Just Listening: An IntroductionVarsano, Paula; Varsano, Paula
2024 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture
doi: 10.1215/23290048-11118522
The essays collected in this special issue all respond to a single question: how have the producers of Chinese literature, thought, art, science, and popular culture conceived of their relationship with the nonhuman beings—creatures organic and inorganic, animal or technological—that surround us as humans? While ranging across time periods and training their sights on vastly different objects, these essays manifest a particular interest in examining how voice (together with its notable absence)—as it slips from phenomenon to figuration and back again—appears to set the boundary that both separates and enacts engagement between the human and nonhuman realms. This introduction brings these essays into conversation with each other to highlight some of the unforeseen patterns they manifest as a whole. Among these is the chronological: read in order, these essays hint at a growing awareness of humans’ incapacity to connect, whether with one another or with the nonhuman: an emerging sense that voice does not necessarily correspond to the subjectivity of those that emit or withhold it or that, even if it did, there would be no sure way for a hearer to establish that correspondence, let alone respond with meaningful and appropriate actions or words.
Voices from the Other Side: Exploring Nonhuman Agents and Their Narrative Function in the ZhuangziGraziani, Romain; Varsano, Paula
2024 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture
doi: 10.1215/23290048-11118538
In the history of Chinese literature, the Zhuangzi authors were the first to grant a voice to diverse forms of life, among them a snake, a tree, a dead man, a divine turtle, and even the wind. What exactly is the interest of incorporating nonhuman protagonists in brief literary fictions? Was there something at stake when trying out this pioneering narrative technique, or was it just for the sake of literary innovation and entertainment? Through a detailed analysis of a set of concise narratives, this study uncovers a consistent critique of the religious institutions (chiefly divination and sacrifice), as well as the economic practices prevalent during the Warring States period. It aims to demonstrate that the Zhuangzi's comprehensive critique of the Zhou cultural order achieves its “hearability” through a recurrent use of striking dualities, including day and night, dream and wakefulness, and humans and nonhumans. A heretofore silent and passive community of living beings raises its voice and is able to challenge the well-established discourse proclaiming human sovereignty over the natural world. These voices and the themes they raise serve, among other things, as a literary strategy intended to illuminate the universality of violence and the criminal essence of human culture (wen 文).
Simian Episteme, circa 1200Hong, Jeehee; Varsano, Paula
2024 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture
doi: 10.1215/23290048-11118498
This article examines intersensory practices between seeing and hearing surrounding the medium of painting in middle-period China. Deviating from the better-known pictorial practice in which a mimetic image of a sound maker provides an entryway into a fictive soundscape, the central work discussed in this article depicts only a listener, and an unusual one at that: a seated monkey at the intersection of poetic, religious, and ecological boundaries. Attentive to the puzzling nonhuman form of the represented subject as an unlikely listener, it probes how the interplay between seeing and hearing gave rise to a complex sonic environment in pictorial medium. The unveiling of the mixed modality steers us toward an underrecognized role of painting in Chinese history as a material stimulus for multisensorial experiences, beyond the rhetoric of “soundless poetry” that has often stifled such dynamic potential of the medium.
Cauldron, Copper, Cash: Medieval Bronze in Motion and FluxMoser, Jeffrey; Varsano, Paula
2024 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture
doi: 10.1215/23290048-11118490
Medieval Chinese thinkers conceptualized ancient bronzes in anthropocentric terms—as mute, inert objects that required the engagement of a perspicacious human subject for their value to become apparent. They also regarded bronzes as animate things that had the capacity to act independently of direct human manipulation, and they situated bronzes within frameworks of material vitalism that parallel many aspects of the “new materialism” associated with contemporary theorists like Karen Barad and Jane Bennett. This article interprets both of these understandings as containment strategies designed to rein in and constrain bronze's ever-present capacity for liquefaction. As with other metals, bronze was forever oscillating between solidity, in the form of discrete, functional objects, and liquidity, as a mutable substance of tremendous potency. Both states spawned different metaphors. Tracing this tension between solidity and liquidity, from the casting of the Nine Cauldrons and the origin myths of Chinese civilization through the medieval challenge of adapting a metallist currency regime to an expanding economy, this article explores how the cultural logics and natural tendencies of bronze were intertwined.
The Crying Statue in Early Qing DramaKelly, Thomas; Varsano, Paula
2024 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture
doi: 10.1215/23290048-11118514
Should the theatrical fantasy of a statue coming to life involve an actor performing the role of a thing, or a prop taking the place of a human? Proceeding from contests between Hong Sheng 洪昇 (1645–1704) and acting troupes over the staging of the “Crying Statue” 哭像 (Kuxiang) scene in his dramatic masterpiece Palace of Lasting Life (Changsheng dian 長生殿), this article examines how the figure of the living icon became a focal point in broader struggles to conceptualize the relationship between theater and rituals of mourning. Actors staged this complicated scene as an “auspicious sacrifice” (jiji 吉祭), one that foregrounds the transcendence of love over lifeless matter. Hong, conversely, insists on the function of the scene as an “unpropitious rite” (xiongdian 凶奠), a solemn meditation on mortality and the collective expression of grief. By redirecting focus from the object to the space and social dynamics of mourning, Hong questions the drive to bestow on things a life that is not their own.
Dehumanized Voices and Traumatic Articulations in Late Nineteenth-Century Chinese Classical TalesWei, Li; Varsano, Paula
2024 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture
doi: 10.1215/23290048-11118546
This study leverages trauma theory to examine Xuan Ding's 宣鼎 (1832–1880) Yeyu qiudeng lu 夜雨秋燈錄 (Recorded on Rainy Nights by Autumn Lamp), a collection of classical tales published in the aftermath of the Taiping Civil War (1850–1864). The analysis here delves into the concept of dehumanization, typically understood as the denial of one's intrinsic human traits by other people. In the late Qing context, dehumanization can occur when an individual is perceived as deviating from the path of self-cultivation, or as inept at or resistant to fulfilling prescribed social and gender roles, often leading to social ostracism. Xuan Ding conveys both the acute trauma of the Taiping war and the quotidian, gender- and class-based traumas imposed by late Qing society through the dramatic depiction of characters who undergo a metamorphosis into subhuman forms. This study also shows that in his preface to the collection, Xuan engages in the artistic dehumanization of his own literary persona. From this strategic position of moral self-exile, he is able to both provide a platform for dissenting voices and suggest the therapeutic potential of writing during times of suffering. This study explores how one writer's depiction of the trauma of dehumanization navigates and illuminates the nuanced boundary between the human and the nonhuman as understood at this time. By investigating the complex interplay of dehumanization and trauma, and their manifestation in literature, this study invites consideration of culturally specific nuances within trauma theory and opens up avenues for comparative analysis.
Manuscript and the Human in Modern ChinaEstep, Chloe; Varsano, Paula
2024 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture
doi: 10.1215/23290048-11118506
While the stylus, or handwriting instrument, is typically left out of narratives of technologization, this article details how manuscripts expressed modernity. By examining representations of pens and brushes in print media and cinema from the Republican and socialist eras, this article shows that the stylus served as a metonym for the changing status of the human in manuscript writing in the modern period. While earlier literary examples show that the brush and the human were understood to be commensurable, mutually resonant categories, rapid technological and political changes in the twentieth century led to increasing friction between the human and various forms of manuscript writing. This reevaluation of the relationship between writer and writing instrument began in the early twentieth century and resulted in anxiety over the introduction of mechanized forms of inscription into a human-centered writing process. Examples from Maoist cinema in the latter half of the twentieth century show the replacement of this anxiety with attempts to integrate manuscript writing into socialist modernity through the displacement of the writing subject.
What Noise Does a Psychotic Door Listen To? Information, Intermediality, and Guo Baochang's Peking Opera Film Dream of the Bridal ChamberLam, Ling Hon; Varsano, Paula
2024 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture
doi: 10.1215/23290048-11118530
The Chinese opera film criticism of the late 1950s coincided with the introduction of cybernetics to China. Echoing cybernetics’ emphasis on the homeostasis of an artificial or living machine archived by filtering noise from information in the environment, film critics aimed no less at maintaining the steady states of Chinese culture (epitomized by traditional opera) when taking on the treacherous milieu called modernization (in the form of cinema). The whole problematic of opera films—in which one is forced to choose filtering out formulaic operatic gestures or realistic cinematic mise-en-scène as noise to maintain a self-cohesive cultural system—follows from the mistake of essentializing media specificities as prior to the contingent encounter among different mediums. However, an alternative approach lies in treating noise not as interference that must be eliminated but as surplus information that introduces system errors, triggers phase shifts, and brings about random changes for genuine self-organization, allowing us to confront control with the noise in its own channels. A revamping of cybernetics in this regard opens up new possibilities of understanding opera films through the peculiar prism of Guo Baochang's 2005 opera film Chungui meng 春閨夢 (Dream of the Bridal Chamber). And that prism particularly takes the form of a series of moon gates (yueliang men 月亮門), an architectural trope invoked throughout the film signifying the cybernetic circuit of gateways that at once exerts control over and yet is disturbed and reshaped by the noisy signals arising from the mutual interferences among opera, film, and, ultimately, television.