The Age of Silver

Challenging the widespread understanding of the “rise of the novel” as a uniquely European literary phenomenon, The Age of Silver attempts to move beyond this monocentric world-system perspective and remap world literature across national lines. Endeavoring to further the parallel globalizing impulses in both the humanities and the social sciences, Ma aims at establishing a more balanced model of transregional comparison and advancing “a transcultural category of the realist novel as having analogous materialist tendencies and shared macrohistorical roots in the world system” (6) in the 1500–1800 period, or “the Age of Silver.” This is indeed an ambitious attempt (a reflection of the “think big” mentality), and a successfully convincing one as well. The cross-continental literary phenomenon described and analyzed in the book is particularly correlated with the global silver trade and the sociological and cultural effects it stimulated in East Asian and Western European regions.Aiming at widening the conceptual possibilities of East–West comparisons, the author chooses four major case studies for detailed discussion in the main four chapters, namely, Jin Ping Mei (China), Don Quixote (Spain), The Life of an Amorous Man (Japan), and Robinson Crusoe (England). Rather than imposing Western theories upon Eastern examples, The Age of Silver aims to “unpack and recoordinate the categories themselves” and aspires to be “a starting point for a broader and multiway transcultural recalibration” (11) and hopes to “generate a new conceptual baseline” (14). Chapter 2 defines Jin Ping Mei as not just a distinctively Chinese text, but as an important demonstration of transcultural literary early modernity, in the sense that it serves a function of national representation and critique, and its narrative indicates a subversive political consciousness. Chapter 3 contextualizes Don Quixote within Spain's ethnic and global relations and reads from the novel a nationally symbolic political critique as well. Don Quixote's engagement with the intricate ethnic, political, and economic dynamics is adeptly observed through the depiction of the image of silk, a minor item easily overlooked previously. Chapter 4 reads from Ihara Saikaku's fiction on the seventeenth-century Japan, particularly The Life of an Amorous Man, an ironic vision of national realities and fantasies about the outside world. Chapter 5 argues that Daniel Defoe's writings constitute a local variation of global literary shifts, rather than a privileged pioneer of novelistic modernity. The purpose of Chinese negativity in the two sequels to Robinson Crusoe is to attack a powerful civilizational Other that conflicts with Defoe's ideology of an Anglocentric world system.What the book presents is a “horizontal reading” following the steps of Pascale Casanova and Franco Moretti, for on a broader level, a planetary understanding of the rise of the novel is a vital part of reimagining “world literature” as a “global civil society” or a “world republic of letters” (49). Edward Said theorized that the East was both “an integral part of European material civilization and culture” and “one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other,” which “has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience” (4). The horizontal method is a crucial step toward resituating Europe and its Others upon the same plane of historical time, thereby leading to a more balanced model of transregional comparison. The Age of Silver constructs a different genealogy of novelistic modernity, and the book's findings “have broad implications for recalibrating transcultural literary inquiries” (6).The 1500–1800 period is an era of multifaceted global confluences and divergences wherein Europe occupies not a position of transformation and dominance, but a networked and even peripheralized place. And the flow of the silver trade allows the readers to recast the genealogy of modernity and connect Eastern and Western cultural and literary histories in previously unimaginable ways. The rise of monetary powers “in this macrohistorical context augmented socioeconomic fluidity, which subsequently destabilized the ritualized certainties of past political and communal bonds” (107). If we want to approach these interlocking socioeconomic and cultural phenomena in a more cogent manner, “we must develop a comparative vision that is nontotalizing, associative and transregional” (28). The novel in the East and the West both change from retelling inherited heroic narratives to representing individual life, and the socioeconomically informed and nationally allegorical mode of realism are brought to the foreground in this era.The book presents an interactive vision on materiality and literary creativity, arguing that globalization is never a passive consequence of Western European forces of capitalism and colonialism, instead, it emphasizes the worldmaking roles of non-Western civilizations as an alternative framework, charting out a multilocal trajectory of the emergence of economic and cultural modernities. Thus, the emergent realist narrative forms of the early modern era can be broadly correlated with the social and political significances money and commerce assumed during the Age of Silver.However, it seems to me the theoretical framework of the book still has not escaped the influence of Karl Marx's “the economic base determines the superstructure,” because the book emphasizes that the parallel incipient realisms of the Eastern and Western narrative landmarks in question are all characterized by serious engagements with material forces or the history of money and commerce, which are transcultural catalysts of cultural work's increasing engagement with state power and increasingly active social functions. Within the global economic and cultural transitions of the Age of Silver we need to discuss and analyze local components, but what is not influenced, directly or indirectly, by material forces if we put them into a vast background of global silver trade? Nobody and nothing can be exempt from the “national problem of materiality” (8) if you seriously think about it.It is probably a bit far-fetched to say that in Jin Ping Mei, Cai Jing is a name suggestively puns on “wealth” (cai) and “semen” (jing) for the name is conveniently borrowed from real history. Although Qinghe was based upon the historical setting of Linqing, when the author quotes that the population grew from 8,356 in the late fourteenth century to 66,745 in the year 1600 “according to official census reports” (67), she seems to forget that “Truth is fiction when fiction is true, Real becomes non-real when the unreal is real” (Cao Xueqin), characters and places in the novel are not necessarily those in the real life, and “literature is really not a reflection of the social process, but the essence, the abridgement and summary of all history” (René Wellek).Finally, chapter 1 seems rather daunting for readers who are not familiar with Western theories on novelistic modernity. Although synthesis and reinvention of theoretical concepts are sometimes necessary and inevitable, had the opening chapter been less pluralistic in theory the book probably would be friendlier and easier to digest, therefore, more appealing to potential readers. But surely these are only minor issues, compared with the successes the author has achieved in asserting an untried method of reading early modern classics “horizontally.” Ma has persuasively demonstrated the literary reactions to the social and moral fluidities brought about by the rise of monetary powers indicated by the flow of silver in a global context and the book has undoubtedly provided a launching point for further inquiries of this kind in looking at the “rise of the novel” in a more holistic manner, and moving one step closer to reimagining “world literature” as a “global civil society.”

Comparative and World Literature · European Cultural and National Identity · History · Spanish Literature and Culture Studies

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