Transportation systems such as the bridge, the asphalt road, and the carriage represent the dominating logic of abstract space (and representations of space) imposed by the Western modern. However, as this spatial logic tries to conceal or erase the existing difference (by repressing the dangerous ferry business under the bridge or excluding the walking pedestrians), it paradoxically reveals its own ambivalent, if not self-contradictory, nature. The same logic that wipes out differences also creates fresh watching positions and new imaginary spaces, which, as shown in the cases discussed in the previous section, are specifically manifested by the new witnessing distance created by the modern bridges and the literati’s attempt to capture the fleeting carriages in the rationally framed pictorials.
Furthermore, if we consider these new imaginary spaces in light of Lefebvre’s “differential space,” in which the unseen/unknown/absent space of the criminal can no longer be excluded but is instead derived from urban space’s dominant logic, what we get is something resembling the narrative structure the of the detective story. In this sense, then, the spatiality embedded in the detective genre is no longer an imported paradigm. Instead, it was much anticipated by a newly developed Shanghai urban collective. Or, we may say it is a figure of anticipation, through which the late Qing literati try to predict and make sense of the imagined criminal space repressed under the modern/urban spatial logic. As we are reminded by Sherlock Holmes in “The Adventure Bruce-Partington Plans”:
Look out this window, Watson. See how the figures loom up, are dimly seen, and then blend once more into the clouded bank. The thief or the murderer could roam London on such a day as the tiger does the jungle, unseen until he pounces, and then evident only to his victim.
(Doyle 2: 398)
In this passage, if the modern façade of the quintessential capitalistic institution (the bank) is clouded by London’s thick fog and turned into the urban criminal’s cover, such a symbolic disguise of the criminal urban space behind the architectural façade of modernity is more than a common trope or cliché about the criminality in the dark.
Rather, it carries significant symbolic weight which relates detective fiction’s narrative’s structure to the modern metropolitan spatiality. Holmes’s initial gesture is to direct Watson’s eye from the cozy inside of the Baker Street apartment to the foggy streets outside the window. What should be noted here is that the jungle-like outside is already the outside filtered through the panes of the apartment’s interior. The outside world is a dangerous world of criminals, but it is precisely in the apartment that Holmes is allowed to overview the streets and to present the “dimly seen” figures to the readers, projecting an imagined space of urban jungle. In this jungle, however, the permeating fog, in turn, has also interiorized the streets by separating every individual from each other, thus turning the outside/public/collective into isolated apartments of the inside/private/individual.
Of this blurring of the inside/outside dichotomy, Benjamin’s insightful comment, again, serves as a helpful point of departure: “The street becomes a dwelling place for the flâneur ; he is as much at home among the house facades as a citizen within his four walls” (37). On a symbolic level, as the jungle outside is domesticated into the urban space inside, while the detective’s sitting inside is the precondition ensuring his seeing of criminality outside, the boundary dividing the two is somehow transformed into a spatial mediation between the two. For an urban detective, a complete investigation consists of two opposite spatial movements: to walk out of the apartment to encounter the unpredictable differences in the dangerous jungle, and, on the other hand, to stroll back into his headquarters sheltered by the
safe walls behind the modernized/standardized uniform of English façades.
As Franco Morrtti acutely points out, “[T]he murderer and the victim are inside. Society—innocence and weak—outside. The victim seeks refuge in a private sphere, and precisely there, he encounters death, which would not have stuck him in the crowd” (135-136). In other words, detective fiction tends to punish both the murderer and victim: those who offend the collective stasis of the society by their seeking for individual secrecy or particularity. To further modify his view with Todorov’s detective typology, I suggest that the detective genre’s social mentality is one that mediates between the inside and outside of modernity’s spatial division, where the two ends of the binarism—the exotic criminal on the streets and the domestic detective in the apartment—are interconnected. Guided by such a duality, with a particular focus on the spatial arrangement represented in literary texts, I will embark on a comparative reading of several Doyle’s short stories and Shanghai urbanites’ literary representations of their everyday lived space, focusing on both Shanghai’s urban architecture and their various textual representations which articulate the detective narrative’s mediation between the interior and the exterior.
Reading Shanghai literati’s urban sketches, I focus on an ambivalent duality embodied by a trope of mediation, namely, modernity’s spatial/social mapping between inside and outside. The inside/outside duality may refer to a twofold dynamic: the emerging consciousness of the private and the public and the convergence of the exotic and domestic, both of which may be symbolically represented by the interior and the exterior of urban architectural spaces. It is from the mediation between the inside and outside, I argue, that Shanghai’s urban literati manage to produce a particular mode of criminal detection.
First of all, it should be noted that the emerging “public sphere”31 in urban
31 Here I am referring to the “public sphere” defined by Jurgen Habermas.
Shanghai is the first in its kind in Chinese history. Furthermore, this particular public sphere should be construed as an interactive process instead of the product formulated between Western administration’s spatial reconfiguration and the urban literati’s response to it. As is noted by several scholars, during the last three decades of the nineteenth century, an emerging social circle, or in Bourdieu’s words, a “habitus,”
consisting exclusively of urban literati—tabloid journalists, writers, publishers, low-ranked officials, business brokers—was already taking shape in Shanghai.32 With various side jobs offering unstable income and constantly changing lodging places, a large number of these literati led a somewhat bohemian life in the urban space. To serve their needs to dwell, to write, to idle, and to spend their leisure time, various public places gradually emerged, among which the following public spaces are particularly pertinent to my discussion: public leisure parks or gardens, courtesan houses, and opium dens. These were places where the intellectuals were exposed to
“differences,” where they mediated between two distinctive spheres divided by the façades erected by the foreign concessions in the original Chinese city of Shanghai.
With these modern façades standing as a visualized filter, the urban literati’s particular mode of perception—their constant peeping into the unknown urban space both inside and outside—forms a unique trope of voyeurism, which I will read as a detective mentality seeking to see all. In this case, Benjamin’s visualized metaphor of panorama serves as an intriguing departure point for us to understand such a detective voyeurism:
The interest of the panorama is seeing the true city—the city indoors.
What stands within the windowless house is the true. Moreover, the arcade, too, is a windowless house. The windows that look down on it are like loges from which one gazes into its interior, but one cannot see
32 See Wang Min’s The Social Life of the Journalists in Shanghai, 1872-1949.
out these windows to anything outside. (Arcades Project, 532)
By offering a simulated urban spectacle composed of buildings and windows, the panorama theater serves as a perceptive filter to satisfy urbanites’ desire to delve into the unknown and demystify the urban space. What it offers, nevertheless, is nothing other than an already interiorized outside. Urban observers long for the exposure of the city’s interior secrecy, in that both dangerous pleasures and criminal malfeasance behind the doors can be turned into public spectacles. Yet, the very form of such exposure is based upon a particular spatial design where the outside is always already domesticated to the inside. Such a mode of perception is echoed in Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. In the opening of “A Case of Identity,” one of the earliest translations into Chinese, Holmes tells Watson:
If we fly out of that window hand in hand, [. . .] gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which going on, the coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chain of events, [. . .]
it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable. (Doyle 2:287)
In the chaotic urban London, Sherlock Holmes becomes what Raymond Williams describes as a “ratifying figure,” “the man who can find his way through the fog, who can penetrate the intricacies of the streets” (227). Such a flying and escaping image, with its aerial view capable of seeing all (including what is behind the doors), may find its counterpart, however unlikely at first sight, in late Qing Chinese literati’s literary representations of the “public space” designated by the Western authority:
華人遊息闢公園，鐵作圍欄與柵門。三五茅亭聊備坐，碧梧遮日任 風翻。 (Gu 98)33
33 “For the leisure of the Chinese, the park is newly open within the iron gates and railings. / Few thatched huts offer few seats, with the lush sun-sheltering leaves of London Planes flapping in the winds.”
沿河草地碧芳菲，半面臨街鐵索圍。傍晚兒童遊戲集，踢球奔走快 如飛。(Gu 98)34
江干何處立斜暉，碧草清陰與夢違。燕子不知巡警例，隨風猶得自 由飛。(Wang 3770)35
In the first halves of these rhymes, the seemingly beautiful scene of Chinese Park (華人公園) is limited and shadowed by the circled territory within the “iron railings and the nearby streets” as well as the “patrolling police,” all of which the spatial borders and modern facades outwardly imposed by the Western Municipal Council. In the latter halves of these rhymes, the blowing winds, the children’s flying steps and the flying swallows seem to indirectly lead the narrator toward a free space that is both inside and outside of modernity’s spatial designation: it is not an outright escape from the urban modern but rather an ambivalent space shifting in between, a shifting mentality still in search of its own space beyond the boundary mapped by the Western modern public sphere. Since the British settlers founded the first public garden, the Public Park (外灘公園) in 1868, demonstrating a public space where Westerners could walk around to see and get seen by others, several Chinese-founded gardens have also appeared in urban Shanghai, among which Zhang Garden, Xu Garden, and Yu Garden were the most famous. In the year of 1900, under the pressure from Chinese intellectuals, the colonial administration opened another park—Chinese Park—beside the Public Park, which was previously for Westerners alone. In this context, the trope of “flying beyond” certain designated territories should be considered alongside Shanghai’s emerging division of the public spheres and private
34 “The verdant riverside turf is circled by the iron chains beside the street. / Kids gather to play at dusk, kicking the balls with their swift flying steps.”
35 “Where can I find the sunset along the riverbank? The green grass and the lush shadow have no place for my dream. / The swallows, ignorant to the patrolling police, still enjoy the freedom of flying in the wind.”
spheres in the late nineteenth century, which might have spatially alienated the Shanghai urbanites, preventing them from piecing together what Jameson called an
“absent totality” in terms of social space.
If the urban landscapes and architectural arrangements of the Foreign Concessions were a kind of restrictive territories where the Chinese were surrounded, intimidated, and spatially regulated and socially alienated by an intruding presence of the Western standard, it is precisely beyond these architectural spectacles of the West that the urban literati gradually derived a representational space to detect and negotiate such a domesticated foreign façade on the Chinese soil. To further explicate this trope of seeing beyond the façade and mediating between the inside and the outside, I will turn to the courtesan houses, teahouse, and wine bars in Shanghai and examine how the sinful secrecy of sex and crime, the public spectacles of fighting, and the intruding policing force were intriguingly represented in urban literati’s literary representations through their rhetorical designs.
For most of the rather bohemian literati in urban Shanghai, the city’s glamorous leisure quarters of prostitution were closely connected to their career of writing and publishing. As many of these intellectuals had become the so-called
“literati who had fallen from favor” (失意文人),36 they inevitably sought comfort from the “Shanghai Flowers,” the courtesans and prostitutes whose very destinies were considered by the literati as similar to theirs (Yeh 432). In terms of spatial distribution, the leisure quarters of courtesan houses, teahouses, and the emerging publishing houses were densely spread over the commercial district in the British Concession, occupying the areas between Shanghai’s main streets such as Fuzhou Road (福州路; The Fourth Avenue), Nanjing Road (南京路; The First Avenue), and Henan Road (河南路) which meridionally strings up Fuzhou and Nanjing Roads. This
36 See Yeh 432.
particular zone of publishing and prostitution business was mainly composed of a unique apartment block called linong (里弄), within which a new kind of residential unit called shikumen (石庫門), or the “Stone-gate,” was designed and built during the 1850s and 1860s to accommodate the refugees swarming into the urban space. After the lower class and proletariats were driven into the Concessions by the Taiping army, beside the hut slums along the riverside and the bourgeois community in western Shanghai, there were few affordable choices left for the newcomers.37 To accommodate this excessive population while exercising efficient governance over the city slums, the Western city planners and architects invented this particular form of architectural space and construct block apartments for rent, providing cheaper residences for the immigrants in the downtown, which, however, soon turned into the city’s famous red-light district (Luo 51-54). With such rapid compartmentalization of urban space into China’s most prosperous leisure quarters and the block apartments’
mixing with the unlicensed squatter houses, these blocks soon evolved into an unruly space of prostitution, crime, and disease. Thus, Shanghai’s courtesan houses, teahouses and wine bars during the late Qing period not just served as the public spaces wherein the urban literati could engage in social activities; they were also spaces where local gangs and residents would compete and negotiate their secretive territories between the block apartments and their narrow alleys.
Such a criminalizing of urban space also incurred the Foreign Concessions’
administrative regulations, as is depicted in Chi Zhizheng and Ge Yuanxu’s accounts of the official ban on chi-jian-zha (吃講茶), “having a cup of tea to settle a dispute.”
The emerging pubic spheres of Shanghai and the private residential units were thus interwoven together, forming a quarter where the public was juxtaposed with the private, where individual clients might be under the scrutiny of the administrative
37 The description of Shanghai’s soaring house price in recorded in Notes about the Travels in Shanghai. See Ge Yuanxu.
gaze. From the 1890s to the 1910s, the Municipal Council gradually established a set of protocols regarding every aspect of these blocks: fire control, public hygiene, and the registration of residential identity were among the most urgent issues for the administration (Li 293-296). This way, the authorities had successfully imposed stringent regulations upon shikumen’s architectural format: their venting and drainage designs and their coded doorplates, for instance. As a result, many of the newly built blocks had assumed a rather standardized form: with the outlook of a Victorian terraced house, these new apartments had the small encircled yard of a traditional Chinese house and the Western-styled fronts uniformly facing the streets in Gothic, Classical, or Baroque fashion.
Nonetheless, even if modernity’s spatial restructuring had transformed the interior texture of Shanghai’s secretive and sinful space into the public spectacle, Chinese literati’s ambivalent representations of a bloody crime in March 1877—an incident happened behind the façade of a standardized unit residence—still implied a
“differential space” undermining modernity’s dominant spatial logic. A courtesan’s client was stabbed to death by another courtesan’s client, who climbed into the brothel from the street, because the latter mistook the former for his favorite courtesan’s new lover. The crime was closely followed by the reporters in three installments with precise details of space and direction, scene and actions, interviews of the witnesses, and meticulous descriptions of the post-mortem examination (Shanghai News 19:
11930-11938). Yet, despite all these attempts to explain the shocking bloodshed, in the last headline piece, the commentator did not call for further public intervention or investment to prevent similar crimes. Contrary to his previous two reports which seemed to rationally and objectively represent a crime committed in a modernized apartment block, the writer anxiously concluded the reportage by claiming that such an unpredictable crime only affirmed the significance of “destiny” and “fate” (命數)
in the Chinese tradition (19: 11953). These news articles reveal an collective anxiety in their rhetoric ambivalence. On the one hand, they try to pierce into the city’s secretive criminal space behind the modern façade of shikemen apartments with the seemingly authentic and transparent representations; on the other hand, they try to keep modernity’s time and space at bay by resorting to the Chinese conceptualization of time and space: fate and destiny.
In this sense, the standardized apartment blocks not only functioned as the capsule hotels, providing a new dwelling experience with compartmentalized spaces, but also gave rise to an intriguing spatial division where prostitution, thuggee, and other secretive criminal activities were stilled allowed under the superficial regulating and policing epitomized by the formulated architectural façades. In addition, with the exotic architectural façades literally dividing the residents’ living space into the private interiorized Chineseness and the exteriorized public foreignness, a unique spatial imaginary in-between the public policing and private criminality might have been nourished.
This superficial policing through the architectural division between the interior/private/domestic Chinese and exterior/public/exotic foreignness during the late nineteenth century should be further contextualized in light of Shanghai’s changing landscapes, especially the increasing presence of the Western-styled public buildings in the Foreign Concessions: the English and French consulate buildings in the Classic and Colonial styles on the bund, the Holy Trinity Church of the nineteenth
This superficial policing through the architectural division between the interior/private/domestic Chinese and exterior/public/exotic foreignness during the late nineteenth century should be further contextualized in light of Shanghai’s changing landscapes, especially the increasing presence of the Western-styled public buildings in the Foreign Concessions: the English and French consulate buildings in the Classic and Colonial styles on the bund, the Holy Trinity Church of the nineteenth