Elective Affinities. Literary Soul Mates and the Marketplace in late Qing Fiction

Abstract

There is a saying: “For whom do you act, and who will pay attention to you?” When Zhong-zi Qi died, Bo Ya never played his harp again. Why was that? A man does something for the sake of someone who understands him, as a woman adorns herself for someone who is attracted to her. In the triangle of author, work, and public the last is no passive part, no chain of mere reactions, but rather itself an energy formative of history. This is an article about books within books and the passions and the actions they engender. It explores, in other words, fictional representations of the act of reading and writing, selling and buying books in late Qing literature. This theme is not a novelty in the xiaoshuo tradition. In fact, one would be surprised not to find such representations of printed matter in the text-obsessed Chinese culture. Eleven centuries of printing books, resting on an even longer tradition of literary production and scholarship, attest to the centrality of the written word in Chinese society, where, as Cynthia J. Brokaw writes, “possession of—or at least access to—books was essential to respectable success.” No wonder, then, that authors wrote books into their novels. The way in which some popular fictional works at the end of the Qing dynasty frame the reading and buying of books, however, is striking enough to raise a set of very interesting questions: What can we learn from the ways books, as physical, tangible objects, are represented in the novels of this period? Where and why do the authors position themselves and the readers of