Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts Read online

  Literary Cosmopolitanism

  In these writing we encounter a temperament, vision, and expressive capacity that are decidedly cosmopolitan. Qian returns again and again to the seemingly narrow topics of literary and critical practice, but the scope of his inquiry is anything but provincial, as it targets the modes of perception that shape human experience. Unlike many of his contemporaries who used their familiarity with multiple languages and cultural traditions to reify the boundary between East and West and play one off against the other in dualistic fashion, Qian’s writings created a multidimensional field in which languages and ideas interact in unexpected ways.

  This phenomenon is most readily apparent in the stunning range of literary and cultural references that was to become a hallmark of Qian’s discursive style. In the essay “On Happiness,” for instance, the prophet Solomon, Stéphane Mallarmé, Su Dongpo, Wang Danlu, Novalis, Georges Rodenbach, and B. H. Brockes rub shoulders within the space of a paragraph. While such ostentatious displays of learning have dazzled many readers, they have also irritated others who have been unable to see past their superficial showiness. Qian would have been heartily amused, for instance, by a Western missionary’s guide to modern Chinese literature published in 1948, in which the exasperated reviewer of Fortress Besieged complains that “the author cannot refrain from being pedantic i.e. giving unnecessary and irrelevant foreign slogans and maxims (German, Spanish, French, Italian, etc.), a fact which repels most readers. Anybody could have done that by referring to a dictionary.”10 In fact, Qian’s comparisons are neither facile nor pointless, though they are certainly numerous.

  These literary and cultural allusions deserve comment because in Qian’s early works their onslaught is even more fast and furious. Besides showing off his much-remarked-on erudition, however, Qian’s juxtaposition of ideas that may have no previous genealogical link also opens up an arena of contesting ideas without presupposing the superiority of one over another on account of its origins. This is an early iteration of Qian’s unique brand of comparative literature—the close integration of literary and critical practice that defined his style as a creative writer and underpinned the structure of Limited Views. This literary approach seems to meld the traditional Chinese commentarial practice of juxtaposing relevant texts sans explanatory “connective tissue” with the spontaneity and contemplativeness of the “baroque style” of seventeenth-century European literature.11 The result of this combination is particularly notable for two reasons. First, its intellectual egalitarianism was (and is) a rare thing in a Chinese literary field hampered by polar political tendencies to either elevate or denigrate the foreign. Second, it challenges both Chinese and non-Chinese writers and comparatists to be competent in many languages and cultures. Qian did not just bring foreign ideas into China but also created a literary practice whose range remains unmatched by writers working only in European languages.

  In Margins and Human, Qian also expresses cosmopolitanism negatively by repeatedly castigating humans for their narrowness of vision. Qian saw this as a particular occupational hazard for the man of letters. In “Explaining Literary Blindness,” he compares the worldview of linguists and philologists to “Gulliver in Brobdingnag gazing up at the jade-white bosom of the empress and seeing her hair follicles but not her skin,” and to a fly “flying from one pinch of garbage to another” unaware of any world other than what it can see out of its tiny eye sockets. In “God’s Dream,” God’s authorial vanity blinds him to the true nature of his creations, man and woman, who soon turn against him. In “Inspiration,” a Swedish specialist in Chinese phonology refuses to interpret the meaning of a Chinese novel (translated into Esperanto) for his fellow Nobel Literature Prize committee members, telling them that “your inquiry just now lies in the area of Chinese semantics, which is quite outside my field of specialization. Whether the Chinese language contains meaning is a topic I should not blindly pass judgment on before I have obtained unimpeachable evidence.” Deferring his colleagues’ praise about his scholarly circumspection, the Sinologist “insist[s] that he was nowhere close to the [Nobel-winning] American ophthalmologist . . . [who] specialized only in the left eye, and did not treat any malfunction of the right.” Qian later revived this theme in a self-deprecating sense by titling his critical masterwork Limited Views.

  We see Qian’s literary cosmopolitanism not only in his thematic concerns but also in his use of figurative language. The simile, for example, with its transformative powers of juxtaposition, was one of Qian’s favorite linguistic devices for refining an idea. As Qian writes in Limited Views:

  The use of multiple similes to convey a single idea is a technique philosophers use in an attempt to prevent the reader from becoming fixated on a particular analogy and clinging to it rather than the idea. . . . A quick give-and-take enlivens the mind. When analogies and illustrations are presented en masse, each vying to be the most apt or alluring, the insights keep shifting and according themselves to different vehicles. In this way, each analogy gives way to the next and none lingers, the writing flows and does not dwell on a single notion, and the thought penetrates to all aspects of the subject and does not guard a single corner.12

  This observation alerts us to a tension in Qian’s prose between the multidirectional nature of figurative language and the singular truth posited by realism. Qian’s further observation, made during a discussion about poetry, that “the abundant use of imagery and similes . . . is cumulative and convergent”13 also aptly describes both his essays and his fiction. The extreme interpretation of Qian’s language play would be that he was a postmodern writer whose relativist treatment of languages and ideas created a realm of floating signifiers.14 Yet Qian at most skirted the bounds of the postmodern, because in playing with language’s malleability he reaffirmed its value. However tenuous the link between signifier and signified, Qian appreciated that words have meaning and impact.

  Qian’s insistence on maintaining a critical breadth of vision testifies to his independence as a thinker, particularly his detachment from the intellectual and political imperatives of his day. Qian claims in the preface to Margins (discussed in the following section) that his book is simply a projection of individual sensibility, but we can nevertheless take “Cold Room Jottings,” the title of the series in which four Margins essays first appeared, as indicating not just the frigidness of Qian’s accommodations in wartime Kunming but also the critical ideal of dispassionate appraisal, which Qian believed could be best realized from a “marginal” position.15 One of the hallmarks of the human, Qian argues in “Explaining Literary Blindness,” is humans’ possession of a “trans-subjective point of view”: the ability “to divorce questions of right and wrong, authenticity and falsity from their own personal gain and loss, and separate questions of good and evil, beauty and ugliness from their individual likes and dislikes.” Indeed, the self-possession that allowed him to complete these creative works during the material deprivations and political pressures of World War II may well have later helped him filter out the distractions of the Mao years to complete his monumental reappraisal of the Chinese literary canon.

  Self-Marginalization

  Another insight into Qian’s attitude toward literary-critical practice can be found in the innocuous preface to Written in the Margins of Life. Positing life as “one big book,” Qian proceeds to outline his view of how the book of life should be “read.” Distancing himself from the establishment (“book critic”) and its claims to authority, he celebrates the subjectivity of the individual response—the exclamation mark in the margins, the scribble between the lines. In doing so, Qian asserts his right to engage with his subject on his own terms without having to fit his thoughts and insights into a coherent grand narrative. He argues for the primacy of the discrete observation, waving aside the presumption that a critic must be consistent or systematic in his criticism.16 The studiedly casual, even tongue-in-cheek, tone belies the great degree to which this critical philosophy influenced
Qian’s life and works.

  Above all, it is a manifesto for independence. Reading emancipates new ideas, which are more easily attained and savored at a pace of leisurely browsing. While putting the world between two covers, as it were, Qian’s bookish metaphor implies that life’s inconsistencies and contradictions cannot be interpreted through a single idea. “Life-as-book” treats criticism of both life and literature as an ongoing dialogue, in which marginal scribblings expand the boundaries of the text itself. Furthermore, the metaphor advocates a mind-set open to free, wide-ranging language play. The posture invites the reader to lower his guard, to accept paradox and incongruity, and to join in the fun. As Qian tries to convince us at the end of “On Happiness,” “contradictions are the price of wisdom.”

  The title theme of Margins was an enduring refrain in the careers of Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang alike. The title Written in the Margins of Life was first proposed by Yang, herself a noted dramatist, translator, short-story writer, novelist, and memoirist. Half a century later, when the publishing house Sanlian was preparing to issue The Qian Zhongshu Collection, she revived this theme by grouping many of Qian’s other published essays under the title In the Margins of the Margins of Life (Rensheng bianshang de bianshang ). In 2007, at age ninety-six, Yang published a book of reflections on death and the afterlife under the title Arriving at the Margins of Life: Answering My Own Questions (Zou dao rensheng bianshang: Zi wen zi da ). The title phrase, she wrote in her preface, had stuck in her mind and inspired her to write down her own answers to the questions that no one else could answer for her.

  As much as he acquainted himself with the ideas of others, Qian Zhongshu, like Yang, searched for his own answers to life’s big questions. In his personal life, as in his writing, Qian never courted popularity. During his years working for the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, according to Yang’s memoir, We Three (Women sa , 2003), Qian attended the meetings he was obliged to attend but otherwise kept his head down and focused on his scholarship. He and Yang insisted that they “did not run with the herd” (bu hequn ) and in later years publicly avowed hermitage to ward off the well-wishers who only interrupted their reading regimen. In one instance, Qian is said to have brushed off an interview request with the line, “If you enjoy eating an egg, why bother to seek out the hen that laid it?” Self-marginalization afforded Qian the mental space to indulge his personal interests, which lay primarily in the realm of ideas. This is to say that Qian chose to pursue knowledge in the open field of literature rather than in the relatively closed society in which he lived many of his adult years. Whether or not his chosen isolation might have limited his cosmopolitan vision in any way, Qian’s inward turn indicates that he refused to be psychologically constrained by either the place or the time he happened to inhabit.

  Encyclopedic Laughter

  The essays and stories in this volume are propelled by a current of laughter. Fans of Fortress Besieged will find here a similarly dense concentration of inspired aphorisms, witticisms, similes, and wordplay. The very title of Qian’s short-story collection Human, Beast, Ghost, for instance, is something of a word game. On the surface, the title simply groups the stories’ protagonists into three categories. “God’s Dream” features a divine being who becomes disappointed with his human creations and eventually hastens their deaths. Darkie, the title feline in “Cat,” slinks into and out of the narrative of the longest story in the collection. The Writer, the protagonist in “Inspiration,” turns himself into a ghost through inadvertent authorial suicide and descends to Hell to face judgment before King Yama, only to pull off an unexpected reincarnation. In “Souvenir,” a pilot is martyred in battle after an affair with a lonely housewife, leaving her carrying his child. These stories exhibit a recurring focus on life, death, transmigration, and resurrection—in other words, of movement among these three categories.

  Yet the title can also be interpreted as Qian’s conflating or blurring the lines between these three categories. The God in “God’s Dream” turns out to be all too human—even prehumanly infantile—while Aimo, in “Cat,” is repeatedly likened to her pet. Qian may be implying that each of us is part human, beast, and ghost. Or, given the contempt for evolutionist thought on display in “God’s Dream,” “Reading Aesop’s Fables,” and “On Moral Instruction,” “human, beast, ghost” may indeed posit mankind’s devolution. In Qian’s writings, we come to expect and enjoy such ambiguities. At the same time, the author alerts us that we are always on the cusp of falling prey to an authorial joke.

  As this example suggests, Qian enjoys provoking laughter and reflection through playing with linguistic form. His familiar essays, for instance, frequently employ the structural device of contrasting necessity with surplus. In “Windows,” the second piece in Margins, Qian writes, “For a room’s inhabitant a door is a necessity, while a window is to some extent a luxury.” In “On Laughter” he points out that “if we hold that laughter is an expression of humor, then laughter must be regarded as nothing more than a waste product or luxury good, since not all of mankind has a need to laugh.” The loaded word “luxury” purposely misleads the reader to anticipate a moralizing attack on extravagance, but in fact it serves as the prologue to a paean to the aesthetic joys of the surplus, what the philosopher Zhuangzi called the “usefulness of uselessness.”

  Such inversions are a symptom of Qian’s playful contrarianism, which itself can be taken as a type of self-marginalization. Distorting logic and common sense, these facetious riffs parody solemn discourse. Authorities are cited out of context, and quotations are misapplied in incongruous settings. By turning common wisdom on its head, Qian deconstructs logic and then reconstructs it in a recognizable but self-contradictory form. In doing so, he reveals how linguistic rules can lead one astray. Applying the same logic to two categories as seemingly parallel as the age of a man and the age of mankind results in absurdities such as the following chain of assertions in “Reading Aesop’s Fables”:

  Looking at history in its entirety, antiquity corresponds to mankind’s childhood. Man began in infancy and, through several thousand years of advancement, slowly reached the modern age. The more ancient the era, the shorter man’s history, while the later the era, the deeper his accumulated experience and the greater his age. Thus, we are actually our grandfathers’ elders and the Three Dynasties of high antiquity cannot match the modern age in long standing. Our faith in and fondness for ancient things consequently takes on new meaning. Perhaps our admiration for antiquity is not necessarily esteem for our forebears but merely delight in children; not respect for age but the flaunting of age.

  Qian thus does not stop at simply pointing out language’s potential for engendering logical fallacies, but instead inverts and subverts linguistic forms to create them.

  The critic C. T. Hsia once generously wrote that “to lampoon intellectuals is not Qian Zhongshu’s central creative concern: it is rather to unfold the perennial drama of ordinary human beings in desperation, vainly seeking escape or attachment.”17 We see this broader scope of vision at work in dramatizations such as the relationship between Aimo, Jianhou, and Yigu in “Cat.” It must be noted, however, that Qian was not above ad hominem attacks. Consider his fictional incarnation of Lin Yutang in the same story, which revolves around an imaginary upper-class social circle in Beiping. Even a partial excerpt gives a sense of the complexity of Qian’s caricatures:

  The man leaning back on the sofa with his legs crossed, smoking, was Yuan Youchun. . . . He believed that China’s old civilization was best represented by playthings, petty cleverness, and hack entertainment writers. In this sense, his enterprise was much like the Boxers’ cause of “Supporting the Qing and Eliminating the Western:” he shelved high-minded Western religious theory and began to promote the style of intellectual hangers-on, such as Chen Meigong and Wang Baigu. Reading his writing always felt like eating a substitute—margarine on bread or MSG in soup. It was even closer to the “chop suey” served in overseas
Chinese restaurants: only those who had never sampled authentic Chinese cuisine could be tricked into thinking it was a real taste of China. . . . His pipe was famous. He mentioned it frequently in his articles, saying that his inspiration derived entirely from smoking, the same way Li Bai’s poems were all the product of his drinking. Some suggested that he must be smoking not pipe tobacco but opium, since reading his articles made one yawn, as with the onset of a habitual craving, or want to sleep, as if one had taken an anesthetic. It was suggested that his works be sold not in bookstores but in drugstores as sleeping pills, since they were more effective than Luminal and Ortal but had no side effects.

  Such “set pieces” are the mark of a particular encyclopedic mode of laughter known as Menippean satire, which derives its name from the Greek philosopher and Cynic Menippus. This classical European form differs from both plain satire and the novel in its intellectual orientation. Although definitions of the genre vary,18 its salient features include a mixture of prose genres, often with verse mixed in; an erudite demeanor combined with a taste for derision; play with paradox; and a penchant for heaping, list making, and other forms of accumulation. The distinction between the novelist and the Menippean satirist, according to Northrop Frye, is that the former “sees evil and folly as social diseases, but the Menippean satirist sees them as diseases of the intellect.” As such, he “deals less with people as such than with mental attitudes.”19 Goals of the Menippean satirist are to expose the inadequacies in others’ thinking through dissection and analysis, and to demonstrate his own superior intellect. His most conspicuous technique is the repeated and exuberant display of learning.