"I don't have a problem with Descartes."

This one somehow ends up being about Descartes

Hi, everyone! Last time, I wrote about a talk I gave about my journey with novels and imperialism, at an event where the historian John Delury gave a talk about his journey with representation of empire in the work of the sixteenth-century thinker Gu Yanwu. Then I ran out of time and didn’t get to talk about the discussion, or the things that I thought about afterwards… so, that’s what’s happening today.

The first part of the discussion followed the time-honored tradition where we sat in two chairs and talked to each other, while holding microphones. Is there any way for this format not to be awkward? We were careful to choreograph our approach to the two chairs from opposite sides of the room, so we wouldn’t trip over each other… but, if anything, this only compounded the awkwardness, because it took so long to walk to the chairs. Then we sat there for a while, talking about differences in imperialism between China and “the West.” I was struck to learn that the Confucian concept of empire doesn’t have “expansionism” built in; it just ends somewhere, at the barbarians, and that’s the size of it. (But it still has hierarchies and I found the idea of “empire without expansionism” very challenging to hold. What then is empire? Is it just “big”?

This made me start thinking about definitions of “the novel”; e.g. whether it’s still “the novel” if it’s about groups and not individuals, which is something people say about the classic Chinese novels, none of which I have successfully finished reading. I remember a discussion in grad school about whether The Romance of the Three Kingdoms WAS a “novel”; was it Eurocentric to call it that—as if everyone had to be writing “novels”? or was it Eurocentric to say that fourteenth-century Chinese people WEREN’T writing novels, just because they were Chinese. As in most “what is a novel” debates, this one comes down to whether you think of “the novel“ more as a tradition of texts in conversation with each other, or an objective phenomenon that can arise independently in different places.

Can you spot any individualists? Source: Library of Congress

This is sort of a digression but, toward the end of my time at Stanford, I remember hearing that Franco Moretti had turned all his energies to the question of why “the rise of the novel” took place in Europe and not in China. I was losing my mind with my dissertation and remember thinking, “What a strange question,” and then not thinking about it again… and then I graduated and never found out the answer. Now, thanks to the generous support of readers like you, I was have finally read most of this article and can report back! So the question is actually “why was there a European but not a Chinese ‘rise of the novel’ in the eighteenth century” (given that other conditions used to explain the “rise of the [European] novel”—e.g. a “dynamic” economy, literacy, printing technologies, etc.—also existed in China). The tl;dr is, it’s because Chinese people read novels so carefully, and read and wrote so many commentaries about them. So Chinese people weren’t just frenetically publishing gazillions of novels and reading (or tl;dr-ing) them at random, like European people. And the European frenetic publishing and the frenetic reading were in a mutually reinforcing cycle, and this is related to how markets determine literature, and also to something about the bourgeoisie. Somehow this left me feeling more unsettled and confused, like: what is a novel, what is frenetic, what is commentary.

But anyway, the empire discussion reminded me of the conversation about “the novel”—because OK, if you define “the empire” or “the novel,” not as a historical tradition that links different empires and novels to Alexander the Great or Don Quixote or whatever, but as an objective phenomenon that can arise anywhere… then what do the different examples have in common? What if it’s the same for novels as for empires, i.e.—“it’s big”?

This is something I have thought in the past about novels. The novel (as Bakhtin points out) is the first major literary form younger than the technology of writing; by definition, it encompasses more than a person can think about all at one time (so it has to be written and “discovered” over time—not just by the reader, but also by the writer). Which made me wonder: is that what an empire is—a space too big to think about all at once, without administration by writing?

At that point, we started taking audience questions, which turned out to be about our “different approaches”: John, a historian, almost never says “I”; whereas I, Elif, am constantly talking and writing about myself. Soon, we ended up at a place where John was representing “objectivity,” and I was representing “subjectivity.” It was a very pro-subjectivity room, which is in line with a central observation of postcolonial criticism, viz. the geographically unequal distribution of “subjectivity,” where people in “the West” get to be thinking subjects, and everyone else ends up becoming an object.

This is what brings me to Descartes—because some decoloniality people actually tie imperialistic thinking back to Descartes, and I got completely obsessed with this last year when I was researching the Ukraine essay. But as usual I’m putting the really juicy stuff behind the paywall… and you know that means Descartes.

Thanks for reading!