The introduction of Western utopian novels,
Caused a change in the concept of time and space in late Qing science fiction
The first day of Liang Qichao's diary was December 19, 1899 in the Western calendar, that is, the seventeenth day of November in the Chinese calendar, and he said in the following brackets that "(all subsequent records are written in the Western calendar)", which I think is an important change in Liang Qichao's thinking. Not only did he record the change in his worldview, but it also had an impact, and I think the whole science fiction of the late Qing Dynasty began here.
Why did it start this way? Because he officially introduced the Western view of time through the Western calendar. The Western calendar is the year after the birth of Jesus, and the modern conception of time in the Western calendar is linear, from the past, the present to the future, and the future not only becomes a possibility, but can almost become an imaginary reality, from the past to the future, can be calculated, or predicted. The most important feature of Western science fiction is to set time in the future. The aforementioned "Looking Back" is an example. Here I would like to introduce another book, Sleepwalking in the Twenty-first Century, which is clearly stated, and the story takes place in 2065, because the story begins in this year, so that the future time can be imagined and speculated.
So is there any future imagination in China's previous novels? Sure, but not much. There are legends in the Tang Dynasty, but it is not necessarily written in the future, such as "Pillow In the Book", which is to experience a character's career in the form of a dream, this person spent a lifetime in the dream, and finally found that it was a dream. The story of "Nanke Taishou Biography" is that a person sleeps under a locust tree, dreams that he has made a big locust Anguo horse, gave birth to children, did Taishou, glory for a while, woke up to find a lot of ants in the tree, and originally entered the world of ants in his dream. Of course, there are also stories that some people see the Queen Mother of the West and the Daughter of the Dragon King in a dream... These stories can compress everyday time and space into dreams, but there is basically no future-like imagination.
"Two Residences", Li Oufan's speech, Xi Yunshu's recording, Century Wenjing | Shanghai People's Publishing House, June 2021 edition
The imagination of the future is connected with the Western concept of time in a straight line, and it is also related to the imagination of Western utopias. The word "utopia" comes from the famous book of Thomas More (1478-1535), whose ideas were derived from Plato and mostly about the blueprint for an ideal society for the future, and thus related to the so-called "utopian socialism". Marx once specifically proposed the works of Charles Fourier (1772-1837), who imagined the future society, even the parisian houses were designed, the second floor of each house is connected, you can go from here to there, thinking very carefully.
Another utopian socialist, robert Owen (1771-1858), was not so different, his urban concept was not so strong, but a village, with a lot of technology, agriculture and technology combined, which was a nineteenth-century British tradition. The most famous utopian novel in Russia is Chernyshevsky's What to Do? 》(What is to be Done？ Imagine a revolutionary new society with high-rise buildings and electricity, an extremely modern society built by a group of revolutionary comrades. This series of things is related to the time concept of Western modernity, but these important classics, except for Moore's Utopia (this translation is from Yan Fu), were not introduced in the late Qing Dynasty, and it was not until the intellectuals of the May Fourth period that they began to discuss the utopian socialism of Fourier, Owen, and Saint-Simon, but by that time science fiction was not popular.
The popularity of science fiction in the late Qing Dynasty is not only novel in content, but also easy to read, entertaining, and read more, and the concept of the future floats between the lines, and slowly has a subtle effect. Liang Qichao's Western knowledge is also related to another personal experience. As you know, when the YMCA was first founded in Shanghai, Liang Qichao used to be there as a secretary, and the person who founded the YMCA was Timothy Lee, a very courageous and ambitious missionary. He brought with him a number of Western books that he considered important, and his assistants translated them into Chinese. There is a very important history book called "Outline of the New History of Taixi", which was later rewritten as "The History of Taixi", which became a popular novel, and Chen Jianhua has already done research.
The other is Looking Backward, originally titled Looking Back, which Timothy Lee excerpted and dedicated to the Qing government, believing that the future depicted in this ideal novel would be something that China could learn from. I've read this English book twice, and I can't buy it now, the thin one by Edward Bellamy, subtitled "2000-1887 A.D.", so this future world is flashback from 2000. It begins with a Bostonian named Julian West, who says, "I was born in Boston in 1857." What the? 1857？ You think I'm wrong? It should have been 1987... In fact, it is not wrong, the protagonist of the novel was born on the second day of Christmas 1857, that is, around 4 o'clock in the afternoon of December 26, and felt the blowing of the East Wind in Boston for the first time. I assure the reader that the east wind of that distant era is as bitter as the east wind of the present year 2000 AD."
The story is from a very fanciful new century, looking back at the very chaotic situation in Boston where the author lived at that time. The author uses this method to advocate reform, arguing that this novel is not a socialist novel, but a capitalist novel. The best capitalism in the future, in addition to the state having some important means of transportation, but also to build shopping malls, there is no money, each person will take a credit card, what you want to buy, take what you need, each do their best. He put together capitalism and socialist ideals, life is very comfortable, when he sleeps at night, classical music comes out as soon as the phone is pressed, there is a small card, the card is pressed, you have to listen to the organ, if you want to listen to the violin, there is the violin, and the garden, and so on, which is very similar to now.
The author is an American patriot whose purpose is to say that in the United States, if we all work together, we can make American society very good in a rational and effective way. So some argue that this ideal of his is very similar to what the United States later called "Taylorism" — a man named Taylor who was efficient and invented a collective division of labor that made American cars fast and good. We are now under his influence and are so busy that it is Taylor's problem. His whole set of things—which Jameson thought was important—was not only about efficiency, but about capitalism making greater profits.
Liang Qichao emphasized the utility of the novel, not for fun, but for more important political purposes. However, it is very interesting that within a few years, it seems that around 1904 and 1905, the "ideal novel" of "Looking Back" became a popular chapter and back novel. I once checked the first chapter of it and found that the order of time in the Chinese edition was very careful, for fear that the reader would not understand. Because, when you wake up, what if the time is wrong? At that time, the average reader was not so easy to recognize the Western calendar, so the translator used this method to explain that the original time was like this, and it can be looked back and forth from the future. This mode of looking back and forth directly enters Liang Qichao's own novel "The Future of New China". If you think about it, the first chapter of "The Future of New China" is to celebrate 1962, to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of China's new constitution, the Shanghai Expo, and a Mr. Kong came to the stage to give a speech and review the past. This model, I think, can be directly connected with Bellamy's "Looking Back". This conceptual change happened around 1900, no more than two years ago, directly into the minds of late Qing novelists, who could translate and rewrite them to drive the development of a large number of science fiction novels.
Liang Qichao
The second prerequisite is the concept of space. There are too many people talking about space now, because some people think that postmodern theories are based on space, especially the study of architecture or other art forms, and talking about space is too bizarre and becomes something too abstract. But the space in my mind has a very specific historical experience. Why? Let's start with Liang Qichao again. As mentioned earlier, when he changed from a "Chinese man" to a "world man", the territory of China's imagination in his personal experience also expanded. From China to other countries, there are several different territories, then the boundaries of the boundaries of the territories begin to be perceived. Unlike China, which was a "Middle Dynasty" in ancient times, the so-called "Middle Kingdom", China is the center, and the barbarians are in the periphery. If you leave Middle-earth, you will enter the barbarian state, and when you enter the barbarian country, you will encounter gods and ghosts. For example, in "Journey to the West", the Tang monks took the scriptures, and when he left the border of the Tang Dynasty, the monster appeared, and there was no monster in the border of the Tang Dynasty.
Earlier border myths also have the Queen Mother of the West, whose territory is probably in the West; At the same time, in order to live forever, Qin Shi Huang sent people to Penglai Immortal Island to ask for immortal elixirs, probably this immortal island is in the East China Sea, but how far is it? Where is it close? Some people say that it is close to Japan, and that is what later people said. In fact, it doesn't matter, because the calculations in myths and legends are not so precise. The ancients' imagination of Middle-earth, China itself, basically had two patterns: one was round, Pangu opened up the world, and the earth sank to the southeast, so the earth in China's imagination was flat and round; Another tradition, the concept derived from the Taoists, believes that the earth is square, the four squares, just in line with the traditional Chinese concept of time, the four directions of the four seasons, from the ancient city streets of Chang'an City, all the way to the houses where the general scholar class lived, are based on the four directions of the southeast, southwest, and northwest.
However, at the end of the Qing Dynasty, around 1900, the concept of space changed. The first reason is that this pattern of square circles is too simple to encapsulate the whole world and the earth. Several diplomats and politicians of the Qing Dynasty, like Xue Fucheng, went abroad and came back to write reports, which talked about this, and of course, like Wei Yuan's "Atlas of the Sea Kingdom", brought in the basic world geography. Modern geography is almost synchronized with the understanding of the Western world, and the maps drawn are becoming more and more precise. After the Opium War, the British invaded China, and the british were most powerful in maps. At that time, the town guards felt that the British map was too powerful, and before entering Hong Kong, the map measurement was very accurate.
The map of the world has aroused the imagination of Chinese of five continents, and they also know that the world is divided into five continents, but they still can't figure out where Oceania is and where Africa is, so they have to rely on imagination. However, some things are directly derived from historical experience, such as the prohibition of Chinese workers in the United States in 1904, which caused an uproar in China and set off an anti-American Chinese labor movement to boycott American goods. So I began to expand my imagination of geographic space, and what is China's position and role in the world map has become a concern for everyone.
How did intellectuals in the late Qing Dynasty recognize the "end of the world" in science fiction works?
If we look at several important texts of the late Qing dynasty novels, we will find that it seems to be inseparable from the factors I have just talked about: the factor of time, the factor of the Western calendar, the imagination of the future, and even the expansion of geographical knowledge.
Let's start with a few practical textual examples to discuss this a bit. The first example is Liang Qichao's translation of the Diary of the End of the World. The author of this French version is Camille Flammarion. This Flamalion was an astronomer who was quite famous at the time. In his later years, he liked spiritualism, called Spinitualism in English, and the famous American psychologist William James also liked this kind of spiritualism. Predicting that sooner or later the Earth would be attacked by another planet (a comet) and that the Earth would be destroyed if the collision was severe, he wrote a novel called The End of the World Diary in order to warn the world. The novel was popular at the time, with a Japanese translation, but I couldn't find it yet, and it was later adapted into a movie. This story was somehow selected by Liang Qichao and translated into Chinese. I checked it, and in the "Late Qing Dynasty and Early Ming Dynasty Novel Book Series" compiled by Yu Runqi, there are two "Diary of the End of the World", one translated by Liang Qichao and the other rewritten by Bao Tianxiao, although the two stories are from the same source, the latter can only be regarded as creation.
In the end, where is the focus of Liang Qichao and Bao Tianxiao on the two of them? It's worth studying. The story of the movie I can find on the Internet is that there is a scientist who knows that the comet is going to hit the earth, and the French capitalists at that time spent a lot of time drinking, he wanted to wake them up, hoped to open an international conference to discuss this issue, but everyone was afraid of affecting the market, so the capitalists objected, wanted to arrest this scientist, and the story began here. Then, the comet really came, and the scientists told everyone what to do, but it was too late, and in the end it was inevitable to destroy the entire earth. But the earth is not destroyed at once, and when it begins to be destroyed, it feels that the whole earth is cold and that human beings are slowly extinct. The significance of this imagination is so profound that many years later there is a poem by Eliot that includes the last sentence, "This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper", "The earth is so finished / Not a bang, but a boo". A sigh is over. It's very poetic, at least what I see in Flamarion's story is a very poetic, slightly philosophical science fiction novel.
Looking at the translation of Liang Qichao and Bao Tianxiao, Bao Tianxiao's translation pays more attention to scientists, he turns the protagonist into a Chinese philosopher, a philosopher with a bit of Buddhist meaning, and tells a set of life principles, everyone is listening. However, in Liang Qichao's version, he paid more attention to the factor of talent and beauty, and in the end, only one "peerless beautiful teenager" and "peerless beautiful girl" were left. The others were dead. At first, the whole country of the North was submerged (the story is very similar to the Hollywood movie "The Day After Tomorrow" that you have seen), and they found that there was a place in southern Africa, and everyone came here, and then they were all destroyed; The rest of the group ran to Ceylon, and when they arrived, there was only one island left, and there was only a man and a woman and a dog left on this island. The man wanted to live, the girl gave the boy a kiss, said I want to go first, the boy held her hand, felt that everything in the world was gone, suddenly ran out of a dog, and then died together. The description is beautiful, but I think it's funny. I don't know how the readers reacted at the time. Liang Qichao added a grandiose -- "Translator Yue" at the end of the story, and what this afterword means is still unclear to me.
Some readers or critics may ask, Liang Qichao is now advocating a new novel, advocating the concept of progress of time, advocating the development of science, building a new China, and reforming the people's morality. His answer was even stranger, he said that I was not translating this story for you ordinary people, not for ordinary people like you. When the Buddha spoke about the Huayan Sutra to those great bodhisattvas, maybe I could recite one or two sentences: "My Buddha, from under the Bodhi tree, said Huayan for the great bodhisattvas, and all the voices of ordinary people, such as deaf and dumb, are called Buddhas settled." Why? The reason is not ripe. I have translated this text, in the language of bodhisattvas, not in the language of ordinary people. These words are very philosophical, and the meaning behind them comes from the Buddhist wisdom sect. Of course, you can say that Liang Qichao is an elitist.
For me, a very interesting point is that perhaps in Liang Qichao's time and space imagination, there is no way to imagine the "ultimate" problem, such as the ultimate problem I mentioned in my previous lecture. In the Western conception of time, the Christian final judgment, this ultimate idea is combined with the imagination of the end of the world, if you don't believe it, you can watch the movie Apocalypse Now. The Book of Apocalypse Now is a modern version of apocalypticism that reintroduces this idea to the Vietnam War.
The question facing Liang Qichao is, what kind of resources can a traditional intellectual find for this kind of life and death event and the interval between time and space that are beyond his imagination? Honestly speaking, the resources provided by Confucianism were not much, at that time Liang Qichao was reading the Buddha, knowing that the Buddhist family, including Lu Xun at that time, was also reciting the Buddha, Liang Qichao found an allusion from the Buddhist family, and reluctantly (I think it was reluctant) to play a round field for himself.
Personally, I don't think the writer's statement is entirely credible, and he says it a bit sophistry in his afterword. But at least it proves that the intellectuals' imagination of the concept of the world at that time was suddenly pushed to such a far extent, and it took only one or two years, two or three years of work, from understanding the world to fantasizing about the end of the world. People of that era could imagine the earth, balloons and airships, flying to the moon at once, and the moon was not far enough to fly to Mars; It is not enough to have a submarine, it is not enough to take a submarine to five continents, it is not enough to run to five continents, but also to the Antarctic and the Arctic. In many science fiction novels, all of a sudden to the South Pole, all at once to the North Pole, its concept of time is not very clear, the author does not know how long it takes to go from the South Pole to the North Pole, there is no accurate concept. Perhaps there is a little more of a geographical concept of Europe, because someone came back from Europe to write reports and travelogues. Maybe there's a little bit of knowledge about the United States, but it's not very clear where Africa is and where Oceania is. So you can directly study the Western geographical knowledge and time concepts obtained by ordinary people at that time with the novels of the late Qing Dynasty, which I think is very interesting.
Li Oufan, image courtesy of the publisher.
"New Stone" is a text that responds to Liang Qichao's novel theory,
But why is it not working well?
Let's talk about another example, which you may have all seen, called "The New Stone". The New Stone Chronicle was written by Wu Zhao in 1905. Why did I choose New Stone? Not only because many scholars have mentioned it, for example, Professor Hu Zhide wrote a special chapter on the "New Stone Record" in an English book - he talked about the first twenty-two times of the "New Stone Record", and my interest is in the last twenty times - if you have read the "New Stone Record", you will find that the first twenty-two times is about Jia Baoyu running to Shanghai at that time and encountering some strange phenomena in Shanghai, a bit like "The Strange Situation Witnessed in Twenty Years", which is a little more interesting. He also brought a servant, saying that Jia Baoyu seemed to have been robbed by robbers, and when he was separated from his servants, he left Shanghai—the city he knew better—and went into a wilderness in which he entered a science fiction world. I think it's a very interesting imagination. In the twenty-second time, it is written that "Jia Baoyu first entered the civilized realm", and he came to a place after passing through the wilderness, with a archway on it, which read "Civilization Realm". It's a little Utopia, a little utopia. He didn't talk about distance, he went in at once, and he didn't say whether it was a dream or not.
Later, Jia Baoyu had a dream, which was done in the "civilized realm". After he entered the "civilized realm", someone came to take him. He thought of the word "civilization", a term that everyone is familiar with in modern Chinese. It came from Japan and was very popular in the late Qing Dynasty. Jia Baoyu met an old man called Eastern Civilization in the "Civilization Realm" and began a series of dialogues.
Many people have studied this paragraph, including Wang Dewei's famous article "Jia Baoyu Sits on a Submarine". Everyone knows that Jia Baoyu is a traditional talent, and when he enters this new world, he can even take a spaceship and a submarine. What's even more interesting is that he was baptized by this "Oriental civilization" and gave birth to three men and one woman (or four men and one woman?). )。 Everyone represents the best virtue of China in the author's mind, and the people who live in this new civilized society have public morality, medical knowledge, and know how to prevent floods. The wonderful thing is that this "civilized realm" is like a rural area, but the territory of "people and national wealth", divided into two million districts, each district is a hundred squares, the number is very large, but he describes it so that we feel that it is not so big; Each district uses a word as a symbol, with Li, Le, Wen, and Zhang in the center, and Benevolence, Righteousness, Li, Wisdom, and so on in the East (see The Twenty-second Time). I think this is a very interesting imaginary design, that is, to combine the small Chinese Taoist people with taohuayuan and Confucian moral norms to become a utopia.
Wu Zhaoren is a typical late Qing Dynasty novelist, he has no interest in talking about what this place looks like, he is not a blueprint designer, he just leads the reader into a new fantasy realm, but this new realm, the more we look at it, the more familiar it is. He brought in some new things, some strange things, gave it a kind of Chinese cultural code, or Chinese more accustomed things, so that everyone knew that maybe this ideal was feasible, maybe in the future China these things can be adopted. Wu Zhaoren was a relatively conservative reformist who was not in favor of revolution, but he was in favor of restoration. In particular, he pointed out that China's traditional morality and morality between men and women must be adhered to.
The New Stone Book
He accepted and had reservations about the so-called Western studies, especially in science and technology, which were introduced in large quantities at that time. What is very interesting is that there is a "timer" in the novel, that is, the clock, and the clock in the "civilization realm" is semi-new and not old, and it is far from the current clock. In the Western calendar, we talk about this hour, an hour of time, he said it is not good, a day divided into twenty-four hours is inconvenient, because your clock has a morning afternoon, or our Chinese tradition is good, the Chinese tradition of one more is almost two hours, do not divide the morning and afternoon, he invented this clock, that is, do not divide the morning and afternoon. The clock was very interesting, he probably had seen the kind of small toy clock brought in from Germany, and when the time came, after the bell rang, a bird came out and called a few times. You can glimpse from these very small details what the late Qing novel imagines of the hour of utopia. However, if you put these small details together, you still can't make up the imagination of the home country and the imagination of the nation as the scholars in Taiwan say. I think this is the point I want to state, the national imagination is a relatively long-term process, I am afraid that it will not be until the May Fourth period, after the 1920s, that everyone slowly knows that the original nation-state is like this, and the real formation is in 1928 when the National Government officially established the capital in Nanjing.
In terms of literary value, this novel is nothing remarkable, and it can even be said that the author's imagination has only reached a certain level, and there is nothing remarkable. But if we look closely at the "transitional brushwork" of this transitional period— a concept I coined myself — it's more interesting. What is "transitional brushwork"? That is, the narrative method used by the author is not so stable, you say it is new, not new, you say it is old, there is also a little innovation. I am often very distressed by this formal problem, how to deal with late Qing novels, Western narrative theory is not used, all kinds of late Qing novels are good and bad, all are similar, what to do? However, I found a very obvious phenomenon that in the late Qing Dynasty novels, the perspective of the narrator changed more and more, and various narrators came out, and the status of the narrator was not very stable.
Later, I read Zhao Yiheng's small book "The Troubled Narrator" and felt very enlightened, he said that there are traditional novel narrators in China, there are narrators after the "May Fourth" new literature, and there are three kinds of narrators of the late Qing Dynasty, and the most distressed is the narrator of the late Qing Dynasty. Why bother? He has a very detailed analysis, that is, the narrator of the traditional novel originally coincided with the general value of the society at that time, and he represented the general value of the society at that time. What if the narrator and the values of the time do not match? There are also a few authors who know how to deal with it, and one of them is Li Yu of the late Ming Dynasty. The narrator of Li Yu's "Twelfth Floor" is himself, he puts his own name in it, and from his point of view, he can play with various characters between the palms. Li Yu was a remarkable writer who could make a playful ridicule of the moral trends of the late Ming Dynasty and tease them with a postmodern approach. He even brought the telescope, a new thing invented in the West, into the model of the talented beauty, and became the toy of the talent peeking at the beauty. At that time, these strange tools that the Western Jesuits had just brought in were just fun, but in the late Qing novels, they were not only fun, they may be fun on the surface, but the purpose behind them was very serious.
In other words, "The New Stone Record" is Wu Zhaoren's use of a novel text to respond to Liang Qichao's novel theory, but it is very different. Why is there such a big difference? On the one hand, because the author is more conservative, his talent is limited; On the other hand, I think the most important thing is that Liang Qichao did not see a problem at all, to innovate novels, so what about the form? What if there is new content and the old form cannot accommodate it? This is a very important question, but Liang Qichao did not think of it at all, because he only thought of the function of the novel - "stabbing, smoking, mentioning"; He was not a literary theorist, he was not analytical of texts, and he did not use many examples, most of which were British Victorian novels translated through the Meiji period in Japan, and are now studied by many scholars. Mr. Xia Zhiqing wrote a paper in his early years, mentioning that Liang Qichao had read one of the earliest Novel Texts in Japan, called "The Adventure of a Beautiful Person".
Late Qing dynasty science fiction and traditional Chinese novels
What's different?
"The Adventure of a Beautiful Lady" was written by a politician in the Meiji period, and a hero who wrote about Meiji ran to Philadelphia in the United States, met two Spanish beauties, and the three of them traveled to Philadelphia together to visit the Liberty Bell and the place where the U.S. Constitution was drafted. This Meiji warrior had an impassioned look on his face and wanted to return to Japan to save the country and do something big. It turned out that those two beauties were also fallen nobles and opposed the Spanish dynasty. This is a typical political novel written by Japanese Meiji writers, combining political ambitions and sentiments, and if you examine them again, the British political novels introduced in the early Meiji period were all such characters. I think Liang Qichao liked this kind of thing, but he only wrote one "New China Future" and did not last because he was too busy to do a lot of other things and did not have time to write novels.
Recently I came across a material on the Internet, and a Japanese scholar said that one of the most popular books in Japan during the Meiji period, like Timothy Lee's stuff, introduced important writers from English literature as a whole. The author of the book, Samuel Smiles, is called Self-Help, which introduces the British value system, and also mentions his favorite British writers, including Bulwer-Lytton, who wrote "Xinxi Gossip", and Walter Scott, who was the author of Lin Qinnan's later translation of "Saxon Heroes after the Disaster". He introduced historical novels, political novels, and romance novels, but he did not introduce important realist novelists of the same period, such as Dickens.
What surprised me even more was that the Japanese scholar also mentioned that the first European novel to introduce Western science to Japan in the form of a novel was originally called Anno Domini 2065, which was "2065 AD", and the English translation was renamed Anno Domini 2071, and there was a Chinese translation called "Sleepwalking in the Twenty-first Century". The author of the original book, alias Dr. Dioscorides, is Latin, and it turns out to be a Dutch writer, and I think he should be a nineteenth-century figure. Why do Meiji people look up to this Dutch writer? Because only one port could be opened in Japan during the shogunate era, and only Dutch people could enter, the Western school in Japan at that time was called Dutch learning, and the most important thing in Dutch learning was medicine.
The novel "Sleepwalking in the Twenty-first Century" has not been carefully read so far, I only found it by chance from the Internet yesterday, and it can be downloaded, so I will share it with you now. I think it is very noteworthy that the Chinese translation uses the traditional annotation mode, and explains the new terms in the original text in small prints below the translation. The novel is preceded by a preface, added by the translator, which speaks of the book being popular in Europe. The story begins with this: "Remembering a certain afternoon, sitting alone and meditating, feeling the characters of the past, and because of the culture, if the Dutch celebrities ..." Various famous historical figures came out. I think the novel is a bit like Looking Back, which is to put the story in the future of 2065 or 2071 and look back at the history of Europe. And the important figures in it, some of which are easily recognizable, such as Galileo, are translated as Polyluan, and below there is a note "Italian astronomer..."; Then there was Roger Bacon, "The Philosopher of England..." all the way down.
So where do these annotations come from? I think that the novelists of the late Qing Dynasty did not have the ability to control this kind of knowledge, I am afraid that it was translated from Japan, which needs to be verified. Let's look at the page again, the narrator arrived in London, it is new year's day 2071 after the era, and the utopian time is very clear, which year and which month and which day. He came to Londonia, where he thought it was his former home, London, but he didn't know him anymore and became a stranger. He meets a thirteenth-century figure, Bacon, and his girlfriend Fondesi, who is Phantasia in English or Dutch, meaning fantasy, and you can also say the philosopher Bacon and his shadow. As soon as I saw this, I thought of Huang Longzi and Ji Gu in "The Journey of the Old Remnant", two people living in seclusion on a mountain. The narrator then sees that the bell tower reads "New Year's Day 271 BC", which leads to a long discussion about time and timing, talking about "True Time", what is called "Mean Time", and finally creating an "Aleutic Time", Chinese called "Arudite Time". He said, "I know it when it's really right" — I know it in real time, "I know it in the middle of time" — I know the time in China. The "middle time" here may be Greenwich Mean Time, or it may be the "Aleutic Time" mentioned in the book. Then there was a whole bunch of talk, including what twelve hours, the alien population of Londonia, very carefully. I've only read three pages so far, and I haven't looked at it carefully. If anyone is going to write a master's thesis, it's a very good topic. This text seems to have been serialized in the Embroidery Novel, and may not have been completed. I don't know how the readers reacted at the time. This novel is obviously not about playing, the content is very rich, and it will be studied later.
If you want to talk about the interest of readers at that time, you can see it in the novels serialized in "Embroidery Novel". Not only science fiction is serialized, but there are many other things, and the "Old Remnant Journey" and "A Short History of Civilization" that I talked about last time are serialized in this magazine at the same time. In addition, there is Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe, both of which depict "half-hanging" utopias. Why do Chinese like it? "Robinson Crusoe" is about Robinson going to a desert island and living with a native named Friday, the relationship between these two people, now American scholars regard this as the relationship between colonialism and colonization, but readers in the late Qing Dynasty did not think so, may be as a kind of science fiction. Why? Because another kind of science fiction novel is called "The Dream of Fools", that is, there is a group of patriots in China who were hunted down by the Qing court, ran to a small island, saw the natives on the island, and naturalized the natives, and the natives became their slaves, becoming a small utopia.
A large number of other texts are mostly semi-science fiction, semi-historical interpretations, some are about world wars, inventing all kinds of electric and optical weapons, there is a novel about Hungary being bullied by the great powers, looking for help from China, and there is a "doctor of electricity" in China who runs away and uses electronic weapons to conquer them. The final winner, of course, is China. At that time, the great powers had not yet risen, and it was still the era of the sick man of East Asia, and naturally there was a kind of repressed resentment that could not come out, so through the power of "sound, light, chemical, and electricity" invented in science fiction, China became the center of the world. Let's see how it develops electricity and power plants? It is also connected with the geography of China. For example, the electric doctor in "Electric World", he built the world's largest power plant, where? It is behind kunlun mountain. All in all, mixing some fantasy technology with details from traditional Chinese mythology can make the content extraordinarily rich, sometimes to the point of being unruly.
I have a basic question that I can't answer yet, which is technically, what details in this kind of novel are a little new? What changes have occurred since external factors have entered the text? If, according to Hu Shi, these are "living literatures", then does it represent a possibility of the evolution of the novel genre? Because during the May Fourth period, people thought that everything was evolved, and the style was also evolving. Regarding the theory of stylistic evolution, I am not talking about it, but have a theoretical basis. There was a left-wing theorist, I think it was remarkable, an Italian named Franco Moretti, who had taught at Stanford University, whom I had never met, but whom we had admired for a long time, who had sent me several of his books, and I had two very important ideas from his books.
The English edition of Modern Epic
He has a book called Modern Epic, which has a chapter on literary evolution, which he says drew directly from Darwin's theory of evolution. He said that the transformation of style is not because of new content and themes, but because of the change in the subsection (device) of narrative technique, and his concept is basically derived from the narrative of Russian formalism, that is, in a certain kind of narrative section, the old rules will have a new role, he used a word called re-functionalization - function is the role, re-function is the "re-action"—— As a result, a change in genre forms was gradually formed. This view explains at least part of why the late Qing narrator is ever-changing, that is, some of its roles have begun to change, which is not the same as the traditional, but it is still in the traditional position, and has not completely become a new type of subjective narrator, such as Lu Xun's novels "Kong Yiji" and "Blessings".
In addition, Moredi also has a concept called the evolution of the "bricklayer" (bricolage), he said that the structure of the novel is like building a house, you have to see the patch patch inside the mud brick gap, often the evolution of the novel form, it is in the patch process. He used a surprising example—it turns out that he and I used the same example—that is, the musician Schoenberg that I talked about last time, Schoenberg talked about a-tonality, the so-called tonality or the twelve-tone rhythm, did not deliberately create something new, he said that in traditional harmony, from one tone to another, there is a transition, the transition tone is semitone, the whole tone and the accompanying sound are treated equally, and together they become the twelve-tone law, and the atonality is born, and he becomes a new form. From this standpoint, we cannot say that it can be applied to the late Qing novel, because one of my more pessimistic conclusions is that the late Qing novel has not yet developed its novelty in details, and we do not even know which details are important, and we often have to find its novelty in the stylistic gaps that the author and the reader do not pay attention to. So how to find it? Each person's explanation is different.
I've just tried to do some of my personal quest, hoping to see new problems in some details, such as how the novel begins, how the narrator enters, how the plot flashbacks, how the novel is structured, and so on. The most obvious feature of late Qing novels is that the plot narrative is often cut off, and the author has no time to write, or cannot write, which are external factors. What about the intrinsic factors? Further discussions need to be continued.
But in general, the writing method of the late Qing novel has been a little different from the traditional novel, it is no longer like the previous "Three Kingdoms" and "Water Margin" writing, its sense of history is not so strong, it does not attach the present to the past, obviously written in the Ming Dynasty, but said that it is the story of the Song Dynasty, like "Golden Plum Bottle"; The Romance of the Three Kingdoms was written by the Ming Dynasty, but it was written about the Three Kingdoms in ancient times. The Ming Dynasty also had a very interesting novel, called "Journey to the West Supplement". Journey to the West is the only one that occasionally talks about the future world. If you have seen it, you will know that on the surface it is still talking about the past world, and the future world is only talking about a little. There is a passage that says that Qin Juniper came out and was judged by Sun Wukong, who turned into Yu Ji and Xiang Yu in conversation. However, in the middle, Sun Wukong accidentally entered the future world and found out how the calendar of this world is upside down, one month starts from the 30th and 29th, and the first day is the end, isn't it very strange? So at that time, the imagination of the future was a mirror image, as if it were refracted from a mirror.
And the role of this mirror image, in traditional Chinese literature, was transmitted from ancient times all the way to the Qing Dynasty, and even to the "Mirror Flower Edge". If it is regarded as a fable, it has the role of a dream, and the narrator can think about it, and use the analogue script to say to the reader, "Rank the official..." On the other hand, I find that the "I" of the vernacular text comes in, sometimes written as "Yu", sometimes as "I", and this "I" comes in directly through the narrator's voice, and the narrator's voice is sometimes not necessarily the author's voice. This kind of complexity seems to naturally enter the text, but it does not change the formal norms of the text itself, but becomes a Lu Xun-style short story. Everyone is familiar with Lu Xun. I won't dwell on it here. In fact, even from such a little hint, I feel that the late Qing dynasty novels are still worth studying.
Why was Kang Youwei the most successful writer of utopia at that time?
Finally, I would like to talk about the writer I personally think has been the most successful writer of utopias, that is, Kang Youwei. Kang Youwei never admitted that he wrote a novel, because the famous book he wrote was called "Datong Shu". According to modern scholars, he began writing in 1902 when he was in exile in India, serialized a part in the magazine "Intolerable" in 1913, and published the whole book after his death in 1927. I would like to ask the same question, that is, how did Kang Youwei imagine his world of Datong? I have not yet said this, the materials have been brought, but they have not yet been compiled into chapters. By chance, I met a film director in Hong Kong named Chen Yaocheng, who made a documentary called "Kang Youwei in Sweden" or "Datong". I don't know if you have seen it? I brought it today, but I don't have time to show it to you because of copyright issues. He especially put the story of Kang Youwei in Sweden, Kang Youwei has a book called "Sweden Travels", he asked me if I have read it, I said I have not read it, he immediately gave me this book. This book is not taken seriously in Kang Youwei's travels around the twelve nations.
It turned out that in 1904, when the texts of these late Qing novels we were talking about appeared in large numbers, Kang Youwei was wandering in Europe and went to Sweden twice. His favorite European city, which he himself put it clearly, is not London, which he says is too dirty and the houses are too old; It's not Paris either, Paris is pretty much the same, too old; New York, he said the houses are uneven, some high and some low are not good-looking; Then he said berlin was better, but it was still dirty; The best city is Stockholm, the capital of Sweden. He said Stockholm and The capital of Hungary, Budapest, are two of his favorite Western capitals, with Stockholm being the most beautiful. Why? It is the only capital in Europe on a small island. Kang Youwei likes the island very much, to what extent? He bought a small island near Stockholm and wanted to go into hiding there, stayed in a hotel on the island for a long time, and wrote many poems. The first time he went to Stockholm was with his daughter Kang Tongbi, he lived in the famous Grand Hotel, right in the port, and recently my wife and I also stayed in Northern Europe, the bed was too soft and uncomfortable, but it has a long history. Many years ago, I was holding an academic conference with many Chinese intellectuals in a small city hotel, and Professor Ma Yueran said to us: Do you know? Kang Youwei lived here, I didn't care at the time, and then looked for information, found that it was the hotel on the island he talked about, and he liked the island very much.
Datong Shu, by Kang Youwei, Zhonghua Bookstore, July 2012 edition
He began writing the first draft of the Datong Shu from 1901 to 1902, and this experience gave him enough inspiration to combine the Confucian tradition with the experience of the West, all in his book Confucius Reform Examination. Kang Youwei belongs to the modern Literary School, and the dispute between the modern Anduwen and the Ancient Literature is not unusual for me, but what is strange is that Kang Youwei can turn the "future" into a reality. And China's previous battles between ancient and modern times have never regarded the future as so important. In the "Book of Datong", Kang Youwei is very clear about the design of the future, and everyone knows that he is divided into three stages: the chaotic world, the ascension to the peace world, and the final ideal political system is equivalent to the world of datong. The book proposes to "go to the Nine Realms", including national boundaries and family boundaries, and the future geography is also clearly stated, and the division of land is autonomous, "the longitude and latitude of each place are divided into Baidu, fifty degrees north of the equator, fifty degrees south of the equator, a total of 10,000 degrees", well-organized.
The most important thing is that - this film is also finally proposed - to remove the shackles of the marriage system, Kang Youwei is the earliest feminist, he believes that the marriage system is very bad, men and women marriage should have a contract, a month period, such as men and women love each other and then extend. Although it seems ridiculous on the surface, it is said that many couples in Europe today are practicing this system, signing a contract when getting married, who the children should belong to if they divorce in the future, how to divide the property, and other arrangements. Of course, Kang Youwei's imagination could not be realized, but he designed a very detailed blueprint.
I think kang Youwei's tragedy is that his utopian imagination can not be realized in China, and we can see the difficulty of utopia construction, in fact, there is still a problem until now: how to build a utopia, will it become a "dystopia" in the future? This is a nightmare that we face after learning from the West to the East. The Hollywood movies you see are all dystopian, what "Spider-Man", "Batman" and so on, the background is a magic city, technology is used by bad people, fortunately, there is a Superman like Batman and Spider-Man to fight and save mankind. What if Superman fails? At present, "Batman" has filmed the fourth episode, in which the villain of Joker, the actor played very well, the real person finally died of drugs, but did not die in the movie. This contrast between dystopianism and utopia in contemporary popular media is another topic worth exploring.
Speech | Leo Fan
Excerpts | Xu Yuedong
Editors | walk away