The Anachronistic Novel: Reading Pearl S. Buck Alongside Franco Moretti

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 insider‐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 attempting 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.