Reorienting the Novel's Rise

In On Literary Worlds (2012), Eric Hayot wagers that literary studies' long-established habit of thinking about modernity Eurocentrically and “Eurochronologically”—that is, in a way that refuses to take non-Western literatures or comparative methods seriously—“produces bad theories of literature and bad literary history” (Hayot 7). By this crucial measure, Ning Ma's The Age of Silver: The Rise of the Novel East and West provides an important and much-needed model of both a good theory of literature and good literary history. In order to do so, it foregrounds the problem of scale in conceptualizing how forms like the novel emerge and install themselves as mechanisms of cultural logic. Where Raymond Williams called attention to the extended duration of such deep cultural revolutions, Ma—alongside Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Shu-mei Shih, and other theorists of “planetary comparatisms” (28)—takes on their geographic breadth. Only by recognizing “the greater Eurasian macrohistory” that has been disavowed by Eurocentric accounts of “the rise of the novel” and of modernity in general (43), Ma argues, can we appreciate both why the novel appears across various cultural traditions when it does and what it was invented to do. The book's contribution to studies of the novel is not just that it provides an expanded context for framing our understanding of the novel's cultural work; it is, rather, its forceful intervention in discussions that have persisted in orienting accounts of the novel, in one way or another, around Ian Watt's study and its Anglocentric claims. The Age of Silver performs this intervention by definitively decentering Robinson Crusoe in its own critical narrative.The Age of Silver's method of reading draws on Joseph Fletcher's notion of “integrative history,” which focuses on the “horizontal continuities” of seemingly distinct national cultures that coexist in a particular historical moment in order to ask “whether they are causally interrelated” (Fletcher, qtd. in Ma 1). The lines of causality Ma traces are in part historical, in part literary. On one hand, the book argues that the emergence of a global silver economy in the years 1500 to 1800 compels the emergence of the novel. The precise cultural circumstances that generate versions of the novel in China, Spain, Japan, and England vary, of course, but they share the overarching condition of recognizing that things are changing on the ground as a result of the same expansive trade network. On the other hand, the book shifts from a strictly historicist mode of interpretation to one focused on the agency of narrative structure to argue that novels of the Age of Silver “symbolically reenact transforming relations between cultural constraint and mobility in a context of changing material forces” (12). By so metabolizing the material changes enacted by economic transformations, the novel itself is responsible for generating the subjectivities, collectivities, and revised social orders that characterize modernity. The economy may cause the rise of the novel, but the novel causes the rise of the nation and its subjects.Four primary texts—the anonymous Chinese novel The Plum in the Golden Vase (Jin Ping Mei) (ca. 1580–1600), Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote (1605, 1615), Ihara Saikaku's Life of an Amorous Man (Kōshoku ichidai otoko) (1682), and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719–20)—serve as coordinates of Ma's remapping of the novel's history. Among the numerous literary critics cited in the book's first chapter, which lays out the method of “horizontal reading” (48), Ma leans perhaps most heavily on Georg Lukács's theory of the novel as a form that addresses the condition of “transcendental homelessness” that attends mass ideological shifts and the reordering of social relations. In contrast to Lukács's emphasis on what is lost in such moments of cultural destabilization, Ma focuses on what is generated: specifically, “more independent forms of political and cultural consciousness” (39). All four novels present forms of desire and agency figured in individual subjects as a way of addressing social problems that seem materially tied, in one way or another, to vast global forces. For Ma, “novelistic realism” is an effect of newly awakened attention both to the material details of individual, everyday experience and to the persistent sense that such details are evidence of a more expansive reality than the individual subject can fully comprehend. The Age of Silver novel establishes material complexity as a fundamental quality of lived experience. Its realism is the cumulative effect of various techniques for capturing both the texture of that complexity as it is encountered as a quotidian flow of money and things, and the indeterminacy of the world decentered by the magnitude of those flows. The novel attends particularly to what is opened up, rather than foreclosed, by the material conditions of modernity—in Ma's words, to “‘unreified’ forms of reification” (40).This account of the novel's rise begins in China: Ma posits the late Ming novel The Plum in the Golden Vase, which displays an “intense preoccupation with the question of materiality,” as “a different beginning for conceptualizing the realist novel” (54, 52). The seventeenth-century critic Zhang Zhupo commented on Plum's concern with shiqing, or “worldly affairs”; over the course of a hundred chapters focused on the life and legacy of “the lecherous merchant Ximen Qing,” it narrates the material details of its protagonist's day-to-day affairs, including the intertwined concerns of household management, business transactions, and sexual conquest (62). The way silver “saturates Plum's narrative world” testifies to China's emergent reliance on bullion from overseas and the concomitant waning of Confucian structures of social relation and cultural practice; the relationships that take shape in this world are negotiated by scandalous exchanges of luxury objects and transgressive sexual pursuits, both associated with financial ambition, household chaos, and broader political disorder. Ultimately, however, the novel draws on Ming-era medical discourse's emphasis on the harms of sexual excess to posit the eroticized human body as a formal solution to the threat of new kinds of expansive wealth: the sexually spent body figures a critique of the desire for the boundless growth of capital. “The most scandalous aspect of the novel, in this sense,” observes Ma, “contains its moral core” (76).Turning next to Don Quixote, Ma offers a brilliant reading of Cervantes's mock-epic that foregrounds Spain's role, along with China, as one of the “epicenters of the Age of Silver” (81)—a role that finds it caught between “the contradictory makings of Spain as a nation and as an empire” (84). Quixote's delusion, Ma argues, is not founded on a mere confusion of romantic fiction and historical fact but specifically on a belief in the illogical historical claims and romantic myths that gird the material development of the Spanish Empire. The tension between Spanish romantic imperialism and “the tremendous cost of empire-building” that is felt by all people living in Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is allegorized in the pairing of Quixote and Sancho Panza, in which “the contrapuntal image of Sancho . . . emits a lived earthly reality that punctuates Don Quixote's imperial fantasy” (91). The dark comedy of Spain's vulgar pursuit of its imperial dreams can be seen, for example, in how the “Enchanted Boat” chapter parodies Columbus's accidental conquest of the “New World,” which had such massive global consequences; in the Cave of Montesinos episode's allusions to the German moneylenders who financed Habsburg conquests and the wretched labor conditions in the Almedén mercury mines that fed the production of silver bullion; and in the invocation of the Chinese empire as, simultaneously, an imagined source of opportunity for the Spanish nation as it rises within the global economy and the horizon of Spain's imperial ambitions. Although it does not pursue this line of thought, the Quixote chapter provides a good foundation for thinking about the kinship of quixotic romanticism to orientalism as twin strategies to mythologize active colonial endeavors and to preemptively naturalize European claims to global resources before material claims can be effectively staked. Ma concludes that Cervantes's novel, like Plum, carries a critical response to the emergent political economy at the level of narrative form: both novels are “structurally decentered” narratives that examine how “the mounting power of money and goods . . . augmented socio-economic fluidity” and that dwell with the ambivalent consequences of these material forces rather than “consolidating them into a totalizing ideality” (107).By relying on macrohistorical frameworks rather than models of “cultural influence” to explain the roughly coeval emergence of similar literary techniques in such different places, Ma is able to mount a compelling argument for the novel as a response to broadly shared cultural conditions. Saikaku's ukiyo-zōshi, or “floating world” fictions, come out of Japan's late seventeenth-century Genroku period, which resembles the Spanish Golden Age of a century earlier in its simultaneous “flourishing of . . . commerce and culture” as Japan became (after the Spanish colonies in South America) the world's second greatest exporter of silver. These narratives, in their episodic composition, resemble the Spanish picaresque, and like both Plum and Don Quixote, Saikaku's works combine a critical commentary on official cultural orders with detailed descriptions of life in a commercialized society. Yet they are mapped concretely with reference to Japan's contemporary landscape, making use of the tension between the peripatetic culture of the growing chōnin class conducting trade within the Japanese archipelago and the sakoku or “locked country” policy, established in 1639, that heavily restricted both the presence of foreign traders within Japan and the ability of Japanese merchants to venture beyond national borders. These material parameters compel narratives that, like their counterparts overseas, present competing dynamics of fluidity and constraint as the condition of modern life.Saikaku's novels, The Life of an Amorous Man (1682) and The Life of an Amorous Woman (1686), “both feature a protagonist whose sexual promiscuity verges on the fantastic” (127) and revise classical romance as bourgeois erotic farce. Their “vernacularization of desire” (129) relocates classical and religious motifs to the sordid world of sex and commerce to narrate the material world's disruption of traditional social order—how, for example, the market for fashion redirects desire and flouts sumptuary laws; how the sex trade cuts across traditional social and political hierarchies; and how the luxury goods market deflates aristocratic distinction. Vulgar forms of desire and pleasure substitute for traditional heroic pursuits, but these pleasures are presented as real and worth pursuing, even “imbued with emancipatory potentials” (134). Japan's involvement in broad global movements inheres in the form of commodities that are situated in proximity to these local erotic pursuits: in Amorous Man, tobacco is “the new ‘scent’ of the pleasure quarters,” and a Dutch spyglass serves as a prosthetic that allows the protagonist Yonosuke to spy on a woman as she bathes (132). Yonosuke's lifelong journey of cosmopolitan sexual conquest around Japan leads, eventually, to the multiethnic pleasure districts of Nagasaki; from there, he sets out to sea in search of a mythical “Isle of Women,” a final “journey of no return” that parodies the ritual Buddhist suicide practice Fudaraku tokai but also alludes to the death penalty, under sakoku policy, for leaving the country by sea without authorization. Yonosuke's vulgar conquests accrue into a fantasy of the “liberating potentials of material desire,” one that leads the imagination beyond the bounds of existing cultural order, vindicating mercantile as well as sexual aspirations without resolving them into “any definitive form of ethics or rationality” (137).The Age of Silver's final chapter brings us to the place where Watt started his tale of the novel's rise: Robinson Crusoe. Here, it serves as evidence not of the novel's origins but of England's “belated” entrance to a literary movement that was sweeping a good portion of the globe (140). Crusoe is not only a belated example of the Age of Silver novel; it is, Ma argues, also an ideological outlier in its attempt to represent “a self-contained and totalizing narrative world to rationalize its protagonist's . . . conquest” (145). Ma's reading deftly destabilizes Crusoe's claims—particularly its endorsement of “an ideology of colonial dominance under the guise of a story of solitary survival and individual material success” (145)—as well as the claims Watt made of and through it, by way of a series of decentering moves. In addition to positioning Defoe's novel as temporally lagging and ideologically marginalized, she emphasizes how Watt's argument relies on reducing the Crusoe narrative to its first installment. By restoring The Farther Adventures (1719) and Serious Reflections (1720) to the frame, we can see how Defoe's attempts to imagine an Anglocentric world economy through his self-sufficient protagonist keep foundering on the material reality of global trade's polycentric networks and England's distinct disadvantages in relation to other centers of trade, particularly China. Expanding Lydia H. Liu's influential reading of “Crusoe's earthenware pot,” Ma shows how Crusoe broadly disavows global material contexts in order to support its fantasy of an Anglocentric world. Of all the novelistic realisms addressed in The Age of Silver, Defoe's is presented as the most flagrantly unrealistic: where the Chinese, Spanish, and Japanese examples all employ techniques to represent the decentered quality of national power and everyday life in a global context, the English example invests considerable effort in distorting the world into a shape that privileges and stabilizes England's position in ways that simply do not correlate to material reality.In a final blow to Robinson Crusoe's iconic status, Ma shows how Moll Flanders and Roxana, which reckon more openly with Britain's “socioeconomic and cultural destabilizations” by the silver economy, present better examples of the kind of transnational realism that defines the early novel. The female protagonists of Defoe's later works render the logics of commerce strange and convoluted in ways that cannot be resolved into an ethos of individualism. In stark contrast to Crusoe's deeroticized island, Moll and Roxana inhabit hypereroticized social orders that resonate with the Chinese and Japanese novels. Trade is conflated with sex work, such that the subject of commerce is also its object; exercising their social agency through this mode of exchange, immersed in material desire rather than exempted from it, Defoe's heroines, unlike Crusoe, “allegorize the surrounding political and epistemological instabilities” that characterize social life in the Age of Silver (161). Ma's epilogue indicates that it is, in fact, the English novel's sustained interest in the complexity and ideological promise of female protagonists—not Crusoe's “economic nationalism” (151) or investment in masculine individualism—that fully integrates it into the global trend of literary realism: in the eighteenth century, both Samuel Richardson's novels and Chinese “talent-beauty” (caizi jiaren) novels “responded to the ongoing cultural destabilization by reinventing the figure of the chaste woman as the new moral center” of modern societies (171).This important book shows that to take up its horizontal methods of reading is hardly radical but merely corrective to the extremely limited definition of “world literature” that has dominated literary studies since the late nineteenth century. Reading the novel as emerging, from multiple sites, out of a transnational Age of Silver realigns us with an expansive and unstable understanding of the “world” that itself characterizes the literature of the age—a world not organized according to the power dynamics of full-fledged European imperialism and its aftermath but generated more messily by the intersections, confluences, and competitions of various commercial pursuits. Ultimately, Ma defines the novel as a literary form invented to negotiate a relationship between, on one hand, individual actors in a commercialized world and, on the other, the only partially conceivable world system into which commerce integrated them. Out of such negotiations come forms of material desire as well as a concept of civic life. But it is the indeterminacy of the relationship that compels the novel's way of thinking—its notion that a narrative focused on immediately available things might make its way toward worldly possibilities that are real but have not yet been put into words.

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