Rethinking the Modern Chinese Canon: Refractions across the Transpacific

Abstract

On encountering Clara Iwasaki's Rethinking the Modern Chinese Canon: Refractions across the Transpacific, one first notices the striking boldness of the title. Yet after reading the book, one may feel the title appears almost too modest. Iwasaki's critical concept of refractive relations offers exciting possibilities for the study of cross-cultural literary or artistic traveling in any direction, though her stated aim is to increase attention to the multidirectional and multilingual movement of texts across the Transpacific. Using this concept of refractive relations, “which draws both from [Shu-mei] Shih's relational approach and [André] LeFevre's description of translation as a form of refraction,” Clara Iwasaki entirely dispenses with anxieties of adaptation and trueness to an original, instead examining the ways in which authors and texts achieve new meanings “when read with and against each other” (16, 17).As waves pass from one medium to another, waves refract: they bend their path and change their speed and wavelength. So too with the refractions Iwasaki examines: “These refractions are fundamentally shaped by historical and political forces across the transpacific, and these forces are inseparable from the way that these authors and texts travel, how they are translated, how they are received, and how all of these different refractions interact with one another” (17). Impeccably structured and theoretically coherent, the book consists of four chapters, each of which focuses on the various ways in which the work of a canonical author refracts along transpacific literary and artistic networks. By choosing to work with four canonical authors, Iwasaki allows her refractive method to demonstrate its own usefulness by offering compellingly novel approaches to very familiar figures.Chapter 1 examines Xiao Hong's work in light of her connection to, and translation by, Japanese and American leftist and cosmopolitan intellectuals. Here Iwasaki easily demonstrates her acumen as both a researcher and a reader. The chapter opens with a letter published in the year of Xiao Hong's death, in the Hong Kong newspaper Shidai wenxue, from Upton Sinclair to Xiao Hong, in which Sinclair thanks Xiao for her “beautiful gift which Agnes Smedley brought to me” and tells her that with the letter he encloses “a copy of my book” as well as “some of my recent pamphlets” (25). Following this strikingly material evidence of literary exchange, Iwasaki explores the literary networks formed among Xiao, Agnes Smedley, Helen Foster Snow, and Upton Sinclair, using their various interactions and exchanges to mutually illuminate their relationship to China and to leftist ideals. The chapter contains an astute reading of a reference to Sinclair's The Jungle in Xiao Hong's well-known short story “Hands.” Iwasaki focuses less on Xiao's narrator, who misses Sinclair's message, than she does on Xiao's proletarian protagonist, Wang Yaming, who relates Sinclair's character directly to her own life. Iwasaki writes, “Xiao Hong's depiction of reading the works of American leftist writers reveals the imaginative potential of proletarian fiction. The effect of this phenomenon is to create a shared readership among the marginalized” (39). Significantly, Iwasaki's own analysis illustrates how productive an attentive reading of Xiao Hong's novel can be for understandings of Sinclair's work.From the literary engagement with Sinclair's text, the chapter moves to consider the English translations of Xiao Hong's work undertaken by Helen Foster Snow and Chia Wu, and most recently—and imaginatively—by Howard Goldblatt. The title of the chapter, “Second Chances,” views translation not as the opportunity for a transcendent textual afterlife that Walter Benjamin imagines in his “The Translator's Task,” but instead asserts that “each [translation] remains less a transcendent entry into the literary canon and more a new, often selective interpretation” (31). Rather than evaluating these translations based on their trueness to the original text, Iwasaki remains refreshingly open: “The authors and translators discussed in this chapter,” she insists, “reimagine important aspects of the original text itself, engaging in a dialogue with it by imagining or refracting different possibilities for the text” (31).Chapter 2 considers the enduring allure of Yu Dafu, whose mysterious disappearance and inconclusive biography allow him to simultaneously serve competing nationalisms. The chapter is motivated by two excellent and overlapping questions: “What makes Yu Dafu so portable? Why does he travel with ease along the transpacific circuits left by Japanese imperial aggression?” (71). The chapter does not so much answer these questions as provide multiple examples of scholars and authors conducting literal or metaphorical searches for Yu Dafu, in the process of which they use his image “to suit the ends of Japanese apologism, pan-Asianism, Chinese nationalism, and Sinophone Malaysian identity” (105). In this chapter, the archive figures prominently as a potential repository of clues to the location of the “corpus or corpse” of Yu Dafu, who, after fleeing Singapore for Sumatra, left his home one night in 1945 and never returned (72). While Iwasaki does not directly make this point, the chapter strongly implies that part of what facilitates Yu Dafu's portability is the unsolved mystery of his life: the absence of a definitive ending to his life story allows Yu Dafu's image to be commemorated and his story molded to suit the political aims of the teller.Chapter 3 investigates Lao She's Anglophone and Sinophone canons, focusing on the translations of his long-lost Chinese manuscript, Gushu yiren, translated into English as The Drum Singers by Helena Kuo, and then back into Chinese by Ma Xiaomi. The chapter examines translation as a gendered process, considering the ways in which Lao She's female translators insert themselves into their work. Chapter 4 explores what Iwasaki calls the “parasitism” in Zhang Ailing's posthumously published manuscripts: her tendency after settling in the United States to recycle her literary work as she translates between English and Chinese, “cannibalizing” her own writing in the process (153).The book is rich in biographical detail and anecdote, as well as in sensitive readings. Figures who appear flat in previous literary historical accounts come to life in idiosyncratic detail. We learn that Helen Foster Snow, for example, invoked Arthurian legend in imagining Mao Zedong as “the chairman of the Yenan Round Table. His men were knights and the women were truly ladies!” (52). Iwasaki shows her prowess as a reader through an aptitude for identifying “echoes,” a process that stresses her careful attention to her source material. For instance, in chapter 3, Iwasaki finds these echoes resonating in the descriptions of the male form in Helena Kuo's own novel, Westward to Chungking, and in her translation of Lao She's The Drum Singers. Iwasaki's analysis of these echoes allows her to persuasively claim that “as a translator, Kuo makes her influence and her point of view felt throughout the novel while using the name of the author and assuming his voice” (132).Yet at times rather bold claims are made for which the book offers scant evidence. One is struck by a paragraph that opens with the provocation, “As a youth Yu Dafu was notorious for fetishizing corpses” (90). In turning to the footnote, the evidence provided is not conclusive: “A charge made by Yu Dafu about himself and echoed in ‘Buyi.’ See Tsu, Sound and Script, 188” (108). While a primary source would be preferable to the otherwise unproblematic citation from Sound and Script, using contemporary Malay-Chinese author Ng Kim Chew's short story “Buyi” as justification for a biographical claim about Yu Dafu borders on the farcical. Ng Kim Chew's protagonists frequently indulge in salacious speculation about Yu Dafu, as Iwasaki well knows: “Ng's stories satirize and respond to the scholarly record by repositioning scholars who seek to learn more about Yu Dafu's disappearance as corpse and corpus fetishists who are obsessed with uncovering details of the life of the famous Chinese author” (98). Is no one immune?The book displays a remarkable objectivity regarding writers who, though canonical, have also been the subject of scandal or political intrigue, and have attempted, sometimes very successfully, to wield this notoriety. As Iwasaki writes, “All the authors discussed in this book have drawn upon their literary persona to captivate readers” (152). Furthermore, the agents of these authors' refraction, who are often their translators or biographers and occasionally scholarly critics, are shown here to take a very free hand as they move the authors' works into new languages or represent them in alternative literary contexts. If Iwasaki judges her subjects, she works hard not to let her reader see it, beginning with the emphatic title of her introduction: “No Heroes, No Villains.” For example, Iwasaki refrains from asking whether Helena Kuo should have done what she did to Lao She's text and focuses instead on what happened when she did it. In the end, the first undertaking would always rest on opinion, however well founded and persuasive. The fact that Iwasaki pursues, instead, the second undertaking prevents her from falling into the same trap that beset Hu Yuzhi and Suzuki Masao, the Yu Dafu scholars that Ng Kim Chew lampoons in his short story. In Iwasaki's description, “By reading for Yu Dafu, they overlook everything else in front of them” (94). For her part, Iwasaki remains acutely alert to what is in front of her. Her openness to her material allows her to very persuasively claim in conclusion, “Literary refraction holds the possibility of revealing alternate angles or hidden traces that are missed in the anthologization of national and world literatures. While these refractions do not fit into a single unified image of an author, as is often expected, the resulting messy effects result in multiple and often contradictory images which highlight the richness of the material” (191–92). To borrow an image Iwasaki deftly wields throughout her analysis, it is the brokenness of the mirror, after all, that makes it glitter.