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Today we will be talking with Lorenzo Fato about his new book, Hundred Days Literature, Chinese Utopian Fiction at the end of Empire, 1902, 1910 published by Brill. The completion of this book has benefited from Lorenzo during the call of birth and research project called East Asian Uses of European Paths, supported by the Hair on It Work and led by Professor Joaquin Quotes. In Hundred Days Literature, Lorenzo explores the landscape of early modern Chinese fiction through the lens of the utopian novel and casts new light on some of its most peculiar, yet often overshadowed literary specimens. Hi Lorenzo, thank you very much for taking the time today to talk to us about your book, Hundred Days Literature, Chinese Utopian Fiction at the end of Empire 1902, 1910.
Hi, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. Sure, absolutely. Absolutely.
And the book is fantastic, let me say that just to start at the very beginning. And great, yeah, I had a lot of fun reading it. And before I get into more details about the book, I wanted to ask whether you could tell us a little bit more about yourself and the way you came to Asian Studies, about your interests in Chinese Utopian novels, specifically at the beginning of the century in China. Yeah, I can do that.
So as for the first question, where did I come from? I'm an Italian scholar, I studied in Venice at the Kefoskur University of Venice as a student, I was trained as a psychologist, so I would say that they moved slowly from the classics to more modern and contemporary stuff. I completed my PhD there between the University of Venice and the Jean-Moulin Lantra University of Lyon in France in a joint degree program in 2015. And after a few months looking for jobs, I landed in Hong Kong at the Department of Translation of the Chinese University of Hong Kong for one year as a post-doc researcher.
And then I moved to Heideberg-Roulin right now. In this three year window, I managed to transform what was originally my PhD dissertation into this book we're talking about. As for how I ended up, the basic question of how I decided to study East Asian languages and Chinese in particular is, I have a funny anecdote about that. It comes from when I was in high school and we were doing modern contemporary European history and I realized that we were not doing much about what was going on in East Asia in particular.
But I pretty much knew nothing about what's going on over there. And the rememberter was a point one chapter in my history book that if I remember correctly, it was using both way-chiles and Piedem for transcribing Chinese names. And so I found myself very confused about whether it was reading about the same persons, you know, if this really senior names were actually referring to the same mouths of all the same dancing, and so on and so forth. And I remember that the SME history professor and he was a bit confused and he wasn't sure about his answer.
And so that made me realize that I absolutely no commission knowledge of the language spoken in Chinese, the history of the country, the literature, the philosophy. And so I thought it was a good enough reason to, when it came to choosing a path in my university education tool. That's a very nice anecdote. That's a very nice anecdote.
And it makes a lot of sense because specifically in the history textbooks and some parts of Europe, Eastern Europe as well, you have this dual system that confuses many, many people, myself included. So yeah, I think that's, yeah, I think, yeah. Right, so that's a very nice start. And just to get into the matter of things, the book, as I saw it, but you can correct me if I'm wrong, is comprised of five chapters and the introduction and the conclusions as well, right?
And it makes an intervention in the way utopian novels developed during the fast-changing times, specifically during transitional periods as the one between 1902 and 1910. And in the introduction you mentioned the tumultuous history of the end of the Qing Dynasty and the different cultural investments when developing the utopian novel, as well as the way in which the novel functions and what the goals are and so on. So my question about this would be whether you could tell us more about the way you trace the genealogy of the utopian novel in your book. Yes, of course.
So I might have made that my relying on the label of utopia, utopia and writing and so on, is I wouldn't say forced, but it's a very conscious decision. Well, I mean, unfortunately that was not my initial plan. I wasn't sure I was going to end up working within the frame of utopia and fiction. I ended up using this perspective in order to make sense of what looked to me like a blind spot and what had been written before about that particular time.
The major blind spot is the one that caused the main fort as the main threshold for defining where modern Chinese details should start. And I'm not the first one to say this. I mean, there's a lot of that one on the set that was planned a lot about it and catching the analyzer and so I'm not the first one to make these claims. The thing is that even though martial looks of all Chinese scholarship about modern Chinese literature takes the 1919 as a sort of threshold period from which everything starts, everything new starts, if you actually look right a little, let's say a few years before that, there was so much going on that there were so many movements and dependencies and trends and experiments, that most of the time they didn't go anywhere, but they were trying to go somewhere.
And among these different kinds of writings, there was the political novel that the wrote about science fantasy that everyone wrote about. There was science fiction coming out, the detective novel. So I thought that was my starting point. I also realized that many of these labels that came about around that time were also very artificial and oftentimes it was very difficult to pinpoint a particular genre to a particular work.
So it takes some, there's a certain flexibility that makes for a very cool, discursive space to explore for people like me interested in writing a sensation. Sure, sure, absolutely. And the end of the, even before the end of the Qing dynasty, you had a lot of cultural work happening and as you said, a lot of movements that remain for some reason or another understudy up to this day. And it's just, I don't know, it's like a child in a, for Christmas in a candy store, it's just so fascinating.
Yeah, that's true. And most of these novels are so massively, I'll just say, what's the word there? Prolific, the main writers are so prolific and writing such a massive on this way. I remember I was talking to, to Darwin actually, some months ago.
And I think an interesting way to look at it would be to consider a sort of pre-modern post-modernism going on in that the medium of the novel and the language were explored in such a prolific and bizarre and a typical and unexpected way. Very self-referential, very self-aware that for one could say, and I think I make these claims somewhere in the book, maybe I can remember it now, but they were both two steps ahead and still one step behind or two steps behind. And so that's why this sort of lack of synchronicity and characterizes weird as a very particular one. And also for a long time, relegated at close up in the background as a sort of minor weird and weird uncle, can you just share it out?
For sure, yes, and there's much to be said about these almost as a cultural kind of dance, the two steps forward, one step back, I like to think about it. Yeah, absolutely. No, no, it is dance because in this huge corpus of unexplored literature you can find, so I read and just to be clear, I'm not claiming I am sort of some sort of expert on the whole, but because there was so much, so many things going on, so many texts and genres and writers and philosophers, turn writers that I still have my reading to do. I was lucky enough to stumble upon this corpus of text, to put together this corpus of text that made sense if read through the utopian lens, and so that's what I ended up doing.
And I did it for a very simple reason. Initially I was really interested in working on Chinese science, on the origins of Chinese science fiction. And as I started, first year of each we were talking about here in 2012, and as I started working on that, I realized that as it happens often that somebody else just happened to have just written a whole lot of dissipation about it, so I read that dissipation and was like, yeah, that was what I wanted to write, so I better find something else. And of course I'm talking about my colleague and friend, Daniel Isaacson, I think he is in North Carolina State University, and he wrote, he published a couple of years ago, celestial empires, which is a history of Chinese science fiction that starts from the same timeframe that they use in my book.
So I figured, so I cannot talk about science fiction, but it's particularly that this text is networked or like cloud of text, we're using science fiction, we're using different genetic perspectives to talk about the future, and most of the time this is about the future turned into idealization of the times to come, some imagination of possible new futures in which the condition of early modern late in period China, which was one of subjugation, was being overturned, and the young China as I talked about it, would take back its place at the center of the world order, and so oftentimes these discourses would take once converted into translated into novels they would turn into what we would understand now as you look in novels in the manner of Edward Bellamy's or William Morris, or those older dimensions later on. Yes, yes, and I have a question about this. Yeah, later on. Yeah, of course.
Right, and I think too, because you just mentioned the word fiction, right, and I think you ponder on the role of fiction and its function according to Yang Tichao, and then you analyze that in relation to Taiyun Pei's short story New Year's Dream. So I was fascinated and I would love our listeners to know more about the way we can theorize the role fiction plays and how it evolves and mutates in the utopian novel, and specifically at this watershed moment at the beginning of the 20th century, that is so fruitful and so fascinating. So this may sound counterintuitive, considering that in the book I realized I tend to lose myself a lot into pseudo-theoretical digressions, and this remains between us, but one of the main critiques I got from during the peer review process was me getting lost in this theoretical. I wanted to write directly.
I wanted to write a sophisticated way about very simple things and that was one mistake that was pointed out to me anyway. What I'm saying is that we don't need to do much theorizing about this kind of novel scene that the theorizing was going on itself back then. Yang Tichao was a lot different from Yang Tichao. All these people, they were, before even starting to write novels, they were writing about what a novel should do, or could do.
So there was a high level of self-awareness about how to use this instrument that is novel. And so I feel in retrospect, of course, now it appears clear to me, I feel like I didn't have to theorize much about it because most of the perspective I tried to unpack where already being unpacked back then, when Yang Tichao writing about how it is necessary to use fiction in order to get people, it was both harking back to a Confucian tradition of a sort of moralistic view on literature that would put a lot of responses that would justify the writing and the enjoying of fiction only if we went to a higher goal. It was both looking back at the other kinds, but it was also writing in response to, he was writing from a new moral ground, he was somehow rejecting the, what Perling defined as the, oh my god, I missed my, I'm forgetting the Mandarin docs and Jesus. And yes, thank you.
Yes, I'm going to do that. So this sort of very fluidity, it is sophisticated but not, let's say, engaged kind of writing. So it was Nenshein saying that the novel should, the first function of novel, that the power of the novel lies in its capacity to change the mind of people, it was, in any way it was doing. And so, yeah, I kind of lost my child here.
So this is where my theorizing around this genre comes about. And my interest, when I use the label utopia, I don't really refer to the imaginary landscapes this opened and described on the surface of these novels. Rather, I mean, treat by how there's a certain discrepancy between what these authors claim they want to do. So they claim they want to give visions of the China of the future.
They're going to show the people how things are going to be if we all destroy, for reform. So there's a sort of, a first level of declarations of overall intentions in this case. But also there's the way the text behave and how the, what is actually given in the text is not always what was claimed to be given by the author in the first place. So there's a certain discrepancy that there's something that doesn't compute and, or that is missing, there are blind spots.
And so this is, this is to me what is utopian in, in, in, in, in, in, it's not there. It's the non-place of the text. And this is a perspective that I adopted from, from a particular book. I'm not going to, I'm not going to lie about my, my sources, but I picked up this, this angle from, from the book, which is a, which is an analysis by, by French Semititian Duymaran on Thomas Morzito, written in, if I remember correctly in, in, in, around 1968, in which it talks about Thomas Morzito, Thomas Morzito, and not really in terms of, it tries to foreground how the utopian locus of the text of, of Morz text is not really the island that, that Mor was trying to describe, but rather the, what was missing from the description of the island, and what was not, the discrepancies between the level of narration and the level of description of the text.
So this is what I tried to do. This is the, the, the approach I had in mind when I, when I started putting together an analyzing text that, that, that, that, that I, that I picked up on, from a book, from a book. Sure, sure. It, it, it makes sense.
And I think it, you can see it throughout the book. I mean, the introduction does a very good job at describing these, these lenses you are using, and also your interpretation of the term utopia. So I think after the introduction, we're all set to go into, you know, the, the matter of things. And speaking of that, you know, the first chapter appears to be the one where you define, even more the terms and you draw the connections with excellent scholarship on Chinese utopian novels.
And, you know, you do mention, Isaac's and, and yay, and, you know, others and David Wong. I think it would be useful for, for the listeners to, to hear a bit more about the background on to which your conceptualization is take root, like, you know, the larger conversation. And you didn't mention these a little bit just now, but maybe just expand a little bit more. The late chain has been explored a lot, at least from the late 90s.
And, and David Wong, he is not like my main point of referencing that. He kind of opened that door. And, and, and at least for me, I mean, I, I still consume myself pretty young in my year researchers, I'm probably missing out on so many things. But anyway, it seems to me that, that is all this go away of late chain came up.
That was a fairly recent affair. And the, that one's book is from 1997. So let's say the last 20 years or so anyway. So my point is how do we get there?
And so in the first chapter, what they tried to do was look back at histories of Chinese fiction, these verses around Chinese fiction that were written maybe not in the very same years that maybe not in the very, in that particular decade, they focus on as a critic, but soon they're after, right? And so I looked, I looked into who was writing like the, I think the 20s about the Chinese literature of the last 50 years. I, I read, I read some Luzhan, I read Ayan. And so I was trying to look into these early scholars of Chinese fiction to see if they themselves picked up anything like what they want, what they want to talk about.
And what is interesting to me is that most of the novel is, some of the movies I, I engage with are not even mentioned, like if not very, very, very marginally. And those that are mentioned, such as Wu Jain-Ran or also known as Wu Waiao, who brought the new story of the stone, he's considered like most often not a chief example of these old tiny writers that were struggling to become modern, right? And you have a sort of change in perspective with Ayan in 1930s, late 1930s with the history of ancient fiction in which some elements of truly, maybe not really revolutionary writing but rather innovative writing are, back up. So this is what I try to do.
I try to see whether this, the work of this novel is, I was reading was actually recognized as such, you know? If Ayan, for example, the New Year's Dream by Ayan Pei was actually like, was in the rather of those who cared about literature, you know? And it, I was struck about this blind spot about this, this genre that I call in my book conveniently because you know, you have to sell books, so you have to find out good perspectives to talk about normal stuff. But what they call butobassie, back then was also known as Lissian, like a speculative fiction.
And this, you can find the mentions of Dijan in the horn titles of the civilizations of this book, so the title, the four small characters on top of the title on the upper corner of the page, they would mention a butobassie of Lissian. But it was overall quite dismissed. Jansi Shao, I don't remember where he wrote it, but if someone gives a list of genres that were out to say, all the rage back then. And so I guess this series of different kinds of writing, the political novel, the military novel, the romantic novel, the scientific adventure, but there's little mention of you talking writing as such.
It was almost like an unspoken agreement that if you look at fiction as a tool for cultivating a new form of a new nation and its citizens, then of course it's going to be utopian. Of course you're going to talk about how things are going to be. So this is to me the interesting blind spot that brought me to actually foreground this label of utopian writing, because it's there. At least I tried to argue for that.
Right, and it's very informative for us today to use this lens and look back at the ways in which it was or it wasn't labeled as such, the reasons for which it wasn't and what does it say about the spirit of the time or the political views that people had at that time not to think about this type of literature the way we do today. So I think just by using this lens, you are implicitly raising questions that I'm very sure others will pick up very soon. So yeah, I think it's very interesting. And any blind spot, the way you're describing it might just open a door to very cool.
I think that's very point interactive, but maybe you think it's a special line spot. The second blind spot is what we do as academics, which I try to find some angles that are not explored and we try to write about it. So there's that, I think, but it works in different layers. There are the blind spots of recent scholarship, at least before the 1990s, having late 1980s, having somehow dismissed the late change as a sort of transitionary here that was not as interesting as the classics that were before and the truly new leaders should have came with the May 4th.
But the blind spot was also the blind spot going on back then at this sort of implied unspoken vision of literature as something that has encoded a utopian goal. Sure, absolutely. Yes, absolutely. And not as a blind spot, but sharing some sort of similarities, I think with that in mind we can move forward to discussing a little bit your second chapter that you talk about to unfinished novels, specifically Liang Tichao's Xinjiang Guohe, and Chen Tianhuan should support.
And these seem to be, as you say, useful starting points for the understanding of utopian thinking and writing as a practice of displacement, of historical consciousness. And I think you do a very nice kind of description at the beginning of the chapter in which you are saying that you're using this idea of the unfinished novel to your advantage and to develop your own thinking. So that's kind of my cue to ask you to say more about these, the second chapter. Of course, what you know, I'm not quite glad about this.
These are not easy novels to read. The kind of language they're written with is something that is changing day by day after day. And so we're not there yet with a really a truly modern utonwa. We are of course, of course, the center is away from proper class.
So it's something, it's a weird animal, let's say. And so it took me a long time to go through this, not just to be honest with you. And I started to realize that many of the, when I was constructing my corpus, I realized that many novels were incomplete unfinished. And it was so frustrating because you take the time to, you like delve into the text and you struggle because it's written in comprehensive other times.
And you try to make sense of it. And then it just stops and you realize what's so, what should I do? I just throw away whatever I read so far. And the thing is that unfinished novels, unfinished literary projects, unfinished philosophical projects, these three projects were something pretty common, like then, or at least common enough that you would notice that if you really dig into what was being published, you have these many projects that were like very, what's the world, very ambitious at the beginning.
And then they turned out into nothing. And like the ancient history of the single world IT, it was supposed to be the first element of a trilogy that would comprise the future of all China, which was supposed to be a dystopian text. And then the new Pitch Blossom Spring, the Sinta, Sinta, which was, and so it was, you know, and actually took the time to write an essay, a sort of commercial trailer like essay in which it was going to publish this new magazine and this new magazine was going to publish, to serialize these three novels, right, of which the Sinta, what would I do? It was the first installment.
And so, you know, I think I assume that readers like them were maybe hyped to see what was going to happen with these projects, but eventually, the end of the writing of the chapters, you know, and it just abandoned the project. And honestly, I don't know why I didn't find myself, I didn't find anything, any document, letter, diary entry, or whatever that in which the entry time itself talks about why it stopped writing, it stopped working on the project. He was being excited, so it was happening all over the place, so I assume that was not his main concern. Anyway, so there's one element which is that unfinished work are pretty common.
There's another major text that somehow, and to intuitively, I don't mention my book, which is the Utopan Yoti, the Travel to Utopan, which, you know, it's the title is pretty obvious, so we just want to ask why it didn't include it in the book, because that's mostly what they would consider science fiction and Isaac's and all that brought a lot about it already as I thought was, anyway, it doesn't matter. This novel wasn't finished as well, so there are many infinites, which is fine in general, but if you look at the, if you adopt the Utopan perspective, then it becomes pretty fascinating to me, which it seems to me, so I don't know if you, if you, how familiar you are with Thomas Moore's Utopia, the original genre-founding book, but there's a, in one of the letters that work as part of, part text of Moore's Utopia, the narrator is being asked, so is, roughly today is being asked, so where is this island we talk about? Where did you go? Where did you find this idea of society that you keep telling us about?
And then the narrate, the story was that as the narrator tries to answer the question, we can give you the actual coordinates of the location of Utopia. Somebody started coughing, and so the writer, the, the, the, the, the, the, the narrator, was the first person who was writing the story claims that it didn't hear the explanation of where Utopia is, right? And this is often interpreted in a, of course, in a metaphorical way in that there's, when it comes to, to Utopia, you have to pause it as sort of shift outside of history. So you're not, you're not given the way you get to Utopia, you're just given the figure of Utopia, which is somewhere far away, and it's somewhere that is not usually reachable.
And this is the potential of the idea, it posits like a radical, a radical outness that would undermine and unset your, your, let's say, your, your own ideological immemorial, so to say. And so it was fascinating to me that you have this text that claim that they want to represent the Utopia of China, of future China, of course, post-colonial China. But when it actually comes to doing that, to giving you that image, this text just vanished into nothing. So they just stop somewhere in the middle, and then you're left there wondering, so what's, where is the, this image of the future that we were promised, you know, which I think it's a bit of a fascinating way of looking at what the genre was doing, this kind of writing was trying to do in the first place.
So I kind of pushed, I kind of pushed the logic of the argument to the actual physical idea of the text, of the text being unfinished, of us not having chapters this way. Right, right, right. And it's a, it's a meta gesture, right? Where it's writing and creating the, the hype and, you know, probably the, the whole thinking process, who knows.
But you know, you stop short of it in a gesture that somehow continues by itself, but we don't know. So that probably has a lot of potential to, to still be unraveled, right? And you know, this kind of writing, it came about right after the 100 years, that's where my book, the title of my book, sounds from, yeah, 100 days reforms. So these people were writing, you talk in others because they just realized that when they tried to implement those measures of measures of reform in the actual place where they were living, it didn't turn out well.
They were either killed or exiled. So in this perspective, the Ethiopian fiction was really sort of, was a genre that was basically recognizing a failure, because you know, if you could, if you know how to get to a better place, you get there, you know, you don't, you, you're not stuck in the novel, you're not stuck fantasizing about it. Right, stuck or, you know, some sort of continuity, right, between, you know, the historical reality and the narrative about the history itself, you know, so there's some sort of porous borders from what you're saying that appears to have constructed, being constructed, right? And, right, so speaking of historical coordinates and contours, I think chapter three presents a, presents us with a provisional detour from, from these, these, you know, matters at the, during the late, period and also late in fiction.
And I think the chapter comes out as looking at, quote, unquote, China as the object of representation of the other. And I think this is the first chapter where you, you do comparative work or comparative analysis between, you know, Edward Bellamy's looking forward to 2000 to. Oh, sorry. Yes, looking backward.
I'm sorry. I was looking at the, the. He's forward and he's looking backwards. Right.
So that was published in the United States in 1888. And then Arthur Dudley's looking further backward 1890, right? Exactly. And he's on one hand and then Kanye way and then T.
Charles on the other, right? So, and then further in the chapter, you also juxtapose Nancy Charles to Timothy Richard. So you know, just if you could expand more on the work of comparison and the very productive nature that informs the chapter, you know, here. Yeah.
Sure. Of course, so here I have to give credit where credit is due and this is a, this is a, Catherine here wrote a lot about the micro, he uses the expression migration of the genre from, from Europe to the Philippines to Japan and then to China and talks about the political novel in the manner of, of the Israelis coming be looking back, Bellamy's looking backward as a similar trajectory in that it informs, it was translated, let's say, assimilated at the beginning, summarized, abridged, it circulated in different forms at the turn of the century and it was fascinating to me that some, it's almost like the text itself gets translated, mistranslated, cut to pieces and it fragments all over the landscape and then elements of the text are picked up all over the place. And so the resources in the novels that I myself worked on and it's fascinating when you actually look at the text and how I try what I did, what I tried to do was were two things basically. The first one was, I tried to look into how the translation, the first summarized translation that was given by Timo Tiviturkin in 18, oh my god, 1892, 93, I really meant memory.
I tried to see how that particular translation was received and so you have kind of writing about it, you have a pencil to mention it somewhere. Then I followed the genealogy of Bellamy's translation till the 19 hands when you have actually a proper, let's say, a proper, well-informed, well-written and faithful translation of the text. But even before that, you have elements of Bellamy's novel circulating and getting into the DNA of what has been written locally. And so this is one thing.
I also realized that you have a complete, you have secular mirroring representations of how the future should be. If you, Bellamy's looking backward was highly criticized at the time. Many critics thought it was like a socialist generation of the United States. One of the sequels that Bellamy's novel thought was this looking forward backward.
I think it's a very, very, very minor. I'm not a super expert on American literature, but I'm pretty confident it's a very minor writer. I'm at the margins of Canon. And he brought a critique of Bellamy's that made use of the Yellow Peril trope to do this mantle.
Bellamy's, you're talking a deal. So what is, what this vintage size is, if we really do like you suggest, if we really adopt the form of governance that you're pushing for, so if we nationalize all industries and we eliminate corporation and we get rid of private property, if we do that, it's going to take no time for the Chinese to come here and invade us. Right? And then the rest of the novel is looking forward backward.
It's presented as a history lecture in which this Chinese professor goes to a college in Boston and has an auditorium of American students, how they lost control of the country and now they ended up being invaded by the Chinese. But this is not, but then it takes things a step forward further and it says that, well, of course, this is the speaking voice, the speaking, the point of view is that the Chinese professor, as it was imagined by these American, also. Anyway, to the end of the novel, what started as a dystopian take on network relevance, utopian vision, turned back again into a sort of trans-cultural utopia in which the differences between Chinese and Americans are somehow mediated or neutralized. So the description of the Chinese, I would say the Chinese states of America described at the end of this novel is actually pretty good.
It's not such a dark scenario as the beginning of the novel makes you think it's going to be. And so what's funny to me is that these kind of visions of the future in which China becomes this new world power somehow overlap or if they don't overlap, they point to completely opposite directions. So what is for Bintan and Dystopia, our Chinese organization is for the Chinese, the utopia of China as the new world power. So when they do not overlap, they respond to each other as the negative and the positive of a photography.
And this is not only my own reading of these texts, my own desire to put them together, but rather if you actually look at the circulation of some of these texts, at least, you find the traces that bring one text being rather than translated and assimilated and rewritten from one side of the world to the other. Yeah, and in the introduction, you present chapters four and five as a unit that expands the concept of utopian spectacle. So we have a term here, right? And the main parts are Udian Ren's Cinci tote and Lu Xiu, Cin Jung-Bou, right?
So yeah, yeah. So then I was wondering about the connections and the line of thought between spectacle and utopias, both theoretically and narratively for these chapters. I was trying to be fancy and both French philosophers, as we all do, but I guess the basic idea would be that there's a, as I mentioned at the beginning of this interview, there's a level of narration and a level of description and a level of intention, let's say, that overlap or do not overlap in writing these texts. There are claims made by authors that say they want to present a particular vision of the future.
There's a matter of the text of what is being given. And then there is what is missing from the text, what readers informed readers like we could be right now would expect to find, but actually do not find when it gets to the matter of the of the novels, right? So when I, my reference to the emotional spectacle was both figurative and deteral, figurative in that it seems to me, there's what is being presented in these texts is a sort of, of the hand can be lit, like a sort of facade, a facade of utopian prowess, facade of postcolonial, of this postcolonial scenario in which the word order is with the late 19 early 20th century word or is reversed. And so China in particular case moves from a position of semicolonial or hypoclonal if it is to, so we have some high position of hypoclonal subjugation to one of his demonic centrality, but there is sort of this narration of reversing that is even as a figure, you know, as this description of ideal cities of this beautiful city of Shanghai being super technological and clean and the new hub of the new capital of the word.
Also, this is a very well presented facade. The point is that once you start to try to look behind the curtains behind this sonography, you realize there are certain important elements of narration that are not even that are missing and that like, for example, how do we get there, you know, how that for like this was about the economic foundations of such a state or the way we we may completely move toward this utopian, utopian landscape, this utopian arrangements. And to me, when the texts try to go there, the whole not structure breakdown, you think about the new story of the stone, which is pretty niftyly conceived as a 20 plus 20 chapter novel in which the first 90 chapters are like a satirical take on, on written via China, pretty much in line with many other novels, written on time. And the second half is its utopian counterpart.
When it comes though, to move from one, from the first half to the second half, the narration breakdown. And this is particularly clear in the beginning, the mystery of the stone in that the plot somehow refuses to make sense. Characters are lost, characters are like left apart. There's a sort of like unreliability in the way the story is told that somehow makes it difficult to properly articulate the passage, you know, to properly articulate how we get to the utopian part of the text, which is similar to the Thomas Moore episode in which when somebody asks for where you talk, somehow the message doesn't get true for reasons.
So that's the spectacle to me. It's a spectacle to the extent in which it's very much consciously put forward as an arrangement of symbols. But when you want, but like when you're a theater, if you move behind the stage, you'll realize how everything is made up in a way that for the public, it makes sense. Only if you stay in the position of the public, you know, in the carefully arranged position of the reader who is given this image of this utopian image, which is what the text was in the first place.
If you write to educate, to teach, to push for a particular ideological perspective, then of course you're putting the reader in a certain position so that he or she looks at certain things and that others, right? Or gives priority to whatever aspect you want to be given priority as the provider of this message of this knowledge of this piece of text. Yeah, very interesting. And the process and the mechanics through which this, you know, the attention towards certain ideas or certain passages gets focused in the text, I think it's worth exploring further.
And I think there's so many conclusions and so many paths you can draw and take that, you know, I assume that writing the conclusion part must have been quite hard. So, you know, I was thinking about what would be the main points that you want the readers to take away, you know, maybe kind of an enticing type of being like with my book instead of knowing about the conclusion. But yeah. Oh, this is hard.
I wouldn't know. So this is maybe what kind of point do you think that writing these books is like when the climbers are asked, why would you climb out Everest and the answer because it's there? You know, I wasn't really thinking about making a larger point to what it was doing. I was just, I thought I found this text and we were there and I thought, hmm, nobody's writing about them, so I'm just going to give you something interesting to talk about and I was thinking to give these listeners something interesting to think about.
So when I was in, I wasn't, last time I was in Beijing, it was in 2015 and right before the Shanghai Expo. Anyway, the Expo was a big thing and it just, and so that was the main talk around town. And I remember that I just started to explore this late-shining writing and I found a new edition of the, I think it was a new sign up, I used to use one of the two texts that I focused on in the first four-hundred-hundred-tenth chapter. It was republished in this really fancy, shiny red, bright red cover, hard cover edition and in the cover it had the main pavilion, the main building of the Expo and then this note that said, what would, I'm translating from memories, I may be wrong, but something in the line, so what we were dreaming one hundred years ago, we were realizing it today.
And in fact, this season was written in 1910. It was basically a rewriting of Bellamy's looking backward in which this character falls asleep and wakes up in the 1950s. And he realizes that Shanghai in the 1950s has become the center of the world and all nations of the world are convening in Shanghai to celebrate this era of typing of a piece of universities. And so what is being given in the text in the written 1910 is something I would say comparable to what the Expo was trying to do in 2010, so to say, it gives you this sort of new narration, you know, sort of end of history or beginning of a new history kind of animation.
And so it's funny to me that somebody back then in 2010 decided, actually remember that one other year before there was this really minor text that was exploring this future possibilities and decided to use this text, you know, to reframe a retargeted text in the, around the time the Expo was taking place. And it's funny to me because to be honest, it's bad to say, but you know, we're not all talking about those, you know, it's not major. We're not talking about major contribution to world literature. These are very, unfortunately, it's a genre that gets form-like and repetitive very quickly, you know.
So the thing is, regardless of the actual quality or how engaging the novel is, somebody decided to publish it in 2010 and using it as a sort of proof that there was a grand scheme of things that was turning out right because it should have been, you know. So I don't know. I guess this is my final take on the opening. Well, I mean, before the final take, you know, I wanted to invite you or, you know, even just to ask whether there's something else we didn't go over today, but you would really like your listeners to know.
You know, either about the period you're talking about the book, I don't know, specifically then. Just, I'm going to pat myself on the back briefly. If anything, I translated a lot in the probably notice as well. There are many long bits of translations that, you know, these texts are not really easy to engage.
And so I suppose that's something we're proud of in that I, well, I don't know, which side project that never became concrete. So what I wanted to do was initially wanted to translate these texts, but then I realized it was too much and they were not always so engaging. So I figured why don't a cool thing to do would be to go back to the purpose of text and maybe compose a hyper novel with the most interesting sections of those texts that the text they explore in the book. I think it would make for a pretty cool and engaging project during translation and that never did, but still there are fragments of it in the book.
And maybe the most consistent part, consistent translation that you can find is the New Year's Dream by Tiampe, which is such a bizarre short story because Tiampe was not a novelist. It was an educator, philosopher, an anarchist, an experimental supporter. And the only piece of fiction that he wrote was, as a youngster, was this piece of fiction, you know. And it's very peculiar to me.
It's such an important figure, the founder of Academy of Scenic, the president of data. When he decided to try his end of fiction, he went for the, for this kind of writing, right? It's just fascinating to me. And that's why, and it offers a really good starting point to get familiar quickly with the genre because it's a short story.
It contains all the tropes, the themes, the tones, the particularities of the genre. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the short story is really, really interesting. And even if you're not as a scholar or just a person interested in utopian fiction, even if you're not particularly interested in translation, but it makes a lot of sense.
And it's definitely well positioned inside the analysis of the book. So definitely, I will check it out again. Be honest, you're the first person I'm talking to who actually went through the whole book. Of course, I'm not considering the viewers of my supervisors or my mom, but you're the first external reader that actually, we told them I'm actually scared.
Absolutely. And I'm honored to be the first you talk to about this. And definitely I'm back to you, too, trying to work on the book. And I have a lot of other questions, but I know that right now we already taken a lot of your time.
I just wanted to ask you, what are your other projects, your summer projects, what are you working on right now that excites you? That's a tough question. I've been struggling a little bit recently to find some really cool long-term project to engage with. I think it's a key thing, it's getting drawn back to the late-shin period.
I think there's so much to say about it. I'm thinking about working around travel looks and child writing in a twofold perspective and writing a project for a fictional and factual travel looks in early modern China in which I'm trying to put together different, let's say that as China was becoming part of the world at large in the late empire, a lot of people were writing about, a lot of writers were like traveling and writing about the travels. Or maybe they were writing about imaginary places and setting these travel looks in a fictional context. What I'm saying is that there's a strange shifting between fictional and sexual narrations in travel looks that, for me, they look a lot like a time still kind of mapping the new world that was expanding around as the borders of the empire was falling apart.
So I think there's something to say about it, so this is what I'd like to do. I hope I can make something out of it with you. I'm definitely looking forward. It sounds so interesting that I think a lot of the listeners would also look forward for the next book or the next article or anything that would come out of it.
For now I would like to thank you very much for agreeing to speak to us about your book. I wish you good luck. Thank you.