The Age of Silver: The Rise of the Novel East and West (Global Asias) [1 ed.] 0190606568, 9780190606565

Citation preview

i

T H E AG E O F   S I LV ER

ii

GLOBAL ASIAS Eric Hayot, Series Editor

Foreign Accents by Steven G. Yao A Taste for China by Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins Lin Shu, Inc. by Michael Gibbs Hill The Age of Silver by Ning Ma

iii

THE AGE OF SILVER The Rise of the Novel East and West

NING MA

1

iv

1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Ma, Ning, 1978– author. Title: The age of silver : the rise of the novel East and West / by Ning Ma. Other titles: Rise of the novel East and West Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2016. | Series: Global asias | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016011174 | ISBN 9780190606565 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: Realism in literature. | Fiction—History and criticism. | Silver in literature. | Literature and globalization. | Modernism (Literature)—History. | Xiaoxiaosheng. Jin Ping Mei ci hua. | Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 1547–1616. Don Quixote. | Ihara, Saikaku, 1642–1693. Kōshoku ichidai otoko. | Defoe, Daniel, 1661?–1731. Robinson Crusoe. | Comparative literature. Classification: LCC PN3340.M27 A34 2016 | DDC 809.3/032—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016011174 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

v

To my mother.

vi

vii

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments  ix Introduction: Toward Horizontal Comparisons  1 1. Global Silver, Local Novels  15 2. Along the Grand Canal: The Lord of Silver in The Plum in the Golden Vase  51 3. La Mancha to the Indies: The Romance and Materiality of the Empire in Don Quixote  79 4. Out of Nagasaki: To the End of the Floating World  109 5. Caribbean to China: Crusoe’s Two Adventures  139 Epilogue: The Transcivilizational Feminine and World Literature  167 Notes  183 Bibliography  229 Index  261

vii

viii

ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many years have passed since my days in Princeton University, where the initial ideas and comparative aspiration of this book were first nurtured. My greatest thanks go to my mentor Andrew Plaks, whose inspiring lectures on Chinese literature and pioneering comparative vision have been a shaping force in my intellectual growth. I am also indebted to the rigorous but caring guidance of April Alliston and Martin Kern, and to the stimulating while supportive environment of the Department of Comparative Literature and the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton. The “think big” mentality and generous university fellowship during those graduate school days allowed me to embark on unconventional scholarly pursuits, and, for that, I am always grateful. The collegial and forward-​looking atmosphere at Tufts University fostered the gradual maturation of a youthful research project into the current book. Especially, I  benefited from conversing and sharing ideas with my colleagues Xueping Zhong, Charles Inouye, Hosea Hirata, Susan Napier, Kamran Rastegar, Gregory Carleton, Vida Johnson, Christiane Zehl Romero, Joel Rosenberg, Gloria Ascher, and Daniel Brown. I also thank Gary Leupp and Lisa Lowe for looking at earlier versions of the manuscript and offering helpful feedback. Furthermore, I am indebted to Elizabeth Remick, who has been a friend and mentor through the years. I appreciate the A. Owen Aldridge Prize from the journal Comparative Literature Studies, and the Sidonie Clauss Dissertation Prize from the Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, which endorsed earlier presentations of my comparative idea and encouraged its further development. I also thank the Committee on Faculty Research

ix

x

x Acknowledgments

Awards from Tufts University in helping me conduct research over the summer. Through conferences, publication projects, and emails, feedback and support from the scholarly community have been crucial to the progression of my research. My thanks first go to David Porter for his tireless and much needed promotion of the research topic of comparative early modernities, from which I have benefited greatly. It is always an enjoyable experience to meet with Rivi Handler-​Spitz, who, with her perceptive insight and witty personality, has helped me fine-​tune this book. I appreciate attention to my research from Tamara Chin, Ming Dong Gu, Patricia Sieber, Alexander Des Forges, Wai-​yee Li, Lydia Liu, and Franco Moretti. Friendly supports from Min Ye, Enhua Zhang, Lanjun Xu, Chunmei Du, Man Xu, and Ariel Fox have also been memorable parts during my writing of the book. Earlier presentations of the ideas that bear fruit here have appeared in the journal Comparative Literature Studies and Encountering China: Early Modern European Responses (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2012), which is edited by Rachana Sachdev and Qinjun Li. I thank the reviewers, editors, and publishers of these articles. I  am also grateful for Professor Naiqiao Yang from Fudan University for selecting my article “When Robinson Crusoe Meets Ximen Qing: Material Egoism in the First Chinese and English Novels” for Chinese translation and inclusion in Selected Essays on Comparative Literature:  China (Beijing:  Beijing Normal University Press, 2012). The books’ manuscript has been significantly improved on the basis of careful reports from anonymous reviewers from the Oxford University Press. I thank Eric Hayot’s editorship and his overseeing of the book’s publication. My thanks also go to Andrew Alquesta and proofreaders from the Oxford University Press for their timely assistance on the editing of the book. Last, but not the least, nothing is possible without the support of my family. It is my tremendous luck to enjoy the selfless care of my parents and in-​laws, the solid assurance of my husband Dapeng, and the beaming smiles of Jerry and Emily, who have been growing along with the present book. To their love and presence I am forever indebted.

1

Introduction

Toward Horizontal Comparisons

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country . . . In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-​sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-​sidedness and narrow-​ mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature. —​Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848)1 Historians are alert to vertical continuities (the persistence of tradition, etc.) but blind to horizontal ones. … However beautiful the mosaic of specific studies that make up the “discipline” of history may be, without a macrohistory, a tentative general schema of the continuities, or, at the least, parallelism in history, the full significance of the historical peculiarities of a given society cannot be seen. … Integrative history is the search for and description and explanation of such interrelated historical phenomena. Its methodology is conceptually simple, if not easy to put to practice: first one searches for historical parallelisms (roughly contemporaneous similar developments in the world’s various societies), and then one determines whether they are causally interrelated. … We see it as needlepoint. The horizontal continuities (the weft of the web) run from left to right. From top to bottom run the various vertical continuities of successive societies (the warp). … Finally to complicate the structure further and, more important, 1

2

2 Introduction

to create a pattern of the needlepoint itself, is the thicker and more brightly colored yarn of the historical interconnections running in all directions through the web. … The subtle translucent hues of the warp and the dazzling colors and patterns of the needlepoint yarn almost totally conceal the horizontal continuities of the weft. But without the weft we have no needlepoint at all. Only a bag of threads. —​Joseph Fletcher, “Integrative History: Parallels and Interconnections in the Early Modern Period, 1500–​1800”2 If we imagine ourselves as planetary subjects rather than global agents, planetary creatures rather than global entities, alterity remains underived from us; it is not our dialectical negation, it contains us as much as it flings us away. —​Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Death of a Discipline3

WORLD LITERATURE, WORLD SYSTEM

According to the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s enthused words to his young assistant, Johann Peter Eckermann, in January 1827, “National literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.”4 Now, nearly two centuries after this famous conversation, the term “world literature” has become more ubiquitous, yet less certain, than ever before. Despite frequent and ardent calls for cross-​cultural dialogues, the actual writing of comparative and “global” literary studies always seems to be an unwieldy mission, simultaneously galvanized and burdened by the unique mission “to synthesize complex and discrepant information that was never designed to be drawn together.”5 Rather than starting from already defined objects of study, a comparatist must begin with a theory of scale and relationality—​t hat is, from a vision of “worldedness.”6 It is upon this point, however, that the idea of the “world” thickens into a complex spatial politics that revolves around a constant tension between the local and the global, and between the “non-​West” and the “West.” Whereas the return of the imaginary of “world literature” voices the globalized aspirations of comparative literature to venture outside its conventional orbit around the “Western civilization,” its reemergence has amounted to not so much a unified research model as a rugged discovery of the pitfalls and potentials that occur when one tries to reimagine the world across national lines and the colonizer/​colonized divide, under impulses as incongruent but just as exigent today as when Goethe first envisioned Weltliteratur.7

3

Introduction  3

Around the turn of the millennium, the field of world literature received a forceful push from the provocative propositions of “systematic” analysts, most notably Pascale Casanova and Franco Moretti. In similar ways, they argue for carrying out literary criticism in a “world-​system” fashion that reflects the ways in which comparative sociologists such as Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein have approached the history of capitalism.8 Based on this cross-​disciplinary premise, Casanova and Moretti highlight the underlying core-​periphery structure of the “world literary system” in a manner that parallels Braudel’s and Wallerstein’s model of the global economy. So far, critical responses to Casanova’s and Moretti’s proposals have been enormous, practically constituting the main theme of “world literature” debates over the last decade.9 More than manifesting individual opinions or oversights, their world-​system literary theories threw into relief a collective intellectual dilemma in which the question of the “world” is concerned—​that is, on the most basic level, whether we can imagine a single world without resorting to the primacy of a single “center,” or, in other words, without Eurocentrism. Granted, in the new millennium few critics would uncritically follow a teleological view of the Eurocentric world order as a necessary evolutionary goal or a sure sign of progress. Yet, however negative it has become in ethical terms, Eurocentric history continues to retain an ontological worldmaking priority precisely due to a widely shared, even when critically motivated, diffusionist vision that views globalization as a passive consequence of Western European forces of capitalism and colonialism. This is the kind of conceptual paradox that homologically persists through Braudel’s and Wallerstein’s world-​system models and Casanova’s and Moretti’s paradigms for world literature. Faced with the difficult task of cross-​cultural reading, we must creatively move beyond this monocentric world-​system perspective without falling back into a fragmented multiculturalism or losing sight of the complex dynamics of power and representation.

HORIZONTAL CONTINUITIES

If the bottleneck of our current comparative literary exercises has much to do with the inherent limitations of prevailing world-​system outlooks, which from Braudel to Wallerstein structurally position Western Europe as the primary source of global transformations, the question then becomes whether there exists alternative frameworks that instead emphasize the worldmaking roles of non-​Western civilizations. Keeping this issue in mind, one notes that, over the last two or three decades, globalization

4

4 Introduction

and world history studies have indeed turned toward a more holistic direction with highly fruitful results. A particularly remarkable trend in this vein is the “re-​Orient” perspective proposed by comparative historians such as Janet Abu-​Lughod, Andre Gunder Frank, Kenneth Pomeranz, Roy Bin Wong, Jack Goldstone, Victor Lieberman, James Blaut, Warren I. Cohen, John M. Hobson, Jack Goody, and Giovanni Arrighi. Working against the Orientalist foundations of Western social and historical theories, these scholars have, on the one hand, demonstrated that many allegedly unique aspects of European economy, society, politics, and culture that previously served to explain the “Rise of the West” are, in effect, not so singular given their earlier or roughly contemporaneous Asian counterparts. On the other hand, they have reconstructed the multimillennial traces of a networked Afro-​Eurasian ecumene, which had first accumulated key civilizational “resource portfolios” in the East and further evolved in relation to the new ecological and geopolitical conditions brought about by the European colonization of America.10 Decades ago, Edward Said theorized that the East was both “an integral part of European material civilization and culture” and “one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other,” which “has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience.”11 Structurally, if the writing off of Asia as hypostasized alterity was foundational to the rationalizing procedure of Western self-​representations and self-​u niversalization, the world-​system reincorporation of these radically externalized Eastern histories means no less than destabilizing the basic scales of modernity, origins, and difference that previously regulated the outer limits of historical thought. An ongoing project, the gradual recuperation of the Eastern half of world history is demonstrably a site of crucial resources for not only how we can practice cross-​cultural comparison differently, but also how we should begin to conceive the historical basis of comparison differently.12 The concept of “horizontal continuities,” first advanced by the late comparative historian Joseph Fletcher, anticipates the new brand of methodology world literature should learn from “re-​Orient” comparative historical studies. Noting wide-​ranging global parallels between 1500 and 1800 as well as the failure of mainstream historiography to take account of them, Fletcher criticizes the “microhistorical” lopsidedness of area-​based research and pictures a twofold method as a new macrohistorical paradigm. In his words, this horizontal method requires that “first one searches for historical parallelisms (roughly contemporaneous similar developments in the world’s various societies), and then one determines whether they are causally interrelated.”13 When attributable to a common condition, the discovered parallelisms become “horizontal continuities,” that is to say,

5

Introduction  5

transregional correspondences not necessarily related in themselves but allied through global factors. In his thought-​provoking 1998 book ReOrient:  Global Economy in the Asian Age, Frank emphatically invokes Fletcher’s pioneering vision to underscore the imperative of doing “integrative horizontal macrohistory.” In Frank’s words, “The very attempt to examine and relate the simultaneity of different events in the whole historical process or in the transformation of the whole system—​even if for want of empirical information or theoretical adequacy it may be full of holes in its coverage of space and time—​is a significant step in the right direction.”14 Critically speaking, the horizontal perspective Fletcher and Frank advocate is a necessary corrective to the epistemological bias aptly characterized by the anthropologist Johannes Fabian as “the denial of coevalness” in Western knowledge disciplines, which habitually situate other cultures in not just different places but also different times—​that is, linking them with a perpetually “traditional” past in contradistinction to the West’s steady progress toward “modernity.”15 Given this ingrained frame of mind that continues to haunt intellectual productions today, the horizontal method is a crucial step toward resituating Europe and its Others upon the same plane of historical time, thereby leading to a more balanced model of transregional comparison. A highly productive framework among sociologists and historians, the horizontal perspective entails tremendous potential for comparative literature. David Damrosch has stated that the writing of a global literary history should involve the “opening up” of “the longue durée of literary history,” in order to “reveal the broader systemic relations between literary cultures, not opposing world literature to national literatures but undertaking to trace the cocreation of literary systems that have almost always been mixed in character, at once localized and translocal.”16 This idea of literary “cocreation” strikes perfect accord with the principle of horizontality. In light of the long globalization perspective opened up by post-​Eurocentric world history, scholars have mapped out the distant interconnections and parallelisms within the Afro-​Eurasian ecumene as far back as the “urban revolutions” of the Bronze Age.17 According to Jerry Bentley, the virtue of tracing these previously obscured linkages is to show “that the world has never been the site of discrete, unconnected communities, that crosscultural interactions and exchanges have taken place since the earliest days of human existence on planet earth, that Europe has not always been a unique or privileged site of dynamism and progress, that identities have always been multiple and malleable.”18 Here Bentley describes a broader project world literature should undertake based on its distinctive humanistic position. The premise of “horizontal continuities” is indispensable for cultivating this mutually enriching cross-​fertilization.19

6

6 Introduction

THE AGE OF SILVER AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL EAST AND WEST

Embarking on a new initiative to further the parallel globalizing impulses in the humanities and the social sciences, The Age of Silver advances a transcultural category of the realist novel as having analogous materialist tendencies and shared macrohistorical roots in the world system of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. In particular, the cross-​ continental literary phenomenon at the center of this book was correlated with the global silver trade and the sociological and cultural shifts it stimulated in East Asian and Western European regions. This transregional thesis challenges the widespread understanding of the “rise of the novel” as a uniquely European literary phenomenon. Given the (realist) novel’s intimate theoretical ties to the overarching question of “modernity,” The Age of Silver ultimately argues for the importance of the horizontal method in pluralizing the trajectories of the modern, a meta-​question that has been implicitly structuring the basic geohistorical scales of comparative analysis. Focusing on the 1500–​1800 period, The Age of Silver reexamines the “early modernity” of the era according to a conjunctural global perspective, rather than routinized Eurocentric narratives of linear development. Thus reconfigured, the “early modern” implies not the necessary root of capitalist, colonial, industrial, and Enlightenment telos, but preceding and polycentric alternatives that were later repressed by these hegemonic constituents of nineteenth-​century Euromodernity—​or what I shall specify as “Modernity” in this book. In contrast to the monocentric framework of Modernity that is characterized by Western capitalism and Enlightenment subjectivity, The Age of Silver reexcavates a form of modernity writ small, which can be broadly defined as social mobility and critical consciousness. Constructing a different genealogy of novelistic modernity, this book’s findings have broad implications for recalibrating transcultural literary inquiries. Titled “Global Silver, Local Novels,” the first chapter of this study lays down its interdisciplinary framework by first discerning a rupture between Goethe’s and Marx and Engels’s visions of globalization when they all correlated world trade and world literature during the first half of the nineteenth century. The chapter subsequently positions the Goethean vision within the transcontinental connections rediscovered by current early modern studies, and moves to advance an “Anthropocenic” materialist perspective that can take account of the multilateral history of global commerce and contacts beyond the class-​based history of the European “bourgeoisie.” The “Age of Silver” is then my characterization of the 1500–​1800 Anthropocene

7

Introduction  7

that took place due to the far-​reaching globalizing significances of China’s massive importation of South American and Japanese silver during these centuries. This world-​system perspective of the early modern era recasts European capitalist political economies not as the fountainhead of modernity and globalization, but as belated and local responses to already globalized modern dynamisms. After outlining the Age of Silver, c­ hapter  1 develops a transcultural concept of the early realist novel, which is characterized by parallel shifts in Eastern and Western narrative works during the 1500–​1800 period from retelling inherited heroic narratives to representing individual life under the conditions of a commercialized society. My primary examples for this cross-​continental literary trend include two canonical Western texts—​ M iguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605, 1615)  and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), which together represent the similarly influential yet often competitive theses on the Spanish and English origins of the novel. The Eastern cases I  investigate consist of the anonymous Chinese novel The Plum in the Golden Vase (Jin Ping Mei, c. 1580s or 1590s) and the Japanese writer Ihara Saikaku’s Life of an Amorous Man (Kōshoku ichidai otoko, 1682). Little known in the West, these texts occupy important positions in Chinese and Japanese literary histories for pioneering native forms of narrative realism. The chapters after “Global Silver, Local Novels” are individual case studies devoted to these main texts and their historical contexts. Overall, encompassing the East Asian commercial circuit, the Iberian Age of Discovery, and finally the Anglocentric phase of capitalist and colonial acceleration, the four geographical vantage points in my comparative study chart out a multilocal trajectory of the emergence of economic and cultural modernities. This horizontal spectrum provincializes the prevailing “England first” narrative of modernity and globalization and foregrounds a more polycentric early modern past. Combining sociological and literary concerns, my analysis emphasizes that the parallel incipient realisms of the Eastern and Western narrative landmarks in question are all characterized by serious engagements with material forces and with a sphere of life that closely resembles contemporary realities. Reading these texts in a world-​system sense thus demands a close attention to economic history and, specifically, to the history of money and commerce. In this light, beyond the Europe-​centered lineage of Enlightenment thought and capitalist ideology, the emergent realist narrative forms of the early modern era—​whose Eastern development has been theoretically ignored—​can be broadly correlated with the social and political significances money and material objects rapidly assumed during the period.

8

8 Introduction

Importantly, whereas the Eastern and Western texts juxtaposed in this book exhibit different viewpoints on money and trade, they all symbolize individual-​market-​state relations in the face of a similar crisis I  call the “national problem of materiality.” As will be detailed in c­ hapter 1, this observation is vital to my reconfiguration of a set of influential theories of the novel, including those by Georg Lukács, Mikhail Bakhtin, Ian Watt, Benedict Anderson, and Fredric Jameson.20 Realigning the entangled relations of the novel, realism, capitalism, the individual subject, the nation, and the “civil society” or the “public sphere” in these earlier models, I contend that novelistic modernity resides in a narrative work’s symbolic tendencies toward forming substate public associations under the historio-​ philosophical conditions Lukács famously portrayed as “transcendental homelessness,” which refers to the “homelessness of an action in the human order of social relations, the homelessness of a soul in the ideal order of a supra-​personal system of values.”21 For my comparative thesis, this Lukácsian notion usefully characterizes the transcultural destabilization of traditional belief systems and power structures due to global commercial expansions during the Age of Silver. Decentering communal social and spiritual values, these horizontal processes of dissolution at the same time unsettled the metaphysical postulations of state power often associated with these values, and thus triggered more secular and critical modes of political consciousness. In both Eastern and Western arcs of the Age of Silver, the realist narrative mode was a literary invention stimulated by the impacts of materiality upon social and political life, and epitomizes a substate form of public participation that started to gain momentum through this historical transition. According to my horizontal findings, in short, commerce and money were transcultural catalysts of cultural work’s increasing engagement with state power and, at the same time, increasingly active social functions. To be sure, the literary expression of this mode of cultural modernity was not limited to vernacular narratives or the realist form, and can be found in other categories such as poetry and fantasy. Nonetheless, the type of early realist novel at the heart of this book constitutes the most evocative site of the historical and theoretical questions at stake, given that the “newness” of the form in the Western narrative tradition has so far monopolized discussions of the “rise of the novel” as a touchstone of literary modernity. In this larger intellectual setup, a foregrounding of the emergence of the same narrative “newness” in the East—​roughly around the same time and in fact slightly earlier—​provides a powerful and necessary counterthesis to the West-​centric account of the genesis of the novel. The comparative argument I advance positions narrative realism not as a necessary evolutionary telos, but as a telling sign of the rising dominance of materiality and its

9

Introduction  9

cultural repercussions in multiple early modern localities in a context of global economic shifts. For the purpose of discerning horizontal evolutions of substate cultural forces through the subject of the novel, the concept of the “nation” forms a highly productive unit of analysis, if we invoke the term not to mean a fixed ethnic or political identity, but rather to indicate a community’s critical yet entangled imaginary relations to state power—​t hat is, as civil associations. In ­chapter 1, civil formation is the core idea that guides my synthesis and reinvention of a set of twentieth-​century theoretical concepts including Bakhtin’s “heteroglossia,” Lukács’s “transcendental homelessness,” Anderson’s “imagined communities,” and Jameson’s “national allegory.” Through this eclectic overview, I  propose that what Lukács pessimistically characterized as “transcendental homelessness” and “reification” in a commercialized society actually helped create public imaginaries that are independently and diversely related to state power. In terms of literary representation, this historical condition encouraged aesthetic tendencies that correspond to Bakhtin’s idea of heteroglossia, which rests at the heart of Bakhtin’s approach to the novel and refers to “a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and interrelationships (always more or less dialogized).”22 According to Bakhtin, furthermore, heteroglossia is the sociolinguistic antithesis to “monoglossia” or the “authoritative discourse,” which in his depiction “centers our verbal consciousness as a compact and indivisible mass” and “is indissolubly fused with its authority—​w ith political power, an institution, a person—​and it stands and falls with that authority.”23 In light of these Bakhtinian notions, the early realist novels discussed in this book are mostly heteroglossic manifestations of substate cultural relations, or, in other words, “national allegories” in a multivoiced manner, except for the somewhat special case of Robinson Crusoe. In contrast to Jameson’s binary employment of the approach to separate Western and non-​Western literatures, this national allegorical reading goes back to an earlier period before the “First World” and “Third World” began and affirms a heterogeneous “national” nature narrative texts started to assume in both the East and the West during the seminal 1500–​1800 era. A heteroglossic national theory of the novel unsettles and rebuilds the West-​centric theories from Lukács to Jameson on a transcultural scale. To reinforce this conceptual reconstitution, c­ hapter 1 further refers to a range of multicentric models of social theory and world literature, such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of the “rhizome,” Bruno Latour’s “actor-​ network theory,” Homi Bhabha’s “vernacular cosmopolitanism,” Édouard Glissant’s “Relation,” Spivak’s “planetarity,” and Wai Chee Dimock’s recent redefinition of “world literature” as a “lexical” form of “global civil

10

10 Introduction

society.”24 For my analysis, the similarly pluralist orientations of these recent perspectives help assert that reality and representation—​or materiality and signs—​have networked relations, and that these interactions during the Age of Silver fostered cultural and political modernities in multiple places. In contrast to the Anglo-​European pedigree of Modernity, the process of commercial “reification” in the other cases I survey remained culturally “unreified.” In other words, the other social spheres witnessed no ideological sublimation of the capitalist political economy and of the unitary bourgeois subject. Whereas the mainline of Western historiography tends to see this absence as a failure in achieving cultural and political modernity, I propose that a state of “unreified reification,” so to speak, provides a generative condition that helped preserve the literary-​civil sphere’s critical distance to both the market and the state. This decentering tendency is a fundamental characteristic of the pluralist form of cultural and political modernities I emphasize in this book. Along with this reinterpretation of narrative evolution, The Age of Silver also reconsiders a larger set of issues surrounding the theorization of modernity. On a basic level, the ongoing debates about world literature are rooted in an apparent conflict between a West-​centric model of modernity and globalization and a nativist formulation of multiculturalism and ethnic “traditions.” The recent retreat of Western studies toward national and regional confines by no means resolves the issue since it leaves the conflict hidden rather than transformed. Whether as a positive universal or a negative universal, the “West” persists as the global imaginary in contrast to the “non-​West” area specificities. In order to transcend this binary opposition, we must turn our attention away from the histories of political, economic, and intellectual institutions, and toward the less structured spheres of material relations, everyday life, and spontaneous cultural creations and associations. Thus rethought, a pluralist form of cultural and political modernity implies a pluralist liberalism with global historical roots. This more amorphous and multicentric liberal force may involve growing individual connections to and mobility across material and social networks, the more and more independent forms of subjectivity and public relations generated by such sociocultural fluidities, as well as the increasingly transregional and transcultural nature of these sociological shifts and their inductive conditions. For the vexed politics of cross-​cultural comparisons, a reformulation of modernity along the lines laid out above promises a new cosmopolitan politics in the “vernacular” sense as discussed by scholars such as Bhabha, and connotes a rejuvenating notion of world literature as a pluralist “global civil society” or “world republic of letters.” Whereas studies of contemporary culture and globalization have moved toward a “planetary” vision in this vein, we must look back into the past to readjust the

11

Introduction  11

question of “origins” and genealogy. The Age of Silver intervenes in precisely this historical sense. All in all, the case of the transcultural early realist novel constitutes a multivalent entry point into the entangled questions of modernity, global history, and world literature. Of course, the topics of “modernity,” “realism,” and the “novel” have been heavily theorized in the West and as Western concepts. Readers who are suspicious of their cross-​cultural relevance may hence construe the prominence of these analytical categories in The Age of Silver as yet another version of the West’s theorizing of the non-​West. I  argue, however, that this assumed incongruity between Western terms of modernity and non-​Western “traditions” is itself a fundamental intellectual effect of Modernity, which conceptually allocates the non-​West as its radical externality. In order to develop a new cosmopolitan comparative politics, then, we must first break or punctuate this interior-​exterior boundary and revise the historical foundations of the categories of modernity. In c­ hapter 1, I discuss this critical strategy in relation to the emergent intellectual landscape of planetary comparatisms. Rather than imposing Western theories upon Eastern examples, The Age of Silver aims to unpack and recoordinate the categories themselves. The different geohistorical scales generated by this process are indispensable for further cross-​cultural dialogues and alignments, one example of which may be a reevaluation of China’s Confucian-​Daoist-​Buddhist legacies as renewing philosophies of modernity. The Age of Silver aspires to be a starting point for a broader and multiway transcultural recalibration, not its conclusion. Methodologically, The Age of Silver contends that the horizontal comparative approach is not only productive or interesting, but critically necessary. To a large extent, its critical vision mirrors what Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt have referred to as “counterhistory,” which “opposes itself not only to dominant narratives, but also to prevailing modes of historical thought and methods of research.”25 If, to recall Fletcher’s words cited in the epigram to this book, “historians are alert to vertical continuities (the persistence of tradition, etc.) but blind to horizontal ones,” then horizontality is an essential counterhistorical tool for unearthing what has been obscured, masked, and eradicated in intellectual discourse and memory. To a degree, as a work of literary interpretation my comparison echoes Jameson’s argument that the “political unconsciousness” is the underlying core of aesthetics.26 However, rather than focusing on traditional Marxian categories that center on the social classes and the modes of production, The Age of Silver builds its materialist and political concerns upon the more transcultural measures of “constraint” and “mobility,” which Greenblatt has usefully discussed as the symbolically constitutive

12

12 Introduction

polarities of “culture.”27 From this dualistic viewpoint, the early realist novels in my comparison all symbolically reenact transforming relations between cultural constraints and mobility in a context of changing material forces. Moreover, while exhibiting very different social foundations and ideological inclinations, their narrative structures all imply critical commentaries on national political economic matters. In this sense, they are all “heteroglossic” modes of “national allegories,” which engage with the surrounding political environment as the scope of critical representation and reflection. After theorizations of a pluralist understanding of novelistic modernity in ­chapter 1, ­chapter 2 focuses on the anonymous sixteenth-​century Chinese novel The Plum in the Golden Vase (Jin Ping Mei), and situates the novel within late Ming society’s material contacts with the outside world and internal developments of economic, cultural, and political modernities. It postulates Plum as the “first modern novel” in order to open up a transcultural lineage of narrative realism. Specifically, the chapter analyzes Plum’s reflection of the collapse of Confucian “cardinal relations” due to the rule of money in society and politics, and the novel’s fusion of the themes of political and kinship decay. It argues that the novel’s foregrounding of the characters’ sexual excess and family conflicts serves a function of national representation and critique, and that its narrative indicates a subversive political consciousness and changing visions about human nature and individuality. Overall, these findings reposition Plum not just as a distinctively “Chinese” text, but as an important example of transcultural literary early modernity. Chapter 3 discusses Cervantes’s Don Quixote in light of imperial Spain’s position in the Age of Silver. It first relates the picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes’s pioneering realism to rapid commercial developments in Spain after the colonization of the New World. Then the chapter reads Don Quixote as a far more complex literary engagement of the same context. Drawing on emergent transnational approaches to Cervantes, it interprets Don Quixote’s romantic idealism as connoting aspects of Habsburg imperialism, and his relations to Sancho and Dulcinea as symbolizing the historical ironies within imperial Spain’s ideologies and material foundation. My analysis further contextualizes the novel within imperial Spain’s ethnic and global relations, including its Muslim connections, “purity of blood” doctrine, transatlantic colonialism, and relations to East Asia. The chapter thus situates Don Quixote’s modernity within early modern global history, and reads from the novel a nationally symbolic political critique similar to the other cases. Chapter 4 delineates seventeenth-​century Japan’s global relations and internal socioeconomic shifts, and analyzes in this light the new literary

13

Introduction  13

sensibility expressed by Ihara Saikaku’s “floating world” fiction. It argues that Saikaku’s fiction indicates the Tokugawa merchant townsman class’s paradoxical social status, which was economically empowered by the country’s commercial growth, while remaining politically subordinated. This historical situation informed Saikaku’s ambiguous representations of materiality as a trigger of social chaos and an instrument of individual empowerment. Based on these themes, the chapter reads from Saikaku’s works, in particular his 1682 novel The Life of an Amorous Man (Kōshoku ichidai otoko), an ironic vision of national realities from the townsman perspective as well as fantasies about the outside world placed against Tokugawa Japan’s domestic constraints. This reading aligns Saikaku with the literary horizontal continuities of the Age of Silver, and reveals his neglected importance to the general discourse of narrative modernity. Chapter 5 situates the works of Daniel Defoe within the Age of Silver and argues that his novelistic writings represent not so much an “origin,” an idea popularized by Ian Watt’s The Rise of The Novel, as a belated response to global early modernities. For this purpose, it discusses the neglected second half of Robinson Crusoe, in which the protagonist travels to the East as a trader. This sequel’s pronounced anxiety toward Asian economic and technological advancements implicitly structures the trope of island survival and self-​sufficiency in the book’s famous first part. Narratively consolidating capitalist and colonial tendencies, the novel Robinson Crusoe as a whole exhibits a “monoglossic” construction that is atypical of global narrative realisms during the Age of Silver. In comparison, Defoe’s later works Moll Flanders and Roxana return to the social setting and present more “heteroglossic” treatments of the socioeconomic transitions of the period through the transgressive figure of the “fallen woman.” Despite their distinctive endorsement of capitalist ideology, Defoe’s writings constitute a local variation of global literary shifts, rather than a privileged pioneer of novelistic modernity. This book’s epilogue outlines a further East-​West narrative coevolution in which the novel form developed a feminized and interiorized orientation on both sides. Examples that manifest this transcultural parallel include the rise of “talent-​beauty” novels in seventeenth-​century China and the appearance of Samuel Richardson’s sentimental narratives in eighteenth-​century Europe. Notably, several works of the “talent-​ beauty” genre were the earliest Chinese novels translated and introduced to Europe during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In his famous talk on the notion of “world literature” in the late 1820s, Goethe in fact launched his discussion after having pointed out a “strong resemblance” between the translated “talent-​beauty” novels and Richardson’s works.28 Based on the horizontal findings of this book, the East-​West

14

14 Introduction

humanistic similarity noted by Goethe indicates resonant cross-​cultural responses under the conditions of “transcendental homelessness,” when the novel form became reformulated into a means of private edification detached from the degraded domain of social and political powers. This deep-​rooted literary horizontal continuity once again indicates a critical necessity to culturally pluralize a typically West-​centric conceptual nexus of modernity and subjectivity. In light of the macrohistorical cultural shifts I  have traced, we can see that these transcultural privatizing tendencies in fact deepened and complicated the novel’s public civil dynamics, while rendering the genre a more self-​conscious and autonomous participant in national cultural and political expressions. Whereas a fuller study of these later horizontal dynamics demands another occasion, this book hopes to generate a new conceptual baseline that enables future investigations of this kind. As the Goethean moment indicates, due to its profound constriction by a Eurogenetic imaginary of modernity and globalization, the current discourse of world literature has not yet been able to articulate a preceding global early modernity, the marginalized Eurasian linkages of which constitute a theoretically unheeded subtext of Goethe’s otherwise canonized notion of Weltliteratur. This book hopes to assert a mostly untried method of reading that can facilitate the retrieval of this multivalent early modernity, which, in light of today’s increasingly polycentric world order, is more relevant to imagining the global future than the monocultural legacies of the nineteenth century.

15

1 Global Silver, Local Novels THE ANTHROPOCENIC WORLD MARKET

As a strategy for thinking beyond national histories and leveling the grounds of comparison between the West and the non-​West, the horizontal macrohistorical perspective I propose is in essence synergistic with the burgeoning “transnational” and “planetary” approaches to literature and culture, although it aims to push these emergent forms of critical inquiry toward a new set of frontiers. The most crucial of these advancements is the multi-​perspectivism demanded by the principle of “horizontality,” which stands in contrast to the still mostly nationally bounded parameters of existing transnational researches. Rather than observing cross-​cultural or Self-​Other relations from one vantage point, horizontal comparison requires two or more viewpoints, which counterbalance and complement one another as equally embedded participants within a greater whole. Another key principle of the horizontal method is its openness toward a panhistorical view of the past, which parallels the long perspective of globalization world historians now pursue. This recontextualizing strategy is significant for expanding the conceptual scale of world literature beyond the Eurocentric predeterminations of a primarily post-​1800 chronology. In relation to these temporal and transdisciplinary extensions, finally, horizontal comparative thinking must be attentive to trade and material contacts as the substructural world-​making forces across national histories and civilizational divides. The method of “horizontal continuities” hence implies a form of ecomaterialist comparatism, which propels us to envision a networked and polycentric symbiosis of the world market and world literature, and a macrohistorical continuity that does not need to go through Europe or any other forms of “centrism” as a necessary point of departure. Along with this recognition, we ought to rethink the “world market” 15

16

16  The Age of Silver

outside the Eurogenetic history of capitalism as an environmental continuum that resembles what geologists have theorized as the “Anthropocene.” This critical outlook bears reintegrative meanings that are both multimillennial and contemporary.1 To put the above proposals into perspective, we must invoke Marx and Engels’s seminal 1848 account in The Communist Manifesto, which attributes the birth of Weltliteratur to a world market created by the European bourgeoisie, the revolutionizing “subject” of history. Casanova’s and Moretti’s theories of world literature and the critical debates they have provoked indicate that although the politics, methods, and localities of world literature have by now received complex reflections, the assumed scales and “origins” of its “worldedness” remain tacitly similar to the Manifesto’s narrative of homogenization and dominance.2 Revisitations of a far longer trajectory of economic globalization, a comparative project sociologists and historians are now actively promoting, nonetheless permit us to perceive the European expansion not as the primary driver of history but as contingent upon polygenetic global networks. Instead of being a totalizing structure of globalization, the world market in this Anthropocenic mode signals a hybridizing body logic of the world. This new materialist perception of the world market is instrumental for opening up a more holistic model of comparative literature. Though its intellectual articulations are quite recent, the Anthropocenic world market that underlies this book’s horizontal comparisons is historically well documented and was actively discussed by European economic writers until as late as the end of the eighteenth century. An important case in point is Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, which portrays a global yet multicentered commercial circuit wherein “the copper of Japan makes an article of commerce in Europe; the iron of Spain in that of Chili and Peru,” and “the silver of Peru finds its way, not only to Europe, but from Europe to China” (I.11.73). Emphasizing circulation and exchange rather than any particular group of historical “subject,” The Wealth of Nations refers to Chinese and other non-​European economies as equal commercial partners and sometimes examples worthy of emulation, rather than “primitive” Others fated to subjugation by the European model.3 This multipolar conception of the world market also appears in Goethe’s comments on world literature about two decades before the Manifesto. While picturing a purified domain of intellectual communication, Goethe repeatedly compares transnational literary circulations to “free intellectual trade relations.”4 Evoked as both a metaphor and a historical condition, the polymorphous global economy in Goethe’s discussion of world literature is consistent with the phenomenon of mercantile globalization depicted by Smith, whose late eighteenth-​century account presents a world bonded

17

Global Silver, Local Novels  17

by trade in the absence of a uniform social system, revolutionary class, or geographical core. As will be discussed further in the epilogue, Goethe’s speech on the dawning era of “world literature” expresses an East-​West continuum in correspondence to the Smithian geoeconomic vision, for it was directly spurred by a common humanity and moral poetics he had sensed from reading several translated Chinese novels. This East-​West dialogic imaginary that helped germinate the Goethean Weltliteratur, however, vanishes completely in the Manifesto, which avows instead a decisively monocentric global order that “has made barbarian and semibarbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.”5 Goethe and Manifesto-​era Marx and Engels were certainly writing on different sides of a tectonic moment in East-​West relations. The outbreak of the First Opium War in 1839, which ended with Qing China’s defeat by the industrialized British navy and the unequal terms of the Nanjing Treaty in 1842, seriously weakened China’s formerly counterbalancing presence in the global economy and political system during the post-​Columbian European expansion. This shift in international power as well as Europe’s own turbulent revolutions around the period inevitably informed the Euro-​diffusionist historical vision we find in the Manifesto. As it was, Goethe’s lingering sense of East-​West parity, which is reminiscent of Smithian economics and the more multicultural strand of the Enlightenment as represented by Leibniz, was already a rare sentiment when he coined the term Weltliteratur in the 1820s: this is the very decade when Hegel emphatically announced that “China and India lie, as it were, still outside the World’s History” in his famous lectures that later became The Philosophy of History.6 In the wake of the First Opium War, for observers looking from the European “centers,” this Hegelian world historical vision must have appeared an indisputable fact. In her recent book An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak sensitively notes that, between its Goethean and Marxian moments, the idea of world literature altered from an “aporetic” “mode of ‘to come’ ” to a decided entity.7 In view of reintegrative world-​ system studies, one nevertheless observes that within the Goethean “to come” an “already-​there” waits to be reintroduced. Although the sprawling globality Goethe was still sensing in the 1820s is traceable across a multimillennial span, the liminal 1500–​1800 era constitutes an especially fertile bridge for negotiating the question of “beginnings” that became theoretically closed over the course of the nineteenth century. Given their pivotal roles in linking the global past and present, these “early modern” centuries have occupied a central position in East-​West world-​system studies and have been rediscovered as an

18

18  The Age of Silver

era of Eurasian “horizontal continuities” par excellence. Importantly, due to the significance of the global silver commerce in linking the world’s economies and societies during these multilinear transitional centuries, we need to rethink the 1500–​1800 period as an Anthropocenic world-​ historical longue durée one may call the “Age of Silver.”8 Below, I elucidate this world-​historical backdrop in relation to a critical perspective the Argentine philosopher Enrique Dussel has cogently named “transmodernity,” which reconfigures the idea of modernity beyond Eurocentrism.9 These macrohistorical premises shall prepare us toward resituating the characteristically Eurocentric thesis of the “rise of the novel” within an uncharted East-​West spectrum.

TOWARD TRANSMODERNITY

“Modernity,” in Adam McKeown’s words, is “a concept that has proven frustratingly resilient in its universalizing Eurocentrism and its ability to evade analytical concreteness.”10 Traditionally, the idea of “modernity” depends on the economic category of capitalism, the intellectual category of the Enlightenment, the political category of liberal democracy, the technological category of science and mechanic production, the institutional category of the nation-​state, and the cultural category of individualism as its main historiographical pillars. Since the surges of critical theory and postcolonial studies around the 1960s, the concept has been negatively associated with the hegemonies of capitalist production, bourgeois institutions, and imperialism.11 In virtually all these cases, however, to speak of the “modern” is inescapably to speak of processes that began with Western Europe. By this premise, whereas the West became “modern” through its own “evolution,” non-​Western regions started “modernity” only insofar as they came under Western influences and began to copy Western models. “Modernization,” in this sense, is a term that is apparently identical with “globalization” and “westernization.” Due to all these assumptions, the notion of the “modern” further necessitates a binary view of historical time. Its multifarious meanings in different knowledge domains in the end all congregate to postulate a total systematic change of human history, and in this manner a singular rupture between the past and the present. Overall, the “resilient” Eurocentric construction of the imaginary of modernity, whether negatively or positively defined, lies at the foundation of what Johannes Fabian calls the “denial of coevalness” in historiographical representations of the West and the non-​West.12 This temporal binary further entails a local/​global spatial dichotomy, according to which

19

Global Silver, Local Novels  19

globalization is a byproduct of Eurogenetic modernization due to the powerful forces of capitalism and colonialism. To indicate the theoretical double bind this tenacious geohistorical presupposition generates, it is illustrative to briefly review two widely noted books, both published in 2000, which likewise strive to articulate less Eurocentric trajectories of modernity and globality: Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference and Walter Mignolo’s Local Histories/​ Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking.13 In the former, Chakrabarty forcefully pinpoints “capitalism” as the epistemological telos by which the “hyperreal Europe” becomes the “silent referent in historical knowledge.” Aiming to take account of the economic and political pluralities of non-​European experiences, Chakrabarty detects “an element of deep uncertainty” in Marx’s Theories of Surplus Value, when the text acknowledges that European industrial capital “originally finds the commodity already in existence, but not as its own product, and likewise finds money in circulation, but not as an element in its own reproduction.” This hidden genealogical disjunction between commercial and industrial forms of capitalism in Surplus Value builds to Chakrabarty’s distinction between the “two histories of the capital”: diverse “History 2s” of locally embedded economies, which had historical roots in the heterogeneous mercantile antecedences noted by Marx, as opposed to that of “History 1”—​ “a history posited by capital itself.”14 Having offered this revealing critique, Chakrabarty still insists on the necessity of the name of “Europe” for translating “political modernity” into other geographical localities, a conclusion that paradoxically maintains the “hyperreal” universality of the Europe he sets forth to “provincialize.”15 In ways that parallel Chakrabarty’s insights and limits, Mignolo’s Local Histories/​Global Designs advances an analytical method he calls “border thinking,” which reconsiders history from the side of “colonial difference” and correlates plural area histories as complementary yet distinctive parts of shared global networks. Representing the Latin American subaltern perspective and drawing on insights from seminal figures in the field such as Enrique Dussel and Anibal Quijano, Mignolo argues against Wallerstein’s presentation of colonialism as a derivative rather than constitutive element of capitalist modernity. Correlating the Eurocentric geographical imaginary with the subject-​object split in Enlightenment rationality, whereby “the accent is placed on the individual character of the knowing subject, thus suppressing the intersubjective dimension in the production of knowledge,” Mignolo further notes that the “decolonization” of historical knowledge must start from overcoming such a monocentric intellectual structure.16 While making these valiant arguments, Mignolo nonetheless maintains throughout his analysis an equation between the history of globalization

20

20  The Age of Silver

and that of colonization. As the main title of his book explicitly designates, his thesis begins with the supposition that the “global” inevitably resides with top-​down “designs” and power structures. What if, one wonders, we turn the logic around and rethink power—​however “global” it may appear to be—​as ultimately a local design in itself within a larger material ecology? This inverted perspective unveils the wider conditions beyond the direct controls of the “coloniality of power” and more thoroughly destabilizes the Eurogenetic teleology Mignolo contends to unsettle. Significantly, Dussel in his newer works begins to promote this more complete causal reversal of Europe’s relation to the globe by assimilating the findings of East-​West world-​system studies, thereby realizing the critical project Chakrabarty and Mignolo both gesture toward yet fall short of realizing in full. Calling the macrohistorical imaginary that arises from these reintegrating histories “transmodernity,” Dussel notes that re-​Orienting historiographies supplies a wider context to what he has previously identified as Europe’s “two modernities”—​that is, an Iberian and colonially based “first modernity” and an Anglo-​Germanic “second modernity,” which came to pass as the only modernity. Having devised this theory of “two modernities” in critique of Wallerstein’s Eurocentric world-​system model, Dussel observes that the uncovered Eastern side of the story points to a “broadened problematic,” which further presses the reified modern teleology into contact with a “transformative exteriority.”17 In Dussel’s view, East-​West world-​system studies deflate the history of the European hegemony as an abrupt world-​historical episode of less than two centuries and as a contingent phenomenon dependent upon dynamics and agencies elsewhere. “Re-​Orienting” comparative studies thus carry broad critical repercussions for pluralizing the lineages of globalization and modernity in relation to trajectories, connections, and crises outside the limits of Euro-​diffusionist historiography. Similar to Dussel’s conception of “transmodernity,” Arif Dirlik has looked across recent debates on East Asian modernities and proposed to reexamine the “origins” of the modern world in a “transcontinental,” non-​ teleological, and integral pluralist manner. Dirlik’s comments below are cited at length because they aptly delineate a “multilinear” understanding of modernity, which I  likewise pursue through a literary perspective in this book: In order to avoid teleology, the two periods taken as the ‘modern’ and the ‘early modern’ are better viewed as contradictory rather than as evolutionary phases in the history of modernity. Euro/​American modernity was built not only on the conquest of others, but also the conquest of its own past. We need to recover what Alexander Woodside has described as ‘lost

21

Global Silver, Local Novels  21

modernities,’ not for reactionary purposes of restoration or revival, but as resources to help out in the resolution of problems of modernity that have become critical. That means a prior recognition, however, that what is being recovered is not something ‘early modern’, or ‘premodern’ or traditional, but an alternative within modernity in its initial phase. It is in this phase that it is possible to speak of ‘alternatives’, rather than the present, when claims to alternative modernities are deeply compromised through entanglement in capitalist modernity. If Europe is to be ‘provincialized’, it is in this early phase of modernity, when European modernity was one among others, rather than the present when capitalist modernity, globalized, provides the grounds for modernity globally.18

In light of Dirlik’s argument, it is heuristic to posit an East Asian “first modernity” that began with the oft-​noted “economic miracles” of Song China around the eleventh century, which witnessed major technological and institutional developments including the proliferation of printing, paper money, bureaucracy, urbanization, maritime trade, and even quasi-​ industrial production. Through the thirteenth-​century rise of the Mongol Empire, which stimulated greater Eurasian integration, these Song developments became a distant progenitor of the European transformation, which was simultaneously indebted to other forms of Asian modernities such as the scientific innovations of medieval Islam.19 Within this larger backdrop, the 1500–​1800 period, or the “Age of Silver,” is an era of multifaceted global confluences and divergences, when preexisting Asian modernities and Europe’s “two modernities” coevolved through trade ties, New World silver, and expanded cultural and informational contacts.20 The following section in this chapter foregrounds the unfolding of the global silver trade since approximately the 1550s as an ecomaterialist ecology that surrounded the emergence of Europe’s capitalist modernity, and as the macrohistorical foundation of my correlation of East-​West cultural and literary shifts during these multipolar, transformative centuries.

THE AGE OF SILVER

About half a century after Christopher Columbus’s unexpected landing in the New World, Spanish colonizers began uncovering rich silver deposits and finally recuperating the enormous costs of their expeditions. The most prominent of those mining sites is the legendary Potosí, a once deserted area at a barren altitude of 15,000 feet in the Andean ridges of today’s Bolivia, then Peru. Following the discovery of silver in 1545, the region

22

22  The Age of Silver

transformed at an astonishing pace. By the beginning of the 1600s Potosí had transformed into a metropolis of about 160,000 inhabitants—​a population on par with London or Paris at the time. From the mid-​sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, Potosí and other American mines produced about two thirds of the world’s total silver output, and their yields alone by 1800 were nearly five times greater than the global silver stock in 1500. Mostly controlled by the Spanish, the massive quantity of newly found American silver entered international circulation soon after being excavated, resulting in complex economic and sociological repercussions in far-​flung corners of the world. As voluminous scholarly literature has demonstrated, a major portion of these New World mineral treasures ended up in China, where silver money had evolved into its national currency and had been in severe short supply. American silver flooded into China by different routes, most directly via Spain’s Acapulco-​Manila galleons that began to sail across the Pacific in 1571, shortly after the Spanish colonization of the Philippines. Loaded with bullion on their eastbound voyage, the galleons usually returned to supply American and European markets with silk, porcelain, and other consumer goods that Chinese merchants had taken to Manila. As to the silver first shipped to Europe by Spain’s famous “treasure fleets,” an indeterminate but substantial portion likewise went to China after being first traded to the Portuguese, Dutch, English, and other Europeans, who subsequently spent the money in their own “East Indies” trade.21 In addition to New World mines, China drew another colossal influx from its eastern neighbor, Japan, the world’s second largest silver producer next to South America. Rich in mineral wealth, Japan experienced a mining boom due to technological breakthroughs as well as the political sponsorship of Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536?–​1598) and the Tokugawa shogunate. It has been suggested that Japan exported an astounding portion of about 75 percent of its entire silver yields to China between 1601 and 1708, often going through the hands of European middlemen allowed to stay in Japan—​first the Portuguese, then the Dutch.22 Throughout the seventeenth century an enormous quantity of Japanese silver bullions was traded to China either from Nagasaki, the only Japanese port open to foreign trade after the “locked country” policy of the 1630s, or by more clandestine passages, including rampant smuggling.23 The preceding paragraphs may be restated by the eloquent description of a Portuguese merchant, who wrote in 1621 that silver “wanders throughout all the world in its peregrinations before flocking to China, where it remains, as if at its natural center.”24 Culturally disparate, Eastern and Western societies during the period were likewise swept into a swelling vortex of circulating money and goods. Sensing this global commercial

23

Global Silver, Local Novels  23

connection, Smith thus observes in The Wealth of Nations, “The silver of the new continent seems . . . to be one of the principle commodities by which the commerce between the two extremities of the old one is carried on, and it is by means of it, in a great measure, that those distant parts of the world are connected with one another” (1.1.167).25 In the words of the monetary historians Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, the China-​bound silver trade during the 1500–​1800 period constituted “an industry with economic tentacles penetrating into the social fabric of all populated continents.”26 A substructural force, the international bullion flow affected diverse localities on ecological, fiscal, and political levels as well as the dark unfoldings of colonialism. All in all, we can justly refer to the 1500–​1800 era as the “Age of Silver,” during which the white metal’s borderless and transmuting motions connected nations, peoples, and individuals in covert yet profound ways.27 Memorably, Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez state that the emphasis on the China-​bound silver commerce is important for advancing a “reversal of causality” to counterbalance the Europe-​centered narratives about the early modern world economy.28 East-​West world-​system analysts such as Frank and Pomeranz have adopted a similar contextualist perspective and have likewise stressed the global significances of the China-​bound bullion flow. A pioneering work of re-​Orienting historiographies, Frank’s ReOrient compellingly excavates, on the one hand, Asia’s and especially China’s continuously powerful position in global economy until as late as the beginning of the nineteenth century, and, on the other, the European economy’s heavy dependence upon the Asian trade via the capital stock provided by New World silver. In his nuanced 2000 study The Great Divergence, Pomeranz arrives at an analogous conclusion after combing through pre-​1800 economic data from China and Europe’s most advanced economic centers—​the lower Yangzi region and England. Finding few conclusive differences between these two regions, Pomeranz ventures a geoecological explanation for the nineteenth-​century East-​West divergence—​that is, in place of institutional, cultural, or technological disparities, Europe’s serendipitous acquisition of American mineral wealth and later the finding of rich coal deposits close to England’s production centers were likely the most decisive factors for industrialization to first occur in a part of Western Europe rather than China.29 In an even broader world-​historical framework, we must further embed Frank and Pomeranz’s findings within a panhistorical Old World continuum. For all its genuinely planetary impacts, the Columbian consequences of 1492 took place upon the earlier Afro-​Eurasian world-​system. According to Abu-​Lughod’s important work, Before European Hegemony (1989), which offers one of the earliest critiques of the Eurocentric bias of Wallerstein’s

24

24  The Age of Silver

world-​ system model, 1492 occurred within a polycentric “thirteenth-​ century world system,” one that encompassed eight overlapping regional subsystems between the South China Sea and northwestern Europe. This East-​West trading circuit directly motivated the “Age of Discovery” and Columbus’s accidental landing at a whole new landmass. The China-​bound bullion flow after the discovery of American silver was a logical continuation of the earlier geoeconomic momentum of the “thirteenth-​century world system.” Furthermore, according to Fernand Braudel’s crucial studies on the history of capitalism and Giovanni Arrighi’s reconfiguration of his thesis in an East-​West spectrum, preexisting Old World ties provided exogenous stimuli of Europe’s capitalist transitions. The thirteenth century is an important beginning in Braudel’s treatment of the history of capitalism, which he equates not with free trade or the industrial mode of production, but with a state ideology of “endless accumulation.” According to Braudel, “Capitalism only triumphs when it becomes identified with the state, when it is the state  .  .  .” since capitalist power formations ultimately depended on the big profits that came along with economic monopolies in the “top layer,” the state’s partnership with financial capitalism and the credit system, and the large returns generated by international trade.30 By these criteria, Braudel pinpoints fifteenth-​century Venice as the originating example of the capitalist state, and situates this historical occurrence within the context of Venice’s intense struggles against other Italian city-​states over monopolizing the eastbound Levant trade across the “long sixteenth century” (1350–​1650). Although Braudel stops short of noting the Asian half of the relationship, Arrighi’s 2007 book Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the 21st Century realizes this cross-​reference by opposing the Braudelian definition of capitalism to the Smithian dynamic of economic growth. In Arrighi’s reading, what Smith promotes in The Wealth of Nations amounts to a “noncapitalist market economy,” in lieu of the “extroverted form of capitalism” underscored by Braudel. In fact, throughout The Wealth of Nations, Smith describes the European developmental path as an “unnatural and retrograde” order heavily dependent upon foreign trade, colonialism, and militarism, while portraying the more self-​sufficient economies of China and other Asian states as better examples of the “natural” pattern of market growth.31 Recontextualizing the emergence of European capitalism in terms of the history of global trade and state power formations, the Braudel-​Arrighi thesis disrupts the evolutionary narrative of capitalist modernity and exposes the profoundly exogenous nature of early modern European economic development. Overall, despite the explorative nature of their studies, re-​Orienting historians from Frank to Arrighi have revealingly provincialized the

25

Global Silver, Local Novels  25

histories of “capitalism” and industrialization, which have been a central pillar of the conceptual edifice of (Euro-​)Modernity. Consonant with the critical purpose of the postcolonial approach to globalization, their findings further open up a different and still little understood world-​ system dynamic, wherein Europe occupies not so much a position of transformation and dominance, but rather a networked and even peripheralized place within preexisting global continuums. Even until the late eighteenth century, European economies were in deficit in their trading relations to China, and Britain was no exception to this pattern, despite having become the most commercially advanced area of Europe. After the 1750s, due to its astronomical importation of tea, Britain’s trade imbalance with China rapidly enlarged in ways that stimulated widespread anxieties within the country. Meanwhile, the Qing court’s restriction of foreign trade to the “Canton System” triggered a “discourse of stagnation, obstruction, and political illegitimacy” in English commercialist writings about China during the period. All of these circumstances led to the massive English trade of India-​made opium with China. During the opening decades of the nineteenth century, the opium trade soon became the premier financial source of the expanding British Empire and reversed the eastward silver flow. These international political economic shifts concurred with changes in Western transportation, technology, monetary, and financial systems, and contributed to radical geopolitical transformations in East-​West relations as marked by China’s defeat in the First Opium War. Together, these conditions drew the curtain on the Age of Silver, the memory of which was subsequently expunged by the monocentric constructions of Western social and historical theories over the course of the nineteenth century.32

RE-​ORIENTING EARLY MODERNITY

The altered East-​West imaginary we have observed between Goethe’s and the Manifesto’s notions of “world literature” occurred during a world-​historical juncture when Europe’s global hegemony began to reach its climax around the 1850s. Today, the ongoing emergences of re-​Orienting and “transmodern” historiographies showcase an exigent need to think past the monocultural biases of the nineteenth century’s intellectual legacy. Accordingly, enthusiastic responses to East-​West world-​system studies have arisen from a historical field customarily positioned as the quintessential “birthplace” of modernity—​that is, “early modern” England. In richly informative ways, scholars such as David Porter, Robert Markley, Chi-​Ming Yang, Gerald

26

26  The Age of Silver

MacLean, Srinivas Aravamudan, Yu Liu, and Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins have recovered the intricately formative meanings of Asian goods, ideas, and images to English culture and literature during the 1500–​1800 period, the linear construction of which is fundamental to the Eurocentric framework of modern history.33 In Markley’s words, through a previously precluded East-​West perspective, “early modern studies may be at the beginning of a paradigm shift away from Eurocentric discourses, narratives, and habits of thought that invest post-​1800 conceptions of empire, technology, science, and economics—​the ideology of modernity—​with a transhistorical status.”34 In comparison to the more established transatlantic approach to early modernity and its focus on European colonial operations, the question of coeval Eurasian relations harbors a much less noted world-​historical dynamic. A fuller delineation of this undertheorized world-​system subtext constitutes a fecund ground for understanding the lineage of the present beyond the “the ideology of modernity” and its reified global-​local hierarchies. For all their valuable contributions, efforts to re-​Orient cultural early modernity have mostly concentrated on studying the East’s depiction in and influences on the West, typically without comparative engagement with Eastern literatures and histories themselves. In order to surpass this monolocal limit, Porter has insisted on the “imperative” of doing East-​West cultural histories according to the horizontally synchronic comparatism economic and social historians have pursued. Mirroring the considerable range of socioeconomic parallels found by re-​Orienting historians, Eastern and Western cultural spheres during the 1500–​1800 period also present strikingly similar trends. In the cases of China and England, for instance, during the two or three centuries before their fateful military clashes, both regions witnessed the spread of commercial publishing, the popularization of vernacular fiction, the growth of female readership, and the literary and philosophical emphases on individual sensibility. These convergences often resided outside direct lines of influence or contact, thereby eluding conventional historicist methods. Yet, similar to the critical effects of East-​West comparative histories, their articulations are vital for disrupting the monovocal production of the discourse of modernity and creating more inclusive categories of literary and historical understanding.35 Whereas there is little doubt that, as Porter avers, synchronic East-​West cultural comparisons are worthy endeavors even without a final attribution of causation, the world-​economic longue durée I  have described as the “Age of Silver” is a vital materialist framework for reinvestigating the 1500–​1800 period on a global level, especially across its previously marginalized Eurasian axis. Beyond the European expansion itself, the Anthropocenic spectrum of the silver trade allows us to recast the

27

Global Silver, Local Novels  27

genealogy of “modernity” and bridge Eastern and Western cultural and literary histories in previously unimaginable ways. On a theoretical level, in order to achieve this reintegration, we must transfer the basis of our materialist approach to culture from the assumed essence of “use value” to the planetary surface of exchange value, or, in other words, from the sociological “mode of production” to the anthropological domain of consumption. Once a stigmatized area of materialist analysis associated with fetishism, alienation, and inauthenticity, consumption has received more serious treatments in recent scholarship as “a mirror of the human condition” and “the very arena in which culture is fought over and licked into shape.”36 From Marcel Mauss’s notion of “inalienable” possessions, Igor Kopytoff’s “cultural biography” of objects, to Bill Brown’s “thing theory,” materialist critics have by now developed sophisticated studies on the political, cultural, and existential implications of objects, though typically on a monosocial basis.37 Yet, as world-​system analysts such as Christopher Chase-​Dunn and Thomas Hall have noted, cross-​area commodity flows could have wide-​ ranging sociocultural effects. In their words, “prestige-​goods economies constitute systemic networks because the ability of local leaders to monopolize the supply of these goods is often an important source of stability and change in local power structures.”38 Thus, whereas Wallerstein excludes the trade in Asian “luxury” goods from his theorization of the “modern world-​ economy” on the assumption that their historical impact was tenuous, the now extensive writings on the social and ideological functions of commodities indicate that their intersocietal and cross-​societal circulations could very well be an important historical venue where “worlding” processes take place. Even a cursory consideration of the importance of spice to the “Age of Discovery”; of opium to the histories of the British Empire, colonial India, and China; and of “chinaware” to the European perception of “China,” indicates that the social lives of transnational goods could make nations and wars. If we follow the Braudel-​Arrighi thesis, the forces of commodities could have shaped the trajectory of European capitalism in a manner that is more fundamental than industrialization per se. Although current research on consumption is still mostly centered on the master narrative of European capitalism, significant scholarly attention has been paid to sophisticated consumer cultures and market relations in non-​Western traditions. According to these studies, the 1500–​1800 period, which was characterized by global monetary and commercial expansion, witnessed material cultures flourishing across multiple global areas from China and Japan to Mughal India, the Islamic world, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa.39 Entangled with the “Rise of the West,” these polycentric market coevolutions entailed a lived complexity and a broader scope, and must be better understood as worldmaking forces on their own terms.

28

28  The Age of Silver

Methodologically, in order to approach these interlocking socioeconomic heterogeneities and their cultural repercussions, we must develop a comparative vision that is nontotalizing, associative, and transregional. To this end, I will synthesize a set of theoretical notions of multicentrality, including Spivak’s “planetarity”, Glissant’s “creolity”, Deleuze and Guattari’s “rhizome,” Latour’s “actor-​network theory,” Bhabha’s “vernacular cosmopolitanism,” and Dimock’s recent presentation of world literature as a “global civil society”.40 Then I will situate these considerations within influential theories of the novel by critics such as Lukács (“transcendental homelessness” and “reification”); Bakhtin (“heteroglossia”); Anderson (“imagined communities”); and Jameson (“national allegories”). Creatively integrating these apparently discrete social and literary theories, I aspire to reexamine the novel’s contested implications as a characteristically “modern” genre, and to think across transnational contexts, social forces, and literary worlds. On this conceptual basis, I shall argue that the novel in the East and the West coevolved toward a socioeconomically informed and nationally allegorical mode of “realism” due to transregional conditions of cultural displacement during the Age of Silver. Focusing on the emblematic issue of the novel, my analysis is meant in a broader sense to diversify and relink forms of economic, political, and cultural modernity beyond the unipolar trajectory of the “hyperreal Europe.” In the section below, I will begin with an explication of the emerging intellectual landscape of planetary comparatisms and their resonances with my horizontal method.

PLANETARY COMPARATISMS

Spivak proposes the notion of “planetarity” in her 2003 book The Death of a Discipline as a critical alternative to the homogenizing idea of globalization. According to Spivak, “If we imagine ourselves as planetary subjects rather than global agents, planetary creatures rather than global entities, alterity remains underived from us; it is not our dialectical negation, it contains us as much as it flings us away.”41 Aiming to revitalize comparative literature, Spivak arrives at the idea of “planetarity” in order to search for a critical “level playing field” (5, 45), wherein the “West” and the “non-​ West” can be rethought beyond “mere nation-​origin collectivities” and the “colonizer/​colonized divide” (53). Along with this objective, Spivak predicts the limits of the formalist mode of comparative literature and pictures a transdisciplinary method she depicts as “comparative Area Studies,” which demands the cross-​fertilization of comparative literature, the social sciences, and history (75–​76). In contrast to Moretti’s quantitative paradigm

29

Global Silver, Local Novels  29

of “distant reading,” Spivak’s “planetary” comparatism signals a counterbalancing critical mode one may call “deep reading,” which shifts the sociological basis of world literature from the panoptic systematizations of ready-​made scales to the vast substrata of material interconnections.42 Rather than speaking of the “world system of literature” in the singular and from the point of view of an all-​k nowing analyst, planetary criticism is attentive to the “world systems in literature” and their relations to the world at large. As an example, Spivak cites how an awareness of the 1930 Irwin-​Gandhi Pact transports Virginia Woolf’s fleeting engagement with imperialism in A Room of One’s Own, published just one year earlier, to a wholly different critical frontier. Redolent of Said’s “nomadic” and “contrapuntal” reading strategy discussed in Culture and Imperialism, Spivak’s planetary approach underscores the interactive dynamics that are less visible in Said’s account.43 According to her observation, for instance, one must not ignore the involvement of “Indian business interests” in the promotion of the Irwin-​Gandhi Pact, an “economic fact” that “would undo a binary opposition between Britain and India” and better disclose “the genealogy of globalization in its current manifestation, before postcolonialism or liberal multiculturalism began” (52–​53). As indicated by Spivak’s evocative examples, reading the worldedness of inner literary spaces requires constant association, hybridization, and recontextualization on microscopic yet border-​crossing levels.44 Promoting a similar redefinition of world literature, Nirvana Tanoukhi contends that the ethics of comparison must move “from metaphorical deployments of ‘space’ toward concrete discussions about the materiality of literary landscapes.”45 In a consonant manner, Pheng Cheah characterizes worldhood as “a form of relating or being-​with . . . to be found in the intervals, mediations, passages, crossings between national borders.” “World literature,” according to Cheah’s subsequent argument, should be a “literature that is of the world, a fundamental force in the ongoing cartography and creation of the world instead of a body of timeless aesthetic objects.”46 While these discussions from Spivak to Cheah are illuminating, for the horizontal approach I am advising, Shu-​mei Shih’s recent essay “Comparison as Relation” is even more noteworthy due to its effort to network multiple literary worlds by a transcultural world-​historical arc.47 Also inspired by the reintegrative method of re-​Orienting historiography, Shih’s essay conjoins East-​West world-​system perspectives with the Martinican critic Édouard Glissant’s notion of “Relation,” which indicates “both a way of describing and understanding the globalized world of ‘infinite interaction of cultures’ ” and “an act (Relation as ‘an intransitive verb’) that changes all the elements that come into relation with each other.”48 In Glissantian terms, this principle of “Relation” can be further characterized as “creolity”

30

30  The Age of Silver

or “Chaos,” which he depicts as “totality in evolution, whose order is continually in flux and whose disorder one can imagine forever.”49 Employing this associative vision, Shih’s comparative analysis uses a macrohistorical “plantation arc” to bridge three literary worlds: William Faulkner’s American South, Chang Kuei-​hsing’s Sinophone novel Monkey Cup (2000), and Jamaican writer Patricia Powell’s The Pagoda (1999). Products of their own time and space in the absence of direct literary lineages, these texts all address a shared human history related to slavery, the coolie trade, and racism, while manifesting comparable moral complexes through their analogous narrative tropes of “contaminated decent” and similarly vertiginous “baroque” styles. According to Shih’s elegant conclusion, “In its singularity as text and interconnectedness in history, we may say, lie a literary work’s literariness.”50 Rather than erasing the relevance of poetics and form, world-​historical associations of multiple literary worlds simultaneously bring out the globality and the singularity of a text in resonance with its otherwise unrelatable counterparts in the same planetary continuum. This cross-​cultural reading strategy thus helps construct a widened and lived form of world literature beyond national traditions and the metropolitan “technologies of recognition.”51 Relation, Shih affirms following Glissant, is poetics: “Literature is part and parcel to the world, and poetics is as much about understanding the text as understanding the world.”52 Akin to the principle of horizontality in this book, Shih’s relational method is an exercise in multiperspectivism, which compels the critic to travel beyond a familiar field and embrace the geographical multiplicities of global historical flows. Importantly, Shih’s comparative reading judiciously withdraws from the dichotomous politics of treating the non-​West as a necessary site of resistance, utopia, or ethical elevation, strategies that are ostensibly exalting yet analytically flattening. By the example of Chang Kuei-​hsing’s Monkey Cup, Shih reminds us, “The coolie-​turned-​settlers in the Borneo rain forest are as capable of oppressing the indigenous peoples as the British colonizers.” Attendant to the non-​West’s equally complex and culpable political economic operations, “Relational comparison confronts power as it is, without apology.”53 Shih’s insistence on distributing agencies as well as accountabilities across the colonizer/​colonized divide mirrors Spivak’s similar concerns with the involvement of Indian business interests in the promotion of the Irwin-​Gandhi Pact. Although some criticize it as “redux humanism,”54 planetary comparatism in fact offers a more holistic strategy for confronting and unpacking “the complex, global network of power-​inflected relations that enmesh our world.”55 Given the kind of critical “levelness” to which it aspires, neither the negativities of capitalism and hegemony nor the positivities of innovation and reflection are dynamisms exclusive to Western agencies. Rather, all these staple forces of history are

31

Global Silver, Local Novels  31

problems and opportunities on an always globalized scale. In this manner, they weave together multivalent worlding conditions we can, and should, relate to the idea of world literature.

NETWORKEDNESS

Investigating the underlying world systems in literary texts for a “level playing field” of comparison, Spivak and Shih likewise resort to a new materialist position that resonates with Bruno Latour’s “actor-​network theory” (ANT), which has been noted by more and more literary analysts. In brief, Latour prioritizes the “webs of association” that consist of specific linkages over already assumed “Contexts,” and underscores materially mediated relations—​which he calls “interobjectivity”—​as the intellectually repressed “body” of social relations.56 Resembling Spivak’s search for a “level playing field” of cross-​cultural analysis, Latour devises his method to “keep the social flat” and “to force, so to speak, any candidate with a more ‘global’ role to sit beside the ‘local’ site it claims to explain, rather than watch it jump on top of it or behind it.”57 ANT is thus a work of “cartography,” a “slowciology,” or what Latour calls the “footwork” of history, for its practice deliberately “slows down” sociological analysis via a close mapping of the material and spatial concreteness of events and relations (139). Due to its macro-​micro dialectic, ANT analysis precludes separating the “actor” and the “network”: “The first part (the actor) reveals the narrow space in which all of the grandiose ingredients of the world begin to be hatched; the second part (the network) may explain through which vehicles, which traces, which trails, which types of information, the world is being brought inside those places and then, after having been transformed there, are being pumped back out of its narrow walls” (179–​180). Using the very small to “reassemble” the very big, Latour’s networked approach mirrors planetary comparatists’ emergent efforts to analyze the concrete “materiality of literary landscapes.” Other than transcultural correlations, the Latourian model can also facilitate a rethinking of the intricate ties between literary and historical worlds due to its connective potency. In part drawing from Latour’s argument, Eric Hayot’s 2012 book On Literary Worlds perceptively utilizes the idea of “connectedness” or “networkedness” as one of the “six variables” for theorizing the “worldedness” of literary texts. In Hayot’s words, “Networkedness in aesthetic worlds allows us to talk about the sense of diegetic world-​space created by the village marketplace’s selling of tea or a casual mention of an Oriental carpet, but also about how the world theorizes the set of relations

32

32  The Age of Silver

among its various characters.” Citing Alex Beecroft, Hayot further proposes that networkedness is related to the question of audience and by extension to the text’s “political and economic environment,” which could have varying “local, cosmopolitan, national, or global frameworks.” Modifying Beecroft’s argument, moreover, Hayot notes that if we believe that “works not only reflect such orientations but conceive, refuse, or otherwise engage with them, such a model would allow critics to approach aesthetic worlds from the ‘outside,’ as it were, without presupposing that the field of address exerts a determining effect on the aesthetic sphere.”58 Given the constant yet unstable interactions between “reality” and representation, the expressed materiality of literary worlds signals the mounting influences of material objects and forces upon the “political and economic environment” of a particular locality and indicates the creative capacity of literary actors to imaginatively reorder these shifts from their own existential and moral perspectives. This interactive vision on materiality and literary creativity is an important premise for my comparative analysis. In short, a networked understanding of aesthetic-​historical relations allows us to see literary worlds as neither passive reflections of reality nor thoroughly autonomous realms. For my analysis of the rise of the novel during the Age of Silver, the transcultural emergences of narrative realisms in the East and the West indicate literary actors’ active agencies in responding to outside material influences. As will be elaborated further, the political and social frameworks that structure these responses can be productively called “national.” Rather than implying nationalistic or ethnically bounded identities, the idea of the “national” here suggests a substate space for critical public participation through cultural forms. In this vein, we can further reinvent novelistic theories from Jameson’s “national allegory” to Lukács’s “transcendental homelessness” along the lines of two synergistic proposals I see as representing a new ethics for world literature—​that is, Dimock’s recent discussion of world literature as a “lexical” form of “global civil society,” combined with Bhabha’s notion of “vernacular cosmopolitanism.” In the section below, I first introduce the relevance of Dimock’s and Bhabha’s ideas before reconfiguring the theories of the novel by critics such as Jameson and Lukács.

“GLOBAL CIVIL SOCIETY” AND “VERNACULAR COSMOPOLITANISM”

Dimock’s 2006 book Through Other Continents:  American Literature across Deep Time innovatively resituates American literary studies in a

33

Global Silver, Local Novels  33

“planetary” scope. For the interest of my study, Through Other Continents advances two promising critical proposals, one of which is a new conception of “genre” following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s idea of the “rhizome.” According to Deleuze and Guattari, the rhizome represents an intellectual drive to “ceaselessly [establish] connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles,” in contrast to the static “root-​tree” system of thinking that is preoccupied with origins and chronology.59 In their words, a “rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.”60 Borrowing this rhizomatic conceptual mode, Dimock reimagines literary genre as “a phenomenal field of contextually induced parallels” and as a “decentralized web” of “second and third and fourth cousins.”61 To further this argument, Dimock alludes to the set theorist Douglas Hofstadter’s discussion on “recursion” and “heterarchy” for “a kind of switch mechanism in the reversible hierarchy between the local and the global.”62 In contrast to the “core-​periphery” fixity of a hierarchical order, a “heterarchical” system is one in which “individual elements can be recombined in varying sequences of priority.”63 It is hence a useful notion for reading beyond the borders of national culture and language. Significantly, going beyond merely formalist concerns, Dimock’s planetary comparatism launches a political objective toward equating the imaginary of “world literature” with that of a “lexical” form of “global civil society.”64 Here we come to the second point of her study I aim to carry out further in this book. Following Michael Walzer’s writing on the subject, Dimock conceives the civil society as “a sphere of life that is both smaller and larger than the territorial regime: it is subnational in one sense, transnational in another. This duality of scale means that its sphere of action is on either side of the state apparatus.” As she further notes: “Civil society might indeed be one of the side effects of the nation-​state, but it is not coincidental with it, for, as a side effect, ‘it must also be another place,’ a place not territorial but associative, and extending as far as those associations extend.”65 The “civic” nature of literature and of reading, in these senses, is framed by national historical experiences, yet is independent from the centralizing authority of the territorial state. It is thus where the potentials of a cosmopolitan humanism reside, a humanism that stems not from a detached ideality but from expressive moments that are heterogeneously integrated owing to their shared relations to power. Inventive as it is, Dimock’s planetary argument remains centered on the metropolitan standpoint of American literature, and her notion of the “global civil society” has been questioned for its utopian oversublimation.66 Although it requires further substantiation and complication, Dimock’s

34

34  The Age of Silver

fusion of world literature and the “global civil society” does connote fertile implications if we rework her proposal in two directions. First, in place of automatically treating the “civil society” as a realm of emancipation and transcendence, we should remain alert to its potentially hegemonic nature—​as discussed by Gramsci, Foucault, Althusser, and Bourdieu, on the one hand—​and be attentive to its possible service to the homogenizing forces of nationalism and imperialism as noted by Anderson and Said, on the other.67 Another caveat to add is that, when defining it structurally as “another place . . . on either side of the state apparatus,” we must enlarge the notion of the “civil society” to include public associative networks that could exist beyond Western metropolitan centers and the institutional establishment of electoral democracy.68 This conceptual widening allows us to sense and articulate latent civil formations across plural historical spaces and times, and hence to recontextualize the often assumed singularity of Western political modernity. Using the principle of the “rhizome” and “heterarchy” discussed earlier, we can speak of the “civil” politics of a single literary text in the absence of systematic changes in the culture at large—​that is to say, as a form of political modernity writ small rather than writ large. Equipped with this critical strategy, we can subsequently appreciate previously neglected cultural modernities outside Eurogenetic histories and develop a more transcultural understanding of world literature as a “lexical” form of “global civil society.” Diverging from Dimock’s metropolitan perspective, Bhabha criticizes Enlightenment liberalism as “a liberalism devoid of the crucial interpolation of its colonial history,” and argues to interpret human nature “. . . as the cultural ‘sign’ of a social or discursive event,” rather than a universalized, abstracted idea.69 Along with this historicization, Bhabha notes that a more genuine “cosmopolitical” consciousness rests in what he calls “vernacular cosmopolitanism” or “subaltern secularism,” which resides in a “potentially subversive, subterranean concept of community,” and always remains “unsatisfied,” “indeterminate,” marginal, and hybrid. According to Bhabha, this “vernacular cosmopolitanism” is necessary for cultivating “certain affective and ethical identification with globality premised on the need to establish a subject of transhistorical memory.”70 Rather than being limited to the Enlightenment model, vernacular cosmopolitan thinking negotiates between local specificities and translocal values, in order to rearticulate alternative and marginalized experiences outside the master narrative of Western modernity. Whereas Bhabha developed his concept of “vernacular cosmopolitanism” to address the cross-​cultural issues of postcolonial globalization, the Age of Silver we have retraced is both a forgotten prelude and an alternative to the history of Modernity, for it is rich with the kind of “indeterminate”

35

Global Silver, Local Novels  35

and “vernacular” cultural characteristics Bhabha has theorized as necessary counter-​theses to Eurocentric narratives of modern humanity. As will be made clear, Robinson Crusoe, the “first English novel” in Watt’s influential analysis, differs from preceding Chinese, Spanish, and Japanese cases not because it exceptionally expresses a secular critical consciousness and is thus singularly “modern,” but because it manifests a drive to eradicate the “indeterminate” ideological features of the other cases. In this manner, the Crusoeian narrative model indicates an inseparable historical nexus of liberalism, capitalism, and colonialism, forces that gave rise to a hegemonic ideology of Modernity. In comparison to Robinson Crusoe’s crystallization of an Anglocentric Enlightenment-​capitalist-​colonial history, the other examples are better representations of the novel’s “vernacular cosmopolitanism,” or rather “cosmopolitanisms,” during the Age of Silver. This conclusion has broad implications for the ongoing search for a new concept of global humanity. Overall, by theorizing a transcultural category of early novelistic realism, my analysis foregrounds material mobility’s stimulation of plural forms of critical civil consciousness outside the Enlightenment pedigree of rationality, capitalism, and liberalism. In this manner, while unsettling the Eurocentric thesis of the “rise of the novel,” my analysis on a broader level belies the often assumed incompatibility between multiculturalism and cosmopolitan thinking. Once we reinterpret cosmopolitanism in a “vernacular” and multilocal sense, it becomes possible to transcend the Eurocentric “metropolitan” mode of cosmopolitanism, which has delimited the current impasses of world literature. Following along these lines, despite their different points of departure, Bhabha’s “vernacular cosmopolitanism” and Dimock’s understanding of the “global civil society” are in effect compatible ones, since they both emphasize a subterranean and implicitly subversive stratum of political life, which resides both beneath and beyond the official state. This understanding enables us to reinvent in a planetary manner a notion Jameson unfortunately employed some time ago to divide “First World” and “Third World” literatures:  that is, “national allegories.” The next section explores this synthesis and further ties it to Andersonian, Bakhtinian, and Lukácsian frameworks in order to advance a transcultural understanding of the novel’s “civil” dynamic and cultural modernity.

RETHINKING “NATIONAL ALLEGORIES”

Jameson’s critics have repeatedly pointed out that the trouble with his argument rests not with the idea of “national allegory” per se, but with his

36

36  The Age of Silver

reductive treatment of it as a necessarily “Third World” literary quality in opposition to the privatized cultural forms of the Western “First World.”71 This dichotomization in fact contradicts Jameson’s well-​k nown argument that literary works are not isolated aesthetic objects or merely manifestations of individual psychologies—​rather they are “socially symbolic acts” and hence demand politically and historically sensitive analyses.72 Jameson’s curious abandonment of this position when cross-​referencing the West and the non-​West presents a telling example of the tenacious power of binary comparative thinking, according to which non-​Western histories and cultures are necessarily the West’s “Other.” On the other hand, contrary to what has often been said about Jameson’s reductionism, the “national allegories” he reads from “Third World” texts are not uniformly nationalistic. His analysis of Lu Xun in support of the “national allegory” thesis, for instance, underscores the purpose of cultural and social self-​critique rather than nation or ethnic construction.73 Connoting a wide degree of critical fluidity, Jameson’s idea of “national allegories” mirrors his assertion that literary works are at their core public and political. Or, according to Imre Szeman’s apt description, Jameson’s idea of “national allegories” offers a crucial theoretical concept for depicting “the conditions of possibility of metacommentary at the present time.”74 Understood as a structural dynamic rather than nationalism in a narrower sense, the Jamesonian notion of “national allegories”—​as long as we delink it from his binary argument—​is in effect quite close to Anderson’s position in Imagined Communities: despite his preoccupation with the problematics of nationalism, Anderson ultimately aims to grapple with the historical structure of national awareness, that is, “the framework of a new consciousness—​the scarcely-seen periphery of its vision—​as opposed to centre-field objects of its admiration or disgust.”75 The “nation,” is, of course, a highly malleable concept that demands further clarification as to how it will be understood in this book. For Anderson, as a historical category, the nation began with a process of dissolution, when “three fundamental cultural conceptions, all of great antiquity, lost their axiomatic grip on men’s minds”—​that is, (1) a sacred scrip-​language that “offered privileged access to ontological truth,”(2) “the belief that society was naturally organized around and under high centers—​monarchs who were persons apart from other human beings and who ruled by some form of cosmological (divine) dispensation,” and (3) “a conception of temporality in which cosmology and history were indispensable.”76 Stemming from these conditions of displacement, the Andersonian nation denotes a new form of communal solidarity that occurred by chance of territorial togetherness. According to Anderson’s well-​k nown argument, this secular collectivity is best represented by the “meanwhile” and the “homogenous, empty

37

Global Silver, Local Novels  37

time” in novelistic narratives. While Anderson points to a crucial historical dynamic, the scope he addresses is too narrow for conceiving the “deep roots” of the nation as an ethnic-​political-​territorial formation, which is often shaped by religious and monarchical forces in the first place.77 In this light, it is more holistic to conceive Anderson’s “imagined communities” as a substructural and secularized version of the broader category of the “nation.” This earthly nature is where the space of a “civil society” lies in the “subnational” sense discussed by Dimock. Though it is susceptible to the impulse of nationalistic homogenization Anderson probes, this civil space is at the outset borne of disenchantment and displacement. As such, it is imbued with an ideological porousness that renders it linkable to other similar spaces. Given the inbuilt decentering proclivities of Anderson’s “imagined communities,” Mikhail Bakhtin’s theorization of the novelistic discourse in terms of a subversive heteroglossia complements his model in meaningful ways.78 In Bakhtin’s words, heteroglossia means “a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and interrelationships (always more or less dialogized),” as opposed to “monoglossia” or the “authoritative discourse,” which “is indissolubly fused with its authority—​with political power, an institution, a person—​and … stands and falls with that authority.” 79 The process of sociolinguistic dissolution Bakhtin portrays through the term “heteroglossia” clearly resonates with Anderson’s characterization of the unsettlement of monarchical and cosmological forms of meaning during the emergence of national “imagined communities.” Remarkably, both critics single out the novel genre as the primary literary form that manifests these major historical transitions. According to Robert Bennett’s perceptive depiction, for both Anderson and Bakhtin the novel genre indicates “a fundamental, epochal shift in human consciousness that has caused both social structures and cultural forms to be reconceptualized based on secular rather than sacred models.” Starting from the same premise of disintegration, the two critics have pursued different conceptual emphases: “Anderson sees novels as centripetally organizing heteroglossia into a collective, though imaginary, national identity, but Bakhtin sees novels as centrifugally disorganizing such collective narratives in order to liberate the heteroglossia they seek to control.” Rather than being incompatible frameworks, these Andersonian and Bakhtinian configurations of the nation and narration should be regarded as “complementary theories,” since their combination expresses a fluid spectrum of secularized subject-​nation relations between the extremities of convergence and divergence.80 For the cross-​cultural comparatism we pursue, the Anderson-​ Bakhtin synthesis allows us to trace collective allegories in both Western and non-​Western literary spheres beyond civilizational differences and the

38

38  The Age of Silver

colonized/​colonizer divide, and thus to investigate the question of novelistic modernity inherent in this structure on a transcultural scale.

REALISM, “TRANSCENDENTAL HOMELESSNESS,” REIFICATION

For Jameson, Anderson, and Bakhtin, the novel form crystallizes existential conditions in a secularized time. On these accounts, they resemble other major theorists of the novel such as Ian Watt and Georg Lukács, who likewise treat the genre as the premier embodiment of literary modernity. All these theorists also assume that novelistic modernity is a unique offspring of European history, and became spread to the rest of the world through the European expansion.81 Although critics such as Margaret Doody have argued for a larger definition of the “novel” as longer prose fiction in general, theorizations of the novel since Lukács and Watt almost always revolve around certain assumptions of “realism,” which, as Marina MacKay frankly summarizes, “has been the key term in most accounts of why the novel matters, and … has come to mean many things.”82 Once measured by this theoretical core, the novel has been commonly presumed as a Eurocentric genre, which reached its apex during the nineteenth century. Rather than an isolated literary question, moreover, the novel in this heavily theorized sense is laden with sociological and historical implications pertaining to the histories of Enlightenment rationality, capitalism, liberal democracy, nation formation, and colonialism. However multicultural we now allow the novel’s wider varieties to be, it remains an uncertain question how this broadened vision can actually expand, challenge, or engage with the Europe-​centered theoretical core of the novel, a core that has always combined literary and sociological elements. In Moretti’s approach to world literature, wherein the question of the novel occupies a pivotal position, we can sense the kind of conceptual ambiguity described above. While his controversial essay “Conjectures on World Literature” presents the novel as the quintessential example of the “wave”-​like Weltliteratur that extends from the Western “core” to the non-​ Western “periphery,” Moretti has through his editing efforts created the multivolume essay collection titled The Novel to accommodate the “polygenesis” of the genre in Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and Arabic traditions. Though a valuable endeavor, the collection of these non-​Western materials resembles what Moretti portrays in “Conjectures” as the first type of world literature—​that is, “a mosaic of separate, ‘local’ cultures . . . characterized by strong internal diversity.” According to “Conjectures,” this narrative heterogeneity was superseded by the homogenizing form of the European

39

Global Silver, Local Novels  39

novel according to a “source-​target” cultural relationship between the West and the non-​West.83 My planetary reworking of Anderson, Bakhtin, and Jameson’s theories of the novel nonetheless points to a third comparative modality beyond Moretti’s “tree” and “wave” patterns of world literature. A fitting trope for this alternative conceptual mode is the “rhizome,” the Deleuzian sense of which has been employed by Dimock to redefine literary genre on the basis of affinity and shared contexts. In addition to the Anderson-​Bakhtin perspective on nation and narration, Georg Lukács’s seminal treatise The Theory of the Novel, which likewise relates the realist novel to the historical dynamics of displacement and secularization, is similarly relevant to the rhizomatic literary-​historical relations in question. According to Lukács, the novel is a displaced “epic” form characterized by the structural principle of “irony,” and renders “sensuous as the lived experience of [its] characters” a collective condition of “transcendental homelessness—​the homelessness of an action in the human order of social relations, the homelessness of a soul in the ideal order of a supra-​personal system of values.”84 Along with this idea, Lukács famously states that the novel is “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God.”85 In this light, the novel genre allegorizes larger socioideological destabilizations through seemingly random individual biographies.86 Whereas Lukács emphasizes the negative effects of alienation as the result of this communal symbolic breakdown, my foregoing discussion indicates that this process of displacement leads to more independent forms of political and cultural consciousness. The sense of “totality” Lukács attributes to the world of Hellenistic epics hence implies an immobile and mythologized perception of the given cultural order and of its inherent power structures. The unsettlement of these inherited forms of meaning inevitably entails an ideologically equalizing impulse, and a demystification of the cultural fixtures that buttressed traditional modes of power. Given the Anthropocenic perspective of my East-​West comparison, Lukács’s theory of the novel has a distinctive strength due to its materialist approach, which is pertinent to linking the novel’s civil-​aesthetic modernity with world economic history. In particular, the sociological phenomenon of “reification” Lukács discusses in History and Class Consciousness directly relates the existential problematic of “transcendental homelessness” to material stimulants. Influenced by the Marxian idea of the commodity fetish, Lukács equates “reification” with “the essence of commodity-​ structure,” when “ … a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a ‘phantom objectivity,’ an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-​embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people.” Signifying the rule of money

40

40  The Age of Silver

under capitalist modernity, the social process of “reification” radically reverses subject-​object relations, whereby the former becomes passive and subjugated and the latter becomes active and dominant.87 Later on, Lucien Goldmann in his Towards a Sociology of the Novel reworks Lukács’s theory of reification and defines the novel as “the transposition on the literary plane of everyday life in the individualistic society created by market production.” In Goldmann’s words, “There is a rigorous homology between the literary form of the novel . . . and the everyday relation between man and commodities in general, and by extension between men and other men, in a market society”—​that is, the loss of “use value” or “authentic values.”88 Writing many decades ago, Lukács and Goldmann were primarily concerned with the “dehumanizing” negativity of reification as the antithetical condition of proletariat consciousness. In the twenty-​first century, we can revise their observations away from the uniform Marxian model of class production and social change and toward a pluralist form of materialist cultural analysis. In the context of the Age of Silver, I propose that we distinguish between “unreified” forms of reification, so to speak, that persisted in locations such as Ming China, Tokugawa Japan, and Golden Age Spain, and the ideological reification of capitalist rationality during the Anglo-​Germanic “second modernity.” In other words, while likewise contributing to a collective condition of “transcendental homelessness” and disrupting traditional social stratifications, the commodity relation in most of the cases we examine remains conceptually desublimated, as opposed to the intellectual sublimation of the principle of “endless accumulation” into an ethical system of liberty, rationality, and nationalism during the Anglo-​Germanic “second modernity,” which is distinctive insofar as it enacted a “reification of reification” and culturally normalized the commodity principle. For the question of the “rise of the novel,” the above distinction helps us reposition Watt’s immensely influential argument that practically created the topic as such within the horizontal parameter of the Age of Silver. Although Watt’s study has long been criticized within the field of English literary studies, on a comparative level his association of the novel with an Anglogenetic constellation of cultural forces including capitalism, “middle-​ class” values, Enlightenment rationality, and Protestantism persists as an indispensable reference point for anyone interested in correlating the novel with certain conditions of modernity.89 Notably, the Wattian model has informed not only those who read the novel’s history in a linearly progressive sense, but also those who are critical of the genre’s hegemonic and imperialist connotations. Said’s Culture and Imperialism, for instance, is one important example that treats the novel as a Eurocentric form imbricated with the histories of colonialism and imperialism.90 The horizontal

41

Global Silver, Local Novels  41

framework of my study nonetheless situates the “rise” of the English novel within an already integrated planetary system, which contained multiple other trajectories of socioeconomic and cultural modernity under a macrohistorical condition of “transcendental homelessness.” Below I shall outline an East-​West rise of the novel as a new basis for theorizing narrative modernity.91

THE RISE OF THE NOVEL EAST AND WEST

In order to “re-​Orient” the “rise of the novel” as social scientists have done with economic and political histories, we must take note of the cultural history of sixteenth-​century China, where several major vernacular novels emerged and established a literary model in the tradition. Jin Ping Mei, or The Plum in the Golden Vase (henceforth Plum), an anonymous work first circulated in manuscript form in the 1590s, is especially notable owing to its groundbreaking documentations of a mundane world characterized by money and sex. For this reason, Chinese readers have long described Plum as a book of “worldly affairs” (shiqing) in contrast to earlier works of vernacular fiction that features heroic and fantastic themes. In the words of Patrick Hanan, “If one defines the novel as in some way concerned with depicting social change or conflict by the careful documentation of the texture of society, then [Jin Ping Mei] is the first true Chinese novel.”92 The subject of “worldly affairs” launched by Plum continued to evolve through later narrative works, most significantly in the eighteenth-​century novelist Cao Xueqin’s masterwork The Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou Meng). Even after the “New Fiction” (Xin Xiaoshuo) movement that promoted Western narrative models in the semicolonial context of early twentieth-​century China, the tradition of native narrative realism from Plum to Red Chamber continued to play a vital role in shaping the discourse, aesthetics, and politics of “modern” Chinese fiction.93 Throughout the 1500–​1800 period, Chinese vernacular novels were translated and transported to regions in East and Southeast Asia such as Korea, Vietnam, and Japan.94 Meanwhile, Japan during the second half of the seventeenth century witnessed notable narrative turnabouts while experiencing remarkable commercial expansions. The most prominent sign of this narrative transition was the appearance of Ihara Saikaku’s (1642–​1693) “books of the floating world” (ukiyo-​zōshi), as marked by the publication of his first major work of prose fiction, Life of an Amorous Man (Kōshoku ichidai otoko), in 1682. Diverging from the elegant courtly

42

42  The Age of Silver

tradition of the earlier monogatari classics such as The Tale of Genji and The Tale of Ise, Saikaku’s writings focus on the politically subordinate class of the merchant townsmen and the lives and sentiments of prostitutes in an earthly setting of commerce, fashion, and pleasure. Later writers such as Tamenaga Shunsui (1790–​1843) further developed a similar genre of urban love stories known as ninjōbon (“Books about Human Feelings”). Around the 1890s, just about the same time as Tsubouchi Shōyō penned his seminal literary treatise The Essence of the Novel, which argues to reform Japanese literature by the standards of Victorian narrative realism, important Meiji authors such as Ozaki Kōyō (1868–​1903) and Higuchi Ichiyō (1872–​1896) started to rediscover Saikaku as the “realist of Japan” and as a model for their own literary practices. Although The Tale of Genji can be justly called the “world’s first novel,” Saikaku’s far worldlier “books of the floating world” constitute an important landmark of native realism in Japanese literary history.95 Once we attend to Eastern realist narrative landmarks from Plum to Amorous Man, the chronological proximity of these works to the European “rise of the novel” is quite arresting. Likely completed during the last two decades of the sixteenth century, The Plum in the Golden Vase is closely coeval with Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) and Don Quixote (1605, 1615), which inaugurated narrative realism in European fiction. Remarkably, this literary synchronicity corresponds to the peak years of the Sino-​ Spanish silver commerce that followed the opening of the Acapulco-​ Manila route. Augmenting Ming China’s silver stock by as much as tenfold, the transcontinental silver trade simultaneously financed the rise of the Spanish Empire.96 As another major silver producer of the period, seventeenth-​century Japan developed wide-​ranging material ties to the outside world via its trading port Nagasaki and other passages despite its general seclusion from the outside world since the 1630s. Saikaku’s literary innovations took place when Japanese society was experiencing a period of remarkable economic and cultural efflorescence due to the Tokugawa peace and a monetary revolution that occurred alongside the global silver flow. In comparison to these preceding literary-​historical coevolvements, the “rise” of the English novel Watt traces back to Defoe was a rather belated phenomenon and was directly indebted to Spanish precursors. Defoe’s fictional and nonfictional writings were also profoundly informed by developments in England’s domestic and overseas commerce during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In fact, the complete version of Robinson Crusoe contains a second part in which the protagonist travels to the Far East as an overseas trader, although the sequel has been persistently neglected in studies on the “rise of the novel.” As will be detailed

43

Global Silver, Local Novels  43

in chapter 5, the sequel foregrounds Defoe’s concerns with the English economy’s lack of centrality in the world market of the early eighteenth century, concerns that underlie the first part of the novel in a masked manner.97 The sequel’s disappearance from the “rise of the novel” discourse is symptomatic of the intellectual disavowal of a greater Eurasian macrohistory in the Anglocentric construction of Modernity. Reexcavation of these forgotten world-​system relations shall bridge literary worlds as seemingly incommensurable as those of Plum and Robinson Crusoe, and accordingly help us reconceptualize the possible scope of the modern. Relinking East-​West novelistic histories during the Age of Silver according to the principle of planetary comparatism discussed earlier, the main chapters of this book juxtapose the literary worlds of Plum and Saikaku’s “floating world” narratives with those of Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe—​the two books that have, in paradigmatic ways, demarcated the beginnings of the European novel. Bearing potent defamiliarizing effects in a horizontal comparison, these two canonical European texts are also representative of a dualist complexity of the history of the Western novel. According to Marthe Robert’s succinct description of this duality, the Western novelistic form is characterized both by a “Quixotery” that expresses modernity as the “self-​searching, self-​questioning literary movement which uses as subject matter its own doubt and belief in the value of its message,” and by a “Crusoism” that is “ ‘modern’ insofar as it expresses very clearly tendencies of the mercantile middle class which emerged from the English Revolution.”98 Robinson Crusoe thus signifies a retotalizing literary impulse following the detotalizing penchants of Don Quixote. Indicatively, the world-​historical settings from which these texts emerged correspond to what Dussel has called Europe’s “two modernities,” that is, the first Iberian modernity tied to Renaissance humanism, the Mediterranean Muslim-​ Christian interregional system, and colonization of the New World, as well as the second “Anglo-​Germanic” modernity that symbolically universalized itself as the only modern lineage. Given these world-​system associations, a horizontal examination of these two texts alongside roughly coeval Chinese and Japanese narrative landmarks bears fecund meanings for correlating Europe’s “two modernities” with antecedental and coevolving Eastern modernities. In view of the commercial coevolutions of the Age of Silver, it is not coincidental that the male protagonists of Plum, Amorous Man, and Robinson Crusoe are all merchants by occupation. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are not tradesmen per se, yet as members of the lower nobility and the peasantry, they similarly belong to the less privileged social classes. In these ways, our transcultural examples all, to a degree, match Eric Auerbach’s proposal in Mimesis that “modern realism”

44

44  The Age of Silver

ultimately indicates “the rise of the more extensive and socially inferior human groups to the position of subject matter for problematic-​ existential representation,” and consists in an “embedding of random persons and events in the general course of contemporary history.”99 The cases we have further suggest that the representational weight assumed by these characters of lower social tiers functions to enact dramas of mobility. Their biographies are thus allegories of a collective process of deconstitution and reconstitution, a process wherein the individual is no longer a fixed component within a transcendentally ordained identity system, but a transmutable part within a secular domain of horizontal exchange. In this light, the texts in question all engage with the spiritually hollowing yet politically equalizing forces of money and commerce, or what we can otherwise name the national problem of materiality. The novelistic modernity at the center of my comparative inquiry then connotes a nationally symbolic realist mode, which emerged at both ends of the Eurasian continent during the Age of Silver in response to a historical condition of “transcendental homelessness.” Expressing analogous trends of commercial expansion and cultural destabilization, the Eastern and Western literary examples in our comparison simultaneously manifest divergent geographical perspectives. In the Eastern cases, the narrated socioeconomic mobilities mostly occur within a domestic parameter. On the Western side, in contrast, they are profoundly linked with the exogenous forces of colonial history and global trade. Emblematic of Europe’s “two modernities,” the literary visions of Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe are deeply entwined with the histories of Spanish and English colonial expansion during the Age of Silver, though in very different ways. As I shall discuss further in ­chapter 3, according to the illuminating transnational studies on Don Quixote, despite his iconic image as a tragic idealist, the book’s famous protagonist implicitly projects the psychology of a “would-​be emperor” in mimicry of Habsburg Spain’s imperialist ideology.100 While crystallizing the dawning of a disenchanted secular time in European history, Cervantes’s novel further contains an ironic commentary on the totalizing state politics of imperial Spain and its overblown colonial outreach. In contrast, fantasizing an English subject’s thorough domination over a Caribbean island, the first section of Robinson Crusoe conforms to Said’s argument on the ideological symbiosis between the solitary and liberal subjectivity in English novels and the history of British imperialism.101 Also evident in Robinson Crusoe is the homogenizing ideological process I have described as the “reification of reification,” for Defoe’s story of island survival rationalizes material accumulation as a rightful and quasi-​d ivine reward to the self-​making homo economicus. In our

45

Global Silver, Local Novels  45

horizontal perspective, all these aspects of Defoe’s narrative exemplify the “simplifying” logic of Anglo-​G ermanic “second modernity,” which promoted a monosubjective and monocultural epistemological system in support of its own sense of centrality within an entangled global reality. Overall, Robinson Crusoe is a narrative underlain with mutually consolidating capitalist, liberal, colonial, and nationalistic tendencies, and hence represents a constellation of the hegemonic inclinations associated with the rise of the English novel.102 In contrast to the reification of capitalist ideology that happen in Robinson Crusoe, the other cases in our horizontal juxtaposition present an indeterminate textual politics of “unreified reification.” On this account, Don Quixote is in fact more similar to the distant Eastern narrative landmarks than to Robinson Crusoe. Related to this ideological divergence, one literary peculiarity of Robinson Crusoe is its deliberate repression of the bodily aspects of material desire in service of its rationalization of the capitalist impulse. This repression is absent in the other narrative landmarks in our comparison. Both Plum and Saikaku’s writings feature sexuality in prominent ways as a parallel to economic desire. Though not an explicitly erotic text, Don Quixote ties Sancho’s expressed monetary interests to unsublimated bodily forces by highlighting his gluttonous and profane behaviors.103 Having diverse forms and emphases, these bodily treatments of the materialist drive likewise prevent the rational abstraction and sublimation of the logic of capital. Importantly, given the increasing entanglement of money and power through economic developments, a desublimation of material forces simultaneously connotes political and social critiques. Exemplifying this symbolic logic, the merchant protagonist’s decadence in Plum directly corresponds to degenerations in the imperial court and among the literati elites. Thus rather than merely targeting the newly rich, the novel launches a scathing critique of the Ming Empire’s ruling authorities. In comparison to Plum’s negative treatment of material desire as the source of individual ruins and national disorder, Don Quixote exhibits a far more accepting attitude toward commerce and economic self-​advancement. It portrays such desires as lived and hybridizing forces of reality that disrupt the purist Habsburg ideology, which the protagonist mimics via his chivalric fantasies. Nonetheless, Cervantes’s novel continues to desublimate the logic of capital by hinting at the ironic entanglements between the power of money and Habsburg imperialist ideology, on the one hand, and by counterbalancing materialist social ethos with the utopian aspects of the protagonist’s convictions, on the other. Through this ambivalent attitude toward materiality, Don Quixote sustains a heteroglossic multivalence and decenters all fixed forms of meaning or authority.

46

46  The Age of Silver

Saikaku’s writings exhibit a similar double-​voicedness. Irreverently subverting classical aesthetics, Saikaku’s fiction promotes the material realm of money and consumption as the foundations of a distinctive mercantile identity detached from Tokugawa cultural and political orthodoxies. Due to the parodic and ironic thrust of his writings, Saikaku nonetheless maintains a vulgarized and deidealized image of this emergent identity.104 Overall, whereas the Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish cases from the Age of Silver exhibit diverse attitudes and cultural frameworks, the early realist novels from these spheres all sustain a critical distance from both political privileges and the rule of money, which then became the mixed grounds of social power. In contrast to the decentering textual politics of the other cases, Robinson Crusoe reconsolidates the disintegrated historical relations of meaning, money, and power by constructing the image of a triumphant homo economicus. The insular setting of Defoe’s novel, however, indicates the extraordinary circumstances it takes to enable such a simplifying narrative. Moreover, the first part of Robinson Crusoe, which is set in the Caribbean, allows the protagonist to master his environment in ways unimaginable in his own social context and in a manner that allegorizes British dominance over other places and peoples. The second part of the novel further reveals that the book’s first half masks a profound sense of insecurity over its projected myths of individual self-​sufficiency and British world dominance. At the same time, whereas Robinson Crusoe suppresses the bodily aspects of material desire in order to sublimate its “economic individualism,”105 the erotic dimension of materiality becomes visible again in Defoe’s later works from Moll Flanders to Roxana.106 As I shall discuss in chapter 5, the sexual constituents of Defoe’s later novels correspond to these narratives’ social settings and different gender dynamics. Symbolically, they express anxieties over kinship and interpersonal chaos in a market-​oriented society wherein money, goods, and people are increasingly prone to free circulation. Thus turning away from Robinson Crusoe’s simplifying narrative of capitalist rationality, Defoe’s later novels project an ideological complexity that is more commensurable to novelistic evolvements elsewhere. Structurally, Defoe’s “fallen” heroines, from Moll to Roxana, parallel Plum’s scheming and sexually bold Pan Jinlian (Golden Lotus) and Saikaku’s self-​ narrating prostitute heroine in The Life of an Amorous Woman. The similar theme of female material agency in these texts subverts not only traditional patriarchal cultural systems, but also the continuously male-​centric power dynamic engendered by economic mobility. In both the East and the West, these problematic female figures emerged to symbolize an ultimate state of symbolic breakdown. Interestingly enough,

47

Global Silver, Local Novels  47

their appearances likewise foreshadowed analogous narrative counterstrategies in their own cultural spheres—​that is, novelistic constructions of a purified ideal of love, marriage, and femininity as the new moral center of individual life. This observation brings us to a further East-​West literary resonance addressed in the epilogue of this book, one that is germane to the origins of the Goethean Weltliteratur.

CODA: THE SENTIMENTAL TURN

Most evident in the Chinese and English cases, the figure of the chaste woman became prominent in fictional narratives following the appearances of materialist narratives such as Plum and Defoe’s novels. Our observation of this convergence is helpful for recontextualizing Goethe’s famous speech on Weltliteratur, which was given partly in response to his reading of translated Chinese novels of the “talent-​beauty” (caizi jiaren) genre, a genre that consists of refined love romances and started to gain popularity in China around the mid-​seventeenth century. Translated versions of these “talent-​beauty” novels had arrived in Europe since the 1760s through the efforts of figures such as Thomas Percy (1729–​1811) in England and the Sinologist Jean-​Pierre Abel-​Rémusat (1788–​1832) in France.107 In their prefatory remarks, both Percy and Rémusat comment on the arresting similarities between the lifelike qualities of the Chinese novels being presented and the type of new narrative aesthetics practiced by English authors such as Richardson and Fielding. Informed by these comparisons, Goethe, in his talk to Eckermann, speaks of a “strong resemblance” between these Eastern texts and Richardson’s sentimental novels. Having an idealized notion of the East, Goethe relates the moral purity he saw in the Chinese novels to a primordial Chinese spirit. An understanding of earlier Eastern precedents such as The Plum in the Golden Vase nonetheless guides us to see a deeper parallel between the Chinese talent-​beauty novels and Richardson’s works, since their themes of chastity likewise carry out a reformist literary agenda in the face of ongoing cultural destabilizations. The literary-​historical logic of this correspondence in fact closely conforms to Goethe’s vision of “world literature,” which in his view designates a realm of purified humanistic resonances in counterbalance to a world of thickening economic and political interdependencies. A new conception of moral subjectivity rests at the heart of the East-​West cultural parallel behind Goethe’s conception of world literature. Emerging from similar contexts of cultural displacement, Chinese talent-​ beauty novels and Richardson’s writings both promoted the figure of the chaste

48

48  The Age of Silver

woman to relocate the existential and ethical center of individual life from the collective political and social order to private conducts and sentiments. In this light, the “sentimental” turns in Eastern and Western novels likewise channeled the genre’s incipient realism into an idealist direction, and generated an interiorized image of the self in opposition to both commodity relations and political power.108 In light of our foregoing discussions, this literary convergence suggests the novel’s developing power in both the East and the West to construct a substate cultural and moral sphere in counterbalance to real-​world economic and political forces. In both Chinese and European narrative histories, furthermore, the sentimental turn was followed by continuous literary transmutations. On the European side, the Bildungsroman narrative mode, of which Goethe is a seminal figure, is characterized by a symbolic dualism as it treats the sentimental self with both sympathy and irony.109 In the Chinese case, the eighteenth-​century classic The Dream of the Red Chamber is an analogous example that situates its protagonists’ idealism within a mundane reality. The similarly dualistic attitudes in the European Bildungsroman and Chinese texts such as the Red Chamber indicate Eastern and Western novels’ increasingly complex engagements with the unstable relations between subjectivity and materiality under the conditions of “transcendental homelessness.” At the same time, through its private motifs of gender, sexuality, and aesthetics, the novel genre in both spheres grew into an independent cultural form, offering new ethical and existential representations when traditional cosmological and political meanings became increasingly destabilized. All these observations on East-​West narrative coevolutions push the familiar issue of modern subjectivity into unfamiliar directions. While foregrounding previously unnoted parallels between the East and the West, they reformulate the question not simply in terms of aesthetics or psychology, but with regard to broader historical and social shifts. The private selves that took form through these transcultural processes, in short, were the building blocks of a new form of the “public.”110 Although a fuller exploration of sentimental and postsentimental narratives rests outside the scope of this study, thoughts on these later developments gesture toward a wider and more complex spectrum of East-​West horizontal literary continuities. In sum, by practicing a hitherto untried method of horizontal reading, my analysis shall unfold a macrohistorical process through which Eastern and Western novelistic narratives grew to create “another place” of meaning and identity away from the state-​defined official discourse. This transmodern and Anthropocenic perspective on the novel resituates the genre’s emblematic modernity beyond a Eurogenetic lineage. On a broader level, a

49

Global Silver, Local Novels  49

planetary understanding of “the rise of the novel” is a vital part of reimagining “world literature” as a “global civil society” or a “world republic of letters,” since it articulates a polycentric form of globality and modernity for which current comparative theories have not yet developed a language, method, or politics. Upon these premises, then, let us delve into the first literary world in our horizontal comparison, late sixteenth-​century China’s The Plum in the Golden Vase, in order to generate a transcultural account of the rise of the novel across the world-​historical continuum of the Age of Silver.

50

51

2 Along the Grand Canal

The Lord of Silver in The Plum in the Golden Vase

By 1644 China is a part of world history, deeply affected by the movement of silver in the world’s trade, by the dissemination of crops and foodstuffs which would transform its agriculture, and by weapons and warfare, plagues, and products which bore in on the daily life of the Chinese people. In the consciousness of peoples, whether Chinese, Europeans, or others, the national entities of Eurasia remained worlds apart and would do so until very recent times. Yet in many ways . . . the civilizations and national entities of Eurasia were becoming mutually responsive. —​F. W. Mote, “Yuan and Ming” (1977)1 One man in a hundred is rich, while nine out of ten are impoverished. The poor cannot stand up to the rich who, though few in number, are able to control the majority. The lord of silver rules heaven and the god of copper cash reigns over the earth. Avarice is without limit, flesh injures bone, everything is for personal pleasure, and nothing can be let slip. In dealings with others, everything is recompensed down to the last hair. The demons of treachery stalk. —​Zhang Tao (1609)2 As a thought experiment, one might read Chalmers Johnson’s The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, a sobering look at the political, military, and economic costs and consequences of an American empire headed toward a seemingly irrevocable decline, in conjunction with Ray Huang’s classical study, 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline. The uncanny similarities between these two works suggest the need for new modes of thinking about the relationships between the early modern and the all-​too-​modern world. —​Robert Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination (2006)3 51

52

52  The Age of Silver

“THE FIRST TRUE CHINESE NOVEL”

Scholars who are interested in rediscovering Eurasian histories of modernity have widely noted the “early modernity” of China’s last two imperial dynasties, Ming (1368–​1644) and Qing (1644–​1911), before the First Opium War (1839–​ 1842) that conventionally demarcates the rupture between “traditional” and “modern” China. Experiencing unprecedented market and population growths, Ming-​Qing China was at the same time far more involved in international trade than previous eras. In a world-​system sense, while lying outside the Europe-​centered geopolitical orbit, China’s massive attraction of foreign silver via exporting consumer goods during the period was a crucial substructural condition of coeval European and global developments.4 This chapter situates one literary landmark from late Ming China, the anonymous one-​hundred-​chapter novel Jin Ping Mei, or The Plum in the Golden Vase (henceforth Plum), within the macrohistorical context of the Age of Silver and as a different beginning for conceptualizing the realist novel.5 Even though all endeavors in terms of a historical “firsthood” must be hypothetical, rereading Plum in this vein is worthwhile for pluralizing the metaliterary thesis of the “rise of the novel,” which despite its heavily criticized status carries far-​reaching theoretical repercussions. Long noted in Chinese literary history as a native forerunner of narrative realism, Plum has been heuristically described by Patrick Hanan as the “first true Chinese novel.” In a manner that is especially relevant to my thesis of the Age of Silver, Plum contains “a mass of detail about money and prices,” again to use Hanan’s apt description, and virtually constitutes a novelistic history of late Ming China’s rising silver economy.6 Despite ongoing controversies over the book’s date of composition, internal economic details from the novel, as I shall further explain, place the time of its final completion within the last two decades of the sixteenth century—​the very period when the opening of the Acapulco-​Manila route increased China’s silver supply by as much as tenfold.7 Thus, on a world-​historical level, Plum’s seemingly self-​contained narrative world was created within cross-​ continental forces that substructurally ran through late Ming history. While its socioeconomic conditions occurred as an integral part of the Age of Silver, Plum’s literary vision also corresponds to the politically critical and nationally allegorical nature of novelistic creations elsewhere, since it offers a troubling account of the waning powers of Confucian moral philosophy to regulate social relations and state practices. Thus exemplifying a collective condition of “transcendental homelessness,” the novel’s theme of moral and spiritual void simultaneously helps express a more independent political attitude and a more complex engagement with human nature.

53

Along the Grand Canal  53

These patterns are comparatively meaningful for theorizing the multilocal emergences of realist narrative aesthetics during the Age of Silver. Before we delve into the arguments outlined above, some introductory information on Plum will be helpful. In Chinese literary history, Plum is the latest of the “four extraordinary books” (sida qishu) that surfaced in the Ming book market. Composed between the early fourteenth and the mid-​sixteenth centuries, these books together mark the first full blossoming of the vernacular novel in the tradition. The three preceding “extraordinary books” consist of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo yanyi), a chronicle of the fierce military competitions after the fall of the Han dynasty during the early third century, Outlaws of the Marsh (Shuihu zhuan), which retells the legends involving a group of bandits who rebelled against the corrupt Northern Song government (960–​ 1127), and The Journey to the West (Xiyou ji), a magical fantasy based upon the Buddhist Xuanzang’s pilgrimage to India during the early Tang dynasty (617–​907).8 Like these antecedents, Plum has rather murky origins. At first, it was circulated as a manuscript among a small circle of readers during the 1590s. The book’s first extant printed edition dates to 1617, decades before the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644. At its outset, Plum borrows from one episode in the earlier “extraordinary book” Outlaws, in which a debauched merchant named Ximen Qing seduces Pan Jinlian (whose name literally means “Golden Lotus”) and conspires with her to poison her hapless husband Wu Da. In the original story, the two perpetrators are summarily killed by the victim’s avenging brother Wu Song, a principle hero of Outlaws. Plum, however, lets the conspirators escape death and live on for several more years until being destroyed by their own excesses. An entirely new literary creation after retelling the Outlaws episode in its opening chapters, Plum develops a vast system of characters and chronicles at great length the protagonist’s decadent life in and outside his household, which includes many servants and six wives. Spending page after page portraying the family’s endless parties, outings, scandals, and squabbles, the novel presents numerous details about daily objects and social practices that belong to the contemporary life of late Ming China rather than its supposedly twelfth-​century setting. As this massive narrative slowly moves toward its conclusion, the protagonist suffers a fatal illness as a result of his indulgences in sex and wine, despite having amassed a large fortune and received a coveted official position through bribery. Following his death, the household soon crumbles after a quick series of scandals, betrayals, and bankruptcies. The novel ends its dystopian vision by reporting the fall the Chinese state itself under the assault of invading nomadic armies.9 Owing to its candid treatment of the topics of money and sex and meticulous attention to socioeconomic and domestic matters, Plum has

54

54  The Age of Silver

long been noted among Chinese readers for inaugurating a new tradition of narrative style. The book’s influential seventeenth-​century commentator, Zhang Zhupo (1670–​1698), for instance, deployed the term “worldly affairs” (shiqing) to describe Plum’s distinctive concerns in contrast to the earlier “extraordinary books.”10 According to a commentator from the eighteenth century, Plum is the most “extraordinary” of all the “extraordinary books” since it conjures up the illusion of a complete everyday world:  “From business transactions to the various delicacies of land and sea, from clothing and daily objects to jokes and banters, every odd corner and trivia is registered to the fullest detail; its thoroughness is such that everything seems to have come from the author’s own experience.”11 When composing his seminal study on the history of Chinese fiction in the 1920s, Lu Xun followed Zhang Zhupo’s lead and identified Plum as the founding piece of “the novel of worldly affairs” (shiqing xiaoshuo). According to Lu Xun, this narrative subgenre further evolved through seventeenth-​century talent-​beauty novels and culminated in the eighteenth-​century masterwork The Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou Meng) by Cao Xueqin.12 During the 1930s, critics such as Zheng Zhenduo and Wu Han began to present Plum as the first work of narrative “realism” (xieshi zhuyi) in the Chinese tradition, while tying its groundbreaking features to the social crises brought about by commercial expansion and political corruption during the late Ming era.13 Later, scholars based in North America likewise noted the book’s historical significance, often in comparison to the Western novel. In his 1968 introduction to a set of famous Ming-​Qing Chinese novels, C. T. Hsia observes that Plum “has departed from history and legend to treat a world of its own creation, peopled by life-​sized men and women in their actual bourgeois surroundings divested of heroism and grandeur.” Hanan, as cited, wrote on the book’s “landmark” status in the following words: “If one defines the novel as in some way concerned with depicting social change or conflict by the careful documentation of the texture of society, then [Plum] is the first true Chinese novel.”14 Of course, the reading of Plum in terms of the Western standard of realism may now look outdated. Looking back at the twentieth-​century reading history of Plum, Naifei Ding in her 2002 book Obscene Things comments, “What has been mistaken for an early ‘realism’ is actually an antiobject-​ motivated celebration of conspicuous object consumption” (187). Although Ding’s observation is astute, we can in fact revive the relevance of the term “realism” to Plum by attending to the significance of money and material objects in the book. As I will illustrate over the course of this book, Plum’s intense preoccupation with the question of materiality is a transcultural pattern also present in canonical European texts from Don Quixote to

55

Along the Grand Canal  55

Robinson Crusoe. For all its fuzzy borders and Eurocentric baggage, the term “realism” is a fitting designation for the earthly orientations Eastern and Western narrative texts both assumed during the Age of Silver due to the shared historical conditions of “transcendental homelessness.” In a critically productive sense, an identification of Plum with early realism can mobilize a creative reworking of established theories of the novel, while linking Ming-​Qing narrative history to horizontal counterparts elsewhere and to more contemporary concerns, as suggested by Markley in the epigram to this chapter. Below, as the foundation for aligning Plum with these broader implications, I  will first review some basic aspects of late Ming society and its position in the emergent world economy.

LATE MING CHINA IN THE AGE OF SILVER

Historians of China have long utilized the term “late imperial” to demarcate the Ming and Qing dynasties, especially from the sixteenth century onward, as a distinct unit of analysis. The following lines by Evelyn Rawski succinctly summarize the basis for this delimitation: The late imperial period (sixteenth through nineteenth centuries), was substantively different from its predecessors and was characterized by considerable continuity in key institutions and socioeconomic structure. In investigating this continuity, we discuss three major phenomena: economic growth and change which led to shifts in the composition and character of the elite; an expansion of the educational system, produced in part by economic growth; and the onset of large-​scale printing, stimulated by prosperity and expanded education.15

Before the rapid economic expansions that started during the sixteenth century, Ming China experienced successful agricultural developments and momentous population increase. Imported quick-​y ielding American crops including maize, sweet potatoes, and peanuts played a contributive role in the process. Between 1400 and 1600, Ming population experienced an immense growth, from sixty-​five to one hundred and fifty million. Under the Qing dynasty, Chinese population again doubled during the eighteenth century. Although the majority of this booming population remained rural, Ming-​Qing China’s urban centers were more populous than ever before. The cities, especially those clustered around the economically advanced Lower Yangzi area—​such as Nanjing, Hangzhou, and Suzhou—​became centers of both commerce and culture. These prosperous

56

56  The Age of Silver

urban settings empowered the merchant class, who assumed prominent social influences and could obtain gentry status by educating their sons to succeed in civil examinations. In this shifting socioeconomic context, an important new school of thought known as the “philosophy of mind” (xin xue) flourished based on the writings of the school’s founding figure Wang Yangming (1472–​1529) and of other well-​k nown thinkers such as the “heretical” writer Li Zhi (1527–​1602). Against orthodox Neo-​Confucian teachings on immutable human hierarchies, practitioners of the “philosophy of mind” promoted the subjective mind as the site of moral categories and even emphasized desire (yu) as the true expression of human nature. Meanwhile, following from the spread of printing technology, commercial book markets thrived nationwide. One of the new genres that surged through this thriving world of print was the daily encyclopedia, which classified everyday goods and activities to help its readers navigate and imagine a reality saturated with myriad objects. The proliferation of luxury goods, which included both domestic products such as silk and overseas exotics such as Southeast Asian spice, blurred the status lines these sumptuous items once signified.16 While all these social and economic trends were escalating during the second half of the Ming dynasty, many Ming-​Qing writers began to condemn the subversion of tradition and the exploitative human relations that came with the mounting powers of money and things. In all aspects, late Ming China’s commercial expansion and pleasure-​seeking culture radically diverged from the Ming founder Zhu Yuanzhang’s (re. 1368–​1398) vision of his dynasty as a reviver of Confucian orthodoxy after nearly a century of Mongol rule. Although later Ming emperors strived to maintain Zhu Yuanzhang’s conservative state policies, the dynasty after its middle run started to develop a thriving market economy and many newfangled trends outside the state’s control. According to Zhang Tao’s observation just before the turn of the seventeenth century, “Silks were rarely worn in the homes of officials” during the early Ming, but since the decadent reign of the Zhengde emperor (re. 1505–​1521), members of all social tiers had begun to “drag their white silken garments as they roam about such that you can’t tell who is honored and who is base.” Although Ming official ideology placed merchants at the bottom of the “four categories of people” after scholars, peasants, and artisans, commerce was unquestionably a powerful force in late Ming life. For Zhang Tao, the rampant materialism of his age contrasts starkly with the older order of the early Ming, during which, as he nostalgically wrote, “Every family was self-​sufficient, with a house to live in, land to cultivate, hills from which to cut firewood, and gardens in which to grow vegetables.” Zhang further portrays the early Ming as a time of proper human relations and harmony, when “Women spun and wove and

57

Along the Grand Canal  57

men tended the crops. Servants were obedient and hardworking; neighbors cordial and friendly.” In Zhang’s eyes, during the current age humanity nonetheless fell to such a nadir that “Avarice is without limit, flesh injures bone, everything is for personal pleasure, and nothing can be let slip.”17 Indignantly, Zhang traced the source of this widespread social degeneration to the reign of money: “The lord of silver rules heaven and the god of copper cash reigns over the earth.”18 Of the two numismatic culprits condemned by Zhang, copper had been in use in China as a major form of currency since around the third century bce, typically issued as a round coin with a square hole in the center. The “lord of silver,” on the other hand, entered Chinese history much later. Historically, the Chinese economy’s turn to silver at first occurred within the private sectors in response to the Mongol-​ruled Yuan dynasty’s (1271–​1368) disastrous overissuing of paper money during its last few decades. Whereas Zhu Yuanzhang resolutely banned silver in order to sustain the official position of paper currency, Chinese traders never regained their confidence in state-​sanctioned money and continued to use silver as the monetary standard. Yielding to market pressures, the Ming state allowed in 1436 the residents of several provinces to pay part of their taxes in silver. As the Chinese economy became increasingly dependent on silver, supply soon fell behind demand. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, silver shortages likely caused “severe monetary constraints” in Ming state operations and private trades.19 Under these conditions, silver began developing an extraordinarily high value in China, likely doubling the world average during the time. This arbitrage stimulated the influx of overseas silver in the wake of the American and Japanese mining booms around the midcentury. According to monetary historians Dennis Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, who pinpoint the establishment of the Acapulco-​Manila route in 1571 as the beginning of globalization, the initial profit margins of the China-​ bound silver trade were so large that they enriched all parties involved.20 In the words of one European observer in Manila, Chinese traders’ hunger for silver was such that they “would journey to hell” to obtain it. As proof, the same writer recorded a memorable line spoken to him by a Chinese merchant in pidgin Spanish: “Plata es sangre”—​that is, “silver is blood.” The Chinese merchant’s comparison of silver to lifeblood finds a distant echo in Frank’s ReOrient, which avers that “money and especially silver money was the blood that flowed through [the world’s] circulatory system and oiled the wheels of production and exchange.”21 Involving a global movement of capital and commodities, the international bullion flow into China was a key condition of what William Atwell called an “emerging world economy.” Silver’s extraordinary demand in China resulted in its exceptionally narrow exchange ratio to gold, an arbitrage difference that rendered the

58

58  The Age of Silver

purchase of Chinese gold by silver a literally money-​spinning enterprise for foreign traders. More crucially, silver was the most profitable trading medium when foreign merchants used it to buy popular Chinese goods such as porcelain, silk, and tea, which were in rising demand worldwide.22 For China itself, the influx of foreign silver significantly altered its monetary history. According to Richard von Glahn, the amount of bullion imported to China between 1550 and 1600, estimated at 46.6 tons per year, was nearly ten times larger than China’s average annual domestic silver yield. Despite temporary recessions, the China-​bound silver inflows during the two centuries afterwards were much greater.23 This massive international supply enabled silver to become the primary medium of exchange in China. According to Timothy Brook, in seventeenth-​century China “Weavers used [silver] to pay taxes. Jesuits in Nanjing and housewives in Guangdong kept some on hand for domestic purchases. Large merchants handled it in sums in the hundreds and thousands of taels. Everyone saw it and everyone used it.”24 A contemporary witness, Father de las Cortes, reports in his 1626 memoir that “There is not a child who does not know how to estimate the metal of the ingots and its degree of purity.”25 In Atwell’s summary, the influx of foreign silver propelled key socioeconomic changes in China, including “a sharp increase in agricultural specialization and commercialization; rapid growth in the silk, cotton, and porcelain industries; a significant expansion in interregional trade; and the widespread implementation of the so-​called ‘Single-​Whip Method’ of taxation whereby most land taxes, labor service obligations, and extra levies were commuted to payments in silver.”26 The rise of the “lord of silver,” to recall Zhang Tao’s term, in these ways initiated a whole new phase in Chinese economic history. Empirically undeniable, the China-​bound silver trade remains a matter of ongoing debate in interpretations of its historical effects. According to a number of scholars, the Ming-​Qing Chinese economy might have suffered from the “transaction costs” it had to pay for all its silver. For instance, expanded silk production for silver revenue led to the massive conversion of farmlands in the lower Yangtze area into mulberry fields. This reduction of agricultural resources generated devastating consequences when a period of bad weather and poor harvests plagued Ming China’s final decades. Nationwide famines raised grain price to unprecedented levels and triggered widespread rebellions, which overthrew the Ming state before the Manchu conquest in 1644.27 Before its catastrophic end, late Ming China experienced drastic economic, political, and cultural transmutations alongside internal market growth and expanded global contacts. As an initial attempt at comparing these dynamisms with European early modernity, historians of China once

59

Along the Grand Canal  59

launched a “sprouts of capitalism” thesis to characterize the era’s remarkable commercial developments. Although driven by a revisionist purpose, debaters concerned with the “sprouts” argument tended to fall back upon the comparative question already raised by Max Weber and Étienne Balázs:  that is, why China did not produce “capitalism” despite its early economic advancements. The more recent generations of East-​West comparatists, however, have transcended the older conceptualization of “capitalism” as a normative stage of human development, and reexamined the Chinese “difference” as an important empirical basis in which to reembed and provincialize the West-​centric theories of capitalism and modernity.28 Realigning theory and history, this major shift in East-​West epistemology further encourages us, in Victor Lieberman’s words, “to relax distinctions not only between East and West, but between ‘premodern’ and ‘modern’,” and to treat “both distinctions in their more categorical form as self-​ flattering conceits.”29 Seeing China and Europe as mutually imbricating spatial formations, “re-​Orienting” historians have interpreted well-​k nown China-​West differences in new ways. For instance, their study of the historical impacts of geographical conjunctures indicates that the Chinese economy faced a far weaker incentive toward long-​distance explorations, owing to a more self-​ sufficient internal market and spatial proximity to the pre-​1500 world’s most active commercial circuit, the Indian Ocean economy. Subsequently, despite possessing advanced naval technologies and having sponsored the Zheng He expeditions of the early fifteenth century, the Chinese state had few practical reasons for overseas explorations and expansion. This lack of geographical stimulus contrasted sharply to the urgent economic and political motivations of the European “Age of Discovery.” Columbus’s “discovery” of America, while leading to truly epochal results, was ultimately an accidental outgrowth of an earlier Eurasian world-​system.30 Another important finding of re-​Orienting historians is that the state-​ market opposition in explanations of China-​West differences is deeply reductive. According to Braudel’s equation of capitalism with the capitalist state, the “non-​interventionist” market is in itself an “ideal type” generated by the ideology of capitalism.31 Arrighi’s analysis in Adam Smith in Beijing further indicates that Smith’s notion of “free trade” was presented in contrast to the “unnaturally” extroverted, militarist, financially dependent, and nationally monopolistic characteristics of early modern European economic developments rather than as descriptions of their historical reality. Compared to the monopolies that led to institutional and political legitimizations of capitalism in Europe, the Chinese state during the Ming-​Qing period was in certain areas more decentered than its European counterparts. In Arrighi’s view, China during this period actually developed its economy

60

60  The Age of Silver

in closer resemblance to the form of “natural” market growth envisioned by Smith. Given its increased productivity in keeping with tremendous population growth, Ming-​Qing society was likely experiencing an “industrious revolution” on the basis of small-​scale production in agriculture and industry, as opposed to capital accumulation propelled by monopolistic business organizations during Europe’s long sixteenth century (c. 1350–​1650).32 In line with Arrighi’s argument, historical research on the silverization of Chinese economy also reveals a mostly market-​driven monetary transition. As mentioned, late Ming China’s silver standard evolved through the market’s resistance to state-​authorized money, a trend the Ming court finally yielded to by instituting the “Single-​Whip Method” (yi tiao bian fa) in 1581, which mandated that all taxes be collected in silver. Despite having become the foundation of the national economy, silver, in terms of its supply source, remained dependent upon private overseas trade. For this reason, silver money in pre-​1800 China was never minted as national coins, but exchanged in terms of the weight unit “tael” or “liang” and degrees of purity.33 Thus moving from its state-​sanctioned currency to market-​based commodity currency, China’s monetary history during the Age of Silver followed a path opposite to coeval European and Japanese evolvements, which were directly subjected to the state’s minting and coining system. An understanding of this difference belies the stereotypical image of the Chinese state as a constantly centralized power system that held the nation’s economy firmly in its grip.34 Furthermore, and somewhat paradoxically, the apparent stability of imperial China’s sociopolitical structure likely had to do with its relatively fluid class structure. According to William Skinner, in Chinese history “a cultural development comparable to that of the bourgeoisie of late medieval Europe or of the chōnin of Tokugawa Japan was forestalled by the absence of effective barriers to the eventual translation of commercial wealth into gentry status.”35 This “absence of effective barriers” occurred after the early disintegration of aristocratic powers in Chinese history through the Tang (618–​907)-​Song (960–​1279) dynastic transition around the tenth century. Noting the comparative historical significance of this key sociopolitical change, the Japanese Sinologist Naitō Konan (1866–​1934) advanced the influential argument that modernity began with Song China due to the state’s fostering of a nonaristocratic and nonmilitary class of the scholar-​official elite, a system that further freed peasant labor and encouraged for-​market production. Owing to these earlier developments, there was very little aristocracy to stand in the way of late Ming mercantile capitalism. Meanwhile, the demoted position of commerce in Confucian thinking did not, in practice, establish real obstacles to the translation of mercantile wealth into urban elite status. By educating their sons toward success in civil examinations, mercantile families could legitimately enter the rank of the scholar-​official elite.36

61

Along the Grand Canal  61

Also related to the question of the “modern” character of Ming society is whether it had a “civil society” or “public sphere,” a topic that instigated heated debates in the 1990s. According to William Rowe, who was one of the first to argue for the existence of a civil society in Ming China, “even though ‘there was no discursive counterpart in imperial China for civil society,’ one can find many signs of commercial capitalism, public management, civil law, publishing for profit, and even autonomous organizations from the late Ming on.”37 Whereas objectors to Rowe’s position inevitably drew upon fundamental differences between Chinese and European histories, Philip Kuhn offered the salutatory reminder that “the ‘West’ from which Jürgen Habermas, among others, elaborated the concepts of the public sphere and civil society is not the historical West but its theoretical double”—​that is to say, “they are ideal types, not direct transcriptions of concrete historical formations.”38 Given this more or less spectral quality of the “civil society,” it becomes possible to rearrange its potential empirical resources beyond its conventional avatars, landmarks, and linear arcs. Though lacking a bourgeois revolution, late Ming cultural and political history does present a wealth of examples for this thought experiment. Notably, for instance, while social attitudes toward commerce and consumption during the period could be either “progressive” or “conservative,” wavering between the discourses of “splendor” (sheng) and “excess” (she), both sides presented critical views of traditional figures of authority such as high officials, leaders of the Buddhist and Daoist clergy, and members of the imperial court.39 These criticisms are especially visible in personal essays, dramas, fictions, and other forms of “unofficial” writings, which all surged during the late Ming period in a cultural context characterized by commercial publishing, private academies, “heterodox” philosophies, increased fractions within the elite, and a growing class of discontented scholars unable to find success in the impossibly competitive civil examinations. As a salient indication of the critical cultural atmosphere of the period, the corruption case of the former high courtier Yan Song (1480–​1567) and his son Yan Shifan became a national scandal and a recurring subject in dramatic and fictional literatures from the late Ming period. Meanwhile, representing the increasing independency of scholar-​officials, in 1589, a magistrate named Luo Yuren boldly condemned the Wanli emperor in his well-​publicized memoir for indulging in the “four vices” of “wine, sex, money, and vanity.” The literati activism indicated by Luo’s action reached a climax during the last few decades of the Ming dynasty, when the Donglin party emerged as a politically self-​ conscious organization among discontented officials. In light of all these examples, should the late Ming state be called “despotic,” as the familiar Orientalist trope goes, this was a form of despotism that had already been vigorously denounced by late Ming writers and political activists.40

62

62  The Age of Silver

Based on the foregoing considerations, late Ming China exhibited signs of “early modernity” in terms of its vigorous economic growth and an emergent domain of critical political culture. The Plum in the Golden Vase emerged upon these historical conditions. Characterized by Hanan as the “first true Chinese novel,” this Chinese literary landmark can be further posited as the world’s “first modern novel” for the purpose of broadening the historical theory of the novel. Encyclopedic in scope, Plum creates a full picture of the “confusions of pleasure” of its age, a world that is shot through with the modern existential problematic Lukács characterizes as “transcendental homelessness.” Generally speaking, Plum belongs to the “conservative” end of late Ming thought, since its basic concerns converge with Zhang Tao’s dark view of the disorderly reign of the “lord of silver.” Underlain by a Confucian framework, the novel nonetheless expresses a strident critique of the moral failures of the scholar-​official class and of the imperial court. The domestic unit at its narrative center thus serves as a metaphor for national political economic degenerations. While correlating the individual self, the family, and the state according to the Neo-​Confucian discourse of moral management, Plum ironically represents a radical fall of this utopian Confucian universe in an era ruled by money and objects.41 Thus exposing the degraded authority of the state and engaging with the national problem of materiality, Plum exhibits a civil-​aesthetic dynamic we can likewise locate in the other cases surveyed in this book. In the section below, we first examine how Plum utilizes the motif of silver money for narrating a nation in decay and for treating the new individual images foregrounded by such a historical crisis.

THE LORD OF SILVER

In chapter 79, Plum moves into one of its most crucial narrative moments—​ the death of its protagonist, the lecherous merchant Ximen Qing. Having bribed his way up the official ladder and amassed a large fortune, he falls fatally ill due to his sexual excesses. Thirty-​three and sonless at the point of his death, Ximen Qing must entrust his entire estate to his son-​in-​law and heir-​by-​default, Chen Jingji. In this distressing context, the protagonist discloses to Chen in an impressively clearheaded manner all the complicated finances of his multibusiness network: The satin goods store has a capital worth 50,000 taels of silver, but part of the capital and interest belongs to our kinsman Qiao and should be returned to him. Have manager Fu sell off the stock, one batch at a time, and then close the shop. The spun silk store being managed by Ben the Fourth has a capital

63

Along the Grand Canal  63

worth 6,500 taels of silver, and the silk and cotton goods store being managed by Brother-​in-​Law Wu the Second a capital worth 5,000 taels. After selling off the stock, the proceeds should be brought home . . . Li the Third and Huang the Fourth still owe us the 500 taels of capital that they borrowed, not to mention the 150 taels of interest that they owe us. If you succeed in collecting these debts, you can use the money to pay for my funeral expenses. You and manager Fu can continue to operate the two shops in the front of our property. The pawn shop has an operating capital of 20,000 taels, and the herbal medicine shop one of 5,000 taels. Clerk Han and Laibao have 4,000 taels worth of merchandise on their boat in Songjiang. As soon as the waterways are open to navigation again, you should go down to meet their boat and bring the cargo back home to be sold. The silver realized by the sale can be used to provide the living expenses for your mother-​in-​law and the rest of the family. School Official Liu still owes me 300 taels, Assistant Magistrate Hua owes me 50 taels, and Xu the Fourth’s shop outside the city gate still owes me 340 taels of capital and interest. The contrasts for these debts are all in my possession, and someone should be sent as soon as possible to press for their collection.42

Businesslike yet rife with melancholic undertones, Ximen Qing’s plan to liquidate his long array of business ventures chillingly mirrors his physical depletion. Strikingly, with his lingering breath, the protagonist draws close to a dozen references to specific amounts of money, all counted in silver and adding up to about a hundred thousand taels. Alongside these financial details that reflect his variegated dealings in textile goods, herbal medicine, and moneylending, the protagonist mentions a roster of his employees and debtors, who form a mixed social group comprised of shop clerks, merchants, and scholar-​officials. Geography constitutes another economic matter that occupies the dying man’s mind: the waterway that leads to Songjiang (modern-​day Shanghai) is frozen, blocking cotton goods worth four thousand taels from returning. After Ximen Qing’s death, Chen Jingji must cash in that cargo for the living expenses of the remaining family. When commenting on this financially meticulous passage upon the moment of Ximen Qing’s death, Plum’s important seventeenth-​century commentator Zhang Zhupo wrote that “the whole purpose of the many ledgers is to show the reader the uselessness of wealth, which one cannot take away at death.”43 In this regard, Ximen Qing’s numerically stuffed deathbed ledger ultimately points to a transcendental void. According to Zhang Zhupo, moreover, Plum’s narrative features an ironic contrast between “heat” (yan) and “cold” (liang) imageries: the first encodes the protagonist’s meteoric rise and the crowded human network he attracts with wealth and power, and the second connotes the inherent emptiness of his emotionally

64

64  The Age of Silver

hollow relations, which scatter as soon as his possessions disperse.44 Ximen Qing’s deathbed ledger thus embodies both the climax and anticlimax of his life, for the material assets he has so obsessively and unscrupulously accumulated will soon fall apart and enter the hands of others, in close resemblance to the women in his family compound. The alteration of possession and dispossession patterns the basic rhythm of Plum, and the fates of the novel’s human actors are closely interlocked with the unstable itineraries of money and things. In complete opposition to Ximen Qing’s wistful deathbed wish that the household should “keep vigil over [his] spirit tablet, and not go your separate ways” (ch.79; Roy, 4:655), the last twenty chapters of Plum quickly play out the family’s disintegration and its economic collapse, as the wealth and the human network the protagonist has accumulated rapidly dwindle to nothingness. In his commentary on the protagonist’s deathbed words, Zhang Zhupo counts alongside Ximen Qing and observes that the total capital worth of the protagonist’s shops, merchandizes, loans, and real estate amounts to around 100,000 taels. This is not a very impressive sum in the eyes of Zhang Zhupo, who lived during the late seventeenth century, as he bewails after the calculation, “Ximen Qing’s wealth adds up to but a little over a hundred thousand taels, yet he has led such a sinful life. Alas, how frightening it is!”45 Writings more contemporary with Plum conform to Zhang Zhupo’s sense that Ximen Qing’s opulence as described by the novel is merely moderate. Several late sixteenth-​century sources report that the richest merchants of the time boasted a million taels or more.46 Dwarfed by the actual moguls of the period, Ximen Qing is nonetheless rich enough to undo life or cheat death in the social world portrayed by Plum, wherein the price for a young servant is usually just a few taels.47 Those having artistic skills and sexual appeal would have cost more, such as Pan Jinlian—​X imen Qing’s fifth wife and partner in crime, who was sold for thirty taels at the age of sixteen (ch. 10; Roy 1:26). In ­chapter 10, fifty taels and a set of silver and gold wares given to the local magistrate help the protagonist get away with the murder of Wu Da (ch. 10; Roy 1:189). Later on, when a prosecutor from the Ming court launches charges against Ximen Qing and his political protectors, the protagonist flees the arms of law with a heftier bribe—​five hundred taels (ch. 17; Roy 1:343). In fact, even if we double the price, as Ximen Qing does when judging a murder case after having become a magistrate himself (ch. 47; Roy 3:141), one hundred thousand taels would still be enough to buy one’s life a hundred times over. Although it saturates Plum’s narrative world, silver is a rarer presence in earlier Chinese literary works. Notably, Plum’s monetary scene diverges from its source materials in Outlaws of the Marsh, in which paper bills and

65

Along the Grand Canal  65

copper cash are more common than silver currency. Overall, despite its alleged setting in the Northern Song dynasty of the twelfth century, Plum unambiguously reflects the contemporary life of late sixteenth-​century China, an unfolding present that was materially different from not only the Song dynasty several centuries ago but also the fairly recent past during which Outlaws was composed, perhaps somewhere around the mid-​ fifteenth century. Throughout Plum’s massive narrative, except for one or two references to copper cash, the numerous monetary transactions the novel describes—​from major business deals to small tips—​are all delivered in silver. One instance of the currency difference between Plum and Outlaws is that, while copying almost verbatim from Outlaws the passages on Wu Song’s defeat of a ferocious tiger, Plum changes the reward Wu receives from the local magistrate from “one thousand strings of copper cash”—​presumably given via a paper bill that represents the amount—​to thirty taels of silver.48 Historically, the numismatic change that happens between Outlaws and Plum directly corresponds to Ming China’s rapid “silverization” after the influx of overseas bullion. Although Plum’s composition date is still a matter of debate, many scholars have followed the text’s internal historical evidences and attributed the time of its completion to the 1580s or the 1590s during the Wanli reign (1572–​1620). In particular, given the novel’s several references to an agrarian tax in silver, its final version must have been finished after the nationwide implementation of the “Single-​Whip Method” (yi tiao bian fa) in 1581.49 If the practice of the “Single-​Whip Method” signifies the silverization of late Ming China’s national economy, Plum is very much a satire of the silverization of the national psychology. Given the actual fall of the Ming dynasty several decades later, the novel’s portrayal of the reign of silver money as a buildup to national disasters is almost clairvoyant. Notably, the Chinese word for “silver” is homophonous with that of “excess,” both pronounced as “yin.” Usually referring to sexual licentiousness, yin as excess also implies a more abstract sense of greed and transgression.50 This symbolic connotation is fundamental to the literary design of Plum and to its underlying political critique on the degraded late Ming state. In fact, a rumored origin of the novel is that it was written to satirize the corrupt courtier Yan Song, whose embezzlement scandal became a flagrant sign of the degeneration of the scholar-​official class. Twentieth-​ century academics have also proposed that the book’s target was imperial, with possible candidates ranging from the earlier Zhengde emperor (re.1505–​1521) to the reigning Wanli emperor.51 Though none of these theories are conclusive and it is overly reductive to read the novel as a roman à clef, Plum does feature an overarching political theme through its depictions of Ximen Qing’s corrupt liaison with the high courtier Cai Jing.

66

66  The Age of Silver

Cultivated through the protagonist’s lavish bribes, Cai’s patronage ensures Ximen Qing’s climb up the social and economic ladder with complete disregard to morality and law. Having rewarded the semi-​illiterate protagonist a government position (ch. 30), Cai Jing later ritualizes his ties to Ximen Qing by taking him as a foster son (ch. 55).52 Given that the father-​son bond rests at the core of the Confucian “Five Cardinal Relations” (wu lun), Ximen Qing’s sonship to Cai Jing is emblematic of the novel’s underlying concerns with the political and kinship disorders induced by unchecked greed. In fact, having a name that suggestively puns on “wealth” (cai) and “semen” (jing)—​words that symbolize the avarice and lust that characterize the protagonist’s life—​the minister’s role in the novel can be read in more symbolic than realistic terms, and hence as an archetypal figure of the general collapse of the Confucian civilizational order due to the overflow of material self-​interests.53

VIEWS FROM LINQING

Staging Ximen Qing’s corrupt ties to Cai Jing upon a city-​state nation-​ scape, Plum’s geographic setting represents the collective degenerations that spread from the imperial center to the urban merchant class. In his classic historical geographical analysis, William Skinner theorizes the “top-​down” administrative enforcement of the state and the “bottom-​up” economic accumulations of the city as two mutually responsive forces in late imperial China’s political economy, a model Charles Tilly has borrowed to study nation formation in general.54 Plum’s literary geography is richly suggestive of these nationally framed city-​state interactions. On the surface, the main setting of Plum is a provincial town named Qinghe, where Ximen Qing lives with his large household of six wives and numerous servants. For the most part, the protagonist moves between his family courtyard and his shops, as well as the town’s brothels, temples, and government bureaus. The novel only shows Ximen Qing traveling far away from Qinghe in two chapters, both times to the capital to visit the powerful courtier Cai Jing (ch. 55; ch. 70). Meanwhile, the protagonist has at his disposal a team of delegates who regularly travel on his behalf for currying political favor or purchasing commercial goods. For the first of these goals, the destination is almost invariably Cai Jing’s mansion in the capital. The business trips, on the other hand, routinely end up in Lower Yangzi areas such as Hangzhou and Songjing, wherefrom Ximen Qing’s employees buy quantities of silk and cotton. Merchants from the Lower Yangzi region and other parts of China repeatedly appear in Qinghe as well, bringing in trading

67

Along the Grand Canal  67

opportunities from afar. In addition to traveling characters, distant exotics, from extravagant textiles to overseas spices, are essential to the trappings of luxury that saturate the decadent life of the Ximen household. The protagonist’s town-​based social circle is thus situated within a narrative world space with multiple transregional networks. Though fictionalized, Plum’s literary geography can be closely mapped to the economic geography of late Ming China. Notably, by setting the story in the city of “Qinghe,” Plum makes a deliberate change to its predecessor, Outlaws, in which the story of Wu Da’s murder occurs in a primarily rural location named Yanggu. Along with this modification, the novel repeatedly asserts that Qinghe—​which has no exact historical equivalent in itself—​ is close to Linqing, a historically important port city in today’s Shandong province, located at the heart of the Grand Canal that connected the Ming capital, Beijing, with Hangzhou—​the center of the economically advanced Lower Yangzi region. According to several scholars of the novel, the fictional Qinghe was indeed based upon the historical setting of Linqing.55 In this light, via its alteration of the geography of Outlaws, Plum transfers its narrative world from the countryside to the city, and subsequently to the intertwined political economic networks between the city and the state. Historically, after the restoration of its Canal section in the early fifteenth century, Lingqing became the home of a national custom house, which garnered more tax revenue than any other station around the nation by the late sixteenth century. Population grew as the city’s commerce thrived, rising from 8,356 during the late fourteenth century to 66,745 in the year 1600 according to official census reports. More importantly, Linqing attracted from all corners of China a great number of traveling merchants, who supposedly outnumbered the local population by tenfold. Through the Canal’s broad interregional outreaches, Linqing’s goods reached as far as the Bohai Bay area that faces the Korean Peninsula in the north and Guangdong and Fujian in the south, ports that were directly linked with maritime commerce.56 During the Ming period, foreign travelers who found the chance to enter the Chinese inland—​including the famous Matteo Ricci—​a lso typically journeyed up the Canal and encountered Linqing as a main stop.57 In 1472, when he saw the city for the first time, the eminent scholar-​official Li Dongyang (1447–​1516) wrote that “Official and merchant boats sail past thick and fast,” apparently approving of Linqing’s intermingled political and economic flows.58 In contrast to Li Dongyang’s praise of late Ming China’s vibrant material culture, Plum stresses instead the problem of excess that came along with the quickened circulations of objects and people, since they directly corroded the nation’s political and cultural institutions. Mirroring the historical Linqing, the Qinghe in Plum boasts a thoroughly commercialized

68

68  The Age of Silver

scene, wherein the protagonist’s many businesses thrive. Importantly, aside from being a moneylender, Ximen Qing has broad dealings in luxury goods. His textile stores, by far the largest of his investments, are filled with silk fineries legally forbidden to the merchant class. His herbal medicine shop in fact contains many varieties of spices, including overseas exotics. The commodification of these luxury goods in Plum again mirrors historical trends of the late Ming period. Textile production around the Lower Yangzi region, which constituted the historical background of the novel’s depictions of Ximen Qing’s silk business, was, in Brook’s words, “a clear example” of “the transition from trading in surplus to trading in commodities” in the development of commerce after the mid-​Ming.59 Moreover, by their convenient access to the Canal, Linqing merchants indeed formed a prominent group in the nationwide textile trade. Spice, another important category in Ximen Qing’s trade, was also a proliferating luxury good of the period, and its importation doubled over the course of the late Ming. Failing to ban private spice trade, the Ming state eventually legalized it in coastal regions from Zhejiang to Canton and Fujian. Henceforth, the “social life” of spice in China transformed from a time-​honored “tributary” and religious item to a free circulating commodity.60 In world-​historical terms, Ximen Qing deals in two of the most profitable global commodities of the period: silk and spice. In the narrative design of Plum, the protagonist’s relation to these lucrative luxury goods takes on a chaotic promiscuity as he simultaneously employs them for trade, bribe, and personal consumption. On the one hand, the novel portrays Ximen Qing’s textile trades as being highly profitable and serving a vibrant local consumer culture: the “spun silk store” he opens with 500 taels worth of stock purchased at a bargain of 450 taels, for instance, sells “several tens of tales worth of merchandise” every day (ch. 33; Roy, 2:262–​263). By the time of Ximen Qing’s death, this shop accumulates a value of 6,500 taels—​ more than twelve times that of its initial cargo. Enormously enriched by the textile commerce, the Ximen household—​in blatant violation of Ming sumptuary laws—​indulges itself in the finest and latest fashion vogues. In ­chapter 15, when feasting in a roadside building on the night of the Lantern Festival, the protagonist’s lavishly dressed wives dazzle passersby with their new robes made with the richest brocades, fine satin, and other extravagant silk materials. Noticing the courtly style of their dresses, an onlooker begins to speculate that they “must be dependents of some princely or noble household.” Ironically, this comment is immediately followed by another observer’s conjecture that the women “must be whores from the licensed quarter that some big spender has engaged to entertain him while he enjoys the lanterns” (Roy, 1:304). Such a juxtaposition of the court and the brothel testifies to the utter social disarray in an age of indiscriminate

69

Along the Grand Canal  69

luxury consumption, while deflating imperial authority to little more than an image of extravagance and luxury. The gossips on the street of Qinghe thus deliver a strident commentary on the cultural chaos of the period. According to Sophie Volpp’s rightful observation, in Plum “objects out of place serve as an index of people out of place.”61 In the novel, other than being consumed by the Ximen household itself, out-​of-​bounds luxury goods are the sine qua non of Ximen Qing’s elaborate gifts to Cai Jing. Symbolizing deviant political and kinship exchanges, these forbidden objects are often enumerated and foregrounded in the text. The set of gifts that later win Ximen Qing the foster fatherhood of Cai Jing, for instance, are catalogued in full in the novel: These consisted of a crimson python robe, a dragon robe of statutory green, twenty bolts of brocade in Han dynasty pattern, twenty bolts of Sichuan brocade, twenty bolts of asbestos fabric, and twenty bolts of cloth imported from the Western Ocean. In addition, there were forty bolts of fabrics in flowered and plain patterns, a girdle with a jade plaque depicting the king of the Lion Barbarian, a girdle with a plaque of aloeswood enchased with gold, ten pairs each of jade cups and cups of rhinoceros horn, eight goblets of pure gold enchased with floral designs, ten luminescent pearls, and two hundred ounces of gold for his own personal expenditures (Roy, 3:356).

Revealing the blatantly transgressive nature of the gifts, the catalogue begins with the extravagant python robe and the exclusive imperial regalia itself—​the dragon robe, followed by other first-​rank silk luxuries.62 The list also includes valuable exotics that traditionally served as ritual gifts in the imperial court, yet became widely commercialized during the late Ming period, such as the “asbestos fabric” and “Western-​Ocean” cloth (likely Indian calico), the gold-​enchased plaque of aloeswood, and the rhino-​horn cup.63 The use of all these prestige items as a merchant’s bribes to a high official ironically subverts the courtly gift culture. Mirroring actual historical trends to an extent, the outrageous catalogue in this scene is a fictionally exaggerated account that aims to drive home the degradation of the exchanged objects’ traditional political-​ritual meanings. Remarkably, Plum frequently refers to gifts used as bribes as renqing, a term that literally means “human feelings.” This usage is a corruption of the term’s classical Confucian meaning as the sincere sorrow a son feels at the passing of his father.64 Extending beyond the merely affective ties between parent and child, in the Confucian moral system the principle of filial piety (xiao) is regarded as the universal foundation upon which other “cardinal relations” (lun) are built—​namely, the bonds between the sovereign and his ministers, between husband and wife, between the elder and

70

70  The Age of Silver

the younger brothers, and between friends.65 Given these symbolic ramifications, the idea of filial piety in Confucian thought resembles a religious imperative, or, in Andrew Plaks’s words, “the central axis running through all the other cardinal relations, often conceived as a quasi-​metaphysical model of vertical continuity at the heart of the cosmic order.”66 The degradation of filial piety into money and gifts, which the novel exemplifies through the case of Ximen Qing and Cai Jing, thus represents a dislocation of the entire Confucian ideal of social order. Simultaneously, nonetheless, this literary emphasis on displacement demystifies the subject-​sovereign bond figured in filial terms, and provides the basis of the novel’s powerful political critique. Manifested through Ximen Qing’s relation to Cai Jing, Plum’s political purpose also underlies the domestic unit at the center of its narrative world. Overall, the protagonist’s decadent personal life mirrors parallel chaos across society at large and within state politics. By this correspondence, the symbolic implications of the novel’s domestic sphere radiate far beyond the scope of a family or a city and toward a parameter of representation that is no less than “China”—​or what the novel calls the “Central Plain,” zhongyuan—​itself.

SEXUAL POLITICS

In ­chapter 21 of Plum, in one of the scandalous jokes that is told during a family banquet, Ximen Qing’s six wives are compared to the “six ministries” of the state. The jester further suggests that the women’s chambers are as open to outside visitors as the ministries to the itinerant “head yamen clerk” (Roy 2:24). Though presented as a joke, the state-​family correlation in this scene hints at the novel’s allegorical treatment of its central domestic setting. Throughout the narrative, Ximen Qing is recurrently compared to a “benighted ruler.”67 Given his corrupt ties to Cai Jing, the protagonist’s failed rulership over his household corresponds to larger political and social disorders. In service to this general framework, while possessing memorable individualities, the protagonist’s wives all symbolize aspects of the degraded cultural and political system. The ineptitude of Ximen Qing’s principal wife, Wu Yueniang (Moon Lady), for instance, connotes the ineffectuality of the established ritual authority.68 The second wife Li Jiao’er and the fourth wife Sun Xue’e, who are both former prostitutes, represent the decadent material life of the Ximen household, since the former is the keeper of the family coffers and the latter oversees the kitchen. As a telling indication of the household’s defunct ritual order and its materialistic human ties similar to the sex trade, Wu Yueniang ends up adopting Li

71

Along the Grand Canal  71

Jiao’er’s niece, Li Guijie, a popular prostitute patronized by Ximen Qing, as her “foster daughter.” While reflecting kinship chaos in the Ximen family, Wu’s absurd foster motherhood mirrors the protagonist’s likewise disorderly connections to Cai Jing. The confused and fickle domestic relations in the novel thus symbolically parallel political corruption on the level of the state.69 More at the center of the narrative are Ximen Qing’s three other wives: Meng Yulou, Pan Jinlian, and Li Ping’er. All of them, intriguingly, are widows. Meng Yulou, the protagonist’s third wife, is said to be the widow of a cotton-​cloth dealer, who amassed a sizeable fortune from his booming trade (ch. 7). Meng’s marriage to Ximen Qing has obvious financial consequences: her dowry contains more than 1000 taels of silver, which is a considerable addition to the protagonist’s wealth at this earlier point of the novel. An even more lucrative marriage, on the other hand, comes from Ximen Qing’s sixth wife, Li Ping’er. Li was once the wife of Hua Zixu, one of the protagonist’s “sworn-​brothers.” “Sworn-​brotherhood,” literally called “the bond of righteousness” or jieyi, is a heroic motif central to the earlier “extraordinary books” from Three Kingdoms to Outlaws. By taking an oath to treat each other as brothers, the characters in these earlier narratives are willing to sacrifice even their own lives to honor the bond.70 An affront to this heroic concept of jieyi, Ximen Qing’s ties to his several so-​ called “sworn-​brothers,” most of whom are shameless hangers-​on, revolve around their endless merrymakings in local brothels and are fraught with instances of mutual manipulation and deceit. In the case of Hua Zixu, who happens to be the protagonist’s next-​door neighbor, Ximen Qing has sworn brotherhood with him because of his rumored wealth. Ximen’s later adultery with Hua’s wife, Li Ping’er, is likewise entangled with monetary interests. During the affair, and after a threatening legal charge against Hua over his questionable inheritances, Li resolutely passes trunks of treasures and silver taels into Ximen Qing’s hands, secretly planning to leave her husband for good. Later on, having fallen ill due to the stress of the legal charge, Hua Zixu dies after Li Ping’er’s neglect and mistreatment (ch. 14). Soon afterwards, Ximen Qing buys the adjacent land of the Hua household with the very money Li Ping’er has provided and finally marries Li as his sixth wife. Similar to Meng’s dowry, the wealth Li brings to Ximen Qing over the course of their affair and marriage is crucial to his initial capital accumulation. In terms of Confucian cardinal relations, Ximen Qing’s affair with Li Ping’er—​the wife of a former sworn-​brother—​dislodges the sacred bonds of marriage, brotherhood, and friendship. Meanwhile, the narrative repeatedly hints that Li Ping’er’s enormous wealth likely came from political corruption and sexual scandal. Unrelated to any specific trade, Hua Zixu inherited

72

72  The Age of Silver

his wealth from his uncle, a former palace eunuch. In the novel, little is disclosed about the dead eunuch except that, according to a brief speech by Li Ping’er, he “succeeded in amassing a tiny fortune for himself . . . when he came back from Canton.” As Li further divulges, seeing his own nephew as a good-​for-​nothing, the eunuch entrusted most of his property to Li Ping’er “for safekeeping” (ch. 15; Roy, 1:277). Though not openly stated in the text, during the late Ming a eunuch in Canton—​the home of Ming China’s major customhouse dealing with overseas commerce—​could mean only one thing: an overseer of the foreign trade bureau (shi bo si). Wielding a power that often superseded the authority of local officials, eunuchs in Canton frequently engaged in corruption and embezzlement.71 In Plum, the old eunuch’s inappropriate decision to entrust his possessions to Li Ping’er instead of her husband also seems to suggest a quasi-​incestuous relationship between Li and her uncle-​in-​law. The wealth Li brings to the protagonist through her betrayal of Hua is thus tainted by political and sexual wrongdoings from the start, in parallel to its corrupt functions in the control of the new owner. Due to the unusual political origins of her wealth, Li Ping’er possesses rare treasures that are still hard to find around the marketplace despite the proliferation of luxury commodities. Always including the ritually significant python robe as a centerpiece in his gifts to Cai Jing, Ximen Qing is on one occasion short of some specific varieties of the python robe to complete his tributes. Learning of the situation, Li Ping’er immediately contributes bolts of textiles embroidered with the python pattern from her own stash of luxury goods (ch. 25; Roy 2:98). Considerably finer than those purchased in the counterfeit market of Hangzhou, Li’s python textiles are of authentic palace origin and likely came from the old eunuch’s embezzlements. This episode suggests that the palace, while possessing material privileges the market cannot fully reproduce, is nothing but a hub of the most expensive and lavish objects, which can be spirited away and possessed by others without moral qualms. Power is, in this sense, detached from any sacred or ethical core of meaning, and comes to be defined entirely by the possession of things. Whereas Li’s fathomless possessions connote political disorder, Plum’s most memorable character, Pan Jinlian, Ximen Qing’s fifth wife, embodies an unscrupulous desire for wealth and power through her sexual appeal. Indicating the sexualized nature of Pan’s image, her name “Jinlian” literally means “Golden Lotus,” which is an epithet for the ultimate erotic fetish in late Ming culture—​that is, the bound feet. Many of the novel’s most scandalous sexual scenes take place between her and the protagonist. However, Pan’s repeated bargaining for favors and gifts during these heated moments reveals the material motives that underlie her sexual relation to Ximen Qing. The pecuniary subtext inherent in Pan’s eroticism is also present

73

Along the Grand Canal  73

in many of the protagonist’s other affairs, which are likewise maintained through his gifts of money and fashion goods. The most blatant of these cases concerns his adultery with Wang Liu’er (literally Wang the Sixth), the wife of his employee, Han Daoguo. Fully aware of the affair, Han turns a blind eye to the already publicized scandal for the material benefits it generates. Wang Liu’er, indeed, feels self-​justified enough to boast to Han that their improved living conditions are “all owing to my willingness to surrender my body to him” (ch. 39; Roy, 2:392). Given that Pan Jinlian is the sixth of her family and is sometimes called “Liu’er,” she and Wang Liu’er are clearly narrative doubles. Significantly, Ximen Qing’s death occurs as a consequence of his consecutive sexual encounters with Wang Liu’er and Pan Jinlian, the two eroticized characters who are at the same time barefacedly materialistic. This narrative outcome follows upon a key event that occurs around midway through Plum’s voluminous narrative, when Ximen Qing receives one hundred pills of a special aphrodisiac from a mysterious “foreign monk.” The protagonist first tries the drug with Wang Liu’er. Later on, he also frequently uses it in his “battles” with Pan. In the chapter in which he falls fatally ill, the one hundred pills are almost spent. Having consumed one of his last doses in a reckless orgy with Wang Liu’er, the intoxicated protagonist returns home and stumbles into the room of a sex-​starved Pan Jinlian. In her aroused haste, Pan administers the last three pills of aphrodisiac to the heavily drunk Ximen Qing, forgetting the monk’s warning that the drug must be taken one pill at a time. Stimulated by this overdose and virtually unconscious, Ximen Qing is subjected to Pan’s manipulations. This startling scene ends with the unstoppable overflow of the protagonist’s semen, followed by blood and finally mere cold air (ch. 79). Notably, the eroticized plot of Ximen Qing’s death structurally parallels his devious pursuit of wealth through currying political favors, since the foreign monk episode occurs immediately after his lavish banquet with two newly appointed officials, an occasion that allows him to bribe one guest into assigning him 30,000 “salt vouchers” (yan yin) and special permission to monopolize the trade for one month. Through these privileges, the protagonist makes an extraordinary profit, which he subsequently invests into the opening of a lucrative satin goods shop (ch. 60; Roy, 3:495). The novel’s juxtaposition of the “salt vouchers” and the aphrodisiac interconnects the protagonist’s economic and sexual desires. However, the fatal overdose at the end ironically nullifies the meaning of every silver tael he has earned. When describing the depleting gush of the protagonist’s semen, the novel employs a striking metaphor:  like “mercury pouring down a tube” (ch. 79; Roy, 4:1120). Given the late Ming belief in the transmutability between mercury and silver,

74

74  The Age of Silver

and that the Chinese term for mercury—​shui yin—​l iterally means “water silver,” the novel’s metaphorical description of Ximen Qing’s fatal ejaculation simultaneously offers a potent image of the melting away of his wealth, which will soon be stolen, appropriated, or squandered by his circle of false confidants. In light of the above analysis, Plum’s theme of sexual excess serves a purpose of political and moral critique. Whereas the novel foregrounds sexual deviance in its depiction of the protagonist’s decadence, money rests at the foundation of all his political and personal misdoings. According to Zhang Zhupo’s comment, in Plum, “Though sex is able to move people, it is not a pass to everything as wealth is.”72 The nineteenth-​century commentator Wen Long likewise notes that in the book “The harms caused by money are more severe than the damages related to sex.”73 Notably, Wen Long’s comment is given with regard to ­chapter 27, which includes some of the most scandalous sexual scenes in this generally risqué novel. Before portraying its central sexual episode, the chapter meaningfully begins with a detailed account of Ximen Qing’s gifts to Cai Jing, bribes that would soon buy the protagonist a post in the officialdom (ch. 30). Remarkably, the centerpiece of these gifts consists of four silver statues (yin ren)—​which pun on “men of lust” or “men of excess.” These intriguing figurines symbolically suggest the “four wicked ministers” headed by Cai Jing, a group of political evildoers whose mismanagement and greed are berated by the novel for ruining the entire empire. This prelude indicates that the sexual perversion in the main body of the chapter implicitly functions to condemn the political and economic perversions that occur in the novel’s background.74 In order to perceive the confluence of sexual and political themes in Plum, we should also attend to the significant image of fashion goods in the novel. While the novel’s female characters prostitute themselves for fine jewelry and clothing, luxury fashion objects likewise occupy a prominent position in Ximen Qing’s gifts to Cai Jing. As mentioned, the protagonist’s birthday tributes to Cai Jing invariably contain python robes. These robes are typically dyed bright red, which is, according to Ming laws, a sacred color reserved for major ritual occasions, such as ancestral worship at the imperial temple.75 In Plum, the ritually honored crimson color nonetheless proliferates as a vulgarized status symbol. As soon as he obtains an official title, for instance, Ximen Qing begins to appear in a variety of crimson robes, although the color is well beyond his given rank. Personifying the corruption of political power, Cai Jing is also conspicuously associated with the crimson robe. In the only chapter where the minister appears in person, the novel lets us vaguely visualize him from the protagonist’s perspective: “There was placed a grand preceptor’s folding armchair, covered with a tiger skin, on which there sat a figure, garbed in a crimson python robe”

75

Along the Grand Canal  75

(ch. 55; Roy 3:354). Devoid of distinctive human features, Cai Jing’s image in the scene is completely defined by the objectified tokens of power around him. In ­chapter 70, in which Ximen Quing visits the capital to thank Cai Jing for his recent promotion, the slew of corrupt officials he encounters are likewise swathed in bright red. Toward the end of this chapter, after portraying Wang Ye and Gao Qiu—​two depraved courtiers similar to Cai Jing—​as both dressed with “crimson robes and jade belts,” the narrative warningly relates the color they wear to national disasters in the following passage: “Solely because the wicked and sycophantic occupied positions of power; It was only appropriate that the Central Plain should become soaked in blood” (ch. 70; Roy 4:303).76 Thus linked with blood and destruction, the proliferating crimson color foreshadows the violent fall of the dynasty in the novel’s final chapter when the smoke and flames of war swallow the once overly opulent empire, a catastrophic ending that darkly yet powerfully concludes the book’s national allegory about individual, domestic, and political degradations all under the rule of the lord of silver.

BEGINNINGS OF THE END

The final twenty chapters of Plum following Ximen Qing’s demise recount the quick disintegration of the Ximen household and the violent deaths of main characters such as Pan Jinlian and Chen Jingji. Soon after the protagonist’s death, Chen Jingji starts an affair with Pan Jinlian and the two are driven out of the household after Wu Yueniang finds out about the scandal. Later, Pan is brutally slaughtered by the returning Wu Song (ch. 87), while Chen dies at the hand of a bandit during his tryst with Pan’s maid and confidant, Chun Mei (Spring Plum), who then becomes the wife of a high-​ ranking officer (ch. 99). In contrast to the bandit heroes in Outlaws, Chen Jingji’s killer Zhang Sheng is as decadent as members of the Ximen family and has become the lover of Ximen Qing’s fourth wife, Sun Xue’e, who has been sold as a prostitute after the protagonist’s death. Finally, Chun Mei’s strange death due to her sexual excess, in a manner that resembles Ximen Qing’s ending, concludes the drama of kinship chaos in Plum’s final chapters.77 Significantly, the novel situates the dispersals and deaths of its central characters within the historical context of the fall of Northern Song due to the Jurchen invasion. Brought down by military forces from the north, the fictional dynasty in Plum has been ruined on a fundamental level by the corruption of the likes of Cai Jing and Ximen Qing. In the novel, the tragic fate of Ximen Qing’s firstborn son Guan Ge is an important

76

76  The Age of Silver

narrative arc that prefigures the domestic and national collapses that culminate at the novel’s end. The son of Ximen Qing and Li Ping’er, Guan Ge—​whose name means the “Boy of Official Entitlement”—​is born at the same moment the protagonist receives his official post from Cai Jing as a result of his lavish gifts. Though viewed by his father as an auspicious sign of his rising wealth and power, Guan Ge is always in poor health. Jealous of Li Ping’er’s wealth and fertility, Pan Jinlian deliberately trains her pet cat to attack the boy, which leads to Guan Ge’s premature death and, later, the passing of Li Ping’er due to inconsolable grief (ch. 62). Whereas Guan Ge’s feebleness allegorizes the fragility of Ximen Qing’s apparent success through devious political ties, his second son Xiao Ge, who is borne by Wu Yueniang upon the moment of his death, symbolically reinforces the theme of kinship decay. In the novel’s final chapter, amid a whirl of national chaos, Xiao Ge—​whose name means the “Boy of Filial Piety”—​is identified by a mysterious monk, Pujing, as the reincarnation of his father and as being destined to atone for Ximen Qing’s former sins. Thus Yuniang agrees to give up her son, who is already fifteen years old, to Pujing as a disciple (ch. 100). Although this conclusion seems to end the novel on a note of Buddhist redemption and regeneration, it hardly counterbalances the moral disorder elaborated throughout the narrative, wherein the Buddhist and Daoist clergies are portrayed as being equally contaminated by materialism as the secular world. Xiao Ge’s departure, which literally severs the family bloodline, thus indicates not so much a religious conclusion but the irrevocable loss of the kinship-​based Confucian moral-​political order.78 Overall, within the anarchic world of Plum, the only sense of order seems to come from materiality itself. Given the harms associated with erotic excess in the late Ming medical discourse, sex—​as indicated by the circumstances of Ximen Qing’s and Chun Mei’s deaths—​constitutes a fundamental biological limit the text employs to contain the otherwise boundless expansion of desire.79 Rather than resorting to a metaphysical source of meaning, the book thus asserts a merely physical truth. Whereas the novel utilizes the term “ben qian,” which means “foundational money” or “capital,” to refer to monetary funds and sexual prowess, its narrative revolves around an ironic contrast between these two forms of materiality: if wealth or capital is open to infinite growth, the body will be spent or damaged by indiscriminate sexual expenditure.80 By subsuming the unlimited principle of money to the limited principle of sex, then, the novel manages to reach a proper ending. The most scandalous aspect of the novel, in this sense, contains its moral core. Yet, if the deaths of characters such as Ximen Qing, Pan Jinlian, Chun Mei, and Chen Jingji express a retributive logic of desire, this self-​ destructive pattern somehow lacks universality in the world of the novel.

77

Along the Grand Canal  77

The most obvious exception to this pattern is Wang Liu’er. Directly motivated by money in her affair with Ximen Qing, Wang Liu’er is also the first to turn her back on the protagonist when he breathes his last, as she urges her husband, Han Daoguo, to embezzle the one thousand taels he acquired when trading cotton for Ximen Qing’s store. For Wang Liu’er, the money is a rightful reward for her years of sexual service to Ximen Qing. The two then run away with the money and suffer no retributive consequences (ch. 81). Later, the novel casually reports that, after Han Daoguo’s death, Wang Liu’er marries her former husband’s brother, with whom she has already developed an adulterous relation. By coincidence, Wang also ends up inheriting the land and properties of a gentry’s family. As one of the most materialistic characters in the novel, Wang Liu’er, through her sidelined fortuitous ending, suggests a reality principle of sheer objective contingencies beyond the retributive framework the novel employs in the other cases. The image of Meng Yulou, the cotton dealer’s widow, also complicates the novel’s attitudes toward materiality. Having chosen Ximen Qing as her second husband over the son of a local scholarly family, Meng clearly embodies a new social attitude. At the same time, despite her mercantile background and close association with Pan Jinlian, Meng remains a rational and pacifying character in the deeply fractioned household. Toward the book’s end, Meng remarries an official who shows her true affection, and the two are reported to have happily lived to an old age. In the opinion of Zhang Zhupo, given her capabilities of self-​management in the chaotic domestic environment, Meng’s image serves as the author’s “self-​a llusion.” If we follow this theory, Meng represents the novel’s endorsement of a more viable form of individual desire.81 Last but not the least, the most multivalent character in Plum is doubtlessly Pan Jinlian, the “one who fascinates as much as she repulses.”82 Pan is malicious, murderous, and always insecure of her standings, yet bold enough to objectify any man as the target of her lust. Unsettling the sexual hierarchy characteristic of patriarchal power, she embodies a radically transgressive form of individual desire. While using her image to express the thorough moral decay of the era, Plum foregrounds Pan as its most vividly portrayed character with complex intentions and desires.83 Comparatively, Pan’s image resonates with that of the similarly subversive heroines in Saikaku’s fiction and in Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Roxana. These insubordinate female images manifest the significance of gender and sexuality in denoting larger processes of cultural destabilization, and in representing altering visions of individuality. In the epilogue to this book, we will see further variations of these correlations of gender and individuality in Eastern and Western narrative texts.

78

78  The Age of Silver

In short, the new realist trend we observe in Plum has transculturally comparable aspects, and was rooted in Ming China’s socioeconomic shifts within a global system of material interrelations. While Plum shows few explicit concerns with the outside world, it does from time to time hint at an international sphere as a source of exotic goods and material temptations. Specifically, this foreign domain looms behind the Canton eunuch’s surreptitious embezzlement; the exotic spices consumed by the Ximen household; the forbidden overseas luxuries the protagonist sends to Cai Jing; and the outlandish image of the aphrodisiac-​giving monk. Moreover, in a historical sense unregistered by the novel itself, the “lord of silver” that rules over its degraded social world ultimately traveled from a much broader world space. In the following chapters, we shall see the pertinence of the same global silver economy to landmarks of narrative realism elsewhere. The most contemporary of these cases to the appearance of Plum in late Ming China took place in Spain, the “mother country” of the world’s richest silver mines. Despite their numerous differences, imperial Spain and Ming China were both epicenters of the Age of Silver, and were both at the forefront of the monetary impacts of the New World mining booms. In this macrohistorical context, it is unsurprising that money and commerce likewise became prominent narrative themes in Spanish picaresque fiction, which emerged during the late sixteenth century, and, in a more complex manner, in Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. As two roughly coeval Eastern and Western landmarks of narrative realism, Plum and Don Quixote, for all their apparent incommensurability, both exhibit the historical conditions of “transcendental homelessness” and nationally-​f ramed critical political perspectives. Rethinking Cervantes’s masterwork in this uncharted East-​West manner can further expand the rising transnational approach to his works against his reified literary status as a canonical “Western” writer, while resituating Don Quixote’s famed yet debated “realism” within a broadened transcultural spectrum. With these interests in mind, we now turn from Plum’s overly opulent port city to Don Quixote’s La Mancha, the heartland of the largest military and colonial empire of the Age of Silver.

79

3 La Mancha to the Indies

The Romance and Materiality of the Empire in Don Quixote

America bores open all her mines, and unearths her silver and her treasure, to hand them over to our own Spain, which enjoys the world’s best in every measure, from Europe, Libya, Asia, by way of Sanlúcar, and through Manila, despite the Chinese man’s displeasure. —​Bernardo de Balbuena, “Grandeza Mexicana” (1604)1 Miguel de Cervantes’s greatest creation, Don Quixote, was an aspiring conqueror. Although he based himself on the so-​called Book of Chivalry, his hopes were neither merely fantastical nor narrowly chivalric. They were about this world, recognizably political—​and astoundingly ambitious . . . He wanted to lead great armies and give away conquered provinces to his loyal comrades. He believed himself capable and worthy of founding vast empires . . . [H]‌e wanted all this, he believed, not for his own sake but out of love for a higher being—​the divinely beautiful and all-​powerful Dulcinea. Don Quixote’s notions were not exclusively “Spanish.” Nevertheless, it is hardly a coincidence that Cervantes was a citizen and soldier of the Spanish Empire and a fellow countryman of Charles V, the Conquistadores, and Ignatius Loyola. It is clear that being historically close to these figures helped Cervantes to understand his own hero. Like the best of them, Don Quixote wants to conquer the world and is possessed by love for the Divine; like the worst of them, he is a violent madman. —​Henry Higuera, Eros and Empire2

79

80

80  The Age of Silver

There is no reason to lament Cervantes’ misfortunes, nor the mediocrity of his daily life. He could thus, through an experience which is seldom obtained when the writer is successful and wealthy, know, observe, and feel the beat of Spanish life in its greatness and in its poverty, in its heroic fantasy and in the sad reality of an imminent decadence. He was to leave in his books the most faithful image of this life, reflected in multiple perspectives with bittersweet irony and penetrating humor. —​Angel de Rio, “Cervantes’ Harassed and Vagabond Life”3

“A POWERFUL KNIGHT”

“Sir Money is a powerful knight  .  .  .  whoever carries him by his side/​is beautiful though he be ugly.” Such is the famous line by Francisco Gómez de Quevedo (1580–​1645), a main cultural figure of the Spanish Golden Age.4 Distantly, Quevedo’s sarcastic comment on the dawn of the new age of money echoes similar apprehensions expressed by Zhang Tao and many other Chinese literati writers at the other end of the Eurasian continent, likewise during the opening decades of the seventeenth century. This synchronicity is more than coincidental. Around the time when Chinese traders rushed to import overseas silver as soon as the Japanese mining boom occurred in the 1530s, Spanish explorers were ardently hunting for gold in the New World territories they had encountered and colonized as an accidental outcome of Columbus’s miscalculated westbound sail for China. Meanwhile, in order to obtain genuine access to the lucrative goods of the East—​a goal the Portuguese had first accomplished through their eastward explorations around the Cape—​Spanish fleets ventured further west in 1519 under the captainship of Ferdinand Magellan into the vast Pacific, eventually reaching the islands they later named “Philippines” in honor of Philip II. The Spanish searched for several more decades to establish a return route from the Philippines to Mexico’s Acapulco and conquered Manila as their Eastern base in 1571. All these transpacific processes, in crucial ways, happened alongside serendipitous silver strikes in the New World, first in 1545 in Peru’s Potosí (in today’s Bolivia) and then in Mexico’s Zacatecas within the same decade. The windfall of American silver gave rise to a monetary revolution in Castilian Spain and Europe at large while securing endless loans and credits to support the Spanish Crown’s sprawling military ventures. At the same time, propelled by the same trading motives that had triggered the European “Age of Exploration,” New World bullion soon began its massive flows to the East in exchange for Chinese

81

La Mancha to the Indies  81

goods, both via Spain’s Acapulco-​Manila course and through the redistribution of other Europeans, who had siphoned away large portions of the transatlantic silver first sent to Seville and Cádiz through loans and commerce. Typically reminted as silver ingots once they entered China, Spanish pesos became so prevalent around Chinese coasts that they were also accepted there in the original form. According to one specialist on the subject, “By the conclusion of the sixteenth century, use of the Mexican peso had become generalized in southern China, where more Mexican money circulated than in Mexico.”5 Given the global bullion flow that linked China and Spain as two epicenters of the Age of Silver, writers such as Quevedo and Zhang Tao were essentially looking at the same material continuum from different vantage points when voicing their anxieties about the spreading rule of money. While Zhang and other late Ming literati bemoaned the blurring of cultural boundaries and moral degenerations that came with expanded commercial circulations, the same problems preoccupied Quevedo and a succession of Renaissance Spanish writers. In the words of Pedro de Navarra in a book published in 1567, “In this age of ours riches are esteemed more than virtue and that the base and immoral rich man will be better received in many places than the distinguished man who is virtuous and poor.” Antonio de Torquemada, another Spanish writer from the sixteenth century, stated that the minting of precious metals “was the greatest perdition which could ever come into the world  .  .  .  because of the covetousness which came into the world along with money.”6 In a similar vein, Quevedo notes in his satirical poem that “Sir Money is the one who makes dukes and ranchers equal.”7 These observations match Barry Ife’s characterization of an inversion of “the polarity between wealth and status” in early modern Spain.8 Infiltrating actual social power, money simultaneously displaced the discourse of value and virtue related to the elite status. Thus, according to the eminent scholar of Spanish history José Antonio Maravall, in Golden Age Spain “money had come to be the necessary basis for the success of any enterprise, occupying a role formerly reserved to other values or goods, principally heroic valor and individual virtue.”9 Tellingly, this inverted social hierarchy between status and wealth manifests itself linguistically in the altered implication of the term “rico” (rich) from meaning “noble and wealthy” to meaning “noble because wealthy.” Hence, in the dictionary he completed in 1611, the Spanish lexicographer Sebastián de Covarrubias (1539–​1613) observes that though “Ricos homes, according to Spanish custom, are those who in other countries are called counts or barons. … Nowadays men with a lot of money have taken over the title ‘ricos’; these are the nobles, the knights, the counts and dukes, because money secures everything.”10

82

82  The Age of Silver

Important for our comparative purpose, the parallel and interrelated spreads of monetary powers in China and Spain were accompanied by remarkably analogous narrative inventions. Around the time when The Plum of the Golden Vase initiated a realist turn in Chinese fiction, a similar emphasis on the material world surged in Spanish narratives. The anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes, published in 1554, spearheaded this narrative turn in Spanish literature. A founding piece of the picaresque narrative, Lazarillo has been widely noted for inaugurating Western fiction’s transition toward narrative realism in contrast to the enchanted vision of medieval romance. According to characterizations such as the one provided by Francisco Rico, Lazarillo is a realist work par excellence, for it is “governed by the criteria of probability, experience, and common sense, by the same criteria of veracity that are generally used in daily life, and told in language that is in turn substantially in keeping with the everyday.”11 Once we attend to Lazarillo’s concrete contents, these “criteria of probability, experience, and common sense” on a more specific level concern the rule of money. Narrated in the first person, Lazarillo tells the story of its eponymous protagonist from boyhood to adulthood and his experiences under a slew of morally failing masters. Lazarillo’s first master is a blind yet wily beggar who “knew hundreds of prayers off by heart” and “had endless ways of getting money out of people.”12 By sending out prayers, predictions, and quack medicine to credulous followers, the beggar “made a lot of money from these tricks and earned more in one month than a hundred blind men usually do in a whole year” (Lazarillo, 8). The material corruption of religion prefigured by this opening episode becomes a more developed theme throughout the rest of the novel. Lazarillo’s second master is a stingy priest who almost starves him to death, and he leaves his fourth master, a shady friar, in a short while “because of one or two other things I’d rather not mention.” His later masters further include a seller of papal indulgences, and a chaplain who profits from vending water to his parishioners. Intermixed with the episodes about these degraded clergymen is the story of Lazarillo’s third master, an impoverished squire (escudero) who lives off the bread begged by his servant and devotes whatever scant resources he owns to keeping up a “proper” appearance. Finally, Lazarillo settles down and works for the government as a town crier in Toledo, while marrying the mistress of the archpriest of San Salvador in the role of a cabrón—​“a man who permits his wife’s infidelity not only shamelessly but for his own profit.”13 Having made this compromise, Lazarillo also abuses his newly gained political position for money. As he boasts in the last chapter, “So if anybody anywhere in Toledo has wine to sell or anything else, he won’t get very far in this business unless Lazaro de Tormes has a finger in the pie” (58). In our comparative spectrum, though presented in a less condemning

83

La Mancha to the Indies  83

manner, these barefaced materialistic attitudes in Lazarillo are not unlike those manifested by Plum’s characters. Following the appearance of Lazarillo, the picaresque theme was further developed in Spanish novels such as Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache (1599), López de Úbeda’s La Pícara Justina (1605), and Quevedo’s El Buscón (1626). Widely disseminated and translated across Europe, Spanish picaresque novels created an important literary prototype that influenced many later European fiction writers, including eighteenth-​century English authors from Defoe to Fielding. But the most influential Spanish literary work for the development of the Western novel is doubtlessly Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605, 1615), which has been characterized by eminent twentieth-​century critics as “the first great novel of world literature” (Lukács), “the classical and purest model of the novel as a genre” (Bakhtin), and “the totemic ancestor of the novel” (Jameson).14 Tying the figure of Don Quixote to both a belated feudalism and a tragic idealism, many readers have treated Cervantes’s novel as a premier literary token of the onslaught of Europe’s capitalist modernity and of the ensuing existential conditions of “transcendental homelessness,” as Lukács called it.15 Along these lines, the factor of money in the novel has received much critical attention. Famously noting that “All prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote,” Lionel Trilling, for instance, wrote that Cervantes’s masterwork “suggests that the novel is born with the appearance of money as a social element—​money, the great solvent of the solid fabric of the old society, the great generator of illusion.”16 With close attention to early modern Spain’s political and cultural contexts, Maravall similarly listed monetary economy together with a standing army and bureaucracy as “the three fundamental pillars” of the political form of the modern state, a historical structure that stands in contrast to Don Quixote’s utopian mentality.17 The more recent works of Carroll Johnson, David Quint, and Myriam Yvonne Jehenson and Peter N. Dunn, among others, have likewise related Don Quixote and Cervantes’s other writings to the social and ideological dislocations brought on by the ascendant power of money.18 Clearly rooted in major socioeconomic shifts in Spanish society, Don Quixote is a dualistic work wherein the protagonist’s internal world is positioned in opposition to the social and the material domain, in contrast to the earthly subjectivities at the center of both Spain’s emergent picaresque fiction and the Chinese novel Plum. Traditionally interpreted as a remnant of feudalist enchantment resisting capitalist reason, the idealist aspects of Don Quixote’s personality have received more complex scholarly treatments, in particular through the transnational perspective that relinks Cervantes’s literary worlds to imperial Spain’s ethnic and colonial histories. One important finding of these studies concerns the world-​historical connotations of

84

84  The Age of Silver

the romance genre essential to Don Quixote’s characterization. More than a merely formal convention or a purely European genre, the romance tradition in a transnational perspective involves an ideological history entwined with the Iberian “Reconquista,” the “Age of Discovery,” and the conquest of the New World. In this light, as discussed by Hispanists such as Henry Higuera, Diana de Armas Wilson, William Childers, Barbara Fuchs, and Frederick A. de Armas, rather than being a thoroughly ahistorical ideality, Don Quixote’s chivalric fantasies connote a ludicrous version of Habsburg imperialist ideology.19 Higuera, whose comments are cited at the opening of this chapter, represents this opinion when he notes that Don Quixote’s delusions are in fact “about this world, recognizably political—​and astoundingly ambitious.” A  radical subversion of what Anthony Close has called the “romantic approach” to Don Quixote, the identification of Cervantes’s famous protagonist with a would-​be “world emperor” reemphasizes the book’s satirical purposes, and discloses its deep-​running transcontinental contexts.20 In these lights, the target of Don Quixote’s labyrinthine irony is not so much the marvelous per se, but the contradictory makings of Spain as a nation and as an empire shortly before and during Cervantes’s lifetime.21

TRANSMODERN CERVANTES

In world-​historical terms, the satirical aspects of Don Quixote’s image should be understood in the context of imperial Spain’s ethnic and colonial histories. In order to articulate the constitutive role of coloniality in European capitalist modernity, Latin America-​based critics such as Enrique Dussel and Walter Mignolo have recuperated an Iberian “first modernity” prior to “the second modernity of Anglo-​Germanic Europe.”22 One key phenomenon of this Iberian “first modernity” is the serendipitous economic boost that occurred as a fortuitous result of the Columbian expedition. Important to the reading of Don Quixote, the Columbian venture took place when Spanish culture was infused with a romance-​like ideology of adventure and conquest, in the wake of the completion of the centuries-​ long “Reconquista.” Inflating Spain’s militarism by the financial resources it generated, the inflows of colonial wealth at the same time engendered new socioeconomic and international situations that dislodged the historical foundations of the romance ideology. On the verge of the seventeenth century, the once daunting Spanish Empire was already haunted by irresolvable foreign debts, multiple bankruptcies, and aggressive competitions from northwest Protestant Europe, despite having the world’s richest silver mines in its possession. Rather than originated from a world of pure fiction,

85

La Mancha to the Indies  85

Don Quixote’s misadventures are symbolic of a national history stranger than romance. Thus, like the case of Plum we surveyed in the last chapter, Don Quixote is a national allegory that emerged under a condition of “transcendental homelessness” and provided critical commentaries upon the contemporary political and economic environment. This comparative observation can help us reexamine this canonical novel’s paradigmatic though ambivalent form of “realism.” As a number of Hispanists have argued, although the designation of Don Quixote as the “first modern novel” is honorific, it is aesthetically and historically reductive to position the book as the progenitor of a narrowly European “realist” lineage in anticipation of the telos of Enlightenment rationality and bourgeois subjectivity.23 Yet if Don Quixote is hardly about generating an illusion of “reality” per se, the book does emit a deeper “realist poetry,” which José Ortega y Gasset describes in his classic analysis of the novel in the following words, “to put things at a certain distance, place them under a light, slant them in such a way that the stress falls upon the side which slopes down toward pure materiality.”24 While Ortega wrote the above comment as a meditation on Don Quixote’s relation to the emergent European scientific culture, his description also fittingly portrays the novel’s symbolic undoing of the mystified ideality of imperial Spain. As will be discussed further, given the mirroring relation between Don Quixote’s fantasies and the romance-​like ideology that accompanied Spain’s meteoric imperial rise, the material realities confronting the protagonist connote the hybrid economic forces the Spanish court depended upon despite its totalizing ideology. While having an emancipatory implication, the material world in Don Quixote has no sublimated or rationalized meanings. In the next chapter, we will see that Saikaku’s writings express a similarly ambiguous treatment of materiality. In the case of Robinson Crusoe analyzed in the last main chapter of this book, the multiplicities of the material world are nonetheless homogenized and simplified as the “value” created anew by a single (British) individual on a one-​man island. In light of Dussel and Mignolo’s theory of Europe’s “two modernities,” although the Iberian “first modernity” established the basic conditions for the “coloniality of knowledge,” it was the Anglo-​Germanic “second modernity” that consolidated a monocentric cultural system of rationalization.25 In line with this macrohistorical context, the self-​destabilizing proclivity of the Cervantine novel suggests the liminality of the Iberian “first modernity,” wherein the logics of capitalism and colonialism were not yet fully legitimate. Robinson Crusoe, on the other hand, exemplifies the totalizing impulse of the Anglo-​ Germanic “second modernity.” Thus, though Don Quixote is culturally and geographically closer to Defoe, the book’s decentering textual politics

86

86  The Age of Silver

in fact resonate more with its unmet Eastern “cousins” such as Plum or Saikaku’s “floating world” fiction. Once we attend to these horizontal relations, it becomes possible to read Don Quixote not as an abstracted center of the “Western civilization,” but as representing the critical cultural dynamisms that surged across the Age of Silver.

THE ENCHANTED BOAT

Reading Don Quixote in the context of the Iberian “first modernity” requires an understanding of the ideological genealogies of the romance genre at the heart of the book’s irony. Although Don Quixote alludes to many “books of chivalry,” the crowning influence upon the protagonist undoubtedly comes from Amadís of Gaul. Written by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo (1450–​1504) on the basis of a fourteenth-​century original, this enormously popular romance fathered a whole dynasty of Amadís sequels and inaugurated the chivalric literature trend among Iberian readers during the sixteenth century. Dramatizing and validating such themes as martial valor, loyalty, Christian religiosity, and exotic wonders, chivalric literature resonated with early modern Spain’s military and imperial projects and was widely read among Spanish soldiers, even prompting some of its avid readers to join the military.26 Historically, these military ventures first concerned the slow process known as the “Reconquista,” in which Christian forces gradually reclaimed most of Iberia from Islamic rule by 1250, except for the area of Granada, which persisted in the southeast corner of the peninsula as a Muslim kingdom until its fall in 1492. The heroic image of the knight and the glory of adventure fostered by this historical background continued to inform the navigational ventures of the “Age of Discovery,” which was directly motivated by the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. Deepening centuries-​old Christian-​Muslim rivalries around the Mediterranean, the Ottoman occupation of Constantinople also blocked the European access to the eastbound Levant trade. At the conclusion of the War in Granada (1482–​1492), the “Catholic Monarchs” Ferdinand and Isabella, whose marriage in 1469 inaugurated the beginning of Spain as a nation, had thoroughly depleted the royal treasury. Out of financial desperation, the monarchs endorsed Columbus’s westward maritime exploration for Asia against all odds, a point that shall be addressed further. In addition to the monarchs’ need for quick wealth, the religious zealotry that accompanied the Reconquista—​which culminated in the forced conversion or expulsion of the Muslim and Jewish populations and the “purity of blood” ideology—​ likewise motivated the Columbian expedition. Traditional

87

La Mancha to the Indies  87

European myths about Prester John and St. Thomas propagated the idea of finding Christian allies or converts in East Asia. Moreover, according to Columbus’s own journal, he and his sponsors had the hope that Asian wealth would fund the ultimate Christian triumph—​that is, the conquest of Jerusalem.27 Etched in the motivations of the Columbian expeditions, the Reconquista ideology continued through the Spanish colonization of the New World. In this context, chivalric images and ideas unsurprisingly infiltrated the cult of Spanish “Conquistadores,” who were often self-​motivated explorers and soldiers in the hunt for wealth and political advances in the New World. The most consequential of these conquests happened with Hernán Cortés’s (1485–​1547) defeat of the Aztec Empire around the Valley of Mexico in 1521 and Francisco Pizarro González’s (c. 1471 or 1476–​1541) takeover of Peruvian regions from the Inca Empire in the 1530s.28 Exemplifying the significance of the romance imaginary to these military campaigns, Bernal Díaz de Castillo (1492 to 1498–​1585), who had participated in Cortés’s expeditions, writes in his memoire of how Spanish sailors, at the first sight of the shores of Mexico, “were amazed and said it was like the enchantments they tell of in the book of Amadís.”29 In Don Quixote, the novel’s initial setting, La Mancha, Spain’s rural heartland, evokes the romance genre’s dense historical and ideological connotations. As “the borderland of the empire,” La Mancha was a frontier region between northern Christian and southern Muslim Spain during the “Reconquista.” It also served as a refuge area for expelled Moriscos (Muslims who converted to Christianity, often by coercion) from Granada in the aftermath of the War of Alpujarras in 1571, which was fought between Philip II’s forces and Morisco rebels.30 In 1609, Philip III forcefully drove out all the remaining Morisco populations from Spain. Don Quixote hints at these events in the famous episode in which Sancho reencounters his old neighbor Ricote, a wealthy Morisco who furtively returns from Germany to unbury the treasures he has left in Spain.31 Historically significant to Spain’s Christian-​Muslim relations, La Mancha also mediated the roads between the imperial center Madrid and southern Andalusian cities such as Seville and Cádiz, which had a history of Islamic influences and later rose to be Europe’s principle transatlantic ports. Thus, though apparently an economic and political backwater, La Mancha was during Cervantes’s time a national crossing space and a key juncture in Spain’s operations as a world empire.32 Upon describing the protagonist’s decision to sally forward as a latter-​ day knight-​errant, Don Quixote reports that “the first thing he did was to attempt to clean some armor that had belonged to his grandfathers and, stained with rust and covered with mildew, had been lying forgotten in a

88

88  The Age of Silver

corner for centuries.” According to Childers’s interpretation, the text here implies that the protagonist has received the hidalgo status as the descendant of a Reconquista participant.33 Ironically, the protagonist sells acres of the land he has inherited to purchase “books of chivalry” under the radically changed socioeconomic conditions of post-​Columbian Spain. Considering the historical incongruities denoted by the protagonist’s chivalric genealogy, the grounds of which have changed from a national history to a sold fiction, one interesting fact of the novel is that during his adventures as a knight-​errant, Don Quixote travels neither to Madrid nor to Seville. In ignoring Madrid, he contradicts the knights-​errant’s traditional ties to the royal court; by foregoing Seville, he acts against the tides of a new historical time. In Book 1, ­chapter 13, a traveler named Vivaldo explicitly invites the protagonist to Seville, with the tongue-​in-​cheek comment that “adventures” abound in the port city. Allied with the images of the newly-​rich indianos (returned emigrants from overseas), prostitutes, and thieves, the idea of Seville stands in stark contrast to the notion of chivalry.34 Courteously but determinedly turning down Vivaldo’s invitation, Don Quixote eventually journeys to Barcelona before returning to his native village. Shunning the degenerate Atlantic port city, the protagonist in Book 2 does conduct a significant crossing that ironically alludes to both the romantic stereotypes and the Columbian voyages at the foundation of the Spanish Empire. This crucial narrative moment concerns the “Enchanted Boat” episode (Book 2, c­ hapter  29), in which Don Quixote and Sancho float across Spain’s River Ebro on an oarless boat and thus depart from the Castilian regions of central Spain for the northeastern areas of Zaragoza and Catalonia. Immediately following this crossing, the protagonist’s adventures enter a new narrative arc, which revolves around a long series of machinations by the Duke and the Duchess. In this narratively and geographically intermediary episode, transoceanic allusions permeate the protagonist’s farfetched speeches. Thus overlapping Spain’s domestic geography with its incredible overseas outreaches in ludicrous yet meaningful ways, the “Enchanted Boat” chapter evocatively parodies the Columbian accident, which engendered complex legacies for Spain and the entire globe. Signaling the importance of the episode, Book 2 foreshadows the image of the enchanted boat in its opening chapter, wherein the protagonist laments the degradation of knightly morals in the present age. In his words: There is no one now to sally forth from this wood and enter that mountain, and from there to go to a wasted and deserted shore of the sea, most often stormy and tempestuous, and to find there on the beach a little boat without oars, sail, mast, or tackle, and with undaunted heart to fling himself in and

89

La Mancha to the Indies  89

entrust himself to the implacable waves of the deep sea, which at one moment toss him up to the sky, and at another engulf him in the abyss. Then, exposing his chest to the irresistible tempest, he finds himself, when he least expects it, more than nine thousand miles from the place where he embarked; and leaping on to a remote and unknown shore, he undergoes experiences worthy to be inscribed not on parchment, but on brass (Book 2, ch. 1, 535).35

Characteristically, Don Quixote describes a conventional theme in chivalric literature, the theme of the enchanted boat. Notably, other than appearing in Amadís of Gaul and other romances with medieval settings, the enchanted boat is also a recurrent motif in literatures of the Age of Discovery. One version of it, for instance, can be found in The Lusiads, the Portuguese epic that eulogizes Vasco da Gama’s arrival in India in 1498. Luís Vaz de Camões (1524–​1580), the author of this epic poem written in the Homeric style, was himself a transoceanic traveler and probably started writing the poem while serving in Macau in the 1560s. Despite his real seafaring experiences, Greco-​Roman gods dominate the maritime world Camões created. In this mythical setting, da Gama’s historic landing at Calicut is preceded by a storm unleashed by Neptune on behalf of Bacchus, who represents Asia’s antagonistic attitudes toward European encroachment. Venus, who patronizes the Portuguese, sends out nymphs to seduce the winds, thus saving da Gama’s fleet. As calmness returns to the sea, the captain sees—​as if in a miraculous vision—​Calicut in the distance (Canto 6).36 Overall, given romance’s intimate ties to Iberian navigational discoveries and distant conquests, the deflated “Enchanted Boat” topos in Don Quixote unsettles not just romance stereotypes, but also the whole history of maritime expeditions, colonization, and empire formation. Don Quixote’s subsequent pronouncement renders these historical references unmistakable. After embarking upon the oarless boat with a reluctant Sancho, Don Quixote declares that the vessel must have been sent by a knight in distress. He then begins a pseudoscientific lecture claiming that they are about to “emerge into the open sea” and approach the equator—​“that equinoctial line that divides and cuts the opposite poles at equal distance” (734). The following pages comically present the protagonist’s attempts to introduce Sancho to high-​sounding geographical and cosmological notions that include “colures, lines, parallels, zodiacs, ecliptics, poles, solstices, equinoxes, planets, signs, and points” (735). The absurdity of the scene reaches its climax when Sancho jumbles Don Quixote’s statement about “the computation of Ptolemy, the best cosmographer known” (el cómputo de Ptolomeo, que fue el mayor cosmógrafo que se sabe), mispronouncing it to the effects of “a gaffer with whorish amputation or I know not what” (puto y gafo, con la añadidura de meón, o meo, o no sé cómo).37

90

90  The Age of Silver

The real punchline of the episode, however, resides in Don Quixote’s comment right after he announces that they are close to the open sea. In his words, “. . . according to the Spaniards and those who embark Cádiz to go to the East Indies, one of the signs by which they know that they have passed the equinoctial line I mentioned is that lice die on everyone aboard ship” (735; my emphasis). The protagonist then urges Sancho to “make the investigation” on himself. But Sancho finds plenty evidences to the contrary. Historically, Cádiz was, of course, one of Europe’s main maritime gateways to America, the “West Indies” or simply the “Indies,” rather than to Asia or the “East Indies.”38 Don Quixote’s geographic error humorously mirrors the miscalculation of Columbus, who initially aspired to arrive in Asia by sailing westward from Spain. Cádiz was the departing port of Columbus’s second voyage, which involved 1,200 sailors and seventeen ships, a tremendous expansion of the three-​ship fleet he captained in 1492 from Palos de la Frontera. This grand undertaking, however, failed to prove to the Catholic Monarchs that the newfound land was anywhere near the legendary riches of “Cathay” or a truly profitable colony at all. Columbus’s later voyages, the fourth and last of which was also from Cádiz, were subsequently downsized to no more than half a dozen ships. Columbus, the “Admiral of the Ocean Sea,” died refusing to acknowledge that he had arrived anywhere other than Asia, despite doubts by many other Europeans immediately upon his first return in 1493.39 By Cervantes’s time, knowledge of the American continent as a separate landmass had been long been established in Western Europe, with the resultant distinction between the “East” and “West” Indies. Don Quixote’s reference to the “East Indies” in the “Enchanted Boat” episode is doubly anachronistic, since it alludes to Columbus’s outdated nautical notion while using a geographical distinction the explorer would not have made. This narrative moment thus presents the history it recalls as thoroughly illogical. The ludicrously distorted image of Ptolemy in the “Enchanted Boat” episode also contributes to the ironic Columbian allusion, for the underestimation of the Earth’s circumference and a corresponding exaggeration of Asia’s eastward extent in the ancient scholar’s works constituted one source of Columbus’s mistaken assumptions.40 Although Ptolemy’s writings were still influential during Cervantes’s time, most geographical experts contemporaneous with Columbus already knew better. For many years before his first voyage, Columbus’s proposal of a westbound route to Asia had been rejected around Europe. For example, his plan was turned down by John II’s Portuguese council twice, the second time upon the news of Bartolomeu Dias’s (1451–​1500) navigation along the tip of Africa in 1488, a critical success that made possible da Gama’s arrival in Calicut a decade later. In Spain, Columbus presented his plan to Ferdinand and Isabella as

91

La Mancha to the Indies  91

early as 1486 and was likewise rejected.41 The monarchs’ later endorsement of Columbus in 1492 against the opinion of their council was due to the financial desperation they faced at the completion of the War in Granada. Recalling these tortuous and haphazard pasts when the Columbian journeys and the Age of Discovery became the idealized subjects of national epics in Iberian literature of the period, the “Enchanted Boat” episode in Don Quixote offers a subtle national historical critique, which denaturalizes the trajectory of Spain’s imperial formation. The rich irony of the “Enchanted Boat” episode stems from the fact that it features Don Quixote and Sancho, two rural characters whose itineraries are patently limited to the Spanish interior. This comic depiction suggests the historical incongruence between Spain as an empire and as a domestic society. The conquest of America led to Spain’s rapid transformation into a transoceanic empire from its prenational past as “a collection of intermittently warring kingdoms” about a century earlier.42 Spanish citizens were guided to envision themselves as members of a Christian empire by romance literature and popular plays such as those by Lope de Vega (1562–​1635), the leading literary figure of Golden Age Spain. However, the Spanish court’s heavy militarism, “purity of blood” ideology, counter-​Reformation movements, and dependency upon foreign capital all generated a tremendous cost of empire-​building, which negatively affected Spain’s local inhabitants. The images of Don Quixote and Sancho mirror those of Spain’s lesser nobles and peasants, who actually suffered through the political and economic deprivations that wracked Spain during its imperial rise.43 By his chivalric imagination and his delusions as a “would-​be emperor,” Don Quixote personifies the madness which Cervantes’s novel suggests to underlie Spain’s history as a world empire. The contrapuntal image of Sancho, as will be discussed further, emits a lived earthly reality that punctuates Don Quixote’s imperial fantasy. In this way, the novel’s famous literary pair allegorizes larger national historical themes, which are simultaneously interlaced with the profound transnational dimensions of imperial Spain. In the novel, the geographical dislocation that characterizes the “Enchanted Boat” episode is also a literary fallacy other characters find in “books of chivalry.” In the words of a priest, “What mind, that is not wholly barbarous and uncultured, can find pleasure in reading of how a great tower full of knights sails away across the sea like a ship with a fair wind, and will be tonight in Lombardy and tomorrow morning in the land of Prester John of the Indies, or some other that Ptolemy never described nor Marco Polo saw?” (Book 1, ch. 47, 478). This ridicule of romantic geography, which once again alludes to the enchanted boat topos, hints at the strangeness of history itself. The New World, after all, was a place “Ptolemy never described nor Marco Polo saw.” Its entrance into European visions

92

92  The Age of Silver

and exploitations both disenchanted and reenchanted past geographical images. Unable to locate real sources of wealth other than a limited amount of gold and pearls, Columbus deliberately stuffed his returning fleet with exotica, native men and women included, along with reports of curiosities and wonders in the newfound land with the hope of sustaining the Spanish court’s interest in his expeditions.44 Myths of wealth and Christian religiosity continued to inspire transatlantic navigational and colonizing activities, yet for many decades after Columbus’s death in 1506 as well as Cortés’s and Pizarro’s conquests, the Spanish failed to capitalize the prospective values of their American colonies. The situation, however, dramatically changed in 1545 due to the unveiling of Potosí’s fathomless riches. Fulfilling the enchanted image of America as the source of legendary wealth, this turn of events unleashed real-​world capital and reshuffled Spain’s socioeconomic relations. However, rather than benefiting Spain itself, New World wealth quickly flew into foreign pockets through war loans and international trade, in the midst of unsettling news of exploitation and troubling moments of national bankruptcy. In a self-​contradictory manner, New World money was both an enabling condition of the romance of imperial Spain and a force that unsettled its ideologies. These historical ironies underlie Don Quixote’s arguably most famous chapter, the Cave of Montesinos episode.

FUGGERS’ MINES

Significantly, as he encounters the “enchanted boat,” Don Quixote is recollecting his dreamlike experiences in the Cave of Montesinos (Book 2, ch. 23). In this preceding episode, Don Quixote descends alone into a subterranean pit. Upon resurfacing, the protagonist dreamily describes his tour around the crystal palace in the cave guided by an old man who calls himself Montesinos. The question of whether his account of the cave is true becomes a recurrent motif throughout the rest of the novel. Alluding to the classical theme of descent into hell and rife with grotesque distortions of romantic imagery, the Cave of Montesinos episode is widely regarded as the symbolic core of the novel.45 Though the episode alone can sustain book-​length studies, here I focus on one particular moment that, in resemblance to the hidden Columbian allusion in the “Enchanted Boat” chapter, signals the national allegory that looms behind the protagonist’s delusions. This specific moment involves Don Quixote’s purported meeting with his imagined lady-​love, Dulcinea, and her two maids in the cave. In this oneiric encounter, one of the maids informs Don Quixote that her mistress is in dire need of “half a dozen reals, or as many as you have” (694). Don Quixote

93

La Mancha to the Indies  93

replies that all he has to offer is four reals, while adding that he wishes to “be a Fugger” (ser un Fúcar) in order to relieve Dulcinea’s troubles. The Fuggers were a historically prominent German banking family from Augsburg. Their legendary wealth and intimate ties with the Habsburg court gave rise to the idiomatic expression “to be a Fugger,” which Don Quixote curiously employs in this scene as an expression of his uncharacteristic wish to get rich. In order to understand the profound irony of this narrative moment, we must consider the central financial role the Fuggers and other foreign moneylenders played in Spain’s imperial operations. Ludicrously petty, Dulcinea’s loan request in the Cave episode implies a parody of the Spanish court’s unsolvable debts, which began with the Catholic Monarchs and snowballed under the reign of the first Habsburg ruler, Charles I, who ruled Spain between 1516 and 1558. Warring on multiple fronts against the French Crown in Italy, the Ottoman Empire around the eastern Mediterranean, and the Reformation movements in Germany, Charles I funded his expensive military campaigns and political projects primarily by borrowing from German and Italian moneylenders. These high-​interest loans generated astonishing debts over time. When Potosí’s treasures came to light in 1545, Spain’s royal finances were already in deep default, and Philip II inherited a debt of about thirty-​six million ducats and an annual deficit of one million ducats from Charles I. Pressures from this accumulated debt propelled Philip II to announce bankruptcy in 1557, 1575, and 1596, during the very years when American mines were churning out unprecedented volumes of silver.46 From the late 1480s on, the Augsburg-​based Fugger family loaned money to the Habsburg monarchs. In 1519, Jakob Fugger (1459–​1525), the most famous member of the lineage, played a crucial role in financing Charles I’s selection as the Holy Roman Emperor. In return, Charles I granted members from the Fugger family various privileges and monopolies in Spain and in the New World, although these overseas rights were sometimes thwarted by resistances from Conquistadores. In 1525, Charles I  leased Spain’s largest mercury mines at Almadén in the mountain ranges of Sierra Morena to the Fuggers.47 Decades later, during the second half of the sixteenth century, this decision made the Fuggers a major stakeholder in the world’s silver commerce, for mercury had by then become the basis of a new refining technique that increased bullion productivity by as much as tenfold. Although rich mercury deposits were located at nearby sites such as Peru’s Huancavélica, the insatiable needs of American silver production continued to draw massive imports of mercury from Almadén and from other parts of the world, including as far away as China.48 As demands grew dramatically, Almadén started to employ convict labor in 1566 since it was difficult to enlist enough voluntary workers. The galley slaves freed by Don

94

94  The Age of Silver

Quixote when he approaches Sierra Morena (Book 1, ch. 22) may very well be heading for the Almadén mines.49 The Fuggers’ abuse of the convict miners was notorious. One investigator from the 1580s indignantly described Almadén sites as “hellish scenes of backbreaking labor.”50 Unprotected daily contacts with mercury caused irreparable physical and mental damages as well as high mortality rates among the miners. Repeatedly using the image of mercury poisoning in Don Quixote to portray uncontrollable trembling owing to fear or shock, Cervantes was clearly familiar with its symptoms. Working as a government clerk, the novelist was likely aware of the publicized terrors of Almadén as well.51 Meanwhile, reports of the even more abhorrent conditions in American silver mines were also circulating in Spanish sources of the period. Native laborers and, later, African slaves, many of whom also suffered from mercury toxicity, were forced to toil in these mines. Several times a day while carrying heavy loads of ore, they had to ascend and descend crude, often frayed ladders, which were made of widely spaced leather straps and were suspended hundreds of feet in the air. Safety measures were nonexistent and accidents were frequent.52 Like Almadén, the brutal scenes of the American silver mines were compared by Spanish writers to hell itself. In the condemning words of Bishop Domingo de Santo Tomás (1499–​1570), Potosí was the “mouth of hell through which enter every year a great quantity of people whom the greed of the Spaniards sacrifices to their god”—​that is, the god of silver.53 In theory, the grimly exploitative Almadén and American mines should have enriched Spain’s royal treasury, since the famous “royal fifth” code prescribed that twenty percent of the gross value of mined New World precious metals went to the Spanish Crown. In reality, however, New World silver and other precious metals were frequently subject to smuggling. As for the bullions that were actually commuted to the king, a large portion was already pledged in advance for repaying loans. Moreover, under Philip II and Philip III, military expenses escalated at a faster rate than the inflow of American wealth. The greatest toll came from Spain’s prolonged attempts at repressing the Protestant revolts in the Netherlands, known as the “Eighty-​ Years War.” According to one estimate, “Between 1566 to 1654 the Military Treasury in the Netherlands received a minimum of 218 million ducats from Castile, while the Crown received only 121 million ducats from the Indies.”54 Aside from exhaustive war expenses, Spain was simultaneously losing its silver through luxury importation, often, ironically, to its Protestant rivals—​ the Dutch and the English.55 Owing to all these factors, for imperial Spain, the New World’s seemingly boundless wealth all too often existed in the phantom form of royal credit. Passing through Spain like a restless traveler, American bullion and its power to serve as credit was nonetheless real enough to restructure socioeconomic life and provision wars. As we shall

95

La Mancha to the Indies  95

see, this historical process, while changing Spain’s national history, also left profound and traumatic imprints upon Cervantes’s own life. After learning of Dulcinea’s financial plight, Don Quixote asks Montesinos “whether persons of quality who are enchanted can suffer need.” In reply, his guide answers that “what is called want is the fashion all over the world; it extends throughout, touches everyone, and doesn’t spare the enchanted,” while adding that Don Quixote should grant the request since “the security is apparently good” (694). This exchange, immediately followed by Don Quixote’s “to be a Fugger” remark, throws a satirical jab at Spain’s history of imperial debts. According to Hispanists such as Higuera, Dulcinea is a romantic personification of imperial Spain and its projected Christian idealism.56 This symbolism deepens the political satire implied by her loan request. What renders the scene truly grotesque is its setting—​a n underground space resembling both hell and the murderous mines of Almadén and Potosí, a subtext that darkly lurks behind Don Quixote’s “to be a Fugger” allusion. Laden with hellish implications in the Cave of Montesinos episode, the image of the Fuggers reappears in the Ricote episode in a far more positive light. There, Sancho’s past Morisco neighbor describes his new home, Augsburg, the Fuggers’ hometown and business center, as a place where “there is liberty of conscience” (Book 2, ch. 54; 915).57 Juxtaposing the two moments, we see in Cervantes’s literary vision an intriguing ambivalence concerning money and materiality. While carrying sinister exploitative implications, these material forces also offer a new venue for individual self-​realization and constitute a counterforce to the political and religious ideology of Habsburg Spain. As to be discussed in the following section, Sancho functions as the main embodiment of these subversive connotations of economic desire. In this sense, his relation to Don Quixote, to an extent, mirrors Cervantes’s own relation to the Spanish Empire as a poorly appreciated veteran. With these historical and autobiographical implications, the narrative theme of paying Sancho in the novel ends up promoting an ethics of just payment in opposition to the romantic ideology of the empire.

PAYING SANCHO

In his vision in the Cave of Montesinos, Don Quixote encounters Dulcinea in the form of a crude peasant girl. This image has its origin in Sancho’s trickery of Don Quixote, for in order to cover up an earlier lie, the squire leads the protagonist to believe that his lady-​love and her maids have been transfigured by evil spells. Traumatized by the sight of a peasant Dulcinea,

96

96  The Age of Silver

Don Quixote develops an obsession to “disenchant” her and restore her ethereal beauty. Given Dulcinea’s implication as a romantic personification of imperial Spain, Sancho’s account degrades this idealized figure into an antithetical token of Spain’s humbling socioeconomic realities. Don Quixote’s quest to “disenchant” Dulcinea, therefore, implies a delusional effort to resuscitate Spain’s imperial myths. In Book 2, an elaborate hoax by the Duke and the Duchess further tricks the protagonist into thinking that the unfortunate “princess” will be relieved if Sancho voluntarily flogs himself 3,300 times. This scenario leads to a conversation toward the novel’s conclusion in Book 2, ­chapter 72, in which the two main characters negotiate over the financial reward Sancho should expect from this self-​ afflicting service: “If I had to pay you, Sancho,” replied Don Quixote, “in proportion to the greatness and importance of the services rendered, not all the wealth of Venice or the silver mines of Potosí would suffice to recompense you. Reckon up what you have of mine, and put a price on each stroke.” “They are 3,300 and odd,” said Sancho, “of which I have given myself about five. The rest are to come. Let those five count as the odd ones and let us come to the 3,300, which at a quarter of a real piece—​and I wouldn’t for the world take less—​come to 3,300 quarter-​reals. The 3,000 quarter-​reals make 1,500 half-​reals, which are 750 reals. The 300 quarter-​reals make 150 half-​reals, which go to 75 reals. Adding these to the 750, it comes to 825 reals. These I’ll subtract from the cash of your worship’s I have on me, and I’ll go home all gaudy and gladhearted, though well whipped, for, as they say, ‘He who goes fishing shouldn’t fear a wetting.’ I will say no more . . . ” (1029–​1032).

An overarching theme in the novel, the question of Sancho’s payment has received much critical attention. In The Origins of the English Novel, McKeon employs a historical materialist perspective and notes that the economic tension between Sancho and Don Quixote “synoptically mediates the historical transition from feudalism to capitalism.”58 In a similar vein, the Hispanist Carroll Johnson interprets the “drama of Sancho’s salary” as encoding a divergence between wage-​based labor and the medieval code of mercedes, a lord’s favor or rewards for the service of his vassal. Indeed, the term mercedes recurs in Sancho’s negotiation with Don Quixote as an economic relation he rejects. In his words, “I don’t want to trust rewards [mercedes] that arrive late or never” (572). Johnson nonetheless avoids a teleological reading of Cervantes’s novel by pointing out that, although Sancho’s demands indicate the growing dominance of a wage-​ based conception of human relationships, Don Quixote’s intricate ties to Sancho as master, employer, rival, and friend suggest a “nostalgically

97

La Mancha to the Indies  97

evoked feudalism” imagined “before the definitive triumph of capitalism and division of humanity into exploitation and exploited.”59 In this light, the socioeconomic vision of Don Quixote is highly volatile, reflecting a historical moment of profound liminality and indeterminacy. On the other hand, whereas Johnson and McKeon both interpret Sancho’s payment according to a Europe-​centered historical materialist framework, transnational perspectives on the novel have fruitfully foregrounded the subtext of colonial economy in Don Quixote’s promised “favors” to Sancho. Time and time again, Don Quixote reminds his squire of the “island” to be found as the reward of their adventures. In the protagonist’s demanding yet reassuring words to Sancho, “when they least expected it, if their masters were lucky, they found themselves rewarded with an island or something equivalent, and at least they were given a title and a lordship” (Book 2, ch. 28). The trope of the island in Don Quixote and Sancho’s negotiations again calls to mind the image of Columbus, who famously wished to be made “Governor General” over whatever islands he should discover according to the Capitulations of Santa Fe. After the “discovery” of America, Columbus gifted a New World island to the Italian voyager Michele da Cuneo, who accompanied him on his second journey, and later secured for his son, Diego, the governorship of Hispaniola.60 Rather than coming from a “feudal” system narrowly located within European history itself, the economic relations between Don Quixote and Sancho closely reflect the colonial economy that accompanied Habsburg Spain’s imperial rise. Signaling the novel’s transnational subtext, the protagonist’s far-​flung rhetoric in his speech to Sancho recalls both the older Mediterranean trade route that had enriched Venice, and the Potosí mines that became the fountain of Spain’s imperial wealth. Sancho’s calculations, on the other hand, are likewise rich with allusions to Spain’s economic history, though from a very different perspective. Notably, his absurdly repetitive enumeration conjures up the image of actual coins, particularly the quarter-​real or cuatrillo, the smallest piece of Spanish silver currency, which he equates with the worth of each whip to be inflicted on his body. The text further emphasizes the numismatic materiality of Sancho’s payment by letting him convert between smaller and larger silver monies until he arrives at a number measured in reals, which served as the basic denomination of Habsburg Spain’s silver-​based coinage system.61 Turning Dulcinea into a topic of financial negotiation, the narrative theme of Sancho’s payment further bares the unromantic economic foundations of the idealized image of imperial Spain she embodies. As early as 1589, Bartolome Felippe in his treatise titled “The Counsellor” advises that “money, as is commonly said, is the very nerve of war, for it begins and ends it.”62 Later Olivares similarly reminded Philip IV that “Kings

98

98  The Age of Silver

cannot achieve heroic actions without money.”63 Although American mineral wealth funded Spain’s imperial expansion, Philip II’s announcement of yet another bankruptcy in 1596 following the English defeat of Spain’s Armada in 1588, to use J. H. Elliott’s words, meant both “the end of northern Castile’s financial preeminence” and “the end of Philip II’s imperial dreams.”64 The material degradation of Dulcinea in Don Quixote ironically suggests these national crises. If the ideal Dulcinea whom Don Quixote blindly worships recalls a bygone imperial glory, Sancho’s introduction of a vision of her as a crude peasant girl reveals a traumatizing reality that the protagonist strives to undo through his desire to “disenchant” Dulcinea. Yet the two characters’ elaborated negotiation indicates that this imperial wish must be matched by just compensation. If someone has to literally take pains to dissolve the imagined spell, the price must be right.65 Demanding such a just price, Sancho equates the value of each lash devoted to the disenchantment of Dulcinea to the quarter-​real or cuartillo. The petty value of this smallest piece of Spain’s silver currency stands in ironic contrast to the empire-​building wealth of Potosí. At the same time, the image of the coin also connotes a national history of economic decline. Due to the quick outflow of colonial silver to pay for war loans and foreign goods, Spanish currency around the end of the sixteenth century experienced constant debasements, which severely affected smaller monetary units such as the cuartillo. Nominally silver, the cuartillo would become entirely composed of copper later during the seventeenth century.66 In this historical context, Sancho’s absurdly repetitive calculation heightens the materiality of these gradually devalued small coins, and hence implies an ironic comment on Spain’s national poverty, despite its apparently enormous imperial possessions. Nonetheless, Sancho’s negotiations with Don Quixote indicate that, through the spreading monetary culture these coins helped foster in Spanish society, an equal playing field of valuation and exchange emerged between the terms of an empire and those of a peasant. Unmoored from the ideological totality dictated by the transcendental Dulcinea, an ideality the protagonist wishes to resurrect, the novel’s “realist poetry” presses all voices and demands into constant interchanges across a horizontal network of “pure materiality,” no matter how sacred or how profane.

THE EMPEROR OF CHINA

Thanks to the many details available regarding Cervantes’s life, certain biographical information also helps elucidate the ironically structured national allegory that underlies Sancho’s payment. In his semiautobiographical

99

La Mancha to the Indies  99

poem Journey to Parnassus (1614), Cervantes famously announces that he “had lost the movement of the left hand for the glory of the right.” This statement refers to his permanent injury from the historic Battle of Lepanto in 1571, in which the Spanish-​led Holy League defeated the Ottoman navy in the Gulf of Corinth off western Greece.67 A few years after this victory, which was widely celebrated around the Christendom, Cervantes was captured by Algerian corsairs when leaving his military base in Naples for Spain in 1575. He was then held as a captive in Algiers for five years until being ransomed by members of the religious order of the Trinitarians.68 Upon returning home, Cervantes took on a government post in 1587 and requisitioned supplies such as wheat and olive oil for the Armada. This tedious yet confrontational job led to charges of embezzlement, which temporarily landed him in jail in 1592. In 1594 Cervantes became a tax collector and was once again imprisoned in 1597 due to fiscal conflicts. Supposedly, it was during the several months of this second incarceration that Cervantes began forming the concept of Don Quixote.69 Dissatisfied with his clerical positions, Cervantes petitioned for vacancies in the New World twice during the 1590s.70 Both requests were turned down, and the maimed veteran had to continue with his domestically bounded posts for over a decade while striving to add modest increases to his income by composing plays and poems. Although the publication of the first part of Don Quixote in 1605 found immediate success across Europe and the New World, the book did not bring Cervantes any major financial relief. During the final decade of his life, Cervantes managed to secure courtly patronage from the Count of Lemos, yet tasted another bitter rejection in 1610 when his influential benefactor excluded him from the selected literary entourage to Naples.71 A solider in youth, a government clerk in middle age, and a writer in late years, Cervantes went through a wide spectrum of experiences linked with Spain’s imperial history. If the younger part of his life reverberated with the chivalric dream of military glory, the novelist spent many of his remaining years serving a quotidian and cumbersome role in Spain’s imperial-​military operations, while witnessing the Invincible Armada’s spectacular defeat by the English navy and the nation’s general decline. Judging from his petitions for New World posts in the 1590s, America apparently impressed Cervantes as a desirable escape from unpayable debts, tiresome commissions, and the harshness of Spanish laws. Both of his applications were nonetheless denied for no apparent reason. On the second note of rejection Cervantes received from the Council of Indies, an official scribbled the curt response, “Let him look around here for some favor [merced] that may be granted him.” The bureaucratic language used here strikingly mirrors Don Quixote’s “favor”-​based economic promise to Sancho.72 The heavy sacrifice

100

100  The Age of Silver

Cervantes had made for the Habsburg’s imperial dreams was obviously not compensated in kind, and the payment issue inherent in his personal relation with the empire finds a symbolic equivalent in Sancho’s financial negotiation over Dulcinea’s disenchantment. In the words of Diana de Armas Wilson, due to his thwarted “transatlantic desire,” Cervantes’s fictional writings “are haunted, intermittently but insistently, by vivid images of the New World.” Owing to this historical subtext, in Wilson’s conclusion, “The matter of America must be factored into the rise of the Cervantes novel.”73 In an East-​West comparative framework, it merits noting that, as indicated by the Columbian allusions in the “Enchanted Boat” chapter, the transatlantic connections of Cervantes’s literary universe are further linked with a broader Eurasian history. Another example of this geographical continuity is Cervantes’s curious reference to China in the dedication to the second book. There, according to Cervantes’s account, which is addressed to his patron, the Count of Lemos, the emperor of China sent a message to invite him “to found a college for the teaching of Castilian” in China and to use Don Quixote as the textbook. Yet when the author inquired if “His Majesty” had prepared any funding for the travel, the messenger replied that “His Majesty had not given a thought to it.” The emperor’s financial negligence breaks an otherwise desirable deal for the author, who describes himself as being “confoundedly short of money” and subsequently declares his allegiance to his true patron “the great Count of Lemos in Naples” (524–​525). Obviously meant as a joke, Cervantes’s “emperor of China” story expresses a diasporic wish he once aimed to realize through his American petitions. Relocating the possible world of his future career from the New World to China, Cervantes utilizes the Eastern empire’s ambivalent image as a rival political and cultural domain to reposition his personal worth in relation to the imperial system of his native country. Although scholarship on imperial Spain’s transpacific ties has been scarce, new publications such as those by Robert Richmond Ellis and Carmen Hsu have begun to reveal the remarkable amount of early modern Iberian writings about Asia. In general, these accounts present China and other Asian states as powerful and affluent domains impervious to the influences of the Habsburg monarchy and Christianity.74 According to Juan González de Mendoza’s (1545–​1618) widely disseminated book about China, the Chinese “need no one, because everything necessary for human life overflows there, and they need nothing.”75 The viceroy in Mexico in his report to the Spanish Crown in 1573 expressed a similar apprehension by noting that “neither from this land nor from Spain, so far as can now be learned, can anything be exported thither [i.e. to China] that they do not already possess.”76 Reduced to subsidiary status or complete obsolescence in both its economic and

101

La Mancha to the Indies  101

political operations, imperial Spain’s transpacific outreach was where its logic of empire was thoroughly subverted. At the same time, as a non-​Christian Other, the image of China in Iberian writings around the time of Philip II was frequently subjected to charges of idolatry and trickery, condemnations that circulated alongside equally recurrent ideas of China’s positive achievements in cultural refinement and orderly governance. These contradictory assessments sometimes coexisted in the writings of a single author. According to Carmen Hsu’s analysis, Philip II’s two letters addressed to Ming China’s Wanli emperor, one in 1580 and another in 1581, show the same ambivalence as they “dissimulate” an underlying sense of Christian superiority and imperial ambitions while aiming to present the Spanish Crown as a European “equal” to the Chinese monarch. Entrusted to Augustinian and then Franciscan friars, these carefully crafted documents never reached their intended recipient.77 Although the Spanish court tried to be tactful in its diplomatic dealings with China, its colonization of America and the Philippines encouraged a plan to conquer China among members of the Iberian military and religious establishments in the 1580s. After some serious deliberations, Philip II eventually abandoned the proposal as unfeasible.78 For Cervantes, China’s multivalent image rendered it a particularly impressive conceit for his novel’s extraordinary and universal appeal. In a prescient sense, Cervantes’s story of the “emperor of China” forecasts his novelistic creation as an unprecedented type of “world literature,” which can be appreciated by all humanities across the most divisive political and religious barriers. On the other hand, considering the Count’s rejection of Cervantes from his Naples entourage a few years earlier, Cervantes’s desire for receiving validation from the most unlikely place entails a hidden sarcasm about the questionable taste of his patron, who failed to value a literary genius even readers of an alien culture would appreciate. In a still deeper sense, beyond unsettling the Count’s aesthetic authority, China’s double meaning as a superior/​inferior Other also generates an uncanny duality that deflates Spain’s imperial power system. As a clear indication of this mirroring effect, Cervantes’s writing refers to the emperor of China as “His Majesty” in the same way one would hail the Spanish emperor. The vague promises and denials the author relates to the Chinese emperor’s message also parallel the kind of vacuous language prevalent in the Habsburg bureaucracy, such as the curt official rejection to Cervantes’s American applications. In these historical and personal contexts, the question of just payment looms through the emperor of China story as a new form of ethics, which entitles the author to turn down the terms of a monarch. Mediated through the image of an exotic other, this reversed power relation can be symbolically translated back into the novelist’s own national context.

102

102  The Age of Silver

While echoing Sancho’s payment negotiation with Don Quixote, the “emperor of China” fantasy undercuts imperial Spain’s overblown image as a world empire and resituates it within a polycentric world market. Historically, according to the argument of the monetary historian Dennis O.  Flynn, as the early modern world’s greatest bullion consumer, the Chinese market was indeed exerting a distant yet momentous impact on the political economy of imperial Spain. Reaching the zenith of its power in the 1580s, about a decade after the establishment of the Acapulco-​Manila route, the Spanish Empire was in crucial ways sponsored by the large profit margins of the initial cycle of the global silver trade. When the once excessive silver profits in the Chinese market gradually dwindled during the early seventeenth century due to increased supply, Spain’s escalating financial stresses, brought on by warfare on multiple fronts, finally reached a breaking point.79 Even though these geoeconomic dynamics must have been too amorphous to detect for individuals experiencing their effects, they were the material substructures on which the image of the “emperor of China” assumed its multivalent meanings for Cervantes and his Spanish readers. Indicating both parity and alterity, the dualistic image of the “emperor of China” in Cervantes’s writing is as ambivalent as the historical patterns of East-​West interactions during the Age of Silver. While fostering increasing material interconnections and forces of mobility around the globe’s distant corners, transcontinental contacts during the period were simultaneously haunted by conflicts that were sometimes brutally violent. Although, as previously mentioned, Philip II’s deliberations forestalled a full-​blown war between Ming China and the Spanish Empire, Sino-​Hispanic interactions around Manila were not free of bloodshed. The darkest of these moments involved the 1603 massacre of 20,000 Chinese in Manila by the Spanish administration. Unnerved by the arrival of a Ming delegation sent by the Wanli emperor to investigate the rumored existence of a large silver mine in the Philippines, Spanish officials tightened their control over the local Chinese community, who were subsequently driven to revolt after a series of frictions with the Manila government. The Spanish government’s violent crackdown of the uprising resulted in the horrendous massacre. Decades later, in 1639, another violent confrontation in Manila claimed the life of thousands of Chinese protestors.80 Taking place along the borders of Eastern and Western civilizations, all this violence remained only obscurely registered in extant Chinese and Spanish sources, without becoming identifiable forms of cultural memory on either side. Unbacked by a supporting state system and exposed to the multitude of dangers of dealing with European trading empires, Chinese overseas traders were a historically marginalized group, who had nonetheless performed crucial

103

La Mancha to the Indies  103

roles in linking the world’s material life during the Age of Silver.81 A more holistic narrative of the emergence of the “modern world” must account for the darkness of the Manila massacres as well as the historical agencies of Chinese overseas traders and of other non-​Western mercantile formations, whose forgotten histories propel us to envision a more multilateral picture of the trajectory of globalization. Although Cervantes’s transnational vision does not reach as far as the Manila connection that materially linked Chinese and Spanish imperial histories, the novelist could then closely witness from his home the kind of politically charged yet economically entangled ethnic situation that surrounded the Philippine port city, given that the same paradox characterized imperial Spain’s relations to its Jewish and Muslim populations. Against the “purity of blood” ideology the Habsburg court promoted, the spreading world of goods in Spanish society constituted a counterforce of interethnic and interclass fluidity.82 In the next section, I will consider how Don Quixote’s engagement with these intricate ethnic, political, and economic dynamics can be observed through its depiction of the image of silk. A luxury good of Eastern origins, silk goods occupy a significant position in the literary world of the sixteenth-​century Chinese novel The Plum in the Golden Vase, as we have examined in the previous chapter. Framed by a more positive attitude toward materiality, the image of silk in Don Quixote also offers a fruitful site for tracing the novel’s relation to surrounding cultural transitions and transnational relations. An analysis of its presence in the book thus provides a pertinent thread for thinking about novelistic early modernity across the East-​West spectrum.

THE TIME OF SILKS

Don Quixote suffers his first drubbing when he intercepts a group of Toledo merchants who are traveling to Murcia to buy silk and forces them to acknowledge the unparalleled beauty of Dulcinea (Book 1, ch. 4, 78). Commenting on this encounter, Frederick A. de Armas noted that it enacts an ideological conflict between the “Old Christian” imperial ideology Don Quixote embodies and the “multicultural vision” associated with the Murcia-​bound Toledo merchants, who represent a rising “global mercantilism” in Renaissance Europe. Sixteenth-​century Spain’s sericulture industry began with Islamic roots, and the Murcia silk industry was dependent upon the labor forces of Moriscos and Coversos—​forcefully converted Muslims and Jews. Considering the “purity of blood” zealotry that characterized Spain’s political culture during the period, Don Quixote’s defeat

104

104  The Age of Silver

by the Toledo merchants connotes the inevitable failure of a homogenizing imperial discourse to purge real-​world material hybridities. According to de Armas’s analysis, in the silk merchant episode these hybridities involve a “tripling of otherness”—​that is, “Islamic silks, Murcian Jewishness, and Toledan picaresque materialism.”83 This sense of irony deepens if we further relate the incident to another notable reference to the Toledo silk industry in the novel. During a radically self-​decentering moment, the text reports that, if not for the intervention of its narrator, the paper bundle that contains the original manuscript of Don Quixote by a certain “Cide Hamete Benengeli” would have been sold as food for silkworms (Book 1, ch. 9, 107).84 In addition to the novel’s subversive attribution of its own origins to the “Moorish” culture being suppressed by Habsburg ideology, the manuscript’s pending consumption by silkworms relegates its written contents to a dispensable nature. This ironic situation subsequently deflates the imperial romance Don Quixote mimics throughout the narrative. Empire, in other words, can hardly escape the cannibalizing forces of materiality. Indicating a hybrid economic reality that belies the Habsburg court’s monocultural pretensions, silk products in Don Quixote further signal a spreading commercial culture that motivates desires for upward mobility. According to Susan Byrne’s observation, as a kind of “legal parody,” the social landscape of the novel is populated by “a whole cast of richly dressed characters” in blatant violation of Habsburg Spain’s sumptuary restrictions.85 Flying in the face of these official prescriptions, one of the most lavish displays of silk in Don Quixote takes place on the occasion of the wedding of the wealthy farmer Camacho, whose nuptial ceremony is spiced up by a whole group of sword dancers “all dressed up in the whitest linen and with headdresses of different colors embroidered in fine silk” (667). Soon after, in the symbolic dance that represents the opposition of love and money in the triangular relationship of Camacho, Quiteria, and Basilio, we see that the figure representing wealth is “clad in a rich dress of gold and colored silks” (Book 2, ch. 20, 668). Demonstrating the Spanish nouveau riche’s growing economic powers, which allowed them to appropriate traditional aristocratic symbols, the material luxuries Camacho conspicuously exhibits throughout the ceremony are psychologically influential to its onlookers. The novel attends to this social effect by depicting Sancho’s changed attitudes toward the marriage from disapproval to support, since, as a fellow peasant, he is reminded by Camacho’s proud parade of wealth that “social mobility is possible.”86 Upward mobility, of course, has always been the ambition of the Panza family. For instance, Sancho’s wife, Teresa, talks about changing “her grey-​flannel petticoat into hoops and silk gowns” when imagining their daughter’s transformation into a noblewoman through marriage (Book 2, ch. 5, 559). Camacho’s wedding further proves

105

La Mancha to the Indies  105

to Sancho that marrying rich is even more preferable than marrying high, for hard cash rather than lineage has become more definitive for the social manifestation of status. In historical terms, the propagation of luxury goods was a material phenomenon prevalent during Cervantes’s lifetime, yet hardly imaginable a century prior during the reign of Spain’s Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, who were praised by observers of the time for wearing “only woolen cloth.”87 While demonstrating the virtue of modesty, the monarchs’ unpretentious clothes came from a more materially austere period, one that stands in stark contrast to the swirling world of luxury goods, many imported, that inundated both the Habsburg court and the society under its governance. Around Cervantes’s time, the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella was the subject of a prevalent cultural nostalgia about a bygone “Golden Age” of superior morality and social stability. This nostalgic imaginary became further intertwined with both classical Greco-​Roman ideals and myths of the New World as an Edenic land whose inhabitants “have no weights of deadly money” and live “without quarrels over ‘mine’ and ‘yours.’ ”88 Given their similarly idealistic nature, Don Quixote’s chivalric fantasies naturally resonate with the Golden Age “communitarian fantasy” associated with utopian images of the New World and of Spain’s own past.89 Thus, from the protagonist’s perspective, the proliferation of silk goods is emblematic of a decadent historical present in contrast to the utopian past he dreamily portrays in ­chapter 11 of the first book, when he speaks of how maidens of the ancient time wore few adornments but “some green dock leaves interwoven with ivy,” unlike “those now in fashion among people who value so highly Tyrian purple and silk fretted in countless patterns” (118). Later on, the novel presents an ironic twist to the protagonist’s nostalgic vision by letting him encounter “two most lovely shepherdesses—​at least two were clad like shepherdesses.” In the narrator’s playful description, the girls look the part “except that their bodices and skirts were of finest brocade; their skirts … were petticoats of luxurious golden silk” (Book 2, ch. 25, 940). Soon these “shepherdesses” turn out to be some rich farmers’ daughters who are passing time by acting out bucolic roles. Having read the first book of Don Quixote, they invite the protagonist and Sancho to join them in a banquet. The chapter ends with Don Quixote’s collision with a herd of fighting bulls when he tries to challenge passersby to acknowledge that the beauty of the two “shepherdesses” is second only to Dulcinea. In this episode that once again brings about the complex interplay of fiction and reality, the girls’ silk dresses betray the concrete materiality of the present despite their mimicking of idyllic archetypes. If, as Ife has observed, the “mixture of high romance and precise documentary detail is a trademark of Cervantes,” this particular technique, as exemplified by the shepherdess

106

106  The Age of Silver

episode, helps express the novel’s attention to the changing material landscapes of the past and the present.90 In sum, the image of silk in Don Quixote acts as a polysemous sign of multicultural mercantilism, of vacillating social lines, and of a materially proliferating present. All of these connotations constitute ironic commentaries upon the monocultural imperialism and the utopian communitarianism Don Quixote represents. Given this symbolic tension, it is significant that the protagonist is, in fact, also susceptible to the surrounding commodity culture. Having derided that “Most of our knights nowadays prefer to nestle in the damasks, brocades, and other rich silks they wear rather than in armored coats of mail” (Book 2, ch. 1, 535), Don Quixote is not exempted from the same vanity. His favorite pair of stockings, the novel reminds us several times, are adorned with green silk, a luxury beyond his given station as a mere hidalgo. By Sancho’s report, like the protagonist’s transgressive act of renaming himself a “don,” Don Quixote’s silk stockings are frowned upon by the caballeros, the actual knights who “don’t relish seeing the petty gentry setting themselves up against them, especially those squireens who black their shoes and darn their black stockings with green silk” (542).91 This detail reveals that Don Quixote’s “madness” is intermixed with an intentional act of self-​promotion, which has been stimulated and enabled by the socially blurred circulations of material goods. In c­ hapter 44 of the second book, we see a fleeting acknowledgement from Don Quixote himself on the material aspects of his ambitions. In this narrative moment, the protagonist lodges in the duke’s mansion and finds that the seams of his precious stockings suddenly burst open. Vowing that he “would have given an ounce of silver for a dram of green silk” (837), Don Quixote can only put his request in monetary terms rather than seeking a kingly favor. Serving as indicative signs of a changing present in Don Quixote, silk goods historically constituted a premier material linkage between Spain’s silver capital and global commerce during the Age of Silver. Whereas Castilian Spain had developed a domestic sericulture industry by 1500, it kept importing silk products from a wide range of regions including Italy and Turkey. A  large quantity of Chinese fabrics also entered European markets via the Manila-​Acapulco galleon trade and other commercial networks. This influx reduced silk’s overall price in Europe and led European manufactures to emulate Chinese production techniques.92 The silk stockings that adorn Don Quixote and many other characters in Cervantes’s novel, for instance, were historically carried by the Manila galleons in “many thousand pairs” per cargo.93 A list of over a hundred types of goods given by Antonio de Morga, who served as an administrator in the

107

La Mancha to the Indies  107

Philippines in the 1590s, shows that Chinese traders shipped to Manila a large variety of luxury fashion items similar to those donned by the richly clad characters in Don Quixote, such as “fine untwisted silk, white and of all colors, wound in small skeins; quantities of velvets, some plain and some embroidered in all sorts of figures, colors, and fashions, with body of gold and embroidered with gold; woven stuff and brocades, of gold and silver upon silk of various colors and patterns; quantities of gold and silver thread in skeins; damasks, satins, taffetas, and other cloths of all colors . . . ” The catalog goes on to include many different kinds of spices, foodstuffs, animals, furniture, household goods, precious stones, and metals. De Morga concludes his meticulous enumeration with an emphatic claim that, despite its length, the catalogue has left out still more “rarities which, did I refer to them all, I would never finish, nor have sufficient paper for it.” 94 Such an endless abundance of goods substructurally connected the superstructurally distant realms of the East and the West during the Age of Silver, drawing these culturally disparate societies into a common vortex of commercial coevolution. For the literary horizontal continuities traced in this book, the kind of global commodity continuum as recorded by de Morga points to a shared world market condition beneath the realist resonances of narrative landmarks such as Plum and Don Quixote. In the East as in the West, the mounting power of money and goods in this macrohistorical context augmented socioeconomic fluidity, which subsequently destabilized the ritualized certainties of past political and communal bonds. As discussed theoretically in the introduction, the existential conditions of “transcendental homelessness” generated by this process of displacement contributed to the formation of a subnational “civil” space, wherein individual subjects became more mutable and active participants across a horizontal network of political and economic exchange. Similarly indicative of this transcultural dynamic, Plum’s and Don Quixote’s groundbreaking realist effects likewise function to deliver critical representations of the impacts of proliferating material forces upon their national environments. Whereas Don Quixote is more approving of the ideologically equalizing and socially intermingling consequences of material disseminations, the book continues to align these substructural forces with a desublimated realm of “pure materiality” and refrains from reconsolidating them into a totalizing ideality. Consequently, the national allegory presented by Cervantes’s masterwork is just as structurally decentered as Plum’s dystopian literary world. Overall, these two narrative landmarks indicate that novelistic coevolutions in the East and the West assumed parallel capacities to provide national political

108

108  The Age of Silver

critiques and ideological experimentations under changing socioeconomic conditions. This comparative thesis prompts us to reconsider the novel form’s “modernity” in a more transcultural and contingent light, beyond the Eurocentric teleology that tends to define the basic scope of such inquiries. In the following chapter, Saikaku’s “floating world” fiction from Tokugawa Japan will enter our horizontal juxtaposition as another key Eastern example of narrative realism from the Age of Silver.

109

4 Out of Nagasaki

To the End of the Floating World

So secretly he sought out a Chinese trader and inquired if he happened to know of any rare thing in a foreign country. “Although I have heard of them,” replied the Chinese trader, “never yet have I seen a phoenix, or a thunderbird. After all, whatever is rare in Japan—​such as aloeswood and ginseng—​is equally rare in China.” This Chinese merchant, having traversed thousands of miles of rough sea at the risk of his life, had come all the way to Japan solely in search of one rare thing—​money. —​Ihara Saikaku, “The Pillar Rice Cakes of Nagasaki,” from This Scheming World1 When I was just a child, I heard it said that things which pass before a man’s eyes have a way of drifting into his mind, and unless he mentions them, they will expand and give him a swelled head. Now, I haven’t had a respectable thought in ages, for that matter, I have never had a swelled head either, but what I have done is take these clumsy observations of people’s follies and write them down . . . Just like some fine twill damask imported from Cathay, I have spun these tales and woven my humble yarns. —​Saikaku, “People’s Hearts in the World of Ours” of Some Final Words of Advice2 [Saikaku] was less interested in a neat beginning, middle, and end than he was in the cumulative effect that a progression of images, however tenuously related, could induce. A cluster of these images becomes a story (sometimes remaining an incoalescent array of subplots and digressions), and a cluster of stories becomes a book, or a “novel.” —​Robert Danly, on Higuchi Ichiyō (1872–​1896), In the Shade of Spring Leaves3

109

110

110  The Age of Silver

“THE REALIST OF JAPAN”

Similar to the case of China, Japan’s relation to the “modern world system” is laden with considerable theoretical ambiguities. As the only “core” geographical region outside Europe and North America over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Japan has been regarded as an “exceptional” case in global economic and political histories. However, in geocultural terms, Japan’s literary, aesthetic, and historical traditions have remained deeply localized, peripherized, and Orientalized in West-​normative knowledge systems.4 All these complexities render “modernity” a problematic conceptual category in Japanese studies. From a literary and cultural perspective, Dennis C. Washburn notes that since Japan’s Meiji Restoration of 1868, which has been routinely recognized as the beginning of its modern era, “the process of westernization marginalized Japanese culture and created the extreme self-​consciousness and sense of belatedness reflected in the historicist usage of kindai and gendai,” the Japanese terms for the “modern.”5 Citing earlier scholars such as Nakamura Mitsuo, Washburn further argues that “the ambiguity of the meaning of modern arose from the uncritical tendency to simply equate modernity with the West,” and that this dilemma is connected with “a strategy typically employed to constitute modern identity and to differentiate it from traditional notions of the self,” while “[ignoring] the modernity of the past.”6 Moreover, in Washburn’s view, “the critique, or deconstruction, of modernization theory in the West” has stimulated Japanese scholars to provide a “supposedly native reading of the Japanese tradition,” which “is itself a nativism that binds us ever more tightly to our own assumptions.”7 Paralleling and interrelated with the case of China, Japan constitutes another significant geographical vantage point in our East-​West horizontal comparison. With respect to the Age of Silver that forms the macrohistorical framework of this book, the case of Japan is especially noteworthy due to its historical role as a major silver exporter in the early modern world and the flourishing of its commerce and culture around the same time. Moreover, in resemblance to the other areas we examine, Japanese literary history during the period witnessed more realistic and earthly narrative tendencies. The most salient indication of this new literary trend is Ihara Saikaku’s (1642–​1693) ukiyo-​zōshi or “floating world” fiction, which diverges from past conventions to focus on an urban world of pleasure, fashion, and trade, with a playful yet implicitly melancholic attitude that suggests the ethos of the economically thriving yet politically subordinated class of the Tokugawa townsman. In a larger historical context, long before the arrival of Matthew Perry’s fleet in 1853 that led to the “opening of Japan” and the Meiji Restoration,

111

Out of Nagasaki  111

Japanese history was richly imbricated with transregional linkages through its multicentury contacts with China and other Asian states, its absorption of Buddhism, and its contacts with Europeans since the early sixteenth century. With regard to the Age of Silver at the center of this comparative inquiry, Japan bears a special significance as the second largest silver producer of the period next to the Spanish colonies in South America, responsible for perhaps one third of the global total output of silver during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Japanese mining boom began in the 1530s during the Sengoku or “Warring States” period (c 1467–​1573), an era of constant conflict among Japan’s rivaling domain lords (daimyo). The boom continued through the unification process that led to the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate in Edo (1603–​1868), until the mines gradually died out during the eighteenth century. A hefty portion of Japan’s prestigious silver yield—​some say as much as seventy-​five percent—​was traded to its continental neighbor, China.8 Meanwhile, based on the stimuli of precious metal monies and the political stability brought about by unification, the seventeenth century was a period of significant commercial and cultural developments in Japanese history. Resembling the Spanish Golden Age around the end of the sixteenth century, Japanese cultural history boasts a spurt of literary and artistic creativity during the Genroku period (1688–​1704). Accounts of Japanese literary history typically highlight the dramatic works of Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–​1725), the haikai poetry of Matsuo Bashō (1644–​1694), and the prose fiction of Ihara Saikaku (1642–​1693) as the most notable achievements of these closing decades of the seventeenth century. These Genroku cultural landmarks emerged in a context of flourishing urban cultures, especially within Japan’s three metropolitan centers—​Edo, the shogun’s capital; Kyoto, the imperial and cultural capital; and Osaka, “the kitchen of the country.” As the Japanese population doubled and even tripled within about a century under the Tokugawa peace, all these cities were among the most populous in the seventeenth-​century world, each having over a third of a million residents on the verge of the eighteenth century.9 This period of rapid commercial growth witnessed the rise of the chōnin, or merchant townsmen, in the economic sector. In part following the Chinese model, the Tokugawa social order placed merchants at the bottom, while honoring the hereditary warrior class of samurai as the elite group. After the gradual dissolution of Japan’s traditional economic and military structures, however, many samurai elites fell into destitution and often had to rely on high-​interest money loans from merchants. In the words of one historian of Tokugawa Japan, “No heady theorizing was required to realize that many trends of the day were not in accord with prevailing moral beliefs, such as merchants dominating the economy, samurai living in debts,

112

112  The Age of Silver

peasants rebelling, and townspeople flocking to vulgar theatre.”10 As a cultural correlative to this shifting social landscape, a distinct narrative genre that came to be known as ukiyo-​zōshi, “books of the floating world,” rose to popularity in seventeenth-​century Japan. Like its cousin in the realm of visual arts—​the famous ukiyo-​e (“pictures of the floating world”), ukiyo-​ zōshi was closely associated with the growing chōnin class, who had begun to develop cultural tastes independent from the Confucianized samurai class. Originally a Buddhist term referring to the “sad impermanence of earthly things,” the word “ukiyo” by the mid-​seventeenth century “acquired such meanings as ‘modern,’ ‘up to date,’ ‘fashionable,’ and even ‘fast.’ ” With its emphasis on living for the moment, the idea of the ukiyo suggested to Tokugawa readers “the world of pleasure, of the pursuit of money necessary to enjoy it, and of the instability that underlay all,” as well as “the bright figures, costumes, and settings” that constituted “an atmosphere unoccupied by moral and intellectual preoccupations.”11 Resting at the heart of this vibrant yet rootless floating world were the nation’s pleasure quarters, characterized by glamorous fashions and the constant exchange of money and desire, where relationships were ever-​changing, bonded by little more than gold and silver coins. The most representative figure of the ukiyo-​zōshi is doubtlessly the prolific writer Ihara Saikaku. Borne to an Osaka merchant family, Saikaku made a name early on as a haikai poet and was known for his legendary feat of having composed over 20,000 stanzas of haikai in a single day and night. After the untimely death of his wife in 1675, Saikaku retired from family trade and became a lay monk, while traveling widely across Japan. Despite his earlier achievements in poetry, Saikaku turned to prose in his forties and, in 1682, published his first major work of fiction, Kōshoku ichidai otoko (Life of an Amorous Man; hitherto Amorous Man), which became an immediate bestseller. Following this success, Saikaku replicated his earlier prodigious literary productivity and completed over a dozen books in the decade between 1682 and 1692. Other than the longer Life of an Amorous Woman (Kōshoku ichidai onna, 1686), and the novella-​like stories of Five Women Who Loved Love (Kōshoku gonin onna, 1685), Saikaku’s fictional writings are mostly in the form of short stories. Some of these collections, most notably The Eternal Storehouse of Japan (Nihon eitaigura, 1688) and This Scheming World (Seken munesan’yō, 1692), concentrate on the world of commerce. His other works feature a diversity of topics such as homoerotic love, samurai honor, and family morality. The Genroku author tried his hand at travelogue and detective stories as well, creating some of the earliest examples of these narrative types in the Japanese tradition.12 Popular during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Saikaku’s writings fell into obscurity during the late Tokugawa period. Nonetheless,

113

Out of Nagasaki  113

during Japan’s radical cultural transitions of the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Saikaku’s prose fiction experienced a major revival, which subsequently shaped his position in Japan’s national literary history.13 One of the leading figures of Saikaku’s Meiji rebirth was Ozaki Kōyō (1868–​1903), a key member of the important group of writers associated with the literary magazine Ken’yūsha (Friends of the Ink Stone). By the conscientious efforts of Kōyō and other writers such as Kōda Rohan (1867–​ 1947), Saikaku’s name became popularized as “Japan’s realist” and even “the best Japanese novelist.” According to Rohan, in Saikaku’s writings, “Not only can we come to know the customs and feelings of people from two hundred years in the past as though we are looking at a mark on the palm of our hands, we can also see that even now the days and nights of events that Saikaku has painted for us are still occurring.”14 Saikaku’s newly established reputation as “Japan’s realist” was not only retroactive but also generative for Meiji writers, as his writings inspired the literary innovations of authors including Kōyō, Rohan, and the female novelist Higuchi Ichiyō (1872–​1896).15 Writers such as Ozaki Kōyō and Higuchi Ichiyō turned to Saikaku as a pioneering native realist precisely around the time when Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859–​1935) published his seminal 1885 treatise The Essence of the Novel (Shōsetsu Shinzui), which has been widely regarded as the founding text of modern Japanese literature and was an inspiration to China’s New Fiction Movement.16 Promoting the nineteenth-​century Western novel as the true “shōsetsu” (the Japanese equivalent to the Chinese xiaoshuo), Shōyō advances an evolutionary scheme of literary history that is patterned according to the ideology of Social Darwinism, which was tremendously influential to the Meiji notions of modernization and westernization. In Shōyō’s words, “Unless we study and follow the superior ways of the West, thereby creating the basis for a superior haishi, our Eastern shōsetsu-​haishi will remain at the stage of the Western romance and never have the opportunity to progress.”17 In the context of the paradigm shift advocated by Shōyō, the rediscovery of Saikaku by Meiji writers such as Kōyō, while echoing Shōyō’s principle of narrative realism, constructed an alternative mode of literary modernity away from the West-​oriented evolutionary doctrine.18 Highly similar to the case of Plum in Chinese literary history, the works of Saikaku in the horizontal perspective we have established represent yet another important Eastern example of novelistic modernity. On the other hand, in contrast to the European examples and full-​ length Chinese novels like Plum, Saikaku’s “novels” are quite short and are composed of relatively independent episodes in ways that resemble Spanish picaresque narratives. This characteristic of Saikaku’s narrative

114

114  The Age of Silver

is related to his earlier practices of the poetic form haikai and an aesthetic emphasis on ephemerality and mutability. Despite this stylistic difference, similar to the Spanish and Chinese examples highlighted in previous chapters, Saikaku’s “floating world” narratives connote critical commentaries on the official cultural order while presenting vivid images of a commercialized society. In her study on Saikaku, Mary Elizabeth Berry perceptively discerns from his writings a “nation without nationalism,” by which she means a lived network of material and informational exchanges in the absence of politically homogenizing institutions.19 This analysis of Saikaku meaningfully corresponds to the Bakhtin-​A nderson synthesis I have elaborated in ­chapter 1. In other words, the “nation without nationalism” in Saikaku’s works conforms to our comparative thesis that the early realist novels from the Age of Silver encode literary crystallizations of “heteroglossic” “imagined communities.” With regard to the specific case of Saikaku, the heteroglossic tendency of his writings is manifested through his characteristic blending of high and low discourses, a method I shall further discuss as “vernacularization.” Given that the new textual forms and politics of Saikaku’s works were rooted in the surrounding socioeconomic shifts and commercial coevolutions during the Age of Silver, the rest of this chapter first surveys aspects of Tokugawa history to illuminate these larger contexts. Then it addresses how Saikaku’s “floating world” narratives engage with the surrounding national problem of materiality through the marginalized lens of the Tokugawa townsman, while generating a prototype of novelistic modernity that is both Japanese and global.

JAPAN AS THE FLOATING WORLD

Japan’s “three unifiers”—​Oda Nobunaga (1534–​1582), Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–​1598), and Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–​1616), founder of the shogunal line that lasted from its official inauguration in 1603 to the Meiji Restoration of 1868—​a ll made conscientious efforts to capitalize upon the archipelago’s remarkable mineral wealth. Hideyoshi, the ruler for the last two decades of the sixteenth century, was especially active in taking control of Japan’s precious metal mines, propagating the use of gold and silver monies, and employing silver to trade with China for raw silk and other goods.20 In the words of a Japanese chronicler under Hideyoshi’s reign, “Ever since the advent of Hideyoshi, gold and silver have gushed forth from the mountains and from the plains in the land of Japan . . . In the old days, no one as much as laid an eye on gold. But in this age, there are none even among peasants

115

Out of Nagasaki  115

and rustics, no matter how humble, who have not handled gold and silver aplenty.”21 Following these developments, in 1601, two years before his formal installment as shogun, Ieyasu ordered the casting of several forms of gold (e.g. ōban, koban) and silver (e.g. cho-​gin) currency, which formed the basic monetary system for the next two-​and-​a-​half centuries. Under Ieyasu’s rule, some fifty gold mines and thirty silver mines came into production. Around the late 1630s, gold and silver monies truly overpowered the traditional rice currency in general market exchange, although rice would continue to serve as the main form of payment within the political system as the basis of tax and stipends for the samurai elite.22 The full monetization of the Japanese economy was accompanied by vigorous domestic commercial growth. In his influential History of Japan, Engelbert Kaempfer (1651–​1716), who spent two years in Japan between 1690 and 1692 during his service as a physician for the Dutch East India Company, avowed that “there is scarce a house” in the city of Kyoto (Miyako) “where there is not something made or sold.” The thriving city of Osaka, in Kaempfer’s description, was a “universal theatre of pleasures and diversions.”23 Enriched by a flourishing urban commercial culture, Tokugawa merchants were nevertheless confined to a low political and legal position. Through its “four-​division” (mibunsei) system based on the Confucian model, the Tokugawa state relegated the merchant class to the bottom tier of society. One infamous indication of this hierarchical structure concerns an edict that granted the samurai the “license to cut down” (kiri-​sute gomen): that is to say, to kill with impunity any “agriculturists, artisans, and merchants” who behave in a “rude” or “other-​than-​expected” manner.24 Yet, despite being “the masters of the four classes” in official ideology, the samurai class lived on fixed rice stipends from domain lords, a source of income that became increasingly inadequate in a world of fluctuating prices and growing expenses. Long-​term peace also weakened the military rationale that had supported the prestige of the samurai. Whereas samurais of a higher rank sometimes managed to land in civil offices, those of the lower strata often “led lives more similar to those of marginally employed commoners than to the ruling elite’s.”25 The most deprived were the so-​called rōnin, or masterless samurais. As many older daimyo clans dissipated during Japan’s unification, the number of rōnin under Tokugawa rule grew to unprecedented numbers—​about half a million around the late seventeenth century.26 Having no stable income unless they could find a new lord, many members of the rōnin group “had to live by their wits and swords” and mingle with the common folks.27 The ideologically demoted merchant or “urban commoner” (chōnin) class, in contrast, was tremendously enriched by Japan’s gold-​and-​silver economy and the nation’s unification, which meant surging demands for

116

116  The Age of Silver

interregional transportations and disseminations of goods, including the rice yields that served as the basic tax unit for the shogun and daimyo. The creation in the 1660s of a seaborne national trading network, which consisted of an east lane that connected northeastern Honshu (the Main Island) to Edo and a west lane from Japan’s northern sea edge to Osaka, further empowered the merchants of these urban regions.28 Overland travels were likewise brisk, thanks to a far-​reaching road system at the heart of which was Japan’s busy national highway, Tōkaidō (East Sea Lane).29 In his memoir, Kaempfer avows that “the Japanese travel more often than other people.”30 While numerous merchants traversed the country on a daily basis for commerce—​most frequently to Edo, Kyoto, Osaka, and Nagasaki—​ many seventeenth-​ century Japanese also journeyed for pilgrimage, or under such pretense for diversion. In the description of Laura Nenzi, seventeenth-​century Japan was an “age of movement par excellence,” despite the Tokugawa state’s elaborate traffic regulations and passport requirements.31 On the other hand, however conveniently seventeenth-​century Japanese citizens traveled domestically, they could hardly ever step outside the national borders. Although there had been a long history of Sino-​Japanese contacts, the two countries’ relations were once tense due to Hideyoshi’s two invasions of Korea that targeted Ming China in the 1590s and pirate raids along Chinese coasts prior to the 1630s.32 Meanwhile, Japan’s initial contact with Europe began after a typhoon rushed a Portuguese ship to Kyushu in 1543. While capitalizing on the lucrative Sino-​Japanese silver trade by acting as its middleman, the Portuguese converted many Japanese to Catholicism during the sixteenth century. Yet, in the wake of the Shimabara Rebellion (1637–​1638) led by Christianized peasants, the Tokugawa shogunate relentlessly persecuted Japan’s Christian followers and expelled all Portuguese inhabitants from Japan in the 1630s. This series of events led to the “locked country” (sakoku) policy that was finalized in 1639 and lasted until the end of the Tokugawa era. Under this policy, Japanese citizens were forbidden to sail overseas on pain of death, and foreign trade was, for the most part, limited to the Chinese and Dutch merchants who traveled to Nagasaki. Generally, Dutch traders were confined to the small artificial island of Dejima in the bay of Nagasaki, although a small envoy was allowed to visit Edo on regular basis, a policy that made Kaempfer’s observations of the Japanese inland possible. Chinese merchants were assigned to their own settlement in a walled compound near Dejima.33 Segregated into different quarters, the multiethnic community at Nagasaki nonetheless exchanged commodities of a truly global spectrum. In his memoir, Kaempfer writes that the cargos Chinese traders took to Nagasaki include “raw silk from China and Tunkin [The northernmost

117

Out of Nagasaki  117

part of today’s Vietnam, usually spelled “Tonkin”]; . . . sugar from various countries; calamine, to produce brass, from Tunkin; turpentine (from wild pistachio trees), gum lacca, myrrh, agel, and aloeswood from Champa, Cambodia, and neighboring countries,” as well as “various books on philosophy and theology printed in China . . . ” The goods taken into Japan by the Dutch were equally diverse. Aside from different textiles and spices, they also contained “fake coral, foreign birds, and a variety of foreign natural and manufactured, new and rare curiosities,” as well as European “molten glass” and “mirrors,” which Japanese artisans would further process to make “telescopes, magnifying glasses, and spectacles.”34 From its domestic society to its foreign relations, seventeenth-​century Japan was a world rife with fluid interactions and movements, in contrast to its stratified and segregating formal orders. Japan’s emergent “licensed quarters,” which occupy a central position in Saikaku’s fictional writings, offer a symbolic setting of this mixture of social constraint and fluidity. Historically, in order to separate the “bad place” from the proper social sphere, the Tokugawa shogunate designated special areas in various cities to house all the local brothels. Eventually, there were about twenty such areas across Japan during the seventeenth century. The most prominent of these districts were naturally those in the country’s metropolises: Shimabara in Kyoto, Yoshiwara in Edo, and Shinmachi in Osaka. In order to physically enforce their segregation, the shogunate typically situated these licensed quarters at the city’s periphery and encircled them with a wall or moat, as in the cases of Shimabara and Yoshiwara. However, patronized by both high and low classes from daimyo and samurai to townsmen, the world within these isolated enclosures was fraught with transgressive social contacts. In particular, the pleasure district in Nagasaki was a site of curiosity for many Tokugawa observers, since the courtesans there from time to time ventured into the foreign settlements and took on Chinese or Dutch customers. 35 In addition to the nation’s burgeoning pleasure quarters, the rapid growth of a commercial print culture was another important context for Saikaku’s narrative creations. During the mid-​seventeenth century, Japan was far more literate than it had been one hundred years earlier. As the shogunate and daimyo endeavored to educate the samurai so that they could serve in civil positions, merchants and farmers actively sought private schooling in order to master the skills of writing, reading, and accounting necessary for commerce. Concurrent with the spread of literacy was the spread of printing technology. Having first adopted the movable-​type method brought in by the Europeans, Japanese publishers in the 1630s began using the woodblocks technology that was prevalent in China because it was more suitable for reproducing Japanese scripts and the illustrations that

118

118  The Age of Silver

commonly accompanied published books during the period.36 Soon enough, seventeenth-​century Japan’s thriving print culture generated a nationwide network of public information exchange alongside developments in transportation and the economy, and disseminated heterogeneous reading materials that included Japan’s earlier classics such as The Tale of Genji and Tales of Ise, Buddhist scriptures, Chinese philosophical texts and vernacular fiction, medical manuals, calendars, encyclopedias, and maps. Meanwhile, fictions about contemporary Japanese life, such as those composed by Saikaku, also became a vibrant part of this expanding world of print, and populated the term ukiyo—​the “floating world”—​as a vivid description of seventeenth-​ century Japan’s altering social landscape and cultural sensibility.37 Although Saikaku is the defining figure of the “books of the floating world,” one frequently cited locus classicus of the term ukiyo comes from an earlier book entitled Tales of the Floating World (Ukiyo monogatari, 1665) by Asai Ryōi (c 1612–​1691). Written as an imaginary dialogue, Ryōi’s brief prologue delivers a tongue-​in-​cheek exposition of ukiyo according to the Buddhist notion of the sorrowful world:38 It seems that they call this a sorrowful world [ukiyo] because in all things, nothing can be fulfilled; nothing goes as you want it to go. It’s like that saying, “Scratch the soles of your feet with your shoes still on.” You feel an itch, but you can’t scratch it. It seems within reach, but you can’t reach it.

In reply, the other interlocutor in the prologue vouches for a more optimistic definition of the ukiyo: No, that’s not the meaning of it at all. When we live in this world, we see and hear the good and the bad in all things; everything is interesting, and we can’t see more than one inch in front of us. It’s not worth the skin of a gourd to worry about it; fretting just causes indigestion. So cross each bridge as you come to it; gaze at the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms, and the bright autumn leaves. Floating along with an unsinkable disposition, like a gourd bobbing along with the current—​this is what we call the floating world [ukiyo].39

Following from the gourd image in the preface, Ryōi’s tale tells the story of Hyōtarō (“hyō” means gourd), a rich young man from Kyoto. One day attacked by “a hitherto unknown itch,” he begins to frequent Shimabara, the licensed pleasure district of the city, until he runs out of money. He then becomes a minor samurai in the service of a local lord, offering consultations on “how to tax the rice paid to retainers of the fief in such a way as to take back at least half” and “next, how to make sure that the farmers of the domain would remit their full yearly tribute without fail,

119

Out of Nagasaki  119

even if it meant selling their wives and children, vacating their houses, or running off to another province.” After condemning these discussions for being “based solely on greed” and revealing “no trace of compassion or human decency,” Ryōi’s narrative quickly moves into a farcical account of Hyōtarō’s escape from the fury of a samurai he has played a prank on and his subsequent disguise as a Buddhist monk under the name Ukiyobō (“Floating-​World Priest”). In this new role, the protagonist reappears as a jester-​critic in the mansion of another lord, this time advocating nobler goals such as reinforcing samurai morality and shunning extravagance. Soon enough, the lord tires of his good consuls and dismisses him. Ukiyobō vanishes afterward, leaving behind nothing but a poem:  “Now my heart has returned to the sky. My body, left behind, is the discarded husk of the cicada.”40 Ukiyobō’s last words allude to the traditional Japanese poetics of evanescence, according to which the world itself is like a cicada shell—​“empty, frail, and quickly passing.”41 Concluded in a lyrical manner, Ryōi’s narrative has nonetheless portrayed a world of gloomy exploitations, wild twists and turns, and pressing material forces. As much as the characters themselves, money, taxes, and rice prices take on life in the text as mutable social elements. In one of his most righteous moments, Ukiyobō bitterly denounces manipulative merchant practices that subvert the natural tendency of humanity: “In the old days people used to pray they would be spared droughts, floods, or typhoons, but the merchants today pray for precisely these disasters, in the hopes that the value of the rice in their storehouses will increase.”42 The fluctuation of rice prices highlighted in this passage was a socioeconomic issue that aroused considerable cultural anxiety in Tokugawa Japan.43 As mentioned, rice was the foundation of Japan’s agrarian tradition and constituted the basis of tax collection and land values during the Tokugawa period. It was also the form in which samurai salaries were paid. The stability of the price of rice was thus of primal importance for maintaining the privileges of the traditional elite class. Yet, like that of all other commodities, the price of rice oscillated throughout the Tokugawa era. Moreover, in order to purchase all other types of goods, daimyo and samurai had to sell their surplus rice to merchants, in particular to the warehouse owners in Osaka. In these ways, the commodification of rice augmented the socioeconomic shifts brought about by the growth of monetary powers in Tokugawa Japan. While reproaching exploitative mercantile behaviors, Ryōi’s narrative—​ as indicated by his famous discussion on ukiyo in the preface—​places at its center an image of the mutable self, one that is breathlessly reinvented as a profligate, a counselor, a priest, a jester, and finally, a cicada shell. Despite its Buddhist undertones, the fluid mode of individuality represented by

120

120  The Age of Silver

Ryōi’s ukiyo is ultimately a product of the world of secular pleasures. In light of our comparative framework, the “floating world” motif in Japanese narrative texts likewise crystallizes the phenomenon of “transcendental homelessness” observable in other cultural spheres across the Age of Silver. The following sections examine the development of this “floating world” motif in Saikaku’s writings, first by attending to his short story collections The Eternal Storehouse of Japan and This Scheming World.

FROM ETERNAL STOREHOUSE TO THE SCHEMING WORLD

Ryōi, the author of Tales of the Floating World, was a samurai who later lost his employment and became a rōnin. Like Ryōi, many Tokugawa fiction writers, dramatists, and poets—​including major authors such as Chikamatsu and Bashō—​came from the lower tier of the samurai class. By contrast, Saikaku was the son of an Osaka-​based merchant family, although in youth he had already earned a literary reputation as a haikai (comic verse) poet in affiliation with the Danrin school headed by Nishiyama Sōin (c. 1605–​ 1682). His early poetic writings exhibit an unorthodox stylistic blending of the lyrical and the prosaic, a feature that would continue to characterize his prose writings. Due to their unconventional nature, Saikaku’s poems were dubbed by his contemporaries as “Hollandic” (Oranda-​ryū), a description he willingly embraced despite the term’s then typically pejorative meaning as foreign and outlandish.44 For an example of Saikaku’s distinctive poetic vision and his economic preoccupations, we may turn to the following haikai set that poeticizes the pedestrian subject of money minting: Today the master smelter feels the first autumn wind The Gotō metalworkers own cherry blossoms and red leaves “This whole wide garden under the shogun’s breath.” Pure water, too, flows through channels and out the Dragon Mouth.45

121

Out of Nagasaki  121

Many forms of social and symbolic crossings underlie this intriguing poem. Historically, descendants of the Gotō clan mentioned in this poem were commissioned managers of Japan’s gold mint. This illustrious legacy began with Gotō Shōzaburō (1571–​1625), a rich Kyoto merchant who was appointed by Ieyasu as his major advisor for developing and minting Tokugawa coins. Noted for his technological skill in metalwork and his experiences with foreign trade, Shōzaburō became “the brain behind Ieyasu’s currency policy,” and his lineage continued to wield influence over Tokugawa Japan’s monetary operations.46 Beginning with the present time, Saikaku’s poem meanders into the past moment of Ieyasu’s meeting with Shōzaburō in the shogun’s Edo castle garden, which was known for its winding rivulets and “dragon-​shaped drain holes.” Conjoining lyrical and political implications, the poem further juxtaposes the image of the castle-​garden with an industrial scene:  a mint filled with the hot vapors from the metallurgic transformations of “pure water,” an image that refers back to the rivulets of the shogun’s garden. Overpowering “cherry blossoms and red leaves,” the paramount cultural symbols of impermanence, these mists of the smelter further cloud “the shogun’s breath.” Technology and commerce, by the suggestion of these poetic designs, become a force of transformation more powerful than political status or nature’s rhythm. Intriguingly, the poem’s roaming allusions conclude with the image of a “mouth,” one that evokes the streams in the shogun’s garden, the spouts of the mint, and possibly the poet’s own, which is the ultimate creator of the poem’s hybrid historical vision.47 Worldly poems like the above example prefigure Saikaku’s later experimentations with prose fiction. Also notably, by subjecting the recent history of Ieyasu and Shōzaburō to his own poetic vision, Saikaku’s work presents an earthly and creative perspective on a national subject matter. This individualized and lively perception of Japan as a nation also characterizes his prose writings. As Mary Elizabeth Berry has noted, in Saikaku’s writings, “Nihon becomes not just a commonly accessible mental ground but a practically intertwined space of exchange, where ideas, goods, ships, tourists, traders, and wanderers can and do move.”48 Saikaku’s collection of thirty stories first published in 1688 under the title The Eternal Storehouse of Japan is a clear indication of the national space his works aim to generate. As a whole, the book enacts the rise and fall of merchants and their families in a backdrop of nationwide market shifts, through which some individuals emerge riding the tides, glory galore, while others fall behind the waves to drown in the ruin of themselves and their familial lineages. A generally optimistic book, Eternal Storehouse opens its first story, “Riding to Success on a Lucky Horse,” with a new philosophy of money.

122

122  The Age of Silver

According to this initial passage, human beings “are born, it seems, with an emptiness of soul, and must take their qualities wholly from things without.” Thus, as the narrative proceeds, “each one of us must bow before the Heavenly Goddess of Thrift (not Shinto priests alone, but samurai, farmers, traders, artisans, and even Buddhist bonzes), and we must husband gold and silver as the deity enjoins. Though mothers and fathers give us life, it is money alone which preserves it.”49 Upon the premise of money’s generative and quasi-​d ivine significance, “Riding to Success” begins by introducing a Kannon temple’s practice of lending “lucky zeni” to the pilgrims, usually in very small sums totaling no more than ten copper coins. Afraid to offend Kannon, the pilgrims always pay back the loan along with due interest. One day, an ordinary-​looking man unprecedentedly borrows a thousand coins from the temple. Reloaning the temple’s coins to local fishermen around the busy wharves of Edo’s Koami-​cho district at 100 zeni for each transaction, always with an explanation of the money’s auspicious origins, the borrower-​ turned-​lender keeps careful calculation of the compounded amount of his debt to the temple. Then, in the thirteenth year, he sends the temple a cargo of 8,192,000 coins—​exactly what he is supposed to pay back at this point—​v ia the nation’s highway, Tōkaidō, “on specially hired pack horses.” Amazed and delighted by this windfall of fortune, the monks of the temple build a pagoda using the returned zeni. The story ends by revealing that the borrower’s name is Amiya, who becomes “famed through Musashi province.”50 Throughout the story, the text is deliberately obscure on the causal chain that enables the miraculous rise of Amiya’s wealth—​t hat is, whether it results from the “luck” inherent in the temple money or from his own business acumen, including using the money’s religious origin as a marketing ploy. Notably, Amiya chooses to return his debt in its original form rather than in gold or silver. Given that the returned copper coins would weigh over thirty tons if taken literally, this narrative design stretches the bounds of plausibility, yet serves an important symbolic purpose in maintaining the material consistency of the coins, thereby creating the sense of a perfect correspondence. Quantitatively enlarged yet qualitatively the same, the coins in the story fuse the liquid world of market exchange with the ritualized mystique of religious piety. The story thus reinvents the apparent antipodes of money and faith as one another’s harmonious supplements. Placed at the head of the collection, “Riding to Success” bestows a transcendental aura upon monetary forces in support of the promercantile argument explicated at the story’s beginning. With its references to public transportation networks such as the Tōkaidō and the Koami-​cho wharves, the story works to map this new social philosophy onto a national scale.

123

Out of Nagasaki  123

Starting with the optimist vision of “Riding to Success,” Eternal Storehouse includes many other success stories in which ingenuity, thrift, and perseverance lead to tremendous wealth, or at least a decent livelihood. The idea of luck and occasionally supernatural forces appear throughout the stories to instill their material world with spiritual undertones. Drawing together earthly and ethereal domains, money and commerce in Eternal House also blend ritually stratified social classes. As the book’s prologue asserts, everyone must “husband gold and silver as the deity enjoins” (13) regardless of status. In the narrative world of Eternal Storehouse, even the most privileged daimyo household must bow to fluctuating economic forces, as we see in the story entitled “In the Past, on Credit, Now Cash Down.” After a detailed description of the period’s proliferate luxury fashion, a trend that flies in the face of Tokugawa sumptuary regulations, the story first voices orthodox opinions by commenting that “a merchant wearing fine silks is an ugly sight. Not only is homespun better suited to his station, but he also looks smarter in it.” Samurais, the text continues to note, “for whom an imposing appearance is essential in the course of duty,” must mark out their status with finer clothes and “even those without any servants should not dress like ordinary person.” The subsequent development of the story indicates that these statements are likely ironic, since the narrative swiftly shifts to portray the elite class’s dependency upon traders of luxury fashion. Due to the Tokugawa surveillance policy of “alternate attendance” (sankin-​kōtai), which required the domain lords to leave their family members in Edo as hostages whenever they traveled back to their home provinces, the shogun’s capital, with its many illustrious customers, was a golden market for textile merchants. Yet, Saikaku’s narrative soon reveals that the lords, despite their daunting facades, are living on dwindling revenues. As a result, “the greater part of the sales were on credit, and accounts remained unsettled year after year. Such money would have been more profitably invested even with a Kyoto banker.”51 While drapers in Edo are suffering great losses, one merchant breaks the norm and asks for cash only in his textile shop. This strategy turns out to be spectacularly successful, for the merchant backs up his special requirement with exquisite and prompt services “whenever a samurai required a formal waistcoat for an immediate audience with his lord or someone was in urgent need of a gown for a dress occasion.” To attest to the great profitability of this business model, Saikaku’s narrative avows that in the store, “the average daily sales were said to amount to 150 ryō.” The story further reports that the name of this “model of a great merchant” is Mitsui Kuroemon, who has been identified by scholars as Mitsui Hachiroemon, the founder of the Mitsukoshi department store chain that first opened in Edo in 1683.

124

124  The Age of Silver

Dense with real-​world references, “Now Cash Down” ends with a fantastic description of the myriad contents inside the “alphabetically arranged drawers” of Kuroemon’s shop: Neatly folded in the alphabetically arranged drawers of his shop were all the materials of Japan and countries overseas, a varied selection of antique silks. Lady Chūjō’s’s homespun mosquito net, Hitomaro’s Akashi crepe, Amida’s bib, a strip of Asahina’s flying-​crane kimono, the mattress which Daruma Taishi used for meditation, Rin Wasei’s bonnet, and Sanjō Kokaji’s sword sheath. Absolutely nothing was missing. A firm with such well-​fi lled stock books is indeed fortunate! 52

The above list absurdly attributes the hodgepodge of objects it includes to religious or historical figures representing purity and transcendence, such as the Amida Buddha, the celebrated seventh-​century poet Hitomaro, and the Chinese scholar Rin Wasei (Lin Pu), who was noted for his passion for plum blossoms and cranes.53 The arbitrary alphabetical order imposed upon these objects, as if in an encyclopedia or in a catalogue of goods, heightens the sense of chaos implied by their juxtaposition, yet also announces a new commercial logic that is reshuffling past social and cultural relations. The story’s fantastic ending thus symbolizes the socioeconomic reversal that occurs through its course, wherein a merchant rejects the credit system that privileges the elite, and subsequently succeeds in creating his own commercial kingdom. Following laudatory tales such as “Riding to Success” and “Now Cash Down,” Eternal Storehouse assumes heavier tones in its last few stories, which focus instead on cases of business failure. The escalating financial risk engendered by economic development underlies these instances of financial ruin. The very last piece in Eternal Storehouse charts a few of such examples, yet then moves into the topic of a “celebrated family” of three generations of farmers living “in perfect contentment, worshiping the gods and holding the Buddhas in deep reverence” in a village near Kyoto. Upon the auspicious occasion of the head of the family’s eighty-​eighth birthday, however, the household’s bucolic life is rudely disrupted by townsmen from Kyoto. Begging the old farmer to cut them a bamboo grain-​level for good luck, the intruders go on to chop down almost all the straight bamboo in the area. The story ends with the picture of a wealthy merchant using one of these levels to measure silver when dividing his possession among his three sons.54 From rice to silver, the changing measuring function of the level symbolizes a historical shift. Wishfully imposing the more settled order of the past upon the unpredictable present, the merchants in Saikaku’s story are themselves the invasive force that has irrevocably altered Japan’s

125

Out of Nagasaki  125

socioeconomic scene. Upon this ironic vision, Eternal Storehouse concludes its narrative with the following epilogue: Money is still to be found in certain places, and where it lies it lies in abundance. Whenever I heard stories about it I noted them in my great national stock-​book, and, in order that future generations might study them and profit thereby, I placed them in a storehouse to serve each family’s posterity. Here they now rest, as securely as the peace of Japan.55

Highlighting the idea of “Japan” as the ultimate subject of his mercantile tales, Saikaku’s epilogue also presents the family as the fundamental constituent of this national body. The book’s central image, the “eternal storehouse,” indeed refers to “a merchant’s private storehouse, stocked high with goods which would serve that merchant’s family for generation after generation into the dim future—​an image of endless family prosperity.”56 However, despite Eternal Storehouse’s general optimism, lineage disintegration is a recurrent motif in its stories. The theme of kinship decay is even more prominent in Saikaku’s 1686 short story collection Twenty Cases of Unfilial Children, which parodies the influential didactic Chinese book Twenty-​Four Cases of Filial Conducts. One especially macabre tale from this collection begins with a villager’s murder of a traveling priest for his gold under the urge of his eight-​year-​old daughter. Six years later, the girl stabs the wife of a samurai she has seduced and refuses to surrender herself to the authorities, even though her father is being held hostage. Executed as a result of his daughter’s callousness, the father before his death repents of his murder of the priest and views the girl’s unfilial act as retribution. Soon enough, as the story concludes, the girl herself is caught and executed. Ironically, the girl’s initial suggestion of murdering the priest functions as a grotesque instance of filial piety, because the blood money greatly improves the family’s livelihood. Grown out of blind greed, however, the girl’s material concerns for her family naturally turn into coldhearted betrayal when her own interests are at stake. In this chilling narrative, gold is the evil temptation that exposes the worst of humanity. When the girl persuades her father to murder the priest, the narrator intrudes to comment on the strangeness of a poor village girl’s ability to recognize the value of gold pieces. When killing the hapless priest even after he has surrendered his gold, the father coldly announces: “Your money was your enemy. Consider this is the floating world.”57 This statement casts the ukiyo as a dystopian realm, wherein material desires run amok and foster egoistic obsessions just as threatening to strangers as to one’s closest kin. In 1692, one year before his death, Saikaku published one of his last works, This Scheming World, the title of which can be more literally

126

126  The Age of Silver

translated as Worldly Mental Calculations.58 Likewise focusing on the world of commerce, Scheming World reads like a pessimistic sequel to Eternal Storehouse. In place of great merchants and miraculous wealth, Scheming World attends to the life of petty characters, who are perpetually pressed to scrape together enough money for their bills. Significantly, the stories in Scheming World are organized according to a common temporal framework—​that is, the New Year’s Eve (Ōmisoka). Ritually associated with closure and cleaning, the New Year’s Eve in seventeenth-​century Japan was also the time of debt collection. This particular time of the year thus serves as a fit occasion for comedies, farces, and sometimes tragedies, “when the poorer townsmen desperately tried to make ends meet and, in the process, revealed their true nature.”59 One story in the book depicts a masterless samurai’s wife’s pawning of an old halberd sheath, which the broker impatiently throws away as a “worthless” object. Claiming that the sheath was used by her dead father “when he so valiantly distinguished himself at the time of Ishida’s revolt” (that is, a decisive battle in 1600 that founded the Tokugawa rule), the woman vehemently denounces the broker’s irreverence for the family heirloom, and vows that she is “ready this very instant to die if need be.” Eager to appease the woman, the pawnbroker offers her for free “three hundred mon in copper, plus three sho of rice.” The narrative later discloses that the woman’s wrath was in fact a ploy to “blackmail” the pawnbroker, and notes that she has lost her moral pride due to poverty, despite being the daughter of a samurai.60 Given the unappreciated sheath’s association with the founding of the Tokugawa rule, the apparently trivial event in the story is suggestive of the samurai class’s gradual loss of cultural value in a money-​reigned reality. Continuing the collection’s theme of debts and poverty, Scheming World’s penultimate story, “Lord Heitaro,” takes place in a Shin Buddhist temple in Osaka, wherein a priest recites the sermon on Lord Heitaro—​ a well-​k nown follower of Shin Buddhism—​every year on the night of Setsubun (the beginning of spring). In this particular year, the Setsubun overlaps with the New Year’s Eve, and the sermon’s audience dwindles to a meager company of three, since everyone else is busy settling their bills. After the sermon, the priest disappointingly finds out that the attendees all come to the temple for purposes other than seeking enlightenment. An old woman in the group confesses that her only son asks her to leave home so that he can distract his debtors and avoid paying the bills under the pretense that his mother is missing. Another is a man from Ise who has been driven out of his house by his wife due to his failure to make money. The third is a thief who comes to the temple for some drinking money, yet finds nothing that is worth stealing. Deeply moved by these confessions, the priest exclaims, “Truly the Floating World is a sad place that you, who

127

Out of Nagasaki  127

are born with the possibility of salvation, should have been afflicted with such wicked desires!” Yet, just when the priest is “sunk in earnest contemplation of the realities of human life” in the following day, he is interrupted by a busy succession of requests. First a woman reports that the priest’s niece has just given birth. Then, a man comes in to inform him of the funeral arrangements for a cabinetmaker, who has hanged himself “after a quarrel with a bill collector.” Following these news of birth and death, a tailor enters to report the theft of the white silk kimono he is making for the priest. Finally, a profligate son who has been disinherited by his father comes to sojourn in the temple by the arrangement of his mother. All these worldly commotions destroy the priest’s meditative moment, leading to the story’s ironic conclusion:  “And so it is that, inasmuch as he lives in this same Floating World as all of us, even a Twelfth Moon priest has little time for contemplation.”61 The whirlwind of events at the end of “Lord Heitaro” brings to the fore a crowded social space that overpowers even the purified mindset of a Buddhist priest. Similar to the priest’s disrupted religious contemplation, in Scheming World the ritual certainty of the New Year’s Eve is undercut by the hectic interchanges of the earthly world, wherein human calculations cheat nature’s cycle and carry over the “Great Divide between winter and spring” a tumult of old debts (19), which linger on throughout the seasons as the agitated motions of the “floating world” itself.

VULGAR GENJI

Once we turn attention to Saikaku’s longer fictional narratives, it is notable that his two representative works of this kind, The Life of an Amorous Man (1682) and The Life of an Amorous Woman (1686), both feature a protagonist whose sexual promiscuity verges on the fantastic. According to the numbers given in the first chapter of Amorous Man, by the age of fifty-​four the protagonist, Yonosuke, “had slept with 3,742 women and 725 men.”62 In Amorous Woman, which is narrated in the first person, the heroine confesses that her male lovers “numbered more than ten thousand.”63 Though stated in a more or less tongue-​in-​cheek manner, these totals conjure up a vast public realm which these protagonists traverse with their amorous bodies. Mostly occurring within the “licensed quarters,” their erotic adventures from time to time permeate into the social realm as well. While reflecting the urban gaieties and the rising pleasure industry of the period, Saikaku’s amorous tales contrast sharply with the harsh regulation of private conduct under Tokugawa legal codes, which allowed a woman

128

128  The Age of Silver

to be captured and stabbed to death if she eloped and left her husband. In another example, “a person who falls in love with the daughter of the master of the house . . . at the request of the master, [could] be executed, exiled, or, at the very least, bodily removed.”64 Generally lighthearted, Amorous Man does include one dark episode wherein Yonosuke becomes close to a woman who has run away from her husband and is later killed by her kinsmen. In Saikaku’s more realistic novella-​like tales of Five Women Who Loved Love, several stories conclude with the lovers’ tragic deaths under the draconian legal code. Going against the Tokugawa control of sexuality, the erotic in Saikaku’s writings also deflates classical lyrical and religious motifs. The self-​narrated Amorous Woman, for instance, parodies the style of the Buddhist confession tale, with a new mission to “pique and to satisfy voyeuristic desire rather than to lead souls to enlightenment.”65 As to Amorous Man, the book at the center of my subsequent discussion, the protagonist Yonosuke is a vulgarized version of legendary lovers such as Prince Genji and Ariwara no Narihira (825–​880), the Heian nobleman and poet widely believed to be the hero of The Tales of Ise. In the words of Haruo Shirane, Amorous Man “transforms Genji into an urban commoner who travels from one pleasure quarter to another in seventeenth-​century Japan. The result is a vernacular parody of a Heian aristocratic text in which the humor derives from the unexpected transformation of a figure of cultural authority into a contemporary character with whom common readers could identify.”66 In addition to Genji, Saikaku’s merchant protagonist’s fantastic sexual history also recalls the myth of Narihira as being a manifestation of Kannon (Avalokiteśvara, the Bodhisattva of Mercy) and having made love to 3,733 women in order to bring them salvation.67 Turning classical romance into “farcical bourgeois lust,”68 Amorous Man is interspersed with playful literary allusions to the stories Genji and Narihira. For instance, in one episode of Amorous Man, Yonosuke starts an affair with a widow after having met her in the Ishiyama Temple, where Lady Murasaki purportedly composed her masterwork. The protagonist’s affair in this romantic setting nonetheless ends up as a superficial fling and results in the birth of a son who is soon abandoned.69 In another episode, the text alludes to Narihira’s romantic encounter with two singing girls when it lets Yonosuke experience a similar situation, which ends anticlimactically when Yonosuke exhausts his travel money and abandons the girls. This turn of event constitutes a narrative watershed, after which Yonosuke begins a rapid downward spiral as he liberally writes promissory notes in the name of his family in order to satisfy his temporary flames on the business trip, until his father—​f urious at the incoming pile of unauthorized debts—​d isowns him.

129

Out of Nagasaki  129

Adding to Amorous Man’s mundane reinvention of classical romance is its setting within a concrete contemporary landscape, which the narrative presents in a map-​like manner through a breathless list of place names. Within a few chapters after his disinheritance, for instance, the protagonist travels to Yoshino, and then to Naniwa (2:7), Katano, Hiraka, and so forth. Later on he further journeys “from Udono to Isoshima, to Mishima, to Kokura, to Shimonoseki, and back to Kyoto” (3:2).70 This narrative design of Amorous Man provides a literary equivalent to the larger cultural trend Marcia Yonemoto has called “the vernacularization of space,”71 by which she refers to a nonhierarchical and horizontally organized representational mode observable in maps and geographical texts from seventeenth-​century Japan. As previously described, since the 1630s Tokugawa Japan had been an era of busy domestic travels despite its sakoku policy. Cartographical activities also flourished during the period. Whereas state land surveys around the beginning of the century laid the groundwork for early modern Japanese maps, the public dissemination and rearrangement of this geographical knowledge mostly depended on private compilers and commercial printing.72 One prominent commercial mapmaker of the period was Ishikawa Ryūsen (fl. 1680–​1720), whose “Outline Map of Our Empire” (Honchō zukan kōmoku, 1687) and “Map of the seas, mountains, and lands of Japan” (Nihon kaisan chōriku zu, 1689)  became the “most enduring images of Japan from the early modern period.” Other than national maps, Ryūsen also made maps of individual cities. His most influential product of this kind is the “Outline map of Edo” (1689). Through its captions and supplementary texts, Ryūsen’s Edo map mixes political, commercial, and cultural spaces into one information mélange, which encompasses facts as diverse as the ranks of individual daimyos, pilgrimage sites and other “famous places,” city personnel from Confucian scholars to dentists and haikai poets, and directories of merchant specialties and entertainments.73 The juxtaposition of these categories signals the secular attitudes of a commercial culture, which treats all areas of life in an equalizing manner. Saikaku’s playful reworking of the classical aesthetics of love indicates the same cultural sensibility. In other words, if Ryūsen’s maps signal a “vernacularization of space,” as Yonemoto calls it, by transporting the legends of Genji and Narihira into a hybrid and concrete contemporary landscape, Amorous Man performs a vernacularization of desire. The novel’s depiction of proliferating prestige goods contributes to this vernacularizing effect, and reflects a trend that historically took place through the expanding commodity circulations of seventeenth-​century Japan. By the end of the century, classical romances like Genji had themselves become part of the commercial book market and appeared as motifs of games and fashion products. According to the

130

130  The Age of Silver

description in Amorous Man, kimonos decorated with scenes from Genji are the latest urban vogue. As Saikaku’s novel depicts, male customers of the pleasure quarters try to outdress one another as they patronize the fashionable prostitutes as a form of luxury good. Thus, in one scene of Amorous Man, a Kyoto courtesan’s custom-​made robe decorated with paintings by a renowned artist drives her patrons to “[vie] with one another to match this outfit with dashing robes of their own.” A lifetime dweller of the floating world, Yonosuke is himself a close follower of the latest fashion in blatant violation of Tokugawa sumptuary rules, which forbade merchants from wearing silk. Even beyond middle age, the protagonist flaunts on the streets of Kyoto wearing a “yellow crepe de Chine embroidered with the fancy crests of his favorite courtesans” and a long list of lavish accessories (186–​187).74 Yet if luxury fashion is the definitive veneer of the floating world, its glamour is ultimately a vain disguise for its lack of authenticity. The protagonist and his company clearly recognize this reality with regard to the female beauty they patronize. In c­ hapter 5, Yonosuke and his friend Sehei encounter in Fushimi—​a town on the outskirts of Kyoto—​an impoverished prostitute who nonetheless has an outstanding beauty and elegant manners. Sehei subsequently observes that “the prostitutes here need not be pretty, but they must wear attractive robes,” so that “with second-​hand finery brought here from the first-​class houses of courtesans in Shimabara [the famous courtesan district in Kyoto], or brocades and figured silk bought for them by their bosses . . . they can at least put on an alluring front.”75 As it turns out, this prostitute who has not followed the popular trend to falsify her beauty is the daughter of a ruined samurai family. Touched by her background, Yonosuke ransoms her out of prostitution. In the end, the protagonist’s money makes the real difference. The samurai’s daughter, however, embodies a fallen yet inimitable moral essence in contrast to the rootless material flows of the floating world. In a chapter that parallels the Fushimi episode, Yonosuke ransoms another prostitute who has a high-​class background. This time, the protagonist’s recognition of the ransomed woman’s prestige begins with her ability to identify the rare aloeswood incense he takes out at a drinking party to sober up the atmosphere. The woman further distinguishes herself by trying to give the forty pieces of silver the protagonist sends her to a mendicant monk.76 The incense-​discerning prostitute’s image in this episode is reminiscent of the recurrent motif in Genji, which represents the “way of the incense” (kōdō)—​that is, the blending of different varieties of aloeswood aromatics—​ as a profound expression of one’s cultivation and personality.77 Like silk, the aloeswood became a proliferating luxury commodity in seventeenth-​ century Japan. Kaempfer’s report indicates that, in addition to numerous

131

Out of Nagasaki  131

textiles, Chinese and Dutch traders brought a great number of expensive spices and drugs, usually of Southeast Asian origins, to Nagasaki.78 During the Genroku period, moreover, incense peddling was a common disguise of underground boy prostitutes.79 These historical contexts add rich connotations to the scene in Amorous Man wherein the protagonist travels to the countryside and meets a group of traveling kabuki actors who moonlight as prostitutes (ch. 8). While spending the night with one of them, Yonosuke is brought to a shabby inn where “rice bran was smoldering in an earthenware mortar—​to drive away mosquitoes.” Strangely, the smell reminds the protagonist of aloeswood incense and arouses his “sensual instincts” (37). If the scent of the aloeswood once symbolized “the realm of highest knowledgeable beauty,” in this scene, it becomes a stimulant of fleeting sensual delight.80 At the same time, Yonosoku’s confusion of the scent of rice—​the foundation of Japan’s rural past—​with that of the aloeswood subtly mirrors his bedmate’s boundary-​crossing itinerary between Japan’s cities and villages, and between drastically different orders of society. In a long dialogue with Yonosuke, the boy prostitute reveals that he has served a wide range of patrons from lords and priests to woodcutters and fishermen from all corners of Japan. The purpose of all this, he concludes, is “to earn some spending money.”81 Just as that money transforms the purified aloeswood into a free circulating commodity, the boy prostitute, through the commodification of his own body, equalizes the relations between his socially stratified and geographically dispersed patrons. From the incense-​k nowing prostitute’s unusual refinement to the confusion of scents the protagonist experiences in his encounter with the boy prostitute, Amorous Man counterpoises the classical connotations of aloes-​ wood against a dominant monetary culture. Saikaku scholars have repeatedly noted that the fluid mixing of the high and the low is a salient feature of his narrative method. In the words of Taniwaki Josefsu, “we can just as well say that as classical elements are vulgarized, so vulgar elements are classicized; in saying this, the doubling of value, a relativization takes place, this is where laughter springs from.”82 By attending to how the complex images of luxury goods such as silk and spice contribute to the vision of hybridity in Saikaku’s narrative, we may further relate his literary invention to seventeenth-​ century Japan’s expanding commodity networks, which altered social distributions of traditional prestige goods and, as a corollary, deflated their aristocratic cultural connotations. More than a phenomenon internal to Japan’s domestic life, the socioeconomic transition in the backdrop of Saikaku’s floating world fiction took place within global commercial coevolutions of the Age of Silver. Historically, through its expanding material contacts with the outside world, Tokugawa Japan “got the knowledge of raw silk, the cotton plants,

132

132  The Age of Silver

and iron, and later came to produce along these three lines, which worked quite a revolution in [its] industries and trade, and at the same time what is called a middle class, consisting of industrial and commercial capitalists, came into existence between the ruling samurai and the lowest.”83 This economic history helps contextualize Yonosuke’s family’s lucrative trade in cotton, which became Japan’s first cash crop during the seventeenth century. Enriched by goods such as cotton, Japan’s merchant townsmen also became avid consumers of traditional luxury items including silk and spice, as we have seen from Amorous Man’s meaningful representations of these prestige goods. Notably, with similarly rich literary implications, the book also mentions several times a newfangled global commodity that recently gained popularity in Japan—​that is, tobacco, which was introduced from the New World to East Asia around the 1600s. In Amorous Man, tobacco products constitute the new “scent” of the pleasure quarters.84 Given this erotic connotation, it is deeply ironic when Amorous Man contrasts the “rough, reckless spirit” of the current age to the “delicacy of feeling” in the past by reporting that “Men visited the blossoming plum trees in Kitano or wisterias in Otani, not to admire the flowers but to crush them in their hands. They saw the smoke erupting majestically from Mt. Toribe and thought no more of it than the smoke issuing from the bowls of their slender tobacco pipes.”85 Mt. Toribe was a cremation ground in the vicinity of Kyoto and appears in Genji as the burial site of the prince’s mistress, Yūgao (the “Evening Face”; ch. 4), and his principle wife, Lady Aoi (ch. 9), who were both cursed by the angry spirit of his former lover, Lady Rokujō.86 Considering these allusions, the comparison of Mt. Toribe’s smoke to that of tobacco pipes in Amorous Man ironically trivializes the romantic themes of death and passion. In Amorous Man, the most memorable appearance of a traveling global object concerns the telescope Yonosuke uses when he is nine to spy on a bathing maid (ch. 3). According to the text, the protagonist’s spyglass is “the sort used at country estates, summer houses, and pavilions overlooking a lake, undoubtedly an import brought in through Nagasaki by Dutch traders.” Characterized by this “Hollandic” origin, which resonates with Saikaku’s unorthodox writing style, the telescope guides Yonosuke’s gaze toward not only the woman’s naked body but also the tub water “thick with little bubbling balls of body oil and soap” (21).87 A parody of Prince Genji’s peering through curtains and screens before his amorous encounters in the Heian classic, the telescope scene of Amorous Man is at once vulgar and vernacular. Following from the preceding discussion, the new sensibility expressed by this scene signals the dawn of a new age wherein the power of materiality and technology breaks older boundaries, from access to status symbols to the limits of perception, thus exposing its

133

Out of Nagasaki  133

participants’ visions to the floating world’s illusory glamor as well as its underlying grime.

A JOURNEY OF NO RETURN

Whereas Yonosuke’s family owns businesses in the textile trade and moneylending, Saikaku’s narrative suggests that the initial source of its wealth comes from the enormous profits associated with Japan’s silver mines. Amorous Man hints at this background in its opening passage about Yonosuke’s father, a scene in which the lyrical images of the moon and blossoms are dissonantly set against the banal, semiindustrial landscape of a silver mine settlement: Blossoms scatter soon after they bloom, and people grieve. The moon, too, always sinks down behind the mountains. Near Mount Irusa in the province of Tajima, in a silver-​mining settlement, lived a man who came to be known as Yumesuke, Man of Dreams. Weary of making money, he put aside his worldly duties as a mine manager and moved to Kyoto, where he dreamed, asleep and awake without reserve, along the double path of female and male love.88

According to Jeffrey Richard Johnson, Japanese critics have treated this opening passage of Amorous Man as a “ ‘manifesto of [the] early modern,’ a human centered, ‘anti-​medieval’ aesthetic, and  .  .  .  a statement against the grain of the still prevalent, stereotypical image of the Japanese aesthetics of nature. … ”89 We should further note that this significant aesthetic turnabout is expressed through Saikaku’s reference to concrete material history. Specified as part of the province of Tajima, the setting at the beginning of Amorous Man likely refers to the renowned Ikuno silver mine, which rivaled Iwami as one of Japan’s richest veins. The protagonist’s father, Yumesuke, must have worked there as a manager and accumulated immeasurable wealth.90 However, for Yumesuke, the “Man of Dreams,” the glut of riches produced by the mines gives rise to a hollowing sense of ennui and a powerful impulse for expenditure. This desire essentially engenders the book’s protagonist Yonosuke, who is borne of one of the three courtesans Yumesuke has ransomed from Shimabara. The narrative purposefully leaves the mother’s name untold. After all, domestic ties have little place in the floating world of desire. Embodying the Everyman of the ukiyo, Yonosuke becomes “an unremitting agent of lust”91 in fulfillment of the impulse of consumption

134

134  The Age of Silver

inherent to his own origins. As foreshadowed by the first chapter, following his precocious initiation into the art of love at the tender age of seven, Yonosuke goes on “to drain every drop of vital fluid from his kidneys.”92 Self-​destructive as it is, this depleting process in Amorous Man is at the same time imbued with emancipatory potentials. Remarkably, the image of the drained kidney returns in the novel’s final chapter, this time in the words of Yonosuke to his company about their journey to the Isle of Women: “You may exhaust your kidneys and vital fluids . . . and get yourself buried there, but, well, what of it? All of us here happened to be born to live our whole lives without ties or families. Really, what more could we ask for?”93 As these lines indicate, the journey Yonosuke and his crew resolve upon enacts the logical extreme of their constant propensity to drift away from all anchors and attachments—​t his time from Japan itself and, by extension, from historical reality at large. Indeed Yonosuke’s bold outing is meant to be a journey of no return. The men on his ship are all aged, and their voyage ominously yet ludicrously mirrors the practice of Fudaraku tokai, the ritual of religious suicide in which a Buddhist devotee would float away in a sealed boat equipped with a plug for sinking, under the belief that at the end of this passage rests the paradise of Kannon. Most famously associated with the Kumano shrines, Fudaraku tokai often meant a departure from the archipelago of Japan into the Pacific.94 Here, in place of the Buddhist Pure Land, Yonosuke’s boat heads toward erotic abandonment, to an island that borders on the world of demons. While the lore of the Island of Women can be traced to the Chinese classic Shanghai Jing (The Classics of Mountains and Seas), its cartographical and literary representations in seventeenth-​century Japan were often conflated with those of another mythical island that came down from the tradition of Buddhist didactic tales—​that is, Rasetsukoku, a country of shape-​shifting temptresses who would sap the life forces of shipwrecked sailors through sexual seduction.95 In an otogizōshi story written during the Muromachi period (1392–​1573), the great warrior Yoshitsune faces grave dangers on the Island of Women, which is portrayed as a realm of sexually insatiable and semibarbaric women, and he escapes only by his unusual wit and luck.96 A 1658 Japanese encyclopedia briefly describes the island in a similarly threatening light: “There are no boys in this land. When young boys come here they never return.”97 Moving toward a monstrous otherworld, Yonosuke’s last journey nevertheless takes place in concrete historical time, which the text explicitly dates to the same year of Amorous Man’s first publication, “the year Tenwa 2 (1682).”98 In this contemporaneous setting, another implied subtext of the novel’s ending is the sakoku policy that subjected all citizens who left the country in an unauthorized manner to the death penalty.99 Considering

135

Out of Nagasaki  135

this historical connotation, it is fitting that Amorous Man’s penultimate chapter specifies the last stop of the protagonist’s lifelong, cross-​country sex tours as Nagasaki, Japan’s primary contact zone with the outside world. Describing the impulsive nature of this excursion before the protagonist’s final departure, the narrative states: In ancient times the great scholar Abe no Nakamaro [c. 701–​770], while sojourning on the foreign soil of China, expressed in verse a powerful yearning for the moon rising over his native land—​over Mt. Mikasa in Yamato. Yonosuke, however, as started out on his journey, reversed that sentiment. He was already feeling the lure of the moon over the ‘foreign’ port city.100

Subverting the lyricism of the moon into a stimulus of longings for the foreign rather than home, Saikaku’s narrative further characterizes Yonosuke’s Nagasaki trip as an economic inversion. When asked by a business associate what imported goods he wishes to purchase in the port city, Yonosuke answers “something Japanese.”101 His interlocutor immediately construes that Yonosuke is heading for the Maruyama pleasure quarter. Receiving Chinese and Dutch customers, the courtesans of Maruyama were a topic of curiosity in seventeenth-​century Japanese culture. For instance, the bestseller The Guide to the Brothels of All Provinces, which was an inspiration for Amorous Man, devotes “a good deal of voyeuristic attention to the engagements between the local courtesans and the Chinese” in its section on Maruyama.102 Amorous Man’s portrayal of Maruyama adds its own twist to the national fascination with the district’s cross-​ethnic sex trade by underscoring the foreigners’ “stamina . . . without restriction and segregation” due to aphrodisiacs, in contrast to the aged protagonist’s waning energies.103 Filled with the presence of overpowering foreign Others, Nagasaki confronts Yonosuke with signs of his own biological and libidinal finitude, a symbolic effect that mirrors the geographical, political, and economic constraints the port city historically demarcated for the Tokugawa townsmen. To better situate Amorous Man’s national allegory through its erotic geography, it is apposite to cite a haikai set that once again exemplifies Saikaku’s “Hollandic” poetic style. In this richly symbolic poem, an ordinary couple’s sexual rejuvenation by an imported aphrodisiac seems to represent Japan’s own renewal through extending itself into an infinite outside world: Passing along so many limbs: moon at dusk

136

136  The Age of Silver

“Am I night-​blind? I can’t see any birds.” “How far does it continue, this sea of mist?” “Autumn wind blowing from even beyond Holland Measuring, mixing pine resin powder into ointment.” “Wife and husband both sore in their lower backs.” “They can’t tell anyone about last night’s love.” “From now on don’t break the porch slats.” “Listen, spring water’s rattling the weir.” “Young eels yearn up the Chikuma River.”

According to Christopher Drake’s helpful reading of the poem, “The rush of the water returns through the earlier clattering of limbs and the sounds of the autumn wind, while the blind passion of needle-​like baby eels as they, lithe as monkeys, leave the Pacific and enter the mouth of the Chikuma River suggests that the island of Honshu curves like a giant lover, one without clear boundaries.” Echoing other images of crossing in Saikaku’s poems, “from birds to Mongols to fishers to the legendary Yuriwaka Daijin,” this haikai piece indicates “that Saikaku’s concept of ‘Japan’ was as multivalent as his notion of the border between this and the ‘other’ world, between literary language and everyday speech.”104 This fluid notion of the national space stands in sharp contrast to the historical reality of seventeenth-​century Japan’s legally sealed boundaries. The ending of Amorous Man, read in this light, encodes a subtle critique of Tokugawa Japan’s closed borders and, as a corollary, of the politically disenfranchised status of the merchant townsmen. According to David Gundry, the image of the Chinese in the Nagasaki chapter of Amorous Man suggests a political critique in that it evokes China’s civil examination system, which provided an avenue of social mobility unavailable in the hereditary system of Tokugawa social ranks.105 While this reading is pertinent, we should further note that the Chinese

137

Out of Nagasaki  137

and Dutch merchants in the novel also represent a freedom of trade and travel denied to their Japanese counterparts. Significantly, before embarking upon his final journey Yonosuke buries six thousand ryō of gold coins to symbolize his own funeral. Leaving the money behind, the protagonist and his crew load their ship with a variety of goods, including two hundred pails of clove oil, four hundred sacks of pepper, hundreds of pounds of mercury and cotton seeds, as well as a dazzling line of erotic objects consisting of “600 latticed penis attachments, 2,550 water-​buffalo-​horn dildos, 3,500 tin dildos, 800 leather dildos, 200 erotic prints.”106 Mixed with blatantly sexual objects, many of the goods on Yonosuke’s ship—​including clove oil, pepper, and mercury—​were prized overseas imports in Tokugawa commerce. Taking these goods back to the sea in the final chapter of the novel, Yonosuke implicitly assumes the position of the Chinese and European merchants who historically brought these coveted objects into the self-​ enclosed Japan. Given this implied role reversal, Amorous Man’s ending enacts a fantasy of reaching outside the Tokugawa government’s isolationist policy, which is emblematic of the restraining forces placed on the townsmen’s mercantile and individual aspirations. Once situated in a national political context, Yonosuke’s search for the Island of Women can be read as a mythical escape from the historical limits symbolized by his Nagasaki trip. The arsenal of sexual stimulants the protagonist carries on his last journey all connote rejuvenation and rebirth, especially given that the ship’s cargo also includes “swaddling clothes” that signify “second childhood.”107 Having exhausted the pleasure and power allowed to him within the domestic confines, Yonosuke, in his final sexual expedition, makes a once-​and-​for-​a ll exit from the sealed borders of his native country, bringing with him an outflow of libidinous, economic, and political desires.108 Forged through cultural and political perspectives distinctive to seventeenth-​century Japan, the national political critique underlying Amorous Man is analogous to novelistic early modernities that emerged elsewhere, and was historically rooted in the horizontal material and cultural contacts of the Age of Silver. In our comparative framework, while Amorous Man’s theme of excessive consumption and sexual expenditure resembles that of the late Ming novel The Plum in the Golden Vase, Saikaku’s narrative underscores the escapist and even liberating potentials of material desire, despite revealing apprehensions of the social and domestic disorders caused by the power of money. In this sense, Saikaku’s writings parallel Cervantes’s works by pitting the hybrid reality of material exchange against a stratified political order.109 On the other hand, both Cervantes and Saikaku continue to maintain an ironic distance to material desire, and refrain from sublimating it into any definitive form of ethics or rationality. All

138

138  The Age of Silver

in all, then, the cases surveyed thus far all manifest the liminal process I have described in the introduction as “unreified reification.” Through their complex engagements with the decentering force of materiality, the novels in question further assumed politically critical and nationally symbolic functions. Keeping in mind this transcultural pattern of novelistic early modernity, we shall reexamine the “first English novel”—​t hat is, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719)—​i n the following chapter. As we shall see, in this canonical Western text that often serves as the starting point for discussing the “rise of the novel,” the lived and decentering effects of material reification become ideologically reified into a new form of rationality. A  more contextualized reading of Defoe’s writings and his national environment, however, indicates that such an epistemological closing functions precisely to mask broader global linkages, which this book has sought to reconstruct.

139

5 Caribbean to China Crusoe’s Two Adventures

It is a fine summer morning in 1730. The prosperous London merchant flings back the chintz quilt, very old-​fashioned but a beloved family heirloom, straightens his muslin night-​shirt and puts on his Chinese silk dressing-​gown as the maid enters with the tea, milk and sugar. She trips, and the newly bought matched blue and white china tea service is smashed. There will be a row. —​John E. Wills, “European Consumption and Asian Production in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries”1 There are no sunsets and no sunrises; there is no solitude and no soul. There is, on the contrary, staring us full in the face nothing but a large earthenware pot . . .By believing fixedly in the solidity of the pot and its earthiness, [Defoe] has subdued every other element to his design; he has roped the whole universe into harmony. —​Virginia Woolf, “Robinson Crusoe”2 It had a thing instead of a head, but no head; it had a mouth distorted out of all manner of shape, and not to be described for a mouth, being only an unshapen chasm, neither representing the mouth of a man, beast, fowl, or fish; the thing was neither any of the four, but an incongruous monster . . . if I have not represented their monstrous deities right, let imagination supply anything that can make a misshapen image horrid, frightful, and surprising; and you may with justice suppose those sagacious people called the Chinese, whom, forsooth, we must admire, I say, you may suppose them prostrate on the ground, with all their pomp and pageantry, which is in itself not a little, worshipping such a mangled, promiscuous-​gendered creature. —​Daniel Defoe, Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe3 139

140

140  The Age of Silver

HALVED RISE OF THE NOVEL

Having charted narrative landmarks from China, Spain, and Japan to illustrate networked literary evolutions across the Age of Silver, we arrive in this final chapter at the case of the eighteenth-​century English author Daniel Defoe. Due to the tremendous influences of Ian Watt’s 1957 book The Rise of the Novel, Defoe’s writings have been positioned as a terminus a quo for thinking about the novel’s history. Despite all the challenges it has received over the half century since its publication, Watt’s book continues “to be amplified, supplemented, or dismantled by every critic concerned with the novel’s emergence, that vast field of inquiry for which Watt’s very title (with or without skeptical quotation marks) remains the customary shorthand designation.”4 The lack of a geographical modifier in the title of Watt’s book situates the complex meanings of the “novel” ambiguously between being a specifically English phenomenon and a global occurrence. Our transcultural inquiry nonetheless locates the eighteenth-​ century English narrative turnabout not as an “origin” but as a belated part of global early modern transitions. To relate this comparative thesis to the world-​economic continuum of the Age of Silver, we should note that Defoe’s novelistic writings were closely related to the development of commerce and international trade in early modern Britain. English competitions for overseas trade, against the leading Iberian powers and other rivals such as the Dutch, had been a key national policy since the Elizabethan era. The English navy’s legendary defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 allowed its merchants to venture into the Indian Ocean once monopolized by Iberian vessels, a development that led to the founding of the English East India Company (henceforth EIC) in 1600. Nonetheless, throughout the seventeenth century English overseas interests were consistently threatened by rival forces such as the Spanish and the Dutch. Given that the then widespread idea about Britain’s precariously inadequate domestic resources “placed the burden on international trade to solve complex ecological, demographic, and economic crisis,” the EIC regarded its mission as essential to national wealth and security.5 In the words of Josiah Child, who was appointed as the director of the Company in 1677, “Foreign Trade produceth Riches, Riches Power, Power preserves our Trade and Religion; they mutually work one upon and for the preservation of each other.” Furthermore, Asia was, in Child’s assessment, the most strategically critical region of all. In his words, “All other Foreign Trade in Europe doth greatly depend upon East-​India Commodities; and if we lose the Importation of them into Europe, we shall soon abate in all our other Foreign Trade and Navigation . . . ”6

141

Caribbean to China  141

Trade in both domestic and overseas domains is a main subject matter in the numerous writings of Daniel Defoe, who authored not only Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders (1722), and Roxana (1724)—​books that became central to the “rise of the novel” discourse—​but also many semi-​journalistic writings such as The Complete English Tradesman (1726) and a large number of commentaries on contemporary political and economic affairs.7 Defoe’s economic preoccupations profoundly informed his fictional works, as in the case of Robinson Crusoe.8 Shortly after the publication of the first book of Robinson Crusoe in 1719, Defoe completed and published two more sequels to the book: The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), which narrates Crusoe’s post-​island adventures as an overseas trader and his travels to the Far East, and Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, with His Vision of the Angelic World (1720), which consists of moral essays written as Crusoe’s reflections on his experiences from the island to his Eastern journeys. According to Melissa Free’s revealing study, roughly 75 percent of the over one thousand published editions of Robinson Crusoe before the 1920s included both the original and Farther Adventures, and many of them also contained Serious Reflections.9 Thus, “If Robinson Crusoe was by far the most popular novel of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is likely that The Farther Adventures was the second most widely read novel in English for two centuries after its publication in 1719.”10 As a corollary, in Robert Markley’s words, “To the extent that Crusoe becomes a mythic figure, that myth, at least through 1920, includes his identity as a merchant.”11 While the separation of Crusoe’s two adventures had already begun before Watt penned The Rise of the Novel, Watt’s utter silence on the existence of this sequel in his seminal book further perpetuated the critical oblivion of Crusoe’s later career. Notably, this neglect characterizes not only scholarship that works to sustain Robinson Crusoe’s constructive significances to the history of “middle-​class” individualism, either in progressive or disciplinary senses, but also in admittedly revelatory postcolonial treatments of the book’s underlying imperialist themes. Only recently, Farther Adventures and Serious Reflections began to receive more detailed attention in the works of critics such as Lydia Liu, Markley, and Free, whose contributions disclose a hidden gap in prevailing approaches to the novel.12 Remarkably, the separation of the two parts of Robinson Crusoe in literary history is prefigured by the “Robinson Crusoe setting” in nineteenth-​ century Western economic writings, which tended to single out the insular first half of the novel for theoretical postulations. As early as 1867 in Das Kapital, Marx famously comments that “Robinson Crusoe’s experiences are a favorite theme with political economists.”13 In his earlier writings in

142

142  The Age of Silver

A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Marx astutely critiques the unrealistic employment of the Crusoe scenario among “bourgeois economists” such as Frédéric Bastiat, noting that this idealized model marks “the starting point of history; not as something evolving in the course of history, but posited by nature, because for them this individual was in conformity with nature, in keeping with their idea of human nature.”14 Despite this critical appraisal, in Das Kapital Marx also resorts to the Crusoe setting in his theorization of labor value, thus furthering the reductive intellectual legacies of the model.15 Considering the extraordinary popularity of the Crusoe setting among nineteenth-​century economists, the obliteration of Farther Adventures and Serious Reflections in their analyses likely preconditioned the disappearance of these two parts from Robinson Crusoe’s literary discourse. Seen together, the marginalization of the two Robinson Crusoe sequels in economic and literary discourses over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries signals a common simplification process Dussel and others have critiqued as the self-​rationalizing and self-​u niversalizing strategy of the Anglo-​Germanic “second modernity.”16 In this light, a reemphasis on Crusoe’s mercantile identity and global itineraries is meaningful for counterbalancing the larger ideological trend behind the selective scholarship on the novel. On a comparative level, whereas Robinson Crusoe’s famed “realism” has nationally symbolic connotations in resemblance to the other cases we have analyzed, its collective allegory has a hegemonic effect toward consolidating capitalist and colonial ideologies. Nonetheless, Crusoe’s global travels in Farther Adventures reveal a polycentric world system, which Defoe’s narrative must explicitly engage with in order to fully represent its central image of the homo economicus. When the European expansion during the nineteenth century gradually displaced the multicentered global order, Robinson Crusoe’s second part subsequently became a structural excess, and hence must be purged from the novel’s meaning as a founding myth of the modern (European) individual. Relinking Robinson Crusoe’s two parts, this chapter shall treat the book and Defoe’s other writings as local components within the global economic and cultural transitions of the Age of Silver. This investigation provincializes the Anglocentric construction of early modernity, while resituating Defoe’s novelistic works within a transcultural comparative perspective. For these purposes, let us first single out a significant narrative moment from the conclusion of the first book of Robinson Crusoe. Like the passages we have highlighted in the preceding chapters, this moment is saturated with the image of silver money, yet for quite different purposes.

143

Caribbean to China  143

CRUSOE’S REWARD

For an indication of Robinson Crusoe’s relation to the history of silver money, let us turn to the following passage, which portrays the protagonist’s extraordinary financial success after his return to civilization: Accordingly I agreed, gave him [Crusoe’s broker in Lisbon] Order to offer it to them, and he did so; and in about 8 Months more, the Ship being then return’d, he sent me Account, that they had accepted the Offer, and had remitted 33,000 pieces of Eight, to a correspondent of theirs at Lisbon, to pay for it. In Return, I  sign’d the Instrument of Sale in the Form which they sent from Lisbon, and sent it to my old Man, who sent me the Bills of Exchange for 328,000 pieces of Eight to me, for the Estate; reserving the Payment of 100 Moidores a Year to him, the old Man, during his Life, and 50 Moidores afterwards to his Son for his Life, which I  had promised them, which the Plantation was to make good as a Rent-​Charge. And thus I have given the first Part of a Life of Fortune and Adventure—​a Life of Providence’s Chequer-​ Work, and of a Variety which the World will seldom be able to show the like of; Beginning foolishly, but closing much more happily than any Part of it ever gave me Leave so much as to hope for.17

Described as “Providence’s Chequer-​Work,” the monetary reward in this passage brings about a happy ending that sanctifies the protagonist as the self-​making homo economicus. Interesting enough, though, the image of money central to the first book’s conclusion has been purposefully erased from its main narrative about Crusoe’s island survival. We can observe this narrative logic from a dramatic monologue the protagonist delivers with both contempt and regret before a pile of gold and silver coins he finds from the ship’s wreckage: “O Drug! . . . what art thou good for? . . . one of those Knives is worth all this Heap.” Despite belittling the recovered money as something that should “go to the Bottom as a Creature whose Life is not worth saving,” Crusoe expresses enough interest to calculate that their total value equals thirty-​six pounds. “Upon second thoughts,” the protagonist decides to collect these coins for safekeeping (43). Later, when discovering more money on the ship, the protagonist’s language evokes pillaging as he reports that he “lugg’d this Money home to my Cave, and laid it up.” These nearly impulsive acts of hoarding indicate the novel’s masked mercantile concerns.18 After all, Crusoe is by occupation an overseas trader. Although the island setting conceals the underlying conditions of commerce in Crusoe’s story, the return of money as the ultimate reward to

144

144  The Age of Silver

his experiences reveals the larger reality that has been suspended in the narrative. Closer attention to historical details in the novel further indicates that Crusoe’s adventures take place within a contemporary context of global trade and contacts. Notably, the “Piece of Eight” by which Crusoe receives payment for his Brazilian plantation was the English name for the Spanish peso, since the coin was nominally equivalent to eight reals. As mentioned in the earlier chapters, due to its high level of silver content, the peso became the de facto standard of international commerce during the Age of Silver. Thus, unsurprisingly, while using the Portuguese gold coin moidore to compensate his middleman in Lisbon, Crusoe completes the sale of the plantation with the most internationally honored currency form of the time. The fact that Crusoe obtains his payment in a Spanish currency—​which was minted with Mexican and Peruvian silver—​for the sale of a Brazilian plantation bespeaks the global economic networks surrounding his adventures. Likewise reflecting this global backdrop, the protagonist’s island—​specified in the novel’s title as “near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque,” which is close to the Trinidad in the Caribbean—​ends up as a multiethnic colony with mixed Spanish, English, and native populations.19 What’s more, the Anglo-​Hispanic connections we see throughout the novel’s historical background correspond to Defoe’s possible literary debts to Cervantes. According to Diana de Armas Wilson, the island setting in Robinson Crusoe bears striking resemblance to the cannibal island described in Cervantes’s final, posthumously published work, Persiles and Sigismunda (1617). Wilson sees this potential Cervantine ancestry of Robinson Crusoe as one reason to trace “coevolutionary rather than evolutionary histories of the novel.” Other than linking Spanish and English literary histories, the resonance between Cervantes’s and Defoe’s literary worlds occurred due to their roots within a common history of navigation and colonization. Thus, in Wilson’s words, given that “Both the Spanish and English rises of the novel were linked to European voyages to America,” we need to “reconsider not only Defoe’s various unacknowledged debts to Cervantes, but also the debts of both writers to legends of Caribbean cannibals.”20 Historically rooted in a common backdrop of transatlantic navigation and colonialism, the protagonists of Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe, for all their apparent differences, both embody an ideology of conquest. We have seen that Don Quixote dreams to be a “world emperor” under the influence of the Habsburg imperial ideology. Remarkably, despite being the model homo economicus, Crusoe has also imagined himself as the “Emperor over the whole Country which I had possession of” (241) on his

145

Caribbean to China  145

island. The two novels, however, treat their protagonists’ similar imperialist fantasies in opposite ways. Whereas Don Quixote’s ironic construction unsettles the imaginary of the empire, Robinson Crusoe conjures up a self-​contained and totalizing narrative world to rationalize its protagonist’s distant conquest. In other words, in contrast to Don Quixote’s critique of empire as a ludicrous illusion, Crusoe’s metaphorical kingship over the Caribbean island connotes a different kind of national allegory, one that symbolizes the creation of “a largely self-​sufficient colony that is bound to him and, by analogy, to Britain.”21 Indicating the nationally symbolic function of Crusoe’s story, the monetary reward he receives after returning to civilization is improbably large. According to David Wallace Spielman’s illuminating analysis, the 328,000 Pieces of Eight Crusoe earns equal “between £14,400,000 and £2,160,000 today,” a fantastic sum that must have guided original readers of the novel to regard it “as a fable, not anything resembling what goes on in real life or the relationship to God any of them is likely to have experienced.”22 In our comparative framework, Robinson Crusoe’s fable-​like monetary account is not in itself exceptional, since money and material objects have important literary connotations in all the narrative texts we have surveyed. What is unique about Robinson Crusoe, on the other hand, is that it displaces the social context of the material world and subsequently endorses an ideology of colonial dominance under the guise of a story of solitary survival and individual material success.23 Through his apparent self-​sufficiency, the protagonist becomes “the supreme representative of English imperial power in its newest dominion.”24 Or, as Laura Doyle has aptly described, “The mercantile, colonial, and Puritan narrative merge (in Defoe’s text and in the longer rhetorical history) in the story of the modern self’s ‘Forsaken Solitary Condition’ (as Crusoe repeatedly refers to it) on the Atlantic (96, 112, 113, 139). This state is the precodition for liberation, prosperity, and salvation.”25 Premised on the image of the solitary individual, Crusoe’s tale of island survival nonetheless must end on a note of fantastic monetary reward. This conclusion reveals the actual national political economy his story implicitly allegorizes. What’s more, in addition to the transatlantic commercial and colonial subtexts of Crusoe’s Caribbean adventure, Farther Adventures makes it clear that the first book’s myth of the protagonist’s self-​sufficiency is contextualized by Britain’s actual lack of centrality in global trade of the period, during which the East was an especially powerful economic domain outside European influences. As we have seen, Crusoe’s wealth after the sale of his Brazilian plantation is so enormous that his further travels overseas are hardly necessary in an economic sense. Farther Adventures’s East Asian plot is thus a symbolic design to address a historical condition that

146

146  The Age of Silver

underlies the fantasies of self-​subsistence, manufacturing brilliance, and colonial dominance in the story of Crusoe’s Atlantic triumph. In order to better understand the sequel’s preoccupations, it is useful to first take a detour into Defoe’s 1725 novel A New Voyage Round the World, by a Course Never Sailed Before, wherein the East’s threat to the author’s vision of a London-​centered global commercial order likewise functions as a central narrative theme.

A NEW VOYAGE ROUND THE WORLD

Influenced by the prevalent mercantilist belief that the health of a nation’s economy depends on its precious metals stock, Defoe’s fantasy of an Anglocentric global commerce entails the goal of enlarging Britain’s share of New World gold and silver.26 Thus, when picturing London’s dominance of world trade in The Complete English Tradesman (1726), Defoe envisions the following scene in which Britain becomes the greatest possessor of America’s mineral wealth by the strength of its goods: “Not a Fleet of Portuguese Ships from the Brazils, not the Galleons or Flota from New Spain, but the Gold of the first, and the Silver of the last, or at least a great share of it, is the product of English Stocks, and belongs to London Merchants, whose Goods sold upon Credit at Lisbon and Cádiz, went first out to America to purchase that Gold and Silver . . . ”27 Crusoe’s fable-​like fortune upon the conclusion of his island adventures directly resonates with this national fantasy. The trading reality of the early eighteenth century, however, was quite different. Its overseas ventures being threatened by Dutch and Spanish rivals, Britain was also losing its silver stock in its expanding Eastern trade. After several failed attempts at establishing commercial access to China, English ships succeeded in trading in Macao and Canton in 1637, although they “sold no English goods at all, but disposed of 80,000 ‘pieces of eight.’ ”28 Historically, Britain had been in trading deficit to China due to the importation of silk, tea, and porcelain until the opium trade overturned the monetary flow between the two regions around the 1820s. Considering this context, the eastward flow of English money was a national economic issue that informed Defoe’s creation of Robinson Crusoe’s fictional adventures from the Caribbean to the Far East. The same mercantile anxiety also runs through one of Defoe’s later novels, A New Voyage Round the World.29 As several scholars have discussed, New Voyage reflects Defoe’s strong interest in opening up an English colony in the Patagonian area of eastern South America.30 Essentially, Defoe’s plan was to expand the colony to the

147

Caribbean to China  147

western side of the Andes, in particular the Valdivia region in southern Chile, a place “where the Spaniards hardly meddle” and had “the Advantage of a Quantity of Silver and Gold, to make an effectual Foundation of all manners of Commerce.”31 Defoe’s project responded to the rising English investments in the South American waters after the founding of the joint stock corporation “South Sea Company” in 1711, which in 1720 nonetheless underwent a catastrophic financial crash known as the “South Sea Bubble.”32 For our purpose, however, it must be noted that Defoe’s South Sea preoccupations in New Voyage are directly associated with his dissatisfaction at Britain’s growing deficit in its trade with Asia, which was the actual destination of much of the outflowing American silver. Emphasizing “a course never sailed before,” New Voyage fantasizes a new way of circumnavigation by which English merchants manage to first sell their goods in the East and then bring home gold and silver from the New World, in complete contrast to the actual trading pattern of the time. Written in Defoe’s typical first-​person narrative style, New Voyage is delivered in the voice of a nameless captain whose defining characteristic is his insistence on inverting the normal course of circumnavigation. Instead of going around South America and then crossing the Pacific to Asia, “as has been the ordinary way,” the captain advocates sailing to the East Indies first and then traversing the Pacific to the west coast of America. The rest of the crew unanimously reject his proposal on the grounds that, “our first business was to go to the South Seas, where our goods were wanted, and would sell for money, and then to the East Indies, where our money would be wanting to buy other goods to carry home, and not to go to the East Indies first, where our goods would not sell, and where we could buy no other for want of money” (8–​9). The captain is forced to comply, but due to unexpected weather conditions, he manages to revive his plan, finally ushering the merchants’ ship to the East Indies via the Cape of Good Hope. While trying to convince the crew of the feasibility of profiting from their unusual route, the captain reasons that English goods in the Philippine Islands must be exorbitantly expensive because they are usually transported by the Spanish via a succession of American and transpacific stops. Thus, by trading with the East Indies directly, he and his fellow merchants should be able to sell their cargo at exceedingly competitive prices (18). The captain’s speculations are gloriously verified in Manila, where merchants of different nationalities immediately flock to buy their goods—​which are mostly “fine clothes” and linen—​with valuable Asian commodities including cloves, porcelain, Chinese silks, and “a great sum of money” (96). The entire cargo sells out within a few days, disappointing many other potential buyers. The Eastern goods the English merchants obtain in Manila are later sold with hefty profits in western South America. In the end, the merchants

148

148  The Age of Silver

return home with a shipload of gold and silver, the ultimate proof of any commercial victory. New Voyage’s portrayal of the enormous popularity of English goods in Manila blatantly subverts the trading reality of the early eighteenth century. Defoe himself was, of course, well aware of Britain’s disadvantages in its commerce with Asia. In fact, in the latter part of New Voyage he belies his earlier fantasy by having the captain frankly criticize the one-​sided monetary flow between Britain and Asia in the following words: “… our East India trade is all carried on, or most of it, by an exportation of bullion in specie and a return of foreign manufactures or produce; and most of these manufactures also, either trifling and unnecessary in themselves, or such as are injurious to our own manufactures.” The captain goes on to list those “trifling and unnecessary” Asian imports, which in his opinion include “china ware, coffee, tea, japan works, pictures, fans, screens, &c.” (154). Historically, among the Eastern “trifles” condemned by Defoe’s captain, tea would become the single most important Chinese import to Britain during the late eighteenth century, although during Defoe’s time a more prominent Eastern commodity in English culture was the “chinaware.” In New Voyage, “chinaware” notably appears among the goods Chinese merchants in Manila bring to trade for English merchandises. In that episode, the captain—​in contradiction to his later description of “chinaware” as “trifling and unnecessary”—​eyes the “seventy great chests” of porcelain sent by “seven or eight Chinese or Japanners,” as the text dismissively reports, with evident desire and describes them as “exceeding fine.” Their Eastern sellers, however, are belittled by the narrator as “strange, ugly, ill-​looking fellows” (94). Defoe’s contrasting rhetoric about the commodity and the people from whom it originated indicates his ambivalent attitudes toward East Asia. On the one hand, Eastern goods during the period commanded a worldwide popularity and were coveted by all mercantile interests; on the other, they constituted a major counterforce to Defoe’s dream of a world market dominated by English manufacturers. The threats from Asian economy contextualize New Voyage’s fantasy of the English crew’s landing in a terra nova in the largely uncharted waters of the South Pacific by virtue of its new circumnavigation route. New Voyage describes the immense commercial potential of trading with these insolated island populations in the following words: “… having no manufactures or materials for manufactures of their own, [they] would consequently take off a very great quantity of English woollen manufactures, especially when civilised by our dwelling among them and taught the manner of clothing themselves for their ease and convenience.” As the text further fantasizes, “in return for these manufactures, it is evident we should have gold in specie, and perhaps spices, the best merchandise and return in the world”

149

Caribbean to China  149

(156). By envisioning a remote Pacific island as the supporting periphery to English economy, Defoe’s novel implicitly endeavors to offset the actual multicenteredness of global economy during the period. Later, in portraying the English ship’s arrival in Valdivia and Patagonia, New Voyage nonetheless returns to an acknowledgement of the trading reality of the time, and reports that the goods obtained from Manila fetch prodigious prices in these New World regions. Overall, New Voyage’s vacillation between economic reality and fantasy occurred owing to the divergence between Defoe’s Anglocentric ideal and the actual trading order of the early eighteenth century, during which the East remained a more dominant commercial force. The same historical situation also contributed to Defoe’s vision of Robinson Crusoe’s adventures from the Caribbean to China. In order to trace out this literary-​historical interconnection, the following section shall focus on a hidden linkage between Crusoe’s earthenware pot in the first book, an image Virginia Woolf once highlighted as a main token of the novel’s overwhelming “earthiness,” and the monstrous image of a tower made of “chinaware” in Farther Adventures.

CRUSOE’S EARTHENWARE POT

Virginia Woolf’s widely read essay on Robinson Crusoe contains a remarkable passage on the dominating realist effects of the novel. In particular, her writing foregrounds the protagonist’s earthenware pot as the most striking image of the spiritual bleakness of Defoe’s narrative world: There are no sunsets and no sunrises; there is no solitude and no soul. There is, on the contrary, staring us full in the face nothing but a large earthenware pot. We are told, that is to say, that it was the 1st of September 1651; that the hero’s name is Robinson Crusoe; and that his father has the gout. Obviously, then, we must alter our attitude. Reality, fact, substance is going to dominate all that follows. We must hastily alter our proportions throughout; Nature must furl her splendid purples; she is only the giver of drought and water; man must be reduced to a struggling, life-​preserving animal; and God shrivel into a magistrate whose seat, substantial and somewhat hard, is only a little way above the horizon. Each sortie of ours in pursuit of information upon these cardinal points of perspective—​God, man, Nature—​is snubbed back with ruthless common sense. Robinson Crusoe thinks of God: “sometimes I  would expostulate with myself, why providence should thus completely ruin its creatures … But something always return’d swift upon me to check

150

150  The Age of Silver

these thoughts.” God does not exist. He thinks of Nature, the fields “adorn’d with flowers and grass, and full of very fine woods,” but the important thing about a wood is that it harbours an abundance of parrots who may be tamed and taught to speak. Nature does not exist. He considers the dead, whom he has killed himself. It is of the utmost importance that they should be buried at once, for “they lay open to the sun and would presently be offensive.” Death does not exist. Nothing exists except an earthenware pot. Finally, that is to say, we are forced to drop our own preconceptions and to accept what Defoe himself wishes to give us.33

Penetrating as it is, Woolf’s reading after all accepts the monologist reality Defoe’s narrative forces into being. Yet, once we rehistoricize the material details Defoe “subdued . . . to his design,” to use Woolf’s phrase, his seemingly objective material and technological descriptions are often far from the well-​understood realities of the period. For this reason, Lydia Liu aptly calls Robinson Crusoe a “proto-​science fiction.”34 As we have discussed, Crusoe’s improbable wealth after the sale of his plantation and the English merchants’ Manila success in A New Voyage are both pseudorealistic. A similar observation can be given to Crusoe’s making of the earthenware pot, an image Woolf underscores in her reading. In the novel, the earthenware pot episode occurs about two years after Crusoe’s arrival on the island when he needs containers to store the harvest of the year. Having produced a number of crude, sun-​baked vessels and pots with clay, the protagonist accidentally finds “a broken Piece of [his] Earthen-​ware Vessels in the Fire, burnt as hard as a Stone, and red as a Tile” (88). Thus inspired to burn his wares with high temperature, the protagonist eventually produces two “Earthen Pots, as hard burnt as cou’d be desir’d; and one of them perfectly glaz’d with the Running of the Sand” (88). Presented as another ingenious invention of the protagonist’s, “earthenware”-​making in the episode, according to Lydia Liu’s illuminating analysis, “simultaneously evokes and disavows the palpable presence of the Chinese porcelain and all the associated meanings this image could call up in the mind of Defoe’s contemporary European readers, like chinaware, delftware, faïence, maiolica, the porcelain towers that were being constructed in parks and gardens around Europe, chinoiserie, and so on.”35 Following on Liu’s observation, we may add that, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Western Europe imported at least seventy million pieces of Chinese porcelain, which became a prized symbol of beauty and refinement in both royal chambers and bourgeois homes. European emulations of the Chinese porcelain led to the inventions of “soft-​paste European porcelain,” the most famous of which was the Dutch “delftware.”36 As Liu further notes, given Defoe’s professional experience with

151

Caribbean to China  151

brickmaking, he must have been able to appreciate the technological significance of transforming sun-​baked pottery into a hardened and glazed vessel, especially when the differences between “earthenware,” “soft-​paste imitations of Chinese porcelain,” and the “true porcelain” assumed a “metaphysical” burden about the real and “that which merely looked real” among his contemporaries.37 In this light, Defoe’s insistence on calling Crusoe’s reinvented pots “earthenware” purposefully denies a widely discussed technological difference of the period and subsequently erases the Chinese context of the episode. The erasure of the Chinese associations of the earthenware episode once again expresses Defoe’s economic nationalism. Due to the trading deficits accumulated by importations of Eastern goods such as “chinaware,” some European mercantile thinkers described China as a threatening nation of “porcelain-​headed extortioners.”38 Sharing a similar attitude, Defoe was vocally critical of the English royalty’s obsession with Chinese porcelain. In A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–​1727), for instance, the author paints an absurdly extravagant scene to ridicule Queen Mary’s porcelain collection: The queen brought in the custom or humour, as I  may call it, of furnishing houses with china-​ware, which increased to a strange degree afterwards, piling their china upon the tops of cabinets, scrutores, and every chymney-​ piece, to the tops of the ceilings, and even setting up shelves for their china-​ ware, where they wanted such places, till it became a grievance in the expence of it, and even injurious to their families and estates.39

Satirizing the royal obsession with the Chinese porcelain, Defoe was equally apprehensive of the spread of other foreign luxuries to the detriment of Britain’s national industries. Silk, another major Chinese export, was unsurprisingly disparaged in his writings as yet another pernicious Eastern extravagance. In 1708, for instance, Defoe wrote sarcastically that the English monarch of the time, Queen Anne (re. 1702–​1714), “was pleased to appear in China and Japan, I  mean China silks and calico.”40 Defoe’s rhetoric launches his criticism directly at the foreign origins of the fabrics rather than their own lavishness. For Defoe, the court’s obsession with foreign luxury goods was particularly harmful because it set a bad example for all other social classes. As he writes in A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, the royal taste swayed “the humours of the common people so much . . . as to make them greivous to our trade, and ruining to our manufactures and the poor.”41 According to Defoe, the principal ills of the proliferation of luxury dressing are not the confusion of social ranks—​as we have seen in the earlier chapters—​but the promotion of foreign goods over

152

152  The Age of Silver

native ones. As he emphatically argues in The Complete English Tradesman, “The first and main thing is this, that while we are call’d Home Traders, we shou’d not be promoters of Foreign Trade in prejudice of our own.”42 In The Complete English Tradesman, Defoe’s economic nationalism produces a scenario in which the whole world becomes dependent on English goods. In his vision, “London consumes all, circulates all, exports all, and at last pays for all, and this is Trade; this greatness and wealth of the City is the Soul of the Commerce to all the Nation  .  .  .  ”43 To a great extent, the Robinson Crusoe myth allegorizes this fantasy of a London-​centered world economy. Despite being frequently worded as “necessity,” Crusoe’s material creations on the island soon step beyond basic sustenance and move toward accumulation and refinement—​in other words, to the stage of surplus and even luxury production. The “stock book” in which he carefully documents the fruits of his labor resembles both an inventory of goods and a laboratory log. According to Marx’s famous comment, if they were to be placed in a social context, Crusoe’s ledgers contain “all that is essential to the determination of value.”44 Displaced by the island setting of the first book of Robinson Crusoe, this social dimension is nevertheless inevitable in the book’s actual making and circulation. Once consumed by the English reading public, the novel’s meticulous documentation of Crusoe’s labor functions to elicit a social agreement for the protagonist’s unchallengeable ownership of the goods he produces, of the technologies of making them, and, finally, of the island he transforms. Within the novel, by force of Crusoe’s material dominance of the island, the later arrivals of the Spaniards and the cannibals hardly threaten his position as the true master of the place. Translating economic prowess into political power, Crusoe’s mastery of the island in essence symbolizes Defoe’s vision of an Anglocentric global order due to Britain’s superior manufacture and trade. The word “porcelain,” which implies an economic and technological force alien to English manufacturers during Defoe’s time, has no place in the writer’s dream of either a Crusoe-​centered island or a London-​centered world trade. Similarly excluded from Defoe’s depiction of Crusoe’s “earthenware” pots is the blue-​and-​white decoration that became the hallmark feature of exported Chinese porcelain, a feature that was imitated by nearly all European knockoffs of the chinaware. Crusoe frankly calls the first two sun-​baked urns “ugly” and describes the burnt “pipkin” as “good” but “not handsome.” The crude appearances of these wares work to indicate a process of trial and error, and hence Crusoe’s position as the inventor. Of course, a deserted island is not the right place for making delicate blue-​and-​ white porcelain wares. Yet, given suggestive terms such as “kiln,” “burnt,” and “glazed” in the earthenware passage, the very resemblance between Crusoe’s experiments and those carried out by contemporary European

153

Caribbean to China  153

manufacturers in search of the “true porcelain” implies the historical reality the novel’s insular setting functions to obscure and displace. Crusoe’s post-​island career in Farther Adventures is a natural extension of the first book’s underlying global context, for in the sequel Defoe’s narrative moves to dislodge—​indeed to make monstrous—​the Eastern economic domain at odds with his nationalistic agenda. Reading Farther Adventures as an integral part of the novel, we can clearly see that the intertwined myths of individual self-​sufficiency and empire in the first book hide an anxiety that, confronted by European rivals and the strong autonomy—​even superiority—​of Asian economies, Britain’s “home trade” was far from being the master of the eighteenth-​century world economy.

AN INCONGRUOUS MONSTER

The fear of peripherality is already written into the particular geographical setting of the first book of Robinson Crusoe. According to Markley’s revealing analysis, Defoe’s placement of Crusoe’s island in the Caribbean intriguingly differs from the actual location of the shipwreck survived by Alexander Selkirk, a real-​life castaway whose story served as a noted inspiration for Robinson Crusoe. Selkirk was stranded for five years on Juan Fernández, an island “off the coast of Chile” and “a resort for buccaneers, a stopover for European expeditions to the Pacific, and a potential naval base.” Defoe’s decision to relocate the island from the Pacific to the Atlantic, in Markley’s opinion, is likely owing to his “chagrin” that “England had no ‘plantations’ in the Pacific, and the East India Company’s voyages to the Far East were, by and large, not efforts to establish colonies but to insinuate its way into regional trading networks.” “By shipwrecking Crusoe in the Caribbean,” Markley surmises, “Defoe locates his narrative within a New World economy of slave trading and colonial development,” a setting that “renders plausible the ‘colonization’ of the island in a region where England could point to some success.”45 Markley’s comments expose the comparatively marginalized position of England in European overseas competitions around the early eighteenth century. Eager to profit from the “East-​India” trade, England’s ventures into Asian waters were besieged by threats from other powerful European competitors. By the 1700s, the Juan Fernández that led to the Pacific passage to the East was still very much a forbidden area to the English. Selkirk reportedly hid himself from all Spanish ships that approached the island in fear that “they would murder him, or make a slave of him in the mines.”46 Written during a time when England was plagued by domestic

154

154  The Age of Silver

and international troubles, Defoe’s tale of Robinson Crusoe’s miraculous self-​sufficiency conjured up the image of an omnipotent and blessed survivor in order to offset an ongoing sense of national crisis. James Joyce once famously commented that “The true symbol of the British conquest is in Robinson Crusoe . . . The whole Anglo-​Saxon spirit is in Crusoe; the manly independence and the unconscious cruelty; the persistence; the slow yet efficient intelligence; the sexual apathy; the practical, well-​balanced religiousness; the calculating taciturnity.”47 Incisive as it is, Joyce’s reading is, after all, a retrospective observation from the vantage point of the early twentieth century. During Defoe’s time, Britain’s colonial “conquest,” or even its very overseas survival, was characterized by a far greater degree of ambiguity and uneasiness. The writer’s decision to place Crusoe’s island in the more promising waters of the Caribbean rather than the menacing Pacific navigation zone of the Juan Fernández is a small yet indicative sign of this historical context. The Asia-​bound global context Defoe deliberately avoided in the first book of Robinson Crusoe nonetheless returns with a vengeance in Farther Adventures, as a source of anxiety the protagonist strives to denaturalize through his travelogue.48 Portraying Crusoe’s revisitation of his Caribbean island, where he settles a series of troubles that have occurred during his absence, the opening chapters of the sequel offer an anticlimactic conclusion to his engagement with the island, which has fallen from a model of economic self-​sufficiency to an “unprofitable backwater” beset with “well-​ known problems of early eighteenth-​ century colonies—​ d iminishing resources, political conflicts, and external threats.”49 Claiming that “I have now done with the island, and all manner of discourse about it” (121), Crusoe abandons the New World territory he has cultivated for decades and travels to trade with the “East Indies.” This narrative design exposes the dilemma that confronted early modern Britain’s overseas endeavors, which were besieged by the difficulties of establishing profitable colonies and were heavily dependent upon the Eastern trade despite the disadvantages its merchants experienced there. To compensate for the unsettling reality that opens its narrative, Farther Adventures goes on to enumerate the protagonist’s denunciations of virtually all the peoples and places he encounters in his trade and travels, especially the Chinese civilization that is the ultimate Other to English religious, cultural, and economic powers. In Farther Adventures, one notable scene that presents a demonized image of the East concerns the protagonist’s sighting of a “chinaware house,” which can be read as a monstrous double of the earthenware pot in the first book. While heading toward the northern Chinese border with a Russia-​bound caravan, Crusoe learns about “the greatest rarity in all the

155

Caribbean to China  155

country,”—​that is, “a gentleman’s house built with China ware.” Crusoe’s close examination of the house leads to a long descriptive passage that begins as follows: I was then curious, indeed, to see it; and when I came to it, it was nothing but this: it was a timber house, or a house built, as we call it in England, with lath and plaster, but all this plastering was really China ware—​t hat is to say, it was plastered with the earth that makes China ware. The outside, which the sun shone hot upon, was glazed, and looked very well, perfectly white, and painted with blue figures, as the large China ware in England is painted, and hard as if it had been burnt (170).

The words “glazed,” “burnt,” and “perfectly white” in this passage all echo the earthenware pot description in the first part of Robinson Crusoe. However, the kinship of these two episodes is barely recognizable because Defoe ascribes the material product they both portray to utterly different origins. Whereas the earthenware pot episode erases all implications of porcelain to affirm the English protagonist’s own inventiveness, the chinaware house scene underscores the Chineseness of the building as an example of Eastern extravagance. In fact, for eighteenth-​century European readers, the “chinaware house” in Defoe’s sequel would immediately recall the famous image of the “Porcelain Pagoda of Nanjing,” which was popularized by Johan Nieuhof’s (1618–​1672) bestselling illustrated memoir about his travel in China.50 The real Nanjing pagoda that inspired Nieuhof’s report was, however, built with a type of glazed and multicolored pottery tile known as liu li rather than the true porcelain—​ci.51 While spreading the myth that the tower was made of “porcelain,” Nieuhof’s account does indicate the quality of liu li by describing the pagoda’s exterior as “all Glaz’d over and Painted with several Colours, as Green, Red, and Yellow.”52 Defoe’s presentation of a house made of tiles that are “perfectly white, and painted with blue figures” thus reinvents the image propagated by Nieuhof. In fact, rather than mirroring any actual Chinese building, the “chinaware house” in Farther Adventures is akin to well-​k nown chinoiserie constructions such as the Trianon de Porcelaine commissioned by Louis XIV in 1670. European in its general style, the Trianon boasted a lavish roof constructed entirely with “blue and white faience tiles.”53 Similar to his attack on Queen Mary’s porcelain collection, Defoe’s Sinophobia as expressed in this scene has its root in the craze for exotic consumption among European nobles, who in turn influenced the taste of the general public at the expenses of Europe’s native industries. By the ways its goods were consumed in Europe, China came to be associated with “idleness” and excess among nationalistic economic thinkers like Defoe, in whose eyes the Eastern country must

156

156  The Age of Silver

have been characterized by a culture prone to vacuous display rather than rational production and healthy commercial circulation.54 The chinaware house in the sequel exemplifies Defoe’s idea of the Chinese excess with its bedazzling, almost infinite repetition of tiles “all made of the finest china . . . mixed with gold . . . joined so artificially . . . that it was very hard to see where [they] met” (170). The spectacle of the house induces both fascination and denial. Having been kept by “this odd sight” for so long that he falls two hours behind the caravan’s schedule, Crusoe ends his visit with the conclusion that the Chinese skills in porcelain are more style than substance: “As this is one of the singularities of China, so they may be allowed to excel in it; but I am very sure they excel in their accounts of it; for they told me such incredible things of their performance in crockery-​ware, for such it is, that I care not to relate, as knowing it could not be true.” Then Crusoe diverges to mention the rumor about a Chinese workman’s capability of making a ship “with all its tackle and masts and sails in earthenware, big enough to carry fifty men.” Without further argument, Crusoe shrugs off the story as nothing but a lie: “I knew the whole of the story, which was, in short, that the fellow lied: so I smiled, and said nothing to it” (171). Silent yet assertive, Crusoe uses the absurd image of an earthenware ship to generalize the Chinese “singularity” at “crockery-​ware” as empty stories and strange excess. The usage of the words “earthenware” and “crockery-​ ware” again erases the qualitative difference between Chinese porcelain and English pottery, with the implication that the Chinese “singularity” in fact rests in extravagant ornamentation or downright lies. By conjuring up the fantastic image of the chinaware house and the strange rumor of the earthenware ship, Defoe fiction implicitly denounces the historical reality of the ships of Chinese porcelain that were then inundating Euro-​ American markets. Calling the chinaware house passage in Farther Adventures an “extraordinary scene of encounter and unmasking,” Lydia Liu notes that Crusoe’s “metaphysical will to truth implies a necessary act of violence toward the object . . . in as much as Crusoe’s act of unmasking turns china into a synecdoche of China (a pun made easy by early modern typography, the violence is directed at both).”55 Later in the chapter, the latent “violence” of Crusoe’s scrutinizing gaze bursts out with chilling hostility when he reaches the foot of the Great Wall and looks at its fortresses as a “mighty Nothing” that could be easily smashed by European forces. In Crusoe’s words to his Portuguese pilot, “do you think it would stand out an army of our country people, with a good train of artillery; or our engineers, with two companies of miners? Would not they batter it down in ten days, that an army might enter in battalia; or blow it up in the air, foundation and all, that there should be no sign of it left?” Notably, the word “nothing” recurs in Crusoe’s

157

Caribbean to China  157

depictions of the chinaware house and of the Great Wall. This literary continuity reveals the two narrative moments’ similarly violent interpretations of the image of China. While Crusoe’s verbal attack against the Great Wall uncannily presages future warfare, his deciphering gaze at the “chinaware” architecture harbors a more fundamental enmity instigated by England’s commercial frustrations in its China trade.56 In Serious Reflections, Crusoe’s denunciation of China finds a metaphor that is even more arresting than the pointless complexities of the porcelain house. This time, the protagonist recalls the grotesque image of an “idol” he supposedly witnessed in a garden near Nanjing. According to the passage cited at the opening of this chapter, the image of the statue resembles “a mangled, promiscuous-​gendered creature . . . an incongruous monster.” As Markley has counted, after describing this horrific vision, the book devotes “twenty-​three hefty paragraphs, many of them more than a page long, to castigating the Chinese for their pride, immorality, technological backwardness, corrupt government, hideous art, and political tyranny.”57 The prominent theme of Chinese negativity in the two sequels to Robinson Crusoe reveals that one of their primary purposes is to de-​Sinicize the early-​eighteenth century global order, or, in other words, to attack a powerful civilizational Other that conflicts with Defoe’s ideology of an Anglo-​ centric world system. Characterized by infinite connectivity and self-​similarity, Defoe’s monstrous image of the “Chinese” idol is reminiscent of the similarly excessive image of the porcelain house. Devoid of a given order and predictable movements, as something that “might have stood with any side forward, or any side backward, any end upward, or any end downward,” the “Chinese” idol can be read as a metaphor of the complex power dynamic early modern European merchants faced in their trading relations with China. Other than civilizational achievements, China’s shrewd businessmen constituted another oft-​noted topic in the very large number of publications on China in seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​century Europe. While some of these descriptions praise Chinese merchants as trustworthy oath-​keepers who “will hazard their Head to keep their Word” (Francis Gemelli Careti), others warn that when trading in or near China “a stranger will always be cheated, if he be alone” (Louis le Comte Comte).58 Either way, these accounts depict China as a robust and even unrivaled mercantile center. In the words of Louis le Comte, whose writings on China Defoe consulted, “There is no Nation under the Sun, that is more fit for Commerce and Traffick, and understand them better,” and “The infinite Trade and Commerce that is carried on everywhere, is the Soul of the People, and the primum mobile of all their Actions.”59 Attaching the image of the model homo economicus to a non-​English/​European and non-​Protestant/​Christian Other, these reports

158

158  The Age of Silver

directly contradict Defoe’s Anglocentric world economic imaginary. The Chinese labyrinth of “infinite Trade and Commerce,” which was controlled by powerful local social networks, decenters Crusoe’s position as the all-​controlling master and surrounds him with a multicentered global continuum. By the logic of Defoe’s self-​validating national allegory, these unsettling implications of the image of China must be relegated to a place of “mimetic lapse.”60 In other words, they must be regarded as a realm of monstrous nonreality, insomuch that Defoe’s narrative can subsequently reaffirm the reality of the Anglocentric ideological system at the center of its literary agenda. Portraying the “Chinese” idol as a grotesque intermixing of “man, beast, fowl, or fish,” Serious Reflections relates the horror of this image of Otherness to the threat of hybridity. Whereas the protagonist used to sit on the island with his domesticated animals “like a King,” surrounded by his “Favourite,” the parrot Poll, and his dog and cat as if they were his “servants” (108), the animal-​human relation in the first book follows a master-​ slave dynamic that prefigures Crusoe’s later authority over Friday and the natives, and is thus quite different from the “Chinese” idol’s conjunction of a diversity of beings as interrelated equals with indistinguishable borders. Moreover, perplexing to Crusoe as to whether it is made of “wood or stone,” the idol thwarts the protagonist’s position as the subject of knowledge and possession. Utterly incomprehensible in the eyes of Crusoe, the images of the Chinese idol and its implied double, the porcelain house, present an impervious monstrosity in contrast to the evolutionary stories of the earthenware pot and other material technologies in the first book. Based on our relinking of the two halves of Robinson Crusoe, however, we can see that the projected “reality” of Crusoe’s Caribbean island is ultimately a “science fiction” that serves to displace a polycentric global order, which reemerges in Farther Adventures. Rethinking Woolf’s comments on Robinson Crusoe, Lynn Festa notes that, considering the constitutive significances of objects in the book, Defoe’s novel forces us to ponder the possibility of a “capacity to grasp the world from the place of a thing—​to find fitting a shape so utterly not one’s own—​that makes a person human.”61 Attention to Farther Adventures, which is lacking in Festa’s account, as in many other readings of Robinson Crusoe, nonetheless reveals that this thing-​originated “place” of the Crusoe myth stems from a transcultural historical hybridity Defoe’s fiction aims to undo. By this symbolic design, the Crusoe myth is uncannily symptomatic of the Anglocentric “second modernity,” which uses Orientalism as a founding principle to purge the rational relevance of Europe’s Eastern Others. The very existence of Farther Adventures, however, signals that the normativity of a Eurocentric global order was not fully established in the Western imagination at this point. Rather it was

159

Caribbean to China  159

not until well into the nineteenth century that the Crusoe myth began to assume a genuinely paradigmatic eminence, as a powerful origin tale of the “starting point of history” in economic and literary theorizations of a West-​centric narrative of modernity, while Crusoe’s Eastern travels became an unwanted narrative excess. In the following section, we shall nonetheless see that the theme of monstrosity likewise characterizes Defoe’s treatment of the social effects of commercial circulation in Moll Flanders and Roxana through the figure of the promiscuous “fallen woman.” His denouncement of the “Chinese” idol in Serious Reflections thus also registers the sense of change and chaos in his own national environment. The sense of transition and contingency in Moll Flanders and Roxana generates a more open-​ended novelistic discourse that resonates better with other Eastern and Western works of early realism from the Age of Silver. The symbolic significance of gender and sexuality in these later novels by Defoe, furthermore, is comparable to what we have observed in cases such as the sixteenth-​century Chinese novel The Plum in the Golden Vase. In the epilogue, we shall further discuss how the interlinking of historical and sexual chaos in Eastern and Western narrative texts, such as Plum and Defoe’s writings, prefigured the reinventions of the theme of female chastity in these traditions, a parallel that constituted a hitherto unnoted subtext of Goethe’s famous speech on the dawning era of “world literature.”

PROMISCUOUS MONEY

Despite his vehement attacks on virtually every aspect of China in Farther Adventures, Crusoe ends up buying £3,500 worth of valuable Chinese merchandises to trade to Europe. “Loaded in all eighteen camels” to be transported across the Russian steppes (which was an active Eurasian commercial line during the early eighteenth century), the cargo includes “ninety pieces of fine damasks, with about two hundred pieces of other very fine silk of several sorts, some mixed with gold . . . a large quantity of raw silk, and some other goods . . . together with tea and some fine calicoes, and three camels’ loads of nutmegs and cloves” (172). To put the value of his goods into a historical perspective, it is approximately equal to the annual income of the top 0.06 percent or the top 800 richest families in England around 1688.62 This comparison further indicates the rather fantastic nature of the monetary accounts in Robinson Crusoe. Given that in Farther Adventures and his other writings Defoe frequently attacks Eastern goods as “the slightest and foolishest Trash in the World,”63 Crusoe’s enumeration

160

160  The Age of Silver

of his cargo hides the author’s silent fascination with the actual appeal of Chinese products in contradiction to the book’s expressed ideological position. Having Crusoe denounce Chinese objects and customs every step of the way, Defoe in Farther Adventures ends up presenting Eastern commerce as a complex network of consumption and exchange beyond his protagonist’s comprehension and control. In this light, the monstrous image of the “Chinese” idol in essence symbolizes the protagonist’s relation to Eastern culture and economy. Intriguingly enough, monstrosity is also a trope Defoe repeatedly employed to portray Britain’s own spreading commercial culture. In The Complete English Tradesman, for instance, he writes about the “monstrous” increase of London “mercers”—​i.e. silk dealers—​from fifty or sixty shops in 1663 to three hundred or four hundred by the end of the century.64 In A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, Defoe also memorably calls London a “great and monstrous Thing.”65 Considering the parallel metaphors of monstrosity in Defoe’s depictions of foreign and domestic commercial scenes, the fear and fascination his Robinson Crusoe series projects onto the image of China mirror his ambivalence about Britain’s own socioeconomic and cultural destabilizations. Defoe’s later novels such as Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana (1724) overtly manifest his concerns with cultural chaos in the new commercial era. In these books that focus on the “she-​merchants,” the social and erotic dimensions of material desire Defoe deliberately obscures in Robinson Crusoe resurge as prominent literary constituents. These complexities allow his later novels to represent more “heteroglossic” explorations of individual mobility beyond the totalizing discourse of capitalist rationality. Similar to the marginalization of money in the first part of Robinson Crusoe, the book’s eradication of sexuality is a symbolic device used to displace exchanges and hybridities between the Self and the Other, and hence to rationalize an ideology of capitalist-​colonial dominance. On one level, this textual politics of Robinson Crusoe corresponds to Max Weber’s theory of capitalism’s impulse to suppress sex for its own rationalization, a model Watt has invoked to interpret Crusoe’s desexualized personality.66 Rather than typifying narrative trends of the period, however, Robinson Crusoe’s nonsexual nature sharply diverges from the “semipornographic” tendencies of English fiction from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.67 Whereas these preceding and coeval English works, such as the popular novels of Eliza Haywood (1693–​1756), resemble Eastern cases such as The Plum in the Golden Vase in representing “Lust—​the carnal degradation of love—​and the lust for money” as “… interchangeable signifiers of corruption,”68 Defoe’s male-​centered narratives from Robinson Crusoe to Captain Singleton completely purge the sexual motif, and subsequently erase the

161

Caribbean to China  161

potentially socially disruptive aspects of material desire. Importantly, these desexualized narratives are invariably tied to the diasporic subject matter of travel. This narrative pattern hints that colonial conditions are essential to rationalizing the capitalist impulses these protagonists embody. The return of eroticism in Moll Flanders and Roxana is inseparable from their similar narrative focuses on the figure of the “fallen woman.” Due to this different gender structure, these books present a more contingent vision on Self-​Other relations and a prominent theme of plural identities. To a large degree, Defoe’s female characters share the materialistic preoccupations of their male counterparts such as Crusoe and Captain Singleton. Owing to their gender, however, sexual commerce replaces trade in their quest for profit and self-​empowerment. “Consigned to compulsory self-​commodification,”69 Defoe’s female characters occupy an ambiguous human-​thing position, which allows their images to allegorize the surrounding political and epistemological instabilities in ways that are more provocative than his male protagonists. One important angle to examine the divergence between Defoe’s male-​ centered and female-​centered narratives resides in their representations of kinship decay, which is a prevalent motif in his fictional works. In the words of Christopher Flint, Defoe’s novels are “all written in the form of autobiographical memoirs and all beginning with an initial loss of or escape from the family.”70 Symbolically, the persistent theme of domestic separation in Defoe’s works serves the purpose of freeing his protagonists from all social restraints, the most basic of which is the parent-​child bond. In Robinson Crusoe, for instance, the protagonist’s breakaway from human society begins with his obstinate decision to depart from his parental home. Elaborating on Crusoe’s mastery over the island and over the colonial subject Friday, the narrative in the end elevates the protagonist to the position of the patriarch and redeems his “original sin.” Excluded from patriarchal identity, Defoe’s heroines, however, can only enact the motif of kinship decay in a hypereroticized rather than deeroticized manner. The material desire they embody thus assumes an ambiguous promiscuity, which is both transgressive and liberating. In Moll Flanders, one especially notable narrative device that expresses the transgressive nature of the heroine’s desire is the theme of incest, which Ellen Pollak describes as “the ideological and structural fulcrum” of the novel.71 On the narrative level, Moll violates the incest taboo after she unwittingly marries a man who turns out to be her half-​brother. In a symbolic sense, this outcome signifies the chaotic consequences of the heroine’s interfusion of her economic and erotic desires. When describing her first sexual commerce with a man, the elder son of the household where she serves as a maid, Moll admits that “I was more confounded with the Money

162

162  The Age of Silver

than I was before with the Love.” The heroine further portrays the one hundred guineas her lover brings to her in a silk purse as a genuine stimulant of her erotic desire. In her words, “[m]‌y Colour came, and went, at the Sight of the Purse, and with the fire of his Proposal together; . . . so putting the Purse into my Bosom, I made no more Resistance to him” (28–​29).72 According to Ann Louise Kibbie’s analysis, placing so much emphasis on the libidinal lure of money, the novel in fact renders sex “redundant, an anticlimax” in the heroine’s erotic life.73 In one symbolically significant narrative moment, after her second and last legal husband hides their remaining properties in the Southwark sanctuary of the Mint away from impatient debtors, Moll reports, “I went into the Mint too, took Lodgings in a very private Place, drest me up in the Habit of a Widow, and call’d myself Mrs. Flanders” (64). This transformative process, which involves the heroine’s “minting” of a new and duplicitous identity for herself, “suggests Moll’s identification with currency.”74 Given Moll’s intimate association with money, her incest symbolizes the radical interpersonal chaos that could have come along with monetary and commercial circulations, a scenario Defoe himself alertly addresses in his morality books, Family Instructor (1715) and The New Family Instructor (1727). Thus, in Laura Doyle’s words, “If we can read Defoe’s conduct books as expressions of his anxiety about the fracturing pressures on families within an economic system he otherwise condones, we can see that Moll’s horror at incest does the same.”75 In Moll Flanders, the heroine’s troubling transgressions nonetheless find a reassuring solution through a transatlantic plot. Moll’s incestuous marriage to her half-​brother occurs in the English settlement in Virginia in North America. After she flees back across the Atlantic following the discovery of the true identity of her husband, Moll finds new partners and ways to profit until she falls into the arms of the law and faces the gallows. In the end, however, thanks to the amnesty the American colonies provided to English convicts, Moll travels once again to Virginia and is thus reunited with her brother-​husband and one of their sons, Humphfry. In this narrative design, “a woman’s illicit sexuality allegorizes Britain’s free laws, thieving crimes, and colonial prosperity.” The novel’s nationally symbolic plot generates what Doyle calls a “comedy of liberty’s equivocation,” for Moll ends up inheriting her biological mother’s colonial wealth and arrives at a happy ending across the Atlantic, while her brother-​husband quietly passes away. Indicatively, Moll’s reunion with Humphfry, the fruit of her incest, revolves around her motherly gift of a gold watch in return for her son’s gift of a “Deer skin Bag . . . with five and fifty Spanish Pistoles in it” (336). Though evocative of the gold-​loaded “silk purse” that has lured Moll into her first sexual trade, Humphfry’s “deer skin bag” functions to normalize Moll’s motherhood despite its incestuous basis. By these altering

163

Caribbean to China  163

motifs, Moll’s story eventually performs a “naturalization of capital,” and subsequently justifies “the new matrix from which she profits, where the circulation of money and goods (uprooted from embedded community and generated now by ‘individuals’) no longer demands the structure of an incest taboo.”76 Notably, in both Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, the protagonist’s economic individualism finds justification in the new transatlantic environment: the former achieves this effect through an assured narrative of self-​sufficiency, while the latter arrives at its happy ending in a less settled manner by a comic resolution of the incest taboo. Whereas these narrative patterns indicate the crucial significance of the colonial condition to Defoe’s novelistic creations, his 1724 novel Roxana somehow abandons the transatlantic prospect and ends up as his darkest, yet likely most powerful, reflection on the volatility and hybridity of individual identity in the changing socioeconomic system. As the ex-​mistress of a wealthy jewelry merchant, a prince, and finally a Dutch banker, the heroine of Roxana blends the worlds of goods, monetary capital, and political privilege through her promiscuous sexual ties. In the end, the heroine marries the Dutch banker and the couple purchases the titles of duke and duchess. Rather than signifying the linear growth of the self as in Robinson Crusoe, this ending ironically concludes the heroine’s unpredictable shifts between mutable identities and social roles, and is burdened with the terrible suggestion that the ennobled heroine might have arranged the murder of her own daughter in order to hide her scandalous past. In contrast to Moll’s normalized incest, Roxana’s potential murder of her daughter exhibits “the monstrous logic of a closed circuit in which capital destroys the self that it creates.”77 Although the novel’s disturbing ending suggests a radical situation of kinship decay, the almost self-​destructive logic of Roxana’s story is simultaneously accompanied by an especially rich narrative configuration of “the fungibility of identity.”78 To go back to the question of monstrosity in Serious Reflection’s presentation of the “Chinese” idol, Defoe’s novel associates Roxana’s border-​crossing identities with both Orientalist exoticism and gender ambiguity. The heroine’s pseudonym “Roxana” in fact was related to “multiple literary and historical characters of Turkish provenance,” and served as a “generic name for an oriental queen, suggesting ambition, wickedness, and exorcism” in English representations of the Orient during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the words of Srinivas Aravamudan, the name defines the heroine as “ ‘a mere Roxana,’ a public woman, actress, and counterfeit of the real thing.”79 The novel develops this trope of “Roxana” most fully through the moment of the heroine’s lavish “Turkish” dance. Her dance ends up attracting the attention

164

164  The Age of Silver

of a certain “prince,” who the narrative suggests to be the King of Britain himself, and the heroine subsequently becomes the nobleman’s mistress for three years (247–​248). This turn of event indicates the supreme seductive power of Roxana’s Oriental guise, which entices both merchants and kings. Moreover, rather than passively serving men of wealth and power, Roxana’s erotic career is ultimately a means of self-​ regeneration. The urge toward individual liberation and empowerment through her sexuality in fact infuses the heroine’s image with a gender ambiguity, given her expressed wish to be a “Man-​Woman” on the grounds that “Liberty seem’d to be the Men’s Property” (171). Overall, combining Eastern and Western disguises, while moving between different gender and status roles, Roxana is a transgressor of all borders. In this sense, her image parallels the “promiscuous-​gendered” “Chinese idol” in Serious Reflections. The Orientalist excess Defoe condemns from Crusoe’s perspective thus characterizes the absolute freedom and absolute chaos of his own historical world, as crystallized through the image of Roxana. In light of this book’s horizontal comparative perspective, Roxana’s questioning of stable identity is in fact more consistent with the novel’s transcultural tendencies during the Age of Silver than the self-​solidifying narrative of Robinson Crusoe. Moreover, after Defoe, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, two other central figures to the English “rise of the novel,” further approached surrounding socioeconomic shifts with new narrative models and new visions of the self.80 Richardson and Fielding are very different writers, yet neither of them promotes the individual’s “endless accumulation” of economic and social mobility with the same straightforward approval as Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Whereas Fielding adopted the reintegrative perspective of an omnipresent narrator and utilized self-​balancing plots to impose a sense of order upon the haphazard flows of a commercial world, Richardson’s works launched a sentimental narrative transition toward promoting a feminized and privatized mode of moral subjectivity separated from political and economic powers.81 The case of Richardson, as to be addressed in the epilogue, can again be brought into a meaningful comparison to Eastern narrative developments, in particular the slightly earlier emergence of “talent-​beauty” novels in seventeenth-​century China. Resembling Richardson’s sentimental novels, Chinese “talent-​beauty” narratives, by their idealization of love and femininity, aimed at creating a private moral order in detachment from the social and political space. As mentioned in the introduction, this East-​West parallel is germane to the birth of Goethe’s idea of “world literature.” Overall, through analogous sentimental turns, Eastern and Western novels both assumed more subjectivized and more autonomous

165

Caribbean to China  165

civil-​aesthetic dynamics. This transcultural development resonates with Goethe’s idea of literature’s special place in generating a cosmopolitan humanistic affinity, which occurs upon yet transcends transnational political and economic relations. These linkages signal further horizontal continuities in the histories of Eastern and Western novels, and may guide us to deepen a polygenetic perspective on the “world republic of letters.”

166

167

Epilogue

The Transcivilizational Feminine and World Literature

Dined with Goethe. “Within the last few days, since I saw you,” said he, “I have read many things; especially a Chinese novel, which occupies me still and seems to me very remarkable.” “Chinese novel!” said I; “that must look strange enough.” “Not so much as you might think,” said Goethe; “the Chinese think, act, and feel almost exactly like us; and we soon find that we are perfectly like them, except that all they do is more clear, pure, and decorous, than with us.” —​Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations of Goethe1

On February 21, 1827, less than a month after he spoke to Eckermann on the dawning era of “world literature,” Goethe enthusiastically communicated to his young associate his anticipation of an artificial canal that would cut through the Isthmus of Panama in a manner proposed by Alexander von Humboldt. In Goethe’s view, should there be such a passage, “ships of any burden and size can be navigated through it from the Mexican Gulf to the Pacific Ocean,” and “… innumerable benefits would result to the whole human race.” Expecting that the “young state” of the United States would eventually bring this momentous project to materialization, Goethe further predicted that “along with the whole coast of the Pacific Ocean, where nature has already formed the most capacious and secure harbors, important commercial towns will gradually arise, for the furtherance of a great discourse between China and the East Indies and the United States.” Following on this vision, he proceeded to picture two other grand transportation projects: a “junction of the Danube and the Rhine” for the growth of “German resources,” and the English development of “a canal through the Isthmus of Suez.” Noting that these geographical transformations would 167

168

168 Epilogue

certainly occur after his lifetime, the poet concluded his predictions on an emotionally poignant note. In his words, “Would I could live to see these three great works! It would be well worth the trouble to last some fifty years more for the purpose.”2 Goethe’s enthusiasm for the integration of the world’s ocean ways matches his recurrent framing of the idea of world literature with the notion of trade. In his 1830 preface to the German translation of Thomas Carlyle’s biography of Friedrich Schiller, for instance, Goethe relates world literature to a desire for “free intellectual trade relations.” In a similar manner, one of Goethe’s letters to Carlyle compares the translator to “a middle-​man in this universal spiritual commerce.”3 Associating global literary exchange with what he perceived as an unrelenting shrinking of continental distances by force of “merchant-​ships” and “men-​of-​war,” which would make the Panama Canal inevitable,4 Goethe’s intuition in the late 1820s prefigured Marx and Engel’s correlation between world literature and the world market in The Communist Manifesto about two decades later. Despite their direct lineage, the Goethean and the Marxian visions of literary globalization nonetheless presuppose different world systems. Although being transformed by primarily Euro-​ A merican agents, the world for Goethe was still a polycentric system that depended on the “furtherance of a great discourse” between the East and the West. The Manifesto, in contrast, presents a global order dominated by the European bourgeoisie, who “compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production” and in this unswerving manner “creates a world after its own image.”5 In this monocentric historical vision, the East-​West resonance and communication Goethe had in mind when he envisaged the prospect of world literature became conceptually impossible. As I  suggested in the introduction, Goethe’s and Marx’s contrasting visions of world literature occurred at different sides of the East-​West “great divergence” that took place around the mid-​nineteenth century. As a counterthesis to the monocentric account of globalization and modernity that has been dominating the intellectual course since the time of the Manifesto, this book charts analogous realist trends in East-​West narratives during the pre-​Divergence centuries, with the purpose to remap the “rise of the novel” discourse to a transcultural continuum of global early modernity. Overall, the groundbreaking realist styles of the literary texts I have surveyed came about in response to the dissolution of established cultural and socioeconomic structures due to the ascension of monetary and material forces, and connote nationally allegorical implications owing to their critical engagement with the surrounding political economy. While representing larger historical shifts, these early realist works foreground the changeability of

169

Epilogue  169

identity and the active roles of individual desire within the ongoing social transformations. As mentioned in the previous chapter, parallel sentimental trends emerged in Chinese and English novels during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as analogous narrative strategies to construct a private domain of emotional and moral commitment in separation from the materialistic social sphere. This literary convergence had a direct bearing on Goethe’s conception of the notion of “world literature,” and is pertinent to reexamining the question of modern subjectivity on a transcultural basis. Although a more detailed treatment of this development is outside the scope of this study, it is apposite to conclude our present inquiries with the comparative questions surrounding the Goethean encounter, in order to gesture toward further horizontal resonances in the novel’s Eastern and Western histories.6 Specifically, according to the passage cited at the opening of this chapter, Goethe entered into his speech on world literature after commenting on the common humanity he had sensed from the reading of a Chinese novel. In his talk, Goethe further notes a “strong resemblance” between the Chinese text and the works of Samuel Richardson. Based on the few details Goethe offered in his conversation with Eckermann, the particular Chinese book in his mind must have been an anonymous text entitled Hao qiu zhuan. First published during the 1650s, Hao qiu zhuan happens to be the first full-​length Chinese fictional work introduced to European readers. An English translation of the book in four volumes, edited by Thomas Percy (1729–​1811) and named Hau kiou choaan: or, The Pleasing History, was first published in London in 1761. Within the next two years, French, German, and Dutch versions of the novel based on the English rendition came out in Paris, Leipzig, and Amsterdam.7 In addition to Hao qiu zhuan, Goethe was also reading other translated Chinese novels of the period, such as an 1826 French translation of Yu Jiao Li, another anonymous novel from the seventeenth century.8 In his conversation, Goethe must have been thinking about these books as well. Typically featuring the love romance between a beautiful and artistically cultivated maiden and a talented scholar, Hao qiu zhuan, Yu Jiao Li, and other similar books have been generally referred to as “talent-​beauty” (caizi jiaren) novels by scholars of Chinese literature. Widely popular in China from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, the talent-​beauty genre has fallen from favor since the early twentieth century.9 Given that critics today often view books such as Hao qiu zhuan and Yu Jiao Li as works that possess little literary value, one might conclude that Goethe’s interest in them resulted from the sheer dearth of translations of Chinese literary texts available in Europe during the period.

170

170 Epilogue

In light of the transcultural literary correspondences we have established, however, Goethe and his contemporaries’ interested responses to the translated talent-​beauty novels are not entirely accidental. In both talent-​beauty novels like Hao qiu zhuan and Richardson’s works, we can in fact observe parallel reinventions of the discourse of female chastity for reforming and elevating the cultural meaning of individual desire. This literary similarity accounts for the “strong resemblance” Goethe observed between the two sides. Nonetheless, whereas Goethe attributed the “purity” of Hao qiu zhuan to an essential Chinese spirit, the historical spectrum we have opened up reveals that the book’s theme of love and chastity was a deliberate design in reaction to the prevalent topic of sexual decadence in earlier works of Chinese fiction, such as The Plum in the Golden Vase and a number of erotic texts that emerged during the late Ming period.10 The talent-​beauty genre’s reformist agenda can be clearly seen in a preface included in the earliest extant edition of Yu Jiao Li. According to the curious claim of the anonymous prefacer, the book was composed by the same group of writers who had authored The Plum in the Golden Vase, in order to amend their faults in having produced such a scandalous text.11 Though implausible, the story expresses the cultural rationale of the novel’s idealization of love. According to another preface in the same edition, Yu Jiao Li was written to offset the overly “concrete” (shi) nature of earlier vernacular novels by portraying decorous protagonists who “… , though clearly in love, do not fall into the sea of desire.” Thus, in the opinion of the prefacer, the novel offers a much-​needed antidote to the degeneration of literary and social ethos.12 Going back to our comparative question, Yu Jiao Li’s reformist purpose closely resembles the concerns of Richardson’s novels. As a matter of fact, the Chinese prefacer’s argument cited above is quite similar to the words of a reader’s letter published in the first edition of Pamela, which came out in 1741 and launched Richardson’s literary success. In the letter, the reader praises the unflinching virtue of the book’s eponymous heroine and comments that “a Piece of this Kind is much wanted in the World, which is but too much, as well as too early, debauched by pernicious Novels.”13 The parallel reformism of the two cases explains why the chaste Chinese talent-​ beauty novels appealed to eighteenth-​century European readers and were chosen for circulation in Europe in the first place.14 Thomas Percy, the chief literary figure responsible for the publication of the 1761 English edition of Hao qiu zhuan, explicitly expresses the didactic purpose of his promotion of the Chinese book in his dedication of the translation to the Countess of Sussex. Despite dismissing China’s religious difference, Percy writes, “At a time when this nation swarms with fictitious narratives of the most licentious and immoral turn, it may have some good effect to shew what strict

171

Epilogue  171

regard to virtue and decorum is paid by writers amongst the Chinese, notwithstanding the deplorable ignorance they labour under of those sublime and noble truths, which we enjoy to so little purpose” (vol. 1, 5).15 In its “virtue and decorum” also rests Hao qiu zhuan’s principle appeal to Goethe. In his dialogue with Eckermann, Goethe imagined that China must have “innumerable other legends, all turning upon what is moral and proper.”16 When making this comment, Goethe clearly had no idea that the Eastern civilization he associated with permanent tranquility was the birthplace of a text as morally chaotic as Plum. Rather than reflecting a timeless Chinese spirit, the talent-​beauty novels’ purified nature stemmed from a pressing sense of moral destabilization. Like Richardson’s works, they were every bit the product of a world that had lost its past certainties. More specifically, Chinese “talent-​ beauty” novels and Richardson’s works both responded to the ongoing cultural destabilization by reinventing the figure of the chaste woman as a new moral center. In contrast to the ancient patriarchic codes of female chastity in Chinese and Western traditions, in Richardson’s works and the talent-​beauty novels the heroine’s chastity exemplifies an individual personhood that transcends social hierarchies. On the side of English studies, scholars have long treated Richardson’s works as representing a “culture of sensibility” and “a watershed in the evolution of modern consciousness.”17 According to April Alliston, for instance, chastity in Richardson’s writings departs from the traditional “patrilineal” function of ensuring a “reproductive fidelity” between father and son.18 In a similar vein, Nancy Armstrong has made the influential argument that Richardson employed women’s disfranchised and secluded status in a patriarchic society to signal a space for a private morality in opposition to social and political roles.19 Likewise, in his study on the separation of public and private spheres in eighteenth-​century English culture, Michael McKeon comments that the “modern culture of constancy” in Richardson’s novels “… holds out the promise ‘that people can successfully control their behavior and feelings in a much more thorough way than was previously believed.’ ”20 Elsewhere, McKeon has further observed that the elevation of female chastity in eighteenth-​century English writings occurred in a context of “discredited aristocratic honor,” or, in other words, the gradual bankruptcy of an ideological correlation of social and moral orders, a discourse that traditionally functioned as “the most fundamental justification for the hierarchical stratification of society by status.” The chaste woman’s embodiment of “the locus and refuge of honor as virtue” in eighteenth-​century English culture thus occurred upon a prevalent cultural skepticism toward the past ideology of aristocratic honor.21 Following from the historical patterns described above, Richardson’s Pamela inverts the inner-​outer correspondence in aristocratic ideology by

172

172 Epilogue

featuring a maidservant’s unflinching resistance to the sexual advances of her master. Deployed in this context, the discourse of chastity becomes the core of a moral self that empowers the heroine to transcend her political subordination. Concluded with the heroine’s reconciliation and marriage with her reformed master, Pamela nonetheless caused widespread controversies among its eighteenth-​century readers. According to one commentator who wrote in the 1760s, Richardson’s first major novel generated “two different Parties, Pamelists and Anti-​Pamelists,” as “Some look upon this young Virgin as an Example for Ladies to follow . . . Others, on the contrary, discover in it, the Behavior of an hypocritical, crafty Girl in her Courtship; who understands the Art of bringing a Man to her Lure.”22 The Pamela debate indicates the profound separation of virtue and power in the cultural consciousness of the period, an environment in which the book’s happy ending appeared dubious. Richardson’s second major work, Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady, carefully resolves this ideological dilemma with a tragic ending, while turning the heroine’s chastity into a spiritual quality. Unknowingly drugged and raped by her harasser, Lovelace, Clarissa begins a “courtship of death” due to her inner sense of chastity and dignity.23 In this narrative design, the deprivation of the heroine’s bodily chastity becomes the very means to attesting her spiritual chastity. No longer chaste according to physical or social definitions following the rape, Clarissa transforms virtue entirely into a creation of her interior will and sentiment. On a broader level, the distinction of bodily and spiritual chastity in Clarissa pushes the inner-​outer dislocation in the cultural consciousness of the period to a logical extreme. When we compare Richardson’s works to Chinese talent-​beauty novels, some differences are obvious. For instance, the epistolary style for which Richardson is famous is absent in the Chinese narrative tradition, which did not witness the spread of first-​person narratives until the early twentieth century under Western influences. Furthermore, in contrast to the rakish image of the male protagonist in Richardson’s first two novels—​a pattern that is nonetheless subverted by his third major work, Sir Charles Grandison, and by a series of late eighteenth-​century novels that feature the “man of feelings,” Chinese talent-​beauty novels tend to maintain a perfect parallelism between the hero and the heroine’s moral character and artistic refinement, while relegating villainous forces to more marginal places in the narrative plot. These and other dissimilarities aside, Chinese talent-​ beauty novels resemble Richardson’s writings in presenting an interiorized form of moral agency through the theme of chaste love and female virtue. Analogous to Richardson’s subversion of aristocratic ideology by the chastity theme, Chinese talent-​beauty novels detach conjugal bonds from the correlative nexus of the Confucian “Five Cardinal Relations” (wu lun),

173

Epilogue  173

which, in resemblance to the Western patrilineal code, prescribes female chastity for the purpose of maintaining patriarchic lineage and, by extension, political loyalty. In The Plum in the Golden Vase, interconnected sexual, kinship, and political corruptions amount to a total subversion of the “Five Cardinal Relations.” In contrast to Plum’s pairing of public and private decays, talent-​beauty novels decouple the two domains and elevate marriage as an independent value that, while lying outside political and social concerns, is more fundamental to individual life. In Yu Jiao Li, a speech by the protagonist Su Youbai directly distinguishes marriage as an autonomous bond detached from the other cardinal relations. According to Su, “the duty which a subject owes his prince” is a mere matter of “opportunity,” and the cardinal bond that matters the most to him resides in a fulfilling marriage, without which “there is no consolation even in death” (ch. 5; 36).24 This statement redefines the foundation of marriage as loving companionship rather than authority and subordination, and elevates the conjugal relation above political ties. In this manner, similar to Richardson’s works, talent-​beauty novels reframe marriage and chastity as a matter of personal choice and sensibilities, rather than as hierarchical codes in service of the social organization of power. Hao qiu zhuan, the book that impressed Goethe with its “purity,” also presents the chastity motif as a manifestation of individual moral choice. The central event of the novel concerns a nightly meeting between the hero Tie Zhongyu and the heroine Shui Bingxin under pressing circumstances. Although their meeting violates the Confucian principle of gender segregation, the two protagonists conduct themselves in a perfectly proper manner. In his conversation with Eckermann, Goethe highlighted this scene by noting that the lovers in this Chinese novel “showed such great purity during a long acquaintance that, when they were on one occasion obliged to pass the night in the same chamber, they occupied the time with conversation and did not approach one another.”25 After this pivotal episode that occurs around the midpoint of the novel, Hao qiu zhuan spends its remaining pages detailing the hero and heroine’s unremitting efforts to prove their innocence against the ulterior schemes of a high courtier’s nephew, who covets Shui for himself. To this end, the protagonists even avoid all physical contact after their wedding ceremony, until the heroine’s virginity is vindicated in the imperial court. In the chapters that slowly move toward the protagonists’ final exculpation, the narrative repeatedly suggests that one’s moral character is determined from within. When facing the accusation of her ill-​natured uncle, for example, the heroine compares the immoral appearance of her behavior to “floating clouds,” and insists that the intention of her “heart” (xin) constitutes the “foundational essence” (ben) of her personal purity (ch. 6; 37).26

174

174 Epilogue

As in Pamela, in Hao qiu zhuan the heroine’s intact virginity serves as the ultimate proof of the protagonists’ moral integrity. However, another well-​k nown talent-​beauty novel from the same period, Jin Yun Qiao zhuan (Romance of the Golden Hairpin), parallels Clarissa in turning its heroine’s chastity into a purely spiritual property. Although Jin Yun Qiao zhuan was not introduced to Europe like Yu Jiao Li or Hao qiu zhuan, it was popular enough to be spread to Southeast Asia and became the source of the Vietnamese classic Tale of Kiều by Nguyễn Du (1766–​1820). 27 The novel was based on earlier accounts of a good-​ hearted prostitute named Wang Cuiqiao, who became the mistress of the powerful pirate lord Xu Hai and later committed suicide after she mistakenly persuaded Xu to surrender to the government, which led to his execution. Retelling this famous story, Jin Yun Qiao zhuan places a new emphasis on Wang’s personal history before her political involvement in the Xu Hai incident. 28 This narrative focus is linked with the book’s aim to represent the heroine as an embodiment of the morality of the “heart” (xin) in contrast to her debased body and social persona (shen). The book’s prefacer under the pseudonym “Tianhuacang Zhuren” (Master of the Heavenly Flowers Collection) pithily summarizes this inner-​outer opposition in the book, saying, “A person who has an unsullied body [or, lives an unsullied life] yet degraded heart is unchaste despite being chaste; a person who has a degraded body yet blameless heart is chaste despite being unchaste.”29 In terms of its narrative content, Jin yun qiao zhuan first portrays the heroine’s chaste behaviors during a secret love affair, thus establishing her image as a romantic yet virtuous young lady. Later, Wang sells herself as a concubine to raise the necessary bail to save her father from a disastrous lawsuit, yet is tricked into becoming a prostitute. The degradation of the heroine’s body, as in Clarissa, functions to bear out her inner moral sentiment. To this end, Jin Yun Qiao zhuan includes a large number of song lyrics Wang composes to express her sufferings and her deep sense of alienation from her sullied environment. Toward the end of the novel, in departure from earlier stories of Wang’s suicide, the heroine is rescued from drowning and returns home. She is thus reunited with her parents and her former lover, Jin Zhong, who by Wang’s request has married her younger sister. In order to compensate for her sacrifices, the family arranges Wang’s marriage to Jin as another principle wife. However, the heroine refuses to share Jin’s bed, since, in her own words, her body “has degenerated and should have been dead a long time ago.” In Wang’s eyes, such a deteriorated body is no longer a part of her moral self and must be purged from her conjugal life to maintain her “chastity after defilement.” By this argument, Wang’s virtue becomes purely a quality of the “heart” and transcends the female role that

175

Epilogue  175

her body signifies. As Jin exclaims after the heroine’s speech, “Now I see that you are in fact not a woman, but belong to the order of great saints and heroes” (ch. 20; 220). Jin’s conclusion effectively sums up the powerful implication of the body-​heart opposition that emerges through the narrative of Jin Yun Qiao zhuan, a duality that allows a former prostitute to assume a saintly stature after she has endured the most debasing experience in the traditional Confucian value system. In light of the new materialist thesis I have explored in the preceding chapters, the similar division of inner and outer selves in Richardson’s works and Chinese talent-​beauty novels indicates analogous literary reactions to the social and moral fluidities brought about by the rise of monetary powers. In this context, the theme of chastity allegorizes a resistance to exchange, and hence represents a counterforce to the materialism that permeated social and political life. Thus, as critics have observed, Richardson’s writings are “ardently anticaptialist,”30 a tendency that diverges sharply from the promaterialist stance of Defoe’s texts. As an obvious example of this contrast, in diametric opposite to the choices of Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Roxana, Pamela refuses the jewels her master promises if she becomes his mistress, and announces that her real “jewel” rests with her chastity.31 The Chinese talent-​beauty novels advance a similar antimaterialism. For instance, turning down the marriage proposal of a wealthy and privileged family despite his impoverished conditions, Yu Jiao Li’s protagonist Su Youbai explains to one of his acquaintances that neither rank nor wealth is more important to him than a “beauty” with whom he can share a “pulse-​ to-​pulse affinity” (ch. 5; 36). While the antimaterialist motive contributed to the idealist tendency of Richardson’s works and talent-​beauty novels, these texts’ promotion of individual autonomy through the theme of chastity is also laden with political implications. Attending to the political connotation of the “rape plot” in Richardson’s narratives, Laura Doyle has suggested that, based on Clarissa’s rhetoric—​such as “The LAW shall be my resource” and “freedom which is my birthright as an English subject”—​in the face of Lovelace’s persecutions, Richardson’s novel “apprises to be national allegory by way of a woman’s violation story.”32 In Hao qiu zhuan, we can in fact observe a similar “rape plot,” given that the heroine Shui Bingxin has been harassed by a high courtier’s relative. Facing the persecution and schemes of the heroine’s harasser, Shui Bingxin and the hero Tie Zhongyu repeatedly invoke the ideas of the “law” (fa) and “justice” (yi) as decrees higher than not only the power of a magistrate, but also that of the emperor. In the heroine’s words when she confronts her uncle, “a person of true worth follows one’s own sense of moral integrity and makes no compromises even in front of the emperor, let alone a magistrate” (ch. 10; 80). As this statement shows,

176

176 Epilogue

through its dramatization of the theme of chastity, Hao qiu zhuan endorses an equalizing civil ethics in resemblance to Richardson’s novels. Characterized by analogous social and political connotations, Chinese talent-​beauty novels and Richardson’s works likewise inherited the emergent narrative realisms in their cultural spheres in order to carry out their reformist purposes. On the Western side, Samuel Johnson’s famous Rambler no. 4 (1750) manifests this goal of transforming the social influences of narrative realism, when he comments that, in contrast to “the romances formerly written,” where “every transaction and sentiment was so remote from all that passes among men, that the reader was in very little danger of making any applications to himself,” the “familiar histories” in contemporary writings call for imitation since they resemble the “living world.” Furthermore, according to Johnson, given their power to sway a reader’s personality and morality, properly written fictions “may perhaps be made of greater use than the solemnities of professed morality, and convey the knowledge of vice and virtue with more efficacy than axioms and definitions.”33 Chinese sources offer a parallel theory about the social benefits of representing the familiar world. The following passage from a preface to a widely read seventeenth-​century collection of vernacular short stories, for instance, advocates a social-​aesthetic logic that closely resembles the principle of Johnson’s Rambler no.4: Mirages on the sea and flaming mountains are admittedly extraordinary, yet they are not familiar sights to the eye or common news to the ear. We doubt their existence in the same manner insects who live and die within the summer doubt the existence of ice. Benevolence, righteousness, ritual propriety, and wisdom are the normal state of the heart. Loyalty, filial piety, chastity, and integrity are the normal ways of conduct. …  Yet it often so happens that we lose our normal state of the heart and deviate from our normal ways of conduct . . . and therefore they become wonders to be communicated with others. A story of these themes will make its reader grieve or sigh, and bring delight as well as shock. The virtuous will be encouraged and the evil-​minded will be alerted. Social custom will thus be edified with pleasant results. Hence we know that the most touching and wondrous stories are those that teach people about the normal state of things . . . Writings about strange feats such as swallowing blades or fire, or odd phenomena like thunder in winter or ice in summer, are airy fancies completely devoid of merit. Readers who want to make the best of fiction should take heed of these words.34

Given these converging perceptions in China and Europe on the reformist functions of narrative realism, it is no longer surprising that works such

177

Epilogue  177

as Hao qiu zhuan and Yu Jiao Li should have struck their European readers with an arresting aesthetic familiarity. As noted in the editorial materials included in the translated Chinese talent-​beauty novels, these Chinese texts are comparable to recent European novels in terms of their socially edifying effects, lifelike techniques, and nationally representational capacities. For instance, in his preface to Hao qiu zhuan, Percy states that, like the writings of Fielding, whose novels would help a foreigner “form a truer notion of the genius and spirit of the English” than “whole volumes of Present States of England, or French Letters concerning the English nation,” Hao qiu zhuan provides “a faithful picture of Chinese manners, wherein the domestic and political economy of that vast people is displayed, with an exactness and an accuracy to which none but a native could be capable of attaining” (Vol.1, xvii). In his translation of Yu Jiao Li, the Sinologist Jean-​ Pierre Abel Rémusat (1788–​1832) likewise praises Yu Jiao Li “for supplying the information wanting in the accounts of voyagers and the common geographical authorities” (Vol.1, xii). To Rémusat, the literary merit of Yu Jiao Li is particularly comparable to that of Richardson’s works, as he exuberantly explicates in the following passage: It is in the portraiture of details that the Chinese novelists excel, in which respect they may be compared to Richardson. Like that ingenious author, they render their characters interesting and natural by reiterated strokes of the pencil, which finally produce a high degree of illusion. The persons whom they create, may be said to stand before you, their motives of action are fully laid open, you hear them speak of themselves, and learn to track even their minute peculiarities of manners and conversation. What so many continental readers have experienced on the perusal of the English Clarissa, has often been felt by me in running over for the first time certain Chinese romances. The interest in their pages arose precisely in proportion to the stage of my progress; and in approaching to the termination, I found myself about to part with some agreeable people, just as I had duly learnt to relish their society. This is always the case with the romance of detail, when it is correct in the species of portraiture which it assumes to delineate. It is felt heavy in the first instance, but after a while the progress seems too rapid; we yawn over the first volume, and devour the last (Vol.1, xii).35

As Percy’s and Rémusat’s comments indicate, European intellectuals who were themselves experiencing the “rise of the novel” saw strong narrative parallels in these distant Eastern texts. This transcultural awareness, however, disappeared from the monolithically West-​centric conception of the “modern novel” over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In fact, even though the translated Chinese talent-​beauty novels were still

178

178 Epilogue

stimulating feelings of humanistic affinity on the verge of the nineteenth century, the image of the East in Western perceptions during the period was already moving in the opposite direction. A small but indicative sign of this trend can be found in a curious advertisement, which mentions a recent exhibition of two Chinese women in London, in the 1827 English translation of Yu Jiao Li. In the words of the advertisement, “a large portion of London have been recently gratified with the contemplation of two Chinese ladies who have condescended to waive the privilege of high rank for the small consideration of half-​a-​crown per head admission; it is trusted that a due stock of interest has been excited to ensure the favorable reception of ‘Two fair cousins’ of the same national family, through the familiar medium of a brace of neat duodecimos.”36 The exhibition, which took place in Pall Mall, is reported in a news article published in Times on December 12, 1826. In sharp contrast to the notion of a common humanity we see in Rémusat’s and Goethe’s writings, the Times report highlights the exhibited Chinese women’s radical alterity by drawing attention to their bound feet. As the article states, “There is no exaggeration in the extreme smallness of the Chinese women’s feet. The shoe of Attoi Whoatty, which we had in our hands, does not exceed four inches. We saw them pass through the room and go upstairs to their chambers, and it was evidently as difficult a task to them as it would be to a child just beginning to walk.” The news report proceeds to speculate on the racial consequences of foot-​binding on the entire Chinese population:  “The cruel practice of cramping the feet of the Chinese women must, by preventing them from taking exercise, have a sensible effect on the health of the nation. It is impossible that the offspring of such women should be otherwise than a puny race.”37 According to Yu Jiao Li’s 1827 English advertisement, the book and the Pall Mall exhibition should have attracted English consumers in similar ways since they belong to the “same national family”—​that is, “China.” Rémusat’s preface and the Times report, however, in fact present opposite cross-​cultural visions, since the former stresses humanistic and aesthetic affinities, whereas the latter highlights the Chinese Other’s civilizational difference and backwardness. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the East-​West humanistic commonalties Rémusat and Goethe had once envisioned became an increasingly marginalized view. Now, in the face of the necessity to renew world thinking in the post-​Eurocentric era, it is high time to revive a more integrated view of East-​West social and cultural histories, which experienced especially significant horizontal continuities during the Age of Silver. However minor the case of Yu Jiao Li and the novelistic history surrounding it may look in comparison to the vast task of rethinking historical world systems, it is ultimately a relevant part to this

179

Epilogue  179

broad project. The main chapters of this book have charted an initial phase of East-​West narrative coevolutions prior to the more idealistic and interiorized tendencies of Chinese talent-​beauty novels and Richardson’s works. In brief, I have argued that a macrohistorical condition of “transcendental homelessness” during the Age of Silver triggered transcultural emergences of narrative realisms. The Eastern and Western texts in my comparison indicate from their own geographical vantage points commercial expansions’ stimulation of social mobility and larger processes of cultural destabilization. Their realist tendencies are underlain with politically critical and nationally allegorical functions. This horizontal argument realigns novelistic modernity with a multipolar global context and reestablishes commensurabilities between Eastern and Western literary histories. On a broader level, it challenges the unilateral equation between globalization and modernity with westernization, and foregrounds a polycentric mode of global early modernity for pluralizing the genealogy of “world literature” and historical transcultural relations. After the materially oriented novels we have focused on, Eastern and Western novels presented further parallels, such as the idealizing sentimental trend we have observed in this epilogue. Following the sentimental turnabout, moreover, both Eastern and Western narrative literatures started to exhibit more complex treatments of inner-​outer and subjective-​ objective polarities, a pattern we can find in roughly coeval works such as the eighteenth-​century Chinese classic The Dream of the Red Chamber and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–​1796). Considered the founding text of the Bildungsroman tradition, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship exemplifies a dualistic structure in which the artistic idealism of the protagonist is set in contrast to a pragmatic, disenchanted world.38 According to theorists of the novel such as Lukács, the Bildungsroman represented by Wilhelm Meister constitutes a paramount expression of the problematic conditions of modern subjectivity, for it manifests the unrealizable nature of ideal values and authentic personality in a materialistic social reality. In Lukács’s terms, this underlying tension forms the essential “irony” of the modern novel, or, in other words, the genre’s thematic concern with an irresolvable rift between the protagonist’s subjective and objective worlds. Discussed as a unique aspect of Western literary modernity, the novelistic irony characterized by Lukács is nonetheless also observable in coeval Chinese novels such as The Dream of the Red Chamber, wherein the novel’s young protagonist’s naïve romanticism is surrounded by a story of family degeneration, financial mismanagement, and political schemes.39 The striking similarity and synchronicity of the emergences of an ironic dualism in Eastern and Western narrative texts again indicate the fertile opportunities of horizontal comparison between the two sides,

180

180 Epilogue

and the Eastern literary dynamisms that have been neglected by theories of the novel. In light of the resurged question of world literature, the analogous inner-​outer dislocations in Wilhelm Meister and Dream, which occurred in a larger context of East-​West narrative horizontal continuities, belie Jameson’s bifurcation of Western and non-​Western literatures in a manner that has not yet been addressed by the large number of criticisms to his model. Belonging to a period prior to the primarily post-​1800 focus of literary comparatists, a period long before the “First World” and the “Third World” began, the transcultural parallels in question indicate that the interiorizing narrative trend Jameson exclusively associated with Western modernity already emerged in a context of coevolving Eastern and Western early modernities, and was from the start laden with national historical implications. One productive approach toward overcoming the dichotomous view Jameson’s theory represents, thus, is to recover these forgotten beginnings and continuities, which lie outside the discourse of cultural incommensurability or a strictly antihegemonic model of postcolonial critique. While the exploration of further East-​West literary horizontal continuities demands other occasions, this book has provided a launching point for further inquiries of this kind. Given the controversial question of “world literature” and the novel’s central position in related debates, a less Eurocentric configuration of the historical parameters of the genre is crucial for advancing its comparative examinations in a more genuinely “planetary” direction. Considering its intimate ties to the historical dynamics of material mobilities, national imaginaries, the gender structure, and private-​ public relations, the novel also constitutes an especially important topic for thinking about literature’s significances to society, politics, and cultural identity on a transcultural level. As detailed in the theoretical discussions of c­ hapter 1 and exemplified through my literary analyses, works of early realism from the Age of Silver in general present what Bakhtin has characterized as a “heteroglossic” narrative politics through their hybridization of different social voices and positions. The parallel realist inventions of these texts rest in their foregrounding of the force of materiality as a historical agent of social and cultural mobility. In attending to changes in both social life and the political economy under conditions of commercial circulations, furthermore, these narratives become nationally allegorical and express modes of critical political consciousness. Other than the somewhat exceptional case of Robinson Crusoe, the narrative works we have examined treat the material domain as a lived, desublimated realm, in the absence of a reified capitalist ideology. Due to this ideological openness, identity and authority become malleable categories in these narrative worlds that reflect

181

Epilogue  181

multilocal cultural displacements during the Age of Silver. As I suggest in this epilogue, the historical contingencies registered by early realist novels further stimulated parallel constructions of the autonomous, idealized self through the theme of female chastity in Eastern and Western narratives, and these sentimental turnabouts subsequently grew into more complex narrative modes of ironic dualism on both sides. By tracing these literary horizontal continuities, we can see that the typically West-​centric conceptual nexus of narrative realism and modern subjectivity has excluded richly comparable Eastern counterparts. In this transcultural light, moreover, we can theoretically reinforce public and historical dimensions of novelistic images of the self, which constitute a substate civil discourse. Looking at the “rise of the novel” in such a more holistic manner, we are one step closer to reimagining “world literature” as a “global civil society,” which is characterized by diversity, but also commonality and interconnections. All in all, by the horizontal comparative perspective we have followed, one would perhaps agree with Goethe that there is, after all, a common humanity, except that it is not the timeless essence he assumed, but rather historically networked and constantly changing. To map the trajectory and interrelations of these changes would allow the term “world literature” to fulfill its true promise, for, instead of simply denoting a collection of “great books” of various national origins, the notion suggests an integrative whole—​a macro literary history. For the goal of drawing out such a larger structure—​or what Fletcher describes as “a tentative schema of the continuities, or, at the least, parallelism in history,” it seems that, almost two centuries after Goethe’s hopeful pronouncement that “the epoch of world literature is at hand,” the need to “hasten its approach” is as urgent as ever.

182

183

NOTES

Introduction 1. Karl Marx:  A  Reader, ed. Jon Elster (Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press, 1986), 227–​228. 2. Joseph Fletcher, “Integrative History:  Parallels and Interconnections in the Early Modern Period, 1500–​1800” [1983], in Studies on Chinese Islamic Inner Asia, ed. Beatrice Forbes Manz (Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1995), part x, pp. 39, 38, 56. 3. Gayatri Spivak, The Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 73. 4. Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations of Goethe, trans. John Oxenford (New  York:  Da Capo, 1998), 164. 5. Haun Saussy, “Comparative Literature: The Next Ten Years,” ACLA State of the Discipline Report, http://​stateofthediscipline.acla.org/​entry/​comparative-​literature-​next-​ten-​years (accessed May 8, 2014). 6. For discussions on the questions of worlding and comparative scale, see, for instance, Eric Hayot, On Literary Worlds (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Nirvana Tanoukhi, “The Scale of World Literature,” New Literary History 39, no. 3 (2008); and Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). 7. For books and collections of essays addressing these issues with regard to the topic of “world literature,” see David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2003); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Death of a Discipline; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Emily Apter, Against World Literature (New York: Verso, 2013); Christopher Prendergast, ed., Debating World Literature (New  York:  Verso, 2004); Haun Saussy, ed., Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (Baltimore:  John Hopkins University Press, 2006); Theo D’haen et  al., eds., World Literature:  A  Reader (London:  Routledge, 2012); Rita Felski and Susan Friedman, Comparison:  Theories, Approaches, Uses (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2013); David Damrosch, ed., World Literature in Theory (Hoboken, NJ:  Wiley-​Blackwell, 2014). Theo D’haen, ed., The Routledge Concise History of World Literature (London:  Routledge, 2012) also provides a helpful overview on the issue of world literature.

183

184

184 Notes

8. The most representative works by Braudel are his three-​volume Civilization and Capitalism, first published in English by the University of California Press in 1992. Wallerstein published four installments of his studies under the title The Modern World-​System from 1974 to 2011, as well as numerous essays. For an interdisciplinary volume that combines Wallersteinian world-​system perspective and comparative cultural concerns, see David Palumbo-​Liu, et al., eds. Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World: System, Scale, Culture (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2011). The world-​system perspective has been promoted by academic journals such as The Journal of World-​Systems Research, The Journal of World History, and Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center. Also see Christopher Chase-​ Dunn and Salvatore J. Babones, eds., The Routledge Handbook of World-​Systems Analysis (London: Routledge, 2012) for a comprehensive survey. 9. See Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), along with “Literature as a World,” New Left Review 31 (2005): 71–​90, and “Combative Literatures,” New Left Review 72 (2011): 123–​134, as well as Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (2000), 54–​68; and “More Conjectures,” New Left Review 20 (2003), 73–​81. These two theorists have been cited, often critically, in many later publications related to the topic of world literature. For examples, see Jonathan Arac, “Anglo-​Globalism?” New Left Review 16 (2002): 35–​45; Jale Parla, “The Object of Comparison,” Comparative Literature Studies 41, no. 1 (2004):  116–​125; Shu-​Mei Shih, “Global Literature and the Technologies of Recognition,” PMLA 119, no. 1 (2004): 16–​30; Wai Chee Dimock, “Genre and World System: Epic and Novel on Four Continents,” Narrative 14, no. 1 (2006): 85–​101 (also included in Through Other Continents); Gayatri Spivak’s “World Systems and the Creole,” Narrative 14, no. 1 (2006): 102–​112; Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza, “Dead, or a Picture of Good Health? Comparatism, Europe, and World Literature,” Comparative Literature 58, no. 4 (2006): 418–​435; Tanoukhi, “The Scale of World Literature”; Emily Apter, “Moretti’s World Literary-​Systems,” in Against World Literature (Verso, 2013), 45–​57; Michael Emmerich, The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 231–​236; and Jerome McGann, A New Republic of Letters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 201–​208. 10. On Eastern civilizational “resource portfolios” (i.e., ideas, institutions, technologies), see John Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2004), 2. For “re-​Orienting” comparative historical studies, see Janet Abu-​Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–​1350, reprint ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Roy Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence:  China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2000); Jack Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) and Why Europe? The Rise of the West in World History 1500–​1850 (New York: McGraw-​H ill Humanities, 2008); Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels:  Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.  800–​1830, 2 vols. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 2009); James Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World:  Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (New  York:  Guilford, 1993) and Eight Eurocentric Historians (New York: Guilford, 2000); Warren I. Cohen, East Asia at the Center: Four Thousand Years of Engagement with the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); John Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2004); Jack Goody, The Theft of History (Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press, 2007); Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing:  Lineages of the Twenty-​First Century (New  York:  Verso, 2007); and Patrick Manning and Barry K. Gills, eds., Andre Gunder Frank and Global Development: Visions, Remembrances, and Explorations (New  York:  Routledge, 2013). For reviews and assessments of this line of scholarship, see Jack Goody, ed., Capitalism and Modernity:  The Great Debate (Cambridge, UK:  Polity, 2004); Jan Nederveen Pieterse, “Globalization

185

Notes  185

Goes in Circles:  Hybridities East-​West,” in Hybridising East and West:  Tales Beyond Westernization:  Empirical Contributions to the Debates on Hybridity, eds. Dominique Schirmer, et al. (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2006), 21–​32; Peer Vries, “The California School and Beyond: How to Study the Great Divergence?” History Compass 8, no. 7 (2010): 730–​751; Arif Dirlik, “Revisioning Modernity:  Modernity in Eurasian Perspectives,” Inter-​A sia Cultural Studies, 12, no. 2 (2011):  284–​3 05; and Stefan Gaarsmand Jacobsen, “Chinese Influences or Images? Fluctuating Histories of How Enlightenment Europe Read China,” Journal of World History 24, no. 3 (2013): 623–​6 60. 11. Edward Said, Orientalism. 25th anniversary edition with 1995 afterword (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003), 1–​2 . 12. For notable works on East-​West comparative literature, see Longxi Zhang, The Tao and the Logos: Literary Hermeneutics, East and West (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992); Mighty Opposites:  From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China (Stanford:  Stanford University Press, 1999), and From Comparison to World Literature (New  York:  SUNY Press, 2015); Yingjin Zhang, ed., China in a Polycentric World:  Essays in Chinese Comparative Literature (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 1998); and Ming Xie, Conditions of Comparison:  Reflections on Comparative Intercultural Inquiry (London: Continuum, 2011). Whereas The Age of Silver likewise aims to widen the conceptual possibilities of East-​West comparisons, it adopts a distinctive world-​historical and materialist perspective. 13. Fletcher, “Integrative History,” 38. 14. Frank, ReOrient, 227. 15. See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 37–​52. 16. David Damrosch, “Toward a History of World Literature,” New Literary History, 39, no. 3–​4 (2008): 490. 17. For a rethinking of East–​West cultural history from the Bronze Age perspective, see Jack Goody, The Theft of History, 2007. 18. Jerry Bentley, “Globalizing History and Historicizing Globalization,” in Globalization and Global History, eds. Barry K. Gills and William R. Thompson (London: Routledge, 2006), 29. For the long globalization perspective, see Andre Gunder Frank and Barry K. Gills, eds., The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand? (London: Routledge, 1993); A.G. Hopkins, Globalization in World History (New York: Norton, 2002); C. Chase-​Dunn and E.N. Anderson, eds., The Historical Evolution of World Systems (New York: Palgrave, 2005); Barry K. Gills and William R. Thompson, eds., Globalization and Global History (London: Routledge, 2006); and Jan Nederveen Pieterse, “Periodizing Globalization: Histories of Globalization,” New Global Studies, 6, no. 2 (2012): 1–​25. 19. Other than Damrosch’s “Toward a History of World Literature,” arguments that trace the beginnings of world literature to ancient globalizations can be found in Alexander Beeroft, “World Literature without a Hyphen:  Towards a Typology of Literary Systems,” in New Left Review 54 (2008):  87–​100; Stephen Greenblatt, ed., Cultural Mobility:  A  Manifesto (Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press, 2009); and McGann, A New Republic of Letters, 2014. Unquestionably valuable, these discussions have so far centered on symbolic, linguistic, and textual contacts and thus differ from the materialist and sociological perspective I pursue in this book. 20. See Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel:  A  Historico-​Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (The M.I.T. Press, 1971); Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination:  Four Essays, ed. and trans. Michael Holquist (University of Texas Press, 1981); Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel:  Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1957); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991); and Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), and “Third-​World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (1986): 65–​88.

186

186 Notes

21. Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, 61–​62. . 22. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 243. 23. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 263. 24. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London:  Continuum, 1988); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social:  An Introduction to Actor-​Network-​Theory (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2005); Homi Bhabha, “Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism,” in Text and Nation: Cross-​Disciplinary Essays on Cultural and National Identities, eds. Laura Garcia-​Moreno and Peter C. Pfeiffer (Columbia, SC:  Camden House, 1996), 191–​ 207; Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (University of Michigan Press, 1997); Spivak, Death of a Discipline; Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents, 2006. 25. Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago:  The University of Chicago Press, 2001), 52. 26. See Jameson, The Political Unconscious. 27. See Stephen Greenblatt, “Culture,” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, eds. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (The University of Chicago Press, 1990), 225–​232. 28. Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations of Goethe, 1998.

Chapter 1 1. The term “Anthropocene” has been associated with the argument of the Nobel Prize-​w inning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen on the environmental changes brought on by the Industrial Revolution. However, other scientists such as William F. Ruddiman have applied the term to a much longer period beginning with the agricultural revolutions about eight thousand years ago. See, for instance, William Ruddiman, “The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era Began Thousands of Years Ago,” Climatic Change 61, no. 3 (2003): 261–​293. This book adopts this broader implication of the term to evoke the planetary repercussions of silver mining during the 1500–​1800 period, as will be detailed further. In terms of its ecologically oriented and object-​based critical approach, my study is resonant with the emergent theoretical landscape of environmental humanities as represented by the writings of Timothy Morton in The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010) and Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). In The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–​1730 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Robert Markley uses the term “eco-​cultural materialism” (pp. 5, 13, 17–​18) to describe his critical perspective. My approach shares the same orientation, though moving toward a further step of horizontal networking and cross-​referencing. 2. For a thoughtful reexamination of the contemporary implications of the Manifesto’s world literary vision, see Aijaz Ahmad, “The Communist Manifesto and ‘World Literature,’” Social Scientist 28, no. 7–​8 (2000), pp. 3–​3 0. For a critique of the Orientalist foundation of Marxian historiography and the “Asiatic mode of production,” see Hobson, Eastern Origins, 1–​2 8. For an informative study on Marx’s writings on non-​Western societies, see Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins:  On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-​ Western Societies (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2010). Also see Lütfi Sunar, Marx and Weber on Oriental Societies:  In the Shadow of Western Modernity (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014). 3. This observation rests at the core of Arrighi’s argument in Adam Smith in Beijing, which I  shall detail further. For passages from The Wealth of Nations that positively assess the Chinese economy, see, for instance, I.8.24, I.11.129, II.5.22, and III.1.7. 4. Cited and translated by Stefan Hoesel-​U hlig, “Changing Fields: The Directions of Goethe’s Weltliteratur,” in Debating World Literature, ed. Christopher Prendergast (New York: Verso, 2004), 38. For more discussions of this idea in relation to the Manifesto, see, for instance, Jonathan Arac, “Commentary:  Literary History in a Global Age,” New Literary History 39, no. 3 (2008): 755; and Pheng Cheah, “What Is a World? On World Literature as World-​ Making Activity,” Special Issue: On Cosmopolitanism, Daedalus 137, no. 3 (2008): 26–​38.

187

Notes  187

5. Karl Marx: A Reader, 228. 6. Georg W.  F. Hegel, Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New  York:  Dover, 1956), 116. For a helpful review of the image of China in Western social thought, see Gregory Blue, “China and Western Social Thought in the Modern Period,” in China and Historical Capitalism:  Genealogies of Sinological Knowledge, eds. Timothy Brook and Gregory Blue (Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press, 1999), 57–​109. A  book-​length treatment of Leibniz’s relation to Chinese thought can be found in Franklin Perkins, Leibniz and China: A Commerce of Light (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 7. Spivak, Aesthetic Education, 461. 8. For critiques of the teleological implications of the concept of “early modernity,” see Jack Goldstone, “The Problem of the ‘Early Modern’ World,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 41, no. 3 (1998): 249–​284 and Lynn Struve, “Chimerical Early Modernity:  The Case of ‘Conquest Generation’ Memoirs,” in The Qing Formation in World-​Historical Time, ed. Lynn Struve (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2004), 335–​372. The volume Comparative Early Modernities, 1100–​1800, ed. David Porter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)—​including contributions from economic historians such as Kenneth Pomeranz, R.  B. Wong, and Jack Goldstone as well as literary and cultural scholars—​provides new arguments on the concept of an “early modern” China and on the problems and possibilities of thinking about early modernity globally. Whereas I  largely agree with the seven-​century span Porter settles on for accommodating non-​ Western origins of modernity, such as those that evolved in Song China (which I  shall discuss further), this book uses the term “early modern” in most cases in reference to the 1500–​1800 era. 9. See Enrique Dussel, “World-​System and ‘Trans’-​Modernity,” Nepantla: Views from South 3, no. 2 (2002):  221–​244, and “Transmodernity and Interculturality:  An Interpretation from the Perspective of Philosophy of Liberation,” Transmodernity 1, no. 3 (2012): 28–​59. The term “transmodernity” was first coined by the feminist philosopher Rosa María Rodríguez Magda and elaborated at length in her Transmodernidad (Barcelona:  Anthropos, 2004). For discussions of the term and Dussel’s conception of it from Latin American subaltern perspectives, see Walter Mignolo, “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 1 (2002): 57–​96, and Ramón Grosfoguel, “World-​Systems Analysis in the Context of Transmodernity, Border Thinking, and Global Coloniality,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 29, no. 2 (2006):  167–​187. The term has been employed to name the journal Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-​ Hispanic World (University of California e-​scholarship) since 2011. Although so far the concept of “transmodernity” has circulated mostly in Latin American and Latino studies, Dussel’s newer works have expanded it to broader world-​systematic concerns in connection with the re-​Orienting historiographical movement. 10. Adam McKeown, “Periodizing Globalization,” History Workshop Journal 63, no. 1 (2007): 220. 11. For a general survey of the intellectual discourse on “modernity,” see Peter Wagner, Modernity as Experience and Interpretation (Cambridge:  Polity, 2012). For noted studies that aim to open up alternative forms of modernity, though maintaining the premise of Euro-​genetic globalization, see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic:  Modernity and Double-​ Consciousness (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1993); Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large:  Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Martin Albrow, The Global Age: State and Society Beyond Modernity (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 1996); S. N. Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus 129, no. 1 (2000):1–​ 29; and Alternative Modernities, ed. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2001) with contributions from Homi Bhabha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Leo Ou-​fan Lee et al. In We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), Bruno Latour offers a sobering argument on the inherent ideality of the Enlightenment modernity discourse and its limits. For a helpful review of the ongoing debates over the genealogy and theorization of modernity with attention to diverse geographical and cultural perspectives, see Gennaro

188

188 Notes

Ascione, “Unthinking Modernity:  Historical-​ Sociological, Epistemological and Logical Pathways,” Journal of Historical Sociology 27, no. 4 (2014): 463–​489. 12. See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other:  How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 37–​52. 13. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe:  Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2000) and his further clarifications in “In Defense of Provincializing Europe: A Response to Carola Dietze,” History and Theory 47, no. 1 (2008):  85–​96; and Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/​Global Designs:  Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 14. For the “hyperreal Europe,” see Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 27, 37, 45. For Chakrabarty’s analysis of Surplus Value and distinction of “two histories of the capital,” see Provincializing Europe, 62–​71 and “In Defense of Provincializing Europe.” 15. This paradox is especially clear in the epilogue to Provincializing Europe (e.g., 254–​255). Thus, according to Amit Chaudhuri’s mixed review of the book in London Review of Books, “Chakrabarty’s work gives us a richer, more penetrating language to deal with modernity and the colonial encounter . . . It is the ambiguity of Chakrabarty’s own position as both a critic and archivist of modernity that gives his study its poetic undertow and its intelligent irresponsibility.” For a critique of Provincializing Europe along the lines I  have suggested, see Duy Lap Nguyen, “The Universal Province of Modernity: A Critique of Provincializing Europe,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 16, no. 3 (2014): 445–​462. 16. For Mignolo’s explication of “border thinking,” see Local Histories/​Global Designs, x, 3–​49; for a critique of the Wallersteinian world-​system, see 56–​58; for a critique of Enlightenment epistemological monocentrism, see 59–​60. On this last point, one observes that Mignolo’s position parallels other counter-​Eurocentric historiographical critiques such as Robert J. C. Young’s White Mythologies:  Writing History and the West, 2nd ed. (London:  Routledge, 2004) and Timothy Reiss’s Against Autonomy:  Global Dialectics of Cultural Exchange (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). Wallerstein’s response to the challenges of the Latin America-​based world-​system perspective can be found in the essay “Americanity as a Concept, or the Americas in the Modern World,” which he co-​authored with Anibal Quijano, in International Social Sciences Journal 44, no. 4 (1982): 583–​591. 17. On “transformative exteriority,” see Dussel “Transmodernity and Interculturality,” 42. Also see his discussion of transmodernity in relation to Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of exteriority in “World-​System and ‘Trans’-​Modernity,” 234. On Europe’s “two modernities,” see “World-​System and ‘Trans’-​Modernity,” 227–​229 and Dussel, “Beyond Eurocentrism:  The World-​System and the Limits of Modernity,” in The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 1998), 3–​31. Mignolo also addresses Dussel’s historiographical model at length in Local Histories/​Global Designs, though without taking the further step of connecting the post-​1492 Euro-​A merican system to the preceding Eurasian circuit. 18. See Dirlik, “Revisioning Modernity,” 285–​286, and Alexander Woodside, Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Hazards of World History (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2006). 19. World historians have widely noted the “economic miracles” and other breakthroughs of Song China. See for instance Philip D. Curtin, Cross-​Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 109–​110 and William H. McNeill and John R. McNeill, The Human Web: A Bird’s-​eye View of World History (New York: Norton, 2003), 121–​127, which addresses China’s transitions since the Song in terms of the emergence of the world’s “first market society.” As one of the pioneering scholars to “re-​Orient” world history, Marshall Hodgson notes in The Venture of Islam, 3 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974; reprint 2009) that, given that the later European transformations benefited “in both material and moral ways” from the diffusions of China-​originated elements across Afro-​Eurasian civilization networks, “the Occident seems to have been the unconscious heir of the abortive industrial revolution of [Song] China [960–​1279]” (Vol. 3, p.  197). In the field of Japanese Sinology, Naitō Konan (1866–​1934) has launched the

189

Notes  189

influential argument that modernity began with Song China owing to the emergences of a nonaristocratic scholar-​official class and for-​market social relations. For developments and assessments of this thesis, see Hisayuki Miyakawa, “An Outline of the Naitō Hypothesis and Its Effects on Japanese Studies of China,” The Far Eastern Quarterly 14, no. 4 (1955): 533–​552 and Joshua A. Fogel, ed., Naitō Konan and the Development of the Conception of Modernity in Chinese History (Armonk, NY:  Sharpe, 1983). For essays on the continuity of Chinese development since the Song period, see Paul Jakov Smith and Richard Von Glahn, eds., Song-​ Yuan-​Ming Transition in Chinese History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 20. Historical studies on the 1500–​1800 period from global perspectives have become a rapidly growing field. For informative accounts on East-​West relations during the period, see for instance Joanna Waley-​Cohen, The Sextants of Beijing: Global Currents in Chinese History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000); Geoffrey Gunn, First Globalization: The Eurasian Exchange, 1500–​1800 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); Timothy Brook, Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007); D. E. Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–​1800 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009); and Charles Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (New York: Knopf, 2011), which updates Alfred Crosby’s thesis of “Columbian exchange” by taking account of the Asian arm of post-​1492 global economic, ecological, and demographic shifts. 21. The scholarly literature I consulted on the topic of the silver trade includes: Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon’:  The Origin of World Trade in 1571,” Journal of World History 6, no. 2 (1995):  201–​221; “Arbitrage, China, and World Trade in the Early Modern Period,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 38, no. 4 (1995): 429–​448; and “Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity through the Mid-​Eighteenth Century,” Journal of World History 13, no. 2 (2002): 391–​427. Also see Flynn, “Comparing the Tokugawa Shogunate with Hapsburg Spain: Two Silver Empires in a Global Setting,” in The Political Economy of Merchant Empires: State Power and World Trade, 1350–​1750, ed. James D. Tracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 332–​359; Richard von Glahn, “Myth and Reality of China’s Seventeenth-​Century Monetary Crisis,” The Journal of Economic History 56, no. 2 (1996):  429–​454 and Fountain of Fortune:  Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000–​1700 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996); “Cycles of Silver in Chinese Monetary History,” in Economy of Lower Yangzi Delta in Late Imperial China:  Connecting Money, Markets, and Institutions, ed. Billy K.L. So (New  York:  Routledge, 2012), pp. 17–​71; Frank, ReOrient; William Atwell, “Ming China and the Emerging World Economy, c. 1470–​ 1650,” in The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 8, The Ming Dynasty, eds. Denis Twitchett and Frederick W. Mote (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 376–​418 and Atwell, “Another Look at Silver Imports into China, ca. 1635–​1644,” Journal of World History 16, no. 4 (2005): 467–​490; Brook, Vermeer’s Hat, 152–​184; Alejandra Irigoin, “The End of a Silver Era: The Consequences of the Breakdown of the Spanish Peso Standard in China and the United States, 1780s–​1850s,” Journal of World History 20, no. 2 (2009): 207–​244; Mann, 1493; Nanny Kim and Keiko Nagase-​Reimer, eds., Mining, Monies, and Culture in Early Modern Societies: East Asian and Global Perspectives (Boston, MA: Brill, 2013); and Niv Horesh, Chinese Money in Global Context:  Historic Junctures Between 600 BCE and 2012 (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 2013). On Potosí, see Flynn and Giráldez, “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon,’ ” 209; Mann 1493, 178–​191; and Nicholas A. Robins, Mercury, Mining, and Empire: The Human and Ecological Cost of Colonial Silver Mining in the Andes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). For silver production estimates, see ReOrient, 144 and Flynn and Giráldez, “Cycles of Silver.” For trade routes, see ReOrient, 142–​149; Atwell, “Ming China and the Emerging World Economy,” 389–​392; and Brook, Vermeer’s Hat, 84–​116. 22. See Matao Miyamoto and Yoshiaki Shikano, “The Emergence of the Tokugawa Monetary System in East Asian International Perspective,” in Global Connections and Monetary History, eds. Dennis Flynn et al. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 174. 23. For details on Japanese silver exportation to China, see Atwell, “Ming China and the Emerging World Economy,” 396–​399; and von Glahn, “Myth and Reality,” 432 ff., Fountains of

190

190 Notes

Fortune, and “Cycles of Silver in Chinese Monetary History” Apart from Nagasaki, Japanese silver routinely entered China via the Tsushima domain near Korea and the Satsuma domain close to the Ryūkyū Kingdom. See Kazui Tashiro and Susan Downing Videen, “Foreign Relations during the Edo Period: Sakoku Reexamined,” Journal of Japanese Studies 8, no. 2 (1982): 283–​306. 24. The quotation is cited in von Glahn, Fountain of Fortune, 128–​129 and Frank ReOrient, 131–​32. The original document is Arbitrio sobre la plata (Discourse on Silver; published in Lisbon in 1621)  by Duarte Gomes Solis. For a discussion of the historical significance of Solis’s economic thought, see Antonio Almodovar and Jose Luis Cardoso, A History of Portuguese Economic Thought (New York: Routledge, 1998), 22–​23. 25. For other passages from The Wealth of Nations on the China-​bound bullion flow, see for instance I.5.20, I.11, 74, I.11.166, I.11.167, I.11.229, II. 5. 22, IV.1. 33. 26. Flynn and Giráldez, “Cycles of Silver,” 417. 27. Von Glahn has employed the term “Age of Silver” in Fountain of Fortune with a focus on the East Asian commercial circuit. I use this term in this book primarily in reference to the 1550–​1750 period with emphasis on the silver trade’s border-​crossing significance as a connective mechanism between Eastern and Western histories. 28. Flynn and Giráldez, “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon,’ ” 217. 29. See especially Pomeranz, Great Divergence, 20–​21, 66. 30. See Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 64–​65. Abu-​Lughod’s Before European Hegemony emphasizes a similar world-​economic compulsion that bounded European economy to the eastward Levant trade. 31. See The Wealth of Nations, III.1.9, for Smith’s discussion of the “unnatural and retrograde” order of European development. See IV.7.129 for his objection to colonialism as economically “unnatural” and his advice for Britain to abandon all its colonies. See I.8.24, I.11.129, II.5.22, and III.1.7 for Smith’s positive assessments of Chinese economy. 32. Flynn and Giráldez describe these processes as the “Tea and Opium” cycle in “Cycles of Silver.” See Alejandra Irigoin “The End of a Silver Era” on the transpacific dissolution of the silver standard in the 1820s in the wake of the Mexican War of Independence. See David Porter, Ideographia:  The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 2001), 193–​240 on the “discourse of stagnation, obstruction, and political illegitimacy” (245) that took form in English commercialist writings against the “Canton System.” 33. See Porter, Ideographia and The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-​ C entury England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Markley, The Far East in the English Imagination; Chi-​M ing Yang, Performing China:  Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in Eighteenth-​c entury England, 1660–​1760 (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011); Gerald MacLean, Looking East:  English Writing and the Ottoman Empire before 1800 (New  York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Yu Liu, Seeds of a Different Eden: Chinese Gardening Ideas and a New English Aesthetic Ideal (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008); and Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins’s A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 34. Markley, The Far East in the English Imagination, 22. 35. See Porter, “Sinicizing Early Modernity: The Imperatives of Historical Cosmopolitanism,” Eighteenth-​Century Studies 43, no. 3 (2010): 299–​306. 36. See Frank Trentmann’s introduction to The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2012), 1; and Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption (New York: Routledge, 1996), 37. 37. See Marcel Mauss, The Gift:  Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (London:  Routledge, 1990); Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in, in The Social Life of Things:  Commodities in Cultural

191

Notes  191

Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 64–​ 93; and Bill Brown, A Sense of Things:  The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 38. See Chase-​Dunn and Hall, “Comparing World-​Systems: Concepts and Working Hypotheses,” Social Forces 71, no. 4 (1993): 85. Also see Jon D. Carlson “Externality, Contact Periphery & Incorporation,” in Christopher Chase-​Dunn and Salvatore J. Babones, eds. The Routledge Handbook of World-​Systems Analysis (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 87–​89, for a supportive argument on the world-​systematic significance of prestige goods trade. 39. These situations are described across the essays collected in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption. See for instance Craig Clunas, “Things in Between: Splendour and Excess in Ming China” (47–​63); Jeremy Prestholdt, “Africa and the Global Lives of Things” (85–​110); Michelle Craig McDonald, “Transatlantic Consumption” (111–​126), and Prasannan Parthasarathi and Giorgio Riello, “From India to the World:  Cotton and Fashionability” (145–​171). Also see John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1994), and Paula Findlen, ed., Early Modern Things: Objects and their Histories, 1500–​1800 (New York: Routledge, 2012). For a critique of Eurocentrism in consumption studies, see Craig Clunas, “Modernity Global and Local:  Consumption and the Rise of the West,” The American Historical Review 104, no. 5 (1999): 1497–​1509. 40. See Spivak, Death of a Discipline; Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation; Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia; Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-​Network-​Theory; Homi Bhabha, “Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism”; and Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time. 41. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 73. Further citations in text. 42. On “distant reading,” see Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (2000):  54–​68, and Graphs, Maps, Trees:  Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2005). 43. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New  York:  Knopf, 1993). On “contrapuntal and nomadic” reading, see xxv and 66–​67. 4 4. Franco Moretti has attended to the question of literary space in his Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–​1900 (London: Verso, 1998), though primarily through the perspective of the European nation-​state rather than cross-​cultural comparison. 45. Tanoukhi, “The Scale of World Literature,” 600. 46. Cheah, “What Is a World?”, 30. 47. Shih Shu-​Mei, “Comparison as Relation,” in Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, eds. Rita Felski and Susan Friedman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 69–​98. Further citations in text. 48. Shih, “Comparison as Relation,” 84. 49. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 133. Also see Françoise Lionnet and Shih Hsu-​mei, eds., The Creolization of Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 50. Shih, “Comparison as Relation,” 96. 51. See Shih, “Global Literature and the Technologies of Recognition,” 16–​30. 52. Shih, “Comparison as Relation,” 79. 53. Shih, “Comparison as Relation,” 89. 54. See Revathi Krishnaswamy and John Charles Hawley’s editorial comments in Krishnaswamy and Hawley, eds., The Postcolonial and the Global (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 106. 55. Micol Seigel. “Beyond Compare: Comparative Method after the Transnational Turn,” Radical History Review 91 (2005): 78. 56. See Latour, Reassembling the Social, especially 174, 179–​180, and Latour, “On Interobjectivity,” Mind, Culture, and Activity 3, no. 4 (1996): 228–​245. 57. Latour, Reassembling the Social, 148. Further citations from the book in text. 58. Hayot, On Literary Worlds, 77. Also see Alex Beecroft, “World Literature without a Hyphen,” New Left Review 54 (2008): 87–​100.

192

192 Notes

59. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 8. 60. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 27. 61. Dimock, Through Other Continents, 74. 62. See Wai-​Chee Dimock’s introduction to Dimock and Lawrence Buell, eds., Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 12, and Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach:  An Eternal Golden Braid ([1979]; New York: Basic Books, 1999). 63. This characterization of Dimock’s approach is given by Robert Dixon in “Scenes of Reading: Is Australian Literature a World Literature?” in Peter John Kirkpatrick and Robert Dixon, eds., Republics of Letters: Literary Communities in Australia: 82. 6 4. Dimock, Through Other Continents, 8. 65. Dimock, Through Other Continents, 24–​25. Also see Michael Walzer, Toward a Global Civil Society (Providence, RI:  Berghahn, 1995). For critical surveys of “civil society” as a concept, see John Ehrenberg, Civil Society:  The Critical History of an Idea (New  York:  NYU Press, 1999); Michael Edwards, Civil Society (Malden, MA: Polity, 2004); and Mary Kaldor, “The Idea of Global Civil Society,” International Affairs 79, no. 3 (2003): 583–​593. “Global Civil Society” has become a major research topic in the London School of Economics with a focus on understanding “globalization ‘from below.’ ” See in “LSE: Global Governance” http://​w ww.lse.ac.uk/​g lobalGovernance/​research/​g lobalCivilSociety/​home.aspx (retrieved 1/​5/​2015). For debates on the question of “civil society” in historical East Asian societies, see Timothy Brook and B. Michael Frolic, eds., Civil Society in China (Armonk, NY:  M. E. Sharpe, 1997); Karla W Simon, Civil Society in China: The Legal Framework from Ancient Times to the “New Reform Era.” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Frank J. Schwartz and Susan J. Pharr, eds., The State of Civil Society in Japan (Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Eiko Ikegami, Bonds of Civility:  Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005). For a comparative account on civil society with attention to traditional East Asian roots, see Jude Howell and Jenny Pearce, Civil Society and Development:  A  Critical Exploration (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2002). 66. See, for instance, Robert Dixon, “Scenes of Reading” in Kirkpatrick and Dixon, eds., Republics of Letters, 81–​82. Also see Spivak’s response to Dimock’s proposals in “World Systems and the Creole.” 67. Here I am thinking of classic critical concepts such as Gramsci’s “cultural hegemony” from Prison Notebooks, Foucault’s “episteme” from The Order of Things, Althusser’s “interpellation” from “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” and Bourdieu’s “cultural capital” from The Forms of Capital, as well as Anderson’s Imagined Communities and Said’s Culture and Imperialism. 68. Dimock, Through Other Continents, 25. 69. Bhabha, “Unsatisfied,” 203, 200. Also see Pnina Werbner, “Vernacular Cosmopolitanism,” Theory, Culture and Society 23, nos. 2 and 3 (2006): 496–​498; and Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds, Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). 70. Bhabha, “Unsatisfied,” 196. 71. See Jameson, “Third-​World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (1986): 65–​88. The best-​k nown critique of Jameson’s article is Aijaz Ahmad, “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory,’” Social Text 17 (1987): 3–​25. For a more recent reassessment of Jameson’s argument, see Imre Szeman, “Who’s Afraid of National Allegory? Jameson, Literary Criticism, Globalization,” South Atlantic Quarterly 100, no. 3 (2001): 803–​827. 72. See Jameson, The Political Unconscious:  Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 1981). Szeman notes that “national allegory” is initially a term Jameson utilizes in Fables of Aggression:  Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (London: Verso, 2008 ([1979]) to describe the British writer Wyndham Lewis’s novel, Tarr (1918).

193

Notes  193

73. Cf. Zhang Longxi’s analysis of Jameson’s reading of Lu Xun in Mighty Opposites:  From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 1998), 119–​125. 74. Szeman, “Who’s Afraid of National Allegory,” 805. 75. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 65. For helpful commentaries on Anderson’s literary theory, see Pheng Cheah, “Grounds of Comparison” and Jonathan Culler “Anderson and the Novel” in Cheah and Culler, eds., Grounds of Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict Anderson (New York: Routledge, 2013), 1–​20, 29–​52. 76. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 36. 77. See, for instance, Azar Gat, Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), which comments on the Andersonian model of the novel on page 12. Against the intellectual tradition of attributing the beginning of the nation as a historical category to eighteenth-​century Europe or the French Revolution, Gat proposes a long historical perspective that begins with ancient Egypt as the “first nation-​state.” For inquiries into East Asian national formations beyond the European model, see, for instance, Chun-​shu Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Empire: Nation, State, and Imperialism in Early China (Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan Press, 2007); Wang Hui, China from Empire to Nation-​State, trans. Michael Gibbs Hill (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2014); Mary Elizabeth Berry, Japan in Print:  Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); and Joshua A. Fogel, ed., The Teleology of the Modern Nation-​state (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). 78. Here I  am in particular thinking about Bakhtin’s “Epic and the Novel” (1941) in M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination:  Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin:  University of Texas Press, 1981). For discussions of Bakhtin’s model in relation to the question of the nation, see, for instance, Timothy Brennan, “The National Longing for Form,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990) 44–​70; Laura E. Ruberto, et al, eds. Bakhtin and the Nation (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2000); and Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 79. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 243, 263. 80. Robert Bennett, “National Allegory or Carnivalesque Heteroglossia? Midnight’s Children’s Narration of Indian National Identity,” in Bakhtin and the Nation, 186. 81. See Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel:  Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1957); and Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel:  A  Historico-​Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1971). For a later reworking of Watt’s argument utilizing the “dialectic approach,” see Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–​1740 (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). In Theory of the Novel:  A  Historical Approach, ed. Michael McKeon (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), McKeon anthologizes and reinterprets with his own editorial notes a range of influential essays by Western critics including Watt, Bakhtin, Lukács, and Anderson on the question of the novel, with the purpose of identifying the novel as “the quintessentially modern genre,” which “is deeply intertwined with the historicity of the modern period, of modernity itself” (see “Introduction,” xv). 82. See Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (Rutgers University Press, 1997). Also see the long-​term and global approach adopted by Steven Moore in The Novel: An Alternative History. 2 vols (New York: Continuum, 2011). On the persistence of the implied concept of “realism” in the novel’s theorization, see Marina MacKay, The Cambridge Introduction to the Novel (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 14. Also see Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism (New  York:  Verso, 2013) for his recent statements on the matter. In MacKay’s summary with reference to Auerbach, Bakhtin, Watt, and Lukács, realism involves “mixing of the styles, from the high literary style to ordinary demotic language; the serious treatment of the everyday lives of the ordinary,

194

194 Notes

unaristocratic masses; the embedding of those ordinary lives in their very specific social and historical contexts” (Cambridge Introduction, 12). As MacKay admits, “The long prose fictions of the premodern East have yet to be integrated into the Western consensus on the rise of the novel” (186). For recent theoretical efforts toward thinking about realism as a useful category of transnational analysis, though with a primarily contemporary focus, see the essays collected in Modern Language Quarterly 3 (2012) under the title “Peripheral Realisms.” 83. See Moretti, “Conjectures” and “Evolution, World-​ Systems, Weltliteratur,” in Studying Transcultural Literary History, ed. Gunilla Lindberg-​Wada (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2006), 120, on his distinction of two types of “world literature.” The English version of Moretti’s The Novel (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2007) is a two-​volume selection of the five-​volume Italian version Il Romanzo. Though Moretti’s “core-​periphery” configuration of world literature has been widely criticized, his diffusionist theory about the history of the novel has been more accepted. For a supportive invocation of Moretti’s model in postcolonial analysis, for instance, see Mariano Siskind “The Globalization of the Novel and the Novelization of the Global: A Critique of World Literature,” Comparative Literature 62, no. 4 (2010): 336–​360, also included in D’haen, et al, eds., World Literature: A Reader, 329–​ 352. In “Dead, or a Picture of Good Health? Comparatism, Europe, and World Literature,” Comparative Literature 58, no. 4 (2006): 418–​435, Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza portrays the novel as a “clearly Eurocentric” genre and thus criticizes Moretti for focusing on the form in his theorization of world literature. 84. Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, 61–​62. 85. Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, 88. 86. For discussions of the contemporary meanings of Lukácsian aesthetics, see Timothy Bewes and Timothy Hall, eds., Georg Lukács: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence: Aesthetics, Politics, Literature (New York: Continuum, 2011); and Michael Thompson, ed., Georg Lukács Reconsidered: Critical Essays in Politics, Philosophy, and Aesthetics (New York: Continuum, 2011). 87. See Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1972), 83. The term “reification” or “thingification” (Verdinglichung) appears only once or twice in Marx’s Capital in phrases such as the “personification of things and reification of persons.” See Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (New  York:  Vintage Books, 1977), 209. For more on Marx’s usage of the term, see Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, “Rethinking Reification,” Theory and Society 16, no. 2 (1987):  263–​293. On new interpretations of Lukács’s employment of the concept, see Andrew Feenberg, “Rethinking Reification,” in Georg Lukács: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence, 101–​120; Feenberg, “Reification and its Critics,” in Georg Lukács Reconsidered, 172–​194; and Timothy Hall, “Reification, Materialism, and Praxis:  Adorno’s Critique of Lukács,” Telos 155 (2011): 62–​82. Also see Axel Honneth. Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, ed. Martin Jay. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). While these discussions move Lukács’s model to a less teleological and class-​deterministic direction, they stop short of making room for transcultural applications of the concept. 88. Lucien Goldmann, Towards a Sociology of the Novel, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1975), 7. 89. According to Brean Hammond and Shaun Regan’s assessment in Making the Novel: Fiction and Society in Britain, 1660–​1789 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), Watt’s thesis about half a century later is “bloody but unbowed” (4). David Cunningham also recently explicitly argues that “there is something more historically specific at stake in question about the rise of the novel as such, whatever its lengthier ‘polygenesis.’ ” See Cunningham, “‘Very Abstract and Terribly Concrete’: Capitalism and The Theory of the Novel,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 42, no. 2 (2009): 311. In the summary of Marina MacKay, “in the world of strictly eighteenth-​century studies, The Rise of the Novel continues to be amplified, supplemented, or dismantled by every critic concerned with the novel’s emergence, that vast field of inquiry for which Watt’s very title (with or without skeptical quotation marks) remains the

195

Notes  195

customary shorthand designation.” See MacKay, “The Wartime Rise of The Rise of the Novel,” Representations 119, no. 1 (2012): 120, which helpfully situates Watt’s scholarship within his experience as a POW of Imperial Japan during the WWII. In the assessment of Moretti, “Compared to Lukács and Watt, we know a lot more about 18th-​century narrative, or early historical novels; but in ‘such matters as causation of behavior,’ we know a lot less.” See Moretti, “The End of the Beginning: A Reply to Christopher Prendergast,” New Left Review 41 (2006), 83. 90. Said’s Culture and Imperialism in essence agrees with the genealogy of the novel as charted by Watt’s The Rise the Novel and Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel, though situating the line of evolution in a different ideological dimension (see for instance Culture and Imperialism, 70, 156–​157). Likewise informed by Watt, Anderson also attributes the beginning of the novel to eighteenth-century England. See Imagined Communities, 25. 91. To further clarify, my comparative analysis in this book does not aim to exclude other forms or earlier works of fiction from the rubric of the novel. Rather, its purpose is to search for a form of literary horizontal continuity and pluralize the notion of narrative modernity. Historically, as a literary term, the “novel” was an English neologism of the eighteenth century, whereas most European languages other than Spanish (which has the analogous term “novella”) retained older words with the etymon “roman” for designating all longer works of prose fiction. In Institutions of the English Novel: From Defoe to Scott (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), Homer Obed Brown persuasively points out the significance of Walter Scott’s ten-​volume Ballantyne’s Novelist’s Library (1821–​1824) in shaping the corpus of earlier English narrative fiction and argues that “it can with some accuracy be said that the eighteenth-century novel was invented at the beginning of the nineteenth century.” In this light, around the time of their composition and initial circulation, Western works now often regarded as founding pieces of the “novel” were characterized by the same formal and institutional ambiguity as their roughly coeval Eastern works. For prevailing narrative terms and their conceptual histories in Japanese and Chinese cases, see Adriana Boscaro, “Monogatari” and Judith T. Zeitlin, “Xiaoshuo” in The Novel. Vol. 1: History, Geography, and Culture, ed. Franco Moretti, 241–​248; 249–​261. 92. Patrick Hanan, “A Landmark of the Chinese Novel,” in The Far East: China and Japan, eds. Douglas Grant and Millar MacLure (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961), 329. 93. For a brief account of the pattern described here, see Zhang Longxi, “The Changing Concept of World Literature,” in World Literature in Theory, ed. David Damrosch, 517–​518. For reassessments of Chinese literary transitions from the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, see, for instance, Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice:  Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 1995); David Der-​Wei Wang, Fin-​d e-​Siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1848–​1911 (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 1997); Xiaobing Tang, Chinese Modern:  The Heroic and the Quotidian (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2000); Denise Gimpel, Lost Voices of Modernity: A Chinese Popular Fiction Magazine in Context (University of Hawaii Press, 2001); The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project, eds., Milena Doleželová-​Velingerová et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Haiyan Lee, Revolution of the Heart:  A  Genealogy of Love in China, 1900–​1950 (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 2007); and Patrick Hanan, Chinese Fiction of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries: Essays by Patrick Hanan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). C. T. Hsia’s “Yen Fu and Liang Ch’i-​ch’ao as Advocates of New Fiction,” in Chinese Approaches to Literature, ed. Adele Rickett (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 221–​257, still remains a useful account of the New Fiction Movement. 94. An overview of these processes can be found in Claudine Salmon, Literary Migrations: Traditional Chinese Fiction in Asia (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2013). Also see Atsuko Sakaki, Obsessions with the Sino-​Japanese Polarity in Japanese Literature (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005), especially ch. 1–​2 , on Japanese receptions of Chinese vernacular fiction.

196

196 Notes

95. Standard references to Tokugawa literature and Saikaku’s writings in English are still Howard Hibbett, The Floating World in Japanese Fiction (North Clarendon, VT: Tuttle, 1959) and Donald Keene, World within Walls: Japanese Literature of the Premodern Era, 1600–​1867 (Columbia University Press [1976] 1999). Also see Hibbet’s newer book The Chrysanthemum and the Fish: Japanese Humor since the Age of the Shoguns (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2002). For newer translations of and concise introductions to Tokugawa literary works, see Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–​1900, Haruo Shirane, ed. (Columbia University Press, 2008). For a contextualized discussion of Tamenaga Shunsui, see Maeda Ai, Text and the City: Essays on Japanese Modernity, 226–​228. Criticisms related to Saikaku will be further detailed in ­chapter 3. For Shōyō’s Essence of the Novel, its significance to Japanese literary history, and the concurrent canonization of Saikaku by writers such as Kōyō, see Currents in Japanese Culture: Translations and Transformations, ed. Amy Vladeck Heinrich (Columbia University Press, 1997); Inventing the Classics:  Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature, eds. Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki (Stanford University Press, 2002); and Atsuko Ueda, Concealment of Politics, Politics of Concealment: The Production of “Literature” in Meiji Japan (Stanford University Press, 2007). Robert Lyons Danly’s preface to his translation of Ichiyō’s fictions in In the Shade of Spring Leaves: The Life of Higuchi Ichiyō, with Nine of Her Best Stories (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992) provides an excellent introduction to the art of Saikaku, who was a major influence to Ichiyō. Karen Thornber’s Empires of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009) is a remarkable study on multiway contacts and receptions across the East Asian literary system with focus on the early twentieth century and touches on the influences of Shōyō’s Essence of the Novel and Kōyō’s writings on Chinese and Taiwanese writers. See Empires of Texts, 117–​118, 145–​146, and 179. 96. Cf. Flynn and Giráldez, “Cycles of Silver” and Dennis Flynn, “Comparing the Tokugawa Shogunate with Hapsburg Spain: Two Silver Empires in a Global Setting,” in The Political Economy of Merchant Empires: State Power and World Trade, 1350–​1750, ed. James D. Tracy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 332–​359. 97. In recent scholarship, the second part of Robinson Crusoe has received more detailed treatments in Porter’s Ideographia; Markley’s The Far East in English Imagination; Lydia Liu, “Robinson Crusoe’s Earthenware Pot,” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 4 (1999): 728–​757; and Melissa Free, “Un-​Erasing ‘Crusoe’: ‘Farther Adventures’ in the Nineteenth Century,” Book History 9, no. 1 (2006): 89–​130. 98. See selections from Marthe Robert, Origins of the Novel in Theory of the Novel, ed. McKeon, 68. 99. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, with introduction by Said, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), 4. 100. Upon this point, I  am informed by Henry Higuera, Eros and Empire:  Politics and Christianity in Don Quixote (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995); Diana de Armas Wilson, Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World (Oxford University Press, 2003); William Childers, Transnational Cervantes (University of Toronto Press, 2006); and Frederick A. de Armas, Don Quixote Among the Saracens: A Clash of Genres and Civilizations (University of Toronto Press, 2011). 101. See Said, Culture and Imperialism, 70, 77. 102. My interpretation of Robinson Crusoe on these points have been informed by a sizable number of postcolonial readings of the novel. See, for instance, Robyn Wiegman, “Economies of the Body: Gendered Sites in Robinson Crusoe and Roxana” in Reading with a Difference: Gender, Race, and Cultural Identity, ed., Arthur F. Marotti (Wayne State University Press, 1993), 207–​226; Robert P. Marzec, “Enclosures, Colonization, and the Robinson Crusoe Syndrome: A Genealogy of Land in a Global Context,” boundary 2, 29, no. 2 (2002):129–​156; Christopher F. Loar, “How to Say Things with Guns: Military Technology and the Politics of Robinson Crusoe,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 19, nos. 1–​2 (2006): 1–​20; and Laura Doyle, Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–​1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).

197

Notes  197

103. See Mikhail Bakhtin’s discussion of Sancho’s “grotesque realism” and the politics of bodily degradation in Rabelais and His World (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 1984), 21–​23. 104. For a careful effort to read Saikaku in light of Bakhtinian novelist theory, see Jeffrey Johnson, “Saikaku and the Narrative Turnabout,” Journal of Japanese Studies 27, no. 2 (2001): 323–​345. 105. On “economic individualism” in Defoe, see Watt, Rise of the Novel, 61–​74. 106. Eroticism was also a prevalent feature of early modern English fiction. For an informative comparative account of early modern Chinese and English erotic literatures, see Katherine Carlitz, “Pornography, Chastity, and ‘Early Modernity’ in China and England, 1500–​1640,” in Comparative Early Modernities, ed. Porter, 99–​124. Also see Adrienne Laskier Martin, An Erotic Philology of Golden Age Spain (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2008) for an account of the Spanish case. 107. Thomas Percy, ed. Hau kiou choaan, or, The Pleasing History:  A  Translation from the Chinese Language. 4 vols. (London:  R.  and J.  Dodsley, 1761); and Jean-​P ierre Abel Rémusat, Iu-​kiao-​li, ou, Les deux cousines (Paris: Moutardier, 1826). On Goethe’s comments, see Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations of Goethe, 164. For references to Goethe’s reading of Hao qiu zhuan, Yu Jiao Li, and other translated Chinese texts, see Zhongshu Qian, “Thomas Percy and His Chinese Studies,” in Vision of China in the English Literature of the 17th and 18th Centuries, ed. Adrian Hsia (Hong Kong:  The Chinese University Press, 1998), 301–​325; Porter, Chinese Taste in the Eighteenth Century, 154–​ 183; Reihard Meyer-​K aikus, “World Literature beyond Goethe,” in Cultural Mobility, 96–​121; Daniel Purdy, “Goethe, Rémusat and the Chinese Novel:  Translation and the Circulation of World Literature,” in German Literature as World Literature, ed. Thomas Beebee (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 43–​62. 108. The above observations have been informed by studies on Richardson and eighteenth-​c entury domestic fiction such as Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction:  A  Political History of the Novel (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1987); G. J. Barker-​B enfield, The Culture of Sensibility:  Sex and Society in Eighteenth-​C entury Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-​C entury England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity:  Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); and Helen Thompson, Ingenuous Subjection:  Compliance and Power in the Eighteenth-​C entury Domestic Novel (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). Scholarly writings on Chinese talent-​b eauty fiction, the “cult of sensibility (qing),” and women and fiction in late imperial Chinese culture can be found in Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-​C entury China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); Keith McMahon, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists:  Sexuality and Male-​Female Relationships in Eighteenth-​C entury Chinese Fiction (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 1995) and Polygamy and Sublime Passion:  Sexuality in China on the Verge of Modernity (University of Hawaii Press, 2010); Martin Huang, Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China (Harvard University Press, 2001); Anthony C. Yu, Rereading the Stone:  Desire and the Making of Fiction in Dream of the Red Chamber (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2001); Tina Lu, Persons, Roles, and Minds: Identity in Peony Pavilion and Peach Blossom Fan (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 2002); Paolo Santangelo, Sentimental Education in Chinese History:  An Interdisciplinary Textual Research on Ming Qing Sources (Leiden, The Netherlands:  Brill, 2003); Ellen Widmer, The Beauty and the Book:  Women and Fiction in Nineteenth-​C entury China (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2006); and Haiyan Lee, Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). 109. For a thoughtful comparative essay on Goethe and Red Chamber, see Chunjie Zhang, “Reading Goethe’s Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandtschaften) through The Story of

198

198 Notes

the Stone (Hong Lou Meng): Immanent Divinity, Vegetative Femininity, and the Mood of Transience,” in German Literature as World Literature, 25–​42. 110. Notably, in her more recent writings Nancy Armstrong has underscored the significance of the “network” and of “the nation as hub” as an underlying structure of the domestic novel. See “The Network Novel and How it Unsettled the Domestic Novel,” in A Companion to the English Novel, eds. Stephen Arata, et  al., 306–​320 (Malden, MA: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2015).

Chapter 2 1. F.M. Mote, “Yuan and Ming,” in Food in Chinese Culture: Anthropological and Historical Perspective, ed. K.C. Chang (Yale University Press, 1977), 195. 2. Cited in Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China (University of California Press, 1998), 238. 3. Robert Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination, 22. Also see Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire:  Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan, 2004) and Ray Huang, 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981). 4. See, for instance, Janet Abu-​Lughod, Before European Hegemony (1991); Roy Bin Wong, China Transformed (1997); Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient (1998); Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence (2000); Jack Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1991) and Why Europe? (2008); Warren I.  Cohen, East Asia at the Center (2000); John Hobson The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization (2004); Jack Goody, ed., Capitalism and Modernity: The Great Debate (2004); Alexander Woodside, Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Hazards of World History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing (2007); Arif Dirlik, “Revisioning Modernity: Modernity in Eurasian Perspectives” (2011); David Porter, ed., Comparative Early Modernities (2012); and Manning and Gills, eds. Andre Gunder Frank and Global Development. 5. For a complete English translation of Jin Ping Mei, see The Plum in the Golden Vase, trans. David Roy, Vol. 1–​4 (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2006–​2011). Citations of the text in this chapter are from Roy’s translation, unless otherwise noted. Notable English scholarly writings on the novel include Patrick Hanan, “A Landmark of the Chinese Novel” (1961); C. T. Hsia, The Classic Chinese Novel: A Critical Introduction (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 1968); Katherine Carlitz, The Rhetoric of Chin P’ing Mei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Indira Satyendra. “Metaphors of the Body: The Sexual Economy of the Chin P’ing Mei tz’u-​hua,” CLEAR 15 (1993): 85–​ 97; Andrew Plaks, The Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel: Ssu ta ch’i-​shu (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1987); Martin Huang, Desire and Fictional Narrative (2001); Naifei Ding, Obscene Things: Sexual Politics in Jin Ping Mei (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Sophie Volpp, “The Gift of a Python Robe:  The Circulation of Objects in Jin Ping Mei,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 65, no. 1 (2005):  133–​158; Shang Wei, “The Making of the Everyday World: Jin Ping Mei cihua and Encyclopedias for Daily Use,” in Dynastic Crisis and Cultural Innovation: From the Late Ming to the Late Qing and Beyond, eds. David Der-​wei Wang and Shang Wei (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 63–​92. Roy’s translation (esp. Vol. 1)  contains detailed bibliographies that include Chinese and Japanese sources. For a comparative study of eroticism and sentiments in Chinese and French novels with Plum as a major example, see Tonglin Lu, Rose and Lotus: Narrative of Desire in France and China (Albany, New York: SUNY, 1991). For a study on early modern consumption using Plum in comparison to European cases, see Peter Burke, “Res et verba: Conspicuous Consumption in the Early Modern World,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. Roy Porter, 148–​161. (New York: Routledge, 1994). 6. See Hanan, “A Landmark of the Chinese Novel,” 329.

199

Notes  199

7. For information regarding Plum’s dating and authorship, see Plaks, Four Masterworks, 55–​72. In Plaks’s conclusion, despite earlier theories that Plum was composed during the Jiajing era (1521–​1567), “the culminate weight” of the numerous arguments on this issue does “give an edge to the theory of Wan-​li [1563–​1620] composition” (61). The earliest extant edition of Plum dates to 1617, although various evidences indicate that at least a portion of the book’s manuscript was circulating among a small group of readers by the mid-​1590s. Recently, Xu Yongming’s essay “A New Candidate for Authorship of the Jin Ping Mei: Bai Yue (1499–​1551)” in Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 33 (2011): 55–​74 revives the theory of earlier authorship by promoting yet another candidate as the novel’s author. The article’s evidences are, however, circumstantial, as are most other proposals on the subject. For Roy’s intriguing suggestion that Plum’s author was none other than the great late Ming dramatist Tang Xianzu (1550–​1616), see Roy, “The Case for T’ang Hsien-​t su’s Authorship of the Jin Ping Mei,” CLEAR 8, no. 1–​2 (1986): 31–​ 62. Xu Jianping in “Jin Ping Mei liutong huobi zhitai yu chengshu niandai buzheng” in Wenxue Yichan (Literary Heritage) 5 (2006): 141–​143persuasively points out that due to recurrent references to nationwide agrarian taxes in the book, the novel’s final completion could only happen after the comprehensive implementation of the “Single-​W hip Method” (yi tiao bian fa) in 1581. 8. All these novels were published anonymously and appeared in print mostly during the sixteenth century. In terms of their earliest extant editions, Three Kingdoms dates to 1522, Outlaws to 1589, Journey to the West to 1592, and Plum to 1617. Bibliographical references from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have led twentieth-​century scholars to attribute Three Kingdoms to Luo Guanzhong (fl. 14th century), Outlaws to Shi Nai’an (c. 1296–​1372) or Luo Guanzhong, and Journey to the West to Wu Cheng’en (c. 1506–​1582), although little is known about these putative authors. Plaks’s Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel contains detailed discussions on the questions of dating and authorship with regard to these novels. The term “four extraordinary books” came into circulation during the seventeenth century in the Chinese book market. See Four Masterworks, 5n. In The Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel, Plaks emphasizes the four works’ common aesthetic features as “literati” novels in terms of their “figural recurrence,” ten-​chapter narrative units, and narrative parallelisms. In ways that were inspiring to the conception of this book, Plaks uses the Lukácsian notion of “irony” to describe historio-​aesthetic commensurabilities between the Chinese texts in question and the Western novel since Don Quixote. See Plaks, “The Novel in Premodern China,” 181–​125, in The Novel, Vol.1, edited by Moretti. Except for Plum, which was based on one episode from Outlaws, all the earlier three “extraordinary books” have much earlier sources, which have been attributed to oral traditions such as the flourishing culture of urban storytelling during the Song period (960–​1279). These sources are addressed in detail in Four Masterworks. Also see Robert Hegel’s Reading Illustrated Fiction in Late Imperial China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 18–​60, for an overview of the development of fiction in the Chinese tradition.   The four Ming masterworks and later major novels such as Cao Xueqin’s The Dream of the Red Chamber and Wu Jingzi’s (1701–​1754) Scholars (Rulin waishi) were traditionally published with prefatory interlinear commentaries, which are significant for understanding narrative theories in the Chinese tradition. For translations of these commentaries, see David L. Rolston, ed., How to Read the Chinese Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). Ming Dong Gu’s Chinese Theories of Fiction: A Non-​Western Narrative System (Albany, New  York:  SUNY, 2006) provides a valuable account of the distinctive features of Chinese narrative criticism as they evolved through the Ming and Qing periods. For informative accounts of the trend of vernacularization and secularization in Chinese fiction, see, for instance, Sheldon H. Lu, From Historicity to Fictionality: The Chinese Poetics of Narrative (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 1994); Liangyan Ge, Out of the Margins:  The Rise of Chinese Vernacular Fiction (Honolulu:  University of Hawaii Press, 2001); and Zuyan Zhou, “Carnivalization in The Journey to the West: Cultural Dialogism in Fictional Festivity,” CLEAR 16 (1994): 69–​92.

200

200 Notes

9. It should be noted that the most popular editions of Plum prior to the twentieth century were based on the “Illustrated” (xiu xiang) version, which provided the basis of Zhang Zhupo’s commentaries cited in this chapter. The earlier extant edition dated to 1617, otherwise known as the “Chantefable” (cihua) version due to its different title, was not rediscovered and revived until the 1930s. For detailed textual studies of these editions, see Patrick Hanan, “The Text of Chin P’ing Mei,” Asia Major 10, no. 1 (1963): 1–​57; and “Sources of the Chin P’ing Mei,” Asia Major 10, no. 2 (1963): 23–​67. The “Chantefable” version is the standard text used in today’s scholarship on the novel and is the basis of Roy’s translation. My discussion in this chapter also primarily follows this version. For a reemphasis on the distinctive literary values of the “Illustrated” version, see Xiaofei Tian, “A Preliminary Comparison of the Two Recensions of Jinpingmei,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 62, no. 2 (2002): 347–​388. 10. Zhang Zhupo’s commentaries were printed in editions of the book wherein it is referred to as the “Number One Extraordinary Book.” Zhang’s longer essay called “Jin Ping Mei du fa” (How to Read Jin Ping Mei) has been translated by David Roy and included in How to Read the Chinese Novel, 196–​243. “Shiqing” (“worldly affairs” or “mundane affairs”) is a term he employs throughout his commentaries, notably in the essay “Di yi qi shu fei yin shu lun” (“The Number One Extraordinary Book is Not an Obscene Book”). 11. Cited in Jin Ping Mei ziliao huibian (Collected Materials on Jin Ping Mei), ed. Huang Lin, 6. My translation. 12. See Lu Xun Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilue (first draft published in 1923), which has been translated into English by Yang Hsien-​y i and Gladys Yang under the title A Brief History of Chinese Fiction (Beijing Foreign Press, 1959). Lu Xun utilizes the term “the novel of worldly affairs” (shiqing xiaoshuo) and “the novel of human feelings” (renqing xiaoshuo) alternatively to refer to the narrative tradition from Plum to Red Chamber. Yang’s translation renders the term into the “novel of manners.” For an assessment of the seminal influences of Lu Xun’s historiography, see R. Hegel, Reading Illustrated Fiction, 22–​23. 13. See Zheng Zhenduo (1898–​1958), “Tan Jin Ping Mei cihua” (“A Discussion of Plum”), Wenxue 1.1 (1933), now in Jin Ping Mei ziliao huilu (Collected Sources of Plum), ed. Fang Ming (Hefei, China: Huangshan chubanshe, 1986), 247–​265 and Wu Han (1909–​1969), “Jin Ping Mei de zhuzuo shidai ji qi shenhui beijing” (“Composition Date and Social Background of Plum”), Wenxue jikan 1, no. 1(1934), now in Jin Ping Mei ziliao huilu, 266–​303. Whereas Lu Xun has been famed as the “father of modern Chinese literature,” Zheng Zhendu is the seminal figure in founding the Chinese discourse of “world literature” (“shijie wenxue”). See Jing Tsu, “Getting Ideas about World Literature in China,” Comparative Literature Studies 47, no. 3 (2010): 290–​317. 14. Hsia, Classic Chinese Novel, 166; Hanan, “A Landmark of the Chinese Novel,” 329. 15. Evelyn Rawski, “Economic and Social Foundations of Late Imperial China,” in Popular Culture in Late Imperial China, eds. David Johnson, et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 3. 16. For surveys of these social and historical trends, see Evelyn Rawski, “Economic and Social Foundations of Late Imperial China,” 3–​33; Plaks, Four Masterworks, 3–​52; Benjamin Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550–​1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 1–​23. On late Ming consumption culture, see Timothy Brook, Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), and Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005). Population figure is from Elman, On Their Own Terms, 9. For world population comparison during the 1500–​1800 period, see Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, Vol.1, 1992, 31–​50. Standard historical references to the Ming and Qing periods are Frederick W. Mote, Imperial China, 900–​1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990); and Dennis Twitchett, ed., Cambridge History of China, vols. 7–​9 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988–​2002). 17. Cited in Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 238.

201

Notes  201

18. On Zhang’s comments and the social trends he describes, see Brook, Confusions of Pleasure, 73, 144, 149, 221. 19. See William Atwell, “Ming China and the Emerging World Economy, c. 1470–​1650,” in Cambridge History of China, vol. 8, ed. Dennis Twitchett, 381–​384. For more detailed accounts, see Richard Von Glahn, Fountain of Fortune and “Cycles of Silver in China”; and Niv Horesh, Chinese Money in Global Context. 20. See Flynn and Giráldez, “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon’: The Origin of World Trade in 1571” and “Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity through the Mid-​Eighteenth Century.” 21. Frank, ReOrient, 132. The “Plata es sangre” citation is on the same page. 22. See William Atwell, “Ming China and the Emerging World Economy”; Flynn and Giráldez, “Arbitrage, China, and World Trade” and “Cycles of Silver”; Brook, Vermeer’s Hat, 152–​184, and Troubled Empire, 213–​237; and Mann, 1493, 157–​209. The reported “silver is blood” comment was given by Sebastien Manrique, a Portuguese missionary who lived in Manila from 1637 to 1638 and is cited in von Glahn, “Myth and Reality,” 436. 23. See Richard von Glahn, “Myth and Reality,” 440, 432. 24. Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure, 10. 25. Cited in Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, vol.1, 454. 26. Atwell, “Ming China and the Emerging World Economy,” 404–​405. 27. See for instance Flynn and Giráldez, ‘Cycles of Silver” and Mann, 1493, 199–​200. Also see a Chinese official’s report on mulberry-​related land use crisis in Mark Elvin’s The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 465. 28. For these debates, see Timothy Brook and Gregory Blue, eds., China and Historical Capitalism: Genealogies of Sinological Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Jack Goody, ed., Capitalism and Modernity:  The Great Debate , 2004. Weber’s primary discussion on China can be found in The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism, first published in 1915. For a critique of Weber’s position, see Blaut, Eight Eurocentric Historians (New York: Guilford, 2000), 19–​30. Also see Lütfi Sunar, Marx and Weber on Oriental Societies (2014). Étienne Balázs’s major writings are Chinese Civilization and Bureaucracy; Variations on a Theme (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1964) and Political Theory and Administrative Reality in Traditional China (London:  University of London, 1965).For one example of the influences of Balázs’s Sinological vision on critical theory, see Deleuze and Guattari’s theorization of the oriental “despot” in Anti-​ Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Penguin, [1972], 2009), 197–​198. 29. See Victor Lieberman, ed., “Transcending East-​ West Dichonomies,” in Beyond Binary Histories: Re-​Imagining Eurasia to c 1830 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999). 30. For geographical difference, see Abu-​Lughod Before European Hegemony, 316–​371; and Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing, 211–​249. On the Indian Ocean economy, Chinese overseas commercial networks, and relations to Southeast Asia, see K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean:  An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press, 1985); Kenneth McPherson, The Indian Ocean: a History of People and the Sea (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Philippe Beaujard, “The Indian Ocean in Eurasian and African World-​Systems before the Sixteenth Century,” Journal of World History 16, no. 4 (2005):  411–​465; Angela Schottenhammer, ed., Trading Networks in Early Modern East Asia (Wiesbaden, Germany:  Harrassowitz Verlag, 2010); Eric Tagliacozzo and Wen-​Chin Chang, eds., Chinese Circulations:  Capital, Commodities, and Networks in Southeast Asia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Brook, Troubled Empire, 213–​237. For accounts on Zheng He and the early Ming expeditions, see Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405–​1433 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) and Edward L. Dreyer, Zheng He: China and the Oceans in the Early Ming Dynasty, 1405–​1433 (New York: Pearson, 2006). Also see Abu-​Lughod Before European Hegemony, 352–​373 and Mann, 1493, 3–​38 for helpful reconstructions of the backgrounds of the Columbian expeditions. For Chinese maritime politics, diplomacies, and the “tributary” imaginary, see Gang Den, Maritime Sector, Institutions,

202

202 Notes

and Sea Power of Premodern China (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999); Gang Zhao, The Qing Opening to the Ocean: Chinese Maritime Policies, 1684–​1757 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2013); and David Chan-​oong Kang, East Asia Before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). 31. Cf. Hobson’s critique of the “laissez-​faire myth” in European economic history in Eastern Origins, 243–​281. 32. Braudel explicitly defines capitalism as monopoly and state ideology on the basis of Europe’s “long sixteenth century” in Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism, 64–​65. On the East Asia “industrious revolution,” see Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing, 32–​42. 33. According to a European traveler in 1695, one tael of silver (roughly equivalent to the weight of a Spanish peso or “piece of eight,” at around 37.5 grams or about 1.3 ounces) was enough to “buy the best bread in the world for six months.” Since silver had to be cut apiece in daily purchases, another European observer avowed in the 1730s that for the purpose of cutting and weighing silver, there was scarcely a man in China “however wretched he may be, who does not carry scissors and precision scale around with him.” These observations are cited in Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism vol.1, 455. 34. See von Glahn, Fountain of Fortune for details and Niv Horesh, Chinese Money in Global Context: Historic Junctures Between 600 BCE and 2012 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), for a comparative analysis. 35. George William Skinner, The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford University Press, 1977), 268. 36. For discussions of the Naitō thesis, see Hisayuki Miyakawa, “An Outline of the Naitō Hypothesis and Its Effects on Japanese Studies of China,” The Far Eastern Quarterly 14, no. 4 (1955):  533–​552; and Joshua A. Fogel, ed., Naitō Konan and the Development of the Conception of Modernity in Chinese History (Armonk, NY:  Sharpe, 1983). For studies on social mobility, the civil examination, and merchant-​gentry relations in late imperial China, see Ping-​Ti Ho, The Ladder of Success in Imperial China: Aspects of Social Mobility, 1368–​ 1911 (Columbia University Press, [1965] 2011); Benjamin Elman, A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Joseph Esherick and Mary Backus Rankin, eds., Chinese Local Elites and Patterns of Dominance (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1990), and Richard John Lufrano, Honorable Merchants: Commerce and Self-​Cultivation in Late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997). 37. Cited in Timothy Brook and B. Michael Frolic, eds., Civil Society in China, 70. Rowe’s argument is primarily given in “The Problem of ‘Civil Society’ in Late Imperial China,” Modern China 19, no. 2, Symposium: "Public Sphere"/​"Civil Society" in China? Paradigmatic Issues in Chinese Studies, III (1993): 139–​157. Also see Jude Howell and Jenny Pearce, Civil Society and Development, ch. 4; and Karla W Simon, Civil Society in China: The Legal Framework from Ancient Times to the “New Reform Era” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) for related analyses. 38. Summed up in Brook and Frolic, eds., Civil Society in China, 21. See Philip Kunn, “Civil Society and Constitutional Development,” in La Société civile face à L’État, ed. Léon Vandermeersch (Paris: École française d’Extrême-​Orient, 1994), 301–​307. 39. On the two contrasting attitudes toward economic developments and consumption in late Ming China, See Craig Clunas, “Things in Between: Splendour and Excess in Ming China,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption, ed. Frank Trentmann, 47–​63. For a summary of the emergence of antiauthoritarian sentiments and more autonomous forms of political and cultural consciousness in sixteenth-​century China, see Plaks, Four Masterworks, 6–​13. For other pertinent studies on late Ming and early Qing politics and culture, see Ray Huang 1587, A Year of No Significance; Maram Epstein, Competing Discourses: Orthodoxy, Authenticity, and Engendered Meanings in Late Imperial Chinese Fiction (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2001); Chun-​shu Chang and Shelley Hsueh-​lun Chang, Crisis and Transformation in Seventeenth-​Century China: Society, Culture, and Modernity in

203

Notes  203

Li Yü’s World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998); and Harry Mille, State Versus Gentry in Late Ming Dynasty China, 1572–​1644 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 40. For the cases of Yan Song and Luo Yuren, see Plaks, 10–​12. For developments of commercial publishing during the Ming dynasty, see Kai-​w ing Chow, Publishing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004); Cynthia J. Brokaw and Kai-​Wing Chow, eds., Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005); and R. Hegel, Reading Illustrated Fiction. On Jin Ping Mei and print culture, see Shang Wei, “The Making of the Everyday World: Jin Ping Mei cihua and Encyclopedias for Daily Use.” The classic study on the “philosophy of mind” intellectual movement is William Theodore de Bary, eds., Self and Society in Ming Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970). For more recent studies, see Pauline C. Lee, Li Zhi, Confucianism, and the Virtue of Desire (Albany, NY: SUNY, 2012); and George L. Israel, Doing Good and Ridding Evil in Ming China: The Political Career of Wang Yangming (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2014). Donglin activism received a book-​length treatment in John W. Dardess, Blood and History in China: The Donglin Faction and its Repression, 1620–​1627 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002). In relation to the themes addressed in this passage, it should be noted that “xiaoshuo” (lit. “small talk”), the common Chinese term for “fiction,” was often alternatively called “unofficial histories” (ye shi). See Sheldon H. Lu’s analysis in From Historicity to Fictionality (especially 6–​8, 162–​170) on “xiaoshuo” as “a counter-​d iscourse to the ideology of the official literary canon” (174n). 41. The self-​family-​state correlation in the process of self-​cultivation is a basic proposition of the canonical Neo-​Confucian text Da Xue (Great Learning). For readings of Plum as a subversion of The Great Learning framework, see Plaks, Four Masterworks, 156–​170, and Carlitz, Rhetoric, 30ff. Also see Indira Satyendra “Metaphors of the Body,” and Katherine N. Carlitz, “Family, Society, and Tradition in Jin Ping Mei” in Modern China 10, no. 4 (1984): 387–​413 for micro-​macro relations in the novel. 42. Slightly modified from David Roy’s translation in The Plum in the Golden Vase, vol.4: The Climax, pp. 657–​658. Further citations in text. 43. Zhang Zhupo, “Commentaries on Chapter  79,” in Jin Ping Mei hui ping hui jiao ben (A Collated Edition of Plum with Collected Traditional Commentaries), ed. Qin Xiurong (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1998), 1171. All translations of Zhang’s commentaries quoted in this book are mine. 4 4. Zhang Zhupo, “Commentaries on Chapter 1,” in Jin Ping Mei hui ping hui jiao ben, 3–​4. Also see Andrew Plaks, Four Masterworks, 82–​83. 45. Zhang Zhupo, “Commentaries on Chapter 79,” in Jin Ping Mei hui ping hui jiao ben, 1191. 46. See accounts by Wang Shizhen (1526–​1590), cited in Fu Yilin, Ming Qing shidai shangren ji shangye ziben (Merchants and Commercial Capitals in Ming and Qing) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1956), 23–​24; and by Xie Zhaozhe (1567–​1624), cited in Ho Ping-​ti, “The Salt Merchants of Yang-​chou: A Study of Commercial Capitalism in Eighteenth Century China,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 17, no. 1–​2 (1954):143–​4 4. 47. For example, in c­ hapter 30 a young maid is bought for seven-​a nd-​a-​half taels (Roy, 196); in ­chapter 37 a young girl is sold for only four taels (Roy, 373); and in ­chapter 60 another maid is sold for five taels (Roy, 490). 48. For a Chinese study that uses the monetary backgrounds of Outlaws as a basis to date the novel’s composition to the 1420s, with later addition around the mid-​1500s, see Hou Hui, “Yi Shuihu zhuan qian ban bu zhuan yu Ming Xuande chunian: shi cong xiao shuo de huo bi xin xi jia yi tui duan” (A Conjecture on the Composition of the First Half of Outlaws during the Xuande Era [1426–​1435] of Ming: As Induced by the Novel’s Monetary Depictions), in Wenxue Yichan (Literary Heritage) 5 (2005): 148–​152. 49. See Xu Jianping, in “Jin Ping Mei liutong huobi zhitai yu chengshu niandai buzheng” (“Complementary Evidences on Jin Ping Mei’s Currency System and Composition Dates”) in Wenxue Yichan (Literary Heritage) 5 (2006): 141–​143.

204

204 Notes

50. See Katherine Carlitz, “Puns and Puzzles in the Chin P’ing Mei:  A  Look at Chapter  27,” T’oung Pao 67, no. 3–​5 (1981): 232–​233. 51. For these theories, see Plaks, Four Masterworks, 56–​59. 52. See Paul Martinson, “Pao, Order, and Redemption:  Perspectives on Chinese Religion and Society Based on a Study of the Chin P’ing Mei” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1973), 228–​232 for an account of Ximen Qing’s delegates’ various trips to the capital for submitting birthday gifts to Cai Jing. 53. See David Roy, “A Confucian Interpretation of the Chin P’ing Mei,” Proceedings of the International Conference on Sinology, Section on Literature (Taipei:  Academia Sinica, 1981), 58–​59. 54. See George William Skinner, The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford University Press, 1977) and Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States:  AD 990–​1992 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1992). 55. See, for instance, Ye Guitong, Lun Jin Ping Mei (On The Plum in the Golden Vase) (Henan, China: Zhongzhouguji chubanshe, 2005), 136–​137; Wang Rumei, Wang Rumei Jiedu Jin Ping Mei (Interpretations of The Plum in the Golden Vase by Wang Rumei) (Jilin, China: Shidai wenyi chubanshe, 2007), 256. 56. See Du Mingde “Jin Ping Mei yu Linqing” (“Jin Ping Mei and Lingqing”), in Jin Ping Mei yu Linqing, ed. Huang Lin and Du Mingde (Shandong Xinhua, 2008), 170–​185. For English writings on Linqing, see Brook, Confusions of Pleasure, 49, 108, 117–​119, and Brook, The Troubled Empire, 113–​114. 57. For Ricci’s experiences in and near Linqing, see Michela Fontana, Matteo Ricci: A Jesuit in the Ming Court (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), 151–​182. 58. Quoted in Kevin Bishop and Annabel Roberts, China’s Imperial Way: Retracing an Historical Trade and Communications Route from Hong Kong to Beijing (Hong Kong:  Guidebook, 1997), 65. 59. Timothy Brook, “Communications and Commerce,” in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 8 of The Ming Dynasty, Part 2, 688–​689. Also see William Atwell, “Ming China and the Emerging World Economy,” in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 8, 404–​406. Kenneth Pomeranz estimates that the Lower Yangzi region probably generated more than three-​ fourths of early modern China’s silk products. See The Great Divergence, 139. Lower Yangzi cities including Huzhou and Hangzhou are described in Plum as the places frequented by Ximen Qing’s employees. See Roy 3:210, 3:421, 4:178. 60. See Yan Xiaoqing, Hui Fuping, “Zheng He xia xiyang yu Mingdai xiangliao chaogong maoyi” (“Zheng He’s Western-​Ocean Voyage and the Spice Tributary Trade of Ming”), in Jianghai xuekan 1 (2008): 180–​185. Also see Chinese Circulations, 174–​176. On the “social life” of material goods, see Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things:  Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988). To my knowledge, there is still no substantial critical treatment of Ming China’s vibrant spice culture and its literary reflections, similar to what Timothy Morton did in English studies. See Timothy Morton, The Poetics of Spice:  Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic (Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press, 2000). 61. Volpp, “Gift of a Python Robe,” 136. 62. On the illicit nature of the python robe, see Volpp, “The Gift of a Python Robe.” In Volpp’s words, the python robe was “second in rank only to the imperial dragon robe” and “derived its cachet from the close resemblance of the python insignia to the dragon (the python had four claws instead of the dragon’s five)” (145). 63. “Asbestos fabric” is literally called “fire-​washable cloth” (huo huan bu) in the Chinese original. Known for its fire-​resistant quality, the fabric was initially an imported tributary item, although China began to domestically produce the material around the end of the Northern Song dynasty. Marco Polo’s Travels records a story about the Yuan emperor’s gift of an asbestos tablecloth to the Pope for sacramental purposes. See Huang Jingchun and Fan Wenxing, “Zhongguo gudai dui huo huan bu zhi lijie yu renzhi kaolue” (“A Study of the Knowledge and Understanding about Asbestos Fabric in Ancient China”), in Shengming, zhishi, yu

205

Notes  205

wenming: Shanghai shehui kexuejie xueshu nianhua lunwen ji (Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 2009), 340–​344.   The “Western-​Ocean cloth” (xi yang bu) in Plum must refer to the famed Indian cotton stuff (i.e., “calico”) which was manufactured along the Indian Ocean from Calicut to Cambay and often used to trade for Southeast Asian spices by participants of the Indian Ocean economy. It was a valued gift item in the Ming and Qing court. See Wang Yuanlin and Lin Xingrong, “Shisi zhi shiba shiji ouya de xiyangbu maoyi” (“The Eurasian Trade of ‘Western-​Ocean Clothes’ between the Fourteenth and the Eighteenth Centuries”), in Dongnanya Yanjiu 4 (2005), 86–​91. The printed variety of the Indian cotton was a sought-​a fter commodity in the European markets and motivated important technological renovations in the European textile industry. See Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello, “East and West: Textiles and Fashion in Early Modern Europe,” Journal of Social History 41, no. 4 (2008): 896–​900.   The aloeswood is also known as “agarwood” or “eaglewood” in English. Its usual Chinese term is “chen xiang,” literally “sinking aromatic.” For more on the history of the aloeswood and its trade during the early modern time, see Andrew Dalby, Dangerous Tastes: The Story of Spices (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 68–​71; and Tana Li, Nguyễn Cochinchina: Southern Vietnam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 78–​80. Judging by the Chinese original, the “aloeswood” used for Cai Jing’s girdle in Plum—​named as qinan—​refers to a particularly valuable subtype of the genus, the finest aloeswood, once known as “calambac” in English due to its origin in Champa, the ancient kingdom located in today’s Vietnam. Records from around the 1600s indicate that the qinan wood was taxed in China at a rate twenty times higher than ordinary aloeswood and a hundred times more than pepper. Obviously, it belonged to the most expensive spices one could possibly buy during the time. For tax information, see Yan Xiaoqing, Hui Fuping, “Zheng He xia xiyang yu Mingdai xiangliao chaogong maoyi” (“Zheng He’s Western-​Ocean Voyage and the Spice Tributary Trade of Ming”), in Jianghai xuekan 1 (2008), 185. For an early-​nineteenth century definition of “cambalac,” see The London Encyclopaedia: or Universal Dictionary Of Science, Art, Literature, and Practical Mechanics, vol. 22 (London: Thomas Tegg, 1829), 690–​691.   The rhinoceros horn, while having a long history in China’s foreign trade, was also more thoroughly commercialized as a result of the growth of international trade around China’s seashore. In a mid-​seventeenth century memo to the young emperor of the newly established Qing dynasty, an official proposes reopening commerce to the Portuguese settlement in Macao and lists rhino horns alongside pepper and other spices as profitable items in Macao’s trade to Canton, whose merchants would further distribute the goods to the Chinese inland. As the official concludes emphatically to reassure the emperor, “This trade tends to accumulate money.” Cited in Angela Schottenhammer, “Characteristics of Qing China’s Trade Policies, Shunzhi through Qianlong Reigns,” in Trading Networks in Early Modern East Asia, ed. Angela Schottenhammer (Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2010), 114. 6 4. Plaks, Four Masterworks, 171. Also see Martinson, “Pao, Order, and Redemption,” 319, on the novel’s perversion of the scared meaning of “renqing” as recorded in Confucian classics such as Liji (The Classic of Rite). 65. A canonical definition of the “Five Cardinal Relations” can be found in Mencius, Book III, part I, 4.8. See “Mencius,” trans. Irene Bloom, in Sources of Chinese Tradition, vol. 1, eds. de Bary and Bloom, 133, for a translation of the passage. Cf. Plaks, Four Masterworks, 156–​180, on Plum’s systematic perversion of the cardinal relations. 66. Plaks, Four Masterworks, 171. 67. Cf. Carlitz, “Family, Society, and Tradition in Jin Ping Mei” and Plaks, Four Masterworks, 163–​165. 68. Cf. Jianjun He, “Burning Incense at Night:  A  Reading of Wu Yueniang in Jin Ping Mei,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 29 (2007): 85–​103. 69. In the indignant words of Plum’s nineteenth-​century commentator Wen Long, “Those who are not of the human(e) order, if one keeps them company, one will become not-​human. Prostitutes take foster mothers, sons-​in-​law play with mothers-​in-​law, mistresses drink with

206

206 Notes

servant boys, younger brothers commit adultery with wives of older brothers, all the world is become muddy chaos.” Cited in Naifei Ding, Obscene Things, 195. To compare with actual social practices, see Ann Beth Waltner, Getting an Heir: Adoption and the Construction of Kinship in Late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991). 70. Cf. Martin Huang, Negotiating Masculinities in Late Imperial China (Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 2006), 87–​112. 71. See Li Hongtao, “Mingdai Guangdong de shibo taijian” (“Eunuchs as Overseers of the Foreign Trade Bureau in Ming Canton”), in Shantou daxue xuebao 24, no.1 (2008): 80–​84. Also see Shih-​shan Henry Tsai, The Eunuchs in the Ming Dynasty (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1996). 72. Zhang Zhupo, “Jin Ping Mei du fa” (“How to Read Plum”), included in Jin Ping Mei ziliao huibian (Compiled Sources of Jin Ping Mei), ed. Huang Lin (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1987), 71. 73. Wen Long, “Commentary on Cha. 27,” included in Jin Ping Mei ziliao huibian, 436. 74. Cf. Carlitz, “Puns and Puzzles in the Chin P’ing Mei: A Look at Chapter 27.” 75. These prescriptions can be found in Ming Shi, “Yufu zhi” (History of Ming, “Dress Codes”). 76. “Central plain” is a term recurrent in Plum in reference to China at large. See indexes in Roy’s translation. 77. For literary analyses of these endings, see Ming Dong Gu, “Brocade of Human Desires: The Poetics of Weaving in the ‘Jin Ping Mei’ and Traditional Commentaries,” Journal of Asian Studies 63, no. 2 (2004): 333–​356 and Zheng Huili, “A Negative Poetics: Desire and Death in the Xiuxiang Jin Ping Mei,” Tamkang Review 43, no. 1 (2012): 99–​121. 78. See Carlitz, The Rhetoric of Chin P’ing Mei, 141 and Plaks, Four Masterworks, 168 on the ironic aspects of Plum’s message of Buddhist redemption. 79. For backgrounds on the medical theory Plum employes, see the chapter on “‘Nourishing Life’:  Ming Bodies of Generation and Longevity,” in Charlotte Furth, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History: 960–​1665 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 187–​223. 80. Cf. Martin Huang, Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China, 96–​100 and Indira Satyendra, “Metaphors of the Body.” 81. Cf. Plaks’s analyses of Meng Yulou’s ambiguity in Four Masterworks, 171. 82. Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History, vol.1, 649. According to Moore’s enthused assessment of Pan’s literary image, “This Chinese Madam Bovary, this Lady Macbeth of Ch’ing-​ho, this Salome of Shantung Province is one of the most fully realized characters in world literature” (650–​651). 83. Cf. Naifei Ding, Obscene Things, 143–​224.

Chapter 3 1. Cited in Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Holding the World in Balance: The Connected Histories of the Iberian Overseas Empires, 1500–​1640,” The American Historical Review. 112, no. 5 (2007): 1359–​1385. Slightly modified. 2. Higuera, Eros and Empire, 1. 3. Cited in Roberto González Echevarria, ed., Cervantes’ Don Quixote:  A  Casebook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 31. 4. For a full translation of the poem along with the Spanish original, see Vincent Barlett, et al., eds., Dreams of Waking: An Anthology of Iberian Lyric Poetry, 1400–​1700 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 321–​324. 5. Diego G. Lopez Rosado, Historia del peso mexicano (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1975), 32. English translation of the quotation is included in Flynn and Giráldez, “Cycles of Silver,” 413. On the historical processes described above, see Flynn and Giráldez, “Born with a “Silver Spoon,”” and “Cycles of Silver”; Flynn, “Comparing the Tokugawa Shogunate with Hapsburg Spain”; Mann 1493, 3–​163. Also see Felipe Fernández-​A rmest, Pathfinders:  A  Global History of Exploration (New  York Norton, 2007) and Rainer F. Buschmann, et  al., eds., Navigating the Spanish Lake:  The Pacific in the Iberian World, 1521–​1898 (Honolulu:  University of Hawaii Press, 2014). Standard reference materials

207

Notes  207

on early modern Spanish history are J. H. Elliot, Imperial Spain 1469–​1716, 2nd rev. ed. (London:  Penguin, 2002) and Henry Kamen, Spain 1469–​1714:  A  Society of Conflict (New York: Pearson, 1991). 6. Both of these quotes are cited in Jose Antonio Maravall, Utopia and Counterutopia in the “Quixote” (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 47. 7. Dreams of Waking, ed., Barletta, 323. For more on Quevedo and Golden Age Spain, see George Mariscal, Contradictory Subjects:  Quevedo, Cervantes, and Seventeenth Century Spanish Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). 8. Ife, “The Historical and Social Context,” in The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes, ed. Anthony J. Cascardi (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), 24.For similar discussions, see Jonathan Dewarld, The European Nobility, 1400–​1800 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and Anthony Cascardi, Ideologies of History in the Spanish Golden Age (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997). 9. Maravall, Utopia and Counterutopia, 38. 10. Cited in Myriam Yvonne Jehenson and Peter N. Dunn, The Utopian Nexus in Don Quixote (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006), 90. For more on the social effects of New World money in Spain, see Elvira Vilches, New World Gold: Cultural Anxiety and Monetary Disorder in Early Modern Spain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 11. “Lazarillo de Tomes,” in Moretti, The Novel, vol. 2, “Forms and Themes,” 146. The text of Lazarillo I cite below is from Anonymous and Francisco de Quevedo, Lazarillo de Tormes and the Swindler: Two Spanish Picaresque Novels (Penguin Classics, 2003), trans. Michael Alpert. Citations in text. For critical discussions on Lazarillo and the picaresque genre, see for instance Peter Dunn, The Spanish Picaresque Fiction: A New Literary History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Giancarlo Maiorino, ed., The Picaresque: Tradition and Displacement (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Anne J. Cruz, Discourses of Poverty: Social Reform and the Picaresque Novel in Early Modern Spain (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); Gordana Yovanovich, Play and the Picaresque: Lazarillo de Tormes, Libro de Manuel, and Match Ball (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); and Francisco J. Sánchez, An Early Bourgeois Literature in Golden Age Spain: Lazarillo de Tormes, Guzmán de Alfarache and Baltasar Gracián (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). For an account of Don Quixote’s relation to the picaresque, see Cesáreo Bandera, The Humble Story of Don Quixote: Reflections on the Birth of the Modern Novel (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 2006), and Edward H. Friedman, Cervantes in the Middle: Realism and Reality in the Spanish Novel from Lazarillo de Tormes to Niebla (Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2006). 12. Anonymous and Francisco de Quevedo, Lazarillo de Tormes and the Swindler: Two Spanish Picaresque Novels, trans. Michael Alpert, 8. All citations of the text are from this version. Further citations in text. 13. Alpert, “Introduction,” in Lazarillo de Tormes and the Swindler, ix. 14. See Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, 103; Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 324; and Jameson, The Political Unconsciousness, 152. For influences of Spanish fiction from the picaresque to Don Quixote in England, see Ronald Paulson, Don Quixote in England: The Aesthetics of Laughter (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); J. A. G. Ardila, ed., The Cervantean Heritage: Reception and Influence of Cervantes in Britain(London: Legenda, 2009); and Barbara Fuchs, The Poetics of Piracy:  Emulating Spain in English Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). For an analysis of Cervantes’s influences on theories of the modern novel, see Rachel Schmidt, Forms of Modernity: Don Quixote and Modern Theories of the Novel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011). 15. Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, 97–​111. According to Lukács, “Don Quixote is the first great battle of interiority against the prosaic vulgarity of outward life” (104). 16. Lionel Trilling, “Manners, Morals, and the Novel,” The Kenyon Review, 10, no. 1 (1948): 15. 17. Maravall, Utopia and Counterutopia, 37. 18. See Carroll B. Johnson, Cervantes and the Material World (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000); David Quint, Cervantes’s Novel of Modern Times:  A  New Reading

208

208 Notes

of Don Quijote (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2005); and Myriam Yvonne Jehenson and Peter N. Dunn, Utopian Nexus. 19. See Henry Higuera, Eros and Empire:  Politics and Christianity in Don Quixote (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995); Diana de Armas Wilson, Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); William Childers, Transnational Cervantes; Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire:  The New World, Islam, and European Identities (Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Exotic Nation:  Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); and Frederick A. de Armas, Don Quixote Among the Saracens: A Clash of Genres and Civilizations (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013). 20. See Anthony J. Close, The Romantic Approach to Don Quixote:  A  Critical History of the Romantic Tradition in Quixote Criticism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1978). 21. For a reading of Don Quixote in light of Spain’s national formations, see Anthony Cascardi, “Imagining the Nation,” in Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 165–​196. 22. See Enrique Dussel, “World-​System and ‘Trans’-​Modernity,” 221–​244 and “Transmodernity and Interculturality: An Interpretation from the Perspective of Philosophy of Liberation,” Transmodernity 1, no. 3 (2012):  28–​59; Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/​Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). 23. See Childers’s critique in Transnational Cervantes, 69, 204–​205, 218–​219. Also see Edward H. Friedman, Cervantes in the Middle; Félix Martínez-​Bonati, Don Quixote and the Poetics of the Novel (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), and Edwin Williamson, Half-​Way House of Fiction: Don Quixote and Arthurian Romance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984). 24. José Ortega y Gasset, “Meditations on Quixote” (1914), in Theory of the Novel, ed. McKeon, 284. For comments on Don Quixote’s “Moorish” author, see Childers, Transnational Cervantes, 70–​ 76; Luiz Costa Lima, The Dark Side of Reason:  Fictionality and Power (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 4–​14; and E. C. Graf, “When an Arab Laughs in Toledo: Cervantes’s Interpellation of Early Modern Spanish Orientalism,” Diacritics 29, no. 2 (1999): 68–​85. 25. See Mignolo, Local Histories/​Global Designs, 56–​61. 26. As an indication of the book’s special significance to Don Quixote, in the famous “inquisition” episode (Book 1, ch. 6) Amadís of Gaul is the only survivor of the protagonist’s burnt library, spared owing to the intervention of the barber, for—​as he has heard—​“ it is the best of all the books of its kind” (86). We wonder if the barber’s informant is none other than Don Quixote himself, who at various points in the novel lionizes the hero of the book. Don Quixote’s fascination with Amadís is among the range of signs that imply curious resemblances between his image and the Conquistadores of the early sixteenth century. See Childers, Transnational Cervantes, 33–​34, 56–​57; Diana de Armas Wilson, Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World, 117–​119. For more studies on the romance genre and its relation to Cervantes, see for instance Barbara Fuchs, Romance (London: Routledge, 2004); Edward Dudley, The Endless Text: Don Quijote and the Hermeneutics of Romance (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997); Edwin Williamson, Half-​Way House of Fiction: Don Quixote and Arthurian Romance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984); Romance: Generic Transformation from Chrétien de Troyes to Cervantes, ed. Marina Brownlee and Kevin Brownlee (Hanover, NH: University of New England Press, 1986); Howard Mancing, The Chivalric World of Don Quijote: Style, Structure, and Narrative Technique (University of Missouri Press, 1982); Daniel Eisenberg, Romances of Chivalry in the Spanish Golden Age (Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 1982) and Henry Thomas’s classic study Spanish and Portuguese Romances of Chivalry ([1920]; Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013). For studies that situate the romance genre within the histories of the Crusade, the Age of Discovery, and the conquest of the New World, see Jennifer Robin Goodman, Chivalry and Exploration, 1298–​1630 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 1998) and Simone Pinet, Archipelagoes: Insular Fictions from Chivalric Romance to the Novel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

209

Notes  209

27. For backgrounds on the Columbian expeditions, see Mann, 1493, 3–​51. Also see Carol Delaney, “Columbus’s Ultimate Goal: Jerusalem,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48, no. 2 (2006): 260–​292, and Delaney, Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem: How Religion Drove the Voyages that Led to America (New York: Free Press, 2012). 28. Details of these conquests can be found in John Hemming, The Conquest of Incas (New York: Harcourt, 2003) and William H. Prescott, The History of the Conquest of Mexico (Random House, 2010). 29. Bernal Diaz de Castillo, The Truthful History of the Conquest of New Spain. Cited in Thomas, Spanish and Portuguese Romances of Chivalry, 82. 30. See Childers, Transnational Cervantes, 35; 23–​43. Also see Childers “Don Quixote and the War of the Alpujarras: The Historical Debasement of Chivalry as a Correlative to Its Literary Parody,” Hispania 88, no. 1 (2005): 11–​19. 31. The Ricote episode has been widely commented upon. See for instance Johnson, Cervantes and the Material World, 51–​70; Childers, Transnational Cervantes, 80–​84; Barbara Fuchs, Passing for Spain: Cervantes and the Fictions of Identity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 38–​45, and Anthony Cascardi, Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics, 181–​194. 32. According to Childers, throughout Don Quixote the protagonist encounters numerous characters from all walks of life while they crisscross La Mancha along an X-​shaped network of roads. See Transnational Cervantes, 34. The chapter in which Don Quixote braves the lion (II, 17), one that is anticlimactically indolent, intimates Spain’s imperial activities across the Mediterranean, for the magnificent beast is being sent to Madrid as a tribute from Oran, a North African Moorish city then occupied by the Spanish. The more discussed destination in the novel, particularly in Book I, is Seville, the metropolis that looked out to overseas wealth and fed the growth of local urban commerce and underworld societies. See Karl-​Ludwig Selig, “Don Quixote and the Exploration of (Literary) Geography,” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 6, no. 3 (1982): 341–​357. 33. See Childers, Transnational Cervantes, 33. 34. See G. Marscal, “The Figure of the Indiano in Early Modern Spanish Culture,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 2, no. 1 (2001):  55–​68. Seville appears in Quevedo’s picaresque novel El Buscón (The Swindler) as the last stop of the rogue protagonist, who aspires to strike his fortune in the New World. Seville is also the principle setting of Cervantes’s novella “Rinconete and Cortadillo” from The Exemplary Tales (Novelas ejemplares) (1613), whose main characters join the city’s crime syndicate Monipodio. For an analysis of “Rinconete and Cortadillo” in relation to New World economy, see Johnson, Material World, 37–​50. 35. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Walter Starkie (New York: Signet Classic, 2001), 535. Unless otherwise noted, all page references to and citations from the novel in this chapter are based on this edition. Further citations in text. 36. See Luïs Vaz de Camoes, The Lusiads, trans. Landeg White (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008). For a comparative article on The Lusiads and the late sixteenth-​century Chinese novel Voyage of the San Bao Eunuch by Luo Maodeng, loosely based on Zheng He expeditions, see Robert Finlay, “Portuguese and Chinese Maritime Imperialism: Camoes’s Lusiads and Luo Maodeng’s Voyage of the San Bao Eunuch,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, no. 2 (1992): 225–​241. 37. Compare to Tobias Smollett’s 1796 translation of the same sentence: “Copulation and Kiss-​ me-​Gaffer, with the addition of Tool-​i’-​me, or some such name.” As Smollett explains, “As it is altogether impossible, in a translation, literally to preserve the low humor arising from blunders upon words or sounds, I have been obliged to substitute an equivalent jingle, in the room of Puto, Gafo and Meon, which are Spanish words signifying a whore, a catamite, and a piss-​in-​bed: so that Sancho, deceived by the affinity of these sounds to Computo, Comographo and Ptolomco, thought he had reason to say his master had produced a fair set of evidences.” See Don Quixote, trans. Tobias Smollett (New York: Modern Library, 2004), 192. 38. During the early seventeenth century, Cádiz was the major competitor against the Seville-​ Sanlúcar axis that possessed the legal monopoly over the America trade. In 1717, both the

210

210 Notes

monopoly and the Casa de Contratación were formally transferred from Seville to Cádiz. Due to its economic significance and seaside position, Cádiz was repeatedly sacked by the English navy during Elizabeth’s reign. The most damaging of these attacks occurred in 1596. The sacking of Cádiz is notably the historical ground of Cervantes’s novella “The Spanish-​ English Girl” (“La española inglesa”) from The Exemplary Tales (Novelas ejemplares) (1613). See Johnson, Material World, 153–​194, for detailed discussion on the geoeconomic and geopolitical complexities of Cádiz and their literary significances in “La española inglesa.” Also see Joseph V. Ricapito, Cervantes’s Novelas Ejemplares: Between History and Creativity (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2000), 39–​69. 39. See Mann, 1493, 3–​51. For Columbus’s references to China, see Zhang Zhishan, “Columbus and China,” Monumenta Serica 41 (1993): 177–​187. Also see John Noble Wilford, “Columbus and the Labyrinth of History,” The Wilson Quarterly (1991): 66–​86, and Margarita Zamora, Reading Columbus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). It is popularly believed that the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci (1454–​1512), whose name marks the continent “America,” was the first to distinguish the unknown land Columbus had encountered as a separate continent. Martin Lehmann has recently disputed this theory and attributed the distinction to other sources from the 1500s in “Amerigo Vespucci and His Alleged Awareness of America as a Separate Land Mass,” Imago Mundi 65, no. 1 (2013):15–​24. Also see Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents, a Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 40. See Donald Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, Vol. 2, 68–​69. For more on the influence of Ptolemy in seventeenth-​ century Spain, see Chad M. Gasta, “Cervantes’s Theory of Relativity in Don Quixote,” Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 31, no. 1 (2011): 51–​82. 41. These circumstances are described in Wilford, “Columbus and the Labyrinth of History,” among other sources. 42. Ife, “The Social and Historical Context,” in The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes, 12. 43. See Childers, Transnational Cervantes, 32–​ 36. The ironic Columbian allusion in the “Enchanted Boat” episode counterbalances the kind of national epic Lope de Vega constructs in El Nuevo Mundo descubierto por Cristóbal Colón (The New World Discovered by Christopher Columbus). For an analysis of this play, see Teresa J. Kirschner, “The Staging of the Conquest in a Play by Lope de Vega,” Pacific Coast Philology 27, no. 1–​2 (1992): 37–​43. For the changing economic and social status of the hidalgo, see Maravall, Utopia and Counterutopia, 41–​57. 4 4. See Elvira Vilches, “Selling the Indies: Columbus and the Economy of the Marvelous,” in New World Gold (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 53–​94. 45. For a recent book-​ length study on this episode, see Henry W. Sullivan, Grotesque Purgatory: A Study of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Part 2 (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2008). 46. On debts and bankruptcies at the Spanish court, see Kamen, Society in Conflict, 82–​98, 161–​ 171 and Elliot, Imperial Spain, 285–​320. 47. On the Habsburgs and the Fugger family, see Wilson, Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World, 89–​90; Johnson, Material World, 63–​6 4; Kamen, Society in Conflict, 89–​90. For a recent biography on the banking family, see Mark Häberlein, The Fuggers of Augsburg: Pursuing Wealth and Honor in Renaissance Germany (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012). 48. For the mercury refining technique, see Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, Vol. 2, The Wheels of Commerce, 326–​327. Mercury was among the goods Chinese traders frequently took to Manila. See Timothy Brook, Vermeer’s Hat, 179. For the Portuguese exportation of Chinese mercury, see Jonathan Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (London and New York: Penguin, 1985), 184–​187. 49. This possibility is suggested in Selig, “Don Quixote and the Exploration of (Literary) Geography.” 50. Cited in Anne J. Cruz, Discourses of Poverty: Social Reform and the Picaresque Novel in Early Modern Spain (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 80. Also see Wilson, Cervantes,

211

Notes  211

the Novel, and the New World, 90. Over the course of the seventeenth century, a great number of African slaves were likewise forced to work in Almadén by “two-​to-​one ratio” to convict labor. See A. Hernández, et al. “The Almadén Mercury Mining District, Spain,” Mineralium Deposita 34, no. 5–​6 (1999): 539–​548. 51. E.g. pp. 179, 313, 753 in the Signet edition of Don Quixote. See Wilson, Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World, 90, on Cervantes’s familiarity with the Almadén area. 52. See Mann, 1493, 30–​33. 53. Cited in Nicholas A. Robins, Mercury, Mining, and Empire: The Human and Ecological Cost of Colonial Silver Mining in the Andes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 74–​75. 54. See Kamen, Society in Conflict, 139. 55. Johnson has charted these ironies in detail with regard to Cervantes’s novella “Spanish-​ English Girl” in Material World, 153–​194. 56. See Higuera, Eros and Empire, 7–​36. 57. Cf. Johnson’s reading in Material World, 63–​6 4. 58. McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, 283. 59. Johnson, The Material World, 36. 60. See Wilson, 155–​ 156. Also see Daniel Nemser, “Governor Sancho and the Politics of Insularity,” Hispanic Review 78, no. 1 (2010): 1–​23. For the broader context on island fantasies and European fictional development, see Simone Pinet, “On the Subject of Fiction: Islands and the Emergence of the Novel,” Diacritics 33, no. 3 (2006):  173–​ 187 and Pinet, Archipelagoes: Insular Fictions from Chivalric Romance to the Novel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 61. For a detailed study on the numismatic background of Don Quixote, see David Brian Fiero, “ ‘Don Quijote’:  A  Numismatic and Economic Analysis” (PhD diss., University of Nebraska, 1997). 62. Cited in Maravall, Utopia and Counterutopia, 47. 63. Cited in E.C. Riley, “Ideals and Illusions” (from Riley, Don Quixote, 1986), in Miguel de Cervantes, ed. Harold Bloom(Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2005), 63. 6 4. J. H. Elliot, Imperial Spain 1469–​1716 (2nd rev. ed., London: Penguin, 2002), 273. 65. To an extent, Sancho and Don Quixote’s negotiation mirrors the “just price” debates during the period. See Vilches, New World Gold, 161–​176. For a helpful analysis of the complex interpersonal dynamics between Sancho and Don Quixote, see Edwin Williamson, “The Power-​Struggle between Don Quixote and Sancho: Four Crises in the Development of the Narrative,” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 84, no. 7 (2007): 837–​858. 66. For this process of debasement, see Elvira Vilches, “Coins, Value, and Trust: The Problematics of Vellón in Seventeenth-​Century Spanish Culture,” in Signs of Power in Habsburg Spain and the New World, eds. Jason McCloskey and Ignacio López Aleman (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2013), 99; and Michael Thomas D’Emic, Justice in the Marketplace in Early Modern Spain: Saravia, Villalon and the Religious Origins of Economic Analysis (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2014), 64. The trend of debasement gave rise to the copper-​made silver substitute “vellón” or “billion,” otherwise known as “blanca,” which was essentially a form of fiat money. Cf. Quevedo’s ridicule of the “blanca” in “Sir Money is a Powerful Knight,” in Dream of Waking, 322–​323. 67. See James Fitzmaurice-​Kelly, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra: A Memoir (Oxford: Clarendon, 1913), 22. Also see Jean Canavaggio, Cervantes (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990). 68. Cf. Maria Antonia Garces, Cervantes in Algiers: A Captive’s Tale (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005). 69. This background is given in Cervantes’s prologue to the first part of Don Quixote. 70. See Wilson, Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World, 33–​39. 71. An older but informative account of Cervantes’s relation to the Count of Lemos’s patronage can be found in Otis H. Green, “The Literary Court of the Conde de Lemos at Naples, 1610–​1616,” Hispanic Review 1, no. 4 (1933): 290–​308. 72. For the quotation, see Wilson Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World, 37–​38. Also see Canavaggio, Cervantes, 102.

212

212 Notes

73. Diana de Armas Wilson, “Cervantes and the New World,” in The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes, ed. Cascardi, 208, 221. 74. See Robert Richmond Ellis, They Need Nothing: Hispanic-​Asian Encounters of the Colonial Period (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012) and Carmen Hsu, “Writing on Behalf of a Christian Empire: Gifts, Dissimulation, and Politics in the Letters of Philip II of Spain to Wanli of China,” Hispanic Review 78, no. 3 (2010): 323–​344. 75. Ellis, They Need Nothing, 86. 76. Mann, 1493, 29. 77. See Hsu, “Writing on behalf of a Christian Empire.” 78. On the planned conquest of China, see Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, Vol. 1, book 1, 746–​47; Timothy Brook, Vermeer’s Hat, 164–​166; and Robert Finlay, The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 3–​4. 79. See Flynn’s argument in “Comparing the Tokugawa Shogunate with Hapsburg Spain,” “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon,’ ” and “Cycles of Silver.” 8 0. These two massacres are described in detail in Timothy Brook, Vermeer’s Hat, 166–​ 181. Additional information can be found in José Eugenio Borao, “The Massacre of 1603: Chinese Perception of the Spaniards in the Philippines,” Itinerario 23, no. 1 (1998): 22–​ 39; and Guillermo Ruiz-​Stovel, “Chinese Merchants, Silver Galleons, and Ethnic Violence in Spanish Manila, 1603–​1686,” México y la Cuenca del Pacífico 12, no. 36 (2009): 47–​63. 81. On Chinese overseas and trading networks, see Chinese Circulations: Capital, Commodities, and Networks in Southeast Asia, eds. Eric Tagliacozzo and Wen-​Chin Chang (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 82. There are many studies on Muslim-​Christians-​Jewish relations in medieval and early modern Spain. For a recent monograph, see Chris Lowney, A Vanished World: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Medieval Spain (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2006). Muslim and Jewish populations were traditionally the economically most vibrant groups in Iberia. 83. Frederick A. de Armas, Don Quixote among the Saracens, 49. On the Islamic dominance in Renaissance European silk production, see Lisa Jardine, World of Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 63. Toledo became an important silk center in Spain in the late fifteenth century; Murcia, on the other hand, developed a sizable sericulture industry by the mid-​sixteenth century and emerged as a regular provider of raw silk for Toledo. The growing economic importance of Murcia was related to the decline of Granada, Spain’s traditional silk center, due to the expulsion of the Moriscos following the unsuccessful revolt in the Alpujarras in 1568. See Carroll Johnson, Material World, 7. 84. Although the text does not state it explicitly, the fact that the bundle is being sold to a silk merchant implies that it is intended to be used as food for worms. See Carroll Johnson, Material World, 6. Notably, the particular Toledo district where the discovery occurs is specified as the “Alcaná”—​t hat is, smaller Jewry. Historically, one important social group that contributed to the rise of the Toledo silk commerce was indeed composed of “converted Jewish specialized silk workers and merchants.” See The Cambridge History of Western Textiles, Vol. 1, ed. David Jenkins (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 340. 85. See Susan Byrne, Law and History in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, 103–​104. 86. See Jehenson and Dunn, The Utopian Nexus, 135. 87. See Kamen, Society in Conflict, 60. 88. This image of the New World was presented by Peter Martyr on the basis of his interview with Columbus. Cited in Jehenson and Dunn, The Utopian Nexus, 45. 89. See Jehenson and Dunn, Utopian Nexus, 87. 90. Ife, “The Social and Historical Context,” in The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes, 11. 91. Cf. Sancho’s report in the same passage on the knights’ objections to Don Quixote’s name: “The gentry say that you’re not content with being a country gentleman and that you have turned yourself into a don and thrust yourself into knighthood with no more than a few miserable vinestocks and two acres of land, with a tatter behind and another in front to bless your name” (542).

213

Notes  213

92. Cf. Cambridge History of Western Textiles, ed. David Jenkins, 445, 465. 93. William Lytle Schurz, The Manila Galleon (Boston: E. P. Dutton, 1959), 32. Cited in Atwell, “Ming China and the Emerging World Economy,” 40. 94. Quoted in Timothy Brook, Confusions of Pleasure, 205.

Chapter 4 1. Ihara Saikaku, This Scheming World, trans. Masanori Takatsuka and David C. Stubbs (Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 2005), 108. 2. Ihara Saikaku, Some Final Words of Advice, trans. Peter Nosco (Rutland, VT:  Tuttle, 1980), 117. 3. Robert Danly, commentary on Higuchi Ichiyō’s (1872–​1896) “The Yoshiwara,” in In the Shade of Spring Leaves (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), trans. Robert Danly, 114. 4. For historical studies of Japan’s world-​system relations, see Bruce Loyd Batten, To the Ends of Japan: Premodern Frontiers, Boundaries, and Interactions (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003) and Robert I. Hellyer, Defining Engagement:  Japan and Global Contexts, 1640–​1868 (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Asia Center, 2010). Also see Masao Miyosh, Off Center:  Power and Culture Relations Between Japan and the United States (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1998) for an analysis of Japan-​West cultural relations. 5. Dennis Washburn, The Dilemma of the Modern in Japanese Fiction, 4. 6. Dennis Washburn, The Dilemma of the Modern in Japanese Fiction, 7, 9. 7. Dennis Washburn, The Dilemma of the Modern in Japanese Fiction, 267. 8. Cited by Matao Miyamoto and Yoshiaki Shikano in “The Emergence of the Tokugawa Monetary System in East Asian International Perspective,” in Global Connections and Monetary History, 174. For the Sino-​Japanese silver trade, see A. Kobata, “The Production and Uses of Gold and Silver in Sixteenth-​a nd Seventeenth-​Century Japan,” The Economic History Review 18, no. 2 (1965):  245–​ 266; von Glahn, Fountains of Fortune; Flynn, “Comparing the Tokugawa Shogunate with Habsburg Spain”; and Nanny Kim and Keiko Nagase-​Reimer, eds., Mining, Monies, and Culture in Early Modern Societies: East Asian and Global Perspectives (Boston, MA: Brill, 2013). 9. General references on the period’s history include Conrad D. Totman, Early Modern Japan (Berkeley, CA:  University of California Press, 1993.); Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 4, Early Modern Japan, ed. John Whitney Hall (Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press, 1991); Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge, Mass.:  Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000); and Louis G. Perez, Daily Life in Early Modern Japan (Westport, CT:  Greenwood, 2002). Also see Engelbert Kaempfer (1727), Kaempfer’s Japan:  Tokugawa Culture Observed, eds. Beatrice M. Bodart-​Bailey and Derek Massarella (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999) for Kaempfer’s famous account of Japan while serving as a physician in the Dutch East India Company between 1690 and 1692. For the doubled population, see Kaempfer’s Japan, 12. Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–​1900, ed., Haruo Shirane (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 1–​20, also contains a helpful introduction to basic features of the period. 10. Tetsuo Najita, “History and Nature in Eighteenth-​century Tokugawa Thought,” in Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 4, 600. For the trends described previously, see Totman, Early Modern Japan, 140–​160. 11. See Howard Hibbett, The Floating World in Japanese Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959.), 10–​11. For more backgrounds on the ukiyo-​zōshi, see Conrad Totman, Early Modern Japan (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 184–​222. Conventionally ukiyo-​zōshi has been positioned as a more developed narrative form in contrast to the earlier “kanazōshi” from the early seventeenth century. For a recent reexamination of this literary history from the perspective of commercial printing, see Laura Moretti, “Kanazōshi Revisited: The Beginnings of Japanese Popular Literature in Print,” Monumenta Nipponica 65, no. 2 (2010): 297–​356.

214

214 Notes

12. To date, the following books of fiction by Saikaku have been translated: Five Women Who Loved Love, trans. Theodore de Bary (Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 1956); The Japanese Family Storehouse; Or the Millionaires Gospel Modernised, trans. G. W. Sargent (Cambridge, UK: University of Cambridge Press, 1959); The Life of An Amorous Woman, trans. Ivan Morris (New York: New Directions, 1963); The Life of an Amorous Man, trans. Kenji Hamada (Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 1964); This Scheming World, trans. Masanori Takasuka and David Stubbs (Rutland, VT:  Tuttle, 1965), and another translation of the same work Seken Munezan’yō under the title Worldly Mental Calculations, trans. Ben Befu (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966); Comrade Loves of the Samurai, trans. E. Powys Mathers (Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 1972); Tales of Japanese Justice, trans. Thomas Kondo and Alfred Marks (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1980); Some Final Words of Advice, trans. Peter Nosco. (Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 1980); The Great Mirror of Male Love, trans. Paul Schalow (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). For newer translations of portions of his writings, see Early Modern Japanese Literature, ed. Haruo Shirane, 21–​85.   To my knowledge there has not yet been a published book-​length study on Saikaku in English, although detailed analyses of his texts can be found in David James Gundry, “ ‘No Barrier between High And Low’: Love, Ethics, Status and Style in the Fiction of Ihara Saikaku,” PhD diss., (Stanford University, 2009); Jeffrey Richard Johnson, “Novelness in Comical Edo Fiction: A Carnivalesque Reading of Ihara Saikaku’s ‘Koshoku Ichidai Otoko,’ ” PhD diss., (University of Washington, 1994); Christopher Drake, “Saikaku’s Requiem Haikai ‘A Thousand Haikai Alone in a Single Day’: Its Context, Dynamics, and Haibun Extensions,” PhD diss. (Harvard, 1987); Paul Gordon Schalow, “ ‘The Great Mirror of Male Love’ by Ihara Saikaku,” PhD diss. (Harvard, 1985); Caryl Ann Callahan, “ ‘Tales of Samurai Honor’: Ihara Saikaku’s ‘Buke Giri Monogatari,’ ” PhD diss. (Harvard, 1978); and Richard Douglas Lane, “Saikaku: Novelist of the Japanese Renaissance,” PhD diss. (New York: Columbia University, 1957).   Illuminating studies of Saikaku’s writings from the perspective of social history can be found in Gary Leupp, Servants, Shophands, and Laborers in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994) and Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Eiko Ikegami, Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Mary Elizabeth Berry, Japan in Print: Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). Also see classic studies on Edo fiction including Howard Hibbett, The Floating World in Japanese Fiction and Donald Keene, World within Walls (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976). Dennis C. Washburn provides a comparative account of “floating world” and Meiji modernities in The Dilemma of the Modern in Japanese Fiction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). 13. The Saikaku revival is discussed in detail in Molly Catherine Des Jardin, “Editing Identity: Literary Anthologies and the Construction of the Author in Meiji Japan,” PhD diss. (University of Michigan, 2012), 95–​147. Also see Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature, eds. Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 192–​194. 14. Kōda Rohan, “Ihara Saikaku,” Kokumin no tomo 83 (May 1890):  27. Cited in Des Jardin, “Editing Identity,” 135. 15. Kōyō, famed for his novel Gold Demon (Konjiki Yasha), participated in compiling the three-​ volume collection of Saikaku’s complete prose works (1894), which became the definitive version of the author’s oeuvre, and wrote a series of articles to promote Saikaku’s literary status. See Des Jardin, “Editing Identity,” 133–​136. For an elegant introduction to Saikaku and his influences on the woman novelist Higuchi Ichiyō, see Robert Danley’s long commentary on “The Yoshiwara” in In the Shade of Spring Leaves, 109–​132. 16. For a discussion of the paradigm shift in Japanese literature marked by Shōyō’s The Essence of the Novel, see Tomi Suzuki, Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 15–​33. On the translational relation between shōsetsu

215

Notes  215

and xiaoshuo, see Zeitlin, “Xiaoshuo” in The Novel, Vol. 1, ed. Moretti, 260–​261. Also see Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—​ China, 1900–​1937 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995) for the mediating role of Japanese translations of European concepts on Chinese incorporation of Western notions during the early twentieth century. For a recent critique of the lineage of modern Japanese literature as established by Shōyō’s Essence of the Novel, see Atsuko Ueda, Concealment of Politics, Politics of Concealment:  The Production of Literature in Meiji Japan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). 17. Cited in Narrating the Self, 20. “Haishi” means “vulgar, unorthodox history.” See Narrating the Self, 17–​20. 18. According to Robert Danly, Kōyō and other writers involved in the Saikaku revival “invoked the Edo master as a kind of antidote to the preoccupation of their fellow writers with the European origins of the modern novel.” See In the Shade of Spring Leaves, 109. It should be noted that, while promoting an evolutionary scheme with the Western novel as the ideal model, Shōyō does refer to Genji and other pre-​Meiji texts as native precedents of narrative realism. See Washburn, The Dilemma of the Modern in Japanese Fiction, 77–​93. Shōyō also emphasized the value of Tamenaga Shunsui’s ninjōbon (writings about human feelings). In one of his articles, analogous to the parallel I address in the epilogue, Shōyō points out the similar emphases on female subjectivity in Shunsui’s and Richardson’s writings. See Suzuki, Narrating the Self, 22. 19. Berry, Japan in Print, 222. In Bonds of Civility, Eiko Ikegami expresses a similar understanding by placing Saikaku’s “floating world” fiction within the emerging “aesthetic networks” of Tokugawa Japan, or a substate realm she otherwise calls “associations” or “publics,” although she insists on separating this substructural form of “civility” from an institutionalized understanding of the “civil society” according to the European model (Ikegami, Bonds of Civility, 19–​4 4, 150). However, in light of this book’s horizontal recalibrations, the alternative civil connotations of Saikaku’s “floating world” are precisely what we must rediscover in order to generate more pluralist perspectives on political and cultural modernity. 20. Hideyoshi’s possession of gold and silver was legendary, an image he deliberately publicized through spectacular displays such as his famed tea house covered with gold or the “twelve horses loaded with gold and silver” he used when marching for Kyushu in I587. Parading gold and silver as emblems of his wealth and power, Hideyoshi further endorsed the usage of these precious metals as currencies, and employed them in bulk for military provisions. See Kobata, “The Production and Uses of Gold and Silver,” 257; and Mary Elizabeth Berry, Hideyoshi (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 57. 21. Quoted in Atwell, “Ming China and the Emerging World Economy,” 398, note 71. 22. See Kobata “The Production and Uses of Gold and Silver,” 265; Totman, Early Modern Japan, 70–​71. 23. Engelbert Kaempfer, The History of Japan, 3 vols. (Glasgow, UK: J. MacLehose, 1906), vol. 3, 21. Quoted in Howard Hibbett, The Floating World in Japanese Fiction, 5–​6. 24. The “license to cut down” decree is cited in Ivan Morris’s introduction to Ihara Saikaku, The Life of an Amorous Woman, 5. In actual jurisdiction, the pardons given to samurai violence on this ground were rather limited. See Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan, 102. 25. Totman, Early Modern Japan, 185. 26. This figure is cited in Morris, Love of an Amorous Woman, 428. 27. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan, 117. For an overview of the decline of the samurai, see Stephen Turnbull, The Samurai: A Military History (New York: Routledge, [1977], 2013), 252–​269. 28. See Totman, Early Modern Japan, 6. 29. For the influence of this national highway on Tokugawa politics and culture, see Jilly Traganou, The Tōkaidō Road:  Traveling and Representation in Edo and Meiji Japan (New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004). 30. Kaempfer’s Japan, 271. 31. See Laura Nenzi, Excursions in Identity:  Travel and the Intersection of Place, Gender, and Status in Edo Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008), 1.

216

216 Notes

32. Known as “Japanese bandits” or woko in Ming China, the pirate forces close to Chinese coasts were often consisted of a mixture of Chinese and Japanese participants. 33. For details, see Michael S. Laver, The Sakoku Edicts and the Politics of Tokugawa Hegemony (Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2011). The Sakoku (closed country) edict of 1636 is cited and discussed in Charles Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, 1549–​1650 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), Appendix VII, 439ff. For an overview of Japan’s foreign relations after the arrival of the Portuguese, see Totman, Early Modern Japan, 44–​46. 34. Kaempfer’s Japan, 226, 209. For further details on Tokugawa Japan’s foreign trade, see Totman, Early Modern Japan, 141–​148. 35. See Early Modern Japanese Literature, ed. Haruo Shirane, 8–​10. On exotic fantasies about Maruyama, see Nenzi, Excursions in Identity, 70–​71. Also see Gary Leupp, Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543–​1900 (New York: Continuum, 2003) for an overview of interracial relations in Japanese society during the period. 36. Printing technology was first introduced to Japan by Christian missionaries and first used in 1594 to print a Romanized Japanese translation of Aesop’s Fables under the title Isoho monogatari. For an overview of the development of printing and the book market, see Early Modern Japanese Literature, ed. Haruo Shirane, 11–​13. 37. Cf. Berry, Japan in Print. 38. There is still no full English translation of Ryōis book. For portions of the text, see Early Modern Japanese Literature, 29–​33. Also see Donald Keene, World Within Walls, 156–​160. 39. The above citations are from Early Modern Japanese Literature, 30, trans. Jack Stoneman and Richard Lane. 4 0. The above summary and citations are based on Donald Keene, World Within Walls, 156–​160. 41. See Charles Inouye, Evanescence and Form:  An Introduction to Japanese Culture (New  York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 19. For more on the symbolism of the cicada in Japanese aesthetics, see Evanescence and Form, 20–​26. 42. Donald Keene, World within Walls, 158. 43. For a discussion of cultural anxieties over unstable rice prices, see Nam-​Lin Hur, Prayer and Play in Late Tokugawa Japan: Asakusa Sensōji and Edo Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 143–​4 4. 4 4. Saikaku’s relation to Danrin poets is addressed in Danly, In the Shade of Spring Leaves, 112–​ 113. Also see Christopher Drake, “The Collision of Traditions in Saikaku’s Haikai,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 52, no. 1 (1992): 5–​75. For the “Hollandic” reputation of Saikaku’s poems, see Drake, “Collision of Traditions,” 21. 45. Cited in Drake, “Collision of Traditions,” 50–​51. 46. See Sir George Bailey Sansom, A History of Japan:  1615–​1867 (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 1965), 11. For more on the important position of Gotō Shōzaburō under Ieyasu’s rule, see Charles Ralph Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, 430–​431, and Matsunosuke Nishiyama, Edo Culture: Daily Life and Diversions in Urban Japan, 1600–​1868 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997), 38. 47. Cf., Drake’s reading of the poem in “Collision of Traditions,” 51. 48. Berry, Japan in Print, 222. 49. The Japanese Family Storehouse; Or the Millionaires Gospel Modernised, trans. G. W. Sargent, 13. Sargent’s edition contains detailed annotations on socioeconomic backgrounds of the story. Further citations from the book in text. Also see Keene, World within Walls, 196–​200, for introductions to passages from the book. 50. The Japanese Family Storehouse, 15–​16 and 151n. 51. The Japanese Family Storehouse, 27. 52. For citations above, see The Japanese Family Storehouse, 28–​29. 53. See The Japanese Family Storehouse, 162n. 54. The Japanese Family Storehouse, 145. According to Sargent’s note, “eighty-​eight” symbolizes the character “rice.” 55. The Japanese Family Storehouse, 146.

217

Notes  217

56. The Japanese Family Storehouse, p. xxix. 57. For summary and analysis of this story, see Keene, World within Walls, 186–​188. So far there is no English translation of Twenty Cases of Unfilial Children. 58. See This Scheming World, trans. Masanori Takasuka and David Stubbs, and another translation of the same work, Seken Munezan’yō, under the title Worldly Mental Calculations, trans. Ben Befu (Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 1966). 59. Ben Befu, Worldly Calculations, 16. 60. This Scheming World, 26. 61. This Scheming World, 120–​25. 62. Hamada’s translation of Amorous Man censors many sexually explicit passages from the original. For a more accurate translation of portions of the novel, see Christopher Drake’s translation under the title Life of a Sensuous Man in Early Modern Japanese Literature, 21–​34. The citation is from Drake’s translation in Early Modern Japanese Literature, 28. 63. The Life of an Amorous Woman, trans. Ivan Morris, 207. 6 4. Cited in Early Modern Japanese Literature, 14. 65. Charles Inouye, Evanescence and Form, 74. 66. See Haruo Shirane, “The Tale of Genji and the Dynamics of Cultural Production: Canonization and Popularization,” In Envisioning The Tale of Genji:  Media, Gender, and Cultural Production, ed. Haruo Shirane (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2008), 41. For Amorous Man’s parody of Genji and Narihira, also see Jeffrey Johnson, “Saikaku and the Narrative Turnabout,” Journal of Japanese Studies 27, no. 2 (2001):  323–​345, Johnson, “Novelness in Comical Edo Fiction,” and Hibbett, The Floating World in Japanese Fiction, 92. 67. See The Ise Stories: Ise Monogatari, trans. Joshua S. Mostow (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010), 6. 68. Hibbett, The Floating World in Japanese Fiction, 92. 69. See Hamada, Amorous Man, 41. 70. These itineraries are summarized in Johnson, “Novelness in Comical Edo Fiction,” 106–​07. 71. Marcia Yonemoto, Mapping Early Modern Japan: Space, Place, and Culture in the Tokugawa Period, 1603–​1868 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 14. 72. See Berry, Japan in Print, 210. Also see Yonemoto, 9. 73. See Yonemoto, Mapping Early Modern Japan, 21–​22, 26. More studies on map making and travel literature in Tokugawa Japan can be found in Constantine Nomikos Vaporis, Breaking Barriers: Travel and the State in Early Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Jilly Traganou, The Tōkaidō Road; and Laura Nenzi, Excursions in Identity. Saikaku’s 1685 collection of thirty-​five stories titled Saikaku’s Tales of the Provinces (Saikaku shokoku hanashi) sets a model for later travel writings. 74. See Hamada, Amorous Man, 186–​187. For more details on fashion consumptions during the period, see Donald H. Shively, “Sumptuary Regulation and Status in Early Tokugawa Japan,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 25 (1964–​1965), 123–​164, and Louis Peres, Daily Life in Early Modern Japan, 98–​100. 75. Hamada, Amorous Man, 25. 76. Hamada, Amorous Man, 137–​38. 77. See Aileen Gatten “A Wisp of Smoke: Scent and Character in The Tale of Genji,” Monumenta Nipponica 32, no. 1 (1977): 35–​48. 78. Starting from the fourteenth century, the goal of kōdō—​“way of the incense”—​changed from blending to distinguishing the scents of various types of aloeswood, which are categorized according to a set of codes known as “Five Bouquets” (gomi)—​that is, “sweet, bitter, spicy, sour, and salty”—​a nd “Six Countries [of Origin]” (Rokkoku), which includes Kyara (Vietnam or Cambodia), Rakoku (Thailand), Manaban (unidentified, possibly the Malabar coast of India), Manaka (Malacca), Sumatora (Sumatra), and Sasora (likely western India). See Gatten, “A Wisp of Smoke” and Kiyoko Morita, The Book of Incense: Enjoying the Traditional Art of Japanese Scents (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1999), 53–​56. For Chinese trading of aloeswood in Nagasaki, see Kaempfer’s Japan, 226, 445. Tokugawa Japan was an extremely lucrative market for overseas spices: one pound of

218

218 Notes

Calambac—​t hat is, the finest type of aloes wood—​purchased by Chinese merchants in Hội An for 15 taels could be sold for forty times the price in Nagasaki, at 600 taels. See Tana Li, Nguyễn Cochinchina: Southern Vietnam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 79. 79. On the links between incense peddling and male prostitution, see Gary Leupp, Male Colors, 78, 162. 80. K. Yamada, Tōa Kōryō Shi (Tokyo: Tōyōdō, 1942), 316. Quoted in Aileen Gatten “A Wisp of Smoke,” 47. 81. Hamada, Amorous Man, 38. Cf. Gregory M. Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire:  Male-​ Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600–​ 1950 (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1999). 82. Cited in Johnson, “Novelness in Comical Edo Fiction,” 200. 83. Yosaburō Takekoshi, The Economic Aspects of the History of the Civilization of Japan, vol. 2 (New York: Routledge, 2004), 415. 8 4. Tobacco, a New World product that began to gain currency in Japanese and Chinese markets around the 1600s, was, to an extent, the vulgarized cousin of the preexisting spice culture in Old World regions. It first came to Japan probably around the 1600s and became widespread in a mere decade. Richard Cocks, an English merchant who once ran a trading post in Macao, noted in 1615 that “it is strange to see how these Japons, men, women, and children, are besotted in drinking that herb; and, not ten years since it was in use first.” Cited in Timothy Brook, Vermeer’s Hat, 136. The production of tobacco was initially prohibited, but it was legalized in 1663 and grew to be a major cash crop of Japan. See Harold Bolitho, “The Han,” Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 4, 213. Saikaku’s story “A Subterfuge behind a Literary Screen” from Japanese Family Storehouse is set in the background of the Sino-​Japanese tobacco trade. Culturally, tobacco smoking was closely related to the image of prostitutes and the pleasure quarters. Amorous Man makes recurrent reference to this association, as in the irreverent scene about an intoxicated prostitute who passes gas in her sleep while Yonosuke smokes his tobacco pipe. For a discussion of this passage and its ironic Buddhist allusion, see Johnson, “Novelness in Comical Edo Fiction,” 200–​2 01. 85. Hamada, Amorous Man, 43. 86. See Murasaki Shikibu, Tale of Genji, trans. Royall Tyler, 72, 177, 1152. In Tyler’s translation the name of the mountain is spelled as Toribeno. 87. Hamada, Amorous Man, 21. In a seventeenth-​century Chinese story composed by Li Yu, the European telescope likewise appears to help the young protagonist peep into a private feminine space, this time overseeing a whole group of bathing servant girls. See Li Yu, “Thousand-​Li Glass (Telescope),” in A Tower for the Summer Heat, trans. Patrick Hanan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 18–​39. 88. This translation is from Christopher Drake’s version in Early Modern Japanese Literature, 22. 89. See Johnson, “Novelness in Comical Edo Fiction,” 208. 90. On the Ikuno silver mine and the mine management system, see Yosaburō Takekoshi, The Economic Aspects of the History of the Civilization of Japan, vol. 2, 34, 428; Totman, Early Modern Japan, 69–​70; and Mining, Monies, and Culture in Early Modern Societies, 163 and 208. 91. Keene, World within Walls, 169. 92. Early Modern Japanese Literature, 28. 93. Early Modern Japanese Literature, 34. 94. David James Gundry makes this suggestion in “No Barrier between High and Low,” 104. For more on “Fudaraku tokai,” see Max Moerman, Localizing Paradise: Kumano Pilgrimage and the Religious Landscape of Premodern Japan (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2006), 93–​94. 95. For a genealogy of the myth, see Max Moerman, “Demonology and Eroticism: Islands of Women in the Japanese Buddhist Imagination,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 36, no. 2 (2009), 351–​380. According to Marcia Yonemoto’s research, the Island of Women and

219

Notes  219

Rasetsukoku appear as the same place on Ishikawa Ryūsen’s (fl. 1680–​1720) widely reproduced maps of Japan:  “Outline Map of Our Empire” (Honchō zukan kōmoku, 1687)  and “Map of the Seas, Mountains, and Lands of Japan” (Nihon kaisan chōriku zu, 1689). Even though these maps were published slightly later than Amorous Man, they reflect the culmination of an earlier process by which the tradition of the Nyõgonoshima assumed threatening meanings similar to those implied by the Rasetsukoku. See Marcia Yonemoto, Mapping Early Modern Japan, 33. 96. For the Yoshitsune legend, see Yoshitsune: A Fifteenth-​century Japanese Chronicle, trans. Helen Craig McCullough (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966), 51. 97. Moerman, “Demonology and Eroticism,” 366. 98. Hamada, Amorous Man, 233. 99. The regulation began in 1633. See Totman, Early Modern Japan, 114, and Charles Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, Appendix VII, 439ff. 100. Hamada, Amorous Man, 226. Nagasaki looked “foreign” as it “developed peculiar features representing the mixture of Dutch and Chinese manners and customs.” See Yosaburō Takekoshi, Economic Aspects, vol. 2, 126. For the poem cited see Joshua S. Mostow, Pictures of the Heart: The Hyakunin Isshu in Word and Image (Honolulu : University of Hawaii Press, 1996), 161–​163 (poem 7). 101. This is the translation David James Gundry gives in “No Barrier between High and Low,” 170. 102. See Excursions of Identity, 170. 103. See Hamada, Amorous Man, 227, and Gundry, “No Barrier between High and Low,” 170–​171. 104. See Christopher Drake, “The Collision of Traditions,” 52–​54. 105. David James Gundry, “No Barrier between High and Low,” 171. 106. This passage is taken from Moerman, “Demonology and Eroticism,” 370. 107. Hamada, Amorous Man, 231. Influenced by the Chinese zodiac, Tokugawa Japanese culture treated the age sixty as one full cycle of life. 108. As noted by Conrad Totman, the Tokugawa government’s “restrictive measures” on foreign contact “were taken . . . without actually reducing the volume of trade.” See Totman, Early Modern Japan, 116. 109. Due to this convergence, Bakhtinian narrative theory, which has been developed with Don Quixote as one of its premier examples, is highly pertinent to thinking about Saikaku’s works. For a thoughtful consideration of the applicability of Bakhtinian concepts to Saikaku and comparisons of early modern Spanish and Japanese fiction, see Johnson, “Novelness in Comical Edo Fiction.”

Chapter 5 1. John E. Wills, “European Consumption and Asian Production in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, eds. Brewer and Porter (London: Routledge, 1993), 133. 2. Virginia Woolf, “Robinson Crusoe,” in The Second Common Reader [1932], by Virginia Woolf (London: Hogarth, 1965), 58. 3. See The Works of Daniel Defoe, vol. 2 ed. Howard Maynadie (London: Clements, 1840), 41. 4. Marina MacKay, “The Wartime Rise of ‘The Rise of the Novel,’”, Representations, 119, no. 1 (2012), 120. Notable works on English fiction in response to the Wattian thesis include:  Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist:  From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1986); Michael McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, 1600–​1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); and How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719–​1900 (New York, Columbia University Press, 2005); J. Paul Hunter Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-​C entury

220

220 Notes

Fiction (New  York:  W.W. Norton, 1990); Firdous Azim, The Colonial Rise of the Novel (London, Routledge: 1993); Homer Obed Brown, Institutions of the English Novel: From Defoe to Scott (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998); William Beatty Warner, Licensing Entertainment:  The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–​1750 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998); Margaret Anne Doody The True Story of the Novel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997); Josephine Donovan, Women and the Rise of the Novel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998); Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Laura Doyle, Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–​1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); and Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 5. See Robert Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination, 5. 6. Sir Josiah Child, A Treatise Wherein is Demonstrated … that the East-​India Trade is the most National of All Trades (London, 1681), 29. Child’s statements are quoted in Robert Markley, The Far East in the English Imagination, 1600–​1730 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 4–​5. For a concise overview of early English efforts to trade with China, see Oskar Hermann Khristian Spate, Monopolists and Freebooters (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 97–​101. 7. To put the amount of Defoe’s nonfictional writings into perspective, the most complete collection of this kind, The Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2000), includes eight volumes. 8. It should be noted that Defoe’s reputation as a major novelist happened only after Walter Scott gave his fictional works a prominent position in his ten-​volume Ballantyne’s Novelist’s Library (1821–​1824), which became the standard reference work on the earlier English novels. Before this point, Defoe was at best a nebulous literary figure despite the popularity of his Robinson Crusoe, and was far less recognized by publishers and readers of the period as the inventor of a “new species of writing” in the manner of Samuel Richardson or Henry Fielding. Given the formative influences of Scott’s anthology, as Homer Brown concludes, “it can with some accuracy be said that the eighteenth-​century novel was invented at the beginning of the nineteenth century.” See Homer Obed Brown, Institutions of the English Novel from Defoe to Scott, 8–​9, 183. Also see Marina MacKay, The Cambridge Introduction to the Eighteenth-​Century Novel, 225–​226, and Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel. 9. See Free’s chart and explanation in “Un-​Erasing ‘Crusoe’:  ‘Farther Adventures’ in the Nineteenth Century,” Book History 9, no. 1 (2006): 89–​130. 10. Robert Markley, “Aesthetico-​Constructivism: Farther Adventures in Criticism,” Philological Quarterly 86, no. 3 (2007): 299–​300. 11. Robert Markley, “Aesthetico-​Constructivism,” 302. 12. In The Rise of the Novel, Watt says nothing about the two sequels to Robinson Crusoe, which is an intriguing omission, given that he does acknowledge other sequels in the book such as Pamela’s. Attention to the second and third books of Robinson Crusoe is absent from most of studies on the “rise of the novel” cited earlier, even though the first book of the novel remains a central text. For emerging studies on Farther Adventures, see Robert Markley, “Aesthetico-​ Constructivism,” Free, “Un-​ Erasing ‘Crusoe,’  ” and Lydia Liu, “Robinson Crusoe’s Earthenware Pot,” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 4 (1999): 728–​757. It should be further noted that a known source of the island plot in Robinson Crusoe is of Asian origins, that is, the twelfth-​century Arabic philosophical novel Hayy bin Yaqzan, which had been transmitted to European readers through Islamic Spain. See Srinivas Aravamudan, “East-​West Fiction as World Literature: The Hayy Problem Reconfigured,” Eighteenth-​Century Studies 47, no. 2 (2014): 195–​231. 13. Karl Marx, Capital:  A  Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1. Edited by Friedrich Engels. Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling ([1867] Reprint, New  York:  Cosimo Classics, 2007), 88. For an interdisciplinary volume on Robinson Crusoe (principally the first part) and economic theory, see Robinson Crusoe’s Economic Man: A Construction and

221

Notes  221

Deconstruction, eds, Ulla Grapard and Gillian Hewitson (New  York:  Routledge, 2012). Maximillian E. Novak’s Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962) is a classic study that relates formal features of Defoe’s novels to economic matters. For newer interpretations with regard to the materialist aspects of Defoe’s writings, see, for instance, Deidre Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meanings (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), 28–​46; Carol Houlihan Flynn, The Body in Swift and Defoe (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth-​and Nineteenth-​Century Britain (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008), 93–​124. 14. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the critique of Political Economy ([1859], New York: International Publishers, 1970), 188. See William S.  Kern “Robinson Crusoe and the Economists” in Robinson Crusoe’s Economic Man, 71, for more analyses. 15. Karl Marx, Capital:  A  Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, 88–​89. For overviews on the employments of the “Robinson Crusoe setting” among economic theorists, see Michael V. White, “Reading and Rewriting: The Production of an Economic Robinson Crusoe” and William S.  Kern “Robinson Crusoe and the Economists” in Robinson Crusoe’s Economic Man, 15–​41, 62–​74. White traces the epistemological construction of Robinson Crusoe as the quintessential homo economicus to the coevolvements of marginalist economics and Robinsonade literary motifs since around the mid nineteenth century. 16. See Dussel, “World-​System and Trans-​Modernity,” and Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/​ Global Designs. 17. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719), ed. Michael Shinagel, 2nd ed. (New  York:  W.W. Norton, 1975), 219. All page references to the novel in this chapter are based on this edition. Further citations in text. 18. Critics of Defoe’s novels have frequently pointed out the underlying mercantile ideology of Robinson Crusoe. For an analysis of this kind, see, for instance, Wolfram Schmidgen, “Robinson Crusoe, Enumeration, and the Mercantile Fetish,” Eighteenth-​Century Studies 35, no. 1 (2001), 19–​39. 19. The location is given on the title page of the 1719 edition of the novel. 20. Diana de Armas Wilson, Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World, 212. In Wilson’s observation, the resemblance between Robinson Crusoe and Persiles and Sigismunda might have contributed to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s comment in 1818 that in Cervantes’s last novel “the English may find the germ of their Robinson Crusoe.” For a recent monograph on the image of America in Defoe’s writings, see Dennis Todd, Defoe’s America (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010). For the significance of the maritime motif in the English novel, see Margaret Cohen, The Novel and the Sea (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). 21. See Christopher Flynn, “Nationalism, Commerce, and Imperial Anxiety in Defoe’s Later Works,” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, 54, no. 2 (2000): 15. 22. David Wallace Spielman, “The Value of Money in Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and Roxana,” The Modern Language Review, 107, no. 1 (2012): 76. 23. See Robyn Wiegman, “Economies of the Body: Gendered Sites in Robinson Crusoe and Roxana,” in Reading with a Difference: Gender, Race, and Cultural Identity, ed. Arthur F. Marotti (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 207–​226. 24. Flynn, “Nationalism, Commerce, and Imperial Anxiety in Defoe’s Later Works,” 14. 25. Laura Doyle, Freedom’s Empire, 187. 26. For a recent volume on early modern British mercantilism, see Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire, eds. Philip J. Stern and Carl Wennerlind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 27. Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, vol. 2 (London: Charles Rivington, 1727), 143–​144. 28. Michael Greenberg, British Trade and the Opening of China, 1800–​ 1842 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 6. 29. All page references to the novel in this chapter are based on Daniel Defoe, A New Voyage Round the World, ed. George Aitken (London: J.M. Dent & Co., 1900). Citations in text.

222

222 Notes

30. See Jane Jack, “A New Voyage Round the World: Defoe’s Roman à Thèse,” Huntington Library Quarterly 24, no. 4 (1961); P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens, “Defoe’s ‘South-​Sea’ and ‘North-​ Sea’ Schemes: A Footnote to A New Voyage Round the World,” Eighteenth-​Century Fiction 13, no. 4 (2001); and David Todd, Defoe and America, 60–​61. 31. Daniel Defoe, Review, Tuesday, August 7, 1711. Quoted in Jane Jack, “A New Voyage Round the World,” 325. 32. See P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens, “Defoe’s ‘South-​Sea’ and ‘North-​Sea’ Schemes.” 33. Virginia Woolf, “Robinson Crusoe” in The Second Common Reader, 58. 34. Liu, “Robinson Crusoe’s Earthenware Pot,” 736. 35. Liu, “Robinson Crusoe’s Earthenware Pot,” 741. 36. The exportation figure is cited in Robert Finlay, “The Pilgrim Art: The Culture of Porcelain in World History,” Journal of World History 9, no. 2 (1998), 142. For more on the economic and cultural significances of European importations of Chinese porcelain, see Timothy Brook, Vermeer’s Hat, 54–​83; Robert Finlay, The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History; Collecting China: The World, China, and a History of Collecting, ed. Vimalin Rujivacharakul (Lanham, MD:  Rowman & Littlefield, 2011); and Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins, A Taste for China:  English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2013). 37. Liu, “Robinson Crusoe’s Earthenware Pot,” 749. 38. Quoted in Robert Finlay, “The Pilgrim Art,” 142. 39. Daniel Defoe, A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, eds. Furbank, et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 65. 40. Quoted in Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce: Civilization and Capitalism 15th-​18th Century, vol. 2, 180. 41. Daniel Defoe, A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, 65. In The Complete English Tradesman written around the same time, Defoe also describes a “flourishing of pride” that drove “the poorest citizens strive to live like the rich, the rich like the gentry, the gentry like the nobility, and the nobility strive to outshine one another.” See Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, vol. 2, 166–​167. 42. Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, vol. 2 (1727), 175. In the book Defoe in fact argues against sumptuary regulations, at one point blatantly stating that “Trade is propagated by our crimes, the people support one another by their Extravagance and Luxury, their Gaiety and Pride; Gluttony and Drunkenness assist to maintain the Nation; the people grow rich by the people.” See Complete English Tradesman, 118. 43. Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, vol. 2, 142–​43. 4 4. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, 88. 4 5. All the quotations in this passage come from Robert Markley, “‘I have now done with my island, and all manner of discourse about it’:  Crusoe’s Farther Adventures and the Unwritten History of the Novel,” in A Companion to Eighteenth-​C entury English Novel and Culture, eds. Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia (Malden, MA:  Wiley-​ Blackwell, 2006), 31. 46. See the account by Woodes Rogers (c. 1679–​1732) included in the Norton edition of Robinson Crusoe, 232. When compared with the well-​publicized story of his real-​life model, Selkirk, Crusoe’s prosperity on the island is fantastically different. Far from becoming a triumphant island colonizer, the actual survivor was in extremely poor physical and mental condition when he was rescued by Captain Edward Cooke’s crew in 1709. See Robinson Crusoe, ed. Shinagel, (W.W. Norton), 230–​238. 47. James Joyce, “Daniel Defoe” (1964). Included in the Norton edition of Robinson Crusoe, 323. 48. All page references to the sequel are based on Daniel Defoe, The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (Rockville, MD: Serenity, 2009). 49. Robert Markley, “ ‘I have now done with my island,” 32. 50. Nieuhof traveled to China in 1656 with a Dutch embassy representing the VOC. For the embassy see John E. Wills, Jr., Embassies and Illusions, Dutch and Portuguese Envoys to

223

Notes  223

K’ang-​his, 1666–​1687 (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1984), 42. Nieuhof’s memoir was first published in Leyden 1665 and was soon translated into many other European languages. Some editions of the book contain over 150 illustrations. See Lothar Ledderose, “Chinese Influence on European Art, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries,” in China and Europe: Images and Influences in Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Thomas H.  C. Lee (Hong Kong:  The Chinese University Press, 1991), 224. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the “Porcelain Tower” as portrayed by Nieuhof was “the Chinese building best known in Europe.” See Patrick Conner, Oriental Architecture in the West (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979), 17. 51. The Chinese name of the Buddhist pagoda is “Da bao’en si ta” (“The Tower of the Temple of Great Gratitude”). It was built by the order of the Yongle emperor (1402–​1424), and was destroyed during the Taiping Rebellion of the 1850s. See Jonathan Spence, God’s Chinese Son: the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997), 206–​208. The tower is consistently described as being made of “liu li” rather than “ci” in Chinese sources, many of which are collected in Zhang Huiyi, Jinling Da bao’en si ta Zhi (Records of the Dao bao’en si ta of Nanjing) ([1937] Nanjing, China: Nanjing Press, 2007). 52. Johannes Nieuhof, An Embassy from the East-​India Company of the United Provincés, to the Grand Tartar Cham Emperor of China, Deliver’d by Their Excellencies Peter de Goyer and Jacob de Keyzer, at His Imperial City of Peking. 2nd ed. (London: By author, 1673), 78. 53. The Trianon was demolished seventeen years after it was built, since the blue-​a nd-​white tiles were too fragile for architectural purposes. See Lothar Ledderose, “Chinese Influence on European Art,” 232, and Patrick Conner, Oriental Architecture in the West, 20. For a discussion of other “porcelain houses” around Europe, see Lydia Liu, “Robinson Crusoe’s Earthenware Pot,” 751–​753. Nieuhof’s image of the porcelain tower was a noted inspiration for William Chambers’s (1723–​1796) famed pagoda in Kew Gardens, which was erected in 1762. See Lothar Ledderose, “Chinese Influence on European Art,” 233–​234. 54. For Defoe’s Sinophobia, see David Porter, “A Peculiar but Uninteresting Nation: China and the Discourse of Commerce in Eighteenth-​Century England,” Eighteenth-​Century Studies 33, no. 2 (2000): 181−199; G. A. Starr, “Defoe and China,” Eighteenth-​Century Studies 43, no. 4 (2010): 435–​454; and Swetha Regunathan, “‘An Incongruous Monster’: Idolatrous Aesthetics in Crusoe’s China,” Digital Defoe 5, no. 1 (2013): 45–​6 4. 55. Lydia Liu, “Robinson Crusoe’s Earthenware Pot,” 752. 56. One relevant context for Defoe’s Sinophobia expressed in the sequel was “the anti-​Asia feeling then being fermented by the English textile workers in their campaign against the imports from Asia.” See Theodore Nicholas Foss and Donald F. Lach, “Images of Asia and Asians in European Fiction, 1500–​1800,” in China and Europe: Images and Influences in Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Thomas H. C. Lee (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1991), 177. Also see David Porter’s analysis of the negative image of China in eighteenth-​ century English commercialist writings in Ideographia, 193–​240. 57. Markley, The Far East in English Imagination, 192. 58. Cited in Markley, The Far East in English Imagination, 198, 199. 59. Louis le Comte, Memoirs and Observations (London, 1697), 237. Cited in Markley, The Far East in English Imagination, 199. Le Comte’s Memoirs was a source material consulted by Defoe. 60. See Swetha Regunathan, “An Incongruous Monster,” 56. 61. Lynn Festa, “Crusoe’s Island of Misfit Things,” The Eighteenth Century 52, no. 3 (2011): 467. 62. David Wallace Spielman, “The Value of Money in Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and Roxana,” 68. The average annual earnings of these households were between £1,500 and £5,999. 63. Cited in G. A. Starr, “Defoe and China,” 437. 6 4. Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, vol. 2 (London:  Charles Rivington, 1727), 166–​ 167. These numbers are also quoted in Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce: Civilization and Capitalism 15th–​18th Century, vol. 2, 69. 65. Daniel Defoe, A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain. Edited by Philip Nicholas Furbank, W. R. Owens, and Anthony J. Coulson (New Haven:  Yale University Press,

224

224 Notes

1991), 135. . Defoe’s phrase has inspired the title of Jerry White’s book, A Great and Monstrous Thing: London in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 66. In Watt’s words, “sex . . . is one of the strongest potential menaces to the individual’s rational pursuit of economic end, and it has therefore, as we shall see, been placed under particularly strong controls in the ideology of industrial capitalism.” See The Rise of the Novel, 67. 67. The characterization “semi-​pornographic” is from Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel, 96. See John J. Richetti, Popular Fiction before Richardson: Narrative Patterns, 1700–​1739 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992) for a survey of “amatory” fiction before and around Defoe’s time. For more backgrounds, see Lynn A. Hunt, ed. The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–​1800 (New York: Zone Books, 1993) and Ian F. Moulton, Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). For an informative comparative account of early modern Chinese and English erotic literatures, see Katherine Carlitz, “Pornography, Chastity, and ‘Early Modernity’ in China and England, 1500–​1640” in Comparative Early Modernities, ed., David Porter, 99–​124. 68. Michael McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, 262. 69. See Robyn Wiegman, “Economies of the Body:  Gendered Sites in Robinson Crusoe and Roxana” in Reading with a Difference, ed. Arthur F. Marotti, 209. 70. Christopher Flint, “Orphaning the Family: The Role of Kinship in Robinson Crusoe,” ELH 55, no. 2 (1988): 381. For more studies on kinship and family in eighteenth-​century English literature, see Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-​Century England: Household, Kinship and Patronage (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Ruth Perry, Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748–​1818 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 71. Ellen Pollak, Incest and the English Novel, 1684–​1814 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2003), 116. Pollak’s book treats the persistence of the trope of incest in English fiction by authors such as Manley, Defoe, Fielding, and Austen. 72. Citations are from Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders: The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (New York: Penguin, 1989). 73. Ann Louise Kibbie, “Monstrous Generation: The Birth of Capital in Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Roxana,” PMLA 110, no. 5 (1995): 1026. 74. Ann Louise Kibbie, “Monstrous Generation,” 1025–​ 1026. For other related discussions, see Lois A. Chaber, “Matriarchal Mirror:  Women and Capital in Moll Flanders,” PMLA 97 (1982):  212–​226; Bram Dijkstra, Defoe and Economics:  The Fortunes of Roxana in the History of Interpretation (London:  Macmillan, 1987); Laura Mandell, “Bawds and Merchants: Engendering Capitalist Desires,” ELH 59, no. 1 (1992): 107–​123; Robyn Wiegman, “Economies of the Body:  Gendered Sites in Robinson Crusoe and Roxana”; and Laura J. Rosenthal, Infamous Commerce:  Prostitution in Eighteenth-​Century British Literature and Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). 75. Doyle, Freedom’s Empire, 157. 76. Doyle, Freedom’s Empire, 157. 77. Ann Louise Kibbie, “Monstrous Generation,” 1032. 78. William Warner, Licensing Entertainment, 164. Cited in Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism, 65. 79. Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism, 66. 80. See Homer Obed Brown, Institutions of the English Novel, 171–​202. 81. The epilogue contains more discussions on Richardson. My understanding of Fielding’s works here has been informed by McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 382–​410; James Thompson, “Patterns of Property and Possession in Fielding’s Fiction,” Eighteenth-​ Century Fiction 3, no. 1 (1990): 21–​42; Martin A. Kayman, “The ‘New Sort of Specialty’ and the ‘New Province of Writing’:  Bank Notes, Fiction and the Law in Tom Jones,” ELH 68, no. 3 (2001): 633–​653; Hilary Teynor, “A Partridge in the Family Tree: Fixity, Mobility, and Community in Tom Jones,” Eighteenth-​Century Fiction, 17, no. 3 (2005): 349–​372; and Scott

225

Notes  225

MacKenzie, “‘Stock the Parish with Beauties’ ”: Henry Fielding’s Parochial Vision,” PMLA 125, no. 3 (2010): 606–​621.

Epilogue 1. Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations of Goethe, trans. John Oxenford (New  York:  Da Capo, 1998), 164. 2. Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations of Goethe, 173–​174. Cf. Astrida Orle Tantillo, Goethe’s Modernisms (London: Continuum, 2010), 45–​47, for more comments on this passage and its relation to the world vision of Faust. The Panama Canal was eventually completed by the United States in 1914. 3. See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethe’s World As Seen in Letters and Memoirs, ed. ‎ Berthold Biermann (Freeport, NY:  Books for Libraries Press, 1971), 374 For comments on Goethe’s trade metaphor, see Stefan Hoesel-​U hlig, “Changing Fields:  The Directions of Goethe’s Weltliteratur,” in Debating World Literature, ed. Christopher Prendergast (London:  Verso, 2004), 26–​53; Pheng Cheah, “What is a World? On World Literature as World-​Making Activity,” in Special Issue: On Cosmopolitanism. Daedalus 137, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 26–​38; Jonathan Arac, “Commentary: Literary History in a Global Age,” New Literary History, 39, no. 3–​4 (2008): 747–​760. 4. Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations of Goethe, 174. 5. Karl Marx: A Reader, ed. Jon Elster (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 228. 6. While the sentimental convergence discussed in this chapter seems to be the most prominent in Chinese and English cases, the emergence of ninjōbon as represented by Tamenaga Shunsui’s (1790–​1843) Shunshoku Umegoyomi (Colors of Spring: The Plum Calendar) (1832–​ 1833) in late Tokugawa Japan implies a similar tendency. For translations of portions of Shunsui’s book, see Early Modern Japanese Literature, 388–​414. For more discussions on the East-​West sentimental narrative turns, see Ning Ma, “‘A Strong Resemblance’: Samuel Richardson, Chinese Talent-​Beauty Novels, and a Secret Origin of ‘World Literature,’” in Encountering China: Early Modern European Reactions, eds. Rachana Sachdev and Qingjun Li (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2012), 103–​126. 7. See Zhongshu Qian, “Thomas Percy and His Chinese Studies,” in Vision of China in the English Literature of the 17th and 18th centuries, ed. Adrian Hsia (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1998), 301–​325. 8. Jean-​Pierre Abel Rémusat, Iu-​kiao-​li, ou, Les deux cousines (Paris:  Moutardier, 1826). For reference to Goethe’s reading of Hao qiu zhuan, Yu Jiao Li, and other translated Chinese texts, see Patricia Sieber, Theaters of Desire: Authors, Readers, and the Reproduction of Early Chinese Song-​Drama, 1300–​2000 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 14. Also see Reihard Meyer-​Kaikus, “World Literature beyond Goethe,” in Cultural Mobility, ed. Greenblatt et al., 96–​121, and Daniel Purdy, “Goethe, Rémusat and the Chinese Novel: Translation and the Circulation of World Literature,” in German Literature as World Literature, ed., Thomas Beebee (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 43–​62. 9. For two notable studies that contain extensive discussion of the talent-​b eauty novel, though not from a comparative perspective, see Keith McMahon, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists:  Sexuality and Male-​Female Relationships in Eighteenth-​C entury Chinese Fiction (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 1995) and Martin Huang, Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2001). 10. For studies that address these late Ming erotic novels, see for instance McMahon, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists and Huang, Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China. For an informative comparative study on Chinese and English discourses of pornography and chastity during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Katherine Carlitz, “Pornography, Chastity, and ‘Early Modernity’ in China and England, 1500–​1640,” in Porter ed., Comparative Early Modernities, 99–​124. 11. Included in Yu Jiao Li (Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1990), 1. The edition dates to the 1650s.

226

226 Notes

12. This preface is written by a certain “Master of the Hall of Pure Governance” (Suzhengtang Zhuren). It has been translated by Richard Hessney in the appendix to his dissertation “Beautiful, Talented and Brave: Seventeenth-​Century Chinese Scholar-​Beauty Romances,” Ph.D.  diss., Columbia University, 1979. For the quoted lines, see Hessney’s translation in “Beautiful, Talented and Brave,” 353. 13. See Samuel Richardson, Pamela:  Or, Virtue Rewarded (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, [1741], 2001), 9. According to Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely’s notes to this edition, the preface was probably written by Rev William Webster (1680–​1758) or by Samuel Richardson himself as Fielding insinuated in Shamela (note 10, p. 526). All page references to the novel in this chapter are based on this edition. Further citations in text. For a study of the “pernicious novels” condemned here, see Richetti, Popular Fiction before Richardson. 14. Percy’s edition was based on a translation brought back by James Wilkinson, an English merchant who had traded in Canton. Part of the original translation was in Portuguese. See Zhongshu Qian, “Thomas Percy and His Chinese Studies,” 181–​182. 15. References to Percy’s edition of Hao qiu zhuan are based on Hau kiou choaan: or, The Pleasing History: A Translation from the Chinese Language, 4 vols. (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1761). Cf. David Porter’s comment in “Sinicizing Early Modernity: The Imperatives of Historical Cosmopolitanism”:  “Percy’s profound ambivalence toward China is neither surprising nor unique: at a time when Britons were first forging their identity as a nation, the Middle Kingdom loomed large on the horizon as a rival claimant not only to the spoils of international trade but also to the laurels of cultural achievement” (305). 16. Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations of Goethe, 165. 17. See G. J. Barker-​Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-​Century Britain, xxxiv. For other studies on eighteenth-​century English fiction that has informed this chapter, see Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction; Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-​Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); and Helen Thompson, Ingenuous Subjection: Compliance and Power in the Eighteenth-​Century Domestic Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). 18. April Alliston, Virtue’s Faults:  Correspondences in Eighteenth-​Century English and French Women’s Fiction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 56. 19. See Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, 108–​109. 20. Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity, 298. 21. All the citations above are from Michael McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, 131. 22. Quoted in Bernard Kreissman, Pamela-​Shamela:  A  Study of the Criticisms, Burlesques, Parodies, and Adaptations of Richardson’s “Pamela” (Lincoln, NE:  University at Lincoln, 1960), 40. 23. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady [1747–​1748] (London: Penguin Books, 1985), 189. 24. Translations of Yu Jiao Li are mine. Page references are to the Chinese original of the book, based on the Zhongguo gudian xiaoshuo mingzhu baibu edition (Beijing: Huaxia chubanshe, 1995). Cf. Iu-​Kiao-​li, or the Two Fair Cousins, 2 vols. (London: Hunt and Clarke, 1827), vol.1, 112–​113. As stated in the chapter on Plum, the “Five Cardinal Relations” is a fundamental Confucian moral principle that prescribes the correct relations between sovereign and minister, father and son, husband and wife, elder and younger brothers, and friends. In its orthodox form, the bond between husband and wife focuses on the former’s higher authority in relation to the latter, a domestic hierarchy that parallels and reinforces other relational hierarchies, especially a son’s filial piety toward his father, and a minister’s loyalty toward the sovereign. 25. Conversations of Goethe, 165. In the novel, the heroine, Shui Bingxin, is forced by her greedy uncle to marry the good-​for-​nothing son of a court dignitary. The resourceful heroine manages to circumvent her uncle’s plan and presents her grievance to the local magistrate. The hero, Tie Zhongyu, hears about this case and tries to persuade the magistrate to rule in the

227

Notes  227

heroine’s favor. Finding Tie an obstacle to their scheme, Shui Bingxin’s uncle and her suitor secretly poison him, and their misdeed is soon discovered by the heroine. In order to save the hero who has fallen seriously ill, Shui Bingxin takes him to her home to convalesce, thus breaching the ritual prohibition of direct contact between unmarried men and women. 26. Translations of Hao qiu zhuan are mine. Page references are to the Chinese original of the book, based on the Zhongguo gudian xiaoshuo mingzhu baibu edition (Beijing:  Huaxia chubanshe, 1995). 27. Translations of Jin Yun Qiao zhuan in this chapter are mine. Page references are to the Chinese original of the book, based on the Zhongguo gudian xiaoshuo mingzhu baibu edition (Beijing: Huaxia chubanshe, 1995). Citations in Text. 28. For an account on the evolution of the Wang Cuiqiao tale, see Martin Huang, Desire and Fictional Narrative, 213–​214. 29. “Tianhuacang Zhuren” played an important role in the emergence of seventeenth-​century talent-​beauty novels. He was the editor, publisher, and prefacer of at least sixteen examples of the genre, including Yu Jiao Li. According to Liu Ts’un-​yan, Tianhuacang Zhuren was likely active during the second half of the seventeenth century and “had extensive connection with the book trade in the lower Yangtze at that time” (Quoted in Hessney, “Beautiful, Talented and Brave,” 18). 30. Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 129. 31. See Samuel Richardson, Pamela:  Or Virtue Rewarded (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, [1741], 2001), 190. 32. Doyle, Freedom’s Empire, 934. Also see Frances Ferguson, “Rape and the Rise of the Novel,” in Special Issue: Misandry, and Misanthropy. Representations 20 (1987): 88–​112. 33. See Samuel Johnson, The Rambler (London: Harrison and Co., 1792), 10. Cf. “Preface by the Editor” in Pamela, 3: “If to give practical Examples, worthy to be followed in the most critical and affecting Cases, by the modest Virgin, the chaste Bride, and the obliging Wife: If to effect all these good Ends, in so probable, so natural, so lively a manner, as shall engage the Passions of every sensible Reader, and strongly interest them in the edifying Story . . . ” 34. From “Xiaohua Zhuren”‘s preface to Jingu qiguan (Extraordinary Accounts from the Past and the Present), which was first printed around the 1630s. My translation. Translations of three stories from the collection appear in Jean-​Baptiste Du Halde’s (1674–​1743) influential Description de la Chine (Paris: Chez Henri Scheurleer, 1735), which was translated into English in 1736 as The General History of China. 35. Citations from the English translation of Rémusat’s French rendition Iu-​Kiao-​li, or the Two Fair Cousins. 36. Iu-​Kiao-​li, or the Two Fair Cousins (1827), viii. Other than the Times article, I have not been able to locate more sources on the exhibition. For a better documented English exhibition of Chinese objects, see the account on Nathan Dunn’s 1842 exhibition of “Ten Thousand Chinese Things” in London in Elizabeth Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 116–​119. 37. For an excellent survey of Western accounts of Chinese footbinding, see Patricia Buckley Ebrey, “Gender and Sinology: Shifting Western Interpretations of Footbinding, 1300–​1890,” Late Imperial China 20, no. 2 (1999): 1–​34. For an important new study on the cultural history of footbinding, see Dorothy Ko, Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2005). The bound-​foot is a central motif in The Plum in the Golden Vase, yet its image is for the most part absent in the talent-​beauty novels discussed in this chapter. 38. Here I am thinking about theoretical arguments on the Bildungsroman as a historical genre as in Georg Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 132–​143; Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman and its Significances in the History of Realism,” in Speech Genres and Other Later Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee and Michael Holquist (Austin:  University of Texas Press, 1986), 10–​60;

228

228 Notes

and Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, trans. Albert Sbragia (London: Verso, 1987). For a discussion of The Dream of the Red Chamber as Bildungsroman, see Andrew Plaks, “Leaving the Garden: Reflections on China’s Literary Masterwork,” in New Left Review 47 (2007), 109–​129. 39. For a comparison of The Dream of the Red Chamber and Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship according to Lukács’s notion of irony, please see Ning Ma, “Illusion and the Self: Honglou Meng, Wilhelm Meister, and Bildungsroman,” Tamkang Review 46, no. 1 (2015): 93–​115.

229

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abu-​Lughod, Janet. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–​1350. Reprint ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Abu-​Lughod, Janet. “Discontinuities and Persistence:  One World System or a Succession of Systems.” In The World System:  Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand? edited by Andre Gunder Frank and Barry K. Gills, 278–​291. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Ahmad, Aijaz. “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory.’” Social Text 17 (1987): 3–​25. Ahmad, Aijaz. “The Communist Manifesto and ‘World Literature.’” Social Scientist 28, nos. 7–​8 (2000): 3–​30. Albrow, Martin. The Global Age:  State and Society Beyond Modernity. Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 1996.Alliston, April. Virtue’s Faults:  Correspondences in Eighteenth-​ Century English and French Women’s Fiction. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. Almodovar, Antonio, and Jose Luis Cardoso. A History of Portuguese Economic Thought. New York: Routledge, 1998. Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation).” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, edited by Ben Brewster, 127–​186. London: New Left Books, 1971. Anderson, Kevin B. Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-​Western Societies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 1991. Anon. Hao qiu zhuan. Beijing: Huaxia chubanshe, 1995. Anon. Jin Yun Qiao zhuan. Beijing: Huaxia chubanshe, 1995. Anon. Yu Jiao Li. Beijing: Huaxia chubanshe, 1995. Anon. The Plum in the Golden Vase (Jin Ping Mei). Translated by David Roy. Vol. 1–​4. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006–​2011. Anon. and Francisco de Quevedo. Lazarillo de Tormes and the Swindler:  Two Spanish Picaresque Novels. Translated by Michael Alpert. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003.

229

230

230 Bibliography

Arac, Jonathan. “Anglo-​Globalism?” New Left Review 16 (2002): 35–​45. Arac, Jonathan. “Commentary: Literary History in a Global Age.” New Literary History 39, nos. 3– ​4 (2008): 747–​760. Aravamudan, Srinivas. Enlightenment Orientalism:  Resisting the Rise of the Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Aravamudan, Srinivas. “East-​West Fiction as World Literature: The Hayy Problem Reconfigured.” Eighteenth-​Century Studies 47, no. 2 (2014): 195–​231. Ardila, J. A. G., ed. The Cervantean Heritage: Reception and Influence of Cervantes in Britain. London: Legenda, 2009. Armas, Frederick A. de. Don Quixote Among the Saracens: A Clash of Genres and Civilizations. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Armstrong, Nancy. How Novels Think:  The Limits of Individualism, 1719–​ 1900. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Armstrong, Nancy. “The Network Novel and How it Unsettled the Domestic Novel.” In A Companion to the English Novel, edited by Stephen Arata et  al., 306–​ 320. Malden, MA: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2015. Arrighi, Giovanni. Adam Smith in Beijing:  Lineages of the Twenty-​ First Century. New York: Verso, 2007. Asai Ryōi. Tales of the Floating World. Translated by Jack Stoneman and Richard Lane. In Early Modern Japanese Literature:  An Anthology, 1600–​1900, edited by Haruo Shirane, 29–​33. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Atwell, William S. “Ming China and the Emerging World Economy, c. 1470–​1650.” In The Cambridge History of China. Vol.8, The Ming Dynasty, edited by Denis Twitchett and Frederick W. Mote, 376–​418. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Atwell, William S. “Another Look at Silver Imports into China, ca. 1635–​1644.” Journal of World History, 16, no. 4 (2005): 467–​490. Appadurai, Arjun, ed. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity At Large:  Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Apter, Emily. “On Oneworldedness: Or Paranoia as a World System.” American Literary History 18, no. 2 (2006): 365–​389. Apter, Emily. “Untranslatables: A World System.” New Literary History, 39, no. 3 (2009): 581–​598. Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. New York: Verso, 2013. Ascione, Gennaro. “Unthinking Modernity:  Historical-​ Sociological, Epistemological and Logical Pathways.” Journal of Historical Sociology 27, no. 4 (2014): 463–​489. Aseguinolaza, Fernando Cabo. “Dead, or a Picture of Good Health? Comparatism, Europe, and World Literature.” Comparative Literature 58, no. 4 (2006): 418–​435. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis:  The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953. Auerbach, Erich. “Philology and Weltliteratur.” Translated and introduction by Maire and Edward Said. Centennial Review 13, no. 1 (1969): 1–​17. Azim, Firdous. The Colonial Rise of the Novel. London: Routledge, 1993.

231

Bibliography  231

Ballaster, Ros. Fabulous Orients:  Fictions of the East in England 1662–​1785. Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2005. Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination:  Four Essays. Edited and translated by Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Bakhtin, Mikhail. “The Bildungsroman and its Significances in the History of Realism.” In Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, translated by Vern W. McGee and Michael Holquist, 10–​60. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. Balázs, Étienne. Chinese Civilization and Bureaucracy; Variations on a Theme. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964. Balázs, Étienne. Political Theory and Administrative Reality in Traditional China. London: University of London, 1965. Bandera, Cesáreo. The Humble Story of Don Quixote:  Reflections on the Birth of the Modern Novel. Washington, DC: CUA, 2006. Barlett, Vincent et al., eds. Dreams of Waking: An Anthology of Iberian Lyric Poetry, 1400–​1700. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Barker-​Benfield, G. J. The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-​Century Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Batten, Bruce Loyd. To the Ends of Japan:  Premodern Frontiers, Boundaries, and Interactions. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003. Beaujard, Philippe. “The Indian Ocean in Eurasian and African World-​Systems before the Sixteenth Century.” Journal of World History 16, no. 4 (2005): 411–​4 65. Beebee, Thomas, ed. German Literature as World Literature. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Beecroft, Alexander. “World Literature without a Hyphen:  Towards a Typology of Literary Systems.” New Left Review 54 (2008): 87–​100. Bentley, Jerry H. Old World Encounters: Cross-​Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-​Modern Times. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Bentley, Jerry H. “Globalizing History and Historicizing Globalization.” In Globalization and Global History, edited by Barry K. Gills and William R. Thompson, 16–​ 30. New York: Routledge, 2006. Berry, Mary Elizabeth. Hideyoshi. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Berry, Mary Elizabeth. Japan in Print:  Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Bewes, Timothy, and Timothy Hall, eds. Georg Lukács:  The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence: Aesthetics, Politics, Literature. New York: Continuum, 2011. Bhabha, Homi. “Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism.” In Text and Nation: Cross-​ Disciplinary Essays on Cultural and National Identities, edited by Laura Garcia-​Moreno and Peter C. Pfeiffer, 191–​207. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1996. Blaut, James Morris. The Colonizer’s Model of the World:  Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History. New York: Guilford, 1993. Blaut, James Morris. Eight Eurocentric Historians. New York: Guilford, 2000. Bloom, Harold, ed. Miguel de Cervantes. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2005. Blue, Gregory. “Chinese Influences on the Enlightenment in Europe.” In Knowledge across Cultures: Universities East and West, edited by Ruth Hayhoe, 277–​288. Wuhan, China: Hubei Education Press, 1993.

232

232 Bibliography

Blue, Gregory. “China and Western Social Thought in the Modern Period.” In China and Historical Capitalism: Genealogies of Sinological Knowledge, edited by Timothy Brook and Gregory Blue, 57–​109. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Bodart-​Bailey, Beatrice, and Derek Massarella, eds. The Furthest Goal:  Engelbert Kaempfer’s Encounter with Tokugawa Japan. Sandgate, Folkestone: Japan Library, 1995. Borao, José Eugenio. “The Massacre of 1603:  Chinese Perception of the Spaniards in the Philippines.” Itinerario 22, no. 1 (1998): 22–​39. Boscaro, Adriana. “Monogatari.” In The Novel. Vol. 1: History, Geography, and Culture, edited by Franco Moretti, 241–​248. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Edited by John Thompson and translated by Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Rules of Art:  Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Translated by Susan Emanuel. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. Boxer, Charles Ralph. The Christian Century in Japan, 1549–​1650. Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1951. Braudel, Fernand. Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism. Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. Braudel, Fernand. Civilization and Capitalism. Vol.1, The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible. Translated by Siân Reynold. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Braudel, Fernand. Civilization and Capitalism. Vol.2, The Wheels of Commerce. Translated by Siân Reynold. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Braudel, Fernand. Civilization and Capitalism. Vol.3, The Perspective of the World. Translated by Siân Reynold. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Brennan, Timothy. “The National Longing for Form.” In Nation and Narration, edited by Homi Bhabha, 44–​70. New York: Routledge, 1990. Brokaw, Cynthia J. and Kai-​Wing Chow, eds. Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Brook, Timothy. The Confusions of Pleasure:  Commerce and Culture in Ming China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Brook, Timothy. “Communications and Commerce.” In The Cambridge History of China. Vol.8, The Ming Dynasty. Edited by Denis Twitchett and Frederick W. Mote, 579–​707. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Brook, Timothy. Vermeer’s Hat:  The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World. New York: Bloomsbury, 2007. Brook, Timothy. The Troubled Empire:  China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010. Brook, Timothy and Gregory Blue, eds. China and Historical Capitalism:  Genealogies of Sinological Knowledge. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Brook, Timothy and B. Michael Frolic, eds. Civil Society in China. Armonk, NY:  M. E. Sharpe, 1997. Brown, Bill. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Brown, Bill, ed. Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Brown, Homer Obed. Institutions of the English Novel: From Defoe to Scott. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998.

233

Bibliography  233

Brownlee, Kevin, and Marina Scordilis Brownlee, eds. Romance: Generic Transformation from Chrétien De Troyes to Cervantes. Hanover, NH: University of New England Press, 1986. Burke, Peter. “Res et verba:  Conspicuous Consumption in the Early Modern World.” In Consumption and the World of Goods. Edited by John Brewer and Roy Porter, 148–​161. New York: Routledge, 1993. Byrne, Susan. Law and History in Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Toronto:  University of Toronto Press, 2013. Camoes, Luïs Vaz de. The Lusiads. Translated by Landeg White. Oxford:  Oxford World’s Classics, 2008. Canavaggio, Jean. Cervantes. New York: W.W. Norton, 1990. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Translated by M. B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Casanova, Pascale. “Literature as a World.” New Left Review 31 (2005): 71–​90. Casanova, Pascale. “Combative Literatures.” New Left Review 72 (2011): 123–​134. Carlitz, Katherine. “Puns and Puzzles in the Chin P’ing Mei: A Look at Chapter 27.” T’oung Pao 67, no. 3–​5 (1981): 216–​239. Carlitz, Katherine. “Family, Society, and Tradition in Jin Ping Mei.” Modern China 10, no. 4 (1984): 387–​413. Carlitz, Katherine. The Rhetoric of Chin P’ing Mei. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Carlitz, Katherine. “Pornography, Chastity, and ‘Early Modernity’ in China and England, 1500–​1640.” In Comparative Early Modernities, 1100–​1800. Edited by David Porter, 99–​124. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Carlson, Jon D. “Broadening & Deepening: Systemic Expansion, Incorporation & the Zone of Ignorance.” Journal of World-​Systems Research 7, no. 2 (2001): 225–​264. Carlson, Jon D. “Externality, Contact Periphery & Incorporation.” In Routledge Handbook of World-​Systems Analysis. Edited by Salvatore J. Babones and Christopher Chase-​Dunn, 87–​ 96. New York: Routledge, 2012. Cascardi, Anthony. Ideologies of History in the Spanish Golden Age. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997. Cascardi, Anthony J. Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote. Translated by Walter Starkie. New York: Signet Classic, 2001. Chaber, Lois A. “Matriarchal Mirror:  Women and Capital in Moll Flanders.” PMLA 97, no. 2 (1982): 212–​226. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe:  Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “In Defense of Provincializing Europe:  A  Response to Carola Dietze.” History and Theory 47, no. 1 (2008): 85–​96. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Modern and the Secular in the West: An Outsider’s View.” Review on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. Journal of the American Academy of Religions, 77, no. 2 (June 2009): 393– ​409. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Humanism in a Global World.” In Humanism in Intercultural Perspective, edited by Jörn Rüsen, 23–​36. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript Verlag, 2009. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Muddle of Modernity.” In American Historical Review 116, no. 3 (June 2011): 663– ​675.

234

234 Bibliography

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “From Civilization to Globalization:  The West as a Signifier in Indian Modernity.” Inter-​Asian Cultural Studies 13, no. 1 (2012): 138–​152. Chang, Chun-​shu. The Rise of the Chinese Empire: Nation, State, and Imperialism in Early China. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007. Chang, Chun-​shu, and Shelley Hsueh-​lun Chang. Crisis and Transformation in Seventeenth-​ Century China: Society, Culture, and Modernity in Li Yü’s World. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. Chang, K. C., ed. Food in Chinese Culture:  Anthropological and Historical Perspective. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977. Chase-​Dunn, Christopher and Thomas D. Hall. “Comparing World-​Systems:  Concepts and Working Hypotheses.” Social Forces 71, no. 4 (1993): 851–​886. Chase-​Dunn, Christopher, and Thomas D. Hall. Rise and Demise:  Comparing World-​Systems. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997. Chase-​Dunn, Christopher, and Salvatore J. Babones, eds. The Routledge Handbook of World-​ Systems Analysis. New York: Routledge, 2012. Chaudhuri, K. N. Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Cheah, Pheng. “Grounds of Comparison.” Diacritics 29, no. 4 (1999): 3–​18. Cheah, Pheng. “What is a World? On World Literature as World-​Making Activity.” In Special Issue: On Cosmopolitanism. Daedalus 137, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 26–​38. Cheah, Pheng. “The Material World of Comparison.” In Special Issue: Comparison, edited by Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman. New Literary History 40, no. 3 (2009): 523–​545. Cheah, Pheng, and Jonathan Culler, eds. Grounds of Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict Anderson. New York: Routledge, 2003. Also published as expanded version of Diacritics 29, no. 4 (Fall 2000). Cheah, Pheng, and Bruce Robbins, eds. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Childers, William. “‘Don Quixote’ and the War of the Alpujarras:  The Historical Debasement of Chivalry as a Correlative to Its Literary Parody.” Hispania 88, no. 1 (2005): 11–​19. Childers, William. Transnational Cervantes. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Chow, Kai-​w ing. Publishing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Chow, Rey. “In the Name of Comparative Literature.” In Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, edited by Charles Bernheimer, 107–​116. Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Chow, Rey. “On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem.” In Special Issue: Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory, boundary 2, 25, no. 3 (1998): 1–​24. Chow, Rey. “How (the) Inscrutable Chinese Led to Globalized Theory.” PMLA 116, no. 1 (2001): 69–​74. Chow, Rey. The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Chow, Rey. The Age of the World Target:  Self-​Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Chow, Rey. “Framing the Original:  Toward a New Visibility of the Orient.” PMLA 126, no. 3 (2011): 555–​563.

235

Bibliography  235

Clarke, J. J. Oriental Enlightenment:  The Encounter between Asian and Western Thought. New York: Routledge, 1997. Close, Anthony. The Romantic Approach to Don Quixote:  A  Critical History of the Romantic Tradition in Quixote Criticism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Close, Anthony. Cervantes and the Comic Mind of his Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Clunas, Craig. “Modernity Global and Local:  Consumption and the Rise of the West.” The American Historical Review 104, no. 5 (1999): 1497–​1509. Clunas, Craig. Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005. Clunas, Craig. “Things in Between:  Splendour and Excess in Ming China.” In The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption, edited by Frank Trentmann, 47–​63. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Cohen, Margaret. The Novel and the Sea. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. Cohen, Warren I. East Asia at the Center: Four Thousand Years of Engagement with the World. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Conner, Patrick. Oriental Architecture in the West. London: Thames and Hudson, 1979. Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost, eds. New Materialisms:  Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Crosby, Alfred. Ecological Imperialism:  The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–​ 1900. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Crosby, Alfred. Germs, Seeds, and Animals:  Studies in Ecological History. Armonk, NY:  M. E. Sharpe, 1994. Crosby, Alfred. The Columbian Exchange:  Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972. Cruz, Anne J. Discourses of Poverty:  Social Reform and the Picaresque Novel in Early Modern Spain. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Cunningham, David. “‘Very Abstract and Terribly Concrete’: Capitalism and The Theory of the Novel.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 42, no. 2 (2009): 311–​317. Curtin, Philip D. Cross-​Cultural Trade in World History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Dalby, Andrew. Dangerous Tastes: The Story of Spices. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000. Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. Damrosch, David. “Toward a History of World Literature.” New Literary History 39, no. 3–​4 (2008): 481–​495. Damrosch, David, ed. World Literature in Theory. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2014. Dardess, John W. Blood and History in China: The Donglin Faction and its Repression, 1620–​1627. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002. de Bary, William Theodore, eds. Self and Society in Ming Thought. New  York:  Columbia University Press, 1970. Defoe, Daniel. The Complete English Tradesman. Vol. 2. London: Charles Rivington, 1727. Defoe, Daniel. The Works of Daniel Defoe, vol. 2. Edited by Howard Maynadie. London: Clements, 1840. Defoe, Daniel. A New Voyage Round the World. Edited by George Aitken. London: J.M. Dent & Co., 1900.

236

236 Bibliography

Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe [1719]. Edited by Michael Shinagel. 2nd ed. New  York:  W.W. Norton, 1975. Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders:  The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders. New York: Penguin, 1989. Defoe, Daniel. A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain. Edited by Philip Nicholas Furbank, W. R. Owens, and Anthony J. Coulson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991. Defoe, Daniel. Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Defoe, Daniel. The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Rockville, MD: Serenity, 2009. D’Emic, Michael Thomas. Justice in the Marketplace in Early Modern Spain: Saravia, Villalon and the Religious Origins of Economic Analysis. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2014. Delaney, Carol. “Columbus’s Ultimate Goal:  Jerusalem.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48, no. 2 (2006): 260–​292. Delaney, Carol. Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem: How Religion Drove the Voyages that Led to America. New York: Free Press, 2012. Deleuze, Gills, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus:  Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum, 1988. Deleuze, Gills, and Félix Guattari. Anti-​ Oedipus:  Capitalism and Schizophrenia. New York: Penguin, [1972], 2009. Den, Gang. Maritime Sector, Institutions, and Sea Power of Premodern China. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999. Des Jardin, Molly Catherine. “Editing Identity: Literary Anthologies and the Construction of the Author in Meiji Japan.” PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2012. Dewarld, Jonathan. The European Nobility, 1400–​1800. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996. D’haen, Theo et a l., eds. The Routledge Concise History of World Literature. London: Routledge, 2012. D’haen, Theo et al., eds. World Literature Reader. London: Routledge, 2012. Dijkstra, Bram. Defoe and Economics: The Fortunes of Roxana in the History of Interpretation. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1987. Dimock, Wai Chee. “Genre and World System: Epic and Novel on Four Continents.” Narrative 14, no. 1 (2006): 85–​101. Dimock, Wai Chee, and Lawrence Buell, eds. Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Dimock, Wai Chee. Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. Ding, Naifei. Obscene Things:  Sexual Politics in Jin Ping Mei. Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2002. Dirlik, Arif. “Revisioning Modernity: Modernity in Eurasian Perspectives.” Inter-​Asia Cultural Studies, 12, no. 2 (2011): 284–​305. Doleželová-​Velingerová, Milena et al. The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Donovan, Josephine. Women and the Rise of the Novel. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998. Doody, Margaret Anne. The True Story of the Novel. New Brunswick, NJ:  Rutgers University Press, 1997. Douglas, Mary, and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods:  Towards an Anthropology of Consumption. New York: Routledge, 1996.

237

Bibliography  237

Doyle, Laura. Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–​1940. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Drake, Christopher. “Saikaku’s Requiem Haikai ‘A Thousand Haikai Alone in a Single Day’: Its Context, Dynamics, and Haibun Extensions.” PhD diss., Harvard University, 1987. Drake, Christopher. “The Collision of Traditions in Saikaku’s Haikai.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 52, no. 1 (1992):5–​75. Dreyer, Edward. Zheng He:  China and the Oceans in the Early Ming Dynasty, 1405–​1433. New York: Pearson, 2006. Du Mingde. “Jin Ping Mei yu Linqing” (“Jin Ping Mei and Lingqing”). In Jin Ping Mei yu Linqing, edited by Huang Lin and Du Mingde, 170–​185. Shandong, China:  Shandong Xinhua, 2008. Du, Ming Gong. “Brocade of Human Desires:  The Poetics of Weaving in the ‘Jin Ping Mei’ and Traditional Commentaries.” The Journal of Asian Studies 63, no. 2 (2004): 333–​356. Du, Ming Gong. Chinese Theories of Fiction:  A  Non-​ Western Narrative System. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2006. Dunn, Peter. The Spanish Picaresque Fiction:  A  New Literary History. Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 1993. Dussel, Enrique. “Beyond Eurocentrism:  The World-​System and the Limits of Modernity.” In The Cultures of Globalization, edited by Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, 3–​31. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Dussel, Enrique. “World-​System and ‘Trans’-​Modernity.” Nepantla: Views from South 3, no. 2 (2002): 221–​244. Dussel, Enrique. “Transmodernity and Interculturality: An Interpretation from the Perspective of Philosophy of Liberation.” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-​Hispanic World 1, no. 3 (2012): 28–​59. Ebrey, Patricia Buckley. “Gender and Sinology: Shifting Western Interpretations of Footbinding, 1300–​1890.” Late Imperial China 20, no. 2 (1999): 1–​34. Echevarria, Roberto González, ed. Don Quixote:  A  Casebook. Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2005. Eckermann, Johann Peter. Conversations of Goethe. Translated by John Oxenford. New York: Da Capo, 1998. Edwards, Michael. Civil Society. Malden, MA: Polity, 2004. Ehrenberg, John. Civil Society: The Critical History of an Idea. New York: NYU Press, 1999. Eisenberg, Daniel. Romances of Chivalry in the Spanish Golden Age. Newark, DE:  Juan de la Cuesta, 1982. Eisenstadt, S. N. “Multiple Modernities.” Daedalus, 129, no. 1 (2000): 1–​29. Elliot, J. H. Imperial Spain, 1469–​1716. 2nd rev. ed. London: Penguin, 2002. Ellis, Robert Richmond. They Need Nothing: Hispanic-​Asian Encounters of the Colonial Period. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Elman, Benjamin. A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Elman, Benjamin. On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550–​1900. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Elman, Benjamin. A Cultural History of Modern Science in China. Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2009.

238

238 Bibliography

Elman, Benjamin. Civil Examinations and Meritocracy in Late Imperial China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Elvin, Mark. The Pattern of the Chinese Past: A Social and Economic Interpretation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1973. Elvin, Mark. “Braudel and China.” In Early Modern History and the Social Sciences:  Testing the Limits of Braudel’s Mediterranean. Edited by John A Marino, 225–​253. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2002. Elvin, Mark. The Retreat of the Elephants:  An Environmental History of China. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Elvin, Mark. “Some Reflections on the Use of Styles of Scientific Thinking to Disaggregate and Sharpen Comparisons Between China and Europe from Song to Mid-​Qing Times (960–​1850 CE).” History of Technology 25 (2004): 53–​103. Emmerich, Michael. The Tale of Genji:  Translation, Canonization, and World Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Epstein, Maram. Competing Discourses: Orthodoxy, Authenticity, and Engendered Meanings in Late Imperial Chinese Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Esherick, Joseph, and Mary Backus Rankin, eds. Chinese Local Elites and Patterns of Dominance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Fang Ming, ed. Jin Ping Mei ziliao huilu (Collected Sources of Plum). Hefei, China: Huangshan chubanshe, 1986. Felski, Rita, and Susan Stanford Friedman, eds. Comparison:  Theories, Approaches, Uses. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2013. Ferguson, Frances. “Rape and the Rise of the Novel.” In Special Issue: Misandry, and Misanthropy. Representations 20 (1987): 88–​112. Festa, Lynn. “Crusoe’s Island of Misfit Things.” The Eighteenth Century 52, no. 3 (2011): 443–​471. Fiero, David Brian. “‘Don Quijote’: A Numismatic and Economic Analysis.” PhD diss., University of Nebraska, 1997. Findlen, Paula, ed. Early Modern Things:  Objects and their Histories, 1500–​ 1800. New York: Routledge, 2012. Finlay, Robert. “Portuguese and Chinese Maritime Imperialism:  Camoes’s Lusiads and Luo Maodeng’s Voyage of the San Bao Eunuch.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, no. 2 (1992): 225–​241. Finlay, Robert. “The Pilgrim Art: The Culture of Porcelain in World History.” Journal of World History 9, no. 2 (1998): 141–​187. Fletcher, Joseph. “Integrative History:  Parallels and Interconnections in the Early Modern Period, 1500–​1800.” In Studies on Chinese and Islamic Inner Asia, edited by Beatrice Forbes Manz, part x. Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1995. Flint, Christopher. “Orphaning the Family: The Role of Kinship in Robinson Crusoe.” ELH 55, no. 2 (1988): 381–​419. Flint, Christopher. “Nationalism, Commerce, and Imperial Anxiety in Defoe’s Later Works.” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, 54, no. 2 (2000): 11–​24. Flynn, Carol Houlihan. The Body in Swift and Defoe. Cambridge, MA:  Cambridge University Press, 2005.

239

Bibliography  239

Flynn, Dennis O. “Comparing the Tokugawa Shogunate with Hapsburg Spain:  Two Silver Empires in a Global Setting.” In The Political Economy of Merchant Empires:  State Power and World Trade, 1350–​1750, edited by James D. Tracy, 332–​359. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Flynn, Dennis O., and Arturo Giráldez. “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon’: The Origin of World Trade in 1571.” Journal of World History 6, no. 2 (1995): 201–​221. Flynn, Dennis O., and Arturo Giráldez. “Arbitrage, China, and World Trade in the Early Modern Period.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 38, no. 4 (1995): 429–​4 48. Flynn, Dennis O., and Arturo Giráldez. “Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity through the Mid-​Eighteenth Century.” Journal of World History 13, no. 2 (2002): 391–​427. Fontana, Michela. Matteo Ricci: A Jesuit in the Ming Court. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon Books, [1966], 1970. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish:  The Birth of the Prison. New  York:  Pantheon Books, [1975],1977. Free, Melissa. “Un-​Erasing ‘Crusoe’:  ‘Farther Adventures’ in the Nineteenth Century.” Book History 9, no. 1 (2006): 89–​130. Friedman, Edward H., Cervantes in the Middle: Realism and Reality in the Spanish Novel from Lazarillo de Tormes to Niebla. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2006. Fuchs, Barbara. Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Fuchs, Barbara. Passing for Spain: Cervantes and the Fictions of Identity. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Fuchs, Barbara. Romance. New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge, 2004. Fuchs, Barbara. Exotic Nation:  Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Fuchs, Barbara. The Poetics of Piracy:  Emulating Spain in English Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Fogel, Joshua A., ed. Naito Konan and the Development of the Conception of Modernity in Chinese History. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1983. Fogel, Joshua A., ed. The Teleology of the Modern Nation-​State. Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Foss, Theodore Nicholas, and Donald F. Lach. “Images of Asia and Asians in European Fiction, 1500–​1800.” In China and Europe: Images and Influences in Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries, edited by Thomas H. C. Lee, 165–​188. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1991. Frank, Andre Gunder. ReOrient:  Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1998. Frank, Andre Gunder, and Barry K. Gills, eds. The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand? London: Routledge, 1993. Furbank, P.N., and W.R Owens. “Defoe’s ‘South-​Sea’ and ‘North-​Sea’ Schemes: A Footnote to A New Voyage Round the World.” Eighteenth-​Century Fiction 13, no. 4 (2001): 501–​508. Furth, Charlotte. A Flourishing Yin:  Gender in China’s Medical History:  960–​ 1665. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Gallagher, Catherine, and Stephen Greenblatt. Practicing New Historicism. Chicago:  The University of Chicago Press, 2001.

240

240 Bibliography

Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar, ed. Alternative Modernities. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Garces, Maria Antonia. Cervantes in Algiers:  A  Captive’s Tale. Nashville, TN:  Vanderbilt University Press, 2005. Gasta, Chad M. “Cervantes’s Theory of Relativity in Don Quixote.” Cervantes:  Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 31, no. 1 (2011): 51–​82. Gat, Azar. Nations:  The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Gatten, Aileen. “A Wisp of Smoke:  Scent and Character in The Tale of Genji.” Monumenta Nipponica 32, no. 1 (1977): 35–​48. Ge, Liangyan. Out of the Margins: The Rise of Chinese Vernacular Fiction. Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 2001. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-​Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Gimpel, Denise. Lost Voices of Modernity:  A  Chinese Popular Fiction Magazine in Context. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Goethe’s World As Seen in Letters and Memoirs. Edited by Berthold Biermann. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1971. Goldmann, Lucien. Towards a Sociology of the Novel. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock, 1975. Goldstone, Jack. Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Goldstone, Jack. “The Problem of the ‘Early Modern’ World.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 41, no. 3 (1998): 249–​284. Goldstone, Jack. Why Europe? The Rise of the West in World History, 1500–​ 1850. New York: McGraw-​Hill Humanities, 2008. Goodman, Jennifer Robin. Chivalry and Exploration, 1298–​1630. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 1998. Goody, Jack, ed. Capitalism and Modernity: The Great Debate. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2004. Goody, Jack. The Theft of History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Graf, Eric C. “When an Arab Laughs in Toledo:  Cervantes’s Interpellation of Early Modern Spanish Orientalism.” Diacritics, 29, no. 2 (1999): 68–​85. Graf, Eric C. Cervantes and Modernity: Four Essays on Don Quijote. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International, 1977. Grapard, Ulla, and Gillian Hewitson, eds. Robinson Crusoe’s Economic Man: A Construction and Deconstruction. New York: Routledge, 2012. Green, Otis H. “The Literary Court of the Conde de Lemos at Naples, 1610–​1616.” Hispanic Review 1, no. 4 (1933): 290–​308. Greenberg, Michael. British Trade and the Opening of China 1800–​ 1842. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Greenblatt, Stephen. “Culture.” In Critical Terms for Literary Study, edited by Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, 225–​232. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995. Greenblatt, Stephen. Cultural Mobility:  A  Manifesto. Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press, 2009.

241

Bibliography  241

Grosfoguel, Ramón. “World-​ Systems Analysis in the Context of Transmodernity, Border Thinking, and Global Coloniality.” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 29, no. 2 (2006): 167–​187. Gundry, David James. “No Barrier between High and Low”: Love, Ethics, Status and Style in the Fiction of Ihara Saikaku.” PhD diss., Stanford University, 2009. Gunn, Geoffrey. First Globalization: The Eurasian Exchange, 1500–​1800. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Häberlein, Mark. The Fuggers of Augsburg: Pursuing Wealth and Honor in Renaissance Germany. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. Hall, John Whitney, ed. Cambridge History of Japan. Vol. 4, Early Modern Japan. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Hall, Timothy. “Reification, Materialism, and Praxis:  Adorno’s Critique of Lukács.” Telos 155 (2011): 62–​82. Hammond, Brean, and Shaun Regan. Making the Novel:  Fiction and Society in Britain, 1660–​ 1789. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Hanan, Patrick. “The Text of Chin P’ing Mei.” Asia Major 10, no. 1 (1963): 1–​57. Hanan, Patrick. “Sources of the Chin P’ing Mei.” Asia Major 10, no. 2 (1963): 23–​67. Hanan, Patrick. “A Landmark of the Chinese Novel.” In The Far East: China and Japan, edited by Douglas Grant and Millar MacLure, 325–​335. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961. Hanan, Patrick. “The Development of Fiction and Drama.” In The Legacy of China, edited by Raymond Dawson, 115–​143. Oxford: Clarendon, 1964. Hanan, Patrick. Chinese Fiction of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries:  Essays by Patrick Hanan. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Hayot, Eric. The Hypothetical Mandarin:  Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Hayot, Eric. On Literary Worlds. Oxford University Press, 2012. He, Jianjun. “Burning Incense at Night: A Reading of Wu Yueniang in Jin Ping Mei.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 29 (2007): 85–​103. Headley, John M. “Spain’s Asian Presence, 1565–​1590: Structures and Aspirations.” The Hispanic American Historical Review 75, no. 4 (1995): 623–​6 46. Hegel, Georg W. F. Philosophy of History. Translated by J. Sibree. New York: Dover, 1956. Hegel, Robert. Reading Illustrated Fiction in Late Imperial China. Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 1998. Heinrich, Amy Vladeck, ed. Currents in Japanese Culture:  Translations and Transformations. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Hellyer, Robert I. Defining Engagement:  Japan and Global Contexts, 1640–​1868. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2010. Hemming, John. The Conquest of the Incas. New York: Harcourt, 2003. Hernández, A. et al. “The Almadén Mercury Mining District, Spain.” Mineralium Deposita 34, nos. 5– ​6 (1999): 539–​548. Hessney, Richard. “Beautiful, Talented and Brave: Seventeenth-​Century Chinese Scholar-​Beauty Romances.” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1979. Hibbett, Howard. The Floating World in Japanese Fiction. New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1959. Hibbett, Howard. The Chrysanthemum and the Fish:  Japanese Humor Since the Age of the Shoguns. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2002.

242

242 Bibliography

Higuchi, Ichiyō. In the Shade of Spring Leaves: The Life of Higuchi Ichiyo, with Nine of Her Best Stories. Translated by Robert Lyons Danly. New York: W.W. Norton, 1992. Higuera, Henry. Eros and Empire:  Politics and Christianity in Don Quixote. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995. Ho, Ping-​Ti. The Ladder of Success in Imperial China:  Aspects of Social Mobility, 1368–​1911. New York: Columbia University Press, [1965] 2011. Hobson, John M. The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Hodgson, Marshall G.S. The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History In A World Civilization. 3 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977. Hodgson, Marshall G.S. Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam, and World History. Edited by Edmund Burke III. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Hoesel-​U hlig, Stefan. “Changing Fields: The Direction of Goethe’s Weltliteratur.” In Debating World Literature, edited by Christopher Prendergast, 26–​53. London: Verso, 2004. Hofstadter, Douglas. Gödel, Escher, Bach:  An Eternal Golden Braid. New  York:  Basic Books, [1979] 1999. Honneth, Axel. Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea. Edited by Martin Jay. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Hopkins, A. G. Globalization in World History. New York: W.W. Norton, 2002. Hopkins, A. G. Global History: Interactions between the Universal and the Local. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Horesh, Niv. Chinese Money in Global Context: Historic Junctures Between 600 BCE and 2012. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. Hou Hui. “Yi Shuihu zhuan qian ban bu zhuan yu Ming Xuande chunian: shi cong xiao shuo de huo bi xin xi jia yi tui duan” (A Conjecture on the Composition of the First Half of Outlaws during the Xuanhe Era [1426–​1435] of Ming: As Induced by the Novel’s Monetary Depictions). Wenxue Yichan (Literary Heritage) 5 (2005): 148–​152. Howell, Jude, and Jenny Pearce. Civil Society and Development: A Critical Exploration. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2002. Hsia, C. T. The Classic Chinese Novel: A Critical Introduction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1968. Hsia, C. T. “Yen Fu and Liang Ch’i-​ch’ao as Advocates of New Fiction.” In Chinese Approaches to Literature, edited by Adele Rickett, 221–​257. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975. Hsu, Carmen Y. “Writing on Behalf of a Christian Empire: Gifts, Dissimulation, and Politics in the Letters of Philip II of Spain to Wanli of China.” Hispanic Review 78, no. 3 (2010): 323–​344. Huang, Jingchun, and Fan Wenxing. “Zhongguo gudai dui huo huan bu zhi lijie yu renzhi kaolue” (“A Study of the Knowledge and Understanding about Asbestos Fabric in Ancient China”). In Shengming, zhishi, yu wenming: Shanghai shehui kexuejie xueshu nianhua lunwen ji, 340–​344. Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 2009. Huang Lin, ed. Jin Ping Mei ziliao huibian (Collected Materials on Jin Ping Mei). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1987. Huang Lin, and Du Mingde, eds. Jin Ping Mei yu Linqing. Shandong, China:  Shandong Xinhua, 2008. Huang, Ray. 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981.

243

Bibliography  243

Huang, Martin. Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Huang, Martin. Negotiating Masculinities in Late Imperial China. Honolulu:  University of Hawaii Press, 2006. Hunt, Lynn A., ed. The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–​ 1800. New York: Zone Books, 1993. Hunter, J. Paul. The Reluctant Pilgrim:  Defoe’s Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in Robinson Crusoe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1966. Hunter, J. Paul. Before Novels:  The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-​ Century Fiction. New York: W.W. Norton, 1990. Hur, Nam-​Lin. Prayer and Play in Late Tokugawa Japan:  Asakusa Sensōji and Edo Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Ife, B.W. “The Social and Historical Context.” In The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes, edited by Anthony J. Cascardi, 11–​31. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Ihara Saikaku. The Japanese Family Storehouse, or The Millionaire’s Gospel Modernised. Translated by G.W. Sargent. Cambridge, UK: University of Cambridge Press, 1959. Ihara Saikaku. The Life of an Amorous Woman, and Other Writings. Translated by Ivan Morris. New York: New Directions, 1963. Ihara Saikaku. Life of an Amorous Man. Translated by Kengi Hamada. Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 1964. Ihara Saikaku. Worldly Mental Calculations. Translated by Ben Befu. Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 1966. Ihara Saikaku. Comrade Loves of the Samurai. Translated by E. Powys Mathers. Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 1972. Ihara Saikaku. Tales of Japanese Justice. Translated by Thomas Kondo and Alfred Marks. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1980. Ihara Saikaku. Some Final Words of Advice. Translated by Peter Nosco. Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 1980. Ihara Saikaku. The Great Mirror of Male Love. Translated by Paul Schalow. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990. Ihara Saikaku. This Scheming World [newer translation of Worldly Mental Calculations]. Translated by Masanori Takatsuka and David C. Stubbs. Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 2005. Ikegami, Eiko. Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Inouye, Charles Shirō. Evanescence and Form:  An Introduction to Japanese Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Irigoin, Alejandra. “The End of a Silver Era: The Consequences of the Breakdown of the Spanish Peso Standard in China and the United States, 1780s–​1850s.” Journal of World History, 20, no. 2 (June 2009): 207–​244. Israel, George L. Doing Good and Ridding Evil in Ming China:  The Political Career of Wang Yangming. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2014. Israel, Jonathan I. Enlightenment Contested:  Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–​1752. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Jack, Jane. “A New Voyage Round the World:  Defoe’s Roman à Thèse.” Huntington Library Quarterly 24, no. 4 (1961): 323–​336. Jacobsen, Stefan Gaarsmand. “Chinese Influences or Images? Fluctuating Histories of How Enlightenment Europe Read China.” Journal of World History 24, no. 3 (2013): 623–​660.

244

244 Bibliography

Jameson, Fredric. Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist. London: Verso, 2008 (1979). Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious:  Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981. Jameson, Fredric. “Third-​World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Social Text 15 (1986): 65–​88. Jameson, Fredric. The Antinomies of Realism. New York: Verso, 2013. Jansen, Marius B. The Making of Modern Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Jehenson, Myriam Yvonne, and Peter N. Dunn. The Utopian Nexus in Don Quixote. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006. Jenkins, David, ed. Cambridge History of Western Textiles. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Jenkins, Eugenia Zuroski. A Taste for China:  English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Jones, David Martin. The Image of China in Western Social and Political Thought. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Johnson, Barbara. Persons and Things. Cambridge, UK: Harvard University Press, 2010. Johnson, Carroll B. Cervantes and the Material World. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Johnson, Chalmers. The Sorrows of Empire:  Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic. New York: Metropolitan, 2004. Johnson, Jeffrey. “Novelness in Comical Edo Fiction: A Carnivalesque Reading of Ihara Saikaku’s ‘Koshoku Ichidai Otoko.’” PhD diss., University of Washington, 1994. Johnson, Jeffrey. “Saikaku and the Narrative Turnabout.” Journal of Japanese Studies 27, no. 2 (2001): 323–​345. Johnson, Samuel. The Rambler. London: Harrison and Co., 1792. Johnston, Rebecca Carol, Richard Maxwell, and Katie Trumpener. “The Arabian Nights, Arab-​ European Literary Influence, and the Lineages of the Novel.” Modern Language Quarterly 68, no. 2 (2007): 243–​279; Julien, Eileen. “Arguments and Further Conjectures on World Literature.” In Studying Transcultural Literary History, edited by Gunilla Lindberg-​Wada, 122–​132. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2006. Kaempfer, Engelbert. The History of Japan. 3 vols. Glasgow, UK: J. MacLehose, 1906. Kaempfer, Engelbert. Kaempfer’s Japan: Tokugawa Culture Observed. Edited, translated, and annotated by Beatrice M. Bodart-​Bailey. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999. Kaldor, Mary. “The Idea of Global Civil Society.” International Affairs 79, no. 3 (2003): 583–​593. Kamen, Henry. Spain 1469–​1714: A Society in Conflict. New York: Pearson, 1991. Kamen, Henry. Imagining Spain. Historical Myth and National Identity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Kang, David Chan-​oong. East Asia Before the West:  Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Kayman, Martin A. “The ‘New Sort of Specialty’ and the ‘New Province of Writing’: Bank Notes, Fiction and the Law in Tom Jones.” ELH 68, no. 3 (2001): 633–​653. Kazui Tashiro, and Susan Downing Videen. “Foreign Relations during the Edo Period: Sakoku Reexamined.” Journal of Japanese Studies 8, no. 2 (1982): 283–​306. Keene, Donald. World within Walls:  Japanese Literature of the Premodern Era, 1600–​1867. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976.

245

Bibliography  245

Kern, William S. “Robinson Crusoe and the Economists.” In Robinson Crusoe’s Economic Man, edited by Ulla Grapard and Gillian Hewitson, 62–​74. New York: Routledge, 2012. Kibbie, Ann Louise. “Monstrous Generation: The Birth of Capital in Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Roxana.” PMLA 110, no. 5 (1995): 1023–​1034. Kim, Nanny, and Keiko Nagase-​Reimer, eds. Mining, Monies, and Culture in Early Modern Societies: East Asian and Global Perspectives. Boston, MA: Brill, 2013. Kirkpatrick, Peter John and Robert Dixon, eds. Republics of Letters:  Literary Communities in Australia. Sydney, N.S.W: Sydney University Press, 2012. Kirschner, Teresa J. “The Staging of the Conquest in a Play by Lope de Vega.” Pacific Coast Philology 27, no. 1–​2 (1992): 37–​43. Kiyoko Morita. The Book of Incense:  Enjoying the Traditional Art of Japanese Scents. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1999. Ko, Dorothy. Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-​Century China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. Ko, Dorothy. Cinderella’s Sisters:  A  Revisionist History of Footbinding. Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2005. Kobata, A. “The Production and Uses of Gold and Silver in Sixteenth-​a nd Seventeenth-​Century Japan.” The Economic History Review 18, no. 2 (1965): 245–​266. Koehler, Martha. Models of Reading: Paragons and Parasites in Richardson, Burney, and Laclos. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2005. Koehler, Martha. “Redemptive Spaces:  Magdalen House and Prostitution in the Novels and Letters of Richardson.” Eighteenth-​Century Fiction 22, no. 2 (2009): 249–​278. Kopytoff, Ignor. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process.” In The Social Life of Things:  Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 64–​93. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Kreissman, Bernard. Pamela-​Shamela:  A  Study of the Criticisms, Burlesques, Parodies, and Adaptations of Richardson’s “Pamela.” Lincoln NE: University at Lincoln, 1960. Krishnaswamy, Revathi, and John Charles Hawley, eds. The Postcolonial and the Global. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Kunn, Philip. “Civil Society and Constitutional Development.” In La Société civile face à L’État, edited by Léon Vandermeersch, 301–​307. Paris: École française d’Extrême-​Orient, 1994. Lach, Donald F. Asia in the Makings of Europe. 3 vols. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1965–​1993. Lamont, Thomas. “Mutual Abuse:  The Meeting of Robinson Crusoe and Hayy Ibn Yaqzân.” Edebiyat 13, no. 2 (2002): 169–​176. Larner, John. Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Latour, Bruno. “On Interobjectivity.” Mind, Culture, and Activity 3, no. 4 (1996): 228–​245. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social:  An Introduction to Actor-​ Network-​ Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Laver, Michael S. The Sakoku Edicts and the Politics of Tokugawa Hegemony. Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2011. Lee, Haiyan. Revolution of the Heart:  A  Genealogy of Love in China, 1900–​1950. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007.

246

246 Bibliography

Lee, Pauline C. Li Zhi, Confucianism, and the Virtue of Desire. Albany, NY: SUNY, 2012. Lee, Thomas H.  C., ed. China and Europe:  Images and Influences in Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1991. Lehmann, Martin. “Amerigo Vespucci and His Alleged Awareness of America as a Separate Land Mass.” Imago Mundi 65, no. 1 (2013):15–​24. Lemire, Beverly, and Giorgio Riello. “East and West:  Textiles and Fashion in Early Modern Europe.” Journal of Social History 41, no. 4 (2008): 887–​916. Leupp, Gary. Servants, Shophands, and Laborers in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Leupp, Gary. Male Colors:  The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Leupp, Gary. Interracial Intimacy in Japan:  Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543–​1900. New York: Continuum, 2003. Levathes, Louise. When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405–​ 1433. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Lewis, Martin W., and Kären Wigen. The Myth of Continents:  A  Critique of Metageography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Li, Hongtao. “Mingdai Guangdong de shibo taijian” (“Eunuchs as Overseers of the Foreign Trade Bureau in Ming Canton”). Shantou daxue xuebao 24, no.1, (2008): 80–​84. Li, Tana. Nguyễn Cochinchina: Southern Vietnam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. Li, Yu. The Carnal Prayer Mat. Translated by Patrick Hanan. Honolulu:  University of Hawaii Press, 1990. Li, Yu. A Tower for the Summer Heat. Translated by Patrick Hanan. New  York:  Columbia University Press, 1992. Li, Yueqiang. “Hujiao maoyi yu mingdai richang shenghuo” (“The Pepper Trade and Everyday Life during the Ming Period”). Yunnan shehui kexue 1 (2010): 126–​131. Lieberman, Victor. Beyond Binary Histories:  Re-​ Imagining Eurasia to c 1830. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. Lieberman, Victor. Strange Parallels:  Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.  800–​1830. 2 vols. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 2009. Lima, Luiz Costa. The Dark Side of Reason:  Fictionality and Power. Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 1992. Liu, Lydia. Translingual Practice:  Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. Liu, Lydia. “Robinson Crusoe’s Earthenware Pot.” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 4 (1999): 728–​757. Liu, Yu. Seeds of a Different Eden: Chinese Gardening Ideas and a New English Aesthetic Ideal. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008. Loar, Christopher F. “How to Say Things with Guns:  Military Technology and the Politics of Robinson Crusoe.” Eighteenth Century Fiction 19, nos. 1–​2 (2006): 1–​20. Lovett, A.W. “The Castilian Bankruptcy of 1575.” The Historical Journal 23, no. 4 (1980). 899–​911. Lu, Sheldon H. From Historicity to Fictionality:  The Chinese Poetics of Narrative. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. Lu, Tina. Persons, Roles, and Minds: Identity in Peony Pavilion and Peach Blossom Fan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.

247

Bibliography  247

Lu, Tonglin. Rose and Lotus: Narrative of Desire in France and China. Albany, NY: SUNY, 1991. Lu, Xun. A Brief History of Chinese Fiction. Translated by Yang Hsien-​y i and Gladys Yang. Beijing: Beijing Foreign Press, 1959. Lufrano, Richard John. Honorable Merchants: Commerce and Self-​Cultivation in Late Imperial China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997. Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-​Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1971. Lukács, Georg. History and Class  Consciousness:  Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1972. Lynch, Deidre. The Economy of Character:  Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meanings. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998. Ma, Ning. “‘A Strong Resemblance’:  Samuel Richardson, Chinese Talent-​Beauty Novels, and a Secret Origin of ‘World Literature.’” In Encountering China:  Early Modern European Reactions, edited by Rachana Sachdev and Qingjun Li, 103–​126. Lewisburg, PA:  Bucknell University Press, 2012. Ma, Ning. “Illusion and the Self: Honglou Meng, Wilhelm Meister, and Bildungsroman.” Tamkang Review 46, no. 1 (2015): 93–​115. MacKay, Marina. The Cambridge Introduction to the Novel. Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press, 2011. MacKay, Marina. “The Wartime Rise of The Rise of the Novel.” Representations, 119, no. 1 (2012): 119–​143. Mackerras, Colin. Western Images of China. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. MacLean, Gerald. Looking East:  English Writing and the Ottoman Empire before 1800. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Maeda, Ai. Text and the City:  Essays on Japanese Modernity. Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2004. Maiorino, Giancarlo, ed. The Picaresque: Tradition and Displacement. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Mancing, Howard. Chivalric World of Don Quixote: Style, Structure and Narrative Technique. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982. Mandell, Laura. “Bawds and Merchants:  Engendering Capitalist Desires.” ELH 59, no. 1 (1992): 107–​123. Mann, Charles. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. New York: Knopf, 2011. Manning, Patrick, and Barry K. Gills, eds. Andre Gunder Frank and Global Development: Visions, Remembrances, and Explorations. New York: Routledge, 2013. Maravall, José Antonio. Utopia and Counterutopia in the “Quixote.” Detroit:  Wayne State University Press, 1991. Markley, Robert. “Violence and Profits on the Restoration Stage:  Trade, Nationalism, and Insecurity in Dryden’s Amboyna.” Eighteenth-​Century Life 22, no. 1 (1998): 2–​17. Markley, Robert. “‘I have now done with my island, and all manner of discourse about it’: Crusoe’s Farther Adventures and the Unwritten History of the Novel.” In A Companion to Eighteenth-​ Century English Novel and Culture, edited by Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia, 25– ​47. Malden, MA: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2006. Markley, Robert. The Far East in the English Imagination, 1600–​1730. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

248

248 Bibliography

Markley, Robert. “Aesthetico-​Constructivism:  Farther Adventures in Criticism.” Philological Quarterly 86, no. 3 (2007): 291–​314. Mariscal, George. Contradictory Subjects: Quevedo, Cervantes, and Seventeenth-​Century Spanish Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. Mariscal, George. “The Figure of the Indiano in Early Modern Spanish Culture.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 2, no. 1 (2001): 55–​68. Martin, Adrienne Laskier. An Erotic Philology of Golden Age Spain. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2008. Martínez-​Bonati, Félix. Don Quixote and the Poetics of the Novel. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992. Martinson, Paul. “Pao, Order, and Redemption: Perspectives on Chinese Religion and Society Based on a Study of the Chin P’ing Mei.” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1973. Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the critique of Political Economy. Translated by S. W. Ryasankaya. Edited by Maurice Dobb. New York: International Publishers, 1970. Marx, Karl. Capital. Translated by Ben Fowkes. New York: Vintage Books, 1977. Marx, Karl. Karl Marx: A Reader. Edited by Jon Elster. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Classics, 1993. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1. Edited by Friedrich Engels. Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Reprint, New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007. Marzec, Robert P. “Enclosures, Colonization, and the Robinson Crusoe Syndrome: A Genealogy of Land in a Global Context.” boundary 2, 29, no. 2 (2002): 129–​156. Mauss, Marcel. The Gift:  Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. London: Cohen, 1990. McCloskey, Jason, and Ignacio López Aleman, eds. Signs of Power in Habsburg Spain and the New World. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2013. McDonald, Michelle Craig. “Transatlantic Consumption.” In The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption, edited by Frank Trentmann, 111–​126. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. McGann, Jerome. A New Republic of Letters. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–​1740. Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. McKeon, Michael, ed. Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. McKeon, Michael. The Secret History of Domesticity:  Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. McKeown, Adam. “Periodizing Globalization.” History Workshop Journal 63, no. 1 (2007): 218–​230. McMahon, Keith. Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists: Sexuality and Male-​Female Relationships in Eighteenth-​Century Chinese Fiction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. McMahon, Keith. Polygamy and Sublime Passion: Sexuality in China on the Verge of Modernity. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010. McMurran, Mary Helen. The Spread of Novels: Translation and Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.

249

Bibliography  249

McNeill, William H., and John R. McNeill. The Human Web: A Bird’s-​eye View of World History. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003. McPherson, Kenneth. The Indian Ocean:  A  History of People and the Sea. New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1993. Menocal, María Rosa. The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 2002. Meyer-​Kalkus, Reinhard. “World Literature beyond Goethe.” In Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al., 96–​121. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Mignolo, Walter. Local Histories/​Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Mignolo, Walter. “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference.” The South Atlantic Quarterly, 101, no. 1 (2002): 57–​96. Millar, A. E. “Revisiting the Sinophilia/​Sinophobia Dichotomy in the European Enlightenment through Adam Smith’s ‘Duties of Government.’” Asian Journal of Social Science 38, no. 5 (2010): 716–​737. Mille, Harry. State Versus Gentry in Late Ming Dynasty China, 1572–​1644. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Min, Eun Kyung. “Thomas Percy’s Chinese Miscellanies and the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765).” Eighteenth-​Century Studies, 43, no. 3 (2010): 307–​324. Miyakawa, Hisayuki. “An Outline of the Naito Hypothesis and Its Effects on Japanese Studies of China.” The Far Eastern Quarterly 14, no. 4 (1955): 533–​552. Miyosh, Masao. Off Center: Power and Culture Relations Between Japan and the United States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Moerman, D. Max. Localizing Paradise:  Kumano Pilgrimage and the Religious Landscape of Premodern Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Moerman, D. Max. “Demonology and Eroticism: Islands of Women in the Japanese Buddhist Imagination.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 36, no. 2 (2009): 351–​380. Moore, Steven. The Novel: An Alternative History. 2 vols. New York: Continuum, 2011. Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. Translated by Albert Sbragia. London: Verso, 1987. Moretti, Franco. Modern Epic:  The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez. New York: Verso, 1996. Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–​1900. London: Verso, 1998. Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review 1(2000): 54– ​68. Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. London: Verso, 2005. Moretti, Franco. “The End of the Beginning:  A  Reply to Christopher Prendergast.” New Left Review 41 (2006). Moretti, Franco. “Evolution, World-​Systems, Weltliteratur.” In Studying Transcultural Literary History, edited by Gunilla Lindberg-​Wada, 113–​121. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2006. Moretti, Franco, ed. The Novel, 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Moretti, Franco. “The Novel: History and Theory.” New Left Review 52 (2008): 111–​124. Moretti, Laura. “Kanazōshi Revisited: The Beginnings of Japanese Popular Literature in Print.” Monumenta Nipponica, 65, no. 2 (2010): 297–​356. Morton, Timothy. The Poetics of Spice:  Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

250

250 Bibliography

Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects:  Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2013. Mostow, Joshua S. Pictures of the Heart:  The Hyakunin Isshu in Word and Image. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996. Mote, F. M. “Yuan and Ming.” In Food in Chinese Culture:  Anthropological and Historical Perspective, edited by K. C. Chang, 195–​257. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977. Mote, F. M. Imperial China, 900–​1800. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Moulton, Ian F. Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Mufti, Aamir. “Orientalism and the Institution of World Literature.” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 3 (2010): 458– ​493. Mungello, D. E. Curious Land:  Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology. Stuttgart: Steiner, 1985. Mungello, D. E. The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–​1800. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. Murasaki Shikibu. The Tale of Genji. Translated by Royall Tyler. New York: Penguin Classics, 2001. Nancy, Jean-​Luc. The Creation of the World, or Globalization. Translation and introduction by François Raffoul and David Pettigrew. Albany, NY: SUNY, 2007. Nemser, Daniel. “Governor Sancho and the Politics of Insularity.” Hispanic Review 78, no. 1 (2010): 1–​23. Nenzi, Laura. Excursions in Identity: Travel and the Intersection of Place, Gender, and Status in Edo Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008. Nguyen, Duy Lap. “The Universal Province of Modernity: A Critique of Provincializing Europe.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 16, no. 3 (2014): 445–​4 62. Nieuhof, Johannes. An Embassy from the East-​India Company of the United Provincés, to the Grand Tartar Cham Emperor of China, Deliver’d by Their Excellencies Peter de Goyer and Jacob de Keyzer, at His Imperial City of Peking. 2nd ed. London: By author, 1673. Nishiyama, Matsunosuke. Edo Culture:  Daily Life and Diversions in Urban Japan, 1600–​1868. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997. Novak, Maximillian E. Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe. Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1962. Osamu, Oba. Books and Boats:  Sino-​ Japanese Relations and Cultural Transmission in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Trans. Joshua A. Fogel. Honolulu:  University of Hawaii Press, 2011. Padrón, Ricardo. The Spacious Word:  Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Padrón, Ricardo. “The Blood of Martyrs Is the Seed of the Monarchy: Empire, Utopia, and the Faith in Lope’s Triunfo de la fee en los reynos de Japón.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 36, no. 3 (2006): 517–​537. Palumbo-​Liu, David et  al., eds. Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World:  System, Scale, Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Parker, Alexander A. Literature and the Delinquent: The Picaresque Novel in Spain and Europe, 1599–​1753. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 1978. Parla, Jale. “The Object of Comparison.” Comparative Literature Studies 41, no. 1 (2004): 116–​125.

251

Bibliography  251

Parthasarathi, Prasannan, and Giorgio Riello. “From India to the World:  Cotton and Fashionability.” In The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption, edited by Frank Trentmann, 145–​171. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Paulson, Ronald. Don Quixote in England: The Aesthetics of Laughter. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Percy, Thomas. Hau kiou choaan, or The Pleasing History:  A  Translation from the Chinese Language. 4 vols. London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1761. Peres, Louis. Daily Life in Early Modern Japan. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002. Perkins, David. Is Literary History Possible? Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Perkins, Franklin. Leibniz and China:  A  Commerce of Light. Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press, 2004. Perry, Curtis. Material Culture and Cultural Materialisms in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2001. Perry, Ruth. Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748–​1818. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pflugfelder, Gregory M. Cartographies of Desire:  Male-​Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600–​1950. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Pieterse, Jan Nederveen. “Globalization Goes in Circles: Hybridities East-​West.” In Hybridising East and West:  Tales Beyond Westernization:  Empirical Contributions to the Debates on Hybridity, edited by Dominique Schirmer et al., 21–​32. Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2006. Pieterse, Jan Nederveen. “Periodizing Globalization:  Histories of Globalization.” New Global Studies, 6, no. 2 (2012): 1–​25. Pinet, Simone. Archipelagoes:  Insular Fictions from Chivalric Romance to the Novel. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel. “Rethinking Reification.” Theory and Society 16, no. 2 (1987): 264–​265. Plaks, Andrew. The Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel: Ssu ta ch’i-​shu. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987. Plaks, Andrew. “Leaving the Garden:  Reflections on China’s Literary Masterwork.” New Left Review 47 (2007): 109–​129. Plaks, Andrew. “The Novel in Pre-​Modern China.” In The Novel, Vol.1: History, Geography, and Culture, edited by Franco Moretti, 181–​216. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Pollak, Ellen. Incest and the English Novel, 1684–​1814. Baltimore:  John Hopkins University Press, 2003. Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Pomeranz, Kenneth, and Steven Topik. The World That Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present. 3rd ed. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2012. Poovey, Mary. Genres of the Credit Economy:  Mediating Value in Eighteenth-​and Nineteenth-​ Century Britain. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008. Porter, David. “A Peculiar but Uninteresting Nation: China and the Discourse of Commerce in Eighteenth-​Century England.” Eighteenth-​Century Studies 33, no. 2 (2000): 181−199. Porter, David. Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. Porter, David. The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-​Century England. Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press, 2010.

252

252 Bibliography

Porter, David. “Sinicizing Early Modernity:  The Imperatives of Historical Cosmopolitanism.” Eighteenth-​Century Studies 43, no. 3 (2010): 299–​306. Porter, David. “The Crisis of Comparison and the World Literature Debates.” Profession 15 (2011): 244–​258. Porter, David, ed. Comparative Early Modernities, 1100–​ 1800. New  York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Prendergast, Christopher, ed. Debating World Literature. New York: Verso, 2004. Prescott, William H. The History of the Conquest of Mexico. New York: Random House, 2010. Prestholdt, Jeremy. “Africa and the Global Lives of Things.” In The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption, edited by Frank Trentmann, 85–​110. Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2012. Price, Leah. The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2000. Ptak, Roderich. “The Transportation of Sandalwood from Timor to China and Macao, ca. 1350–​1600.” In Portuguese Asia:  Aspects in History and Economic History, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, edited by Roderich Ptak, 89–​109. Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 1987. Purdy, Daniel. “Goethe, Rémusat and the Chinese Novel:  Translation and the Circulation of World Literature.” In German Literature as World Literature, edited by Thomas Beebee, 43–​ 62. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Qian, Zhongshu. “Thomas Percy and His Chinese Studies.” In Vision of China in the English Literature of the 17th and 18th Centuries, edited by Adrian Hsia, 301–​325. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1998. Qin Xiurong, ed. Jin Ping Mei hui ping hui jiao ben (A Collated Edition of Plum with Collected Traditional Commentaries). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1998. Quint, David. Cervantes’s Novel of Modern Times:  A  New Reading of Don Quijote. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Rawski, Evelyn. “Economic and Social Foundations of Late Imperial China.” In Popular Culture in Late Imperial China, edited by David Johnson et al., 3–​33. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Regunathan, Swetha. “‘An Incongruous Monster’:  Idolatrous Aesthetics in Crusoe’s China.” Digital Defoe 5, no. 1 (2013): 45–​6 4. Reichwein, Adolf. China and Europe: Intellectual and Artistic Contacts in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968. Reiss, Timothy J. Against Autonomy:  Global Dialectics of Cultural Exchange. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Rémusat, Jean-​Pierre Abel. Iu-​kiao-​li, ou, Les deux cousins. Paris: Moutardier, 1826. Rémusat, Jean-​Pierre Abel. Iu-​Kiao-​li, or the Two Fair Cousins, 2 vols. Translated from French by Hunt and Clarke of York Street. London: Hunt and Clarke, 1827, Ricapito, Joseph V. Cervantes’s Novelas Ejemplares:  Between History and Creativity. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1996. Rice, James P. “In the Wake of Orientalism.” Comparative Literature Studies 37, no. 2 (2000): 223–​238. Richardson, Samuel. Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady [1747–​1748]. London:  Penguin Books, 1985. Richardson, Samuel. Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded. Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1741], 2001.

253

Bibliography  253

Richetti, John J. Popular Fiction before Richardson:  Narrative Patterns, 1700–​ 1739. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992. Riley, E. C. “Ideals and Illusions.” In Miguel de Cervantes, edited by Harold Bloom, 63–​79. Philadelphia : Chelsea House Publishers, 2005. Robins, Nicholas A. Mercury, Mining, and Empire: The Human and Ecological Cost of Colonial Silver Mining in the Andes. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. Rodríguez Magda, Rosa María. Transmodernidad. Barcelona: Anthropos, 2004. Rolston, David L., ed. How to Read the Chinese Novel. Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1990. Rosado, Diego G. Lopez. Historia del Peso Mexicano. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1975. Rosenthal, Laura J. Infamous Commerce:  Prostitution in Eighteenth-​Century British Literature and Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. Rowe, William. “The Problem of ‘Civil Society’ in Late Imperial China.” Modern China, 19, no. 2 Symposium: "Public Sphere"/​"Civil Society" in China? Paradigmatic Issues in Chinese Studies, III, (1993): 139–​157. Roy, David. “A Confucian Interpretation of the Chin P’ing Mei.” In Proceedings of the International Conference on Sinology, Section on Literature, 39–​61. Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1981. Roy, David. “The Case for T’ang Hsien-​tsu’s Authorship of the Jin Ping Mei.” CLEAR 8, no. 1–​2 (1986): 31– ​62. Ruberto, Laura E. et  al., eds. Bakhtin and the Nation. Lewisburg, PA:  Bucknell University Press, 2000. Ruddiman, William. “The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era Began Thousands of Years Ago.” Climatic Change 61, no. 3 (2003): 261–​293. Rugo, Daniele. Jean-​ Luc Nancy and the Thinking of Otherness. New  York:  Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Ruiz-​Stovel, Guillermo. “Chinese Merchants, Silver Galleons, and Ethnic Violence in Spanish Manila, 1603–​1686.” México y la Cuenca del Pacífico, 12, no. 36 (2009): 47–​63. Saffar, ‎ Ruth S. El, and Diana de Armas Wilson, eds. Quixotic Desire: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Cervantes. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1994. Said, Edward. Orientalism. 25th anniversary edition with 1995 afterword. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003. Sakaki, Atsuko. Obsessions with the Sino-​ Japanese Polarity in Japanese Literature. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005. Salmon, Claudine. Literary Migrations: Traditional Chinese Fiction in Asia. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2013. Salvadore, Matteo. “The Ethiopian Age of Exploration: Prester John’s Discovery of Europe, 1306–​ 1458.” Journal of World History 21, no. 4 (2010): 593–​627. Sánchez, Francisco J. An Early Bourgeois Literature in Golden Age Spain: Lazarillo de Tormes, Guzmán de Alfarache, and Baltasar Gracián. Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Sansom, Sir George Bailey. A History of Japan:  1615–​1867. Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 1965. Santangelo, Paolo. Sentimental Education in Chinese History:  An Interdisciplinary Textual Research on Ming Qing Sources. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2003.

254

254 Bibliography

Satyendra, Indira. “Metaphors of the Body: The Sexual Economy of the Chin P’ing Mei tz’u-​hua.” CLEAR 15 (1993): 85–​97. Saussy, Haun. “Comparative Literature:  The Next Ten Years.” ACLA State of the Discipline Report. http://​stateofthediscipline.acla.org/​entry/​comparative-​literature-​next-​ten-​years (accessed May 8, 2014). Saussy, Haun, ed. Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization: The 2005 ACLA Report on the State of the Discipline. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Schmidgen, Wolfram. “Robinson Crusoe, Enumeration, and the Mercantile Fetish.” Eighteenth-​ Century Studies 35, no. 1 (2001): 19–​39. Schmidt, Rachel. Forms of Modernity:  Don Quixote and Modern Theories of the Novel. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. Schottenhammer, Angela. “Characteristics of Qing China’s Trade Policies, Shunzhi through Qianlong Reigns.” In Trading Networks in Early Modern East Asia, edited by Angela Schottenhammer, 101–​154. Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2010. Schurz, William Lytle. The Manila Galleon. Boston: E. P. Dutton, 1959. Schwartz, Frank J., and Susan J. Pharr, eds. The State of Civil Society in Japan. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Seigel, Micol. “Beyond Compare: Comparative Method after the Transnational Turn.” Radical History Review 91 (2005): 62–​90. Selig, Karl-​Ludwig. “Don Quixote and the Exploration of (Literary) Geography.” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 6, no. 3 (1982): 341–​357. Shao, Yun. “Romancing the Iron Age: Trade, Migration, and Class Mobility in Cervantes’ Novella La española inglesa.” Crítica Hispánica 33, no. 1–​2 (2011): 205–​214. Shirane, Haruo, ed. Early Modern Japanese Literature:  An Anthology, 1600–​1900. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Shirane, Haruo. “The Tale of Genji and the Dynamics of Cultural Production: Canonization and Popularization.” In Envisioning The Tale of Genji: Media, Gender, and Cultural Production, edited by Haruo Shirane, 1–​48. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Shirane, Haruo, and Tomi Suzuki, eds. Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Shively, Donald H. “Sumptuary Regulation and Status in Early Tokugawa Japan.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 25 (1964–​1965): 123–​164. Shu-​Mei Shih. “Global Literature and the Technologies of Recognition.” PMLA 119, no. 1 (2004): 16–​30. Shu-​Mei Shih. “Comparison as Relation.” In Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, edited by Rita Felski and Susan Friedman, 69–​98. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Shu-​Mei Shih, and Françoise Lionnet, eds. The Creolization of Theory. Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2011. Sieber, Patricia. Theaters of Desire: Authors, Readers, and the Reproduction of Early Chinese Song-​ Drama, 1300–​2000. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Simerka, Barbara. Discourses of Empire:  Counter-​ Epic Literature in Early Modern Spain. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2008. Simon, Karla W. Civil Society in China: The Legal Framework from Ancient Times to the “New Reform Era.” Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

255

Bibliography  255

Siskind, Mariano. “The Globalization of the Novel and the Novelization of the Global: A Critique of World Literature.” Comparative Literature 62, no. 4 (2010): 336–​360. Skinner, George William. The City in Late Imperial China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1977. So, Billy Kee Long, ed. The Economy of Lower Yangzi Delta in Late Imperial China: Connecting Money, Markets, and Institutions. London and New York: Routledge, 2013. So, Richard Jean. Coolie Democracy:  US–​ China Political and Literary Exchange, 1925–​1955. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Spence, Jonathan. The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci. London and New York: Penguin, 1985. Spence, Jonathan. The Search for Modern China. New York: W.W. Norton, 1990. Spence, Jonathan. The Chan’s Great Continent:  China in Western Minds. New  York:  W. W. Norton, 1999. Spencer, Jane. The Rise of the Woman Novelist:  From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1986. Spielman, David Wallace. “The Value of Money in Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and Roxana.” The Modern Language Review 107, no. 1 (2012): 65–​87. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “World Systems and the Creole.” Narrative 14, no. 1 (2006): 102–​112. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. Stanley, Amy. Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Starr, G. A. “Defoe and China.” Eighteenth-​Century Studies 43, no. 4 (2010): 435–​454. Stein, Stanley J. and Barbara H. Stein, eds. Silver, Trade, and War: Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern Europe. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2003. Stern, Philip J. and Carl Wennerlind, eds. Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Struve, Lynn. “Chimerical Early Modernity: The Case of ‘Conquest Generation’ Memoirs.” In The Qing Formation in World-​Historical Time, edited by Lynn Struve, 335–​372. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. “Holding the World in Balance: The Connected Histories of the Iberian Overseas Empires, 1500–​1640.” American Historical Review 112, no. 5 (2007): 1359–​1385. Sullivan, Henry W. Grotesque Purgatory: A Study of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Part 2. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1996. Sunar, Lütfi. Marx and Weber on Oriental Societies:  In the Shadow of Western Modernity. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014. Suzuki, Tomi. Narrating the Self:  Fictions of Japanese Modernity. Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 1997. Szeman, Imre. “Who’s Afraid of National Allegory? Jameson, Literary Criticism, Globalization.” South Atlantic Quarterly 100, no. 3 (2001): 803–​827. Tadmor, Naomi. Family and Friends in Eighteenth-​Century England:  Household Kinship and Patronage. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Tagliacozzo, Eric, and Wen-​Chin Chang, eds. Chinese Circulations: Capital, Commodities, and Networks in Southeast Asia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

256

256 Bibliography

Tang, Xiaobing. Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Tanoukhi, Nirvana. “The Scale of World Literature.” New Literary History 39, no. 3 (2008): 599–​617. Tantillo, Astrida Orle. Goethe’s Modernisms. London: Continuum, 2010. Tashiro, Kazui, and Susan Downing Videen. “Foreign Relations during the Edo Period: Sakoku Reexamined.” Journal of Japanese Studies 8, no. 2 (1982): 283–​306. Taylor, Mark C. The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Terian, Andrei. “The Incomparable as Uninterpretable: Comparative Literature and the Question of Relevant (Re)contextualization.” World Literature Studies 5, no. 22 (2013): 52–​63. Teynor, Hilary. “A Partridge in the Family Tree: Fixity, Mobility, and Community in Tom Jones.” Eighteenth-​Century Fiction 17, no. 3 (2005): 349–​372. Thomas, Henry. Spanish and Portuguese Romances of Chivalry [1920]. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Thompson, Helen. Ingenuous Subjection:  Compliance and Power in the Eighteenth-​Century Domestic Novel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Thompson, James. “Patterns of Property and Possession in Fielding’s Fiction.” Eighteenth-​ Century Fiction 3, no. 1 (1990): 21–​42. Thompson, Michael, ed. Georg Lukács Reconsidered: Critical Essays in Politics, Philosophy, and Aesthetics. New York: Continuum, 2011. Thornber, Karen. Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Thornber, Karen. “Comparative Literature, World Literature, and Asia.” American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) State of the Discipline Report 2014. http://​stateofthediscipline. acla.org/​entry/​comparative-​literature-​world-​literature-​and-​asia. Tian, Xiaofei. “A Preliminary Comparison of the Two Recensions of Jinpingmei.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 62, no. 2 (2002): 347–​388. Tilly, Charles. Coercion, Capital, and European States: AD 990–​1992. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1992. Todd, Dennis. Defoe’s America. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Totman, Conrad D. Early Modern Japan. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993. Traganou, Jilly. The Tōkaidō Road: Traveling and Representation in Edo and Meiji Japan. New Y ork: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004. Trentmann, Frank, and John Brewer, eds. Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives: Historical Trajectories, Transnational Exchanges. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006. Trentmann, Frank, ed. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption. Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2012. Trilling, Lionel. “Manners, Morals, and the Novel.” The Kenyon Review 10, no. 1 (1948): 11–​27. Trocki, Carl A. Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy: A Study of the Asian Opium Trade, 1750–​1950. London: Psychology Press, 1999. Tsai, Shih-​shan Henry. The Eunuchs in the Ming Dynasty. Albany, NY: SUNY, 1996. Tsu, Jing. “Getting Ideas about World Literature in China.” Comparative Literature Studies 47, no. 3 (2010): 290–​317. Turnbull, Stephen. The Samurai: A Military History New York: Routledge, [1977], 2013. Twitchett, Denis C., ed. Cambridge History of China. Vols. 7–​9. Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press, 1988–​2002.

257

Bibliography  257

Ueda, Atsuko. Concealment of Politics, Politics of Concealment: The Production of “Literature” in Meiji Japan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Vaporis, Constantine Nomikos. Breaking Barriers: Travel and the State in Early Modern Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Vilches, Elvira. New World Gold:  Cultural Anxiety and Monetary Disorder in Early Modern Spain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Vilches, Elvira. “Coins, Value, and Trust: The Problematics of Vellón in Seventeenth-​Century Spanish Culture.” In Signs of Power in Habsburg Spain and the New World, edited by Jason McCloskey and Ignacio López Aleman, 195–​212. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2013. Volpp, Sophie. “The Gift of a Python Robe: The Circulation of Objects in Jin Ping Mei.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 65, no. 1 (2005): 133–​158. von Glahn, Richard. “Myth and Reality of China’s Seventeenth-​Century Monetary Crisis.” The Journal of Economic History 56, no. 2 (1996): 429–​454. von Glahn, Richard. Fountain of Fortune:  Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000–​1700. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996. von Glahn, Richard and Paul Jakov Smith, eds. The Song-​Yuan-​Ming Transition in Chinese History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. von Glahn, Richard. “Cycles of Silver in Chinese Monetary History.” In Economy of Lower Yangzi Delta in Late Imperial China: Connecting Money, Markets, and Institutions, edited by Billy K.L. So, 17–​71. New York: Routledge, 2012. Vries, Peer. “The California School and Beyond: How to Study the Great Divergence?” History Compass 8, no. 7 (2010): 730–​751. Wagner, Peter. Modernity as Experience and Interpretation:  A  New Sociology of Modernity. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2008. Wahrman, Dror. The Making of the Modern Self:  Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-​Century England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. Waley-​Cohen, Joanna. The Sextants of Beijing:  Global Currents in Chinese History. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000. Wallerstein, Immanuel Maurice. The Modern World-​System (Studies in Social Discontinuity). 4 vols. New York: Academic Press, 1974–​2011. Wallerstein, Immanuel Maurice. “Conclusion:  World-​ Systems Analysis as a Knowledge Movement.” In Routledge Handbook of World-​ Systems Analysis, edited by Salvatore J. Babones and Christopher Chase-​Dunn, 515–​521. New York: Routledge, 2012. Wallerstein, Immanuel Maurice, and Anibal Quijano. “Americanity as a Concept, or the Americas in the Modern World-​System.” International Social Sciences Journal 44, no. 4 (1992): 583–​591. Waltner, Ann Beth. Getting an Heir: Adoption and the Construction of Kinship in Late Imperial China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991. Walzer, Michael. Toward a Global Civil Society. Providence, RI: Berghahn, 1995. Wang, David Der-​Wei. Fin-​de-​Siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1848–​ 1911. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. Wang, Hui. “Trans-​Systemic Society and Regional Perspective in Chinese Studies.” boundary 2, 38, no. 1 (2001):165–​201. Wang, Hui. China from Empire to Nation-​State. Translated by Michael Gibbs Hill. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.

258

258 Bibliography

Wang, Rumei. Wang Rumei Jiedu Jin Ping Mei (Interpretations of The Plum in the Golden Vase by Wang Rumei). Jilin, China: Shidai wenyi chubanshe, 2007. Warner, William Beatty. Licensing Entertainment:  The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–​1750. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998. Washburn, Dennis C. The Dilemma of the Modern in Japanese Fiction. New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1995. Waters, Lindsay. “The Age of Incommensurability.” boundary 2 28, no. 2 (2001): 133–​172. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957. Watt, Ian. “Flat-​Footed and Fly-​Blown: The Realities of Realism.” Eighteenth-​Century Fiction 12, no. 2 (2000): 147–​166. Wei, Shang. “The Making of the Everyday World: Jin Ping Mei cihua and Encyclopedias for Daily Use.” In Dynastic Crisis and Cultural Innovation: From the Late Ming to the Late Qing and Beyond, edited by David Der-​wei Wang and Shang Wei, 63–​92. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Werbner, Pnina. “Vernacular Cosmopolitanism.” Theory, Culture and Society 23, nos. 2 and 3 (2006): 496– ​498. White, Jerry. A Great and Monstrous Thing:  London in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. White, Michael V. “Reading and Rewriting: The Production of an Economic Robinson Crusoe.” In Robinson Crusoe’s Economic Man, edited by Ulla Grapard and Gillian Hewitson, 15–​41. New York: Routledge, 2012. Widmer, Ellen. The Beauty and the Book:  Women and Fiction in Nineteenth-​Century China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Wiegman, Robyn. “Economies of the Body: Gendered Sites in Robinson Crusoe and Roxana.” In Reading with a Difference: Gender, Race, and Cultural Identity, edited by Arthur F. Marotti, 207–​226. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993. Wiggin, Bethany. Novel Translations: The European Novel and the German Book, 1680 to 1730. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. Wiggin, Bethany. “World Literature and the Eighteenth-​ C entury Novel: Amsterdam, Leipzig, 1701.” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 49, no. 2 (2013): 112–​130. Wilford, John Noble. “Columbus and the Labyrinth of History.” The Wilson Quarterly (1991): 66–​86. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Williamson, Edwin. The Half-​Way House of Fiction:  Don Quixote and Arthurian Romance. Oxford: Clarendon, 1984. Williamson, Edwin. “The Power Struggle between Don Quixote and Sancho: Four Crises in the Development of the Narrative.” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 84, no. 7 (2007): 837–​858. Wills, John E., Jr. Embassies and Illusions, Dutch and Portuguese Envoys to K’ang-​his, 1666–​1687. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Wills, John E. “European Consumption and Asian Production in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” In Consumption and the World of Goods, edited by John Brewer and Roy Porter, 133–​147. London: Routledge, 1993. Wilson, Diana de Armas. “Cervantes and the New World.” In The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes, edited by Anthony Cascardi, 206–​225. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

259

Bibliography  259

Wilson, Diana de Armas. Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Winks, Robin W., and James R. Rush, eds. Asia in Western Fiction. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1990. Wolf, Eric. Europe and the People without History. 2nd edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Wong, Roy Bin. China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. Wood, Denis, and John Fels. The Power of Maps. New York: Guilford, 1992. Wood, Denis, and John Fels. Rethinking the Power of Maps. New York: Guilford, 2012. Woodside, Alexander. Lost Modernities:  China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Hazards of World History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Woolf, Virginia. “Robinson Crusoe.” In The Second Common Reader [1932], by Virginia Woolf, 58– ​60. London: Hogarth, 1965. Xie, Ming. Conditions of Comparison:  Reflections on Comparative Intercultural Inquiry. London: Continuum, 2011. Xu Jianping. “Jin Ping Mei liutong huobi zhitai yu chengshu niandai buzheng.” Wenxue Yichan (Literary Heritage) 5 (2006): 141–​143. Xu Yongming. “A New Candidate for Authorship of the Jin Ping Mei:  Bai Yue (1499–​1551).” CLEAR 33 (2011): 55–​74. Yang, Chi-​Ming. Performing China: Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in Eighteenth-​century England, 1660–​1760. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. Ye, Guitong. Lun Jin Ping Mei (On The Plum in the Golden Vase). Henan, China: Zhongzhouguji chubanshe, 2005. Yonemoto, Marcia. Mapping Early Modern Japan:  Space, Place, and Culture in the Tokugawa Period, 1603–​1868. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Yosaburō Takekoshi, The Economic Aspects of the History of the Civilization of Japan. Vol. 2. New York: Routledge, 2004. Yoshihiko, Amino. Rethinking Japanese History. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2012. Young, Robert J. C. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 1990, 2004. Yovanovich, Gordana. Play and the Picaresque: Lazarillo de Tormes, Libro de Manuel, and Match Ball. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Yu, Anthony C. Rereading the Stone:  Desire and the Making of Fiction in Dream of the Red Chamber. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Zamora, Margarita. Reading Columbus. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Zeitlin, Judith T. “Xiaoshuo.” In The Novel. Vol. 1: History, Geography, and Culture, edited by Franco Moretti, 249–​261. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Zhang, Longxi. The Tao and the Logos: Literary Hermeneutics, East and West. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992. Zhang, Longxi. Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Zhang, Longxi. “The Changing Concept of World Literature.” In World Literature in Theory, edited by David Damrosch, 517–​518. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2014. Zhang, Longxi. From Comparison to World Literature. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2015.

260

260 Bibliography

Zhang, Chunjie. “Reading Goethe’s Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandtschaften) through The Story of the Stone (Hong Lou Meng): Immanent Divinity, Vegetative Femininity, and the Mood of Transience.” In German Literature as World Literature, edited by Thomas Beebee, 25–​42. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Zhang, Yingjin, ed. China in a Polycentric World:  Essays in Chinese Comparative Literature. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Zhao, Gang. The Qing Opening to the Ocean:  Chinese Maritime Policies, 1684–​ 1757. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2013. Zheng, Zhenduo. “Tan Jin Ping Mei cihua” (“A Discussion of Plum”). Wenxue 1, no. 1 (1933). In Jin Ping Mei ziliao huilu (Collected Sources of Plum), edited by Fang Ming, 247–​265. Hefei, China: Huangshan chubanshe, 1986. Zhishan, Zhang. “Columbus and China.” Monumenta Serica 41 (1993): 177–​187. Zhou, Zuyan. “Carnivalization in The Journey to the West:  Cultural Dialogism in Fictional Festivity.” CLEAR 16 (1994): 69–​92.

261

INDEX

Abu-​Lughod, Janet, 4, 23–​24 actor-​network theory, 9, 31 Afro-​Eurasian (Old World) ecumene, 5, 23–​24 Age of Discovery, 7, 59–​60, 86–​92 Age of Silver, 6–​7, 23–​25 Amadís of Gaul, 86 Anderson, Benedict, 8, 36–​37 Anthropocenic materialist perspective, 6, 15–​16, 26–​27 Arrighi, Giovanni, 4, 24, 59–​60 Auerbach, Eric, 43–​4 4 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 8, 36–​37 Balázs, Étienne, 59 Bentley, Jerry, 5 Bhabha, Homi, 9, 34 Bildungsroman, 48, 179–​180 Blaut, James, 4 Braudel, Fernand, 3, 24, 59–​60 Bronze Age, 5 Casanova, Pascale, 3 Cervantes, Miguel de, 7, 98–​102, 144 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 19–​20 “chinaware” (porcelain) in Western perspectives, 149–​153, 154–​157 civil society: late Ming China, 61; as substate cultural forces, 8–​9, 33–​35 Cohen, Warren I., 4

Columbus, Christopher, 21, 59, 86–​92 Communist Manifesto, The, 1, 16–​17 Confucian cardinal relations, 12 consumption and commodities, 27 counterhistory, 11 culture as mobility and constraint, 12 Damrosch, David, 5 Defoe, Daniel, 7, 13, 42–​43, 140–​165; A New Voyage Round the World, 146–​149. See also Moll Flanders; Robinson Crusoe; Roxana Deleuze, Gilles, 9, 33, 39 Dimock, Wai Chee, 9, 32–​33 Dirlik, Arif, 21 Don Quixote, 7, 12, 42, 83–​108, 144–​145 Dream of the Red Chamber, The (Honglou Meng), 41, 48, 54, 179–​180 Dussel, Enrique, 18, 20–​21 East India Company (EIC), 140 Eckermann, Johann Peter, 2 ecomaterialist comparatism, 15 Engels, Frederick, 1, 6, 16 Eurocentrism, 3, 18 Fabian, Johannes, 5, 18 female images, 77, 159 Fielding, Henry, 47 “first modernity” (Iberian), 20, 83–​85 261

262

262 Index

First Opium War, 17, 25 Five Cardinal Relations (Confucianism), 66, 69–​72, 75–​76, 172–​173 Fletcher, Joseph, 1–​2, 4 “floating world” fiction, 13, 112–​114, 118–​120 Frank, Andre Gunder, 4, 23, 57 Fuggers, the, 92–​95 Gallagher, Catherine, 11 Glissant, Édouard, 9, 29–​30 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 2, 6, 13–​14, 47–​48, 167–​168; Wilhelm Meister, 179–​180 Goldmann, Lucien, 40 Goldstone, Jack, 4 Goody, Jack, 4 Greenblatt, Stephen, 11–​12 Guattari, Félix, 9, 33, 39 Hanan, Patrick, 41, 52 Hao qiu zhuan, 173–​174 Hayot, Eric, 31–​32 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (The Philosophy of History), 17 heterarchy, 33 heteroglossia, 9, 12–​13, 36 Hideyoshi, Toyotomi, 22, 114–​115 Higuchi, Ichiyō, 42, 113 Hobson, John M, 4 horizontal continuities, 1–​2, 3–​5, 11, 15, 180–​181 imagined communities, 9, 35–​36 imperial Spain, 12, 83–​87, 91–​95; relations to China, 100–​103 Jameson, Fredric, 8, 12, 35–​36 Jin Yun Qiao zhuan (Romance of the Golden Hairpin), 174 Johnson, Samuel, 176 Journey to the West, The (Xiyou ji), 53 Latour, Bruno, 9, 31 Lazarillo de Tormes, 12, 42, 82–​83 Lieberman, Victor, 4, 59

Life of an Amorous Man (Kōshoku ichidai otoko), 7, 13, 127–​138 literary geography: in Defoe, 146–​149, 153–​154; in Don Quixote, 87–​88; in The Plum in the Golden Vase, 66–​70; in Saikaku, 129–​130 Lu, Xun, 36, 54 Lukács, Georg, 8, 38–​41 Lusiads, The, 89 luxury goods (silk, spice, exotics), 27; in The Plum in the Golden Vase, 67–​70; in Saikaku, 130–​131; (silk) in Don Quixote, 103–​107 macrohistory, 4–​5 Mark, Karl, 1, 6, 16–​17, 141–​142; Theories of Surplus Value, 19 Markley, Robert, 25–​26, 51, 141 materiality: as bodily forces, 45; and sexuality, 45, 72–​74, 76, 159–​163 Mignolo, Walter, 19–​20 modernity: capitalism, 3, 6–​7, 19, 24, 59; “denial of coevalness,” 5, 18; early modernity, 6, 21; East Asian, 21; English, 26; as a Eurocentric concept, 18; Europe’s “two modernities,” 20–​21, 43, 83–​85; Japan, 110; late Ming China, 55–​61; modernity versus (Euro-​) Modernity, 6; Song China, 60 Moll Flanders, 13, 46, 159–​162 money and commerce, 7, 9; Golden Age Spain, 81; late Ming China, 56–​59 monoglossia, 9, 13 Moretti, Franco, 3, 28–​29, 38–​39 Naitō, Konan, 60 national allegories, 9, 35–​38 national problem of materiality, 8, 44, 114 networkedness, 31–​32 novel: and civil dynamics, 14, 35, 48–​49; and colonialism, 44, 144–​145; as a cross-​continental phenomenon, 6–14; and the nation, 8, 12, 32;

263

Index  263

realism, 6–​9, 28, 39, 43–​4 4, 54–​55, 82–​84, 107, 113, 140, 176–​177; “the rise of the novel,” 6, 13, 42–​43; Spanish and English origins, 7, 43–44, 144; theories, 8, 28, 38–​39 Orientalism, 4 Outlaws of the Marsh (Shuihu zhuan), 53–​54, 64–​65, 67 Ozaki, Kōyō, 42, 113 Percy, Thomas, 47 picaresque novels, 82–​83 planetarity, 2, 9, 28–​31 Plum in the Golden Vase, The, (Jin Ping Mei), 7, 12, 41, 52–​55, 62–​78 political unconsciousness, 12 Pomeranz, Kenneth, 4, 23 Porter, David, 25–​26 Potosí, 21–​22, 93–​97 Quevedo, Francisco Gómez de, 80–​81 Quijano, Anibal, 19 reification, 9–​10, 39–​40; “unreified reification,” 10, 45 Rémusat, Jean-​Pierre Abel, 47, 177–​178 “re-​Orient” comparative history, 4–​5, 20–​21, 23–​24, 59–​60 rhizome, 9, 33, 39 Richardson, Samuel, 13–​14, 47–​48, 171–​172 Robinson Crusoe, 7, 9, 35, 42–​43, 85, 140–​160 romance, 83–​92 Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The (Sanguo yanyi), 53 Roxana, 13, 46, 162–​164

Said, Edward, 4, 29, 40 Saikaku, Ihara, 7, 13, 41–​42, 110–​138 “second modernity” (Anglo-​Germanic), 20, 143 Shih, Shu-​mei, 29–​30 silver: in Don Quixote, 96–​98; in The Plum in the Golden Vase, 62–​66; in Robinson Crusoe, 144–​145; in Saikaku, 133–​134 silver trade, 6, 16, 21–​23, 42, 57–​58, 80–81, 92–​95, 102 Skinner, William, 60, 66 Smith, Adam (The Wealth of Nations), 16–​17, 23–​24 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 2, 9, 17, 28–​29 Tale of Genji, The, 42 “talent-​beauty” novels, 13–​14, 47–​48, 169–​177 Tokugawa Japan, 110–​138 transcendental homelessness, 8, 14 transmodernity, 18–​21 Tsubouchi, Shōyō, 113 vernacular cosmopolitanism, 9–​10, 34 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 3, 19–​2 0, 23–​2 4 Watt, Ian, 6, 8, 13, 38–​40, 140 Weber, Max, 59 Wong, Roy Bin, 4 Woolf, Virginia, 149–​150 world literature: as “global civil society,” 9–​10, 32–​33; and the novel, 39; Weltliteratur, 2–​3, 6, 13–​14, 16–​17, 47–​48 world market, 1, 15–​16, 107 world system analysis, 3–​5, 23

264

265

266

267

268

269

270