Intransitive Encounter, by Nan Da (Introduction)

INTRANSITIVE ENCOUNTER Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange

Nan Z. Da

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INTRODUCTION Intransitivity

Intransitive Encounter holds open a cross-­culturalism that is wholly self-­ contained, that uses itself up in the moment of transpiration, and does not demand institutionalization, demonstrable impact, or empirical evidence of the fact that it has taken place. The book lives in one archive—­ nineteenth-­century Sino-­U.S. literary encounters—­to study the formal dynamics in which such intransitive cultural exchanges might be seen and the historical dynamics that gradually reduced our capacity to recognize this type of cross-­culturalism. Formality, the central hermeneutic of this book, gives name to both these dynamics. It names the literary characteristics of having boundaries despite participating in history’s unfolding or cultural sharing. This is a manner of walking away from interpollination that has nothing to do with a subversive rejection of globalization, merely a wish for the sufficiency of a nonverifiable, idiosyncratically significant encounter that the print-­cultural mediation of modernity will grant. Second, formality names the seeming opposite dynamic: the processes, both man-­made and built into the evolution of genres of communication, that have led to the implicit belief that an exchange must have duration and mappable afterlives, as well as normalizing capacities, if it is to be called an exchange at all. To read for formality, lodged in various places inside and outside literary content, is to understand how texts at the intersection of China and the United States in the nineteenth century simultaneously made

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possible, and turned away from, globalization and its teleological narratives of convergence.

One way of classifying this book is to see it as a catalog of self-­erasing Sino-­U.S. literary interactions in the long nineteenth century. In both the “informal” genres and their more canonical counterparts, we have literary rapprochements that tend to cancel out, through form or rhetoric or logics unique to literature, the fact that Sino-­U.S. exchanges even happened or left long-­lasting impact. This book inaugurates a careful way of reading such self-­canceling transmissions—­engagements that, measured by positivist assessments of international relations, might as well not have happened—­ and describes a kind of exchange in which nothing is exchanged. This is a history that has been missing until now of a genre, the “literary exchange,” that is much stranger than we tend to give it credit for. At the collapse of one empire and the beginning of another, China and the United States came to each other specifically motivated by the possibility of more expedient ways to express complex political ideas and implement difficult political reforms, deploying the other’s literature, literary systems, and literary objects amid vast uncertainty about the eventual configurations of their own countries.

Diverging from idioms of appropriation, dissemination, and collaboration, many of these cross uses of literatures were minimal (but not insincere) investments in others and in others’ literature as a set of opportunities to make that which did not seem politically, experientially, or rhetorically plausible, plausible. It needs to be said at the outset that this minimal investment has no ethical valence in and of itself; it is simply the formal expression of limited transmission. Like intransitive verbs, minimal investments are vectored actions whose “effects are contained within the agent” and do not pass to other objects or beyond certain limits.1 This oxymoronic paradigm, launched in the book’s title and preserved throughout, brokers a path of interpretation for the simultaneously momentous and superficial aspects of transnational literary events between 1800 and 1910.

On the U.S. side, this spans the seventy-­odd years after the founding of the nation; on the Chinese side, most of the cases fall before the establishment of the Republic of China in 1912. Intransitive literary exchanges abounded during this period when collaborations and cross-­ethnic transactions between China and the United States were still being codified. This is not a claim of insularity. The extensive sharing of Chinese and American texts and cultural materials in the nineteenth century did produce

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certain historical and cultural outcomes; in fact, this book helps re-­create this very close nineteenth-­century Sino-­A merican world. Chinese and American writers wrote and thought much more (and much more matter-­ of-­factly) about each other than one might have guessed.2 America came into a long-­standing tradition of China thinking from the European Enlightenment circulated through both the Old China Trade and the presence of French missionaries in American public life. This meant that China/ Chineseness broadly understood was not a foreign concept in the new nation but more a well-­circulated body of ideas. According to Owen Alridge, “by the end of the eighteenth century every major European book about China could be found somewhere in the United States, and a number of books on China by American authors were in print and contributing to the rise of a new national literature.”3 In the years from 1750 to 1850 excerpts of translated Chinese texts and lengthy commentary on China could also be found in most print periodicals. As the nineteenth century progressed American attitudes toward China were also routed through Evangelical Christian missionaries in China, Pacific commercial interests, diplomatic strategies, the increasing presence of Chinese immigrants, and Progressive Era immigration politics.4 China thinking served as a delivery mechanism for calibrating historiographic methods for a postrevolutionary world, legitimating the utopian designs of the Free-­Soilers, shoring up Progressive politics, and redesigning the public sphere. China, for its part, figured America into its cartographic imaginary in the 1830s and continued to translate, publish, digest, and account for American literary and cultural production through the early 1900s.5 The figure of George Washington, whose abdication of power became a catchphrase for recessive governance, appeared in many political tracts, including one published for the Taiping Rebellion in 1855. Anglo-­A merican texts deeply impacted the Qing dynasty’s last-­d itch modernizing efforts and the Republic of China’s early national reform. United States thinking stirred new plans for mending the Manchurian state, reclaiming classical literature as political allusion, and campaigning for women’s rights and literacy. On both sides unique political contexts determined how a piece of foreign literature ought to be used—­a nd most often it was as a conceptual shortcut that eased social projects and political enunciation.

Using other people’s literature to create conditions of thinking produced scripted and unscripted engagements that share a lack of commitment

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toward transpacific interpollination and codevelopment and the narrative of an increasingly closer world.

Washington Irving (1783–­1859), for example, used the fact that China might have but did not fully intersect with America to reflect on the changes to historical writing in the modern democratic state. The active erasure of geopolitical connections and convergences could be seen in both places: the presence of China in his early American writings and those writings’ later appearance in translation in China. Intransitivity was a way for Irving to react to changes in the role of textual materials in the public sphere and American historiography and register the historical moment when failures of transmission become figured as social malaise—­when formality becomes bad form. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–­1882) argued that the literariness of others should become an impetus for domestic political change but insisted that this could really happen only if literature were used and then discarded, left behind. Emerson’s involvement in the second Sino-­U.S. treaty (1868) and its politics of transpacific collaboration in the 1860s and 1870s reveal his practice of ephemeral cosmopolitanism, the need to protect the activational power of any particular idea against the problems and compromises that can arise when going too far with anything. For Emerson, who urgently analogized reform to ecstatic experience, the most hard-­line instrumentalism was the one that best preserved the power of literature and the one that promised the least amount of ideological corruption.

On China’s side, literary expressions and styles unique to late Qing culture and Chinese diasporic practices allowed for an engagement without importation and acknowledgment without intake to occur even in the most ostentatious forms of cross-­nationalism. The foreign minister Dong Xun’s (1810–­1892) translation in 1865 of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life” onto a paper fan, a gesture hailed as forging Sino-­U.S. relations, was an instance of textual handling that defies the commonplace that translation means importation of the text’s ideas to one’s own country. His gesture forces us to revisit both China’s media-­driven understandings of translation and the most beloved of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poems that also explore the nuances of transpersonal sociality through the contingencies of media and mediation. The late Qing feminist writer Qiu Jin (1875–­1907) was drawn to Anglo-­American reform literature but suggested in her poetry and fiction that this literature needed only to be mentioned and neither read

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nor verified. Her stance reflected wider Qing publication practices in which Anglo-­American literature often served as memes, metonyms of wider worlds that readers did need to know about and yet could never, nor would want to, fully ascertain. On the other “side” of the Pacific, the Chinese-­ American reformer Yung Wing (1828–­1912) dedicated his life to a series of projects—­ most notably the Chinese Education Mission—­ which were undone precisely because no one else could permit the possibility of a meaningful intransitive encounter. His own writings decoupled communication from transference, opening up the possibility of a future in which no one can tell exactly how much you’ve taken from being “Chinese” or “American.” The Asian-­American writer Edith Maude Eaton (1865–­1914) wrote stories in the early years of the twentieth century that allegorized literary exchange between white Americans and Asian immigrants to contest the notion that reading about something changes you for good. These stories situated the fantasy of perfect responsiveness to other people’s texts within early twentieth-­century Progressive attitudes toward East-­West relations and dramatized the tragicomic consequences of treating proximity to other people’s literature as evidence of exchange and acculturation.

These literary episodes, anchoring the six chapters of this book, lie on the page as if they constituted a conventional literary history, but their analogy to one another is in the act of finding in the other discursive situations or literatures whatever happens to be needed to solve domestic political impasse or to generate some praxis for a local project, whatever it might be.

Filling out the picture of a pre-­twentieth-­century Sino-­U.S. world, these moments are often surrounded by and even occur within genres and forms at once banal (superficial so as to be almost beneath mentioning) and nongeneralizable (surprisingly specific to each situation): banquet speeches, treaty documents, empty gestures, on-­the-­spot translations, name-­d ropping, casual thought experiments and political utopianisms. Not quite special enough for canonical literary analysis and yet too precious from an archival standpoint to be excluded, these genres and forms trouble the artificial but serviceable narrative of the transition from a pre-­to post-­transpacific world in the nineteenth century. On the one hand, these manifold uses of literature clearly evidence the ways nations or emergent nations naturally venture into other real and imaginary spaces to create conditions of thinking at all. To call these interactions transnational, however, means

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suffusing them with geopolitical and semantic significances beyond what the baseline interaction, whether an off-­t he-­cuff poem or one allusion among many, can bear.

The secondary claim of this book is that something happened to formality in the nineteenth century as a result of globalization and transnationalism more specifically. As anyone who has encountered Foucauldian scholarship knows, the nineteenth century saw the folding of myriad eroticisms, carnalities, deviances, inclinations, and bodily habits into the single liberatory but perhaps too-­legible conjugation of “sexuality.” This book forwards a parallel genealogy. The period between 1800 and 1910 (roughly speaking, between the end of the Qing reforms and the beginning of the new Republic, between the founding of the United States and the end of Reconstruction) saw shrinkage in, and conflation between, various types of formality. With more dinner speeches, photo ops, and mimed interactions in the transpacific world, a certain kind of formality started to move out of view while another began to dominate views of cross-­culturalism. This book does not attempt to explain this entire process, but it does provide some original answers to why it happened. Nineteenth-­century Sino-­U.S. “literary exchanges” occurred during the same time that the concept of the “literary exchange” was emerging, one that would incorporate a baseline expectation of cultural transmission. A historically locatable change occurred in the semantics of the term “literary exchange,” one that set the terms of Sino-­U.S. relations. Unusual emphasis was placed on translation and cultural transmission in the three Sino-­American treaties of the nineteenth century, even more so when Sino-­U.S. literary and cultural exchange was seen to have failed to transmit and transform. The solidification of the genre of the “literary exchange” and the officializing of cultural contact brought enormous pressure to bear on our conceptions of what counts as meaningful cross-­cultural encounter—­more precisely, the idea that it has to count for something at all. Globalization did something to our collective sense of the meaning of form and the fate of formality. The new normal of comparative gesturing and comparing gestures in the global nineteenth century necessitated new discourses around the commensurability of form and content. And so reform writers of late Qing, early Republican China continually readjusted the value and definition of form(ality), from the shape that something or some event takes to the transmitter of content through style, genre, themes. International relations

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gave aesthetic works normative social functions that pushed literature into what Jacques Rancière calls the “expressive regime,” the “cultural relativizing of literature as a social expression of a particular state of civilization.”6 If the “new idea of literature is that it is the language of societies and of their history,” as Rancière writes, then it ceased to matter what and how exactly literature represents or by what precise logic it is read and used. As forms become artifacts of culture, each and every instance of literary cultural contact further secures the difficulty of describing their true nature, as the archaeology of literary encounter lies waiting to transubstantiate the smallest of these into large networks of consequence. This means that the limits posed to the accurate representation of any literary transnational interaction begin to issue from within those interactions themselves. Each separate instance of exchange could be superficially regarded and logged as a datum of transmission leading to habits of speech and historicization that then paradoxically rule out the possibility of rich but truly superficial contact.

Let us look at an anecdote of such superficiality and draw from it a parable of our current rhetorical impasse. Alexander Hill Everett (1792–­1847), the second editor of the North American Review, went to China in 1847 and, without having done anything, died there. He got only as far as the first port of call, but he seems to have anticipated our current academic climate in which one should be a transnationalist or die trying. His tombstone in the foreigners’ cemetery on Changzhou Island lay undiscovered until 1984, but at least it was spared from being used as a washboard by the locals, a fate that befell some of the other tombstones with deeper and therefore more tractive engravings. And a good thing, too, suggests an article in the South China Morning Post, or otherwise we would have missed this literal early marker of Sino-­American exchange. Citing Everett’s writings on China, the article reprises the contingency of his death into the familiar idiom of cross-­ culturalism, calling his “the story of a man who forged the first ties between America and the mainland.”7 To be fair, Alexander Hill Everett was one of the earliest Americans to have a sizable China corpus. For Everett, discursive China helped to create conditions of comprehension. In many of these cases, what required comprehension were the limits of transnational identification and emulation.

In political treatises, essays on improvement discourse, and reviews of Chinese literature in translation, Everett touched on China multiple times in his career, each time not taking something from it. For example, in 1828,

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as the editor-­contributor of the North American Review, Everett conducted a formal analysis of the Ming-­dynasty novel Yu jiao li (玉娇梨, Jade and pear), a novel in which the hero marries both the heroines. Everett used this novel’s unconventional marriage plot to argue against the applicability of Malthusian principles to American reform. As one might imagine, the argument was contorted. If the ideal romance novel is characterized by the practical necessity of having to choose, and the deferral of marriage (by calamities, misunderstandings, but, most important, by the presentation of a rival who must be disqualified) “must ever remain the only legitimate object of a true novel,”8 the Chinese custom of allowing three-­person marriages is ruinous to the form of the novel because, for one, it disables the creation of necessary distress and, two, it deprives the reader of the pleasure that distress brings.9 The Chinese novel’s perceived violation of novelistic economy demonstrated the folly of the political goal of having it every which way, thus giving support to Everett’s long-­standing disagreement with the Malthusian “theory of the perfectibility of man” and what he perceived as the erroneous attempts to “revive [it in America] as the basis of a practical reform of the institutions of society” by utopian socialist reformers like Robert Owen and Francis Wright.10 As a thinking technology, Yu jiao li helped Everett articulate his position on domestic programs of reform. While he found “Chinese manners” as they were represented in the novel commendable because they tied happiness to the “cultivation of letters,” he drew attention to the Chinese novel in order to deselect China’s political economy as well as the ones across the Atlantic as one potentially worthy of emulation.

Certainly, Everett can be accused of atavism and Orientalism, although to classify and thus disqualify moments of engagement in this way would be to eliminate almost all engagements. In so many words, Everett was saying that there is a limit to the applicability of one world to another. His attitude toward China merely extended a lifelong suspiciousness toward the dialectics of infinite improvability: why invest in some future horizon of engagement that is truer and more fungible than this one right now, the fact of my reading and my thoughts? His stance makes us grapple with an extended consideration of transnational potential that is provisional, for now only, and that takes nothing for the future.

We do not yet have the critical language to describe the phenomenon of intransitivity in part because transnational methodology has a hard time deconstructing its analog forms. The easy idealism in the closing lines of

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the South China Morning Post article on Alexander Hill Everett begs the question, what else could one have said besides “forging ties”? The well-­ traveled quality of bodies and texts between China and the United States in the nineteenth-­century world—­a sort of documentary transnationality—­is met with the absence of any conceptual vocabulary for describing nonimpact, unless that nonimpact takes the form of purposeful withdrawal or resistance. We either fetishize transmissibility or we fetishize nontransmissibility, but either way, cross-­national and cross-­cultural contact get suspended under the hermeneutics of consequence. The “trans” of transnationalism has become a way of bringing things to account. Originally conceived as a description of affiliations, grievances, and imaginaries larger than the nation-­state, transnational literary studies has evolved into a powerful and versatile analytic that unveils alternative accounts of modernity. It tracks the geographical promiscuity of ideas and texts in history and shows the extent to which such crossings of language and literature mediated formations in places that are generally seen as, and even self-­proclaimed as, hermetically sealed. Therefore, transnational hermeneutics tend to not only recover our often problematic global interconnectedness in history but also reveal the almost always problematic politics that has repressed and continues to repress these coconstitutive origins. Whether it takes the form of official speak or social justice, transnational studies takes upon itself to show us what we do not immediately see about the worldedness of the world.

Pinned by the worldedness claims of transnationalism, however, cross-­ national cultural contact finds it increasingly difficult to square its levity with its gravity. We either romanticize contact as consequential without caring to verify the particulars (think of banquet rhetoric, for example) or we force low-­stakes encounters—­contact that does not aim for meaning beyond the occasion—­into a narrative of the traumatically and irreversibly interconnected world.

China-­West relations lie at the very forefront of this double bind. Every year brings new books—­both popular and academic—­that prove to us that China engaged with the West (and the other way around) earlier and more deeply than we had thought. Finding earlier instances of contact and coproduction cannot help but mirror the global market in the way it uses transnationalism to naturalize China-­rising narratives (such as can be seen in the hype over the book 1421: The Year China Discovered America); at the same time such narratives get a pass since they seem to suggest paths

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forward in what is inarguably a time that needs planetary cooperation. Either way, the demonstration of global consciousness and implicatedness, supralocal belonging and trauma, naturally cleaves to demonstrable interactions, having no room in its logics for nonproductive encounters. Backdating globalization is the art of finding who-­read-­what-­a nd-­w ith-­what consequences. In this praxis, circulation—­our term for the movement of minds, bodies, and texts—­has become as good as transmission. In historical East-­ West transnational studies that categorical confusion occurs in the literary cultural exchange (wenhua jiaoliu), a genre that has assumed a concrete inflection as both the activational site and archive of East-­West crossings.

The argument becomes circular: an exchange—­i ndeed any exchange—­ simultaneously forges ties and shows that ties have been forged. This conflation of content and form short-­circuits our hermeneutics of East-­West contact, our way of reading the substance of contact: to wit, East-­West contact proves East-­West contact. As the evidentiary form of historical transnational happenings, the literary cultural exchange gets away with being “mute,” to borrow Rancière’s description of genres whose gambit is self-­ evidence: it does not have to say anything.

In both the popular and academic publishing worlds, the controlling concepts for this kind of study have been transnationalism, the imaginary, hybridity, exchange, and global flows. And yet there is a way to talk about pre-­twentieth-­century China-­West encounters that has been entirely overlooked, a way that more faithfully describes their phenomenological content and that is, paradoxically, hidden in plain sight. A transnational study of reception that defetishizes transnationalism and reception theory can help us come to terms with encounters both physical and imaginative that squander the opportunity to herald a converging world—­sometimes on principle, oftentimes not. Unlikely affinities between Chinese and American poetics, historiography, utopianism, philosophies of social activism, and transformations in the public sphere all play a part in reconstructing the history of Sino-­U.S. literary exchange in the nineteenth century through period-­and context-­specific uses of literature, and, within those, the feelings as well as habits of use and handling that limit the duration and impact of encounter. The title of this book is Intransitive Encounter, not Intransitive Literary Encounter, so my readers may wonder if it is disingenuous to model all kinds of encounter on the model of the literary-­textual encounter. My explanation is this: even though, intuitively, intransitivity ought to

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attend all kinds of cultural encounter—­economic, political, material, visual, aural, and so on—­there are very few ways to prove this, since, as the very first example in this book of Alexander Hill Everett’s Chinese tombstone shows, material archaeology does not tend to support intransitivity. The reason I can talk about an encounter that carries itself lightly is because I have focused almost exclusively on literary, textual, and book-­historical manifestations of cross-­national and cross-­cultural encounter. My approach flips the method preferred by many sociologists of global literature. They find literary textual encounter extremely convenient for talking about encounter period because these leave a trace in a way that material, economic, and cultural encounters do not quite match. Leaning in to these conveniences many sociologists of literature will extrapolate the literary textual encounter outward to encompass all encounter and end up treating the literary textual encounter in no special way whatsoever. I reverse course, reining in the self-­archiving and the self-­networking inclinations of literary textual encounters, finding these tendencies not worthless but indicative of a different truth.

In nineteenth-­century Sino-­American transnationalism it is when foreign literature is perceived as immediately and urgently useful for political articulation that we get forms of contact that buck the rhetoric of synthesis or interpollination. Having less to do with intentionality than with the logics of literature and literary use, intransitive encounters are sincere considerations of the expressive potential in the works of distant others, considerations that excuse themselves from the teleology and determinisms of the “cross-­cultural” exchange, but, importantly, they do this while they squarely occupy that genre. Intransitivity occurs especially in exchanges at the foreground of Sino-­U.S. relations, where they are touted as emblems of cross-­influencing. Therefore, despite the way it sounds, an intransitive encounter does not spring from a contrarian desire to prove that there is more apartness in the world than we would think or, worse yet, a protectionist stance toward globalization. It cultivates, through the pleasures of close literary and textual analysis, a mode of apprehending the lightness of contact in a very close world.

There are historical ways to explain the formalization of the cross-­cultural exchange that produced the automatic assumption of long-­lasting consequence. Let me start with an obvious one. Brokers of Sino-­U.S. relations

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in the late nineteenth century attached high stakes to a mutual intelligibility based in formal recognition, believing synthesis to be mutually beneficial and disaster averting. Yellow Peril stories at the turn of the twentieth century, including science fictions of Chinese attacks, envisioned the direst outcome of failing to reach this critical threshold: genocide and world wars. More than the inevitability of a showdown between East and West, Jack London’s 1904 story “The Yellow Peril” evinces the racializing logic behind the test of transnational communicative action. In it, a Manchurian named Feng Wang-­Cheng makes a case for the de-­escalation of tensions with China based on their susceptibility to new ideas. The Chinese would not be “so ill-­disposed toward new ideas and new methods,” the story avers, if it weren’t for their suppressive public sphere.11 This suppressive, intractable intransitivity is the target of the story—­“the ideas behind the Boxer troubles and the outbreaks over the introduction of the railroad and other foreign devil machinations have emanated from the minds of the literati, and have been spread by their pamphlets and propaganda.”12 Even though it would seem to jettison faith in a world republic of letters, “The Yellow Peril” actually reinforces the paradigm of rational communicative action by demanding from China external signs of the intake of Western materials, and finding faults in national character when it does not.

Dystopian forecasts of Sino-­U.S. relations from the end of the nineteenth century also incapacitate the possibility of intransitivity by stripping distanciation of any meaningful content and collapsing the spectrum of interaction so that it has to be either friendly homogenization or hostile nonintercourse, and nothing in between. In Looking Further Backward, Arthur Dudley Vinton’s 1890 Sinophobic spin-­off to Edward Bellamy’s 1888 Looking Backward: 2000–­1887, China is able to colonize and enslave America and Europe by the year 2020 because it had closed itself off to all influence from the West thirty years prior. The fictional history professor Won Lung Li explains to a future American audience how they were blindsided by the Chinese: “We saw that you were trying a new experiment. To prevent her people from being contaminated by the new theories, China enforced more strictly her policy of nonintercourse with other nations. We became more and more an isolated people.”13 Nonintercourse is not only racialized but also seen as a bellicose maneuver held in reserve, a way to bypass progressive historical movements and come out on top.

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Aside from such essentializing propaganda that drew on fears over China’s historical nonengagement with the West to pathologize nonintercourse, there are other aspects of modernity that aided the obsolescence of intransitivity. Unlike London’s and Vinton’s political weighting of cross-­communication, these are subtler and have much more to do with the modern condition of compartmentalized social contact. Over the long nineteenth century and especially during the Progressive Era (and early Republican period in China), the impact of encountering other people’s literature was prominently relocated from personal experience to generalizable experience. Cross-­culturalism and literary exchange became privileged and banal at the same time, and from this developed an easy way of talking about consequence that would make minimal demands on cross-­ culturalism: all that would be required is a sufficiently pronounced position of having been exposed to ideas and changed by them.

In the United States, we can locate a shift in the expectation of transcultural literary influence in the changing definition of the term “literary exchange.” John Howard Payne, known to American audiences as the lyricist for the Civil War ballad “Home, Sweet Home,” coined the noun phrase “literary exchange” in 1810. Designed as an enhanced “reading room,” Payne’s “literary exchange” encouraged people to fund and subscribe to “a general depository of Newspapers, Magazines, and Pamphlets, both political literary and scientifick.”14 This literary exchange was international in nature only insofar as it could “gratif[y] strangers who visit this city from abroad, with the earliest intelligence from their respective dwelling place.”15 By midcentury, the term had been adjusted. The Frenchman Alexandre Vattemare, who was instrumental in the founding of the Boston Public Library, pushed for a more systematic and consequential form of international cultural sharing between the years 1839 and 1848 after a similar proposal stalled in his native country. After receiving support from Congress for a rotating exchange of museum artifacts between France and the United States, Vattemare moved to internationalize library collections in response to what he perceived as suboptimal use. Duplicate copies of great works should be circulated so as to reach audiences that previously had no access.

But egalitarianism aside, Vattemare’s system of literary exchange was also “calculated to cement the bands of friendship between foreign and distant countries, and unite them with feelings of fraternal interests.”16 By 1853,

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more than one hundred thirty libraries around the world had subscribed to the book exchange. The rhetoric of mutualism also shaped the Smithsonian Institution’s post-­1860 international initiatives. A book exchange with China had already been taking place in the decade or so before then but had not yet been institutionalized. In 1844, the American statesman Caleb Cushing, who had gone to China to negotiate the Treaty of Wanghia and who was delayed in Macau waiting for the arrival of the Chinese delegation, collected more than twenty-­five hundred volumes of Chinese books with the curatorial assistance of three missionaries, Elijah Coleman Bridgman, Peter Parker, and Samuel Wells Williams. Acquired by the Library of Congress in 1879, this collection launched its Asian-­language division. In 1867, meanwhile, a joint effort by Congress and the Smithsonian Institution engineered the first large-­scale book exchange between the United States and China, with stipulations that the “trade” be balanced. In a process overseen by the U.S. minister to China at the time, Anson Burlingame, and Samuel Wells Williams, seed packets were sent with the books in a quite literal program of interpollination resulting in more than nine hundred thirty volumes of Chinese literature eventually making their way to the Library of Congress. Vattemare’s efforts had, in effect, changed the ontological status of books from static library holdings into a more active program of international reciprocation. Interconnectedness was coaxed and cultivated through a system of exchange designed to be minimally painstaking—­a better utilization of library structures already in place to effect an exchange that should not be hard to turn down.

The importance of the formalization of literary exchange to Sino-­U.S. relations of this prior era cannot be overstated. Institutional initiatives for Sino-­U.S. exchanges evidence a print network’s emergence as something that does the work of international relations without individual actors having to do it at all times. As a genre of communication, the literary exchange is unique in that it moves quite flexibly between multiple systems: printing, diplomacy, missionary work, and industrialization. More anecdotally, books were systematically distributed in port cities along China’s southeastern seaboard in the 1830s. Samuel Wells Williams recounts dropping off bags of both religious and nonreligious books with the locals. Some of them were ungraciously returned but the net effect of “applications for books [being] now general” was complaints that they should have brought more.17 Through the 1860s and 1870s, the Methodist missionary Young John Allen

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worked with the Education and Translation Bureau in Shanghai to produce more than two hundred fifty volumes of translations, later published by the Methodist Society for the Diffusion of Christian and General Knowledge Among the Chinese.18 Transnational newspapers (those touching on global matters published by American nationals for Chinese audiences) appeared in the 1860s, including the North China Herald (Huabei jiebao), the Globe Magazine (Wanguo gongbao), and the Shun Pao (Shen bao), and these sometimes published acculturated versions of American literature. At the onset of China’s Self-­Strengthening Movement in the mid-­1860s, publishing houses and academies—­most notably the Jiangnan Arsenal (Jiangnan Zhizaoju) and the Shanghai School of Combined Learning (Tongwen Guan)—­ produced large-­scale translations of Western scientific and technical literature with the assistance of the Englishman John Fryer (later professor of Asian literature at the University of California).19 During this time Japanese intermediaries also began to disseminate Anglo-­American texts on the mainland, their influence reaching its height during the New Culture Movement of the late 1890s.20 In 1904, and again in 1908, China made large donations of books to the Library of Congress. In 1908, as recompense for the gift of the unused monies from the Boxer Indemnity Fund, China gave to the United States five thousand twenty volumes of the ten-­ thousand-­volume Complete Collection of Books from Antiquity and the Present (1701–­1706), the oldest and largest Chinese encyclopedia since Yongle’s Great Encyclopedia (1408). These were displayed at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (aka the St. Louis World’s Fair).

By a conservative estimate, at least thirty thousand volumes traded hands between the two countries between 1800 and 1910. By serving as proxies for contact this bibliographic system encouraged a particular association of textual circulation with being in the world as a nation. After a global tour in 1848, the Chinese writer and statesman Xu Jiyu (1795–­1873) published a ten-­volume book called Brief Records of the World (1849) and catalyzed the Westernization Movement (Yangwu Yundong). Drawing cartographic knowledge from Xu’s work, the Qing scholar Feng Guifen wrote an essay called “Selectively Adopting Western Learning” that represented a paradigm shift, a fundamental change effected by modern cartography on the way people regarded the function of books: “Today the world is ninety thousand li around. Could it be that where ships and carts can reach so can the human will . . . ​According to Western maps there are at least a hundred

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countries in the world. Of all the books in these countries only those from Italy and England have been translated, and that was at the end of the Ming dynasty, with the total number of translations roughly at ten.”21 These few lines reinforce the idea that if the world has become traversable, “an unbroken surface on which there is no place that cannot be reached,” then the books from all its parts should be made available.22 The map of the world that Xu Jiyu had provided had convinced Feng Guifen that China was already behind in doing translations. In this new paradigm, globalization normalizes expectations about the international circulation of texts. While there may be more books than one had ever dreamed of in more languages than one had known existed they are theoretically all able to reach you; they are all already there.

The fact of large quantities of English-­language Chinese writings appearing in Shanghai and other port cities in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth has been studied as a print-­ cultural phenomenon or a politics of circulation that reproduces itself mimetically in aesthetic practice and identity—­that is, as forms of literary cosmopolitanism.23 But this gives us only half the picture. Because literary exchange was normativized under the logics of recognition and reciprocity the movement of books became synecdochially linked to desired patterns of international cooperation. The volume of books being conveyed across the Pacific was accompanied by a correlative uptick of investment in some shared future, never mind what happens in each individual case of reception. Ernest Fenollosa’s 1898 essay “The Coming Fusion of East and West” and F. S. C. Northrop’s 1946 Meeting of East and West: An Inquiry Concerning World Understanding both reflect this development: literary exchange must have a telos, a convergence that happens when the sharing of textual and cultural materials and practices passes a critical threshold.

Northrop envisioned Eastern and Western civilizations supplementing each other, each excelling in what the other lacks, coming together in a dialectical nature. Fenollosa similarly divvies up enviable and unenviable traits between East and West, the “synthesis” of which he foresaw would “mark this close of our century as a unique dramatic epoch in human affairs.”24 The deconstructivist turn in book history teaches us that the circulation of literature and print matter tends to want to sustain the semblance of an ever-­expanding public sphere, in which no transfer of units

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of communicative material can ever be for nothing. As Andrew Piper says, “romanticism is what happens when there are suddenly a great deal more books to read, when indeed there are too many books to read.”25 Romanticism describes the beliefs and expectations bibliographication of the world instills. In the 1837 issue of the Harvardiana, Horatio Hale declared, “I am happy to state that our fame and circulation is not confined to the bounds of our University—­nay, not of our hemisphere! (hear!) It has extended to the very antipodes!”26 What passes for evidence of this extensive circulation in China? He produces in-­text “exquisite verses, by the fair Princess Li-­si-­k win, the daughter of the Chinese Emperor, addressed to the Purophagoi.” These turn out to be a nonsensical series of Chinese characters, many of which are made up. It goes without saying that during the reign of Emperor Daoguang, no such princess existed. In print-­cultural modernity people can romanticize literary exchange as something that happens quite efficiently and effectively (and, importantly, without having to recognize this as romance).

Histories of cultural-­lingual contact bend toward narratives of hybridity and so, as Christina Lupton points out, “it becomes circular . . . ​when the concepts and the tools designed to collate and connect texts” are used to “evidence a history of connection and collection.”27 Literary exchanges often exaggerate their own qualities of being read, impactful, well traveled. This consideration is what distinguishes my skepticism toward transnational studies from others. Transnationalism is popularly seen as a widening public sphere, with ideal reading practices and alterity management outsourced to the work of books and other print media. This conceptualization obtains even when people envision its relation to the public sphere as a negative or skeptical one—­that is, by regarding texts in translation or circulation as criticizing the politics of rational communicative action or modeling the praxis of disaffiliation. Transnational and world literature studies’ epistemic investments in normative models of communication account for Nancy Fraser’s skepticism toward the “transnational public sphere.”28 Although she too does not relinquish utopian aspirations for the transnational public sphere, Fraser’s skepticism offers a respite from sociologies of literature that treat the public sphere as an impoverished model that can be ameliorated by inclusivity, universal inclusivity in fact—­taking into account more books, more sites of production and reception, more other people’s public spheres

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and other routes of reading and exchange. Sociologies of literature inspired by the insights of Pierre Bourdieu into cultural capital and that work at a far distance from tropes, lineation, or narration return repeatedly to distensions and asymmetries in the relationship between texts and the world they live in to expose literary transnationalism and circulation as things that reprise economic inequality.29 So when the canon of world literature thinks it represents constituents when it in fact symbolically represents the flows of capital—­so goes the Bourdieuian argument—­the result is either tokenism or false consciousness, but either way correctable by political conscientiousness. Intransitive Encounter does not reach for such a politics and it does not deploy a similar method of reading. It rejects the idea that disaffiliation from normative models of the public sphere and tracing literature’s subservience to the movement of capital are the only ways to undo transnationalism and world literature’s most persistent romances. Simple attention to details will begin to undo the literary exchange’s hold on our imagination and manners of speaking.

Formality, the aspect of a piece of literature most linked with intransitivity, covers at its most basic level the prompts and occasions in which transnational mindedness is an easily picked-­up (and therefore discardable ) option. To read for formality is to see how a text sets boundaries for itself despite participating in history’s unfolding or cultural sharing. Of all the ways that the crucial period of pre-­twentieth-­century East-­West contact has been historicized and theorized, formalities have never been studied for their full semantic and critical potential.30 This seems like an understandable situation since formality, conventionally defined as sociality without intrinsic content, is hardly the thing that gets good critics excited. We generally see ourselves as moving away from superficiality, fake niceties, and things of inconsequence, not toward them. Frances Ferguson, explaining something about Kantian formalism, points out that since aesthetic practices and objects often have another life in functional systems, such as communication, their “formality” often comes to be described as a shadow, a redundant loop, “the empty or superfluous imitation of the look of function.”31 Literary historians prefer to work with form, understood prevalently as literature and cultural practices’ intense reflection of reality bundled into delimited shapes. Franco Moretti, for example, adopts a relatively

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straightforward Marxist view of “form as a struggle” for all his world literary comparative morphologies: because “forms are the abstract of social relationships: so, formal analysis is in its own modest way an analysis of power.”32 From Caroline Levine we get some relief from the association between form and power structures in her suggestion that while “form can indicate essence . . . ​it can also mean the superficial trappings, such as conventions—­mere forms.”33 I deviate from Levine, however, in her definition of forms as things traceable across space and time and networks as “defined patterns of interconnection and exchange that organize social and aesthetic experience.”34 While such broad formalisms can generate accounts of wide literary-­sociological events, I have found that these ways of talking about form’s embeddedness in social relations do not quite capture the phenomenon that mobilizes literary expression to the task of intransitive contact. Even as collaborations and cross-­ethnic transactions between China and the United States were being codified, we still see rapprochements that, by the very logic of how literary mediation works, never solidify into patterns of interconnection.

It matters greatly for China studies (and for Americanist studies) to find some way of reading literature’s cross-­national, social lives without resorting to the sociomorphological methods of the “formal analysis” practiced by Levine and Moretti. If literary forms are only patternable things that can at any point be boiled down to social power dynamics, which can be further boiled down to charts and maps, and if social and aesthetic experiences self-­ organize into “patterns of interconnection and exchange,” one wonders what is the point of interpretive reading at all or making distinctions between social-­aesthetic experience and interconnective exchange. But more to the point, reductive and positivist definitions of form, and the use of the word “form” to neatly encapsulate literary and cultural phenomena, have a long history in China’s semicolonial encounters with the West. Raphael Pumpelly’s 1870 travelogue, Across America and Asia: Notes of a Five Years’ Journey Around the World, offers a good example of the romance of transmission that grew organically out of performing “formal analysis” on China. A remarkable text that few have read for more than its information, Across America and Asia rounded up myriad phenomena and shapes under the head of form: “the tables of variable form” in mining, “the character of the human form,” “the drawing of form,” “a form of etiquette and a familiar form,” “forms of disease,” “the globular form of cake,” the form of religion as

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taken up by the Chinese.35 Form was, for Pumpelly, the basic unit of interpollination; the convertability of all things into form promised this outcome. So to China he gave this advice: “Were it to be carried out, an era of unparalleled and unthought-­of progress would commence in the history of China. Every branch of Western industry and civilization would be encouraged and promoted, the resources of the country largely developed, and the social, intellectual, and moral advancement of the people sought after in attainable form.”36 Everything becomes form, and all forms transfer.

The versatility of the word “form,” the seeming equivalence between it and the Chinese term xingshi, and the ensuing East-­West politics of their commensuration to this day hamper our study of the richness and multiplicity of things besides forms in China that for my purposes include customs, postures, mores, aesthetically self-­imposed constraints, rhetorical styles, citational practices, locodescriptive verse, as well states of impersonality and context indifference that can be obtained only in Chinese grammar—­all of which can be accessed only through capable, careful readerly practices and critical intuition. The edging out of these conventions and styles by the single word “form” occurred in China as part of a long process of negotiating theories and concepts from the West by adapting but also changing its own language. Although China was only partially colonized in the nineteenth century, its negotiations with the West extended far beyond the spheres of unequal economic and political treaties, as has been abundantly documented. Practically speaking, the introduction of concepts and new words required that one find a commensurable equivalent in the host language. In addition to concepts whose improvised equivalences were obviously more problematic (“freedom,” “individualism,” “nation,” or “character”) we might also include form, formalism, and formality—­terms from discussions of China and Chineseness in Anglo-­American texts that were also translated for Chinese consumption.

Nineteenth-­century texts that traveled between China and America tended to reference unrelated phenomena with the catch-­a ll “form,” establishing “forms” observed by outsiders as the things that indexically captured Chinese reality and “formalities” as that which hid them. In his book Chinese Characteristics (1894), a text that had an enormous impact on how the Chinese saw themselves in the early twentieth century, the American missionary turned sinologist Arthur H. Smith (1845–­1932) doubled down

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on this distinction. In a particularly devastating accusation, he wrote that “the theory which the form of the character seems to favor, is not at all substantiated by the facts of life among the Chinese,” a life characterized by “formality and artificiality,” especially in its official spheres.37 In the chapter “The Absence of Sincerity” Smith cataloged in “formal expression” a “whole vocabulary” of scripted insincerity, of going through the motions of dialogue and engagement. For example, in China it is customary that “one should never refuse a request in an abrupt manner, but should, on the contrary, grant it in form, although with no intention to do so in substance.”38 My quibble with Chinese Characteristics is not over whether Chinese people practice sincerity or insincerity—­surely they, like any other people, do both. Rather, I bring it up to show how Smith’s designation of formality bifurcates public life and inner life, making form fall on either side of intent, and makes intent the measurement of an action’s meaningfulness. One either intends (or means) or doesn’t; if the latter, then formality is merely an artifice. I also do not mean to chastise Smith for this semantic constriction: part of my argument about cross-­cultural contact is that there are only so many ways to express what one encounters. However, the effect this had on Chinese postencounter conceptualization of form and formality cannot be ignored. Smith’s book comes early in a translingual process in China spanning the nineteenth to the mid-­twentieth century that transformed the concept of the formal—­inadequately translated as xingshihua in Chinese—­by giving it a surface-­depth, appearance-­substance structure. The effects of this process still linger in the term “formalism” (xingshi) and its twentieth-­century version, an ideology in which formalism is synonymous with “proceduralism” (xingshizhuyi). From a term whose sole connotation was the shape that things take, a usage that lasted through most of the nineteenth century, xingshi’s conceptual proximity to Western-­ introduced “form(alism)” made it vulnerable to a semantic slide. Formalism became associated with a tendency toward pure proceduralism and empty ceremony that was inflected as “Chinese” and that was something to be avoided.39 When xing doubled for “form,” the Chinese language of formality became simultaneously impoverished and self-­essentializing.

A hermeneutics of intransitivity involves a two-­step process of first stripping away twentieth-­century rhetorics of formalism and habits of regarding formality and then restoring to our critical vocabulary and cultural knowledge formalities that have little to do with insincerity even if they do

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sometimes live in the pro forma. I also want to be clear that this understanding of formality means more than the return of attention to things like elevated diction, prolixity, reserved manners of speaking, culturally specific rituals, ornamentation, decorum, and so on. I am thinking about formality as a multigenre, multiexpressive phenomenon one of whose main characteristics is the suspension of teleology for cross-­culturalism. Having the quality of understatement, ambiguity, and retreat from either taking or rebuffing what is observed, this kind of formality lives within lingual-­, textual-­, and context-­specific constraints (strict forms) and is also extremely conscious of its life in mundane, cross-­cultural social conventions (mere forms). Let me apply a concrete example. After extensive touring in the United States in 1904, the Chinese statesman and political theorist Liang Qichao (1873–­1929) found himself in the Harper Library at the University of Chicago. After faithfully logging his observations of America’s print-­ cultural modernity in Diary of Traveling in the New World, he gives his readers a reflection whose tone seems indiscernible: Though the scale is impressively large, there is not a lot of novelty. A cursory look tells us that we cannot be familiarized with all the contents. When I toured the university again, I found the size of the library and the athletic fields to be the most moving. I saw that inside the library of this university there were no librarians.

The students could take out books on their own. I was astonished. I asked a custodian if there were ever missing volumes. He told me, “Every year sees the loss of two hundred volumes or so. But this is merely a loss in quantity. If a librarian were to be stationed there to guard the books, the cost would be enormous. Plus it would inconvenience the students. That is why we do not do it. Generally books go missing half a month before final examinations; students steal them to study. After the exams are over, many are returned.” From this we can see that the level of public-­ minded virtue here is just so-­so. And yet even with this practice being as such, Eastern people could learn a hundred years and not make it their own.40

Although this is a cross-­cultural reflection brought on by the contemplation of the uses of literature, no existing conventions teach us exactly how to read this vignette. It pops up in a text whose function is to examine American culture and see what can and cannot be implemented back home.

Up to this point Liang had taken a more or less laudatory tone with regard to America’s print-­cultural nationalism, noting, for instance, America’s

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quadrupling of its newspapers between 1850 and 1900.41 In its entirety the book had a cross-­cultural trajectory. But here we are treated to a far more equivocal appreciation of Americans’ use of books—­a drama of formality.

The library’s honor system is revealed as a vast formalism: the students and the university operate on the pretense that free access reflects the state of equality, a state free of things like envy and sabotage. We learn that while this benefit of the doubt is given out of convenience, this formality has an internal balance. It is hard to tell from the language here if the library’s laxity is good or bad. Certainly, the library exposes a weak spot in the praxis of freedom in America, and the absence here of public-­minded virtue, a dominant theme in Liang’s writings, seems damning. At the same time Liang studies it and narrates it in a way that does not precipitate a judgment. The formality of the unsecured library mirrors the formality of Liang’s speech that averts a set of questions that the discovery about the books naturally raises: is the Harper Library’s way of doing things sustainable, much less worthy of emulation? Can it be implemented in China? Or does it only reveal the hypocrisies in America? The vignette’s final line—­is it deference or polite rejection?—­avoids even the act of saying no thank you through a grammar that does not need to make clear whether it refers to a future or present case.

In this example we close in on a mode of seeing that stops short of making good on the content of that which is being observed, whether these are “lessons from America” or salvo for critique. The Spanish philosopher Xavier Zubiri redefined formality as the aspect of sentient impressions of the world that deliver reality to us “de suyo,” or in its own right.42 For Jacques Derrida, formality was “whatever aspect of the thing in general presents itself, lets itself be seen, gives itself to be thought.” 43 Enabled by these views of formality as a special gateway to a phenomenological reality that otherwise evades our perceptions, we might say that, in distinction to hollowness, meaninglessness, rote procedure, and ornamentation, formality is a genre in which non sequiturs—­discontinuities of content and intent—­may occur in plain sight.

They are documentable and evidentiary but transitory and singular. Reading formality means pointing to a body of literary history, its embeddedness in its historical-­social context, and finding an understated position, a quietness that is not at all the same as quietism or subversion. Thus while a moment of transnational or cross-­cultural literary contact can look quite “loud” (in big-­data terms) in history, the affects and intelligences that

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people bring into formalities will tend, upon closer scrutiny, to remain quite recessive. Rather than put its stresses on shareable, cocreated forms (such as loan words, hybrid genres, traveling texts and literary patterns, diasporic imaginaries, colonial and postcolonial formations), formality raises, through the question of what people actually do, the possibility of a mismatch between public function and private intent in moments of cross-­culturalism embedded in larger histories that view the two as virtually indistinguishable. In this book, formality comes to encompass a whole set of literature and literary practices that fall out of lockstep formation with Sino-­U.S. relations as such even when they constitute the very content of Sino-­U.S. relations.

The guiding premise of transnational East-­West studies is a sense that contact brings accommodation and accommodation brings transformation.

Already a highly developed field, transnational East-­West studies runs into difficulties accounting for the “slightness” of impact. Transnational historicism has made its principal objective the recovery of East-­West connections and pathways over and against the persistent rhetoric of isolated development and intact societies.44 Dialectical histories of synthesis are attended by a critical ethos that either mourns the tolls that synthesis can take or mourns its failed aspirations.45 Intransitive Encounter departs from these studies by tweaking the premise: it asks if maybe the transnational phenomenon that is most prevalent and also hardest to isolate and describe is an indifference to transmission that doesn’t even rise to the level of a refusal. Under the frame of intransitivity (and its ideological neutrality) we can begin to enter the so-­called archive of nineteenth-­century Chinese-­U.S. exchanges and see something other than U.S. imperialism and Orientalism and China’s coming under the influence of the West.46 We also see something other than Northrop’s or Fenollosa’s visions of a fusionist, transcultural cosmopolitanism.47 Unlike the uses of literature in studies of cosmopolitanism, most of those in this archive have little interest in describing the experience of being in the world together, or ways of engaging the other in order to construct a shared literary modernity. And unlike Orientalism or Occidentalism, structures of thought that “willfully distor[t] or misapprehen[d] the other for one’s own, local purposes,” these same uses of literature do not concern themselves primarily with constructions, appropriations, and other products of an East-­West imaginary.48 I develop the insights of Bruno Latour, Erving Goffman, Niklas Luhmann, Benedict Anderson,

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and contemporary theorists of genre, adjustment, and minimalism to regard textual moments in East-­West transnationalism as processes of selection, appropriation, repurposing, and catalyzing, but with a default expectation of neglect. Together with historical poetics and historical literary practices, these strains of social systems theory will help to produce a clear map for reading print-­facilitated encounters in which there are only provisional mediations and interactions.

All of this means enhancing our understanding of modernity as the legislation of just-­sufficient interactions with the study of East-­West transnationalism, which in the most capable hands also challenges our habitual ways of describing modernity. Supplementing the accounts of modernity as a series of infrastructural and economic changes, postures of repudiation of and nostalgia for the past, or as the overcoming of separation between distinct cultures and places, China studies and East-­West transnational studies scholars ask us to think about modernity as a process defined by miscommunication and disavowal. There are usually three levels into which this argument can fall, each more sophisticated than the one before it. The first is, simply: consider China’s part in the equation; accounts of modernity tend to leave it out. In the second, misreadings and failures of readings of the other (China, Chineseness; the West, Westernness) are not just unhappy by-­products of modernizing but the very preconditions of that process.

Nation-­building ideologies, narrative techniques of realism, classificatory systems for difference, and the standardization around the world of quotidian things such as calendars, reference tools, and the codex book are all by-­products as well as modernizing technologies. The third is that inventions produced by modern comparisons between East and West—­ such as the concept of the “ideograph,” or “Chinese inscrutability,” or “logocentrism”—­served a technological imaginary. The partial comprehension of Chinese language and customs made possible a transformative, double connotation of “symbol” as both a representational metaphor and a unit of information that could be fed into machines.49 Theorists of modernity who work on the medial, lingual, and political unconscious of historical East-­West transnationalism focus on the politics of language and representation when cross-­national imaginings are activated. Although this book departs from these scholars at critical points, it is heavily indebted to their idea that historical transnational thinking and translingual praxis change our understanding of modernity and not just through an additive

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or revisional logic. If the history of modernity and all our instruments for measuring it—­including the very idea that abstract phenomena like “symbols” and “signifiers” have an empirical substratum—­cannot be separated from China-­West encounters, then revisiting such encounters will surely help us see this modernity slightly askew, see that it has what some media theorists and sociologists describe as built-­in apparatuses for partitioning interaction and partitioning moments for the occasion only from their accretional contributions to a wider process of globalization.50 Two adjustments are necessary for this restorative process, in which what is restored is indifference and immanence and which, I argue, can be restored only through literary analysis. First, this book contends that while all kinds of literary phenomena must be examined to accurately describe intransitivity, much is lost in establishing representation, translation, and imaginative work as the most important things to analyze in transnational encounters of a literary nature. With varying degrees of literalness, the chapters in this book treat literature as media, in the specific sense of being agentic both in its content and in its physical manifestations.51 Giving attention to the scripted circulation embedded in a piece of literature’s physical form, I examine not only the effects writers imagined literary objects could have on their audiences but also a literary object’s own demands on the people handling its exchange. Using literature has its own logic of contact. It is distinct from that of translation, translingualism, and the exchange of goods and is distinct from literary representation and literary worldedness. New phenomenologies of reading recognize that the multiplicity of our forms of engagement means revising our notions of interpretive communities and expanding our definitions of “using literature.”52 We need a vocabulary for the readerly phenomenon of “mereness,” and the difficulty of compiling one represents one of the weird consequences of overexhausting the notion of a respublica litteraria.53 The second adjustment has to do with the term “the sociology of literature.” This book models a kind of sociology of literature, but it also contests that there is something off about the guiding principles behind current sociologies of literature. The sociology of literature hypothesizes (in ways too often of late algorithmically tested) that we can determine something about someone or some group of people by a list of the things they have read or to which they have been exposed. At the same time, it is sociology of literature’s premise that we are perhaps not very determined

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by the things we have read. After all, if reading and book handling stand in for human interactions—­if they are social, in other words—­t hey will of course adapt to their environment, changing their intensities, durations, visibility, and level of commitment in the same way that people move through society. This contradiction remains an open secret in the sociology of literature. Romanticizing the relationship between other people and the books and texts they encounter delays this recognition by fostering an inattention to this paradox in the practice of the sociology of literature.

As a sociology of nonintending behaviors or preferences in print-­cultural modernity, Intransitive Encounter also draws from Bruno Latour, the person who is responsible for the revival of literary network mapping, but takes from him his hypothesis that distributive agency necessarily means vanishing networks.54 For Latour something counts as doing the work of the social when and only when it causes an unexpected difference; it does not have to issue from any one actor and is for this reason “distributed.” A network, our favored metaphor for literature’s distribution, is terminologically unsuitable for describing these mediations because it catches what sits there only after the mediation has taken place, a map of “a string of actions where each participant is treated as a full-­blown mediator.”55 Latour’s insights into the intransitivity of mediation force our conventional sociologies of literature to reconcile their cartographic, data-­tracking impulses with our willingness to grant literature some of society’s distributed agency. As many others drawing on Latour have argued, we use and have always used literature for self-­maintenance (the business of getting on and getting by), transcendence (the business of putting oneself in another state or reality), and relationality (the business of interacting with others). In this book, acts of “using literature” should not be taken in the narrow senses of calling on a book to galvanize political activism or to balance a wobbly table; rather, I mean to excavate the sense of having the content and the packaging of a piece of text or textual practices make something happen immediately, of literature being able to do things to you, to animate you into thinking things, but perhaps just for now. Literary exchange, which had few definite parameters or objectives in the nineteenth century (although that changed by the end of the century), could be better conceptualized, then, as a form of mediation, a matter of putting foreignness or foreign texts in another literary environment to see what the new juxtapositions can

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effect. Viewing foreign texts in circulation as media and as tools of thought foregrounds the intransitivity and intransigence that writers preplanned for their cross-­cultural explorations. We are able to see, after Latour, the curiously diverse semiliterary, semimaterial things that people believe can make them act and that they then necessarily leave behind, but also resist doing what many of Latour’s followers do, which is to map, track, and otherwise visualize these agentic things as if they were permanent events. The simultaneous active use and putting aside of another’s literature is important for our understanding of how ante-­and postbellum “transnational” thinkers and late Qing, early Republican Chinese thinkers defected from the official transcript of internationalization without seeing that as anything but a common but misunderstood characteristic of modern sociality.

Attending to literary exchange with an eye toward the complexity of interaction, Intransitive Encounter also revivifies fundamental insights from theories of modern communication. For the twentieth-­century sociologist Erving Goffman, intransitivity attends all communication, as when people talk past one another to keep the conversation going, and what is spoken slides like water off a duck’s back. This is not the proverbial speaking but not hearing one another. In the unlikelihood of pure transmission, interactors tacitly agree that communication consists of equal parts message and self-­repair: the preservation of the contract of the communicative event. Goffman’s theory of communicative disattention originates in eighteenth-­century philosopher David Hume’s idea that discontinuity, interruption, and the acceptance of gaps undergird functional social and political life. Studying modern social interactions, Goffman describes “a case not of interaction but of turned away, or averted, interaction” that models what Mark Seltzer calls the official world, a world whose dominant mode is noninteraction and limited sociality. Communication secures communication, a process that ironically makes disattention hard to see, hence the need for “microanalysts of interaction.”56 For Goffman, then, the empiricism of interaction must always finally turn to phenomenology, the minute account of experience. The sociology of literature begins, as another literary critic alternatively puts it, “by recognizing the sociology in literature”57 wherein literature and sociology are “allies in the endeavor to grasp both the complexity of interaction and the mystery of collectivity.”58

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Goffman’s notion of exchange pairs well with twentieth-­century German philosopher and sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s counterintuitive description of modernity as a world in pieces that functions at all only with built­in limits to communication. For Luhmann, medium—­t he places where interfacing might occur, as air or water or ducts but also literary codes and genres—­is constitutionally indifferent to transference. In fact, Luhmann did not believe “culture” could be “communicated.”59 Where conventionally we think of cross-­culturalism as a dialogic process, in which more and more “bits” get transferred across, Luhmann would consider it a genre onto its own, partially meeting the needs of many other arenas and evolving to “participate in the communication of invented forms.”60 In his account of the world, communication does not want to happen just as information does not want to flow and the preconditions of communication happening at all must be neutralized, reduced, and generalized. For Luhmann, the concept of cross-­culturalism might be more accurately classified as a “generalized symbolic medium of communication,” a set of codes that make improbable communication more possible. Since the “social” exists only in communicative moments and is not the result of communicative moments, generating a sociology of literature in Luhmann’s terms means examining these moments for both their social content and the ways they use forms to make social communication continue, the way they establish rules for not saying too much in order to secure communication for the future. Because literary-­ linguistic exchange tends to pattern itself after economic exchange (and that genre’s hedging of inherent risk) and also because it is communication period it will always try to reduce the prerequisites of its own happening, to proceed as if it were the case that such an exchange is not only logical but also intrinsically meaningful. Luhmann thus gives us some leverage for talking about literature’s own consciousness of the structural demands of internationalization. Part of literature’s intransitivity, as I make clear, is its own awareness of the relational scheme into which it has been drawn and social task to which it has been assigned. His theories of modernity would remind us that we take our cues for cross-­culturalism from fiction rather than the other way around. Therefore while “cultural” contact happens with and because of literary texts, contact itself and its ramifications are not something that literature is in a position to fully thematize or comprehend.61 Historicization must factor in what books and book-­related

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practices want us to believe about the world that houses them and their appointment as a medium within it. Intransitivity is thus necessarily an exegetical praxis (something becomes intransitive by virtue of how we read it) and not just something in a piece of literature itself (as a form, theme, or topos); a piece of literature’s formality becomes another name for that consciousness of productive artifice of using the reading of literature to proxy cross-­cultural relations.

By injecting Luhmann’s counterintuitions into close readings of literary exchanges, I intend to produce a systems-­theory-­savvy version of global literary studies that does not at all wish to systematize literature or make some new critical object that Moretti might call literary world systems.62 Indeed the two projects could not be more different. The coinage of the “world literary system,” the term with reference to which all comparativists, sociologists of literature, theorists of translation, and multilingual literary critics have had to frame their positions, has fundamentally misunderstood the word “system.” Systematicity, and its presence in this world literary system, is rarely if ever discussed, or seen only as something large and connected in which connections might be hard to see because of the noise that permeates information systems. When people say “world literary system” they tend to mean the market-­adjacent phenomena of hegemonic standardizations in reading cultures that can be counterbalanced by the styles, translational choices, and formal idiosyncrasies resisting the effects of amalgamation. While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this hermeneutics, its object is not really a “world literary system.” A system is not, by definition, a large networked thing with centers and peripheries. A system is not a network, period. The word “system” in “respiratory system” or “postal system” does not refer to the total sum of organs and veins, mail trucks and envelopes, but rather to the operational closure they can enjoy by virtue of their openness to their environment. Respiratory systems and postal systems are constantly interacting with things from outside that have to be coded in the right way—­oxygenated or not, having a postage stamp or not (or otherwise they do not understand what to do with them)—­and for this reason stay closed (pulmonary systems do not become circulatory systems, postal systems do not become telecommunication systems). Rather than making new drawings of the world literary system or coming up with new taxonomies for its inner workings, it might be much

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more productive to consider how literature tweaks the sociality of worldedness by acting systematically. One might think that to call individual pieces of literature systematic is to insult them. The writings I look at behave like systems in the least mechanistic and most accurate sense of that word: in them things from their external environment (like titles of foreign books) also have to be coded the right way in order to enter the narrative, and narrative exposes itself to a foreignness precisely in order to stay intact. From this proper definition of systematicity we can extract parables of world literary flows that destabilize the concept of a world literary system from within representation rather than simply adding one more thing to it or one more version of it.

Because of their seeming similarity, I want to make absolutely clear the difference between distant reading, which grew out of world literary systems, and the hermeneutics of intransitivity. If globalization produces standardization, then very small differences in things that look practically the same can buck that tendency: this conviction constitutes the only similarity between distant reading and reading for intransitivity. In distant reading, a genre—­the true crime novel, for example—­can be imported to Indonesia to the detriment of preexisting Indonesian writing styles, but the specific translational and stylistic decisions involved in that transfer can resist that standardizing effect in morphologically visible ways. Treating texts as bags of morphological traits, distant reading regards global literary encounters as informational transfers, however large or small, that can be rooted out and visualized through data mining; adaptive resistances can also be characterized, cataloged, and tabulated in the same manner.63 Implicitly criticizing this practice, Eric Hayot differentiates the world of world literature from the world of “world systems,” asking that we give more attention to the ontological construction of the world in world literature.64 For Emily Apter, who notices that the “the expansive ‘world’ of [a] quant-­d riven ecosystem” actually “contract[s] the economy of interpretation,” moving away from capitalism’s “networks of cultural circulation, literary markets, and genre translation” means scaling up to the planetary and from there recommitting to the Kantian vision of a world of enlightened rational communication.65 This book takes these critical interventions very seriously; nonetheless, reading for intransitivity does not necessitate a shift to one represented world among a competing system of represented worlds or

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to a different viewpoint or scale. The systematic behavior of literature in this world, at scale, sufficiently undermines the praxis of distant reading and the world-­systems theory of literature.

A true systems-­theory approach to literary cross-­culturalism does not mean a dispassionate, antihumanist survey of the history of literature but rather an appreciation of scarcity (of available forms of expression, of attention, of narrative space, of personal and cultural memory, of methods of distribution, and so forth) that will help us to not take the circulation of texts or their readers’ engagement to be a limitless resource. Christina Lupton uses systems theory in this way to show that a textual network is active only at certain times in very context-­specific ways and that, above all, it needs the time and the experiential investments of readers who can give them only in limited amounts. A history of a textual network for her is therefore not a “constant draft of experience” or a continuous expanse of interconnections that sees the appearance of a text as evidence enough of its saturation in the lives of those who encounter it.66 This correction in effect constitutes an ecocritical hemming in of the sociology of literature, also seen in Alexander Beecroft’s reminder that “texts and literatures are in competition with one another for the scarce attention of readers,” and that therefore the study of literature’s circulation must be attentive to such constraints.67 If we acknowledge that literature engages its environment in distinct, bounded ways, then, Beecroft argues, the literary exchange cannot be starved down to the logics of interminable commensurability that defines economic exchange. By focusing on the boundary-­ policing effects of systematicity in literature, Intransitive Encounter also takes an ecological approach to what we can only now call cross-­culturalism, although not one that might be obviously read as being ecological. True to the goals of conservation, the book strikes out a position that does not demand the piling up of visible transformation in great populations of people simply because they have been exposed to something new or the wasteful turning over of old material and customs with completely new ones. This position regards the moment of inspiration or whatever that transpired between cultural actors, and their respective nations, as enough without exhausting that moment’s full implications. And against utopian assessments of transnationalism as inherently redemptive or destructive, this book asks that we might rather turn to the conservative (as in resource

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conservative) aspects of cultural exchanges for models of asking less of the world while taking inspiration from it.

In this way, the history of East-­West transnationalism will finally be put in conversation with political philosophies and aesthetics of minimalism—­ the circumscribed and low-­threshold engagements and the collaborative imaginings of betterness whose bars for entry remain low and whose promises of reciprocity and efficacy are reined in. This book is particularly indebted to the theorization of recessive phenomena—­happenings and knowledge so recessive they might as well never have happened—­and its regard of limited transmission as a formal phenomenon, rather than as a moral position or a cultural tendency or an aesthetic preference for ephemerality.68 Relatedly, feminist and affect theory’s insight that living within genre can provide workable adaptations to the historical present greatly informs this book’s argument that a literary encounter departs from its prescribed official genre by making a minimal adjustment, a very small tweak that is practically invisible from the outside.69 In an important sense, reading for intransitivity means acknowledging that at any given moment the available forms of cross-­cultural expression are always very finite and that therefore the most conventional and banal examples—­examples that seem to conform completely to expectation—­w ill yield interesting deviations.

Besides raising the possibility of a more accurate, less projective, and less demanding history of sociocultural interactions, the politics of minimal adjustment also allows me to study cross-­culturalism aiming for less than what many believe can come of carrying out all of cross-­culturalism’s operatives.70 It is not literary objects but literary criticism that curbs the impulses both within the academy and at large to force things to demonstrate a change from what has come before and, when they cannot or do not prefer to do so, rewrite their decisions as reluctance or withdrawal. Intransitive encounters are products of an interplay of forces and so have no intrinsic morality, but by recognizing their existence and their pervasiveness we might inadvertently impose less pressure on the world’s endangered cultures and peoples to show us how exactly they have taken something in, and with what widespread or negligible effects, and thus give up their idiosyncrasy and privacy.

Praise for I n t ra n s i t i v e En co u n t e r “In this bracingly intelligent and impressively researched study of nineteenth-century Sino-U.S. encounters, Nan Z. Da focuses on transnational exchanges in which not much of anything is exchanged and worlds are not transformed. The result is a transformative book that challenges assumptions about transnationalism and maps out productive new ways of exploring the limits of cultural exchange.”

—Robert S. Levine, author of Race, Transnationalism, and Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies

“Da has written the first great book on nineteenth-century Sino-U.S. literary relations and a truly great book on the current state of comparative literature.

Da’s beautiful readings of what she calls the many ‘intransitive encounters’ between Chinese and American literature demonstrate the ways in which the idea of a global, East-West world literature is a fantasy that obscures the much more interesting differences, failures, and untranslatable moments that have generated a long history of literary criticism. This book should be required reading for students and scholars of American and comparative literature.”

—Virginia Jackson, UCI Endowed Chair in Rhetoric, University of California, Irvine

—R. John Williams, author of The Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology, and the Meeting of East and West

“Da makes a unique contribution to transpacific literary studies and suggests a new approach to transnationalism that is theoretically sophisticated, historically revisionist, and potentially paradigm changing. Intransitive Encounter is a work of great originality, imagination, and erudition.”

—Yunte Huang, University of California, Santa Barbara

Intransitive Encounter Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange

Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange

“Intransitive Encounter offers nothing less than a complete reimagining of the literary encounter. With acuity, archival sensitivity, and analytic insight, Da argues that previous assumptions about transnational literary contact have perpetuated a hermeneutic that crosses out as much as it crosses over—and that what gets crossed out is precisely an opportunity to see the literary as a different kind of encounter.”

Intransitive Encounter

Nan Z. Da is an assistant professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.

Da

Jacket design: Milenda Nan Ok Lee Jacket art: Chen Qi, Dreaming of Butterfly, No. 1, 2000 陈琦, “梦蝶之一” (木板水印), water-based woodblock print.

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Nan Z. Da

Why should the earliest literary encounters between China and the United States—and their critical interpretation—matter now?

How can they help us describe cultural exchanges in which nothing substantial is exchanged, at least not in ways that can easily be tracked? All sorts of literary meetings took place between China and the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, involving an unlikely array of figures including canonical Americans such as Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; Chinese writers Qiu Jin and Dong Xun; and Asian American writers like Yung Wing and Edith Eaton. Yet present-day interpretations of these interactions often read too much into their significance or mistake their nature— missing their particularities or limits in the quest to find evidence of cosmopolitanism or transnational hybridity.

In Intransitive Encounter, Nan Z. Da carefully re-creates these transpacific interactions, plying literary and social theory to highlight their various expressions of indifference toward synthesis, interpollination, and convergence. Da proposes that interpretation trained on such recessive moments and minimal adjustments can light a path for SinoU.S. relations going forward—offering neither a geopolitical showdown nor a celebration of hybridity but the possibility of self-contained cross-cultural encounters that do not have to confess to the fact of their having taken place. Intransitive Encounter is an unconventional and theoretically rich reflection on how we ought to interpret global interactions and imaginings that do not fit the patterns proclaimed by contemporary literary studies.