Philosophy of Play (6): Fortress Beseiged
This essay begins with a claim that guides all that follows. Qian Zhongshu’s Fortress Besieged is a study of lives and institutions that deny play in the richest sense. The denial shapes desire, work, courtship, and speech. It also shapes universities, where the novel sets some of its sharpest scenes. I read the book with Bataille’s idea of play as lucid expenditure that binds a circle through shared risk and shared loss. I see the same denial at work in our contemporary social arrangements. Homes and offices and platforms organise attention around return and around audit. Education has taken on that temper and has become anti play in the Bataillean sense. The cost is real. Communities grow cold when surplus cannot find a form. The novel exposes the process with patient comedy. It matters now because the process has widened. The book is urgent and necessary reading for anyone who wants to understand why so many circles feel like sieges and why courage before embarrassment has become rare.
Zhongshu’s Fortress Besieged first appeared in 1947 and follows Fang Hongjian across three linked arenas of life in late Republican China. The voyage home from Europe supplies a stage where desire, vanity, and social reading work in a confined place. Shanghai offers drawing rooms and backstreets where courtship and status anxiety cross. A long journey westward with a small academic cohort sets up an education in group dynamics, and the later months at a provincial university reveal how institutions turn energy into ritual. The final section, a marriage that becomes a small siege, draws together the lessons about play, expense, and the way relationships handle surplus.
I take my essays on Bataille and play as a framework for the analysis. They offer a way to talk about expenditure without return, and about rites that bind a group by spending the surplus of living. The lens does not crush the novel into a scheme, but it clarifies how scenes of flirtation, gossip, and domestic quarrel carry the force of a general economy that exceeds utility.
The question is simple. What happens to play when a society is anxious about identity and advancement? What happens to love when the rites that should waste gracefully are replaced by contracts or by theatre that pretends to be serious? The shipboard opening returns Fang to China with a fake foreign degree in his luggage and with the ambiguous charm of a wayward student. He moves among a small set of passengers. He trades glances and gestures with Miss Pao who is theatrical and knowing, and with Su Wenwan who is cool and educated, and he misreads signals with the enthusiasm of someone who cannot help spending attention in the wrong places.
The boat keeps social space tight. Every choice is visible. Every action is replayed in gossip. Fang’s attempts to appear clever become a currency that others spend. He tries to appear worldly and generous, then discovers that every gift turns into a claim that someone else will contest. A Bataillean reading names this as misplaced sovereignty. Sovereignty lives where a person can waste without fear, where they can expose themselves to risk and not collapse into calculation at the last second. Fang moves toward that edge yet he veers away. He does not confess desire. He will not endure shame. He makes a display in place of a rite.
The scenes with Miss Pao assemble a small economy of glances and phrases that promise intimacy while postponing it. The play remains legitimate while the rule is felt by both players, and while there is an acceptance that pleasure may end without compensation. Fang wants to convert play into possession. He tries to own what should remain shared. The claim to own breaks the circle that keeps play light. It turns a rite into a transaction. The voyage ends before a true expenditure has occurred.
Expenditure binds only when the group accepts loss together and without a compensating narrative of profit. Shanghai enlarges the circle while deepening the ambiguous economy. The city offers salons, cousins, and family friends, it also offers a background of war that remains largely offstage. Fang moves between Su Wenwan, her cousin Tang Xiaofu, and the suitor Zhao Xinmei who reads Fang as a rival. The scenes do not lead to firm attachments. They generate expenditure. Gifts are prepared and then withdrawn. Pledges emerge and quickly dissolve. A Bataillean vocabulary clarifies the dynamic. Eroticism is defined as an assent to life to the point of loss, a consent to risk that makes the living feel more present because it brushes against the limit. The Shanghai scenes flirt with such consent and then retreat into manoeuvre. Speakers quote poetry in order to avoid feeling. Compliments are offered as signals of status rather than as invitations to exposure. When Fang and Su Wenwan trade letters or agree to meetings, the promise of a rite stands before them. Each time a moment approaches in which embarrassment might be borne and pleasure might be accepted as an end in itself, a calculation enters and the rite dissolves.
The reader who does not know the novel should picture a pattern of visits, meals, and small ceremonies that never quite resolve. Every figure wants to remain sovereign without risking the fall into laughter or shame that a real sovereign moment requires. The journey to Sanlü University assembles a coach party of academics and administrators who must spend days in one another’s company across battered infrastructure. The troupe includes Zhao and Fang, as well as men who love titles and women who must navigate their postures. The movement through inns and stations acts like a travelling rite. It poses a question about what a small collective does with boredom, hunger, and pride. Here the play is not erotic in the narrow sense, it is a social experiment that demands generosity. When a surplus cannot find a form, the group will seek a victim or a hard border where waste can be forced into orderly channels. The travel party demonstrates both options.
It sometimes converts surplus into song or story, that is a clean waste, and sometimes into insult or backbiting, that is a dirty waste. In the former case, the group binds; in the latter, it frays. The provincial university offers a stage where the restricted economy of utility and rank tries to control the general economy of desire and festival. Sanlü University gives the novel a compact model of intellectual life that has been emptied of sovereignty. The faculty and administration quarrel over housing, pay, titles, and norms of teaching. A visiting committee sees through the charades. Classes run on imitation.
Fang and Sun Roujia fall into an attachment within this setting, and friendships fluctuate as storms pass over the quad. A culture survives when it turns surplus into rites that bind. Sanlü’s rites are parodies. Ceremonies around lectures, inspections, and banquets enforce seriousness while refusing genuine waste. The parties are staged as proof of status rather than as events where people yield to presence. The final section, which follows the marriage of Fang and Sun Roujia, offers the most concentrated view of the fortress image. Those outside want to enter. Those inside want to leave. The narrative watches a couple who attempt to create a home that might host sovereign play and who find themselves instead performing a script of debt. Relatives visit and place demands. Gifts arrive and carry obligations. Privacy is breached by advice and surveillance. The couple experience the rise and fall of petty hurts that accumulate because there is no shared rite for release.
A Bataillean approach frames marriage as a possible sovereign circle, a place where the partners agree to spend time, attention, and desire without calculation, where embarrassment is accepted and transformed into intimacy. The marriage in the novel tries to reach that circle and fails. The failure comes from fear that a clean waste will look like weakness. Each partner seeks small compensations that eat up the energy that might have been spent in play. The result is a siege conducted with soft weapons, silence, insinuation, and strategic gifts. The siege sustains life but starves joy.
Play in this Battaillean framework means a lucid expenditure that happens inside a rule. The rule makes room for risk and keeps the risk from turning to harm. General economy means that life throws up more energy than useful plans can absorb, and unless the surplus is given a form, it will leak into cruelty or war. Eroticism means assent to life at the edge of loss and it depends on courage before laughter and tears. Sovereignty names those moments when a person or a group is free from return on investment and can let an action be its own end. Desœuvrement, the unworking of work, names the shared space where action is suspended without turning into a project.
On the ship Qian builds a small theatre of glances, names, and positions in which everything can be seen and nothing can be completed. Fang treats Miss Pao as a gift he can appropriate. The essays on eating and expenditure teach that to swallow is to claim possession and to domesticate what resists. Fang tries to domesticate a woman who has her own script. She enjoys his attention as a resource for her own passage. The play is legitimate while it stays within a shared circle. At Hong Kong the circle ends and the scene reveals that the gestures had meaning only inside the temporary rule. The scene refuses to convert into a promise. Fang’s vanity receives a light punishment, and the reader learns how play can save face by ending cleanly.
The Shanghai courtship lets the reader watch a cosmopolitan elite spend its surplus on gossip, quoting, and performance. Qian has an ear for how educated speakers advertise taste by scattering learned references. The performance gives pleasure yet it also shields the performer from exposure. But sovereign play carries embarrassment and risk. It opens the self to joy and shame. It permits a small breach in the ordinary defences. Shanghai talk often avoids that breach.
Fang tries to time his words to keep advantage. Su Wenwan measures him by that timing. The result is a pattern that looks like war by other means. Lovers circle one another with scouts and feints. When they meet, they do not share a waste that binds. They trade evaluations. The narrative shows how every evaluation creates a remainder that no account can balance. Zhao Xinmei, the rival, reads the same code yet plays it with more force. The triangle maintains tension without a centre because each actor wants acknowledgement without surrender. The result is a dance that uses up time without producing a feast.
The group journey to Sanlü gives an anatomy of small group play. A coach or a train compartment generates rules that everyone can sense. A singer needs consent. A joke needs complicity. A pecking order needs acceptance. Those who do not wish to play must still submit to the rules of the temporary circle. Bataille warns that a group that cannot waste will invent victims, the journey shows how this happens. When the mood turns bitter, the surplus is spent by turning on a scapegoat. When the mood holds, laughter consumes the remainder and leaves the group lighter.
Qian draws the faces and postures with patient detail. He shows how a remark that would pass in a generous moment becomes offensive in a stingy one. He shows how a boast that would appear playful in a circle of equals becomes a claim of rank when the circle cannot hold play. Fang’s own conduct wavers. He wants to be the man who can tell the story and sing the song. He fears the slip into embarrassment if the note cracks or the anecdote misfires. He keeps a reserve that preserves dignity and kills joy.
Any of us who has travelled in cramped conditions will recognise how real the rules feel, and how a single episode of true generosity can reset the mood for hours. Sanlü University acts as a magnified version of the coach. The rules are more formal, the stakes are higher, the play is thinner. General economy appears here as a concrete sociological fact. The institution receives money and prestige. It channels energy through titles and committees. It offers a rhetoric of seriousness that promises returns in the form of trained students and publications. All of this belongs to what Bataille calls a restricted economy. A restricted economy tracks inputs and outputs. It resents waste. It construes festivals as instruments for recruitment or reputation.
A general economy cannot be captured by that schema. It demands that some energy be lost in forms that have no return, in laughter, song, a feast without speeches, a class where the teacher confesses not knowing and invites joy. Qian’s satire shows a campus where every event is captured by purpose. Even the private lives of the teachers are recruited for the purpose of looking modern and respectable. Fang’s romance with Sun Roujia has room to breathe only when they escape the purpose ridden circle. They do not do so often.
The courtship at Sanlü, like that in Shanghai, approaches a threshold where confession or risk might open the circle to sovereignty, and then retreats. The marriage then takes on the character of a failed bedside. In Blanchot "the bedside" is understood as a scene where a small group keeps company with a person near death, it insists that the circle bind without turning the event into a work. The bedside must end and must leave no monument. It must guard the speech that gives up speech. The house of Fang and Sun Roujia should be a bedside for desire. The circle should protect exposure, embarrassment, forgiveness, and quiet, it should end each quarrel cleanly without remainder.
The couple are not given such a circle by their kin or by their own courage. The home becomes a workshop for small projects, reputations, and mutual audits. The siege hardens. The paradox of the fortress holds. Those who are outside still imagine that an entry would end loneliness, those who are inside imagine that an exit would end debt.
Qian is a comic classicist. He clothes the action in metaphors and allusions that reveal characters as marginal scholars of their own lives. Bataille explains how form can waste decorum in order to make presence appear. Qian uses that idea in prose. He sets up images that sabotage polite expectation. A refined phrase ends with a vulgar twist. A comparison that begins with philosophy ends with a household object. The effect is to create a small shock that makes the scene more present. Presence is the fruit of sovereign expenditure. It is the moment when a reader stops asking what the scene will achieve and simply lets it be itself. Qian’s technique trains the reader to accept such moments. The comedy is not a distraction from seriousness. It is a rite that spends energy without return, and thus reveals a depth that sober rhetoric cannot reach.
This reading also clarifies why the fake degree matters. The document stands for a counterfeit of sovereignty. A degree confers public recognition that a person has wasted years in a disciplined way for no immediate return. Study is a rite that spends time and attention without promise. When a degree is bought, the rite is faked. The person gains a badge without the sovereign experience that the badge is supposed to attest. Fang carries such a badge. He carries a counterfeit testimony that he has lived sovereign time. This intensifies his desire to find situations where he can appear to be free. He needs play to supply what the degree denies, and because he seeks the look of play rather than its reality he keeps failing at the last step.
The novel thus uses a comic prop to show a serious lack. We can grasp the point by analogy. Imagine a medal that stands for bravery that was never tested. The wearer will either hide or overcompensate. Both tendencies distort play. A real feast requires that the diners forget prestige. A person who feels their insignia are false will always be counting. The Bataillean framework helps resist an easy moral. The problem is not that Fang lacks authenticity in some abstract sense. The problem is that a culture of restricted economy rewards the appearance of sovereignty while penalising its practice.
The Shanghai salons and the Sanlü committees like the look of courage and waste, and yet they insist on return on investment. Fang mirrors the surrounding code.
Bataille presents play as a name for a human constant that appears wherever surplus energy asks for form. Cultures differ in how they answer. Qian stages one answer that falters. The lens describes the falter without erasing the specificity of place. The shipboard codes are European and Chinese at once, the Shanghai codes belong to treaty port life, the university code has both modern and traditional accents. The point is not to force one culture into another, it is to see how a general economy crashes against restricted walls in this time and place.
Laughter releases a circle from the grip of seriousness. It permits the body to convulse in a movement that achieves nothing and is therefore free. Qian threads this through the novel by giving characters lines that float away from their speakers as if the language were laughing on its own. The best jokes expose the speaker as a fool without malice. The worst jokes press the scapegoat function into service. The difference often lies in whether the group can spend without a target. In the coach scenes a song that fails can still generate joy when the group decides to treat the failure as a gift. In the Sanlü scenes a teacher’s slip turns into a pretext for rank. The same act receives a different value because the economy differs.
The home scenes after marriage confirm the diagnosis. The visits from relatives work like inspections. They convert hospitality into an audit. The couple have no safe rite where energy can be lost cleanly. They are forced to spend on face and on small episodes of persuasion. Each episode leaves a residue of resentment, a balance that the next day resumes. The house becomes a machine for making remainder, and a machine for converting remainder into complaint.
Blanchot's bedside model shows the alternative. A bedside circle refuses to treat the limit experience as work. It accepts the waste of time and speech. It does not convert attention into moral capital. The novel shows how hard it is to maintain such a circle under pressure from family codes that make everything serve purpose.
Sovereignty appears as a rhythm rather than as a state. It shows up in staccato moments when someone accepts risk and does not ask for a return. The novel records flashes of such rhythm. A minor character brings tea without calculation. A rival offers a line that really praises. A quarrel pauses and the pause is kept. These are small details and the narrator does not inflate them. They teach us to recognise the pulse. The tragedy of the siege is not that play vanishes, it is that every rhythm breaks before it can teach the body to move differently. We can now see how the parts line up, not as a moral tale about marriage alone, but as a sustained inquiry into how a culture handles the necessary waste that makes life bearable.
Five plain statements track the five sections of the narrative. First, shipboard play shows expenditure without return as a necessary practice for human beings caught between work and loneliness, it also shows how a lack of courage at the summit of risk produces humiliation.
Second, Shanghai courtship shows a cultured elite that seeks the look of sovereignty and falls back into calculation whenever the rite begins to work, it reveals how a city without strong festivals teaches lovers to become accountants.
Third, the journey to Sanlü shows how small groups can either bind by laughter or fray by scapegoating, it demonstrates that surplus must be lost somewhere and that generous play is the cleanest form of loss.
Fourth, the university exposes the restricted economy that mistakes all rites for tools and starves the general economy that keeps a culture warm, it shows that institutions can host study as a sovereign waste only when they stop treating every act as a project.
Fifth, the marriage renders the proverb of the fortress as a concrete image of a home that cannot waste cleanly and so breeds remainder.
These statements sound abstract until we return to the scenes. Fang on the deck of the ship wearing his fake degree like armour and peacocking among travellers who see through him, the quarrels in Shanghai parlours that pivot on epigrams and on an eagerness to win without exposing desire, the jolting trip to Sanlü where jokes and songs become tests of courage, the campus where ranks and committees eat the time that should be saved for thought, the cramped home where gifts feel like debts and advice feels like intrusion.
Each image grounds the Bataillean theory. Each image also asks a practical question. What would have allowed play to ripen into sovereignty? The answers are smaller than slogans. They look like permissions. Allow one feast without speeches. Allow one class to end in shared laughter. Allow one courtship to speak plainly and accept embarrassment. Allow a coach party to sing badly and keep the tune. Allow a home to guard privacy with kindness rather than with secrecy.
The novel does not claim that such permissions would turn history aside. It insists that failing to grant them makes history feel like siege. Bataille does not ask a culture to become extravagant. He asks it to give form to the excess that appears no matter what plans are made. He teaches that expenditure without return is not waste in the pejorative sense, it is the price of presence. He suggests that eroticism does not require scandal, it requires trust at the edge of loss. He shows that desœuvrement is not idleness, it is a shared pause that rescues life from becoming a chain of projects. He hints that sovereignty is less a power than a rhythm that visits when people stop asking for a reward.
Fortress Besieged reads as a comedy of manners when skimmed. It becomes a study in general economy when the scenes are weighed. Its final tone is not bitter. It is practical. The novel teaches how courage before embarrassment opens a space where love can breathe, and how fear of such courage tightens the siege. The last pages do not offer a rule for happiness. They offer a pattern for noticing when the rhythm of sovereignty approaches. The pattern is available to anyone. It requires only that a group accept small losses together. It requires that a person accept to blush and to laugh. It requires that institutions give time back to their members in forms that are not measured. The book does not ask for miracles. It asks for permissions that cost little and return nothing. The return is the absence of return. The gain is the presence that comes when accounting stops. This reading remains practical, it suggests small rites that waste lucidly, bind cleanly, and end without debt, and it keeps faith with the novel’s comedy by staying close to rooms, to tables, to seats, to clocks, to weather, and to the ordinary courage that play requires.
It's an essential read for anyone craving for playfulness in a world that sadly seems to be a fortress beseiged.