisely as such a dramatization of the traumatic discovery of ethnicity, these poems constitute an expressly transnational example of literary production by Asians in the United States, one that underscores the need to develop a more complex conception than currently available of both “American” and, more particularly, “Asian American” culture that cuts across national and linguistic boundaries by taking into more explicit account the particular significance of differences between languages and their attendant cultural and literary traditions.6 By the term “transnational,” I mean embedded within and arising through a complex web of political, socioeconomic, and other forces that exert their effects across and between boundaries defined and maintained by different nation-states, even as nation-states have and arguably continue to function as crucial nodes in the (uneven) distribution of those forces in various places around the world. Equally important, when considered against the perhaps more readily expected horizon of “Chinese” cultural history, these poems also demonstrate that not all those who responded in literary terms to the forces of modernity specifically as a “Chinese” (along whatever axes such an identity is conceived) did so from a relatively socially authoritative position of class or educational privilege. So the question arises: how adequately to address the manifold complexities inscribed within this sort of expressly transnational cultural production? In recent years, theories about the phenomenon of globalization and the related effort to rethink the idea of cosmopolitanism have come to offer a powerful conceptual framework for discussing the dynamics of culture as it travels across and between boundaries traditionally defined by the category of the nation-state. Most notably, perhaps, Arjun Appadurai has offered a spatially based configuration of five different dimensions to address the complexities of contemporary transnational cultural production: The new global cultural economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order, which cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models (even those which might account for multiple centers and peripheries). Nor is it susceptible to simple models of push and pull (in terms of migration theory), or of surpluses and deficits (as in traditional models of balance of trade), or of consumers and producers (as in most neo-Marxist theories of development) . . . The complexity of the current global [cultural] economy has to do with certain fundamental disjunctures between econ-

transplantation and modernity  [ 305  ] omy, culture and politics which we have only begun to theorize. I propose that an elementary framework for exploring such disjunctures is to look at the relationship between five dimensions of global cultural flow which can be termed: (a) ethnoscapes; (b) mediascapes; (c) technoscapes; (d) finanscapes; and (e) ideoscapes.7

Structurally comparable to the notion of manifolds in mathematics, Appadurai’s framework defines a multidimensional space within which to map the complicated dynamics of contemporary global cultural phenomena. Despite its insistent contemporaneity, however, this model also offers a useful way to approach certain historical events and expressions that reveal their full meaning only from the vantage of a rigorously transnational perspective. Within such a framework, the Island poems can be productively understood in broad terms not just as the isolated expression of different anonymous individuals, but also as the collective result or trace of large-scale asymmetries in the distribution of resources between, at least, China and the United States within the global economy or world “finanscape.” Precisely as such, moreover, these poems also record changes in at least two distinct, localized “ethnoscapes” by reflecting the movement of a particular group of people to an entirely different geographic and ethnic region of the world. At the same time, they reveal patent inconsistencies and contradictions within the articulated ideology, or “ideoscape,” of the United States as a nation-state and its differentially applied policies of immigration, which stem at least in part from the images, or “mediascape,” connected with Asians (or, to use a more historically relevant term, “Orientals”) in general, and Chinese in particular at this time. And as for the “technoscape,” the creation of these poems obviously remains grounded in the domain of analog, and even pre-mechanical, rather than digital practices. Yet, as we shall see, various aspects of their language specifically connect them with a particular region in China, even as they only arise at once within and in response to the United States as a geopolitical entity. Accordingly, then, the Island poems in turn indicate the extent to which the process of globalization can be productively understood as a historical, and not just a contemporary, phenomenon. In an endeavor related to that of Appadurai’s, another anthropologist, Aihwa Ong, has proposed the idea of “flexible citizenship” as a way to conceptualize the fluid and diverse strategies of cultural, political, and financial engagement at various sites within “the shifting discursive terrains of the global economy” (136) specifically by members of the Chinese diaspora.

[ 306  ]  steven g. yao

Attempting to articulate a framework for examining the political economy of diasporic identities, she defines this notion in the following way: I use the term flexible citizenship to refer especially to the strategies and effects of mobile managers, technocrats, and professionals who seek to both circumvent and benefit from different nation-state regimes by selecting different sites for investments, work, and family relocation.” (136, emphasis in the original)

Together, these thinkers have successfully helped to define new approaches for research on world-scale movements and activities, especially those by groups or individuals identified in some way as “Chinese.” More particularly, they have established fresh paradigms by which to address the complex meaning of such expressive feats as the Island poems, paradigms going beyond traditional conceptions of international exchange and interaction. At the same time, however, inasmuch as the Island poems represent an early manifestation of a distinctly “transnational” cultural production by economically and politically disempowered peoples, various aspects of their manifold significance remain outside the articulated scope of the models of globalization and cosmopolitanism put forth by Appadurai and Ong respectively. For, despite early disclaimers to the contrary, Appadurai develops his theory as a response to explicitly contemporary phenomena, based on the ostensibly “self-evident” claim that “today’s world involves interactions of a new order and intensity” (324). Yet, as I have already suggested, various historical events and expressions only reveal their full import when seen in the light of world-scale interactions between apparently distinct nations and cultural traditions. Thus, Appadurai’s model for global cultural flow can be usefully extended by including an additional temporal dimension in order both to recognize the phenomenon of globalization as also a historical process and to enable consideration of the particular significance of linguistically specific cultural practices such as classical Chinese poetic expression in different contexts around the world. Comparably, Ong focuses exclusive attention on an elite class of Chinese (im)migrants who bring with them in their travels to various parts of the world relatively high levels of human, financial, and cultural capital. More particularly, she attends primarily to the various economic, familial, and political negotiations by these elites specifically as a form of culture. The Island poems, however, not only constitute an expressive achievement that significantly pre-dates the period of Appadurai’s concern and its attendant, admittedly remarkable technological, financial, and other infrastructures.

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Equally important, they also arise out of the social and cultural circumstances of an entirely different class of people than those capturing Ong’s theoretical imagination. Accordingly, then, I want in what follows to trace through the intricate weave of diverse historical, social, and cultural contexts in both China and the United States against which the Island poems gain their complex significance, as well as to situate them in what I hope will be a provocative relation to other more familiarly “American” cultural achievements from the same time. Along the way, I also hope to suggest some possibilities for expanding the temporal and socio-economic range of current approaches to globalization and cosmopolitanism, to show how historical and linguistically particular Asian American literary studies can help complicate or refine models of transnational interactions involving people negotiating between different cultures.

ii Modeled after the renowned Ellis Island in New York, the Angel Island Immigration Station has become (in)famous as the site of entry for, among others, the majority of the roughly 175,000 Chinese immigrants who entered the United States between 1910 and 1940.8 As a number of historians have already discussed, this immigration came as a response to the worsening economic and political turmoil in China at the time, conditions that themselves arose from the widespread effects of Western imperialism throughout Asia since at least the middle of the nineteenth century. With its roots in the establishment of Canton as the major site of Chinese trade with Western countries beginning in the mid 1700s, this imperialism reached perhaps its most visceral and obvious expression in the series of military conflicts between China and various Western powers, including the first Opium War, fought with Great Britain between 1839–42, and the Anglo-Chinese War, waged with the assistance of the French, from 1856 to 1860.9 On one level, then, such large-scale movement of people constitutes a reaction to the advent of socio-political modernity in China.10 Within Appadurai’s terms, these events comprise the broader “finanscape” against which the Island poems at once signify and gain their greater cultural meaning. In this respect, the social, political, and economic processes and events that gave rise to such migration represent the same forces that contributed to the entire range of indigenous responses to the forces of Western modernization in China, as well as throughout Asia more generally. These

[ 308  ]  steven g. yao

include, most notably, perhaps, the renowned May Fourth movement in literature, as well as the other cultural activities now grouped under the general rubric of Chinese Modernism. But whereas the works of such wellknown Chinese Modernists as Lu Xun, Yu Dafu, Ding Ling, and others in the metropolitan centers of Beijing and Shanghai embody the cultural production of a socially privileged, highly educated stratum of elite Chinese society, the persons responsible for the poems carved into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station detention buildings came from a considerably different geographical area and socio-economic group. As Lai, Lim, and Yung note in their Introduction to the collected poems, like the vast majority of Chinese immigrants from this period and earlier, “These poets of the exclusion era were largely Cantonese villagers from the Pearl River Delta Region in Guangdong Province in South China” (23). The socio-geographic origins of their authors constitute one of the important contexts, what Appadurai would probably call part of their “ethnoscape,” for grasping the broader significance of the Island poems. For they indicate a set of both cultural and linguistic (or perhaps more usefully in this case, dialectal) parameters within which the poems operate. And this, in turn, helps to clarify their relation to both traditional Chinese literature, especially poetry, and other expressly literary texts written in Chinese during roughly the same period. As anyone with knowledge about China and its internal linguistic diversity already recognizes, people originating from Guangdong province speak various forms of the Yue language, more widely known as the Cantonese dialect, as their native tongue. And while the written language remains thoroughly comprehensible across different mutually unintelligible regional vernaculars or dialects, the Island poems contain many colloquialisms and transliterations of English words particular to this form of spoken Chinese.11 For example, in addition to several attributive tags identifying authors from regions in Guangdong province such as Taishan and Xiangshan, numerous poems include the specifically Cantonese colloquial terms Ailun (埃崙) for Angel Island itself, fannu (番奴) for Westerners in general, Tang Shan (唐山) for China, and Huaqi (花 旗), or “the land of the flowered banner” for the United States.12 These and other markers of Cantonese situate the Island poems in a slightly different register or channel of articulation than other more famous examples of Chinese literary production from around this time, virtually all of which were grounded in Mandarin, the northern dialect or language which has exerted a pervasive cultural hegemony since at least 1913 when it was established by the Republican government as the national standard.13 Such

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linguistic or dialectal specificity constitutes one of the several axes along which these poems differ from the established canon of “modernist” Chinese literature, which has focused almost exclusively on cultural production based in urban metropolitan centers. At least indirectly, therefore, the Island poems suggest the need to address broader regional considerations in order to gain a more detailed picture of the full range of literary expression in Chinese during this time. For the people who composed the poems carved into and written on the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station did so partly in response to the same social and economic forces of modernity that drove such canonical Chinese Modernists as Lu Xun and others to produce their more widely renowned cultural achievements. Consequently, the dialectal elements of these poems indicate the extent to which the designation of “Chinese” itself requires some attention to regional and internal dialectal differences so as to recognize the considerable diversity within such a broad category;14 and this in turn necessitates further refinement to the conception of “ethnicity” in discussing the movements of peoples and cultural expressions identified under such rubrics to other areas of the globe and their attendant social, political, and historical contexts.15 Likewise, within the terms of Appadurai’s model for global cultural flow, the “ethnoscape” must be recognized as itself a complex space constituted by various dimensions of potentially significant differences. Even more than the geographic origins of their authors, perhaps, the formal aspects of the Angel Island poems signify their complex cultural meaning as feats of an expressly transnational literary production by politically and economically disempowered peoples. Such concerns matter because of the chosen genres of these poems, which, as I mentioned earlier, attempt to follow the conventions and principles of classical Chinese verse. Lai, Lim, and Yung offer a general accounting of the styles of these poems: All of the poems are written in the classical style [wen yan文言]. Of these, about half are written with four lines per poem and seven characters per line. About a fifth have eight lines per poem and seven characters per line. The remainder consist of verses with six or more than eight lines and five or seven characters per line. There are also a few poems with lines of four characters each, as well as several couplets and one long composition written in the pianwen [駢文] style (a euphuistic style utilizing parallel-constructed couplets with antithetical meanings), published in a San Francisco Chinese newspaper. (25)

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To expand somewhat on the significance of these chosen styles within the domain of Chinese culture and the meaning of their deployment in this alternative context: all of the poems written by Angel Island detainees represent different types of classical verse forms, among them qi yan jueju or “seven-character abbreviated verse,” qi yan lüshi or “seven-character regulated verse,” gu shi or “ancient verse,” and “four syllable verse” patterned after works in the Shi Jing or The Book of Poetry (dating roughly from between the twelfth though the seventh centuries BCE). Needless to say, long before the writing of the Island poems, all of these styles already represented traditional, expressly “high-art” forms, ones with strict rules of composition that have over the course of history come practically to embody the very idea of “poetry” in China. Consequently, Chinese people of practically all socio-economic and educational levels would have had some acquaintance with their conventions, though, as we shall see, this familiarity does not imply a mastery of their rules in terms of composition. Some Western codified forms enjoying a comparable degree of prestige or cultural capital might be the sonnet, the sestina, and the villanelle. By contrast, the elite cultural figures associated with Chinese Modernism at the time were vigorously proclaiming these older poetic forms obsolete, and they sought to find new modes of expression more compatible with specifically “modern” and Western values. More particularly, such writers as Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu wrote polemical essays declaring the need completely to abandon the entire wen yan tradition as an antiquated and culturally retrograde anachronism, while others like Xu Zhimo employed everyday spoken language patterns as the foundation for developing a new “free-verse” conception of poetry.16 In fact, the ostensibly populist move of adopting the vernacular bai hua form of spoken Chinese over the specifically written wen yan style as the appropriate medium for literary expression has long been considered one of, if not the, defining characteristic of Chinese Modernism.17 So, even though they were responding to the same forces of “modernity” and Western influence as their more elite Modernist counterparts, the Angel Island poets chose to express themselves through established poetic forms, forms that in other circles were considered decidedly outmoded. In part, this reflects their relatively lower levels of education and cultural exposure. For it seems entirely possible, and indeed even likely, that the predominantly rural Cantonese villagers immigrating to the United States through Angel Island had no knowledge whatsoever of the various literary innovations promulgated by different movements in Beijing and Shang-

transplantation and modernity  [ 311  ]

hai. Nevertheless, precisely because these older poetic forms still enjoyed considerable prestige at the time, their use by the Angel Island poets constitutes a form of cultural resistance to the duress of immigration to and subsequent incarceration in the United States, a defensive response to their confrontation with the ideological landscape of the United States and its attendant legal, bureaucratic, and penal machinery. Indeed, inasmuch as poetry itself long occupied a place of enormous importance within a Chinese cultural hierarchy, as revealed and reinforced by its historical use in the imperial examination system, they might reasonably be said to have epitomized the highest possible expression of Chinese culture as a whole in the minds of these villagers. Consequently, rather than merely the product of a reactionary aesthetic, these poems represent a culturally conservative response to the experience of confronting the ethnic chauvinism, racism, and blatant cultural condescension that marked U.S. immigration policy at the time and found concrete expression at Angel Island. In fact, they might best be seen as a formally or generically strategic attempt to maintain a proud sense of “Chinese” cultural identity within a decidedly hostile, yet in many ways still economically attractive, environment in which such an identity was systematically devalued. Or to put it in more explicitly theoretical terms, in striving to negotiate the fundamental disjunctures between their experiences of the financial or economic and ideological terrains of the United States, these commoner immigrants resorted to expressly traditionalist forms of literary composition. Thus the Angel Island poems embody a different type of populism than that pursued in the works of Chinese Modernism, and in doing so, they indicate the need to broaden the parameters informing the study of literary production in Chinese during this period. Such populism also finds expression in the many “flaws” of composition displayed in these poems, violations of the rules for rhyme and tone distribution, as well as even mistakes of character usage. While a complete accounting of the numerous departures from established rules of classical Chinese verse composition in these poems remains beyond the scope of this paper, suffice it to say that, as a whole, the Island poems exhibit a tremendous range of quality in relation to traditional measures of poetic achievement in Chinese. As the editors note in their Introduction, “The style and language of some works indicate that the poets were well-versed in the linguistic intricacies of poetic expression, while others, at best, can only be characterized as sophomoric attempts” (25).18 As a useful gauge, consider the couplet selected as the winner in a competition held by the Angel

figure 12.2  Commemorative stele on Angel Island. Photograph by the author.

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Island Immigration Station Historical Advisory Committee and inscribed on a granite monument dedicated in 1979, “to commemorate the immigrants, their endurance, perseverance, and courage” (see Figure 12.2). 別井離鄉飄流羈木屋 開天闢地創業在金門

Parting wells and leaving homes, they drifted and floated to arrive at this wooden house; Opening skies and breaking ground [also a phrase used to describe the creation of the world] they founded a livelihood at the Golden Gate If this couplet hardly attains to a sublimity of poetic expression, never­ theless, as befits its purpose as a formal commemoration in the manner of a stele,19 it adheres to an orthodox pattern of tone distribution for classical Chinese verse, as well as exhibits a strict grammatical parallelism ­between its two lines, with the first four character phrases in each line following a V-N-V-N pattern, a central binomial verb as the next two char­ acters, and a V-Adj-N pattern for the final three characters. The couplet also achieves a degree of formality and compression by omitting any explicit subjects, as often happens in classical Chinese verse. And if it employs stock phrases as in the first part of the second line, it achieves a certain economy of expression precisely through the use of such phrases. As an illustrative contrast, poem 28 from the Appendix to Island exhibits considerably greater verbal ingenuity, while still demonstrating a strong command of tonal rules, as well as a facility for economy and compression:

西施盡住黃金屋



泥壁篷窗獨剩儂



寄語樑閒雙燕子



天涯可有好房隆

A Xi Shi always lives in a house of yellow gold; Only mud walls and portholes are left for me. I send a message to the pair of swallows in the rafters, A glorious room may await me over the horizon. (Translation mine)

[ 314  ]  steven g. yao

In addition to a clear mastery of tonal rules and a thoroughly orthodox use of rhyme, this poem also achieves an impressive economy through the clever use of a pun based on a historical allusion. The initial two characters of the poem, 西施 , refer to a famous woman of great beauty from the late Spring and Autumn period (723–484 BCE). Here the allusion serves as an oblique reference to Westerners, and Americans in particular, since the character 西 (xi) denotes the West, and 西施 (Xi Shi) is a beauty, or 美 人 (meiren), which also coincides with a term for “American,” based on the Chinese term for the United States, 美國 (Meiguo). Other signs of literary erudition include the use of the character 儂 (nong), an expressly classical form of the first-person singular personal pronoun, which rhymes with the final character of the fourth line. Exhibiting a comparable degree of sophistication and knowledge of the Chinese literary tradition, poem 34 ends with a clever parody of the final line of Wang Han’s (exact dates uncertain, but he thrived during the early eighth century) famous Tang-Dynasty poem 涼州詞 (“Song of Liangzhou”), a work canonized as poem number 267 in the renowned collection 唐詩三 百首(Three Hundred Poems of the Tang).20 A wry lament about the prospect of having to go off to war in the far western reaches of the empire, Wang’s poem concludes with the rhetorical question: 古來征戰幾人回

Since ancient times, how many people have returned home from waging war? Substituting basic synonyms for the initial and final characters of this line, the latter in order to maintain the rhyme scheme for his own poem, the author of poem 34 similarly asks:

從來征戰幾人還



How many people have ever come back from waging war?

Such deft allusive play illustrates the higher end of traditional literary skill among the Island poets, and it suggests that, just as the Western Steppes represented the “frontier” and zone of contact with uncivilized but powerful “barbarians” for the Tang, so in modern times the Pacific and the U.S. shoreline occupy the same position in relation to China. On the other end of the scale, poem 19 from the Appendix not only fails to adhere in any way even to the most basic principles of tone and rhyme,

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but it also employs the simplest diction and overt statement, rather than suggestion or demonstration, to convey its distraught feelings of isolation and misery:

自己想來真苦楚



蒼天今日因如何



困我鄙人在木樓



音信無跡實難過



I think to myself, “This is really miserable; For what reason does the blue sky today Imprison me, this humble one, in a wooden building? Without a trace of news, it is truly hard to bear.”

In addition to displaying such a tremendous range of skill in relation to traditional standards of literary quality in Chinese, the Island poems also exhibit a variety of problems in the more basic arena of character usage. The editors of the volume have painstakingly sought to correct as many “errors” as possible in the printed version of these poems, in order that their significance as historical documents can more easily be appreciated and apprehended. Yet such “mistakes” themselves remain a fundamental aspect of their larger cultural meaning, as well as a key to their particular expressive logic. Moreover, in their zeal to normalize the language of the Island poems, the editors have in some instances gone arguably too far, offering “corrections” that obscure the kind of “historical” information they sought to preserve. So, for example, in the seventh line of poem 24 from the Appendix, the editors give the corrected line as follows: 口個][口的]利息重重疊

which they translate as “The interest piles one on top of another” (155). In the original, however, the first two characters read 哥的, which have the same pronunciation as the ostensibly more “correct” replacement characters, but with the resultant change in the semantic meaning of the line: “Older brother’s debts pile up one on top of the other.” The meaning of the original line accords with what we already know about the economics of emigration from China to the United States at this time, namely that older family members often took loans to finance the voyages of siblings or other relatives. Consequently, the original line offers an entirely plausible historical scenario that the editors have obscured through their “corrections.”

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Hardly a crucial matter in and of itself, I mention this problematic emendation not to criticize the editors of Island, who have done a tremendous service in bringing these poems into print and normalizing their language. Rather I have drawn attention to such an example simply to underscore that, when read through a grid defined by a motive other than that of grammatical regularization, the various “mistakes” or “errors” contained in the original poems themselves take on a meaningful significance. Most important, a large number of these “mistakes” constitute the use of incorrect characters in place of ones with the exact same, or at least phonetically similar, pronunciation, though with slightly different radical components to indicate an entirely different semantic meaning. For example, in poem 4 of the collection, the author originally used the character 椎 (zhi in Mandarin), meaning “hammer” or “mallet,” instead of 錐 (zhui in Mandarin), meaning “awl,” which is required in the phrase 錐股 (zhui gu) that alludes to Su Qin 蘇秦, the scholar of the Warring States period (403–321 BCE), who sought to make himself study diligently throughout the night by devising a contraption that would drive an awl into his thigh whenever he began to fall asleep. The phrase itself has come to mean metaphorically “to study with great diligence and determination.” A pragmatic equivalent in English might be to “keep one’s nose to the grindstone.” Similarly, in poem 36, the original author used the character 掉 (diao), meaning “to turn” or “to move” or “to fall,” instead of the character 棹 (zhao), meaning “oar,” which completes the binomial phrase 買棹 (mai zhao) , which means “to hire a boat for a journey.” Comparable mistakes in English would be the use of “their” in place of either “there” or “they’re,” or the substitution of “wait” for “weight.” Read through a grid other than that of editorial regularization, these and other similar errors represent an important dimension along which the Island poems as a whole convey their complex social meaning. For whereas the many violations of classical rules for rhyme and tone distribution throughout the Island poems represent mistakes of a fairly high order, ones easily attributable to an understandable lack of rhyme books and other such reference material, these errors reflect a more basic limitation, revealing an incomplete grasp on the part of their authors of written Chinese and its complexities. The language of these poems, then, suggests a significantly oral (or perhaps aural) dimension in the process of composition, which in turn underscores the relatively non-elite status of their authors. Hence, the poems at once attest to and adumbrate the way in which poetry as a cultural practice served as a means for common people immi-

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grating from China to the United States to negotiate the trauma of entering a new environment in which they no longer constituted a racial or cultural majority, but instead confronted a social formation, with its attendant legal and governmental infrastructure, that cast them in distinctly inferior positions within a racialized hierarchy. In other words, these poems embody a distinctly cultural attempt to come to grips with the painful discovery of the social condition of ethnicity on the part of a group of Chinese commoners driven to such an encounter by the political and economic forces of modernity. As one of the Island poets revealingly laments: Many days on Island without freedom. Lonely and desolate now, I mix with prisoners. Grievances fill my belly; I rely on poetry to express them. (poem 31, Appendix, Island 157, translation modified) Up to this point, I have discussed the overlapping Chinese historical and cultural contexts within which the Island poems operate. In some ways, this might seem merely to belabor the obvious, discussing the extent to which these works are “Chinese.” After all, what could make something any more “Chinese” than being composed in Chinese written characters? But the significance of these poems goes beyond the limits of any single national or cultural designation, even if they function semantically within the terms of a particular, identifiable, though still multiply determined, language. For as the quotation immediately above makes quite clear, the United States at once as an ideal and as an actual, geopolitical entity remains essential to the creation of these poems, constituting both the immediate occasion or cause for their composition and an important thematic location in the expression of their sentiments. Here we can begin to see some of the limitations of Ong’s otherwise useful concept of “flexible citizenship” in the discussion of expressly transnational or global cultural production. For it is precisely the category of “citizenship” to which these members of the Chinese diaspora, along with other Asians, had no access due to existing U.S. immigration laws; and furthermore, because of their straitened capital circumstances, they also lacked the capacity for any sort of additional economic or geographic “flexibility.” In other words, Ong’s notion depends upon a considerable degree of economic, social, and political privilege that simply does not apply for people throughout a significant range of different historical circumstances, most notably those surrounding the entry of the vast majority of Asians into the United States before

[ 318  ]  steven g. yao

1952, when the McCarran-Walter Act nullified the racial restriction of the earlier 1790 naturalization law, which had reserved naturalized citizenship to “whites” only. In their collection, Lai, Lim, and Yung have grouped the Angel Island poems under five broad headings that identify their basic thematic concerns: the Voyage, the Detainment, the Weak Shall Conquer, About Westerners, and Deportees and Transients. While admittedly a retrospectively conceived arrangement, such organization highlights the various aspects of the immigration experience addressed by these poems, and it thereby helps to underscore their collective meaning as a dramatization of a traumatic encounter with modernity that results in the discovery of ethnicity as a condition of social being in a new and largely hostile environment. Moreover, the Island poems serve as an illuminating counterpoint to the efforts of a number of more familiar American Modernists at the time, which arise out of an engagement with Asian literary expression generally, and with classical Chinese poetry in particular, most notably that of Ezra Pound and his highly esteemed renderings of medieval Chinese lyrics in Cathay (1915), a work that, in the words of George Steiner, “altered the feel of the language [i.e. English] and set the pattern of cadence for modern verse.”21 Such a coincidence points not only to the diversity inherent within the very category of “American” culture, but also to a proportionate increase during the period in the influence of “China,” through both its human and literary expressions, in the constitution of that diversity. To put the matter another way, the Island poems represent the obverse or under-side of a period of highly influential “sinographic” activity in recent U.S. cultural, and especially poetic, history. Needless to say, perhaps, none of the Angel Island poets regarded themselves as “American” in any way. Such a sentiment would have been all but impossible given the institutional prejudice they faced as a condition of their arrival. Nevertheless, they did possess a sense of their lives as determined by larger political and economic forces then shaping the world, forces defined by and channeled through various nation-state regimes and their existing relations of power, and this marks the Angel Island poems as early manifestations of a global cultural dynamic. Indeed, a number of the poets explicitly connect their desire to enter the United States and the treatment they received upon arrival to the fate of their home country. So one of them lamented, “For what reason must I sit in prison?/ Merely because my country is weak and my family poor” (poem 34, Island 85, translation modified); and another ends his poem upon a similar note of com-

transplantation and modernity  [ 319  ]

plaint, “Chinese people of a weakened nation,/ can only sigh about the lack of freedom” (poem 63, Island 128, translation modified). Comparably, the writer quoted previously who declared his reliance on verse gives voice to the same idea, though in a rather more elaborate fashion, which hopefully conveys a sense of the enormous range of skill and tone throughout the body of these poems: I have awakened to laws of gain and loss because my country is weak: I have realized rules of decay and growth since I sought after wealth. In idle moments, I have another sort of mad, wild thought: That I have gained consent of the western barbarians to enter America. (poem 31, Appendix, Island 157, translation modified) And still others expressed anger and exhortation as they looked to the future and dreamed of a different fate for themselves and for their home country in a reconfigured arrangement of world power: “If the day comes that I achieve my goal and win success, / I will certainly mow down these savages and not even spare the grass” (poem 35, Island 84, translation modified); or even more openly militant:

I strongly urge you, my compatriots, not to mourn, Even though you’ve been imprisoned in this wooden building. On that day after China arises and turns around, She will command her own bombs to annihilate America. (poem 41, Appendix, Island 160, translation modified)

Such hortatory strains run throughout the body of the Island poems, which make it clear that many individual writers had in mind as their audience both fellow and future detainees. And this expressly social quality in turn reveals a crucially performative dimension to these poems, one registered in the material conditions of their production by means of inscription on the walls of the detention building. Moreover, the expressly nationalist sentiments marking so many of these poems demonstrate the capacity (or perhaps function) of nationalism itself to serve as a primarily defensive strategy for shoring up the terms of a cultural identity in response to systematic political disenfranchisement and naked displays of power that have their roots in world-scale political and economic asymmetries. In addition, as the editors point out, “The poets borrowed liberally from one another,

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repeating each other’s phrases and allusions . . . There are also indications that some poems might have been written by one person and revised by another at some later date” (Island, 24).22 These facts cast the Island poems as a substantially collective achievement, one that not only transparently records the private experiences of different beset individuals, but which also stands as a potential model for collaborative cultural endeavor. And this collaborative dimension, in turn, distinguishes the Island poems from much of contemporary Asian American poetic, and indeed more broadly literary, production, which remains premised on a conception of poetry as the unique expression of a private self, or in other words, on an individualistic notion of authorship. Such a view underwrites, for example, not only the work of testimonial poets writing today like Li-young Lee, but also even the efforts of those like David Mura, Marilyn Chin, and John Yau, who, in the words of George Uba, recognize “problematics of language and event both as a way of approaching identity and of renouncing its stability.”23 In reflecting, and perhaps even modeling, a collective cultural enterprise, the Island poems remain a vital literary achievement, their various linguistic challenges and traditional aesthetic limitations notwithstanding. For they offer a glimpse into the possibilities of a mutually inspiring and supportive cultural production in which different individual voices explicitly address and respond to one another, combining to produce a collective significance that goes beyond the limitations of a singular perspective or lone point of articulation. Ultimately, this collaborative dimension, along with the performative impulse behind both the admonitory rhetoric and the actual writing of the Island poems, suggests a kind of structural parallel between the Island poems and another distinctively “American” cultural tradition or practice that emerged and established itself during this period, namely that of jazz, and it arguably provides a better rationale than sheer historical facticity for maintaining their continued importance within the arena of our contemporary culture. If a comparison between the Island poems and the more familiarly “American” tradition of jazz seems too contrived, let me be clear in saying that I do not assert any kind of actual historical relationship of influence or communication between these two types of cultural expression that appeared in the United States in the early years of the twentieth century. Obviously, the relative physical and cultural isolation of the Island poets, and indeed of Asian immigrants to the United States during this period generally, together with the geographic origins and movement of jazz at this time from New Orleans to Chicago and then first toward the eastern

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regions of the country, make the claim to any sort of direct or even intentional connection between the two, at the very best, highly speculative. At the level of expressive structure, however, the Island poems exhibit a range of features generally associated with jazz as a distinctively “American” cultural practice.24 Like jazz, the Island poems as a group feature different individual voices frequently in direct conversation or reaction to one another across both space and time. Consequently, they also contain a significantly improvisatory element, taking previously articulated themes or figures and adapting them to different individual situations. In addition, they at once arise out of and explicitly address specifically political concerns and the desire for social justice. Moreover, the Island poems embody an expressly demotic or popular cultural production, one that employs traditional “high-art” forms in an entirely new setting and to a distinctive purpose. Here, their inscription on the barrack walls connects with the time-honored literati tradition in China of tibishi, or poems written on walls, which, as Judith Zeitlin has discussed, “first emerged as a sub-genre during the Six Dynasties but really only came into vogue during the Tang dynasty” (74).25 In their manifold cultural negotiations, then, the Island poems indicate the need to enrich our discussion of so-called ethnic literature through expressly comparative cultural analysis, as well as by further particularizing the theoretical terms of ethnic culture itself.

iii For some time now, Lisa Lowe’s notion of “hybridity” has stood out as arguably the dominant conceptual model for characterizing Asian American cultural production. As she employs it, the term serves to underscore the vast range of differences, including those of country of origin, generation, class, gender, and historical circumstances of immigration, among others, contained within the very designation “Asian American” as a cultural and discursive category. In this way, she emphasizes the “dynamic fluctuation and heterogeneity of Asian American culture.”26 Needless to say, perhaps, such a model fits well with the association between the Island poems and jazz. After all, jazz itself typifies a “hybrid” cultural production in both its formal characteristics and its sociocultural origins. Precisely because of its enormous scope, however, Lowe’s notion of “hybridity” simply constitutes an acknowledgment of the expressly multiple linguistic and cultural determinants for Asian American cultural productions, as well as the uneven material circumstances giving rise to them. As such, it really only identifies

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in the broadest terms a general condition of Asian American culture. Elsewhere, I have sought to refine Lowe’s conception of “hybridity” by developing a taxonomy of “hybridization strategies” that recognizes important differences between the vast range of possible strategies for joining together and negotiating those various cultural resources that inform Asian American cultural production. Among these strategies include the category of “transplantation,” which I have defined as the explicit incorporation or depiction of foreign cultural elements specifically as such within the dominant operative medium of a work without an attempt to familiarize those elements or any concessions to potential incomprehensibility on the part of readers. Perhaps the most obvious example of this strategy would be that of “code-switching,” or the use of different languages in their original form. Within this new theoretical frame, the Island poems constitute a particularly intense form of “transplantation,” one in which entire works in a language other than English serve as a means for negotiating a traumatic experience brought about through an encounter with “America.” In this respect, the “transplantation” of traditional Chinese poetic forms enacted by the Island poets does not correspond with a conception of “hybridity” that applies to jazz. But their operative medium does bring expressly dialectal and aural conditions to bear on an intensely written cultural tradition to produce a curiously mixed language. Consequently, the Island poems map an aesthetic economy comparable to that of jazz during its early development, in that they deploy foreign traditional cultural forms in an expressly “American” setting, and in the process transform the terms of their social and cultural meaning. Pushing this admittedly rough syllogism somewhat, we can in turn perhaps usefully consider the development of jazz itself as an early instance of culture that came into being as a result of forces operating on a global scale. After all, like the Island poems, early jazz too arose out of the migration, deployment, and adaptation of culturally specific musical traditions and forms by people facing systematic oppression and exploitation due to the physical displacement caused by complex, world-scale economic and cultural interactions, or in other words out of dynamics fundamental to conditions accompanying the global spread of modernity. The promise of such a structural parallel finds contemporary fulfillment, moreover, in recent achievements by Asian American artists operating in different expressive media. Thus, for example, well-known Japanese American poet Lawson Inada has pursued a sustained engagement with jazz as a foundation for his own expressly ethnic poetics, citing this musical tradition/practice as

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his strongest influence. More specifically, in his Legends from Camp (1992), a volume of poems that, in the words of Juliana Chang, “inscribes Japanese American racial subject formation in the trauma of wartime internment” (134–35), Inada undertakes both a thematic and a formal exploration of jazz history and the possibilities of its musical style so as to “work to redress the pain of racial trauma by enacting an alternative to the dominant time of the nation” (136). “Inada’s poetics of repetition and improvisation,” Chang further argues, “enable restagings and reworkings of a troubled past, and his poetics of syncopation enact the rhythm and status of the racially marginalized subject as outside of standard national historic time” (136). Notwithstanding the tremendous differences in historical subject, operative language and cultural heritage between the Island poets and Inada, Inada’s jazz-inspired poetry about Japanese American internment during World War II helps to validate the link between the Island poems and jazz as structurally parallel responses to the trauma of minoritization. Moreover, Chang’s provocative insight into the disjunctive temporality of Inada’s verse offers a way in turn to understand the pervasive concern with time throughout so many of the Island poems as something more than just documentary evidence. Instead, whether marking the length of detainment, or the moment of composition according to either the lunar calendar or the founding of the Chinese republic, the Island poems also display the traces of a clash between two distinct national and cultural temporalities.27 In addition to Inada’s jazz-inspired poetics, the recent growth of a new form of jazz that explicitly incorporates various elements from different specific Asian musical traditions also elaborates a parallel between the classical Chinese poems of Island poems and jazz as transnational cultural expressions. Works by such composers and musicians as Francis Wong, Fred Ho, Jon Jang, and Vijay Iyer, among others, have helped to extend the boundaries of this ostensibly prototypical “American” idiom even further by reformulating the terms under which it explores new possibilities through an engagement with other musical styles, forms, and traditions. And just as jazz practices have continued to evolve over time, so the Angel Island poems also continue to inspire new achievements and to expand the range of “American” cultural expression. In Island: Immigration Suite No. 1 (Soul Note, 1997), pianist and composer Jon Jang has created (and performed) an extended composition that memorializes the experiences and efforts of the Angel Island poets and other immigrants who passed through the Immigration Station. Organized into five movements (à la classical sonata form?), the piece expressly cuts across a range of conventional cul-

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tural boundaries. At the basic level of instrumentation alone, Jang’s Island: Immigration Suite No. 1 employs such traditional Chinese instruments as the pipa (a four-stringed vertical lute), the zhonghu and erhu (both twostringed instruments bowed in the manner of a fiddle), the guanzi (a double-reeded bamboo flute), and various percussion instruments such as cymbals, together with the standard “Western” instruments: piano, tenor and soprano saxophones, English horn, alto flute, and even cello. Moreover, the piece includes blues-inflected spoken word recitations by Asian American poet Genny Lim, who also plays a Tibetan “singing” bowl and a dhamaru, of two of her own poems and two poems from the Island collection translated into English.28 Structurally, jazz devices such as call-andresponse, variable tempo, and improvisational segments complement and complicate established Chinese musical forms. So, for example, based on naamyam, a Cantonese narrative song form, the first movement, “Burial Mound,” opens with a pentatonic melody played by the zhonghu lead and accompanied by pipa, guanzi, and clopping percussion that explicitly invokes Cantonese musical style. After approximately thirty-six measures, at 1 minute 15 seconds, a solo tenor saxophone enters, playing a lyrical blues variation of the original melody, and Lim recites her titular poem. At 3 minutes 10 seconds, the original trotting melody returns, this time played on both zhonghu and tenor saxophone, and Lim again recites her poem, but more lyrically, adapting her intonations to the tonal modulations of the original pentatonic melody. The second movement, “First Interlude / Yellow Woman,” combines Western dissonant melodic line and improvisation on piano and tenor saxophone with Chinese instrumental accompaniment. It then moves into a dirge-like section featuring both erhu and piano as accompaniment for Lim, who chants her poem, “Yellow Woman,” in which she constructs an ethnic heritage by connecting herself to previous immigrants and the various occupations they filled. I am the daughter of seafarers, gold miners, quartz miners railroad workers, farmworkers garment workers, factory workers restaurant workers, laundry man houseboys, maids, scholars rebels, gamblers, poets paper sons . . . (12)

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The remaining movements attempt to develop a distinctive musical idiom through similar combinatory strategies, and the suite as a whole insistently explores different techniques for bringing together two distinctive musical cultures in order to achieve cross-cultural expression. Indeed, such an interest constitutes a persistent strand throughout Jang’s overall career. As he himself declares in the liner notes to the work, “Tiananmen!29 used Chinese sorrow songs within the context of postmodern jazz/improvi­ sational music. Island represents a transitional period for me where postmodern jazz/improvisational music is put into a Chinese musical context” (Island liner notes, 5–6). Unfortunately, it goes beyond the scope of this paper to offer a detailed discussion of the rest of Island: Immigration Suite No. 1, and so it remains for others with greater and more complete musicological knowledge both to assess the significance of Jang’s own description of his approach to bridging Asian musical and jazz traditions, as well as to analyze the formal mechanisms throughout the remainder of the composition. Nonetheless, Jang’s work in Island: Immigration Suite No. 1 underscores how the Angel Island poems represent not just an historical, but a living part of Asian American (which is to say significantly transnational) culture, demonstrating how these literary works by immigrant Cantonese commoners from the Pearl River Delta remain a vital cultural force, inspiring new feats of Asian American cultural production, despite the assumptions and methodological challenges that have limited our understanding of them.

notes 1. Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung, Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910–1940 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), 28; hereafter abbreviated as Island. A first edition of this collection was published by HOC DOI (History of Chinese Detained on Island; San Francisco, 1980). 2. This statement was made by Xing Chu Wang, poet and editor of East West Forum. As quoted in the article “Chinese Poetry Scholars Visit Immigration Station,” in Passages: The Newsletter of the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation 5, no. 2 (Winter/Spring 2002): 2. 3. For this background see Island, 90 n. 49. 4. Ibid., 2. 5. This was also the period that saw the emergence of the Chicago school of sociological thought that developed at least partly in response to the “Oriental Problem.” For a discussion of this see Henry Yu’s acclaimed study Thinking Ori-

[ 326  ]  steven g. yao entals: Migration, Contact and Exoticism in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 6. For a recent collection of essays that attempts to address precisely this subject, see Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits, ed. Shirley Geoklin Lim, John Blair Gamber, Stephen Hong Sohn, and Gina Valentino (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006). 7. Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 328; hereafter abbreviated as Disjuncture. Appadurai defines the various “scapes” collectively as “the building blocks of what (extending Benedict Anderson) I would like to call imagined worlds, that is, the multiple worlds which are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe” (329). More specifically he defines them in the following terms: (a) “By ethnoscape, I mean the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guestworkers and other moving groups and persons constitute an essential feature of the world and appear to affect the politics of (and between) nations to a hitherto unprecedented degree” (329); (b) “by technoscape, I mean the global configuration, also ever fluid, of technology, and of the fact of technology, both high and low, both mechanical and informational, now moves at high speeds across various kinds of previously impervious boundaries” (329); (c) the “finan­ scape” involves “the disposition of global capital” that operates through such instruments as “currency markets, national stock exchanges and commodity speculations” (330); (d) “Mediascapes refer to both the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information (newspapers, magazines, television stations, and film production studios), which are newly available to a growing number of private and public interests throughout the world, and to the images of the world created by these media” (330); and (e) “Ideoscapes are also concatenations of images, but they are often directly political and frequently have to do with the ideologies of states and the counter-ideologies of movements explicitly oriented to capturing state power or a piece of it” (331). 8. For a detailed history of Angel Island that includes discussion of its role as the point of entry into the United States for immigrants from other Asian countries, including Japan, Korea, and India, see Jennifer Gee, Sifting the Arrivals: Asian Immigrants and the Angel Island Immigration Station, San Francisco, 1910– 1940, PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 1999. 9. For more information on these conflicts and the effects of Western imperialism generally on the migration of Chinese people from this region to the United States, as well as to other parts of the world, see Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991), 5–8. Also see Lucie Cheng and Edna Bonacich, Labor Immigration Under Advanced Capitalism: Asian Immigrant Workers in the United States Before World War II (Berkeley:

transplantation and modernity  [ 327  ] University of California Press, 1984), 16–29. Of course, there has also been a great deal of historical scholarship on these events and their consequences for the Chinese people and nation from a more traditional perspective, but such research goes beyond the scope of this article. 10. For the purposes of this paper, I will use the term “modernity” to designate the social, economic, and political changes associated with Western incursion into China. By “modernism” and “modernist,” I refer to movements or individuals who responded in specifically cultural, and especially literary, terms to the advent of Western influence in China. 11. John DeFrancis, among others, has argued that the different major versions of spoken “Chinese” should be designated as separate languages, or at least by the term “regionalect,” since they are mutually unintelligible. This seems a sensible distinction, but in popular usage the term “dialect” still serves as the general term marking the linguistic divisions between Mandarin, Wu (the form of Chinese native to Jiangsu and Zhejiang), Yue (Cantonese), Xiang (Hunanese), and other varieties of spoken Chinese. See John De Francis, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984), 57. 12. For use of these phrases, see poems 2, 7, 9, 10, and others. 13. This decree took place at a Conference on Unification of Pronunciation sponsored by the Guomindang regime, and it formalized the adoption of Mandarin as a governmentally sanctioned medium. The previous imperial regime (the Qing Dynasty) employed Mandarin as the basis for “Guan hua” or “official’s speech,” the language of officials, or “mandarins,” which explains how this variety of Chinese came to be known in English as Mandarin. 14. See also Rey Chow’s Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). 15. For a similar view focusing on writings by other authors in Chinese, see the volume Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity and the Languages of American Literature, ed. Werner Sollers (New York: New York University Press, 1998), especially the articles “Redefining Chinese-American Literature from a LOWINUS Perspective: Two Recent Examples,” by Te-hsing Shan, 112–23, and “Worlds of Difference: Lin Yu Tang, Lao She, and the Significance of ChineseAmerican Writing in English,” by Xiao-huang Yin, 176–87. 16. Of course, this does not mean that Chinese Modernists did not completely abandon wen yan in their literary efforts. Even Lu Xun consistently wrote classical verse throughout his career, even as he composed his renowned vernacular stories. Rather, their promotion of bai hua constituted an attempt both to modernize and popularize literature within Chinese culture, but they also maintained their engagement with older, more elite forms. 17. For a particularly noteworthy recent attempt to complicate this admittedly simplified and conventional picture of Chinese Modernism, see David Derwei Wang’s Fin-de-Siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849–1911 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997).

[ 328  ]  steven g. yao 18. For a poem that exhibits considerable command of the conventions of classical Chinese verse, see poem no. 28 in the Appendix to Island (discussed here, 22). For a more “sophomoric” poem, see no. 19 from the Appendix, which not only violates the technical requirements for the rhyme scheme of the form it takes, but also employs simplistic diction and bald statement, rather than suggestion or demonstration, to convey its distraught emotion. 19. For a discussion of an entirely different approach to Chinese poetry written on steles, see Haun Saussy’s discussion of Victor Segalen’s Stèles in this volume. 20. Thanks are due to Haun Saussy for bringing this example to my attention. 21. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 358. Others interested in Chinese poetry include such Modernist figures as William Carlos Williams and, of course, Amy Lowell, who translated a number of medieval Chinese poems in her initially successful efforts to challenge Pound for leadership in the development of Imagism. For a useful recent discussion of Lowell, her collaborator Florency Ayscough, and the more renowned efforts of Ezra Pound, see Yunte Huang, Transpacific Displacement: Translation, Ethnography and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 22. See also, for example, similarities between poem 63 and poem 44 of the Appendix. 23. George Uba, “Versions of Identity in Post-Activist Asian American Poetry,” in Reading the Literatures of Asian America, ed. Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 35. 24. For the sake of simplicity, I invoke here the cliché of the uniquely “American” origins of jazz. But as I suggest below, this critical commonplace could and should be usefully complicated. For a wonderful discussion of the deployment and adaptation of “jazz” within a modern Chinese cultural context, see Andrew Jones’s illuminating study Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), wherein he seeks “to hear the ‘China’ in American jazz just as distinctly as the ‘America’ in Chinese popular music, and to identify the ways in which both are implicated in the global unfolding of colonial modernity” (8). 25. For a useful discussion of this phenomenon, see Judith T. Zeitlin, “Disappearing Verses: Writing on Walls and Anxieties of Loss,” in Writing and Materiality in China: Essays in Honor of Patrick Hanan, ed. Judith T. Zeitlin and Lydia H. Liu, with Ellen Widmer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard-Yenching Institute, 2003), 73–132. More specifically, Zeitlin addresses the practice during the Qing dynasty, to which the Island poets had the most direct historical connection, of collecting tibishi by women as a response to “the recent violent events of the Qing conquest and the wholesale destruction of so much of the Ming cultural heritage” (107). Inasmuch as all of the Island poets were male, Zeitlin’s discussion raises profoundly interesting gender issues as they relate to the production of the poems carved onto the walls of the Angel Island station.

transplantation and modernity  [ 329  ] 26. Lisa Lowe, “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences,” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 1, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 28. Reprinted in Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996). 27. For references to time in terms of length of imprisonment or suffering due to travel, see poems 5, 19, 28, 53, 63, 64, 66, as well as Appendix poems 9, 17, 21, 22, 24, 31, 47, 53, and 57. For references to the time of composition according to cultural traditions associated with the lunar calendar, see poems 5, 12, and 14, as well as Appendix poems 3, 25, and 53. For references to time measured from the establishment of the Chinese republic in 1911, see poems 36 and 57 and Appendix poem 62. And for poems that record a concern with time expressed in terms of age, see poems 3 and 54. 28. These are Appendix poem 31, “Random Thoughts While Staying in the Building” (157) and poem 39 (88), which contains a reference to an essay by Han Yu (AD 768–824). 29. Jang’s album from 1993, which was done as a response to the massacre of students and other democracy demonstrators by the Chinese communist government in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

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13 

Western Journeys of Journey to the West Carlos Rojas

There is no East here. West is meeting West. This was all West. All you saw was West. This is The Journey in the West. maxine hong kingston, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book

Wittman Ah Sing, the Chinese American protagonist of Maxine Hong King­ston’s novel Tripmaster Monkey (1987), uses a loose identification with the figure of Sun Wukong 孫悟空 or “Monkey” (the irascible protagonist of the sixteenth-century Chinese novel Journey to the West) as a way of resisting and flaunting the ethnic and racial stereotyping he encounters in late-1960s California. Throughout the novel, Wittman paranoically invites stereotyping judgments from those around him, only to shoot them down before they are even uttered. Without denying the reality of ethnic and racial prejudices during that period, it is nevertheless true that Wittman’s own relationship with ethnic stereotyping appears to be in no small part negative, insofar as he consistently uses the prospect of potential stereotypes as a sort of negative foil against which he is able to begin to articulate his own sense of self-identity. It is as if it is only through the creation of a blank screen onto which potential stereotypes and prejudices may be projected and even exaggerated that it thereby becomes possible for him to articulate a coherent, hybridized identity. The flip side of the issue of ethnic and cultural stereotyping is the question of cultural translatability. Wittman clearly never intends to renounce [ 333  ]

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his Chinese heritage altogether, but rather seeks to explore the ways in which that heritage is transformed as it is translated into the society and culture of 1960s California. His own personal process of cultural assimilation, therefore, functions as a metonym for the more abstract question of how traditional “Chineseness” is itself continually transformed as it translates into different historical periods and geographic regions. Furthermore, this notion of “translation” is not a mere metaphor, insofar as a crucial anchor of the novel as a whole involves Wittman’s loose “translation” and adaptation of the Chinese novel Journey to the West, among other Chinese texts, into modern American theater. Wittman’s choice of the novel Journey to the West, and his own identification with the novel’s protagonist, Monkey, is ironically appropriate in this regard, insofar as Journey to the West is itself explicitly concerned with the possibility of transcultural travel and translation. In addition, Monkey not only is one of the best-known characters in Chinese literature, but furthermore is one whose own cultural origins are deeply shrouded in mystery. In both the sixteenth-century novel itself, as well as in the cultural tradition that preceded and followed it, the figure of Monkey has consistently occupied a paradoxical status of representing, on the one hand, a quintessential icon of mutability and, on the other hand, a paradigm of cultural continuity. In fact, it is precisely the very consistency of his trademark rebelliousness and incorrigibility that ultimately makes Monkey so familiar and beloved to Chinese readers, and has therefore contributed to the remarkable constancy of his fictional identity as the Journey to the West story has been retold and adapted by countless generations, both within China and abroad. In this essay, I will consider a handful of more recent instances in which artists located, like Wittman, at the cultural margins of “China” proper, use the figure of Monkey—and, more generally, the Journey to the West narrative as a whole—as a screen onto which they may project their own anxieties about individual and collective identity. In each of these latter adaptations, the Journey to the West narrative is itself transported and “translated” into the partially alien cultural terrains of Hong Kong, Japan, and the United States, while at the same time helping to deconstruct conventional assumptions about the nature and limits of “Chinese” culture itself. The earliest of these contemporary adaptations is Hong Kong director Jeffery Lau’s (Liu Zhenwei 劉鎮偉) 1995 cinematic diptych, Chinese Odyssey (Dahua xiyou 大華西游]), produced and released simultaneously in two parts: Part 1, Pandora’s Box (Yueguang baohe 月光寶會), and Part 2,

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A Cinderella (Xianlu qiyuan 仙履奇緣). Two years later, Minekura Kazuya began production on a manga (comic book) adaptation of the same work, which he entitled Saiyuki 最游記, or “Journey to the Max” (punning on the homophonic Japanese reading of the Chinese title for Journey to the West, “Xiyouji” 西游記). In addition, this manga series has also provided the basis for a popular fifty-episode anime (cartoon) version, which first aired on Japanese television in 2000. Finally, in March 2001, the American television network NBC screened a four-hour miniseries, The Lost Empire, directed by Peter Macdonald and written by Chinese American playwright David Henry Hwang (currently best known for his deconstruction of Orientalist aesthetics in his play M. Butterfly). Although differing markedly in style, content, and intended audience, these three works collectively have important implications for our understanding of the processes by which Chinese culture, and even “Chineseness” itself, circulates through an increasingly diasporic global space. Beyond preserving the basic narrative premise of a journey, together with the loose character-types of the main protagonists of the Ming Dynasty novel, each of these adaptations basically manifests an almost complete disregard for the specificities of the original. They borrow on the cultural and institutional authority of the Ming novel, while then immediately proceeding to challenge that same authority from within. As they circulate through a series of global mediascapes, these contemporary adaptations of Journey to the West can be seen as disarticulated fragments, not only of the original Ming Dynasty novel, but also, more generally, of Chinese cultural identity itself. Furthermore, each of these contemporary works comment allegorically, at the level of their actual plots, on the more general processes of cultural translation and dissemination pertinent to their own creation and circulation. More specifically, they each use “Orientalist” stereotypes of a historically static traditional China as a way of commenting allegorically on the question of the position and relevance of Chinese culture within the contemporary world.

treacherous translations Journey to the West is based loosely on the Chinese monk Tripitaka’s (Tang Sanzang 唐三藏) seventh-century pilgrimage to India to obtain a set of Buddhist scriptures and bring them back to China to be translated into Chinese. From as early as the tenth century onward, this Journey to the West1 narrative has been repeatedly adapted into a variety of different forms,

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with the best known and most influential of these adaptations being the hundred-chapter novel allegedly written in the late sixteenth century by a certain Wu Cheng’en.2 In that Ming Dynasty novel, together with the broader narrative tradition in which it is embedded, Tripitaka is accompanied on his journey by three semi-divine disciples, Monkey (Sun Wukong), Sandy (Sha Wujing 沙悟凈) and Pigsy (Zhu Bajie 豬八戒), each of whom has unique magical powers as well as distinctive personality flaws. Two other important characters in the narrative are the Guanyin Bodhisattva, who serves as the travelers’ “guardian angel,” and the Bull Demon, who is one of Monkey’s most prominent enemies. Although the Ming Dynasty version of the narrative is certainly the best known, the actual story nevertheless continued to evolve long after the completion of the novel itself, and over the course of the succeeding four centuries, this quintessential allegory of transcultural travel and textual translation has itself been translated and adapted into a wide range of other languages and media. In addition to the innumerable adaptations of the original story into other media—including drama, opera, cartoons, and, eventually, television and film—there have also been a number of adaptations and extensions that actually transform the basic content and premises of the original story itself. Early examples of the latter phenomenon can be found, for instance, in the seventeenth-century novels Sequel to Journey to the West (Xu Xiyouji 續西游記) and The Later Journey to the West (Hou Xiyouji 後西游記), both of which are frequently regarded as debased take-offs on the original.3 Similarly, the first decade of the twentieth century witnessed the production of such parodic adaptations as Wu Jianren’s 吴趼人 incomplete A Ridiculous Journey to the West (Wuli qunao zhi Xiyouji; 1908), Dulu’s New Investiture of the Gods (Xin fengshen yanyi 新封神演義; 1908), a hybrid of Journey to the West and another late imperial classic novel, Investiture of the Gods [Fengshen yanyi 封神演義]), together with Lengxue’s New Journey to the West (Xin xiyouji 新西游记; 1909).4 The contemporary texts I will be discussing here represent adaptations of Journey to the West at the level of both medium and content. Lau’s, Minekura’s, and Hwang’s texts each take Tripitaka’s original journey to India in search of the scriptures and transcribe it into a new context, while at the same time drawing on a variety of modern media (cinema, television, and anime) to present these new stories. In Lau’s 1995 Chinese Odyssey diptych, for instance, the original journey to the West is presented as having ended in failure, with Monkey having now been reincarnated five hundred years later as the petty bandit leader Joker (Zhizun bao 至尊寶), played by one of

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Hong Kong’s leading comic actors, Stephen Chow (Zhou Xingchi 周星馳]), who is initially unaware of his “true” identity. Joker spends most of the first of the two films, Pandora’s Box, fleeing from an assortment of demons who hope that he will lead them to Tripitaka so that they may consume his flesh (and thus gain immortality). At the very end of Pandora’s Box, Joker is then accidentally transported five hundred years back into the past, where, in A Cinderella, he eventually reassumes his original identity as Monkey, all the while attempting to retrieve the magical “Pandora’s box” that would allow him to return to the present. Like Chinese Odyssey, Minekura Kazuya’s Journey to the Max is also premised on a second journey five hundred years after the first. In this case, the main protagonists of the work are mostly supernatural demons, or youkai 妖怪, who nevertheless continue to maintain a human appearance. At the beginning of the work, these demons inhabit a figurative island of calm and stability within a larger sea of contestation and violence: “In an age of chaos, in which heaven and earth are commingled, there was a land in which humans and youkai coexisted in peace. This land was a capital of culture and religion, also known as the Peach Spring Land (Tougenkyou 桃源鄉).”5 This commingling of heaven and earth in Peach Spring Land is also represented thematically and visually through a confluence of East and West, past and present. For instance, one of the most distinctive features of Journey to the Max lies in its adroit combination of traditional/magical and modern subject matter, including traditional weapons such as a nyoibou (a priest’s staff) and such explicitly modern weapons as Smith & Wesson revolvers (explicitly labeled in English), together with a parallel fascination with disposable commodities such as crumpled packs of Hi-lite cigarettes, half-empty cans of Asahi beer, etc. This delicate balance between “heaven and earth,” tradition and modernity, however, is soon threatened by the news that Monkey’s mortal enemy, the Bull Demon, who has been imprisoned in India for the past five hundred years, is in the process of being revived by his son, Red Boy (Kougaiji), and his former wife, the Empress Gyokumen. It is explained, furthermore, that in order to resurrect the Bull Demon, Red Boy and the Empress will need both the Holy Land sutra, which they already possess, together with the “Infernal Land Sutra,” which is currently in the hands of a disciple of the original Tripitaka. The latter-day incarnations of Journey to the West’s original quartet of pilgrims are therefore now summoned by Guanyin to undertake another journey to the West, with their goal this time being not the retrieval of Buddhist scriptures, but rather the prevention of the Bull Demon’s resurrection.

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Finally, David Henry Hwang’s 2001 television miniseries, The Lost Empire, also uses a secondary quest centuries after the first in order to foreground the contentious contrast between traditional and modern cultures. In this case, the quest has its origins in the contemporary Chinese city of Xi’an (which had been the site of China’s capital for many centuries), but then jumps back in time to the late Ming Dynasty period, when Journey to the West was originally written. The general premise of the mini-series is that a reactionary consortium of ghosts of past Chinese rulers have been attempting for five hundred years6 to destroy all remaining copies of the novel Journey to the West, and thereby effectively reverse the “modern” historical development that the Chinese novel is portrayed as having made possible. The late twentieth century is presented as marking the precise moment at which these imperial ghosts are on the verge of completing their task, and already the fabric of modern society has started to tear under the strain (e.g., skyscrapers flicker, traffic lights blink on and off for no reason, etc.). Nick Orton, a “China scholar” turned conventional businessman (played by Thomas Gibson, best known for his role in the American television series Dharma and Greg) is therefore recruited by Guanyin (played by the Chinese American actress Bai Ling) to travel back in time five hundred years to late-Ming China in order to rescue the last remaining copy of the novel. In doing so, it is explained, he will succeed in “return[ing] traditional values to [his] world . . . the traditional values upon which all civilization is built.” Lost Empire, therefore, is not so much a rereading of Journey to the West as it is a transposition of the Journey to the West text back into the original narrative itself. In Lost Empire, the object of the new quest becomes not the Buddhist sutras, but rather the ur-text of the Ming Dynasty novel itself. It is, therefore, precisely the novel’s original textual and cultural authority that, now, provides the basis for Hwang’s strong rewriting of it. One of the ironies of the mini-series is that, while its plot is premised on the profound impact the Ming Dynasty novel has ostensibly had on Western culture, the mini-series constitutes the first time that the Chinese work has been introduced to an American audience on such a scale. In a sense, The Lost Empire merely makes explicit a theme that underlies each of the other two adaptations as well. Just as The Lost Empire transposes the original quest for the Buddhist sutras into a meta-quest for the Ming novel itself, A Chinese Odyssey can similarly be seen not so much as a reflection of Monkey’s struggles to resist his own latent identity, but more importantly as an exploration of the processes by which contemporary adaptations may challenge the thematic limits of the original novel. The work

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oscillates between the time period during which the original journey first took place, and Joker’s “present,” in which Journey to the West exists only at the level of a fantastic narrative—with these two worlds finally overlapping with each other at the very end. Each of the volumes of the manga version of Journey to the Max, meanwhile, opens with a tongue-in-cheek variation of the conventional disclaimer that “This is a work of fiction, and its contents bears no relationship with real-life characters, settings”—a disclaimer that, in this context, is highly ironic—not only on account of the overtly fantastic nature of the plot of the Japanese manga as a whole, but also because, in fact, the Journey to the West narrative from which it explicitly takes its inspiration was itself based on a historical “real-life event.” In each of these contemporary works, therefore, the original “journey” comes to function as a metaphor for the narrative’s own process of translation and adaptation, with the ambiguous authority of the Journey to the West coming to stand in for a more general and inchoate anxiety about the nature of a “Chinese” cultural tradition itself, and its pertinence to the “modern” world. It is in this sense that these three adaptations function as sites of cultural projection, against which anxieties of cultural identity are played out. The historical Journey to the West narrative represents not only a site of origin and source of inspiration for the contemporary adaptations, but at the same time also constitutes a point of resistance against which these contemporary narratives of self-discovery are articulated and elaborated. Just as Wittman Ah Sing’s attempts to articulate his identity as a Chinese American necessarily went hand-in-hand with his need to distance himself from certain pre-existing cultural stereotypes, similarly each of these contemporary adaptations finds it necessary to distance itself, in various ways, from the Ming novel that helps to lend it its identity in the first place.

temporal interregna Mikhail Bakhtin coined the term “chronotope” to refer to the spatio-temporal nexus that helps to anchor a work’s identity. In the case of Hwang’s, Lau’s, and Minekura’s adaptations of Journey to the West, however, one could say that their respective identities are grounded not so much in a specific chronotope, but rather in their systematic transgression of the sorts of spatial and temporal boundaries that such a notion would appear to presuppose in the first place. Most obviously, the concept of a “journey” itself implicitly challenges the degree to which topographical boundaries are

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understood to constrain identity. While the notion of a geographical “journey” is self-evidently central to the Journey to the West narrative, I would nevertheless suggest that, in the case of these three contemporary adaptations, the surface narratives of spatial dislocation are intimately bound up with parallel narratives of temporal dislocation. These latter themes of temporal dislocation, furthermore, can be seen as having been developed against an ideological backdrop of the contrast between teleological notions of “modern” development, on the one hand, and of “Orientalist” fantasies of a static, unchanging Orient, on the other. In the original Journey to the West, the account of Tripitaka’s journey to India is preceded by another “journey” through time. Specifically, the narrative opens with an account of Monkey’s mythological origins as an incarnated block of stone, and then provides a rough overview of the first several centuries of his existence, up to the point when he is imprisoned under the Mountain of the Five Phases as punishment for his perennial insurrection. He is finally liberated by Guanyin five hundred years later in order to accompany the Tripitaka on his pilgrimage to India. It is precisely this notion of a five-hundred-year interregnum, in turn, which becomes one of the crucial anchors for each of these three contemporary adaptations of the work. A Chinese Odyssey, for instance, opens with the original Monkey having been unwittingly reincarnated five hundred years later as the mortal bandit leader, Joker, who, in turn, is subsequently catapulted five hundred years back into the past. In the opening of Journey to the Max, meanwhile, we are told that it is not Monkey, but rather his mortal enemy, the Bull Demon, who had been imprisoned in India five hundred years earlier by the original incarnation of Tripitaka. A modern incarnation of Tripitaka, together with his three companions, have now been recruited to travel to the “West” to prevent the reincarnation from taking place. This notion of a temporal loop, moreover, is made explicit at the beginning of chapter 1 of the manga (corresponding to episode 2 of the anime) version, when Monkey excitedly remarks that “Things are finally moving, aren’t they,” and Guanyin corrects him, noting that, “All of this [actually] started long ago . . . 500 years ago.” NBC’s The Lost Empire, finally, takes as its starting point not the historical moment of Tripitaka’s seventh-century journey itself, but rather that of the sixteenth-century completion of the Ming Dynasty novel. In The Lost Empire, the five-hundred-year moratorium is one that has been imposed, not on any actual character (either Monkey, the Bull Demon, etc.) but rather on the text of the original work itself. The evil consortium of imperial ghosts have been struggling for five hundred years

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to destroy the ur-text of the Ming Dynasty novel, in the hope that this will cause its influence to disappear as well, thus reverting the “modern” world back to the antiquarian timelessness of premodern China. The five-hundred-year gaps at the center of each of these contemporary adaptations function not so much as reinscriptions of historical specificity, as they are symptoms of the anachronistic erasure of historical difference itself. One of the basic premises of Lost Empire, for instance, is that the original text of Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West manuscript might somehow be preserved in the unopened tomb of Qin Shihuang 秦始皇, the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty—conveniently ignoring the fact that the emperor died, and was entombed, around 200 BCE, which is to say, more than fifteen hundred years before Wu Cheng’en was even born. Similarly, Journey to the Max is set in an imaginary space identified as “Peach Spring Land”—alluding to Tao Yuanming’s famous fourth-century essay, “Peach Blossom Spring” (Taohua yuan 桃花源), in which a fisherman accidentally stumbles across an isolated and utopian community that had existed in compete isolation from the historical “development” of the rest of Chinese society, to the extent that its inhabitants did not even know what the current dynasty was. This implicit allusion to “Peach Blossom Spring” in Minekura’s work is jarringly anachronistic, insofar as Tao Yuanming’s essay antedates by several centuries not only the earliest versions of the Journey to the West narrative, but even antedates the historical seventh-century journey on which the subsequent narratives are based, as well. Like the Qin Dynasty tomb setting of Lost Empire, however, this anachronistic gesture in Journey to the Max functions as a powerful symbol of the fetishistic (mis)appropriation of history in these three contemporary adaptations in general. Originally symbolic of a space outside of the historical self-identity of dynastic China, the fantasy-space of the Peach Blossom Spring here becomes remobilized as a symbol of how traditional China itself is imagined to be positioned fundamentally outside of Western modernity. It is certainly no coincidence that these three modern adaptations, each produced immediately before or after the contemporary turn of the millennium, all share a common fascination with the theme of a half-millennial temporal interregnum. In each case, the rapidity of contemporary Westernization and modernization is implicitly contrasted with the imaginary ideal of a static, unchanging “traditional China/Asia.” This “Orientalist” subtext is most evident in The Lost Empire, where the consortium of Chinese rulers seek to “turn back the clock,” to erase the “modernizing” advances of the past several centuries and return China to an unspecified

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dynastic past that appears to embrace the entire span of time from the Qin Dynasty (221–207 BCE) to the late Ming Dynasty (1368–1644). Journey to the Max is similarly premised on a crisis that threatens the ahistorical and atemporal space of the modern-day “Peach Blossom Spring,” which is represented as having remained unchanged for more than five hundred years. Chinese Odyssey, meanwhile, takes as its starting point an indeterminate moment in mid-imperial China, and then jumps back five hundred years to what is ostensibly the seventh-century moment of Tripitaka’s original voyage. In each case, the half-millennium temporal jumps that are depicted inevitably bring attention back to the period of millennial transition within which the work was being produced. In sum, as disparate as they might appear at first glance, the three transcultural adaptations I am considering here share several common concerns. Originating at the socio-cultural margins of China (Hong Kong, Japan, and “Chinese America”), all three works implicitly struggle with the question of what the position of Chinese culture will be in the contemporary world. Just as Journey to the West was explicitly concerned with the translation and assimilation of foreign cultural and intellectual influences like Buddhism into China, similarly each of these contemporary works examines the reverse processes by which Chinese cultural influences may enter into circulation within a global diasporic space. Embedded within these narratives of cross-cultural circulation, however, is an implicit anxiety about the ultimate significance of (Chinese) culture itself. In each case, Chinese/Asian cultural identity ends up being defined negatively as that which occupies a reactionary temporal space outside of a forward-moving Westernization. The irony here, though, is that this sort of representation implicitly ends up echoing a cluster of Western Orientalist assumptions that seek to situate the traditional Orient within a space of temporal stasis radically outside of temporal progress. One of the key points of continuity linking together the various temporal spaces within these contemporary adaptations, as well as helping to ground each adaptation to the Ming original, can be found in the figure of the Guanyin—the traditional bodhisattva of compassion, and one of the most celebrated and revered Buddhist figures throughout Asia. While in A Chinese Odyssey, Guanyin is virtually the only figure who is presented in a relatively serious and non-parodic way, in the other two adaptations she marks one of the outer limits of cultural fungibility. In David Hwang’s The Lost Empire, for instance, it was precisely the hypersexualized portrayal of Guanyin, played by the scantily clad and midriff-baring Chinese Ameri-

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can actress Bai Ling, which came to be one of the features for which the work was most widely mocked and ridiculed after it was released. Many viewers, particularly Asian American ones, found her sexualized presentation to be a travesty of her traditional significance within a Sino-Buddhist cultural and intellectual tradition. In actuality, however, Hwang’s and Bai Ling’s portrayal of Guanyin was actually quite tame, particularly as compared with the way in which she had appeared in the manga version of Journey to the Max from a couple of years earlier.7 These debates over the nature of her representation notwithstanding, Guanyin actually provides one of the few constants in these, otherwise rather dissimilar, adaptations, which is itself ironically appropriate, given that Guanyin herself is an emphatically transcultural figure. The figure of Guanyin actually has its origins in Indian Buddhism, before having been introduced into China around the seventh century CE. That process of transcultural translation, however, also entailed a curious moment of transgendered transformation, insofar as Guanyin was originally a masculine figure within the Indian tradition but subsequently came to be imagined as female within the Chinese context.8 Conventionally depicted as gazing narcissistically at her reflection in a pool of water, Guanyin stands for the combination of narcissistic plenitude and inherent fluidity of individual identity. At the same time, it is perhaps precisely this latter fluidity of appearance and identity that has helped to make Guanyin one of the most influential Buddhist figures not only in East Asia, but also in diasporic Asian communities around the world.9 In this sense the figure of Guanyin parallels that of the Journey to the West narrative as a whole, in that they both emblematize a similar paradoxical combination of historical continuity and systematic mutability that (this essay contends) characterizes the legacy of Chinese culture as a whole.

contestations of identity One of the closest parallels, in these contemporary adaptations of Journey to the West, to Guanyin’s trademark mirror-gazing can be found in a crucial scene that functions as a hinge between the two films that make up Jeff Lau’s Chinese Odyssey diptych: Pandora’s Box and A Cinderella.10 Near the end of Pandora’s Box, Guanyin appears before Joker (in the form of her disembodied portrait) and explains to him not only his past identity as Monkey, but also the way in which he was fated to reclaim that same forgotten identity:

[ 344  ]  carlos rojas 500 years ago, your master Tripitaka sacrificed his life to save you. Heaven Emperor planned that you revive after 500 years. I hope that you’ll be like your master, and sacrifice yourself for others. You must absolve yourself of your past sins. Put the Gold Ring on your head and admit your sins, and then you’ll become the super Monkey King. In this way you’ll take the responsibility for retrieving the scriptures from the West. . . . You haven’t become the Monkey King because you haven’t met the person who will give you the 3 birthmarks [san li zhi 三粒痣].

After this long lecture, Joker, in an apparent combination of confusion and genuine denial, then asks her innocently, “Are you speaking to me? Surely you’re not speaking to me! You must have mistaken me for someone else.” Joker is not entirely incorrect in his denial here, insofar he has not yet been interpolated into the historical/fictional identity of the Monkey King that has been assigned to him. A Cinderella then picks up where Pandora’s Box ended, with Joker having been accidentally catapulted five hundred years back into the past. The first person he encounters in this earlier period is the beautiful goddess Lin Zixia 林紫霞 (played by Athena Chu/Zhu Yin 朱茵), who immediately proceeds to fulfill Guanyin’s earlier prediction by claiming Joker as her own and using a magic wand to brand the sole of his foot with three dots, or “birthmarks.” This branding is then followed by a curious “mirror stage” scene, in which Joker peers into the magic mirror he has been carrying around with him (and, up to this point, been using to reassure himself that he is not Monkey), and now sees not his own human face, but rather a distinctively simian visage. Instead of providing an external image that consolidates the viewer’s own sense of self-identity, however, this mirror scene in Chinese Odyssey, by contrast, merely reinforces Joker’s own resistance to the identity that has apparently been assigned to him. Like Wittman Ah Sing in Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey, Joker’s process of identity formation is, at this stage, largely a negative, reactive one, motivated by patterns of resistance toward the “external” identities that are being projected onto him. Furthermore, the image in the magic mirror notwithstanding, “Joker” nevertheless retains his original personality and human appearance11 until the end of the film, when he finally agrees to renounce worldly desire as well as his own mortal identity, and as a result essentially splits into two autonomous characters, with both “Joker” and “Monkey” briefly existing side-by-side. Joker’s displaced (non)identification with the externalized identity he

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sees in the mirror becomes, in turn, emblematic of one of the ways in which each of these contemporary adaptations grapples with the issue of the continuity and limits of both cultural and individual identity. That is to say, the broader question of the manner in which the original novel is linked to its various contemporary adaptations is itself played out figuratively within the adaptations themselves, as their protagonists are frequently presented as struggling to assert their own identities against the backdrop of the textual/cultural traditions by which they are shadowed. Each of these contemporary adaptations uses anxieties about personal identity as a way of grappling, indirectly, with the issue of the temporal and cultural gap intervening between the Ming original and its various contemporary adaptations—a “gap” that is represented metaphorically within the adaptations themselves by the figure of the 500 year interregna. The fictional characters in these contemporary adaptations engage with these crucial temporal interregna in two ways. Some characters, like Monkey in the Ming novel, are presented as having remained essentially frozen in a state of temporal stasis for several centuries, before reawakening essentially unchanged. Other characters, however, appear as later reincarnations of the original characters, and therefore have quite distinct identities from their namesakes. These two scenarios of “reawakening” and “reincarnation” represent alternate approaches to dealing with the relationship between the temporal gaps, on the one hand, and the continuities of identity that suture them together, on the other. While the “reawakening” scenario presupposes an ideal of precise continuity of identity over time, the “reincarnation” scenario, by contrast, opens up a space of difference wherein the issues of subject-formation and contestations of identity may be explored. Regardless of which scenario, or combination of scenarios, they use to integrate these five-hundred-year interregna into their plots, all three of these contemporary adaptations nevertheless are based on a similar premise, whereby latter-day incarnations of the original Journey to the West characters find themselves transplanted back into a modified version of the original narrative, thus making it necessary for them to find a way of coming to terms with their former identities. The question of the extent to which these earlier identities are allowed to play a determining role over those characters’ subsequent incarnations therefore becomes one of the chief challenges of each of these contemporary texts. In several cases, the reincarnated “doubles” actively resist the identities that have been as-

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signed to them, just as the contemporary texts themselves resist too direct an identification with the Ming Dynasty novel they each take as their reference point. The most obvious example of this sort of resistance to a legacy of prior identity can be seen in the case of Joker in A Chinese Odyssey, in that throughout the entire first film he remains in ignorance/denial of his “true” identity, as Monkey, even as he is simultaneously attempting to impersonate that same identity for purely strategic purposes (having realized that the demons pursuing him will not kill him if they believe that he is actually Monkey). In The Lost Empire, similarly, Nick Orton appears as a highly skeptical and reluctant Tripitaka—and this ambivalence, it turns out, echoes his own conflicted feelings with respect to Chinese culture in general. Orton originally had been passionately in love with the Ming novel, but when his wife complained about the amount of time he was putting into his Chinese studies, he decided to destroy his own personal copy of the Chinese novel in an attempt to preserve his marriage. Orton’s struggle to defeat the supernatural forces seeking to destroy the novel is, therefore, symbolic of his own conflicted attitude toward the work and the broader cultural tradition it represents. Finally, in Journey to the Max, “Tripitaka’s” three disciples are presented as supernatural “yokai,” who embody a crucial continuity with the original Journey to the West protagonists, while at the same time featuring very distinctive “modernized” personalities and appearances. As “Pigsy” observes at one point early in the work, “It appears that the only youkai in Peach Blossom Spring who still retain their personalities [identities] are Sandy, Monkey, and myself.”12 In this latter work, furthermore, the questions of the continuity of identity are played out at a quite literal, visual level. For instance, Tripitaka and his masters in heaven all have red chakras inscribed on their foreheads, and it is explained that, “The deep red chakra, inherited from the previous Tripitaka, is the proof of those chosen by heaven, closest to the seat of the gods.”13 Many of the evil characters, furthermore, are identified by distinctive tattoos. The Spider Demon, for instance, has an elaborate floral tattoo on her chest between her breasts, while the Bull Demon’s daughter, Lilin, appears with a distinctive triangular pattern on her shoulder. Finally, and perhaps most suggestively, Lilin’s half-brother, the Bull Demon’s son, Red Boy, appears with an actual barcode imprinted on his shoulder. Red Boy’s barcode, in turn, foregrounds particularly cogently a thematic tension that haunts not only Journey to the Max, but also arguably the

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more general phenomenon of contemporary, transcultural adaptations of Journey to the West as well. That is to say, to the extent that Red Boy is the heir of his father, the Bull Demon, and furthermore is explicitly concerned with attempting to bring about his father’s resurrection, he can therefore be seen as representing the continuity of a (trans-Asian) cultural tradition. On the other hand, Red Boy and the other main characters of the work function, within the context of manga and anime culture in general, as marketable commodities, the products of a highly rationalized transnational culture industry that is explicitly concerned with creating demand, both in Japan and abroad, for these sorts of quasi-Orientalized cultural productions. As such, Red Boy (and, by implication, the text as a whole) is implicitly located at the intersection of two disparate regimes of temporal imagination. On the one hand, his attempt to revive his father, and thereby burst the idealistically atemporal “Peach Spring Land” bubble, is implicitly premised on an Orientalist fantasy of traditional Asia being located outside of the sorts of historical teleologies conventionally associated with the West. On the other hand, Red Boy’s status as a figurative (and literal) commodity endows him within a different temporal logic of planned obsolescence, whereby future demand is always-already inscribed into the commodity form itself. These issues of the continuity and limits of individual identity, in turn, are also a central concern of the original Ming Dynasty Journey to the West itself. Throughout that novel, one of Monkey’s favorite tactics is to transform his appearance in order to outwit his enemies (though he and his companions are also frequently confounded by demons who use the same tactic against them). Furthermore, one of Monkey’s trademark tricks consists of taking hairs from his own body and magically transforming them into myriad miniature versions of himself. These sorts of corporal substitutions and transformations not only contribute a great deal of humor and excitement to the work, but also reinforce its underlying Buddhist critique of the reliability of physical appearance. Similar issues of the transmutability of individual identity, furthermore, also run parallel with another set of concerns, in Journey to the West as well as in its more recent adaptations, with issues of the limits of textual and linguistic identity. For instance, the novel’s thematization of issues of the doubling and fragmentation of individual identity not only reflect an interest in Buddhist beliefs in the impermanence of mortal existence, but also could be seen as symbolic of the text’s concerns with the limits of textual transmitability as well. More specifically, not only is the plot of the

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Ming Dynasty Journey to the West explicitly concerned with the translation and introduction of Sanskrit Buddhist scriptures into China, but the novel (with its wealth of allusions to Buddhist texts and concepts) can itself be seen as an illustration of this very process of textual and conceptual translation and dissemination. Conversely, one of the Buddhist texts that is foregrounded most prominently in the novel is the Heart Sutra, associated with Meditation school (known in Chinese as “chan” 禪 and in Japanese as “zen”), which was explicitly premised on a recognition of the necessary limits of the written text as a means of conveying knowledge and enlightenment.14 Furthermore, the Meditation school’s attention to the potential autonomy of the textual representations once they enter into circulation beyond the direct control of those who created them parallels the contemporary anxiety about the potential ramifications of cultural productions as they enter into transnational circulation. These cultural productions become, in a sense, bodily fragments, reflecting simultaneously the inherent constructivity of the original cultural corpus from which they derive, while at the same time pointing to its possibilities for continual reinvention.

“body beyond the body” I will conclude by turning to a final contemporary adaptation of the Journey to the West: the installation piece Shen wai shen 身外身, first exhibited in Tokyo in 2000 by the New York–based conceptual artist Xu Bing 徐冰.15 This adaptation is concerned not so much with the circulation of texts, narratives, or even identities (as in the case of the preceding three examples), but rather with the transnational circulation of (written) language itself. Currently based in New York City, Xu Bing is best known for his large installment pieces that seek to deconstruct the perceived graphic power of the Chinese language. For instance, one of his most famous works, The Book from the Sky (Tianshu 天書), completed in 1988, took him more than three years to create, and consists of an enormous array of volumes and scrolls with “Chinese” text printed with traditional wood-block printing techniques.16 The individual characters or ideographs that collectively make up these various texts (more than four thousand distinct ideographs in all, and each duplicated many times), however, are all completely meaningless, having been spuriously constructed out of the basic components found in “orthodox” Chinese characters. Xu Bing’s works along these lines effectively separate the cultural power traditionally accorded to the Chinese writing scheme from the actual meaning that it is used to convey.17

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The exhibit Shen wai shen (which Xu Bing himself translates as “Body without Body,” but which could perhaps be more accurately translated as “Body beyond the Body”) is based on a specific scene from the beginning of Journey to the West, in which Monkey battles the “Monstrous King of Havoc” and uses some of his own body hairs to create thousands of miniature Monkeys: Seeing that his opponent was growing fiercer, Wukong [Monkey] now used the method called the Body beyond the Body. Plucking a handful of hairs from his own body and throwing them into his mouth, he chewed them to tiny pieces and then spat them into the air. “Change!” he cried, and they changed at once into two or three hundred little monkeys encircling the combatants on all sides. For you see, when someone acquires the body of an immortal, he can project his spirit, change his form, and perform all kinds of wonders.18

In the Tokyo exhibit, Xu Bing took the original Chinese text of this passage, together with parallel translations of the same passage into Japanese and Korean, and mounted each version of the text on a wall, using an array of different-colored (blue, yellow, and pink) “Post-it”-type adhesive cards, with one color corresponding to each of the three East Asian languages. Each adhesive card contained a single ideograph or word from the text, and was mounted on a pile of other color-coded cards containing the equivalent of that same word in each of the three featured languages. The audience was then invited to randomly remove the upper cards from each pile, thus revealing the words/characters in the other languages which lay underneath. As a result of this audience intervention, each of the three passages eventually became a Babelesque mixture of the three different languages. “Body without Body” builds on Xu Bing’s fascination with the conceptual limits of the Chinese written language, and although it does not itself feature the technique of ideographic deconstruction for which Xu Bing is most famous, the work is nevertheless developed against the backdrop of the historical dissemination of the Chinese orthographic system throughout East Asia. As is well known, both Japan and Korea had borrowed the Chinese orthographic system for their own languages, in spite of the fact that the linguistic structure of their respective languages differed considerably from that of Chinese.19 The specific passage from Journey to the West that Xu Bing selected for his 2000 project is also quite interesting in its own right. The passage in question is one of the earliest allusions in the novel to Monkey’s trademark technique whereby he uses his own body

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hairs to create a multitude of miniature versions of himself. These bodily replicas therefore exist outside of Monkey’s own body, while at the same time suggesting the degree to which he, himself, is always necessarily partially removed from his own identity. Furthermore, another of the terms that, along with “shen wai shen,” is used in Journey to the West to describe Monkey’s process of corporal disassociation, is “fenshen” 分身.20 Composed of two characters meaning “partial/parted” and “body,” respectively, this term is of Buddhist origins (a¯tmabha¯va-nirmita in Sanskrit), and at a literal level refers to the separation and reduplication of the body of the Buddha.21 More recently, the term “fenshen” has also been used in contemporary Taiwanese and Japanese fiction, as a euphemism for the male phallus—thus suggestively bringing together the way in which this symbolic separability of (self-)identity represents both a site of power (the “phallus”), as well as functioning as a reminder of its potential loss.22 In psychoanalytic terms, Monkey’s disarticulated hairs can be seen as functioning as “partial objects”—fragments of the Self that enter into circulation within a liminal space at the boundaries of the Self. Jacques Lacan argues that these partial objects function as “objects of desire,” objects of narcissistic investment that ironically further reinforce the subject’s understanding of his or her own limits: The objet a is something from which the subject, in order to constitute itself, has separated itself off as organ. This serves as a symbol of the lack, that is to say, of the phallus, not as such, but insofar as it is lacking. It must, therefore, be an object that is, firstly, separable and, secondly, that has some relation to the lack.23

The figure of Monkey and his “partial/parted selves,” therefore, becomes an evocative metaphor for Chinese culture itself, as it circulates and is continually reinvented as a diasporic “body beyond the body” within a postmodern and increasingly transnational world. As Chinese cultural artifacts such as Journey to the West come to circulate within a transnational space outside of the ostensible geographic borders of China “proper,” they not only force us to rethink the relevance of China with respect to a variety of Western and “Westernized” societies outside or at the margins of China’s physical borders, but also challenge our understanding of the ostensible “Chineseness” of the original text. These questions of textual and linguistic origins, which Xu Bing foregrounds so effectively in “Body without Body,” are also a central concern in the original version of the novel itself. In fact, the climax of the Ming Dy-

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nasty version of Journey to the West takes place when the intrepid travelers are on their way back to China from India, and discover that the scriptures they have been given actually consist of “only snow-white paper without a trace of so much as half a letter on it.”24 When they return to India to demand the “real” thing, they are indeed given sutras with actual writing on them, but at the same time are also informed that the earlier “blank texts are actually true, wordless scriptures, and they are just as good as those with words.”25 I would suggest that the text of Journey to the West itself has come to function as a comparable “blank text,” providing a narrative base onto which an eclectic range of cultural fantasies and hermeneutic preoccupations may be inscribed. In other words, to the extent that the Buddhist scriptures in the original novel were (potentially) “wordless” ones, the “Journey to the West” narrative at the heart of each of these contemporary works could also be seen as a similar tabula rasa, onto which a variety of concerns and apprehensions are continually projected. In a sense, we can see these concerns with the inherent translatability of the Journey to the West narrative as a symbolic enactment of more tangible concerns with the translatability of Chinese (and, more broadly, Asian) identity in an increasingly transnational and diasporic world.26 Furthermore, as these multilingual and multimedia adaptations circulate through a modern global space, they both testify to the inherent translatability of the original narrative, while at the same time illustrating the way in which the cultural continuity implied by that narrative is turned violently in upon itself. Fidelity to the original becomes somewhat incidental to the dynamic elaboration of the new contexts in which the narrative finds itself, though in each case the ostensible authority of the original invariably comes back to haunt the adaptations. The apparent “blankness” of the Journey to the West narrative, therefore, is revealed to be partially illusory, and it perhaps can be seen more productively as an invisible palimpsest, wherein the contemporary adaptations are in contestatory dialogue with the latent, underlying remnants of the presumptive and contested authority of the original. More generally, this notion of a “body without body,” or “body beyond the body” provides a useful metaphor for the process of textual and cultural dislocation I have been examining in this essay. Monkey, in Journey to the West, represents a space of fluidity and transmutability, mirroring the way in which the Journey to the West narrative itself, in these contemporary adaptations, circulates fluidly within the “diasporic public spheres”27 that have developed at the sociocultural margins of “China” proper. Just as the

[ 352  ]  carlos rojas

circulation of souls and identities in Journey to the West, and in each of these contemporary adaptations, draws attention to the limits and permeability of individual identity, similarly the circulation of these texts and narratives within a postmodern global space also helps us to think about both the limits as well as the possibilities of “Chineseness,” as it is being perpetually reimagined and reinvented. The point here is not that “Chineseness” and “China” are merely imaginary constructs, but rather that they may be seen as supplementary “localities” that are produced through the process of transcultural circulation itself.

note 1. Throughout this essay, I will use italics to differentiate the Ming Dynasty novel from the more general Journey to the West narrative on which it draws. 2. For a discussion of the work’s authorship and textual history, see Glen Dudbridge, The Hsi-yu chi: A Study of Antecedents of the Sixteenth-Century Chinese Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); Anthony Yu, “Introduction,” in Journey to the West, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 13–21; and Andrew Plaks, The Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987). 3. See Xu Xiyouji (Nanjing: Jiangsu wenyi chubanshe, 1986) and Hou Xiyouji (Taipei: Laogu wenhua shiye gongsi, 1983). For a discussion of the latter text, see Xiaolin Liu, Odyssey of the Buddhist Mind: The Allegory of the Later Journey to the West (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1994). 4. For a discussion of these three works, see David Der-wei Wang, Fin-de-Siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849–1911 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 202–4. 5. Hayto Date, dir., Gensomaden Saiyuki (Geneon, 2000–2001). Translation adapted from unofficial translation by Hammel, at http://hanayume.net/Saiyuki/episodes.html. (Accessed October 30, 2003; this Web site is no longer online.) 6. Technically, the interim between the Ming completion of the novel and the contemporary period is actually only four hundred years, but the mini-series does not allow itself to be distracted by these sorts of historical technicalities. 7. The manga version features several suggestive images of Guanyin, in which she appears either bare-breasted or dressed in rather erotic, gothic attire. In the parallel section of the subsequent anime version, however, she is alluded to but is not represented directly. 8. The Journey to the Max manga alludes to this gender ambiguity in the figure of Guanyin, when it inscribes her image with the conventional symbols of both femaleness and maleness: “♀♂.” 9. For a discussion of the religious and cultural history of Guanyin in China, see

western journeys of journey to the west  [ 353  ] Chun-fang Yu, Kuan-yin: The Chinese Transformation of Avalokitesvara (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). For a discussion of the ways in which the figure of Guanyin has continued to evolve and circulate through a global sphere, see Sandy Boucher, Discovering Kwan Yin, Buddhist Goddess of Compassion (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000). 10. Jeffrey Lau Chun-wai, dir., A Chinese Odyssey, parts 1 and 2: Pandora’s Box and Cinderella (Brilliant Star Development), 1995. Translation modified from original subtitles. 11. That is to say, we continue to see him in his human form a “Joker,” though some of the other characters within the film appear to perceive him as “Monkey.” 12. Gensomaden Saiyuki, episode 1. 13. Gensomaden Saiyuki, episode 6. 14. In fact, when Tripitaka first receives the Heart Sutra, he actually receives it orally, and it is on account of the fact that he “was spiritually prepared [that] he could remember the Heart Sutra after hearing it only once. Through him, it has come down to us this day” (Journey to the West 1, 393–94). At the same time, however, it has been observed that this critique of various forms of textual mediation is itself largely rhetorical and ideological (reinforcing, for instance, the presumptive authority of the Buddhist master), in the sense that the actual practice of Chan Buddhism continues to rely as heavily on textual mediations as do other schools of Buddhism. See, for instance, Bernard Fauré, The Rhetoric of Immediacy: A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991). 15. This installation was prepared for the Ginza Graphic Gallery exhibition The Book & the Computer and was paired with works by Koga Hirano of Japan and An San-Su of South Korea. See Xu Bing’s Web site, Xu Bing Studio: http://xubing. com/ShenWaiShen/gallery.html. (Accessed April 15, 2006.) 16. See the “Book from the Sky” at Xu Bing Studio, http://www.xubing.com/ BookFromSky/gallery.html. (Accessed April 15, 2006.) 17. A great deal has been written in both English and Chinese about Xu Bing, including Britta Erickson, The Art of Xu Bing: Words without Meaning, Meaning without Words (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001); Janelle S. Taylor, “Non-Sense in Context: Xu Bing’s Art and Its Publics,” Public Culture 5 (1993): 317–27; Wu Hung, “A ‘Ghost Rebellion’: Notes on Xu Bing’s ‘Nonsense Writing’ and Other Works,” Public Culture 6, no. 2 (Winter 1994); and Stanley K. Abe, “No Questions, No Answers: China and A Book from the Sky,” boundary 2 25, no. 2 (Fall 1998): 47–76. 18. Yu, Journey to the West, vol. 1, 97. 19. Chinese is, in general, an uninflected language, which makes it possible to have a one-to-one correspondence between ideographs and syllabic units; Japanese and Korean, by contrast, are both highly inflected languages, and therefore need to subject the Chinese ideographic system to considerable modification to make it intelligible.

[ 354  ]  carlos rojas 20. The first instance of this term in the text can be found in chapter 3, in which Monkey resorts to the “magic of bodily division” (fenshen fa) to transport a large armory of weapons he has found (Yu, Journey to the West, vol. 1, 101). 21. For instance, the locus classicus for this term is chapter 11, The Emergence of the Treasure Tower, of the Buddhist scripture The Lotus Sutra (precise origins unknown; first translated into Chinese in 255 CE), where it is used to refer to the “various Buddhas who are emanations of my [the Buddha’s] body.” Burton Watson, trans., The Lotus Sutra (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 172. 22. See Carlos Rojas, “Wu Jiwen and the Ruins of Representation,” in Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 5, no. 1 (July 2001): 29–64; and “The Coin of Gender in Pinhua baojian,” in From the Late Ming to the Late Qing: Dynastic Decline and Cultural Innovation, David Der-wei Wang and Shang Wei, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2006), 297–324. 23. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1998), 103. 24. Yu, trans., Journey to the West, vol. 4, 392. 25. Yu, trans., Journey to the West, vol. 4, 393. 26. Sheldon Lu examines a related set of concerns in his book, China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001). 27. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1996).

14 

Seminal Dispersal, Fecal Retention, and Related Narrative Matters: Eileen Chang’s Tale of Roses in the Problematic of Modern Writing Rey Chow

i All students of modern literature are, presumably, familiar with Georg Lukács’s analysis of naturalism and formalism in the essay “Narrate or Describe?” (1936).1 For Lukács, the ascendance of the descriptive over the narrating mode in fictional writing signaled the epochal aesthetic changes that had been occurring in European literature since the mid-nineteenth century. The main cause for such changes was, he writes, capitalism, which was characterized by “objective facts” such as “the domination of capitalist prose over the inner poetry of human experience, the continuous dehumanization of social life, the general debasement of humanity.”2 Instead of the wholeness of composition and depth of character that one finds in the well-plotted novels of Scott, Balzac, and Tolstoy, writers of the bourgeois capitalist era (such as Zola and Flaubert) had become increasingly preoccupied with the tedious accuracy of turning minutiae into lifeless tableaux, in the face of which authors and readers alike were reduced to passive, cynical observers (rather than participants). For all its virtuosity and specialized [ 355  ]

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craftsmanship, therefore, description was the sign, in writing, of a general ideological and social crisis. It is easy to point to the ideological and aesthetic assumptions behind Lukács’s analysis and criticize his readings for their seemingly elitist longing for the writing methods of a bygone era. Indeed, the examples of literary works classified by him as “great art” reveal the obvious biases in his cultural frame of reference. Once this is understood, however, his account remains thought-provoking, not least because it offers a sustained discussion about the vital connections between social necessity and the making of fiction—in what we nowadays would call the politics of style. Embedded in Lukács’s text is a crucial question that has lost none of its relevance even today: How does one see in verbal language? The traditional manner of responding to this question has tended immediately to translate the act of visual perception into something nonperceptual, so that the question becomes “How does one understand in verbal language?” Such a translation “resolves” the problem by stripping sight and visuality of their sensuous dimensions, so that seeing becomes, in effect, a mere metaphor, a convenient stand-in for the idealist, nonperceptual vision called understanding. This typical, metaphorical resolution effectively avoids the complexity of the historical and philosophical questions about sensory experience—such as what is outside and inside the human organism, whether sense impressions are singular or compound, how the senses and memory interact with one another, and so forth. Yet by the same gesture, it also forecloses the possibility of coming to terms with the semiotic status of visual or sensualized descriptions, with the fact that such descriptions are by no means natural or the same as actual physical visual perception itself. Once we refuse this traditional practice of simply de-sensualizing seeing, questions of a different order open up: How does the sense of sight operate in a medium that is not preeminently visual? Indeed, can the sense of sight operate in a medium that is not visual, a medium such as verbal language? Conversely, how does one write visually—how does one narrate (with) visual signs such as images and metaphors? With these questions in mind, it becomes possible to rearticulate Lukács’s concerns in “Narrate or Describe?” as symptomatic of an anxiety over the complicated interconnections between seeing and writing in an era in which the explosion of visual information could no longer be comfortably contained within the artificial limits of the Gutenberg leadtype technology. As Nancy Armstrong points out, the onset of pictorialism Lukács found so deplorable in certain realist novels was the sign that a

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fundamental change was taking place, in mid- to late-nineteenth-century Europe, in the relationship between the codes of visuality and the codes of writing.3 Lukács accurately sensed that the proliferation of visible, material objects that invaded the perceptual field—something he attributed to bourgeois capitalism—had rendered obsolete the well-organized narrating methods that he deemed laudably characteristic of the classic realist novels. Hence the unmistakable tone of mourning in his language: “Narration proportions, description merely levels”; “Description . . . becomes the dominant mode in composition in a period in which, for social reasons, the sense of what is primary in epic construction has been lost. Description is the writer’s substitute for the epic significance that has been lost” (Lukács, 127). “The loss of the narrative interrelationship between objects and their function in concrete human experiences means a loss of artistic significance” (131). “With the loss of the art of narration, details cease to be transmitters of concrete aspects of the action and attain significance independent of the action and of the lives of the characters” (132). We may summarize Lukács’s predicament as follows: being a sensitive and well-trained reader, he discovered the insuppressibility of visual objects in literary writings of the bourgeois age; he even noticed that the narratives of certain authors had become dependent on incorporating the multiplicity of the visual as such, yet in his tone he still clung nostalgically to the idealist notion of seeing-as-understanding. When recast in the medium of vision, his arguments are iconophobic, intent as they are on the necessity to control and repress the increasingly fluid interpenetration between visual and nonvisual systems of signification. For him, the relationship between such systems had to be a hierarchized one: if the visible world looked random and fragmented, it was the writer’s responsibility to coordinate—or subordinate—it in such a manner as to represent a kind of moralaesthetic order. In his mourning of epic proportions, there is a sense that visual data are potentially not only disruptive but usurpatory; their sheer abundance can easily take over the age-old practice of storytelling, turning the latter into a mere documentary produced by a mechanistic camera eye. (“[W]hen description is the dominant technique, . . . writers attempt a vain competition with the visual arts” [Lukács, 138].) Strictly speaking, then, the practice for which Lukács was nostalgic was not simply the classic realist novel per se but more precisely a kind of writing by overlooking: it is only by appropriating and restraining visual attention, his argument implies, that a mastery of narrative perspective can be achieved. Narration, in other words, is ultimately about seeing not with the eyes but with the

[ 358  ]  rey chow

mind. Description, alas, has let the (seemingly) spontaneous function of seeing dominate in such a way as to paralyze the act of narrating, which is now deformed by an overload of observable information.4 Inscribed in Lukács’s impassioned account about fiction writing is thus, first of all, a cluster of overdetermined epistemic issues pertaining to the exact nature of the relationship between abstraction and sensuousness (seeing, in particular). These issues include the enmeshment, in philosophy and literature, of seeing with understanding, and the consequent impossibility of talking about seeing without the idealist baggage; the continual hierarchy by which the act of seeing is trivialized and considered inferior to philosophical or artistic vision; and the difficulty of assessing the precise status of visuality in narration. Add to these the historical situation of bourgeois capitalism, in which the combined forces of commerce, imperialism, technology, and urbanization mean that visuality has become and will continue to be an ever-expanding realm, and we can begin to appreciate the magnitude of the problem at hand. Although Lukács was constrained by his specialization as a reader of philosophy and literature, the alarming and conservative conclusions he drew about the sense of sight, and the desperate attempts he made to reconjure a time when sight could still be disciplined, hidden, or eliminated are in fact not entirely distinguishable from the overall theoretical concerns over vision and modernity that are shared by other major theorists. We think here of Martin Heidegger’s “The Age of the World Picture,”5 Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”6 and, closer to our own time, Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle7 and Paul Virilio’s War and Cinema.8 These theorists write about the hegemony of vision as a result of modern technology,9 the mechanical reproduction of art, the ubiquity of the commodified image, and the strategies of modern warfare with their techniques of precise visual targeting. Such a hegemony has led, in turn, to a profound distrust of vision, and theorists working in advanced industrial nations have accordingly adopted critical approaches that warn about the danger, indeed the untrustworthiness, of vision as both a spontaneous and a coerced phenomenon. To this extent, there are the deconstructionist critics who seek refuge in the negative mediating work of language in order to stave off the alluring immediacy of the visible (something they relegate to the realm of phenomenology), and there are also those who, like Virilio in particular, theorize visuality in such ways as to historicize the political programming and ideological manipulation that structure the preemptive ubiquity of vision.10

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In this larger cultural-theoretical context, what allows Lukács’s discussion to retain its germaneness is his attention to visuality (in the form of descriptive minutiae) as a problematic of writing, specifically of narration. How is one to write, his work asks, in an age dominated by the continual production of visual information, when writing can apparently no longer compete by bringing the visual field under its control? Should writing accommodate visual technologies such as photography, film, television, video, and so forth, adhere to the function of documentation, and become thus the instrument of a straightforward reflectionism? (Though a Marxist, Lukács’s criticism of the propagandist tendencies of socialist realism should be remembered here as consistent with his criticism of reflectionism in general.) Does it still make sense to speak of narration; can stories still be told in light of the preemptive dominance of visuality?11 Despite his claims to historical understanding, Lukács’s elegiac mood made it impossible for him to see the historically transformed relationship between visuality and narration in any terms other than a tragic fall. Nor was it possible, consequently, for him to grasp that alternative manners of narration could be emerging from the ruin of the older assumptions about seeing. What unnerved him, in Nancy Armstrong’s terms, was the new cultural collaboration that was taking shape between the codes of fiction and the codes of visuality in the production of knowledge itself.12 The sense of loss so insisted on by Lukács in his mournful theory may, I believe, be overcome if we turn to another equally well-known argument, Roman Jakobson’s “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances.” Intended primarily as a study of the disturbance of aphasia, Jakobson’s structuralist differentiation between linguistic functions offers a useful means of moving beyond the impasse left by Lukács’s account of the demise of narration. According to Jakobson, each linguistic sign acquires intelligibility by two operations, both of which put the sign in relation to other signs. The two operations, which he designates by the terms metaphor and metonymy, work respectively by way of alternation and by way of combination: “A given significative unit may be replaced by other, more explicit signs of the same code, whereby its general meaning is revealed, while its contextual meaning is determined by its connection with other signs within the same sequence.”13 The metaphoric operation, premised as it is on an internal code of equivalence (or similarity), is usually hidden from the actual utterance, while the metonymic operation, whose principle is that of contiguity (or alignment), is usually detectable in an external or contextual relation of a sign combining with other signs. As

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Jakobson puts it, “[t]he development of a discourse may take place along two different semantic lines: one topic may lead to another either through their similarity or through their contiguity. The metaphoric way would be the most appropriate term for the first case and the metonymic way for the second” (Jakobson, 109–10). Moreover, “[a] competition between both devices, metonymic and metaphoric, is manifest in any symbolic process, be it intrapersonal or social” (113). Extrapolating from Jakobson’s schema, we may argue anew that the crisis of writing elaborated by Lukács is, in effect, an observable moment of historical change in the relationship between the metaphoric and metonymic functions in verbal construction. What Lukács refers to by the term narration—namely, a mode of storytelling in which sensuously and visually perceptible details are “naturally” subsumed under or simply withheld from the actual writing so that a proportioned, commanding vision may emerge—can now be reformulated as a particular politics of style in which the metonymic operation remains the foremost strategy of narrative organization.14 What Lukács calls description, that is, the mode that packs the narrative space with one material detail after another with no end (that is, no proportioned structure) in sight, may now be understood in terms of a new politics of style in which the metaphoric operation (which establishes an equivalence among things—which “levels,” as Lukács writes of the descriptive mode) has seemingly become dominant to the point of overtaking the metonymic. The onset of pictorialism—that is, of a repetitious detailing of visual phenomena—in narration was disturbing, then, because (as Lukács rightly perceived it) an epochal shift in the balance of power between metaphor and metonymy had taken place.

ii For any novelist working in a modern urban setting, some version of these profound questions about the historically changing relationship between abstraction and sensorial perception, between the metaphoric and metonymic functions of writing, would no doubt present itself. One can only speculate that, in a metropolitan environment such as early-twentiethcentury Shanghai, in which the encounters among different cultures and peoples, and the abundance of commodities from foreign lands, were daily affairs, the entire twin problematic of how to see in writing and how to narrate in visuality would only intensify exponentially. In the framework of non-Western modernity, the attempt of a Lukács to look back to tra-

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dition—to Lessing’s Laocoön, for instance, and through Lessing to Homer’s Odyssey (Lukács, 137–38)—in order to trace the genealogy of narrative methods is compounded by a conscious nativizing of tradition itself, a nativizing that is typically accounted for not only by way of the rise of bourgeois capitalism (as in Lukács’s case) but also by way of the invasive and unavoidable presence of the foreign, of Westerners. If we are to follow the socio-aesthetic lead of Lukács’s analysis, it would be necessary, in the case of modern non-Western writings, to supplement his classic Marxist attention to capitalist impact with an equal attention to the impact of that specter generally referred to as the West,15 in order to evaluate historically any politics of style. The literary author I would like next to discuss in some detail is the renowned Chinese woman writer Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing, 1920–1995), who rose to fame in Shanghai during the first half of the 1940s, when the city was occupied by the Japanese. Writing in a culturally transitional period and being well-read not only in her ethnic literary tradition but also in European and American literatures, Chang was no stranger to the ambivalent epistemic possibilities produced by visuality in modernity. If she participated in the fascination with visual spectacles that were generated by capitalist urbanization and commodification—as the colorful descriptions of streets, urban living, fashion, food, and other quotidian details in her writings indicate—she was equally aware of the destructiveness of warfare (through the constant Japanese bombing she experienced as a university student in Hong Kong from 1939 to 1942) and of the ideological coercion enabled by political surveillance machines (see, for instance, her descriptions of life under Chinese communism).16 For precisely the reason that they offer some of the most uncompromised insights into the contradictions of nationalism, patriotism, and modernist enlightenment, her works were, for a long time after 1949, considered politically incorrect, and disappeared from mainland Chinese critics’ attention until the 1980s. Outside China, her fame was restored when her works were endorsed by the male Chinese new critic C. T. Hsia in his book-length appraisal of modern Chinese fiction, the first of its kind to be published in English in the United States in the early 1960s.17 While Chang’s reputation as a writer has since been firmly and irrevocably reestablished, at least among Chinesereading publics, the peculiarities of her writings remain, as ever, resistant to elucidation.18 Chang’s writings, especially her autobiographical and critical essays, contain innumerable references to sensuous pleasures.19 She loved colors,

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the scent of gasoline, the rattle made by trams. She contemplated experiences of reading, looking at art, listening to music, watching dancing—activities that are specifically oriented toward aesthetic enjoyment. But the range of her foci extends considerably beyond the restrictively intellectual and aesthetic spheres to encompass entirely mundane activities such as living in an apartment building, going to the fresh market to shop for her meals, visiting fabric stores simply to admire the colors and patterns on display, and looking at old family photographs. As well, she wrote about personal encounters in her university dormitory, in the hospital where she worked as a nurse, or on the street during wartime in Hong Kong.20 Meanwhile, if Chang’s prose is suffused with references to the material aspects of quotidian living, it never became or attempted to become a theory of aesthetics in that the experiences of sensuousness she so relished were never distilled or abstracted to become philosophical arguments. Instead, Chang remained primarily a fiction writer whose concerns had to do with narrative strategies and constructions. This is not to say, however, that sensuous experiences simply enter her writings in the form of themes. Rather, the point I would like to make is how the sensuous as such can be seen in Chang to bring about certain adjustments in the very conceptualization of narration itself. Obviously, this is a large point, a full-fledged demonstration of which cannot be done in the space of one essay. I will therefore raise some issues through a reading of one fictional text, the short story “Hong meigui yu bai meigui” (“Red Rose and White Rose,” first published in Shanghai in 1944), in the hope that the implications, if valid, can be taken up in a longer study. “Red Rose and White Rose” intrigues me in part because of its explicitly metaphoric associations, as the title itself indicates. It is, for instance, possible to interpret this story by elaborating on the meanings of red, white, and roses, and how they correspond to the two main female characters. What I’d like to argue, nevertheless, is that Chang’s use of such metaphorical elements is indicative of a more interesting effort to juggle the mutually implicating problematics of visuality and narration, of metaphor and metonymy—an effort that cannot, to my mind, be reduced to what the French author and critic Alain Robbe-Grillet in his essay “Nature, Humanism, Tragedy” has perceptively called the “analogical vocabulary of traditional humanism.”21 This point will become clearer in a moment. “Red Rose and White Rose” describes some years in the life of an accomplished young man, Tong Zhenbao. A well-educated “new youth” of the “new China” of the Republican era, Zhenbao had gone to Edinburgh

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for advanced study and recently returned to his hometown Shanghai. He is now a skilled textile engineer at a high-level position in a company financed by foreigners. Before he has his own lodgings, Zhenbao is staying temporarily at the home of a friend, Wang Shiyuan, who has a pretty and flirtatious wife, Jiaorui. While Wang is away on business, Zhenbao and Jiaorui embark on a passionate affair. Jiaorui becomes so seriously in love with Zhenbao that she wants to divorce her husband, but Zhenbao, aware of the bright future that lies ahead of him, has no intention of committing himself to her. In spite of her pleas, he abandons her and soon afterward establishes himself with a well-educated bride from a good family, Meng Yanli, who eventually gives birth to a daughter. (The story actually begins when the daughter is nine years old and “expenses for her college education were already secured.”22) Yanli is the opposite of Jiaorui. Not only is she quiet, skinny, and boring, she also has no interest in sex. If their home is, to all appearances, well-maintained and peaceful, the couple’s relationship is virtually nonexistent except in the form of mutual resentment and suspicion. Zhenbao openly and regularly indulges himself with prostitutes. By chance one day, he meets Jiaorui again on the street trolley. She has remarried, aged, and put on weight, but seems content. As she talks about her life after their separation and tells him that it was he who taught her about love, Zhenbao, overwhelmed by feelings of jealousy and melancholy, begins to cry (Chang, 95–97). His relations with Yanli continue to deteriorate. One day, Zhenbao discovers that she is having an affair with her tailor. He becomes reckless in his womanizing behavior, neglects to give Yanli housekeeping money, and gradually loses his good social reputation. But life goes on. What are the visual images of red rose and white rose doing in Chang’s narrative? They are, we are told from the beginning, the two names Zhenbao gives to the two most important women in his life: “There were two women in Zhenbao’s life. He called one his White Rose and the other his Red Rose. One was the holy and chaste wife, the other was the passionate mistress” (57). Rather than being endowed with their own subjectivities, the women characters are deliberately presented by Chang as objects of a man’s erotic imagination. To this extent, the images serve the function of metaphorizing female sexuality, with red standing for romance, experience, and licentiousness, and white standing for virginity, innocence, propriety, and so on. Yet to follow this line of inquiry would be, first of all, to adopt without questioning Zhenbao’s masculinist perspective. Second, it would be to adopt a habit of interpretation with the assumption that nar-

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rative meanings are a matter of excavating what is hidden in some interior depth beneath the surfaces, the images. Put another way, it would be an analogical manner of reading because it is primarily invested in establishing corresponding or equivalent meanings that are held together within the (visual) metaphors. Whereas in Jakobson’s account, metaphor is simply differentiated structurally as one kind of linguistic function, Robbe-Grillet, paying special attention to the fact that language always produces moral value, offers a provocative critique of metaphoric reasoning in terms of its implication in humanism or anthropomorphism. The gist of Robbe-Grillet’s argument can be glimpsed in the following: A true bridge of souls thrown between man and things, the humanist outlook is preeminently a pledge of solidarity. In the literary realm, the expression of this solidarity appears chiefly as the investigation, worked up into a system, of analogical relations. Metaphor, as a matter of fact, is never an innocent figure of speech. To say that the weather is “capricious” or the mountain “majestic,” to speak of the “heart” of the forest, of a “pitiless” sun, of a village “huddled” in the valley, is, to a certain degree, to furnish clues as to the things themselves: shape, size, situation, etc. But the choice of an analogical vocabulary, however simple, already does something more than account for purely physical data, and what this more is can scarcely be ascribed only to the credit of belles-lettres. The height of the mountain assumes, willy-nilly, a moral value; the heat of the sun becomes the result of an intention. . . . In almost the whole of our contemporary literature, these anthropomorphic analogies are repeated too insistently, too coherently not to reveal an entire metaphysical system. . . . Metaphor, which is supposed to express only a comparison, without any particular motive, actually introduces a subterranean communication, a movement of sympathy (or of antipathy) which is its true raison d’être. (53–54)

For Robbe-Grillet, the principle of equivalence that constitutes the functioning of metaphor is not just a structural differentiation but rather a mechanism of metaphysical value-production: metaphors work by implying that there is a hidden unity between themselves and the things they metaphorize. Because such a hidden unity can only be the result of the participation of human consciousness in the world of things—because, in other words, metaphors are a means of endowing things with human

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attitudes and intentions—metaphoric thinking is ultimately a moralizing process in which what is being affirmed remains human subjectivity. In metaphor, man remains the center of things. Although Robbe-Grillet’s examples are nonvisual ones, his thesis applies with equal pertinence to visual metaphors. Indeed, precisely because images are conventionally theorized in terms of notions such as resemblance and likeness (to reality), RobbeGrillet’s point about the ideological assumption of analogical reasoning becomes arguably the clearest in the case of visual metaphors.23 Returning to Chang’s narrative, we will see that if we simply concentrate on “red rose” and “white rose” as metaphors for the women characters, something crucial will be missed. The polarization of the two terms, Red Rose and White Rose, distracts attention from the fact that the women in Zhenbao’s life are parts of a series of exchangeable, replaceable objects.24 Early on in the narrative, we are told that Zhenbao’s choice of metaphor is inspired by another woman previous to Jiaorui and Yanli, a woman called Meigui, or Rose, whom he had met while he was a student in Britain. A Eurasian whose father was English and whose mother was Cantonese, and an easygoing, carefree girl, Rose would have let Zhenbao do whatever he wished with her sexually. While taking Rose home in his car on the day he was to leave her, he was almost aroused to the point of breaking propriety, but he restrained himself. Having been born poor, having been sent as a “new youth” of China to Britain for an education so he could serve his country, Zhenbao told himself that he had to remember and submit to his higher duty. This episode with Rose left such a deep impression on him that her name has since become the signifier with which he conceives of the women in his life. “Rose,” then, is not simply a name but an objectification of a kind of a primary, unforgettable encounter, the emotion of which is not fulfilled until later. “Rose” cannot be given up and will need to be repeated with variations. Before Rose, there had also been the odorous prostitute in Paris to whom Zhenbao lost his virginity; after Yanli, in Shanghai, there are the “dark” and “plump” prostitutes (93) he favors for the hot sex he cannot enjoy with his wife. Clearly, once this serializing of women is made obvious, it would no longer be sufficient to read “red rose” and “white rose” analogically, as straightforward metaphors corresponding to Jiaorui and Yanli. If roses are metaphors, the femininity they metaphorize is itself another metaphor, one that, moreover, is being multiplied in the form of a repeated and endlessly repeatable phenomenon. This conscious narrative strategy of proliferating metaphors and visual objects is not unlike the tendency toward

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degenerate pictorialism that Lukács finds alarming about the descriptive method. What is thought-provoking here is that Chang does not simply replace narration with description; rather, she reworks narration from within, using the most conventional and stereotypical of metaphors yet assigning to them a decidedly different function from that of an analogical embedding and excavation of deep meanings. In her hands, the metaphoric fantasy attached to women from a masculinist perspective is now staged over time in a steady succession of female appearances, in the form of partial segments. Using Jakobson’s terms, we may say that metaphoric substitutions and repetitions—roses, women— are now actively projected by Chang onto the metonymic axis, the axis of combination that constitutes the narrative movement itself. If, in Zhenbao’s perspective, rose and femininity are a unified and hence infinitely repeatable paradigm—a paradigm that nonetheless receives its meaning from him, the new Chinese man—the actual syntagmatic chain of the narrative, by giving us one imperfect woman after another and never with any sense of wholeness, systematically undermines that unity. The projection of the metaphoric function (of alternation) onto the metonymic axis thus becomes a way of rendering visible, of making explicit—at the level of formal structure—the ideological assumptions that have been condensed in the value-producing mechanism of metaphor, the mechanism that equates rose with a particular woman, then with multiple women, and finally with all of femininity. The scuttling of metaphoric reasoning accounts for the detailed descriptions of the material environments around the women. Topographically, the successive appearances of the women are coordinated through a number of temporary spaces and locations, which further the sense of displacement characteristic of the narration. Zhenbao’s transaction with the prostitute in Paris was conducted in a cheap hotel room. With Rose, intimate physical contact took place inside the cramped space of a car. With Jiaorui, the mutual seduction takes place within her apartment in her husband’s absence (Jiaorui compares her own heart to an apartment building, only to change it to a “newly built detached house” after she falls in love with Zhenbao [74, 80]). Yanli, of course, is the only one with whom sex is conducted within the confines of a permanent home. Finally, with the Shanghai prostitutes, it is back to brothel rooms and rickshaws. The last encounter with Jiaorui happens in the public space of a street trolley. Therefore, although Zhenbao, as the protagonist, occupies the more or less secure position of a man standing in the forefront of the new nation,

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the narration of his story takes us in a rather different direction. Writing with an obvious enthusiasm for the deliciously picturesque kinds of details that Lukács frowns upon, Chang participates in what may be viewed as a major shift in narrative methods, in China as elsewhere, that was the overdetermined outcome of globalist modernity in the twentieth century.25 So far, I have pinpointed this shift in formal, comparative terms by drawing on the literary theories of Lukács, Jakobson, and Robbe-Grillet. While Lukács’s concern with pictorialism helps lay out the problematic of modern writing, Jakobson’s structuralist arguments have assisted with explaining the astute displacement of the alternating function of the metaphoric mode onto the metonymic in “Red Rose and White Rose,” and Robbe-Grillet’s critique of metaphor’s anthropomorphic assumptions has served to foreground the satiric, anti-masculinist implications of Chang’s narration. However, the nuance of Chang’s text is far from being exhausted by these literary-theoretical explanations; it demands further elaboration by way of a more explicitly sociological focus.

iii The metonymized objectifications of the women characters in “Red Rose and White Rose” are a remarkable way of dramatizing the issue of cultural dislocation at a point in Chinese history when contacts with foreign peoples and things have made it necessary more than ever to reimagine what it means to be “Chinese.” In the story, such contacts with the foreign are made explicit from the beginning. Not only are the events located in Shanghai, which, during the first half of the twentieth century and prior to the ascendancy of Hong Kong, had been the most Westernized Chinese city; we are also told that Zhenbao once studied abroad and is now hired by a firm financed by foreigners. But although Zhenbao has clearly crossed cultures as a kind of cosmopolitan man, his behavior is that of a character who has absorbed foreign wisdom in order to apply it to national selfstrengthening back home. Similarly, although sexual adventures take him in and out of his own culture (he had sex with a Paris prostitute and later with Shanghai prostitutes), and in and out of the propriety of civilized society (he had sex with a friend’s wife and then with his own wife), there is never a doubt that he remains firmly Chinese—and a respectable member of the new Chinese society at that. Even during an age when “[s]emen,” to cite Frank Dikötter’s perceptive observation about the scientific thinking on sexuality in Republican China, “was a form of capital which had to be

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carefully managed in the interests of the nation and future generations,”26 Zhenbao’s transcultural seminal dispersal, like his transcultural academic endeavor, is never allowed to challenge the authenticity of his cultural and national status. In more than one sense of the phrase, here is a man who is free to go in and out of places (countries, female bodies) without endangering his sense of who he is. From the beginning, he is described as “a modern Chinese person who has come closest to the ideal” (57), and, as the ending of the novel comments, whatever has happened, “Zhenbao woke up the next morning, changed his bad behavior, and once again became a good man” (108). The West, insofar as it is a recurrent spectral presence in modern Chinese writing, appears here in the manners in which the women characters are described in contrast to Zhenbao. From his perspective, the prostitutes, of course, are beneath mention—they are women who have long crossed the boundary of propriety to become social outcasts and untouchables. But consider Rose, a Eurasian who is also considered a huaqiao, an overseas Chinese. In her case there is the suggestion that her sexual looseness—her willingness to engage in sexual activities before marriage—has something to do with the fact that she is, somehow, not genuinely Chinese. In the case of a woman, then, the crossing of one kind of boundary renders her suspect in regard to all other boundaries; sexuality, nationality, and cultural identity are thus inextricably imbricated with one another—so much so that they become ways to interpret one another.27 This is similar in the case of Jiaorui. A huaqiao from Singapore, she had been sent to England by her family for further studies, but really in order to find a husband. In the scene in which Zhenbao first meets her, her attempt to show him her own name in Chinese triggers comments from her husband that are repeatedly studded with the distinction between an “us” and a “them”: “Tamen huaqiao” (“They overseas Chinese”) (69). Throughout Jiaorui’s seduction of Zhenbao, multiple sensuous and material details are provided to suggest her cultural impurity—that is, her inauthenticity as a proper Chinese lady. When she is introduced to Zhenbao, for instance, she has just emerged from a shower with her wet hair wrapped inside a towel. As she shakes his hand, he realizes that hers still has soap on it. She likes peanut butter, coffee, and Western confection; she plays the piano; she has boyfriends in her husband’s absence; she is experienced and passionate in bed. While such a hybridized female object is exotic and erotically exciting to be sure, she is not marriage material for our new Chinese man “poised at the threshold of the world” (58).

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Conscious of his humble class origins and of the fragility of what he has earned through hard work (86), Zhenbao is determined to “create a ‘correct’ world which he can carry with him,” and in which “he will be the absolute master” (61). His resolution on the sexual front is that he will marry an authentic, virginal Chinese woman, who still holds herself and, by implication, her culture, intact. Yanli’s frigidity can thus be seen as a suggestion precisely of her “integrity,” her refusal to let herself cross that important boundary into the terrifying reality of physical and psychological maturity. But it is not enough to portray her as a sexually frigid wife. In one of the most visually striking passages in modern Chinese fiction, Chang describes Yanli as being constipated and preoccupied with her own obstructed bowel movement: Yanli became sick with constipation, and had to sit in the bathroom for several hours every day. Only during that time could she justifiably do nothing, say nothing, think nothing. The rest of the time she also said nothing and thought nothing, but then she was still a little anxious and would feel the need to walk about, albeit without a purpose. Only in the bathroom during daylight did she feel secure, rooted. She lowered her head to look at her snow-white belly, so pure and so white—sometimes it stuck out a little, sometimes it caved in. The look of the belly button kept changing too—sometimes it was the sweet, clean, and expressionless eye of a Greek statue; sometimes it was a bulging angry eye; sometimes it was the eye of some satanic idol. There was a dangerous smile in the eye, but still it was lovely, with its corners bending, giving shape to some crow’s feet. Zhenbao took Yanli to a doctor, and bought her some medication according to the newspaper advertisements. Then he saw that she was not entirely enthusiastic about getting well; it was as if she wanted to keep this sickness around for the sake of self-respect. So he no longer cared. (101)

Read against Lukács’s criteria, this image of Yanli unable to defecate is a perfect example of precisely the representational mayhem triggered by the descriptive method: once the epic sense of proportions is lost, any kind of minutia, even that which used to be aesthetically off limits, becomes admissible into the frame of narration. From Lukács’s standpoint, Chang’s narrative resembles rather an indiscriminate camera’s eye, thrusting before us in a matter-of-fact manner embarrassing pieces of information that an old-fashioned artist would certainly have suspended from view.

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One way of countering Lukács, naturally, would be by arguing and reasserting the metaphorical profundity of the distasteful image. Accordingly, “White Rose” sitting on the toilet, literally holding everything inside herself and looking at herself in this lily-white condition, can be seen as a visual metaphor of the ambivalence of what it means to be Chinese in modernity: Should one let go of the shit inside and become liberated, or should one hold onto that shit like a sacred treasure, one that is fiercely guarded by the eye of some mysterious idol? Being Chinese—is it a source of inconvenience and inferiority, or a source of pride and superiority?28 Significantly, this image of narcissistic excrement-retention is superimposed upon that of domestic femininity. The woman at home is thus the one who embodies or epitomizes the purity of that cultural essence called China, in contrast to the licentious ones, like Rose, Jiaorui, or the Shanghai prostitutes, who have, exactly like Zhenbao, transgressed cultural and sexual boundaries. In this light, the final ironic twist to this tale of roses is, of course, that the constipated Chinese lady herself, too, is committing adultery right under her husband’s roof, with her tailor. In the terms of our argument, however, the image of a viscerally selfcontained “White Rose” does not stop at being a metaphor for a profound truth about China. Something has happened to the operation of metaphorizing itself in Chang’s description. Placed in tandem with the woman and the place that are supposed to be Zhenbao’s home (with its imperative of biological reproduction and participation in national self-strengthening), this image is strapped onto the idealist, masculinist projections of a new China like an enormous prosthesis, an unexpected and vulgar extension. If, as Robbe-Grillet argues, metaphoric thinking is ultimately invested in a kind of metaphysical unity between man and things, a unity that receives its efficacy through the belief in interiority and depth rather than in surfaces, such a unity is resolutely circumvented in Chang’s narration. For one thing, there is, narratologically speaking, no need for such a description of Yanli to be in the story at all, yet Chang would go on to append yet another related passage: Under the light [in the bathroom], Yanli’s color was her own pale yellow. Of course, paintings of pretty women throughout the ages had never adopted such an embarrassing theme: there she was, lifting her pants, bending, about to get up [from the toilet]. Her hair was falling over her face. She had already changed into her pajamas with a white background dotted with small flowers. The top was raised pretty high,

seminal dispersal, fecal retention  [ 371  ] with half of it tucked under her chin; the pants were heaped cumbersomely around her feet. In the middle one could see the segment of a body that looked like a white silkworm. In the United States, this sight would probably have made a fine commercial for toilet paper. (104)

The effect of these images is not exactly that of the pathos of the ordinary. Rather, by deliberately exposing a character in such undignified moments, these images are unmistakably aggressive, making it difficult for us to be sentimental about her. In describing Yanli in these superfluous sensuous details, Chang has not, I would contend, so much made use of visual metaphors to project deeper meanings as she has made visible, through the most ungainly kind of pictorialism, the limits of metaphorizing itself—in the form of a physical blockage, a pathological self-absorption, and a rooted resistance to change. Strictly speaking, therefore, White Rose’s constipation stands both as a metaphor and an absurdist banalizing of metaphor: the idealist vision/understanding of the ambivalence of being Chinese (as mentioned in the previous paragraph), arguably still the outcome of metaphoric reasoning, is in these images mercilessly materialized into the sordid sight of a married woman bored out of her mind, gazing at her own navel while sitting on the toilet, or of her in the awkward position of having just finished her business and in the process of getting up, her pants still around her ankles. By ignoring the decorum of visual restraint and releasing the descriptive data around Yanli’s bathroom rituals, Chang makes it impossible for the metaphor of “White Rose” to stay in place as metaphor. Instead, the congruence of metaphoric reasoning itself is now metonymically derailed into something quite alien from its principle of speleological equivalence. The purity of “White Rose” turns out to be no more—and no deeper—than a case of stopped-up interiority. In concentrating on what they perceive to be matters of language and writing, none of the theories of Lukács, Jakobson, and Robbe-Grillet is particularly concerned with women, but read together their analyses serve to articulate a modernist problematic around visuality and writing, which can also be clarified in terms of the problematic of metaphor and metonymy. From this it is but another step to realize how women, on account of their frequently metaphoric positions in representation yet continually liminal positions in societies East and West, must somehow also be (already) present in the implications of these theories, the silence of our male theorists notwithstanding. In Chang’s short story we find a salient instance of how women, by being staged narratively as the sensuous objects that seemingly

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stand in the way of a classical dramatic action/ vision, have brought about a revamping of the balance of power between metaphor and metonymy, and thus a reconceptualization of the practice of narration from within. The cultural and linguistic belittling and demeaning of those who are in diaspora—those who, for historical reasons, are compelled to leave home and whose ties with the authentic fatherland have become suspect because of contacts and couplings with foreigners—is something familiar to diasporic communities around the world, but in “Red Rose and White Rose” this sociological fact is explored specifically in relation to the narrative descriptions of femininity and sexuality. If the endless debates about what is authentically Chinese (value) and what is not—debates that undoubtedly have their equivalents in other cultures—are characteristic of the histories of diasporic populations in modern times, these debates are given a new turn in Chang’s story by being linked, by being contiguously placed in relation to sexism; it is sexism, her story demonstrates, which constitutes the core of cultural authenticity, loyalty, and patriotism—and gives them their metaphoric depths. Such sexism makes women the visible bearers of cultural and sexual boundaries, bearers whose transgressions matter, while the equivalent transgressions of men continue to be overlooked. As in Lukács’s theory about narration in classical times, the possibility of a proportioned, hierarchical vision is achieved at the expense of subordinating certain unruly, unwieldy material phenomena. In the narration that is the tale of conventional sexual mores, these often turn out to be women. The vivid descriptions of women in Chang’s fiction thus stand as a narratological device of coming to terms with the fraught relationship between seeing and writing, a relationship whose ambiguities are clearly part and parcel of the encounter between the Chinese and Western cultures. Although, even in light of Robbe-Grillet’s stringent critique, readers will probably never be able to give up reading such descriptions of women metaphorically,29 it would seem appropriate now to redefine even the most irresistible of such metaphors in Chang instead as unfinished, untotalizable fragments of an ongoing writing of modernity, in which the proliferation of femininity in objectified forms, together with the innumerable sensuous details elsewhere in her work, is symptomatic of her subtle and original endeavor to reshape and reinvent the politics of narrative. In Chang’s narration, women are placed not exactly as metaphors but more precisely as prosthetic installments of a picture-story ever in progress. Their objectified materiality can no longer be “overlooked” and subordinated as in Lukács’s theory; instead, these women-objects are now constitutive of a kind of nar-

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rative motion that specializes in the systematic unfolding of differences between, as well as within, cultures. Chang’s dislodgment of metaphors may finally also be seen as a rejection of the sympathetic reasoning that, as Robbe-Grillet writes, always refers back to human beings as the consummate subjects. Against the backdrop of the revolutionary and nation-building rhetoric of her age, she has narrated a world with bright and colorful images that turn out to be glossy, slippery surfaces that neither serve as repositories of human sympathy nor encourage any kind of humanistic solidarity. This, a non-Western woman author’s consistent defiance and (a)voiding, through writing, of the euphoric sentiments of anthropomorphism is, to say the least, evocative, and it will likely remain a point of controversy in Chang’s enduring fascination for her readers.30

notes The translations of Eileen Chang’s texts in this essay are my own. I would like to thank Elizabeth Weed for her helpful comments and suggestions. 1. Georg Lukács, “Narrate or Describe?” Writer and Critic and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Arthur D. Kahn (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1970), 110–48. For related interest, see also the following works by Lukács: The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin, 1962); Studies in European Realism, trans. Edith Bone (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964); and A Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972). 2. Lukács, “Narrate or Describe?” 127. Hereafter cited in the text as Lukács. 3. Armstrong argues that photography was at the forefront of this new relationship, which mediated the problematic of literary realism in the nineteenth century and beyond. See also the discussions in her book of Lukács’s work: Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). 4. The assumption that the visual is “spontaneous” is of course part of the ideology underlying Lukács’s biases. See Martin Jay, “Photounrealism,” in Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), also published as “Photo-unrealism: The Contribution of the Camera to the Crisis of Ocularcentrism” in Vision and Textuality, ed. Stephen Melville and Bill Readings (London: Macmillan, 1995), 344-60, for a discussion of how the sense of the real produced by the camera was coded and how such realism paradoxically led to a distrust of the human eye; see Armstrong for a related argument, namely, that after the mid-nineteenth century, visuality as such and its so-called realist effects are already parts of a new system of intelligibility with which fiction writers have to come to terms. Alain Robbe-Grillet’s very different argument about description in the essay “Time

[ 374  ]  rey chow and Description in Fiction Today” (1963) is illuminating also: “The place and the role of description have changed completely. While the preoccupations of a descriptive order were invading the entire novel, they were at the same time losing their traditional meaning. Preliminary definitions are no longer in question. Description once served to situate the chief contours of a setting, then to cast light on some of its particularly revealing elements; it no longer mentions anything except insignificant objects, or objects which it is concerned to make so. It once claimed to reproduce a pre-existing reality; it now asserts its creative function. Finally, it once made us see things, now it seems to destroy them, as if its intention to discuss them aimed only at blurring their contours, at making them incomprehensible, at causing them to disappear altogether” (For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, trans. Richard Howard [1963; repr., New York: Grove, 1965], 147). 5. Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Colophon, 1977), 115–54. 6. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 217–67. 7. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Red and Black, 1970). 8. Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1989). 9. This phrase is taken from the title of a collection of essays on philosophy and visuality; see David Michael Levin, ed., Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 10. For an extended argument about the widespread turn against ocularcentrism in twentieth-century French theory, see Jay, Downcast Eyes. 11. In this respect, Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller” is comparable to Lukács’s work in its nostalgic exploration of the art of storytelling, which Benjamin contrasts with what he calls information (that is, journalism). “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 83–109. 12. Benjamin’s work on Charles Baudelaire in the era of high capitalism may be understood in light of this new cultural collaboration. See the essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, 155–200. 13. Roman Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances, ” in Language and Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (1956; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), 99–100. Hereafter cited in the text as Jakobson. 14. Jakobson makes the interesting observation that “[t]he primacy of the metaphoric process in the literary schools of Romanticism and Symbolism has been repeatedly acknowledged, but it is still insufficiently realized that it is the predominance of metonymy which underlies and actually predetermines the socalled Realist trend.” Even more interesting is the fact that although Jakobson,

seminal dispersal, fecal retention  [ 375  ] like Lukács, associates the realist trend of writing with a major author such as Tolstoy, his reading of Tolstoy’s handling of visual details is significantly different from Lukács’s: “Following the path of contiguous relationships, the Realist author metonymically digresses from the plot to the atmosphere and from the characters to the setting in space and time. He is fond of synecdochic details. In the scene of Anna Karenina’s suicide Tolstoy’s artistic attention is focused on the heroine’s handbag; and in War and Peace the synedoches ‘hair on the upper lip’ and ‘bare shoulders’ are used by the same writer to stand for the female characters to whom these features belong” (Jakobson, 111; my emphasis). 15. An ethnographic footnote needs to be made here of the fact that foreigners, especially Westerners, are literally referred to as “ghosts” in Chinese because they are considered to be outside the bounds of human civilization. 16. See the essays on Hong Kong during the war in Liuyan (1945; repr., Taipei: Crown, 1968) and Zhang kan (Taipei: Crown, 1976), and the novels Yangge (1954; repr. Taipei: Crown, 1968) / The Rice Sprout Song (New York: Scribner’s, 1955); and Chi di zhi lian (Taipei: Huilong wenhua, 1954). 17. C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 2nd ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1971). Like many of his generation who had migrated from mainland China to Taiwan and then to the United States, Hsia was anticommunist in political convictions and, as a literary critic, associated the greatness of art with timeless, universalist, humanistic values. Although it offers some subtle readings of Chang’s texts, his critical language remains quite blind to its own ideological assumptions. 18. Since Chang’s death in 1995, a considerable number of publications on her life and works have appeared. In 1996, a large-scale international conference on Chang was held under the auspices of the China Times in Taipei. This was an extremely rare, perhaps unprecedented, event for a Chinese woman writer. During the same period, the University of California Press reissued two of Chang’s novels that had been published in English in the 1950s and the 1960s—The Rice Sprout Song (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) and The Rouge of the North (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), both with forewords by David Der-wei Wang. 19. For an informative discussion, see Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 267–303. 20. See the many discussions of these and other topics in the collections Liu yan, Zhang kan, and Duizhao ji – kan lao zhaoxiang bu (Hong Kong: Crown, 1994). 21. Alain Robbe-Grillet, “Nature, Humanism, Tragedy,” in For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, trans. Richard Howard (1963; repr., New York: Grove, 1965), 72. 22. Chang, “Hong meigui yu bai meigui” [“Red Rose and White Rose”], in Zhang Ailing duanpian xiaoshuo ji (1944; repr., Taipei: Crown, 1968), 57. Hereafter cited in the text as Chang. 23. For an illuminating discussion of the thorough reconceptualizing of visuality,

[ 376  ]  rey chow space, time, and language in Robbe-Grillet’s writings, in particular in his fiction, see Roland Barthes, “Objective Literature: Alain Robbe-Grillet” (originally published in French in 1954 and in English in 1958), in Two Novels by Robbe-Grillet: Jealousy & In the Labyrinth, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove, 1965), 11–25. 24. See Lin for the argument that if modernization in early-twentieth-century China was in part motivated by resistance toward Western and Japanese colonialism, such an anti-colonialist project is, in Chang’s story, based ironically on the colonization of women (202). Lin also offers a discussion of the narrative of the Hong Kong film Red Rose and White Rose (1994), which was adapted from Chang’s story and directed by Stanley Kwan. Wenqi Lin, “Houxiandai de fengge, houzhimin de xianggang: Guan Jinpang dianyingzhong de nüxing yu (fan) guojia yuyan,” in Identity, Difference and Subjectivity: From Feminism to Post-Colonial Imagination, ed. Jian Yingying (Taipei: Lixu wenhua, 1997), 173–216. 25. For more discussions of the historical changes in twentieth-century Chinese fictional writing (discussions that involve multiple authors, men and women), see Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), chapters 2, 3, and 4. 26. Frank Dikötter, Sex, Culture, and Modernity in China: Medical Science and the Construction of Sexual Identities in the Early Republican Period (London: Hurst and Co., 1995), 171. 27. For a more detailed theoretical argument about women as bearers of cultural boundaries, see Rey Chow, “The Politics of Admittance: Female Sexual Agency, Miscegenation, and the Formation of Community in Frantz Fanon,” in Ethics after Idealism: Theory-Culture-Ethnicity-Reading (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). 28. This ambivalent value status of being Chinese is found throughout “Red Rose and White Rose.” For instance, when Zhenbao and Jiaorui run into Mrs. Ashe, a friend of Zhenbao’s, one day, we read the following description: “Being from England herself, Mrs. Ashe was married to someone of mixed blood. Because of that she went out of her way to be English. . . . Going to England was ‘going home,’ even though her husband had been born in China and was the third generation of his family to live there; even though her own last relative in England had already died” (84). 29. Jakobson offers a succinct explanation for this tendency toward metaphor in interpretation: “Similarity in meaning connects the symbols of a metalanguage with the symbols of the language referred to. Similarity connects a metaphorical term with the term for which it is substituted. Consequently, when constructing a metalanguage to interpret tropes, the researcher possesses more homogeneous means to handle metaphor, whereas metonymy, based on a different principle, easily defies interpretation” (113). 30. The exhibitionistic self-portrayals Chang offers in her autobiographical writ-

seminal dispersal, fecal retention  [ 377  ] ings—self-portrayals that show her as a mercenary, petty, and unkind woman who was socially inept and who loved lowbrow entertainment—are especially interesting in this light. A substantive discussion of this point will have to be offered in another essay.

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Contributors

Timothy Billings is associate professor of English literature at Middlebury College, where he specializes in Shakespeare, early modern literary studies, and the representation of China in early modern European texts. He is coeditor of a translation and critical edition of the French and Chinese poetry of Stèles by Victor Segalen. Christopher Bush is assistant professor of French literature at Northwestern University, where he teaches modern French and comparative literature. He has published in Representations, Comparative Literature, and Comparative Literature Studies, and is co-editor, with Timothy Billings, of a translation and critical edition of Victor Segalen’s Stèles (2007). Rey Chow is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown University, where she holds appointments in Comparative Literature, English, and Modern Culture and Media. The books she has authored include Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films (2007); The Age of the World Target (2006); The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (2002); Ethics after Idealism (1998); and Primitive Passions (1995), which received the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association. Danielle Glassmeyer is assistant professor in the Department of English at Bradley University.  She studies gendered discourses that underwrite representations of the “third world” in twentieth-century American literature and culture. [ 379  ]

[ 380  ]  contributors

Eric Hayot is associate professor of comparative literature at the Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel quel (2004) and the co-editor of The EverQuest Reader (2007); his essays have appeared in Representations, Contemporary Literature, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, PMLA, and Comparative Literature, among others; and he is a regular contributor to the online blogzine Printculture. Timothy Kendall is the 2007 Australian Parliamentary Fellow and is working on a project examining the relationship between the Australian Parliament and the People’s Republic of China. He holds a PhD in literary and cultural studies and is the author of Ways of Seeing China: From Yellow Peril to Shangrila. Walter S. H. Lim is associate professor of English literature at the National University of Singapore. He is author of The Arts of Empire: The Poetics of Colonialism from Ralegh to Milton and John Milton, Radical Politics, and Biblical Republicanism. Lucien Miller is professor emeritus of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he specialized in East–West literary relations. His books include South of the Clouds: Yunnan Tales, The Masks of Fiction in the Dream of the Red Chamber, and Exiles at Home: Stories by Ch’en Ying-chen. He is a Catholic deacon whose ministry includes Jewish–Catholic dialogue and Asian religious encounter. David Porter is associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Michigan. He is author of Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe and numerous articles on the reception of the Chinese style in eighteenth-century England. Carlos Rojas is assistant professor of modern Chinese literature and film at the University of Florida. His interests include issues of visuality and corporeality from a transcultural perspective. He is coeditor (with David Der-wei Wang) of Writing Taiwan: A New Literary History. Haun Saussy is Bird White Housum professor of comparative literature and East Asian languages and literatures at Yale University. He is author

contributors  [ 381  ]

of The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic and Great Walls of Discourse, editor of Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization, and has published numerous articles. Steven J. Venturino is adjunct professor of English at Loyola University Chicago. He is the author of several articles, and the editor of Contemporary Tibetan Literary Studies: Proceedings of the Tenth Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, 2003. Henk Vynckier is associate professor of foreign languages and literature at Tunghai University in Taichung, Taiwan. He has published on medieval literature, women writers, and the literature of travel and adventure. Steven G. Yao is the author of Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender, Politics, Language (2002) and an associate professor of English at Hamilton College, where he teaches Anglo-American modernism, translation history and theory, and Asian American literature. His essays on Asian American literature have appeared in Textual Practice, LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, and Representations. Currently, he is completing a book-length study of Chinese American poetry entitled Foreign Accents: Chinese American Verse and the Counter-Poetics of Difference in the U.S., 1910–Present, which has earned fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center and the American Council of Learned Societies.