The Cosmic Library Adam Colman

The Cosmic Library has always followed notions, tangents, and moods prompted by books that can never be neatly summarized or simply decoded. This new season is no exception. Still, there's a difference: we're prompted now by more than one major work. In season five, we're talking about short stories in the United States.

You’ll hear from New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman, the novelist Tayari Jones, Washington Post critic Becca Rothfeld, the writer Justin Taylor, the Oxford scholar of short stories Andrew Kahn, and the actor Max Gordon Moore. And you’ll hear a reading of a Nathaniel Hawthorne story that will add an exciting new dimension to your reality.

Deborah Treisman in this first episode clarifies both the challenge and the promise of our subject. She says, “The term itself, 'American short story,' is slightly problematic, just because there are so many people in the U.S. writing short stories who perhaps came from somewhere else, who have a different heritage, whatever else it is—they're not playing into this tradition of Updike and Cheever and so on." Short stories in the United States tell us something way beyond any straightforward national narrative. "What's around right now is such multiplicity," Treisman says, "that it's rare to find a story that you would think of as classically American.”

Contemplating multiplicity is part of the mission here in season five. We're talking about expansive range, about the uncontainable proliferation sustained by brevity. Short fiction, it turns out, can launch you into maximal excess just as novels can—and much more swiftly.

Guests:
Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker
Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage
Becca Rothfeld, critic at The Washington Post and author of All Things Are Too Small
Justin Taylor, author of Reboot
Andrew Kahn, author of The Short Story: A Very Short Introduction
Max Gordon Moore, actor—with Broadway credits including Indecent and The Nap
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The trailer is here for the new season of The Cosmic Library! This five-episode season concerns a subject both smaller and vaster than any massive book, and that subject is: short stories in the United States.

You’ll hear how short stories exceed their own brevity and meld with a reader’s mind; you’ll hear about the history of the short story across continents; you’ll hear how stories are edited at The New Yorker; and you’ll hear a thrilling reading of the cosmically bewildering “Wakefield,” a classic story by Nathaniel Hawthorne in which this guy moves next door and hides out for twenty years.

Guests include The New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman, Oxford scholar Andrew Kahn, Washington Post critic Becca Rothfeld, the novelist (and writer of short stories) Justin Taylor, and the actor Max Gordon Moore. Find it at Lit Hub or wherever you go for podcasts—new episodes will be released weekly, starting April 24th.
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Here, in the conclusion of our five-episode season on The Hall of the Monkey King, you’ll hear about Journey to the West’s capacity for reinvention across centuries—about, in other words, its openness to different circumstances, something like the Monkey King's own openness, his playfulness.
Julia Lovell says, “Running through Monkey's actions and personality is a love of this thing called play. He's an incredibly playful character. And I don't think it's a coincidence that the Chinese word in the title of the novel that is translated as 'journey'—you—can also be translated as 'play.'"
Kaiser Kuo describes the history of openness in China with regard to cosmopolitanism. He mentions the echoes between the Ming Dynasty (when Journey to the West was written) and the Tang Dynasty (when the novel is set). Both of those dynasties, he says, have "periods of outward-facing and inward-facing.” These are times of intensified tensions that Kaiser Kuo observes here across Chinese history.
Journey to the West makes much of related dynamics between outward-facing and inward-facing, especially through its playful mood. In this novel, adventuring through traditions from China and from outside China, thinking in different keys, leaping from philosophy to philosophy, and seeking transcendence all depend upon a wild amount of play, of experiment, of fun.
Guests this season include Julia Lovell, whose recent translation of Journey to the West is titled Monkey King; D. Max Moerman, scholar of religion at Columbia; Xiaofei Tian, scholar of Chinese literature at Harvard; Karen Fang, scholar of literature and cinema at the University of Houston—she’s now working on a biography of Disney legend Tyrus Wong; and Kaiser Kuo, host of the Sinica Podcast.
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You can encounter Journey to the West in film, on television, in comic books—it’s a sixteenth-century novel that lives comfortably in an age of cinema and video games. This episode, then, follows a tangent away from the sixteenth century and into the movies. We’re talking about heroic quests and martial arts in media centuries after Journey to the West’s publication.

Wuxia cinema, in particular, occupies our attention here. These are films of high drama and martial arts in pre-modern, legendary Chinese settings. Karen Fang, scholar of cinema and literature at the University of Houston, notes “threads of connection” between Journey to the West and wuxia, and connections include the similar presence of a spiritual quest and martial artistry in a mythical-historical world. Still, to be clear: in this installment, we’re going for a walk away from the novel and into the movies. It’s just that we find a few patterns that match those of the Monkey King’s adventures. 

Wuxia stories, like the Monkey King’s, draw from dynamics between intense self-cultivation and power struggle. The result is a durable kind of kinetic drama—it’s opened up cinematic possibilities for decades. Karen Fang explains the heart of it all: “The underlying idea in wuxia is this idea that somebody can reach a level of human transcendency—a transcendent power, a transcendent skill—through years of training and dedication, both to physical training, but also spiritual dedication.”

Guests in this episode include Karen Fang, scholar of literature and cinema at the University of Houston—she’s now working on a biography of Disney legend Tyrus Wong; Kaiser Kuo, host of the Sinica Podcast; and Julia Lovell, whose recent translation of Journey to the West is titled Monkey King.
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You might, for good reason, not associate restless irreverence with religious engagement. But in Journey to the West, the Monkey King’s adventure through Daoist and Buddhist drama does have both elements, and the book weaves together multiple moods as result, including those of spiritual clarity and zany satirical play. Whether the novel does all this for the sake of ultimate, anarchic satire, for a livelier spirituality, or for other reasons: that all gets debated. Julia Lovell says in this episode:
Literary critics have been arguing about the spiritual, religious elements of the book for centuries. Some have always maintained that the book has actually a very intricate religious design, that Monkey is an allegory for the human mind. So in this reading, Monkey stands for the instability of human genius in need of discipline, namely the trials of the pilgrimage, to realize its potential for good. 
There’s justification for such a reading, even if it’s not the only possible interpretation of this book. Lovell says:
The earliest Buddhist sutras translated into Chinese analogize the human mind as a monkey, as restless, erratic, volatile. And by the end of the first millennium C.E., the phrase “monkey of the mind” (xinyuan) had become a stock literary allusion for this restless human mind. 
Following the Monkey King’s successful scenes of mischief, you might interpret the book as a joyous celebration of that Monkey Mind; or, the difficulties and disciplinary experiences that change the Monkey King could make the novel seem like a spiritually exacting pilgrim’s quest. There's no single answer here. You'll have to choose your own adventure.
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Different belief systems—and just differences in general—collide and merge in Journey to the West, the classic Chinese novel at the center of this season. “In Dungeons & Dragons terminology, you’ve got this lawful good monk and then you have this chaotic good monkey,” says Kaiser Kuo (co-founder of China's first heavy metal band and host of the Sinica Podcast) in this episode. And their quest succeeds: the combination of the monk Tripitaka's lawfulness and the Monkey King's chaos works out.

That intertwinement of differences shapes Journey to the West, on multiple levels. It’s about a quest for Buddhist texts, but Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, makes his way through Daoist self-cultivation and Confucian thinking, too. The divine realm includes Daoist deities such as the Jade Emperor, but it’s also a Buddhist realm, including the Buddha and Guanyin. There’s a playful engagement with everything here, and the translator Julia Lovell explains the world behind that kind of expansive interaction with various traditions:

The novel sprang from a much older set of legends about a real historical character who lived around 600–664 CE as a subject of the Tang empire in China. Now the Tang is one of the great eras of Chinese imperial expansion, when the empire extends from the edge of Persia in the northwest to the frontier with modern Korea in the northeast. Taizong, the emperor on the throne in Tripitaka’s time—he’s the character who in the novel dispatches Tripitaka off to India to fetch the sutras—Taizong is the vigorous, ruthless ruler who pushes the frontiers of his empire out so far. 

And in the decades that follow this, the Tang empire is awash with cosmopolitan products and ideas. And still today in China, the Tang is celebrated as this period of phenomenal cosmopolitan flourishing of the empire and ideas throughout China.

In this episode, we think about how a wild novel gave that cosmopolitan attitude a new narrative life.

Guests in this episode include Kaiser Kuo, host of the Sinica Podcast; Julia Lovell, whose recent translation of Journey to the West is titled Monkey King; D. Max Moerman, scholar of religion at Columbia; and Xiaofei Tian, scholar of literature at Harvard.
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