France/China. Intercultural Imaginings (review)

This volume focuses on portrayals of China in a range of twentieth-century French texts that include novels, and one film, as well as auto-fictional accounts. While the range of authors covered is wide, it is not always clear why other French textual encounters with China from the period are excluded: Malraux, notably, or Alexandra David-Néel, who might have provided an interesting contrast with the women writers who are treated (Kristeva, Suzanne Bernard, Élizabeth Qi-Guyon). That said, the volume is clearly an essay rather than a global survey. Hughes sees the body, and desire for a corporeal contact with the Chinese Other, as a central facet of the discursive formation she calls 'France/Chine'. The first chapter focuses on a range of fictional and auto-fictional approaches grouped together because of their focus on the urban landscape of Beijing. Segalen's René Leys is emblematic of the group, and Hughes offers a subtle analysis of its enclosed cultural spaces and boundaries. Using Elizabeth Grosz's theories on the relation of bodies and cities, she constructs Beijing as an agent in its own right: it is a subject that causes desire or love in its French visitors, but ultimately expels some and inflicts corporeal punishment on others (which leads her to answer the question 'who killed René Leys?' in a novel way). Chapter 2 deals with the writings of visitors to China from the 1950s to the 1970s, including Leiris, Étiemble and some of the Tel Quel group. The impression is one of a 'petulant' (p. 42) disappointment at China's failure to afford bodily gratification to its desiring visitors. Hughes suggests that the construction of China as an arid, bad mother, who rejects corporeal contact with the foreigner, may be a French cultural particularity. The third chapter, on late-twentieth-century encounters with 'France/Chine', would appear to have a tangential relationship with this thesis. It deals partly with the journalist Marc Boulet, whose fluent Mandarin made it possible for him to make long stays among the drug dealers and prostitutes of post-Maoist China, disguised as a Chinese citizen of the Uyghur minority. However, even Boulet writes within the pre-existing French cultural prism of China's unwillingness to accept intercultural transactions, and indeed appears to struggle with this unwillingness. The chapter then moves on to deal with the film Irma Vep, in which Olivier Assayas directed the Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung. While one might wonder what a film, and one set in France, is doing in this corpus, it does in fact provide an interesting angle since Assayas, according to Hughes, effectively comments on the French 'wariness' about the mixing of cultures and the integration of Chinese otherness (p. 86). The discursive construction of intercultural relations with China as inevitably blocked, and China itself as the agent of this blockage, would appear to be a peculiarly French take on China. Clearly such a thesis —in itself very interesting —begs a sustained comparative study; and indeed the volume opens up vast potential areas for investigation.