China Blues

Fortress Besieged by Qian Zhongshu  (圍城，围城) 

“1937 was a hellish year for China,” writes Jonathan Spence in his deeply informative introduction to this popular and highly acclaimed novel.  “After years of threats and corrosive expansion into Chinese territory, the Japanese finally moved to all-out war, first in the Peking region, and soon after in Shanghai…by the late fall of 1937, the Chinese troops had crumbled, and the Japanese advanced triumphantly through the largely abandoned defense lines to the Nationalist capital of Nanking.  There, in December 1937, the infamous ‘Rape of Nanking’ brought death or agonizing humiliation to hundreds of thousands of Chinese men, women, and children…. It is into this bleak setting that Qian Zhongshu unceremoniously tosses his hapless hero Fang Hung-chien.” 

Widely recognized as the greatest Chinese novel of the twentieth century, Fortress Besieged is, for all its satire of western-leaning intellectuals, scholars, philosophers, doctors, and professors, a remarkably un-political story, given the chaos and suffering in which it is set, focusing almost myopically as it does on the picaresque, often comical bumbling of the wisecracking “moral weakling”, Fang Hung-chien.  The prodigal son, Fang returns to China, to Shanghai, on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War, aboard the Vicomte de Bragelonne, a ship packed to overflowing with Chinese nationals, Indians, Vietnamese, French, and Jews in flight from Hitler.  With nothing but a fake diploma, no prospects for work, and the not unpleasant knowledge that his wealthy fiancée is dead, he sets out to find his place in the fraught and rapidly changing nation.  Yet the novel is hardly so serious as that, but asserts itself as a clever, unabashedly erudite comedy of manners in which we are introduced to a dazzling assortment of nationals and foreigners in late 1930’s China: “the lowly porters, shopkeepers, innkeepers, bus drivers, country folk, soldiers, prostitutes, and French policemen serving their mother country in her Concessions in China; the middle-class returned students, country squires, journalists; and the rising middle-class bankers, compradors, factory managers, Japanese collaborators, and others”, each delightfully, indelibly described.

Subtle, sophisticated, rife with allusions to Chinese and European philosophy, literature, history, culture, and folklore (each meticulously footnoted for those so inclined), Fortress Besieged is nevertheless a highly readable, highly satisfying novel for expert and novice alike.   

Qian Zongshu (Ch’ien Chung-shu, 1910-1998) is one of China’s foremost “scholar-novelists.”   A devotee of Hegel and Proust, and a master of classical Chinese, English, Greek, Latin, German, French, Spanish, and Italian, Qian is seen by many in China as the last link  in an unbroken chain of geniuses stretching back to Confucius.  Yet his life as a writer was anything but easy.  Having returned to China in 1938, like his character Fang Hung-chien, he, along with other intellectuals like him, was persecuted by Mao Zedong, forbidden to study and write and forced for years to work as a janitor. Besides being one of the few acknowledged masters of vernacular Chinese in the twentieth century, Qian was also one of the last authors to produce substantial works in classical Chinese, most notably his magnum opus, the five-volume Guan Zhui Bian, literally ‘the Pipe-Awl Collection,’ an extensive assortment of notes and short essays on poetics, semiotics, and literary history.

First published in China in 1947, Fortress Besieged was translated by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao and published by New Direction Books in 2004. 

I’d like thank my friend Estelle Wu for her recommendation that I read Fortress Besieged.  I am grateful to her.

Peter Adam Nash

Flâneur

"The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home."
                                             Charles Baudelaire

“Man as civilized being, as intellectual nomad, is again wholly microcosmic, wholly homeless, as free intellectually as hunter and herdsman were free sensually.”  

                                             Oswald Spengler

Flâneur. Derived from the French verb flâner, meaning “to saunter or lounge”, flâneur is a term traditionally understood to mean "stroller, idler, walker". As described on The Arcades Project website, he is typically an educated man and wealthy enough to spend his days strolling idly through the streets of Paris (or some other such city), probing his surroundings and making observations about people and places that might otherwise go unnoticed. He is “a narrator who is fluent in the hieroglyphic vocabulary of visual culture,” a voyeur with a “cool but curious eye”. Rootless, anonymous, an inveterate outsider, he is a man who, for all his refinement, for all his vanity, is wildly protean in nature, sometimes invisible, often solipsistic, degenerate, effete. He is a parasite, “dragging the crowd for intellectual food.” And how we envy him this, this indulgence of eye and heart and mind. From Charles Baudelaire, Georg Simmel, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce to Franz Hessel, Walter Benjamin, Juan Goytisolo, and Edmund White, intellectuals and writers alike have found themselves transfixed by the enigma of this distinctly modern, distinctly urban prowler.

The nameless 46 year-old narrator of Genazino’s short novel The Shoe Tester of Frankfurt is just such a man.  While not wealthy enough to support his penchant for wandering the streets of Frankfurt, he is lucky enough to be employed by the small but rapidly expanding Weisshuhn Shoe Factory as a tester of shoes! And so begins the irony, the humor, of this lightly, delightfully philosophical tale. “All you have to do is spend the whole day walking around in brand new shoes,” explains the narrator, “and then write as detailed a report as possible about your sensations while walking.” Troubled by his past, by failed relationships, by love, he lives his days in silent rebellion against what he calls his “unauthorized life”--the fact that he was born into the world without his consent. Yet he is no misanthrope--no Timon of Athens, no Schopenhauer.  As with all flâneurs he finds the city irresistible, drawn out of his apartment each day to wander its crowded streets, to examine its shops and restaurants, marveling like a child at the sights and sounds, and piecing them together as clues. For the details of urban life, he has a promiscuous eye (and nose), noting with interest, with pleasure, a woman in a wheelchair, a Mickey Mouse tie, the stench of “hairspray, gasoline, bratwurst, smoke and chicken excrement.” He marvels at a cockeyed dog.  In his ramblings through the city he notices a Japanese woman eating a peach, admires “an old cardboard trunk with a tin-plated handle”, observes an elderly gentleman in a restaurant who has dropped a potato on the floor. The “unlooked-at-people” hold a particular fascination for this man without qualities in his restless struggle to make sense of the city in which he swims, to discover the meaning of his aimless, lonely, fish-like life.

Wilhelm Genazino was born in Mannheim, Germany in 1943, has published numerous books, including eight novels, a trilogy, and two collections of essays.  His many literary honors include the Bremer Literaturpreis (1989), the Hans-Fallada-Preis (2003), and the Georg-Büchner-Preis (2004).  He lives in Frankfurt.  The Shoe Tester of Frankfurt was translated from the German by Philip Boehm and published in 2006 by New Directions Books, New York. 

Peter Adam Nash