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Foreign Literary Influence in Liu Cixin's Diqiu Wangshi

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Foreign Literary Influence in Liu Cixin's Diqiu Wangshi Foreign Literary Influence in Liu Cixin's Diqiu Wangshi This thesis is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Research School of Humanities and the Arts at the Australian National University William John Peyton Submitted July 2019 Declaration This thesis is my own work and all sources used, to the best of my knowledge, have been acknowledged. Except where previously published English translations have been cited, all Chinese material used in this thesis has been translated by myself. William John Peyton Acknowledgments My sincerest thanks go to Ye Zhengdao, Will Christie and Russell Smith for their essential insights and feedback as well as their continual encouragement and guidance over the course of the project. I would also like to thank my family for their sustained support from the beginning. This dissertation would likewise not have been possible without the funding provided through the Australian Government Research Training Scholarship, the Australian National University and the Center for Chinese Studies at the National Central Library in Taipei. Abstract This thesis examines Liu Cixin’s Diqiu Wangshi (The Remembrance of Earth’s Past), a Chinese science fiction trilogy whose translation is unprecedently popular in the Western world. In his interviews and critical writings, Liu Cixin often explains that he is predominantly influenced by modern and contemporary Anglophone authors, including George Orwell, Arthur C. Clarke and Aldous Huxley, among others. By considering Liu’s trilogy in view of such influences, this thesis breaks down the aesthetic and thematic components of Diqiu Wangshi, these being scientism, humanism, historicism and utopianism. It also considers the influence of the Chinese author Wang Meng’s youth fiction Qingchun Wansui and how its idealism helps to shape the aesthetic and moral character of Liu’s work. The purpose of this analysis is to account for the originality of Diqiu Wangshi, arguing that its ingenuity is found in its conscious engagement with translated fiction rather than in the literature of Chinese science fiction. The dissertation more generally aims at exploring how contemporary Chinese writers of the post-Mao period are clearly more influenced by western fiction, translated and untranslated, and universal thematic concerns than current critical approaches seem to suggest. Contents 1) Science Fiction with Chinese Characteristics? 2) Politicism 3) Scientism 4) Humanism 5) Historicism 6) Utopianism 7) Contemporary Fiction with Western Characteristics 8) Bibliography 1) Science Fiction with Chinese Characteristics? In 2006, a Chinese engineer and author named Liu Cixin 刘慈欣 published a widely-read serialized story in the magazine Science Fiction World 科幻世界. This work, titled Three Body 三 体, became very popular among its readers, leading it to be picked up by the Chongqing Publishing House for novelization. This story would be expanded into a trilogy, with two sequel volumes titled The Dark Forest 黑暗森林 (2008) and Death’s End 死神永生 (2010). Following the 2013 translation of Three Body into English, rendered by its translator Ken Liu as The Three Body Problem, the work and its two sequels have attracted enormous attention from readers and critics alike in the English-speaking world, with the combined trilogy being retrospectively titled Diqiu Wangshi 地球往事 or The Remembrance of Earth’s Past, amounting in total to around 880,000 characters.1 The first volume notably won the Hugo Award in 2015 and the third was nominated in 2017, causing a great stir in the press as to the larger phenomenon of “Chinese science fiction.” It is an uncommon thing that a science fiction work receives such attention from critical circles and it is even rarer that a Chinese-language work finds a popular readership outside the Chinese- speaking world. David Der-Wei Wang’s 2017 volume A New Literary History of Modern China features a timeline beginning with The Dream of the Red Chamber, published in 1792, and ends with Nobel prize wins of both Gao Xingjian 高行健 and Mo Yan 莫言, in 2000 and 2012 1 Gwennaël Gaffric, “Liu Cixin’s Three Body Trilogy and the Status of Science Fiction in contemporary China,” translated by Will Peyton, Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 46, No. 1 (2019): 26. 1 respectively. However, wedged in between these two last events is the publication of San Ti in 2006, which reflects how critically significant the work is considered within the wider modern Chinese literary canon.2 Liu Cixin himself hails from Shanxi province in central China. He originally pursued a career as a computer engineer in a power plant, first encountering science fiction, he recalls, at the age of eighteen, when he read the translated works of Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rendezvous with Rama, considered to be seminal classics of science fiction in the West. In one interview, when asked which works he’d recommend Xi Jinping to read, he named Rama and 2001, his own works being too long for a busy president to read.3 It is these works which, to this today, he cites as his foundational influences and of which he says much of his earlier writing were mere imitations. While he has mentioned other significant influences as wide as Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Liu is a proponent of the most technical science fiction, mirroring that of the Western Golden Age, the works of which were very often written by scientists. “I write science fiction because I love science,” Liu says in an interview in the scientific periodical Nature, “and want to give the beauty of science literary expression.”4 He says, in another interview, “my works are all mere imitations of 2001: A Space Odyssey.”5 2 A New Literary History of Modern China, edited by David Der-Wei Wang (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2017). 3 Ruan Fan, “Hugo Award winner Liu Cixin: I'm just writing for the beer money.” China Daily. 24 August 2015. http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/2015-08/24/content_21691926.htm. Accessed September 2016. 4 Sullivan, Colin. “The Three-Body Problem and beyond — a Q&A with Liu Cixin.” Nature. 19 August 2016. http://blogs.nature.com/futureconditional/2016/08/19/the-three-body-problem-and- beyond-a-qa-with-liu-cixin/. Accessed August 2016. 5 Li Fuying, “Liu Cixin cheng Kelake ran ziji chansheng xie kehuan niantou zhijin buguo shi” (Liu Cixin says that Clark inspired him to write sf and that his vision is timeless). Shenzhen Evening 2 Liu, in his reading of Clarke at a young age and pursuing an almost exclusive interest in non-Chinese fiction and a preference for translated western fiction, should prove an interesting case study for what scholars call “translingual practice,” as he seemingly draws from foreign literary sources rather than ones in his native Chinese tongue. It is a set of influences only made available from the early 1980s onward, as China opened to the world economy, and to which Liu is seemingly one of the earliest to have been exposed and responded. The translingual nature of influence brings to the forefront the concept of “world literature.” With regard to the Chinese language, “the concept of ‘world literature’ has been a much-debated topic within Chinese and comparative literary studies since the early 1990s.” As Paola Iovene elaborates, “rather than a canon of works, for most scholars it denotes a mode of circulation and reading mediated by translation and an approach that focuses on the dynamics of literary exchange. But despite the global scope that the term ‘world’ suggests, its theorization has largely focused on the circulation of genres and forms from and back to Euro-American literature.”6 The question of cross-lingual influence in Chinese literature was brought to bear on Liu Cixin by Angie Chau who focuses on his huge popularity in the West. As she argues, “China’s efforts to make a name for itself in cultural production on the international scale has so far failed miserably in competition with Hollywood blockbuster films, K-pop music, and Japanese anime, but now literature in the form of science fiction is poised to accomplish this lofty goal.”7 The recent Chinese Hugo wins “have produced a timely opportunity for Chinese literature to enter world News. 1 April 2013. http://www.chinanews.com/cul/2013/04-01/4695080.shtml. Accessed August 2016. 6 Paola Iovene, Tales of Futures Past: Anticipation and the Ends of Literature in Contemporary China (Redwood: Stanford University Press, 2014), 76. 7 Angie Chau, “From Nobel to Hugo: Reading Chinese Science Fiction as World Literature.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture. Vol. 30, No. 1 (2018): 114. 3 literature” on the condition that “this proposed shift in perception of SF … occur[s] first within China, then, aided by the process of translation, in its circulated form abroad.”8 “If all it takes for Chinese literature to enter world literature at this point is for Chinese SF to be read, critiqued, consumed, and received as literature, the reception of Three-Body domestically in China and globally in translation has confirmed this long-awaited step.”9 It is far too early to answer this question yet, given that the popular reception of Chinese sf is limited (almost) entirely to Liu’s trilogy. These observations echo relatively recent comments on Chinese and world literature by Bonnie McDougall, who highlights “the neglect of the role of translation in the promotion and reception of contemporary Chinese literature around the world.”10 In general, she stresses that “world literature is translated literature, and translated literature is world literature” crucially because literary exchange is wholly dependent on translation. Overall (though one might consider Liu Cixin an exception), “the translation of contemporary Chinese literature into English over the past three or four decades, whether by Chinese or non-Chinese translators and whether published inside China or abroad, has not been a great success.”11 The problem lies in how one considers world literature: either as “elite” cultural material of a highbrow nature produced by writers, translators and publishers, or as “global culture,” which can encompass anything from popular television shows to pop songs.
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