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UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Intrusion Story and Lessons from the Fantastic: A Cross-Cultural Study Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9zm4k3ps Author Lien, Fontaine Publication Date 2014 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE The Intrusion Story and Lessons From the Fantastic: A Cross-Cultural Study A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature by Fontaine Lien December 2014 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Lisa Raphals, Chairperson Dr. Heidi Brevik-Zender Dr. Rob Latham Copyright by Fontaine Lien 2014 The Dissertation of Fontaine Lien is approved: Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgments First, I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to my dissertation committee: Dr. Lisa Raphals, Dr. Heidi Brevik-Zender, and Dr. Rob Latham. Thank you for your unwavering support even when I felt I could not continue, and for patiently guiding me with your expertise. I am grateful to the University of California, Riverside, which supported my graduate studies with a Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellowship. I am also grateful to the professors and mentors at that institution, who have taught me so much: Dr. Michelle Bloom, Dr. Johannes Endres, Dr. Kelle Truby, Shuliang Hsu, Dr. Han-Hua Chao, Dr. Sabine Doran, Dr. John Namjun Kim, Dr. Stephanie Hammer, Reiko Sato, Dr. Georg M. Gugelberger, Dr. Yenna Wu, Dr. Perry Link, and Dr. Yang Ye. In addition, special mention needs to go to my professors from the University of California, Los Angeles, Dr. David Schaberg and Dr. Miranda Johnson-Haddad, who got me started on this path. I would like to thank my parents, who were unfailing supportive and never prodded me to pursue a more traditionally lucrative career. I would also like to thank my constant friends, especially Michelle Tawada, Annabelle Chou, Chenshu Zhou, Sue Hertzog, Hongjian Wang, Chris Huang, Flannery Wilson, and Anne Savitch, who remain unwavering despite seeing me at my worst, who believed in me when I did not. I am grateful also to my extended family, official and unofficial. I cannot possibly enumerate here all those who have blessed me with their love and friendship; I confess that my lack of an attempt here is due to a lack of confidence in my memory, which my friends would surely smile at and forgive. iv Finally, I would like to dedicate this dissertation to my grandmother, Wang Shaohua, who never asked when I would receive my Ph.D., and only asked if I was well fed. You are missed. v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Intrusion Story and Lessons From the Fantastic: A Cross-Cultural Study by Fontaine Lien Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in Comparative Literature University of California, Riverside, December 2014 Dr. Lisa Raphals, Chairperson Currently, various types of fantasy literature are analyzed primarily as genres within the confines of national literatures. This thesis proposes a cross-cultural approach to fantasy, instead of one in which each “national” genre is analyzed in isolation, and often only with the critical tools and theoretical background of its respective tradition. It argues that there are undeniable parallels between different versions of the short fantasy tale as it has appeared in various traditions, and that studying them together can prove fruitful to our understanding of how fantasy works. Taking up important collections of fantastic tales by Pu Songling (Liaozhai zhiyi), Barbey d’Aurevilly (Les Diaboliques) and Rod Serling (The Twilight Zone), as well as a number of similar contemporary works, I discuss the ways all of these works function through a similar set of mechanisms, despite their differences in language, provenance, and cultural significance. Each of these authors/creators made liberal use of what I call the “intrusion story,” in which what is deemed strange or fantastic in each instance is the overwhelming focus. In the intrusion story, the strange includes the following: dissolved vi or destabilized boundaries (between categories that are seemingly mutually exclusive such as life and death, human and animal, inanimate objects and living beings, etc.), marginalized figures of society, and narrative subversion of readers’ expectations. By using all of these elements, the goal is to maintain the reader or viewer’s attention and to deliver the author or creator’s moral message. This inquiry contributes to our overall understanding of fantasy in two ways: First, it creates a framework for examining fantasy across cultures; second: it points to connections between a diverse array of literary creations, instead of abandoning each work to its traditional designation of either zhiguai (strange tale), conte fantastique (fantastic tale), or science fiction. The fox spirit, aristocratic coquette, and android model are from different literary traditions, but their common characteristics and purposes show that there are surprising similarities in the way fantasy stories are manufactured for our consumption and edification. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction……………………………………………………………………..… 1 Chapter 1 Fantasy and Strangeness in Western and Chinese Literature………………….…17 Chapter 2 The Fantastic Short Story in Late Imperial China……………………………..…56 Chapter 3 The Fantastic Short Story in Nineteenth-Century France……………………......99 Chapter 4 Strange Tales in the Era of Mass Communication: The Twilight Zone…………144 Conclusions…………………………………………………………………...…180 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………. 185 viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” (The Twilight Zone)……………….….. 157 Figure 2: “Perchance to Dream” (The Twilight Zone)…………………….….. 160 Figure 3: “Twenty Two” / “The Invaders” (The Twilight Zone)……………... 166 ix Introduction The Traditional Opposition Between Fantasy and Realism Ghosts, monsters, constructs of the mind, marvelous realms, and extraterrestrial beings are considered “figments of the imagination” in terms of the rational scientific discourse that permeates most post-industrial societies. In terms of literature, works in which these entities emerge from the domains of personal imagination and spirituality, and become as “real” as any person or object with which the literary characters interact, are usually considered fantasy -- as opposed to realist literature. I believe that this type of literature makes the overall statement that these entities make their presence felt in our world as much as those that can be felt by touch or measured by machine. They should thus, in that sense, be considered as “real” or “natural” as anything that would be considered as such in a positivist view of reality. In terms of literary significance, this somewhat arbitrary division between the supposedly real and whatever is posited as its opposite has always been one of our primary means of classifying, evaluating, and understanding literature. Romanticism prioritized the expression of interior, intangible, subjective feelings and thus de- emphasized the idea of an objective, impersonal reality (Wolfson and Manning 1999, 4- 5). The nineteenth-century fantastic tale in Western Europe is often cited as an easy antithesis to the realist novel from the same period (Sandner 2004, 7; Harter 1996, 1-4). In China, the May Fourth campaign championed realist literature due to its alignment with Western rationalistic values, and its suitability as a vehicle for advocating social and 1 political reform (Anderson 1990, 27-75; David Der-Wei Wang 2000, xiv-xv). Realism, as opposed to what was viewed as an ornate and obscure classicism, was supposedly the most direct expression of popular society -- the voice of the people (Lee 1993, 362-63). Today, physical and electronic bookstores classify “fantasy and science fiction” as a category entirely separate from “regular” fiction, whatever that may signify. Just as literary theoreticians and critics have used the real-unreal divide as a distinguishing criterion in their evaluation of literature, those in charge of categorization in literary commerce have decided that “fantasy and science fiction” literature warrants its own category distinct from “other literature.” In terms of one’s individual rapport with literature, a reader might very well decide whether a particular work suits his or her tastes based on its proximity to--or, as the case may be, distance from--whatever version of “reality” he or she already subscribes to. All this has not been to imply that the “unreal” can be unproblematically demarcated from the “real.” I merely point out these two currents in literature have always been defined against each other for scholarly, strategic, or political purposes. Scholars may choose to do so for the sake of convenience, clarity, or argument. Romantic writers chose to explore psychological and exotic landscapes because they sought to distinguish themselves from the rationality and objectivity of the Enlightenment (Wolfson and Manning 1999, 7). Fantasy and realism have always been definitionally intertwined, and literary scholarship has sought to categorize, understand, and analyze the various strains of fantasy as well as their relationship to realist literature. Critical work on fantastic literature has generally posed the following broad questions, with varying 2 conclusions: Why fantasy?1 How does fantasy work?2 What are the main types of fantasy and how are they different from one another?3