Ivan Stacy Talks Spittoon U Launch and Postwar Fiction

In the short space of six years, the Spittoon Collective has grown from the hosting of small poetry nights in the Beijing hutongs, to being a truly international organization, with locations in multiple cities across China, Europe, and most recently, the United States. The original, Beijing sub-branch of the collective remains the largest, and now includes poetry, fiction, non-fiction and storytelling events, a book club, as well as poetry and fiction workshops, among its regular offerings. The ever-popular Spit-Tunes series (collaborations between poets and musicians culminating in performances) has returned in full force, and the collective recently celebrated the launch of the seventh issue of the Spittoon Literary Magazine. With the spread to new locations, multiple fantastic collaborations, and an abundance of creative energy, Spittoon shows no signs of slowing down any time soon. Which begs the question: what comes next?

Spittoon has drive and ideas, and Beijing is big city, but surely after a time there’s nowhere else to go and the momentum has got to peter out…right?

Wrong!

Spittoon has recently begun piloting a project called Spittoon U, which is designed to forge connections with universities and university students in Beijing. At the helm of this new project is Ivan Stacy, a professor at Beijing Normal University. I talked with Ivan recently to find out more about the Spittoon U project, and to get to know him and his work a little better.

First of all, thank you so much for agreeing to talk with me about this new project! Tell me a bit about yourself. Where are you from? What is your academic background and area of interest? What is it that attracts you to that subject?
I’m from Northumberland, in the northeast of England, quite close to the Scottish border, in the countryside. I studied English Literature, and did my bachelors and masters at the University of East Anglia, then had quite a long break when I first came to China, then went back and did my doctorate in Newcastle, which I got in early 2013. I mainly research contemporary literature around the theme of complicity, which is the book I've just written, but increasingly I’m interested in global literature, which obviously is a huge topic, but being in China and reading fiction is one way of at least starting to understand the place, so I’m trying to broaden my horizons in terms of what I’m reading.

It’s one of those things, I think I was always going to study literature at university. It was always my best subject at school. I’ve never had a particularly romantic relationship with literature. Some people really get transported by it. For me, it’s a way of thinking about the world, and the best way of engaging with the big issues we think about, ethically and globally, and these sort of big questions. For me, literature is always a route into that.

How long have you been in China? What brought you to China and Beijing?
This round I’ve been in mainland China since 2017. So two years in Hangzhou at Zhejiang University, and came to Beijing to Beijing Normal in autumn 2019. I was in Hong Kong for a couple of years before Hangzhou, but it’s actually my third stint in China. I first came in 2002 to Beijing as a result of a very chance conversation with one of the higher-ups at the University of East Anglia who mentioned the university had a connection with a school in Beijing, and did I want to have a job teaching there? I was just coming to the end of my masters in literature, and felt like I needed  a break from university life so I thought, “Why not?” So that was the start of it all. I was working at a school out in Pingxifu, with is north in Changing district. There is now a subway stop in Pingxifu, but there wasn't when I got there, and coming from the airport you’ve got to cross the north of the city, not even really into the city proper, so I remember just driving along these dusty roads, thinking: what am I doing here? So that was my arrival in Beijing.

Then I left during SARS in 2003. The company I was working for at that point had a head office in Bangkok, so I ended up in Thailand for a bit, and then came back in 06/07. So for my third stint here it has been incredible to see Beijing change so much. I get nostalgic for how it used to be, but I think a lot has changed for the good as well.

How long have you been in Beijing? What is your work here? How long have you done that work/been in your current position? What do you like about the work you do?
As I've said I’ve been here this time since 2019. I’m an associate professor at Beijing Normal University so I teach literature classes there, and also research is quite a big component of what I have to do, so I’m publishing my research on contemporary literature. I teach a couple of 20th-century courses. The 20th-century novel, the British novel specifically, I’ve got a post-grad group, and 20th-century novels in English to my third years, and I teach more general courses in drama, and something called Western Humanist Classics which is a survey of Western thought, which I have quite a lot of freedom in how i teach that. I have a heavy literature bias and I tend to do mainly literary texts in that, but I throw in a couple of others as well.

In terms of what I like about it, I get to read and talk about books for a living, so that’s really not a bad way to earn a crust! The students are generally great as well. So in terms of the teaching side, it’s just a pleasure to be able to teach people. I think teaching people from a very different intellectual background is always interesting because certain assumptions that I would have they don’t necessarily share, and I think those kinds of dialogues are very interesting.

In terms of the research, it’s a job with a huge amount of autonomy. As long as I’m publishing work I can pick what I want to write about. So that kind of self-direction is really a privilege to be able to have as well.

And I think personally, that mixture of…the social side of me loves being in the classroom talking to students, whereas the introvert [side of me] loves to be able to sit down and be able to get stuck in some writing as well.

Talk a bit about Spittoon U. How did the idea for the project originally come about? What attracted you to the concept?
Spittoon U is a project to try and get more university students involved in Spittoon, really in quite a general sense. Initially, it was Daniel [Vuillermin—former Spittoon Beijing coordinator] who came to me with the idea, and I think it was something Matt [Byrne—founder of Spittoon] had come up with as well. So when I first got to know Daniel, he knew I was at Beijing Normal and therefore in a good place to involve students. And this is the first time we’ve done it. It’s only been going for a few weeks really. And I think my approach to it is just to see how things go. You know, the world hasn’t been particularly predictable in the last year or so, so I’m not planning too far ahead. So far we’ve been promoting events to students and just encouraging them to come and get involved.

We ideally would like students to get really involved in the culture of Spittoon and really be a part of it rather than just coming to the odd thing. So we’ve designed a semi-structured course to take them through various Spittoon events and get them to workshop their writing and get them to actually be writing their own stuff, and contributing, and becoming involved in that way.

Hopefully, in the slightly longer term, in the next year or so, I hope we get a group of students who are really into it and are full participants in Spittoon projects.

At the moment we’re just starting with Beijing Normal and seeing how it goes, but obviously, there’s a large number of universities in Beijing, so we’ll see what works this time, and then try to expand to other universities as well.

You are still in the early stages of the project. What can you say about how it’s going so far? What have you enjoyed? What are some of the positives? The challenges?
So far it’s not been going very long, so it was great to see the level of interest. As usual, how things work in China is you set up a WeChat group and see what happens! A lot of students joined that, and there seems to be initial interest. I think the challenge will be translating that into students actually coming to stuff because we’re doing Spittoon events off-campus, and I’d prefer to really keep it that way otherwise it becomes just another on-campus activity. You know, the COVID pandemic has sort of constrained people’s movements, there’s a lot going on on-campus, and students are busy in terms of the number of hours they're expected to do, but I think it’s healthy for them to get off campus and mix with non-students. So I hope we’ll be able to keep doing Spittoon stuff in the venues we usually do them but get students to come to them. There can be a financial issue as well. We do stuff in places like Modernista, and it’s a lot of money to a student. I hope that won’t be too much of a barrier.

What do you see for Spittoon U going forward?
Going forward, as I said I hope we’ll get students really to be part of Spittoon rather than occasionally just coming along. And I hope it will reach the point where actually they’re taking the initiative and starting to have students organizing and initiating stuff. I think one of the great things about the organization is it’s very fluid, so that would be great if students could have the confidence to do that sort of thing.

You wrote a book! Tell us a bit about it. How did it come about?
My book is called “The Complicit Text: Failures of Witnessing in Postwar Fiction.” It’s published by Lexington books and came out late last year. It came out of my doctorate which was about complicity, and that was quite a circuitous route. I started off writing about trauma, and there was a lot of interest in trauma at that time (and still is), but I was never quite comfortable with the subject. I was looking at Kazuo Ishiguro and W. G. Sebald, who to me felt like they were around the edges of trauma, sort of ripples outwards, and often narrating from a sort of comfortable position rather than a position of being traumatized, and it is that sort of peripheral position that actually led me to change my topic and to move from trauma to complicity. You know, people in intermediate positions of not being a victim, necessarily, and not fully being a perpetrator. People who maybe contributed sometimes in small ways to wrongdoing. Think of “The Remains of the Day.” The butler, Stevens, is polishing silver for a master who is sympathetic to the Nazis. How much of a contribution to wrongdoing is that? That’s one of the questions the book asks.

So it’s this kind of issue I was looking at, on three levels. These are books about complicity. As a theme, what are they saying about complicity? But there’s also a sense on a second level that the text itself can be complicit. The stories we tell ourselves and other people, often, in the way they sort of minimize events or minimize contributions to wrongdoing, can themselves be a form of complicity.

And the third level is: as we read this stuff if we’re sympathetic to somebody like Stevens, are we sort of morally complicit in the way we receive, understand, interpret texts as well?

So I looked at complicity on those three levels. I mentioned Ishiguru and Sebald, and they’re at the core of it, but for the book, I expanded to six. So it begins with Albert Camus, then Milan Kunera, then Ishiguru, Sebald, then Thomas Pynchon, and Margaret Atwood. So moving from Camus and that sort of postwar concern with collaboration, [Camus being] someone who is writing for the resistance in occupied France, but in the later texts much more looking at complicity as a matter of being embedded in systems and structures. Atwood wrote the MaddAddam trilogy which is all about environmental collapse, so there’s a question of just by being part of the market economy, by being consumers to what extent are we complicit? That’s quite a bleak sort of outlook because it gets to the point where almost everything we do is complicit, but I’m not sure that's a particularly useful thing to say, so I think it's worth looking at types of complicity and gradations of it as well.

That is absolutely fascinating, and I, for one, am totally interested in learning more. Where can people get your book?
Amazon has it, so you can get it on Kindle no problem, as far as I know. Getting a hard copy out here is possible on JD. It’s pretty pricy still, but the Kindle edition is getting closer to a reasonable price. I guess the publisher will try to sell as many copies as they think they can to its target audience, which is university libraries, and then once it’s done that I hope the price will come down and it will be easier to get it. Beijing Normal library has a copy as well. Anybody out there who works at universities, try to get your libraries to order a copy. That’s one way of getting a few into Beijing that are going to be affordable for people to read.

Thank you so much for taking the time to talk about your work and Spittoon U. If people want to get involved with Spittoon U how could they do that?
For students it’s easy enough – there’s a WeChat group and they can get in touch with me.  If people are interested in organizing and promoting it, say, to other universities, contacting me directly would be the best way to do it. As I said, we’re sort of feeling our way with it at the moment, and it's quite consciously just trying stuff out at the moment, so if somebody did want to initiate something at another institution I’d be very welcome to talk about that and we could talk about anybody’s particular ideas, either for other universities or for events. I’d be delighted to talk, so coming to me directly would be the best way.

Many thanks to Ivan Stacy for the above interview. I think it’s safe to say that Spittoon isn’t likely to run out of steam any time soon! Hopefully there will be many good things to come with Spittoon U. If you would like to become involved with Spittoon U, you can contact Ivan at: ivanstacy@bnu.edu.cn.

 READ: Spittoon Presents: Wooden Shutters From Issue 7

Images: Ivan Stacy