Spatial Literary Studies in China (Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies) 3031039130, 9783031039133

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GEOCRITICISM AND SPATIAL LITERARY STUDIES

Spatial Literary Studies in China Edited by Ying Fang Robert T. Tally Jr.

Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies Series Editor

Robert T. Tally Jr. Texas State University San Marcos, TX, USA

Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies is a new book series focusing on the dynamic relations among space, place, and literature. The spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences has occasioned an explosion of innovative, multidisciplinary scholarship in recent years, and geocriticism, broadly conceived, has been among the more promising developments in spatially oriented literary studies. Whether focused on literary geography, cartography, geopoetics, or the spatial humanities more generally, geocritical approaches enable readers to reflect upon the representation of space and place, both in imaginary universes and in those zones where fiction meets reality. Titles in the series include both monographs and collections of essays devoted to literary criticism, theory, and history, often in association with other arts and sciences. Drawing on diverse critical and theoretical traditions, books in the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series disclose, analyze, and explore the significance of space, place, and mapping in literature and in the world.

Ying Fang  •  Robert T. Tally Jr. Editors

Spatial Literary Studies in China

Editors Ying Fang School of Foreign Languages Zhejiang Gongshang University Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China

Robert T. Tally Jr. Department of English Texas State University San Marcos, TX, USA

ISSN 2578-9694     ISSN 2634-5188 (electronic) Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies ISBN 978-3-031-03913-3    ISBN 978-3-031-03914-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03914-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For HU Yamin and Fredric Jameson

Series Editor’s Preface

The spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences has occasioned an explosion of innovative, multidisciplinary scholarship. Spatially oriented literary studies, whether operating under the banner of literary geography, literary cartography, geophilosophy, geopoetics, geocriticism, or the spatial humanities, more generally, have helped to reframe or to transform contemporary criticism by focusing attention, in various ways, on the dynamic relations among space, place, and literature. Reflecting upon the representation of space and place, whether in the real world, in imaginary universes, or in those hybrid zones where fiction meets reality, scholars, and critics working in spatial literary studies are helping to reorient literary criticism, history, and theory. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies is a book series presenting new research in this burgeoning field of inquiry. In exploring such matters as the representation of place in literary works, the relations between literature and geography, the historical transformation of literary and cartographic practices, and the role of space in critical theory, among many others, geocriticism and spatial literary studies have also developed interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary methods and practices, frequently making productive connections to architecture, art history, geography, history, philosophy, politics, social theory, and urban studies, to name but a few. Spatial criticism is not limited to the spaces of the so-called real world, and it sometimes calls into question any too facile distinction between real and imaginary places, as it frequently investigates what Edward Soja has referred to as the “real-and-imagined” places we experience in literature as in life. Indeed, although a great deal of important research has been devoted to the literary representation of certain vii

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identifiable and well-known places (e.g., Dickens’s London, Baudelaire’s Paris, or Joyce’s Dublin), spatial critics have also explored the otherworldly spaces of literature, such as those to be found in myth, fantasy, science fiction, video games, and cyberspace. Similarly, such criticism is interested in the relationship between spatiality and such different media or genres as film or television, music, comics, computer programs, and other forms that may supplement, compete with, and potentially problematize literary representation. Titles in the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series include both monographs and collections of essays devoted to literary criticism, theory, and history, often in association with other arts and sciences. Drawing on diverse critical and theoretical traditions, books in the series reveal, analyze, and explore the significance of space, place, and mapping in literature and in the world. The concepts, practices, or theories implied by the title of this series are to be understood expansively. Although geocriticism and spatial literary studies represent a relatively new area of critical and scholarly investigation, the historical roots of spatial criticism extend well beyond the recent past, informing present and future work. Thanks to a growing critical awareness of spatiality, innovative research into the literary geography of real and imaginary places has helped to shape historical and cultural studies in ancient, medieval, early modern, and modernist literature, while a discourse of spatiality undergirds much of what is still understood as the postmodern condition. The suppression of distance by modern technology, transportation, and telecommunications has only enhanced the sense of place, and of displacement, in the age of globalization. Spatial criticism examines literary representations not only of places themselves, but of the experience of place and of displacement, while exploring the interrelations between lived experience and a more abstract or unrepresentable spatial network that subtly or directly shapes it. In sum, the work being done in geocriticism and spatial literary studies, broadly conceived, is diverse and far reaching. Each volume in this series takes seriously the mutually impressive effects of space or place and artistic representation, particularly as these effects manifest themselves in works of literature. By bringing the spatial and geographical concerns to bear on their scholarship, books in the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series seek to make possible different ways of seeing literary and cultural texts, to pose novel questions for criticism and theory, and to offer alternative approaches to literary and cultural studies. In short, the series aims to open up new spaces for critical inquiry. San Marcos, TX

Robert T. Tally Jr.

Acknowledgements

In exploring the realm of literature and of spatiality for many years, I have benefited enormously from the support of numerous teachers, colleagues, friends, and students. First of all, I want to thank HU Yamin, my doctoral supervisor, for her gracious help and overall mentorship and especially for her advising me to take “spatial narrative” as the topic of my doctoral research, which helped open the door of spatial theory and criticism for me. Next, I would like to thank Rob Tally for proposing this collection of essays, for his guidance and hard work throughout the project, and for his enthusiasm, encouragement, thoughtfulness, and friendship since we got to know each other in 2016. Besides these, I am deeply indebted to the many other professors who offered significant instruction and knowledgeable insight no matter where my studies have taken me, including NIE Zhenzhao (now at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies), SUN Wenxian, ZHANG Yüneng, SU Hui, and LUO Lianggong from Central China Normal University (my Alma Mater), ZHU Liyuan and LU Yang from Fudan University,  MEI Xinlin from Zhejiang University of Technology, and YAN Jia from Sichuan University. I am also very grateful to  my friends and  colleagues  at Ningbo University and  Zhejiang Gongshang University, who provided me with stimulating conversation, helpful advice, and camaraderie. I would like to particularly thank and acknowledge WANG Chunhui, LIN Yan, ZHENG Chenyi, GUAN Mingwei, LIAO Qingyun, and HAN Sheng, my postgraduates at Ningbo University, for helping me to hone my thinking on spatiality and spatial criticism. Not least I would like to thank MAO Zhihui, YAN Hongfei, and WU Yanfei, my bosom friends, for being a continued source of company, ix

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comfort, and understanding. Above all, I want to thank ZHONG Xuezheng, my husband, and ZHONG Chen, my son, for their unfailing love, patience, and support over the years, and their constant enrichment of my lived spaces. —Ying Fang I would like to thank FANG Ying (Ying Fang) for her remarkable work in making this collection of essays possible. In addition to editing this book with me, she was the primary contact for the contributors and she oversaw and coordinated the translations. Ying is also a major scholar and critic in the fields of spatial literary studies, narratology, and comparative literature, not to mention a translator and a poet, and I am grateful to her for everything she has done and continues to do. This project would have been impossible without her tremendous efforts. I was fortunate to be able to meet many of the contributors, along with other scholars, during my visits to Tianjin and Beijing in 2017 and to Ningbo, Hangzhou, and Shanghai in 2019. The first visit was coordinated by LIU Ying of Nankai University, where I was honored to give a presentation as part of her “American Literary Geographies” project, and I am grateful to her, the other members of that program, and to her students for welcoming and guiding me. In Beijing, I also met with CHEN Shuoying and LIU Zixu of the Academy of Marxism, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, who were gracious and informative hosts. In 2019, during a trip organized by Ying, I had the honor of speaking at Ningbo University (in connection with the International Symposium on Sea Literature and Culture), Zhejiang University, Zhejiang University of Technology, Shanghai Jiaotong University and Fudan University. I am very grateful to ZHU Liyuan, MEI Xinlin, WANG Songlin, XU Yongming and SHANG Biwu for their kind invitations and hospitality and to the students and faculty at all of these marvelous institutions of higher learning. Here in the United States, I wish to thank my students, colleagues, and friends. While working on this and related projects, I had had the privilege of holding the NEH Distinguished Teaching Professorship in the Humanities at Texas State University, and this volume represents a contribution to that project, titled “The Spatial Imagination in the Humanities.” Above all, I thank Reiko Graham for all her love and support. —Robert T. Tally Jr.

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Jointly, we would like to thank the contributors and translators for their laborious work and excellent contributions, and the panelists for sharing their thoughts in the roundtable discussion on “Spatial Literary Studies” at Ningbo University in November 2019. We are grateful to Allie Troyanos of Palgrave Macmillan, we are also indebted to the peer reviewers, who offered not only encouragement but also some insightful suggestions. We dedicate this collection to Fredric Jameson and HU Yamin (胡亚 敏), the most revered scholars and beloved professors for us each. The scholarly connection between them foreshowed our friendship and cooperation. Fredric Jameson is well known as the leading Marxist literary critic writing in English today, as well as a champion of language, literature, and social thought; he is a brilliant teacher, both in the classroom and in his writings and presentations. HU Yamin is professor and former dean of the School of Chinese Language and Literature, and the leader of the “First-­ Class Discipline” of the Chinese language and literature, at Central China Normal University. She is also Vice President of the National Chinese and Foreign Literary Theory Society, Vice President of the National Marxist-­ Leninist Literary Theory Society, and President of the Theory of Literature and Art Society of Hubei province. Professor Hu’s research interests include literary criticism, narrative theory and comparative literature. She is the author of numerous books, including Narratology (Central China Normal University Press, 1st edition, 1994, 3rd edition, 2004), Comparative Literature (Higher Education Press, the 3rd edition, 2016), and The Contemporary Construction of the Chinese Format of Marxist Literary Criticism (People’s Publishing House, 2020). Her edited work Keywords in Western Literary Criticism and Contemporary China (China Social Science Press, 2015) has been published by Routledge in 2020. Professor Hu is a monumental figure in the history of Narratology and Marxist Literary Criticism, notably one of the pioneers who introduced narratology to China, and she is among those who have been dedicated to exploring and constructing the Chinese format of Marxist Literary Criticism. We are honored to be able to dedicate this volume to such wonderful mentors and friends.

Contents

Part I Spatial Theory and Technology   1 1 Spatial  Literary Studies in China: A Brief History  3 Ying Fang 2 An  Exploration of the Problems of Space and Spatialization 21 Jia Yan 3 Mobility  Studies: A New Direction in Spatial Literary Studies 37 Ying Liu 4 Developing  the Chinese Academic Map Publishing Platform 53 Yongming Xu, Benjamin Lewis, and Weihe Wendy Guan 5 Space:  The Keyword of Art History Study 81 Juan Mao

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6 The  Attributes of British and American Literary Maps: An Exploration 89 Fangyun Guo 7 Spatial  Narrative in Fiction: “Spatialization” of Fiction Narrative107 Ying Fang Part II Studies in Literary Geography 127 8 The  Construction of Academic System in a New Literary Geography129 Xinlin Mei 9 Regional  Aesthetics and the Historical Formation of the Image of Jiangnan in the Literature of Six Dynasties151 Yonghai Ge 10 American  National Parks: Symbolic Landscapes169 Li Li 11 Walking  Landscape: Spatial Experience and Imagination of Modernity in the Overseas Travelogues in the Late Qing Dynasty185 Jigang Huang 12 Introducing  Literary Geography to the History of Chinese Literature201 Debao Pan 13 Spatial  Metaphors and the Literary Cartography of Shanghai in Modern Chinese Novels221 Lanxiang Ji

 CONTENTS 

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Part III Geocritical Studies and Textual Analysis 239 14 The  Middle Place: Mediation and Heterotopia in Nick Joaquín’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels241 Iping Liang 15 L  ewis’s Babbitt, Literary Maps, and the Production of Space in American Cities257 Hairong Zhang 16 Pretext,  Embedded-Text, Subtext: On the Landscape Narratives of Willa Cather’s One of Ours281 Hongfei Yan 17 Embedded  Geographies in GUO Pu’s “River Fu”299 Sophia Kidd 18 The  Source of the Terror: Interpreting the Liminal Space in Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter311 Ying Tian 19 Antebellum  Literary Cartography and the Construction of an American Oceanic Space327 Jie Hou Index343

Notes on Contributors

Ying  Fang  (方英) is Professor of Comparative Literature and World Literature at Zhejiang Gongshang University, Zhejiang, China. She is the author of Spatial Narrative in Fiction (2017) and more than 40 articles, and the translator of Spatiality by Robert T. Tally Jr. (Peking University Press, 2021). She has completed a project sponsored by China’s National Social Science Fund, “A Study on Spatial Literary Criticism,” and is working on a book and several articles in the fields of Literary Cartography, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Criticism. She is also a poet, who has published a collection (coauthored with ZHONG Xuezheng,  her husband) Walking and Singing (2019), and many poems online. Yonghai Ge (葛永海)  is a professor and PhD advisor in the College of Humanities at Zhejiang Normal University. His fields of expertise are mainly the study of ancient novels and traditional culture and Literary Geography. He is also good at cultural creativity and planning. He has completed seven major projects, including those sponsored by the National Social Science Fund of China, and the ministerial and provincial projects. At present, he is presiding over the key project of National Social Science Fund “A Study on the Literary Maps of Ming and Qing Dynasties from the Perspective of Trekkers’ Narrative.” He has published A Study of Ancient Chinese Novels and Urban Culture and The Principles of Literary Geography (one of the two coauthors) and more than 80 papers in such influential journals as Social Sciences in China, Literary Review, and Literature & Art Studies. More than 20 of them have been reprinted by Xinhua Digest, Chinese Social Science Digest, and photocopies of xvii

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Newspapers of Renmin University of China. His writings have won various awards, including the Second Prize of the Excellent Social Science Achievement Award of China’s Ministry of Education, and the First Prize of Excellent Achievement of Philosophy and Social Sciences in Zhejiang Province. Weihe Wendy Guan  is the Executive Director who manages daily operations of the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University. She came to Harvard in 2006 as the Director of GIS Research Services for the newly established Center. Prior to that, she managed professional services at a GIS consulting firm in Washington; headed the geospatial information technology department for a multinational forestry corporation; and supervised GIS teams in a Florida government agency. Guan has a PhD in ecology and GIS; an MA and MS in geography and natural resource management, and a BS in biology. She taught GIS in various universities, including the Harvard Extension School. Fangyun Guo (郭方云)  is Professor of British and American Literature, and PhD advisor at Southwest University, Chongqing China. For the last ten years he has written, in some of the most peer-reviewed journals in China, twelve articles about literary cartography, such as “The Poetics of the Queen’s Body in literary Map: Taking The Comedy of Errors as an Example,” “‘Give me that map’: The Feminist Production of Space and Geographical Artefacts in King Lear,” “Spatial Politics: Cartography and National Identity in King Lear and Henry V,” “Keywords in Literary Theory: Literary Map,” and so on. His monograph Literary Cartography (2020), published by Commercial Press, the most prestigious publisher in social sciences and humanity in China, approaches geopoetics via ontology and methodology,  directing at the construction of  a  theory of literary mapping systematically. He can be reached at [email protected]. Jie  Hou  (侯杰) is a lecturer at Nankai University, teaching General English. She has written two articles on literary cartography and critical cartography, “The 19th Century American Literary Cartography’s Impact on the Construction of American Sea Space” (2017) and “Maps and Women: Women’s Critical Cartographic Practice and Its Social Functions in the American Progressive Era” (2019). She is going to complete her doctorate in English Literature at Nankai University in 2020 and her dissertation is tentatively titled The Literary Cartography and Oceanic Space Production in the 19th Century American Nautical Narrative.

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Jigang Huang (黄继刚)  is professor in College of Liberal Arts, Shantou University, where he specializes in Spatial Aesthetics, landscape narrative, and keyword criticism. He is the author of two books: Modernity Imagination of Space: Landscape Description in Literature (2017) and A study of Edward Soja’ s Spatial Thoughts (2016). He is also the editor of “New Vision of Literary Criticism,” a Wuhan University Press book series. Lanxiang  Ji  (纪兰香) is Associate Professor of Chinese literature at Jiaxing University. Her fields of expertise are mainly Chinese ancient novels and literary geography. She has completed “The Literary Maps of Beijing and Shanghai in the Novels of the Late Qing Dynasty and the Early Republic of China,” a project granted by China’s Ministry of Education, as well as numerous articles on Literary Spatial Studies. Sophia Kidd  is an associate research fellow at Sichuan University, where she researches classical Chinese aesthetic theory and literature, as well as the implications of this aesthetic theory on China’s contemporary political economy of culture. She read for her BA in Philosophy at University of California: Santa Cruz where she studied History of Consciousness with Prof. David C. Hoy and Philosophy of Religion with Prof. Robert Goff. Her MA in Classical Chinese Literature at Sichuan University was studied under pre-­Qin specialist Prof. Liu Liming, and her PhD was read under Prof. Zhou Yukai, specialist in Song Dynasty literature and Chan poetry. She writes mainly on regional aesthetics, focusing on Southwest China. Her recent book on how culture paves the New Silk Roads, also known as the One Belt One Road or Belt and Road Initiative, discusses political economies of culture and arts infrastructure in the sixty-plus nations and territories along the New Silk Roads. Benjamin  Lewis  has been with the Center for Geographic Analysis, Harvard University, for over ten years. He manages a team that develops and maintains geospatial platforms and tools to support research activities including data visualization, web mapping, data harvesting and enrichment, spatial analytics, georeferencing, gazetteer development, data search and discovery, interoperability solutions, and map portal development. Li  Li  (李莉)  is Professor of British and American Literature at Nankai University, Tianjin. She is the author of Study on 20th Century American Academic Writers (2013) and Women’s Growth: A Feminist Approach to

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Tennessee Williams’ Works (2004). She is working on cultural and literary landscape in American literature. Iping  Liang  (梁一萍)  is Professor of English and American Studies at Taiwan Normal University. She writes in the areas of Archipelagic American Studies, Native American and Indigenous literatures, Asian American literatures, Overseas Chinese Studies, and Critical Plant Studies. As the president of the Association of Studies in Literature and Environment in Taiwan, she organized the 2018 International Symposium of Literature and Environment in East Asia, from which the volume, Mushroom Clouds: Ecocritical Approaches to Militarization and the Environment in East Asia, was germinated (2021). She is the author/editor of Storytelling Survivance: A Critical Reading of Native American Fiction (2021), I’m Migrant: New Perspectives of Overseas Chinese Studies (2018), Ghost Dances: Toward a Native American Gothic (2006), and Asia/America: Asian American Literatures in Taiwan (2013), the first Chinese-language essay collection on multiethnic Asian American literatures. While serving on the advisory board of Multi-Ethic Studies of Europe and the Americas (MESEA), the International Society for Study of Chinese Overseas (ISSCO), and on the executive editorial board of Translocal Chinese: East Asian Perspectives (Brill), she was the Editor-in-Chief of Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies (A&HCI). Her research project investigates the island cartographies in ethnic American literatures. Ying Liu (刘英)  is a professor in the Department of English at Nankai University. She is the author of several books, including Writing Modernity: Geography and Space in American Literature (2017), Seeking for Harmony: Contemporary American and Chinese Women Writers’ Quest for a Better Life (2004). Her research focuses on Literary Geography, studies in mobilities and literature, and Women’s Studies. Juan Mao (毛娟)  professor in College of Chinese Language and Literature at Sichuan Normal University, specializes in western literary theory and art theory. She has written three books, including “Silent Avant-garde” and “Pluralistic Postmodernism”: Studies on Ihab Hassan’s Postmodern Criticism of Literature (2016), and more than 30 essays, such as “A New Landscape in the Face of Contemporary Art” (Literature and Art Research, 2015). She has also translated such articles as “Canon and Times” and “Postmodern Values” included in Literary Theory: An Essential Reader (2013) and presided over three projects granted by the National Social Science Fund of China. In recent years, she focuses her academic interests on contemporary

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western spatial criticism and its influence on China. In addition, she is also a calligrapher, whose calligraphy work was presented to and then collected by Comrade Deng Xiaoping, and who has been invited to give calligraphy lectures at Sorbonne University and other universities or research institutions, which was reported by the European Times. Xinlin Mei (梅新林)  is professor in the School of Humanities at Zhejiang University of Technology, member of the Steering Committee for Cultural Quality Education of China’s Ministry of Education, and member of the Discipline Planning Review Group of the National Social Science Fund of China, as well as president of “Journey to the West” Cultural Research Association, vice president of China’s Society of Dreams of Red Mansions, and editorial board member of Chinese Social Science Digest, Literary Heritage and the Journal of A Dream of Red Mansions. He mainly writes in the fields of Literary Geography, Redology, and Chinese academic history. He has successively presided over one major and two general projects sponsored by the National Social Science Fund. He has written 12 books and more than 100 articles. He has won two Second Prizes of the Excellent Social Science Achievement Award of China’s Ministry of Education, the Original Book Publishing Project Award of the General Administration of Press and Publication of China, three First Prizes and four Second Prizes of the Excellent Social Science Achievement Award of Zhejiang Province. His representative works of Literary Geography and Spatial Research include The Form and Evolution of Chinese Literary Geography (2006) and Principles of Literary Geography (2017). He is working on three projects as an editor-in-chief: a series of monographs entitled Literary Geography Research, a series of translations with the general title of Western Literary Geographies, and a collection of essays included in Literary Geography Reader. Debao  Pan  (潘德宝), PhD  of literature, now teaches in the School of Humanities at Zhejiang University of Technology. His academic interests are Literary Geography and the History of Literary Concepts. He is chairing a key project “Chronicles of Modern Chinese Literary Criticism” sponsored by the National Social Science Fund of China. Robert T. Tally Jr.  is Professor of English at Texas State University. He is the author of numerous books, including For a Ruthless Critique of All That Exists: Literature in an Age of Capitalist Realism; Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination; Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism; Poe and the Subversion of American Literature; Utopia in the Age of Globalization; and Spatiality. His edited collections

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include Spatial Literary Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Space, Geography, and the Imagination; Teaching Space, Place, and Literature; The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space; The Geocritical Legacies of Edward W. Said; Literary Cartographies; and Geocritical Explorations. Tally is also the editor of Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, a Palgrave Macmillan book series. Ying  Tian  (田颖)  is an associate professor in English Department at Hangzhou Normal University. She specializes in English novel, literature of the American South and Spatial Criticism. She is the author of The South and “The Sojourner”: A Study of Carson McCullers’s Novels (2022). She has written many articles on Carson McCullers’s studies and Spatial Criticism, including “The Secrets of Maps: Cognition, Religion and Literature” (2019), “An Overview of Carson McCullers’s Studies Abroad” (2018), “Starting with the Kitchen: On the Spatial Changes in The Member of the Wedding” (2018), “Carson McCullers: a ‘Sojourner’ in the South” (the first co-­author, 2017), “Space and Power: Exploring the Construction of Space in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” (2015), and “The Source of Terror: Interpretation of ‘the Liminal Space’ in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” (2015). Yongming Xu (徐永明)  is Professor of Chinese Literature at Zhejiang University, Assistant Director of Zhejiang Document Collection and Compilation Center, and Lead of Big Data and Chinese Academic Mapping Research Team. He has been to Harvard-Yenching Institute and the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University as a Visiting Scholar. He has written five monographs, six edited books, and five edited volumes of ancient texts, including A Study of Wuzhou Literati from the Yuan to Early Ming, A Biography of Song Lian (1310–1381), Song Lian’s Chronicle, Abstracts on the Individual Collections of Ming Authors Based on Personal Inspection (co-author), Essentials on Documents About Zhejiang (deputy editor-in-­chief), Research Papers on Tao Zongyi, An Anthology of Critical Studies on Tang Xianzu in Western Scholarship (co-editor), Fang Guozhen Historical Materials, Collection of Rare Ming and Qing Works Held in the Yenching Library at Harvard University in the United States (forthcoming), The Individual Collections of Ming and Qing Authors Held in the Yenching Library at Harvard University in the United States (forthcoming), Collected Works of Tao Zongyi, Collected Works of Zheng Yuanyou, Collected Works of Wu Sidao, Collected Works of Hu Kui, Poetry Anthology of Past Dynasties in Puyang.

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Hongfei Yan (颜红菲)  is professor at Nanjing Institute of Technology. She is the author of many articles on Spatial Literary Studies and the translator of Willa Cather’s Shadows on the Rock. She is working on a collection of essays on the Geography of Art as well as a monograph, Geonarrative in Willa Cather’s Novels. Jia Yan (阎嘉)  is Professor of Aesthetics and Cultural Study at Sichuan University, Executive Director of the China’s Society of Literary Theory, President of Sichuan Aesthetics Society, Vice President of Sichuan Literature and Art Theory Research Association. He is the author of Literary Theory: An Essential Reader (2013), Mosaic: A Study on Literary and Cultural Theories in Postmodern Times (2013), and Multi-Cultures and the New Traditions of Literary Criticism in China (2005), as well as numerous articles on spatial and cultural studies. He is also the translator of David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity (2003, 2013) and many articles on Neo-­Marxism and Human Geography. He is chairing a Major Project sponsored by China’s National Social Science Fund, “Translation and Study of the Important Works of Western Neo-Marxist Literary Theories and Space Theories,” and has presided over many projects supported by China’s National Social Science Fund, China’s Ministry of Education, and Sichuan Philosophy and Social Science Research Fund. Jia Yan has also won several Prizes of the Excellent Social Science Achievement Award of China’s Ministry of Education and of Sichuan Province. Hairong  Zhang  (张海榕) is Professor of American Literature at University of Hohai, where she specializes in American literature in twentieth century, with a particular emphasis on space and geography in American Urban literature. She has authored one book, A study of Narrative Space in Sinclair Lewis’s Fiction (2011), and many articles on American literature, including “The ʻHyperrealʼ Urban Landscape in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49” (2019), “Urbanizational Movement, Urban Discourse and Urban Spatial Justice in American Urban Literature” (2019), “Urban Landscape and American Urban Literature” (2018), “Sinclair Lewis’s Portfolio of Literary Maps: Zenith and the Production of Space in American Cities” (2017), “Another Wire-Walker: On Intertextual Writing in Let the Great World Spin” (2017), “ʻThe Revolt from the Villageʼ in Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street” (2012), and “Transracial Narrative in Sinclair Lewis’s Kingsblood Royal” (2010).

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Notes on Translators Libo  Feng  (冯立波) teaches English at the College of Science and Technology, Ningbo University, specializing in the practice, theories, and teaching of translation and interpreting. He translated the chapter “Spatial Narrative in Fiction: ‘Spatialization’ of Fiction Narrative” by FANG Ying. Yüyan  Li  (李雨燕) is a postgraduate student majoring in English Language and Literature at Nankai University, Tianjin, China. She translated LI Li’s chapter “American National Parks: Symbolic Landscapes.” Manhua Liu (刘曼华)  is completing her PhD in the Department of Arts and Humanities at Zhejiang Normal University, majoring in Ancient Chinese Literature. She translated GE Yonghai’s chapter “Regional Aesthetics and the Historical Formation of the Image of Jiangnan in the Literature of Six Dynasties.” Nanxi  Wu  (吴南曦)  is a PhD candidate in Chinese Classics Research Institute, Fudan University. Her research proposal relates to literary geography and poetry studies. She translated PAN Debao’s chapter “Introducing Literary Geography to the History of Chinese Literature.” Yanfei Wu (吴燕飞)  teaches English at Ningbo University, specializing in British and American poetry and spatial narrative. She is also a modern poet of local influence. She translated JI Lanxiang’s chapter “Spatial Metaphors and the Literary Cartography of Shanghai in Modern Chinese Novels.” Hongfei Yan (颜红菲)  is a professor at Nanjing Institute of Technology. She translated MEI Xinlin’s chapter “The Construction of Academic System in a New Literary Geography” in addition to contributing her own chapter “Pretext, Embedded Text, Subtext: On the Landscape Narratives of Willa Cather’s One of Ours.” Wentao  Zhang  (张文涛) teaches translation between Chinese and English at the College of Science and Technology, Ningbo University, specializing in the practice, theories, and teaching of translation. He translated HUANG Jigang’s chapter “Walking Landscape: Spatial Experience and Imagination of Modernity in the Overseas Travelogues in the Late Qing Dynasty.”

List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4

The distribution map of poetry authors in “Complete Yuan Poetry” (全元诗)65 The distribution map of locations in “Siku Quanshu Catalog Summary” (四库全书总目提要)66 Movement tracks of Su Shi (苏轼)67 Movement tracks of Wang Yangming (王阳明)68

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Introduction

There is a thriving tradition of spatially oriented literary studies in China, and this tradition has been bolstered in recent years by the transformative research in spatial theories and practices associated with the spatial turn in the humanities. This volume, Spatial Literary Studies in China, is intended to introduce to an English-speaking audience a selection from the variety of vibrant and innovative work currently being undertaken by literary scholars and critics in China. The book is not imagined as a study of China’s role in spatial literary studies worldwide or of the transcultural and geopolitical issues facing scholars in the critical humanities today. Rather, our more humble aim is to present important and relevant work being done in China, all of which had been previously untranslated and thus largely unavailable to English-speaking readers. Given their diversity and scope, the essays included here represent the wide range of critical practices available to spatial literary studies in China today. The book is divided into three parts, titled “Spatial Theory and Technology,” “Studies in Literary Geography,” and “Geocritical Studies and Textual Analysis,” but in many cases, the content of the individual chapters exceeds and transgresses these artificial boundaries, sometimes combining different perspectives, methodologies, and techniques, and sometimes blending with other approaches. Just as some of the characteristic demarcations among different sorts of studies may not consistently or ultimately hold, so too the divisions employed here in forming the three parts must be viewed as merely heuristic, tentative, and provisional. In Part I, the authors’ contributions explore a number of issues relevant to the spatial turn in the arts and humanities in the twenty-first century. It xxvii

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begins with the brief, historical survey of spatial literary studies by FANG Ying, which in turn sets the stages for the many essays to come in the volume. Next, Chap. 2 by YAN Jia is a discussion of the problems of the two concepts of “space” and “spatialization.” In order to deal with the problems posed by terminological fuzziness for spatial theory and research, this chapter attempts to define “space” as a noun and “spatialize” as a verb, then extends the theory of the production of space to the field of understanding and exploring the spatial production and reproduction of culture and art. Yan argues that, in order to understand the cultural and artistic production of space, we must also look into the philosophical conception, cultural memory, life experience, and expressive modes on which the spatial production of culture and art depend. Yan believes that in this way, we can grasp the uniqueness, differences, and pluralism of the spatial production in activities of culture and art. The third chapter is a systematic and theoretical study on mobilities in American literature, including the research methods and the significance of such study. LIU Ying holds that the “mobility turn” of the twenty-first century has drawn enthusiastic attention from literary studies and argues that mobility is the essential feature of American culture and that American literature’s representation of mobility is mainly based on the model of body-space-mobility, with mobility media (transport technology and transport infrastructure) and mobility politics as the two basic dimensions. According to Liu, the significance of Mobility Literary Studies is: on the micro level, it focuses on the embodiment of mobility and sees mobility as spatial practice of the body; on the macro level, it reveals the interplay between mobility and literature, namely, the changes in narrative structure and literary genre impacted by the transformation of mobility technology and infrastructure, on the one hand, and, on the other, a series of ways in which literature functions, such as observing mobility evolution, revealing mobility politics, participating in mobility discourse, and intervening mobility practice. In Chap. 4, XU Yongming, Benjamin Lewis, and Weihe Wendy Guan discuss the matter of developing the Chinese Academic Map Publishing Platform. This chapter is a response to the trend that humanities research is making greater use of quantitative spatiotemporal analysis and visualization. Xu and his team developed an academic map publishing platform (AMAP) with the aim of supporting the digital humanities from a Chinese perspective. In compiling materials mined from China’s historical records,

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AMAP attempts to reconstruct the geographical distribution of entities including people, activities, and events, using places to connect these historical objects through time. This project marks the beginning of the development of a comprehensive database and visualization system to support humanities scholarship in China and aims to facilitate the accumulation of spatiotemporal datasets, support multi-faceted queries, and provide integrated visualization tools. The software itself is built on Harvard’s World Map codebase, with enhancements which include improved support for Asian projections, support for Chinese encodings, the ability to handle long text attributes, feature level search, and mobile application support. The goal of AMAP is to make Chinese historical data more accessible, while cultivating collaborative open source software development. Chapter 5 views “space” as a key word in the study of art history. MAO Juan observes that “space” is not only a physical existence, but also a product of cultural and social relations and that the interest in “Space” has been brought into the study of art history and art theory, and the emphasis on the social relationship between artistic practice and the environment has become a significant component of this field. Mao finds that diverse spatial agencies mold contemporary art in unique forms, and space conveys its meaningful construction of society, history, culture, art, and other areas. Thus, this chapter concludes that grasping the connotations of the key word “Space” in the study of art history, opening up a new perspective of space interpretation, and changing the way of expression and interpretation in the academic study of art history can provide us with a new approach to the spatial construction of contemporary art history. GUO Fangyun examines the essence of literary maps in Chap. 6. Focusing on the ontological aspects of the practice of literary cartography, which has emerged in the last two decades, this chapter explores three fundamental features of literary maps, namely, ideologicality, visual-textual narrationality, and ontological spatiality. Guo observes that relations and formations of power wind their way through the whole process of space-­ mapping and map-reading, and spatial knowledge arises to be the accomplice of ideology and turns out to be apparent or latent quest for power surveillance. Moreover, the plots of literature are visualized by relative maps through a process by which the spatial backgrounds and narrational contents are well blended. Ultimately literary maps exhibit the ontological features of space via three dimensions, the physical, the narrational, and the symbolic, which in turn foregrounds the internal spatial logic of literary cartography.

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Chapter 7 is a discussion of spatial narrative in fiction. FANG Ying views the spatial narrative in fiction as a narrative model, the “spatialization” of fiction narrative. Fang argues that, compared with the traditional fiction narrative, spatial narrative is dominated by spatial order and logic and is organized, expressed, and completed by spatial construction, with space and spatiality as its focus. Fang examines the spatialization of fiction narrative in two aspects: the spatialization of expression and that of content. The “spatialization” of content is considered by Fang as the emphasis on space in the aspect of content or on the spatial description, position, sequence, relation, and connotation. Fang analyzes it in three ways. First, the foregrounding of space, which lays stress on spaces and sets spaces as the foreground, not the background or backdrop, of fiction narrative. Fang points out that there is either a large proportion of spatial description or a space with an independent and thematic significance. The second is the organization of narrative by space, which is based on the foregrounding of spaces. Fang delves into the three paths to achieve it: to substitute the combination of spaces for the plot, to push the progress of narrative by shifting spaces, and to form a narrative rhythm through the repetition of spaces. The third aspect of the “spatialization” of content discussed by Fang involves spaces as the major source of the meaning of fiction, or, the themes of fiction mainly lying in the meaning of spaces, namely, the meaning of spatial images, perception, and relations. In Part II, the focus is on the field of literary geography, an interdisciplinary approach that combines the humanistic approaches of literature with the social scientific analysis proper to geographical research. Chapter 8 by MEI Xinlin is a tentative construction of academic system in a new Literary Geography. Mei argues that, from the perspective of the space-­ time coordinates of the blending of China and the West in the new century, China’s Literary Geography, which is gradually moving towards the stage of disciplinary self-consciousness, has actually transcended the tradition and the West, and therefore can be named as the “New Literary Geography.” Mei also calls on more scholars to make joint efforts to realize the triple return of the locality, standard, and origin in promoting the transcendence of time and space between ancient and modern times and between China and the West, so as to establish an institutional home for the New Literary Geography, whose academic system can be constructed in terms of the four dimensions of concept, discipline, theory, and methodology.

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In Chap. 9, GE Yonghai surveys the regional aesthetics and the historical formation of the image of Jiangnan in the literature of Six Dynasties. As this chapter reveals, the reason why the region Jiangnan (江南, the South of the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River) becomes a specialized and widely accepted concept rich in symbolic meanings in Chinese culture is not only its prominent economic and cultural position, but that generations of literati have managed to establish this as a place suited to literary representation. This chapter investigates the historical formation of the image of Jiangnan in the literature of Six Dynasties through the perspective of regional aesthetics. Ge observes that the Tribute System since pre-Qin period highlights the truth that the power center has exploited the territories, which makes the specialties in Jiangnan area more notable for people; and this is the historical precondition that Jiangnan becomes a kind of image rather than a simple geographical name. Ge also discloses how twice southern literati’s migrations to northern areas during the Six Dynasties have emphasized and strengthened the perspective of regional aesthetics, which also makes the image of Jiangnan as an aesthetic category that changes in two aspects. Firstly, the patterns of aesthetic activities have transformed into a more positive one. Secondly, it is the landscape rather than the specialty that becomes the main aesthetic object. Ge points out that the unceasing reinforcement of perspective of regional aesthetics and the gradually settled agreement about the conception of Jiangnan are two decisive factors of the historical formation of the image of Jiangnan. LI Li, in Chap. 10, examines American national parks as symbolic landscapes to advocate nationalism. By pointing out that national parks in the United States have been regarded as a true reflection of American spirit and one integral part of American traditional culture, this chapter attempts to demonstrate what important roles national parks play in fostering American national consciousness and constructing national identity and how they reveal the political and national features of landscape. Li also explicates why and how the American national park idea originated, how the national parks were depicted as the representative spaces by painters of the Hudson River School, as well as by explorers, geologists, and writers in the mid- and late nineteenth century. Li shows how their varied landscape depictions aroused American people’s patriotism and collective memory and how these parks and their representation made unique contributions to the construction of American cultural confidence and common identity.

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Chapter 11 by HUANG Jigang examines the spatial experience and imagination in the overseas travelogues in the late Qing Dynasty, which describe the cultural imagination abroad. Huang argues that the overseas travelogue tends to place individual subjects in the mirror of Other to build up identity and cultural construction as it features “moving” and “border-crossing” in space, which would lead to a new understanding of their own culture and their reflective judgments. Huang also points out that its dazzling landscape writing has constructed a geographical and cultural space with obvious “synchronicity,” and such spatial cognition has transcended the limitation of linear narrative of culture and made it possible to produce modern experience in the late Qing Dynasty. In Chap. 12, PAN Debao investigates the introduction of literary geography to the history of Chinese literature. Pan observes that, from the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth century, we can locate four important stages in the process of rewriting the history of Chinese literature initiated by the concept of literary geography. First, in the 1890s, the “Comparative Study of Northern and Southern Literature” began to be registered in a series of works of Chinese literary history written by Japanese scholars. Second, in the 1910s, the study of geographical distribution of playwrights appeared in WANG Guowei’s History of Song and Yuan Drama. Third, in the 1930s, LIU Jing’an and others were devoted to the study of the geographical distribution of writers of the past dynasties in compiling the works on the history of Chinese literature. Fourth, in the 1940s, CHEN Yinke (a.k.a. Yinko Chen) constructed a theoretical model, a “Spatiotemporal Approach” to Chinese literature history. Pan also explains the significance of literary geography’s inclusion in the research of Chinese literature history, such as the methods of geographical research on literature and literati, which can all provide an opportunity for reflection on rewriting Chinese literary history. This in turn can include the re-­ exploration of the mode of literary history, the re-understanding of its object, and the re-interpretation of the driving force of its evolution. Chapter 13 by JI Lanxiang provides a survey about the spatial metaphors and the literary cartography of Shanghai in modern Chinese novels. Ji argues that the clear and accurate description of Shanghai’s urban geographical space by modern novelists objectively presented to the readers a unique map of Shanghai in the world of the texts: The Foochow Road (called “Simalu” [四马路] in the novels, or, No. 4 Horse Road, the English name for the road before 1864) at the core of the British Concession area was in the center of the literary map; the French Concession and the

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American Concession were in the sub-center, and Shanghai county served as the boundary of the map, located between the dominant space and the recessive space. Ji notes that the map of Shanghai in modern novels not only outlined the distribution pattern of Shanghai’s urban space, but also had multiple spatial metaphorical meanings, including the novelists’ national anxiety, urban confusion, and local complexes. The chapters in Part III fall into the category of geocritical studies and textual analysis, or, to borrow Westphal’s and Tally’s term, geocriticism. In Chap. 14, LIANG Iping adopts the historical trope of the “middleman” in order to explore how the ethnic Chinese migrant merchants had historically straddled the divide between the Spanish conquistadors and the local indigenous peoples in the Philippines and investigates the spatial intermediation of the “middle place” in Nick Joaquín’s seminal novel, The Woman Who Had Two Navels (1961). By drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, Edward Soja, Robert Tally, among others, the chapter examines the literary cartography of the “middle place” in the novel. First, it focuses on the ethic enclave of Binondo, Manila Chinatown, which mediates between the native city of Manila and the colonial regime of the US after the war. Second, it applies Edward Said’s thoughts on postcolonial exile to the exilic setting in Hong Kong and investigates how the island space, as a site of Foucauldian heterogenic intermediation, is also a “middle place” that provides Filipino expatriates with a sense of postcolonial exilic agency. Chapter 15 by ZHANG Hairong tries to take the American writer Sinclair Lewis as the “Babbitt Literary Map” of the “imagination space” for the activities of the characters in his works such as Babbitt from the spatial criticism and the cultural geography theory and investigate Zenith City, office buildings, and suburban villas of Babbitt Maps in the process of urban space production in the United States, so as to construct the deep logical connection between the American capitalist social form and class-­ oriented space production and then explore the characteristics and cultural connotations of Lewis’s “Babbitt Literary Map.” In Chap. 16, YAN Hongfei analyzes the pretext, embedded text, and subtext in the landscape narratives of Willa Cather’s One of Ours, the first work that Willa Cather’s multivolume project whose named changed from “Nebraska Trilogy” to “Crisis Series.” Yan notes that landscape narratives not only mark a distinctly local brand for the community society, but also characterize the protagonist and show the splintering historical context. From the perspective of landscape narratives, this chapter explicates how the use of pretext, embedded text, and subtext can make the novel form

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intertextual narrative strategies in order to realize the narrative function such as the thematic change, spatiotemporal metaphors, and narrative irony. Yan believes that it is the landscape narratives that eventually make One of Ours a modern novel full of ambiguities, dialogism, and multiple meanings. Chapter 17, by Sophia Kidd from Sichuan University, views the physical geography in Jin (晋) dynasty GUO Pu’s “River Fu” as embedded geographies. GUO Pu (郭璞) is one of the most erudite writers, scholars, diviners, and geomancers known to the Chinese canon. His lifelong comprehensive studies in Confucian and Daoist classics gave him a working knowledge of how various regions of China contributed to new Eastern Jin dynasty cultural narrative and linguistic tradition. This chapter explores the efficacy of studying the cultural geographical dimension in GUO Pu’s “River Fu” (江赋) in light of comparative Chinese and Western literary geographies. Looking at this fu as an example of literary cartography, we examine the author’s choices of cultural tropes as he narrates the flow of the Yangzi River from its reputed source in the Min Mountains just east of Tibet all the way eastward China’s eastern coastline. TIAN Ying explores the liminal spaces of Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter in Chap. 18. Tian notices that while the sense of terror runs through this novel, the source of the terror seems to be nowhere to be found, which is very perplexing to readers. Tian points out that, by means of the interactions and the transformations between the real and the imaginary, McCullers constructs “the liminal space” which is “neither here nor there” and that in the light of images of the liminal space such as the mirror, the inside room, the outside room, and so on, the author has made a breakthrough in “a temporal master-narrative” by employing the spatialization of time and the spatial narratives to expose the dreadful life of the marginalized people in the Southern U.S. community. Tian analyzes how the experiences of the liminal space incarnate the living experiences, so that McCullers’s concern with the liminal space shows that she gives an insight into the plight and identity of the “Other” in the society of the South. Therefore, Tian locates the source of the terror in space much more than in time. Chapter 19 by HOU Jie discusses the antebellum literary cartography and the construction of an American oceanic space. By using literary cartography, this chapter examines several antebellum American oceanic novels and reveals how the American literary cartography in them reflected and participated in the construction of a distinctively American oceanic

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space. Hou argues that the writers, by composing personal narrative, national narrative, and post-national narrative, symbolically deconstructed the British colonial map, constructed the American national chart, redrew the American national boundaries, and finally predicted the arrival of the era of globalization by portraying a world chart. Altogether, the essays in Spatial Literary Studies in China present a fascinating overview of the important spatially oriented research currently being undertaken by literary scholars in China today. With the publication of these essays in English, we hope to introduce an Anglophone audience to such research, and we look forward to more works in the field of spatially oriented studies by Chinese scholars being made available to readers outside of China. Additionally, we hope to foster more and greater academic exchanges and cooperation among scholars from China, the United States, and elsewhere in the near future. Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China Texas State University, San Marcos, TX, USA 

Ying Fang 方英 Robert T. Tally Jr.

PART I

Spatial Theory and Technology

CHAPTER 1

Spatial Literary Studies in China: A Brief History Ying Fang

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, such topics as space, spatiality, spatial relations, mapping, and geography have risen to become the hot issues in literary studies as well as in other disciplines of humanities and social sciences in China. An increasing number of Chinese scholars have been partaking in a kind of spatially oriented literary study, and their work has become an indispensable and fast growing part of the field “spatial literary studies” as it has emerged globally. For example, in the past two decades, more than 23,000 articles and numerous books of literary studies in China alone have been published with the keyword of “space” in their titles. The rise of spatial literary studies in China has a deep and rich historical context. It would be interesting, and maybe also necessary, to present a brief overview of the notions of “space” in ancient China. The earliest

Y. Fang (*) Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Fang, R. T. Tally Jr. (eds.), Spatial Literary Studies in China, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03914-0_1

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concept of space in China can be traced back to “Cosmos” in Guanzi (管 子⋅宙合篇).1 In this essay, “合” (hé) with the meaning of “a receptacle” is used to refer to “space” while “六合” (six hé) equals the four directions (east, west, south, and north, also the directions surrounding the center) and up and down (四方上下),2 indicating a three-dimensional space. More frequently, “宇” (yǔ) is employed to represent space. As is recorded in “Nature” in Wenzi (文子⋅自然),3 time from the past to the present is called “zhou” (宙), and space consisting of the four directions and up and down, “yu” (宇) (往古来今谓之宙, 四方上下谓之宇). Here, “yu” refers to space while “zhou” to time. In modern Chinese, the phrase “宇宙” (yǔzhòu) means cosmos or universe, and in many cases, the two characters both convey spatial meanings. The ancient Chinese usually viewed “yu” as formless and infinite, as in their opinion, what is formless is necessarily also boundless. For instance, as is discussed in “GENG Sangchu” in Zhuangzi (庄子⋅庚桑楚),4 “yu” is an entity that cannot be contained by anything else (有实而无乎处者, 宇也), which suggests “yu” (space) is objective and infinite. In the meanwhile, some theories also maintain that space (天, tiān, sky/firmament) is finite. For example, the Theory of Celestial Sphere (浑天说, hún tiān shuō), which is the mainstream theory in ancient Chinese astronomy, holds that the sky/firmament is a solid sphere with a shell (its boundaries) on the inner surface of which is embedded the stars, and the sun and the moon move along the curves of the sky.5 Apart from the different views and theories on the finiteness/infiniteness of space, there have been some widely accepted notions with respect to the matter of space. First, many theories believe that there is a constant movement of “Yuan Qi” (元气, the origin of breath and energy) between the sky and earth, which suggests that space is the form of existence and movement of Yuan Qi.6 The second feature of the concept of space in ancient China is that it attaches much importance to the orientation of space, insisting that space is anisotropic and that directions have absolute significance; for example, this theory holds that the directions of up and down as well as the significance of them are absolute.7 Thirdly, as of the pre-Qin period, it has been agreed that the universe is “orderly.” For example, the sky and the earth are opposite to each other, and they are made up of symmetrical and harmonious center with four directions, the position of the center is higher than that of the four directions, and the four directions surround the center. In this order, “Tao” (道, dào) governs the relationship of “heaven, earth and man.”8

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In addition to such concepts as “he” (合), “yu” (宇), and “tian” (天), “dili” (地理) is also an important spatial concept worth discussing, and even indispensable, in examining the notion of space in the history of China. The word “dili” is first used in Zhouyi (周易), or, The Book of Changes, and it goes like this: “By observing the trajectories of stars in the sky and the geographical morphology of the earth we can know the causes of light and dark” (仰以观于天文, 俯以察于地理, 是故知幽明之故。).9 Here “dili” (地理, meaning “geography” in modern Chinese) refers to the morphology of the earth, and constitutes a complementary dichotomy together with “tianwen” (天文, the trajectories of stars in the sky, meaning astronomy in modern Chinese), which embodies the traditional Chinese philosophy of dualism of Yin (阴, back to the sun, the dark) and Yang (阳, facing the sun, the light). Just as the Chinese have long developed their spatial concepts, so they have enjoyed a long history of literary studies which are related to space, spatiality, spatial elements and relations. Such studies in ancient China are focused on human-place relations, or, on the relations and interactions of literature and geography, which may be regarded as a kind of literary geography. This “literary geography” originated from the pre-Qin period, developed in Han and Wei dynasties and the Six Dynasties, enriched and diversified itself in later dynasties, and has become a tradition of Chinese literary criticism. It includes regional literary studies, the geographical studies which involve literary interpretations, the analyses of the geographical elements in literary works, the literary studies from some geographical perspectives, and so on. The earliest literary geographical studies center on the researches on Book of Songs (诗经, Shı ̄jı ̄ng), a representative of the Northern Chinese literature, and The Verse of Chu (楚辞, Chǔcí), a canonical work of Southern Chinese literature; to various degrees, these studies involve interpreting and commenting the works in the two books from the perspective of geography. For example, many interpretations of Book of Songs are related to the discussions on the Poetry of 15 Nations (十 五国风, 15 Guó Fe ̄ng), the different features of the poetry in different nations, or in different regions and geographical environments. Many discussions are also focused on the regional significance of the poetry included in Book of Songs, and how these poems can play the role of enlightening the people in different nations and regions. These can be regarded as a literary geographical study in a broad sense. The earliest representative studies on Book of Songs and The Verse of Chu are Metrical Patterns of Poetry (诗谱, Shı ̄ Pǔ) by ZHENG Xian (郑玄, 127–200 CE) and Notes on The Verse of

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Chu (楚辞章句, Chǔcí Zhāngjù) by WANG Yi (王逸, years of birth and death unknown) of Han Dynasty. These two books are characterized by their rich content of literary geographical criticism. But even before them, a work of history is worth discussing for its “literary geographical research,” that is, The Geography Volumes in Chronicles of the Han Dynasty (also Book of Han) (汉书⋅地理志) written by BAN Gu (班固, 32–92 CE), which is the first work with “geography” in its title in China’s history, and which creates a special style of setting geographical information in official historiography. The volumes have examined the customs of different regions in different dynasties, among other things, through textual research and interpretation of Book of Songs and The Verse of Chu, and reveal the relationship between customs, geography, and politics. The methodology used in this study in and of itself should be viewed as a kind of literary geography. After the Han Dynasties, according to MEI Xinlin (梅新林) and GE Yonghai (葛永海), China’s literary geographical studies have developed in four directions: First, following the legacy of BAN Gu’s, ZHENG Xian’s and WANG Yi’s works, there has gradually formed a tradition of interpreting the canonical literary works, such as Book of Songs and The Verse of Chu, and by doing so examining the relations between geography and literature. Second, studies on the relationship between geographical environments and the writing styles of the writers, along with the content of their works, with LIU Xie’s (刘勰) “stimulating effects of natural sceneries on literary creation” (江山之助), a famous phrase in Dragon Carving and Literary Mind (文心雕龙), as the representative. Third, comparative studies of the Northern and Southern Chinese Literature, with “Preface to Literature” in Chronicles of the Sui Dynasty (隋书⋅文学传序) compiled by WEI Zheng (魏徵) as the representative. Last but not least, studies of regional literature and culture along with the prosperity of local essay collections and poetry comments (诗话, Shı ̄huà).10 Following these four general scholarly directions, China’s literary geographical studies have enjoyed a continuous and fruitful development, and they have focused on such genres as historical records, literary theories, prefaces to essay collections, and commentaries on poetry. Since the early 1900s, China’s literary writing and studies have begun to undergo a modern transformation, so have China’s “spatial literary studies” (mostly studies in literary geography). Among the many aspects of this trend of “modernization,” especially noteworthy are the following: Firstly, in “On the Major Geographical Trends in China,” LIANG Qichao

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(梁启超) put forward the concept of “literary geography” (文学地理, wénxué dìlı ̌) in 1902, and explained that literary geography was often influenced by and thus changed with “political geography,”11 which disclosed that the regionality of literary development and prosperity is closely related to the move of political center. Liang is believed to be the first person to use the phrase “literary geography” in a scholarly writing in China. Secondly, the articles “On the Differences of the Northern and Southern Literature” (南北文学不同论, 1905) by LIU Shipei (刘师培) and “The Spirit of Qu Yuan Literature” (屈子文学之精神, 1906) by WANG Guowei (王国维) completed the summary of the comparative studies on the Northern and the Southern literature. Thirdly, in the 1930s and 1940s, new explorations were made in the realm of regional literary studies. Fourthly, WANG Guowei, LU Xun (鲁迅), and other scholars “restated Chinese literary history” by integrating geographical elements or adopting the perspective of literary geography in their literary history writing.12 According to PAN Debao (潘德宝), there are several important stages in this process. For example, in 1910s the geographical distribution of playwrights’ ancestral home and residence was included in The History of Song and Yuan Drama by WANG Guowei, which signals that literary geography has been integrated into the books of literary history compiled by Chinese scholars; in the 1930s, the publication of such works as An Outline of the History of Chinese Literature (中国文学史大纲, 1931) by CHEN Guantong (陈冠同), Discussing Some Questions in the History of Chinese Literature (中国文学史解题, 1932) by XU Xiaotian (许啸天), and An Outline of the History of Chinese Pure Literature (中国纯文学史纲, 1935) by LIU Jing’an (刘经庵) marks an all-round inclusion of the “geographical distribution of writers” into the new-style history of Chinese literature; in the 1940s, CHEN Yinke (陈寅恪, a. k. a. Yinko Chen) completed the construction of a theory model of a “spatiotemporal approach” to Chinese literary history, which reached an unprecedented height, and which could function as a summary of encompassing literary geography into the new-style history of Chinese literature.13 Since the Reform and Opening Up, literary studies in China have witnessed a rapidly increasing influence from, and embrace of, the Western philosophical, literary, and social theories and ideas, which include the influence of what has been called the “spatial turn.” During 1980s and 1990s, two directions of research have emerged and diverged (and also overlapped in some way) in China’s spatial literary studies. One can be seen as “spatiality studies” of literary works, and the other is inheriting and

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carrying forward the tradition of literary geography. In the first direction, attention has been focused on the matter of spatiality of the form of the works or of the represented world, which encompasses the spatial formations, structures, or “spatial form” (borrowing Joseph Frank’s concept), and the time-space relations in the works; research in this area has also focused on narratological functions, thematic significance, aesthetic values, cultural meanings, and philosophical thoughts of the various types of space and of the spatial relations and elements in the represented world constructed by the author. The works studied are mainly modern Chinese novels and ancient Chinese poetry. There are also studies on spatial theories and criticism of Western scholars, such as Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope theory. However, generally speaking, there has been only a small number of theoretical publications in this realm in China during that period. In the other direction, the studies in literary geography as a tradition have been so much developed that, on the one hand, more articles of theoretical explorations and conceptual discussions have been published while textual analyses have been carried out with an even wider scope and with more profound consequences, and on the other hand, some scholars—like JIN Kemu (金克木), TAO Litian (陶礼天), YAN Jiayan (严家炎), YANG Yi (杨义), and YUAN Xingpei (袁行霈)—began to advocate establishing the distinct discipline of Literary Geography. For instance, by putting forward the concept of “literary topology,” JIN Kemu attempted to advance a kind of “topological” research (also a literary geographical study in a large sense), which consists of at least four aspects. The first is “distribution research,” which includes the regional distribution of authors’ places of birth and residence, and of different styles of literary work and culture, as well as the changes of distribution, the relationship between the region’s geographical features and distribution of litterateurs, arts, culture, and so on. The second is “trajectory research,” which involves the traveling trajectories of some literary writers, artists, works, styles, and genres, and the travel-writing routes of writers. The third can be called “location research,” such as examining the location or locations where a certain literary or artistic school has formed and kept developing. The fourth is named “dissemination research,” like studying how the same motif or structure has emerged or developed in different places, and whether there is a certain model of their formation and development.14 Another important article of this period is TAO Litian’s “Literature and Geography: A Brief Discussion of Chinese Literary Geography,”15

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which specifically advocates establishing the discipline of literary geography, and briefly discusses the connotation and denotation of this concept. This article was originally included in his monograph The Northern “Feng” and Southern “Sao,” where TAO shared his thoughts about the disciplinary location of Literary Geography and its definition: Literary Geography “is both a sub-discipline of human geography, or of cultural geography, and a sub-field of aesthetics, or of social arts,”16 and “is dedicated to studying the multi-layered and dialectical inter-relations between literature and geography,” mainly including the research of “the regional literature and the region of literature, the regional literature and the region of culture, and the regional literature and the regional culture.”17 What should be noticed is that although some scholars began to advocate establishing Literary Geography as a discipline or sub-discipline, the last two decades of the twentieth century mainly saw regional literary studies as the major part and focus of literary geographical studies, with more and more “regional literatures” being recognized and examined, among which the Peking School and Shanghai School were the most influential. As of the beginning of the twenty-first century, spatial literary studies or spatially-oriented studies have witnessed a rapid and remarkable increase and advancement. Chinese scholars have been exploring this realm in two different and mutually reinforcing directions: The first has been focusing on the translation and study of the Western spatial theories, especially U.S. and European texts and theories; the second has been examining Chinese texts, culture, and topics, as well as the attempts to construct Chinese theoretical discourse. The first type of research is largely composed of the translation, introduction, organization, analysis, and localization of the theories, methods, and findings from the West. It mainly encompasses the following four areas: 1. The spatial theories relevant to literature or literary studies, such as those of Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Fredric Jameson, Bakhtin, Edward Soja, David Harvey, and Gilles Deleuze. Among them, Harvey and Soja are the favorites of Chinese spatial literary critics. Much translation and research work has been done around them, like The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change translated by YAN Jia (阎嘉) (who has done several important projects about, and published a series of articles on, the space theories of Harvey) and Soja’s Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places translated by LU Yang

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(陆扬) (who has written numerous articles on the “spatial turn” and the spatial thoughts of the theorists from the West). Also worth noting are the Major Project “The Translation and Research of the Major Works of New Marxist Literary Theories and Space Theories in the West” funded by Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, co-­ chaired by YAN Jia and LU Yang, and HUANG Jigang’s (黄继刚) project “A Key-Word Study on the Postmodern Spatial Aesthetics.” 2. The overlapping territory of literature and geography, including the introduction and studies of cultural geography, literary geography, geocriticism, and landscape, as well as the textual and historical research and disciplinary construction of American literary geography (a Major Project funded by Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, chaired by LIU Ying [刘英] from Nankai University). Some popular translated books in the field of cultural geography include Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values, and Humanist Geography: An Individual’s Search for Meaning, and Mike Crang’s Cultural Geography. Some important articles are LIU Ying’s “Cultural Geography: A Keyword in Critical Theory”18 and YAN Hongfei’s (颜红菲) “A Review on Western Literary Geography Research” and “The Theoretical Context, Main Study Fields, and Research Perspectives of Euramerican Geocriticism.”19 As for landscape study, ZHANG Jianfei (张箭飞) is organizing the translation of the series of “Literature and Landscape” and has published her translated books such as Landscape and Identity: Geographies of Nation and Class in England by Wendy Joy Darby and The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–1800 by Malcolm Andrews, while LI Li (李莉) is writing a book on the studies of landscape. A new trend is that, in the last three years, increasing interest and attention has been attached to Bertrand Westphal and Robert T. Tally Jr., especially Westphal’s “la géocritique” and Tally’s “geocriticism.” Several books by each of them are being translated, more articles have been translated and published in Chinese journals, and an increasing number of articles and book reviews are emerging to introduce and discuss their research and thoughts.20 For example, Westphal’s La Cage des méridiens : la littérature et l’art contemporain face à la globalisation (translated by ZHANG Qiang [张蔷]) and Tally’s Spatiality (translated by FANG Ying [方英]) have been published in Chinese;

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­moreover, Westphal’s La Géocritique: Réel, fiction, espace  and Tally’s Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination  have been translated into Chinese and will be published soon. 3. The theoretical and textual research of mapping, literary maps, and literary cartography, which has risen to the forefront of literary studies in China, and has contributed quite a lot of insightful and inspiring articles to Chinese literary academia. In this area, MEI Xinlin and GUO Fangyun (郭方云) have published excellent works, such as “Literary Mapping” by Mei,21 included in Social Sciences in China, the most authoritative journal of humanities and social sciences in China, and Guo’s series of essays in this field and a book titled Literary Cartography (2020). Also worth pointing out is that Tally’s concept of and studies on “literary cartography” have been drawing increasing attention among Chinese literature scholars. Articles on his “literary cartography” (and his other concepts and thoughts), as well as interviews and book reviews have been published and well and broadly received.22 4. The studies of some particular literary phenomena (such as mobility), genres (such as urban narratives, travel literature), individual writers (such as Franz Kafka, Sinclair Lewis, Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, Italo Calvino, V. S. Naipaul), and various kinds of literary works. Most of such studies employ certain space theories or related methodologies from the West. ZHANG Demin (张德明), CHENG Xilin (程锡麟), LIU Ying, and ZHANG Hairong (张海榕), among others, have done valuable and enlightening explorations in this field. As for the second type, namely, the exploration and reconstruction of Chinese theories and critical discourses in this realm, five aspects are particularly worth discussing. First, the forging or reforging of the theories and discourses of (new) Chinese literary geography, which should be considered as a major contribution that Chinese scholars have made to spatial literary studies, or more broadly, to the spatial humanities, and even more generally to the academic humanities worldwide. In this territory of research, regional studies keep going deeper and wider and remaining its major part, focusing on the topic of the relation between literature and regional culture, including the regionality of literature, the geographical distribution of litterateurs, the literary history of regions, and other related matters. The most important contributions may be the theoretical explorations like YANG Yi’s A Comprehensive Study of Literary Geography23 (which

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is composed of five parts: The General Discussion, Regional Cultures, Ethnic Cultures, Literature and Culture between China and Abroad, The Modern Literary Geography) and a large number of essays of theoretical discussions,24 holistic researches such as The Regional Literary Geographical Research of Wei and Jin Dynasties by HU Axiang (胡阿祥), Traffic and Literature in Tang Dynasty by LI Dehui (李德辉), Maps and Pictures of Chinese Classical Literature by YANG Yi, The Formations and Evolution of Chinese Literary Geography by MEI Xinlin, and Literary Geography and Literati Distribution in Qin and Han Dynasties by LIU Yuejin (刘跃进),25 and especially the construction of a new Literary Geography as an independent discipline, a Major Project chaired by MEI Xinlin, with the remarkable work Principles of Literary Geography collaborated by MEI Xinlin and GE Yonghai as its representative achievement. Chapter 7, “The Construction of Academic System in a New Literary Geography,” will disclose the major arguments, thoughts, and structure of Mei and Ge’s book. Second, the overlapping territory of digital humanities and spatial literary studies, namely, digital maps/mapping of literature. The representatives of this area include two significant projects. One is chaired by WANG Zhaopeng (王兆鹏). It employs the technology of GIS to digitally integrate massive scattered literature materials of literary research (such as those about the chronology of writers’ life, writers’ life stories, notes on the compilation of individual writers’ works, the chronology of literary works of a particular period or a particular region, and so on), and to combine the chronological and geographical information of writers’ works with the historical maps of those works to realize the integration of time and space in literary research and the visualization of writers’ traveling trajectories.26 The other is the Academic Map Publishing Platform managed by XU Yongmin (徐永明). This project is being carried out by Big Data and Chinese Academic Mapping Research Team of Zhejiang University, and the platform is cofounded by Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences, Zhejiang University and the Centre for Geographic Analysis, Harvard University.27 Chapter 2, “Developing the Chinese Academic Map Publishing Platform,” will show us how this platform is operated and what the people there have been doing. Third, the research of “space” in literary studies, aesthetics, art history, cultural criticism, and other relevant fields. Important essays in this area are as follows: “An Exploration of the Problems of Space and Spatialization” by YAN Jia,28 “Space Theory and Literary Space” by LU Yang,29 “Space from Multiple Perspectives: A Keyword for Art History Research” by

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MAO Juan (毛娟),30 “On Aesthetic Space” by YAN Xianglin (颜翔林),31 “The Modern Evolution and Theoretical Dimensions of Spatial Aesthetics” by HUANG Jigang,32 “Literary Space: The Construction of Relations” and “The Spaces in Literary Narrative” by FANG Ying.33 Fourth, studies on spatial narrative, including some theoretical inquiries and a huge number of textual analyses, examining the spatial narrative of some particular works or an individual writer’s narrating style. Quite a lot of books on narratology include the topic of space in narrative. Moreover, there have been about three hundred dissertations with “spatial narrative” in their titles, most of them delving into the matter of spatial narrative in literary works, arts, and films. What is especially worth noting is the theoretical exploration and construction in this territory, such as A Study of Spatial Narrative by LONG Diyong (龙迪勇),34 which aims at a systematic study on the matter of spatial narrative and a tentative theoretical construction of the discipline of “spatial narratology,” and discusses the topics of the spatial turn in narratology, spatial form, spatial writing, the relation between architecture space and Chinese literary narrative convention, as well as the spatiality of memory, of historical narrative, and of image narrative; and FANG Ying’s Spatial Narrative in Fiction,35 which on the basis of defining the concept of “narrative space,” attempts to examine the model characteristics, the time-space relationship, and the implication expression, of the spatial narrative in fiction. Broadly speaking, spatial narrative study can be viewed as a sub-field of narratology which remains a hot field and focus of attention among literature scholars in China’s last twenty years. And fifth, the theoretical construction and critical practice of spatial literary criticism. LU Yang in his 2016 article “The Pedigree of Spatial Criticism” advocates that “although spatial criticism is not a widely-­accepted term, we name it now, hoping that having its name, spatial criticism can open up its bright prospect.”36 FANG Ying in her article “Mapping Spatiality: Spatial Narrative and Spatial Criticism”37 discusses the concept, focus, and scope of research of “spatial criticism,” and argues that “spatiality” is the keyword, the focus, as well as the perspective of spatial criticism. Additionally, HUANG Jigang has investigated the matter of cultural significance in spatial criticism.38 The above are all theoretical discussions. As for critical practice of spatial literary criticism, there have been numerous essays analyzing the spatiality issues of particular works from the perspective of space, or by drawing on some space theories and adopting relevant approaches.

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This brief survey is an attempt to map the major contour lines of spatial literary studies in China, from the ancient times to the present, as well as the important traditions and variations of these studies, and the connections among them. This tentative and provisional map is intended to provide readers with some sense of a big picture of the spatially-oriented and spatially-related researches carried out by Chinese scholars, and the discussion of the twenty-first century studies can particularly serve as a standard by which the essays included in this book have been selected.

Notes 1. Guanzi (管子), whose name is GUAN Zhong (管仲, Guǎn Zhòng), is an important politician, militarist, and Taoist in the Spring and Autumn period. Guanzi is a compilation of thoughts and theories of various schools of philosophy, politics, ethics, etc., especially of Guanzi and the Guanzhong School in the pre-Qin period. 2. 李海, 张仁士: “中国古代对空间的认识,” 《理论探索》, 1995 年第 3 期, 第 19 页。 [LI Hai, ZHANG Renshi, “The Understanding of Space in Ancient China,” Theoretical Exploration, no. 3 (1995): 19.] 3. Wenzi (文子), a philosopher, writer, educator, and thinker in the Spring and Autumn period and Warring States period, is the ancestor of Taoism. 4. The name of Zhuangzi (庄子) is ZHUANG Zhou (庄周, Zhuāng Zhōu), who is a thinker, philosopher, writer, and representative of Taoist School in the middle of the Warring States period. The book Zhuangzi mainly reflects Zhuangzi’s critical philosophy, thoughts of art and aesthetics, and so on. GENG Sangchu (庚桑楚) is the name of a person mentioned in the essay “GENG Sangchu.” 5. 关增建: “中国古代关于空间无限性的论争,” 《自然辩证法通讯》, 1997 年第5期, 第 50–51 页。 [GUAN Zengjian, “On the Infiniteness of Space in Ancient China,” Journal of Dialectics of Nature, no. 5 (1997): 50–51.] 6. 李海, 张仁士: “中国古代对空间的认识,” 《理论探索》, 1995 年第 3 期, 第 20 页。[LI Hai, ZHANG Renshi, “The Understanding of Space in Ancient China,” Theoretical Exploration, no. 3 (1995): 20.] 7. 关增建: “中国古代的空间观念,” 《大自然探索》, 1996 年第 4 期, 第115 页。 [GUAN Zengjian, “The Concept of Space in Ancient China,” Exploration of Nature, no. 4 (1996): 115.] 8. 刘茂国: “中国古代先秦时期空间思想探析,” 《城市》, 2013 年第 2 期, 第 74–76页。 [LIU Maoguo, “The Space Thought in the PreQin Period in Ancient China,” City, no. 2 (2013): 74–76.]

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9. 李学勤主编: 《周易正义》, 北京: 北京大学出版社, 1999 年, 第 266 页。 [LI Xueqin ed., Notes and Corrections of Zhou Yi (Beijing: Peking University Press, 1999), 266.] 10. 梅新林, 葛永海: 《文学地理学原理》, 北京:中国社会科学出版社, 2017 年, 第 31 页, 第 77–87 页。 [MEI Xinlin, GE Yonghai, Principles of Literary Geography (Beijing: China Social Sciences Press, 2017), 31, 77–87.] 11. 梁启超: 《饮冰室合集》第 2 册《饮冰室文集》之“中国地理大势论,” 北京:中华书局, 1989年。 [LIANG Qichao, “On the Major Geographical Trends in China,” in Essays of Drinking Ice Room, the 2nd volume of Collection of Drinking Ice Room (Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company, 1989).] 12. See梅新林, 葛永海: 《文学地理学原理》, 北京: 中国社会科学出版社, 2017 年, 第 31–32 页。 [MEI Xinlin, GE Yonghai, Principles of Literary Geography (Beijing: China Social Sciences Press, 2017), 31–32.] 13. 潘德宝: “文学地理走进新体中国文学史的重要节点与意义,” 《浙江 社会科学》, 2020 年第 9 期, 第 131–140 页。 [PAN Debao, “The Process and Significance of Introducing Literary Geography into the New Works of Chinese Literary History,” Zhejiang Social Sciences, no. 9 (2020): 131–140.] 14. 金克木: “文艺的地域学研究设想,” 《读书》, 1986 年第 4 期, 第 87–90 页。 [JIN Kemu, “Tentative Ideas on the Topology Research of Literature and Arts,” DuShu, no. 4 (1986), 87–90.] 15. 陶礼天: “文学与地理—中国文学地理学略说,” 费振刚、温儒敏主编, 《北大中文研究》, 北京: 北京大学出版社, 1998年, 第 178–196页。 [TAO Litian, “Literature and Geography: A Brief Discussion of Chinese Literary Geography,” in Chinese Studies of Peking University, eds. FEI Zhengang, WEN Rumin, Beijing: Peking University Press, 1998, 178–196.] 16. —: 《北“风”与南“骚”》, 北京:华文出版社, 1997 年, 第 5 页。 [—, The Northern “Feng” and Southern “Sao” (Beijing: Sino-culture Press, 1997), 5.] 17. Ibid., 11–12. 18. 刘英: “文化地理,” 《外国文学》, 2019年第 2 期, 第 112–123 页。 [LIU Ying, “Cultural Geography: A Keyword in Critical Theory,” Foreign Literature, no. 2 (2019), 112–123.] 19. 颜红菲: “开辟文学理论研究的新空间—西方文学地理学研究述评,” 《武 汉大学学报:人文科学版》, 2014 年第 6 期, 第 112–117 页。 [YAN Hongfei, “A Review on Western Literature Geography Research,” Wuhan University Journal (Humanity Sciences), no. 6 (2014): 112–117.] —: “当 代欧美地理批评的理论语境、主要论域和研究视角,” 朱立元主编, 《美 学与艺术评论》(第 19 辑), 太原:山西教育出版社,  2019 年, 第 32–43 页。 [—, “The Theoretical Context, Main Study Fields, and Research Perspectives of Euramerican Geocriticism,” in Journal of Aesthetics and Art

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Review (Vol. 19), ed. ZHU Liyuan (Taiyuan: Shanxi Education Publishing House, 2019), 32–43.]) 20. Studies on Westphal include the following articles: 梅新林, 纪兰香: “论 韦斯特法尔的地理批评,” 朱立元主编, 《美学与艺术评论》(第 19 辑), 太原:山西教育出版社, 2019 年, 第 118–136 页 [MEI Xinlin, JI Lanxiang, “On Bertrand Westphal’s Geocriticism,” in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Review (Vol. 19), ed. ZHU Liyuan (Taiyuan: Shanxi Education Publishing House, 2019), 118–136.]; 张蔷: “论韦斯特法尔的空间隐喻 与世界文学观—从《子午线的牢笼》谈起,” 《外国文学研究》, 2020 年 第 2 期, 第 60–70 页 [ZHANG Qiang, “Westphal’s Spatial Metaphor and His View of World Literature: A Discussion of La Cage des méridiens and More,” Foreign Literature Studies, no. 2(2020): 60–70.]; 齐艳: “波 特兰⋅韦斯特法尔地理批评的四个重要转向,” 《南京社会科学》, 2019 年第 8 期, 第 126–130 页 [QI Yan, “Four Important Turns of Bertrand Westphal’s Geocriticism,” Social Sciences in Nanjing, no. 8 (2019): 126–130.]. Studies on Tally include the following articles: 陆扬: “空间转 向和塔利的空间批评,” 《上海大学学报(社会科学版)》, 2020 年第2期, 第 120–127 页 [LU Yang, “Spatial Turn and Tally’s Spatial Criticism,” Journal of Shanghai University (Social Sciences), no. 2 (2020): 120–127.]; 朱立元, 陆扬, 罗伯特⋅塔利: “关于空间理论和地理批评三人谈——朱立 元、陆扬与罗伯特⋅塔利教授的对话,” 方英译, 《学术研究》, 2020 年第 1 期, 第 143–148 页 [ZHU Liyuan, LU Yang, Robert T.  Tally Jr, “A Trialogue on Space Theory and Geo-criticism—A Conversation Between Zhu Liyuan, Lu Yang and Robert T.  Tally Jr.,” trans. FANG Ying, Academic Research, no. 1(2020): 143–148.]. 21. 梅新林: “论文学地图,” 《中国社会科学》, 2015 年第 8 期, 第 159–181 页。 [MEI Xinlin, “Literary Mapping,” Social Sciences in China, no. 8 (2015): 159–181.] 22. See 方英: 《文学绘图: 文学空间研究与叙事学的重叠地带》, 《外国文学 研究》, 2020 年第 2 期, 第 39–51 页 [FANG Ying, “Literary Cartography: An Overlapping Territory of Spatial Literary Studies and Narratology,” Foreign Literature Studies, no. 2 (2020): 39–51.]; —:“文学空间研究: 地 方、绘图、空间性,” 朱立元主编, 《美学与艺术评论》(第 19 辑), 太原: 山西教育出版社, 2019 年, 第 56–72 页 [—, “Spatial Literary Studies: Place, Mapping, and Spatiality,” in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Review (Vol. 19), ed. ZHU Liyuan (Taiyuan: Shanxi Education Publishing House, 2019), 56–72. ]; 袁源: “Doing and Teaching Spatial Literary Studies: An Interview with Robert T. Tally Jr.,” 《外国文学研究》, 2019 年第 3 期, 第 1–15 页 [YUAN Yuan, “Doing and Teaching Spatial Literary Studies: An Interview with Robert T. Tally Jr.,” Foreign Literature Studies, no. 3 (2019): 1–15.]; 沈洁玉: “空间⋅地方⋅绘图: 《劳特利奇文学与空间手册》 评介,” 《外国文学动态研究》, 2019 年第 2 期, 107–112 页 [SHEN

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Jieyu, “Space, Place, and Mapping: A Review of The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space,” New Perspectives on World Literature, no. 2 (2019): 107–112.]. 23. 杨义: 《文学地理学会通》, 北京: 中国社会科学出版社, 2013年。 [YANG Yi, A Comprehensive Study of Literary Geography (Beijing: China Social Sciences Press, 2013).] 24. The important essays include YANG Yi’s and MEI Xinlin’s series of essays which are mostly included in their books, and the following: 曾大兴: “建 设与文学史学科双峰并峙的文学地理学科——文学地理学的昨天、今天 和明天,” 《江西社会科学》, 2012 年第 1 期, 第 5–13 页 [ZENG Daxing, “To Establish the Discipline of Literary Geography as Important as the Discipline of Literary History—The Past, Present, and Future of Literary Geography,” Jiangxi Social Sciences, no. 1 (2012): 5–13.]; 钟仕伦: “概 念、学科与方法: 文学地理学略论,” 《文学评论》, 2014 年第 4 期, 第 28–35 页 [ZHONG Shilun, “The Concepts, Discipline, and Methodology: On Literary Geography,” Literary Review, no. 4 (2014): 28–35.]; 彭民权: “文学地理学的体系建构与理论反思,” 《江西社会科学》, 2014 年第 3 期: 86–91 [PENG Minquan, “The Systematic Construction of and Theoretical Reflection on Literary Geography,” Jiangxi Social Sciences, no. 3 (2014): 86–91.]. 25. 胡阿祥: 《魏晋本土文学地理研究》, 南京: 南京大学出版社, 2001 年。 [HU Axiang: The Regional Literary Geographical Research of Wei and Jin Dynasties (Nanjing: Nanjing University Press, 2001). ] 李德辉: 《唐代交 通与文学》, 长沙: 湖南人民出版社, 2003 年。 [LI Dehui, Traffic and Literature in Tang Dynasty (Changsha: Hunan People’s Publishing House, 2003). ] 杨义: 《中国古典文学图志》, 上海: 生活⋅读书⋅新知三联书店, 2006 年。 [YANG Yi, Maps and Pictures of Chinese Classical Literature (Shanghai: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2006).] 梅新林: 《中国文学 地理形态与演变》, 上海: 复旦大学出版社, 2006 年。 [MEI Xinlin, The Formations and Evolution of Chinese Literary Geography (Shanghai: Fudan University Press, 2006).] 刘跃进: 《秦汉文学地理与文人分布》, 北京: 中 国社会科学出版社, 2012 年。 [LIU Yuejin, Literary Geography and Literati Distribution in Qin and Han Dynasties (Beijing: China Social Sciences Press, 2012).] 26. The important achievements of this project include five major databases, namely The Chronologically Geographical Database of Works in Tang and Song Dynasties (唐宋作家作品编年系地数据库), The Database of Basic Information of Poets in Tang and Song Dynasties (唐宋诗词文作者基本信 息库), Database of Jinshi in Tang and Song dynasties (In the imperial examination system in ancient China, those who passed the royal court examination of the central government were called Jinshi.) (唐宋进士数据库), Annals Database of Civil Officials in Tang and Song Dynasties (唐宋文官编

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年数据库), Entry Database of 20th Century Research Works on Literature in Tang and Song Dynasties (20 世纪唐宋文学研究论著目录数据库), with nearly 500,000 records of data and more than 20,000,000 Chinese characters, and Chronological Maps of Tang and Song Literature which employs the technology of GIS to integrate the chronological and geographical information of writers’ works in Tang and Song Dynasties with the historical maps of those works to visualize the writers’ traveling trajectories and the information of their literary creation. These can be reached via https:// sou-­yun.com. 27. The platform can be reached by http://amap.zju.edu.cn. Since its release on 19 March 2018, more than 1600 maps and dozens of millions of records of data have been published. The published data and maps of this platform cover the fields of Geographical Science, Environmental Sciences, Transportations, and Humanities, etc. In the area of Humanities are data and maps about the geographic distribution of the writers from Complete Works of Song (全宋文), Complete Poetry of Yuan (全元诗), Biographies of a Collection of Poetry from Past Dynasties (列朝诗集小传), as well as of the playwrights of Ming and Qing Dynasties, of the writers from Jiangxi Province during Song Dynasty, and the like. 28. 阎嘉: “空间和空间化问题蠡测,” 朱立元主编, 《美学与艺术评论》 (第19辑), 太原: 山西教育出版社, 2019 年, 第 21–31 页。 [YAN Jia, “An Exploration of the Problems of Space and Spatialization,” in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Review (Vol. 19), ed. ZHU Liyuan (Taiyuan: Shanxi Education Publishing House, 2019), 21–31.] 29. 陆扬: “空间理论和文学空间,” 《外国文学研究》, 2004 年第 4 期, 第 31–37+170 页。 [LU Yang, “Space Theory and Literary Space,” Foreign Literature Studies, no. 4 (2004): 31–37+170.] 30. 毛娟: “多元聚焦的空间:艺术史研究的关键词之一,” 《文艺理论研 究》, 2016年第4期, 第171–174页。 [MAO Juan, “Space from Multiple Perspectives:A Keyword for Art History Research,” Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art, no. 4 (2016): 171–174.] 31. 颜翔林: “论审美空间,” 《文艺理论研究》, 2010 年第 2 期, 第 51–56 页。 [YAN Xianglin, “On Aesthetic Space,” Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art, no. 2 (2010): 51–56.] 32. 黄继刚: “空间美学思想的现代演进及其理论面向,” 《西南民族大学 学报(人文社会科学版),》, 2015 年第 12 期, 第 207–212 页。 [HUANG Jigang, “The Modern Evolution and Theoretical Dimensions of Spatial Aesthetics,” Journal of Southwest Minzu  University (Humanities and Social Sciences), no. 12 (2015): 207–212.] 33. 方英: “文学空间: 关系的建构,” 《湘潭大学学报(哲学社会科学版)》, 2016 年第 3 期, 第 107–110 页。 [FANG Ying, “Literary Space: The Construction of Relations,” Journal of Xiangtan University (Philosophy

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and Social Sciences), no. 3 (2016): 107–110.] —:“文学叙事中的空间,” 《 宁波大学学报(人文科学版)》, 2016年第4期, 第 42–48 页。 [—, “The Spaces in Literary Narrative,” Journal of Ningbo University (Liberal Arts Edition), no.4 (2016): 42–48.] 34. 龙迪勇: 《空间叙事学》, 上海: 生活⋅读书⋅新知三联书店, 2015 年。 [LONG Diyong, A Study of Spatial Narrative (Shanghai: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2015).] 35. 方英: 《小说空间叙事论》, 上海:上海交通大学出版社, 2017 年。 [FANG Ying, Spatial Narrative in Fiction (Shanghai: Shanghai Jiaotong University Press, 2017).] 36. 陆扬: “空间批评的谱系,” 《文艺争鸣》, 2016 年第 5 期, 第 86 页。 [LU Yang, “The Pedigree of Spatial Criticism,” Contention in Literature and Art, no. 5 (2016): 86.] 37. 方英: “绘制空间性: 空间叙事与空间批评,” 《外国文学研究》, 2018 年第 5 期, 第 114–124 页。 [FANG Ying, “Mapping Spatiality: Spatial Narrative and Spatial Criticism,” Foreign Literature Studies, no. 5 (2018): 114–124.] 38. 黄继刚: “空间批评和文化意义生成,” 《温州大学学报⋅社会科学 版》, 2012 年第 6 期, 第 38–43 页。 [HUANG Jigang, “Spatial Criticism and Generation of Cultural Significance,” Journal of Wenzhou University (Social Sciences), no. 6 (2012): 38–43.]

CHAPTER 2

An Exploration of the Problems of Space and Spatialization Jia Yan

Difficulties in Understanding and Defining the Term “Space” Now, space has become a hot topic in Chinese academic circles. We can find discussions and researches on space in a variety of fields—literature, art, sociology, architecture, urban planning, Marxist philosophy and so on—and there have been many inspiring and constructive achievements. However, about how to define the meaning of “space” theoretically, and how to understand the constructing role of this concept in the history and culture of a particular nation, there are still great ambiguities and This chapter was originally published with title “An Exploration of the Problems of Space and Spatialization” in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Review (vol. 19), ed. ZHU Liyuan (Taiyuan: Shanxi Education Publishing House, 2019), 21–31. [阎 嘉, “空间与空间化问题蠡测,” 《美学与艺术评论》(第 19 辑), 朱立元主编, 太 原: 山西教育出版社, 2019 年, 第 21–31 页。

J. Yan (*) Sichuan University, Chengdu, China © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Fang, R. T. Tally Jr. (eds.), Spatial Literary Studies in China, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03914-0_2

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vagueness in our academic world. For example, when we meet such terms as environment, landscape, mountains and rivers, place, location, district, region, area, surface, boundary, distance, and geographical location, regardless of what the authors originally mean, we are often in lack of a clear and explicit definition of their meaning. In other words, most of the research results remain in a vague and simple description for them. In fact, David Harvey has already recognized the difficulty of defining the word “space,” and he argues: ‘Space’ often elicits modification. Complications sometimes arise from the modifications (which all too frequently get omitted in the telling or the writing) rather than from any inherent complexity in the notion of space itself. When, for example, we write of ‘material’, ‘metaphorical’, ‘liminal’, ‘personal’, ‘social’ or ‘psychic’ space (just to take a few examples) we indicate a variety of contexts that so inflect matters as to render the meaning of space contingent upon the context. Similarly, when we construct phrases such as spaces of fear, of play, of cosmology, of dreams, of anger, of particle physics, of capital, of geopolitical tension, of hope, of memory or of ecological interaction (again, just to indicate a few of the seemingly infinite sites of deployment of the term) then the terrain of application defines something so special as to render any generic definition of space a hopeless task.1

If we take a closer look at this problem, we will realize that many famous scholars engaged in the study of space are more or less aware of the complexity of defining “space.” Rob Shields, a Canadian scholar, has found that there are over 17 definitions for “space” in the Oxford Dictionary. Although the term “space” in English is etymologically derived from Latin spatium in the same way as French and Italian, “English-language theorists have often limited their appreciation of space to a quantitative definition with reference to distance and to time.”2 Edward Soja, a student of Henri Lefebvre, also realizes: while such adjectives as “social,” “political,” “economic,” and even, “historical” generally suggest, unless otherwise specified, a link to human action and motivation, the term “spatial” typically evokes the image of something physical and external to the social context and to social action, a part of the “environment,” a context for society – its container – rather than a structure created by society.3

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There might be many more such arguments. However, in recent years, in the Chinese context, in addition to Edward Soja, people are more familiar with Henri Lefebvre’s and David Harvey’s theories of space, whose thoughts and views were deeply influenced by Marxist theoretical tradition. In The Production of Space, published in 1974, Lefebvre proposes the famous dialectical triad of spaces: the perceived-conceived-lived triad (in spatial terms: spatial practice, representations of space and representational spaces).4 According to Harvey’s explanation, “spatial practice” refers to “the space of experience and of perception open to physical touch and sensation”; “representations of space” means “space as conceived and represented”; and “representational space” implies “the lived space of sensations, the imagination, emotions and meanings incorporated into how we live day by day.”5 Harvey himself, in his 1973 book Social Justice and the City, puts forward the concepts of “absolute space,” “relative space” and “relational space.”6 In his view, “[a]bsolute space is fixed and we record or plan events within its frame”; in terms of relative space, “[s]pace is relative in the double sense: that there are multiple geometries from which to choose and that the spatial frame depends crucially upon what it is that is being relativized and by whom”; “[r]elevant space” means “there is no such thing as space or time outside of the processes that define them.”7 When we discuss the theories raised by Lefebvre and Harvey and apply their ideas to the explanations of the more extensive problems of space (such as the architectural space, city space, art space), we should distinguish the different starting points and aims of these pioneers of contemporary theory of space, fully understand and digest their intentions and real meanings, instead of simply applying their theories to the different contexts. For example, the dialectical triad of spaces proposed by Lefebvre mainly aims at revealing the operating rules of capitalist society in the context of urbanization and globalization after the Second World War, especially exploring deeply the possibilities of the socialist revolution and liberation in this context. Harvey’s space theory, mainly from the perspective of geographical space, focuses on the capital expansion around the world in the postmodern era of capitalism, and pays close attention to the unbalanced development of geography and the unfair and unjust problems caused by the capital expansion. Harvey’s theoretical construction relies on the classical Marxist theory of political-economic critique of capitalism and tries to develop his historical-geographical materialism in the postmodern times.

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Therefore, when Chinese researchers continue to pay attention to various spatial issues, what is most important for them is not just to introduce the works and the viewpoints of important theorists abroad, or just to apply them to different professional fields, let alone just borrowing the terms superficially. The crux of the problem lies not only in that we are in a completely different social context, but also there are great differences in the origin, path, connotation and goal of our researches. For us, it is very difficult to use Harvey’s concepts of “absolute space,” “relative space” and “relational space” (he even adds into the terms some Marxist political-­ economic ideas from Capital like labor, capital, use value, exchange value and value) to interpret Chinese traditional landscape painting and the unique ideas of space in the different aspects of Chinese ancient arts. Nor can we apply Lefebvre’s theory of the dialectical triad of spaces to the analysis and evaluation of various kinds of Chinese contemporary issues of culture and arts (such as current approaches of space problems in the field of visual images in our academic world). I believe that one of the most important questions in the study of space theory within Chinese academic circles is how to get out of the one-way acceptance of the foreign theories and ideas, including Lefebvre’s and Harvey’s impacts, in spite of their importance, and how to get rid of the bondage of their theoretical frameworks. We should no longer simply make explanations for the foreign theories and views, instead, we ought to concentrate on different issues in the fields of space, especially with the spatial problems related to the uniqueness of our cultural tradition, difference and diversity. We should abandon the way of thinking of homogeneity and simplification. Otherwise, our study of theory of space will end up in a blind alley.

Analysis of the Connotations of Space and Spatialization When we try to delve deeper into the connotations of the concept and theory of space, “space seems to turn into an inaccessible territory suddenly.” “Nonetheless, our semantic confusion does not stop us from using the word in almost any context as one term in a helpful metaphor, or as an analogy for an abstract concept … ʻSpace’ proliferates in our discourse.”8 However, in my opinion, we can set aside the semantic confusion and contextual complexity of the term “space” temporarily and, instead, make

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a preliminary clarification for the term from a general point of view. This may help us to approach and grasp the basic meaning of this word. Starting from the simplest meaning of this word, we can find that the two most obvious and fundamental differences—the space as a noun-based concept and the spatialization as a verb-based one—the two connotations are actually very different in meaning. Based on these two different properties of the term space, we are able to clarify the semantic confusion in the use of the term space in the theoretical field with some accuracy. Firstly, “空间” (space) is a noun-based term, and it is only used as a noun lexically in Chinese. It refers to “existence,” and it’s an “objective” existence relative to our “abstract” consciousness. This is the most basic connotation of the word “空间” (space). “空间” (space), as “existence,” can be definitely divided into two obviously different categories in the real world. One is material, real or concrete space, such as buildings, urban blocks, geographical areas, mountains and rivers in nature. This kind of space, as material, real and concrete existence, is the most basic condition for our everyday life, and the entity that we can feel and grasp with our own senses in our real world. Therefore, we can name it as “physical space.” At the same time, there is another kind of spiritual, abstract or conceptual space, such as the representations of maps, networks, advertisements and other media, diagrams, schematics as well as images and boundaries in artistic communication. These spaces are the conceptual, symbolic and abstract subsistence of incorporeity. They are also indispensable to our existence in the world. They are the guidance and the referential framework for us to understand, grasp and guide our own life in the perception of the physical space. We may refer to them as “conceptual spaces.” From the ontological point of view, human beings exist not only in the physical, concrete and subsistent space, but also in the spiritual, abstract and conceptual space. Both of the two kinds of space are often interwoven and overlapped in our existence and perception. Yet, more and more theorists on space theory have recognized that the complexity of spatial problems not only lies in the interweaving and blending of two different aspects of space in the sense of existence. Physical space and abstract space do not merely “exist” here or there objectively and immutably. In other words, being presence of space, if it is not relative to human history, tradition, culture, social practice and various creative activities, then it is meaningless and does not deserve our theoretical attention and discussion. As a result, in recent years theorists have been talking

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more and more about another important term—spatialization. As professor Rob Shields of the University of Alberta in Canada says: Since its presentation in Places on the Margin, spatialisation seems to have provided a tool-kit for geographical analyses of a much broader set of phenomena … The term has been disseminated as a keyword across human geography in particular. Contributors to a recent reference book use the term over a hundred times in 350 pages to profile Key Thinkers on Space and Place.9

In the everyday usages of French and English, according to Shields, the term spatialization means “making sth. have spatiality.” According to French thinkers in the twentieth century as Foucault and Deleuze, he argues, in the French usage, spatialization more indicates “to capture the sense in which places are ‘cast’ as ‘places-for-this’ or ‘places-for-that’.” He uses the term to emphasize on its role of culture, that is, “the cultural role that it plays by constructing a crucible and arena for the play of capital, art and technology.”10 Shields’s point is very important and very enlightening. In my opinion, if “空间 (space)” as a noun refers to an “objective” entity, then “空间 (spatialize)” as a verb should be given a different term for distinguishing. Shields’s term “spatialization (空间化),” in my opinion, is an appropriate term for the verb-based “空间.” Therefore, “空间化 (spatialization),” as a verb-based term, refers to a kind of human social practice, through the construction of practical, operational activities and make something present, and in the process, make people’s ideas, thoughts, concepts, feelings, emotions, and so on become a sensible, tangible and perceptible thing (object, image, sound, language, etc.). Thus, “空间化 (spatialization),” as a kind of social constructional practice unique to human beings, corresponds to the aforementioned two meanings of the term space, namely, physical space and conceptual space. In this sense, we can also say that space is the result of the spatialization of human activities. It is also in this sense that we can say that spatialization is a kind of social production and reproduction of space, and space, as the result of spatialization, must have sociality. For example, a building is the result of the actual construction by workers according to the blueprint of the architect. It is the product of the spatialization of the physical form of the blueprint through the labor practice of the society. The construction activity of workers is a kind of social production activity of space. The blueprint of an architect is also a kind of spatialized social production

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activity, which is the product of transforming the ideas and images in his mind into the abstract spatialized drawings. Workers create a physical space through social spatialized production, while architects create a conceptual space through social spatialized production. Furthermore, spatialization or spatial production as a kind of constructive activity is made up of two categories: social space production and cultural space production. The production of social space is often relative to the physical and material production and the construction of social practice. In Lefebvre’s eyes, space is social space, production of space is the production of social space, and social space is the product of social practice. The focus of Lefebvre’s space theory is on the characteristics of the development of contemporary western capitalist society, and he tries to criticize the space production of capitalism from the perspective of Marxist theory of social space, and inquires the possibility and problems of urban revolution. Harvey’s historical-geographic materialism dissects the capital dynamics behind the space production of capitalist society in the postmodern era based on the accumulation and the circulation of capital, and he aims to reflect on the possibility and problems of proletarian revolution in the postmodern condition. It follows that the production of space in different societies has different purposes, methods, theoretical frames and models, and naturally has different influences and functions on their social life. The production of cultural space in the process of spatialization has a more direct relationship with the understanding of activities of artistic production and its historical process. So far, the production of cultural space has not attracted enough attention from theorists, or people have not paid enough attention to the production of cultural space. Lefebvre once said: “Donc, un certain « travail » sur le texte (message) qui produit du sens en partant d’ébauches, de fragments, ce qui entraîne un mouvement complexe.” (“Hence, a certain ʻworkʼ on the text [message] which produces the meaning starting from attempts and fragments which provoke a complex movement.”)11 According to this, we can also say that, from the perspective of the theory of space production, all artistic creation activities are essentially activities of the production of cultural space. Although we can regard “production of meaning” as the core and ultimate aim of activities in the production of cultural space, the process of production of the cultural space is not so simple. For example, the meaning of art is represented not only through the entirety of the work of art, but also embodied in its material, technology and process of production.

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Different Aspects: Production of Cultural Spaces and Artistic Ones Professor Rob Shields attaches great importance to the status and role of cultural space in spatial production. He says, “Is space not a cultural artefact in its own right, a socially produced framework which may become a self-fulfilling prophecy by structuring actions? Nearly every philosopher and social thinker has dealt in some way with space or spatiality.”12 When he analyzes the “dialectical triad of spaces” put forward by Lefebvre, he points out that Lefebvre’s space theory has made an important theoretical revision to Marxism, and proposed that production of social space is not only the production of commodities or other products, but also the production of works of art or works of nature. He quotes M. Smith’s summary of Lefebvre’s space production of the dialectical triad of spaces: Space is perceived through involvement in ‘social practices’, conceived in ‘representations’ of that space, e.g. architecture, and lived through the association of images and symbols with specific representational ‘spaces’ that acquire and communicate meanings and are the loci of passions, e.g. the home, the wilderness and so on. Each aspect of this triad of spatial relations is in a dialectical relation with the others.13

It strikes me for its excessive complication and convolution. For example, expressions like “perceived,” “conceived,” “lived” and “communicate” seem to show us a temporal order. This kind of relationship seems to be inconsistent with the real condition where we experience space in our existence. For another example, “[e]ach aspect of this triad of spatial relations is in a dialectical relation with the others.” In practice, how should we understand and explain this “dialectical relation”? In my opinion, in the production of cultural and artistic space, what is the most important and the most fundamental is the subject of production—people (cultural producers, artists, etc.)—and their complex perceptual activities in the situation of co-existence with the physical and abstract spaces. In this process, the producers of space are bound to develop together in the intentional relationship and sympathy with the physical and abstract spaces by relying on some existing concepts, frames, patterns, past life experiences, specific traditions and cultural memories, unique expressions and material media. Thus, the exploration of the production of cultural and artistic spaces is primarily to inquire the pre-existing

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concepts, frames, modes, past life experiences, specific traditions and cultural memories, unique expressions and the mastery of material media that cultural and artistic producers rely on in their production activities, rather than the physical space itself. The acquisition of cultural and artistic meanings is also relative to these factors. In short, the production of cultural and artistic spaces and the acquisition of the meanings result really in the products of the existing concept and understanding framework that the producer relies on. Besides, the more complex problem is that the ideas, concepts and theoretical frameworks on which the production of cultural and artistic spaces depend have no unified and universal mode, let alone the so-called universal and eternal “law.” Emphasizing this point means that we should acknowledge the uniqueness and the difference of the production of the cultural and artistic spaces. This question is precisely the most contentious focus in space researches and theories. In any case, we can put aside all kinds of disputes for the time being and start from the important aspects involved in the production of culture and art spaces: concepts, ideas, comprehension framework, emotional accumulation and so on, which in most case play a vital role in the production of cultural and artistic spaces. 1. The philosophical ideas on which the producer depends in the production of cultural and artistic spaces. In the practice of the production of space, the most basic philosophical ideas on which the producers depend are bound to be closely relative to the cosmology of a nation and its cultural tradition. There has never been the uniformity and the universality in the cosmology of different nations and their cultural traditions. For example, in the ancient Chinese cosmology dominated by pre-Qin Dynasty Confucianism, the view of the cosmology conceived and taken for granted is like this: Alternation between Yin (阴) and Yang (阳) is called Tao…. Heaven is lofty and noble, Earth is low and humble, and the positions of Qian (乾) and Kun (坤) are thereby determined. The determination of loftiness and lowness prescribes positions of nobility and humbleness for all things of creation. Movement of heaven and tranquility of earth are in constancy, they demonstrate clearly the firm nature of Yang and the yielding nature of Yin. Concepts and ideologies are divided in the same categories,

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animals and plants are distinguished in similar groups, contradictions between similarity and difference always give rise to good fortune and disaster. Planets in the sky form patterns of celestial phenomena, geographic features and all things of creation on the earth take different shapes. In those patterns, features and shapes manifest the principles of change. Therefore, mutual communion and alternation between firm Yang and yielding Yin evolve into the eight trigrams, and various combinations of two trigrams form the sixty-four hexagrams. It is just as thunder rumbles, wind breezes and rain moistens, the sun and the moon move in cycles and seasons alternate between heat and cold. The sages designed hexagrams through observation of natural phenomena, attached judgments to indicate clearly good fortune and disaster, and alternation of firm Yang and yielding Yin gives rise to endless changes.14

Thus, Yin and Yang, Heaven and Earth, the Way of Heaven, Dignity and Abasement, Qian and Kun, Hardness and Softness, Sages and Hexagrams make up the key words in the basic framework of this cosmology. This view of the universe has dominated ancient Chinese perceptions of the universe and the nature and the production of cultural and artistic spaces throughout the lengthy history. The spatial structure and presentation in ancient Chinese mountains-and-waters paintings, either explicitly or implicitly, interpret such a cosmic conception in the way of “embodying Tao (道) by shapes.” In the cosmology of ancient Greece, Phoenicia, Egypt and Rome, which originated from the Mediterranean civilization, the philosophical conception and its model almost follow the mathematical logic such as arithmetic and geometry. In the light of this philosophical idea and thinking modes it is assumed that space follows the law of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and so on to be able to measure and master the logic of the finiteness, and its basic principles had been formulated by a lot of thinkers, such as Pythagoras, Aristotle, Euclid, Newton etc. They constitute the mainstream of traditional view of space in Europe since ancient times. Therefore, we could find that the view of the universe in old Chinese civilization often is chaotic, non-linear, non-logic, infinite, but in the Mediterranean culture, the view of the universe is arithmetic, geometric, logic, linear, finite. Both of two different traditions parallel in thousands of years of history, their shapes and their ancient main traditions of the production of cultural and artistic spaces have no common grounds. They are not blended, mutual-impacted or mutual-influenced. Hence, we can say that the philosophical tradition of the production of cultural and artistic

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spaces of Chinese civilization and that of the Mediterranean civilization is fundamentally incommensurable. 2. The cultural memory on which producers depend in the production of cultural and artistic space. Cultural memories in different ethnic and cultural traditions are always embodied in the unique images or motifs of their literature and arts. They continue to influence the process of spatialization and spatial production in the production of cultural and artistic space, thus forming the difference, uniqueness and irreplaceability of national culture and art. The images of Nüwa (女娲) and Houyi (后羿) in ancient Chinese myths, and the expressions of apricot blossom (杏花), spring rain (春雨), Jiangnan (江南), north of the Great Wal l(塞上), falling flowers (落红) and autumn clouds (秋云) in our ancient poetry, as well as the motifs of dreams, retribution and reunion in novels and operas, all reflect the cultural memories passed down from generation to generation in the long history  of the Chinese nation. As cultural images and motifs, they are often crystallized in the creation of cultural and artistic space in the form of cultural heritages, thus shaping the uniqueness and differences that vary from other national cultures. In the Mediterranean civilization, Achilles, Zeus, Aphrodite, Apollo, Prometheus, Oedipus, Virgin Mary, Christ, Magdalene, Medusa and so on are the images and motifs of Greek and Christian culture in ancient history. These cultural images and motifs are also unique and unrepeatable, and they have influenced explicitly or implicitly the production and reproduction of later cultural and artistic spaces. It needs to be emphasized that the unique images and motifs formed by different national cultures during the diachronic process cannot disappear or be erased, just like birthmarks. Therefore, the unique images and motifs in the production of cultural and artistic space make a nation and its cultural tradition keeps its original color in the production and reproduction of cultural and artistic space. This is the real source of the discrepancy between national cultures and arts. Although the interflow and influence of different civilizations exist in the process of cultural inheritance, their differences are unable to be eliminated or ignored. 3. The life experience on which the producer relies in the production of cultural and artistic space. In the process of production and repro-

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duction of cultural and artistic space, a nation’s philosophical ideas and cultural memories tend to be collective, or they are tacitly approved by a group consciousness and go into their tradition by spatial production, but the life experience of the producers of space here should be personal, experiential and unrepeatable. It is either an artistic work as a result of spatial production or a theoretical work as a reflection of the process of spatial production. In the theory of ancient Chinese mountains-and-waters painting, at least since the Southern Dynasties, there have been the theoretical writings that reflect on the process of the production of mountains-and-waters painting space handed down. In the Southern Dynasties, ZONG Bing (宗 炳) says that “the sages hold Tao in their hearts and apply Tao to everything, and the philosophers clarify their minds and understand and taste the images of Tao without distractions.”15 GUO Xi (郭熙) of the Northern Song Dynasty thinks that “the aspiration of the forest and the spring and the companion of mist and clouds in the twilight haunt always on my dream and mind, and I can’t see and hear anything.”16 In such a statement, what the author says is neither the so-called universal truth nor objective facts. They express their own personal experience in the production and reproduction of space of mountains-and-waters painting that they “thought should be so.” No matter “Sage” or “philosopher,” or GUO Xi himself, they are all individuals who experience the interestingness of mountains-and-waters in practice. What they say, such as “experiencing Tao embodied in everything,” “pure the heart and taste the image,” “the aspiration of the forest and the spring” and “the companion of mist and clouds in the twilight,” are actually descriptions of individual experience, which must contain personal perception and gnosis of natural landscape based on life history of the experiencer. It is difficult for an outsider to understand the complex connotations that an artist has acquired from his own experience in the nature and the reality. However, once this kind of understanding is theorized and even canonized, it is sure to exert a continuous influence and guiding role on the production and reproduction of cultural and artistic space for later generations. Ancient Chinese mountains-and-waters painting is a special way of experiencing Tao by literati. It certainly includes different individual awareness of the universe and the way people lived, which is surely enshrined in the artistic space created by literati and displayed in the personality traits of landscape space, such as the “huge mountains-and-­waters”

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(全景山水) by JING Hao (荆浩), JU Ran (巨然), FAN Kuan (范宽), and the “broken mountains and remaining waters” (残山剩水) by MA Yuan ( 马远) and XIA Gui (夏圭). In this sense, the artistic space represented by ancient Chinese mountains-and-waters paintings, as it were, is actually the internalized and personalized space of artists. 4. The expression modes on which the producer depends in the production of cultural and artistic space. There is no need to say that philosophical idea, cultural memory, and life experience involved with spatialization and spatial production, once theorized, are extremely important to any cultural and artistic tradition. However, we should not neglect the transformation from the idea to the technical operation and the schematization, that is, through techniques, media, rules, modes and so on, the conceptual theory is fixed and materialized through concrete technical operations. This is precisely what is difficult for some people who are only familiar with concepts and theories to approach and thoroughly understand. It is the weakest link in the theory of the production of cultural and artistic space, and it is the most vulnerable point for some seemingly “comprehensive” art theory and art history to show their shortcomings and difficulties. The work “On Mountains-and-Waters” (山水论) attributed to WANG Wei (王维) starts by saying: “When painting mountains-and-waters, one should have intention before painting with a brush. Ten feet of a mountain and one foot of a tree, one inch of a horse and one-tenth inch of a man. A man far away has no eyes, and a tree far away has no branches. Distant mountains without rocks, faint as eyebrows; Far water without waves, high as clouds.”17 Reading carefully, we’ll find it is obvious that these statements are making rules for the representation of space of mountains-and-waters. The most important of these rules is the principle of “the intention before a brush,” which means one has not painted yet and some intention already clear in his mind. The brush follows with where the heart reaches. What the landscape looks like in front of me is nothing like the eye moving along with the object, as the theory of “imitation” says, but the paintings under my brushes have all come from my “intention.” WANG Wei (王微)’s “On Painting” (叙画) in the Southern Dynasties said, “Besides, the ancient people did not use painting to investigate the boundaries of cities, indicate the locations of counties, mark

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fortress hills, and divide swampy rivers. Instead, they drew pictures based on the natural mountains and waters that were integrated with shapes and spirits to move people’s hearts. So with a tube of pen, to simulate the body of the universe of all things…”18 Here, the expression of space of mountains-and-waters follows the principle of soul perception. With “shapes and spirits to move people’s hearts,” the spirit and the heart have become the highest principle guiding the space of mountains-and-waters. This artistic principle has nothing to do with the perspective based on geometry and mathematics, which determines the space of two and three dimensions in European painting. The perspective looks at objects from a fixed angle of view. With the help of geometry and mathematics, it tries to represent three-dimensional objects seen from a fixed visual angle on a two-dimensional plane in a seemingly “real” way. What it imitates is the limited objects seen by one’s eye, without understanding and guiding by one’s mind. Therefore, we can think that the space of western perspective is a limited space, the space with eyes and no mind.

Conclusion To sum up, the problem of defining and comprehending “space” actually involves the space as the entity, the spatializing practice of creating the space, as well as the concept and perception that dominate and influence the spatialization. In my opinion, the complexity of this problem lies in the interlacing and mutual permeating of the materiality of the physical space, the practice of the spatializing of creating the space, and the ideas and perceptions that govern the spatialization. However, theoretical study and interpretation always point to the conceptual aspect, because this is the supporting point on which spatial practice develops, and it is the crystallization of theoretical reflection. In terms of the production and reproduction of cultural and artistic spaces, if we cannot deeply grasp and understand the uniqueness of tradition accumulated in the long historical process from the above four levels, we are bound to fail to comprehend the mystery of the production and reproduction of cultural and artistic spaces. Moreover, the plural laws of space and spatializing can but keep a foothold in the uniqueness and difference of the cultural tradition on which the spatial production and reproduction depend.

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Notes 1. David Harvey, “Space as a Keyword,” in David Harvey: A Critical Reader, ed. Noel Castree and Derek Gregory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 270. 2. Rob Shields, Spatial Questions: Cultural Topologies and Social Spatialisations (London: Sage Publications, 2013), 15. 3. Edward Soja, “The Socio-Spatial Dialectic,” in Annals of the American Association of Geographers, vol. 70, issue 2 (1980), 210. 4. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 38–40. 5. David Harvey, “Space as a Keyword,” 279. 6. —, Social Justice and the City (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 13. 7. —, “Space as a Keyword,” op. cit., 272–273. 8. Rob Shields, Spatial Questions: Cultural Topologies and Social Spatialisations, op. cit., 18, 17. 9. Ibid., xii. 10. Ibid., xi. 11. Henri Lefebvre, Espace et politique, Préface de Remi Hess (Paris: Ed. Economica, 2000), 17. English translation see Writings on Cities, Selected, translated and introduced by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 192. 12. Rob Shields, Spatial Questions: Cultural Topologies and Social Spatialisations, op. cit., 8. 13. Mick Smith, “Repetition and Difference: Lefebvre, Le Corbusier and Modernity’s (im)moral Landscape,” in Ethics Place and Environment vol. 4, issue 1 (2001), 36. 14. 阮元(清), 《十三经注疏·周易系辞上》上册, 北京: 中华书局, 1980 年, 第 78 页, 第 75–76 页, 第 76 页。 [RUAN Yuan (Qing Dynasty), The Survey Part I, The Zhou Book of Change, Commentary and Subcommentary to the Thirteen Classics, Volume I (Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company, 1980), 78, 75–76, 76.] 15. 宗炳 (南朝·宋), “画山水序,” 俞剑华编《中国画论类编》上, 台 北: 华正书局, 1984 年, 第 583 页。 [ZONG Bing (Song of Southern Dynasties), “Preface to Mountains-and-Waters Painting,” in YU Jianhua ed. Classification of Chinese Painting Theories, Volume I (Taipei: Huazheng Book Company, 1984), 583.] 16. 郭熙(北宋), “林泉高致,” 俞剑华编《中国画论类编》上, 第 632 页。 [GUO Xi (Northern Song Dynasty), “The Elegance of Forest and Spring,” in YU Jianhua ed. Classification of Chinese Painting Theories, Volume I, 632.]

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17. 王维(唐), “山水论,” 俞剑华编《中国画论类编》上, 第 596 页。 [WANG Wei (Tang Dynasty), “On Mountains-and-Waters,” in YU Jianhua ed. Classification of Chinese Painting Theories, Volume I, 596.] 18. 王微(南朝·宋): 《叙画》, 俞剑华编《中国画论类编》上, 第585页。 [WANG Wei (Song of Southern Dynasties), “On Painting,” in YU Jianhua ed. Classification of Chinese Painting Theories, Volume I, 585.]

CHAPTER 3

Mobility Studies: A New Direction in Spatial Literary Studies Ying Liu

Mobility is changing and defining our everyday life. Mobile phones and modern logistics have overturned traditional consumption methods and lifestyles. Information flow, capital flow, urban-rural population migration and global talents mobility have not only profoundly affected various social relations, but also caused cultural mobility and cultural hybridity. In the era when mobility has played a central role in our life, “mobility” has become the common focus of various disciplines such as human geography, sociology, anthropology, and tourism in the twenty-first century. This is called the “mobility turn”1 or the “new mobility paradigm.”2

This essay was originally published in Foreign Literature Studies, Issue 2 of 2020. What follows is the full information: LIU Ying, “Mobility Studies: A New Direction in Spatial Literary Studies,” Foreign Literature Studies, no.2 (2020): 26–38. [刘英: “流动性研究: 文学空间研究的新方向,” 《外国文学研究》, 2020年第2期, 26–38页。]. Y. Liu (*) Nankai University, Tianjin, China e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Fang, R. T. Tally Jr. (eds.), Spatial Literary Studies in China, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03914-0_3

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With its academic sensitivity, literary criticism has captured this research trend. If the “spatial turn” of social sciences in the 1990s gave birth to literary geography and spatial criticism, the “mobility turn” that occurred in the early years of the twenty-first century may have also drawn enthusiastic attention to the issue of mobility in literary studies. Stephen Greenblatt, who once spearheaded New Historicism, once again issued “A Mobility Studies Manifesto.”3 In recent years, Mobility Literary Studies has been growing rapidly and its publications are abundant. Palgrave Macmillan has published the book series Palgrave Studies in Mobilities, Literature and Culture. Routledge and Springer also launched a considerable number of monographs, such as Mobility in Victorian Fiction (2015), Spatial Turn: Space, Place and Mobility in German Literature and Culture, etc. In addition to this, since the publication of the cultural geography journal Mobilities in 2006, many articles have taken literature as their object of study. This indicates that mobilities studies not only has a wide range of influence in the field of social sciences, but also has  gradually extended into the humanities. At the same time, mobilities theories have provided fresh perspectives and rich theoretical resources for literary criticism. Such a vigorous and prosperous wave of Mobility Literary Studies shows that “mobility” has become a keyword for literary studies. However, although the literary studies on mobility has made great achievements, its theoretical origin, occurrence logic, and research model are yet to be systematically explored. In light of this, the essay first presents the theoretical background of the mobility turn and explores the chemistry between the mobility turn and literary study. Then, this chapter discusses the basic dimensions and significance of Mobility Literary Studies.

From the Spatial Turn to the Mobility Turn The year of 2006 was a landmark year for mobilities studies. In this year, sociologists John Urry and Mimi Sheller collaborated to publish the paper “The New Mobility Paradigm,”, cultural geographer Tim Cresswell published the book On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World, and the academic journal Mobilities launched its first issue. These three events signaled the mobility turn. Since then, mobility research has had a wide-­ ranging impact on many fields in the social sciences. In the 15 years from 2006 to 2020, not only has Mobility grown into one of the most influential academic journals, but also the new journals Applied Mobilities,

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Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies have been published, contributing to the surge of mobility research. At the same time, a series of books and textbooks on mobility have been published, among which the most widely received and influential works include: John Urry’s Sociology beyond Societies: Mobilities for the 21 Twenty-First Century, Mobility: New Perspectives on Transport and Society, and Peter Adey’s Mobility. The publication of Routledge Handbook of Mobility in 2014 marked the entrance of mobility research into mainstream social sciences. The emergence of the mobility turn is not groundless. The earliest can be traced back to German sociologist George Simmel. First of all, Simmel discovered from the mobility infrastructures such as roads and bridges that humans have made outstanding achievements in establishing connections across spaces. Building a road connects two places, and building a bridge connects the two sides of rivers. This human achievement is derived from the “will to connection” as he expressed it.4 “This will to connection is a shaper of things and of relations. We see many other examples of how movement is frozen into solid structure and more generally the consequences of a Nietzschean will to connection.”5 Second, Simmel distinguished between various socio-spatial patterns of mobility: nomadism, wandering, migration, tourism, adventure and other types6 and also pointed out the interconnected relationship between bodily travel and information flow; Third, in “The Metropolis and the Mental Life,” Simmel examined the urban life in terms of the effects of modern patterns of mobility upon social life. Based on the above reasons, Simmel is therefore considered to be the “first to attempt the development of a mobilities paradigm,”7 leaving an inspiring legacy for future generations of mobility scholars. Simmel’s legacy is inherited and developed by the spatial turn which began with Henry Lefevre’s The Production of Space (1974). It is then further developed into a theory of relational space by Doreen Massey. In her Spatial Divisions of Labor (1984), Space, Place and Gender (1994), Massey noticed the increased movement of capital, people, food, clothes across different places and emphasized that it is this movement that links the local with the global. Since the mid-1990s, spatial theory has placed increasing emphasis on mobility, flow, and circulation. Manuel Castell conducted theoretical exploration of “spaces of flow,” James Clifford advocated the shift of anthropological research from tracing the roots of authentic cultural traditions to the routes of cultural flow and connection.8 If previous anthropological research is rooted in the organic, closed

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and inner-circular culture, the researches in the context of globalization focus on cultural interaction, cultural translation, and cultural communication. By the end of the twentieth century, the concept of “mobility” had become a key word in globalization studies, thanks largely to Zygmunt Bauman, who argues that “Mobility climbs to the rank of the uppermost among coveted values, and the freedom to move, perpetually a scarce and unequally distributed commodity, fast becomes the main stratifying factor of our late-modern or postmodern time.”9 At the time of the millennium, two sociological masterpieces were published: Bauman’s Liquid Modernity and Urry’s Sociology Beyond Society: Mobility in the 21st Century. The former book takes “liquidity” as the feature of modernity, and the latter takes “mobility” as the characteristic of modernity. If modernity means a new “temporal and spatial experience,”10 Bauman is more focused on time, while Urry pays more attention to space. So, what is “mobility” under the view of the New Mobility Paradigm? First, “there is the use of mobile to mean something that moves or is capable of movement.”11 Second, “there is the sense of mobility deployed in mainstream sociology/social science. This is the upward or downward social mobility. Mobility here is vertical. There is mobility in the longer-­ term sense of migration or other kinds of semi-permanent geographical movement. This is a horizontal sense of being on the move.”12 Although mobility usually takes place in the form of movement, it is distinct from movement. “Mobility involves a displacement -the act of moving from point A to point B. The movements of people (and things) all over the world and at all scales are full of meaning. They are the products and producers of power.”13 Movement can be thought of as mobility abstracted from contexts of power. We can think of movement as the dynamic equivalent of location in abstracted space, and think of mobility as the dynamic equivalent of place. The word “location” is emotionally neutral, while “place” is emotion-provoking. People refer to “location” only to indicate geographic orientation, but people are more emotionally attached to a place where they have lived for a long time. And this is the difference between mobility and movement. Before the mobility turn, spatial mobility and social mobility belong to two separate camps of research, while new mobility paradigm takes the connections between the two as a research priority. The relationship between mobilities studies before and after the new mobility paradigm is like the difference between the parallel line and the intersecting line. The

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new mobility paradigm builds bridges between the macro and micro mobility, human and non-human mobility, physical and virtual mobility, mobility and immobility. Looking back on the development of spatial theories, whether it’s Lefebvre’s dynamic space or Massey’s relational space, or Soja’s “third space” and Castell’s “space of flow” or “network society,” all points to the dynamic becoming and interactions of space and anticipates the paradigm shift from the spatial turn to the mobility turn. At the same time, the rise and development of the new mobility paradigm are also due to the dialogue among different disciplines. Although the mobility turn originated mainly from sociology and human geography, theorists in other disciplines have also made great contributions—Foucault’s ideas of power discourse, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, Deleuze’s theory of assemblages and the nomad, feminist theory, postcolonial studies—all create sufficient theoretical foundations for the emergence of the mobility turn.

What Makes the Mobilities Literary Studies Possible? The mobility turn has swept through the social sciences, and has also caused the explosion of literary scholarship on mobilities. It is fair to say that the richness of research on mobilities within literary field is no less than that in social sciences. So, how does this happen and what makes the mobilities literary studies possible? John Urry’s statement can be used to partly reveal the nature of the phenomenon: “Contributions from cultural studies, feminism, geography, migration studies, science studies, sociology, transport and tourism studies and so on are hesitatingly transforming social science and especially invigorating the connections, overlaps and borrowings with both physical science and with literary and historical studies. The mobility turn is post-disciplinary.”14 The mobility turn activates literary studies’ inherent interdisciplinary and innovative potentiality. The chemistry and dialogue between the literary studies and the mobility turn enrich and enhance each other. This could happen due to the following factors: First, the original drive of the mobility turn is an interest in cross-­border movement and relationality. This cross-border logic is not only applicable to geographical mobility, but also to the cross boundary disciplinary movement, as Mimi Sheller puts it, “the new motilities paradigm challenged the idea of space as a container for social processes, it also

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challenged disciplinary containers and allowed sociologists, geographers, anthropologists, artists and architects and many others to move with each other in new assemblages that drew in ever-widening circles of interests and creative instigation.”15 And literary studies are part of this new assemblages, because what makes literature distinctive is not its “literariness,” but its inclusiveness and integration of knowledge from different disciplines, or its being at the intersection of various disciplines. As the object of literary studies precedes the division of disciplines, this inherent interdisciplinary attribute of literary study itself makes it possible to integrate all new theories into its interpretation tools. Second, in terms of the theoretical resources of the mobility turn, it owes much to literary studies. As early as the 1990s, postcolonial literary criticism, cross-cultural studies, and migration studies have already discussed mobilities. For example, Edward Said emphasizes the meaning and significance of displacements, dislocations, and relocations in space in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.16 Caren Kaplan focuses on the production of postmodern discourses of displacement in modernity and calls attention to the continuities and discontinuities between terms such as “travel,” “displacement,” and “location” as well as between the particularized practices and identities of “exile,” “tourist,” and “nomad.”17 These literary critics paved the way for the mobility turn. Third, the emphasis on representation of mobility gives literature an important position in mobility. Inspired by Lefebvre’s Production of Space, Tim Cresswell builds a triad model of mobility: First, mobility as a fact, or pure motion, that is observable, and empirical reality. Second, the ideas about mobility that are conveyed through a diverse array of representations ranging from film to law, literature to philosophy. These representations of mobility capture and make sense of it through the production of meanings. Third, mobility is practiced, experienced, and embodied.18 These three aspects of mobility interact with one another: “How we experience mobility and the ways we move are connected to meanings given to mobility through representation. Similarly, representations of mobility are based on ways in which mobility is practiced and embodied.”19 According to the model, literature is an essential part of mobility itself. What’s more, Edward Soja’s “third space” theory provides a theoretical basis for the marriage of mobility turn and literary research.

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The Basic Dimensions of Mobilities Literary Studies The new mobility paradigm expands and extends the horizon and scope of spatial literary studies, mainly in four aspects: it emphasizes that mobility not only unfolds in space, but also produces space. “The time-space compression—the effective shrinking of the globe by ever-increasing mobility at speed enabled by innovations in the transportation technology”20 is a striking example, the role of mobility in spatial interaction,21 which suggests that relational spaces are product of capital, people, goods, and information flow; the role of mobility in the production of space at local, regional, national and global scale and place reconceptualized as open, practiced and in process; mobility as embodied spatial practice.22 This essay takes American literature as case study and discusses the basic dimensions of literary mobility research. The reason for choosing American literature as an object of study is due to two factors: one is the scarcity of research in this area, and the other is that mobility is a central quality of the American and an essential element of American literature, as is shown in four aspects: First, throughout American history, the national imagination of the United States is established on the promise of mobility and the “American Dream” is the carrier and symbol of this commitment to mobility; second, as Tim Cresswell argued that “mobility has often been portrayed as the central geographical fact of American life, one that distinguishes Euro-Americans from their European ancestors.”23 This is discussed by American modernist iconic writer Gertrude Stein in her Preface to The Gradual Making of the Making of the Americans: “I am always trying to tell this thing that a space of time is a natural thing for an American to have always inside them as something in which they are continuously moving … it is something strictly American to conceive a space that is filled with moving, a space of time that is filled always filled with moving …”;24 Third, mobility in the United States is far from straightforward: on the one hand, the United States claims to be the most freely mobile state, on the other hand, it excludes marginalized groups such as women and African-Americans from mobility freedom; Fourth, American literature has shown a keen response to the change of American mobility, and pays close attention to the embodied experience of mobility. Based on the above-mentioned reasons, this essay argues that the study of American literature can capture the core of the Mobility Literary Studies more centrally.

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By examining American literature from the perspective of the new mobility paradigm, we find that literary representation of mobility is mainly executed through a body-space-mobility model and laid out with mobility medium (transport technology and transport infrastructure) and mobility politics as the two basic dimensions. Transportation attracts more and more attention after the mobility turn. According to Peter Adey, “From transportation technologies permitting transported mobilities by train, car, bicycle, aeroplane; from the infrastructure of roads, rail, regulations, wires, pipes and cables; to the mobile and miniature objects of the now ubiquitous mobile phone mobilities, these mediating mobilities are ubiquitous. Societies are incredibly mediated and mobile, which permits, facilitates and enables social relations.”25 Tracing back to the etymology of “transportation” shows that transportation and literature are naturally related, as de Certeau discusses in Practice of Everyday Life, “In modern Athens, the vehicles of mass transportation are called metaphorai. To go to work or come home, one takes a metaphor—a bus or a train. Stories could also take this noble name: everyday they traverse and organize places, they select and link them together. They are spatial trajectories.”26 The fact that both transportation and narratives are spatial practices enables Mobility Literary Studies to be naturally connected with spatial literary studies. And the mobility turn provides a new perspective for examining the relationship between transportation, literature, and space. This new perspective compels us to raise new questions: What new spatial experience does each new transportation technology bring about? How does its reconstruction of spatial experience lead to the appearance of new literary themes and the innovation of aesthetic forms? How does the transportation technology revolution affect the spatial production and cross-­ scale spatial relationships? How does literary representation of mobility affect mobility practice? To explore these issues, the history of American literature must be read alongside with the history of American transportation. If we map out the timeline of transportation technology development, ships, trains, automobiles, and airplanes are the transportation technology innovations which occurred respectively in the early nineteenth century, the late nineteenth century, the early twentieth century, and the middle and late twentieth century. In different historical stages, literary representation of the transportation mobility is different. Trains and cars are frequently used as mobility tools in everyday life, so American literature pays more attention to them.

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As a symbol of the new transportation and machine age in the nineteenth century, trains and railways produced a series of spatial changes: First, according to The Railway Journeys: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century, “space is both diminished and expanded by railway train. The diminution of space caused the nation’s contraction into a metropolis.”27 So, the role of transportation infrastructures in the development of nation-states’ social, political, economic structures, the impact of enhanced networking capabilities on the emergence and evolution of national consciousness is a prominent theme throughout mobilities studies;28 secondly, the train creates a new type of social space—the carriage. De Certeau made an in-depth analysis of this in Chap. 8 “Railway Navigation and Incarceration” in Practice of Everyday Life: “The traveler is pigeonholed, numbered, and regulated in the grid of the railway car, which is a perfect actualization of rational utopia”;29 at the same time, the train makes people feel the tension between the immobility of the body and the mechanized movement, which isolates the body from the scenery outside the train and loses the natural and embodied experience of the scenery. All these new spatial and physical experiences intersected for the first time in the train mobility and sparked national discussion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries United States. American literature also participated in this public forum on train mobility. American writers sensitively felt the pulse of this time-space experience brought by the modern “iron horse,” for example, Emily Dickinson’s 1891 poem “I like to see it lap the miles” shows the joy of seeing train wheels flying across space. American Literary Regionalism of the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century recorded the role train mobility played in space production. First of all, the passage of trains through the United States has achieved national time standardization, enabling all regions of the United States to implement a unified time and achieve two major spatial effects: space compression and space extension. “Space compression” is manifested in the fact that the railway eliminates the spatial barriers between the countryside and the city, and promotes the flow of population, goods, information, and capital. In Sarah Orne Jewett’s Deep Haven (1877), The Country Doctor (1884), Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), the emergence of railways made rural space no longer a closed and static pre-modern pastoral, but a “third space” between pre-modern and modern world. These novels show a consciousness of the local places linked with the outside world. So it is fair to say that the American literary regionalism is not a retreat from the dynamic

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change of life but faces up to the space compression and demonstrates a “progressive sense of place,”30 which fits in with the global-local times and the relations they give rise to. “Spacel extension” is manifested in the railway network connecting the various regions of the United States, ending the geographical seclusion and cultural isolation, connecting national spaces, smoothening cultural exchanges, and strengthening national identity. At the same time, the railway map visualizes the national spatial network and participates in the production of national spatial order. Willa Cather uses railroad images throughout her many novels to show how the Midwestern rail network with Chicago as its hub has changed the natural landscape and social space of the Midwest. Willa Cather portrays the transformation of American society as a spatialization phenomenon.31 In addition, Jewett’s The Life of Nancy (1895), “Going to Shrewsbury” (1889), and Stephen Crane’s classic work “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” (1898), William Faulkner’s southern novels, etc. all reflect that the railway network unites the places along the rail line with the national space, replicates and consolidates the spatial reorganization of capitalism, and integrates the local economy with the national and even the global economy; secondly, trains and railways have promoted the democratization of tourism and stimulated people’s desire to know the history and local customs of other parts of the United States, thus become the driver for the rise of American literary regionalism. What’s more, Willa Cather’s My Antonia (1918), Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country (1913), Stephen Crane’s “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” (1898) and other works reflect the close relationship between the space of the train carriage and the production of class order. From ships to trains, subways, cars and airplanes, each transportation technology innovation has fundamentally changed people’s spatial and temporal experience. Moving between different spaces of over the sea, on the land, in the air and underground makes people feel lost and enables people to experience a kind of unnamed “liquid modernity.” American literature is both inspired by the transportation revolution and makes visible the liquid modernity through aesthetic formal experiments. If the history of American literature and the history of US transportation are placed side by side, the relationship between literature, mobility, and liquid modernity would be all clear. However, the sense of time-space compression caused by the transportation technology does not occur for everyone and in every field. There are inequalities in the access to mobility.32 For this reason, Massey

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proposes the concept of politics of mobility differences.33 What is the cause of mobility differences? According to Massey, the differences in mobility reflect and express existing social hierarchies.34 Tim Cresswell further expounded: “By a politics of mobility I mean the ways in which mobilities are both productive of social relations and produced by them. Social relations are of course complicated and diverse. They include relations between classes, genders, ethnicities, nationalities, and religious groups as well as a host of other forms of group identity. Mobility, as with other geographical phenomena, lies at the heart of all of these.”35 Viewing the representation of mobility in American literature from the perspective of “the politics of mobility,” the most striking one is the gendered mobility differences. If we have a glance at the iconic travel writings in the history of American literature, whether it’s Herman Melville’s sea voyage, Mark Twain’s river journey, or Jack Kerouac’s road travel, all involve adventures in public spaces. But these public spaces are mostly male-centered, basically excluding women. Women are often compared to “harbor,” “home” and other static places and private spaces. If Tim Cresswell’s Gendered Mobility is a theoretical criticism of gendered division of mobility,36 his paper “Mobility as Resistance” conducts a textual analysis of the novel On the Road and argues that it reinforces the binary opposition and hierarchy between male/female, public/private spaces.37 After the Beat Generation, with the second wave feminism’s “the personal is political” slogan and the strong criticism of the gendered space division, American feminist literary criticism challenges the gendered road narratives. Since the 1980s, American female writers join the road writing. Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Tree (1988) and Pigs in Heaven (1993), Hilma Wolitzer’s Hearts (1980), Chelsea Cain’s Dharma Girl: A Road Trip Across the American Generations (1996) focus on women’s automobility and rewrite traditional road novels’ representation of automobility: Driving on the road not only provides women with a continuous space of private space, domestic space, and social space, but also becomes a dynamic space for mother and daughter to negotiate and grow together. Driving on the road enables women to realize the flow of feelings and emotions between them. Compared with male road novels, the representation of the automobility in women’s road literature shows two differences: First, the motivation to get on the road is different: men are mostly to get rid of the bondage of social structure, women are mostly to get rid of the constraints of domestic space; Second, destinations are different: men drive from civilized space to wilderness space, women from patriarchal space to

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women’s space. If women driving cars is a spatial practice that transgresses the gendered division of mobility, women writers devoting themselves to new road novel writing is a practice of literary mobility that transcends the gender division of genres. In addition to gendered mobility difference, another important manifestation of mobility politics in the United States is racial mobility difference. The self-claimed mobility freedom is in fact merely a white privilege, and the very existence of African-American is an irony on the myth of American mobility freedom. They were transported from Africa to the United States and were tortured during the Middle Passage. A hundred years later, Toni Morrison unveiled this dusty history with the novel Beloved (1987) which is a late requiem for the 60 million missing black men. After African-Americans were forced to come to the United States and became slaves, they were deprived of both spatial and social mobility. If the nineteenth-century white American lamented that the railway led to the passing of a quiet and idyllic pastoral life, for African-Americans who have never had an idyllic field, the train brings no despair but the hope of getting rid of the shackles of slavery. With the help of abolitionists, the train became an important way for black slaves to escape to the north of the United States and Canada, known as the “underground railroad.” American writer Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize novel The Underground Railroad (2017) rewrites the traditional slave narrative and represents the experience of African-American slaves fleeing to the north through the railway transportation in the nineteenth century. If the nineteenth-century train provided a mobility medium for African-­ Americans to get access to political mobility, then, with racism intensified after World War I, the train again became the main tool for the Great Migration of African-Americans. During the Great Migration, many African-American writers gathered in New York in the 1920s and 1930s and made the Harlem Renaissance. Zola Neale Hurston, among many other writers, wrote migration narrative, showing how the train helped the “Great Migration.” On the one hand, trains and railways provide a way for African-­ Americans to obtain social mobility through spatial movement, and on the other, the train carriages have become political space for racism to strengthen racial order through spatial order. The African-American literature of the early twentieth century criticized the absurd logic of the Jim Crow car. Charles Chesnutt’s novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901) describes two doctor friends who were already seated in the same car, but

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because of their different skin colors, the black doctor was brutally driven out of the car for the whites. The white doctor was also forbidden to enter the car for the blacks. Ralph Ellison’s early autobiographical story “Boy on a Train” complained about the racial politics of the train car. The story takes place in 1924. A11-year-old black boy is sitting in a car for the blacks which is close to the engine. The car is not only very hot and sultry, but also full of luggage and stuffed with white people’s dogs.38 The most unbearable thing is that his mother is harassed by a white peddler. Such an unbearable experience in the train casts a lasting shadow of racism on his young mind. African-American writers are not criticizing the racial mobility injustice all the time, they also portray the train car as a space of hope and light. In Chap. 10 “Railroad” of his novel Home to Harlem (1928), Harlem Renaissance writer Claude Mckay tells the story of a veteran named Jack who met his mentor while working as a chef in a dining car. E.B Du Bois’s Dark Princess (1928) describes the experience of two conductors of different classes becoming close friends in the carriages. The carriages provide people of different classes with a space for interaction where they become lifetime friends beyond class differences. Spaces such as trains, cars, subways, airplanes, stations, and airports are all liminal spaces, a transitional space, or what de Certeau calls “space of everyday practice.”39 It is a space where people stay and move on. It is space where people of different races, classes, and ages meet and interact with each other. It is a space where old spatial order is challenged and new spatial order is generated by people’s performances and interactions. American women writers and African-American writers depicted and challenged the gendered space and the racist space in their novels and short stories. They have not only fought for “space justice,”40 but also transgressed the boundary of literary tradition and performed literary mobility. Since the twenty-first century, the global aviation industry has grown rapidly, the internationalization of modern logistics has accelerated, physical and digital mobility are closely intertwined, and such large-scale mobility innovation and increased mobility not only dramatically changed the social and economic life but also triggered the “mobility turn.” The mobility turn, whose inception, budding, and growth are deeply indebted to the “Spatial Turn,” stresses the connectivity and dynamics of space and the crucial role mobility plays in the construction of space. The significance of Mobility Literary Studies is: on the micro level, it focuses on the embodiment of mobility and sees mobility as spatial practice of the body;

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on the macro level, it reveals the interplay between mobility and literature, namely, the changes in narrative structure and literary genre impacted by the transformation of mobility technology and infrastructure on the one hand and, on the other, a series of ways in which literature functions, such as observing mobility evolution, revealing mobility politics, participating in mobility discourse, and intervening mobility practice.

Notes 1. See Kevin Hannam, et  al., “Editorial: Mobilities, Immobilities and Moorings,” Mobilities, vol. 1, no. 1 (2006): 1–22; John Urry, Mobilities (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007); Peter Adey, et  al., Routledge Handbook of Mobilities (New York: Routledge, 2014). 2. See Mimi Sheller and John Urry, “The New Mobilities Paradigm,” Environment and Planning A, vol. 38, no. 2 (2006): 207–226. 3. See Stephen Greenblatt, Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2013). 4. Simmel G., Simmel on Culture, ed. Frisby D. Featherstone, M. (London: Sage, 1997), 171. 5. John Urry, Mobilities, 20. 6. Simmel G., Simmel on Culture, ed. Frisby D. Featherstone, M. (London: Sage, 1997), 160. 7. John Urry, Mobilities, 20. 8. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentith Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 9. Bauman Z., Globalization: The Human Consequences (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1998), 2. 10. Berman Marshall, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 2010), 15. 11. John Urry, Mobilities, 7. 12. Ibid., 8. 13. Cresswell Tim, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2006), 2. 14. Urry John, Mobilities, 6. 15. Mini Sheller, “From spatial turn to mobilities turn,” Current Sociology, March 27 (2017): 6. 16. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage Books, 1994), 84. 17. Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourse of Displacement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 29. 18. Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World, 3.

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19. Ibid., 4. 20. Ibid., 4. 21. Hesse M., “Cities, material flows and the geography of spatial interaction: urban places in the system of chains,” Global Networks, vol. 10, no. 1 (2010): 75. 22. Peter Merriman, Mobility, Space and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2012), 18. 23. Tim Cresswell, Tramp in America (London: Reaktion, 2001), 19. 24. Gertrude Stein, “The Making of the Making of Americans,” in Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten (New York: Viking, 1945), 258. 25. Peter Adey, Mobility (New York: Routledge, 2017), 210. 26. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 115. 27. Shivalbusch Wofgang, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization and Perception of Time and Space (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2014), 50. 28. Marian Aguir, Charlotte Mathieson, Lynne Pearce (ed.), Mobilities, Literature, Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 10. 29. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 112. 30. Massey Doreen, Space, Place and Gender (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 156. 31. Joseph Urgo, Willa Cather and the Myth of American Migration (Urbana: University of Illinois P, 1995), 39. 32. Massey Doreen, “Power-geometry and Progressive Sense of Place,” ed. Bird, J., Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change (New York: Routledge, 1993), 60. 33. Massey Doreen, Space, Place and Gender, 3. 34. Ibid., 149. 35. Tim Cresswell, “Towards a Politics of Mobility,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 28, no.1 (2006): 21. 36. Tim Cresswell, Gendered Mobilities (New York: Routledge, 2016). 37. Tim Cresswell, “Mobility as Resistance: A Geographical Reading of Kerouac’s ‘On the Road,’” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, no. 18 (1993): 249. 38. Ralph Ellison, Flying Home and Other Stories (1937–1954) (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 13. 39. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 117. 40. Edward. Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 2010), 1.

CHAPTER 4

Developing the Chinese Academic Map Publishing Platform Yongming Xu, Benjamin Lewis, and Weihe Wendy Guan

This essay was originally published in SPRS International Journal of Geo-­ Information, Volume 8, Issue 12 (December 2019). Funding: This project is funded by Zhejiang University and Harvard University. The platform benefited from other projects contributing to the GeoNode code base, especially the Secondary Cities project funded through NSF #1841403. Acknowledgments: The authors wish to thank all team members who contributed to this project both in system code and in platform content, especially Paolo Corti, Lijun Wang, Yao Liu, and Feng Zhang. Author Contributions: Conceptualization, Xu Yongming, Benjamin Lewis and Weihe Wendy Guan; Data curation, Yongming Xu; Formal analysis, Benjamin Lewis; Funding acquisition, Yongming Xu and Weihe Wendy Guan; Investigation, Benjamin Lewis and Weihe Wendy Guan; Methodology, Yongming Xu and Benjamin Lewis; Project administration, Yongming Xu and Weihe Wendy Guan; Resources, Yongming Xu; Software, Benjamin Lewis; Supervision, Weihe Wendy Guan; Validation, Yongming Xu and Benjamin Lewis; Visualization, Yongming Xu and Benjamin Lewis; Writing— original draft, Yongming Xu, Benjamin Lewis and Weihe Wendy Guan; Writing— review & editing, Yongming Xu, Benjamin Lewis and Weihe Wendy Guan. Y. Xu School of Humanities, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Fang, R. T. Tally Jr. (eds.), Spatial Literary Studies in China, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03914-0_4

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Introduction This chapter documents the experience in developing the Chinese Academic Map Publishing platform (AMAP). The introductory section provides an overview of Chinese historical research and highlights the richness and importance of geographic information in the historical records in China. This background provides the impetus for building a platform to more effectively create, organize, analyze, visualize, and share such spatiotemporal information. The following section provides an overview of existing platforms used in historical GIS and the digital humanities, grouping them into three categories based on their functionality and intended use, arriving at Harvard’s WorldMap as the best starting point for developing AMAP. The next section describes the AMAP development process, from the establishment of international collaboration, to customizing WorldMap to meet AMAP requirements, to developing content and use cases on the platform, and listing major functions. The Challenges and Opportunities section analyzes the major obstacles the team faced, how we addressed them. These include the unique Chinese Internet environment, Chinese character encoding, unique datum and map projections required by the Chinese government using the topographic map non-linear confidentiality algorithm, and the cultural differences between China and the United States in software development and communication. The Future Perspectives section explains the significance of the AMAP platform and its planned growth. The last section describes our conclusions and points out critical issues for the future of the project. An Overview of Chinese Historical Research Preserved in the vast ancient and modern literatures of China, embedded in its unequaled record of human civilization, over many millennia and across vast regions of land and sea, there exists vast amount of geographic information. Thanks to recent technology advancements, we now have a chance to improve our understanding of the history of this part of the

B. Lewis • W. W. Guan (*) Center for Geographic Analysis, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

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world through the lens of geographic information systems (GIS). We suggest that there is an opportunity to make geographic relationships more explicit, especially those relating to human activities. At the level of an individual, this may include the geographical distribution of his/her place of origin, travel routes, and social relations. For a group, this may involve the group’s distribution and migration trajectory. For non-living objects, this may represent their existence, distribution, and change. A geographic area as large as China contains a holistic collection of geographic information about its people, things, and events throughout history and we aim to make this information more explicit and usable for scholars. For many thousands of historical figures in China, their birth places, activities, titles or positions, social networks, artistic output such as poems, inscriptions, writings, etc. have been recorded through the dynasties, with geographical information existing for most of these records. For geographic places, there are countless features with names on the landscape, such as administrative villages, towns, neighborhoods, gates, stations, passes, mountains, lakes, springs, waterfalls, bridges, caves, marshes, ponds, etc. For built structures, there are countless records describing palaces, pavilions, temples, private houses, and others. And for historical events large and small, in a large portion of cases the geographic locations have been recorded. The reason this geographic information exists is that through the centuries, Chinese scholars have paid great attention to the recording and studying of geographic relationships. “Yu Gong” (禹贡), China’s oldest book of geography, recorded mountains, rivers, terrain, soils, and their properties. The “Geography” (地理志) that first appeared in “Han Shu” ( 汉书) became an indispensable part of the official history of future generations of Chinese scholars.1 Local history was recorded in  local history books (地方志), and these books form a rich set of local geographic information in China. In addition, there are many other publications about geography in China. In the Confucian “Classics, History, Philosophy and Literature” (经史子集) four categories of publications, the “geographical” bibliography in the History category cataloged the ancient geography publications. For example, “Yuanhe County Map” (元和郡县图志), “Tai Ping Huan Yu Ji” (太平寰宇记), “Yuan Feng Jiu Ji Zhi” (元丰九域志), “Da Ming Yi Tong Zhi” (大明一统志), “Da Qing Yi Tong Zhi” (大清一 统志), and “Du Shi Fang Ji Ji Yao” (读史方舆纪要) are all important

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works of geography. In addition to textual records and research writings, the ancients also used maps to mark territories and place names. The ancients called maps “yutu” (舆图) or “illustration maps.” This type of “illustration map” should be thought of as a schematic diagram rather than as a modern map developed using survey methods. A wealth of geographic information describing ancient China is stored this way. There are many ways in which an understanding of geographic relationships between people and places is important for understanding the history of ancient China. These include connections between people, events, customs, products, poetry, etc. Traditional Chinese illustration maps, or “yutu,” are an important source of historical geographic information. However, there are some disadvantages to traditional geographic renderings. First, it is difficult to use such maps for spatial analysis. For example, when we compile a local chronical gazetteer of a county, the local writers and editors may know the county’s population and local elites well. However, it is difficult for them to know the relationship between population and elites at the national level. In order to show the distribution of historical actors across the country, one would need to gather and map hundreds of thousands or even millions of data points. In addition, although traditional maps can be visualized and labeled, locations are usually not accurate. Finally, paper maps are hard to access, limiting their audience. Modern geographic information system (GIS) solved some of these problems, enabling digital maps to spread quickly, and “flying into the homes of ordinary people” as described in a well-known Chinese poem.2 The Need for a Platform The widespread digitization of historical materials in the twenty-first century has made computers central to the work of scholars in the humanities. As the volume of digital historic documents increases, so has the need to make this content available for scholars to explore and analyze over the web. This has led to improvements in platforms for storing and managing such content. Looking ahead, given the large volume of well-structured digitized historical content available, a range of research opportunities now exist for applying machine learning and other advanced processing technologies to the analysis of such collections. Geospatial data describing historical events and people have many uses but there are few platforms that are designed to handle the particular characteristics of geographic data, both in terms of data storage and in terms

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of query, display, and basic analysis. Knowing where something happened is important for understanding why it happened, for seeing relationships between events which might otherwise go unnoticed. In addition, for a historically oriented system, knowing when something happened is also important and there exist even fewer platforms which support basic temporal search or display capabilities in addition to spatial functions. Geospatial technology is being widely used in military, economic, transportation, agricultural, humanities and other fields, and these fields have produced a large volume of well-structured geospatial information. For researchers to publish, query and share such data, digital mapping platforms are required. In a humanities context such a platform should support the following core capabilities: • Use by a distributed group of scholars from many institutions to upload and create new spatial datasets online, compose maps, symbolize layers, and comment on each other’s layers • Standard GIS map exploration tools such as pan, zoom, identify • Creation of metadata to describe the datasets • Search tool for finding data by time, space, and keyword • Search tool for user uploaded content or content on remote servers • Allow access control to one’s own content, enabling a user to make her layers private, share them with a small group, or share with the world • Choice of multiple languages in the user interface There are many online mapping platforms already in existence, most of them are developed and used by scholars outside of China. Chinese scholars need a platform that meets their needs in China’s unique Internet environment, with map projection, language encoding, and other properties suitable for Chinese users.

An Overview of Existing Platforms for Historical GIS and Digital Humanities There exist a variety of online platforms which provide scholars with access to historical spatial information in the context of the digital humanities, some of which we have listed below. Each of these systems presents ideas for developing a better system to enable digital humanities data to be

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generated, brought together, and made available to scholarly communities across China. The systems we looked at fall into three broad categories: The first category provides access to a particular data collection. These systems are library-like in that they represent authoritative datasets which are well curated and generally do not change. Typically, the data is created and maintained by one organization, and fitting with their mission. These systems do not provide tools for outside users to create or edit data on the site. Examples of such systems include: • China Biographical Database (CBDB): The Chinese name of the project is “中国历代人物传记数据库” and it is led by Professor Peter K. Bol of Harvard University. The collaborators include the Research Center for Ancient Chinese History of Peking University and the Institute of History and Language of the Central Research Institute of Taiwan. The “Chinese Historical Biography Database” is currently the world’s largest database of Chinese historical figures’ biographical data for analysis. Some 400,000 Chinese historical figures are recorded in it, and there are nearly 500,000 people from other sources, such as Chinese local chronicle gazetteers. The database is made freely accessible for online query and download.3 • China Historical GIS (CHGIS): This database provides data on the historical political divisions of China. The project is also led by Professor Peter K. Bol of Harvard University with project management by Lex Berman. This project is in collaboration with Fudan University’s Center for Historical Geographical Studies to vectorize Chinese historical place names and historical maps. The database also records administrative hierarchies of place names and their evolution through time in the form of a relational database. The database is accessible for online query and may also be downloaded for free.4,5 • Great Britain Historical Geographical Information System (GBHGIS): This project documents the changing human geography of the British Isles since the first census in 1801 and is developed and hosted by the University of Portsmouth. It was sponsored by the UK government.6 • U.S.  National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS): This archive provides access to census data for the United States back to 1790. The National Historical Geographic Information System is developed by the Minnesota Population Center (MPC) and sponsored by US federal funding.7

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• Rumsey Map Collection: This collection contains over 150,000 maps and related images at a variety of scales in global locations, range in date from about 1550 to the present. Rumsey Map Collection is hosted by Stanford University and sponsored by philanthropist David Rumsey. The collection focuses on rare sixteenth through twenty-first-century maps of North and South America, as well as maps of the World, Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania. The collection includes atlases, wall maps, globes, school geographies, pocket maps, books of exploration, maritime charts, and a variety of cartographic materials including pocket, wall, children’s, and manuscript maps. Items range in date from about 1550 to the present.8 These are just a few such archives. Other historical GIS platforms include the Belgian historical GIS project at Ghent University, Belgium; the Batanes Islands Cultural Atlas developed by the University of California at Berkeley; the New York City Historical GIS Project developed by the New York City Public Library; and the Historical Geographic Information System developed by Wikipedia, among others. A second category of online GIS system enables users to search across multiple distributed collections. This type of system, or registry of systems, harvests metadata from multiple federated collections and stores them in a central registry to make data easier to discover. Examples of this type of system include: • Geoplatform: This system is developed by the member agencies of the U.S. Federal Geographic Data Committee, and maintains a registry of over 160,000 datasets which are distributed across many state and government agency portals within the United States.9 • INSPIRE Geoportal: The INSPIRE Geoportal is the central access point for spatial data provided by European Union member states. The Geoportal maintains a registry of datasets which are distributed across many national geospatial portals.10 • Harvard Geospatial Library: This system contains historic map images, census data, place names and locations, road networks, elevation models, and many other layers distributed across the libraries of many universities.11 • Old Maps Online: This system indexes over 400,000 historic scanned maps which are served up from many libraries and archives.12

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• Digital Public Library of America: This system maintains a registry of over 34 million maps, photographs, books, news footage, oral histories, personal letters, museum objects, and artwork which are distributed across hundreds of cultural institutions in the United States.13 A third category of online GIS system is a hybrid system which allows users to search for content as described above but also allows them to create and edit content directly online which can then be made available for others to discover as a dynamic library. This kind of system combines data search tools with additional tools for data and metadata creation as required by the AMAP project. Some of these systems include a registry as described above to enable users to find and use data which resides on other systems in addition to local data. We will now examine the hybrid systems in more detail from the perspective of best fit for AMAP. • ArcGIS Online: This platform is a full featured commercial hosted product developed by Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri). The platform is comprised of applications and templates for creating and sharing interactive maps, and is an integral part of Esri’s ArcGIS suite of applications. The platform supports a wide range of GIS data symbolization, curation, and sharing capabilities. While ArcGIS Online supports the functionality required by the AMAP project, it was not chosen for the project because the AMAP system must be run from inside the Zhejiang University firewall.14 • CartoDB: This system is a hosted GIS platform for building online GIS applications. It is especially well suited to business and government settings in which a developer builds custom applications for the organization using the Carto platform. Carto has several business oriented vertical products but does not have one oriented toward the humanities. While the platform is very good for building analytic applications, Carto does not provide some of the basic tools needed by the AMAP project such as data search, map composition, and data sharing.15 • MapStory: This open source map-based storytelling platform is oriented toward the display of temporal data, being capable of generating animations showing spatial change over time. MapStory is based on GeoNode, the same underlying system as WorldMap and so supports many of the same capabilities in terms of data curation and

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sharing. MapStory does not however support federated search or the discovery of data on other systems.16 • OmekaNeatline: Omeka is a humanities oriented content management system well suited to telling stories around web-based, humanities oriented content. It is being used to manage many kinds of collections including photos, documents, videos, and maps. Neatline is a plugin for Omeka’s plugin architecture, and allows users to tell complex spatial and temporal stories by overlaying various types of content on maps and associating them with dates and locations. OmekaNeatline does not include a data search capability.17 • Harvard WorldMap: WorldMap is a global geographic information dissemination and sharing platform developed by the Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA) of Harvard University. It grew out of the CGA’s experience building one-off web mapping tools for scholars, many of whom come from the social sciences and humanities. WorldMap allows them to create, curate, and share their materials online. WorldMap also supports data search and discovery by temporal extent, spatial extent, and keyword. Its database contains Chinese geographic information and maps on demographics, religion, transportation, urban studies, ethnic and language, energy, environment, education, climate, public health, economics, history, and many other subjects. For example, on the subject of literature and history, there are maps about scholars in the Ming Dynasty, road maps of Ming and Qing Dynasties, geographical distribution of Jinhua literati’s social relations, distribution maps of Chinese temples in 1820, and distribution maps of defense posts in the Ming Dynasty.18 WorldMap supports the core functions needed by the AMAP project, and being open source, can be installed inside the Zhejiang University firewall. For these reasons WorldMap was chosen as the best starting point for developing the AMAP system.

The Construction of the Chinese Academic Map Publishing Platform Usually a platform development would start by user requirements gathering, followed by system design, proof of concept, prototyping, basic content creation, pre-release, and finally formal release for end users to add

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more content. However, the construction of the AMAP system proceeded in a rather unconventional manner. Because the system adopted an existing platform (Harvard WorldMap which is functional in the English environment) as the base system, and the Chinese users’ demand is rather urgent, content development started as soon as the base system was installed, at the same time as system customization and functional enhancement were ongoing. This process has proven to be efficient, as the platform was made available for end users early on, and content accumulated quickly; but also challenging, as users often encountered unstable performance due to frequent code upgrades and constant debugging. “Challenges and Opportunities” section provides more discussion on this. The conception of this project and its unique approach started from the establishment of an international collaboration. Establishing the Collaboration Zhejiang University’s Big Data and Humanities Academic Map Team was established in April 2017. The members are composed of faculty members from the School of Humanities, the Institute of Geographic Information Science, and the School of Computer Science and Technology. The team is affiliated to the Social Science Research Institute. It is focused on the construction of a geospatial database for the vast amount of Chinese cultural history data, and started conducting spatial analysis on the data. The team’s goal is to build China’s first culturally and historically oriented academic map publishing platform. The design of the platform aims to tightly integrate data and information on the backend with visualization and analysis capabilities on the front end. Harvard University’s digital humanities research is well recognized globally. Chinese cultural and historical databases built at Harvard include the Chinese Historical Geographic Information System (CHGIS), the Chinese Historical Biographical Database (CBDB), and the many China data and map collections on WorldMap. On October 12th to 13th of 2017, President Wu Zhaohui of Zhejiang University led a delegation to visit Harvard. The team and the Center for Geographic Analysis signed a memorandum of understanding on the joint construction of the AMAP. According to the memorandum, the two sides will conduct cross-­ regional cooperation and jointly create an academic map publishing platform suitable for China’s national conditions, presenting China’s cultural history from a spatial dimension. Building on the foundation of Harvard’s

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WorldMap, the team will reconfigure and improve it to form AMAP. To better meet the needs of Chinese users, the team will add Tianditu (天地 图) as the Chinese base map, improve language translation for the user interface, add support for Chinese map projections, Chinese text encodings, and long text in spatial data attributes, among other enhancements. Customizing the Current WorldMap for AMAP In order for the WorldMap platform to meet the needs of the AMAP project, a number of enhancements were required. Because the source code for WorldMap is open, it was possible for the team to make the necessary changes. Below we discuss each of the major enhancement areas and the way in which WorldMap was modified to support the new functions. Home page customization. The original default WorldMap homepage was very simple but AMAP platform users needed to be able to easily determine the most popular and most recent layers and maps, as well as have access to videos including those describing how to use the system. The AMAP team therefore customized the default Javascript homepage to include these new features. Multi-language user interface. Because the main target audience for the AMAP system is scholars within China, it is critical that users have the option of a user interface written in Chinese. The WorldMap platform, by virtue of its underlying GeoNode content management system, can be configured to support a wide range of languages including Chinese. The team examined all sections of the interface and created Chinese labeling wherever it was needed. Chinese language basemap. There exist a number of Chinese language basemaps and it is important the AMAP system can use them. WorldMap uses the OpenLayers javascript library for map display which provides a framework for bringing in new base layers, but some Chinese layers are not supported out-of-the-box and significant coding is required to enable them. The team found that some base layers are easier to add to the system than others. Depending on the API of new base layers it may not always be possible to support all functions, such as automated map thumbnail generation or printing. Long text in layer attributes. The AMAP project, being oriented toward the mapping of events in poetry and prose in Chinese, must be able to make extensive text contents searchable by users. For this reason, the limitation in text length in WorldMap had to be eliminated. For layers

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which are created online in the system there was no issue, however for uploaded content it is more complex since shapefiles have a 256 character limitation. For this reason, it was necessary to add a new vector upload file type, GeoJSON, which has no such text length limitation. Feature level text search. The AMAP project must support user search against spatial features which contain Chinese text, with the ability to highlight all matching features on a given layer or set of layers. This capability was developed for the AMAP system using the Common Query Language (CQL) method of querying and highlighting a Web Map Service (WMS) layer, which is supported by GeoServer, the underlying map renderer used by WorldMap. Bulk social media postings. The AMAP project plans to use Chinese social media to promote content in the AMAP system, and to make the process of posting efficient. A capability was therefore developed for generating a list of map or layer names with matching URLs ready for posting. This capability was developed with a Javascript enhancement to the Layer and Map query pages in WorldMap. Mobile device search. The AMAP platform must be accessible from mobile devices as well as from regular computers. To support this capability a mobile map viewer was developed by the AMAP team in Javascript which enables basic map navigation functions in the field. Developing Content and Use Cases on the Platform On March 19, 2018, AMAP was jointly established by the Big Data and Academic Map Innovation Team in the Social Science Research Institute of Zhejiang University and the Center for Geographic Analysis of Harvard University. The website http://amap.zju.edu.cn was officially launched, marking the birth of a comprehensive academic map publishing platform suitable for China’s national conditions. In its first 18 months, more than 500 maps and more than 500,000 data sets have been released on the platform. The content covers geosciences, agronomy, health, environment, transportation, climate, meteorology, and of course the humanities. For example, the health category has “The spatial and temporal distribution of infectious diseases in Hangzhou”; The food safety category includes “Food rumor distribution map,” “Hangzhou Market Supervision Administration Food-related Rumor Video (with link),” “Fake Honey Video (with link),” “2011 Hangzhou Agricultural and Sideline Products Logistics Center Vegetable Pesticide

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Residue Survey,” etc.; The agronomy category includes “Zhejiang Silkworm Silk Weaving Proverbs Distribution Map” and “1993 Basic Situation of Zhejiang Agricultural Business Fields”; The environmental category has “PM2.5 concentration detection”; The climate and meteorological categories include “Zhu KeZhen track map” (竺可桢行迹图), “Zhejiang average temperature and annual differences”; The economic and financial categories include “Zhejiang Population Growth Rate in the Late Qing Dynasty,” “Zhejiang Banking (钱庄) Industry Status (Republic of China era),” “Zhejiang County Banks, Time of Establishment and Capital Composition,” etc.; The geosciences category includes “Land Use Performance Evaluation,” “The First to the Sixth Releases of the Chinese Historical and Cultural Towns and Their Locational Index,” “The First to the Sixth Releases of the Chinese Historical and Cultural Villages and Their Locational Index,” “The First to the Fifth Releases of 5,825 Chinese Traditional Villages and Their Location Index,” and many others. At present, the platform has more maps in the humanities field than others. These include the distribution of poetry authors in “Complete Song Articles” (全宋文), “Complete Yuan Articles” (全元文), “Complete Yuan Poetry” (全元诗) (Fig. 4.1), “Complete Jin Yuan Ci” (全金元词), and “The Collection of Poems in the Dynasty” (列朝诗集小传), among other distribution data of character groups. The system also has data on

Fig. 4.1  The distribution map of poetry authors in “Complete Yuan Poetry” (全元诗)

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opera authors of Ming and Qing Dynasties, female authors of Ming and Qing Dynasties, opera performers of the Qing Dynasty, writers of Jiangxi Province in the Song Dynasty, scholars from Jiangxi Province of the Song Dynasty, Model women mentioned in the history of the dynasties, writers from Yunnan Province of the Ming and Qing Dynasties, the ancient and modern figures of Zhejiang, females in the literary families around Taihu Lake in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, and distribution maps of ancient surnames (Wu, Zhou, Xu, Cha, Sheng, Jiang, Chen, Wang, Liu, Ye, Zhang). The geographical distribution data layers for non-human subjects include the “Siku Quanshu Catalog Summary” (四库全书总目提要) (Fig.  4.2), “Zhejiang Literature Collection Catalog” (浙江集部著述总 目), the geographical distribution of the Literature Collection Catalogs in various provinces (Jiangxi, Jiangsu, Hunan, Guangdong, Anhui, Sichuan, etc.) in the Qing Dynasty, and the subtitles of the “Continuation of Siku Quanshu” (续修四库全书). The maps of intangible cultural heritage include national and local intangible cultural heritage lists, shadow play distributions, and video data. Data about individual historical figures include Zhuge Liang (诸葛亮 181–234), Lu Ji (陆机 261–303), Wang Bo (王勃 650–675), Chen Ziang ( 陈子昂 659–700), Zhang Yue (张说 667–731), Wang Wei (王维 701–761), Bai Xingjian (白行简 776–828), Du Mu (杜枚 803–852), Feng Yansi (冯延 巳 903–852), Yan Shu (晏殊 991–1055), Shi Chengxun (释成寻

Fig. 4.2  The distribution map of locations in “Siku Quanshu Catalog Summary” (四库全书总目提要)

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Fig. 4.3  Movement tracks of Su Shi (苏轼)

1011–1081), Su Shi (苏轼 1037–1101, Fig.  4.3), Hong Mai (洪迈 1123–1202), Lu You (陆游 1125–1209), Zhu Xi (朱熹 1130–1200), Xin Qiji (辛弃疾 1140–1207), Ouyang Xuan (欧阳玄 1283–1357), Wu Shidao (吴师道 1283–1357), Shi Naian (施耐庵 Approximately 1296–1370), Song Lian (宋濂 1310–1381), Liu Ji (刘基 1311–1375), Gao Qi (高启 1336–1373), Xie Jin (解缙 1396–1415), Shen Zhou (沈周 1427–1509), Chen Xianzhang (陈献章 1428–1500), Li Dongyang (李东阳 1447–1516), Wang Ao (王鏊 1450–1524), Yang Yiqing (杨一清 1454–1530), Zhu Yunming (祝允明 146–1526), Wang JiuSi (王九思 1468–1551), Tang Yin ( 唐寅 1470–1523), Wen Zhengming (文征明 1470–1559), Wang Yangming (王阳明 1472–1528, Fig. 4.4), Xia Yan (夏言 1482–1548), Gui Youguang ( 归有光 1506–1571), Wang Shenzhong (王慎中 1509–1559), Li Panlong ( 李攀龙 1514–1570), Shen Mingchen (沈明臣 1518–1596), Xu Wei (徐渭 1521–1593), Wang Daokun (汪道昆 1525–1593), Wang Shizhen (王世贞 1526–1590), Li Zhi (李贽 1527–1602), Tang Xianzu (汤显祖 1550–1616), Feng Qi (冯琦 1558–1603), Ye Xianzu (叶宪祖 1566–1641), Yuan Hongdao (袁宏道 1568–1610), Feng Menglong (冯梦龙 1574–1646), Qian Qianyi ( 钱谦益 1582–1664), Zhang Dai (张岱 1597–1685), Chen Zilong (陈子龙

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Fig. 4.4  Movement tracks of Wang Yangming (王阳明)

1608–1647), Huang Zongxi (黄宗羲 1610–1695), Fang Yizhi (方以智 1611–1680), Li Yu (李渔 1611–1680), Gu Yanwu (顾炎武 1613–1682), You Dong (尤侗 1618–1704), Hou Fangyu (侯方域 1618–1704), Zhu Yizun (朱彝尊 1629–1709), Qu Dajun (屈大均 1630–1696), Wang Shizhen (王士禛 1634–1711), Kong Shangren (孔尚任 1648–1718), Quan Zuwang (全祖望 1705–1755), Zhang Tingyu (张廷玉 1672–1755), Yao Nai (姚鼐 1731–1815), Nalan Rongruo (纳兰容若 1655–1685), Zheng Banqiao (郑 板桥 1693–1765), Yuan Mei (袁枚 1716–1797), Dai Zhen (戴震 1724–1777), Gong Zizhen (龚自珍 1792–1841), Zeng Guofan (曾国藩 1811–1872), Zhang Yuanji (张元济1867–1959), Lu Xun (鲁迅 1881–1936), Xia mianzun (夏丏尊 1886–1946), Mao Dun (茅盾 1896–1981), Xu Zhimo (徐志摩 1896–1931), Yu Dafu (郁达夫 1896–1945), Sun Kaidi (孙楷第 1898–1986), Yu Pingbo (俞平伯 1900–1990), Feng Xuefeng (冯雪峰 1903–1976), Lin Huiyin (林徽因 1904–1955), Li Jianwu (李健吾 1906–1982), Zhang Ailing (张爱玲 1920–1995), et al. Functions of the Platform The AMAP platform provides users with various functions such as publishing, editing, searching, viewing, query by location, and sharing. Each area is briefly described below.

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• Publish a map: If the user has built an excel data table with latitude and longitude, she may wish to publish it on AMAP. A basic procedure for doing this is to save the excel file in CSV format, load it to QGIS, export it to the shapefile format from QGIS (Shapefiles contain multiple files with the suffixes dbf, prj, shp, and shx), then upload the shapefile (multiple files) to the AMAP platform to form a layer. The user may click on the layer to enter the layer page, click the “Create a map” button, select Tiantidu as the base map, and give the created map a name and save it. In this way, a map may be created and published. • Edit a map: The AMAP platform provides editing capabilities for uploaded layers and for created maps. Editing functions include setting thumbnails, defining symbology for geographic features, and controlling access permission. For example, when a user wishes to set a layer’s access permission, the platform provides several settings: “Who can view it?” “Who can download it?” “Who can change the metadata?” “Who can edit the data in this layer?” “Who can edit the symbology for the layer?” “Who can manage it?” • Search for maps: For published maps, the platform provides options to search by map name and layer name. For example, if a researcher would like to search for keywords with “Hangzhou” in the abstract of the map, she may find “Distribution of Zhejiang Weisuo in the Ming Dynasty,” “Index of Authors of Ming Dynasty Female Authors,” “Zhejiang Ming Dynasty Characters,” and “Map of Ming Dynasty Stations and Roads.” If she entered “Zhejiang,” all maps with “Zhejiang” in the map name or abstract will be displayed. • View a map: After finding a map, the researcher can preview the map on the “View Map” page. The specific data hidden in the map is not visible in preview. Once the user enables the “Identify” button, clicking on geographic features on the map will bring up attribute information. • Find a location: The platform provides the ability to search for a location. After opening a map, on the menu bar there is an icon for “Place Name Index” or “Gazetteer search.” In this tool one can enter a place name, such as “Ningbo,” and all place names containing “Ningbo” will appear. If one clicks on the layer to go to the map associated with the layer the user may get the information needed. If the user wanted to locate the place, the user may double-click the place name and a popup window containing the candidate locations for this place name will appear on the current map. The user may

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then pick one to determine the location of the place name. This “Gazetteer search” can be used both to find places and to locate other key fields such as “person name,” “book name,” and “era” if they are selected as gazetteer fields in the layer’s metadata page. • Share a map: Users may share URL links to their own maps or maps posted by others. The platform provides more than ten kinds of social media sharing methods, including: Email, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, WeChat, QQ, QQ Space, Tencent Weibo, Sina Weibo, Renren.com, Tieba, Baidu.com, and Douban.com.

Challenges and Opportunities The development of AMAP is an on-going endeavor by the teams at Zhejiang University and Harvard University. In less than two years, the two groups have overcome a range of challenges and have learned several lessons both technical and cultural which will hopefully be valuable, as we go forward in this collaboration. Internet Environment The Internet has been expanding rapidly in China since the 1990s. Early on there was a brief period of free communication with the world outside China, which was soon followed by tightening government controls. This domestication of the Chinese Internet has been a multi-directional process involving multiple social actors, complex flows and interactions, and polyvalent and ambivalent outcomes. In just a little over two decades, the Chinese government has perfected a system of Internet control, including monitoring, blocking or filtering of information from outside China, and the censoring of information inside. A complex system of IP banning, DNS spoofing and redirection, URL filtering, and packet forging, popularly dubbed the “Great Firewall” was erected as a virtual boundary, selectively separating Chinese cyberspace from the outside.19 The Chinese national Internet firewall blocks a growing inventory of international web services including Google base maps. There is also a severe time delay when accessing those international services which are allowed from inside China. Individual organizations in China, such as universities often implement an even stricter network security control, forbidding the consumption of any international web services, and blocking all access from non-Chinese IP addresses. China’s Internet is now like a huge

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intranet, containing many small intranets inside it.20 This design has obvious advantages in terms of network security, but it also causes headaches for international collaborations which rely on shared web platforms and collaborative code development to be successful. The development of the AMAP system was hindered by this restrictive Internet environment in a number of ways. One direct impact was the inability of AMAP to access remote mapping layers. An AMAP instance running on the Zhejiang University server can only accept data layers stored in its local database. For example, it cannot take advantage of the global web map service registry in WorldMap.21 This limitation forced the development team to focus on data layers contributed by users in China exclusively. Because international developers have no access to the AMAP server on the Zhejiang University intranet, system configuration, performance diagnosis, and debugging were performed by the Zhejiang University team without direct outside support. Issues, testing and remediation suggestions and their outcomes, were communicated between the two teams asynchronously. The difference in time zones made the process much slower than onsite operations would have been, with a typical dialog cycle taking two days. Often a test which could have been done in minutes onsite would take days, sometimes even weeks, to manage between the two teams. To overcome the ambiguity of verbal descriptions, the teams used screenshots and videos to document issues and solutions, which though taking more time to create, results in more accurate documentation. The blockade of popular international base maps required AMAP to replace WorldMap base maps such as Google Maps and Open Street Maps with Chinese base maps such as Tianditu (天地图).22 Because Tianditu is not used in international applications outside of China (see discussion in the “Map projection and datum” section below), the Harvard team and the international open source developer community for Geonode (the core component of WorldMap) have little experience with Tianditu. Once again, the Zhejiang University team was on its own handling issues related to Tianditu base map integration. Character Encoding Spatial data in vector format usually contains attributes, or tables of values which are associated with geographic features (points, lines, or polygons). Each cell in such a table contains a sequence of characters representing a

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number, a text string, a date, a URL, etc. In different languages, these characters may be composed of different letters of the alphabet, different punctuation, etc. When stored in a computer, these values are converted to a sequence of bytes, or numeric values. Sometimes more than one byte is used to represent a single character. The binary key used to translate between a sequence of bytes and their corresponding character is known as character encoding. There are many different encoding systems, some for a specific language, such as GBK for simplified Chinese characters, but others cover many languages, such as UTF8. Most software systems have a default encoding that works for the most common type of language used within an intended user community. When another language needs to be used, the user must inform the system of the correct encoding used by their data, so the software can use the right encoding and display the data correctly. WorldMap, as a system intended for the international user community, uses UTF8 as the default encoding. However, most Chinese users are more familiar with operating systems which use language settings that default to the GBK encoding. Even though WorldMap can also handle GBK encoding, it is not the default, and thus requires users to declare it specifically when they upload their data. Alternatively, users may convert their data to UTF8 so that when they upload it to WorldMap, the system will handle it correctly by default. This seems to be an easy-to-understand process, however, even with user training and help documents, encoding mismatch is one of the most common user problems. To better address this challenge, the team will revise training materials to give more emphasis on character encoding. Map Projection and Datum A map projection is a systematic transformation of geographic coordinates which converts the coordinates of locations recorded as latitudes and longitudes on the three-dimensional earth surface, into coordinates on the cartesian plane of a map. Maps cannot be created without map projections. The shape of the earth is modeled in many ways, including as a sphere, an ellipsoid, or more accurately, as an irregular 3-D object, using a geodetic datum. A datum defines the earth’s surface by the radius for a sphere, the major and minor axes for an ellipsoid, or other more nuanced parameters for a 3-D object. It also defines the position of the surface

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relative to the center of the earth. A datum is an integral part of a map projection, as projected coordinate systems are based on geographic coordinates, which in turn are referenced to a datum. Because of the irregular shape of the earth and the transformation from a 3-D surface to a 2-D plane, all map projections, regardless of which datum they reference to, introduce locational distortion. Typically, when creating a map, one would select the datum and projection which best preserve locational accuracy and minimize distortion. However, for national security concerns, a country may develop a special datum which purposely distorts geographic coordinates. Maps created in these countries may be legally required to use a map projection which references the required datum. China’s GCJ-02 datum is such a geodetic datum. It was formulated by the Chinese State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping, which developed a topographic map non-linear confidentiality algorithm based on WGS-84, the internationally recognized reference coordinate system used by the Global Positioning System. A marker with GCJ-02 coordinates will be displayed at the corresponding location on a GCJ-02 map. However, if placed on a WGS-84 map, the coordinate offsets can result in up to a few hundred meters error. Similarly, a WGS-84 marker (such as an untampered GPS location) when placed on a GCJ-02 map, will also show up at a seemingly random location somewhere within a radius of a few dozen to a few hundred meters. There are official transformation tools for converting WGS-84 coordinates into GCJ-02 coordinates, but there is no official tool for the reverse transformation.23 Web map services meeting this Chinese government mandate must reference the GCJ-02 datum, or another Chinese proprietary datum with even more distortion such as Baidu or Gaode. Some international base map service providers complied, such as Google; others did not, such as OpenStreetMap. The discrepancy between GCJ-02 and WGS-84 is clearly visible on the BBBike web map comparison application.24 AMAP’s primary user community is in China, therefore it is required to use Chinese base maps. The default base map in AMAP is Tianditu. When users upload spatial data layers created in China referenced to GCJ-02 base maps or using Chinese government approved GPS devices, the features will line up with the Tianditu base map, preserving the relative locational accuracy. AMAP also provides an OpenStreetMap base map as an alternative, to support data referenced to the WGS-84 datum, in which case the user may manually switch the base map to OpenStreetMap. For

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most AMAP users however, the mapping is at a small enough scale that a shift of a few hundred meters does not matter, thus this problem will not be of great concern for them. Many spatial datasets created in earlier years in China are referenced to the Xian 1980 datum, which can be transformed to GCJ-02 or WGS-84 using popular GIS tools such as ArcMap or QGIS. Software Development Culture Software engineers from China have played an increasingly important role in the open source sector.25 The total number of GitHub users and contributors from China has been growing rapidly, promoting China’s ranking among world countries.26 However, open source is a relatively new practice in China with many challenges.27 Despite being ranked among the top three countries by total number of open source contributors, China hasn’t made it to the top 25 countries by number of contributors per capita.28 Even though computer code is a universal language, human language still plays an important role in software-oriented collaborations. Living in a non-English-speaking society, Chinese software engineers have to first overcome the language barrier when collaborating with the global community.29 Perhaps more important than the human language difference, however, is the difference in the culture of communication. In many Chinese organizations, employees are used to hierarchical communication chains within the organization and one-to-one contacts across organizations. Compared with instant team-wide messaging on Slack and other channels, the hierarchical style is more effective in carrying out a well-­ defined and tightly managed project, but it is less effective in harnessing creative ideas in a loosely coordinated group, which most of the open source communities are. The AMAP project experienced this cultural difference in communication in the earlier stages of the project and it took some time for both teams to adjust their communication styles to accommodate one another. Another major challenge for the AMAP project is the small number of Chinese language users in the international GeoNode open source community. Other major efforts around the world which contribute to GeoNode are English-language based. This holds true even for those projects which are based in Europe. Therefore, when new code is introduced to GeoNode, there are few Chinese pilot users to test the Chinese-related

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functions. Bugs and regressions that are specific to Chinese language encoding, map projection, or data structure remain undiscovered in new releases of GeoNode due to lack of testing by Chinese users. This situation led to a number of setbacks to the AMAP project which occurred after version upgrades. One of the initial objectives of the AMAP project was to collaboratively develop a software platform, knowing the teams are from different cultures, with the hope that in the process, each team would learn technical skills from the other, while improving their ability to solve problems in complicated situations. The two teams have now set off to build AMAP, a Chinese-centric platform for humanities research, and do so by following open source software development protocols. The preliminary results are encouraging. The platform has been widely used while being under construction, despite the glitches pre-release platforms commonly have. As the Zhejiang University team becomes more familiar with the GeoNode-­ based AMAP system, as well as the open source community it is part of, there will be a transition of responsibility from the Harvard team to the Zhejiang team for future enhancements and design changes.

Future Perspectives We believe that the establishment of the AMAP platform is important for the following reasons: • The platform is China’s first comprehensive geographic information platform, which supports the publishing of geographic information data on any historical subject matter. • The platform supports the creation of historical big data on a system run within China rather than on a server run within another country as has often been the case in the past. • The platform provides a reference for government decision-making, social services, and scientific research. • The platform promotes the use of big data within an academic context. • The platform is useful for primary and secondary school students who wish to learn about geographic conditions in China at national, provincial, and local scales. • We see potential for this platform providing a basis for the development of smart tourism services.

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The overarching objective of AMAP is to build a platform for developing datasets in order to support quantitative and statistical studies, location-­based query and visual presentation; containing data in humanities, social sciences, economics and other fields; providing support for governments’ decision-making, academic research and social services. To achieve that, new capabilities and datasets are in the plan to be added, which include the following: Capabilities to be added: • Provide more advanced support for mobile device users • Provide a more robust search engine for spatial data • Provide new categories in the metadata catalog to meet the needs of Chinese scholars’ data and map publications Data content to be developed: • Map the movements of documented historical figures. There are tens of thousands of such historical figures from before the Qin Dynasty up to the present. • Map the distribution of Chinese writers throughout history, including large-scale collections, female writers of all dynasties, and writers of various styles. • Map the locations mentioned in historical literatures, such as “Complete Tang Dynasty Poems” (全唐诗), “Complete Song Dynasty Poems” ( 全宋诗), “Complete Yuan Dynasty Poems” (全元诗), “Complete Song Dynasty Lyrics” (全宋词), “Complete Jin and Yuan Dynasty Lyrics” (全金元词), “Complete Tang Dynasty Essays” (全唐文), “Complete Song Dynasty Essays” (全宋文), “Complete Yuan Dynasty Essays” (全元文), and poems and essays of Ming and Qing Dynasties. • Develop data as well as video and audio files for cultural heritage sites, scenic parks, former residence of celebrities, temples and cultural gathering places. • Map the catalog of historical literature from Zhejiang Province. • Develop a database for Chinese local historic gazetteers, including data about officials, imperial examinations, famous characters, arts and literature (writings). • Develop data for famous villages and towns. • Develop data for artists. • Develop data for hard to quantify cultural heritage. • Develop data on social and economic factors.

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Conclusions The AMAP system provides a way for humanities scholars in China to create, organize, discover, analyze, visualize, and share research content, benefiting from the ability to organize and visualize that content by geographic space as well as by time. The platform initially provided a majority of content from the humanities, but it has since expanded to other subject areas, including the social sciences, environmental science, public health, business, tourism, public service, government administration, and others. The system has been used to support teaching at the college level, and has the potential to be adopted for K-12 classrooms. The system also holds promise for addressing another important area: improving the availability of scholarly data within China, and facilitating the sharing of that data within China and globally. As the initial development phase of the system nears completion, and the project enters a new phase of functional enhance and content expansion, AMAP will face new challenges. There will continue to be the need for a strong software engineering team, knowledgeable about the unique technical environment in China and the specific needs of Chinese scholars, but this same team must also remain well-connected to the global open source GeoNode developer’s community. In this regard, it will be critical to find a way to facilitate effective knowledge transfer between the current collaborating team members, and participating graduate students as they progress in their graduate program. In the longer term, there may also be a role for a private company based in China to help maintain and grow the system. As an open source system like AMAP evolves, it is especially important to find a way to balance the short-term need of adding new functions quickly, (perhaps forking the code to bypass the lengthy process of getting buy-in from the community and checking in changes to the core code base), with the long-term need to remain synchronized with the latest version of the code base. Once a system is forked, it can become costly to migrate back to the main code base again, especially if the fork has been allowed to persist for months or years. If the system remains unsynchronized with the main code base, the project can lose the benefit of contributions from the global open source community. As content accumulates and the number of users increase, maintaining system stability and performance will become more challenging. Security, backup and recovery, archiving and preservation, both for the system

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code, its digital contents, and the published maps and data as permanent links, will demand significant attention and resources. The future of AMAP and its sustained growth, therefore, will depend largely on the availability of resources, both hardware and manpower. As an academic research project, the development of AMAP has achieved its initial goals. In addition to the platform as a product and the contents assembled, the knowledge gained by the team and the lessons learned during the system’s development, especially as relates to the international nature of the collaboration around an open source project, have been valuable. Our hope is that this knowledge, well documented, will benefit other groups which engage in similar collaborations.

Notes 1. Unknown author. Yu Gong 《禹贡》. Shang Shu《尚书》 (a.k.a. Book of Classics 《书经》); Historical Records 《史记》, Volume 2, Xia Ben Ji— Second 《夏本纪·第二》; and Han Book—Geography《汉书·地理志》. Unknown publisher, unknown date. 2. Liu, Yuxi (刘禹锡, Tang Dynasty). Wu Yi Xiang 《乌衣巷》. Complete Tang Poetry《全唐诗》, China Publishing House (中华书局), 1999, Volume 365, p. 4127. 3. China Biographical Database. Available online: https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/cbdb/ (accessed on 20 September 2019). 4. Xu, Y. Some Visualization Approaches to the Study of Classical Literature: A case Study on Tang Xianzu. Journal of Zhejiang University, 2018; Volume 48: Number 2. 5. China Historical GIS.  Available online: https://sites.fas.harvard. edu/~chgis/ (accessed on 20 September 2019). 6. Great Britain Historical GIS. Available online: http://www2.port.ac.uk/ research/gbhgis/ (accessed on 20 September 2019). 7. National Historical Geographic Information System. Available online: https://www.nhgis.org/ (accessed on 20 September 2019). 8. David Rumsey Map Collection. Available online: https://www.davidrumsey.com/ (accessed on 20 September 2019). 9. Geoplatform. Available online: https://www.geoplatform.gov/ (accessed on 20 September 2019). 10. INSPIRE Geoportal. Available online: https://inspire-­geoportal.ec. europa.eu/ (accessed on 20 September 2019). 11. Harvard Geospatial Library. Available online: https://library.harvard.edu/ services-­tools/harvard-­geospatial-­library/ (accessed on 20 September 2019).

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12. Old Maps Online. Available online: https://www.oldmapsonline.org/ (accessed on 20 September 2019). 13. Digital Public Library of America. Available online: https://dp.la/ (accessed on 20 September 2019). 14. ArcGIS Online. Available online: https://www.arcgis.com/ (accessed on 20 September 2019). 15. CartoDB.  Available online: https://carto.com/ (accessed on 20 September 2019). 16. MapStory. Available online: https://mapstory.org/ (accessed on 20 September 2019). 17. OmekaNeatline. Available online: https://omeka.org/classic/plugins/ Neatline/ (accessed on 20 September 2019). 18. Harvard WorldMap. Available online: http://worldmap.harvard.edu/ (accessed on 20 September 2019). 19. Yang, G. A Chinese Internet? History, practice, and globalization. Chinese Journal of Communication, 2012; pp. 49–54. 20. Cimpanu, C.  Oracle: China’s internet is designed more like an intranet. Available online: https://www.zdnet.com/article/oracle-­chinas-­internet-­ is-­designed-­more-­like-­an-­intranet/ (accessed on 20 September 2019). 21. Corti, P.; Lewis, B.; Kralidis, A. T.; Mwenda, N. J. Implementing an open source spatio-temporal search platform for Spatial Data Infrastructures. PeerJ Preprints. 2016. Available online: https://peerj.com/preprints/2238/ (accessed on 20 September 2019). 22. National Geomatics Center of China. Available online: http://www.tianditu.gov.cn/ (accessed on 20 September 2019). 23. Wikipedia. Restrictions on geographic data in China. Available online: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_data_in_ China (accessed on 20 September 2019). 24. OpenStreetMap.org. Map Compare. Available online: https://mc.bbbike. org/mc/ (accessed on 20 September 2019). 25. Simsek, G.  Chinese Open Source Software. Software Engineering Daily. 2018. Available online: https://softwareengineeringdaily. com/2018/12/09/chinese-­open-­source-­software/ (accessed on 20 September 2019). 26. GitHub People. Available online: https://octoverse.github.com/people. html/ (accessed on 20 September 2019). 27. Ahmed, M.  Open Source Software Development in China. University of Oulu, 2012. Available online: https://wiki.oulu.fi/download/attachments/28092087/ossd_2012_kc_lamichhane_ahmed.pdf?version=1&mo dificationDate=1353314890000&api=v2 (accessed on 20 September 2019).

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28. Hoffa, F. GitHub top countries. 2016. Available online: https://medium. com/@hoffa/github-­top-­countries-­201608-­13f642493773 (accessed on 20 September 2019). 29. Torsello. Top 10 countries on StackOverflow and GitHub. NLPx Tales of Data Science 2015. Available online: http://nlpx.net/archives/172/ (accessed on 20 September 2019).

CHAPTER 5

Space: The Keyword of Art History Study Juan Mao

Since the 1960s, the western academic world has gone through “spatial turn.” People gradually realized the great significance of “space” in social life. As a geographical concept, the term “space” is widely used in non-­ geographical fields, and the issue of “space” has drawn great attention from the humanities, and it has become a cut-in point for scholars to discuss postmodernism and globalization, which exerts a far-reaching impact on urban research, urban planning, philosophy, literature studies, cultural studies, and many other fields. This topic has become a new domain of modern multi-disciplinary theoretical exploration. “Time” and “history” have always been the main factors in tackling the practice and problems of art, which has been a tradition from Aristotle in This essay, originally titled “Space from Multiple Perspectives: A Keyword of Art History Study,” was published in Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art. What follows is the full information: MAO Juan, “Space: The Keyword of Art History Study,” Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art, no. 4 (2016): 171–174. [毛娟: “空间: 艺术史研究的关键词,” 《文艺理论研究》, 2016 年第 4 期, 171–174 页。] J. Mao (*) Sichuan Normal University, Chengdu, China © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Fang, R. T. Tally Jr. (eds.), Spatial Literary Studies in China, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03914-0_5

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the West. In the title page of Laocoon, Lessing quoted the poem of the ancient Greek poet Simonides, “Painting is dumb poetry and poetry speaking painting.”1 He considered that poetry was an art of time and painting was an art of space. “Painting uses forms and colors in space. Poetry articulates sounds in time.”2 Meanwhile, he also conveyed the view that poetry was superior to painting, and time was superior to space. In modern West, the theoretical concern with space-time and space-time experience can be traced back to the French poet Baudelaire: “Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.”3 But Baudelaire’s main concern here is time. Before the twentieth century, people paid more attention to time than to space. For a long time, people regarded space as an inanimate container. “Space was treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, and the immobile. Time, on the contrary was richness, fecundity, life, dialectical.”4 So, “space devaluation” was prevalent in Western academic circles. Later, with the rise of “cultural geography,” theorists such as Henri Lefebvre, Edward W.  Soja, Michel Foucault, and David Harvey interpreted and intervened from different perspectives, and challenged the idea of space as a physical entity or an empty container seriously. Lefebvre tried to change the simple understanding of space, he thought that space is a social product, “space is permeated with social relations: it is not only supported by social relations but is also producing and produced by social relations.”5 Space production is an open process, which comes into being in history and transforms in historical evolution. Therefore, spatiality is always closely related to historicity and sociality. We should attach importance to the understanding and interpretation of “spatiality,” as well as to the understanding of “historicity” and “sociality.” Soja, in following Henri Lefebvre’s tradition, argued in the Third Space that Henri Lefebvre greatly expanded the dimensions of social space research. He said, “It is space, not time, that obscures us today.” He argued that “Today, however, it is space more than time that hides consequences from us, the ‘making of geography’ more than the ‘making of history’ that provides the most revealing tactical and theoretical world. This is the insistent premise and promise of postmodern geographies.”6 As the leading figure in contemporary space theory, David Harvey introduced spatial study into the vision of Marxism research. As a scholar of human geography, the issue of space in relation to the geographical environment serves as Harvey’s entry point of accepting and developing Marxist theory. He found that within the Marxism tradition, there was no

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clear statement about space and time, and no relevant theory of space and time had been developed. In his view, space is the key to understanding cities. The changes of different forms of the city contain a profound spatial transformation. “Space and time are basic categories of human existence. Yet we rarely debate their meanings; we tend to take them for granted, and give them common-sense or self-evident attributions.”7 These scholars tried to change people’s neglect of space from different perspectives. Spatiality is an important point for us to understand geography, architecture, sociology, and art history. “Time” and “space” are two basic dimensions of people’s understanding of the world and human beings exist in their co-evolution. “Space and time are the framework in which all reality is concerned. We cannot conceive any real thing unless under the conditions of space and time.”8 However, people’s long-time neglect of the spatial dimension makes it difficult for us to clearly explain the complex relationship between art and society. Like “time,” “space” is the product of human cultural activities, which is also produced in the evolution of history. Therefore, theorists have criticized the neglect of space, we need to re-understand and re-­ explain space, which is also the need of contemporary academic construction and human development. Today, as the common focus of geography, philosophy, sociology, literature and art, “space” does not mean “emptiness,” and it is not only a material existence, but also a product of culture and social relations. In recent years, scholars’ concern about “space” has entered the research field of art history and art theory. “Space” is not a container, but a “text” endowed with profound cultural connotations. Emphasizing the social relationship between artistic practice and environment is an important theoretical basis for the spatial study of art history. Space criticism in art studies focuses on how “space” conveys multiple meanings in the fields of society, history, culture, and art through its own meaning system. “Space” has become a multi-disciplinary research focus across humanities, geography, politics and sociology, and has become the key word in our study of art history. As a research method, key words mainly reveal the differences, contradictions, rifts, and tensions of social and cultural meanings from the perspective of language. Grasping the connotation and significance of the key word “space” in the study of art history and opening up a new perspective of space interpretation will help us to understand and construct contemporary art history.

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The core of art history is art. Like the human body, it experiences birth, growth, aging, and death. At present, more and more researches show that art history exists not only in the narration of art history, but also in the unique special spatial forms, such as the exhibition of museums. “One of the focuses in recent art theory” according to Professor Zhou Xian, “is the so-called Museology, which involves how museums (art galleries) deal with complex art history materials.”9 Art historians are more interested in different forms of activities in museums, galleries, colleges, and so on. Allan Wallach, for example, sees museums as “places where social hierarchies are played out and reinforced.”10 Carol Duncan says that the museum is a ritual place: “It is the visitors who enact the ritual. The museum’s sequenced spaces and arrangements of objects, its lighting and architectural details provide both the stage set and the script.”11 Annie Coombes examines the history of British museums, seeing it as a place to talk about race, colonialism, nationalism, and so on.12 In modern art, it is difficult to imagine how art history could be vividly reproduced without the spatial form of a museum. Museums have a long history in the West. According to Mr. Su Wei, the word “museum” in English comes from the Latin “Museion,” which means “the place where Muse appears.” In Chinese, we think of “Museum” as a place for collecting and studying objects representing the cultural heritage of nature and mankind. “Museum” means “art gallery” in both Chinese and Western languages, but used more often than “art gallery.” Behind this change, there is a rich historical and cultural context of transformation, from which we can touch the historical details of modernity and the changing process of modernism art concept.13 In1793, the Louvre became the first museum in modern sense. The greatest significance of which is to make those works of art once enjoyed by the authorities accessible to the public, and it also increases the aesthetic factors in the sense of sociology. In modern times, the construction mode of European “museum” comes from the Louvre Museum, and the national will and national consciousness are instilled by it.14 Closely related to art history, “museum” is an important spatial dimension for us to interpret the writing of art history. It used to be a shrine to privilege, occupied by the classic works, and it is willing to create a space for people to get a unique perspective and experience away from the real world. In the long development, it finally becomes a place which is external to the time consciousness of the audience, but internal to their spatial experience. It ought to be said that its development is deeply rooted in modern democracy, and the history

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and historical art and culture are managed by the power of democracy and the state. German art historian Hans Belting has discussed in depth the position and predicament of space institutions such as “museums” in the contemporary art system under the background of modernity. “Whether new art is begging for the stage in the museum or if the museum is hunting for new art. Without the museum, today’s art would be not only homeless but also voiceless and even invisible. In turn, the museum, as barely prepared as it is for contemporary art, would give up itself if it closed its doors to new art. This enforced alliance effectively wipes out any alternative to the museum.”15 What is the significance and value of museums and galleries when they are no longer shrines for the privileged, when artists are no longer selected, and when everything is accessible. Whether the traditional form of museum is still appropriate at present, and whether it can still show the function of art history, these problems are greatly related with the development and writing of the art history after modernism. With the increasing ambiguity of the concept of art history and the gradual disintegration of modernist art history principles, the relationship between art history and space forms such as museums and art galleries has undergone many changes, especially after the authority of art history has gradually weakened. Museums and art galleries present different structures and diverse features. On the one hand, these spatial forms create greater economic value; on the other hand, they disguise their power preference. Each gallery has its own value standard, and they have the right to choose the art that suits their own preference, positions, and interests. As a mode, they therefore have exclusivity and value judgment. In the contemporary era, however, its success seems to have been left to public interpretation and market acceptance, and art has embraced the marketization of galleries: “prices as an index of prestige,”16 and the visual symbol of art. When the art market extended to all fields of the art system, it began to transform artistic creation, art criticism, art history writing and art institutions, and dissolve the judging mechanism established by modernism, so that the autonomy of art is once again in crisis.17 As professor Zhou Xian puts it, the exhibition of museums and art galleries is actually a narrative of past history in the art world, and a reproduction of specific social ideology and its social relations. On the surface, it looks like people are watching all kinds of exhibits, but in fact, they unconsciously are constructing a specific relationship between subjects and objects, individuals and groups, the

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present and the past, and a certain standard of viewing value, activating some kind of social memory.18 It is noteworthy that space institutions such as museums and art galleries do not dominate contemporary art, but they shape it. Contemporary art absorbs various forces from different channels, and conveys various meanings of these forces. Museums and art galleries not only display works of art, but more importantly, they convey certain artistic concepts and become the presence of certain history. Donald Preziosi, American art historian, argues that “The modern practices of museology—no less than those of the museum’s auxiliary discursive practice, art history (let us call this here museography)—are firmly rooted in an ideology of representational adequacy, wherein exhibition is presumed to ‘represent’ more or less faithfully some set of extra-museological affairs; some ‘real’ history which, it is imagined, pre-exists its portrayal; its re-presentation, in exhibitionary space.”19 Preziosi holds that the museum is a constructed narrative space. As a system, it is the product of the construction of modernity, nation-state and cultural identity, and the crystallization of the collective memory of a national culture. The study of museum chronicles is a unique angle of art history research. In fact, all kinds of museum exhibitions in history show a kind of narrative of art history in different spatial ways, as if telling various art stories to people. So, Preziosi continues: “Museums, in short, established exemplary models for ‘reading’ objects as traces, representations, reflections, or surrogates of individuals, groups, nations, and races and of their ‘histories’. They were civic spaces designed for European ceremonial engagement with (and thus the evocation, fabrication, and preservation of) its own history and social memory. As such, museums made the visible legible, thereby establishing what was worthy to be seen, whilst teaching museum users how to read what is to be seen: how to activate social memories.”20 Italian art historian Giulio Carlo Argan mentioned in The Historicity of Art and Art History that the “Urban Space” is one of the core concepts in the study of art history. Mass media has a profound impact on the development of contemporary art. The development of media history and art history tells us that the transformation of media forms has brought about profound change in human media and the way of reception. On the one hand, space suffers various impacts and loses its integrity; on the other hand, space always tries to maintain its own frame category. Media Theorist Marshall McLuhan compares media to the extension of human beings. In the media age, information is closely related to media. Through the media,

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human visual and auditory experiences can transcend the boundaries of time, space, and flesh. In this context, Argan is keenly aware of the new challenges faced by art history: the impact of media technology on art and the de-differentiation of traditional elite culture by mass culture. Therefore, he explicitly puts forward the “spatial turn” in the study of art history. Modern art history has successfully expressed the abstract concept of space, which is the basic concept for all visual arts, in the form of urban space. Because urban space-city is regarded as a veritable information system, all the pure phenomenological studies of aesthetic experience (past or present) tend to the phenomenological study of urban space, because urban space is regarded as the space of social life, that is, the space of communication.”21 Space has the value of considering art history from a new perspective. Compared with pure visual and poetic aesthetic value, it is more inclusive. The significance of “spatial turn” in art history lies not only in shifting people’s attention from time to space, but also in the effort to change people’s traditional cognition of society and history. Auguste Rodin once said that great artists were exploring space. Space is not a conceptual perspective relationship, every inch of texture, every color and every shape in the picture is space, which is the product of history, society, and practice. As a key word in the study of art history, “space” not only represents the material form in people’s actual feeling, but also reflects the connotation of spiritual level. Like “time,” it is an important dimension for human beings to feel the world. Many theorists have expounded the attribute of space from different angles, and this explains the openness of spatial theory. In addition, “space” has become a research strategy for intellectuals to intervene in reality and participate in politics. As an important research base of modern human geography, it has become an indispensable new perspective and new path to the study of contemporary art theory.

Notes 1. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “Preface,” in Laocoon, an Essay upon the Limits of Painting and poetry, trans. Ellen Frothingham, (New York: Dover Publications, 2005), 2. 2. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon, an Essay upon the Limits of Painting and poetry, 69. 3. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern life, trans. P.  E. Charvet, (London: Penguin Books, 2010), 13.

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4. Michel Foucault, “Questions on Geography,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 70. 5. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 286. 6. Edward W.  Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 1. 7. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990), 201. 8. Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to the philosophy of human culture (New York: Yale University Press, 1944), 62. 9. 周宪主编: 《艺术理论基本文献》, 北京: 生活·读书·新知三联书店, 2014年, 序言第16页。 [Zhou Xian, “Preface,” in Documents of Western Contemporary Art Theories, ed. Zhou Xian (Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2014), 16.] 10. Anne D’Alleva, Methods and Theories of Art History (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2005), 55–56. 11. Carol Duncan, “The Art Museum as Ritual,” in The Art of Art History, ed. Donald Preziosi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 478. 12. Annie E. Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture, and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 2. 13. Hans Belting, Art History after Modernism, trans. Caroline Saltzwedel and Mitch Cohen (Chicago & London: U of Chicago P, 2003), 107. 14. Ibid., 110. 15. Ibid., 97. 16. Ibid., 98. 17. Ibid., 21. 18. 周宪主编: 《艺术理论基本文献》, 序言第17页。 [Zhou Xian, “Preface,” in Documents of Western Contemporary Art Theories, 17.] 19. Donald Preziosi, “Epilogue: The Art of Art History,” in The Art of Art History, 488. 20. Ibid., 489–490. 21. 转引自周宪主编: 《艺术理论基本文献》, 第215页。 [Quoted from Zhou Xian (ed.), Documents of Western Contemporary Art Theories, 215.]

CHAPTER 6

The Attributes of British and American Literary Maps: An Exploration Fangyun Guo

I Since the groundbreaking study of Literary Cartography in British and American literature in The Eye of History: Literature and Cartography in the Colonial Encounter, a PhD dissertation by Bruce Avery in 1992, scholarship has witnessed over two decades of gathering research on the subject.1 So far, literary works ranging from the Renaissance period to the This essay is revised from a chapter about the attributes of literary maps in Literary Cartography, a theoretical monograph directing at the construction of a spatial poetics of cartography in English literature. What follows is the full information: GUO Fangyun, Literary Cartography, Beijing: The Commercial Press, 2020.  Moreover, this essay is translated by GUO Fangyun (郭方云) and HE Ping (和平), and revised by Sophia Kidd and Edward Painter. F. Guo (*) School of International Studies, Southwest University, Chongqing, China e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Fang, R. T. Tally Jr. (eds.), Spatial Literary Studies in China, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03914-0_6

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Postmodern period have been studied through this spatial lens, and “there has gradually been a diversification in research perspectives closely related to Ecologism, Post-colonialism, Feminism and Deconstructivism.” Consequently, typical themes, such as environmental otherness, spatial paradox, objectification of the female, desire embodiment and disorientation in space, have been introduced to the field of Literary Cartography. Nevertheless, there exist shortcomings in the existing literature exemplified both by “severe scarcity of ontological research” and “monotony of critical strategies” concerning the study of English literary maps.2 The discrepancy between myriad existence of textual studies and the absence of theoretical research, not only exhibits the popularity of literary mapping practices, but also highlights the significance of exploring theoretic principles in scholarship. Above all, attribute research of literary maps proves to be both urgent and indispensable. The pioneering scholars represented by Avery in this field, utilized the cartographic images to scrutinize the potential power discourse in Britannic literary landscapes, involving British writers across a temporal range, such as Edmund Spencer, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Rudyard Kipling, and Salman Rushdie.3 This focus on the visual appearance of literary maps, principally derived from the traditional notion of Cartographic Positivism and Graphic-centralism, suffers from a preoccupation with a narrow conceptualization of the word “map.” However, this misconception can be rectified by various literary maps, for example, the imagery world mentioned by Socrates’ disciple in Aristophanes’ Clouds, the T-O map in the eyes of Theseus in The Knight’s Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer,4 the God’s facial map praised in Philip Sidney’s poems, as well as the yellowish two-dimensional graph of Jefferson Town in William Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury. Originally no visual maps but only textual spatial descriptions were attached to these monumental works, providing convoluted visualizations such as depicted via stream of consciousness in modern masterpieces represented by T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The attribution of this phenomenon is due to the newly modified conceptualization of the “literary map” in broad sense, having to do, namely, with, “the graphical representation or textual depiction of spatial information in the world constructed in literary works.”5 Inquiry into the literary maps should go beyond the traditional definition of mapping, providing a much broader space for scholastic exploration. Etymologically speaking, “attribute,” a word deriving from late Latin attribūtum, is defined as “a quality or character ascribed to any person or

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thing, one which is in common estimation or usage assigned to him; hence, sometimes, an epithet or appellation in which the quality is ascribed.”6 For Aristotle, “essence,” or ουσία, determines the attribute of the thing. Moreover, “the thing and what being is for it are the same, and in another way they are not.” Thus, it is of great significance to parse out the nature of the thing, as it is a way of obtaining truth.7 In other words, the exploration of essence is an indispensable phase in the construction of an ontology, which lays down the foundational logic of this research. Accordingly, this essay will focus on visual-textual narrative and ontological spatiality in British and American literary maps, directed at advancing ontological research into Literary Cartography.

II Previous to the discussion of visual-textual narration in literary maps, it is vital to make a clear distinction among the terms “narrate,” “narrative,” and “narrativeness.” The word “narrate,” deriving from old Latin “narrāre,” originally means “to relate or to recount,” while “narrative” in literary criticism refers to “an account of a series of events, facts, etc., given in order and with the establishing of connections between them.” Comparatively speaking, “narrativeness” is defined as “the quality that makes narrative not merely present but essential.”8 Starting from the time of Gottfried Leibniz, abstract principles and scientific laws have been employed by Western thought to explore the nature of things, “which indicates narrative would be, at best, merely illustrative. Thus, critics like Fyodor Dostoevsky and Lev Tolstoy believe this fabricated knowledge model is just a chimera and are strongly against it.” However, Gary Saul Morson takes exactly the opposite point of view. He argues that the concept of “narrativeness” is very crucial, because it can help readers to understand “works that do away with” what he calls “the literature of (narrative) process, works that maximize narrativeness in a peculiar way that does away with structure and closure.”9 Accordingly, the value of narrativeness should be strongly stressed. Noticeably “narration” in this essay means the depiction of story, while “narrativeness,” principally embodied in narrative form and narrative content, refers in particular to the attribute of the plot-­ depicting function of literary maps. As the aforesaid literary maps can be categorized into two types, namely, the visual (linear, graphical) and the verbal (wordy, textual), general readers may take it for granted that they differ in medium, which is both

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apparent but moderately assumptive. It is true that graphical space, like the frontispiece of Utopia, takes a considerable proportion in traditional literary maps. Even in modern times, many literary cartographers are advocates of traditional positivism, leaving precious map space for visual depiction instead of words, sometimes even keeping it vacant and consequently allowing scarce room for artistic narrations.10 Obviously, having not fully developed the narrational potentials of literary maps but inflicted them with a huge waste of cartographical material, this practice of narrow-­ minded Graphic-centrism requires urgent modification and correction. Actually, a real literary map does not just function as the simple representation of the distributional characteristics embedded in spatial background, but instead takes full advantage of the relation between literature and maps, as well as increased proportion of textual narration, aiming at the harmonious combination of graph and text, serving well the visualization of literature. Without doubt, scholars need to get a clear understanding of advantages and disadvantages of graphical narrations and textual ones in order to help some writers to foster strengths and circumvent weaknesses during the process of writing. Although the image schema being visualized in literature is vivid, it is likely to be bounded by the limited space of a page, which might not be obvious in relatively simple expression of scenery, for example, the island story-telling of Utopia. However, the disadvantage of visualization may be compounded by the increasing complexity of spatial relations. For example, it is difficult for us to imagine that a world map visualizing Robinson Crusoe’s journeys could include all incidents, whether important or trivial, which the protagonist encounters during his overseas exploration. Therefore, literary cartographers need to keep a dynamic balance between images and words, the extent of which is difficult to maintain. The vital point is that, existing literary maps can provide sufficient space for textual narration, but their potentials have not been fully developed by some British and American scholars.11 In any case, a writer should endeavor to increase literary depiction, so that a graphical Logos can be identified and affirmed. Especially when outlining verbal maps, he or she needs to pay special attention to the spatial sequence as well as features of the object depicted. Dante has set a good example via employing the model of Seven Deadly Sins in Christianity, namely, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy, and Pride, to depict hierarchical layers of hell during his journey in purgatory. Fully armed with Dante’s artistic imagination and Ptolemy’s method of spatial

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calculations, a Florentine humanist called Girolamo Benivieni drew a vivid cosmological schema in religion, which was appended to Divina Commedia in 1506.12 As a result, literary works, by means of the shared symbol of letters, not only endow maps with nomenclature full of cultural connotations, but also create imaginative spaces inaccessible to actual territory, both of which witness the narrative power of literary maps. Moreover, textual depiction in literary works is usually given much more space than maps, in line with reader’s expectations of the medium. For the traditional map reader, a conventional domain is strictly bounded by a framed page, next of which is governed by another world. This means that if a map is flipped over to the next page, in most cases a new spatial theme would be generated. Such reception theory of map reading reserves quite limited space for literary cartographers to operate within, from which one can hardly see the possibility of expressing complicated spatial themes within limited ranges, and for which linear literary maps are so scarce in number. With regard to depiction in literature, to express through the space of several separated pages is so natural a phenomenon that it hardly goes beyond readers’ expectation; their aesthetic reactions at this moment will not be suspended by page turning because the inertia of textual reading will help them to maintain continuity in their mind. Take Moby-Dick as an example, there exists, as a close reading of this monumental novel shows, a considerable distance between the whaling area of Ahab and the homeland of Queequeg—a cannibal prince from a southern Pacific island. Relative spatial remoteness, as the novel indicates, can be further strengthened by two descriptions about (sea) maps separated by 53 pages: “Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are”;13 “For many years past the whale-ship has been the pioneer in ferreting out the remotest and least known parts of the earth. She has explored seas and archipelagoes which had no chart, where no Cook or Vancouver had ever sailed” (99). However, these physical spaces and textual distance do not hinder readers from comprehending the narrative process of this novel. On the contrary, they construct abundant imaginative space for the protagonist to eulogize epic whaling—in the eyes of Ishmael, the whale-­ ship functions not only as a measuring instrument of the world undiscovered, but also as a carrier of the “noble” mission to emancipate poor races living in the far corners of the world from “the yoke of Old Spain”(100). Ultimately this special way of space construction endows this novel with a unique form of spatial narrative, which generates the effect of omnipresent

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cartographic presence, although there is no physical map accompanied at all. On all accounts, visualization and textualization constitute two basic modes of narration concerning literary maps, an important point a researcher should bear in mind. In order to have better comprehension of the content of literary maps, a literary cartographer needs to be aware of not only the distinction and sameness of these methods, but also their “vice and virtue.” For a formalist, form weighs the same with content; undoubtedly, literary mappers should highlight the former, but the latter also deserves equal attention, especially with essential information encoded in symbols as a noticeable component of literary narration veiled by graphical representation. As for the reader, spatial awareness will assist them in collecting relative information scattered throughout the text, reassembling them into a macroscopic schema of psychological space under the guidance of cartographic logic. Hence meaning is generated and significance of space is accentuated. A good example can be set up by a spatial study of T.  S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Because of the fragmentation in this poem, a well-known modernist’s technique which imitates vividly a modern world shadowed by broken and disillusioned dreams, there is an absence of continuity in both time and space, yet an organic spatial structure is still vaguely perceivable—Eliot’s modernist protagonist in the first three chapters wanders in a European waste land centering on London. Then he drifts to West Asia in the fourth chapter, withdraws himself in the fifth one by returning to the starting point of a barren continent, and finally makes a halt at Southern Asia. Covering vast spatial dimensions, this journey in The Waste Land has already drawn a consistent route map, both latent and apparent, making marvelous compensation for a disjointed spatial pattern. In the meantime this massive displacement in Eliot’s verbal map symbolizes the anguished appeal of a shattered modern soul—“in essence the tune of spatial wandering in the poem is a soul’s badly yearning for his homeland.”14 Such a textual route map generated from broken entities of (un) consciousness perfectly exhibits hermeneutically the paradoxical basis of spatial tension in modern aesthetics, and well illustrates from a literary cartographic perspective stated by Joseph Frank: that the unity of a modernist’s work is represented in “the entire pattern of internal references” or “the principle of reflexive reference.”15 It should be also noted that sometimes the schematized narrative content of literature, can even be more obscure than one might have expected,

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which requires readers to blend it closely with the original text for a better and more thorough interpretation. The chivalrous route map in Don Quixote is a typical example. Silhouetted by the text, this abstract route map foregrounds the romantic and heroic journey of the protagonist. However, such heroic complex yearning for a perfect medieval knight is totally incompatible with the secular background of capitalism in the eighteenth century. In addition, a further rendering of Don Quixote’ poverty and fallen aristocratic identity turns this journey outlined by the route map into an imagined behavior of nostalgic chivalry, both pitiful and ridiculous. Hence the map must be viewed with an understanding of the satirical tone of the novel. But the graphic narrative in Utopia is more exceptional. Firstly, there is very little textual information contained in the map, forcing the readers to exert their imagination in transferring landmarks into meaningful narrative elements, then to concatenate them into an integral plot frame according to literary logic, which is commonly characterized by linear literary maps. Secondly, the scenery of picturesque space itself refers to landmarks in a geographical sense, while space constructed by words is incarnated in textual expression of the artistic world. Hence, these two kinds of space are antagonistic to each other but referential to the same object simultaneously, producing a peculiar artistic effect of both reality and fantasy. Contrasted with a singular physical map, the variety of meaning contained within the literary schema in Utopia is amplified due to the affiliation with narrative components, which gives witness to the narrative charm of literary maps as well as the metaphysical reason accounting for their existence. Still it is necessary to point out that the traditional form of space and narrative content is synchronous, just like the aforesaid map annexed to Dante’s Divina Commedia. However, this does not necessarily mean that the well-ordered literary maps of classicism are beyond reproach. It is very effortless for this kind of highly routine narrative process to turn into a dogma of plots, wherein some kind of aesthetic fatigue emerges in a spatial dimension. However, since perplexity is caused by a complicated, messy, and broken spatial structure in The Waste Land, this may frustrate many readers’ interest, challenging them to balance between narrative (routine) norm and spatial variation. This brings to the fore a critical issue for both writers and scholars of literary maps. And yet, in most cases, the overemphasis of the narrativeness of a map will dilute or even misdirect an inherently spatial relation, transforming literary maps into totally textualized description, consequently abandoning their original graphical significance.

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But this cannot be an excuse to simplify narrative function of literary maps. On the contrary, in the present literary cartographic arena dictated by dominant scientism, a stress upon verbal features of literature rather than semiotic spatial relations should be highly encouraged. The recognition of narrativeness of literary maps, is an important prerequisite for approaching the essence of space.

III As a special tool for writers to evaluate and represent the world, almost every literary map foregrounds a spatial relation between the location of the targeted object and its surroundings, thus possessing spatial attributes originally deriving from the ontological spatiality of a map itself, just as Edward W. Soja observes: Building on Giddens, one can see more clearly an existentially structured spatial topology and topos attached to being-in-the-world, a primordial contextualization of social being in a multi-layered geography of socially created and differentiated nodal regions nesting at many different scales around the mobile personal spaces of the human body and the more fixed communal locales of human settlements. This ontological spatiality situates the human subject in a formative geography once and for all, and provokes the need for a radical reconceptualization of epistemology, theory construction, and empirical analysis.16

An important contribution made by Soja and Giddens is their affirmation of the theoretical significance of geographic spatiality from an ontologically perspective, showing an orientation toward the spatial study of literary maps. However, the spatial property of literary maps is more closely related to the spatial construction of literary writing, which requires writers to consider sequencing of parts as well as their mutual logic when planning a work. In return this special spatiality can offer writers a better construction of the theme, either explicit or implicit. Although some literary works rely on chronological rather than spatial relation to anchor their narrative process, spatial consciousness related to a cognitive map is still indispensable, which can be inferred by historical experience: Inborn spatial consciousness, deeply embedded in human beings, can be strengthened through acquired education, and winds its way through various human behaviors, lest an individual lose himself/

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herself in sophisticated social activities. Therefore, abiding by this innate spatial subconsciousness, many writers will take the spatial relevance among textual elements into consideration when outlining works. This will forge an ontological framework of spatial significance, and ultimately provide crucial logic and realistic possibility for future restoration or analysis of relative textual structure. Specifically, the spatiality of literary maps is well exhibited via three dimensions, the Physical, the Narrational, and the Symbolic, as explained in what follows: The first is the Physical dimension. As a kind of calligraphic symbol, the sequence and arrangement of certain letter or character strokes occupy a certain amount of textual space, and the framework of a single word also constructs a spatial image. Words assembled into sentences under some designated syntax rules will form coherent permutations of words, forming certain sentence patterns, as paragraph and passage come into being with the help of punctuation marks. Whether the physical arrangements of these texts connotate any specific allegorical meaning or not, they do possess features of explicit spatiality. In addition, under many circumstances the arrangement of words is a kind of calligraphic visual symbol, too. For instance, being the oldest representative of Western visual poetry, the Phaistos Disk in ancient Greece is characterized with spatial imageries— this clay disk, created on Crete tentatively dated 1700 BC, is the most primitive work of visualized literature in the Western world, on which 242 symbols constitute 45 pictographic icons, such as knife, ax, arrow, hoe, animals, flowers, plants, and human beings with different ages and genders as well.17 Centering upon a supernatural point, the industrious and virtuous ancient Greeks, with their vigorous nature, together with the vast and lofty sky, vividly duplicate the geographical prototype drawn from a cosmological view in ancient Greece, which congruously reveals the spatiality of letters. Actually, most verbal maps highlight their spatial attribute by means of their different arrangements of words. But there are still some literary texts possessing advantages of both visuality and textuality, among which the List Map distinguishes itself via cartographic framework and narrative content. This kind of map can be divided into two categories: the textual list map and the graphical list map. The framework of a textual list map takes the shape of T-O map but does not contain any depiction of lines. By way of illustration, some medieval maps, like Wildmore Fen (1224) and Sherwood Forest (c.1400), do not contain any graphical description but bunches of words (e.g., place-names, and narrative or explanatory notes).18

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From the simplest point of view, these maps adopt plain texts rather than graphic lines as their major mode of presentation. However, some list maps are variants of graphical maps. For example, in the T-O map of Etymologiae (c. 600–625), an encyclopedia by Isidore of Seville, the diagram, like a graphical list map, is separated from texts; the narrative depiction that spawns multiple pages is undoubtedly the principle way of its spatial construction—with large chunks of unbroken words, the first page dwelling on how the sons of Noah, Sem (Shem), Iafeth (Japheth), and Cham (Ham), divide the world into three parts. Then Isidore utilizes words to list names of relevant nations of the three continents as well as their genealogy.19 General speaking, Isidore’s map adopts the framework of the medieval T-O map which disintegrates the world into triple parts. Meanwhile, in the course of representing space Isidore mainly adopts the textual body and temporal dimension to depict in a cosmological schema the unity of Divine Creation and Word of God. Accordingly, maps and literature are knitted through illustrated religious words. At this point, the physical layer of the text woven by words or lines witnesses a structural transference, which turns from the original attribute of linguistic material to literary framework transformed by spatial reconstruction. This incorporates a temporal dimension, paving the way for the study of narrative structure in literary maps. The second layer of literary maps is the Narrative dimension. The spatiality of narrativeness in literary maps originates from a unique perspective, which can represent co-existent spatial relations through omniscient zero-focalization, an imitation of the conventional theatric (survey) point of view practiced by a well-known Netherlandish cartographer Abraham Ortelius in his masterpiece Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570). By contrast, internal focus, which is quite different from what one had expected, can also be employed by literary cartographers such as Mark Twain to manifest subjective imagination filtered by a “screen of consciousness.” In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, “I,” a white boy in the transitional period of America during the nineteenth century, utilizes the first-person perspective to narrate a romantic journey shared by Finn and Jim on a raft. The raft, in a metaphorical sense, is a surveying vessel of freedom, which starts from a small town called St. Petersburg in Missouri and floats downstream along the heartland of America.20 During this symbolic journey, the white juvenile must go through a series of tests and trials, for example, the danger of being swindled and snatched and the struggle between good

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and evil in his soul, in order to accomplish the goal of spiritual maturity. Jim, serves perfectly as the foil of the hero, drafting with Finn a harmonious blueprint in which two races of America are sailing together on the same vessel, hand in hand and shoulder to shoulder. Consequently, with a psychological map drawn on a nationwide scale, Mark Twain well exerts introspective narrative strategy to delineate an adventurous schema of the Mississippi River full of quintessential American Cultural features. This well illustrates the narrating merit of a literary map. Of course, modern and contemporary writers may dissect and dislocate the organic sequence of textual space in order to achieve a scattered and disorderly effect generated by stream of consciousness, or put space in a subordinated position for the sake of other textual devices. However, these writers, whether intentionally or subconsciously, still need an invisible (moving) trajectory of space in a literary work, thereby providing a referentially textual signpost for their own writing. Meanwhile this also calls for a latent spatial logic to further develop psychological cognition during the modification of a text, verifying the feasibility of spatial structures in their work. This provides readers with conceptual possibilities for the restoration of the original mental schema in the targeted text. Molloy (1951), a famous novel by Samuel Beckett, sets a paradoxical example, exerting ingenious irony by which to testify as to the indispensable significance of an organic narrative trajectory in literary maps. When starting his journey to search for Molloy, a man who lost his memory, “it was then the unheard of sight was to be seen Moran making ready to go without knowing where he was going, having consulted neither map nor time-table,” even knowing very little about Molloy himself.21 Yet judging from the wandering state, the monologue style, and the mental outlook, it is logical to conclude that Moran and Molloy represent two facets of the same psyche in a modern disintegrated society. In a maze constructed by (dis) continuity of consciousness and disordered semiotic signs, Moran does not carry the “map” showing the orientation of life and the “time-table” recording the journey of life, for life is “senseless, speechless, issueless misery” (13). On the one hand, the absence of map and time-table indicates the protagonist’s intentional deconstruction of the traditional space-time continuum in order to obtain absolute mental freedom. On the other hand, it causes the confusion concerning the journey’s direction and social order, which reveals that so-called freedom is just a self-deceiving fantasy, thus to some extent indicating Moran’s (even Beckett’s) subconscious rejection of postmodernism.

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No matter what the implied meaning is, Molloy has touched upon the issue of spatio-temporal structure in literary maps, a topic that has been explored by many British and American writers, among whom Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot exert a kind of literary “free will” beyond time (and space) to initiate their creative practice and thus to shift readers’ focus from traditional expectations of time sequence to ontological spatiality. Thus, the frequent usage of time fragmentation and juxtaposed images in The Cantos and The Waste Land forces readers to deduce meaning via spatial logic of simultaneity, by which the spatial narrativeness comes into existence and thereby a unique spatial effect is generated: In a non-naturalistic style, then, the inherent spatiality of the plastic arts is accentuated by the effort to remove all traces of time-value; and since modern art is non-naturalistic, we can say that it is moving in the direction of increased spatiality. The significance of spatial form in modern literature now becomes clear: it is the exact complement in literature, on the plane of esthetic form, to the developments that have taken place in the plastic arts.22

The third layer of literary maps is the Symbolic dimension. The symbolic space of literary maps is mutually constituted by the physical layer and the narrative layer, directed at constructing a tri-dimensional spatial network of literature through different textual permutation of letters, changing scenery, and multi-directional flow of plot, by which the depiction of real and virtual world is accomplished. The underlining reason is that literary maps, with an inherent symbolism, are also a part of a macroscopic symbolic system: Words and phrases, just like dots and lines on a map, function as the basic elements of literary language, upon which small regions of space are constructed, then each individual space coordinates to constitute the syntactic structure of literary space. Meanwhile, the literary map is not only a semiotic construction within a subjective framework, but also as an artistic representation in an objective world. It combines well the merits of both verbality and visuality, and renders artistic symbols with profound meaning that exhibit evocatively the multiple mapping relations between intensions and images; just as the German-American Iconologist Erwin Panofsky has argued, “changes in representations—due to aesthetics, perspective, or otherwise—were created out of changing mind world associations.”23 Under many circumstances, in order to express their intensions and emotions, a writer usually needs to muster up all senses with which to

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affect one’s subject. This includes harkening back to the basic attribute of an image as well as its metaphorical structure, for the purpose of extracting a transcendental essence of relative literary conceptualization and aesthetic connotation. Simultaneously, a writer must choose a spatial pivot of anchoring geographical perception whilst appraising its significance as well as its potential impact, thereby conducting an appropriate narrative discourse. Moreover, it is also necessary for a writer to create an appropriate externalization form of text during the process of incessant meaning negotiation and value judgment, in order to blend narrative field into literary depiction through a certain narrative framework. This is done while adopting a specific pragmatic strategy and system of semiotic symbols to codify content, all of which distinguishes literature from the confinement of ordinary social production, and arise to be an indispensable part of a cultural norm in the sense of artistic spatiality. Take the case of Robert L. Stevenson as an example. At the very beginning of the famous pirate story, Treasure Island, Stevenson drafts a portolan chart of a fantastic island, upon which the whole plot unfolds and characters with various class and identity navigate, driving the arrow of textual narrative forward. From this point of view, the map in the novel is not just a metaphorical guide, but also a “real” map on which spatial logic and artistic creativity dwell, just as Stevenson himself admits: As I paused upon my map of “Treasure Island”, the future character of this book began to appear there visibly among imaginary woods; and their brown faces and bright weapons peeped out upon me from unexpected quarters, as they passed to and fro, fighting and hunting treasure, on these few square inches of a flat projection.24

Undoubtedly, the synthetic guiding role of a physical literary map, especially for the readers of Treasure Island, is more obvious because the map at this moment has already been transformed into an indispensable steering tool of literature, which leads readers to saunter in a fictional space stimulating their visual imagination to “view” the whole narrational process of the story. When restoring the plot and meaning of a literary work, readers need to track the original spatial information, a process in which a literary map can help them aggregate the source spaces faster, storing them in relevant a segment of memory according to certain spatial features. After successfully connecting with the information storage unit in their nervous system,

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the readers can accumulate and categorize relative spatial information in those memory units in order to find out the mutual basic attribute, logical sequence, as well as inner structure of the input space. Having accumulated a background knowledge, the readers can preliminarily sketch the contours of original textual space via blending, comparison, amendment, and projection, then they can rehearse, verify, and deduce the hidden artistic logic.25 Next, with the aid of interrelated cartographical knowledge, readers endeavor to conduct mapping in a psychological dimension, to fill a regional geography with spatial relations processed earlier, mapping it across one’s consciousness, forming in the end a textually mapped scenery justified by psychological verification. Although this kind of spatial structure resorts to the verbal depiction of every textual unit to construct a framework, forming an autonomous space comparatively “independent of temporal structure of the world and sequential arrangement of the text,” it surpasses spatial details and ascends to be a panorama of the entire text. This represents, meanwhile, a conceptual metaphor of the whole world— different from the actual topographical map. The spatial structure in literature is a symbolic operation governed by principles of artistic epistemology, which takes on the features of a spatial dream involving paradoxes between fact and fiction, continuity and separation as well as totality and partiality.26 In general, the Physical dimension of a literary map points to certain letters or symbols as well as single spatial junctures which array themselves according to certain spatial grammar and form literal spatial tendencies in different forms. Accordingly, the Literal layer, representing certain territory names, refers to its literal meaning of the whole territory in the text. Meanwhile, the united and homogeneous concept of space also indicates synchronicity between cartographical territory, history, and space (geography).27 The Narrative dimension, by contrast, combines places full of legends and stories to configurate particular narrative frameworks and spatial rhythms, mixing all the spatial elements, and ultimately forming the multi-­ layered symbolic graphics of a literary map, which dwells between imagination and experience, and describes a sophisticated relationship between thought, subject, landscape, and location. At this phase, maps not only reinforce readers’ perception of the world, but also contribute to the exploration of cognitive schema in this world and essence of literary spatiality, which in the long run provides a firm logical support for methodological strategies in literal cartography.

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IV When discussing the property of literary maps, this essay holds partially the stance of Essentialism deriving from Plato and Aristotle, which insists that things possess inherent essence, otherwise they could not maintain their identities. Taking the opposite perspective, research would easily fall into the trap of nihilism closely related to Anti-Essentialism and Deconstructivism. As far as this study is concerned, literary maps differ themselves from general literary production through uniquely visual-­ verbal narration and ontological spatiality. However, like truth itself, these essential attributes of literary maps, which possess inherent cognitive relativity, are not the transhistorical, changeless, exclusive and eternal, as they exist in a completely isolated literary loop. Otherwise, just as Anti-­ essentialism worries, this would evolve into dogmatic rules. What’s more, literary maps as well as other artistic works, are produced by human beings in certain social contexts, and as such, their attributes are essentially products of cultural norms. Moreover, the imagery of literary maps does not only consist of graphic marks in the sense of a traditional horizon of expectation, but undertake in most cases the function of spatial construction by textual depiction. In a broader symbolic perspective, both map and literature share the same system: semiotic signals. As German philosopher Ernst Cassirer has argued, “humans were animale symbolicum, or animals capable of making symbols and this direct relationship between sign and concept is crucial.” Wittgenstein advances one step further toward linguistic spatiality by declaring that: linguistic expression is like a geometric projection—the figure can be projected in multiple ways, each corresponding to a different language; however, the original figure, or meaning, remains unchanged. This does not imply that meaning is completely static. Rather, language and meanings change and there is not an overall, eternal meaning for any concept.28

Being a particular way of artistic representation, literary language inherits the correlative features of the signifier and the signified in a linguistic sense, but in most cases, it adheres to artistic logic rather than that of mathematics. Hence a textual narrative produces more dimensionalities of the signified and constructs conceptual metaphors in relatively visualized ways. Approached from this point of view, concrete imagery described by

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literary language is not only closer to a picture but also paves the way for more conceptual possibility concerning the studies of attributes of literary maps. However, the present scholarship of British and American cartography is still dominated by Positivism. Apparently, there is no ground for blame against their precise and objective professional standards, but a kind of technological rationality has surpassed the extension of truth to such an excessive degree that it has evolved into a kind of radical scientific egoism. Just as Geoff King observes, “the map has become the only reality, not representing a territory but establishing its sole form of existence.”29 Obviously, this cartographic positivism denounces one’s subjective initiative and worsens the issue of spiritual emptiness inflicted by technological civilization, which establishes a conceptual barrier between science and art. Literary maps challenge this obsolete epistemology held by scientific absolutists, and utilizes their logical advantage of correlating subject and object to construct an attribute model with great interdisciplinary significance. Their narrativeness rolls both the form and content of literary maps into one, while at the same time spatiality embraces all literary elements within one artistic world, manifesting artistic attributes of literary maps from different perspectives, thereby establishing a conceptual pillar for the ontology of cartographic imagination, meanwhile paving the way for methodological studies in spatial poetics. Ergo, Literary Cartography possesses a bright prospect of application in the future.

Notes 1. In this study Literary Cartography, defined in a broad sense, refers to all literary studies in maps, not just confined to map-making in literature. 2. 郭方云: 《英美文学空间诗学的亮丽图景: 文学地图研究》, 《外国文 学》, 2013 年第 6 期, 第 110–117 页。 [GUO Fangyun, “Wondrous Panorama of Spatial Poetics in British and American Literature: Literary Cartography,” Foreign Literature, no. 6 (2014): 110–117.] 3. Bruce Avery, The Eye of History: Literature and Cartography in the Colonial Encounter (Ann Arbor., MI: ProQuest LLC, 1992), 1–252. 4. T-O map was the dominate spatial pattern of medieval cartography in Europe, with letter T inside an O. The spherical earth, like letter O, was divided into three continents, Asia, Europe, and Asia, via waters in the shape of T, in which the Don (the Tanais) and the Nile formed the horizontal line, while the vertical line was symbolized by the Mediterranean Sea.

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5. 郭方云: 《文学地图》, 《外国文学》, 2015 年第 1 期, 第111–119 页。 [GUO Fangyun, “Literary Map,” Foreign Literature, no. 1 (2015): 111–119.] 6. J.  Simpson & E.  Weiner, eds., The Oxford English Dictionary, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 775. 7. Aristotle, Metaphysics Books Z and H, trans. David Bostock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 9. 8. J.  Simpson & E.  Weiner, eds., The Oxford English Dictionary, vol. 10, 219–220. 9. Gary Saul Morson, “Narrativeness,” New Literary History 34, no.1 (March, 2003), 59–73. 10. Babara Piatti, et  al., “Mapping Literature: Towards a Geography of Fiction,” in Cartography and Art, eds. William Cartwright, et al (Berlin: Springer-Verlag Heidelberg, 2009), 184. 11. Buzz Podewell, Shakespeare’s Watch: A Guide to Time and Location in the Plays, 2 vols. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2009). 12. David Woodward, ed., The History of Cartography, Volume 3: Cartography in the European Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 453. 13. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick: An Authoritative Text, Context and Criticism, ed. Hershel Parker (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), 55. 14. 郭方云: 《论的空间诗学内在特征》, 《外国文学》, 2008 年第 2 期, 第 67-70页。 [See GUO Fangyun, “Internal Spatial Unity in The Waste Land,” Foreign Literature, no. 2 (2008), 67-70.] 15. Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature: An Essay in Two Parts,” The Sewanee Review 3, no. 2 (Spring, 1945), 221–240. 16. Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 12. 17. Dick Higgins, Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature (New York: State University of New York Press, 1987), 2. 18. Catherine Delano-Smith & R. J. P. Kain, English Maps: A History (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 29. 19. Evelyn Edson, Mapping Time and Space: How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed Their World (London: British Library), 5–6. 20. Mark Twain, The Annotated Huckleberry Finn, ed. Michael Patrick Hearn (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 1–470. 21. Samuel Beckett, Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable (New York: Calder, 1997), 124. 22. Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature: An Essay in Three Parts,” The Sewanee Review 53, no. 4 (Spring 1945), 651. 23. Quoted in Adele Lorraine Worz, The Visualization of Perspective Systems and Iconology in Durer’s Cartographic Works: An In-Depth Analysis Using

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Multiple Methodological Approaches (Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest LLC, 2007), 42–45. 24. Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 227. 25. Gilles Fauconnier, Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xliv; 16–21. 26. Gabriel Zoran, “Towards a Theory of Space in Narrative,” Poetics Today 5, no. 2 (1984), 316–320. 27. David Woodward, ed., The History of Cartography, Volume 3: Cartography in the European Renaissance, 12–13. 28. Quoted in Adele Lorraine Worz, The Visualization of Perspective Systems and Iconology in Durer’s Cartographic Works: An In-Depth Analysis Using Multiple Methodological Approaches, 42. 29. Geoff King, Mapping Reality: An Exploration of Cultural Cartographies (London: Macmillan, 1996), 3.

CHAPTER 7

Spatial Narrative in Fiction: “Spatialization” of Fiction Narrative Ying Fang

The convention of “temporality” is found in both fictional creations and narrative researches. As time is essential to narrative and what is narrated in fiction is a sequence of events in the time order, the issues of temporality and temporal logic have always been a focus for writers as well as theorists, and “temporality has dominated discussions of narrative poetics.”1 Yet in the fiction of the twentieth century, there emerged a tendency of narrative This is an abridged version of the essay “Spatial Narrative in Fiction: ‘Spatialization̓ of Fictional Narrative,” which was originally published in Frontiers of Narrative Studies (the 2nd volume). What follows is the full information: 方 英: “小说空间叙事:内容的空间化,” 《叙事研究前沿》 (第二辑), 尚必武主编, 北 京: 外语教学与研究出版社, 2017年, 第 90–103 页。 [FANG Ying (Ying Fang), “Spatial Narrative in Fiction: ‘Spatialization̓ of Fictional Narrative,” in Frontiers of Narrative Studies (the 2nd volume), ed. SHANG Biwu (Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2017), 90–103.] Moreover, this essay is mainly translated by FENG Libo (冯立波) from Ningbo University.

Y. Fang (*) Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Fang, R. T. Tally Jr. (eds.), Spatial Literary Studies in China, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03914-0_7

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“spatialization,” as was manifested in Joseph Frank’s explorations of the “spatial form”2 in a number of theses. What is spatialization? The notion is directly related to the meaning of space. The investigation of spatialization cannot be made without the three fundamental meanings  of space: void, place and extension.3 From them, spatialization is given the attributes of tri-dimensionality, spanningness and inclusiveness. Spatialization can also be both abstract and concrete. William Holtz points out in his discussion of spatial form, “Frank’s abstracted spatial order is offered as a displacement of sequences of human action by an image of man perceiving.”4 From what he holds, it can be inferred that spatial form is a combination of abstract (and abstracted) forms and concrete images, and a replacement of linear sequence with tri-­ dimensional images. Holtz’s insights point to the shared feature of space, spatiality and spatialization: abstract yet concrete, multi-dimensional, visualisable and spanning. “Narrative spatialization” in this thesis can be the materialization and formalization of the abstract, synchronically spanning cracks of time, as well as the visualization of the concrete, stressing and highlighting narrative spatial forms and spatial construction. Narrative spatialization, that is, spatial narrative, can be seen as one of the many narrative modes. Compared with the conventional narrative, in spatial narrative, the spatial logic dominates the narrative with space or spatiality as the focus. The narrative is organized, expressed and completed by spatial form, position, sequence, relation and connotation. In spatial narrative, spatial sequence possesses dominance over  temporal sequence and the spatial factors over other narrative factors such as time, characters and plot. In a broader sense, spatial narrative is a narrative of space as well as one about space and through space. Spatial narrative in fiction can be explored from the two aspects of expression and content, that is, the spatialization of expression and that of content. Considering the length limits, the present chapter takes the latter as the subject. The spatialization of content can be understood as spatiality, spatial sequence and spatial logic dominating and governing narrative in terms of content, with various abstract or concrete spaces as the narrative focus. In other words, the focus in content is on spatial description, construction, relation and connotation. This is different from the conventional narrative modes whose emphasis is on the plot or characters. The spatialization of content is mainly reflected in three aspects: the “foregrounding” of space in narrative, the organization of narrative by space and spaces as the major

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source of the meaning of fiction. The first aspect is the basis of the second and the third, and is the pre-requisite for the spatialization of content; important yet not essential, the second aspect merits special attention; the third aspect, also the outcome of the first two, is often the main sources of the meaning of fiction. These three aspects can all be found in any typical spatial narrative.

The “Foregrounding” of Space in Narrative The “foregrounding” of space in narrative can be seen as space playing an essential and prominent role in narrative, a role rather than the sites, settings, or backdrops where stories happen, plots unfold, characters live and act and personalities are set off. If a narrative is compared to an oil painting, then in spatial narrative, space is no longer the faintly visible “background”; instead, it is the “foreground” of narrative. This is shown by the foregrounding of spatial images, perceptions, and relations in narrative, as they are the critical elements for constructing physical, mental and social spaces. Of the three, spatial images are especially important. Spatial images refer to the linguistically created images of things (humans included) in space, or images of architecture or place as a whole. Set in the foreground of narrative, the images of these spatial elements constitute the spatialization of content. Spatial perceptions in this context refer to the characters’ feelings toward spatial characteristics such as objects, sounds, smells as well as sizes and crowdedness of the spaces. Spatial relations include physical relations between objects like positions, directions and distances as well as relations bearing mental and social characteristics like social standings, hierarchy and ethics. As spatial relations are relatively more abstract, their foregrounding is often accompanied by the foregrounding of spatial images and spatial perceptions. “Foregrounding” mainly takes two forms: first, elaborate descriptions of space taking up a heavy proportion in narrative; second, spaces given an independent and thematic significance in narrative. Firstly, a heavy proportion of spatial description. In conventional narratology, spatiality is found in description. “According to Bremond, relations of the spatial contiguity of objects dominate in the description.”5 Genette differentiates between narration and description, holding that [n]arration attaches itself to actions and events considered as pure processes, and thus it puts the emphasis on the temporal and dramatic aspect of récit;

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description on the contrary, because it lingers on objects and things considered in their simultaneity, and because it envisages processes themselves as spectacles, seems to suspend the course of time and contributes to spread the récit in space.6

Obviously, Genette views narration as temporal and eventful while description as spatial, simultaneous and visual. According to Elrud Ibsch, Philippe Hamon “acknowledges the twofold characteristic of the description. On the one hand the description is the place where the story is suspended, with a certain emphasis on the arresting of action; on the other hand the description is the place ̒where the story is interrupted̓ […]”7 The argument here reveals that description suspends the story time, and also compares description to a place which itself is a spatial image, thus disclosing the spatiality feature of description. Gerald Prince in his work A Dictionary of Narratology includes the entry of “description” and defines it as “[t]he representation of objects, beings, situations, or (nonpurposeful, nonvolitional) happenings in their spatial rather than temporal existence, their topological rather than chronological functioning, their simultaneity rather than succession.”8 Once again, “description” is described as spatial, topological and simultaneous, as the opposite of temporal, chronological and successive. Description is regarded as subsidiary in traditional narrative theories. Seymour Chatman points out the prejudice against description of a long historical standing, a tradition that “considers Description secondary or derivative—not just at the service of but positively inferior to Narrative.”9 This tradition can be seen in many theorists’ writings, and has been discussed by David Herman in the chapter of “Spatialization” in his famous work Story Logic: “In some of the early research on narrative, if space was discussed at all it was used negatively to mark off setting from story […] orientation from complicating action […] description from narration proper […]”10 Here Herman categorizes setting, orientation and description as “space” in narrative, and reveals the inferiority of these spatial elements in early studies on narrative. Herman furthers his discussion by quoting Jeffrey Kittay, who notices that, the legacy of “Aristotelian concept of action … suggests that description be viewed as secondary, and purely functional, or merely decorative.”11 Herman’s observation highlights the polarization of narrative and description, and also the tradition of seeing description as secondary. This is exactly the role description plays in conventional narrative in fiction. Spatial description is like the

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supporting actor in the background, inessential in narrative; it appears at the beginning and ending in fiction or as a character appears, used for setting the atmosphere or highlighting the character’s image. In the nineteenth century, the proportion of description increased in novels and was employed for more purposes on more varied occasions. This trend has been summarized in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, In early narrative texts, space is often reduced to a mere backdrop or stage design […] It is not until the rise of the realist novel that detailed description of spatial elements becomes a functional feature of narrative discourse. The trimmings of space become more relevant still in movements such as literary impressionism and psychological realism until, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the pauses of narratorial description are largely replaced by perceptions of space shown from the perspective of an internal focalizer.12

In addition, Elrud Ibsch also examines the historical changes of description in the nineteenth and twentieth-century novels, and makes a detailed analysis of the different functions of the spatial description in this period. In his essay about spatial description in literary texts Ibsch explicates that description can reflect “the thematic macrostructure” and even convey the thematic meanings of a novel, can function regulatively “in the interplay of space and psychic situation of the protagonist,” between macro- and micro-level, can “determine the level of action” of a novel, or “predict the action in a deterministic way,” and can embody characters’ feelings. Meanwhile Ibsch also points out that [i]n spite of the important function which spatial description has as an explanatory and/or predictive factor vis-a-vis the level of action, it is action which contributes primarily to the construction of meaning in the Realist and Naturalistic narrative. The main signifiers are the changes occurring in the conditions of the characters in the course of time […]13

In other words, it is the characters’ actions, the events and the time logic that play the dominating role in these novels. Therefore, generally speaking, spatial description in the twentieth century remained subsidiary and functional, merely inessential narrative background that could be skipped without spoiling the comprehension of the whole. However, the substantial amounts of spatial narrative in the twentieth-century fictions overturned the secondary role of description. Spatial description, once the

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background, now set in the foreground, is no longer negligible or skippable in fiction. The “foregrounding” of space is particularly common in French New Novel (Nouveau Roman), and is one of the main characteristics of this genre. Large proportions of spatial description were no more the background but the highlighted and stressed “foreground” of narrative. “The Nouveau Roman writers hold that humans are living for but one instant out of eternity and writers shall be able to seize the critical moment in the same way a snap shot camera freezes the ‘now’ instant in a flash.”14 In French Nouveau Roman, instant scenes are often elaborately depicted, and made the foreground of narrative. Alain Robbe-Grillet’s short story collection, Instantanés (1962), is a typical example. In quite the majority of the stories, the construction of space is completed through objective and vivid spatial descriptions and the highlighting of some momentary images. In some stories, there is no portrayal of characters, hardly any plot, nor any sense of time flow, but only spatial depictions without which the comprehension of the meaning of the writing is utterly impossible. A good example would be the murder story of “La Chambre Secrète,” which is about the murderer attempting to get away from the secret chamber as the murdered woman’s body was found. The story is told on the basis of extremely detailed spatial descriptions from different angles: up-close, distant, the murderer’s perspective, and another man’s perspective. They are about the different parts of the victim’s face and body, her hand and leg cuffs, the murderer’s countenance, cloak and actions, the secret chamber’s floor, columns, stairs, hall, arras, mat, incense burner as well as the changeable light and shadow effects. The story is not an account of the murder, yet the detailed spatial descriptions reproduce it, suggesting what are critical in the process and serving to reveal the hidden meanings of the story. In the chamber, a naked woman, hands and legs cuffed and stabbed in the chest, was found dead from breathing failure. The killer wrapped in his cloak disappeared from the doorway. The victim’s life as well as the critical nature of the incident dissipates in the air just like the wisp of smoke from the incense burner in the chamber. It could be said that the spatial descriptions present a series of pictures in its own order, taking up the foreground of narrative and narrating the whole story in a most graphic manner, which endows the story with boundless profound meanings. As Robbe-Grillet puts it, compared with conventional narratives, the role and purpose of description in Nouveau Roman have changed completely. The focus on description can be found throughout the writing. Hence, readers have lost

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their freedom in skipping descriptions, for if they do, they almost have to turn to the end of the book. That is equal to skipping the entire content of the book.15 Secondly, the independence of spaces. In some of the Nouveau Roman works, spatial descriptions account for such a substantial percentage that they become an indispensable part of narrative that cannot be neglected, gaining an independent and thematic significance. In other cases where their proportions are not so heavy, spatial descriptions still play a significant and independent role. Where does this independence come from? When investigating spatial narrative in Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, Jeffrey R.  Smitten discovers that Hawthorne’s novel “is distinguished among other nineteenth-century American novels for its insistence upon setting over action, which is one of the key ingredients in spatial-form fiction.”16 The “spatial-form fiction” here can be categorized into “spatial narrative.” Smitten goes on explaining how Hawthorne attempted to “spatialize his scene,” or, “to have pure atmosphere do the work of narrative action”: Hawthorne’s use of time makes time almost the “servant of space,” and “a spatial fact” when “action is seen as recurrent within the pattern of ancestral sin and guilt”; the effect of action within such strictly limited bounds is spatial; characterization becomes “secondary to the house’s pervasive influence.”17 Smitten’s words suggest that, when spaces (places, locations, environments and so on) are freed from the secondary position and assume their own meanings and powers, influences and unique functions, they are no longer merely about where incidents and actions occur; they become essential factors to the occurrence of incidents and actions, and such spaces are endowed with an independent significance. Mieke Bal has also discussed spaces with independent significance. As is observed by Bal, Spaces function in a story in different ways. On the one hand, they are ʻonly’ a frame, a place of action […] In many cases, however, space is ‘thematized’: it becomes an object of presentation itself, for its own sake. Space thus becomes an ‘acting place’ rather than the place of action. It influences the fabula, and the fabula becomes subordinate to the presentation of space.18

This reveals the two functions the space serves in a story: structuring and thematization. The space, in the first case, is a structure, or “the place of action,” merely set in the background. In the second, the space is “thematized” and becomes the subject of description itself. Hence, it has

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become the “acting place” rather than “the place of action.” The latter means “where things happen” while the former refers to how things exist there, which makes their occurrence possible. According to Bal, the “acting place,” that is, the “thematized space,” is a breakthrough from the background status of space, making it the independent foreground of narrative. From Smitten’s and Bal’ statements, the independence of space lies in its functions, influences and its own meanings. The sorghum field in Red Sorghum (红高粱) by MO Yan (莫言) is such an independent space. It is constructed by numerous spatial images: sorghum of various colors and appearances in different seasons, weather conditions and settings. Red sorghum, green sorghum, erect sorghum, fallen sorghum, sorghum ears, sorghum leaves, all constitute independent spatial images. Others include images of characters in action: grandma and grandpa making love in the open, grandma shot and falling like a butterfly, grandma dying in the sorghum field, smiling and gazing at the sky with bared breasts, grandpa lifting saber and splitting the Japanese young man … These spatial images are like fragments of time which, when pieced together, present the spaces of Gaomi (高密)  in that specific historical period. They are momentary pictures painted with rich colors and forceful lines, or sculptures of collected climaxes connecting the past, the present and the future. All are frozen and locked in the space of the red sorghum field loaded with lessons from history as well as the meaning of life. A series of significant events in the novel take place in the sorghum field or are related with it. What constitute the base tone, the dominant color, the foreground, the background, the breath and soul of this “red sorghum space” are the expanses of sorghum plants. The sorghum field is not only a physical existence; it is a spiritual one as well. This space is a witness to the history of the Dongbei people in Gaomi like my grandma and grandpa in the story, endowing them with a unique quality that can be called “heroism and rascality.” The sorghum field is more than “the place of action”; it is the force that drives action, the way of existence as well a symbol of the life of these people, the “acting place” and the “foreground” of the novel.

Organization of Narrative by Space Organization of narrative by space refers to the practice of organizing narrative by spatial connections, relations and changes, with space as the narrative unit. Based on the foregrounding of spatial narrative, organization

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of narrative by space is not like what is found in the picaresque novel where the story hinges on the change of places of events that happen to the protagonist while the places are put at the background of narrative. Using places as the thread of happenings or even using place names as chapter headings is not uncommon in fiction. However, it is not spatial narrative if the space is merely used to describe where events take place, people act or meanings occur. In many of the twentieth-century novels, the space is not only foregrounded; it also plays a role in organizing and advancing narrative. In these works, spatial relations become the thread in the organization of narrative. This takes three forms: substituting the combination of spaces for the plot, pushing the progress of narrative by shifting spaces and forming a narrative rhythm through the repetition of spaces. Firstly, substituting the combination of spaces for the plot. In conventional narrative, the plot plays a critical role. This can be traced back to Aristotle’s Poetics whose explorations into tragedy have exerted a far-­ reaching influence on the development of Western narrative works. He defines tragedy as “an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of certain magnitude,” and views Plot (“the arrangement of the incidents”) as the first and most important element, the “end” and “soul” of a tragedy.19 As for the proper structure of the Plot, Aristotle argues for a whole “which has a beginning, a middle, and an end,” which means that a well-constructed plot “must neither begin nor end at haphazard,”20 and for unity which entails “the structural union of the parts being such that, if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed.”21 The importance of a well-constructed plot and the plot’s being a whole and unity also features his discussion of Epic poetry: “[T]he plot […] should have for its subject a single action, whole and complete, with a beginning, a middle, and an end.”22 As can be seen in Aristotle’s observation, the imitation of action, the relations between incidents, and the wholeness and unity of the plot are placed in the center of the narrative works, which has formed an important tradition in Western narrative, and shaped the views on the plot in Western fiction criticism. For instance, E. M. Forster not only emphasizes actions and the plot in narrative, he also explicitly stresses the causal relation in the plot of narrative. In the view of Forster, the  Story is the narration of incidents by the natural chronological sequence of their happening while the focus of the Plot is on causal relations, though it also narrates incidents.23 For this reason, Forster holds that the plot is superior to the story itself.

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Influenced probably by this “unity of plot” view from Aristotle, most conventional narratives unfold in a complete plot chain: beginning, development, climax and ending. Even if there are two or more parallel plots, a relatively more explicit one is always found amid an array of events. In such fictions, the connections between events and the development of the plot are key to narrative, whereas in some spatial narratives, the plot is no longer the focus, fading out to be substituted by the combination of spaces. A good example would be Virginia Woolf’s “The Mark on the Wall,” which is mostly based on various spatial combinations as the foreground of narrative. The writing, mostly about a succession of mental activities after “I” saw the mark on the wall, is of a stream of consciousness style. Two types of space are constructed in it: the physical space and mental space—the series of spatial images in “my” mind triggered by the mark and “my” imagination. Most part of the fiction is descriptions of these two spaces. In this writing of fewer-than-4000 English words (fewer than 6000 Chinese characters), there are about 100 spatial images which firmly occupy the foreground of narrative. The narrative unfolds by the very means of the combinations of the two physical spaces and more than ten mental spaces. The two physical spaces are the inside of the room where “I” am staying and the outside of it that “I” can see. The mental spaces (or, imaginary spaces) include the crimson flag flapping from the castle tower on the black rock, the old house with an old hanging picture, the lost things flashing back in “my” mind, the imagination of after-life, the fictitious stories of Shakespeare and Kingsway, the spaces of “tombs or camps”… Each type of space is a combination of various spatial images. For instance, the mark is imagined to be “the head of a gigantic old nail […] revealed its head above the coat of paint, and is taking its first view of modern life in the sight of a white-walled fire-lit room […]” This triggers the construction of a mental space—“my” thoughts on knowledge and order and “my” imagination of a pleasant world: A quiet, spacious world, with the flowers so red and blue in the open fields. A world […] which one could slice with one’s thought as a fish slices the water with his fin, grazing the stems of the water-lilies, hanging suspended over nests of white sea eggs […] How peaceful it is down here, rooted in the centre of the world and gazing up through the grey waters, with their sudden gleams of light […]24

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These few sentences are loaded with visually powerful spatial images, and the entire writing is basically a collage of tens of such images. Conventional plot development cannot be found in it, nor clear time changes. Instead, there are flashing images, random permutations and combinations of different spaces. The narrative focus is on the free shift of spatial images, the exquisite display of the spatial activity of consciousness flow. Spatial image combinations, so to speak, have substituted plot development to play the role of organizing narrative in “The Mark on the Wall.” Secondly, pushing the progress of narrative by shifting spaces. In some spatial narrative works, space, especially places, as the narrative foreground, serves as the driving force in narrative, that is, the narrative unfolds and advances by means of space/place shift. “WU Zixu” (伍子胥) written by FENG Zhi (冯至) is a case in point. Despite the complete storyline of WU fleeing the state of Chu to the state of Wu avenging his father and brother, the narrative is, essentially speaking, driven by the shift of space. To put it differently, on the surface, the plot is WU’s fleeing, yet the hidden thread is the construction and change of different spaces. The latter is more intriguing than the former, and more effective in advancing the narrative. Why is it so? An important reason is that instead of dramatizing the escape itself, the author focuses on the description of nine places, putting them at the narrative foreground and underlying the narrative with the shift of them. The fiction consists of nine chapters whose headings are Chengfu, Linze, Weibin, Wanqiu, Zhaoguan, Jiangshang, Sushui, Yanling, Wushi, all names of places of happenings in the story. In most cases, there are no clear connections between happenings in different places, nor is there a timeline. Time change is reflected by space shift which pushes the progress of the narrative revealing WU Zixu’s experiences and feelings in different locations. For example, Chengfu is a place “filled with the woe and pain of the displaced,”25 disappointments with a broken dream for prosperity as well as senses of rootlessness and insecurity. For the WU brothers who are imprisoned here, such a place makes them feel that “they are like two trees previously grown on fertile land and are now transplanted in a small pot with poor soil and that if their growth is to continue, the only chance lies in breaking the pot.”26 In contrast, massive construction projects are going on in Yingcheng, the capital of the state of Chu, and “the nouveaux riches are doing evil in the brand new buildings.”27 The imprisonment in Chengfu, the manipulations from Yingcheng and the hatred for it are the very factors that prompt WU Zixu’s plan—getting away for a new place with new

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possibilities. The advancing of the narrative is achieved by means of place shift—WU’s leaving Chengfu for Linze. In this chapter, the author elaborately describes “the place to take refuge” in turbulent times, yet WU, with the lessons he has learned from the past, believes that the peacefulness of this place will eventually be ruined by the chaotic world, and leaves resolutely. Weibin, the capital of the state of Zheng used to be a place where governments were transparent and people were contently settled. Yet Jian, the crown prince’s impudence lets WU Zixu down and Zichan’s death drains his ambition. WU Zixu cannot help feeling that “he is unable to fit in such a clear universe.”28 Only the rising state of Wu can be Chu’s equal. WU Zixu’s idea of going to the new place lies under and pushes the progress of narrative. WU passes Wanqiu, Zhaoguan, Jiangshang and sets foot on the state of Wu, and then passes Sushui and Yanling and finds himself in Wushi to start a brand new life. The narrative of this leg of journey is again completed via the construction, shift and connection of different spaces. The author employs spatial change to organize his narrative, and therefore readers must grasp the hidden thread of narrative from the shift of spaces. Thirdly, forming a narrative rhythm through the repetition of spaces. Rhythm is a term considered to be related to time in most cases. According to The Poetics Dictionary whose chief editor is master YUE Daiyun, “rhythm is the most fundamental and essential element in the phonetic form rules in poetry,” and “the rhythm pattern is formed by the regular repetition of certain linguistic features within and among the syllables in poems,” and these features include phonetic length and intensity, pitch, number of syllables, pause and so on.29 From this, it is revealed that rhythm is basically the regular repetition of phonetic forms in the dimension of time: duration, interval, length and number of its segments. This definition is universally recognized by Chinese and English dictionaries as well as Encyclopedia Britannica. However, according to the observation by W. J. T. Mitchell, rhythm is originally a term to indicate spatial changes. As is discussed by Mitchell, the history of the word “rhythm” “illustrates not only the transactions of verbal-visual and temporal-spatial patterning but also the reversibility of literal-metaphoric distinctions.” By drawing on the modern studies of the word “rhythm” in the earliest Greek texts, he explains that it is derived from the Greek root for “ery,” “which suggests the action of ‘drawing’ […] and which plays on the same double meaning as do ‘draw’ and ‘drawing’ in English. ‘Rhythmos’ […] was used to mean something like ‘form,’ ‘shape,’ or ‘pattern.’” By quoting J.  J. Pollit,

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Mitchell reveals that the transference of the term “Rhythmos” from spatial arts to temporal arts occurred in descriptions of the dance. Pollit explicates that the ancient Greek word for “Rhythmos” was originally the “positions” that the human body was made to assume in the course of a dance, in other words the patterns or schemata that the body made. In the course of a dance certain obvious patterns or positions, like the raising or lowering of a foot, were naturally repeated, thus marking intervals in the dance. Since music and singing were synchronized with dancing, the recurrent positions taken by the dancer in the course of his movements also marked distinct intervals in the music […] This explains why the basic component of music and poetry was called […] “foot”.30

Therefore, “rhythm” is originally a spatial term and later conveys both temporal and spatial meanings, and in the latter case, it refers to the regular repetition of and intervals between spaces. In some fictions, some particular types of space are constantly repeated to form the spatial rhythm of narrative. In Robbe-Grillet’s Le Voyeur, spatial repetition extends almost throughout the writing, forming a rhythmic narrative framework. The story is mainly about what Mathias, the protagonist, does on an island during three days. On the first day, he peddles watches and on the second and third he tries to destroy evidence to cover up his murder crime. The narrative unfolds by means of the shift of spaces. A macro observation would reveal that there is a regular repetition among the spatial changes. The pattern takes two forms. One is the constant repetition of what Mathias relates of his day one experiences (Chaps. 1 and 2), mainly including the spaces of roads, passageways, doorways, residents’ homes and stores. Here “roads” is a collective term covering small town streets, village paths, seaside roads, square roads, smooth roads, bumpy roads and stone-paved ones. They are the protagonist’s transitions from one door-to-door peddling to another, as well as the connections from one indoor space to another indoor space. Passageways, doorways and the indoor spaces are closely related and combined to make the space of residents’ homes which are the main stops for Mathias’ business. However, the author focuses substantially on the various “passageways”: the pitch-­ dark hallway, the narrow corridor, the dim stairway, the messy enterclose, the empty courtyard, and on the “doors”: closed doors, half-closed doors, wood doors, doors with decorative patterns, the hedge of the vegetable lot and so on. These passageways and doors are the spaces and barriers the

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protagonist has to go through to get into the homes where he could do his sales job. Repeated descriptions of these spaces prolong the time between the peddling activities and bring changes to the narrative rhythm. “Residents’ homes” is also used in a collective sense for different indoor spaces, referring to the living room, the bedroom, the kitchen, the dining room and so on in different cases. Once inside a resident’s home, Mathias would start peddling watches. “Stores” mostly include the butcher’s shop, the wine store, the grocer’s and the café, other stops for sales. The first two chapters of the writing are based on the repetition of these space types, which demonstrates the protagonist’s peddling efforts and experiences in different places. Additionally, these repeated types of space, as the “foregrounded” of the narrative, play a significant role in its organization and structuring. From the outside to the inside, from the streets to the homes, from the passageways to the rooms, the constant repetitions of this space shift pattern form intervals of different lengths as well as the narrative rhythm of the entire writing. Spatial rhythm in this case is not only the prominent mode for the organization of narrative, but related to the significant message of the story as well: voyeurs are everywhere, in the streets, outside the door or window and even inside the homes and they will be there repeatedly.

Spaces as the Major Source of the Meaning of Fiction Spaces as the major source of the meaning of fiction means that the themes of fiction mainly lie in the meaning of spaces, namely, the meaning of spatial images, perception and relation. As they are an essential component and the “foreground” of narrative, and play an organizing role in narrative, spaces become the major source of the meaning of fiction. Such works are undoubtedly endowed with a spatialization quality in terms of content and fall into the spatial narrative category. Spaces as the major source of the meaning of fiction can be reflected in two aspects: the theme of fiction determined by a certain space; spatial combinations as the principal source of the meaning of fiction. The determination of the theme by the meaning of a certain space is realized via the construction of the space which plays a definitive role in the narrative. Hence the fiction itself, in the aspect of content, is a spatial

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narrative, and in such cases, space is in the foreground of narrative and at the core of meaning. The meaning of the castle in Kafka’s The Castle is apparently key to the theme of the novel as well as the major source of its meaning. The castle is a space symbolic of an inaccessible place, an unapproachable and irresistible force, an irrational and ridiculous order. Taking into account the author’s ethnic identity of an “exiled Jew,” it is not difficult to find that the space of the castle also reflects the spatial anxiety and identity crisis of the exiled. From a human existence perspective, the unreachable space of the castle embodies a profound struggle of existence: the conflict between freedom and imprisonment, the paradox between the limitedness of individuals and the limitlessness of space. As ZHANG Deming notes, “Individuals, insignificant and with limits, experiencing the limitless space… can only be on a journey with no destination and in an existence full of promise as well as despair.”31 This is the very gist of the novel. In some cases, the fiction has its meaning derived from the combinations of various physical and mental spatial images and perceptions. La Route des Flandres (1960) written by Claude Simon is such an example. The narrative is based on the death of Captain de Reixach, and there are elaborate and repetitive descriptions of the instant of his being shot and falling down, which serves as the major source of the meaning of the novel. How to interpret this specific instant? What has the author given to it so that it has a rich and associative texture? A close investigation would reveal to readers that this instant is made up of a number of different spatial images. At the beginning of the novel, there is the scene of the captain getting shot: the captain drawing his saber, raising one arm, making a classic soldier-on-horseback sculpture pose amid the flying machine-gun bullets from behind the hedges. Yet with the light effects, he is a dark silhouette with a glinting blade, which, with the horse, looks like a casting in a grayish white piece of metal. When the captain, the horse and the saber fall together, it is as if the sculpture started melting and collapsing before the burnt camion. The camion is like a beast, a pregnant bitch and the smell of its burnt tires lingers in the spring afternoon air. It is a reddening vision of a pool of stagnant water soaked with houses, orchards and hedges and dazzling steel parts.32 The spatial images in this short passage, visual or olfactory, construct the instant of the captain collapsing, a ridiculous and helpless instant in a war, a heroic act without meaning. The dim silhouette and the shining saber fall down to quickly integrate into the lifeless pool just like the “dead” camion. In the imagination of Georges,

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the narrator, the captain holding his sword high collapses like a beheaded duck. He falls as if tripped by a leg sweep, or someone had the carpet under his feet suddenly taken away in a comic show.33 In Blum’s memory, the captain’s death is a fuzzy image: a silhouette on horseback, raising one arm, brandishing his sword, slowly falling until everything vanishes like dissipated clouds. Together with this in Blum’s mind’s eye is the captain’s sexy and alluring wife and her infidelity stories.34 In the spatial perception and mental images of these two characters, this critical instant, intertwined with trivialities and absurdities in life, seems ridiculous and insignificant. At the end of the novel, the first-person narrator “I” presented to readers this freeze-framed instant again: the bony and stiff upper body of the captain riding on horseback is, in the eyes of the sniper, an ink dot at first, and it then becomes larger with the muzzle silently following its movements and pointing at his vital parts, “the black steel gun gleaming in the sunlight.”35 This last account is the very freeze frame of this moment of visual and olfactory richness before the gunshot. Why and how the captain loses his life remains a myth. Even “I,” the narrator, cannot be sure whether what “I” saw is real or just a dream. However, this instant of death is rich and full, loaded with profound and diverse connotations, because of the combinations of various spatial images. The series of images relating to this instant embody the complex meanings of war, death, fate and existence. In addition, the captain’s death and other death images—piled corpses, suicide scenes, the moaning earth amid gunfire, buildings battered by artillery, remains of daily-use articles and the like—echo and reinforce one another to make up the “death space” of the novel. (Please note that the analysis on the death images and the death space is deleted for the length of this chapter.) This death space constitutes the essential theme of the novel and the vehicle for the author’s thoughts on death and existence. This chapter explores spatial narrative in fiction in terms of content, that is, the forms that spatial narrative takes in the content aspect. With the focus on space, this narrative model reveals the significance of space, depicts spatial conditions of human existences, outlines spatial distributions of interpersonal relationships, relates individual spatial experiences, anxieties, crises and conflicts as well as reflecting the unprecedented close connections between existence and space. On the spatialization of the expression level, the author has conducted a  discussion  included  in her 2017 book The Spatial Narrative in Fiction. What is worth pointing out is that the spatialization of content and that of expression are not separate or unrelated; instead, they often influence each other. Stressing space on

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the content level often leads to the spatialization of expression, and spatial narrative in the aspect of expression tends to highlight space in content. Hence, quite a number of works bear both features, and they await further investigations from the academia.

Notes 1. Susan Stanford Friedman, “Spatial Poetics and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things,” in A Companion to Narrative Theory, eds. James Phelan & Peter J. Rabinowitz (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 193. 2. Joseph Frank proposes and discusses the concept of “spatial form” in the following essays: Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature: An Essay in Two Parts,” The Sewanee Review, vol. 53, no. 2, 3 (Spring, Summer 1945); —, “Spatial Form: An answer to Critics,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 4, no. 2 (Winter, 1977); —, “Spatial Form: Some Further Reflections,” Critical Inquiry, no. 2 (Winter, 1978). 3. 吴国盛: 《希腊空间概念》, 北京: 中国人民大学出版社, 2010年。 [WU Guosheng, Greek Spatial Concepts (Beijing: China Renmin University Press, 2010).] In this book, WU makes an in-depth exploration into “void” and “place” and states in Chap. 12 titled “Neo-Platonism: Shifting towards Contemporary Spatial Concepts” that spatial concepts at that time have incorporated the meaning of “extension.” He also points out on page 16, “When the old world came to an end, ‘extension,’ ‘place’ and ‘void’ were complete. The concept of space, as a proper integration of the three, emerged, but with tremendous conceptual confusion.” 4. William Holtz, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature: A Reconsideration,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 4, no. 2 (Winter, 1977): 282. 5. Elrud Ibsch, “Historical Changes of the Function of Spatial Description in Literary Texts,” Poetics Today, no. 4 (Autumn, 1982): 97. 6. Gérard Genette, Figures II (Paris, 1969), 59. Qtd in Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form: Some Further Reflections,” Critical Inquiry, no. 2 (Winter, 1978): 285–286. Translated from French to English by Joseph Frank. 7. Elrud Ibsch, “Historical Changes of the Function of Spatial Description in Literary Texts,” 97. 8. G. Prince, A Dictionary of Narratology (London: Scolar Press, 1988), 19. 9. Seymour Chatman, Coming to Terms (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 23. 10. David Herman, Story Logic (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 265.

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11. Jeffrey Kittay, “Descriptive Limits,” in “Towards a Theory of Description,” Special Issue of Yale French Studies, no. 61 (1981): 225–243. Qtd in David Herman, Story Logic, 265. 12. David Herman, ed., Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 553–554. 13. Elrud Ibsch, “Historical Changes of the Function of Spatial Description in Literary Texts,” 99–102. 14. 林秀清: 《诗画结合的新小说》, 克劳德⋅西蒙: 《弗兰德公路⋅农事诗》, 林秀清译, 桂林: 漓江出版社, 1999 年, 译本前言第 5 页。 [LIN Xiuqing, “The French New Novel: Combination of Poetry and Painting,” “Foreword” in The Flanders Road, The Georgics, Claude Simon, trans. LIN Xiuqing (Guilin: Lijiang Publishing Limited, 1999), 5.] 15. 罗伯-格里耶: 《今日叙事中的时间与描述》, 阿兰⋅罗伯-格里耶: 《为了 一种新小说》, 余中先译, 长沙: 湖南文艺出版社, 2011 年, 第 172 页。 [Alain Robbe-Grillet, “Time and Description in Today’s Narrative,” in For a Nouveau Roman, Alain Robbe-Grillet, trans. YU Zhongxian (Changsha: Hunan Literature and Art Publishing House, 2011), 172.] 16. Jeffrey R. Smitten, “Introduction: Spatial Form and Narrative Theory,” in Spatial Form in Narrative, eds. Jeffrey R.  Smitten & Ann Daghistany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 42. 17. Ibid. 18. Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (the 2nd edition) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 136. 19. Aristotle, The Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher, in Western Classics in Literary Criticism: From Plato to Henry James, ed. YAO Naiqiang (Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 2003), 34–35. 20. Ibid., 36. 21. Ibid., 37. 22. Ibid., 54. 23. E. M. 福斯特: 《小说面面观》, 冯涛译, 北京: 人民文学出版社, 2009 年, 第 74 页。 [E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (Beijing: People’s Literature Publishing House, 2009), 74.] 24. Virginia Woolf, “The Mark on the Wall.” Online. Available http://digital. library.upenn.edu/women/woolf/monday/monday-­08.html 25. 冯至: 《伍子胥》, 选自冯至: 《十四行集》, 北京: 华夏出版社, 2011年, 第 101 页。 [FENG Zhi, “WU Zixu,” in The Collection of Sonnets, FENG Zhi (Beijing: Huaxia Publishing House, 2011), 101.] 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 109.

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29. 乐黛云等主编: 《世界诗学大辞典》, 沈阳: 春风文艺出版社, 1993 年, 第 242 页。 [YUE Daiyun et  al. eds., The Poetics Dictionary  (Shenyang: Chunfeng Art and Literature Press, 1993), 242.] 30. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Spatial Form in Literature: Toward a General Theory,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 6, no. 3 (Spring, 1980): 548–549. 31. 张德明: 《卡夫卡的空间意识》, 《浙江大学学报 (人文社会科学版)》, 2004 年第 4 期, 第 142 页。 [ZHANG Deming, “On Kafka’s Space Consciousness,” Journal of Zhejiang University (Humanities and Social Sciences), no. 4 (2004): 142.] 32. 克劳德⋅西蒙: 《弗兰德公路⋅农事诗》, 林秀清译, 桂林: 漓江出版社, 1999 年, 第 6 页。 [Claude Simon, The Flanders Road, The Georgics, trans. LIN Xiuqing (Guilin: Lijiang Publishing, 1999), 6.] 33. Ibid., 64. 34. Ibid., 168. 35. Ibid., 225. The quotation is translated from the Chinese version (see note 32) by FENG Libo.

PART II

Studies in Literary Geography

CHAPTER 8

The Construction of Academic System in a New Literary Geography Xinlin Mei

The natural genetic relationship between humans and geography not only breeds the subject of geography and establishes its important subject status as “mother of science,” but also provides the possibility of the integration of literature and geography into “literary geography.” As far back as the “Axial Age” (between 800 BC and 200 BC) with the first cultural boom of mankind, when geography, as the “mother of science,” flourished in both ancient Greece and China, it inspired and shaped the prototype of literary geography centered on China and ancient Greece. Then

This essay was originally published in Zhejiang Social Sciences, Issue 7 of 2017. What follows is the full information: 梅新林: “̒新文学地理学 学术体系之建构,” 《浙江社会科学》, 2017 年第 7 期, 第 112–125 + 159 页。 [MEI Xinlin, “The Construction of Academic System in New Literary Geography,” Zhejiang Social Sciences, no. 7 (2017): 112–125 + 159.] The English version has been slightly deleted. Moreover, this essay is mainly translated by YAN Hongfei (颜红菲).

X. Mei (*) Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou, China © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Fang, R. T. Tally Jr. (eds.), Spatial Literary Studies in China, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03914-0_8

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starting from this period, the long-established literary geography went through two major periods led by China and the West respectively. In the 1940s, August Dupouy’s Géographie des Lettres Francaises (1942) and André Ferre’s Géographie Litteraire (1946) were published by Armand Coli and Sagittaire in succession, which took the lead in announcing the birth of Western literary geography. After the 1970s, along with the “spatial turn” in humanities and social sciences in Europe and the United States and the flourishing of cultural study in China, the two axes of Chinese and Western literature and geography flourished together again. This is not only the product of the rising spatial consciousness of mankind in the context of globalization, but also the inevitable result of the development of Chinese and Western literature and geography. In particular, after entering the twenty-first century, Chinese academics, in the process of drawing on Western human geography and independently exploring literary geography, have not only made a series of important achievements in the physical study of literary geography, but also committed themselves to the construction of literary geography as an emerging interdiscipline with a global perspective, local characteristics and the spirit of the times, which has vigorously promoted the overall prosperity of literary geography and the re-establishment of the “dual axis” between China and the West. The New Literary Geography, which is gradually moving toward the stage of disciplinary self-consciousness in China, is actually a New Literary Geography beyond the tradition and the West, and is therefore named “New Literary Geography” here. The new proposition of “New Literary Geography” requires us to rethink many focal issues of literary geography with new vision and thinking, and to provide more innovative theoretical results. But the most important thing at present is to make new explorations to construct the academic logic and the system of “New Literary Geography.”

The Concept of “New Literary Geography” What is “New Literary Geography”? Before answering this question, let us turn first to why this question is raised, for only by knowing its “the reason why” can we know its “why” more deeply. Since for a long time, the local academic community has not systematically sorted out or studied the historical traditions and achievements of Chinese and Western literary geography, and there has been no Chinese version of some important works such as August Dupouy’s Géographie des

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Lettres Francaises and André Ferre’s Géographie Litteraire, some scholars have made a misjudgment that “literary geography” did not exist in the West or acclaimed that “literary geography” is a unique discipline in China.1 Regarding this judgment, we should adopt a global perspective to discriminate and correct it from the following two aspects: on the one hand, Western literary geography has a long historical tradition and characteristics, which is an indisputable fact, so we cannot rashly conclude that literary geography does not exist in the West or it is a unique discipline in China; On the other hand, the rise, development, and theoretical exploration of Chinese literary geography since the 1980s did not have a direct line of succession with the Western literary geography tradition established by Dupouy and Ferre’s works, which were produced in different periods and manifested in different forms. Basing on geographic history, I think that it is appropriate to refer to the “new geography” centered on Germany in the nineteenth century and the “new cultural geography” centered on Britain and the United States since 1980s, and to draw inspirations from this two research paradigms to put forward the new proposition of “New Literary Geography.” 1. From geography to “new geography.” The Western academia generally believe that modern geography transferred from the classical period to the modern period in the early nineteenth century in Germany, marked by the publication of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Cosmos and Carl Ritter’s Die Erdkunde. Humboldt’s achievements reached the peak of that era and are known as the pioneer of discipline and the founder of modern geography. Ritter, however, is known for establishing the scientific status of geography and promoting the successive establishment of university geography department through researching and constructing the concept and system of geography. Judging from the history of geography, the academic transformation of classical-modern geography, the establishment of geography as a discipline with independent research objects and a complete academic system, and the introduction of geography into the university education system all have epoch-­ making significance. Geoffrey J. Martin named this phenomenon as “new geography” in his famous work All Possible Worlds: A History of Geographical Ideas, regarding that the establishment of the department of geography in German universities led by professors in 1874 marked the birth of “new geography” in Germany. Since then, this transformation quickly spread to France, the United Kingdom, Russia, the United States,

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and many other countries. Among the above five countries, ­differences in explaining the nature of geography have resulted in different national schools in geography studies.2 We could conclude that the “new geography” mainly manifested itself in the theoretical innovation and school establishment when it was introduced into university curricula during the classical-modern transition period. 2. From cultural geography to “new cultural geography.” In the 1920s, American geographer Carl Sauer adopted the concept “landscape” from German geography and the other concept “superorganic” from anthropology to construct his cultural geography. His masterpiece The Morphology of Landscape was published in 1925, marking the accomplishment of cultural geography and the “Berkeley school.” In the 1980s, led by British scholar Peter Jackson and American scholar Denis Cosgrove, a new trend, based on the criticism of traditional cultural geography featuring the “Berkeley school,” began to emerge. Jackson’s Maps of Meaning: An Introduction to Cultural Geography and Denis Cosgrove’s The Iconography of Landscape were successively published in the late 1980s, which were regarded as the symbol of the birth of “new cultural geography.” Since then, in his masterpiece “Cultural Geography,” Mike Crowne reconstructed the genealogy of traditional literary geography, focusing on the reconstruction of the three concepts of “culture,” “space,” and “landscape,” and combined his theory with the “cultural turn” and the “spatial criticism” in the 1970s, aiming at the evolution and innovation of academic paradigms, which has had a tremendous and far-reaching impact on the entire Western geography as well as the humanities and social sciences. 3. From literary geography to “New Literary Geography.” In the 1940s, French scholar August Dupouy’s Géographie des Lettres Francaises and André Ferre’s Géographie Litteraire were published successively, marking the birth of literary geography in France. But Géographie des Lettres Francaises was specialized in French literary geography, with an emphasis on the physical research of the provincial areas. Ferre’s Géographie Litteraire, however, being the first work entitled with “literary geography” directly, had set out from the national study to the general study, therefore, compared with Géographie des Lettres Francaises, it is thus more iconic as the formal emergence of a “literary geography.” The “New Literary Geography” used this frame to reconstruct the academic system of literary geography through the double transcendence of “ancient-modern” and “Chinese-Western.” Following the connotation of “new geography” and “new cultural geography,” “New Literary Geography” empha-

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sized the academic innovation as common points, reconstructed its concepts, theories, methodologies, and disciplinary construction. Strictly speaking, however, although the “New Literary Geography” has experienced the pioneering, relaunch and diversified development in the late twentieth century, and is moving toward a new stage of disciplinary self-­consciousness in the new century, it has not yet completed the historical and doctrinal unification which is based on the principles of literary geography and sufficient originalities. Therefore, to break the “old” and establish the “new,” “New Literary Geography” needs to stand on the new academic ground in the twenty-first century, reviewing and integrating relevant worldwide academic achievements then and now to make a fundamental breakthrough in theoretical construction.

Transcending the “Ancient-Modern” Time Dimension The first connotation of “New Literary Geography” is relative to the local traditional literary geography. It is a new transcendence of the long-­ standing traditional literary geography in a dimension of “ancient-­ modern.” Tracing back to the origins, the study of literary geography in both China and the West has a very long historical tradition, especially in China, where there is no rupture like that of the Western Middle Ages, and thus it had been leading the way and kept flourishing for a long historical period. Its uninterrupted development and achievements are embodied in the following four aspects: The first is the classic literary geographical interpretation that originated from JI Zha (pre-Qin) discussing Poetry by appreciating music and officially began from BAN Gu’s Han Book: Geography (Han Dynasty), ZHENG Xuan’s Mao Poetry (East Han Dynasty) and WANG Yi’s Chuci Paragraph (East Han Dynasty), and so on; the second is the study of the relationship between literature and geographic environment, represented by the theory of “the assistance of rivers and mountains” proposed by LIU Xie in the Southern Dynasty; the third is the comparative study of literature between the North and South regions, represented by Book of Sui: Record of Classic Works written by WEI Zheng in the Tang Dynasty; and the fourth is the study of regional literature and culture in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, accompanied by the flourishing of local literary collections and poetry. The “Four Theories” mentioned above, namely, “poetry and geography theory,” “the assistance of rivers and mountains theory,” “South-North comparative theory,” and

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“local literature theory,” represent the core achievements of native literary geography studies during the long classical period in history, and thus have formed an enduring academic tradition. By the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, inspired by “the eastward transmission of western learning” and the blending of East and West thoughts, the long-standing Chinese traditional literary geography gradually entered the modern period of transformation. Basing on the comparative analysis of Chinese and Western academic achievements, we can find that from the beginning of the twentieth century, the Chinese academic circles, through the “intermediary” pathway of Japan, started with the introduction of Kant’s idea on literary geography in LIANG Qichao’s “The Great Potential of Chinese Geography” (1902), and first put forward the concept of “literary geography” in China, achieving a modern transformation on the basis of drawing heavily on the Western’s geographical environmental determinism and fusing the results of traditional literary geography. LIU Shipei’s On the Differences between Northern and Southern Literature (1905), WANG Baoxin’s On Literature and Geography (1906), WANG Guowei’s The Spirit of Quyuan’s Literature (1907) were among those who summarized the central theme of the comparison of North-South literature, WANG Pijiang’s Modern Poetry and Regions (1934), TANG Guizhang’s A Study of Native Place of Poets in Two Song Dynasties (1943), ZHU Xie’s Hexi Corridor and Western Regions in Poetry of S-Tang (1944) and other new extensions to the study of regional literature; WANG Guowei’s History of Chinese Opera in Song and Yuan Dynasties (1913), LU Xun’s Outline of Han Chinese Literary History (1926), GU Shi’s Chinese Literary History Outline (1926), GE Zunli’s Chinese Literary History (1930), CHEN Guantong’s Chinese Literary History Outline (1931), LIU Jingan’s Chinese Literary History Outline (1935), and other works attempted to “retell the history of literature” with a literary geography perspective. These were the landmark achievements of the modern transformation of traditional literary geography in the early twentieth century, but not many breakthroughs were made in theoretical contribution, especially in its disciplinary construction. There is no doubt that the rise of “New Literary Geography” in the late twentieth century is an inevitable outcome and important achievement of the reform and opening up in the new era. Especially at the turn of this century, the native academic circles have made more efforts in the process of relearning and rethinking Western Humanistic Geography and independently made their way to push its development, and have ushered in an

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unprecedented era of full prosperity which resulted in the re-establishment of the pattern of Sino-Western dual axis. Generally speaking, it has gone through the following four historical stages, namely, the pioneering stage in the 1960s and 1970s,3 the restart in the 1980s, the diversified development in the 1990s, and the discipline self-consciousness in the early twenty-first century. These four stages were almost simultaneously the two-way progress of theoretical development and practical exploration, and were deeply marked by the social transformation and academic innovation of China at the turn of the century. The transcendence of “New Literary Geography” needs the support of both practical exploration and theoretical innovation, but the more important and difficult one is theoretical construction. JIN kemu’s Tentative Ideas on Regional Studies of Literature and the Arts (1986) first proposed the idea of “literary area study” and advocated the study of “distribution research,” “trajectory research,” “fixed-point research,” and “dissemination research,”4 which played a pioneering role in the field. Then in 1987, YAN Chunjun proposed the concept of “geographical literature.”5 In 1992, LV Jiajian followed the concept of “geographical literature” and focused on the topic of “landscape literature.”6 It was in 1998 that TAO Litian finally chose the name “literary geography,” and at the same time, he put forward the idea of establishing the discipline of literary geography. TAO not only made new theoretical explanations on the disciplinary nature, theoretical framework, and research scope, and methods, but also put forward a preliminary idea for the layered research of literary geography: The first layer is the study of the general principles, rules and methods, that is, the introduction to literary geography; the second is the study of country-specific literary geographies, of which Chinese literary geography is one of them; and the third is regional study, such as discussion of Chinese Northern and Southern literature respectively.7 This is an important breakthrough to the previous indeterminate concept of “literary geography” and the relative lag in theoretical construction. In the twenty-first century, literary geography has become a prominent subject with its explosive achievements in the four areas which are regional literature, the literary geospatial studies, the holistic study, and the theoretical constructions—these four above were mutually intermingling and promotive and marked the signs of disciplinary self-consciousness. In addition to some academic works published during this period referring to it in some degree, a number of theoretical research papers have covered a wide range of topics such as conceptual analysis, disciplinary positioning,

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theoretical construction, and methodological innovation. ZHNG Shilun once summarized five kinds of representative views, namely, YANG Yi’s “map theory,” MEI Xinlin’s “literature-oriented theory,” TAO Litian’s “marginal theory,” ZENG Daxing’s “relationship theory,” and ZOU Jianjun’s “space theory.”8 Obviously, the classification above was somehow simplistic and the reality was more complicated for although they all converged under the banner of “literary geography,” they did not share the same conceptual distinction, disciplinary positioning, theoretical construction, and methodological innovation. The most crucial problem was that all the above-mentioned theories were like scattered pearls that had not yet been assembled into an organic whole, which urgently required an original and comprehensive work dedicated to the theoretical debate and system construction, since the capacity of papers is inherently too limited to undertake this academic mission.

Transcending the “Chinese-Western” Space Dimension Another important connotation of “New Literary Geography” is relative to Western literary geography, which is a new transcendence of the long-­ standing Western literary geography in the spatial dimension of “Chinese-­ Western.” Western literary geography’s original foundation rooted in ancient Greek “descriptive geography,” and then experienced a long period of downturn in the Middle Ages. Until after the fifteenth century with the help of the Renaissance, great geographic discoveries and the strong impetus of the Enlightenment, Western literary geography finally overtook, leading the new trend, not only by conceptual refinement, theoretical innovation, diversified exploration and eventually contributed to the formal birth of literary geography, and had long dominated the academic trend and development direction of the world literary geography. Taking the publication of August Dupouy’s Géographie des Lettres Francaises and André Ferre’s Géographie Litteraire in 1940s as the dividing line, the former literary geography started with Vico’s “poetic geography” in the eighteenth century, then Montesquieu’s “geographical environment determinism” formally laid the theoretical foundation, and Kant’s thought on literary geography,9 both of whom had a wide and far-­ reaching impact on literary geography in this period and later. After entering the nineteenth century, with the modern transformation of geography

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and the birth of human geography, Western literary geography entered a period of multi-directional exploration. Madame de Stael’s study of European geography and Northern-Southern literature marked the beginning, and Taine’s theory of three elements, namely, race, environment, and time, summed up its achievements. Undoubtedly, the early explorations and achievements of literary geography mentioned above have provided academic resources for Dupouy and Ferre’s studies. Among them, Montesquieu’s “geographical environment determinism,” Madame de Stael’s theory of Northern-Southern literature, and Tanner’s triple element theory are more direct and profound. If we compare Dupouy’s Géographie des Lettres Francaisesauteur with André Ferre’s Géographie Litteraire in their titles and academic purposes, we can discover that Géographie Litteraire is more general in nature than Géographie des Lettres Francaises, thus makes more new breakthroughs in the theoretical establishment. In particular, it took the lead in proposing the idea of establishing a discipline of “literary geography” and emphasized its rationality and growth as an independent discipline. “First of all, literary geography should make itself explicit and the legitimacy of literary geography as an independent discipline should be affirmed and demonstrated through special work.”10 “Thus the research for the principles of classification will set the course for the principles of explanation, the discovery of which should complete the constitution of literary geography as a science.”11 “On the one hand, literary geography no longer waits for the support of systematic papers for existence; on the other hand, literary geography can only be constructed as a sub-branch of geographical research and literary research.”12 “If literary geography finally gains the same influence as historical geography, it will not be that important in another way: to be precise, it would rather be a task in leaving notes and comments on creative thoughts, a task with infinite scope for completion.”13 In addition, Ferre made many achievements in literary maps and cartography. There are 23 maps in the book, among which the biographical maps of the famous literati are of particular academic value. To sum up, with the successive publications of Dupouy’s Géographie des Lettres Francaises and André Ferre’s Géographie Litteraire, literary geography finally claimed its official emergence in France and took a crucial step in the construction of the academic system. However, due to the fact that the book is extremely thin, with only 30,000 characters translated into Chinese, and the lack of details on a series of important topics on concepts, theories, methods, and disciplines, it still fails to make a significant

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breakthrough in the construction of the academic system of “literary geography.” Since the 1970s, the theoretical innovation of “spatial criticism” brought unprecedented vigor to literary geography and provided rare opportunities and resources for the reconstruction of the academic system of literary geography. Under the banner of “spatial criticism,” however, there was a vast and complex academic community, which had been involved in developing literary geography to varying directions and had a huge and far-reaching impact on the theoretical innovation and practical exploration, but it was not literary-based and much less the construction of an academic system of literary geography. In contrast, the studies of “regional criticism,” “geocriticism,” “literary cartography,” and “geopoetics” were more intrinsically compatible with literary geography, and had made many achievements in theoretical exploration. “Regional criticism,” also known as “literary regionalism,” achieved twice academic prosperities in the United States in the late nineteenth century and 1920s–1930s respectively. After the 1990s, a climax of “literary regional criticism” centered on the United States had formed gradually. As Douglas Reichert Powell pointed out in Critical Regionalism: Connecting Politics and Culture in the American Landscape, “Literary critical regionalism is a new mode of cultural research which puts regional literary texts in a broader context of culture, politics, history and geography.”14 “Geocriticism” was initiated by Robert Tally of the United States and Bertrand Westphal of France, with the former constructing his theoretical system of geocriticism on the basis of three elements of space, mapping, and place; the latter aiming to establish a set of theoretical frameworks and practical methods by introducing three basic concepts of spatio-­temporality, transgressivity, and referentiality.15 In the research field of “literary map,” Franco Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel: 1800–1900 and Graphs, Maps, Trees, Abstract Models for a Literary History, as well as Eric Burson’s Novels, Maps, Modernity: The Spatial Imagination, 1850–2000 had contributed to literary geography-­ map ideas. In addition, some scholars were devoted to the concept refinement and theoretical discussion of “literary cartography,” “poetic cartography,” and so on,16 which also promoted the theoretical construction of literary geography. In his essay “Literary Geography, Geocriticism and Geopoetics,” French scholar Michel Collot once divided the entire research system of “literary geography” into three layers: “literary geography” (sub-concept,

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equivalent to “regional criticism”), “geocriticism,” and “geopoetics,” which were also three core sub-concepts in the conceptual system of literary geography.17 It is, however, still difficult to reach a consensus in the Western academia for the time being, and the concepts tend to appear respectively. Moreover, neither the theoretical achievement of “regional criticism,” “geocriticism,” nor “literary cartography” can replace the academic system construction of literary geography itself. As for “geopoetics,” which used to be at the core of the academic system, it is still at the preliminary stage of exploration, therefore, cannot truly undertake the mission. In short, looking at the historical evolution of Western literary geography, to reconstruct the academic system of “New Literary Geography” is to transcend Western literary geography.

Academic Return by Double Transcendences Based on the diachronic and synchronic comparison of the “ancient- modern” and the “Chinese-Western,” literary geography, which rooted in the local academic tradition and referred to Western “spatial criticism” theory, needs to achieve its transcendence of both the dimensions. But the more essential requirement is the academic return of the ontological meaning of literary geography, including the return of the localization, the return of the standard and the return of the original, collectively known as the triple returns, in order to build a place for the “New Literary Geography” to establish itself. 1. The return of the localization The evolution from geography to literary geography is the result of the modernization, globalization, and humanization of geography, and the multidisciplinary differentiation and integration in the twentieth century, which finally converge in the main currents of “spatial turn” and “spatial criticism,” representing the main developing direction of Western literary geography. As far as the interaction between China and West is concerned, there were two meetings between the East and the West in the early and late twentieth century respectively, with far-reaching implications. More importantly, both the modern transformation of traditional literary geography in the early twentieth century and the rise of literary geography at the turn of the twenty-first centuries are in fact the result of a “double borrowings”—Chinese human geography draws lessons from Western

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human geography, while literary geography draws on the achievements of human geography at the same time. Especially since the 1980s, a large amount of Western human geography theories had been introduced,18 which has played an important role in promoting the emergence and construction of human geography at the turn of the century in China, both in terms of theoretical resources and academic influence. Corresponding to the massive input of the aforementioned Western human geography theories is the revival of native human geography in the new era which is roughly in line with the research path of literary geography in the same period, and the mutual influence is obvious. Based on the above-­mentioned “double borrowings,” a certain Westernization of local literary geography since the twentieth century is inevitable. As CHEN Yinque points out, however, “Those who are truly capable of forming their own systems of thought and making gains must absorb imported doctrines on the one hand, and not forget the status of the original nation on the other.”19 The facts have proved and will continue to prove that the real beneficial research paradigm includes both reasonable absorption of Western theories and reliance on Chinese literary reality and cultural traditions, and that only the combination of Western theories and local reality can make the theory vigorous. Of course, the “local return” of literary geography that is particularly emphasized here is essentially an open rather than self-enclosed return, a “local return” based on global vision and the fusion of East and West. 2. The standard return The so-called disciplinary standard question is whether literary geography is literary or geographic? Or is it geographic studies in a literary or geographical niche? That is to say, whether literary geography belongs to the subject of literature or geography? No matter in native or Western literary geography, and no matter in practical research or theoretical exploration, the disputes of disciplinary standard and generalization of literature have existed for a long time. Three reasons account for this phenomenon: The problem of historical tradition comes first. When Kant first mentioned “literary geography” in his Physical Geography in the eighteenth century, he placed it among the sub-disciplines of geography,20 as a sub-discipline of geography rather than a sub-discipline of literature,21 and this is the origin of the academic tradition of future generations of geography. The second is a matter of academic logic. The fusion of “literature” and

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“geography” into the emerging interdisciplinary discipline of “literary geography” will inevitably be constrained and influenced by its parent disciplines—“geography” and “literature” at the same time, thus inevitably leading to a struggle between the literary and geographical standards. The third is a matter of practical orientation. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of literary geography and the different professional backgrounds of many researchers, when they inject various academic intellectual resources into literary geography, they also inevitably bring the risk of generalizing it. After all, it is determined by the interdisciplinary nature of literary geography. Therefore, the key issue is not about how to eliminate or bridge the disputes of disciplinary standard because such disputes themselves have the positive effects of simulating diverse vitality, but lies in how to grasp the original nature of “literature” in literary geography. Therefore, the “standard return” of literary geography is a kind of return to a new relatively independent interdiscipline. 3. The return of the original Moving from local return and standard return to original return is not only the deepening of the internal logical relationship of literary geography as an interdisciplinary integration or as the emergence of an independent interdiscipline but also a response to various problems in current research practice, including the “two skins” of “literature” and “geography,” the imbalance of the focus, the lack of in-depth mutual interpretation of the spatial form-meaning, and so on. In view of this, the original return of literary geography needs to be based on academic logic and to find an effective solution to the problems mentioned above, the most crucial of which is the mutualization and integration of “literature” and “geography.” The intrinsic link between “literature” and “geography” can not only be mutually interrelated through the “geographicalization of literature” and the “literarylization of geography,” but also through “literary space,” which make the intersection between “literature” and “geography” moving toward a deeper integration. After this “multualization” and “integration,” the “literature” of “literary geography” no longer refers to the general “literature,” instead, it refers to “spatial literature” specifically. Similarly, the “geography” of “literary geography” is “geography” in the sense of “literary space,” and it doesn’t mean “geography” in general. It is through the bond of “literature-­ space” that each other is deeply integrated into “literary geography.”

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Then, taking the “double-layer space” of “outer space-inner space” as the basic axis, from the outside to the inside, from the obvious to the hidden, and from the text to the map, the three-dimensional blending model of “outer space-inner space,” “narrative space-metaphor space,” and “text space-map space” is refined and constructed. The interaction of “outer space-inner space” emphasizes promoting the “spatial turn” of traditional region-area literature research and shifting the focus of literary geography, while the interaction of “narrative space-metaphor space” aims to dig into the inherent causality through the spatial form, thereby revealing the various metaphorical meanings contained in it, and the interaction of “text space-map space” is based on the mutual interpretation of the “text-map” between two language systems in the dual fusions of “outer space-inner space” and “narrative space-metaphorical space,” through which it is reconstructed into a unique structure of the mutualization of “time-­space” and the correspondence of “text-map,” and gradually, from the surface to the deep, forms a “map-text” mutual interpretation and intertextuality.22 This not only contributes to the deep integration of “text space-map space” itself, but also provides new opportunities and vitality for the integration of “outer space-inner space” and “narrative space-­ metaphorical space.” The movement from the local return and standard return to the original return is a process of sequential unfolding and sublimating. From the “route map” of the doctrinal logic of “New Literary Geography,” this is the final destination after the double transcendences of ancient-modern and Chinese-Western based on the time-space coordinates.

The Academic Framework of “New Literary Geography” After unremitting exploration and development since the late twentieth century, the time is ripe for the construction of the academic system of “New Literary Geography,” which is rooted in tradition and borrowed from the West. Like other emerging interdisciplinary disciplines, the core content of the reconstruction contains four elements, namely, concept, discipline, theory, and method. If we compare the reconstruction of the academic system to building a mansion, these four elements can then be compared to the four pillars that support the mansion of “New Literary Geography.”

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1. Conceptual definition The establishment of any new interdisciplinary academic system needs to consider “naming” in the first place because this is the most crucial step in determining its legitimacy, hence the importance of the conceptual definition of “literary geography.” Nevertheless, the historical evolution of ancient and modern times, the synchronic differences between China and the West, and the different understandings of the concept of “literary geography” by many scholars have brought considerable difficulties to the conceptual definition of “literary geography,” so that some scholars have raised the problem of “naming dilemma.”23 In view of the plurality, ambiguity, and complexity of the concept itself, and in order to further deepen the conceptual definition, I first give a definition of “literary geography” as follows: “Literary geography is an emerging interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary research method that organically integrates the study of literature and geography, based on literature and focusing on literary spatial study and its development direction is to grow into a relatively independent and comprehensive discipline,”24 then to further integrate and refine it into a “general concept-subconcept” compound conceptual system, which is condensed into four core sub-concepts of “regional criticism,” “geocriticism,” “critical mapping,” and “geopoetics” with reference to the academic logic, practical exploration, and theoretical thought within the general concept of “literary geography.” Among the sub-concepts, “regional criticism” focuses on the study of “outer space,” while “geocriticism” focuses on the study of “inner space.” “Critical mapping” lays emphasis on the combination of “text-map” that connects the outer space and inner space, and “geopoetics” focuses on integrating the theoretical construction of “regional criticism,” “geocriticism,” and “critical mapping” and providing theoretical support and guidance for the entire theoretical system. The extraction and deduction of the “general concept-subconcept” compound conceptual system mentioned above is an inevitable outcome of the internal academic logic of literary geography. It is also a systematic integration of many separated and disordered subconcepts, which marks the complete establishment of the conceptual system of literary geography. 2. Disciplinary orientation At present, the academic circles in China pay much attention to disciplinary orientation than to the other three issues of conceptual definition,

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theoretical construction and methodological integration, and many opinions and disputes have also emerged in relative discussions. Among them, the central issue is the disciplinary orientation, which broadly forms three representative views: the literary oriented standard, the geographical oriented standard, and the literary-geographical dual attribute standard. The geographical oriented standard came out firstly. It started from Kant’s Physical Geography in the mid-eighteenth century whose main body was composed of scholars from the geographical research community, who tended to regard literary geography as a sub-discipline or a related research field of geography or human geography. The literary oriented standard is mainly held by scholars from literary academia which is in a dominant position in domestic academia. The literary-geographical dual attribute standard is between the two poles of literary oriented and geographical oriented standard, and can be regarded as a compromise between the above two standards. The three kinds of standard theories can learn from each other and complement themselves. At the same time, we need to pay attention to the disciplinary genealogy and the disciplinary boundary theory. Disciplinary genealogy is an effective indicator to measure whether the orientation and construction of literary geography are becoming mature, which roughly include literary geographic theory, literary geographic history, literary geocriticism, literary regionalism, ethnic literary geography, gender literary geography, literary geography and style, comparative literary geography, literary geographic informatics or bibliography, etc., and may be subdivided into more special literary geography study sequences as needed. Disciplinary boundary theory means that the interdisciplinarity is originally the characteristic of the discipline and the driving force to move from disciplinary integration to academic innovation. However, it should not be a boundless pan-disciplinary, and a reasonable disciplinary boundary should be established. This just confirms Clark’s words quoted here: “Every speciality can only progress by crossing its own professional boundaries into areas that are not yet demarcated.”25 At the same time, however, we should listen to another suggestion from British scholar E. F. Schumacher: “Every discipline is beneficial in its own sphere, and beyond this sphere it becomes harmful and even destructive.”26 3. Theoretical construction Theoretical innovation is crucial for construction and sustainable development of any discipline. In terms of the effectiveness of theoretical

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construction of current Chinese and Western academia, the Chinese academia is lagging behind in practical exploration, while the Western academia lacks a focus due to the diversity of theories. Therefore, it is particularly necessary to absorb academic achievements from the two parent disciplines and move toward the theoretical debate on the original meaning of literary geography, so as to promote the theoretical construction of literary geography to achieve key breakthroughs. According to the interdisciplinary nature and characteristics of literary geography, and referring to the three core questions extracted and summarized by the eminent American geographer Martin: “Where is it?” “What is it like?” “What does it mean?”27 and Moretti’s “double-layered space” theory of “literature in space” and “space in literature,”28 I reconstruct the “three original theories” of “territorial restoration,” “scene restoration,” and “spiritual exploration” as the three pillars of the theoretical construction of literary geography, a relatively stable “golden triangle” structure. The internal academic logic is summarized as follows: Firstly, “territorial restoration” is based on the spatial orientation of literary geography and corresponds to the “outer space,” that is, “literature in space.” It includes “spatial domain,” “plate structure,” “central positioning,” “peripheral vitality,” and “regional rotation” and other key elements that constitute the foundation of the theoretical construction of literary geography. Secondly, “scene restoration” is based on the morphological analysis of literary geography, connecting “outer space” and “inner space,” that is, “literature in space” and “space in literature,” but at the same time acting as an intermediary between the “outer space” of “territorial restoration” and the “inner space” of “spiritual exploration.” Its main theme is embodied in three “restorations”: return to the living scene, return to the fresh modality, and return to the human spirit, which is the main part of the three pillars of the theoretical construction. Thirdly, “spiritual exploration” is based on the exploration of meaning of literary geography, which is consistent with “inner space,” that is, “space in literature.” The meaning exploration should also be presented as different values based on different genres of text and hermeneutic theories, including metaphysical and physical orientations, but its highest pursuit should be the meaning of life. Among the “three original theories,” “spiritual exploration” is from the outside to the inside, focusing on the meaning of “inner space,” deepening and sublimating the meaning from “outer space” to “inner space,” marking the ultimate direction of the three pillars of literary geography

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theory construction, and characterizing the openness, profundity, and sustainability of literary geography.29 4. Methodological innovation “Literary geography” is an emerging interdiscipline that combines literature and geography, as well as a transdisciplinary approach to research. The question of how to combine scientific research methods and aesthetic criticism methods put forward by ZOU Jianjun in “How should we carry out research on literary geography?” is more in line with the nature of transdisciplinary research methods of literary geography.30 In view of this, I think that it can be summarized as the “binary compound research method” (referred to as the “binary method”) for a more systematic explanation and demonstration. Ultimately, this is determined by the interdisciplinary nature of literary geography, that is, the interdisciplinarity also determines the “duality.” On the one hand, we need to learn and use the scientific research methods of “geography,” including accurate spatial positioning, data statistics, charts compilation, and even the use of professional tools, which are fundamental to the study of geography, and the study of literary geography is no exception; On the other hand, it is necessary to inherit and apply the aesthetic methods of “literature,” including the detailed description, analysis and interpretation of the form and meaning of text space, because the study of literary geography takes literature as its standard, which is essentially an aesthetic rather than a scientific behavior, and requires sufficient aesthetic imagination, perception, and judgment. The two methods mentioned above are far apart, but they can work together just as the two wings of a bird, which are indispensable to each other. The “binary method,” however, is not a simple binary combination. According to the distinction between “outer space” and “inner space,” scientific methods are more suitable for “outer space,” while aesthetic methods for “inner space,” which requires a relative division of labor but alternate application and integration, either from the outside in, oriented by aesthetic research methods; or from the inside out, corroborated by scientific research methods. Among the four parts of the reconstruction of “New Literary Geography” academic system, the “conceptual definition” focuses on confirming its “identity,” “disciplinary positioning” aims to establish its “framework,” “theoretical construction” puts the soul into it, a “methodological integration” provides an “approach” for it. The four aspects

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constitute the core connotation of the reconstruction of the academic system of “New Literary Geography,” among which “theoretical construction” is of the most importance. Literary geography, as a new interdiscipline, has attracted worldwide attention in the academia at the turn of the century, and is gradually developing into a relatively independent discipline. It depends not only on the opportunity provided and nurtured by the spirit of the times, but also on the efforts of generations of scholars. For a long time, many local scholars have devoted themselves to the study of literary geography, while at the same time harboring the academic ideal and mission of constructing a new interdisciplinary academic system, and their unremitting efforts and remarkable achievements in different space of time have become an important link and foundation for reconstructing a “New Literary Geography” academic system with global vision, local characteristics, and the spirit of the times. However, it should be emphasized again that the reconstruction of the academic system of “New Literary Geography” is itself open and pluralistic, just like the task of constructing a magnificent building; different designers will come up with different design and construction plans, which will inevitably lead to controversies among different opinions, and perhaps even various criticisms. We believe that these disputes and criticisms will become an important driving force to promote the overall progress of the academic system reconstruction of “New Literary Geography.”

Notes 1. 参见曾大兴, “建设与文学史学科双峰并峙的文学地理学科—文学地理学 的昨天、今天和明天,” 《江西社会科学》, 2012 年第 1 期, 第 6 页。 [See ZENG Daxing, “Constructing a discipline of literary geography that coexists with the literary history: The past, present and future of Literary Geography,” Jiangxi Social Sciences, no. 1 (2012): 6.] 2. See Geoffrey J.  Martin, “Forward,” in All Possible Worlds: a History of Geographical Ideas (上海: 上海人民出版社 [Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Publishing House], 2008), 3–4. 3. If we look beyond the literary academic circle, we can find that the typical study of literary geography from the realm of geography has gone ahead. “Phenology in Tang and Song Poets’ Poems” in Zhu Kezhen and Wan Minwei’s Phenology (Hunan Education Press, 1963) and Zhu Kezhen, “A Preliminary Study on China’s Climate Change in the Past Five Thousand Years” (Archaeological Journal, no. 1, 1972) have both quoted Tang and

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Song’s poems to prove the related issues of phenology, which is the application and reconstruction of the traditional method of “poem” to prove “land.” Chen Zhengxiang, a famous Taiwan geographer, in his The Geography of Poetry (The Commercial Press, Hong Kong Branch, 1978) discussed the geography of Tang poetry in detail and in section of “Development and Prosperity of the Southern Yangtze River,” three maps of poets attached, namely, “Poets in the Tang Dynasty,” “Poets in the Song Dynasty,” and “Poets in the Ming Dynasty,” which can be regarded as the landmark achievements of the research of literary geography in the late twentieth century and it is also the beginning of the Chinese literary cartography. 4. 参见金克木, “文艺的地域学研究设想,” 《读书》, 1986 年第4期, 第 85 页。 [See JIN Kemu, “Some Thoughts for Regional Studies of Literature and Art,” Reading, no. 4 (1986): 85.] 5. 参见颜纯均, “张承志和他的地理学文学,” 《文学评论》, 1987 年第 1 期, 第51–58 页。 [See YAN Chunjun, “ZHAN Chengzhi and His Geographical Literature,” Literary Review, no. 1 (1987): 51–58.] 6. 参见吕嘉健, “地理学文学略论,” 《广西社会科学》, 1992 年第 5 期, 第 62–65 页。 [See Lv Jiajian, “A Brief Discussion on Geographical Literature,” Guangxi Social Sciences, no. 5 (1992): 62–65.] 7. 参见陶礼天, “文学与地理—中国文学地理学略说,” 《北大中文研究》, 1998 年创刊号。 [See TAO Litian, “Literature and Geography—A Brief Introduction to Chinese Literary Geography,” Beijing University Chinese Studies, inaugural issue in 1998.] 8. 参见钟仕伦, “概念、学科与方法: 文学地理学略论”, 《文学评论》, 2014 年第 4 期, 第 28–35 页。 [See ZHONG Shilun, “Concepts, Disciplines and Methods: A Brief Discussion on Literary Geography,” Literary Review, no. 4 (2014): 28–35.] 9. In this essay, ZHONG Shilun first mentioned Kant’s above discussion on geography and the concept of “literary geography.” This led to the following conclusion: The concept of “literary geography” comes from Germany. 10. André Ferre, Géographie Litteraire (Paris: Sagittaire, 1946), 17. 11. Ibid., 14. 12. Ibid., 93. 13. Ibid., 94. 14. Douglas Reichert Powell, Critical Regionalism, Connecting Politics and Culture in the American Landscape (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 9. See Liu Ying, “The Study of American Literary Regionalism in the Era of Globalization,” Foreign Literature, no. 2 (2012). 15. Bertrand Westphal, La Géocritique: Réel, fiction, espace, Éditions de Minuit (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2007).

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16. 参见郭方云: 《文学地图》, 《外国文学》, 2015 年 1 期。 [See GUO Fangyun, “Literature Map,” Foreign Literature, no. 1 (2015).] 17. Michel Collot, Pour une géographie littéraire, Fabula-LhT, no. 8, Le partage des disciplines, mai (2011). 18. 参见汤茂林, 柴彦威, “改革开放以来我国人文地理学译著出版的特征、 问题与建议,” 《人文地理》, 2007 年第 3 期。 [See TANG Maolin and CHAI Yanwei, “Features, Problems and Suggestions of the Publishing of Chinese Human Geography Translations since the Reform and Opening Up,” Human Geography, no. 3 (2007).] 19. 陈寅恪, “冯友兰中国哲学史下册审查报告,” 《金明馆丛稿二编》, 上海: 上海古籍出版社1980年, 第252页。 [CHEN Yinke, “FENG Youlan’s Review Report on the Second Volume of Chinese Philosophy History,” in The Second Edition of Jinmingguan Collection (Shanghai: Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House, 1980), 252. 20. Immanuel Kant believes that “history involves events that occur one after another in terms of time, while geography involves phenomena that occur simultaneously in terms of space. The latter obtains different names according to different objects of research. According to this, it is sometimes called physical geography, mathematical geography, political geography, and sometimes called moral geography, theological geography, literary geography or commercial geography.” 康德: 《自然地理学》, 李秋零主编 《康 德著作全集》 第 9 卷, 中国人民大学出版社 2003 年版, 第 162 页。[Kant, Physical Geography, edited by LI Qiuling, The Complete Works of Kant, Volume 9 (Beijing: China Renmin University Press, 2003), 162.] 21. 参见钟仕伦, “概念、学科与方法: 文学地理学略论,” 《文学评论》, 2014 年第 4 期。 [See ZHONG Shilun, “Concepts, Disciplines and Methods: A Brief Discussion on Literary Geography,” Literary Review, no. 4 (2014).] 22. 参见梅新林, “论文学地图,” 《中国社会科学》, 2015 年第 8 期。 [See MEI Xinlin, “Literature Map,” Chinese Social Sciences, no. 8 (2015).] 23. 参见彭民权: “文学地理学的体系建构与理论反思,” 《江西社会科学》, 2014 年第 3 期。[See PENG Minquan, “The System Construction and Theoretical Reflection of Literary Geography,” Jiangxi Social Sciences, no. 3 (2014).] 24. 梅新林, “中国文学地理学导论,” 《文艺报》 2006 年 6 月 1 日。 [MEI Xinlin, “Introduction to Chinese Literary Geography,” Art News (June 1, 2006).] 25. Burton R. Clark, The Higher Education System: Academic Organization in Cross-National Perspective (杭州: 杭州大学出版社 [Hangzhou: Hangzhou University Press], 1994), 15. 26. E.  F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful (北京: 商务出版社 [Beijing: The Commercial Press], 1984), 27.

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27. Geoffrey J. Martin, All Possible Worlds: A History of Geographical Ideas (上 海: 上海人民出版社 [Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Publishing House], 2008), 2–6. 28. Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel: 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1998), 3. 29. 参见梅新林, “文学地理学: 基于空间之维的理论建构,” 《浙江社会科 学》, 2015 年第 3 期。 [See MEI Xinlin, “Literary Geography: Theoretical Construction Based on the Dimensions of Space,” Zhejiang Social Sciences, no. 3 (2015).] 30. 参见邹建军, “我们应当如何开展文学地理学研究,” 《江汉论坛》, 2013 年第 5 期。 [See ZOU Jianjun, “How Should We Carry Out Literary Geography Research,” Jianghan Tribune, no. 5 (2013).]

CHAPTER 9

Regional Aesthetics and the Historical Formation of the Image of Jiangnan in the Literature of Six Dynasties Yonghai Ge

As a concept with regional attributes, what “Jiangnan”1 corresponds to is actually a multi-dimensional composite image composed of the scenery, local specialties and customs with specific regional characteristics. The formation

ZHANG Feng (张凤), my graduate student, has contributed a lot to the writing of this essay by looking up information and drafting part of the text. I would like to express my gratitude here. This essay was originally published in Academic Monthly, Issue 3 of 2016. What follows is the full information: GE Yonghai, “Perspectives of Regional Aesthetics and the Historical Formation of the Image of Jiangnan in the Literature of Six Dynasties,” Academic Monthly, no.3 (2016): 90–103. [葛永海: “地域审美视角与六朝文学之ʻ江南’意象的历史生成,” 《学术 月刊》, 2016 年第 3 期, 第 90–103 页。 ] And there are some deletions and revisions.

Y. Ge (*) Zhejiang Normal University, Jinhua, China e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Fang, R. T. Tally Jr. (eds.), Spatial Literary Studies in China, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03914-0_9

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of “Jiangnan” image is the result of the interaction between subjective and objective factors. The uniqueness of historical and geographical environment is the foundation of the image, while the literati’s aesthetic choice under the restraint of cultural concepts of the era is the very core element.

The Tribute System and the Imagery of Local Products in Jiangnan 1. The tribute and ancient books of natural history The earliest connection between Jiangnan and Chinese culture is the tribute system which dates back to ancient times. The Shoo King (禹贡) explains the meaning of “yu gong” as: “Yu divided China into nine regions, dredged the river according to the mountains, and formulated the varieties and quantities of tribute according to the specific conditions of the land.”2 “Yu Gong” means that “Yu made the regulations of the tribute of China.”3 The description of the nine regions of China in the text is based on the sequence and structure of “divide the nine regions, define its mountains and rivers, delimit its boundaries, classify its products and distinguish its tributes.”4 Yang-Chow, located in the southeast, was roughly equivalent to the Jiangnan area today. “Zhifang Shi” in “Xia Guan” of Rites of Zhou (周礼⋅夏官⋅职方氏) says: Zhifang Shi is in charge of the map of China, so as to know the land of China well, distinguish the people of the kingdoms, the vavasories and the fiefdoms, other nationalities like Siyi, Baman, Qimin, Jiuhe, Wurong and Liudi outside the Central China, calculate their property by the quantities of grains and the livestocks, and thus know their advantages and disadvantages. It identifies the fiefdoms in China, so that all kingdoms have their common causes and interests. The southeast is Yang-Chow, whose most famous mountain is Kuaiji. Its lake is called Ju Ou, and its river is named the Three Keang, while its water that can be used for irrigation is the Five Lakes. Its specialties include gold, tin, bamboo arrow, and its ratio of males to females in the population is two to five. What’s more, it is suitable for birds and beasts breeding, and rice planting.5

The duty of Zhifang Shi is similar to that of Geography today, focusing on local geography and customs rather than simple tribute. Kuaiji was originally the name of a mountain, taking it as the name of a city, “was to

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stabilize the moral character of the land,”6 as ZHENG Xuan (郑玄) noted. The reason why “gold, tin and bamboo arrows” were seen as the specialties of the place is that they were not only offered as tributes, but also transported and sold by merchants between the north and south, so they were fairly profitable. “Ratio of males to females in the population is two to five” indicates that there were fewer men than women in this area, as was described in “On Wealth and Commerce” of Shiki (史记⋅货殖列传), “The men in Jiangnan tend to die early due to the low terrain and humid climate.”7 The warm and wet climate, however, makes it a suitable place for birds and beasts breeding and rice planting. It can be seen from the above that the early records of Jiangnan paid more attention to famous products than the specific physical geography. The descriptions of Jiangnan’s scenery and products in the two books are roughly the same, both of which call the southeast region Yang-chow, number its mountains and rivers, and identify “gold, tin and bamboo arrow” as its specialties. This kind of record also appears frequently in other documents, focusing on the description of a limited selection of products rather than all the local products. This way of recording has a subtle influence on the formation of the image of Jiangnan. For instance, naming Yang-chow as “Jiangnan,” a region full of rivers and lakes, and identifying the local specialties such as “gold, tin, bamboo arrow,” all helped to strengthen people’s impression of Jiangnan. This way of recording not only implies that Jiangnan was a remote and desolate place at that time, but also reflects that the perception of Jiangnan by people in Central China was constrained in the form of tribute and commodity exchanges. And this way of communication and understanding has always influenced the mutual cognition between Jiangnan and the Central China. 2. From ancient books to literature: The imagery of local products in Jiangnan Most of the local products in the tributes are Ruiying (it is said that in ancient times, when the emperor cultivated morality, the era would be peaceful and the heaven would bring auspicious omens), which is conducive to the national economy and people’s livelihood. These characteristics make it easier for tribute to emerge as images in poetry. Thus it can be learned that local products of Jiangnan were recorded in natural history books due to the tributary system, and were then introduced into literature.

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In The Shoo King, local products of Yang-chow such as “bamboos small and large,” “oranges” and “pomelos” are all the objects described with high frequency in later poems. The poets’ attention to and description of these objects are obviously influenced by the traditional concept of “Ruiying.” The records and imagery in the previous documents have influenced the poets’ preference for these objects when choosing images. In later literature, the most widely distributed bamboo in Jiangdong was repeatedly emphasized, among which a very famous one called “bamboo arrow,” namely “small bamboos” in The Shoo King, has been regarded as “beauty of the southeast,” as is described in Erhya (尔雅), “When referring to the beauty of the southeast, we cannot miss the bamboo arrow of Kuaiji.”8 “Orange” and “pomelo” are also local products with Jiangnan characteristics. For example, in Ode To The Orange (橘颂), QU Yuan (屈 原) wrote: “Here the orange tree is found, / Shedding beauty all around. / Living in this southern grove, / From its fate it will not move.”9 Although the poem is intended to praise virtues of the orange, the selection of the “orange” image is closely related to its status as a tribute of Jiangnan. Though the poems about orange in later generations are mostly parodies of Qu Yuan’s meaning, its origin can be traced back to this. After Qin, the Han Dynasty was the beginning period of the poetic creation of “Jiangnan.” It is worth noting that the literary description of “Jiangnan” in the Han Dynasty is so scarce that it can hardly be found in The Collection of Folk Songs and Ballads in the Han Style (乐府诗集). The only explicitly statement seems to be the famous one The South of the Yangtze River (江南): The south of the Yangtze River teems with lotus seeds. / How dense and flourishing are the lotus leaves, / Around which the fish swims and breeds! / The fish swims to the east of the leaves; / The fish swims to the west of the leaves; / The fish swims to the south of the leaves; / The fish swims to the north of the leaves.10

WU Jing (吴兢) of Tang Dynasty wrote A Detailed Explanation of the Ancient Themes of Yue Fu (乐府古题要解), and changed the title of this poem to “The Song of Jiangnan.” This is a very simple poem both in sentence patterns and dictions. The objects described in the poem only include lotus, lotus leaf and fish which are the most characteristic images of Jiangnan as a riverside region. Of course, there are also hidden images like lotus gatherers, lotus boats and water. The first two sentences describe the beautiful scenery in Jiangnan, and the last four are repetitive in sentence

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pattern, using the shift of direction to describe the dynamic state of fish playing amid the lotus leaves back and forth, which is lively and full of folk flavor. Although there are other rich implied meanings in the choice of fish and lotus as images, the reason that they are local products is essential.

Entering the North and Missing the South: The Independent Presentation of the Aesthetic Perspectives Toward Jiangnan During The Three Kingdoms period, it is said that “Throughout the Wei Dynasty, its literature surpassed Wu and Shu and occupied the first place.”11 The cultural and academic soil in Jiangnan was barren. Although there were famous scholars like SHEN You (沈友) and XUE Ying (薛莹) in the state of Wu, few of their works went down in history. The whole literary world of Jiangnan was lackluster. From the tributary system to the ancient books of natural history, then from the ancient books to the ballad, the preliminary imagery of the local products of Jiangnan was completed. That the local products entered the poetry and prose in a striking way and became known to more people was actually due to “Two LU” (“二陆”), namely LU Ji (陆机) and LU Yun (陆云), who entered Jin Dynasty at the end of Wu. The spatial movement of literati made “Jiangnan” finally stand out. After Jin destroyed Wu, many people of Wu came to the north to seek office in Jin, with “Two LU” as the first. The fact that “Two LU” entered Luoyang had a great influence on other scholars in Jiangdong. Lots of literati also went into Luoyang one after another. Large clans such as LU, GU, ZHANG in the Wu county, and HE, YU in the Kuaiji county, all entered the north in about the 15 years from the end of Taikang period to Taian period, forming an upsurge of southerners seeking their official development in the north. In the Jin Dynasty, the yearning of Jiangnan celebrities in the north for their native products is amazing. As “The Biography of Literati” Volumes of The History Book of Jin (晋书⋅文苑传) records, ZHANG Han (张翰), a native of the Wu county, thought of the cane shoots, water shield soup and perch of Wu when feeling the autumn wind in Luoyang. He said, “The most important thing in life is to be comfortable. How can you be an official thousands of miles away to pursue fame and wealth?” So he ordered his servant to take him home. “Cane shoots, water shield soup and perch” are all local products of Jiangnan. ZHANG Han missed them so much that he went back home. He would rather live in Jiangnan than travel far to enter government service.

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However, the Wu people, who were saddened at the destruction of their kingdom, were rather marginalized. The northern nobles often opened a discussion with Jiangnan’s specialties and mocked at them. As recorded in “Speech” of A New Account of Tales of the World (世说新 语⋅言语), Lu Ji went to visit WANG Wuzi (王武子). With some goat cheese in front of him, Wang pointed at Lu Ji and asked, “What famous food in Jiangnan can be compared with this?” Lu Ji said, “We have water shield soup produced in Qianli Lake to compare, even with no salt and fermented soya beans in it!”12 The humiliation from the northern scholars, however, stimulated a stronger regional consciousness of the Wu people. Both “Two LU” showed an intense regional subject consciousness in their poems. LU Ji described the Wu State in the article On the Debate of the Destruction (辩亡论): The land is a stretch of tens of thousands of miles; the soldiers in armor are numbered in millions; the fields are fertile; the soldiers are trained; the weapons are sharp, and the wealth is abundant. There is the sea in the east and the fortresses in the west, with the Yangtze River controlling its territory, and the mountains surrounding its borders. The favorable conditions of the state have never exceeded this time. If the people with medium ability keep it by benevolence and justice, manage it properly with moral, follow the law passed down by SUN Quan (孙权), remain diligent and careful in civil affairs and government affairs, abide by the established strategies, and guard the fortresses, we will live forever, and there will be nothing in peril.13

And he added: “Wu will crusade against the states in Central China, and wipe out people who violate the law.” LI Shan (李善) quoted Zuo Zhuan (左传) in his annotation of the sentence: “Wu is Zhou’s noble descendant. Now it has become strong and can be compared with states  in Central China.”14 LU Yun was seeking an official position in Luoyang together with his elder brother LU Ji. His homesickness was as strong as the latter’s. His poems not only show his appreciation to the talented scholars in Jiangnan, but also reflect his remembrance of the local things of his native land. The former can be seen in poems such as the Reply to My Elder Brother LU Pingyuan (答兄平原诗): “Your poems are like shining treasures, / Like the gold in the south. / They are as brilliant as a forest crested with plume.”15 The so-called the gold in the south refers to the talented and learned people in Jiangnan. In “The Biography of XUE Jian” of The Book of Jin (晋书⋅薛兼传), it is recorded that Xue Jian enjoyed equal popularity with JI Zhan (纪瞻), MIN Hong (闵鸿), GU Rong (顾荣) and HE Xun (

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贺循), and together they were called “the five talented scholars.” “When they first set foot on Luoyang, ZHANG Hua (张华), the minister of public works, was surprised and remarked, ‘They are all gold from the south!’” The latter in poems such as Reply to ZHANG Shiran (答张士然诗) says: There seems to be no end on the long road, / With villages and towns along the way. / Customs vary from place to place, / And I’m afraid it’s hard among the thousands of neighbors to make acquaintance. / On the road I cannot seek the old-time joy. / How can nostalgia be born out of thin air? / Thus I miss the land of my hometown more and more, / And often seem to see the shadow of the old friend.16

Although the local conditions changed, LU Yun did not change his feelings when thinking of his homeland. Thus we can know his deep affection for it. As for “Two LU,” on the one hand, the spatial migration has contributed to the strengthening of aesthetic consciousness of Jiangnan in their poetry to a certain extent, and the regional consciousness has been more clearly reflected. On the other hand, due to the limitations of that time, poems written by “Two LU” are mostly modeled on ancient poetry, and there are many poems composed of four-word lines. So, their selection of poetry language was influenced more by ancient styles. Although they have already paid attention to the regional features of Jiangnan, the fusion of minds and images was not unified enough, and the imagery was not sufficient. What’s more, though the regional consciousness of the Wu people in the poems has already been extremely strong, it is more commonly seen in the prose than in the poem. Therefore, neither complete consciousness has been formed nor mature works created to integrate Jiangnan images into poetry.

“Assimilating the North in the South” “Entering the North and Missing the South”: The Establishment and Strengthening of Aesthetic Standard for Jiangnan and the Second

1. “Assimilating the north in the south” and the germination of the consciousness of Jiangnan standard In Chinese Cultural Geography (中国文化地理), Mr. CHEN Zhengxiang (陈正祥) once put forward the viewpoint of “the southward movement of Chinese cultural center,” claiming that the three great waves from the

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Yongjia Rebellion (永嘉之乱), through the Rebellion of An Lushan and Shi Siming (安史之乱), to the Jingkang Disaster (靖康之难), prompted the large-scale southward movement of the cultural center, and finally helped Jiangnan obtain the status of cultural center.17 After the Yongjia Rebellion, the Southward Movement of the Jin royal family opened this epochal chapter, which objectively provided an important historic opportunity for the germination of the “Jiangnan standard” which had not existed before. The so-called Jiangnan standard refers to the observation perspectives that the southern scholars took Jiangnan as their foothold and starting point to evaluate characters, customs, arts and literature. After the migration to the south, the previous observation of the south by northern people became that of the south by northerners who went south. In the Western Jin Dynasty, people always paid close attention to the evaluation of the northern figures. There were a large number of chapters discussing the figures of Central China in the “Appreciation” chapter of A New Account of Tales of the World. For example, “There are ‘Three Gu’ (三 嘏) among elegant people in Luoyang: LIU Cui (刘粹), style named ‘chun gu’ (纯嘏), LIU Hong (刘宏), style named ‘zhong gu’ (终嘏), and LIU Mo (刘漠), style named ‘chong gu’(冲嘏).” “There are three talents in Taifu’s (namely, SIMA Yue司马越) mansion: LIU Qingsun (刘庆孙), an outstanding person, PAN Yangzhong (潘阳仲), a learned person, and PEI Jingsheng (裴景声), a profound knowledgeable person.” “The Seven Sages in the Bamboo Forest, each has an outstanding son,” etc.18 On the other hand, Jiangnan people were praised on a national scale. For instance, in “Speech” of A New Account of Tales of the World, it is said that “HE Xun of Kuaiji is a man with chaste temperament, profound knowledge, and polite speech and actions. He is indeed not only an outstanding person in the southeast, but also an outstanding talent nationwide.”19 At the beginning of the Eastern Jin Dynasty, a large number of scholars, represented by the celebrities of old families in the north, gathered in the south, which gradually resulted in Jiangnan’s advantage in the number and quality of talents. The Battle of Fei River which broken out in 383 was of great significance in military, politics, as well as in culture. On the one hand, this war greatly thwarted the northern regime’s ambitious plans to move southward. More importantly, it helped the Eastern Jin Dynasty win a psychological advantage. The result of this psychological advantage magnified by the cultural advantage effect is that scholars seemed to be able to discuss the north from the standpoint of Jiangnan, which was an important sign of the psychological change of that time.

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Jiangnan, which has gradually gained an independent position, embodied its independent character in many aspects, notably the fall and rise of status of northern learning and southern learning as well as northern language and southern language. As “Literature” of A New Account of Tales of the World records: CHU Jiye (褚季野) said to SUN Anguo (孙安国), “People in the north have profound, comprehensive knowledge.” Sun replied, “Southerners are clear and concise in their learning.” When ZHI Daolin (支道林) heard this, he said, “Sages, of course, need not to be mentioned here. For those below the average level, the way northerners study is like looking at the moon in a bright place while the way southerners study is like gazing at the sun through a window.”20

Mr. YU Jiaxi (余嘉锡) added an annotation to the dialogue between CHU and SUN: “This statement implies that the north people are knowledgeable but not proficient, while the south people are proficient but not knowledgeable.”21 The learning of the north and that of the south people are clearly competitive against each other, and each has its own merits. In this regard, there are at least two points worth summarizing. One is that the change of the subject’s position is an important reason for the change of the evaluation, that is, from judging the south in the north to judging the south after entering the south, from observing it from afar to observing it near, and from misunderstanding to understanding. The other is that after the Jin Dynasty’s migration to Jiangnan, the merging of the culture in Central China and that in native Jiangnan is the main factor for the establishment of cultural advantages of Jiangnan. After migrating to the south, the Eastern Jin Dynasty managed to gain a firm foothold in Jiangnan amid the changes of political situation, and the cultural advantages of Jiangnan gradually accumulated. This advantage was the result of the combination of cultural inheritance of Central China and famous products and scenery in Jiangnan, a process we call it “assimilating the north in the south.” With the gradual establishment of Jiangnan standard, psychological advantage was shown, which was mainly reflected in the important change of cultural attitude from being passive to being active. 2. “Entering the north and missing the south” of YU and WANG and the enhancement of aesthetic images of Jiangnan

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YU Xin (庾信) and WANG Bao (王褒) were the most famous and influential scholars among those who entered the north from the state of Liang. In terms of origin, YU Xin was a native of Xinye in Nanyang and WANG Bao was a native of Linyi in Langya. However, their parents had already been living in Jiangnan. YU Xin’s father YU Jianwu (庾肩吾) was one of Liang’s senior officials. WANG Bao’s great grandfather WANG Jian (王俭), grandfather WANG Qian (王骞), and father WANG Gui (王规), all were officials in the Southern Dynasty with great reputation. It can be seen that although YU and WANG were originally from the north, they were born and grew up in the south and were actually southerners. As a southerner in the north, YU Xin missed his hometown, and expressed his emotion through poetic images. For example, “The trees in the north look like those planted on the banks of New Pavilion. / The sand in the north is like that in Longwei Bay.” (“Overlooking the Wei River” 望渭水诗) “A thousand seeds have ripened in the green house. / The flowers with purple ears are in full bloom.” (“Suddenly I Saw Areca” 忽见槟榔诗) His “Lament for the South” (哀江南赋) gives an overview of the local products of Jiangnan: At that time, the court of Liang was full of joy. The buildings and the pool gardens were connected with each other, and the sound of bells and drums was heard. There were many officials and rich families in the lane, and each family had literary talents. A huge Jianxing Garden had been built in Hailing, and the bank of the Qinhuai River had been rebuilt for the Yangtze River. The east gate of the country was far away from the place where the First Emperor of Qin drove stones into the sea to build a bridge, while the south gate reached the Xianglin area bounded by MA Yuan’s (马援) copper pillars. There were thousands of orange trees and bamboos in every orchard. Western neighbors paid tribute to the jade that did not sink into the water, while southern friends offer feathers that were lost in the water. People sang the songs of Wu and Yue, and danced to the songs of Chu, living and working in peace and contentment, just like grass and trees greeting warm spring, fish and dragon embracing the timely wind and rain.22

Tangerine gardens, bamboo windows, the songs of Wu and Yue, the grass and trees, fish and water are common images in Jiangnan, described repeatedly by scholars. YU Xin enumerates all of them here, not only to describe what Jiangnan is like, but also to integrate poetic language and Jiangnan specialties to form a set of Jiangnan images. In prose, this group

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of images embody unique emotions, while in poetry, they are clear and mellow images full of Jiangnan characteristics. WANG Bao was as well-known as YU Xin. After the fall of Jiangling, they went north and were all valued by the Northern Dynasty. The First Emperor of Zhou compared them to “Two LU” in the Jin Dynasty and treated them well. Although WANG Bao was favored by the Northern Dynasty, he still felt that the mountains and rivers were alien when he first arrived. The most famous poem is “Crossing the Yellow River to the North” (渡河北诗): The leaves fall as the autumn wind blows, / Just like the waves of the Dongting Lake. / In Changshan and the county of Dai, / Many fortresses were built along the Yellow River. / It’s heartbreaking to hear the music of the north and the song of Longtou. / In the evening, facing the horses on the long journey, / I was lost at the turning point of the mountain.23

Judging from its content, this poem was written when Wang Bao was forced to go north after Jiangling was occupied. So there is the sound of distress. The first two sentences originated from the verse of Elegies of the State of Chu (楚辞): “The Autumn Breeze sighs as it flutters slow; / The Lake is ruffled, and the Leaves drift low.”24 Although in Elegies of the State of Chu, the ripples of Dongting and the leaves were created to entertain the gods when people made a sacrifice, they were located in the south and were full of the scenery and charm of the south, so the poets selected them as the symbolic poetic language of the south when choosing images. People in the Six Dynasties often associated Dongting Lake with Jiangnan, and some believed that there were two Dongting Lakes, Dongting of Wu and Dongting of Chu, both of which had corresponding myths and legends. It is worth noting that from “entering the north and missing the south” of LU Ji and LU Yun to that of YU Xin and WANG Bao, it indicates the typical cultural posture represented by the spatial movement of the representative literati in different periods represented by the Western Jin Dynasty and the Southern Dynasties. The strong sense of dislocation between subject consciousness and space perception began to shape the aesthetic perspective toward Jiangnan, and strengthen the regional consciousness of Jiangnan standard. As far as the aesthetics meaning is concerned, the difference in transmutation of the time periods is not only reflected in the change of aesthetic objects, but also in the construction of aesthetic images.

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As an outstanding representative of the transformation from freehand brushwork to iconicity in the Six Dynasties, XIE Lingyun’s (谢灵运) poems featuring the depiction of mountains and rivers, became an important link in the process of the imagery of the southern scenery. The poetry creation of XIE Lingyun not only made the scenery of Jiangnan enter the literary works on a large scale for the first time, but enriched and completed the connotation of the aesthetic image of Jiangnan, laying a foundation for the multi-level description of Jiangnan images by literati such as XIAO Yan (萧 衍), XIE Tiao (谢朓), YU Xin, WANG Bao in Qi and Liang Dynasties.

The Formation of Jiangnan as a Literary Image: Image Construction and Cultural Identity The so-called Jiangnan image, as mentioned at the beginning of this essay, refers to the multi-dimensional compound images centered on the concept of “Jiangnan” and constituted by the corresponding customs, local specialties and people with specific regional characteristics in literary works. In summary, it can be found that the turning point in the development of “Jiangnan image” is the southward migration of the Jin Dynasty. Taking this as the boundary, the development can be divided into two periods. The earlier stage is the germination period of Jiangnan image, which includes the Han, Wei and Western Jin Dynasties, especially the Western Jin Dynasty which is the most typical; the later stage is the enriching and maturing period of Jiangnan image, covering the Eastern Jin Dynasty, Song, Qi, Liang and Chen of the Southern Dynasties, and the Sui Dynasty, with Qi and Liang as the peak. Among the literati in the earlier stage, Two LU, ZHANG Zai and ZHANG Han were the representatives, while in the later period, XIE Lingyun, XIAO Yan, Xie Tiao, WANG Rong (王融), XIAO Gang (萧纲), YU Xin, WANG Bao, YANG Jian (杨坚) and LU Sidao (卢思 道) were the representatives. Both groups of literati are typical characteristic of their times. Through analysis, it can be found that the later literati groups have made a relatively important leap forward based on what the earlier literati groups achieved both in image construction and cultural identity. 1. Image Construction The first important difference between the former and the latter period is image construction. It mainly refers to the refining of artistic forms by the literati group, through which the imagery of Jiangnan local products

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can be obtained, and then developed to maturity. To sum up, the development process of Jiangnan image can be roughly divided into three situations. The first one focuses on “perception of objects.” The awakening of regional consciousness has gone through a process from objects to feelings and then to aesthetics. We call it “the theory of being touched by things” in this essay, which means a process from perceiving local products to missing the region. The function of the conception of “being touched by things” in poetry creation was initially in the form of poetic language. A typical case is “The Poem of the Pomegranate of Taigu” (诗⋅大谷石榴) written by ZHANG Zai (张载): The tasteful pomegranate comes from Taigu. / Its skin is like solidified cream, / And its juice is like clear water. / The sugarcane of Jiangnan, / The persimmon of Zhangye, /The orange of Sanba, / The crabapple of Guazhou, / Are all pleasant delicacies.25

Although there is poetic sentiment, the characteristics of local products are more obvious. We need to fully understand the significance of “being touched by things” and expressing the emotion. It was based on the poetic transformation of the images that led to the development of the poems from the landscape poetry of Song Dynasty to object describing poetry of the Qi and Liang Dynasties, and then to the maturity of palace-style poetry of the Liang and Chen Dynasties. The second one stresses aesthetics. After the Jin Dynasty moved to the south, the images of Jiangnan began developing from “being touched by things” to aesthetics, from germinating to flourishing. In the Southern Dynasties, the literati competed to chant Jiangnan-themed poetry, which has been a grand view in its history. The “Jiangnan” conception in the poems and the images of specific famous objects that correspond to it gradually formed a unique aesthetic system. What were used in the poems of the Southern Dynasties to express pure poetic feelings were mostly natural images, among which the most common were the mountains, rivers and vegetation in Jiangnan. In the poetry of the Six Dynasties, there are not a few works directly titled “The Song of Jiangnan” (“江南曲”) or “The thought of Jiangnan” (“江南思”), which constitute a distinct cultural background. “Jiangnan” and its scenery and specialties form a mutual reflection, which is close to “intertextuality.” Hence, the local products and customs of Jiangnan changed into the regional characteristics and aesthetic perspectives of Jiangnan.

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The third one highlights comprehension, which is an extension of the second. Yu Xin, Wang Bao and other literati missed the south in the north, for they had been away from the south for a long time. Compared with the pure poetic feelings of Qi and Liang people, they had a stronger sense of space separation, which was mixed with extremely rich life experiences. Being in the north, as “In the frontier fortress Yuguan (榆关), message from the Liang Dynasty is cut off, /And the envoys coming from there are not seen to pass by,”26 YU Xin couldn’t help but sigh: “In an old age far away from home, I really feel that there are too many changes in the world!” The so-called life perception just lies in the clear comparison of consciousness and the invisible inner world. Carefully chewing the poetic language, we can understand that although there was separation between the north and the south, the poet had the same sentiment and never forgot the south. The image of Jiangnan has been expanded and enhanced in cultural connotation after being added with more life experiences. 2. Cultural Identity Looking back on the Qin and Han Dynasties to the Six Dynasties, with the growth and decline of the national strength and regime change, Jiangnan started a time-consuming contest of culture with the north, which formed a series of cultural interactions triggered by the perspectives of regional aesthetics. Its evolution chain can be summarized as follows: observing the south from the north (the Qin and Han Dynasties)—entering the north and missing the south (from the Wu Dynasty to the Jin Dynasty)—entering the south and observing the south (from the Western Jin Dynasty to the Eastern Jin Dynasty)—assimilating the north in the south (the Eastern Jin and the Southern Dynasties). In this evolution, it is especially worth noting that with the initial establishment of Jiangnan standard consciousness, a psychological state of cultural identity began to sprout gradually after “assimilating the north in the south” became an increasingly conscious cultural strategy. HU Xiaoming (胡晓明) once proposed the concept of “Jiangnan Identity”: That is to say, the cultural tension resulted from awareness of Jiangnan consciousness, powerful Jiangnan native emotions, and strong influence of Jiangnan culture (a cultural psychology beyond political recognition and

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moral legitimacy, which is produced due to the development and progress of literature and academics).27

He believes that “the true Jiangnan identity was not completely established until the Northern and Southern Dynasties,” with the rise of symbolic cultural phenomena, cultural achievements, cultural trends and critical discourse. It should be noted that Jiangnan identity was not achieved overnight but was a cyclical process full of twists and turns. At the same time, a reverse “northern complex” was also constantly strengthening and counteracting. In this regard, as the main direction of the efforts of all the southern scholars, for “Jiangnan identity,” “assimilating the north in the south” was also a process of gradually dissolving and integrating the “northern complex.” On the one hand, it is “assimilating the north in the south.” On the other hand, it is “missing the south in the north.” After the southward movement of the Jin Dynasty, the situation changed greatly. Northern scholars competed to move to the south, and Jiangnan became the orthodox place for scholars and bureaucrats of Central China. So cultural achievements contributed to cultural advantages. This kind of cultural identity continued until the Sui Dynasty. Emperor Yang of Sui attached great importance to the achievements of Jiangnan culture, and even punished the historiographer who despised them. Such a cultural policy background gave birth to a new aesthetic perspective toward Jiangnan, that is the native northerners miss the south because of their admiration for Jiangnan. In a word, since the people of Jin migrated to the south, “Jiangnan identity” and “Jiangnan image” are interdependent. The former is cultural psychology, and the latter is artistic form, each promoting and complementing the other. On the one hand, the early spread of “Jiangnan image” promoted the establishment and realization of “Jiangnan identity” to a certain extent. On the other hand, “Jiangnan identity” has a prominent external significance for the historical generation of Jiangnan image. At the beginning, the literati’s cognition of the landscape and products of Jiangnan was due to their practicality. Later, it was mainly out of aesthetic appreciation. After the Southward Movement, however, the literati continued the appreciation of Jiangnan’s scenery, but at the same time admired the demeanor of Jiangnan celebrities as well as the cultural relics, decrees and regulations, which was precisely where the very acculturation power of Jiangnan identity lied.

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Conclusion The historical formation of Jiangnan image in the Six Dynasties is of great significance. As far as Jiangnan culture is concerned, it plays a foundational role in the historical evolution of Jiangnan culture and its developing into an independent system later. It is right from the Six Dynasties that the development of “Jiangnan image” was smoothly incorporated into the track of cultural heritage, thus expanding its depth of development in the cultural organism, and obtaining a long-lasting vitality, then finally accomplishing the historical poetic construction of Jiangnan culture. Moreover, the poetic aesthetic scale of the increasingly mature Jiangnan image completely surpasses the constraints of time and space, and is recognized and appreciated by the literati of all times. As TANG Xiaofeng (唐晓峰) says, “The essence of love for one’s land is love for himself or herself. When the native land is endowed with people’s emotion and value, people and the land will be ‘one’. This kind of ‘oneness’ is realized not in nature, but in humanity.”28 The image of Jiangnan revealed an aesthetic characteristic that was hidden and covered in the innermost heart of Chinese literati, and made it conspicuous, so much so that the later generations regarded this aesthetic characteristic as one of the artistic standards of Chinese classical poetry.

Notes 1. The concept of “Jiangnan” has always been understood in a variety of ways. This essay takes the concept corresponding to that of the Six Dynasties, namely, it is equivalent to “Jiangdong” (江东) and “Jiangzuo” (江左). It mainly refers to the region south of the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, but sometimes it also refers to the region south of the middle reaches of the Yangtze River. 2. (唐)孔颖达: 《尚书正义》, 上海: 上海古籍出版社, 2007年, 第189页。 [KONG Yingda (Tang Dynasty), The Orthodox Exposition of Shang Shu (Shanghai: Shanghai Classics Publishing House, 2007), 189.] 3. Ibid., 190. 4. From the “Geography” Volumes in “The Records of Classics” of The Book of Sui (隋书⋅经籍志⋅地理). 5. (清) 孙诒让: 《周礼正义》, 北京:中华书局, 1987年, 第2636–2640页。 [SUN Yirang (Qing Dynasty), The Orthodox Exposition of Rites of Zhou (Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company, 1987), 2636–2640.] 6. Ibid., 2640.

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7. (汉) 司马迁: 《史记》, 北京: 中华书局, 2013 年, 第 3937 页。 [SIMA Qian (Han Dynasty), Shiki (Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company, 2013), 3937.] 8. 胡奇光, 方环海: 《尔雅译注》, 上海: 上海古籍出版社, 2004年, 第 254 页。 [HU Qiguang, FANG Huanhai, Translation and Annotation of Erhya (Shanghai: Shanghai Classics Publishing House, 2004), 254.] 9. 杨宪益, 戴乃迭 (译): 《楚辞选》, 北京: 外文出版社, 2001 年版, 第 121 页。 [YANG Xianyi, DAI Naidie (trans.), Selected Elegies of the State of Chu (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 2001), 121.] 10. 汪榕培: 《英译乐府诗精华》, 上海: 上海外语教育出版社2008年版, 第 15 页。 [WANGRongpei (trans.), Gems of Yuefu Ballads (Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 2008), 15.] 11. 刘师培: 《中国中古文学史讲义》, 北京: 中国人民大学出版社, 2004 年, 第 22 页。 [LIU Shipei, Lecture Notes on the History of Middle Ancient Chinese Literature (Beijing: China Renmin University Press, 2004), 22.] 12. 徐震堮: 《世说新语校笺》, 北京: 中华书局, 1984 年, 第 48 页。 [XU Zhen’e, Proofreading and Annotating on A New Account of Tales of the World (Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company, 1984), 48.] 13. (唐)李善 (注): 《文选》, 北京: 中华书局, 1977 年, 第 740 页。 [LI Shan (Tang Dynasty), Notes on Selected Works (Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company, 1977), 740.] 14. Ibid., 736. 15. 黄葵 (点校): 《陆云集》, 北京: 中华书局, 1988 年, 第 49 页。 [HUANG Kui, Punctuating and Collating on Collected Works of LU Yun (Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company, 1988), 49.] 16. Ibid., 91–92. 17. 陈正祥: 《中国文化地理》, 上海: 生活•读书•新知三联书店, 1983 年, 第 3–5 页。 [CHEN Zhengxiang, Cultural Geography of China (SDX Joint Publishing Company, 1983), 3–5.] 18. 徐震堮: 《世说新语校笺》, 北京: 中华书局, 1984年, 第 237, 239, 240 页。 [XU Zhen’e, Proofreading and Annotating on A New Account of Tales of the World (Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company, 1984), 237, 239, 240.] 19. Ibid., 52. 20. Ibid., 117. 21. 余嘉锡: 《世说新语笺疏》 (上册), 上海: 上海古籍出版社, 1993 年, 第 216 页。 [YU Jiaxi, Commentaries on A New Account of tales of the world (Shanghai: Shanghai Classics Publishing House, 1993), 216.] 22. 瞿蜕国 (选注): 《汉魏六朝赋选》, 上海: 上海古籍出版社, 1979 年, 第 213 页。 [QU Tuiguo (ed.), Selection of Fu in Han, Wei and Six Dynasties (Shanghai: Shanghai Classics Publishing House, 1979), 213.]

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23. 佘正松: 《边塞诗选》, 南京: 凤凰出版社, 2012 年, 第 94 页。 [SHE Zhengsong, Selection of Frontier Poems (Nanjing: Phoenix Publishing House, 2012), 94.] 24. 杨宪益, 戴乃迭 (译): 《楚辞选》, 北京: 外文出版社, 2001 年, 第 121 页。 [YANG Xianyi, DAI Naidie (trans.), Selected Elegies of the State of Chu (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 2001), 43.] 25. 逯钦立 (辑校): 《先秦汉魏晋南北朝诗》, 北京: 中华书局, 1983 年, 第 739 页。 [LU Qinli, Compilation and Collation of Poems in Pre-Qin, Han, Wei and Jin Dynasties (Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company, 1983), 739.] 26. Ibid., 2368. 27. 胡晓明: “‘江南’再发现——略论中国历史与文学中的‘江南认同’,” 《华东 师范大学学报》, 2011 年第 3 期, 第 113 页。 [HU Xiaoming, “Rediscovery of ʻJiangnan’—on ʻJiangnan Identity’ in Chinese History and Literature,” Journal of East China Normal University, no.2 (2011): 113.] 28. 唐晓峰: “还地理学一份人情,” 《读书》, 2002 年第 11 期, 第 62 页。 [TANG Xiaofeng, “Returning Human Sympathy to the Geography,” Dushu, no.11, (2002): 62.]

CHAPTER 10

American National Parks: Symbolic Landscapes Li Li

Introduction As Henri Lefebvre argued, “Like space, nature was also politicized since it was introduced to conscious and unconscious strategies. For instance, the management of national parks has already become a kind of strategy.”1 Indeed, American national parks have confirmed the politicization of natural landscapes in the process of their establishment, growth and preservation. E-journal USA issued by the State Department published “National

This essay was originally published in Journal of Zhejiang International Studies, Issue 1 of 2019. What follows is the full information: LI Li, “American National Parks: Symbols of Landscape Nationalism,” Journal of Zhejiang International Studies University, no. 1 (2019): 105–112. [李莉: 《美国国家公园: 风景民族主 义符号》, 《浙江外国语学院学报》, 2019 年第 1 期, 第 105–112 页]. Moreover, this essay is mainly translated by LI Yüyan (李雨燕).

L. Li (*) Nankai University, Tianjin, China e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Fang, R. T. Tally Jr. (eds.), Spatial Literary Studies in China, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03914-0_10

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Parks, National Heritage” in 2008 advocated that national parks were national landmarks which symbolized American value, dream and origin. They are “America’s Best Idea.”2 American environmental historian Alfred Runte believed that idealism in national parks, as America’s best idea, defined America and served as a cultural icon.3 A six-episode documentary series, “The National Parks:America’s Best Idea,” filmed over six years, tells a story about the initial idea of national parks, records the birth of national parks in the mid-nineteenth century and traces back the growth of national parks over the last 150 years. It is also a documentary of human history by reproducing the history of how Americans made efforts to protect unique national landscapes to emphasize the true meaning of national culture and a democratic country. August 25, 2016 was the 100th anniversary of American national parks in memory of the signing of National Park Service Organic Act by President Woodrow Wilson in 1916. National Park Service indicates that the fundamental aim of national parks is to unite all American people together. National parks are not only of leisure, entertainment and economic value, but also a part of national construction. Up to now, there are 59 national parks in the United States, including the first one in the world—Yellowstone National Park (1872). In January 2016, the article “How National Parks Tell Our Story – and Show Who We Are” published in National Geographic magazine suggested that national parks offer a definition of Americanness. The purpose of national parks is not just to protect scenic landscapes, but to tell America’s story.4 They represent the diversity of American natural landscapes and also serve as a vital part of American culture and historical memory. Key issues in landscape studies include landscape and identity as well as the relationship between landscape and history or politics. Wendy Darby, an American anthropologist, proposed in Landscape and Identity: Geographies of Nation and Class in England (2000) the rediscovery of landscape and illustrated the crucial roles it plays in power, nationalism and national identity.5 American renowned geographer Peirce Fee Lewis proposed seven axioms as a summary of the cultural meanings of landscape:6 first, the axiom of landscape as a clue to culture; second, the axiom of cultural unity and landscape equality; third, the axiom of common things. Common landscapes are by their nature hard to study by conventional academic means and are thought with less academic value. Nonacademic literature draws more attention from landscape scholars, such as writings of the “new journalists,” trade journals, advertisements for commercial products and promotional travel literature. The fourth is the

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historic axiom. Only if we know about history, can we know about landscapes, because our doings and our makings are inherited from the past. The fifth is the geographic or ecologic axiom. Elements of a cultural landscape make almost no cultural sense if they are studied outside their geographic (i.e., locational) context. The sixth is the axiom of environmental control. Most cultural landscapes are intimately related to the physical environment. Thus, the reading of cultural landscape also presupposes some basic knowledge of physical landscape. What’s more, environmental factors not only include space occupied by humankind but also climate, landforms, soils and the like. The seventh is the axiom of landscape obscurity. The landscape does not speak to us very clearly. We need “the alternation of looking, and reading, and thinking, and then looking and reading again, can yield remarkable results, if only to raise questions we had not asked before.”7 Swedish anthropologist Orvar Löfgren pointed out the relationship between landscape and American identity construction in On Holiday: A History of Vacationing. The nationalization of the landscape was not the same in different countries. Compared with western civilization, the Scandinavian countries, the United States, and Canada are marginal to historic sites, long history and enduring civilization. Two reasons why it is so important for America to reevaluate landscapes are as follows. One is that strong religious traditions and nationalism after the War for Independence promoted early tourism to launch “sacred places.” The other is the nineteenth-­century American intellectuals’ inferiority complex due to young America’s lack of long history of civilization and high-level culture, “No monuments, no ruins, no Eton, no Oxford, no Epsom, no Ascot, no antiquity, no legends, no society in the received sense of the word.”8 Consequently, American people turn to the wilderness and their natural landscapes, which become the main arena to construct national culture and identity. The first steamboat sailed in the Mississippi River in 1811. The navigation of clipper boats between New  York and Liverpool began in 1818. Santa Fe Railway started to build in 1821. The first railway was completed in 1826. The first passenger rail line began to operate in 1830. These improvements in transportation brought many tourists to eastern America, and as a result, the Hudson River and mountain-view tourism flourished. Meanwhile, the works of explorers, geologists, writers and painters played a crucial role in naturalizing national landscapes.9 Depictions of American scenery by artists boosted American tourism and promoted the federal government to protect and advertise natural landscapes. The idea of

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national parks is one of the important ways to construct American identity and define Americanness. Focusing on the Hudson River School and American literature, this essay takes the early American national parks as examples, discusses the functions of landscapes in national parks in the process of American identity building and reveals nationality behind landscapes.10

Hudson River School’s Depiction of Western National Parks The aesthetic value of landscape has long been discussed by artists, and landscape painting is one of the typical ways for them to reveal the aesthetic value of landscape. Landscape paintings are the true reflection of the culture of a specific place. The themes of landscape paintings are consistent with landscape topics: the beauty, change and power of nature, the interdependence between man and nature, the historical evolution of landscapes as well as the characteristics of different places and scenes. In 1825, with the completion of the Erie Canal, the Hudson River became the most important trade channel in the United States at that time and triggered the unprecedented prosperity of economy, trade and tourism on both sides of the river. It also marked the beginning of the “Hudson River School,” the first independent school with distinct American characteristics in the history of American art and the most important school of American landscape painting in the nineteenth century. Conforming to the trend of westward movement and western exploitation at that time, the painters of this school took the full advantage of their talents and artistic imagination to present the unique mountains and rivers of the United States, extolled the beauty of the landscape in the West, and expressed their deep love and awe for their motherland. The majority of the early painters depicted the beautiful scenery of the Hudson River Valley. Later their vision extended to the New England, the western and southern United States and even the Polar Regions and South America.11 The most important landscape painter Thomas Cole is esteemed as the founder of the Hudson River School, known as “the first major American painter to devote himself to the wilderness.”12 Cole viewed the vast and wild landscapes of the United States as the product of God, different from the civilized European landscapes. Cole asserted that “the most distinctive, and perhaps the most impressive, characteristic of American scenery is its

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wildness,”13 and in this way the American scenery outweighed the European landscape, because “in civilized Europe the primitive features of scenery have long since been destroyed or modified.”14 The early works focusing on the wild and magnificent landscape of the American West played a very important role in publicizing the magnificent scenery of the United States and promoting the establishment of national parks in the United States. The implication in the works was “directly related to the national image and personality of Americans and responded to the challenges encountered by the young republic in its early days. For example, the painters regarded the untamed wild nature as a new Eden, and so the themes of Christianity and symbolism often appeared in their works. What’s more, they also expressed patriotism in their paintings.”15 Cole further stated, Whether he beholds the Hudson mingling waters with the Atlantic— explores the central wilds of this vast continent, or stands on the margin of the distant Oregon, he is still in the midst of American scenery—it is his own land; its beauty, its magnificence, its sublimity—all are his.16

In the progression of the United States, the Hudson River School painters have produced many landscape paintings which presented regional characteristics of the American West. They tried their utmost to extol romanticism and patriotism and spared no efforts to help the United States secure its own position, cultivate American culture and artistic tastes. Cole is a well-deserved founder of the Hudson River School. In 1825, he produced a number of sketches while traveling along the Hudson River and later presented a series of landscape paintings on exhibition, which aroused a sensation at that time. This year was also regarded as the beginning of the Hudson River School. His landscape paintings can be classified into two kinds. One is of religious and moral subject matter, such as “The Garden of Eden,” “The Course of Empire” and “The Voyage of Life.” The other kind is pure landscape paintings, including “View on the Catskill—Early Autumn,” “Distant View of Niagara Falls,” “View on Lake Winnipiseogee” and so on. Cole pointed out that wilderness was the most distinctive scenery in the United States, since forests, mountains, lakes and waterfalls in the United States are all natural and original. If Europe symbolized culture, then the United States represented uncultivated nature. Americans growing up in a country of nature should seek origins of culture and art from the natural scenery, their glorious heritage.17 A quick

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glance of the titles clearly shows that Cole’s landscape paintings are based on the most natural scenery in the United States, depicting the beauty of the American landscape and inspiring the American people’s love for their hometown and motherland to establish a sense of pride and to build up their national identity. Frederic Edwin Church is Cole’s student as well as the representative of the second generation of the Hudson River School. He was good at depicting large panoramic landscapes, such as the wide “Niagara Falls,” “Cross in the Wilderness” and so on. Albert Bierstadt joined several journeys of the west expedition and was also a craftsman in portraying large landscapes of the American West. His most famous creation is the Yosemite Landscape Series, among which the best is “Sunset at Yosemite” which vividly brings into life the splendid scenery of Yosemite Valley under golden sunset, scattered mountains, colorful sky, clear water and lush trees. The bright and soft colors and atmosphere allure people into a fairyland with the sublime natural beauty. Anne Hayden, an American historian, highly praised Bierstadt’s paintings, “Bierstadt portrayed the western landscape in the style that Americans expected, which made his works very popular and strengthened Americans’ view of the West as a noble and beautiful Eden.”18 Thomas Moran also took part in the west expedition and collaborated with photographer William Henry Jackson in creating the images that presented Yellowstone region to lifelike and contributed a lot to Yellowstone’s becoming a national park, the first one in the world in 1872. His most famous work is “Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone” (1872). The center of the picture shows the Yellowstone Waterfall pouring down, and the viewer seems to be on the site, hearing the roar of the waterfall. On both banks of the Grand Canyon are lush trees with rocks. The painting shows the grandeur and magnificent beauty of the Yellowstone Grand Canyon. In the summer of 1873, Moran joined in Major John Wesley Powell’s Canyon expedition. For Moran, to portray the spectacular Grand Canyon was almost the most important artistic mission in his life. Shortly after return to the east, he completed the panoramic painting “the Grand Canyon” the following year. If Powell’s heroic narrative of the Grand Canyon inspired the imagination of all Americans, it was Moran’s paintings that made it visible and visualized to the general public. Moran’s paintings made the canyon’s mythical sublimity understandable by elaborate visual expressions.19 Moran infused realistic and non-realistic elements to portray the Grand Canyon. Powell thought highly of the authenticity

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of the painting and stated that Moran utilized unusual ways to depict the depth, volume, distance, form, color and clouds of the Grand Canyon and fashioned the most vivid and magnificent picture.20 Soon after the painting was completed, the US Congress purchased it at US$10,000, which proved its significance and value to the country. Historians highly appraised the contribution of this painting to American culture-building, and believed that Congress’ ownership of this artistic piece had exerted great impact on the forward-looking direction of national territorial politics. With the last exploration of the untouched US continent, “The Grand Canyon,” along with Moran’s other paintings, is believed to influence the establishment of a national park system.21 Angela Miller has gone through the relations among landscape painting, progress and the ideas of nationalism evolving in the mid-nineteenth century, and pointed out that the foremost cultural task of landscape painting was to construct American national identity by presenting American landscapes.22

National Parks in the West in Literary Works In comparison with civilized European countries, the United States does not have abundant cultural heritage, nor does it have plentiful cultural relics and historical ruins, elaborately planned and designed landscapes. What it has is the vast and diversified natural landscapes. Perry Miller called the United States a “Country of Nature” and believed that for the early Puritans, the wilderness was not only the homeland in which they made a livelihood, but also an important factor in reshaping American culture and national identity.23 Richard White proposed that the purpose of establishing national parks was to build an “Organic Machine.” He defined the remaking of the Columbia River in the northwest of the Pacific as an energy system. Although it had been modified due to interventions of human activities, it still retained its natural, “unmade” features.24 Miller believed that the remaking of this river required more manpower and technical investment while Richard Grusin put more emphasis on the logic and practices of representation through which national parks reproduce nature.25 The purpose of setting up national parks was not only for environmental protection, but also for the cultural and political significance behind national parks. The reason why the US federal government established national parks in the nineteenth century was to publicize American landscapes by institutionalizing and standardizing national parks, to attract

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tourists home and abroad to appreciate the natural beauty of this country, and to get acquainted with the unique features of American national culture. Therefore, national parks have become an important means for the American government to construct American culture and national identity and secure national reputation. Take the Grand Canyon as an example. The Grand Canyon National Park, 443 kilometers long, is located on the Colorado Plateau in northwestern Arizona of the United States. It was promoted and planned by US President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908. The Colorado National Reserve was established in 1911. The US Congress enacted legislation to establish the Grand Canyon National Park on February 26 in 1919. Looking back on the history of the discovery of the Grand Canyon, the pioneer of western literature, James Ohio Pattie is one of the earlier writers who portrays the Grand Canyon in his travel logs. His book The Personal Narrative of James O. Pattie published in 1831 keeps a detailed record of the characteristics of natural geography and cultural geography of the American Southwest.26 According to his travel log, Pattie once reached somewhere around the Colorado River and then found the Grand Canyon. The discovery of the Grand Canyon contributes to John Wesley Powell, the national hero in American people’s mind. One-armed Powell was a veteran, scientist and explorer. His greatest achievement was unveiling the mystery of the Grand Canyon. In May 1869, Powell and nine people sailed to explore the Green River, the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River. After overcoming many challenges, the group he led became the first one to discover the Grand Canyon along the Colorado River. His travel log, The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons, truly and objectively describes how Powell led the expedition members with extraordinary courage and perseverance to surmount numerous difficulties and dangers. During the whole journey, they touched upon many unknown fields in geology, geography, hydrology and humanities and thus made the first feat of exploring the Colorado Grand Canyon in human history. During the adventure, Powell could not help uttering his shock and excitement of beholding the Grand Canyon for the first time. Looking at the Grand Canyon from lofty cliffs, all tourists with no exception were captured by the sublimity and grandeur of the scenery. They found it so deep and dark that made it mysterious and enchanting, and they could not help holding in awe.27 In addition, Powell also commented on the Grand Canyon depicted by Hudson River painters: mountains and glaciers painted by Church were like a kingdom of glory; a mountain cliff painted

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by Bierstadt was so high that an eagle was out of sight before it reached the summit of the mountain; Moran combined these two great painters’ features together, and his works included both splendid cliffs and vast rocky mountains, which were characterized of immeasurable height.28 At the end of the book, Powell declared that one had to have sufficient energy and courage and time to explore thoroughly the Grand Canyon because it was much more difficult to surmount than the Alps or the Himalayas.29 As a result, the cultural significance of the Grand Canyon began to be recognized by Americans as an important medium to awaken national consciousness. American writers and explorers at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century all invariably used two words when describing the Grand Canyon. One was shock and the other was lofty. In 1882, the geologist Clarence Dutton published another book on the geography and history of the Grand Canyon, Tertiary History of the Grand Canyon District, which vividly displayed the history of the Grand Canyon, the vastness of the area and the magnificent scenery of the region. Readers may acquire a lot of scientific knowledge and sense the special attraction of the Grand Canyon. In addition, the book also includes many precious sketches and topographic maps as appendix. In Chap. 8, “The Panorama from Point Sublime,” Dutton displayed an amazing panorama of the Grand Canyon. He described the scenery with awe and love: In all the vast space beneath and around us there is very little upon which the mind can linger restfully. It is completely filled with objects of gigantic size and amazing form, and as the mind wanders over them it is hopelessly bewildered and lost. It is useless to select special points of contemplation. The instant the attention lays hold of them it is drawn to something else, and if it seeks to recur to them it cannot find them. Everything is superlative, transcending the power of the intelligence to comprehend it.30

The Grand Canyon is “the sublimest thing on earth. It is so not alone by virtue of its magnitudes, but by virtue of the whole—its ensemble.”31 In short, Dutton believed that no words could fully present the wonderful scenery of the Grand Canyon, because it was a magnificent, beautiful incarnation, a symbol of the power of nature. Dutton was proud that the United States had such landscapes, and believed that the Grand Canyon was unique in the world.

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The lover of nature, whose perceptions have been trained in the Alps, in Italy, Germany, or New England, in the Appalachians or Cordilleras, in Scotland or Colorado, would enter this strange region with a shock, and dwell there for a time with a sense of oppression, and perhaps with horror. Whatsoever things he had learned to regard as beautiful and noble he would seldom or never see, and whatsoever he might see would appear to him as anything but beautiful and noble. Whatsoever might be bold and striking would at first seem only grotesque. The colors would be the very ones he had learned to shun as tawdry and bizarre. The tones and shades, modest and tender, subdued yet rich, in which his fancy had always taken special delight, would be the ones which are conspicuously absent.32

“Surely no imagination can construct out of its own material any picture having the remotest resemblance to the Grand Canon.”33 In 1899, the American woman poet Harriet Monroe expressed the same shock and respect after visiting the Grand Canyon, thought that the Grand Canyon did not belong to this world. After the Grand Canyon became a national park, a large number of tourists flocked. To meet the needs of tourists, John C. Van Dyke wrote the famous travel guide The Grand Canyon of the Colorado: Recurrent Studies in Impressions and Appearance in 1920. The book not only introduced the geographical features of the Grand Canyon, but also demonstrated its beauty from the perspective of aesthetic value. He pointed out that at the first glance of the Grand Canyon, every tourist got a big shock. The scale of the Grand Canyon was beyond people’s imagination and comprehension. Besides, when commenting on its color, people did not know where to start. The color of the Grand Canyon was like the air and sky beyond one’s imagination.34 The works of Dutton and Dyke highlight the magnificent natural scenery of the western United States represented by the Grand Canyon, and more importantly contain rich cultural connotations, including the historical process of early American immigration and western development. On the one hand, they think highly of national landscapes, and on the other hand, they promote patriotism and cultivate national pride among the general public at the early stage of the young republic. In this way, landscape depiction has become a manifestation of national character and an effective tool to construct national identity. Eco-literature writer John Muir is respected as the “Father of American National Parks” and the leader of the early American environmental movement. He visited for decades mountains in the west and glaciers in the

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northwest, leaving nearly ten monographs and 60 diaries. Muir helped protect the Yosemite Valley and create the Sierra Club, the most important environmental organization in the United States. The association is currently the largest environmental and outdoor activity club in the United States. Three works related to western landscapes are My First Summer in the Sierra (1869), The Mountains of California (1894) and Our National Parks (1901). My First Summer in the Sierra is the diary Muir kept while visiting the Yosemite Mountains from June 3 to September 22 in 1869. He vividly recorded the natural landscape of the American West with verisimilitude and detailed descriptions—vegetation, animals, rocks, glaciers, waterfalls, rivers and valleys, by which numerous readers are enticed. It was God’s spirit in the wilderness that attracted Muir, the “son of nature,” to explore the endless mysteries of nature and to make his own pilgrimage. He devoted his whole life to feeling the beauty of nature, the truth of nature and the seasonal change of nature. He did his best to stimulate American patriotism and national consciousness by presenting the beauty of natural landscape which is the common home of all creatures. He made strong appeal to the federal government and the public to protect the natural beauty by legislation. He wrote on June 13, 1869, “Another glorious Sierra day in which one seems to be dissolved and absorbed and sent pulsing onward we know not where. Life seems neither long nor short, and we take no more heed to save time or make haste than do the trees and stars. This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality.”35 On June 15, Muir described a reviving morning: “Down the long mountain-slopes the sunbeams pour, gilding the awakening pines, cheering every needle, filling every living thing with joy. Robins are singing in the alder and maple groves, the same old song that has cheered and sweetened countless seasons over almost all of four blessed continents. In this mountain hollow they seem as much at home as in farmers’ orchards.”36 Divinity and spirituality of nature shown by Muir brought into existence a harmonious ecological environment which could allow lives to be reborn in four seasons, and human beings could obtain joy and revelation from the coexistence with nature. Muir highlighted four national parks in Our National Parks: Yellowstone, Yosemite, General Grant and Sequoia National Park. Yellowstone National Park was termed the source of the “end of the world” legend by Muir. It was famous for the most violent geyser in the world: “The wildest geysers in the world, in bright, triumphant bands, are dancing and singing in it amid thousands of boiling springs, beautiful and

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awful, their basins arrayed in gorgeous colors like gigantic flowers; and hot paint-pots, mud springs, mud volcanoes, mush and broth caldrons whose contents are of every color and consistency, plash and heave and roar in bewildering abundance.”37 According to Muir, Yosemite National Park was a place where God chooses to dress up with beautiful scenery. “It includes the head waters of the Tuolumne and Merced rivers, two of the most songful streams in the world; innumerable lakes and waterfalls and smooth silky lawns; the noblest forests, the loftiest granite domes, the deepest ice-sculptured cañons, the brightest crystalline pavements.”38 There are countless wonderful gardens in Yosemite National Park, scattering among valleys and forests at different altitudes and terrains. There existed countless animals in the valley, a paradise for various birds, like grouse, alpine quail, robin, Clark crow, mallard, hummingbird, woodpecker, water blackbird. Muir’s nature writings are characterized of multiple disciplines such as botany, zoology, geology, geography, human history and meteorology. What he wished in the whole life was that national parks could become a place for over-civilized people to return to nature and renew themselves spiritually, national parks could become a window demonstrating American democracy, and natural landscapes could be approached, visited and enjoyed by all citizens.39 In a word, Muir deserves to be regarded as the protector of American natural landscape and the pioneer of national park idea in the United States. Stemming from his personal experiences of the wilderness in the West and meditation over natural landscapes, Muir re-presented his individual feelings and thoughts in his artistic works, and consequently, the natural landscape aroused American people’s fidelity and love to their homeland, their country and their pride in being a member of the unified nation.

Conclusion Alfred Runte linked landscapes with nationalism and national identity, and pointed out that the idea of American national parks originated from the cultural anxiety compared with European cultures. Thus, national parks are established to “seek a unique national identity.”40 American writers, explorers, and painters of the Hudson River School from the mid to late nineteenth century highly praised the beauty of landscapes represented by several major national parks in the western United States. Their enthusiastic promotions of striking landscapes lead to the establishment of national

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parks and successfully awaken the common memory and patriotism among American people. Edward Bernbaum further pointed out that national parks represent the “soul of the United States”41 which fosters national pride and cultural confidence. In addition, national parks are inbred with historic and artistic values, which make them become important places for American citizens to get acquainted with national history, cultivate patriotism, and learn goodness, justice and dedication.42 Since their establishment, the American national parks have played a significant part in protecting natural landscapes, shaping national identity and national consciousness. In this way, national parks have become symbolic landscapes.

Notes 1. 亨利·列斐伏尔: 《空间与政治》, 李春译, 上海: 上海人民出版社, 2015 年, 第 5 页。 [Henri Lefebvre, Espace et Politique, trans. LI Chun (Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 2015), 5.] 2. 王鹏飞, 安维亮: “国家公园与国家认同——以黄石公园诞生为例,” 《首 都师范大学学报》 (自然科学版), 2011 年第 6 期, 第 63 页。 [WANG Pengfei, AN Weiliang, “National Parks and National Identity: Case Study of Yellowstone National Park,” Journal of Capital Normal University (Natural Science Edition), no.6 (2011): 63.] 3. Alfred Runte, National Parks: The American Experience (Lanham: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2010), xiii. 4. David Quammen, “How National Parks Tell Our Story – and Show Who We Are” (2016). Online. Available http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ magazine/2016/01/national-­parks-­centennial. 5. See Wendy Joy Darby, Landscape and Identity: Geographies of Nation and Class in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 6. Pierce Fee Lewis, “Axioms for Reading the Landscape: Some Guides to the American Scene,” in The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays, ed. D.W. Meinig (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 11–32. 7. Ibid., 27. 8. Orvar Löfgren, On Holiday: A History of Vacationing (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 35. 9. Ibid., 35–37. 10. LI Zhengliang summarizes in “Landscape Nationalism” the significant role landscapes have played in the foundation of countries such as Germany, Japan and the United States. (李政亮: “风景民主主义,” 《读书》, 2009

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年第 2 期, 79–86 页。 [LI Zhengliang, “Landscape Nationalism,” Dushu, no.2 (2009): 79–86.] 11. 郁火星: “‘哈德逊河画派’ 与美国风景的描绘,” 《艺术百家》, 2015 年第 4 期, 第 190 页。 [YÜ Huoxing, “Hudson River School and American Landscape Depiction,” Hundred Schools in Arts, no.4 (2015):190.] 12. Thomas Cole, “Essay on American Scenery” (2017). Online. Available https://www.csun.edu/~ta3584/Cole.htm. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. YÜ, 190. 16. Qtd. in YÜ, 190. 17. Thomas Cole, “Essay on American Scenery” (2017). 18. YÜ, 194. 19. Joni Louise Kinsey, Thomas Moran and the Surveying of the American West (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), 124. 20. Thurman Wilkins, Thomas Moran, Artist of the Mountains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966), 133. 21. Ibid., 339. 22. Richard Grusin, Culture, Technology, and the Creation of America’s National Parks (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 4. 23. Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1956), 204–216. 24. Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Making of the Columbia River (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), ix. 25. See Grusin, note 8, 174. 26. Martin Padget, “The Southwest and Travel Writing,” in The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing, eds. A. Bendixen & J. Hamera (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 78–99. 27. 约翰·韦斯利·鲍威尔: 《科罗拉多河探险记》, 雷立美译, 广州: 花城出版 社, 2007 年, 第 373 页。 [John Wesley Powell, The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons, trans. LEI Limei (Guangzhou: Flower City Publishing House, 2007), 373.] 28. Ibid., 371–372. 29. Ibid., 380. 30. Clarence E. Dutton, The Tertiary History of the Grand Cañon District, with Atlas (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1881), 150. 31. Ibid., 143. 32. Ibid., 141. 33. Ibid., 142. 34. John C. V. Dyke, The Grand Canyon of the Colorado: Recurrent Studies in Impressions and Appearances (Rpt. in Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1920), 19.

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35. John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra. Online. Available https:// cread.jd.com/read/startRead.action?bookId=30364211&readType=3. 36. Ibid. 37. John Muir, Our National Parks. Online. Available http://www.gutenberg.org/files/60929/60929-­h/60929-­h.htm#chap02. 38. Ibid. 39. 高科: “美国国家公园思想的多重面相——读罗伯特·基特尔《完好无损地 保护: 美国国家公园思想的演变》,” 《社会科学论坛》, 2016 年第 8 期, 250 页。 [GAO Ke, “Multiple Visions of the American National Park Idea—Interpretation of Robert B. Keiter’s To Conserve Unimpaired: The Evolution of the National Park Idea,” Tribune of Social Sciences, no.8 (2016): 250.] 40. Ibid., 249. 41. 陈耀华, 张丽娜: “论国家公园的国家意识培养,” 《中国园林》, 2016 年 第7 期, 第 8 页。 [CHEN Yaohua, ZHANG Lina, “The National Consciousness Cultivation of National Parks,” Chinese Landscape Architecture, no.7 (2016): 8.] 42. Ibid., 8.

CHAPTER 11

Walking Landscape: Spatial Experience and Imagination of Modernity in the Overseas Travelogues in the Late Qing Dynasty Jigang Huang

What is presented in an overseas travelogue is a rendezvous and encounter of its writer and the unknown in a foreign country. The special “spatial writing” contains not only the “amazing narration” and “reverie” in the description of humanistic landscapes, but also the “shock” and “admiration” in the writers’/subjects’ mind, thus constructing various cultural This essay was firstly published in Inner Mongolia Social Sciences (Chinese Version), Issue 6 of 2015. The following is the full information: Jigang Huang, “Spatial Experience and Imagination of Modernity in the Overseas Travelogues in the Late Qing Dynasty,” Inner Mongolia Social Sciences (Chinese Version), no. 6 (2015):123–128. [黄继刚: “晚清域外游记中的空间体验和现代性想象,” 《内 蒙古社会科学 (汉文版)》, 2015 年第 6 期, 123–128页。]

J. Huang (*) Shantou University, Shantou, China © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Fang, R. T. Tally Jr. (eds.), Spatial Literary Studies in China, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03914-0_11

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imaginations during their overseas trips. The overseas travelogues in the late Qing Dynasty can be roughly divided into two types: private ones and official ones. The former ones are mainly written by private individuals during their overseas travel, study or sojourn, with such representative works as GUO Liancheng’s Summary of a Journey to the West (郭连城, 《西游笔略》, 1863), WANG Tao’s Account of European Travel (王韬, 《漫游随录》 1870), WANG Zhi’s Diaries of an Overseas Tourist (王芝, 《海客日谭》, 1871), LI Gui’s A New Record of Global Travel (李圭, 《环游地球新录》, 1876), PAN Feisheng’s A Note on the West Journey (潘飞声, 《西海纪行 卷》, 1887); the latter ones are mainly works on foreign customs and national conditions written by envoys or diplomats of the Qing government, including such representative works as WANG Yongni’s Diary of Returning Homeland (王咏霓, 《归国日记》, 1887), LIU Hongxi’s Diary in England (刘鸿锡,《英轺日记》, 1891), CHEN Lanbin’s Account of an Envoy to the United States (陈兰彬, 《使美纪略》, 1891), GUO Songtao’s Account of Diplomatic Mission to the West (郭嵩焘, 《使 西纪程》, 1891), QIAN Depei’s Essays on European Travel (钱德培,《欧 游随笔》, 1891), ZOU Daijun’s Diplomatic Records of the West (邹代钧, 《西征纪程》, 1891), XUE Fucheng’s Diary of an Envoy to Four Countries: Britain, France, Italy and Belgium (薛福成, 《出使英法意比四 国日记》, 1891), ZHANG Yinhuan’s Diary of Three Continents (张荫桓, 《三洲日记》, 1896), LI Fengbao’s Diary of an Envoy to Germany (李凤 苞, 《使德日记》, 1891), CAI Jun’s Notes of an Envoy Abroad (蔡钧,《出 洋琐记》, 1891), WANG Zhichun’s Sketches of an Envoy to Russia (王之 春, 《使俄草》, 1895), CUI Guoyin’s Diary of Diplomatic Mission to America and Peru (崔国因, 《出使美日秘国日记》, 1897), Zaize’s Diary of Political Investigation (载泽, 《考察政治日记》, 1905). Compiled into a book series named From East to West, Chinese Travellers before 1911 with the efforts of ZHONG Shuhe, a contemporary publisher, these works have drawn extensive attention in the academic circles. On the whole, as a unique cultural imprint, overseas travelogues are more than geographical literature in terms of their cultural connotation, value and significance. They witness the outset of modernity and the narrative turn in modern Chinese literature as in such aspects as stylistic content, narrative literary grace and aesthetic experience. While in detail, writers’ cross-cultural imagination and cultural practice in overseas travels are inevitably faced with the related problems caused by the cultural gap. In the moment of “synchronicity” when crossing the geographical

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boundaries, travelers not only change their “vision” from “eye tour” to “mind tour,” experiencing “shock,” “moving” and “border-crossing” of their thinking, but also met a completely different “Other” which helps the “strange eyes” construct the imagination of modernity about a foreign country, as well as acts as a mirrored cultural image, enabling the writers/ subjects to reflect on themselves and to adjust and correct themselves while they are gazing at the “Other.” The emergence of this kind of “gazing” has something to do with the traditional visual centralism. In his Eye and Mind, Merleau-Ponty intentionally blurs the traditional dichotomy of subject and object, and argues “what is watching is not mind, but body and eyes. At the same time, the eyes and the body are also the objects being watched, and the watcher is also the watched.”1 Therefore, as a special literary text, a travelogue is featured with space “moving” and “border-crossing,” and readily puts the individual subjects into the mirror of the Other in the process of cultural identification and identity construction. This kind of cultural contrast definitely leads readers to the new recognition and reflection on their own culture. For example, a culturally confident minister of the late Qing Dynasty named ZHANG Deyi found himself being watched by the westerners when he was watching the West with a sense of superiority. Particularly, his long braid and cheongsam became the focus of what westerners were curious to watch. The western media not only followed him here and there and depicted what he was like in detail, but also called it “picturesque” visual appreciation. Therefore, as a kind of spatial experience, the overseas travel contains the complete process of cultural absorption, cultural authentication and the establishment of cultural identity, as well as all kinds of imagination on modernity in the process of national construction.2

From “Celestial Realm” to “Global Awareness”: The Modernity Turn of Space After the Opium War in 1840, the late Qing Dynasty was confronted with “a change that had not ever happened in the previous thousands of years.”3 In this turbulent political situation, Chinese culture also underwent important changes under the influence of western modernity. While the western modernity, generated along with the modern scientific civilization and instrumental rationality, is in line with the characteristics of “early endogenous type,” the modernity in the late Qing Dynasty, forced into

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the development track of western modernity under the premise of internal and external trouble, surrendering and humiliation, is a typical example of “late exogenous type.” As an important brunch of the experience of modernity in the late Qing Dynasty, the spatial experience has its prominent representation: the substitution of “global” consciousness for the idea of “celestial realm.” The construction of the traditional Chinese concept of “celestial realm” originated from the assumption that “the sky is round and the earth is square,” which “regarded the world under the heaven as a big self-­centered space.”4 The knowledge of this regional centralism is especially strengthened by the kingship politics that “Under the heaven, all is the king’s land; while in the border of the kingdom, all the subjects belong to the king,” and forms a “stereotype” of writing with cultural inertia, preoccupying the initiative area of spatial discourse, and creating relatively fixed expressions and images to present the continuity of culture. For example, up to the middle of Ming Dynasty, the Chinese still called the whole Europe to the west of “Xi Yu” (literally, western regions) as “Tai Xi” (literally, extreme west). Therefore, the “celestial realm,” as a pre-­modern space concept, contains not only the self-imagination of regional centralism, but also the hierarchically different system of concentric circles of culture, which clearly shows the different hierarchical concepts between China and the West. Even in the early period of the late Qing Dynasty, going abroad was still viewed by most people as wandering alone into the uncharted sea or drifting thousands of miles to the uncivilized lands; they thought that leaving their motherland to devote themselves to the services for the foreign people was no doubt a desperate choice.5 In addition, the “distinction between China and the West” is not only reflected in the ethnic difference and geographical gap, but also in the huge difference between the advanced cultures and the backward ones. For example, ZHENG He’s overseas trips to the West not only built the cultural confidence of the Chinese Empire, but also catered to the psychological imagination that China was in the center of the cultural stage. Just relying on this existing or bumptious cultural superiority, the Chinese government formulated the borderland and ethnic policies like “conciliation” or “paying tribute to the court.” This cultural superiority (including language, value, system, technology and other aspects) formed the basis of intellectuals’ self-mirror-image in the late Qing Dynasty, which was reflected in a core word: “Zhong Hua” (name of China, literally, the cultural essence in the center).”6

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However, the superiority of “celestial realm” was mercilessly broken through by the “global” awareness conveyed in the overseas travelogues, especially reflected in the “collapse of the celestial empire” after the Opium War. After that, “the distinction between China and the West” became a false proposition that needed no more words to talk about, and “eyes open to see the world” became the helpless and expedient measure of the late Qing government in the dilemma. The “global” picture gradually became the geographical fact that Chinese were forced to accept. PI Jiayou described Chinese inner struggle after waking up in his “Song of Awakening”;7 LI Gui’s A New Record of Global Travel even showed a picture of the earth on the front page, trying to show a brand-new global consciousness in the form of visual pictures. These “space” images became objective facts, which could not be ignored, deconstructed and reconstructed Chinese people’s global space imagination, and forced the intellectuals in those days to gradually pay attention to the “global” geographical knowledge. Chronologically, the related works include: WEI Yuan’s 50-volume Atlas and Description of the Countries Beyond the Seas in 1843, YAO Ying’s Records of Tibetan Travel (1844) and XU Jiyu’s 10-volume World Geography (1848). However, generally, the knowledge about space was not fully popularized in this period, and people were still used to bringing all kinds of new knowledge about the world into their own traditional cultural system, or just taking it as an after-dinner topic. This in fact lies in the “imbalance between knowledge and attitudes,”8 that is although new knowledge was produced, it was not widely spread and accepted by Chinese people, and even regarded as heresy. Additionally, the publications on world geography in the late Qing Dynasty were all from second-­ hand materials through collection, collation and compiling, so the compilers themselves did not personally investigate and verify what was published through field work. Therefore, from the perspective of audience, overseas travelogues, to a large extent, became an important medium for Chinese people to acquire spatial cognition, and played an important role in promoting Chinese people’s cognition and acceptance of “global” awareness. In this regard, the cultural effect of overseas travel goes beyond personal experience and becomes the potential driving force of social transformation and it directly promotes the evolution of social culture. Especially, in the process of the conflict between the two civilizations, once the one cultural value meets crisis, the other one will have the opportunity to be culturally identified, hereby making possible the cultural transformation. Therefore, the spatial transformation from “celestial

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realm” to the “global” awareness in the late Qing Dynasty is not only a change in geographical science cognition, but also a new construction of social history and culture. The dazzling landscape writing in the late Qing travelogues constructs a geographical and cultural space of the West with obvious “synchronicity.” This spatial cognition breaks through the “linear” cultural narrative and provides the possibility for the generation of modernity experience in the late Qing Dynasty.

From “Eye Tour” to “Mind Tour”: The Modernity Experience of Space If a foreign travel is a “cultural border-crossing,” an outset and discovery of cultural self-consciousness, and “a kind of discovery or reconstruction of cultural tradition and social identity,”9 the various travel experiences of people going abroad in the late Qing Dynasty can be regarded as the appropriate footnotes of this assumption. John Urry once used “the tourist gaze” to regard “seeing” in the process of travel as the production process of meaning and the self-reconfirmation. The contents of these “gazes” range from the tourists’ sensorial narration of curious and strange things to the objective records of social cognition, from the absurd ghost or immortal stories to vulgar and unbearable naughty ones. These subjective experience facts were highly valued by the authorities, so that the various travel records of the envoys were regarded as reliable and complete historical data. At this phenomenon scholar Justin Stage was deeply surprised, so he called it “history of curiosity.” However, from today’s perspective, as the earliest documents for Chinese people to watch, explore and imagine the West, the late Qing overseas travelogues fully showed the process of occurring of various modernity experiences and imagination at that time. The modernity hereby refers not only to the ideological modernity of elite scholars, the transformation of cognitive modes and cultural systems, but also to the modernity of daily life style. In other words, it is just in the experiencing and feeling process of the daily things that the overseas travelers acquire kinds of different and fresh modernity experiences and really feel the fundamental changes brought by the modernity of the daily life. For example, the telegraph “connects people from thousands of miles in a second,” the train “rushes quickly” day and night, and the electric light is “always bright” all night long.10 Marshall Berman regards this experience as a subjective reflection of the drastic changes in

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the world and describes it as a huge “whirlpool.” Modern people will find a new self in “disintegration and rebirth, trouble and pain, ambiguity and contradiction.”11 In this “whirlpool,” there is not only the ever-changing external modern world, but also the inner self-awareness that is surging with the tide; this experience not only deconstructs the existing traditional value system of Chinese people, but also generates and develops a brand-­ new cultural experience. For the late Qing envoys who first set foot on overseas trips, travel is a process of self-confirmation and constant searching. They had to accept the established fact that they had been moved from the center to the edge of world stage, and they had to redefine their own identity and images. During this period, they were bound to experience the strangeness and maladjustment brought about by the “changing scenery” in space and “changing with each passing day” in time. Under this premise, how to “see the world” and how to “see oneself” became the turning point of the generation of modernity experience. In this chapter, the inner changes caused by the ones of external world are described as the shifting from “eye tour” to “mind tour,” and is presented as the interwoven contradiction of “shock,” “moving” and “border-crossing” in terms of cultural psychology.12 First of all, the so-called eye tour of late Qing travelers is similar to the “shocking” experience described by Benjamin, a German philosopher, which is a dazzling feeling brought about by their first facing with the strangeness and the unknown. When WANG Tao first arrived in London, he suddenly felt that “the light shines brightly all night until the dawn, which is ten times as bright as the light of a candle. It is almost like a land of eternal brightness without night.”13 In his Travels to Europe and the United States, ZHANG Deyi described his experience when officially arranged to visit the World Expo, and he visited many departments such as the machine bureau, the mint bureau, the post office, the telegraph office and the train bureau (traffic bureau). GUO Songtao’s Account of Diplomatic Mission to the West recorded his experience of being invited to visit museums. If the World Expo breaks the self-sustaining “celestial realm” pattern of Chinese people and establishes the cognition of the world as a whole, the museum shows the whole process of the evolution of western modernity on the basis of historical continuity. During this period, these “blank people” with even no modern knowledge comprehended, with a fresh and curious view, the new world with which they are not familiar, so they had a variety of strange “shocking” experiences when

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seeing such new things as “fire wheel vehicles” (train), “fire wheel house” (elevator), “cabinet dark news” (bell ring), “wooden oxen and gliding horses” (bicycle), and “instant photos” (photography), “Spring-clicking watch” (clock), “thousand-Li mirror” (telescope), “electrical sounding instrument” (telephone), “iron tailor” (sewing machine), etc. BIN Chun even mistakenly regarded the wedding ceremony as a funeral, “white corolla, plain clothes, snow white shoes; it’s not my fault, it’s a wedding ceremony with a new bride.”14 When ZHANG Deyi first saw family planning supplies and condoms in Paris, he believed that “such people were not punished enough even sentenced to death,” because these things were against the traditional ethic doctrine that “among the three kinds of unfilial piety, no offspring is the most important.”15 Such a variety of “shocking” experiences were attributed to the “knowledge gap” of the late Qing travelers, because they didn’t have enough comparable counterparts in their knowledge system, let alone the classification and corresponding cultural interpretation. At the same time, the “shocking” experiences were also caused by language barriers. Although most of the envoys were selected from the School of Combined Learning (a language school) and had certain English skills, their English level was still poor for the lack of understanding of modern science and technology. Therefore, GUO Songtao had to record his whole day’s spectroscopic experiment as “a piece of white cloth”; while ZHI Gang cautiously chose to keep silent after watching a chemical experiment in France for his lack of understanding of it. The second kind of modernity experience is presented as “moving.” The “consciousness of celestial empire” of the late Qing Dynasty determined that the “eye tour” of the late Qing envoys was not “gazing” but “moving” after a “shocked” glance. That is to say, although the traveling was carried out in a foreign cultural background, it was a mastery and understanding of the foreign experience in the travelers’ own knowledge context. As a projection of eye vision, “moving” actually has background of cultural centralism and aesthetic ideology. Its main cognitive mode is comparison and assimilation, that is, to bring strange cultural phenomena into the existing conceptual framework of the subject for comparative analysis, and to expand the appreciation of “all other countries being native places” by means of cultural transfer, authentication and replacement. What can be seen as “the West” becomes the “mirror image” of the late Qing Dynasty, and what is seen along the way is just the reflection of Chinese own culture. What is seen along the way confirms and

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strengthens the preexisting superior self-image, which distorts the true cognition of western modernization and conceals the realistic issues of western modernity. LIN Zhen, adopting the traditional Chinese romantic narrative pattern focusing on “talented scholars and beautiful ladies” in his A Sketch of Overseas Travel, described his cultural experiences and travel imagination in foreign countries with such familiar romantic Chinese characters as “Chang’e,” “CAI Wenji” and “XIE Daoyun.” While XUE Fucheng and others held the view of cultural centralism, and came to the ironic conclusion that “western learning traces back to China.”16 In his Diary of an Envoy to Four Countries, XUE Fucheng subjectively attributed all the origins of western civilization to their Chinese counterparts and he even regarded such works as Zhuangzi (《庄子》), Huainanzi (《淮南 子》) and Mozi (《墨子》) as the sources of western electrical science, business administration science and optics. CHEN Qiu, on the other hand, concluded that the so-called sound, light, electricity and so on in western science were all covered within the traditional Chinese “six arts.”17 They insisted that “Confucianism” was the “core” and the principle of ethics; while “the skills and technology” were “the end,” just practical skills. The “fundamental pursuit of a scholar lies in mind, not in skills.”18 It can be said that in this kind of modernity experience, “myth and fantasy plays a great role, which constructs the cultural horizon of travelers, and this horizon in turn mixes reality and illusion into a kind of cultural imagery.”19 The first two kinds of experiences still stay in the “eye tour” stage for strange and different things, while “border-crossing” as another kind of modernity experience is a typical “mind tour.” Suppose “shocking” is expressed as cultural aphasia and superficiality, and “moving” is shown as cultural optimism and egotism, “border-crossing,” on the contrary, is embodied in cultural introspection and modest seeking for knowledge. Frederick Fisher argues that “the transfer of spatial geography means the change of cultural environment, which makes possible the cultural ‘border-­ crossing’.”20 Especially when the façade of cultural superiority was faded and travelers began to really experience and observe the western cultural life, “vision” gradually began to be focused on the deep social problems, and the comparison and reflection of Chinese and western cultural systems and values. This change of “way of seeing” shows the real emergence of modernity awareness. In particular, the intellectual elites sent abroad around 1870 paid special attention to the practical science and technology on the national welfare and people’s livelihood, and carried out

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comparative analysis on the cultural system behind science and technology. For example, GUO Songtao began to reflect on the limitations of “just learning skills from the west” since the “Westernization Movement” in his Diaries in Paris and London. He noticed that Chinese students in Britain mostly studied the art of war, while Japanese students there studied military system. After careful comparative observation, he was deeply worried about the situation of the late Qing government stuck in internal and external trouble. Another example can well illustrate the moving of focus from “eye tour” to “mind tour.” WANG Tao described in his Account of European Travel, when visiting a British telecommunications bureau, that “inside are exotic flowers and plants, and a tree about two feet high is covered with glass, and its dense leaves are like those of banyan tree. I was told it was mother-and-son tree, brought from afar … The electric wire is used in different countries like Britain, America, Germany and France, by which message could be received in an instant no matter how far it is from.”21 Here, WANG Tao is more like an explorer and his writing more like an anecdote. It can be seen from this that tourists’ pursuit and worship toward the western science and technology is not so much from the understanding of civilization as it is from the wholesale acceptance of popular culture. QIAN Zhongshu called it “the traveler’s leave to lie.”22 He believed that their understanding of western modernity was neither fair, objective, nor comprehensive and profound. Later, HUANG Zunxian also visited the telecommunications bureau when he was on a mission to London. He described in his Farewell Today, “Each day has lots of moments, but when to receive your message? If only I had the telegraph, you’ll get the letter immediately.”23 Whereas praising the speed of modern telecommunications, HUANG Zunxian questioned such an approach in terms of conveying feelings and expressing ideas: the transmission of information after various translations is likely to be distorted and beyond recognition. The development of modern communication technology provides convenience for the spreading of information, but also intensifies the sense of strangeness and tension between people. It can be said that HUANG Zunxian’s holistic cognition and critical reflection on modernity are relatively profound and dialectical. On the whole, the overseas travelogues of this period are more like a detailed “summary of civilization investigation,” covering industrial manufacturing, political diplomacy, social customs, military and transportation, places of interests, culture and education, celebrities and political figures, etc. XU Jianyin’s Essays in Europe recorded up to 89 factories he

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visited, and DAI Hongci’s An Envoy’s Diaries in Nine Countries recorded nearly up to 400 scenic spots. As far as tourists were concerned, the landscape description was no longer the focus of their works. They focused their attention on the economic system, political democracy and social livelihood of western countries, and even began to criticize and reflect on the modernity of the West. During this process, the subjective lyric narration of travelogues was weakened, while the objective scientific description was enhanced. A large number of relevant statistical data and analytical graphs were used in travelogues. For example, in LIANG Qichao’s Journey to the New Continent appeared the “Trust” data, the company’s economic capital table, the corporate public welfare donation table, the Chinese occupation statistical table, the Chinese group statistical table, the Chinese population statistical table, etc.24 Through close contact and in-depth investigation of western social and cultural systems, travelers gave up the old knowledge, and they no longer thought the western civilization was just technology, manufacturing or weapon making. Instead, they expanded their learning objects to many fields such as economic reform, political system and cultural customs. Seeking new things in foreign countries, this group of intellectuals also transformed from firm “westernists” to determined “reformists.”

The Cultural Characteristics and Modernity Imagination of Overseas Travel The cultural characteristics of overseas travel are represented in the narrative mode and stylistic form of overseas travelogues. The stylistic differences are reflected in the different levels of tourists’ cognition of modernity in different periods. The travelogues in the early period mainly took parallel prose or long verse as the main form with the linguistic style of traditional Chinese Fu.25 This may be seen as “the heritage of Han Fu, regarding the trip to the United States as the expansion of the Qing Empire, and boasting the glory of the Empire in the territory of imaginative literature.”26 For example, what is reflected from the exotic customs in LIN Zhen’s A Sketch of Overseas Travel is all the mirror images of traditional Chinese culture. The objective “overseas sketching” turns to the illusory “subjective expression.” In his works, the foreign lands and the native ones, or the new world and the old one, can be described as the two sides of one body, which are the exterior and interior of each other. Later,

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WANG Tao, for the purpose of “evidence,” believed that for the genre form of travelogues, the best choice was “investigate diary” and diary travelogues emphasized the collection of information, with everything in detail and being understood at a glance. The introduction of political commentaries genre into overseas travelogues can, to a certain extent, make up for the lack of analysis and reasoning in the latter. However, these diaries, viewing what was in western countries as the models of civilization, just focusing on the introduction and explanation of “skills and technology,” ignored the complex modernity behind the technological civilization, thereafter showed a contradictory cultural psychology: acceptance and rejection, pursuit and hesitation, “rapid progress” and “slow change.” The travelogues of LIANG Qichao and KANG Youwei used the sophisticated objective recording method instead to increase the evaluation and reflection on the foreign political and economic system, social and cultural forms. In terms of contents, their works were full of obvious political commentaries, while in terms of style, they used flexible and easy modern sentences to replace the ancient rigorous and rhythmic poetry structure, which made the travelogues more like a “collection of politics and economics.” Frankly, in the late Qing Dynasty when the information was not smooth, almost all the cultural imagination about overseas was transcribed and constructed by overseas travelogues. The “foreign lands” visited not only became “Other,” but also raised an opportunity for self-cognition and self-correction. The accumulation in the number of overseas travelogues made the cultural description and modernity imagination gradually precipitated into the “foreign images” in the public opinions and minds of the late Qing Dynasty. According to Anderson, the limited cognition on foreign lands, after being spread in public, would turn into a collective interpretation on foreign images, and be shaped as “social imaginary.” The imagination about modernity included not only the shock and admiration in the first contact with foreign strange world, but also the re-­ examination, recognition and critical reflection of their own culture. Due to the Chinese writers’  illusion on “celestial realm” caused by cultural centralism that China was veiwed as the center of the world, or their stronger discourse power in the unequal communication context, it was difficult for all these travelogues of “personal experience” or “factual records” to achieve objectivity and value neutrality, and these works, thereby, inevitably included the tourists’ personal feelings and reinforced “prior views” (prejudice). However, the cultural significance of overseas travelogues lies

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in the reconstruction of the existing cultural cognition by the subjects through continuous contact with the Other under the premise of recognition of differences. This kind of reconstruction actually covers the whole dialectical process of self-denial to cultural renewal and to cultural reconstruction. Generally speaking, from adhering to the traditional Confucian culture to gradually recognizing and affirming the western modern value system, the cross-cultural imagination of late Qing intellectuals went through three different mental processes:27 In the first stage, they were obviously impacted by the western ideological system in terms of their traditional cultural values, but they still adhered to the Confucian ethics of “order of heaven and earth.” They had a vague understanding of “modernity.” They first felt that “their technology is inferior to that of the west” from the level of practical skills, so they put forward the coping strategies of “learning from the advanced technologies in the West in order to resist the invasion of the Western powers,” Jiangnan Manufacturing Bureau and Fujian Naval Academy, School of Combined Learning can be said to be the products of this stage. In the second stage, the late Qing intellectuals took a firm step in practicing China’s modernization, including the vigorous implementation of the “Westernization Movement,” from introducing western science to developing national industry, from imitating foreign military manufacturing to developing domestic transportation industry, as well as the subsequent reform of the imperial examination, the Reform Movement of 1898, and the Hundred Days’ Reform, which also became a new prospect and situation of China in the late Qing Dynasty. In the third stage, they shifted the focus from “seeking wealth” in economic and industrial structures to “striving for strength” in social and cultural systems. On the premise of introspection of traditional culture, cultural self-­ confidence is re-mentioned again, including the Enlightenment of “the May 4th Movement” and a series of cultural innovations, so as to explore the development path of China’s democracy and freedom. The process of constant inspection and reflection from “practical skills,” “systems” to “culture” can also be equivalent to different aspects of the generation of travel modernity in the late Qing Dynasty. This essay describes them as three stages: learning from particular achievements, absorbing systematic knowledge and understanding cultural system. From this, we can see that the traditional value system of the late Qing Dynasty was weakened and the mixed cultural identity was gradually established. To be specific, it is human nature to be fond of new and strange things, which is the most

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natural expression in cross-cultural communication and foreign imagination. In particular, the “reversed life” of travel itself breaks the stereotype and dreariness of secular life, which makes the generation of such experience a logical thing. While the systematic scientific and technological knowledge and industrial achievements as materialized civilization were just what was most needed in late Qing dynasty, so that once it was introduced, it would be irresistible. Finally, the cultural system, as what is under the scientific and technological civilization, has its subtle and profound significance, which has a long way to go before it is finally accepted through a hard and complicated transmission process because of the cultural differences between China and the West. Of course, the process of outset, occurrence and transformation of cultural modernity does not strictly follow the temporal order, but develops progressively and gradually. However, from the interlaced links that modernity experiences, we can see that the overseas traveling in the late Qing Dynasty was the main approach of inward inspection for late Qing intellectuals. The transfer of their “vision” projection and the change of their “experiencing process” reflect the different stages of the late Qing intellectuals’ recognition of cultural modernity, and represent the different tracks of their ideological evolution.

Notes 1. 杨大春: 《杨大春讲梅洛—庞蒂》, 北京: 北京大学出版社, 2005年, 第 117页。 [YANG Dachun, Lectures on Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2005), 117.] 2. This essay argues that the imagination of modernity in the late Qing Dynasty is firstly a kind of metaphysical and visualized understanding and interpretation of its own nation. Secondly, it constructs an ideal of a nation on the basis of the conceptual system of western countries according to the theory of social and historical progress. The visualized imagination and the construction of entity are in a two-way interaction, and they work together to realize the final formation of the national conceptual system of the late Qing Dynasty. 3. 《中国近代史资料丛刊·洋务运动 (四)》, 上海: 上海人民出版社, 1961年, 第 351 页。 [Materials on Modern Chinese History Series: The Westernization Movement (VI) (Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 1961), 351.]

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4. 葛兆光: 《古代中国文化讲义》, 上海: 复旦大学出版社, 2006年, 第 7页。 [GE Zhaoguang, Lectures on Ancient Chinese Culture (Shanghai: Fudan University Press, 2006), 7.] 5. An imperial court official of the late Qing Dynasty once wrote a couplet to Guo Songtao: “Different and outstanding out of your peers, and not blended into the traditional Chinese world; How could you leave your motherland to serve the foreign devils instead of human beings?” 6. 殷海光, 《中国文化的展望》, 上海: 上海三联书店, 2002 年, 第 2 页。 [YIN Haiguang, Prospect of Chinese Culture (Shanghai: Shanghai Joint Publishing, 2002), 2.] 7. PI Jiayou says in his Song of Awakening [皮嘉祐, 《醒世歌》], “If we observe the earth, we’ll find China is not in the center; the Earth is round, who is in the center and who is on the periphery?” 8. 周宁: “天下辨夷狄:晚清中国的西方形象,” 《书屋》, 2004 年第 6 期。 [ZHOU Ning, “Knowing Foreigners from the Land under Heaven: Western Images in Late Qing Dynasty,” Book House, no. 6 (2004).] 9. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 2003), 12. 10. The concept of “pluralistic modernity” put forward by WANG Dewei (王 德威) provides “legitimacy” for the modernity presentation of the late Qing overseas travelogues. In his Repressed Modernity, he argues that the literature of the late Qing Dynasty is not the preparation for the May 4th Movement, but another aspect of the modernity of Chinese literature. Although the modernity of the late Qing literature was not fully developed due to various reasons, the modernity of the May 4th Literature was carried forward by the political movement. However, this does not mean that the latter is more reasonable than the former. 11. Marshall Berman (trans.), All that is Solid Melts into Air, the Experience of Modernity (北京:商务印书馆 [Beijing: The Commercial Press], 2003), 16. 12. This corresponds to John Urry’s three categories of travelers: the “trippers,” whose travel is merely a fleeting “snapshot” glance; the “tourists,” whose travel presents as the collection and filtering of various landscape impressions; and the “travelers,” whose travel presents as the appreciation of the natural world and the contemplation on the subject themselves. 13. 吴以义, 《海客述奇: 中国人眼中的维多利亚科学》, 上海: 上海科学 普及出版社, 2004 年, 第 121 页。 [WU Yiyi, Overseas Travelers’ Stories: Science of Victorian Era in Chinese Eyes (Shanghai: Shanghai Popular Science Press, 2004), 121.] 14. 斌椿 (清), 《海国胜游草》, 长沙: 湖南人民出版社, 1985 年, 第 165 页。 [BIN Chun (Qing Dynasty), Poems on Overseas Travel (Changsha: Hunan People’s Publishing House, 1985), 165.]

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15. 张德彝 (清), 《欧美环游记》, 长沙: 岳麓书社, 1985 年, 第 709 页。 [ZHANG Deyi (Qing Dynasty), Diary of a Chinese Diplomat (Changsha: Yuelu Press, 1985), 709.] 16. 薛福成 (清), 《出使四国日记》, 北京: 社会科学文献出版社, 2006 年, 第 190 页。 [XUE Fucheng (Qing Dynasty), Diary of an Envoy to Four Countries (Beijing: Social Science Literature Press, 2006), 190.] 17. Since Zhou Dynasty (1046–256 BC), Ancient Chinese students were required to master the six arts (liù yì [六艺]), which included rituals (礼), music (乐), archery (射), charioteering (御), writing (书) and mathematics (数). —Translator’s note. 18. 《中国近代史资料丛刊·洋务运动(二)》, 第 30 页。 [Materials on Modern Chinese History Series: The Westernization Movement (II), 30.] 19. 郭少棠, 《旅行: 跨文化想象》, 北京: 北京大学出版社, 2005 年, 第 133 页。 [S.T. Kwok, Travel: Transcultural Imagination (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2005), 133.] 20. Frederick Fisher, A Globe-Trotter’s Guide (Culture Shock! Practical Guides) (Portland: Graphic Arts Books, 1995), 3. 21. 吴以义, 《海客述奇: 中国人眼中的维多利亚科学》, 第 107 页。 [WU Yiyi, Overseas Travelers’ Stories: Science of Victorian Era in Chinese Eyes, 107.] 22. 钟叔河, 《书前书后》, 合肥: 安徽教育出版社, 2012 年, 第 183 页。 [ZHONG Shuhe, Around Books (Hefei: Anhui Education Press, 2012), 183.] 23. 曹旭, 《黄遵宪诗选》, 北京: 中华书局, 2008 年, 第 82 页。 [CAO Xu, Selected Poetry of Huang Zunxian (Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company, 2008), 82.] 24. 梁启超 (清), 《新大陆游记》, 北京: 社会科学文献出版社, 2007 年, 第 25–38 页。 [LIANG Qichao (Qing Dynasty), Travelogues of the New Continent (Beijing: Social Science Literature Press, 2007), 25–38.] 25. Fu (赋), a genre originated in Han Dynasty, featured with perfect style. —Translator’s note. 26. 吴以义, 《海客述奇: 中国人眼中的维多利亚科学》, 第 108 页。 [WU Yiyi, Overseas Travelers’ Stories: Science of Victorian Era in Chinese Eyes, 108.] 27. 何晓明, 《百年忧患——知识分子命运与中国现代化进程》, 上海: 上海 东方出版中心, 1997 年, 第 20–23 页。 [This is only a preliminary division. See HE Xiaoming’s A Century of Hardship: The Fate of Intellectuals and the Process of China’s Modernization (Shanghai: Shanghai Oriental Publishing Center, 1997), 20–23.]

CHAPTER 12

Introducing Literary Geography to the History of Chinese Literature Debao Pan

“The history of Chinese literature” emerged in East Asia at the end of the nineteenth century, starting a new writing form. And among all the emerging elements of the paradigm of these new works, literary geography played an extremely important role in almost every respect, from the historical view to the paradigm and method, but was generally ignored. Therefore, through the reduction of the process of literary geography being introduced into the new works on Chinese literary history, this

This essay was originally published in Zhejiang Social Sciences, Issue 9 of 2020. The full information is: Pan Debao, “The Process and Significance of Introducing Literary Geography into the New Works of Chinese Literary History,” Zhejiang Social Sciences, no.9 (2020): 131–140 + 111 + 161. [潘德宝: “文学地理走进新体中国文学史的重要节点与意义,” 《浙江社会科学》, 2020 年第 9 期, 第131–140 页、第 111 页、第 161 页。]. Besides, the whole text is translated by WU Nanxi (吴南曦).

D. Pan (*) Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou, China © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Fang, R. T. Tally Jr. (eds.), Spatial Literary Studies in China, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03914-0_12

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chapter aims at reconfirming and explaining its pivotal stages, theoretical logic, and innovative value, so as to provide some enlightenment for the study of “rewriting the history of Chinese literature.”

The “Comparative Study of North and South Literature” Was Registered in a Series of Works of Chinese Literary History Written by Japanese Scholars The first momentous stage that literary geography was introduced into the new form of the history of Chinese literature was in the 1890s, when a group of Japanese scholars began to attach importance to “literary geography” in their works on the history of Chinese literature, such as Kojō Teikichi’s (古城貞吉) The History of Chinese Literature: the Preface (支那 文学史⋅序論, 1897), Sasagawa Tanerō’s (笹川种郎) The History of Chinese Literature (支那文学史, 1898)  and The History of Chinese Novels, Plays and Verse (支那小说戏曲史, 1897), Kojima Kenkichirō’s (兒岛献吉郎) The History of Chinese Literature: In Ancient Times (支那大文学史古代篇, 1909), Fujita Toyohachi’s (藤田豐八) Drafts of Chinese Literature History: the Pre-Qin Period (支那文学史稿⋅先秦文学, 1897), Takase Takejirō’s (高 濑武次郎) The History of Chinese Literature (支那文学史, 1901), Katsura Isō (桂五十郎) and Suzuki Torao’s (铃木虎雄) Comments and Interpretation of the History of Chinese Poetry (評释支那詩史). These works all contained a discussion of the differences between north and south literature in China. The main reason why “literary geography” joined these Japanese works of the history of Chinese literature then was that, many Japanese scholars accepted the “three-element theory” raised in History of English Literature written by Hippolyte Adolphe Taine that consisted of the race, environment and era, in addition to the narrative form of literary history based on it. So to speak, with the introduction of Taine’s theory, the first golden age of Chinese literature history took shape, along with “literary geography” entered this new narrative frame. Besides, another important factor for “literary geography” being introduced to the early works on the history of Chinese literature was the widespread “Comparative Study of North and South Literature.” And among all those related works, the most classical exposition was to tell the major difference between Chinese north and south literature so as to find how to

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perfect both of them, just as “Book of the Sui Dynasty: The Preface of Literary Biography” (隋书⋅文学传序) said: 江左宫商发越, 贵于清绮, 河朔词义贞刚, 重乎气质。气质则理胜其词, 清 绮则文过其意, 理深者便于时用, 文华者宜于咏歌, 此其南北词人得失之大 较也。 若能掇彼清音, 简兹累句, 各去所短, 合其两长, 则文质斌斌, 尽善尽 美矣。 [The rhythm of poems in the east of the Yangtze River sounds really impassioned, and it is usually so graceful and gorgeous that the poems could be easily intonated, yet the weakness lies in their excessive attention to rhetoric over the attention to meaning. While in the north of the Yellow River, lyrics are mostly rational and meaningful, therefore these songs are more educational, whereas their literary skills are not good enough to support the significant themes. This is the main difference between north and south poets, their works will be perfect in both aspects of rhetoric and meaning if they can learn from each other.]1

More importantly, with the national unification during the Tang and Song Dynasties, the political, economic and cultural boundaries between the north and south were blurred, while the “Comparative Study of North and South Literature” inheriting from the Wei and Jin Dynasties was evolved into a criticism mode, and began to be used in the criticism of literature and art. Both the above influences left obvious marks in those early works of the history of Chinese literature written by Japanese scholars. For instance, The History of Chinese Literature: The Preface written by Kojō Teikichi, The History of Chinese Literature written by Sasagawa Tanerō and The History of Chinese Literature: In Ancient Times written by Kojima Kenkichirō all cited the classical discussion in “Book of the Sui Dynasty: The Preface of Literary Biography,” but attributed the formation of the characteristics of the southern literature to the “environment,” which was evidently merged with the theory of “geographical determinism” from the West. So it could be seen that with the cultural blending of the East and the West, Japanese scholars chose to make corresponding adjustments according to their recognition of the geographical characteristics of the Chinese north and south literature: Firstly, they adjusted the directions of the traditional “Comparative Study of North and South Literature” from north and south to northwest and southeast; Secondly, they learned the diversity of Chinese literary geography sufficiently at the same time of reinterpreting the traditional topic. These two aspects were both more in line with the overall pattern and the trend of Chinese literary geography.

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In a word, these early works of the history of Chinese literature not only drew lessons from Taine’s “three-element theory,” especially the factor of “environment,” but also learned from the traditional “Comparative Study of North and South Literature.” This was the fusion of literary geography between China and western countries, as well as the manifestation of the localization of the western theory. Through the Japanese scholars, these early achievements were introduced to China, and created a new form of the history of Chinese literature and historical views, paradigms and methods. However, though these early works once looked at the history of Chinese literature from the perspective of literary geography, the relevant expounding had not been carried out, with only general discussion in the introduction of the book. Therefore, the further development of the study of literary geography, and the effective combination of literary geography and the history of literature, were still waiting to be explored.

The Study of the Distribution of Playwrights’ Native Places Appeared in History of Song and Yuan Drama The second stage of literary geography being involved in the new history of Chinese literature was in the 1910s, marked by the publication of WANG Guowei’s History of Song and Yuan Drama in 1913, when literary geography was formally involved in the works of the history of Chinese literature compiled by Chinese scholars and achieved a new level. The acceptance of literary geography in WANG Guowei’s book was intensively revealed in the ninth chapter “Time and Place of Yuan Drama” (元剧之时地), including the textual research, statistics and discussion of the native places of the Yuan-Dynasty playwrights. And through the analysis, WANG found that the native places of the Yuan-Dynasty playwrights mainly tended to move from the capital city in the north of the country to Hangzhou in the south, thus deduced the origin of Yuan-Dynasty plays with a view of the literary and cultural centers combining.2 Besides, though both WANG and Japanese scholars were retelling the “Comparative Study of North and South Literature,” History of Song and Yuan Drama was much more innovative and transcendent in many ways as it reached a new realm of studying the history of literature and literary geography. And it resulted from three historical reasons:

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1. “The Consciousness of Problems” of Japanese Scholars in the Old Works of Literary History WANG Guowei’s work did surpass those of Japanese scholars with its accurate description of literary geography in the history of literature, but we could not deny that the “consciousness” of this study actually originated from Japan. Around 1900, Kojō Teikichi, Kojima Kenkichirō and Sasagawa Tanerō published a series of books on Chinese literary history. However, the subsequent scholars like Suzuki Torao were not so satisfied with these previous discussions of the “north-south” topic. They planned to describe the geographical center of the history of Chinese literature more accurately, that might be why a precious historical material called “The Fragment of the Writing Conversation Between Suzuki Torao and LUO Zhenyu (罗振玉)” (铃木虎雄与罗振玉的笔谈残稿) showed a trace of the “consciousness” of studying the native places of playwrights.3 In this record, what Suzuki Torao asked was “in which place is the creative writing the most vigorous,” this was exactly the latest topic of Japanese Sinology around 1910, while obviously, the traditional “Comparative Study of North and South Literature” could no longer figure it out, neither did LUO Zhenyu’s answer then. WANG Guowei had joined this historical conversation, too. Despite that there was no mention of his opinion in the transcript, later, in 1913, WANG discussed the statistics of the native places of playwrights in his new book History of Song and Yuan Drama. It seemed just like a cogitative response of Suzuki’s question “in which place”, as well as a great consequence extended from its “consciousness”. 2. The Exploration and Improvements of the Statistical Method in the Study of the Geographical Distribution of Litterateurs Since the question was identified, it required a corresponding solution to establish the statistic system of the geographical distribution of litterateurs, which first derived from the introduction of some western instrumental concepts such as “human geography,” “political geography” and “literary geography,” then combined with the traditional textual research and the western positivism. After a series of instrumental concepts being put forward in LIANG Qichao’s (梁启超) “Talking about the General Trend of Chinese Geography” (中国地理大势论, 1902) and some other works which learned from the western theories, QIAN Jibo (钱基博) took the lead in

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coming up with a new research method in the sixth chapter in his article “The Discussion on the General Trend of Chinese Geography” (中国舆地 大势论), talking about the similarities and differences between the Yangtze River school and the Yellow River school. This work pointed out that during the Spring and Autumn Period, the Yangtze River Basin produced more Taoist masters, while the Yellow River Basin more Confucian masters. Specifically, there were 22 Taoist masters, including 13 from the south, 5 from the north and 4 unknown, and 36 Confucian masters, including 35 from the north and 1 from the south.4 Thus it could be seen that this research method was easy to operate, and the statistic of geographical distribution proved QIAN’s point of view as well as made his research more accurate and scientific. Besides, it should be mentioned that QIAN Jibo’s statistic was the inevitable way to do an in-depth “Comparative Study of North and South Literature,” later it was WANG Guowei who completed the further deduction. 3. The Establishment and Application of “Playwrights’ Database” Before writing History of Song and Yuan Drama, WANG Guowei checked and annotated A Collection of Qu (曲录, qu is a type of verse for singing, which emerged in the Southern Song and Jin Dynasties and became popular in the Yuan Dynasty in China). This work started in 1908, then the book was added up to six volumes the next year. Besides, WANG also checked The New Edition of Collating and Commenting on “The Ghost Book” (新编录鬼簿校注, 1910), and The Preface of 30 Kinds of Zaju Plays Published in the Yuan Dynasty (元刊杂剧三十种序录, since 1912, and zaju is a kind of poetic drama set to music, flourishing in the Yuan Dynasty in China). All these works aimed at establishing a prototype of the playwrights’ database, which was the basis of carrying out the statistic of the distribution of playwrights’ native places. And around 1907 after the publishing of “The Spirit of QU Yuan’s (屈 原) Literature” (屈子文学之精神), WANG began to pay attention to the geographical distribution of litterateurs. For example, in 1910, he talked about a feature of the geographical distribution of Yuan-Dynasty litterateurs that “most Chinese playwrights lived in one place” in his book Talking about the Collection of Qu (录曲馀谈). Despite the lack of any accurate data, he roughly found out the geographical distribution of playwrights, which meant his playwrights’ database was set up tentatively. In addition, WANG also noticed some changes, like different centers of the

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geographical distribution in different times. Therefore, compared with the “Comparative Study of North and South Literature” based on assumptions in Japan, WANG Guowei’s research was more strict and precise. In brief, from the Japanese scholars’ realizing, sharing and answering the questions about the history of literature, and the exploration and improvements of the statistics of litterateurs’ geographical distribution, to the establishment and use of the playwrights’ database, it was proved that WANG Guowei used to be at the very forefront of the academic community of his time, with his work History of Song and Yuan Drama showing remarkable significance in the process of literary geography entering the new history of Chinese literature.

The Geographical Distribution of Writers of the Past Dynasties Was Compiled in the Works on the History of Chinese Literature The 1930s witnessed the third stage of the literary geography being introduced into the new history of Chinese literature, during which plenty of representative works were published, like The Outline of the History of Chinese Literature (中国文学史大纲, 1931) by CHEN Guantong (陈冠 同), Solving Problems of Chinese Literary History (中国文学史解题, 1932) by XU Xiaotian (许啸天), The Outline of the History of Chinese Belles Letters (中国纯文学史纲, 1935) written by LIU Jing’an. That was to say, the geographical distribution of litterateurs fully became involved in the new-­ style history of Chinese literature. Compared with WANG Guowei’s statistics on the native places of Yuan-Dynasty playwrights, these works above were more comprehensive. And during the research process from the dynastic study to the general study, as well as from surveying the single literary form of plays to investigating all genres, “The Geographical Distribution of Chinese Litterateurs” (支那文学家の地理上の分布, Suzuki Torao, 1918) played an “intermediary” role again. Then it was directly cited, borrowed and reconstructed by Chinese scholars, thus started a new stage in which literary geography was roundly integrated into the general history of Chinese literature. 1. The Origin: Suzuki Torao First Created “The Geographical Distribution of Chinese Litterateurs”

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As early as in 1906, Suzuki Torao and Katsura Isō edited a lecture note “Comments and Explanation of Chinese Poetry: the Introduction” (評释 支那詩史⋅绪论) for Waseda University, inheriting the previous “Comparative Study of North and South Literature,” almost without any new opinions. However, he went further and pondered a focus topic: how to describe the geographical centers of Chinese literature accurately. This inspired WANG Guowei so much that in the ninth chapter of his book History of Song and Yuan Drama, he gave plenty of attempts yet only aimed at answering part of the question concerning the Yuan Dynasty. It was not until when an academic talkfest was held in Kyoto Imperial University on November 29  in 1918, and Suzuki Torao announced his latest work “The Geographical Distribution of Chinese Litterateurs,”5 that the question “in which place is the creative writing the most vigorous” was answered in terms of the general history of literature. In Suzuki Torao’s work, the names of Chinese litterateurs were listed according to their birth provinces and living dynasties so as to form a geographical distribution table in two sheets. The first one was divided into the following six periods: The Zhou Dynasty and the Warring States Period, the Western and Eastern Han Dynasties, the Three Kingdoms Period, the Jin Dynasty (266–420), the Southern and Northern Dynasties, and the Sui Dynasty. While the second one was constitutive of the Tang and Five Dynasties, the Song Dynasty, the Jin Dynasty (1115–1234), the Yuan Dynasty, the Ming Dynasty, and the Qing Dynasty. These two sheets covered 15 provinces and regions including Shandong, the capital (Hebei), Henan, Shanxi, Shaanxi and Gansu, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui, Jiangxi, Hubei and Hunan, Sichuan, Fujian, Guangdong, Guangxi, Yunnan and Guizhou, with 806 litterateurs in all, among whom most were in Henan and Shandong before the Tang dynasty, but after that, more lived in Zhejiang, Henan and Jiangsu. This table was of great significance as it was the first comprehensive statistics of the geographical distribution of Chinese litterateurs in the past dynasties. On one hand, it inherited and refined the thoughts of literary geography in the 1890s. On the other, it accepted and promoted WANG Guowei’s research method in History of Song and Yuan Drama. Later this table was translated and imitated by Chinese scholars widely. 2. The Introduction: HUANG Xuwu (黄朂吾) and CHEN Guantong Translated and Introduced “The Geographical Distribution of Chinese Litterateurs.”

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Suzuki Torao’s study of Chinese literature always caught Chinese scholars’ eyes. However, his article “The Geographical Distribution of Chinese Litterateurs” had not been appreciated until HUANG Xuwu firstly translated it into Chinese, though this version seemed to be not spread widely. Instead, The Outline of the History of Chinese Literature written by CHEN Guantong was the first to introduce the geographical distribution of litterateurs into the history of Chinese literature. This book was published by Shanghai Minzhi Publishing House in 1931 as the syllabus of Chinese literature history in high school, with the third appendix “Geographical Distribution Table of Chinese Litterateurs in Previous Dynasties” (我国历代文学家地理的分布表) directly translating Suzuki Torao’s “The Geographical Distribution of Chinese Litterateurs” (Actually CHEN’s table was totally the same as Suzuki Torao’s, even without any modification of the notes, and had not mentioned Suzuki Torao at all, so today we can regard it as a plagiarism, but at that time this was fairly common). It was the first time that the geographical distribution of litterateurs appeared in the academic works on the history of Chinese literature. However, in this book, the geographical distribution of the litterateurs and the exposition of literary history could not support each other, for the whole book was divided into seven parts drawing on the dynasties, while the geographical distribution table did not match these parts accordingly. 3. The reflection: XU Xiaotian made a criticism of Suzuki Torao in Solving Problems of Chinese Literary History. Undoubtedly it was never a success that CHEN Guantong “introduced” Suzuki Torao’s article into the high school syllabus. Nevertheless, it inspired many Chinese scholars’ reflection on Suzuki’s work. For example, XU Xiaotian cited Suzuki Torao’s geographical distribution table in the chapter “The Geographical Distribution of Chinese Litterateurs” (中 国文人地理的分配) of his book Solving Problems of Chinese Literary History (1932), then made a detailed analysis and severe criticism on it. Firstly, XU pointed out that Suzuki Torao’s table made a considerable mistake by taking a series of irrelevant people as litterateurs, such as some political figures, thinkers of the Pre-Qin Period, historians of the Western and Eastern Han dynasties, Neo-Confucianists of the Song and Ming Dynasties, textual critics of the Qing Dynasty, soldiers and emperors. Secondly, he also found that Suzuki Torao omitted many true writers like GUAN Hanqing (关汉卿), WANG Shifu (王实甫), MA Zhiyuan (马致

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远), LI Haogu (李好古), QIAO Jifu (乔吉甫), DONG jieyuan (董解元), MA Dongli (马东篱), GAO Ming (高明). Therefore XU Xiaotian thought Suzuki Torao’s distribution table “totally a mess” and it was “simply too ridiculous.”6 At this point, Suzuki’s materials probably came from the official history, and whenever the names were recorded, he took them into the list. But when XU Xiaotian wrote his book, the concept of “belles letters” had developed greatly, so thinkers, politicians and textual critics were completely excluded, while the omission of “belles-letters writers in the Yuan Dynasty” was extremely criticized. Besides, what XU Xiaotian did not criticize was Suzuki Torao’s recognition of the native places of Chinese litterateurs. It was said in “The Introductory Remark of the Study on Chinese Literature” (支那文学研究例言) written by Suzuki Torao that, as for the people in the attached table in his “The Geographical Distribution of Chinese Litterateurs,” they belong to these places where they actually lived in, instead of the written places of their native families in the book.7 Yet Suzuki Torao’s distribution table was not completely organized in this way, so it was still biased toward static description. Furthermore, the more important thing was to coordinate the geographical distribution table of litterateurs with the narration of literary history. XU Xiaotian had not been aware of this question, certainly he hadn’t put forward any solutions, either. A further study on this case was LIU Jing’an’s The Outline of the History of Chinese Belles Letters. 4. The Reconstruction: LIU Jing’an’s The Outline of the History of Chinese Belles Letters surpassed the achievements of Suzuki Torao. “The Geographical Distribution Table of Chinese Litterateurs” (中国 文学家的地理分布表) in LIU Jing’an’s book The Outline of the History of Chinese Belles Letters (1935) included people far less famous than those recorded by Suzuki Torao et al., as LIU took “belles letters” as a rather strict standard. And in terms of literary geography, the superiority of his book could be embodied in these following two aspects: Firstly, he made the “geographical distribution table of literature” closely match with the narration of the history of literature. LIU believed that the geographical distribution table of Chinese litterateurs could tell us how the Chinese litterateurs took turns and the evolution of Chinese cultural centers,8 so he summarized the difference between north and south literature as well as the migration of literary centers of different dynasties

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in the conclusion of the book, and detailed the comparison of the number of litterateurs among three periods of “before the Jin Dynasty, the Northern and Southern Dynasties to the Yuan Dynasty, and Ming and Qing Dynasties.”9 Secondly, LIU carried out his thought of literary geography throughout the narration of literary history. For instance, in his opinion, The Book of Poetry (诗经) was seen as the north literature with mainly realistic thinking, while Chu Ci: Songs of the Chu Kingdom (楚辞) was the dreamlike and romantic south literary work.10 Additionally, the chapter of novels in his book discussed the torpid origin of the novel through the characteristics of the north and south culture, and the chapter on plays cited WANG Guowei’s History of Song and Yuan Drama for reference. Moreover, at the end of the book, LIU revealed the regular pattern of the transition of Chinese literary centers moving from the north to the south at different times. On the whole, from WANG Guowei to Suzuki Torao and LIU Jing’an, the integration between the history of Chinese literature and literary geography gradually achieved important breakthrough.

The Construction of the Theory Model of the “Spatiotemporal Approach” to Chinese Literary History The fourth stage of literary geography stepping in the new works of Chinese literary history was in the 1940s, and a classical treatise of this period was CHEN Yinke’s “Spatiotemporal Approach” to the history of literature, which was put forward in his article “Annotation of ‘A Song of Everlasting Sorrow’” (长恨歌笺证, 1947). CHEN considered it necessary for all literary scholars to study not only time, but also the space of litterateurs and literary works to make a conclusion in one book.11 His thesis was of conclusive significance for both introducing the literary geography into the history of Chinese literature and completing its internal narrative structure, with three most important steps followed: 1. The “Spatiotemporal Approach” to the “Comparative Study of North and South Literature” The “Comparative Study of North and South Literature” was first raked up by LIANG Qichao in the early twentieth century. He put the

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traditional topic of the comparison of north and south literature under a new framework of literary geography in “Talking about the General Trend of Chinese Geography” (1902), trying to find the internal relationship among “literary geography,” “political geography” and the changes of the amphibious transportation first from a national perspective, and then gradually from a global perspective, and he truly made a progress. Then LIANG’s thesis was positively supported by LIU Shipei’s (刘师 培) “Differences Between North and South Literature” (南北文学不同论, 1905), WANG Baoxin’s (王葆心) Influences of the Region on the Literature (文之总以地域者, 1906) and WANG Guowei’s The Spirit of QU Yuan’s Literature (1907). They all made a systematic summary of the long-­ standing topic of north and south literature, and had broken out the limitations of traditional study with three new views: the dual dimension of the “north and south literature-literary geography,” the literary time and space of the whole country of all dynasties, and the poetic spirit integrating both north and south. 2. The “Spatiotemporal Approach” to the Study of Song and Yuan Drama The ninth chapter of History of Song and Yuan Drama was “Time and Place of Yuan Drama” (元剧之时地), which combined “time” (the period) and “place” (the native place), focusing on the textual research on the changes of time and geographical distribution of the Yuan-Dynasty drama. This did blend time and space together. As for the “time,” WANG Guowei divided the Yuan-Dynasty plays into three phases, each of which presented the central area of the distribution of playwrights. While in terms of the “space,” he not only showed the geographical distribution of the Yuan-Dynasty playwrights through some tables visually, but also paid great attention to the important stages of the alternation of generations and the migration of each generation’s center: First, there was a compilation office in Yanjing as well as a literature office in Pingyang in the 27th year of the Emperor Taizong of the Yuan Dynasty (Yanjing and Pingyang are both cities in ancient China); Second, the literature office was moved to the capital in 1265; Third, the playwrights were all from Hangzhou after the middle of the Yuan Dynasty, and the center of plays had moved to the south. From this point of view, the two dimensions of time and space of WANG Guowei’s research were mutually integrated.

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In addition, WANG also got four main regions of the geographical distribution of the Yuan-Dynasty playwrights: the capital, the municipality directly under the central government, the south of the Yellow River and the north of the Yangtze River, and Jiangsu and Zhejiang area. So it could be seen that he had actually transformed the literary question of the north and south into regions among the whole country, thus completed the fusion of the two propositions “north-south literature” and “literary geography” in the field of the stylistic study on plays. 3. The Overall Spatiotemporal View of the Study on the Literature of the Past Dynasties. A series of works on Chinese literary history published in the 1930s had developed an overall spatiotemporal view of the study on the literature in the past dynasties. For example, LIU Jing’an once made a summary of “The Geographical Distribution Table of Chinese Litterateurs” in his book The Outline of the History of Chinese Belles Letters (1935): From the Zhou and Qin Dynasties to the Jin Dynasty (266–420), the number of writers of the north was four times more than that of the south; And from the Northern and Southern Dynasties to the Yuan Dynasty, the gap between these two numbers was narrowing. While during the Ming and Qing Dynasties, there were four times more litterateurs in the south than the north on the contrary.12 Besides, this book also had “The Chronology of the Birth and Death of Chinese Litterateurs in Previous Dynasties” (中 国历代文学家籍贯生卒年表) attached in the end, which was a combination of time and space, either.13 Furthermore, AO Shiying (敖士英) published The Chronology of Chinese Literature (中国文学年表) in the same year,14 with the fourth volume including “The Statistical Table of the Places where Writers Came into Being” (作者产生地域表) and “The Map of Writers’ Cradles” (作者产生地域图). This kind of statistical method of literary geography was quite typical and advanced at their time, with a vital meaning of the mutual integration of literary history and literary geography. All these above advancing three stages laid a solid foundation for CHEN Yinke’s “Spatiotemporal Approach” to the history of literature, as well as pushed forward a higher requirement for the narration of Chinese literary history, that is, to construct a new narrative paradigm with the integration of time and space. In fact, this had never been achieved throughout the study of the history of Chinese literature in the past

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hundred years, therefore it could be said that CHEN Yinke’s thoughts were rather forward-looking, innovative and transcendent.

The Significance of Literary Geography Being Included in the New Works on Chinese Literary History It was of great value that literary geography was becoming more and more precise and scientific in the new works on Chinese literary history, to be more specific, we could make a brief discussion from three perspectives. 1. The “Paradigm” for the Study of Literary Geography Though the study of literary geography on the field of literary history accounted for a small proportion, it had a significance of “Paradigm” advocated by Thomas Samuel Kuhn, and had triggered many new topics, especially WANG Guowei’s History of Song and Yuan Drama. On one hand, WANG’s research set an example for the Japanese scholars, such as Shionoya On (鹽谷温) in addition to Suzuki Torao. Shionoya On attached “An Extra Table of the Yuan Verse Authors’ Regions” (元曲作者地方别 表) in his work A Lecture of the Introduction of Chinese Literature (支那文 学概論講話, 1919), and in Things about Yuan Zaju Plays (元の雑劇に就 いて, 1926) as well as Verse in the Yuan Dynasty (元曲, 1934), he discussed the Yuan-Dynasty playwrights mainly in way of the regional changes. All these works were based on WANG Guowei’s perspective. Besides, the third chapter of the book The History of Modern Chinese Plays and Verse (中国近世戏曲史) written by Aoki Masaru (青木正兒) in 1930 recalculated the geographical distribution of the playwrights so as to find out the process of Yuan-Dynasty plays moving from the north to the south and finally conquering the local drama in the south, and the next chapter showed “The Geographical Distribution Table of Ming and Qing Playwrights” (明清戏曲作者地方分布表), which was obviously influenced by WANG Guowei’s research, too. On the other hand, WANG Guowei’s study offered a model for those scholars in the School of Wu as well. Not only WU Mei (吴梅) himself attached great importance to WANG Guowei’s thesis as his articles “Overview of North and South Plays and Verse” (南北戏曲概言), “Profile of Yuan Zaju Plays” (元剧略说), and a letter “To DING Xiufu” (与丁琇

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甫) all noticed the questions about literary geography, with Shuang Ya Qu Hua: Talking about Chinese Qu in the Frost Cliff (霜崖曲话) almost excerpting WANG’s original text in the eighth volume, but also some disciples of him kept furthering his steps. For example, LU Qian (卢前) made an additional statistic in his book The History of Sanqu Verse (散曲史, sanqu is a type of verse for singing, which emerged in the Southern Song Dynasty then became popular in the Yuan Dynasty), based on the “works” in A New Edition of “The Spring Snow (elegant verse)” Edited by Yuefu (乐 府新编阳春白雪, yuefu was originally a government office “the Music Bureau” inherited from the Qin Dynasty. It was officially established in the Han Dynasty for collecting folk songs and ballads, and gradually became the name of them.) and New Plays of Both Royal and People Edited by Yuefu in the Taiping Years (朝野新声太平乐府) written by YANG Chaoying (杨朝英), then found that the center of sanqu writing was the West Lake in Hangzhou.15 Moreover, HUANG Xuwu, who translated Suzuki Torao’s work “The Geographical Distribution of Chinese Litterateurs,” and TANG Guizhang (唐圭璋), the author of “A Textual Research of Native Places of Song Poetry Writers During the two Song Dynasties” (两宋词人占籍考), were also the disciples of WU. 2. The Integration of “Literature Geography” and “Talents Geography” Along with the deepening of research, the study of literary geography had integrated the methods and theories of talents geography. For instance, Science published DING Wenjiang’s (丁文江) article “The Relationship Between Historical Figures and Geography” (历史人物与地理的关系) in No.1 of Vol. 8 in 1923, which calculated the number of historical figures in different regions in a given period by finding out the native places of about 6000 people included in “the twenty-four histories” (which includes a series of Chinese dynastic histories from remote antiquity till the Ming Dynasty), and finally draw a “distribution table of historical figures” as well as an “imperial examination table in the Ming Dynasty” according to “The Inscription of ‘Jinshi’ in the Ming Dynasty” (明代进士题名录; Jinshi were people who passed the highest imperial examination in ancient China), in order to describe the Chinese cultural centers and their changes in a quantitative way. Therefore it was reprinted in various publications and inspired a series of similar works. Compared with the qualitative description based on the geographical determinism, DING’s research appeared more “objective” and

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“scientific,” which was rather newfangled at that time, so its methods and theories were integrated into the study on literary geography, such as “Female Writers in 300 Years: the Preface of ‘Brief of the Qing-Dynasty Young Ladies’ Literature’” (三百年中的女作家——《清闺秀艺文略》 序) written by HU Shi (胡适), which counted the native places of 2310 female writers in the Qing Dynasty and discovered that women writers from Jiangsu and Zhejiang accounted for nearly a third of the country’s total number by each, and if those from Anhui were included, this proportion occupied more than two-thirds. HU’s study linked the rise and fall of literature with the level of local culture and furthered the interpretation of the evolution of literature from ancient to modern society greatly. 3. The Reflection on the Writing of the History of Chinese Literature “The history of literature” had played an irreplaceable role during the process of literature education, literature research, cultural heritage collation and nation construction for more than 100 years. And the “Spatiotemporal Approach” to the study of Chinese literary history had been a pivotal proposition to the discussion of “rewriting the history of Chinese literature” launched in the 1980s, and the comprehensive reflection of the twentieth-century Chinese literary history at the turn of this new century. That is to say, the integration of literary history and literary geography has actually been urging us to reflect on the writing of the history of Chinese literature. First, it reminds us re-exploring the mode of literary history. Actually, in a very long time, as for the study on literature, lots of scholars tended to pay attention only to time, but neglected the space as well as the inherent relationship between these two aspects, consequently forming a blind spot in their researches. However, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, more than 2800 academic works on the history of Chinese literature were published, witnessing two rounds of the mutual blending of literary history and literary geography flourishing in the twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries respectively. And in the middle of the twentieth century, CHEN Yinke’s theory model of the “Spatiotemporal Approach” to Chinese literary history was not only a summary of the previous period, but also a guide to later scholars. Then both the theory of “redrawing the map of Chinese literature” proposed by YANG Yi (杨义), and “reconstructing a spatiotemporal new paradigm” suggested by MEI Xinlin (梅新林) to correct the linear history of literature through bringing in the view of literary

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geography, can be regarded as the response to CHEN Yinke’s study, and are new explorations of the form of writing the literary history as well. Second, it makes us re-understand the objects of studying the history of literature, since the traditional mainstream of the literary history usually takes litterateurs and their works as its main objects. Consequently, the literary study seems only a collection of criticism to those writers and works, just like a catalogue with summaries as it used to be, unless the view of literary geography is included. In fact, the geographical distribution of writers, the spatial images and the pathways of transmission of literary works, with their evolution, are all the objects of the study on literary history. It is unquestionable that the history of literature tends to extend in two directions of both time and space, therefore the literary geography can be of great significance in developing the objects of literary study. Finally, it encourages us to reinterpret the engine of the evolution of literary history. To be specific, the discussion of “rewriting the history of Chinese literature” in the twentieth century mainly resulted from people’s dissatisfaction of political and social histories replacing the literary history, which humorously caused the absence of “literature” in the history of literature, and this was exactly a weakness due to the lack of the dimension of interpreting the impetus of literature’s evolution. As mentioned above, a group of early works on literary study were unable to keep introducing literary geography or the literary theory of space into the history of literature throughout their writing process, since the traditional “Comparative Study of North and South Literature” was not self-consistent enough then. Until the 1930s, some other scholars, such as LIU Jing’an, began to pay attention to the geographical distribution and the changes of centers of litterateurs. Later CHEN Yinke constructed a theory model of the “Spatiotemporal Approach” to Chinese literary history, which found three new bases for the driving force of the history of Chinese literature: First, the evolution of the geographical distribution of litterateurs in different times, including the relationship between the rise and fall of literature, and the changes of cultural centers; Second, the space images in literary works that revealed the reasons why litterateurs began to write; Third, the interaction between litterateurs and literary groups in their native places, which told the significance of literary fashion in one time at one place, of the holistic evolution of the national literature.

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Notes 1. 魏征, 令狐德棻 (唐): 《隋书》, 北京: 中华书局, 1973 年, 第 1730 页。 [WEI Zheng, LINGHU Defen (Tang Dynasty), Book of the Sui Dynasty (Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company, 1973), 1730.] 2. 王国维: 《王国维全集⋅宋元戏曲史》, 杭州: 浙江教育出版社, 2009 年, 第 91 页。 [WANG Guowei, The Collection of WANG Guowei’s Works · History of Song and Yuan Drama (Hangzhou: Zhejiang Education Publishing House, 2009), 91.] 3. 谢正光: “铃木虎雄与罗振玉的笔谈残稿,” 载大陆杂志社编《大陆杂志语 文丛书第三辑》第三册《序跋⋅目录学⋅语言文字学》, 台北: 大陆杂志社, 1975 年, 第 337 页。 [XIE Zhengguang, “The Fragment of the Writing Conversation Between Suzuki Torao and LUO Zhenyu,” collected in Preface and Postscript Bibliography Linguistics, The Third Album of the Chinese Series, Edited by The Continent Magazine, Vol. 3 (Taipei: The Continent Magazine, 1975), 337.] 4. 钱基博: “中国舆地大势论”第六节,” 《新民丛报》, 1905 年 4 月第 66 号。 [QIAN Jibo, “The Discussion on the General Trend of Chinese Geography,” Section 6, Xinmin Repository, no. 66, April, 1905.] 5. 铃木虎雄: “支那文学家の地理上の分布,” 后收录于《支那文学研究》, 京都: 弘文堂书房, 1925 年。 [Suzuki Torao, “The Geographical Distribution of Chinese Litterateurs,” later collected in The Study on Chinese Literature (Kyoto: Press of Hirobumidou, 1925).] 6. 许啸天: 《中国文学史解题》, 上海: 群学社, 1932 年, 第 208–209 页。 [XU Xiaotian, Solving Problems of Chinese Literary History (Shanghai: Qunxue Society, 1932), 208–209.] 7. 铃木虎雄: 《支那文学研究》, 京都: 弘文堂书房, 1925 年, 《例言》第 3 页。 [Suzuki Torao, The Study on Chinese Literature (Kyoto: Press of Hirobumidou, 1925), “The Introductory Remark,” 3.] 8. 刘经庵: 《中国纯文学史纲》, 北京: 著者书店, 1935 年, 第 2 页。 [LIU Jing’an, The Outline of the History of Chinese Belles Letters (Beijing: Authors Bookshop, 1935), 2.] 9. Ibid., 461–462. 10. Ibid., 22. 11. 陈寅恪: 《元白诗笺证稿》, 北京: 生活⋅读书⋅新知三联书店, 2001 年, 第 9 页。 [CHEN Yinke, A Textual Research on the Poems of the School of YUAN Zhen and BAI Juyi (Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2001), 9.] 12. 刘经庵: 《中国纯文学史纲》, 北京: 著者书店, 1935 年, 第 461–462 页。 [LIU Jing’an, The Outline of the History of Chinese Belles Letters (Beijing: Authors Bookshop, 1935), 461–462.] 13. Ibid., 463–475.

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14. 敖士英: 《中国文学年表》, 平北: 立达书局, 1935 年版。 [AO Shiying. The Chronology of Chinese Literature (Pingbei: Lida Book Company, 1935).] 15. 卢前: 《卢前曲学四种》, 北京: 中华书局, 2006 年, 第 8 页。 [LU Qian, Four Kinds of LU Qian’s Study on Qu (Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company, 2006), 8.]

CHAPTER 13

Spatial Metaphors and the Literary Cartography of Shanghai in Modern Chinese Novels Lanxiang Ji

The narrative of novels takes place in a certain space, which is the basis for its occurrence and development. And the space in novels is not made up together randomly, but organized orderly following the narrative logic of the writers, and can objectively build a spatial form with its meaning. According to writers’ spatial narrative, readers can usually draw a literary map. For example, in the late Qing Dynasty, novels set in Shanghai increased dramatically along with the rapid rise of the city, and according

This article was originally published in Zhejiang Social Sciences, Issue 7 of 2018. What follows is the full information: JI Lanxiang, “Spatial Metaphors and the Literary Cartography of Shanghai in Modern Chinese Novel,” Zhejiang Social Sciences, no. 7 (2018): 139–145. [纪兰香: “近代上海小说地图及其空间隐喻”, 《浙江社会科学》, 2018 年第 7 期, 139–145页。]

L. Ji (*) Jiaxing University, Jiaxing, China © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Fang, R. T. Tally Jr. (eds.), Spatial Literary Studies in China, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03914-0_13

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to my incomplete statistics, there are at least more than one hundred. Some of them directly mention Shanghai in their titles, such as The Singsong Girls of Shanghai (海上花列传), A Fairytale in Shanghai (海上尘天 影), A Dream of Prosperity in Shanghai (海上繁华梦), Romantic Dreams in Shanghai (海上风流梦), The Legend of Prostitutes in Shanghai (海天鸿 雪记), and The Accompanied Tour Around Shanghai (上海游骖记). The others, though do not contain “Shanghai” in the titles, definitely tell stories with Shanghai as their background, such as The Noise of the Street (市 声), The Nine-Tailed Turtle (九尾龟), The Nine-Tailed Fox (九尾狐), and Tide in Xiepu (歇浦潮, Xiepu is one of Shanghai’s old names). Obviously, Shanghai’s urban space depicted in the novels is true and accurate, including not only the names of various real places, streets, and buildings, but also many credible traffic lines and activity space of the characters. The clear and exact description of Shanghai urban space in the novels can even function as “a tour guide to Shanghai” for outsiders. And readers can draw a literary map of Shanghai based on the main characters’ walking scope and living space.

The Center of the Literary Map of Shanghai: The British Concession with No. 4 Horse Road as Its Core Since Shanghai became a treaty port, the map of urban Shanghai had been changing constantly. From the perspective of the municipal structure, the political and economic center of Shanghai was always located in Shanghai County before the port was open to the world. Until by the end of the nineteenth century, with the establishment of the British, French, and American concessions, Shanghai formed a special political pattern of “one city with three administrations”—the Chinese area, the Public Concession, and the French Concession. Among them, the Public Concession was the combination of the British Concession and the American Concession, but in citizens’ eyes, these two concessions had their own different regions and boundaries. Therefore, the urban map of modern Shanghai was generally marked with four different regions: the British Concession, the American Concession, the French Concession, and Shanghai County.1 This governance pattern was reflected not only in the division of regional space, but also in the literary map of Shanghai novels. In modern novels set in Shanghai, characters mainly move around the British Concession, centering on No. 4 Horse Road (Foochow Road) (四

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马路). Although most of them come from different places, their activity space in Shanghai is similar, extending outward from No. 4 Horse Road. They reside in inns on No. 4 Horse Road, recreate in taverns, restaurants, teahouses, parks, and brothels on No. 4 Horse Road, and take walks in Zhangyuan Garden and Yuyuan Garden on Bubbling Well Road, which is also in the nearby. The wandering route of QIU Ba (邱八), a son of a rich family, and LIN Daiyu (林黛玉), a prostitute, in The Nine-Tailed Turtle is quite typical: “(QIU Ba) takes a carriage ride with Daiyu to Zhangyuan Garden (张园) every day. After the lanterns are on, they would go to Yipinxiang Restaurant (一品香番菜馆) to have a western-style dinner. Sometimes, after that, they would go to the Dangui Tea Theater (丹桂茶 园) to see a night opera show. It has almost been a routine.”2 QIU Ba’s carriage trip represented a route that most dandies took in Shanghai at that time. For newcomers to Shanghai, to feel the bustling atmosphere of this metropolitan city in the foreign concessions, they cannot do without going to the theater, eating foreign dishes, taking a carriage trip, and visiting Zhangyuan Garden. In the seventeenth chapter of Chitchat and Basking in the Sun (负曝闲谈), HUANG Ziwen (黄子文)’s mother travels from the Shaoxing countryside to Shanghai. A prostitute suggests to HUANG Ziwen: “Take her to see an opera, eat big dinners, take a carriage, and play around Zhangyuan Garden.”3 For men in Shanghai, in addition to the above four activities, there is one more: visiting brothels. Foreign restaurants, theaters, teahouses, and brothels are the most famous on No. 4 Horse Road in the British Concession. Therefore, such places on No. 4 Horse Road and Zhangyuan Garden and Yuyuan Garden (愚园) on Bubbling Well Road (静安寺路) become the main activity space of the characters in the novels. For example, the name of No. 4 Horse Road appears 44 times in Legend of Flowers in Shanghai, 26 times in The Nine-­ tailed Turtle, and 20 times in the first 30 chapters in A Dream of Prosperity in Shanghai. LI Ou-fan (李欧梵) pointed out in his essay “Culture, Literature and Modernity of the Late Qing Dynasty” (晚清文化、文学与 现代性), “If we look at the popular novels of the late Qing Dynasty in this way, as long as the issues of reform and modernity are involved, Shanghai is in the background of almost every novel. And the so-called spatiotemporality of Shanghai means No. 4 Horse Road, academies and brothels.”4 The British Concession, with No. 4 Horse Road as the core, has become the central area of the literary map of Shanghai, mainly because this street, as the most prosperous and well-known area in Shanghai, provides the writers with a variety of colorful life scenes. CHI Yingcheng (池志澂)

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wrote in A Dream-Like Tour in Shanghai (沪游梦影) that: “The British Concession is the best place in Shanghai, and No. 4 Horse Road is the best in the British Concession, so visitors sing high praise for the Road.”5 In the eyes of foreign journalists at the end of the Qing Dynasty, “Foochow Road is where Shanghai’s entertainment venues converge, where you find everything the Chinese crave—opium, music, drama, women. Foochow Road is so famous all over China […] some Chinese come from afar just to see the social butterflies on Foochow Road.”6 On No. 4 Horse Road, almost all the high-end brothels, Chinese restaurants, western restaurants, teahouses, opium houses, and other places of consumption in Shanghai were concentrated. In particular, CHI Yingcheng stressed that “The brothels of different styles and ranks in Shanghai are among the best in the world. Generally speaking, those titled Shuyu (书寓) and Changsan (长三) are the best, with Yaoer (幺二) in the second rank.”7 The social function of Shanghai brothels in modern times was far greater than its function to offer erotic service. In the modern novels, we can find that the brothels in the vicinity of No. 4 Horse Road are the important scenes frequently depicted. In short, all kinds of living space on No. 4 Horse Road provide rich and colorful life scenes for narrative in modern novels. Another reason that the bustling No. 4 Horse Road becomes the main narrative space in the novels is that it accommodates a complex, diverse, and heterogeneous group of people. The newspaper Shen Paper described Shanghai in 1890 as “a tiny land, in which people from over 20 Chinese provinces and over 20 foreign countries are spending their daily life. It’s not an exaggeration to say that there are more people than ants here. There are wine and food for epicures; there are fireworks for happy tourists; there are cars and horses for travelers; there are opera theaters, tea houses, and opium houses for people seeking a pastime; There are book fairs, billiard rooms, photo shops, all as fascinating as possible.”8 As “a place where money flows like water,” No. 4 Horse Road brings together dandies and other groups of people from all over the country. These diverse and heterogeneous groups provide inexhaustible creative resources for novel writing.

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The Sub-center of the Literary Map of Shanghai: The French Concession to the South of the Pidgin River The French Concession was established in 1849 after the British Concession, covering the area between the British Concession and Shanghai County at the very start. During the rebellion war of Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (太平天国), the French Concession began to flourish, as it was closer to Shanghai County than the British and American concessions. According to Dream Records of Southern Shanghai (淞南梦影录) published in 1883, “The French Concession is to the south of the Pidgin River(洋泾浜), while the British Concession is to the north of the Pidgin River, both with dense population and noisy streets […].”9 During the years from the end of the nineteenth century to the first two decades of the twentieth century, the French Concession, though heavily populated, lagged far behind the British Concession in urban construction and commercial development. In My Guide to Shanghai (沪游杂记) published in 1887, the author described his visit to the French Concession: “In the northeast of our city, the French Concession is densely populated, but the streets are rather narrow. In its east, people from Fujian and Guangdong Province run their businesses.”10 In 1898, the German journalist Goldmann saw the French Concession through his eyes: “If one is to make a full assessment of the contribution made by the British in Shanghai, he only needs to look at the view of the French Concession to see what the French have not done […] In the streets with famous French names, the Chinese built their low, dirty wooden houses […] Though there are a lot of French people here, most live in the British Concession.”11 In Goldmann’s opinion, despite their ambition, the French did not take any concrete actions and lagged far behind the British Concession in urban construction. In the modern novels, the fashionable playboys and decent people in Shanghai seldom visit the French Concession except for dining in the restaurants on Rue Du Consulat (法大马路). The French Concession was mainly inhabited by the people from the bottom of the society and people in poverty, thus it became the sub-center of the literary map of modern Shanghai. In contrast to the high-end hotels on No. 4 Horse Road, which mainly met the needs of the affluent and upper-middle-class people, the French Concession provided a large number of cheap and simple hotels and rental rooms and became the first choice for the poor or lower class

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people. XIA Shixing (夏时行), a poor young man from another province, in A Dream of Prosperity in Shanghai, also frequents the high-end brothels on No. 4 Horse Road by day with a group of dudes, for the pretense of being rich. But because of his failure in finding a decent and well-paid job, he can only live in a small lane near the Passiejo Rue (八仙桥路) in the French Concession, sharing a small room with three families. As he has been owing a debt to an expensive brothel for a long time, the procuress comes but finds him dressed in rags, dwelling in a rented shabby room. Both of them are extremely embarrassed, and soon a fierce quarrel bursts out, for he is still not able to pay the debts. In sharp contrast to No. 4 Horse Road with all the high-end brothels, the French Concession is home to a large number of lower class brothels. In Old Stories in Shanghai (沪壖话旧录), the author HAISHANG Shushisheng (海上漱石生) mentioned: “The Erotic Opium Houses are places for enjoyment of the lower class people. They are everywhere in the new streets outside the east gate and north gate of the French Concession. […] The French Concession is still as it was.”12 In Legend of Flowers in Shanghai, young people from rich families stay at the Changsan Brothels (the highest rank in this trade) on No. 4 Horse Road, while the youth from poor families and servants in rich families, such as ZHAO Puzhai (赵朴斋) and ZHANG Xiaocun (张小村), seek erotic service in the inferior brothels on the new streets of the French Concession. Compared with the Changsan brothels on No. 4 Horse Road, the opium houses here are cramped with shabby interior decoration. Needless to say, the prostitutes in these opium houses are no match for those in the Changsan and Yao’er brothels on No. 4 Horse Road, in terms of talent, appearance, and social skills. However, these places are more affordable to unemployed and low-status proles like ZHAO Puzhai. The French Concession is also a haven for young dandies who are down and out in Shanghai. Most of the main characters in the modern novels are from wealthy families in surrounding counties. So when they first come to Shanghai, they choose to stay at expensive inns on No. 4 Horse Road without any hesitation and patronize lots of commercial places frequently. But once they squander all their money, they will be expelled from the British Concession without mercy, and then the French Concession, with its low cost of living, will embrace them. In A Dream of Prosperity in Shanghai, a pair of dandies named YOU Yezhi (游冶之) and ZHENG Zhihe (郑志和) arrive in Shanghai with plenty of money. They dwell in the Changfa Inn (长发客栈) near No. 4 Horse Road, which is a nice inn with clean food and neat rooms. Infatuated with prostitutes, they rent a high

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mansion in the rich community called Guansheng Li (观盛里), at the west end of No. 4 Horse Road. Soon, the prostitutes steal all their money and make them penniless. At first, they manage to live in a shabby inn in the British Concession. Later, these poor, sick, penniless young men are driven away and have to live in the cheapest, shabbiest inn near Tourane Rue (郑 家木桥路) in the French Concession. The inn is in such a bad condition that it is called a beggar’s inn. Finally they have to return home. In short, in the modern novels, the French Concession is relatively backward in urban construction, commerce, and trade, and the living cost there is relatively low too, thus mainly attracting poor and lower class people from all over the country. In the early years of the French Concession, the public security was in chaos, especially around Tourane Rue and Rue Pere Huc (东新桥路) along the boundary River of the British and French concessions. Low-class opium houses, casinos, and brothels were concentrated, and gangs were rampant, forming hotbeds for all kinds of crimes. As a result, this area is rarely visited by the main characters of the novel but becomes the stronghold of various downtrodden people and the underclass, thus turning into the sub-central area of the literary map.

The Second Sub-center of the Map of Shanghai Novels: The American Concession in Hongkou (虹口) The American Concession is located in the north of Woosungjiang River (吴淞江), mainly in the Hongkou area. It is recorded in Dream Records of Southern Shanghai that “The American Concession extends from the north of Neepardoo River (二摆渡河) to Hongkou”13 and “The American Concession is in the north bank of Wusong River, and is the residence of Cantonese businessmen and Japanese people. It is inferior not only to the British Concession, but also to the French Concession.”14 This was the situation of American Concession in the early 1880s. As this area was the hub for Shanghai’s imports and exports, a large population of porters and other migrant workers gathered here. In addition, Hongkou’s urban construction was relatively backward, which made the cost of living here relatively low. Therefore, this area also attracted poor people from all over the country. “There is really nothing worth mentioning about the American Concession,” wrote the German journalist Goldmann in 1898, “This is called Hongkou, and the place that extends out along the shipyard is actually the port area of Shanghai […] The main street is called ‘Broadway’,

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which is definitely broad, but the houses are mostly run-down and ugly. People go there mainly for the woodcuts in small Chinese shops.”15 In modern novels, the American Concession in Hongkou, like the French Concession in the south of the Pidgin River, has become the sub-­ center of Shanghai’s literary map, because it falls far behind the British Concession in urban construction, commercial prosperity, and material enjoyments. Therefore, the main characters in the novel mostly stay in the area around No. 4 Horse Road, seldom visiting Hongkou, a living place for people with little income or abnormal social identity. For example, in Odd Things Witnessed in Twenty Years (二十年目睹之怪现状), the two main characters live in Hongkou. One is LI Jingyi (黎景翼), the son of a bankrupted official who is not good at financial management and has come into huge debts. Therefore, the whole family escape from Fujian Province and finally move to Hongkou. Since LI has been out of work for many years and is in the grip of poverty now, he tries to defraud his younger brother, but fails. Then he sets up a scam to sell his sister-in-law to a brothel for a considerable sum of money. In one word, this down and out dandy can do anything for money. The other is a poor scholar making a living by fortune-telling based on given Chinese characters. He is in a poverty-stricken condition after losing his school house. He moves to Hongkou and finds that many of his town mates are running private schools for young children here. Now his whole family resides in a single shabby room. In short, Hongkou is home to the poor or unsuccessful people from other provinces. Hongkou’s relative remoteness also tends to make it the first choice for people with special identity, such as revolutionaries, people with ambiguous identities, and criminals. In the novel The Flower in the Sea of Sin (孽海花), the revolutionaries, secret lovers, and escaped concubines all choose to live in Hongkou. The revolutionary party member from Japan live in the inn named “Changqing Hall” on No. 1 Horse Road. The amorous and gifted young man CHEN Jidong (陈骥东) also settles his secret lover, a British wife, in a house on Range Road to avoid possible conflicts with his French wife, who lives around Jing’an Temple in the British Concession. And the so-called Minister Counselor’s Wife, JIN Wenqing (金雯青)’s concubine, FU Caiyun (傅彩云), escaping from the lonely life in JIN’s house after his death, has also been hidden in Hongkou for a while. For all these people the remoteness of Hongkou makes it the best place for their concealment. Hongkou is also the resident place for the down and out people expelled from No. 4 Horse Road, especially when those dandies from other places

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become poverty-stricken. CHEN Bohe (陈伯和), a character in The Sea of Hatred (恨海), escapes from Beijing because of the riots in the year of Gengzi (including the Boxer Rebellion and the Invasion of the Eight-­ Nation Alliance to China in 1800) but makes an unexpected fortune on the way to Shanghai. He lives in the Dafang Inn near No. 4 Horse Road in the British Concession, always hanging out with bad friends in brothels, opium houses, and other popular entertainment places. Soon prostitutes sweep away all his money. He thus falls instantly into poverty. Being poor but addicted to the opium, he moves from the Dafang Inn to a tutty and small opium house in Hongkou. Later, he is found by his father-in-law and temporarily lives in the British Concession but runs away many times because of opium addiction. Poor and ill, he can only live in the cheap small opium houses in Hongkou and finally falls dead in this area. From the migration track of CHEN Bohe in Shanghai, it can be seen that he lives in the vicinity of No. 4 Horse Road when he is rich and in Hongkou after being down and out. The process from his prosperity to his degradation is also the process of his being driven away to Hongkou from No. 4 Horse Road. The common features of the American Concession and the French Concession, as the sub-centers of the literary map of modern Shanghai, are their backwardness in urban construction and commercial development and the lower degree of prosperity in comparison to the British Concession. Therefore, they become the living space for the minor characters in the novels and the short-term residence for the major characters when they fall into poverty. In fact, most novelists of this period tended to express “exhortation and punishment” in their works, focusing their eyes on the “indulgence” of the people in the central zone in order to warn and admonish the dandies. A Dream of Prosperity in Shanghai by SUN Jiazhen (孙家振) begins with this: “The area within ten miles in the foreign concession is both the hotbed for erotic service, and a trap full of thistles and thorns, which makes many people indulged and lost in it. The book is a collection of what I have seen and heard in my daily life, and I hope it can not only inspire some discussion, but also serve as a warning to the readers.”16 The bustling and central area is mainly in the British Concession, and the French and American concessions naturally become the sub-­ centers of the map of Shanghai novels.

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Boundaries of the Literary Map of Shanghai: The Dominant and Recessive Spaces A geospatial “boundary” refers to the connective zone of adjacent areas. In the novels about modern Shanghai, the range of characters’ activities is mainly in the concessions, which become the dominant space. The readers are familiar with the daily life there, such as food, accommodation, traveling, and entertainment. But little is known about Shanghai County, which is separated from the concessions only by a city wall. As a part of the geographical space of Shanghai, Shanghai County, together with other neighboring counties, has become the zone connecting Shanghai and its adjacent places, the passway to the concessions, the departure site, and home to return for characters in those novels. Although Shanghai County is adjacent to the concessions, few outcomers stay here, and even the young locals rush to the bustling foreign concession as well. In the novel A Dream of Prosperity in Shanghai, XIE You’an (谢幼安) and DU Shaomu (杜少牧) travel to Shanghai from Suzhou. While choosing their residence between the north and south of the city (respectively, referring to the concessions and Shanghai County), “You’an knows that Shaomu loves a lively life. Even if they resided in the south of the city, Shaomu would go to the north every day. So, it’s better to dwell in the north.”17 This is also the choice of most outsiders who come to visit Shanghai at that time. Similarly, the local youth are rarely reluctant to leave the crowded and dilapidated Shanghai County, either. Although the brothers TAO Yunfu (陶云甫) and TAO Yufu (陶玉甫) in the novel The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai are from an official family in Shanghai, they also spend their daily lives mainly in the concession, and the novel has no account of their lives in the county town. For another instance, the merchant HONG Shanqing (洪善卿) in the novel has opened the Yongchang Ginseng Shop in Xian’gua Street (咸瓜街), Shanghai County, but the novel gives little account of his activities there. His daily life is mainly near No. 4 Horse Road in the British Concession. Therefore, in the literary map of modern Shanghai, Shanghai County is located beyond the boundary zone. In modern novels, people who are active in the concessions come from the nearby counties mainly in Zhejiang and Jiangsu province, such as Songjiang, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Changzhou, Huzhou, Wuxi, Ningbo, and Yangzhou. From these places people pour into Shanghai, and then go back when they leave Shanghai. The main characters in The Nine-Tailed

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Turtle like ZHANG Qiugu (章秋谷), FANG Youyun (方幼恽), LIU Houqing (刘厚卿), GONG Chunshu (贡春树), and FANG Ziheng (方子 衡), all come from Changzhou, with the exception of QIU Ba from Huzhou. And in A Dream of Prosperity in Shanghai, the main characters XIE You’an, DU Shaomu (杜少牧), QIAN Shouyu (钱守愚), and QIAN Shaodu (钱少愚) are from Suzhou; PAN Shao’an (潘少安) is from Changzhou; YOU Yezhi and ZHENG Zhihe are from Yangzhou. Shanghai attracts them like a magnet for the prosperity, fashion, and luxury of the concession area. The neighboring counties are the entrance and exit to and from Shanghai for the characters, thus becoming the boundaries of the literary map of Shanghai. As the boundary of the literary map of modern Shanghai, Shanghai County and other surrounding counties are not only the connecting zone of the geographical space between Shanghai and its adjacent areas in the map, but also the boundary of dominant space and recessive space outside the literary map. The dominant space is the foreign, modern, and urbanized area. In contrast, the recessive space is the local, traditional, and rural area. The Shanghai County, as the epitome of many Chinese traditional counties, lags far behind the concessions. LI Weiqing (李维清) commented in Local Chronicles of Shanghai (上海乡土志) that: “In the concessions, roads extend in all directions, while the streets inside the county are narrow. The concessions are extremely clean, the cars move even without kicking up any dust, and people here lead a happy life. While in the county, although has a bureau responsible for road cleaning, the water in the rivers still has a pungent smell, and squat toilets can be seen everywhere in secluded corners. So the county is totally a different world in contrast to the concessions.”18 For another example, in the book A Brief History of Civilization (文明小史), the three brothers of the JIA family in Wujiang County, Jiangsu Province, learned about many new things and exotic objects in Shanghai from the newspaper and sighed, “Alas, we live in this remote place, just like frogs in the well knowing nothing of the great ocean. When would we be able to go to Shanghai, and see the world, and have a meaningful life?”19 In a word, concessions in Shanghai present the view of a spacious, neat, lively, fashionable, and open urban landscape, while Shanghai County and the surrounding counties present the view of a crowded, dirty, humble, outdated, ill-informed, and traditional county landscape. The gap between the two worlds lies in turns of the infrastructure and material living standard. At the same time, the various weird and dangerous social phenomena in the concessions are also totally different

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from the traditional and conservative social customs of Shanghai County and the surrounding counties, representing the foreign and the local, the modern and the traditional, the urban and the rural of social culture, respectively. Consequently, most of the young outcomers in the modern novels finally return to the traditional rural space after having experienced a wonderful yet perilous journey in the metropolitan concessions of Shanghai.

The Metaphorical Meaning of the Spaces in the Literary Map of Shanghai The narrative space is where the novel develops its narration. A specific space produces specific plots and stories, while the specific plots and stories need their specific space, so the plot, story, and narrative space of the novel are inter-dependent and generated mutually. In Atlas of the European Novel, Franco Moretti summed up the characteristics of the map of European novel: “They highlight the ortgebunden,20 place-bound nature of literary forms: each of them with its peculiar geometry, its boundaries, its spatial taboos and favorite routes.”21 Modern novels depicting Shanghai also have boundaries, space taboos, and preferred routes, which are reflected in the map of the novels, building a spatial form with the British Concession as the center, the French and American concessions as the secondary centers, and Shanghai County and other surrounding counties as the boundary. This spatial distribution has multiple metaphorical meanings. First, the map of Shanghai novel is a metaphor of novelists’ national anxiety. The ground for this argument is that the map of modern Shanghai can be seen as the map of concessions, whose establishment and urbanization are directly related to the opening up of Shanghai as a port city after the Opium War, at the cost of losing the national sovereignty of China with enormous humiliation. Started from the small British Concession, Shanghai’s urban space was finally occupied mostly by the British, American, and French concessions and reshaped by the foreign powers according to their political force and capital accumulation, as well as their identity privileges. Moreover, the foreign powers also took advantage of the incompetence of the Qing government and gradually seized the legislative, executive, and judicial powers of the concessions, making them the political “gray zones” that were out of the Qing government’s control.

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This situation also made it easy for the concessions in Shanghai get rid of the traditional moral bounds, thus become slack in morality. In addition, the ultimate purpose of the establishment of concessions is to pursue commercial interests. Making money is the only pursuit for foreigners who come to Shanghai from thousands of miles away. For example, an English man simply said that “My job is to make money and get rich as quickly as possible. I rent the land and houses to the Chinese and get three to four percent interest, which is the best deal I can do with my money. I hope to make a fortune in two or three years at the most, and then leave. What does it matter to me whether Shanghai would be burned down or submerged in water? Do not expect a man like me to spend years and years in this unsanitary place for the benefit of future generations. We are all ‘money-makers’ and we are all pragmatic. Our profession is to make money, as much as possible, as quickly as possible--and to achieve this, every means permitted by law is good.”22 Since the concessions pursued the commercial values, profit and material enjoyment over justice, morality and ethics, which ran counter to the traditional Chinese ethics, the social lifestyle and consumption view here were also completely overturned, just as WU Jian-ren (吴趼人) wrote frankly in Odd Things Witnessed in Twenty Years: “Shanghai is densely populated by a mixed community of merchants and cheap laborers, as well as foreigners and locals. A large number of things, like swindles, kidnapping, gambling, and many other strange unexpected cases emerge here—which transform the place where people were simple and honest sixty years ago into a risky and dangerous world full of fugitives.”23 WU’s anxiety of the morality and values in the concessions is truly outspoken. And when a novelist attaches all his attention to the dominant space, the concession, worrying about the social atmosphere, morality and values here, it is exactly the expression of his anxiety about his country. Second, the map of Shanghai novels also implies the novelists’ urban confusion. “According to the psychology of memory, people’s impression and memory of the environment are divided into three levels: the object, field and event.”24 So are the writer’s impression and memory of the city. The object, field, and event are interrelated. Among them, the field is the specific environment where the event takes place and also the spatial carrier of the object and the event. And from the point of view of the “object,” most modern novelists wrote their works similarly as “a guidebook of Shanghai,” describing various fashionable objects in the British Concession, from the infrastructure and means of transportation to the daily necessities.

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For example, Yipinxiang Western Restaurant not only was well decorated with exquisite utensils, but also had introduced the latest scientific and technological achievements in the world at that time, such as electric lamps, electric fans, and telephones. Its material standard was almost in step with the world. Besides, from the perspective of the “field,” the center of the map of modern Shanghai novel is the British Concession with No. 4 Horse Road as its core. That is to say, the British Concession is the main space of the novel narrative. The novelists make their protagonists roam around the prosperous places and various large parks on No. 4 Horse Road in the British Concession all day long, among which the specially marked places are Yipinxiang Western Restaurant, Dan’gui Tea Theater, the high-end Changsan brothels in Huifang Li Community and Zhangyuan Garden beside Jin’an Temple. Zhangyuan Garden, for instance, is the most fashionable place for entertainment with all sorts of leisure facilities and can be seen as a scenic spot, a restaurant, a teahouse, a theater, a library, a photo studio, an exhibition hall, a funfair, and so on. The novelists introduce a variety of things of the concessions minutely, from which we can see their infatuation of the material civilization here. Furthermore, in terms of the “event,” although the luxurious British Concession is a land of romance and wealth, it is also full of temptations, deception, and other kinds of traps. Many young people indulge in diversified desires after arriving in Shanghai and become victims of scams for their lack of experience, finally lose their money or even their lives. Time and again, the modern novelists tell stories of loss, degradation, and destruction of the young outsiders in the British Concession, as well as swindles and scams, which reflects their angst of the urban social atmosphere in the concessions. Therefore, the map of modern Shanghai novels is a metaphor of the novelists’ urban confusion with a mixed feeling of both obsession and panic. Third, the map of Shanghai novels also implies the novelists’ local complexes. The characters in the modern Shanghai novels, mostly from the surrounding counties, are sick of the poor material conditions, the dreary lives, and the out-of-date thinking in their hometown but admire the fashion, civilization, romance, and prosperity in Shanghai. And these “brave people” also cross the line between the traditional local space and the modern urban space. However, after a fantastic yet dangerous urban experience, most of them will be disillusioned and eventually choose to return to their native space. For instance, in A Brief History of Civilization, when three brothers of the JIA family learn the prosperity and advanced civilization of Shanghai from the newspaper, they are fascinated and are all eager to travel to Shanghai. Then in Shanghai they witness plenty of hypocritical

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and ugly scenes, so returning home naturally becomes their final decision. From this, the trip to Shanghai only seems to prove the coexistence of dreams and traps in this city. And from the novelists’ point of view, cities are places of luxury and vanity, full of temptations and pitfalls, which make young people fall into depravity, abandon their families, and even lose their lives, while the traditional native space is the fertile ground for them to grow up with talents. For example, in A Dream of Prosperity in Shanghai, YOU Yezhi and ZHENG Zhihe spent all their money in Shanghai and were once very close to the death. But after returning home, these two prodigals thoroughly changed—in Shanghai, they were flirtatious and impetuous, but later at home, they became honest, gentle, polite, and hard-working, trying their best to make progress. All kinds of plots like this in the novels reflect that the modern novelists may criticize the traditional countryside to some extent but still identify with it more. By comparing with the urban-rural dualistic mode of Balzac’s Paris series in the nineteenth century, we can see the local complex of the writers of Shanghai series in modern China more clearly. Many characters in Balzac’s novels go to live in Paris from other provinces, such as Rastignac in Father Goriot and Lucien in The Glory and Misery of the Courtesans. Subsequently their lifestyle changes, from a frugal native life to a luxurious metropolitan life in Paris. But unlike the young outsiders in Shanghai, they are keen to integrate into the life in Paris. “And once these roles are in the new community, they will never look back, even if they fail and end up in destruction in Paris (like Birotteau and Lucien).”25 Barzac’s characters are extremely unconfident of their old lifestyle in the face of the metropolitan lifestyle in Paris and even deny themselves. On the contrary, the characters in modern Shanghai novels are attached to the traditional rural lifestyle subconsciously. To them, the urban lifestyle is only a condiment, and their final destination is still their native land. So on the issue of the opposition between urban and rural space, in Balzac’s novels, cities have achieved a dominant position, while in the modern Chinese novels, the power of cities is still very weak, and the traditional local space takes the leading role as before, which also reveals the modern novelists’ local complex—the identification and attachment to the traditional rural lifestyle after experiencing the modern urban life. In short, the literary map of modern Shanghai novels not only outlines the urban spatial form of Shanghai in modern novels, reflecting its internal narrative logic, but also interprets the cultural code of modern Shanghai together with the unique emotional appeal and complex urban perception of the novelists in that particular era.

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Notes 1. The Complete Map of Shanghai County and Concessions published in the tenth year of Guangxu Emperor (1884) by Shanghai Dianshizhai Press (上海点石 斋出版社) indicates the area of the British, French, and American concessions and Shanghai County in different colors. In Dream Records of Southern Shanghai compiled by HUANG Shiquan (黄式权) in the ninth year of Guangxu Emperor (1883), the geographic location of the concessions is recorded as follows: “The French Concession is to the south of the Pidgin River, and the British Concession is to the north […] The American Concession is to the north of the Woosungjiang (吴淞江) River.” In 1893, CHI Yingcheng (池应澂) wrote in “A Dream-like Tour in Shanghai” that “All the places where people from Britain, France and the United States live are called c̒ oncessions’.” And in 1898, Goldmann, a German journalist once visiting China, wrote in his report: “Shanghai consists of the British Concession, the American Concession, and the French Concession […] But generally speaking, only the British Concession is a city in real sense […].” 2. 漱六山房: 《九尾龟》, 武汉: 荆楚书社, 1989 年, 第 175 页。 [Shuliushanfang (ZHANG Chunfan, 张春帆), The Nine-Tailed Turtle (Wuhan: Jingchu Publishing House, 1989), 175.] 3. 蘧园: 《负曝闲谈》, 南昌: 江西人民出版社, 1988 年, 第 91 页。 [QU Yuan, Chitchat and Basking in the Sun (Nanchang: Jiangxi People’s Publishing House, 1988), 91.] 4. 李欧梵: 《李欧梵自选集》, 上海: 上海教育出版社, 2002 年, 第 278 页。 [Leo Ou-fan Lee, Selections from Leo Ou-fan Lee (Shanghai: Shanghai Education Press, 2002), 278.] 5. 葛元煦等: 《沪游杂记 淞南梦影录 沪游梦影》, 上海: 上海古籍出社, 1989 年, 第 156 页。 [GE Yuanxu, et al. (eds.), My Guide to Shanghai, Dream Records of Southern Shanghai, A Dream-Like Tour in Shanghai (Shanghai: Shanghai Chinese Classics Publishing House, 1989), 156.] 6. 王维江, 吕澍辑译: 《另眼相看: 晚清德语文献中的上海》, 上海: 上海辞 书出版社, 2009 年, 第 184 页。 [WANG Weijiang, Lü Shu (eds. & trans.), A New Perspective: Shanghai of the Late Qing Dynasty in German Literature (Shanghai: Shanghai Lexicographic Publishing House, 2009), 184.] 7. 葛元煦等: 《沪游杂记 淞南梦影录 沪游梦影》, 上海: 上海古籍出社, 1989 年, 第 163 页。 [GE Yuanxu, et al. (eds.), My Guide to Shanghai, Dream Records of Southern Shanghai, A Dream-Like Tour in Shanghai (Shanghai: Shanghai Chinese Classics Publishing House, 1989), 163.] 8. 《申报》 1890-12-01. [Shen Paper, December 1st, 1890.] 9. 葛元煦等: 《沪游杂记 淞南梦影录 沪游梦影》, 上海: 上海古籍出社, 1989 年, 第 103 页。 [GE Yuanxu, et al. (eds.), My Guide to Shanghai, Dream Records of Southern Shanghai, A Dream-Like Tour in Shanghai (Shanghai: Shanghai Chinese Classics Publishing House, 1989), 103.]

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10. Ibid., 1. 11. 王维江, 吕澍辑译: 《另眼相看: 晚清德语文献中的上海》, 上海: 上海辞 书出版社, 2009 年, 第 170–171 页。 [WANG Weijiang, Lü Shu (eds. & trans.), A New Perspective: Shanghai of the Late Qing Dynasty in German Literature (Shanghai: Shanghai Lexicographic Publishing House, 2009), 170–171.] 12. 熊月之主编: 《稀见上海史志资料丛书2》, 上海: 上海书店出版社, 2012年, 第 83 页。 [XIONG Yuezhi (ed.), Rare Records of Shanghai Series 2 (Shanghai: Shanghai Bookstore Publishing House, 2012), 83.] 13. 葛元煦等: 《沪游杂记 淞南梦影录 沪游梦影》, 上海: 上海古籍出社, 1989 年, 第 155 页。 [GE Yuanxu, et al. (eds.), My Guide to Shanghai, Dream Records of Southern Shanghai, A Dream-Like Tour in Shanghai (Shanghai: Shanghai Chinese Classics Publishing House, 1989), 155.] 14. Ibid., 103–104. 15. 王维江, 吕澍辑译: 《另眼相看: 晚清德语文献中的上海》, 上海: 上海辞 书出版社, 2009 年, 第 172 页。 [WANG Weijiang, Lü Shu (eds. & trans.), A New Perspective: Shanghai of the Late Qing Dynasty in German Literature (Shanghai: Shanghai Lexicographic Publishing House, 2009), 172.] 16. 孙家振: 《海上繁华梦》, 南昌: 百花洲文艺出版社, 2011 年, 第 1 页。 [SUN Jiazhen, A Dream of Prosperity in Shanghai (Nanchang: Baihuazhou Literature and Art Press, 2011), 1.] 17. Ibid., 6. 18. 李维清: 《上海乡土志》, 上海: 上海古籍出版社, 1989 年, 第 4 页。 [LI Weiqing, Local Chronicles of Shanghai (Shanghai: Shanghai Chinese Classics Publishing House, 1989), 4.] 19. 李伯元: 《文明小史》, 上海: 上海古籍出版社, 1982 年, 第 122 页。 [LI Boyuan, A Brief History of Civilization (Shanghai: Shanghai Chinese Classics Publishing House, 1989), 122.] 20. The expression is Reiner Hausherr’s, “Kunstgeographie—Aufgaben, Grenzen, Möglichkeiten,” Rbeinische Vierteljabrsblätter, XXXIV (1970): 58; Qtd. in Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1998), 5. 21. Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1998), 5. 22. 阿礼国: 《大君之都》第 1 卷, 第 37–38 页, 载《上海法租界史》, [法] 梅 朋, 傅立德著, 倪静兰译, 上海: 上海社会科学院出版社, 2007 年, 第 146–147 页。 [Rutherford Alcock, The Capital of the Tycoon (Volume 1), 37–38, quoted from C.  B. Maybon and J.  Fredet, trans. NI Jinglan, Histoire De La Concession Francaise De Changhai (Shanghai: Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press, 2007), 146–147.]

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23. 吴趼人: 《二十年目睹之怪现状》, 北京: 中国画报出版社, 2014 年, 第 1 页。 [WU Jianren, Odd Things Witnessed in Twenty Years (Beijing: China Pictorial Publishing House, 2014), 1.] 24. 陈望衡, 丁利荣主编: 《环境美学前沿》第 2 辑, 武汉: 武汉大学出版社, 2012年, 第 227 页。 [CHEN Wangheng, DING Lirong (eds.), Frontier of Environmental Aesthetics (Volume 2) (Wuhan: Wuhan University Press, 2012), 227.] 25. 戴维•哈维: 《巴黎城记: 现代性之都的诞生》, 黄煜文译, 桂林: 广西师范 大学出版社, 2010 年, 第 36 页。 [David Harvey, Paris, the Capital of Modernity, trans. HUANG Yuwen (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2010), 36.]

PART III

Geocritical Studies and Textual Analysis

CHAPTER 14

The Middle Place: Mediation and Heterotopia in Nick Joaquín’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels Iping Liang

Introduction In 1973, sociologist Edna Bonacich at the University of California, Riverside, published an essay, “A Theory of Middleman Minorities,” in which she argued that “there is a general consensus that a number of ethnic groups in the world have occupied a similar position in the social An early version of this essay was published in Forum of World Literature Studies under the title of “Middleman Minority: Ethics, Ethnicity, and the Chinese Middleman in The Woman Who Had Two Navels” (11.3, 2019: 464–479). I thank the FWLS editors for the permission to revise parts of the essay for the current volume. I also want to give my gratitude to Prof. Robert T. Tally Jr., who has guided us in the spatial turn toward literary cartography, and to Prof. Ying Fang, who has been most encouraging and supportive of my participation in this project. I. Liang (*) National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Fang, R. T. Tally Jr. (eds.), Spatial Literary Studies in China, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03914-0_14

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structure. Among these are the Jews in Europe, the Indians in east Africa, and the Chinese in Southeast Asia … In contrast to most ethnic minorities, the middlemen occupy an intermediate rather than a low-status position.”1 Bonacich’s “theory of middleman minorities” has gained a wide circulation in the field of ethnic Chinese studies. For example, Charles Hirschman states in his essay “Chinese Identities in Southeast Asia: Alternative Perspectives” (1988) that “the historical experience of the Chinese in Southeast Asia is rather different. Perhaps a more appropriate model is the ‘middleman minorities hypothesis’ proposed by Edna Bonacich (1973; also see Bonacich and Modell, 1980; Turner and Bonacich, 1980; van den Berghe, 1981).”2 According to Hirschman, “the theory [underscores] the intermediate position of ethnic Chinese minorities concentrated in the small business sector.”3 Moreover, Evelyn Hu-DeHart in her study of Chinese migrant merchants in the Spanish empire claims that “European trading posts in Southeast Asia, such as Manila and Batavia, attracted a large number of Chinese migrant merchants. Because imperial China did not allow direct contact with Europe, Chinese migrant merchants had become the ‘middlemen’ in the SinoSpanish maritime trade network.”4 As Hu-Dehart has noted, the presence of the Chinese in the Philippines is historical and important. According to Edgar Wickberg, the historian who pioneered in the study of the Chinese in the Philippines, “direct contact between China and the Philippines had existed at least from the Sung Dynasty (A.D. 960–1279).”5 The role of the Chinese and the Chinese mestizos has been “of great significance to Philippine historical development.”6 Wickberg comments that the Chinese demonstrated their talents in commerce and “rose to prominence as … middlemen wholesalers of local produce and foreign imports.”7 The fact that the first Chinatown was established in Binondo, Manila in 1594 testified to the settlement and thriving of the Chinese in the Philippines. By 1603, the population of the Chinese was estimated around 20,000 while that of the Spaniards was only about 1000.8 To sum up, the history of the Philippines, as Chinese Filipino historian Richard Chu claims, may have been “more Tsinoy than we admit.”9 In the words of Bernardita Reyes Churchill, “What is important insofar as the history of the Chinese in the Philippines is to weave it into the history of the Philippines so that the Chinese are included in the national narrative, not as immigrants or a separate community, but as Filipinos.”10 By adopting the notion of the Chinese middleman—as Bonacich, Hirschman, Hu-DeHart, and others—have observed, I use the historical

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figure of the “middleman” as a trope of mediation in my reading of the literary cartographies of the ethnic Chinese communities in The Woman Who Had Two Navels (1961) by Nick Joaquín. Whereas most critics have paid attention to the “two navels of the Philippines”—for example, Rocío Davis argues for the notion of “cross-culturality” of both the Spanish and the American cultures;11 Mina Roces states that “the Filipino having two navels representing the Spanish and the American colonial heritage”12—I focus on the literary cartographies of the Chinese quarter—both Binondo and Hong Kong—where the Chinese are concentrated.13 Accenting the historical presence of the Chinese middleman in the Philippines, the purpose of this paper is twofold. First, I investigate the spatial imagination of the Chinese quarter in the novel. By drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, Edward Soja, and especially Robert T. Tally Jr., I look into the intersection of ethnicity and spatiality in the novel. Second, I draw on Edward Said’s postcolonial theory of exile and argue for a postcolonial contrapuntal mirroring and spatial intermediation between Binondo and Hong Kong. I contend that Hong Kong literally becomes the space of Foucaultian heterotopia, where the exilic Filipino revolutionaries could achieve a sense of postcolonial agency. In other words, by employing the trope of the Chinese middleman as a historical construct of mediation, I examine the heterotopic intermediation of the “middle place” in Manila Chinatown and Hong Kong. My arguments are divided into four parts. In part one (the current section), I introduce the historical trope of the “Chinese middleman” by drawing on the work of Edna Bonacich, Charles Hirschman, Evelyn Hu-DeHart, and Edgar Wickberg. In part two, I give a theoretical account of the relationships between ethnicity and spatiality by drawing on the work of Robert T. Tally Jr., Jeffrey Partridge, Shirley Lim, Maria Herrera-Sobek, and others to argue that Manila Chinatown functions as a middle place between insurgent Filipinos and the US regime. In part three, I analyze the Saidian exilic space of Hong Kong and examine how it is taken as a space of heterogenic and postcolonial intermediation. In part four, I make the conclusion.

Manila Chinatown as a Middle Place In Spatiality (2013), Robert T. Tally Jr. accounts the historical process in which discursive interest has turned from history to space in parallel with the development from modernism to postmodernism. He observes, “space was viewed by philosophy as static, empty, and mere background to

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historical and temporal events.”14 He highlights the insight of Charles Olson, who in his 1947 study of Melville “placed heavy emphasis on space … and this attention to space was tied to his view of the ‘postmodern.’”15 According to Olson, “space is the mark of new history.”16 Like Olson, Tally focuses on Melville and cites Moby-Dick (1851) as a prototype of literary cartography, which he comments: Melville employs a literary technique that is itself fundamentally a form of mapping. In examining both the real places of the geographical globe and the imaginary places of his own fictional universe, Melville’s literary cartography discloses the real-and-imagined spaces of the world, as Edward Soja (1996) has called them.17

Envisioning the writer as a mapmaker, Tally argues that “narrative, according to this view, is a form of world-making, at least as much as it is a mode of world-representing.”18 He cites writers like James Joyce, Italo Calvino, and Georges Perec, among others, to analyze their mappings of Dublin, Paris, and the “invisible cities.”19 He also discusses the work of Francois Hartog, Peter Turchi, Yi-Fu Tuan, Mikhail Bakhtin, Erich Auerbach, Georg Lukacs, and, most importantly, Frederic Jameson to illuminate how each critic has contributed to the notion of literary cartography.20 Focusing on the notion of “cognitive mapping,” Tally argues that the experience of spatial disorientation is a form of “existential anxiety”21 and that the task of literary cartography is to try to “project a world,” that is, to draw a map and provide a sense of orientation to the world—what Tally considers as the “cartographic imperative” in his other book, Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination (2019). If literary cartography maps an imaginary place to create a world, “literary geography” denotes the opposite: it depicts the process how “the readers will use the texts as guidebooks … through the physical geography in search of the ‘real’ places they already know from the ‘fictional’ depictions of them in the novels.”22 In other words, the notion of “literary geography” depicts the process how the reader would first read Mrs. Dalloway (1925) before he/she physically visits London. As Tally puts it, “literary geography is largely a product of the reader’s own engagement with the text, and especially with the narrative maps produced therein.”23 Mrs. Dalloway in this way provides a “literary geography” of London for the reader. At this juncture, it is notable that the two concepts work like the two sides of the same coin—that is, how the text provides both the

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locale of literary cartography for the writer and that of literary geography for the reader. By drawing on the notions of literary cartography and literary geography, I turn to the spatial imagination of Chinatown in the novel. In his Beyond Literary Chinatown (2007), Jeffrey F. L. Partridge argues that the notion of “literary Chinatown” is “an imagined community.”24 By drawing on Hans Robert Jauss’ reception theory, Partridge is interested in the “dialectical process at the nexus of reader, author, and text.”25 He reads works by Maxine Hong Kingston, Shawn Wong, Gish Jen, and others and argues that the spatial representations of cultural hybridity, diaspora, transnational flows, and so on in the ethnic ghetto are beyond readers’ assumptions.26 Likewise, I argue that Nick Joaquín, by representing the middle place in both Binondo and Hong Kong, maps a spatial dialectical trajectory that mediates between home and exile—between Manila Chinatown and the exilic island space in the discursive context of the “cartography of power.”27 My reading of the middle place is particularly drawn to Michel Foucault’s seminal speech “Of Other Spaces,” which he first presented in 1967. While Foucault pays attention to places like cemetery, hospital, prison, asylum, and so on, I argue that the ethnic enclave of Chinatown could be likewise conceptualized as an “other space.” Moreover, in colonial Manila, it is the “other space” of the Chinese quarter (Binondo), where the female protagonist, Connie Escobar, goes for shelter after she denounces her parents. This incident takes place when Connie discovers that her father, who works in the colonial US government, is involved in bribery and embezzlement. Refusing to be “educated on stolen money,”28 Connie decides to quit school, runs away, and goes to Binondo. She finds a job, “working as dishwasher in a chop suey joint in the Chinese quarter.”29 I argue that Connie’s action to denounce her parents could be taken as a symbolic gesture to rebel against the US colonialism. Her choice to run away and go Binondo manifests how the heterogeneous space of Manila Chinatown is engaged in a postcolonial “cartography of power” to counter the US colonization. Thus, the presence of the Chinese quarter— the Chinese chop suey in Binondo—provides the “middle place” that is situated between the center of US colonial power and the subjugated hometown of Manila. Drawing on Edward Said, Tally further contends that “what had seemed literally and figuratively peripheral, such as the goings-on in distant lands far from the metropolitan centers of London or Paris, are

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actually central to the formation of literature and culture.”30 I argue that the Chinese quarter in Binondo as an ethnic enclave represents such a periphery that however is “central to the formation of the [colonial culture]” in the Philippines. It manifests not only the “spatial unconscious” that Partridge illuminates in relation to the “humanist allegiances to the interest of a particular race, class, and gender”31 but also, in more active terms, the “ethical responsibility” that Shirley Lim and Maria Herrera-­ Sobek maintain with regard to the “interpretation of other cultures.”32 It is notable that the presentation of the Chinese quarter in the novel is handled with a sense of liminal virtuosity that reveals the distinct and prominent presence of the ethnic Chinese in the Philippines. By placing the novel at the intersection of ethnicity and spatiality, I aim to examine how the representation of the ethnic Chinese quarter is achieved through the spatial intermediation of the exilic space in Hong Kong, which I turn to in the next section.

Hong Kong as a Middle Place Joseph Galdon argues that one “basic theme in Philippine fiction is the theme of alienation and the failure to communicate. This is reflected most clearly in the theme of exile that recurs time and again among writers of Philippine fiction particularly in the post-war period.”33 The Woman Who Had Two Navels would fit the bidding—not only because the theme of the novel centers on exile but also because the narrative time is set in the post-­ war era—right after the Philippines gains independence after WWII. The novel is temporarily set after the trip made by General Monson who has been on exile since the country was taken over by the US. While the theme of exile is self-evident, the locale of exile—Hong Kong—is noteworthy. As Galdon points out, “Hong Kong in The Woman Who Had Two Navels is a symbol of exile.”34 Similarly, Marie Rose Arong argues that the significance of Hong Kong lies in its historical association with Filipino revolutionaries, expatriates, and historical figures such as José Rizal, Emilio Aquinaldo, and Artemio Ricarte. Arong points out that Hong Kong was the place where Dr. Rizal practiced medicine, where General Aguinaldo led his government-in-exile, and where General Artemio Ricarte went on exile—whom she actually considers as a source that might have inspired the characterization of General Monson.35 In this section, by drawing on the work of Edward Said, Michel Foucault, and David Morgan, I contextualize the Filipino exilic experience, examine the exilic space of Hong

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Kong, and analyze how the “Chinese quarter” in Hong Kong provides a postcolonial exilic agency by being a space of heterogenic intermediation. In “Reflections on Exile,” Edward Said depicts the condition of exile and the possible solution out of the predicament. He says, Exile [is] an alternative to the mass institution that dominates modern life. Exile is not, after all, a matter of choice: you are born into it, or it happens to you. But, provided that the exile refuses to sit on the sidelines nursing a wound, there are things to be learned: he or she must cultivate a scrupulous [sense of] subjectivity.36

Said cites the works of post-war German intellectuals, such as Theodor Adorno and Erich Auerbach, who wrote their representative works on exile.37 According to Said, “[Mimesis] owed its existence to the very fact of Oriental exile and homelessness. … [It is] a work built upon a critically important alienation from [the west.]”38 Comparing Said with post-war German exilic intellectuals, David Morgan argues that Said, as an Arab living in the West, is able to “name a space and a subjectivity that allows the postcolonial subject to critique power from a distanced perspective while also acknowledging the subject’s grounding in the cultural and political milieu.”39 He maintains, “Said’s exile both acknowledges its embeddedness in a network of discursive powers and resists them through exilic criticism.”40 By drawing on Morgan’s work of the Saidian “model for critical postcolonial agency,”41 I argue that the exilic subjectivity is what characterizes the political and ethical action of the postcolonial project that Joaquín aims to do in The Woman Who Had Two Navels. To start with, it is this political and ethical practice of “postcolonial exilic agency” which motivates the Monsons’ expatriation in Hong Kong. It is therefore important to observe the series of flights made by General Monson, Connie Escobar, Senora de Vidal, and Paco Texeira. They want to escape from Manila in order to get away from the shackles of colonial control in terms of the US regime, mother-daughter betrayals, bodily stigmata, and gothic hauntings.42 Most crucially, it sets the tone of postcolonial defiance in the case of General Monson, who goes Hong Kong to assert “the secret pride, the secret exultation”43 of Filipino nationalism. Moreover, I argue that the island space of Hong Kong, while being outside of the colonial regime of the US, becomes the “transitional

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stage”44 that mediates between the precolonial Manila and the present US colony. It literally occupies the Foucauldian notion of the heterogeneous space. According to Foucault, “there are, in every culture, real places— which are something like counter-sites—in which the real sites … are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.”45 In the case of the novel, Hong Kong is undoubtedly a real place, but it is also the “counter-­ site” of the colonized homeland in Manila, which has, by force, become a US colony. In other words, there is a mirroring relationship between the real site (Hong Kong) and the heterotopia (Hong Kong as the counter-­ site of the homeland in Manila). Laura Rice elaborates, “heterotopias … are real (that is, material) places that serve as mirrors of other real (material) sites, destabilizing them.”46 That is to say, the material place of Hong Kong mirrors the colonized homeland in Manila, destabilizing both. Moreover, I argue that the island space of Hong Kong is therefore a Foucauldian heterotopia, mirroring precolonial Manila, while contesting, inverting, and destabilizing both. In the following, I analyze how the heterogeneous space of Hong Kong is able to break free from the confinement of US colonial power and functions as a postcolonial space of heterotopic intermediation. The novel starts with an emphatic confrontation with the heterogeneous space of Hong Kong—where Connie Escobar seeks surgical help from (the young) Dr. Monson and where an exilic homeland is displayed in the clinical room: And why here? wondered Pepe Monson, removing bewildered eyes from her face and looking rather dazedly around the room; feeling the room’s furniture hovering vaguely—the faded rug on the floor; the sofa near the doorway, against the wall; the two small Filipino flags crossed under a picture of General Aguinaldo; the bust of the Sacred Heart upon the bookshelf, between brass candlesticks; the tamaraw head above each of the two shut windows.47

While the opening powerfully sets up the chronotope of the story, it is also charged with the effect of Gothic haunting—where the furniture hovers and the eyes are bewildered48—as if the clinic were not real. It is riveting how Joaquín zooms in on the immediacy (“hereness”) of Hong Kong in order to highlight the forsaken homeland “away” in Manila. In this way, the spatial mirroring between Hong Kong and Manila sets off the heterotopic relationship between the two venues. Moreover, like Manila, Hong

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Kong is a harbor city surrounded by water—where there is always a view “of the harbor, gay with junks and ferryboats; where the Monson family would swim with the English, the Chinese, or the Portuguese in Deep Water Bay”49 and where they would realize that they are stranded “on the foreign sands of a foreign shore.”50 In other words, the harbor city of Hong Kong is situated at a “critical distance”51 that wavers as a space of “intermediation” between the Philippine archipelago and the US continent. If the setting of Hong Kong is introduced by Pepe Monson, the elder brother of the Monson boys, it is reiterated by Tony Monson, the younger brother, who like Joaquín is sent to the monastery to be trained as a Catholic priest.52 Being presumably the persona of the author (Joaquín) himself, Tony gives another spellbinding picture of the heterotopic harbor space of Hong Kong: [H]e stood by his cell window, felt a sudden bitter tenderness for the city spread out and humming joyously beneath him, for this doomed heathen town that was home and not home, that was birthplace but not native land, that he had loved and feared and finally rejected, but whose beauty—soggy in spring time, steamy in summer, perfect in autumn, perverse in winter— his foreign bones knew like a wife and regarded like a stranger; never quite familiar, never wholly embraced, being still the rented habitation of his childhood, where he had dwelt in body though not inspirit, and in whose streets he had walked the streets of that other city, the true native city he had had never known … whose clear image had always overlaid these hilltops that he had climbed as a boy, … and the sea, and the harbor with the ferryboats, and Kowloon beyond, smoky and sprawling black and gold in the sunshine, where his father lay dying in exile.53

In his vivid and sensual descriptions of the houses, streets, seasons, hilltops, harbor, and ferryboats, Joaquín gives a most fascinating heterogenic picture of Hong Kong, the “rented habitation” of the Monson family on exile. While the mirroring relationship between Hong Kong and Manila is emphatically accented by the hallucinating repetitions of the contrast between home and exile, wife and mistress, the native and the heathen, and so on, it clearly unveils the “critical distance” between Hong Kong and Manila, the uncanny similarities between the two (material) places. Most importantly, from the point of view of Tony, who is standing by the cell window at this juncture, the sight “beneath him” (the streets, roofs, harbor, and ferryboats sprawling beneath and beyond) allows him to see

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the other place (the Manila home city) where he is not. It reminds us of the visual and spatial mirroring that Foucault comments—“the mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes the place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there.”54 Following the Foucauldian theory of mirroring, I argue that Hong Kong thus becomes the heterotopia of Manila. Moreover, the mirroring relationship between Hong Kong and Manila is doubled by Pepe Monson and his best friend, Paco Texeira. While they share the same experience of an exilic childhood in Hong Kong, Pepe’s spatial imaginary of Manila is associated with the waters and Paco’s is with the mountains. Born in Hong Kong, both Pepe and Paco get to know Manila from their fathers. For the Monsons, they like to swim in Deep Water Bay, where the father and the sons would “race each other all the way to an island across the bay” and where the mother would sit “knitting beside the lunch basket.”55 It is by the waters “while [his mother] handed the sandwiches around, his father would tell them about the waters back home he had swum in when a boy. But what [his father] most loved to talk about was the river that ran right behind their house in Binondo.”56 Like the harbor sight viewed by Tony, that provokes the mirage of Manila, the waters in Deep Water Bay mirror those in the Pasig River, flowing through Manila.57 It is needless to say, a relationship of mirroring heterotopia is created between the two watery cities. As for Paco, his spatial imaginary of Manila is associated with mountains. His father tells him that the mountains in Hong Kong are bald and wrinkled like old dogs that had lost their hair, and so small you could climb up to their tops and down again in half an hour … [They are] not like the mountains back in the Philippines that took days and even weeks to climb and were thick with trees and shrubbery and dangerous with wild animals. Then he had begun to tell Paco about a range of mountains just across Manila Bay that looked like a woman stretched out in sleep.58

This imagery of “a range of mountains stretching out like a woman in sleep across Manila Bay” then becomes the dominant landscape that registers the spatial imaginary of the motherland. The imagery later repeats twice in the narrative. It appears again when Paco goes to Manila for the first time, seeing “from the railing of the ship … with a shock of

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recognition, a range of mountains that looked like a woman sleeping.”59 It makes such an impact that Paco feels powerfully “a stirring of clan-emotion—a glow, almost, of homecoming.”60 Then, most intricately, this “stirring of clan-emotion” re-surfaces when he meets Senora de Vidal, who embodies “a combination of primitive mysticism and slick modernity”;61 who symbolizes “the mountains and the [mythic] woman sleeping in a silence mighty with myth and mystery”;62 and who reminds him of the “range of mountains that looked like a woman sleeping,”63 which his father had told him back in Hong Kong. Thus, the narrative at this juncture runs a full circle by going between Pepe and Paco, between the waters and mountains—the seascape and landscape that invoke the memories of the Filipino motherland—and between Hong Kong and Manila, the (almost) homed and yet unhomed harbor cities—to render Filipino nativism, postcolonial exile, and heterotopic mirroring full force in the narrative tapestry of the novel. This picture of a cosmopolitan Hong Kong being transported to post-­ war Manila brings us to the historical heterogeneity that is at home in Manila Chinatown, which serves as the nodal point in support of Filipino postcolonialism (as we have discussed in the previous section). When Paco eventually meets Connie in Manila, he accompanies her in one of the city tours to the Chinese quarter—“They drove through the cramped slums where the Manila Chinese are kenneled: wet walls, wet cobbles, bridges arching over stagnant canals, craggy tenements dripping rain into tight twisting streets, a raggedness of black roofs and the arrowy silhouette of a pagoda soaring in the rainy moonlight.”64 Paco follows Connie to a temple, where he sees “an old bearded Chinaman, sucking a long pipe”65— just another familiar image of the old heathen Chinatown. It comes to the climax when Paco overlooks Connie, who is worshipping “an old fat god, with sagging udders, bald and white bearded and squatting like a Buddha; and the sly look in its eyes was repeated by the two navels that winked from its gross belly.”66 The figure of Biliken has been rendered as a fetish of “pagan fatalism,” which has strangely become “a source of comfort” to Connie.67 It is the statue of the laughing Buddha that she searches for most desperately when they return to the family garden after the Japanese occupation. It is Biliken who not only redeems the sacrifice of Minnie68 but also suffers from the war-ridden destruction of Manila, where he is found being “fired twice … [with] two small black holes peered like eyes from the top of the great belly.”69 It is important to realize that Connie feels a strong sense of

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self-­identity with Biliken, the heathen deity, as he, like her, also suffers from the colonial trauma of physical disfiguration and psychic schizophrenia (being a symbol of savage evil). It is San Juan who not only appreciates how Joaquín makes avail of the “mythopoeic power of the Chinese culture”70 but also gives the Chinese pagan deity a most promising interpretation: While war destroyed Manila and its fabled ramparts, ravaged the gardens and fairgrounds where Connie played, Hong Kong remains the promise materialized: Biliken’s dominion, the self-renewing carnival which overthrows Platonic Ideas and sanctifies the heterogeneous drives of the body, the transversal orgies of jouissance.71

Here, I argue that the “heterogeneous drives of the body,” as well as the “transversal orgies of jouissance” in association with the pagan deity Biliken worshipped in the old temple in the Chinese quarter, provide the material space for Filipino postcolonial exilic agency. Most importantly, it is the Chinese quarter—either Hong Kong or Binondo—that provides a space of heterogeneous intermediation for subversion. Thus, it is critical to point out that the old family house of the Monsons is located inside Binondo. General Monson, while swimming in Deep Water Bay, would always tell the Monson boys, [H]ow their old house in Binondo had a large stone azotea behind, with steps going right down to the water, and how you could go out on that azotea and buy everything you need—rice, fish, honey, eggs, live poultry, feed for the horses, fruits and vegetable—from villagers rowing into town in small boats that looked something like American Indian canoes.72

Conclusion I hope that my theoretical elaborations and textual readings so far would have driven home the historical trope of the Chinese middleman that I started with. I would conclude by turning to the relationship between ethnicity and spatiality. I argue that against the historical racialist discourse of the “inscrutable Chinese,” Nick Joaquín represents the ethnic Chinese “otherness” as a practice of “supplementing imperative” to counter [the] tendencies to a totalizing rhetoric about the marginalized Oriental others. Most importantly, as I have argued in this paper, Joaquín has done so by

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providing a heterogenic spatial mirroring relationship of intermediation between the center of colonial power and the “other spaces” in Binondo and Hong Kong. In a seemingly centrifugal manner, his baroque swing of spatial intermediation is, however, anchored in Binondo, the oldest and “the most labyrinthine”73 of Metropolitan Manila. It is the place of the old Monson family house, where General Monson reminiscences about the old days of precolonial Manila, and it is also the place where the Monson boys would dream about—humming “the house of our fathers is waiting for us to come home,”74 which runs like a refrain throughout the novel. We would imagine centuries ago when the Chinese forefathers came to Manila, selling silk and tea, they would have mixed with the native Indigenous  peoples in the archipelago, who had been as old as Native American Indians. It is that literary cartography of Binondo, the oldest Chinatown in the world, which Nick Joaquín has rendered available as both home and the middle place of heterotopic intermediation in The Woman Who Had Two Navels.

Notes 1. Edna Bonacich, “A Theory of Middleman Minorities,” American Sociological Review, vol. 38, no. 5 (1973): 583. 2. Charles Hirschman, “Chinese Identities in Southeast Asia: Alternative Perspectives,” in Changing Identities of the Southeast Asian Chinese since World War II, eds. Jennifer Cushman and Gungwu Wang (Hong Kong: Hong Kong UP, 1998), 22. 3. Ibid., 23. Cecilia Green and Yan Liu in their study of the Chinese in the Caribbean also observe that as Brereton and others have noted, soon after their arrival, the Chinese in the British West Indies “quickly emerged as a classic ‘middleman minority,’ a small ethnic group carving out a niche in the shop keeping sector” (2). 4. Evelyn Hu-DeHart, “16th-century Chinese Migration in the Age of Globalization,” in I’m Migrant: New Perspectives of Overseas Chinese Studies, eds. Joan Chang and Iping Liang (Taipei: NTNU Press, 2018), 31. 5. Edgar Wickberg, The Chinese in Philippine Life, 1850–1898 (Manila: Ateneo UP, 2000), 3. 6. Edgar Wickberg, The Chinese Mestizo in Philippine History, 1964, trans. Go Bon Juan, (Manila: Kaisa Para Sa Kaunlaran, 2001), 1. 7. Ibid., 47. Moreover, the role of the Chinese middleman in the Manila Galleon, or la nao de la china, signified the intermediation of the Chinese merchants in the Manila-Acapulco maritime trade network that had con-

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nected the Pacific and the Atlantic for 250 years (1565–1815). As we know, the term “Sangley” was used by colonial Spaniards to refer to Chinese migrant merchants who often went back and forth between Macao and Manila. Their children born in Manila became the “mestizos de Sangleys.” For details, please see Wickberg. 8. Edgar Wickberg, The Chinese in Philippine Life, 1850–1898, 3–4. 9. This is also the title of Chu’s book, “more Tsinoy than we admit” (2015). 10. This is cited from Churchill’s review of Chu. Please see https://shop. vibalgroup.com/products/more-­tsinoy-­than-­we-­admit. 11. Rocío Davis, “Nick Joaquín’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels,” Philippine Studies, vol. 44, no. 2 (1996): 269. 12. Mina Roces, “Filipino Identity in Fiction, 1945–1972,” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 28, no. 2 (1994): 303. 13. The ethnic Chinese occupy about 25% of the Filipino population. For details, please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Filipino. 14. Robert T. Tally Jr., Spatiality (New York: Routledge, 2013), 33. 15. Ibid., 38. 16. Qtd. in Robert T. Tally Jr., Spatiality, 38. 17. Robert T. Tally Jr., Spatiality, 45. 18. Ibid., 49. 19. Ibid., 48–54. 20. Ibid., 54–67. 21. Ibid., 71. 22. Ibid., 82. 23. Ibid., 85. 24. Jeffery F.  L. Partridge, Beyond Literary Chinatown (Seattle: U of Washington P, 2007), ix. 25. Ibid., 6. 26. Ibid., ix. 27. Robert T. Tally Jr., Spatiality, 122. 28. Nick Joaquín, The Woman Who Had Two Navels (Manila: Philippine Center, 1961), 14. 29. Ibid., 15. 30. Robert T. Tally Jr., Spatiality, 90. 31. Jeffery F. L. Partridge, Beyond Literary Chinatown, 26. 32. Shirley Lim and Maria Herrera-Sobek, “Foreword: The Ethics of Writing, Reading, and Othering,” Guest Editors, Vol. 33, No. 2, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies (Taipei: NTNU Press, 2007), 4. 33. Joseph Galdon, Philippine Fiction: Essays from Philippine Studies, 1953–1972 (Manila: Ateneo UP, 1972), xiv. 34. Ibid., xiv.

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35. Arong writes, “Hong Kong is an important locale for Filipino revolutionaries and expatriates. Jose Rizal practiced as an ophthalmologist in Hong Kong prior to his exile in Dapitan, and the first Philippine republic led by General Emilio Aguinaldo used Hong Kong as its base for its government-­ in-­exile. Doctor Monson’s character is loosely based on another Filipino general—General Artemio Ricarte—who spent time as an exile in Hong Kong (Zialcita 222) after refusing to pledge allegiance to the US and controversially returned to the Philippines at the request of the Japanese during the occupation of Manila” (463). 36. Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (London: Granta Books, 2000), 2. 37. Adorno wrote Minima Moralia (1951) while on exile in the US and Auerbach authored Mimesis in Turkey (1946). 38. Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1984), 8. 39. David Morgan, “Critical Distance: The Postcolonial Novel and the Dilemma of Exile.” Diss. (University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2009), 19. 40. Ibid., 23. 41. Ibid., 1. 42. Ibid., 94. 43. Ibid., 42. 44. E.  San Juan Jr. Subversions of Desire: Prolegomena to Nick Joaquín (Honolulu: U of Hawaii P, 1988), 174. 45. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” trans. J. Miskowiec, Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité (1984): 3. 46. Laura Rice, “Of Heterotopias and Ethnoscapes: The Production of Space in Postcolonial North Africa,” Critical Matrix, vol. 14 (2003): 38. 47. Ibid., 4. 48. What follows the descriptions of the furniture and decorations is the “fog [bulging] against the windowpanes, as though elephants were wedging past” (4). Arong also points out that “in Gothic literature, mist or fog is conventionally used to blur objects not only to reduce visibility, but also to usher in terror, be it in the form of a person or a thing.… Hong Kong’s infamous fog, especially during winter, generates the ideal Gothic atmosphere for the novel” (463). 49. Nick Joaquín, The Woman Who Had Two Navels (Manila: Philippine Center, 1961), 9. 50. Ibid., 9. 51. Please see Morgan. 52. It is also important to note that like Joaquín, Tony Monson refuses to go back to St. Andrew’s after his meeting with Connie (197). 53. Nick Joaquín, The Woman Who Had Two Navels, 88.

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54. Ibid., 4, italics added. 55. Ibid., 9. 56. Ibid., 9. 57. For details, please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laguna_de_Bay. 58. Nick Joaquín, The Woman Who Had Two Navels, 26–27. 59. Ibid., 27. 60. Ibid., 27. 61. Ibid., 27. 62. Ibid., 27. 63. Ibid., 28. 64. Ibid., 36. 65. Ibid., 36. 66. Ibid., 36. 67. Marie Rose Arong, “Temporality in Nick Joaquín’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels,” Kritika Kultura, Vol. 30 (2018): 468. 68. It refers to the doll, Minnie, which helps Connie “discover” her two navels. 69. Nick Joaquín, The Woman Who Had Two Navels, 166. 70. E. San Juan Jr., Subversions of Desire: Prolegomena to Nick Joaquín, 187. It is also important to understand the temporality of the Chinese New Year and the imagery of the Chinese Moon in Chap. 4. Please see also San Juan. 71. Ibid., 188. 72. Nick Joaquín, The Woman Who Had Two Navels, 9. 73. Ibid., 8. 74. Ibid., 73, italics original.

CHAPTER 15

Lewis’s Babbitt, Literary Maps, and the Production of Space in American Cities Hairong Zhang

On July 20, 1921, Grace, Sinclair Lewis’s wife, wrote a letter to Alfred Harcourt to highlight that her husband had already drawn a complete set of city map of Zenith before he started writing Babbitt. Therefore, “the city size, office building in downtown and villa in the city or suburbs described in this novel have presented a clear image in Lewis’s mind”,1 his wife said. However, these maps did not draw researchers’ attention. After

This is a translated version of the essay “Lewis’s Babbitt Literary Maps and the Production of Space in American Cities”. What follows is the full information: 张 海榕: “刘易斯的ʻ巴比特文学地图’与美国城市的空间生产”, 载《外国文学评 论》, 2017 年第 2 期, 第 111–127 页。 [ZHANG Hairong, “Lewis’s Babbitt Literary Maps and the Production of Space in American Cities,” Foreign Literature Review, no. 2 (2017): 111–127.]

H. Zhang (*) University of Hohai, Nanjing, China © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Fang, R. T. Tally Jr. (eds.), Spatial Literary Studies in China, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03914-0_15

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Lewis passed away, John Mayfield paid a visit to Lewis’s study room and occasionally found his hand-made and systematic 18 maps. Then, researchers have studied these maps meticulously and named them “Babbitt Maps”.2 The creation of “Babbitt Maps” not only adds a reliable road sign and realistic evidence to literary fiction, but also a symbol field where the plot of the novel can be unfolded and justified. It is a display screen of the relationship between the characters, thereby foregrounding the inherent logic of the narrative.3 Why Lewis drew “Babbitt Maps” purposely? Batchelor believes that they are not only for Babbitt, but also aims to “establish a unified urban background like Balzac, and serve for the subsequent description of different urban communities and social classes” (“Sinclair”: 402). Indeed, Zenith city has become main urban geographic landscape of Lewis’s four masterpieces including Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), and Dotsworth (1929). It is a sense of lacking of history and highly abstract if “Babbitt Maps” are only considered as urban background and map tools, which neglect the complex intentions of the map in Lewis’s description, the internal connection between the map and the novel text, and the external interaction of the “graphics”. Traditional literary criticism always consider that the shape of character is the core aspect in studying Babbitt, who believes that Lewis used satirical methods to expose the business supremacy and commercialism in American society in the early twentieth century, and successfully create “Babbitt”—a typical image of philistine with venality, vanity, and snobbery.4 In recent years, human geography has become a new perspective of studying literary criticism. Based on the notion that “space is a kind of social production”, Lefebvre, a French thinker, put up with a concept of “space production”, who believes that space production is an appreciation method adopted by capital in order to generate more profits to consolidate the political rule of capitalism.5 Under the influence of this trend of thought, the contents of “development of suburban villa housing” and “prosperity of the real estate industry” in “Babbitt” began to attract the attention of researchers.6 “Literary Map”, as an interdisciplinary research method of literary geography,7 organically combines the text of the novel with maps, as “it aims to transplant and learn from the theory, methods and techniques of ‘maps’ by using the two narrative language systems of ‘graphic-text,’8 which develops a relatively complete graphic-text structure and intertextual function”. Therefore, it possesses the theoretical perspective of “Babbitt” “picture-text” interpretation. In view of this, this article

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combines the above-mentioned “Babbitt Map” with the novel text of “Babbitt” and defines this combination as “Babbitt Literary Maps”9 and uses it to investigate the process of the author’s participation in the production of urban space in the United States of Zenith City, office buildings, and suburban villas. As a metaphorical carrier of space production in the writer’s imagination, “Babbitt Literary Map” is not only the urban geographic spatial form in the text, but also a clear proof of Lewis’s participation in the production of urban space in the United States. This literary map not only exemplifies the realistic elements of Lewis’s literary imagination, but also highlights his spatial scope and literary route for arranging and controlling the plot and inspires the visual imagination of the researchers. This article attempts to “examine” the narrative deployment and metaphorical process of these three types of city maps in the story in detail, in order to examine Lewis’s complex emotional structure and rational understanding of the urbanization process in the United States.

“The Great Zenith”: The Spatial Positioning and Spatial Circle of American Cities A literary map serves a dual function: It can either represent a physical space associated with a writer or a character (such as London depicted by Charles Dickens), or show the very fictional territory made up by an author (such as the Yoknapatawpha County in William Faulkner’s). Therefore, the three core issues that the literary map study focuses on are “where it is”, “what it is like”, and “what it means”.10 Where is Zenith? According to Richard Ringeman, Lewis’s biographer, the critic Mencken suggested in 1921 that Lewis should position Zenith as “a city in the United States, but not a megacity like New York or Chicago. With a population of 200,000 to 500,000, the size of Zenith is similar to that of Baltimore in Maryland, Omaha in Nebraska, Buffalo in New York, or Birmingham in Alabama”.11 In the first half of 1922, following Mencken’s advice, Lewis visited several cities in the Midwestern US, such as Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio.12 After that, he let the name, location, and size of his imaginary city settled13 and made it clear in the fourth “Babbitt Map” that the city was in the fictitious State of Winnemac.14 Careful readers of Babbitt, however, will not be able to pinpoint the exact location of Zenith, let alone the state of Winnemac. What readers know about it exactly is its population—361,000 or 362,000.15 All the other geographic information readers are given is in

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fragments—Babbitt has a short meeting in Chicago (see Babbitt: 193), a long-distance trip to Maine (see Babbitt: 107), and during the period, he has to change coaches in New York (see Babbitt: 115); it wasn’t until the publication of Arrowsmith that Lewis, the author who kept readers in suspense, made it clear that Zenith was located in the Midwestern US, somewhere between Chicago and Pittsburgh in space.16 Zenith is, arguably, Lewis’s “production of space” that encapsulates characteristics of several cities. More specifically, Zenith features the industrial industries of Minneapolis, Lewis’s historical memory of Seattle’s class system, and the Workers’ strike in 1916, as well as the topography of Cincinnati (see Rebel: 174). In fact, the reasons why Lewis “deliberately” blurred the spatial orientation of Zenith can be boiled down to the following two: First, after the publication of his novel Main Street, a great hit in America back in 1920, the town Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, which was described in the novel, became the focus of readers. On that note, Lewis deliberately downplays the regionality of Zenith17 to draw readers’ attention to the character Babbitt so as to show the differences between the two novels; second, “Only the Midwest can truly represent America”, Lewis concluded in an interview. “Midwesterners are real Americans, who have their own houses, send their children to college, and help the wheel of history rolls on”.18 What Lewis said was true that, after the publication of Babbitt, “anyone with a clear head would see that Zenith is the very model featuring American life and its prosperity” (Babbitt: 145). Businessmen from different cities in the Midwest vied with each other to demonstrate that zenith was the city where they lived,19 which was crowned as a story of approval for a time in American literary circles. Mathew Edney believes that geocriticism has two basic dimensions: One points inward to the noumenon itself and the other focuses outward on the historical context.20 Why did population serve as an important factor in Lewis’s selection of cities? First of all, urban population is an important indicator of urbanization. According to historical records, the urban population only accounted for 5.1 percent of all American population in 1790, but it increased 4.5 times21 in just 30 years from 1830 to 1860. And by 1890, the proportion rapidly increased to 35.4 percent, which means more than one-third of the population lived in the city. By 1922, the year when Babbitt was published, 51.4 percent of Americans lived in cities.22 That’s why Babbitt said it proudly: “According to the last census, there are almost twenty American cities with more people than we do even though we now have a population of 361,000; cities like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia

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and so on will still be bigger than us” (Babbitt: 145). Secondly, urban population also serves as an important reference for measuring the level of urban productivity. In the census of 1910, the United States for the first time designated a city with a population of more than 200,000 and the administrative units within its ten-mile radius as a “Metropolitan District”, which served as an important factor considered when measuring the level of urbanization and making urban policies. Lewis’s location of Zenith at the heart of the ChiPitts Megalopolis Bolts23 was in line with the actual needs of urban spatial production in the United States. The region in the 1920s was characterized not only by its outstanding capacity, but also by the formation of a complete heavy industry production center. At the same time, it formed a production network covering all kinds of industrial cities in the region. The scale of the cities decreased evenly and the integration degree of that was high. Finally, an urban system with the central city as the backbone and the small- and medium-sized cities as the auxiliary was formed.24 The large scale of industry, coupled with the high concentration of industrial capital, on the one hand, made the means of production and workforce highly concentrated and, on the other hand, made urban spatial production a tool, a means, and a medium for realizing economic benefits. The city of Zenith, described by Lewis, is an emerging city in the very industrial chain, which represents the spatial production of American cities. Just as what Babbitt thought, the core work of a city is “Produce-­ produce-­produce! That’s what the country needs, and not all this fancy stuff” (Babbitt: 13). The importance of material production is everywhere in the text: “Cues of men with lunch-boxes clumped toward the immensity of new factories, sheets of glass and hollow tile, glittering shops where five thousand men worked beneath one roof, pouring out the honest wares that would be sold up the Euphrates and across the veldt. The whistles rolled out in greeting a chorus cheerful as the April dawn; the song of labor in a city built—it seemed—for giants” (Babbitt: 1). What is Zenith like? The city of Zenith, as the start of the narrative, is at the center of the spatial world of the novel. At the beginning of the first chapter, the narrator “could hardly wait” to depict the “text map” of Zenith City and to conjure a picture of “spatial production” with “social imagination” up,25 which outlines the reality of Zenith in broad strokes: The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. They were neither citadels nor churches, but frankly and beautifully office-buildings.

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The mist took pity on the fretted structures of earlier generations: the Post Office with its shingle-tortured mansard, the red brick minarets of hulking old houses, factories with stingy and sooted windows, wooden tenements colored like mud. The city was full of such grotesqueries, but the clean towers were thrusting them from the business center, and on the farther hills were shining new houses, homes—they seemed—for laughter and tranquillity. (Babbitt: 1)

In terms of the specific image of Zenith, Lewis begins with a traditional “bird’s eye view” of the city: On this map, the extremes are reconciled together—people’s ambition symbolized by tall buildings, the decay represented by dilapidated buildings, and the decline implied by churches. The sharp class disparity and totally different architectures along with the flagrant contrast between old buildings and emerging suburban villas have become metaphorical representations of physical space. In the abstract sense of the city, Zenith’s text map fits in perfectly with the “concentric zone model” of the city featured by five circles. The model was proposed by Ernest W.  Burgess, a sociologist of Lewis’s time.26 However, the space of the five circles in the novel is clearly divided, with rigid hierarchy and strict discipline. So, it’s really hard to reach cross class: Babbitt’s office, the Reeves Building, is in the central business district on the first circle, which is his “pirate ship” (Babbitt: 19). The skyscrapers that symbolize capitalist civilization belong to successful middle-class businessmen (economic beneficiaries) in all walks of life. Their standard attire is a gray suit, tortoiseshell glasses, a woven collar, a snakehead pin, a cigar lighter, and a club badge. In their spare time, they drive to and from golf courses, clubs of various types, chambers of commerce, banquets, and country houses (see Babbitt: 7). The first and fourth circles are their daily living areas. Against the backdrop of the consumer society, they lead a normal and uneventful life. The rich of the fifth circle are both the rulers of political power (such as William Washington Ethan, president of the First State Bank) and planners for urban “spatial production” (such as Charles McKelvey, who runs the Dodsworths’ construction company, and Conrad Lyte, a real estate speculator). They live in their “gorgeous” suburban villa heavily guarded and seldom go out. They control the “spatial production” of this city and even the fate of the country in their mansions “politely yet coldly and secretly” (Babbitt: 171). The second and third circles are for tenements, slums, bunkhouses, and brothels. Simple, cramped, and crowded are the essential characteristics of the two circles.

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This spatial environment not only limits the physical space of the urban paupers, but also destroys the sense of belonging and security that the private space should have. Babbitt’s college classmates, the Rieslings, live here. “No apartment-house in Zenith had more resolutely experimented in condensation than the Revelstoke Arms, in which Paul and Zilla Riesling had a flat. By sliding the beds into low closets the bedrooms were converted into living-rooms” (Babbitt: 103). The life of blue-collar class here is depressed and boring. They tried turning to spirit refining, but failed at last. In no way can they escape from the fate of neuroticism and mental breakdown. At the end of the novel, Riesling tried to kill his hysterical wife Zilla and got arrested for that, which exemplifies the fate of blue-collar class here best; in addition, “in the slum beyond the railroad tracks, a young man who for six months had sought work turned on the gas and killed himself and his wife” (Babbitt: 79). At this time, the urban spatial circle is not only the entity of real life, but also a concentrated display of social hierarchy. On that note, from the beginning of its emergence, the space circle is not only the product of class division, but also the result of capitalist spatial production. As Lefebvre put it, capitalism “produces space by taking up space”.27 That is to say, it produces and reproduces social relations with the aim of serving the surplus value of capitalist production. What does the city of Zenith mean? Lewis first learned about Zenith “in the vehicle” with the aid of Babbitt. He “learns from Babbitt’s daily life about the practices of city life”.28 The familiar streets that Babbitt passed through, the five concentric circles, the boundaries of industrial and commercial areas, the nodes of the circular railway,29 and high entrance halls of the commercial area which symbolizes landmarks all made it clear to him that Zenith is a “big” or a “gigantic” city: “It was big—and Babbitt respected bigness in anything; in mountains, jewels, muscles, wealth, or words. He was, for a spring-enchanted moment, the lyric and almost unselfish lover of Zenith” (Babbitt: 24). Then, Lewis used Babbitt’s visual cognition repeatedly to reinforce the “big” city image. With the same logical chain, he closely links “tall soldiers”, “white fire”, “gigantic buildings”, “huge bus station”, “behemoth”, and “fascinating city” together, thus deepening the synonymous expression of this “city image”.30 Finally, Lewis deliberately arranged for Babbitt to have a distant view of Zenith and praised it for four times, which shows his positive evaluation toward the city’s geographic atlas. In Babbitt’s eyes, “Zennis” is not only a “gigantic” city, but also a symbol of “vitality”. This is as much Lewis’s view of the city as Babbitt’s attitude toward Zenith. In the preface to the unpublished

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Babbitt, Lewis emphasizes the importance of large cities: “From the perspective of industrialization, the city of Zenith is magnificent. Half of the global production of necessities such as cars, machinery, flour, railroad tracks, electrical equipment, etc. is provided by a city of Zenith’s size. They are miraculous and admirable”.31 Lewis’s view of the city is confirmed by Richard Lingeman after Lingeman reading through notes32 Lewis made when writing Babbitt. In the notes, Lewis wrote, “we have reason to believe that Zenith is an interesting and inherently great city with a vast city outline and all kinds of people. Charm and ordinariness coexist here, and multiple social circles also coexist (although each circle has its own criteria)” (see Rebel: 176). The song of Zenith in the novel echoes the author’s view of the city: Good old Zenith, Our kin and kith, Wherever we may be, Hats in the ring, We blithely sing Of thy Prosperity. (Babbitt: 128)

It is worth noting that the countryside as a foil for the urban landscape is deliberately obscured by Lewis. The only village left in the novel is “Catawba” (Babbitt’s birthplace), yet readers can neither know its geographical location nor its topography or customs. The reason is that the spatial production turns cities into production centers, and rural areas can only be attached to urban space. The social production of American capitalism in the 1920s accelerated the process of urbanization, changed the spatial structure of urban and rural areas, and created a modern urban geography with the characteristics of the United States, which led to the urban dominance of the countryside and ultimately a serious division and isolation of urban and rural areas. The unexpected spatial effect of “gigantic cities” and their monopolies conjured back in that time, and Zenith is the representative of these “gigantic cities”.

“Silver” and “Cliff”: Spatial Definition and Masculinity of American Cities From David Harvey’s critical perspective of urban space, urbanization has always been a key means to absorb surplus capital and surplus labor. It further promotes capital accumulation by creating and producing space.33

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George F.  Babbitt, a real estate broker in the Lisph office building in Zenith commercial center, is one of the driving forces of this urbanization movement. “He does not produce anything special, neither does he make butter, shoes, nor writing poetry, but he is adept at running houses and is good at selling properties that people can’t afford” (Babbitt: 2). In other words, the office is Babbitt’s “bandit ship”. He directly or indirectly participates in the definition and allocation of urban space and encodes the spatial logic of national space production with real estate language. Among the “Babbitt Map”, the most detailed maps are three maps about Babbitt’s office: One is “around Babbitt’s Office” (No. 12), which is actually the specific location map of Babbitt’s office marked by asterisk (taking the third block as the boundary, there are four companies in the north and south as a group and nested). One is Babbitt’s Office (No. 13), which lists all the furnishings in the office, even the sofa and chair can be seen clearly with south-facing Babbitt’s desk. From this position, you can see any corner of the office, presenting a set of detailed and nested space rules. Another (No. 14) is a perspective view of the office of Chandler Mutt, chairman of the Zenith City Real Estate Association (showing a nested space scale of six offices) (see “Sinclair”: 401–407 and appendix “Babbitt Map”). It can be seen that the size of nested space is the dominant spatial feature of Babbitt’s office, while perspective is its implicit spatial feature. In the novel, Lewis’s description of Babbitt’s office space almost completely copies the explicit and implicit functions of the three maps mentioned above. Just as Foucault said, “space is the basis of any power” and “the spatialization of power is the basic strategy and way of discipline control in modern society”.34 The “nesting” and “perspective” of Lisph Building in the novel have their distinct spatial power representation. Each office is connected with other offices through compartments, forming an office environment of the same pattern. The spatial value-added structure of one room connected with several rooms behind is almost the same as the spatial pattern on maps 12–14. It is similar to a maze in form, but it appears well under the arrangement of monitoring mechanism. The ordered and hierarchical spatial order shows a kind of extension of spatial perception. As a result, Babbitt’s “small room separated by an oak baffle of half an frosted glass” (Babbitt: 26) can monitor all employees from the back, and everything in the big office outside is under Babbitt’s control; on the contrary, once Babbitt enters the staff’s place, he immediately realizes the power of being monitored—“the employees keep a poker face, putting all

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eyes on him; Miss McGonagall looked up from the typewriter; Miss Benningan glared over the account book; Matt Penman stretched his neck behind the alcove; Stanley Graf had a calm with an expressionless face” (Babbitt: 56). How can there be such power deterrence like invisible transparent frosted glass? In fact, for Babbitt, the office is not only a means and method to show his authority but a strategy of discipline and punishment. The purpose is to “shape” a submissive group who is respectful to authority. However, paradoxically, Babbitt is also disciplined by the same monitoring mechanism while training employees. As David Harvey has analyzed, human beings have typically created a nested spatial scale hierarchy to organize their behavior and understand their world.35 The result is that “everyone is under surveillance, and there is no escape in such a transparent spatial arrangement”.36 In this sense, the space production of the office is not only the dynamic mechanism of power construction, but also the requisite of its control. Discipline power pursues the continuous visibility of the monitoring object in the invisible way of monitoring organization. Babbitt is the “poor victim” under the office monitoring mechanism. On the surface, he is an “enviable” successful business man who is good at language, competitive, and able to make money, “smart, fashionable and almost perfect modernization” (Babbitt: 54), but, in fact, his standards of likes and dislikes have been strictly defined and fully displayed by the consumer society according to the requirements of masculinity: “He likes the world of comfortable and generous men” (Babbitt: 3), dressed in a “masculine flannel shirt” (Babbitt: 4); he often smokes but “does not have a cigarette box” because “he thinks the person with the cigarette box is a bit sissy” (Babbitt: 7); in order to “act as a tough guy” and breathe so-called “fresh air”, Babbitt also likes to sleep in the “corridor” outside his bedroom (Babbitt: 2). During the day, “the most solemn thing is to make up the ambulatory bed”, and he is covered with a “travel blanket” which “symbolizes freedom and heroism” (Babbitt: 3). He hates “the little circle of wives and stenographers”, especially “the greeting of his wife and the crisp scratching of a stiff brush combing her hair” (Babbitt: 3). All kinds of details show that Babbitt’s masculinity belongs to “hegemonic masculinity”. He unconsciously thinks that “active, competitive, powerful, controlled and dominant”37 men are the real men. However, it is a pity that the hegemonic masculinity discourse system has serious exclusiveness. It emphasizes the characteristics of bravery, toughness, tenacity, aggressiveness, and perseverance and denies the emotional needs and expression of

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male individuals, denouncing the individual’s sympathy and compassion, regarding these as the gender norms of female temperament, thus having the characteristics of inhumanity as well. In the construction process of hegemonic masculinity, “men need to constantly examine their own behavior according to these norms, so as to realize the identity of the same gender psychologically”.38 However, in the process of self-examination, Babbitt always feels “not energetic” and “feels uncomfortable all day long”. He himself also wonders: “I have tried my best to do what I should do: I support my family, build a good house, occupy a six-cylinder car, run a pretty good office, and I don’t have any bad habits except smoking—in fact, I’m quitting smoking; I join the church; I often play golf in order not to get fat, and only socialize with those decent people, even though I’m not satisfied with it” (Babbitt: 47). Lewis is well aware that masculinity, on the one hand, endows people with courage and spiritual strength to face pressure, difficulties, and dangers, but, on the other hand, it has become a major source of male pressure, anxiety, and personality alienation. As a group of antagonistic spatial images between “silver rods” and “cliff”, office buildings predict hegemony. On the one hand, Babbitt “cherishes” the office building like silverware. “Under normal circumstances, he praises the office building and is surprised and proud that he has set up this reliable and lovely institution”. Moreover, “he regards the office building as a spire of the commercial palace, which makes ordinary people feel awed Reverence, passion and faith” (Babbitt: 10). But on the other hand, as if standing on the edge of a cliff, he “hates” the office “like a bathroom with ceramic tile floor, ochre metal ceiling, faded map on hard powder wall, light colored oak chair with varnish, steel table and filing cabinet painted yellow green, which is like a steel plate teacher Don, loitering and laughing are all sins of immorality” (Babbitt: 26). The variety of colors (ochre, pink, light, and yellow green) in the office environment quietly imply the “feminization” of working atmosphere, revealing that Babbitt “hates the hard work of real estate business, his family members, and thus himself” (Babbitt: 3). Finally, he dreams of “escaping” from the office environment, “escaping” from his family, and “escaping” from social responsibility.39 What is the reason Babbitt lacks confidence and wants to escape? What is the root of his masculinity crisis? From the perspective of human life habits, “luxury, laziness, excessive mental activities, and exclusion of physical labor will eventually lead to the lack of masculinity and ‘excessive

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civilization’”.40 From the perspective of urban space, “one of the main reasons for Babbitt’s masculinity anxiety is the power monitoring mechanism of office buildings”.41 This monitoring mechanism, on the one hand, relies on punishment and repression, which makes individuals feel scared like a “cliff”; on the other hand, it shows a sense of self-realization and self-­achievement closely linked with desire, which makes individuals feel happy like “silverware”, and the latter is more secretive and effective than the former. From the social background, from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, with the deepening of industrialization, the urban and rural spatial changes in American society inevitably require the cultural changes and corresponding transformation of masculinity. Due to the change of economic status, the middle class has become the backbone of the society.42 In order to adapt to the commercial economic model of maximizing material benefits, the men of the middle class will spend their daily time in office buildings, instead of adopting self-­ sufficient economic model of agricultural family like the men in the traditional pioneering period. Most of the time is spent on manly activities such as hunting, pastoral life, and logging.43 In the face of the changing working situation, middle-class men tend to hover between the traditional gender role and the new role, which makes them more and more insecure. The success of the women’s election campaign in 1920 further exacerbated the widespread concern of American men. Therefore, to define and describe the masculinity crisis44 of the middle class by grasping the spatial characteristics of the office is the new space production and era demand of Lewis’s office stories.45 How to solve their masculinity crisis? Henry Maven called on the American middle class to “get out of the closed office environment, go out into the streets, drive to the highway, talk to the farmers, and join the truck drivers. They are the real men in the future”.46 Similarly, Lewis deliberately arranged two different psychological evolutionary escape paths for Babbitt to fight against the crisis of masculinity: One is the five unconscious dreams, which often meet with “dream fairies”,47 and the other is two conscious “trips to Maine”—intimate contact with nature at the border of northeast wilderness. Babbitt’s psychological escape path is to the point, reflecting Lewis’s concern about the decline of middle-class masculinity in the United States and the solutions he proposes.

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“Standard Flower Highland Villas”: Spatial Separation and Homogenization of American Cities As the industrialization of the United States, the agglomeration of the urban population, the establishment of the public transport system, and the deterioration of the urban environment began in the early nineteenth century, some middle-class and rich families began to move from the urban center to the suburbs, and the process of “suburbanization” began to start. By the end of the nineteenth century, suburbanization had accelerated with the laying and extension of trams to the suburbs.48 It can be said that suburbanization is not only a transformation of urban spatial layout, but also a process of transferring the population center, economic activities, and political influence from the central city to the suburbs, in which economic competitiveness is the main factor of urban suburbanization.49 From 1870 to 1900, the pattern of population distribution in the suburbs of American metropolitan was separated according to income levels, regardless of the racial origin of European immigrants, resulting in a “class-segregated” suburban living environment.50 So “suburbanization also helps to transform European-Americans into ‘whites’ who can live and marry each other relatively easily. This unity among whites is based on residential segregation, shared housing and life opportunities, but these opportunities are largely beyond the reach of people of color”.51 Therefore, the suburbanization of the United States gradually has the typical characteristics of the urban white middle-class community, neither the existence of industry and commerce nor the residents of the lower class and the non-white race, otherwise it cannot be called a suburb.52 “Babbitt Maps” has three maps describing Babbitt’s house in detail—a “Flower Highland” suburban villa.53 After the abstract map is magnified by the novel text, it shows the deep meaning of “Babbitt Literary Map”. Firstly, from a long distance, Babbitt’s home is a “standardized suburban villa” located in a residential suburb of the “Flower Highland” on the slope. Although it is three miles from the city center,54 “the grass is now lush, dotting with brightly colored houses in amazing comfort. In front of the fresh and blooming flowers, apple trees have been covered with new leaves, like a green torch; The white flowers of the peach trees twinkled in the valley of a brook, and the robins chirped” (Babbitt: 22). From a close distance, the suburban life of the middle class living next to each other and separated class is the dominant demand of the society at that time. “Babbitt’s double-colored Dutch colonial house with both green and

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white color is one of three buildings in a row on Chatham Street. His left door is Sam Dobelblau who works as a secretary at a well-funded bathroom equipment wholesale store; His right door is Ph.D Howard Littfield, a personnel manager and advocacy consultant at Zenith Tram” (Babbitt: 20). At the end of the novel, Babbitt’s son Ted and Howard’s daughter Eunice finally fell in love with each other, fulfilling the hidden social needs of the next generation of the middle class who intermarry each other; by contrast, black hairdressers and young black shoeshine in Pompey’s hairdressers can only live in the “tan wood house” of the slum (see detail in Babbitt: 231). The contemporary cartographer J. B. Harley thinks from the social cartography point of view that “the map has certain social and political attributes”,55 and it is in this sense that the “Flower Highland” is no longer just the geographical place where the event occurs but has been given the meaning. The literary map of the Villa Babbitt reveals not only social and political contradictions, but also class positions, each of which is ideologically related. The reason why the “middle-class partition” of “Flower Highland” can be formed lies in the spatial mechanism of American society at that time. In early 1909, the National Association of Real Estate Boards in the United States established a restrictive property contract prohibiting the leasing or sale of landed property to “anyone other than Caucasians”.56 In 1924, the association stipulated that “no property developer should introduce members of a race or nation or any individual who would clearly undermine the property value of a neighborhood into society”.57 Housing mortgage agencies refuse to lend home loans to black families in white communities, and this kind of discriminatory lending policy is known as the “redlining”.58 Drew Weiss argues that “the composition of race and class in the 20th century’s America is also basically a spatial process, and the space of cities and suburbs is marked by race and class”.59 The discriminatory policies of housing market and financial institutions directly promote the segmentation of suburban housing market and class segregation, and its performance is the formation of “dual housing market”.60 The founders of the “dual housing market” include residential mortgage lenders, land developer, real estate agents, and so on. The rapid development of suburbanization in the United States is linked with the speculation of property developers in the suburbs. They have witnessed the creation of suburbanization in the United States and helped them to quickly complete the space production of American cities.61

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“Flower Highland” suburban villa not only represents the space partition of the United States, but also is a standardized, homogeneous display. Although all villas may be in various shapes, they are the residence of the same class and the expression of the same interest. Villa owner Babbitt is also engaged in the sale of “standardized housing”, so it can be said that he is a screw of Fordism’s “standardized” production chain. With the unlimited expansion of Fordism’s mode of production in the United States, and the emergence and expansion of urban real estate brokers like Babbitt, American cities are bound to be “standardized” and “homogenized” in spatial form. “By breaking through the boundary between one society and another, the capitalist production unifies space. This unification is also the expansion and concentration of vulgarization. Just as the accumulation of goods produced on a large scale for the abstract space of the market has shattered local and legal barriers, breaking through the limits of all medieval societies that have maintained the nature of craft production, it has also eliminated local autonomy and quality”.62 It is Babbitt’s “hard work” that the whole town of Zenith forms the same “standardized” urban space template. “If a stranger suddenly comes to Zenith’s business center, it’s hard to distinguish it from other cities like Oregon, Georgia, Ohio, Maine, Oklahoma or Manitoba” (Babbitt: 41). For this, Lewis holds a kind of complex ambiguous attitude. He is sensitive to the fact that standardization objectively reflects the pace of American urbanization. In the novel, on the one hand, he has repeatedly affirmed the social progress brought by standardized social mass production through the mouth of lawyer Donne: “Standardization itself is nothing better. When I bought an Ingersoll watch or a Ford car, I spent less money and got better tools. I knew the quality of the goods I bought and saved time and energy to develop my personality. I don’t care if they’re standardized. This standardization is excellent!” (Babbitt: 77). On the other hand, he has expressed his abhorrence toward “standardized cities” by Dr. Yavich: “I hate your city. It standardizes everything. Beauty is beautiful, but there is not vitality” (Babbitt: 102). On the one hand, Lewis’s vague expression of “standardized mass production” shows that capitalism has gained absolute dominance; on the other hand, it also shows that capitalism of “Ford era” has historical particularity: It lurks the historical trend of “homogenization” and the historical situation of “heterogeneity” at the same time. In early 1904, Veblen had foreseen that “the idea of standardization affects people’s daily life and even manipulates people’s behavior and

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knowledge”.63 Influenced by Van Bolen, Lewis is equally concerned about the alienation of standardized ideas. He expresses his critical position through the radical Donne: “I’m against Zenith’s idea of standardization, definitely, I am also against that traditional competition. The real villain is the neat, nice, hardworking people. They did all they could to create comfortable conditions for their children. The worst thing about these guys is that they are very kind and very smart, at least at work. You don’t hate them, but their standardized thinking is your enemy” (Babbitt: 78). In the city life of Zenith, almost all the precepts and moral norms are standardized. Babbitt, for example, must adhere to the idea of standardization in order to become a standardized citizen of the city and to turn himself into an empty-headed, completely devoid of personality: “City main body exists only in the group—naturally want to fight for the group’s rules and regulations. They can’t have anything other than standardization and consistency, because the source of their personality has dried up”.64 Babbitt would feel insecure and unstable when he left the group, causing to some extent the alienation and confusion of his personality. The “self-discipline and self-motivation” of self-made under Puritanism and Protestant ethics have become peer-to-peer, standardized, and group-made under hedonism in the process of urbanization. In November 1920, Lewis wrote in a letter to the critic Doren: “After Main Street, I’m going to write a book about the life of an ordinary businessman, a tired businessman, a man who lives not in the Ge town but in a city of 300,000 to 400,000 people”.65 After the publication of Babbitt, the typical character of Babbitt—he was self-satisfied and following the behavior of the middle class66—successfully entered the English dictionary and became the spokesman for “American businessman” and “American life”. Since then, the image of “Babbitt” has appeared in the view of British and American literature and culture: The new stories about city men of “Babbitt” is continued in C.E.M Joad’s Babbitt Warren (1926), Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Sui (1955), Williams Witt’s An Organized Man (1956), Elizabeth Stevenson’s Babbitt and Bohemians (1967), and so on. The subtlety of Babbitt’s Literary Map lies in Lewis’s creative replacement of American urban space production experience with novel narrative experience and map drawing experience and the transmission of realistic kinetic energy in the form of graph-text combination. It realizes the abstract experience and rational interpretation of art for urban space production. By rereading Babbitt today in the twenty-first century, the

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significance lies in revealing Lewis’s “Babbitt’s Literary Map” and the mystery of “Space production” in American cities—It not only refers to the spatial orientation and spatial circle of American cities, but also bears witness to the harm caused by spatial definition and spatial partition to urban people, prompting people to think about the potential impact of space production on human social existence, emotional structure, and mental state.

Notes 1. Harrison Smith (ed.), From Main Street to Stockholm: Letters of Sinclair Lewis 1919–1930 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952), 78–79. 2. As described by Grace, “Babbitt Map” is a three-city geographic form composed of 18 maps: Zenith City, Babbitt’s office buildings in the city center, and Babbitt’s suburban villas, 13 of which focus on the urban spatial layout of Zenith in the novel, involving location, topography, and landform (including Babbitt’s familiar block close-up, distant view, Zenith city topography map, Zenith city topographic map 35 kilometers away, topographic map 6 kilometers away from the city hall, Zenith city key areas, Zenith city center, the location map of Zenith’s commercial city hall, etc.). The other five maps show the living situation of the character Babbitt in detail: Two are about the specific location of Babbitt’s office, and three depict Babbitt’s suburban residences—the geographical location of the “flowering heights” near Zenith, a close-up view of the community, and a location map of the center of the community (see Helen Batcheloi, “A Sinclair Lewis Portfolio of Maps Zenith to Winnemac,” Modern Language Quarterly, 32 [1971], 401–408 [subsequent quotations from the same work will be marked with the first word of the famous title and the page number of the quotation source, no additional notes]; see also James M.  Hutchisson, “‘All of Us Americans at 46’: The Making of Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt,” Journal of Modern Literature, 18.1 [Winter, 1992]: 95–114). The research of Batchelor and Hutchison is limited to verifying what the “Babbitt Map” conveys. The geographic information lacks an empirical investigation of the intrinsic connection with the novel text “Babbitt”. 3. Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1998), 1–10. 4. See Ludwig Lewisohn, “Review of Babbitt,” in Nation, 22 Sept. 1922, 284–286; Robert Littel “Babbitt,” in New Republic, 1 Oct. 1922, 152; Lewis Mumford “The America of Sinclair Lewis,” in Mark Schorer, ed., Sinclair Lewis: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-­

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Hall, 1962), 159; David C. Pugh “Baedekers, Babbittry, and Baudelairen,” in Martin Bucco, ed., Critical Essays on Sinclair Lewis (Boston: G. K. Hall 1986), 31; Glen A. Love, Babbitt: An American Life (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993). 5. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Nicholson-Smith Donald (Oxford: Blackwell Publisher Ltd., 1991), 53. 6. See James S. Miller, “Zoning the Past: Brokers, Babbitts, and the Memory Work of Commercial Real Estate,” Journal of American Studies, no. 44 (2010): 287–311; Catherine Jurca, White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century-American Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 44–75; however, the above research did not realize that space production in “Babbitt” is not only a comprehensive penetration and comprehensive manifestation, but also has an internal connection with the “Babbitt Map”. 7. Regarding the literary map, the representative works of related research achievements in the West include John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (London: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (London: Verso,1999); Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein, eds., Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain (London: Cambridge University Press, 2001); J.  A. Hunt, Narrating American Space: Literary Cartography and the Contemporary Southwest (Ann Arbor: ProQuest, 2001); for the relevant research in the field of English and American literature in China, please refer to Guo Fangyun’s “Literature Map,” Foreign Literature, no.1 (2015): 111–119, “The Queen’s Body Poetics in the Literary Map: Taking ‘The Wrong Drama’ as an example Cases,” Foreign Literature Review, no.2 (2015): 5–17. 8. 梅新林:“论文学地图”, 《中国社会科学》, 2015 年第 8 期, 第 159 页。 [Mei Xinlin, “Literature Map,” Chinese Social Sciences, no.8 (2015): 159.] 9. From the perspective of the creation of literary maps, the “Babbitt Literary Map” is not an exclusive invention of Lewis. In the field of European and American literature, there are the soul road map in Dante’s Divine Comedy, the island map in Thomas More’s Utopia, the nautical chart in “Robinson Crusoe” by Defoe, the ranger chart in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the treasure map in Stevenson’s Treasure Island, and so on. 10. Geoffrey Martin (translated by Cheng Yinong and Wang Xuemei), All Possible Worlds: A History of Geographical Ideas (上海: 上海人民出版社 [Shanghai People’s Publishing House], 2017), 2–6. 11. Richard Lingeman, Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street (New York: Random House, 2002), 173. The following quotations from the same

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work will be marked with the title “Rebel” and the citation page number, no longer note. 12. See James M.  Hutchisson “‘All of Us Americans at 46’: The Making of Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt,” 100. 13. Lewis first named it “Monarch City” and later “Zenith” (Zenith means peak, heyday). He takes it that the name “Zenith” is of more commercial characteristics and Zenith is a futuristic city of “beauty and justice” (see Rebel: 175). 14. Unfortunately, compared with Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, the state of Vinnemark conceived by Lewis is far less influential in academia and is hardly known, which also makes it a blind spot in the study of Lewis’s novels. 15. Sinclair Lewis (translated by Wang Yongnian), Babbitt (北京: 作家出版社 [Writers Publishing House], 2006), 145. Subsequent quotations from the same work will be marked with the title of the work and the page number of the source of the quotation. 16. Sinclair Lewis (translated by Li Dingkun et al), Arrow Smith (南京:江苏人 民出版社 [Jiangsu People’s Publishing House], 1987), 95. 17. After reading the first 75 pages of the manuscript of Babbitt, the publisher, Harcourt, advised Lewis to focus more on the characters and to show cities, civilization, and other things by the characters. Lewis said in his reply that the novel must be about Babbitt, not Zenith (see “Lewis to Harcourt, 12 February 1922,” in Harrison Smith, ed., From Main Street to Stockholm: Letters of Sinclair Lewis, 1919–1930, 97). 18. Anne O’Hare McCormick, “Zenith Discusses Babbitt, Epic of Pullmania,” New York Times Book Review, 22 Oct. (1922): 3. 19. See Thomas S. Hines, Jr. “Echoes from ‘Zenith’: Reactions of American Businessmen to Babbitt,” The Business History Review, vol. 41, no.2 (Summer, 1967):123–140. 20. See Mathew Edney, “Brian Harley’s Career and Intellectual Legacy,” Cartographica, vol. 40. no.1/2 (2005): 1–17. 21. See Howard P.  Chudacoff, The Evolution of American Urban Society (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1981), 63. 22. In the process, megacities just sprang up. In 1790, there were only five cities with more than 10,000 people, but between 1860 and 1910, the number of cities with a population of 100,000 or more increased from 9 to 50 (see Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census: Fourteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1920: Population 1920, Number and Distribution of Inhabitants [Washington, D. C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1921], 47; see also Howard P.  Chudacoff, The Evolution of American Urban Society [Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1981], 94–95).

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23. “The ChiPitts Megalopolis Bolts” is a simple letter combination of the two metropolis—Chicago and Pittsburgh. 王小侠: 《美国都市带演进机制研 究》, 沈阳: 东北大学出版社, 2014 年, 第 83 页。 [Wang Xiaoxia, A Study on the Evolution Mechanism of American Urban Belts (Shenyang: Northeastern University Press, 2014), 83.] 24. Such as the grain processing in Milwaukee, meat processing and canning in St Louis, steel processing in Pittsburgh, machining in Detroit, locomotive manufacturing in Columbus, shipbuilding in Cincinnati, and glass production in Toledo. 25. Since the 1920s, western critics have regarded “Babbitt” as Lewis’s work of social imagination, emphasizing its satirical criticism of the ills of American business. The book was believed a true reflection of the life of the middle class at that time (see Stephen S.  Conroy, “Sinclair Lewis’s Sociological Imagination,” in Harold Bloom, ed., Sinclair Lewis [New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987]; Mark Schorer, ed., Sinclair Lewis: A Collection of Critical Essays [Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1962]). Such criticism lacks a micro-analysis of the commercial society, which has affected Chinese academia since then. 26. See Ernest W. Burgess, “The Growth of the City: An Introduction to A Research Report,” in Robert Park and Ernest W. Burgess, eds., The City (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976), 47. From the perspective of urban ecology, concentric zone model means that the first circle of central business district radiates outwards and the second circle serves as the transition zone, which is characterized by depression and recession. There are a lot of low-income slums, rental housing, and possibly ethnic enclaves in the second circle. The third circle is home to workers. They often live in smaller and more dilapidated houses on small plots. The fourth and fifth circles are detached villas and luxury apartments for middle class and rich class, respectively. See Arthur Getis (translated by Huang Runhua et al.), Geography and Life (北京: 世界图书出版公司 [World Map Publishing Company], 2013), 495. 27. Henri Lefebvre, The Survival of Capitalism: Reproduction of the Relation of Production, trans. Frank Bryant (London: Allison and Busby, 1978), 21. 28. Ian Buchanan, Michel de Certeau: Cultural Theorist (London: Sage Publication, 2000), 111. 29. Lynch sees the city as a system which contains an organized set of structures that have psychological significance for the inhabitants. Paths, boundaries, districts, nodes, and landmarks here all provide important hints for people’s walking experience and for psychological orientation. See 凯文• 林奇: 《城市意象》, 方益萍, 等译, 北京: 华夏出版社, 2011年。 [Kevin Lynch, Images of the City, trans. Fang Yiping et  al. (Beijing: China Publishing House, 2011).]

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30. The presentation of city image originates from people’s perception of moving and thinking of experiencing city space. See Roger Trancik (translated by Zhu Ziyu), Looking for the Lost Space—The Concept of Urban Design (北 京: 中国建筑工业出版社 [China Construction Industry Press], 2008), 120. 31. Sinclair Lewis, “Unpublished Introduction to Babbitt,” in Sally Parry, ed., Go East, Young Man (New York: Signet Classics, 2005), 17. 32. The writing process of Babbitt can be divided into three steps: First, Lewis made a series of notes (covering many aspects of American social life in the 1920s), which includes not only different character arrangements, but also his own views on the city of Zenith; secondly, he wrote an outline of the structure of the novel and its focus; finally, Lewis finished the complete print draft of Babbitt, which was modified many times in blue, red, and black marks (see James M. Hutchisson “‘All of Us Americans at 46’: The Making of Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt,” 95). 33. David Harvey (translated by Ye Qimao), Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (北京: 商务印书馆 [The Commercial Press], 2014), 43. 34. Michel Foucault (edited and translated by Xia Zhujiu), A Reader of Cultural Forms and Social Theories of Space (台湾: 明文书局 [Mingwen Publishing House], 1998), 221. 35. David Harvey (translated by Hu Daping), Space of Hope (南京: 南京大学 出版社 [Nanjing University Press], 2006), 76. 36. 吴治平: 《空间理论与文学的再现》, 兰州: 甘肃人民出版社, 2008 年, 第 112 页。 [Wu Zhiping, Space Theory and Literary Representation (Lanzhou: Gansu People’s Publishing House, 2008), 112.] 37. 方刚: 《男性研究与男性运动》, 济南: 山东人民出版社, 2008 年, 第 43 页。[Fang Gang, Male Research and Male Movement (Jinan: Shandong People’s Publishing House, 2008), 43.] 38. 刘岩: “男性气质”, 《外国文学》, 2014 年第 4 期, 第 114 页。 [Liu Yan, “Masculinity,” Foreign Literature, no. 4 (2014): 114.] 39. According to Harvey C.  Mansfield’s Masculinity, the most outstanding qualities of masculinity are courage, firmness, self-control, self-confidence, and strong sense of responsibility. See 哈维•曼斯菲尔德: 《男性气概》, 刘玮译, 南京: 译林出版社, 2009 年, 第 283 页。 [Harvey C. Mansfield: Masculinity, trans. Liu Wei (Nanjing: Yilin Publishing House, 2009), 283.] “Escape” is the most prominent feature of his lack of self-confidence in masculinity crisis. 40. David Arnold, Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 133. 41. Graham Thompson, Male Sexuality under Surveillance (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2003), 50.

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42. See Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 13. 43. See Clare Virginia Eby, “Babbitt as Veblenian Critique of Manliness,” American Studies, vol. 34, no. 2 (Fall, 1993): 5–7. 44. See Joe L.  Dubbert, “Progressivism and the Masculinity Crisis,” in Elizabeth H. Pleck and Joseph H. Pleck eds., The American Man (N. J: Prentice Hall, 1980), 303–320; Peter N.  Stearns, Be a Man! Males in Modern Society (New York: Holmes&Meier, 1990), 10–11. 45. See L. C. Mitchell, Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 97. 46. Qtd. in Graham Thompson, Male Sexuality under Surveillance, 47. 47. George Josie believes that the description of the “dream fairy” in the novel has benefits of two levels for Babbitt: One is to help Babbitt release his sexual desires at the unconscious level; the second is to symbolize the surveillance of hegemonic masculinity, which aims to make Babbitt conform to the established norms and definitions of masculinity. (Qtd. in Graham Thompson, Male Sexuality Under Surveillance, 54). 48. Historical data show that although in the 1900–1910 and 1910–1920 periods, the population growth rate of urban centers was 35.5% and 26.7%, respectively, 27.6% and 22.4% higher than that in the suburbs in the same period, but in the 1920–1930 period, the population growth rate in urban centers was 23.3%, while that in the suburbs rose to 34.2%, nearly 11 percentage points above the former, as a result of the standardized car production. 49. See Rober Park and Ernest W. Burgess, eds., The City, 1. 50. See Sam B.  Warner, Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870–1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press and the MIT Press, 1962), 46–64. 51. Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 98–99. 52. Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 6. 53. The 15th “Flower Highlands and Neighbors” details the name of each street nearby: Royal Avenue, Prince Avenue, Buckinghamshire, King William Road, and Queen Anne Road. The 16th map “Highlands” is an enlarged version of the above-mentioned map. The 17th map, “Sowntown Heights,” shows the name and shape of Babbitt’s neighbors and the more detailed is the style of Babbitt’s two-story building, the number of rooms, and the furnishings at home (the function of each room is indicated by

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letters, while the classification of items is by numbers). (See “Sinclair”: 401–407 and the “Babbitt Maps” in the appendix.) 54. According to Lewis’s definition of the suburbs of Zenith, he thinks that six miles from the city building is suburban; “Flower Highland” is three miles from the city building, so the writer calls it a villa of outskirt (see “Sinclair”: 401–408; see also the seventh of the “Babbitt Maps” in the appendix). 55. J. B. Harley, “Text and Contexts in the Interpretation of Early Maps,” in Paul Laxton, ed., The New Nature of Maps (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2001), 26. 56. Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century, 41. 57. See David L. Kirp et al., Our Town: Race, Housing, and the Soul of Suburbia (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1955), 5. 58. Ibid. 59. Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century, 98–99. 60. The so-called dual housing market is “a market in which there is a segregation of the residential classes. The white middle class pre-occupied new houses in the suburbs of the city and the areas in which the existing living environment is superior, while the other classes, such as blacks, are usually located in the center of the city and are usually located in the worst-case areas” (Peter O. Muller, Contemporary Suburban America (N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1981), 89–90). 61. Philip C. Dolce ed., Suburbia: The American Dream and Dilemma (NJ: Prentice Hall, 1981), 1–5. 62. Guy Debord (translated by Wang Zhaofeng), La Societe du Spectacle (南京: 南京大学出版社 [Nanjing University Press], 2017), 77. 63. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1919), 67. 64. T.  K. Whipplo, “Sinclair Lewis,” in Mark Schorer, ed, Sinclair Lewis: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1962), 71. 65. Glan A. Love, Babbitt: An American Life, 17. 66. 见陆谷孙: 《英汉大辞典》 (第二版), 上海: 上海译文出版社, 2017 年, 第 123 页。 [See Lu Gusun, English-Chinese Dictionary (the 2nd edition) (Shanghai: Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 2017), 123.]

CHAPTER 16

Pretext, Embedded-Text, Subtext: On the Landscape Narratives of Willa Cather’s One of Ours Hongfei Yan

One of Ours is a novel that caused considerable controversy when it was published in 1922. Although the novel was an immediate commercial success and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923, it was subjected to some harsh criticism from many influential writers and critics, particularly for its portrayal of the war and its characters in the second half of the novel. H. L. Mencken, who had highly praised My Ántonia, criticized the novel This article was originally published in Shandong Foreign Language Teaching, Issue 6 of 2017. What follows is the full information: 颜红菲: “前文本⋅嵌文本⋅潜 文本——论《我们中的一个》的景观叙述”, 《山东外语教学》, 2017 年第 6 期, 第 67–75 页。 [YAN Hongfei, “Pretext, Embedded-text, Subtext—On Landscape Narratives of Willa Cather’s One of Ours,” Shandong Foreign Language Teaching, no. 6 (2017): 67–75.] And there are some deletions in the English version.

H. Yan (*) Nanjing Institute of Technology, Nanjing, China © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Fang, R. T. Tally Jr. (eds.), Spatial Literary Studies in China, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03914-0_16

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for its lack of truthfulness in its portrayal of the protagonist on the battlefield and doubted that Claude would die with his fanatical fantasies about the war;1 Sinclair Lewis, who had also previously praised Cather’s novel, refused to accept the Pulitzer Prize in 1926, citing objections to the Pulitzer committee’s reasons for awarding it to Cather: “[F]or the American novel published during the year which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life, and the highest standard of American manners and manhood.”2 Hemingway’s letter to Edmund Wilson was even more unabashedly cynical about the novel: “Wasn’t that last scene in the [battle] lines wonderful? Do you know where it came from? The battle scene in Birth of a Nation. I identified episode after episode, Catherized. Poor woman, she had to get her war experience somewhere.”3 Edmund Wilson also argued that the novel was only superficially true, that what was lacking is Claude’s emotional truth about the war, and that the novel failed because of an infantile romantic naivety about the war.4 The criticism was so vitriolic that some scholars even suggested that it was the overwhelming criticism suffered by this novel that led Cather to speak of the world broke into two in 1922 or thereabouts. Maybe the optimistic and positive tone of the early Cather novels had greatly influenced the expected perspective of critics and readers, made them less able to see at a glance the ironic pessimistic tone implicit in One of Ours. As a result of the negative reviews of these major critics and writers, the novel was neglected for half a century. It was not until the 1970s that critics pointed out that it was a misread modernist novel. In fact, Cather did not share the Don Quixotean idealism of the protagonist, and One of Ours was actually a satirical novel with a great irony between the “rugged reality of American life” and the “capricious and romantic ideal.”5 Since then, more scholars had explored the potential ironic discourse from perspectives of wilderness image, narrative perspective, intertextuality, and so on. Jean Schwind pointed out that the protagonist Claude wears “Claude Glass” and the world seen through the “Claude Glass” was a romanticized landscape, but Claude’s voice was not the only one, the author also arranged multiple voices in the text, unifying the interaction between romantic and ironic voices in an organism.6 By analyzing the intertextuality between Tennyson’s The King’s Narrative and One of Ours, Susan Rosowski pointed out the blindness of Claude’s romantic spirit, the irony which came from the stark disparity between the blind optimism and the harshness of the battlefield.7 Merrill Skaggs argued that in One of Ours, Cather, in contrast to the style of the early Prairie series, maintained a

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certain distance between the author and the protagonist, a distance that was full of irony, and that One of Ours was a watershed work of Cather, from which her later themes and creative styles could find their source.8 In recent years, criticism has been broadened and the attention has been paid to the complex emotions and thematic ambiguities. For example, Steven Stout and Richard C. Harris also pointed out the ambiguous tendency of the novel, emphasizing that it was a modern polyphonic novel full of openness and dialogism. Like the Nebraska series, One of Ours is still a regional novel, in which character situation, everyday life, farm work, and rural community are all put on a local color, making the regionality become the basis of the text interpretation. In Willa Cather’s novel, there are large pieces of description of landscapes applied to represent the regionality, which not only put on a distinctive local brand for everyday life, but also become a mirror to reflect the rift of the times. Therefore, this article intends to start from the perspective of landscape narrative, discussing how the novel forms an intertextual process with the surface text through the use of narrative strategies of pretext, embedded text, and subtext, to realize thematic convey, time-space metaphor, and narrative irony. Such narrative strategies make One of Ours a modern novel full of ambiguities, dialogism, and multiple meanings. More specifically, through the reference of the pretext, the novel completes the “paradise lost narrative,” showing the split between the past and the present within the regional community; by embedded text, the classic legends are subtly inset in the landscape description, forming a contrast tension in intertextuality and suggesting the idyll ideal’s lost once in the European then in the United States again; through the dialogue between the subtext and the surface text, irony is produced, showing the huge contrast between the protagonist’s inner world and the external reality, as well as the fantastic fusion between the sublime and blind poles of the character.

The Narrative of the Lost Paradise with Reference to the Pretext One of Ours consists of five chapters, divided into two parts in plot: the story of the first part took place within the United States, describing the depressing life of Claude, the protagonist, in his small town farmland in the West; the last two chapters of the second part recount Claude’s

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experiences when he went to France to fight in World War I and was eventually killed on the battlefield. Following the first generation of pioneers in O, pioneers! and My Ántonia, this novel is a continuation of the Nebraska narrative, with the transition from the “Garden of Earthly Delights” theme to the “modern wilderness” theme.9 The landscape narrative considers early Prairie Trilogy as pretexts, showing temporal coherence and spatial heterogeneity in its presentation of Nebraska’s nature, families, farms, and communities, while, at the same time, combining rich detailing with the use of symbolism to make the whole work both a sense of present reality and a sense of historical weight. The use of the pretext outwardly indicates the author’s continuing interest in Nebraska as a regional writer and gives the novel an epic feature through the chronological writing of different periods in the region. Intrinsically, the theme of the wilderness in first part of One of Ours is made clearer through the contrast with the pretext and the variation of theme expressed through the heterogeneity of space. The first part of the novel takes place in Nebraska around the time of World War I. On the one hand, the frontier had been closed and continued western expansion encountered geographical limitations; on the other hand, the new commercialized society completed its spatial expansion with the extension of the railroads westward, the pioneer spirit was replaced by consumerism, and Jefferson’s idealized agrarian utopian society suffered disintegration. As a writer with a strong historical consciousness, Cather had always considered the Nebraska regional narrative in the context of historical cyclical theory, where the closure of the frontier and the rise of industrialism in the region meant for her the end of one era and the beginning of another: “Nebraska, the end of a cycle.”10 One of Ours is directly continuous with My Ántonia, the third one of the Prairie Trilogy, in both time and space, obviously not by accident, but by a careful artistic treatment based on the overall layout and thematic manifestations. The novel begins with an austere description of the Claude family’s deserted breakfast, in contrast to the summer feast at the end of My Ántonia, which some scholars have likened to the Last Supper. In addition to the beginning and end of the sequence between supper and breakfast, the landscape of One of Ours also begins with autumn and takes autumn and winter as its main tone, following the high summer of My Ántonia. The spatial construction also reflects the succession between the two. The novel ends with Jim’s description of Antonia’s apple orchard as a sanctuary surrounded by three barriers:

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The hedges were so tall that we could see nothing but the blue sky above them … The afternoon sun poured down on us through the drying grape leaves. The orchard seemed full of sun, like a cup, and we could smell the ripe apples on the trees. The crabs hung on the branches as thick as beads on a string, purple-red, with a thin silvery glaze over them.11

The orchard narrative concentrates on the twin metaphors of the Holy Grail and the Garden of Eden, with the European apple trees flowering in the New World as a testament to the miracle, and Garden of Earthly Delights theme reaches its peak here. While in One of Ours, we can see that there is no description of the apple orchard here. Instead of the narrative of the apple orchard, it is the narrative of the father cutting off Claude’s favorite cherry tree. Claude was deeply aware of the great changes taking place in this land: Claude felt sure that when he was a little boy and all the neighbours were poor, they and their houses and farms had more individuality. The farmers took time then to plant fine cottonwood groves on their places, and to set osage orange hedges along the borders of their fields. Now these trees were all being cut down and grubbed up… The people themselves had changed. He could remember when all the farmers in this community were friendly toward each other; now they were continually having lawsuits. Their sons were either stingy and grasping, or extravagant and lazy, and they were always stirring up trouble. Evidently, it took more intelligence to spend money than to make it.12

The juxtaposition of these two paragraphs together shows the natural relationship between farm life and the shaping of humanity. The emotional attachment to living place becomes a strong link to the relationships of community members, and orchard landscape in people’s lives simultaneously engages and influences their emotional structures. However, the subsequent tree-cutting behavior has changed the landscape of the former community, as well as the values and emotional structure of the people. The act of cutting down the trees is associated with “everyone’s desire to destroy those things they used to be proud of,” suggesting that the value ties connecting the former community are being severed, and in One of Ours, Antonia’s orchard is destroyed, and the prairie community in O, Pioneers! suffers disintegration. In comparison to the Prairie Trilogy, the tone of its landscape narrative in One of Ours is also changed. The lyrical tone that runs through My

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Ántonia becomes a plaintive tone in One of Ours, and the narrative point of view changes from an external perspective to an internal perspective, no longer with a lot of situational landscape descriptions. Cather explains that the reason for cutting out all the pictures is that the boy is not looking at the picture:13 “Claude crossed the fields mechanically, without looking where he went. His power of vision was turned inward upon scenes and events wholly imaginary as yet” (237). The rejection of the immediate landscape suggests a separation between the character and his environment or a refusal to be present and an intentional distancing. Cather’s removal of the beautiful pastoral landscape and the images that inspire passion and imagination from Claude’s eyes is the opposite of the lyrical approach to the landscape throughout Jim’s narrative, allowing the same land to inspire completely different emotions and imaginations in the two minds. Jim wanted to be the poet of the land, expecting to be “the first to bring the Muse into my country” and to write with “a great feeling” that “where the pen was fitted to the matter as the plough is to the furrow.”14 From this perspective, it is easy to understand why One of Ours no longer contains the lyrical descriptions of the landscape that were present throughout My Ántonia. From the moment Claude’s cherry tree was cut down, the world that stirred his emotional imagination was far away from, who, even in the face of “the yellowest hour of the autumn day,” “stood lost in a forest of light, dry, rustling corn leaves, quite hidden away from the world” (79). Let’s compare the landscape narrative of sunset between My Ántonia and One of Ours. One is the famous sunset ploughing scene in My Ántonia, which is presented from Jim’s perspective, sacred and solemn: There were no clouds, the sun was going down in a limpid, gold-washed sky … On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disk; the handles, the tongue, the share—black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun. (245)

In contrast and in timely continuity with the summer sunset is the landscape of late autumn sunset in One of Ours. The landscape is presented from the perspective of the implied narrator, as Claude is driving home from farming in a late autumn afternoon, and under the “dazzling blue sky,” “watching the flocks of crows go over from the fields where they fed

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on shattered grain, to their nests in the trees along Lovely Creek” (80). This late autumn sunset scene resembles Van Gogh’s “The Raven in the Wheat Field,” in which Van Gogh conveyed images of gloom and death. Claud was on his way home, alongside Greedy crows were still cawing about before they flapped homeward. When he drove out to the highway, the sun was going down, and from his seat on the load he could see far and near. Yonder was Dan’s wagon, coming in from the north quarter; over there was the roof of Leonard Dawson’s new house, and his windmill, standing up black in the declining day. Before him were the bluffs of the pasture, and the little trees, almost bare, huddled in violet shadow along the creek, and the Wheeler farm-house on the hill, its windows all a flame with the last red fire of the sun. (80)

“The sun was going down,” and the sky was filled with the shadows and cries of crows, blackened windmills, small trees huddled in the shadows, and Claude’s wagon making its way alone at sunset toward the steep slope leading to the highland pastures. The narrative of the landscape is highly suggestive, as the desolate countryside, the dark windmills, the afterglow of the setting sun, and the single horseman seem to suggest a twentieth-­ century Don Quixote’s story and the final destiny of the protagonist. The flame of the sun reflecting on the windows of his house seem to be the deepest summons, calling him to leave this land where passion and creativity no longer exist, to flee to Europe, to find a meaningful life.

Spatiotemporal Metaphors Under Embedded Text The use of embedded text is another distinctive feature of One of Ours. The knightly associations triggered by the scene of Claude’s horse riding alone suggest that the novel uses the knightly legend as an embedded text to form a dialogue with the surface text. In terms of artistic treatment, besides embedding knightly legends, Cather also introduces Roman myths, folk legends, and historical stories, scattering, mixing, and transforming them into the specific situations, “Nebraskaizing” or “Frenchizing” historical legends with a landscape full of symbols and metaphors, so that the localized present narrative can be expanded and transcended in time and space, showing a deep historical reference and multi-layered meanings of the novel.

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Claude is no longer able to find something sacred on his father’s farm that will inspire his life, so he leaves the West to join the expedition to France. In traditional chivalric literature, the hero’s series of adventures take place in a constant spatial progression. One of Ours still follows this pattern in its artistic approach, depicting Claude’s expedition from farm to town and then across the ocean to France, suggesting Claude’s quest for faith through a parody of chivalric literature. As Susan Rosowski has noted, One of Ours is “an American version of the Arthurian legend,” in which Claude, like a knight, goes “to worship his hero, to fulfill a mission, and to follow a chivalric ideal,”15 with the conviction that “he was going abroad with an expeditionary force that would make war without rage, with uncompromising generosity and chivalry” (248). In the Middle Ages, the knight’s identity was granted in the church through strict church ceremony, while in One of Ours, Claude’s knight’s identity was achieved through a narrative of church landscape. In dealing with this event of great significance to Claude, Cather intentionally has Claude entered the wrong church. Claude had intended to visit the Cathedral of Notre Dame with his comrades, where there is “a statue of Charles the Lionheart, over the spot where the lion-heart itself was buried” (344), King Charles being the leader of the Third Crusade and representing power and conquest. By mistake, Claude entered the Church of St. Ouen, where Mary Magdalen, the wife of Jesus, is considered “the living Grail.”16 Cather embeds the Grail legend in the text through the metaphor of the church, where Mary Magdalen, as the bearer of the Grail, represents the love and mercy that are forever transmitted on earth and the courage and passion to realize this ideal. The novel presents the reader with a church landscape from Claude’s point of view. The moment he was confronted with the “rose window with a purple heart,” the church bells ring, the moment Claude finds the Holy Grail: “The revelations of the glass and the bell had come almost simultaneously, as if one produced the other; and both were superlatives toward which his mind had always been groping,—or so it seemed to him then” (342). The “purple heart of the rose” is a symbol for the Mary, in contrast to the figure of the Lion-­ Hearted King, who leads his soldiers in forceful conquest. Claude sat for a long time “with solemnity” in front of the flower window, feeling the moment of passing through the sacred history: [S]omething about stars whose light travels through space for hundreds of years before it reaches the earth and the human eye. The purple and crimson

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and peacock-green of this window had been shining quite as long as that before it got to him … He felt distinctly that it went through him and farther still. (343)

At this moment, the past time and the present time merged in Claude through the sunshine of the church window glass and the church bell became the symbol of the hero’s presence inspired by revelation, which made Claude feel that he was one with the Holy Grail knight. The church space carries a revelatory function, so that Claude’s deposited memories mixed with abstract ideals and strong emotions were able to be responded in the church scene, similar to Bergson’s epiphany brought by a moment of intuition. No longer confused, he penetrated the darkness of the church with “a frank and contemplative gaze,” an idea formed in the penetration of light: “Life was so short that it meant nothing at all unless it were continually reinforced by something that endured; unless the shadows of individual existence came and went against a background that held together” (406). The revelation of the Church of St. Ouen led Claude to finally find his Holy Grail and to sacrifice himself for it without hesitation. The voyage from America to France was a true crusade for Claude, but the incident of Claude entering the wrong church was ironic. The more noble and passionate the hero’s emotion was, the stronger the irony was. Claude’s perspective had been adopted during the whole process, suggesting that his pursuit was a kind of vanity, even a kind of self-deception. In order to express the irreversible historical process of the destruction of the pastoral life by modern industrial society, One of Ours also embeds a traditional American landscape pattern, that is, the imagery of “machines intruding into garden,” as a metaphor to represent the break-up of the Arcadian pastoral life. The recurrence of the landscape pattern of “machines intruding into garden” in American literary tradition is because its symbolic meaning captures the essence of American social transformation; the core of the recurring imagery is based on the opposing pattern of Garden and Machines, and the sudden intrusion of machines into garden symbolizes the break of Arcadian tranquility and harmony in American literature. In the works of Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville, Mark Twain, Fitzgerald, and others, one can read the scene in which the protagonist, absorbed in a contemplative reverie of nature and landscape, is suddenly disturbed by the sound of a train or steamboat, which at the moment destroys Arcadia, both in the mind and in reality. Leo Max pointed out that “Virgil’s Eclogues was the real source of pastoral style in American literature,” because he

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discovered Arcadia in these poems, and “constructed a symbolic landscape that skillfully blends myths with reality, which had greater relevance to the American experience.”17 Early American immigrants celebrated the New World as a quiet idyll away from the industrial bustle of Europe, and when the West was developed, the pastoral ideal became an inevitable theme of Western mythology; Alexandra’s cornfield and Ántonia’s orchard are the Arcadia of American pastoral narratives, representing tranquility, simplicity, and self-sufficiency, thus in a sense that O, Pioneers! and My Ántonia are also seen as the idyllic epics of American West. In One of Ours, this peace and harmony was broken when Claude was pulling two mules working in the field when the sudden roar of a truck frightened the two mules, dragging Claude off the ground and starting to run. “They carried him right along, swinging in the air, and finally ran him into the barb-wire fence and cut his face and neck up” (138). Some scholars have argued that “the imagery of a man tangled in barbed wire suggests the disappearance of the American frontier and the frontier spirit.”18 But from the novel’s narrative approach, the meaning the author wants to convey is richer and deeper. The novel does not directly describe Claude’s injury but rather describes the whole situation through Leonard’s description to Claude’s best friend, Ernest, who at that moment was having a picture in his mind of his parents’ farming, and it is “a picture of the earliest ploughing he could remember”: He saw a half-circle of green hills, with snow still lingering in the clefts of the higher ridges; behind the hills rose a wall of sharp mountains, covered with dark pine forests. In the meadows at the foot of that sweep of hills there was a winding creek, with polled willows in their first yellow-green, and brown fields. He himself was a little boy, playing by the creek and watching his father and mother plough with two great oxen, that had rope traces fastened to their heads and their long horns. His mother walked barefoot beside the oxen and led them; his father walked behind, guiding the plough. His father always looked down. His mother’s face was almost as brown and furrowed as the fields, and her eyes were pale blue, like the skies of early spring. (137)

This peaceful and tranquil picture of European farming is meaningfully embedded in the narrative of “machines intruding into garden,” when the picture of European farming in Ernest’s mind was interrupted by Leonard’s car intruding, and Leonard then relayed to Ernest the story of Claude’s injury caused by machines intrusion. The juxtaposition of two narratives

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of “machines intruding into garden” stretches the space, which not only implies the disappearance of American frontier and frontier spirit, but also brings an end to the agrarian tradition in a larger scope. The embedding of European farming scenes into American farming narrative symbolizes the historical reincarnation, and the stories that once happened in Europe were then repeated in America. Alexandra had lamented when she entered the city that the world was a big prison for her, but she still had the watershed to keep her away from the hubbub, which was her last Arcadia, and for Ántonia, the apple orchard. But, for Claude, the paradise ceased to exist in a roar, and he had nowhere to escape, the barbed wire symbolizing the cage that held Claude prisoner, and the former Arcadia was now a prison for him.

The Dual Perspectives of Surface Text and Subtext The novel suffered much criticism and became one of Cather’s most controversial works, the root of which is directly related to its dual narrative perspective. Free indirect speech is widely used in the novel, and the narrative moves between the implied author and Claude himself, forming a dual narrative perspective, which leads to a controversial understanding of the novel. Specifically to the landscape narrative, we know that the interpretation of the landscape is often the result of the subject’s intentionality; in One of Ours, the surface text formed by Claude’s landscape description and the subtext formed by the implied author’s landscape interpretation are often juxtaposed, producing a rupture within the text and presenting an ambiguous mixture of thoughts and emotions, the tension between the two makes the ironic meaning of the text especially obvious. Claude is a young man who pursues lofty ideals, yet is naive and inexperienced, and possesses “Quixotic ideas” (248). The irony of Claude’s name itself suggests that he is always viewing the world through a “Claude Glass”.19 Obviously, this artificial requirement for a picturesque view is not a natural and objective way of looking at the world and is strongly subjective and imaginative. The novel names the protagonist as Claude, implying that he always misinterprets and distorts the real world through the “Claude Glass.” In the landscape narrative of the novel, the implied author has been accompanied by Claude’s perspective, reminding the keen reader of the protagonist’s blindness. Claude traveled across the ocean to France, and the novel enters the second part of the war narrative. From Volumes IV and V onward, Cather

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shifts the focus of her criticism away from the satire on American life to the satire on American idealism and its victims. Correspondingly, in terms of narrative technique, the ironic tone shifts from the boy “not looking at the landscape” in the first three volumes to the soldier paying particular attention to the landscape. For Claude, fighting in Europe was the projection of his romantic dreams, and when we see what Claude experienced from his point of view, it is easy to understand why Hemingway criticized Cather’s depiction of war as a poor imitation, full of dramatic and staged scenes. But in fact this is exactly what Cather intended. In landscape narrative, realistic details in the first three volumes are more replaced by Claude’s subjective fantasy interpretation of landscape in the second two volumes, while the implied author would suggest that this is just an illusion from time to time, that is to say, the narrative perspective constantly switches between the implied narrator and Claude. For example, the description of the landscape at the beginning of Volume IV, when the train transporting Claude and the expeditionary force docked at a shipyard by the sea: This was like a dream. Nothing but green meadows, soft grey water, a floating haze of mist a little rosy from the sinking sun, spectre-like seagulls, flying slowly, with the red glow tinging their wings—and those four hulls lying in their braces, facing the sea, deliberating by the sea. (268)

The landscape paints an ethereal picture, directly pointing out that the so-­ called Claudean ideal is nothing but a dream, but at the same time the novel uses free indirect speech to convey Claude’s thoughts of these ships: They were like simple and great thoughts, like purposes forming slowly here in the silence beside an unruffled arm of the Atlantic. He knew nothing about ships, but he didn’t have to; the shape of those hulls—their strong, inevitable lines—told their story, was their story; told the whole adventure of man with the sea. (268)

The idea of linking his expedition with the great Greek expedition made Claude passionate. Similar to the heroic words of Don Quixote in front of the windmills, Claude gave his oath of allegiance to the dilapidated wooden ships:

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Wooden ships! When great passions and great aspirations stirred a country, shapes like these formed along its shores to be the sheath of its valour. Nothing Claude had ever seen or heard or read or thought had made it all so clear as these untried wooden bottoms. They were the very impulse, they were the potential act, they were the “going over,” the drawn arrow, the great unuttered cry, they were Fate, they were tomorrow! (268–269)

This passage with exclamation points and parallel structures is a parody of Claude’s exaggerated passion, contrasting ironically with the landscape described by the implied author. Also while the novel describes from Claude and the fresh soldiers’ perspective the excitement of seeing the Statue of Liberty, the cheering crowds, and Longfellow’s poetry, the implied author calmly inserts a voice-over into the scene: That howling swarm of brown arms and hats and faces looked like nothing but a crowd of American boys going to a football game somewhere. But the scene was ageless; youths were sailing away to die for an idea, a sentiment, for the mere sound of a phrase … and on their departure they were making vows to a bronze image in the sea. (274)

This group of young men, ignorant of the harsh war they were about to face and driven by blind patriotic passion, were made to die for nothing more than abstract ideas, hazy emotions, and even a mere phrase. From “ideas” to “emotions” then to “one phrase,” the power diminishes step by step, becomes more and more uncertain, more and more faint, and finally turns into a series of ellipses, “a great cloud of smoke” that “dazzles” behind Liberty all the way through, making her an obscure bronze statue in the sea, for which the youth gave their lives. The entire nautical narrative is extremely symbolic, and the narrative shifts between two perspectives as well. The ship on which Claude sailed was named “Anchises,” the father of Aeneas in Virgil’s epic Aeneas, who guided Aeneas in founding the city of Rome. The author consciously visualizes the historical metaphor by naming the ship, making the soldier’s voyage symbolic. In the nautical narrative, landscape descriptions are constantly inserted, along with the use of free indirect speeches to represent Claude’s subjective imagination and misinterpretation of the landscape. Claude, like the other soldiers aboard the ship, naturally and easily stirs in his heart the emotions of epic poetry, in which young men set out to save their fathers; for Claude, the United States of the New World and

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ancient Europe are not merely two geographical concepts, but also represent a cultural father-son relationship, a salvation of an ancient civilization by the American spirit. The sailed ship helps Claude realize his dream of being part of the great mission. While, in fact, the ship is dilapidated, with peeling paint and rusty pipes, “This liner was in truth the ‘Old Anchises’; even the carpenters who made her over for the service had not thought her worth the trouble, and had done their worst by her. The new partitions were hung to the joists by a few nails” (300). Soon there is an outbreak of vicious influenza on board, resulting in the deaths of a large number of soldiers, making this excursion a journey of death. The implied author conveys the ominous signs through the symbolic depiction of the natural landscape, which echoes the death-shrouded troop ship. The strong, curling, foam-crested waves threw off the light like millions of mirrors, and their colour was almost more than the eye could bear. The water seemed denser than before, heavy like melted glass, and the foam on the edges of each blue ridge looked sharp as crystals. If a man should fall into them, he would be cut to pieces. (293)

Late in the afternoon, The wind fell, and there was a sinister sunset. Across the red west a small, ragged black cloud hurried,—then another, and another. They came up out of the sea,—wild, witchlike shapes that travelled fast and met in the west as if summoned for an evil conclave. They hung there against the afterglow, distinct black shapes, drawing together, devising something. (293)

This highly symbolic depiction of the landscape suggests both the massive outbreak of disease and the injustice of the war, the “ragged black cloud hurried” and the “evil conclave,” are the very evil powers gathered in Europe to wage war. But when the narrative turns to Claude’s perspective, in a free indirect speech, he equated this scene with the childhood reading of adventure novels: The fog, and rain, the grey sky and the lonely grey stretches of the ocean were like something he had imagined long ago—memories of old sea stories read in childhood, perhaps—and they kindled a warm spot in his heart. Here on the Anchises he seemed to begin where childhood had left off. (304)

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He said to himself with satisfaction: “Well, History had condescended to such as he; this whole brilliant adventure had become the day’s work” (312). But the implied author points it out directly—“that was his illusion” (304).

Conclusion In short, the novel produces multiple layers of textual space through intertextuality, textual embedding, and shifting perspectives, linking One of Ours to the earlier Nebraska series as a post-Nebraska narrative, increasing the difficulty and complexity of the artistic expressions of the novel. At the same time, from this novel, Cather no longer seeks the integrity and unity of the themes in her earlier novels. This is a novel that intrinsically contains the modernity conflict between instrumental rationality and value rationality, which is materialized in the novel as the follows: it admires the prosperity brought about by the rapid development of American industrialization and at the same time deplores the simple, idyllic life that has been replaced by materialism; it celebrates Claude’s dedication to the preservation of his ideals and at the same time mocks his blind, naive romanticism.

Notes 1. James Woodress, Willa Cather: A Literary Life (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 333. 2. Sinclair Lewis, The Man From Main Street: A Sinclair Lewis Reader: Selected Essays and Other Writings, 1904–1950, eds. Harry E Maule and Melville Cane (New York: Random House, 1953), 19. In his letter of rejection to the Pulitzer Board, Lewis made it clear that he refused to receive the Pulitzer because he disagreed with the Pulitzer’s rationale for awarding Cather the prize, which he believed that novels were not judged on the basis of literary achievement per se, but rather as pandering to the fashionable codes of good form of the time. It has also been suggested, however, that Lewis refused the Pulitzer in frustration because he failed in the competition with the women writers as Wharton and Cather for the prize for both Main Street (1921) and Babbitt (1923). He did not refuse to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature. 3. Ernest Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961, ed. Carlos Baker (New York: Scribner, 1981), 105. 4. Edmund Wilson, “Mr. Bel, Miss Cather and Others,” Vanity Fair (Oct. 1922). Rpt. in Willa Cather: The Contemporary Reviews, ed. Margaret

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Anne O’Connor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 143–144. 5. David Stout, Willa Cather’s Imagination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975), 84. 6. Jean Schwind, “The Beautiful War in One of Ours,” Modern Fiction Studies, no. 1 (1984): 142–167. 7. Susan J.  Rosowski, The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather’s Romanticism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,1986), 1106–1107. 8. Steven Stout (ed.), Memorial Fictions: Willa Cather and the First World War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 247. 9. Some scholars have compared Cather’s work to Eliot’s The Wasteland, published the same year. There is no mutual influence between the two works per se, but there are many thematic and structural similarities between them, both documenting “the individual and social failures that result from the inability to transcend the spirit of another culture.” The two works, both structured in five chapters, are also identical in their thematic development, with the first chapter presenting a picture of the decline of society as a whole, the second and third depicting step-by-step failures at the individual level, and the fourth chapter, “Death in the Water,” followed by Chap. 5, expressing the desire for spiritual regeneration. The common theme throughout the two works is the Grail legend, in which the protagonist’s search for the Grail implies that the reality of the environment is unable to provide any meaningful spiritual value and that the “wasteland” becomes a metaphor for both works, as well as the context and meaning of One of Ours. See David Stouck, Willa Cather’s Imagination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975), 89. 10. Willa Cather, “Nebraska: The End of the First Circle,” The Nation, no. 117 (1923): 236–241. 11. Willa Cather, My Antonia (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1945), 341. 12. Willa Cather, One of Ours (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1934), 101–102. The following references are all from this version, and the page numbers are indicated in the text, so no cites will be made in Notes. 13. Willa Cather, Willa Cather in Person, ed., L.  Brent Bohlke (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 39. 14. Willa Cather, My Antonia (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1945), 264. 15. Susan J.  Rosowski, The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather’s Romanticism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 97. 16. K. Peter Stich, “Historical and Archetypal Intimations of the Grail Myth in Cather’s One of Ours and The Professor’s House,” in Texas Studies in

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Literature and Language, no. 2, Summer (Texas: University of Texas Press, 2003), 201–230. 17. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (北京: 北京大学出版社 [Beijing: Peking University Press], 2011), 13. 18. Pearl James, “The ‘Enid Problem’, Dangerous Modernity in One of Ours,” ed. Steven Trout, Cather Studies: History, Memory, and War (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 101–127. 19. The name “Claude Glass” comes from Claude Lorrain, the famous French landscape painter of the seventeenth century, who was adept at selecting and manipulating natural scenes and tones to create landscapes that were more beautiful and harmonious than the real thing. In the eighteenth century, landscape tours were popular and as a result of the influence of oil landscape paintings, the “Claude Glass” was used to assist landscape tourism by using a convex oval mirror to select the ideal angle to give the real natural landscape an effect similar to that of a framed oil painting, also known as a Claudean landscape. Visitors’ interest in the landscape is based not so much on an appreciation of nature itself, but on their own constructed images of nature’s connections, reflecting the imaginative ways in which they view the landscape.

CHAPTER 17

Embedded Geographies in  GUO Pu’s “River Fu” Sophia Kidd

In his groundbreaking volume, Spatiality, Robert T. Tally, Jr. opens his chapter on literary cartography by discussing Herodotus’ (484–425 BCE) Histories and crediting French Historian François Hartog (1946–) with an insight into the historian as both mapmaker and rhapsode.1 Tally also reiterates the connection of “rhapsode” with its etymological roots in the Greek words “rhaptein” “to stitch” and ōidē “song, ode.” This is to suggest that the writer of a history is creating a map rife with authorial intentional and editorial agenda, stitching together, as it were, a narrative of the places and territories a textual history represents. This is very interesting in itself. However, in connection with Chinese literature, and in particular the Chinese “rhapsody” or fu, a genre which came into prominence in China in the Han dynasty (203 BCE–220 CE), this is an extremely poignant observation.2 The fu (赋) is a crucial genre of Chinese wen (文) or letters. Histories and fu, as the form of prose-poem, were all wen. The word wen literally means “patterns”, whether they be natural patterns

S. Kidd (*) Sichuan University, Chengdu, China © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Fang, R. T. Tally Jr. (eds.), Spatial Literary Studies in China, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03914-0_17

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found in nature or patterns of human thought, sound, meaning, and representation. The connection in Chinese literature and literary theory between “patterns” and historical writing is a given one, so obvious and implicit that it has been overlooked for the last century. For some decades now in China, however, spatial studies have been gathering critical mass, and Tally’s work on spatiality has added much needed impetus. Soon to be released in Chinese translation throughout the Chinese Mainland, Spatiality reminds Chinese historiographers of the fruitful connections drawn between spatial production in literature and ideology. Conversely, post-Frankfurt school Western literary geographers and spatialists,3 being so focused on the endemic nature of this connection, are surprised to discover that this connection between spatial representations and ideology is a very fresh and ‘new’ point of view on the Mainland, one that should, indeed, be cautiously articulated.

On Chinese and Western Literary Cartography Chinese and Western geographical and spatial theory inhere in different canons and intellectual traditions. Some of the earliest Chinese geography can be found in Pre-Qin (prior to 206 BCE) writings such as the Small Calendar of Xia (夏小正), Classic of Mountains and Seas (山海经), Tributes to Yu (禹贡), and the Map of Regions Giving Tribute to Yu (禹贡地域图), as well as in the Former Han (202 BCE–8 CE) text Biographies of Those Engaged in Trade (货殖列传). These maps were all textual in nature, and although they may have originally included graphic maps, none of these graphics have survived until today. While the earliest Western maps derived from Babylon in the sixth century BE, such as the Imago Mundi, the ancient Greeks were similar to their Chinese counterparts in that their maps were often textual and not graphic. These topographical writings are found in texts such as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, mapping out lands and territories with literary flourish. Thus, we see that in both ancient China and ancient Greek civilization, literary cartography was the primary mode of mapping. Then, with the rise of the Roman Empire, we see a shift toward cartographic maps and away from literary cartography. However, in China, literary and historical canons continue to rely on textual maps up until just over a hundred years ago. Official dynastic histories included a section titled Geographical Records (地理志), and these official histories were produced from the Han (203 BCE–220 CE) through the Qing (1636–1912 CE) dynasties. In an article titled Discussion

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on the Differences between Chinese and Western Geographical Thought and Special Characteristics of Classical Chinese Geography (试论中西地理思想 的差异及中国古代地理学的特点), YU Xixian states: Western modern scientific culture and geography was disseminated to China. From this point forward, all study of classical Chinese geography was done from a Western methodological point of view. Thus, the counterbalance of Chinese traditional conceptions of history was displaced and traditional Chinese academic practices in geography and other fields grew to be looked down upon, even to be cast into the dungeon of “superstition.” Over the past century in the West, and for seventy years or so of Chinese geographical scholarship; there has been a return to inter-disciplinary geography, prompted largely by the advent of the information age, fuzzy logic, deconstruction, and ecological studies; seeing a revival of systems thinking.4

China’s embrace of the Western scientific method in all fields saw the suppression of its traditional interdisciplinary academic tradition over the past century or more, and now we ironically see the West arrive at an interdisciplinary merging of hitherto distinct fields of study in order to solve pressing problems in the world today such as ecological collapse. With the emergence of literary geography and spatial studies in literature of the West since mid-twentieth century, and in China over the past three to four decades, this interdisciplinary merging of graphic and textual cartography lends itself as a tool for understanding classical Chinese literary texts. This is due to rich spatial sensibilities in classical Chinese thought, philosophy, rhetoric, and aesthetics. In the Western and Eastern Jin tradition within which GUO Pu (郭璞, 265–420 CE) received his education and wrote his own contributions to the canon, key geographical texts influencing the scholar poet and occultist’s own spatial studies include the Classic of Mountains and Seas and the Map of Regions Giving Tribute to Yu. GUO Pu made an annotation of the former which is accepted in Chinese scholarship today as the authoritative version. While the Map of Regions is one of the earliest proto-scientific geographical texts in Chinese historical geography, focusing on mathematical methods and material dimension of mapping, the Classic of Mountains and Seas, deriving from some centuries earlier and just then seeing a revival, is full of mythology and other cultural geographical dimensions. In a corporal linguistic analysis of GUO Pu’s “River Fu,” we see that both of these texts appear heavily used in GUO Pu’s literary cartography of the Yangzi river.

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Cultural Geographical Dimensions in GUO Pu’s “River Fu.” Thus, we see that GUO Pu’s own thinking was hybrid in the sense that he was both “logical” and “legendary” as a literary cartographer. GUO Pu straddled not only Taoist and Confucian sensibilities and intellectual traditions, but also two dynasties, that of the Western Jin (266–316) and Eastern Jin (317–420 CE).5 GUO Pu was born just 1 year before the Western Jin usurped the CAO Wei Kingdom (220–266 CE), and 15 years before the Western Jin unified all of China for the first time since the fall of the Han empire. Then as the “Disorder of the Eight Kings” (八王之乱) raged on, destabilizing China, the Western Jin finally collapsed with the invasion we have mentioned above. Five northern tribes, including the Xiongnu and the Xianbei, overtook the northern lands, and once the Western Jin Han peoples had fled as refugees to the south, a period known as the Sixteen Kingdoms lasted from 304 to 439 CE in the north, occupying regions which had hitherto always been the heartland of Han China. GUO Pu played an important role as a refugee leading other families to safety in the south, using his wits and a belief in spatial provenance by throwing the oracle coins of the Book of Changes. Once in the south, GUO Pu held a position as divination expert with WANG You, an important statesman in the administration of the new Eastern Jin emperor. However, his importance for the Eastern Jin was also literary, and he was brought to compose and “stitch together” the disparate elements of the fallen Western Jin empire with those of the local leading families in the South, providing founding emperor SIMA Rui (司马睿, 276–323 CE) with a cultural narrative of legitimacy fit for a refugee dynasty.

Innovations in GUO Pu Studies In the field of GUO Pu studies, there are two current trends of innovation. The first is in exploring GUO Pu’s Immortal Lyrics (游仙诗) from a Taoist point of view. The expression used to extend this discourse is “pro-­ immortal tendencies” (列仙之趣). Heretofore, GUO Pu studies have read the Immortal Lyrics from “anti-immortal tendencies” (非列仙之趣) point of view.6 This has much to do with the ideological tendencies prevalent in China from the 1930s on through the 1990s, which cultivated an atheist and Marxist dialectical materialism across all disciplines, from mathematics to literature and art. Daoist thinking was considered decadent (tuifei 颓 废) and its advocates degenerate (moluo 没落) feudalists. Only at the turn

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of the twenty-first century do we begin to see this language as slightly dated and traded out in new editions for more contemporary discourse. After Opening-Up and Reforms in 1978 and subsequent policies allowing for a measure of philosophical, ideological, and religious freedom, Taoist readings of appropriate texts have begun to make the long journey home to China. Just in the past five years has the first volume of “pro-­ immortal tendencies” GUO Pu scholarship appeared as  that of ZHAO Peilin (赵沛霖) in his studies in GUO Pu’s Poetry and Fu (郭璞诗赋研究).7 Being cautious, ZHAO explains in this book that his cultural archaeology and explication of “pro-immortal tendencies” in GUO Pu’s work are not meant to negate the “non-immortal tendencies” school, but rather to supplement it and create color where before there were gaps in the palette of GUO Pu scholarship. GUO Pu’s achievements in philosophical and religious Taoism, and the way these achievements show up in his extensive body of scholastic and literary work, have yet to be fully explored in the field of GUO Pu studies. The second area of innovative development in this field focuses on GUO Pu’s life’s work in the Book of Changes (易經). The Book of Changes was one of the three xuan (玄) texts of the Abstruse school (xuanxue 玄 学), or Dark School of Learning, prominent in scholarship and literature during the Six Dynasties period, along with the Classic of the Way and Virtue (Daodejing 道德經) attributed to Laozi (老子, sixth century BCE) and the Zhuangzi (莊子) attributed to Master Zhuang (late fourth century BCE). Of the three xuan texts, however, while the Zhuangzi and the Classic of the Way and Virtue are considered Taoist, the Book of Changes enjoys a double role in Chinese literary cultural history, straddling both Taoist and Confucian discourse. The Book of Changes, while providing all of the necessary mechanics of basic Taoist philosophy, with its principles of yin and yang (陰陽), as well as the five-element (五行) theory, also enjoys the supreme position as the “head” of the ancient Six Confucian Classics (liu jing zhi shou 六經之首). GUO Pu’s position as divination expert in WANG You’s retinue gave the scholar poet and master of yinyang fiveelement thinking an opportunity to publish his Confucian orthodox works such as commentaries on the encyclopedia of regional material and intangible culture Approaching Elegance (尔雅) and the survey of Han dynasty regional dialects in China, Dialects (方言). These commentaries informed and were informed by less orthodox research and writings on Taoism and proto-Taoist regional folk religions.

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To study GUO Pu’s philosophical and religious Taoist influences, it is best to read his Immortal Lyrics, his Forest and Caves of Change (易洞林), Book on Funerals (葬书), and Commentary on the Biography of Mu Tianzi (穆天子传注). The second of these, the Forest and Caves of Change is a very spatial text, in two aspects. Firstly, it is an interesting document of GUO Pu’s experience as a refugee leading dozens of families as they fled together from north of the Yellow River to south of the Yangzi River in Jianye (present-day Nanjing). Throughout this journey, families depended on the scholar poet and occultist for their lives. Whenever they would arrive at a crossroads, or were faced with marauding thieves or a long detour, GUO Pu would cast the oracle coins and divine their future course. The Forest and Caves documents this journey as well as certain crucial divinations which contributed to the successful and safe arrival of his charges in what would soon become the new capital of the Eastern Jin Dynasty. This was the first time in Han Chinese history that the capital was established south of the Yangzi River. The second, and more implicit spatial character of the Forest and Caves of Change, as with most of GUO Pu’s corpus, is its foundations in yinyang and five-element theory. Yin (阴) and yang (阳) are the two fundamental forces of the cosmos, which in their interaction give rise to all things. The five elements stand for many sets of things, most notably the material forces: Water, Wood, Fire, Earth, and Metal, but they also stand for cardinal directions and colors. Red fire is in the south, black water in the north, white metal in the west, blue-green wood in the east, and yellow earth in the center. It was by casting the coins to divine certain of the elements that GUO Pu predicted in which direction it would be safe for he and his charges to move. He was so successful at this that the new emperor appointed him as court diviner of the Eastern Jin, to help the new dynasty find the best way forward with state affairs.

Physical and Cultural Geographical Dimensions in the “River Fu” GUO Pu’s “River Fu” earned him great repute not only at the time, but for centuries to come, as the greatest writer of fu in Chinese history. Existing scholarship on this fu would have us believe that this fu was widely acclaimed because it was a testament to GUO Pu’s classical education in Confucian classics as well as to the scholar poet’s great patriotism. These are both very true reasons for the fu’s success. One of the principal reasons for selecting the River Fu for this paper is the crucial timing of this fu’s first appearance. GUO Pu composed this rallying ode to Jin

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restoration most likely to be recited aloud at court in the presence of Emperor Yuan Di (元帝) SIMA Rui and officials at a moment in time when the new empire had not yet stabilized. The Eastern Jin empire had only just established its capital at Jiankang (modern day Nanjing) and had not yet gained the unanimous support from the ruling Southern families that it needed in order to feel secure. The SIMA family reign was still quite shaken after the north had fallen to five northern tribes, forcing them to flee as refugees from their homeland. GUO Pu understood well the new Eastern Jin dynasty’s feeling of struggle, loss, and hope. In his narration of the Yangzi River’s course through the south of China, from Mount Min in the far west to the Pacific Ocean by the river’s delta mouth, GUO Pu sewed together disparate cultural regions with aesthetic nuance. Using records found in a chapter on GUO Pu in the Book of Jin (晋书) as well as place names and historical allusions in GUO Pu’s work, scholars have a rough idea of the author’s movements. When the River Fu was written, between 317 and 318 CE, he was serving in WANG You’s retinue. WANG You was serving in this time first as Prefecture Chief of Danyang and then as Provincial Governor of Yangzhou. This places GUO Pu in the immediate area around Jiankang. LI Shan’s Tang Dynasty commentary on the “River Fu” in Xiao Tong’s Selections of Refined Literature (文选) cites the Book on Jin Restoration (晋中兴书) as saying that GUO Pu wrote this fu in order to help restore the Jin Dynasty.8 The fact that GUO Pu wanted very much to recover lost northern lands and restore the dynasty after the fall of Western Jin is well documented throughout his works. It is unclear from this citation, however, whether LI Shan is saying that GUO Pu wrote this fu about the Yangzi River specifically tailored for the emperor who lived by the Yangzi River or whether he wrote it to rally and draw attention to the efficiency and intention of Eastern Jin officials. The overall intention to bring about the Jin Dynasty restoration is consistent in either case. The River Fu is close in textual character to the Han Dynasty epideictic fu. It is long and uses a copious amount of rare and difficult words employed in making long lists of regions, cities, tributary rivers, mountains, gods, and legends associated with the Yangzi river, as well as plants, animals, and minerals naturally appearing within and around the river. This lends itself to a grounded study of physical and cultural space within the text. The listing of the plants, animals, and minerals, then, fills the fu’s river with rich material resources which may serve the new Eastern Jin Empire. In his mapping of the Yangzi River, GUO Pu selected certain key place names while ignoring others. Analyzing these choices help us to understand GUO Pu’s discursive spatial production, if one were to closely

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examine how represented “physical” spaces within his text are sewn together inter-textually with similar spaces in other contemporary as well as prior texts. Although GUO Pu is the first writer in China’s canon to devote a piece of writing to the Yangzi River, many of the place names mentioned had already been written about, as had similar narratives on other bodies of water. GUO Pu may have been sewing the legitimacy of those source texts into his own text’s cultural narrative. The main cultural shift that GUO Pu wanted to bring about was to put the Yangzi River on a par with the Yellow River, as a central cultural and spiritual artery of not just Han civilization, but of the new Eastern Jin, itself. Here are the first six lines of the River Fu: 咨五才之并用, 寔水德 之灵长。 惟岷山之导江, 初发源 乎滥觞。 聿经始于洛沬, 拢万川 乎巴梁。9

Of the five efficacious elements, water’s virtue is most powerful. The Yangtze River’s source is at Mount Min, overflowing a wine vessel. Its flow begins at the Luo and Mei Rivers, holding in itself ten thousand rivers of Ba and Liang.10

These lines first draw the reader’s attention to the five elements, those elements at the ontological root of all things between Heaven and Earth. Then, more efficacious than wood, fire, earth, and metal, water is the most meaningful element. This is a Taoist and proto-Taoist orientation of value and may have held appeal to the ideology of the ruling Southern families. Progressing still further into his argument, he names the Yangzi River in the Fu’s third line as that river which originates at Mount Min. Chinese geographers have since discovered that the Tuotuo River, not the Min Mountains, as the actual source of the Yangzi River. However, GUO Pu’s assertion of the Yangzi River as part of the legends surrounding the great Emperor Yu as documented in the Book of Documents is important to note, especially because it is possible that GUO Pu knew the truth about the Yangzi’s actual origin.11 The River Fu’s last six lines, nearly 1600 words later, then emphatically declare that the Yangzi River and Yellow River alone can claim magnificence and eminence borne of primordial pneuma. 焕大块之流形, 混万尽于一科。 保不亏而永固, 禀元气于灵和。 考川渎而妙观, 实莫着于江河

Bright matter forms from the Great Clod, being then converged in a single hollow. Eternally flowing, never depleting, receiving primordial pneuma in sacred harmony. Of all the rivers and waterways marvelous sights, it is obvious that the Yangzi and Yellow Rivers are most marvelous.

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Not only does GUO Pu list place names and rich natural resources in the beginning and middle sections of the River Fu, in the final section, GUO Pu also delves into his masterful command of China’s mythological geography.12 He weaves legends into his narrative, associating gods, goddesses, and immortals with the river in ways which command respect and devotion to not only the river, but also the entire legacy of Central Plains Han civilization. The fact that the River Fu was very well received indicates that GUO Pu’s spatial representation of the Yangzi River as new cradle of Han civilization fulfilled contemporary social needs.13 Its success reflects cultural tendencies and expectations at the turning point between Western and Eastern Jin. The River Fu gained great favor with the emperor who in return rewarded GUO Pu with an official position at court.14

Notes 1. Robert T. Tally Jr., Spatiality (New York: Routledge, 2013), 48. 2. The Chinese genre “fu” (赋) is often translated as “rhapsody,” see David R. Knechtges’, trans. Selections of Refined Literature, Volume II: Rhapsodies on Sacrifices, Hunting, Travel, Sightseeing, Palaces and Halls, Rivers and Seas (New Jersey: Princeton Legacy Library, 1987), 321–351, where Knechtges translates GUO Pu’s “River Fu” as “Rhapsody on the Yangzi River.” Professor Knechtges has long since the publication of this translation turned to no longer translating the term “fu,” but merely leaving it in its pinyin “fu.” I have found in studying the genre that while the fu in its early forms had a strong historical and performative element, such as with the Han dynasty’s epideictic fu, later forms of the fu are less “rhapsodic,” such as in the case of GUO Pu’s short “Well Fu,” written about a particularly deeply dug well near his hometown. I agree with Martin Kern in his Western Han Aesthetics and the Genesis of the “Fu”, Harvard-Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 63, No. 2 (Dec., 2003): 384, where he writes: “With regard to the early performances, Knechtges is fully justified in comparing the fu to the Greek rhapsody; see his The Han Rhapsody: A Study of the Fu of Yang Hsiung (53 BC-AD 18) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 13 and compare Andrew Ford, ‘The Classical Definition of Rhapsōdia,’ Classical Philology, no. 83 (1988): 300–307. However, translating a technical term from ancient Chinese into one from ancient Greece creates its own problems.” GUO Pu’s “River Fu” is close in textual character to the Han Dynasty epideictic fu and was performed for the first emperor Yuan Di of the Eastern Jin, SIMA Rui. However, I remain consistent in refraining from translating the term fu throughout this chapter, using instead the pinyin of the Chinese term.

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3. “Spatialist” is a term I have coined for the growing number of scholars and writers who concentrate upon the production of space in literature and art, as well as those who study this production. 4. 于希贤：“试论中西地理思想的差异及中国古代地理学的特点 ”，《云南地理 环境研究》，1993 年第 1 期，第 7页。

[YU Xixian, “Discussion on the Differences Chinese and Western Geographical Thought and Special Characteristics of Classical Chinese Geography,” Studies in Yunnan Geographical Environment, vol. 5, no. 1 (1993): 7. (Translation by the author)] 5. GUO Pu’s textual production occurred throughout his lifetime, beginning in the Western Jin period. Many of his works, however, are difficult to date, thus I follow HU Axiang (胡阿祥) in his published PhD dissertation, Studies in Wei and Jin Native Literary Geography (魏晋本土文学地理研 究) (Nanjing: Nanjing University Press, 2001), 48. HU’s comprehensive geographical distribution of Wei and Jin period writers lists and maps writers according to their places of birth within political boundaries existing in the second year of the Western Jin Taikang reign (281 CE). GUO Pu is thus mapped at Wenxi, Hedong (闻喜, 河东) in Sizhou (司州, today Wenxi, Shanxi Province) even though this region no longer belonged to the Jin reign by the time GUO Pu published most of his works. This classification of authors according to their hometown and not necessarily according to a site of literary production is presently debated amongst Chinese literary geographers. 6. Cf: 连镇标: 《郭璞研究》, 上海: 三联书店, 2002 年。 [LIAN Zhenbiao, GUO Pu Studies (Shanghai: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2002).] LIAN Zhenbiao was writing at a time when it was not acceptable within accepted scholarship to state outright that GUO Pu was Taoist or that certain of his works were Taoist in orientation. LIAN, therefore, presents a balanced discussion of GUO Pu’s work in the Changes as well as the “Immortal Lyrics,” suggesting ultimately that GUO Pu was a patriotic Confucian. More recent direct leanings toward GUO Pu’s Taoist or protoTaoist influence owe much to Lian’s scholarship. See in particular his chapters on “On the Origins of GUO Pu’s Thought on the Changes” (郭璞易 学渊源考), “On GUO Pul’s Thought on the Changes” (郭璞易学思想考), and “On GUO Pu’s Divinatory Practices and Religious Taoism” (郭璞易 占与道教关系探考) in GUO Pu Studies. 7. 赵沛霖: 《郭璞诗赋研究》, 北京: 中国社会科学出版社, 2015年。 [ZHAO Peilin, GUO Pu’s Poetry and Fu (Beijing: Chinese Social Sciences Academy Press, 2015).] 8. Compare two versions of LI Shan’s (Tang dynasty) commentary on the “River Fu” in scroll 12 of XIAO Tong’s (萧统, 501–531, Liang dynasty) Selections of Refined Literature (文选), vol. 12 (Beijing: Zhonghua Book

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Company, 1977), 83, and (Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House, 1986), 557. The Zhonghua Book Company version reads LI Shan’s citation of the Book of Jin Restoration (晋中兴书) as “(GUO) Pu in an effort to restore the Jin Dynasty, as the emperor was living by the (Yangzi) River, took it upon himself to describe the beauty of the River.” (“璞以中兴, 王 宅江外, 乃赋述川渎之美。”) The Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House version reads “emperor was living (王宅)” alternatively as “the three types of officials (三宅)”, which has a similar connotation. Both versions use the Hu ke ben (胡刻本) manuscript, which is Qing Dynasty restoration of the Southern Song version (宋刻本), although the Zhonghua Book Company version does use a photocopied print of the original carving, while the Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House prints a re-typeset version, which could explain the discrepancy, although the Sibu congkan jing Song ben (四部丛刊景宋本) version of the Commentary on the Wenxuan by the Six Officials on Selections of Refined Literature (六臣注 文选) reads LI Shan as “the three types of officials” as well as Lü Xiang (吕 向) as saying “The emperor was living (王居),” using the word ju (居) for “living,” rather than “zhai (宅),” illustrating, if nothing else, that this text is not stable. David R. Knechtges follows the Zhonghua Book Company version and translates the entire sentence as “‘because the King of the Restoration (i.e., SIMA Rui, who in 318 established he Eastern Jin “Restoration”) took up residence south of the Yangzi,’ GUO Pu wrote this fu ‘to relate the beauty of streams and waterways.” Knechtges’ translation conveys the essential components of this line, while not addressing some of the finer arguments concerning textual disparities between versions of the Selections of Refined Literature circulating today. 9. Original GUO Pu texts used in this paper follow NIE Enyan’s use of Ming Dynasty scholar ZHANG Pu’s (张溥) One Hundred and Three Famous Writers: GUO Pu Hongnong Collection (汉魏六朝白三名家集⋅郭弘农集), see NIE Enyan (聂恩严), GUO Pu Hongnong Collection GUO Pu (郭璞弘 农集校注) (Taiyuan: Shanxi People’s Press, 1990). The base version (底本) used by NIE Enyan is an officially produced text from the end of the Ming Dynasty. I, like NIE Enyan before me, have compared this base version with a number of other versions of GUO Pu’s texts, most importantly versions of a large portion of GUO Pu’s texts compiled by YAN Kejun (严可 均) in his Complete Jin Dynasty Writings (全晋文) (Beijing: Commercial Printing and Publishing House, 1999), as well as ZHANG Bo’s One Hundred and Three Famous Writers: GUO Hongnong Collection as printed in scroll 56 of the Ji bu (集部) section of the Emperor’s Collection of the Complete Library in Four Sections Qinding (钦定四库全书). 10. English translation based on that by Knechtges, David R. Xiao Tong Wenxuan or Selections of Refined Literature, Volume 3: Rhapsodies on

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Sacrifices, Hunting, Travel, Sightseeing, Palaces and Halls, Rivers and Seas (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987). 11. GUO Pu’s assertion here that the Yangzi River originates at the Min Mountains is largely based on a passage in the Book of Documents (preQin), see Annotations and Commentary on the Book of Documents (尚書 注疏) scroll 5 in the Book of Xia (夏書) section entitled Tribute to Yu gong (禹 貢), commented and annotated by LU Deming (陸徳明) and KONG Yingda (孔穎達), Annotation and Commentary on the Thirteen Classics (十 三经注疏), RUAN Yuan (阮元) (Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company, 1980). GUO Pu repeats this assertion in both his Annotation of Approaching Elegance, or Erya zhu (尔雅), and Annotation of the Classic of Mountains and Seas (山海经注). LI Daoyuan (郦道元) in his Annotation of the Classic of Waterways (水经注) affirms this assertion as well. At the end of the Ming Dynasty, a travelogue by XU Xiake (徐霞客) alternatively posited the Jinsha River (金沙江) as the source of the Yangzi, directly contradicting the Spring and Autumn period Tribute to Yu assertion of the Min Mountains as source. At the end of the nineteenth century, then, geographers had discovered that the actual source of the Yangzi River was the Tuotuo River (沱沱河). There is some debate that given GUO Pu’s knowledge of China’s geography, his assertion of the Min Mountains as source to the Yangzi River may have been a narrative affect, meant to give the Yangzi River stronger precedent in China’s cosmological heritage narrative, tracing it back to the legends surrounding the Great Yu. These assertions are mostly unfounded, however, as are assertions that the Classic of Waterways Shui jing (水经) was originally written by GUO Pu. 12. Cf: GUO Pu’s commentary on the Classic of Mountains and Seas, especially its role as mythological geography in China. 袁珂: 《山海经校注》, 北京: 北京联合出版社, 2013 年。 [YUAN Ke. Annotation and Commentary on the Classic of Mountains and Seas (Beijing: Beijing United Publishing House, 2013).] 13. Cf: Henri Lefebvre, Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974). As well as Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). 14. Parts of this chapter have been reworked from Sophia Kidd, “Geographical Dimensions in GUO Pu’s ‘River Fu’,” Comparative Literature East West (Chengdu: Sichuan University Press, 2016).

CHAPTER 18

The Source of the Terror: Interpreting the Liminal Space in Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter Ying Tian

Carson McCullers (1917–1967), an American Southern woman writer, has always been concerned with time and space. In the poem “When We Are Lost” (1952), McCullers writes of her reflections on time and space: “The terror. Is it of Space, of Time? / Or the joint trickery of both conceptions?”1 The sense of terror de facto runs through her first novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) in which the depictions about it are very striking to readers. To be more specific, the word “terror” appears 6 times This article was originally published in Foreign Literatures, Volume 138, Issue 2. What follows is the full information: TIAN Ying, “The Source of Terror: Interpreting ‘the Liminal Space’ in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” Foreign Literatures, vol. 138, no. 2 (2015): 103–112. [田颖: “恐惧之源——《心是孤独 的猎手》的‘阈限空间’阐释”, 《国外文学》, 2015 年第 2 期, 103–112 页。]

Y. Tian (*) Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, China e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Fang, R. T. Tally Jr. (eds.), Spatial Literary Studies in China, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03914-0_18

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in the novel. In addition, there is a large variety of “terror,” such as “fear,” “fright,” “afraid,” and “horror,” which repeatedly turn up 27 times in the work. Considering the poem “When We Are Lost,” we readers are as perplexed as McCullers is: what is the source of terror? Is it of Space, of Time? With regard to the art of the novel, time and space are the primary forms of narratives. Chinese scholar, WU Xiaodong (吴晓东) claims that “the significance of time and space lies in a fact that both are the ultimate issues in writings, which cannot be taken away from the internal forms and the external experiences of novels.”2 The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is not an exception in which two narratives can be discovered, namely, a temporal master-narrative3 and the spatial narrative. With the “spatial turn” presenting a new approach to literary criticism, McCullers’s studies in the twenty-first century have witnessed a shift from the analyses of loneliness and alienation to the focus on the sense of space and place. Therefore, providing a new look at the way that literary spaces are represented and experienced in her works, numerous critics try to explore how McCullers and her writings are being read and understood by the spatial studies among which the imaginary spaces in her works have been highlighted. For instance, Darren Millar elaborates the “various articulations of utopian fantasy”4 demonstrated by the imaginary spaces in McCullers’s novels. Jennifer Murray argues that “a sort of fairytale ‘once upon a time’ space”5 in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is unreal. All of the analyses of the imaginary and unreal spaces offer a new perspective to McCullers’s studies. Nevertheless, a sort of liminal space between the real and the imaginary has been overlooked. To a great extent, “liminal entities are neither here nor there,”6 which is the living existence for the marginalized people in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Given the fact that the liminal space in McCullers’s writings spares much room for a new reading, this essay will use spatial theories to seek for the source of terror by resolving the following two relevant questions: in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, how does McCullers work on the spatial narratives by the liminal space to break through “a temporal master-­ narrative”? How does the liminal space arouse a sense of terror to reveal the living experience of the marginalized people in the novel?

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Mirror: The Liminal Space Between the Real and the Imaginary Speaking of the relations between time and space, we have to figure out what is fictional time in literary works from the outset. To David Lodge, “duration” plays a vital role in fictional time: “Another aspect of fictional time is duration, as measured by comparing the time events would have taken up in reality with the time taken to read about them. This factor[duration] affects narrative tempo, the sense we have that a novel is fast-moving or slow-moving.”7 In The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, duration is not very long, only lasting more than one year (from May 1938 to July 1939). For the surface reading of this novel, the linear and serial duration of fictional time, from May 1938 to July 1939, is “a temporal master-­ narrative.” While for the symptomatic reading, we can find out a spatial narrative in which the duration of fictional time has been spatialized to a large extent and then split into different fragments of time in this work. At the very beginning of the novel, Biff Brannon, a café owner who calmly observes people around him in the small southern town, gives a subtle insight to time and space by his own experience in the café: Biff leaned against the wall. In and out--in and out. After all, it was none of his business. The room was very empty and quiet. The minutes lingered. Wearily he let his head sag forward. All motion seemed slowly to be leaving the room. The counter, faces, the booths and tables, the radio in the corner, whirring fans on the ceiling--all seemed to become very faint and still.8

In this episode, space and time are not inseparable. In this moment, “the minutes lingered,” while spaces kept changing between the counter, the booths, tables, the corner, and so on. Grasping the transient moment, Biff situated himself outside the scope of time, without feelings about the tangible and physical world around him—that is why “all seemed to become very faint and still” and “all motion seemed slowly to be leaving the room,” just to “seize, isolate, immobilize for the duration of a lightning flash.”9 To Joseph Frank, the moment is called “pure time.” He holds that “‘pure time’, obviously, is not time at all--it is perception in a moment of time, that is to say, space.”10 WU Xiaodong explains the reason why pure time is not time but space: “Pure time is space, because it is almost still and motionless. In this moment, different spaces of memories, images,

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characters and other details are juxtaposed. In terms of narrative, it [pure time] is ‘a break of a temporal narrative’…The novel, in this sense, seems not to tell a story, but present fragments of numerous details with a form of space.”11 In other words, different from the linear, serial, and continuous “temporal master-narrative,” pure time just emphasizes the discontinuous presentation of the “fragments” of details. Thus, pure time is “a spatialisation of time and memory.”12 Moreover, M. M. Bakhtin analyzes time-space relations as it follows: “space and time are bound together into one inseparable knot.”13 Bakhtin’s notion of “one inseparable knot” can be interpreted as “pure time,” namely, a spatialized time in its pure state. In The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, mirror can be taken as “one inseparable knot” to present “pure time.” Through the medium of mirror, McCullers portrays Biff’s liminality by the transformations of spaces between the real and the imaginary. In the famous speech given in 1967, Michel Foucault coined a new term by himself: heterotopias. In contrast to utopias, he defined heterotopias as “a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror.”14 To Foucault, “[t]he mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there.”15 That is to say, mirror is a liminal space to link the real and the imaginary. In the light of etymology, the word “liminality” originates from Latin “limen,” equivalent to “threshold” in English, which is “neither here nor there” claimed by Victor Turner, a British anthropologist. Episodes of mirror in the novel are very significant to the characterization of Biff Brannon. Mirror firstly appears in Part I Chap. 2. At midnight in the early summer (around May 1938), Biff went into the bathroom to avoid a fight with his wife Alice: He [Biff] stood before the mirror and rubbed his cheek meditatively. He was sorry he had talked to Alice. With her, silence was better. Being around that woman always made him different from his real self. It made him tough and small and common as she was…The door was open behind him, and in the mirror he could see Alice lying in the bed. […] Alice was almost asleep again, and through the mirror he watched her with detachment. There was no distinctive point about her on which he could fasten his attention…When he was away from her there was no one

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feature that stood out in his mind and he remembered her as a complete, unbroken figure. (15)

Alice died of tumor in October 1938. Four months later (February 1939) in Part II Chap. 8, when Biff was rummaging through the bathroom closet, he stood before the mirror again, plunging himself into the memories of the marital life in the past: He [Biff] stood shirtless before the mirror and dabbled some of the perfume on his dark, hairy armpits. The scent made him stiffen. He exchanged a deadly secret glance with himself in the mirror and stood motionless. He was stunned by the memories brought to him with the perfume, not because of their clarity, but because they gathered together the whole long span of years and were complete. Biff rubbed his nose and looked sideways at himself. The boundary of death. He felt in him each minute that he had lived with her [Alice]. And now their life together was whole as only the past can be whole. Abruptly Biff turned away. The bedroom was done over. His entirely now. (224)

As analyzed above, these two episodes of mirror are “pure time” to portray Biff’s transient feelings when he is standing before the mirror. In terms of the chronological order, the linear time (from May 1938 to February 1939) seems to be immobilized and sluggish. During “a break of a temporal narrative,” however, we readers can grasp the fragmental moments of Biff’s “pure time.” In the first episode of mirror, spaces around Biff keep changing in the following order: the bathroom→Biff’s inner world→the bedroom→the memories. In the second episode, more images of spaces are juxtaposed in a moment: the bathroom→the memories→the boundary of death→the past→the bedroom. All of these spaces are not congruent with each other in the linear chronological time of routine life. Through the medium of mirror, nevertheless, the physical spaces (the bathroom and the bedroom) and the psychological spaces (Biff’s inner world, the boundary of death, and his memories) both are juxtaposed. That is to say, all of the unrelated spaces are closely connected and consistent with each other in the spatial narrative, which constructs “a field” of liminal space between the real and imaginary. I think the mirror in the text functions as montage in film narrative. Sergei Eisenstein, a Russian film director and theorist, establishes his

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reputation in the practice of film-making and his theory of montage. Eisenstein articulates the very nature of montage as it follows: We have the fact that no montage sequence exists in isolation but is in the nature of a partial depiction of the single overall theme which in equal degree pervades all the sequences. The juxtaposition of other such partial details in a particular montage structure evokes in the spectator’s perception that common essence which generated each separate element and binds them together into a whole, and specially into that generalised image through which the author (and after him the spectator) has experienced the theme of the film in question.16

As a film director employs montage in the film narrative, McCullers uses the mirror to evoke “the spectator’s[reader’s] perception” of Biff’s living experience in the spatial narrative: when he is standing before the mirror, the past, the present, and the future of his life are all in a moment of simultaneity and juxtaposition. Only in this way, can McCullers break through the limits of the traditional temporal narrative to recompose, juxtapose, and transform the unrelated spaces by the “magical” mirror in her writings. In the episodes of mirror in the text, two vital clues can be discovered: the first episode tells a reader that Biff’s marriage is not happy at all; the second one reveals Biff’s feminity when he “dabbled some of the perfume” before the mirror. Reading the novel in depth with these clues, we readers find out the reasons for Biff’s miserable life: his liminality of gender identity. As Victor Turner suggests, “[t]he undifferentiated character of liminality is reflected by the discontinuance of sexual relations and the absence of marked sexual polarity.”17 Always wearing his mother’s wedding ring on his little finger, Biff is impotent in the marital life. McCullers is describing Biff’s intense loathing for his masculinity: Biff noted this. He was thinking that in nearly every person there was some special physical part kept always guarded … Lingeringly Biff turned the ring on his little finger. Anyway he knew what it was not. Not. Any more. A sharp line cut into his forehead. His hand in his pocket moved nervously toward his genitals. (29)

With “the discontinuance of sexual relations” with Alice, his repulsion against masculinity and embrace with feminity, Biff actually has “two bodies in one” that “conjures up the figure of androgyny.”18 In this sense, transgressing gender and sexual norms, Biff is a “liminal personae

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(‘threshold people’).”19 His bewildering gender and sexuality lead to the crisis of identity: Between the two worlds he [Biff] was suspended. He saw that he was looking at his own face in the counter glass before him. Sweat glistened on his temples and his face was contorted. One eye was opened wider than the other. The left eye delved narrowly into the past while the right gazed wide and affrighted into a future of blackness, error, and ruin. And he was suspended between radiance and darkness. Between bitter irony and faith. (359)

Obviously, “counter glass” here can be seen as a variant of “mirror.” The word “suspend” which appears two times in the text portrays vividly Biff’s liminality in tensions of his life: he is neither here nor there, but just “between the two worlds,” “between radiance and darkness,” and “between bitter irony and faith.” In this case, “these persons [threshold people] elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space.”20 Then sense of terror takes the form of liminality, which is an unsolved riddle to Biff. At the end of the novel, “[a]nd the riddle was still in him [Biff], so that he could not be tranquil. There was something not natural about it all—something like an ugly joke. When he thought of it he felt uneasy and in some unknown way afraid” (358). According to what has been discussed, we can unravel the riddle now. As Foucault announced, our own historical moment now is the epoch of space. So, “the anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space, no doubt a great deal more than with time.”21 Living betwixt and between the real and the imaginary, Biff is a threshold person without a sense of place and belonging. Through the medium of mirror, the attributes of liminality evoke his anxiety, loneliness, and indeterminacy, which are the source of the sense of terror for him in the novel.

The Inside Room and the Outside Room: The Liminal Space of Adolescence With the spatialization of “pure time,” the limits of “a temporal master-­ narrative” have been broken by the spatial narrative. In The Poetics of Space, the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard cites a poem by Noël Arnaud, a French poet: “I am the space where I am.”22 That is to say, space does matter to one’s own identity. In The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, nearly

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all characters have to be confronted with a predicament of living spaces. On the one hand, they are very frightened with their inability to fit in the public and unfamiliar space; on the other hand, they strive for the personal spaces of their own. Mick Kelly, a teenager girl in the novel, is a typical example. From the perspective of Bildungsroman, many critics focus on body, gender, and grotesque in the text to analyze Mick’s freakish adolescence.23 To Mick, however, the crisis of puberty is concerned not only with the physiological changes during adolescence, but also with the fear of her living spaces: A queer afraidness came to her. It was like the ceiling was slowly pressing down toward her face. How would it be if the house fell apart? Once their Dad had said the whole place ought to be condemned. Did he mean that maybe some night when they were asleep the walls would crack and the house collapse? Bury them under all the plaster and broken glass and smashed furniture? So that they could not move or breathe? She lay awake and her muscles were stiff. (311)

The ceiling, the walls, and the furniture are all about the living spaces in a house. The personal and private spaces are very important to Mick. As the English woman writer Virginia Woolf asserts, “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”24 To a woman, a room of her own stands for freedom, dream, and hope. Unfortunately, Mick’s family cannot afford a room of her own, so she can only find herself in a situation of “in-between.” She has no choice but to reconcile with the dreadful life eventually—she accomplishes “the rite of passage” and then enters the world of adults. At odds with the surroundings, Mick is quite estranged from her peers, and “she [Mick] wasn’t a member of any bunch” (104). Living in a shabby and crowded house where she tries to escape, she is always dreaming of a private place for herself: “It was funny, too, how lonesome a person could be in a crowded house. Mick tried to think of some good private place where she could go and be by herself and study about this music. But though she thought about this a long time she knew in the beginning that there was no good place” (53). Like Biff, Mick is also a threshold person whose living spaces are “neither here nor there.” In Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, the threshold appears as a place of sudden turning points in life. So, Mick represents “a person on the threshold of a final decision, at

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a moment of crisis, at an unfinalizable--and unpredeterminable--turning point for his [her] soul.”25 As a 13-year-old girl who “wouldn’t be fourteen for eight more months” (108), Mick is experiencing the turning point in her life. To the French feminist Simone de Beauvoir, an age of 13 is a very crucial stage at puberty where the crisis and the turning point occur, because “[a]t about thirteen is the time when boys go through a real apprenticeship in violence, when their aggressiveness is developed, their will to power, their love for competition; and it is at just this time that the girl gives up rough games.”26 At personal initiation, the age of 13 can be compared to a threshold, a liminal period from an adolescent to an adult. As McCullers writes in the manuscript of the novel, “[m]any things of great importance happen to her [Mick] during this time. At the beginning she is a crude child on the threshold of a period of quick awakening and development.”27 With a fear of adolescence, Mick is living in a liminal space as a threshold person. Mick’s liminality is portrayed by McCullers in two aspects. Firstly, she is bewildered by the indeterminacy of her gender identity. Different from other girls at the same age, Mick is a tomboy. With obvious masculinity, “she was dressed in khaki shorts, a blue shirt, and tennis shoes--so that at first glance she was like a very young boy” (18). She is “[f]ive feet six inches tall and a hundred and three pounds” (111), and much taller than her peer group. Growing up so fast to the womanhood, Mick inevitably comes to be aware of the physiological changes of her body, which gives rise to the crisis and fear of adolescence. “The kid Mick picked at the front of her blouse to keep the cloth from rubbing the new, tender nipples beginning to come out on her breast” (29). As to her height, she tried to smoke, because “maybe cigarettes would help stunt the rest of her growth” (111). In The Second Sex, Beauvoir describes the troubled period in girls’ initiation as “this time of unrest”: What is happening in this time of unrest is that the child’s body is becoming the body of a woman and is being made flesh…Something is taking place— not an illness—which is implied in the very laws of existence, but still is of the nature of a struggle, a laceration.28

Suffering from “a struggle” and “a laceration” at puberty, Mick is worried by her gender identity with dubious nature all the time. In this case, “this time of unrest” is identified with “the threshold of a period” portrayed by

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McCullers in the manuscript. As a tomboy at puberty, Mick is a liminal person between a boy and a girl, between an adolescent and an adult. Secondly, it is very hard to establish Mick’s living spaces securely. Without a sense of belonging, she said to herself, “I sure would rather have some place to myself than anything I know” (51). As a result, Mick tries to seek for a place of her own in the outside world and the inside world: With her [Mick] it was like there was two places—the inside room and the outside room. School and the family and the things that happened every day were in the outside room. Mister Singer was in both rooms. Foreign countries and plans and music were in the inside room…The inside room was a very private place. She could be in the middle of a house full of people and still feel like she was locked up by herself. (163)

In my view, the inside room and the outside room represent the physical space and the mental space, respectively. No matter which room she places herself in, Mick keeps looking for a private space. ZHANG Deming (张德 明) analyzes the different roles of time and space in writings, suggesting that “only in the private space, can a protagonist feel safe and identify himself or herself. In this sense, time appears not to matter so much.”29 In the outside room, Mick especially likes the secluded corners. Climbing up the ladder and straddling the peak of the roof boldly, she has a try of smoking alone. Sneaking into an empty house with a Keep Out sign, she writes her initials “M.K.” on the wall to declare her ownership of the house. When her elder sisters Hazel and Etta asked her to leave their shared room, “Mick strutted from one corner to the other until she had covered all the floor space” (41). It goes without saying that corner means a lot to Mick. “To begin with, the corner is a haven that ensures us one of the things we prize most highly--immobility.”30 To Mick, thus, corner functions as a nest or a shell to secure her from hurts and attacks. As Bachelard writes, “the corner is the chamber of being.”31 In the novel, corners represent the real physical world which means the outside room to Mick. On the contrary, the inside room is Mick’s inner world. “All intimacy hides from view,”32 so Mick hides her secrets, dreams, and hopes in the inside room: love for music, a dream to travel in a foreign country, and her clinging to the mute Singer. When she enters the inside room, her passion, inspiration, and thoughts in a deep slumber are all awakened in a minute. The following event is taking place in the inside room:

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She lay on her stomach on the cold floor and thought. Later on—when she was twenty—she would be a great world-famous composer. She would have a whole symphony orchestra and conduct all of her music herself. She would stand up on the platform in front of the big crowds of people. To conduct the orchestra she would wear either a real man’s evening suit or else a red dress spangled with rhinestones. The curtains of the stage would be red velvet and M.K. would be printed on them in gold. Mister Singer would be there, and afterward they would go out and eat fried chicken. He would admire her and count her as his very best friend. (240–241)

“Space calls for action, and before action, the imagination is at work.”33 In the inside room where what is impossible to happen in the outside room can become true, Mick is a dreamer full of imagination. In contrast to the physical, real, and limited space of the outside room, the inside room is the mental, imaginary, and infinite space. These two rooms provide Mick with completely different living experiences of spaces. She is an outsider, a marginalized person, and a wanderer in the outside room, but a dreamer, a master, and an owner in the inside room. During the whole period of puberty, Mick is lingering around the two rooms all the time. “During the day she was busy in the outside room” (311), but at night “[s]he shut her eyes and went into the inside room” (181). Standing on a threshold between the outside room and inside room, Mick is a liminal person without her identity. Unfortunately, an unexpected event taking place in the outside room ends up the liminal period in Mick’s adolescence. She has sex with her friend Harry Minowitz when they ride out bikes together. To Mick, losing her virginity is “a rite of passage” at puberty which represents a landmark in her life. As Beauvoir analyzes, “[t]his defloration [taking a girl’s virginity] is not the gradually accomplished outcome of a continuous evolution, it is an abrupt rupture with the past, the beginning of a new cycle.”34 Sarah Gleeson-White points out that “[f]or Mick Kelly, it is the loss of her virginity, again conjuring up the image of indelibly staining blood, which she understands as a visible marker of her entry to womanhood.”35 Afterwards, Mick asks the black servant Portia a question, “Look at me. Do you notice anything different?” (278). Apparently, she can feel something different in her for the “defloration.” The loss of virginity, therefore, is a watershed to demarcate “an abrupt rupture” with her puberty and “the beginning” of womanhood. In this way, the liminal period in the initiation comes to an

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end all of a sudden. It is impossible for Mick to always linger around the outside room and the inside room, so that she has to choose either of them. Later on, the mishaps—financial crisis in the family, breaking up with Harry, the mute Singer’s suicide—urge Mick to make a choice immediately. “Now she could not stay in the inside room. She had to be around somebody all the time. Doing something every minute. And if she was by herself she counted or figured with numbers” (305). Finally, Mick has to work in the ten-cent store to make money for family, giving up her dream to be a musician. Great changes occur when Mick enters a world of adults. Instead of being a tomboy, “she [Mick] wore Hazel’s green silk dress and a green hat and high-heeled pumps with silk stockings. They fixed her face with rouge and lipstick and plucked her eyebrows. She looked at least sixteen years old when they were finished” (318). At the end of the novel, “she [Mick] getting to be a regular lady these days” (315). To me, Mick’s transformation from a tomboy to Southern Lady is very ironic, because “Southern Lady is subject to patriarchy. Restrained and prudent, Southern Lady cannot express themselves as freely as men can.”36 Reconciling herself to life, Mick has realized that her puberty comes to an end in haste. Afterwards she has a subtly different feeling about terror. As mentioned above, “a queer afraidness came to her” initially (311), but in this moment “she was ashamed for the first scared feeling that had come to her” (316). We can safely say that the sense of terror is not gone, but it still lurks deep in her heart. In my view, the reason for the different feelings about terror is that Mick is confronted with the upheavals of her living spaces. JIN Li (金莉), a prominent Chinese critic of American literature, holds that “the confinement of space deprives women of movement in McCullers’s works, which features a narrative of domesticity in her writings.”37 At the very beginning of the novel, Mick struggles for a private space (the inside room) with her awakening consciousness. But in the end, her embrace with the public space (the outside room) means that she yields to the convention and patriarchy in the South. Facing up to the predicament of her living spaces, Mick finally withdraws from the inside room and comes to fit in the outside room. Once she has made a choice, she is completely prevented from movement and confined to the stifling family life. It is self-evident that Mick’s fate is doomed to be a tragedy. As McCullers writes in the manuscript, “[h]er [Mick’s] tragedy does not come in any way from herself--she is robbed of her freedom and energy by an unprincipled and wasteful society.”38 Probing into her tragedy, I think that

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robbing “of her freedom and energy” is actually the ruthless deprivation of the very limited living spaces for her. The binary opposition between the inside room and the outside room reflects her predicament of living spaces. Trying to strike a balance between these two rooms, Mick is a typical threshold person as Biff is. Likewise, to Mick, the sense of terror comes from the liminal space at puberty.

Conclusion: The Source of Terror Orhan Pamuk believes that “novels are second lives…At such times, we feel that the fictional world we encounter and enjoy is more real than the real world itself. That these second lives can appear more real to us than reality often means that we substitute novels for reality, or at least that we confuse them with real life.”39 That is to say, the second life in novels can be taken as the incarnation of the first life in the real world. It is widely accepted that The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is an autographic novel which is a writing of reflexivity of McCullers’s personal experiences at puberty.40 Gleeson-White claims that McCulers’s works “present us with physically freakish characters--giants, dwarfs, mutes, androgynes, and so on--reflecting her own self-styled freakishness and the exploration of gender and sexual identity that she carried out in her own life.”41 In The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, the real world around McCullers is reproduced in her fictional world. She explicitly explains the characterization of her novels: “I am so immersed in them [the characters] that their motives are my own…I become the characters I write about.”42 In terms of liminality, as a writer, McCullers situates herself on the threshold between the real world and the fictional world. Let us get back to the question at the very beginning of this paper: what is the source of terror? Maurice Blanchot believes that the nature of writing is to experience space rather than time. As he elaborates in The Space of Literature, “[t]o write is to surrender to the fascination of time’s absence.”43 Coincidentally, in an essay “How I Began to Write” (1948), McCullers articulates that the beginning of her writing is closely related to her living spaces at an early age: “By that winter the family rooms, the whole town, seemed to pinch and cramp my adolescent heart. I longed for wanderings.”44 To her, writing is a special way of wandering, which frees her from the confined living spaces in the real world. Thus, she believes that “[t]he writer by nature of his profession is a dreamer and a conscious dreamer.”45 When writing The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, McCullers is “a

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conscious dreamer” full of imagination and inspiration to connect the real and the imaginary with the “knot” of liminal space, by breaking through the limits of the linear and serial duration of temporal narrative. According to what has been discussed, we readers have tracked down the source of the terror—the terror comes fundamentally more from space than from time. Thus, the answer to the question asked by McCullers in her poem has been found. With the spatialization of time, the linear, serial, and continuous temporal narrative breaks into fragments of the heterogenous spaces with the attribute of liminality. In The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, almost all characters are facing up to the predicament of their living spaces: neither the public space nor the private space can be provided in the South in the 1940s. Biff and Mick are just the epitomes of the group of “the Other,” wandering around the margin of the society in the South. To conclude, McCullers’s concern with the liminal space shows that she gives an insight into the plight and identity of the “Other” in the South. May Sarton claims that “[t]his [The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter] is the story of a group of people and their lives in a small southern town. It might be almost anywhere. It might be round the corner.”46 Thus, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter tells us a story about universality and timelessness.

Notes 1. Carson McCullers, “When We Are Lost,” in The Mortgaged Heart, ed. Margarita G. Smith (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 287. 2. 吴晓东: 《从卡夫卡到昆德拉: 20 世纪的小说和小说家》, 北京: 生活⋅读 书⋅新知三联书店, 2003 年, 第 163 页。 [WU Xiaodong, From Franz Kafka to Milan Kundera: Novels and Novelists in the 20th Century (Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2003), 163.] 3. Edward W. Soja defines a temporal master-narrative as “a historical but not yet comparably geographical imagination,” focusing on linear, serial, repetitive, and cumulative time instead of space. See Edward W.  Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Theory (London and New York: Verso, 1989), 11. 4. Darren Millar, “The Utopian Function of Affect in Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding and The Ballad of the Sad Café,” Southern Literary Journal, vol. 41, no. 2 (Spring, 2009): 89. 5. Jennifer Murray, “Approaching Community in Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” Southern Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 4 (Summer, 2004): 108.

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6. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 1991), 95. 7. David Lodge, The Art of Fiction: Illustrated from Classic and Modern Texts (New York: Viking, 1992), 187. 8. Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 26. 9. Joseph Frank, The Idea of Spatial Form (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 23. 10. Ibid., 26–27. 11. 吴晓东: 《从卡夫卡到昆德拉: 20 世纪的小说和小说家》, 第 182–183 页。 [WU Xiaodong, From Franz Kafka to Milan Kundera: Novels and Novelists in the 20th Century, 182–183.] 12. Joseph Frank, The Idea of Spatial Form, 27. 13. M. M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, eds. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist  (Austin: University of Texas University, 1986), 40. 14. Michel Foucault, “Texts/Contexts of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, in Diacritics, vol.16, no. 1 (Spring, 1986), 24. 15. Ibid. 16. Sergei Eisenstein, Towards a Theory of Montage, trans. Michael Glenny, in Sergei Eisenstein: Selected Works (Volume II), eds., Michael Glenny and Ricard Taylor (London and New York: I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd. 2010), 299. 17. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, 104. 18. Sarah Gleeson-White, Strange Bodies: Gender and Identity in the Novels of Carson McCullers (Tuscaloosa and London: The University of Alabama Press, 2003), 96. 19. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, 95. 20. Ibid. 21. Michel Foucault, “Texts/Contexts of Other Spaces,” 23. 22. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (New York: The Orion Press, 1964), 137. 23. See Sarah Gleeson-White, Strange Bodies: Gender and Identity in the Novels of Carson McCullers, 11–37. 24. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, eds. David Bradshaw and Stuart N. Clarke (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 3. 25. M.  M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. and ed.  Caryl Emerson, (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 61. 26. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans.  and ed. H.  M. Parshely (London: Jonathan Cape, 1953), 329. 27. Carson McCullers, Illumination and Night Glare, ed. Carlos L.  Dews (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 166.

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28. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 307–308. 29. 张德明: 《西方文学与现代性的展开》, 北京: 中国社会科学出版社, 2009 年, 第 150–151 页。 [ZHANG Deming, Western Literature and the Unfolding of Modernity (Beijing: China Social Sciences Press, 2009), 150–151.] 30. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 137. 31. Ibid., 138. 32. Ibid., 88. 33. Ibid., 12. 34. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 367. 35. Sarah Gleeson-White, Strange Bodies: Gender and Identity in the Novels of Carson McCullers, 16. 36. 李杨: 《美国南方文学后现代时期的嬗变》, 济南: 山东大学出版社, 2006年, 146 页。 [LI Yang: Changes of American Southern Literature in the Postmodern Period (Jinan: Shandong University Press, 2006), 146.] 37. 金莉: 《20世纪美国女性小说研究》, 北京: 北京大学出版社, 2010 年, 161 页。[JIN Li: Twentieth-Century American Women’s Fiction (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2010), 161.] 38. Carson McCullers, Illumination and Night Glare, 166. 39. Orhan Pamuk, The Native and the Sentimental Novelist, trans. Nazim Dikbas (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), 3. 40. See Virginia Spencer Carr, The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers (Athens and London: U of Georgia P, 2003), 1–40. 41. Sarah Gleeson-White, “Revisiting the Southern Grotesque: Mikhail Bakhtin and the Case of Carson McCullers,” in Carson McCullers (New Edition), ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009), 60. 42. Carson McCullers, “The Flowering Dream: Notes on Writing,” in The Mortgaged Heart, ed. Margarita G.  Smith (Boston and New  York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 277. 43. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln and London: Univeristy of Nebraska Press, 1989), 29. 44. Carson McCullers, “How I Began to Write,” in The Mortgaged Heart, ed. Margarita G. Smith (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 251. 45. Carson McCullers, “The Flowering Dream: Notes on Writing,” 280. 46. May Sarton, “Pitiful Hunt for Security: Tragedy of Unfulfillment Theme of Story That Will Rank High in American Letters,” in Critical Essays on Carson McCullers, eds. Beverly Lyon Clark and Melvin J. Friedman (New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1996), 19.

CHAPTER 19

Antebellum Literary Cartography and the Construction of an American Oceanic Space Jie Hou

In the early nineteenth century the United States witnessed a phenomenon: “maps of the new nation were prominently featured in portraits, decorated the walls of American homes and schools, were integrated into textbooks and didactic puzzles, and were displayed in public offices, coffee houses, and taverns.”1 The above phenomenon seems to be common, but it can throw light on the important role of maps in the early days of the country’s establishment. In fact, maps not only permeate American material culture, but also exist in the field of humanities and social This article was originally published in Foreign Literatures. What follows is the full information: HOU Jie, “The 19th-Century American Literary Cartography’s Impact on the Construction of American Sea Space,” Foreign Literatures, no. 2 (2018): 37–45. [侯杰: “美国 19 世纪的文学地图对美国海洋空间建构的作用”, 《国外文学》, 2018 年第 2 期, 37–45 页。] J. Hou (*) Nankai University, Tianjin, China © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Fang, R. T. Tally Jr. (eds.), Spatial Literary Studies in China, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03914-0_19

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sciences, where lies the ideological influence of maps that cannot be ignored, but is often ignored. As for the literary field, “within the wider well-known ‘spatial turn’, an exciting ‘cartographic turn’ now seems to be flourishing.”2 This new interdisciplinary perspective enables us to reexamine the relationship between literature and maps and explore the unknown functions of literary cartography. Literary cartography “aims to present and reveal the form and significance of literary geographical space with the organic integration of two narrative language systems of ‘image-text’, which has relatively complete image-text structure and intertextual function. Broadly speaking, there are two orientations and types of literary cartography: hypostatic literary maps and metaphorical literary maps.”3 However, according to Professor Robert Tally, “literary cartography or literary geography, as I understand it, operates precisely by virtue of the specifically literary nature of the project, and writing itself is a form of spatialization that depends upon the reader’s acceptance of numerous conventions.”4 This kind of literary cartography doesn’t pay much attention to real tangible maps but carry on the analysis around literature works, reveal how writers draw literary maps with words through writing, and thus uncover literature works’ profound significance and influence with the aid of the literary cartography theory. In Melville, Mapping and Globalization (2009), Professor Robert T. Tally Jr. demonstrated how Melville drew a world map in Moby Dick by using literary cartography, which is very inspiring and highlights the literary mapping of a post-national world system in Moby Dick. Inspired by him, this article will pay attention to metaphorical literary maps drawn in representative antebellum American sea narratives, so as to reveal the interaction between literary maps drawn in these sea narratives and the construction of an American oceanic space. These antebellum American sea narratives jointly created the first golden period of the development of American sea narratives. They not only had great scale and influence in quantity and quality but also played a far-reaching role in the construction of the oceanic space of the United States and even the global space, laying a solid foundation for the United States to replace Britain as a new marine and global hegemony after World War II. Four works are selected: James Cooper’s The Pilot, a Tale of the Sea (1823), the first sea narrative in the history of American literature and also a “national narrative” reflecting national consciousness; Richard Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast (1840) and Melville’s Typee (1846), both of which are “personal narratives” created by the writers according to their

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own navigation experiences; Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), a “post-national narrative,” transcending his era and national borders. Living in different periods of American national development, these three writers also created distinctive narrative works and drew different literary maps. This article discusses the following question: what role did literary maps in these works play in the construction of an American national oceanic space?

National Narratives and the Initial Mapping of American National Nautical Chart The nineteenth century saw the rising of American nationalism. As a literary form, “national narratives” also joined in the national construction in full swing at that time and played a role in shaping the national image in the imagination space. “National narratives” mostly revolve around a certain period of national history, which embodies a kind of “national consciousness” and “national voice.” Cooper’s The Pilot, a Tale of the Sea is a “national narrative” based on the Second American War of Independence (War of 1812), which tells the story of the heroic struggle between the American navy and the British colonists. Before the Second American War of Independence, the U.S.  Coast was tightly blockaded by British warships. The United States had no national maritime right, let alone a national nautical chart. After the war, although Britain did not promise to stop robbing American sailors and ships, it actually gave up the suppression of American maritime trade. With the development of American economy and trade, it is urgent to draw the national nautical chart and defend the national maritime right. The task of drawing a national nautical chart falls not only on the shoulders of cartographers, but also on the shoulders of writers who draw literary maps with words. “The act of writing itself might be considered a form of mapping or a cartographic activity.”5 This kind of literary mapping is not only an objective representation of national territory, but also plays a role in constructing and defending national territory. “Maps and novels,” states Eric Bulson, “have had a long and prosperous relationship.”6 Said claims that, “Yet most cultural historians, and certainly all literary scholars, have failed to remark the geographical notation, the theoretical mapping and nautical charting of territory that underlies Western fiction, historical writing, and philosophical discourse of the time.”7 Although his view runs a risk of being radical, it reveals the close

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relationship among cartography, colonialism, and novel creation, which brings enlightenment to the study of literary cartography. On the one hand, maps are complicit with colonialism and facilitate the partition of imperialism; on the other hand, maps can be torn and redrawn, which makes it possible to resist colonialism. Like maps, literary maps can both serve colonialism and fight against colonialism. Cooper’s literary mapping in The Pilot just played a role of resisting British colonialism. At the beginning of the novel, Cooper questions the British colonists’ jurisdiction over some sea areas by using the “map”: A single glance at the map will make the reader acquainted with the position of the eastern coast of the Island of Great Britain, as connected with the shores of the opposite continent. … Over this sea the islanders long asserted a jurisdiction, exceeding that which reason concedes to any power on the highway of nations, and which frequently led to conflicts that caused an expenditure of blood and treasure, utterly disproportioned to the advantages that can ever arise from the maintenance of a useless and abstract right. It is across the waters of this disputed ocean that we shall attempt to conduct our readers, selecting a period for our incidents that has a peculiar interest for every American, not only because it was the birthday of his nation, but because it was also the era when reason and common sense began to take the place of custom and feudal practices in the management of the affairs of nations.8

Through the above words, Cooper cleverly laid the foundation for redrawing the nautical chart later. To redraw a nautical chart, you have to tear the existing nautical chart apart. Since the ownership is disputed, it is possible to redraw the nautical chart. In an era of “not dealing with international affairs according to old customs and feudal laws and regulations,”9 the Britain colonial nautical chart is in question, and the rising United States urgently needs to draw its own nautical chart. J. B. Harley has indicated that, “As much as guns and warships, maps have been the weapons of imperialism.”10 Many theorists agreed with Harley’s point of view, but Deleuze puts forward different opinions in A Thousand Plateaus. According to him, “The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, and susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation.”11 It is clear that Harley and Deleuze have the opposite view of the map. Harley believes that, “It offers a vision of state power and control that seems to

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willingly stifle any attempts at resistance to the power of the map.”12 It seems that the power of maps is unshakable. By contrast, Deleuze believes that maps are open, collapsible, and can be redrawn. It is undeniable that mapping is sometimes a means for colonists to occupy colonies, but it cannot be ignored that mapping may also become a way for the colonized to resist colonialism. The nautical chart mapped in The Pilot plays a role in fighting against British colonialism, that is, by tearing apart the British colonial nautical chart and drawing the national nautical chart of the United States, the purpose of building and defending the American oceanic space can be achieved. The U.S. nautical chart drawn by Cooper in The Pilot is of great significance to the young country, because the mapping of territory is a necessary element for the establishment of an emerging country. David Harvey, in The Condition of Postmodernity, explains how property rights, political boundaries, and transportation rights made a belief in the objectivity of spatial representation essential.13 In other words, maps and borders have the function of objectifying spatial representation and making space manageable. David Buisseret also pointed out that one of the reasons for the rapid rise of Cartography in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was “national unity,” in which “the potential role of maps”14 was attached great importance by the government. The government attaches particular importance to the ability of maps to create manageable political space. “When landowners and rulers do not know the limits of their territory, their power is weakened.”15 It is no exaggeration to say that maps—which can help build national identity and national image—make a country a country. In addition, the map of a country usually represents its territory and sovereignty. In this sense, cartographers are also responsible for safeguarding national sovereignty by mapping. Accordingly, writers must also play a role in safeguarding national sovereignty by drawing literary maps. Although national territory includes territorial land, territorial sea, and so on, land is usually more concerned than sea. For example, Jefferson’s “Embargo Act,” Turner’s “Frontier Thesis,” and O’Sullivan’s “Manifest Destiny” all have a tendency to place more emphasis on land than on sea. In contrast to this tendency, Philbrick put forward the view of “maritime nationalism” and believed that there were complicated historical origins between the United States and the sea: “The same national values were attached to the sea: it represented the arena of past glories, the training ground of the national character, and the field on which wealth and power were to be won for the country.”16 This view emphasizes that the

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construction of oceanic space plays an important role in the establishment and development of the United States. As with the construction of land space, the construction of oceanic space also needs commercial, military, maps, and other forces to complete together. But in comparison, nautical charts play a more significant role in the construction of oceanic space. On the one hand, the navigating route is quite different from the road on land. Without the guidance of nautical charts, the ships may disappear at any time like a mirage. On the other hand, the division of the territorial sea borders between countries is more controversial than that of the land borders, and the nautical chart has become a historical evidence or realistic proof. The rapid development of shipbuilding technology, naval strength, and overseas trade in the nineteenth century created favorable conditions for American nautical charting. The first half of the nineteenth century was the heyday of clipper. By the 1860s, wooden sailboats had become very common, and the United States, rich in timber resources, had become the world’s leader in shipbuilding. In 1807, American engineer Robert Fulton made the first successful voyage of steamer “Clement.” In the War of 1812 between British and American navy, a steam warship designed by Fulton successfully defended the New  York port and helped the United States Navy to achieve brilliant success. “This unexpected victory made the American people’s patriotic enthusiasm and marine nationalism unprecedented high.”17 It is in this context that Cooper created a series of literary works about the ocean, which laid a solid foundation for further drawing the national nautical chart of the United States and constructing the American oceanic space. Critics such as Philbrick think that even if Cooper didn’t create the more well-known frontier novels, his 11 sea novels alone would be enough to occupy an important position in the history of American literature. Both Melville and Conrad regard Cooper as the originator of American sea narratives and admit to being influenced by him. In this sense, Cooper’s works have created a new genre. Cooper regards the sea as a unique region with its own culture, and he places his hope for the country on these people who live on the sea. In these works, the desire to build a strong U.S.  Navy and the praise for American warships and crew can be seen everywhere. In The Pilot, to punish the British colonists, the U.S. Congress sent two warships to the British coast to harass and take hostages. After a breathtaking sea and land battle, the U.S. Navy, with the help of legendary

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hero pilot Gray (the prototype is Paul Jones, the famous U.S. Navy hero), completed the mission and returned home triumphantly. Cooper expressed his desire to build a strong navy with the help of Gray. In The Pilot, Gray said: “Had I but a moiety of the navy of that degenerate republic, the proudest among those haughty islanders should tremble in his castle.”18 A strong navy is the main embodiment of a country’s national marine power. Cooper “conveys this thought everywhere in his works that the U.S should strengthen their national marine power by building a strong navy.”19 Cooper’s sea novels not only show the readers a magnificent picture of the sea, but also help the United States to establish the consciousness of mapping its own oceanic space by drawing literary maps. To be exact, Cooper depicted the incipient national nautical chart of the United States, the outline and borders of national identity, and made the definition of the country more specific. This role of literary cartography is particularly important for the new country, which can really promote its formation and development.

Personal Narratives and the Border-Remapping of the American Nautical Chart In the 1840s, the United States became independent politically, economically, and culturally. Because of the rapid development, the domestic resources and markets at that time were far from meeting the American ambition. By the 1860s, the western border of the United States had reached the Pacific Ocean, but the whole country still showed an obvious tendency of expansion. It was no accident that “personal narratives” with adventurous and exotic colors quietly prevailed at that time, because they not only showed people a new world, but also played an important role in promoting the expansion of American territory in imagination space. Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast and Melville’s Typee are both popular “personal narratives” at that time, recording their own navigation experiences and sketching two personal navigation routes. In spite of various defects of “personal narratives,” which “are described as itineraries rather than as maps: diagrams organized around the still subject-centered or existential journey of the traveler, along which various significant key features are marked.”20 The itinerary is only based on the individual experience or specific itinerary of the travelers, which lacks the integrity and technicality of the map. However, this itinerary is an essential part of the map, “State

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borders are brought into being through mapping, both by the imperative to be mapped and through the medium of mapping.”21 It can be said that Dana, Melville, and other writers just provide a new border for redrawing the national nautical chart of the United States, consciously or unconsciously participate in the construction of the American oceanic space, and promote the expansion of the national oceanic space of the United States. Two Years Before the Mast is regarded as the most representative nautical narrative in American literature. Dana wrote in the first chapter of Two Years Before the Mast that: “I design to give an accurate and authentic narrative of a little more than two years spent as a common sailor, before the mast, in the American merchant service.”22 He also truthfully recorded what he saw and heard during his voyage in the first person in the book. Once published in 1840, the book has achieved remarkable success in Britain and the United States, to some extent, bringing the California coast into the American vision. In Chapter 21, Dana says of California: Such are the people who inhabit a country embracing four or five hundred miles of sea-coast, with several good harbors; with fine forest in the north; the waters filled with fish, and the plains covered with thousands of herds of cattle; blessed with a climate, than which there can be no better in the world; free from all manner of diseases, whether epidemic or endemic; and with a soil in which corn yields from seventy to eighty fold. In the hands of an enterprising people, what a country this might be!23

In Milestones in California History: Two Years Before the Mast: Its Significance 150 Years After Publication, Marlene Smith-Baranzini wrote: “Dana’s assessment of California also encouraged the United States to find a way to acquire California from Mexico and was thus a prelude to the American conquest.”24 In other words, Dana drew a new border for the national nautical chart of the United States in advance by sketching a personal navigation route; inspired by this new border, the United States searched for opportunities to occupy California, so that its nautical chart really expanded. It is undeniable that the writer, through the creation of literary works, has drawn a blueprint for expanding the national oceanic space of the United States to some extent and participated in the construction of the national nautical chart of the United States. In addition to California, Americans are also looking to some islands in the South Pacific. “To begin the study of American travel to the South Pacific, we must acknowledge the place the Marquesas Islands hold in the

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history of American imperialism.”25 In 1815, U.S.  Navy General David Porter asked President James Madison for his order to lead the U.S. Navy on a journey of Pacific exploration, hoping to promote potential overseas trade and military colonization. After arriving in Nukuheva, David Porter sent a circular announcing that he had occupied the Marquesas Islands in the name of the United States. Since then, David Porter has also written Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean (1822), which has attracted wide attention in the United States. Although Melville claims that Typee is based on his whaling trip in the South Pacific in 1842 and his experience in Nukuheva, some scholars point out that it is largely influenced by General David Porter’s description of the Marquesas Islands. “Melville’s descriptions of these foreign practices were not entirely his own…At times he recognized his own references, as when he clearly states the histories on which he relies; at others he entirely neglects to mention his sources, as in his unattributed use of Captain David Porter’s Journal of the Cruise of the U. S. Frigate Essex.”26 The fact that Porter led the U.S. Navy to the Marquesas Islands aroused great American interest in the islands, which triggered the impulse of Melville and other writers to make literary maps of the islands. On the surface, Typee is just a travel writing, which describes the adventures of the protagonist Tommo in the cannibal tribe of the Marquesas Islands, the unforgettable natural landscape, local customs, and shows the reader a personal navigation route map. In fact, on the one hand, it is a representation of the American military, trade, and other overseas expansion actions in the nineteenth century; on the other hand, it depicts a new border for the national nautical chart of the United States in the nineteenth century, participates in the further construction of the American oceanic space, and plays a role in promoting the expansion of the American oceanic space.

Post-National Narratives and the Mapping of a World Nautical Chart Since the nineteenth century, the United States has become increasingly powerful and gradually embarked on the road of expansion. The American elite represented by Melville began to reflect on the expansion tendency of the United States. Michael Rogin even praised Melville as the Marx of the United States because he systematically criticized the national structure of the United States in the nineteenth century.27 Moby Dick was published in

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a time when “national narratives” were in the ascendant, while Moby Dick transcended the national framework, constituted a world text, and was a representative work of “post-national narratives”. If it can be seen in Typee that “Melville had both resistance and participation to the then popular ideology of Empire expansion,”28 then in Moby Dick, Melville depicted a broader world nautical chart, stood at the angle of the world and even human beings to examine the colonial tendency of the United States, and predicted the arrival of a global era. This critical attitude held by the American elites represented by Melville and their influence on all sectors of the society through their writing laid a foundation for the rapid rise of the United States in the future. In other words, reflection and criticism also constitute an aspect of literary mapping, which makes the function of literary mapping more comprehensive. In Melville, Mapping and Globalization, Tally points out that Moby Dick transcends the national framework at that time and constitutes a “post-national narrative.” Because a “post-national narrative” often avoids taking a stand on issues of national importance, it can help writers to break through the limitations of “national narratives,” so as to expand the perspective to the global scope and project a world map. At the moment, instead of an itinerary or a realistic map, writers are drawing a world map through Mercator projection29—although there are obvious distortions in some places, it presents a broader and more real map in a sense than the fact, which presents the spherical surface of the whole earth on a plane. Some of Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe’s works embody this feature, while Melville’s Moby Dick is the most obvious one. From the perspective of “post-national narratives,” Tally emphasizes that Moby Dick is a world text and a world system map that transcends national borders. Besides, as a typical sea narrative, Moby Dick, while transcending the national system, pays more attention to the construction of the entire oceanic space and depicts a world nautical chart. First of all, geospatially, the track of Pequod in Moby Dick is almost all over the world, showing a global perspective. Starting from the Nantucket on the east coast of the United States, through the South Atlantic Ocean to the southern cape of Africa, Pequod entered the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean to hunt Moby Dick all the way, which is a global ocean trip. Secondly, from the perspective of race and humanity, the sailors on Pequod come from all over the world, with complex race and ethnic composition, reflecting the trend of globalization involving various races, nationalities, and countries on the earth. “Looking at chapter 40 of Moby Dick alone, we can see that

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the sailors on board come from at least the following different regions: South tacit, the Netherlands, France, Iceland, Malta, Sicily, long island, Azov, China, East India, Tahiti, Portugal, Denmark, Britain, Spain, and Santiago.”30 Pequod carries these sailors of different colors and beliefs to sail in the unique space of the ocean, which seems to be a miniature world. Thirdly, from the perspective of economy and trade, the industrial category and economic influence of Pequod as a whaling ship is of global significance. Melville made an encyclopedic introduction to the development of whaling industry and the function of sperm whale oil in Moby Dick. At that time, the whaling industry was not only the backbone of American national economy, but also growing into a global industry. Many scholars have hailed whaling as the first global industry. In the early nineteenth century, whaling became “the first global business.”31 Melville’s praise of whaling industry and whalers reflects his advanced global perspective. In a word, the elements of sea narratives such as the sea, sailors, and whaling industry all show that Moby Dick depicts a world nautical chart beyond the national boundaries. What is the purpose of Melville’s depiction of such a world nautical chart? Is it to provide a blueprint for the United States to build a worldwide maritime expansion? On the contrary, this world nautical chart is a critique of American colonialism and a conception of world globalization. This globalized world previewed by Melville is an ideal and harmonious world. Discrimination among countries, races, and religions no longer exist, only equality and fraternity. Therefore, Moby Dick not only criticizes the reality, but also yearns for and pursues an ideal world. It has the general characteristics of a “Utopian Narrative.” However, the Utopia in Moby Dick is neither a distant place nor a distant future, but a global and common development of the world’s oceanic space—an oceanic Utopia. In Utopia in the Age of Globalization, Tally airs his views as follows: To put it another way, utopia is a means of mapping the world. Utopia is an attempt to construct or project a totality, and in this I associate it closely with Jameson’s concept of “cognitive mapping”. As in that model, the Utopian impulse reflects an effort to situate oneself in space and in history, imaginatively projecting a world that enables one to represent the apparently unrepresentable totality of the world system. This act of figuration comes across in Utopian texts as a form of literary cartography.32

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In other words, globalization itself is a utopian word, which promises more equality and freedom, unlimited wealth creation, and deepening cultural exchange and understanding. Melville’s Moby Dick is such a nautical chart, which constructs a sea Utopia space and anticipates the arrival of a global era. In this utopia under the background of globalization, equality and fraternity will replace colonialism, racial discrimination, religious persecution, and so on—which can be fully demonstrated by analyzing the plot of Moby Dick. At the beginning of Moby Dick, Ishmael and Queequeg met dramatically in the Spouter-Inn. The two had to share a bed because all beds are already occupied in the inn. Queequeg is a “barbarian” with mysterious tattoos all over his body, and even when he is asleep, he has an axe in his mouth. At first Ishmael was very afraid of this roommate, but he gradually found that Queequeg had a noble heart. “But savages are strange beings; at times you do not know exactly how to take them. At first they are overawing; their calm self-collectedness of simplicity seems as Socratic wisdom.”33 They soon became good friends and boarded the Pequod together. In the following days and nights, Ishmael tried to persuade Queequeg to convert to Christianity, but he failed. In addition to religion, Ishmael was also amazed by Queequeg’s clothes and diet. However, after a while Ishmael learned to respect Queequeg and stopped trying to change this friend. The eulogy of this kind of friendship in Moby Dick is very obvious. In Chapter 72, Melville describes the whole process of skinning whales. The skinned whales are almost entirely under the water. In order to ensure the safety of the sailors working in the water, a rope is tied on their waist and the other end of the rope is tied on the waist of another sailor on the deck. In this way, one rope connects two lives. Although there are many diametrically opposite aspects between Queequeg and Ishmael, they are connected by this rope on Pequod—one person’s mistake may lead to the destruction of the other. Why did Melville arrange for such two representatives from different groups to gradually establish friendship? For Melville, there is such a relationship between the East and the West. The invasion of the East will eventually lead to the self-destruction of the West. Only through the common development of both sides can we create a harmonious world. Chapter 94 of Moby Dick is about sailors squeezing whale oil together. During the process of squeezing the whale oil, Ishmael found that he was rubbing his partner’s hands unintentionally. For him, “[s]uch an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation

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beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.”34 In addition, Melville also mentioned the magical effect of sperm whale oil, which “is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger; while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.”35 Through these plots, Melville depicts a world of mutual assistance and love. In Moby Dick, Melville not only didn’t preach the superiority of Western civilization, but implied that it was not the East but the West that needed to be saved. On Pequod, Queequeg threw his mocker into the air, frightening him into shouting for help. Just as the captain scolded Queequeg for this, the man was accidentally hit into the sea by the mast with a gust of wind. Before the other sailors could react, a figure crossed the ship’s side—Queequeg stood up and dived into the water to save the man. Later, “he put on dry clothes, lighted his pipe, and leaning against the bulwarks, and mildly eyeing those around him, seemed to be saying to himself—‘It’s a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians. We cannibals must help these Christians.’”36 Melville’s treatise on “barbarians” saving “civilized people” goes beyond that. In Chapter 110, a coffin was made by a carpenter on board during the serious illness of Queequeg and engraved with unique patterns of his own culture. After Queequeg miraculously recovered, the coffin was transformed into a lifeboat. It is this lifeboat that represents the alien culture that finally saves the life of Ishmael, who represents the western culture. Although the momentum of American colonial expansion was booming at that time, there was a clear stream of anti-colonialism in Moby Dick. As a vision and a dream, Melville’s goal is very clear: to build a world of brotherhood that everyone yearns for. In this sense, Moby Dick can be regarded as Melville’s vision of a harmonious and ideal society, and it draws a utopian nautical chart.

Conclusion “In the history of the world, the ‘nautical chart’ occupies a very important position.”37 The sea narratives before the American Civil War in the nineteenth century depicted such a nautical chart which has changed the world. By literary mapping the writers questioned the British colonial

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map, sketched the national nautical chart of the United States, redrawn the borders of the national nautical chart, and previewed a world nautical chart. They practiced the functions of literary cartography by using different narratives: tearing, describing, constructing, and reflecting on the political space. In the process of representation and participation in the construction of their own national oceanic space, writers’ attitude toward the construction of oceanic space is also constantly changing: from actively promoting the formation of national nautical charts, to objectively representing the changes in the boundaries of the national nautical charts, to rethinking the expansion tendency of American colonialism. This kind of reflection can be said to transcend writers’ own times and national boundaries and predict the arrival of a global era while depicting a world nautical chart. Therefore, literary cartography is not only a powerful ideological tool for building national space, but also a powerful tool for thinking about global culture and social reality.

Notes 1. Danis Wood, Rethinking the Power of Maps (New York: The Guilford Press, 2010), 32. 2. Tania Rossetto, “Theorizing Maps with Literature,” Progress in Human Geography, no. 38 (2014): 513. 3. 梅新林: “论文学地图”, 《中国社会科学》, 2015 年第 8 期, 159–181 页。 [MEI Xinlin, “On Literary Cartography,” Social Sciences in China, no. 8 (2015): 159–181.] 4. Robert T. Tally Jr., Spatiality (New York: Routledge, 2013), 5. 5. Ibid., 45. 6. Geoffrey Stacks, Critical Cartography in Contemporary American Fiction and Art (Indiana: Purdue University, 2011), 3. 7. Edward W.  Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 58. 8. James Fenimore Cooper, The Pilot (New York: Charles Wiley, 1823), 1. 9. Ibid., 1. 10. J. B. Harley, “Maps, Knowledge, and Power,” in The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Paul Laxton (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins U.P., 2001), 57. 11. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 12.

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12. J.  H. Andrews, Meaning, Knowledge and Power in the Map Philosophy of J. B. Harley (Dublin: Trinity College Department of Geography, 1994), 7. 13. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990), 245. 14. David Buisseret, Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps: The Emergence of Cartography as a Tool of Government in Early Modern Europe, ed. Buisseret (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 4. 15. Geoffrey Stacks, Critical Cartography in Contemporary American Fiction and Art, 14. 16. Thomas Philbrick, James Fenimore Cooper and the Development of American Sea Fiction (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1961), 1. 17. 段波: “库柏海洋小说中的海权思想”, 《外国文学》, 2011 年第 5 期, 96–103页。 [DUAN Bo, “Cooper’s View of the Sea Power in his Maritime Fictions,” Foreign Literature, no. 5 (2011): 96–103.] 18. James Fenimore Cooper, The Pilot (New York: Charles Wiley, 1823), 98. 19. 段波: “库柏海洋小说中的海权思想”, 96–103 页。[DUAN Bo, “Cooper’s View of the Sea Power in his Maritime Fictions,” 96–103.] 20. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (NC: Durham, 1991), 51. 21. Danis Wood, Rethinking the Power of Maps, 32. 22. Richard Dana, Two Years Before the Mast (New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909), 4. 23. Ibid., 155. 24. Marlene Smith-Baranzini, “Milestones in California History: Two Years before the Mast: Its Significance 150 Years after Publication,” California History, no.12 (1990/1991): 12. 25. Christopher Mcbride, “Americans in the Larger World: Beyond the Pacific Coast,” in American Travel Writing, ed. Alferd Bendixen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 165. 26. Jason Frank, A Political Companion to Herman Melville (Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 2013), 26. 27. Ibid., 2. 28. 杨金才: “异域想象与帝国主义——论赫尔曼⋅麦尔维尔的‘波利尼西亚三部 曲’”, 《国外文学》, 2000 年第 3 期, 67–72 页。 [YANG Jincai, “Foreign Imagination and Imperialism—on Herman Melville’s Polynesian Trilogy,” Foreign Literature, no. 3 (2000): 67–72.] 29. Robert T.  Tally Jr., Melville, Mapping and Globalization (New York: Continuum, 2009), 16. 30. 王彦兴: “《白鲸》和美国的帝国主义视野”, 《四川外语学院学报》, 2002 年第 6 期, 66–69 页。 [WANG Yanxing, “Moby Dick and the American Vision of Imperialism,” Journal of Sichuan International Studies University, no. 6 (2002): 66–69.]

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31. Callum Roberts, The Unnatural History of the Sea (Washington: Oisland Press/Shearwater Books, 2007), 83. 32. Robert T. Tally Jr., Utopia in the Age of Globalization (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), ix. 33. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or, the Whale, eds. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G.  Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern UP, 1988), 50. 34. Ibid., 408. 35. Ibid., 407. 36. Ibid., 61. 37. 宫崎正胜: 《航海路线图的世界史》, 朱悦玮译, 北京: 中信出版社, 2014 年, VII页。 [Masao Miyazaki, The World History of Nautical Route Map, trans. ZHU Yuewei (Beijing: CITIC Publishing Group, 2014), VII.]

Index1

A Academic map, 62, 64 Academic map publishing platform (AMAP), 54, 60–64, 68–71, 73–78 Adolescence, 317–323 The American Concession, 222, 225, 227–229, 232, 236n1 American literature, 43–48 American national parks, 169–181 The American West, 173, 174, 179 Ancient books of natural history, 152–153 Art history writing, 85 Assimilating the north in the south, 157–162, 164, 165 Automobility, 47

B Babbitt, 257–273 Binary compound research method, 146 Border, 329, 331–336, 340 C Cather, Willa, 281–295 CHEN Yinke, 211, 213, 214, 216, 217 Chinese, 54–78 Chinese classical literature, 299–307 Chinese literary geography, 11 “The city revolt against the village,” 264 Cole, Thomas, 172–174 Concentric zone model, 262, 276n26

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Fang, R. T. Tally Jr. (eds.), Spatial Literary Studies in China, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03914-0

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INDEX

Concept of space, 4 The consciousness of Jiangnan standard, 157, 161 Contemporary art, 83, 85–87 Cultural cognition, 197 geography, 299–307 imagination, 185–186, 196 memory, 28, 29, 31–33 D Difference, 24, 25, 29–31, 34 The digital humanities, 54, 57–62 Distribution, 55, 56, 61, 64–66, 76, 204–207 Dutton, Clarence, 177, 178 E Eastern Jin Dynasty, 304, 305 Embedded-text, 281–295 Entering the north and missing the south, 155–162, 164 Essence, 91, 94, 96, 101–103 Essentialism, 103 F Fiction, 107–123 Foochow Road, 222, 224 Foregrounding of space in narrative, 108–114 Foucault, Michel, 243, 245, 246, 248, 250 The French Concession, 222, 225–229, 232, 236n1 Fu, 299, 304, 305, 307n2 G Gender identity, 316, 319 The geographical distribution, 205–214, 217

Geographic space, 77 The Grand Canyon, 174–178 GUO Pu, 299–307 H Harvard University, 58, 61, 62, 64, 70 He, 5 The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, 311–324 Heterotopia, 241–253 Historical context, 3 Historical formation, 151–166 The history of Chinese literature, 201–217 Hong Kong, 243, 245–253, 255n35, 255n48 The Hudson River School, 172–175 I Idea of art, 84, 86 Identity construction, 187 Image construction, 162–165 The image of Jiangnan, 151–166 Intertextuality, 282, 283, 295 J Jiangnan identity, 164, 165, 168n27 Jin Dynasty, 304, 305, 309n8 Joaquin, Nick, 241–253 K Keyword research, 83 L Landscape, 258, 264 narratives, 281–295 Late Qing overseas travel notes, 190 Lewis, Sinclair, 257–273 The liminal space, 311–324

 INDEX 

Literary cartography, 221–235, 299–302, 327–340 Literary geographical studies, 5, 6, 8, 9 Literary geography, 301 Literary map, 89–104, 221–227 Literature, 54, 61, 76 Literature of the Six Dynasties, 151–166 Literature-oriented theory, 136 LIU Jing’an, 207, 210, 211, 213, 217 Lived experience, 28, 29 Local complex, 234, 235 M Main Street, 260, 272 Map, 327–333, 335, 336, 340 Map criticism critical mapping, 143 Masculinity, 266–268 McCullers, Carson, 311–324 Mirror, 313–317 Mobility, 37–50 The Mobility Turn, 37–42, 44, 49 Moby Dick, 328, 329, 335–339 Modern Chinese novel, 221–235 Modernity, 185–198, 295 Modern transformation, 6 Montage, 315, 316 Muir, John, 178–180 Museum, 84–86 N Narrative/narrativeness, 91, 95, 96, 98, 100, 104 dimension, 98, 102 irony, 283 mode, 108 space-metaphor space, 142 National anxiety, 232 National identity, 170, 174–176, 178, 180, 181

345

National narrative, 328–333, 336 Nautical chart, 329–340 New Literary Geography, 129–147 North and south literature, 202, 203, 210, 212 O Oceanic space, 327–340 One of Ours, 281–295 Ontological spatiality, 91, 96, 100, 103 Openness of space theory, 87 Organization of narrative by space, 108, 114–120 Outer space-inner space, 142 P Pattern of expression, xxviii, 28, 30 Personal narrative, 328, 333–335 The Philippines, 242, 243, 246, 249, 250, 255n35 Philosophical idea, 29, 30, 32, 33 Physical dimension, 97, 102 The Pilot, 330–333, 340n8, 341n18 Platform, 54, 56–71, 75–78 Playwrights’ native places, 204–207 Pluralism, xxviii, 24, 34 Poetic creation of “Jiangnan,” 154 Politics of mobility, 47 Post-national narrative, 329, 335–339 Powell, John Wesley, 174, 176, 177 Presence of History, 82 Pretext, 281–295 Production of space, 27, 29 Products of social relationship, 83 Publish, 57, 69 Pure time, 313–315, 317 R Railway, 45, 46, 48 Regional aesthetics, 151–166 Relational space, 41, 43

346 

INDEX

The rite of passage, 318, 321 River Fu, 299–307 S Scene restoration, 145 Sea narratives, 328, 332, 336, 337, 339 Self image, 193 Shanghai, 221–235 The significance of Literary Geography, 214–217 Social memory, 86 Space, 21–34, 81–87, 108–123, 243–250, 252, 257–273 Space experience, 185–198 Spaces as the major source of the meaning of fiction, 120–123 Spatiality, 108–110 Spatialization, 21–34, 107–123 of content, 108, 109, 122 of expression, 108, 123 Spatial literary studies, 37–50 in China, 3–14 Spatial metaphor, 221–235 Spatial narrative, 107–123 Spatial practice, 43, 44, 48, 49 Spatial turn, 7, 10, 13 Spatio-temporal Approach, 211–214, 216, 217 Spatio-temporal metaphor, 287–291 Spiritual exploration, 145 Subtext, 281–295 Symbolic dimension, 100 Symbolic landscape, 169–181 Synchronic, 186 T Tally, Robert T. Jr, 299, 300 Territorial restoration, 145

Terror, 311–324 Text space-map space, 142 Tian, 5 Transport, 41, 44 The tribute system, 152–155 Two Years Before the Mast, 328, 333, 334 U Uniqueness, 24, 29, 31, 34 Urban confusion, 233, 234 V Verbality, 100 Visuality, 97, 100 W WANG Guowei, 204–208, 211, 212, 214 Writers of the past dynasties, 207–211 X Xuanxue, 303 Y Yuan Qi, 4 Z Zenith, 257–265, 271, 272, 273n2, 275n13, 275n17, 277n32, 279n54 Zhejiang university, 60–62, 64, 70, 71, 75, 78n4