”Aika on kaikkein haurain pinta”

Abstract

“Time Is the Flimsiest Surface.” Affective Distance and the Weight of History in Yiyun Li’s Kinder Than Solitude
 This article examines the linkages between personal and political history and their relationship to the experience of time and a ective distance in Yiyun Li’s (b. 1972) novel Kinder an Solitude (2014). The method of analysis is a combination of close reading with a specific focus on affective distance, and a historically contextualizing approach. In this article, the notion of affective distance refers to an individual level psychic and emotional experience of estrangement, loneliness, and temporal and spatial discontinuity. The manifestation of a ective distance in Li’s novel is analyzed in relation to Sianne Ngai’s (2005) theory of ambivalent and “noncathartic” feelings that characterize late modernity and are associated with situations of blocked or suspended agency. The article also discusses the historical context of Li’s novel, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and their political aftermath, in light of Michel Foucault’s (1976) and Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) theories of biopower and biopolitics. It concludes that the affective distance experienced by the novel’s three main characters is rooted, on the one hand, in their traumatic personal past, and on the other, in China’s recent history and its political present in the ambivalent space between an authoritarian political regime and neoliberal market economy.