Culture Shock:Joyce is infiltrating cultural life in China to the extent that he is seen through a prism of Chinese values rather than as a distant import, writes Fintan O'Toole.
Jin Di is about the same age as James Joyce's Ulysses, a book whose translation into Chinese he regards as the main achievement of his life. As an elderly man in a culture that still reveres old age, a retired professor of English and translation at Tianjin Foreign Studies University and the winner of prestigious awards for his translations, he has a freedom of speech that is unusual in Chinese intellectual circles. When I met him recently in Beijing, he used that freedom to excoriate those "authoritative voices" in China who persist in seeing Joyce's work as "vulgar" and "degenerate". In the way he talks, you get a sense of the degree to which Joyce retains in China what he has lost in the West - the aura of a dangerous, subversive figure. Coming from a Dublin where Joyce has become a secular saint, whose relics are venerated with all the ardour and mystique of a medieval martyr, there is something very refreshing about glimpsing a culture in which he still has such an edge.
Jin Di is proud of the fact that, when Ulysses was first published to outraged official responses in the West, the Chinese poet Xu Zhimo hailed it as an epoch-making masterpiece and compared Joyce to, of all people, Lenin, as a figure "both worshipped and attacked". But, he says, "this enthusiasm was suppressed in China for 60 years and only began to re-emerge in the 1980s", when some of the stories from Dubliners appeared in Chinese translations. Some of Jin Di's translations from Ulysses and an essay of his about Joyce were published in the magazine World Literature in 1986. Even then, he says, "Ulysses was admitted into the country but with a clear warning: 'beware of degeneracy'." That official view has remained in force. He cites a recent article on Ulysses in the official press that characterised it as a "portrayal of the isolation and desolation of man in modern western society". This in turn reflects the line taken in the most authoritative Chinese encyclopaedia, which has Joyce reflecting "the corruptness and degeneration of modern western society" and "the vulgarity and pettiness of the modern metropolitan's spiritual life".
Jin Di reckons that about half of the students who encounter Joyce in the course of their English literature studies in Chinese universities still think of him as an exemplar of cultural degeneracy. In this respect, contemporary China may, ironically, give us a clearer view of the reception of Joyce in his own time than we can get from the reverential tone of most contemporary western criticism.
Yet official suspicions have not prevented Joyce from becoming an important presence in Chinese culture now. They may, indeed, have added to Joyce's attractions for Chinese students and intellectuals. He both embodies ideals of artistic and intellectual freedom and allows those notions to be discussed in ways that have indirect but very powerful resonances for China's current situation.
Li Weiping, who is professor of English at Shanghai International Studies University, cites Joyce as "the most original and influential writer of the 20th century" and would have him "hailed in China as in the West as a champion of artistic freedom". While he finds Finnegans Wake "not just an intimidating but an impossible book", and "suffered a lot" when reading Ulysses for the first time, he believes that Chinese students are finding Joyce's work gradually more approachable. Dubliners is now "almost a must" for those taking a degree in English literature and, as a result Dublin itself has become, in their imaginations, "a familiar, accessible and universal place". Those taking MA degrees typically read at least some of Ulysses, and though Finnegans Wake remains as daunting for the Chinese as it is for the Irish, there is now a Chinese translation.
A mark of this absorption of Joyce is that Chinese scholars tend to see his work not as a distant and exotic import, but through the prism of Chinese values. Jin Di picks up both on Joyce's celebration of the common man and on references in Ulysses to the "spirit of man" and sees Leopold Bloom as a Confucian character for whom, as in Confucian thinking, "benevolence is the cardinal virtue". Li Weiping sees Joyce's "spiritual legacy" as being almost as important as the books themselves, and interprets that legacy through contemporary Chinese respect for both modern innovation and personal endurance. He sees Joyce as being to literature "what Albert Einstein is to science", but also admires, in more traditional terms, his "diligence and perseverance" in overcoming hardship and setbacks.
These latter qualities may fit well into long-established Chinese values, but they also have a political element in the context of Chinese intellectual life now. Persistence and endurance are qualities that have been all too necessary for Chinese scholars, intellectuals and artists. Joyce's eventual acceptance both worldwide and in China itself gives them a hopeful image of trials overcome. Those trials themselves provide a context in which censorship can be discussed: one scholar at this month's conference on Joyce in Beijing University gave a detailed account of Joyce's "lonely indomitable battle against publishers and printers" in relation to Dubliners. It was an accurate account of Dublin a century ago. Listeners were left to work out whether it was also a faithful account of China today.