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The social life of nations: a comparative study of turn-of-the-century American and Chinese utopian fiction, 1888-1906
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The social life of nations: a comparative study of turn-of-the-century American and Chinese utopian fiction, 1888-1906
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THE SOCIAL LIFE OF NATIONS: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF AMERICAN AND CHINESE UTOPIAN FICTION, 1888-1906 by Shao-ling Ma A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (COMPARATIVE LITERATURE) August 2012 Copyright 2012 Shao-ling Ma ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS One writes alone. However, this dissertation had never been, from start to finish, the work of a single person. The Dana and David Dornsife College Doctoral Fellowship Program, the Graduate School, and the Comparative Literature department of the University of Southern California have provided generous financial support throughout the duration of my Ph.D. study. The USC U.S.-China Institute has made possible my summer research project in Beijing, China in 2011. I am indebted to my dissertation advisor, Professor Peggy Kamuf, for her untiring support, supervision, and encouragement, and most of all for teaching me to become a better reader over the last six years. I would also like to thank the rest of my dissertation committee: Professors Akira Mizuta Lippit, John Carlos Rowe, and Dominic Cheung for giving me thoughtful and generous feedback, and for making the defense an inspiring and enjoyable process. Just as this dissertation is not simply borne out of the last stage of my doctoral research but the culmination of years of reading, writing, and sometimes-serendipitous findings, I am grateful to a group of scholars at USC and elsewhere who have made themselves indispensable over time. They include: Professors David Lloyd, Panivong Norindr, Karen Pinkus, Michael du Plessis, Anne McKnight, Alice Echols, Roberto Ignacio Diaz, and Jack Halberstam. Géraldine Fiss first introduced me to late Qing science fiction and graciously allowed me to cite from her unpublished manuscript for Chapter Four of this dissertation. I also wish to underscore the extent to which my thinking continues to be shaped by Professors John William Phillips and Ryan Bishop at the National University of Singapore. iii It goes without saying that my interest in the question of the social and the community has been sustained by the friendships around me. This dissertation owes indefinitely to Samuel Solomon’s incredible intellect, camaraderie, and appetite; Mayee Wong’s good humor and steadfastness; Lindsay Nelson’s kindness and patience; Seth Michelson’s spirited companionship; and Caterina Crisci’s beautiful sarcasm and loyalty. The support and intellectual engagements of Nada Ayad, Sandy Kim, Emilie Garrigou, Colin Dickey, Nicole Antebi, Oana Sabo, Adrienne Walser, Erin Sullivan, Ana Lee, Mary Traester, Ching Lim, and Jeremy Fernando have all helped to keep my feet on the ground. Last but not least, no words could adequately acknowledge the love and gratitude that I have for my parents, Li-shun and Yun-lan Ma, my sister, Shaowei, and my in-laws, Eddy and Susan Clark. I must not forget to recognize my nonhuman companions, Lil’ Bear, King Tubby, and Dennis for their patience when I was too busy to take them out for walks. And to my husband, Justin Clark, who coaxed, chaperoned, and cheered on this project like it was his own, I look forward to writing it all over again with him. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii ABSTRACT v PREFACE vii INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE: CONCEPTS AND METHODS IN THE INTERPRETATION OF TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY AMERICAN AND CHINESE UTOPIAN SOCIALITY 32 CHAPTER TWO: THE PRIMITIVE, ASIAN TIME-TRAVELER: A STUDY OF ACCUMULATION IN LOOKING BACKWARD AND LOOKING FURTHER BACKWARD 84 CHAPTER THREE: THE INVENTION OF NATIONALISM IN A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR’S COURT AND NEW STORY OF THE STONE (XIN SHITOU JI) 170 CHAPTER FOUR: TRANSPACIFIC SPIRIT TELEGRAPHY IN A TRAVELER FROM ALTRURIA AND “A TALE OF NEW MR. WINDBAG” 248 CONCLUSION 305 BIBLIOGRAPHY 323 v ABSTRACT My dissertation uncovers the under-explored intersection between American and Chinese literary utopianism from the years 1888 to 1906, during which the United States and China were caught between changing notions of nationhood and empire. As John Carlos Rowe observes, the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century United States was bound by the contradictory self-conceptions of a “powerful imperial desire and a profound anti- colonial temper.” Distancing itself from the colonialism of the Old World, American nationalism can be said to be part of a new global logic in which the Chinese found themselves since the first Opium War. Not colonized as part of a single European empire, China’s semi-colonial status signified the kind of emerging capitalist power relation of which U.S. involvement in Latin America and Asia was exemplary. I argue that American and Chinese utopian novels of the period combined seemingly conflicting ideals of nationhood and empire into fantastic and often dystopian visions of world unity. The absence of a comparative study of American and Chinese utopian fiction of the period is symptomatic, I argue, of a larger trend in transnational studies, which divorces the study of empire and nationhood from the larger problematic of the social. Instead of viewing the novels’ treatment of nationalism, imperialism and internationalism as separate and conflicting, I see them, following Frederic Jameson’s argument, as complementary group formations which are utopian insofar as they express the unity of a collective. The notion of a “social life of nations,” which gives my dissertation its title, alludes to the social relationality between nationhood, empire and ideas of a larger world unity. To the extent that nations venture forth and “meet” other nations, that they vi sometimes cooperate in good faith and more frequently fight with each other, one can say that even nations have social lives. Chapter One establishes the key concepts operative throughout the project, and the historicity of their interrelations in the time period in question: the Marxist dialectics between utopia and ideology, the concept of the social in late Qing intellectual thought, as well as American and Chinese views of nationalism, empire and internationalism. Chapter Two studies Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1886) and its “unofficial” dystopian sequel, Looking Further Backward (1890) by Arthur Dudley Vinton, and how the devices of sequels, successions and accumulations explain the role that individual memory plays in the social lives of the American nation. Chapter Three adapts Benedict Anderson’s famous thesis of the imagined community in order to argue for the invention of nationalism in Wu Jianren’s Xin shitou ji (New Story of the Stone) (1905-6) and Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). Chapter Four examines the figure of the utopian traveler as an impossible allegory for collective narration in William Dean Howells’ A Traveler from Altruria (1892-3) and Donghai Juwo (Xu Nianci)’s Xin faluo xiansheng tan (New Tales of Mr. Windbag) (1905). My Conclusion reflects on the significance of history for utopian fiction and makes the case for a historical-theoretical practice in the construction of China in theory and in China/Western comparative methodologies more generally. vii PREFACE In Being Singular Plural, Jean-Luc Nancy analyzes the ways in which the community and the idea of the social have been grounded in some notion of the individual subject or self. When society withdraws into a self-representation that is “the void of its own specularity” (47) and the being-social is reflected only in this scintillating play of images, what we have is Situationism’s conception of “the society of spectacles” where commodity fetishism or the dominance of capital more generally is the only real self- appropriation of social being (49). To this on-going retreat of the social, of which Situationism is only one symptom, Nancy asks, What does the impoverished word “society” now say when it is emptied of all “sociation” or “association,” not to mention emptied of the “communities” and “fraternities” that constitute our images of primitive life (the construction of which has, in general, shown itself to be fantastical)? (49, my emphasis) This dissertation is an attempt to revisit the notion of society at a time when it was neither impoverished nor primitive and when fantastical constructions of the social were still possible even as or precisely because some of its creators were driven by realistic notions of the “good society.” Like the Situationists in Nancy’s view who by seeking a deeper, more authentic “reality” of society did not carry through their intuition of the “appearance” of society as the only society there is (54), the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American and Chinese writers I study both question and affirm the social in their utopian creations. Turn-of-the-century American and Chinese utopian fiction instrumentalizes society as a step in a larger process that leads to the “hypostasis of togetherness or the common” (Nancy 59). This hypostasis constitutes what I call utopian sociality: the uneven relation between nationhood, empire, and ideas of world viii unity or internationalism. For these utopian writers, utopian thinking is a rethinking of the social or sociality where the essence of the social is, however, not society itself. As a result, to borrow from Nancy again, the “social” is never presentable under the heading of the “social” but only “under the heading of either a simple, extrinsic, and transitory ‘association,’ or of a transsocial presupposition” (ibid.). In the context of this present work, American and Chinese utopian sociality is presented through the nation, empire, and the world, with the last term serving the final representation of social totality. This is how the social comes to have such an unnamable relation with u-topia, or the non-place. It is perhaps not untimely to revisit and reformulate Margaret Thatcher’s famous dictum of the non-existence of society: “there is no such thing as utopia.” 1 INTRODUCTION After the Chinese discovered the world, their understanding of it developed in successive layers. First came their understanding of national strength, next their understanding of politics, now they are at the stage of understanding culture, and in the future they will understand society. -- Fu Sinian I. Overview This dissertation examines a period during which the United States and China were caught between changing notions of nationhood and empire. As John Carlos Rowe observes, the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century United States was bound by the contradictory self-conceptions of a “powerful imperial desire and a profound anti- colonial temper” (Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism 3). Distancing itself from the colonialism of the Old World, American nationalism was part of a new global logic in which the Chinese also found themselves since the first Opium War. Not colonized as part of a single European empire, China’s semi-colonial status signified the kind of emerging capitalist power relation of which U.S. involvement in Latin America and Asia was exemplary. I argue that American and Chinese utopian novels of this period combined seemingly conflicting ideals of nationhood and empire into fantastic and often dystopian visions of supranationalism and world governance. My research sheds new light on a previously neglected intersection in American and Chinese literary production from the years 1888 to 1906. Three years after Edward Bellamy’s utopian bestseller Looking Backward: 2000 – 1887 was published in Boston in 1889, the novel was serialized in a Shanghai missionary publication, the Globe Magazine (Wanguo gongbao), which translated “utopia” as “a world of great union” (datong zhi shi ) (Huters, Bringing the World 107). In his On Universal Principles (Renxue 2 ), Tan Sitong similarly referred to Looking Backward as exemplary of the philosophy of "great union" in the Li yun (244) 1 . Other readers of Bellamy’s work such as Liang Qichao, Kang Youwei, and Wu Jianren, in various degrees, shared this desire for the eventual disappearance of national boundaries. I do not wish to overstate the influence of the American novel on the first generation of Chinese reformers. However, it is reasonable to question how its predominantly national focus – Bellamy sets the novel entirely in Boston and his description of a limited “world” union, consisting of the United States, the European nations, Australia, Mexico and parts of South America takes up less than a page – is remolded to fit the Chinese writers’ vision of a futuristic world-wide utopia with traditional Confucian characteristics. Thus despite the influence that one late-nineteenth century American novel had on a number of late Qing Chinese utopian writings, I am less guided by the influence- reception model than I am by what I see as a theoretical gap between the American utopian writers’ preoccupation with the ideal nation on the one hand and their Chinese counterparts’ interest in an international utopianism on the other. While I distinguish the international aspect of these utopian novels from what is grouped under the currently popular study of transnationalism, my dissertation contributes to the latter’s theoretical moorings. I assert that the absence of a comparative study of American and Chinese utopian fiction of the period is symptomatic of a larger trend in transnational studies, which divorces the study of empire and nationhood from the larger problematic of the social. If we start from the position, already made available by the utopian novels, that 1 Unless otherwise indicated, all English translations of Chinese primary and secondary source materials are mine. 3 the nation-state, empire and supranational world are all utopian, then we can reposition all three as varied but by no means contradictory expressions of the social. I argue that what characterizes these novels as utopian is not their escapism or romanticism, but their ability to encapsulate the narration of nationhood, empire, and the supranational as different narrations of group formations and collective unities. The notion of a “social life of nations,” which gives my dissertation its title, alludes to the social relationality between nationhood, empire, and ideas of a larger world unity. To the extent that nations venture forth and “meet” other nations, and sometimes cooperate in good faith or more frequently fight with each other, one can say that even nations have social lives. As historical documents, the utopian works tell a different story of the period leading up to American global hegemony and China’s ascending influence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. My study begins with 1888, the year in which Looking Backward was published, and concludes with 1906 when the last installment of Wu Jianren’s New Story of the Stone (Xin shitouji) appeared in Nanfang bao (Southern Times). Although my choice of this timeframe supports the general claim that utopian and dystopian literature thrives during turbulent transition periods, I am ultimately more interested in how the historical period brings two disparate literary traditions into conversation with each other. That utopian fiction can flourish in one period and die off in another also applies to science fiction more generally if one follows, as I do, Darko Suvin’s definition of utopian fiction as a socio-economic sub-genre of the broader literary form (61). I also include dystopian literature within the sub-genre of utopian fiction. In the context of late nineteenth-century United States, dystopia is characterized as “satire of 4 the progressive tendencies of industrialism and parody of the popular genre of utopian fiction” (Pfaelzer, “Parody and Satire” 61). While Arthur Dudley Vinton’s Looking Further Backward is the only ostensibly dystopian work included in my study, I discuss how Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Wu’s New Story of the Stone (Xin shitouji), and Xu’s “A Tale of New Mr. Windbag” can also be read as critiques of utopia. In The Obsolete Necessity: America in Utopian Writings, 1888-1900, Kenneth M. Roemer lists over 200 titles in his sample of utopian novels, short utopian pieces and other related tracts published between 1888 to 1900. Recovering from the economic panic of 1873, the last two decades of the nineteenth century saw increasingly unequal distributions of wealth, tensions caused by growing immigration and racial differences, and the gradual disappearance of cheap, fertile land. The response to these developments was the numerous strikes at Haymarket Square, Pullman, and Homestead (Roemer 5). Even the more sacrosanct areas of religion and the family were assailed. John Fiske’s popular lectures on the nature of human progress and the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race, ministers’ sermons, and other articles in Arena, Forum, Atlantic, Harper’s and Century reflected Americans’ conflicting beliefs in religion and science; rising divorce rates heightened anxieties about family values (ibid.). In 1890, the U.S. Census officially announced the closing of the American frontier, an observation that Frederick Jackson Turner would lament, three years later, in his famous lecture delivered to the American Historical Association at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Yet just as the scale and grandeur of the 1893 World’s Fair boasted of American industrial optimism, 5 the late nineteenth century also enthralled utopian writers with its technological advancements, exciting prospects of city life, and social reforms, populist or progressivist, that offered solutions for the social ills of the era (ibid.). The White City, as the Columbian Exposition was popularly called, brought to life John Winthrop’s seventeenth-century invocation of a “city upon a hill.” It crystallized a “willed national activity to a determined, utopian goal” (qtd. in Ngai 60). The upsurge of literary utopianism fed on the period’s paradoxical combination: the desire both to change the United States and to preserve what was fundamentally unique about the country. American utopian fiction drew from the popularity of the domestic, sentimental romance, the popular reform novel and the “oral conventions of the pulpit, the lecture platform, and the stage” (Roemer 6). Many authors of utopian works emphasized in numerous prefaces, afterwords, and articles that they adopted the fictional form as “sugarcoating” for their realistic programs for the future (Roemer 3). With some notable exceptions, most late nineteenth-century utopian writers departed from the tradition of locating their utopias in an imaginary, non-existent place. Instead, they located their versions of the perfect society at a temporal remove, very often through the mechanism of time travel that projected present reality into a mythic past or future. This emphasis on the real space of utopia thus underscores the other Greek etymology of the word, the eu- topia, or good place. With both utopian and dystopian imaginations, the American frontier was then reopened to a historical-temporal one whereby history itself could be overcome for the ultimately perfect society. This is the case for most of the American utopian novels I will examine: Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Arthur Vinton’s 6 Looking Further Backward, and Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. That some of the novels situate their utopias in the United States allow their authors to deal directly with domestic problems such as industrialization, monopoly formation, immigration, and so forth. However it is just this geographical specificity that makes it difficult to associate the genre with American expansionist ideology and an internationalist perspective. Antonis Balasopoulos summarizes this difficulty: Overlooking the often complementary rather than antithetical status of insularity and expansionism in national self-fashioning, the study of U.S. utopian fiction during its late nineteenth-century apogee has consequently yielded to a comfortably ‘domestic’ framework of interpretation. (15) In contrast, it would be difficult for students of late Qing science fiction and literary utopianism to insist on a domestic framework of interpretation when almost all of such texts rejected insularity for visions of a strong Chinese race and nation leading the rest of the world. Such visions were direct responses to a waning Qing dynasty incapable of coping with rebellions, economic unrest, and external pressures. Science fiction in China was a Western import during the late nineteenth century, although the development of the genre has to be traced to new ways of thinking about fiction and the novelistic form more generally. In 1894, British missionary Timothy Richard translated and serialized in abridged form Bellamy’s Looking Backward (Wang Der-wei 273). Between 1903-1905, Lu Xun translated Jules Verne’s De la terre à la lune trajet en 97 heures et 20 minutes and Voyage au centre de la Terre (Xu Shan-e 50). Liang Qichao’s 1902 essay, “On the Relationship Between Fiction and Society” distinguishes between “idealistic fiction” and “realistic fiction.” In another essay published in the same year, Liang laid down further sub-genres of idealistic fiction that included “historical fiction, 7 “political fiction,” “philosophical-scientific fiction,” “military fiction,” “adventure fiction,” “detective fiction,” and so forth (Zhang Zhi 69). These categories were perceived as idealistic because of their ability to “journey to other worlds and change the air that one breathes” (ibid.) Specifically, “philosophical-scientific fiction” held “noble ideals and scientific observations” that were seen as being able to bring “progress to the world, encourage imaginative thought” (ibid.) Consequently, it became an important category featured in most late Qing fiction journals (ibid.). According to Zhang Zhi, the transition from “philosophical-scientific fiction” to its latter-day designation as “science fiction” reflected a general sense of confusion over literary genres and the need to distinguish between scientific and political-societal ideals (ibid.). Thus a volume of Liang’s journal, New Fiction, grouped Plato’s Republic and Verne’s 20000 Leagues Under the Sea together under the same heading of “political fiction” and Wu Jianren’s New Story of the Stone (Xin shitouji), which I will discuss in Chapter Three, was labeled “social fiction” (ibid.). Popular Western science fiction novels were not the only models from which Chinese utopian writers drew their inspiration. Classical Chinese utopian archetypes existed as early as the fourth century B.C., the most famous being Tao Qian’s Daoist paradise, the “Peach Blossom Spring.” At the same time, late Qing novels that do not belong to the science fiction or utopian genre, open with a utopian or dystopian landscape such as Liang Qichao’s The Future of New China, Yi Suo’s Huang Xiuqiu, and Zeng Pu’s A Flower in the Sea of Sins (Wang Der-wei 270). As Balasopoulos remarked about the American utopian novels of the time, the discovery of an idealized society – 8 especially when such a society co-exists as an alternative world within China itself – underscores the complementary rather than antithetical relation of insularity and expansionism in national self-fashioning. If turn-of-the-century American utopian fiction has been largely disregarded in American literary studies, science fiction at large is even more neglected by traditional scholarship on Chinese fiction of the period. This neglect is largely due to the May Fourth literati’s dismissal of the genre as inappropriate for the model of “literary science” that they were trying to institute (Wang Der-wei 253). Late Qing science fiction was regarded as being too fantasy-like and not scientific or modern enough for realism and naturalism, the two European literary forms that inspired the May Fourth writers. Opposing this tendency to treat late Qing fiction in general as a belated modernity, David Der-wei Wang argues that late Qing science fiction ought to be valued precisely as a “fantasy of science” that combined the tradition of fantasy writings with the new cognitive models and technological emphasis of science fiction (254-5). According to Wang, who prefers the term science fantasy to science fiction, the genre enacted “a new literary hermeneutics, a literary as well as an intellectual effort to grapple with fictional explorations of the frontiers of reality and truth” (255). In the case of utopian fiction, we can also add to the frontiers of reality and truth those of China and the world, the domestic and the foreign, and of the national and the international. Hence Joseph Levenson’s famous observation that China’s contracted from being a world to a nation in the world can also be seen as an expansion and extension from a previously restrictive worldview (qtd. in Tang, Global Space and the Nationalist 9 Discourse of Modernity 2). For Liang Qichao, China’s passage toward a nation in the world is indeed an expansion that opens up new room for growth. In his preface to “On Groups,” Liang tracks the progress of group formation through the Age of Disorder, the Age of Relative or Small Peace, and the Age of Grand Unity according to the classical Chinese Three-Age theory. Liang’s teacher, Kang Youwei, had earlier adapted this Three-Age theory to Buddhism, Taoism, and Western utopian thought in his utopian treatise The Book of Datong. 2 According to Kang, the first age is dominated by inter- state rivalry, the second age progresses to more inter-state cooperation and international tribunals, and finally, the third age will see the withering away of all nation-state boundaries and the establishment of a world government. In Liang’s development of Kang’s utopian schema, the gradual dissolution of the nation state is rephrased in terms of the evolution of group formations. There are many nations in the world [tian xia], divided between one’s own group and those of others. Accordingly, in an Age of Chaos, groups are more individualistic. In an Age of Grand Unity, groups must be social. When individualism and individualism meet, there can be survival. But when individualism and sociality meet, one can rule. (93) In Liang’s view, the Western nations, for all their strengths, were still ruling according to the grouping of nations and not yet by the grouping of the world [tian xia]. Unambiguously Liang declares that “the social, or the group, is the logic of the world 2 I will return to Kang’s utopian treatise in Chapter One. Besides the influence of Kang’s utopian treatise on Liang, Yan Fu’s translation of Spencerian evolutionary theories clearly dominates Liang’s developmental view of the social. The three stages of group formations work by way of the survival of the fittest. Barbaric sociality gives way to civilizational sociality, and the progression of the world is dependent upon the increasing strength of sociality. There does not seem to be room for heterogeneity, and thus sociality in Liang’s view, once attained in the age of Grand Unity, is homogeneous through and through. This is an unmistakable limit in the utopian internationalism of the time that, I argue, utopian fiction renders more ambivalent. 10 [tian xia] as such.” This dissertation takes changing global relations as a condition upon which national differences appear as self-evident, as well as a flexible space where American and Chinese utopian writers play out their imaginations of the world. 3 While U.S. expansionist ideology has been richly explored and New American Studies has established its claim as a strong transnational and comparative discipline, it remains a challenge to define China’s “foreign policy” in the late nineteenth century. A common response is to say that China simply had none, given the crumbling state of the late Qing empire and the encroachment of foreign hegemony through the two Opium Wars, the Sino-Japanese War, and the Boxer Rebellion. There can be nothing resembling foreign policy if there is no existence of a strong nation-state to ensure the very frontier between the domestic and the foreign in the first place. Perhaps a better way of approaching the question of the relation between turn-of-the-century utopian fiction and an international perspective is to impute to the nation-state a flexible sociality that spills over to both imperialism and world-formations. Is it possible to call for a New Chinese 3 To take the world as a point of departure for my comparative study of American and Chinese utopias is to heed Marx’s finding that the world market “forms the presupposition as well as [production’s] substratum” (Grundrisse 227). Although the world market often appears as the culmination of an investigation into political economy that begins with the basic components of capitalist wealth, with the commodity as in Capital I or with money as in Grundrisse, this order of presuppositions and results is actually a problem of Marx’s dialectical method, which he explains in the preface to the second edition of Capital I. There, he distinguishes between the method of inquiry and method of presentation: the former presents the ideal as if it is an a priori construction of the material world, whereas it is the latter that truly analyzes the material world in its different forms of development. Similarly, the world market appears to be the end result of the development of the capitalist economy, whereas it is the point of departure in reality. Marx explains in the Grundrisse in the section “The Method of Political Economy”: The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point of departure in reality and also the point of departure for observation [Anschauung] and conception (101). 11 Studies in the late Qing period along the lines of the New American Studies, or has such a call been preempted by the assumption that we should first “wait” for the “maturing” of the discipline of Chinese studies in North American academia, as if the transnational turn in any national literary tradition has to stand in line behind its national progenitor? 4 As Liang’s essay argues, the logic of the world lies in the social, or the group, whose meaning, constituent parts, and dynamics are far from exhausted in the nation-state. It is with this “logic of the world” that my study of turn-of-the-century American and Chinese utopian fiction begins. II. Speculations on the Social At this point, a possible objection to my approach might be: “how can you claim a relation between utopian novels and a global historical problematic, when it’s obvious that the novels you discuss are concerned with domestic problems and not with questions beyond the nation-state? Even if Arthur Vinton’s Looking Further Backward is about the fear of racial difference and Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, well, as the title makes obvious, deals with the clash between the New and Old Worlds, aren’t they more about the Americanization of the world rather than actual interrelationships between countries? The same goes for the Chinese novels of the time. Wu’s New Story of the Stone and Xu Nianci’s “A Tale of New Mr. Windbag” do not feature any central Western characters. Characters traveling in an air balloon in Huangjiang diaosou’s Moon Colony do venture to the United States and other foreign places, but their stays there are merely episodic. Perhaps these utopian novels cannot reflect debates around international 4 Shu-Mei Shih’s Visuality and Identity makes a strong case for transnational, Sinophone studies but its focus is on the late-twentieth-century Chinese visual culture. 12 relations because they do not adequately engage with politics in the first place; they are all too intent on looking for the perfect society instead! In a way these utopian novels are really more like Victorian social problem novels – if only they were real!” My straw man’s critique about the predominance of non-realist, social concerns in these turn-of-the-century utopian novels is of course a parody of an intellectual blind- spot. A Marxist approach to literature such as Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey’s study of literary effects that stage an imaginary solution to ideological contradictions, or a non-Marxist one such as Darko Suvin’s definition of utopian novels as an “estrangement arising out of an alternative historical hypothesis,” can offer much insight into the global historical problematic in which utopian novels are embedded. I leave the actual discussion of these theories to Chapter One. For the time being, the straw man’s critique highlights two issues that, upon further investigation, help to support the aims of my study. First, it assumes that something like international relations is a matter of politics, whatever the latter might mean. This assumption rests on the further assumption that nation-states are the only actors in global relations, an assumption bequeathed by the legacy of realist and neo-realist schools of international relations. The second issue can be elaborated in the following manner: the depiction of a perfect society, as in utopian novels, risks becoming apolitical since everything is so perfect as to render complex political mechanisms obsolete. In sum, the reservation of internationalism for politics and the characterization of utopian novels as apolitical presume a clear understanding of what politics and the political mean, insofar as the latter denotes whatever the “social” is not. 13 Discussing the apolitical tendency in utopian novels, John F. Kasson, in his study of the machine-like efficiency of Bellamy’s technocratic utopia, writes: “Since the possibility of conflicts of interest is denied, no provision is made for political dissent. Indeed, Bellamy sought to eliminate politics altogether . . .” (198). As the protagonist Julian West learns in the year 2000, most of the duties of the state government are rendered superfluous; without need for an army, navy or any military organization, its only task is to provide for the immediate needs of every citizen (Bellamy 29). Indeed, the spell of conformity, freedom from competition, and the lack of political disagreements often make late nineteenth-century American utopias appear to border on dystopic bleakness. Like Looking Backward, Howells’ A Traveler from Altruria emphasizes Altruria’s peaceful transition to a socialist state almost in a blink of the eye. Because it casts revolutions as instantaneous evolutions, it is no wonder that Kasson describes Bellamy’s utopia as a depoliticized one. The same problem may be found in Liang Qichao’s The Future of New China, one of whose influences may be traced to Bellamy’s novel. Liang’s novel is an unfinished work in which the future China has been reached in advance through a flashback narration, leaving its readers uncertain as to what has actually happened that makes the future of a “New China” possible. We may go further to suggest that these utopian novels are all about society, the perfect society, and not about the politics of such a society. But just what does this statement really mean? What does it mean to suggest, even as a speculation, that a novel is depoliticized to the extent that it is “all social”? 14 A strictly “social” perspective on human existence, to put it in the simplest terms, has been denigrated for its purely economical functionality – one that is linked with Marxist thought in its crudest, most popularly received form. Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition, comes close to an attempt to theorize the social. She associates the rise of the social realm with the rise of the household or of economic activities to the public realm (28). Such a view of the social fits well with Bellamy’s description of the perfected state as one that operates “as a family, a vital union, a common life” (123). However on the whole, Arendt’s thoughts on the social are far from concise. Most of the time, it occupies a symbolic role in her argument, a metaphor she employs to prop up its antithesis, that is, political action. Hanna Fenichel Pitkin sums up Arendt’s peculiar usage of the social pertinently: The Human Condition’s answer to the alarming situation that we moderns have found ourselves in seems to be society, the social (3). Moreover, “Arendt depicts it as a living, autonomous agent determined to dominate human beings, absorb them, and render them helpless” (Pitkin 3). In fact, so monstrous is this living thing that Arendt hypostasizes the adjective social into a noun and associates it with verbs such as “to absorb,” “to devour,” “grow,” “pervert” and “conquer” (Pitkin 3-4). Jean Baudrillard’s In The Shadow of the Silent Majorities has a more complicated understanding of the social, defining it as a system of representation whereby the signified is the people (45-6). According to Baudrillard, the social became invested in the political in the eighteenth century, or what he calls “the golden age of bourgeois representative systems” (46). Ultimately, Baudrillard’s use of the social does not differ 15 much from Arendt’s. Both imbue it with a life of its own, hypostatized as a noun, and as an unfortunate undermining of the political by Marxism. Marxist thought, with its successive developments, inaugurated the end of the political and its particular energy. Here began the absolute hegemony of the social and the economic, and the compulsion, on the part of the political, to become the legislative, institutional, executive mirror of the social. The autonomy of the political was inversely proportional to the growing hegemony of the social. (46) Why are we less familiar with the use of the social as a noun when the same use for the political is so recognizable? Despite its bad name, I adopt the hypostatized form of the social as a noun and dissociate it from its negative definition as whatever the political is not. I use the social in its straightforward meaning as derived from its etymology, namely what relates to society, associations, collectives and group formations, and as a form of communitarianism, being-together, and collective solidarity in general. But the most important questions remain: can there be a concept of the social that is not the mere negation or exclusion of the political? Furthermore, what does this concept of the social, if we can indeed call it a concept, have to do with a thinking of the world? To answer these questions, I turn to the most concise political theory of the concept of the political, that of Carl Schmitt. As is well known, the steps in Schmitt’s definition of the concept first involves a patient teasing out of the political from other associated concepts. The system of hierarchy and subordination is such that every concept worthy of its name, including the social, finds itself enmeshed in it. First, by wresting the definition of the political away from the presupposed concept of the state, Schmitt also exposes the misconstrued 16 opposition between the political and the social. 5 Schmitt does not oppose the interdependence of the spheres of political existence but the derivation of the essence of the political from other endeavors of human thought. He writes, “the equation state = politics becomes erroneous and deceptive at exactly the moment when state and society penetrate each other” (22). The mistake thus lies in confusing a sphere of political existence with its essence which depoliticizes the political itself. “The political must therefore rest on its own ultimate distinctions, to which all action with a specifically political meaning can be traced” (26). The question for us is whether Schmitt might agree that the social is to be distinguished from society at large. His answer would be yes insofar as the former, like the political, can only be defined by specifically social categories that do not rely on other endeavors of human thought and action. However, it does not take long to realize that, for Schmitt, a definition of the social is included in that of the political. “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy” (26) – and so begins one of the most succinct and yet controversial definitions laid out in twentieth-century political theory. It must be clarified, however, that Schmitt poses this definition in the sense of a “criterion” not derived from other criteria, and not as an “exhaustive definition or one indicative of substantial content” (26). It is here in Schmitt’s further definition of the criteria that I situate my understanding of the social: the distinction of friend and enemy means “the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissociation” 5 This is similar, in part, to Hardt and Negri’s claim in Multitude (78). 17 (26). In my opinion, the social is simply a union or separation, an association or dissociation that is made intense to “the utmost degree” by the concept of the political as defined by Schmitt. Recall once more that Schmitt is concerned neither with how such groupings are formed, nor with how these antithetical forms may give rise to other substantial content, but only with the condition they are not derived from other criteria. The “utmost degree of intensity” here refers to the absolute situation in which “only the actual participants can correctly recognize, understand, and judge the concrete situation and settle an extreme case of conflict” (27, my emphasis). Schmitt’s notions of the decision and of the definition of the sovereign as the one who decides on the exception are crucial. This is evident as we proceed to read: This [friend-enemy] grouping is therefore always the decisive, human grouping, the political entity. If such an entity exists at all, it is always the decisive entity, and it is sovereign in the sense that the decision about the critical situation, even if it is the exception, must always necessarily reside here. (38) The notion of the sovereign exception is of course central to Schmitt’s overall thought, which I do not elaborate because it is outside the scope of this dissertation. For my purposes, it suffices to understand why Schmitt takes pains to distinguish the political from the state, society and any other existential spheres of human endeavors. Any association of that nature is merely social in the loose sense of the word: human groupings are not yet political unless their distinctiveness is intensified to the utmost degree. “The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping” (29). Perhaps this is why, even more so than the concept of the political, that of the social has never been strictly defined. After The 18 Concept of the Political, it seems that the social, like the moral, aesthetic, economic, is merely a loose or weak sense of the political. But what if there is only a “loose” or “weak” definition of the social? This does not mean that the social would then be a mere derivation of Schmitt’s concept of the political. It does not even mean, or is it relevant, that such a derivation would render any attempt to define the social disagreeable to Schmitt’s strict standards for definitions. Everything hinges on the extent to which this “loose” or “weak” definition of the social undercuts the “strong” sense of the political that Schmitt goes to great lengths to preserve. By “strong” I refer to the self- or meta-defining characteristic of the political that in turn makes the distinction between friend and enemy distinct from other distinctions, that is, other antitheses such as that of beautiful and ugly, profitable and unprofitable, and so on (26). Simply put, the political has that self-defining, self-distinctive register that Schmitt constantly elevates above other concepts such as the moral, the aesthetic, and the economic. It becomes virtually impossible to distinguish the form of the political from its content: the distinction between the political and the non-political would amount to a distinction between friend and enemy, which would in turn make the first distinction a distinctly political one. It is as if the aim in defining the political is to have no further need for definitions when everything does indeed become intensified to the utmost degree. When the religious or the moral becomes “decisive” about its friend-or-enemy, it is no longer purely religious, moral, or economic, but political (37). Any distinction, decision or definition, if it would be a strong one, would have to be political. Schmitt 19 does not waver on this: “nothing can escape this logical conclusion of the political” (36). If a concept of the social is henceforth a weak sense of the concept of the political, it is not because the former lacks its own ultimate distinctions but that it challenges the very idea of distinctions, differences, and mediation that define, as we have seen, the workings of the political. Most of all, this understanding of the social – let’s no longer call it a concept in Schmitt’s sense of the word – puts into doubt the kind of presupposed political decision that must always already be made before the “ever present possibility of combat” (34). Schmitt argues that the “real possibility” of a friend-enemy grouping, that is, to repeat, the real possibility of a becoming-political of “weak” social formations, is war (35). I wish to examine this repeated evocation of war as “real possibility” (Schmitt also relies on phrases such as “the exceptional case,” the “most extreme consequence,” etc.,), via Jacques Derrida’s careful reading of the same text in The Politics of Friendship. First, it is necessary to quote from Schmitt on the connection between the political decision and war, and what is implied there for my speculations on the social in relation to a thinking of the world. A world in which the possibility of war is utterly eliminated, a completely pacified globe, would be a world without politics. It is conceivable that such a world might contain many very interesting antitheses and contrasts, competition and intrigues of every kind, but there would not be a meaningful antithesis whereby men could be required to sacrifice life, authorized to shed blood, and kill other human beings. For the definition of the political, it is here even irrelevant whether such a world without politics is desirable as an ideal situation. The phenomenon of the political can be understood only in the context of the ever present possibility of the friend-and-enemy grouping, regardless of the aspects which this possibility implies for morality, aesthetics, and economics (35, my emphasis). 20 A weak definition of the social, amid the political grouping of nation-states according to friends and enemies, finally sneaks up onto the grand stage of the world. But surely such a world would have no room for the social. We are here dealing with a circular situation. If one follows the argument that the possibility of war is the possibility of the “meaningful antithesis” of the friend-enemy grouping, then the understanding of the social that I have been proposing would at the same time defer the actuality of this “ever present possibility.” However such a non-decisive and non-distinctive world will then imply a world without politics – sociality will still give rise to, as Schmitt optimistically admits (or pessimistically, depending on, precisely one’s “politics”), “very interesting antitheses and contrasts, but such a world will no doubt be depoliticized” (35). Are we ready to take such risks? But is not the possibility of depoliticization also part of the “ever present possibility” of the political? Is depoliticization not an exception to the rule, which all the more makes the rule? Derrida drives home this aporia in Schmitt’s self- defining, self-distinctive concept of the political as “the oscillation and the association between actuality/effectivity and possibility” (128, my emphasis). Derrida proceeds to explain that this simultaneous oscillation and association makes for a strategy that is both “original (a displacement of the traditional concept of possibility) and classic (in the recourse to a condition of possibility in a transcendental-ontological type of analysis)” (124-5). I contend that utopias, by their construction of an imaginary society, put to work a notion of the social that because of the reference to presently existing society, oscillates between actuality/effectivity and possibility. 21 The more exceptional are war, hostility and the political event, the more they signal the ever present possibility of the friend-enemy grouping. By the same logic, the more exceptional is a world without politics – a world that is entirely, and merely “social” – the more it signals the ever present possibility of the political. Consequently, the “ever present possibility” of a union or separation, an association or dissociation that is not made intense to “the utmost degree” contaminates the concept of the political from the beginning. Hence if Schmitt were to take his conclusion to its most logical end, he would have to admit to “having to measure politicization in terms of the degree of depoliticization” (Derrida, Politics 129). Derrida is right to identify war as the telos of the political life (131). And to extend Derrida’s reading, it will not be unreasonable to find depoliticization at the other end of this political telos, indecision as the oscillation and association between actuality/effectivity and possibility, and a non-present, which is not even a modification of the present, that marks the rule of the “ever present.” Here, Derrida’s translation of Schmitt’s original German phrasing is crucial. “‘The sole remaining question’ is that of knowing if the friend/enemy grouping which determines the opposition as purely and solely political (not religious, moral, or economic [and I might add, not social] ‘is or is not present as possibility or as real actuality/effectivity’” (131). George Schwab’s translation of The Concept of the Political simply renders the sentence as “… whether such a friend-and-enemy grouping is really at hand” (37), which misses the entire syntactical ambiguity that Derrida goes on to remark. The decision of this “sole remaining question” is not between the order of presence or the order of modalities of this presence (real or effective/actual possibility) but simply between 22 present and non-present (123). Derrida critically adds: perhaps presence itself is spectral (132). In any case, one no longer knows for sure. Therein lies the maddening possibility for depoliticization. No doubt such a telos is ultimately utopian for Schmitt since he is convinced that even if a nation declares its friendship for the rest of the world, another people will appear to make the friend-enemy distinction and take over political rule (51-2). I neither intend to reach an understanding of the social through world pacifism nor am I aiming to depict a telos of the social. Rather, I am arguing that a thinking of the world is but also possible through a thinking of the political as long as the latter is in fact ruled by the exception of depoliticization or socilalization. Schmitt clarifies, a few pages later, that this utopian sociality is evident in the “correct and honest” use of the German word for international. Distinguished from the word interstate, an international movement is that which goes beyond the borders of states and “ignore[s] the territorial integrity, impenetrability, and impermeability of existing states as, for example, the Third International” (56, my emphasis). That an existing example of a depoliticized universal society is given here does not seem to contradict Schmitt’s general rule that no depoliticization can occur. Yet besides this instance of the Socialist Third International, Schmitt assigns very little importance to Marxism, except as a “most effective example” of the friend-enemy antithesis: bourgeoisie and proletariat (74). However, I only need to point to “On the Jewish Question” where Marx criticizes the limits of “political” emancipation for being the expression of man’s separation from his community, in order to show Schmitt’s erroneous summary of Marxism. The antithesis between bourgeoisie and proletariat is not 23 for Marx, as Schmitt claims, a concentration of “all antagonisms of world history” (74). The real antithesis is between capital and labor, which, as we know, are not antithetical but are two sides of the one and same relation, that is, they are reproductive of one another. Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular situation, only when man has recognized and organized his “own powers” as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished. (Marx, “On the Jewish Question” 46) According to Marx, political power is in fact a weak form of social power insofar as it separates man from his species-being. Isn’t this implied in Schmitt’s very definition of the political, in the extreme possibility of political groupings? To return to the question I posed earlier in this section: can there be a concept of the social that is not the mere negation or exclusion of the political? My response would be “no,” indeed the social cannot be dissociated from the political, but only because it challenges the very idea of distinctions, differences, and mediation that define the workings of the political. The aporia that Derrida identifies in Schmitt is just as pertinent for my speculation on the social thus far. “But no politics has ever been adequate to its concept . . . the inadequation to the concept happens to belong to the concept itself” (114). Is it still necessary to point out how such an inadequation frustrates Schmitt’s methodological-rhetorical account at every turn? To his question “which social entity (if I am permitted to use here the imprecise liberal concept of the ‘social’) decides the extreme case and determines the decisive friend-and-enemy grouping?” (43), we might respond: the social is precisely that 24 whose very indecision lies at the heart of its associations and groupings. This is not to say – and here we must warn ourselves against the psychologizing tendency that treats a group as “indecisive” in the common sense of the word – that sociality does not “know” who its friends-and-enemies are, but that such a decision might be suspended, contradicted, and rendered passive at every turn. Once we accept that there is only a “weak” definition of the social, we can then gain a non-totalistic understanding of all group formations that can be narrated rather than merely conceptualized. III. Marx’s Narration of the Social In “On the Jewish Question” as well as other earlier writings, Marx puts forward a significant distinction whose specific terms he will modify in his later writings. Starting from the critique of religion, Marx distinguishes between a partial, merely political emancipation that involves a state’s emancipation from religion, and a complete, human emancipation that censures the state itself for being the secular basis of religiosity (40). Similarly in the 1844 Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx differentiates a partial, political revolution from a radical, universal human revolution (139). This emphasis on the “human” has become characteristic of Marx’s early, humanist phase. Later as he concentrates on the critique of capitalism, Marx directly addresses the question of any emancipation from or revolution of the constitution of society at large, and formulates a theory of sociality that does not presuppose any heuristic definition of human nature or natural rights. It thus departs from the premises of traditional social contractual philosophies. Debates as to whether Marx’s thought can justifiably be divided into two clear periods fall outside the purview of this 25 project; I argue, however, that despite Marx’s subsequent abandonment of Feuerbach’s notion of “species-being” and other related expressions in his later works, the overall tenor of his observations on society remains generally consistent. In the Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx’s criticism of a partial, merely political revolution belongs to the larger response to what he sees as Hegel’s formal separation of the political state and civil society. In France, such a political revolution might take place if one class of civil society could merge and fraternize with the whole society as its general representative -- “only in the name of the universal rights of society can a particular class lay claim to universal dominance” (140). The case of Germany, on the other hand, was different. Since it lacked a class that would “mark it as the negative representation of society,” it would not be capable of a political revolution (140). Interestingly and as we will see, what Germany supposedly lacked it made up for more than adequately; while in France partial, political emancipation could lead to universal, human emancipation, in Germany the latter was the “conditio sine qua non” for the former (141). Marx gives the reason for this by way of an analogy to narrative form: The relation of the various sections of German society is therefore not dramatic but epic. Each of them begins to be aware of itself and begins to establish itself with its particular claims beside the others, not as soon as it is oppressed, but as soon as the circumstances independent of its actions create a lower social substratum against which it can in turn exert its pressure. (140, my emphasis) Whereas dramatic form tells the story of how a sphere of society first becomes oppressed by a subjugating class and in its liberation from the latter comes to stand for the whole of society, epic form conceives of an entirely different ordering of society wherein each set 26 of relations only exists because material conditions independent of its actions have given rise to a “lower social substratum” that is, strictly speaking, not even a part of civil society. Ernesto Laclau’s reading of the same essay summarizes the bifurcation in the Marxist tradition of emancipatory politics as follows. On the one hand, universal emancipation means the direct reconciliation of society with its own essence without any mediation (51). On the other hand, partial, political emancipation is achieved only through its transient identification with the aims of a particular social actor, which signifies a “contingent universality constitutively requiring political mediation and relations of representation” (51). It is this second view of emancipation that Laclau attributes to Gramsci’s work on hegemonic universality – a universality contaminated with particularity. However, I would argue that Laclau, by overlooking Marx’s distinct characterization of society in terms of narrative form, is too quick to conclude that the epic form of society necessarily means the dissolution of all particularities. To return to Marx, the proletariat is “a class in civil society that is not of civil society, an estate that is the dissolution of all estates” and most significant, it is “the dissolution of society existing as a particular class” (141-2). The last phrase approximates to what would be famously known as the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” but this oft- misunderstood phrase must not distract from what we are presently following as Marx’s “narration” of the social. Just as Marx is not charging Philosophy of Right with empirical inaccuracy but is concerned with, as Joseph O’Malley rightly remarks, “Hegel’s way of considering and manner of speaking about political society” (xxxiii), I am not interested in verifying Marx’s depiction of French and German societies. Instead, what guides this 27 project is the possibility of understanding societies as narrative forms and the implications this understanding holds for the development of the novel. In the 1962 preface to The Theory of the Novel, Georg Lukács argues that forms are not a constraint but a “becoming conscious, the coming to the surface of” the totality of being (34). This, however, does not mean that a form such as the epic, whose object is life itself, is opposed to drama’s object which is essence and which thus merely reflects life. “The concept of totality for the epic is not a transcendent one, as it is in drama; it is not born out of the form itself, but is empirical and metaphysical, combining transcendence and immanence inseparably within itself” (49). In light of Marx’s description of German society, the latter, like the epic, cannot transcend life as it is materially conditioned under capitalism without each individual section first becoming aware of itself and establishing its claims besides the others (Contribution, 140). In contrast, the particular, subjugated class such as that in France cannot be the subject of a universal emancipation because by immediately identifying itself with society and, in doing so, standing for and representing the whole of society, the particularity of each section of society is not allowed first to establish itself. Such a subject, to put it in Lukácsian terms, can be the carrier of transcendental but not dialectical synthesis. A particular class such as the French bourgeoisie can very well “contain all the conditions for totality within its own structure and transform its own limitations into the frontiers of the world,” but –here Lukács and Marx reach the same conclusion – “such a subject cannot write an epic” (Lukács 54). 28 Insofar as we detect an emerging theory of aesthetics in Marx’s 1844 writing that finds one of its most important elaborations in Lukács’ 1914-5 work, to say that Marx’s view of society contributed, in varying degrees, to subsequent debates about the role of art is simply to state the obvious. What is not immediately apparent and needs to be explored, however, is how Marx accentuates the unstable, aporetic structure of the social and in doing so undercuts the totalizing tendencies associated with the Marxist tradition. As we have seen, it is this association that Arendt makes in The Human Condition, which leads Pitkin to use the metaphor of the monstrous “Blob” in 1950s science-fiction films to describe her definition of the social. For the relations of each section of German society to belong to the epic and subsequently to be conducive of the kind of universal, human emancipation that Marx has in mind, and for the extensive totality that Lukács proposes for the epic form, it is necessary that there be a “class in civil society that is not of civil society” (Contribution, 141; emphasis added). Such a proletariat class differs from the French representative class in that it does not stand for totality as a part stands for a whole; it is itself outside of society. The proletariat, as “an estate which is the dissolution of all estates,” shows that the very incompletion of society is the condition of possibility for a narration of society. As it turns out, the epic that Marx attributes to German society takes the specific form of the novel in Lukács’ study: “the novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning of life has become a problem, yet which still thinks of totality” (56). The creation of a “lower social substratum” that Marx analyzes as the rise of the proletarian class creates the totality, 29 which was previously not directly given, at the same time as it destroys it. Unlike conditions within French society, German society cannot represent the totality of society due to the existence of a class that is only “in” civil society by not being of it (141). In the terms of Schmitt’s analysis, this concept of society is really a weak concept of the political. If the “political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping” (29), the antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie can only approach the “most extreme point” by dissolving the very antagonism itself. And this is indeed what happens when we understand Marx’s study of society as a narrative form: this revolutionary society or “the epic of an age” will culminate in the dissolution of the very totality of the society that was previously concealed. In other words, the ultimate attainment of social power, for Marx, would also result in a de- socialization, which in Schmitt’s language is no less than the “ever present possibility” of the social. This is why I affirm that there is only a “weak” concept of the social. As for Laclau, his reading of a complete dissolution of societal differences only works if the relation of constitutive parts is synecdochal. However when the tropological movements between constitutive parts is put into motion by a part that is outside of the whole – a society outside of the traditional reference of a domestic society in the form of an international society – what we have is a very different logic of the social that I hope to work out through my readings of the utopian fictions in the following chapters. I describe the utopian novels’ incomplete narration of the social as enacting forms of utopian 30 sociality that combine the challenges of nationhood or empire into varying ideals of inter- or supra-nationalism. It is this very incomplete and indecisive operation that sustains the social life of nations. IV. Chapter Outline Rather than follow a chronological order, I organize my five chapters in conceptual clusters that group certain American and Chinese novels according to their varying emphasis on questions of nationalism, imperialism and internationalism. Chapter One, “A Review of Concepts and Methods in the Interpretation of Turn-of-the-Century American and Chinese Utopian Sociality” establishes the key concepts operative throughout the project and the historicity of their interrelations in the time period in question: the dialectic between utopia and ideology, the concept of the social in late Qing thinkers such as Liang Qichao and Kang Youwei, American exceptionalism, Chinese semicolonialism, nationalism and internationalism. Chapter Two, “The Primitive Time-Traveler: A Study of Asiatic Accumulation in Looking Backward and Looking Further Backward” studies Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1886) and its “unofficial” dystopian sequel, Looking Further Backward (1890) by Arthur Dudley Vinton. To the extent that Vinton draws on Julian’s pre-utopian experience plotted in Looking Backward, Looking Further Backward does not just succeed Bellamy’s work; it considers the question of succession as part of its argument against utopia. This chapter studies the devices of sequels, successions and accumulations in order to explain the role that individual memory plays in the social lives of the American nation. 31 Chapter Three, “The Invention of Nationalism in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and New Story of the Stone (Xin shitouji)” examines the invention of nationalism in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and Wu Jianren’s New Story of the Stone (1905-6). I adapt Benedict Anderson’s famous thesis of the imagined community to show how both novels invent the nation-state with technology, as well as with the fictive plays of individual identity through the time-travel narrative. Chapter Four, “Transpacific Spirit Telegraphy: The Social Narration of Utopia in A Traveler from Altruria and “A Tale of New Mr. Windbag” analyzes the role of the first person narrator in what I term as the social narration of utopia in William Dean Howells’ A Traveler from Altruria (1892-3), and Xu Nianci (Donghai juewo)’s “A Tale of New Mr. Windbag” (“Xin faluoxianshengtan”) (1905). I argue that this social narration of utopia must be understood in light of the turn-of-the-century transpacific fascination with both the psychic forces of communication and new means of telecommunications such as the telegraph. My conclusion reflects on the relevance of my work on contemporary responses to time travel and alternate realities, and makes the case for a historical-theoretical practice in the construction of China in theory and in China/Western comparative methodologies more generally. 32 CHAPTER ONE: CONCEPTS AND METHODS IN THE INTERPRETATION OF TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY AMERICAN AND CHINESE UTOPIAN SOCIALITY Certainly a conception of the world is implicit in every prediction. -- Antonio Gramsci I. The Dialectics of Utopia and Ideology Marx and Engels’ denunciation of utopian socialism as unreal or the unscientific in favor of actual communist revolution in The Communist Manifesto and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific has provoked considerable debate around the fraught relation between Marxism and utopia studies. The first two sections of this chapter provide a reading of the key moments of these debates so as to trace a trajectory of utopian thinking from, on the one hand, its negative association with ideology to its resolution of the utopia-ideology dialectic, and, on the other hand, as a way of understanding modernity, the nation-state, and expansionist imperialism, to an internationalist conception of collective dynamics or social formations. My definition of utopian sociality contributes to the currently widespread transnationalist understanding of communal solidarities that exist beyond the nation-state. My emphasis on a “weak” concept of the social, in the preceding Introduction, informs my claim as to the necessary incompletion and indeterminateness of every group and social formation. This American-Chinese comparative project claims that what characterizes these novels as utopian is not their escapism or romanticism, but their ability to encapsulate nationhood, empire and the supranational as different narrations of group formations and collective unities. The notion of a “social life of nations,” which gives my dissertation its title, alludes to the relationality between nationhood, empire, and ideas of a larger world unity. 33 By taking the flexible range of nationhood-empire-world unity as the focal point of comparison, my study hopes to call into question the supposed incommensurabilities concerning “East/West” comparativisms. My understanding of the social through the utopian configurations of nationhood, empire and internationalism shares some of Bruno Latour’s goals to redefine the term not as a specific realm or ontologically stable entity, but as the “very peculiar movement of re-association and reassembling” (7). However, my criticism of nation-based literature as at once totalizing and fluid resonates most with recent works by Marxist and world-system theorists that call for a reconsideration of the relationship between postcolonialism and global capitalism. In this dissertation, China’s historical status as a semi-colony and the United States’ repudiation of Old World colonialism for a powerful imperialism are seen as not essential but relational in their structural positions within the emerging world order. I argue that it is such relationality that uncovers the social conditions thrown up by global capitalism, which postcoloniality has failed to address. Turn-of-the-century American and Chinese utopian fiction register the historical capacity of literature to represent the structuring totality of new means and relations of production and consumption made possible by emerging print cultures. At the same time, the heterogeneity and fissures of these utopian desires expose imperialism’s complicity with ideals of world governance and internationalism. A thinking of the social life of nations through turn-of-the-century literary utopianism demands rather a whole new logic of collective dynamics starting from a basic conceptual category that is not immediately entangled in the loaded (and often normative) opposition between the universal and the particular, the transnational and the national, and so forth. I argue that 34 “the social” or “sociality” offers just such a name for designating the as-yet-untheorized object: the collective. My account of this trajectory of utopian thinking from its negative association with ideology to its renewal of a transnational or international thinking does not seek to map an evolutionary logic of progress. I do not aim simply to reflect these critical moments but to trace a critical transformation of their synthesis. The first section outlines an uneven development among the chapter’s structural components and prioritizes the contradictions and unevenness that is the basis of Marx’s reading of society. By “reading,” I mean to suggest that there can be narrations of collective dynamics, and of what I call the social or sociality. Both utopian thinking and Marxism seek to better society. This seems so obvious as to go without saying. Yet, upon closer inspection, it is precisely this self-evident focus on change that grounds the quarrel between the two fields and their subsequent developments. As Engels states in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, utopia tries to imagine as perfect a system of society as possible, while scientific socialism examines the historico-economic process from which the antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie arises, and finds in the existing economic situation the means of ending the conflict (72). Subsequently, Louis Althusser’s works have gone very far in advancing the distinctiveness of Marxist “Science” or “Theory” that is thought in conjunction with the real economic base and in opposition to the ideological superstructure. It is not difficult to see how Althusser would view utopian socialism in relation to Marx: exactly as a kind of Hegelian mystification that Marx seeks to demystify. Both utopian and scientific 35 Socialism aspire to change the world, but just as Hegel sees the “truth” of the world in the Idea and the reduction of the concrete life of a historical epoch to its internal spiritual principle, that is, its ideology, Marx seeks to transform its dialectical structures. According to Althusser’s arguments in “Contradiction and Overdetermination,” this transformation is not a simple inversion of the Hegelian dialectic but a complete overhaul of the dialectical terms as well as their relations, namely, between a “determination in the last instance by the economic mode of production and the relative autonomy of the superstructures (national traditions and international events)” (112). Thus the difference between utopian and scientific socialism is not, as an initial reading of Engels’ statement above might suggest, that utopian socialism lacks the “true” dialectical method that Marxism subsequently supplies. Althusser has little patience with what he calls the “pre- dialectical” question of the application of method or the exteriority of the dialectic to its possible objects (93). The difference between utopian and Marxist transformations of society is instead that the former focuses only on the “method” of transformation and loses sight of investigating the base-superstructure “content” of society, while the latter treats the “method” of transformation as internal to the very “content” of society. Here even the apparently straightforward contrast between interpretation and change in Marx’s famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach becomes more complex in light of Althusser’s explanation of an overdetermined contradiction between the economic base and the ideological superstructure. Change does not supersede interpretation in the way that a Hegelian contradiction does; it determines interpretation, and in one and the same movement, is determined and radically affected by it (Althusser 101). To paraphrase the 36 conclusion to this important essay and substitute the word utopia for Hegel, “we need a little more light on Marx, or what is the same thing, a little more Marxist light on utopia itself” (116). For this reason it is not out of the question to read Althusser as a thinker of utopia, albeit an oblique one, and to find in the following comment a starting point from which to launch my discussion. One day it will be necessary to do what Marx and Engels did for utopian socialism, but this time for those still schematic-utopian forms of mass consciousness influenced by Marxism (even the consciousness of certain of its theoreticians) in the first stage of its history: a true historical study of the conditions and forms of that consciousness. (105) The first phrase “to do what Marx and Engels did for utopian socialism” must be understood by what follows, that is, “for those still schematic-utopian forms of mass consciousness influenced by Marxism.” Read in this way, one can say that Althusser links utopian socialism to the larger field of political, social, religious, artistic and intellectual endeavors that can be collectively understood as ideology. For this reason I am not studying utopian-socialist thinkers such as Fourier, St. Simon, and so forth, but the wider phenomenon of literary utopianism that I see as undergirded by Marxist critiques of ideology. After all, there can be no true historical study of any utopian thinking without first studying the conditions and forms of the relation between the means of changing society and the end. Here I must clarify an important point. While socialism played a significant role in the utopian communes and writings of the nineteenth century, it is not at all the case that all utopian fiction is influenced by the precise way of thinking that is Marxism. The utopian novels selected for this study illustrate this fact. However, Althusser’s call to 37 evaluate the forms of mass consciousness influenced by Marxism reminds us that no serious utopianism that seeks to transform present society can avoid addressing its own relation to societies, both real and imagined. Subsequently I argue that no thinking other than Marxism takes as seriously as its central problem the relational components of society, that is, the relation between the economic base and semi-autonomous superstructure that we glimpsed above. In other words, I argue that utopia and Marxism share a rigorous relational study of the social. We are as indebted to what Marx and Engels did for utopian socialism as we are to what subsequent utopia studies did for Marx and Engels. Here Louis Marin’s observation that “as a figure in discourse, utopia is written and imagined within the discourse which criticizes it” is undoubtedly crucial (xxi). The narration of utopia also takes place in the history of its criticism. Hence if the weakness of utopian socialism lies precisely in its inability to decipher the overdetermined base-superstructure relation of society, it has also failed at one stroke to explain its own ideological status – as a discourse that dreams of an improved society. Darko Suvin’s classical definition of utopian fiction as a socio- economic sub-genre of science fiction underscores the apparent affinity of the genre with socialist and communist concerns (37). Without refining what he means by the “socio- economic,” however, Suvin leaves up in the air the question of utopian fiction as an aesthetic form and its position in the base-superstructure relation. More helpful in this regard is Paul Ricoeur’s Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. Ricoeur observes that whether Marxism views ideology in opposition to the real or to science, utopia is taken together with ideology as the unreal or the unscientific. According to Ricoeur, Karl Mannheim 38 was one of the first thinkers to link ideology and utopia under the general problematic of noncongruence without reducing their difference (159). While utopia is the noncongruence that encourages change, ideology can be seen as the other modality of noncongruence that resists change (Ricoeur 159). Ricoeur credits Mannheim with expanding the concept of ideology to include even a critique of ideology, but in doing so he establishes a circularity of ideology in which any possibility of critique is enmeshed (170). Mannheim does point to a comparison between utopia and ideology as a way to overcome the circularity but fails to take this comparison to its final conclusion. Ricoeur, by referring to utopia as a “practical concept,” imbues the utopia-ideology relation with its potential to break free of the ideology versus science opposition, and in doing so opens a new direction for social theory. The only way to get out of the circularity in which ideologies engulf us is to assume a utopia, declare it, and judge an ideology on this basis. Because the absolute onlooker is impossible, then it is someone within the process itself who takes responsibility for judgment . . . . It is to the extent finally that a certain solution to the problem of judgment may be found. (172-3) In a similar vein, Ernst Bloch’s magnum opus, The Principle of Hope, Vol. 1, argues that every class ideology produces a surplus over and above the false consciousness attached to its position (156). This surplus is produced by nothing other than the effect of a “utopian function” in the ideological creations of the cultural side (153). “Without the utopian function,” Bloch writes, “class ideologies would only have managed to create transitory deception, not the models in art, science and philosophy” (153). Bloch’s analysis, however, risks upholding a functional or instrumental view of 39 culture, which Fredric Jameson addresses in his seminal reworking of Marxist hermeneutics. In The Political Unconscious, Jameson’s argument in the conclusion to the book, “The Dialectic of Ideology and Utopia,” is threefold. First, he challenges what he calls an immanent critique that can be found in Ricoeur’s claim that “the effectively ideological is also, at the same time, necessarily utopian.” Instead, Jameson contends that only a collective unity can achieve the squaring of the circle of ideological conditioning. Contemporary criticism tends toward a model of immanence that relies on some ideal transparency of individual consciousness over and above ideological conditioning (273- 4). Jameson argues that a positive Marxist hermeneutic that goes beyond the purely ideological must first confront a “decentering” of the consciousness of the individual subject (274). This is the first step in Jameson’s explication. Next, he points out that the recovery of utopian impulses in cultural texts is not dialectical enough as it still depends on an initial separation between means and ends – “between Utopian gratification and ideological manipulation” (278). This functional view of culture as utopian appears as a “weak” solution to the real problem. In contrast, a “strong” view of the problem reveals that the hermeneutic circle is less that between ideology and utopia but between ideology and the unity of a collective. For the latter is both the space for testing out a noninstrumental conception of culture as well as the very concept that grasps the ideological superstructure as the instrument of class domination, legitimation, and social mystification. Finally, the third part of Jameson’s complex series of arguments consists in showing how “all class consciousness of whatever type is utopian insofar as it expresses 40 the unity of a collectivity” (281). Most significant, Jameson adds that the expression of such unity of a collective is an allegorical one (281). He goes on to explain: The achieved collectivity or organic group of whatever kind – oppressors fully as much as oppressed – is Utopian not in itself, but only insofar as all such collectivities are themselves figures for the ultimate concrete collective life of an achieved Utopian or classless society. Now we are in a better position to understand how even hegemonic or ruling-class culture and ideology are Utopian, not in spite of their instrumental function to secure and perpetuate class privilege and power, but rather precisely because that function is also in and of itself the affirmation of collective solidarity. (281) Any collective is utopian when it is an allegory of a society that is eventually without collective differences. As I argue in the Introduction, such a society may result in a dissolution of the social itself, but this is always implied in a notion of the social that suspends, contradicts, and renders passive the decisive antagonism between a friend and an enemy. The social figures an ultimate utopian or classless society – and it is this figuration that keeps every association or group formation from reaching what Schmitt calls the “utmost degree of intensity” whereby there would no longer be any room for mobility, ambivalence, uncertainty, or hope. Jameson’s allegorical-Utopian perspective resolves the problem of a functional or instrumental conception of culture that we find in Bloch. It also differentiates Jameson’s analysis of the ideology-utopia dialectic from that of Ricoeur. While both affirm a universal value in the cultural text, Ricoeur ultimately opposes ideology to what he emphasizes in his reading of The German Ideology as “the life-process of definite individuals” (77). This preference for individual praxis means that any analysis of class is predicated on an ontological structure of operating individuals, leaving the dynamics of groups subsumed as a second-order effect (75). Even though Jameson does not follow 41 Ricoeur’s Lectures on Ideology and Utopia here in his concluding chapter, his observation on Ricoeur’s earlier work, Freud and Philosophy, contains the same line of critique that I make above. According to Jameson, Ricoeur’s formulation of Marxist hermeneutics in Freud and Philosophy is one that is modeled on the act of communication between individual subjects. It cannot therefore offer any meaning for the collective process (275). By radicalizing the utopia-ideology dialectic as an allegory of collective solidarity, The Political Unconscious allows us to return to Althusser’s call at the beginning of the chapter. To “do what Marx and Engels did for utopian socialism” amounts to, in Jameson’s terms, reworking “a whole new logic of collective dynamics, with categories that escape the taint of some mere application of terms drawn from individual experience (in that sense, even the concept of praxis remains a suspect one)” (284). If Jameson’s controversial 1986 essay “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” were to be expanded to book form as a “Third-World companion” to his classic work, one wonders whether The Political Conscious would not make an appropriate title. For in the 1986 essay, Jameson argues that even the most apparently “private” third-world texts “necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society” (69). In comparison, first-world cultural texts have more unconscious allegorical structures and must be deciphered with new interpretive mechanisms laid out in The Political Unconscious (79). Among the many critics of this essay, Aijaz Ahmad’s assessment of 42 Jameson’s rhetoric of otherness is most effective. Of particular relevance to my argument is Ahmad’s critique of Jameson’s conflation of nationalism with other forms of sociality, “no matter how central that factor is in instituting the social formation as a whole” (23). However, Jameson’s reductive approach to third-world literature and cultural expression can be given another interpretation when we read this essay alongside the conclusion to The Political Unconscious earlier mentioned. Combining the two arguments centering on the dialectics of utopianism and collectivity in the earlier work and the national allegory of third-world literature in the later one, it appears that third-world literature, in Jameson’s opinion, would be more utopian than others. This is what is really at stake: so- called third world literature such as Chinese fiction is more utopian because even narratives not centered around any particular group are always already allegories of a national collective. If my study shows that the Chinese works are more utopian, it is not because it merely confirms what is implied by Jameson’s observation. Rather than overdetermining Wu’s New Story of the Stone (Xin shitouji), and Xu’s “A Tale of New Mr. Windbag” as national narratives, I argue that they are utopian because they are more invested than their first-world counterparts in projecting the nation-state onto visions of world unity. Ultimately, utopian criticism is not problem-free when it comes to deciphering questions of comparison, modernity, the nation-state, and internationalism in the American and Chinese turn-of-the-century novels from two disparate literary traditions. Nonetheless, I maintain that the critical line of inquiry that runs through the Marxist investment in utopia and the recent surge of interest in utopian fiction as a medium for understanding 43 modernity, the nation-state, and postcolonial critiques is a productive one. Not only does this line of inquiry have the benefit of highlighting the historical materialist dimension of what is known as the “spatial turn” in contemporary critique. It also explains how it is that a fictional genre, which premises a non-place, can critically intervene in transnational studies. Lastly, it cannot be overstated how Marxism and utopianism, with their ambitions for complete and not piecemeal change, share an inextricable thinking of the world. It is for this reason that I choose my epigraph from Gramsci: “Certainly a conception of the world is implicit in every prediction” (171). II. The Spaces of Utopia Yet, there is more than one way of conceiving a new global society beyond the nation- state. Aijaz Ahmad defines the fine line separating a kind of international or transnational sociality dictated by capitalism and the world market, from one that inherits a legacy of leftist-oriented politics: Internationalism, in other words, has been one of the constitutive traditions of the Left, but in this age of late capitalism it is best to recognize that certain kinds of internationalism also arise more or less spontaneously out of the circuits of imperialist capital itself, and the line between the internationalism of the Left and the globalism ofcapitalist circuits must always be demarcated as rigorously as possible. (qtd. in Eperjesi 86) Thomas Peyser’s 1998 study Utopia and Cosmopolis: Globalization in the Era of American Literary Realism is symptomatic of this entanglement of the two kinds of internationalism that Ahmad speaks of. Peyser’s book focuses on an aspect of turn-of- the-century American utopian fiction that has not received sufficient attention: the shift by which the nation is replaced by the globe as the fundamental unit of human association (x). His pairing of Edward Bellamy, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William Dean 44 Howells with Henry James is justified by his explanation that even though James’s comsmopolitanism is far from utopian, the four authors share an articulation of the network of discourses – “imperial literary, sociological, technological” – that accompanied the consolidation of the world within the reach of Western political and economic systems (5-6). Nonetheless, Peyser’s acknowledgement of the material forces of production and reproduction at work in the world market is subsumed by the strong Enlightenment and humanist tradition in his sense of utopian cosmopolitanism. The latter heralds the eventual consolidation of the human race while retaining the category of the nation-state, not in order to criticize the historical contradiction of global capitalism but merely to affirm its reality. Hence Peyser can quote from Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto – “In place of the old local and national seclusion and self- sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations” – as evidence of the globalizing imperatives of technology and capitalism (16). Yet he refrains from taking a further step and considering the polemical context of Marx and Engels’ assertion, which challenges such a mode of the world market. In a similar vein, Peyser’s many references to Theodore Adorno, Paul Ricoeur, Georg Lukács, Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, and Ernst Bloch, among others, are made as if these thinkers had not attacked the present political and economic system in their documentation of it. While there may well be connections between utopia and the cosmopolis, as suggested by the title of Peyser’s book, this work has merely preserved the state of cosmopolitanism as it is and omitted the basic element of change or noncongruence that, as we have seen, constitutes utopian thinking. This is not to deny that writers like Bellamy, Howells, and 45 Gilman – I will analyze the former two at length – are conservative in their half-hearted gestures towards social reform and the conditions of the working class. I am interested, however, in examining the contradictions in their universalist aspirations, the limits of their sense of cosmopolitanism when confronted with the question of racial difference, and how American exceptionalist thinking dominates the form of their utopian outlook. If Peyer’s work is a sign of a devaluation of the ideological critique of utopian fiction and a celebration of global capitalism and the world market, then Dohra Ahmad’s recent book, Landscapes of Hope: Anti-Colonial Utopianism in America, renews the transformative politics of utopian fiction. This transformative aspect is, in the author’s words, “a forgotten but significant precursor to the ‘globalization from below’ that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have called for in our own century” (4). Ahmad successfully transposes the anti-colonial theory of intellectual decolonization to what is called defamiliarization or cognitive estrangement in utopian studies, which allows writers and readers to exceed the constraints of their existing conditions (5). Unlike Peyser, Ahmad readily and explicitly acknowledges how canonical utopian fictions have been implicated in expansionist ideologies from the outset: this applies to the discovery of new continents and islands in the fictions of More, Bacon, and others, as well as the myth of progress and American exceptionalism that surfaces in Looking Backward (6). In addition to examining the racialist and expansionist legacy of canonical utopian fiction, Landscapes of Hope shows that anti-colonial utopias jettison the logic of developmentalism for new utopias that “replace bordered nations with loose networks of 46 transnational solidarity, developmentalism with nostalgia, and utilitarianism with romance” (6). The kind of anti-colonial utopianism that Ahmad examines in the journal Young India, as well as in the fictional and non-fictional writings by Laipat Raj, Rabindranath Tagore, Sarojini Naidu, Pauline Hopkins, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Richard Wright, focuses on minority populations and a transnational vision uniting other colonized and working people unbounded by the nation-state. The real strength of Ahmad’s reading lies in her perception of the shortcomings of transnational solidarity as a structural basis for a utopian vision (12). Hence the relatively stable utopias of Bellamy, William Morris, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman anticipate self-contradiction just as much as do Du Bois’s “world of colored folk” and Laipat Rai’s periodical nation (12). For this reason, Ahmad’s book does not fully capitulate to an implied inner teleology or developmentalism (by beginning with the expansionist-and-racist-therefore-“bad” canonical fiction of the late nineteenth century and ending with the “good”-because-transnationalist trend of the anticolonial utopian novels of the mid-twentieth century) that it censures. Without such internal inconsistencies in both the canonical and anti-colonial utopian fiction, and, or to put it simply, without the ideological contradictions of every literary text, there would be no utopian thinking to speak of. It is peculiar that Ahmad announces, rather unequivocally, that, “utopia is a fundamentally anti-dialectic endeavor” (8). I began the first section of this present chapter by asserting that Marxism’ disagreement with utopian socialism and utopian thinking realigns the dialectical relations between ideology, utopia, and the collective. It 47 is this dialectical nature of utopia that allows for the interesting internal contradictions and failures of the texts that Ahmad discusses. Yet at the same time, Ahmad acknowledges that “we might still describe Communism – especially in the form of the various socialist internationalisms flourishing during this period – as a utopian endeavor in its determination to forge a better and entirely new future” (8, my emphasis). The eschewing of a dialectical relation between utopia and Marxist criticism, I argue, hinges on the author’s choice of describing Communism rather than actually reading or analyzing it. It is precisely this lack of a dialectical analysis between the individual and the group, the nation and the transnational, and ideology and groups that makes Landscapes of Hope ultimately too descriptive for a theory of collective group dynamics or social formations. This dissertation hopes to show that the Marxist dialectic – of which I see the “various socialist internationalisms” as theoretical extensions – is not just one utopian endeavor among others; rather, it confronts the central question in all utopian thought itself: how to rethink the social in what I call utopian internationalism. Peyser’s and Ahmad’s works are but examples and do not exhaust the range of scholarship in utopian studies. I point to them so as to indicate how the engagements of utopian discourse with internationalism or transnationalism are far from having extricated themselves from the dilemma of class consciousness, which is that it must also reflect a universal value beyond its narrow concerns. As I discuss earlier in this section, a certain logic of collective dynamics should be investigated as a question and not presupposed as a given. Peyser’s narrow conception of cosmopolitanism and (to a lesser extent) Ahmad’s disavowal of dialectical utopian thinking validate, to quote Jameson once again, “the 48 undiminished power of ideological distortion that persists even within the restored Utopian meaning of cultural artifacts” (290). Hence a broader thinking of utopias that exceeds the nation-state cannot be so easily accomplished by what Peyser claims as something of a “Peter Principle”: “[e]very organization will expand to the point at which the concept behind it no longer makes sense” (ix). Is not one of the tasks of reading and writing about literature and cultural texts to decipher the underlying concepts that may or may not make sense, even old concepts like space and time that drive the expansiveness of a concept like organization, the world, transnationalism or cosmopolitanism? As I hope to demonstrate through my discussion of another utopian critique below, one of the crucial contributions of utopian fiction to the increasing currency of transnational studies is its explicit thematization and representation of space and time. Phillip E. Wegner’s compelling work, Imagined Communities: Utopia, The Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity reconsiders the often-discredited work of genre criticism as a fundamental aspect of the self-interpreting “being-in-the-world” of any text, a term which he takes over from the Heideggerean analysis of Dasein (xx). Instead of the rigid taxonomies often associated with genre criticism, Wegner’s focus on the “existence” of the genre – as opposed to its ontological essence – helps to put narrative utopia in dialogue with other literary and intellectual traditions. What results is a reinvention of the utopian genre as one that allows enough flexibility while maintaining an institutional identity across different contexts. Rather ingeniously, Wegner compares this open-ended sense of the narrative utopia to another modern institution, namely, that of the nation-state (8). In contrast to either Peyser’s Utopia and Cosmopolis or Ahmad’s 49 Landscapes of Hope, Wegner’s Imagined Communities provides a more thorough insight into the spatial-temporal dimensions of the utopian genre. I will discuss the increasing contemporary turn toward space and away from questions of temporality, and the consequences that this turn has for the discipline of comparative literature in section IV of this chapter. I suggest that as an explanatory tool, the spatiotemporal relationship, very much like the dialectical relation between ideology and collective solidarity, is requisite for the study of other institutional formations such as the spatial histories of modernity, the conceived space that makes up the modern nation-state, and the latter’s expansion into the world system. For Wegner, space and time are also pedagogical tools with which the generic tradition of the narrative utopia exerts an impact on its later readers. Wegner’s institutional approach to the genre of narrative utopia also engages with a narrative of historical change that combines an immanent formal analysis of the individual text with the diachronic perspective of particular cultural backgrounds (9). Furthermore, given the semi-autonomous levels that the generic text inhabits and at the same time mediates, Wegner’s focus on the narrative status of historical change also underscores the dialectical aspect of utopian fiction: from the biographical to the “imagined” bonds of the national, and finally “into the most abstract and yet still concrete level of the mode of production itself” (9). For Wegner, the narration of the utopian genre also contributes to interdisciplinary research centering on questions of space, cultural geography, and transnational discourses. Without reproducing Wegner’s competent summary of the spatial analysis of Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Michel De Certeau, David Harvey, Kristin Ross, among others, I note that it is interesting, for my focus on 50 the question of collective sociality, to see where Wegner positions narrative utopia vis-à- vis the spatial levels commonly discussed by some of these thinkers (15). According to Wegner, narrative utopia occupies the same in-between space that Lefebvre positions at the level of the conceived, that Harvey’s Lacanian reading of the Symbolic situates as representations of space, and that Jameson calls “cognitive mapping.” All these levels of spatial analysis or conceptual categories “provide the mediating link between the spaces of the individual and those of the larger social and historical realities she inhabits” (15). It is this understanding of the narrative utopia as a spatial narration of history that allows Wegner to focus on another pedagogical operation: utopian estrangement and temporality. While the etymology of utopia refers immediately to what is outside of space, Darko Suvin’s influential definition of utopia as “estrangement arising out of an alternative historical hypothesis” reminds us that utopias are also frequently outside of time (37). This temporal disruption is also closely related to Mannheim’s and Ricoeur’s discussions of ideology and utopia. Wegner synthesizes the relation between ideology, utopia, and time eloquently: “if ideology creates the synchrony or place of a given social reality, then utopia marks its potential for diachrony or historical becoming” (18). Hence Bloch’s observation of the utopian surplus that arises out of ideology, which we earlier noted, is also a surplus that disrupts the closure of any historical present. From his early works The Spirit of Utopia and “Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics,” Bloch formulates revolutionary potential in a nonsynchronic view of time. Although critics have attacked nonsynchronicity for the deferral of any utopian future, and hence 51 for the failure to represent the future, Wegner sees such representational failures as indispensable for transgressing the limits of any systemic, cultural, and ideological enclosure. He writes: “it is precisely in its failures to ‘transcend’ its present that the utopian text ultimately succeeds . . . in doing so, the narrative utopia plays a vital role in teaching its readers how to become modern subjects” (24). Utopia’s temporal estrangement is thus what Bloch calls the Novum – that which is radically and unexpectedly new – as well as its full expression – the Ultimum, the “total leap out of everything that previously existed” (qtd. in Wegner 20). Wegner links this complete astonishment brought about by the Novum and the Ultimum to the role of anxiety in Heidegger’s study of space in Being and Time (20). In the next section, I shall extend this sense of complete astonishment to the encounter between radically different racial and cultural others. III. The Staging of Imaginary Solutions In Imagining China: From “Confucian Utopia” to “The Holy, Red Land,” Zhou Ning summarizes the shift in the West’s image of China from a “Confucian utopia” between the seventeenth and eighteenth century, to a “Maoist utopia” in the 1960’s and 70’s: In the West’s political horizon, China’s image has turned from being a “Confucian utopia” to an “Eastern autocratic empire,” from a positive image to a negative one, from an idealized land to a feared place. But at the same time, we also notice that with the disappearance of the “Confucian utopia” as a positive image in the West’s political expectation, one part has imperceptibly [ ] became ideological [ ] in content, the other, through “antirealism” or “mystification,” has turned into a kind of ideologically alienated [ ], aesthetic experience. In the past, Westerners tried to politicize what was in fact a literary “Confucian utopia,” now, they attempt to make it literary. The problem then was how to make real the “Confucian utopia.” The problem now is how to remove, or at least distance the “Eastern autocratic” image of China from reality, and make it 52 a Romanticized image of Eastern sentimentalism. (92, my translation and emphasis) The politicization of what is in the first place an aesthetic construct and the aestheticization of politics in the historical staging of China as utopia resonates with Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” The essay’s conclusion is well known: Fascism renders politics aesthetic and Communism responds by politicizing art (242). Zhou’s examination of the Western imagination of the Chinese utopia forcibly introduces the aspect of cultural differences and transmission into Benjamin’s idea. Benjamin’s formulation of the withering of the aura of the work of art, read alongside the Zhou’s passage above, now takes on an additional meaning significant for my present study. For what better way to cope with the withering away of “authenticity” and “historical testimony” than to depict it as a non-place, as utopian? In this sense, any inscribing of cultural differences and of the discourses of the Other cannot be but a persistent decaying of the aura, if indeed the aura can ever be full and pure in the first place. 6 For the age of mechanical reproduction is certainly also the age of global capital and economic imperialism. When Benjamin seeks “to comprehend the social basis of the contemporary decay of the aura” in view of the increasing significance of the masses, the latter can no longer be confined to those of Western Europe. Since “the desire of contemporary masses [is] to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward 6 Here, Arif Dirlik’s aptly-titled The Postcolonial Aura, without calling upon Benjamin’s use of the word, implicitly criticizes the mystical authenticity or authority of postcolonial critique of being both the historical condition generated by transformations in capitalism, and as a way of speaking about that condition. 53 overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction,” it is important to observe the worldwide reach of this spatial and human proximity. In other words, we have to widen the “social basis of the contemporary decay of the aura” (Benjamin 223, my emphasis). The social, in this case, must go beyond the confines of Europe to include the latter’s contact with the world, made possible precisely by the age of mechanical reproduction. My question is how such thinking from a domestic socius to an international one takes place, and how this kind of taking place paradoxically necessitates a new utopian interpretation. What Bloch calls the utopian Other, the Novum – that which is unexepectedly new – as well as its full expression, the Ultimum – “the total leap out of everything that previously existed” that will always be treated with astonishment (The Principle of Hope 203) – thus cannot refer to the strict polarization of China vs. the “West,” but to an overall astonishment in the face of the manifestation of the world. Read in this way, the age of mechanical reproduction and the rise of a conception of the world do not usher in an era of the total assimilation of the other; instead they allow for differences and incompletion in the representation of social totality. In my Introduction, I have shown how the very incompletion of society is the condition of possibility for a narration of society in Marx’s writings. Let me turn to another aspect of this incompletion or non-totalization in Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future. There, Jameson takes from Bloch the distinction between the to-be-realized Utopian program and the more obscure Utopian impulse that spills over from the sum of individual texts to everything future-oriented (3). This Utopian impulse includes political and social theory even though – and especially when – the latter aims at realism and avoids everything 54 Utopian (3). A similar distinction can be found in More’s Utopia: one that zooms in on the realization of the Utopian program, the other an “obscure yet omnipresent Utopian impulse” that can be found in many varied political practices and expressions (3). While the Utopian program involves a commitment to closure and totality in the name of autonomy and self-sufficiency, Jameson interprets the Utopian impulse as a four-level allegory consisting of Bloch’s tripartite body-time-collectivity (5-7). The utopian investment that is the text coheres in the materiality of the individual body, which is measured at the anagogical level of the collective as biographical and historical time collides (9). These levels of Utopian allegory do not lead to a conscious Utopian program and its realization, and for this reason, the anagogical level that Jameson employs to denote the collective does not work toward the sense of totality characteristic of the Utopian program. Yet this does not mean that totality is not structurally requisite in utopias in general. Early in the introduction to the book, Jameson writes: “Utopian form is itself a representational mediation on radical difference, radical otherness, and on the systemic nature of the social totality” (xii). I follow Jameson’s proposition in Archaeologies of the Future to shift the discussion of utopia from content to representation as such. Rather than solely taking these texts to be expressions of political opinion or ideology, Jameson agues for a “utopian formalism.” It is not only the social and historical raw materials of the Utopian construct which are of interest but also the representational relations between them – such as closure, narrative, and exclusion or inversion. Here as elsewhere in narrative analysis what is most revealing is not what is said, but what cannot be said, what does not register on the narrative apparatus. (xiii) 55 It is with this “perversely formalist” approach to utopia as a genre that Jameson poses the question of a collective wish fulfillment that is part of the nature of Utopian desire. Instead of seeing the latter as defeatist or incapacitating, it is “concrete and ongoing” (84). Eschewing the fatality of utopian programs, the utopian impulse or desire follows an aesthetic paradigm whereby we see that “not only the production of the irresolvable contradiction is the fundamental process, but that we must imagine some sort of gratification inherent in this very confrontation with pessimism and the impossible” (84). The decay of the aura that Benjamin laments in the age of mechanical production must be affirmed as this sort of impossible gratification. Similarly my study of utopian internationalism refers to the novels’ collective wish fulfillments that thrive on the production of the social coalescence of the nation-state, empire, and visions of world unity. What kind of utopian impulse drives the imagination of China as utopia? As we have seen from the quoted passage at the beginning of this section, Zhou focuses on a historical break between the politicization of an aesthetic “Confucian utopia” during the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, and the aestheticization of a political “Maoist utopia” in the 1960’s and 70’s. His study skips over the period of the dawn of the twentieth century that I am concerned with here. Nonetheless, the book alludes to the internal contradictions between literature and history of this time period. Indeed, the nineteenth century does not seem to fit neatly into either of the author’s two historical categorizations. On the one hand, there was the increase in trade, travels, religious proselytizing, war, and the rise of Sinology as a “concretization” or “making real” of 56 Europe’s knowledge of China (93-4). On the other hand, the writings of Victor Segalan, René Reiss, and Saint-John Perse, for example, also ushered in a new “illusory” impulse to re-imagine China (94). Here Zhou’s use of the terms “the concrete” or the “real,” and the “illusory” or “aesthetics” becomes problematic. The co-existence of what he prescribes as the concretization of aesthetics and the aesthetization of concrete knowledge thus makes the late nineteenth century into a transitional as well as contradictory period in the historical staging of China as utopia. In this period, China appears to be both politicized and aestheticized. Having said this, we need to unpack rigorously the very terms that are at work in Zhou’s rather unorthodox utopian criticism. The question of whether the image of China in the nineteenth century is a politicization of an aesthetic utopia or the aestheticization of a political one is in fact misleading. Instead we have to rethink the question of literature’s relation to ideology and reexamine what is implied in Zhou’s association of the “illusory” with “aesthetics” in opposition to what is “real” or “concrete.” An investigation of these terms will also reconsider the categories Zhou uses to contrast the “ideological content” of the Confucian utopia of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, with the “aesthetic effect” of the Maoist utopia in the second half of the twentieth century. Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey’s “On Literature as Ideological Form” questions Althusser’s positioning of art between ideology and science (“knowledge” or “theory) and proposes that any study of the aesthetics of art is necessarily part of an ideological process. They also reject a theory of Marxist aesthetics that is still trapped by the question of literature’s universal essence. Instead, they argue for a historical study of 57 literary “effects” in their internal contradiction with other effects such as the political, historical, and social (84). As they see it, there is no separation between ideology and literature because there is no aesthetic ideology definable outside literature (86). Balibar and Macherey’s insistence on the inseparability between aesthetics and ideology is rooted in the classic Marxist rejection of the false dialectic between form and content, whereby “the artificially imposed terms alternate so that literature is sometimes perceived as content (ideology), sometimes as form (‘real’ literature)” (87). This mechanical separation and interchangeability between the ideological-as-content and the aesthetics- as-form is what allows Zhou to mark a historical shift in the Western imagination from the Confucian China of the seventeenth and the eighteenth century, to the Maoist utopia of the twentieth century. Consequently, any attempt to fit the nineteenth century into Zhou’s schema only shores up the author’s inadequate grasp of utopia’s ideological “content” that contrasted with its later “mystification,” “ideological alienation” and a particular “aesthetics.” To quote Zhou again: “with the disappearance of the ‘Confucian utopia’ as a positive image in the West’s political expectation, one part has imperceptibly became ideological in content, the other, through ‘antirealism’ or ’mystification,’ has turned into a kind of ideologically alienated, aesthetic experience” (92). A passage from Balibar and Macherey can help correct some of the confusion in Zhou’s terminology: literature is produced finally through the effect of one or more ideological contradictions precisely because these contradictions cannot be solved within the ideology, i.e., in the last analysis through the effect of contradictory class positions within the ideology, as such irreconcilable. Obviously these contradictory ideological positions are not in themselves “literary” – that would lead us back into the closed circle of “literature.” They are ideological positions within theory and practice, covering the whole field of the ideological class struggle, i.e. religious, juridical, and political, and they correspond to the 58 conjunctures of the class struggle itself. But it would be pointless to look in the texts for the “original” bare discourse of these ideological positions, as they were “before” their ‘literary” realizations, for these ideological positions can only be formed in the materiality of the literary text. That is, they can only appear in a form which provides their imaginary solution, or better still, which displaces them by substituting imaginary contradictions soluble within the ideological practice of religion, politics, morality, aesthetics and psychology. (88) This is why Balibar and Macherey continually underscore the status of literature and ideology as “effects” that are produced by social relations covering the whole field of the ideological class struggle. An aesthetic effect that leads to definitive terms such as fiction, realism, and the mechanism of identification does not exist in any a priori form unaffected by the materiality of the literary text. Yet this production of literary effects does not “end” in the finished product of the literary text but goes on to produce other effects. Later in the essay, Balibar and Macherey explain how the effect of the literary text “is to provoke other ideological discourses which can sometimes be recognized as literary ones but which are usually merely aesthetic, moral, political, religious discourses in which the dominant ideology is realized” (95-6). What interests me most in their analysis is how the materiality of the literary text produces imaginary solutions of ideological contradictions. Unlike Zhou’s vague use of the “real” or “concrete” versus the “illusory,” literature’s materiality is, according to Balibar and Macherey, closely imbued with the imaginary. This argument can be found toward the end of the long passage quoted above as they proceed to explain how such an imaginary solution is “represented” (88). For representation is not meant in the sense of “figuring a solution which is really there” but “in the sense of providing a ‘mise en scène,’ a presentation” that is really a “display” and an “operation” (88). Literature cannot simply represent – in the “mirroring” 59 sense of reflection that Marxist thought is always so critical of – a solution to ideological contradictions when the solution is not yet there in the existing mode of production. (This refers back to the discussion of Althusser’s essay “Contradiction and Overdetermination,” which claims that Marx’s “solution” to Hegelian dialectics is to transform the dialectical terms as well as their relations). It is especially pertinent that Balibar and Macherey define literature as that which is produced precisely because the solution of implacable ideological contradictions is “impossible” (88). Literature’s specific relationship to the impossible thus comes up against the denial that there is any special “literary” aspect of a literary text in the first place. Literature is that which makes possible, via staging, mise en scène, and display, an impossible, imaginary solution. Literature does not make accessible the imagined, in and of itself, since it is only the material re-presentation of what is imaginary. What appears as an “inbuilt disadvantage” of the literary text becomes the very “literariness” that Balibar and Macherey are so ambivalent about. The operation of the literary text, that is, its staging as opposed to a mere expression (“its putting into words [sa mise en mots])” of ideology, “has an inbuilt disadvantage since it cannot be done without showing its limits, thereby revealing its inability to subsume a hostile ideology” (88-9). Simply put, the limit of a literary text goes quite a long way: such a text submits itself to ideological effects, but it also delimits the latter to further stagings and mises en scène. While I share with Balibar and Macherey their suspicion of a universal “essence” of literature, their analysis has also convinced me that literary productions have specific effects and operations that cannot be denied as literary. Moreover, do we not find in their scrutiny of literary or 60 aesthetic effects in general, as the re-presentation of an imaginary solution to ideological contradictions, the very premise of all utopian fiction as such? How can such an elaborate staging be thought together with Jameson’s contention in The Political Unconscious that all collectives are in a way allegories for the utopian or classless society? These are important questions that I will address in the following chapters. The detour through Balibar and Macherey lays bare the limits of Zhou’s views on literature and ideology in Imagining China. The latter is without a doubt a much-needed work on Chinese utopias, and its focus on the one-directional utopian imaginations of Western Orientalism shows that more work is needed to stage other imaginary solutions to a wider ideological contradiction. Althusser’s delineation of Marxist dialectics, as a “determination in the last instance by the economic mode of production and the relative autonomy of the superstructures (national traditions and international events)” (112), reminds us that both national traditions and international events are part of the superstructure. They are particular ideological effects whose mutual contradictions are produced in the materiality of the literary text, which, as we have seen, cannot be understood apart from the aesthetic effect of literature in general. This basic, materialist understanding of the superstructure means that what I call utopian internationalism is not a mere reflection of the shift by which the nation is replaced by the globe. Instead, utopian internationalism must be conceived as part of utopian fiction’s staging of an imaginary solution to the particular ideological contradiction, among others, between the nation-state, empire and the emerging global interconnectedness of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. To insist once more with Balibar and Macherey, what is 61 imaginary does not refer to the non-material. The imagination of the world as utopia and therefore of a certain alternative sociality is a literary effect that actively inserts itself within the reproduction of other ideological factors inherent in the dialectic between utopia and ideology. It is in this way that utopian literature comes close to fulfilling the pedagogical function that Wegner proposes in his Imaginary Communities. IV. American Exceptionalism and Chinese Semicolonialism: “A Dynamite in Disguise.” The fin-de-siècle period saw an active production of American and Chinese utopian fiction in the midst of changing global affairs that helped shape the national consciousness of China and the United States. International events such as the first Opium War (1839-42), the Taiping Rebellion (1850-64), the First Chinese Exclusion Act in the United States (1882), the first Sino-Japanese War (1885) and the presence of the Eight-Nation Alliance in Beijing during the height of the Boxer Rebellion (1898-1901) colored China’s experience until the proclamation of the first Chinese Republic in 1911. While questions about strengthening the nation dominated intellectual debates of the time, they were accompanied by a contradictory quest to revitalize the ruins of an empire through a transnational historical reinvention. Hao Chang, for one, argues that nationalism – either conceived as a “reactive nationalism” that grew out of reactions to imperialist aggressions or “ethnic nationalism” that explained the animosity of Han Chinese against the ruling Manchu ethnicity – is a limited explanatory category in accounting for the “universalistic” orientations of the intellectual trends of the time (2). Rebecca E. Karl, to cite another example, contends that nationalism is not antithetical to “universalism” as long as the former is taken as diverse intellectual praxes and concept- 62 formations irreducible to statism and the latter is understood as a global historical condition (7-10). My dissertation follows the debates opened up by Chang and Karl, but takes into account the role that race plays in the paradoxical relation between nationalism and internationalism or ideas of world unity. For the latter often expresses a certain utopian exhilaration bordering on racial superiority that is operative in the utopian internationalism that I aim to critique. Kang Youwei’s The Book of Datong exemplifies Chinese intellectuals’ hopes for a stateless, warless world in which China plays a central role. The Age of Datong, or Grand Unity, is the ultimate stage preceded by the Age of Disorder and the Age of Relative or Small Peace in the classical Chinese Three-Age theory. Even though the Age of Datong foresees a world with no racial or national boundaries, Kang’s utopian program is heavily marked by his discrimination toward the “darker” races, namely the African blacks and the “brown-skinned” peoples of the Pacific Islands and Southeast Asia. For Kang, “solutions” to racial differences range from intermarriages between these darker races and the white and yellow races, which entails moving the former to colder climates and their adopting of a different diet (120-3). Race is thus exploited as a mediating factor to explain China’s national weakness on the one hand, and to project its global future on the other. This study deals with these contradictory self-conceptions in turn-of-the-century China and the ways that the utopian imagination of the period represents them, in Balibar and Macherey’s sense of mise en scène. 63 In the same historical juncture, on the other side of a Pacific Ocean whose name would come to designate a growing regional imaginary, the United States and its people also identified themselves in contradictory terms: as united by a nationalism that is at the same time prophetic and also universal. This contradictory self-conception, most strongly embodied by the legacy of the Manifest Destiny, is accompanied by another paradox, that of a strong imperial desire and a powerful anti-colonial disposition to differentiate the United States from the Old World. In the wake of the successful Spanish-American War of 1898, when the United States gained control over Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippine Islands, and other territories in the Pacific, Germany seized part of the Shandong province in China. Russia, France, Japan, and Britain were also acquiring their respective “spheres of influence.” In the same year, a group of New York merchants responded by forming the Committee on American Interests in China, renamed the American Asiatic Association, and subsequently asserted pressure on the Department of State to act against the potential portioning of the old Chinese empire (Eperjesi 197). The McKinley administration saw the opportunities of the Chinese market as central to its new exploits in the Pacific and in 1899, U.S. Secretary of State John Hay asked the major European powers to assure American trading rights in China in his famous “Open Door” policy. In August 1900 when the Boxer rebellion reached Beijing, the United States sent troops to join Russian, British, French, German, and Japanese contingents in a rampant campaign of conquest, lootings, and killings. The combined expedition marked a turning point in American foreign policy. For the first time since the American Revolution, the United States fought alongside European imperial powers in a multinational force. This alliance 64 with the Old World, albeit temporary, quelled prior anxieties that the United States had with respect to its competitiveness in the Asian market. As John R. Eperjesi notes in his study of the Journal of the American Asiatic Association published by the American Asiatic Association, “The situation in China led to the postulation of a paranoid binary in which European colonialism, against which the United States could not compete, was imagined as a threat to a glorious future of Asian-American coprosperity” (200). President McKinley’s declaration that imperialism “was foreign to the temper and genius of this free and generous people . . . alien to American sentiment, thought and purpose” must thus be seen as part of the paradoxical invention of a different hegemonic power that is gradually making incursions into the Asian Pacific Rim (qtd. in Stephanson 90). It should be pointed out that the Asian Pacific Rim is by no means a homogenous entity, but an uneven geographical construction. According to Eperjesi, for example, the Philippines were an object of United States plotting, while China was a “latent subject, a sleeping giant, to be regenerated by American influence” (206). This idea of China as an insular Eastern empire is common in the popular imaginations of the time. Julian West, the protagonist of Looking Backward, while troubled by the labor problems in the United States in 1888, asks his prospective father-in-law where they should emigrate to “if all the terrible things took place which those socialists threaten” (10). China is depicted as one of the last utopias free from the social turmoil that plagued the United States. He said he did no know any place now where society could be called stable except Greenland, Patagonia, and the Chinese Empire. ‘Those Chinamen knew what they were about,’ somebody added, ‘when they refused to let in our western civilization. They knew what it would lead to better than we did. They saw it was nothing but dynamite in disguise.’ (Bellamy, Looking Backward 10) 65 Writing in 1888, Bellamy was probably aware that the view of China’s stable isolation from Western civilization was an exaggeration. It is true that China was not confronted with the same labor problems and anti-monopoly movements plaguing the United States, but rebellions such as the Taiping movement – whose leader, Hong Xiuquan, was strongly influenced by the spread of Protestant Christianity in China – effected multiple social reforms whose repercussions, at any rate, did not leave China “stable.” Nonetheless, a similar political rhetoric can be heard in Theodore Roosevelt’s urgent call to increase the sphere of influence of the U.S.: “We cannot, if we would, play the part of China, and be content to rot by inches in ignoble ease within our borders, taking no interest in what goes on beyond them, sunk in a scrambling commercialism; heedless of the higher life, the life of aspiration, of toil and risk” (8). As we can see, little effort is spent in justifying “a scrambling commercialism” as long as economic expansion into the Chinese market is coupled with “aspiration, toil and risk.” The image of China as a counterpoint to the duty that the United States has to the world is not merely a turn-of- the-century opinion. According to Anders Stephanson, every nation-state claims its uniqueness as a higher authority. “Yet for example, the dynastic ‘Mandate’ that legitimated Confucian China never envisaged a transcending ‘end’ of history through a fundamental change of the world in accordance with its own self-image” (xii). This is the West’s static image of China still stuck in the kind of “Confucian utopia” that Zhou’s Imagining China identifies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As this study hopes to uncover, China does envisage a fundamental change of the world in accordance 66 with its own self-image, except that through this process, China’s self-image becomes indissociable from a utopian staging of a different social life of the nation. It has been widely acknowledged that China’s encounter with European and American powers is distinct from outright colonialism, and much scholarly work has summed up China’s experience from the mid-nineteenth century to the Republican era (1911-1945) as “semicolonial.” Shih Shu Mei, in The Lure of the Modern, tracks the origin of the term “semicolony” to its usage in the 1920s and 1930s by Marxist thinkers, including Mao Zedong, as a way to describe the coexistence of colonial and native feudal structures. According to Jürgen Osterhammel, the term originated with Lenin and was developed by Chinese Marxists as integral to the “comprehensive history of China’s semi-feudal semi-colonial society” (qtd. in Shih, The Lure of the Modern 31). Yet this semi-feudal aspect of semicolonialism has also contributed to a characterization of this period of Chinese history as politically impotent and culturally barren, only to be revived by the literary modernity of the May Fourth movement. Mary Wright’s pioneering research on the dynamism of late Qing China in the 1960s, as well as the recovery of half of the 2000 or more works produced at the turn of the century in recent years, has prompted recent scholarship to challenge this static perception of the late Qing. David Der-wei Wang’s Fin-de-siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849-1911 and Theodore Huters’ Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China can be seen as part of the “first wave” of scholarship to revitalize late Qing literary production. 67 I consider Wang and Huters’ studies as the first wave of this important scholarship insofar as they employ a model of a static global stage on which China is emerging as a dynamic force. They do not see the Chinese intellectuals’ attempt to reposition China was not seen as part of a larger discursive attempt on the part of the rest of the world to reimagine itself. Much work is needed to debunk the Orientalist view of a passive China receiving the West’s active construction, but even more urgent is an attention to China’s role in the interconnected historical formation of global modernity. It should be made clear that I am not at all downplaying the value of the contribution of this first wave scholarship to rethinking late Qing history and culture. Nor am I so naïve as to forget that Wang and Huters’ research is defined by their discipline of Chinese studies and, as such, makes no claims to speak for other national literary traditions. However what concerns me theoretically is the fine line dividing an argument for late Qing modernity tout court and seeing such a literary modernity as the effect of an uneven, ideological contradiction between national traditions and international events. I quote the passage below from Wang’s book to illustrate the limits of this first wave of late Qing literary scholarship. I see the late Qing as the beginning of the Chinese literary ‘modern’ because writers’ pursuit of novelty was no longer contained within indigenously defined barriers but was inextricably affected by the multilingual, cross-cultural trafficking of ideas, technologies, and powers in the wake of nineteenth-century Western expansionism. (5) Wang’s choice of phrases such as “affected by” and “in the wake of” points to an idea of literary modernity that still gives historical priority and cultural centrality to China’s reception of Western expansionism. There is no question that Western ideas contributed 68 significantly to China’s view of the world. But this approach needs to be supplemented with the question of whether or not China’s view of the world also affects the ways in which Western expansionism is perceived. This more dynamic view of the China-West- World triad in turn complicates scholarship on late Qing literary modernity. In Bringing the World Home, Huters rightly perceives the paradox of China’s semicolonial experience as one that is caught between a reformist movement bent on strengthening the Qing dynasty in its weak confrontations with the West on the one hand, and a literate public that was for the most part eager to retain the perceived unity of Chinese traditions and culture on the other. (2-3). As the title indicates, it is China that is bringing the world home, and not the other way round. But certainly this emphasis on China’s agency suggests that the world at the turn of the century is somehow a static, homogenous whole. Perhaps the “anxiety of influence” that Huters detects in these Chinese intellectuals’ encounter with Western ideas also accompanies this first wave of late Qing literary studies. The equation of “the world” with “Western ideas” at the expense of other narratives and experiences thus appears as a deeply anxious process. Huters writes: “What unifies these cultural artifacts [namely, Western ideas] is a particular pattern of anxiety that I attempt to trace out, in which the imperative to break radically with the past was precisely what rendered the paradoxical and insistent need to maintain a continuity with the past in some form” (10, my emphasis). We find a similar rhetoric of anxiety earlier in the book: “In contrast to this receptivity to variety, however, the period [1895-1919] was also characterized by an agonism at the center of the whole process, resulting, I argue, in a countervailing tendency to shut off alternatives even as 69 they were being advanced” (7). By alternatives, Huters is here referring to alternative perceptions of history. However, it is almost as if the Chinese intellectuals’ anxious dilemma between the old and the new is intensified by a prior foreclosure of any dilemma between the homogenous West and a disjunctive, complex world. Recent works by Arif Dirlik, Rebecca Karl, Eric Hayot, Tani E. Barlow, James Hevia, Robert Bickers, Joanna Waley-Cohen, and others in the field of new Qing history can be seen as a second wave of late Qing studies that frames China’s relation to the world in a new light. Not content with merely showing that late Qing reformers and intellectuals exhibited hopes for a dynastic renewal, expansion, and in some cases, Sino- Western convergence, these scholars also take into account the material, uneven nature of global relations that the first wave scholars bypass. Dirlik’s Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution is close to my own project in identifying the internationalist utopianism in turn-of-the-century Chinese thinking. According to Dirlik, turn-of-the-century utopianism, once it extends to the ideal of world unity, hopes to realize China’s position not as the middle empire, but as a participant in the new world of supra-nations. As I have pointed out with respect to Kang’s The Book of Datong, it is not enough for China to be a modern nation-state; it must be a collective entity in a world beyond nation-states. Writing at a time when China’s worldview is affected by a fumbling central government on the one hand, and external pressures on the other, Kang’s utopia has to come from the future. The dilemma framed by Huters, namely the Chinese intellectuals’ hesitation between an embrace of Westernization and the retention of Chinese traditions, can be reformulated as a contradiction between 70 nationalism and internationalism. “What is most significant here is that the very condition that necessitated the redefinition of China as a nation in a world of nations elicited as its dialectical counterpoint a new vision of a world in which nations would once again disappear and humankind would discover a world of unity” (Dirlik 55). Rebecca E. Karl’s seminal work, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, connects the initially expansive global or internationalist moment in the definition of Chinese nationalism (1895-1905) to one that is more attuned to a racial-ethnic revolution in pursuit of state power (1905-1911) (3). The global or internationalist moment that Karl attends to focuses on China’s growing sense of identification with the non-Euro-American world at the turn of the century, which “initially made the modern world visible as a structured totality” (4). Karl adopts this view of totality from Jameson, who defines it as a “textual and representational multiplicity that is ‘to be reunified … at the level of its process of production, which is not random but can be described as a coherent functional operation in its own right’” (221 fn.2). The conceptual production of such a totality creates a global unevenness, and so the notion of the “world” or the global becomes a historical problematic that complicates the more usual West/(Japan)/China confrontation around which studies on modern Chinese history are mostly organized (4). Karl’s view of the global historical problematic critiques the diachronic staging of modernity that informs Euro-American- centered ideologies of modernization, which posits non-Western cultures closer to the end of a teleological, universal History. In opposition to this normative, hegemonically enforced view of History, Karl proposes to bring into view a world of “synchronic 71 temporality emphasizing historical identification and spatial proximity” (5). Refining Benedict Anderson’s well-known formulation of temporal simultaneity in the formation of national identities as well as Partha Chatterjee’s “native” imaginary as a culturalist challenge to Anderson’s thesis, Karl claims that “a historical-spatial logic” best explains “an immanence of global transformation” or “immanent synchronicity” (5-8). Karl’s emphasis on global unevenness introduces the materiality of global dimensions that are often thrown out of the equation in attempts to recuperate local histories (20). In its main chapters, Staging the World discusses Chinese intellectuals’ observations of or participation in non-Euro-American-centric events in the world such as the “discovery” of Hawaii as a center of the Pacific, the Philippine revolution against the United States, and the relation between ethnicity and nationality as perceived through the Boer war in South Africa (25). However Karl has to assume that when intellectuals such as Liang compare China to Turkey and India, among other non-Western, imperialized and colonized countries (14), this act of comparison was constituted after and even outside of the uneven global spatiality that she so insistently underscores. In other words, comparisons between Chinese and non-Euro-American nationalisms are only taken to be an effect of modernity, instead of as part of its cause. Part of the problem, in my opinion, is her use of Jameson’s notion of totality to delineate China’s identification with the non- Euro-American world as one, which “initially made the world visible as totality” (4). Even though Karl stresses that this totality is a conceptual production, for Jameson, the production of a concept such as nationalism, statism, or internationalism is always a problem of the representation of a collective process that is, as we recall from section I, 72 an allegorical one. In The Geopolitical Aesthetic, Jameson further defines totality as social or collective totality: “For it is ultimately always of the social totality itself that it is a question in representation” (4). Since it is impossible to represent social totality, the cognitive or allegorical investment in such a representation will mostly be an unconscious one (9). I argue that the comparison between Chinese and non-Euro-American nationalisms at the turn of the century, and any act of comparison as such, do not simply reproduce the various groups or collectives under representation. To be clear, comparisons bring to light an allegorical, non-literal representation of what is in fact impossible to represent totally. 7 This is not to say that Karl is unaware of the dangers in reifying non-Euro-American histories as yet another, albeit benign Other to Chinese consciousness, or that the “staging” of any “world” does not confront its own conditions of impossibility (5; 16). It is however to suggest that a more adequately theorized method of comparison is needed in such a “synchronic modern global temporality and uneven global spatiality” (16). As the next section will argue, to think about what is at stake in the comparative aspect of any scholarship requires a reassessment of space and time and the contemporary critique of chronocentrism that has often resulted in the withdrawal of time from the spatiotemporal relationship. 7 Karl explains right from the outset that her title of “staging the world” is to be taken as a defamiliarizing approach, since the idea of a commonly shared stage is a historical and political illusion (4). I am tempted to link this to Balibar and Macherey’s exposition of literature as the staging of an imaginary solution to an ideological contradiction. 73 VI. “Lifting the Temporal Veil of Time”: Time, Space, and Revolutionary Discourse Perhaps if Staging the World were a literary, instead of historical, study in the field of Chinese Studies, the act of comparison would take on a different role in the author’s “spatial-temporal logic.” For Chinese literary scholars have, for some time now, been responding to the claim that it is easier to rid China of the dominating Euro-American “area,” but more difficult to break out of the ubiquitous application of Western literary theory. Haun Saussy, for one, who feels that the dilemma between “area” and “method” is a false one, provocatively suggests that post-structuralism and deconstruction have been thinking from the outset about China and the cultures influenced by China. It is uncertain to me, as I look over the record, whether the intersection is really that of a method coming to affect an area, or whether the area was somehow part of the method already, so that deconstruction is unable, for historical reasons, to think about anything without to some extent thinking or dreaming about China. (40) 8 Yet others, like Natalie Melas writing in a different context, retain the potential in the “area” and in doing so takes as her inquiry the space of comparison that in Karl’s work seems like an afterthought of the comparison of spaces. Hence even though Melas’ work does not deal with Asia or China, I find her investigation of comparative literature’s institutional history a useful complement to Karl’s opening of the field of Chinese Studies to a more transnational discourse. In All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison, Melas traces the institution’s late 8 In a similar vein, Yingjin Zhang, the president of the American Association of Chinese Comparative Literature (AACCL), declared in 1998 that we must “no longer make an ‘either/or’ choice between Western theory and Chinese literature” (7). 74 nineteenth-century focus on a comparative method that took from anthropology an evolutionary structure. This evolutionary structure meant that comparison itself became an unmistakable indication of social progress. “The more a society advances – that is, expands and specializes – the more it brings under the purview of comparison” (21). Unsurprisingly, such an evolutionary, positivist view made the comparatist’s job remarkably imperial: in Hutchenson Macaulay Posnett’s 1886 account of the field, comparison’s expansionism goes hand in hand with the increasing variety of cultural contact, all the while restricting its availability to a specific, privileged domain of empire (23). The strength of Melas’ analysis lies in her extension of this positivist aspect of comparative literature to a broader modern epistemic field, drawing on Michel Foucault’s influential concept of “heterotopia” in the 1967 essay “Of Other Spaces” (26). Heterotopia is an “effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, and the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (26). Melas contrasts this experiential and representational emphasis of spatial heterotopia with the kind of absolute incommensurability that Foucault analyzes in his earlier work The Order of Things. While heterotopoic difference in The Order of Things posits the other at the limit of our own thought, the heterotopia suggested in “Of Other Spaces” has shifted to that which “generated relationality” (28). Melas’ overall study will build on this relational aspect in the status of space as an epistemic ground of comparison. What I wish to point out is that even though both Melas and Karl identify the limits of chronocentrism in the diachronic view of different historicities, All the 75 Difference in the World actually theorizes the status of space as an epistemic ground for comparison in the sphere of knowledge. As we shall see, the problematization of space opens up the question of time that so much of the spatial turn has sought to make obsolete. Like Karl, Melas draws on Jameson’s description of the totality of the world system. Whereas Karl stresses the point that China’s identification with the non-Euro- American world “initially made the world visible as totality” (4), Melas highlights Jameson’s claim that such a totality is knowable, but at bottom unrepresentable. In conclusion, “at issue is not primarily space as an object of interpretation … but rather space as a perplexing condition of knowledge in which there is a fundamental cleavage between the possibility of conceiving a spatial totality and the impossibility of experiencing or representing it as such” (29). Space, in the most general sense of the word, is then not only the object of any comparative project; it should also be problematized and defamiliarized as the epistemic frame within one’s own research. The question of time, on the other hand, is neither problematized nor defamiliarized, but rejected as an epistemic frame altogether. The withdrawal of time from the previously inextricable, spatiotemporal relationship can be attributed to contemporary efforts to resituate concepts such as culture, modernity, the center and the periphery, the global and the local, in fixed and asynchronic positions. Although Melas herself is not concerned explicitly with the critique of chronocentrism, her analysis of space as an epistemic ground for comparison inevitably leads to a withdrawal of time, which has always been “groundless” anyway. 76 The space of comparison, inclusive by virtue of its transversal extensiveness, would in a first moment negate the negation of this temporal unity and withdraw the discriminating evolutionary hierarchy from the geography of the globe as one might lift a distorting temporal veil in order to reveal space as such. (Melas 29, my emphasis) I find the language with which Melas lifts “[the] distorting temporal veil in order to reveal space as such” somewhat suspicious. Its metaphysical tone harks back to the very language of early comparatists such as Posnett who emplots all societies in different times on an arc where progress is measured by the society’s relative distance or closeness to the observer’s [read: the West’s] present. The primitive society’s relative distance from the present, then, is negated in order to reveal the past as nothing other than a modified present, as nothing other than what the society would one day become – if it would only become – on the evolutionary or developmental scale of progress. It is precisely this negation of time that completes the late nineteenth-century comparatist’s magic trick: the negation of space between the “West” and the “Rest” cannot be thought apart from the negation of time in order to assign the “Rest” to the normative rank of “late developers.” The double deployment of the phrase “negation of negation” in the above-quoted passage from Melas does not exempt her from the metaphysical entanglements of time and space either. Is not the Hegelian Aufhebung all along at work here? Has the critique of metaphysics not been attentive from its beginning to the complicity between time and space, and not simply time itself? Here it is where Jacques Derrida’s “Ousia and Gramme: Note on a Note from Being and Time” is indispensable for understanding what it means when one “lifts the temporal veil in order to reveal space as such” (Melas 29). Originally published in 1968, 77 this early essay of Derrida’s is a specific response to Heidegger’s “destruction” of classical ontology and its “vulgar concept of time,” but its critical tenor helps throw light on the withdrawal of time from the recent spatial turn. Without being able to do full justice to this important, but now seldom-read essay, I single out his commentary on Hegel: “at each stage of the negation, each time that the Aufhebung produced the truth of the previous determination, time was requisite . . . in negating itself, space is time” (42- 3). Furthermore, the negation of this negation would amount to nothing other than a negativity posited for itself, as time (43). Hence time is neither the veil concealing space nor is it a disappearing act in the “negation of negation.” What Melas does reveal in the passage I quote above is only the complicity of time and space as it coheres in the line of thinkers from Aristotle, Kant and Hegel on, a lineage so powerful that, as Derrida shows, Heidegger’s attempt to shake free from the vulgar concept of time could not quite destroy it. Furthermore, each of the terms time and space is only what the other is not, and any attempt to represent concerns the question of “com-parison” itself (Derrida, “Ousia and Gramme” 56). I am not at all arguing that we have to return to metaphysics in order to truly understand either space or time, as if it were not the “essence” of both that the spatial turn has taken to task. What I do affirm is Derrida’s insight that “every text of metaphysics carries within itself, for example, both the so-called ‘vulgar’ concept of time and the resources that will be borrowed from the system of metaphysics in order to criticize that concept” (60). And it is still this “vulgar” complicity of time and space that can give us the very resources with which to detach comparison from an imperialist, evolutionary hierarchy. Instead of 78 rejecting temporality as an epistemic frame altogether, we have at present other ways of engaging with the shifting relationship between the present, past, and future, and most important, with the role that time plays in discourses of transformative politics. Very often, utopian fiction is such a metaphysical text where the Novum and the Ultimum, to use Bloch’s terms, are only new and astonishing to the extent that they defamiliarize the resources borrowed from the system of metaphysics. I have tried to show that what allows utopian criticism to discuss concepts such as the nation-state, modernity, and the international cannot be limited to a purely spatial analysis. To do so would be to relinquish a critique of the role of time in the development of global capitalism, and to give up at one go the possibility of conceiving a different sense of temporality that is not simply a barrier to be overcome. In the Grundrisse, Marx analyzes capitalism’s capacity for overcoming the barrier of circulation time in the creation of an extensive world market. He writes: “Thus, while capital must on one side strive to tear down every spatial barrier to intercourse, i.e. to exchange, and conquer the whole earth for its market, it strives on the other side to annihilate this space with time, i.e. to reduce to a minimum the time spent in motion from one place to another” (539). The triumph of capitalist time over geographical space does not, however, eliminate the potential for a revolutionary temporality in Marx’s analysis. Unarguably it is time, that is, labor-time that determines the value of labor-power. Capital flattens out all ranges of temporalities – the past, present and future – as mere modifications of the present determined by grammar: “the difference between previous, objectified labor and living, present labor here appears as a merely formal difference between the different tenses of 79 labor, at one time in the perfect and at another in the present” (Grundrisse 465-6). Benjamin criticizes this flattening of all temporal difference as the “empty homogenous time” that restricts historical progress to the “continuum of history” (“Theses on the Philosophy of History” 261). Moreover, labor manipulates the duration of the working day that makes possible the production of surplus value. Marx shows in the section of “The Working Day” in Capital I that the establishment of a normal working day is itself the product of a “protracted and more or less concealed civil war between the capitalist and the working class” (412). A proletarian revolution, simply put, must reclaim for himself or herself the time of the worker, which under capitalism is always the time of the capitalist (416). According to Benjamin, only this revolution can blast out of the “continuum of history” (“Theses on the Philosophy of History” 261). But when will this revolution happen? What would we make of the time of this revolution when capitalist time ends and the worker’s time begins? We can glean a tentative response to these questions from Derrida’s Specters of Marx, when he explains how he arrived at the title of his much-awaited book on Marx. When, in 1847-48, Marx names the specter of communism, he inscribes it in an historical perspective that is exactly the reverse of the one I was initially thinking of in proposing a title such as ‘the specters of Marx.’ Where I was tempted to name thereby the persistence of a present past, the return of the dead which the worldwide work of mourning cannot get rid of, whose return it runs away from, which it chases (excludes, banishes, and at the same time pursues), Marx, for his part, announces and calls for a presence to come. (101) Ultimately, Specters of Marx names the “event” of a new communist revolution that is at one and the same time the revenant to-come. Between Marx’s performative call for the communist specter and the temptation of the return of the dead, Derrida’s thought draws 80 us to the untimely nature of the revolution as it is conjured like a ghost in The Eighteenth Brumaire. Paradoxically, what is new in a revolution hinges on how much it inherits from the past: “the more the new erupts in the revolutionary crisis, the more the period is in crisis, the more it is ‘out of joint,’ then the more one has to convoke the old, ‘borrow’ from it” (109). Even when Marx conjures the ghosts of past revolutionaries “on the scale of world history,” they have to pass through another disjointed time: in Derrida’s reading, the task of the time of the old French Revolution is an anachrony that is haunted by the other temporality of Roman costume and phrases (111). The more Marx wants to be done with specters and to distinguish the spirit of the revolution from its specters, the more he shows the revolution to be “fantastic and anachronistic through and through” (112). It is this irreducible inheritance that makes the Communist specter so haunting. Therefore if Marxism promises a thinking of revolutionary temporality that does not retreat in the face of recent discourses of the spatial term, such a thinking must promise an entirely different kind of temporality altogether, as well as a different thinking of the social dimension of revolutions. Commenting on an important passage in The Eighteenth Brumaire -- “the social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry form the past, but only from the future. . . . . In order to arrive at its own content, the revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead” – Derrida writes: “The whole novelty of the new would inhabit this social dimension, beyond the political or economic revolution (115). A modification of Derrida’s observation reads: the whole novelty of the world would inhabit this social dimension. 81 Another thinking of what is new and thoroughly revolutionary returns our discussion to the beginning of this chapter concerning the transformative aspect of utopian thinking. To recall my argument drawn from Althusser, the difference between a utopian and a Marxist transformation of society is that the former focuses only on the “method” of transformation and loses sight of the base-superstructure “content” of society, while Marx treats the “method” of transformation as internal to the very “content” of society. An actual transformation of the social still requires interpretation; both interpretation and change exist in a dialectical relationship whereby change both determines and is determined by interpretation. This is where I highlight the need to understand utopian fiction’s revolutionary thought as social revolution. For a peculiar aspect of the American and Chinese utopian novels at the turn of the century is their noticeable lack of revolutionary change. Both Bellamy and Howells describe a natural, non-violent transition of the existing capitalist order to a socialist one by means of a ripening of public opinion reflected in the electoral process. While the protagonist in A Connecticut Yankee, Hank Morgan, does unleash violent clashes between the Old and New Worlds, represented by Merlin’s magic incantations and Morgan’s technological sensibility, societal change is ultimately subsumed under the narrative of time travel and romantic revelations. The absence of dramatic change is all the more glaring in the Chinese novels I study. That this is so, however, should not be seen as a weakness but as a stronger combination of the travel narrative with utopian fiction, and hence an effect of the melding of multiple utopian worlds into the world of the narrative. Thus the protagonist 82 Jia Baoyu in Wu’s New Story of the Stone is able to move from the eighteenth-century setting of the classical tale The Dream of the Red Chamber, to the author’s time in the early years of the twentieth century, and further into the mythical future of what Wu calls the “Civilized World.” Xu Nianci’s “A Tale of New Mr. Windbag” is even more literal in its protagonist’s flights of fancy. The splitting of Mr. Windbag into part spirit and part body, and their simultaneous journeys into outer space and the center of the earth result in an intense deterritorialization of the existing world. Despite the lack of revolutionary change in these utopian novels, I argue that their narration of the social reframes the problem of revolution as a discursive one. Dirlik refers to this discursive revolution as the “utopianization of revolution” (29). Meaningful revolution does not just mean the creation of revolutionary institutions but first implies “the transformation of the social discourses – ways of thinking and talking about society – that constituted society” (29). I emphasize the importance of this transformation of the ways of thinking and talking about society. We take for granted that the insistence on a “social revolution” is a common legacy of all socialist discourses that spill over to nonsocialist advocates of change, but we tend less to see how pervasive this notion of the social is in challenging an ideological closure of the social by the political (33-5). For Dirlik, it is anarchism’s attention to the concept of the social that aligns it with a post- Marxist criticism of ideology and to utopianism (41). For the rest of this dissertation, I hope to show that it is the narration by utopian fiction of the social as incomplete and indecisive that reinvigorates a Marxist thinking of utopianism. 83 In Chapter Two, I turn to Bellamy’s Looking Backward and its “unofficial” dystopian sequel, Looking Further Backward (1890) by Arthur Dudley Vinton. This chapter studies the devices of sequels, successions and accumulations in order to explain the role that individual memory plays in the social lives of the American nation. Arthur Vinton’s Looking Further Backward is a novel of temporal estrangement that thematizes racial difference as the barrier to the realization of a world market. Here, it is no longer circulation time that obstructs the extension of the market, as Marx observes in the Grundrisse. The novel takes its narrative model from Bellamy’s Looking Backward, but magnifies the problem of racial difference that Bellamy’s homogenous society suppresses by imagining a dystopic future where the Chinese takes over the United States. At a period when the American Federation of Labor was advocating for Chinese exclusion on the grounds that a choice had to be made between “American manhood” or “Asiatic coolieism,” Vinton’s novel resolves the problem of labor not through Chinese exclusion – as the US government did in the anti-immigration act of 1882 – but, ironically, through their inclusion in a new transpacific society. I discuss the allegorical forms of representing this racially mixed totality, and the necessary incompletion of its social narrative. 84 CHAPTER TWO: THE PRIMITIVE, ASIAN TIME-TRAVELER: A STUDY OF ACCUMULATION IN LOOKING BACKWARD AND LOOKING FURTHER BACKWARD Nobody – not even a practitioner of Zukunftsmusik [music of the future] – can live on the products of the future, or on use-values whose production has not yet been completed. -- Karl Marx I. To Help up the Laggards Looking Backward tells the story of 30-year old, rich investor Julian West, who falls into a hypnotic sleep in 1887 and wakes up in 2000 to find the United States transformed into a state-socialist utopia. Through conversations with Dr. Leete and his family, in whose house his underground bedroom was found, Julian narrates the striking changes put into effect by the national re-organization of labor. Under this new system called Nationalism, money is abolished and work is motivated by honor. Everyone regardless of his or her profession, gender, and ability, receives an equal number of annual credits instead of wages. The national working age is from 21 to 45 years old, after which one’s life is spent in leisure and enjoyment. Women are no longer dependent upon men for sustenance. Cooking and laundry are done at public facilities. In short, the Gilded Age - individualism of Bellamy’s time has peacefully evolved into the noble dream of a Christian, technocratic nation united as a “family” and a “common life” (123). However, Julian does not, at first, adjust well to the twenty-first century. He has vastly outlived his generation and feels shut out from the present. Julian’s wondrously technological vault, with its hydraulic cement and asbestos-lined walls is what protected him from the fire on the night of his hypnosis in 1887. But it appears that it is the literary tradition of romance – the magical century-long sleep and the love affair with a utopian lady – that truly gives 85 him a new lease of life. Dr. Leete’s daughter, Edith, turns out to be the great- granddaughter of Julian’s nineteenth-century fiancée, also named Edith, whose relationship with Julian tragically ended when the latter was thought to have perished in the conflagration of his house. By patiently easing Julian’s transition to the twenty-first century, the sentimental heroine’s obsession with her ancestress and her betrothed finds its satisfying conclusion. And through his love for the virtuous utopian lady, Julian regains his personal identity and secures his place as a history professor in Nationalist utopia. When Edward Bellamy published Looking Backward in 1888, little did he expect his time-traveling, utopian hero to inspire so many fictional reprises. A sampling of the titles of fictional responses to Bellamy’s novel shows just how much these unofficial sequels aimed to advance on the back of the original novel’s fame: Looking Further Backward, Looking Further Forward, Looking Within, and Looking Beyond. Like most successful and bestselling novels, Bellamy’s utopian vision came in for strong criticism. Arthur Dudley Vinton’s Looking Further Backward, published in 1890, is not the only unofficial sequel to dish it out. However, its dystopian world is the only one that reinterprets Bellamy’s depiction of a racially and ethnically homogenous United States. Fast-forward to the year 2023, Looking Further Backward is narrated by Professor Won Lung Li, who has taken the position formerly occupied by Julian at Shawmut College after the Chinese army has successfully overtaken the United States. “Born of the race” that Americans have “for centuries been trained to think as inferior,” Li narrates to his students the history of the invasion that has since reversed the racial 86 hierarchy of the nineteenth century (10). The lectures underscore the primary defect of the Nationalist system: the lack of a standing army and resources to defend the nation in times of war. The reason that the United States eventually loses the war is thus rationalized as the very same cause for the Chinese invasion. In Vinton’s imagination, every nation-state in the world has undertaken the Nationalist system of governance, and the Celestial Kingdom has to act alone in order to protect her people from the “pernicious doctrines of Nationalism” (32). After Nationalist emissaries from the outside world persistently challenge China’s isolationist policies, China finally adopts a more aggressive foreign policy. It first supports an anti-Nationalist coup d’état in France, before declaring war on the United States. At an actual historical juncture when the Qing government and some Chinese intellectuals were indeed wary of the encroaching imperial powers and Western influences, and the United States was concerned with the “invasion” of American factories by Chinese workers, the “perniciousness” of transnational doctrines can be seen to cut both ways. The weaknesses of Bellamy’s utopia and the events of the invasion are not always expressed in Li’s own words. Instead, the Chinese professor often recites from Julian’s journals that are found after his demise at the second battle of Lake Erie as General of the college regiments. Julian might have fought and died for his Nationalist countrymen, but in terms of his ideological beliefs, he stands on the side of his nineteenth-century, pre- utopian brethren, or—but interestingly it comes down to the same thing – on the side of the Chinese army. In Looking Further Backward, the time-traveling, utopian hero of Bellamy’s imagination thus becomes its fiercest critic. At the time of Li’s closing lecture, 87 the Chinese have subjugated the country by sheer force of numbers and minimized any risk of rebellion through a gradual, as opposed to sudden change in the order of government (Vinton 184). The American Nationalist army has been hemmed in on all sides by the Chinese army occupying a territory whose outer boundaries stretch from south of Montreal down to Ohio, curving round the Rocky Mountains and round north of the latitude of Puget Sound (ibid.). The Great Wall of China has dramatically shifted continents to surround the United States: “Behind this wall, whose bricks are armed men, is a thriving population wholly devoted to our Celestial Emperor” (Vinton 187). If the Julian of Bellamy’s novel has initial difficulties reconciling his nineteenth-century sensibility to twenty-first century utopian thinking, the Julian of Vinton’s rewriting finds that he can respond to the circumstances of the Chinese invasion better than his fellow countrymen precisely because of his pre-utopian life. If the former Julian needs Edith to romantically convert and seal his fate in the new world, it is Professor Li who relies on the later Julian – through citing his wartime journals – to communicate effectively the weaknesses of Bellamy’s Nationalist system. Thus it is fair to observe that Looking Further Backward accumulates details of the Chinese invasion in order to convince the reader, through Julian, of the pitfalls of the Nationalist system In The Utopian Novel in America, 1886-1896: The Politics of Form, Jean Pfaelzer studies how utopian novels differ from realist novels in that the latter are determined by the potentiality and growth of characters. In contrast, she argues, “Looking Backward achieves its effect by accumulation, piling up enough details to convince Julian, and by extension the reader, of the perfection of the Nationalist world” (35, my 88 emphasis). Eric Hayot, in The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity and Chinese Pain, claims that Li’s character remains static except in terms of his narrative style as he switches from the more indicative mode of “telling” the story to the primarily mimetic mode of “showing” it when he reads aloud from Julian and his son Leete’s journals (158- 9). Both Pfaelzer and Hayot’s critiques of the limits of character development in utopian fiction thus remark a problem with the notion of accumulation. In the ways that Pfaelzer and Hayot use it, accumulation is simply synonymous with stasis, immobility, or the mechanical. The meaning of accumulation as a gathering, collecting, and heaping up is understood solely through the notion of quantitative increase, and not also as an increase over time. However, what if what Looking Backward and Looking Further Backward accumulate are not just details of Nationalist perfection or imperfection, but also the utopian traveler’s age, history, and experience, such that the notion of accumulation in fact spells potentiality and growth? Once we consider Julian’s century-long sleep in Looking Backward critically, and think about his utopian experiences in the twenty-first century as an accumulation of his nineteenth-century, pre-utopian past, then we can conceive of the U.S.-China conflict in Vinton’s unofficial sequel in terms of a further accumulation of Julian’s historical sense. And is this not what a sequel does by definition, a subsequent development and installment continuing the course of the story begun in the previous work? Looking Backward and Looking Further Backward collapse their protagonist’s individual memory into a collective history with which their respective, alternative futures are then contrasted. In the former, the bright future of America has no real need 89 for other countries; in the latter, the horizon is one where national borders and sovereignties offer little security. Despite the dystopian genre’s general political conservatism, Vinton’s novel is more radical than Bellamy’s because it presents a future where the form of national memory becomes identifiable, or at least structurally isomorphic with the very foreign other that it sets out to exclude. Unlike other yellow- peril fiction of its time, Looking Further Backward shows that what is labeled as “Asiatic” paradoxically enables the uneasy narration of American nationhood. This chapter proposes a rethinking of Marx’s concept of the Asiatic mode of production in terms of primitive accumulation in order to explain the roles that memory and forgetting play in national consciousness. What I call “Asiatic accumulation” underscores the utopian and dystopian materiality of historical recollection. It further highlights the material aspects of late nineteenth-century immigrant labor, which the anti-Chinese discourse centered on. In the Grundrisse, Marx refers to primitive accumulation as “historic presuppositions, which, precisely as such historic presuppositions, are past and gone, and hence belong to the history of its formation, but in no way to its contemporary history” (459). Although not often examined together, Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation also applies to his contentious (because notoriously inconsistent) concept of the Asiatic mode of production. As I shall discuss below, Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of Asiatic production shows that the concept of primitive accumulation is far from being past and gone, but in fact continues to supplement the current mode of production. This is what marks as ideological Julian’s primitive accumulation of nineteenth-century, pre-utopian 90 history: it persists after the economic base has shifted to a quasi-socialist system in Bellamy novel. Interestingly, I argue that this is also what makes Julian’s role in Looking Further Backward “Asiatic”: if Vinton paints a dystopian future of Chinese supremacy over the United States, he can only do so because such a future is articulated by a representative of America’s past. Looking Further Backward sets the stage for a thinking of American and Chinese utopian sociality as the intermingling and subsequent blurring of the past and the future with both American and Chinese characteristics. Critical essays on Bellamy and Looking Backward are numerous. However, to my knowledge, Eric Hayot’s chapter “Chinese Bodies, Chinese Futures: The ‘Coolie’ in Nineteenth-Century America,” in his book The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity and Chinese Pain, is the only work that discusses Looking Further Backward in some detail. According to Hayot, “scholarship has largely read Vinton’s novel as a work of American dystopian literature, or as one of several responses to Bellamy, and has paid little attention to the Chinese context” (153). Jean Pfaezler discusses the novel very briefly in her analysis of American dystopia (“Parody and Satire in American Dystopian Fiction of the Nineteenth Century” 66-68). Kenneth M. Roemer singles out Vinton’s novel for its anti-Chinese sentiments (The Obsolete Necessity 72). Wegner turns to it as supporting his own insight into Bellamy’s feminization of America (85-7). However, with the exception of Hayot, none of these scholars addresses Looking Further Backward for more than a few pages; the novel appears to be little more than a title in the catalogue of turn-of-the-century American utopian and dystopian novels. My own reading of the novel thus owes much to Hayot’s work. I agree with him that in a context in which 91 “China’s status as a threat to national and economic integrity and indeed to the possibility of an American future is routinely discussed in terms of an ‘invasion,’” Vinton’s novel is significant because its “major formal feature is a relation to the future, in which an actual Chinese invasion poses a threat to American national and economic integrity” (154). However I disagree with Hayot that the novel is only interesting in the Chinese context, and not also as a work of American dystopian literature that lashes out at its utopian predecessor (153). For what Hayot rightly identifies as the question of America’s transnational futurity is part of a hidden problematic in Looking Backward that Vinton inevitably uncovers in his representation of racial and ideological differences. As Jameson proposes, there is a Bakhtinian dialogue or argument between different positions in the Utopian tradition (Archaeologies, 143). These opposing positions claim the status of the absolute, that is, either the ultimately utopian society or a dystopian one, but both “are willing to descend into the field of struggle of representability and desire in order to win their case and convert their readership” (ibid). The history of utopian works become “interiorized” within works that succeed them, and assert their force into the subsequent utopian argument (ibid). Vinton’s Looking Further Backward does not just succeed Bellamy’s novel; it considers the question of succession as part of its argument against utopia. What I mean by the question of succession is simply the novels’ accumulation of Julian’s pre- utopian and post-utopian historical sense. Looking Further Backward activates his pre- utopian, nineteenth-century knowledge in order to shore up the weaknesses of Bellamy’s 92 utopian blueprint. This sense of historical accumulation can generate an alternative reading of what Hayot rightly identifies as America’s transnational futurity. Hence, that there are no Chinese, or for that matter, any in-depth characterization of non-Anglo-Saxon Americans in Looking Backward does not mean that there is therefore nothing to be said about relations of race, immigration, and global capital as they figure in it. Similarly, it is not true that Looking Further Backward’s depiction of a Chinese invasion and the underlying tensions threatening the nation-state is its author’s wild and baseless variation on Bellamy’s novel. It is easy to forget that Vinton intends for his novel to be, first and foremost, a critique of Bellamy’s Nationalist utopia. In the preface, the author has this to say about utopian proposals in general: “But a false guide is worse than no guide, and a wrong solution of a great human problem is worse than no solution” (6). I wish to emphasize the historical connection between Looking Further Backward’s invasion plot and the turn-of-the-century transnational network of labor relations that was rapidly diversifying the United States’ racial make-up. However, this historical connection ought not take away from what Vinton’s reading of Bellamy is able in turn to produce. If my own reading of Vinton, then, cannot choose between a historical or a fictional reading, it is because “this relationship is not a certain quantitative distribution of shadow and light, of weakness or of force, but a signifying structure that critical reading should produce” (Derrida, Of Grammatology 158, original italics). According to Pfaelzer, American dystopian fiction first became popular between 1887 and 1894 when utopian fiction also flourished after the publication of Bellamy’s novel (“Parody and Satire in American Dystopian Fiction of the Nineteenth Century” 61). 93 Like its utopian counterpart, dystopian fiction relies on the reader’s recognition of the historical problems that it addresses. But at a level not found in utopian fiction, dystopian fiction also relies on the reader’s recognition of the literary tradition to which it is opposed. Pfaelzer defines American dystopia as first a “satire of the progressive tendencies of industrialism and parody of the popular genre of utopian fiction” (ibid.). The historical context that is satirized and the literary form that is parodied define two significant referents of dystopian fiction. Pfaelzer’s explication of dystopian fiction as part historical satire and part literary parody would benefit from Derrida’s now classic explanation of the task of reading in Of Grammatology: all readings, and not just dystopian fiction’s reading of utopian literature per se, cannot transgress the text toward a referent or signified whose content would take place outside of language and of writing in general (158). This is not to say that American-Chinese relations and Asian exclusionism are only accessible in a text, but that they can only be read in a chain of differential traces that make up their conditions of possibility. The more we try to fix what is “Chinese” about the invasion in Looking Further Backward, the more that racially, culturally, and politically charged signifier opens up to the question of what determines the foreign and the unknown who crosses the increasingly permeable American borders of the late nineteenth century. Therefore, the more interesting and vital questions would be: what is the relationship between racial and national difference as such, on the one hand, and utopian discourse, on the other? What is it in the utopian and dystopian tradition that makes possible their contesting the representability of racial, cultural, and national differences in order to win their case, so to speak? I suggest that before we can discuss 94 the significance of the Chinese invasion in Looking Further Backward, it is necessary to trace first how Vinton’s criticism of Bellamy’s novel reveals what the latter has to say about a world-wide utopian change. According to Vinton, the main weakness of the Nationalist government lies in its relinquishing of all military capabilities including a standing army, defense funds, weapons production, and the police in view of the sole task of the public redistribution of wealth, which does not actually eradicate inequality, discontent, envy, and corruption. This total lack of any need of national defense is made most peculiar by the fact that Bellamy takes his idea of the national organization of an entire people from the military system of fixed and equal services. He calls this national workforce the industrial army while abstracting the name from any of its usual connotations. Yet the author insists that his modeling of the industrial army after the military serves as more than just a rhetorical analogy. Instead, the army is to be the “prototype” of the state-run economy, “furnishing at once a complete working model for its organization, an arsenal of patriotic and national motives and arguments for its animation” (Bellamy, “How and Why I Wrote ‘Looking Backward’” 23-4). However, the real reason behind Bellamy’s de- militarization of his utopian society, which Vinton finds so problematic, has to do with Bellamy’s belief in the eventual world peace that his utopia will achieve. In Looking Backward, Julian expresses surprise that whereas in his day, the proper function of government was thought to be limited to maintaining military and police forces against the “public enemy,” the new government of the twenty-first century seems to have been extended beyond these powers (28-9). But what or who are these 95 public enemies, Dr. Leete asks, “are they France, England, or hunger, cold and nakedness?” (29) Before Nationalism, governments’ reaction to the slightest “international misunderstanding” had been to declare war on each other (ibid.). The old system had a reckless propensity to sacrifice human and material resources for war on so- called enemies when the real enemies are hunger, cold and nakedness (ibid.). Thus, as Dr. Leete explains, what Julian sees as the utopian government’s extension of powers is in fact a limitation since it is now solely focused on the real public enemies (ibid.). We have no wars now, and our governments no war powers, but in order to protect every citizen against hunger, cold, and nakedness, and provide for all his physical and mental needs, the function is assumed of directing his industry for a term of years. No, Mr. West, I am sure on reflection you will perceive that it was in your age, not in ours, that the extension of the functions of governments was extraordinary. (29) I shall return to discuss this Schmittian connection between war and the political, and how this figures in the interracial and transnational themes of Looking Further Backward. For now it is crucial to note that once we trace the logic of demilitarization to its most logical cause, namely, the disappearance of any conflicts between nations, we find that what Vinton is really criticizing with the dystopian tale of Looking Further Backward is that Bellamy’s proposal of a utopian society can be extended to the rest of the world. In his 1889 essay “How I Came to Write Looking Backward” Bellamy states that whereas the published story is a “romance of the ideal nation,” in its first form “it was a romance of an ideal world” (22-3). The first draft of Looking Backward depicts the United States as a mere administrative province of the great World Nation, whose capital was in Berne, Switzerland (23). The original plan was also to set the future utopia in the year A.D. 3000. However, as Bellamy further develops the notion of the national 96 industrial service modeled after the military system, where citizens serve the nation just as soldiers do with public and patriotic motives instead of private gain, he realizes the urgency of his book as “the vehicle of a definite scheme of industrial reorganization” (24). With his growing conviction that the National organization of industry can resolve the problem of the control of wealth by the monopolies as well as the labor problems besieging turn-of-the-century America, the author of Looking Backward brings the utopia forward ten decades to the year 2000 A.D. Yet the shorter time span in which Bellamy believes Nationalism would overhaul society also means that the scope of this change has realistically to be reduced. This is how the eventual shape of Looking Backward contracts from being “a romance of an ideal world” to that of the ideal nation: The same clear conviction as to the method by which this great change is to come about, which caused me to shorten so greatly my estimate of the time in which it was to be accomplished, necessitated the substitution of the conception of a separate national evolution for the original idea of a homogeneous world-wide social system. The year 3000 may, indeed, see something of that sort, but not the year 2000. It would be preposterous to assume parity of progress between America and Turkey. The more advanced nations, ours surely first of all, will reach the summit earliest and, reaching strong brotherly hands downwards, help up the laggards. (24) From the above passage, we find a rate of utopian change measured in terms of a time-space relation that is opposed by Marx’s description of capitalist circulation. Circulation is requisite for the realization of capital as value as it metamorphosizes from money to commodity and then to money again. In the Grundrisse, Marx analyzes the process whereby circulation time determines value only insofar as it “appears as a natural barrier to the realization of labor time” (539). Because the time it takes for the circulation of capital has to lead to more payment for necessary labor time, it takes away from 97 surplus labor time, from which surplus value is directly derived. In short, circulation time is the barrier to the productivity of labor, an obstruction to “the self-realization process of capital” that is indispensable to the valorization process (ibid.). Since capital seeks to conquer as many markets as possible, the overcoming of the barrier of circulation time is most important for the development of global capital Thus, while capital must on one side strive to tear down every spatial barrier to intercourse, i.e. to exchange, and conquer the whole earth for its market, it strives on the other side to annihilate this space with time, i.e. to reduce to a minimum the time spent in motion from one place to another. The more developed the capital, therefore, the more extensive the market over which it circulates, which forms the spatial orbit of its circulation, the more does it strive simultaneously for an even greater extension of the market and for greater annihilation of space by time. (If labor time is regarded not as the working day of the individual worker, but as the indefinite working day of an indefinite number of workers, then all relations of population come in here. . . .) There appears here the universalizing tendency of capital, which distinguishes it from all previous stages of production. (Marx, Grundrisse 539-540) While capitalist circulation seeks to annihilate both space and time, Bellamy’s plan for a global-utopian circulation overcomes temporal barriers at the expense of space. Here, John R. Eperjesi’s analysis of the above-cited passage in Marx can be adapted for my purpose. He finds in Marx’s study of global capital evidence of a “metageography of circulation” and the “construction of a regional imaginary for capital” (215-6). In Eperjesi’s culturalist reading of the capitalist-economic matrix, the American imaginary of the Asian Pacific at the turn of the century is such a regional imaginary in which spatial and temporal barriers to expansion need to be overcome in advance. “‘Asia and Oceania’ was posited as the extensive limit to domestic production designed to direct the expansion of capital so that the conditions enabling the production of surplus value at home could be re-created” (217). I borrow Eperjesi’s analysis of the “metageography of 98 circulation” in Marx to explain the time of utopian change. As we have seen, Bellamy’s increased certainty in the feasibility of his utopian blueprint is accompanied by a serious doubt as to its geographical reach. Like capital, utopian imagination does not stop at the nation-state. It too “strives to tear down every spatial barrier” even though – and perhaps precisely because – it knows no fixed space (Marx, Grundrisse 539). Herein lies the relationship between racial and national differences, on the one hand, and utopian discourse, on the other: precisely because a utopia worthy of its name has to be a world- wide one, like capital, there are also spatial and temporal barriers that obstruct the realized utopia of any single, collective unity. I argue that just as global capitalist circulation constructs regional imaginaries in its confrontation with the barriers of global time and space, utopian fiction similarly constructs specific spatial fixes in order to realize utopian change by a definite point in time. The deadline for the building of a perfect society cannot be indefinitely deferred: the realization of utopia in the nearer future necessitates a contraction of its ideal boundaries from the world to the nation. In Bellamy’s case, however universal he originally intends his utopian vision to be, he has to forgo its reach to the world’s less advanced nations (“How and Why I Wrote ‘Looking Backward’” 24). Here is where the American, late nineteenth-century realization of utopian value, unlike that of capitalist value, comes to be limited. It cannot overcome time and space simultaneously. Between the choice of a world-wide utopia in 3000 A.D. and accelerating the time of its fulfillment to 2000 A.D., Bellamy’s decision is clearly undergirded by Spencerian and Darwinian thought of his time. In one sentence – “it would be preposterous to assume 99 parity of progress between America and Turkey” – Bellamy reestablishes the spatial barrier to utopian change (ibid.). Precisely because Turkey is here posited to be further backward in the linear progression of time than America, it is also by default further outside of the geographical scope for utopian evolution. A century is a long time for capitalist circulation, but for the utopian writer, the “laggards” will just have to wait for America’s “brotherly hands” (ibid.). Therefore even though Dr. Leete tells Julian that there are no more wars between nations, this does not mean that there are no more interactions between them. Looking Backward does outline the effects that its utopian plan would have on other countries in the world, but as with the author’s Spencerian belief in progress, the utopian plan will only affect a select few. In terms of the novel’s optimism regarding world peace, the presupposition of a world without wars is an outright presupposition that marks the utopia’s ultimate fictionality. For later in the novel, when Dr. Leete elaborates on the loose form of federal union made up of the European nations, Australia, Mexico, and parts of South America, his discussion is limited to the commercial aspects of foreign exchange, extended free trade and free immigration. Such a narrow focus certainly does not satisfy readers like Vinton who needs more than a presupposition of world peace to justify scrapping a standing army (68). It is all the more curious that Bellamy’s ideal of the federal union can even be termed as “world-wide” when it excludes the whole of Asia and Africa. In Vinton’s rewriting of Nationalism’s future, he refers to Bellamy’s limited idea of a world-wide federal union as a mere narrative oversight, and expands the reach of 100 Nationalism to all the nations of the world except China (Looking Further Backward 15). The latter alone retains her “ancient civilization and form of government,” and “it is fortunate for the world that she did so” (15). China establishes itself as an exceptional power – its expansionist and exceptionalist ideology of foreign policy closely mirrors that of the United States under the McKinley administration--while the United States itself is stripped of any weight in the international arena. We learn about China’s decision to abandon its passive policy of non-intercourse with foreign nations in favor of the military option in order to preserve its own system of government (30). The stage is set not only for China and the United States; the Chinese-supported, newly-established French empire has become a dependency of China, paying the latter an annual tribute of many million tales (23-4). France subsequently plays a not insignificant role in China’s policy of depopulating the U.S. of its citizens and repopulating the country with Chinese subjects (84). France is to be the other destination, besides China, for this terrible population exchange, as passenger ships and freighters shuttle the Atlantic between France and the U.S., carrying westward Chinese and French citizens and to France an equal number of young American men over the U.S. (85). In a page borrowed from the annals of the Atlantic slave trade, Vinton goes on to describe the pitiable conditions of the ocean passage. Such conditions do not improve after the American men disembark in France or China. “Strangers in a strange land, not knowing the tongue of their masters, sold at private sale and public auction as laborers to whosoever would hire them, they became practically slaves” (86). 101 I interpret, therefore, the distance separating a “look backward” and a “look further backward” as both a historical-temporal and a spatial distance. Looking further back from the Christian calendar year of 2023, or in Professor Won Lung Li’s Chinese calendar, from the year of the great dragon, 7942 (10), the formal setting of Vinton’s novel parodies the international potential of Bellamy’s utopia. Even before we can begin to discuss the unofficial sequel’s racist elements, the connection of racial and national differences to utopian thinking, which seeks to overcome the material temporal and spatial obstacles that accentuate these differences, needs to be further explored. If a dys- topia or “bad place” is the counter-reaction to a world-wide union, the challenge is to see what hope is left for alternative social formations beyond the nation-state. II. Will the Real Coolie Please Stand Up? By positing the Chinese as formidable invaders as well as rulers, Looking Further Backward literalizes what was frequently styled a metaphorical invasion of the United States by Chinese immigrant labor at the turn of the century, while simultaneously playing on the stereotypical image of the late Qing government as a weak and inferior state incapable of any domineering foreign policy. William F. Wu, in his study of yellow peril as a literary theme, discusses how the fear focuses on specific issues such as possible military invasions, the alleged moral degeneracy of Asian people, and the potential genetic mixing of Anglo-Saxons with Asians (1). American intellectuals of the time such as John Fiske observed that “if some future Attila or Jinghis were to wield as a unit the entire military strength of the four hundred millions of Chinese, possessed with some suddenly-conceived idea of conquering the world” he may really have a chance at 102 crushing European civilization (114). Yet his confidence in the “English race” leads him to posit that “if the Chinese are ever going to try anything of this sort, they cannot afford to wait very long; for within another century, as we shall presently see, their very numbers will be surpassed by those of the English race alone” (114-5). Vinton, like many other novelists in the yellow-peril tradition, seizes upon this perpetual threat of the populous Chinese in his novel. Colleen Lye, in America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893- 1945, traces the imperialist moment of the “yellow peril” that coincides with America’s arrival on the world stage (24-5). Although Lye’s study is not about utopian fiction per se, it does not miss the “historically well-traveled circuit between racism and utopian energies” (58). She focuses on American naturalism as a historically specific mode of representing an increasingly heterogenous America, and on how this representation is accompanied by the “Asian question” of the time, in particular, the exclusionist policies of the late nineteenth century. “Despite the U.S. ‘opening’ of China,’ ‘Chinese’ is a metonym for the closing of unique American conditions of possibility” (54). The burgeoning American labor movement from the 1870s to the 1930s perceived Chinese labor as so great a threat that it legitimized the exclusion of Asians as a part of its anti- corporate, and even anticapitalist discourse (58). American popular fiction of the time mobilizes the Asiatic racial form to convey its anti-monopoly sentiments, whether the latter is eventually geared toward Populism or Socialism. Hence while Ignatius Donnelly draws up an agrarian utopia freed from an Asianized modernity in Caesar’s Column, Jack 103 London seeks to exclude Asian existence from a supposedly borderless socialist future in The Iron Heel (67). According to Lye, the Asiatic form becomes the readily available tool anti- monopoly fiction uses to criticize both the oligarchical and unequal conditions of monopoly capitalism, as well as the latter’s dependence on foreign labor and the Asian market. At the heart of this material relation between anti-monopoly fiction and racial difference is undoubtedly Chinese labor and the ubiquitous figure of the coolie. “An oxymoronic Chinese figure of modern immanence,” the coolie figure also collapses the distinction between the pre-industrial past and the industrial present (Lye 67). Henry George, when attacking Californian land monopoly in his 1879 analysis of political economy, Poverty and Progress, compares the decadence of the U.S. economic system to that of Oriental China (68). It is not difficult to trace the genealogy of this notion of Oriental despotism to the eighteenth century and to Montesquieu or to Marx and Engel’s theory of an “Asiatic mode of production” in the nineteenth century. Though as Lye carefully notes, this theory includes traits that are radically inconsistent with one another (ibid). In her brief discussion of the notion of Asiatic production, Lye highlights Perry Anderson’s own study of the genealogy of the concept. According to Anderson, Marx and Engels emphasize the domination of the despotic state machine and its economic exploitation in their distinction between the Asiatic mode of production and European feudalism (Anderson 483; Lye 68). “For Perry Anderson, the close identity between the ruling class and the state in ‘Oriental society’ meant that between the self-producing villages ‘below’ and the hypertrophied state ‘above,’ dwelt no intermediate forces” (Lye 104 69). Lye sees this absence of intermediate forces as evidence of Donnelly’s and London’s rendition of an increasingly Asiatic production in the United States. Both paint a dystopian image of American industrialization that has divided people into two rivaling camps: the oligarchs versus everyone else (Lye 69). In The Hypothetical Mandarin, Eric Hayot’s summary of anti-Chinese sentiments in turn-of-the-century American fiction is similar to Lye’s above, although his study of the alleged character of Asian labor focuses on the discourses around the physical body of the Chinese worker. Stories such as Pierton W. Dooner’s “Last Days of the Republic” (1880), Robert Woltor’s “A Short and Truthful History of the Taking of Oregon and California by the Chinese in the Year A.D. 1899” (1882), and other short stories published in the Overland Monthly are all invasion tales that feature hordes of faceless Chinese armies unresponsive to pain and suffering (Hayot 149-9). Like the coolie figure after which these Chinese hordes are modeled, the Chinese armies are depicted as indifferent to their own casualties and to the cause of their struggles (ibid.). In contrast, the Americans are shown to be too trusting of foreigners. Their valiant but undeniable defeat raises the urgency for a breed of Americans “ideologically and militarily equipped” to resist future foreign invasions (149). Even though Dooner and Woltor do not share the same anti-monopoly interests as Donnelly and London, their books nonetheless set the logic of individual, craft labor and American manhood over and against the foreign hordes employed in factory work, or coolies, in short (ibid.). These fictional examples are all very well, but like those found in Lye’s survey, the common theme of a becoming-Asian of American industrialization does not apply to 105 Looking Further Backward. There, according to Hayot, the American-Chinese conflict resolves itself into a new transpacific polity for the citizens of both countries – and we might add, for French citizens as well (149). Despite the violent descriptions of the battles and deportation policies, the novel ultimately presents a sympathetic view of an open and prospective future (ibid.). Yet, Hayot is always cautious about overstating the exceptional status of Looking Further Backward compared to other dystopian invasion novels and anti-Chinese science fiction of its time. 9 Whatever pride of place Looking Further Backward has in the pantheon of paranoid, anti-Chinese American science fiction must lie, therefore, in the fact that it neither followed the models that preceded, nor inspired the works that followed it, in the fact, that is, that its imagination of the future was so uncompelling as to allow it – along with Vinton’s literary career more generally – to disappear without leaving much of a mark on even that small subsection of American literary history to which it belongs. (151) I agree with Hayot that Vinton’s failure to replicate the staple plotlines and characterizations found in most anti-Chinese American science fiction can be partially explained by his location outside of California. While Dooner, Wolton, and Frank Norris published in San Francisco where their white reading audiences were familiar with the coolie stereotype and prone to the anxieties posed by Chinese labor, Vinton’s novel was published in Albany, New York (Hayot 151). Even though the Northeast had its share of Chinese workers’ strikes and ensuing outcries, it did not face the same issues that were 9 Wegner also picks up on the strangely upbeat tone in which Professor Li closes his lecture with a summary of the benefits brought by the Chinese takeover. He compares the novel to Phillip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle whereby “Vinton’s view of the consequences of the successful invasion of the United States by an Asian nation is in fact deeply ambivalent” (86). I would add that Wegner’s observation seems to have overlooked the ideological bias of the narrator (Li) who cannot but sing China’s praises. But it is indeed the case that the tone of his closing lecture dramatically differs from the condescending nature of his opening remarks. 106 confronting writers of classically anti-Chinese science fiction in California (ibid.). It is perhaps for this reason that Vinton’s depiction of America’s Chinese future is better able to come to terms with the effects that global capitalism and transnational networks of labor and trade have on the insularity and independence of the nation-state (Hayot 165). Yet, the figure of the Chinese coolie so central to much of the discourse about China and the American future is erased in Vinton’s novel. Hayot makes much of this absence of the Chinese worker in Looking Further Backward. Walter Benjamin’s explanation for the absent masses in the oeuvre of Charles Baudelaire, that the “most important subjects are hardly ever encountered in descriptive form,” may also explain the absent coolies in Vinton’s novel (165). Consequently, also absent from the novel is the particularly Asiatic mode of production on which Lye centers her analysis of Donnelly’s and London’s fiction (164). According to Hayot, “[t]he coolie’s ‘absence’ from the novel functions as a determining negative space, an ideological black hole around which the novel revolves and from which it cannot escape” (165). However Vinton’s primary attack on Nationalism’s demilitarization and anti-individualistic thinking does not require him to depict the scene of production and, by extension, the Chinese worker. The only Chinese who are represented in the novel are military officers and personnel. Even the narrator, Professor Li, was before his current assignment an officer in the Chinese Bureau of Foreign Intelligence and spent the preceding year and six months in Europe and North America studying the weaknesses of the Nationalist governments (21-2). The appearance and mannerisms of the first Chinese envoy whose fleet lands in Boston Harbor, as well as 107 those of all the subsequent Commissioners, Admirals, Captains and Lieutenants, give the impression that Vinton is in no way basing his descriptions on ordinary Chinese workers. 10 This of course does not mean that he is not exoticizing them. For example, the description of the “good-looking, well-made Chinaman” who is His Excellency, Lieutenant Hi, is immediately followed by a declared fascination with their “long tails of hair” (46). Beyond these unremarkable instances, the invading army does not seem to have any particularly Chinese characteristics at all. In fact, throughout most of the novel, Vinton reverses the Asian stereotype, so as to “consistently displace and defamiliarize contemporary cultural formations by shifting their national origin or moral value, retaining the stereotype’s terms but inverting its logic” (Hayot 154, emphasis in the original). Julian describes the Chinese who with their “polished manners, and skill in conversation . . . would have made them charming hosts, under different circumstances” (143). In contrast, the American bureaucrats and officers, including the President, appear mechanical, greedy, and robotic. Under the Nationalist system, the Americans have become sheep-like communalists while the Chinese have become the most individualistic, independent Americans. From this, it is clear that Vinton uses one racial and cultural stereotype to play off the other in order to contrast the Chinese army’s military efficiency with the American government’s mechanical delays in reacting to the invasion. Therefore one can hardly describe the coolie’s absence from the novel as an 10 Because of his residence in Hartford, Connecticut Vinton might have been aware of the Chinese Educational Mission, which from 1872-1881 saw 120 Chinese students who were sent to America to acquire Western expertise and on their return would help to direct China's efforts to strengthen itself and repel foreign aggression. Many of these students studied in Hartford and the Hartford Courant ran news of the Mission and its students (Desnoyers 251). 108 “ideological black hole” (Hayot 165). Similarly, the American worker has no role in Looking Further Backward except in an eye-witness’s account of the arrival of the first Chinese fleet (Vinton 44-5). Nothing further is said of this eye witness whose manuscript Li quotes, other than the fact that he “was one of those drafted from the unclassified grade of common laborers” in Bellamy’s industrial army (ibid). In sum, if there is any ideological black hole at all regarding the non-appearance of the Chinese coolie in Looking Further Backward, it has to be traced back to the absence of production or work in Bellamy’s novel. It is through this black hole that the character of Julian falls and lands in Vinton’s dystopian universe. When I say production or work I am not qualifying it as Asiatic, feudalistic, capitalist, or socialist, but simply production tout court. Despite Vinton’s aim to present a dystopian society that is the greatest possible contrast with Bellamy’s utopia, he ends up reproducing one of Looking Backward’s most peculiar traits, namely, the absence of work. I shall now turn to Bellamy’s novel to examine this question as part of my larger experiment to put the concept of Asiatic production back into Vinton’s universe – even if it means still leaving the coolie out. Just as it is appears uncharacteristic for a late nineteenth-century, American, yellow-peril type invasion novel not to feature the coolie figure, given the significance of the industrial army as the productive force of the entire nation it is all the more peculiar that there is no depiction of production or work in Bellamy’s utopian scheme. While the Julian of the nineteenth century “derived the means of his support from the labor of others, rendering no sort of service in turn” (Looking Backward 3), he wakes up in the 109 twenty-first century to learn that the new system has no room for such luxurious existence in utter idleness. Through conversations with his host, Julian learns that the national organization of labor constitutes an industrial army, which takes from the principle of universal military service the idea that every citizen’s contribution to the nation is equal and absolute. In this new system, the choice of trade or profession is determined by each person’s natural aptitude, and preference is given to applicants who have acquired the most knowledge of the trade they opt for (33). Yet, Julian does not encounter any of the members of this industrial army at work. Dr. Leete is now long retired from his medical career. We never find out the occupation of Mrs. Leete (otherwise unnamed) before her retirement. Edith, who is in her prime years, does not seem to occupy herself with anything at all besides her “indefatigable shopping” (48). 11 With the exception of a nameless clerk whom Julian and Edith meet at the sample store and a waiter who serves the Leetes in their public dining hall, Julian does not actually witness the industrial army at work. Wegner explains: “The very absence of work in the text signals the nature of the social morass that Bellamy hoped to avoid in his new society: the problem of the modern industrial laborer” (78). By contrast, what the utopian author does seem to welcome is another modern, social formation, namely, the rising middle-class consumerist culture (ibid.). Yet, Bellamy hardly holds back when it comes to detailed explanations of what work stands for under Nationalism. It is honor, patriotism, and duty, rather than higher 11 Only in the sequel to Looking Backward, Equality, do we learn that Edith is in the second year of her three-year compulsory service as an unclassified worker and that she has been working as an agricultural worker (44). 110 wages that inspire workers to labor for their country (46). While a capitalist society equally values honor, the difference in the year 2000 is that individuals are honored for serving society instead of their selfish interests (63). Throughout the novel, the idea of work is inseparable from that of the nation and citizenship: “the worker is not a citizen because he works, but works because he is a citizen” (65). In Jonathan Auerbach’s view, Bellamy can only correct the “dislocated” relation between labor and capital by engaging in a kind of dislocation of his own when he replaces the forces of production with a “‘machinery of distribution’ that magically regulates itself” (27). For a utopian system built on the ideal of work as a higher duty without wage-profits, the absence of labor from the novel only underscores the author’s distrust of nineteenth century workers’ rights (Pfaelzer, 42). But is there really no production at all in Looking Backward? Does the narrator, Julian, participate in any aspect of production at all? On the third day after he first wakes up in the Boston of 2000 A.D., Julian expresses his concerns about his place in the new society to Dr. Leete. Over these three days, he has learned about the principles behind the new collectivist economy, the transformations in social relations that are premised upon equality, and the many changes that the society effects to the everyday lives of the Leetes. It is only natural that Julian feels the need to figure out his life in relation to his adopted society, however unnatural his entry into the twenty-first century has been. “Now that I am beginning to feel my feet under me, and to realize that, however I came here, I am here, and must make the best of it” (86). Dr. Leete assures his guest that he does not at all view his stay as temporary, furthermore, that “such a guest as [Julian] is an acquisition not willingly to be parted 111 with” (86). Here, the kind doctor is referring to Julian as an “acquisition” in the affectionate sense. However, it is not until after Julian’s response that we learn of another practical value of the twenty-first century “acquisition” of its nineteenth-century ancestor. “Thanks, doctor,” I said. “It would be absurd, certainly, for me to affect any oversensitiveness [sic] about accepting the temporary hospitality of one to whom I owe it that I am not still awaiting the end of the world in a living tomb. But if I am to be a permanent citizen of this century I must have some standing in it. Now, in my time a person more or less entering the world, however he got in, would not be noticed in the unorganized throng of men, and might make a place for himself anywhere he chose if he were strong enough. But nowadays everybody is a part of a system with a distinct place and function. I am outside the system, and don’t see how I can get in; there seems no way to get in, except to be born in or come in as an emigrant from some other system.” (86) However perfect the system of the industrial army has been in providing everyone with a job and a place in society, it has not anticipated a participant such as Julian who is physically 30 years of age, but who has not gone through the usual process of basic education and occupational training (ibid.). Yet precisely for this reason, it is unlikely that he will go unnoticed in the twenty-first century. Dr. Leete explains that even though Julian has only been in contact with his family, the whole nation has been excitedly following his experience even before his resuscitation (ibid.). The reason why Julian has not yet made the acquaintance of his fellow citizens is because they take into account his precarious nervous condition. “It was thought best that I should take exclusive charge of you at first, and that you should, through me and my family, receive some general idea of the sort of world you had come back to” (ibid.). As it turns out, it has already been decided what would be the best function for Julian in this society, even though he himself admits that he has neither trade, art, nor special skill (87). He has not earned a dollar in 112 his life, or done an hour’s work (ibid.). Does Bellamy have in mind for his hero an occupation as a common laborer? Certainly not, and it is not because that position may be in any way unrespectable, as Dr. Leete quickly adds. Despite his lack of professional training, Julian has on his resumé the sheer fact of having lived in the nineteenth century, and is “easily the master of all our historians on questions relating to the social condition” of that period (87). Yet Julian’s historical knowledge of the earlier century alone is not sufficient; it must be accompanied by a knowledge of the present, which to Bellamy’s readers, would be a “future” history contained in the fictive present of the year 2000. Dr. Leete tells Julian: “. . . and whenever in due time you have sufficiently familiarized yourself with our institutions, and are willing to teach us something concerning those of your day, you will find an historical lectureship in one of our colleges awaiting you” (ibid., my emphasis). Surely since the day of his first awakening to the utopia, Julian has been familiarizing himself with its institutions. Julian’s new post as an educator of Nationalist America also implies his having been educated, albeit informally, by the system via the Leetes’ patient guidance. To my knowledge, only Wegner has commented on Julian’s history lectureship and its role in the overall educational system in the novel: The new educational apparatus thus would play a crucial role in suturing these publics [the different classes, the rich, poor, educated and ignorant] into a unified national body, while at the same time providing a central “opportunity” for intellectuals in the emergent national culture – a role into which West, as a history professor, is then inserted. (97) Yet, Julian does not actually begin his history lectureship, or what he appropriately refers to as “an occupation ready-made” for him, until after or at least outside of the diegesis of 113 the novel. 12 Even though the author’s preface is presented as a lecture in the history department of Shawmut College, Julian’s actual employment talents remains extradiegetic. What is in the narrative, however, is in fact a prolonging of the period that Dr. Leete mentions above, that is, the “whenever-in-due-time” until Julian “sufficiently familiarizes” himself with the utopia’s institutions (87). The educator is at the same time an apprentice, for Julian, in the meantime, needs to brush up his knowledge of the twenty-first century as well. Therefore it is possible to read the entirety of Looking Backward as a preparation or training for Julian’s career as a history professor. As both Auerbach and Wegner remark, schooling, rather than the industrial army, is the guiding principle in Bellamy’s utopia (97). What they do not point out is that Julian’s schooling is the guiding principle of the narration itself. Bellamy has written a whole novel about a utopian-educational Ideological State Apparatus. In Althusser’s classic study of Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus, which he distinguishes from the Repressive State Apparatus, the former does not constitute an organized unity controlled by the ruling classes in possession of State power, but expresses the effects of the clashes between “capitalist class struggle and the proletariat class struggle, as well as their subordinate forms” (100). The ISA is secured by the ruling class but the effects of the clashes between various class struggles are contradictory (ibid.). The ISA is not unique to mature capitalist modes of production, 12 In Equality, it appears that Bellamy changes his mind. Julian realizes that “the very last people who had any intelligent idea of the nineteenth century, what it meant, and what it was leading to, were just myself and my contemporaries of that time. After I have been with you a few years I may learn enough about my own period to discuss it intelligently” (36). This hesitation in Julian’s grasp of his own period is interesting, but it falls outside of the focus of this chapter. 114 even though Althusser argues that under feudalism, its individual types vary and are on the whole smaller in number (101). What I identify as the educational ISA of Looking Backward, therefore, brings Althusser’s analysis to a different context: neither a capitalist nor a feudalist social formation, Bellamy’s state-socialist or quasi-socialist order also has its own ideological state apparatuses. 13 There is no doubt that ideological state apparatuses would exist in any utopia that is the future of capitalism, although they would, just as Althusser observes of the feudalist ISAs, vary in number and individual type. One trait that remains constant in either a mature-capitalist mode of production or Bellamy’s Nationalist economy would be Althusser’s thesis regarding the dominance of the educational ideological apparatus (104). The latter is evident Bellamy’s state socialist economy. Even though under Nationalism, all professional training stops at the age of 30, surely an exception can be made for the age-defying, time-traveling emigrant from the past. Hence despite the absence of production in the economic sense, the development of Julian’s character hinges centrally on his gradual assimilation into the reproduction of the utopia’s conditions of production, that is, the ideological superstructure of the Nationalist economy. Perhaps it is not too far-fetched to have suggested that an “ideological black hole” – to use again Hayot’s term for the absence of coolies in Vinton’s novel – of production exists in Looking Backward. A whopping 162 pages of educating Julian for his informed look backward cannot be all that unproductive especially when the 13 On the question of the dialectics of ideology and utopia, see Chapter One.. 115 production is ideological. As Althusser reminds us, “the ultimate condition of production is therefore the reproduction of the conditions of production” (85). III. Historia Obscura In the opening pages of Looking Backward, Julian enters the new order as someone who is outside of the system. By the time the narration closes, Bellamy’s readers assume that the utopian traveler would be well integrated into the system in order for him to begin his historical lecture on December 26, 2000. In my preceding discussion on the educational Ideological State Apparatus in Looking Backward, I began with the resolution of Julian’s alienation from the utopian twenty-first century. However, our Althusserian analysis of the reproduction of relations of production must also pursue the beginning of Julian’s so- called alienation, and not just its resolution. In the larger scheme of this chapter, our movement from Vinton’s rewriting of Julian’s post-utopian life back to Bellamy’s first insertion of Julian into the twenty-first century is only getting more complex. Up to this point, I have shown that the absence of production in Bellamy’s novel in fact points to the reproduction of relations of production insofar as the whole narration entails Julian’s education in the ways of the utopia. Yet, because it is Julian’s historical knowledge of the nineteenth century that makes his eventual lectureship “an occupation ready-made” for him in the first place (97), the utopia’s main ideological apparatus surrounds the complex question of history itself. This section examines the novel’s particular treatment of historical time in conjunction with Julian’s individual existential history, before opening up to the question of his age when he wakes up in utopia. I will 116 try to show that Julian’s “primitiveness” and his accumulation of a pre-utopian, pre-state- socialist mode of production is what initially obstructs his recognition of the new world. From its opening, the novel is presented as a historical lecture for Shawmut College set in December 2000 (Bellamy 1), narrated through the time-traveling experiences of Julian West. Bellamy stresses the values of historical study in pointing out that the new utopia is less than a century old, and the remarkable fact that so “prodigious a moral and material transformation” could take place in so short a time (ibid.). Yet, in order to downplay the historical lesson’s overtly “formal” or “instructive” qualities, the author casts the book “in the form of a romantic narrative” (ibid.). The romance will put its imagined twenty-first century readers in the shoes of the nineteenth-century narrator so that they will revisit the principles behind the modern social institutions, which they have taken for granted (1-2). However, given that Looking Backward was published in 1888, the historical lecture is really a future history whose romantic narrative is internal, and not external to its narrative structure: there is nothing overtly formal or instructive for nineteenth-century readers who will have to take on the twenty-first century utopian perspective so as to further reposition themselves as a nineteenth-century Bostonian who has undergone a century-long sleep. The “reader” who Bellamy addresses when he explains that modern social institutions and their underlying principles are matters of course refers to the historical lecture’s fictional audience as well as the novel’s presumed reader (1). Thus as he proceeds to add that an examination of the last hundred years makes for a “solid ground for daring anticipations of human development during the next one thousand years” (2), he is addressing both his contemporaries who have the 117 advantage of foresight, and his fictive twenty-first century reader who has the luxury of hindsight. Thus it is rather perfunctory for Bellamy to “alleviate the instructive quality of the book by casting it in the form of a romantic narrative” when the very instructive nature of its history is one of future history (1). One cannot decide whether it is the novel’s future history that makes up the content of the romantic narrative, or whether it is the romantic form that enables the novel’s paradoxical treatment of history. Since the novel’s traversing of the two periods of historical time is achieved by its narrator’s century-long sleep, we have to add the component of existential experience to that of historical time. Jameson shows that discussions of temporality always bifurcate into historical time (predominated by interrogations of the future) and existential time (predominated by the question of memory) (Archaeologies of the Future 7). It is precisely in utopia that these two dimensions are reunited (ibid.). “Existential time is taken up into a historical time which is paradoxically also the end of time, the end of history” (ibid.). However, this conflation of individual time with collective time in science fiction and utopian fiction often produces different variations of time that do not necessarily result in an end of subjectivity (ibid.). Here, Julian’s transgression of the biological limits of existential time – when he sleeps for a hundred and thirteen years and wakes up as young and healthy as he was at age 30 – is a clear instance of the transcendence of one kind of collective time (nineteenth-century capitalism) by a different one of the future (twenty- first century state socialism), even as he still remains within his individual time. In Jameson’s words, with Julian’s “reentering [of] the stream of history and development over and over again” the literary prototype of Washington Irving’s Rip von Winkle offers 118 Bellamy “a readjustment of individual biology to the incomparably longer temporal rhythms of history itself” (ibid.). What significance does Looking Backward’s readjustment of individual to historical time have for the dialectic between ideology and utopia? My previous discussion of the Political Unconscious shows that the dialectic between ideology and utopia has been construed in a way that relies on some ideal transparency of individual consciousness, which is always already an ideological construct. The dialectic between ideology and utopia ought to be rethought as that between ideology and the unity of a collective since the latter is the very concept that grasps the ideological superstructure as an instrument of class domination (Jameson, The Political Unconscious 278-80). According to Jameson, all class consciousness is utopian since it expresses the unity of a collectivity (281). Most important, this utopia can only express itself figuratively, as an allegory (ibid.). Julian, whose individual, existential time is bound to historical time, is an allegorical figure of collective difference in futuristic Boston. Julian’s account of his own age before his century-long sleep depicts a class society afflicted with labor troubles, captured by the famous metaphor of society as a stage coach where many pulled at the rope and the few rode (Bellamy, Looking Backward 6). However, state ownership of property, labor, and production in the twenty- first century has made class an archaic term insofar as everyone depicted in the novel leads a comfortable, middle-class existence. The labor unions and the working classes play no role in the transition to this classless society (28). The only room for individual distinction in Bellamy’s utopia is Nationalism’s grading system, where every worker 119 wears an insignia emblematic of his or her industry that is graded from iron, silver to gilt (60-1). This ranking system forms the backbone of Bellamy’s industrial army. Without the lure of money, the emulation of honor and the ambition to rise in the ranking system alone must guarantee the productivity of the entire workforce. Most significantly, Bellamy’s Boston, whether it is in the post-Reconstruction era of 1887 or in the future 2000, is racially and ethnically homogenous. The only colored character in the novel is Julian’s house servant in the nineteenth century, his “faithful colored man Sawyer” who perishes in the fire. Ahmad reads Bellamy’s quick dismissal of the novel’s only colored character symbolically: “In a parallel process to his cure of the bourgeoisie through the surgical removal of the proletariat, Bellamy also cures the ills of Reconstruction by neatly excising the novel’s only character of color” (27). The only character who stands out from the homogenous utopia is its narrator: a white, privileged, and handsome male who naturally gets the girl. The only thing is that, technically speaking, Julian West is also 143 years old. This question of age is not unfamiliar to a writer of Bellamy’s background. He started out as a writer in the romance genre whose short stories explore issues of time, memory, identity, the processes of self-transformation and their impact on the larger society. In one of his earlier short stories, “The Old-Folks’ Party,” Bellamy focuses his fascination with time and identity on the specific question of aging. A group of young men and women in a weekly social club, when discussing the theme for their next gathering, decide to dress up and behave as what they expect to look, feel, and think like fifty years hence. As one of these members in her early twenties puts it, this old folks’ 120 party would be “a sort of ghost party, ghosts of the future, instead of ghosts of the past” (34). The idea of themselves in their seventies seems so remote and foreign that they start to refer to their personae for the upcoming party in the third person: “. . . and the first person of grammar ought to be used only with the present tense. What we were, or shall be, or do, belongs strictly to the third person” (35). Although members of the club manage to access their future selves simply through some make-up and make-believe, and do not have to experience Julian’s supernatural, century-long hypnosis, they too address the question of one’s control over future time and the philosophy behind aging and alterity. “The members of the club observed with astonishment that, however affectionately we may regard old persons, we no more think of becoming like them than of becoming negroes” (38). When they meet a week later in their convincing costumes and mannerisms of old age, the party comes to the melancholic realization that they are not in fact acting out the lives of others, but merely rehearsing their own coming reality (45). “The sense of age was weighing on them like a nightmare” (ibid.). However in “The Old Folks’ Party,” such a nightmare is something from which one can awake by simply pulling off a wig and resuming a youthful demeanor. In Looking Backward, on the other hand, age is not something that Julian can shrug off so easily. His existential time is reunited with historical time to create a confused, historical sense. As a result, as Pfaelzer points out in another essay, “the tension resides not within the utopian present, but between the utopian present and the nonutopian past” (“Immanence, Indeterminance” 59). Julian is a figure of difference in a utopian, collective society because he stands for the 121 contradictory forces of history itself. He is in many ways outside of history, since he literally sleeps through a century of it. Yet at the same time, he is made to represent history by virtue of having lived in the nineteenth century. Through Julian, history thus becomes an ideological force field, which, according to Althusser, exists materially insofar as it represents an imaginary relationship between individuals and their social relations. We can find several instances in the novel where Julian’s origin from the nineteenth century places him “outside the system” (Bellamy, Looking Backward 86). After demonstrating much of the workings of the nineteenth century, Dr. Leete exclaims at the “piquancy of [Julian’s] nineteenth-century ideas” and “the rare quaintness of their effect” (95). The constant contrast between the two centuries also makes him a “child of another race and yet the same” (ibid.). Although his new hosts acknowledge the strangeness of Julian’s antiquarian ideas, it is the utopian traveler who has to do all the work to adjust himself to the future. Edith points out to Julian how it is more difficult to look forward fifty years than it is to look back a thousand (85). We belong to a future of which you could not form an idea, a generation of which you knew nothing until you saw us. But you belong to a generation of which our forefathers were a part. We know all about it . . . while we say and do nothing which does not seem strange to you. So you see, Mr. West, that if you feel that you can, in time, get accustomed to us, you must not be surprised that from the first we have scarcely found you strange at all. (85) Not surprisingly, Julian refers to himself as “some strange uncanny being, a stranded creature of unknown sea,” foolish enough to fancy that he might “in time become naturalized” (144). Pfaelzer proposes that this psychic alienation is first a result of Julian’s social alienation (“Immanence, Indeterminance” 57). I wish to further her point 122 by arguing that this social alienation comes from his structural position as a member of the capitalist class in late nineteenth-century, pre-utopia America. Not having to work because of his inheritance from his great grandfather, and the subsequent growth of this wealth through investments (Bellamy, Looking Backward 4), Julian’s few troubles consist of the delay, due to incessant labor strikes, of the completion of his new home for his soon-to-be-bride Edith Bartlett (7). Not caring to understand the specific causes of these strikes that have become so common during this period (7), Julian shares the “apprehensions of [his] class” in feeling a “particular grievance” against the working classes “on account of the effect of their strikes in postponing [his] wedded bliss” (9). In addition to this animosity to the workingmen’s problems, we learn that Julian suffers from chronic insomnia. For fear of the nervous disorder that comes from sleeplessness, Julian resorts frequently to hypnosis by the practice of “animal magnetism” in an underground vault specially built for its quiet isolation (11). Julian’s regular descent into the hermetically sealed chamber, which also serves as a storage of valuables, is kept secret from everyone except for his servant Sawyer and the quack doctors who perform the hypnosis (11). Dr. Leete’s discovery of Julian’s secret subterranean bed-chamber a hundred and thirteen years later is nothing less than an archaeological evacuation. On his second day in the twenty-first century, Julian wakes up half-dreaming that he is back in his bed at home, and that he has an appointment with the builder to discuss the labor strike and its postponement of the completion his new house (37). “The chagrin which this recollection brought with it effectually roused me” (ibid.). But realizing that he is not after all in his bedroom, he struggles with the loss of identity that his century- 123 long sleep brings. This loss is a mental torture that no words can describe: “no other experience of the mind gives probably anything like the sense of absolute intellectual arrest from the loss of a mental fulcrum” (ibid.). Walking in the streets of Boston in 2000, Julian compares himself to a traveler who returns to his native city after years of absence. But unlike the traveler who can perceive that the changes to his birthplace are inevitable, Julian has no sense of any lapse of time (38). So far as my consciousness was concerned, it was but yesterday, but a few hours, since I had walked these streets in which scarcely a feature had escaped a complete metamorphosis. The mental image of the old city was so fresh and strong that it did not yield to the impression of the actual city, but contended with it, so that it was first one and then the other which seemed the more unreal. There was nothing I saw which was not blurred in this way, like the faces of a composite photograph. (38) While the Boston of the twenty-first century presently and physically exists in front of Julian, it is its status as a contested impression that most disturbs the viewer. Because he does not experience a lapse of time in his sleep through the twentienth century, his memory of nineteenth-century Boston is no less vivid than the actual city standing before him. The result is a continuous blurring of the nonutopian past and the utopian present as images. Therefore the visual metaphor of the faces of a composite photograph describes Julian’s confused historical sense, and, ultimately, his relation to reality. I suggest that this scene lends another perspective to the question of history in Althusser’s study of ideology. According to Althusser, the thesis that ideology has no history should not be grasped in the negative and positivist sense of its history being external to it, in the history of concrete individuals (“Ideology and the ISA” 108). Instead the thesis needs to 124 be defended in a positive (and not positivist) sense. Ideology functions in a peculiar way such as to make it “a non-historical reality, i.e. an omni-historical reality, in the sense in which that structure and functioning are immutable” (109). Ideology is here understood not as being transcendent and a negation of temporal history, but as a positive affirmation of history as omni-present and trans-historical (ibid.). Refuting the notion that the ideological imagination of the world reflects the conditions of existence of men, i.e. their real world, Althusser contends that it is men’s relation to these conditions of existence, which is reflected in ideology (111). Ideology does not distort existing relations of production but “the imaginary relationship of individuals to the relations of production and the relations that derive from them” (ibid., my emphasis). Combining the two thesis together, one may conceive of an ideological accumulation of history or historical sense. If ideology is trans-historical, that is because history is always already distorted as an imaginary relationship of individuals to the relations of production. The individual, in this sense, imagines himself in a historical relationship to his society when that society is no more. Since Bellamy’s novel is precisely centered on Julian’s straddling of two historical modes of production, his position outside the new society is ideologically reflected in the imaginary relation to the primitive, capitalist relations of production of the nineteenth century that he cannot shake off. But of course, it appears outrageous to suggest that capitalism is “primitive”; everything we know about the history of industrial capitalism and modernity tells us otherwise. But my reading is based on such an outrageous claim. First, I take Julian’s century-long sleep, and his “primitiveness” to heart. Second, I accept for a moment – so 125 as better to problematize it later -- the teleology of classical Marxist theory that posits communism as the end point of capitalist economies. Just as feudalism gave way to capitalism, the latter must also be thought as a pre-history of whatever economic system succeeds it. In Capital I, Marx explains the meaning of what is actually “primitive” about pre- capitalist accumulation. “So-called primitive accumulation” is “nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. It appears as ‘primitive’ because it forms the pre-history of capital, and of the mode of production corresponding to capital” (Capital I 874-5, my emphasis). Pre-capitalist accumulation forms a pre-history of capital because it begins from a non-capitalist production of value, whereas once capital has become capital as such, it creates its own values and hence its own history. Hence what is pre-historical does not necessarily mean that it is further back in historical time, but that it does not have capitalism’s propensity to reproduce the capital relation, and hence to create its own historical conditions. The possibility of imagining a non-capitalist order is thus the possibility of rethinking the order of the pre- historical and the historical altogether. In the Grundrisse, Marx elaborates on what he means by pre-history and history according to the more Hegelian terms becoming and being. Pre-capitalist conditions of production, or – to use Marx’s other term for primitive – “antediluvian” conditions of capital belong to “its historic presuppositions, which, precisely as such historic presuppositions, are past and gone, and hence belong to the history of its formation, but in no way to its contemporary history, i.e. not to the real system of the mode of production 126 ruled by it” (459, original emphasis). Another name for so-called primitive accumulation is simply a historical presupposition. It refers to the “becoming” or “arising” of capital precisely because the latter is “not yet in being but merely in becoming” (459). Once capital establishes its own reality, that is, once it is no longer merely becoming but in being, these historical presuppositions independent of capitalism disappear from history as such. Capitalism posits its own presuppositions, namely, its own surplus values by means of its own production process. “It no longer proceeds from presuppositions in order to become, but rather it is itself presupposed, and proceeds from itself to create the conditions of its maintenance and growth” (460). Hence to think of a primitive capitalist accumulation is to conceive of it as forming a historic presupposition of an alternative economic system. This is not a simple reversal of Marx’s analysis of the history of economic modes in Capital and Grundrisse, but an attempt to work out the history of relations of production that he never completed. Such an attempt is also a glimpse into Marx’s future-thinking and his utopian impulse. To recall, the utopian impulse must be differentiated from the utopian program as something that spills over from the sum of individual texts to everything future-oriented, and cannot be contained within the collective totality characteristic of the utopian program (Jameson, Archaeologies 3; 9). Martin Nicolaus, in his translation of the Grundrisse, points out that Marx was planning three works: 1) a critique of the economic categories or the system of bourgeois economy, 2) a critique and history of political economy and socialism, and 3) “a short historical sketch of the development of economic relations or categories” (461 fn. 56). The third work was never completed, but the section “The Original Accumulation 127 of Capital” in Notebook IV of the Grundrisse outlines what this unfinished work might have looked like. This correct view [an understanding of the past lying behind capitalism] likewise leads at the same time to the points at which the suspension of the present form of production relations gives signs of its becoming – foreshadowings of its future. Just as, on one side the pre-bourgeois phases appear as merely historical, i.e. suspended presuppositions, so do the contemporary conditions of production likewise appear as engaged in suspending themselves and hence in positing the historic presuppositions for a new state of society. (461, original emphasis) In Looking Backward, Julian embodies the nineteenth-century capitalist past lying behind the state socialism that Bellamy proposes for the twenty-first century. Bellamy was writing to his contemporaries in the hopes that they would see in Julian’s visit to the future a foreshadowing of public, instead of private wealth organized under the industrial army of Nationalism. Like Bellamy, Marx was writing with the foresight that contemporary conditions of production would suspend themselves and posit the “historic presuppositions for a new state of society” (461). But Looking Backward is no Communist Manifesto: whereas for Bellamy the state is to remain the sole employer and owner of means of production, for Marxist-Leninists, the state is only a transitory governing force in the revolutionary stages before it too withers away. There are certainly major differences between Bellamy’s and Marx’s visions of a new society, as well as between their ideas as to how such a society may come about. My point, however, is to emphasize the possibility of imagining capitalism’s past as foreshadowing what new social formations is to come. It is this capitalist accumulation identified with the figure of the utopian time-traveler that drives Bellamy’s utopian impulse. The “primitive” nature 128 of Julian’s capitalist accumulation thus calls for a speculative future-history of capitalism, one that looks back to the capitalist past in order better to look to its future. My interpretation of Julian’s initial alienation as an ideological accumulation of history or historical sense nevertheless diverges from Marx’s writings on primitive accumulation. It thus requires some elaboration. Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation refers only to an accumulation of the economic base, and not, as I have just done, to an ideological accumulation. It is rather straightforward to detect a previous accumulation insofar as it is economic: the “correct observation and deduction” of the laws of bourgeois economy “always leads to primary equations – like the empirical numbers e.g. in natural science – which point towards a past lying behind this system” (Grundrisse 461). On the other hand, it is much trickier to find in Marx’s writings the legal and political superstructure, to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. Past and present consciousness does not line up like empirical numbers in primary equations that can be discovered with “correct observation and equations.” In the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx lays down the classic dictum for an understanding of the relation between the economic base and the superstructure (20-1). It is the material, productive forces of society, when they contradict the existing relations of production, that bring about an era of social revolution (21). It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness . . . The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. (21, my emphasis) A social revolution and complete transformation is judged by the contradictions of material life, and not by consciousness (21). Material transformations are determined by 129 the “precision of natural science” – again, as precise as primary equations (Grundrisse 461). As for the “legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out,” they do not lend themselves to scientific measurement. The only certainty one may reach concerning changes in the ideological superstructure is that they remain “within the framework of the old society” after the material conditions for the relations of production have matured (Marx, “Preface” to Contribution 21). “The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure” (ibid, my emphasis). Since only the imprecise interval of “sooner or later” guides a historical investigation of men’s consciousness or ideological superstructure, nothing prevents the latter from remaining after the economic foundation has already shifted its base. This is what happens in the case of Julian’s ideological accumulation of historical sense after capitalism has been replaced by quasi-socialism: the novel’s preparation for Julian’s eventual history lectureship requires a reproduction of his nineteenth-century, pre-utopian experience. History is thus the form and content of this ideological accumulation. To return to the scene of Julian’s disorientation on the second day of his new utopian life, it is worthy of note that when he wakes up that day to experience a strong loss of identity, he thinks that he is meeting up with the builder to discuss the effect of the labor strikes on the construction of his new house. This architectural motif in his relationship to his physical surroundings compounds his realization that he is no longer in the nineteenth century. For two hours while he is walking around new Boston, he sees 130 up-close the changes to the houses and the streets in the peninsular part of town (Bellamy, Looking Backward 38). While the property-owning Julian of the Gilded Age benefits from the contradiction between labor and capital, he is also affected by the delay to the completion of his house caused by the same contradiction. Here in twenty-first century Boston, he does not see how this contradiction has been resolved, but only the results of its resolution in the neatly ordered city. Julian no longer owns any property or investments, but neither is he now alienated from the forces of production since the latter are now publicly owned and equally distributed. Yet, his material dis-alienation does not correspond to the loss of his “mental fulcrum” (37). The old city and the new become impressions superimposed on a composite photograph that represents the imaginary relationships he has to both the past and to the present relations of production. By now, the metaphor of the composite photograph should resonate with Marx’s own metaphor for ideology, the famous camera obscura. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside- down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-processes as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process. (Marx, The German Ideology 154) Julian’s consciousness of the changes in the twenty-first century is material, just as the image of the new city is a physical imprint on the retina. But at this point in the novel, his conscious existence cannot tear itself away from the time of the nineteenth century, and all the relations that he used to have in the former society. Julian’s ideology of history or historical sense, as I have proposed, is not a distortion of the existing relations of 131 production. Instead, it is “above all the (imaginary) relations of individuals to the relations of production” (Althusser 111). He can only relate to the utopian economy historically when his former material relation to the private capitalism of monopolies, trusts, and rampant labor strikes alienates him from present reality. According to Althusser, the imaginary representation of the relationship between individuals and their social relations always exists in an apparatus, and this existence is material (112). Similarly, Julian’s imaginary representation of his past and the present in a composite photograph does not derive from an ideal or spiritual existence; it arises from the disjunction between two eras of material conditions, which in turn produces a rupture in his historical sense. We can even say that the problem with Julian is that he accumulates too much. In Marx’s terms, his pre-utopian existence, which forms the historic presupposition of Nationalism, may be past and gone (Grundrisse 459), but it continues to inform his twenty-first century, utopian consciousness. Julian’s state of disorientation does not appear just upside-down as in Marx’s camera obscura, but as composite images of the past superimposed on the present. Here, Sarah Kofman’s observation on Marx’s metaphor serves as a counterpoint to my analysis: The camera obscura is the unconscious of a class, of the dominant class which, in order to maintain its domination indefinitely, has an interest in hiding from itself the historical character of its domination, indeed all that is historical, the processes of genesis, the divisions of labor . . . indeed, difference itself. (Kofman 17) Bellamy’s hero of the dominant class can no longer hide the historical character of its domination. Everywhere in the twenty-first century utopia, all that is historical appears alongside its contemporary. 132 IV. Asiatic Production Unbound In the previous section, I suggested that to think of a primitive capitalist accumulation means to accept, so as better to problematize it later, the teleology of classical Marxist theory that takes communism to be the end point of capitalist economies. Now that we have seen how the older, capitalist society that Julian represents is not supplanted but continues to haunt the new socialist utopia, the ideological accumulation of Julian’s nineteenth-century historical sense not only disturbs Marxist teleology from within, but it also allows us to review the concept of primitive accumulation from the perspective of the Asiatic mode of production. As Lye, Anderson, and many other scholars have noted, Marx does not give a systematic treatment of the concept of Asiatic production in his writings over the years. As early as 1853, Marx’s private correspondence and public statements concerning Asiatic production aligns him with traditional European commentators who emphasize the stagnation and despotism of Asian history and society (Anderson 476). In his essay “On Colonialism,” Marx repeatedly asserts the ahistorical nature of Indian and Chinese societies (ibid.). Where Marx differs slightly from other European commentators on Asiatic societies is in his analysis of the existence of self-sufficient village communities characterized by their domestic crafts and labor, onto which oriental despotism was supposedly superimposed (Anderson 477). However, at this stage of Marx’s interpretation, he still maintains the State above and the villages “below” in a coeval relation. According to Anderson, it is the later Marx of the Grundrisse who assigns “an unmistakably predominant function” to the notion of the “self-sustaining village 133 community.” The latter is now the “socio-economic reality behind the ‘imagined unity’ of the title of the despotic sovereign to the land” (ibid.). Amidst oriental despotism and the propertylessness which seems legally to exist there, this clan or communal property exists in fact as the foundation, created mostly by a combination of manufacturers and agriculture within the small commune, which thus becomes altogether self-sustaining, and contains all the conditions of reproduction and surplus production within itself. (Marx, Grundrisse 473) It is also this emphasis on the undergirding of despotic rulership by communal property that leads Marx to extend the Asiatic mode of production beyond its application to Asia (Anderson 477; Marx, Grundrisse 471). I will elaborate later on the significance that this non-Asiatic mode of production has for Bellamy and Vinton’s novels. For now, what interests me is the procession of older forms of accumulation or historic presupposition within the Asiatic mode of production itself when the latter is already defined as a “process which precedes the formation of the capital relation or of original accumulation” (ibid.). Like a Russian doll in which a presupposition is hidden within another presupposition or a primitive accumulation within another accumulation, Marx’s observation concerning the clan or communal property as the foundation or presupposition of the state shows that an earlier presupposition does not have to be superseded by a later one, but can continue to appear in it. In the same section from the Grundrisse, Marx explains that the family and the clans appear as an “initial, naturally arisen spontaneous community” of “first presupposition” (472). “The clan community, the natural community appears not as a result of, but as a presupposition for the communal appropriation (temporary) and utilization of land” (ibid., original emphasis). Marx is thus using the term presupposition in the same sense when he explains the 134 concept of primitive accumulation, that is, in the sense of being “past and gone,” that which “belongs to the history of its formation,” and not to its “contemporary history” (459). The individual is thus a member of this community, which he regards as the common proprietor or possessor (472). It is from this presupposition that individual labor first comes to be appropriated and in which communal landownership is dissolved (ibid.). “The real appropriation through the labor process happens under these presuppositions which are not themselves the product of labor, but appear as its natural or divine presuppositions” (ibid., original emphasis). Over time, the form that precedes Asiatic production leads to a comprehensive unity standing above the original communal clan, or the “first presupposition” (ibid.). As I have already suggested, this process does not mean that the earlier presupposition completely disappears. What Marx finds at this point of his study of Asiatic modes of production or primitive accumulation in general is that the first presupposition simply and literally accumulates. Anderson does not note this overlapping of presuppositions in Marx. Here, Deleuze and Guattari’s original reading in Anti-Oedipus of the opposition between the first presupposition of the family and clans, or what they call the primitive territorial machine, and the emerging Asiatic despotic state deserves our attention. According to the two thinkers, the despotic machine or the barbarian socius challenges the “lateral alliances” and the “extended filiations” – in Marx’s language, the “initial, naturally arisen spontaneous community” of “first presupposition” (472) – of the more primitive formation (193). The new socius goes on to develop new alliances and direct filiations, but it does not extinguish the older community. 135 It remains to be said that, in order to understand the barbarian formation, it is necessary to relate it not to other formations in competition with it temporally and spiritually, according to relationships that obscure the essential, but to the savage primitive formation that it supplants by imposing its own rule of law, but that continues to haunt it. (194) Marx’s seemingly straightforward definition of Asiatic production thus becomes, in Anti- Oedipus, a complex machine of flows whereby the primitive communities subsist and continue to “produce, inscribe, and consume” (196). These coded flows are in turn overcoded by the transcendent unity of the despotic state (ibid.). It can be said that the despotic Asiatic state even appears rather schizophrenic since it replaces the primitive territorial machine on the one hand, while maintaining the old territorialities on the other: “what is produced on the body of the despot is a connective synthesis of the old alliances with the new, and a disjunctive synthesis that entails an overflowing of the old filiations into the direct filiation” (198). It is not even a simple case of, in Anderson’s observation, Marx’s conception of this mode of production extending beyond the geographical location of Asia. For Deleuze and Guattari, Asiatic production comes to affect even our understanding of history. Along with the State that expresses or constitutes its objective moment, Asiatic production “is not a distinct formation: it is the basic formation, on the horizon throughout history” (217). As a basic formation that can exist alongside other supposedly more mature formations, the concept of Asiatic production is freed from the straight-jacket of the orthodox Marxist teleology; no longer is it a “process which [has to] precede the formation of the capital relation or of original accumulation” (Grundrisse 471). 136 In addition, Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of capital as decoded and deterritorialized flows shows that capital also comes from underdeveloped, peripheral, and archaic territorialities. “So true is it that primitive accumulation is not produced just once at the dawn of capitalism, but is continually reproducing itself” even with capitalism (Deleuze and Guattari 231). At the same time and for the same reason, capitalism, which establishes itself in the conjunction of primitive formations, has such a universal character (224). However, Hegelian totality and uniformity has no place in Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of universality and universal history. Once they set out from the insight that the “Asiatic” is unbounded by geographic as well as temporal limits, they need not go much further to reach the radical conclusion that “the only universal history is the history of contingency” (224). Hence, it is as if the Julian of Vinton’s rewriting has to look further backwards in order to find the Asiatic in Bellamy’s novel. After reviewing the extent to which Marx’s concept of the Asiatic mode of production opens up to a basic formation throughout history that continually reproduces itself while being inscribed by even more primitive formations, we are finally beginning to uncover the relevance of the Marxist concept for Bellamy and Vinton’s novels. This has so far been a counter-intuitive procedure: namely, to look for Asiatic production in places where there are simply no Asians—or anyone else for that matter – at work. Hayot’s study in The Sympathetic Mandarin, and to a certain extent, Lye’s in America’s Asia, have already ascertained the non-relevance of the concept of Asiatic production for Looking Further Backward. However, once we replace the rigid presupposition of the Asiatic as that which comes before capitalism with 137 Deleuze and Guattari’s interpretation of the Asiatic according to the savage primitive formation that continues to haunt it, it is not difficult to argue otherwise. There are no Asians in Looking Backward but it presents the problem of history and successive formations through the primitive accumulation of Julian’s nineteenth-century past. The imagined unity of the state does not supplant but continues to be inscribed by the primitive clan-formation or self-sustaining village community. Similarly, the twenty-first- century utopian society makes sense only alongside the previous century’s more primitive capitalist relations of production from which Julian comes. It is difficult to think of capitalism as primitive – in the sense of forming the pre-history of Bellamy’s Nationalist utopia – but such a thinking of future-history is precisely the grist of utopian fiction’s mill in general, and of Looking Backward in particular. Julian’s ideological accumulation of historical sense is thus at once “primitive” and “Asiatic” because it is able to inhabit the future. Paradoxically, as my previous section demonstrates, this future also requires Julian’s nineteenth-century, pre-utopian experience – all 143 years of it – to further its own ideological state apparatus. Whether it is the primitive that needs the futuristic or the other way round –Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of flow is starting to show its relevance here, though it is probably the first time that their names appear in a reading of Looking Backward – Julian experiences history as a distorted, imaginary relationship to non-linear, co-existing, and contingent relations of production. 14 14 According to Hayot, the novel faces a “mimetic impasse” when gesturing toward the future beyond 2023 A.D. (154). Perhaps this inability to imagine the future beyond has to do with the fact that the novel disrupts the strict separation between the past and the future in its treatment of Julian’s pre-utopian history. 138 There is an additional level of interpretation in Marx’s explanation of Asiatic production in the Grundrisse that is relevant for Bellamy’s novel. It concerns the larger problem of the social and its place in the dialectics of ideology and utopia. In The Political Unconscious, Jameson argues that Marx’s study of Asiatic production is similar to Durkheim’s view of religion in that they are both concerned with the problem of a symbolic affirmation of collective unity. The following passage from Jameson pertains to the aspect discussed above of the self-sustaining communities that lies behind the supposed unity of the Asiatic despot. But this passage also points to another problem that I have not yet examined. In most of the Asiatic land-forms, the comprehensive unity standing above all these little communities appears as the higher proprietor or as the sole proprietor. . . . Because the unity is the real proprietor and the real presupposition of communal property . . . the relation of the individual to the natural conditions of labor and of reproduction . . . appears mediated for him through a cession by the total unity – a unity realized in the form of the despot, the father of many communities – to the individual, through the mediation of the particular commune. (Marx, Grundrisse 472-3; qtd. in Jameson 285, original emphasis) Jameson’s interest in the notion of Asiatic production lies in the problem of the ideological function of such a conception of social unity (The Political Unconscious 286). Unfortunately, Marx’s concept here serves as little more than a placeholder for Jameson’s larger concern, that is, a methodological proposition combining a Marxist negative hermeneutic or ideological analysis with a Marxist positive hermeneutic, “or a decipherment of the Utopian impulses of these same still ideological cultural texts” (ibid). After identifying “the problem of the symbolic enactment of a collective unity [that] is inscribed in that problematic by Marx himself,” Jameson leaves its solution to his readers (ibid., original emphasis). 139 Can Bellamy’s simple novel of a hypnotized and time-traveling utopian hero present some solution of this problem in Marx? Earlier in this chapter, I argued that Julian’s century-long sleep readjusts his individual biology to “the incomparably longer temporal rhythms of history itself” (Jameson, Archaeologies 7). The overlap between individual time and collective history acts out the problem, according to Jameson above, of the ideological function of an attempt at social unity. Collective history cedes to Julian his mediated relation to both the pre-utopian and utopian conditions of labor and of reproduction. This is why in his disoriented walk around the new Boston, he sees the old city superimposed onto the new as a composite photograph (Bellamy, Looking Backward 37). History, in Looking Backward, thus performs the same ideological function as the State in Marx’s formulation of the Oriental despot: both are the sole proprietor and comprehensive unity standing above its more primitive participants. At the same time, both cede to the individual an appearance of this unity when in fact the contradiction between past and present relations of production could not be starker. This is why history, for Julian, is ultimately an ideological accumulation: ideological because of the imaginary relationships he has to both the past as well as to the present. To recall Althusser, ideology does not distort existing relations of production but “the imaginary relationship of individuals to the relations of production and the relations that derive from them” (Althusser 111). If history performs the ideological function of the state, then Julian’s nineteenth-century, pre-utopian past becomes analogous to the more primitive communes in Marx’s Asiatic production. It helps to mediate the overwhelming narration of future-history for our time-traveling hero – a mediation, as we shall see, that also 140 continues to accumulate in Vinton’s unofficial sequel. Looking Backward’s utopian blueprint provides an insight into the Asiatic mode of production just when we are about to dismiss it for its conservatively domestic outlook. 15 Far from representing the Chinese worker and transnational labor, however, its utopian mode of production is Asiatic because it accumulates the past. Through Julian’s primitiveness, we catch a glimpse of the savage primitive formation that continues to haunt Bellamy’s nationalist utopia (Deleuze and Guattari 194). Finally, these efforts to read the concept of Asiatic production back into Bellamy’s novel must carry over to Looking Further Backward. This is no doubt an equally risky argument, given Hayot’s confident understanding of “Asiatic form” as “the relation between monopoly, labor and capital embodied in the ‘coolie’ figure” (164) to the extent that the latter’s “absence” from the novel functions as a determining negative space, an “ideological black hole around which the novel revolves and from which it cannot escape” (165). However, as I have tried to show, the coolie’s absence in no way affects the theoretical implications of Marx’s controversial concept. “Asiatic production is not a distinct formation: it is the basic formation, on the horizon throughout history” (Deleuze and Guattari 217). After all, if one were to be rigid about what the concept “truly” signifies, the coolie is a thoroughly modern figure of industrial capitalism and has really nothing to do with pre-capitalist, Asiatic production. Thus I agree much more with 15 To my knowledge, Peyser is the only critic who has acknowledged the international dimension to Looking Backward. Although he argues for Bellamy’s cosmopolitanism in his Utopia and Cosmopolis, his definition of cosmopolitanism leaves out the basic element of change and incongruency that constitute utopian thinking. Dhora Ahmad’s Landscapes of Hope, on the other hand, squarely criticizes Bellamy for his limited parochialism and lack of transnational aspirations. I have already discussed these two works in Chapter One. 141 Hayot when he compares the “absent” coolie in Vinton’s novel to Julian: “in many ways, they are simply the ghosts of the good nineteenth century haunting the United States into remembering its forgotten values” (166). While Hayot refers to these values as “the ability to suffer, to endure without complaint the cost of an ‘Asiatic’ modernity” (ibid), what ties the coolie to Julian is the logic of a historical, ideological accumulation evident in the Asiatic mode of production. In this sense, the Julian who encounters the Chinese invasion reactivates his nineteenth- century, pre-utopian historical sense, which he has relinquished by the end of Looking Backward. Hence Looking Further Backward, like its predecessor, also puts to work the concept of Asiatic production through its protagonist’s pre-utopian past, which begins before and outside of the narration of the novel. However, whereas Bellamy uses Julian’s capitalist past in order to contrast its sordidness with the twenty-first century state socialism known as Nationalism, Vinton mobilizes it in order to expose the fallacies of utopia in America. In Looking Further Backward, Julian is, through his successor at Shawmut College Professor Li, a mouthpiece for Vinton’s critique. It is not that Julian knows more than the narrator about the events of the invasion, but that “his diary is of inestimable value as contemporaneous history, and of no small value as literature” (Vinton 82). From the opening lecture, we hear about the utopian traveler’s reassessment of the achievements of the Nationalist system, which he now realizes that “Dr. Leete had pictured in altogether too roseate a light” (12). Despite the utopian changes, the spirit of acquisitiveness, the desire to accumulate property, demagoguery and corruption remain (13). Since the inheritance of property has not been abolished under Bellamy’s system, 142 the collection of valuables – even though they could not be sold or re-purchased – becomes a continual source of inequality (14). Vinton’s Julian also criticizes the grading system for creating discontent and envy (ibid.). Julian’s role as a critic of Bellamy’s utopia is strongest when the Chinese invasion further accentuates the weaknesses of the Nationalist system. By virtue of his past life in post-Civil War and pre-Nationalist America, Julian is credited as the only person who recovers the virtues of Gilded Age individualism and who longs for the time when the government used to possess the military capabilities to defend the country in wars. He is also the only person who realizes from the beginning the seriousness of China’s intention, and the urgency for the United States to prepare immediately for war. For example, on the day China’s declaration of war is calmly announced without much public agitation, Julian, for the first time, notes the degeneration rather than the progress of the twenty- first century as compared to the nineteenth century. He recalls: how the news would have been promulgated and received in my day; how the news-boys would have been crying extra editions of the newspapers through the streets; how the city would have been awake all the night; how the regular army would be hurrying east and west to man the coast defenses, and every navy yard hard at work. (26) On the whole, Julian is astonished by the lack of excitement in the face of an impending, full-out invasion. This lack of excitement is attributed to no other reason than the inability to view the declaration of war as “a matter of personal moment to each individual” (28). But even as a collective concern, the war does not meet with a substantial concern from the government: only ten percent of the active labor force is reorganized as a local military force. Julian, along with ten percent of the students in the 143 Historical Section of Shawmut College, is to be mustered into the military service (38). This force proves to be utterly incapable of altering the shape of the war to come, as Boston surrenders to the Chinese army without a fight (60). The Chinese demand ransom in silver and gold money, but due to the abolition of money in place of the credit system, neither Boston nor the central government has any means to pay the amount (60-1). At home, Julian is astonished by Edith’s apathy in the face of their surrender. She laughs at his fears, since to her mind the Chinese invasion “was but a temporary incident” (64). The formerly utopian heroine, whom Bellamy crafts to play the role of Julian’s soul- mate, is here under Vinton’s misogynist pen caricatured as an ignorant woman who blatantly lacks her husband’s foresight. While “for many years” Julian feels “one with the people of today,” that is, with the people under the Nationalist system of the twenty-first century (65), the Chinese invasion jolts him out of this affinity. “But now I feel myself a stranger in a strange land,” writes Julian, and his estrangement is brought about by the war (ibid.). “. . . the dust of the old order of things was about me, blinding me, when I spoke of war and bloodshed, of rapine, battle and conquest” (ibid). Convinced of the explosiveness of the coming war, Julian manages to persuade Edith to leave town and go to their Adirondack cottage (67). However, as expected, it proves to be extremely difficult to procure the necessary transportation out of Boston. At the railroad station, Julian finds out that all trains from Boston have ceased operation because of the Municipal government’s orders to gather all war munitions and distribute them to other city divisions westward (71-2). Such an order is obeyed blindly without any suspicion that their “obedience was actually 144 denuding the country of war materials and accumulating it in the possession of the enemy!” (72). Again, with the authority of an older person who always complains about the way things used to be, Julian disparages what he sees as a lack of individuality: “in the days of my youth such blind obedience as this would have been impossible” (ibid). In fact, on one of the box-cars after the West family is finally able to get on a local freight train, Julian remarks on the ease with which Edith gets along with the older passengers. She had always liked old people – partly, perhaps, because her aged father and mother had made her their companion, partly also, perhaps (as I used to say to her, jokingly), because she had a husband who, as ages were usually counted, was nigh on to two hundred years old. (112-3) Julian may joke about his age, but this nearly two-hundred-year old’s history is no laughing matter. While his family is in Chicago in the middle of their journey westward, Julian visits the President who immediately expresses his excitement to see him, since “it would be beneficial to learn from you what steps would probably have been taken by the government, as it existed in your youth” (126). The ensuing conversation is marked by further disagreements between the two over the appropriate executive and legislative authority on matters of National defense (127-9). Despite these differences, Julian remains the faithful civil servant he is and accepts the post of Commissioner to negotiate with the Chinese (133). However, instead of empowering him to negotiate any final treaty with the invaders or to lead an army, the President’s instruction to his newly commissioned officer is vague: “remonstrate with them on the invasion of the country and especially on the wanton destruction of life and property in Boston and New York” (134). With nothing more than “remonstrance” as his strategy and bargaining chips, Julian takes up his new post. During his journey back to 145 New York to meet with the Chinese, Julian reflects on the nature of his twice-estranged circumstances: once when he wakes up among his countrymen of the future, in 2000 A.D., and now as he meets with the foreign invaders in 2020. He contrasts his first awakening and the curiosity that he stirs up as a most unusual émigré with the way that the Chinese now receive him. Even though Julian’s story causes much curiosity in their eyes, it also serves as a paradoxical rapport. But my strange experience did not make me contemptible in their opinion; on the contrary they thought more of me than of my associates. Ancestors and the men of antiquity had been so long objects of veneration in the Celestial Empire, that I, who had been a contemporary with their progenitors seemed in their opinion to be entitled to the same respect that they entertained for those progenitors. They listened to me, therefore, as if the accumulated wisdom of two centuries spoke in my words (143). If the Chinese make Julian feel strangely at home, their invasion also highlights the displacement that he now feels among his fellow Nationalists. The Julian of 2020 A.D. becomes the same person who first wakes up to Bellamy’s future in Looking Backward and who feels disturbingly ungrounded in the new world. It seems very strange to me that I alone, of all the millions of this land, should have anything like a just appreciation of war. It is true that I was but an infant when the war waged between the North and the South; but even so, there was something then in the midst of all about me and in the common talk of my childhood’s friends, that have made me wiser, as I think, than the men of the present generation – or if not wiser, perhaps, more far-seeing. It seems to me as if I had learned long years ago, what the people of this nation are just beginning to learn. (Vinton 111) To be fair, Julian earlier explains that it is not so much that the actual abilities of the individuals of today have deteriorated (110). Instead, he blames it on the “system which has made [men] so thoroughly part of a governmental machine that they cannot use their individual ingenuity in the performance of their official duties” (110). By virtue of his 146 historical origin from the past, Julian is able to look further backward to steal a glimpse of a utopia’s dystopian future. In addition, he is able to do so by a simultaneous looking beyond: beyond the focus in turn-of-the-century American utopian fiction on primarily domestic issues and toward the limits of nation-state sovereignty. To recall the reading of Benjamin in Chapter One, the age of mechanical reproduction essential to the utopian writer’s imagination coincides with the age of economic imperialism. What Bloch calls the utopian Other, the Novum – that which is unexepectedly new – as well as its full expression, the Ultimum – “the total leap out of everything that previously existed” that will always be treated with astonishment (203) – this cannot refer to the strict polarization of China vs. the “West,” but to an overall astonishment at the possibility of world-wide change. Nonetheless, like capital, spatial and temporal barriers also limit utopian change. Bellamy’s decision to bring about a quicker utopia means that he has to shortchange its geographical scope. Vinton’s Looking Further Backward presents us with a future where one of the “laggards” – to use Bellamy’s term – finally manages to reach America’s “brotherly hands” (Bellamy, “How I Came to Write Looking Backward” 24). And what a violent and dystopian reach it is! V. A Political Invasion of the Social So far, I hope to have shown that it is with something more than an unequivocally anti- Chinese racism that Vinton inserts the race question into Bellamy’s depiction of a racially homogenous and insular America. Vinton’s deviation from the formulaic plotlines and characterizations of anti-Chinese novels of the time cannot be simply dismissed as an anomaly. Looking Further Backward employs Julian’s ideological accumulation of 147 personal history to its dystopian end: he is the “Asian” in the novel not simply because he, by virtue of his nineteenth century, pre-utopian sensibility, recognizes their individualistic thinking and ways of governance. He is truly “Asian” also not simply because the overlapping of his pre-utopian and utopian experiences resembles what Deleuze and Guattari call the “haunting of the barbarian formation” (194). Julian is “Asian” – and this would be, Vinton’s final critique of Bellamy – because he understands the concept of the political. John F. Kasson, in his study of the machine-like efficiency of Bellamy’s technocratic utopia, writes: “Since the possibility of conflicts of interest is denied, no provision is made for political dissent. Indeed, Bellamy sought to eliminate politics altogether . . .” (198). Although Vinton does not charge Looking Backward in Kasson’s exact terms, his accusation of the Nationalist government’s inability to perceive the real threat posed by the Chinese invaders, its unwillingness to devote more attention and resources to the war effort without compromising its labor force, and most important, its belief in the absolute redundancy of international conflicts, puts him squarely on the side of Carl Schmitt. The defects of Bellamy’s society can be summed up rather simply: it is not political. In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt defines the specific political distinction as that between friend and enemy. The political denotes “the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissociation” (26). Schmitt emphasizes that the concepts of friend and enemy are not “metaphors or symbols” and have neither “normative nor pure spiritual antithesis” (28); they have “real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing” (33). The concept 148 of the political is defined by this “real possibility” of “the real war” (35). Schmitt is careful to steer clear of ideological debates here, as he explains that the definition of the political favors neither “war nor militarism, neither imperialism nor pacifism” (33). That the political is nonetheless defined by the possibility of war has to be grasped according to the decision that determines “whether this situation has or has not arrived” (35). In other words, a collective can very well enjoy a long period of peace without war, but it must be able to evaluate the situation and make the concrete decision should the threat of war ever arise. Hence the crux of Schmitt’s argument lies in his use of the terms “real possibility” and “exception” to qualify the relationship between war and the concept of the political. I have already assessed the significance of these terms, and Derrida’s seminal reading of them in the Introduction. In this chapter, I am interested in seeing how Schmitt’s analysis may apply to Vinton’s critique of Bellamy, and how the Chinese invasion plays out the friend-enemy distinction in Looking Further Backward. I have so far referred to Vinton’s novel as an invasion tale and not a war novel; the difference lies in the fact that the narrative is largely devoted to explaining the causes and implications of the invasion, and the West family’s experiences, but devotes little space to the actual battles themselves. The novel does spend some time explaining China’s deportation policy and the sufferings that deported Americans had to face in their passage to China and France (Vinton 84-6; 101-2). However, it also only briefly describes the brief battle at West Point in pure reportage style (104-7). Professor Li’s focus is not on the actual fighting of the battles. Instead, his lectures are intentionally general and “purely initiatory” to further subsequently more engrossing studies (108). 149 Their main aim is to present “the general gloom and confusion which possessed men’s mind when [Nationalism] was tried and found wanting,” and this last purpose is fulfilled by his quoting from Julian’s diary (ibid). On the whole, the novel is less interested in the actual battles (since they are mostly short-lived and unexciting to begin with, given the two sides’ contrasting military strengths) than in the Nationalist system’s inability to grasp correctly this state of war when all signs point to its inevitability. Looking Further Backward is a lament concerning the incapacity of the United States to decide whether war has or has not arrived. Schmitt’s statement sums up this situation well: The political does not reside in the battle itself, which possesses its own technical, psychological and military laws, but in the mode of behavior which is determined by this possibility, by clearly evaluating the concrete situation and thereby being able to distinguish correctly the real friend and the real enemy. (Schmitt 37, my emphasis) It is the Americans who cannot evaluate what to the Chinese is a concrete situation of military aggression. Before invading the United States, China sees in the growing discontent in France an opportunity to support a coup d’état, and use it as a warning to the rest of the world (Vinton 33). Without a navy or standing army, or military or naval agents abroad to report back the activities of other nations, the United States is in “utter ignorance” of China’s “great preparations” (41). “[W]e in China were not surprised at the French Revolution nor at its success, we were surprised, and very greatly surprised, that the United States were so little warned by it” (22). Even more outrageous is the Municipal Council’s inability to respond to the first Chinese fleet’s control of Boston and its demand of ransom in gold and silver money. Since Nationalism has dispensed with money, and the national economy now operates with a credit system 150 equally allocated to each citizen (62), there is no ready solution as to how any payment can be made to the Chinese. To illustrate this dire situation, Li exaggeratedly claims that there is even some talk of giving a ball to the Chinese as payment (ibid.). Regardless of whether this claim is true or mere gossip, “it was but an illustration of the inability of a people to understand what they have been taught to believe was impossible to happen” (Vinton 62-3). In other words, Americans cannot understand the impossibility of the scenario, preached under Nationalism, that international conflicts have ceased, and along with that the need for national defense. “They had lived and acted as if war was no longer a possible thing” (28). In Schmitt’s language, Nationalist America cannot see that the “real possibility” is the impossibility of the end of war. “To the Bostonians indulging in delusions of hope, the Chinese instead of enemies were simply visitors – unwelcome visitors, indeed, and visitors whom it was wise to propitiate, but still visitors” (63). Little more needs to be said about this inability to regard the invaders as enemies. “A world in which the possibility of war is utterly eliminated, a completely pacified globe, would be a world without the distinction of friend and enemy and hence a world without politics” (Schmitt 35). Looking Further Backward does not propose that war with any particular nation is the solution to the problems of Bellamy’s utopian blueprint. The novel merely illustrates the fallacy in Bellamy’s optimism about a world-wide utopia, and the extent to which that creates a world without enemies. Similarly, we read in Schmitt that “for the definition of the political, it is here even irrelevant whether such a world without politics is desirable as an ideal situation” (35). The only factor that is relevant in his definition is that the 151 friend-enemy distinction and war is the “ever present possibility” (45). It is simply out of the question, for Schmitt, that the world will be depoliticized, however such a scenario may be desired. This cannot be done by a nation simply “declaring its friendship for the entire world or by voluntarily disarming itself” (51-2). “The world will not thereby become depoliticized, and it will not be transplanted into a condition of pure morality, pure justice, or pure economics” (52). And “pure economics” does seem to be what Vinton portrays of the Nationalist system. Of all of the thousands of manufacturers in the country, none can produce a cannon (Vinton 29). The only production of small firearms is of “trifling capacity” for sporting purposes (ibid.). Public parks and buildings for public recreation stand in the place of what used to be coast defenses and forts, and there is no longer any training in military science (ibid.). This utter absence of national defense is rationalized in terms of economic prudence. As the narrator goes on to explain, the Nationalist theory sees a standing army in time of peace as “a collection of idlers who added nothing to the resources of the State, but were none the less consumers” (29). By the same logic, the manufacture of ammunition is a waste of resources (ibid.). Furthermore, the maintaining of military schools just means that fewer resources can be spent on developing the skills of actual workers with real productive skills (ibid.). Perhaps this is why Bellamy calls the industrial force of his new world the industrial army: production is to be the only “army” under Nationalism. Julian queries the President on the above paradox in their conversation. Instead of having Muster Day as the day where the men and women of appropriate age in the 152 country join the ranks of the industrial army, why cannot the President designate the army as the branch of the industrial service most in need of service? (132) In Julian’s view, there is no difference between the demand for guns, uniforms, powder and shot, and that of a new variety of silk or cotton cloth (ibid.). The President’s claim that he and the government lack the power to authorize the production of war munitions and the conscription of soldiers is based on the reasoning that no number of enemies can justify the death of one citizen-solider: “What right have I – what constitutional or moral right have I, to sacrifice the life of one man, even to save the life of ten others?” (130). Hence we see another dimension to Kasson’s comment about Bellamy’s elimination of politics: it is not merely the lack of provision for political dissent but the purely economic interests of the system and the lack of the friend-enemy distinction that turns the United States over to its depoliticized future. Without a strong State capable of self-defense, it is as if the Chinese had invaded a mere “society” and not a once-formidable nation. Thus the depiction in Looking Further Backward of U.S.-China hostilities puts to work Schmitt’s definition of the political as the utmost possibility of war. The invasion, while formally speaking a question of race, becomes a political invasion of what Vinton finds objectionable as a social-ist and depoliticized utopia. In the end, Julian might have died fighting the Chinese (Vinton 178), but he also did so on the side of their beliefs. Suffice to say that while I saw much that compelled me to admire the ingenuity with which our invaders have made the main features of our Nationalistic theory serve the ends of their own government, I saw also much that caused me great grief in the apathy of our citizens and the debasement which had already begun to show in society. (Vinton 149) 153 With this combination of admiration and grief, Vinton seems to shatter the elaborate edifice that is the utopian education of Julian in Looking Backward. The distinction between the Chinese and the Americans, the invaders and the peace-loving victims, seems to remind Bellamy’s admirers that “the distinction of friend and enemy denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissociation” (Schmitt 26). If the victory of the Chinese army suggests a successful re-politicization of the United States, what is left of the question of the social? Is there any room in the transpacific futurity of the United States for a union or separation, an association or dissociation that is not intensified to the utmost degree of intensity? In my study of Schmitt in the Introduction, I suggest that there is only a “weak” concept of the social that undercuts the “strong” sense of the political that Schmitt goes to great lengths to preserve. The social, then, is simply a union or separation, an association or dissociation that is made intense to “the utmost degree” by the concept of the political as defined by the German jurist and philosopher (26). The more exceptional are war, hostility and the political event, the more that exception signals the ever present possibility of the friend- enemy grouping. By the same logic, the more exceptional a world without politics is – a world that is entirely, and merely “social” – the more it signals the ever present possibility of the political. Consequently, the “ever present possibility” of a union or separation, an association or dissociation that is not made intense to “the utmost degree” contaminates the concept of the political from the beginning. There is no pure political invasion that is not accompanied by a simultaneous creation of new socialities that blur the friend-enemy distinction. 154 This is why despite all of its dystopianism, Looking Further Backward ends on such an ambiguous note regarding the aftermath of the invasion. This is what Li has to say about the gradual control of the country by the Chinese: If our progress has been slow, it has also been sure, and irresistible. . . . The conditions of our future advance will, however, differ from those of the past. The Nationalists have learned from their reverses, and the Nationalistic system of government has been changed until to-day it does not so much differ from that which we enjoy. (187) It is of course Vinton’s novel that attempts to teach his 1890 reader a lesson about Bellamyian Nationalism. But unlike other yellow peril and invasion novels, in particular London’s An Unparalleled Invasion, the lesson does not end with a counter-attack where the Americans eventually defeat their enemy and prove their permanent superiority. Vinton’s lesson to his 1890 reader regarding the defects of the Nationalist utopia becomes less and less harsh, and even appears to celebrate the outcome of what is from the beginning a losing battle. It is certainly an overexaggeration to say that the events which the novel depict tip over to utopian, but the optimism with which Li, the colonizer, announces the acquiescence of the U.S. to the “irresistible” Chinese invasion does herald the formation of a new social entity that is neither properly Chinese nor American. 16 Most significantly, by the gradual blurring of the friend-enemy distinction with which the 16 Hayot analyzes this “mutual imbrication of the colonizer and the colonized, the Chinese with the Americans,” through a formal conflict between the novel’s two modes of storytelling (157). According to Hayot, the novel is made up of two modes of storytelling: the first indicative and the second mimetic. Li’s increasingly citational lecture can thus be taken as a personal accommodation of an American style (ibid). If the Chinese invasion and subsequent transformation of the United States is a political one, then the narrator’s own personal transformation in the country where he now resides and works takes place on a narrative level (159). 155 novel begins, Looking Further Backward exposes the question of the social in the utopian and dystopian genre. The following section will substantiate in greater detail how this blurring of the utmost political distinction, that is, the simultaneous depoliticization of the political invasion, is not merely an ideological tool that Li’s lectures use in order to further an image of transpacific unity. By releasing into circulation Julian’s primitive accumulation of nineteenth century, pre-utopian, and capitalist relations of production, the novel portrays an unlikely alliance between the Americans and the Chinese. Again, this alliance is deceptively “purely economic”. VI. Filiative Gold For there is a minor but not at all insignificant detail in the Wests’ departure from Boston after the city falls to the Chinese at the early stages of the invasion. Since the invading army is guarding all railroads and waterways, Julian decides to use an old horse, which Dr. Leete has left behind after his death, as their mode of transport (Vinton 65). The family packs only their lightest necessities in terms of clothing and personal belongings (68). The ever-practical Julian, however, does insist on bringing one provision, which Edith derides as a foolish decision. This item turns out to be several thousand dollars in gold that were discovered in a safe along with its owner in his underground chamber twenty years ago (ibid.). “This, being useless as money, had, with the exception of a few pieces given away as curiosities, remained intact” (ibid.). No doubt there is something about this useless item, whose possession is truly unique to its owner’s origins from the past that makes Julian feel he has to bring it with him on the family’s escape. What, then, 156 is to happen to this archaic symbol of nineteenth-century capitalism in the midst of the siege? In order to make out the itinerary of this sum of money, which in its nineteenth- century, pre-utopian existence is far from useless, we have to return to where it was first found in Looking Backward. To do so, I suggest that we pick up with the scene where we last left Bellamy’s Julian, that is, after he wakes up on the second day of the utopia and suffers from a total disorientation on the streets of new Boston. Julian’s aimless wandering around his revamped home city leads him back to the Leete’s residence where he manages to find some comfort in Edith’s compassion (39). Over the next few days, Julian proves to be a calm, rational, and considerate novice in the ways of the twenty-first century. When Edith brings up the underground chamber where Julian was first discovered, the latter seems confident enough that he will not experience the same loss of identity to be ready to revisit the place. Furthermore, if Edith goes with him, she will “keep the ghosts off” since it is thanks to her that his “footing is now so firm in this new world” (102). Sure enough, back in the vault, Julian experiences none of the distress and loss of “mental fulcrum” that afflicted him on his lone walk on the streets of new Boston. The difference between that day and this present visit to Julian’s underground vault is that in the streets, he experiences no lapse of time, whereas in the vault he feels that a “hundred years had intervened” (ibid.). Julian attributes the difference in his view of time to his better understanding of his new surroundings and, in particular, his realization of “the prodigious changes that have transformed the world” (103). “I no longer find it hard, but very easy, to realize that I have slept a century” (ibid.). This ease in turn makes his former life remote and unreal, and in a matter of three 157 days, Julian no longer sees an image of his former life superimposed on his utopian world. Just before they are leaving the chamber, Julian remembers a great iron safe in the room in which lies several thousand dollars in gold and “any amount of securities” (104). If I had known when I went to sleep that night just how long my nap would be, I should still have thought that the gold was a safe provision for my needs in any country or any century, however distant. That a time would ever come when it would lose its purchasing power, I should have considered the wildest of fancies. Nevertheless, here I wake up to find myself among a people of whom a cartload of gold will not procure a loaf of bread. (104-5) This passage might very well sum up the whole of Looking Backward. It captures not only Bellamy’s quasi-socialist economy where money is no longer a means of payment and exchange value, but also the extent to which such a society is so fanciful that only a mysterious century-long sleep can lend it plausibility. Most of all, it appears that Julian’s casual rediscovery of his former life’s wealth does not at all undermine his newly-gained assurance of the reality of his life in the twenty-first century. That his money is now worthless is all the more a material evidence for the state of his ideological perception of history. Just as Julian’s realization of prodigious change helps him to gain a sense of the historical interval, his worthless wealth becomes a reminder of his changed relationship to the relations of production. Unlike the double images formed in a composite photograph, here nineteenth-century money shares no vague outline with bread. To put this in more Marxist terms, the value of bread, as a commodity, cannot be expressed in terms of money: the latter is no longer the universal exchange value. If the contents of his safe have any value, then it is solely as a reminder of the distance between the nonutopian 158 past and the utopian present, which Julian, in the previous scene, obfuscates in an ideological double vision of history. This is the only mention of Julian’s safe and his former wealth in Bellamy’s novel. To my knowledge, no other commentator analyzes what this useless “hoard” of money and securities may signify for Julian’s historical role, and what position it may take vis-à-vis the Gilded Age’s capitalist economy, on the one hand, and the Nationalist era of communal labor, property relations, and public capitalism on the other. 17 However, as we are already starting to see, this sum of money may not be so useless in the society of Vinton’s novel. Just as the Chinese invasion reignites Julian’s ideological accumulation of history, the rediscovery of his nineteenth-century wealth suggests that the economic transformation undertaken by Bellamyian Nationalism – replacement of money, exchange value and economic circulation by the credit system and direct distributions – may very well be reversed. While material transformations can be determined by the “precision of natural science” (Grundrisse 461), ideological transformations are much more difficult to ascertain. In any case, the ideological superstructure stays in place “within the framework 17 Hoarding appears to describe the contents of Julian’s underground safe because under a money economy, a “safe provision” of gold that is withdrawn from the processes of buying, selling, and thus of circulation does resemble the petrification of money into a hoard that Marx discusses (Capital 228). In Julian’s case, however, the notion of hoarding does not account for the fact that his money and securities are now useless as a measure of value. He cannot, after a certain duration in the Nationalist system, decide to release them back into circulation by using them to buy commodities, and earn a profit. Neither does hoarding serve the purpose of a monetary reserve for a country to check the mass of money in circulation to the saturation level of the sphere of circulation (231-2). In the first place, Julian’s so-called “hoarding” is an accident of his century-long sleep and the fire that destroyed his house except for his hermeneutically sealed vault. As a “hoarder,” there is certainly no way of enjoying his gold in this utopia. For this reason Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation, as the pre-history of a specific mode of production, is more apt to account for Julian’s “wealth” in Looking Backward. 159 of the old society” after the material conditions for the relations of production have matured (Marx, “Preface” to Contribution 21). However, Julian’s recognition of the usefulness of this previously worthless sum of money bids one to rethink Marx’s notion of primitive accumulation in its fullest sense: the historical presuppositions of a post- capitalist, quasi-socialist society may be “past and gone,” but it can also still be part of its “contemporary history” (Grundrisse 459). Julian’s primitive capitalist accumulation is completely worthless in Looking Backward, and merely serves as a reminder of the economic overhaul of Nationalism. However, this same accumulation is now in Looking Further Backward a foreshadowing of a new social formation. The question that remains to be addressed is this: in what ways would the accumulation of Julian’s former life as a capitalist regain its purchasing power after the Chinese declares war with the United States? I argue that the revival of a primitive mode of production in the context of the Chinese invasion will also signify the beginning of a differentiated American-Chinese economy. Even though the Wests have with them thousands of dollars in gold on their westward journey away from Boston, they still rely on their credit cards to purchase items like an old hand-car for transportation purposes (Vinton 76-7). The credit allowance for each individual may be large enough for all ordinary occasions, but certainly not for an “extraordinary event” such as war, which was ruled out as a possibility when the credit amount was fixed (115). In addition, the Nationalist credit system does not encourage “frugality and accumulation” since such decisions have to be thoroughly explained to the authorities and approved by them (116). The idea that any 160 “future, unforeseen or unexpected event” is reason enough for an accumulation would be totally out of the question for the Nationalist authorities (ibid.). The drawbacks of this credit system become increasingly apparent to its citizens as the war intensifies. Julian writes of the corruption and bribery that his family encounters when they try to procure faster modes of transportation (118). However, the most significant descriptions of the failings of the credit system and the inevitable return of the money economy is expressed by Leete whose diary becomes, toward the last third of the novel, the source from which Li draws his lectures. Leete notes that since the Chinese have refused to buy and sell on credit, many people are unable to procure necessities. Out of desperation, citizens of this once-prosperous economy are driven to steal paintings and other valuable jewels in order to sell them for cash in barter houses that the Chinese have established all over Boston (157). When Leete accompanies his father as a Commissioner back to Boston, he revisits his fiancée Margaretta Nesmyth only to discover that she has sold her own engagement ring to help the poor and the hungry (155-6). What ensues is thus a seemingly innocuous and clichéd process whereby Leete tries to get back Margaretta’s diamond ring. With the help of Lieutenant Wong – whose kindness toward his enemy makes him the perfectly benevolent colonizer – Leete finds that it is possible to trace the sale and purchase of the ring in written record (158-9). The problem is how to get together the money to buy back the ring. A renowned painting that used to hang in the Wests’ residence could have been the solution, but that solution is now out of the question after the confiscation of the house and all its belongings (159). Upon hearing of his son’s troubles, Julian suggests that the $3, 000 in gold coin he has 161 been carrying with him throughout the trip would be more than enough to purchase the item (ibid). The nineteenth-century patriarch, after quickly calculating the exchange rate between the U.S. dollar and the Chinese tael, assures his son that he can leave the changing of their money to him (160). Lieutenant Wong proves to be trustworthy in finding out where the ring is, and after no trouble at all, Leete is able to put the ring back on Margaretta’s finger. No gold is worthless just because one’s enemy has minted it. In this case, with the quick exchange of American gold for Chinese money, locating an American engagement ring is nothing too trivial for the Chinese officer to attend to. This whole episode does not avoid outright sentimentality, and Leete’s regaining of Margaretta’s engagement ring only further seals the stereotype of the charitable fiancée and her resourceful fiancé. I mention this episode merely to indicate the point at which Julian’s capitalist wealth re-enters a formerly moneyless economy. It is the only place where American gold is put back into circulation for Chinese money, which will then subsequently set off other chains of sales and purchases. Vinton’s decision to restart the process of capitalist circulation in this American-Chinese economy, which Bellamy has almost shut down, also reopens the process of social totality that Marx studies in the Grundrisse. In Bellamy’s view, “buying and selling is essentially anti-social in all its tendencies” and ought to be a regulated activity between citizens and the state (42). Since the state is now the sole producer of all sorts of commodities, all commodities are purchased at public storehouses. A system of direct distribution replaces trade and the need for money because every citizen is able to procure goods and services by checking 162 off a number of credits on his or her card. During Julian’s visit to the local storehouse, Edith shows him how all shopping now takes place in sample stores, from which orders are sent to the warehouse. The purchased goods are then delivered by large tubes to the city districts from where they are distributed to individual houses (51-2). That Bellamy’s system of distribution dispenses with circulation – defined simply by the exchange of commodities for money and then for more commodities and more money – is the most significant aspect of the Nationalist system. Would Marx agree with Bellamy that capitalist buying and selling is anti-social (42)? But the problem with capitalism, as Marx sees it, is not that it is simply “anti”-social. Instead, as his examination of circulation shows, capitalist circulation creates the illusion of social relations. Circulation is the movement in which the general alienation appears as a general appropriation and general appropriation as general alienation. As much, then, as the whole of this movement appears as a social process, and as much as the individual moments of this movement arise from the conscious will and particular purposes of individuals, so much does the totality of the process appear as an objective interrelation, which arises spontaneously from nature; arising, it is true, from the mutual influence of conscious individuals on one another, but neither located in their consciousness, nor subsumed under them as a whole. Their own collisions with one another produce an alien social power standing above them, produce their mutual interaction as a process and power independent of them. (Marx, Grundrisse 197) For Marx, it is reductive to conclude that the problem with capitalism is that it is anti- social. Instead, capitalism produces an “alien social power” independent of individuals. As he goes on to explain, circulation is both a “totality of the social process” as well as the “first form in which the social relation appears as something independent of the individuals, but not only as, say, in a coin or in exchange value, but extending to the whole of the social movement itself” (Grundrisse 197). Circulation thus separates from 163 itself – from the totality of the social process – in order to appear as independent from the individuals who precisely make up this totality (ibid.). If what is independent of its constituent parts extends at the same time to the whole of the social movement, then surely social totality cannot take its point of departure from the free social individual or even “the mutual influence of conscious individuals on one another” (ibid). Circulation is “alien” because it is not recognizable as something that comes about by the mere sum of individual actions. Circulation is the first totality among the economic categories to bring to light the autonomy of the social process. While Bellamy, by eradicating buying and selling, attempts to dissolve the very totality of the society that was previously concealed (Marx, Contribution 141), Vinton revives the kind of social totality that Marx points to in the Grundrisse. It is for this ultimate reason that Looking Further Backward is defined according to its dystopian characteristic: it reverses the narration of the social in Bellamy’s novel. Hayot contends that the genre of dystopian fiction is generally uninteresting in the way that it tends to produce defamiliarization via pure reversal. However, I argue that Vinton’s dystopian reversal is interesting precisely because it reverses Bellamy’s utopian transformation by the introduction of racial difference. If Marx studies social totality in capitalist circulation, Vinton examines the circulation of global capital that is as transnational as it is transhistorical. Via Leete’s use of his father’s otherwise-forgotten wealth, the latter becomes the utmost and physical embodiment of Julian’s ideological accumulation of nineteenth-century history. The time-traveling hero finally puts the last of his Asiatic production into good use before eventually dying at the battle of Lake Erie. That this “Asiatic” mode of production is both 164 the source and end-point of capitalist formation reminds us of the contingency of universal history, as well as of its nonsynchronous temporality. Little could Bellamy have guessed that his meek hero would help launch a new era of American-Chinese economy in this way. Here, I use the term American-Chinese not only because of the circulation of the currencies of both countries. The “American-Chinese” aspect of this economy also refers to the brief alliance between Lieutenant Wong and Leete in the latter’s search for Margaretta’s ring. Clearly, there are propagandistic reasons driving Li’s narration of this episode of cooperation between the colonizer and the colonized; but it also reveals what these new alliances and filiations signify for our concept of the Asiatic mode of production now that it is embroiled in the capitalist machine. For Wong and Leete’s brief intercultural alliance has a very specific purpose: the recovery of Margaretta’s ring symbolically recovers her eventual marriage to Leete, which would in time form the new American family under Chinese rule. (It is not insignificant that subsequently in the novel, Chinese officers go on to help Leete smuggle his fiancée and her family onto the train leaving Boston.) In other words, the putting to use of Julian’s primitive, pre-utopian, and capitalist wealth symbolizes the economic reality that underlies marriage traditions. Whether it is the 1880s, the year 2000 or 2023 A.D., the mode of production plays a large role in the reproduction of relations of production, or in Althusserian terms, the Family ISA. Just as the conventionally sentimental portrayal of Edith in her romance with Julian, as well as the overall romantic genre that Bellamy works into his utopian novel, are not just weak literary devices extraneous to the utopian-economic blueprint, Leete’s 165 symbolic reaffirmation of his engagement with Margaretta must be viewed as integral to his father’s nineteenth-century, capitalist accumulation. The question of gender relations, marriage, and the family structure is central to the circulating totality of the social process. One could turn to another of Pfaelzer’s observation about the romance plot between Julian and Edith in Looking Backward to illustrate this point. As an “émigré from capitalism” standing outside “the history of social transformation” (“Immanence, Indeterminance” 59), Julian is brought back into history with “the recuperative powers of sentiment [rather] than with socialism” (62). It is true that the romance plot between Julian and Edith helps Julian integrate into the futuristic utopia. However, we need not divorce the sentimental romance from questions of the utopian economy, which is to say, from the main utopian program. The opposition of “sentiment” to “socialism” is a faulty one, which never fails to nudge the “woman question” outside of some of the more serious political and socio-economic discourse. This is what Pfaelzer does when she argues: “In the creation of women characters, Bellamy affirms that the future ideologically replicates the present. Here utopia fails to transcend the mediations of popular culture and the ideology of the Cult of True Womanhood” (“Immanence” 61, my emphasis). In pointing to the future’s ideological replication of the present, the utopian critic confirms Marx’s observation: “a social formation which did not reproduce the conditions of production at the same time as it produced would not last a year” (qtd. in Althusser 85). 166 That Edith’s character “ideologically replicates” the stereotypical nineteenth- century women says a lot about the novel’s reproduction of nineteenth-century ideological relations of production in general. In other words, this ideological replication of the present does not merely, as Pfaelzer’s analysis implies, pertain to women characters or sentiment; it concerns Bellamy’s vision of the perfect society at large. Bellamy cannot perpetuate patriarchal images of female submissiveness while entirely dismantling the material conditions for sexism, patriarchy. Hence despite Bellamy’s support of the women’s suffrage movement of the time, and his progressive notions regarding women’s economic independence, the author’s ideal institution for the new world, the industrial army, remains patriarchal. While women also work in the industrial army, they belong to a separate allied force under a woman general-in-chief and constitute an exclusively feminine régime (125). Whereas the President of the United States is chosen from among the superintendents by vote of the honorary members of each trade guilds, women’s separate allied force means that they neither have a voice in the election of the President, nor are they eligible to run for this highest office of the nation. The only power that the female general-in-chief has is in her veto of measures respecting women’s work, pending appeals to Congress, and as judges deciding over cases where both parties are women (ibid.). The separation of the sexes in the industrial army and government speaks to Bellamy’s belief that there are inextricable differences between men and women. As Dr. Leete explains to Julian, “the lack of some such recognition of the distinct individuality of the sexes was one of the innumerable defects” of late nineteenth-century society (125). 167 In the new order, women are given education and career opportunities and are released from the burdens of housework as long as all these advancements take place in “a world of their own, with its emulations, ambitions, and careers” (126). Therefore while American feminists such as Catherine Beecher would have supported Bellamy’s policy of isolating women from the masculine world of politics, feminists like Mary H. Ford who demand equality between the sexes would have objected to the segregation (Strauss 77). Ultimately, both strands of feminism of the time would have found it problematic that Bellamy defines women by marriage and motherhood. “The higher positions in the feminine army of industry are entrusted only to women who have been both wives and mothers, as they alone fully represent their sex” (127). “Although ostensibly a feminist and socialist,” Sylvia Strauss notes, “Bellamy was unable to transcend his middle-class and patriarchal attitudes in Looking Backward” (80). 18 In Looking Further Backward, Vinton is much more straightforward than Bellamy regarding his beliefs in gender inequality. Not only are Edith and Margaretta given weak, supporting roles to the strong male leads, they display the negative effects of gender equality under Nationalism: rashness, abrasiveness, and strong-mindedness. In 18 I cannot go into depth concerning Socialist Feminism and its analysis of the material conditions for the reproduction of gender relations. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels declares that with the abolition of capitalist production and of property relations, full freedom in marriage without economic considerations would abolish all inequality between men and women. The direct correspondence of human sexual behavior such as monogamy or polyandry and economics, or, simply put, classical-Marxist economic determinism blinds Engels to the oppression of women in noncapitalist systems. Work done in the field of socialist feminism over the last three decades shore up some of these insufficiencies of classical Marxist categories in dealing with the question of women (Hennessy and Ingraham 6-7). By rethinking concepts such as production, reproduction, class, consciousness, and labor, socialist feminism identifies the complicity between patriarchy and socialism and how it complicates women’s role in social reproduction. 168 Li’s words, the Chinese invasion of the United States will right the wrongs with regards to the woman question: “woman no longer competes with man, but has become as the Gods intended she should be, the handmaiden of male humanity” (Vinton 188). Most important, Vinton affirms the ideological reproduction of familial relations in conjunction with his affirmation of capitalist economy. This is why, ultimately, Leete’s alliance with the Chinese officer, Lieutenant Wong, is less important than the capitalist end to which their alliance serves as the means: In brief, the capitalist machine begins when capital ceases to be a capital of alliance to become a filiative capital. Capital becomes filiative when money begets money, or value or surplus value . . . instead of simply representing the relations of commodities, it enters now, so to say, into relations with itself. It differentiates itself as original value from itself as surplus-value; as the father differentiates himself qua the son, yet both are of one and the same age. (Deleuze and Guattari 227) By exchanging American gold for Chinese money, Julian increases the chances of continuing his family name through Leete and Margaretta. Hayot is right in observing that Julian’s last name “West” had signaled in Bellamy’s novel “the replacement of the nineteenth century’s frontier of space to [sic] the twenty-first century’s frontier of time” (171). But given all that we have seen of Julian’s ideological and economic accumulation, it is difficult to agree with Hayot that the primitive nineteenth century has therefore died along with Julian in the battle of Lake Erie (Hayot 171). Similarly, it is also doubtful that the twenty-first century’s frontier of time has completely rid itself of nineteenth century’s frontier of space. For the latter already consists of the Asian Pacific frontier, which, as Eperjesi points out, does not emerge only in the twentieth century as the successor to the nineteenth century’s continental frontier. Instead, the Asian Pacific 169 frontier was there from the start (Eperjesi 26). And in the case of Vinton’s novel, we see the crossing of this frontier, most paradoxically, in the Wests’ westward journey into the country’s interior after the Chinese invasion. For what makes possible their turbulent travels on the railway in the first place if not the building of the transcontinental railroad in the mid-nineteenth century by Chinese laborers? As David Palumbo-Liu points out: The very revision of modern American time and space was enabled by Chinese labor on the transcontinental railroad, that concrete, modern technological link that, in a particular enactment of time/space compression, shrank the distance between the Atlantic seaboard and the Pacific coast and allowed America to imagine more precisely its particularly modern dream of an American Pacific lake. (Asian/American, 2-3, qtd. in Eperjesi 56) If Chinese labor on the transcontinental railway helped revise modern American time and space, then Vinton’s rendition of Julian’s “Chineseness” exposes the anxieties that go into such a revision. The twenty-first century frontier of space in Looking Further Backward has not eradicated the nineteenth century’s frontier of time; instead, time and space merge to open the Wests’ family name to Asia. In the end, Looking Further Backward does not only imagine an alternative America. It conjures a version of Chinese-exceptionalist foreign policy that uncannily mirrors the Chinese utopian writers’ view of world governance and racial superiority that I will subsequently study. What is utopian for one race is naturally dystopian for the other: “The Chinafication of the U.S.” is “a moral duty we owed our own nation, which otherwise might have been tainted with the Nationalism, which most of the world had been infected with” (Vinton 176). However, we are only just beginning to see the possible converging of the utopian and dystopian imagination. 170 CHAPTER THREE: THE INVENTION OF NATIONALISM IN A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR’S COURT AND NEW STORY OF THE STONE (XIN SHITOU JI) In the past the Chinese have been great engineers (as witness the colossal canals, cities, bridges, and temples still existent) and great inventors, for, very many years before such things were thought of in Europe, they invented the compass, gunpowder, paper, porcelain, and printing. . . . It is scarcely within the reach of prophecy to predict that the next, if not the present, generation will feel the industrial competition of China, not alone through her emigrants here or elsewhere, but through her own people working within her own borders. -- John Fryer I. Reinventing the Imagined Community Questions of technology in utopian thinking have always opened the specialized field of literary utopian studies to the larger study of significant social and cultural movements in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Hence works such as Leo Marx’s authoritative The Machine in the Garden locates a kind of utopian desire in non-utopian novels that attempt to find a middle ground between overcivilized American cities and the country’s pastoral ideals. Utopian fiction’s investment in technological progress and scientific enquiry demonstrates its faith in the betterment of society as a whole, whether such a society is identifiable by race, ethnicity, class, gender, belief-systems, cultural practices, or nationality. Of these various societal formations, the intersection between utopianism and the nation-state is a very well-traversed one. And it is not very surprising that one of the most representative critical works on the relation of utopian fiction to the rise of the modern nation-state, which I have earlier discussed, adapts its title from Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. Wegner’s Imaginary Communities argues that narrative utopia is significant in the constitution of the nation-state as an “original spatial, social, and cultural form” (xvi). Taking to task Anderson’s thesis of the imagined 171 community, Wegner successfully shows that the imagination of a deep, transhistorical bond between members of a community who will never encounter one another is particularly apt for the imaginary space of narrative utopia. The “nowhere” of the root term utopia makes the somewhere possible (ibid.). However, given the amount of critical literature on utopia and technology on the one hand, and utopia and the nation-state on the other, it is curious that these two intersections have not been thoroughly conceived of together so as to examine utopia’s relation to a kind of technocentric nationalism. In this chapter, I develop this notion of technocentric nationalism as an invented – as contrasted with an imagined – nationalism through my reading of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and Wu Jianren’s New Story of the Stone (Xin shitou ji) (1905-6). It is fair to suggest that Anderson’s by-now classical definition of the nation, which forged a new field of study when his work first appeared in 1983, rests heavily on his choice of the word imagined. In the Introduction of his book where he first lays down the simple and yet groundbreaking formulation of an “imagined political community – imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign,” Anderson pauses to examine Ernest Gellner’s comparable, and yet to Anderson’s mind insufficient definition of nationalism as invention. Gellner writes: “Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self- consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.” (qtd. in Anderson 6, original emphasis) According to Anderson, the term invention has too much of the negative connotations of “’fabrication’ and ‘falsity’” and too little of the positive meanings of “’imagining’ and ‘creation’” (ibid.). It is not as if only nationalism masquerades under 172 “false pretenses,” whereas “’true’ communities exist which can be advantageously juxtaposed to nations” (ibid.). There are no false communities versus genuine ones, but only equally imagined communities with different styles of imagination. Once Anderson debunks the role that invention plays in the formation of nationalism, the imagined status of political communities requires no further defending, and makes way for the “meat” of the book: a historical study of the cultural roots and subsequent global spread of nationalism. Gellner’s remark about the inventedness of nations is never again mentioned, and the term imagined has ever since influenced our understanding of one of the most complex form of communities. However, what if invention does not necessarily carry such negative connotations of “’fabrication’ and ‘falsity’” as Anderson’s reading of Gellner claims, but has other connotations that may even exceed that of “’imagining’ and ‘creation’” to highlight the constructed uniqueness of a particular nationhood? I approach the inventedness of nationalism not as an opposition to, but as a stronger interpretation of what imagination or the imaginary means. This is my first proposition: the invented nation is a community that invents itself in the singularity of a first time that must nonetheless be repeated or even reenacted – the founding event, the founding fathers, independence day and so forth. All rhetoric of national commemoration depends on this invention. An imagination requires no precedence, but an invention is always a transgression of previously established rules. Nationalism, as one of the many ways of conceiving of a community, is precisely a reordering of other imagined communities that come before or exist alongside it, whether the latter take the form of the family, village, or the tribe. 173 Anderson proposes that we understand nationalism not as some “self-consciously held political ideologies,” but in terms of the “large cultural systems that preceded it, out of which – as well as against which – it came into being.” (19) However my proposition about the inventedness of nations must also present itself as an invention, which is something that Anderson’s formulation of the imagined community elides. In “Psyche: Invention of the Other,” Jacques Derrida grapples with the complexities of the discourse of invention as having itself to be an invention. In an earlier essay “Declarations of Independence,” he addresses a similar question with regards to the signing into existence of a State that is at the same time an “invention of the signer,” namely, the people of the United States of America and their representatives (10). In signing in the name of the people, the representatives invent an identity for the people at large, and for themselves. Thus the invention of the signer only comes about through “the people differing or deferring themselves through the intervention of their representatives” (ibid.). Consequently, the invention of the signer or the representative is also the invention of the other, the abstract notion of “the people.” To present a discourse of the nation as an invented community is, in Derrida’s words, to allow the “dramatization and the allegory” to begin for it is finally to see the nation as what must be evaluated, recognized, and legitimized by others. But presenting an invention, presenting itself as an invention, the discourse I am talking about will have to have its invention evaluated, recognized, and legitimized by someone else, by an other who is not one of the family: the other as member of a social community and of an institution. For an invention can never be private once its status as invention, let us say its patent or warrant, its manifest, open, public identification, has to be certified and conferred. (Derrida, “Psyche” 5) 174 The nation is not simply imagined, according to Anderson, as limited, sovereign and as a community (6-7). It is not enough to speak of its imaginary status without speaking of the recognition of such a status, not only by other members of the nation – this is what Anderson sees as the horizontal membership of the community (ibid.) – but also by other nations and non-nations in the rest of the world. This is how Imagined Communities emphasizes the worldwide process by which the nation came to be imagined, and once imagined, “modeled, adapted, and transformed” (141). At one point, Anderson adopts the language of legality and illegality to suggest the rampant duplication of the “independent national state model” as a kind of “pirating” (81). At another moment, his explicit use of the language of invention is so fitting that it makes his earlier rejection of Gellner almost half-hearted: “Indeed, as we shall see, the ‘nation’ proved an invention on which it is impossible to secure a patent” (67). My second proposition is to think of an invented community as the product of a long series of inventions and reinventions. Unlike invention, the term imagination does not fully account for this process of duplication and modeling, in short, the complex process in which the nation was first an anomaly but became an international norm by the dawn of the twentieth century. Furthermore, every time Anderson examines how a version of the nation is “pirated,” whether it is by European states, empires, and Asian colonies at various points of world history, an altered version of the original American model is produced. Therefore I argue that the above-quoted passage from “Psyche” captures nationalism’s modus operandi far more succinctly than Anderson’s imagined community: 175 nationalism can never be private once its status is acknowledged. This statement would correspond to a constative description – a pointing out, discovering or unveiling -- of nationalism. However, the public, institutionalized nature of nationalism is at one and the same time carried out by the very performative discourse of its invention. Does not the public identification of the nation present itself as an invention? The invention of the nation speaks for “the operative value of a technical apparatus henceforth available to all” (Derrida, “Psyche” 7). The discourse of invention is thus a speech event that allows one to invent on the “subject of invention,” all the while explaining “the generality of its genre and the genealogy of its topos” (ibid.). My posing the nation and nationalism as the subject of invention is thus indissociable from the generality in which this discourse of invention is presented. This is the kind of reflexive structure that Derrida’s works have always traced, namely, a “self”-reflexivity that “projects forward the advent of the self, of ‘speaking’ or ‘writing’ of itself as other” even as it produces “coincidence with or presence to itself” (ibid.). Derrida’s famous contestation of Austin’s speech-act theory shows how the separation between the constative and the performative statement comes undone: a constative description of nationalism as an invention of the other is also the performative act of nationalism’s invention itself. In “Declarations of Independence,” Derrida makes the case for a “required” and “essential” undecidability between the constative and performative structure for the “very positing or position of a right as such” – the right of a people to found and invent a nation-state (9). Furthermore, it is not insignificant for the discourse on invention to have the operative value of a technical apparatus. My third proposition for the invented nation is 176 that it relies on an invention of stories and narratives, as well as on the invention of machines and technology. These two types of inventions fall under what Derrida outlines as the major “authorized examples” for invention since the end of seventeenth century Europe (10). People either invent stories in the sense of the fictional or fabulous, or they invent machines, technical devices or mechanisms. The first invention by fabulation produces a fictional reality that has no referent outside the narrative, while the second invention of machines produces “a new operational possibility” (ibid.). 19 Later in the essay, Derrida challenges this distinction between invention as fabula or fictio, on the one hand, and as “tekhne, episteme, istoria, methodos, that is, art or know-how, knowledge and research, information,” on the other (34). These two notions do not correspond to two separate types of invented things, but are indissociably the occasion of recurrent operations whereby what is invented for “the first time” must also be repeatable and transmissible “every” subsequent time. “To invent is to produce iterability and the machine for reproduction and simulation, in an indefinite number of copies, utilizable outside the place of invention, available to multiple subjects in various contexts” (ibid.). An invention by fabulation is thus always already mechanical because it reproduces indefinite copies of the same story. By the same logic, a mechanical invention takes the form of fabulation because its only reference is within its operational possibility of 19 Derrida gives the examples of printing and nuclear weaponry in order to highlight how the politics of invention is indissociable from a politics of culture and war (ibid). The example of print immediately recalls the role that Anderson assigns it: as the basis for national consciousness in creating a unified language, and its specific use of calendrical coincidence in the form of newspaper editions. It does not take imagination much further to see how the politics of war is also essential to the development of national consciousness. 177 iteration. “And in all cases [these mechanisms] are ‘stories’: a certain sequentiality must be able to take a narrative form, which is to be repeated, cited, re-cited” (ibid.). Not only is the historical separation between an invention in the form of fiction, and that in the form of machines untenable once we trace the logic of invention to its logico-discursive end; their indissociability is all the more vital for a fictional genre that takes as one of its central motifs the invention of machinery and new technology. I am referring of course to utopian fiction whose depiction of the ideal society is not just some idealistic expression, but one that often hinges on technological progress, and the new cultural practices and social habits that accompany it. This is why, for the purposes of this chapter, it is especially pertinent that the discourse on invention be understood to have the operative value of a technical apparatus. The self-reflexive structure of the performative and constative that Derrida highlights here moves to another level of reflexivity: a novel that tells the story of inventing machines must essentially be inventive with regards to its own fabula or fictio. At the same time, the invented machines or new technologies narrated in the novel become tekhne in the widest sense of the word, that is, they are utilizable apparatuses folded into the iterable structure of the narrative. In the basic terms of literary theory, the invented machines and apparatuses that make up the story or diegesis of the novel join the discourse, that is, the presentation of the narrative. What I call the invention of nationalism challenges the distinction between story and discourse, and that between fabula or fictio and tekhne. Like the co-figuration of the performative and constative that Derrida patiently unfolds in “Psyche,” this chapter 178 studies how the invention of nationalism co-implicates fictional and mechanical know- how in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and New Story of the Stone. While much scholarship has tackled the question of Twain’s critique of imperialism in A Connecticut Yankee, none has illuminated the possibility that its protagonist, Hank Morgan, and his civilizing missions, which range from the invention of the telephone, the telegraph and the factory-line, to cultural practices such as the newspaper, the abolition of slavery, and advertising, also entail the invention of sixth- century national consciousness. Such an invention does not therefore bring Hank’s one- man imperial project full circle, as if the idea of the nation can unmistakably mark the “origin” of a medieval “modernity.” (The phrase medieval modernity itself ought to upset the teleological view of progress.) Instead, I argue that A Connecticut Yankee’s development of national consciousness is part of its critique of imperialism: the failure of Hank’s project to build a civilized utopia in medieval England cannot be fully explained, as Thomas Bulger suggests, by a defect in Hank’s character (238), or by the “intractable nature of humanity” (239). Interestingly enough, Hank’s imperialist ambitions fail because, and not in spite of (to borrow from Bhabha’s study of ambivalent narrations of the nation) "the impossible unity of the nation as a symbolic force” (Bhabha, “Introduction: Narrating the Nation” 1) In contrast, the patriotic tenor of Wu’s New Story is so overpowering that critics tend to assume the status of nationalism rather than unpack and actually examine its problematic formulation. I am indebted to Rebecca E. Karl’s correction of a similar myopia in the field of late Qing and early Republican Chinese history. I propose here to 179 contribute to what she and many others working in Chinese studies emphasize as a discursive nationalism. The latter focuses on nationalism as a concept-formation that is distinct from the pursuit of a political state. Nationalism and statism are historically related, but the former is made up of diverse intellectual praxes that need to be understood apart from the latter as functional and institutional expressions of state power (Karl 17-19). Once nationalism is freed from the constraints of statism, it is possible to open up the definition of China to contesting notions of space and time. In the novel, this contested notion of China is encapsulated in its protagonist’s wish throughout the novel to “mend the sky” ( ). While Baoyu is not an inventor in the same sense that Hank declares himself to be, his inventiveness comes through a blurring of the opposition between the fictional and the real, the civilized and the barbaric, and China and the West. Eventually, what I see as rather one-sided imperialist critiques in A Connecticut Yankee and the unexamined national question in New Story can come together and invent another story. After all, Edward Said’s observation that “To tell a simple national story . . . is to repeat, extend, and also engender new forms of imperialism” works very much both ways (Culture and Imperialism 273). II. The American Boss and His Patents New Story and A Connecticut Yankee do not relate to each other in the way that Vinton wrote Looking Further Backward as a direct response to Looking Backward. Twain and Wu certainly knew nothing of each other’s works but both admired Bellamy’s novel. When Twain published A Connecticut Yankee in 1889, he wrote to Sylvester Baxter, of the Boston Herald, about his thoughts on Looking Backward, which had been published 180 just one year earlier. It is “the latest and best of the Bibles,” Twain exclaimed, and referred to Bellamy as “the man who has made the accepted heaven paltry by inventing a better one on earth” (qtd. in Winters 23). Twain’s hyperbolic, and no doubt, tongue-in- cheek, comparison of Looking Backward to the Holy Book is not all that inappropriate, considering the way that the American bestseller subsequently made its way to China. Between 1891 and 1892, Baptist missionary Timothy Richard produced an abbreviated translation of Bellamy’s novel in classical Chinese (Huters 107). Titled Huitou kan jilue (A Short Account of Looking Backward), Richard’s translation was serialized in Wanguo gongbao, and later published as a single, unabridged volume under the title Bainian yijiao (A Hundred-year sleep) (ibid.). As Theodore Huters and David Wang Der-wei, among others, have noted, Bellamy’s novel was popular and widely circulated among late Qing intellectuals such as Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, and Tan Sitong. Liang very much had Bellamy’s future-prolepsis structure in mind when he composed his unfinished 1902 novel, Xin Zhongguo weilai ji (The Future of New China) (ibid.). More significantly for my purposes, Looking Backward and its time-traveling protagonist became sources of inspiration for New Story (Huters 107; Wang 273). However, Twain and Wu’s shared enthusiasm for Bellamy only went so far; both A Connecticut Yankee and New Story are much more ambivalent about utopia than Looking Backward. Yet, this dose of skepticism does not prompt the two authors to imagine a dystopia like that of Vinton’s. The reason for this is not historical. That is to say, A Connecticut Yankee and New Story differ from Looking Further Backward not because their authors were uninterested in the issue of Chinese immigration and labor in 181 the nineteenth-century U.S. Wu was an outspoken critic of the extension of the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act in 1905. In support of various boycotts of American goods and establishments in China, he left his editor’s post at the American-owned Central China Post (Chu Bao) (Huters 129). As for Twain, even before his famous condemnation of American involvement in the Philippines and China at the turn of the century, he was already advocating for the welfare of the Chinese in the U.S. during the late 1860’s and 70’s. He opposed the exclusion of Chinese coolies from the work on the Southern Pacific Railroad, and published indignant articles against the anti-Chinese discrimination in California (Harris, “China” in The Mark Twain Encyclopedia, 142). Hence it is besides the point to ask whether Wu and Twain see the utopian or anti-utopian genre as an effective vehicle for addressing the problem of racially-based anti-immigration laws. Instead, whatever line of convergence the two authors’ novels might have with Looking Further Backward must be drawn to make apparent the larger issue of the changing relationship between military technology, imperialism, and the inventiveness of nationalism. Vinton’s invasion plot, even as I have shown it to exceed the typical yellow peril genre, no longer accounts for the kind of economic imperialism or informal empire that was beginning to structure American and Chinese foreign engagements from the mid-nineteenth century on. Whatever image of imperialism that Looking Further Backward conjures is ultimately an older mode of political domination through the processes of military invasion and ideological conversions. The novel’s imagination of the future does not recognize the important role of communications technology: set in the year 2023 A.D., the Chinese army’s “hardware” seems to have been stuck in the 182 nineteenth century. Its imperialist threat is built on stagnancy and tradition, instead of change. Herein lies the dystopian message of Vinton’s world: Bellamy’s Nationalism has so weakened American society that even a less-than advanced invading army could easily take over the country. In contrast, Twain does not hesitate to equip his protagonist, Hank Morgan, with much spectacle and inventiveness. We are first introduced to him via a modern-day tourist with the initials “M.T.”, who chances upon Hank and his manuscripts in Warwick Castle, and through whom the former’s adventures are narrated. From the beginning, Hank’s self-declared Yankeeism – “practical,” and “nearly barren of sentiment” (Twain, A Connecticut Yankee 14) – is associated with his ability to “make everything” as head superintendent at a great arms factory (15). He “could make anything a body wanted,” from guns, revolvers, to “all sorts of labor-saving machinery” (ibid.). Most important, “if there wasn’t any quick new-fangled way to make a thing, [he] could invent one – and do it as easy as rolling off a log” (ibid.). It is also very easy to get Hank into a fight, and one day his fellow employee knocks him out with a crowbar during a misunderstanding. When he comes to, he finds himself a prisoner facing the death sentence in the deep dungeons of King Arthur’s Court. In order to escape, Hank claims that he is a magician more powerful than Merlin, and that he will bring about a calamity should any harm befall him (35). The medieval court expects nothing less from a magician than that he perform miracles at will; to Hank, such miracles are nothing more than the “invention” of a calamity (36). He is no magician, but his timing is right on: he remembers that a total solar eclipse is to occur on the twenty-first of June, A.D. 528, the day he is scheduled to 183 be burnt alive. Like “Columbus and Cortez” who “played an eclipse as a saving trump once” (ibid.), Hank skillfully masks historical and scientific knowledge as pure magic. As a result, he manages to have the entire court at his feet, and agrees to “restore” the sun on the condition that he is made perpetual minister and executive to the King and that he will receive one per cent of any increase in revenue that he succeeds in creating for the state (42). Thus begins the “Boss”’s – his given title in the Kingdom – venture to transform sixth-century English monarchism, the power of the Catholic Church, and the culture of knighthood and superstition with nineteenth-century republicanism, technology, and industry. But even the most ambitious change starts from creating “little conveniences” (45). Nothing irks Hank more than the absence of soap, sugar, coffee, tea, or tobacco. He compares himself to Robinson Crusoe who must “invent, contrive, create, reorganize things” (45). However, that he is far from being cast away on an uninhabited island “with no society but some more or less tame animals” (ibid.) is most obvious from how seriously he takes this invention business. . . . the very first official thing I did, in my administration – and it was on the very first day of it, too – was to start a patent office; for I knew that a country without a patent office and good patent laws was just a crab, and couldn’t travel any way but sideways or backwards. (55) Despite his comparing medieval Englishmen to “tame animals” (45), 20 clearly a basic definition of human society exists that Hank seeks to better as both “a business man and statesman” (55). This conflation of politics with business is vital since patent laws are 20 The comparison to animals brings out the question of anthropocentrism that Derrida discusses in “Psyche.” A possible invention is always one made possible by “the tekhne of a human subject within an ontotheological horizon” (44). 184 both juridical conventions as well as industrial property rights that ensure future reproductions and business ventures. As I emphasized in the preceding section, an invention can never be private once its public status as invention is conferrable. “The moment proper to status is social and discursive” (Derrida, “Psyche” 26). Yet, the general status of inventions, namely, that they can be recognized by agreed criteria, also marks a singular event and the signature of the inventor. In Hank’s case, the patent office serves to protect and legitimate all of his subsequent inventions. Indeed, as we shall see, no one who goes through with Hank’s education system, with the exception of Clarence, a page who becomes the Boss’s able assistant, emerges as particularly inventive. At the same time, Hank believes that a patent office and good patent laws are for the greater good, namely, for a country’s progress as a whole. Without them, a country cannot move forward but must be resigned to merely moving “sideways” or “backwards” (55). It is not inventions on their own, but the patented status of inventions that moves a country forward in the spirit of progress. The juridical power of legalizing inventions thus goes hand in hand with Hank’s larger personal ambition to accelerate medieval England’s steps toward modernity. The very first official thing the Boss does in his administration is in fact the institutionalizing of his power and right. “For what is being invented in this way are always institutions. Institutions are inventions and the inventions to which a status is conferred are in turn institutions” (Derrida, “Psyche” 43). In short, it would be more accurate to say that Hank’s first invention is an auto- invention of his own public status as “Boss.” If one of the OED’s definitions for invention is “the action of coming upon or finding,” Hank almost literally comes upon or 185 finds himself in the situation of “enormous authority” through the inexplicable travel back in time (50). For his rise to power has less to do with where he is but when. Once he is convinced that he is indeed in the year 528 A.D. in King Arthur’s Court, he decides that he would “boss the whole country inside of three months; for [he] judged [he] would have the start of thirteen hundred years and upwards” (21). The popular saying of reinventing oneself thus applies to Hank in all senses of the word. Whereas he would only “amount to” a factory foreman in the twentieth century, here in the sixth century, he has all the “knowledge, brains, pluck, and enterprise to sail in and grow up with the country” (ibid.). Not only does he quickly feel at home, he “wouldn’t have traded [the sixth century] for the twentieth” (50). His arrival from the future jump starts his life, and Hank knows this “just as one does who has struck oil” (ibid.). He is a “Unique,” and that is a fact that “could not be dislodged or challenged for thirteen centuries and a half, for sure” (50-1). Armed with ready-made inventions from the future and patents of his own civilizing power, Hank positions himself “at the very spring and source of the second great period of the world’s history” (51). It is not difficult to guess what more than thirteen centuries of advantage does to Hank’s ego and to his view of his sixth-century subordinates. David R. Sewell explains how Twain’s “fable of progress” – borrowing the term from Henry Nash Smith – “displaces onto a temporal opposition the historical confrontation between Europe and the noncivilized world” (141). In Sewell’s analysis, A Connecticut Yankee reveals that utopian narrative is a variety of literary imperialism – “Utopia is always a colony” (142). As we have already begun to see, Hank refers to the 186 Englishmen as “children,” “animals,” “barbarians,” the “quaintest and simplest and trustingest race” (51). The speculative or alternative history of the time-travel plot instills a colonial situation of superiority that in turn encourages further expansionism. It is not enough for Hank to modernize medieval England: three years into his office, he is preparing to “send out an expedition to discover America” (278). Twain’s readers quickly caught on to Hank’s civilizing posture, but not to the author’s critique of it. Sylvester Baxter, reviewing A Connecticut Yankee when it was first published, lamented how savages similar to medieval English still existed among American Indians, Asians, and Africans, who had not been “exposed to the light of a genuine civilization” (qtd. in Kasson 214). However tempting it is to take Twain’s fable of technological and political progress at face value, it is more difficult, in my opinion, to overlook the author’s critique of the colonial rhetoric of progress that culminates in Hank’s own demise after the disastrous battle of the Sand Belt. I maintain that we can learn much about the novel’s anti-imperialist tenor, which as John Carlos Rowe convincingly claims, anticipates most of Twain’s later views in writings such as “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” and “To My Missionary Critics” (178), if we view it in terms of Hank’s hubris as an inventor. As I have earlier suggested, a novel that tells the story of an inventor must also be inventive with regards to its own fabula or fictio. What guides my reading of A Connecticut Yankee is less Hank’s mechanical know-how and more the ways in which that know-how unfolds within the fictional mechanism, namely, the apparatus of time-travel. Technological and political progress is a fallacy precisely because of, and not despite, the fact that it is dependent 187 upon a statesman and businessman from the future. For the truth is that whatever Hank invents is a reproduction and reiteration of something that already exists in his own time, that is, the time of Twain’s readers. The more Hank stresses the ingenuity of his native age, the more he undercuts the singularity of his civilizing endeavors. Factories, Sunday schools, newspapers, soaps, oven cleaners, sewing machines, guns and explosives are all ready-made inventions brought from the nineteenth century with their invented dates expedited. Paradoxically, their future patents are nullified by time only for them to be (re)patented in the sixth century. 21 In judging the nature of Hank’s inventiveness, we find that it is indissociable from the overall time travel plot of the novel itself. This is not to say that the time-loop framework of A Connecticut Yankee is anything new; what draws our attention is that both the form of the novel and its contents come together to comment on the larger question of progress. As Lee Clark Mitchell points out, Twain is not alone in imposing American superiority upon a backward age (247). But “what seems remarkably self-contradictory about the novel is the amusing conceit of a time-loop strategy, which was meant to empower his heroic Yankee but becomes a devastating testimony to human impotence” (ibid.). Paradoxically, it is because A Connecticut 21 Certainly factories, schools and congregations – what Hank calls his “civilization-nurseries” (63) – are not inventions in the same sense that commercial products and mechanical apparatuses are; that the former are institutions, however, merely spells out what is conferred on all mechanical inventions once their statuses are conferred, i.e., institutionalized and stamped by an authority from the nineteenth century. Hence it is not too far-fetched to suggest that even Hank’s ideas about religion, like his distrust of the united Catholic Church and preference for Protestant denominations that lead him to install a variety of congregations, and of the political system are ready-made inventions from the future. The immense contrasts between the sixth century and the nineteenth century make Hank’s nineteenth-century political and social ideas appear so transgressive and original that they resemble inventions. 188 Yankee invests in a linear model of progress and human development that historical change is impossible. Hank cannot take full credit for the changes he introduces to medieval England because even his wish to colonize America is borrowed from the historical fact of his time. This fact, to put it more directly, is the very historical condition of Hank’s practical Yankeeism from the future. Therefore for the most part of the novel, Hank’s attempt to bring nineteenth- century civilization to sixth-century England amounts to more talk than action. From the beginning, Hank strongly objects to the medieval practices of slavery, the institution of knight-errantry and nobility, the Catholic Church, and lastly, monarchy. He is aware that these practices and institutions are so grounded in sixth-century English thinking that only a violent revolution can bring about their downfall (124). “[A]ll gentle cant and philosophizing to the contrary notwithstanding, no people in the world ever did achieve their freedom by goody-goody talk and moral suasion” (124-5). But talk and philosophizing is what mostly takes place. It is easy to identify the whole nation as slaves who “grovel before king and church and noble” (52), and the church in particular as what converts “a nation of men to a nation of worms” (53). Neither does it take an exceptionally modern thinking to disdain the nobles’ “collection” of prisoners at will (113). But except for freeing forty-seven captives from their imprisonment in Morgan Le Fay’s castle, Hank does not carry out explicit political reforms until much later in the story. When he encounters a group of slaves on their way to be sold in the marketplace – a “procession” that he likens to a religious pilgrimage of another order (135) – he is tempted to put a stop to the whole thing and set the slaves free (137). However he 189 restrains himself because he “must not interfere too much and [get] himself a name for riding over the country’s laws and the citizen’s rights roughshod” (ibid.). Hank’s republicanism has to bend to medieval ways, even though his encounters with inequality and unfairness continue to convince him that “even the best governed and most free and most enlightened monarchy is still behind the best condition attainable by its people” (170). Part of Hank’s hesitation comes from what he sees as the persistence of “inherited ideas” (52). He has his in the form of republicanism, and the king and his people have theirs in the shape of titles and pedigrees. “In both cases they flowed in ruts worn deep by time and habit, and the man who should have proposed to divert them by reason and argument would have had a long contract on his hands” (ibid.). Yet Hank does not believe that such inherited ideas mean that human nature cannot be molded, for “training – training is everything; training is all there is to a person . . . there is no such thing as nature” (111). Ideas such as freedom and equality only make sense for someone like Hank who has been “trained” to think so (ibid.). Compassion and human empathy may be innate, but a lifetime of custom, culture, and education is required to translate these sentiments into actual practices of human equality and rights. This debate over nature and culture is tested in the “Tragedy of the Manor House” chapter. While King Arthur sympathizes with the sufferings of a family as a result of the injustices of lordship and the Church, his mind is unchanged with regard to the rights of the lords (206). “He was born so, educated so, his veins were full of ancestral blood that was rotten with this sort of unconscious brutality” (207). It is not till Hank and the King 190 travel incognito and are mistaken for slaves and captured that the King’s actual experience of the system convinces him to abolish slavery (250). As for the breakable tradition of knighthood, Hank finally gets the upper hand after winning a duel against Sir Sagramor. There, Hank proves that even the most lowbrow symbol of practical Yankeeism, a cowboy’s lasso, is mightier than Merlin’s magic, and by extension, superstition. However, these victories are insignificant in light of the power of the Catholic Church. When the latter manages to impose an Interdict against Hank in his absence, few of the Boss’s trained experts come to his aid: the ever-faithful Clarence gathers together a resistance force that amounts to only fifty-two adolescent boys between fourteen and seventeen years of age. When Hank asks him about this selection, Clarence explains that older men were “born in an atmosphere of superstition and reared in it. It is in their blood and bones. We imagined we had educated it out of them; they thought so too; the Interdict woke them up like a thunderclap!” (294-5). The extent of medieval superstition is so great that Hank feels the need to keep his proudest inventions a secret for the first three years. His industries – “nuclei of future vast factories, the iron and steel missionaries of my future civilization” – are carefully hidden in various corners of the country (61). He makes sure that no one is allowed to go into these industrial precincts without a special permit (ibid.). He also sends confidential agents through the country to “undermine the knighthood by imperceptible degrees” (63). Such activities, far from being revolutionary, are designed to “gnaw a little at this and that and the other superstition” (ibid.). Newspapers are starting to circulate, albeit in experimental circles (ibid.). Telegraph and telephone wires are likewise discretely laid as 191 underground wires – “an insulation of [Hank’s] invention” – instead of poles since the latter attract too much attention (64). This secrecy does not cancel out the public nature of patented inventions. Instead it undoes the hard-wrought distinction between the public and the private, thus allowing Hank’s inventions to re-order Arthurian society. As a result, these clandestine modifications make Hank’s actions more and not less inventive. On the one hand, they sow the seeds of progress. On the other hand, Twain’s choice of imagery points to destruction rather than civilization: it is as if the more secretive Hank’s projects are, the more they are dangerous threats to his very own project to save England from the dark ages of kings and priests (62). The double-edged sword of civilization and destruction is most evident in the following passage: My works showed what a despot could do with the resources of a kingdom at his command. Unsuspected by this dark land, I had the civilization of the nineteenth century booming under its very nose! It was fenced away from the public view, but there it was, a gigantic and unassailable fact – and to be heard from, yet, if I lived and had luck. There it was, sure as a fact, and as substantial a fact as any serene volcano, standing innocent with its smokeless summit in the blue sky and giving no sign of the rising hell in its bowels. (63) Kenneth M. Roemer, among others, notes the numerous places where Twain evokes the volcanic imagery in A Connecticut Yankee (31). In addition to the passage quoted above, it is remarkable that Hank’s newspaper is the Camelot Weekly Hosannah and Literary Volcano. The volcanic imagery is employed by many American utopian writers of the time – Roemer counts thirty-one of them –to allude to social tensions that can erupt and destroy the fabric of American society (22). However, Twain’s use of the threat of subterranean explosions is different: instead of warning his readers of the dangers of pent-up workers and other social conflicts, he uses the volcano imagery in 192 order to alert us to the dangers inherent in the concept of progress itself. “In A Connecticut Yankee all the significant volcanic imagery is instead associated with the hero” (Roemer 31). Thus for all of Hank’s support of democracy, and the precautions he takes in preferring piecemeal reforms over violent revolution, Hank exemplifies the clichéd link between power and corruption. With his introduction of a literary press, he also starts censoring authorship (278). With the beginnings of a commercial steam navy, he is also launching a colonial expedition to America (ibid.). He builds several lines of railway, and closes one eye to the workers’ corruption (ibid.). Finally from underneath Hank’s noble wish to introduce unlimited suffrage after the king’s death and thereupon establish a British republic also surfaces his desire, as he shamefully confesses, to be its first president (279). “Yes, there was more or less human nature in me; I found that out” (ibid.). Whether Twain eventually changed his mind about his original faith in progress that is similar to that of Hank’s, which he expressed in several unpublished essays he wrote during his composition of the novel, or he was simply forced to alter Hank’s character as the plot developed, as Roemer seems to suggest (32), he certainly used the chapter on the battle of the Sand Belt to show the shortfalls of Hank’s civilizing project. At this battle, Hank, Clarence, and their fifty-two loyal boys build a fortress of live electrical wires and await the arrival of 30, 000 knights sent by the orders of the church and the nobles. As Clarence, its proud architect, puts it, the use of a single ground connection makes for an “economy” of killing: “it isn’t costing you a cent till you touch it off” (296). And he is right. By nighttime, there are no longer 30, 000 knights but merely 193 a pile of “homogenous protoplasm” (303). The conclusive battle of the Sand Belt – whose destruction of life is, in Hank’s words, both “amazing” and “beyond estimate” – not only proves that modernization has a high price, but that it may even suffer at the hands of its more backward progenitor. For after celebrating their momentous victory in exterminating so many at one go, Hank, Clarence, and their delegation of fifty-two English boys realize that they are slowly being poisoned by the air from the corpses (312). In short, the civilizing project becomes its best critic. III. The Other Inventor: Baoyu’s and Chinese Print Culture Hank’s aim to bring modern civilization to medieval England is thwarted by the very nature of inventiveness that belies his confidence in the first place. Sewell’s claim for the indissociability between utopian narrative and literary imperialism thus needs to be augmented with Derrida’s insights in “Psyche.” Ultimately, it is not so much that the Yankee turns out to be a bad inventor as it is that invention is always an invention of the other: an other to the confident posturing of civilization, an other to technological progress, and even an other to utopia that is not simply dystopian. It would be a mistake to think that I am referring to an Other that is opposable to a self-same identity. As Derrida makes clear, any opposition, dialectical or not, already folds back into what he calls the “regimen of the same” (39). The invention of the other is not opposed to that of the same, its difference beckons toward another coming about, toward this other invention of which we dream, the invention of the entirely other, the one that allows the coming of a still unanticipatable alterity, and for which no horizon of expectation as yet seems ready, in place, available. . . . This invention of the entirely other is beyond any possible status; I still call it invention, because one gets ready for it, one makes this step destined to let the other come, come in. (Derrida, “Psyche” 39, original emphasis) 194 In short, an invention of the other is an experience of the impossible as the only possible invention. Comparativism, and specifically, the discipline of comparative literature, is first and foremost an invention of the other, a way of letting come an “unanticipatable alterity.” I argue that this is the only way one can take to task some of the assumptions that are implied in the comparison of various national literatures. What is the determinable object of national literatures when the very notions of the nation and nationalism are being developed, questioned and assessed there? Or, we can go further in asking as Derrida does in a related context, whether we can even presume what the literary is whenever we risk “comparing anything in the name of comparative literature” (“Who or What Is Compared?” 29). The question of the national and the literary coincide in this particular period of Chinese intellectual history when thinkers such as Liang, and Xu Nianci, whom I study in the next chapter, argue that new novels can cultivate new citizenry. Yet, by way of later institutional forces, late Qing fiction does not figure among the core components of Chinese literary studies in most North American and European academic circles. To put it simply, the very period that produced concrete ideological links between the nation and its literature has not itself been “nationalized.” Allow me a short detour to elaborate on this problem of foregrounding the nation in these late Qing fictions. Here I follow Jonanthan Arac’s definition of the “nationalizing of literary narrative” as an “interpretive process” whereby readers link an American work such as Huckleberry Finn, which “is distanced from national concerns,” to “fundamental national historical experiences” (18). This interpretive process is “allegorical,” that is, it is only possible through “an aggressively active process of readers’ interpretation, about 195 which readers, in fact, differ very widely” (ibid.). According to Arac, the emergence of works that count as what readers immediately recognize as nineteenth-century American literature – The Scarlet Letter and Moby-Dick being the prime examples – encounters a “hypercanonization” that happens when literary narratives become nationalized. Arac’s distinction between literary narratives that can be nationalized through an allegorical reading, and national narratives that explicitly foreground historical national concerns, brings to mind Jameson’s famous essay, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” There, Jameson claims that all so-called third-world national allegories, that is, private individual destiny as always an allegory of the public third- world culture and society (69), are “conscious and overt” (79). In contrast, first-world texts are “unconscious” of the relationship between the individual and the nation, and therefore must be deciphered by interpretive mechanisms” (79-80). For Arac, the nationalization or hypercanonization of American literature is itself an allegorical process, whereas for Jameson, the notion of national allegory is what allows for a “conscious and overt” identification of third-world cultural texts in the first place. Aijaz Ahmad rightly critiques this controversial distinction between first- and third-world literatures as an “epistemological impossibility,” because it is based on a privileging of the nationalist ideology that tautologically defines third-world literature at the same time as it defines Jameson’s three-worlds theory (5-6). By defining the first and second worlds in terms of their production systems (capitalism and socialism, respectively), Jameson describes the third world “in terms of an ‘experience’ of externally inserted phenomena” – “the experience of colonialism and imperialism” (Ahmad 7-8). Defined exclusively in 196 terms of such an “experience,” the third world has no other left-wing, ideological formation other than that of nationalism (8). Ahmad meets Jameson’s exaggerated assertion that all third-world texts are necessarily national allegories with a striking retort: “what else is there that is more urgent to narrate than this ‘experience’ . . . then what else can one narrate but that national oppression?” (9). Thus it appears that Jameson’s own theorizing of third world literature is a process of national allegorization that cries out for some demystification. An instance from “Nationalism, Hypercanonization, and Huckleberry Finn” illustrates this inherent problem in identifying any work of literature as national. Arac shows how a literary critic, Philip Fisher, nationalizes or hypercanonizes Huckleberry Finn by making Jim’s freedom stand for a national freedom through a heroic interpretation of the Civil War (19). Just as the nationalizing of Twain’s beloved novel “produces and reinforces the belief that there is a true America made up by those who take their distance from actually existing America” (ibid), Jameson’s categorization of third-world cultural production, based on a “different ratio of the political to the personal” that is “resistant to our conventional western habits of reading” (69), produces nothing but an image of the third- world. Nationalizing, in this case, becomes a “third-worlding” of the national as the preeminent social group. The problem does not lie with the experience of nationalism per se, but in the inadequate theorization of how such an experience is materially inscribed and expressed. Hence I would modify Arac’s argument to say that even the most outwardly national narratives demand allegorical readings: their status as national narratives has no control 197 over their subsequent readings as more, or less, nationalized. Simply put, there is no a priori national literature. For late Qing fiction that has not received the status of “hypercanonization” equivalent to that of The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, or Huckleberry Finn, it appears that they have been “de-nationalized” despite their explicit foregrounding of historical national concerns. By “de-nationalizing,” I mean to suggest that late Qing novelists’ national concerns are simply taken for granted, and not interpreted, stated, and actually read. This process of “de-nationalization” is perhaps a deeper symptom of the relation between literature and nationalism itself. Not unlike Jameson’s assumption that “all” third-world texts “are to be read as . . . national allegories” (69), the question of what qualifies as “national” is subsumed as a given. What this oversight calls for is not simply a work of rehabilitation. After all, there is no lack of scholarship that uncovers late Qing fiction, in particular how its neglect is partially caused by the problematic, modernist trajectory of May Fourth-dominated literary history. 22 Instead, what I see as the “de-nationalizing” of late Qing fiction demands a more rigorous investigation into the narration of the Chinese nation. One must question, as Arac does in the American context, how it is that certain literary narratives are adopted as national exemplars, and how national narratives have been comparatively neglected (17). My reading of A Connecticut Yankee together with New Story (though the same can be said of other novels in this dissertation) pairs the former’s “Americanness” with the latter’s equally troubling, but nonetheless significant expression of “Chineseness” of 22 It is not surprising that Jameson reads Lu Xun as an example of Chinese national allegory 198 approximately the same period. Even though the word China never once appears in A Connecticut Yankee, Hank’s disastrous construction of medieval England makes literal the rhetoric in every imperial project that seeks to bring – as if from the future – progress to a people of the past. What would it mean to compare Hank’s proclaimed “practical” and inventive Yankeeism (14-5) with an other, which is not opposed to that of the same? Would this other still be an inventor in his or her own right? Properly speaking, Jia Baoyu, the protagonist of New Story, unlike Hank Morgan, resembles more of a passive utopian traveler or observer. Baoyu is not even Wu’s original creation, but a character that the prolific late Qing writer borrows from the eighteenth-century classic, Dream of the Red Chamber (also known as Story of the Stone). In this new tale, Baoyu is recast as a single-minded patriot in order to attack feudal China’s literary preoccupation with the private realm of love and sentimentality. Wu explains that others who have chosen to compose unofficial sequels to Dream of the Red Chamber cannot stop writing about love; instead, he chooses to revive Baoyu and have him accomplish some “serious business” (New Story 7). Yet what is new about this novel is already inscribed in the original tale that is heavily rooted in the Taoist notion of reincarnation and the illusory nature of all human reality. In it, Baoyu is said to be a reincarnation of one of the 3650 pieces of precious stone left over after the Goddess Nüwa mended the sky. The stone bemoans its useless fate, and begs a passing monk and priest to bring him to earth and experience its splendors. Granted his wish, Baoyu is born into a rich family, and subsequently witnesses the decline of its fortunes, the death of his 199 beloved; he sees through the illusory nature of existence, and at the end of the novel, becomes a monk and disappears. Picking up where Dream of the Red Chamber leaves off (Cao never finished the book, though scholars still argue over the ambiguity of the ending), New Story has Baoyu reflect upon his original fate, and decide that he should return to society to fulfill his destiny to “mend the broken sky” ( ) (ibid.). The Chinese character “tian,” has several complex, philosophical significations, including Heaven in the sense of a transcendental, higher order, and the creation of life, but also the earthly laws of morality and destiny, and in common usage, the sky (Liu 525). How we interpret this “tian” is crucial for understanding Baoyu’s role in Wu’s utopian imagination of China. This section discusses the more obvious reading of “tian” as China’s nationhood, and the implication that Baoyu’s ambition to mend the sky is to elevate China’s status as a weak, backward semi-colony to a strong, independent nation-state. Roger B. Salomon’s observation that A Connecticut Yankee is “an interpretation of Western history since the fall of Rome presented in the familiar terms of contrasting civilizations” (102) rings true for late Qing intellectuals and writers’ interpretation of nineteenth-century Chinese history, which always takes the first Opium War as the first in a series of “falls” under foreign pressure. If this was a history of failures and humiliations, Wu attempts to rewrite the contrast of civilizations in China’s favor. The forty-chapter New Story is divided into two parts: the first half of the book reads like the popular genre of exposé fiction of the time such as Zeng Pu’s Travels of Lao Can, and Wu’s own Twenty Years’ Account of Strange Tales. These first twenty-one 200 chapters depict mostly Shanghai and to a lesser extent Beijing at the time of Wu’s writing in the early the twentieth century, also known as the “Barbaric Realm” ( ). There, Baoyu is surrounded by Western gadgets and culture, witnesses the corrupt Qing government, and criticizes his fellow countrymen’s responses to Western influences, which swing from blind worship to violent rejection. The second part of the novel departs from the realist account and moves into the utopian genre proper. These later chapters portray the perfect “Civilized Realm” ( ), a Confucian-techno-utopia (in a fictional region of China probably somewhere in Shangdong province), where its residents take pride in how Chinese submarines, fighter planes, and everyday scientific wonders have overtaken their Western counterparts. The actual contrasts between reality and utopia, as well as barbarism and civilization are played out in terms of China’s lack of national identity in the first half of the novel, and its invention of nationalism in the second half. Because turn-of-the-century Chinese identity was so constrained by international pressures, the notion of an “invented” nation-state is likewise caught between the hard-fought distinction between what can be considered “foreign” or “Western,” and “Chinese” inventions. To see Wu’s portrayal of utopia in Xin shitou ji as an invented nation-state thus engages directly with the question of the relation between science, technology, and national identity. But the notion of invention takes this relation to a next level, since it explores the limits in the mere assimilation and imitation of Western science and technology. Zeng Guofan, an eminent late Qing official best known for his suppression of the Taiping Rebellion, advocates China’s incorporation of advanced Western military technology in the 201 following steps: “After purchasing [foreign ships and canons], we copy the deep thinkers and the wise mechanics, and begin rehearsing, followed by test-producing” (qtd. in Qiu 527). For thinkers like Zeng writing during the 1850s and 1860s who were active in the yangwu (Western affairs) movement, imitation was the immediate task of the self- strengthening movement. But by the time of Wu’s writing of New Story, even “rehearsals” and “test-producing” prove inadequate for China’s nation-building efforts. This inadequacy translates precisely into Baoyu’s dissatisfaction with the so-called “sky” that he endeavors to “mend”: in the first half of the novel mostly set in Shanghai and Beijing, his fellow countrymen have merely adopted and not mastered Western, scientific ways of invention and production. Baoyu’s strongest criticism with regards to the problem of Westernization in turn-of-the-century China is a lack of national identity – a lack accentuated by a growing dependence on Western gadgets and machinery in Shanghai. After traveling on his first steamship, Baoyu is dismayed to learn that even Chinese-owned ships employ Westerners to man their ships because no Chinese can possibly learn how to do so (170). Immediately after this, he comes across matchstick boxes that are made in China, and even though the actual matchsticks are still foreign- made, the boxes themselves affirm his theory that “there is nothing that cannot be learned” (ibid.). The Chinese, he believes, can and ought to be able to take over the foreign monopoly on new inventions and technical know-how (171). Later in the novel, he learns from his new acquaintances Bohui and Yaolian the other reason why there are so few Chinese ship captains: there is only one Chinese insurance company, and most 202 foreign businesses only trust foreign-insured ships (188). At this point, Yaolian (whose full name, Bai Yaolian, sounds like the Chinese term for shamelessness), quips that, “there is no one dependable in China,” and adds that he himself is different because “I may be Chinese, but I have a foreign temperament” (189). To Baoyu, Yaolian looks up to foreigners so much that “he can’t wait to have them for parents” (59). Instead of simply denouncing Bai as unpatriotic, Baoyu accuses him for failing to pursue his pro-foreigner attitude to the letter. “I spent the whole of last night reading and I found out that what foreigners value most is patriotism. I am afraid that these patriotic foreigners would not even want this kind of unfilial offspring!” (ibid.). This question of the foreign “origin” of patriotism and nationalism is not just one idea among others that Baoyu encounters; it encapsulates the complexity of the question of China’s response to the West at large. Huters’ analysis of Baoyu’s paradox gets us straight to this point. If one expresses too much enthusiasm for it [the West] and its ideas, one thereby violates one of the central tenets of Western strength that one is seeking to emulate, the power gained from the notion of community solidarity within the nation-state and of ultimate loyalty to it. Show too little interest, however, and the great tasks of reform will rest undone. (Huters, Bringing the World 163) Huters then goes on to cite Partha Chatterjee’s formulation of the same problem: why is it that non-European colonized countries end up assimilating the very “given attributes of modernity,” that is, the international world order founded upon the nationalism and imperialism that subjugates them in the first place? (164). This is why in New Story, Baoyu’s reflections on nationalism are always informed by the material conditions of imperialism. And this is also how the novel marks its two-part structure by the lack of 203 nationalism in the first, and the invention of nationalism in the second. To borrow Huter’s words again, “It is perhaps only by inventing a utopian realm that knotty issues of domination and unilateral influence can be finessed, even if only momentarily and only in the imagination” (ibid., my emphasis). Utopia exists in the imagination, but the invention of utopia has to be studied in terms of the material effects of imperialism and nationalism. If Sewell and others can demonstrate how utopian narrative is a variety of literary imperialism, surely they are not suggesting that the utopian genre merely helps to escape the trauma of imperialism; on the contrary, the genre is an attempt to represent and cope with such a trauma. This is very different from claiming that a utopian realm can “finesse” questions of imperialism and nationalism “momentarily and only in the imagination” (Huters 164). Thus the task for New Story is not merely to invent a utopia, but to invent a nationalism fit for a Chinese utopia. Before we get to how this is accomplished in the second half of the novel, it is vital to note how the first half, through Baoyu’s eyes, builds up the urgent need for a Chinese nationalism worthy of its name. Hence even though Baoyu does not make and invent things like Hank, he is more perceptive of the stakes involved when production and invention take place unequally between countries. It is through the avenue of print culture that New Story links the question of invention to that of the nation-state much more explicitly than does A Connecticut Yankee. While Hank is initially forced to hide his schools and newspapers from the knowledge of medieval society, Baoyu is very much thrown into the world of print culture and foreign books from the outset. As he soon learns, it is this world that holds 204 the key to China’s inferior position. From the mention of the Shiwu Bao (201), to Gezhi Bookstore run by John Fryer (ibid.), Wu gives a rather detailed picture of the significance of publishing activities in turn-of-the-century Shanghai. Shiwu Bao was established in August 1896 in Shanghai, and was one of the earliest and most important Chinese reformist newspapers (Zhang Xiantao 71). Both domestic and international news, translated from foreign newspapers and classified according to the main Western powers, were featured in the news section of the newspaper. This organization showed how Chinese contemporary events were tied up with international developments. For example, the serialized translation of the “London Railway Company Regulations” was driven in part by the advocacy of railways by another newspaper, Wanguo Gongbao, in its campaign for more industrialization in China (Zhang Xiantao 72-3). When Baoyu discusses his thoughts on the issue of the anti-foot-binding campaign with Xue Pan and Bohui, he is clearly drawing from his reading of Shiwu Bao on the same issue (195-196). According to Zhang, the newspaper dedicated space in six of its volumes from 1897 to 1898 to discussing the issue of the Chinese tradition of foot-binding (73). Baoyu feels that the arguments of the periodical express views that he himself has difficulty putting into words (ibid.). As a politically active writer living in Shanghai, Wu must have been an avid reader of Shiwu Bao during its most active years. Its editorials written by Liang Qichao on the reform campaign alone attracted a large readership. After just a year of publication, the paper had a circulation of 17,000, making it the best-selling periodical in China (Zhang 72-3). As journalistic practices were increasingly informative about wider 205 cultural and intellectual perspectives, newspapers like the Shiwu Bao helped pluralize the print media, and encouraged the establishment of other publishing activities (ibid.). The significant role that the act of acquiring and reading translated texts play in this first half of the novel is not surprising, given Wu’s own experience working in the Jiangnan Arsenal from 1884 to 1897 (Huters, Bringing the World 108). The Jiangnan Arsenal, though initially set up in 1865 as an ironworks factory to manufacture modern arms, began to house a translation department in 1868 when its founders Xu Shou and Hua Hengfang emphasized Western book-learning as the key to mastering mechanical skills (Fan 7). In 1885, John Fryer, the department’s chief translator and purchaser of English books, opened Gezhi Bookstore to the public (Fan 36). When Baoyu asks Xue Pan (Baoyu’s ne’er-do-well lout brother-in-law whom Wu also borrows from Dream of the Red Chamber) and Bohui about buying translated books, they recommend going straight to the Arsenal to select from their fuller collection (201). The two chapters that narrate Baoyu, Bohui, and Xue Pan’s visit to the Jiangnan Arsenal (here merely referred to as the manufacturing department [ ]) are key to the depiction of different aspects of the self-strengthening movement in the late Qing period. Even though their visit is aimed at book purchasing, it includes tours of other parts of the Arsenal that illustrate how mechanical production, which ranges from the production of steel and iron to the manufacturing of guns and cannons, goes hand in hand with scholarship. In addition to the translation house and bookstore, the Arsenal also had schools for English instruction (205). Like the foreign books that Fryer purchased from England for translation into Chinese, the machines that Baoyu sees in the Arsenal are all 206 imported from other countries and mainly operated by foreign engineers and workers (213). 23 This brings up once again the question of China’s passive reception of Western methods of production. After seeing the new machinery, trying his hand at the gatling gun (214), and successfully bringing home piles of translated books, Baoyu asks Bohui why it is that foreigners are willing to teach China how to make guns and cannons without fear of equipping one’s future enemy with means of attack (ibid.). Bohui’s reply gives us an idea of just how complex the question of innovation and invention, as opposed to mere production from rote learning, is for issues of national security. “Since they [the foreigners] are innovative in what they make, what they produce this year is always better than what they produced last year. Take for example the Western guns that we want to make by learning from them. By the time our guns can hit 500 meters [ ], theirs can already shoot a kilometer [ ]. . . . What is there for them to fear when they teach us how to make things?” (213) The way, then, to catch up with foreign mechanical production, as Baoyu immediately points out, is to “investigate and study” (ibid.). Unfortunately, the Chinese mindset is far from innovative, and is always too “stubbornly holding on to old ways” ( ). “When we hear of a new method, we either dismiss it as ridiculous, or too troublesome. Only once the new method is realized do we believe. But then it is too late even to learn from it” (ibid.). This logic is not insignificant for a conversation that takes place right 23 After noting the efficiency of the Arsenal, and the quality and quantity of the works produced, John Fryer writes: “this proves that the Chinese government has been fortunate in its selection, both of native officials and foreign engineers. Very rapid progress has already been made by the Chinese Mechanics in learning the different branches of work and great efforts are about to be made to learn the theoretical as well as the practical part of engineering; yet the time is still distant when the Chinese government will be able to dispense with the superintendence and instructions of Foreign Engineers, in this or any other of their Arsenals” (Fryer (attributed), “The Shanghai Arsenal.” The North-China Herald and Supreme Court & Consular Gazette, Jan 11, 1870, 515-521)” 207 after Baoyu’s book purchasing: if translations of foreign books often emerge ten or twenty years after they were originally published, the only point for anyone reading them is to learn the basics before hoping to catch up with the latest, foreign inventions (ibid.). Baoyu certainly has hopes that China will one day overtake the foreign inventions that it is currently adopting and fabricating. Barely has he transported his newly purchased books home before he is asking how he may be able to obtain newer ones. As Karl points out in her study of the emergence of a new global consciousness in China, “it was not knowledge qua knowledge that was important in the process” (13). What is more significant about Baoyu and Bohui’s discussion is how such “knowing” is indissociable from an inventive way of “doing” and furthermore, how this question of inventiveness is always already concerned with the formation of a Chinese identity. Karl continues, “it was the ways in which the texts produced in the process of knowledge accumulation helped produce a new sense of China’s situation.” Hence even the way in which Baoyu carries the large number of books back home – they finally decide to hire a small cart to do so –is mentioned in the earlier chapter as an issue for discussion (201. It is possible to see the seemingly trivial problem of book transportation as standing for the larger question of how foreign knowledge may be translated, transposed, and ultimately transgressed in order to attain a new sense of Chinese national identity in the second part of New Story. There, the question of Chineseness is pegged to an other-worldly inventiveness on the one hand, and existing, traditional Confucian ethics, on the other. Will Baoyu, who has so far proved not to be an inventor like Hank, be able to invent anything at all? 208 IV. 1. An Experimental Community The vibrant print culture and growing availability of translated foreign texts that Baoyu encounters are limited to the capital Beijing, and cities such as Shanghai, Canton, and Fuchow. Books, pamphlets, and newspapers that engaged directly with international developments, and especially the kind of mechanical inventions that Wu himself would have read about when he was in the Jiangnan Arsenal, catered, not surprisingly, to a selected readership. It would be an overestimation to think that the beginning of any newspaper is immediately evidence of the “confidence of community” that Anderson outlines in Imagined Communities (36). That Hank has to hide his institutional inventions such as the schools and Protestant churches shows that the building of a community is more confidential than it is confident. This is precisely how Hank’s small weekly newspaper starts out: as an “experimental circulation” in what he calls his “civilization- nurseries” (63). Although his secrecy has much to do with the drastic contrasts between the nineteenth and sixth century, it is similar to precautions that any changes to the status quo would have to take. Such is the case for the pioneering Chinese reformist newspapers in 1870s and 1880s when the study society Qiangxue Hui that founded them were banned by the Qing government (Zhang Xiantao 71). For this is what Hank’s effort to establish an institution such as journalism amounts to: an experiment in the “confidence of community” not untrue to his spirit of inventiveness. In the chapter “The First Newspaper,” Hank comes across the newsboy – “one greater than kings” – selling the Camelot Weekly Hosannah and Literary Volcano. “But I was the only person in all that throng who knew the meaning of this mighty birth 209 and what this imperial magician was come into the world to do” (182). If we endorse the role that Anderson ascribes to the newspaper in the imagination of communities, Hank’s above revelation is not insignificant. For Anderson, “all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined” (6). And these imagined contacts are possible due to a fundamental change in the apprehension of time from a medieval simultaneity ordered by the omnipotent and omnitemporal God to our own conception of simultaneity developed in tandem with the secular sciences (24). As is well known, Anderson distinguishes the two modes of apprehending time based on two concepts from Benjamin. The first refers to Messianic time, that is, “a simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present,” while the second denotes “homogenous, empty time” that marks simultaneity by temporal coincidence of the clock and calendar, instead of by prefiguring and fulfillment (ibid.). The novel and the newspaper are two cultural formations that best represent the second kind of simultaneity in the imagined community: the readers’ existing world is fused with the depicted world because both worlds move calendrically through homogenous, empty time, and bind the readers in a shared succession of plural social spaces (30). Newspapers have a “profound fictiveness” in that they imagine a linkage between arbitrary events “without the actors being aware of each other or of what the others are up to” (33). Due to the way that the dates on each newspaper mark a calendrical coincidence and to the market form of the printed press, the newspaper, like the novel, envisions for its readers a secular, historically clocked imagined community (33-4). 210 If we examine the Camelot Weekly Hosannah and Literary Volcano more closely, we find that the newspaper does attempt to enact the kind of simultaneity that Anderson determines to characterize the national imagination. However it is not simply the mode of apprehending time that makes an imagined community, but also the kind of community for which time comes to be apprehended. In a section appropriately titled “Local Smokes and Cinders,” the paper reports on a random list of events featuring nobles from afar, as well as some local trivialities: Sir Lancelot slaughters King Agrivance of Ireland, the return of Sir Charolais to Gaul, the funeral of the late Sir Dalliance, the call for a new name of a special ice cream flavor, the visit of the Demoiselle, Irene Dewlap of south Astolat, and the coming home of Young Barker the bellowsmender (184-5). It is not difficult to guess what kind of community this newspaper presumes – one whose readers, the common men and women, have very little to do with the business of nobles and knights but whose everyday lives in this shared land are determined and governed by them. What kind of community, if there is one, is the Camelot Weekly Hosannah and Literary Volcano helping to imagine? Hank’s response as he reads his journalistic enterprise suggests that he is aware of the schism rather than communitarianism that his journalistic experiment creates. He expresses discomfort at the loudness, the “tone of flippancy,” “the pert little irreverences [sic]” of the reports (183). He attributes such discomfort to the time he has spent in sixth- century England, and the style of language that he has been accustomed to. On one level, we can interpret Hank’s discomfort as nothing more than a contention with style. By contrast, he is comparatively more pleased with the “Court Circular” that is written with 211 more “simple and dignified respectfulness” (185). Yet with respectful tone comes a “profound monotonousness about its facts”: from Monday to Sunday, the only reported event is the same sentence, “the King rode in the park” (184-5)! English journalism at its present stage has not found a way to balance respectfulness in tone with attention- grabbing reportage. This is where Hank’s earlier complaint about style takes on a greater significance. According to Hank, one ought to “disguise repetitiousness of fact” under “variety of form: skin your fact each time and lay on a new cuticle of words” (185, my emphasis). In other words, that nothing of significance happens in court except for the King’s riding activity can be worded in a way that deceives the reader, namely, the King’s subjects, into thinking that “the court is carrying on like everything.” (ibid.) What appears to be Hank’s rather rudimentary lesson in journalistic reporting is really a rethinking of the “confidence of community,” which Anderson so optimistically finds in the passages from the Filipino, Mexican, and Indonesian novels that he analyzes. In fact, editor Clarence’s inability to bring more variety to the “Court Circular” has only superficially to do with the fact that he does not vary his words; the problem is that the actual “content” of the court leaves no room for any “new cuticle of words” to grow (185). Monarchy is the political system that supports repetitiousness of fact and form. The real gap is thus not between the fact or content and form, but between what the newspaper says and how relevant it is for the people who read them. Simply put, there is here no meaningful distinction between content and form; “variety of form” cannot “disguise” the “repetitiousness of fact” (185). Like the section titled “Local Smokes and Cinders,” the “Court Circular” features events that are indeed arbitrary. However, its 212 arbitrariness does not, as Anderson suggests, bound the readers in a shared succession of plural social spaces (30). There is nothing like Anderson’s idea of “a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogenous, empty time,” with its analogue of the nation moving up or down in history (26) in the report of “The King rode in the park” (185). To be sure, various activities are performed on these same exact days by actors who are largely unaware of each other. However what is homogenous and empty is not time itself, but the kind of society in which these actors are embedded. The monotonous facts of the “Court Circular” thus give new meaning to what is truly homogenous in Anderson’s use of the notion of homogenous, empty time. Whereas Chatterjee critiques Imagined Communities for examining only “one dimension of the time-space of modern life,” specifically, the space that apparently people “only imagine themselves in” and not “live in” (131-2), the “Court Circular” is what happens when there is, simply put, little imagination to speak of. Hence, Hank’s seemingly trivial objection to the style of the Camelot Weekly Hosannah and Literary Volcano points to the more fundamental question of the narration of society. When he calls for “a variety of form” to correct the “repetitiousness of fact,” he is in fact also demanding a variety of political and social representation. The question for a modern newspaper like the kind that the Camelot Weekly Hosannah and Literary Volcano aspires to is this: how to account for the diversity of society beyond its royal and noble classes? Earlier in the novel, Hank comes across a similar problem with Alisande’s way of telling a story. Alisande, otherwise known by Hank’s preferred name for her, Sandy, is a 213 noble maiden with whom he is traveling on a quest to save her mistress from alleged ogres. She is as monotonous in her narration as Clarence is in the writing of the “Court Circular.” This is how Hank objects to her description of a fight between one knight and another: . . . by consequence, descriptions suffer in the matter of variety; they run too much to level Saharas of fact, and not enough to picturesque detail; this throws about them a certain air of the monotonous; . . . you can’t tell one fight from another, nor whom whipped; and as a picture, of living, raging, roaring battle, sho! Why, it’s pale and noiseless – just ghosts scuffling in a fog. (91-2) Insufficient detail has greater consequences than simply a pale and noiseless picture. If the newspaper is to occupy such a significant role in Anderson’s theory of nationalism, the “little crudities of a mechanical sort” that Hank points out makes for a pale and noiseless community where one man’s riding activities can stand for all. Eventually, Hank comforts himself in knowing that the Camelot Weekly Hosannah and Literary Volcano is “better than was needed in Arthur’s day and realm” (186). Although the paper fails to represent a more varied and heterogeneous English society, Hank realizes that the latter is not yet ready for the modern-day newspaper. The monks around him ask questions that reveal that they do not even know what a newspaper is, what it is made out of – even the writing that appears on it is alien to them (ibid.). Hank’s English-instruction schools have not yet permeated all of Arthurian society, and even the more educated monks still only read Latin and “a smattering of Greek” (ibid.) As Hank finds out, there is a long way for the reading public to go when they do not know what paper and printing works are (ibid.). In the end, the Boss ends up reading out loud to the monks the events reported in the paper; nineteenth-century print 214 culture is reborn as oral literature. His audience does not hear his words as news linking each and everyone in an imagined community, but as “some holy thing come from some supernatural region” (187). Whatever larger purpose the newspaper may serve is stupendously diminished. For any society may have the most up-to-date technical achievements in the form of the printing press that reproduces sheets of paper in multiple copies and in minute detail, but if it lacks variety of form and content, it is, simply, not newsworthy. To Hank, the monks are not participating individuals confident in their communal belonging to the nation, but small children amazed with his inventions. “These grouped bent heads, these charmed faces, these speaking eyes – how beautiful to me!” (ibid.). Similarly, the paper is at this stage only Hank’s “new baby” (ibid). IV. 2. “All of England is Marching Against Us!” If the Camelot Weekly Hosannah and Literary Volcano is still at its experimental stage, it is because the community in which it circulates is a work in progress. Anderson would no doubt refrain from suggesting that nationalism is an experiment, perhaps because of the negative associations that experiments share with invention, fabrication, and falsity – associations that we have seen him criticize Gellner for. Yet it is precisely in the spirit of invention and experimentation that the chapter “The First Newspaper” helps us to question the narrative possibilities of a community. If consequently the Camelot Weekly Hosannah and Literary Volcano fails to institute the “confidence of community” that Anderson purports, if with its faraway duels and the monotonous reports of the King’s riding activity the paper does not “give a hypnotic confirmation of the solidity of a single community” (27), this is because the invention of nationalism, paradoxically, invents 215 “nothing.” It is “nothing” if, to follow Derrida’s logic of the impossible, “in invention the other does not come” (44, my emphasis). This “other” to A Connecticut Yankee’s imperial mission is the imagined community of the nation, and the other is not the possible. Twain’s account of the first newspaper may be low-brow humor at its best, but only such absurdity can express the wide gap between Hank’s ideals for the newspaper and its actual reportage. “[A]n invention has to declare itself to be the invention of that which did not appear to be possible; otherwise, it only makes explicit a program of possibilities within the economy of the same” (Derrida, “Psyche” 44). For the same reason it is pointless to ask whether Hank intends to invent a nation when he claims to bring the civilization of the nineteenth century to the dark lands of the sixth century. There is really no grand ideological plan behind the Yankee’s desire to boss medieval England other than, as we have seen, the invention of his own public, institutional status. He believes in the virtues of civilization over superstition, but when it comes to demonstrating these virtues through his “civilization nurseries,” superstition tends to make a mockery of civilization. Take for example his attempt to undermine gradually the knighthood. In addition to the knight’s custom steel armor and plumed helmet, Hank has him wear square, stiff garments like a herald’s tabard on which is written an advertisement for soap. “This was a little idea of my own, and had several wholesome purposes in view toward the civilizing and uplifting of this nation” (96). Yet, Hank admits that such an idea is “furtive” and an “underhand blow” (ibid.). The whole point is not to educate the people so that they themselves can see the nonsensical notions of knight errantry, but to make knights appear as ridiculous as possible so that even “the 216 steel-clad ass that hadn’t any board would himself begin to look ridiculous because he was out of the fashion” (ibid.). This method is not inefficient. After all, it also allows Hank to “introduce a rudimentary cleanliness” among the nobility and eventually the people (ibid.). Soap and civilization are thus both disseminated at once, and proud knights are both advertising men for soap as well as “missionaries” for civilization (97). It is with a fine understanding of how advertising works that Hank has his knights sell things whose use is not yet invented, as in the case of a knight that advertises stove polishes when there were no stoves yet (123). Twain does not only make fun of medieval superstition; he satirizes just as much the lofty ideals of civilizing missions. But the battle against knight-errantry can be settled only in the form that knights know how: dueling. Honoring the arrangement that Hank has made with Sir Sagramore four years before the latter leaves Camelot on the quest for the Holy Grail, Hank knows that it is not just knighthood that he is challenging, but also Merlin’s magical powers. The duel is, in short, “a final struggle for supremacy between the two master enchanters of the age” (269). No doubt we are talking about two very different enchanters: one that lays charms on Sir Sagramore’s armors and arms and comes up with a special veil that makes its wearer invisible, and the other who is the self-proclaimed champion for “hard unsentimental common sense and reason” (270). Yet what ensues in the actual duel is a game of tag and cowboy entertainment. For Hank’s enchantment turns out to be a lasso that yanks Sir Sagramore out of his saddle: what he refers to as “common sense and reason” is the realization that the most popular thing in this world is “novelty” (ibid.). It is only after Hank has pulled six knights, including the great Sir Launcelot, off their 217 horses, which prompts Merlin to steal his lasso away, that he brings out the true deadly invention of civilization and modernity, modern artillery. In his words, the “dragoon revolver” is a “thundering apparition” that finally kills Sir Sagramore and nine more knights who take up Hank’s challenge to the entire “chivalry of England” (275). Thereby knight-errantry is proclaimed dead, not at the hands of science alone but by the “magic of science” (277). To Hank’s audience, the revolver is more magical than Merlin’s sleight-of-hand tricks. It extracts all life from its victim in one instantaneous moment and leaves nothing like a wound or much blood, except for a small hole in the left breast of his chain-mail (276). The theme of the comparability of scientific invention to magic is a consistent one throughout the novel. Earlier in his journey with Sandy, Hank realizes that the medieval belief in castles turning into sties and princesses into hogs is no more an enchantment than is the modern reliance on the telephone and its wonders (129). If Hank wants to appear sane to his sixth-century contemporaries, he must keep his “superstitions about unenchanted and unmiraculous locomotives, balloons, and telephones to [him]self” (ibid.). The dragoon revolver is thus magical simply by virtue of its appearance before its time. And I should add this: before Hank has the chance to patent it, the revolver has no public, institutional status except as an enchantment. This is another way of saying that Hank’s inventiveness is, paradoxically, nullified by the fact that he is from a future where he does not invent the telephone, the telegraph, the newspaper, soaps and stove-polishes. Precisely by virtue of the fact that he is from the modern, industrial future, the products familiar to that time can only be accounted for as enchantments. 218 The apparently insignificant bullet hole inflicted on Sir Sagramore thus testifies to the co-figuration of the fictional and mechanical know-how of A Connecticut Yankee that I have underscored. When Hank is first introduced to us, he asks the anonymous narrator if he knows about the “transmigration of epochs – and bodies” similar to the “transmigration of souls” (11). To explain what he means, Hank points to Sir Sagramore’s armor: “observe the round hole through the chain-mail in the left breast; can’t be accounted for; supposed to have been done with a bullet since invention of firearms” (11-12). Hank’s single evidence for his time-traveling escapades is this bullet hole. Through this opening, Hank, both the scientific inventor of modern firearms in sixth-century England as well as its most powerful magician, travels back to the present age. “I saw it done. . . . I did it myself” (12). The “I” that “did” in Sir Sagramore returns to the future from where the invention of firearms will have accounted for the fatal, round hole in the victim’s chain-mail. It would then be more accurate to say that the present time of the “I,” its time of enunciation, is actually the past. Hank’s revolver marks the beginning of the end of knight-errantry and Merlin’s “magic of folderol” (277). It means that he no longer needs to hide his schools, mines, and previously clandestine factories and workshops (ibid.). Moreover, a renewed challenge to the knights and priests keeps them quiet for the next three years while he works on his most extreme plans yet to overthrow the Catholic Church so as to set up the Protestant faith “on its ruins” and introduce, upon King Arthur’s death, universal suffrage (279). But the exposure of “the nineteenth century to the inspection of the sixth” (277) also spells the beginning of Hank’s troubles. His daughter with Sandy, comically but not 219 inappropriately named after the form of salute used at the telephone, “Hello-Central,” is born a sickly child. The doctors advise the family to take her to get some fresh sea air, which works wonders. But when Hank returns from the French coast back to England, the country reeks of a “mournfulness of death” (286) – his “beautiful civilization” has lost all signs of life (287). As he later learns from Clarence, it turns out that the Church has struck an interdict in the aftermath of a war between Sir Launcelot and King Arthur (289). The Church intervenes after the deaths of both, gathers all the remaining clans and knights to its side, and becomes master of the land. But worse than all this chaos is how Hank’s schools, colleges, and workshops surrender to the enemy. The Boss might have thought that he has educated “the superstition out of those people,” but as Clarence puts it, “when the armies come, the mask will fall” (293). As a result, the navy has disappeared, along with the railway, telegraph, and telephone service (294). Even the electrical lights are not spared as the Church bans all modern conveniences (ibid.). In retaliation, Clarence, in Hank’s absence, selects fifty-two boys who because they “have been under our training from seven to ten years have had no acquaintance with the Church’s terrors” (295). As already discussed, the response to the interdict proves Hank’s that “training – training is everything; training is all there is to a person . . . there is no such thing as nature” (111) wrong. The institution of the Catholic Church is an “inherited idea,” which, like nature, flows in “ruts worn deep by time and habit” (52) to the extent that it withstands the modern, civilized, and scientific sway of Hank’s visit from the future. Is it fair to say that these men with superstition in their “blood and bones” are more loyal to 220 the religious institution than they are to their country? According to Hank, it is pertinent to make this distinction between loyalty to one’s country and loyalty to its institutions. You see my kind of loyalty was loyalty to one’s country, not to its institutions or its officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing. . . . ; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out. . . . To be loyal to rags. . . – that is a loyalty of unreason. (82) It fits Hank’s cause as a champion for “hard unsentimental common sense and reason” (270) to say that loyalty to extraneous institutions is a loyalty of unreason that still plagues medieval Englishmen. However, this distinction between the “real thing” that is the country and its worn-out clothing, that is, from Hank’s nineteenth-century American viewpoint, a unified and central Catholic Church, is a circular one. For what does this “real thing” of the country really refer to? Is it possible to separate the symbol of the country from its day-to-day governance and leadership? At one point, Hank reflects on the systems of monarchy and democracy, and decides that there is no country in the world that is not capable of self-government (170). This is so less because democracy is a more efficient or morally superior form of government, though he certainly would agree, than because the very phrase self-government is somewhat tautological. There is no nation to speak of without its “material,” namely, the sum of its people. Conclusively, there is no government except government by the nation (ibid.). The master minds of all nations, and in all ages, have sprung in affluent multitude from the mass of the nation, and from the mass of the nation only – not from its privileged classes; and so, no matter what the nation’s intellectual grade was, whether high or low, the bulk of its ability was in the long ranks of its nameless and its poor, and so it never saw the day that it had not the material in abundance whereby to govern itself. (Ibid.) 221 Hank’s ambivalent and at times contradictory redefinition of the English nation and its people cannot be explained by an inconsistency on Twain’s part. That ambivalence is intrinsic to any narration of the nation, which, in the case of A Connecticut Yankee, is also built into the narration of imperialism. On this subject, Bhabha writes, It is the mark of the ambivalence of the nation as a narrative strategy – and an apparatus of power – that it produces a continual slippage into analogous, even metonymic categories, like the people, minorities, or ‘cultural difference’ that continually overlap in the act of writing the nation. (“DissemiNation” 292) In Twain’s novel, however, the nation does not so much slip into analogous or metonymic categories as revert back to literal or proper language. To explain, I will examine a series of passages in which Hank tries to define the meaning of the nation in the events leading up to the war against the Church and the knights. The more Hank presents England as exceptional and unified, in precise terms, as “the nation – the only nation on earth standing ready to blossom into civilization” (264) the more civilization pulls the rug from under the nation’s feet. Or I should say, the wires from under the nation’s feet. After Clarence rounds up his army of boys, he sets four of them to guard their fortress, situated in Merlin’s old cave which Hank has used to stage one of his “miracles” (295). Clarence then digs out the secret wires that previously connected Hank’s bedroom to the dynamite deposits under the factories, mills, workshops, and magazines, and so forth, and reconnects them to the cave. “We laid it under ground, of course, . . . We shan’t have to leave our fortress, now, when we want to blow up our civilization” (ibid.). Hank has all along planned for the emergency detonation of his civilization nurseries, but he has not foreseen the day when he has to do 222 so from inside his enemy’s former abode. From there, surrounded by a twelve-wire thick electrical fence, glass-cylinder dynamite torpedoes that go around its outer circle, and plenty of ammunition in the inner circle, the Boss signs and proclaims England a republic (296). The proclamation is a desperate one, no doubt, and it backfires by letting the enemies know their exact location. It does manage, however, to get the nation to rally behind the republican cause for a day before the Church, the nobles, and the gentry immediately clamp down on it and swing the pendulum back to its opposite side (300). Suddenly, “all of England was marching against us!” (Ibid.). It is an alarming thought, but one that Hank uses to put his theory about “the mass of the nation” (170) into practice. Instead of seeing the last few chapters of A Connecticut Yankee that detail the Interdict and Hank’s war against English feudalism as evidence of his failed civilizing mission, I view them as coming close to bringing imperialism’s invention of the other to its dramatic fruition. As it appears that all England is marching against them, Hank observes his fifty-two carefully chosen boys closely. “Their faces, their walk, their unconscious attitudes” are a “language – a language given us purposely that it may betray us in times of emergency, when we have secrets which we want to keep” (300). Bear in mind that these boys are selected because they have been well trained in Hank’s school system without the corruption of the Church. Superstition is not “in their blood and bones,” and as a result, they are, unlike older students, unmoved by the Interdict (294-5). But these boys are more than just innocent, blank slates; they also represent the model citizenry, that is, citizens of Hank’s ideal nation – “the only nation on earth standing ready to blossom into civilization” (264). The “language” that Hank nervously talks 223 about is thus the language of the avowal or disavowal of this community in which they are brought up and whose survival is now threatened. It is a language, in short, that constitutes the beginning (or end) of the nation’s narrative. This is why Hank watches them so closely for any signs of their realization that all of England is against them (301). “Ultimately the pressure would become so great that it would compel utterance.” (ibid.) The pressure that Hank is referring to is not just that brought on by the upcoming battle; it is a pressure applied by the vague, abstract symbol of the nation, and expressed in the phrase “all of England.” When one of the boys finally speaks, his statement is, for the first time in the novel, an acute self-identification with the nation. We have tried to forget what we are – English boys! . . . While apparently it was only the nobility, only the gentry, only the twenty-five or thirty thousand knights left alive out of the late war, we were of one mind . . . But think – the matter is altered – all England is marching against us! . . . These people are our people, they are bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh, we love them – do not ask us to destroy our nation! (Ibid.). Hank does not forget to add that the spokesman says all these things in the “neat modern English” that he has taught them (ibid.). But as Hank’s response goes to show, the student is not a master of grammar as his teacher is. Here, I am evoking the distinction between rhetoric and grammar in order to show that unlike assumptions to the contrary, Hank’s narration of the English nation is ambivalent because he interprets it according to grammar, to the logical one-to-one relationship between language and meaning. Yet, this supposedly logical relationship also surpasses the logical. According to Hank, the category of the people stands for England just as his preferred phrase, “the mass of the nation” (170), does, but only the latter is England. What the boyish spokesperson refers 224 to as the people, Hank goes on to rationalize, is nothing more than the 30,000 armored knights who will be defeated (301-2). After which, “the civilian multitude in the rear will retire” (302). There is nothing deeply rhetorical about this practical and strategic analysis; and we ought to hear in the word strategy both strategos or "general," and stratos, which means "multitude, army, expedition." All of England is indeed marching against them, but only the nobles and gentry that make up the knights will fight them (ibid.). Hank’s rationale is to make clear the distinction between figurative and proper or grammatical language: the knights are not metonyms, or, to be more precise, synecdoches, for the whole nation and cannot be substituted for the nation. Hank does not challenge the strong feeling that the boys have as English boys, but only the fact that what they see as their people equates to the “unsmirched” name, England (301). “Now, observe: none but they will ever strike the Sand Belt!” (302). What this means is that “all of England” is against them, but “they,” the 30,000 knights, are not England. Unlike Derrida’s analysis of the Declaration of Independence, wherein the founding document invents both the signer, the representatives of the people of the United States, and the people which they represent, Hank dissociates the representatives from the people as if to remove chaff from the wheat. To return to the passage by Bhabha that I cited above, the nation is ambivalent not because it slips into metonymic categories such as the people, minorities, and so forth, that can be substituted for one another. Instead, the pressure generated by the awareness of a figuration like “All England” is such that it divides the nation into constitutive but by no means synecdochal parts. After Hank successfully blows up an uncountable number of 225 knights – uncountable because once dead, “they did not exist as individuals, but merely as homogenous protoplasm, with alloys of iron and buttons” (303) – he easily separates the nation from the enemy: “The war with the English nation, as a nation, is at an end. The nation has retired from the field and the war. . . . We are done with the nation; henceforth we deal only with the knights” (304, my emphasis). Unlike his boy soldiers, Hank excludes his enemies from his definition of the nation. The knights are part of England and they are also outside of it. However, in the finale of the battle of the Sand Belt as Hank carries out his most spectacular technological display yet, the nation and the knights become violently indissociable. He puts up electric signals from the innermost circle to the cave that allow him to break and renew the electric current in each fence independently, whenever he wants (306). Very soon, in the dark, he and Clarence make out a dark figure in armor standing with both hands on the upper wire, and a smell of burning flesh emitting from his still body (308). Another knight comes by, touches his friend, and then comes another, and another (308-9). The “nation” is suddenly constitutive of three walls of dead men with whom the war is supposed to be over (310). And little does Hank expect his last mechanical ingenuity to be the apparatus that tragically, and quite literally, fuses the nation in one. For not only does the electric fence form a physical wall of dead knights each “killed by a dead friend” upon contact (309), they are now a fatal trap of poisonous air bred by those dead thousands (312). In one of Clarence’s last words, “[w]e had conquered; in turn we were conquered” (ibid.). 226 The aborted invention of the English nation survives through Hank’s manuscript that falls into the hands of our anonymous narrator when he encounters its author in present-day Warwick Castle. But the Yankee’s memory survives together with his writing: thanks to Merlin, Hank sleeps for the next thirteen centuries, living to tell how the “magic of folderol” once again “trie[s] conclusions” with the “magic of science” (277). Anderson’s study of the genealogy of American nationalism that spread to Europe, and subsequently, Africa and Asia uses the trope of a “late awakening” that can be said to be literalized in Hank’s waking up in medieval England. As always, the process of making literal something that is figurative ends up exaggerating the original transmission of meaning. The trope of “’awakening from sleep’” explains “why nationalist movements had bizarrely cropped up in the civilized Old World so obviously later than in the barbarous New” (Anderson 195). Because Hank wakes up not in the seventeenth or eighteenth-century European land of liberalism and enlightenment, but further back in the sixth-century realm of magical spells, duels, and pre-industrial feudalism, the Old World has come to replace the barbarism of the New. Here, it is because the Old World has not experienced nationalistic movements that it is barbaric. “Read as late awakening, even if an awakening stimulated from afar, it opened up an immense antiquity behind the epochal sleep” (Anderson 195-6). If A Connecticut Yankee can be read as Twain’s early critique of U.S. imperialism, then its attempt to advance an imagined community from the future is an even heavier-hearted commentary on how nation and empire go hand in hand. When one fails, the other sinks with it. 227 V. New Story of the Stone’s Techno-Nationalism – “Made in China.” In an interview with the Herald on October 16, 1900, a year that saw the height of the American military campaign in the Philippines, Mark Twain famously declared “I am an anti-imperialist.” According to Hank Hawkins, Twain was most upset by the sway that the “patriotic” argument had on people who had initially opposed the war overseas (37). In an unpublished manuscript, Twain’s argument for the right kind of patriotism echoed the sentiments of his protagonist in A Connecticut Yankee. The truly patriotic act, according to Twain, is to think and act independently rather than to follow what everyone else says: “In a monarchy, the King and his family are the country; in a republic it is the common voice of the people. Each of you, for himself, by himself, and on his own responsibility, must speak” (qtd. in Hawkins 37). In a 1896 entry in his notebook, Twain writes: Talking of patriotism what humbug it is; it is a word which always commemorates a robbery. There isn’t a foot of land in the world which doesn’t represent the ousting and re-ousting of a long line of successive “owners,” who each in turn, as “patriots,” with proud swelling hearts defended it against the next gang of “robbers” who came to steal it and did – and became swell-hearted patriots in their turn. (qtd. in Hawkins 35) Patriotism of course presupposes an imagined community that is the nation, but not all nationalism is expressed patriotically. In other words, Hank’s critique of patriotism does not immediately indicate his thoughts on nationalism. My study of A Connecticut Yankee aims to shed light on the larger implications of an anti-imperialist nationalism. When Hank sets out to boss sixth-century England with his knowledge of the nineteenth century, little does he expect his inventive ways will prepare medieval Englishmen for another later-day development: nationalism. Empire and nation are both inventions of the 228 other that do not oppose each other as two identities in the classical metaphysical tradition. The other to Twain’s critique of a kind of utopian imperialism is indeed an expression of nationalism insofar as both empire and the nation remain incalculable by each other: their encounter is, to highlight my borrowing from Derrida, truly aleatory and escapes all programming (39). It is important to keep in mind that the narration of nations, as the narration of one kind of sociality, does not have to be predicated on one’s professed loyalty and love for it. For this reason, I insist that it is possible, and necessary, to distinguish New Story’s patriotic messages from its narration of nationhood. Those messages provide little room to navigate with regards to the kind of sociality that is in question – for the patrie is here the unquestionable entity – while the narration is what allows for vacillating representations of the social, of which nationalism is but one form. Certainly Baoyu’s wish to “mend the sky” is a patriotic one, but until we unravel what the “sky” refers to, it would be hasty to conclude that the novel does not open up a reading of “China” to contesting spaces and temporalities. After all, the broken sky is figurative and therefore requires a figurative “mending.” Here, the contrast between Hank, who has his training in a nineteenth-century arms factory, and Baoyu, who does not know how to make things, appears clear. The latter is certainly no inventor in the usual sense of mechanical inventions, but he is inventive with regards to his fictional identity as a borrowed figure from Dream of the Red Chamber. After Baoyu is reunited with his servant, Mingyan, the two attempt to find their way back home to Rongguo Manor. They have little luck getting directions from passers-by, despite the 229 Manor being a large and esteemed household name. The only person who recognizes its name gives them a harsh reality check: “if you are referring to Jia Baoyu’s home from Dream of the Red Chamber,” then, as the stranger goes on to exclaim, “you have really lost your head in novels!” (161). When Baoyu hears that there is a character also named Jia Baoyu, he recalls another doubling of his name in “real life” in the person of Zhen Baoyu (Zhen is a homonym for the Chinese word “real,” as opposed to Jia, which means “fake). But this “real life” refers to none other than Baoyu’s fictional existence in Dream of the Red Chamber! According to New Story’s Baoyu, he is the authentic version of both the Zhen Baoyu he remembers, and the fictional Baoyu whom the passer-by mentions. However, all three are really reproductions, indefinite copies of characters from Dream of the Red Chamber. After being told that Rongguo Manor and its inhabitants are fictional constructs, Baoyu obtains Cao Xueqin’s famous novel and finishes it at one sitting. It would be an understatement to say that he is thoroughly mystified when it reads exactly like his life. It is not until he travels to Shanghai, meets up with his uncle, Xue Pan, who is also a character from Dream of the Red Chamber, that he gets to the truth behind the layers of fictional identities. In Shanghai, Baoyu happens to flip through a dated chronicle of famous people and finds his name. He decides that Dream of the Red Chamber is a novel based on his previous life from hundreds of years ago. This is how New Story comments on its fictional reality: whereas readers know that the Baoyu of Dream of the Red Chamber is the original of the Baoyu in New Story, the latter asserts the reverse. Wu’s protagonist maintains that he is reincarnated from a non-fictional, 230 actually existing person of the mid-eighteenth century on whom Dream of the Red Chamber is based. This Baoyu invents his otherwise unoriginal, because adapted-from- an-earlier-novel character by reinventing the order in which he himself comes in the procession of Baoyus. This is something that even Hank’s patent office would find preposterous. This proliferation of copies and copies of copies reminds us that, as Derrida writes, “[t]o invent is to produce iterability and the machine for reproduction and simulation, in an indefinite number of copies, utilizable outside the place of invention, available to multiple subjects in various contexts” (Derrida, “Psyche” 34). Hence while Hank is transformed into a sixth-century inventor of nineteenth- century artifacts, Baoyu has hopes of impacting late Qing China with his own invented genealogy. His insistence on seeing himself as a real-life character has larger implications. For a novel whose first half realistically portrays a Westernized but weakened China, and whose second half depicts a perfectly traditional and yet futuristic, modernized utopia, the question of the fictional or illusory versus the real aspect of Baoyu’s identity undergirds other oppositions in the novel such as the civilized and the barbaric, China and the West, the local and the foreign, nature and culture, as well as the nation and the world. Hence it is not insignificant to note that after Baoyu has determined that he is the inspiration for Dream of the Red Chamber and that, not surprisingly, his name will invite much suspicion from anyone who has heard of the novel, he decides to change his name to Zhong Ying, (184). Remove the radicals from the two characters, and the protagonist’s new chosen name becomes the homonyms , which translates to “Chinese-English.” The conjoining of two political, historical, and cultural 231 entities in Baoyu’s new name echoes the kind of “sky” that he wishes to mend, which by the dawn of the twentieth century is no longer strictly “Chinese,” or at least whose “Chineseness,” cannot be talked about without reference to foreign countries, . Hence if I highlight the constructedness of nationhood in New Story, it is to draw attention to two kinds of constructedness. The first is the one we have seen Baoyu criticize in the Barbaric Realm, namely, that other countries are responsible for inventions, engineering, and most production. As a result, China is defined by what it does not make. The second constructedness is the one that Baoyu finds so admirable about the Civilized Realm, namely, that China has successfully surpassed the foreigners’ level of mechanical know-how. But nowhere is it explained how utopia produces such an abundance of inventors. Nowhere is it shown, except for a very brief mention of the universal school system (298), how its people attain such a high level of scientific learning in the first place. Under its enlightened emperor, Dongfang wenming (Eastern Civilization), who believes that a compulsory moral education guarantees virtuous officials and an orderly society, nationhood is no less constructed than its non-utopian, barbaric counterpart. The utopian construction of nationhood rallies around a slogan that uncannily echoes a popular phrase of our own time: everything is made in and by China, including China itself. Therefore it is appropriate that the first thing Baoyu encounters in the Civilized Realm is a special mirror that tests for civilization as an inward and not outward phenomenon (281). The mirror works like the X-ray except that it reflects, beyond men’s physical skeleton, their civilized or uncivilized nature. Baoyu turns out to be particularly 232 civilized, and is therefore welcomed as a guest (ibid.). This is the land’s policy of “hospitality”: if anyone is tested and shown to be carrying a little barbarism in his or her nature, , the person will be sent to be reformed, after which he or she may be allowed to reenter. As for those who are “thoroughly barbaric and cannot be improved,” they will simply be sent outside the borders (ibid.). Even though this character test appears to promote self-improvement and efforts toward increasing civilization, its raison d’être lies on the side of nature rather than culture. When Baoyu asks Lao Shaonian if they have extended their knowledge of the improvement of human nature to all corners of the earth, Lao replies that “at the present time, people’s characters are mostly barbaric and cannot be improved even with our good ways . . . . those whose natures can be improved would seek help here themselves; we do not need to go to them” (ibid.). Lao Shaonian then explains that with the development of scientific inventions, , all things, including those invisible to the naked eye such as air or sound waves, can be tested. The special detection mirror is a scientific machine that nonetheless resembles more a metaphysical test for good and evil. As Lao Shaonian goes on to elaborate, the “ideal” ( ) behind this invention is derived from a common Chinese superstition, which suggests that kind persons have a red glow about them, while evil persons give out a blackish aura. As the first invention that Baoyu encounters in utopia, this character-test is based on a principle that guides all other inventions that Baoyu will subsequently encounter: utopian science is really a realization, and in some cases, modification of already existing Chinese beliefs. 233 The valuing of Chinese practices over and above Western science and technology is in line with the yangwu [foreign affairs] or self-strengthening reformers who from the second half of the nineteenth century must justify their learning from the West in China’s interests. Leaders of the movement such as Lin Zexue, Wei Yuan, and Feng Guifen rally around the saying “zhongti xiyong,” , an abbreviation of the phrase “Chinese thought as essence, Western thought as application.” 24 Hence what we have in the Civilized Realm is a hybrid of the most advanced scientific development and a traditional Confucian philosophy grounded in the principles of a moral monarch that advises against democracy and constitutional monarchy (218). Western thought thus stands for the mere use, application, and extension of Chinese official and systemic teachings. What is considered as “yong” or use, has to change and conform to the “ti” or body, . As Baoyu visits more of the Civilized Realm, he comes across human-like robots that announce the time, the artificial creation of the four seasons, and the replacement of food by extracted liquid-essences to avoid using fire or heat (180-4). “Euro-Americans eat everything fried or baked,” explains Shaonian, “because they do not know the poison of fire and heat” (184). Such hackneyed dietary theory is only the first of countless instances where the utopian guide introduces every aspect of utopian living by elevating it in contrast to its Western counterpart. National identity asserts itself as a form of a technocentrism. Lao Shaonian has a standard way of introducing new technologies that range from X-ray machines, flying cars, and whale-shaped submarines: it is to lay 24 Does not zhongti xiyong resemble the never-ending scholarly debates surrounding the application of Western theory to non-Western texts, and what seems an erroneous, but nonetheless interestingly symptomatic question of whether non-Western intellectual traditions are “without theory”? I address this further in my Conclusion. 234 emphasis on how much more efficient they are than foreign inventions. Mechanical efficiency thus becomes the way to distinguish civilization from barbarism. Such contrasts often veer toward pure mockery, as for example when the guide and his attentive follower make fun of the clumsiness of the Western hot-air balloon while they ride in their fast and light flying car (201). Yet despite the constant reference to Western machines and inventions in order to highlight their inferiority to Chinese ones, the Civilized Realm is extremely isolated. Foreign inventions and practices are merely pointed to and not actually represented. There are no foreigners in this second half of the novel; it is a hermeneutically sealed paradise as contrasted with the Shanghai and Beijing that Baoyu visits in the first half of the novel. Our utopian traveler’s excursions are conducted in the spirit of experiments and do not go beyond mere experimentation. The Civilized Realm’s ingenious flying-car, automatic hunting-machine, whale-shaped submarine are all employed to capture animals; in the characters’ travels to Africa, Australia, and the South Pole, they do not actually encounter any foreigners. Even the brief underwater encounter with a barbarian submarine ends before it begins (251). Technology makes the Chinese submarine much too fast for the barbarians ever to catch up, but it also makes overseas explorations isolated affairs in every senses of the word. David Wang Der-wei rightly points out that inventions in the Civilized Realm are social, cultural processes (275). But what is even more “social” is the cross-cultural process of inventions and reinventions. If there are any real contrasts between the two realms, it is that the social process of invention is a strictly national preoccupation in 235 utopia, while cultural imperialism forces late-Qing Shanghai to confront foreign ideas and goods. A useful place to examine this notion of a cross-cultural sociality is to revisit the role that reading and books play in the novel. If Baoyu’s purchasing of translated texts in the Jiangnan Arsenal shows the importance of foreign knowledge in turn-of-the- century Shanghai, his visit to the library in the Civilized Realm signals its non-relevance. There, when faced with numerous shelves and volumes of both Chinese and foreign books, his guide insists that if there is one he has to see, it would be a single rope. This is no ordinary rope, but a relic from the prehistoric Chinese method of rope-tying that predates writing (260). According to the guide, the rope is the “ancestor” to writing, and so it belongs in the library (ibid.). After this rope, Baoyu is shown the first editions of Confucian classics and other books that survived Emperor Qin’s book burning. When Baoyu finally asks for newer books, he is shown one by a Chinese author published just the day before. It is titled, not inappropriately, Scientific Invention. But Baoyu only has time to glance at it before hurrying out of the library. This episode sums up the question of scientific inquiry in this utopia rather well: the utopian pursuit of knowledge seems to fetishize both the extremely ancient and the extremely new. Hence ultimately, the utopian Civilized Realm appears as an ethno-nationcentric copy of the Barbaric Realm, whereby China is constructed through a series of technological and scientific breakthroughs. While Baoyu spends the first half of the book complaining about his countrymen’s undiscerning worship of all Western inventions instead of conscientiously learning to make their own, he spends no less time in the Civilized Realm praising Chinese inventions for having trumped those of the foreigners. 236 This is not to say that only the second half of the novel is necessary in New Story’s narration of Chinese nationhood. As I have already argued, the first half of the book builds up and prepares for the relation between invention and nationalism in the second half. Hence rather than view the Barbaric Realm as a world existing apart from its civilized counterpart, the two realms are doubles of each other, by which we can begin to understand nation and utopia as “a kind of ‘doubleness’ in writing”: “a temporality of representation that moves between cultural formations and social processes without a ‘centered’ causal logic” (Bhabha, “DissemiNation” 293). Utopia is thus not a break away from the existing world, but one written, or rather, disseminated with it. We can see this from the way we choose to translate the terms jingjie, . Wang, in Fin-de-siècle Splendor, refers to the first part of Baoyu’s adventure as that which takes place in the “Barbarous World,” and his subsequent venture into utopia the “Civilized World.” However, Wu himself never refers to the two places as worlds but jingjie, , better translated as realms. By translating jinjie as worlds, Wang loses the ambiguity that the word has in its existential position between country or nation, and the world. I suggest that Wang’s decision to translate jingjie as world instead of realm is related to another linguistic ambiguity of the novel, that is, the problematic meaning of the word sky or tian in Baoyu’s ambition to mend the sky, . In an episode after his encounter with the atrocities of the Boxer Rebellion, and his imprisonment for criticizing a powerful Chinese official, Baoyu reflects on his failure (163). He remembers himself at the bottom of the wild Qinggang mountain, where after being in peace for so many years, he decided to make up for that wish of his to mend the sky ( ) and walked out. Unknowingly, he found himself in Beijing 237 and met with the Boxers, only to encounter yet another incident [of being wrongly imprisoned]. No wonder [one calls it] the barbaric country ( ), and furthermore the dark world ( ). This ambition of mine, I am afraid, is ultimately too difficult to fulfill. (Wu 163, my emphasis) The passage draws our attention to the kind of “sky” he is supposed to mend in the first place. It is at once the “barbarous country” and the “dark world” (ibid.). To my knowledge, this is the only place in the novel where all three terms, sky country , and world are used together in the same passage. David Wang, in his above- mentioned book, interprets tian in terms of Yan Fu’s popularization of evolutionary ideas: it is a “new telos that justifies China’s search for wealth and power” and a vast evolutionary organism capable of creation (280). However, tian also refers to the origins of morality and destiny (Liu 524). Moreover, the word significantly incorporates both the meaning of country and world. Hence in line with the traditionalist-Confucian moral of the second half of New Story, I propose that tian here resonates more with the Chinese concept tianxiai, . According to Liu Junping, the word tianxia appears in Laozi’s Dao de Jing fifty-one times, respectively referring to the “sky,” “the heaven,” the “empire,” the “multitude” and all the living beings in the world (524-5). Baoyu’s ambition sounds like a page from Mencius who declares, that, “A man of virtue stays in tianxia’s vastness, takes tianxia’s proper posts, and performs tianxia’s great Dao. Achieving his ambition, he shares it with the people; not achieving his ambition, he follows his Dao alone” (qtd. in Liu 527). Baoyu’s ambition to mend the sky conforms to Mencius’s notion of the individual’s responsibility to fulfill the way of tianxia. 238 But individual virtue alone does not explain the historical urgency in which Baoyu finds himself. A brief summary of the history of the concept tianxia suffices to show how the nineteenth century needs to radically reinterpret it. During the Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties in ancient Chinese history, tianxia referred to a city-state made up of natural villages that are linked by consanguinity (Liu 532). After which, during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, tianxia was a federal state ruled by warring feudal princes (ibid.). The Qin and Han dynasties treated tianxia as a purely political concept, while the Song and Ming dynasties emphasized it as a social ethical order (ibid.). By the mid-to late-nineteenth century, the concept became a practical concern: “what did ‘tianxia’ mean to the Chinese people when the foreigners struck open the gate of China with their strong, seemingly impregnable boats and powerful guns?” (Ibid.). Baoyu may not have seen the gates of China struck open, but in his visits to Shanghai and the Jiangnan Arsenal he witnesses the foreigners’ “impregnable boats and powerful guns.” For this reason, his ambition to mend the broken sky has everything to do with the question of China’s place in the world, a question that cannot be addressed without considering the historical role that the concept tianxia occupies in Chinese cosmology, moral and political philosophy, geography, and collective consciousness. In his article “From ‘Tianxia’ (All Under Heaven) to ‘The World’: Changes in Late Qing Intellectuals’ Conceptions of Human Society,” Luo Zhitian presents an innovative reading of the history of the concept. According to Luo, Levenson’s popular view that late Qing China’s self-perception contracted from tianxia into a state, which I have discussed in the Introduction, only holds if we adhere to the narrow meaning of 239 tianxia conceived as an empire presiding over the barbarian races and vassal states (94). However, if we also consider the concept’s broader meaning to include all mankind and the cosmopolitan spirit, late Qing intellectuals were in fact pushing for China to become a part of the larger world (ibid.). That the narrower meaning holds sway is unsurprising; contrasted to the foreign states and military power, Chinese intellectuals were anxious to find an explanation for China’s defeat. Liang Qichao, for one, thinks that the answer lies in China’s lack of nationalism. Such a lack is further explained on two accounts: on the one hand, “they know of tianxia (all under heaven) and not of country” (“On Patriotism” 22). On the other hand, “they know of self, and not of country” (ibid.). In other words, tianxia is too wide and the self is too narrow; only the nation-state can be the intermediary. The essay “On Patriotism” was published as part of Liang’s larger opus “On the New People” which appeared between 1902 and 1905. According to Luo, the weight given to the nation-state characterizes Liang’s earlier thinking (96). In his later years, Liang downplayed the significance of nationalism and instead emphasized a “supra-national” tradition and a world-thinking (96). The latter differs from the ancient conception of China as tianxia in the sense of a superior, cultural entity that is clearly no longer adequate for coping with China’s foreign competition; tianxia shifts from the ancient’s ideal, conceived world to the empirical world “heard and seen” in the late Qing period (96-7). With works like Wei Yuan’s Haiguo Tuzhi (Illustrated Records of Overseas) and Xu Jishe’s Yinghuan Xhilue (Brief Records of Nations Around), the ancient concept of tianxia is challenged by the co-existence of the 240 “many nations of the world” (Liu 519). Confronted with such a geo-political reality, late Qing intellectuals preoccupied themselves with the question of China’s role in the world with other countries: hence the expansion of tianxia to the world (ibid.). Yet this break in Liang’s earlier and later thinking turns out to be an exaggerated one: although “the so-called tianxia on the lips of the ancient Chinese was not really the whole world, it was so in their ideals” (qtd. in Luo 96). As Luo rightly points out, as early as 1902, Liang was already evaluating the ancients’ concept of the world in terms of what is geographically “real,” as what it “really” is (Luo 97). Yet “insomuch as the ideal was concerned, the conceived could also be ‘real’” (ibid.). It is the same with the concept “all mankind.” Hence “whether or not the term actually referred to ‘all’ of mankind, the ancients’ focus of attention was always ‘all mankind as far as they were aware of them at that time’ and not just a part of mankind – this was the ‘true cosmopolitan spirit’” (ibid., my emphasis). As far as Baoyu is concerned, his wish to mend the sky is therefore always caught up in this dialectics of tianxia as a culturally and morally united entity (the ancient ideal of China), and a geographically grounded world consisting of individual nation-states. But the poles of the ambivalence are not just these two kinds of conceptions of the world; the ambivalence is complicated by the fact that the world is simultaneously imagined as a country. Recall Baoyu’s lament about his experience in Shanghai and Beijing: “No wonder [one calls it] the barbaric country ( ), and furthermore the dark world ( ) (Wu 163). The co-existence of “China” as a country, and worlds both ideal and real make Baoyu’s ambition to mend the sky [tian] particularly difficult to fulfill (ibid.). 241 Another way to understand tian would be according to the more familiar vacillations of the particular and the universal. That which is “broken” and needs to be “mended” is both particular and universal if it is to be a country as well as a world. Hence it is all the more misleading for Wang to translate “realm” as the World when distinguishing the Barbarous from the Civilized because realm is closer to the dual, narrow and broad meaning of tianxia. After all, it is significant that Wu frames the Civilized Realm within, and not outside of, the Barbaric Realm, thus signaling Baoyu’s itinerary as an unfolding of world within worlds. Baoyu stumbles upon the Civilized Realm while he is looking for Xuepan in Liberty Village north of China (174). When he asks his guide in the Civilized Realm about his original destination, Lao Shaonian remarks that there is also a Liberty Village where they are, and the one where Xuepan is must refer to another (non-utopian) place that is more appropriately known as Barbarous- Liberty Village (182). The author’s effort to distinguish the Civilized from the Barbaric throughout the novel goes hand in hand with the constant shifting between the real/true and the fake/illusory, which, as we have seen, is most explicit in Baoyu’s rationalization of his identity. Another instance of such a blurring of fiction with reality occurs with what Wu calls his “hidden allegory” of Mingyan in the chapter where Baoyu first enters the Civilized Realm (174). When Baoyu is reunited with his servant, Mingyan, at the beginning of the novel, the latter appears to have just come to life from a wooden statue. And just before Baoyu finds himself in the Civilized Realm, Mingyan mysteriously turns back into a statue (172). Whether it is the latter Mingyan who indicates the illusory state of the Civilized Realm, or, paradoxically, the human Mingyan who represents the 242 imagined realm of the Barbaric in the first part of the novel, it appears to be the author’s intention to leave us speculating. VI. Conclusion Mingyan is not the only figure whose doubling blurs the opposition of the Barbaric to the Civilized Realm. In the penultimate chapter of the novel, after witnessing the wonderful accomplishments of utopia, Baoyu finally meets its ruler, Dongfang wenming himself. But Dongfang wenming appears to have met Baoyu before, although the latter has no recollection of it. The utopian traveler goes straight to the point of his visit, that is, to hear the latter’s thoughts on his ruling philosophy (311). To which Dongfang wenming replies that despite his accomplishments in the civilized realm over the last fifty years, he still has the unfulfilled wish to bring civilization to the entire world. “Presently, the red, black and brown races are deep in the throes of misery, abuse and near-extinction. I can hardly sit still every time I think of this. Being part of the human race, why is it that these groups encounter such misfortunes?” (Ibid.) Wenming’s question turns out to be a rhetorical one. For these red, black, and brown races may be part of the human race, but they are not viewed as equals. The Chinese ruler’s dilemma is that he does not want just to emancipate these races, for example, to stop at freeing the black slaves (as the “fake” civilized people of the United States did); the real difficulty is how to provide for races who are by nature too stupid, lazy, poor- educated, and hence lack the means of independence (ibid.). On this note, Baoyu sees eye to eye with Wenming (313). Earlier in the novel, Baoyu is shown a special snuff that can create wisdom by a delicate compound made out of essences from brain muscles. The utopian visitor thus suggests using this wisdom-creating snuff to “cure” the inferior races 243 (274-5). This is how the snuff’s inventor, Dongfang de (Eastern Virtue), responds to Baoyu’s already racist suggestion: Its function is merely to aid thinking in people who can already think. The snuff may not even work on those who cannot think. Hence used by civilized people, the snuff can aid in civilization. If used by barbarians, it aids in barbarism. As for whatever thoughts those red and black peoples may have, they come down to the word laziness. If they use this snuff, they would only think of more ways to be lazy. (Wu 313) “Wisdom snuff” is China’s opium for the superior races. This passage highlights Wu’s distinction between three types of peoples: the civilized, that is, the Chinese, the barbarians, namely, the West, and the “others,” who seem to be everyone who is left out of the “East/West” binary distinction. The latter group receives no narrative treatment in either of the two worlds represented in the novel, but its exclusion serves as a common bond between the Civilized and the Barbaric Realms. If I earlier suggested leaving the question of the illusion or reality of the two realms open, the question of race suddenly plummets the Civilized Realm back into nineteenth-century reality. According Frank Dikotter, between 1902 and 1911, the word minzu, often translated as nationality, gains currency as a term to promote symbolic boundaries of blood and descent: “’nationalities’ as political units were equated with ‘races’ as biological units” (406). While the specific discourse of race lies outside this study, the significance of racial identity in the construction of Chinese nationalist narratives in the first decade of the twentieth century cannot be overstated. This relation between race and national identity also helps to explain why the characters in the Civilized Realm have last names that naturalize China as a biologically specific entities, such as Hua (another word for China), Dongfang (Eastern), and Huang (yellow). 244 Baoyu’s wish to mend the sky may be already fulfilled by the illustrious Dongfang wenming and his family members who all hold important positions in the utopian government. However the penultimate and concluding chapters show how the task is far from complete. Not only is the “sky” still broken because civilization has not reached all parts of the world; it is broken because the rules of civilization deem it unattainable by what Dongfang wenming, Baoyu and others agree are the inferior races. Here, then, sky refers simultaneously to the geographical extent of the whole world, as well as to certain culturalist assumptions of the world according to Chinese stereotypes of other races. Since the latter alone ensures that the wish for international unity would remain a futile one, there is in fact little regret on Baoyu’s part when he finds out that Dongfang wenming is a character from his previous life, that is, from the original story Dream of the Red Chamber. Known there as Zhen Baoyu, his last name indicates that he is the “real” (Zhen) double to Baoyu’s “fakeness” (Jia), the “real” precious stone as opposed to the “fake” one. While the play between the real, zhen, and the fake, jia, works in the ending of Dream of the Red Chamber to envelop the whole story within the Taoist notions of truth and illusion, I suggest that in New Story, it functions to comment on the relation between utopianism, nationalism, and internationalism. In the last chapter, it is Baoyu who dreams of a global Shanghai where all countries gather to participate in its hosting of the World Exposition and the International Peace Conference (320-322). Falling asleep the night before he is to leave the Civilized Realm, he dreams that Bohui brings him to witness a transformed China. According to his friend, an onslaught of the anti-American Exclusion 245 Act movements have whipped up Chinese nationalism during Baoyu’s time away in the Civilized Realm (319). The Manchu Court, seeing the strengths and unity of its people, finally concedes to constitutional reforms and sends its ministers overseas to study foreign constitutions so as better to adapt China to them (ibid.). These changes are most noticeable in Shanghai where its treaty port status and the extraterritorial laws have been revoked. Local factories and shops selling domestic goods are growing fast, and most important, the city is preparing to host the World Exposition and an International peace conference. Chinese factories crowd the banks of the Yangtze River that stretch from Wusong to Hankou (ibid.). Lightning speed railroads pass by fields of rich forests and agricultural lands. In this brief paragraph, China appears as an industrial as well as a pastoral paradise – a utopian vision more radical and far more complete than the one described in the Civilized Realm. The absolute monarchy that still holds the reins in the Civilized Realm turns out to be a transitory phase before the country can move toward a more democratic constitutional monarchy. Most important, Dongfang wenming’s wish to civilize all races and communities is magically fulfilled in this dream where China hosts the international peace conference. Yet it cannot be denied that even in Baoyu’s vision of a future China, it is Zhen Baoyu (Dongfang wenming), and not Jia Baoyu, who chairs the peace conference in Shanghai and spearheads China’s successful reform. Both Wang Der-wei and Theodore Huters underscore the sense of the protagonist’s “belatedness” by the end of the novel: he is a late spectator to “what will already have happened” in a vision of China’s future, an embodiment of “belated modernity where someone else has already does the work and he 246 can only witness or copy what has been accomplished” (Huters, Bringing the World 170- 1). However, insofar as Dongfang wenming announces a genuine sense of equality between races and communities in Baoyu’s dream (320), this scene cannot be read without its preceding discussion in the Civilized Realm regarding the prejudice against “the red, black, and brown races” (211). That is to say, contrary to Huters’s claim that Baoyu’s dream erases and thus makes utterly improbable the process by which the Civilized Realm achieved its eventual utopian status, I take the dream as a way of eliding racial prejudices for a truly all-encompassing world-wide society. We are then inclined to take the gap or distance between the Civilized Realm and Baoyu’s dream of China’s leadership in world peace, not as a distance between “reality” and “utopia” when both are self-consciously fictional worlds. Unlike other utopian novels in my study that can all be read as a critique of utopianism, New Story does so by undercutting its own utopia with another utopia. Like the unfolding of the Civilized Realm within the Barbaric Realm, Baoyu’s dream is enacted in the doubling of his own self in the figure of Dongfang wenming, and a utopia within a utopia. While Baoyu’s travels in the Civilized Realm represent a vision of the Chinese nation, the novel cannot represent the world except by pointing to the dream of universal cohesion as a dream inside a utopian dream. This self-undermining utopian impulse in New Story offers us a different interpretation of Baoyu’s original intention to mend the sky. Baoyu’s wish is futile if by sky or tian he is only referring to the “nation-state,” but he may not have entirely failed if the sky also points to the world. For as we saw earlier, Dongfang wenming has not realized such a wish either within the diegesis of the novel. This is perhaps another way 247 of reading Baoyu’s dream of a cosmopolitan Shanghai. In the dream, he may not be the Chinese emperor chairing the World Exposition and the International Peace Conference. But insofar as he is the one dreaming the dream, the dreamer comes close to a kind of democratic participation in the “true cosmopolitan spirit” of tianxia that applies to “all mankind” (Luo 97). 248 CHAPTER FOUR: TRANSPACIFIC SPIRIT TELEGRAPHY IN A TRAVELER FROM ALTRURIA AND “A TALE OF NEW MR. WINDBAG” (When one is not universal, 25 one’s self is like a foreign country; when one is universal, foreign countries become one’s self). -- Tan Sitong I. Introduction Near the end of William Dean Howells’s A Traveler from Altruria, Mr. Homos recounts his country’s transformation into its present utopian existence. He compares “the new civic consciousness” to that of “a disembodied spirit released to the life beyond this and freed from all the selfish cares and greeds of the flesh” (181). While Christianity, socialism, Howells’s brief childhood experience of living in a cooperative, and his later interests in the Shakers’ family-style communes all contribute to the formulation of altruism as a “carryall” solution to the ills of Gilded Age America (Budd, “Altrurism Arrives” 48), the notion of a disembodied spirit appears rather out of place in the author’s utopian vision. Although the comparison of the new civic consciousness to a non- materialistic and non-egoistic “life beyond” is consistent with Christ’s selfless teachings, Howells himself regarded the theological creed of the Christian Socialists not without a sense of “revolt” (ibid.). Like his ambivalence toward religion, leftist politics, and 25 I follow Luke S. K. Kwong in his translation of Tan’s principle of ren, which titles his magisterial work, Renxue, as universal, as opposed to the common English translation of the word as benevolence, humanity, or some variation thereof, which signifies the cardinal Confucian virtue. However, as Kwong and other have pointed out, Tan goes beyond the Confucian paradigm in his discussion of ren to assign it a quasi-scientific meaning. The two words that make up the title, Renxue, can also be taken to suggest two independent aspects of Tan’s thought: ren is the pursuit of a righteous case, and xue, the pursuit of learning. Ultimately, Tan’s wide range of uses for ren defeats an easy translation. Kwong is right to suggest that the philosopher’s use of ren is an “umbrella term” and an “ultimate principle” that governs physical nature, societies, and humanity” (152). “It provided an ambitious, supposedly all-inclusive framework with which to comprehend the cosmic and world-historical processes; hence our rendition of the title, based on the spirit that the work itself progresses, as On Universal Principles” (ibid.). 249 cooperative living, the reference to disembodied spirits only intensifies the contradictions in Howells’s turn to literary utopianism. One has to agree with Louis J. Budd’s observation that Howells arrived at altruism when baffled by the choices of his day and it “stood for his faith and his plight” (48). Yet, considering that the evocation of the spirit occurs elsewhere in the novel, it can hardly be dismissed as uninteresting or insignificant. At one point, the American narrator, Mr. Twelvemough, presents a “fantastic” conception of his utopian guest, Mr. Homos, as a “spiritual solvent”: “Was he really a man, a human entity, a personality like ourselves, or was he merely a sort of spiritual solvent, sent for the moment to precipitate whatever sincerity there was in us, and show us what the truth was concerning our relations to each other?” (113). This depiction of the Altrurian as a spiritual solvent moves away from the earlier discourse of the disembodied spirit in the afterlife, and toward the problem of characterization here framed through Mr. Twelvemough’s dramatized narration. The notion of a spiritual solvent that reveals the truth of social relations is no invention of the narrator’s imagination; it can be traced to spiritualism, the quasi-religious, quasi-scientific mid-century movement in the United States and Europe. Spiritualism in the United States is generally said to begin with the “Rochester Rappings” of 1848. In that year, two teenaged farm girls in upstate New York, Margaret and Kate Fox, claimed to communicate with the dead through “spiritual telegraphy,” whereby mysterious sounds, known as “rappings,” prompted them to call out letters of the alphabet (Kerr 3; Kucich xi). By 1851, the Fox sisters’ fame and their announcement of “the dawn of a new era” of spirit communication had spread throughout the country, 250 and it is estimated that in the 1850s about one million Americans believed in the authenticity of séance communications (Kerr 9). At the peak of its popularity in the 1850s and 1860s, spiritualism was simultaneously a popular fad and an active religious and heterodox movement (Kerr 3). In April 1853, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s brother Charles Beecher reported to the Congregational Association of New York and Brooklyn that the movement was a “subtle but genuine materialism” that rejected Biblical authority (Kerr 13-4). As the title of the movement’s representative publication the Spiritual Telegraph indicates, the rise of spiritualism coincided with popular ideas of technological progress and scientific inventions (ibid.). Paul Gilmore in Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism, examines the use of electricity, science, and technology by writers such as Emerson, Fuller, Whitman, and others. The invention and development of the telegraph further encouraged the analogy between electricity and aesthetics as material forces (Gilmore 479). “With the telegraph, the idea that both thought and language were electric and therefore part of a network linking all of humanity assumed even greater currency” (ibid.). Although scientific technology fostered spiritualist thinking, the movement also inherited from mesmerism, a pseudoscience and parlor entertainment of the 1830s and 1840s, its belief in the existence of a universal magnetic fluid that once activated, will “magnetize” the spirits to obey the medium’s directions (Kerr 6). Most important for my purposes, spiritualist discourses shared with various millennial and utopian movements of the 1840s their use of prophetic language to address social issues of the time. Howells’s recalling the connection between spiritualism and radicalism from his youth further 251 highlights the movement’s advocacy of change in matters of faith, as well as in science and technology: “They were radical in every way, and hospitable to novelty of all kinds. I imagined that they tested more new religions and new patents than have ever been heard of in less inquiring communities” (qtd. in Kerr 11). The Dean of American letters, as Howells was called, is thus no stranger to spiritualism. His earlier novel The Undiscovered Country (1880) tells the story of Boynton’s manipulation of his daughter Egeria’s supposed spiritual powers as a medium. When Boynton realizes that his daughter has no psychic powers and that he has submitted her to all kinds of public performances and emotional duress in the name of spirit communication, he confesses to Ford, once his skeptical antagonist and now Egeria’s suitor, that spiritualism can only convince those who have been convinced by their own senses (366). Boynton goes on to explain that what he has been encouraging via his daughter is not spiritualism, but really materialism, a “grosser materialism” that “asserts and affirms, and appeals for proof to purely physical phenomena” (Howells, The Undiscovered Country, 366-7). The novel’s insight into America’s obsessions with spirit communications, séances, and enchanted mediums has much bearing on its author’s later turn to utopian fiction. There, the unreality and nonexistence of a perfect society does not deter one from proposing its necessity. That Altruria is an imagined country is less significant than the critique it launches of existing political and social institutions in late nineteenth-century America. As we shall see, the attempts by Mr. Twelvemough and his American friends to prove the true identity of Mr. Homos and consequently the actual existence of utopia, end up highlighting their own fictionality within the fictional world 252 of the novel. Like the “undiscovered country” of the afterlife, “from whose bourne, no traveler returns,” – a line Howells borrows from Hamlet – the political urgency of utopian fiction is driven by the imperfect, existing society, and not by physical proof of utopia. 26 Indeed, Altruria is an undiscovered country in many ways: it has no commerce with the outside world, its emissaries live abroad incognito, and Mr. Homos is the first Altrurian to travel to foreign countries in his “national character” (Howells, A Traveler from Altruria 191). He brings with him utopian conceptions of social equality, and the eradication of classes, money, and self-interest so greatly opposed to American principles that something like a spiritual communion is needed to bridge the two countries. For this reason, I aim to show how spiritualism does not simply exist in the novel as one of its 26 It is beyond the scope of this chapter to pursue this question of materiality raised by utopian texts. However, to indicate a direction of how to proceed with this question, I suggest that the materiality, if any, of utopia would have to be thought through the logics of what Paul de Man offers as a “materiality without matter.” Derrida’s insight into this question is helpful when he points to: the text in general, or more rigorously (and this makes a difference that counts here) of “what we call text,” as de Man says, playing with the italics and with the “definition” that he gives by putting the word “definition” in quotation marks. These are literal artifices that mark . . . that one must be attentive to every detail of the letter, the literality of the letter defining here the place of what de Man will call materiality. The literality of the letter situates this materiality not so much because it would be a physical or sensible (aesthetic) substance, or even matter, but because it is the place of prosaic resistance (cf. “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant” in Aesthetic Ideology, where de Man concludes with the words “prosaic materiality of the letter”) to any organic and aesthetic totalization, to any aesthetic form. And first of all, I would say for my part, a resistance to every possible reappropriation. . . . The materiality in question—and one must gauge the importance of this irony or paradox—is not a thing, it is not something sensible or intelligible; it is not even the matter of a body. As it is not something, as it is nothing and yet it works, cela oeuvre, this nothing therefore operates, it forces, but as a force of resistance. It resists both beautiful form and matter as substantial and organic totality. This is one of the reasons that de Man never says, it seems to me, matter, but materiality. . . (“Typewriter Ribbon,” 150-1) 253 political and economic “messages,” but serves as a trope for the narrator’s task as a fictional mediator. As George R. Uba points out, the rush by critics to dissect Howells’s critique of capitalism and the hierarchy of American society in favor of a Christian socialism modeled after the family, has the effect of treating the novel and its sequel, Through the Eye of the Needle, as “social critique made agreeable through the cosmetic of fiction instead of as literary works containing within them social critiques” (118). By the time Howells published The Undiscovered Country in 1880, spiritualism had became less popular, though the literary impact of the movement continued to be felt. James drew on his reading of Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance for “Professor Fargo,” and The Bostonians (1874) drew heavily on spiritualist culture and its relation to radical reform (Kerr 121). Twain, who reported on postwar séances in San Francisco in his early journalistic career in the 1850s, included spiritualist manifestations in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Toward the turn of the century, the interest in spiritualism was channeled into new systems of thought represented by New Thought, Christian Science, Theosophy, or what William James calls the “mind cure movement,” which focused on mental, instead of somatic therapies (Caplan 62). Proponents of the mind cure movement were a heterogeneous group united in their disapproval of the dominance of somatic treatments in medicine and adherence to the mystic Emanuel Swedenborg’s brand of mesmerism that expounded on the laws of mental communication (Caplan 66). One writer, William Leach, sums up these new systems of thought: Mind cure produced new religious ideas and groups – for example, New Thought, unity, Christian Science, and theosophy. As a general spiritual mentality, it was wish-oriented, optimistic, sunny, the epitome of cheer and self-confidence, and completely lacking in anything resembling a tragic view of life. In mind cure 254 there was no darkness, no Melville nor Hawthorne, no secrets, no sin or evil, nothing grim or untidy, only the safe shore and the ‘sunlight of health,’ in one mind-curer’s words. (qtd. in Bennett 181) Leach’s hyperbolism aside, his description of a “wish-oriented” optimism calls up utopian “structures of feeling,” which, to evoke Raymond Williams’ term, act as impulses and desires for change and renewal. Perhaps in part because of this perceived “epitome of cheer and self-confidence” and its promises of change and self-renewal, mind cure, New Thought, and their sub-currents of animal magnetism and mesmerism found their way across the Pacific Ocean in the early years of the twentieth century. In 1896, John Fryer, eminent missionary and translator of Western works into Chinese, published his translation of Henry Wood’s Zhixin mianbingfa (A Method for the Avoidance of Illness by Controlling the Mind) (Liu 248). Wood was an advocate of the open-mindedness and inclusive practices of the New Thought movement (Caplan 80). According to Horatio Dresser, he was the first person to champion the movement publicly (qtd. in Liu 250). Wood’s book, originally titled Ideal Suggestion through Mental Photography, outlines the operations of mental healing by employing the metaphor of the photograph and emphasizing the role of the receiver of images, namely the patient, in the healing process (Caplan 81). “Ideal suggestion is the photographing of pure and perfect ideals directly upon the mind through the medium of the sense of sight. It is voluntary, and free from any admixture of personality or imperfection” (Wood 77). Wood’s understanding of the law of suggestive cures for neuroses does not rely on the healer’s personality or will, but only on his support for the patient (Caplan 81). While these laws lie beyond intellectual comprehension, Wood underscores their orderliness 255 and “scientific adaptability” to the century’s fascination with ether and electricity (Wood 7). In China, Fryer’s translation of Ideal Suggestion through Mental Photography takes up mental healing more generally in the cause of China’s nation building. According to Liu, Fryer began his translation after China’s defeat in the First Sino-Japanese war in 1895, and showed his attentiveness to the political and social climate of the late Qing period by inserting into Wood’s preface his personal comments on “opium houses, crimes, wars, disasters and famine” (249). Fryer was also particularly interested in the power of ether, which just as it fills the space through which sound and electricity can be transmitted, explains the power of thought that can be shared between people (Liu 249- 250). That the power of mental healing, which works like ether in its penetrability between people, is believed to be a cure for a country’s weakness speaks to the larger intellectual trend of xin li, or psyche power that was gaining traction in late Qing China. Liu identifies the first occurrence of xin li in Fryer’s Zhixin mianbingfa as a “peculiar mode of hermeneutics of psyche,” which functions “as a cathected token, and objet a that reveals the strong desire for a rejuvenated nation” (248). Chinese thinkers and writers’ reinterpretation of mental healing as xin li, or “psyche force” thus adjusts the original movement to fit their nation-building purposes. Liang Qichao uses the term xin li to encourage the cultivation, cure, and regulation of the psyche. Like electricity, xin li is believed to be able rejuvenate a sick and static old China (ibid.). Tan Sitong -- Liang’s contemporary and one of the martyrs of the failed 100 days reform of 1898 whose work I will discuss below -- similarly refers to the powers of psychic force in his philosophical 256 writings. Later revolutionaries like Sun Yatsen, Chiang Kaishek, and Mao Zedong continue to insist that national salvation depends on the curing and governing of the minds of the people (ibid.). Liu’s analysis of this “hermeneutics of psyche” shows that late Qing intellectuals’ exposure to the American New Thought movement, which utilized the analogy to electricity to encourage the liberation of thought, paradoxically led to educational and cultural policies of thought control and censorship by later governments (ibid.). Hence even though the therapeutic focus of the New Thought movement moved away from the supernatural element of spirit communication, it shared with its predecessor the belief in invisible means of communication and psychic forces to promote intercommunication. For this reason, New Thought continued to take inspiration from the development of scientific technology in general, and the electromagnetic telegraph in particular. When one of the first Chinese science fiction texts found inspiration in the power of psychic communication to “cure” a nation’s sickness, as well as rival existing telecommunication systems, it partakes of what I call the circuit of transpacific spirit telegraphy, which incorporates both spiritualist and scientific- technological undercurrents into its narrative. Xu Nianci’s short story, “Xin faluoxiansheng tan” (“A Tale of New Mr. Windbag”) (1905-1906) follows the adventures of its narrator, New Mr. Windbag after the splitting of his body into spiritual and physical halves. Unlike other utopian novels, including A Traveler from Altruria, “A Tale of New Mr. Windbag” is not a narrative about any one non-existent, perfect world in particular; it is a groundless, utopian narration. Rather than viewing “A Tale of New Mr. Windbag” as a utopian story in the 257 conventional sense, I examine it as a story of utopian selves by showing how the narrating “I” speaks on behalf of both its spiritual and physical halves for the greater part of the story: the first-person form of address is simultaneously a third person who experiences his dissociation from the outside. New Mr. Windbag resembles the spiritual solvent in Howells’s novel in the sense that he is not really a man or a human entity. However, his solvency does not seek, like Mr. Homos, to connect a utopian society or country with an existing one; rather, it lies in the attempt to reconcile the physical with the metaphysical, and the scientific with the spiritual until it manages to embody, I argue, Marx’s materialist conception of labor-power with the invention of “brain electricity” toward the end of the novel. While Howells imagines a peaceful transition to a socialist economy in Altruria, this chapter shows how Xu has a more incisive understanding of political economy and labor relations. Despite the absurdity implied by his name, and his failure to arrive at a utopian destination, New Mr. Windbag’s travels are not erratic and without purpose. The “utopia” in the story is a state of existence that exhibits Liu’s analysis of a “peculiar mode of hermeneutics of psyche.” In Xu’s story, the utopian narrator does not travel in flying cars, hot air balloons or submarines as Baoyu does in New Story of the Stone; New Mr. Windbag’s spirit and physical bodies are self-sufficient vehicles for a constantly mobile narrative perspective that shuttles from outer space to the center of the Earth. For this reason, whereas many depictions of utopia are technologically driven, Xu’s readers are not drawn into a futuristic city with its many modern comforts such as the telephone and shopping- delivery systems as in the case of Looking Backward, or the tales of mass destruction 258 with advanced gunpowder and artillery, as in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. New Mr. Windbag’s invention of brain electricity is unlike any of the invented technology that I have studied insofar as it emphasizes in its telepathic transmission of electrical waves between persons a thinking of the Greek prefix tele- as distance. Brain electricity does not immediately bring to mind the kind of technological progress envisioned by Bellamy, Twain, Wu, and to an extent, Howells for two main reasons. First, it delves into the relations between traditional forms of labor and new telecommunication technologies vital for the development of global capitalism. Second, it combines para- scientific beliefs in hypnosis, telepathy, ether, and mental healing with the more readily- proven scientific theories of thermodynamics and electricity. Like the American spiritualist publication, Spiritual Telegraph, New Mr. Windbag invokes the turn-of-the- century twinned fascination with spiritualist and mental healing practices and early twentieth-century advances in telecommunications system, which made possible the laying down of transpacific cable lines in 1902. One of the proponents of the Mental Healing movement, Warren Felt Evans captures this affinity as follows. When a message is telegraphed from New York to London no imponderable fluid shoots along the wire but there is only the transmission of force, a vibratory wave in an elastic medium called ether. So when one mind acts upon another mind, and influences its thoughts and feelings, when the bodies they animate are separated by hundreds of leagues, the effect is produced in a similar way. There is only transmission of mental force, and the action and reaction of one spirit upon another. (qtd. in Caplan 72) Hence if brain electricity departs from the usual sense of a machine, it is because it is both mental and mechanical force. Read alongside A Traveler from Altruria, “A Tale of New Mr. Windbag” further radicalizes the rhetorical narration of utopia by 259 transforming the notion of a spiritual medium into the workings of brain electricity that is at once scientific and mystical, both human and machine. Here, spiritualism and New Thought do not, as in Howells’s novel, serve only as a trope for the narrator’s task as a fictional mediator. Even though Howells imagines technology, specifically the use of telegraph messages, as an essential component for the movement responsible for Altruria’s overthrow of capitalism (180), Xu’s conception of technology in the form of brain electricity is far more radical. The two works’ references to disembodied spirits and de-spirited bodies become focalizing standpoints from which I will eventually zoom in on New Mr. Windbag’s narration as telecommunication. The notion of the spirit telegraph that allows me to connect the two works is ultimately more than spiritual: it enacts the social narration of utopia that is the larger framework of my dissertation. My reading of Marx’s characterization of society in terms of narrative form in the introduction develops the theory of a “social narration of utopia.” To recapitulate Marx’s argument in A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: whereas dramatic form tells the story of how a sphere of society first becomes oppressed by a subjugating class and in its liberation from the latter comes to stand for the whole of society, epic form conceives of an entirely different ordering of society wherein each set of relations exists only because material conditions independent of its actions have given rise to a “lower social substratum” that is, strictly speaking, not even a part of civil society (140). The proletariat, as “an estate which is the dissolution of all estates,” shows that the very incompletion of society is the condition of possibility for a narration of society. In my introductory chapter, I show that the epic, which Marx attributes to 260 German society, takes the specific form of the novel in Lukács’ study: “the novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of the meaning of life has become a problem, yet which still thinks of totality” (Theory of the Novel, 56). This chapter explores the transpacific circuit of spiritualism and New Thought that runs through A Traveler from Altruria and “A Tale of New Mr. Windbag,” in order to evaluate the extent to which the two texts enact a social narration of utopia whereby the “totality” of society is no longer directly given, but becomes a problem for representation. II. The Solvency of Society Unlike Bellamy, Vinton, and Twain who rely on time travel to launch their protagonists’ to brave new worlds, Howells uses the more conventional travel narrative to account for Mr. Homos’s visit to an upper-middle class New England summer resort during late nineteenth-century America. The story is told from the point of view of Mr. Twelvemough, a popular writer of romance, whose name comically refers to the diminutive duodecimo paperbacks he authors, and who hosts the Altrurian during his sojourn in the U.S. The main momentum of the novel is driven by the conversations between Mr. Homos and the Americans he encounters, through whom we see the principles of altruism and communalism juxtaposed with American individualism and class differences. Until the last two chapters of the novel, the traveler from Altruria is less interested in talking about his country; in his words, he is here “in America to learn, not to teach” (33). And it is with his attempt to learn as much as possible about America that Howells teaches his readers about the problems of its existing institutions. While Mr. 261 Homos unfailingly offers to assist in the porter’s and waitress’s jobs in the resort, and expresses shock at the strict separation between the professional and working classes, Mr. Twelvemough and his banker, doctor, minister, lawyer and industrialist friends – whose professions represent the plutocratic structure of America – inform the visitor unflinchingly that “you are no more likely to meet a workingman in American society than you are to meet a colored man” (40). Whereas the Altrurian believes that equal political rights are the only means to economic and social equality, the banker abides by the notion that social equality “has been fostered mainly by the expectation of foreigners” since it never existed “except in our poorest and most primitive societies” (41). Mr. Homos’s persistent questioning of the American culture of self-reliance and its profit- making business ideals draws not a little vexation on the part of his host. Mr. Twelvemough feels that it is his “duty” to instruct Mr. Homos that should he think it natural that he can help others in America as he does back home in Altruria, he must “have been deceived by a superficial likeness”; “America and Altruria are absolutely distinct and diverse in their actuating principles” (82). Toward the end of the novel, Mr. Homos finally gives in to sketching out utopia for his American audience at a lecture arranged by one of the hotel’s guests, Mrs. Mackley. There, it becomes clear that A Traveler from Altruria, if it is about an ideal world at all, is folded into the imperfections of the existing one. Altruria and America are distinct; however, the former holds out the possibility of change for the latter. As Mr. Homos explains, Altruria very much used to resemble his host country in terms of the concentration of political and economic powers in the hands of the few, or what his 262 countrymen call “Accumulation” in short. Like other utopian writers of his time, Howells gives credit to the organizing powers of the proletariat and their struggles against Accumulation, but he still prefers the peaceful transition of democratic elections to a bloody revolution. Thus it is by the aptly-named process of Evolution that the people of Altruria cast their votes against the system of Accumulation and its power-holders (180). Given the similarity in economic conditions between pre-Evolution Altruria and present- day America, Mr. Homos hopes that “America prophesizes another Altruria” (193). The distinct and yet parallel pairing of America and Altruria coincides with the relationship that Howells sets up between his two main characters, the first-person narrator, Mr. Twelvemough, and Mr. Homos. While the former expresses mortification and embarrassment at his guest’s entirely foreign behavior and convictions, he “could see that, whatever people said of him, they felt the same mysterious liking at sight of him that [Mr. Twelvemough] had felt” (6). Even as Mr. Twelvemough “disavow[s]” Mr. Homos’s opinions, he cannot tell him to leave: there is “something in the man,” a mixture of contemptible puerility and lovable childlikeness, that “mysteriously appealed to [him]” (81). When Mr. Homos’s presence manages to bring together the Camps, a poor farming family and Mrs. Mackley, a broker’s wife, into a discussion about class difference, his host decides that it might be less his personal charisma than a non-human quality altogether that “precipitate[s]” whatever sincerity and truth “concerning [their] relations to each other” (113). And this is where the figure of the spiritual solvent, which I have earlier discussed, appears in Mr. Twelvemough’s description. If Mr. Homos is able to see Altruria as the mirror of America’s future, his not-unobservant host speculates that he 263 brings out the truth of a more communal human nature divided by class differences and cultural habits. George R. Uba analyzes Mr. Twelvemough’s characterization of Mr. Homos as a “spiritual solvent” according to the overall allegorical structure of A Traveler from Altruria. The latter conforms to Angus Fletcher’s delineation of the basic allegorical mode of the “battle,” which often takes the form of the “debate” or “dialogue” (121). The debate or dialogue in the novel is staged between the socio-economic systems of America and Altruria and their respective ideas of human nature (121-122). According to Uba, the characters in the novel further underscore the structure of the debate by being typologized according to the ideas they represent (122). Consequently, characters are abstract enough that they share certain behavioral traits. Hence “not only may Mr. Twelvemough be seen as a partial aspect of the allegorical Mr. Homos but so too may the rest of the characters” (123). The Greek origin of Mr. Homos’s name, meaning one and the same, symbolizes an “abstract similitude” (ibid.). Similarly, Mr. Twelvemough and his companions at the resort are commonly identified by their occupations, or typologized names such as Mr. Bullion for the banker, and the Mr. Lumen for the professor (123). “The flattening out of characters into near-abstractions” means that Howells has not created “individually complex human beings,” but “a sort of collective psychology” or “landscape of consciousness” where competing ideas of society are debated (ibid.). In Uba’s reading of A Traveler from Altruria as an allegorical narrative, and from the point of view of its characterization as a “morality play,” the allegorical hero, Mr. Homos, reflects a part of every character and is in turn represented by them. Mr. Twelvemough’s “fantastic” 264 conception of Mr. Homos as a “spiritual solvent” is thus a synecdoche, which substitutes part for whole and whole for part through contiguity rather than through resemblance, like metaphor. Yet the synecdoche in question, Mr. Homos-as-spiritual-solvent, is simultaneously a metaphor for a “man, a human entity, a personality like ourselves”: the substitution of one man for all other men is also a substitution of its figural for literal meaning (Howells, A Traveler 113). 27 But that is not all. What appears to be the more pertinent implication of Uba’s analysis is that the metaphor of the spiritual solvent envelops the novel’s characters in more than one allegorical structure. On one level, the metaphor emphasizes the allegorical battle between America and Altruria. On another level, it refers to the allegorical nature of society itself. Hence Uba proceeds to add that “as identified units of a society [the characters] necessarily imply something more” (ibid., emphasis added). Since in allegory the “emphasis lies not with personal confession but with the experience . . . of a social group,” the characters “ultimately represent the ambivalence that Howells imagines to be at the heart of the collective American psychology” (ibid.) Once Uba establishes the view that characters in A Traveler from Altruria are less individual entities than representative typologies, he can treat unproblematically “the experience of a social group” as a whole without referring back to its parts and, specifically, to the role of the narrator of the allegorical text. In contrast, I argue that the 27 I rely on Paul de Man’s redefinition of classical rhetoric’s classification of synecdoche as metonymy: “The relationship between part and whole can be understood metaphorically . . . synecdoche is one of the borderline figures that create an ambivalent zone between metaphor and metonymy and that, by its spatial nature, creates the illusion of a synthesis by totalization” (Allegories of Reading 63). 265 more important aspect of the allegory signaled by Uba, namely, Howells’s ambivalence toward the collective American psychology, emerges at the point where Mr. Twelvemough removes himself from his role as a detached observer and enters the scene of his narration as an active commentator.. The rhetorical mode of Mr. Twelvemough’s doubts about his guest’s identity is not insignificant in relation to his doubts about utopia, which is after all the text’s main preoccupation. This is why I cannot, like Uba, examine the experiences of the social group in A Traveler from Altruria without also paying attention to individual experiences within the social group. Precisely because individual characters are “identified units” of their society, it is vital to analyze the impact of their individual rhetoric on the larger social whole (Uba 123). If A Traveler from Altruria is an allegory of its author’s view of society, it necessarily demands that we read it in terms of what de Man calls “an allegorical narrative of its own deconstruction” (72). As it turns out, Mr. Twelvemough’s characterization of the Altrurian as a spiritual solvent does not on its own yoke the allegorical hero to other characters in the novel; this has to be worked out at the level of his first-person narration. Howells’s novel is not an allegory for any society; it is an allegory for a utopian narration of society. For Mr. Twelvemough’s casting of his guest as a spiritual solvent only highlights the lack of solvency in American society. From the very beginning of the novel, Mr. Twelvemough, expresses a reluctant hospitality toward Mr. Homos. “But I had swung fairly into my story; its people were about me all the time; I dwelt admist its events and places, and I did not see how I could welcome my guest among them, or abandon them for him” (1). Here, as the mediator of the story, the narrator’s intra-fictional position complicates what 266 Tamar Yacobi outlines as the mediation gap – a gap that the narrator-as-mediator both bridges and exacerbates: On the one hand, he serves as an indispensable bridge between two participants [the fictional characters and the reader] who cannot otherwise meet and communicate. On the other hand, he is a wedge driven between them that prevents their direct rapport – a barrier of discourse that is parallel and added to the barrier of existence that divides the fictional world from the real (335). In A Traveler from Altruria, added to the barrier of discourse and the barrier of existence between the fictional and real world is another level of existential barrier between America and Altruria. It is difficult to locate this last barrier because it exists within Howells’s fictional world as well as the real world, since Howells’s readers are like the fictional, non-utopian characters insofar as they are also “visited” by a utopian traveler in the form of the book they are reading. This narrative structure is not unique to utopian fiction; in any fictional world where there is a representation of multiple worlds, the same double wedge occurs. Mr. Twelvemough is conscious of his non-objectivity as the narrator: either he pays undivided attention to the Altrurian, or he keeps his allegiance to his people and their political and socio-economic ideals. By highlighting Mr. Homos’s position both outside American society and outside the narrative frame of A Traveler from Altruria, Howells collapses the figure of the utopian traveler onto the narration of utopia itself. In other words, the narration of the utopian traveler is at one with the narration of society or the social. Howells cannot pose the question of the fictional existence of utopia without at the same time inviting doubts about the reliability of his narrative. At one stroke, he attempts to convince his readers that the problem with his readers’ skepticism with utopian change lies in how that problem is presented in the first 267 place. A Traveler from Altruria thus folds questions of the ontological existence of utopia into the epistemological uncertainty of Mr. Homos. How we know the truth of Mr. Homos’s identity becomes equated with the existence of utopia itself. Subsequently, that his visit disrupts the otherwise peaceful, self-absorbed upper-class society becomes the question for utopia, or the utopian question. Since the narrator finds himself caught between the society to which he belongs and the very definition of society that Mr. Homos challenges, his narrative point of view goes straight to the heart of the question of the social. If the American host does not know how to welcome his guest into his society, it is less because the latter is a foreigner than because the society in question is by definition incomplete: it is predicated upon class differences within its national boundaries. At one point in the novel, Mr. Twelvemough compares their resort hotel to a ship anchored off a foreign coast, where the resort-dwellers rely on the island’s native inhabitants to provide them with supplies (109). Yet they have nothing to do with them and this continues until they sail away at the close of the season and resumes when they return (ibid.). The dilemma Mr. Twelvemough faces, between welcoming his guest or sticking with his people, can be seen at two levels. On the level of the story, it simply means that the guest has to be adjusted into American society, to which he is an outsider. On the level of discourse, the American host seems to suggest that he does not know how to integrate Mr. Homos into his narration itself. To return to the quotation: “But I had swung fairly into my story; its people were about me all the time.” Here, story in the literal sense refers to Mr. Twelvemough’s account of his utopian guest’s visit to America. 268 In the less literal sense, we can equate his story to the people with whom he associates, namely, the question of who gets to be counted as part of society. I have already pointed to the ways in which the question of social equality, inclusion, and exclusion preoccupy Mr. Homos’s debates with the Americans he encounters. Mr. Twelvemough’s recognition of the difficulty in admitting his guest into American society, and by association, into his narrative, further underscores the significance of the social perspective in the narrator’s rhetoric. By making a writer of romantic fiction the narrator of A Traveler from Altruria, Howells suggests that the problem of what gets to be represented in fiction holds serious implications for social representation in general. When Mr. Homos asks Mr. Twelvemough and his friends why the “mechanics, day laborers, iron molders, glass blowers, miners, farmers,” and other “weary workers” (28) do not also retreat to the hotel resort for leisure, the American host replies, . . . I am a writer of romantic fiction, and my time is so fully occupied in manipulating the destinies of the good old-fashioned hero and heroine, and trying always to make them end in a happy marriage, that I have hardly a chance to look much into the lives of agriculturalists or artisans; and to tell you the truth I don’t know what they do with their leisure. I’m pretty certain, though, you won’t meet any of them in this hotel; they couldn’t afford it, and I fancy they would find themselves out of their element among our guests. We respect them thoroughly . . . but we see very little of them, and we don’t associate with them. In fact, our cultivated people have so little interest in them socially that they don’t like to meet them, even in fiction . . . and I always go to the upper classes for my types. (30) The upper classes’ lack of interest in the lives of the working classes goes hand in hand with the same lack of interest in them as subjects of fictional narratives. In a way, we can say that the romance writer is merely portraying his subjects’ isolation from the “lives of 269 agriculturalists or artisans” in the New England summer resort as he sees it (ibid.). Mr. Twelvemough’s fault is that he, like his readers, have no interest in stepping outside of his class to depict “how the other half lives,” to borrow the title from Jacob A. Riis’s groundbreaking photojournalistic work of 1890. 28 However, Mr. Twelvemough cannot be faulted for not representing in fiction what is denied in real life: in the words of his banker friend, the workingman is “certainly not in society” and by implication, he is “socially non-existent” (44). This is not to say that Mr. Twelvemough is a realist writer by the strictest definition. As he admits, his characters from the upper classes are no more than “types” limited to the “good old-fashioned hero and heroine” (30). We can take a page from Howells’s own critical writings as Editor of Harper’s Monthly to sum up Mr. Twelvemough’s literary endeavors: “for it is one of the hard conditions of romance that its personages starting with a parti pris can rarely be characters with a living growth, but are apt to be types, limited to the expression of one principle” (“’Negative Realism’: Stevenson, Balzac” 81). And with this question of types, we are brought back to Uba’s analysis discussed above. Mr. Twelvemough may openly acknowledge that he draws on upper-class types for his novels, but certainly he is not aware of his own fictionality as a character-type. By proposing that Mr. Homos is not an individual of flesh and blood, but a spiritual solvent, he draws our attention to his own construction as a fictional character. Therefore, I claim that Howells superimposes his character-types onto a romance writer who also typifies his characters in order to criticize America’s own categorization of individuals into two types: those who are in society and the others who are socially non- 28 Riis, Jacob A. How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1890. 270 existent. By now we have already departed from Uba’s over-simplistic interpretation of A Traveler from Altruria as an allegorical narrative, which does not submit the allegory to the rhetoric of Mr. Twelvemough’s narration. Through the voice of Mr. Twelvemough, Howells enacts the incomplete narration of society of those who are outside of society. For this reason, A Traveler from Altruria is not one of Mr. Twelvemough’s romance fictions. If the novel nonetheless shares with the romance its tendency toward character-types and allegorical structure, it is because it is a realist novel that veers dangerously toward over-moralizing in its utopian message. Howells points out this danger in the same critical essay I referred to above. The true realist is obliged to expose the meaning of every fact to the risk of over-moralizing because “he feels in every nerve the equality of things and the unity of men” (“Negative Realism” 83). When the realist imagines a utopian visitor to America, he is being romantic; but when he borrows the visitor’s eyes to inspect more closely the inequalities of American socio-economic structure, he is a realist in romantic garb, a realist who reflects on the romantic construction of society as a problem for representation. Amy Kaplan, in The Social Construction of American Realism, claims that realism cannot simplistically reflect urban-industrial changes in the nineteenth century because such changes directly “challenged the accessibility of an emergent modern world to literary representation” (8). Realists do not reflect a ready-made world not because “of the inherent slipperiness of signification but because of their distrust in the significance of the social” (9). While Kaplan does not go into a theoretical explication of what she means by the social, it is sufficient to underscore in her analysis how realistic narratives 271 have to actively construct the social world or society at large. Consequently, her quotation from historian Jackson Lears is also relevant for my purpose: “reality itself began to seem problematic, something to be sought rather than merely lived” (qtd. in Kaplan 9). If literary critics take late nineteenth-century America novelists’ failure to represent American society as a sign of its preoccupation with the romance genre, it is because of the growing sense of “unreality” around them (ibid.). In particular, class difference confronts realism “less as a problem of social justice than as a problem of representation” (11). Like Lukács’ formulation of the novel “in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given” (56), realists see class difference in terms of “the problem of representing an interdependent society composed of competing and seemingly mutually exclusive realities” (Kaplan 11). It is this attempt to construct “a vision of the social whole” that connects realist and utopian novels in their projecting “into the narrative present a harmonic vision of community” (ibid.). Kaplan convincingly argues that we see how “realistic novels have utopian moments that imagine resolutions to contemporary social conflicts by reconstructing society as it might be” (12, my emphasis). Such utopian solutions correspond to what Balibar and Macherey, in their “Literature as Ideological Form” (discussed in Chapter One) propose as the “literary effect” of resolving ideological contradictions. (88) However, despite Kaplan’s identification of the affinity between realistic fiction and their utopian counterparts, it is nonetheless more an exception rather than the rule. In other words, she would be hard-pressed to reverse the order of her above argument and suggest that utopian novels might have realistic moments because they are equally 272 interested in the same “problem of representing an interdependent society composed of competing and seemingly mutually exclusive realities” (11). Therefore at the end of her two-chapter study of Howellsian realism, she observes that the author stops engaging with the “dangerously shifting boundary lines of his urban representation” after the publication of A Hazard of New Fortunes in 1890 (63). According to Kaplan, Howells’ turn to utopian fiction in A Traveler from Altruria signifies a turn away from realism to the extent that the “issues of change and conflict raised by Hazard” are “contain[ed]” rather than confronted head-on (64). The utopian novel “ingests the background of conflict as subject for conversation rather than as a problem for realistic representation” (ibid.). Similarly, Joseph Alkana notes that unlike Howells’ earlier novels such as The Minister’s Charge (1887), Anne Kilburn (1889), and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), which “adhere to a realist avoidance of direct commentary,” the Altrurian Romances are “polemical, didactic, and even hortatory” (83). However not all direct commentaries are antithetical to realist discourses. Wayne C. Booth, in defending the bias against intruding narrators, writes, “the telling is itself a dramatic rendering of a relationship with the author’s ‘second self’ which in strictly impersonal fiction is often less lively because only implicit” (212). Even Henry James, who mistrusts the narrator’svoice, admires a “loquacious” author like Fielding” who addresses commentaries directly to his readers (Booth 213). Furthermore, it is not the case, as Alkana claims, that A Traveler from Altruria does not deal with problems of the working class and with solutions to ameliorate their conditions (83). As I have tried to show, the novel takes as its central 273 problem the question of representing the working classes despite the main characters’ insistence on their absence from society. The chapters where Mr. Homos, accompanied by Mrs. Mackely and Mr. Twelvemough, visits the Camp farmhouse do not merely depict the working classes; they also represent the reasons underlying social segregation according to professions and class differences. If these chapters again risk direct commentary, it is because commentary has to intervene when “showing” comes up against societal prejudice. At one point during their visit, Mr. Homos pauses to take in the simplicity and bareness of Mrs. Camp’s room with his “literary sense” (107). Although the room strikes him as a place “where a great many things might have happened,” the writer of romances is not drawn to the particulars; he remarks to Mrs. Camp that her house seems to him “so typical” (109). Yet of all the characters in the novel, the Camps are the least typical, and perhaps for this reason, Uba completely neglects to discuss their characters in his analysis. Reuben Camp, for one, shows remarkable insight into the reasons why he and his family are not fit to associate with the guests at the resort (111). When Mrs. Makely condescendingly responds that in spite of their divisions and classes, their differing opinions and ideas, they are all Americans, Reuben retorts that perhaps they do not all have the same country (114). Contrary to Mr. Twelvemough’s hesitations, Reuben does not have to abandon his people for Mr. Homos; the latter enters his narrative by bringing a whole obscured section of society along with him. Instead of the divide between those who belong in society and those who are socially non-existent, the distinction now shifts to those who are skeptical of utopia, and of Mr. Homos’ true identity, and those who believe in both. 274 Mr. Homos remains popular with the latter, the “classes he most affected,” a “throng of natives, construction hands and table-girls” (210). It is these people who believe that he is really an Altrurian and that the ideal country he describes really exists. When the question of Mr. Homos’s identity is left to the devices of the more “cultivated people” and their spokesperson, Mr. Twelvemough, the latter concludes that they continue to be “of two minds” about the Altrurian and the actual existence of his perfect commonwealth (211). The novel re-focalizes class divisions onto the figure of the utopian traveler and the beliefs that the different classes have toward this visitor from the “undiscovered country.” In the end, perhaps like Mr. Twelvemough, the working classes are outside of society because they have an entirely different conception of society altogether. A Traveler from Altruria can only “tell” in direct commentary the multiple sides of America that it fails to show on the level of emplotment because its narrator either welcomes his guest within his idea of America and therefore his story, or “abandon[s] them for him” (1). In such “telling,” the novel exposes the instabilities and incompletion of “society” that are “shown” to be logically stable and complete. For this reason, Mr. Twelvemough’s narration is a utopian one: in coming up with the “fantastic conception” of a spiritual solvent that would be able to connect the dots of American society and show them “what the truth was concerning [their] relations to each other,” his narrative perspective nonetheless serves as a wedge in-between. His intention to “employ” this fantastic conception “in some sort of purely romantic design” for his professional purposes does not, fortunately, end up being the novel we have been discussing. 275 III. Of Spirits, Bodies, and Electrical Labor-Power At the beginning of the story, New Mr. Windbag introduces himself as someone who, in his youth, believed in heaven, hell, and all that was possible in the world as prescribed by religious thought (1). As he becomes acquainted with the scientific knowledge of mineral, plant, and animal worlds, the narrator learns that all things can be explained by observation and proof. Yet, he remains perplexed by what does not count as knowledge because it lies outside of science and so cannot be tested and proven, and yet, continues to be “invented” ( ) (ibid.). For two years, he sets out to get to the bottom of this question, with no resolution in sight. In anguish, he climbs to the top of a mountain, loses consciousness in an infinite gravitational pool, and wakes up to find that he has split into – “for lack of better names” – what religions refer to as the “soul” and the “physical shell” ( ) (2). The rest of the story follows his soul or spirit’s journeys from the Himalayas to the planets Mercury and Venus, and his physical body’s adventures to the center of the earth where he meets the ancestor of the Chinese race. Finally, after the reunification of his spirit and physical body, New Mr. Windbag is rescued by an advanced naval fleet organized by Chinese reformers, which indicates that some time has passed since the beginning of the narrator’s adventures (17). Back in China, the narrator attends a hypnosis conference, where he is inspired by the “enigma and unfathomability” of animal magnetism as well as the incredible changes his brain has experienced since the unification of his body and spirit (18). New Mr. Windbag’s subsequent invention of brain electricity emits light that replaces manmade light, sound that surpasses the need for telegraph and telephone companies, heat that makes redundant the need for heating, and 276 telepathic conduits that competes with traditional transportation networks (19-20). Ultimately, the wondrous powers of brain electricity, instead of bettering society, end up causing massive unemployment worldwide and the story concludes hastily with the narrator having to go into hiding (20). Thus the narrator’s invention of brain electricity does not simply fulfill his personal quest at the beginning of the story to discover non- scientific knowledge; it re-imagines the relationship between labor-power and machinery, and provides a serious study of political economy rare among late Qing Chinese fiction. Unlike Wu Jianren’s New Story of the Stone and most late Qing science fiction texts, Xu’s short story is written in classical Chinese. Its fantastic elements combine the classical traditions of the zhiguai (records of anomaly) and chuanqi (fantastic tales and romances) with other variants of late Qing intellectual trends. Xu was a prolific writer and editor of the late Qing journal, Xiaoshuo lin (Forest of Novels), in which “A Tale of New Mr. Windbag” was published. Writing under the pseudonym Donghai juewo (Self- awareness of the Eastern Sea), Xu prefaces the story by explaining how he came to write the story after reading Bao Tianxiao’s Chinese translation of Hora Sensei (Mr. Absurdity) by the Japanese Meiji writer Iwaya Sazannami (1; Luan Weiping 46). 29 Like Hora Sensei, “Xin faluoxiansheng tan” is a loose adaptation of the eighteenth-century German source text The Wonderful Travels of Baron Münchhausen, a German burlesque and one of the first Volksbuch (popular book) (Fiss 22). However, unlike either the German original or its Japanese adaptation, Xu reframes the tall tale with the tensions between scientific knowledge and para-scientific or pseudo-scientific discoveries. This tension recapitulates 29 The prefacing of a novel or short story with an exposition from the author is a tradition of classical Chinese fiction. 277 the hermeneutics of xin li or psychic power discussed in the introduction: how do New Mr. Windbag’s adventures draw from both turn-of-the-century’s preoccupations with technological progress and scientific rationalism and from theories of spiritual transcendence, hypnosis, animal magnetism and mental communication, which lie outside the strict domains of science? A survey of Xu’s aesthetic views helps to better place him in the context of the writer’s intellectual milieu. In Xu’s critical essay, “On the Origins of the Forest of Fiction,” he singles out Hegel’s notion of the subjective expression of art to fit with Julius von Kirchmann’s aesthetic theory of the sensual immediacy of realism (Fiss 15-18). According to Xu’s reading of the German lawyer, politician, and philosopher, aesthetic pleasure arises from the achievement of the concrete ideal (juxiang lixiang) ( ), metaphorical or figurative ideals, as well as from idealizations in general (lixianghua). Before returning to the short story, a short summary of these three aesthetic views is in order. Xu first develops from his interpretation of Kirchmann the notion of an “emotional aesthetics” (ganqing meixue), which have to arise from “images of real substances” to evoke our “visual intellect” and a variety of emotions (Chen and Xia 236). He substantiates what he calls the concrete ideal by outlining the differences between Western and Chinese novels. While Western novels tend to focus on the life of one individual, Chinese novels describe many events in the lives of multiple characters (ibid.). “Critics attribute this to the difference between civilization and barbarism, while I feel that the diversity of events and peoples are in fact the work of great literary genius” 278 (ibid.).Xu next assesses the beautiful by its “metaphorical or figurative nature” that imitates the concrete thing (ibid.). The creation of art has to be inspired by the senses. For this reason, according to Géraldine Fiss, Xu thus singles out aesthetic pleasure, next, rather than aesthetic beauty as the ultimate artistic goal (20). 30 The value of entertainment is significant for Xu: late Qing writers have to affect readers through emotional and therefore entertaining materials in order to convey insights about the future (ibid.). The fourth component of the beautiful is idealization (lixianghua), whereby “elements that are useless and superfluous . . . are removed for stimulating concrete feeling (shiti) so that its original nature (benxing) may be developed” (Chen and Xia 237). The following explanation of what Xu means by idealization is relevant for the science-fictional fantasy plot of “A Tale of New Mr. Windbag.” As for stories about the moon, travels around the world, the end of the world, and trips to the center of the earth and to the depths of the ocean that are increasingly innovative and diverse, they belong to scientific ideals that transcend the natural in order to encourage progress” (ibid.). Realism is not the exclusive domain for evoking the “concrete feelings” and the “original nature” of art. Fantastic literature and science fictional writings also embody Kirchmann’s philosophical idea of idealization. In Xu’s account, the unreal or the unnatural is not therefore useless and superfluous; scientific ideals, when the end goal is to encourage progress, are the highest form of idealization (ibid.). Science fiction and fantastic writings in general thus combine the elements of concrete ideals and metaphorical or figurative ideals for the higher purpose of challenging readers to exceed 30 I am grateful to Géraldine Fiss for allowing me to cite her unpublished manuscript. 279 the limits of the natural. Yet, while New Mr. Windbag’s adventures resemble “such stories about the moon, travels around the world, the end of the world, and trips to the center of the earth and to the depths of the ocean” (ibid.), the narrative is set in motion by his more than two-year quest for “non-knowledge” outside the domains of empirical science, which culminates in the inexplicable splitting between his spiritual and physical selves (Xu, “A Tale of New Mr. Windbag” 1). “A Tale of New Mr. Windbag” poses the question of the contradiction between science and non-science, and consequently, that of the power of literature to mobilize both scientific and non-scientific ideals in the name of progress. What the story gives us is thus a more complex and self-conscious view of idealization than appears in “On the Origins of the Forest of Fiction.” In “My Views on Novels” written in 1908 shortly before his death, Xu redirects his aesthetic inquiry to a discussion of literature’s functions in society. Although the writer agrees that fiction can hasten the development of our society in an entertaining way and intensify our characters and senses, he disagrees that the novel’s task is to reflect society as it is: “society certainly does not come from novels, but novels come from society” (Chen 310). Even though novels are derived from life’s “events” (shiji), they no doubt assist with the “development of power” and the “surging of desire” in life. (ibid.). In short, our only access to society and its events is through records and accounts, but Xu suggests that such accounts need to be told in “an entertaining way” that “intensifies our character and senses” (ibid.). As Fiss points out, even though Xu shares with Liang Qichao the belief in the immense transformative power of fiction, he reverses Liang’s famous formulation of society’s origin in novels in the essay “New Novels” 280 (“Xin xiaoshuo”) in order to emphasize the power of novels to interpret and affect society (14). Xu’s views of aesthetics and literature do not, in my opinion, form a consistent theory of narration, in particular, a theory of how narrative modes structure literature’s relation to society. Whereas his earlier essay, “On the Origins of the Forest of Fiction,” outlines the writer’s theoretical insights into aesthetics, the later “My Views on Novels” professes the practical preoccupation of many late Qing intellectuals with fiction. The narrative mode of “A Tale of New Mr. Windbag” seeks to bridge this theoretical- practical gap. My analysis of the story departs from that of Fiss, and namely from her claim that New Mr. Windbag perceives the world in the “most subjective way imaginable,” and in doing so, endorses Kirchmann’s ideal of an “aesthetic realm” that traces the “unification of subject and object” in the process of perception (21). Instead, I propose that the protagonist of Xu’s story multiplies his subjective points of view and in doing so circumvents the integration of the world-as-object into his process of perception. The story strays from conventional utopian narratives in that it is not a contrast between existing and ideal societies; rather, it disintegrates the narrative perspective in order to put forward the notion of ideal selves as those which lie in the possible-but-not-yet-actual elsewhere. Toward the end of the story when the reunification of the narrative perspective results in New Mr. Windbag’s invention of brain electricity, the self ceases to be an abstract, metaphysical problem; instead it enters the social world of economic production as the “general productive forces of the social brain” in Marx’s analysis (Grundrisse 694). 281 Whether it is with the metaphysical or material self, “A Tale of New Windbag” underscores the tension between individuals and society. In the words of Ernst Bloch, The question about the self is the only problem, the resultant of every world- problem, and to formulate this Self- and We-problem in everything, the opening, reverberating through the world, of the gates of homecoming, is the ultimate basic principle of utopian philosophy (206). Unlike A Traveler from Altruria, the world of “A Tale of New Mr. Windbag” is unusually absurd. New Mr. Windbag is neither “of” society nor outside of it; his story, if anything, swings too quickly into his own subjectivity and his self-transformation. Save for a brief encounter with an old man at the center of the earth who turns out to be the ancestor of the Chinese race, he has no interaction with other human beings. However, in finding himself split into his physical and spiritual selves, his first-person narrative voice takes on the role of an external commentator not unlike that undertaken by Mr. Twelvemough in Howells’ novel, except that he navigates, not between two halves of society, but between two parts of his disintegrated self. Here is how his two selves are described. His spirit takes the form of a one-inch, gaseous sphere that, without eyes, ears, nose, or tongue, has extraordinary sensory perception, without hands or feet, can move without inhibition, and without circulatory, respiratory, digestive, and central nervous systems still carries out their functions (2). His physical body has all the abovementioned organs and systems that his spirit lacks; curiously, everything seems to be in place except for his brain (3). The deliberate absence of his brain from either his spirit or physical self, however incredible is a narrative sleight-of-hand that must be taken seriously. For where can the brain be except in the narrative perspective of the first-person “I,” who cannot be positioned either within his 282 spiritual or physical self because it speaks interchangeably and at times simultaneously for both of them, as the center for all biological functionality? We are led to believe that it is this speaking “I” who is capable of both affect and rationalism. After realizing that his physical self lacks a brain, New Mr. Windbag fears that even with a central nervous system, he will be “non-thinking” and “non-functioning,” “no different from a dead person” (ibid.). Absurdly, he spends the next twenty-four hours weeping over such misfortune, before realizing that if he is truly dead, he cannot possibly be crying (ibid.). Then New Mr. Windbag has a revelation: “Now that I [yu, ] clearly have two bodies, one spiritual, and the other physical, I [yu, ] shall make the best use of them to study everything and invent everything: though I [yu, ] am of one person, my capabilities reach far beyond those of a singular person” (ibid.). Hence it is with such enhanced capabilities that the speaking “I” addresses his spiritual and physical bodies in the third-person plural “they.” New Mr. Windbag’s new powers reach far beyond those of a single individual because he is, quite literally, more than one person. What is more fantastical than his out-of-body and out-of-spirit experience is the first-person narration that is simultaneously a third-person reference to his “selves.” Delighted by this discovery of his increased powers, New Mr. Windbag proceeds to laugh hysterically for another twenty-four hours (ibid.). From affect, to rationalization, and back to affect, it is the speaking “I” who takes account of his disparate selves. In my reading, the splitting of New Mr. Windbag posits another self over and above the Cartesian duality of the mind and the body. Even as he goes on to explain that he is able to combine his physical body and spiritual self into one, or split 283 them at will in various permutations (ibid.), the grammatical imposition of the “I” who continues to address his physical and spiritual halves in the third person prevents any clear unification of the subject. Instead, the grammatical disjuncture between the speaking “I” and the “they” whose experiences “I” narrates raises questions about the cognizant subject who exists outside of any reliable notions of the self. Here, Fiss’s analysis of the story’s treatment of the self serves as an interesting counterpoint to my analysis. According to Fiss, while the narrator’s “initial self-fragmentation mirrors the deeply unsettling sense of disunity, disorientation, and disruption many late Qing intellectuals were experiencing on a subjective level,” the subsequent realization of his increased capabilities signifies an “epistemological enlightenment through self-renewal” (ibid.). In my examination of New Mr. Windbag’s subjectivity, I argue that the absurd complexity of the social-I in “A Tale of Mr. Windbag,” through which the first-person narration simultaneously acts as a third-person narrator, does not undo the sense of disunity and disorientation of the late Qing malaise. As a result, the story up to this point denies itself “epistemological enlightenment through self-renewal” (ibid.). Another episode later in the story, where we learn of New Mr. Windbag’s visit to the planet Venus, further augments the complexity of New Mr. Windbag’s multiple subjectivity. Venus is described as a utopian landscape despite or perhaps because of its lack of human life. The planet is covered in gold, jade, emeralds, and other gems in various shapes and sizes (12), and upon further exploring his surroundings, New Mr. Windbag discovers a mollusk-like organism in a piece of jade and a crystal-like, moth- shaped mineral that emits extreme heat (13). He then concludes that since the dissipation 284 of heat contributes to the development of life on Earth, life on Venus must be at its pre- historical, pre-vertebrate stage (ibid.). At this point, New Mr. Windbag’s knowledge of evolutionary biology is redirected to the colonial desire for a new land and a new race of people: “If I reside here permanently, I will indeed be the ancestor of Venus humans!” (ibid.). However his ancestral desire gets more complicated. In the next passage, New Mr. Windbag comes across his lost diary that records his hot-air balloon expedition to the North Pole five years ago. He has never been to Venus before; hence it is for no explainable reason that his diary should have made its way there. However, if we take the significance of his diary as self-writing to heart, it perpetuates the fantasy of origins that he expresses earlier (ibid.). Since the diary that records his adventure predates the current narrative, it is also antecedent to New Mr. Windbag’s speculation about his role as the origin of a new human species on Venus. Without needing to go into details of his diary entry, one should point out that the narrator’s previous expedition in a hot-air balloon falls within the more traditional genre of travel-adventure narratives popular in the late Qing period. Not only does his earlier adventure contrast with the ongoing out-of-body- and-spirit metaphysical journeys in “A Tale of Mr. Windbag,” but the mysterious way in which this diary made its way to Venus among other primordial life-forms further suggests the narrator’s disoriented self. The folding of New Mr. Windbag’s old diary into his larger autobiographical account raises the question of the origin of his first-person narration. Eventually, New Mr. Windbag is as confounded as we are as to how his lost diary is here in outer space and decides that he shall leave it there on Venus for future archaeologists (ibid.). Since the narrator does not remain on Venus (he subsequently gets 285 caught in a gravitational whirlpool and finds himself back on Earth with his spiritual and physical halves reunified) and become the ancestor of human life there, his diary becomes his stand-in, an arche-fossil not unlike the mollusk, the heat-emitting minerals, and other organisms. The absurdity of this account notwithstanding, the mysterious reappearance of his old diary must be seen in light of the larger problem of the story’s first-person narration of disparate selves. Who or what begins the narration that we are presently following? Does the lost diary imply that one can make sense of the beginning of life only in the presence of a living observer and human records? Is it at all possible to think the existence of pre-historical life before human consciousness? Is the found object, namely, New Mr. Windbag’s old diary, not already the trace of an earlier narrating subject? These are questions that not only further unsettle New Mr. Windbag’s subjective perspective; they also underlie much of the epistemological and ontological premises of philosophical inquiries in general. Empirical science has so far been able to calculate the age of the universe prior to the existence of human beings. But Xu’s fantastic insertion of the narrator’s diary into a discussion about the origins of life also means that scientific objectivity needs to be supplemented with the question of narrative perspectives and subjective points-of-view. 31 31 The question of the arche-fossil, and the ancestrality of reality anterior to human life-forms, is posed elegantly by Quentin Meillassoux in After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Meillassoux argues that the philosophy of speculative realism makes it possible to think the absence of giveness in the ancestral, for “the problem of the arche-fossil is not the empirical problem of the birth of living organisms, but the ontological problem of the coming into being of giveness as such” (21). The “absence of giveness” as such is part of the philosopher’s larger problem to grasp the “in-itself” by getting out of transcendentalism, and the centrality of the subject. The critical relevance of Meillassoux’s philosophy for literary criticism will have to 286 Milena Dolezelova-Velingerova, in “Narrative Modes in Late Qing Novels,” argues that the study of narrative structures and modes are “necessary steps to the resolution of some essential problems of Chinese fiction and its history” (57). Even when late Qing fiction has received “long-overdue theoretical attention,” the indifference to narrative mode persists, perhaps due to the fact that the distinction between first- and third-person narration “is less conspicuous in Chinese than in any Western language” (ibid). Chinese verbs have no indication of person and traditionally the language tends to leave out sentence subjects and pronouns altogether (ibid.). All the same, first-person personal narrations are well established in Chinese classical language (wenyan), and Wu Woyan (Wu Jianren)’s Strange Events was the first attempt at the first-person narrative in the vernacular (baihua) language (66). Dolezelova-Velingerova correctly points out that while classical first-person narratives, like Shen Fu’s Fou sheng liu ji (Six Chapters of a Floating Life), is more like confessional prose focusing on the narrator’s private life, marriage, and emotional experience, the first-person narration of vernacular (baihua) literature, which Wu pioneers, emphasizes the narrator’s observation of the society around him and relegates the narrator’s personal life, including his feelings and emotions, to the background (ibid.). Wu’s novel is engaged with political and social issues unique to China. Given the lack of deeper psychological introspection, Strange Events cannot be said to have copied from the Western first-person novel or the modern Japanese autobiographical novel (ibid.). According to Dolezelova-Velingerova, “the basic question be a much later project. For now, it suffices to ask if it is possible to think the absence of giveness when the first- or third-person narrator weighs so heavily in most literary traditions. 287 ‘Who am I?,’ prevalent in Western fiction is in China overshadowed by the query ‘Who am I in my society?’” (72). One might object to Dolezelova-Velingerova overgeneralization of “Western” and “Chinese” first-person narratives. Nonetheless, her distinction of the question “Who am I in society” as the predominant question asked by Chinese writers is valuable for my purposes. “A Tale of New Mr. Windbag” is written in classical wenyan language, and yet, New Mr. Windbag’s first-person narration is a clear departure from the wenyan form in that he is concerned with political and social issues surrounding the question of late Qing nation-building. At the same time, the narrator does not fail to convey his emotional and psychological insights, as we have seen from the outpouring of affect we earlier described. As a result, “A Tale of New Mr. Windbag” both conforms to and departs from the wenyan and baihua traditions, and it is to such innovations in the first-person narration that we have to be attentive. New Mr. Windbag proclaims near the beginning of the story his decision to “study and invent everything” with his increased powers. The first task he accomplishes is to transform his spiritual body into an incredible light source that can illuminate the whole world (3-4). He first shines his light onto Europe and America, which sends scientists rushing to investigate the strange phenomenon using the telescope, the photometer, and the camera (4). When they fail to identify the light source, New Mr. Windbag scoffs at the backwardness of so-called scientific nations, and turns his light on his homeland in the hopes of discovering a more civilized world there (5). But in China, where it is past noon, everyone is in deep slumber, and lost in their dreams (ibid.). For the 288 small fraction of the population who are awake, they remain in their bedchambers, embracing their wives with small bound feet, while completely ignoring the intense light shining upon them (ibid.). New Mr. Windbag becomes so enraged with what he sees that he wants to set himself on fire and raze his country to the ground so that it may start again as a new land awaiting the discovery of a future Columbus (ibid.). New Mr. Windbag’s failure to enlighten his countrymen is a typical allegory employed by many late Qing intellectuals, including Xu, who express their frustrations and disappointment at Chinese society. Similar frustrations are apparent in “A Tale of New Mr. Windbag.” For instance, New Mr. Windbag’s physical self’s journeys to the center of the earth and meets the ancestor of the Chinese race, who checks on his descendents’ well-being by a daily projection of the “essence” of their “characters” onto a screen (9). On the day of New Mr. Windbag’s visit, the screen projects a heavy cloud of black smoke, which as the Chinese ancestor explains, indicates the state of “poison” among his people (ibid.). The host proceeds to show his guest the display of human characters bottled in various solid, liquid, and gaseous forms, whose colors indicate the development of a human character (ibid.). A transparent liquid stage indicates that the person remains upright and independent without losing his communal character; at the opposite end of the spectrum, the liquid morphine shows the most poisonous character that causes one to be demoralized, unhealthy, superstitious, and stupid (10). The old man laments the latter condition that seems to pervade Chinese society, and when asked by New Mr. Windbag if there are ways to save them, he replies, invoking the earlier allegory 289 of a whole country steeped in sleep and mindlessness, that he wishes he had a loud voice to awake them from deep slumber (ibid.). The reduction of human characters to their essences in various chemical forms reminds us of the episode in New Story of the Stone, where Baoyu encounters the Civilized Realm’s method of detecting civilized or uncivilized characters with projections from a X-ray mirror. The concern with making visible otherwise invisible personal characteristics and traits relates to my earlier discussion of the late Qing preoccupation with xin li, or psyche force that, with proper diagnosis and control, can be turned into a strong and healthy foundation for a renewed national spirit. A return to Henry Wood’s Ideal Suggestion through Mental Photography illustrates my point. There, Wood compares the human body to a “grand composite photograph of previous thinking and mental states” (qtd. in Liu). He argues that human forms are not only revealed through external physical forms, but that with the right kind of mental suggestion, we can alter the “deeper or trans-conscious mind” (ibid.). This notion of the malleability of human thought returns in “A Tale of New Mr. Windbag” when the narrator chances upon the rather nightmarish technology of “human manufacturing” on the planet Mercury that entails the replacing of existing brain fluid with a pristine, white substance. On Mercury, New Mr. Windbag witnesses the transformation of an aged man into a healthy, young person (11-12). This method appears to the narrator both remarkable and highly efficient, for “all elements of human thought and activities are dependent upon the brain” (12). He remarks to himself that when he returns home, he will “amass capital” and set up a “brain improvement” company in Shanghai, which would then rejuvenate the weak Chinese 290 society (ibid.). This entrepreneurial element in New Mr. Windbag’s ambition should not be overlooked. Toward the end of the story, he comes up with a more profound and less gruesome method of “brain improvement.” Upon his return to Shanghai, he attends a hypnosis symposium and learns about the curious powers of animal magnetism (18). He realizes that since his amazing journeys, and the reunification of his spiritual and physical bodies, his brain has undergone an “incredible transformation” (ibid.). “Every time I think of [the] uses [of brain electricity], I know [they] will present a huge obstacle to industries” (ibid.). New Mr. Windbag’s revelatory discovery is in line with the absurd tone of the whole tale, but in contrast to his preceding adventures to the center of the earth, to outer space and back, he is now concerned with industrial effects. His discovery of brain electricity is, I argue, nothing short of a rediscovery of political economy. But before elaborating on this, we should pay attention to how New Mr. Windbag describes his latest invention: Reflecting on my invention of brain electricity, I compare it to the smooth workings of the telegraph and wireless technology, effects of which will surely please society. Yet I feel that such technologies are mechanical and not natural. The use of natural energy is none other than the improved and widespread use of the brain, which everyone has. There being a natural communicative mechanism between people, once the brain receives a thought, depending on the magnitude, it is bound to undergo changes. (18) New Mr. Windbag goes on to explain that even though the brain naturally receives and sends thoughts, an unregulated traffic of multiple thought processes with various recipients or senders can be too chaotic (ibid.) Brain electricity, on the other hand, trains our brains to recognize faces and to categorize information according to the 291 receiver or sender’s information (ibid.). Moreover, it ensures a balance between sending and receiving, so that the energy-depleting process of sending and the energy-adding process of receiving balance each other such that the entire process does not damage one’s mental resources (ibid.). New Mr. Windbag does not really “invent’ brain electricity in the strict sense of bringing forth something that did not previously exist so much as enhance what Xu and his contemporaries believe to be innate psychic communication or telepathic powers. Brain electricity draws from the emphasis in spiritualism and mind cure on the fluidity of thought. Both movements in turn rely on hypnosis, electricity, and animal magnetism to explain the transmission of thought through space. A Shanghai newspaper, Dalu bao, reported on a lecture on hypnosis organized in 1905, the year in which Xu published “The Tale of New Mr. Windbag” (Luan 49). Xu was a member of the Chinese Education Society, with which the conference was associated, and it was very likely that he attended the hypnosis lecture and drew on its proceedings (ibid.). New Mr. Windbag is fascinated with the animal magnetism that constitutes a fundamental principle of hypnotic theories, which posits that the universe is made up of moving particles from the ether that serves as a medium between persons (Luan 49-50). Animal magnetism thus requires both material and spiritual or psychic forces for its communicative channels (ibid.). To see “A Tale of New Mr. Windbag” as solely metaphysical and non-scientific would be to neglect the role that these pseudo-scientific intellectual currents played for both American and Chinese writers of the period. As Luan points out, Xu’s story not only shows an understanding of contemporary science, it also reveals, on a deeper level, an 292 interest in the soul and psychic powers (50). The two strands are almost inseparable. Other science fictional works of the period, such as Chen Hongbi’s translation of an English short story, “Electric Crown” (“Dianguan”), Zudai’s “Secret Chamber” (“Mimishi”), and Qiushan’s Exterminator (Xiaomieqi), all foreground the brain as the spiritual or mental counterpart to the imaging processes of new technologies (Luan 50-1). Xu’s evocation of brain electricity also draws from Chinese philosophical traditions. A case in point is Tan Sitong’s philosophical work, Renxue, published posthumously between 1898-1901. Tan was similarly influenced by Fryer’s translation of Wood’s Ideal Suggestion Through Mental Photography, though he in turn compares mental healing to the Hinayana Buddhist notion of personal salvation and the Confucian ethic of “sincerity” (cheng) (Kwong 146). As Tan writes in a letter to his friend, to whom he forwards a copy of Wood’s book, “a world community and a new international order could come into existence” by the power of the mind alone (ibid.). The utopian internationalist or universalist weight of Tan’s thinking comes through in Renxue when it identifies the teachings of the Buddha, Confucius, Mo-zi, and Jesus Christ as all exemplifying the virtues of benevolence, beginnings, and nothingness (Kwong 153). The book’s central idea of ren is generally translated as “benevolence” but the Chinese character of ren, formed by the radicals for “human” and “two” also denotes the basic association between two people (Tan 38). In Tan’s explication of ren’s twenty-four principles or characteristics, the first principle is tong or throughness, the ever-changing and ever-lasting rule of life (47). The “tools” for such an ever-changing interconnectedness are ether, electricity, and psychic power (ibid.). Later in the book, Tan 293 writes, “the brain is electricity materialized and electricity is brain-without-form” (60). Consequently, this notion of self is both Buddhist and New-Thought in principle: “all beings exist for me, and yet I do not increase; I exist for all beings, and yet I do not decrease” (ibid.). Kwong captures the intellectual thrust of Renxue succinctly: neither Chinese nor Western, and yet both Chinese and Western, “the dialectical potential of such an outlook flowered into a universalist perspective that went beyond the China-West polarity and other forms of cultural parochialism” (163). According to Luan, “A Tale of New Mr. Windbag” and Tan’s uses of brain electricity are not only similar in name; they are basically identical in their structures (52). Both emphasize the duality of matter and spirit in the projection of thought through various mediums such as animal magnetism and ether (ibid.). However, New Mr. Windbag’s invention goes further than the late Qing interest in psychic energies as a source for the renewal of the nation. For what is intriguing about Xu’s adaptation of brain electricity is his attention to its practical effects on industry. Looking back from the novel’s conclusion, the narrator’s entire journey that begins with the fragmentation of his cognizant self leads up to the technological development of this alternative energy source. To recall, New Mr. Windbag is inspired to develop brain electricity not only because of his learning about animal magnetism during the hypnosis conference, but also from the experiences of his mind-body split, which result in a transformation of his brain (18). Since I have argued that his brain resides in the speaking “I” that refers to his spirit and physical halves in the third person, New Mr. Windbag’s discovery of brain electricity is simultaneously a rediscovery and reunification of his 294 cognizant self. It is also at this point of the story, with the joining of the practical functions of brain electricity to the narrative capabilities of the “I,” that Xu finally comes close to the sense of “epistemological enlightenment through self-renewal” as argued by Fiss (44). At this point, however, New Mr. Windbag leaves the cloistered world of the self and enters the social world of economic production. Once he develops what is an extension of his transformative experience as a fragmented self, the result resembles an entrepreneurial commodity. Mr. Windbag’s establishment of schools to teach brain electricity is his cultural capital, a global educational conglomerate whose classes and students extend across the Pacific Ocean to San Francisco, across the South Pacific and Indian Ocean to Africa, the Red Sea, and all the way through the Mediterranean to Europe (19). New Mr. Windbag’s schools of brain electricity are so popular that satellite campuses have to be set up in Tianjin, Yantai, Ningbo, Fuzhou, Guangzhou, Hankou, and Chengdu (ibid.). In half a year, students have increased to two hundred million. New Mr. Windbag is not slow to boast of such accomplishments, as he thinks of himself as the only self-made educator in “all of man’s history” (ibid.). Others scoff at his hubris, and predict that his inventions will not bring him any good (ibid). And little does the narrator foresee that the production and commercialization of this universal energy source will replace companies that produce candles, gas, electrical lamp, electricity, telecommunications, shipping and railroads, resulting in severe unemployment worldwide (19-20). Brain electricity, which replaces both labor and other machines such as the telephone and trains, evokes the kind of global capital that Marx was writing about 295 in the nineteenth century. It is also remarkably similar to our present search for alternative energy sources. Thus even though “A Tale of New Mr. Windbag” does not conform to American utopian narratives that foreground the uneven distribution of wealth, mass unemployment and massive strikes as the driving force for a re-imagination of society, it accounts for the same economic disturbances by reversing the cause-and-effect of utopian change. Whereas prior to New Mr. Windbag’s invention, people are employed to operate telephone lines, the telegraph, electricity generators, and so forth, now they actually possess the means of production in the form of brain electricity. Yet, that workers are nonetheless laid off can only mean that they are dispossessed of their means of production. By ending instead of beginning with massive unemployment brought about by a change in the ownership of the means of production and the relation between these two phenomena, Xu’s short story blurs the line between utopia and dystopia and forcibly introduces the question of labor and capital into a story that on the surface appears to be nothing more than an absurd fantasy. The ambivalence of brain electricity is that it is, despite New Mr. Windbag’s vision, at once natural and mechanical. While the product makes possible the naturalization of a machine within the body, the man now becomes estranged from the machine. This crossing between man and machine can be explained through Marx’s definition of fixed and circulating capital. Following Antonio Negri and Amy E. Wendling, I refer to the section in Grundrisse that discusses machinery as “The Fragment on Machines” (Wendling 100). There, Marx defines fixed capital, i.e. raw materials and machinery, as that which is fixed in the production process and is consumed within it, 296 whereas circulating capital is the reproduction of the relations of capital that make up the worker’s consumption and maintenance of himself as living labor capacity (676-678). Although fixed capital does circulate, it does so only in order to be consumed in production, hence Marx’s distinction of it as “means of production” rather than living labor capacity as the relations of production (678-679). Marx points out that this distinction is based on fixed value’s use in the production process, and not by some inalienable “mode of their being” (681). Hence while “matières instrumentales” (French in the original) such as coal, wood, grease, oil have use values for the process of the production process, the same materials also have a use value outside of production and can be consumed non-commercially (680). Marx is here only concerned with the machine’s “durability, or its greater or lesser perishability” determined by the amount of time during which it can continue to perform its function, whereby its use-value becomes a “form-determining moment, i.e. a determinant for capital as regards its form, not as regards its matter” (685). The differentiation between form and matter is thus crucial for the distinction between fixed and circulating capital in Grundrisse: “things in themselves” are neither fixed nor circulating, but for Marx, this idealist view is no better than a kind of “crude materialism,” which regards “as the natural properties of things what are social relations of production among people” (687). Since nothing is “natural” or “mechanical” in and of itself, but only in its use-value in the production process, brain electricity is a natural energy source that becomes mechanical in its use. Under capitalist modes of production, machines “act upon workers like an alien power” (692-693). “Labor appears, rather, merely as a conscious organ, scattered among 297 the individual living workers at numerous points of the mechanical system” (693). Man is subsumed under the “total process of the machinery itself,” and the “living (active) machine” confronts the individual worker’s “insignificant doings as a mighty organism” (ibid.). Here machines become the real “organism” that is man. Inherent in Marx’s description of the capitalist system is thus a constant blurring between man and machine. The accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed to labor, and hence appears as an attribute of capital, and more specifically of fixed capital, in so far as it enters into the production process as a means of production proper. (694, my emphasis) New Mr. Windbag’s invention of brain electricity is literally speaking of the accumulation of knowledge and skill into the “social brain” of China. By right, this new “social brain” in Xu’s story belongs to labor, but the effects of mass unemployment paradoxically absorb this accumulation into capital.. Here we see the ultimately destructive force of New Mr. Windbag’s invention. The revolution in communication systems makes obsolete the very bodies in which brain electricity is stored: the latter, as fixed capital, is thus detached and absorbed from the “social brain” and labor, as circulating capital, is cast aside as a result. “The Fragment on Machines” helps us explain how brain electricity both enhances and replaces labor-power. Brain electricity causes worldwide unemployment because while it has radically replaced the previous means of production, that is, the machinery that enables the generation of electricity that is used in cable lines, it has not transferred the relations of production from the capitalists to the people. As long as the means of production remain in the hands of capitalists, and not those of the workers themselves, the relations of production make up capitalist wealth 298 and not social wealth. However, the problem, if it needs to be pointed out, does not lie within technology. As Marx explains, “it does not at all follow that therefore subsumption under the social relation of capital is the most appropriate and ultimate social relation of production for the application of machinery” (699-700). Marx’s speculation on the role of machinery in the socialist future thus takes strikes a different note than the one he ascribes to the role of machinery under the capitalist mode of production. Under socialism, machines will free up the worker for his or her development as a “social individual” (705). This coming social individual does not at all inhibit individuality. Since machines help reduce the necessary labor of society to a minimum, they ensure the development of the artistic and scientific potentials of the individuals in the time set free (706). The measure of wealth is then not labor time but disposable time, which is contrary to surplus labor time. The product ceases to be produced by isolated direct labor, but by the combination of social activities (709). Very simply, since workers are now in direct control of the social production process, the saving of labor time with machineries “reacts back upon the productive power of labor as itself the greatest productive power” (711-712). As a result, the distinction between fixed and flexible or circulating capital ceases to hold. “As regards the human being . . . in whose head exists the accumulated knowledge of society,” he is a machine (712). At the end of “A Tale of New Mr. Windbag,” the narrator is ridiculed, castigated, laughed and scoffed at for the destructive effects of his otherwise ingenious invention (20). His absurd adventures come to an abrupt end as he is forced to leave the country (ibid.). As to what remains of his global legacy, I can only attempt some 299 speculations in the spirit of New Mr. Windbag. A likely outcome of mass unemployment would take the form of labor strikes, which would be a fantastic sequel to pursue in itself, given that late Qing literature is entirely silent on the subject. This scenario would not likely be accepted by my readers, since with the exception of coastal cities such as Shanghai, China’s economy was still a feudal economy with little-to-no capitalist activity. This situation would, of course, change over the next few decades, and Xu’s story has already foreshadowed this possibility. If we entertain the possibility of a mass strike, an even more speculative scenario emerges whereby some sort of socialist economy continues to develop the use of brain electricity in the hopes of freeing up labor time for the development of free social individuals. New Mr. Windbag’s grand plan would finally be, in Marx’s vocabulary, China’s “social brain.” But this second scenario is even more absurd, and here historians, both Marxists and non-Marxists, will not fail to point out that China could not progress to late capitalism and, moreover, socialism when it had not even attained the capitalist mode of production. Taking these objections into account, I nonetheless posit the following thesis: Xu’s story could not in all “historical accuracy” follow the course of mass strikes, and from there, some form of a socialist revolution because New Mr. Windbag’s invention unsettles the very teleology of the history of political economy so persuasively argued by Marx and others. 32 In doing so, New Mr. Windbag has finally fulfilled his quest, stated at the beginning of the story, for the so-called “non-knowledge” that lies outside the boundary of empirical science. This non-knowledge is not the splitting of his body into spiritual and physical halves, or his 32 This argument brings me back full circle to Chapter Two, where I show how Vinton’s Julian West unsettles the teleological history of primitive accumulation. 300 ensuing adventures, or even the ability to refer to his fragmented selves in the third person, as I have proposed. If he has indeed found such a “non-knowledge” that is worthy of its name, I find no better way to put it other than in a line from Marx’s Capital: “Mr. Money-bags must be in a situation where he can find in the market a peculiar commodity whose use value possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value” (186). And this commodity is brain electricity. Unbeknownst to his critics, Xu Nianci has created one of the most daring works of political economy. IV. Conclusion I have tried to lay down a transpacific circuit of spirit telegraphy that runs between Howells’ A Traveler from Altruria and Xu’s “A Tale of New Mr. Windbag.” Looking back, I hope that my heuristic way of bridging the two works has not misled readers into thinking that I am examining the actual development of the cable lines that connected the U.S. to China, which were completed in 1902, before the publication of “A Tale of New Mr. Windbag.” But the first expansion of telegraph networks into Asia, motivated by the increase in Western trade with China after the Opium Wars in 1840 and the development of the Trans-Siberian telegraph line as an alternative route to America from Europe, is not irrelevant for my purposes (Baark 55). Marx attributes to the telegraph the shortening of the time of circulation for commodities and capital. At the same time, “the same progress and opportunities created by the development of transport and communication facilities [made] it imperative, conversely, to work for ever more remote markets, in a word – for the world market” (qtd. in Baark 53). Accompanying the development of the electrical and Morse telegraphs over the course of the nineteenth century is the increasing 301 interest in spiritualism, mind cure, and mental healing, which would pave the way for psychical studies of the unconscious in the United States. 33 Despite the disparities between these developments and their internal quarrels, they all referred to electricity and technological communications to explain the invisible traffic that are thoughts and mental energies. To the extent that mental communication knows no bounds, it must also be rationalized for different cultures, religions, and languages. Hence in the words of an American spirit medium, “the germs of revelation are the same with all nations. . . . mediumistic powers have ever been adapted to localities and conditions, among the Jews, the Chinese, the Persians and others. The appearances of the letter have differed, yet been adapted” (qtd. in Taves 195). James M. Peebles, editor of the spiritualist publication, Banner of Light, compared spiritualism to a “Parliament of Religions” (Taves 197). Spiritualist beliefs traveled, as do telegraphs, to “remote markets.” But as we in literary studies know quite well, technology and cultural practices are complex processes that cannot be reduced to simple “transfer” or “influence.” The history of technology is best studied in terms of a technological “dialogue,” where innovation results from the interaction between different kinds of knowledge and technique (Baark 9). It is in the spirit of such dialogues that I have ventured to compare Howells’s and Xu’s works. Their respective narrative modes and structures allow me to trace A Traveler in Altruria’s reference to disembodied spirits to the larger question of Howells’ realism, and “A Tale of New Mr. Windbag”’s metaphysical drama to the relation between the scientific and the spiritual, and the human or organic and the 33 Caplan’s study discusses this history, and in particular Henri F. Ellenberger’s The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. 302 mechanical. In this chapter, my analysis moves from the turn of the century’s twin fascination with spiritualism and communicative technology, to its theoretical implications for the medium that is fictional narration. “Transpacific Spirit Telegraphy” is thus both historically inspired and theoretically driven. If such an approach is mildly schizophrenic, it is perhaps due to the very nature of utopian fiction, which confronts the contradictory impulses of fact and fiction, history and speculation. This chapter’s focus on the challenges posed by social narrations of utopia instead of specific utopian characteristics or themes indicates concern less with the formal classification of utopian narratives than with narrative strategies that appear utopian because of incomplete narrations of the social. While the same might be said of my study of Asian, primitive accumulation in the character of Julian West in Looking Backward and Looking Further Backward, and to the invention of nationalism in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and New Story of the Stone, the first-person narrations of A Traveler from Altruria and “A Tale of New Mr. Windbag” direct attention more sharply to the tension between subjective cognition and the demands of a more objective story. This is how Howells and Xu’s various explorations of spiritualism and the power of mental suggestion bring out the question of the relation of the first-person narrator to his story and by extension, to society. It is with this focus on narration that I approach the different treatments of utopia in the two works: if Mr. Twelvemough’s narration foregrounds the difficulty of narrating utopia to non-utopian readers in the figure of the “spiritual solvent,” New Mr. Windbag’s fragmented selves embody the narration of utopia. His eventual invention of brain electricity can be seen as the becoming- 303 technology of spiritual solvency. Utopia is not a thing that narrates itself; the possibility of its narration conceals the social relations of production. Unlike Baoyu in New Story, New Mr. Windbag does not envision an international unity led by China and the Chinese race; as we have seen, the global reach of brain electricity is far from idealistic. It works, as Marx indicates, both in the service and to the detriment of a world market. In contrast, Howells does not project the collapsing of national boundaries in A Traveler from Altruria. His ambivalent views on immigration and cultural difference will allow us, in conclusion, to highlight the difference between the American and Chinese worldviews. On the one hand, Howells is known to have been a strong supporter of the Haymarket anarchists in 1887 and their socialist ideas from Europe (Alkana 96). On the other hand, in one of his early columns for the Atlantic, he warns of the “American race accomplish[ing] its destiny of dying out before the populatory foreigner” (ibid.). His depiction of the foreigner as “the oblique-eyed, swarthy American of that time,” sums up his attitude toward Irish and Chinese immigration (ibid). When the same issues of immigration and the porosity of national boundaries surfaces in the Altrurian Romances, however and as Alkana notes, “the utopian work transmutes them, first by handling with comic irony questions of immigration and foreign influence in the United States” (96-7). Hence while the American characters’ hostility to foreigners and foreign ideals are in line with Howells’s overall exposé of American principles, it is around the question of worldwide utopian change that the author’s reservations about racial, cultural, and national differences are revealed. At first, Mr. Homos’s explanation of Altruria’s state of isolation is rather innocuous. The utopia happens to be entirely self-sufficient and has no 304 commerce with the “egoistic world,” which is how he refers to other countries (191). But with purposeful isolation comes an unabashed patriotism: Mr. Homos describes the citizens’ love for their country as children love their mothers (190). In contrast, “it is impossible to love the stepmother that a competitive or monopolistic nation must be to its citizens” (ibid.) Unlike America and the rest of the egoistc world, Altruria functions according to the “justice and impartiality of a well-ordered family” where “no man works for another, and no man pays another” (191). The dark side to this notion of the family is, of course, its emphasis on a pure notion of ethnos, the people, and their biological lineage. As Mr. Homos goes on to reveal more about Altruria, it becomes clear that such a family is one predicated on exclusions. Hence despite his insistence that America and Altruria are really “one at heart,” when asked by a farmer if he could move to Altruria, the utopian guest replies, “Ah, you mustn’t go to Altruria! You must let Altruria come to you!” (208). The novel’s sequel, Through the Eye of the Needle, further equates immigration with foreign contamination. There, Mr. Twelvemough observes that Alturians are “forced to discourage foreign emigration . . . and obliged to protect themselves against what they believe an evil example” (qtd. in Alkana 97). In defending his belief that Altruria serves as the uncontaminated pinnacle of human goodness, Howells reminds us of Bellamy’s difficulties (Chapter Two) in accounting for the spread of utopian change to the lesser nations. Other cultures will one day evolve to Altrurian standards; in the meantime, utopia cannot risk its national – or familial – purity for them. 305 CONCLUSION I. The Prohibition That Is History In March 2011, the State Administration for Radio, Film and Television of the People’s Republic of China passed a ban on supernatural, alternative reality, and time-travel plots that encouraged feudalism, superstition, fatalism, and theories on reincarnation (The State Administration) 34 . This ban was less concerned with time travel to the future than with escapes to the past that might promote nostalgia for pre-communist China, and any changes and alternatives to the course of Chinese history (ibid.). In October 2011, during his speech at the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York’s Zuccotti Square, Slavoj Žižek mentioned the Chinese government’s censorship, which had by then been widely circulated on the Internet. According to a transcript of his speech published online, Žižek referred to the ban as a “good sign for China” because the need for such a ban proves that people there still dream of alternatives (Sarahana). 35 In contrast, the lack of such a prohibition in the United States shows that the “ruling system has oppressed our capacity to dream” (ibid.). American – though by this point, Žižek may be using “we” to refer to Western countries in general – films make it so easy to imagine asteroid crashes and the end of the world, but never the end of capitalism (ibid.). Embedded in the rapid and often 34 This information is taken and translated from The State Administration for Radio, Film and Television website. “Guangbozhongju guanyu 2011nian3yue quanguo paishezhizuodianshiju beiangongshede tongzhi.” March 31 2011. Web. March 12 2012. <http://www.sarft.gov.cn/articles/2011/03/31/20110331140820680073.html> 35 Sarahana, “Slavoj Žižek Speaks At Occupy Wall Street,” Impose Magazine. Oct. 10 2011. Web. March 8 2012. <http://www.imposemagazine.com/bytes/slavoj-zizek-at-occupy-wall-street- transcript> 306 sporadic logic typical of Žižek’s prose is the implication that alternative reality and time- travel plots threaten to change not simply history in the abstract sense, but specifically the historical narrative of the struggle against capitalism that culminated in the success of the Chinese communist revolution in 1949. The year 2011 also marked the ninetieth anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and historical dramas, shown both on Chinese TV and the big screen, bore much of the burden of celebrating the communist struggle. The official sanction of historical dramas on the one hand and the denunciation of time-travel narratives on the other cannot be explained only by motives of propaganda. It would be more productive to ask, instead: what is historiography but a kind of theoretical time travel? Ultimately, I am less interested in the real reasons behind the Chinese censorship than with the way in which Žižek presented the newsbyte at the Occupy movement’s headquarters. Whereas the PRC government bans time travel films and television so as to prevent any harkening back to pre-communist times or any undermining of the party’s role in the historical remaking of twentieth-century China, time-travel or alternative- reality storylines pose no threat to the U.S. and the “West” because their histories, or futures, for that matter, do not entail the overthrow of capitalism. Even if we disagree with the Slovenian philosopher about the extent to which only a ban like this shows that people still dared to dream of alternatives – an analysis that takes prohibitions to be symptoms of transgressive possibilities – his speech nonetheless underscores how history is an ideological minefield on which contemporary utopian impulses for alternatives are 307 contested. 36 While the etymology of utopia refers immediately to what is outside of space, Darko Suvin’s influential definition of utopia as “estrangement arising out of an alternative historical hypothesis” reminds us that utopias are also frequently outside of time (37). To revisit Phillip E. Wegner’s observation about the relation between ideology, utopia, and time, which I discuss in Chapter One: “if ideology creates the synchrony or place of a given social reality, then utopia marks its potential for diachrony or historical becoming” (18). By beginning my Conclusion with the PRC’s censorship of time-travel plots and Žižek’s interpretation of it, I hope to show that my study of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American and Chinese utopian narrations of nationhood, empire, and the supranational can be relevant for thinking through contemporary responses to late capitalism. Moreover, these opening remarks allow me to reflect on the problem of history and historiography more generally as a way to return to the question of my comparative methodology, stated in the Introduction, which is guided less by the influence-reception model than by a theoretical gap between the American utopian writers’ preoccupation with the ideal nation on the one hand and their Chinese counterparts’ interest in an international utopianism on the other. The preceding chapters examine a period during which American and Chinese writers incorporate alternative-reality and time-travel plots to realize their respective versions of the ideal social grouping. This ideal may take the form of the nation-state, empire, world unity, or configurations of all three. However, my study also shows how 36 By utopian impulse, I am referring to Bloch’s and Jameson’s distinction between the complete, totalizable utopian program and the more obscure utopian impulse that can be found in varied political expressions and practices, including realist texts, without a commitment to closure and totality. I discuss this distinction in Chapter One. 308 implications arising from time travel complicate and at times obstruct the realization of utopian as well as dystopian imaginations. As a result, dystopian narratives, instead of functioning through satire and irony as the negation of utopia, end up being an alternative version of the “good society.” Chapter Two analyzes just this latter scenario. There, I show how both Bellamy and Vinton collapse the protagonist Julian West’s time-traveling experiences onto the collective histories of the American nation. However, to the extent that Vinton draws on Julian’s pre-utopian experience plotted in Looking Backward, Looking Further Backward does not just succeed Bellamy’s work; it considers the question of succession as part of its argument against utopia. Vinton’s novel presents a future where the form of national memory becomes identifiable or at least structurally isomorphic with the foreign other against which it sets out to discriminate. By subverting the theme of the becoming-Asian of American industrialization, commonly used by other yellow-peril fiction to warn against the “invasion” of Chinese labor, Looking Further Backward shows that what is labeled as “Asiatic” enables the narration of America’s entry into a transpacific Chinese empire, which boasts of economic prosperity, individualism, and relative political stability. Chapter Three focuses on the role of technology and the invention of nationalism in Wu’s New Story of the Stone (Xin shitouji), and Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. But it also investigates the effects of time travel on the protagonists’ individual identities and on the larger question of technological progress. Hank Morgan, by traveling from nineteenth-century America to sixth-century England, embodies the association between technology, modernity, and the makings of the nation-state. Yet 309 Twain’s choice of the time-loop strategy undercuts the sense of inventiveness that his protagonist hopes to achieve through the introduction of modern technology from the future. Ultimately, Hank’s imperial mission to transform England into a medieval version of its latter-day empire fails because of the simultaneous failure of nation building. By way of contrast, while Jia Baoyu in Wu’s New Story of the Stone comes from the past and is a witness to rather than inventor of modern technology in contemporary Shanghai, he is no less inventive when it comes to his own fictional identity as a borrowed figure from Dream of the Red Chamber. It is this aspect of Baoyu’s fictional as opposed to mechanical inventiveness that enables him to reinvent the Chinese concept of “all under heaven” (tianxia) as a blending of the ideal nation-state and the world. Chapter Four departs from the preceding chapters in that it has little to do with time travel in the conventional sense unless the concept is extended to the annihilation of space and time under global capitalism. While Howells uses the more conventional utopian travel narrative of a traveler’s visit to late nineteenth-century America, Xu gets around both the travel and time-travel narratives and creates a radical first-person narrator unbound by either space or time. In “A Tale of New Mr. Windbag,” the eponymous narrator’s travels are not limited to one utopian location: by transcending the physical limits of personhood, he succeeds in inventing a form of labor-power that in theory connects individuals in a manner akin to telepathy but in practice resembles and eventually replaces the telegraph. I argue that despite the overriding concerns in late Qing fiction with political questions of Chinese sovereignty and reforms to dynastic rule, Xu’s creation of brain electricity conforms to and even exceeds Marx’s conception of labor- 310 power in its rethinking of the difference between labor-power as circulating capital and machines as non-circulating capital. In contrast, Howells’ A Traveler from Altruria may typify the appeal of American utopian fiction to direct economic reforms such as the leveling of class differences. Yet, its description of the alternative, socialist economy in Altruria is glancing: Howells spends more time delineating the Christian, family morality that lies behind the Altrurian consciousness than on questions of political economy. Despite these differences, the two works have in common with the other paired novels I study their ways of accounting for worldwide utopian change. The understanding of internationalism in “A Tale of New Mr. Windbag” is a social one in that it does not simply superimpose an ideal of international cooperation and supra-governance, but actually shows an understanding of the material forces that make possible the worldwide revolution in communicative technology. For this reason, New Mr. Windbag’s invention of brain electricity does not found a national utopia, but a global educational conglomerate that specializes in the international commerce of knowledge, which is applied to world capital and industrialization at the cost of worldwide unemployment. A Traveler from Altruria, by contrast, has a parochial view of utopia: Altruria is keen to keep its borders closed to the outside world and its sequel, Through the Eye of the Needle, more clearly equates foreign immigration with contamination. Like Bellamy’s, Howells’ progressive views on political and social equality and optimism in innate human goodness and cooperation are short-circuited by national and cultural chauvinism. What deserves remark is how much New Mr. Windbag’s global education conglomerate -- whose classes and students extend across the Pacific Ocean to San 311 Francisco, across the South Pacific and Indian Ocean to Africa, across the Red Sea and the Mediterranean to Europe, with satellite campuses in Tianjin, Yantai, Ningbo, Fuzhou, Guangzhou, Hankou, and Chengdu (19) -- resonates with the contemporary global restructuring of higher education. New Mr. Windbag’s lucrative brain electricity schools also bring to mind the growth of for-profit universities, their increasingly international status, and what these mean for university-industry relations and the not-for-profit, but nonetheless corporate university. In 2002, China passed legislation that allowed private higher education institutions to earn an “‘appropriate’ profit” (Altbach 25). Even while the majority of accredited universities are at present publicly administered, it is labor market supply and demand rather than government planning that decides resource allocation and utilization (Min 64-5). At the time Xu was writing (1905-1906), New Mr. Windbag’s self-made education empire foretells the far-reaching forces of a knowledge- based economy that thrives on the advances of distance learning and mass distribution of instruction made possible by emerging technologies and greater emphasis on career- oriented adult education at the postsecondary level. What is curiously prognostic about brain electricity is that its inventor’s very mode of instruction embodies the knowledge- commodity: we are told that no words need to be exchanged in his classes since teaching and learning are conducted by an invisible traffic of brain waves (19). When the story ends on the note of worldwide unemployment caused by brain electricity’s generation of energy that replaces electrical communications, it is fair to assume that this simultaneously spells the end of New Mr. Windbag’s education empire. Nonetheless, even if the protagonist manages to evade such a dramatic failure, one wonders whether 312 there would be a need for any of physical campuses and classrooms when everything that is required for the teaching of brain electricity would also be replaced by brain electricity itself. II. Toward More China in Theory Much more can be said regarding the significance of Xu’s short story for critical commentaries on the premium placed on innovation and technology in education, not to mention China’s economic transition that began in the 1980s, which led to an increasing presence of foreign education programs in China as well as more Chinese students studying abroad. The latter phenomenon brings up the issue of the “brain drain” in a globalized educational and labor market, and the relation between education and global citizenry. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) reported that 70% of Chinese students studying abroad between 1978 and 2006 had not yet returned to China (Brandenburg and Zhu 27). These issues lie beyond my current research and I point to them only as signposts for another project. I wish to dwell here instead on the position of Asia, and specifically China, in the global production of knowledge. I am also interested in surveying some of the debates about whether an historical or theoretical approach is the best way to approach East/West comparative studies. For this dissertation has no doubt been shaped, consciously or unconsciously, by the renewed interest in China in post-Cold War academic circles. As Daniel Vukovich eloquently puts it, the evocation of China in humanists’ theories of globalization and cross-cultural studies of China and the West has much to do with the country’s being in the economic spotlight, which raises again the idea that the superstructure follows the base (148). However, the increased 313 reference to China in Western theoretical works brings with it some risks. Vukovich cautions against the kind of “positional superiority” that Western theorists occupy when they assume a certain production of truth about “China” and the “economism of theory” that ensues. “Economism” can be used for a mode of argument that resists considering (or informing oneself about) materialities on the ground and that tends toward an increasing abstraction as though abstraction alone were the proper arena of truth. (148-9) Setting aside his analysis of the orientalist use of China in the theories of Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, I will zoom in on a point in his critique of the increasing abstraction in theory, which, as I read it, calls out for more rather than less theoretical work, or at least for a specific kind of theoretical practice. This point comes in Vukovich’s reading of Empire, when Hardt and Negri compare the Tiananmen incident to the Palestinian Intifada of 1989 and the Zapatista uprising for their “incommunicability” at both a “local level” and with other global struggles (153). According to Hardt and Negri, such failure of communication is symptomatic of the age of empire that heralds a new or future type of communication “based not on resemblances but on . . . differences”: “a communication of singularities” (Hardt and Negri, qtd. in Vukovich 153). Vukovich remarks that, in this view, “despite its alleged ephemerality and inability to ‘communicate’ locally or globally, Tiananmen nonetheless leaps ‘vertically,’ ‘touches’ ‘the global level,’ and ‘attacks . . . Empire’” (Hardt and Negri, qtd. in Vukovich 153). Vukovich wastes no time in pointing out that a mass movement like the Tiananmen Square incident very much relied on communication through big- character posters, handbills, and pirate broadcasts at least on the local level (ibid.). 314 Moreover, precisely because Empire wants to convince us that the multitudes and the common do actually exist and form a whole, “it is crucial to ask what such struggles as Tiananmen, the Intifada, and so on have in common” (ibid., my emphasis). It is not difficult to see how Vukovich is irked by Hardt and Negri’s chain of comparison between these disparate events because of their lack of engagement with concrete situations and political events (154). Unlike Vukovich, I do not question the philosophical aporias and the post-structuralist logic of differences behind Hardt and Negri’s thinking of singularity. However, the real weakness of Empire, in my opinion, is less its lack of historical knowledge in and of itself but more that it does not go far enough in explaining how the theoretical concept of “a communication of singularities” can be used as a comparative methodology that complements historical analysis. To be sure, historical knowledge can explain the similarities and differences between actual events like Tiananmen, the Intifada, and the Zapatista uprising, but it cannot tell us how to conceptualize and organize such similarities and differences into a comparative methodology. As Vukovich himself puts it, a responsible scholar should not “resist considering (or informing oneself about) materialities on the ground” (148-9). But just as “abstraction alone” is not and cannot be the “proper arena of truth,” “materialities on the ground” alone are insufficient and must be augmented with theoretical abstraction (ibid.). One gives more credit to “truth” when one assumes that there is already some kind of theoretical abstraction in the presentation of materialities. After all, history is not reducible to things one finds “on the ground.” If such were the case, one would then be giving too little credit to the jobs historians do. 315 When Vukovich faults Empire for assimilating “foreign contexts” by “a lack of mediation that is rooted in the antidialectical sources of their work,” (154), he is, without explicitly stating so, identifying a persistent conundrum in East/West comparative studies, namely, the encounter of (Western) theory with a non-Western “area.” The general forms of this debate often turn around the question of whether a theory is universal to the extent that it “applies” to non-Western writings and literary conventions. Here, allow me to revisit Haun Saussy’s responses to this question, which I discuss in Chapter One. He argues that “China” was “somehow part of post-structuralism and deconstruction” to the extent that the latter “is unable, for historical reasons, to think about anything without to some extent thinking or dreaming about China” (40). Hence Western theory’s interest in China is not really that of “a method coming to affect an area” when in fact “the area was somehow part of the method already” (ibid.). However, it is precisely the abstraction of Asia and China as a figure to be thought or dreamed about that Vukovich would object to, and he does so in the same essay by referring to Eric Hayot and another work of Saussy’s (158-9). The former claims that the attempt to counter Western theorizations with concrete historicities of China is “moralistic,” “debunking” because such attempt “falsely grant[s] to China or the West an ‘ontological stability’ that neither has” (Vukovich 158). In response, Vukovich argues that Hayot’s argument only holds at the level of the signifier and obscures the material, neocolonial relationship that structures the “West and the Rest” by a core/periphery division (ibid.). In other words, the insistence on the ontological instability of China and the West only works as a closed, self-referential discourse (ibid.). 316 Consequently, “all forms of knowledge – of writing China – are generally equivalent, as they are all ‘graphesis’ – China ceases to exist outside of constructions, dreams, or writings of ‘China’” (ibid.). In the face-off between Western theory and non-Western writings and dreams, Vukovich recognizes the latter as “foreign contexts,” “actual events,” or, if you like, “history” tout court. This is where my view diverges from his, because I do think that theoretical practice can accomplish something when it “yok[es] together facts, images, or events from around the globe into a contemporary theoretical framework that is recognizably Western in provenance” (ibid.). The “yoking together” that constitutes the Sino-West encounter does not have to fall into the trap of an “abstract thought experiment” along the lines of Hayot and Saussy’s works (158). Comparativism is not just a method “applied” to one’s objects of inquiry; it explains concrete historical conditions of literature and culture. I agree with Vukovich’s analysis of Hardt and Negri when it criticizes the lack of mediation and the undialectical nature of their thinking, which is surprising to say the least for two of the most prominent Marxist critics. In the wake of this critique, I find it more urgent than ever to seek to know precisely how we can compare events such as the USSR and China in the 1980s, or Tiananmen and the Intifada and Zapatista movements. Certainly historical research is very helpful in this respect, but it needs to be supplemented by theoretical reflection; mediation and dialectics are both instances of theoretical reflection. 317 III. “Always Compare!” To revise Frederic Jameson’s well-known slogan at the beginning of The Political Unconscious—“Always historicize!”—one might propose as a mediation between Vukovich’s historical position and the increasing abstraction of theory: “Always compare!” The act of comparing is less spoken-of than that of historicizing; but it is a no- less necessary dialectical operation. My comparative study of turn-of-the-century American and Chinese utopian fiction undertakes a rethinking of the relation between units of comparison. These units are the nation-state, to which corresponds the category of national literatures; empire, which shapes postcolonial criticism; and the international, which give form to transnational or world literatures. Using as my theoretical framework Marxist and post-Marxist critiques of group ideology and, in particular, Frederic Jameson’s insight that all group formations are utopian insofar as they express the unity of a collective, I show that the historical formation of nationhood and empire in the American, Chinese, and transpacific contexts coalesce unevenly in fantastic and sometimes dystopian visions of world unity. This process of uneven coalescence constitutes what I call the social narration of groups and collectivities, where the “totality” of society is not directly given, but is a problem for representation. By showing how the novels re-imagine the relationality between nationhood, empire, and visions of world unity, I also sought to emphasize the comparability between the study of national literatures, which is still the mainstay of most university literature departments, postcolonial and transnational literatures and criticisms. One implication of this approach is that the content of my study is also mediated through the forms of 318 comparison. For this reason, while most of the literature on nationalism--ranging from Anderson’s observation of the “inner incompatibility of empire and nation” (83), or Gellner’s distinction between the pre-modern or anachronistic nature of empires and the modern characteristics of nationalism in his Nations and Nationalism (1), to Homi K. Bhabha’s study of colonial supplementarity in The Location of Culture (136)-- posits an opposition or incompatibility between empire and nationhood, I argue that the two are alternate and complementary expressions of a nation’s “social” life. Thus, Chapter Three demonstrates that the invention of nationalism is at the same time the invention of the “other,” that is, imperial desire. In this way, we can reinvigorate much of the focus on the nation in Chinese literature (a trait of third-world texts that Jameson identifies in “Third- World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism”) if we bring it into conversation with postcolonial criticism. As is already underway in the field of study called minor transnationalism pioneered by Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, 37 future collaborations between scholars working on on China and Southeast Asia, for example, will also chart a productive terrain outside of solely East/West comparative studies. Edward Said, in Culture and Imperialism, commended Frantz Fanon for alerting us to the ease with which orthodox nationalism can go down the same path as imperialism and for pointing to “the immense cultural shift from the terrain of nationalist independence to the theoretical domain of liberation” (Said 268). As a postcolonial intellectual, Fanon faced the challenge of transporting Western humanism to a subversive political and social consciousness beyond the nation. According to Said, the major 37 Lionnet, Françoise and Shih Shu-mei. Minor Transnationalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. 319 accomplishment of The Wretched of the Earth is its insistence that identitarian (i.e. nationalist) consciousness must make way for “new and general collectivities,” namely, “lateral, non-narrative connections among people whom imperialism separated into autonomous tribes, narratives and cultures” (273). Fanon first depicts colonialism and nationalism in a Manichean opposition, before inventing an independence movement with “trans-personal and transnational” force (269). Said claims that Fanon’s failure to make the anti-identitarian force explicit must in fact be seen as a “poetic and visionary” accomplishment. In my view, such an accomplishment comes close to Jameson’s explanation of the utopian impulse that escapes the totalizing gestures of a utopian program. Earlier in the twentieth century and in a very different imperial context, late Qing intellectuals appear to enact Fanon’s postcolonial utopian dilemma in their own semi-colonial terms. The coupling of utopianism with something supposedly as specific as national consciousness is not simply a play on the imagined community thesis that Anderson so powerfully develops. It is rather, as Arif Dirlik shows, to trace the historical development of Chinese nationalism as a new global consciousness over and above the constraints of its immediate political ideology (Anarchism 50). This revolutionary consciousness of a global organization of nations points to the origins of the emergence of a Chinese national consciousness that was utopian and idealistic because, while it “now took the nation as its point of departure,” it “perceived in the future the realization of universal ideals” (52). Charlotte Furth, among others, has pointed out the trend of pervasive utopianism in turn-of-the-century Chinese intellectual thought (Dirlik, Anarchism 55). 320 Thus when we investigate the contradiction that China faced when it tried to adopt the ways of the very Euro-American powers that threatened it, we must not see this contradictory adoption of nationalist discourse as a merely defensive move, that is, as a way to guarantee Chinese survival in a highly competitive environment (54). On the contrary, not only did Chinese nationalism open itself up to the world, it also brought with it “a new sense of time and space” or what Dirlik calls “an internationalist utopianism” (55). The ideal of world unity, once encompassed within the claims to universality of Chinese civilization but no longer contained within the conception of a spatially and temporally limited Chinese nation, was now projected upon the new world of nations as a historical project in whose realization China was to be a participant. (Ibid.) In the Introduction and Chapter One, I discussed Kang’s Book of Datong (Datong Shu), which assimilates elements of Buddhist and Confucian universalism with social Darwinism to present a future society that will transcend class, racial, gender, familial and ultimately, species boundaries starting from the removal of national distinctions. In Chapter Four, I also studied Tan’s Ren xue, or On Universal Principles (Kwong 165) in relation to “A Tale of New Mr. Windbag.” Both Kang and Tan’s works merit mentioning again in order to emphasize their roles as Chinese patriots and nationalists who looked beyond the achievements of national goals to a global transformation. “The earth,” writes Tan, “must be governed in such a way that there is only one world but no states” (95). The attempt to inscribe China’s place in the world leads these early nationalists to espouse a world without states, that is, a perfect, nonexistent, and therefore utopian space. It is also this strand of utopian nationalism without nations that introduces a strong 321 fictionality into late Qing political discourse. Utopia is fictional not because it imagines the yet-to-come good place, but because it marks the impossibility of a single, determined identity of the social collective, whether it is to take the form of or beyond the nation- state, or, as we have seen in the conclusion of New Story of the Stone, a world without nation-states but one organized around racial stereotypes and discrimination. This is another way of understanding Jameson’s definition of the allegorical expression of the unity of a collective as that which cannot be represented, but only figured (Political Unconscious, 281). This study does not uphold the nation-state and its correlative national literature as the only point of analysis. Just as utopia has much to say about the question of collectives and communities, narrations of the nation do not reduce, but can actually add to the flexible valence of social formations. I view my dissertation as contributing to Wang Hui’s criticism of the dominance of Western-centric “nation-state” logic or “nationalistic knowledge.” As Huters writes in his introduction to Wang’s The Politics of Imagining Asia, the China that Wang examines fits neither into the Western nation-state system, nor into the “concept of a traditional, agrarian empire, the definition of which precludes, in its very design, the capacity for self-conscious participation in the making of its own modern history” (3). Going further than my study of utopian sociality, Wang’s work uncovers what he calls a “social revolutionary perspective” on Asia that counters the various culturalisms, statisms, and theories of civilization that emerge in modern history (Wang Hui 34). The social revolutionary viewpoint held by Lenin, Sun Yat-sun, Li Dazhao, and others does not just study the actions of the nation-state, but various 322 social forces and their interrelations (ibid.). According to Wang, Lenin’s view of Asia, which includes China and Russia, is a synthesis between the logic of revolution and an updated view of Hegel’s conception of Asia as medieval, barbarous or ahistorical (ibid). On the one hand, national self-determination is sought within the imperialist international order. On the other hand, the state and its violence must be directed internally, “toward peasant interests and capitalist development” (34). What makes “Asia Asia is the special position of Asian countries in the capitalist world-system . . . produced out of . . . a dynamic analysis of the class composition and historical tradition internal to Asian societies” (ibid.). In short, the social revolutionary perspective requires a “dynamic analysis of the international and internal relationships of different societies” (35, my emphasis). This study has attempted to decipher just this dynamic relation between the international and the internal in utopian fiction. 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Creator
Ma, Shao-ling
(author)
Core Title
The social life of nations: a comparative study of turn-of-the-century American and Chinese utopian fiction, 1888-1906
School
College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Program
Comparative Literature
Publication Date
07/09/2014
Defense Date
05/01/2012
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
Comparative Literature,Imperialism,Internationalism,Marxism,nationalism,OAI-PMH Harvest,Science fiction,transnationalism,utopia
Language
English
Contributor
Electronically uploaded by the author
(provenance)
Advisor
Kamuf, Peggy (
committee chair
), Cheung, Dominic (
committee member
), Lippit, Akira Mizuta (
committee member
), Rowe, John Carlos (
committee member
)
Creator Email
shaoling.ma@gmail.com
Permanent Link (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-54051
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UC11289169
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usctheses-c3-54051 (legacy record id)
Legacy Identifier
etd-MaShaoling-925.pdf
Dmrecord
54051
Document Type
Dissertation
Rights
Ma, Shao-ling
Type
texts
Source
University of Southern California
(contributing entity),
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
(collection)
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The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...
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University of Southern California Digital Library
Repository Location
USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA
Tags
Marxism
nationalism
transnationalism
utopia