Comparative Freedoms : Conceptions of Personal Freedom in post 1950 American, Australian and Chinese fiction

Abstract

My thesis, ‘Comparative Freedoms: Conceptions of Freedom in post-1950 American, Australian and Chinese Fiction’ seeks to investigate the transcultural continuities and discontinuities in liberal thinking concerning personal freedom across the United States, Australia and China, by examining textual explorations of ideas of freedom from within these different cultures. A discussion of ideas of personal freedom necessarily involves an engagement with concepts of ‘selfhood’ within these countries, for as Isaiah Berlin so justly notes, ‘conceptions of freedom directly derive from views of what constitutes a self, a person, a man’.1 2 3 There are a number of reasons for the continued influence of the United States as a world leader in modern conceptions of freedom. ‘No idea is more fundamental to Americans’ sense of themselves as individuals and as a nation than freedom’“ suggests Eric Foner, the leading historian on American freedom. Indeed ‘freedom’ has become a central term in American discourse, so much so the language of freedom has come to permeate all aspects of American culture.’ In our increasingly globalised world, has United States interventionist foreign policy and cultural imperialism transplanted, alongside McDonald’s, American understandings of freedom to other parts of the globe? Or is the concept of freedom culturally and linguistically contingent, as proponents of ‘Asian values’ and cultural specificity would suggest?4 I attempt to explore these questions in relation to Australia, a country considered in many respects to be America’s closest cousin; and in regards to China, thought of by many as America’s diametric opposite. Thus, my thesis focuses upon the impact of cultural globalisation on ideas of personal freedom as refracted through the prism of contemporary fiction. I have chosen to examine contemporary fiction not only because literature can offer unique insight into a culture but also because the creative act in itself has long been considered a close expression of personal freedom (because it can be seen as a reflection of ‘noumenal’ insight). 5 Furthermore it is evident that imaginative writing provides a liberating space for the discussion of what has often been a politically sensitive subject. If literature is thought to be so closely related to personal freedom, then to what extent has the increased global circulation of literature and its popular surrounding critical discourses such as postmodernism, poststructualism and postcolonialism, also contributed to changes in people’s conceptions of freedom? Given that freedom itself is a relative concept often defined by comparison, authors covered in my dissertation seek to explore the concept in reference to alternatives found in foreign works and cultures. The thesis is set out in four chapters, the first of which explores conceptions of freedom in internationally popular works of American fiction such as Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate (1959), Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch (1959), and Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) alongside his Mao 7/(1991) and White Noise (1985), in an attempt to establish a basis for comparison regarding ideas of personal freedom. It approaches the contemporary conception of American freedom as inherently associated with the ideas of democracy and individualism and significantly influenced by traditional frontier mythology (specifically the archetypal figure of the outlaw hero), the psychological impact of the Cold War, consumerism and the advent of literary postmodernism. The second chapter on Australian fiction begins with Peter Mathers’ Trap (1966) and David Ireland’s The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (1971), in order to explore the Australian manifestations of the outlaw hero and surrounding frontier mythology in comparison to the handling of similar themes in Kesey’s Cuckoo’s Nest. Ireland’s novel is also used to explore the impact of modern liberal capitalism and neo-imperialism on personal freedom, as is Christos Tsiolkas’ Dead Europe (2005), which invokes Derrida’s theory of hauntology and deals with the theme on a more global scale. The chapter ends with a discussion of Kim Scott’s Benang (1999) which with comparative reference to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, continues to discuss the relevance of themes of postcolonialism, and literary postmodernism to contemporary conceptions of freedom. Using Edward Said’s seminal theory as a point of embarkation, the third chapter explores the use of orientalism (despite its recognised inadequacies) as an emancipatory strategy in the familiar work of Emerson, Thoreau, and Kerouac. Having gained an understanding of the intricacies of cross cultural borrowing, this chapter then moves towards the possibility of an age of ‘post-orientalism’ and cultural hybridity in a discussion of American author Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel Tripmaster Monkey (1989) and Australian author Brian Castro’s novel After China (1992). As in the first two chapters, the fourth chapter also begins its discussion of Chinese freedom with an exploration of a folkloric figure of resistance and autonomy through a reading of two of Jin Yong’s martial arts novels. The subsequent reemergence of such figures in antiheroic form in Chinese fiction from the late 1980s onward is reflective of the countercultural Zeitgeist evident in Wang Shuo’s Playing For Thrills (1989). The chapter ends in a discussion of the recluse tradition as an alternative mode of resistance in dissident writer Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain. Gao’s novel seems an appropriate text to end with as accusations surrounding Gao’s apparent ‘Westernisation’ initiate interesting discussion regarding the ever more complicated nature of crosscultural ‘influence’ and to what extent a ‘pure’ cultural identity is possible in our current age of globalisation. My thesis explores the related questions of whether the commonalities found between works from different cultures in relation to concepts of freedom are a result of the homogenisation that is a consequence of the global age, whether they suggest evidence of a certain humanistic universality, and whether there is perhaps enough evidence for the maintenance of cultural specificity despite globalising trends. Ultimately I believe my research provides evidence of what Roland Robertson has referred to as a ‘process involving the interpenetration of the universalization of particularism and the particularization of universalism’.6 In doing so I believe it also illustrates the number of ways in which contemporary works may fit within a broader context of ‘world literature’, and provides an example of the international reading practice and intellectual projects made possible by the realities of contemporary global informational technology. Despite its provisional use of national categorization, it is a project that demonstrates the extent to which literature has moved beyond national and linguistic boundaries, whether because the local text borrows from the global in its attempt to reach a self-definition, because of the international circulation of a particular work, or because of the cross-culturalism of an author.