Iovene,Paola.Tales of Futures Past:Anticipation and the Ends of Literature in Contemporary China

T ales of Futures Pastinvestigates and explores how visions of the future have influenced the development of Chinese Literature.In a variety of Chinese texts ranging from science fiction to translation journals,from modernist writing to environmental literature,this book sets an ambitious goal to demonstrate two seemingly different though interrelated visions of the future:“destination” and “anticipation.” The future seen as a destination indicates a developmentalism of the state,where what comes should be “better” than the present.The concept of anticipation indicates the perception of time “inscribed in the present,shaped by past experience,and encompassing such private and public affects as hope and fear.”1Paola Iovene,Tales of Futures Past:Anticipation and the Ends of Literature in Contemporary China (Stanford:Stanford University Press,2014),7.By comparison,the future considered as“anticipation” is envisioned as a cluster of forward-oriented intellectual,political,and emotional dispositions.As the affective state,“anticipation”encompasses thematic,formal,and practical aspects of literary culture.“By complementing a notion of the future as destination with one understood as anticipation,”2Ibid.,4.the book explores how fantasies of the past and visions of the future conflate in Chinese literature,and how anticipation shapes fictional narratives,debates,and editorial practices.

By using Ye Yonglie’s 叶永烈 (1940—2020) sci-fi bookLittle Smarty Travels to the Future(1978),Tales of Futures Pastaddresses the narration of imagination in science fiction from the late 1950s to 1980s,and reveals how the imagination reconfigured public and private life.Comparing with Tian Han’s 田汉 (1898—1968)Rhapsody of Ming Tombs Reservoir(1958),in which the proletariat fantasizes about subjugating nature and conquering the globe with socialist mobilization and manual labor,sci-fi showed a noticeable shift to the glorification of mental prowess.By tracing the trajectory of sci-fi in the twentieth century,Iovene claims that as the echo of openness towards the unknown,sci-fi further explored the diversification of futuristic genres and created a new relation between the work of the mind and the work of the hand.The reemergence of sci-fi in the 1980s demonstrated the trope of futurity:the texts not merely relieved the bitterness of “scar literature”and engaged in the debates about notions of humanity and democracy,but also served as almost a voyeuristic mode of anticipation,witnessing the greater deeds of scientific knowledge.Moreover,scifi stories reflected social anxieties and fears under specific social circumstances;but in the realm of private life,their imaginative devices were for settling personal issues,contributing to the redefinition of what it meant to be human,indicating hopes and expectations that shaped mundane life.

“Translation Zone” is another dimension for Chinese literature to anticipate the world and imagine world literature.In the second and third chapters,Iovene observes the significance of the role played by literary journals,such asYiwen《译文》 (renamedShijie wenxue《世界文学》[World Literature]in 1959).As an indispensable realm for Chinese literature to develop and show expectation,the journal makes space for literary experimentation.InYiwen/World Literature,the encyclopedic juxtapositions of texts register on the literary and political expectations of how the present is about to evolve.With an ongoing engagement with Western literature,the visions of “progress” and “anticipation” imply a better grasp of reality.While China was on the path to modernization,journal editors were inclined to be more open to world literature.Worrying about lagging behind the global literary trend,major journals aimed to foster forms of writing with future-oriented vision:“Anticipation thus affected the selection of translated text both as perceived belatedness and as vanguardism,each of them more dominant at particular historical junctures but coexisting simultaneously.”3Ibid.,79.Discussing the contribution of editors and critics such as Li Tuo李陀 (b.1939) and Cai Xiang 蔡翔 (b.1953),Iovene demonstrates that they have promoted and endorsed aspiring young writers,such as Can Xue 残雪 (b.1953),Yu Hua 余华 (b.1960) and Sun Ganlu 孙甘露(b.1959) in the mid- to late 1980s.The “midwives” helped redefine literary values which were autonomous from both state and commodity economy.In other words,dense personal networks depending on writers,editors,and journals shaped the literary production and anticipatory map at that period.

The literary past also serves as motivation to look forward.In the fourth and fifth chapter,Iovene investigates the late Tang poet Li Shangyin 李商隐 (813—858) whose poems were appropriated in many texts in the 1980s and 1990s with an aim to redefine futuristic rhetoric of literary discourse.Li’s poems offer a way to focus on interiority and establish an autonomous literary space,and the issue of how to interpret and revive Li Shangyin’s allusive verses divided the critics and writers into different groups in the 1980s.Some critics contended that Li’s “poetics of blurriness” and expression of individual subjectivity could be connected with modern language and “misty” poetry.Wang Meng 王蒙 (b.1934) even compared Li’s poetry to the famous “card game fiction” of modernism,the native sources of modernism.Iovene then proceeds to elaborate that Wang Meng’s own writing practices,especially his “stream of consciousness” fiction,reflect a rather cautious appropriation of Li Shangyin’s syntactic discontinuity and figurative language.The ambiguity and psychological complexity of Li’s poetry are also reflected in Ge Fei’s 格 非(b.1964) novellaJinse《锦瑟》(Brocade Zither) (1993):“The mutual entanglement of reality and dream in narrative is part of traditional Chinese mysticism,which Ge Fei invokes against the linear,grand narratives.”4YANG Xiaobin,The Chinese Postmodern:Trauma and Irony in Chinese Avant-Garde Fiction (Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press,2002),184.Li’s verses are scattered throughout the novella,and recursiveness and unpredictability highlight a similar indeterminacy between the past and present.These fictional texts provide a dialogic rendition of Chinese classical poetry,and thus literary past emerges as an integral dimension of the present that remains open-ended.

The allusion of Li Shangyin’s poetry is also presented in Ge Fei’s novelChunjin Jiangnan《春尽江南》(End of Spring in Jiangnan) (2011),which Iovene mainly discusses in the final chapter.As Iovene claims,“End of Spring in Jiangnantraces a nearly total erosion of expectations of a better future life.”5Iovene,Tales of Futures Past,140.To highlight the disharmonious relationship with respect to the shape of the future,Iovene borrows the term “pulviscular prose” from Italo Calvino to indicate the main trope of “fog” shrouding the text.“Fog” serves as the medium in Ge Fei’s novel to connect four forms of toxicity:shame,sacrifice,superfluity,and crime.The consequences of the environmental pollution imply an indistinct,long present contrasting with a more punctuated,forward-oriented past,and the expectations for a proper life are lost in vain.

“Anticipation is not just a reaction,but a way of actively orienting oneself temporally.”6Vincanne Adams,Michelle Murphy,and Adele E.Clarke,“Anticipation:Technoscience,Life,Affect,Temporality,”Subjectivity 28,no.1 (2009):247.By bringing together literary,historical,and environmental modes of anticipation,the book vividly demonstrates how technological,political and literary horizons of expectation have shaped writing and editorial practices in contemporary Chinese literature.Tales of Futures Pastbegan with tropes of planning,purity,and control,and ends with an emphasis on insecurity,toxic excess,and a loss of foresight and insight due to “the clouding of all lines of vision.”7Iovene,Tales of Futures Past, 161.The book infers a loop of anticipation,from hopeful to doubtful,mixed with the perception of the past and the desire to engage in an open world.In my view,some points and discussions in the book revolving around“anticipation” are thought-provoking,and the critical theories Iovene utilizes are inspiring for Chinese literature study.But unfortunately,the conclusion is fragmentary and slightly rushed and does not clarify connections between different parts,so it fails to constitute an integral and overall horizon of anticipation.In any case,the visions of futurity the book presents have great academic potential,and they need to be further investigated by literary scholars.