orientalism

Iss. 10 | May 2008 ISSN 1575-2275 Journal of the UOC’s Humanities Department and Languages and Cultures Department

Iss. 10 I May 2008 DOSSIER

Orientalism

CONTENTS

Orientalism: thirty years on. Introduction .............................................................................. 1 Carles Prado-Fonts

The Western Representation of Modern China: Orientalism, Culturalism and Historiographical Criticism ............................................................................................... 7 David Martínez-Robles

Instrumentalisation of Passions, Social Regulation and Transcendence of Power in the Hanfeizi 韓非子 ......................................................................................................... 17 Albert Galvany

On Monkeys and Japanese: Mimicry and Anastrophe in Orientalist Representation ............. 26 Blai Guarné

Against besieged literature: fictions, obsessions and globalisations of Chinese literature ....... 37 Carles Prado-Fonts

The humanities in the digital age

Carles Prado-Fonts (coord.)Lecturer, Department of Languages and Cultures, UOC

ReCommeNded CITaTIoN

PRADO-FONTS, C. (coord.) (2008). “Orientalism” [online dossier]. Digithum. Iss. 10. UOC. [Retrieved on: dd/mm/yy].<http://www.uoc.edu/digithum/9/dt/eng/orientalism.pdf>ISSN 1575-2275

Els estudis que impulsen la revista només s’indiquen a la primera pàgina.

Orientalism: thirty years on*Introduction

Submission date: November 2007Accepted in: December 2007Published in: May 2008

Carles Prado-FontsLecturer, Department of Languages and Cultures, [email protected]

ReCommended CitAtion: PRADO-FONTS, Carles (2008). “Orientalism: thirty years on. Introduction“. In: “Orientalism“ [online dossier]. Digithum. Iss. 10. UOC. [Retrieved on: dd/mm/yy].<http://www.uoc.edu/digithum/10/dt/eng/introduction.pdf>ISSN 1575-2275

AbstractThis dossier contains a series of articles inspired by Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism. Together, the articles in the dossier show the importance of Said’s contribution and defend the need to continue working to make it even more important and valid, both in the academic context and in terms of the social diffusion it deserves. With a common thematic thread –the per-ception of the Other (“the Orient”) from our perspective (“the West”)– these articles shun the conception of East Asia as an independent “discipline“ and treat it, on the contrary, as an ob�ect of study that must be tackled with methodological rigour“ and treat it, on the contrary, as an ob�ect of study that must be tackled with methodological rigour and treat it, on the contrary, as an ob�ect of study that must be tackled with methodological rigour from specific disciplines: history, philosophy, anthropology and literature. This should facilitate, on one hand, the possibility of putting forward arguments and observations that enrich already existing debates in each discipline by shedding new light on them and, on the other, the social diffusion of these ideas on East Asia beyond limited circles.

KeywordsOrientalism, Said, East Asian Studies, Area Studies

“Orientalism” Dossier

Federico Borges Sáiz

ResumAquest dossier aplega un seguit d’articles inspirats en el concepte d’orientalisme d’Edward Said. En con�unt, els articles del dossier demostren la importància de l’aportació de Said i defensen la necessitat de continuar treballant per a fer-la encara més rellevant i vigent, tant dins del context acadèmic com en la difusió social que hi hauria d’estar inevitablement connectada. Amb un fil temàtic comú –la percepció de l’Altre (“l’Orient”) des de la nostra perspectiva (“l’Occident”)– aquests articles defugen

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the humanities in the digital age

Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

Iss. 10 | May 2008 iSSn 1575-2275 Journal of the UOC’s Humanities Department and Languages and Cultures Department

Carles Prado-FontsOriginal title: Orientalisme: a trenta anys vista. Introducció

* The text of this introduction is the result of the MEC I+D (HUM2005-08151) Interculturalidad de Asia oriental en la era de la globalización research pro�ect. The main ideas presented below were commented on and debated in the seminar East Asia: Orientalisms, Approaches and Disciplines organised by the Inter-Asia research group at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. I am grateful for the comments of those who attended the seminar.

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.uoc.edu/digithum/10/dt/eng/introduction.pdf


Orientalism: thirty years on. Introduction


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la concepció de l’Àsia oriental com a «disciplina» independent i la tracten, en canvi, com a ob�ecte d’estudi que cal abordar amb rigor metodològic des de disciplines concretes: història, pensament, antropologia, literatura. Això hauria de facilitar, d’una banda, la possibilitat de pro�ectar arguments i observacions que enriqueixin debats �a existents a cada disciplina aportant-hi una nova llum i, de l’altra, la difusió social d’aquestes idees sobre l’Àsia oriental més enllà de cercles restringits.

Paraules clauorientalisme, Said, Estudis de l’Àsia Oriental, Estudis d’Àrea

1 If the reader opens The Asian Mystique: Dragon Ladies, Geisha Girls & Our Fantasies of the Exotic Orient, they will immediately come upon the following anecdote, involving the book’s author, the American �ournalist Sheridan Prasso:

In 1990, shortly after I had moved from Chicago to Asia as a news correspondent, I became intrigued by a frequent visitor to my Mid-levels neighbourhood of Hong Kong, a man who shouted in a sing-songy voice the same words over and over as he traversed the winding, hilly streets. I lived in an apartment block in front of a concrete wall holding back the mountainside, and to me this mass of concrete seemed an affront to nature. I knew that the Cantonese people of Hong Kong believe that there are gods everywhere and in everything –in the kitchen, the trees, the water, and the landscape. Could this man be chanting to appease the mountain god who might be angered by this man-made desecration? I wanted to indulge the fantasy that I was witnessing the mystical Asia out the window of my concrete apartment block. I told my Chinese-speaking roommate about the man, and one day as I heard his cries I went running to get her. She stepped onto our small balcony, listened to his chant, and turned to me laughing, “I believe he is collecting scrap metal”. I was never able to see Asia in the same way again. (Prasso, 2005, pp. xi-xii)

This �ournalist’s anecdote is likely to have caused an uncomfortable smile in more than one reader: we have all been victims of some similar situation, to a greater or lesser degree. It may seem to us, therefore, that the anecdote exposes the shame of our ignorance. In addition –something that may be even more important– it betrays us and makes obvious the assumptions we start from when we try to understand an Other who is distant from us and quite different. As a result of the representational systems that inevitably surround us in the West, frequently our perception of cultures and societies such as the Chinese, Japanese or Korean is tinged, often unconsciously, by an exotic veil.

In recent decades, globalisation of capitalism has made it such that the presence of these cultures in Catalonia and Spain

1. On stereotypes and other questions related to otherness, difference and meaning, see �uarné (200�). On stereotypes and other questions related to otherness, difference and meaning, see �uarné (200�).On stereotypes and other questions related to otherness, difference and meaning, see �uarné (200�).

is progressively less singular and more visible –not only on paper or on the screen of the press and the media, but also in the daily realities and routines of almost everyone: in schools, neighbourhoods, at work or in the supermarket. Paradoxically, however, this greater presence and familiarity has (still) not banished the ma�ority of myths, stereotypes and beliefs concerning the other –stranger, distant, exotic, incomprehensible– that, as we said, tinges our assumptions and slants our perceptions in a predetermined direction.1 Thirty years after the publishing of a ma�or work in the humanities and social sciences such as Orientalism, by Edward Said (1978), which precisely exposes and denounces these representational mechanisms, the paradox deserves, we believe, a brief review.

2In Orientalism, Said dissects the way in which, from the West, a certain image of the Orient has been constructed that has marked our way of understanding it, representing it and approaching it. By now, the three dimensions, which, according to Said, channel these representations of the Oriental Other are well-known: the academic study that has as its ob�ect of analysis the East or the Middle East; a discourse within which East and West are opposite concepts and where one represents the other and performs as such; and the Western style to dominate, restructure and spread its authority over the Orient with the �ustification that Western culture and values, assumed as opposite to Oriental ones, are superior. Said shows how these dimensions, in an interrelated way, have constructed and continue to construct the concept of the Orient through a process that labels, defines and �ustifies this geographical area and acts in it. In other words, Said explains to us that our visions of the Orient are nothing more than re-presentations, ideological constructions anchored in a specific perspective –in our case, Eurocentric– and with an inherent agenda.

As the author himself acknowledges, Said’s Orientalism draws inspiration from the work of Michel Foucault and is fully in keeping with the effervescence of poststructuralism –a group of intellectual movements born around the decade of the 1970s that questioned ideas, concepts and approaches that had been assumed as central or “universal“ in theory, knowledge and language. Said’s contribution




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is fully identified with the poststructuralist will to “decentre the universe“ and, in the words of Derrida (1966), question “the structurality of the structure“. This is how various movements or branches of poststructuralism construct a critical pro�ect meant to undo, contradict or endow with complexity assumptions that had not been placed in doubt until that time. Feminism and gender studies, for example, criticised patriarchal and phallocentric ideology. Derridian deconstruction, for its part, questioned the centrality and transparency of language, text and meaning per se. In the case that concerns us, Said’s contribution made it easier for postcolonial studies to study in depth the multiple implications derived from the historical complicity between Eurocentrism and Western imperialism.

Indeed, Said’s work was not the first to critically reveal these types of mechanisms of colonialism. More than two decades earlier, for example, Frantz Fanon had already published the important Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and, years later, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), in which, from his experience as a psychoanalyst, he made an analysis of the psychological effects of colonialism on the identity of those being colonised.2 Said, instead of centring his analysis on the oppressed, focused on the oppressors –and this new angle made his contribution paramount. Aside from generating an important academic debate, there were at least two other main consequences to his work. First, Said’s contribution paved the way for postcolonial criticism in the poststructuralist magma. Following Said’s Orientalism, other analyses appeared that were more sophisticated than the Orientalist discourse, including that of Homi Bhabha, as well as more direct criticisms of this same discourse, such as that of �ayatri Spivak –to mention only two of the various representatives of these two tendencies that, together with Said, comprise the so-called Holy Trinity of postcolonialism. Second, from an institutional perspective, Said’s work and the debate it engendered helped to develop postcolonial studies as a legitimate academic framework –with the establishment of courses, academic programmes, centres and lines of research, profiles and professional associations and other “technologies of recognition“ (Shih, 200�).

It goes without saying that Said’s work has also received numerous criticisms from various sources: both from those who, feeling that they were being directly alluded to as “Orientalists“ and in disagreement with Said’s approaches, attack him, offended, from the neighbouring trench (Lewis, 1983), as from those who, immersed in the same poststructuralist paradigm that helped to conceive and disseminate Said’s reflection, question several aspects from the inside (Ahmad, 1992). At any rate, the importance of Said’s contribution to the academic community and to knowledge in humanities and social sciences is, by now, indisputable. Drawing inspiration from defences of postmodern anthropology (Fabian,

2000), we can state that, in a very complex historical moment, Said was capable of raising the correct questions relating to the comparison of cultures, although perhaps he did not provide proper answers –or, maybe, as suggested by Josep Maria Fradera (200�), that he had the merit to lay “the problem of comparison“ on the table but was unable to provide a solution.

Thirty years have gone by since the publication of Orientalism and we now find ourselves in a very different historical context. From our position, we consider it appropriate to make a couple of observations regarding the validity of Said’s contribution for our social and academic reality. First, the anecdote from Sheridan Prasso with which we began this introduction, or the many similar personal anecdotes that probably came to mind as we read it, suggests that the translation of Said’s ideas beyond the academic world is, still, inadequate. The representation of the Other implicit in diverse contexts and in technologies of generation and circulation of knowledge –the press and the media, cinema and literature, etc.– does not seem to indicate that the critical approaches of Said have spread through the various social spheres and taken root widely or firmly. It is probably not very adventurous to affirm that this situation shows the difficulty in finding bridges or meeting points between the academic world and social diffusion of knowledge –especially in minority academic fields. Second, in the institutional field related to the study of East Asia, the development and the validity of Said’s contributions have not had the same repercussion in the United States –where Orientalism was first published and where study and research on East Asia have undergone an important transformation over the past twenty years– as in academic contexts of Catalonia or Spain. Indeed, the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Said’s work coincides with another modest anniversary –in 2008, the official programme in Asian Studies in Catalonia and Spain celebrate their first five years of existence–, and it is pertinent, also, to reconsider the validity of Said’s work in our more local academic context.

3The creation of the degree in East Asian Studies represented a remarkable milestone that, apart from finally bringing to fruition that which a small group of university professors had demanded for years, began to put us on the level of the ma�ority of European countries. The academic and institutional legitimisation made it easier to make a degree available to society that, until that time, had been surprisingly absent from the catalogue of official degrees in Spain and that, without a doubt, was needed for a more rigorous and profound understanding of the global world that surrounds us –a world in which the role of countries such as

2. English translations of the original French: F. Fanon (1967) English translations of the original French: F. Fanon (1967)English translations of the original French: F. Fanon (1967) Black Skin, White Masks. New York: �rove Press; F. Fanon (1963) The Wretched of the Earth. New York: �rove Weidenfeld.




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China, Japan or Korea is increasingly visible and important. After five years of existence, however, it is important to also examine some of the dangers derived from the creation of a specific and “isolated“ educational field for the study of East Asia.

Taking a closer look at this point it is interesting to return to the first of the dimensions of Orientalism that Said denounced some three decades ago:

The most readily accepted designation for Orientalism is an academic one, and indeed the label still serves in a number of academic institutions. Anyone who teaches, writes about or researches the Orient –and this applies whether this person is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian or philologist– either in its specific or general aspects, is an Orientalist, and what he or she says or does is Orientalism. Compared with Oriental studies or Area studies, it is true that the term Orientalism is less preferred by specialists nowadays, both because it is too vague and general and because it connotes the high-handed executive attitude of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century European colonialism. Nevertheless, books are written and congresses held with “the Orient” as their main focus, with the Orientalist in his new or old guise as their main authority. The point is that even if it does not survive as it once did, Orientalism lives on academically through its doctrines and theses about the Orient and the Oriental. (Said, 1978, p.2)

Thirty years on, this description is not totally invalid –especially in terms of East Asian Studies in our country. In order to understand the reasons for this stagnation, it is perhaps worthwhile to go back to the origin of these studies as academic concepts or programmes, which is nothing more than Area Studies. Originating in America during the Cold War, Area Studies were organised into teaching nodes centred on a geographical area that the student was required to tackle from different disciplines: language, history, literature, society, politics, international relations, etc. The aim of these programmes was, originally, to promote the training of specialists in the countries and regions they were interested in strategically, to “get to know“ the Other –the enemy on the other side of the Iron Curtain, for example.

Although today the context is certainly another and, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the geopolitical dynamic is very different, present-day Area Studies have inherited several characteristics intrinsic in their origin. Some of these traits are still quite tangible: in America, PhD students who are US citizens and who study languages and cultures “of strategic importance to the country“ (such as Arabic or Chinese) can receive government funding through FLAS (Foreign Language and Area Studies) grants, a remnant of the famous Title VI, National Defense Education Act of 1958. However, beyond these more lucrative implications, there are numerous consequences that, from a discursive viewpoint,

are even more important. As a result of this kind of framework and ob�ectives, Area Studies are in keeping with –more or less explicitly– a policy that reinforces differences between cultures, more than one that searches for similarities between a distant culture and one’s own –as denounced by the Swiss sinologist Jean-François Billeter (2006) when he wisely criticises the approach inherent to “star“ sinologists like François Jullien who base their success in the West precisely on the strategic accentuation of these differences, without a broad, profound and academically rigorous historicism.

Picking up Said’s contribution again, Rey Chow describes the criticism of theorist Harry Harootunian, who regrets the missed opportunity whereby Area Studies were unable to produce an alternative form of knowledge given the opening that the publication of Orientalism provided:

As Harootunian goes on to argue, for all its investment in the study of other languages and other cultures, area studies missed the opportunity, so aptly provided by Said’s criticism of Orientalism, to become the site where a genuinely alternative form of knowledge production might have been possible. (Chow, 2006, p. �1-�2)

Thus, the delay in the implantation of an official degree in Asian Studies in Catalonia and Spain has resulted in the fact that, when in America, the birthplace of Area Studies, the problems inherent in them have now been reconsidered, in our academic context we have simply reproduced this same questionable structure. In contrast to America –where the different university departments (Linguistics, History, Comparative Literature, Anthropology, Sociology, Archaeology, etc.) have professors specialising in that discipline as applied to a certain region of East Asia and in which, despite in some cases teaching still being carried out from Area Studies programmes, the approaches are markedly disciplinary–, in an academic context such as ours, there are not enough specialists, from the different university disciplines and departments, with experience in East Asia. There is the risk, then, that the teaching context for East Asian Studies could end up converting a degree into an isolated “discipline“, closed within itself and without interaction with the other spheres of knowledge that should shape it.

It is important to understand my line of argument: I am not trying to negate the validity and the potential of East Asian Studies. On the contrary, I strongly believe that they can be of value as the setting which, taking East Asia or one of its regions as a common ob�ect of study, allows for a critical and enriching interdisciplinary dialogue in various directions. From my point of view, however, it is essential that this dialogue be carried out between specialists with solid methodological training in some specific discipline. It is also essential that this dialogue have the predisposition of all parties: on one hand, of the disciplines themselves and the




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mechanisms that articulate them (schools, departments, publishers, professional associations, etc.), where there is still great reluctance to accept an ob�ect of study such as East Asia as being serious and legitimate and that are beset by markedly, and more or less concealed, Orientalist pre�udices. And, on the other hand, of the many professors who specifically promote Orientalist isolation and the ghettoisation of East Asian Studies with various excuses and for diverse reasons –from the very incapacity to maintain this intradisciplinary and interdisciplinary dialogue, to the ma�or benefits (of all kinds) that academic isolation may yield. We must, therefore, foster an interdisciplinarity that is both well understood and constructive, without falling into the trap that, as stressed by Néstor �arcía Canclini (200�, pp.122-123) in reference to the case of cultural studies, may end up setting this very interdisciplinarity: it is imperative that research and analysis on East Asia be well-anchored in a discipline of specific knowledge that contributes rigorous methodologies of analysis and that guarantees the circulation of results beyond “Orientalist“ circles.

4Thus, the dossier contains a series of articles inspired, in one way or another, both by Said’s concept of Orientalism and by concerns about the state of East Asian studies in this country. Together they show the importance of Said’s contribution, of the reflection he inspired and, at the same time, defend the need to continue working to make it even more important and valid, both in our academic context and beyond –in the social diffusion that it should inevitably inspire. With a common thematic thread that is in keeping with the reflections we have made throughout this introduction and that may be synthesised as the perception of the Other (“the Orient”) from our perspective (“the West”). The articles in this dossier shun the conception of East Asia as an independent “discipline“ and treat it, on the contrary, as an ob�ect of study that must be tackled with methodological rigour from specific disciplines –history (David Martínez-Robles), philosophy (Albert �alvany), anthropology (Blai �uarné) and literature (Carles Prado-Fonts)– applied to different geographical areas (China, Japan) and to different periods (from the classical world to contemporary times).

From these markedly disciplinary contributions, the collection of articles puts forward arguments and observations that enrich already existing debates in each discipline by shedding new light on them –that which comes from an ob�ect of study that is still not widespread or bestowed great legitimacy in our country, as is the case of East Asia. We also hope that this dossier helps to revitalise

Said’s work so that, in the future, cultures can come together in a more ethically balanced way and that all of us may be more aware of the determining factors that predetermine this coming together. In other words, and returning to anecdote from Sheridan Prasso with which we began this introduction, so that in the future these anecdotes do not cause us such an uncomfortable smile. To revisit Orientalism, published thirty years ago, also means to reconsider it, today, for thirty years hence.

References:

AHMAD, A. (1992). In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso.

BILLETER, J. F. (2006). Contre François Jullien. Paris: �ditions�ditions Allia..

CHOW, R. (2006). The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work. Durham / London: Duke University Press.

DERRIDA, J. (1966). “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”. Writing and Difference. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978.

FABIAN, J. (April 2000). “To Whom It May Concern”. Anthropology News. No. 9.

FANON, F. (1952). Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: �ditions�ditions du Seuil..

FANON, F. (1961). Les damnés de la terre. Paris: �ditions�ditions Maspero..

FRADERA, J. M. (Spring 200�,). “Edward Said i el problema de la comparació”. Illes i Imperis. No. 7, pp. 5-7.

�ARCÍA CANCLINI, N. (200�). Diferentes, desiguales y desconectados: Mapas de la interculturalidad. Barcelona: �edisa.

�UARN�, B. (200�). “Imágenes de la diferencia. Alteridad, discurso y representación”. In: E. ARD�VOL; N. MUNTAÑOLA Representación y cultura audiovisual en la sociedad contemporánea. Barcelona: Editorial UOC. Pp. �7-127.

LEWIS, B. (June 2�, 1982). “The Question of Orientalism”. The New York Review of Books. Vol. 29, no. 11.

PRASSO, S. (2005). The Asian Mystique: Dragon Ladies, Geisha Girls & Our Fantasies of the Exotic Orient. New York: Public Affairs.

SAID, E. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Viking. SHIH, S. (200�). “�lobal Literature and the Technologies of

Recognition”. PMLA. Vol. 119, no. 1, pp. 1-29.




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Carles Prado-FontsLecturer, department of Languages and Cultures, [email protected]

Carles Prado-Fonts has a degree in Translation and Interpretation (Autonomous University of Barcelona, 1998), MA in Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies (University of Westminster, London, 2001), MA in Modern Chinese Literature (University of California, Los Angeles, 200�) and is Doctor cum laude in Translation Theory and Intercultural Studies (Autonomous University of Barcelona, 2005). His doctoral thesis, Embodying Translation in Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature (1908-1934 and 1979-1999): A Methodological Use of the Conception of Translation as a Site, explores the role of translators in the origins of modern Chinese literature. He has been lecturer in the UOC’s Department of Languages and Cultures since 200�, where he teaches the sub�ects of Chinese Literature and East Asian Literatures: 19th and 20th Centuries, and coordinates the areas of East Asian Literature, Culture and Thought. He has taught Chinese culture and civilisation at the University of California, Los Angeles, and collaborates with the Autonomous University of Barcelona and Pompeu Fabra University. He has translated Pan Gu crea l’univers. Contes tradicionals xinesos and Diari d’un boig i altres relats by Lu Xun into Catalan (finalist in the 2001 Vidal Alcover Translation Prize).

This work is sub�ect to a Creative Commons Attribution-nonCommercial-noderivs 2.5 Spain licence. It may be copied, distributed and broadcast provided that the author and the e-�ournal that publishes it (Digithum) are cited. Commercial use and derivative works are not permitted. The full licence can be consulted on http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/es/deed.en.



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The Western Representation of Modern China: Orientalism, Culturalism and Historiographical Criticism*


David Martínez-RoblesLecturer, Department of Languages and Cultures (UOC) and Department of Humanities (Pompeu Fabra)[email protected]

RecoMMenDeD citAtion: MARTÍNEZ-ROBLES, David (2008). “The Western Representation of Modern China: Orientalism, Culturalism and Historiographical Criticism”. In: Carles PRADO-FONTS (coord.). “Orientalism” [online dossier]. Digithum. No. 10. UOC. [Retrieved on: dd/mm/yy].<http://www.uoc.edu/digithum/10/dt/eng/martinez.pdf>ISSN 1575-2275

AbstractThe West’s perception of China as a historical entity has evolved over the centuries. China has gone from a country of miracles and marvels in the medieval world and a refined and erudite culture in early modern Europe, to become a nation without history or progress since the Enlightenment of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The first historians of China were, in fact, representatives of the great Western empires at the end of the 19th century and their work perceives China from epistemological positions that clearly form part of the Orientalist and colonial thought that was characteristic of the period. History written throughout the 20th century, despite the efforts made to overcome the prejudices of the past, was unable to distance itself completely from some of the resources used in representation or the stereotypes that the Western world had come to accept about China and East Asia since the Enlightenment. Only in recent decades has a critical historiography appeared to denounce the problems inherent in the discourse produced on China, and even this has failed to address them fully.

Keywordshistoriography, Orientalism, paradigms, representation, China

ResumLa percepció que des d’Occident s’ha tingut de la Xina com a ens històric ha evolucionat al llarg dels segles. La Xina va passar de ser un país de prodigis i meravelles en el món medieval i una cultura refinada i erudita al començament de la modernitat



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David Martínez-RoblesOriginal title: La representació occidental de la Xina moderna: orientalisme, culturalisme i crítica historiogràfica

* I would like to thank Manel Ollé Rodríguez for revising a previous version of this article, for the comments by Séan Golden and the general contributions of the participants at the “East Asia: Orientalisms, Approaches and Disciplines” Seminar organised by the Inter-Asia Research Group of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, at which a number of the ideas subsequently established over these pages were presented. Obviously, any shortcomings and inaccuracies of the ideas expressed here can only be attributed to the author.


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Western Representation of Modern China: Orientalism…


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europea, a convertir-se en una nació sense història ni progrés amb el pensament il·lustrat del final del segle xviii i començament del xix. Els primers historiadors de la Xina són, de fet, representants dels grans imperis occidentals del final del segle xix, i la seva obra percep la Xina des de posicionaments epistemològics que s’inscriuen molt clarament en el pensament colonial i orientalista característic d’aquell període. La història escrita durant tot el segle xx, malgrat que s’ha esforçat a superar els prejudicis del passat, no s’ha deslliurat completament d’alguns dels recursos representacionals i els estereotips que el món occidental ha assumit sobre la Xina i l’Àsia oriental des de la Il·lustració. Només en les últimes dècades ha aparegut una historiografia crítica que ha denunciat les problemàtiques inherents del discurs elaborat sobre la Xina, tot i que no ha aconseguit resoldre-les completament.Paraules clauhistoriografia, orientalisme, paradigma, representació, Xina

In 1922, in a work entitled The Problem of China, after having lived in Beijing for about a year and having visited other Chinese cities, philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell wrote:

China, like every other civilised country, has a tradition which stands in the way of progress. The Chinese have excelled in stability rather than in progress; therefore Young China, […] perceives that the advent of industrial civilisation has made progress essential to continued national existence. (Russell, 1922, p. 26)

As with other leading intellectuals of the 1920s (J. Dewey, H. Driesch, R. Tagore), Russell was invited to Peking University to give a series of courses about what in China was perceived as “Western knowledge”, at a time when this institution had already become one of the leading exponents of the New Culture Movement which crystallised around the time of the 1919 Versailles Conference, when at the end of the First World War, German concessions on the Chinese coast were handed over to the Japanese in one of the most visible gestures of disrespect observed in Western imperialism for decades in China and one of the most transparent displays of the weakness of the Chinese republican government. It was in this context, during the academic year 1921-1922, that Russell lectured on philosophy, logic and sociology at the renovated university and came into contact with many of the new Chinese intellectuals of the age: Liang Qichao, Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao, etc. (Ogden, 1982, pp. 533-539). Even Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, who would decades later become the most important leaders of the People’s Republic of China, attended some of his lectures. (Clark, 1976, p. 639).

In The Problem of China, Russell offers a very critical look at the actions of the Western powers in China and tries to distance himself from the ethnocentric perspective which at the time characterised the majority of publications about Asian countries reaching the European public. At the same time, he showed his sympathies and admiration for the Chinese culture and people,

which he described as having a conscious desire to distance themselves from early 20th-century stereotypes about China and East Asia in general. Russell is particularly critical of some of the more fundamental principles of Western modernity, such as the idea of progress, which is viewed from the prism of the disastrous events that had gripped Europe in the preceding years. In 1916, this critical attitude towards the West had led him to be imprisoned for six months; the result of his anti-war stance. Despite this effort, however, Russell was a man of his time and, as such, persists in some of the stereotypes, which, for almost two centuries, have defined and driven the historical discussion about the Chinese world, as we see in the citation at the start. In fact, some of the ideas referred to by Russell (tradition, a lack of progress, the stability of the Chinese world) became –by taking them on, justifying them or reinterpreting them– the intellectual scaffold with which the majority of Western analysts and historians from the late 18th century to the 20th century have tackled the Chinese world.

One of the most significant and authoritative examples is that of John K. Fairbank (1907-1991), probably the most eminent historian on China of the 20th century, who in 1989 reissued a revised version of his work, China. Tradition and Transformation, originally published eleven years previously (in collaboration with E. Reischauer). When it refers to the significance of the First Opium War (1839-42), which represented the defeat of China by the British Navy and the start of the semi-colonial European dominance of important areas of Chinese sovereignty, Fairbank says:

In demanding diplomatic equality and commercial opportunity, Britain represented all the Western states, which would sooner or later have demanded the same things if Britain had not. It was an accident of history that the dynamic British commercial interests in the China trade was centered not only on tea but also on opium. If the main Chinese demand had continued to be for Indian raw cotton, or at any rate if there had been no market for opium in late-Ch’ing China, as there had been none earlier, then there would have been no “opium




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war”. Yet probably some kind of Sino-foreign war would have come, given the irresistible vigor of Western expansion and immovable inertia of Chinese institutions. (Fairbank, Reischauer, 1989, p. 277)1

Even though this text was written half a century later, Fairbank goes much further than Russell in the assumption of some principles (such as the immobility and inertia of the Chinese world compared with the vigour of the West, the impossibility of avoiding conflict, the communion of Western interests, China’s inability to respond), which, as we will see over the coming pages, are the result of an intellectual tradition that has its roots in the Enlightenment thought and expansionism of the great European empires. A tradition which, though with different nuances and perspectives, is based on the same sources as Orientalist thought, as described by Edward Said in Orientalism (1978), and, indeed, is one of the most obvious examples of such in academic study.

The formation of a historical discourse on China

Ever since the mediaeval period, China has been an empire of mythical characteristics in the European imagination: the utmost representation of the so-called Far East. Marco Polo had defined a number of traits that would remain unaltered for centuries in the European portrayal of the Chinese world: the luxury and refinement, the culture of exoticism, the mysterious nature of the women, the unheard-of ingenuity and invention, etc. make China an unknown, distant and mysterious world, yet one that is admired and attractive, as suggested by one of the titles of the work by the Venetian, The Book of Wonders.2 The lack of direct contact between the two ends of the Eurasian continent, as a consequence of the fall of the Mongol Empire, which had managed to unify this vast area, contributed to the reification of these ideas, which were applied to everything that extended from the east of the Mediterranean, beyond the known world.

The 16th century represented a point of inflection in this trend. The Portuguese route that had led Vasco da Gama to the coast of India skirting the African continent and which continued as far as the ports of Japan and China brought Europe and East Asia into contact once again. And it was by this route, which was completed by the one that the Spaniards opened up through America and the Philippines, that not just goods but cultural products and ideas, including religious ones, circulated. For almost two centuries, the

Catholic missions acted as the utmost exponent of the relations between the Chinese Empire and Europe. The missionaries, especially those of the Society of Jesus, became high-level cross-cultural agents, to the point where some of them attained a position of privilege and entered the court of the emperor as astronomers, engineers or painters.3 Thus, they offered China the friendlier face of the European world, that of the arts and sciences, which they used as an advertisement to spread Christian doctrine among Chinese intellectuals, at the same time conveying to the West a benevolent and friendly view of the Chinese world, interested in justifying their mission and their method. The Jesuits believed that the most effective way of entering the Chinese world meant first converting its governors to the Christian cause; the people then converting should only be a question of time. To do this, they had to adapt to an elaborate and complex culture like that of the Chinese. Consequently, they abandoned their religious habits to adopt the ceremonial robes of the Chinese officials, they learned cultured language, they studied Chinese history and they analysed and translated the Confucian classics. We should not be surprised, then, that the treatises that they wrote about the Chinese world were extremely well documented and that, moreover, they often portrayed the reality of East Asia in sincerely laudatory terms. Confucianism, for example, reached Europe as a moral philosophy that predated the values of Christianity, an idea that was very well received among some 17th-century intellectuals who began to preach the need for a natural religion outside the domain of the Church and who saw in Chinese thought a source of inspiration. (Zhang, 1988, p. 118).

This perception gave birth to the Sinophile thought of the 17th and early 18th centuries, which boasted representatives of the intellectual stature of Leibniz, Wolff, Rousseau and Voltaire, who, in their works, praised very diverse aspects of the Chinese world, such as the language, the political system and education. In their works, China became a country governed by a philosopher king with the assistance of literati who are selected by taking into consideration nothing more than their intellectual and moral standing. The respect for laws, the tolerance in ideas and the political excellence are virtues that eclipse the shortcomings –which, nevertheless, did not go unnoticed by some of these thinkers. However, circumstances changed radically in the second half of the 18th century, in both Europe and China, and the Western portrayal of the Chinese world underwent a radical volte-face.

On the one hand, the method of the Jesuits of fitting in with Chinese culture was strongly criticised by the other orders, giving rise to the so-called Rites Controversy: the Society of Jesus ended

1. My italics.My italics. 2. Polo’s work has been published under a number of titles. The most usual, Polo’s work has been published under a number of titles. The most usual,Polo’s work has been published under a number of titles. The most usual, Il Milione (1298), probably refers to the author’s tendency to state that everything

in China has a grandeur and occurs with an extraordinary abundance –there is “a million” of everything– a topic that many of his successors would pick up” of everything– a topic that many of his successors would pick up of everything– a topic that many of his successors would pick up and which lasts until today.

3. For the role of the Jesuit missionaries as intercultural mediators, see Golden (2000).For the role of the Jesuit missionaries as intercultural mediators, see Golden (2000).




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up being dissolved by the Papacy, and the less tolerant Catholic orders expelled by the Chinese emperor. Meanwhile, in Europe the ideas of rationalism gave way to the crystallisation of the enlightened thought of modernity, with its faith in progress. Leibniz and Voltaire were concerned with showing the universality of reason and China was an ideal example of their proposals. Yet, from this point on, enlightened Europeans submitted China to their ideas on historical progress: the stability that had previously been interpreted as an example of the virtues of its political system would become regarded from the mid-18th century onwards as a sign of its lack of evolution and modernity.4

One of the most classic formulations of this Sinophobic thought is seen in J. G. Herder, who in his Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Humanity (1787) said: “The [Chinese] empire is an embalmed mummy painted with hieroglyphics and wrapped in silk; its internal life is like that of animals in hibernation” (XIV, p. 13).5 For Herder, Chinese culture is one that has not evolved for centuries, the vestiges of a distant past, a country without a present, like Egyptian hieroglyphics, which belong to a dead culture. And it was this stereotyped vision that, reproduced and amended, resonated throughout the work of most European intellectuals at the end of the 18th century and throughout the 19th century, from Adam Smith to Marx. However, the one who best defined it was Hegel in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (1840), in which he dedicated an entire section to China.

Hegel feels that China represents the starting point of the history of humanity, in a formulation that we can consider one of the intellectual bases of the Orientalist representation of Asia: “The History of the World travels from East to West; for Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia is the beginning” (Hegel, 2004, p. 13). And he adds:

Early do we see China advancing to the condition in which it is found at this day; for […] every change is excluded, and the fixedness of a character which recurs perpetually takes the place of what we should call the truly historical. China and India lie, as it were, still outside the World’s History, as the mere presupposition of elements whose combination must be waited for to constitute vital progress. (Hegel, 2004, p. 29)

Hegel clearly defines the mechanisms of representation of the Chinese world and East Asia, which remained in force for many decades: China is an empire that remains outside historical

processes, with neither evolution nor progress, inert, passive and unable to assume Western modernity by itself. And it is the West that can make the Chinese emerge from this lethargy. The Western world, therefore, becomes a factor –a necessary and sufficient factor– in the transformation of East Asian countries, which becomes the intellectual justification for the colonial actions of the great Euro-American powers in the Pacific and Asia. All the texts which, from the second half of the 19th century, attempt to analyse the modern history of China share this epistemological paradigm, which turned China into an apprentice of the civilising lessons of Western countries.6 China –and East Asia in general– is always described as the passive and feminine part in the relationship it has with the civilised and masculine West (Guarné, 2005). And it is from this perspective that, in the colonial context of the nineteenth century, the Chinese are described as inferior and barbarous, narrow-minded and xenophobic. This is how one of the few texts of the time published in Spain about China describes them, introducing the Fu Manchu stereotype that first literature and then cinema would feed off for decades:

El carácter [of the Chinese] en la apariencia es muy afable,of the Chinese] en la apariencia es muy afable,] en la apariencia es muy afable, humano y modesto; en realidad son vengativos y crueles. Son muy ceremoniosos y corteses, y sobre todo observadores exactos de sus leyes, sobre lo cual se vela con mucha severidad; su genio y talento son vivos, espirituosos, animados y penetrantes, y poseen más que ninguna otra nación el arte de disimular sus sentimientos y deseo de venganza, guardando tan bien todas las apariencias de humildad que se los cree insensibles a todo género de ultrajes; pero si se les presenta la ocasión de destruir a su enemigo, se aprovechan de ella con ahínco y precipitación hasta lo sumo. (Álvarez, 1857, pp. 93-94)7

Despite everything, critical voices could be heard regarding the colonial actions in East Asia, which attempted to overcome this strongly Eurocentric, even racist, view and during the last decades of the 19th century and first decades of the 20th an effort was made to transform China into an object of academic study. Oxford University, to offer a distinguished example, was the first to offer Chinese classes in 1876.8 The first lecturer was James Legge, a Protestant missionary who led an ambitious translation project of the great Chinese classics and is the embodiment of the erudite Western figure who approaches Chinese culture with honesty and passion.9 These first Sinologists, despite the fact that they do

4. For the change in European thought from Sinophilia to Sinophobia, see Zhang (1988, pp. 116-123).For the change in European thought from Sinophilia to Sinophobia, see Zhang (1988, pp. 116-123). 5. For an analysis of Herder’s representation of the Chinese world, see Goebel (1995).For an analysis of Herder’s representation of the Chinese world, see Goebel (1995). 6 For an analysis of the history of Euro-American aggressions in China in the 19th century, under the banner of educating and civilising, see Hevia (2004).For an analysis of the history of Euro-American aggressions in China in the 19th century, under the banner of educating and civilising, see Hevia (2004). 7. See translation at the end of the article, cit 1. (Editor’s note).See translation at the end of the article, cit 1. (Editor’s note). 8. In fact, the first Chair in Chinese Studies in London was significantly earlier and dates from 1837, and held by Samuel Kidd. In Cambridge, in 1888, former In fact, the first Chair in Chinese Studies in London was significantly earlier and dates from 1837, and held by Samuel Kidd. In Cambridge, in 1888, former

diplomat and interpreter Tomas Wade became the first to teach Chinese. In France, courses in Chinese had begun much earlier, in 1815 at the Collège de France run by Jean-Pierre-Abel Rémusat. For the origins of Sinology in the West, see Honey (2001).

9. Legge’s translations, over 7 volumes, were published in 1861 under the title Legge’s translations, over 7 volumes, were published in 1861 under the title The Chinese Classics: with a translation, critical and exegetical notes, pro-




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4. Sobre el pas del pensament europeu de la sinofilia a la sinofòbia, vegeu Zhang (1988, pàgs. 116-123). Sobre el pas del pensament europeu de la sinofilia a la sinofòbia, vegeu Zhang (1988, pàgs. 116-123). 5. Per a una anàlisi de la representació de Herder del món xinès, vegeu Goebel (1995). Per a una anàlisi de la representació de Herder del món xinès, vegeu Goebel (1995). 6. Per a una anàlisi de la història de les agressions colonials euroamericanes a la Xina de segle Per a una anàlisi de la història de les agressions colonials euroamericanes a la Xina de segle xix en la seva dimensió pedagògica i civilitzatòria, vegeu Hevia (2004). 7. Veg. la traducció al final de l’article, cit. 1 (N. de l’ed.). Veg. la traducció al final de l’article, cit. 1 (N. de l’ed.).

not actively participate in the colonial intellectualism defined by Said, do unconsciously assume the epistemological categories that drive the colonial discussion of the age in which they lived. It is significant, for example, that the renowned translation by Legge of the Chinese classics should be financed by Joseph Jardine, a member of one of the most important British merchant clans working in China in the 19th century, whose fortune was linked directly to the lucrative opium trade.10

These experts in the Chinese world, of which Legge is only an example, take on a dual function of representation: on the one hand, they become the authorised ambassadors in the West of Chinese civilisation, spokespersons and often defenders of the cultural principals that they take from the Chinese world, even though, on the other hand, they do so always clinging to their own almost pedagogical stance as standards of Western enlightened ideals. This is how a figure still around today was born: that of the expert in the Chinese world, which constitutes a discipline different form –apart from– the other academic disciplines, which generally left the Chinese and the non-Western world beyond their sphere of research.

The study of Chinese history in the early decades of the 20th century was in the hands of these Sinologists, missionaries, diplomats and functionaries who knew the Chinese world in person, in the hands of more or less well intentioned representatives of the imperial powers in Asia. It is a history that is clearly centred on the actions of the Western countries in the Chinese world, which are interpreted, albeit often critically, as the unleashing that allowed the Chinese to enter modernity, admitting the technological and scientific superiority of the West, which emerges as a civilising model and pedagogue. The same historical processes are sought in Chinese history that affected the Western countries: for this reason, these historians reflect on the non-development in China of a European-style industrial revolution or on the reasons for the lack of capitalist-oriented forms of economic organisation. The West, then, is the norm and yardstick of historical progress, and in this comparative perspective, Chinese history shows a series of shortcomings and anomalies in its development.11 In spite of everything, however, this paradigm that we could call imperialist makes China a historical object in its own right and, therefore, overcomes the Sinophobic thought that we can still find in some writers at the start of the 20th century.

The sociocultural approach

After the Second World War, a new generation of completely professional historians began to emerge, who had studied at the modern universities of the United States and Europe, with a much more solid and attentive training in the discipline, and this led to the modern development of the history of China and East Asia. However –despite the systematic study of Chinese archives, the application of scientific text analysis and less Eurocentric comparative research methodologies– emphasis continued on the role of Western aggressions in China. The whole of Chinese history was interpreted on the basis of the significance of these agressions by studying the impact of modernisation imposed by Euro-American countries –viewed as a necessary phenomenon for the activation of Chinese history– in traditional East Asian societies, despite certain aspects of Western imperialism being explicitly criticised. In fact, concepts such as change and transformation, true emblems of enlightened modernity, took on an extraordinary cultural value for the historians of the time, forming the basis for their entire research and the interpretation of Chinese history. This had a perverse effect, as numerous aspects of the history of Chinese society that have nothing to do with the colonial aggressions of Western nations disappear from historical contemplation and, therefore, are implicitly denied. Required reading for this historiographical context is the text quoted above by John K. Fairbank, the leading Chinese historian from the mid-1940s to the late 1980s, a long period during which modern Chinese history took on meaning on the basis of the question of its response to Western aggressions.

This perspective throws up a number of quite obvious problems. On the one hand, it takes on an active role for the West compared with a solely reactive China. In other words, despite the fact that it was no longer a question of the passive reality as discussed by the enlightened figures of the 19th century, China continued to be denied the possibility of acting for itself, without stimulation from the West. In addition, as we saw in the text cited above, the West was seen as a reified entity, a block with very few differences, that shares unique aims and the same colonial enterprise and whose spatial and temporal complexity is often overlooked. Likewise, China was, in the work of the historians of the time, a construct, a simplifying abstraction that sidelines the exceptional diversity of the Chinese world, which puts the validity of a large part of the generalisations made about it in doubt. This explains the fact

legomena and copious indexes. Despite one and a half centuries having passed since its publication, Legge’s translation still enjoys a renowned reputation for its accuracy among specialists. For information about Legge, see the extensive biography by Girardot (2002).

10. William Jardine, patriarch of the clan and co-founder of the Jardine-Matheson firm, which is still trading today as one of the most high-profile companies William Jardine, patriarch of the clan and co-founder of the Jardine-Matheson firm, which is still trading today as one of the most high-profile companies in Hong Kong, was the driving force behind the Sino-British war of 1839-42.

11. A more extensive analysis of the role that the West has played as a benchmark for modern Chinese history and of how this has been perceived as a problem A more extensive analysis of the role that the West has played as a benchmark for modern Chinese history and of how this has been perceived as a problem can be found in Cohen (1984, 3 et seg.).




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that in the historical discourse maintained during these decades, a significant number of the historical processes that affect modern Chinese history go unnoticed and are not studied by historians, simply because they have nothing to do with the presence of foreign countries on the Chinese coast. Some events are even interpreted as a reaction to Western actions that were in fact an evolution of internal forces and processes with their origins in a period long before the arrival of foreign powers in China.

With this approach, the cultural, intellectual and even psychological aspects of the Chinese world are of such specific importance that, all too often, they sideline the political or economic factors (which are the foundations of historical research with regards to Western countries). It is assumed that traditional Chinese culture –which at this time was almost synonymous with Confucianism– was not simply the brake that impeded the modernisation of China from the inside, but in fact the reason for the supposed attitude of closure, denial, rejection, or, at least, resistance to the influence and modernisation arriving from the West. Political or economic questions, therefore, are relegated to the background. This sociocultural approach, as it is often called, does not cease to be an academic and sublimated form of the Orientalisation of the Asian cultures discussed by Said: China is different per se, an ontologically different entity, by non-Western definition, and therefore the categories with which the Chinese world should be analysed and understood are specific and inherent to it, radically different from those applied to other historical realities. This explains for these historians that contact with the West has inevitably been antagonistic and not due to political differences; it is rather a cultural shock between European universalism and that which in this representation of the Chinese world is understood as Sino-centrism. Armed confrontation was inevitable, as we see above in the citation by Fairbank, which in turn acts as justification for the actions of imperialism in the Western Pacific.

The 1970s represented a challenge to these ideas with the appearance of a new generation of historians, especially in America, who brought into doubt some of the assumptions of the dominant historiography regarding China. The first critical voices focused on denouncing the “apologetics of imperialism”,12 in the context of the protests against the war in Vietnam and the appearance of a critical conscience that was not only concerned with the historical facts, but also with how these are read, interpreted and articulated.13 The historian as a questioning figure takes on

a relevance that had not been made explicit until then: facts are not objective, unquestionable and transcendent, but something problematic and subject to the interpretation of whoever analyses them. As a result of this evolution, after 1980 historiography followed very different paths that were much less clearly defined and secure.

The history of China has currently moved –a great deal– away from the (meta)narratives of just a few decades ago, if only at a theoretical level. Historians are obliged to act with the caution required by the historical and regional diversity of the Chinese world. Methodologically, many problems are posed in extrapolating what the research shows about one Chinese region for the others. And this regionalisation of history, which is no longer based on the traditional administrative divisions, also has a temporal dimension: what is stated of a specific period of history cannot be stated per se of other moments in history, as had unfailingly been done by a great many historians until a few decades ago.14 This represents a much broader recognition of the dynamism of the intellectual, social, political and economic life of China in all periods. An example will allow us to grasp this: when historians had posed the reasons that explained the outbreak of the opium wars, the Chinese intellectual and functionary class had always been seen as a homogeneous group of representatives of the most orthodox Confucian or neo-Confucian thought, supposedly hostile to any change to the Chinese political and administrative system. Research in recent years, however, has shown that among the Chinese intellectuals of the period there were highly contrasting factions and parties which show that what we call Confucianism is a political, philosophical and intellectual project that cannot be shoehorned into the categories that Western analysts –on the basis of the characterisation made by the Jesuit missionaries who first presented it to the European world in the 16th and 17th centuries– have tried to apply to it.15

Nonetheless, some of the most basic formulae of the sociocultural approach have survived this criticism, both within and beyond the work of historians. One of the most visible and well-known examples is the so-called Asian Values Debate, which attempts to recognise and, indeed, demand the validity of cultural values common to the countries of the Asian continent that can be compared with “Western values”. These Asian values have often been identified as supposedly Confucian values despite the evident contradiction represented by attributing to a continent of the human and geographical extent of Asia, or to a significant part

12. Most notable among the first criticisms of the imperialist approach were the contributions of Nathan (1972), Esherick (1973) and Lassek (1983), who pub- Most notable among the first criticisms of the imperialist approach were the contributions of Nathan (1972), Esherick (1973) and Lassek (1983), who pub-Most notable among the first criticisms of the imperialist approach were the contributions of Nathan (1972), Esherick (1973) and Lassek (1983), who pub-lished a number of articles in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, which was founded precisely as a reaction to the major North American research institutions that focused on East Asian countries.

13. It should be remembered that leading figures of 20th-century intelligentsia who had a huge influence over their peers, such as Michel Foucault, Haydn It should be remembered that leading figures of 20th-century intelligentsia who had a huge influence over their peers, such as Michel Foucault, Haydn It should be remembered that leading figures of 20th-century intelligentsia who had a huge influence over their peers, such as Michel Foucault, Haydn White, Jacques Derrida, Edward S. Said, Jean-Françoise Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, etc., published some of their most fundamental and referenced works in the 1970s.

14. For the regional analysis of Chinese historical reality, see Skinner (1977 and 1985).For the regional analysis of Chinese historical reality, see Skinner (1977 and 1985). 15. For the different factions of Chinese intellectuals at the Imperial Court in the context of the First Opium War, see Polachek (1992).For the different factions of Chinese intellectuals at the Imperial Court in the context of the First Opium War, see Polachek (1992).




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of it, a unity based on cultural values that originate, in fact, from a specific region and very specific period of the past. We will not enter here into evaluating the bases of this debate, which despite the political manipulation to which it is subjected, would allow us to reflect on a number of fundamental issues regarding how we understand alterity and project our epistemological categories on to other realities without having first evaluated their suitability. In any event, it is important to understand how far, in the majority of formulations that have been made, it is based on culturalist reasonings that contradict the historical and social reality of the countries to which it refers.16

Criticism and post-paradigmatisation

However, criticism of imperialist apologetics and the sociocultural approach, or recognition of the diversity of China, geographically and historically, is one thing and it is quite another to overcome the problematicity of the historical discussion about the Chinese world. Therefore, far beyond the revisionist tendency of the 1970s and 1980s, the last two decades have seen a whole range of proposals, some more successful than others, which have attempted to replace the old paradigms that had marked the development of the historiography for almost two centuries with new formulae more suitable to getting to grips with the history of China.

One of the first was drawn up by US historian Paul A. Cohen. He proposed changing the focus of the history of China, which until then had been centred on the activity of foreign countries in China, for what he called a China-centred history of China. This was a history that took China, not the West, as its starting point, and –on an epistemological level– has to be deployed using Chinese criteria, not those imported from the West (Cohen, 1984). Cohen’s proposal is a coherent response to the situation of historical Chinese studies, which coincided with the extraordinary rise of local studies in the 1970s and 1980s, and which recognises the dynamism and diversity of the Chinese world. Proposing a series of criteria derived from the Chinese world means, among many other things, assessing the validity and legitimacy of some of the categories applied to the analysis of Chinese history, which, in fact, have their origins in certain historical processes exclusive to Western countries, such as modernity or contemporaneity. However, using these “China-centred history” approaches also lead to certain doubts about the methodology which are hard to

resolve. Cohen explicitly rejects external visions of Chinese history, and in fact establishes a somewhat inaccurate distinction of what external and internal focuses are. This is an approach, which, as with the Asian Values Debate, still has Orientalist echoes: China has remained isolated in universal history, clearly following different historical development guidelines, which need to be known from the inside, starting with the Chinese language and culture. In other words, despite explicitly rejecting the sociocultural approach, he reaches a series of similar conclusions, which, in short, do not help break away from the historical alienation of China.17

Another trend in the historiography that has been developed in recent years points in the opposite direction to the one outlined by Cohen and consists of integrating Chinese history into world history, not so as to enhance the latter, but as an essential part thereof. It is a question of understanding Chinese history from a broad perspective. China, particularly over the last five centuries, has not only participated in, but has also contributed to the development of some of humanity’s great historical processes. The work of historian and sociologist Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (1998), is probably the best known in this inclusive understanding of history. For Frank, our representation of the Asian world has to overcome the Eurocentrism that has characterised it for centuries to accept the important role that the continent of Asia has played in world history: in his own words, history has to “reorient”.18 Despite the fact that Frank’s work is unable to overcome some of the most basic premises with which enlightened thought had approached the Chinese world (progress, development),19 it has had an important influence on other authors who from both Chinese history and a more global approach have attempted to carry out this integrating project.20 These are works which, generally speaking from an economic history perspective, try to show the “Oriental” roots of Western civilisation, or at least show the influence that the Asian world has had, so as to challenge the ethnocentric approaches that have always dominated our perception of history.

However, this comparative perspective is not free from methodological risks. In spite of the fact that some of these writers are aware of it, others fall into the trap of attempting to establish correlations in an insufficiently critical manner. That is, there is the danger of looking, a priori, in Chinese history for processes and problems that are alien to it, or of which it is at least pertinent to question their legitimacy as a basis for comparison. In other words, the danger of falling into the same ethnocentrism –now more

16. The value of the Asian Values Debate lies more in its criticism of the supposed universality of the enlightened values than in the definition or justification of The value of the Asian Values Debate lies more in its criticism of the supposed universality of the enlightened values than in the definition or justification ofThe value of the Asian Values Debate lies more in its criticism of the supposed universality of the enlightened values than in the definition or justification of values applicable to the Asian continent.

17. For a critical analysis of Cohen’s approach, see Dirlik (1996b, pp. 262-268).For a critical analysis of Cohen’s approach, see Dirlik (1996b, pp. 262-268). 18. Beltrán (2006, esp. �27-35) analyses the contributions of Frank’s work and contextualises it within the production of knowledge about East Asia in the Beltrán (2006, esp. �27-35) analyses the contributions of Frank’s work and contextualises it within the production of knowledge about East Asia in the

academic world, in both the West and Asia. 19. For a critique of the Eurocentrism implicit in the critique of Eurocentrism by Frank, see Dirlik (2000, 73For a critique of the Eurocentrism implicit in the critique of Eurocentrism by Frank, see Dirlik (2000, 73 et seg.) 20. Highlights include the work of a number of specialists in Chinese history, such as Pomeranz (2000), Wong (1997) or Waley-Cohen (1999), or that of his- Highlights include the work of a number of specialists in Chinese history, such as Pomeranz (2000), Wong (1997) or Waley-Cohen (1999), or that of his-Highlights include the work of a number of specialists in Chinese history, such as Pomeranz (2000), Wong (1997) or Waley-Cohen (1999), or that of his-

torians with a more global perspective, such as Bayly (2004) or Hobson (2004).




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furtive– to be found in the historians of the first half of the 20th century. Nevertheless, the recovery of China and Asia in general for the construction of a truly universal history represents a step forward in the creation of a non-exclusive and integrating history.

This rejection of the forms of Eurocentric thought, in which the work of experts in subaltern studies such as Dipesh Chakrabarty and Ranajit Guha have had a notable influence, has led to another of the shifts seen in recent decades. That is, some historians paying greater attention to the methodological contributions of other disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, literary studies, political science, etc. Without a doubt, the development of the ideas of postcolonialism, postmodernity and cultural studies has been a key factor in this trend, which has not always been sufficiently balanced.21 Indeed, some of the most challenging historiographical proposals have seen the light in this setting, which reflects on the articulation of such concepts as power and domination, imagination, culture and representation. One of the leading names in this field is that of Turkish historian Arif Dirlik, concerned with questions of an epistemological nature that are not usually part of the agenda of the majority of historians. A large part of Dirlik’s reflections revolve around the concepts of progress and modernity: according to this historian, despite the critical evolution in recent decades of part of the historiography, a radical challenge to the teleological representation of the history inherited from the European Enlightenment has not been seen. For Dirlik, “it is necessary to repudiate this historical teleology in all its manifestations” and to identify “alternative modernities”, not to fall into a return to the reifying impetus of the sociocultural approach (as Cohen did), an approach that must finally be overcome, but to recover “historical trajectories that have been suppressed by the hegemony of capitalist modernity” (Dirlik, 1997, p. 127). In fact, according to Dirlik, the disturbing influence of Eurocentrism cannot ever be completely overcome unless the very idea of “development” is challenged at root. It is not a question of rejecting modernity per se, an attitude that would lead us to a certain self-Orientalisation, but, while recognising it, creating alternative modernities that overcome the narratives of the Enlightenment that still dominate historians daily activities (Dirlik, 1996, pp. 277-278).

Conclusions

A paradigm is not a simple theoretical proposal, instead it has an epistemological dimension that affords it all of its regulatory capacity. It is a sieve that sets the possibilities for knowledge: whatever does not meet the rules set by the paradigm cannot

be considered, and therefore does not exist, is not historical, as we have seen with part of the Chinese reality for centuries. Nonetheless, the strength of a paradigm is not limited to a culture or borders. It sets what is true and scientific, has a universal nature, such that everything with pretensions of science must meet its specifications if it does not want to be excluded. The history of China is no exception. The historical paradigms that have dominated the Western intellectual tradition have ended up being imposed on China as though it were another form of imperialism. Despite the fact that in this article we have limited ourselves exclusively to the Western representation of Chinese history, it should be taken into account that, to give a clear enough example, Chinese Marxist thought has ended up assuming some of the more basic principles of the imperialist approach of which it is the sworn enemy: according to Marxist historiography, only the Chinese Communist Party managed to end the backwardness and lack of modernisation of China, a backwardness and a need for modernisation that are the same starting point of the imperialist approach that we have analysed. When all is said and done, Marxism is deeply rooted in the teleological thought of European enlightened modernity.

Indeed, it is Arif Dirlik, aware of the strength of the historiographical paradigms, among other proposals, who rejects any attempt to establish new paradigms that set out and demarcate our approach to Chinese history (and non-Euro-American history in general), as this would mean repeating the same mistakes and vices of historians throughout the 20th century. In fact, since the development of the critical historiography that began at the end of the 1970s, no great new paradigm has appeared to replace the previous ones.

However, the fact that after the appearance of a critical historiography no new paradigm has imposed itself does not mean that the old paradigms have been completely overcome. We have already seen that some of the attempts to reposition Chinese history in world history have not been able to avoid the ethnocentric approaches despite their aim of constructing a markedly non-Eurocentric discourse. Likewise, many of the theoretical reflections mentioned in the preceding pages have gone unnoticed by a significant number of historians, which helps us understand why so many books still being published today on the history of China continue to be rooted in the premises of the old, theoretically, superseded paradigms; or why that which students learn in our universities unfortunately often maintains a marked Orientalist tone.

In fact, China historians have an educational responsibility with a social aspect that reaches far beyond their research tasks. In a society such as ours, in which Asian studies have just begun

21. For a critical reading of the influence of cultural studies on the historiography of modern and contemporary China in 1980s and 1990s, see Huang For a critical reading of the influence of cultural studies on the historiography of modern and contemporary China in 1980s and 1990s, see Huang (1998).




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and where the interest of public opinion in East Asian countries is very recent, this pedagogical task takes on greater relevance. Orientalist cliches and stereotypes are present in almost every activity connected to Chinese culture, from cinema festivals to academic conferences, or popular celebrations and exhibitions by prestigious museums. The imperialist and Orientalising perspective, although very often explicitly rejected, is repeatedly seen implicitly in the majority of these activities. This is why education is required: not only does the historian, or the specialist in East Asian art, literature or economics, have to try and convey knowledge, but they also have to denounce explicitly the discursive anomalies that have traditionally determined our way of representing the reality of East Asian countries.

Cit 1. The character [of the Chinese] appears to be very good-

natured, humane and modest; in reality they are vengeful and cruel: they are very ceremonious and courteous, and above all follow their laws to the letter, which they do with great severity: their genius and talent, lively, spiritual, animated and penetrating, and more than any other nation, they possess the art of disguising their feelings and desire for revenge, hiding all appearances of humility so well that one believes them to be insensitive to all types of outrage; but if you offer them the opportunity to destroy their enemy, they eagerly and hastily take advantage of it to the full.

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FRANK, A. G. (1998). ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

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David Martínez-RoblesLecturer, Department of Languages and cultures (Uoc) and Department of Humanities (Pompeu Fabra)[email protected]

Graduate in Philosophy (University of Barcelona) and PhD in History (Pompeu Fabra University). He is a lecturer in the UOC’s Languages and Cultures Department and Pompeu Fabra’s Humanities Department. His research centres on modern and contemporary history of China and its representation in the Western world. He has published articles and works on a range of aspects of Chinese history and culture; the most recent being La lengua china: historia, signo y contexto. Una aproximación sociocultural [‘The Chinese Language: History, Sign and Context. A Sociocultural Approach‘]; (Editorial UOC 2007).

This work is subject to a Creative Commons Attribution-noncommercial-noDerivs 2.5 Spain licence. It may be copied, distributed and broadcast provided that the author and the e-journal that publishes it (Digithum) are cited. Commercial use and derivative works are not permitted. The full licence can be consulted on http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/es/deed.en.





Instrumentalisation of Passions, Social Regulation and Transcendence of Power in the Hanfeizi 韓非子


Albert GalvanyPostdoctoral researcher at the École Pratiques des Hautes Études (Religious Studies Department)[email protected]

Recommended citAtion: GALVANY, Albert (2008). “Instrumentalisation of Passions, Social Regulation and Transcendence of Power in the Hanfeizi 韓非子”. In: Carles PRADO-FONTS (coord.). “Orientalism” [online dossier]. Digithum. Iss. 10. UOC [Retrieved on: dd/mm/yy].<http://www.uoc.edu/digithum/10/dt/eng/galvany.pdf>ISSN 1575-2275

AbstractThe basic aim of this article is to present, albeit it schematically, some of the fundamental elements upon which the political and philosophical proposal of the Hanfeizi, one of the most important texts of pre-Imperial China, is based. This ancient text is especially evocative for philosophy in that it constitutes a real exception in classical political theory. Whereas the principal socio-political proposals, which were to a greater or lesser extent utopian, put forward by both Western and Chinese philosophers, consider that the greatest obstacle to achieving these projects lies in the passionate nature of humans, the work traditionally attributed to Han Fei defends the idea that an ordered social body is only possible thanks precisely to that passionate side. Using this core argument as a basis, the article will not only try to clarify the specific way in which this unique ideological system is legitimised and organised, but also endeavours to show the common ideological links between the authoritarian conception of the Hanfeizi and some of the more essential aspects of economic liberalism as presented in the work of Adam Smith.

KeywordsAncient China, Han Fei, domination, legalism, liberalism, Adam Smith

ResumAquest article té el propòsit fonamental de presentar, encara que sigui de manera esquemàtica, alguns dels elements fonamentals sobre els quals se sosté la proposta política i filosòfica del Hanfeizi, un dels texts més importants de la Xina preimperial. Aquest text antic resulta especialment evocador per al pensament en la mesura que representa una veritable excepció en la teoria política clàssica. Mentre que les principals propostes sociopolítiques, més o menys utòpiques, articulades tant per pensadors occidentals com xinesos, consideren que el major obstacle per a la consecució d’aquests projectes rau en la naturalesa passional de l’ésser humà, l’obra atribuïda tradicionalment a Han Fei defensa que només és possible obtenir un cos social ordenat gràcies precisament a aquesta dimensió passional. A partir d’aquest eix argumental, el nostre article no solament tractarà d’aclarir



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Albert GalvanyOriginal title: Instrumentalización de las pasiones, regulación social y trascendencia del poder en el Hanfeizi 韓非子


http://www.uoc.edu/digithum/10/dt/eng/galvany.pdf


Instrumentalisation of Passions, Social Regulation and…


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la manera concreta en la qual es legitima i organitza aquest singular sistema ideològic, sinó que també s’esforçarà a posar de manifest els vincles ideològics comuns entre la concepció autoritària del Hanfeizi i alguns dels aspectes més essencials del liberalisme econòmic tal com es presenten en l’obra d’Adam Smith.Paraules clauXina antiga, Han Fei, dominació, legisme, liberalisme, Adam Smith

In recent times, in the realm of French-speaking Sinology, the study of classical Chinese thought has momentarily ceased to be a merely historical, almost archaeological and, consequently, anodyne and sterile issue in the eyes of people outside this particular field of knowledge to become the focus and object of considerable intellectual controversy, which has even broken through the narrow margins usually imposed by the discipline. The trigger of such a dispute is to be found in the publication of a succinct but estimable essay penned by Sinologist Jean-François Billeter against the theses of one of his most popular and controversial colleagues, François Jullien (Billeter, 2006). In turn, the latter was not slow in coming back with a reply in which he sought to neutralise Billeter’s arguments while restating the validity of his own ideas (Jullien, 2007). By no means is it my aim here to take sides in this debate by offering a detailed review of the two stances. In all, and insofar as my article seeks to establish a sort of comparative schema or, at least, a perspective of rapprochement between temporally and spatially disparate strands of thought, I feel it is appropriate to tackle, albeit superficially, one of the issues around which a large part of this discussion revolves: the problem of “alterity”.

It is fair to say that the methodological and philosophical project of François Jullien has been well and successfully received, as is reflected in the important number of translations of his work, both in Western and Asian countries. Perhaps part of this success is due to the fact that the fundamental architecture of his proposal is relatively simple, and, consequently, extremely attractive. In his opinion, contact with the categories of classical Chinese thought, which historically speaking were forged independently from the Indo-European categories and which, therefore, are presented as “the other” radical of Western philosophy, offers a distance from where it would be possible to see ourselves as subjects of that European tradition of which we are the product, whether we like it or not. If, as appears in a dialogue attributed to the platonic

1. “Socrates: �Did you ever observe that the face of the person looking into the eye of another is reflected as in a mirror, which is called the pupil, there is a“Socrates: �Did you ever observe that the face of the person looking into the eye of another is reflected as in a mirror, which is called the pupil, there is a sort of image of the person looking?’ Alcibiades: �That is quite true.’ Socrates: �Then the eye, looking at another eye, and at that in the eye which is most perfect, and which is the instrument of vision, will there see itself?’” (Plato, Alcibiades, 132c-133b).

2. François Jullien himself has explained the content of his proposal on numerous occasions: François Jullien himself has explained the content of his proposal on numerous occasions: Penser d’un dehors (la Chine): Entretiens d’Extrême-Occident, Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 2000, and Dépayser la pensée: Dialogues hétérotopiques avec François Jullien sur son usage philosophique de la Chine, Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, Paris, 2003.

tradition1, the eye cannot look at itself and needs to be reflected in the pupil of another eye (an “other” eye) to do so, neither can the Western philosopher appropriate their own condition without reflecting on the “other” thought, in this case personified by ancient China.2 In short, according to the programme defined by Jullien, the encounter with classical Chinese thought would not merely achieve the satisfaction of an intellectual curiosity, resembling a sort of vain and exotic tourism; his overriding interest would lie more in the fact that, when penetrating a radically different conceptual universe, the possibility of outlining a new perspective would open up before us, of conquering a privileged position (or distance) from where it would finally be possible to be aware with greater clarity of the framework, of the axioms and of the limitations that have configured the development of European philosophy and, consequently, armed with that new vision, also be in a position to overcome them.

However, such a project arouses certain suspicions. One should ask, for example, up to what point that look towards the other person responds to a genuine opening up or whether, on the contrary, it is no more than a utilitarian and egocentric projection. In this same sense, and from an epistemological point of view, the achievement of that distancing as a result of the dialectic with a radical alterity that comes from self-observation also proves to be suspicious. Is that look free of categories and prejudices when aimed at “the other”? Is that distance that is invoked as a goal, and from which would finally emanate awareness, critical self-awareness, of our itinerary as civilisation, not in fact an indispensable, and therefore prior, condition for that exterior look to be properly legitimate? In short, the greatest difficulties of Jullien’s project are to be found in its results. Despite the fact that, at least ideally, his proposal, through the contact with that radical alterity symbolised by classical Chinese thought, aims to offer an alternative to metaphysics, to Western ontology, in reality, the consequences are otherwise: that use of alterity produces, in my opinion, an even greater stagnation in the categories of




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being and of identity. It generates two perfectly defined worlds (frequently as a result of an extreme simplification): on the one hand, Europe, and on the other, China, without it being evident that this schism has been overcome.

The truth is that, as Jonathan Z. Smith says, “alterity” should not be understood in any way as a descriptive category, as an artefact of the perception of what is different and what is common, but rather as a political and linguistic project, a question of rhetoric and of judgement; for that reason, it would only be possible to create genuine progress in knowledge when “the other” ceases to be an ontological category, when its unshakeable and absolute metaphysical nature is dissolved. Despite its apparent taxonomic exclusivity, “alterity” is in fact a fundamentally trans-national issue, a matter of the “in-between” (J. Z. Smith, 1985, p. 46). The lessons taken from Smith’s theoretical contributions mean, in principle, a drastic inversion of the postulates and the methodological arguments insistently defended by François Jullien in his work. From that perspective, “the other” would reach its most problematic, and consequently fertile, degree from the intellectual point of view not when it is perceived as something radically different, as a forceful and irrevocable “alterity”, but, quite to the contrary, when it is seen as something implausibly close, proximate, similar. This similarity, which emphatically dissolves the longed-for and, to some extent, always tranquillising “alterity” (since, ultimately, inside the schema received, it is also the unequal, heterogeneous nature of the other that allows us to constitute, forge, by contrast, a differentiated, perfectly clear and distinct ontic identity), implies, in my opinion, a more fruitful, less paralysing, starting point when tackling the approach, the location and the critique of our own civilisation, than the formula chosen by writers such as Jullien. Less paralysing because, as opposed to what happens with the commitment to radical “difference”, the encounter with that “similar alterity” does not lead to the (re)affirming of two ontologically unique and consolidated entities but that, in recognising a certain affinity in that “other” that was thought to be completely alien, the foundations on which lies the recognition of identity, one’s own and of others, are finally split, giving way to an incisive and tenacious state of interrogation characteristic of philosophical inquiry.

Consequently, the following article that I am presenting can be seen as a specific example of that alternative proposal, which, instead of pursuing the game of radical alterity, deals with the concern for similarity in what is different. In specific terms, it is presented as a rapprochement to the work of a Chinese philosopher called Han Fei (280-233 BC), who, despite being twice as removed from our culture in time and space, in geography and history, does however contain a surprising common nexus

with the work of British philosopher and economist Adam Smith (1723-1790). The starting point of our enterprise corresponds to the confirmation that the relentless search for a perfect political organisation appears, both in the West and in the East, to have come up against the same obstacle time and time again: the irrational side to humans. Starting with Plato’s proposal and passing through that of Hobbes, Montesquieu or even Confucius, almost all theoretical initiatives which aim to solve the conflict of human political and social organisation agree on highlighting passions, the true animal side of humankind, as the primary stumbling block for the achievement of their projects. In contrast to all these, authoritarian philosopher Han Fei believes that that irrational side is not only not harmful, but that it constitutes the true foundation of the social order, the only possibility of building long-lasting social order. It is, then, an exceptional proposal in the history of political thought.

However, and this is the really interesting point, the political and social model designed by Han Fei that has a clear totalitarian vocation presents, as we will have the opportunity to see later, not a few elements in common with the intellectual bases of economic liberalism as presented by one of its principal ideologists: Adam Smith. Throughout this article, I will try, therefore, to present the elementary schema of Han Fei’s proposal to compare it subsequently with certain aspects of Adam Smith’s work, in the hope that this exercise of contrast and comparison generates in the reader a number of basic questions about our time.

Lessons from history: the imperative of adaptation

In order to understand the ideological proposal of Han Fei, it is essential to first view his conception of historical processes.3 Since its very origins, philosophical reflection in ancient China has been inseparable from a certain disposition in relation to the past. Looking at what occurred in High Antiquity is a basic criterion of authority for consolidating the unique identity of each ideological proposal and, at the same time, the principal argument for legitimising the political aspiration designed for a new present, which is, almost always, projected on to a supposedly immediate horizon. The work of Han Fei is not unconnected to that general trend, in contrast to what has been said by some experts.4 Consequently, in one of the two chapters devoted to the commentary on the, entitled “Illustrating Laozi” (Yu Lao 喻老), we find the following anecdote, the aim of which is to comment on Section LXIV of Laozi:

3. For a more complete analysis of the conception of history and time in legalist thought, see A. Galvany (2004, pp. 349-386). 4. In that sense, see, for example, D. Bodde (1938, p. 211).




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Wang Chu was travelling carrying a bundle of books when he met Xu Fong on the road to the land of Zhou. [Xu] Fong said: “Business consists of action. And action comes from opportunity. Anyone who knows of it is uninitiated in the ways of business. Books consist of discourses. And discourses come from knowledge. Anyone who knows does not accumulate their knowledge in books. So why are you walking along carrying all these books?” After which, Wang Chu set fire to his books and began dancing round the pyre. Knowledge does not rear its head much in discourses; wisdom is not kept in books. Our time condemns that attitude, but Wang Chu was able to return [to the way (dao)]. It is a question of learning to unlearn. Which is why [Laozi] says: “Learn to unlearn and return to the origin which the masses condemn”. (Qiyou, 2000, chap. XXI, p. 449)

This passage from the Hanfeizi proclaims the conviction that the action that we intend to carry out on what is real, whatever that may be, cannot be based on the study of books, inasmuch as the knowledge that comes from them already belongs to a time that is passed and, therefore, inevitably expired. The moral of the anecdote narrated by Han Fei is exemplary: the path, the attitude, the practice (xing 行) of Wang Chu is hindered by the burden of inherited, erudite knowledge, and this is what Xu Fong reveals. Insofar as it is not possible to apply permanent prescriptions, fixed forever in a text, for a time which never stops changing, the learning and study of books, from the past, becomes useless and even harmful. In the world of business (shi 事), the ritual appropriateness of gesture, or its moral quality of agreement with the precepts conveyed by the wise men of Antiquity, is not as important as its sole efficacy within the plan of action (wei 為). And, in the opinion of Han Fei, the guarantee of that efficacy in the action depends on its appropriateness, its adaptation, its suitability at the propitious moment (shi 時). The phrase that we have translated as “anyone who knows of it is uninitiated in the ways of business” hides a play on words, a suggestive semantic wink: on the one hand, supported by the term chang 常 understood as “tradition” or “custom”, Han Fei certifies the absence of fixed rules, of hereditary prescriptions in that which knows that an action’s success depends on its adaptation to the times; but that very passage also uses the other meaning of the term chang (“permanent”, “constant”) to illustrate the willingness of that man dedicated to the action, to evoke change as the only persistent aspect, the continuous transformation of things and that, therefore, the man of action must prove himself to be radically dynamic, completely without static disposition. In Han Fei’s opinion, it is essential to accept the transformation of history, of change, of succession, and adapt to the new conditions to avoid the propagation of disaster and put an end to the reigning disorder. Like his predecessor Shang Yang, Han Fei considers it essential to reform the political and administrative institutions in

such a way as to dispel all types of disagreement, of heterogeneity, between the course of time and the political actions that are intended to be imposed on it. It is the current conditions that must determine the form and methods of government, and not the other way round. Han Fei stresses the dynamic and irreversible nature of time and, with this, proclaims the need for continuous adaptation to its demands. In accordance with that conception of time and of history, the conservative attitude (encapsulated in Confucian ideology), which refuses to accept the transformation of the development process, the permanent updating of the present, is simply ridiculous. In this sense, he appears to be truer to the respect for history, praised and exulted by Confucian tradition, than the very representatives of that philosophy.

In Han Fei’s opinion, it is the study of the past, with its permanent changes and innovations, unexpected twists and turns and its frequent discontinuities, which reveals its dynamic nature and which shows, therefore, up to what point that nostalgic (and static) look at an idealised Antiquity is absurd and even historically false. The adaptation of the political institutions and practices to the different circumstantial frameworks of each moment is all that guarantees the progress, the survival of society, the arrival of efficient governors. Just as with that changing reality to which we must permanently adapt, political practice is also viewed in a dynamic way; the governors, the Administration, must be aware when observing the changes that occur in the social and economic reality of the country to adapt their responses accordingly. It is no surprise that in the second excerpt quoted below, Han Fei uses the metaphor of technical innovations. Apart from being a particularly illustrative allegory of the anti-traditionalist principles that dominate its system, this metaphor reveals one of the fundamental elements defended in his work, namely: the instrumental nature of political practice. Contrary to what occurs with the two other intellectual strands of the age, Confucianism and Taoism, Han Fei openly sustains the instrumental condition of the government of men. As we will see later on, in the final analysis, this attitude is derived from a radically amoral conception of politics. In any event, the direct consequence of this utilitarian conception of political practice is the need to adapt the methods of government, the means or instruments for achieving social order and peace, to the reality on which it is intended to act, without any argument other than that of its effectiveness carrying any weight. In this sense, Han Fei advocates a model of government that is able to be willing and open to the modification of its values and structures. As we have already seen, Han Fei’s criticism of the traditional stances of Confucianism originates from the study and objective scrutiny of historical deployment.

In times of High Antiquity, the population was scant and animals were plentiful; people were unable to dominate the wild beasts, birds of prey and serpents until the day when a wise man had the idea of binding ropes together to construct




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nests and put the people out of harm’s way. Fired with enthusiasm, the people made him king and gave him the title of “Sovereign of the Nests”. In that far-off time, people lived off fruit, roots and shellfish; the rottenness of raw food damaged their insides, with many of them dying from the disease; there then appeared a wise man who made a fire with wood and got rid of the fetidness in the food thanks to cooking. The people, overcome with joy, made him king and gave him the title “Sovereign of the Wood”. The empire was flooded in Mid-Antiquity; Kun and Yu traced the course of the rivers. In Recent Antiquity, the tyrants Jie and Zhou razed the empire to the ground with fire and blood until they were punished by the monarchs Tang and Wu. If, during the Xia dynasty, someone had proclaimed the intervention of the nests or burning wood, they would have been mocked by Kun and Yu; if, during the Yin and Zhou dynasties, someone had traced the courses of the great rivers, they would have been ridiculed by the monarchs Zhou and Wu. Everyone who now praises the methods of Antiquity and the procedures of Yao, Shun, Tang, Wu and Yu deserves to be mocked by the wise men of today. True wise men do not devote themselves to the servile cultivation of Antiquity; they do not use any immutable rule as a model. They consider the issues of the moment and adopt the corresponding provisions. (Qiyou, 2000, chap. XLIX, p. 1085)

The passage that we have just quoted picks up a large part of the elements that the tradition linked to Confucian thought had used to sanction a model of government dedicated to the reiteration of attitudes or methods from the past. In that sense, Han Fei’s argument is controversial and provocative. It uses the evolutional schema associated with Confucian theories to show, from these same positions, the implicit contradictions in its conservative attitude. Although the passages relating to the past have often been interpreted stating the iconoclastic conception of history in Han Fei’s system, my opinion is more to the contrary: Han Fei does not aim to break with the weight of history but, on the contrary, to remain radically faithful to its teachings. Consequently, from this perspective, the Hanfeizi in fact does nothing more than take to the extreme the respect and fidelity to history shown by philosophers attached to Confucianism, only the lesson taken from the study and analysis of it is diametrically opposed to the one sustained by its ideological adversaries. For Han Fei, seeking to impose order on society through antiquated and expired means proves to be as vain and dangerous as historically incorrect. In an age of great disputes and permanent convulsions, persisting in the use of inappropriate, out-of-date methods leads inevitably to the most absolute disorder and, therefore, to the ruin of the country.

Han Fei justifies constant innovation as an efficient method for establishing the social order in the scrutiny of history itself, in

the internal dynamism of the historical deployment. Consequently, he repeats the analogy of technical innovations, on this occasion referring to war, with the aim of illustrating the futility of anyone who seeks to model their political action in mirroring the past:

The staff, the shield and the great ceremonial axe cannot defeat anyone who has a long lance and a short halberd; genuflections and reverences serve for nothing before troops who march a hundred miles a day; noble ceremonial archers can do nothing against the power and precision of modern crossbows; the pole used to fend off attackers scaling the walls is sterile against the new methods of assault. The men of remote Antiquity contended in virtue; those of late Antiquity competed in sagacity; those of the present fight with strength. (Qiyou, 2000, chap. XLVII, p. 1030)

Han Fei’s argument is impeccable. It resorts to the analogy of military weapons and tools to illustrate the abyss that exists between the past and the present in a terrain that is especially sensitive to the need to adapt constantly to the new situations. If the weapons of yore, designed with care for their rituals, fulfilled their function for war uses and behaviours, they can no longer do anything against the efficiency of the new technologies. Although the passage comments on the incomparable military superiority of the weapons of the present compared with those of the past, with it Han Fei aims to highlight the ineluctable process of time and the need to adapt to it. Insisting on a model of action belonging to an outdated time and using ancient instruments to tackle an age based on efficiency and on the power of technology reveals a reckless mentality that surely leads to death in a terrain as scarcely indulgent as war. However, the gap between the war technology of the past and the current strategic and military conditions for the present not only serves to show the necessary adaptation of the political and administrative tools to a new social reality, but at the same time also sanctions its coercive nature. The passage from the Hanfeizi ends with a number of sentences loaded with intention. When he sustains that the “men of remote Antiquity contended in virtue; those of late Antiquity held competitions in intelligence and perspicacity; those of the present only understand strength”, Han Fei explicitly associates a conception of the historical process in which human society slowly loses its harmony, its virtuous and peaceful coexistence and the use of techniques and methods of coercive government. However, in the conception of time proclaimed by Han Fei, that social mutation that favours and legitimises the use of political violence is not due to a radical transformation of human nature in itself; it is not the case that in the past men were kind-hearted and that subsequently their very essence was transformed into the opposite. Then, to what is owed this difference between the attitude or social behaviour of the men of the past and those of the present? Han Fei offers an answer in the following passage:




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In Antiquity, men did not work on the land, and the fruits of vegetation were sufficient on which to feed; women did not weave and the hides of beasts were enough with which to clothe oneself. Without toiling hard, sufficient abundance was obtained. The population was scant, whereas material goods surfeited. Consequently, people did not know what conflicts were. Without the promise of great prebends and without the threat of serious punishments, men governed themselves. Yet in the present day, a family with five children is not at all exceptional; when each one of them has five children in turn, a grandparent could find themselves surrounded by twenty-five grandchildren. With a population growth of this calibre, men have multiplied whereas goods have become scant. Now it is necessary to work hard to achieve subsistence, thus, eager for gain, men argue over bread crumbs. And no matter how much reward is doubled and penalties are toughened, there is no way of bringing an end to the disorder. (Qiyou, 2000, chap. XLIX, pp. 1087-1088)

The lucidity shown in the analysis of history by Han Fei in this passage is astonishing. It is not strange that some experts consider that his work anticipates by more than twenty centuries the transcendental demographic theories on the development and evolution of human societies formulated by T. R. Malthus (1766-1834) (Chun, Xiaobo, 1983, pp. 93-94). For Han Fei, the reason why these archaic societies reached a perfect peaceful coexistence, free of antagonisms and disputes, is exclusively due to the evident balance between a scant population and abundant material resources. In his opinion, the extraordinary opulence that characterised the life of these remote ancestors meant that they could completely fulfil their desires, fully realise their most basic inclinations, without conflicts occurring; the abundance of resources dilutes the competition for survival and prevents disputes from breaking out in the society, in a way that people can even allow themselves the luxury of governing themselves (min zi zhi 民自治) without the need to resort to any higher external authority of a repressive nature. However, as of the moment when that rare favourable imbalance begins to invert, the situation changes drastically: the uncontrolled increase in population, the exponential growth of the demography, transforms the material conditions of life and means that the populations now have to compete even to satisfy their most elementary appetites and needs.

Human nature: from the spontaneous to the automatic

Far from attempting to correct or reform this pulsional nature, Han Fei limits himself to adapting to it; for him, the idea that the basic behavioural mechanism of humankind consists of the permanent quest for pleasure and the rejection of what is harmful is not liable

to be judged morally, as in reality it is just a “natural” fact, one more condition to which the governor must adapt. In Han Fei’s opinion, if people can be governed, this is because they belong to the kingdom of living beings and to the fact that, as such, they are inexorably subject to biological laws. Far from seeking to reform man as a being dominated by natural inclinations, the art of politics –the science of the government of men– conceived by the more authoritarian currents of Chinese thought, legalism and military strategy, simply aims to adapt fully to that state in the broad sense of the term: to accept, as such, the pulsional nature and adapt to it:

In general terms, to govern the world, it is entirely necessary to adapt to human nature. Punishments and rewards may be used thanks to the fact that human nature is composed of preferences and aversions. Consequently, once punishments and rewards can be used, prohibitions are respected and orders are carried out, such that order reigns. (Qiyou, chap. XLVIII, p. 1045)

The government of men depends on the political and administrative methods being able to adapt correctly and necessarily (bi yin 必因) to their passionate nature, to the irrefutable fact that their behavioural mechanism responds to the tendency or propensity towards pleasure or profit and the rejection of suffering or harm. It is the inclinations and aversions of human natures that enable, in the final instance, the efficiency of the disciplinary technology, the punishments and the rewards, the true foundation of the law/model (fa 法) and, by extension, of life in society. The very foundation of society lies, for these writers, in the passionate nature of the human being, in the dimension that it shares with the other living beings, and not in what differentiates it: criminal law is nothing more than the crystallisation and extension of natural reason. Consequently, once the essential mechanism of behaviour of humankind has been discovered, government and control become evident: it suffices with availing completely of life through the power of punishing with extreme severity the actions that do not fit in with the will of the sovereign or the strategist and of rewarding generously those who do so in order to obtain in consequence a docile man-machine willing to obey “naturally”:

That by which the far-sighted sovereign controls and handles their subjects is solely [the logic of] the two handles. The two handles are based on punishments and rewards. What do punishments and rewards mean? Punishments consist of annihilating and executing; rewards of the granting of honours and remunerations. (Qiyou, 2000, chap. VII, p. 120)

In short, the social system of these authoritarian thinkers lies in the impartial and automatic distribution of rewards and punishments depending on the efforts and the results obtained by each individual. It concerns, in effect, the subject interiorising this




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behavioural schema, adapted to their most basic nature, until they make it their own and welcome it into themselves without even being aware of it. The ideal of this system lies in that finally, and as an effect of its brutality and its efficiency, the specific application of the punishments or of the penalties proves to be completely useless insofar as the subject has fully interiorised the desired behavioural schema: the fund of passions and spontaneous urges (ziran 自然) becomes, thanks to the implacable application of this rigid behavioural schema, an automatic, predictable and perfectly domesticated behaviour. Faced with the challenge of governing and administering a huge number of subjects, the conception of power designed by Han Fei found in that apparently simple system of punishments and rewards the key to achieving all of their ambitions: subject to and by their own natural inclinations, these masses tend to become mere predictable objects that can be manipulated, devoid of any capacity for resistance or opposition. Perfectly adapted to the pulsional nature of the human being, the disciplinary apparatus of punishments and rewards is no more, in fact, than the extension of the tendencies seen in natural flows and cycles.

The dream of the self-regulated society: egoism and the invisible hand

The true foundations of the social order designed by Han Fei, therefore, consist of establishing a device minutely calculated in the irrational, pulsional side to humans, in their insatiable thirst for gain, in the pure logic of egotistical desire. “Altruism encourages resentment, while self-interest certifies social harmony”, Han Fei states without scruples (Qiyou, 2000, chap. XXXII). The logic that dominates the relationship between sovereign and subjects, between governors and governed, in short, the equation that impregnates the entire social body and keeps it in perfect conditions of balance, prosperity and coherence is none other than that of self interest (li 利), of the calculation of advantage and gain (ji 計). On this point, the authoritarian theories of Han Fei coincide astonishingly with the elemental theses of economic liberalism, as explained by one of its leading authors, Adam Smith:5

Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from the regard to their own

interest. We address ourselves, not to the humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of their own necessities but of their own advantages. (A. Smith, 1986, pp. 118-119)

By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. […] By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. (A. Smith, 1986, p. 32) The dazzling prose of Han Fei reproduces these very ideas

put forward by Adam Smith, indeed with prodigiously similar arguments and analogies when explaining his conception of social relationships:

If a doctor lances boils and absorbs their blood without being related at all to the patients, it is because the egotistical benefit drives him to act like this. Similarly, the yearning for fortune and wealth is what makes a wheelwright build his carriages in the hope that the kingdom is prosperous; while the coffin maker does so trusting that there will be many deaths. And this is not because one of them is charitable and the other malevolent, but simply because if there are no rich individuals, the former will soon have no customers, just as if there are no deaths, neither will the latter be able to sell his coffins. The coffin maker does not detest his fellow men by nature, but he is interested in them dying. (Qiyou, 2000, chap. XVII, pp. 322-323; chap. XIX, pp. 366-367)

The natural government of legalist thought is similar to the natural laws of the liberal economy; the despotism of celestial regulation is related to the tyranny of market self-regulation by means of the invisible hand. Both systems are grounded in a supposedly efficient, natural and spontaneous mechanism, fully independent from its actors, be they subjects or consumers. Founded on the law of desire, on the range of the most basic human instincts, Han Fei’s disciplinary apparatus and the market logic of Adam Smith project an abstract mechanism of total regulation, the efficiency of which depends on its ability to remove itself from the desire of the people to whom it is applied: domination of the latter requires that the source of this mechanism be transcendent, that the system be depersonalised, perfectly inaccessible. The latter appears not to have been fulfilled in Han Fei’s proposal; when all is said and done, this last instance from

5. The first and best attempt at comparison between these philosophers corresponds to J. Levi (1992). “Gouvernement naturel, économie de marché etThe first and best attempt at comparison between these philosophers corresponds to J. Levi (1992). “Gouvernement naturel, économie de marché et despotisme démocratique”. Le Genre Humain. No 26. pp. 141-161.




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where the law emanates is the monarch, an individual. Han Fei’s theory has a whole range of practices and methods to resolve this sticking point, which seek the dissolution of the monarchy as an individual full of passions and dominated by them.

The ideal governor conceived by Han Fei, in the very image of Heaven or the ancestral spirits, must be devoid of all traces of passion. Without desires, immobile, inactive and empty, it is founded on the ordering principle of nature, the way, or dao 道. Before exercising domination over others, the sovereign must have self-domination. Through meticulous corporal and mental discipline, described and contained in texts associated with Laozi, the master of men must gradually throw off all their intentional and irrational elements to embrace pure vacuity, transcend completely the instinctive laws that dominate the rest of their subjects.

The way impregnates all issues, every destiny conforms to it, it charts life and death. It classifies the names and different events, bringing together what is identical by nature. It is therefore true to say that the way does not identify with the ten thousand beings, its efficiency does not identify with the yin and the yang; the same way that balance does not identify with the light and the heavy, nor does the line identify with the projected or the sunken, the diapason does not identify with the dry or the wet, nor does the master of men identify with his subjects and ministers. These six cases show the importance of the way. There are no two ways, so it is called “One”. Therefore, the intelligent ruler esteems singleness, the characteristic feature of the way. (Qiyou, 2000, chap. VIII. P. 152)

This excerpt reproduced from the Hanfeizi insists time and time again on stating the disparity, the radical heterogeneity between the way and phenomenal beings (wu 物); the metaphysical and abstract vocabulary, taken from Taoist literature, stresses the transcendence of the cosmological-political principle from which human beings emerge and on which they depend. Inside this schema, the figure of the sovereign is identified with that transcendent principle. Totally dehumanised, they become the only exception that breaks the rule and the tyranny of passions: from their dominant, transcendent position, the sovereign, in harmony with the inhuman laws and principles that govern the universe, now proves to be inaccessible. As in strategic thought, Han Fei’s sovereign achieves perfection when they are able not to show any flank, any constant external or internal disposition (xing 形) to which the adversary can adapt. All of the political-strategic vocabulary shared by Chinese authoritarianism revolves around this same principle: like water, symbolically associated with the underlying order of the universe, the perfect army and sovereign melt into the fundamental dynamism of that supreme principle; they must present a continuous polymorphic plasticity, a permanent absence of rigid and determined forms and configurations, a

configuration in perpetual motion that prevents any attempt to stop them, to fix them, and thus allows for future adaptation.

Han Fei’s ideal sovereign is placed on the same level and shares the same attributes assigned to the way with regard to pure negativity or vacuum (wu 無), which, nonetheless, generates and dominates the rest of beings. By clinging to this absence of forms or configuration (wu xing 無形), the adversary cannot either apprehend it or even give it a name: by being placed beyond any determination, imperceptible, unnameable, indefinable, it then melts into the subtlety and the efficiency of invisible spirits. Like them, the governor successfully embraces the principle of the absence of forms and becomes unfathomable; so they are left outside the scope of the rival and of their subjects. As in the military sphere, where it is necessary to shed any constant form to exercise domination over the adversary, the sphere of politics also demands a total absence of determination or configuration to achieve the imposing of their will. This radical absence that is the essential structure of their whole being becomes fundamental: by melting into the pure negativity, they place themselves at the root of the original unfathomable vacuum that, for Chinese thought, dominates all things. No matter how paradoxical it may be for our tradition, in China, the non-being, that which lacks permanent configurations or forms, is prior to and controls that which is already formed, which has a precise constitution. On the basis of this unique metaphysical schema, the governor is confused with the subtle efficiency of the spirits, with the movement and the principles of nature, and so certifies the essential templates of an absolute power.

Reference

BILLETER, J. F. (2006). Contre François Jullien. Paris: Éditions Allia.BODDE, D. (1938).D. (1938). (1938).1938).. China’s First Unifier: A Study of the Ch’in

Dynasty in the Life of Li Ssu (280?-208 B.C.). Leiden: E. J. Brill. Leiden: E. J. Brill.CHUN, Z. 張純; XIAOBO, W. 王曉波 (1983). Han Fei sixiang

de lishi yanjiu 韓非思想的歷史研究. Taibei: Lian Jing chuban gongsi.

GALVANY, A. (2004). “La genealogía del poder coercitivo en la China antigua: historia, instituciones políticas y legitimación”. Estudios de Asia y África. Vol. 39, no. 2.

JULLIEN, F. (2007). Chemin faisant: Connaître la Chine, relancer la philosophie (Réplique à ***). Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

QIYOU, C. 陳奇猷 (2000). Hanfeizi xin jiao zhu 韓非子新校注. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe.

SMITH, A. (1986). The Wealth of Nations. New York: Penguin Classics.

SMITH, J. Z. (1985). “What a Difference a Difference Makes”.“What a Difference a Difference Makes”. In: J. NEUSNER, E. S. FRERICHS (eds.). To See Ourselves as Others See Us: Christians, Jews, “Others” in Late Antiquity. Chico (California): Scholar Press.




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Albert GalvanyPostdoctoral researcher at the École Pratiques des Hautes Études (Religious Studies department)[email protected]

Graduate in Philosophy, with a diploma in Chinese Studies and a PhD in Comparative Literature. He has studied at the East Asian Languages and Civilisations Faculty at the University of Paris, VII, where he specialised in classical Chinese and the intellectual history of ancient China. He is the author of editions of classical Chinese texts such as Sun Tzu’s El arte de la Guerra [“The Art of War’], or Wang Bi’s Comentarios al Yijing [“Yijing Commentaries’]. He is also the author of scientific contributions to international journals on the history of classical Chinese thought and translations, of which the following stand out: Shigehisa Kuriyama’s The Expressiveness of the Body, Jean Levi’s Confucio, or François Jullien’s La Grande Image n’a pas de forme.

This work is subject to a Creative Commons Attribution-noncommercial-noderivs 2.5 Spain licence. It may be copied, distributed and broadcast provided that the author and the e-journal that publishes it (Digithum) are cited. Commercial use and derivative works are not permitted. The full licence can be consulted on http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/es/deed.en.






Recommended citation: GUARNÉ, Blai (2008). “On Monkeys and Japanese: Mimicry and Anastrophe in Orientalist Representation”. In: Carles PRADO-FONTS (coord.). “Orientalism” [online dossier]. Digithum. No. 10. UOC. [Retrieved on: dd/mm/yy].<http://www.uoc.edu/digithum/10/dt/eng/guarne.pdf>ISSN 1575-2275

AbstractA number of lines of investigation are presented from a current project into the implications of Orientalism in the stereotypical representation of Japan through the analysis of the discourses of the paradox and inverse civilisation, and the consideration of the animalisation strategies of the Other in the travel literature of Pierre Loti and the fiction of Pierre Boulle.

Keywordsanimalisation, cultural paradox, inverse civilisation, colonial mimesis, Orientalism, Planet of the Apes, Japan

ResumEs presenten algunes línies de treball d’un projecte en curs sobre les implicacions de l’orientalisme en la representació estereo-típica del Japó per mitjà de l’anàlisi dels discursos de la paradoxa i de la civilització inversa, i la consideració de les estratègies d’animalització de l’Altre en la literatura de viatges de Pierre Loti i l’obra de ficció de Pierre Boulle.

Paraules clauanimalització, paradoxa cultural, civilització inversa, mimesi colonial, orientalisme, El planeta dels simis, Japó



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On Monkeys and Japanese: Mimicry and Anastrophe in Orientalist Representation*

Submission date: November 2007acceptance date: December 2007Published in: May 2008

Blai GuarnéAssistant Professor of Anthropology, Department of Humanities, Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona) and Department of Social Anthropology, University of [email protected]

* Certain points in this article have been discussed in B. Guarné (2008), «Imágenes ominosas. Escarnios e injurias en la representación de la “mujer japonesa”», in: E. BARLÉS; D. ALMAZÁN (coords.), La mujer japonesa: realidad y mito, Zaragoza: Asociación de Estudios Japoneses en España (AEJE) / Universidad de Zaragoza.

Blai GuarnéOriginal Title: De monos y japoneses: mimetismo y anástrofe en la representación orientalista

http://www.uoc.edu/digithum/10/dt/eng/guarne.pdf



On Monkeys and Japanese: Mimicry and Anastrophe…


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If you want to know who we are,

We are gentlemen of Japan:

On many a vase and jar-

On many a screen and fan,

We figure in lively paint:

Our attitude’s queer and quaint-

You’re wrong if you think it ain’t, oh!

The Mikado, W. S. Gilbert

There is nothing surprising in the fact that

the same people who arrange chrysanthemums

cast swords.

The Interpretation of Cultures, C. Geertz

Orientalism and colonial mimesis

Despite being well known, the extraordinary potential of penetration of Orientalist discourse, capable of transforming the Other into what it attributes to it, still comes as a surprise. The operation of power and knowledge of Orientalism defines and shapes the conditions of possibility of a colonised Other, whose existence is reduced to the obsessive reproduction of a repertoire of stereotypical images, which are both ambivalent and long-lasting (Bhabha, 1983); a set of fetish imprints through which the colonised becomes the indisputable evidence of the inferiority attributed to them.

This inferiority has its representational punctum in the simian mystification of the colonised. With profound historical implications

1. “It was a strange and eventually tragic happenstance of nature that the Negro’s homeland was the habitat of the animal which in appearance most resembles man. The animal called ‘orang-outang’ by contemporaries (actually the chimpanzee) was native to those parts of western Africa where the early slave trade was heavily concentrated. Though Englishmen were acquainted (for the most part vicariously) with monkeys and baboons, they were unfamiliar with tailless apes who walked about like men. Accordingly, it happened that Englishmen were introduced to the anthropoid apes and to Negroes at the same time and in the same place. The startlingly human appearance and movements of the ‘ape’ –a generic term though often used as a synonym for the ‘orang outang’- aroused some curious speculations” (W.D. Jordan, 1968, pp. 28-29).

2. A scientific context that it was felt had found in the idea of race a solid base for human classification. Linné, Systema Naturae (1735); Bufón, Histoire naturelle (1749); Blumenbach, De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa Liber (1775); Cuvier, Le règne animal distribué d’après son organisation (1816).

3. Tarde defines imitation as “celui d’une action à distance d’un esprit sur un autre, et d’une action qui consiste dans une reproduction quasi photographique d’un cliché cérébral par la plaque sensible d’un autre cerveau […] Le psychologique s’explique par le social, précisément parce que le social naît du psychologique […] J’entends par imitation toute empreinte de photographie inter-spirituelle, pour ainsi dire qu’elle soit voulue ou non, passive ou active” (G. Tarde, 1993, p. viii).

4. “Il y a imitation quand un acte a pour antécédent immédiat la représentation d’un acte semblable, antérieurement accompli par autrui, sans que, entre cette représentation et l’exécution, s’intercale aucune opération intellectuelle, explicite ou implicite, portant sur les caractères intrinsèques de l’acte reproduit.” (E. Durkheim, 1930, p. 115).

5. It was in his study into body techniques where Mauss set out this idea: “Et je conclus que l’on ne pouvait avoir une vue claire de tous ces faits, de la course, de la nage, etc., si on ne faisait pas intervenir une triple considération au lieu d’une unique considération, qu’elle soit mécanique et physique, comme une théorie anatomique et physiologique de la marche, ou qu’elle soit au contraire psychologique ou sociologique. C’est le triple point de vue, celui de ‘l’homme total’, qui est nécessaire”. In the imitative act, Mauss recognises a triple dimension : social, psychological and biological. “Mais le tout, l’ensemble est conditionné par les trois éléments indissolublement mêlés” (M. Mauss, 1993, p. 369).

(W. D. Jordan, 1968), the image of the monkey constituted a fertile metaphor for both justifying the colonial enterprise and denying its consequences.1 Two fundamental elements supported this nuclear position: on the one hand, evolutionary primitivism as a symmetric and inverse characteristic to the civilising superiority of the coloniser; and on the other, its pedagogical potential in reforming and transforming the colonised. Imitation of the monkey was therefore an archetype of the natural immaturity of the Other and at the same time a first-class instrument for its correction, the medium whereby civilisation was possible even among the clumsiest and slowest of its beneficiaries.

Since the mid-19th century, imitation has been a key concept in the debate on cultural evolution, articulated at the confluence of the natural and social sciences. A century before, Linné’s racial classification had established the bases of evolutionary study with the pioneering link between monkeys and humans.2 Lamarck’s evolution model being supplanted by Darwin’s conception of natural selection would allow for the identification of imitation as a learning and adaptation strategy common to all animals. Following in the wake of evolution theses, works by Romanes from comparative psychology, the ethnic psychology of Letourneau or the psychology of peoples and the masses of Le Bon would contribute to the establishment of homologies between primatism, primitivism, mental underdevelopment and infancy (N. Dias, 2005). At the end of the century, Les lois de l’imitation (1890), by Gabriel Tarde,3 would evaluate behaviour whose potential of conveyance would constitute a cause célèbre in the intellectual debate with Émile Durkheim4 (1897). Only the genius of Marcel Mauss (1936), after the end of the first quarter of the 20th century, would achieve a complex integration of sociology, psychology and biology into the cultural reflection on imitative practices.5

Yet the representational resorts of imitation had been deeply established in the imagination of colonial domination. The image




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of the Negro, of the coolie, of the oriental, was called to carry out a process of reform in which the mimesis of the coloniser would be seen as the last of its consequences, when in reality it would

constitute the first and most persistent of its threats.In the colonial system, the universal dignity of the coloniser

was only seen in relation to the natural inferiority of the Other in the civilising process. It was a relationship founded on the maintenance of the bonne distance (E. Saada, 2005), the manifest distinction between the reformer and the reformed, the officer and the subordinate, the original and the copy, as a means of making the latter an “authorized version of Otherness” (H. K. Bhabha, 1984). An impossible effort for “similarity”, to “become another” (A. Memmi, 1971, p. 186-189), turned the colonised into a subordinate copy of the coloniser, rushing them into the imbalance of a “non-existence” (F. Fanon, 1993, p. 139) trapped in the constant renunciation of their own identity.6

Paradoxically, the colonial discursivity contained the germ of its own subversion. Beyond its more proclamatory values, the reform of the colonised was only efficient on the surface, enclosed in a level of mechanicism that, avoiding their mutation into an equal, kept them in a state of “pure colonised” (A. Memmi, 1971, p. 146).7 Yet the imitative practice implied an uncontrollable competence in use, diluting the difference between imitator and imitated. The trop bien imitation (E. Saada, 2005) of the coloniser by the colonised would then be revealed as a more worrying and disturbing effect than its own failure. If, on the one hand, it tested the eclosion of a system that denied the colonised the originality that they took on as their own, on the Other, it undermined producing a perturbing scenario: the dismantling of their privileges. Thus, imitation became in turn “un vecteur essentiel de l’assimilation des indigènes et une menace pour la reproduction des identités européennes outre-mer” (E. Saada, 2005, p. 29).

Beyond the untiring mimesis of the coloniser, the colonised, recognisable Other insofar as a “subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (H. K. Bhabha, 1995, p. 86), thus integrated a menacing presence in the mimetic tension with the Westerner.8 A disturbingly close resemblance to similarity made him a subject of ambivalence between mimesis and mimicry, the reply and the replication, the copy and the parody. Ultimately, the imitation of the metropolitan meant a strange victory that presaged an inexorable defeat.9 In this context, the image of the monkey would contribute to re-establishing the confidence of a

discourse that found in “pantomime simiesque” (A. Memmi, 1966, p. 124) a fruitful means for reducing anxiety at the successful metropolitisation of the colonised.

A l’effort obstiné du colonisé de surmonter le mépris (que méritent son arriération, sa faiblesse, son altérité, il finit par l’admettre), à sa soumission admirative, son souci appliqué de se confondre avec le colonisateur, de s’habiller comme lui, de parler, de se conduire comme lui, jusque dans ses tics et sa manière de faire la cour, le colonisateur oppose un deuxième mépris: la dérision. Il déclare, il l’explique au colonisé, que ces efforts sont vains, qu’il n’y gagne qu’un trait supplémentaire: le ridicule. Car jamais il n’arrivera à s’identifier à lui, pas même à reproduire correctement son rôle. Au mieux, s’il ne veut pas trop blesser le colonisé, le colonisateur utilisera toute sa métaphysique caractèrologique. Les génies des peuples sont incompatibles; chaque geste est sous-tendu par l’âme entière, etc… Plus brutalement, il dira que le colonisé n’est qu’un singe. Et plus le singe est subtil, plus il imite bien, plus le colonisateur s’irrite. Avec cette attention et ce flair aiguisé que développe la malveillance, il dépistera la nuance révélatrice, dans le vêtement ou le langage, la «faute de goût», qu’il finit toujours par découvrir. Un homme à cheval sur deux cultures est rarement bien assis, en effet, et le colonisé ne trouve pas toujours le ton juste. (A. Memmi, 1966, p. 160-161)

The accusation of imposture, of grotesque imitation or subversive simulation, thus degraded the colonised to the level of mere copy, which made preservation of the domain possible, of the coloniser’s privilege in the colonial drama. (A. Memmi, 1971, p. 211). The case of Japan is particularly revealing. Not having been formally colonised, Japan would integrate itself with the strength of an equal into the European-Atlantic order, which drove its opening-up during the second half of the 19th century. In this process, the colonial imagination would have to articulate specific forms of domination that adjusted Japan to the idea of “Oriental” shaped in the “absolute and systematic difference between the West, which is rational, developed, humane, superior, and the Orient, which is aberrant, undeveloped, inferior” (E. Said, 1980, p. 300).

Essentialising Japan in terms of a particular, unusual and paradoxical characterisation constituted a productive strategy

6. We can see in this exercise the violence that makes up the mimetic desire, in the sense put forward by R. Girard (1978). 7. As “être de carence” (A. Memmi, 1966, p. 148), “hors de l’histoire et hors de la cité” (A. Memmi, 1966, p. 129). “La véritable raison, la raison première

de la plupart de ses carences est celle-ci : le colonialiste n’a jamais décidé de transformer la colonie à l’image de la métropole , et le colonisé à son image. Il ne peut admettre une telle adéquation, qui détruirait le principe de ses privilèges” (A. Memmi, 1966, p. 106).

8. An uneasy partial presence (H. K. Bhabha, 1995, p. 88) that plunged the superiority of the coloniser into the bottomless mimetic vertigo referred to by M. Taussig (1993, p. 237).

9. In a similar sense, B. Fuchs (2003) analysed how imitation eroded imperial power from the start of European colonialism: “By exposing the constructedness of homogeneity, challenging and ironizing narratives of difference, and effectively enabling subjects to cross boundaries, mimesis introduces or reserves cultural variance under the guise of similarity” (B. Fuchs, 2003, p. 166).




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to introduce its entity into the political order articulated by Orientalism “as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (E. Said, 1980, p. 3). An order based on the non-Western/Western, pre-modern/modern, particular/universal dichotomy (N. Sakai, 1988),10 which configures the “non-Western” from the lack of something which defines it negatively compared with Western completeness (B. Turner, 1994).11

Japan would therefore integrate an Orient that would be Orientalised “not only because it was discovered to be ‘Oriental’ in all those ways considered common place by an average nineteenth-century European, but also because it could be –that is, submitted to being– made Oriental” (E. Said, 1980, p. 5-6). In this political project, discussions on paradox and inverse civilisation (B. Guarné, 2007b) constituted seminal representational strategies12 in the characterisation of Japan.

From Japanese paradox to Japanese oxymoron

The essential language of paradox was historically a unique means in the Western representation of Japan, covering the different levels that occurred between contradiction and antagonism. The first chronicles of the Jesuit missionaries already bear witness to the difficulty in accommodating their experience to the premises of the Savage/Civilised dichotomy that constituted the classification of the world in the 16th century.

The society discovered offered many of the elements attributed to the savagery of the infidel: geographical remoteness, strange customs, “aberrant” and, evidently, ignorant of the “true faith”, but their presence was paradoxical in a culture sensitive to the arts and learning, divided into hierarchical forms of government, with

religious institutions and a profound sense of honour. Elements of civilisation exclusively assumed by Christian Europe. The cultural complexity of the discovery and, fundamentally, the ability of its chroniclers to tell of it, presented the image of Japan as a paradox, or indeed, an oxymoron, going as far as establishing in its characterisation the particular forms of this discourse.

Traditionally used in the description of non-European peoples,13 the resource of the counter position would therefore acquire specific characteristics in the idiosyncratic representation of Japan. Both the contrarieties highlighted by Alessandro Valignano14 (1583, 1592) and the contradictions recorded by Luís Fróis15 (1585) emphasised the idea of Japan as the opposite to Europe, but not necessarily “savage” or “barbaric”. Beyond these notions, Japan was only decipherable in its antagonism with Europe. The structure of the counter position would therefore contribute to shaping “the Japanese” into a mirror image, the opposite of “the European”. From that point on, Western imagination of the exotic would represent Japan as a cultural anastrophe, between the fascination for the peculiar and the unease at the equivalent.

It is significant that this discourse should be reproduced throughout time. Ultimately, the establishment of a template of formal correspondences between Europe and Japan implied the recognition of a relationship of equivalence, something that sensitively bordered on the weighing up of the central position of the West in the world. Following the forced opening-up of Japan in the 19th century, the homologies were difficult to combine with the geography of imperial domination in the spirit of “the West and the rest” (S. Hall, 1992). In this context, the impossibility of capturing a reality that stubbornly eluded the imagination of colonial domination would lead to absolute estrangement. The celebrated topsy-turvydom entry of the work Things Japanese (1890), by Basil Hall Chamberlain, demonstrated the intellectual consecration of this extravagant characterisation.16 As it cannot be

10. “After all, what we normally call universalism is a particularism thinking itself as universalism, it is doubtful whether universalism could ever exist otherwise” (N. Sakai, 1997, p. 157).

11. B. Guarné (2007a). 12. Particular forms of representation set out in systems of truth, in the Foucaultian sense, involved in the stereotypical construction of the Other. 13. As J. Bestard et al. (1987) explain, from the 15th century on, European seafarers and members of religious orders had used the anti-ethical formula of the

us/them in their descriptions. The structure of the counter position allowed decoding in close terms of the peoples discovered by means of a dual distortion, which while condemning the differences as deviations tried to discover similarities, without ceasing to view these societies as “savage”.

14. “Tienen también otros ritos y costumbres tan diferentes de todas las otras naciones, que parece que estudiaron de propósito cómo no se conforman con ninguna gente. No se puede imaginar lo que acerca de esto pasa, porque realmente se puede decir que Japón es un mundo al revés de cómo corre en Europa” (A. Valignano, 1954, p. 33).

15. “La gente de Europa se deleita con el pescado asado y cocido; los japoneses huelgan mucho más de comérselo crudo […] Nuestros cerezos dan muchas y hermosas cerezas, los de Japón dan muy pequeñas y amargas cerezas, y muy hermosas flores que los japoneses estiman […]Las [mujeres] de Europa trabajan con todos los medios y artificios para blanquearse los dientes; las japonesas trabajan con hierro y vinagre para hacer la boca y los dientes negros […] Nosotros enterramos nuestros difuntos; los japoneses en su mayor parte los queman” (L. Fróis, 2003, pp. 121-130).

16. “The whole method of treating horses is the opposite of ours […] They carry babies, not in their arms, but on theirs backs […] Japanese keys turn in instead of out, and Japanese carpenters saw and plane towards, instead of away from, themselves […] When building a house, the Japanese construct the roof first […] Japanese women needle their thread instead of threading their needle, and that instead of running the needle through the cloth, they hold it still and run the cloth upon it. Another lady, long resident in Tôkyô, says that the impulse of her Japanese maids is always to sew on cuffs, frills, and other similar things, topsy-turvy and inside out. If that is not the ne plus ultra of contrariety, what is? […] Strangest of all, after bath the Japanese dry themselves with a damp towel!” (B. H. Chamberlain, 1905, pp. 481-482).




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adjusted to the classification order, Japan would be represented as a paradox as both the sublime and the grotesque seemed possible.

Between metaphor and reality

The work of French writer Pierre Loti17 constitutes a paradigmatic expression of the literary conformation of this imaginary.18 Loti, l’enchanteur du japonisme, is responsible for some of the longest lasting passages in the stereotypical characterisation of Japan. In his works we find, among others, the image of the Japanese woman as a dragonfly and a butterfly, origin of endless subsequent adaptations.19 The Japan described by Loti is the scenario of a continuous déjà vu,20 a country “of enchantment and magic”, of tea houses, lanterns, parasols and paper kites, smoking pipes and iced liqueurs of essences of flowers, the “surprising home of all the extravagancies” immersed in the intense “murmur of the cicadas”.

In his works Madame Chrysanthème (1887) and Japoneries d’automne (1889),21 the images of “the West” and “the East” shape the sensualist description of a landscape dominated by the narcissistic view of the European. A view expressed in concrete narrative forms that would inscribe Japan in the imaginary categories of Orientalism.22 As metaphoric resources, the obsessive articulation of the diminutive23 and the sustained practice of animalisation will confine “the Japanese” to the “Oriental” pole of the West/East equation. This equation is represented in specific episodes as the «morganatic marriage» between Loti and Chrysanthème, an expression of the Modern/Traditional inequality in the Male/Female formula.

Mesdames les poupées […] Presque mignonnes, je vous l’accorde, vous l’êtes, -à force de drôlerie, de mains délicates, de pieds en miniature; mais laides, en somme, et puis ridicu-

17. Pseudonym of Louis Marie Julien Viaud (1850-1923). 18. “Toujours du bizarre à outrance, du saugrenu macabre ; partout des choses à surprise qui semblent être les conceptions incompréhensibles de cervelles

tournées à l’envers des nôtres...” (P. Loti, 1920, p. 87). “Comme nous sommes loin de ce peuple japonais, comme nous sommes de race dissemblable!...” (P. Loti, 1920, p. 229).

19. The image of the dragonfly foreshadowed the butterfly of the different versions of this work in the musical adaptation of André Messager (1893), as well as in the story of Madame Butterfly, by John Luther Long (1898), and in the theatre version of David Belasco (1900), precedent of Puccini’s famous opera (1904). “…Elle dormait à plat ventre sur les nattes, sa haute coiffure et ses épingles d’écaille faisant une saillie sur l’ensemble de son corps couché. La petite traîne de sa tunique prolongeait en queue sa personne délicate. Ses bras étaient étendus en croix, ses manches déployées comme des ailes –et sa longue guitare gisait à son côté. Elle avait un air de fée morte. Ou bien encore elle ressemblait à quelque grande libellule bleue qui se serait abattue là et qu’on y aurait clouée [...] Quel dommage que cette petite Chrysanthème ne puisse pas toujours dormir : elle est très décorative, présentée de cette manière, -et puis, au moins, elle ne m’ennuie pas” (P. Loti, 1990, pp. 108-109). “Leurs corps frêles, posés avec une grâce exotique, sont noyés dans des étoffes rigides et des ceintures bouffantes dont les bouts retombent comme des ailes fatiguées. Elles me font penser je ne sais pourquoi, à de grands insectes rares ; sur leurs vêtements, des dessins extraordinaires ont quelque chose de la bigarrure sombre des papillons nocturnes” (P. Loti, 1920, p. 228-229).

20. Loti feels “en plein dans ce petit monde imaginé, artificiel, que je connaissais déjà par les peintures des laques et des porcelaines. C’est si bien cela! [...] Je l’avais deviné, ce Japon-là, bien long temps avant d’y venir” (P. Loti, 1920, p. 30).

21. Also part of this study is the consideration of La Troisième Jeunesse de Madame Prune (1905). 22. I develop this question in more detail in B. Guarné (2008), «Imágenes ominosas. Escarnios e injurias en la representación de la “mujer japonesa”», in: E.

Barlés; D. Almazán (coords.), La mujer japonesa: realidad y mito, Zaragoza: Asociación de Estudios Japoneses en España (AEJE) / Universidad de Zaragoza. 23. What Loti considers an image of “Japon physique et moral” (P. Loti, 1920, p. 220).

lement petites, un air bibelot d’étagère, un air ouistiti, un air je ne sais quoi… (P. Loti,1990, pp. 61)

[...] la petite, la minuscule madame Touki-San; haute comme une demi-botte, celle-ci; treize ans au plus, et déjà femme, importante, pétulante, commère. Dans mon enfance, on me menait quelquefois au théâtre des Animaux savants; il y

Photograph of Pierre Loti in the garden of his mansion in Rochefort, France




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avait là une certaine madame de Pompadour, un grand premier rôle, qui était une guenon empanachée et que je vois encore. Cette Touki-San me la rappelle. (P. Loti, 1990, p. 95)

D’ailleurs je reconnais le charme des petits enfants japonais; il y en a d’adorables. –Mais, ce charme qu’ils ont, comment passe-t-il si vite pour devenir la grimace vieillotte, la laideur souriante, l’air singe?... (P. Loti, 1990, p. 155)

Petites mousmés très mignonnes, vieilles dames très sin-gesques, entrant avec leur boîte à fumer, leur parasol couvert de peinturlures, leurs petits cris, leurs révérences ; caquetant, se complimentant, sautillant, ayant toutes les peines du monde à tenir leur sérieux. (P. Loti, 1990, p. 174)

Un peu trop dorés, trop chamarrés, ces innombrables mes-sieurs japonais, ministres, amiraux, officiers ou fonctionnaires quelconques en tenue de gala. Vaguement ils me rappellent certain général Boum qui eut son heure de célébrité jadis. Et puis, l’habit à queue, déjà si laid pour nous, comme ils le portent singulièrement! Ils n’ont pas des dos construits pour ces sortes de choses, sans doute; impossible de dire en quoi cela réside, mais je leur trouve à tous, et toujours, je ne sais quelle très proche ressemblance de singe. (P. Loti, 1890, p. 88-89)

Despite the eccentricity of these passages, it is not a marginal characterisation that, renouncing a stance of discursive centrality, comprises an isolated portrayal. The simian representation of the non-European constituted a common place in the system of colonial visibility. A year before the publication of Madame Chrysanthème, Henry Adams (1886) was surprised not to have found signs of monkeyism among the Japanese. This was a frequent myth that, with regard to imitation, had to be refuted by Sidney L. Gulick (1903), even at the start of the century. The image of the monkey constituted a powerful metaphor of the colonised Japan, which also found in the cultural habit of dress an efficient element to emphasise the distance with the West. In this sense, in their travel journals and among several authors, D. Sladen (1892, 1903, 1904), G. Waldo Browne (1901) and Sir Henry Norman

(1908), would censure the Japanese insistence on incorporating Western dress.24 European fashion constituted a sign of civilisation; its adoption by the Japanese, a form of lèse-majesté (I. Littlewood, 1996, p. 25), a hybrid masquerade (H. T. Finck, 1896)25 which plunged Japan into le grotesque et la bouffonnerie pitoyable” (P. Loti, 1920, p. 299). Compared with Western modernity, Japan was only tolerable in its Orientalist representation,26 “Japanised” as an exotic tableau vivant populated by samurais and geishas in kimonos.

The Japanese female costume undoubtedly has its disadvantages in practical life (it hampers the gait), but it is infinitely more picturesque and becoming than a Parisian costume on a Parisian woman; and when the Parisian costume is transferred to a Japanese woman, the effect is usually deplorable –an utter absence of fit, style, ease, and naturalness (H. T. Finck, 1896, p. 251).

Here you saw how Western civilisation had eaten into them. Every tenth man was attired in Europe clothes from hat to boots. It is a queer race. It can parody every type of humanity to be met in a large English town. Fat and prosperous merchant with mutton-chop whiskers; mild-eyed, long-haired professor of science, his clothes baggy about him; schoolboy in Eton jacket, broadcloth trousers; young clerk, member of the Clapham Athletic Club, in tennis flannels; artisans in sorely worn tweeds; top-hatted lawyer with clean-shaven upper lip and black leather bag; sailor out of work; and counter-jumper; all these and many, many more you shall find in the streets of Tokyo in half an hour’s walk. But when you come to speak to the imitation, behold it can only talk Japanese. You touch it, and it is not what you thought. (R. Kipling, 1988, p. 169).

This view would take on a unique entity in specific episodes of history such as the Russo-Japanese war or during the conflict on the Pacific. American war propaganda articulated the most baneful images of the strangeness of the enemy, portraying the Japanese as animals, primarily “yellow monkeys” hiding in the jungles of Burma27 or raping white women in a characterisation that put them in the category of the subhuman (J. W. Dower, 1986)28. The

24. D. Sladen (1892), The Japs at Home, Queer Things about Japan (1903), More Queer Things about Japan (1904), written together with N. Lorimer; G. Waldo Browne (1901), Japan: the Place and the People; Sir Henry Norman (1908), The Real Japan.

25. The Orientalist view of Finck allows him to recognise surprising similarities: “In Kyôto even more than in Tôkyô, I was struck by the fact that, when Japanese girls are very pretty they greatly resemble Spanish beauties in their sparkling black eyes, dark tresses, olive complexion, petite stature, and exquisite grace, at least from the waist up. The resemblance would be greatly heightened if they would copy Spanish ways of arranging the hair and give up their stereotyped style of combing it back from the forehead –the most trying and least becoming of all modes of coiffure” (H. T. Finck, 1896, p. 262).

26. In his correspondence with B. H. Chamberlain, Lafcadio Hearn wrote: “The country is certainly going to lose all its charm, -all its Japanesiness; it is going to become all industrially vulgar and industrially common-place. And I feel tired of it. In short, the pendulum has swung the wrong way recently” (E. Bisland (ed.), The Japanese Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, Boston / New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1910, p. 132.).

27. In films such as Objective, Burma!, by Raoul Walsh (1945), or Bataan, by Tay Garnett (1943), and Back to Bataan, by Edward Dmytryk (1945). 28. “The variety of such metaphors was so great that they sometimes seemed causal and almost original. On the contrary, they were well routinized as idioms




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pedagogy of hate that had permeated North American popular culture for centuries in the shameful image of the black monkey was thus adapted to the portrayal of the Japanese in the formulas of the yellow monkey and the Japes (Japs & apes), reproducing the White/Black racist structure in the White/Yellow opposition (R. Slotkin, 1992).

The implications of the visual dehumanisation of the Japanese would be profound and its consequences devastating for millions of people. In a historically popular imaginary fascinated with the extravagant description of Japan, the systematic and deliberate repetition of these images would contribute to exceed the limits of the myth shaping reality itself. As has been shown, despite the fact that in reality no one believed that the Japanese were monkeys, “once the metaphor is accepted, it becomes that much easier to erase the line between image and reality” (I. Littlewood, 1996, p. 17).

It would not be until the imminent end of the war that the need to prepare the American administration after victory would re-humanise Japan in its antithetical relationship with the West. Again, the discourses of the paradox and of the inverse civilisation would permit an interpretation of a disconcerting culture, of aesthetes and warriors, as refined in the cultivation of chrysanthemums as brutal in the forging of katanas.29 In this project, the relativist twist introduced by R. Benedict in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946) would have the virtue of shaking the cultural certainties of the West,30 completing a circular and autopoietic discourse that would end up being implied in the self-characterisation of the Japanese themselves.31

Cultural anastrophe and inverse civilisation

Half a century after the first edition of Madame Chrysanthème appeared, another French writer, Pierre Boulle,32 was to publish a no less fantastic travel journal. Boulle would describe an “inverse civilisation” where chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans enslaved

of everyday discourse, and immensely consequential in their ultimate functions. At the simplest level, they dehumanized the Japanese and enlarged the chasm between ‘us’ and ‘them’ to the point where it was perceived to be virtually unbridgeable” (J.W. Dower, 1986, pp. 81-82).

29. In this sense, R. Benedict (1946) wrote: “All these contradictions, however, are the map and woof of books on Japan They are true. Both the sword and the chrysanthemum are a part of the picture. The Japanese are, to the highest degree, both aggressive and unaggressive, both militaristic and aesthetic, both insolent and polite, rigid and adaptable, submissive and resentful of being pushed around, loyal and treacherous, brave and timid, conservative and hospitable to new ways. They are terribly concerned about what other people will think of their behavior, and they are also overcome by guilt when other people know nothing of their misstep. Their soldiers are disciplined to the hilt but are also insubordinate” (R. Benedict, 1946, pp. 2-3).

30. As has been pointed out, in the Benedict monograph “a mesura que els japonesos van deixant de ser éssers estranys i erràtics, són els nord-americans els qui comencen a semblar-ho” (T. Aoki, 2006, p. 83), to the extreme that “What started out as a familiar sort of attempt to unriddle oriental mysteries ends up, only too successfully, as a deconstruction, avant la lettre, of occidental clarities. At the close, it is, as it was in Patterns of Culture, us that we wonder about. On what, pray tell, do our certainties rest? Not much, apparently, save that they’re ours” (C. Geertz, 1988, p. 121-122). See also the studies compiled in: “Chrysanthemum and the Sword”. Dialectical Anthropology, vol. 24, No. 2, pp. 141-233 June 1999.

31. On this subject, see: B. Guarné (coord.), “Identitat i representació cultural: perspectives des del Japó”, Revista d’Etnologia de Catalunya, no. 29, December 2006. <http://www.raco.cat/index.php/RevistaEtnologia/issue/view/4633/showToc>

32. Pierre Boulle (1912-1994). 33. P. Boulle, (1963) The Planet of the Apes. New York: Vanguard.

humans. A few years before Barthes wrote his naïf ethnography on Japan, L’Empire des signes (1970), Boulle published La Planète des singes33 (1963), the story of a non-human, primate civilisation where apes had appropriated human technology.

The stunning episode of the archaeological discovery of a human doll that could speak, pronounce “a simple word, a two-syllable word: ‘papa’” (P. Boulle, 1968, p. 182), the exclusive

Japanese advertising of the film, Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), the first sequel in the film series


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cultural skill of the monkeys, would reveal a terrible truth: the appropriation of human technology by their natural Other, apes, going so far as to surpass them and make the old dominator the dominated; the coloniser becomes the colonised.

Donna Haraway (1989) pointed out the historical development of Western primatology as “colonial knowledge” that defined “the human” according to “the simian”, in a project similar to the Orientalist construction of the “West” in relation to the “East”. For Haraway, the study of primates, as “simian orientalism” (D. Haraway, 1989. pp. 10-11), constituted scientific knowledge in that the dramatisation of the differences between “the animal” and “the human” was shaped in the broadest scenario of the oppositions of power: Nature/Culture, Woman/Man, Savage/Civilised, East/West.34

The society described by Boulle confronts us with a totalitarian system, where a profound sense of honour and a deep respect for hierarchy and traditional values run parallel to the unease about identity that arises from the encounter with human civilisation.35 Contrary to the film adaptation directed by Franklin J. Schaffner36 (1967), Boulle describes an ultra-futuristic civilisation where simians dress like humans, drive motor vehicles and live in skyscrapers.37 Boulle’s works enjoyed publishing success in a world, which, still persuaded by the positive nature of Western/Eastern classification, expectantly observed the Japanese miracle. The recovery of a country historically shaken by “modernity” that now relocate the desire to achieve political equality with the West, projecting itself into a technological future as an economic equal or superior.

Almost a decade before the La Planète des singes was published, Boulle had come to the public attention with a novel that reflected his experience as an Allied prisoner during the war against Japan. Entitled Le Pont de la rivière Kwaï38 (1952), Boulle would capture his memories as a combatant in China, Burma

and Indochina through the moral experience of the captivity of a group of British soldiers condemned to forced labour in a Japanese POW camp.39 What would eventually become his most famous work, situated the reader in a position of unease when confronted with their own brutality in the escape from the Other –faced with the abyss of discovering that the absolute difference with this Other is simply one of the multiple expressions of a shared reality.

L’ABIME infranchissable que certains regards voient creu-sé entre l’âme occidentale et l’âme orientale n’est peut-être qu’un effet de mirage. Peut-être n’est-il que la représentation conventionnelle d’un lieu commun sans base solide, un jour perfidement travesti en aperçu piquant, dont on ne peut même pas invoquer la qualité de vérité première pour justifier l’exis-tance? (P. Boulle, 1958, p. 9)

If we consider La Planète des singes in the light of the biography of its author –French colonist in Southeast Asia and combatant against the Japanese– the dystopia that he proposes is revealed as the backdrop on which are projected both the terrors of the colonial experience40 and the anxiety for a colonised who overcomes the coloniser with their own weapons.41 In this sense, Ulysse Mérou, the protagonist of the story, bitterly agrees:

A bien réfléchir, pourtant, je ne sais si je dois m’enorgueillir de cette découverte ou bien en être profondément humilié. Mon amour-propre constate avec satisfaction que les singes n’ont rien invente, qu’ils ont été de simples imitateurs. Mon humiliation tient au fait qu’une civilisation humaine ait pu être si aisément assimilée par des singes. (P. Boulle, 1990, p. 154)

34. “The Orient has been a troubling resource for the production of the Occident, the ‘East’s’ other and periphery that became materially its dominant. The West is positioned outside the Orient, and this exteriority is part of the Occident’s practice of representation […] Simian orientalism means that western primatology has been about the construction of the self from the raw material of the other, the appropriation of nature in the production of culture, the ripening of the human from the soil of the animal, the clarity of white from the obscurity of color, the issue of man from the body of woman, the elaboration of gender from the resource of sex, the emergence of mind by the activation of body” D. Haraway (1989, pp. 10-11).

35. Common places that find a surprising expression in the visual reference to Japanese culture, eg in the recreation of the image of the San Zaru, the three monkeys of Nikko (Mizaru, Kikazaru, Iwazaru), during the trial scene. Also added to this is the fact that to mould the simian prosthesis, make-up artist John Chambers used an Asian face.

36. Born and educated in Tokyo –son of American missionaries– and a combatant in the War of the Pacific, Schaffner’s biographical link to Japan is an interesting element when we look at his work. It is this feature that he has in common with Boulle, in whose work the Oriental theme will be a constant from his early novels, such as Le Sacrilège malais (1951).

37. In this adaptation for the cinema, the first in an extensive film and television series, budgetary reasons were a determining factor in the decision to set the simian civilisation in a caveman society.

38. The Bridge over the River Kwai. P. Boulle (1952). New York: Vanguard, 1954.39. As the author himself says in Aux sources de la rivière Kwaï. P. Boulle (1966), My own River Kwai, New York: Vanguard Press, 1967. 40. European colonialism, the historical experience of slavery and the slave trade, segregation and racial conflict, are themes present both in Boulle’s work and

in the film adaptation by Schaffner. For more information on these subjects, see the study by E. Greene (1996) on the impact of the film saga of The Planet of the Apes on North American popular culture.

41. The most outstanding of the “children of the West”, Japan, organised the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, just nineteen years after the military defeat, six years later the Osaka World Expo (1970), a symbolic milestone in the new Japan as an economic and technological power, and in 1975, the Ocean Expo in Okinawa.




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The words of Mérou resonate in those of Memmi when he writes:

Un colonisé conduisant une voiture, est un spectacle auquel le colonisateur refuse de s’habituer ; il lui dénie toute normalité, comme pour une pantomime simiesque. (A. Memmi, 1966, p. 124)

When with the benefit of hindsight we link La Planète des singes to the works of Loti, a strange tension is established in the Western tradition of narrating Japan as a paradoxical and inverse civilisation. A tradition in which its representation as cultural anastrophe finds in the image of the monkey a metaphor of polysemic nuances, both in the definition of “the Japanese”42 and in the characterisation of “the Western”.

Finally, the stories of Boulle and Loti confront us with the representation of an absolute Other, natural or cultural, simian or Japanese, inverse copy of human civilisation or of Western civilisation. With the challenge of a mimetic, grotesque and threatening presence, which –beyond the denotated– inquiries us about the sense of “the Western” and “the human” as identical and exclusive categories in the representation of the world.

42. E. Ohnuki-Tierney (1987, 1990a, 1990b, 1991) has identified in the monkey the figure of the trickster or clown in Japanese cultural tradition: “Macaques are uncannily similar to humans —at least the Japanese thinks so— both in their bodies and in their behaviour. No other animal has figured more prominently in deliberations about who the Japanese are as humans vis-à-vis animals and as a people vis-à-vis other peoples. The meanings and tropic functions assigned to the monkey therefore enable us to tap essential dimensions of the Japanese conception of self. The monkey provides us with a strategic window into the Japanese world view and ethos” (E. Ohnuki-Tierney, 1990, p. 91).

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Blai Guarnéassistant Professor of anthropology, department of Humanities, Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, and department of Social anthropology, University of [email protected]

Blai Guarné has a PhD in Cultural Anthropology, specialising in the anthropology of Japan. His research interests cover the theory of representation, cultural and post-colonial studies and analysis of visual culture. He has carried out fieldwork in Latin America, Europe and Asia with funding from national and international institutions. He has led research and taught at the University of Barcelona, National University of Misiones, Argentina, Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest, Hungary, and The University of Tokyo, Japan, where he was a Visiting Scholar with a grant from the Japanese Government. He currently holds the post of Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Humanities of the Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, and in the Department of Social Anthropology of the University of Barcelona, and he is a member of the Inter-Asia Research Group at Autonomous University of Barcelona. His most recent publications include the edition of the monograph on Japanese cultural identity: “Identitat i representació cultural: perspectives des del Japó”, Revista d’Etnologia de Catalunya, No. 29, online version: <http://www.raco.cat/index.php/RevistaEtnologia/issue/view/4633/showToc>

This work is subject to a Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivs 2.5 Spain licence. It may be copied, distributed and broadcast provided that the author and the e-journal that publishes it (Digithum) are cited. Commercial use and derivative works are not permitted. The full licence can be consulted on http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/es/deed.en.

TAUSSIG, M. (1993). Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York / London: Routledge.

TURNER, B. S. (1994). Orientalism, Postmodernism & Globalism. London / New York: Routledge.

VALIGNANO, A. Sumario de las cosas de Japón (1583). Adiciones del sumario de Japón (1592). In: J. L. ÁLVAREZ-TALADRIZ (ed.). Tokyo: Sophia University, 1954.







Against a besieged literature: fictions, obsessions and globalisations of Chinese literature*

AbstractChinese literature in the 20th century has seen how the combination between, on one hand, the canon established by Socialist realism in China and, on the other, the approaches of Area Studies in the West imposed a limited vision and a partial and slanted assessment of its complexity. The article argues that it is essential to recover the literariness of the literary text, appealing to the sophistication and critical capacity of readers, as a basic strategy for liberating Chinese literature from the interpretive siege that constrains it. The article analyses the interrelation of various aspects –such as the confusion between reality and fiction, the obsessions for interpretations of a national allegorical nature or other mechanisms of globalisation and self-Orientalism– that, in an interrelated way, determine the production and circulation of modern and contemporary Chinese literature in the global literary system. The novel Fortress Besieged by the writer Qian Zhongshu is a paradigmatic example of this situation.

KeywordsChinese literature, globalisation, Orientalism, self-Orientalism, Qian Zhongshu



ResumLa literatura xinesa del segle xx ha vist com la combinació entre, d’una banda, el cànon marcat pel realisme socialista a la Xina i, de l’altra, les aproximacions pròpies dels Estudis d’Àrea a Occident imposava una mirada limitada i una valoració parcial i esbiaixada de la seva complexitat. L’article defensa que és imprescindible recuperar la literarietat del text literari, apel·lant a la sofisticació i a la capacitat crítica dels lectors, com una estratègia fonamental per a alliberar la literatura xinesa del setge interpretatiu que la constreny. L’article analitza la interrelació de diversos aspectes –com ara la confusió entre realitat i ficció, les obsessions per les interpretacions en clau al·legòrica nacional o altres mecanismes de globalització i auto-orientalisme– que, de manera interrelacionada, determinen la

37




* This article is the result of the research project MEC I+D (HUM2005-08151) Interculturalidad de Asia Oriental en la era de la globalización. I am grateful for the kind and, as always, stimulating comments of David Martínez and Joan-Elies Adell. Errors and omissions are attributable solely to the author.


Carles Prado-FontsLecturer, Department of Languages and Cultures, [email protected]

ReCommended CiTATion: PRADO-FONTS, Carles (2008). “Against a besieged literature: fictions, obsessions and globalisations of Chinese literature”. In: “Orientalism’ [online dossier]. Digithum. Iss. 10. UOC. [Retrieved on: dd/mm/yy].<http://www.uoc.edu/digithum/10/dt/eng/prado.pdf ISSN 1575-2275


Carles Prado-FontsOriginal title: Contra la literatura assetjada: ficcions, obsessions i globalitzacions de la literatura xinesa



http://www.uoc.edu/digithum/10/dt/eng/prado.pdf

Against a besieged literature: fictions, obsessions…


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producció i la circulació de la literatura xinesa moderna i contemporània dins del sistema literari global. La novel·la La fortalesa assetjada de l’escriptor Qian Zhongshu és un exemple paradigmàtic d’aquesta situació.

Paraules clauliteratura xinesa, globalització, orientalisme, auto-orientalisme, Qian Zhongshu

It is common for some literary genres, such as the historical novel, to purposely roam an ethereal figurative frontier, a line that fades away in the hands of readers who agree –consciously– to enter into an interplay of correspondences blurred, to a greater or lesser extent, between reality and fiction. Up to a certain point, therefore, it does not seem necessary to remind ourselves of that which seems obvious when we read works such as The Name of the Rose or Perfume: the distinction between history and literature. However, when we confront geographically distant works of literature, the obviousness is no longer so, and the reminder becomes, perhaps, pertinent and necessary. It is also common that, in this new context, we forget –unconsciously– about the fictionality of the literary work and we read any text coming from, for example China, Japan or Korea, whether it be realist or modernist, traditional or avant-garde, romantic or science fiction, almost as an essay that reflects in a frank, transparent and non-problematic way the “society”, “history” or “culture” of a given country.

To a certain extent, then, we can observe that the acuteness that makes us aware of the interplay between reality and fiction concealed behind a literary work is usually proportional to the distance that separates us from the culture of the work in question. When, as readers, we decide to begin a novel by a foreign author with the intention of learning about a reality that is remote and unknown to us, we are guided by a noble, but at the same time dangerous, curiosity. The impatience to draw closer to the Other often causes to dare to thoughtlessly extrapolate from a piece of literary fiction a whole series of facts and conditions (historical, social, political, cultural) about a context that is unknown to us. Thus, we forget an essential condition of the novel: whatever its appearance may be, it is no more than a literary artefact. Although it is true that each novel is set in a specific historical context and, therefore, maintains an inevitable tie with the society and culture within which it was created, it is also true that, as a novel, it presents us with a representation –more or less accurate, more or less slanted, more or less plausible– with all the problems

1. See the introduction to this dossier which summarily sets out the main contributions of poststructuralism in the field of the humanities and social sciences since the 1970s.

2. In this article, I have used the characteristic periods for Chinese literary history, whereby “modern” ( xiandai) relates to the literature produced from the 1920s onwoards (the specific year varies depending on the historian in question) and “contemporary” ( dangdai) refers to literature dating from 1976 onwards, the year of the death of Mao Zedong. These periods differ greatly from those used in European literary contexts, for example.

3. See the introduction to this dossier.

inherent therein and sufficiently studied ever since the beginning of poststructuralism.1

Any teacher of non-Western literatures repeatedly meets readers perfectly capable of producing sophisticated interpretations of works that are close to them but that, when it is a question of confronting texts that are culturally distant, they turn into naive readers who forget the complexity of the literary act and blend reality with fiction, literature with history. Unfortunately, however, this is not an attitude limited to the student or amateur reader; rather, it is shared in the academic sphere and in the field of criticism. Modern and contemporary Chinese literature2 is a paradigmatic example. Victim of unsophisticated interpretations and of the sole perspective provided by Area Studies,3 Chinese literature has been seen from the West as a cultural mirror, historical document or sociological fieldwork that provides us with clear, unquestionable truths about an objectivable China. Consequently, Chinese literature has had difficulties in being treated on an equal footing –as literature in its breadth and complexity– in the global literary system.

In the Chinese case, two differentiated, but mutually sustaining, fronts have contributed to the siege of the literariness of the literary work. On the one hand, the restrictive Western view that we have just commented on, related to Area Studies and with a long historical trajectory that –as has already been denounced by Edward Said (1978)– starts with colonial Orientalism, intensifies during the second half of the 20th century, as a result of the particular dynamics of the Cold War, and can be seen to continue in the parameters of today’s global capitalism. On the other hand, the Chinese conception of literature itself: if literature in China has been seen, from the beginning, as a moral or educational tool, literary instrumentalism reached its greatest expression during the middle of the last century. At Yan’an Forum in 1942, Mao Zedong ( ) declared that art and literature had to remain at the service of the masses and that, therefore, writers had to write for workers, peasants and soldiers –nothing could be further from the “art for art’s sake” with its Kantian roots that has dominated most modern




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artistic conceptions in the West. The subsequent imposition of this socialist realism not only marked Chinese literary development during practically the entire second half of the century, but also brought about a revision of previous literature. It is precisely this recanonisation that has governed the exportation of Chinese works to the West in recent decades. In short, then, we can see how the convergence of these two fronts (Area Studies in the West and socialist realism in China) generated a discourse that shaped and, to a degree, continues to shape a particular way of approaching, understanding and assessing Chinese literature.

This article starts from the premise that this conception, in effect during more than half a century, offers only a partial and incomplete vision of modern and contemporary Chinese literature: not all that has been written in China during the last hundred years falls within the context of (socialist) realism, nor does everything that has been labelled as such fit with this assessment.4 The Chinese literary panorama is much more complex than that which Area Studies and historiography have outlined, as demonstrated by authors, works and literary movements throughout the 20th century. Regarding this, the article presents the following thesis: it is essential to recover the literariness of the literary text, appealing to the sophistication and critical capacity of the reader, as a basic strategy for liberating Chinese literature from the siege that constrains it. We will proceed to briefly examine three of the aspects that constitute this siege and that limit the perception of the complexity and plurality of 20th century Chinese literature.

Fictions and realities

In Witness Against History, Yomi Braester (2003) has shown that the approach to Chinese literature by Area Studies does not take into account the literariness of literary works, nor the contradictions and complexities inherent in them. Literature is fiction and must be read as such. Braester’s contribution to the field of modern Chinese literature comes at a moment in which, as of a relatively short time ago, scholars such as Leo Lee, Ted Huters, David Wang or Shu-mei Shih have been attempting to place in doubt, by means of different strategies, the premises that have governed the comprehension, assessment and circulation of modern Chinese literature both in China and the West. Huters (2005) and Wang (1997) have chosen to do so by questioning the date of the beginning of Chinese literary modernity. Instead of adopting the dates that have been considered canonical (around

the May Fourth Movement of 1919), they date this beginning in the last decades of the 19th century. This exercise does not involve a simple chronological precision, rather it is transcendent because it recovers works and authors from a period of great cultural and literary effervescence that the previous historiography –dominated by the socialist theses that situated the genesis of modernity in the authors of May Fourth– had thought little of and condemned to obscurity. In turn, Lee (1999) and Shih (2001) have opted to question the form and content of Chinese literary modernity. Following the path opened up by Chinese academics like Yan Jiayan ( ), they have brought to light and given literary significance to modernist texts and authors from cosmopolitan Shanghai of the twenties and thirties, symbolised by the journal Les contemporains (( xiandai) that –also owing to the dominance of that –also owing to the dominance of socialist theses– have not enjoyed critical consideration until now. Braester, on the other hand, introduces a new method, questioning that which had always been considered Chinese literary modernity “from the inside”: by means of critical re-readings of modern works, he deconstructs the meanings that they were traditionally given and shows the complex relation between history, testimony and representation, which have dominated Chinese literary modernity. Beyond the specific value of Braester’s contribution to the discipline, his work is of interest because it demands a critical, sophisticated and open-minded interpretation, which avoids pre-existing paradigms and that, fundamentally, lays the problematic relationship between fiction and reality on the table.

Without going into the profound analyses of Braester, the famous preface to the first edition of the collection Call to Arms ( ) by the writer who is traditionally considered to be the father of modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun ( ; 1881-1936), provides us with two simple and illustrative examples of the confusion between history and literature.

Firstly, let’s look at the so-called “slide incident”. This is a celebrated episode because it describes the key moment in which Lu Xun decided to give up his medical studies in Japan to devote himself fully to literature:

I do not know what advanced methods are now used to teach microbiology, but at that time lantern slides were used to show the microbes; and if the lecture ended early, the instructor might show slides of national scenery or news to fill up the time. This was during the Russo-Japanese War, so there were many war films, and I had to join in the clapping and cheering in the lecture hall along with the other students. It was a long time since I had seen any compatriots, but one

4. Indeed, a simple way of highlighting this diversity is to take into account that not all the literature in the Chinese language comes from the People’s Republic Indeed, a simple way of highlighting this diversity is to take into account that not all the literature in the Chinese language comes from the People’s Republic of China, but also from Taiwan, large parts of South-East Asia, such as Malaysia or Singapore, and a wide number of places around the world with speakers of the Chinese language, who, together, account for thousands of writers and hundreds of millions of readers living beyond the political borders of mainland China. Shih (2004 and 2007) coined the term Sinophone literature precisely to highlight and stress this literature with different characteristics and problems than those of the literature coming from the People’s Republic.




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day I saw a film showing some Chinese, one of whom was bound, while many others stood around him. They were all strong fellows but appeared completely apathetic. According to the commentary, the one with his hands bound was a spy working for the Russians, who was to have his head cut off by the Japanese military as a warning to others, while the Chinese behind him had come to enjoy the spectacle.

Before the term was over I had left for Tokyo, because after this film I felt that medical science was not so crucial after all. The people of a weak and backward country, however strong and healthy they may be, can only serve to be made examples of, or to witness such futile spectacles; and it doesn’t really matter how many of them die of illness. The most important thing, therefore, was to change their spirit, and since at that time I felt that literature was the best means to this end, I determined to promote a literary movement. (Lu, 1923, p. 3)

As I have said, the incident has been traditionally interpreted as the triggering of Lu Xun’s literary career and, consequently, as the foundation of modern Chinese literature. Thus, it has generated a great deal of analysis that has read the collected works of Lu Xun solely in terms of this biographical anecdote and, indirectly, applied it to the analysis of the whole of modern Chinese literature. Thus, it could be said that the effect that Lu Xun sought over the reader is fully successful. However, it must be taken into account that the incident has not been verified and that the famous slide has never been found. Obviously, this does not undermine the anecdote or mean that it may not be true, especially taking into account that it is a prologue written autobiographically. However, it must make us reflect on the way we handle a (literary) text and the legitimacy of extrapolating information from such.

Secondly, we need to look at how the prologue ends. Lu Xun explains that, owing to the failure of various literary and cultural projects that he had embarked on after making his decision to pursue a literary career, he became reluctant to write. Retired from public life, he kept an absolute silence. Thanks to the insistence of friends, he confesses, he decided to take up literary activity once again:

True, in spite of my own conviction, I could not blot out hope, for hope lies in the future. I could not use my own evidence to refute his assertion that it might exist. So I agreed to write, and the result was my first story, A Madman’s Diary. From that time onwards, I could not stop writing, and would write some sort of short story from time to time at the request of friends, until I had more than a dozen of them.

(…) It is clear, then, that my short stories fall far short of being works of art; hence I count myself fortunate that

they are still known as stories, and are even being compiled in the book. Although such good fortune makes me uneasy, I am nevertheless pleased to think they have readers in the world of men, for the time being at least. (Lu, 1923, p. 56)

Traditionally, critics have interpreted this fragment –and the decision it describes– as an example of the writer’s social commitment, an attitude that set the guidelines that modern Chinese literature would follow. However, there is no need to look too closely at the author’s life to see the apparent contradiction between modesty, benevolence and docility transmitted by these paragraphs and the iconoclastic, temperamental and difficult character of Lu Xun. Studies such as that by Michel Hockx (2003), for example, help us to understand that this type of modest representation was usual at that time. It is, simply, a series of literary and social conventions and protocols –in the style of the captatio benevolentiae– inherent in the act of writing and publishing during the early decades of the 20th century in China. Again, we find an example in which an interpretation excessively focused on searching for historical evidence that does not take into account the nature and conventions of the (literary) text is dangerous, as it can lead to clues that end up being false.

Obsessions and Orwellisations

The desire to offer social, cultural and, in particular, political information has marked a large part of the translations of Chinese literature into Western languages that have been published in recent decades. Critics such as Henry Zhao have lamented this situation:

There have been a number of compilations of contemporary Chinese writings. Regrettably, most scholars of contemporary Chinese literature still regard the work of Chinese writers as interesting chiefly for their sociological or political content. The very titles of these books (Mao’s Harvest, Stubborn Weeds, Seeds of Fire, amongst others) reveal the underlying intention of the selections. (Zhao, 1993, p.17)5

Zhao criticises that works by Chinese literary authors are read chiefly from this sociological-political perspective (the interest of which, it must be said, he does not deny at any time), without taking into account their artistic qualities. When these novels or stories are scrutinised from a political perspective (understood here in a very limited sense as the tension between writer and party/government and not in a broad sense as the relation between any artistic manifestation and the historical context in which it is

5. Goldblatt (1995) has produced another collection more recently, with a striking title: Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused.




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unavoidably interwoven), we put aside the rhetorical and poetic devices that characterise them and that, fundamentally, make them literary.

From a theoretical point of view, reflections on the concept of national allegory –especially those of key figures such as C. T. Hsia or Fredric Jameson– have catalysed this politicising vision. In his famous A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, Hsia (1961) criticised the alleged “obsession with China” suffered by Chinese writers that limited their creativity. From a quite different paradigm, Jameson (1986) defended a similar and controversial thesis: the literatures of the Third World are necessarily allegorical given the socioeconomic context in which they are immersed. In relation to these types of theorisations based on allegory, Shu-mei Shih observed that:

Allegory is only one kind of meaning-producing form, and it is also but one of the hermeneutical codes we can bring to the reading of texts. Clever readers can […] interpret any text as an allegory, as long as they labor to do so. (Shih, 2004, p. 21)

It is plausible, therefore, to think the “obsession with China” and the obstinacy to make political interpretations based on the nation may end up being more of a pathology of critics and readers who, consciously or unconsciously, come to a text with a predetermined hermeneutic intention, than of Chinese literature itself. Notwithstanding, it is significant that, despite the fragility of the thesis of Hsia and Jameson, the impact of their approaches has been considerable both in the academic field and in the popular imagery.

Alongside this problem of interpreting the literary object, it is also worthwhile to remark on a reflection made by Milan Kundera on what he calls the Orwellisation of literature. For Kundera, literature cannot be turned into a solely political surface, in the style of the novel 1984 by Orwell: “The pernicious influence of Orwell’s novel resides in its implacable reduction of a reality to its political dimension alone, and in its reduction of that dimension to what is exemplarily negative about it” (Kundera, 1996, p. 225). Literature must maintain strictly literary values, such as those that appear in the works of Kafka. The stories by the Czech author, he tells us, include “windows” that allow escape from the grey and sordid reality that surrounds the characters. In The Trial, for example, there is “poetry” thanks to a series of grotesque and

ironic anecdotes, which the author inserts in the middle of the most anti-poetic moments that the character has to go through. In the most difficult moments, these ways of escape grant a small dose of individual freedom and, in this way, literature exercises a liberating role. In 1984, on the other hand, there are neither windows nor ways of escape and, therefore, the result is a kind of a treatise on thought disguised as a novel. For Kundera, then, to Orwellise literature by reducing it to a merely political role, and to the negative aspects of politics, means turning it into victim of a totalisation that, in cases such as 1984, is precisely that which the Orwellised work means to criticise.6

In the field of Chinese literature, the Orwellisation of literary works (which perhaps, based on what we will go into detail on in the next section, should be called Wildswanisation)7 has dominated literary production and, above all, has monopolised interpretation. This interpretative template has even been applied to works and authors that explicitly shun political totalisation and the resulting reductionism. The most paradigmatic case is probably that of Gao Xingjian ( ; 1940-). Following his being awarded; 1940-). Following his being awarded the Nobel Prize in the year 2000, the main points of reference with which critics and the media guided the Western reader to approach Gao’s works revolved around his being a dissident who had been forced to flee from China for political reasons.8 Essential elements for the interpretation of his work –his early works as an essayist and translator, the recovery of Western modernism, his facet as avant-garde playwright or, even, his artistic painter side– were relegated to the background. Gao himself has repeatedly flatly rejected literature as practical, political and moral utilitarianism, but this does not mean that he is not willing to publicly commit himself in “non-literary” ambits. In the piece “I am an Advocate of Cold Literature” ( , Wo zhuzhang yizhong leng de wenxue), he comments:

Literature basically has nothing to do with politics but is purely a matter of the individual. It is the gratification of the intellect together with an observation, a review of experiences, reminiscences and feelings or the portrayal of a state of mind.

Due entirely to political need, it unfortunately grew fervent, and subjected to attacks or flattery, it was helplessly transformed into an instrument, a weapon or a target, until it finally lost what was inherent in literature. (Gao, 2003, p.11)

6. In close relation to that detailed here, Kundera also talks about Kafkology as an interpretative pattern that reduces the sense of a novel to the (supposed) biographical links between author and protagonist, which creates an idealised image of the author and a very limited interpretation of their work. “Kafkology produces and sustains its own image of Kafka, to the point where the author whom readers know by the name Kafka is no longer Kafka but the Kafkologized Kafka” (Kundera, 1996, p. 42).

7. The term comes from the popular novel by Chang (1991), which was a great success in the West and which has been influential in strengthening the The term comes from the popular novel by Chang (1991), which was a great success in the West and which has been influential in strengthening the traumatic narratives commented on by Shih subsequently.

8. For analysis of the Nobel Prize in general and its awarding to Gao Xingjian in particular, see Lovell (2006). The awarding of the 2006 Nobel to the Turkish For analysis of the Nobel Prize in general and its awarding to Gao Xingjian in particular, see Lovell (2006). The awarding of the 2006 Nobel to the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk reinforces this argument.




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For this reason he proposes the term “cold literature”:

This sort of literature that has recovered its innate character can be called cold literature to differentiate it from literature that promotes a teaching, attacks contemporary politics, is involved with changing society or gives vent to one’s feelings and ambitions. This cold literature will of course not be newsworthy and will not arouse public attention. (Gao, 2003, p.12)

The paradox of the case of Gao Xingjian is indicative of the strength of the discourses that dominate the way of interpreting Chinese literature. Despite his attempts to distance himself from the obsession with China and the Orwellisation of literary works, Gao is adopting a stance that polarises the literary act and that inevitably reinforces, by opposing it, the interpretation of his works from a political, historical and biographical viewpoint.9

Globalisation and self-Orientalism

Far from being an isolated literature or one that was closed within itself, 20th-century Chinese literature has been characterised by an important opening up to Western literatures.10 At present, contemporary Chinese literature plays a full part in the dynamics that regulate the global literary system, although it occupies a marginalised position.11 To believe, then, that Chinese works that have been translated were generated in independently and that they provide us with a “representative” and “authentic” taste of a literature and of a culture removed from contemporary canons underestimates the capacity of the global literary market to influence the production of marginalised literatures.

With regard this, it is useful to turn to the notion of technology and its relation to intercultural recognition as put forth by Shu-mei Shih:

I would like to resituate the notion of technology […] in the transnational terrain of cross-cultural politics of power and in the national terrain of interethnic and intercultural politics of power, so that it denotes the constellation of discourses, institutional practices, academic productions, popular media and other forms of representation that create and sanction concepts. “Technologies of recognition”, then, refers to the mechanisms in the discursive (un)conscious –with bearings on social and cultural (mis)understandings– that produce “the West” as the agent of recognition and “the rest” as the object of recognition, in representation. (Shih, 2004, p. 17)

Shih reminds us that recognition is never neutral: there is the one who recognises and the one who is recognised, and this process is governed by a discursive imbalance. Applying this reflection to the literary field helps us to think of the negotiations and imbalances inherent in the world of translation: what is translated and in which direction. Shih goes into depth on this idea, analysing two of the “technologies” (academic discourse and the literary market), which favour the recognition and circulation within the global literary system of a particular model of novel related to China:

Some of the sensational trauma narratives about China’s Cultural Revolution written in English by first-generation immigrants living in the United States, Britain, and France, for instance, may be categorized as deliberate national allegorical narratives with an eye to the market, and so may the works of the much-criticized fifth-generation cinema from China, in which allegory was supposed to be the chief mode of representation. When the signified is predetermined, allegories are easier to write or create and to understand and consume. A predetermined signified is produced by consensus between the audience in the West and the Third World writer or director. It is a contractual relation of mutual benefit and favor that works first to confirm the stereotyped knowledge of the audience and second to bring financial rewards to the makers of those cultural products. (Shih, 2004, p. 21)

The collection that Shih refers to, which includes works such as the popular Wild Swans (Chang, 1991) could be broadened to include other works with a certain degree of commercial success, but not specifically centred on the Cultural Revolution, such as The Good Women of China, Beijing Doll, Shanghai Baby, Madame Mao or The Bonesetter’s Daughter. Although many of these novels are not even written in Chinese, they are given the qualifier of Chinese literature in the media, bookstores and in the catalogues of university libraries. A feminised national allegory is hidden –yet quite explicit on book covers that tend to combine exoticism and femininity– behind the promise of bringing the reader closer to the reality of an unknown China. All of this forms part of an Orientalist discourse that the Western reader –even before reading the novel, when they have only seen the cover– easily identifies and “recognises” and that, consequently, increase the sales of the book. This contract of mutual benefit that Shih comments on, then, complicates the dynamic of intercultural recognition. We are not dealing with a simple binomial conflict recogniser/recognised,

9. In the second chapter of Shih (2007) other paradoxes of this type are analysed, linked, for example, to the work of the artist Hung Liu (In the second chapter of Shih (2007) other paradoxes of this type are analysed, linked, for example, to the work of the artist Hung Liu ( ; 1948-). 10. Between 1902 and 1907, for example, the number of translations published was slightly higher than the number of original works produced (Tarumoto, Between 1902 and 1907, for example, the number of translations published was slightly higher than the number of original works produced (Tarumoto,

1998, p. 39). 11. For discussion of marginalisation and Chinese literature, see Prado-Fonts (2006).For discussion of marginalisation and Chinese literature, see Prado-Fonts (2006).




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agent/object. Thus, if the dominant literatures are those that have the agency to recognise or ignore, the marginal literatures do not wait for this recognition passively, but are capable of moulding themselves to facilitate it.12

At heart, the negotiation between Chinese literature and global literature is nothing more than a reflection of the tensions between the global and the local in the contemporary world. However, far from creating a new paradigm that would substitute Orientalism as a dominant discourse, the situation of Chinese literature shows us that, as highlighted by Arif Dirlik, Orientalism has not disappeared, but simply been reconfigured in relation to Said’s original conception:

[…] far from being a phenomenon of the past, Orientalism, and the culturalist epistemology that nourished it, are very much alive in the present –in a reconfigured relationship between politics, culture, and history– but not necessarily where Said located them. (Dirlik,1996, p. 99)

In other words then, it is not about the “objectifying” discourse characteristic of the colonial period, but a relational phenomenon more typical of contemporary neo-colonialism.

Indeed, the above considerations could be refuted by arguing that perhaps we are overestimating the importance of the market in relation to literature; or diluted by pointing out the fact that these types of Wildswanised works accounting for an important part of the volume of translations of “Chinese” literature may only have a relative importance: after all, this commercial predominance of popular literature is common around the world, and this does not exclude the considerations that may be made about “serious” literature. Regarding this, it is important to make two clarifications that, in the case of Chinese literature, qualify these possible objections.

Firstly, setting aside the fact that the distinction between popular and elitist has been rather diffuse and problematic in 20th-century Chinese literature, in the current socioeconomic situation, the impact of commercialisation has marked the functioning of the Chinese literary system in a decisive way. One of the most obvious demonstrations of this is the progressive abandoning of the short story in favour of the novel as the dominant and, to a degree, prestigious literary form. Reputed writers of today, such as Mo Yan ( ; 1955-), Yu Hua ( 华; 1960-) or Su Tong (; 1960-) or Su Tong (; 1963-), have chosen to devote more attention to novels since

this, among other things, facilitates exportation (and profits) in the form of translations, films or television series.

Secondly, in the case of the majority of Western literatures, recognition of the market is balanced by –or, at least, usually coexists uncomfortably with– other “technologies of recognition”, such as literary criticism or the academic world. In the case of Chinese literature, however, the recognition of Wildswanised works is not limited to the market but has been much more transversal and, therefore, there has not (yet) been a critical or academic counterweight, on the contrary: criticism and the academic world have also focused on these works and have reinforced the monopoly. This takes us back to the two previous points of this article and shows the circularity and strength of the siege to which modern Chinese literature is subjected.

The siege of Fortress Besieged

The confusion between reality and fiction, the obsessions with China and the interpretations of a national allegorical nature or the mechanisms of globalisation or self-Orientalism that we have analysed throughout this article limit the West’s perception of Chinese literature and determine its circulation in the global literary system. It should come as no surprise, then, that works by authors as important as Shen Congwen ( ; 1902-1988) or Qian Zhongshu ( ; 1910-1998), marginalised by both socialist canons and a global literary market that has no interest in works that do not invest in trauma and the most explicit historical representation, have been overlooked, victims of this literary siege.

Fortress Besieged ( weicheng), by Qian Zhongshu, published in instalments in 1946 and in book form in 1947, is probably one of the clearest examples (Qian 1946).13 In China, the work went practically unnoticed during decades. To the fact that it was published at a time in which the country was in the middle of civil war, we must add that, with the communist victory and the introduction of the literary directives of socialist realism, the novel was no longer to be found in bookshops and libraries and was not available until 1980 in a revised edition.14 For his part, the author, Qian Zhongshu, abandoned novel writing and made something of a name for himself as an essayist and classical literature scholar, a discipline in which he took refuge like many other writers threatened by Maoism –although he was unable to avoid having problems during the Cultural Revolution. In the

12. As Shih points out above, this phenomenon has been clearly seen in the case of fifth-generation filmmakers such as Zhang Yimou ( As Shih points out above, this phenomenon has been clearly seen in the case of fifth-generation filmmakers such as Zhang Yimou ( ; 1951-) or Chen; 1951-) or Chen Kaige ( 华; 1952-), a movement symbolically starting in 1984 with the film; 1952-), a movement symbolically starting in 1984 with the film Yellow Earth ( huang tu di), where Chen was the director and Zhang director of photography.

13. English translation: Z. Qian (1979).English translation: Z. Qian (1979). Fortress Besieged. J. Kelly and N. K. Mao (trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 14. The celebrated and (supposedly) canonical The celebrated and (supposedly) canonical History of Modern Chinese Literature (华华 zhongguo xiandai wenxue shi) written in the late 1970s by

a large group of specialists coordinated by Tang Tao ( ) is an example of the way in which the novel was overlooked. Fortress Besieged did not appear in the first edition (1979), and was only mentioned briefly in subsequent editions.




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West, the novel took decades to be recognised. Even though the US critic of Taiwanese origin, C.T. Hsia –in the midst of the Cold War and while stressing aesthetic patterns opposed to the Marxist literature of mainland China– emphasised its merits for the first time in the early 1960s in the foundational A History of Chinese Fiction, the level of recognition was by no means widespread.15 In the academic field, the work of Qian Zhongshu has remained overshadowed by authors such as Lu Xun or Lao She, precisely because, given its nature, it is not apt for the mirror-reading carried out by Area Studies. In the commercial field, the novel has been translated into the principal Western languages, but with little publicity and sales chiefly related to university teaching.

The work, which recounts the vicissitudes of the main character, Fang Hongjian, from the time of his return to China in the middle of the War of Resistance against Japan after having spent four years in Europe studying, does not describe in an explicit way the military conflict in which the action is set. This differentiates Qian from the majority of writers who were contemporaries of his and who opted to give in to the political demands of the time and, as a prelude to the overriding socialist realism of the sixties and seventies, loaded their works with political and patriotic content. Qian’s work is closer to that of other writers who managed to integrate bellicose elements in their works without losing a certain aesthetic composure –stories like “Love in a Fallen City” ( qingcheng zhi lian) or “Sealed Off” ( fengsuo) by Zhang Ailing ( ; 1920-1995) would perhaps be the most important examples. Qian decided to always keep armed conflict and the political situation as a carefully drawn backdrop: never visible but at always key to the action of the characters. This manoeuvre, carried out at a time in which writers were asked to take a political stance and in which the social, political and cultural context was sufficiently convulsed, confers extraordinary value on the novel.

If we focus our attention on formal aspects such as datong ( ; a juxtaposition of elements from different fields or traditions) or chedan ( ; literally “without meaning” or a manoeuvre by which the narrator of the work often closes a tense scene with a joke or an absurd phrase), which affect the narrative form and plot development of the novel, then Fortress Besieged can be seen to be more closely related to Kafka than to Orwell, harking back to the two poles that Kundera proposed.16 Paradoxically, however, although these characteristics show the literary richness of the work, at the same time they condemn it to intra- and intercultural obscurity: this formal and literary nature represented a major obstacle for the dissemination, interpretation and valuing of Fortress Besieged as commented on above. The novel, however, reserves one last turn that drives home its nobility: in the way of

a prophecy, it portrays right from the first pages, the national and international alienation to which fate would subject it. Fang Hongjian, a figure halfway between China and the West, incapable of finding his own place and of communicating with either of the two sides, personifies the very novel he gave life to and even personifies a certain body of Chinese literary production: works besieged by the reductive perspective from which Chinese literature is traditionally interpreted, appraised and disseminated in China and in the West.

References

BRAESTER, Y. (2003). Witness Against History. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

CHANG, J. (1991). Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China. London: Simon and Schuster.

DIRLIK, A. (1996). “Chinese History and the Question of Orientalism”. History and Theory. No. 35, vol. 4, pp. 96-118.

EGAN, R. (ed., trans.). (1998). Limited Views: Essays on Ideas and Letters. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center.

GAO, X. (2003). En torno a la literatura. L. Ramírez (trans.). Barcelona: El Cobre Ediciones and Editorial Complutense.

GOLDBLATT, H. (ed.). (1995). Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused. New York: Grove Press.

HOCKX, M. (2003). Questions of Style: Literary Societies and Literary Journals in Modern China, 1911-1937. Leiden and Boston: Brill.

HSIA, C. T. (1961). A History of Modern Chinese Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press.

HUTERS, T. (1982). Qian Zhongshu. Boston: Twayne Publishers.HUTERS, T. (2005). Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the

West in Late Qing and Early Republican China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

JAMESON, F. (1986). “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism”. Social Text. No.15, pp. 65-88.

KUNDERA, M. (1996). Testaments Betrayed. L. Asher (trans.). London: Faber and Faber.

LEE, L. (1999). Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

LOVELL, J. (2006). The Politics of Cultural Capital: China’s Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

LU, X. (1923). Selected Stories. H. Yang and G. Yang (trans.). Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1972.

15. The fact that a work deemed to be canonical, as is The fact that a work deemed to be canonical, as is The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature (Mostow, 2003), should not include a single reference to the work is a clear example.

16. These aspects can not be looked at in further depth here due to a lack of space. Readers can garner a basic idea of this question by looking back at the These aspects can not be looked at in further depth here due to a lack of space. Readers can garner a basic idea of this question by looking back at the arguments put forward by Huters (1982) and Egan (1998). For analysis of the existential scope of the work, see Xie (1990).




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MOSTOW, J. (ed.). (2003). The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature. New York: Columbia University Press.

PRADO-FONTS, C. (2006). “Marginalization Inside-Out: Thoughts on Contemporary Chinese and Sinophone Literature”. [online article] Revista HMiC. No. IV, pp. 41-54.

<http://seneca.uab.es/hmic/2006/HMIC2006.pdf�<http://seneca.uab.es/hmic/2006/HMIC2006.pdf�QIAN, Z. (1946). Weicheng. Beijing: Shenghuo Dushu Xinzhi

sanlian shudian, 2004. SAID, E. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Viking. SHIH, S. (2001). The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in

Semicolonial China, 1917-1937. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

SHIH, S. (2004). “Global Literature and the Technologies of Recognition”. PMLA. No. 119, vol. 1, pp. 1-29.

SHIH, S. (2007). Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press.

TANG, T. (ed.). (1998). History of Modern Chinese Literature. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press.

TARUMOTO, T. (1998). “A Statistical Survey of Translated Fiction (1840-1920)”. In: D. POLLARD (ed.). Translation and Creation: Reading of Western Literature in Early Modern China, 1840-1918. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

WANG, D. (1997). Fin-de-siecle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849-1911. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

XIE, Z. (1990). Cunzaizhuyi yu zhongguo xiandai wenxue. Taibei: Zhiyan chubanshe.

ZHAO, H. (ed.). (1993). The Lost Boat: Avant-garde Fiction from China. London, Wellsweep Press.

Carles Prado-FontsLecturer, department of Languages and Cultures, [email protected]

Carles Prado-Fonts has a degree in Translation and Interpretation (Autonomous University of Barcelona, 1998), MA in Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies (University of Westminster, London, 2001), MA in Modern Chinese Literature (University of California, Los Angeles, 2004) and is Doctor cum laude in Translation Theory and Intercultural Studies (Autonomous University of Barcelona, 2005). His doctoral thesis, Embodying Translation in Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature (1908-1934 and 1979-1999): A Methodological Use of the Conception of Translation as a Site, explores the role of translators in the origins of modern Chinese literature. He has been lecturer in the UOC’s Department of Languages and Cultures since 2004, where he teaches the subjects of Chinese Literature and East Asian Literatures: 19th and 20th Centuries, and coordinates the areas of East Asian Literature, Culture and Thought. He has taught Chinese culture and civilisation at the University of California, Los Angeles, and collaborates with the Autonomous University of Barcelona and Pompeu Fabra University. He has translated Pan Gu crea l’univers. Contes tradicionals xinesos and Diari d’un boig i altres relats by Lu Xun into Catalan (finalist in the 2001 Vidal Alcover Translation Prize).

This work is subject to a Creative Commons Attribution-nonCommercial-noderivs 2.5 Spain licence. It may be copied, distributed and broadcast provided that the author and the e-journal that publishes it (Digithum) are cited. Commercial use and derivative works are not permitted. The full licence can be consulted on http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/es/deed.en.





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