Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian
402
Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian
402eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Tang uncovers crucial clues to modern Chinese literary and cultural practices through readings of Wu Jianren’s 1906 novel The Sea of Regret and works by canonical writers Lu Xun, Ding Ling, and Ba Jin. For the midcentury, he broadens his investigation by considering theatrical, cinematic, and visual materials in addition to literary texts. His reading of the 1963 play The Young Generation reveals the anxiety and terror underlying the exhilarating new socialist life portrayed on the stage. This play, enormously influential when it first appeared, illustrates the utopian vision of China’s lyrical age and its underlying discontents—both of which are critical for understanding late-twentieth-century China. Tang closes with an examination of post–Cultural Revolution nostalgia for the passion of the lyrical age.
Throughout Chinese Modern Tang suggests a historical and imaginative affinity between apparently separate literatures and cultures. He thus illuminates not only Chinese modernity but also the condition of modernity as a whole, particularly in light of the postmodern recognition that the market and commodity culture are both angel and devil. This elegantly written volume will be invaluable to students of China, Asian studies, literary criticism, and cultural studies, as well as to readers who study modernity.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822380887 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/03/2000 |
| Series: | Post-Contemporary Interventions |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 402 |
| Lexile: | 1510L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Xiaobing Tang is Associate Professor in Modern Chinese Literature at the University of Chicago.
Read an Excerpt
CHINESE MODERN
The Heroic and the QuotidianBy XIAOBING TANG
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2000 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-2412-6
Chapter One
Trauma and Passion in The Sea of Regret: The Ambiguous Beginnings of Modern Chinese Literature
The momentous emergence of the modern Chinese novel was greatly accelerated in 1902 when Liang Qichao (1871-1929), in political exile in Yokohama, started the literary journal Xin xiaoshuo (New fiction) and in its inaugural issue published a manifesto-like article to expound on the vital connection between "new fiction" and social progress and democracy. Hyperbolic rhetoric aside, Liang Qichao in this essay presents a compelling argument that the popular novel should function, and therefore be respected, as the most effective medium for mass education and spiritual cultivation. With its unsurpassed capacity for expressing emotion and depicting reality, the novel is extolled as the highest form of literature. This rather pontifical revaluation, according to the literary historian Chen Pingyuan, ushered in a structural adjustment to the native aesthetic order and helped push novelistic narratives to the center of literary discourse and production during what is commonly referred to as the late Qing period. The unprecedented social and cultural prominence granted to the popular novel, in retrospect, prepared anecessary condition for the beginning of modern Chinese literature at large, even though not all that was initiated would later be recognized as legitimate or relevant.
In direct response to Liang's tireless trumpeting as both a theorist and an enthusiastic practitioner of the new fiction, the modernization of the Chinese novel forged ahead in the first decade of the twentieth century, often turning fiction into an open forum for either direct social commentary or political fantasy. This generic transformation was further aided by the contemporary influx of modern Western popular fiction (at first, mostly by means of Japanese translations) that demonstrated a new set of techniques, such as the rendering of narrative time, plot arrangements, and perspectival shifts. Late Qing fiction or xiaoshuo (at the time the term also included drama) generated enormous creative energy because this once lowly literary form was now explicitly related to the reality of the modern world as well as its representation. The overwhelming volume of fiction writing from this period attests to a historical need for novelistic narration and, more importantly, for new narratable knowledge. Indeed, the numerous and ephemeral labels that accompany the new fiction point to a continual effort to name and order an estranged world and its hidden logic. The first five issues of Liang Qichao's New Fiction, for instance, introduced a dozen different types of xiaoshuo defined in terms of their subject matter, ranging unevenly from historical, scientific, and diplomatic to adventurous and detective. If a general intersection of what David Der-wei Wang calls "confused horizons" took place in the late Qing conception of the novel, the seemingly unstoppable fictional output also signaled the active engineering of an epistemic restructuring, on the one hand, and a multifarious, often conflictual reality that the new fiction would have to encounter and represent, on the other. The ideal reader, consequently, was bluntly instructed to acquire encyclopedic knowledge and to respect the pedagogical seriousness of the new novel.
However, the predominantly rationalist approach to fiction writing, which fueled Liang Qichao's "revolution in the realm of the novel," soon led to an awkward situation. The new fiction writers were so absorbed in popularizing new ideas and concepts that novels seemed more and more like political or philosophical treatises. Even more problematically, such compositions were often left unfinished either because no viable plot was present to continue or because a central argument had been made. Also, from the start, the new fiction carried strong elitist and moralizing overtones insofar as its readership was largely imagined to be a nation of new citizens. While didacticism helped elevate the literary status of the novel, inattention to entertainment value rendered the once popular form of vernacular fiction increasingly abstruse and unpalatable to actual readers. Already there appeared an ideological strife between a serious proto-literature of engagement and a literature for popular entertainment. This divide was to yield greater and longer lasting shock waves during the May Fourth period, when a thriving consumerist urban culture became one of the declared adversaries of the modernist New Literature movement. In historical hindsight, the intense enthusiasm for a new fiction at the turn of the century may illustrate how modernity was largely anticipated to be a mobilizing and morally uplifting mode of collective existence. The aporia in the new fiction discourse reveals that its passionate endorsement of a political modernity served to reduce, rather than reaffirm, the secular and fragmentary experience that called for novelistic representation in the first place.
For Wu Jianren (1866-1910), a prominent late Qing novelist, one mortal weakness of the rationalistic new fiction was precisely its departure from being novels. Specifically, Wu Jianren deplored the new fiction's inability to appeal to readers both intellectually and emotionally. In his preface to the first issue of Yueyue xiaoshuo (The all-story monthly), he critically assessed the achievements of the new fiction since Liang Qichao's revolutionary 1902 essay on the symbiotic relationship between the novel and social governance. Denouncing a facile conformity among fiction writers, Wu Jianren vented his frustration with reading an ineffective novel. "Of today's hundreds of thousands of new works and new translations that are called fiction, I dare not say that there are not any that reflect a concern with social governance; yet I have seen more than enough bizarre and fragmentary works, strenuous and unreadable translations. With publications like these, I do not know what others may think after reading them; as for myself, they all fail to move me emotionally." Wu Jianren made these disparaging remarks in September 1906, when he and the translator Zhou Guisheng were invited to coedit the newly established literary journal The All-Story Monthly. By then, he had already published several novels in Liang Qichao's New Fiction, including parts of his widely acclaimed Ershi nian mudu zhi guai xianzhuang (Strange things witnessed in the past twenty years). His affiliation with Liang's journal, however, did not entirely define his profile as a popular novelist. On the contrary, although some of his own works may also seem "bizarre and fragmentary," Wu Jianren was never comfortable with a narrow understanding of new fiction as the forum for promoting modern cultural values and practices. He may be best remembered for his contribution to what Lu Xun once famously characterized as the "fiction of exposure" of the late Qing period, but the social criticism embedded in his exposé-style fiction did not always lend itself neatly to an agenda of programmatic political reform. Nonetheless, Wu Jianren never disavowed the grave social and moral responsibility on the part of a novelist. He firmly believed that all novels, be they historical or romantic, should serve a pedagogical purpose and lead their readers onto the proper "boundary of morality." For him, the value of a novel does not derive from its advocating the new over the old, but rather from its telling the good from the evil. "At such a moment of moral disintegration, we all hope to find a way to stop the general decline. We should then begin with nothing short of the novel."
As if to demonstrate his conviction of the novel as a means of moral edification, Wu Jianren published in October 1906, independently of The All-Story Monthly that had come out a month before, a short novel titled Henhai (The sea of regret). A carefully constructed romantic tragedy that illustrates the novelist's understanding of the social content of human emotion and sentiment, the novel was an instant success. As A Ying documents in his pioneering study of late Qing fiction, its enormous popularity helped initiate and establish the subgenre of unfulfilled romance in modern Chinese fiction. The basic story line of The Sea of Regret itself was repeatedly adapted and rewritten for the greater part of the twentieth century, on stage and eventually in cinema. The sad tale of injured lives that unfolds in the novel conveys Wu Jianren's belief in the healing power of votive attachment, but it also voices a deep-seated anguish over the disintegration of the social and cultural fabric of life, now threatened from both within and without. It is a seminal narrative because it goes to great lengths to explore the internal journal of a displaced individual, and in the process it represents the psychological consequences of a traumatic encounter with the modern world.
The Writing of Passion
Contrary to the more confident, even militant, ethos of the reform-minded new fiction, Wu Jianren's first romance centers on the mental and emotional impacts of violent dislodging, depicting a subjectivity formed in fear. By means of exhorting devout passion as a stabilizing method in the face of a familiar world being shattered, The Sea of Regret, among other things, reclaims the writing of mythical pathos from the native literary tradition and turns it into a fundamental and yet equivocal theme for modern fictional discourse.
The immediate motivation for Wu Jianren to write The Sea of Regret, as Patrick Hanan suggests, was to counterbalance two contemporary texts of considerable impact. The first was Joan Haste, a sentimental romance by the then-popular English novelist H. Rider Haggard. In 1901, an abbreviated rendition of the novel, in semiclassical Chinese, was serialized in a translation journal from Suzhou and attracted much attention, especially among educated male readers, who found in Joan an ideal combination of bold love and self-sacrifice. For a while, Joan, together with Marguerite of La dame aux camélias (by Alexandre Dumas fils, translated into Chinese in 1899), deeply enchanted a male romantic, if curiosity-driven, imagination and was idolized as the perfect embodiment of an affectionate, maternal, and universal femininity. In the reformist elite culture at the time, the quiet infatuation with the sensual and emotional lives of these two fictional characters seemed to share the same intensity as the public and much-pronounced admiration for other heroic women figures, most notably Madame Roland of the French Revolution and Sofiya Perovskaya, the Russian anarchist.
In 1905, however, Lin Shu, the prolific translator of La dame aux camélias fame, outraged the reading public by putting out a full translation of Joan Haste, only the second half of which had been grudgingly divulged in the first rendition. This new and complete translation caused a righteous uproar because it revealed that Joan, whom one commentator had adored as a "celestial fairy in the realm of passion," apparently had sexual intercourse with her lover, was impregnated sans marriage, and disgraced herself further by miscarrying. All these bodily details had been judiciously edited out by the two initial translators. Yet the outcry of disillusionment at the scandalous revelation had less to do with Joan's descending to the reality of human weaknesses and suffering than with the realization that she behaved improperly. The same commentator who worshipped the first immaculate Joan was compelled to bitterly denounce the new Joan as slutty, indecent, shameless, and selfish-in short, "a fraud in the realm of passion." The difference between these two incarnations, according to him, was that one Joan has pure passion (qing) but no lust (yu), and the other has mere lust in the guise of passion. After banishing the lustful Joan for good, the critic turned to inveigh against the meddlesome Lin Shu, accusing him of posing as a novelist and of churning out licentious translations that "bear the least benefit to society."
Another critic, writing in the journal New Fiction, which by now had been relocated to an increasingly metropolitan Shanghai, seized the occasion to expound on the relationship between romantic fiction and the new society. Acknowledging the formative influence of fiction, Jin Songcen postulated that the various genres in new fiction, best represented by translations such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (Heinu yutian lu) and Jules Verne's Deux ans de vacances (Shiwu xiao haojie) and Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (Bashi ri huanyou ji), would have a positive impact on society because they erected new role models. "Therefore I am pleased to read today's new fiction, but I am terrified to read today's romantic fiction." The popular romances that caused his grave concern were none other than La dame aux camélias and Joan Haste, reckless foreign novels that, in his view, would only mislead the young and impressionable. The customs and mores suggested by these tales, he warned, would aid and abet rampant Europeanization and result in people abandoning their jobs and studies to frequent dance halls. In the end, the fearful society that became imaginable in light of romantic fiction meant not only the loss of a valuable national heritage, but, more disturbingly, a veritable disarray in social order and boundaries.
Also in this essay, Jin Songcen found it necessary to generalize about romantic passion (qing) as part of human nature and a universal principle. The prevalence of qing explains why the expression of love and sentiment always occupies a key position in literature, be it Western or Eastern. "Given the difference and lack of communication between these two societies, it is the literary people's unavoidable duty to take advantage of the power of fiction to bring them together, employing passion as the common source." Since some novelists had failed to fulfill their obligation, and, worse, because romantic fiction now threatened the future of the country, the critic saw no option but to deny and demonize passion altogether. Evoking a central myth of Chinese culture, Jin Songcen argued that he would sooner see the heaven of passion remain broken, and any passionate awakenings be smothered with the help of Nüwa's stone, than witness what was bound to degenerate into unbridled carnality.
A fantastic figure in creation mythology, the goddess Nüwa is believed first to have given life to men and women in the world. Then, in the wake of a fierce agon between the gods of water and fire, which caused the vault of heaven to collapse, she, as a caring mother, mended the broken sky with colorful stones that she painstakingly melted and fused. In the folkloric tradition, Nüwa is usually associated with the themes of mothering, fertility, and healing, but also with the spirit of dedication, even romantic devotion, in a despairing situation. Since the late imperial age, Nüwa has functioned persistently as a symbol of extraordinary dedication and endeavor, in no small part because of the wide-reaching impact of Shitou ji (The story of the stone; also known as Honglou meng [Dream of the red chamber]), particularly when Nüwa was paired with another mythical feminine spirit, the bird Jingwei. Drowned in the eastern sea, the young daughter of the god of fire came back to life as a bird named Jingwei and was determined to fill up the sea with stones and twigs that she carried from the western mountain. In their Sisyphean efforts to mend heaven and fill up the sea, Nüwa the Ur-mother and Jingwei the faithful daughter are believed to have committed themselves to a passion that is at odds with reality. When Jin Songcen proposed to disrupt the heaven of passion so as to prevent men and women from engaging in dangerous free interaction, he was pointedly reversing the popular myth and viewing romantic passion as an ominous threat. It is significant that his endorsement of new fiction went hand in hand with his radical denunciation of new romances, for the unconscious anxiety preoccupying an elite-reformist social discourse at the time was precisely how to regulate the antihierarchical tendencies of sentiment and emotional exchange that would conceivably break loose when the dynastic order was done away with. Liang Qichao's initial exposition on the positive relationship between fiction and social governance, from this perspective, had happily envisioned literature as an unproblematic technology for advancing modernity. A blind spot in this agitating vision had been the messy and ambiguous status of romantic sentiment and longing, which Liang conveniently dismissed as a harmful legacy of traditional literature.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from CHINESE MODERN by XIAOBING TANG Copyright © 2000 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations ixAcknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
Part I 11
Part II 163
Afterword 341
Glossary 349
Selected Bibliography 357
Index 369