THINGS

Fall 2001
Volume 28, Number 1

Collectors are among the most suggestive characters in literary histories, East and West. What is intriguing about them is often not only what they collect but also the paradoxical movement, inscribed in their collecting behavior, from the frivolous to the serious, from the casual pleasures of accumulating nonessential objects to the most perverse kinds of addiction. This movement reveals a type of personality disorder that can be aesthetically fascinating. But aesthetic observations alone have far from exhausted the interpretative possibilities of the collector's obsession; other libidinal ramifications, albeit less frequently observed and explored, lurk behind what seems at first to be a matter of pure eccentric individualism. This is especially the case if a collector is faced not only with his or her collected objects but simultaneously with the forces of socialization, such as the moral imperative of self-sacrifice vis-à-vis a collective. At the juncture between the love for the inanimate as such and the demands of group identity, what might the act of collecting signify? What might an intimacy with inanimate objects do to one's sense of communal belonging, of being part of, say, a national community?

See Also Svetlana Boym: On Diasporic Intimacy: Ilya Kabakov's Installations and Immigrant Homes (Winter 1998) Benedict Anderson: Exodus (Winter 1994)

These questions are unveiled by the remarkable, little known short story "Lian" ("Attachment") by the modern Chinese author Lao She, the pen name of Shu Qingchun or Shu Sheyü (1899-1966).1 In the discussion to follow, I suggest that inscribed in this narrative of an ordinary man's idiosyncratic obsession with collectibles is nothing less than an alternative way of thinking about what we nowadays call identity politics. Accordingly, the far-reaching implications concerning social identity and identification are illuminated not so much through the familiar light of human subjectivity as through the obscure allure of material objects, an allure that in turn tells us something about the passion with which such objects have characteristically been condemned in modern theory.

1. See Lao She, "Lian," Pinxue ji (Wenjin chubanshe, 1944), pp. 110-21; trans. Sarah Wei-ming Chen, under the title "Attachment," Blades of Grass: The Short Stories of Lao She, trans. William A. Lyell and Chen (Honolulu, 1999), pp. 211-25; hereafter abbreviated "A." The story was first published in the journal Shi yü chao wenyi, 15 Mar. 1943, pp. 37-43.

Rey Chow is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown University and the author of several books, including, most recently, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (forthcoming).