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ahorbinskiBibliographic Data: Jones, Andrew F. Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
Main Argument: "This book is a historical enquiry into the development of this discourse [of development] in the Chinese literary and media culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly as refracted through and subject to criqitue in the work of Lu Xun and many of his contemporaries" (3). "Development" is "a way of knowing, narrating, and attempting to manage processes of radical historical change" although "the term is haunted by its own semantic instability" (ibid). Jones notes that devleopmentalism has become the sovereign logic of China (and of other countries), with ruinous consequences; thus the book also "initiates a genealogical critique of developmental thinking by tracing its origins in the translation of evolutionary biology into Chinese letters in the late nineteenth century…and suggesting how it gave rise to new narrative forms, lent its structure to the historical imagination, and tragically limited ideological horizons" (4). Moreover, Chinese intellectuals were not doing this in isolation; it was part of global process in which evolutionary thinking "was translated and assimilated to local discourse throughout East Asia and a host of other locales" (5).
Historiographical Engagement: Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power; Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China; Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice; Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern; Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples Jones argues that although the introduction of evolutionary thought into China was a fairly elite affair, "the nearly universal purchase of evolutionary ideas by the early 1930s--and thus their hegemonic status--was a product of their vernacularization across a wide variety of popular media" (8). Moreover, evolutionary theory circulated not only in terms of content but "most effectively as a narrative structure, a historiographic template that could account as easily for literary history, political institutions, or military technologies" (9). Why? For one, "evolutionary narrative…became an indispensable means of representing the predicament of national development in a colonial world order" (ibid). For Jones, Lu Xun is central, because his work "simultaneously reproduces and critiques the logic of developmental history," often at the level of form (11). Jones is also concerned to untangle development from the modern, noting that recent efforts to rethink global modernity in terms of local forms run the risk of "reifying modernity as an ontological category" (14). He then discusses some of the ways that "modernity" has been translated into Chinese, and how Yan Fu's Spencerian translations figured China as already modern in the sense that China was, by evolutionary analogy, already overcome and in its place in the natural order of things; development offered a solution for this, but only as mediated by elites, which bequeathed a tension to modern Chinese literature (and indeed, one suspects, to modern Chinese history). Not coincidentally, in this period the figure of the child also became a crucial site of concern for elite Chinese society (as well as one of profit for the Chinese publishing industry)--in the child as metaphor for the nation and as metaphorical developmental stage in the evolution of the human being lay the chance to spring the developmental trap.
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter reads late Qing literature in terms of late Victorian history and literature, and in particular Wu Jiaren's New Story of the Stone, a speculative fiction sequel to Cao Xueqin's classic novel The Story of the Stone. Wu Jiaren drew up and transformed tropes from the works of two late Victorian authors, namely the American Edward Bellamy's time-traveling socialist novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887, and the novels of the Frenchman Jules Verne, particularly 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Although Wu Jiaren attempts to use the speculative fiction structure adapted from Bellamy to overturn the developmental and colonialist logic of "natural" human history, using tropes of classification and no-sovereignty derived from Verne, ultimately the attempt is undermined by the colonial violence Wu seeks to undermine. Jones argues that the influence of "evolutionary thinking" not only in the West but in the global colonized sphere has yet to be adequately interrogated:
Evolutionary thinking entered the colonial sphere through the process of translation in the print cultures of colonial nodes and treaty ports: Shanghai, Calcutta, Seoul, Tokyo, to name a few. The "iron house" of developmental logic, however, meant that the translation of these ideas by the intellectuals who did so also left them with a sense of anxiety over their own agency as builders of modern nations, anxiety reflected in Wu's novel and in the works of Lu Xun.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at inheritability as a trope in literature, particularly Lu Xun's story "The Misanthrope," and also at the vernacularization of ideas about evolutionary biology. The first point about vernacularization is that the "vernacular literature" of the May Fourth movement was itself a vernacularization not just of classical Chinese, but also "in relation to the languages of the imperial powers" via, for instance, the Europeanization of Chinese syntax (68). Second, the evolutionary thinking translated and introduced by such people as Yan Fu underwent a second-order vernacularization when these ideas were popularized through "the explosive grown of a new commercial print culture, centered in Shanghai" (ibid). The debate about inheritability of course goes back to the Darwinian versus Lamarckian debates on inheritability--while incorrect, the Lamarckian hypothesis allowed for animal agency as a factor in the course of evolution. Lamarckianism played particularly well in the Chinese popular print culture, to the extent that Lamarckian "soft inheritance became an inescapable precondition for evolutionary thinking in China. To dispense with Lamarck (or to refuse, in the wake of Mendel, to allow soft inheritance in through the backdoor of Spencerian social theory or eugenics) was to acknowledge that the geopolitical game had already been fixed in the mists of geological time" (73). Jones traces the dissemination of evolutionary narratives to children's magazines, which frequently showed children learning their lessons teaching those same lessons to animals: "they not only promise to inoculate Chinese children from the threat of atavism, but also offers the possibility of educating them for upward mobility in the colonial world order" (89). [These magazines are in fact how Jones got the idea for the book.]
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at "the child as history in Republican China." The twenty years between the New Culture movement in 1917 and the outbreak of war with Japan in 1937 "Witnessed an unprecedented explosion of discourse for and about children, childhood, and childhood development," encompassing both popular and academic discourses (103). Jones argues that "developmentalism in its contemporary form must be traced back to discourses of development in the Republican era, and understood in part as a way of seeing children as figures for national history," which leads to the reverse question: "How might it be possible to see history through the eyes of children?" (105) Jones argues that this emphasis on children was made possible "by a particular sort of ideological mirage" which "hinges on what I will call an immaculate conception of history, a conception in which the child is figured as an agent of national redemption" (105). Why? Because evolutionary thinking figured Chinese civilization and culture as a stunted, backward legacy that had to be sloughed off--hence, the New Culture movement, and that the project itself "problematizes the transmission of culture from one generation to another, and in so doing, places the figure of the child and the practice of pedagogy squarely at the center of questions of national history" (106). Jones reads Lu Xun's "Diary of a Madman" as a process of unlearning the lessons of the Confucian canon and argues that in the end (because the narrator's brother actually has been feeding him human flesh) the text presents "the terrifying and tainted inevitability of cultural inheritance," that heritage cannot be overcome or rejected (108): "children, he implies, cannot serve as blank states, primed for a redemptive rewriting of the national story, for culture is always already inscribed upon them, in the very process of biological and social reproduction" (111). Lu Xun's story was part of the "discovery of childhood" in Republican China (late and delayed, in developmental schemas, of course), and in turn that "the centrality of children in May Fourth nationalist discourse both underwrites and is underwritten by a new culture industry that depends on the children's market as a major source of revenue" (112). Thus the literature and the business showed a "double movement between rescuing children and being redeemed by them, between saving the children and consuming them as grist for the new literary mill" (118), influenced further by the fairy tale scholars of Europe including Andrew Lang and the folklorists of Japan led by Yanagita Kunio, so that "literature by children" (songs, etc) also became an object for collection. Children's toys similarly became an object for concern, even as they served as "obstinate mirrors of the distortion and oppressions of the time that surrounds them, and of the now in which they continue to speak to us" (125).
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the "historically determinate and pervasive cultural logic in which children and commodities were consistently linked together as part of a larger narrative of national development in Republican China" (129). In this discourse, evolutionary thinking and capitalism fused so that it became a commonplace that "in order to survive, China must not only reproduce itself as a society through its progeny, but also 'add value' to the raw materials of its biological inheritance by way of education, as as to create a product fit to compete in a global marketplace" (130). This discourse was part of the rise of "product nationality," which came to be a tool of anti-imperialist resistance, particularly in Chinese boycotts of Japan-made goods as Japanese imperialism escalated. As well as critical photomontages juxtaposing urban children's toys and actual rural Chinese children (the toys cost more), Jones also reads the movie Playthings (1933) as a vision of China's national future--a future which belongs to the bourgeoisie, in which China's rural peasants are "merely the evolutionary remnant of a triumphal history that has yet to unfold" (145-46).
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the relations between the "blind Russian anarchist and Esperanto advocate, Vasilii Eroshenko" and Lu Xun, both of whom were interested in and ultimately bound up with "intense efforts on the part of Chinese intellectuals to develop a modern children's literature" (150). Jones reads Eroshenko's fairy tale "A Narrow Cage," which Lu Xun translated from the Japanese, as a kind of "modernist fairy-tale" in which the conventions of the genre are subjected to self scrutiny, which is an interesting strategy given the discourse on fairy-tales as both the "childhood of fiction" and also "the most important means by which educators might effect the civilization (wending kaihua) of children, and with them, the nation" (151). Reading Eroshenko's stories, Jones finds many similarities with Lu Xun's work, raising the question of the influence of the former on the latter, but Jones argues rather that "the affinities between these two authors, finally, may not be so much a question of influence (to the doubtful extent to which such influence could be apportioned) as instead their common participation in what we might term, following Friedrich Kittler, a newly emergent and increasingly globalized discourse network" (167). As for the story itself, Jones concludes that "in the end, Eroshenko's fairy tale imprisons the reader in the very impasse with which it began, history comes to a standstill, and narrative itself becomes a narrow cage. It remains to be seen whether or not the cage may serve as a portal to historical insight" (173).
Critical assessment: This is an excellent book that makes some very complex arguments, complex enough that these notes most assuredly do not capture all of what Jones is saying. I think the fact that there is no conclusion as such is very much on point--in its own way, this book is a critique of the present as much as of the past. "'Might there still be someone who hasn't eaten human flesh? Save the children.'"
Further reading: Miriam Hansen, "Vernacular Modernism"
Meta notes: Evolution has no preordained goal, and extinction is the fate of all species.
Main Argument: "This book is a historical enquiry into the development of this discourse [of development] in the Chinese literary and media culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly as refracted through and subject to criqitue in the work of Lu Xun and many of his contemporaries" (3). "Development" is "a way of knowing, narrating, and attempting to manage processes of radical historical change" although "the term is haunted by its own semantic instability" (ibid). Jones notes that devleopmentalism has become the sovereign logic of China (and of other countries), with ruinous consequences; thus the book also "initiates a genealogical critique of developmental thinking by tracing its origins in the translation of evolutionary biology into Chinese letters in the late nineteenth century…and suggesting how it gave rise to new narrative forms, lent its structure to the historical imagination, and tragically limited ideological horizons" (4). Moreover, Chinese intellectuals were not doing this in isolation; it was part of global process in which evolutionary thinking "was translated and assimilated to local discourse throughout East Asia and a host of other locales" (5).
Historiographical Engagement: Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power; Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China; Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice; Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern; Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples Jones argues that although the introduction of evolutionary thought into China was a fairly elite affair, "the nearly universal purchase of evolutionary ideas by the early 1930s--and thus their hegemonic status--was a product of their vernacularization across a wide variety of popular media" (8). Moreover, evolutionary theory circulated not only in terms of content but "most effectively as a narrative structure, a historiographic template that could account as easily for literary history, political institutions, or military technologies" (9). Why? For one, "evolutionary narrative…became an indispensable means of representing the predicament of national development in a colonial world order" (ibid). For Jones, Lu Xun is central, because his work "simultaneously reproduces and critiques the logic of developmental history," often at the level of form (11). Jones is also concerned to untangle development from the modern, noting that recent efforts to rethink global modernity in terms of local forms run the risk of "reifying modernity as an ontological category" (14). He then discusses some of the ways that "modernity" has been translated into Chinese, and how Yan Fu's Spencerian translations figured China as already modern in the sense that China was, by evolutionary analogy, already overcome and in its place in the natural order of things; development offered a solution for this, but only as mediated by elites, which bequeathed a tension to modern Chinese literature (and indeed, one suspects, to modern Chinese history). Not coincidentally, in this period the figure of the child also became a crucial site of concern for elite Chinese society (as well as one of profit for the Chinese publishing industry)--in the child as metaphor for the nation and as metaphorical developmental stage in the evolution of the human being lay the chance to spring the developmental trap.
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter reads late Qing literature in terms of late Victorian history and literature, and in particular Wu Jiaren's New Story of the Stone, a speculative fiction sequel to Cao Xueqin's classic novel The Story of the Stone. Wu Jiaren drew up and transformed tropes from the works of two late Victorian authors, namely the American Edward Bellamy's time-traveling socialist novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887, and the novels of the Frenchman Jules Verne, particularly 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Although Wu Jiaren attempts to use the speculative fiction structure adapted from Bellamy to overturn the developmental and colonialist logic of "natural" human history, using tropes of classification and no-sovereignty derived from Verne, ultimately the attempt is undermined by the colonial violence Wu seeks to undermine. Jones argues that the influence of "evolutionary thinking" not only in the West but in the global colonized sphere has yet to be adequately interrogated:
At a fundamental level, evolutionary thinking involves understanding and narrating the social and cultural realms in terms derived from evolutionary biology. Crucial to this sort of thinking is a reliance on developmental narratives in which human history is figured in terms of natural history, and individuals as much as nations are assumed to move along a continuum from the 'savage' to the 'civilized.' This is a narrative mode, moreover, constructed around tropes that are characteristically monist in their insistence on the organicist notion that societies and bodies are best understood in terms of one another. (29)
Evolutionary thinking entered the colonial sphere through the process of translation in the print cultures of colonial nodes and treaty ports: Shanghai, Calcutta, Seoul, Tokyo, to name a few. The "iron house" of developmental logic, however, meant that the translation of these ideas by the intellectuals who did so also left them with a sense of anxiety over their own agency as builders of modern nations, anxiety reflected in Wu's novel and in the works of Lu Xun.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at inheritability as a trope in literature, particularly Lu Xun's story "The Misanthrope," and also at the vernacularization of ideas about evolutionary biology. The first point about vernacularization is that the "vernacular literature" of the May Fourth movement was itself a vernacularization not just of classical Chinese, but also "in relation to the languages of the imperial powers" via, for instance, the Europeanization of Chinese syntax (68). Second, the evolutionary thinking translated and introduced by such people as Yan Fu underwent a second-order vernacularization when these ideas were popularized through "the explosive grown of a new commercial print culture, centered in Shanghai" (ibid). The debate about inheritability of course goes back to the Darwinian versus Lamarckian debates on inheritability--while incorrect, the Lamarckian hypothesis allowed for animal agency as a factor in the course of evolution. Lamarckianism played particularly well in the Chinese popular print culture, to the extent that Lamarckian "soft inheritance became an inescapable precondition for evolutionary thinking in China. To dispense with Lamarck (or to refuse, in the wake of Mendel, to allow soft inheritance in through the backdoor of Spencerian social theory or eugenics) was to acknowledge that the geopolitical game had already been fixed in the mists of geological time" (73). Jones traces the dissemination of evolutionary narratives to children's magazines, which frequently showed children learning their lessons teaching those same lessons to animals: "they not only promise to inoculate Chinese children from the threat of atavism, but also offers the possibility of educating them for upward mobility in the colonial world order" (89). [These magazines are in fact how Jones got the idea for the book.]
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at "the child as history in Republican China." The twenty years between the New Culture movement in 1917 and the outbreak of war with Japan in 1937 "Witnessed an unprecedented explosion of discourse for and about children, childhood, and childhood development," encompassing both popular and academic discourses (103). Jones argues that "developmentalism in its contemporary form must be traced back to discourses of development in the Republican era, and understood in part as a way of seeing children as figures for national history," which leads to the reverse question: "How might it be possible to see history through the eyes of children?" (105) Jones argues that this emphasis on children was made possible "by a particular sort of ideological mirage" which "hinges on what I will call an immaculate conception of history, a conception in which the child is figured as an agent of national redemption" (105). Why? Because evolutionary thinking figured Chinese civilization and culture as a stunted, backward legacy that had to be sloughed off--hence, the New Culture movement, and that the project itself "problematizes the transmission of culture from one generation to another, and in so doing, places the figure of the child and the practice of pedagogy squarely at the center of questions of national history" (106). Jones reads Lu Xun's "Diary of a Madman" as a process of unlearning the lessons of the Confucian canon and argues that in the end (because the narrator's brother actually has been feeding him human flesh) the text presents "the terrifying and tainted inevitability of cultural inheritance," that heritage cannot be overcome or rejected (108): "children, he implies, cannot serve as blank states, primed for a redemptive rewriting of the national story, for culture is always already inscribed upon them, in the very process of biological and social reproduction" (111). Lu Xun's story was part of the "discovery of childhood" in Republican China (late and delayed, in developmental schemas, of course), and in turn that "the centrality of children in May Fourth nationalist discourse both underwrites and is underwritten by a new culture industry that depends on the children's market as a major source of revenue" (112). Thus the literature and the business showed a "double movement between rescuing children and being redeemed by them, between saving the children and consuming them as grist for the new literary mill" (118), influenced further by the fairy tale scholars of Europe including Andrew Lang and the folklorists of Japan led by Yanagita Kunio, so that "literature by children" (songs, etc) also became an object for collection. Children's toys similarly became an object for concern, even as they served as "obstinate mirrors of the distortion and oppressions of the time that surrounds them, and of the now in which they continue to speak to us" (125).
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the "historically determinate and pervasive cultural logic in which children and commodities were consistently linked together as part of a larger narrative of national development in Republican China" (129). In this discourse, evolutionary thinking and capitalism fused so that it became a commonplace that "in order to survive, China must not only reproduce itself as a society through its progeny, but also 'add value' to the raw materials of its biological inheritance by way of education, as as to create a product fit to compete in a global marketplace" (130). This discourse was part of the rise of "product nationality," which came to be a tool of anti-imperialist resistance, particularly in Chinese boycotts of Japan-made goods as Japanese imperialism escalated. As well as critical photomontages juxtaposing urban children's toys and actual rural Chinese children (the toys cost more), Jones also reads the movie Playthings (1933) as a vision of China's national future--a future which belongs to the bourgeoisie, in which China's rural peasants are "merely the evolutionary remnant of a triumphal history that has yet to unfold" (145-46).
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the relations between the "blind Russian anarchist and Esperanto advocate, Vasilii Eroshenko" and Lu Xun, both of whom were interested in and ultimately bound up with "intense efforts on the part of Chinese intellectuals to develop a modern children's literature" (150). Jones reads Eroshenko's fairy tale "A Narrow Cage," which Lu Xun translated from the Japanese, as a kind of "modernist fairy-tale" in which the conventions of the genre are subjected to self scrutiny, which is an interesting strategy given the discourse on fairy-tales as both the "childhood of fiction" and also "the most important means by which educators might effect the civilization (wending kaihua) of children, and with them, the nation" (151). Reading Eroshenko's stories, Jones finds many similarities with Lu Xun's work, raising the question of the influence of the former on the latter, but Jones argues rather that "the affinities between these two authors, finally, may not be so much a question of influence (to the doubtful extent to which such influence could be apportioned) as instead their common participation in what we might term, following Friedrich Kittler, a newly emergent and increasingly globalized discourse network" (167). As for the story itself, Jones concludes that "in the end, Eroshenko's fairy tale imprisons the reader in the very impasse with which it began, history comes to a standstill, and narrative itself becomes a narrow cage. It remains to be seen whether or not the cage may serve as a portal to historical insight" (173).
Critical assessment: This is an excellent book that makes some very complex arguments, complex enough that these notes most assuredly do not capture all of what Jones is saying. I think the fact that there is no conclusion as such is very much on point--in its own way, this book is a critique of the present as much as of the past. "'Might there still be someone who hasn't eaten human flesh? Save the children.'"
Further reading: Miriam Hansen, "Vernacular Modernism"
Meta notes: Evolution has no preordained goal, and extinction is the fate of all species.