Transnational Negotiations and the Interplay Between Chinese and Western Detective Fiction at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
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UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Transnational Negotiations and the Interplay Between Chinese and Western Detective Fiction at the Turn of the Twentieth Century Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6233v4kx Author Hao, Ruijuan Publication Date 2012 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Transnational Negotiations and the Interplay Between Chinese and Western Detective Fiction at the Turn of the Twentieth Century A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature by Ruijuan Hao September 2012 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Marguerite Waller, Chairperson Dr. Vivian-Lee Nyitray Dr. Michelle Bloom Copyright by Ruijuan Hao 2012 The Dissertation of Ruijuan Hao is approved: _______________________________________________ _______________________________________________ _______________________________________________ Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgements First and foremost, I profoundly thank my advisor Professor Marguerite Waller for always reading my work with care and patience, and for offering invaluable advice, suggestions, and guidance. She has been a constant and foundational source of intellectual, moral, and emotional support throughout graduate school. In addition, I am heavily indebted to Professor Vivian-Lee Nyitray who is always welcoming and has taught me to think critically about Chinese philosophy and culture. My gratitude also extends to Professor Michelle Bloom, a steady and grounding influence during my dissertation stage. Her insight, knowledge, and feedback have allowed me to broaden my scope of research and present my arguments more persuasively. I wish also to thank the wonderful people at the Department of Comparative Literature who are always there to help me, rain or shine, with their generosity and kindness. I thank Professors Thomas Scanlon, Sabine Doran, Mariam Lam, John Kim, Marguerita Long, Heidi Waltz, Yenna Wu, Yang Ye, and Perry Link for their guidance, support, and confidence in me. I also salute all my colleagues in the program with whom I have shared laughter and tears over the years, from whom I have learned so much, and of whom I have many beautiful memories. I have also gained enormously from conversations with Professor Timothy Wong at Arizona State University, who was generous with his time, advice, and scholarship. My thanks also go to Professor Janet Gilligan at Wayne State College for her editorial and critical feedback in proofreading my drafts. Furthermore, I was also fortunate during my research to get to know scholars such as Annabella Weisl in Germany and Wei Yan iv in Singapore, who gave me access to their works and helped me to shape ideas. I am also very grateful to experts like Janet Moores and Kuei Chiu who work at the library of University of California, Riverside for their efficiency and effectiveness in locating books and other research materials. Last but not least, I would like to express my sincere appreciation to my family and friends on both sides of the globe. I particularly thank my parents and my brother in China for their unconditional love and support, and my special friends in America, Patricia Cook, her late husband Thomas Cook, and Sonia and Victor Garcia, who have made me a part of their family, nurturing me during my everyday life and inviting me over for holidays and special occasions. v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Transnational Negotiations and the Interplay Between Chinese and Western Detective Fiction at the Turn of the Twentieth Century by Ruijuan Hao Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in Comparative Literature University of California, Riverside, September 2012 Dr. Marguerite Waller, Chairperson This project examines the multi-layered interactions between Chinese and Western detective fiction at the turn of the twentieth century. I analyze Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, the Chinese translations of Conan Doyle, and Cheng Xiaoqing’s Huo Sang cases, using them as cultural lenses through which to read these interactions. Shaped by a variety of conflicting and indigenizing cultural elements, both Chinese and English detective discourses perform a profound identity crisis and a sense of haunting anxiety as they articulate interactive relationships between the Orient and the Occident. By constructing the Orient in his Holmes stories as a place of disease, contagion, disaster, barbarism, and chaos, Conan Doyle presents an imminent Oriental menacing force that threatens the superiority of the British Empire. But at the same time, ambiguities and textual tensions permeate Conan Doyle’s Orientalist discourse that destabilize such modern conceptualizations as gender, race, identity, reason, science, and progress. Conan Doyle’s desire to denationalize the discourse of Western modernity was vi intercepted by a simultaneous process of nationalization, manifested in the fears and anxieties of the Empire as it faced an emerging Orient that rebelled against colonial exploitations and strove for modernization and independence. By contrast, I perceive in the interactions between Chinese translators and Western writers an almost contrary trajectory. Chinese translators of Western detective fiction were obsessed with nationalism, using modern detective fiction as an educational tool to bring enlightenment to Chinese society. This process of nationalization co-existed with their denationalizing project of adopting the Western model of modernity that they saw embodied in the Holmes stories. Despite their advocacy of Western-style modernization, however, Chinese translators and writers of detective fiction offered an active response to modern conceptualizations such as science and progress through a subtle and complicated process of indigenization. Based on my analyses of the strategies used in translating Holmes and the ambiguities presented in Cheng Xiaoqing’s Huo Sang cases, I argue that these marginalized May Fourth intellectuals, whether consciously or not, applied native Chinese detective genre gong-an and traditional cultural values as powerful tools in negotiating cultural difference with the Holmes detective discourse. vii Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................. 1 Controversy in May Fourth Literature.................................................................. 5 Research Questions and Literature Review .........................................................11 Research Scope and Parameters..........................................................................17 The Structure of My Dissertation........................................................................23 Chapter One: Cutting Across the Cultural Gaze ......................................................28 Awakening Gaze and the Politics of Fiction .......................................................34 Late Qing Generation and Its Ambiguous Play with the West .............................40 9 May Fourth Generation and Its Unstable Cultural Identity .................. …………43 Translating the West Through Vernacular Chinese..............................................48 Sherlock Holmes Comes to China.......................................................................51 Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes in Britain.....................................................55 Cheng Xiaoqing Across Cultural Boundaries......................................................59 Mediating Between the Masses and Translations.................................................63 Cheng Xiaoqing’s Experiment with Early Films .................................................66 Chapter Two: Passing the Orient in Sherlock Holmes..............................................70 Sherlock Holmes and the Irrational Orient in Detection ......................................73 The Indian Mutiny and Its Threat to the British Identity......................................78 Training and Residing in the Orient ....................................................................86 Poison and Disease from the Oriental Tropics.....................................................89 The Uncanny Face of the Orient .........................................................................93 China in the Orient and Opium Smoking.............................................................98 Opium Smoking as a Moral Disease..................................................................103 Opium Den and Anxiety about the Chinese.......................................................108 Ambiguity and Textual Tension in Conan Doyle’s Orientalist Discourse ..........111 viii Chapter Three: Translating Modernity Through Detective Fiction.......................116 Leaping into Modern Time ...............................................................................124 Translating Sherlock Holmes............................................................................129 Experimenting with the Narrative .....................................................................130 Manipulating Reading Structures......................................................................135 Localizing the Cultural Discourse.....................................................................139 Questioning Occidentalism ...............................................................................144