Sensory Literary Studies

Hot Noise and Emotive Scents: Review of Sensing China

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Sensing China: Modern Transformations of Sensory Culture. Shengqing Wu & Xuelei Huang, eds.. Routledge, 2022.

Reviewed by Astrid Møller-Olsen

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright January, 2023)

The ancient pages of the book before me are rumpled by water damage, the lower right corner of each page is stained brown and all but torn off, it smells musty and would feel sticky were I allowed to touch it. This object is a product of repeated multisensory reading sessions. It is a volume of choral sheet music from the European Middle Ages and its pages are marked by the audible breath of the singers, as well as by the touch of their fingers, hastily turning the page in time for the next verse. Holding it in their hands, they viewed the sheet music with their eyes and translated it into sound with their brains and vocal cords. The temperature and moisture of the room and the bodies in it merged with the sounds and became a visual imprint, a tactile trace of a melody heard long ago.

As this description of one object from the small but wondrous exhibition “Sensational Books” (2022) at the Weston Library in Oxford shows, the boundaries between sensory categories—and between physical and social aspects of sensation—are as permeable as they are practical. What is “a sense” really? How many are there, and might they not differ between periods, cultures, bodies, and social contexts? These are some of the questions posed by contemporary sensory studies, a field that combines sociological, anthropological, and historical approaches to diversify and nuance our understanding of what sensation means, has meant, and can mean. It is highly fitting that Sensing China, a new and very welcome addition to this cross-disciplinary area of scholarship, begins with a deconstruction of the very term “sense.”

It is this flexible approach to multi- and cross-sensory realms that Shengqing Wu and Xuelei Huang instill in the reader by beginning the introductory chapter to their edited volume with a quote from Qian Zhongshu 錢鍾書 that includes the lines “colour can appear to embody temperature, sound embody form, heat and cold have weight and smell solidity” (1). To Qian’s poetic rumination on synaesthesia (通感), Wu and Huang add that their own objective is to “offer a critical investigation of a variety of sensory phenomena, representations, and discourses in Chinese cultural history, and of modern transformations of sensory culture in particular” (3). With a mind firmly focused on sensory collaboration, transformation, and context, rather than sensory systematics, the reader can begin to explore the manifold methodological and disciplinary perspectives in the following eleven chapters.

The volume is chronologically arranged in four parts—Part 1: Understanding the Senses in Traditional Culture; Part 2: Reconfiguring the Senses and Modern Sensibility; Part 3: Socialist Corporeality, Sensorium and Memory; and Part 4: Senses, Media and Postmodernity—covering sensory culture in China from as early as 500 BCE to well into the 2000s (followed by an epilogue). This makes it easier for readers interested in specific periods to find their way. However, when reading all the chapters (and I encourage you to do so, because insights are not limited to historical facts but also include innovative methodologies and inspiring analyses), shared themes surface. Although a cursory inspection of the table of contents seem to reveal that many of the chapters focus on individual senses, most of them end up demonstrating that no sense works in isolation and that sensation is always social and quite often emotional as well. Instead of proceeding through the chapters in order, below I survey the chapters with an eye toward their shared themes and concerns, as well as highlighting key arguments and insights; to save space, I refer directly to the authors rather than the full title of each chapter.

Jane Geaney, author of the pioneering On the Epistemology of the Senses in Early Chinese Thought,[1] reminds us that the notion of “a sense” as a universal concept is the first obstacle we need to dismantle to gain a deeper understanding of sensory experiences, thoughts, and transformations across time. She begins by destabilizing any easy translation of the Chinese term 官 guan as “senses that inform and/or confuse the heart-mind (心 xin)” and goes on to “reassess the very idea of an early Chinese concept of ‘sense’” (19). Geaney shows that early texts were not very systematic in their use of the term guan and that although guan sometimes substitutes for specific sensory organs such as the eye or the ear, i.e., the physical forms by which we grasp the world, it is also used for less conventional “senses” such as happiness, form, name, and more, leading her to conclude that “we cannot infer that guan replaces a general category term like ‘sense’” (20). In short, when reading early Chinese texts, we tend to treat guan as a dead metaphor when, as Geaney demonstrates, it was still very much alive and flexible.

Like Geaney, Paolo Santangelo deconstructs the notion of a “sense” and adds an important affective dimension to our understanding of sensation when he notes that the modern term ganjue 感覺 “makes no distinction between mental and physical feelings” and that “social and moral effects of the senses remain the basis of debate on senses” in Ming and Qing sources (43). Sensation, according to Santangelo, is not exclusively physical but inherently social and emotional as well. He employs this position to delve into the social aspects of scent as a marker of cultural and gendered identity that “signals the unity of the physical and social body [and] transfers ideological and social distinctions to a visceral level” (52). Xuelei Huang continues Santangelo’s exploration of the relationship between scent and identity to analyse how specific fragrances not only set social groups apart but can also act as medium through which one may live out a fantasy of belonging to another class, gender, or ethnicity through a kind of “smell-voyeurism” (81).[2]

Staying on the theme of emotions and sensory mediations, Carlos Rojas analyses mediated touch as an enhanced form of intimacy. He notes that because the sense of touch is surrounded and guarded by norms and taboos, visual mediation allows vicarious tactile interchanges where direct touch is not possible due to social convention—as between father and son in Song Dong’s 宋冬 artworks—or because of sexual normativity—as with the male lovers in Wong Kar-wai 王家衛 and Zhang Yuan’s 張元films. Shengqing Wu likewise examines the confluences between visuality and tactility in her study of how Chinese cinemagoers in the 1910s and 1920s learned a new way of kissing from the actors on the screen and went on to savor the smell and taste of the sweet (甜蜜) kiss that was the product of this multisensory mimesis. One could extend this historical survey backwards from the contemporary norms regarding men touching men that Rojas analyzes, through Wu’s description of the visual introduction of new heterosexual kissing standards in the early twentieth century, and on to premodern Chinese medicine, where, as Elisabeth Hsu has shown,[3] rules regarding who could touch the female body required diagnostics on women to be performed through the medium of a silk cord to avoid direct skin contact.

In my own work on literary sensory studies,[4] I have been inspired by the idea of whole-body sensation (身體感) proposed and developed in the anthology Body/Object Nuances: Research on Material Things and Bodily Sensations, edited by 余舜德 Yu Shuenn-Der. [5] It would have been exciting if more of the chapters in Sensing China engaged directly with the broader field of sensory studies, taking up comparisons with findings from other areas, disciplines, and periods as well as with new theories and conceptualizations of sensation.

Jie Li’s chapter stands out for its introduction of a new and radically cross-sensory concept, anchored in her literal translation of 热闹 renao (lively) as “hot noise”—a multisensory term that is “at once visual, aural, olfactory, gustatory, and haptic” (202). This brilliantly conceived analytical fulcrum allows Li to examine the whole-body experience of open-air cinema in Mao-era China from a variety of different and overlapping sensory perspectives. Above all, Li shows that the physical surroundings of open-air cinema were as important as the content of the film being screened. Even when a screening was suspended due to frequent breakdowns in the mobile equipment, the canvas screen itself, blowing in the wind, became a spectacle known as “white cloth film” (205). When in motion, the sensory symphony on screen was coupled with an equally entertaining sensory disharmony off screen, consisting of shouts, bickering, and laughter from neighbors all around. The “phantom commensality” (211) of filmic feasts was accompanied by the festive smells and tastes from homemade snacks and street vendors. As Lena Henningsen shows in her chapter, partaking by proxy is a theme that continues to resurface in the “spiritual feasts” of recalling past meals during times of hunger, which is given permanence through inscription in literary texts (178).

Returning to the hot noise of open-air cinema, Li describes how the film itself was bodily produced by people on manual generators, pedalling to provide the needed electricity, and consumed not only optically (with even the visual impression bracketed by the heads of other spectators) but corporeally and socially by the crowd as well. The very nature of open-air cinema led to an “intense awareness of one’s body between the sky and earth, vulnerable to wind, rain, snow, mosquitoes, heat and cold,” while the social dimension took center stage when film screenings were used for political purposes as well as for matchmaking (215-216). The communal nature of such sensory experiences is not only of academic interest, as Xiaobing Tang argues in his chapter, they have been instrumental in transforming Chinese society. Stressing the need for historians to understand the bodily experiences as well as the material circumstances of historical subjects, he concludes that when it comes to 1930s China, “unless we truly grasp the sensory implications as well as the affective power of mass singing, our understanding of a formative stage of modern Chinese culture may remain incomplete and inadequate” (143).

In open-air cinema, the social, contextual, and collaborative aspects of sensation naturally come to the fore. However, by using a multisensory analytical term like hot noise, other researchers could tease out more subtle but equally somatic dimensions of pursuits usually viewed with a visual bias. After all, even lone reading sessions in quiet rooms are bodily practises, situated in time, space, and language—affected by expectation, mood, paratext, room temperature, hunger, ambient noise, memory, and more.

Celebrating and employing multisensory frameworks, however, is not without hazards, as two of the chapters in this volume point out. In her chapter, Laikwan Pang analyses how Maoist romantic aesthetics, despite claiming to represent the materiality of everyday life, could be “understood as anti-material and anti-corporeal” (166) because of the priority given to the abstract ideological message that the graphic bodies were there to convey. In a similar vein, Kirk Denton cautions that, although involving more senses can help museums become more than “mausoleums,” the immersive quality of sensory exhibitions risk blinding the visitor to the constructedness of the narratives on display, their selectivity, and the things that are absent from them.

Despite such possible pitfalls, the value of Sensing China and its multisensory paradigm is (at least) twofold. First, it adds a new corpus of studies from Chinese languages and cultures to the ongoing global research on sensation and the social; second, the collective method of “(re)thinking through the senses” (3) may form an exciting and fruitful framework for future engagements with material grassroots history, comparative literature, and immersive fieldwork.

Although the Weston Library exhibition did display books chewed by toddlers, most of us have stopped tasting books in such a direct way. Yet there is no denying that books are more than just visual. That is why reading with a cup of coffee on a sunny bench is not the same as reading hungrily in a library sustained only by the musty scent of old pages or reading on a tram full of teenagers because you just have to finish this book you have for review. The Weston exhibition posed the question of what the growth of e-books might do to our reading habits and to the multisensory aspects of reading. Well, a few years ago I saw a young man on a bus in Shanghai flicking at the virtual page edges of his e-reader. Clearly, tactility was still a big part of his reading experience. Our bodies don’t just go away, despite all the screens we surround ourselves with. There is no question that sensory habits transform us just as we transform them, as Barbara Mittler appropriately observes in her epilogue to the volume, but often in inventive and unforeseen ways. There is always more to study, always more to sense.

NOTES:

[1] Geaney, Jane. On the Epistemology of the Senses in Early Chinese Thought (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002).

[2] The role that odor plays in creating and sustaining cultural hierarchies was emphasized by Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott in their joint monograph Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (New York: Routledge, 1994).

[3] Hsu, Elisabeth. “Tactility and the Body in Early Chinese Medicine.” Science in Context 18, no. 1 (2005): 7-34.

[4] Møller-Olsen, Astrid. Sensing the Sinophone: Urban Memoryscapes in Contemporary Fiction (Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2022).

[5] Yu, Shuenn-Der 余舜德, ed., Ti wu ruwei: wu yu shentigan de yanjiu 體物入微/ 物與身體感的研究 (Body/object nuances: research on material things and bodily sensations). (Taipei: National Tsing-hua University Press, 2008).

A Three-City Problem: Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei

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The first section of my new monograph Sensing the Sinophone: Urban Memoryscapes in Contemporary Fiction (Cambria 2022) I call the SKELETON because it provides the structure for the book. It consists of 1) the theoretical foundations for the analyses inlcuding an introduction to literary spacetime and alternative sensoria and 2) my triangular approach to comparative literature and an introduction to the six primary texts analysed throughout the book.

Chapter 2. The Three-City Problem: A Kaleidoscope of Six Works

I begin by borrowing Liu Cixin’s Three-Body problem (which he, in turn, has borrowed from mathematical physics) and convert it into a three-city problem. While the interaction between two bodies poses a relatively simple problem, the addition of a third body of approximately equal mass complicates calculations immensely. Likewise, a literary triangular comparison creates more junctions and convergences than a twofold one. Furthermore, “it frustrates any tendency towards binarism (be it East-West or North-South) and complicates notions of internal homogeneity by centering on cultural interchange as constitutive for our understanding of place” (Sensing the Sinophone, 24).

I then sketch out recent discussions on the form and content of Sinophone literature and add my own triangular urban approach – focusing on the three cities of Hong Kong, Taipei, and Shanghai that are all (to various extents) culturally and linguistically hybrid cities with (semi)colonial pasts. These three cities constitute sites of negotiation between strong urban identities and (contested) ties to mainland China, and act as individual anchors for both regional and international networks.

Finally, I introduce the six literary works that I analyse comparatively throughout the book (rather than relegating each to its own chapter), namely:

Shanghai: Chen Cun 陈村. Xianhua he 鲜花和 [Fresh flowers and] and Ding Liying 丁丽英. Shizhong li de nüren 时钟里的女人 [The woman in the clock].

Taipei: Chu T’ien-hsin 朱天心. Gudu 古都 [The Old Capital] and Wu Mingyi 吳明益. Tianqiao shang de moshushi 天橋上的魔術師 [The magician on the skywalk].

Hong Kong: Dung Kai-cheung 董啟章. Ditu ji 地圖集 [Atlas] and Dorothy Tse 謝曉虹. Shuang cheng cidian I–II 雙城 辭典I–II [A dictionary of two cities I–II] (written jointly with Hon Lai Chu).

The CORPUS of the book is then dedicated to the study of the countless fictional cities nestled within the six literary works written by authors from the 3 real-world metropoles Hong Kong, Taipei, and Shanghai. In the following readings, “I turn my attention away from each real-world city as a center of gravity and toward the analytical interactions between these three bodies of equal mass. For the sake of intelligibility, and to foster such interactions, I impose a theoretical and thematic framework characterized by a high degree of flexibility.”

Part I. Skeleton
Chapter 1. Literary Sensory Studies: The Body Remembers the City
Chapter 2. The Three-City Problem: A Kaleidoscope of Six Works
Part II. Corpus
Chapter 3. Sense of Place: Walking or Mapping the City Chapter
4. The Nose: Flora Nostalgia Chapter
5. The Ear: Melody of Language Chapter
6. Sense of Self: The Many Skins of the City Chapter
7. The Mouth: Balancing Flavors Chapter
8. The Eye: Fictional Dreams
Part III. Excretions
Chapter 9. Sense of Time: Everyday Rhythms
The City Remembers: Concluding Remarks

Literary Sensory Studies, Urban Spacetime & Memory Knitwear

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My first monograph Sensing the Sinophone: Urban Memoryscapes in Contemporary Fiction (Cambria 2022) is coming to a library near you! So I guess it’s only polite that I introduce you to one another.

The book is all about sensory engagements between body and city, so I’ve divided it into three sections:

  1. SKELETON: theoretical foundations, literary spacetime, alternative sensoria, and triangular comparisons.
  2. CORPUS: the literary analyses, thematically organised around extended sensory organs into 6 chapters.
  3. EXCRETIONS: analytical comparisons, temporal typologies, and concluding remarks.

Chapter 1. Literary Sensory Studies: The Body Remembers the City

I begin by presenting the idea that the rapid and violent restructuring of cities like Hong Kong, Taipei, and Shanghai from the 1990s onwards affects the way we think about space and time: “When entire building blocks are here today and gone tomorrow, or vice versa, space starts to shift and entangle itself with time as the elusive silhouettes of memory gain a new urgency and begin to shape how spatial reality is perceived.”

So I argue that we need to analyse urban spacetime as a unified concept and discuss some of the ways this has been done (from Bakhtin’s chronotopes to Elana Gomel’s impossible topologies) and could be done.

I also introduce the term time-space (inspired by Doreen Massey and Kevin Lynch) to designate discrete chunks of spacetime, such as “my shabby home-office on a February morning in 2022” or “the illuminated Shanghai Bund on his 103rd birthday.”

I extoll the approach that I call literary sensory studies, which is follows in footsteps of Cai Biming’s take on body-sensations (身体感) as well as sensory studies scholars’ call to examine and expand the traditional fivefold sensorium, but from the vantage point of literary analysis. Fictional narrative has a wonderful capacity for highlighting the cross- and multisensory foundation of almost all sensory experiences, as well as imagining and describing forth sensations of pain, hunger, temperature, and selfhood that are not part of the conventional sensorium.

Finally, I talk about the creative aspects of memory and use the metaphor of “memory knitwear” to highlight that “each time you rip up the fabric and reknit it following the same pattern, the result will be subtly different, paralleling the process of opening, reconfiguring, and re-storing memories described by neurobiology.”

Part I. Skeleton
Chapter 1. Literary Sensory Studies: The Body Remembers the City
Chapter 2. The Three-City Problem: A Kaleidoscope of Six Works
Part II. Corpus
Chapter 3. Sense of Place: Walking or Mapping the City Chapter
4. The Nose: Flora Nostalgia Chapter
5. The Ear: Melody of Language Chapter
6. Sense of Self: The Many Skins of the City Chapter
7. The Mouth: Balancing Flavors Chapter
8. The Eye: Fictional Dreams
Part III. Excretions
Chapter 9. Sense of Time: Everyday Rhythms
The City Remembers: Concluding Remarks

ICAS Ground-Breaking Subject Matter Accolade

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The IBP was originally launched to bring a focus to academic publications on Asia; to increase their worldwide visibility, and to encourage a further interest in the world of Asian Studies. Organised every two years, together with the ICAS conference, the IBP has grown from a small experiment, to one of the largest book prizes of its kind. Along the way, we expanded to include, in addition to the English Book and Dissertation prizes, prizes for publications in Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

Ground-Breaking Subject Matter Accolade for English-language dissertation in the Humanities

AUTHOR: Astrid Møller-Olsen

TITLE: Seven Senses of the City: Urban Spacetime and Sensory Memory in Contemporary Sinophone Fiction

Lund University, 2020

This dissertation investigates the narrative mechanisms and imagery that Sinophone fiction uses to narrate complex human experiences that were rooted in space, time and memory. It breaks new ground in engaging with sensory paradigms to show how this fiction creates civic histories.

See the other IBP 2021 English Language Edition – Humanities winners here.

Sensing the Sinophone

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My first monograph is underway! Haha! It will be published as part of Cambria Press’ wonderful Sinophone Worlds series of which I already have many amazing titles on my bookshelf including Wilt L. Idema’s Insects in Chinese Literature, Chia-rong Wu’s Supernatural Sinophone Taiwan and Beyond, and Isaac Yue’s Monstrosity and Chinese Cultural Identity.

Sensing the Sinophone: Urban Memoryscapes in Contemporary Fiction combines narratological tools for studying time in fiction with critical concepts of spatiality in order to establish an analytical focus on narrative voice and reliability (including the inaccuracy of memory), structural non-linearity (such as mental time travel), and the construction of fictional parallel cities as loci for plot development. In this study, the conventional sensorium and its role in recollection is explored and amplified to include whole-body sensations, habitual synesthesia, and the emotional aspects of sensations that produce a sense of place or self.

By analyzing narratives that make use of and encourage multisensory, spatiotemporal understandings of reality characterized by permeable boundaries between material, social and imaginary domains, this monograph shows how contemporary cities change the way human beings think and write about reality.

Blurbs

Some very kind reviews have already been posted on Cambria’s page:

“With a lineup of works drawn from contemporary Chinese and Sinophone communities, Astrid Møller-Olsen pays special attention to the articulations of senses in the texts under discussion, from audio-visual contact to melodious association, tactile sensation, aromatic emanation, and kinetic exercise, culminating in mnemonic imagination and gendered fabulation. The result is a work on urban synesthesia, a kaleidoscopic projection of sensorium in a narrative form. Her analyses of works by writers such as Chu Tien-hsin and Wu Ming-yi are particularly compelling. Sensing the Sinophone has introduced a new direction for literary studies and is sure to be an invaluable source for anyone interested in narratology, urban studies, environmental studies, affect studies and above all comparative literature in both Sinophone and global contexts.” —David Der-wei Wang, Harvard University

“Evoking the language and logic of poetry, Sensing the Sinophone is a brilliant literary urban ecology that conjures cities, like texts, as open, dynamic, sensing, vital, enduring entities. How, Astrid Møller-Olsen asks, do characters experience sensory memories in six novels of Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Taipei, activated by architectural, botanical, and bodily presences in the city? With theoretical insights ranging from quantum mechanics to Confucian cosmology, this phenomenological elucidation of fictionalized cities as somaticized organisms with physiological functions is a remarkable intervention.” —Robin Visser, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

More about the book

Since the 1990s, extensive urbanization in East Asia has created a situation in which more people identify themselves as citizens of the city where they live, rather than their ancestral village or nation. At the same time, this new urban identity has been under constant threat from massive municipal restructuring. Such rapidly changing cityscapes form environments of urban flux that lead to narrative reconfigurations of fundamental concepts such as space, time, and memory. The resulting contemporary urban fiction describes and explores this process of complex spatial identification and temporal fluctuation through narratives that are as warped and polymorphic as the cities themselves.

Building on previous scholarship in the fields of Chinese/Sinophone urban fiction, sensory studies, and comparative world literature, Sensing the Sinophone provides a new city-based approach to comparativism combined with a cross-disciplinary focus on textual sensescapes.

Through an original framework of literary sensory studies, this monograph provides a comparative analysis of how six contemporary works of Sinophone fiction reimagine the links between the self and the city, the past and the present, as well as the physical and the imaginary. It explores the connection between elusive memories and material cityscapes through the matrix of the senses. Joining recent efforts to imagine world literature beyond the international, Sensing the Sinophone engages in a triangular comparison of fiction from Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Taipei—three Sinophone cities, each with its own strong urban identity thatc comes with unique cultural and linguistic hybridities.

Sensing the Sinophone is an important addition to several ongoing discussions within the fields of comparative literature, urban studies, memory studies, geocriticism, sensory studies, Sinophone studies, and Chinese studies.

TOC

Part I. Skeleton

Chapter 1. Literary Sensory Studies: The Body Remembers the City

Chapter 2. The Three-City Problem: A Kaleidoscope of Six Works

Part II. Corpus

Chapter 3. Sense of Place: Walking or Mapping the City

Chapter 4. The Nose: Flora Nostalgia

Chapter 5. The Ear: Melody of Language

Chapter 6. Sense of Self: The Many Skins of the City

Chapter 7. The Mouth: Balancing Flavors

Chapter 8. The Eye: Fictional Dreams

Part III. Excretions

Chapter 9. Sense of Time: Everyday Rhythms

The City Remembers: Concluding Remarks

Bibliography

Index

Monster Plants in Sinophone Fiction

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First published via The Monster Network blog 24 June 2021.

A monster plant is a sinister thing, it thwarts knowledge and reverses the rules – you don’t eat it, it eats you; despite its roots, it moves about. A monster plant is monstrous because it behaves like a human; in it, we see the worst sides of ourselves: our greed, lust, violence. Or so it used to be…

But in our age of human-made climate change and environmental unpredictability, the so-called Anthropocene, plants have morphed from the radical (pun intended) ‘Other’ who can destroy us, to the one who might save us. Significant botanical others are not confined to the pages of Nature writing – vegetal characters are not only a subject for science fiction but walk abroad in a variety of literary contexts.

What can we learn from these unruly creatures? Can being curios about what it means to be a plant help us understand what being human might come to mean in the future? (Already there is an imbalance in this question – estimates calculate that this planet is home to nearly 400.000 plant species – clearly, being a plant is a lot of things).

Can thinking and writing with the green ink of botanical organisms help us reimagine the individual in an entangled world where no one is an island, where every body crawling on the ripples of the planet is itself a landscape for other, smaller beings? What can plants tell us about the ways in which we know –the shape and the form of knowledge? Might writing in green ink change the meaning of that writing all together?

In my project “Green Ink,” I am inspired by the monster as a figure that devours the organised realm of definable concepts and boundaries and excretes a fragmented, yet strangely interlinked, world view. I combine theories of the monstrous with critical plants studies’ insistence on the vegetal perspective in an impossible, but productive, attempt to bypass the patterns of prejudice inherent in the human mind.

I examine human-vegetal interactions and interrelationships, dissect plant-like humans and humanoid plants, as well as explore the completely new fictional species that populate contemporary Sinophone writing. Such monsters are rooted in both local and global traditions, they participate in a variety of discourses from genre fiction to ecocriticism, and they disrupt and outgrow every tradition, discourse, and genre they inhabit.

In the study of literature, plants have traditionally been categorised as either poetic metaphors or providers of exotic or romantic backdrops for narrative action. Although this strictly aesthetic perspective may have been adequate in the past, the contemporary global changes to the environment  –and the consequent renewed literary interest in botanical and natural structure and modes of being- –demand a more nuanced and theoretically informed approach. Fortunately, such work is emerging from a variety of different disciplinary perspectives such as critical plant studies, monster theory, feminist posthumanism, and science fiction studies.

In 2013, a group of American literary scholars published the pioneering anthology Literary Plant Studies introducing Rodopi’s Critical Plant Studies Series, the aim of which was to “initiate an interdisciplinary dialogue, whereby philosophy and literature would learn from each other to think about, imagine, and describe, vegetal life with critical awareness, conceptual rigor, and ethical sensitivity” (Marder). The volume, edited by Randy Laist, first cast the green light on plant characters and plant narrators in (primarily Anglophone) literature from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park over Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony to Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing. In 2017, The Language of Plants edited by Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan and Patrícia Vieira further explored “a biocentric form of literary criticism” that would “seriously regard the lives of plants in relation to humankind in terms that would look beyond the purely symbolic or ‘correlative’ dimension of the vegetal” (xii) from an interdisciplinary angle, and in 2020 Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari published their joint monograph Radical Botany, adding a Franco-American perspective to the discussion.

Parallel with these endeavours in botanical literary criticism and philosophy, the study of botanical monsters in horror fiction constitutes another important strand in the project of critical engagement with literary plants. In this growing subfield, researchers find that horror plants naturally tick many of the monstrous boxes described by Jeffrey J. Cohen in his influential text “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” from 1996. Horror plants seek Frankensteinian revenge for the ill we have done their home planet, they portray deviant sexualities, indulging in excessive auto- or multi-partner reproduction, and they inhabit the limits of knowing as their way of perceiving the world will always illude us despite the best efforts of critical plants studies.

Monster plants fracture the logic of human mastery over nature and expose the Anthropocene as an “epistemological crime-scene stained with erasures of plant consciousness” (Bishop 2018, 7). By blending vegetal, human, and animal characteristics, they force us to abandon the hierarchy of the Great Chain of Being that situates plants at the bottom of a ladder that rises through various “lesser” animals to human beings at the top (Miller 2012, 466). As a subgenre, plant horror “marks humans’ dread of the ‘wildness’ of vegetal nature – its untameability, its pointless excess, its uncontrollable growth,” and function as an unwelcome memento mori reminding us that “while humans may occasionally become food for predatory animals, we all, whether buried in the ground or scattered on the earth, become sustenance for plants” (Keetley 2016, 1).

Inspired and informed by this corpus of literary plant research, my project looks at vegetal-anthropomorph characters that have come out of the closet of horror as a genre and as a type. Such characters can still usefully be approaches as monsters because, even without the horror, they retain an ability to complicate preconceptions and probe what it means to be human, to be plant, or just to be. Some of my monsters are still vengeful, on behalf of the planet or against the imperialism of taxonomy. Some are benevolent, seeking to reintegrate humankind into the natural world we believe to have abandoned. Some are just beings, going about their business, nurturing plants, and falling in love with humans, or the other way round.

Works cited

Bishop, Katherine E. (2018). “’When ‘tis Night, Death is Green’: Vegetal Time in Nineteenth-Century Econoir.” Green Letters 22, no. 1: 7-19. DOI: 10.1080/14688417.2017.1413990

Cohen, Jeffrey J. (1996). “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Gagliano, Monica; John C. Ryan; Patrícia Vieira (2017). “Introduction.” The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Laist, Randy (2013). “Introduction.” Plants and Literature: Essays in Critical Plant Studies. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Marder, Michael (n/d). “Critical Plant Studies.” Brill.com, https://brill.com/view/serial/CPST. Accessed 9 Aug. 2019.

Meeker, Natania and Antónia Szabari (2020). Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction. New York: Fordham University Press.

Miller, T.S. (2012). “Lives of the Monster Plants: The Revenge of the Vegetable in the Age of Animal Studies.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 23, no.3: 460–479.

Keetley, Dawn (2016). “Introduction: Six Theses on Plant Horror; or, Why Are Plants Horrifying?” Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film, edited by Dawn Keetley and Angela Tenga. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

The Membranes by Chi Ta-wei

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We know that everything we experience is mediated -through the senses in collaboration with the brain- it is like there is a membrane between our selves and the world. But where does the membrane stop and reality begin? Can we even be sure that there is something on the other side? Or turn it around; where does the membrane stop, and the self begin? Is there even something at the core? These are the questions raised in Chi Ta-wei’s 紀大偉 novel The Membranes (first published as <膜> in 1995), a unique work of queer speculation, critical futurism, and cyber-psychology, superbly and lucidly translated into English by Ari Larissa Heinrich.

The novel is sometimes described as dystopian, but I see nothing in it that is not already out there, albeit in different forms: Is organ and tissue harvesting from androids worse than from other humans or animals? Is stealing people’s sensory experiences via extra layers of false skin all that different from the gathering of personal information that goes on every time you press your fingers against a computer keyboard to access the internet? Is the brutal class segregation between exposed land-dwellers and protected sea-dwellers unlike the way factories and garbage dumps are habitually constructed in the poorest areas of city and planet? As all good speculative fiction does, The Membranes draws attention to our own world by recreating familiar emotions in estranging environments, providing fresh perspectives on fundamental questions, in Chi’s case, in highly poetic and inventive ways.

The Membranes narrates a short time span around the 30th birthday of Momo, the owner of a skin treatment parlor named Salon Canary located at the ocean floor in the year 2100. Through Momo’s memories and experiences, we learn of her life history and of the many membranes that surround her: “Membranes filtered Momo’s every impression of the world. At thirty, she felt there was at least one layer of membrane between her and the world. Not the kind of membrane she applied to her clients receiving facials at work, obviously. The invisible kind. The kind that made her feel like at tiny water flea – a Daphnia encased in a cell, swimming alone out to sea” (1).

Momo feels separated from her peers and, outside her work, has difficulty engaging in any kind of intimate relations. Beside the psychological barrier (which has very material foundations as the novel reveals), other membranes separate the human Daphnia from the sea of reality. Quite literally, the city she lives in lies “safe under the purple sky of a waterproof and earthquake-proof membrane, deep beneath the ocean, people lived out their days like flowers in a greenhouse” (26).

The skin is perhaps the most immediate membrane, protecting us against illness, except in Momo’s case where it failed to prevent the LOGO virus from slowly destroying her body. This necessitated the construction of Andy -an android specifically (and cruelly) designed to be “compatible” with Momo, to become her first friend and later her organ donor. Elegantly playing with the reader’s gendered expectations, Chi describes the surgical union of the sterile android Andy (sexed as female and gendered feminine) and the human girl Momo, who possesses a penis and is named after a mythical Japanese boy: “Did these two hands belong to Momo or Andy? Whose belly was this? She didn’t have a pee-pee, so that delicate flesh below her belly must have belonged to Andy!” (78).

Recalling Donna Haraway’s groundbreaking 1985-essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Chi reminds us that cyborgs are good to think with, especially when it comes to questions of gender and identity politics, because they are made, just as genders are made, of many (un)natural things in specific contexts. Cyborgs are neither/both human nor/and machine -they represent a messier approach to identity reiterated by Momo when she asks, “whose belly is this?” After all, that belly is home to many hundreds of species of bacteria with each their specific DNA as well as Momo’s “own” cells.

The most persistent membrane, however, exists between Momo and her mother. This is not the cellular membrane of a crustacean in the sea, but of a fetus in a womb. It is not a human merged with an android, but a child disjoined from a parent. Together with the android theme, the theme of parentage explores what it means to be and individual. If one individual can emerge from another, then where and when does individuality begin within all those layers of blood and uterine fluids. And, as Momo points out, emerging from one membrane into the other, one is still a caged canary.

In her dermic treatment work, Momo uses a kind of cream called M-skin which settles into a second skin on the client’s body. This skin is able to record sensory information and replay it through a computer: “Put simply, imagine the body is an old-style tape recorder and M-skin is a cassette: every stimulus experienced by Tomie Ito’s body was recorded like a sound. When Momo got the cassette and made a copy, she could play it on the tape recorder of her own body” (59).

From this angle, the skin is not our ward against the world, but our gateway to it, the line of encounter between inner and outer, I and you. Momo uses M-skin to spy on her clients and, in effect, live through their bodies, problematizing the habitual understanding of the skin as the boundary of the self. If one can share memories, share sensory experiences, share the most intimate moments, what remains of the singular I?

The novel is not only concerned with individuality and identity politics. There are subtle hints at social and political critique in the very structure of Momo’s ocean world: “The new sea-dwellers also left behind unwanted structures like pollution-producing factories and nuclear power plants (which meant, however, that some key personnel were forced to remain on the surface to man the reactors). Also left behind were prisons and various tools of punishment, since governments universally recognized that leaving convicts on the surface was actually a convenient punishment in and of itself” (22).

In the end, membranes are inescapable, and perhaps they are the very location of life. Just as the skin act as the zone of encounter between self and world, so is this wet origin of humanity, “the ocean: just a membrane on the surface of a giant apple” (67). Like the membranes present everywhere, Chi’s novel in Heinrich’s translation presents a view of reality that is certainly layered but also porous. If membranes are everywhere, they are also pierced, smeared, breached and rewoven. By encouraging a closer look at surfaces, the novel suggests that this is where much of our identity (social, sexual, species) resides and is constantly reconfigured. The core, the brain, the mind, or whatever we call it, does not thrive in vacuum, but needs and feeds on sensory stimuli from the boundaries of the body.

The Membranes is a fascinating and beautifully conceived novel, deceptively simple and alluringly deep, smoothly mediated by the membrane of Heinrich’s excellent translation. I can’t wait to get my hands on more of Chi’s work.

Chi, Ta-wei (author) and Ari Larissa Heinrich (translator). The Membranes. Columbia University Press, 2021.

Invisible Realms of Science Fiction with Mingwei Song

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What is the New Wave of Chinese Science Fiction and how do the invisible aspects of reality that it brings to light impact the genre, the scholarship, and our understanding of literature in general? In this first instalment of the Sinophone Unrealities podcast, I talk with Mingwei Song about his love of science fiction, his latest book The Fear of Seeing, and his critically acclaimed experiments with SF poetry.

We take a peek at invisibility on all levels of literary research: From the unseen realms of society that take centre stage in works by writers such as Han Song, to the overlooked sides of SF that emerge through poetry, and beyond into the hidden sides of academia where poets dwell.

Listen here.

Art: Joanne Taylor/Nettop/UiS

I’ve started this podcast to explore the latest research into speculative Sinophone fiction through informal conversations with other researchers/writers/translators about their work and their passions. I’m as thrilled as the next person by the increasing popularity of Chinese SF, but I feel that by widening the generic scope to include all works with speculative elements such as fantasy, time-travel fiction, weird stories, and the genre-defying experiments by authors like Dorothy Tse 謝曉虹, Hon Lai-chu 韓麗珠 and Ho Sok Fong 賀淑芳 –as well as Dung Kai-cheung 董啟章 and Luo Yijun 駱以軍 who Mingwei refers to as “new baroque” writers in this episode– we can really appreciate the glittering variety and spectacular inventiveness of contemporary fiction in Chinese.

Just as some texts refuse to be confined to a single genre, so do many scholars have a finger in more than one literary pie. Some write poetry to express themselves differently than the peer reviewed paper allows, many translate to make their research material available to people in their homeland and share the wonderful tales they discover on their forays into other languages. Some begin as writers or translators and turn to academia later as a breath of fresh air, bringing whole new curriculums and practical perspectives with them. This fruitful collaboration between literary spheres and the multiple roles we play in academia and beyond is something I will return to throughout this series.

If blockbusters like Liu Cixin’s Three Body Problem have paved the way, there is no reason to stop here and miss the treasure troves of mythical robotics, humanoid tree-people, premodern string-based internets, and mushroom-houses that lie ahead. Join me for new adventures into the world of Sinophone Unrealities.

Some of the writers Mingwei talks about (and that you will definitely want to read) are: Liu Cixin 刘慈欣, Han Song 韩松, Xia Jia 夏笳, Dung Kai-cheung, and Luo Yijun. Check out The Translated Chinese Fiction Podcast with Angus Stewart for episodes with/about several of these authors -and many more. Bon appétit!

Invisible Guest: Mingwei Song is Associate Professor of Chinese & Director of Chinese program at Wellesley College, Massachusetts USA. He has published several monographs on both modern and contemporary Chinese literature including Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman 1900-1959, 《五四@100》 (May Fourth@100) with David Der-wei Wang and 《中國科幻新浪潮》 (New Wave of Chinese Science Fiction). His pioneering work on new wave Chinese SF has made him one of the leading scholars in this field and his latest –much anticipated– book The Fear of Seeing: The Poetics and Politics of Chinese Science Fiction is forthcoming with Columbia University Press. His poetry has appeared in eminent journals including the legendary 今天 (Today) and a collaborative collection with Luo Yijun (駱以軍) is underway. 

 

Sounding the Dream: Can Xue and Jorge Luis Borges

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NOW AVAILABLE via Project MUSE (requires institutional login): https://muse.jhu.edu/article/787090

I am looking forward to seeing my essay on the overlapping practices of creative dreaming, writing and reading in Can Xue and Jorge Luis Borges in print! It is forthcoming -in the august company of several really innovative articles on aural metaphors in literary criticism- in the belated December issue of The Canadian Review of Comparative Literature‘s special Issue “Cultural Resonance and the Echo Chamber of Reading,” guest edited by Shuangyi Li.

It performs a comparative reading of oneiric imagery in works by two different authors (Can Xue and Jorge Luis Borges) in two different genres (fictional short story and non-fiction essay) from two different languages (Chinese and Spanish), in order to challenge unidirectional notions of literary inspiration and allow them to sound together.

Though strikingly individual in her writing style, critics often compare the work of Can Xue (née Deng Xiaohua 1953-) to that of Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), an author whose writing she has analysed in detail in her monograph Interpreting Borges (解读博尔赫斯). This volume is itself a textual chimera, posing as a work of criticism, yet possessing much the same literary style and freedom as Can Xue’s creative writing. Borges approaches literary criticism and philosophical exegesis in a similar fashion in his non-fictions, many of which follow narrative patterns recognisable from his short stories in what literary scholar Ned J. Davidson calls “a successful amalgam of fiction and essay” and proclaims as “an acknowledged contribution of Borges to the history of genres.” Both authors, then, display a disinclination to separate practices of reading and writing. In this essay, I borrow Gaston Bachelard’s aural metaphor of poetic reverberation to study how literary inspiration works in ways more complex than the causal relationship indicated by authorial inspiration or, in aural terms, by source and echo.

The Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Special Issue: Cultural Resonance and the Echo Chamber of Reading. December 2020 (47.4).

Introduction
Shuangyi Li 399

Resonant Listening: Reading Voices and Places in Born-Audio Literary Narratives
Sara Tanderup Linkis 407

Computational Resonance: Modelling Thomas Mann’s Early Novellas
Laura Alice Chapot 424

Sounds in Contact: The American Bird Sounds of a German-American Worker Poet and New Empirical Methods of Comparing Literary Sounds
Gunilla Eschenbach and Sandra Richter 449

Sounding the Dream: Crosscultural Reverberations between Can Xue and Jorge Luis Borges
Astrid Møller-Olsen 463

Echoes of the Past and Siberian Nature’s “Radical Otherness”: An Ecological Reading of Contemporary Travel Writing
Ana Calvete 480

National Renaissance and Nordic Resonance: Language History and Poetic Diction in Nineteenth-Century Sweden
Alfred Sjödin 496

Creative Destruction in Multilingual Sound Poetry: The Case of Eiríkur Örn Nor∂dahl
Karin Nykvist 514

The Resonance of Conflict: Genre and Politics in the Transatlantic Reception of The Quiet American
Oscar Jansson 533

Literary Resonances against Ideological Echo Chambers: Wu Zhuoliu’s Orphan of Asia and the Necessity of World Literature
Flair Donglai Shi 552

Multi-sensory Readings: A Practical and Drinkable Approach

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In my recent research, I have been greatly inspired by scholars of Sensory Studies and their endeavour to reconceptualise the senses as collaborating, manifold and cultural. In my work, I extend these notions to the study of literature and analyse the ways in which fictional texts represent and reinvent sensory experience. So, as a summer project, I devised this practical experiment in literary sensory studies: I tried combining the primarily audio-visual pleasure of reading with the gustatory delights of various beverages:
20200704_180146Science Fiction and Stout:

Both the brew and Liu Cixin’s universe are dark and bitter-sweet, but with a deeper tang that is addictive. While I was no end disappointed that none of the wall-facers (futuristic heroes attempting to save the world) were women, I enjoyed the auxiliary inventiveness and the repeated motif of dragonflies across the mass of text, like the sweet undertones of the beer’s roasted malt.

whiskey satireSatire and Single Malt:

Wang Xiaobo’s 黄金时代 (The Golden Age) is an account of love in a Cultural Revolution labour camp. It chronicles the slightly dull daily doings of the young man Wang Er, spiced with his sexual relationship with a young (female) doctor and topped with their shared prosecution by the local powers that be in a raw yet complex experience, not dissimilar to a tarry beaker of Laphroigh.

crime coffeeCrime and Coffee:

Comforting yet refreshing, I haven’t yet tired of Agatha Christie nor of my daily mocha, probably never shall. Have read these books countless times and enjoy them, despite always already knowing “who dunnit” (what is the world coming to when Heidegger and the queen of crime fiction can co-inhabit the same paragraph – I like it!). Also enjoy hunting for older paperbacks with their graphic aesthetics of bygones eras, some overt and gaudy, some elegantly simple.

20200821_182158Fantasy and Kombucha:

Bubbling and fast-paced, Genevieve Cogman’s novels press all the right buttons for me, including hunts for rare books, supernatural henchmen and a steam punk heroine, matching the variety of sweet, sour and zingy notes in the fermented tea-based drink.