A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule

Abstract

Lévi-Strauss in understanding human condition. Lam concludes in Chapter 5 that emotion is intrinsically exterior and spatial by invoking Martin Heidegger’s discussion of “here” and “yonder.” More significantly, he applies this imagery of spatialized emotion to Lu Xun (1881–1936)’s famous metaphor of China being a closed “iron house.” This author points out that what entraps Lu Xun was not cannibalistic tradition but “the objectification of space set before him,” the alleged “awakened” one (p. 234). According to the author, we are all locked out of this iron house. Ambitiously drawing upon the studies of literature, philosophy, and anthropology/ritual studies, Lam successfully brings the literary representation of emotion in premodern Chinese literature and theater to the fore, highlighting the spatialized character of emotion in both print and theatricality and the dynamics between performers and spectators. The book enormously contributes to the reader’s understanding of traditional Chinese aesthetics, its cultural production, and the importance of spatialized emotion in Chinese cultural representation. I have two suggestions, however. First, while discussing early modern Chinese theater buildings, the author could have also considered the theater with one-sided stage inside native associations, huiguan, in addition to temple and teahouse theaters; Second, when discussing the Chinese theatrical notion of “putting oneself in the place of someone else,” the possibility of full empathy of the characters, or impossibility thereof, and the self-reflexive mockery of Chinese performers, the author should have benefited a lot from modern theater theorists and practitioners Bertolt Brecht and Konstantin Stanislavski.