Jon Solomon
翻译学报. 2019, 3(1): 139-183.
This essay focuses on the salient place given to staging both the modern regime of translation and the institution of literature alongside a dramatization of anthropological difference in Liu Cixin’s acclaimed science fiction trilogy, Remembrance of Earth’s Past (also known as The Three Body Problem). These are concerns that are, I would argue, not only historically central to twentieth-century Chinese literature, but also place twentieth-century Chinese literature squarely at the crux of some of the most fundamental questions about aesthetic modernity. These questions revolve around the way in which the type or the figure plays a crucial role in the construction of the nation-state.
As quintessentially modern social institutions, both the regime of translation and the institution of literature converge around aesthetic ideology, in which the figure and the type play a paramount role. This is not just any figure, but rather the figure of the human, configured through the logical economy of genus, species, and individual. As a kind of abstraction that is intimately woven into the fabric of everyday life (or what Marx calls a “real abstraction”), this “logical economy” is most evident in that experience of identity peculiar to modernity: being an individual who belongs to a national community within that community’s membership in a larger, single species among other species. Together, these two institutions form an inherently comparative biopolitical infrastructure that I call the apparatus of area and anthropological difference.
A brief comparison with Wuhe’s Remains of Life helpfully illustrates the extent to which Liu Cixin’s Trilogy is invested in the apparatus of area and anthropological difference that arises through the operation of translation, while a comparison with Mao Dun’s focus on subjective formation helps to highlight the implications of Liu Cixin’s attack on Chinese socialist realism. Liu’s fiction should not be seen as what happens when a large developing nation with a tradition of literary talent achieves the concentration of capital and technology that might permit an ambitious space program, but as what happens when the international institution of literature develops on the basis of an historical repression of its own aesthetic ideology.
