MCLC: China, middlebrow to highbrow

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Eric Hayot <ehayot at psu.edu>
Subject: China, middlebrow to highbrow
*******************************************************

I’d like to draw the group’s attention to my review of four recent novels
on/about/from China (two from the US, one from HK, one from the PRC),
which appears in Public Books.

Eric

=======================================================
 

Source: Public Books (1/14/13):
http://publicbooks.org/fiction/china-middlebrow-to-highbrow

CHINA, MIDDLEBROW TO HIGHBROW
By ERIC HAYOT 

January 14, 2013 — Fiction has more than one way of distancing itself from
the real. In most cases this distance serves as a prelude to a future
homecoming. The story, like some interstellar traveler, flings itself
around the gravity well of a larger and more distant planetary object (the
fictional) in order to assure the speed and accuracy of its return to the
space that domesticates it (the real).

How that happens depends on genre. Take satire. For satire it is the
distance from the plausible, the truth stretched—but to a limit—that
allows the reader to grasp the fictionality of the situation the novel
gives us, and also to see how that fictionality boomerangs back to the
possibility of critique. Yes, the situation was ridiculous. But was it
really so ridiculous? That second thought, which lets absurdity reveal, by
contrast, a truth inside the realism from which it had seemed to depart,
makes satire a political genre. Similarly with melodrama, though we do not
often think of it as political. In melodrama, the intensification of
emotional density produces an excess beyond realism. Yes, the emotion was
over the top. But was it really too much? The second thought, again,
layers excess across the real.

Realism is not, therefore, and in the way we usually think of it, a school
or a style; it is a touchstone for all genres, the perspective through
which they aim to understand their world, or to change it.

None of this has especially much to do with China. Nonetheless it prepares
us to see the ways in which these four novels—two satires, one melodrama,
and one modernist pseudo-documentary—might all be grasped as part of the
contemporary social call to understand China, to see it clearly, to name
or frame it, to place it in relation to local or global politics, or to
locate it inside recent or universal world history. In the last decade
economic historians like Bin Wong and Kenneth Pomeranz have demonstrated
that the Chinese economy dominated the planet from about 500 to 1500 CE,
creating the world’s first global economic system. The possibility of
China’s return to that position of dominance—and here I ask all readers to
call up a mental image of a sleeping dragon awakening—is what has folks on
both sides of the Pacific trembling, in fear or glee, for the “Chinese
century” to succeed the American one. “China” is thus one of the names of
the global future as we imagine it.

China is also, therefore, an intellectual and social problem, for
everyone. What is China to us today—assuming the “us” includes (and how
could it not?) the wide variety of people who think of themselves as
“Chinese”? What kind of place is it? What must we know to comprehend its
nature (if it has one)? What would it mean to recognize ourselves (again,
the first person plural includes the Chinese) as people who want to know
what China is, and who are willing to work hard, as authors and as
readers, to understand it? How will such an understanding return us, like
fiction, to a new vision of the world we have known until now?

These questions are too important to be left to the Chicken Littles and
überpatriots on both sides who anticipate them being answered by military
action, trade wars, or mutual exchange and indoctrination via soft power.
And though literature usually leaves these questions aside, at the end of
the day all novelists are Balzacs, and their work opens relentlessly into
the larger historical scene, for which art serves as an inevitable proxy
and figure. One of the functions of the literary is to provide a screen
for the real; literature is a shadow box through which one watches the
eclipse. Fiction’s answers are for this reason always partial. This is a
feature, not a bug, of the aesthetic.

What kind of question is asked, and answered, in Gail Tsukiyama’s A
Hundred Flowers? The book feels about a decade late to the history of US
literature on the Cultural Revolution (two decades if you count the “scar
literature” trend in Chinese). Set in 1958, shortly after the demise of
Mao Zedong’s “Hundred Flowers” campaign, the novel follows the story of
the Wei family, whose father has been put in jail for writing a subversive
letter to the government. Told mostly from the perspective of the family’s
young son, Tao, the novel alternates sections focused on several other
major characters, including the mother, the family’s paternal grandfather,
and a homeless, pregnant woman who is eventually taken in by the Weis.

The novel shares its take on the era of Chinese communism with almost
everything ever written by Anchee Min, with some of Ha Jin’s work, and
indeed with the general trend in Asian American literature to make
historical trauma abroad a figure for the status of Asian Americans in the
United States. Tsukiyama is not an especially political or academic
author, which means that the melodrama and slow sailing of the plot as it
veers into minor crisis after minor crisis (none of which amounts to much
more, finally, than a question of elegiac tone) produce a fairly generic
critique of the People’s Republic. We learn that totalitarianism is bad,
and that family matters. Anchoring the events of the novel, and
particularly the emotional growth of the son, Tao, to the historical fact
of Mao’s campaign allows the melodrama developed inside the family
situation to respond to the historical drama outside it. The family, here,
is the refuge from politics; and Tao’s relationship to his grandfather,
who tells him stories from classical Chinese mythology, is a figure not
only for the shelter that family offers from political storms, but also
for the cultural shelter offered by something like “storytelling” or
“tradition” against the overtly politicized and emotionally cold outside
world. Melodrama’s excess, the intensity of its call to tears, thus marks
the limits of the PRC’s indifferent, bureaucratic governmentality. Love
and care inside the home compensate for, and critique, their absence
outside it.
Is this novel about China then, or China today? Perhaps both, insofar as
its historical themes will recall for most readers that the PRC today
still jails and tortures political dissidents. There is no sense here in
Tsukiyama of a solution to that problem, for this is not an openly
political novel. But we are to imagine, through Tao, that some new version
of China is possible. The politics of melodrama rely here as always on the
prospect of a future in which the child grows up safely.

Things are lighter in the other American novel in this quartet,
Christopher Buckley’s They Eat Puppies, Don’t They? The novel is a satire
and a farce, in which a slightly off-the-wall public relations guy turned
lobbyist foments a US war with China in order to sell a weapon system to
the Department of Defense. His partner in crime is a version of Ann
Coulter, whose sordid backroom manipulations trade on the particularly
phallic, bottled sex appeal that is the stock in trade of the female
anchors of Fox News. On the side of the gods are an American president and
a Chinese premier both interested in averting a stupid war, who battle the
neocons inside their own administrations.

Readers who know David Lodge’s comically stuck middle-age men, whose
sexual and professional crises often dissolve their inner narcissists,
will find much that is familiar in Buckley’s portrayal of the lobbyist
Walter “Bird” McIntyre. Like Lodge, Buckley gives us a quick, light read:
an appetizer, not a meal. As with melodrama, the over-the-top quality of
both the novel’s events and its solutions to them will signal to the
careful reader that none of this is to be taken too seriously. The Chinese
don’t eat puppies, as everyone “knows.”

But in fact some Chinese sometimes do eat puppies, as the presence of
organized dog farming and items on restaurant menus rather directly
attest. What we really all know is that we’re not supposed to say so. What
to make of this situation, in which the novel’s title phrase, itself an
obvious satire of a certain American provincialism, turns out to be a
reasonable question with an affirmative answer? A full reading of the
novel, nothing I’m attempting here, would have to parse the strange
generic qualities of this semi-satirical gesture, wrapping its head around
the double move in which the title’s satirical return to reality happens
too “early”—if by “early” we mean that it never gets off the ground. This
almost instant return from the launch-pad of the imaginary mirrors that of
the novel as a whole, and that of Tsukiyama’s more earnest work: what They
Eat Puppies affirms, under all its satire, is that the Chinese love their
children too.

 
________________________________________

 
The generic gap between English-language novels about China and the kinds
of Chinese fiction that get translated is still fairly stark. Chinese
fiction, if what appears in the US is to be believed, is serious stuff.
This tendency, which distorts the well-meaning reader’s sense—mine
included—of the Chinese literary field, is true of translation more
generally, which mostly ignores genre fiction (with the weird exception of
the Scandinavian detective novel). We can read about the Chinese workplace
novel genre,1 
<http://publicbooks.org/fiction/china-middlebrow-to-highbrow#footnote-1>
but we can’t read examples of it—at least not in English.


That said, we are beginning to see an opening up in the range of Chinese
fiction that gets translated into English, a function of the increase in
the translation of Chinese work more generally (which is itself, of
course, a function of the increasing global interest in China). Dung
Kai-cheung’sAtlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary Cityis part travelogue,
part collection of essays, part fiction. Its semi-documentary,
Calvinoesque style exemplifies the newer, wider range of aesthetic
possibility coming from the Sinophone literary sphere. The book is a
series of short essays, fictions, and thought experiments, written as
though from a future in which the city of Hong Kong has disappeared into
archaeological and anthropological memory. The Hong Kong we get in the
novel—and it is, finally, a novel, if only because of the basic science
fictional conceit that organizes it—thus appears in a strange blur of
memory, research, mistake, and unwitting truth. For readers who, like me,
do not know the city, the novel produces the impression of estrangement,
not the real thing; but this impression is enough to give the entire text
a lovely, mottled glaze. Dung’s perfect capture of the voice of academic
speculation and ambition—his future interpreters of Hong Kong have read
enough post–World War II French theory to draw highly self-assured claims
about the nature of Hong Kong from the slimmest of evidence—produced in me
a high degree of nostalgia, not for the city itself, but for the methodof
its exposure.

That nostalgia for the theory-heavy 1990s is, however, a weird artifact of
the novel’s belated translation into English. Originally published in
1997, the year the British turned over their invented city of Hong Kong to
the People’s Republic, Atlasin Chinese belongs to the era of academic
works like Ackbar Abbas’s Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of
Disappearance (1997) and of films like Wong Kar-wai’sChungking Express
(1994)—and thus to the entire sociocultural apparatus of memory, history,
and geography that gripped Hong Kong in those days. (It also echoes,
openly, the imaginative freedom of Roland Barthes’s Empire of Signs.) From
the perspective of 2012, Dung’s novel acquires a radically different
feel—no less contemporary, I think, than it might have felt in 1997, so
long as we understand that this new contemporary feeling has everything to
do with the global politics that surround Hong Kong and China today, in
which the mainland’s threatened “takeover” of the city has both never
really occurred (at the military level) and already fully taken place (at
the economic level, and in growing and complex ways for Hong Kong
politics).

As with satire and melodrama, the pseudo-documentary, pseudo-academic
style that Dung adopts here gives a version of reality whose obvious
estrangement allows us to view the real anew. In Atlas the target is Hong
Kong, but also, for readers outside that city, the general apparatus by
which cities come belatedly to be known, archived, or told. The book is
filled with descriptions of maps, local legends, and semi-apocryphal
historical events, each appearing in one of fifty-one small sections of
two to four pages apiece. Divided into four larger categories—Theory, The
Streets, The City, and Signs—the pleasure of each exquisite single piece
exceeds, in the moment of reading, any larger relation to the whole to
which it belongs.

The book’s title, Atlas, brings the whole back into view. It is an odd
whole, however, since it bears no relation to any Atlas of my
acquaintance. Consider, for instance, the example of Watercress and Water
Spinach Streets, whose inhabitants move from one to the other (to the
former in winter; to the latter in summer), reflecting the seasonal
availability of those vegetables, with the result that mail sent too close
to the solstice (winter or summer, as the case may be) may languish for
half a year, waiting for its residents to return. We might therefore ask
whether the notion of the atlas expressed here—one produced by a series of
semi-narrative, semi-historical vignettes, arranged in an arbitrary but
potentially significant order that recalls the insane lists of Borges’s
famous Chinese encyclopedia—belongs not to our world but to the future in
which these essays are (imaginarily) written.

In that case the novel would be giving us not only a series of mildly
estranged visions of Hong Kong parsed through a series of mildly
estranging methods of producing those visions, but an epistemological
model for archaeological knowledge. This latter would borrow more from the
pre-modern structure of the cabinet of wonders than it would from its more
regimented, closed, and totalizing successors, the museum, the
encyclopedia, or the dictionary.

Among other things, the combination of structure and intellectual style in
this novel reminds us that no one vision of the city, no mandate or
survey, can completely dominate or destroy it. At least that would be our
reading in 1997. Today, Atlas conveys a nostalgia folded over on itself,
which allows us to see not only that first, mandatory reading of the book,
but to grasp its logic at a distance. That distance frees us to recognize
the ways in which Dung’s work continues to speak, beyond the immediate
days of its production, to perennially interesting questions of knowledge,
imagination, and political control. It also opens onto the possibility of
feeling nostalgic about the premature and anticipatory nostalgia of the
1996–97 period, which still now seems to have been, when we compare it to
the utterly banal modes of Hong Kong’s current semi-integration into the
People’s Republic’s cultural and political spheres, optimistic.

No such sense of optimism pervades Yan Lianke’s Lenin’s Kisses. Where Dung
allows us to inhabit, on loan, a fantastic dimension of maps and
histories, Yan gives us instead an imaginary village located almost
actually in contemporary China, and uses that almost-actually status to
bend the rules of realism around the odd and likeable impossibilities of
satire. The novel tells the story of a minor but self-aggrandizing
provincial official who decides to buy Lenin’s corpse from Russia and
install it in the local capital in order to increase tourism. Along the
way he discovers a village full of disabled people with highly unusual
skills. Recruited into a performance troupe, these folks cause a regional
sensation, quickly earning the millions needed not only to buy the corpse
but to build an extravagant mausoleum to house it; together these will,
most everyone believes, assure the region an endless supply of
Lenin-worshipping tourists.

The somewhat banal skill set of these disabled performers—a one-legged
long jumper, a blind woman who can hear and name dropped objects, a deaf
man who sets off firecrackers around his head—is treated by characters in
the novel as nothing short of extraordinary. The gap between what these
folks can do, which is after all not nothing, but not exactly very much,
either, and the insane ticket prices and hysteria that they command in the
novel is a sign of the general sense of unreality and disconnection that
occasionally turns the novel’s Borgesian imaginaries into far more
troubling, Kafkaesque incomprehensibilities. That no one within the
narrative seems to know anything is wrong tells us, finally, that
something is wrong, just as Josef K’s family’s reaction to his new status
tells us that in a certain kind of world, a level of terrifying
ontological instability is not only expected but politically and socially
unmanageable.

All the good humor and wackiness of the book, which includes a series of
mock footnotes giving us a mixture of real and false historical background
and details on the local dialect, borrows something of the impulse of
Dung’s Atlas, but tunes it to a creepier frequency. That both the chapters
and the footnotes only appear in odd numbers—implying, as translator
Carlos Rojas observes in his introduction, that the even-numbered material
has been censored or disappeared—only confirms the feeling that something
is deeply wrong. Indeed, I find myself wondering if the aesthetic of so
much contemporary Chinese art—the cover photograph of the English
translation is an image from the painter Chen Yu—is the product of the
strange combination of openness and unspeakableness that makes up Chinese
political life, in which one can, for instance, talk openly about the fact
that things are censored, as long as one does not discuss what the
censored things actually are. The novel’s action travels around and around
this missing center until reality intrudes, some fifty pages from the
ending, with predictable results. That those results are also depressing
is a measure of the belief and faith that Yan is able to dispense over the
course of the book’s first four hundred or so pages. The final force of
Lenin’s Kisses rests in its demonstration of the possibility of faith,
even in disaster, but a faith mediated by the novel’s relentless suspicion
of the world beyond the village, whose avatar, Grandma Mao Zhi, is the
story’s only hero.
 
________________________________________

 
The advantage for scholars who write about the literature of earlier
centuries is that our forebears (or their archives) have already selected
for us, for good or ill, the books that count. Working in the
contemporary, we don’t know which works will matter in the long run. This
is why the highbrow novel must claim, against the odds, that it perfectly
captures its era. (Da Chen on Yan Lianke, on the back cover: “This is a
tale of modern China with all its wonders, marvels and absurdities and
ironies roped together, making it a must-read.”) Middlebrow novels,
meanwhile, just have to give you some small amount of pleasure; they have
no interest in being read ten years from now. That is why these four books
make a grouping not especially conducive to some larger snapshot of the
state of literature about China in the United States today. Each
testifies, to be sure, to some dimension of that larger picture, but the
contrast between the American middlebrow texts of Tsukiyama and Buckley,
on the one hand, and the surreal or postmodern realisms of Yan and Dung,
on the other, means that these books never really talk to each other. And
no wonder: they don’t belong to the same literary universe. But this is
not, and cannot be, an allegory for why or how we deal with China today.
The presence of all these books testifies to the immense American interest
in the topic; their generic diversity to the possibilities opened up
inside that broad and variegated interest. It will be a long wait to see
if one of them turns out to have grasped in an especially incandescent and
coruscating way the truth of where we are now.

* 1 
<http://publicbooks.org/fiction/china-middlebrow-to-highbrow#footnote_marke
r-1>See, for instance, Leslie T. Chang, “Working Titles: What do the most
industrious people on earth read for fun?,” The New Yorker, February 6,
2012.

Eric Hayot is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian
Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of On
Literary Worlds (2012), The Hypothetical Mandarin (2009), and Chinese
Dreams(2004), and editor of a book series, Global Asias, with Oxford
University Press.