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The Edge of Knowing

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The Edge of Knowing

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d r e a m s , h i s t o r y, a n d r e a l i s m
in moder n chin ese lit er at ur e

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Roy Bing Chan

A Robert B. Heilman Book

u n i v e r s i t y o f wa s h i n g t o n p r e s s

Seattle and London

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The Edge of Knowing is published with support from

a generous bequest established by Robert B. Heilman,
distinguished scholar and chair of the University of
Washington English Department from 1948 to 1971.
The Heilman Book Fund assists in the publication of
books in the humanities.

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this book is made possible by a collaborative grant

from the andrew w. mellon foundation.

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2017 by the University of Washington Press

Printed and bound in the United States of America

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication

may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or
by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopy, recording, or any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publisher.
University of Washington Press

www.washington.edu/uwpress
Cataloging information is on file with the Library of
Congress.
isbn 978-0-295-99899-2
The paper used in this publication is acid-free and
meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ansi z39.481984.

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For my mother, the bravest dreamer

I have ever known

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con ten ts

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Acknowledgments
Introduction

11

2. Dreaming as Representation: Lu Xuns Wild Grass

and Realisms Social Address

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1. Sleeping through Catastrophe: Dreams, Cataclysmic

Modernity, and the Promises of Literary Realism

74

4. Sleepless Nights in Fast Socialism: Dream Rhetoric

and Fiction in the Mao Era

108

5. Dream Fugue: Jiang Qing, the End of the Cultural

Revolution, and Zong Pus Fiction

147

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3. Realisms Hysterical Bodies: Narrative and Oneiric

Counternarrative in Mao Duns Fiction

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Conclusion: Lu Xun and the Dreams of Politics

and Literature

Glossary of Chinese Characters

Notes
References
Index

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181
185
203
215

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ack now l edgm e n ts

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I thank Andrew F. Jones, my mentor, whose generous care and devotion sustained me, especially during moments of doubt. It is a debt
I have no chance of ever repaying. In addition, I express deep gratitude to Irina Aronovna Paperno and Barbara Spackman for their formative intellectual influence. Irina Aronovna taught me almost all I
know about what to do with literature. Barbara expanded my theoretical horizons and consistently championed me. Theodore Huters
generously mentored me, and I consider myself lucky to be his student although I never took a class from him. Eric Naiman and William Schaefer also offered great support and advice throughout the
years. Willis Konick, Galya Diment, Gordana Crnkovic, James West,
Henry Staten, and Nikolai Popov inspired me to pursue the study of
literature at the University of Washington. Any remaining errors in
the book are mine.
I thank my editor, Lorri Hagman, of the University of Washington Press for providing this manuscript a welcoming home, for providing salient critique, and for pushing me to produce a better, much
improved manuscript. The Modern Language Initiative, funded by
the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and established by the late Helen
Tartar, provided key subvention support. The University of Oregon
Underrepresented Minority Recruitment Program also provided support. I thank these programs for making publication possible.
Material from Chapters 2 and 5 has appeared as articles: Dreaming
as Representation: Wild Grass and Realisms Responsibility, Journal of
Modern Literature in Chinese 11, no. 2 (Spring 2014): 1338; Occupied
Dream: Politico-Affective Space and the Collective in Zong Pus Fiction,
Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 25, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 2150. I
thank the editors of these journals for their gracious cooperation.
ix

Acknowledgments

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The Institution of International Education Fulbright Award and

Harvard University Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies An Wang
Postdoctoral Fellowship offered support that allowed me to travel,
research, and write this book. Professors Wang Zhongchen, Xie
Zhixi, and Wang Hui made study at Tsinghua University possible.
The libraries at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Oregon, Harvard University, Tsinghua University, the Beijing National Library, and Shanghai Library provided indispensable
research support.
I thank the various interlocutors who provided such valuable critique of and support for this manuscript. They include Nick Admussen, Tie Xiao, Anup Grewal, Charles Laughlin, Enhua Zhang, Nick
Kaldis, Eileen Cheng, Tom Mullaney, Jason McGrath, Haiyan Lee,
Kirk Denton, Wendy Larson, Bryna Goodman, Richard King, and
Ying Qian. Thank you all for your inspiration.
Countless friends at UC Berkeley, the College of William and
Mary, and the University of Oregon offered fellowship in the original
sense of the term. They include Andrew Leong, Anastasia Kayiatos,
Amanda Buster, Evelyn Shih, Albert Wu, Juan Caballero, Michael
Cronin, Nicholas Medevielle, Arthur Knight, Anita Angelone, Sergio Ferrarese, Jorge Terukina, Mark Quigley, Mayra Bottaro, Jenifer
Presto, Katya Hokanson, and Susanna Lim, as well as my current colleagues in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures.
Special thanks are due to Maram Epstein, who successfully applied
for an Underrepresented Minority Recruitment Program fellowship
on my behalf.
My best friend, Susan Kas, offered unstinting support in a friendship that has now lasted over fifteen years. I feel lucky to be a part
of her family (including Josh, Jennie, Drew, Evee, Sylvia, and now
Jonah). I look forward to running countless marathons together. As
the marathon of writing this book approached the end, Cameron
Mulders warm companionship inspired me to cross the finish line.
I am tremendously grateful for my family, who supported me as I
dared to wade into academic life. Without their unconditional support, a working-class kid like me would not have lasted long in the
ivory tower. My brothers Ron and Rick have been stalwart champions. My parents, Bing-man Chan and Choi-yuk Tam Chan, who
immigrated to this country with little education and spent all their
lives as manual laborers, demonstrated the value of love, acceptance,
and sacrifice. My mother, in particular, taught me that everyone

Acknowledgments

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deserves an equal shot at a decent life. We continue to recount our

dreams to each other, sometimes strange, sometimes sad, oftentimes
silly. My parents dreamed the best for all of us, and I can only hope
that what I have done so far goes some way toward fulfilling their
wishes.

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The Edge of Knowing

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Introduction

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In the novel The New Story of the Stone (Xin shitou ji, 1905), Wu Jianrens (18661910) science-fiction sequel to the renowned eighteenth-
century classic Dream of the Red Chamber (Hong lou meng; also
known as The Story of the Stone [Shitou ji]), the protagonist Jia
Baoyu, after a vague period of self-imposed exile, suddenly finds himself in contemporary twentieth-century China. In a dilapidated temple he reunites with his valet, Beiming, who has been searching for
his master ever since the first novel concluded. Recounting his arduous search to find Baoyu, Beiming describes entering a mysterious
and enchanted temple, where he encounters a group of Daoists. They
invite him to stay the night and he consents, only to wake up suddenly reunited with Baoyu in the rundown temple. As Beiming notes,
I didnt know that once I fell asleep I would sleep right into this
time, and right into this place. I am truly at a loss.1 Baoyu is similarly at a loss, unsure of where he is and what era he inhabits. In the
old temple they locate an item they have never seen before: a modern
daily newspaper, Shanghais Shenbao. Baoyu tries to make sense of
the text; what most perplexes him, however, are the dates inscribed
on the header: The X month and X day of the twenty-sixth year of
the Guangxu reign, equivalent on the Western calendar to 1901, X
month and X day, Sunday. [Baoyu] gasped in shock.2
Other late Qing novels also feature emphasis on sleeping and
dreaming as ways of figuring modernitys trauma. In the beginning of
Liu Es (18571909) The Travels of Lao Can (Lao Can youji, 19035),

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the eponymous hero dreams of a steamship cast adrift in turbulent

waters, filled with desperate people. Lao Can sails toward the ship
in a small fishing boat, trying to offer assistance. Unable to unite
(tuanti) for their collective rescue, the panicked passengers instead try
to sink the fishing boat. The forlorn steamship unable to save itself is
an obvious allegory for Chinas predicament.3
In these novels we can see how Chinese writers in the early twentieth century were framing the challenge, and even trauma, of modernity in terms of an abrupt awakening from a dream. Not only did the
somatic transition from sleep to awakening suggest how global capitalist modernity was to be framed in terms of alertness; the past itself
was now suddenly understood to have been a dreamy enchantment.
The trope of sleeping and awakening also captured the profound
sense of disorientation, even dizziness, that people emerging from a
deep sleep have often experienced. How did we suddenly wake up in
this time and in this place? How can we understand the reality
of our present when still under the foggy spell of our dreams? Chinese
writers have figuratively understood modernity not simply under the
familiar terms of progress and rejuvenation but also enmeshed within
a more visceral web of figures: sleeping, awakening, hallucination,
and, most important, dreaming.
Dreams have long played a role in traditional Chinese culture and
belief, and often were considered an occasion when communications
from the numinous realm arrived to people during sleep. Dreams were
an important component in both court and folk divination. They are
also a prominent motif in Chinese philosophy. The Analects (Lun yu),
a compilation of sayings attributed to Confucius (sixth century BCE),
record the sage regularly dreaming of the Duke of Zhou, one of the
mythical founders of Chinese civilization.4 Many are familiar with
the passage in the Inner Chapter of the Zhuangzi titled Discussion
on Making All Things Equal (Qi wu lun) in which the philosopher
muses on whether he dreamed of being a butterfly or is actually a butterfly that dreamed of Zhuangzi.5 This parable illustrates the constant
flux and instability of reality. In Buddhism, dream is often used as a
metaphor for the illusoriness of the phenomenal world, thus underscoring the necessity of letting go of ones attachments. Traditional
Chinese literature has often made use of dreams as a narrative device
that allows characters to enter alternate worlds or convene with gods
and spirits. It also often features as a narrative conceit through which
characters learn to recognize lifes ephemerality.

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In standard Chinese (Mandarin), dream is meng. The word has

spawned a large number of related words, each displaying a different shade of meaning. Nightmares are emeng. One can have a dream
(zuomeng) or see within a dream (mengjian). A dream world is a
mengjing. Mengxiang denotes dreams that are more akin to deeply
held ideals or wishes than a somatic experience, while menghuan
denotes illusory fancy. In any case, whether referring to the actual
physical experience of dreaming in sleep or as a figure for desire, all
the various terms have in common an interest on modes of existence
and being that are fundamentally different from extant reality. While
cultures do differ in their particular understandings of dreams, it is
safe to say that most cultures invest in dreams a deep symbolic value
that expresses an interest in possible worlds beyond the present. They
express a common human interest in imagining alternate spaces and
temporalities.
Through the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the rhetoric
of dreams constituted an important discursive frame through which
to imagine and represent the monumental changes in Chinese history.
The language of dreams was appropriate for describing modernitys
disorienting effects. Dreams and their associated rhetoric played a
prominent role in twentieth-century Chinese intellectual culture and
modern literature. They also complicated conventional understandings of historical knowledge and realist literary practice. Dream discourse in realist literature was a site through which hidden tensions
between empiricism and desire, between social critique and utopian
aspiration, and between the world and language became apparent.
These antinomies in turn animated an intellectual and literary field
dominated by a scientistic framework. During the May Fourth Movement, a campaign to remake and modernize Chinese culture that
began in 1919, intellectuals identified dream itself as an exciting new
area of scientific research, one buttressed by the arrival of psychoanalytic theories into China. However, the language and poetics of
dream discourse were not transparent and abstract but polyvalent,
expressive, and allusively dense. The formal materiality and semiotic richness of dream discourse and hermeneutics, one that drew
upon a large indigenous heritage of dream lore, complicated simple
referential notions of language and narrative. Examining dream discourse thus suggests ways in which realist narrative grappled with, on
one hand, the mercurial desire and emotionality inherent within language and fiction and, on the other, a premodern literary and cultural

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heritage that had to be either disavowed or rendered appropriate for

contemporary times.
Some readers may wonder if what is being emphasized here is the
physical experience of dreaming or dream as a kind of figurative discourse about fantasy in general. Any comprehensive conception of
dream should encompass both the physical and symbolic connotations. From the somatic point of view, dreams are phenomena by
which we, in sleep, engender symbolic landscapes of unconscious
experience that are simultaneously baffling as well as pregnant with
possible, portentous significance. Dreams are thus somatic occasions
whereby the body itself seemingly generates meaning. From the symbolic standpoint, dreams are figurative of desire, often utopian in
nature, that carries within it the implication of an alternative embodiment, of a being other than that is wished for over and above ones
present existence. By foregrounding their own difficult interpretation,
dreams also point to the materiality of signification itself. Dreams
thus engage the affective resources of the signifier and encourage the
subject to engage with the creation of meaning in a seemingly tactile
manner. Dream cannot be confined merely to a physical experience, a metaphor, or a metapragmatic discursive gesture but instead
designates a dynamic conceptual matrix that encompasses all of these
notions. As these various usages are related to each other, dreaming
both as an experience and as metaphor will be explored.
Consideration of dreams facilitates a revised exploration of literary
realism that focuses less on its narrative ontology or its sociopolitical
end goals and more on its very management of multiple modes of
representation, some more empirical, others more fantastic. In turn,
these multiple modes of representation articulate a utopian desire for
the real, a category that is itself constantly shifting in different literary, cultural, and political contexts. Dream is not an escape from
proper historical consciousness but a supplemental mode to such consciousness. While dreams may convey a fantastic or distorted reflection of historical reality, we should also take note of the indexical
relation between the form of the dream and the historical reality to
which it responds. Such an emphasis on the dreams production under
the pressure of historic circumstances allows us to see how dream registers the felt effects of a cataclysmic history on dreamers and their
discourse.
This book examines a wide array of works, including both canonical and lesser-known texts that deserve more critical attention. These

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texts span Chinas revolutionary century, and the chapters take the
reader from the early May Fourth period through the end of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1970s. Lu Xun and Mao Dun are the
main foci of the chapters that deal with the Republican era (1911
49). Then a number of authors from the Mao era (194976), including Yang Mo, Wang Wenshi, and Li Zhun, are considered. The final
chapter examines Zong Pus postCultural Revolution fiction. While
this work features in-depth research on dream in intellectual and literary discourse, it is not a genealogy of dream in modern China.
Rather, it takes a cue from the long tradition of dream hermeneutics:
the analysis does not merely note the presence of dream tropes in a
wide array of literary works but also contextualizes close readings
of dreams against a full treatment of the texts in which they appear.
Only through such sustained and holistic readings can we incisively
demonstrate how the examination of dreams compels us to reconsider the totality of the written text in question. Thus analysis here is
not conceived merely as an identification of such and such tropes in a
work but as a hermeneutic inquiry that precipitates a critical working out of the various tensions in the text as a whole. As such, this
work relies on engaged close reading. While close formal analysis is
the methodological center of the work, this textual critique is reinforced by a wide variety of theoretical approaches, including Russian
Formalism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and affect studies.
It is hoped that students and other lovers of literature will find an
engaged model of formal textual analysis.
The complicated dreamwork of the long revolutionary period
seems, in some ways, to have been undercut by some thirty-odd years
of market reforms. State-orchestrated free enterprise could do what
the previous thirty years of centralized planning could not: produce
greater personal wealth, spur rapid urban and industrial development,
encourage integration into a global culture, and create a vast consumer middle class, among other achievements. As a way of showcasing these accomplishments, the Chinese capital, Beijing, was awarded
the 2008 Olympic Games. This book had its start when I was in Beijing during the summer of 2005 and thinking about researching the
interplay of dreams and reality in modern Chinese culture. During
that time the organizing committee of the Beijing Olympics unveiled
their slogan: One World, One Dream (Tong yi ge shijie, Tong yi ge
mengxiang). It seemed intriguing that the state was retrieving this old
rhetoric of dreams to promote the vision of a harmonious Chinese

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society working in concert with a globalized, capitalist world, and

how such a unified dream both co-opted and elided other visions of
a possible world. There was something immediately trite and clichd
about the slogan, but this was perhaps deliberate. The tight, even glib,
parallelism through which the sameness of tong yi was reproduced
in the formal structure of the couplet, as well as the conflation of
world and dream, embodied a sentimental, folksy desire for a unified
realm that is hard to oppose but even harder to substantively define.
The slogan was a brilliant elaboration of Michel Foucaults early formulation of dream as idios kosmos, a world unto itself, lying in the
very bosom of PRC power.6 This slogan, accompanied by winsome,
childlike anthropomorphized mascots, basked in mass sentimentality. However, the media campaigns melodramatic contortions and its
exhaustive efforts to be cute betrayed the hard edge of authoritarian power. When I returned to China in 2007 for a year of research,
this dream was proclaimed everywhere on Olympic banners and
advertisements hanging from school walls, factories, and subway billboards. Most people, whatever their grievances about the current
state of affairs, were swept up in a wave of national pride and enthusiasm, and endorsed, if with some reservation, this dream. It was simply too cute to resist.
The Opening Ceremonies of the Beijing Games, held at 8:08 p.m.
(on the eighth second) on the eighth day of the eighth month of the
eighth year of the second millennium, was a dazzling and spectacular
manifestation of this dream. Through his theurgic direction, the
filmmaker Zhang Yimou summoned a dream vision of China that
inspired both awe and fear among viewers the world over.7 The exacting attention paid to symbolism, numerology, synchronic precision,
and so forth testified to how China was portrayed as pure aesthetic
form, a universe completely immanent unto itself. Unlike Jia Baoyus
confusion about time described earlier, the careful orchestration of
the Opening Ceremonies suggested that China could now demonstrate mastery over time itself.
Caught up in a mode of triumphant nationalist celebration, few
anticipated the subsequent crisis of global capitalism that struck
China particularly hard merely a month after the supposed achievement of the dream. This crisis revealed and further exacerbated
long-
simmering inequities between rich and poor, the urban and
the migrant. It has also led many to question the destructive effects
of unchecked development on Chinas environment and natural

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resources and the dismantling of a state welfare system for those left
behind by such growth. These problems were always there, and only
became steadily worse, but were treated as short-term dilemmas that
would resolve themselves once the invisible hand got around to lifting
everyone up. To question the excesses of unbridled economic liberalization was to declare oneself an enemy of reform, an unrepentant
stalwart of the destructive legacy of the Cultural Revolution. It seems
clearer, however, that China had predicated its economic and political stability on an exaggerated rate of growth that was likely unsustainable. The central government has responded to the crisis through
a massive injection of capital liquidity into banks and a speculative
housing boom, thus softening for the meantime the immediate blow
to masses of workers. While in some ways the state has been successful at lessening the brunt of the crisis upon its populace, it has
also tried to prevent a political crisis engendered by economic difficulties through increasingly authoritarian and repressive restrictions on
political activity and expression. As revolutionary movements swept
through whole swaths of the Middle East, and as Western nations
confronted the largest popular challenge to global capital in decades
in the form of the Occupy movement, the Chinese state has rushed
to lock down the restless territories of Tibet and Xinjiang, as well
as compelled Hong Kong toward more submissive compliance to the
Mainland. It has drummed up nationalist fervor over barely known
islands in the South China Sea in order to direct popular discontent
elsewhere. After thirty years of free-market dogma and the demise
of state socialism, and faced with the lingering, unresolved consequences of the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression,
it might be possible again at this critical historic juncture to refresh
our thinking about Chinas and, ultimately, the worlds political, economic, and cultural future. While One World, One Dream was
always a hackneyed slogan, it seems that a new vision of a transfigured world is precisely what is needed should we want to survive long
in our new century.8
This study of the dreamwork of past writers ranging from the May
Fourth Movement to the beginning of the Reform period thus presents itself with an eye to Chinas future, and the worlds as well. Perhaps we should salvage dream from its relegation to idle fantasy or
irrational wishful thinking and assert that the dream performs important and necessary ideological labor.9 Dreams shake up our ways of
understanding our relationship to history and offer other avenues

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of examining our historic situation in ways not beholden to conventional narrative logic, whether in the form of novels or in the form of
political economic development. Dreams force us to contend with
the discursive materiality that limns our social existence and to examine how such materiality affects the way we relate to others. Dreams
can bring us back to the very heart of historic experience itself. What
follows is a tribute to both those from the past who dreamed about
China and those in the present who continue to dream.