A study of the construction of subjectivity in Internet-based Chinese fantasy novels

Introduction

As one of the most popular fiction genres, the fantasy novel witnessed a boom in 21st-century China. Internal and external factors give rise to the abundance of fantasy in China. On the one hand, the fantasy novel was deeply rooted in the traditions of Chinese myth and local religion, particularly Taoism. Fantasy novels in ancient China can be traced back to The Classic of Mountains and Rivers (Shan Hai Jing, 山海经). In the subgenres of ancient Chinese novels, like zhiguai志怪and chuanqi传奇, fantasy has been an essential literary ingredient and has been incorporated into literary tradition for a long time. On the other hand, since the late 20th century, the development of the culture industry contributes to the wide translation and great popularity of contemporary western fantasy novels, like JK Rowling's Harry Potter series, serving as catalysts for Chinese fantasy. Compared with print media, network fiction websites, such as jinjiang晋江, yuewen阅文, haitang海棠, have advantages of convenience and timeliness and are gaining increasing currency among the younger generation in China. Digital media provides dynamic, non-exclusive and polyvocal platforms for direct communication and interaction between writers and readers in real time, which deeply restructures the traditional mode of literary production. However, the production and consumption of fantasy have been inevitably incorporated into the system of the culture industry, one manifestation of which is that more and more novels are being adapted into TV series, movies and games, objectively promoting the cross-media dissemination and influence enhancement of fantasy novels.

The definition of ‘fantasy novel’ encompasses a variety of interpretations by different theorists, reflecting the genre's complexity and inclusive nature. One significant definition comes from Tzvetan Todorov (1975: 25), who describes fantasy as an ambiguous literary mode that arises from the hesitation between natural and supernatural explanations of events. David Sandner (2004: 12) expands on this by suggesting that fantasy novels focus on mythic storytelling and the internal logic of its worlds, which makes them different from science fiction and horror. He posits that fantasy involves a reimagining of history and culture, weaving together elements of the fantastical with familiar social structures. Kathryn Hume (1984: 20–21) defines fantasy as ‘any departure from consensus reality, an impulse native to literature and manifested in innumerable variations, from monster to metaphor’. In her view, every genre is entangled with two impulses, mimesis and fantasy. Moreover, Brian Attebery (1992: 45) highlights that fantasy novels often challenge the boundaries of reality and delve into the realms of archetypes and myth. He suggests that the genre serves as a medium for exploring existential questions through the lenses of magic and otherworldly experiences. Despite the variety of understandings here, the theorization of fantasy novels shares the interplay between reality and the supernatural power, the construction of alternative worlds, the appropriation of religion and myth, and the exploration of human nature and existential themes. As an essential element of world literature, fantasy fiction offers a thought experiment that places the subject in the ambiguity of blending tradition and modernity, superstition and science, imagination and reality, to test truths that seem timelessly valid.

However, the term ‘Chinese fantasy novel’ seems to be ill-fitting compared with its original name xuanhuan玄幻. Literally, xuanhuan consists of xuan玄and huan幻. Xuan means unfathomable, inexpressible and profound, while huan means illusory, visionary and unreal. On Wuxia World, a well-known website specializing in promoting and translating Chinese online novels, ‘Fantasy’ is listed alongside ‘Xianxia仙侠’, ‘Romance’, ‘Historical’, ‘Sci Fi’, and ‘Game’. It indicates that xuanhuan is closely related to science fiction, wuxia武侠 and other genres with a strong fantasy nature, while the subtle differences between them cannot be ignored (see Raphals, 2019). Xuanhuan originally refers to fantasy novels based on xuanxue玄学 (Chinese traditional metaphysics and mysticism). Xuanxue is an ancient Chinese theoretical system that explains the laws of the universe and immortality cultivation, which mainly includes fengshui风水, fortune-telling命理 and Chinese alchemy炼丹. Compared with ‘Chinese fantasy novel’, Xuanhuan is a more vernacular, cultural and inclusive concept which blends the ancient and the contemporary. Xuanhuan refers to the reconfiguration and redeployment of Chinese cultural resources in historical, religious and mythological traditions. It creates a supernatural world with reference to the laws of operation, hierarchical order, emotional relationships and ethical norms in reality, rethinking and questioning the modern formation of subjectivity in the fictional and limitless world. Therefore, the real theme of xuanhuan novels is the metaphysical exploration of subjectivity. In the analysis by Fredric Jameson (2005: 168), fantasy allows for a unique exploration of the utopian impulse in human nature and the construction of subjectivity, which highlights the tensions between inherent human desires and radical transformation. In his view, balancing radical change with continuity is key to preserving the revolutionary essence of utopian texts.

Owing to the acceleration of cultural globalization, the construction of individual identity has become multi-dimensional, contextualized and liquid. Multinational capitalism and cultural colonialism have continuously expanded their influence through digital media, while the cultural and political forces of the nation-states that used to dominate individual identity have been weakened. This article aims to provide a creative cartography of subjective construction in contemporary Chinese fantasy novels, demonstrating their valuable efforts to balance the classical and the modern, the center and the periphery, as well as roots and routes. While harking back to the continuous and indigenous tradition, the narratives are committed to constructing a new type of decentralized subject, who challenges the established system to create a more democratic alternative world as the agent of revolution. However, the hero always displays an ambivalent attitude towards dominant power and maintains a relationship with community that is both alienating and belonging. Moreover, Chinese fantasy novels question the dominant position of scientific rationality or free will and turn to the interaction and transformation between the mind and body, as well as between conscious existence and unconscious matter. The cultivators are able to break through the limitations of sensibility and strengthen physical function through body techniques, and even achieve the free movement and transformation of the inter-spirit. The endless modification and enhancement of embodied subject in the novels fundamentally deviates from the traditional humanist opinion of bodily integrity, originality and sanctity, firmly pointing to a post-humanist future.

The crisis of identity construction

Internet-based Chinese fantasy novels strongly appeal to and resonate with millions of Chinese young people of all circumstances. One contributing factor is that they are read as initiation stories in contemporary China. As modern initiation stories, these novels, which typically portray a modern protagonist transported into a fantastical world, engage with themes of power, rationality and immortality. During the heroine's journey, she enhances both her physical and mental capabilities, culminating in the attainment of supreme power, supernatural strength and eternal life. In Martin Heidegger’s (1967: 348) words, the protagonist is portrayed as an orphan of modern civilization ‘the abandoned being thrown into the world’ (in die welt Geworfenes), but she does not lose her modern identity, all her past memories, scientific knowledge and the way of thinking from the modern world. In this situation, success does not take root in the adherence to different values and regulations in an unfamiliar world, but in the rational, utilitarian use of modern knowledge and reason. For this reason, Chinese fantasy novels provide an imaginative space, an ‘enclave’ in Jameson's term, where modern, rational subjects are redefined and recontextualized within a pre-modern, pre-enlightened world.

Although there is a deep gap between the enlightened modern society and the enchanted world of mythology, Chinese fantasy novels introduce modern subjects into an alternative world, merging traditional orders with the spirit of enlightenment, characterized by the priority of reason over superstition, the legitimacy and equality of individuals, the protection of rights (liberty, democracy, property, etc.), the improvement of fairness in society and the advancement of secularization. Horkheimer (1987: 55) pointed out that the essence of enlightenment involves a dilemma of domination, where humans must choose either to dominate nature through self-mastery or to be dominated by it. The genre's narrative paradigm resonates with the Robinsonade tradition, where Defoe's protagonist epitomizes the bourgeois subject's dual conquest of both mysterious nature and alterity through instrumental rationality. In this sense, Chinese fantasy novels can also be read as allegories of neoliberal society, intricately weaving together modernity and tradition while combining narratives of the nation-state and individual desires. The ambiguous attitude towards enlightenment discourse embodies the ambivalence of contemporary subjects, who navigate a liminal space between individual-oriented humanism and systemic complicity.

In Chinese fantasy fiction, the first path of identity construction is to retain the modern identity and adhere to the belief in grand narratives. Following this path, the protagonists take up the task of reaffirming and reconstructing the legitimacy of modern values. This progress requires not only a change in cultural consciousness and perceptions, but also a fundamental revolution in the social order and political institutions, reflecting the ideal of construction of utopia. In Joy of Life (Qing Yu Nian 《庆余年》), a popsular online fantasy novel in China, the hero Fan Xian and his mother Ye Qingmei both come from the modern world and change the Qing Kingdom in two different ways. The main storyline is that Fan Xian takes revenge for his mother by killing his father, as well as the king of Qing Kingdom, who is responsible for the death of Ye. The shadow of Ye's death hangs over the story from beginning to end and she is portrayed as the embodiment of past modernity. To build a more egalitarian, democratic and prosperous society, she introduces modern science and technology to improve the productivity of Qing Kingdom, develop industries and promote a series of reforms in terms of the economy, politics and the military. Aiming at preventing the abuse of power and corruption, Ye strives to establish the procuratorate and fights for an equal and fair social order, which threatens the interests of privileged classes and leads to her death. The stone tablet in front of the procuratorate carries her wishes for the people in Qing Kingdom:

I hope that the people of the Qing Kingdom could be unfettered. Not to yield when being mistreated by others, not to be frustrated when being attacked by disasters; if something is wrong, don’t be afraid to correct it. Not to flatter the bigwigs … I hope that every citizen of Qing Kingdom could be a king, the only king who rules over the territory called ‘self’. (Mao, 2008, vol. 7, ch. 94)

This inscription conveys Ye's ideal of training the citizen of the modern nation-state and the autonomous and independent subject for democracy, but the production and cultivation of a new type of independent subject depend on the radical revolution of the entire state apparatus, beyond the sphere of economy, which is a long historical process. As Althusser (2014) argued, ‘all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, through the functioning of the category of the subject’ (190). In other words, individuals internalize the values and norms of the dominant order, shaping their concrete subjectivity within an ideological framework. This process of subject formation is vividly illustrated in fantasy novels, where the cultivation system, family lineage and clan status are often portrayed as the embodiment of Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs). ISAs serve as the basis of the worldview and subjectivity of characters in the magical world, producing subjects who are unable to break down the fundamental mechanisms of the social operation they are subject to, thereby consolidating the established social order. For this reason, although Ye's reform enhanced the political and economic strength of Qing, her modern ideas were too radical and forward-thinking for the time, which led to the emperor and nobles’ suspicion and opposition, ultimately resulting in her being killed by her husband after giving birth.

Despite her death, Ye maintains an absolute presence by her absence and her ideal of modernity lingers in the collective memory as an unfulfilled promise of revolution. In the light of literary form, she is the cause of the others’ actions and constitutes the carrier of the narrative. She is the goddess of enlightenment and the ghost of revolution, wandering in everyone's heart. Although she advanced the principles of equality, democracy and science in her personal and social practices, these modern ideals faded with her death and were superseded by the solidification and reproduction of an established power structure. The project attempts to cultivate a dual subjectivity that embodies both national state identity and democratic autonomy, touching upon the fundamental paradox of ideological production. Subjects are expected to be both the products of existing power structures and the potential vehicles for resistance.

Different to Ye, the hero Fan Xian chooses a path that inherits the secularization of the spirit of enlightenment and abolished grand narratives. Born illegitimate, Fan Xian has a problematic and contradictory identity. However, he was born with great power because his nominal fathers are bigwigs in the kingdom and his real father is the king. It is paradoxical that such an equality fighter relies on his father's status to obtain his power and legal basis. The fundamental dynamic of identity construction always lies in the dialectic of public values and individual desire, privacy and public. Self is a problematic conception because his illegal identity gained legitimacy due to the power he inherited. The hero strives to transform the old social order, even though power is bestowed upon him by it. In this sense, he strives towards his opposite, paradoxically. His successful revenge on his father, the King of Qing and the embodiment of autocratic power, fails to establish a new social order. Instead, he hands over power to a new king, his brother, in the naive belief in the governance-capacity of the new ruler. Fundamentally, his practice removes the possibility of any true revolution and antagonistic practice and thus reproduces the relations of power under the existing system.

The characters in Chinese fantasy fiction restructure the whole issue of subject and project it onto a collective and social level. Thus, the image of Fan Xian serves as a vehicle for understanding the new imagination about the ideal subject by a young generation in the period of transformation of contemporary China's society. The gap between grand narratives and private discourse is refracted through the difference of two generations, from Ye to Fan. Fan's revenge for his mother not only constitutes the surface thread of the narrative, but also represents a nostalgia for the spirit of enlightenment with the attempt to appropriate a missing past. The enlightenment values and ideal of changing society insisted on by Ye are not completely inherited by the younger generation. His revenge for Ye and fighting against power have been reduced to private motives of feeling toward his mother and the requirement of self-preservation, rather than inheritance of the revolutionary spirit. Fan does not fully embrace grand values such as ‘justice’, ‘democracy’ and such. Public value can only be accepted and recognized by the hero when it is transformed into a link with private emotions. His motto, ‘when in poverty, one should perfect oneself; when in prosperity, one has numerous wives and concubines’ (穷则独善其身，富则妻妾成群), reflects a shift in traditional values, which represents a lifestyle of an ordinary individual, only caring about himself and his private affairs and refusing to imagine and implement any fundamental change in social existence. In fantasy novels like Battle Though the Heaven (《斗破苍穹》), Sword Snow Stride (《雪中悍刀行》) and Douluo Continent (《斗罗大陆》), grand social contradictions and ideological conflicts are transformed into narratives of individual growth and resolved imaginatively through individual heroism instead of radical revolution.

Nowadays, everyday life has gained unprecedented significance, becoming a new proposition for citizens and a rational proof of individual dignity and desire, corresponding to the internalization of the mind structure of the postmodern subject, which lays the foundation for the legitimacy of a new literary imagination of the subject. If we regard the text as symbolic expressions of political opinion or ideology, it is necessary to point out that online fantasy novels exhibit traits of individualism, apathy and apoliticism, in a situation where they strike a chord with a considerable number of readers, especially appealing to the young generation in China. Therefore, the diagnosis of subjectivity is a literary and indeed a historical and collective one. Unlike the old imagination of the perfect hero, the new ideal subjects generated by Chinese fantasy fiction, like Fan Xian, embody a series of contradictory characteristics to seek a reconciliation between grand narratives and private discourse. The hero in fiction insists on individual priority over publicity and acts according to the primary norms of utilitarianism, while he cherishes the basic moral values like love, kinship and friendship, which are more important than the great themes like nation and history from his perspective. In alternative worlds, main characters like Fan Xian absolutely have the capability to change the social order but they doubt or opposes this, just as the meaning of Fan Xian's name (the pronunciation of Fan Xian is similar to ‘offense’ in Chinese), suggests something less than completely destroying the world and establishing a new one, because the project of totality overspills their individual dream. More importantly, the key reason lies in their attitudes towards power, being eager for it and afraid of seizing it at the same time.

The contradictory image of the subject in Chinese fantasy fictions represents the identity crisis of the new generation in 21st-century China. On one hand, due to the prevalence of value-pluralism, the once self-evident values of the enlightenment have been thrown into the trash can and have lost their binding power for Generation Z. With the deepening trend towards secularization, it is undeniable that the discrediting of grand narratives has given way to individual values, but attention must be paid to the issue that the extreme expansion of individualism has led to a crisis of legitimacy in public narratives, which makes it more difficult for the young generation to successfully publicize individual values and pursuits. On the other hand, the representation of new subjects provides a locus for the reconciliation between grand narratives and private discourse, forcing us to continually question and explore the relationship between the individual wish for better life and grander narratives of the historical, political-economic issues of the times. In addition to the narrative of totality about the social revolution, are there any other paths towards a more equal and vibrant society?

The blurring and extension of subjective boundaries

In the first section, I showed that the subject faces a deep chasm between publicity and privacy, tradition and modernity, which brings about the crisis of identity construction. Chinese fantasy fiction not only shows that the young generation are struggling with anchoring their location on the map of society as a whole and conceiving of fundamental social revolution, but also makes important progress in the experiment of blurring and extending inter-subjective boundaries, taking steps towards social equality. In light of the construction of the subject, Chinese fantasy fiction maintains the position of mind–body dualism and takes it as the philosophical foundation of fictional plots such as soul-travel and immortality cultivation. Mind–body dualism not only has a long tradition in both the western world and China, but also gains new development by the endeavor of posthumanists.

Rooted in a long tradition in ancient China, interrelations between mind and body are complex and entangled. According to the dominant idea, ancient Chinese philosophy holds the view of body–mind monism, seeing mind and body as an indivisible entity. However, this version is contradicted by Chinese fantasy fiction, which is influenced by the tradition of Chinese religion, especially Daoism and Buddhism. In Chinese tradition, a human can be identified as a mixture of individual components, which are specifically formulated as soul (hun魂) and body (po魄). It is worth noticing that hun/po can only be translated into soul/body at a very general level, and there is still a subtle difference between these two groups of terms that cannot be ignored. Lo Yuet Keung reviews the history of the concepts hun and po. Before the 6th century BC, South China refers to the single soul as hun whereas North China uses po (Lo, 2008). At the end of the 4th century BC, under the influence of the theory of Yin Yang cosmos, hun and po were merged as a composite concept, with the former referring to spirituality and the latter to materiality. A human being as a whole is made of three hun and seven po. In traditional Chinese cosmology and Daoist thought, Hun refers to the ethereal souls, including the soul of heaven, the soul of earth and the soul of a human being, and itlies in spirituality relating to yang阳. By contrast, Po refers to the physical body, encompassing emotions such as happiness, anger, sadness, fear, love, evil and desire, and it lies in matter relating to yin阴. In Mind and Body in Early China: Beyond Orientalism and the Myth of Holism, Edward Slingerland (2019: 19–21) identifies the mind–body relationship in ancient China as ‘weak’ mind–body dualism since matter and consciousness are independent of each other but still influence and interact with each other from his perspective, as opposed to a strong holistic position and traditional western dualism. He not only criticizes the dominant accounts of Chinese philosophy as mind–body monism, but also reconstructs the radical Cartesian mind–body dualism. Descartes, who left a deep and lasting legacy of disembodied rationalism dominating the history of western philosophy, argues that the nature of the mind as the thinking non-extended substance is completely different from that of the body as the extended non-thinking substance, therefore the fundamental distinction between them made it possible for one to exist without the other (1996: 55). Slingerland reaches the conclusion that the weak mind-body in ancient China is characterized by the balance of embodied experience and spiritual pursuit, the secular world and the transcendent other world, so it serves as a unique thought model for the west. In ancient Chinese philosophy, the body, as a material entity, governs both physical and emotional faculties, while the mind is endowed with both sensible and cognitive functions. Moreover, the mind still has the power to coordinate and dominate the whole body (see Slingerland and Chudek, 2011).