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Conclusion
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Conclusion What seems naive about it all, ultimately, is the goal of the Chinese dream itself. At the century’s twilight most of us were sophisticated enough to scoff at utopian pursuits, in China and elsewhere; today we favor smaller, more local interventions. I have tried in the last chapter to imagine, however , what it might have been like to have faith in a utopian vision, and to feel it coming alive, as it were, in the blood and roots of China. It is differently alive, I think, in different moments in the Telquelian trajectory, and is at its least interesting in that period when the group’s political interest trumped its literary one—except in the case of Barthes, who maintained all along a disdain for the political stereotype. But when the dream does happen, it engages a hermeneutic that makes some unusual and interesting demands on our conception of the symbolic order. Tel quel’s “fact-‹nding” mission to China found, it would seem, few of the facts about the Cultural Revolution and Chinese politics; it did, however, produce a certain set of knowledge-objects that cannot be called “facts” in the traditional sense of the term. All this is shaped, as it never was with Pound or Brecht, by the lived experience of geopolitical China. At various moments in the previous chapter I suggested that the relationship to classical China lasted longer than the Maoist one—a tendency visible most clearly in the abandonment of Communist China after 1976 or so, which did not substantially affect what I called in Pleynet’s case a more “literary” relation (directed speci‹cally toward classical China). This suggests that there may have been a fundamental incompatibility between a contemporary vision and an idealized notion of classical China (which is timeless, enduring, artful and subtle in its aesthetic, and so on), since happenings in contemporary China were able to disrupt or disturb the very timelessness of the classical China in question—especially, it would seem, when seen from up close. In the Telquelians’ writing after 1976, the “choice” of China is 176 inevitably described as stemming from an earlier interest in classical China or Taoism.1 Why this difference? It may have something to do with the referential stability of classical China, which unlike Communist China could not offer its practice as a counterexample to theory. The trip to China undid whatever fantasy the Telquelians had about contemporary China, but could not touch their sense of the deeply rooted radical potential of classical China. In the throes of their political relation, the Telquelians occasionally discovered the roots of the Cultural Revolution in the ancient and timeless Chinese past (in its unchanging writing system, in its mountains and rivers, or its prehistorical matriarchy). In so doing, they made the new revolution not especially revolutionary, but rather the natural outgrowth of China’s ancient and inherent radical possibilities. The pastness of the past allowed for a less rigid relation between Tel quel’s “theory ” and Chinese “practice.” Classical China was important for Pound and Brecht, too, though differently in each case. With a single exception, Pound never followed his derisive 1936 take on contemporary China with any commentary on its post-1949, Communist version, though he lived until 1972.2 It is almost as though contemporary China simply did not exist for him, even as he continued to translate and retranslate the classic Confucian texts into English. As for Brecht, he seemed committed up to his death in 1956 to the possibilities of Chinese Communism, and declared Mao Zedong’s On Contradiction to be 1954’s “book of the year.” At the same time he maintained an interest in classical Chinese philosophy and poetry, though his aesthetic or intellectual commitment to China never rose to the dizzying intensities of either Pound’s or Tel quel’s. But even Brecht conceived of Chinese modernity as European—his careful planning of the setting for The Good Person of Szechwan testi‹es to his sense of European modernity as somehow disruptive of a classical China (with Peking Opera gods) already in place.3 Later in life, perhaps the clearest instance of Brecht’s fascination with China’s “classical” modernity came when he translated Mao’s poem “Snow,” written in a classical style and translated by Brecht with the same strategies he had taken from Waley. Originally translated into German by Fritz Jensen as “Chinesische Ode” (Chinese ode), “Snow,” a highly charged political poem in which Mao...