Commentary:
2012; Penn State University Press; Volume: 49; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/complitstudies.49.4.0610
ISSN1528-4212
Autores Resumo“China and the world.” It's an ancient topic. Ancient and ever changing. Consequently, old and yet new.1 It expresses, variably, emulation, competition, communication, and misunderstanding. Historically, the gravitational pull has reversed from time to time.“Modern China and the world” puts a spin on the phrase. On the evidence of the articles in this issue of Comparative Literature Studies, “modern” has been a problem term in China for over a century. Indeed, terms for newness itself were coined and fluctuating throughout much of the twentieth century.2 “Modern China and the world” is evidently aspirational and not infrequently anxious. For twenty-first century China the world encompasses the entire globe, but in the years addressed in most of these articles, the world was the West, and it didn't need to be called modern because it was presumed to be so. “China and the modern world” would express a pull, with the world characterized in terms of its modernity, that is, its economic and technological development, and a wariness lest the purity of “Chineseness” be sullied. “Modern China and the world” is a push, with the more open-ended world tending toward an auratic cultural phenomenon of mostly unargued value. Facing the world, modern China is envious, experiencing and often suffering utopian longings. The world, in this connection, is what Pheng Cheah has described as “an ongoing, dynamic process of becoming, something continually made and remade rather than a spatial-geographical entity.”3 And so it appears from the articles.Wang Ning, who invited my response to this issue, likes to foster dialogue by inviting nonsinologists to comment on the collections he has edited. That spirit is admirable, and there cannot be too much of it—on both sides. Still, we Westerners—committed or condemned to our side of the globe—why should we trouble ourselves about translations of Shakespeare or adaptations of Puccini into a language that, alas, most of us will never learn? (I've tried; it's my own much-damaged utopia.) One reason would lie in our present global imperative enjoining us generally to recognize and respect other cultures; another would be the special presence of China in today's and tomorrow's world. But, as Wang Ning also reminds us, modern is not postmodern, and “modern China and the world” looks back, not forward. Its China is mostly not today's twenty-first century megapower. Instead, these articles tell a twentieth-century story of emergence, convergence, and divergence, not of dominance. The picture of China trying to catch up with “us” that many of these articles paint can be harrowing or inspiring, or often both at once, but it is rarely pretty. Individuals figure heroically, but neither culture is much flattered. That is no one's fault. The times here are out of joint. Dyschronia is by nature wrenching. But then the question returns: what boots it to contemplate the alien agonies of an impoverished translator or a reclusive exile, or even the ambiguous successes of an abortive memoir or the tendentious adaptations of a Western classic? And how should we bring these problematic episodes from the past together with the more present-oriented accounts here of the worldwide internet or of Gary Snyder's fruitful adaptations of ancient Chinese poetry? In Snyder's case, as Robin Chen-Hsing Tsai affectionately portrays it, there is a “cultural translation” that “is not cultural theft but a debt.” Even here, though, the debt is not contemporary and not collaborative but a restitution. And in other articles in this issue, restitution veers perilously close to retribution. For that reason, there remains a utopian aspiration to Snyder's kind of heterogenesis and deterritorialization. Tsai describes a relation “between East and West” (rather than between “modern China and the World”) that “is not uneven or hierarchical.” In practice, Snyder's grand ideal may never be realized; the balance may always be diagonal, never perfect, hopefully not a theft, but always with some element of debt. Under these imperfect circumstances, dialogue remains a challenge—and essential for that very reason.How, then, can these articles speak to an outsider like me? How can I best listen to them? They are by and for specialists. Individually, they are captivating for the curious, but not grist for my mill. What a difference, though, grouping them together makes! As an ensemble, they beautifully map out the coordinates of what might be called China's worlding. I hasten to add that this is not in any sense a judgment on China's massive cultural achievements of the distant or recent past, or of the present, but merely a paraphrase of Wang Ning's observation that “since the beginning of the twentieth century, Chinese literature has been moving toward the world in an attempt to be held in a higher regard within the study of world literature.” Considered together, the radically divergent positions and possibilities suggested by these articles testify to a principal theme in the introduction, that of a “modernity at large.” Breadth, Wang Ning seems to imply, is the staff of life: a “broader reading public,” a cultural production “more welcomed by the masses of people,” “wide circulation,” a “broadened … literary and cultural vision.” The “pluralism and Bakhtinian ‘carnivalization’” that he perceives is an inevitable corollary of the fermentation breaking free of constriction or regulation. The focused case studies that make up most of this issue are the best indicator of the spreading exploration that accompanies modernization.I use “modernization” too in a descriptive sense, not an evaluative one. The essential element is the process form—modern-ization, modern-izing—not the period designation “modernity.” A culture on the move, as China's clearly has been, is inherently plurivalent. In what might be called an organic or conservative culture, styles, forms, and perspectives tend to succeed one another in a more or less evolutionary fashion. Up close, naturally, there are always overlays and disparities of generation, politics, situation, and outlook, but even the multiplicity can be ordered. The Marxian traditions provide our best model for cultural and historical sifting that brings a temporal order to a spatial multiplicity. The most familiar formula is Raymond Williams's tripartition of residual, dominant, and emergent cultures. A tolerably organic present that appears close up to be chaotically composed of conflicting schools and tendencies proves even in relatively near hindsight to be compounded from identifiable forces of advance, consolidation, and restraint. But a modernizing process like China's differs dramatically insofar as it mixes incongruent impulses from within and from without. Emulating a foreign culture both releases and displaces internal forces, in a mixture that can generate liberation and also friction. Heterogenesis or cultural carnivalization is by nature a historical grotesque, well exemplified by the pathos of Zhu Shenghao and Eileen Chang, by Ling Shuhua's abruptly curtailed memoirs, and by the sometimes piquant, sometime bizarrely extravagant adventures of the Chinese versions of Turandot.Modernization of the sort documented in this issue mixes up the times. My model for it originates far afield from these articles. But bringing together remote models is among the cross-fertilizing virtues of encounters of a dialogue with these articles, even if, as is to be hoped, different readers will bring a different mix of models and take away a different recognition. For in its complexity the modernization portrayed here reminds me of Eastern Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century, as described by Virgil Nemoianu in his prizewinning book The Taming of Romanticism.4 Nemoianu begins his chapter on Eastern Europe by quoting the economist Alexander Gershenkron: “The more backward a country's economy, the more likely was its industrialization to start discontinuously as a sudden great spurt proceeding at a relatively high rate of growth of manufacturing output.”5 In the cultural as in the economic sphere, the result is what Nemoianu calls “telescoping,” with “a dialectics of simultaneity” and developments that are “anachronic” rather than successive.6 In contemporary terms, that meant that “both Enlightenment and romantic features could be regarded as revolutionary departures.”7 In today's terms, or those of our recent past, it means that Shakespeare and the Cold Mountain poems can be motors of a forward thrust and that Eileen Chang can bring The Story of the Stone together with Eugene O'Neill, domestic antiquity with foreign modernity, both in the service of futurity. These articles' composite account of modernization shows it to be a paradoxical compound of escape and release, “a flight from the traditional to the modern,” as Xiaoping Wang concludes, that commingles “a robust womanhood” with “a profound cultural and historical nihilism,” with a rare happy ending for the protagonists of Chang's most famous story, but a profoundly unhappy one for their author.In the context of a culture caught in what it perceives as the throes of development, postmodernism is a condition, not a period. At the opening of The Postmodern Condition Jean-François Lyotard attributes “a general dyschrony” specifically to the postindustrial age that followed World War II.8 He wished the postmodern to be a localizable period. But Chinese postmodernity is neither postindustrial nor mid-twentieth century. In his Postmodernism Fredric Jameson is more candid, initially “mean[ing] to offer a periodizing hypothesis” but later conceding “that period concepts correspond to no realities whatsoever.”9 The ferment we call postmodernism has been projected into almost every past era and surely a great many nations and regions, and the relatively dialectical carnivalization, with its rules of encounter and its festive role reversal, has often yielded in current discourse to the nearly chaotic mashup, today's equivalent of yesterday's collage. A relevant example is the “Eggshell,” the Grand National Theater in Beijing, designed by a French architect and recently described—in an article whose point of departure is an earlier article by Wang Ning—as “postmodern in the sense that the past has collapsed in the present and anti-postmodern in the sense that postmodernism is as postmodern as it is ancient, so that it loses its foothold in contemporaneity and its need for periodization.”10 Hence, as Jing Chen says, it is wrong to imagine that “internet literature resists the main genres of print literature” in some kind of orderly succession; rather, it continues the inherent ferment of modernization in a new mode that “represents only an illusion of resistance to the traditional system of literature.” If there is a contradiction between resistance and the illusion of resistance, though, it is inherent to the subject. Postmodernism is an intrinsically conflicted sensibility. Las Vegas, perhaps the quintessential postmodern space (at least before the advent of Beijing's gated Shangri-Las and the Shanghai Expo), is in equal measure Robert Venturi's vital and exhilarated popular art and Baudrillard's seductive but ultimately empty “great whore on the other side of the desert,” in a haunted country where “things lose their shadow, where money loses its value.”11 The postmodern is everything and nothing—everything by virtue of being nothing; hence in a case like “modern China,” “postmodernism” is access to the world in all its profuse and nebulous variety. Resistance as the illusion of resistance, retreat as advance, depressed effervescence: in such perplexed conditions one great civilization steps out to encounter another. One name here for the postmodern condition is “Chineseness,” a utopian nativism that corresponds to the utopian cosmopolitanism of the world, an identity that, as Chengzhou He says, “is characterized by its ambiguities” and “resists a clear-cut definition.”The wonder, then, lies in all the conflicted energies on display throughout this issue, energies that often confront and sometimes surmount obstacles, thrusting out and then shock-absorbing the ensuing collisions, or else, as Tsai says in his utopian, Guattari-inspired essay, “transversally” circumventing them in the hope of finding a revolutionary means of confronting capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism. The emblems here are two great walls that become allegories of modern China facing the world. One is the set for the Forbidden City Turandot, whose massive backdrop—undoubtedly more inescapable in the film than it must have been live—is not labeled “the great wall” by Chengzhou himself, but is named as such in the title of the review by Henry Chu that he cites. The other is Eileen Chang's chronotope, the “grand, sublime figure” that is both “a reification into which the outside world was frozen” and “a utopia.” The varied encounters in these articles, sometimes dismaying, always uplifting, testify to the expansive and productive battles for, against, and with history that embed a great civilization within that imagined construct known as the world.Liu Kang opens by evoking the rising new economies under the Chinese name of “gold bricks.” The name puns on the acronym BRICS, but to an American ear it also inadvertently puns on our native trickster figure, the goldbricker. What surprising riches the dialogue of cultures and languages brings! I hope many other readers will take as much delight and as much profit from them as I have.
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