I use the word “market” broadly to include the academy as well.
For the insistence on literature as representation resonates with a
popular trend in literary studies in American academia today, which
privileges the local over the global, the ethnic over the universal, differ-
ence over commonality. The irony is that, when literature is treated as
representation of a culture or ethnic group, it is often found wanting
for being either “too much” or “too little”: too little, if a literary work
does not sufficiently “reflect” the culture or ethnic group it supposedly
represents; too much, if it overemphasizes a certain aspect at the
expense of other aspects of a culture or ethnic group. Paradoxically,
although these two perceptions seem contrary to each other, they lead
to the same conclusion that the writer or artist “panders” to foreign
readers or audiences. Filmmakers such as Ang Lee and Zhang Yimou
and fiction writers such as Ha Jin and Gao Xingjian have all been
criticized in one way or another for catering to Western voyeurism, the
West’s appetite for exotic China, or the taste of Western readers,
especially the Swedish Academy’s Committee on the Nobel Prize in
Literature!
This kind of criticism finds explicit expression in an article
published in China Dailyon July 24, 2000, by Li Rui, the renowned
Chinese fiction writer. Li aims his rebuke at the avant-garde Chinese
writers of the 1980s, who “pandered to the Western literary establish-
ment.” “None of their works were truly original; none expressed the
true spirit of the Chinese people. But the Western academy loved
them.” He then urges his fellow writers to reject Western values as the
sole yardstick for literature and to “reflect the spiritual world of the
Chinese people and China’s unique culture” ( Li Rui 2000).
Li’s passionate appeal to Chineseness reveals two contradictions.
One is a contradiction between antiuniversalism and universalism.
While he rejects Western taste as the universal standard for evaluating
literatures from different parts of the world, he nevertheless resorts to
“Chinese culture,” “Chinese people,” or “the Chinese spirit” as a
universal category. When he calls upon his fellow writers to adhere to
“Chinese characteristics,” we must ask: what are they exactly? Who
decides what is characteristic and what is not, and which of the
countless “lives and experiences of the Chinese people” should a
writer portray to represent “the soul of our culture”?
Returning briefly to Borges’s essay, we see the irony of which Li Rui
seems unaware, that the insistence that “a literature... must define
itself in terms of its national traits is a relatively new... and
arbitrary concept,” a fairly “recent European cult” (Borges 1999:
423). Elsewhere I have called such preconceived notions of what10 Michelle Yeh9781403976079ts03.qxp:Layout 1 11/9/07 11:08 AM Page 10