Abstract
Huang offers a reflective overview of various approaches in current world literature studies and investigates the concept of “worlding” as a becoming process that involves both the spatial and temporal dimension in light of Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism. Huang also discusses the origin and purpose of the city-making narrative in her dialogic reading of Dung Kai-cheung’s half-fictional, half-historical novel Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City. With a special focus on the performativity of maps, she analyzes the multidimensional interconnectedness among the text, the reader, the author, and the context. This chapter concludes with the possibilities of worlding the relatively invisible and peripheral Hong Kong literature into an encompassing, heteroglossic, and interactive constellation of world literary works.
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Notes
- 1.
This paragraph in Polo’s voice could be read as a telling example of the imaginative interaction between the author, text, and reader: “Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls. You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours. … Or the question it asks you, forcing you to answer, like Thebes through the mouth of the Sphinx” (Invisible Cities, 38).
- 2.
The first fragment of a Hong Kong map can be found on the unnumbered page between Bonnie S. McDougall’s introduction and Part One, called “Theory,” while the second cartographic image of the Central area on Hong Kong Island is printed on page 120 before Part Four, named “Signs.”
- 3.
The English translation of Atlas is the long-form winner of the 2013 Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards for translated works published in 2012. Leo Ou-fan Lee’s words appear in the blurb on the English translation’s undercover. In Dung’s Altas, there are direct references to works of Luis Borges, Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, and Roland Barthes.
- 4.
These 15 terms were listed in both Chinese and English in Dung’s original Chinese text. They are counterplace 對應地, commonplace 共同地, misplace 錯置地, displace 取替地, antiplace 對反地, nonplace 非地方, extraterritoriality 外領屬性, boundary 界限, utopia 無何有之地, supertopia 地上地, subtopia 地下地, transtopia 轉易地, multitopia 多元地/複地, unitopia 獨立地/統一地, and omnitopia 完全地. For a thorough study on the scientific authorship, see Peter Galison (2003).
- 5.
According to the investigation of Lam Jun-cheung, the English word “Hong Kong” first appeared as a place name in the map of “the Macau Road” drawn by Daniel Ross and Philip Maughan. See Lam (2015).
- 6.
I am following Benjamin’s definition of origin in my discussion: “The term origin is not intended to describe the process by which the existent came into being, but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance. Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming, and in its current it swallows the material involved in the process of genesis” (The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 45).
- 7.
Moretti shrewdly points out the absence of maps in Bakhtin’s essay on the chronotope: “it is the greatest study ever written on space and narrative, and it doesn’t have a single map” (Graphs, Maps, Trees, 35).
- 8.
In the epilogue of Dituji, Dung Kai-cheung describes the writing of this book as “a sincere play”: “In my writing process, I have projected all of my personal emotions onto this city where I was born and brought up, onto what I have met, seen and felt in this city, and onto the most private memories and experiences of myself. Even in such a playful writing, there is nothing like cold intellectuality or light-hearted ridicule but passionate reflections. I even find, in some places of this book, that my style has been too sentimental, and even almost maudlin” (161–2).
- 9.
Published by the Hong Kong Government Information Services in 1992.
- 10.
Mu Shiying’s short story “Craven A” offers an interesting example of the narrator’s iconic reading of a female body as if it was a map of China. See Andrew David Field, ed. and trans., Mu Shiying: China’s Lost Modernist, 2014.
- 11.
Dung, “Preface: An archeology for the future” (Atlas, 12).
- 12.
See An Weizhen. My translation of “观看视界” also refers to John Berger’s 1985 book The Sense of Sight, translated into Chinese as Guangkan de shijie “观看的视界.”
- 13.
Holquist, Dialogism, 111.
- 14.
My own translation of the Chinese original text: “When we set this fictional world as Hong Kong, fiction writing would be analogous with building a city. I do not mean to “use the city of Hong Kong as a literary subject,” rather, I want to “build the city of Hong Kong through fiction.” This city built in fiction is not a conglomeration of buildings or spectacles, nor is it a chronical story. Rather, it is a common world that is formed and shared by a communal multiplicity “當我們把這個小說世界設定為香港,寫小說就等於建築一座城市。我的意思不是“以香港這個城市作為小說題材,”而是“以小說來建造香港這座城市”。而這個以小說建築起來的城市,並不只是一堆建築或景觀的集合,也不只是由一些時間串連起來的故事,而是一個由眾數的人所組成和分享的共同世界。(Dung, 450).
- 15.
My own translation of the Chinese original text: “As the unchangeable law goes, all dreams must end, while all flowers must wither. However, when time has entered the perpetual motion in writing, the past and the future will be realized in the present. Dreams may not be illusionary. Flowers may not be fallen. All the experiences and existences, once collected, recorded, fictionalized, will transcend from the singular time-space into a boundlessly multiplying world.” 梦之必破, 华之必衰, 似是千古不变的定律。可是, 当时间在写作中成为永恒的运动, 过去与未来即成就于当下。梦未必虚, 华未必堕, 一切经验, 一切存在, 一经集之、录之、志之, 就可以脱离单一的时空, 成为无限衍生和延伸的世界。For more please see An Weizhen.
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Huang, H.Y. (2018). Worlding Hong Kong Literature: Dung Kai-cheung’s Atlas . In: Polley, J., Poon, V., Wee, LH. (eds) Cultural Conflict in Hong Kong. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7766-1_10
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