The other "Canon"

[lawpark]

Dream of Red Chamber - the appeal are mostly for young feminine readers, and then of course it has good poetry embeded (so good that the poetry actually reflect the characters described); but I actually find it a bit rough-going upfront when I first read that - like Dante, the Red Chamber creates a world on its own - but it takes much more effort to get into it (and of course, I recalled someone actually called Dante's first Canto boring - might have been Gramsci but I could be very wrong). A lot of scholarly efforts go into authorship and trying to guess the ending. In a way the text is prone to academic interests because of the high poetry, requiring deep studies, and offers lot of room for textual studies.

On Jin Yong - the appeal is very different - most teenage boys AND girls love the stories from the beginning. The characters might be shallow, but actually hit the Chinese chords quite deep (you can consider those typical psychology / character of Chinese ladies in their late teens and early twenties - might be more from 1950's to 1980's, possibly different now - and actually matches with the ages of the supposed characters anyway). And it is in the Wuxia genre, not modern emotional novels like Jane Austen - the plot actually needs to be seen in the same way - exciting thorughout, though not without depth. In Jin Yong's third edition many of the plots actually get streamlined; yet the outcome is poorer than the second edition which still has hints of being a serialized output.

In modern literary study, of course Hong Xue (Red Studies) is big, and lots of studies on Lu Xun (mostly because of state-sponsored propaganda), but interests in studying Jin Yong is strong (despite not as much to study - no unfinished story, no mystery of authorship, no class interest of note). Maybe the liking for Jin Yong betrays my time and location of upbringing ... but at least among modern Chinese authors, I think he has the best shot of being canonized in the future.

[JBI]

Dream of Red Chamber - the appeal are mostly for young feminine readers, and then of course it has good poetry embeded (so good that the poetry actually reflect the characters described); but I actually find it a bit rough-going upfront when I first read that - like Dante, the Red Chamber creates a world on its own - but it takes much more effort to get into it (and of course, I recalled someone actually called Dante's first Canto boring - might have been Gramsci but I could be very wrong). A lot of scholarly efforts go into authorship and trying to guess the ending. In a way the text is prone to academic interests because of the high poetry, requiring deep studies, and offers lot of room for textual studies.

On Jin Yong - the appeal is very different - most teenage boys AND girls love the stories from the beginning. The characters might be shallow, but actually hit the Chinese chords quite deep (you can consider those typical psychology / character of Chinese ladies in their late teens and early twenties - might be more from 1950's to 1980's, possibly different now - and actually matches with the ages of the supposed characters anyway). And it is in the Wuxia genre, not modern emotional novels like Jane Austen - the plot actually needs to be seen in the same way - exciting thorughout, though not without depth. In Jin Yong's third edition many of the plots actually get streamlined; yet the outcome is poorer than the second edition which still has hints of being a serialized output.

In modern literary study, of course Hong Xue (Red Studies) is big, and lots of studies on Lu Xun (mostly because of state-sponsored propaganda), but interests in studying Jin Yong is strong (despite not as much to study - no unfinished story, no mystery of authorship, no class interest of note). Maybe the liking for Jin Yong betrays my time and location of upbringing ... but at least among modern Chinese authors, I think he has the best shot of being canonized in the future.

Well, I am yet to see the study that says he is popular because he owned one of the most successful International Chinese newspapers. I mean seriously, he has maybe 4 superb novels, and he promotes them to this day in Ming Pao even after selling the paper.

He also rewrote his books twice, which shows he is obsessed with his own legacy, and with being "pleasing to the contemporary public."

Don't get me wrong, I've read him, and see his skill, but he is like Alexander Dumas, fun when you are reading, but kind of hollow afterward - one can get lost in a Dumas hero, like a Jin Yong hero (except for Guo Jing, awful characterization) but it is the idea of Jin Yong's world that is selling, the immoral China as it functions as a reflection to the contemporary scene (even more so in the Jin Yong generation of China that culminated in that event that didn't happen in 1989).

[mortalterror]

Stluke, you like western literature from the Renaissance, Romantic, and Modern era. But have you read any of the literature from Greece, Hungary, Poland, or Portugal from those eras? Those countries generally don't make the western cannon lists, but Luis Camoes, Vitsentzos Kornaros, Janos Arany, Dionysios Solomos, and Constantine Cavafy are all very strong poets worthy of our collective attention. The western canon isn't complete by any means without them.

[ralfyman]

The need for a canon is painfully obvious: one cannot read everything, and there are critics who have read more than most and are in a better position to advice others on what to read.

What JBI and JCamilo are suggesting is that a universal Canon is impossible because a Canon assumes an all inclusive list of that which is essential reading... and this is all but an impossibility in a great many languages. How many more works of truly marvelous writing exist in the German, French or Italian language beyond those recommended in Bloom's Canon? If we expand the Canon to a universal scale, we are faced with an infinite wealth of worthy writing itself worthy of a Borges' tale.

Certainly, we can act as tourists. Sampling one or two books from each culture... and that is fine. But ultimately, most of us find the a certain culture or language and perhaps a certain genre speaks to us far more than others. Even if we are not scholars... we will often find ourselves focusing upon a limited range of literature. Like JBI, I tend to focus far more upon poetry than the novel. Indeed, I may actually tend to read theater or plays, non-fiction, and shorter forms of fiction more than I read novels. I've read Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, and Checkov... but I'm not overly interested in delving deeper into Russian literature. I love Sterne, Swift, Voltaire, and Rousseau... but could do without most of the rest of the 18th century. I'm not overly interested in American literature after WWII with a few exceptions (Richard Howard, Cormac McCarthy, Anthony Hecht, etc...). I have little interest in Roman writings beyond Virgil, Ovid, and perhaps Horace, but I love the Greeks. I love the literature of the Renaissance and Baroque (Dante, Petrarch, Ronsard, Shakespeare, Spenser, Herrick, Cervantes) and the literature of Romanticism through Modernism... again especially poetry and especially from the English, French, Spanish, Italian, Latin-American and German oeuvres (Holderlin, Novalis, Goethe, Blake, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Yeats, Hugo, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Maupassant, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarme,Valery, Proust, Garcia-Lorca, Neruda, Borges, Garcia Marquez, Hernandez, Vallejo, Machado, Alberti, Rilke, Hesse, Mann, Wilde, Pater, Montale, Calvino, etc...)
from the non-Western world I have special interest in Japanese and Middle-Eastern literature which mirrors my interest in the visual arts of those cultures. certainly, I recognize that Russia, China, Holland, Portugal, Australia, JBI's beloved Canada, Indonesia, India, Africa, Norway, Sweden, etc... all certainly have works worthy of reading... but my time is finite... and so I stick with that which brings me the greatest pleasure.

Against the reality that there can never be an all-inclusive canon lies the reality that one cannot read everything. And knowing what brings you the greatest pleasure will involve, at least, going through works randomly and putting them aside when you feel that they don't give you pleasure.

If, at some point, you heed advice from another, then there's your canon: you have to exclude some works because you don't have the time (or even money) to read them.

Ultimately, we have to accept that our "time is finite," so we choose what has lasted and read them, or we buy or borrow one work after another and experiment.

Now, some will argue that "many" have lots of works at home or can access them easily in libraries or even online, but this is not true.

Finally, I am not surprised that most of the names mentioned in your message can also be seen in books like Bloom's The Western Canon, if not in various anthologies, all selected by professional critics and scholars.

[ralfyman]

Which is exactly one of the themes of Borges, specially in tales like Funes.

Possibly, Borges had his own ideas of reading lists:

For example,

http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/grtborges.html

[JCamilo]

Yes, he made them for fun and not for guidance. Simple as put, he was often hired to select texts , etc and saw listing as a style. Anyways, it is notable that as a teacher he didnt gave his students lists of what to read.

As ralfyman, who said you must list something not personal like a list? You can listen to critics, but mostly, listen to another authors. If you listen to Neil Gaiman you will hear "Chesterton". Much better.

[lawpark]

Well, I am yet to see the study that says he is popular because he owned one of the most successful International Chinese newspapers. I mean seriously, he has maybe 4 superb novels, and he promotes them to this day in Ming Pao even after selling the paper.

He also rewrote his books twice, which shows he is obsessed with his own legacy, and with being "pleasing to the contemporary public."

Don't get me wrong, I've read him, and see his skill, but he is like Alexander Dumas, fun when you are reading, but kind of hollow afterward - one can get lost in a Dumas hero, like a Jin Yong hero (except for Guo Jing, awful characterization) but it is the idea of Jin Yong's world that is selling, the immoral China as it functions as a reflection to the contemporary scene (even more so in the Jin Yong generation of China that culminated in that event that didn't happen in 1989).

I actually grew up in Hong Kong - never in my life read Ming Pao once - yet fascinated with Jin Yong actually not while I grew up, but after I've grown up - first finished reading all his novels after I started working. Personally, I did not feel Ming Pao at work in his getting famous - he is popular to the extent that many bookstores do not put their titles out - you need to ask before you will be presented a packaged set.

Yes, Jin Yong is no Virgil - he clearly didn't think about destroying his work after finishing it. And because of his obsession with legacy, he also stopped writing wuxia novels when young.

Jin Yong is very Chinese in that the world he describes is NOT immoral - it could be a tough world with lots of killings, but the main characters always are struggling with what is right to do. And there is no Krishna as a God saying in the background that killing your kinsman is okay as long as it is your responsibility in life, nor the glorification of an Alexander.

[ralfyman]

Yes, he made them for fun and not for guidance. Simple as put, he was often hired to select texts , etc and saw listing as a style. Anyways, it is notable that as a teacher he didnt gave his students lists of what to read.

As ralfyman, who said you must list something not personal like a list? You can listen to critics, but mostly, listen to another authors. If you listen to Neil Gaiman you will hear "Chesterton". Much better.

One doesn't need to be a teacher or impose to students to exclude particular texts. A list from a famous author, anthologizing, and even editors' and publishers' decision on what to print are also factors involved in the same.

[JBI]

I actually grew up in Hong Kong - never in my life read Ming Pao once - yet fascinated with Jin Yong actually not while I grew up, but after I've grown up - first finished reading all his novels after I started working. Personally, I did not feel Ming Pao at work in his getting famous - he is popular to the extent that many bookstores do not put their titles out - you need to ask before you will be presented a packaged set.

Yes, Jin Yong is no Virgil - he clearly didn't think about destroying his work after finishing it. And because of his obsession with legacy, he also stopped writing wuxia novels when young.

Jin Yong is very Chinese in that the world he describes is NOT immoral - it could be a tough world with lots of killings, but the main characters always are struggling with what is right to do. And there is no Krishna as a God saying in the background that killing your kinsman is okay as long as it is your responsibility in life, nor the glorification of an Alexander.

The only morality in his novels is "serving the people." or looking out for those caught in the struggles of China - he just lifted the concept from Water Margin and kept rehashing it with his xenophobic outlook on history, and his Han Chauvinist ideology.

The Chinese tradition has no morality, Chinese culture has pretty much never had an idea of morality, and Chinese governments, from ancient times to today have always been corrupt. He is looking for a heroism within there, well, I'll tell you where that heroism is, nowhere.

His father himself was part of the "scholarly elite," and as such, he has nostalgia for the time period, but any half-rate historian can realize the dream of China as a great scholarly country is fallacious, simply put, the scholar class always serves the rich in China, which is still the case, and gives a legitimization to the current government in power.

Now, his obsession with the heroism is always taken with a grain of salt - Guo Jing, the hero of his masterpiece, ultimately fails, though he is noble, as the Heroes in Water Margin do. Half of his other heroes retire from the world, his famed trilogy ends with the hero running off with a Mongol while a fascist regime sets on China. Others just leave the conflict, or kill themselves.

His world is problematic in that it still illustrates the contemporary flaws in China - but he supports a reigning power there.

He was, I believe, the first person to meet with Deng Xiaoping from Hong Kong. He supports a regime, and his fiction supports a regime - he is a king sellout politically, and does not hide it. How does that effect his fiction? Well, his fiction promotes the current regime's policy. He is very much involved in politics in his fiction, his fiction even illustrating development in communist Chinese history - his work is racist, it is xenophobic, and it is self-righteous. He himself even saw that, leading to him writing his last novel, but even that text is just another reaffirmation of how good Chinese culture is.

It's simple, you want a more well versed reading of Chinese culture, you read Dream of Red Mansions, or Jin Ping Mei, or a history book. World history right now is afraid to touch Chinese people, and Chinese historians are some of the most self-proud, xenophobic bigots around. They still teach that the west is responsible for the decline of China from number one, and we are the bad guys - that is what is taught in school in China. Why don't they teach how the Wong Merchants got loaded off of selling opium to China at an inflated price, or how the aristocratic class, which existed in China far longer than in Europe pretty much enslaved the local population, or how Chinese polygamy is still practiced to this day?

They don't for a reason - it's part of a propaganda model from a culture that is so self-important, and so afraid to criticize itself. The first real thinkers to do so have all been purged, Mao included. Now we have the Deng Xiaoping Jin Yong Model of historical and cultural discourse - China the Heroic, China the Beautiful, China the scholarly, China the fair, China the culturally rich, China the great - where is the criticism? Where is the person saying, if you are writing historical fiction, how is that woman able to walk when she would have been bound at the feet and forbidden to go outside just some 60 to 70 years ago, or, by extension, 15 years or so before the book was written. Where is the person saying at this time period, life expectancy was less than 30 for the vast majority of people. That doesn't factor in Jin Yong, and nor does it factor in Deng Xiaopingism which his ideology is matched with.

[JCamilo]

One doesn't need to be a teacher or impose to students to exclude particular texts. A list from a famous author, anthologizing, and even editors' and publishers' decision on what to print are also factors involved in the same.

Really? Where are the anthologies of 100 years ago? And the publishers decisions that left out several of canonical authors?

And really, lists from a famous author? Who Stephen King canonized? There is a work that he lists several horror influences, but where is all this importance? Well, Borges has a list, but if you read Borges, you already access the canon, so such listing as beginers guidance is meaningless.

You certainly does not expect that something that is lasting is determiend or helped by stuff that people forget in 3 years, do you?

[WymanChanning]

...or how Chinese polygamy is still practiced to this day?...

Is it really that polygamy is still practiced in today's China? Do you have any evidence to share?

[JBI]

Is it really that polygamy is still practiced in today's China? Do you have any evidence to share?

Evidence？Just go to Beijing and take a look around, the whole culture is obsessed with it. They made TV shows (most removed) about it, and you see it on the street. It is not uncommon to see a Mercedes packed with 4 prostitutes in the back (who look like they are 16), or to see an old man anywhere picking up hookers. Likewise, culturally everywhere you go it is all people are talking about, so and so's 小三 (little three, slang for mistress). High divorce rates almost always point toward husbands having mistresses, and you see it everywhere.

Anywhere that business is done has prostitution linked to it - Karaoke bars, Bars, even fancy restaurants all have hookers at the go, seeing old men with young girls is not uncommon either, likewise, with the presence of migrant workers from the countryside, having a paid girl on the side has become common, especially in places like Beijing or Hangzhou, or other big cities.

Everyone knows it is there, it's just the government has decreed it is not to be talked about. The same way they told me in my text book that China has no gender discrimination.

I would say about 1 in 10 of the local students at my university would do sexual favors for men for money (all denying it, but you encounter them everywhere) and talking to people suggests it is the same in other institutions. Someone needs to be buying these women.

Likewise, my textbook told me that women are only worth something until they are 30, and that if a husband cheats and abuses her, the wife still should act to save her marriage, and not be selfish and divorce him. It's so ingrained in the culture it is ridiculous.

One need only look at how many old people are married to young women there to see what the problem is - 84 year old Nobel Laureate Yang Zhen, for instance, moved back to China and married a 28 year old student, having kids, and the Chinese public calls him a national hero - great example, some old bum having kids with his student, a national hero. And party members driving Ferraris packed with hookers (many poor migrant women from the country side) is another great example of the cultured, scholarly, equitable China. That's your culture without an ingrained sense of morality for you - basically a culture where anything is permissible as long as you have money.

Take Hong Kong for example, this from a 1996 clipping http://www.nytimes.com/1995/02/07/news/07iht-lunar.html

Or this article will give you a better breakdown http://factsanddetails.com/china.php...=4&subcatid=20

The real problem is this, in China women are seen as marriage material only up to age 30. IF one gets divorced, remarrying is almost always more difficult for the woman, and there is societal pressure on her to accept infidelity as a part of her marriage. Likewise, for men, there is nothing telling them what they are doing is the least bit wrong, and everything telling them they have a right to it. Once their wife hits 30, she is rather unable to go anywhere without her losing something, so he would technically have a free reign.

This is not to say infidelity doesn't exist everywhere, but "supporting a mistress" in the Chinese sense is a very Chinese thing. Taiwan was infamous for it back in the day when the Chinese government really cracked down on it, but since they've started cracking down on it, and China has learned from example and has increased - with wealth come concubines if you will.

[JCamilo]

But then, prostitutes, marriage with young women, mistress, etc. are not exactly polygamy and not just in China, right? Hugh Heffner is Canadian right (or at least from reat Canadian nation people call America ) ?

[JBI]

But then, prostitutes, marriage with young women, mistress, etc. are not exactly polygamy and not just in China, right? Hugh Heffner is Canadian right (or at least from reat Canadian nation people call America ) ?

he isn't married right now, he is just polygamous. There is a difference between a womanizer and someone who is married and supporting 3 other women, and whose wife probably knows everything and has society telling her it is his right.

[Alexander III]

he isn't married right now, he is just polygamous. There is a difference between a womanizer and someone who is married and supporting 3 other women, and whose wife probably knows everything and has society telling her it is his right.

But once again it is not a chinese thing, so much as a third world thing. I remember that Moscow and most cities in eastern europe are ridiculously full of prostitutes; if you are a young man they often find you rather than the other way round. I remember being in a club in Moscow and being offered sexual services from half a dozen different girls, that night in the same club.

And keeping a woman on the side is not uncommon in europe, the only thing is that one needs more wealth to be able to pull if of in europe, but it is done. For example a famous Italian actor during the 60's had two wife, and children with them both, and he was open about it. The wife's new about each other and the public didn't overly criticize him for it, it was accepted because he was a rich and famous man and a rich and famous man may very well have several wives.

I guess maybe the shock might be stronger for you as I think that Canada and the USA are much more sexually puritarian and repressed compared to europe which is much more liberal. I mean one of the main attractions of Amsterdam is the prostitutes...And its no secret.

Another common example is that in America, university students don't use prostitutes as it is taboo - in my university and many universities in europe, students regularly visit prostitutes. Though this is more the Italians and French than the english, a middle class English student wont use a prostitute, a middle class french or italian one will, only the upper class english students use them for some reason. I find all these tidbits of anthropology fascinating. But I digress.