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This chapter is principally concerned with the influence of French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941) on two humour-related works by Qian Zhongshu 錢鍾書 (1910–98): “Shuo xiao 說笑” (Talking and laughing) (1939), an essay on humour (youmo 幽默); and his famous novel, Wei cheng 圍城 (Fortress besieged) (1947).1 Considered by many to be the greatest novel of twentieth-century China, Fortress besieged is an ironic and ultimately tragic work, yet it constantly amuses with picaresque humour and comic wordplay.2 Both essay and novel clearly reflect Bergson’s influence as the author wrestles with the concept of humour in theory and application. Qian was not alone in this respect however. Another beloved great Chinese writer of this period, Lao She 老舍 (Shu Qingchun 舒慶春) (1899–1966), was also influenced by Bergson, and some of his writings considered here share a Bergsonian focus on the self as a living person interacting with the mechanical (both mechanistic thinking and actual machines).3 The work of these authors has to be seen in the broader context of the May Fourth Era (1919–49), a period of political upheaval, widespread protest, heated debate and dynamic intellectual inquiry. The ceding of German concessions on the Shandong Peninsula to the Japanese at the end of World War I was deeply felt as a national humiliation. Intellectual debate became even more energized and politicized when, on 4 May 1919, enraged students took to the streets in Beijing and went after “traitorous” officials. Demonstrators were arrested and severely assaulted, unleashing a tide of indignation and radicalism. Merging with the New Culture Movement, the intellectual fervour of the ensuing May Fourth Movement embodied diverse and new modes of thought, expression and social action aimed at strengthening China, including the promotion of science, democracy, “enlightenment”, feminism, Marxism, anti-Japanese boycotts and the emergence of a labour movement. Hand-in-hand with these went an intense cross-examination of Chinese culture. While the literary works examined here 2 The phantom of the clock Laughter and the time of life in the writings of Qian Zhongshu and his contemporaries Diran John Sohigian 24 Diran John Sohigian may not be overtly political, they do offer a critique of the collective mind of modern China and Chinese culture. One facet of these great debates relates particularly to humour, and thus had the greatest impact on the works to be discussed.4 At its heart lay the Bergsonian focus on the self. Thinkers inspired by Bergson’s thought challenged the prevailing rationalist paradigm of the May Fourth Enlightenment Project, whose defenders claimed that scientific reasoning and logic were universal and pre-eminent in explaining not only inanimate matter, but also the living self. Although science may have won the day in university lecture halls of the 1920s, on the pages of these great works of humorous fiction, the Bergsonian recognition of intuition and life as perpetual change and novelty remains pitted against the absolute hegemony of logic, logical developmentalism and positivist scientific reasoning. Bergsonian thought and humour The Bergsonian conception of the self and its comic depiction is addressed directly in Qian’s essay, “Talking and laughing”, where, like Bergson, Qian articulates it variously as the living free self, the dead self and the “phantom self”. The notion of mechanism—often imagined by both men as an actual machine and particularly as the clock—is integral to the analysis of the self and how humour arises from it. Reflected in rigid, deterministic and mechanistic modes of thinking, mechanism constructs a phantom self via which a living being thinks, acts and interacts mechanically. For Bergson, laughter—striking unpredictably like lightning—can serve to convert such mechanized life back to a living free self. Read in conjunction with his writings on time—particularly Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (Time and free will: An essay on the immediate data of consciousness) (1889)—his work on the comic, Le rire (Laughter) (1900), lays out this analysis.5 As a reminder of his influence, the persona of Professor Henri Bergson even pops up in the fictional narrative of Fortress besieged. In “Talking and laughing”, Bergsonian thought and rhetoric lie at the core of Qian’s playfully scathing critique of an earlier tide of interest in humour that had centred on Lin Yutang 林語堂 (1895–1976) and the humour magazine Lunyu banyuekan 論語半月刊 (Analects fortnightly), marked especially by 1933, the “Year of Humour”.6 Qian notes that much laughter, when taken alone, is not in fact humour. He defends true original spontaneous...

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