MCLC: Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City review

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Lucas Klein <LRKlein at cityu.edu.hk>
Subject: Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City review
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Source: Rain Taxi (Winter 2013):
http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2012winter/dung.php

Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City Dung Kai-cheung Translated by
Dung Kai-cheung, Anders Hansson, and Bonnie S. McDougall Columbia
University Press ($24.50) by Lucas Klein

"No one, wise Kublai,” says Marco Polo in Italo Calvino’s Invisible
Cities, “knows better than you that the city must never be confused with
the words that describe it.” In Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary
City, Hong Kong’s Dung Kai-cheung writes, “All places are misplaces, and
all misplaces are misreadings,” and “The prerequisite for the setting of
boundaries on maps is possession of the power to create fiction.”

Calvino’s Invisible Cities has Marco Polo telling Chinese emperor Kublai
Khan of the fabulous and fantastical cities he has visited, all named
after women, like the idealized Venice (Venus) from which he hails. Dung’s
Atlas, meanwhile, tells only of Victoria, a city named after a queen and,
coincidentally, the ur-name of central Hong Kong. Coincidentally, because
in line with Marco Polo’s admonition not to confuse the city with its
verbal representation, despite any resemblance between actual Hong Kong
and the city Atlas describes, its placement is misplaced and its maps are
inscribed with the power of fiction: historical details mix with the
made-up, and fact and the factitious blend in its pages.

Calvino, along with Borges, Barthes, Eco, and Sebald, appears throughout
Atlas—on the back cover, in its pages, and in Bonnie McDougall’s excellent
introduction (as well as in other works by Dung: he titled another book of
fiction Visible Cities) —but these forerunners of international
postmodernism do not strip away the novel’s locality. Not only has
localism, in the form of essay-like entries on maps of old Hong Kong, “not
been a barrier to international appeal,” as McDougall writes, its
exploration of the multi-cultural and trans-lingual identity of the former
territory keep it engaged at once with questions of defining what is
Chinese against the international circuit and with defining Hong Kong
against the larger foil of Chineseness. The fact that Atlas was first
published in 1997, the year the territory was “handed over” from United
Kingdom to People’s Republic rule, adds historical anxiety to the impetus
compelling the novel.

As Calvino writes of one invisible city, “Of all the changes of language a
traveler in distant lands must face, none equals that which awaits him in
the city of Hypatia, because the change regards not words, but things.”
This anxiety can be felt in Dung Kai-cheung’s language itself, as each
section begins with a title in Chinese and its English translation. To
negotiate these and other instances of the book’s bilingualism tests the
translation, completed by Dung with McDougall and her husband, Anders
Hansson, as certain of the English titles do not adhere to their
conventional English usages; the first paragraph of the section titled
“Commonplace” reads, for instance:

When we study ancient maps, we find repeatedly that places with the same
name appear in different forms. These places lumped together under one
name are not in fact the same place but common places. Although they are
not the same place, they have something in common. This is how the term
“commonplace” is defined.

Not a commonplace definition of “commonplace”! The fact that Dung,
Hansson, and McDougall manage such moments successfully attests to the
brilliance of their translation. Bringing instances of foreignized,
displaced English into their lucid, fluid prose, they represent the
rhythms of Dung’s original as they mirror the tension between official
English, written Chinese, and colloquial Cantonese in Hong Kong, as well
as that between the discourse of fiction and the lexicon of critical
theory.

The divide between theory and literature sets off Atlas: its first of four
sections, “Theory,” contains subheadings such as “Counterplace,”
“Displace,” “Subtopia,” and “Omnitopia,” describing maps that meditate in
metafiction on the relationship between depiction—whether via mapmaking or
writing—and the thing itself. “Yet when for whatever reason you acquire or
lose a map through an act of transfer,” we read in “Transtopia,” “you may
not be sure of what is being handed over, whether it is the place itself
or its sovereignty, knowledge, fantasy, or memory.” The following section
of The Atlas, “The City,” gives a historical underpinning of memory to the
previous theoretical fantasies, yet these underpinnings are susceptible to
their own undertow: “Mirage: City in the Sea” begins, “The legendary city
of Victoria was, like Venus [and like Venice], born from the waves of the
sea,” but ends,

from then on, the small island was officially called Hong Kong, and with
the exception of the continuous development of the city on its northern
coast, the name, shape, and position of the island remained unchanged
until recent speculations about its resubmergence. So if map readers today
attempt to unearth the remains of the city of Victoria in the vast ocean
of maps, what they are after might possibly be to perpetuate a love story
born of imagination.

The next section, “Streets,” takes the question of the relationship
between the object and its name further, with a series of
stranger-than-fiction anecdotes about, for instance, a company on Ice
House Street (“snow factory street,” in Chinese) producing snow for
expatriates; or how differences in the availability of produce in summer
and winter caused a street’s seasonal name change, causing delays in the
neighborhood postal system. In “Signs,” the final section, Atlas’s
structuralist poetics takes the turn towards cultural criticism in the
present, even beyond what seems plausible for a book published in the late
 ’90s: “The Tomb of Signs” describes how

Digital maps, compared with the great quantity of maps produced as
material objects, demolish the mythology of maps to an even more advanced
extent . . . On the one hand, maps were a tool of political control at the
exclusive disposal of the emperor, while on the other hand as unique
material objects in themselves they were symbols of power.

“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears,” Calvino writes,
“even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd,
their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”
Victoria, a displaced commonplace for colonial Hong Kong, likewise
operates via deceitful rules and absurd perspectives. Exposing its secret
thread of discourse, Atlas does not shrug, it reveals the structure
beneath the city’s desires and fears, allowing for—even reveling in—the
confusion between the city and its description Marco Polo warned about,
but knew could not be avoided.