WHAT IS LITERATURE?

Last time I wrote, I said I would spend the next few days turning my thoughts about Zukofsky, Olson, and Ginsberg into blog entries. That was in Beijing, on Monday. It's now Saturday in Chicago--where I've been since Wednesday--and I've written nothing and thought little about American poetry of the last seven decades. Instead I've been preoccupied with the move from one country to the next, wondering about our return to Connecticut, and wrestling with the formidable foe of jetlag (I can't understand why, after going to bed after midnight last night, I woke up before five this morning). And instead of poetry or fiction, I've been reading a blog someone pointed out to me called Sex and Shanghai 欲望上海.

The blog, authored by an English expat called Chinabounder, has become something of a site of controversy, and for obvious reasons. Chinabounder's blog does little more than chronicle his sexual exploits amongst women--mostly his former English students--in Shanghai, mixed in with a good dose of asides denigrating the Chinese government, Chinese society, Chinese men, and western women. He seems to consider himself part of the foreign vanguard in China's sexual revolution, and he often peppers his narratives with parentheticals about how Chinese women are reserved and shy and bound by society until he unfetters them with his cunnilingus, his anal-explorations, and his grand English cock.

Like any text, the Chinabounder blog is set amidst controversies and powerplays involving forces much greater than its own use of language. Here, as in many texts, the tensions seem to be involved in the interlocking power relations between women and men and China and the West, and the comments to his posts--both in support and in vitriol--reflect demands that Chinabounder take these forces into account. For his part, Chinabounder does take these forces into account, albeit in a way pretty dismissive of, say, his own complicitness in the networks of power that leave him more empowered, even within China, than Chinese natives themselves, and which tinge his remarks about Chinese men and the Chinese government [despite this, I have noticed an example to the contrary, where Chinabounder acknowledges being overpaid for his work as an English teacher in Shanghai compared to native Chinese teachers of English, and demonstrates that, short of giving his money to his Chinese colleagues, say, he does put in more work to reflect his higher earnings]. As for societal sexism, forget about it. Chinabounder demonstrates the conundrum of the non-selfish lover: in focusing on pleasing her, he gets much more pleasure out of the act. He's not non-selfish; rather, he is just more far-reaching in his selfishness. And inasmuch as he considers his purpose to pleasure all the attractive women of Shanghai, he is ultimately nothing more than self-serving.

The comments, while they tease out some of the issues I've just written about, are practically worthless. They offer a bland frat-boy kind of support or else an easily dismissible shrill about morality and delinquency. Chinabounder has taken his stand, and he doesn't seem interested in backing down. And here, I am about to surprise myself, I want to add: nor should he.

Despite all the geo-political and sexual problems of the Sex and Shanghai blog, the reason that I keep going back to it and looking for something more than titilation is the sheer honesty of the writing. By that I mean, Chinabounder may not be taking into account the larger social, political, or even economic factors of his life in China; and he may not be taking into account how his own culture shock and alienation cause him to find solace in the easy comfort of Chinese women and write about it on a blog that, until recently, was blocked in China; but he is aware of the position that he has taken. He is a strong English man who wants strong Chinese women (and, in the end, maybe even strong Chinese men); all the problematic intricacies of this position are, I think, best read in the light of the fact that he knows what he is doing. What he's doing may be any admixture of right and wrong to you and me, but he has taken his stand. And until the comments on his blog start reflecting more of a spirit of interaction than flaccid support or ranty attacks, I see no reason for Chinabounder to change his mind, or his actions [these last three words I write with caution: Chinabounder seems not to be hurting anyone on purpose, and I have no way of knowing whether his unintentional hurt of other people is large enough to warrant some real behavioral change on his part. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, though, I'll assume that the pain he instills is no greater than the pain brought on by any run-of-the-mill ex-boyfriend].

But I wrote this post wanting to come at answering the question, "What is literature?" If Sex and Shanghai involves itself with questions about gender equality, international parity, and sexual liberation, all in a way that is honest (if not quite responsible) and also conveys some of the emotion and psychology of at least one of its characters, then it is dealing with the same issues in the same way as some of the greatest works of literature. On top of which, Chinabounder seems particularly focused on questions of literature. A line tagged to his blog beneath his archived entries reads, "Everything which is written merely to please the author is worthless," and he has written about the low standards of English-language journalism in China. If I could compare him to an actual writer, I would pick Michel Houellebecq. This is based primarily on the circumstantial evidence--I have read only half of a Houellebecq novel, in a French I was ill equipped to comprehend--of a controversial male writer focused on writing about sex and society, eschewing sentiment and shibboleths and making enemies for his expressed opinions on cultures not his own. And while Chinabounder, for all his literary pretentions, does not possess the command of style to make him comparable to Hoellebecq, he nonetheless is focused on writing and engaged in the world he's writing in. To me, that means that Sex and Shanghai can be read as literature. And I wonder if that changes anything at all.