Intransitive Encounter

Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange

Nan Da

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780231547628
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

All sorts of literary encounters and exchanges took place between China and the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, involving an unlikely array of figures including canonical Americans such as Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; Chinese writers Qiu Jin and Dong Xun; and Asian-American writers like Yung Wing and Edith Eaton. Yet present-day interpretations of these interactions often read too much into their significance or mistake their nature—missing their particularities or limits in the quest to find evidence of cosmopolitanism or transnational hybridity.

In Intransitive Encounter, Nan Z. Da offers an in-depth study of nineteenth-century Sino-U.S. literary and textual interactions that highlights their lack of transpacific interpollination, synthesis, and convergence. She contends that these were exchanges in which nothing substantial was exchanged, at least not in ways that could easily be tracked. Da re-creates a nineteenth-century transpacific world through original readings spanning American poetry, fiction, and transcendental ethics to late Qing political thought, Asian American allegories of reading, and Chinese social theories of the book. She proposes that these glancing encounters point toward a different path for Sino-U.S. relations—not a geopolitical showdown or a celebration of hybridity but self-contained cross-cultural encounters whose participants do not have to confess to the fact of their having taken place. Intransitive Encounter is an unconventional and theoretically rich reflection on how we ought to interpret global interactions and imaginings that do not fit the patterns proclaimed by contemporary postcolonial and literary studies.

Chapter One

INDIFFERENCE IN THE OPEN

Squandering Washington Irving

Narrative strains for the effect of having filled in all the gaps, of having put an image of continuity, coherency, and meaning in places of the fantasies of emptiness, need, and frustrated desire that inhabit our nightmares about the destructive power of time.

—Hayden White, The Content of the Form

THE PARABLE OF RIP VAN WINKLE

Washington Irving’s 1819 “Rip Van Winkle” is a story about living as though historical events never occurred. The title character has too much to drink in the Catskill Mountains and sleeps right through the American Revolution. When he wakes up and returns to the village, King George’s picture above the tavern has been swapped out with George Washington’s—a superficial change against the backdrop of things happening more or less as they did before. The ultimate before-and-after narrative—even the name “Rip” visualizes bifurcation for us—the story betrays the possibility that the “after” might not look all that different from the “before,” or, at the very least, that the protagonist of history wants to unregister the difference by picking up where he left off. Making sense of the strange story means coming to terms with the social being who is not perfectly sensitive to change. Therefore, I begin this study of intransitive encounter with the case of “Rip Van Winkle” and its “reception” in China.

In May of 1872, near the end of the reign of Emperor Tongzhi, Shanghai’s flagship private newspaper, the Shun Pao, published “Rip Van Winkle” in loose translation under the title “Asleep for Seventy Years” (hereafter “Asleep”).1 This is possibly the first piece of American fiction to be published in China, and yet “Asleep” appears without any paratextual information or mention of Irving, a sliver of a story sandwiched between opinion pieces and news reportage. In “Asleep,” a young scholar named Wei one day finds himself in an oasis in the mountains, where he is met by three Daoist saints. After imbibing their liqueur, the young scholar falls asleep only to wake up seventy years later. The story bears the distinct imprint of “Rip Van Winkle.” Wei registers the passage of time only when he notices that his rifle has rotted. Like Rip, he returns to his village to learn that he has completely bypassed the domestic life into which he thinks he has just entered (his wife and son have already passed). I wish to suspend the question of attribution—is this really a translation of “Rip Van Winkle”?—and first turn to Irving’s early America. For the greater part of this chapter I explore the China in the original “Rip Van Winkle” and Irving’s attempts to incorporate Sino-U.S. intransitivity into his works that makes this unattributed translation in China, to which I return at the end of the chapter, so fitting.

Washington Irving is America’s favorite historian of the unnormed ways of being in history. Folk temporality, archival temporality, national historical consciousness, democratic time—these are all present in his works, mostly unsynthesized except for the awkward characters who occupy these temporalities all at once. The transnational Irving that appears in contemporary scholarship maps quite well onto this temporally queer Irving.2 His works depict what it feels like to move through historical time, to live history as the genre is being rewritten. Delinking Irving from national history, where the American public has him so permanently installed, was not only part of a larger contemporary response to ultranationalism, past and present, but also an effort to recover the repressed global imaginaries of American literature in the early nineteenth century.3 The idea that a transnational Irving might think and play in some other time besides national time was the natural culmination of an ongoing attempt to understand Irving’s unorthodoxies, the part of him that looked at the forward movement of time and shrugged. This recasting of Irving in transnationalism enlisted him to unthink the inevitability of the nation. After all, a nation spanning from the East Coast to the West Coast and a deeply racialized nationalist ideology further locked in with each uptick of Irving’s popularity in literary nationalism were not things he could have known would happen.

To see how Irving’s writing defies the idioms of transnationalism we have to follow the transnational Irving quite far, refresh our historical impressions of early Republic America, and see the embeddedness of China in this period. Look anywhere in historical accounts of early America’s relation with China and you will see the spectral outlines of Irving’s life; pay close attention to almost anywhere in Irving’s work and you will see that Sino-American world reflected back. The transnational revisioning of Irving also coincided with new histories of the Old China Trade, the trafficking of silver, tea, and trinkets between the peripheries of the Qing empire and the newly self-constituted United States. These cultural and economic histories restore to our historical consciousness a more Pacific early Republic, one that sent one of its very first ships, The Empress of China, to Canton in 1784. In her book on the object-oriented lives of early America, Caroline Frank paints a picture of a nation so saturated with Chinese goods and discourses (which most of the time didn’t even have to come directly from China) that they disappeared into the background, became the stuff of everyday life and therefore almost beneath special notice. Kendall Johnson has shown the degree to which American “character” was trained on a national romance of trade, especially the behavior of Americans in the China trade, a discourse freshened up and trotted out again during times of national crisis like the Civil War. Thinking about the pervasiveness of the Old China Trade in early American life means correcting the distortions in our most idyllic images of the North American landscape. This was a time when the towering white pines of Maine were being cleared out to make masts for clippers headed for China, and only thereby making room on the rocky coastlines for Sarah Orne Jewett’s faux-iconic pointed firs, which were much smaller in size.4 In James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers, Elizabeth Temple, a figure who romanticizes provinciality, cries out to remind the county sheriff to “purchase the cargo of one of those ships that they say are going to China [and] turn your potash-kettles into tea-cups, the scows on the lake into saucers; bake your cake in yonder lime-kiln, and invite the county to a teaparty.”5 And as American pioneer landscapes must be rethought so too its oceanic literary landscapes. The bulk of Moby Dick, Yunte Huang reminds us, takes place in the Pacific, and the intended destination of the Pequod was likely somewhere in the South China Sea.6 It was a time when China traders doubled as ethnographers and journalists and published tracts on things that were no more than mere occasions, such as Lawrence Jenkins’s “At a Chinese Dinner Party,” based on Bryant Parrott Tilden’s experiences in China in 1819.7 To retrace the footsteps of Irving and his contemporaries we must imagine a time when entire “Chinese” residences were erected in the United States, replete with Chinese architecture, Chinese servants, Chinese flora, and Chinese firecrackers.8

The Old China Trade played a large role in Irving’s life, providing an enterprise for his family to dabble and later fail in, a cast of friends with exotic character traits that could be fictionalized, a public discourse to spoof and spin, history books on China to read and rework, and transpacific policies to chronicle and debate. Through Irving we can trace a web of people across the century’s divide—China traders, sinologists, romanticists who dabbled in sinology, U.S. reformers who traveled to China, and commentators from all walks. From his earliest work, Salmagundi, to his last work, The Life of George Washington, Irving labored as a historian and a phenomenologist of history under the sometimes peculiar but more often prosaic influences of China. Irving’s long and changing relationship to China runs through Salmagundi (1807), A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty (1809), The Sketch Book (1819–1820), Astoria (1836), and Wolfert’s Roost (1855). It would be both tempting and convenient to say that China shaped Irving’s writings the way it shaped the early American global imaginary and that through his writings we can recapture the internationalizing enterprise behind early American literary nationalism. To restore Irving’s writing to its larger-than-we-had-thought communities seems nothing if not good sense. We could proceed in this fashion of resuturing for a while, but then we would hit upon the writer’s insistent preference for tableaux of indifference in the open and his gamble that the person who mishandles transmission, who is not perfectly sensitive to historical and cultural change, and who walks about with open indifference, is the one who has any real historical and cultural interest.

China figured in Irving’s project in two interrelated ways. It stood out as a chance to reflect on the praxis of historiography. In the nineteenth century, the question of how China gets assimilated into history and alters history writing itself received multiple, confused treatments. Tracking China’s place in Western historiography very closely allowed Irving to retrace the network in the way that Friedrich Kittler intended when, speaking of the major changes around 1800, he wrote that “each discourse network alters corpora of the past.”9 Irving was not attempting to build or even re-create a web of associations, but he was fascinated by how new discourses create new obligations for conversion, and how each obligation becomes a kind of social pressure. Thus he was doing what Bruno Latour describes as the real work of reassembling social networks.10 Because sociality and historicity became increasingly isotopic in nineteenth-century discussions of Chinese alterity, and because, across unlikely genres in early-republican America, a sociality indifferent to transmission became symptomatic of historical regressiveness, China also allowed Irving to observe and participate in the warping effects of historiography on constructs of the social. As historiography began to treat individual subjects as the unit of transmission, reflecting on the norming of historiographical methods necessarily involved, for Irving, a hard look at the price that historical coherence exacts on social personhood. What about the person who moves within other configurations of America and ignores its nationalist destiny—let’s call this the transnational person—who also actively declines cross-influencing? Can this person be allowed to be? That was a question that bothered Irving. (And incidentally it is this botheredness that makes the transnational Irving, as variously recovered by Wai Chee Dimock, Stephanie LeMenager, Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky, Caroline Levine, and others, speak to the Irving that Michael Warner canonized as the founding father of nonreproductive genealogy.)11 I argue that Irving’s works, making their way through the tangles of historiography and lived time, actively sought reprieve from the quotidian obligations of transmission while still keeping them within reach for the purposes of professional legibility.

Intransitivity, as I’ve defined it, has very few representational analogues. Irving’s work will already take us to the edge of this dilemma. His writings that touch on China especially underscore his dependency on formality for signs of intransitivity—an indifference to transmission both intercultural and intergenerational that has no social inflections, no behavioral associations, no gender assignations, and no political repercussions. Irving had no way to represent things not taking without the assistance of a trope of asocial inflexibility that also seems, paradoxically, like a ready willingness to go with the flow. Thus Irving also trains our attention to the fact that formality could as easily look like rigidity and holding out, as shallow participation in the newest thing. In this chapter, the dynamics of formality involves (1) holding off as long as possible the crossing over of intransitivity into the clear racial and gender stereotypes of literary nationalism and (2) an attitude of indifference that does not lodge in persons but in style. Irving had to contend with the fact that nontransmission is either overdone or underdone, never quite allowed to just be or not be. His various histories ruminate on the terrible ease with which intransitivity tips out of form and slides into a pattern of social recognition and solid bits of identity. There it becomes symptomatic of queerness, backwardness, ahistoricity, or less-than-ideal forms of race hybridity, exposed to our disdain or our affinity. Luckily, at this point, the transnational afterlives of his writings step in. Reading episodes that occur later in the nineteenth century, I show how the formality that could not quite be sustained in Irving’s work was ironically reactivated in a manner of translation in China that brought him into the country without fanfare and without notice. Intransitivity is ultimately a feature of Irving’s writings that cannot come into view without tracing the part that extends beyond America’s borders. By virtue of his final transnational turn, we are able to see the transnational turn’s fullest limitations.

NORMING HISTORY

Seventy years before the Chinese publication of “Asleep,” approximately the time that the fictional scholar Wei falls asleep, China had come to “Rip Van Winkle” and its tendentiously formed America. And as elusively as Washington Irving runs through the Chinese story, China also runs through his. This section looks at Irving’s use of China’s immanent presence in America to puzzle out geopolitical configurations of the new nation that will never come to pass, staging a considerable part of his intervention as a writer at the juncture where China the nation and China the subject of sinology met American historiography.

After all, who does Rip Van Winkle encounter in the mountains before his sleep of twenty years? After some deliberation, his fellow villagers (and modern readers) settle on Hendrick Hudson, the regional hero of Dutch America’s past. This determination allows Rip to go back and make sense of the oxymoron of the “grave roysters,” their doomed revelry capturing perfectly the pathos of Hudson’s cohort marooned by their mutinous crew on their abortive second trip to the New World. But since the characters can only speculate, there is no way to ascertain whom Rip actually sees. The same event that takes Rip out of historical time (he sleeps through the American Revolution) forces him to hand over his sense of historical management to members of his community, who fashion what might otherwise be personal reverie into a historical encounter, albeit a bizarre one. An inspired choice, Hudson reappearing as a return of the historical repressed accomplishes what Michael Warner calls the “resol[ution of] national history and personal memory into folk temporality.”12 For it is important that it is Hudson, and not some other historical figure’s eidolon, whom Rip and the lay historians in his village decide he sees. The story “Rip Van Winkle” originally belonged to the same collection of “posthum...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Intransitivity
• 1: Indifference in the Open: Squandering Washington Irving
• 2: Extreme Reformality: Burning Bridges with Ralph Waldo Emerson
• 3: Incommunicative Exchange: Yung Wing’s Impersonal Schemes
• 4: The Things Things Do Not Have to Say: Longfellow to Dong Xun
• 5: Open Books: Qiu Jin’s Feminist Reading Time
• 6: Harmless Exaggeration: Edith Eaton’s Tweaks and Glitches
• Epilogue: Untracking Encounter
• Appendix 1: A Note on Chinese Language Appearances in the Book
• Appendix 2: Lexicon
• Appendix 3: Historical Movements, Treaties, Organizations, Institutions
• Appendix 4: List of Chinese Primary Sources
• Appendix 5: List of Chinese Names
• Notes
• Index