Reading East Asian Writing: The Limits of Literary Theory [1 ed.] 9781136134029, 9780700717606

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Reading East Asian Writing

It hasoften beenarguedthat the majority of 'western'literary theoriesare of limited use to the study of non-westernliteratures,as they basethemselves on westernnormsand views of literature. Nevertheless,scholarsthroughout the world have been using and discussingthese theories,and they are often doing so within the confinesof a specific country or area. This book brings together thirteen essaysby specialistsin Chineseand Japaneseliterature who commenton their understandingof literature and their use of theory. Rangingfrom philology to deconstruction,from textual criticism to cultural sociology, and from classicalto modern writing, both the literary works and the approachesto literature treated in this volume representcenturiesof creativethought and expressionby intellectualsboth from East Asia and the westernworld. The authorsconfront the literatures and the theories through general discussionsand specific case studies, focusing on the questionof how culturally specific or universalliterary theories really are.

Michel Hockx is Professorof Chineseat the Schoolof Oriental and African Studies,University of London. He has publishedwidely on modernChinese literature. His most recent monograph is Questions of Style: Literary Societiesand Literary Journalsin Modern China (forthcoming, E.J Brill: 2002). Ivo Smits is Lecturer in Japaneseliterature at Leiden University. He is authorof The Pursuit of Loneliness:Chineseand JapaneseNaturePoetryin Medieval Japan(Franz SteinerVerlag: 1995) and the co-editor of Bridging the Divide: 400 Years The Netherlands-Japan(Teleac!NOT & Hotei Publishing:2000).

RoutledgeCurzon-IIASAsian StudiesSeries SeriesCo-ordinator:Dick van der Meij Institute Director: Wim A.L. Stokhof The InternationalInstitute for Asian Studies(lIAS) is a postdoctoralresearchcentre basedin Leiden and Amsterdam,The Netherlands.Its main objective is to encourageAsian Studiesin the Humanitiesand the Social Sciencesand to promotenationaland internationalco-operation in thesefields. The Institute was establishedin 1993 on the initiative of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences,Leiden University, Universiteit van Amsterdam and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. It is mainly financed by The NetherlandsMinistry of Education, Culture, and Sciences.liAS has playedan active role in co-ordinatingand disseminatinginformation on Asian Studiesthroughoutthe world. The Institute actsas an internationalmediator, bringing together various entities for the enhancementof Asian Studies both within and outsideThe Netherlands.The RoutledgeCurzon-IIASAsian Studiesseriesreflects the scopeof the Institute. The Editorial Board consistsof Erik Zurcher, Wang Gungwu, Om Prakash,Dru Gladney,Amiya K. Bagchi, JamesC. Scott, Jean-LucDomenachand Frits Staal. Imagesof the 'Modern Woman' in Asia

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Edited by Hae-KyungUrn ReadingEastAsian Writing Edited by Michel Hockx & Ivo Smits

READING EAST ASIAN WRITING THE LIMITS OF LITERARY THEORY Edited by Michel Hockx and Ivo Smits

ROUTLEDGE

Routledge

Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published in 2003 by RoutledgeCurzon Published 2013 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY, 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2003 selection and editorial matter, Michel Hockx and Ivo Smits; individual chapters, the contributors. Published by Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. The publisher makes no representation, express or implied, with regard to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and cannot accept any legal responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions that may be made British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Reading East Asian writing: the limits of literary theory I [edited by) Michel Hockx and lvo Smits. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7007-1760-9 1. Chinese literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc. 2. Japanese literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc. I. Hockx, Michel. II. Smits, Ivo, 1965PI2261+ 895.1 '009--dc21 2002068258 ISBN-13: 978-0-700-71760-6 (hbk) ISBN-13: 978-0-203-03761-4 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Dick van der Meij

CONTENTS Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction

1 Fateful Attachments:On Collecting, Fidelity, and Lao She ReyChow

2

3

4

vii viii xi

1

CanonFormationin Japan: Genre,Gender,PopularCulture, and Nationalism Haruo Shirane

22

Lit, tout n'estqu'ordreet beaute: The Surprisesof Applied Structuralism HaunSaussy

39

Kristevan (Mis)understandings:Writing in the Feminine Hilary Chung

72

5 The Heian Literary System:A TentativeModel Rein Raud

92

6

Did the MasterInstruct his Followersto Attack Heretics? A Note on Readingsof Lunyu 2.1 BernhardFuehrer

7

The Powerof Words: Forging Fujiwara no Teika's PoeticTheory. A Philological Approachto JapanesePoetics Michel Vieillard-Baron

159

What the Messengerof Souls Has to Say: New Historicism and the Poeticsof ChineseCulture Daria Berg

171

Placesof Mediation: Poetsand Salonsin Medieval Japan Ivo Smits

204

8

9

117

10 Theory as Practice:

Modern ChineseLiteratureand Bourdieu Michel Hockx 11 Making Space:Kunikida Doppo and the 'Native Place' Ideal in Meiji Literature StephenDodd

220

240

12 Re/reading'ModernJapaneseLiterature' as a Critical Project:The Caseof Dazai Osamu's AutobiographicalNovel Tsugaru ReikoAbeAuestad 13 Digital Wen: On the Digitization of Letter- and Character-based Systemsof Inscription John Cayley

Index

255

277 295

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The Editors would like to thank the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and the International Institute for Asian Studies (lIAS), Leiden, for providing the financial support that made it possibleto gatherthe scholarswhose work is presentedhere at a workshop in London in 1999. SOAS furthermoreprovided ample logistic supportfor the organization of the workshop, while lIAS crucially enabled the publication of this book in its series. To both institutions we expressour gratitudeand appreciation. We are deeply indebted to Gabrielle Constant-Landryfor her highly efficient and conscientiouswork as languageeditor. We also thank Rogier Busserand Dick van der Meij from lIAS, who supervisedand carried out the processof turning our manuscriptinto camera-readycopy. We would also like to thank Dick N.W. Raatgever,who was kind enoughto oversee the compilation of the final index. We are grateful to Anne Sytske Keijser, whose help made it possibleto provide the Chineseglossariesin this book. The calligraphy for the characterfor 'text' or 'pattern' (Ch. wen; Jap. bun) on the duskjacket was done by the handof Owen Tjon Sie Fat. Henry Y.H. Zhao kindly agreedto act as discussantduring the original workshop,and a numberof the essaysincludedherehave benefitedfrom his insightful comments.Duncan Adam and Maria af Sandeberghelped us to organizeand run the workshopand took many concernsoff our hands.Their efforts and contributionsare herebygratefully acknowledged. Chapter3 is a revisedversion of an earlier publication by Haun Saussy, 'Outsidethe Parenthesis(ThosePeopleWere a Sort of Solution), in Modern Language Notes 115:5 (2000), 849-91. © The Johns Hopkins University Press.Reprintedwith permissionof The JohnsHopkins University Press. Finally, we should like to thank all the contributorsfor their hard work, and for their patience. The Editors

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS REIKO ABE AUESTAD, associateprofessorof Japaneseat the University of Oslo, is the author of RereadingSoseki: Three Early Twentieth-Century JapaneseNovels (1998) and 'Nakano Shigeharu'sGoshakuno sake (Five Cups of Sake)'(Journal ofJapaneseStudies,2002). DARIA BERG (D.Phil. Oxon 1995), lecturer in Chineseat the University of Durham, has published extensively on traditional Chinese literature and modern Chinesefiction (PRC and Taiwan), and is involved in a project on women, genderand gentility in China. She is the author of, among others, Carnival in China: A Readingof the Xingshi yinyuan zhuan (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). JOHN CAYLEY, theorist and practitioner, is known internationally for his writing on networkedand programmablemedia(www.shadoof.net/in).He is an honorary research associate in the Department of English, Royal Holloway College, University of London, and an honorary fellow of Dartington College of Arts. His 1999 text movie Windsound won the Electronic Literature Organization's Award for Poetry, 2001 (www.eliterature.org).His last paper-publishedbook of poems, adaptationsand translationswas Ink Bamboo(London: Agenda& Belew, 1996). REY CHOW, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown University, has authoredmany essaysand severalbooks. She is the editor of

Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagininga Field (2000). Her writings in English have been translated into a number of languages,including Chinese,Japanese,Korean, Spanish, French,and German. HILARY CHUNG lectures in Chineseliterature and comparativeliterature at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Her areas of interest include modern Chinese literature, feminist criticism and issues of gender and representationin a comparativecontext. STEPHEN DODD is lecturer in Japaneseat SOAS, University of London. His articles include 'The Significance of Bodies in Soseki's Kokoro' (Monumenta Nipponica, 1998). His forthcoming book centres on of the native place(jurusato) in modernJapaneseliterature. representations

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

BERNHARD FUEHRER, lecturerin ClassicalChinesephilosophyand language at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), is the author of Chinas erste Poetik. Das Shipin des Zhong Hong (1995) and Vergessenund verloren. Die Geschichteder osterreichischenChinastudien(200I). MICHEL HOCKX, senior lecturer in modern Chineseliterature and language at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), is the author of A Snowy Morning: Eight ChinesePoets on the Road to Modernity (Leiden: CNWS, 1994) and of Questionsof Style: Literary Societiesand Literary Journals in Modern China(Leiden: BriIJ, 2002). REIN RAUD, professorof JapaneseStudiesat the University of Helsinki and the acting professorof Asian and Cultural Studiesat the EstonianInstitute of Humanities in Tallinn, is the author of The Role of Poetry in Classical JapaneseLiterature (Eesti Humanitaarinstituut:Tallinn, 1994). HAUN SAUSSY, professorof comparativeliterature and Asian languagesat Stanford University, is the author of The Problem of a ChineseAesthetic (1993) and Great Walls of Discourse (2001). He also edited, with Kang-i Sun Chang,the collection ChineseWomenWriters: An AnthologyofPoetry and Criticism (1999). His current project is entitled The Ethnographyof Rhythm. HARUO SHIRANE, ShinchoProfessorof Japaneseliterature and culture in the Departmentof East Asian Languagesand Culturesat Columbia University, is the authorof The Bridge ofDreams: Poeticsof The Tale ofGenji (1987); Traces of Dreams: Landscape. Cultural Memory. and Poetry of BashO (1997); Inventing the Classics: Modernity. National Identity. and Japanese Literature (2000), Basho no fokei: bunka no kioku (2001); and Early Modern JapaneseLiterature, An Anthology: 1600-1900(2002).

Ivo SMITS, lecturer in Japaneseat the Centre for Japaneseand Korean Studiesat Leiden University, is the author of, amongothers,The Pursuit of Loneliness:Chineseand JapaneseNature Poetry in MedievalJapan (1995), 'The Poet and the Politician' (Monumenta Nipponica, 1998), 'Song as Cultural History' (MonumentaNipponica, 2000), and Bridging the Divide: 400 Years The Netherlands-Japan(2000).

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MICHEL VIEILLARD-BARON, assistantprofessorof JapaneseLanguageand Culture at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO), Paris, is the author of Fujiwara no Teika (1162-1241) et la notion d'excellenceen poesie:Theorieet pratiquede la compositiondans Ie Japonc1assique(2001), and various articles on classicalJapanesepoetry and poetics. He has also translatedan eleventh-centuryJapanesegardentreaty, De la creationdesjardins: Traductiondu Sakuteiki(1997).

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Ivo SMITS AND MICHEL HOCKX The thirteen chaptersin this collection originate from paperspresentedat a workshop held at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London in the summerof 1999. SOAS, with its unique triple institutional focus on languages, area studies and disciplines, provided a most appropriatesetting for our gathering. We planned to presenta variety of theoreticalapproachesavailablewithin our discipline, the study of literature, and to discuss our individual appropriationsof those approaches.At the sametime we intendedto deal with literaturesproducedin areasand written in languages which were often not taken into account by those who formulatedthe theories. The two specific literatureswe investigated,Chineseand Japanese,are often grouped together in the curricula of 'East Asian' departmentsin universities all over the world. In terms of research and publication, however,thesetwo literaturesare rarely studiedtogether,and the abundance of 'East Asian literature' coursestaught in Westernuniversitiesis matched only by a dearthof textbooksand studiesavailableto teachthem in a truly comparativemanner. Our main aim, therefore, in bringing togetherthe work of theoretically inspired scholars of Chinese and Japaneseliterature was to make some practical contributions: to enhancecommunicationbetweenscholarsworking on thesetwo often very closely related literatures,to discusscommon concernsabout the appropriateuse of theory, and to provide comparative perspectivesto studentsin needof readings.There is no single argumentor idea underlying all the contributions to this volume. The unity that these chaptersrepresentis a unity of purpose: to initiate an open and inclusive debateabouttheoriesand methodsamongscholarsof EastAsian literature. As far as this book is concerned, the emphasis is very much on inclusiveness. We have refused to limit our definition of 'theory' to 'contemporaryWestern theory'. Chapters6 and 7 were written from the perspectiveof traditional philology, an approachwhich, though thesedays often trendily disparaged, has maintained and developed remarkably consistent methods over the course of many centuries. Through their scrutiny of the body of traditional literary criticism for instance,in the form of commentaries,that Chineseand Japaneseliterati have produced,these philological studiesat times achievewhat might be called a meta-theoretical

Ivo SMITS AND MICHEL HOCKX perspective.A similar perspectiveis achievedin Chapters3 and 4, which show how fashionableWesterntheories,by the likes of Barthes,Derrida and Kristeva, have been inspired and shaped by the theorists' (mis)understandingof East Asian languagesand cultures. Rather than providing case studiesof 'applications'of a particular methodto a particularculture, these four chaptersshow that method and culture are often inextricably intertwined. Beyond its practical aims, then, this collection will hopefully serve in many ways as a reminder of the limits of literary theory as it is commonly defined. At a fundamentallevel the whole notion of 'literary theory', as a professional scholarly discourse about unique texts by unique people, is strongly indebtedto the Westernmodernisttradition. It is good to remember that Europeanand North American cultural practicesare just as traditionspecific as thoseof China and Japan.It is even better to rememberthat this is a reasonto rejoice: where universality ends,communicationbegins.Apart from the four chapters mentioned above, which explicitly tackle the specificity of the cultural behaviour of Chinese, Japaneseand European intellectuals,many of the other chaptersrevolve aroundthe authors'earnest examinationof their own behaviour.Each in their own way, the authorsof these chaptershave askedthemselvesthe same,crucial question: why is it that I like to use a particular theory or approach,and how does it interact with the texts I read? It is in those self-reflexive moments that the boundariesbetweentext and theory, and betweenChinaand Japan,dissolve. Despitethis attemptto operateat the 'meta-level',there remains,as said above, much that is tradition-specific in both Chineseand Japaneseliterature. It is thereforenecessaryfor this Introduction to present,as succinctly as possible, an overview of the history of the two literatures, and of the various ways in which they have been and are being studied, to lay the groundworkfor the individual explorationsthat are to follow.

WRITING, LITERATURE AND THE CHINESE TRADITION

There are two reasons why the title of this book highlights the term 'writing', rather than the word 'literature'. First and foremost, this is becausespeaking of 'literature', or wenxue in Chinese, or bungaku in Japanese, already signals participation in twentieth-century Westerninspired discoursesand definitions. The concept is indigenous neither to China nor to Japan,and using it to stakeout one'sresearchterritory invites methodological problems which, in view of the fundamental questions raised above, we were keen to avoid at least in the title of our collection, althoughwe do use it, in the broadestpossiblesense,in this Introduction.

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INTRODUCTION

Secondly, the emphasison written texts, as opposedto oral or performed texts, reflects the high status of writing in both cultures. In China, especially,the body of texts which most closely resemblesthat which in the West would be called a 'literary canon'consistsof writings by membersof a societalelite whoseevery utteredword, as soon as it was written down, was consideredworth preserving.For many centuries,this ever-growingcanon, like any other canon, functioned as a pillar of society: it underpinnedthe elite's moral philosophies and aesthetic tastes, it structured systems of educationand (government)recruitmentand it provideda massivetarget for so-called 'counter-traditions'.In one way or another,this canon of writing survived until the early twentieth century, when a new, partly Westerneducated intellectual elite declared it outdated and politically incorrect, abolishedthe classical languageand all of its literary genresand embarked on a hazardousroad of modernizationand cultural displacement. The paragraphabove was easy to write becauseit follows a familiar framework that has shapedmany overview historiesof Chineseliterature. In essencethere is nothing wrong with this framework: the vast rupture with tradition that much modern Chinese literature representsinevitably highlights, in retrospect,the remarkablecontinuity that sometraditional literary forms and poetical views enjoyed throughout a written tradition of a few thousandyears. But neithertraditional Chinesewriting nor modernChinese literature is really the kind of overpowering cultural Molochs that they sometimesappearto be. Both containa plethoraof tensionsand ambiguities of the kind that methodical inquiry, of whatevertheoretical persuasion,is often apt to discover. The canon of Chinesewriting is held to consist of four parts (bu): the classics(jing), the philosophers(zi), the histories (shi) and the collections (ji). The five classicsare very old texts, whose authorshipis traditionally ascribed to Confucius. They are a collection of documentary, lyrical, spiritual and ritual writings that were long hailed as the absolutestandards of good writing and propermorals. The writings of the philosophers,mostly dating from the first centuriesof the Christian era, representattemptsto explicate and systematizethe classicsinto distinct schoolsof thought. The histories, continuously producedthroughout the imperial era, documented the governanceof each ruler of each dynasty, administering 'praise and blame' accordingto the exampleof one of the five classics,the Spring and AutumnAnnals (Chunqiu). Thesethree categories,emphasizingthe role of writing as the most perfect embodimentof moral virtue, correct behaviour and good governance,co-existed,at times uncomfortably, with the fourth category,which containedall the genresof poetic and prosewriting actually practisedby individual literati throughoutthe ages.Although many of those writings looked towards the other three categories for inspiration and

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guidance,they also developedtheir own standardsof formal beauty and aestheticexpression.Much of the classical Chinese literature, especially poetry, that is still appreciatedand anthologizednowadayswas written by individual talents who were at least as committed to art as they were to morality. At the sametime, however, the utilitarian discoursesurrounding classicalChineseliterature has not disappearedin the modernperiod. Until the presentday, the vast majority of educatedChinesereadersconsiderany kind of reading of a literary text that does not take into account the personality of the author and the socio-political context to be utterly fallacious. Relatedto this dynamic equilibrium betweenartistry and morality in the Chineseliterary tradition is the relationshipbetweenwhat might be called 'serious literature' and 'trivial literature'. Within the fourfold framework outlined above, there was traditionally no room for any writing that was overtly fictional. Nevertheless, fictional writing, originating from the Buddhist counter-traditionand from urban-basedoral performances,grew rapidly in popularity as printing technology, invented in China, became more widespread from about the eleventh century onwards. After the economic boom during the late Ming period (late sixteenth/earlyseventeenth century), the publishing of fiction, especially novels, became big businessand attractedthe attentionand active, if often somewhatapologetic, involvementof many membersof the literati elite. The study of the complex distribution of political, economicandcultural capital betweenthe traditional elite and a rising merchantclass with elite aspirationsduring the late Ming period has in recentyearsprovedto be a very fruitful areaof research. In the consensusthat is slowly emerging,the boundariesbetween'serious' and 'trivial' literature appearto be increasingly permeable, so that here,too, formerly rigid divisions have been replaced by a more dynamic picture. Meanwhile,someentirely different dynamicswere shapingthe development of traditional Japaneseliterature. THE JAPANESELITERARY TRADITION AND THE CHINESE LEGACY

The history of Japanesewritten literature is certainly not as old as that of China. The oldest extant texts that may be regardedas somehow'literary', in the sensethat they aim to be more than merely a dateor the descriptionof an item, were collectedin the early eighth century. However, the history of Japaneseliterature certainly compensatesin variety for what it may lack in antiquity comparedto its neighbour. For one thing, Japaneseliterature has for a very long time beenbilingual. Since 'literature' is hereconceivedof as writing, and writing as a system was imported by the Japanesefrom the

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INTRODUCTION

Asian mainland, written Japaneseliterature was from its inception composedin Chineseand not so very long afterwardsalso in Japanese.This led to a long-lasting and ever-changingdynamic between languages,textual domains and readerships.It is only in the past two decadesor so that scholarsreally have begun to recapturethe lost world of Chinesetexts in Japan(kanbun) and its relation to literature in Japanese.With the rise of the school of kokugaku,or national learning, in the late eighteenthcentury, the bias against Chinese as a foreign language grew steadily and was consolidatedin the late nineteenthcentury by the establishmentof kangaku or 'Chinesestudies' as an academicfield devotedto texts from China and kokubungaku(national literature studies) as a field dealing with texts in Japanese.The result came close to an institutional neglect of kanbun as a languageof Japan'scultural and literary heritage. One effect of this dynamicsof languagewas that, in the Heian period (974-1192),narrativetexts in Japanese,memoirs(nikki) as weB as fictional tales (monogatari), were produced mostly by women. In fact, Japan has often been singled out as a culture in which vernacularfiction was created by women, not by men. It is a phenomenonthat still raisesmany intriguing questions about the relationship between language and audiences,and genderand literature. Another dynamic at work in the classic period was Japan'songoing negotiationwith its cultural heritagefrom China in shapingits own distinct traditions. The rhetoric of early poetic treatises, for example, borrowed heavily from Chineseconceptsin their attemptsto raise the statusof waka (poetry in Japanese)to an equal of Chineseverse(kanshi). That is not to say that Chinese notions of poetry's forms and functions were borrowed wholesale.Rather, Japanselectedwhat seemeduseful for its own purposes and soon 'China' had becomea constructthat had little to do with the state across the East China Sea. Scholars speak of 'a China within Japan' to indicate Japaneseperceptionsof China and their role in using or disabusing elementsin moulding tradition to fit current ideas of literature. The very term invented in the Meiji period (1868-1912)for 'literature' (bungaku) is perhapsthe most succinctexample,taken from ancientChinesetexts where it meant 'scholarship'or 'the study of letters'; in turn, it reachedChina as wenxue,bringing this new twist to the continent. Another differencewith China is Japan'seasyrecognitionof fiction as a high form of literature and poetry as a literary domainwhere for a long time men and women were fairly equal contenders.Fiction took many forms as Japangradually moved from the classicto the medievaland literature saw a broadeningof the physical and social landscape.Both protagonistsand producersof texts moved beyond the boundariesof court circles. By the sixteenth century there was a proliferation of war tales and short tales

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Ivo SMITS AND MICHEL HOCKX (soshi), but also the consolidationof no theatreas well as different poetic forms, from the traditional waka to linked verse (renga), which were practisednot only by courtiersor elite warriors but also by commoners.This last developmentwas acceleratedin the Edo period (1600-1868)with the emergenceof a culture of townspeople.A rise in literacy combinedwith the hub of cities eagerfor texts resultedin new forms of theatre(joruri, kabuki), poetry (haikai, senryu)and fiction (ukiyo-zoshi,gesaku)that all twisted and recombinedeven further Japan'scultural legacyand usesof the ever-present 'China within Japan'.

JAPANESELITERATURE ENTERING MODERNITY

If one wishesto pursuethe idea that written literature in Japanstartedwith Chinese writing, then one could with equal brashnesssay that modern writing startedwith Japan'sconfrontationwith nineteenth-centuryWestern literature. For poetry, some might point at August 1882 as a starting date, when a group of young academicspublished Shintaishi sho (Selection of New Style Poetry), a small anthology that contained not only Japanese translationsof Longfellow and Tennyson,but also a few original free verses (shi) by Japanese.Three years later the critic and Shakespearetranslator Tsubouchi Shoyo published his legendaryessayShOsetsushinzui (Essence of the Novel), in which he made a casefor 'modern' (meaningnaturalistic) works of literature in a Europeanmode. And when FutabataShimei started publishing the first part of Ukigumo (Drifting Cloud) the following year, it was felt that Japanhad met the expectationsof literary reformersby presenting them with a modernnovel (shOsetsu)and a new cultural hero, lethargic and self-absorbedand partly modelled after Russian literary anti-heroes. What certainly made the Meiji novel modem was its attempt to 'write the spoken language'(genbun itch i) and its rejection of the literary language that had dominatedwriting for so long. A major genreto make use of the new languagewas the introspectivegenre of the shisosetsu(the translation of which as 'I-novel' is being debatedby somescholars). The idea that the Japaneseconverted from 'pre-modern' to 'modern' literature in less than five years cannotbe taken seriously, nor is the shock of encounteringtexts from the West very satisfying as the sole explanation of modernity'sbeginnings.As a grand narrative of literary history the idea was certainly tempting, if only because of the looming, deterministic parallel with the country's rapid transfonnationin the second half of the nineteenthcentury from a relatively isolated and 'feudalistic' state to an industrializing modernnation-state.However,the debt owed by the novel of the Meiji era to narrative fiction of the later Edo period as well as doubts

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about the validity of regarding Edo Japan as a completely self-contained culture, have placed the undeniablecatalyst role of Western literature in perspective.

MODERN CHINESE WRITING AND THE LINK WITH JAPAN

If understanding modernity in Japanese literature requires a double perspective,i.e. not just looking to the West but also looking back, any attempt to characterize modern Chinese literature necessitatesa triple vantage point: to the West, to the Chinese tradition, and to Japan. The advent of the modern in Chinesewriting has often been equatedwith the introduction of the modern vernacular (baihua) by a group of Beijing University-basedforeign-educatedintellectuals, led by Hu Shi, in the late 191Os. Hu did not directly acknowledgeany influence from the Japanese genbun itchi movement and preferred to credit his readings about the European Renaissancewith providing him with the crucial inspiration to unleashhis 'Literary Revolution'. Hu found further supportfor his ideas in the Chinesetrivial literature tradition, pointing out that many of the great novels of the Ming and Qing dynasties had in fact been written in the contemporaryvernacular.What he did not acknowledgewas the fact that the vernacularthat he himself advocatedwas very different from that found in the great novels. The modern Chinese vernacular was an intellectualized writing language,enrichedwith literally hundredsof new vocabularyitems: translationsinto Chinesecharactersof Westernterms and concepts,which had beeninventedin Japanand were simply takenover by the Chinese.This process of importation of new vocabulary had been taking place for a numberof decadesprecedingHu Shi's proposals,as Japaneseexamples,and even direct Japanese involvement dominated the flourishing Chinese printing industry. Although lingering nationalist sensitivities continue to hamper serious researchin this area, it is fair to say that, at least in the modern period, both the physical and intellectual presenceof 'Japan' in China hashad a very significant cultural impact. A similar observation,albeit one that is more commonplace,can be made about the Western presencein modern China. Historical conditions, i.e. the processesof imperialism, assuredthat this presencewas not just intellectual .but also physical, and that its effects were not just those of influence but also those of real pressure.The reasonwhy the activities of cultural innovators like Hu Shi, and the much-acclaimedfiction writer Lu Xun, continueto standout today is not so much becausewe still believethat they representthe official starting point of modernity, but becauseof the radicalism of their proposedreforms. Their almost wholesalerejection of

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Ivo SMITS AND MICHEL HOCKX classical languageand traditional literary forms and genres in favour of short stories, free verse and drama written in the vernacular betray an anxiety that comes with a concretefear of China's extinction as a nationstate. As Chinese history followed its tortuous path in the course of the twentieth century, this bold spirit of 'cultural revolution' has often been hailed by the political power in chargeof the new canon.It is as yet unclear to what extent theseearly radicals and their writings could lay claim to the same cultural statusthat the communistregime later bestowedon them. It seemsmore likely that their radical stance,and their anxiety, was at least partly conditioned by the fact that they were not as influential as they wanted to be. At least until 1949, the year of the communist official assumptionof power, therewere many other types of writing, someof them much more continuouswith tradition, that were read and valued by Chinese readers.At the sametime, some might arguethat the strictly utilitarian and highly moralist literary systemestablishedby the communistsrepresentsthe most traditional of all modernChinesecultural discourses. INDIVIDUAL INTERVENTIONS

In our own day and age, both Chineseand Japaneseliterature are part of a global literary systemwhich, though still largely dominatedby Europe and North America, allows for relatively more opportunities for exchange, mutual inspiration and articulation of cultural difference. The worldwide circulation of theory is part of this systemand allows scholarsfrom various countriesand various backgroundsto make the kind of critical interventions presentedin this book. Thereare thirteen chaptersin all in this book, loosely groupedtogetherpartly on the basis of the theoriesthat inspired them and partly in chronologicalorder. In the first chapter, Rey Chow deals with a number of the anxietiesof modern Chineseliterature touchedupon at the end of the previous section. Through a joint readingof a 'politically incorrect' wartime story by Lao She and texts by Walter Benjamin, Chow analysesthe literary characterof the collector and the uncomfortablerelationshipbetweenindividual attachment to objects,and eventuallyto art, and commitmentto a collective goal, or to the fate of a nation-state. Chow's seamless integration of theoretical discoursesinto the analysis of a Chinesestory successfullyproblematizes the conventionalview of Lao She as an unconditionally patriotic writer at the centreof the modernChinesecanon. Haruo Shirane's contribution takes a broad look at Japaneseliterary history, also with regard to questionsof canon formation. Shifts in critical outlook, in Japanas well as in the West, have led to continuouslychanging

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notions of what essentially makes up 'Japaneseliterature'. Traditionally, literary history has usually beena narrativeof the decline and fall of genres; the re-evaluationor disavowal of certain genresand the decline in statusof texts in Chinese has resulted in not one but several canons that are all markedly different from pre-modernand early modern ideas of what were importanttexts. The agendasbehindthesere-evaluationswere manifold, but as a rule revolved around establishingand reinforcing the identity of the canonizers,and could be inspired by upcoming nationalism as well as Western ideas of belles-lettres.It was especiallyduring the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuriesthat this reappraisaltook its most far-reaching form and Shiranemakesclear how someof the now well-establishedtexts in fact only gainedtheir recognitionlessthan a centuryago. In Chapter3, Haun Saussyperforms a true critical tour de force in his highly engaged and highly relevant discussion of the method of deconstruction.SubjectingDerrida's writing about the Chineselanguageto the kind of rigorous dissectionthat Derrida himselfappliesto others,Saussy concludesthat Derrida's China is a caricaturemeantto serve as the perfect alternative to the European intellectual order he seeks to undermine. Following the same line of inquiry, Saussydiscoverssimilar principles at work in writings about China and Japanby Kristeva, Barthes, Brecht and others. Rather than chastising these thinkers for their shortcomings, however, Saussy finds renewed inspiration in the conclusion that the relationshipbetween'theory' and 'area' is never one of simple application, and that 'the work of deconstruction'is far from finished. Similar to Saussy,Hilary Chung, in her chapter, starts out by taking a famous French post-structuralistthinker (Kristeva) to task for 'misunderstanding'China, more specifically Chinesewomen. Chung,too, realizesthat thesemisunderstandings originate in Kristeva'swish to appropriateChinese women for her own theoretical and political project. At the same time, however,Kristeva'stheorizationof women's'dissidentpositionality' allows Chung to reread works by four well-known early modern Chinesewomen writers (Chen Hengzhe,Lu Yin, Ding Ling and FengYuanjun) and to place them in an 'anti-essentialist'context, i.e. in a contextthat has beenobscured by later canonizationprocesses.The questionat the end of Chung'schapter, however, states clearly the problems that remain: 'although [Kristevan analysis] opens up avenuesfor a fruitful anti-essentialistanalysis ... how can such a project be viable when it is rooted in a seriously flawed constructionof China?' Moving to questions of aesthetic value, Rein Raud, in Chapter 5, challenges the existing dichotomy between text-centred approachesof literature and sociocentric theories that see texts as objects of social intercourse.His interest lies in combining the two approachesby focusing

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Ivo SMITS AND MICHEL HOCKX on the literary quality of texts. In order to do so, Raud formulates a set of values that a text may assume.The first step is to understandthe cultural grammarto which the literary texts are specific. The secondstep is to see whether they may also function within a larger grammar of different cultures. Texts with intrinsic literary values, Raud argues, do indeed function within the larger grammar, or even challenge it (as opposedto being merely boring or not understood).Raud deftly illustrates his ideas by applying them to a reading of a classic Japanesetext, Sarashina Diary (Sarashinanikki). Chapter 6, by Bernhard Fuehrer, is a highly rigorous philological exercise in reading and interpretation of one line from one of the most canonical works of classical Chinese literature: Confucius' Analects (Lunyu). Collecting and analysinga large numberof commentarieson, and translations of, the line produced by Chinese exegetes and foreign translatorsthroughoutthe centuries,Fuehreridentifies a number of clearly distinct traditions of interpretation,some of which assign almost opposite meaningsto the line in question. Though not grounded in contemporary theory, Fuehrer's essay, in some sense, is more fundamentally poststructuralistthan the work of many self-proclaimedpost-structuralists,as he shows that, both in the Chinese exegetical tradition and in the Western sinological tradition, meaningis very much context bound. Fuehrershows that the very foundationsof Chinesephilosophy, literature and culture are texts that are so old and so ambiguousthat they can literally be made to meananything. In a secondcontribution inspired by philology, Michel Vieillard-Baron discussesthe extent to which ancient texts can be knowable. Philology teachesthat the reconstructionof the text comesfirst: what can we know or conclude about its transmissionand origin and its faithfulness to the first copy? Then we may ask ourselvesif we can reconstructthe text's meaning. In this particular instance an extra layer is added, since the question is whetherthe text at hand is a forgery. The answerprovidesnew insights into our understandingof the language and function of poetic treatises in medievalJapan. Daria Berg's chapter on a seventeenth-centuryChinese novel is groundedin the methodsof new historicism. Ratherthan continuingexisting arguments about the qualities of the texts within the specific genre of writing to which it is supposedto belong, Berg opensup the text to a wide range of historical sources(or 'voices') from the sameperiod. Berg shows that the novel is much more than just a comic story about a Chinesevirago, but an important commenton a pressingsocial issueof its time, namely the relationshipbetweenthe traditional gentry and the rising merchantclass,as they were beginning to interact and indeed intermarry. Berg's chapter

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representsa turn towards the socio-historicalstudy of literature, which is continuedin the two following chapters. In his chapter, Ivo Smits asks whether the model for a sociology of literature as formulated by Pierre Bourdieu can be useful when studying poetic practice in early medieval Japan.His point is not whether observations of seventeenth-or nineteenth-centuryFrench literary practice are applicableto medieval Japan,but whether their heuristic value is such that we can borrow from them the tools and questions that will yield some understandingof the material with which we chooseto work. Through an analysis of twelfth-century poetic salons, Smits demonstrates that Bourdieu'sparametersare flexible enoughto accommodatedescriptionsof older practices,as long as one can make plausiblethe existenceof literature as a relative autonomousfield, and finally that these parametersdo offer insights into how poetry functioned in the poets' lives and how their discussionsof it touchedon principlesof both text and context. Continuingwith Bourdieu, Michel Hockx tries to cometo terms with his own fascination with the French social theorist's ideas. Hockx arguesthat much of what Bourdieu demandsof sociologistsof literature, in terms of 'thick description'of literary practicesand their embeddedness in larger cultural systems,comesnaturally to scholarstrained as areastudiesspecialists. In the following description of Chineseliterary practice of the 1920s and 1930s, Hockx emphasizes the Chinese agents' awareness and open acknowledgementof literary success strategies that are usually left unspokenin the Europeanpracticesstudiedby Bourdieu.He also arguesthat the need for individual distinction, so central to Bourdieu, is much less prominently presentin the practicesof modern Chinesewriters, who prefer to work in collectives. In an attempt to relate sociology to textual study, Hockx uses his observationsto proposea radically different definition of what constitutesa literary text, and its value, in modern Chinese literary practice. Here, too, however,the questionremainsto what extent Hockx's efforts are rooted in actual empirical observation,and to what extent in the desireto distinguishhimselfwithin his own practiceand culture. For StephenDodd, 'theory' is perhapsless an academicprinciple than a choice about how to express personal interest in a text. Well aware of tensionsthat exist betweencritic and object of study, Dodd doesnot merely feel we should acknowledgethe presenceof the critic in any discussionof a text but that we should go one step further and put the critic's identity to active use. In his own case,Dodd'spersonalbackgroundgives him a grip on a writer removed from him in time and place, becausebetween them he sensesa similarly fragmentedidentity. That said, Dodd'sfocus is very much the text and his chapter is firmly grounded in a concentratedreading of a story by the late nineteenth-centurywriter KunikadaDoppo. By also placing

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Ivo SMITS AND MICHEL HOCKX Kunikada'stext in a broadersocio-historiccontext, he balancesthe critic's personalinterestat stakeand arrives at a discussionof the original author's motivationsin a way that reflectshis as well as our own preoccupations. Reiko Abe Auestad begins her chapter by asking why we speak of modern 'Japanese'(or 'Chinese')literature in the first place. Her answeris partly found in the awarenessthat the humanitieshave in the late twentieth century undergonea discursiveturn, that is, an emphasisin studieson not simply 'how languageworks' but what the effects of representationcan be. The interpretationof modernliterary texts and the questionof what it is they representthen becomea questionof whetherwe want to read them against Western texts. Abe offers an alternative reading of Tsugaru, a text by the Japaneseauthor Dazai Osamu, traditionally seen as an exponentof the 1novel genre. Her reading focuseson specific historical conditions, in order to reconstruct what Dazai was representing and to counter earlier interpretationsof the sametext. Finally, John Cayley's contribution takes us to the role of East Asian literature in the present-dayworld, where print culture is gradually waning and the 'networkedand programmablemedia' (NPM) are on the rise. Rather than complaining about the loss of tradition, Cayley, from a dual point of view as creative writer and theorist, demonstratesNPM's ability to enrich traditional Chinese literary texts and provide them with new artistic potential. Cayley especially seesopportunitiesto resurrect,through multimediapresentation,a numberof formal qualities of classicalChinesepoetry, and visual qualities of the Chinese writing system, that have long been ignored, or consideredanathema,in modern writing and criticism. Cayley's argumentsare supportedby examplesof moving imagesthat the readerof this book can accessthrough his website. In this way, the final chapterlinks this publication to the new world of reading East Asian writing that is out thereand where,perhaps,literary theory knows no limits. Leidenand London,April/May 2002

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CHAPTER! FATEFUL ATTACHMENTS: ON COLLECTING, FIDELITY, AND LAO SHE REYCHOW Collectorsare amongthe most suggestivecharactersin literary historiesEast and West.! What is intriguing aboutthem is often not only what they collect but also the paradoxicalmovement,inscribed in their collecting behaviour, from the frivolous to the serious,from the casualpleasuresof accumulating nonessentialobjects to the most perverse kinds of addiction. In this movement lies a type of personality disorder that can be aesthetically fascinating. But aestheticobservationsalone have far from exhaustedthe interpretative possibilities of the collector's obsession; other libidinal ramifications,albeit less frequently observedand explored,lurk behindwhat seems at first to be a matter of pure eccentric individualism. This is especially the case if a collector is faced not only with his/her collected objectsbut simultaneouslywith the forces of socialization,suchas the moral imperative of self-sacrifice vis-a-vis a collective. At the juncture between the love for the inanimateas such and the demandsof group identity, what might the act of collecting signify? What might an intimacy with inanimate objects do to one's senseof communal belonging, of being part of, say, a national community? Thesequestionsare unveiled by the remarkable,little-known short story 'Lian' (,Attachment')by the modernChineseauthor Lao She (1943:37-43; 1944:110-21;1999:211-25),the pen name of Shu Qingchun or Shu Sheyu (1899-1966).In the discussionto follow, I shall suggestthat inscribed in this narrativeof an ordinary man's idiosyncraticobsessionwith collectibles is nothing less than an alternativeway of thinking aboutwhat we nowadays call identity politics. Accordingly, the far-reachingimplications concerning social identity and identification are illuminated not so much through the well-worn light of human subjectivity as through the obscure allure of material objects,an allure which in turn tells us somethingaboutthe passion with which such objects have characteristicallybeencondemnedin modern theory. Often characterizedas a humorousrealist novelist, Lao She is, among modern Chinesewriters, secondperhapsonly to Lu Xun in international renown, with works translated into some twenty languagesother than

REyCHOW

Chinese.2 Lao She had a prolific writing career, which spannedover four decadesfrom the 1920s(when he was a lecturerin Chineseat what was then known as the School of Oriental Studies, University of London) to the 1960s,and which included numerousnovels, short story collections,essays, 3 plays, and poems. In the West, he is best known for his novel Luatua xiangzi (Rickshaw, 1936-7), which features a lower-class labourer, a rickshaw puller. It is notablethat Lao She was the author who producedthe first significant proletarian novel in China even as the ChineseCommunist Party was gathering momentum and beginning to make propagandist declarationsabout writing for the people.4 In 'Attachment' we find a very different kind of story, one that returns us, by an alternative route, to the entire problematic of collective purposeand struggle in a modern political state. First publishedin 1943 during China's War of ResistanceagainstJapan, this story tells of the eventsthat take place in the life of an unremarkableart collector, Zhuang Yiya. Lao She begins by observing that there are two kinds of collectors. The first are those who collect as a distraction. Typically, thesecollectors 'havesome learningwhich enablesthem to make an honestliving' and who, 'wheneverthey have sparemoney ... will spend it on things which delight their hearts and enhance their sense of refinement.' The second kind of collector is very different: 'They collect, but they also peddle. They appearto be refined, but at core they are no different from merchants.'These other collectors' collecting 'is equivalent to hoarding' (Lao She 1999:211-12). Among theorists of modernity, Walter Benjamin's account of the book collector serves as a relevant intertext here because of its unabashed acknowledgementof the importance, in collecting, of ownership. For Benjamin'sbook collector, to acquire an old book is to give it rebirth, and collecting is thus part of an endeavourto renew the world by tearing things out of their original contexts and inserting them in the novel one of the collection. Ownership, Benjamin writes, 'is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects.Not that they come alive in him [the collector]; it is he who lives in them' (Benjamin 1969:67).5Approaching histopic at the historically transitional period from high bourgeoisEuropeansociety to the massculture world of global modernity, Benjamin seesin collecting an intellectual practice that allows one to remain in touch with the past. What are being assembledthrough collecting are not just the things themselvesbut also memories: 'Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories' (60). Together, the twin obsessionswith ownershipand with memory suggestthat collecting carries with it a desire for possessinghistory, even if such a possessioncan only come in fragmented, incomplete forms. At the same time, becauseof the

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often accidentalnatureof the encounterwith objects- one can neverbe sure what might come one'sway, when and where- the nostalgiafor owning the past that is embeddedin collecting is, arguably, inseparablefrom a utopian senseof anticipation, of looking forward to a future that is not yet entirely known. Benjamin'sstanceon collecting is thought-provokingbecauseit offers a significant shift from the stern critique of commodity fetishism that has, since Marx's Capital, beena predominantway of viewing material things in late capitalist culture. In his famous analysis, Marx points out that commoditiesare artificial objectsthat hide the human labour that has gone into their making. To underscorehis point that such commoditiesare false representationsof the real relations of production, Marx mobilizes a series of terms- such as 'mist-enveloped','secret','disguised','hidden', 'absurd' - that foregroundthe fabulous, beguiling natureof their appeal.'The whole mystery of commodities,all the magic and necromancythat surroundsthe productsof labour as long as they take the form of commodities',he writes, 'vanishes... so soon as we come to other forms of production' (Marx 1906:I :7). Despite the ambiguities that may be detected in Marx's memorableportrayal,this portrayal is also what has given rise to a prevalent modernistintellectual tendencyto regard things as superficial and morally suspect phenomena.Writing in the 1920s, Georg Lukacs, for instance, would extendthe implications of Marx's argumentfor his own theory of the reification of human consciousnessin capitalist society. For Lukacs, the thing-dominatedrelation betweenman and the world is what gives rise to ideology, an inverted, distorted understandingof history that could only be correctedthrough the proletarianrevolution (Lukacs 1971). Roland Barthes, on his part, would attempt, in the 1950s, to rewrite the classic critique of 'false consciousness'by way of the tools of semiology,so that reification which Barthes at that time identified with petty-bourgeoisFrench mass culture, from the advertisementsof soap powders and detergents, to ornamental cooking, to toys and plastic - could be dissectedthrough a 'scientific' analysis of staggeringsign systems working in collaboration with one another (Barthes 1973). The novelty and fashionablenessof his analysis (at the time he wrote) notwithstanding,Bartheswas by and large still participating in the Marxist tradition of a deep distrust of the objects that saturate the commercial cultural environment of the industrialized modernworld. In view of this persistentsenseof misgiving about things even within bourgeoisWesternsociety, it is not surprisingthat things were also among the evils that had to be purged in a self-consciouslyrevolutionary political state such as CommunistChina. Among the popular representationsof the traumatic happeningsof the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, for instance,

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is the burning of books and artefacts,the shamefulremindersof bygoneeras of ideological corruption. Such burning was characteristicof the 'class struggle'that was officially launchedagainstboth China'sfeudalist tradition and Western imperialism. As such, the destructionof 'bad' things became Communist China's way of honouring, in a literal manner, the critical revolutionary tradition of thing phobia that arguably began with Marx. Ironically, in the retrospective assessmentsof the Cultural Revolution, scholars and writers have tended overwhelmingly to interpret such destructionof things as part of a larger violence againsthumanity - when strictly speaking, such destruction was entirely genealogicallyconsistent with the Marxist critique of dehumanizationas made manifest in the processesof reification and commodification.In the midst of this theoretical confusiondominatedby humanism(What is human and what is inhumanpreservingthings or destroyingthem?), an interestingquestion is elided: If these remnants of the past are indeed so despicable, why not simply confiscate and dispose of them in secret? Why the visual, almost celebratory,public display of the act of destruction? One possible answer, of course, is 'so as to teach everyone a lesson'. This displacementon to an altruistic, collective purposeis perhapsthe most readily available - and 'respectable'- antidote to any fascination with things in themselves,a fascination which is usually considereda symptom of selfishness.One reasonBenjamin'swork is so powerful, it follows, is that he managesto turn this entrencheddiscursivestereotypingof love-of-thingsas-selfishnessaround, by arguing that collecting, however private and selfish it may seem,can also be understoodas a kind of historical materialist 6 practice. He thus makes it possible to lavish attention on the 'mistenveloped'objectsof bourgeoismodernity while also holding on to Marx's emphasison a critique of history. Indeed,by combiningthat emphasiswith a sympatheticreadingof the inorganic, Benjamin astutelypavesthe way for a drastically different type of theoretical attitude toward the universe of objects. At the same time, his modes of inquiry, because they stem concretely from a historical materialism that specializes in the cultural sedimentsof late capitalist bourgeois Europe, do not necessarilyprovide answersfor every kind of questionthat ariseswith the act of collecting and its existential implications - especially when such questionspertain to a non-Western culture in the throes of collective endeavours such as modernizationand nationalistrevolution. To return to the exampleof China, what kind of historical lesson is being taught in the Cultural Revolution practice of setting piles of things on fire, and for what purpose?In the demonstrativespectacleof burning that is supposedto teach everyone a lesson,there seemsto be somethingthat exceedsthe explicit rationaleof the attributed pedagogicalfunction and, for that matter, any attemptto redefine

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it within a strictly historical materialistframework. It is in this light - that is, the possibletheoreticalinsufficiency of eventhe most sympathetichistorical materialist reader of things, such as Benjamin - that the work of a writer such as Lao She may, I believe, serveas a provocativealternativeapproach to the love of things in moderntimes. In Lao She's protagonistZhuang Yiya we see a good example of the Benjaminian passion for owning bits and pieces of history. History here appears in the form of 'culture' - the 'cherished collectibles' that, supposedly,enhancepeople'ssenseof their own refinement. Remarkably, Lao She depicts changingattitudestoward history by way of the changing attitudestoward collecting, and thereby incidentally introducesthe issue of class understoodin cultural rather than economicterms.7 The first kind of collector, his story tells us, includes those who may be described as membersof the new middle class in early twentieth-centuryurban China: 'In terms of profession,thesepeopleare perhapsgovernmentemployees,or perhapsmiddle school teachers.Sometimeswe also find lawyers or doctors' (Lao She 1999:211).But in terms of the enjoymentof leisure, thesepeople are membersof an older society in which 'culture' still meanssomething pleasurable,somethingto be enjoyedor possessed for itself. Their behaviour toward objects,the scrapsand ruins of bygoneyears,containsan indulgent, lingering quality that is fast becoming out of step with their times. By contrast,the secondkind of collector is merely opportunistic;though these collectors may appearto be refined, they are not collecting for the sake of the pleasure given by the objects but rather in order to make money. Accumulatingthe bits and piecesof the past is for them simply a meansto an end, the end of generatingcapital. To this extent, they belongto a newer order of society, a newer class whose ties with the past are strictly through the external relation of trade and exchange.Apart from its commodified forms, which offer themselvesto be raided,thesepeoplehave little or no use for history, which they supposecan be readily discarded in their march toward the future. Its brevity notwithstanding, 'Attachment' is carefully organized into three distinct narrative segments,each bearing a progressively different significance. The first of these segments concentrateson establishing Zhuang as a characterwith his special attachment.A memberof the Jinan gentry, Zhuang is a college graduate,and has worked as an administrator and as a middle school teacher. He began collecting by buying numerous inexpensiveitems, on which he bestowsa rapt, ritualistic attention. Under his gaze, these items become personified with human features, yet at the sametime he has to subjectthem to an impersonal,methodical processof sorting and classifyingbeforethey can be safely put away:

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He will take home a couple of such eighty-cent treasures,full of insect holes, smudgy, smeared,and crinkled up like an old woman's face. Only at night, after locking the door to his room, will he savor and enjoy his modestpurchases,handling them over and over again. After numberingthem, he will carefully presshis seal on them, then put them in a large cedarchest.This bit of exertion will send him to bed, happily weary and satisfied. Even his world of dreamswill be quaintly ancient.(213) As time goes by, Zhuang acquiresthe reputation- given in jest and with sarcasmby fellow collectorsand shop owners- of being a 'connoisseurof Shandong'sminor artists' (215). Although he would like to earn more in order to buy better pieces of calligraphy and painting, Zhuang never considersusing his collection to make money: 'selling his calligraphy and paintingsto make somemoney is somethinghe will not do. For betteror for worse, this is his collection, and it will follow him to his grave. He will neversell it. He is not a merchant'(216, translators'emphasis). The secondsegmentof the narrative begins as Zhuang turns forty. It is 1937, the year in which China was invaded by the Japanese.By this time, Zhuang has fully internalizedthe idea that he is an expert; he understands the rituals that accompanythe activity of collecting and wants to leave a name: 'He has made no contribution to the world, but becominga collector by a fluke isn't too bad an achievement.He hasn'tlived in vain. After all, as the saying goes, When peopledie they leave behind their name,when wild geeseflyaway, they leave behindtheir cries!' (218). Zhuangdecidesthat he will purchase something that is truly worth money. By luck and circumstance,he comesinto possessionof a painting by the masterShi Qi. Becausethe authenticity of the piece is at first dubious,many collectorsare unwilling to bid, and rumours are soon spreadby Yang Kechang, a rival bidder, that Zhuang is a fool for having purchasedit. The tablesare turned, however, when a connoisseurof great reputation, Mr Lu, certifies that the Shi Qi is indeed a bona fide work by the master. Since Mr Lu's seal of approval enjoys credibility even among 'European and American' collectors,Zhuangis completelyvindicated. It is important to remember that Lao She deliberately places this crowning achievementof collecting in the midst of a national catastrophe, Japan'sinvasion of China. In terms of symbolic significance,the acquisition and authentication of the painting by Shi Qi are simultaneously the acquisition and authenticationof Zhuang's social identity: he is now no longer just fantasizing about being an expert collector but indeed has becomeone. He has taken on the identity that was previously awardedto him only in jest. The secondsegmentends at the point when even Yang

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Kechang,the personwho once mockedZhuang'scredibility, is apologizing to him. Precisely at this point, however, Lao She inserts the historical reminder: 'July seventh- war breaksout with Japan'(221). The following third and final segmentthen brings the entire narrative to a crux with the imminent arrival of the Japanese. We are now offered a shocking observationabout Zhuang: 'It isn't that he lacks patriotic feelings . . . . However, for the sakeof his belovedobjects,it seemsto him that surrender is not necessarilyimpermissible'(222-3). During a time of national crisis, Zhuangcontinuesto be unswervinglyfaithful to his collection of strangeold objects.Unlike everyoneelse, he has not fled and is not exactly sorry for not having done so: 'Every day he waits for the Japanese,holding the Shi Qi in his arms and saying to himself, "Come on then! The Shi Qi and I will die together!'" (223). One day, Yang comesto inform Zhuangthat the Japanesehavearrived in town and would like to appoint him as the head of the EducationBureau. Zhuang'sfirst reaction is that he cannotwork for the Japanese(224). Then Yang explains the conditions: should Zhuang agree, he would save his collection and the Japanesewould showerhim with gifts. Should he refuse, however, his things would be confiscated and he would be punished, perhapseven killed. With tears in his eyes,Zhuanglooks at the two chests of his collection and nods his head. The story ends at this point with the statement'To be attachedto somethingis to die with it' (225). By the end of this story, the Benjaminian themes of ownership and remembrance,themesthat foreground the collector's relationship with the past, have given way to another prominent one, namely that of fidelity. What makes Lao She's story perplexing is not simply the collector's fetishizationof his objects,nor eventhe historical materialistimplicationsof such fetishization; it is, ultimately, the excessiveness and exclusivenessof his attachment,in comparisonwith which other kinds of attachmentdo not seemto have any weight. If history is present,it is presentby way of issues of identification and its social mediations, and by way of the seeming irreconcilability betweenthe personalcollection and the political collective as such. Interestingly, Lao She took a diametrically opposite attitude toward attachmentto things in the autobiographicalessay 'Si da jia kong' (An empty house), which was also written in 1943 and on the similar topic of personal po~sessions. Forced to move from place to place and often in a state of emergencysince 1937, Lao She tells us, he has lost all his books, furniture, utensils, and savings,as well as preciousgifts of calligraphy and paintings from friends. But despitesuch losses,his conclusionin this essay is an upbeatone. In sharpcontrastto the fictional tale, the autobiographical essayends with a morally unambiguouscall to arms: 'Let's not be sad over

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the loss of these books. To save [our] culture, we must [first] defeat the Japanesesoldiers!' (Lao She 1981:421-4). The remarkabledivergencein tone betweenthesetwo piecesof work from the same period suggeststhat Lao She was profoundly ambivalent toward this topic, and that he could 8 handlethis ambivalenceonly in the mediumoffiction. Whereas for Benjamin the critical interest of collecting lies in the impossibility of disentanglingit from recollection, from an attempt to reassemblethe past at the border betweentradition and modernity, for Lao She it is less a question of remembranceand nostalgiathan a question of incommensurableloyalties,9 a question he stages explicitly through the confrontation between Zhuang's attachment to his collection and the impulse toward patriotism when one's homeland is besieged.Rather than the temporal and historical transition emphasizedby Benjamin, therefore, the boundaryhighlighted by Lao She is an existential one, replete with the tensions between submitting to one's native culture and submitting to foreigners (in this case, when the foreigners are the enemiesinvading and looting one's country). Lao She, who was Manchurian rather than Han Chinese, but who served as the secretary general for the All China ResistanceLeague of Writers and Artists during the eight-year war with Japan, could not but be sensitized to this very fraught, indeed ironic, 1o complexof ethnic and national identification in modernChina. If what the collector in Benjamin refusesto give up is an intimate, albeit outmodedrelationship with the past through its remnants,what is it that a charactersuchas Zhuangrefusesto give up? To respondto this question,it would be necessaryto discernthe arguably Lacaniantheoreticalimplications of the story's subtlenarrative movements. In the first segment, it is possible to see Zhuang as purely rummaging around in 'the Imaginary': he is obviously attractedto the bric-a-brac;he is even neglecting his obligations to his wife becauseof his penchantfor collecting, but he has not really graspedthe meaningof what he is doing. It is almost as though what he is rummaging around for are not only the objects but also his own self-knowledge.In this regard,the objects may be seen to provide a kind of mirroring function, an external reflection of his groping efforts. This initial rummagingphasegives way next to Zhuang's determination,as he reachesmiddle age, to make somethingof his life by acquiring at least one worthy item. The purchaseand possessionof the Shi Qi, togetherwith the expert recognition that follows, standsin effect as an entry into 'the Symbolic' at large. If, in the rummaging phase,Zhuang is merely collecting curiosities for idle pleasure, by the time the Shi Qi is bought and authenticatedhe has found a definite purpose-a confirmed social status- for himself.

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The difficult and traumatic questionemergesin the third segment,with the demandmadeby the Japanese,which leadsto an unexpectedencounterwith 'the Real'. The scenarioaroundZhuangat this point is a curious reminderof the well-known one-liner 'Your money or your life!' In terms of logic, the interest of this threat inheres in the impossibility of choice set up by the word 'or', for although the word gives the illusion of an equal choice betweentwo things, it is in fact an impracticableone: one cannothold on to money without holding on to life itself. The moral, it follows, is that one can in reality only 'choose' life, that in fact this is not a real choice between detachablealternativesbecauseone of the terms is the preconditionfor the other. In Lao She'sstory the logic is quite different. The choice presentedto Zhuang by the Japaneseis rather: 'You can have your collection and your life!' Holding on to the material object and holding on to life belong in this instanceon the sameplane rather than being separatedby the dividing line 'or'. But.from the perspectiveofbeinga Chinesecitizen, what would be lost, should one opt for this choice, is a crucial kind of value/possession, namely, one's identity as a member of the national community, a community in which resistance against the common enemy has to take priority as the definitive meaning of belonging. In this regard, the dilemma faced by Zhuang is more akin to the Confucian teaching of she sheng qu yi, 'to surrenderone'sphysical life for moral righteousness' .11 If we translatethis teachinginto a form such as 'Moral righteousnessor your life!', the choice advocatedby the ancients is clear: moral righteousnessis more valuable than life and life itself should no longer be viewed as the ultimate possession,as somethingof which we cannot let go. The ancientswere in effect saying: 'Be morally righteous,or be dead.' The personwho holds on to his own life rather than moral righteousness,so their logic goes, would thus be a coward unworthy of the respectof the humancommunity. During a national crisis when there is a clearly identifiable enemy, patriotism often occupies precisely the elevated place of 'moral righteousness'in the above imperative. Yet patriotism itself - and moral righteousnessby implication - can function so resolutely only becauseit repressesthe ideological mechanism that gives it its momentum. This ideological mechanism works by polarizing external reality into an antagonism between 'us' and 'them', offering those who subscribe to patriotism an unambiguous collective purpose in which to anchor themselves.As Slavoj Zizek suggestsin his writings, the reasonideology works is never simply becauseit tells lies ('ideology has nothing to do with "illusion", with a mistaken, distorted representationof its social content') but rather because it serves a protective function: the polarities, the antagonismson which ideology dependsfor its persuasiveness in fact help

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to shield us from the terror of a free field of significatory possibilities and thus from complete identificatory chaos.12 Adhering to the ideology of patriotism during war, for instance, would allow one the security of an epistemological closure ('we are good, the enemy evil'), which in turn makes it possible to act without self-restraint or compunction. Take the characterYang Kechang in Lao She's story. He is not at all virtuous or likeable, but he has internalized the imperative of patriotism sufficiently enoughto know how to act appropriatelyunderthe historical circumstances. While he is obviously working for the Japanese(who send him to talk to Zhuang) and is thus a national traitor (hanjian), he can act with a clear consciencebecausehe believesthat he is only 'superficially' subservientto the enemy. This is evident when he is contemplatingbuying the Shi Qi. Even though he doubtsthe authenticityof the painting, Yang rationalizeshis wish by way of a patriotic reflex, namelythat it is all right to take advantage of the Japanese:'He wants to secure the painting at the price of a fake painting, then turn aroundand sell it to the Japaneseas genuine.There is no question that the painting is a fine piece. Moreover, even if it should be a fake, the Japanesewill pay a hefty price for it, becausein Japan Shi Qi piecesare highly marketable'(Lao She 1999:219). When Zhuangrefusesto act in accordancewith patriotism, he is refusing precisely a socially endorsedideological anchoringand the protection- the 'life' - that it allows him. His refusal brings to the fore the repressedfact that there is perhapssomething else that is not entirely reducible to the polarization betweenus and the enemy,that the closureand security offered by national chauvinismare not necessarilysatisfying or final. But it is lethal to dare forsake such closure and security. Hence, even though by his decisionZhuanggets to live, the concludingline suggeststhe oppositeto be the case:his surrender tothe Japaneseis in effect a kind of death, a suicidal annihilation of an existencethat has been socially and culturally derived. When he was brutalized and humiliated by the Red Guardsat the onset of the Cultural Revolution, Lao She, too, chose to commit suicide. (He thus becameone of relatively few modernChinesewriters to do so, in contrastto the significant number of suicides among modern Japanesewriters.) In retrospect,the narrative of 'Attachment'seemsto standas an uncannykind of foreboding.13 As a collector, then, what exactly is it that Zhuangrefusesto give up? Is it the love of art itself? Lao She seems,accordingto at least one critic, to 14 intend such a reading. Consideragain the mannerin which he begins his tale, when he offers what appearsto be a straightforwardcategorizationof collectors into two types. Accordingly, Zhuang could be read as the artistic collector who, unlike his mercenary counterpart, refuses to give up his dedication to art. On closer examination, however, what Lao She has

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establishedis a familiar binary opposition between intrinsic and extrinsic relations, a binary opposition that recalls none other than the classical Marxist analysis of commoditiesin terms of use and exchangevalues (an analysisthat, as I mentionedabove, is inscribed in a deep-rootedsuspicion of commoditiesas mendaciousobjects). The problemsinherent in such an opposition have been effectively clarified by poststructuralist analysis, which has demonstratedthat there can be no object of use or intrinsic value which does not at some point come into relation with what is other than itself or outside itself.15 Use or intrinsic value, in other words, is always already an outcome - an after-effect - of exchangeand circulation. By extension,if art can only receive its value when it is insertedinto a system of comparison, circulation, and exchange(however primitive), can there really be a kind of collector who collects purely for the pleasure(use or intrinsic value) of the objectsthemselves? The untenablenatureof this binary opposition betweenthe two kinds of collectors is clearly somethingsensedby Lao She also, for the rest of his narrative performs nothing short of a problematizationor deconstructionof the opposition itself. Consequently, we see Zhuang, despite his initial classification, actively building a social life around his collecting habit (befriending antique shop owners, exchanging views with and offering advice to fellow buyers), gradually acquiring a reputation, and finally achieving professional recognition for owning the painting by Shi Qi. Throughout the story we are made aware of the presenceof foreigners. When Yang brings two Japaneseto look at Zhuang'scollection the first time, Zhuang thinks to himself afterwards: 'Even the Japanesehave come for a viewing. Hm, so this little collection of his has already brought him international recognition!' (218). There are also the 'European and American' antique collectors who are said to give credit to the connoisseur Mr Lu's endorsements.These narrative details, which foreground the interpersonal and transcultural import of Zhuang's activities, offer an alternativeunderstandingof the collector to the binary categorizationthat is set up at the beginning. Such details suggest that, however pure and secludedan object may be in its owner'sfantasy,it is virtually impossibleto avoid its coming into contactwith a systemof evaluationthat is external to and other than itself (such as money, social recognition, or the professional approvalof the connoisseur);the 'intrinsic' or use value of an object, that is, comes inevitably to be validated by what is foreign or extrinsic to it. By implication, the collector who only collectsfor the sakeof the object (forthe love of art) is at best a fantasy; in actual practice he is not entirely distinguishablefrom the peddlingand hoardingones. The necessarybifurcation of the narrative into these two incongruent, indeed contradictory,versionsof Zhuang(who is said to belong to the first

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kind of collector, only then to behave in a manner not entirely distinguishable from the second) is further amplified by the enigmatic ending. Let me trace againthe narrativethreadLao She provides.According to the categorizationat the beginning of the story, what distinguishesthe which is normally not considereda two kinds of collectorsis mercenariness, virtue. Unlike Yang, Zhuang is not interestedin the money he can make from the Shi Qi or his collection. Yet preciselybecauseof this - his lack of mercenariness- Zhuangturns out to be, by implication, the more extreme 'traitor'. This is the unnervingpart of the story, but it would be inaccurateto explain it purely by way of a collector's so-called love for art. (Such an explanationwould justify a meticulouselaborationof art, things, objects, in the name of how history is really inscribed in them, etc., but it would also leave intact the binary opposition - between art and reality, between intrinsic and exchangevalue, betweenunworldly and worldly collectorsthat is alreadychallengedabove.) What makesZhuang'sdecisionprovocativeor scandalous,I think, is not simply that he surrenders(or pretendsto surrender,as in the caseof Yang) to the enemy for the sake of art, but that he is faithfully attached to something other than the national community itself. If he 'lacks' mercenariness,he nonethelesshas not (as the more moralistically minded might expect) filled this lack with patriotism, but insteadhas filled it with devotion to his objects. Though unthinkable under the political circumstancesat the time, his surrenderto the national enemy, a traitorous act to be sure, is still only symptomatic of a much deeperperversionnamely, that he does not desireto live at all without his objects. His reward of life, then, is only the incidental by-productof this perversion,this other fidelity. To recall the terms of our argument, not only has Zhuang overturnedthe assumptionthat physical life is the ultimate possession(as in the threat 'Your money or your life! '); he hasalso substituteddedicationto a grand collective meaningsuch as moral righteousness(as in the imperative she shengqu yi) or love for one's nation with an idiotic and narcissistic dedicationto material objects. As Benjamin writes, 'Not that [the objects] come alive in [the coll~ctor]; it is he who lives in them.' The disturbingnatureof Zhuang'sbehaviourhas less to do with the fact that he gets to keep his life by being a national traitor/moral coward than it has to do with his absurd feeling that life is 16 worth nothing without his own collection of man-made things. What Zhuangrefusesto give up is thereforeneitherthe pure pleasureprovided by the objects nor the social recognition he has won through contacts with others; rather, it is the non-exchangeable,irreplaceable bond he has establishedwith his collection as such.Theseinanimatethings, which in one respectare mere baggage,or garbage,have now been raised to a supreme

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status - not simply the status of physical life itself, which can still be destroyed,but indeedthe statusof that higher, indestructiblesublime ideal, that somethingto die for. In the languageof morals, theseobjects are now on a par and openly vying with yi, the intangible virtue of humanfellowship and communalbelonging for which - and only for which, it is thought individual life shouldbe sacrificed.

* Lao She's story thus stands as a fascinating exploration of a kind of experiencethat borders on identificatory anarchy. Being Manchu in HandominatedChina and thus likely to be more alert than many around him to the artificial, that is, historically constructed,natureof patriotic submission, he found in the tale of an apparent betrayal the occasion to dramatize something that goes much further than the ever-shifting polarities of patriotic ideology. This occasion emerges in the most unremarkableof situations, in the humdrum collecting habits of a middle-classcitizen who thinks he is simply gatheringbric-a-brac for entertainment.In the midst of the objects appearsa void that the man refuses to fill with his fellow citizens' belief in the nation. Lao She,who actively championedthe causeof resistive patriotism during the war, did not allow the impendingnihilism of such a revelation to disrupt the still predominantly realist surface of his storytelling; rather, he relies on the old-fashionedmethod of letting his story's plot do the work, bringing the story to a stop preciselyat the moment when the obsessiveness of Zhuang'sattachmenttransforms into the moral horror of surrenderingto the Japanese.Yet which is the greater horro." surrenderingto the Japanese,or surrenderingto objects?The matter-of-fact style of his light, descriptive prose notwithstanding,by the ending we are suddenlyface to face with the starkestof existentialquestions:what kinds of attachmentsmake life worth living; what kinds of attachmentsare worth dying for? Can these questions still be answered with the old moral imperatives?Should Zhuang 'come to his senses',give up his objects and die a resistive patriot in the handsof the Japanese?Is he not in some way redeemedby his attachmentto the objects- while others go on to destroy themselvesas well as other people with the terror of patriotism? With the concluding line, a traumatic chasm has gaped open through the epistemologically indeterminate behaviourof this most ordinary of xiao . renwu, millor characters.17 The nuancedapprehensionof such paradoxesof fidelity was obviously not admissibleto the constructionof national literature in the modernChina of the mid-twentiethcentury.Instead,patriotismmadegreatleapsforward in

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multiple performanceswith continual polarizations of 'us' and 'them', coercively transforming old allies into new enemies in the years ahead, when communismforged its strongholdin the populace'simagination.Such polarizations fuelled the Red Guards' torture and murder of writers and intellectualssuch as Lao She- in the nameof classstruggle.Yet Lao She's politically incorrect story from the 1940s teachesus somethingimportant about the frenzy of the Cultural Revolution itself. In Zhuang's absolute faithfulness to his objects, in his belief that he would be nothing without them, don't we in fact witness a familiar kind of libidinal investmentexactlythe kind that the party and the nation want of its people?A passage from Zizek helps explain my point here: [W]hy, precisely, does Marx choosethe term fetishism in order to designatethe 'theological whimsy' of the universeof commodities? What one should bear in mind here is that 'fetishism' is a religious term for (previous) false idolatry as opposedto (present)true belief: for the Jews, the fetish is the Golden Calf; for a partisan of pure spirituality, fetishism designates'primitive' superstition,the fear of ghosts and other spectral apparitions, and so on. And the point of Marx is that the commodity universe provides the necessary fetishistic supplementto the 'official' spirituality: it may well be that the 'official' ideology of our society is Christian spirituality, but its actual foundation is none the less the idolatry of the Golden Calf, money. (Zizek 1994:20; first two emphasesin the original, last emphasismine) Rather than being the moral opposite of the altruistic ideal of class struggle, the loyalty to things - what Zizek calls false idolatry - standsin fact as class struggle's'fetishistic supplement',a supplementwhich rivals the 'official spirituality' of the Cultural Revolution in its demand for the love of the people. It is the danger posed by this rivalling 'spirituality', which is equally if not more capableof exerting a magical hold on the people, that is conjured in the perversecollecting behaviour of a minor characterlike Zhuang.For the party, in other words, things are not realities in themselvesbut rather symbols:to destroythem is to destroythe evil idea, ideology, tradition, or history behindthem; the condemnationof the material is in the end still part of an idealist battle. This, ultimately, is the reasonit is imperative, in the process of class struggle, to put on exaggerated performancesof the destructionof things. The excessive,ritualistic natureof the burning of books and artefactsis tantamountto a form of exorcism,the point of which is not simply to dispensewith objects but to combat- to tame by mimicry -a competingillusion in full potency. Nothing short of a

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deliberatedisplay of violence, repeatedat regular intervals for all to see, is deemedsufficient to ward off this competitor'sfierce power. Only by such vehementgesturesof a ritualized attack can an alibi of official ideology's difference from its enemy be safely established:'Since I (the Communist Party) denounce you (feudalist and imperialist objects), I must be completely different from what you stand for.' And, once ritualized in this manner, violence and the loyalty it demands are turned into properties/possessions exclusiveto the political state,which can henceforth legitimize, indeed normalize, the ruthless stamping out of an equal contenderfor popular submissionin the nameof the collective good. Class struggle, then, assumesin the Chinese Cultural Revolution exactly the function of that socially constructed antagonism, polarized between the purity of our own position and the culpability of an enemywho is not one of us simply becausewe are 'struggling' againstit. Such social antagonismis typically mobilized in such a manneras to allow one group (in this casethe party and the state) the privilege of monopolizing violence and loyalty, therebyveiling the more fundamental,radical antagonisminherentto human 18 nature- which Lacanianssuch as Zizek refer to as the Real and which Lao She revealsthroughthe love of objects. Writing books, Walter Benjamin suggests, is the most praiseworthy method of acquiring them; the books written by an author are, accordingly, 9 his most intimate possessions.1This subtle connectionamong collecting, ownership,and a writer's senseof self-identity - madeby a German-Jewish author who chose to end his own life in 1940, when persecutionby the Nazis seemedimminent - was well understoodby those in charge of the harassingagendaof Cultural Revolution. For the latter, it was thus not enough only to demolish relics of the past and strip people of their collectibles; it was also peremptoryto attack writers preciselyfor their most cherishedpossessions - their writings - and to wrest from them the loyalty that, it was thought,could only belongto the party. Lao She's story of the art collector gives us a clue to the complex significance of his reported suicide by drowning in Beijing on 24 August 1966. According to the accountby his son, Shu Vi, Lao She, who had been ill that summer,was subjectedto the typical demeaninginterrogationsand physical torture, and brandeda counter-revolutionary,by the Red Guardson 23 August. He was detainedand abuseduntil after midnight, and orderedto report again to the authoritiesthe next morning. When morning came, Lao She left home after saying goodbyeto his wife, Hu Jieqing(who thoughthe was going to the authorities) and to their 3-year-old granddaughter. Apparently, he then headedfor the small park aroundTaiping Lake, where, it was later reportedby a gatekeeper,he sat motionlessthe entire day. It is believedthat he drowned himself aroundmidnight on 24 August. When his

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body was eventuallycollectedby his wife and cremated,his family was not allowed to retain his ashes.More than a decadelater, when blame for the terrors of the Cultural Revolution was officially laid on the so-calledGang of Four (the influential ultra-leftist clique spearheaded by Mao's wife Jiang Qing), Lao She was exoneratedby party leadersas one of modern China's greatestwriters. In the containerthat should have held his ashes,his family placed a pair of glasses,a pen, a brush, and somejasminetea-leaves- the very things that had accompaniedhim in his life as a writer.20 During his last momentsby the lake, Lao She must have come to the realizationthat his selflessdevotionto his country and the party had cometo nothing: for all his patriotism he had beenbrandedan enemyof the people, someonewho had to be eliminated.Was his suicide one last act of loyaltyof attachment- to the patriotic community, by proving his innocencewith his own life? Or was it an act of defianceand self-defenceagainstthat very community which had utterly betrayedhim by holding on to his ultimate collection - his self-possessionas a writer and an intellectual? 'To be attachedto somethingis to die with it': the statementwith which he had endedthe story he wrote in the 1940snow standsas a fateful, if ever cryptic, emblemof the mannerin which he endedhis own life-narrative. The things that are the most relentlessly condemnedhave a way of getting their retribution. In the ideologically chaotic aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, in the period of disillusionment,since the late 1970sto the present time, with the altruistic pronouncementsof official ideology, what are some of the obsessionsthat have aggressively(re)surfacedin the People'sRepublic?Aside from the McDonalds,Rolexes,MercedezBenzes, colonial Hong Kong pop music, and Western-styleaccommodations,it is, in elite and non-elite circles alike, the cosmopolitanculture of Shanghaiof the 1920s, 1930s,and 1940s, the pinnacle of a decadent,commodities-studded materialist environment, that has returned to fascinate the mainland populace with a vengeance,while the Golden Calf, money, has, to all appearances,replaced communism as the object of belief/idolatry. Such collective attachments to the 'fetishistic supplements' to 'official spirituality' are perhapssimply the latest footnotesto the prophetictale Lao Shetold more than half a centuryago.

Written in 1999, the 100thAnniversaryofLao She'sBirth

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NOTES

1 This essaywas first publishedin Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no. I (2001).

A special note of thanks to Sarah Wei-ming Chen for bringing Lao She's story to my attention years ago and to Bill Brown for his very enablingcommentsand suggestions. 2 For an accountof the foreign translationsof Lao She'sworks, see Lao She 1981 (527-8). 3 For a list of Lao She'sworks, see LaoShe 1988 (266-95). 4 'While the rest of the Chinese literary world debated hotly, and for years, the value of proletarian literature, Lao She wrote the novel that the left wing insisted on but failed to produce' (dust-jacket, Lao She 1979). 5 F or anotheraccountof collecting, seeStewart1984 (151-69). 6 See,for instance,Benjamin 1978. 7 Among modern Chinesewriters, Xu Dishan has made use of the figure of a lower-class woman collector, an urban ragpicker, to point up a moral about the hypocrisy of patriarchal society's investment in 'cultural refinement' in his short story 'Chuntao' (Big Sister Liu) (1934). I have offered a discussionof this story in Chow 1991 (145-50). According to Lao She, Xu was the friend who encouragedhim to becomea writer; seehis essaymourningXu (Lao She 1988:184-90). 8 Michel Hockx has offered the alternative suggestionthat Lao She's 'Attachment'may have been written for the specific purposeto satirize or criticize a specific collaborator, possibly Zhou Zuoren, who collaborated with the Japanesein Beijing, claiming that he was protectingthe collection of the Beijing University Library. 9 Even in real life, Lao She'snostalgiafor the calligraphy and paintings he had lost was due primarily to the fact that they had been personal gifts from friends and elders.SeeLao She 1981 (421-4). 10 Lao She's interest in his own ethnic background is best seen in the unfinished,semi-autobiographicalnovel Zhenghongqi xia (Beneaththe Red Banner), first published in 1979 (Lao She 1981:179-350).For an English translation,seeLao She 1982. For a discussionof Lao She'suse of his Manchuheritagein someof his works, seeLi 1995 (275-97). One of the incidentsthat saddenedhim throughouthis life was the mannerin which his father was killed. A lowly paid palaceguard during the last days of the Manchu Dynasty, Lao She'sfather was carrying gunpowder during the Boxer Rebellion (1900), when the internationalEight-Nation Alliance Army invaded Beijing. Ignited by an incendiary bomb, the gunpowderexploded;with severeburns, Lao She'sfather crawled into a grain shop to await death. When his nephewdiscoveredhim by chance,

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his body had turned black and he was unable to speak. He handedthe nephew a pair of socks he had removed from his swollen feet; these socks were later buried with someother possessionsin his empty tomb. For an accountof Lao She'sinvolvementin the resistanceagainstJapan, see Lao She 1988 (255-6); see also his own account of his activities during the war in 'Bafang fengyu' (Times of Turmoil) (Lao She 1981:

430-77).

11 Yi can also be translatedas 'a just cause' or 'brotherhood'. Its chief emphasisis that of loyalty of a social or communalnature. 12 See, for instance, Zizek 1994 (1-33, 296-331). The latter chapter is excerptedfrom Zizek 1989,ch. 1. The quotationis takenfrom page7. 13 For a discussionof the clear senseof scepticismtoward patriotism that runs throughoutLao She'swritings, a scepticismthat is accompaniedby a recurrent fascination with self-destruction,see in particular Wang

1992 (157-200). 14 'As a story aboutart, "Attachment"is Lao She'sstrongestaffirmation of art as the seedas well as the fruit of love; art gives meaningto man's existence.The war years seem to have consolidatedLao She'sview of himself as a man of the pen and to have confirmed in his mind the validity and importanceof art. The last line in "Attachment" providesa possible reason why Lao She may have committed suicide at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution when he was attacked for his writings' (Chen 1985:89-98). 15 For a well-known and helpful example of such an analysis, see Baudrillard 1981. This analysis of Marx enables Baudrillard to deconstruct,in a systematic manner, the hostility toward commodity fetishism that lies at the core of classical political economy. Unfortunately, in Baudrillard'scasethis perceptiveunderstandingof the contradictions inherent in traditional Marxist critique of 'false consciousness'has led, in his subsequent writings, to the other theoreticalextreme- of an a priori cynical attitude that tendsto scoff at any attempt at ideology-critique because everything is always ideological. Zizek puts it succinctly: '[O]ne should be careful to avoid the trap that makesus slide into ideology underthe guise of steppingout of it. That is to say, when we denounceas ideological the very attempt to draw a clear line of demarcationbetweenideology and actual reality, this inevitably seems to impose the conclusion that the only nonideological position is to renouncethe very notion of extra-ideological reality and acceptthat all we are dealing with are symbolic fictions, the plurality of discursive universes,never "reality" - such a quick, slick "postmodern" solution, however, is ideology par excellence' (Zizek 1994:17; emphasisin the original).

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16 In the semi-autobiographicalshort story 'Xiao renwu zishu' (Autobiography of a Minor Character)Lao She writes of private property in similar, albeit not identical, terms: 'People with brains may consider abolishing private ownership. Some intellectuals may advocate the destruction of the family system. But in my mind, if all private ownership were like our rickety old house and our two jujube trees, I would be happy to declaremyself a conservative.Becauseeven though. what we possesseddidn't relieve us from our poverty, it did provide us that stability that made eachblade of grassand eachtree come alive in our hearts.At the very least, it made me a small blade of grassalways securelyrooted to its own turf. All that I am beganhere. My character was moldedand casthere' (Lao She 1999:244). 17 Again, the short story 'Xiao renwu zishu' (seeabove)may be notedhere for the similarly stark existentialquestionsit poses.Considera passage like the following: 'Every time I saw a mangy dog ... I had to ask, "Why the heck are you living? How the devil did you manageto go on living?" This bit of concern did not rise from contempt but from the commiserationof "One who pities anotherremembershimself." In this pathetic creature I saw my own shadow. Why the heck was I living? How did I manageto go on living? Like this dog, I had no answerbut I felt lost, afraid, and indescribably sad. Yes, my past - what I remembered,what I heard,and what I seemedto rememberand seemed to forget - was a stretch of darkness.I did not know how I had groped my way out' (Lao She 1999:234;translator'semphases). 18 I have offered a detaileddiscussionof Zizek's distinction betweenthese two kinds of antagonism in Chow 1998 (32-54). This chapter was originally publishedin Diacritics 23, no. 1 (spring 1993): 3-22. 19 'Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneselfis regardedas the most praiseworthymethod' (Benjamin 1969:61). 20 In a tragic coincidence, then, Lao She's body-less burial came to resemble his own father's (see note 10). For an account of the last couple of days of Lao She'slife, seeShu Yi 1986 (178-81); seealso the moving accountof the circumstancesof Lao She'sdeath, including the mannerin which his wife, Hu Jieqing,receivednotification to collect his body, documented by Wang Xingzhi (Lao She 1981:535-62). A somewhatdifferent account,also citing Shu Vi, is offered by William A. Lyell, 'Translator's Postscript: The Man and the Stories' (Lao She 1999:279-81).Paul Bady hassuggestedthat Lao She'ssuicidewas most closely paralleled by the suicide of the characterQi Tianyou in Si shi tong tang (Four generationsunder one roof); see Bady 1980 (5-14). Bady's view is sharedby Shu Yi 1986, and elaboratedby Wang 1992 (198-9).

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REFERENCES Bady, Paul (1980) 'Death and the Novel: On Lao She's Suicide', in: Two Writers and the Cultural Revolution: Lao She and Chen Jo-hsi, editedby GeorgeKao. Hong Kong: the ChineseUniversity Press. Barthes, Roland (1973) Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers. London: Paladin. BaudriIIard,Jean(1981) For a Critique ofthe Political Economyofthe Sign. Translatedand with an introduction by Charles Levin. St Louis: Telos Press. Benjamin, Walter (1969) 'Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting', in: Illuminations, edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, and translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken. - (1978) 'Edward Fuchs, Collector and Historian', in: The Essential Franlifurt SchoolReader,edited and with introductionsby Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt.New York: Urizen. Chen, Wei-ming (1985) Pen or Sword: The Wen-Wu Conflict in the Short Storiesof Lao She(1899-1966).Ph.D. diss., StanfordUniversity. Chow, Rey (1991) Womanand ChineseModernity: The Politics ofReading between West and East. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. - (1998) Ethics after Idealism: Theory-Culture-Ethnicity-Reading. Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press. Lao She(1943) Lian. Shiyuchaowenyi, 15 March, 37-43. - (1944) Lian. Pinxueji, Wenjin chubanshe,110-21. - (1979) Rickshaw: The Novel Lo-t'o Hsiang Tzu. Translatedby Jean M. James.Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. - (1981) Lao Sheshenghuoyu chuangzuozishu. Edited by Hu Jieqing. Hong Kong: Sanlianshudian/JointPublishing. - (1982) Beneath the Red Banner. Translatedby Don 1. Cohn. Beijing: PandaBooks. - (1988) Lao She (Zhongguoxiandai zuojia xuanji). Edited by Shu Ji. Hong Kong: Sanlianshudian/JointPublishing. - (1999) 'Attachment',in: Blades of Grass: The Short Stories of Lao She, edited and translated by William A. Lyell and Sarah Wei-mingo Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Li, Peter(1995) 'Identity and Nationhoodin Lao She'sTeahouse',Chinese Studies13/2:275-97. Lukacs, Georg (1971) History and Class Consciousness:Studiesin Marxist Dialectics. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Marx, Karl (1906) Capital: A Critique ofPolitical Economy,3 vols. Edited by Frederick Engels and translatedby Samuel Moore. New York: Modern Library. Shu Yi (1986) Lao She.Beijing: Renmin chubanshe. Stewart, Susan (1984) On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wang, David Der-wei (1992) Fictional Realism in Twentieth-Century China: Mao Dun, Lao She, Shen Congwen.New York: Columbia University Press. Zizek, Slavoj (1989) The SublimeObjectofIdeology. London: Verso. - (ed.) (1994) Mapping Ideology. London: Verso.

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CHAPTER 2

CANON FORMATION IN JAPAN: GENRE, GENDER, POPULAR CULTURE, AND NATIONALISM HARUO SHIRANE Today the term canon usually refersto authorizedtexts, particularly thosein school curricula, or to texts widely perceivedto be worthy of interpretation and imitation. Canon in the narrower sensemeansthe standardrepertoire, the most highly prized or most frequently read or performedworks within a particular genre or institution. By contrast, canon in the broader, more political sense,with which I am concernedhere, meansthose texts that are recognizedand used by dominant institutions. Historically, Westerncanon theory can be divided roughly into two approaches.The foundationali st, who seesa foundation or bedrock in the text, believesthat a canonicaltext embodiessomeuniversal,unchanging,or absolutevalue. A good exampleis the famous essay'What is a classic?',written in 1850 by CharlesAugustin Sainte-Beuve,which notes that '[a] true classic ... is an author who has enriched the human mind,' 'who has discoveredsome unequivocal moral truth, or has once more seized hold of some eternal passion' (Richter 1989:1294). The second approach, generally followed today, is antifoundational,which holds that there is no foundation in the text, that works in the canon reflect the interests of a particular group or society at a particular time: here the term canon, which implies conflict and change, deliberatelyreplacesand critiques the notions of the classicand of tradition, which both suggestsomethingunchangingor given. In this view, traditions, like literary classics,are constructed,particularly by dominantcommunities or institutions. At the sametime, in deferenceto the foundationalistposition, it would be foolish to imply that the texts are empty boxesready to be filled by their next owners.Eachtext implies certainmoral or aestheticvaluesand bearscertainformal characteristics,including genderedauthorship,that have had a deep impacton the mannerin which it is receivedand reconstructed. Taking an anti-foundationalposition, John Guillory, in his book Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, has argued that the ideological or cultural value of the texts in the canondo not lie in the texts themselvesbut in the processesand institutions that give thesetexts value. 'Canonicity is not a property of the work itself but of its transmission'and

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its relation to institutions such as the school (Guillory 1993:55). Pierre Bourdieu, upon whom Guillory draws for his central thesis, has pointed to two fundamentalforms of production: the production of the work and the productionof the value of the work. In fact, for Bourdieu, '[t]he production of discourse(critical, historical, etc.) about the work of art is one of the conditionsof productionof the work' (Bourdieu 1994:35).A canonicaltext in this senseis constantlyre-produced.Canon formation is thus concerned not only with the immediateproducersof the work - the authors,the scribes, the printers, etc. - but with those agents and institutions (such as commentators,patrons,temples,schools,museums,publishing houses)that produce or re-produce the value of the text and that createthe consumers and audiencescapable of recognizing and desiring that value. The key questions,then, are how this value is generated,maintained,and transmitted, and by whom and for what purposes.Here I will be looking at four key dimensions:genre,gender,popularculture, and nationalism.

CANON AND GENRE

One of the key aspectsof canon formation is genre configuration. The history of canon formation in the Europeantradition has in fact often been seenas a history of the rise and fall of different genresor modes.The Genji ippon kyo (Genji One Volume Sutra, 1176), a Buddhisttext written by Priest Ch6ken in the late twelfth century, reveals that the genre hierarchy as it existed in the late Heian and early medieval periods was, roughly speaking, from top to bottom: (1) Buddhist scriptures; (2) Confucian texts; (3) histories such as the Recordsof the Historian (Ch. Shiji, Jap. Shiki); (4) Chinese belles-lettres (bun) such as Anthology of Literature (Wenxuan, Monzen), a collection of Chinese poetry and literary prose; (5) Japanese classicalpoetry (waka); and (6) vernaculartales(monogatari)and soshi,that is to say, nikki (diaries) and related writings in kana. The genre hierarchy here follows the Chinesemodel, with religious/philosophicaltexts, histories, and poetry held in highest regard, while fiction is relegatedto the bottom. The mostly highly regardedcanon,at least from the Buddhist priest'spoint of view, was the Buddhist, followed by the Confucian, texts, Chinese history, and Chinese poetry. At the bottom were the two genres in the Japanesesyllabary, waka and monogatari,with waka of much higher status than prosefiction in kana. Cultural identity was also a major elementin the genre hierarchy. The top four categories,the most prestigiousgenres,were of foreign origin, identified primarily with China (Kara). The two bottom genres, by contrast, were identified with native culture, with Japan (Yamato).

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In the eighteenth century, the nativist scholars of kokugaku (nativist learning), who attackedwhat they perceivedto be foreign influences and createdan alternativesphereof learning basedon what they perceivedto be purely Japanesetexts, attemptedto invert the genrehierarchyfound in texts such as the Genji ippon kyo. They placedwaka and monogatari,the texts in Japanesesyllabary, at the top, while attemptingto de-canonizethe top four categories,especiallyBuddhistand Confuciantexts and Chinesepoetry and histories. It was not, however, until the mid-Meiji period (1890s), with the rise of modern nationalism,the influence of Western phonocentricism,the emphasison a 'national language'(kokugo)basedon kana, and the defeatof China in the Sino-JapaneseWar (1894-5), that this inversion finally becomes irreversible. Throughout the pre-modern period, gakumon, the Japaneseword for learning,meantkangaku(Chinesestudies),which was the centre of various pre-modern discourses, and it was not until the establishmentof kokubungaku(national literature) in the mid-Meiji period, that Japaneseliterature became largely, though not entirely, kana-based literature. Of particular interesthere is that the writers or commentatorsof a genre or text held in low regard frequently attemptedto elevatethat genre or text by giving it traits from higher genresor canons.In the kana prefaceto the Kokinshu (Collection of Old and New JapanesePoems,905), for example, Ki no Tsurayuki (868-945)attemptedto raisethe authority of waka, hitherto considereda low 'private' form, by drawing on Chinesepoetry and poetics. Tale of Genji and Tales oflse rose to the top of the literary canon through their associationwith waka, which was a more canonical genre than the monogatari,and through reconfigurationas history (biography),which was, along with poetry and scriptures,consideredthe highest genre. Renga, or linked verse,which beganas a marginal, populargenre,attemptedto elevate itself by drawing on the authority of the orthodoxy representedby the Nija school of court waka. BashO likewise drew heavily on classical poetry as well as Chinese poetry in an effort to make haikai, considered lowly entertainment,part of a high poetic tradition. The inability of a text to absorbtraits of a more highly regardedgenreor take on new functions could likewise result in de-canonization,as In the caseof Sagoromomonogatari (Tale of Sagoromo,1058-80) and Fujiwara Kinta's Wakan roeishu (Japaneseand Chinese Poems to Sing, 1012). Sagoromomonogatari,an eleventh-centuryvernacularcourt tale considered by medieval poets as well as Edo kokugaku scholars to be of great importance,secondonly to the Genji and lse, was valued by both waka and renga poets as a rich source of waka and poetic imagery, but it lacked sufficient intrinsic interest to survive as a prose fiction in the modern period.1 A similar fate awaited Wakan roeishu, a collection of waka and

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lines from noted Chinesepoetry, which serveda multiplicity offunctions-a collection of 'songs' (kayo), a guide to poetic topics, and a calligraphy handbook.With the disappearance of thesepedagogicaland social functions and the denigrationof Chinesepoetry (kanshi) in the modern period, it lost its wide appeal.By contrast,the Taketori monogatari(Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, 910), which was consideredthe grandfatherof the monogatariin the Tale of Genji, was virtually ignored during the medieval period. Unlike the Tales of/se, which becamethe object of massivecommentary,the Taketori was not closely associatedwith poetry, history, or scripture,the three most highly valued genres. In the modern period, however, the fortunes of the Taketori rose with those of the novel (shOsetsu),and the text has become one of the most popular classics. In Kokubungakuzenshi: Heiancho hen (CompleteHistory of JapaneseLiterature: The Heian Court, 1905), the first full-length study of Heian literary history, Fujioka Sakutaro(1870-1910)referring to the shOsetsuas 'occupying the highest literary position' praisesthe Taketori as 'our country'sfirst novel' (Fujioka 1971:138). Perhapsthe most important genre changeoccurred in the definition of literature itself. Prior to the eighteenthcentury in Europe, literature in the broadestsense meantanything that was related to reading and writing. 2 More precisely, it referredto the humanitiesbroadly defined, to writings of high quality, including those in the fields of history, theology, philosophy, and even natural science.From aroundthe middle of the eighteenthcentury, this notion of literature gradually began to narrow to that of creative or imaginative literature, with particularstresson the genresof poetry, the tale (prose fiction), and drama, as opposedto other forms such as rhetorical persuasion,didactic argumentation,and historical narration.)The emergence of this new notion of literature was accompaniedby the slow rise in the prestige of the novel, which came to enforce the notion of literature as imaginativeor creativewriting. This nineteenth-centuryEuropeannotion of imaginative literature had a profound impact on the construction of both the institution and field of modern kokubungaku, including the construction of 'classical Japanese literature'. In the Meiji period the term bungaku(literature) embracedtwo notions: the notion of bungakuas humanitiesor belles-lettres,a conceptthat fused earlier Japaneseand Chinesenotions of literature and learning with the broader Europeanconception of literature as humanities, and a more narrow notion of creativeor imaginativewriting, which derived in large part 4 from Europe. In the latter half of the Meiji period, there was a rapid shift toward the notion of literature as imaginative writing, correspondingto the shift in Europe from the early eighteenth-centurynotion of literature as humanitiesto that of imaginative literature in the nineteenthcentury. Meiji literary historians sometimes referred to the narrower definition of

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imaginative bungakuas bibungaku(elegantliterature) or junbungaku(pure literature), stressingin particular imagination (sozoryoku),feeling (kanjo), and thought (shiso). The earlier notion of literature as humanities was reflected in the establishmentat the University of Tokyo in 1877 of Bunka daigaku, or the Division of Humanities,which embracedvariousdisciplines, including the Department of Japaneseand Chinese Classics (Wakan bungakuka), while the nineteenth-centurynotion of imaginative literature was reflected in the subsequentseparationof Japaneseliterature (eventually called kokubun)and Japanesehistory into separatedisciplinesin 1888 and in the institutional breakupof what had once been kangaku(Chinesestudies) into the programmes of philosophy, history, and literature.5 The new disciplinary configurations,derived in large part from the German model, radically altered the pre-modernliterary canon, leaving out texts in such fields as history, philosophy, religion, and political science, which had hitherto beenan integral part of literary learning. The nineteenth-centuryEuropeanunitary notion of literature, of various genresbelonging to one larger species,and the Europeanstresson drama, poetry, and the novel, genres considered the epitome of imaginative literature, had a significant effect on the generic conception of Japanese literature, which had held poetry in high esteembut not drama and prose fiction. In the Meiji period, the notion of the shOsetsu(novel), consideredin the Enlightenment,Spencerianschemeas the most advancedgenre, was employed to bring together a wide range of texts - such as monogatari, setsuwa (folk stories), otogizoshi, kanazoshi (kana books), ukiyozoshi (books of the floating world), kibyoshi (illustrated books) - which had hitherto beentreatedas separatephenomenonand had not beenconsidered, with the exception of the Heian monogatari, to be seriouswriting (Suzuki 1996:15-32). Ihara Saikaku (1642-93), the Genroku-period(1688-1704) haikai poet and writer of ukiyozoshi,had fallen into considerableobscurity by the end of the Tokugawaperiod, and it was almost impossibleduring the early Meiji period to obtain copies of his works, which were no longer printed. It was not until the late 1880s, when Japanesewriters and intellectualsbeganto look to their own tradition for the Japaneseequivalent of the European'realist' novelist that the long-forgottenGenrokuwriter was exhumed,recognizedas the foremost fiction writer of the Edo period, and advertisedas the 'Saikaku,the realist of Japan'. From the late twelfth century to the Meiji period, the Genji monogatari (Tale of Genji, \0 19) had been read, at least in the medieval wagaku (Japanesestudies) tradition, as a handbookfor poetry, a model for poetic diction and imagery. Even Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801),who attempted to assertthe value of the Tale ofGenji as narrativefiction, applied a theory, that of mono no aware, which was basedon a classical poetic model of

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catharticexpressionism.Modern literary scholarshipon the Tale ofGenji, by contrast, can be seen as an extended attempt to escape from this long tradition of poetic readings - from the hegemony of waka, which had receiveda thousandyears of attentionas the canonicalform - and to reread the Tale ofGenji first as a realistic novel, and then as a psychologicalnovel. In the early Meiji period, the Tale ofGenji, which depictsan ideal period of direct imperial rule (that of emperors Uda and Daigo) in its opening chapters, was thought to reflect the 'return to imperial rule' movement behind the Meiji restoration. In the period of heavy westernization and global nationalism that followed, by contrast, the Tale of Genji was proclaimedto be the world's first realistic novel, and the text was translated into English so that it could becomepart of 'world literature'. While poetry, first in the form of shi (Chinesestyle poetry) and then later in the shapeof waka, had long been regardedas the highest of genres in Japan,the new Europeannotion of 'poetry' (translatedas shi), like the new notion of 'prose' (sanbun), brought together a variety of genres - for example, waka, haikai, and kayo (songs), together with the newly created shintaishi (new, free-form verse). Matsuo BashO (1644-94), who had been considereda haikai poet (haijin), now was thought of also in the new, wider senseof 'poet' (shijin), and becamea sourceof inspiration for other shijin such as Shimazaki Toson (1872-1943), the Romantic poet of shintaishi, who saw Basho as an alienatedpoet-artist. Thus, while Bash6'sreputation as a haijin sufferedin the Meiji period, he was resurrected,at least in part, as a shijin. Until the Meiji period, performing arts such as no, kyogen,joruri, and kabuki were not consideredthe object of commentaryby medieval wagaku or Tokugawa kokugaku scholars. However, under the influence of the Western notion of dramatic literature, particularly Greek tragedy, Shakespeare's plays, and Europeanopera, dramacame to be consideredan integral, if not key part of national literature, and was raised to the level of 'art' (geijutsu) from mere 'performance'(geino). Joruri and kabuki were not regarded as a form of dramatic literature, as the respectedworks of a specific playwright, until the Meiji period, when kokubungakuscholarsand reformers of national theatre, led by Tsubouchi ShOyo (1859-1935), transformed Chikamatsu into a central literary figure, 'Japan'sforemost dramatist', under the heavy influence of Western models, particularly Shakespeare.With the demise of the Tokugawa military government,no, which had become a form of classical theatre in the Edo period, almost disappeared,but it was revived and the name changed from sarugaku (monkey music) or no to the more dignified name of nogaku(no opera), a shift that reflected the nationalist need to match Europe'soperatic tradition (Takemoto1995:487-510).

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The modernnotions of literature also drove a wedgebetweenwriting and its various material presentations. From as early as the classicalperiod, writing (especially poetry), calligraphy, and painting were often inseparable.In Meiji institutional discourse, by contrast, writing was separatedfrom its visual or material presentation,which was studied by a new discipline, that of art (bijutsu). As Sato Doshin has shown, in the 1880s the categoriesof painting exhibits shifted from the term shoga, which did not distinguish between calligraphy and painting, to kaiga, which referred specifically to painting but excludedcalligraphy (Sato 1996). Calligraphy, which had been consideredone of the three great cultural accomplishments(along with poetry and music), and which had been inseparablefrom the practice of poetry for a thousand years, was thus lost in the new configuration of disciplines. CANON AND GENDER

Another key issue in Europeancanon theory, particularly among feminist scholars,has been the androcentricor male-centrednature of the European literary canon (Friedman 1993). Some critics have argued that women's writing is always 'bitextual', in dialoguewith both masculineand feminine literary traditions. That is to say, women'swriting looks back to both a male and a female canon, while male writing need only concern itself with the dominant,male-orientedcanon(Schor 1987:11 0). Of particular interesthere is the fact that, due to the position of Heian kana literature, much of which was written by women and which stood within a larger Chinese canon, 'bitextuality' applied both to women'swriting and to men'swriting. In the Heian period (794-1185),for example,it was admirablefor a male courtier to be able to master Yamato (Japanese)discourse, which was associatedwith women's writing and feminine aesthetics,alongside the more masculine Chinese discourse, which was reserved for politics, government,philosophy, and religion. Heian male courtiers used hiragana, wrote in the genresassociatedwith women, and took on women'sroles, as exemplified by Ki no Tsurayuki in the Tosa nikki (Tosa Diary, 934-5). In later periods, men similarly relished women's roles, for example, in the anna-mono(women plays) in the no dramaor the onnagata(woman'srole) in Edo kabuki. Significantly, however,women almost never enteredinto the masculine,public, Chinese-relateddiscourse,and they rarely, if ever, played male roles. When a woman attemptedto cross into the male sphere,as the scholarly woman with garlic breathin the rainy-night discussiondoes in the 'Broom Tree' (Hahakigi) chapterof the Tale of Genji, it was looked upon with scorn and aversion, though certain women authors such as Sei

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Shonagon and Murasaki Shikibu managed to successfully display their Chineseknowledgeas a meansof enhancingtheir own status.As Mitamura Masako has pointed out, men had a strong desire to control not only their own spheresbut the female sphere as well, and managedto do so, while womenwere largely confinedto their own sphere(Mitamura 1994). The close association of women with the origins of kana literature createdextremeambivalenceamongmedieval and Edo commentators,who were generally male and inclined to be influenced by Confucian gender constructions.One of the reasonsthat Edo commentatorsand teacherssuch as the Neo-Confucian scholar Hayashi Razan (1583-1657) gravitated to Yoshida Kenko's (1283-1350)Essaysin Idleness,which becamea major classic in the seventeenthcentury, was that it was not only in hiragana, a requirement for teaching the new commoner audience, but that it was written by a man, thus providing a viable alternativeto Heian kana texts by women. In another example, Kamo no Mabuchi (1697-1769),one of the major founders of kokugaku, positively associated masuraoburi (masculinity) with the Man 'yoshu and the ancient period, while negatively associatingtaoyameburi (femininity) with the Heian period, and saw a historical deterioration from masculine to feminine as the capital moved from Nara to Heian (Kyoto). Mabuchi's genderedpoetic history was a means of revalorizing waka, which had long been associatedwith Heian women'sliterature, as originally male and thus a superiorform. By contrast, Norinaga, Mabuchi's leading disciple, positively interpretedfemininity and weakness,which he valorized as an expressionof true emotion, as opposed to masculinity,which he associatedwith Chinaand with superficiality. The Meiji ambivalencetoward the Heian period is also evident in the dissatisfaction that Haga Yaichi (1867-1927) and Tachibana Senzaburo (1867-1901), the editors of Kokubungaku tokuhon (JapaneseLiterature Reader,1890) and pioneersof national literaturestudy, expressedtoward the Heian vernacular,which they felt was too soft and effeminate.Despitetheir decision to leave out kanbun texts, they valued Chinese and Buddhist influences, which they felt 'imbued lofty ideas' into medieval and Edo literature, and preferred wakan konko bun, the mixed Japanese-Chinese style, which they felt was 'more vigorous and manly' than the Heian hiragana style (Haga and Tachibana 1983:13-28). By contrast, Fujioka Sakutaro, the first major scholar of Heian literature and the author of Kokubungakuzenshi: HeianchO hen, written immediately after the RussoJapaneseWar, arguedthat for the nation to be strong, it must be masculine and based on bushido, the way of the warrior, but for the nation to be cultivated, it must turn to the femininity and culture found in Heian literature. If the Heian period, the equivalentof the period of Greeceand Rome, celebratedletters (bun) and the nobility, the Tokugawa period, the

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equivalent of the EuropeanRenaissance,celebratedweapons(bu) and the warrior (bushi). Writings in hiragana representedonly a minor part of the broad corpus dominatedby kangaku(Chineselearning), and of all the prosetexts written by women in the Heian period, only the Tale of Genji was canonizedin the early medieval period, and it was canonizedby men at court as a handbook for poetic composition. The early medieval canonizers,who were men, made no mention of the Pillow Book, the Izumi Shikibu Diary (early eleventh century), or the Kagero Diary (954-74). Women poets appearin the Hyakunin isshu (One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each, edited by Fujiwara Teika) and other prominent poetry collections, but no mention is made of their prose writings except for the Murasaki Shikibu Diary (early eleventh century), which was recognized in connection with the Tale of Genji. Significantly, it is a kana diary by a man, Ki no Tsurayuki's Tosa Diary, rather than the other diaries by women, that first reachedcanonical status. It was not until the 1920s that Heian women'skana nikki (poetic diaries) were recognized as literature worthy of study and fitted into a modern genealogyof 'self-reflective literature' (jishO bungaku),as part of a larger 'I-novel' discourse. It was only with the emergenceof 'women's literature' (joryu bungaku) in the modern period and the critical debate surroundingits emergencethat the Heian women'stradition as we conceive it now was retroactivelyconstructed.

CANON AND NATIONALISM

Post-colonialcritics have arguedthat the dominant canon, particularly as a result of official or statenationalism,can function as a tool of exploitationor political control by creatinga larger senseof cultural homogeneity,a centre of authority or standardthat unites disparateindividuals and groups while often denyingthe identity of a particulargender,class,or subgroup.In Meiji Japan,kokumin,generallytranslatedas 'nation' and sometimesas 'peopleof the nation', was a constitutionally defined notion of the nation that lay betweenthe nation-state(kokka) and the various peoplethat had been made new citizens of that state(Smith 1986). This notion was usedto integratethe people culturally, politically, and socially into the new Meiji state, to construct what Benedict Anderson (1991) has called an 'imagined community', a senseof a unified nation for disparategroups or localities who did not necessarilysharecommon historical, religious, or ethnic roots. The Nihon shoki and Kojiki were both createdout of the need of the early Nara state to authenticatethe Yamato (imperial) clan's world-view and its hegemonyover other clans; and in the modernperiod, thesesametexts were

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reinterpretedas a means of establishingthe Japanesepeople as a distinct race and as citizens of the modernnation-state.In a similar vein, in the midMeiji period the Man 'yashu was canonizedas a 'national poetry anthology' (kokumin kashu), as a poetry anthology written by everyone from the emperorto the lowest commoner.In this view, the Man'yashu,which was actually edited and composedby Nara aristocrats,reflected the unity of the new nation, in which the emperor and the commonerswere perceivedas belongingto the samebody. On the other side of the coin, canonformation has also beena meansof resisting cultural hegemony,of establishingseparateethnic, national, and gender identities. Many of the new fields in North America, for example, such as 'CanadianStudies','African-AmericanStudies','Native American Studies',and 'Women'sStudies' are deliberatelyengagedin building new literary canons as a means of strengtheningtheir own ethnic, national, or genderidentities amidsta larger Eurocentric,androcentricdiscoursethat has traditionally marginalized these groups or communities. Similarly, the kokugakumovement,which came to the fore in the eighteenthcentury and which establishedthe foundation of the modern kokubungakucanon, was not only an attempt to free Japanfrom its position as a cultural colony of China but also a movement by one group of scholars, mainly chanin or urban commoners,to establishtheir own identity vis-a-vis aristocraticD6j6 poets,who belongedto a court-centredwagakutradition, as well as kangaku Chinesestudiesscholars,who dominatedthe intellectual world and bakufu (military government)ideology at the time. In the nineteenthand twentieth centuries,the formation of nationalistic 'traditions',particularly those based on vernacular literature, has also been crucial in decolonialization, in movementsof national liberation, in India, Korea, and elsewhere,which had to forge new national identities separate from that imposed by the colonizers. Canon formation, in short, has served as both a vehicle for control and for liberation. As Eric Hobsbawmand scholarsof nationalism have shown, seemingly non-political spheressuch as aesthetics,literature, and ethics have been critical - if not even more powerful than political institutions - in the processof constructingnation-states,which had to unify their membersby constructing a common cultural identity (Hobsbawn 1983). One consequencewas that cultural phenomenathat had been specific to a particular region or social community acrosstime often becameidentified with the nation. Kabuki, for example,which had been viewedas a vulgar, popular entertainmentfor urban commoners,becamea respectableform of national theatre. In the Meiji period, works of art from various historical periods were declaredto be 'national treasures'(kokuhO) and arrangedin museumsas the embodimentof 'Japaneseculture'. Ukiyoe, which had been

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regardedas disposabledecorations,were suddenlytreasuredas works of art representativeof Japaneseculture as a whole. As Karatani K6jin has argued, critics such as OkakuraTenshin(1862-1913)saw Japaneseart, particularly traditional art uninfluencedby the West, as a sign of superiority of both Japanand 'the East', but the canon of Japanesevisual art, which came to represent Japan abroad at the turn of the century, was in fact largely determined,as in the caseof ukiyoe,by its desirability as a commodity in the West, by the tastes and demandsof Japonisme(Karatani 1994:33-9). In other words, the identity of the cultural tradition, which was intended to distinguishJapanfrom other nationsand give itself a senseof historical and social unity, was constructedin significant part in responseto Western models or markets. European literary and dramatic models had a similar impact on the formation of the Japaneseliterary 'tradition'. At the ideological heart of the national literature movement was linguistic nationalism,the belief that the nation was founded on a common language,the 'national language'basedprimarily on spoken Japanese.In Europe, the phenomenonof national literature emerged as early as the Renaissance,with the use of romancelanguages,but it did not come to the fore until the rise of nationalismin the eighteenthand nineteenthcenturies. In England,for example,the study of literaturegenerallymeantthe study of the Greekand Latin classics,and English literaturewas not acceptedinto the curriculum at Oxford and Cambridge until World War I, an event that aroused nationalistic sentimentsvis-a-vis rival Europeannations. Prior to this point, the study of English literature was regarded as a poor man's classic, for those without the means or ability to study Greek and Latin, much as the study of Japanesetexts, of waka and monogatari, was the curriculum for women who did not have the opportunity to study kangaku. In the Meiji period Veda Kazutoshi (1867-1939),the leading advocateof kokugo and one of the pioneersof modern kokugogaku(national language study), arguedin 1894 that 'loyalty to the sovereignand love of the nation' (chukun aikoku) and a common languagewere the two forces that united Japanas a nation, that the 'national body' (kokutai) was embodiedin the Japaneselanguage(Veda [1894] 1968). This notion of a national language, which was strengthenedby importation of Western phonocentricnotions and the genbun-itchi (union of spoken and written languages)movement, was contrastedwith kanbun, a written languageassociatedwith China, a country that was in decline and that would succumbto Japanin the SinoJapaneseWar. The result was a dramatic pedagogicalshift away from the Confucian classics,the devaluationof Japanesewriting in kanbun, which had beenthe languageof religion, government,and scholarship. The constructionof a national literature andof a national languagewas critical in the face of powerful Westernnations, which representeda model

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for modernizationbut not one for establishinga national identity. Even as they modernized, new nations had to distinguish themselvesfrom other nations by carefully delineating their own national characteristics,which were perceivedto be unique and to have existedover time, especiallyprior to foreign influence. One result, which was different from the kind of nationalismfound in Europeannations,was the emergencein Japanof two forms of nationalism, Japanesenationalism and a broader Asian or East Asian nationalism.This may be one reasonwhy kanbun, while diminished by the rise of Japanesenationalism,was not completely abandonedas part of national literature or national culture. Both the Chinesewriting system and the field of Chinesestudies continuedto have a profound impact on Japaneseculture, particularly as a means of ethical and moral education, which was critical to modern nation-building. In contrastto the kokugaku scholars, who looked back to the ancient period to find a pure form of Japaneseliterature, Meiji scholars, following the evolutionary, Enlightenment model of history, stressedprogress across time, giving value to medieval and Tokugawatexts, which had never been part of the canon,and favouring the medieval 'mixed Chinese-Japanese style' (wakan konkO bun), which they saw as having more strengththan the feminine style of Heian kana literature. One consequencewas that both the aristocratic, emperorcentred literature of the earlier periods and the popular literature of the medieval and Tokugawa periods were treated together as part of a single national literature.

CANON AND POPULAR CULTURE

Another central issue in canon formation has been its function as an exclusionaryand controlling force, as a meansof protecting or enhancing elite culture against the encroachmentsof popular or mass culture. The knowledgeof or accessto the canon,particularly to the languageembodied in the canon, has often been used as a means of maintaining social distinctions and hierarchies. For example, elite aristocratic culture, representedby the D6j6 waka poetssuch as Nij6 Yoshimoto (1320-88),the founder of orthodox renga, drew stimulus from popular culture, from commoner renga poets. At the same time, the nobility drew sharp boundariesaround the classical canon - Tales of Ise, Kokinshu, Tale of Genji, etc. - in order to control, enhance,and transmit its value as cultural capital, the ultimate examplebeing the Kokin denju, the secrettransmissions of the Kokinshu. One of the key distinctions betweencanonizedtexts and non-canonical texts is that canonizedtexts are the object of extensive commentaryand

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exegesisor are used widely in school textbooks,while non-canonicaltexts or genres,no matter how popular, are not. The sameapplies to the modern distinction, which comesto the fore after the late Taish6 period (1912-26), between'pure literature' (junbungaku),a notion nurtured by the bundan,or elite literary circles, and 'popular literature' (taishu bungaku). A careful Bourdieuian distinction must be made here between popularity, which implies accessibility and wider audiences,and authority, which implies privilege and pedigree. Equally important is the distinction between economiccapital, the commercialvalue that may result from popularity and wider audiences,and cultural capital, which often grows precisely because its distribution is limited. ChikamatsuMon'zaemonmay have beenpopular in the Genrokuperiod and his plays may have made moneyfor him and his sponsors,but his plays were not a sign of cultural privilege or authority until they were canonizedin the modernperiod. Canons are generally comprehendedtoday as the instruments of entrenched interests, reproducing the ideology of dominant groups. However, as BarbaraHerrnsteinSmith has pointed out, 'the needs,interests, and purposes of culturally and otherwise dominant members of the community do not exclusively or totally determine which works survive. The antiquity and longevity of domestic proverbs,popular tales, children's verbal games,and the entire phenomenonof what we call "folklore" ... may be more or less independentof institutions controlled by those with political power' (Smith 1983:34). Two very different kinds of canon formation occur in the late medieval period. The first is the one-to-one transmissionof texts and knowledgeby aristocraticpoetry families linked to the imperial court, which culminated in the secret transmission of the Kokinshu. At the sametime, we witness the popularizationof Heian court culture and literary figures through various media, through such performancearts as no drama,renga, haikai, and otogizoshi.Transmittedby travelling minstrels,artists, and performers,the stories and figures of Heian classicalliterature,as well as the classicalassociationof seasonsand famous places, spread, often in abbreviatedor reduced form, to various social classesand to the provinces. In contrastto the closed nature of the Kokin denju, the popularizationof classical figures and associationswas an open process, creating endless variations, many of which were apocryphal. Legendarypersonaesuch as Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, Ono no Komachi, Ariwara no Narihira, Izumi Shikibu, Sei Sh6nagon,Saigy6, and others owe their popularity not only to canonizedtexts preservedby court nobility but also to non-canonicalgenres, such as setsuwa,otogizoshi, and heikyoku (musical recitationsof the Heike), including visual or aural media, which are often sympathetictoward those deprived of power or rejected by society. Popular culture, often driven by Buddhist proselytizers who used non-

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canonicalgenresand mediato preachto illiterate audiences,had a profound impact on canonformation -a processthat was diametrically opposedto the institutional attemptto enhanceand preservecanonicalvalue as exemplified in the secrettransmissionsof the Kokinshu. A salient characteristicof Europeancultural nationalism,particularly in Germanyduring the period of nineteenth-centuryRomanticism,was ethnic nationalism(the senseof a nation bound by blood and kinship ties) basedon the idea of the folk. A similar phenomenonoccurredbelatedly in Japanin the late Meiji and early TaishO periodswith the emergenceof the notion of minzoku(folk), in the belief that the spirit of the people could be found in commonerculture, often prior to writing. In contrastto the earlier mid-Meiji national literature movement,which saw the emperorand the peopleas one body, this national literature movement,centredon literary journals such as Teikoku bungaku (Imperial Literature, 1895-1917) and influenced by GermanRomanticsand folklorists such as Heinrich Heine (1797-1856)and the Brothers Grimm (Jacob, 1785-1863, Wilhelm, 1786-1859), saw the literature of the nation rising up from below. The result was a surge of interest in folk literature, folk songs, legends, and myths, which were thought to embody the essenceof the Japanesepeople from ancient times. Through much of the Heian period, the Man 'yoshuwas known for two court poets, Hitomaro and Akahito, but in the late Meiji and early TaishO period, the Man 'yoshU was re-canonized,with attentionturned, for the first time, to the Azuma-uta(Songs of the East) and Sakimori-no-uta (Frpntier-Guard Songs), which were regarded as min 'yo (folk songs), the songs of anonymouscommoners. The minzokugaku(folk studies)movement,which emergedat the end of the Meiji period, cameto the fore in the 1930s,and experienceda revival in the 1960-70s,expandedthis movementfurther. Minzokugaku,founded by YanagitaKunio (1875-1962)and sometimesreferredto as the New nativist learning (Shinkokugaku),initially attemptedto valorize the non-canonical, what was outside the established academic and state institutions of kokubungaku, seeking culture in 'literature before literature', in oral transmission,and in marginalizedgroups(such as mountainpeople,women and children), which Yanagita Kunio believed were the unconscious bedrockof the Japanesetradition. One effect of the growth of minzokugaku, which was incorporated into kokubungakuby Origuchi Shinobu (18871953) and others, was to assimilate a vast body of non-canonicalgenres, particularly setsuwa,otogi-zoshi,and other forms of folk literature, into the literary canon,a trend acceleratedin the post-warperiod by a new emphasis on popularliterature. The result of modern canonizationwas not simply the imposition of a common high culture on a variegatedcomplex of local folk cultures, but

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rather a mixture of aristocratic (emperor-centred)literature - which had been at the heart of medieval wagaku and Edo kokugaku- and popular literature, particularly that of the medievaland Edo periods.In short, while a significant part of the modern literary canon was formed through political nationalism centred on the notion of kokumin and the central, higher authority of the emperor,anotheraspectof the canonwas driven, at least in significant part, by popular nationalism, which centred on the notion of minzoku (ethnic nation) and which shared much with the eighteenth-to nineteenth-centuryromantic, Herder-esque notion of the folk, of the common people, who were thought to embody the primordial spirit of the 6 nation. From as early as the turn of the century these two strands of nationalism,while often politically opposed,intertwinedand reinforcedeach nation-state, other. For example,with the establishmentof an emperor-based the myths and legendsof the Kojiki, which hitherto had beenknown only to a small group of intellectual elites, were incorporatedinto textbooksas part of Japanesehistory, rewritten to stressthe 'ageof the gods' (kami no yo) and Amaterasu,the sun goddess,as the progenitorof an unbrokenimperial line. After World War II, however, when emperor-centrednationalism was discredited,the Kojiki was stripped of its sacredstatus as part of imperial history. Instead of forming the 'historical' foundation of the modern emperor-systemstate,it becamethe origin of a more broadly construed'folk literature', the grounds for which had been laid earlier by minzokugaku scholarswho had connectedthe gods, myths, and legendsof the Kojiki to a 'living', oral, locally basedtradition in the provincesand villages of Japan.

NOTES

1 2 3

The Sagoromo'spopularity in the Muromachi period was such that it was illustrated in Sagoromoemaki (Illustrated Scroll of Sagoromo) and madeinto a no play. The Latin word littera means letter, and litteratura originally implied knowledge of reading and writing. The English term 'literature' first cameinto use in the fourteenthcentury. The emergenceof the notion of imaginative literature was closely connected to the rise of aesthetics (a term invented by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgartenin 1735) and of the systemof the arts, which had hitherto been indistinguishable from the sciences. In the eighteenth century, a major split emergedbetweenthe new humanities,associated with aesthetics,and the new sciences,associatedwith rationalism. By the nineteenthcentury a clear distinction had been made betweenthe producersof literature as art, who becamethe bearersof 'imaginative

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4

5

6

truth', and the philosophersand historians, who made a claim to a literal, objectiveor 'scientific' truth. Bungaku,the word now used for literature, first appearedin Confucius' Analects,where it meant 'learning', 'studies',or 'scholars',particularly Confucian scholars. In the early 1870s, Nishi Amane (1829-97), an early Meiji scholarof WesternStudies,adaptedthe term to translatethe nineteenth-centuryEuropeanterm for 'literature' in Hyakugakurenkan (Encyclopaedia,1870), using it to mean vaguely humanitiesor belleslettres. In 1885, the departmentof Wakan bungakuwas split into the Wabun gakka (Japaneseliterature programme)and the Kanbun gakka (Chinese literature programme),and in 1889 the Wabun gakka was renamedthe Kokubungakka(national literature programme). JohannGottfried von Herder (1744-1803),whose views on the role of the folk had an impact on the Brothers Grimm and other German Romantics,compiled Volkslieder(Folk Songs)in 1778-9. REFERENCES

Anderson, Benedict (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spreadof Nationalism. Revised edition. London and New York: Verso. Bourdieu, Pierre (1994) The Field of Cultural Production. New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press. Chatterjee, Partha (1986) Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World. Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress. Friedman,Ellen (1993) 'Whereare the Missing Contents?(Post)Modernism, Gender, and the Canon', Publications of the Modern Language Association108:2. Fujioka Sakutaro (1971) Kokubungaku zenshi: HeianchO hen. Vol. I. Reprint, with annotationby Akiyama Ken. Toyo bunko series 198, 247. Tokyo: Heibonsha. Guillory, John (1993) Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: University of ChicagoPress. Haga Yaichi and TachibanaSenzaburo(1983) 'Kokubungakutokuhon', in Vol. 2 of Haga Yaichi senshiJ,edited by HagaYaichi senshUiinkai. Tokyo: KokugakuinDaigaku. Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger (eds) (1983) The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge:CambridgeUniversity Press. Karatani Kojin (1994) 'Japan as Museum: Okakura Tenshin and Ernest Fenollosa.Translatedby SabuKohso', in: JapaneseArt After 1945:

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ScreamAgainst the Sky, edited by Alexandra Munroe.New York: Harry Abrams. Mitamura Masako(1994) 'Janru,daihitsu, seitenkan',Nihon kindai bungaku 50. Richter, David (ed.) (1989) The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and ContemporaryTrends.New York: St Martin's Press. SatoDoshin (1996) "Nihon bijutsu" tanjo. Tokyo: Kodansha. Schor, Naomi (1987) 'Dreaming Dissymmetry: Barthes, Foucault, and Sexual Difference', in: Men in Feminism, edited by Alice Jardine and Paul Smith. London and New York: Methuen. Smith, Anthony (1986) The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Smith, BarbaraHerrnstein(1983) 'Value', in: Canons,edited by Robert von Hallberg. Chicagoand London: University of ChicagoPress. Suzuki, Tomi (1996) Narrating the Self: Fictions of JapaneseModernity. Stanford:StanfordUniversity Press. Takemoto Hirokazu (1995) 'Kume Kunitake to nogaku fukko', in: BakumatsuMeiji-ki no kokuminkokkakeiseito bunkahenyo,edited by NishikawaNagaoand MatsumiyaHideharu.Tokyo: Shin'yosha. Ueda Kazutoshi (1968) 'Kokugo to kokka to', [1894] in: Ochiai Naobumi, Ueda Kazutoshi, Haga Yaichi, Fujioka Sakutaro-shu,Vol. 44 of Meiji bungakuzenshu.Tokyo: Chikumashobo.

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CHAPTER3

LA, TOUT N'EST QU'ORDRE ET BEAUTE: THE SURPRISESOF APPLIED STRUCTURALISM HAUN SAUSSY

Always and always,the difficult inch, On which the vast archesof space Repose,always,the crediblethought From which the incredible systems spring... -WallaceStevens,'The Sail of Ulysses'

The questionalways askedby EastAsianistsof literary theoriesis whethera theory is universal, whether or not it 'applies' to the writings and literary conventionsof Asia.1 Some East Asian specialistshave answeredin the negative,by arguing for a basic incompatibility betweenthe assumptionsof European traditions from which this theory derives and of their Asian counterparts.But from within the universeof 'theory', the question is less one of the difference, the mutual remoteness,of East Asian texts and Europeanmethods,and more one of the excessivecloseness,the inextricable intertwining, of the two. Would 'theory' have emergedwithout the example of Asia to guide it? Asia has done many jobs for literary theory of the poststructuralistkind. It facilitates a critical distancefrom the many things taken for grantedby a more 'naturalizing'aestheticGust as would any exotic point of view); it proposesa different view of history, in which the grand themes of Westernhistory, sacredand secular,becomea mere parenthesison a vast and little-understood syntactic flow; it suggestsdifferent models for the relation betweenart and non-art. There is every reasonfor non-Asianiststo be interestedin Asia. For those of us who try to be simultaneouslyAsianist and non-Asianist in our interpretative work (that is, who try to examine social and artistic phenomenafrom both local and alien perspectives),there is the further need to get a grip on the motives of this appropriation, to assessthe necessary(or opportune)characterof the figure of Asia in the thinking of thesepredecessors. Post-structuralismand deconstructionhave beenthinking from the outset about China and the culturesinfluenced by China. It is uncertainto me, as I

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look over the record, whether the intersection is really that of a method coming to affect an area, or whether the area was somehow part of the method already, so that deconstructionis unable, for historical reasons,to think about anything without to some extent thinking or dreaming about 'China,.2This thinking or dreamingoccursunder the two broad headingsof grammatologyand the end of humanism.(If, that is, these are two: as we shall see, the one tends to shade into the other.) I will begin with some representationsof Chinesewriting that invoke the argumentsabout writing, speech,time and presence- about the 'Iogocentrism'of classical Western philosophy- familiar to us all throughthe early writings of JacquesDerrida: Is not China, in our dreams,the privileged home of space?For our imaginary system,Chineseculture is the most meticulousculture, the most hierarchical, the most impervious to occurrencesin time, the one most attached to the pure unfolding of distance. We imagine China as a civilization of dikes and dams under the eternal face of Heaven, spreadand immobilized acrossthe whole extent of a wallencircled continent. Even Chinese writing does not reproduce in horizontal lines the fleeting passageof the voice, but arranges in columns the motionless and still recognizable image of things 3 themselves. In classicalChina, just as the orientationof a map is establishedfrom within the map - north at the bottom of the frame, eastat the left for a virtual observer,that is, as if the unfolding of the representedspace camefrom behindthe map, from a potential point both in front ofand within the representation(and not like a specularprojection)- so the vertical columns of writing would function, in our view, backwards, going from right to left, as if they were parallel rings in which air circulatesand resounds.A Chineseclassical bookwas not a 'book', but rather, by its framing and even by its binding, a series of perspectives,a striation of fields, of cascades,with sub-fields and sliding transitions in anticipation of an always deferredreturn. Here, the verso is the recto [projected] as depth, while, for us, it is by excluding the verso that the recto becomespossible. Let us take a better look. Writing wells up [sourd, with a pun on 'sourd', deat] from the inscriptional perspectivebecauseit occursat an invisible distanceand temporal remove (not in a face-to-faceencounter): it invites not a seeing but a tracing, whereby the physical support is split into corridors, as if to recall the plural void where writing takes place. Writing is merely detachedonto the surface;it weavesitself onto the

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surface,mandatedby a sourcewhich is not a sourcetowardsa surface which is no longer a surfacebut a fibre written by its lower part held perpendicularlyfrom its upper part (the brush is held straight up in the palm). So the ideogram takes its place in the column - tube or ladder - and fits there like a complex bar released by the monosyllablein the field of speech.4 Thesetwo passages,from 1966 and 1969, representChinesewriting as an antitype to the horizontal, vocal, temporally linear and unidirectional writing of alphabeticcultures. Both assumethat writing is not exhaustively defined as the visual representationof speech;they look for that whereby Chinesewriting exceedsspeech,any speech,even Chinesespeech.Foucault sees Chinese writing as taking on the functions of a written work, an encyclopaedia,prior to the participation of any encyclopaedistor author. It is a kind of automaticarchive. Where Westernwriting is always a track to be pursuedby the relentlesssequenceof Nows marked by the voice in its articulation of letter after letter, and so must be articulatedanew for every act of writing or reading, Chinese writing stores the images of things in vertical rows, 'puts them up' as we say of summer vegetables,in those durable and translucentjars furnished by a non-phoneticwriting system. Chinese writing exhibits 'verticality' not simply in the visual sense; Foucault plays on the designation of the vertical dimension as the paradigmatic axis, the axis of selection, in JacquesLacan's analysis of poetry stemming from Roman Jakobson'sessay on the two operationsof languageand two types of aphasia.5 Foucault'simaginary spatializationof Chinese writing weakensthe syntagmaticconnectionsand reinforces the paradigmatic connections in such measure that sequenceand subjectpredicate relations ceaseto matter: thus Chinesewriting does not fashion sentences,but 'arranges[signs] in columns'. Just as all kinds of objects coexist in space,so the terms of Chineseutteranceare piled up alongsideor on top of eachother in a storehousethe size of a continent.To bring up such an antitype is, for Foucault,a shocktreatmentfor ethnocentrism.It is meant to remind us of the specific history that lies behind the categorieswe use in the Westernworld for making senseof things -a history his Les Mots et les chases attempts to narrate not as the only possible history but as a constrainedyet internally tight set of logical choices.The Chineseantitype takes us out of this specific history and perhapsout of history in general,by making it possibleto imagine a tabula rasa on which no categorieswould be set down in advance.This enabling function the Chineseallusion can exercise regardlessof its factual accuracy - it is enough for Foucault's purposesto have granted us a glimpse of an ontology and a writing so capaciousand so underdetermined.

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Foucault was cautious: he delimits this China as occurring 'in our dreams' and 'for our imaginary system',much as Derrida will refer to the 'European hallucination' produced by early reports of Chinese writing (Derrida 1967:119). The second passage,from Philippe Sollers, invokes Derrida'sanalysisof writing and the book to more pointed- more'realistic' - effect. In De la grammatologieDerrida foretold 'the end of the book and the beginning of writing', saying that '[t]he idea of the book, which always refers to a natural totality, is profoundly foreign to the meaningof writing. The idea of the book is the encyclopaedic protection of theology and logocentrismagainstthe disruption of writing ... [and] againstdifferencein general' (15, 30). For a vision of the idea of the book, no author can match Dante at the end of his Comedy: 'In its depth I saw ingathered,bound by love in one single volume, that which is dispersedin leavesthroughoutthe universe: substancesand accidents and their relations, as though fused together in such a way that what I tell is a simple light' (Paradiso, xxxiii, 85-90; tr. Singleton 1975:377).Sollers makesthe Chinesebook evidenceof a completely contrary metaphysic, somewhat Deleuzian in character: its operation on the mind is not to ingather but to disperse and multiply.6 Anyone who has tried will know how bootless it is to force a classical Chinesephilosophicalbook, often a compilation of fragmentsand anecdotes anyway, into a systematicunity. It is quite accurate,and good advice for readers, to describe the Analects or the Han Feizi as 'a series of perspectives,a striation of fields, of cascades,with sub-fields and sliding transitions'. Yes, but observe the logic of the antitype: for Sollers, the Chinesebook is specifically and determinatelywhat our books are not. To the 'end of the book' symptomatized by an appreciation of writerly dispersal,Sollers conjoins a 'beginningof writing' that coincideswith some points of Foucault'saccountof Chinesescript. Differencesbetweensource and surface, betweenthe writer and the processof writing, are attenuated almost to the point of disappearing.Writing is not scratchedor incised (permanently,unidirectionaIly) but 'detachedonto a surface',releasedfrom one area of a 'fibre' (the brush) on to another (the paper). The ideogram inhabits 'its place in the column - tube or ladder - and fits there like a complex bar' in a page 'split into corridors', a notable reversal of the reduction of the book to the authorial voice. This writing happensas a processof differentiation betweenlike things (or even betweenparts of the same thing, if we call that thing 'fibre') and there is no necessaryor anticipatedend to the process,no openingand calling of the namesfrom the Book of Life. As imagesof a possibleother world, theseconstructionsof China bring support to a deconstructive project. To put it quite simply, China is

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deconstruction;or perhapsChina is what deconstructionwill turn the world into, or reveal the world as always already having been. Staging the surprise-effectof news from far away, the writers calculate (more or less transparently) a demystifying outcome. The distinctiveness of Chinese writing evokes a vision of logical relations, subjectivity, ontology, temporality, and eschatologythat counters the models associated,in the West, with phonetic writing. A certain way of doing things is not the only way; history could have a different set of givens and a different plot structure; the end of civilization as we know it would just be the end of civilization as we know it. Neither author has to be a China specialistto say this, or listen to the complaintsof those of us who are. It is not very useful for the discussion of method, however true, to point out that Sollers, Foucaultand the rest did not speakChineseor know a lot about China. You cannotfault a methodfor the richnessor poverty of its objects.A method is there to suggestways of proceedingwith whateverobjectsyou do have. As for the project, however, it is reasonableto point out that it doesn'thappen in China. Even if Maoism exhibited the propertiesof material writing that made it a seductiveanalogueof literary revolution after the New Novel, the combat for the reversal of phonocentric idealism in which Sollers sees himself as engagedhappensat home, where it is needed,and China works chiefly as an example of what life might be like after the passingof the 7 civilization of the book and the voice. A searchingyet sympatheticreading needsto recognizethis particularity of audienceand moment. Totalk about China in deconstructivevocabularyis to take that vocabularyout on a bold and provocativeexpansion,but not yet to do the work that that vocabulary was assembledto do. It is illustrative, analogicalor allegorical - and I mean by that, in relation not to a real China but to deconstruction'sown project. Zhang Longxi has recently called for a humbler reconsiderationOf 'Westerntheory' aboutChina in light of 'Chinesereality' (Zhang 1998:17982). There is room, however,to perform a chiasmuson the predicates.If we take these passages(and so many others from people of that same generation) as being about China, thel do look like immodest generalizationsfrom a weak empirical base. They are not about China, or not exactly, though they have to seem to be so in order to do the critical work they do. The power and urgency invested in these representationsis exactly the sign that they are not about China: for China here appearsas the symmetrical opposite to what the reader already knows in the West. And from the perspectiveof that 'West', with its limited and limiting ideological commitments,the non-verticality, the spatiality, the undifferentiatedness, of the Chinesewritten world appearsas a truer reality. 'Philosophershaveonly interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it' (Marx 1975:423). As everyoneknows, Marx proposedto begin the transformation

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by turning Hegel upsidedown, putting him on his feet. Sollersand Foucault, more sparingby 90 degrees,will turn world history on its side, so that, when its meaningceasesto circulate from top to bottom and starts to seepfrom right to left, 'we' will have become 'they'. A 'Chinese' theory modifies Western'reality'. The point of methodthat needsto be raisedhas to do with the idea of an 'alternative'. What kind of alterity comes to presence here? The 'Chineseness' of the fables aboutEasternwriting emergesfrom a contrastive perception-process that selectsfrom the pool of possible details those that correlate antithetically with some picture of the familiar way of doing things. Given Dante'sor Derrida's conceptionsof the book, Chinesebooks are anti-booksand their authors perhapsanti-authors.That is good enough for a discussionof the (European)conceptof the book, but tells us nothing about China: you would not, I think, be justified in imagining that, just becausea book is aphoristic and loosely organized, no stern orthodoxies could have proceededfrom it, that China has therefore never experienced the grasp on thinking and practice that a powerful book or doctrine can exercise.To say so would be to contendthat there was no point in going to seehow things play out in China, beyondour perceptionof the Chineseway as different from ours. 'Chinese'and 'Western'assumptionshere meet not in an event but in a contrast. The analyst of contrastive mental space remains Ferdinand de Saussure,who described'the mechanismof language'as 'turning entirely on identitiesand differences,the former being merely the counterpartsof the latter'. Terms are defined not positively - that would be a Ding an sich, and like the dog chasingthe cars,we don't know what we would do if we caught one - but negatively: 'their most exact characteristicis that of being what the others are not.' 'The idea or the phonic substancecontainedin a sign mattersless than what is going on in the other signs around it. The proof is that the value of one term can be modified without any changeoccurring in its sound or its meaning, simply because of a modification in some neighbouringterm' (Saussure1972:151, 162, 166). What makesit possible for there to be such a determining relation among the properties of neighbouringsigns is, in Saussure'saccount,the fact that they all inhabit the same linguistic space,vying for existencelike adjacentbubbles in a fluid; their relationscannotbut be systematic. When our comparativethinking treatsour objectsof thought- say, those huge objects, 'China' and 'the West' - as 'oppositive,relative, and negative entities',tacitly fashioninga systemofrelevantdifferences,our language,in the strict Saussuriansenseof that term, has run on aheadof us. 'In every casewe uncover,not ideas given in advance,but valuesemanatingfrom the system.' That 'the [distinctive] characteristicsof the entity are none other

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than the entity itself (168; cf. 162, 164) is an axiom of semantics,but not of China studies, at least not until the latter has been refined into a closed linguistic system. Symptomsof such a closed system appear in the short texts we have examined: in particular their common motif of 'verticality'. By it Foucault and Sollers are trying to articulate a difference. But the difference between vertical and horizontal is highly determinate,referring back to a point of sameness,to the origin point of an x-y axis; as long as there is a difference betweenvertical and horizontal, we are not suspended in space with no up or down. The alterity operates within a common category(that of dimensionor directionality). Chinesewriting is not, to sum up, necessarilyvertical or timeless; it is vertical and timelessinsofar as we think of ours as horizontal and time-bound. Otherness resolves into antithesis-a figure of speech,not a logical operatoror categoryof being. When a text is generatedby a trope, or better yet a grammarof tropes (for there are many varieties of antithesis), and yet presents itself as description and reference,we confront precisely the form of allegory that 9 readersof Paul de Man are trained to deal with. In the figure of antithesis we need to recognizelanguagetalking. When languagetalks, we are in the presence, however moderated, of glossolalia - about which Jakobson lo showed that it can do without sense,but cannot long abide randomness. One good placeto begin the work of deconstruction- following distinctions to their point of identity and identities to the point of their bifurcation, showing the incompatibility betweenstatementsand the languagein which they are formulated,setting languageand referenceat odds- is in observing the confusionof our relation to China with China'srelation to itself. The questionrhetorical readingsof 'sinography'II must ask, at the risk of annoying by repetition, is: Can the China in this text be constructedby projection from Europeanstarting points?Not that one will ever be able to answer, conclusively, 'no': establishing and exalting a category of raw perception is not, I think, either useful or honest. But if the effort to say somethingabout China establishesa relation, opensan inventory of objects in Saussurianmental space,then the prizes for inventivenessshould go to those whose constructionsare most detailed, come closestto escapingthe magneticpull of antitheticalthinking, delay as long as possiblethe snapping shut of the jaws of tautology. The examplesjust given show writings that attempt to contributeto the dismantling of classical Westernphilosophy and its idols and yet construct differences that must be traced down to a single origin (the asserted differences amount to twin aspects of contrastive identity). The methodologicallessonthat I would like to draw from this - and addressin particular to anyonewho is trying to perform such work in Chinesefor the Chinesepublic - is that deconstructioncannot be a list of authors, abelief

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system or a set of themes.It may articulate themesand presentpictures of reality, as we seeDerrida and Sollersdo with their handling of the image of the book, but for the work of deconstruction to go forward these representations must be dispensable.The story goesthat generalsare always preparingto fight the last war. That is how method works; the last war is after all the one we know how to fight. But it is entirely likely that the next things worth questioningwith the methodsof Derrida and de Man will prove to have nothing in common with those on which junior deconstructorscut their teeth. At stakeis the definition of deconstruction:is it a method,or is it just a peculiargenreof writing with a finite, enumerableset of thematicand formal markers?In order to loosen the grasp of a purely historical inquest, then, I will have to make the methodologicalgesture of defining deconstruction loosely and abstractlyenoughto allow for a critique, in the spirit (if you grant me a spirit) of deconstruction,of ideasthat have emergedfrom the openingprovidedby JacquesDerrida'swork. What do I mean by 'deconstruction'?Too much specificity at the outset will cramp the investigation (it is startling how often the comparative conversationstumbleson the questionof aperture).My Barefoot Doctor's definition, not very sophisticatedbut at least not crucially dependenton a complex infrastructure,holds that deconstructionis what happenswhen you set the wording of a text againstits content,the meansof persuasionagainst the persuasive agenda. This is a procedural definition only. Certain consequences tend to follow from the choice and exploitation of a 'difficult inch', but to define deconstructionby its predicted outcomes- by what it 'achieves'- makes,I think, too optimistic and ideological a claim (does it always achieve them? must it always achieve them?). The most helpful definition for our purposes,I think, will be one that namesthe starting point of a deconstructive investigation and leaves up to improvisation what happensafterward.

* The languageof the texts I havebeenciting, from 1966 and 1969,testifiesto an exceptionalmomentin Frenchintellectual life, the high noon of Tel Quel, at which it seemedthat the combined questioningsof Derrida and Lacan (accompaniedby Barthes, Foucault, Kristeva, Sollers, and many others) were about to open an entirely new era in the humansciences,and the later 12 rifts among the principal personagescould not be anticipated. That moment,that alignmentof the starthinkers,would not last. But the texts that make of the East a conceptualbridge betweengrammatologyand the end of humanismpose questionsof structureand deconstructurethat remain with

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us, though not so much as a set of questionsas a soft consensus(everyone 'knows' how dubiousbinary oppositionsare, that meaningis slippery, etc.). To reread the texts may lead us to reopen the questionsand unsettle the consensus. If Derrida began the major phase of his career with a book on the persistentscandalof writing in the culturesof West Asia and Europe,Julia Kristeva found in Chinesewriting the vehicle for exploring a world marked with different signs. Kristeva remarkson the difficulty of early missionaries and translatorswho could only haltingly render, in Aristotelian or Cartesian language,the Chinesevision of the mutual:

[l]mmanenceof 'reason'within 'matter,' so completethat no 'reason' or 'matter' could be said to exist outside their interdependence .... Their unrepresentable, heterogeneous SCIssion takes form, derivatively, only through a combinatoriumof oppositemarks (+ and -, heaven and earth, etc.) with no hierarchy among them. In other terms: there is no symbolic principle that may be isolated per se, in front of us, as a transcendentlaw.... Chinese writing, destined for a tonal language, is the other essentialcharacteristicof the Chineseworld ... [L]ittle Chineseenter into the linguistic code of social communicationbeforeother children do, as early as the fifth or sixth month, since they begin very early to distinguishtonesas basicfeaturesof their language.And since, atthis young age, the child's dependenceon the body of hislher mother is enormous,the psycho-corporealimprint of the mother will shapethe tonal flow of sound; and this imprint will be transmitted, not obliterated,as a subjacentbut active layer of communicationafter the child has acquiredthe grammaticalsystem- this systembeing more or less secondary,more 'socializing' since it conveysa messagewith a meaning(not just a tonal impulse) to other recipients,not just the mother. Can it be that the Chineselanguagepreserves,thanks to its tones, a pre-syntactic,pre-symbolicregister(for sign and syntax are concomitant),a pre-Oedipalregister?... The same question arises regarding writing. Originally at least partly imagistic, but more and more stylized, abstract, and ideogrammatic, writing retains its evocative visual character (by resemblancewith the object or the objectsthat underlie an idea) and its gestural character(to write in Chineseone must have not only memory for meaningsbut also a memory of movements).... The logic of writing (visual representation,marks drawn from gesture,a signifying combinatoriumsubtendingsign, logic and a certainsyntax) implies, at its base,a speaking/writingwbject for whom what appears

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to us today as a pre-Oedipalphase(dependencyon the maternaland socio-naturalcontinuum, absenceof sharp distinctions betweenthe order of things and the order of symbols, predominance of unconscious impulses) would have had major importance. Ideographic or ideogrammatic writing uses [this phase] for the purposes of state power, politics and symbolism, but without censuringit. A despoticpower that remembersits debtsto the mother and to its historical precursor, the matrilineal family: Hypothesis? Phantasm?- thesereconstructionswould at least help to explain the destruction of the great civilizations of writing after the rise of monotheism(or due to its assaults).Now Egypt, Babylonia, and the Maya are gone, and only China (with its followers in Japan or SoutheastAsia) continuesto 'write'. (Kristeva 1974a:59--62) Continuesto write, that is, in broad daylight, without seekingto cover every stroke of the letter with an equivalentalibi in the voice: continuesto write in the samegesturesthat producepainting and music. This is writing without apology, writing that escapedthe semi-clandestinecareer of the letter narrated in Derrida's De la grammatologie.Like Fenollosa in The ChineseWritten Character as a Medium for Poetry, Kristeva seesChinese writing as operatinga 'transferenceof power' from nature to paperor silk, and thenceto the reader.'The naming-function,the symbolic function, is not isolatedas such [in Chinesewriting]: it is immanent andmakesitself noticed in the rigour of gesture and brushstroke,in the precision of the spaces articulating them, in the concisionof the documentwhich doesnot express, but transfers [n'exprime pas mais translate] an utteranceinto a body and into a social, historical, natural space'(l974b:37-8). Chineselanguageand writing, like music, suspend or, more precisely, overwhelm the linear discourseof the symbolic. That is alreadyenoughto define Chinesepoetry, 'in its typical features', as 'feminine', and a female writer such as Li Qingzhao adds to this already given femininity a further feminine determination.In her poetry Kristeva finds 'a musicality rarely achievedby other poets: the rhythms and alliterations, cunningly intertwined with the outlines of the Chinesecharacters,[which] convey to us an experienceof discoursewhere the slightest atom of sound or script bearsa symbiosis of body, outer world and meaning,and they weavetogethera web that cannot be called either "musical" or "meaningful" since it is both and neither at once' (l974a:100). The immanence of Chinese logic and the concretenessof Chinese writing form for Kristeva a contrastwith the tense,hysterical, metaphysical excessesof Westernmonotheismand alphabetism,both forms of a 'law of the Father'that makesmeaningthrough the exclusion,the definition as non-

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meaning and non-being, of the pre-symbolic or pre-Oedipal 'semiotic' register. In China, owing chiefly to the survival of matrilineal patternsin family life, the exerciseof authority 'uses,but doesnot censor'thosearchaic energies.Chineseauthority resemblesthe psychologicalagent, half censor and half poet, who sits at the gates of dream and 'translates'repressed thoughts into 'representable'content, preserving yet disguising them.13 Authority is not symbolic imposition ('writing' in Plato's and Saussure's sense)but symbolic negotiation.And so the telling of history takesthe shape of dreamworkor lay analysis: Instead of embarking on an explanation that seeks causes,makes deductions,specifiesdeterminations,appearances and essenceswhile of an event- the only logical form of forecastingthe consequences explanationfor us, that which derives from the principle of a logical and metaphysical causality - the Chinese present a tableau of a 'structuralist' or 'strategic' type. Behind the event appears an association(or a combinatorium)that schemesfor the reversalof the previousorder; a combatbetweenforces of good and evil; two-faced personages;persecutions,surprising reversals, conspiracies.As if metaphysical,causal,deterministiclogic had collapsedin the face of the (traumatic)event whose origins we now seek; but without losing the symbolic level, the Chinesespeakingsubjectarticulatesthe event as a game, a war, a combinatorium.... Such an aestheticstyle of reasoning,disconcertingthough it may be to us, has a suresymbolic efficacy: by eliminating from the outsetthe problem of an 'objective truth', impossiblein a political world saturatedwith power relations, it relocates peopleinto symbolic situations from the past or from literature,chosenfor their historical power in the present.And in this archetypal symbolic situation are played out and revealed, as in a show, in a stagedreturn of the repressed,a happeninglike those of anti-psychiatry,the theatrewhich Sadefirst createdfor the benefit of the inmates of Charenton- the emotional, ideological and political dramasunderlyingthe presenttraumaticeventwhich concernsus and which we, on our side, wish to 'understand'.(62-3; 'happening'in English in the original) Where metaphysicallogic demandstruth, immanentlogic seekstherapy, acting-out,the confirmation (through performance)of screenmemories- or efficacy, as Jullien will later put it. 14 This (psychoanalytically and historically) 'archaic' way of thinking connectsancientChina to the present of the Cultural Revolution and separatesthe Chinesefrom their Western interlocutors.I 5 But it raises a further problem of historiography -

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appropriately,since that is where the impulse to look to China began.How is the Chinese predominanceof the 'archaic' to fit into a historical narration?Is this another 'fact' about China that no completely 'Chinese' observercould ever understand?The absenceof difference in their minds, history, language, etc., signifies their difference from 'Occidentals'. If history seeks causes and specifies agency, then Chinese 'structuralist tableaux' will never address history; they may occasionally hit upon a representationisotopic to those of history, but by obeying a different dynamic. History then goes over, along with the symbolic, logic, and the Law in general,to the 'West', perhapsa worrisomeincorporation. The question of difference and its others goes to the root of Tel Quel sinophilia and its motives. Like Sollers, Kristeva is attempting to find in China anotherform of historical time, a way aroundthe teleologicalversion of world history, in which non-Westernsocieties are either precursorsof modern freedom and reason or dead ends.16 Sollers' Sur Ie materialisme worked around Hegel's narrative by weaving Greco-Romanatomism, the materialismof the eighteenthand nineteenthcenturies,Chinesephysicalism, and Mao's 'On Contradiction' into a continuous discourse, tuming metaphysicsfrom Plato to Hegel into a finite series andembeddingit in a larger, antithetical,milieu as nothing but 'the long history of the repression, by idealism, of materialism and dialectics' (Sollers 1974:93). As the symbolic floats (and tosses)on the semiotic; as rationality opensa tentative parenthesisin the unconscious;as capitalism sinks its foundations in the exploitation of labourerswho will eventuallyrevolt: so metaphysicsowes its appearanceof completenessand system to a dependencythat it cannot avow. 'The exclusion of materialism, of sexuality, of history, of the multiplication of language,this is the surplus-valuegesture of idealism' (40). And as a defiant answerto this gesture,Sollers unveils the description of Chinesemaps, books,and calligraphy I cited earlier. 'This is where China comesfrom', he concludes.'And us?' The non-differentiation that China 'comes from', the space in which paper and brush, image and word, semiotic and symbolic, motherand child, reasonand form, presentand past, self and other, all intermingle and imply one another, is the space from which to expecttransformation. In that sense, China is ahead of Europe: 'Why is it that the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution initiates a new, multilateral, non-centred, conceptionof the historical process,a different global ratio of forces with multiple contradictions occupying different levels, which most people, stamped with their primary black-and-white symbolism, are unable to understand?Why is it that the Cultural Revolution finally initiates a nonreligious conception of history, in other words the concrete, daylit, manifestationin history of a unified pluralization of contradiction?'(36).

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The axesare many, then (gender,class,subject/object,signified/signifier, matter/spirit...) but the Chinesedimensionis always the same,that of the mutual interferenceof contrariesathwart a purported opposition. Kristeva stagesthe contrastof non-differenceversusdifferenceby telling the story of a double volleyball game:the Chinesemen'sand women'steamsversusthe Iranian. The Iranians' bodies bulge with the signs of sexual difference: the women are 'corpulent, their hair floating in the wind, passionate,exalted, hugging feverishly after every goal, and piercing the air with stridentcries'; the men are 'real machos,patriarchsof the soil'. On the Chineseside, the women are 'like slender boys' and the men 'frail, more adolescent' (Kristeva 1974a:220-1). If to be Indo-Europeanis to rush loudly and violently toward the two extremesof the sexual spectrum,to be Chineseis to inhabit a middle zone where male and female characteristicsoverlap. Chinesenessis the antithesisof antithesisitself, and if the Chinesewomen's team wins the volleyball game,it is (as the Marxists like to say) no accident. With contrastsconfounded,and no Text visible but the universally repeated slogansand exhortationsof the Cultural Revolution's late phases,semiotic China is not a space of tension but of peace, of the neutralization of opposition. It is the antithesis of the antithetical: China is for Kristeva a place 'without theatre,without noise, without posturing,without hysteria'.It reduced Roland Barthes to despair, often for the very features that so enchantedKristeva: China seemsto withhold the meaning [sought by the visitor], not becauseChina has somethingto hide but, more subversively,because (in very un-Confucian style) China dismantles the constitution of concepts,themes,and names.... It is the end of hermeneutics.... Leaving aside its ancient palaces,its posters,its child ballets and its May Day parade,China is not colourful. The countrysideis flat .. . no historical object interrupts it (no steeples,no manor houses)... . No exoticism.... Finally, this so apparentlycoded discourse[of politics] does not exclude invention, and I would even go so far as to say, a certain playfulness; take the current campaign against Confucius and Lin Biao; it extends everywhere,and takes a thousandforms; even its name (in Chinese: Pilin-Pikong) jingles like a joyous bell, and the countryside is covered with invented games ... the political Text (and it alone) engenderstheseminiature 'happenings'. 17 Kristeva saw in the Chinaof 1974:

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[The project] of constructinga society where power, as it acts, is not representedby anyone:no one can appropriateit so long as no one is excluded from it - and this means women as well, those ultimate slaves,necessarysupportsto the power of the masters,who by being held at one remove from power make it possibleto representpower, indeed make it somethingthat must be represented(by fathers, by lawmakers). A power, then, that is representedby no one, woman or man. But which is recognizedby and for everyone,assumedand exercisedby and for everyone: men and women; men and women exercising power only to critique it, to keep it in play, to make it move. This must be why the 'law court' [tribunal] in China is replaced by 'popular meetings':there would be no more instanceof the Law per se, if every subject, man and woman, took it on him or herselfand refashionedit in a permanentconfrontation of his/her practice and discoursewith those of others - in every act, at every moment?A utopia? A possibility to be dreamedof [or the future, while in the present nothing has been able to overcome the rational rigour of bourgeoislaw and its associatedethics?(Kristeva 1974a:228) Michel Foucault likewise found an opportunity of giving the Maoists a lesson in concretizing their own praxis, which he found dismally compromisedwith the relics of bourgeoisidealism. Foucault: We have to ask if theseacts of popularjustice can or can't take the orderedform of a tribunal. My hypothesisis that the tribunal is not the natural expressionof popularjustice, but that it has rather the historical function of taking hold of it, masteringit, strangling it, while reinscribingit within institutions that are characteristicof State apparatus.... Is the establishingof a neutral instancebetweenthe people and its enemies,one that might separatetrue from false, the guilty from the innocent,justice and injustice, not a way of opposing popularjustice?... What is the organization[of a tribunal]? A table; behindthis table, which setsthem apart from the plaintiffs, a group of third partieswho are the judges.Their position indicates,first, that they are neutral as regardseither party; second,that implies that their judgment is not determinedaheadof time, that it will take shapeafter both parties have had their say, in keeping with a certain norm of truth and a certain number of ideas about justice and injustice, and third, that their decisionwill have the force of authority behind it .... Now this idea that you can have people who are neutral in regard to both

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parties,that they canjudge them in relation to ideasof justice that are absolutelyvalid, and that their decisionsmust be obeyed,I think this all goes very far and seems quite foreign to the idea of popular justice. In popular justice, you don't have three sides, you have the massesand their enemies.And then, when the massesseesomeoneas the enemy, when they decide to chastiseor re-educatethis enemy, they don't refer back to some abstractuniversal idea of justice, they simply refer to their own experience,the experienceof the harm they have suffered and the ways they have been wronged and oppressed; and finally, their decision is not a decision of authority, that is, they don't go through a State apparatusto validate their decisions,they 18 purely and simply executethat decision. Foucaulturgesthe massesto stop interpretingtheir actions in terms of a law that does not belongto them, but to show what they are doing by doing it, becoming a law unto themselves;Kristeva dreams of social action, 'a permanentconfrontation of [everyone's]practice and discoursewith those of others', being sufficient unto itself, with 'no instanceof the Law per se'. This is somewhatdifferent from the chiaroscuromelding of polar qualities (masculine and feminine, heaven and earth, + and - ). China erasesthe difference - or removes the table - that subjects ordinary practice and discourseto the eyes of the law, truth, a transcendentalsignified. China shows us how it is possible to live without the Law as such, without the Symbolic. What preciselyis taking the placeof the Law? Is it that artefactof oriental ethnography,the Absenceof the Law? The Despot?The People?

* It is not for their attempts to seize the movement of history that we rememberthe rebellious ex-structuralists(and it is not a bow to the post1989 consensusabout Marxism to say so). Like their appropriation of psychoanalysis,their historiographywas a meansof making claims about art; their relation to East Asia, which interwove Freudian, Marxian and feminist themes,was perhapsmost of all the articulation of an aesthetic.(I do not meanto say that it was thereforetrivial, only that the languageof art correspondedmore nearly to their vision and abilities.) Roland Barthes' short illustrated accountof a visit to Japan,Empire of Signs, has greatly annoyed specialists of Japan becauseof its cheerful irresponsibility.19

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If I want to imagine a fictive nation, I can give it an invented name, treat it declarativelyas a novelistic object, createa new Garabagne.. . . I can also - though in no way claiming to representor to analyze reality itself (thesebeing the major gesturesof Westerndiscourse)isolate somewhere in the world (faraway) a certain number of features(a term employedin linguistics) [un certain nombrede traits (mot graphiqueet linguistique)),and out of thesefeaturesdeliberately form a system.It is this systemwhich I shaH caH: Japan.... To me the Orient is a matter of indifference, merely providing a reserveof featureswhosemanipulation- whose invented interplay allows me to 'entertain' the idea of an unheard-ofsymbolic system, one altogether detached from our own. (Barthes 1982:3; 1970:9;

1994:2.747)

This is, of course, exactly what I have argued is a persistentsource of error in studiesof 'the East': the antithetical nomenclaturethat frames 'the other' as 'our other', the very thing that 'we' are not. When done straightforwardly and presentedas the results of knowledge, such writing produces inverted tautologies ('allologies' not 'heterologies'), negative portraits of what we think of ourselves. But Barthes is not interested in knowledge. The reality of Japanis to him 'indifferent' (perhapsthis hurts the specialists more than the cliches and blanket judgements they denounce).2oHe is 'deliberate'in his plan of using contrastiverhetoric as a sensory mechanism, a 'reserve of traits' (distinctive features, as in phonology; strokes, as in calligraphy). For the animal in the bush, the perceptionof movementneedsto trigger an instantaneousresponse;for the semiologist, the perception of contrast automatically creates entities, oppositions,series,grammars.Neither creaturecould thrive for long without its sensorium. And so Barthes takes the reader into a reality perceived through such a sensorium,explicatingeverythingin Japanas the contrary of its French counterpart.The fork stabs,the chopstick disentangles;tempura, light, airy, constellatedwith holes, is worlds away from the oily lumpiness of French friture; we prize the gift, a Japaneseprizes the wrapping; the Western actor strives for authenticexpression,the Easternactor for perfect adherenceto convention;the one-armedbandit coughsup a flood of silver dollars, the pachinkomachine,less vulgar and more self-referential,releases as its payout non-negotiablepellets good for yet more gamesof pachinko. Each perceptioninvokes a counter-perception(the implicit contrastwith our ways of doing), and the 'system' to which these features add up, the common axis around which the perceptions revolve, is that Japan is a country of strong signs, self-sufficient signs, signifiers that are not slavesof any meaning, intention or referent (see Barthes 1994:2.1002-3,1013-15,

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1022-5). The name Barthes gives to these semiotic practices - these performancesof, by and for the sign - is again and again 'writing'. Almost any episodeof Barthes' essay could serve as the example of examplessuch a hall-of-mirrors effect is indeed one of its main strategies- so I will seize on one with strong cultural connotations: the art of flower arrangement. In a Japanesebouquet... what is producedis the circulation of air, to which the flowers, leaves, and branches... are merely partitions, corridors, or hurdles ... one can insert one's body into the gaps betweenthe branches,in the aperturesof its stance,not so as to read it (to read its symbolism)but to retracethe path of the handthat wrote it: truly a writing, since it produces a volume, and since, while denying reading the possibility of simply deciphering a message (howeverdeeply symbolic), it allows readingto recreatethe outlines of its work. (my translation, from Barthes 1970:60; cf. 1982:45; 1994:2.778) That is how to read Barthes'book too: not to decipherits message,not to gain information aboutJapan(it containsnone,or so the authortells us), but to insert one's body into the gaps, to observethe writer's hand gracefully engaging with and disengagingfrom the phenomenaof a visit to Japan. Otherwiseone missesthe book's experiment,its constantnarrative present. (This observationalpresenttensedistinguishesBarthes'writing from that of a Kristeva always hurtling toward the archaicstratum in her most everyday exchangeswith modern Chinese.)At its riskiest moments,the experiment has to take on extreme cases,where it seemsthat semiology is out of its depth and can never achieve an adequatedescription of the things talked about: The violence of the Zengakuren [militants of the All-Japan Federationof Students,just then protesting against the U.S.-Japan Mutual Security Treaty and the Vietnam War] ... is immediately semiotic: becauseit is not an expressionof somethingelse (of hatred, indignation, or some moral idea), it comesto rest in some transitive aim (occupyinga city hall, breakingdown a barbedwire fence) .... All this contributesto the production of a masswriting, not a group writing (the gesturesare carried out to their end, no one finishes anyoneelse'saction); and finally, in an extremeof semiotic audacity, it is sometimespermitted that the demonstrators'rhythmic chants evoke, not the Causeor the Subjectof the action ... but simply the action itself (' The Zengakurenare going to fight'). This action is,

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then, no longer crowned,directed,justified, purified by language-a divinity above and apart from the combat, like a Marseillaise personifiedwith her Phrygian bonnet- but doubled by a pure vocal exercise,adding simply one more gesture,one more muscle, to the volume of violence. (my translation from Barthes 1970:139-43;cf. 1982:103-6;1994:2.818) In other words, the formula for the studentdemonstrationis the sameas that for the flower arrangement:gesturesthat are there not to be decodedbut to be retraced. It took a stunning reticence not to report on such events 'journalistically', by assigningmotives and enlisting the reader'ssympathy or condemnation.That reticenceis Barthes'own 'semioticaudacity'. The seriesof examplestakes us once more from the theory of writing to the end of humanism,on a path that leadseastward.(A parallel argumentis AlexandreKojeve's claim to have found in post-warJapana society beyond history, where war and the motives for war had been replaced by the formalisms of aestheticcompetition and 'snobbism':Kojeve 1968:436-7.) Barthesis writing about writing with no humanisticcorruption in sight. The many points of contrast(fork/chopstick,ritual bowing/uneasysincerity, etc.) are incidents,prompts,pretextsfor exploration,not signalsto be interpreted. As a whole, the project recapitulates,but in a different mode, the ruthless analysesof popular culture in Barthes' early work. 'Certain pagesof The Empire of Signs recall the "realism" of your texts in Mythologies,' commented Jean Thibaudeau, 'satire in 1957, utopia today.' Barthes' response: The little tableaux of The Empire of Signs are happy Mythologies: apart from certain personal reasons,this may be becausemy quite artificial position as a tourist in Japan- but a wayward tourist, really an ethnographer- enabledme to 'forget about' the Japanesepetty bourgeoisie,its domination over social behaviour, the art of living, the style of objects, etc.: I was sparedthe nauseaof mythology. One of my projects would be, precisely, to forget the French petty bourgeoisie(this will take a far greater effort on my part), and to catalogue those 'pleasures'I enjoy by living in France. (Barthes 1994:2.1319) It is not just a matter of being new to Japanand illiterate in Japanese;it has to do with the morality of the sign, a reforming perspectivewhich Barthes has abandoned.The example of the Zengakuren,whose language merely heightens the combat without appealing to a principle that lies beyondit, suggestedto one interviewerthat Bartheswas no longer interested

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in historical or political engagement.Queriedabout the imperative 'to enter completely into the signifier', Barthesmaintainedthat '[i]f I have changed on this point, it's a displacement,not a renunciation.... Now we needto move the combat forward, and try to break down not just signs (signifiers over here, signifieds over there), but the very idea of the sign .... What we have to try to breakdown today is Westerndiscourseas a whole, down to its basesand elementaryforms . . . . In our Occident, in our culture, in our language(s),we must engagea duel to the death, a historical struggle with the signified' (2.1015). Barthes acceptedthe description of this task, and specifically of his Empire of Signs, as 'deconstruction','grammatology', 'nihilism' (1294). It is a different combat from that againsthypocrisy. It involves opting for a field of signs from which the very possibility of hypocrisy is absent. 'The nausea of mythology' is provoked by the recognition of dishonesty,and that is excluded (or bootless)in a world of 'strong signs'. Let us supposethat two mortal enemiesare observedbowing to one another: in Japanas Barthesimagines it, they cannot be accusedof duplicity, for bowing does not have the function of symbolizing an inward friendliness. Bowing is bowing to the code of good mannersin general. If you tried to denounceJapaneseperformancesfor hypocrisy, as Bartheshad done in Mythologies for the sad spectaclesof the French bourgeoisie,you would be going up the wrong alley, for a society of pure spectaclehas nothing to fear from an unmasking. Barthes' Japan is a stage for the performanceof Brechtian 'epic theatre': not poorly executedAristotelian theatre, but a realm in which illusion is superfluous.(The Empire of Signs contains repeatedallusions to Brecht.) Hence Barthes' fascination for the Bunrakupuppettheatreand the male actorsplaying women'sroles. Take the Western theater of the last few centuries: its function is essentially to manifest what is supposedto be secret ("feelings," "situations," "conflicts") while concealingthe very artifice of such manifestation.... The stage since the Renaissanceis the spaceof this lie .... With Bunraku, the sourcesof the theaterare exposedin their emptiness. What is expelled from the stage is hysteria, i.e., theater itself .... Bunraku practicesneither the occultation nor the emphatic manifestation of its means; hence it rids the actor's manifestation of any whiff of the sacred and abolishes the metaphysicallink the West cannot help establishingbetween body and soul, cause and effect, motor and machine, agent and actor, Destiny and man, God and creature:if the manipulatoris not hidden, why - and how - would you make him into a God? (1982:61-2; 1970:82-4;1994:2.789-90)

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What is most precious about Japan, its power to strike the foreign observerwith the self-evidenceof satori, is its 'exemptionfrom meaning' (1982:73; 1970:97; 1994:2.797)- exemption,as ofa tax or a debt. Without constantly being held to its debt to meaning, then, Japanesesignifying behaviour operatesthrough a single articulation of its constituents(rather than a double articulation: the laws ofform plus the laws of meaning):it is a form of music more than of language,'un systemesemiotiqueexempt du signifie et qui ne transposequ'un jeu de differencesou seul apparait,prive d'ideologie, Ie proces defrayant les clotures' (a semiotic system exempt from the signified, merely transposinga play of differenceswherein appears alone, shorn of ideology, the processpiercing the barriers [of identity)), to borrow a description from Kristeva (1975:529; there the context is the 'seditious'characterof Wagnerismin Franceof the 1870s). In the paradise of signs, life in general (cooking, wrapping things, conversation)becomes synonymouswith writing, which becomesidentical with music, an absolute representationas opposedto programmatic or mimetic representation(a show in the service of some messageoutside it; see Dahlhaus1991 for the history of the term). Whethera self-sufficient order of signs bearsor needs criticism (in the name of what would one critique it?) is a question left unasked. The 'case against and utopia for' Occidental signification has oddly reprisedthe late-Romanticaestheticof the total work of art. That so peculiar a union should take place (and in Japan,or 'Japan',no less)must come down to someunusualhistorical givens. On 12 March 1935, the director, playwright and actor Mei Lanfang arrived in Moscow with his 'New Theaterof Ancient Forms'. He gave six weeks of performancesin Moscow and Leningrad as well as holding discussionswith local theatrepeople(amongthem Stanislavsky,Meyerhold, Tretiakov, Eisenstein,and Brecht, then an exile from Germany).21Brecht's impressionsof Mei' s acting are recordedin his 1936 essay'Verfremdungseffekte in der chinesischen Schauspielkunst' (Alienation effects in Chinese acting; Brecht 1967:7.619-31;1964:91-9). The alienation effect is achieved in the Chinese theatre in the following way. Above all, the Chineseartist never acts as if there were a fourth wall besidesthe three surroundinghim. He expresses his awarenessof being watched. This immediately removesone of the Europeanstage'scharacteristicillusions .... The actors openly choosethosepositionswhich will bestshow them off to the audience, just as if they were acrobats. A further means is that the artist observeshimself.... The audienceidentifies itself with the actor as being an observer,and accordinglydevelopshis attitude of observing or looking on. . . . The performer portrays incidents of utmost

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passion, but without his delivery becoming heated. At those points where the characterportrayedis deeply excited the performertakesa lock [sic; more likely a braid] of hair betweenhis lips and chews it. But this is like a ritual, there is nothing eruptive about it. It is quite clearly somebodyelse's repetition of the incident: a representation, even though an artistic one. . .. And so lack of control is decorously expressed.. .. [The actor] is careful not to make [the character's] sensations into those of the spectator. Nobody gets raped [vergewaltigt, overpowered]by the individual he portrays.... When Mei Lan-fang was playing a deathscenea spectatorsitting next to me exclaimedwith astonishmentat one of his gestures.One or two people sitting in front of us turned round indignantly and sshhh'd.They behavedas if they were presentat the real death of a real girl. Possibly their attitude would have been all right for a European production, but for a Chinese it was unspeakably ridiculous. (1964:91-5;1967:620-6) The Chineseactor 'limits himself from the start to simply quoting the characterplayed,.22Brecht's break with an 'empathic' theatrewas spurred by a desire to introduce critique into stage performance,to interrupt the action and oblige the audienceto considertheir own interpretationof the events. In Mei Lanfang'sacting he saw a confirmation of his own work of the previoustwenty years.This is the way Mei's legacy (if not his name)has been passed down to present-day Occidental theatre practice, as an activating element of socially critical theatre, a means of disrupting the 'false consciousness'that leads us to assumethat our culture is the sameas eternal nature. It is thus involved with the topic of 'constructedness'in literary and social study (as most commonly practised). Mei Lanfang exemplifies the personwho gets out aheadof artificiality, who, rather than clinging stubbornly to the naturalnessof his categories,turns the wheel in the direction of the skid. A theatre without deception,of self-recognizing artifice, in which nobodygets 'raped'or 'overpowered',is the result. Brecht's response to Mei's acting naturally emphasizedits critical, revisionary force for the bourgeois societies of what were soon to style themselvesthe nations of the 'West'. But there is more to the story than an exchange of techniques and attitudes between 'East' and 'West'. The geographicalterminology is somethingof an embarrassment,for precisely datable reasons.There are several 'Easts' in play here: the cultural East, China and Japan,and what will become,after 1945, the political East, the Soviet sphere of influence. The 'West' is another shifting category: the nations of the geopolitical West may have tried to consider themselves synonymouswith the cultural West (,Plato to NATO', as the undergraduate

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shorthand goes), but nobody could concoct a single cultural category adequate to subsume the various non-Wests into one.23 To continue anticipating the post-1945 terminology, Brecht in 1935, an exile from the 'West', was sitting in the 'East' watching a traditional artist from the 'Far East', and the Soviet (,Eastern')audience'senthusiasticreceptionof Mei's work ran along somewhatdifferent lines from his. The Easternersnoticed aboveall: [T]he peculiar and original rhythmical and musical structureand its interactionwith the movementand the speechof the actors.There are no arbitrary sounds or movements without a purpose. Lanfang's hands:his ten fingers are like ten other characterson the stage,not in the program.One can fail to understandthe music or to appreciatethe eleganceof the costume,or lose the thread of the subject, but it is impossible to distract the attention from these hands, always in movement, from the dance of the fingers, now meaningful, now decorative,now similar to the subtle decorationof clouds, leavesand grassin the old miniatures.(Tretiakov 1935, tr. Marilena Ruscica) When on Mei Lanfang'sstagethe gesturebecomesdance,the dance becomesa word, the word becomesan aria (an aria that is extremely complex from the musical and vocal point of view, not to mention its execution.),then we seethis theater'sorganic integrity .... What we call conventional elementsof representationare only the necessary form of its organic lawfulness and the expedient revelation of the inner structureof the whole representation.(Tairov in Kleberg 1992, tr. Marilena Ruscica) Eisenstein'spraise of Chinesetheatrelikewise emphasizesthe economy and richnessattainableby traditional means: We see how he carries out an entire seriesof devices,of movements that are obligatory in an almost hieroglyphic way, and we understand that there is here a perfectly determinate expression, both wellthought-out and complete. There is an entire series of obligatory positionsfor the reflection of certainvital traditions.... We all know the definition of realism that books give. We all know that plurality must be visible through singularity, as well as that the generalmust be visible through the particular, and that realism is built on this reciprocalpenetration. If we look at the artistry ofMei Lanfangfrom this point of view, it is then possible to observea very curious feature: in Mei's theatre

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both oppositeelementsare pushedto the limits. This generalization reachesthe symbolic and emblematic,while the partial representation becomesthe individuality of the performer. In this way we have remarkableemblems, executedby the original individuality of the actor. In other words, it is as if the boundariesof theseoppositeswere moved farther apart.... Our [Soviet] art is now almost completely reducedto one of its elements,that is, the representation.And this is being done to the enormous detriment of the image. We have witnessedthe disappearanceof the culture of the image, i.e., the culture of the high poetical form, almost completely not only from our theatrebut also from our cinema. We can point at our time, the time of silent cinema, when pure figurative construction played a huge role, and not only the [naturalistic] representationofpeople.24 Mei Lanfang left several kinds of impression. Combining them is something of a constructivist project, in the Russian senseof the word. Unlike that of Brecht and Barthes, the Russians' appreciation of Mei Lanfang is not built around the axis 'illusion/non-illusion', but around the idea of a self-generatingartistic language, a complex 'artifice' with an internal 'lawfulness' visible in every detail - an 'absolute','organic' stage action. The eager discussion around Mei's performances in Moscow (recordedby twelve articles in Pravda during his short stay, an enthusiasm spilling over into symposia, master classes,and letters to the editor) is attributable, according to Georges Banu, to the opportunity Mei's undeniable success brought of opening up once more the question of formalism (Banu 1983). In 1935, the doctrine of 'socialistrealism' had been pronouncedbut not yet enforcedas it would be, starting the next year, with purgesand prison terms for any lingering 'formalists'.(Tretiakov, one of the founders of agitprop theatre, would be arrested and shot for intellectual crimes in 1939; Meyerhold died in 1940 after several years in a labour camp; socialist realism effectively muffled Eisenstein, though it did not eliminate him.)25 Discussions of Mei Lanfang were the last round for formalism and constructivismuntil the 1960s.The non-mimetictraditions of Mei's theatre,the organic integrity of its 'rhythm' and 'music' (both terms taken in a literal and an extendedsense),were object lessonsin favour of the autonomy of artistic genresand the symbolic characterof art - two often contradictory romantic principles here combined in an unusual alliance and against the primacy of politically led 'realism'. (Mei's triumph in Moscow also blunted the critiques of Chinese leftist critics such as Tian Han, whose 1934 articles on Mei' s theatrehad askedwhetherthe genrewas not an elitist feudal relic. Mei invited Tian to help choosethe plays to be performedin the USSR: seeCheng1994:33-5.)

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The 'Chineseactor' - that is, Mei Lanfang, multiply translated- is a variously exemplary figure. For Brecht, he represents a 'citational', interrogativestancetowards illegitimate social consensus;for Eisenstein,he representsthe poeticsof the imaginationin its freedom from crudecanonsof 'representation';for Barthes,he grows to the dimensionsof a populationall the Japanesetogetherare actors 'citing' the roles they inhabit and living lives of 'happy mythology'. Each out of his own need, and all for different reasons,they recognizedMei's minimally naturalistic acting as a 'music'. Under all theseregimesand all theseself-interestedinterpretations,one core of meaning:the adequacyof art. It is possibleto be 'indifferent' toward the East that Mei Lanfang represents,only becausehe substitutesfor it so completely.

* Les structuresne descendent pas dans la rue. -May 1968 graffiti Non des Lois, mais desModeles. -Marcel Granet Kristeva saw in 1970sMaoist ideological discoursea predispositionfor the 'tableauof a "structuralist" or "warrior" type' rather than the consequential, causalnarrative. Another end of history - the end of history-as-narrative?I have tried in this chapter to provide parts of the intellectual context for understandingstructural and post-structuralevocationsof Asia, but a more comprehensiveeffort would be to try to think through the debts of the structuralistepistemologyto cultural relativism (seeRuth Benedict,Patterns a/Culture), to the philosophicaloptions most influential in somecurrentsof feminism (conventionalism,nominalism), to the refusal of ideologies of 'rootedness'such as the rural utopia of Petainism; and this effort would survey with patience and a wealth of detail the reservoir of examples available to all these modes of thinking (on Petainist ideology, see Burin 1997). That would amount to explaining structuralism, the theory of systematic internal meanings, by what is external to it and alien to its system; and it would necessarilymark the borders betweenstructuralism's 'inside' and its 'outside' in ways unavailableto structuralismitself. Here the scopeof the investigationallows only one brief suggestionof how that border might be redrawn, and it will take place by way of the figure of inside versusoutside. Considerthe difference betweenphonology and phonetics.A good structuralistinterprets anelementof linguistic form

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(say the articulation of a French nasalizedvowel) not by searchingout its resemblancesto anotherthing of the same kind (the comparablecasesof vowel + nasal in Latin or Roumanian),or by tracing its history over time (etymology) or space (dialect study), but by observing its systematic relations with the other elementsof its own field. The phonemeis precisely the 'arbitrary, relative and differential' entity produced by the collective mutual interaction of all the sounds of a language: the thought of the individual phonemepresupposes that of the field (the phonologicalsystem~, as the thought of the field presupposesthat of the individual phonemes.6 Within the field we have the possibility of orderedrelations, but outside it, arbitrariness.Structuralism is a dream of harmony (the relation between elementsand systemis one of perfect mutual definition) and of spontaneity (the relation emergesfrom the coexistencein time of the elements,and not from the imperativesof an earlier state). It is a 'happy mythology,.27Asia affords a context in which it is all right to interpret society as an internally coherentsystemof mutually defining elements,where even the conflicts are beautifully grammatizedas a play of signifiers, where oppositionsmelt into indistinction or (like + and -) flaunt their distinctnessin public heraldry. And that would explain the ambiguity of the Asias visited and describedby such malcontentstructuralists(in certain moods and moments,such poststructuralists) as Kristeva and Barthes. A certain rebelliousnessinspires them to situate Asia at the centre of their concerns(the urge to get free of what seemsinescapablyhumanisticand Christian in Europeanculture, even when this culture has beensubjectedto a reinterpretationin the nameof the signified), but their vision of Asia, their commentatorial stance, is surprisingly placid. Because they take it for granted that patriarchy, capitalism,monotheismand the network of transcendentalsignifieds do not operate in Asia, the language of incitation gives way to a language of description. This is what makesthe voyage eastwardsso liberating (or so enervating)for a hermeneuticallytrained intellect. In Asia, then, post-structuralismcomes into its own, which is a pure structuralism. This happy mythology is also, for historical reasons, a Chinesedream of harmony, a ritual idealization. If Claude Levi-Straussis the father of structuralism, its grandfather is Marcel Granet, author of several impressive and beautiful synthesesof Chinese civilization. (Tel Quel's interest in Chinese thought led to the journal's republishing long extracts from Granet.) These works, centring on what we now call 'correlative cosmology',build a picture of China that owes a great deal to the examplesof the Li ji (Recordsof Ritual), the Yi jing (Book of Changes), and Dong Zhongshu, the synthesizer of Han court ritual and natural philosophy. (It was also indebtedto Durkheim and Mauss, whose work on systems of classification Granet knew intimately.) With their cycles of

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interaction among qualitatively defined elements (and parallel series of homologouselements),regulatedperiodsof dominanceand dormancy,and a musical sense of proportion, these cosmologiesseek to work out the greatestnumber of transformationsfrom a small vocabulary: theirs is the beauty of the self-sufficient and symmetrical.Granet'sweak point, as has beenobservedfor someseventyyearsnow (seeRemi Mathieu, 'Postface'to Granet [1929] 1994:532-40),is his habit of treating sourcesseparatedby hundredsor even thousandsof yearsof history as complementarypiecesin the great pattern of Chinesecivilization: but from the ritual point of view this is a triumph, not a failing. The very purposeof sinology for Granetmay have been to reconstructand preservethat pattern. Within theselimitations of aim and method,the work is admirable. In the late 1930sGranetwas engagedin the most formally challengingof all his works, a massivelydetailedwork of reconstructionand inferencefull of chartsdemonstratingpatternsof wife-exchange.The contentof this book (Granet 1939) explains why Granetwas the only ethnologistin the Paris of the 1930s willing to talk about mathematicsand kinship with a student namedClaude Levi-Strauss.Levi-Strauss'debt to Granetis manifest in his first two books. Levi-Strauss([1947] 1967:358-451)contains an extended homageto Granet in the form of an elucidation and generalizationof the 'Chinese system' of marriage and kinship. Granet was, in a sense,what Levi-Strausswould have beenhad he not met Jakobson:a gifted decoderof patterns- but readyto recognizethem only when they presentedthemselves in the form of co-presentsystemsof meaning.The encounterwith lakobson gave Levi-Straussthe idea of latent patterns,or phonologicalsets in which the elementsmight not be meaningfulor in evidenceat the sametime: that is to say, the idea of phonologicalstructureas opposedto the realizationof that structurein speech. The genealogyleading from the Li ji through Granet to Levi-Strauss suggestslurking paradoxesin the appealto China as the land where poststructuralism can come into its own. If the erstwhile structuralistsfound themselvesat peacewith the world and critically disarmedby the spectacle of Asia, one must ask if the opportunities for deconstructionare simply foreclosed. Does a self-containedsystem admit of critique? Or does its structure allow only judgements of inside ('appropriate') and outside ('inappropriate')?The readingsof structuralistlinguistics and anthropology whereby Derrida attempted to demonstratethat there can be no selfcontainedsystemsof this sort, that the founding postulatesof such a system tend to undermine both themselves and their consequences,are both 'internalist' and 'externalist': they use evidence given from within the structure to breach the boundaries of that structure (see e.g. Derrida 1967:54-5). When postmodernkeywords becomean apologia for cultural

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relativism, the notion of totality has reclaimed, it seemsto me, its old privileges. Then the task of deconstructivereading will be, as usual, one of finding opportunities for dislodging the perfect fit of the parts of those systemsthat makeChina 'work' for us, cognitively and otherwise. NOTES

2

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5

This chapter had its origin in invitations from the Comparative Literature Departmentat the University of Chicago and the School of Oriental and African Studies,University of London. An earlier version was publishedas 'Outsidethe Parenthesis',MLN 115 (2000): 849-91. I thank Richard Mackseyfor his kind encouragement, and JohnsHopkins University Pressfor their generouspermissionto reprint. Then as now, it is dedicatedto Susanand RogerBlood. As the discussion will show, 'deconstruction' is here taken rather broadly to indicate the forms of philosophy and human science that followed from the dissolution of the founding distinctions of structuralism(recountedin an exemplarymannerby Derrida 1967:145202). For reasonsof economy, and also to distinguish the argument presented here from an exegetical one (expounding what 'deconstruction' has already said about 'China'), I will present only a few readingsfrom a vast corpus. For explicit discussionsof 'The East' as a post-structuralistlocus, see Spivak, 'Introduction' to Derrida 1976; Lowe 1991; Zhang Longxi 1992; Foster1996 (217); Spivak 1999 (27981, 429-30); Hayot 1999; and Bush 2000. On the formation of a 'Maoist' discoursein Tel Quel between1970 and 1974, seeForest 1995. Foucault 1966 (l0). My translation,as are all other translationsin this chapterunlessotherwisemarked.This passagefollows on the quotation of Borges' imaginary 'Chinese encyclopedia',a reference to which scholars of East-West literary relations seem unerringly drawn. See Zhang 1992 (1). Sollers 1974 (40-1). Barthesreprints the passage,interrupting his own text, at the centre of L 'Empire des signes. Is the figure of the Chinese calligrapherin some way the national anthem,the secrethandshakeof Tel Que!? Jakobsonand Halle 1956 (55-82). A few lines abovethe passageabout Chinese spatiality, Foucault has alluded to the cognitive disturbances observedin aphasics.For the imagery of paradigmaticverticality versus syntagmatichorizontality, seeLacan 1966 (503).

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6 7

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Gilles Deleuze'sinterest in China and its nomad neighbourshas been generously reciprocatedby scholars of East Asia. See e.g. Dean and Massumi 1990; Connery1998. One of Sollers' collaboratorsreflectsthirty yearsafter: 'The questionof the winding-down of metaphysicsand, for that reason,the question of philosophywere at the centreof our preoccupationsthen, and one day it will be necessaryto understandin this perspectivewhat was at stake in Sollers'sand Tel Quel's interest in the "cultural revolution" and more generallyin Taoist China' (Pleynet1997:120). The classicstatementon this point is Spivak'squestioningof 'almost .. a reverseethnocentrism'in Derrida'sassociationof logocentrismwith the West alone: 'the East is never seriously studiedor deconstructedin the Derrideantext' (,Introduction',Derrida 1976, Ixxxii). Seede Man 1979 (268-70)on the definition of 'text' ('the contradictory interferenceof the grammaticalwith the figural field'). Note also that '[ d]econstructivereadingscan point out the unwarrantedidentifications achieved by substitution, but they are powerless to prevent their recurrenceeven in their own discourse,and to uncross,so to speak,the aberrantexchangesthat havetakenplace' (242). Point taken. 'It is easy to observethe rigorous selectivenessand recurrenceof the soundsused' in glossolalia,says lakobsonof one samplefrom Russia; and they bear a determinaterelation to soundsof the speakers'normal language in that they are loaded with 'prevalently alien traits'. The utterancesmay lack meaning,but their drive for order is clear; their very way of being externalto normal, meaningful speechis highly patterned and thus, if not precisely meaningful, at least sculpted in the negative image of meaning.Seelakobsonand Waugh 1979 (211-15). I take the term from David Porter (conversation, May 2000). Sinography,'writing about China', is not sinology - the latter assumes some expert knowledge,while sinographictexts can be revealing even in their naiVete. In a further extension, 'sinography' would be to sinology as historiography is to history, a textual examination of the basesof judgement. A beautiful relic of this alignment is Hollier 1973. For the various partingsof the ways in the years after 1968, seeForest 1995 (387-413) (Sollers-Derridadivergence,1972); Foucault 1994 (2.245-68,281-95) (Foucault-Derrida divergence, 1972); Derrida 1980 (441-524) (Derrida-Lacandivergence,1975). See Freud 1977 (234-5): 'The content of dreams appearsto us as a translation of dream-thoughtsinto another mode of expression. . . . Dream-contentis given in a picture-writing, the signs of which are to be translatedone by one into the languageof dream thoughts.One would

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often be led into error by trying to read these signs for their pictorial quality, ratherthan for their signifying relations.' Jullien 1992. On the issue of screen memories see Freud, 'From the History of an Infantile Neurosis': Freud posits the view 'that scenes from early infancy, such as are bought up by an exhaustiveanalysisof neuroses... are not reproductionsof real occurrences,to which it is possibleto ascribean influence over the courseof the patient'slater life .... It considersthem ratheras productsof the imagination,which find their instigation in maturelife [and] which are intendedto serveas some kind of symbolic representationof real wishes and interests' (in Gardiner1971:192). Kristeva 1974a(63). The 'separation'of modesof thoughtalludesto the narrator'sfeeling of uneasinessand alienness('I feel like a monkey, a Martian, an other') underthe gazeof a group of idle peasants(13-14), a bit of ethnographicalfranknessfor which Kristeva has beenscolded.For a thoughtful discussionof the 'crossingof borders' of which her own work on China is an example,see 1974b(542-3). On the rejectionof Hegelianhistorical necessity,seeKristeva 1975 (23). Barthes 1994 (32-4). 'Happenings'in English in the original. The Tel Quel mission to China (Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Marcelin Pleynet, Philippe Sollers, and Franc;ois Wahl) is chronicled in Kristeva 1990. Foucault 1994 (2.340-46). His interlocutors were Benny Levy and Andre Glucksmann,representingthe Gaucheproletarienne.The episode has beendiscussedin Guo Jian 1996 and 1999. Among early reviewersof the book's English edition, White (1982) was most sympatheticto its vision of 'utopia'. Lowe arguesthat Kristeva and Barthes perpetuated a certain Orientalist tradition: 'The constructionsof China ... conjuredthe oriental Other not as a colonized spacebut as a desired position outside western politics, ideology, and signification.' Yet they 'continuedto figure the Orient as Other', says Lowe, as 'a fetish in both the psychoanalyticsenseof being a fixation ... and the sense of being reified, as Marx writes of the fetishism of commoditiesin capitalistsociety' (1991:188, 173). Compare Wilde 1969 (315). 'In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people. One of our most charming painters went recently to the Land of the Chrysanthemumin the foolish hope of seeingthe Japanese.All he saw, all he had the chanceof painting, were a few lanternsand somefans.... He did not know that the Japanesepeople are, as I have said, simply a mode of style, an exquisitefancy of art.'

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21 The plays presentedin Moscow had beenshortenedand revisedwith an emphasison dance and visual splendourby Mei in consultation with Zhang Pengchun,a Columbia Ph.D. and Professorof English at Nankai University, who also servedas theatrical adviserand interpreteron the company'stours of America and the USSR. On Mei's Moscow tour and its after-effects, see Mei Lanfang 1984 (46-56); Mei Shaowu 1984 (126-59); and Cheng Pei-kai 1994, 1995. Lars Kleberg's 1981 play 'The Sorcerer's Apprentices' (Kleberg 1998:23-49) offers a free reconstructionof some of the Moscow conversationsbetweenMei and his Moscow hosts. Kleberg (1992) subsequently discovered and publishedan actualtranscriptof the discussions. 22 Brecht 1964 (94); 1967 (623) (,beschrankt er sich darauf, die darzustellendeFigur lediglich zu zitieren'). CompareBarthes: 'Comme Brecht l'avait vu, ici rt!gne la citation, la pincee d'ecriture, Ie fragment de code'; 'Qu'est-ce donc que notre visage, sinon une citation?'; 'l'acteur, dans son visage, ne joue pas a la femme, ni ne la copie, mais seulementla signifie' (Barthes 1970:75, 121, 122; 1982:53, 90, 89; 1994:2.786,808, 809). 23 Well, almostnobody: seeWittfogel, Oriental Despotism. 24 Eisenstein in Kleberg 1992 (136-7), translated by Marilena Ruscica. The invocationof 'realism' (i.e., socialistrealism) is merely strategic,as the aim of Eisenstein'sremarks is to reject the current Zhdanovian guidelines for 'realistic' plotting and representation.(Realism, for Alexei Alexandrovich Zhdanov [1896-1948], governor of Leningrad, founder of Cominform and occasionalliterary critic, meant hewing as closely as possible to the Party's interpretationof history and society and avoiding any taint of 'aestheticism'or 'formalism'.) 25 Banu 1983 (146); Cheng1994 (42-3). Note, in Eisenstein'sremarks,the poignantreferenceto 'our time, the time of silent cinema'- the 1920s. 26 The description given here, intentionally simplified, echoes the proposalsof lakobsonfor whom the perfectphonologicalrepresentation would define eachphonemeexclusively by its distinctive features.For a comprehensiveaccount of the history of this discipline, see Anderson 1985. 27 For the classic presentationof a structural methodology basedon the regulated oppositions of phonology, see Levi-Strauss 1958. For an indictment of structural functionalism as the ideology that applaudsa system,any system,'becauseit functions',seeSpivak 1987 (134).

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REFERENCES

Anderson,StephenR. (1985) Phonologyin the TwentiethCentury: Theories of Rules and Theories of Representations.Chicago: University of ChicagoPress. Banu, Georges (1983) 'Mei Lan-fang: proces et utopie de la scene occidentale',Revued'Esthetiquen.s. 5:133-48. Barthes,Roland (1970) L 'Empire des signes.Geneva:Skira. - [1957] (1970) Mythologies.Paris: Seuil. - (1982) Empire of Signs. Translatedby Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. - (1994) CEuvrescompletes.Paris: Seuil. Bertolt, Brecht (1964) Brecht on Theatre: The Developmentofan Aesthetic. Edited and translatedby John Willett. New York: Hill and Wang. - (1967) GesammelteWerkein acht Biinden.Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Burin, Philippe (1997) 'Vichy', in: Les Lieux de Memoire, edited by Pierre Nora. Paris: Gallimard. Bush, Christopher (2000) Jdeographies:Figures of China and Japan in French Modernity. Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles. Cheng Pei-kai (1994) 'Mei Lanfang dui shijie jutan de wenhua chongji' (The cultural impact of Mei Lanfang on world theatre), Dangdai (Con-Temporary)103:26-43,104:66-90. - (1995) 'Mei Lanfang zai Mosike' (Mei Lanfang in Moscow), Dangdai (Con-Temporary)105:140-9. Connery, ChristopherL. (1998) The Empire of the Text. New York: Rowan and Littlefield. Dahlhaus, Carl (1991) The Idea of Absolute Music. Translatedby Roger Lustig. Chicago: University of ChicagoPress. Dean, Kenneth, and Brian Massumi (1990) First and Last Emperors. New York: Autonomedia. De Man, Paul (1979) Allegories of Reading. New Haven: Yale University Press. - (1996) AestheticIdeology. Edited by Andrzej Warminski. Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress. Derrida, Jacques(1967) De la grammatologie.Paris: Minuit. - (1972a) 'Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences', in: The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the SciencesofMan, edited by Richard Mackseyand EugenioDonato. Baltimore: JohnsHopkins University Press. - (1972b) Positions.Paris: Minuit. - (1972c)Marges de la philosophie.Paris: Minuit.

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- (1976) OfGrammatology.Translatedby Gayatri ChakravortySpivak. Baltimore: JohnsHopkins University Press. - (1980) La Carte postale: de Socratea Freud et au-dela. Paris: Galilee. Forest,Philippe (1995) Histoire de Tel Quel, 1960-1982.Paris: Seuil. Foster, Hal (1996) The Return of the Real: The Avant-Gardeat the End of the Century. Cambridge,MA: MIT Press. Foucault,Michel (1966) Les Mots et les choses.Paris: Gallimard. - (1994) Dits et ecrits 1954-1988.Paris: Gallimard. Freud, Sigmund(1977) Die Traumdeutung.Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Gardiner, Muriel (ed.) (1971) The Wolf-Man by the Wolf-Man. New York: Basic Books. Granet, Marcel (1939) Categoriesmatrimonialeset relations de proximite dans la Chine ancienne.Paris: A\can. - [1929] (1994) La Civilisation chinoise. Paris: Albin Michel. Guo Jian (1996) 'Wen'ge sichao yu "houxue'" (Cultural Revolution thinking and 'postmodernism'),Ershiyi shiji 35:1 16-22. - (1999) 'Resisting Modernity in Contemporary China: The Cultural Revolution and Postmodernism',Modern China 24:343-76. Hayot, Eric (1999) 'ChineseDreams:Pound,Brecht', Tel Quel. Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin,Milwaukee. Hollier, Denis (ed.) (1973) Panorama des sciences humaines. Paris: Gallimard-NRF. Jakobson,Roman,and Morris Halle (1956) FundamentalsofLanguage.The Hague:Mouton. Jakobson,Roman,and Linda Waugh (1979) The SoundShapeofLanguage. Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press. Jullien, Fran