遲來的時間或被壓抑的空間?：晚清上海的城市現代性及偵探空間想像, 1860s-1910s

全文

(1)國立台灣師範大學英語學系碩. 士. 論. 文. Master Thesis Graduate Institute of English National Taiwan Normal University. 遲來的時間或被壓抑的空間?：晚清上海的城市現代性及偵探空間想像, 1860s-1910s Belated Time or Repressed Space?: Late Qing Shanghai’s Urban Modernity as a Detective Spatial Imaginary, 1860s-1910s. 指導教授：陳春燕博士 Advisor: Dr. Chun-Yen Chen 研究生：楊子樵 Advisee: Zi-Qiao Yang 中華民國九十九年一月 January, 2010.

(2) 中文摘要中譯福爾摩斯偵探故事於 1896 年首次在維新派文人梁啟超所辦之《時務報》上連載，並成為以科學邏輯啟蒙大眾的文化工具。作為一迥異於傳統公案小說的新犯罪文學，福爾摩斯偵探故事旋即在中國讀者間掀起一連串閱讀、翻譯與模仿的風潮。多數研究者多從翻譯引介之後的「影響」面向爬梳西方偵探文類在中文世界的傳播、模仿及其連帶社會意涵，卻未更深入探討此影響發生前接受環境本身所可能蘊含的偵探元素。本研究企圖另闢蹊徑，將研究焦點放在十九世紀中末葉上海文人城市書寫所呈現的「類偵探」隱喻及其中所透露的另類現代性。以福爾摩斯偵探小說為英文參照文本，本研究選取若干晚清上海文人書寫的城市雜記、新聞報刊、小報畫刊、詩詞及連載小說，並探討其中曖昧的敘事張力及空間游移。透過列斐伏爾的「再現空間」(representational space)、詹明信的「認知繪圖」(cognitive mapping) 以及托多洛夫之偵探敘事學等理論視野,本文試圖探問:在十九世紀中末的上海都會空間裡，面對物質和文化環境的劇烈變化，城市中的文人是否已逐漸醞釀一種前現代的「偵探式」觀看美學。本論文第一章從理論層次探討偵探敘事當中所蘊含的雙向游移及中介，並進一步將此敘事邏輯連結到「再現空間」與「認知繪圖」中所暗示的美學潛能。依循此內在空間邏輯，晚清上海文人在面對現代空間均質化與標準化的壓迫時，亦從現代性內在結構中折射出一隱而未現的「差異空間」(differential space),而此游移中介空間即本文所聚焦的偵探式再現空間。第二章探討上海文人書寫中所呈現的「幻影」及「群眾」，藉此彰顯文人面對都會奇景的觀看模式和置身無名大眾的恐慌。第三章從上海的現代交通動線及建築空間出發，描繪城市文人從租界規劃邏輯中所投射出的雙向窺探與捕捉意圖。第四章從十九世紀新興的醫療空間及自然史演化論述，討論偵探敘事中隱含「啟蒙身體/墮落身體」的曖昧雙重性，並對照晚清譴責小說中自我解構的另類身體空間/時間想像。上海文人不斷逡巡於現代與前現代之間、在場與不在場之間、未來與過去之間、群體與個人之間，而其再現與觀看之模式亦隱約暗示了現代偵探發生的潛在契機。.

(3) Abstract This thesis probes into the condition of possibility behind the introduction and reception of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories in China during the late nineteenth century. While previous scholarship points out that the translated genre could have served as the edifying tool for the Chinese reformist elites to propagate their utilitarian agenda by circulating ideas of the West, it remains far from satisfactory to regard the genre’s immediate popularity simply as China’s wholehearted embrace of the Western modernity. Questioning a belated Chinese literary modernity, I propose an alternative historiography by arguing that a detective aesthetics might have been articulated by the urban literati in Shanghai at the outset of the city’s modernization. Informed by Henri Lefebvre’s “representational space,” Frederic Jameson’s “cognitive mapping,” and Tzvetan Todorov’s detective typology, I thus embark upon a comparative reading of a cluster of cultural texts produced by Shanghai’s urban literati and several Sherlockian detective fictions. Focusing on the narratological, spatial, and social intermediation between absence and presence, between known and unknown, between enlightened and degenerated, the study explores the urban literati’s detective tropes from the following aspects: Chapter Two introduces the tropes of phantasmagoria and incognito, the fundamental visual duality between absence and presence; Chapter Three deals with the “mnemonic” traffic mapping between transience and immutability, the interiorizing/exteriorizing of architectural façade, and their relationship with an emerging detective voyeurism; Chapter Four relates modern detective narratives to an alternative corporal imagination in connection with a social-Darwinist evolutionary temporality. Problemtizing the “foreign” influence upon the Chinese literary creation, the thesis offers not only a chance to reconsider the Chinese literary modernity but the possibility to remap the Western genre’s presupposed cultural boundaries..

(4) Acknowledgements The process of writing this thesis is an ambivalent intermediation between my identity as an English major and my growing interest in the studies of modern East Asia in light of the issue of space/place. In this sense, it is not so much the final assessment of my two-year study in NTNU as the prelude to my research interests in the future. However monstrous this project may seem at first sight, it has finally taken the current shape with the help of many significant others. I am deeply indebted to my advisor and mentor, Professor Chun-yen Chen, whose undergraduate seminar on literary theories in my junior year initiated my intellectual passion for academic research and whose insightful guidance during my graduate years had turned my otherwise immature project into a master thesis. Without her constant encouragement and support, my wild imagination might have only been some unorganized bits and pieces. I also owe a lot to my committee members, Professor Frank Stevenson and Professor Yin-i Chen, whose critical reading of my draft helped me reconsider the scope and organization of this thesis, and whose support and encouragement certainly eased my anxiety and fear during the oral defense. I also want to express my gratitude to several respectable scholars during the process of formulating this project. They include: Professor Sun-chieh Liang, whose timely advice every now and then helped me through several moments of crisis during these years; Professor Tsung-yi Huang, whose scholarship on urban geography significantly changed my imagination about the potentiality of literary studies; Dr. Peng Hsiao-yen, who generously granted me the access to the libraries and archives in Academia Sinica. My thanks also go to Professor Larissa Heinrich in UCSD and Professor Andrew Jones in UC Berkeley, who not only kindly received me during my trip to the U.S.A. but also provided me some wonderful references concerning this.

(5) topic. Last but not least, I want to show my thanks to several friends and families for their wholehearted love and lasting friendship. They are: Jane Li, Elaine Liu, Sarry Tsai, Venk Yang, Yu-shan Chang, Marine Huang, Esther Wang, Steve Yang, Sharron Ou, Jason Chen, and Chia-Chun Chen. I want to particularly thank Elaine, for without her spiritual support, the completion of this thesis would never be possible. Special thanks must go to my wonderful parents. My father, the first and the only Renaissance man I have known in my life, never fails to show me the intellectual rigor of a passionate thinker. My mother, with her sensitive and caring heart, always gives me a sense of peace and confidence when I am in the midst of intellectual turmoil. To them, I dedicate this thesis..

(6) Table of Contents. Introductory I.. A Genre in Question. II.. Shanghai’s Mediasphere as the Site of Cultural Production. Chapter One: from Spatiality to Textuality I.. City Phenomenal and Imaginary: Frederic Jameson and Henri Lefebvre. II.. From Cognitive Mapping to Detective Mediation. Chapter Two: Urban Spectacles and Shanghai Detectives I.. Between Absence and Presence: Shanghai Phantasmagoria. II.. Naming the Unnamable: Monstrous Crowd and Urban Incognitos. Chapter Three: The Stratified City between Alleys and Avenues I.. 1. 14. 23. 42. Between Transience and Immutability : Shanghai Detective’s Traffic Mapping. II.. Out of Road into the House: Architectural Imagination and the Inside/Outside of Criminal Detection. Chapter Four: Medical/Biological Body and Modern Temporality. 75. I.. Pathological Body: Opium-eaters, Medical Discourse, and Detection. II.. Alternative Corporal Imaginations: Transparent Body or Sensational Body?. III. Body in Time: Darwinist Time, Collectiveness and Deduction. Conclusion: Towards an Alternative Literary Historiography Works Cited. 99 105.

(7) Belated Time or Repressed Space?: Late Qing Shanghai’s Urban Modernity as a Detective Spatial Imaginary, 1860s-1910s. Introductory. It is a hobby of mine to have an exact knowledge of London. —Sherlock Holmes. Façades were harmonized to create perspectives; entrances and exits, doors and windows, were subordinated to façades—and hence also to perspectives. —Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space. I. A Genre in Question The first Chinese translation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories was published by the Shanghai-based reformist newspaper, The Chinese Progress (時務報), in 1896. Scholars such as Leo Ou-fan Lee have pointed out that the translated genre might have served as a medium for the reformist elite to propagate their utilitarian agenda and to circulate concepts such as science, logic as well as other social institutions of the West (Unfinished Modernity 186). Eva Hung also suggests that such a choice was a “natural one,” given that the genre was “read extensively by the educated classes in the West—the people responsible for the West’s progress”. 1.

(8) (156). While it might be a rather established view to treat the imported detective fiction as the Chinese literati’s edifying tool to modernize the nation, the perception that the genre’s immediate popularity bespoke China’s wholehearted embrace of the Western modernity remains far from satisfactory. The translation of the Western detective genre into Chinese is hardly a new field for academic study, as much scholarship has been conducted by both Chinese and American scholars. Yet, previous scholarship addressing the translated detective fiction in the Chinese context invariably deals with this literary event in terms of its unilateral influence upon the Chinese intellectual circles. The reception of the genre is often interpreted as late Qing Chinese reformists’ eager attempt to appropriate the genre as the vehicle to educate the Chinese readers in an entertaining way. The translated genre is thus positioned within the context of Chinese intellectual history, with a particular emphasis on the reformists’ hermeneutic (mis)reading of the English texts in view of the genre’s edifying function in their utilitarian political agenda. Both Jeffery Kinkley’s and Ou-fan Lee’s discussions of Cheng Xiaoqing (1893-1976), one of the earliest translators and imitators of Sherlock Holmes stories in China, suggest that the Chinese literati during the first two decades of the twentieth century fervently introduced the new detective figure for two chief purposes: to entertain their readers with the “uncanny” (奇) plots, and to endorse the May Fourth discourse with the new scientific method and deductive logic prevailing in the detective genre. In this sense, the first Sherlockian fictional figure in China, Huo Sang, is created by Cheng not to inherit the Chinese feudal-judicial legacy of Judge Bao but to break away from it. In regard to Cheng’s imitation of the Western detective model and his repudiation of the Chinese crime fiction tradition, Lee sees Huo Sang as a detective figure representing a colonial subject’s internalized colonial mentality, whereas Kinkley regards this fictional creation as a hybrid character with a high agency in its own right.. 2.

(9) Despite the fact that Chinese literature does have its own long-standing tradition of court-case tales (公案小說) and knight-errant stories (俠義小說), whether the genre can be seen as the Chinese version of the detective genre seems quite questionable. As Yuan Jin notes in “Detective Fiction and New Ideology,” the traditional knight-errant stories are different from the Western detective stories in that the Chinese genre, despite its pursuit of truth and its celebration of justice, does not provide the inverted narrative temporality. In other words, the Chinese genre falls short of the suspense and the modern deductive analysis that characterize the Western detective fiction as a distinctive genre. In this sense, he denies the possibility for a local detective to be nourished in China: 由此我們就可以明白：為什麼偵探小說不能直接從中國傳統的公案小說中產生，中國傳統的公案小說不具備新型的意識形態，中國當時也不具備偵探小說需要的社會環境，所以中國自身的小說傳統無法生長出現代偵探小說，偵探小說在中國的問世只能依靠翻譯外國的偵探小說，後來的創作也只有模仿外國的偵探小說。(Yuan 6)1 Yuan might be correct about the basic differences between the Chinese genre and the modern detective fiction. He might also be right about the impossibility for the old Chinese genre to evolve into a new quasi-detective genre in a modern sense. What he has noted is a fact we can see in history: the blooming of various translated detective stories and several Chinese imitations in response to the imported Western genre after its introduction in 1896—most of these imitations are either traditional course-tale stories in the name of detective or the outright copies of the Sherlockian model.2. 1. “We now understand why detective fiction could not derive from the Chinese traditional court-case. tales. Traditional court-case tales could not foster new types of ideologies, neither did China have the social environment required by detective fiction. Detective fiction in China could only originate from the translations of foreign detective fiction, and later creations are nothing but the imitations of the foreign detective genre.” 2 See Eva Hung’s essay, “Giving Text a Context.”. 3.

(10) The studies mentioned above have paved way to our understanding of the translated genre by shedding light upon its historical milieu along with its subsequent influences on later Chinese literary creations. However, most of these studies seem to affirm two presumptions: firstly, the translated detective fiction was ushered in simply because the genre was needed as the Chinese people were in need of an intellectual enlightenment; secondly, during the last decade of the nineteenth century, China did not possess any social condition that might have nourished its own detective aesthetics, since the features that characterize the classic detective narratives were nowhere to be found in the traditional court-case tales and knight-errant stories. In view of these common assumptions, my thesis seeks to intervene in the study of the detective genre in China by examining what I will call the “potential condition of possibility” for the genre’s introduction and reception. That is to say, I would like to probe into an obscure textual field existing before the influence of the Western detective figure took shape, and to elicit a dynamic textual space that might have articulated China’s own detective voice before the English detective genre was imported and emulated by its Chinese followers. The introduction of the Sherlock Holmes stories was coterminous with the blooming of the so-called “literary journalism” in Shanghai, as both belonged to a broader enlightenment movement launched by what Ou-Fan Lee calls “a hybrid group of littérateurs—men who had some knowledge of Western literature and foreign languages but a more solid background in traditional Chinese literature” (An Intellectual History 144). Among these new literati, Liang Qichao (梁啟超) was the most influential one. During the period 1896-1897, The Chinese Progress, the first newspapers founded by him, ran the first translated Sherlock Holmes stories serialized in twelve installments, including “The Naval Treaty,” “A Case of Identity,” “The Crooked Men,” and the “The Final Problem.” As there is no direct record of their. 4.

(11) acceptance and popularity, we might judge from the paper’s huge circulation that these detective stories were widely read at that time. The circulation of The Chinese Progress ranged from 4,000 copies per issue in the beginning to 17,000 at its most flourishing period with its secondary readers reaching to an estimated 1 million (Fang 58). What is noteworthy is that the editorial board decided to end the serialization in 1897, with the story “The Final Problem.” The Japanese sinologist Tadayuki Nakamura suggests that there might have been a conflict between the “economic need to cater to popular taste and the criteria embraced by the education—and morality— advocates” (qtd. in Hung 157). If such a speculation stands, it means that the editors and publishers of The Chinese Progress might have been ambivalent toward the translated genre, whatever their initial purpose was for the serialization. If, indeed, there had been some sort of struggle on the part of these intellectuals, the nature of such a struggle is worth exploring. To probe into this possible ambivalence is the principal line of inquiry guiding the present study. If late Qing literati’s ambivalent struggle toward the genre implies certain discrepancies between their political agenda and aesthetic taste, between the projected and the perceived, and, finally, between the inside and the outside of modernity’s boundary-mapping, this ambivalence is an issue we can elucidate in light of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus. As Kim Dovey points out, “habitus” is a spatial term Bourdieu borrows from architectural concepts, as it connotes “a way of knowing the world, a set of divisions of space and time, of people and things, which structure social practices. It is at once a di-vision of the world and a vision of the world” (284). A group of people with the same habitus may inherit a set of cultural “dispositions,” a set of acquired patterns of thought, behavior, living style, and aesthetics taste. These “dispositions” are the results of an individual’s or a group’s internalization of culture or objective social structures. What Bourdieu’s concept of habitus suggests is far more. 5.

(12) than a mere static “social position” in a hierarchical society. It is rather a dynamic interaction between the objective social space and the subjective perception of that space. In this sense, late Qing literati’s ambivalent struggle in the receiving/resisting of the genre can be regarded as an intriguing crevice that reveals a deeper structural “habitus” to which the literati belong. It seems to me that only through eliciting, if not returning to, the “spatial/architectural” aspect embedded in such a site of cultural production, along with its social ambivalence, can we map out the hidden “condition of possibility” behind such an event of cultural translation as the introduction of the Western detective figure. With Bourdieu’s thinking in view, my initial inquiry has also been inspired by David Der-wei Wang’s reading of Chinese late Qing fiction, especially his proposition that China has the “capacity to generate its own literary modernity in response, and opposition, to foreign influences” (19). Taking the cue from him, I seek to contextualize the introduction and reception of the English detective fiction in the early modern China in light of the development of Shanghai as an urban space. The fact that Sherlock Holmes was the cultural product of the highly industrialized and urbanized. London—with. the. eccentric. mindset. of. the. late-Victorian. bourgeois—directs my attention to the Chinese metropolis, Shanghai, where the translated detective stories were first accepted in the milieu of the city’s mass media and reading public emerging under the foreign occupation through the latter half of the nineteenth century. In order to reconstruct the mentality and readership in relation to the formation of urban space in Shanghai, we have to address several questions: Who were these readers? Were they the elite intellectuals? Did the city’s industrialization and urbanization influence these urban intellectuals’ perception and imagination of their community and living space? Or, to a greater extent, did the reconfiguring of urban space in fin-de-siècle Shanghai bear some kind of relation to. 6.

(13) the birth of a new social space, generating a productive, despite obscure, representational space before the Chinese literati embraced the imported detective model? In Chapter 18 of The Travels of Lao Can (老殘遊記), the word “Sherlock Holmes” is used by Prefecture Bo as a compliment on Lao Can’s ability to solve mysterious cases (214). The presence of the name Sherlock Holmes in a semi-vernacular Chinese fiction seems to be out of place at first glance. Yet, if we consider the image of Lao Can as a doctor-detective in the context of China’s modernization, the term Sherlock Holmes may provide a clue to our understanding of a new episteme being fostered among the late Qing intellectuals. To be more precise, I would suggest that an imaginary detective trope is already being nourished in Shanghai’s urban modernity. To account for the articulation of the detective imaginary and the emerging urban space of Shanghai, I will analyze the newspapers, pictorials, and the topographical writings of some literati during the late nineteenth century, arguing that the literati’s responses to the city’s modern spatial logic was actually corresponding to the English detective genre’s narrative logic. Drawing on various theoretical discussions about spatiality and detective narratology, Frederic Jameson, Henri Lefebvre, and Tzvetan Todorov in particular, this thesis attempts a spatial reading of late Qing Chinese literati’s urban writings in relation to an emerging quasi-detective aesthetics. Treating their diverse literary forms as part of a continuum of collective writing, I argue that a kind of spatiality exclusively embedded in the modern detective genre—that is, the spatial/social mediation between the presence and absence, between transience and immutability, between the known and the unknown—is articulated by Shanghai literati’s representation of the city during the last few decades of the nineteenth century. With this “detective spatiality” already detectable in China’s first international metropolis, the import of the English genre should thus be thought. 7.

(14) of as an event already anticipated by a fundamental change in these urbanites’ perceiving and representational mode rather than an event that marks China’s belated literary modernity.. II. Shanghai’s Mediasphere as the Site of Cultural Production As Simon Joyce notes, during the early decades of the nineteenth century, “new forms of journalism and fiction, most obviously associated with Dickens and Mayhew’s urban sketch, gave impetus to new models of social scientific investigation” (3). The rise of sensational narratives and crime fictions in England cannot be separated from its material conditions, especially the structural change in the industry of mass media and a rising market for popular literature. In late Qing Shanghai, as the Western detective genre and its various Chinese imitations were also published in the form of installment fiction in literary journals and popular tabloids, a review of Shanghai’s literary and mediasphere during the period is necessary for our discussion. During the last three decades of the nineteenth century, Shanghai had not only transformed into a metropolitan with its overpopulated urban space and heated trading economy but, more importantly, assumed the status as an unprecedented national market of publishing industry, producing and circulating cultural products for consumers both in and outside the city. Publications such as tourist guidebooks about Shanghai, topographical pictorials, and installment fictions set in urban Shanghai prevailed the reading market, gradually forming a textual representational space for the emerging urban readers, providing a rather formulated model to the local dwellers and new comers as to what to experience in a city (Des Forges 16-17). The shaping of such a mediasphere was particularly occasioned by two fundamental factors: the new mode of production and circulation of printed books on the one hand, and the high literacy rate in urban Shanghai on the other. First of all, a. 8.

(15) popular reading market was taking shape in urban Shanghai around the late nineteenth century with the help of the imported lithography, movable type techniques, and photographic techniques, which had gradually replaced the relatively slow hand-writing and woodblock craving, making mass production of printed products possible. According to Evelyn Rawski’s pioneering survey on Qing dynasty’s education and literacy, due to the cheap printing costs,3 the price of reading materials in printed form was fairly inexpensive, making popular literature affordable almost to people from all walks of life (118-123). This new development, further, may have been reinforced during the last few decades of the nineteenth century as the Western publishing houses started to massively produce reading materials in Shanghai’s Foreign Concessions.4 Apart from the change in the printing industry, the high literacy rate in late nineteenth century China is itself suggestive of a potential reading public demanding huge consumption of amusement texts. Rawski concludes that China’s basic literacy rate in the nineteenth century was between thirty and forty-five percent for adult males, while the number is estimated to be sixty to ninety percent in urban areas—it may be surprising that in the 1890s Shanghai’s half-a-million literate adults might equal or even outnumber the English readers during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,5 a critical moment for “the rise of the novel” in Britain. In response to this fundamental change in the mode of cultural production and circulation, an accelerated media temporality, and a comparatively high urban literacy. 3. It was possible to produce a book for well under a hundred cash. A short text, on the other hand, might cost just a few cash a copy—less than the cost of a bowel of noodles. See Rawski 121. The new urban readership also owes much to a particular means of media circulation—the circulating library, which is carried by a peddler with an assortment of books in two boxes suspended across his shoulders by a bamboo. Going around the town door by door to advertize various print publications, many of which could be borrowed with low fees, these librarians helped expedite the circulation of books and tabloids. See Des Forges 10-11. 4 London Missionary Society Press (墨海書館), founded in Shanghai in 1843, was the first Western publishing house to appear in China. 5 See Watt, The Rise of the Novel 35-36.. 9.

(16) rate, a huge number of popular texts, mostly characterized by a rather fragmentary form and sensational nature. As we can see, by the 1900s, installment fictions, sensational tabloids, and numerous illustrated zazu (雜俎)6 had already emerged as the major reading materials for Shanghai people’s entertainment (Li Nan 40-42). In view of the changes in the means of cultural production/circulation and the general reading market, my discussion about Shanghai’s urbanity then shifts to the producers, users, and distributors of the city’s cultural products. They are a group of transitional figures whose living space, life styles, and intellectual cultivation were negotiating between the traditional Chinese culture and the Western modernity manifest in the Foreign Concessions—they are, in other words, the new urban literati of Shanghai.7 The socioeconomic status of the Chinese literati underwent a drastic shift during the late nineteenth century. As the empire’s bureaucrat system started to disintegrate, except for some intellectuals who inherited the family property, most literati in the southern provinces near Shanghai were forced to seek a living in the city. Equipped with the ability of reading, writing, and even the proficiency of foreign languages, many of they came to Shanghai to serve as secretaries or translators in trading companies, publishing houses, or offices of official embassies (Li 164). On the other hand, an emerging class of businessmen who thrived on the flourishing international commerce gradually replaced traditional intellectuals. The rise of the new businessmen and the downward movement of urban literates’ to middle-ranked employees together helped form a new social group, which consisted of a literate public that could read and write and exchange ideas about their society. This social group could probably be regarded as the first “urban literati” in China, a group to which Ge Yuanxu (葛元煦), Wang Tao (王韜), and other writers working in. 6. Miscellaneous notes or random thoughts as a type of literature. This “transitional” nature is also discussed in Vance Yeh’s essay, “The Life Style of Four Wenren in Late Qing Shanghai.” 7. 10.

(17) journalism belonged. As business brokers, cultural compradors, and urban dwellers who constantly moved between the inside and outside of the Foreign Concessions, these “word-peddlers” (賣文維生者) were the first group to be able to experience Western modernity bodily, spatially, and socially. In other words, they were not merely the silent users and observers of the urban space, but rather those who could reproduce and represent the city’s urban modernity in their own words. As a young Chinese literatus hired by China’s first modern publishing house, London Missionary Society Press (墨海書館), Wang Tao describes his shocking experiences after he first arrived in the city. He wrote that he was “terribly awed” by the scene of boisterous crowds, the Western residences as well as the traffic bustle within the Foreign Concessions (Li 40). Wang Tao’s contemporaries in Shanghai might have experienced similar cultural shocks, struggling between the curiosity to peep into the unknown, on the one hand, and their belief in Confucius doctrines, on the other, especially when they were exposed to the exotic, grotesque or even mythologized Western material culture. Literati like Wang Tao had recognized the power of the West, but they were also trapped in an unresolved identity crisis, a kind of ambivalence toward the imagined Western or enlightened utopia beyond their experience. When exposed to the stimuli from the Western modern, the urban literati in Shanghai were those who felt most agitated, anxious, and lost, because drastic change in their social position and profession ensued from their first encounters with the urban and/or the West. Unlike those contemporaries of theirs who could simply cry out, “queer skills and excessive cleverness” (奇技淫巧), seeing only the exotic, grotesque, and the frightening side of the urban space, these urban intellectuals had to go a step further to deal with the anxiety within. The sensuous changes brought about by the urban crowds, the speedy transportation systems, and the unprecedented crimes prevailing behind the newly established modern facades might have produced an. 11.

(18) anxiety that desperately looked for new expressions. To a great extent, their expressions would come to find their way through the installment fictions, sensational tabloids, tourist guidebooks, and even the news articles they wrote. Extending Des Forges’s idea of a “mediasphere” taking shape in Shanghai through the “broader textual and visual organization,” I have located a cluster of publications in relation to urban literati’s detective-like configurations of Shanghai within a specific period of time. I will treat the selected cultural texts as a corpus and read them alongside several Sherlock Holmes stories. The Chinese texts related to my interpretation of the detective genre in relation to Shanghai’s urban space include four major publications: (1) pictorials, newspapers, and sensational tabloids including Shanghai News ( 申報 ) and Dianshizhai Pictorials ( 點石齋畫報 ); (2) tourist guidebooks about Shanghai such as Notes about the Travels in Shanghai (滬游雜記), Notes from the Overseas (瀛濡雜志), A Record of. Shanghai’s Dreamy Shadows (淞. 南夢影錄), and A Dreamy Voyage of Shanghai (滬遊夢影); (3) installment fictions: Twenty Years of Strange Witnessing (二十年目睹之怪現象), Dreams of Shanghai Splendors (海上繁華夢), Modern Times (文明小史), and Living Hell (活地獄); (4) poetry: The Bamboo Branch Gamut of Shanghai’s Foreign Concessions (上海洋場竹枝詞). Within the mediasphere of Shanghai, each of these publications should not be treated as a cultural product in isolation. Rather, with their common basis of production and circulation, their strong inter-textual references, and shared literary tropes, these cultural texts should be regarded within “a relation of simultaneity”8 or considered as a set of texts, readings, and rewritings that are open to growth and change—in this sense, they should be considered as a genre per se. My reading of these diverse texts follows Colin Mercer’s suggestion that researchers of popular media and literature should abandon the conventional typology. 8. See Des Forges 12.. 12.

(19) by which we seek to differentiate supposedly “progressive” from “reactionary” cultural texts. Rather, we should focus on the “range of techniques deployed for configuring of the narratives of people, populations, cities, classes, topographies” (186-187). In my comparative study, instead of appropriating the conventionalized typology which aligns detective stories with the reactionary and repressive policing force of modernity, I focus on the ambivalent spatiality that is commonly shared by these Chinese texts. That is to say, these selected cultural texts may seem at once “progressive” and “reactionary” in their representation of the Westernized/modernized urban space with their quasi-detective tropes. They may simply imitate the modern spatial logic and the administrative gaze imposed by the Western settlers, but they may also articulate an ironic or even subversive distance in their representations. In this regard, the Sherlock Holmes stories will serve as a parallel structure exemplifying Victorian detective genre’s spatial configuration—be it reactionary or progressive. On the other hand, the Chinese poems, installment fictions, newspapers, and pictorials together are to be considered as a loosely bounded pre-detective genre. Fragmented as they may seem, these Chinese cultural texts not only provided a panoramic view of Shanghai as a whole but gave rise to a particular series of literary tropes. Mapping Shanghai’s urban space geographically, socially, and bodily in the milieu of the city’s drastic transformation, these literary tropes might have articulated the birth of a quasi-detective aesthetics in a modern sense during the last few decades of the nineteenth century.. 13.

(20) Chapter One: From Spatiality to Textuality. I. City Phenomenal and Imaginary: Frederic Jameson and Henri Lefebvre Inspired by Bourdieu’s insightful concept of habitus, which can elucidate the relationship between the inner phenomenological perception and the exterior structural determination, I hope to extrapolate the “spatial” aspect embedded in his sociological propositions. With this, I seek to further examine the connection between, on the one hand, late Qing urbanites’ ambivalent social “dispositions” implied by their obscure attitude toward the translated genre and, on the other hand, a potential textual space they produced. To build such a correlation between social space and city space alongside the birth of a textual space of detective aesthetics, I turn to Frederic Jameson’s spatial/social framework, which, I suggest, can further be elaborated in tandem with Henri Lefebvre’s concept of representational space in helping me filter through all the complex issues in hand. In his much-discussed essay published in 1988, “Cognitive Mapping,” Jameson proposes an innovative research model inspired by Kevin Lynch’s pioneering study in The Image of the City. Jameson puts forth a paradigmatic analysis of the seemingly isolated aesthetic forms in relation to an inevitable, but almost unrepresentable, “absent totality”—a broader spatial context or a global network that can connect every isolated or alienated individual experience to one another. Thus, for Jameson, every seemingly self-enclosed and fragmentary modernist narrative must entail their “global relativity” of colonial/capitalistic network (350). Kevin Lynch’s original analysis of urban space suggests that the urban dwellers’ alienation and sense of deprivation are directly proportional to the mental “unmapability” in relation to the. 14.

(21) local cityscape’s “legibility” and “imageability” Therefore, if an urban dweller is to feel comfortable and secure in his own city, he/she must follow the outline formed by the city’s “highly imageable” elements—that is, he/she must be oriented by the sensible and visible city form composed of paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks. Only through the acts of memorizing, imagining, and boundary-drawing can the dwellers cognitively map out their own relative position in the urban space. Through Jameson’s theoretical extrapolation, however, such a mapping of space is yoked with the mapping of the Althusserian subject’s self-recognition of the “relation to his or her own Real conditions of existence”: the incapacity to map socially is as crippling to political experience as the analogous incapacity to map spatially is for urban experiences” (353). Jameson thus proposes a new aesthetic form called “cognitive mapping”: when every individual is limited within his/her experience and fails to make sense of the space he/she is situated in (both political and physical), a new set of aesthetic figurations is created to imagine, memorize, and make sense of the “absent totality,” as the urbanite may use his/her imaginary strength to piece up the fragmentary and alienated experiences so as to grasp a whole picture as to where he/she is positioned in a city. In this sense, the individual’s sensuous or phenomenological urban experience is connected to the configuring of a collective and rather cognizable social structure. In my discussion of late Qing literati’s representational space and its relation to the shaping of an unnoticed, if not repressed, existence of a detective spatial imagination, I pose several questions regarding the literati’s cultural position in the milieu of a reconfigured urban space: How would Shanghai’s literati have responded to an environment where their habitus—their previous belief in certain modes of time/space, their privileged social status, their aesthetic taste, and lifestyle—are seriously threatened or forcibly deprived? If the global wave of colonial modernity. 15.

(22) had intruded on their perceived living space and drastically altered their inherited social-spatial environment, rendering them disoriented and alienated urbanites, would they develop a certain kind of “cognitive mapping” with some new aesthetic forms with which to make sense of the city? To formulate these questions in Jameson’s way: if Shanghai as a city during the late nineteenth century did not possess its distinguishable elements upon which its dwellers can position or recognize his/her own identity, how do we then make of the ways in which the urban observers responded or represented Shanghai’s spatial transformations in terms to their efforts to remap their own positions? Last but not least, can such cognitive mapping generate China’s detective literary tropes at all? To further probe into this potential site of cultural production, I draw upon Henri Lefebvre’s conceptualization of the production of social space. In Lefebvre’s framework there are some features compellingly resonant with Jameson’s aesthetics of cognitive mapping, especially what Lefebvre sees as the obscure domain of “representational space” emerging between the “representations of space” (the space abstractly projected by urban planners and technocrats or, the space inherently reproduced) and “spatial practices” (the perceived space composed of daily routine and the facilities pertaining to it). This domain of representational space is particularly pertinent to my discussion as it points to the very core of aesthetic representation with an emphasis on the places experienced and felt, that is, the lived space where desires, dreams, and memories are symbolically produced: “Representational space is alive: it speaks. [. . .] It has affective kernel or centre: Ego, bed, bedroom, dwelling, house; or square, church, graveyard. It embraces the loci of passion, of action and of lived situations, and immediately implies time” (Lefebvre 42). To dwell, to walk, to sleep, to eat, or to die— all these living experiences or routines entail the existence of certain loci upon which we orient ourselves in time. (Physically speaking, marking the. 16.

(23) change of locations is itself the only method to define the passing of time). What Lefebvre suggests here is a strong tendency to “speak” out the “lived situations” in the flux of time: Every living individual dwells in a locus, and it is only through the articulation of this particular locus that one is able to mark his/her position in the changing time of modernity. In other words, in the realm of representational space, to speak is also to speak about the locus, or to speak locus in qua—to speak “on the spot,” and to further relate to other spots. Paralleling Jameson’s (and Lynch’s to a lesser extent) aesthetics of cognitive mapping with Lefebvre’s representational space, we see a strikingly similar tendency: both frameworks attempt to break out of the antinomy between the subjective phenomenological perception and the objective structural determination. According to Jameson, cultural representations perform a mapping function which is needed to bridge between the specificity of individual experiences in a particular locus and the totality of geo-social space in which the subject is situated. The new aesthetic form he proposes is characterized by its attempt to grasp an always fleeting “absent cause” or an ever inaccessible “abstract space of totality,” whose very structure can only be figured out by the seemingly isolated experience of each individual. On the other hand, for a subject to be able map out his own lived situation in relation to an absent totality, it requires the very act of “speaking” or re-presenting the very locus of one’s dwelling. If Jameson’s ultimate concern lies in the revelation of an always absent cause by way of an unique aesthetic form symbolically figured by isolated spatial/social experiences, Lefebvre’s concept of representational space in turn shows how these seemingly fragmentary lived spaces, with their loci spoken out loud, can help negotiate or even challenge the “abstract space” and representations of space in its totality.. 17.

(24) II. From Cognitive Mapping to Detective Mediation From a fragmented and lived situation at present to a more abstract space of totality in absentia, such a process, as I will reiterate in my study, requires a certain kind of mediation, whose signifying movement is embodied in a spatial imaginary through rhetorical figurations—to re-present the loci where one is situated while simultaneously inferring the hidden “absent cause” through the apprehension of such situatedness. On the other hand, such a process of spatial figurations implies an ambivalent metonymic structure, as is suggested by Lefebvre’s comment on the “concealment” of the place of social space: “Perhaps it would be true to say that the place of social space as a whole has been usurped by a part of the that space endowed with an illusory special status—namely, the part which is concerned with writing and imaginary, underpinned by the written text (journalism, literature)” (Lefebvre 52). According to Lefebvre, journalism and literature may serve as the prominent apparatus in the modern state, wielding a rhetorical abstraction as a kind of concealment and displacement of the lived experiences—hence the complicity with “representations of space.” Yet, as I will try to show later, it is also through such mediation and displacement that a possible “representational space” can be symbolically teased out. In this sense, Shanghai urban literati’s representation of the city should not be seen merely as the cultural product prescribed by a preexisting homogeneous social space of the Western modernity. Rather, recalling Lefebvre, it is exactly from such an abstracted space that a generative “differential” space can be mapped out. In this perspective, Shanghai urbanites’ descriptive accounts of the city—their fragmented and incoherent urban sketches—might entail a prescriptive scheme of “representations of space” as to how Shanghai should be perceived, and it is also in these prescriptive discourses that we may identify the infiltration of “representational space.”. 18.

(25) Take for example a scene in the prose fiction Twenty Years of Strange Witnessing (二十年目睹之怪現象) by Wu Jianren (吳趼人), where the first-person narrator and his friend are having morning tea on the balcony of a teahouse in the English Concession (240-242). Overlooking the hustle and bustle on Shanghai’s First Avenue (大馬路), the narrator finds a curious queue of police officers and criminals slowly marching by, as the criminals all wear thick coats and wool robes under the scorching sun. His friend thus explains to the narrator about the rule of Shanghai’s prisons, which require the prisoners, upon the day of their release, to dress in the same way as when they were put in jail. His friend then goes on to commend the fact that even the beautifully dressed high-ranking Chinese officials would be put into an English jail if they commit “room-smashing” (打房間)9 in a courtesan house licensed by the English Concession. The narrator’s friend gives us an intriguing example of a Chinese official who happens to have escaped from punishment of the Municipal Council, thanks to his acquaintance in the English court. With this example, the author aims to condemn the corrupted Shanghai society during the late Qing period. Yet, despite the prescriptive discourse which projects a “universal justice” in line with the progressive discourse of modernity, the readers are reminded that such “witnessing” or “condemning” of a seemingly modern judicial system was rendered possible by a panoramic view of Shanghai’s well-organized streets and avenues, and the inferred existence of “licensed” courtesan houses in the English Concession, both of which products of the Western modernity in Shanghai. What the author insidiously provides, therefore, is a subtle representational space where the obvious prescription of modernity (the praise of “universal” justice) is undermined by its own modern spatial arrangement (the designed streets and licensed prostitute houses). The illusory space. 9. A common expression in Chinese courtesan novels, referring to male clients’ fighting and vandalizing in a prostitute’s room. Most of the time, room-smashing is a kind of ritualized violence for the males to demonstrate their territories.. 19.

(26) of transparency achieved by the narrative is already giving rise to an imaginary space where the absent criminal has already made his escape into obscurity. The omni-present administrative gaze behind the witnessing itself nourishs the dark corners where the criminal is always already absent—the ambivalent mediating between the two, I would suggest, underpins the very movement of detective watching. Such mediation between the absent space of totality and the present space of the lived space points to another theoretical apparatus that informs my study: Tzvetan Todorov’s seminal work on the narratological structure of the detective genre. Todorov points out that a typical detective story is in effect composed of two stories, with the first one (that of the crime) being “absent” from the book while the second (that of the investigation) being “present” in the book: In other words, the narrator cannot transmit directly the conversations of the characters who are implicated, nor describe their actions: to do so, he must necessarily employ the intermediary of another (or the same) character who will report, in the second story, the words heard, or the actions observed. (46) The narrative structure of the detective story, in other words, is based upon the dualities of present/absent, seen/unseen, and known/unknown. To know the crime, the narrator must try to display the seemingly known evidences as “transparent” and “imperceptible” as possible, so as to ensure the authenticity of the “report” in the second story (46). To know the crime, the reader must follow the steps of the detective, the reporter who can mediate between two stories, so as to bridge the discontinuity between the story of the known present/presence and that of the unknown past/absence. The project of modernity, as David Harvey puts it, is basically a “destructively creative” myth built upon the Enlightenment’s progressive time scheme,. 20.

(27) which suggests its ever-changing nature. And, in the midst of flux and change, the hallmark of modernity material basis, the only approach to any sense of “immutability” or “eternality,” Harvey further suggests, seems to be through “freezing time and all its fleeting qualities” (16-21). In this sense, the very structure of modern city planning resembles that of the detective genre, in that the rationalization of urban space and its architecture can be considered the “presence” of the city, which would display and juxtapose the seemingly transparent and authentic façade of the “known space” while trying to eliminate any ambivalent and chaotic element on the way towards modernity. During the late nineteenth century, as Shanghai’s urban space was rapidly reconfigured according to the “representations of space” projected by the Western urban planners since 1840s, Shanghai literati’s everyday living space must have been altered in terms of their representations of space and spatial practices. As the urban explorers confronted Western modernity’s grand façades built upon continuity and homogeneity, the Chinese literati at the time were turned into disoriented, alienated urbanites whose sense of social-spatial totality was drastically deprived. In response to such a “representational crisis”—their inability to rhetorically figure out the absent spatial-social totality—they might have produced a series of expressive tropes to bridge the gap between the known space and the unknown space. Between modernity’s boundary-mapping of social space and an urban reality, between the individual sensuous urban experience and the collective imagination of an absent “total space,” a representational space could have emerged out of such a milieu with its aesthetic (textual, visual, and architectural) articulation spatially figured by the urban dwellers—a tendency recalling Lynch emphasis on the urban observer’s “active role” in perceiving the world and developing his/her own image (6). What I view as Shanghai literati’s “detective representation” of the urban space lies precisely in their. 21.

(28) rhetorical intermediation, or a dynamic in-betweenness in their figuring of a chaotic social/spatial space. This is also an ambivalent spatial-social “differentiating” conceptualized by Lefebvre’s notion of “differential space,” a space always deriving itself from the homogeneous and abstract space of modernity. It is exactly from this inter-mediation, I argue, that the late Qing literati were fostering a quasi-detective aesthetics: If detective fiction can be seen as a self-enclosed textual space that is constantly creating a spatial/social mediation between the space of the crime (absent/unknown/individual) and the space of modern detection (the present/ known/ the collective), I suggest that this ambivalent mediation of space was already implied, albeit dimly, in Chinese literati’s writing about the modern urban space of Shanghai during the late nineteenth century. With their depicting, deciphering, collecting, cataloging, and boundary-mapping of the city, these urban literati might have already prepared the “condition of possibility” for the later reception and popularization of the imported Sherlock Holmes stories. In the following chapters, I would like to show how this narrative logic of the detective genre is actually “embodied” in such a “spatialized” trope of mediation in between.. 22.

(29) Chapter Two: Urban Spectacles and Shanghai Detectives. I. Between Absence and Presence: Shanghai Phantasmagoria To probe into the formation of Shanghai’s modern/urban space, we have to go back to two historical events and examine their part in helping to shape the city’s “modern” nature: one is the Taiping Rebellion (太平天國之亂) that ravaged along the southeast coast between 1850 and 1864; the other is the establishment of Shanghai’s Foreign Concessions since 1843. The parallel developments converged to cause an abrupt increase of Shanghai’s population, as the imported foreign goods destroyed the local job market in the rural provinces, while the riot of Taiping drove a huge flow of refugees from the rural areas to Shanghai. With the unprecedented accumulation of immigrants and foreign capital that demanded large numbers of human resources, the “modern” was articulated by the birth of the new urban experiences. First of all, the Foreign Concessions in Shanghai can be understood as the colonial modernity imposed upon the city, manifest in the implanted modern institutions such as the first railroads, the first gaslight, and the first electric system along with other modern facilities in public or private domains. More importantly, the Concessions also served as a border that divides Shanghai’s urban space into two imagined spheres: the modern and enlightened space as opposed to the pre-modern and chaotic space. This division of the imagined space was at first based on the visible modern institutions introduced by the colonial administration and foreign companies, but later, I argue, was developed by the rise of China’s urban literati and the new urban representational tropes entertained by various literary magazines, newspapers, and tourist guides about Shanghai . It is within this context that we can put in the. 23.

(30) introduction of the English detective, whose popularity lasted through the 1930s (Lee 202). The last three decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a rising readership for published tourists guidebooks about Shanghai and a particular form of poetry called “Bamboo Rhymes” (竹枝詞), both of which, with their sketching reports on urban literati’s experiences and impressions, served as important cultural products formulating discourses on the city and guiding the new comers as to where to go, what to see, and how to avoid trouble in Shanghai. In such a context, these texts served as a kind of buffer zone that could familiarize the urbanites with the ever-changing city landscapes under the penetrating Western modernity. To some extent, these cultural products assume the same function of physiologie literature discussed by Walter Benjamin: “It was indeed the most obvious thing to give people a friendly picture of one another. Thus the physiologies helped fashion the phantasmagoria of Parisian life in their own way. But their method could not get them very far. People knew one another as debtors, and creditors, salesmen and customers, employers and employees” (39). By the same token, Shanghai detective mapping of their living space is related to the very representation of the city with an aesthetic trope similar to the visual logic of Benjaminian phantasmagoria. What is particularly noteworthy in Chinese literati’s urban writings, thus, is their unique rendering of their urban experiences with words such as “illusion” or “mirage” (幻), “dream” (夢), and “shades” (影). Numerous guidebooks to Shanghai or stories set in Shanghai bear titles such as Dreams of Shanghai Splendor (海上繁華夢), A Dreamy Voyage to Shanghai (滬遊夢影), or A Record of Shanghai’s Dreamy Shadows (淞南夢影錄). Interestingly enough, in most of these tourist guidebooks, we can also find the writer’s particular interest in the phantasmagoria shadow play performed in the Foreign Concessions, as shown in the following sketches: “西人影. 24.

(31) 戲奕極變幻，五色絢爛光怪陸離，深山大谷密箐幽篁，變滅煙霞繽紛雨雪，鳥獸蟲魚之飛鳴食宿維妙維肖, 人物則五官四體運動如生，喜怒各形，描摹盡致。[. . .] 影戲之妙，至此嘆為觀止” (Wang 299). 10 In the descriptions of the Western phantasmagoria, phrases such as “suspicious doubt (恍疑),” “changing illusion (變幻),” “grotesque in shape and gaudy in color (光怪陸離),” “inconceivable (不可思議),” “shocking to eyes and mind (駭人心目),” are frequently used by the narrators to convey a kind of dreamy visual experience when watching the shadow play. These rhetorical tropes related to dream-like or illusory images during the late Qing period, I suggest, should be considered in part as Shanghai urban literati’s very attempt to respond to the unknown urban space demarcated by the Western modernity. Furthermore, such a use of visual tropes bespeaks a kind of “detective watching” resonating with Benjamin’s conception of phantasmagoria. One of the most frequently referred metaphors in Benjamin’s poetic rendering of urban space, the term phantasmagoria originally refers to a kind of rear-projection shadow play which can create verisimilar ghost-like figures by deploying various optical devices such as lantern, glass, and illustrated plates. Benjamin uses the term—rather than, say, photography or panorama—to refer to a particular kind of seeing: one rendered possible between shadow and light, between the seen and unseen, between sleeping and awakening, and, finally, between disguise and truth. In his discussion of the origin of detective fiction, Benjamin particularly associates phantasmagoria’s spatial significance to the detective genre: No matter what trail the flâneur may follow, every one of them will lead him to a crime. This is an indication of how the detective story,. 10. “The westerners’ shadow play is extremely illusionary with its flamboyant lighting of grotesque shapes and gaudy colors. From deep valleys to thick forests; from clouds of twilight to rains and snow. The activities of birds, beasts, insects and fish are lifelike, while the exercise of human facial expressions and four limbs are also vividly portrayed, with all kinds of emotions being accurately simulated. Shadow play as wonderful as this is never to be forgotten.”. 25.

(32) regardless of its sober calculations, also participates in fashioning the phantasmagoria of Parisian life. As yet it does not glorify the criminal, though it does glorify his adversaries and, above all, the hunting-grounds where they pursue him. (41) In this sense, the particular “watching” of an urban detective, one that resembles the visual mechanism of phantasmagoria, is built upon the duality of disguise and truth, of dreaming and awakening, as well as his constant chasing movement between the two. The “hunting-grounds” in the city, the space where the detective is led to trace the hidden or unseen criminal, is thus constituted by the reciprocal movement between the light and darkness. A detective “hunting ground” cannot simply be revealed by the detective’s piercing searchlight. Rather, the very existence of such a field is established by a particular mediation between truth and disguise casted by the shadow play. Faced with chaotic reorganizations of space and time, as if staged within a phantasmagoric shadow play, the literati in Shanghai articulate their anxiety about an altered time-space in the following rhymes: 北屯一片闢蒿萊，百萬金錢海樣來，盡把山丘作華屋，明明蜃市幻樓台。(Gu 72) 海市蜃樓幻不長，歐洲諸國盡通商。春申浦勝揚州地，奚只金釵十二行。(Gu 21) 海市中來幻境虛，誰將覆轍鑑前車。繁華今古都成夢，花貌休誇玉不如。(Gu 19)11 11. “After the weedy northern hill was opened and developed, millions of money flooded into the city like the waves of the sea. All the hills are turned into grand mansions, but they are nothing but castle floating in the illusory clouds.”; “A castle in the air cannot last for long. After European countries came to trade with China, the bund of Shanghai outshines the land of Yangzhou, as the beautiful women in Shanghai outnumbered those in Yangzhou.”; “In such an illusory land, who can take warning from the. 26.

(33) The readers can find in these rhymes tropes of time-space compression and metonymic. replacement.. Extending. the. Chinese. literary tradition. of. the. conventionalized saying “seas become farms” (滄海桑田), the frequent appearance of the illusory images in these rhymes not only conveys the change of time but also emphasizes the very mediation between the absent and the present. Betraying the narrator’s original emphasis on the transience of the mirage, these narratives intriguingly provide the readers with a hope of “traceable” route by laying bare the metonymic chain of displacement. In the first verse, before we see the splendid house of mirage in the clouds, readers are informed that the desolate northern part of the city is cleared by the foreign settlers, and then the hills are replaced by grand mansions. Similarly, in the second verse, despite the stress on the illusionary images, the narrator tells us how Shanghai acquires its superior status as the entertainment center after the European traders landed on the bund of Chunshen River (Huangpu River). Yangzhou, the city for leisure in Chinese literary tradition, is invoked only to be replaced. If we put these rhymes in the context of a rising readership of tourist guidebooks—a demand from urban readers for a detailed orientation of what to see, where to go, and how to act in Shanghai—what we encounter then is not simply the trite literary trope of “seas become farms” but rather an emerging trope of laying bare the process under the rubric of “mirage” and “illusions.” The change of the city exemplified by the illusionary. houses,. in. this. case,. is. actually. captured. by. a. historical. absence—“Yangzhou” (揚州), “weeds” (蒿萊), “hills” (山丘), and “carts ahead” (前車), invoked to ensure readers coming to Shanghai of what can actually be expected and compared with. In the preface of A Record of Shanghai’s Dreamy Shadows (淞南夢影錄), the narrator even pushes the duality between present/seen/shadows on the one hand and overturned cart ahead. Since all the prosperous cities in the past have become dreams now, you beautiful ladies should not boast your flower-like faces that outshine jade.”. 27.

(34) absent/unseen/dream on the other to a complicated dialectic: “夢有影乎？曰：有。以夢視夢，則固無影，不以夢視夢，何得無影。以夢為非夢，則因拘而有影; 以非夢為夢，則因悟而有影，是皆心之所造焉而已。[…] 以為夢，則其事皆信而有徵，以為非夢，則其情又若迷離惝恍。以是為夢，影而已矣(96).12 What the narrator repeatedly emphasizes here is that dreams cannot be comprehended and made present without the visible phantom-like shadows, but the shadows are less the embodiment of dreams than the medium through which to evoke the absent dreams. Following this logic, we may infer that the proper way of “seeing” in the urban space of Shanghai is when the urban observer assumes an ambivalent position mediating between the disguise of shadows and the ever fleeting absence of dreams. This visualized narrative logic recalls Todorov’s conception of the detective genre: the always absent story can only be figured and comprehended though the detective’s mediation in between. In this sense, if the Chinese literati’s poetic rendering of dreams and illusions can be regarded as mediation between truth and disguise, between presence and absence, such a rhetoric exercise is in itself a “detective” form: the mysterious incident or crime cannot be traced or made present without the narrator’s effort to assemble the phantoms with the metonymic displacing of the absence/dream with the presence/shadows. Such a metonymic chain (the mediation between the absent and the present) also resonates with Franco Moretti’s observation on the metonymic chain leading the detective from visible clues to invisible crimes: “Clues, whether defined as such or as symptoms or traces, are not facts, but verbal procedures—more exactly, rhetorical figures. As is to be expected, clues are more metonymies: associations by contiguity 12. “Do dreams have shadows? One would say: Yes. If we see a dream from another dream, of course, there are no shadows, but if we can step out of the dream and see the dream, why aren’t there shadows? If we see the dream but denies its existence, the shadows would be born out of our self-limitation. If we do not see the dream but still claim its existence, the shadows are born of our epiphany. All these are nothing more than the creations of our mind. 。[…] We think it is a dream, but all the facts and evidence are laid before us. We don’t think it is a dream, but the plots are so strange and illusionary. We think it is a dream but it is nothing but shadows.”. 28.

(35) (related to the past), for which the detective must furnish the missing term” (146; emphasis original). Treating the famous killing device in “The Speckled Band” as a crucial metaphor, Moretti stresses the term’s metonymic transition from a band to a scarf and finally to a snake. Applying this metonymic logic to our reading of the phantasmagoria’s mediation between absence/darkness and presence/light—a trope that is also manifested in Shanghai literati’s representation of their urban experiences—we may find a similar phantasmagoria-like watching in The Sign of Four when Watson and Holmes are invited by an obscure clue that would lead them to the deciphering of a crime. Sitting in the cab with Holmes and Miss Morstan on their way to Lyceum Theater, Watson ponders over the swarming crowds on the streets of London: The yellow glare from the shop-windows streamed out into the streamy, vaporous air and threw a murky, shifting radiance across the crowded thoroughfare. There was, to my mind, something eerie and ghostlike in the endless procession of faces which fitted across these narrow bars of light—sad faces and glad, haggard and merry. Like all humankind, they flitted from the gloom into the light and so back into the gloom once more. (138-139) In this passage, the shadow play which preludes their criminal investigation is staged by the “shifting radiances” and the “endless procession” of the ghost-like faces appearing and disappearing between the dark streets and streaming window light. It is after this reflection about the urban phantasmagoria that the narrator is able to refer to “all humankind” as a totality, implicating the criminal not yet spotted from the crowd. In other words, the absence of the criminal must be temporally evoked and metonymically displaced by the “assembly of phantasms” (the etymological root of phantasmagoria), which, though not a concrete presence itself, serves as a rhetorical. 29.

(36) agency mediating between the space of the detective and the space of the unknown crime. Attention to such a metonymic exercise and its retrospective movement in between will inform my reading of the “social-spatial syntax” of a potential detective imaginary in Shanghai, as I will go on to probe into the “spatial ambivalence” embedded in various sets of binary oppositions such as transience/immutability, interiority/exteriority, and individuality/collectiveness—figures that are to be paralleled with that between the absent crime and the present detection.. II. Naming the Unnamable: Monstrous Crowd and Urban Incognitos Other than the tropes of phantasmagoria through which Chinese literati represent the visual/spatial sensation occasioned by Shanghai’s urban modernity, the other urban spectacle also contributes to Chinese literati’s detective mapping of the city: the emerging image of the monstrous crowd resulting from the rapid increase of populations precipitated by the Taiping Rebellion. The sensation aroused by this monstrous crowd in Shanghai, I would suggest, resembles the imaginary detective space of suspension and horror, or what Benjamin terms as the “incognitos” of the mass: “It is almost impossible to maintain good behavior in a thickly populated area where an individual is, so to speak, unknown to all others and thus does not have to blush in front of anyone” (40). And this mentality was further intensified in the semi-colonial Concessions in Shanghai after 1845. As its connotations suggest, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the word “Shanghai” can also be used as a verb, referring to the action of “put[ting] aboard a ship by force often with the help of liquor or a drug” or “put[ting] by force or threat into a place of detention.” Such etymological root is itself suggestive of the sense of incognito in urban Shanghai, where one might easily get lost, coaxed, and even murdered. Since the 1860s, the Taiping Rebellion had created a huge number of refugees. 30.

(37) flooding into Shanghai’s concession areas. As the density of population drastically compressed the space perceived by Shanghai residents, for the first time in Chinese history, people faced one another within such a short distance. Before Shanghai was forced open to foreign trade in 1843, the density of population stood at around 626 people per square kilometer, while around the mid 1910s the number was 3,600 (Su 15). This dramatic increase in population during the last few decades of the nineteenth century showcased the excessive process of urbanization, which accelerated the collapse of traditional community based on the family-oriented peasant economy. The huge mass plunging into Shanghai gradually broke the feudal order in the agricultural society and, to some extent, gained the mobility of movement, which might have given rise to an imagined sense of fear for the unknown individuals sojourning in a limited urban terrotory. A parallel glance at London during the same period allows us to grasp a similar change in the city dweller’s mentality caused by the swarming crowd in the “cesspool” of the Empire: [T]he evident fear of crowds, with the persistence of an imaginary of the inhuman and the monstrous, connects with and continues with that response to the mob which had been evident for so many centuries and which the vast development of the city so accurately sharpened. (Williams 216) What Raymond Williams is suggesting here is a way of thinking among the bourgeois that sees the unnameable urban crowd as a source of social danger, a mentality resulting “from the loss of customary human feelings to the building up of a massive, irrational, explosive force” (217). As the fear of the mass in London was tightly connected to the city’s new capitalistic economy and the population growth, the changing economy in southern China had also reinforced a similar monstrous image of the mass, thus creating a space of fear in urban Shanghai. On January 27th of 1879,. 31.