Serial Fu Manchu: The Chinese Supervillain and the Spread of Yellow Peril Ideology

Chapter 4. Machinic Fu Manchu: Popular Seriality and the Logic of Spread

4 Machinic Fu Manchu Popular Seriality and the Logic of Spread I n the 1910s and 1920s, the serial figure of Fu Manchu established itself. in the early 1930s, it became iconic when hollywood forged Fu Manchu ’s definitive “look” with The Mask of Fu Manchu. And between the 1930s and the 1970s, in what i call the figure’s classical phase, its serial spread increased exponentially. the dynamics of this development manifest themselves particularly forcefully when read against later enactments of the figure, around the turn of the twenty-first century. in 2009, Gary indiana published his Fu Manchu novel The Shanghai Gesture, a highly eccentric adaptation of the subject matter, which reads in parts like a descant and resembles an ironic refraction in others—exemplifying, as i argue, that Fu Manchu’s career as a serial figure is petering out, if it has not already ended. in this chapter, i pit this and another recent iteration of the iconic yellow peril figure against the figure’s actualization at the peak of Fu Manchu’s evolution in the mid-twentieth century, tracing Fu Manchu’s rise and fall with close reference to the techniques through which the figure’s iconicity and its larger ideological parameters are stabilized and regularly reenergized. these techniques hinge on the successful management of a serial memory around the figure, as we shall see. to keep this memory intact—or to keep it spinning—is a narrative accomplishment, an operation relying on a precarious mix of repetition and innovation, iconic consolidation and iconoclast regeneration. the figure’s survival and popularity, in other words, rely as much on the workings of cultural recollection as on processes of cultural erasure or forgetting—if one can still pit these two concepts against each other in the age of mass media 92 Chapter 4 and mass communication with their ever-faster circuits of reenactment, rebooting, and reinvention. Serial Memory My attention fixed itself on the spinning roulette wheel and the little white ball whirling inside it. i experienced the sensation that i was the whizzing roulette ball, that the numbers i passed in my spin were the faces of all those i had known at land’s end, and before: that i was myself and Petrie, that smith and Fu Manchu were the same imago, and that the spin would never stop, the ball that was me would never come to rest on red or white, on 7 or 24, but rotate for eternity on that clicketing wheel. (indiana 2009: 204) this is how the narrator of indiana’s The Shanghai Gesture envisions himself at the end of the novel. By then, the fact that Fu Manchu is a cultural construct has been thoroughly driven home. Fu Manchu is of interest to indiana precisely because he has been of interest to so many other people before him. The Shanghai Gesture approaches the serial figure and its larger narrative universe in the terms of formula fiction, correlating its references to the figure of the Chinese master criminal with allusions to many other markedly dated popular yellow peril fictions, such as the 1941 film from which the novel gleans its title. indiana’s narrative thus relishes in quotation, exaggeration, parody, and ironic inversion, while— for large stretches, at least—taking its material seriously enough to trust in its inherent potential, most notably the dynamics of serial narration. or perhaps it would be more appropriate to claim that the material itself brings to bear its potential on indiana’s novel. At the time when indiana’s narrator merges with co-narrator Petrie, who happens to share the last name of the narrator figure in the first Fu Manchu volumes, and identifies with a roulette ball, things have already become quite convoluted. the novel’s many narrative threads and layers have turned out to be complicatedly looped. toward the end of indiana’s novel, the serial memory of Fu Manchu, it seems, has taken control of the narrative: the narrative figures, who never showed too much depth to start with, have become mere props of a stage set or factors in an experimental setup. “they do not command the [serial] memory,” one could say, adapting an observation of lorenz engell on the function of characters in the post–network tV series: “the memory commands them” (2011: 123, my translation; see also Denson and Mayer 2012a). Machinic Fu Manchu 93 to chart...