A Review on Intransitive Encounter: Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange

In the Jesuit or Missionary period of cultural interflow at the intersection of the Ming and the Qing dynasties, the exchange activities between China and Europe were dominated by unilateral activity, with higher frequency of European presence in China than that of Chinese presence in Europe. It is not an overstatement that the Sino-Euro exchange in this phase was characterized by intransitivity, a term used to describe the low effectiveness of cross-cultural transmission, as analogized with intransitive verbs by Nan Z. Da, the author of this book: “minimal investments are vectored actions whose ‘effects are contained within the agent’ and do not pass to other objects or beyond certain limits” (2). In contrast, when it comes to the end of the 19^th century and 20^th century, a period overlapping the collapse of the Qing dynasty and the rise of the Republic in China, China and the U.S. began to engage each other by way of increasing bilateral activities, particularly cultural exchanges by dint of sprouting print-culture. Both sides harbored expectations for each other. “China thinking served as a delivery mechanism for calibrating historiographic methods for a post-revolutionary world, legitimating the utopian designs of the Free-Soilers, shoring up Progressive politics, and redesigning the public sphere” (3). Reciprocally, “China, for its part, figured America into its cartographic imaginary in the 1830s and continued to translate, publish, digest, and account for American literary and cultural production through the early 1900s” (3). The mutual activities indeed transpired between the two countries. But, to the disappointment of the participants of these activities, the expectations have failed to be lived up to, or, in the book’s terms, the encounter was haunted by intransitivity.

The author of the book trains the lens onto the transnational “rendezvous,” or specifically the Sino-U.S. encounter, in the literary realm. Although the role played by translation is not particularly brought to the spotlight, the exchange undertakings between the two countries more or less involve translation or the performers of translation, the translators, with a spectrum from translators in the real sense to those in a less real sense. The book has showcased an array of figures: among Americans are Washington Irving (chapter one), Ralph Waldo Emerson (chapter two), and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (chapter four); among Chinese, Qiu Jin (chapter five) and Dong Xun (chapter four); and among Asian Americans, Yung Wing (chapter three) and Edith Eaton (chapter six). To a great extent, the encounters covered by the book are the cultural transmission events or literary exchange events; and, to some extent, they can also be viewed as translation events. Due to the interventions engendered by a diversity of media coeval to the period at issue, the translation events have been compromised in the sense of their expected effects.

Intransitivity refers to the failure in communication between two countries, and in this book, between China and the United States. Communication is merely charged with the work of imparting information with no concern for reciprocity or sharing of the mentalities of the communicative sides. The failure of communicative exchange is attributed to the incompatibilities between the two languages on the two sides of communication if translation is involved in the exchange. In the case of Sino-U.S. encounter, Chinese and English are untranslatable due to their incommensurability. Ko Kun-hua, an America-educated Chinese at the turn of the twentieth century, who died on his way to be appointed as the first Chinese instructor of Harvard College, has written many Chinese poems in praise of Americans he socialized with. Some of the poems’ English versions were included into his obituary published by The Continent. These poems have fallen short of the roles they were supposed to play due to the incompatibilities between Chinese and English, or “lack of fit between style and topic” (113). The author of this book identifies what occurred to this translation or communication event: “a mismatch between the poems and their symbolic function” (113) as “intransitivity.” Concomitant with the poetic or literary form that invokes the intransitivity with which transnational communication or exchange is stricken, formality, the sociality assigned to communicative activity, also effect intransitvity – even stronger than that incurred by form.

Formality has long been neglected for its being synonymous to “sociality without intrinsic content” (18). Instead, form, as defined by literary historians as “intense reflection of reality bundled into delimited shapes,” (18) is prioritized to be put under scrutiny. However, formality and form have an interactive rapprochement, with the former as the result of the latter’s embeddedness in society. In Chapter Four, the author has effectively shown us how literary expression, the form, is mobilized to fulfill the task of an intransitive contact through formality. The author in this chapter has narrated an anecdote involving a poem fan as a diplomatic gift given by a Chinese diplomat to his American counterpart. Dong Xun (1810–1892), the Qing government’s minister of foreign affairs then, translated Longfellow’s Psalm of Life into Chinese and transcribed it onto a fan. The fan with the translated poem on it has been taken on as a gift, an entity that serves the purpose of promoting the diplomatic relationship. In this case, the form, specifically, the literary or poetic shape, has overshadowed the formality, specifically, the social intentionality assigned to it by its giver. As an improvisional translation, the poem transcribed onto the fan is consequent upon more of a minimal adjustment in form than a maximal accommodation toward internationalism. Minimalism involved in this event refers to the efforts that can be halved but doubled in effect in the process of achieving a diplomatic purpose as intended. However, the version offered by Dong Xun on the fan is just a secondhand translation, which is a re-make of its Chinese rendering by Thomas Francis Wade. Dong Xun’s translation is accused of being produced by “matching aphorism by aphorism,” while this accusation is echoed by Qian Zhongshu钱锺书, who has written about the fan poem, regarding it as “lost potential.” In light of the two responses, it can be seen that the fan poem has failed or ended up in intransitivity both in its literary form for the fact that it is not an actual translation and in its social formality for the fact that it has been stripped of its gift quality as a diplomatic token.

Occasionally, the book touches upon philological analysis to account for the failure of translation as a vehicle of communication. In Chapter Four, in the wake of the explication of Longfellow’s Chinese translation on the fan as a diplomatic gift, 翻译 (fan yi), the Chinese term for “translation” is brought to the fore. If yi译in this two-character term denotes the linguistic transformation that latently transpires in the mind of a translator, fan翻signifies the work of the tangible fabric of a source or a target text. Thus the act of fan, which literally in English means “a turn or flip” (142), is exerted upon physical materials – media or vehicles – the venues where translation occurs. With the increase of media for translation such as print-culture, the translation industry boomed, as a result of which hybridity was achieved across the globe. Then, translingual modernity came into being, wherein loanwords, theories, concepts, and literary devices were imported into China and thus appeared Chinese nationalism as the manifestation of modernity.

We can now detour back to Chapter Two, where the story of Rip Van Winkle and its loose translation represent an indifference to what historically happened in America and sinicized “America.” This indifference helps shed the historical significance of what happened on both sides, a reflection of the failure in the influences of China thinking on America and that of America thinking on China, as well as a syndrome of communicative intransitivity. Similar to the loose translation of the story of Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” in Chapter Five, Qiu Jin inserted into her poem a putative reference to The Mayflower, a novel by American writer Harriet Beecher Stowe, but whose influence in China is far less than Uncle Tom’s Cabin, another novel by the same author. Anyway, the fact that the title of the novel appeared in Qiu Jin’s poem indicates that the novel is not impervious to Chinese revolutionary culture pioneered by Qiu Jin. International encounters are mutual and reciprocal. The degree of intransitivity rendered by encounters differs. In the case of translingual modernity, which is engendered in the Sino-West encounter, the transitivity the West exerted on China is larger than that of China on the West. But in Intransitive Encounter, the author has fallen short of making a comparison between the transitivities respectively received by China and America.

The failure to achieve a consummate exchange, i.e the intransitive encounters as, in the author’s terms, are “products of an interplay of forces”(33), is brought about mainly by the formality and thus superficiality in the communication. With the temporal and technological advancement, people have increasingly come up with vehicles to render the intercultural and international encounter convenient and effective. However, the devices are more distracting rather than facilitating. The book indulges itself in presenting the phenomena of communicative intransitivity with specific instances. But the author has made few efforts to show its readers how to judge the intransitivity, which is supposedly and mainly attributed to the misuse of the communicative facilities for the users’ clumsiness at using them.

Edward Said once compared the transmission of ideas to a tempo-spatial travel. The encounter between Chinese and American literatures can also be analogized as a travel. But in the case of this specific encounter, the journey has failed to bring itself to a completion, while only fulfilling some of all the phases of the travel. What follows is to frame the review of this book within Said’s traveling theory, in the light of which the quite odd diction and obscure wording in this book would become more revealing.

“First, there is the point of origin, or what seems like one, a set of initial circumstances in which the idea came to birth or entered discourse” (Said 226–227). The telos of creating a literary text determines its capacity to be used as an intermediary of communication. However, a piece of literature, especially poetry, is generally created for its own sake or for its poet’s sake. It is quite hard for a poem to go beyond its concentric realm. Even if it is deployed as a constituent of an externally oriented project as in the case of Yung Wing (Chapter 3), the role it plays is limited. “Poetry is rent for thinking thoughts and feeling feelings and not signs of one’s attachment to a project, even if the project is one of rarefied renunciation from the world” (119).

A poem, when deployed as a vehicle for an idea to be communicated across cultures, its self-referentiality would exert centripetal force rather than centrifugal force to prevent it from going any further than the place of its origin. The lack of momentum for the travel of a poem engenders the intransitvity in its target culture. This poetics of travel, an alternative version of Said’s traveling theory, is necessary to be formulated in reference to the book under present review to illuminate the intranstivity that handicapped a more effective transitivity for the interflow between Chinese and American literature in the time this book engages.

“Second, there is a distance transversed, a passage through the pressure of various contexts as the idea moves from an earlier point to another time and place where it will come into a new prominence” (Said:227. Ralph Waldo Emerson (Chapter 2) as identified in this book can be illustrative of this travel phase. The author accuses him of “the central fallacy of Orientalism,”(87) by which he rendered Chinese literature the “bounding site of thought experiments” (87). Emerson appropriated the otherness as relative to the Americanness and contextualized it at his own service. In the author’s words, in the American context, Chinese as “others” and Chinese “otherness” “get co-opted as sources of renewal and self-affirmation” (87). But the efforts of appropriating the Chinese “otherness” was far from being successful, for he failed to integrate the Chinese other’s ideas systematically and allow them to sediment into the American minds. The context in which alien ideas were borne in literature can be compared to the road condition along which literary vehicles traveled. For Emerson, the Chinese ideas seemed to be insensitive to the road condition and failed to be localized as expected. As a result, their prominence in the new environ aborted its achievement.

“Third, there is a set of conditions – call the conditions of acceptance or, as an inevitable part of acceptance, resistances – which then confronts the transplanted theory or idea, making possible its introduction or toleration, however alien it might appear to be” (Said 227). In the fourth chapter about the Chinese translation of Longfellow’s Psalm of Life, which is supposed to be the first American poem translated into Chinese, its traits as a piece of literary work have been reduced to the gift bestowal as a function performed by the fan on which the translated Chinese poem was inscribed. This physical transitivity did not ensure the mental transitivity, i.e., the successful arrival of the poetic thrust embodied by the poem in the mind of the receiver of the gift. The conditions under which the translated poem was received guaranteed the physical acceptance of the fan and the poem on it, but laid the block as the resistance to the ideas to be transplanted inter-nationally or cross-culturally through the Chinese poetic rendering. “The fan poem is a historical object, but when we historicize it we find that, in its dawning objecthood, it wooed the historicity of perpetual presentism” (161). The poem has finally turned out to be “a historical object” with historical significance larger than its present significance as it exuded with the occurrence of the gift bestowal event more than one century ago. Pessimistically, this event can be taken as a labor lost: the physical transitivity, i.e., the arrival of the poem-inscribed fan in the hand of the receiver, was not achieved in tandem with the spiritual or ideational transitivity; optimisitically, the poem has indeed arrived at a destination in America transitively and sent its repercussions mentally, despite that it has deviated from the destination as planned.

“Fourth, the now full (or partly) accommodated (or incorporated) idea is to some extent transformed by its new uses, its new position in a new time and place” (Said 227). If the fourth phase is attained, transitivity is simultaneously achieved. But what the author of the book presents to us are counter-examples to this phase. In Chapter Six, the author argues that “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” stories authored by Edith Eaton about a Chinese-American family have denationalized or re-nationalized the characters and mapped them transnationally, serving as the grounds for testing if they as the alien literature could be conducive or detrimental to mutual understanding. Unfortunately, the cultural exchange that was set against this transnational backdrop, on one hand, failed to afford a full exposure to each other’s cultures, and, on the other hand, revealed each other’s literary conceptions at quite a modest degree. “Belonging to a genre of literature that aims to achieve a simulated totality through a fantasy of the textual contact zone, these stories draw attention to those very artifices, asking whether books and people are actually closer together (in geographical and mental space alike) or whether bibliographic closeness is simply a generic trait in the fiction of cross-cultural experience” (216). Eaton attempted to ensure the co-existence of the two cultures with resort to personalizing and textualizing them in the form of fiction. It turned out that the two cultures were mutually impervious and still stood aloof from each other, or even worse, they were subject to hybridization rather than integration to the extent of losing their unique national identities. Highlighted here are the events of Sino-American literary exchange as the specific implementation of intransitivity. Curiously enough, it can be detected that the title of each chapter is inherent with negative connotations: some words are affixed with in-, un- or -less, and some words connote the implications of denial or obstruction. The aura of negativity hovers over the whole book. Up to the current times, especially under the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic whose aftermath is now still lingering, this intransitivity which originated mainly from the literary exchange between China and U.S. at the turn of the twentieth century, can still have diachronic repercussions and its variants in an array of spheres, such as ideology, trade, and politics. The highly technological media have facilitated the communication and interaction with more convenience and more channels to overcome the intransitivity. But, with the interference of unexpected incidents, the intransitivity is being exacerbated rather than lessened. By comparison, the issue of intransitivity addressed in Intransitive Encounter is far from pathetic.