Chapter 18 liberate by imitation

I'm tired from work today, so I won't write a running account anymore. Posting an article in the article may be a little bit obscure, so let's adjust the style.Jia Dao said: "If a bosom friend doesn't appreciate it, he will return to the old hill." Xiao Jia's classmate is a bit coquettish, but Qian Zhongshu said it well: "A really humorous person has a heart, laughs happily alone, and smiles coldly. , to take a breath for the dull life. Maybe it will be hundreds of years later, tens of thousands of miles away, there will be another person who is separated from him by the river bank of time and space, who will look at each other and smile." I think Qian Zhong An old wise old man like Shu may always have something to say. Who is the "other person" he is talking about?

liberate by imitation "Colonial and Postcolonial Literature" by Elleke Boehmer has been translated by Sheng Ning and published by Oxford University Press in 1998.Even though the book deals with "the text of empire and against empire" written primarily in English, that alone is enough to give it global significance, since from the moment civilization is born, ruling Being and being ruled are the two most basic states of human life.Especially in today's post-modern, post-colonial, post-literary, post-post-post, looking for a back door to freedom without fighting and fleeing has aroused the desire of all hopeless countries, nations without ambition, and intellectuals without integrity.With his magnificent text analysis and penetrating combing and welding, Boemer seems to hint at such a picture: sailing the boat of imitation to reach the shore of liberation.

Whether in the peak period of the racial revolution or the social revolution, "Give me liberty or give me death" is the most passionate slogan - the reason why feminism has been unable to win is probably because it has never shouted "No women's rights, or rather die".However, Ruskin, as the representative of the ruler, declared firmly in his inaugural speech in 1870: "Rule or give me death." Because "the god of destiny has come, and this is the most noble destiny that a nation can accept or reject." ’” Such a life-and-death struggle to rule and be ruled.Don't look at the pretentious appearance of the English-speaking countries when they denounced the Nazis and fascists righteously. Compared with the Nazis, the number of lives killed and humiliated by the English-speaking countries is only a lot more.The only difference is that English-speaking countries are more witty, hypocritical, and more tender.The English-speaking countries finally control every blade of grass and every brain cell on this planet, not by relying on the mass graves or gas chamber concentration camps, but by relying on texts.The most successful part of colonialism is to completely evolve itself into a kind of textual operation. The result of this kind of textual operation enables the colonizer to lie down soundly and even go home without the colony out of his palm.In a certain sense, the wave of national independence in full swing after the war liberated not the ruled, but the sore arms of the rulers. The "post-colonial" or the so-called "pre-colonial" dependence on the colonists has not decreased but has become more visceral.Even in Taiwan, there are quite a few people who sincerely miss the Japanese occupation era because they hate the autocratic corruption of the Kuomintang.The secret here is that colonial rule is an act of collecting information and exercising power across regions and races, and writing is precisely the most effective tool for accomplishing this task.

For the colonizers, the texts of colonialism sustained their already dull and decaying existence.Those adventures made them believe in their courage, those anecdotes inspired their appetite for thought, and the colonizers’ ego expanded in multiple dimensions in the colonial texts, and their lives gained fresh expectations from this. .In the texts of colonialism, the colonists stepped up to the altar step by step. They exploited, protected, graciously offered, and saved. They were the embodiment of justice and conscience. They were always invincible. The audience burst into tears.Colonial texts strengthened the colonists’ sense of superiority and mission. They were full of sincere ideals to collect colonial biological specimens, measure the breasts of African girls and the feet of Chinese women, peel off murals in Dunhuang, and transport away Bangladesh. Buddha statue, to spread "democracy" and "science" to every corner of the world.

"Nationalism" as opposed to colonialism has been a by-product of colonialism from the very beginning.Although the ideological strategy of nationalism and colonialism have different directions, they have the same structure.The local history, race, religion, and traditional culture promoted by nationalism have just become a solid footnote to the rationality and superiority of colonialism.The highest program of nationalism is to catch up with and surpass the colonists according to the value standard of colonialism.As Boemer said: "The literary formulas and literary discourses inherited from the colonists have been appropriated, diverted, transferred from the center, and hybridized." When European-style novels and short stories became the central genre of literature in the East , the Europeans safely withdrew their governors and garrisons, because without the colonialist way of describing the world, the Orientals could no longer find a second way to survive.

Nationalism finally discovered its own dilemma after the war, that is, the more it realizes itself, the more it loses itself.The best nationalist scholars generally speak more than two sets of very different languages, which leads them to have more than two sets of rhetorical systems and modes of thinking.Nationalist writers gradually adopted colonialist genre categories such as adventure stories, rescue stories, confessional stories, etc.Some of these works have earned a place in the halls of colonialism, and they would have scored even more if they had had more "native complexes" attached to them.The emergence of archetypal criticism and structuralist critical methods did not change the centrality of the Western mode of thinking, on the contrary, it made the Western mode more firmly believe that it can survive through eternal self-replication.During the two world wars, the West's own anxiety about change, expressed through modernism, was dispelled by the rise of nationalism after the war.The real crisis that the West is now facing is that the East, which exists as the "other", is shrinking rapidly like a creature that is accelerating its extinction, and the whole world will become the West. As Ashis Nandy said, the West is "everywhere Yes, not only within the West, but also without it: in structures, in thought." The West will have to enter its own dying years, having lost the mirror of its plastic surgery.

The history of nationalism is full of paradox and poignancy.They will eventually find that both localization and globalization are a dream.Independence and revolution are both a happy or a happy loss of self.However, in the process of dying together with colonialism, nationalism found a glimmer of rebirth at the last moment, that is, what colonialism destroys is the real self, and what nationalism destroys is an imitation body, a false self, or Say, what is destroyed is a text.The destruction of texts is only the destruction of a way of permutation and combination of the world, and the world may be regenerated by other ways of permutation and combination.In the rhetoric of revolutionary optimism, it can be expressed as: "The oppressed lose only texts, and what they gain is another new world."

Liberation by imitation, however, is only a hypothesis after all.The subversive nature of imitation has been proved by the history of literature and culture, but it is not known whether it will be liberated after subversion.Texts composed purely of imitation presumably do not exist, and the original elements of postcolonial texts are often ignored by postcolonial criticism.Boemer realizes that his work itself "has a taste of empire", and he seems to be more optimistic about the maturity of post-colonial writing, which can not help but add another doubt: if liberation itself is imitated, human Where will escape?

Perhaps imitation itself is liberating.The essence of art, the essence of human nature, is imitation. (This article is not just a book review)