On Petrus Liu's study of Martial Arts Literature
In recent posts I have focused on ethnographic approaches to martial arts studies. However, although such approaches are dominant in disciplines like anthropology and sociology, which are each in their own way often organised by a focus on 'habitus' or one of its associated cognates (García and Spencer 2013), this sort of approach need not hold a monopoly on martial arts studies. This is because martial arts are not just bodily practices. They are perhaps first and last cultural practices. They exist as much – if not more – in film, TV, literature, fantasy, and even everyday speech.
Petrus Liu discusses 'the rise of martial arts studies' in the field of Chinese literature and culture (Liu 2011: 14). This occurs in his groundbreaking study of martial arts literature, Stateless subjects: Chinese martial arts literature and postcolonial history (2011). This is an important work that is highly relevant to martial arts studies because it performs several kinds of important work. Among these are the following. First, Liu's study recasts our understanding of the status of martial arts literature in modern China. Second, it clarifies certain obscured relations between literature and film. Third, it argues that martial arts literature long had a serious cultural-intellectual status in China, but that 20th century events caused the effort to erase this status from the historical record. And fourth, it picks up on this literary form's role as a site of critical engagement with wider social and historical forces.
Consequently, martial arts literature has a largely untapped capacity to inform a critical engagement with a number of aspects directly and indirectly related to all things 'China' – including, of course, many aspects of martial arts discourse. As Liu writes in the opening words of Stateless Subjects:
The past decades have seen a broad transformation of China studies into the new Sovietology. In the international sphere, this change has involved, in equal measure, frenzied media denunciations of China's human rights violations, pollution, and military buildup – and at the same time, popular, sensationalist images of mummies, angels, and kung fu-fighting pandas. A culture of martial arts has come to play a surprisingly important role in shaping China's global identity, delineating the contours of its cultural influence, helping to predict its political transformations, and suggesting ways to interpret its historical formation as a nation-state. Far from being a trivial matter of popular culture, Chinese martial arts are persistently linked – in the imagination of academic critics, political gurus, business entrepreneurs and social activists – to the master narratives of the twentieth century: capitalism, colonialism, and globalization. (Liu 2011: 1)
From here Liu immediately announces that his study will constitute a rejoinder to the dominant ways of approaching martial arts in film and literature: 'Above all', he writes, 'nationalism has emerged as the most common explanatory paradigm for the study of Chinese martial arts film and literature. Virtually every currently available scholarly work on martial arts fiction connects the genre's historical rise, aesthetic conventions, and popular appeal to the emotional freight of representing the Chinese nation' (Liu 2011: 1). Pointing to one exemplary and influential recent study, Liu argues:
[Chris Hamm's] Paper Swordsmen: Jin Yong and the Modern Chinese Martial Arts Novel (2005), uses the status of Hong Kong as a British colony to explain the author's popular appeal to the masses, characterizing his martial arts novels as the embodiment of 'a heroic and erotic nationalism'. According to Hamm, Jin Yong's writings signify the increasing dominance of 'an essentialized and celebratory Chinese cultural identity' over a 'consciousness of loss and displacement', which serves as 'a point of reference and token of continuity amidst the uncertainties of existence' for the citizens of Hong Kong. Hamm points out that all of Jin Yong's novels were originally serialized in Hong Kong's newspapers before appearing in book form, and he argues on this basis that Jin Yong's martial arts fiction exemplifies Benedict Anderson's theory of 'print-capitalism' – the ability of serialized fiction to create sentiments of diasporic nationalism by allowing readers who have never met each other to imagine themselves as members of a coherent national community: cultural China. In the final analysis, Hamm's explanation is a psychologizing one. His argument suggests that martial arts literature is a result of the colonial inferiority complex of the citizens of the British Crown Colony. The popularity of the genre is explained by its ideological persuasiveness rather than its intellectual depth. (2)
Liu's argument about Chinese martial arts literature will come to invert and displace these terms. However, he does not claim 20th century martial arts literature as intellectual by way of reading it unilaterally and finding hidden depths. Rather, he points to its longstanding status as precisely that – a status that was eroded during modernization movements, and which changed decisively only with 20th century censorship and hostility.
Of the contemporary consensus that it always has something to do with nationalism, however, Liu notes that this interpretation generates a certain cacophony and discord among interpreters:
This common explanation of martial arts fiction as the ideological instrument of Chinese nationalism, however, has generated a bewildering array of contradictory conclusions. Recent martial arts films such as Hero (2002), Kung Fu Hustle (2004), House of Flying Daggers (2004), and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) have led critics to characterize the genre as a paean to Chinese authoritarianism, a representation of diasporic consciousness, an apologia for Chinese unification, cultural resistance to Sinocentrism from the margins, an instrument of China's 'kung fu diplomacy', an index of the exploitation of third-world labor by a Hollywood-centered, capitalist regime of 'flexible production', or the reverse – cultural colonization of America by Asia – an 'Asian invasion of Hollywood'. (2)
Phrased in reverse: 'While these interpretations contradict one another in their assessment of particular texts' relation to Chinese nationalism, they share one thing in common' – namely, 'the assumption that martial arts fiction is a by-product of China's colonial and postcolonial histories, and that therefore the economic and political organizations of China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan (semicolonial, postcolonial, capitalist, socialist, or postsocialist) should serve as the prevailing analytical framework for our interpretation of this literature' (2-3).
Of course, this would seem to make sense, given the importance placed on historicizing cultural phenomena and cultural values in contemporary scholarship. And Liu has no problems with this per se. However, in Liu's words, 'Traditional "state-centered" interpretations emphasize the problem of Chinese identity and the role of the nation-state in the production of the martial arts text' (3); whereas 'martial arts literature has demonstrated a remarkable ability to unify ideological opposites, an ability that is compounded with the genre's antisystemic, rhizomatous dispersion across many registers of social discourse' (3). Indeed, after going through another list of different 'contradictory' takes on martial arts literature, Liu points out that the 'malleable nature of martial arts fiction allows it to be assimilated to political claims about the "Sick Man of Asia'' and "China rising" with equal ease' (3).
Moreover, such state-centred or macropolitical-focused understandings of martial arts literature miss simultaneously the 'forgotten history' and the aesthetics as well as the 'vital contributions to the development of modern Chinese culture' made by martial arts literature (3). Moreover, the presentation of 'mutually contradictory views about China's relation to the world is one of the most curious features of martial arts aesthetics' (5). This is because, Liu argues, the institution of the 'Chinese martial arts novel represents a radically different political philosophy of the state' to those commonly dealt with by philosophers and political theorists. Indeed, in martial arts literature, 'the state is neither the arbiter of justice nor the sphere of moral constraints that prevents civil society from destroying itself through its own rapacity. On the contrary, the martial arts novel invents scenes of stateless subjects to explain the constitutive sociality of the self' (5-6).
If some may regard this sort of argument as just the eccentric invention of a lone critic, it must still nevertheless be acknowledged that the contrary impulse, the widespread and 'persistent desire to read martial arts narratives as national allegories has prevented us from developing a historical account of precisely what is interesting and complex about these works' (5). In fact, Liu notes, and perhaps as a consequence of the dominant tendency, 'no sustained account of twentieth-century martial arts literature as literature – that is, as a historically determinate discourse with a unique set of aesthetic conventions, philosophical basis, institutional history, and thematic coherence – has been forthcoming' (5).
Liu proposes that the 'lack of critical attention to the aesthetics of martial arts narratives stems, no doubt, from a widespread perception of martial arts fiction as potboilers for mass culture consumption that have little to say about serious politics' (5). As indicated above, such a perception 'itself rests on the even more fundamental assumption that politics is always state politics, which is precisely what, I will argue, the martial arts novel as a modern literary movement sets out to challenge' (5).
This is why Liu has two connected aims: on the one hand, 'one aim of the present book is to produce a descriptive account of the distinctive aesthetic properties of the genre', on the other hand, it also aims to 'resituate this genre as an interventionist and progressive cultural movement in twentieth-century Chinese intellectual history that invented the most important model of nonstatist political responsibility' (5).
If this latter claim may still seem hard to swallow for some, Liu quickly points out that the martial arts literature 'discourse of jianghu (rivers and lakes) defines a public sphere unconnected to the sovereign power of the state, a sphere that is historically related to the idea of minjian (between the people) as opposed to the concept of tianxia (all under heaven) in Chinese philosophy' (6). Thus, he suggests that martial arts novels present 'the human subject as an ethical alterity, constituted by and dependent on its responsibilities to other human beings':
It is through the recognition of this mutual interdependence, rather than the formal and positive laws of the state, that humanity manages to preserve itself despite rampant inequalities in privilege, rank, and status. As recounted by martial arts novels, the human subject is made and remade by forces that cannot be defined by positive laws of the state-rage, love, gender, morality, life and death. The formation of this stateless subject is incompatible with the liberal conception of an autonomous rights-bearing citizen. (6)
This is why Liu wishes to redress 'the widely accepted thesis that China's response to foreign imperialism has always been the establishment of a strong modern nation-state' (6). Rather than this, he proposes that modern Chinese martial arts literature might actually be better approaches 'as a thought experiment on this question: If we lived in a world where the meaning of politics were not reduced to the ballot-box, revolutions, fiscal crises, wars, and other trappings of governmentality, what would it mean to be a person of public responsibility?' (6)
This is a long way from most treatments of martial arts fiction – for which we normally mean 'film'. Indeed, this distance is something Liu actively seeks to draw attention to: 'Despite the global hypervisibility of martial arts cinema, no systematic study of this visual culture's literary basis in Chinese fiction is available in English. Wuxia xiaoshuo, the literary tradition that gave rise to these cultural images and political paradoxes of martial arts, is a novelistic genre unique to Chinese literature that has no satisfactory translation in English' (7).
Moreover, just because 'the global hypervisibility of martial arts cinema' means that we all tend to know about martial arts drama and fictions in terms of a history of Hong Kong cinema, and just because academics tend to diagnose many aspects of Chinese culture as connected to a certain kind of cultural pathology, this does not necessarily mean that any of this is right. And it is around these areas that Liu packs the biggest punches:
Known in the West primarily through poorly subtitled films, Chinese martial arts fiction is one of the most iconic and yet the most understudied forms of modern sinophone creativity. Current scholarship on the subject is characterized by three central assumptions that I argue against in this book: first, that martial arts fiction is the representation of a bodily spectacle that historically originated in Hong Kong cinema; second, that the genre came into being as an escapist fantasy that provided psychological comfort to the Chinese people during the height of imperialism; and third, that martial arts fiction reflects a patriotic attitude that celebrates the greatness of Chinese culture, which in turn is variously described as the China-complex, colonial modernity, essentialized identity, diasporic consciousness, anxieties about globalization, or other psychological difficulties experienced by the Chinese people during modernization. (7)
Against all of this, Stateless Subjects 'reinterprets martial arts literature as a progressive intellectual critique of modernization theory' (7). Moreover it insists on the argument that 'martial arts culture was first invented as a poetic relation between words rather than a visual relation between bodies' (7-8).
Thus, Liu asserts, 'Not only did the historical rise of martial arts literature predate the rise of martial arts cinema but the culture of martial arts, even in its cinematic incarnations and adaptations, is explicitly concerned with literariness' (8). In addition, 'against commonly accepted interpretations of martial arts fiction as an apolitical form of escapist fantasy, this book presents it as a mode of intellectual intervention that has shaped the course of modern Chinese history' (8).
The real twist to Liu's reading comes with his claim that 'The historical reason for the genre's exclusion from the Chinese canon lies precisely in its distance from and incompatibility with Chinese nationalism, which since the Qing dynasty has been a campaign to reform literature with criteria derived from European experiences of modernity' (8). In other words, martial arts literature was in a sense a victim of nationalist modernizing discourses, rather than a positive part of them:
The expansion of modernization discourse into the sphere of literary production in the May Fourth period had rendered alternative (nonmodernization-based) philosophical and literary discourses illegitimate, and martial arts fiction, which has resisted Western models of instrumental reason and rational bureaucracy, was quickly branded as the feudal ideology of 'Old China', an obstacle that must be eradicated from the field of cultural production. (8)
But this twist is also something of a double-whammy. Not only was martial arts literature regarded as anathema to nationalist modernization, it should also be understood as initially among the highest and most elite and educated of literary genres:
While May Fourth intellectuals advocated Western thought as the basis for rapid modernization, martial arts novelists continued to draw upon China's indigenous intellectual sources – Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and premodern literary models such as linked-chapter fiction. The martial arts novel in Chinese is renowned for the density of its classical poetic devices, historical allusions, philosophical precepts, and sophisticated plots. Indeed, the martial arts novel is the only genre in modern Chinese literature to be written in a semiclassical language after the early twentieth century, when the spoken vernacular Chinese (baihua) replaced Classical Chinese (wenyan) as the official language of literary communication. Unlike the "universal language" of cinema, the semiclassical language of the martial arts novel is in fact inaccessible to the masses – a fact that bedeviled early twentieth-century Chinese revolutionaries' attempts to frame the genre as merely 'popular fiction'. (8)
Consequently, because of the macropolitical and ideological twists and turns in the first half of the 20th century, far from helping with any kind of nationalist project, 'martial arts novelists were quickly demonized as "traditionalists" who were holding China back from economic and military modernization' (9).
The implications that Liu raises for the significance of all of this for understanding martial arts literature vis-à-vis China – or anything else for that matter – will be discussed in another post.
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