Chinese Literature Podcast VIII
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The Appeal of Uncle Tom's Cabin in Late Qing China
In this one, the CLP bros casually mention that they record all these in a church one of them is a member of. Is this part of their hyper-conservative (for almost anywhere but America) view of 20th century and contemporary politics? I don't want to say that every Christian is a bit right wing—that's not the way of it. Nevertheless, I wonder whether connections with diaspora and mainland Chinese Christendom are shaping these guys’ PoVs, their contacts and priorities. This might also partly explain why they're such babies about Ming dynasty porn. (I did think, ‘man they're Clean Cut in these, and also young to be married with kids.’) If this is what’s up, then honestly I kind of wish they'd clarified their position early on rather than leaving me to work out their entire epistemological-experiential framework like it’s some kind of easter egg.
In this episode, they also also offer a rather uncritical presentation of Taiwan as more authentically Chinese than the mainland (an argument they’re making essentially because in Taiwan, the Cultural Revolution didn’t disrupt the continuity of tradition). So what or who is Authentically Chinese in this figuration? I think the implication is ‘Han and upper class’, in the way a plantation or colonial manor reconstruction is sometimes spoken of as The Real America. But England ain’t ‘stately homes’, come on bruv.
The podcasters slightly lampshade this, because I think they know this is academically pretty dodgy to say. Yet they don’t instead engage with the elements of design, theme parkiness, artificial construction, constrained development and scale that are all necessary to a formulation of Taiwan as heritage industry Authentic. Not for the first time in this podcast, their Taiwan is innocent of history, unshaped by contrary ideological projects and material, international involvements. I feel their analysis would benefit from a comparative perspective on constructions of heritage in other contexts and how these intersect with class. The team announces that they’re aware of imagined or willed continuities, but for me, this serves as more of a protective disclaimer than signposting for an argument they go on to make. Ultimately, the CLP’s analysis comes off as wilfully naive on this point. Fundamentally, I can’t take seriously a claim that nearly the whole previous century of Chinese development is somehow illegitimate, because Reasons. These guys are always pulling this same shit, but they are the only people doing any kind of Chinese literature survey in English, so I have to keep eating this mess and hoping I get more vitamins out of it than mercury.
As for the nominal subject of this podcast, there’s an interesting section on tandem translation in Malaysian Chinese circles and the re-writing (or wildly loose translation) of Uncle Tom's Cabin for Chinese audiences. The translator in question was evidently producing some almost-contemporary Dickens translations, as well.
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This seems important for understanding how western literature (the aforementioned important Uncle Tom’s Cabin translation, and Dickens) entered Chinese cultural spaces, and that translation process.
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Supplement #2: Jonathan Spence’s The Search for Modern China
I appreciate that these supplements handle academic texts, that’s incredibly useful. At this point though, if these guys rec a modern historian I kind of have to take it as an anti-rec. I just find the podcast team thoroughly untrustworthy on this subject, so what led them to their patently politically-shaped takes is only useful in a diagnostic sense. Good to know! But.
This is also the second time at least they’ve talked about historians and literary scholars being very bad at one another’s disciplines. While that’s sometimes an issue, by and large I think they’re extremely conversant disciplines, and that there’s an abundance of genuinely engaging cross-field work? I don’t know, maybe this is a subfield issue.
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Pu Songling, Part 3: Painted Skin
The CLP guys seem very confused that a Daoist thinks a fly-swatter whisk will protect a man from further attacks by a succubus, and call this totally unexplained. Even I know the whisk is a classic Daoist spiritual tool for brushing away evil? You don’t explain crosses and garlic in every vampire story, either, because you don’t have to?
One of the CLP guys then goes, “In one of my favourite fantasy series, Garth Nix’s Sabriel, they have to force a demon into a bottle, which is very weird and inexplicable, much like this.” That’s just a witch bottle. It’s an incredibly common Western European magical tool, with a whole logic behind how it ‘works’. Their lack of knowledge here is strange. This is the podcasters’ own linguistic and cultural tradition, a book one of them claims to really like, and a literary subject on which their authority derives from engagement with purportedly-rigorous academic frameworks (in which context this podcast is a CV boost for them—it’s also monetised). Sometimes this podcast makes me see a case for a much more solid cross-subfield comp-lit education than even the US (relative to the UK) gives its undergrad and graduate students.
Some of the friction I feel with the speakers’ claims would be ameliorated simply by their taking the conversational attitude that they are presenting a very partial, incomplete knowledge of literature. While they sometimes lampshade their position with self-deprecating comments, they do tend to act as though they’re telling you everything about a subject rather than offering fragmentary reflections. It reminded me strongly of seeing, on Twitter yesterday, a guy offer up an entire piece on Labyrinth that insisted the baby theft was a plot hole of some kind, because he’d never heard of changeling children, somehow: I am begging white guys to learn like 3 things about their own folklore before publishing on it for money. In this case, I feel it would be more appropriate for the CLP guys to simply suggest that they themselves don’t understand the whisk’s presence rather than to insist that it’s a baffling inclusion, and that this inexplicability is specifically an authorial choice. They may well be as wrong about the whisk as they are about the entire concept of the witch bottle being ‘unfathomable’.
(If you want to know more about the witch bottle, the Pitt Rivers has some excellent examples, and should have more information on their site. Also the proceedings notes for the second (I believe?) Hidden Charms conference are free on academia.edu, and will give you a quite deep picture of ritual deposits in Western domestic magic. That, however, is moving from fairly general knowledge to something I wouldn’t necessarily expect non-specialists to fuck with.)
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Pu Songling, Part 2: The Painted Wall
The assertion this podcast makes that people would have needed to travel to far-off temple complexes to experience the technology of painting starts to ring a comp-lit klaxon in my ear. In Western medieval history, religious painting is highly parochial in most instantiations. There’s a lot of excellent writing on the medieval phenomenology of small churches and the liturgical experience; it would really surprise me if urban and rural Chinese religious practice did not include similar strategies. Such strategies would make visual art highly accessible throughout the land, even to non-literate people. That is one of the key communicative functions of painting, after all. I’d really like to see the speakers engage with this point of comparison, or simply local religious history, rather than building quite an extensive and slenderly-substantiated argument on the ‘novelty’ of visual experience in the 1600s.