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“On a Chinese screen” (Publication, 1922)

Year

1922

Text

Type

Publication

Contributors (1)

Maugham, W. Somerset  (Paris 1874-1965 Nizza) : Englischer Schriftsteller, Dramatiker

Subjects

Literature : Occident : Great Britain : Prose / Travel and Legation Accounts

Chronology Entries (1)

# Year Text Linked Data
1 1922 Maugham, W. Somerset. On a Chinese screen [ID D30791].
This was a collection of 58 short story sketches, which Maugham had written during his 1919-1920 travels through China and Hong Kong, intending to expand the sketches later as a book.
Inhalt
I THE RISING OF THE CURTAIN
II MY LADY'S PARLOUR
III THE MONGOL CHIEF
IV THE ROLLING STONE
V THE CABINET MINISTER
VI DINNER PARTIES
VII THE ALTAR OF HEAVEN
VIII. THE SERVANTS OF GOD
IX THE INN
X THE GLORY HOLE
XI FEAR
XII THE PICTURE
XIII HER BRITANNIC MAJESTIES REPRESENTATIVE
XIV THE OPIUM DEN
XV THE LAST CHANCE
XVI THE NUN
XVII HENDERSON
XVIII DAWN
XIX THE POINT OF HONOUR
XX THE BEAST OF BURDEN
XXI Dr. MACALISTER
XXII THE ROAD
XXIII GOD'S TRUTH
XXIV ROMANCE
XXV THE GRAND STYLE
XXVI RAIN
XXVII SULLIVAN
XXVIII THE DINING-ROOM
XXIX ARABESQUE
XXX THE CONSUL
XXXI THE STRIPLING
XXXII THE FANNINGS
XXXIII THE SONG OF THE RIVER
XXXIV MIRAGE
XXXV THE STRANGER
XXXVI DEMOCRACY
XXXVII THE SEVENTH DAY ADVENTIST
XXXVIII THE PHILOSOPHER
XXXIX THE MISSIONARY LADY
XL A GAME OF BILLIARDS
XLI THE SKIPPER
XLII THE SIGHTS OF THE TOWN
XLIII NIGHTFALL
XLIV TIIE NORMAL MAN
XLV THE OLD TIMER
XLVI THE PLAIN
XL VII FAILURE
XLVIII A STUDENT OF THE DRAMA
XLIX THE TAIPAN
L METEMPSYCHOSIS
LI THE FRAGMENT
LII ONE OF THE BEST
LIII THE SEA-DOG
LIV THE QUESTION
LV THE SINOLOGUE
LVI THE VICE-CONSUL
LVII A CITY BUILT ON A ROCK
LVIII A LIBATION TO THE GODS

Sekundärliteratur
1923
The Times literary supplement, Book review digest ; vol. 79 (1923).
"It is a very pretty piece of Maughamware, a bibelot in which the dainty marionettes of his lively imagination, delicate irony, pathos, and whimsical humour play their parts."
1974
Stephen C. Soong : The subject of Maugham's description in the chapter A student of the drama concerns his father Song Chunfang who met Maugham.
1994 / 1996
Philip Holden : Rather than representing itself as a diary, or a chronological record of a journey, On a Chinese screen is constituted through visual metaphors. The text's title is a visual metaphor, and the preface introduces the work as making 'a lively picture', giving an 'impression' of the East. Maugham's text seems less a guide, but closer to other forms of tourist memorabilia, such as the photograph album or sketch book. Like a photograph album, it cuts China up into a series of representative metonyms ; the narrator's actual geographical location does not matter. Maugham's narrator insistently pushes Europeans and Americans into the picture. There are individual portraits of representative types again : the British consul, the expatriate woman on a last 'fishing trip', various missionaries, all of whom are held up against the background of China. Yet there are also Westerners who sneak into the foreground of a portrait. On a Chinese screen is not held together by a rhetorical or a narrative structure. Its conclusions regarding China's allochrony are made in a slightly different way.
Almost every contact between China and the West is mediated by the narrator's interlocution. The Chinese and Europeans who are the subjects of Maugham's portraits never meet upon equal terms. Locales, commercial and industrial enterprieses, the higher echelons of local government, or the putatively national government in Beijing, are scrupulously avoided. The narrator himself controls intercourse between the two worlds. He interviews representative types on both sides of his modern/premodern binarism, critiquing Europeans for their lack of understanding of China, and then applying the same caustic irony to the Chinese.
2004
Jeffrey Meyers : Maugham never mentions his route or indicates where he is. Though traveling with Gerald Haxton, he claims to be alone. As he moves restlessy from place to place, he remains a detached and impersonal observer. He offers brief, impressionistic, sometimes satiric snapshots, with thumbnail physical descriptions of the people he meets and an ironic sting in the tail of his anecdotes. Maugham's not primarily interested in the Chinese, but in the English in China. Living in a time warp, permanent exiles with little desire to return to England, mos of the old China hands don't know and don't want to know the Chinese. Their lives of quiet desperation reveal the emotional attrition and spiritual waste of the white man in the East.
2011
Zhang, Yanping : China is represented as a piece of art : it is projected on a screen in the form of a series of pictures. China's foreignness is embodied not only in pictures of landscapes, but also in individual close-ups : slightly deformed coolies in ragged clothes, women walking on bound feet, a Mongol chief leading a truculent caravan, and a singing girl 'in splendid silks and richly embroidered coat, with jade in her black hair'. Maugham's conception of China as a land of 'singular' artistic sensibilities reflects the prevailing British imagination of China in his time. His Chinese screen is strewn with Chinese 'bibelots' : porcelain, bronze, embroidery, elegant calligraphy, exquisite Chinese paintings which bring you 'in touch with the eternal', elaborately-embellished shop-fronts and 'image of Buddha in his eternal meditation'. His collection includes also people. The 'strange' Chinese figures, such as a Chinese official in 'a long black robe of figured silk, lined with squirrel' and an old man wearing 'a small round cap of black silk', 'an old woman goes by in her blue smock and short blue trousers, on bound feet', are depicted as chinoiserie novelties. For Maugham, their exotic appearances have an invigorating effect on the imagination. What Maugham considers to be 'toleration' is less a kind of moral virtue than a sort of cultural freedom. His experience of China's strangeness enables him to shed off cultural prejudice that is inscribed in his cultural formation and allows him to acquire 'a new self'.
The chapter 'The Philosopher' refers to Gu Hongming. Maugham visited Gu Hongming in 1920 in Beijing. He writes : "And here lived a philosopher of repute the desire to see whom had been to me one of the incentives of a somewhat arduous journey. He was the greatest authority in China on the Confucian learning… He was an old man, tall, with a thin grey queue, and bright large eyes under which were heavy bags. His teeth were broken and sicoloured. He was exceedingly thin, and his hands, fine and small, were withered and claw-like… He was very shabbily dressed in a black gown, a little black cap, both murch the worse for wear. I hastened to express my sense of honour he did me in allowing me to visit him."
Gu Hongming presented Maugham the translation of a Chinese poem. What is so fascinating aoubt Gu in Maugham's eyes is his irreconcilable otherness – double otherness, not only in terms of his unambiguous Chineseness, but also of his being the other of the Chinese. Maugham discovered in Gu what he looked for – diversity. Through recognizing the diversity exhibited by Gu, Maugham discovered diversity within himself. It makes visible what is hidden in Maugham : his difference from other British people, his transgression from the banality and monotony that characterize British middle-class culture.
2013
Du Chunmei : The book is filled with caricatures of Western expatriates in China, who live a luxurious and wasted life there, and remain ignorant and disinterested in knowing the real Chinese, fearing racial pollution through direct contact. Maugham's darkest satires are undoubtedly reserved for missionaries, who appear hypocritical, pathetic, and corrupted. A devoted missionary is unable to conquer his innate hatred for the Chinese, whom he is at the same time striving to convert. Maugham's travel book and play take place in the essential old China, manifested in its narrow streets, rickshaw men, opium dens, and gambling houses, and resembles the familiar scenes of London's Chinatown in popular imagination. The nature of Maugham's projection, creating images of Chinamen as dangerous, immoral, and deviant, in fact results from Westerners' unacknowledged anxieties over their own amoral behavious in China.
'The philosopher' Gu Hongming was 'said to speak English and German with facility' and 'had been for many years secretary to one of the Empress Dowager's greatest viceroys'. Gu is an anachronism who lives in the imperial past and who opposes the reform and revolutionary movements in the new China. Maugham was greatly annoyed by Gu's behaviours in the meeting, calling the philosopher a 'pathetic figure'. Gu seems to illustrate the fundamental Oriental danger : its mimicry and retribution. Gu's attack on Western violence against Eastern civilisations – the machine gun as white superiority – explicitly exposes the violent nature of Western domination. Gu trapped Maugham in an uncomfortable position, an arena of pedagogy and punishment. He educated Maugham on the civlised nature of the Chinese and the barbarism of Westerners and their failues ; he punished Maugham by attacking, ignoring, and humiliating him. Gu set up the rules of Chinese etiquette from the very beginning, and forced the English guest to act on the Chinese terms.
Gu insisted on giving Maugham a calligraphy poem in Chinese, which turned out to be an erotic love poem.
"You loved me not ; your voice was sweet ;
Your eyes were full of lauther ; your hands were tender.
And then you loved me ; your voice was bitter ;
Your eyes were full of tears ; your hands were cruel.
Sad, sad that love should make you
Unlovable.
I craved the years would quickly pass
That ymou might lose
The brightness of your eyes, the peach-bloom of your skin.
And all the cruel splendor of your youth.
Then I alone would love you
And you at last would care.
The envious years have passed full soon
And you have lost
The brithness of your eyes, the peach-bloom of your skin.
And all the charming splendor of your youth.
Alas, I do not love you
And I care not if you care."
  • Document: Soong, Stephen C. My father and Maugham. Transl. by Diana Yu. In : Renditons ; no 3 (Fall 1974). [Betr. Song Chunfang]. [Publ. in Chinesisch 1966].
    http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/rct/pdf/e_outputs/b03/v03p081.pdf. (Maug4, Publication)
  • Document: Holden, Phlip Joseph. Colonizing masculinity : the creation of a male British subjectivity in the Oriental fiction of W. Somerset Maugham. Diss. University of British Columbia, 1994.
    https://circle.ubc.ca/handle/2429/6830. S. 128-130. (Maug6, Publication)
  • Document: Holden, Philip. The flaneur abroad : on a Chinese screen. In : Holden, Philip. Orienting masculinity, orienting nation : W. Somersetz Maugham’s exotic fiction. (Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press, 1996). (Maug7, Publication)
  • Document: Meyers, Jeffrey. Somerset Maugham : a life. (New York, N.Y. : Knopf, 2004). Kap. Malaya and China, 1919-1921. S. 150. (Maug5, Publication)
  • Document: Zhang, Yanping. "Of human bondage" : Somerset Maugham in China. (Hong Kong : University of Hong Kong, 2011). M.Phil. Univ. of Hong Kong, 2011.
    http://hub.hku.hk/bitstream/10722/133977/3/FullText.pdf?accept=1 S. 34-35, 38, 40-41, 50-52, 54-55. (Maug2, Publication)
  • Document: Du, Chunmei. Travel along the Mobius strip : Somerset Maugham and Gu Hongming : East of Suez. In : The international history review (2013).
    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/07075332.2013.820776. (Maug10, Publication)
  • Person: Gu, Hongming
  • Person: Maugham, W. Somerset

Cited by (1)

# Year Bibliographical Data Type / Abbreviation Linked Data
1 2000- Asien-Orient-Institut Universität Zürich Organisation / AOI
  • Cited by: Huppertz, Josefine ; Köster, Hermann. Kleine China-Beiträge. (St. Augustin : Selbstverlag, 1979). [Hermann Köster zum 75. Geburtstag].

    [Enthält : Ostasieneise von Wilhelm Schmidt 1935 von Josefine Huppertz ; Konfuzianismus von Xunzi von Hermann Köster]. (Huppe1, Published)