Reading H.T. Tsiang’s "The Hanging on Union Square" as War Literature: The Text as a Refutation of James Campbell’s “Combat Gnosticism” and an Anticipation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s “Just Memory”
I've always believed academic writing should be accessible to a wider audience, so I thought I'd share an essay I turned in today for a graduate literary seminar entitled "War and the Avant-Garde."
In its very physical existence, let alone its recent 2019 induction into the Penguin Classics literary canon, H.T. Tsiang’s 1935 novel The Hanging on Union Square is a text which fiercely resists subsumption into a culture which Milan Kundera describes as a “desert of organized forgetting” (Kundera 1980, pg. 218, cited Nguyen 2016, pg. 10). After receiving a stream of rejections from various mainstream publishers, Tsiang chose to self-publish The Hanging on Union Square in 1935, including quotes from the publishers’ rejection letters on the text’s back covers and inner pages “where blurbs customarily go” (Hsu ix). Through this tongue-in-cheek act, Tsiang seemed to rebel against the established hierarchy of the literary world: rather than deferring to the opinions of established literary taste-makers, Tsiang would show them just how little those opinions mattered. Indeed, the front cover of Tsiang’s original self-published version of the text reads: “YES the cover of a book is more of a book than the book is a book,” “I say — NO,” “SO” (Hsu ix). This cover itself, devoid of any mention of the book’s actual title or even Tsiang’s name, explicitly argues for the primacy of the text’s material existence over the content within. However, in this instance, the separation between form and content is not necessary, as the text’s defiant origin story mirrors the anticapitalist themes that proliferate within its pages.
While one may argue that The Hanging on Union Square is not a war novel, as it does not explicitly reference any specific military operation, Viet Thanh Nguyen reminds us in his 2016 critical text Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War that “to think of war solely as combat, and its main protagonist as the soldier, who is primarily imagined as male, stunts the understanding of war’s identity and works to the advantage of the war machine” (9). It is useful here to reference literary theorist James Campbell, who coined a term for this very fallacy in his 1999 essay “Combat Gnosticism: The Ideology of First World War Poetry Criticism.” In this essay, Campbell defines “combat gnosticism” as “the belief that combat represents a qualitatively separate order of experience that is difficult if not impossible to communicate to any who have not undergone an identical experience” (203). Campbell goes on to warn literary theorists against falling prey to the agenda of combat gnosticism; if we accept its premises, “talking about war becomes an exclusionary activity in which only those who already know can speak to each other. Those on the outside, without experience, cannot learn; whatever experience they have lacks validity. Those on the inside, on the other hand, cannot tell one another anything they did not already know” (209).
While Campbell’s essay pertains specifically to World War I poetry, the combat gnostic framework has maintained a clear grip on our cultural understanding of the definition of “war,” which blockbuster films, news outlets, and even dictionaries strategically program us to imagine as solely a state of active combat; after all, if war remains fundamentally unknowable to civilians, then we do not really have the authority to question its existence. The first question this essay aims to explore is this: if we heed Campbell and Nguyen’s calls to resist and unlearn the ethos of combat gnosticism, is it possible to view The Hanging on Union Square as a critical entry into the war literature canon?
Tsiang came of age during the Chinese Revolution of 1911; while this was not a war in the traditional sense of a prolonged, armed state of conflict between two parties, it was certainly an example of one group using violence against an opposing group in order to achieve their desired political outcome. During this revolution, nationalist Sun Yat-sen and his followers succeeded in overthrowing the imperialist Qing dynasty, which had ruled in China since 1644. Upon his victory, Yat-sen established the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party), also known as the “KMT,” with the aim of creating a democratic republic founded upon The “Three Principles of the People,” which are often translated into and summarized as “nationalism, democracy, and the livelihood of the people” (Yat-sen via Alpha History). (Interestingly, Brittanica translates the third principle as simply “socialism”).
In his 2011 essay “H.T. Tsiang: Literary Innovator and Activist,” literary scholar Floyd Cheung — who later went on to edit the 2019 Penguin Classics edition of The Hanging on Union Square — describes Tsiang’s political inclinations in the aftermath of the 1911 Revolution, writing: “For a short time, Tsiang worked effectively within the KMT as an aide to Sun Yat-sen’s secretary, but after Sun’s death in 1925 and Chiang Kai-shek’s rise to power thereafter, Tsiang’s communist ideals clashed with his party’s increasingly conservative politics. Hence, Tsiang fled to the United States to avoid arrest and possible execution” (57). Although Tsiang was never engaged in armed combat on a physical battlefield, his vocal engagement in the ideological debate taking place between the two factions of the KMT in the years following Yat-sen’s death led to very material consequences, including geographic displacement and risk of bodily harm. Indeed, even after fleeing from China and enrolling as a student at Stanford University in the United States, the Chinese Guide in America reported in their May 1, 1927 issue that “a mob attacked Tsiang and others while they were distributing leaflets critical of the Chinese government” (Cheung xviii). Why, then, should we preference the combat soldier’s war narrative over that of the ideological pundit faced with the same impending threat to his material existence as a direct result of his political convictions?
The issue at play in determining whether The Hanging on Union Square belongs in the war literature canon boils down to whether we determine that the fight for socioeconomic justice constitutes a legitimate form of warfare — in other words, whether we affirm or deny the validity of the term “class warfare.” It is my personal belief — a belief I trust Tsiang shares — that the term “class warfare” is not only valid, but redundant. War both promotes and inherently relies upon the continued proliferation of socioeconomic inequality — between disparate nations, yes, but also between different socioeconomic classes existing within the same “unified” nation whose interests the military claims to holistically represent.
Just last month, The Point, a magazine of philosophical essays on everyday life and culture, put out their Spring 2022 print issue, entitled Issue 27: What is the Military For? On their “About” page, The Point’s editors state that the magazine “adheres to no specific political or social agenda; instead, we ask our readers to participate in a dialogue between diverse intellectual traditions, personalities, and points of view” (Baskin et. al., Web). This commitment to the promotion of diverse viewpoints is difficult to find in the polarized political landscape of post-Trump America, and for this reason I always enjoy reading The Point, as I feel it is advantageous to genuinely work to understand opinions that differ from my own leftist tendencies. However, while I tried to extend my typical grace towards divergent points of view while reading Issue 27, even the most well-crafted arguments in favor of war as a cultural practice fell flat for me here.
The best case of a failed argument for the benefits of war in Issue 27 is Dominic Tierney’s essay “Forward March.” In his attempt to make a case for the U.S. military as an institution which “embodies progressive principles,” Tierney ironically disproves his own argument as he attempts to advance it, writing:
Former Supreme Court Allied Commander of Europe Wesley Clark once described the U.S. military (only half-jokingly) as “the purest application of socialism there is.” The network of veterans’ hospitals is the closest thing in America to European-style socialized medicine. The military also operates America’s single largest day-care system, which is widely seen as the gold standard in national care. Military day care is highly subsidized and can cost a third or less of the equivalent service in the civilian world. In 2013, Child Care Aware judged the military’s childcare centers to be better than every state-run system in the country. Meanwhile, the GI Bill of 1944 helped millions of veterans receive home loans and pay for college—opening the door to the ivory tower for many working-class Americans. In 2008, the Post-9/11 GI Bill provided educational benefits to a new generation of service members. (Tierney 122)
I was completely baffled after reading this passage. If this is the progressive ideal, and we are aware that this is the progressive ideal, why are the same members of the U.S. military that are enjoying these social benefits simultaneously fighting to uphold and implement capitalist economic structures both at home and abroad? Paradoxically, in fighting for their country, members of the U.S. military get to exist outside of their country; after all, it might be difficult for a soldier to remember what ideals they were fighting for if they were distracted by exorbitant outstanding medical bills like the rest of us. As Nguyen writes in Nothing Ever Dies, “wars cannot be fought without control over memory and its inherent opposite, forgetting (which, despite seeming to be an absence, is an actual resource)” (10-11). Here, we see the state leveraging the resource of forgetting against its own soldiers, as they are swiftly removed from the reality of contemporary American existence under capitalism. For them, America actually is a country worth fighting for. As much as I long for democratic socialism to triumph as the dominant political ideology in the United States, I am increasingly doubtful that this will happen in my lifetime. After all, if we taxed the billionaires fairly and created a society where we all got to go to college or the doctor for free, who would still choose to enlist in the military?
If Tierney unintentionally presents this argument for the U.S. military’s reliance upon continued class division under capitalism, Shaan Sadchev intentionally hammers the point home in his essay “My Complex — And Ours,” which The Point’s editors chose to place directly after Tierney’s essay in Issue 27. Saadchev’s central thesis in this essay is that “the Pentagon today exists primarily, though not exclusively, to confer trillions of dollars to thousands of companies,” going on to state that “if we are to reconceive of the military accordingly, it must be seen primarily as an instrument of industry and secondarily as one of aid and defense” (129). Saadchev cites several concrete examples to bolster his argument throughout his essay, including the following:
According to the State Department, there were 29 foreign terrorist groups at the beginning of the War on Terror. After twenty years, $6 trillion and millions of people killed, the number of such groups has more than doubled to 72. In 2017, for example, all U.S. forces killed in Afghanistan died battling an ISIS offshoot that hadn’t existed until 2015. (135)
The argument Saadchev lays out in “My Complex — And Ours” not only proves that warfare is inextricably tied up with issues of socioeconomic class, but also complicates the fundamental ideology of “combat gnosticism” entirely. If it is true that the primary objective of the military is to bolster the economy though the “transmission of trillions of dollars to thousands of companies,” the voice of the combat soldier necessarily loses the superior narrative status it has routinely attempted to claim within the war literature canon. Why would readers grant combat soldiers absolute authority over literary representations of war when the military itself clearly prioritizes the continued financial security of defense contractor CEOs both over and, horrifically, at the expense of combat soldiers’ lives?
It is important to note that this argument is not meant to deny the reality and life-altering nature of combat-induced post-traumatic stress disorder. The psychological ramifications of PTSD are devastatingly real, and when it comes to PTSD stories, the ethics of combat gnosticism (i.e., the privileging of combat soldiers’ voices) absolutely should prevail. However, both the nature of combat-induced PTSD and the tropes of narrative construction render first-hand accounts of such crippling PTSD relatively difficult to find. After all, if you were suffering from debilitating wartime flashbacks, how could you muster the energy to write a cohesive narrative about your experience of suffering said flashbacks? Moreover, why would you even want to? Additionally, the vast majority of readers are far more likely to engage with stories which have strong narrative arcs and some redemptive messaging than stories which resist chronological structure and typically end in tragedy; indeed, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development estimates that 40,056 veterans are homeless on any given night, and United Service Organization stats reveal that we lose over 6,000 U.S. military veterans to suicide each year (National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, Web; Harding, Web).
So, even supporters of the combat gnostic hierarchy must acknowledge that if their hope was to create an accurate portrait of “war” by constructing a war literature canon comprised solely of literature written by active combat soldiers and veterans, that portrait should look a lot more like those grim statistics. Therefore, even when we do choose only to read combat soldiers’ war narratives, not only are we receiving an incomplete portrait of the socioeconomic phenomenon of “war,” we are also not even receiving a full picture of “combat” — just the picture presented by the small group of veterans who are still physically and mentally strong enough to pick up the pen.
Now that we have disproven “combat gnosticism” as a valid organizational principal in the construction of the war literature canon, we must necessarily ask: well, how should we construct the war literature canon? In exploring this question, I ask you to examine the previous section of this essay; it is no coincidence that this section centers specifically around the United States military. While it is true that the United States spends more on defense than the next nine countries combined, it is also true that my proclivity (here, demonstrated intentionally) to conflate “the military” with “the U.S. military” points to a larger issue for American scholars in the ongoing curation of a comprehensive war literature canon: the need for a “just memory,” which we must turn back to Nguyen in order to confront (Peter G. Peterson Foundation, Web).
In Nothing Ever Dies, Nguyen raises a common critique of critical arguments which aim to reshape established cultural narratives by shifting our focus towards previously unheard (typically, actively silenced) voices. “Remembering too much, or remembering the wrong things, is supposedly part of an identity politics motivated by a feeling of victimization, or so the critics claim,” Nguyen writes (16). He continues by stating:
[Those] who insist that we should forget the past and focus on economic and class inequality do not see that inequality cannot be addressed without a just memory. This kind of memory recognizes that nationalism is the most powerful form of identity politics, armed to the teeth and eager to harness all the nation’s resources for war, including memory and the dead.
A just memory opposes this kind of identity politics by recalling the weak, the subjugated, the different, the enemy, and the forgotten. A just memory says that ethically recalling our own is not enough to work through the past, and neither is the less common phenomenon of ethically recalling others. Both ethical approaches are needed, as well as an ethical relationship to forgetting, since forgetting is inevitable. All individuals and groups are involved in strategic forgetting, and we must forget if we are to remember and to live. A just memory constantly tries to recall what might be forgotten, accidentally or deliberately, through self-serving interests, the debilitating effects of trauma, or the distraction offered by excessively remembering something else, such as the heroism of the nation’s soldiers. (Nguyen 16-17)
Looking closely at the above passage, we will attempt to address a second question for the remainder of this essay: how does Tsiang’s The Hanging on Union Square anticipate and exemplify Nguyen’s concept of just memory?
As we charted both the remarkable material history of Tsiang’s text as well as relevant aspects of Tsiang’s biography and political convictions at the outset of this essay, I will, in this final section, endeavor to engage primarily with the content of the text itself. However, it bears emphasizing that Tsiang enjoyed very little success in his lifetime, and was somewhat of an outcast from both his original and adopted home countries. As Hua Hsu writes in his introduction to Hanging:
[Tsiang’s] works came to express a frustration with New York’s proletarian dogma, which, despite an inherent hope for global solidarity, privileged the American urban experience. Tsiang’s other natural audience — those interested in China — ignored him as well, opting instead for the more palatable visions of Pearl Buck (whom he would frequently mock in his novels) and the professionalized establishment of China-watchers. (Hsu xi)
Thus, by Nguyen’s metric, Tsiang passes the test for who is qualified to address economic and class inequality in their art, as these topics “cannot be addressed without a just memory” (16). Because Tsiang spent his life as an eccentric political refugee with no allies in either the American or Chinese publishing communities, it behooves us, as contemporary readers invested in the creation of a just memory, to spend time with Tsiang’s war literature now; the fact that the particular war addressed in Hanging is the all-encompassing class war, rather than a discreet combat war, is merely an added bonus for the anti-capitalist reader, not a requirement in our determination of which war narratives must be revisited and granted due value under the ethos of just memory.
Now that we have established The Hanging on Union Square’s legitimacy as a text worthy of study under the basic parameters of Nguyen’s theory of just memory, we can finally dive into the world Tsiang creates within its pages to see why it should be championed as one of the finest examples of just memory, despite the fact that it was written well before Nguyen was even born. The novel begins with an abstract poetic preface, which reads as a distillation of just memory’s credo; “What is unsaid / Says, / And says more / Than what is said. / SAYS I,” Tsiang writes (1). Here, Tsiang, through his defiant use of all-caps formatting in the preface’s final line, loudly and angrily asserts, once and for all, that his voice is worth listening to. In a world where a small handful of publishers typically gate-keep whose story does or does not get told, Tsiang warns us, we must necessarily question what these publishers allow to be said and why. Whose interests do popular, highly marketable novels serve? Do these stories convey something essential about our material existence, or do they purposefully distract us from it? If we wish to confront the reality of life under capitalism, Tsiang seems to warn, then we must search for and excavate the stories of those whom the system regularly attempts to silence; in other words, we must strive to create a just memory in our curation of the literary canon.
While Tsiang’s preface immediately calls out what Nguyen describes as the “industrialization of memory,” which “proceeds in parallel with how warfare is industrialized as part and parcel of capitalist society,” Tsiang also ensures that The Hanging on Union Square not only will not, but absolutely cannot, fall prey to the well-worn “identity politics” critique which Nguyen identifies in Nothing Ever Dies (Nguyen 13). Not only does Tsiang omit any discussion of Hanging’s protagonist, Mr. Nut’s, racial or ethnic background, he also precludes the question of identity altogether by naming his characters after various societal tropes (i.e., “Mr. Nut;” “Mr. Wiseguy;” “Mr. System;” et cetera). Tsiang’s refusal to disclose his protagonist’s racial make-up or to confer any of his characters with textually idiosyncratic names is a clear argument against the capitalist maxim of “rugged individualism,” a principle which Tsiang routinely fought against in his own life at great personal risk. Tsiang’s goal in writing The Hanging on Union Square appears relatively simple and one-track minded; he aims to highlight and criticize the existence of class warfare under capitalism, and knows that placing too much emphasis on his characters’ individual attributes would complicate this objective.
Indeed, as one character, the Communist organizer Stubborn, thinks to herself after reading about police murders of revolutionaries in “Detroit and other cities,” “what a revolutionist should keep in mind was to get some new person into the ranks. Then the workers’ movement would be like a stream under a bridge. There are not always the same drops of water in it, but there is always a stream. So individuals might come and go, but the movement would go on forever” (Tsiang 105). While we typically aim to avoid the conflation of an author’s beliefs with those of their characters in literary scholarship, I think it is fair to say here, knowing what we do about Tsiang’s personal political leanings and his character-building choices (or lack thereof), that the populist opinions Stubborn espouses in this passage might echo Tsiang’s own.
One could also view Tsiang’s narrative choices as examples of Nguyen’s theory of “strategic forgetting;” in choosing to maintain some descriptive distance from his characters, Tsiang frees up space for the reader to focus on socioeconomic injustice as a systemic phenomenon — as a pervasive and ongoing state of war. Importantly, the specificity Tsiang refrains from in describing his characters can be found in his highly particular rendering of New York City’s geography. For example, when Miss Digger asks Mr. Wiseguy why he is friends with a man such as Mr. Nut, Mr. Wiseguy responds with a site-specific analogy, stating, “for instance, if there were no Third Avenue, and no Bowery, there would be no Fifth Avenue and no Park Avenue. If there were no J.P. and no J.D., there would be no Bums and no Trash. But because there is a Third Avenue and a Bowery, that makes Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue superior. And because there are Bums and Trash, that makes J.P. and J.D. great” (Tsiang 67). Interestingly, while Tsiang’s fictional characters themselves are devoid of actual names, Mr. Wiseguy refers to historic industry titans J.P. Morgan and J.D. Rockefeller on a first-name basis, as if further distinction were entirely unnecessary. This is no accident. In a capitalist society, only those at the top require individual identification; as Stubborn emphasizes, it is strategically advantageous for the working class to rebuke such individualism. However, if class warfare is the battle at hand, then New York City is the perfect terrain for the fight — and Tsiang wants us to know that he has the ability to draw up a detailed situation map.
H.T. Tsiang’s The Hanging on Union Square is a piece of war literature that evokes a just memory and reminds us that combat gnosticism is a myth. In 2022, as armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine continues to dominate the global news cycle, Tsiang’s text serves as an urgent reminder of a timeless truth: the most important war humans will ever engage in, the war which underpins all other social issues and creates all combat, is the war for socioeconomic equality worldwide.
Works Cited
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Campbell, James. “Combat Gnosticism: The Ideology of First World War Poetry Criticism.” New Literary History, Vol. 30, No. 1, Poetry & Poetics, 1999, pp. 203-215. Print.
Cheung, Floyd. “H.T. Tsiang: Literary Innovator and Activist.” Asian American Literature: Discourses and Pedagogies, Vol. 2., 2011, pp. 57-76.
The Editors of Encyclopoaedia Brittanica. “Three Principles of the People: Chinese Ideology.” Brittanica. Web.
Harding, Ashley. “Councilman: ‘We Lose Up Over 6,000 U.S. Military Veterans to Suicide Each Year,” 2022. News4Jax, Web.
Hsu, Hua. “Thanks but No Thanks but Thanks.” Introduction to The Hanging on Union Square by H.T. Tsiang, ix-xiii. Cambridge: Penguin Books, 2019. Print.
National Coalition for Homeless Veterans. “Veteran Homelessness.” NCVH, Web.
Nguyen, Viet Thanh. Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2016. Print.
Peter G. Peterson Foundation. “U.S. Defense Spending Compared to Other Countries,” 2022. PGPF, Web.
Sachdev, Shaan. “My Complex — And Ours.” Issue 27: What Is the Military For? The Point Magazine, 2022, pp. 129-140. Print.
Tierney, Dominic. “Forward March.” Issue 27: What Is the Military For? The Point Magazine, 2022, pp. 119-127. Print.
Tsiang, H.T. The Hanging on Union Square. United Sates: Penguin Books, 2019. Print.
Yat-sen, Sun. Fundamentals of Natural Reconstruction. 1923. Accessed via Alpha History. Web.