The Anachronistic Novel: Reading Pearl S. Buck Alongside Franco Moretti Stuart Christie* Hong Kong Baptist University Abstract Reappropriating Franco Moretti’s term ‘distant reading’, this essay positions American novelist Pearl S. Buck as both the outsider-inside a particular Chinese cultural tradition as well as an insi- der-outside the tradition of Chinese fictionalized historiography (the modern xiaoshuo) which allowed for the birth of a globalized ‘China’ in the English-language novel. Buck’s anachronistic legacy, I argue, runs afoul of Moretti’s own tendency in The Novel, Volume I: History, Geography, and Culture to re-inscribe the nationality and centeredness of received canons, even when attempt- ing to legislate new directions for a global readership. Lacking a home within any particular national or global tradition, extra-canonical novels and their writers parallel the received canon subversively, by questioning the rationale underlying canon formation as a merely classificatory exercise; that is, by questioning how some works are included and others excluded. Once excluded, anachronistic novels nevertheless persist, apart from widespread scholarly recognition. Eventually, however, Pearl S. Buck’s self-proclaimed anachronism, deployed so effectively during her Nobel Laureate speech in 1938, became untimely, as she struggled to convince an American television audience, in 1958, that her views about femininity, China apart, were relevant to modern life. Reaching the West as both the product of poesis (metaphor) and as part of a shared world-historical process (metonymy), the signifier ‘China’ has circulated where the mate- rial China embedded in its own place, space, and time never could. In this essay, I will suggest that the structural divide between ‘Chinese’ signifier and Chinese referent contin- ues to mystify as well as to embellish our understanding of the global circulation of the modern ‘Chinese’ novel. Citing recent research in Moretti’s The Novel, I affirm the latter as an artifact, alternatively, of the collectively fashioned world tradition of letters or of one country’s unique tradition. (And, at times, both.) That such a critical torque should have emerged, operating astride national and global novelistic traditions, illustrates how even a well-informed interlocutor like Pearl S. Buck – here I will offer a brief analysis of the English-language version of the xiaoshuo she invented in the 1930s – embraced the anachronism of novelistic traditions as constitutive. The literature review addressing China and the novel has been invigorated by Moretti’s scholarship, and is characterized by an increasingly skeptical, hermeneutic approach which is prying comparative studies (at long last) away from its origins in disciplinary formalism. (We may recall the standardized vocabulary of plot, theme, affinity, and influence study.) The advent of hermeneutical suspicion does not argue solely against privileged forms of comparative analysis, however. It also situates comparative studies in a globalized context of reading and readership by arguing, alternately, against the ‘monogenesis of modernity’ thesis (Ma 444), which requires the Chinese novel to acknowledge a set of origins diffus- ing from the pre- and early-modern West, as well as for a relation of other-than-strictly- Literature Compass 7/12 (2010): 1089–1100, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00766.x ª 2010 The Author Literature Compass ª 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd