“BENEDICT ANDERSON, in Imagined Communities, suggests that the novel is a product of national culture.”
“Through the simultaneous unfolding of multiple plotlines involving multitudes of characters existing in “homogeneous empty time,” the novel creates a nation and its people. The novel’s readers become aware of history as a communal experience, occurring in multiple places at once.”
“Current reviews classify The Grace of Kings as epic fantasy, in the tradition of Luo Guanzhong’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and as part of the Western fantasy tradition exemplified by both A Game of Thrones and The Lord of the Rings.”
“Reviewers have lauded Grace as both an epic of revolution and as a revolution of the epic genre itself. The novel is set in a fantastic world named Dara, with carefully explained secondary laws in technology, ecology, and social organization.”
“I must define four of my key terms: In contrasting “traditional” and “postmodern” empire, I follow Paul James and Tom Nairn who suggest (in Globalization and Violence) that traditional empire is a territorial state entity extending from a central imperial hub, exercising “extensive hegemony” over local denizens in “one or more of the domains of economics, politics, and culture.” Such denizens in turn labor for the imperial center itself. My definition of postmodern empire comes from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s book Empire, which describes postmodern empire as an aterritorial regime in which authority is decentered, existing in forms of abstracted “exchange,” “production,” “communication,” and “enquiry.””
“My description of “messianic” versus “homogeneous” or “empty” time references Benedict Anderson’s description of the nation, which in turn draws upon Walter Benjamin. Homogeneous time is associated frequently with modernization and routine. It is measured through clocks, calendars, and the like, and it is considered “empty” because it can be filled with any number of events of varying importance. Conversely, messianic time is revolutionary. It is experienced in terms of immediacy, violence, epiphany, and contradiction (e.g., violence for the sake of peace).”
“Within fiction, homogeneous, empty time occurs within the simultaneous unfolding of multiple plotlines involving varieties of characters and locales. These plotlines coalesce into an imagined community, organized by the quantified, measured passage of time. Messianic time, meanwhile, focuses far more on exposition-climax-denouement cycles of action, centered upon transformations in thoughts, societies, power structures, and the like. While The Grace of Kings emphasizes a messianic, revolutionary mode of narration via imperial change, the text settles into a more homogeneous, empty narrative by its conclusion to establish the rightness of its new empire.”
“Power in Grace is ultimately multidirectional and decentered; characters rise and fall in rank, and they travel frequently between nations and territories. Without specific loci or institutions, power becomes abstracted in a nexus of intrigues. In Garu’s empire, differences between ruler and ruled become much less distinct than before.”
“The Grace of Kings not only narrates a series of events spanning different characters and territories; it also compresses such events into a single nation-world that must be considered as a whole.”
“Such moments in the text focus purely on raw sensation, emphasizing characters as larger than life and larger than themselves. They violently upend established order in the most obvious of ways. All the while, such violence remains emphatically and ironically for the sake of peace.”
“Nevertheless, events in Grace never move completely away from quantified measurements of time. Each chapter begins unerringly with dates measured not just in dynasties, but calendrical months and years: “the eleventh month in the third year of the Reign of Righteous Force,” “the third month in the first year of the Principate.” The text does not reveal who created such organizations of time, and the accuracy or justness of such organization does not come into question.”
“In accordance with Benedict Arnold’s interpretation of homogeneous, empty time, the end of Grace establishes a nation as much as it does an empire.”
“Revolutionary and calendrical time both serve to establish a nation-state that in The Grace of Kings becomes an empire ruling over an entire fantastic world.”
“The Grace of Kings is an American novel, by an American writer of Chinese ethnicity. It borrows a period from Chinese imperial history, but displaces this history onto an imaginary world American readers can identify with immediately. Under such real sociopolitical allegiances, one wonders: How does the novel appeal specifically to American nationals? To the culturally Chinese? To those who consider themselves both? Does The Grace of Kings claim empire is still necessary for Americans today? That we live in inequality and intrigue in many ways still resembling imperial China? Such questions are dark, but important to ask.”
“Empire in The Grace of Kings, though enticing, reflects an imperial presence far more real but far less enticing in the real world of Chinese and Americans today.”