“The flaneur abroad : on a Chinese screen” (Publication, 1996)
Year
1996
Text
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)
Type
Publication
Contributors (1)
Holden, Philip Joseph
(1962-) : Professor, English Language & Literature, National University of Singapore
Mentioned People (1)
Maugham, W. Somerset
(Paris 1874-1965 Nizza) : Englischer Schriftsteller, Dramatiker
Subjects
Literature : Occident : Great Britain
/
References / Sources
Chronology Entries (2)
| # | Year | Text | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1919.09-1920.03 |
W. Somerset Maugham and China. W. Somerset Maugham and his partner Gerald Haxton were leaving England for New York and Chicago in September 1919, took a ship north from Saigon, via Haiphong. January 1919 they arrived in Hong Kong ; and continuing up the East coast from Shanghai to Tianjin and inland to Beijing. In Beijing Maugham meets Gu Hongming. After seeing the Great Wall and exploring northern China to the edge of Mongolia, they returned to Shanghai and from there went up the Yangzi River to Chongqing by a rough sampan. By January 3, 1920, Maugham was back in Shanghai and they returned to Hong Kong on January 12. They stayed in Hong Kong until March 1920. Zhang Yanping : The fruits of the trip include a travel book On a Chinese screen (1922), a Peking-based play East of Suez (1922) and a popular novel set in Hong Kong, The Painted Veil (1925). Maugham's works about China are tightly and intensively engaged with his dominant concerns in his life and writings : his covert aesthetic leaning, repressed homosexual desire, and both of them point directly toward his ultimate concern — the quest for freedom. For Maugham, China is a place where he could release his transgressive desires at home — his aesthetic urges and homosexual tendencies, without suffering from moral censure and his quest for freedom. Through his encounter with China, Maugham achieves not only aesthetic renewal and cultural liberation, but also moral freedom. Like many other men of his generation, Maugham found China a haven for homosexuals. For him, China signifies a different sexual mode ; it is a land where homosexual practices are regarded as natural. As a trope for sexual freedom in Maugham's writings, China serves to legitimate his homosexual desire and render him morally inculpable. China is a place where Maugham played a double role : both as a queer and as a gentleman. Writing about China, Maugham strategically writes out his transgressive desire ; denying China, he artfully aligns himself with the dominant gentleman culture. China offers him a double moral freedom : it relieves him of the guiltiness about his homosecual desire and allows him to release the illicit desire without suffering from moral censure. |
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| 2 | 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." |
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Cited by (1)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Zentralbibliothek Zürich | Organisation / ZB |
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