Читать книгу On the Horizon of World Literature - Emily Sun - Страница 13

Liberté, egalité, fraternité. Liberty, equality, fraternity: these are the terms that form the slogan of the French Revolution and that democratic modernity appeals to as sociopolitical principles of a shared humanity. But these principles have substance only within the languages and sociocultural configurations in which human beings as historical beings have their existence, and they can have operativity only within the terms and conditions of languages that sustain their meaning. Their universality is not a presupposition but rather, then, a promise whose actualization and reactualization take place in languages. My contention is that it is only on the basis of detailed and rigorous reading of these languages, as they encounter each other and enter into conversation, that we can begin to ask the question of what such principles as liberty, equality, and fraternity might mean—what modernity might mean within the specific terms and conditions of different lifeworlds. It is for this reason that this book examines practices of writing in Romantic England and Republican China that launch literary modernities by orienting themselves toward the task of actualizing these principles as attributes of being modern across different lifeworlds.

The valence of each term, the significance of the sequencing of terms, and the relationship between them all remain questions for ongoing consideration and deliberation, questions that become both more enigmatic and more precise when read comparatively and cross-culturally. “Liberty,” for instance, is located among a cluster of terms including “freedom” and “emancipation” in English. To translate “liberty,” Japanese and Chinese scholars in the late nineteenth century retrieved a term of previously minor currency and consequence, ziyou, from the Confucian classics as an approximation for a globally circulating concept with local instantiations.⁴¹ That the term “fraternity” falls short as a principle of universality is evident in the way it takes a part—men or brothers—for the whole. In place of “fraternity,” I prefer throughout this study “mutuality,” which designates more properly a condition of interdependence and cooperation that would obtain between human beings as equals.

In my reading of the way the practices of writing in question explore what it means to be modern, I have found instructive the work of two contemporary North American philosophers, Charles Taylor and Stanley Cavell. In his 2004 book Modern Social Imaginaries, Taylor proposes the notion of an affirmation of ordinary life that is constitutive of modernity across cultures and regions.⁴² This affirmation, according to Taylor, involves the valorization of those aspects of human life concerned with production and reproduction, with labor and work, activities that in the Aristotelian tradition of political thought had long been considered infrastructural for the higher task of living well, which was available only to the leisured few. The modern democratic revolutionary values of freedom, equality, and mutuality are in accord with such an affirmation of ordinary life, with the question and task of living well displaced into the locus of the ordinary as a possible pursuit for the many. Affirmations of ordinary life across multiple modernities involve what Taylor calls, after economist Karl Polanyi, “dis-embeddings” from traditional hierarchical orderings of societies and communities, processes of reform and revaluation that include, for instance, the complex transformation of Confucianism from state orthodoxy to way of thought and textual tradition beginning in the early twentieth century. Such disembeddings do not involve a clean break between pasts and presents, as in a linear conception of temporality. They involve acknowledgments and reckonings with the complex afterlives of traditional ordering systems as these undergo dehierarchizing rearticulation. If classical Chinese lost its operativity along with the dismantling of the Confucian administrative apparatus in early twentieth-century China, it survives within both the national vernacular of Mandarin Chinese and the regional vernaculars in which it had become embedded on all levels of linguistic use, from the official to the literary to the everyday, as scripta franca of empire. Elements of classical thought and literary expression inhabit both Mandarin as present-day koiné or lingua franca of the Sinophone world and the ordinary languages in which ordinary life continues always already to take place and evolve in the linguistic-political aftermath of empire and empires.

While Charles Taylor addresses questions of multiculturalism in a broad sense with his notion of modernity as a turn everywhere toward the affirmation of ordinary life, Stanley Cavell is a philosopher whose focus on skepticism as a problem staged in moral thought and aesthetics has taken place intensively and intimately in relation to European and Anglo-American texts. Where Taylor hypothesizes an affirmation of ordinary life, Cavell reads in a corpus of philosophical, literary, and cinematic texts processes well described by the punning title of his 1987 book In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism.⁴³ The ordinary stands here for both lived, everyday existence and the medium of ordinary language in which that experience of living is understood. Skepticism and Romanticism contest the terms and conditions of both ordinary life and ordinary language as a medium of thought, a process of questioning whose paradoxical character is, according to Cavell, essential to our being human. The ordinary is thus subject necessarily to both quest and inquest in the vitality of a process that, experiencing language as dead, seeks to renew and recover it, not by establishing a meta-language for higher thought, but immanently, within the unacknowledged intimacies of ordinary language itself. Cavell’s thinking, which has not traveled as readily beyond the sphere of Euro-American letters as Taylor’s or, even more widely, John Rawls’s, opens up ways of thinking about and reading the operations of legacies of skepticism, in, say, Daoist and Zen Buddhist aesthetics, in the work, or play, of inhabiting and reimagining the ordinary as structurally universal yet locally and historically lived scene of modernity.

In summary, this book examines the literary and aesthetic means by which the question and task of living well as pursuit for the many is explored and enacted in connected moments of incipience for literary modernity in England and China. It aims to offer a complex perspective on the global legacy of conceptions of literature developed in the European Enlightenment and Romanticism as this legacy is activated across linguistic and cultural boundaries and interacts with local textual traditions and social systems. Beginning with the higher, more heroic register of Shelley and Lu Xun’s manifestos, it moves toward middling registers of literary forms and forms-of-life associated with popular storytelling, quotidian leisure, and feminine domesticity, in which affirmations and interrogations of the ordinary involve thick evocation of the sensuous particulars of life-worlds that are not readily available and recognizable to one another. My study traces culturally heterogeneous antecedents that inform and animate comparable creative practices and attends as well to the ways the English and Chinese texts in question register the promises and perils of mechanisms of technoeconomic homogenization that were likewise reorganizing human life in the global long nineteenth century. With the attentiveness it seeks to perform and to encourage, this book aims to open up ways of inhabitation and imagination to one another in a plurally shared and intimately lived world modernity.