The Local Embeddedness of the Body and the Locality of Literature

Within the question of the relation between literature and geographical space, “local experience” is an important keyword. To probe deeply into the locality of literature, one must first clarify the inner mechanism by which experience is generated. On human beings’ innovative activity, Hannah Arendt says: “With word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second birth, in which we ourselves confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our original bodily appearance.” Literature is precisely the human being’s innovative activity of inserting itself into the world through word and deed. In this process, the interaction and mutual shaping between bodily behavior and the environment of existence generate bodily experience and become an important source of literature’s locality.

I. Body, Behavior, Environment, and Experience

Unlike the ordinary understanding, Dewey offered a wholly new interpretation of “experience,” distinguishing “experience” from “consciousness.” Consciousness, Dewey held, has an abstract character, whereas experience carries a more basic and richer meaning: it is what the human being acquires within nature, through the process of interaction between organism and environment—and he emphasized the important role of the body in grasping nature and acquiring experience. Human consciousness and cognition can only be built upon the foundation of bodily behavior and experience. He says: “Every thought and meaning has its substance in some organic act—absorption or excretion, seeking or avoiding, destroying or conserving, signaling or responding, and the like. It has its root in certain definite acts of physiological behavior; that we name psychic acts with physical terms—grasping, comprehending, pondering, acknowledging, assenting, ignoring, understanding, feeling, emotion, and so on—is not merely a ‘metaphor.’” Husserl, in his “return to the things themselves,” likewise stressed the importance of the body in perceptual activity. Their views were further deepened and made concrete in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and in Dreyfus and Taylor’s Retrieving Realism. Merleau-Ponty held: “The experience of our body’s movement is not a special case of cognition; it offers us a way of entering the world and entering objects, a way that should be taken as primary, or as the most original ‘practical cognition.’” He further noted that the “body schema” is the body’s response to the world, the basic structure of the body’s interaction with the world; human perceptual experience is grounded upon bodily movement. Dreyfus and Taylor, for their part, held that “the agent’s world is shaped by its bodily existence … the way I experience or ‘live through’ the world is essentially the way available to an agent with a body like ours,” and reinterpreted Merleau-Ponty’s “body schema” as the common structure formed between body and environment.

One thing these views share is the emphasis that experience is first generated in the lived process of interaction between the human body and its environment, and that bodily behavior is the foundation of all perception, cognition, and knowledge. Such views have become an extremely important intellectual resource for the theory of “embodied cognition,” while modern neuroscience verifies, from an empirical angle, the linkage among body, movement, and cognition. Dennett holds that the structure of human action “quickly becomes a ‘second nature’; you soon absorb the structure of this external phenomenon into the structures you yourself control.” Beilock further points out: “The mind is not an abstract information-processor separate from body and environment. The mind is to a great extent influenced by body and movement.” Brandt says: “Our body is ‘mentalized.’” Yet, because these various theories ultimately focus on problems of perception and cognition, the body’s and behavior’s grasp of the world inevitably becomes mere background to perception and cognition; though it silently contributes to perception and cognition and exerts a foundational influence, it loses its own independent value. “The point of such a theory is to insist that perception must be understood within the background of action and embodiment.” In fact, once a researcher treats bodily behavior as the background of cognition, the independence and distinctiveness of bodily behavior are effaced.

By comparison, Laozi and Zhuangzi offered a more penetrating account of the distinctiveness of bodily experience. Laozi says: “Man takes his law from Earth; Earth takes its law from Heaven; Heaven takes its law from the Dao; the Dao takes its law from what is so of itself (ziran).” That is, the human grasp of the Dao comes from following the natural, from the unity of human, Earth, Heaven, Dao, and nature. “Virtue” (de) is the concrete embodiment, in the human being, of the natural Dao. “The form of great virtue follows only the Dao.” The Dao flows through human, Earth, Heaven, and nature; so long as one situates oneself within nature, complies with nature, and merges into nature, one grasps the Dao. Zhuangzi, for his part, marshals many vivid parables—“the cook (Pao Ding) carving the ox,” “the hunchback catching cicadas,” “Woodworker Qing carving the bell-stand”—to expound, again and again, the human path to grasping the Dao. Whether it be Pao Ding, the hunchback, or Woodworker Qing, each deals with ox, cicada, or wooden bell-stand in an embodied way: by adjusting bodily behavior to suit the object’s structure, they sediment bodily experience in continually repeated movements. Such bodily experience is no longer at the level of “skill” (ji) but has risen to the realm of “the Dao.” And only when they re-enter the unconscious state of “empty stillness” and “sitting in forgetfulness,” “dismissing the limbs, dispelling the intelligence, leaving form behind and casting off knowledge,” can the human being commune with the Dao. In this Dao-attaining state, bodily behavior plays a decisive role. It is precisely through the continual adjustment and repetition of bodily behavior within the world that behavior is constructed into a disposition that complies with the world, that the body gains experience, links and threads through human and world, breaks down the boundary between the two, and thereby grasps the world and the Dao of nature. In this process, human and world have already fused completely into one—that is, the unity of Heaven and humanity, the oneness of thing and self, the state of no-thing and no-self. I am the world, the world is I; the Dao is set, of itself, into my body and becomes my bodily experience.

One could say that the thought of Laozi and Zhuangzi most profoundly expounds the distinctiveness of grasping the Dao through embodied experience of the world, and accords it the highest status—because only by this path can one truly experience the world, reach the things themselves, and grasp the Dao. This is a mode of embodied experience wholly different from cognition. Not only humans but all organisms enjoy this embodied capacity to grasp the environment; otherwise they would be eliminated by nature. Bodily behavior and disposition are therefore the bridge by which human and world fuse, and the fundamental route to embodied experience of the real world and to the acquisition of experience. This process, in which the body deals directly with the world through behavior and fuses with it, is what we call “lived experience” (tiyan). It and the objectifying activities of perception and cognition are two wholly different ways of grasping the world, standing in a tension relation that is at once mutually distinct and mutually influencing.

Since bodily lived experience is the source from which experience is generated, and all other experience and knowledge are built upon it, the local embeddedness and finitude of the body necessarily determine the finitude of the field of activity and the regional character of experience. “If we return to the most basic, original way of being-in-the-world, where we are led to respond to things as affordances, then we can see that what we deal with is a world that, while helping us, also delimits the scope of our activity.” A person’s process of growth is a process of accumulating experience, and the body is rooted in the place of one’s birth and life, continually interacting and exchanging with the surrounding environment so as to adapt to it, and imperceptibly sedimenting experience step by step. Bodily experience cannot but bear a vivid local imprint and naturally possess regional characteristics. The local embeddedness of the body determines the regional character of experience. This experience, formed from childhood, is engraved in the bone; all later experience and knowledge gained through living or learning must pass through its interpretation and through “assimilation–accommodation” (Piaget’s terms) before being transformed into one’s own true experience and knowledge.

II. The Local Embeddedness of Bodily Experience and the Locality of Literature

Literature, art, and the various aesthetic cultures are precisely sensuous forms—what Susanne Langer calls “the form of life”—which both appear as concrete images and are rooted in bodily experience, embodying a rich and vivid vitality, for literature and art can only summon life with life. Dewey linked art and aesthetic perception with experience and regarded experience as the essence of art. He says: “In the degree in which experience is experience, vitality is enhanced. It does not signify being shut up within one’s own private feelings and sensations; rather it signifies active and alert commerce with the world; at its height it signifies complete interpenetration of self and the world of objects and events.” A work of art arises when experience reaches “complete expression”; and when an experience completes its course, becoming consummated and unified, it acquires aesthetic quality. “Art represents both the summit of experience and the pinnacle of the natural world.”

In Personal Knowledge, Polanyi says: “Each great articulate system constructs its world by elaborating and transforming a particular aspect of prior experience.” Literary creation is rooted in experience—a lived, firsthand experience of life, and especially the experience generated from childhood, which from the very outset of one’s life casts a particular way of feeling the world. This is precisely why almost every writer finds childhood memory unforgettable. When a writer enters the imaginative space of literary creation and casts off the everyday repression of reality, returning to “the naked fact of our original bodily appearance,” bodily experience wells up most fully. To be sure, many of a person’s bodily experiences (the deep unconscious) and behavioral instincts are gifts of the organism, with a long history; but experience and disposition acquired through later activity also play an extremely important role, harboring an individual’s irreproducible distinctiveness—and this experience, formed in a particular environment, cannot but embody local color. “The act that endows an artwork with a cultural significance has always been a local affair.” What literature and art prize most is precisely this distinctive personal experience—a “local” experience—with the aim of opening up and sharing it.

The national epic most fully embodies locality. In the epic’s particular “oral formulas” and “compositional components,” profound local experience is condensed, and even a people’s long history is sedimented. “The singer’s art lies in arranging, in close coherence and only as the course of events requires, all these ready-made ‘compositional components,’ and combining them with newly composed lines. Thus the singer is able to sing all of the aforementioned ‘compositional components’ in very different ways.” In the national epic King Gesar, for instance, the core “compositional components” cluster around such narrative units as the horse, the arrow, the sorcerer, and the oath; through polyphonic, repeated singing they highlight the collective memory of the Tibetan community of the Dokham region, display the community’s concrete way of life, everyday detail, and local features, and reveal the epic’s symbolic significance in social life. In oral literary forms, locality is usually co-created by local writers and audiences, because oral literature faces the audience directly and is constrained and filtered by folk aesthetic tendencies. “The aesthetic evaluation of the public can be seen as a force that plays a role in maintaining and revising the value system … Because the environment changes constantly, a community’s value system always needs more or less revision. In periods of marked change in value orientation, artworks can often clearly reflect new socio-cultural ideals.” In the epic, the “oral formulas” and “compositional components” carry long-accumulated, stable value, while new value-change is embodied in newly composed lines and in improvised, occasion-fitting singing—yet it remains a continuation of local features.

In the history of modern Chinese literature there has always been a distinction between the “Beijing school” and the “Shanghai school,” embodying different aesthetic orientations and regional features. But it is native-soil (xiangtu) literature that highlights locality most vividly. The Lu Town and the southern water-towns of Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren, with Runtu, Sister Xianglin, the Bean-curd Beauty, and the black-awning boats; Shen Congwen’s small border town of western Hunan, the Miao stilt-houses along the Yuan River, and its simple folkways; Shi Tuo’s dust-shrouded Orchard Town of the central plain; Xiao Hong’s black soil of the Northeast and its human scenes along the Hulan River; Lin Haiyin’s old-city stories; Wang Anyi’s Shanghai lanes and alleyways—all brim with a rich local flavor and bear an individual, distinctive imprint; even the brothers Lu reveal utterly different physiognomies. This is the homeland where the author grew up from childhood: every plant and tree of the native place, every kinsman and friend, every event personally lived through, is deeply branded upon body and soul and vividly embodied in the literary work.

Yet precisely because one has participated in and been immersed in it since childhood, it can seem flat and unremarkable. Only when the author departs from the homeland, sets foot on foreign soil, and witnesses different people and affairs does the native place stand out in memory, steeped in a rich and melancholy emotion. That is, only when a rupture appears between old experience and new environment—when the once-hidden bodily experience comes into friction or even conflict with the new environment—does the memory lurking deep within resurface, bearing profound emotion. Shusterman says: “Sensation, of course, belongs to the body and is deeply affected by bodily conditions. Our sensory cognition therefore depends on how the body feels and functions, on what the body desires, does, and undergoes.” Dewey puts it more concretely: “An old habit, a fixed routine—if one cares to exaggerate—obstructs the process of forming a new habit, while at the same time the tendency to form a new habit breaks through certain old habits. Thus arise instability, novelty, and the emergent appearance of unexpected and unpredictable combinations.” Old experience produces automatized, unconscious behavior; when a rupture appears between old experience and new environment, and the writer, standing on a new vantage point, looks back and reinterprets the old experience, novelty and emergence occur. Outstanding native-soil works therefore often appear after the author has left the homeland and lost the home—interweaving the pain of rootlessness with the anxiety of seeking roots. Bodily experience is originally invisible; it can only attach to, and project upon, the visible plants and trees, mountains and rivers, village houses, and human affairs. Hence the locality in a literary work appears not only in scenery and human affairs but, more, is embodied in deep and distinctive existential sensations and emotional tones, condensing into a perceptible yet invisible aura (lingyun). Tellingly, this homeland complex is deep-rooted: even when the author harbors resentment toward the native place, he cannot wipe away a deep attachment; yet once he faces a new environment, the rupture of experience robs him of belonging and security, so that he can scarcely conceal an inner indignation and weariness, letting slip—intentionally or not—a sharp irony.

In the novel Miguel Street, Naipaul depicts the human scene of the Indian immigrant community of Miguel Street in the British colony of Trinidad. Here there is no “news” of any kind—only an idle, mediocre crowd: the garbage-truck driver, the accountant-cum-teacher, the Indian preacher, the firework-maker, the barber, the down-and-out poet, the brothel-keeper … and a carpenter named Popo. His curly hair is covered with sawdust and shavings; all day he busily hammers, saws, and chisels, making a “thing without a name,” yet he gladly teaches me the craft. Every morning he stands by the roadside holding a glass of rum without drinking a drop; whenever an acquaintance appears, he dips his middle finger into the glass, licks his finger, and then greets the person. His wife, a cook in a great household, brings me many good things to eat each day and loves to sit across from me watching me eat, having me call her auntie. The way she looks, it is as if she wants me to eat just for her to watch. But she suddenly disappears—abducted by the master of the great household. From then on, no hammering sound is heard in the workshed. Popo begins to drink desperately, gives off a strong reek of rum, often cries out loudly, flies into a rage, even strikes people—behaviors that make him one of that crowd on Miguel Street, and Popo is well satisfied with these new companions. Naipaul was born on Miguel Street; after graduating from Oxford he wrote the short-story collection Miguel Street. As a colony, Miguel Street is economically depressed and its life impoverished; its inhabitants are numb, lowly, and coarse in character, yet also kind and loving; they have never felt the meaning of life or the hope of a future. But when Naipaul enters a new living environment and receives a modern education, his strongest feeling is a nostalgia for the people and affairs of the native place. His way of seeing the world has changed; he cannot but feel deep anxiety over Miguel Street’s condition, and even when his depiction lets slip a kindly faint irony, that deep love for homeland and old folk still presses through the page.

The reason the body is a perfect instrument of learning is that its capacity for learning is strong: it can firmly retain much of what it learns, often without the learner himself being aware of it. Without prior notice or warning, simply by experiencing and participating in this incorporation, it masters social relations. Through “a string of small movements we make casually, without thinking,” the social order is thus recorded in the body, unnoticed and uncontested. These “small movements” that the body learns belong to what Dewey calls “experience.” If the cultural environment is often constructed by conscious, purposive behavior, then the body within that cultural environment is unwittingly steeped in culture and reveals local color. “If separated from culture, he would be an animal physically unable to subsist independently … separated from culture, the human being could not survive mentally either.” In fact the cultural environment contains extremely complex factors: Althusser attends to its ideological aspect, the body being interpellated by ideology; Foucault attends to power relations, calling the body’s being shaped by power “discipline”; Erving Goffman, metaphorically, calls it role-performance on the stage of life; Bourdieu, more concerned with class, calls this process the cultivation of habitus—all of them experiences the body unwittingly learns, bearing not only the imprint of ideology, power, class, and role, but inevitably also the imprint of ethnos and place.

Naipaul is an outstanding postcolonial writer. “One of the structural patterns that recur in postcolonial literature is exile … The presence of these shared themes and the recurrence of structural and formal models are not accidental. They are an appeal to a shared psychological and historical condition, a commonality that crosses the differences among various colonial societies.” “Exile” is separation from homeland and native soil, a rupture of lived experience; and homeland and experience have already engraved an indelible mark, producing an ever-present, permanent wound, so that the structure of “exile” becomes a fate postcolonial writers can scarcely avoid. For Naipaul, it is as though he underwent multiple “exiles”: as one of Indian descent whose ancestral land had long since become a British colony, he had in this sense long undergone a spiritual “exile”; Naipaul himself was born in a Caribbean Indian immigrant community, far from the Indian homeland—another exile; Miguel Street, after all, was inhabited by Indian-descended immigrants, to some degree still maintaining Indian cultural remnants and forming a hybrid immigrant culture—and when he set foot on the road to study in Britain, that journey was the true exile. For Miguel Street, then, Naipaul’s feeling is extremely complex, and the locality that appears in his writing has a flavor all its own.

Relph says: “When we wholly commit ourselves to a place, bitterness and pain follow like a shadow. Wherever there is commitment, there always comes the acceptance of the limits and the suffering a place brings.” Naipaul’s father was an immigrant who pursued individual, independent value, and Naipaul from childhood received a British-style education; though he loved deeply the immigrant community around him, he was unwilling to rest content with the environment’s limits and a life without aspiration. Studying at Oxford was precisely the route to flee those limits and that suffering. But when he left the homeland of his childhood, broke free of the limits, and opened a broad future before him, he could not but feel keenly the sorrow of losing home.

“What we call art is, broadly, created by an individual or a group, and is supported or constrained from behind by the supra-individual taste and sensibility of a particular region or era.” Locality in literature is an extremely complex phenomenon: it is cumulative, fluid, generative, or mutable. Human experience itself has multi-layered sedimentation. As bodily experience common to organisms, it belongs to the deep unconscious and instinct, or may be called Frye’s “archetype”—and it is precisely the commonality of experience at this level that endows literature with a universality shared by all humankind. But for a particular people, it is in turn stamped by that people’s environment of existence, in which language and cultural identity play the chief roles; while the experience sedimented by smaller-range ethnic groups or local life often exists in the form of custom and habitus, and it is precisely at this level that the most marked locality is condensed, revealing an individual’s distinctive sensation and tone. As Tuan Yi-fu says: “An appropriate scale enables a good relation to be established between human perception and a region. And if a region happens to be a natural geographical unit, people can establish an even closer relation with it.” This deep participation in and commitment to local life, the experience of opening one’s heart to “home,” forms “topophilia.” At the same time, locality also flows with human migration or cultural transmission, continually generated and mutated as environments change and cultural exchange grows ever more frequent. In the internet age, swift and convenient cultural transmission scours and washes the local factors of literature like an endless tide. In literary activity, locality and universality always coexist and conflict, fusing and mingling inextricably; to discuss the locality of literature one must therefore attend to this complexity. The more deeply literary creation is rooted in life, the more vivid its locality often is, and the richer the local experience it offers—and this living local experience not only attracts readers but, more importantly, broadens human vision and breadth of mind, strengthening our understanding of the world and our tolerance for various cultures.

Geertz’s advice on anthropological research applies equally to literature. He says: “At one end is the search, point by point, for the particular merit of each specific viewpoint; at the other end is the locating, with a global breadth of vision, of the attitude running through these viewpoints—and the back-and-forth shuttling between the two ends has here dominated the progress of the analysis.” Especially since modern times, literature’s worldwide exchange has grown ever more frequent and its mutual influence ever more marked; there is both fusion and differentiation. We therefore need all the more, in our discussion, to grasp both ends—combining local distinctiveness with a global horizon.