Figures of the World The FlashPoints series is devoted to books that consider literature beyond strictly national and disciplinary frameworks, and that are distinguished both by their historical grounding and by their theoretical and conceptual strength. Our books engage theory without losing touch with history and work historically without falling into uncritical positivism. FlashPoints aims for a broad audience within the humanities and the social sciences concerned with moments of cultural emergence and transformation. In a Benjaminian mode, FlashPoints is interested in how liter- ature contributes to forming new constellations of culture and history and in how such formations function critically and politically in the present. Series titles are available online at http://escholarship.org/uc/flashpoints. series editors: Ali Behdad (Comparative Literature and English, UCLA), Edi- tor Emeritus; Judith Butler (Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley), Editor Emerita; Michelle Clayton (Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature, Brown University); Edward Dimendberg (Film and Media Studies, Visual Studies, and European Languages and Studies, UC Irvine), Founding Editor; Catherine Gallagher (English, UC Berkeley), Editor Emerita; Nouri Gana (Comparative Lit- erature and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA); Susan Gillman (Lit- erature, UC Santa Cruz), Coordinator; Jody Greene (Literature, UC Santa Cruz); Richard Terdiman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz), Founding Editor. A complete list of titles begins on p. 259. Figures of the World The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form Christopher Laing Hill northwestern university press | evanston, illinois Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu This title is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND). Read the license at https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode. A Study of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University The Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute of Columbia University were inaugurated in 1962 to bring to a wider public the results of significant new research on modern and contemporary East Asia. This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)— a collaboration of the Association of American Univer- sities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries— and the generous support of the University of Michigan. Learn more at the TOME website: openmonographs.org. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Hill, Christopher L., 1964– author. Title: Figures of the world : the naturalist novel and transnational form / Christopher Laing Hill. Other titles: FlashPoints (Evanston, Ill.) Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2020. | Series: Flashpoints | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020003924 | ISBN 9780810142145 (paperback) | ISBN 9780810142152 (cloth) | ISBN 9780810142169 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Naturalism in literature. | Literature, Modern—19th century— History and criticism. | Literature, Modern—20th century—History and criticism. | Comparative literature. Classification: LCC PN601 .H49 2020 | DDC 809.3912—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020003924 For my family Contents Acknowledgments ix Conventions xi Preface xiii 1. Literary Travels and Literary Transformation 3 Literatures in the World 11 Naturalist Circuits 17 Contexts 38 The Structure of the Transnational Field 43 2. The Degenerate Body 51 The Genealogy of the Naturalist Body 52 Nerves and Cracks 59 The Story of the Leg 69 Translating Gervaise 75 Jaws and Fists, the Chin and That Hair 80 The Civilized Nerve 88 The Transformation of Mimesis 95 3. The Unbound Woman 99 Cipher Assembled 101 The Birth of the Nana Figure 106 Enclosing an Enigma 112 Individuality without Content 118 Formal Transpositions and Minimal Schemas 125 4. Plains, Boats, and Backwaters 133 Narratives of Structure 135 The Horizons of Struggle 139 Germinal’s Sprouts 146 The View from the Crosstrees 151 Living Unevenness 160 Social Figures and Social Difference 167 Conclusion: Figures in and of the World 173 Notes 187 Bibliography 223 Index 243 Acknowledgments This book would not have been possible without the work of many scholars of naturalist fiction, especially the contributors to two journals dedicated to the field,Cahiers Naturalistes and Excavatio. To them I owe great thanks. Over the years I received inspiration and support for this project from Paul Anderer, Chris Bush, Sebastian Conrad, Vilashini Cooppan, Seth Fein, Shel Garon, Carol Gluck, Eric Hayot, June Howard, Sabu Kohso, Neil Levi, Janet Walker, and colleagues at the universities where I have taught. The editors of Northwestern University Press’s Flash- Points series, especially Susan Gillman and Richard Terdiman, and my editors at the Press, Trevor Perri and Gianna Mosser, saw the value of the project and ushered it into print. I received advice on the manuscript from David Bell, Héctor Hoyos, Youngju Ryu, Jiwon Shin, and Xiaobing Tang, and an anonymous reader for the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia. Jonathan Arac, Marshall Brown, Nina Cornyetz, Reginia Gagnier, and Keith Vin- cent gave guidance on early versions of several chapters. Members of panels and seminars at the American Comparative Literature Associ- ation, Asian Studies Conference Japan, Association for Asian Studies, Association for Japanese Literary Studies, Modern Language Associa- tion, and Society for Novel Studies provided feedback. Mélissa Gélinas, Paul Martin, and Mariane Stanev assisted with the research. ix x ❘ Acknowledgments Many people gave me opportunities to speak on the project. I thank Jonathan Abel, Susan Andrade, Geoffrey Baker, Caroline Eckhardt, Narve Fulsås, Manu Goswami and Kristin Ross, Indra Levy, Ted Mack, Numano Mitsuyoshi, Stefan Nygård and Johan Strang, Nancy Rutten- burg, Alan Tansman, Umemori Naoyuki, Stefan Vandamme and Blaise Wilfert, Tobias Werron, and Jonathan Zwicker. I would not have been able to complete this book without those who provided indispensable support to keep working, including Victoria de Grazia and Jacques Revel. I received institutional and financial support from Columbia University, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences So- ciales, the Freie Universität Berlin, the University of California at Berke- ley, the University of Michigan, Waseda University, and Yale University. Finally, this book owes everything to Miki Higasa and members of my family. Portions of “The Travels of Naturalism and the Challenges of a World Literary History,” in Literature Compass 6, no. 6 (2009), are reproduced with the permission of Wiley. Article copyright © 2009, Christopher L. Hill, journal compilation copyright © 2009, Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Portions of “Exhausted by Their Battles with the World: Neuras- thenia and Civilization Critique in Early Twentieth- Century Japan” in Perversion and Modern Japan: Experiments in Psychoanalysis (Lon- don: Routledge, 2009) are reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear. Chapter copyright © 2009, Christopher L. Hill, ed- itorial selection copyright © 2009, Nina Cornyetz and Keith Vincent. Portions of “Haven’t We Met? On the Scales of Connection,” in Verge: Studies in Global Asias 3, no. 2 (2017), are reproduced with permission of the publisher. Copyright © 2017, University of Minne- sota Press. An earlier version of chapter 3 was published as “Nana in the World: Novel, Gender, and Transnational Form,” in Modern Language Quarterly 72, no. 1 (2011): 75– 105. Copyright © 2011, University of Washington. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder, and the present publisher, Duke University Press. www.dukeupress.edu. Conventions Japanese names are given in the order of family name followed by per- sonal name. Following custom, however, I refer to Japanese authors who used a pseudonym in place of their personal name by the pseud- onym on second reference. This may cause some confusion, so for clar- ity’s sake the most important cases are: Hasegawa Tenkei (referred to as “Tenkei”), Ihara Saikaku (“Saikaku”), Kosugi Tengai (“Tengai”), Mori Ōgai (“Ōgai”), Nagai Kafū (“Kafū”), Ozaki Kōyō (“Kōyō”), Shi- mamura Hōgetsu (“Hōgetsu”), Shimazaki Tōson (“Tōson”), Tayama Katai (“Katai”), and Tsubouchi Shōyō (“Shōyō”). To aid readers, each chapter except the conclusion provides the original title and date of publication of works the first time they are mentioned, regardless of whether they have been mentioned in preceding chapters. With the exception of customary titles, all translations are my own. xi Preface This book is about a kind of fiction known as “naturalism,” a genre of social documentation and critique that first appeared in France in the 1860s and was adopted in many parts of the world over the next sixty years, from the Americas to East Asia. The book is also about how one might study the history of literary form on a large geographic scale. As naturalist fiction traveled the world, adopted in some places and rejected in others, it encountered new social conditions and other ways of writing about society. In the process its topics, themes, and literary form—methods of narration, techniques of description, figurative lan- guage, and so on— changed significantly and sometimes unexpectedly. It became not one but