France/China

Intercultural Imaginings

Alex Hughes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351566704
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

China has long been an object of fascination for the French, who celebrated theirannee de la Chine in 2004. Symptomatic of that fascination are the movements into China made by groups as diverse as the Jesuits, who arrived inL'Empire du Milieu in the late seventeenth century, and theTel Quel intellectuals, whose will to political pilgrimage took th

CHAPTER 1

Touching the Chinese World

Introduction

The central focus of this volume is the manner in which the modern French imagination construes twentieth-century China as a contact-zone; a crucible of transcultural conjunction; a realm where subjects, objects, and arenas emblematic of Chinese and European cultures come together in dynamics of touching, connection, friction. This first chapter gives flesh to that focus by scrutinizing French literary artefacts that chart the spaces of China’s capital city, speak of French (or European) adventures in Beijing,¹ and feed thereby into the broader, twentieth-century discursive formation designated in the Introduction as France–Chine. The French-language narratives considered here are fictions or autobiographical fictions produced at different moments of the contemporary period and concerned with different Pekings. In the first, Victor Segalen’s René Leys, published in 1921–22 and inspired by the mysteries of the Forbidden City, we are shown an age-old, sectored, walled Peking swept up in the 1911 revolution that toppled the Qing dynasty.² In the second and third, Pierre-Jean Remy’s Le Sac du Palais d’Été (1971) and Suzanne Bernard’s Une étrangère à Pékin (1986), we are offered stories located in the Republican capital of the 1960s and 1970s, a period marked by the ravages of the Cultural Revolution.³ Through the fourth and fifth, Christian Garcin’s Le Vol du pigeon voyageur (2000) and Elizabeth Qi-Guyon’s Pluie argentée (2002),⁴ our attention shifts to a post-Maoist, even postmodern Beijing conceived by China-watchers as intensely self-reconstructive and simulacral: gripped by a consumerist orientation towards the West.⁵ Segalen’s tale is a canonical meditation on sino-French interaction, and Remy’s novel, awarded the prix Renaudot, enjoyed popular and critical esteem; the other narratives I have selected here are far less well known. All however posit Beijing as a locus where cultural borders are policed intensely: where monocultural isolation, or corporeal punishment, is imposed upon European bodies willing to slip across cultural frontiers and touch, or breach, the Chinese world. These texts construct Beijing as a domain in which the European subject, deracinated in alien territory, is targeted as an object of cultural segregation by power-forces filtered through a raft of repressive agents and conduits. They cast Beijing as a sphere that is antagonistic to intercultural association, and yet produces European foreign bodies that feel impelled to enact that association, on occasion through a cross-cultural corps-à-corps. They map China’s capital as a realm that manipulates the movements, including the desiring movements, of the European bodies it accepts within itself, transforming them into ‘docile’ bodies, hard put to overcome the spatial and human prohibitions and seclusions circulating around them. In short, these narratives present Beijing’s cityscape as a sort of tease. And in so doing they defy our expectation that variant incarnations of China — Imperial, Republican, post-Maoist — might invite significantly different articulations in French-authored récits de Pékin spanning the entirety of the twentieth century.⁶

Discussions of the transcription, in French literary writings, of Beijing space comment on the static nature of that transcription and isolate its tropes. Such discussions emphasize recurring visions of Beijing as a super-geometrical, timeless environment,⁷ composed of cloistered, sectored subspaces: a ‘cité qui sait si bien inscrire son visiteur dans l’espace et dans le temps’.⁸ In her reading of repetitions within French literary treatments of Beijing’s cityscape, Muriel Détrie suggests that, overlaid with mythifying images, it acquires the shape of a ‘ville utopique’.⁹ The novels examined here present Beijing, rather, as a dystopia, in which the will of the European subject to attain what is cast in René Leys as a pénétration chinoise (RL 43 and passim)¹⁰ is subjected to a considerable degree of discipline, manifest in a variety of corporeally-oriented forms. My investigation of the manner in which they do so adopts a conceptual frame taken from Foucault’s seminal essay Surveiller et punir.¹¹ It draws on Foucauldian notions of how individuals and bodies come through regulatory tactics of spatial and human distribution, containment, and control to succumb to disciplinary management, in order to anatomize the tales of bodily manipulation in the Chinese urban environment offered in the (auto)fictional texts it explores. It leads in the concluding part of this chapter to a synthesizing analysis of the model of sino-European relations adumbrated within the texts discussed in the chapter. That model admits some degree of variance allied to matters of gender. As we shall see, the male-authored writings of Segalen, Remy, and Garcin privilege accounts of cultural and ethnic enclosure, while the stories of Bernard and Qi-Guyon speak of cross-cultural connections that, engendered in Beijing for youthful, female European bodies, are eventually chastised or crushed. However, it remains nonetheless remarkably consistent across the entire corpus of Beijing-based narratives examined in Chapter 1.

René Leys

Together with Malraux’s La Condition humaine, whose primary protagonists are not Chinese, René Leys is the best known of the twentieth-century French-authored fictions that take China as their focus. The object of significant critical attention, Segalen’s novel fascinates through its immersion in various modalities of slipperiness. It foregrounds the relationship between its narrator “Segalen” and René Leys, son of a Belgian father and French mother, who offers “Segalen” ever more questionable tales of his penetration of the heart of Beijing’s Forbidden City (the ‘Dedans’; the Imperial Palace) and who, with the 1911 Revolution, dies mysteriously. Its mix of referential and invented material (it is a ‘treatment’ of Segalen’s dealings with a Frenchman, Maurice Roy, encountered in Beijing in 1910),¹² and its status as a novel embedded in the real,¹³ render it an autofiction whose ‘equation of author and first-person narrator remains ambivalent’.¹⁴ Its generic elusiveness is enhanced by its manipulation of the mystery-story format, combined with its refusal to resolve the enigma posed by (the death of) René Leys: features that engender a text that is, and is not, a roman policier. In its contents, it speaks of the fluidity of identity, meaning, and fact. As Forsdick suggests,¹⁵ instead of being a chronicle of imperial events, René Leys is a ‘diary about the impossibility of recounting those events’, where truth and falsehood, rooted in the stories that René tells and that are re-told in “Segalen”’s account, are mooted as difficult to distinguish. In its narrative construction, René Leys slips between different layers of discourse,¹⁶ constituting a récit where ‘the primary narrative, which also functions as a metanarrative, takes the form of a journal kept by “Segalen”’ (a journal he comes to re-evaluate) and the secondary narrative, ‘embedded in the primary narrative’, is the ‘story of the Inside, in which René Leys nominally features as narrator and “Segalen” as narratee’.¹⁷ It is unstable even in its privileging of Beijing. On the one hand, focussed on tensions between the Real and the Imaginary, René Leys cannot be categorized simply as a novel concerned with the Chinese capital. Yet Beijing is so pivotal in Segalen’s autofiction that his text’s narrative, reliant on elements within elements, visibly mirrors the ‘emboîtement architectural de Pékin’.¹⁸

“Segalen” is in Beijing to write a biography of the Emperor Kouang-Siu (Guangxu), which never comes to fruition. But his diary reveals his ambition to be broader and also twofold, because it targets a cross-cultural encounter with Chinese Other(nes)s and a realization of cultural mixity within himself. His desire embraces ‘having’ and ‘being’, since he seeks to achieve intercultural connection and to incarnate transcultural syncretism in his own, bodily person. The duality that his exoticist desire bespeaks — for “Segalen” is an exote determined to step into the exotic, to live the exotic story¹⁹ — is announced in his journal’s opening segment. The intercultural contact that “Segalen” hopes to have is intimated in his presentation of the Chinese object that his pull towards cultural encounter first fixes on, the dead Emperor. It is apparent in references to Chinese spaces allied with Kouang-Siu that “Segalen” longs to enter (RL 40–43): hidden spaces of the Imperial Forbidden City, which he posits as sealed in the heart of Beijing.²⁰ His will to achieve a purchase on the Chinese world is framed in the notion of a pénétration chinoise that entails physical ingress and intersubjective convergence. It is manifest in “Segalen” ’s subsequent accounts of his aspirations in respect of the Regent, Kouang-Siu’s successor, whose attention he would attract (RL 89–90); of Mme Wang, the Manchurian wife of his Chinese teacher, whom he considers seducing (RL 164–68); and of the ‘Dedans’ he remains eager to breach. His desire to be bicultural — to be a bicultural body, in fact — is signalled in his description of his way of invoking the Emperor, which combines a European speech-act with a Chinese mimetic gesture: ‘dans le profond du milieu du Palais, un visage: un enfant-homme, et Empereur, maître du Sol et Fils du Ciel (que tous les mondes et les journalistes du monde s’entêtent à nommer “Kouang-Siu”, qui est la marque du temps où il régna […]). Il vécut, vraiment, sous son nom de vivant mais indicible… Lui, — et ne pouvant dire le nom, je donne au pronom Européen tout l’accent incliné du geste mandchou’ (RL 40). It is profiled in further Chinese gestural movements (RL 63, 91); in a vestimentary performance of Chineseness “Segalen” recalls enacting in the grounds of his Chinese house (‘Alors, nu sous un vêtement de soie impalpable, de soie chinoise pour l’été, je reçois la grande averse’ RL 155); and in his accounts of his attempts to supplement his native European tongue with ‘le dur Mandarin du Nord’ (RL 43).

“Segalen”’s desire to be bicultural in his self is reflected in the attendants who surround him in Beijing. His Chinese Chinese teacher, Maître Wang, his French-born neighbour Jarignoux, and his second professeur de Pékinois, René Leys, all show signs of that bicultural being that René Leys’s narrator seeks to embody. Wang cannot speak French but possesses ‘un lot de cartes de visite Françaises’, emblematic of his ‘attachement pour les Français’ (RL 45–46) and of his inclination towards a minor mode of cross-cultural mixity. Jarignoux, a blond, tubby ‘Français de souche picarde’, is sinified by his Chinese citizenship, professional activities, and civic decorations (RL 48–53, 71, 123–30), embodying a cross-cultural dualism mirrored in his ‘carton à double face’, inscribed on one side with Chinese characters and, on the other, with a European designation of who and what he is (RL 48, 50). René Leys is the primary ‘Sinified Westerner’²¹ of the text. His immersion in Euro-Chinese métissage is demonstrated in his vestimentary and linguistic performances and physical, social, and professional traits, the totality of which enables “Segalen” to read him as the subject of a European life lived ‘à la chinoise’ (RL 150, 279). Moreover, both Jarignoux and René Leys command, or at least claim to command, that capacity for movement in the realm of the Chinese Other that “Segalen” covets. Jarignoux’s accounts of his relations with Chinese subjects (RL 49–50, 125) seem credible enough. Leys’s tales of his role in the Regent’s Secret Police, his friendship with Kouang-Siu, his affair with the Empress, and his familiarity with the ‘Dedans’ appear, conversely, increasingly incredible. “Segalen” elects however not to replace his ever shakier belief in Rene’s stories with definitive disbelief (RL 280) and to forego conclusion and closure,²² because the fiction of Leys’s incursion into the domain of the cultural(ly) Other, if fiction it is, is enmeshed with his own desire for cultural border-crossing.

“Segalen”’s diary dwells then on questions of sino-European cultural encounter and bicultural identity: on individuals who strike him as variantly bicultural and who may possess, or perhaps do not truly possess, the ability to slip across cultural bounds to which he aspires. (At the diary’s close, “Segalen” proposes himself, qua suggestive influence, as the engineer of Leys’s narrative fabric(ation); its tale of inclusion in the sphere of the cultural Other.) It also dwells on Beijing as a disciplinary environment that affords Europeans a privileged existence enabled by the quelling of the Boxer Rebellion,²³ but precludes, diversely, the privilege of ‘having’ (cross-cultural access) and ‘being’ (bicultural) that “Segalen” craves. “Segalen” ’s journal represents Beijing as a site in which a form of power circulates that is not owned by single agents — the threatened Qing rulers or the cosseted Europeans of the Legation Quarter²⁴ — but is intrinsic to the city itself. Like that anatomized in Surveiller et punir, it is a power that relies on a tactical partitioning (SP 166–75, 228–33) which allots human subjects and bodies to cellularized places and identities, controls masses and individuals, and effects segregations that inhibit ‘dangereux mélanges’ (SP 232). It is a power of spatial distribution (‘la répartition des individus dans l’espace’ SP 166) and identitarian codification. Critics have taken note of René Leys’ depiction of Beijing as a chequerboard environment that directs its narrator’s physical movements as if he were a pawn, pulled toward a powerforce (the ‘Dedans’) that proves magnetic. They have not, however, unpicked the manner in which the Chinese capital is cast as a power-riven locus that disciplines individuals and bodies out of cultural blending, both inter-and intra-personal, and into monocultural isolation. That isolation is evoked in an early section of “Segalen”’s diary, in a reference to European doctors camped in cultural seclusion on the Rue des Légations (...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Touching the Chinese World
• 2 (Un)Touched by China
• 3 Embodied Interculturalism
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index