Gender Politics in Modern China: Writing and Feminism 9780822396840

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Gender Politics in Modern China

Gender Politics in Modern China Writing and Feminism Tani E. Barlow, editor

Duke University Press

Durham and London 1993

© 1993 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 00 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. The text of this book originally was published without the present introduction, index, and essays by Yue and Liu as volume 4, numbers 1 and 2 of Modern Chinese Literature. Second printing, 1998

Contents vii

Howard Goldblatt· Foreword

1

Tani E. Barlow . Introduction

13

Ching-kiu Stephen Chan· The Language of Despair: Ideological Representations of the "New Woman" by May Fourth Writers

33

Lydia H. Liu . Invention and Intervention: The Female Tradition in Modern Chinese Literature

58

Wendy Larson . The End of "Funti Wenxue": Women's Literature from 1925 to 1935

74

Carolyn T. Brown· Woman as Trope: Gender and Power in Lu Xun's "Soap"

90

Rey Chow . Virtuous Transactions: A Reading of Three Short Stories by Ling Shuhua

106

Randy Kaplan . Images of Subjugation and Defiance: Female Characters in the Early Dramas of Tian Han

118

Meng Yue . Female Images and National Myth

137

Wolfgang Kubin . Writing with Your Body: Literature as a Wound-Remarks on the Poetry of Shu Ting

151

Chen Yu-shih . Harmony and Equality: Notes on "Mimosa" and "Ark"

159

Wang Zheng . Three Interviews: Wang Anyi, Zhu Lin, Dai Qing

vi

Contents

209

Richard King, In the Translator's Eye: On the Significance of Zhu Lin.

215

Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, Yuan Qiongqiong and the Rage for Eileen Zhang among Taiwan's Feminine Writers.

238

Jon Solomon, Taking Tiger Mountain: Can Xue's Resistance and Cultural Critique.

266

Sheung-Yuen Daisy Ng, Feminism in the Chinese Context: Li Ang's The Butcher's Wife.

290

Margaret H. Decker, Political Evaluation and Reevaluation in Contemporary Chinese Fiction.

304

Contributors

306

Index

Foreword Howard Goldblatt

A good idea at just the righttime produced excellent results three years ago, when this collection of articles and essays first appeared in Modem Chinese Literature. It was the journal's first issue devoted to gender and feminism, and the first anthology of its kind in Chinese literary studies. It was immediately adopted for classroom use by many of its readers. I foresee a similar destiny for this revised and expanded collection, so ably edited and introduced by Tani Barlow. Rich harvests await anyone interested in the literary activities and achievements of modem China, and specialists and students in Chinese feminist and gender studies have already signaled their appreciation for the project. But I believe, too, that reissuing the volume is yet another sign that East Asian scholarship is making its mark in cultural studies in general. I am pleased that the editorial board of Modem Chinese Literature had the good sense to listen to Professor Barlow back then, for this is a collection that will be used and studied by a great many people for a long time to come.

Introduction by Tani E. Barlow

In a satire on love and literature, the writer Ding Ling confronted her fictional poet Ouwai Ou with a choice. His bound-footed, oriental-style lover,little Ajin, is a tubercular prostitute. Wendy, the so-called modern girl he courts one pale grey Beijing morning, is a profligate hysteric. Which arouses him more (and via the magic of modernist literary metonymy, stiffens his flagging creative resolve), the nativized girl or the modernized girl? Actually, bad-faith relations with female objects are so prominent in the story that it is easy to overlook the modernist codes "A Woman and a Man" brings into play.l What codes are these? Ouwai becomes a man by acting out a stylized heterosexual gender politics that casts him in the role of the desiring subject drawn to a female object and held there in thrall to her narcissism. The woman who makes him feel most manly is the one he desires the most. His manhood, and thus his personhood, in other words is constructed during the dance of bourgeois sexual play. The term that best captures Ouwai (an agent who becomes a self by desiring women and representing reality; see Ching-kiu Stephen Chan's essay in this volume) is zhuti, which I translate "sovereign subject." Ouwai is Ding Ling's parodic male, May Fourth intellectual who nominates himself to be the agent of Chinese modernity. Though he is an unsavory specimen of a man, nonetheless Ouwai's gender performance and class skills denote him a subject in relation to Ajin and Wendy. The story of Ouwai Ou' s erotic dalliances, then, is a parable about the historical mission of the gendered, class-stratified, male-dominated treaty port elite. This class shaped its peculiar national political position through a strategy of appropriating knowledge from the colonial powers. Along with electricity and moving pictures, for instance, professional elites took over social Darwinian discourse on elementary sex differences. Scientific notions, including the dictum that male versus female constitutes the originary difference in nature, fed into the discourses of sernicolonial modernity in China, as a constituting element of modernist codes. That is 1 Ding Ling, "A Woman and a Man," trans. TaniBarlow(with Gary Bjorge), inl Myself am a Woman: Selected Writings of Ding Ling (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989),82-103. I thank Gail Hershatter, Jnderpal Grewal, Donald M. Lowe, and two anonymous readers who commented or contributed to this essay in various ways. Parts of this introduction were lifted out of a shorter essay that prefaced the earlier, special issue of Modem Chinese Literature. My thanks to Howard Goldblatt, editor of Modem Chinese Literature, who encouraged me to take on the enjoyable task of guest-editing the journal's first special issue on gender, feminism and women's literature.

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Tani Barlow

one reason the gendered modernity depicted in Ding Ling's short story is so relentlessly eroticized. 2 Ding Ling's little story plots history into a simple decision: Should Ouwai au, emblematic zhishiJenzi, construct himself in relation to his nativist longing for an erotically satisfactory national past (tradition, represented in a thoroughly unproblematized fashion by the meretricious native girl)? Or would his sense of self and historical mission be better served in relation to the global representational economy of the new, capitalist machine culture (modernity, embodied in the hysterical modern girl with the flashing Garbo eyes)?3 Ding Ling's story has permitted me to introduce a number of historical questions that I feel this volume provokes. I have read "A Woman and a Man" as an historian. So, for the most part, have contributors to this volume read their texts, each attempting to maintain a sense of history in the analytic background. (The sort of history I advocate is fundamentally interrogative rather than narrative.) In part, the shape of Chinese discourse on modernity will seem less certain when viewed through the eyes of these gendersensitive critics. There is here little of the sense of inevitability that often attends conventional history narrative because modernist discourse seems so tentative in these readings. Mostly, however, the contributors qualify as historians because they do not accept at face value a masculinist version of Chinese modernity thatreinscribes, without question, European-style bourgeois sex stereotypes over earlier gendered categories, as Ding Ling's text, for all its burlesque distancing techniques, seems to do. The essays here raise questions about gender and power like: What distinguishes masculinity in Chinese modernist discourse? Is Chinese modernity really inflected masculine? Are there conditions under which modernity is feminine, as Wendy Larson argues? What emancipatory potential did the recoding of male dominance in mod~rnity hold out to women and to men? How should feminine counter-hegemonic writing be evaluated? And what kinds of trouble did writers make who were not entranced by the shapely outlines of the new bourgeois order? 2 Another structuring element in her work of the period was the generally ambivalent economy of gender stratification and racial difference that structured the imaginary relation of the would-be colonizer and the local man (nanxing).

3 For a discussion of this staple in theoretical terms, see "Japan and Postmodernism," a special issue edited by Masao Miyoshi and Harry Harootunian, SA Q. The ubiquity of the modernist/nativist binary can be seen in Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang's history of Taiwan literature in this volume. It is a version of the old Levensonian spider web, this time contextualized as an effect of imperialism and colonial discourses. For an extended discussion of colonial modernity in East Asia, see the inaugural edition of positions: east asia cultures critique (Spring 1993), entitled "Colonial Modernity."

Introduction

3

Essays one through six in this volume focus on the period of Chinese colonial modernity or semicolonialism. (For cultural historians of China this era consists of roughly the last half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries.) The balance of the essays target socialist and postsocialist versions of modernity, particularly recent attempts to regroup the power ofliterature following the antibourgeois campaigns of the Maoist years. All these scholars center their attention on the gendering of the modern literary text. They assume that baihua literature differs considerabl y from colloquial literatures of the past because though all literatures are gendered, each text presents itself according to its specific time and placement. Consequently, each contributor has found herself or himself explaining the complex ways that Chinese texts in modernist discourse recoded femininity and masculinity. Further, the literary critics seem to concur that historical categories are constitutionally unstable; this insight gives questions about gender and modernity, masculine and feminine, and feminism a new importance. China scholars cannot avoid the gender question in studies of modernity, subjectivity and history. Gender discourse and gender semiotics are always part of the constituting forces at work in social formation. Likewise, once the alleged natural order of male dominance is unmasked and seen to be constructed, then, as Carolyn Brown's paper in this volume reiterates, the hows and wherefores of each specific instance become a subject matter of great concern to all scholars. The contribution of the essays in this volume to the larger historical project lies in the way each evaluates the pleasures and constraints of Chinese literary modernisms. What do these essays convey about gender and historical modernity that is so valuable? They support the view that since 1850 or thereabout, changes in who was empowered to write and in the tenor of Chinese writing itself ushered into being two new social subjects, woman (niixing) and man (nanxing), and made them elemental categories of colonial modernity. For instance, the Ding Ling short story I noted earlier encoded a certain kind of performative heterosexuality and celebrated its new centrality in literary representation. Though relatively new to Chinese discourses, the heterosexual binary is recognizable from other bourgeois traditions. The question, then, is really one of specificity. How, specifically, did new formulae for masculinity and femininity get encoded in semicolonial China, in socialist China, and in post-Mao China? What makes Chinese gendered modernities distinctively different from codes in other postcolonial modernities elsewhere? What makes them internally different from each other, in terms that Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang raises here? What pressures have all this

4

Tani Barlow

recoding exerted to transform sexuality into an "identity," and have they succeeded't Ching-kiu Stephen Chan's ''The Language of Despair" invokes modem China's multiple crises of representation, sovereignty, and subjectivity to show how xin niixing, the "new woman" of May Fourth modernity (roughly the 1920s), was constituted a foundation for the masculine, realist canon. Texts by ma1e authors, Chan argues, organized themselves with reference to a specific female literary angst which he reads transitively as a covenant: "The root of your [female] suffering is to be found in my [male] inability to right the wrong that society has done me [as a man]." Chan clarifies the implications of this projection: Her [xin nu.xing] life, her fate, her suffering, her vulnerability, her sexuality, and her despair-all these "I" can assertively represent within the constraints of our social hegemony, because (after all), her identity is nowhere recognizable except in me, and (ironically) my sense of alienation nowhere nourishable but in the marginality-if not the impossibility-{)f "her" self. (my emphasis)

Chan's demonstration of how certain identifiable masculinist literary habits established the sexualized, modem Chinese "new woman" speaks both to the question of gender relations in early, rea1ist baihua texts and to the specific codes of masculine and feminine characterizing China's colonial literary modernity.5 Lydia Liu's argument in "Invention and Intervention: The Female Tradition in Modem Chinese Literature" engages Wendy Larson's essay "The End of 'Funii Wenxue'''; both inject tension into Chan's insight while confirming its basic outline. Liu's focus is the genealogy of the female tradition in modem Chinese literature. Her paper is deeply informed by the rich harvest of writing about women's culture, theory, and history in mainland intellectua1 circles over the last decade. But Liu' s point in singling out the tremulous tradition offemale writing is her belief that in "situat[ing] 4 Feminist scholarship has established in historical and theoretical detail that changes in discourse are always at the same time changes in gendering practices and therefore of "gender itself." In my view, gender is neither a stable relation governing the affairs of extradiscursive men and women nor a matter of culturally relative ways of improvising on the same old tune of anatomical sex difference. Gender signals the performance, and technologies enabling the performance, by means of which the sexes (one, two, three, and more) establish themselves. The newly distinctive codes in discourses of Chinese modernity were not epiphenomenal-that is, they did not just offer a change of externals. Gender coding in Chinese modernities were the protocols through which people became themselves, became men and women. (The last sentence is an amended, paraphrased version of Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity [New York: Routledge, 1990], p. 7. Also see Denise Riley, Am I That Name?: Feminism and the Category of "Women" in History [New York: Macmillan, 1988], Judith Butler. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity [New York and London: Routledge, 1990], and Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, Body Guards: The Cultural Politics ofGender

Introduction

5

female subjectivity in a process that challenges the received idea of womanhood," writers such as Ding Ling, Zhang Jie, and Wang Anyi reinforced an "idea of the female tradition [that is] no less a potent form of historical intervention than it is an invention" (my emphasis). Liu raises an important point. Invention is never a benign, disinterested or accidental exercise. The question her essay obliges the reader to ask is, what compelled the female writers to intervene at all? Certainly the emergence of a literary politics of hierarchical othering (where the male bourgeois subject self-interestedly reconstructs his self through his relations with women) and a counterpolitics of female self-invention at the same time is not a coincidence. The project of women laying claim to literature as a means of "rewriting (the male text) and gaining authorial control" is a key move in most bourgeois gender and identity politics. In other words, discourses of sexuality expressed through baihua literature and the politics of personal identity originate together. The former is a precondition of the latter. Wendy Larson's "The End of 'Funii Wenxue'" directly addresses the historicity of gender codes. Larson seeks to explain why a "demotion of gendered literature" occurred in the decade 1925-35. She makes a significant argument that the decline was a consequence of two historical events. These were, first, the colonial practice of measuring modem Chinese literary norms against a stereotyped idea of the significance of the Western canon and, second, socialism's increasing importance to the educated elite. There is another important emphasis in Larson's piece that Randy Kaplan, Rey Chow, Sheung-Yuen Daisy Ng, and Carolyn Brown all develop in their essays, too. What kind of politics, each asks, governed contests over coding masculinity and femininity (distinguished momentarily from simplistic questions about the ways men exploit women), and how were the qualities of masculinity and femininity assigned and reassigned through literary codes? Reading to expose how gender imbricates a text is a necessary but quotidian, political activity. "Woman as Trope: Gender and Power in Lu Ambiguity [New York and London: Routledge, 1991] for discussion of the links between discourse, representation and gender). For an airing of these matters in a Chinese-language context, see A. Zito and T. Barlow, eds., Body, Subject, Power in China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 5 Speaking the truth of Chinese woman's derogation was a way of empowering young literary men (Ouwai's more respectable brethren), in other words. Mao Dun, Yu Dafu, and others who spoke for their wives and daughters structured the self of the speaker himself, the sovereign subject modern Chinese man. This particularity, as historians have demonstrated, suggests that May Fourth modernity might have something in common with colonial modernities elsewhere. See Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, eds., Postmodernism and Transnational Feminist Practices (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 1994). Also see Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London: Zed Press, 1986).

6 Tani Barlow

Xun's 'Soap'" argues that when you look for masculine or feminine and assume them to be shifting qualities, your reading can unfix them just as it unfixes you. Carolyn Brown elaborates at some length on just how useful it is to consider alternatives to the notion that gender relations are nothing more than extradiscursive bits of the natural order. She demonstrates the specificity of gender performance and intimates that, being historical, no configuration can ever be completely stationary. Within her difficult knowledge, Brown is always able to locate points where Lu Xun's texts evade, refuse, ignore, or resist gender convention. According to Brown, Lu Xun's eagerness to contextualize gender and class oppression into elements of anti-imperialist, nationalist critique, sprang from his principled refusal to renaturalize "woman" and make it into an identity. Lu Xun argued that the physical body-the signifier-the female-had become the repository of a meaning-the signified-that in fact it did not rightfully bear. In rejecting the conventional literary tropes for configuring women and adopting the technique of realist representation to make explicit his critique, Lu Xun demystified the unspoken tenets of the cultural order. One function of myth is to make what is a social construct appear to be the natural order. Lu Xun revealed it again as a construct.

Brown read "Soap" because the story privileged a female character but rejected the common-sense linkages between qualities of femininity and the oppressions of women as a group. Rey Chow's "Virtuous Transactions: A Reading of Three Short Stories by Ling Shuhua" reconsiders Brown's point that modem writers demystify older, naturalized codes of masculine/ feminine. To illustrate how linkages such as those between domestic and feminine, writing and transgression, pretty and derogated got organized in semicolonial times, Chow chose to examine texts of the most "feminine" of all first-generation modern female writers, Ling Shuhua. Chow argues that femininity is a quality born in a social transaction whereby Chinese women "learn to give up their own desires in exchange for their social place." This entails for them a sorrow that cannot be alleviated. Why? Because the discipline required to maintain good behavior within the limits set by the transaction infuses femininity into the text at the same time as the text is itself devalued. Thus, Ling Shuhua's fiction is undervalued because "the label guixiu pai wenxue effectively absorbs the socially transgressive implications of women's attempts at writing by means ofclassification" by domesticizing the text (my emphasis). Ling's only resort is parody. Her texts delight in the moments when the most absurd stipulations of the contract are enforced. The assertion that femininity equals domesticity in semicolonialliterature suggests an older question. Why in twentieth-century literary history

Introduction

7

have codes for gender hierarchy been so easily reabsorbed into other hierarchic social distinctions (e.g., class, national, and Confucian, to name a few)? Randy Kaplan's "Images of Subjugation and Defiance: Female Characters in the Early Dramas of Tian Han," which reads playscripts of the early 1920s, explains the devolution of representations of women in theater from a high point, the early 1920s, to a later subordinate position in the work of left-wing dramatists. In Kaplan's view change did not prove progressive. Even the sorrows of the male-authored May Fourth female hero at least allowed a vision of personal autonomy and encouraged selfwilled acts. Essential sex difference, naturalized sex characteristics, and strict binary opposition may not be natural or universal, but when May Fourth new women adopted them as such, they at least arrogated to themselves an invented realm of free will unheard of before; at least in Kaplan's view. In other words, while the heroines of male dramatist Tian Han are wimpy and whiny, they are not nearly as devalued as later socialist woman robots, who let gender classificatory politics condemn them before they ever open their mouths. Kaplan's view-that socialist gender codes vitiated naturalized, liberatory, necessary sex difference and reversed the progressive trend toward representing women's erotic performance and freedom of choiceis a widely held opinion among many China literary scholars now. The prevailing view owes much to Meng Yue and Dai Jinhua' s 1989 pioneering monograph Emerging from the Horizon of History. 6 Many scholars working in the United States but not represented is this volume, like Chen Xiaomei, Lu Tonglin, and Zhang Yingjin, have also amplified D~i and Meng's insight. The outlines of the earlier book's argument are visible in Meng Yue's vehement, brilliant essay for this volume, "FeJl1aleImages and National Myth." Her polemic argues that socialist revolution ended a promising May Fourth liberation of women by substituting masculinist desire for women's sexuality. The tragedy of the sacrifice of women's sexuality and the need to recover Chinese women's literary tradition (in Lydia Liu's usage) as the proper receptacle of female desire have become defining points of neo-May Fourth scholarship in the People's Republic of China and among scholars in the United States who stay current with debates in China literary circles. The intellectual roots and political objectives of the critique are important to grasp. In Meng's succinct statement: The female image in socialist fiction [ca. 1942-present] can be both a vessel carrying the (male) literatus' private dreams, the "other" or mirror-image of the male writer, and the representative of a certain class 6 Meng Yue and Dai Jinhua, Fuchu fishi dibiao (Emerging from the horizon of history) (Zhengzhou: Henan renmin chuhan she, 1989).

8

Tani Barlow or sociopolitical group, or even the authority of the Communist Party itself. The female image is the allegorical place where the public fuses with the private. To a large extent, as I seek to demonstrate, the female image in socialist literature has worked symbolically to introduce and infiltrate the totalitarian claims of the state within the field ofthe private conscious and unconscious.

In Meng's view, then, cultural coding of gender difference (masculine/ feminine) is suprahistorical yet vulnerable. It can be expected to be fairly similar everywhere-unless that is, it encounters totalitarian interference, as it did in the Maoist period (roughly 1942-1980). The aim of the female critic and female writer who have been alerted to the totalitarian incursions of the state is to rebuild female subjectivity on foundations laid during the earlier period of colonial modernity. Particularly the critic's job is to recuperate and to breathe back to life women's sexuality (Meng seems to grasp sexuality as an essence, not a discourse), by properly representing it in critical and literary terms. Chen Yu-shih and Wolfgang Kubin equivocate in a rather similar manner. A hint of desire for some reliable measure beyond history surfaces most plaintively in Chen Yu-shih's humanist argument "Harmony and Equality: Reflections on 'Mimosa' and 'The Ark.'" Reading mid-eighties fiction, Chen queries her texts: how, she asks, should gender get reassigned, in a manner of speaking, after Maoism? Sexuality and identity should be recoupled, but, in her view, they cannot be. Why? Because even in the best post-Mao male fiction woman just disappears. It keeps on sliding back into the masculinist, Marxist space of the material and the natural and it, woman, is therefore transformed yet again into an inert, exploitable, national resource. Just as the law of necessary linkage had earlier imposed a harmony that Chen finds deeply offensive because it disabled woman under Confucian hegemony, so post-Cultural Revolution writer Zhang Xianliang's social satires recycle a notion of balance that "transforms all issues concerning women into economic issues related to men's construction of themselves as subject." To disrupt the mechanism that persistently returns woman to the level of a natural resource, Chen opts for the humanist individualism she espies in Zhang Jie's key work The Ark. Chinese women must participate in an ongoing struggle to exceed socialist naturalization, Chen argues. Humanism rather than any doctrinaire or foreign feminism, offers the most aptly calibrated intellectual weapon to the insurgent Chinese woman writer and critic. Kubin also shares one ofMeng' s central concerns: is gender difference always coded the same everywhere, and in cases where it apparently is not, should it be? For several decades Kubin has been adapting the AngloAmerican feminist theology of Elizabeth Abel, Susan Gubar, and Sandra Gilbert to his rereading of Chinese women's literature. In this essay, "Writing With Your Body: Literature as a Wound-Remarks on the Poetry

Introduction

9

of Shu Ting," Kubin reads poems of the immediate post-Cultural Revolution years. Female poet Shu Ting helps Kubin make his case that sexual difference is always grounded in the physical body of woman. Beneath the binary EastiWest, and across all opposed, binarial categories such as now/ then, elite/popular, and state/society, stretches, in Kubin's view, the one primordial and originary divide of woman from man. No matter how invasive the state, and no matter how it attempts to erase the gender of the poem, body always tells in the end. The critic's job is to find the body in the poem and locate the distinguishing marks it makes. The strongly argued critical positions ofMeng, Chen and Kubin haunts Wang Zheng's absorbing, frequently hilarious conversations with leading Chinese writers entitled "Three Interviews: Wang Anyi, Zhu Lin, Dai Qing." These interviews are an invaluable resource. They suggest that criticism and writing belonged to separate worlds in the 1980s. Zhu Lin's comment that she never considered her writing to be "about women" before she come into contact with Professor Chen Yu-shih makes this point vividly. So does Wang Zheng's own comment that she herselffound easy access to the writers because she could offer media exposure outside China and therefore, in the predictable loop, greater currency at home. Richard King's brief note on his experience translating Zhu Lin's work reinforces the same point: Chinese women's literature is just another commodity on the global culture market. If decentering really does effect gender politics, then the three final essays, by Jon Solomon, Sheung-Yuen Daisy Ng, and Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, offer intimations of resistance from a margin. Sung-sheng Chang's historical account suggests the primacy of context. Popular writers of the seventies and eighties in Taiwan, particularly Yuan Qiongqiong, all claim Zhang AilinglEileen Chang as their inspiration, Chang demonstrates. But writers within Taiwan's female literary tradition have rewritten Zhang's oeuvre and reimagined her significance from the wildly commercial world of Taiwan's heroic, late-developing capitalism. Chang has several motives for pointing out how Yuan Qiongqiong's texts are feminine and how this femininity gets constructed in the tension between Zhang Ailing's text and Taiwan's frontier capitalist context. First, it allows Chang to shift analysis from erotics to the political economy of the text. Second, she can suggest ways the culturally marginalized (in relation to China's elite literary center) Chinese-speaking intellectual community has reencoded gender and text. Third, she contributes a theme that surfaces as a consequence of her authorial positioning (like Ng and Solomon, Chang has scholarly ties with Taiwan and Hong Kong): a persistent confusion, this critique argues, smudges the line separating femininity (a normative quality) and feminism (an ideology that unlike Marxism was always considered foreign) in the women's tradition of literature as it was reinvented on the periphery. In Daisy Ng's "Feminism in the Chinese Context: Li Ang's The

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Tani Barlow

Butcher's Wife," the indistinction of femininity and feminism becomes acute. For Taiwanese writers of the 1980s like Li Ang. Ng points out. literary feminism is a colonial discourse appropriated into Chinese humanism and not really the rallying cry of a bourgeois movement aimed at political and intellectual liberation for women. Ng's single most important conclusion is that the significance of the novel "does not lie in any progressive insight into women's position in Chinese society but rather in its challenge to the literary conventions of China." So to change the feminine (a quality of personhood) requires changing writing more even than transforming dress, work, family, or national policies. A femininity ratified in literary terms resonates with concerns raised in earlier essays, particularly those of Chan, Chen, Chow, Liu, Larson and Meng, reinforcing the suggestion. that gender codes have worked differently in Chinese modernities than in China's past or in the pasts and presents of other historical traditions elsewhere. Ng concludes by noting that writing and the feminine are linked in Taiwan literary convention and that this site of linkage is precisely where elite contest and transgression have historically occurred. Jon Solomon goes to the roots of sinophone literary modernity in his explication of Can Xue's preoccupation with power, signification and subjectification. Solomon suggests that Can Xue' s mid-1980s texts operate to prevent or preclude the reemergence of the (male) sovereign subject (zhuti). In his review, resistance occurs at the intersection of post-Mao despair and colonial anxiety, where the apprehension of subjectivity is most acute. Solomon hints that for Can Xue the way out has been a project of undoing the processes so lovingly elaborated in Ching-kiu Stephen Chan's celebration of subjectification and modernity. Certainly Chan's realists, strategizing to alleviate their own insufficiencies, sought to participate in the project of universal representation offered under the terms of colonial modernity. Perhaps that is why "a fear of the will to represent everything" appears constantly in Can Xue's work, linked to anxiety over the colonial positioning of Chinese modernity. Helping himself to Can Xue' s anxiety takes Solomon back into the question of possible alternative genealogies. He endorses Can Xue's "antidote: a culture made from the disease itself," which would neutralize the stultifying pressure of Chinese nationalist discourse, the pressure of nationalism's requirement that its every twist and tum be represented in a unitary rationalist historical narrative. Can Xue's project brings us finally to the question of feminism's role in politics, raised in the present volume. Sheung-Yuen Daisy Ng and Sungsheng Yvonne Chang are interrogating the record in search of a Chinese literary feminism. Why, they want to know, have literary feminisms in Chinese-language texts so often reshaped what should be a political critique

Introduction

11

into an analysis of sex -typed personal qualities? What might rehabilitate the political edge of feminisms that are constantly deflected into the feminine or dismissed as Western? Meng Yue, Rey Chow, Carolyn Brown, and Wendy Larson, on the other hand, bring feminist humanism to bear as they air the historical forces that in their views have shaped gender inequity and configured its performance since modem times began. These scholars suggest a further problem: Why do the women's movement and the new organizations of subordination occur in Chinese modernity simultaneously? Yet, most recent U.S. dialogue about feminisms in Chinese-language contexts has revolved around the problem of authenticity. Scholars have argued that feminisms are inapplicable to Chinese contexts, or that China has its own indigenous feminisms, or that the accidents of birth and genetics make some subjects more capable of speaking about feminisms in connection with China than others. What the essays in this volume suggest is that arguments actually proceed ex post facto in light of the demonstration of feminism's multiplicities and utilities in a variety of contexts. Scholars from Meng Yue and Carolyn Brown to Rey Chow and Wendy Larson to Lydia Liu and Daisy Ng have drawn on the resources of theoretical and practical feminisms with tremendous creativity. That much is quite simply already fact. This reissued set of papers actuall y suggests some newer questions that might profitably be asked in the future, including: How do feminisms circulate internationally? What are the basic orientations of feminisms now in China? Are there ways of thinking about justice and women's special conditions that do not engage feminisms? If tradition is constructed ideologically, then is feminism a critique of tradition, or is it constructed at the same time as the binary tradition/modernity, and is it therefore simply another "other" of tradition? Are Chinese feminisms critiques of nationalism or not? Beyond antisexism, what do specific ferninisms have, if anything, that might form a place for strategic affinities? The critic must read the literary text if she is to explain in the necessary, mundane, nuts-and-bolts fashion how gendering is discursively engineered. Lydia Liu, Carolyn Brown, and Jon Solomon all discern countertraditions that have refused, confused, disrupted, or diffused modernist attempts to link female subjectivity to a binary construction of gender. Most vividly in the work of Meng Yue and Chen Yu-shih, and in Wang Zheng's dialogue with writers Dai Qing, Wang Anyi, and Zhu Lin, feminist politics takes the form of a straightforward call to resuscitate the historical feminism of China's colonial modernity, the May Fourth period. Meng Yue particularly attacks what she considers the refusal of the Mao era to recognize innate gender difference. She seems to tum to a feminism rooted in female particularism.

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Tani Barlow

But at a different level this volume represents a current transnational impulse in feminism? At the very least, its republication is a by-product of the explosion offeminist criticism in the Chinese-speaking world and of the resurgence of an educated women's movement particularly on the China mainland during the 1980s. Looked at from that perspective, the volume forms the meeting place of gender-sensitive cultural criticism of all sortshuman rights advocacy from the margin (Chen Yu-shih and Carolyn Brown), postcolonial criticism (Ng, Chow, Chang, Chan, and Solomon), Chinese mainland-inspired critiques (Meng and Liu), and a progressive, Western white feminism (Larson, Kubin, and Kaplan). It therefore joins feminist movement globally, further evidencing the capacity of efforts of social justice to engage, affiliate, and align in many progressive ways.

7 See Caren Kaplan and Inderpal Grewal, eds., Scattered Hegemonies (Minneapolis: U ni versity of Minnesota Press, 1994).

The Language of Despair: Ideological Representations of the "New Woman" by May Fourth Writers Ching-kiu Stephen Chan

The deepest longing of human existence is ... the longing of man for selfhood, the longing to transform the narrow peak of existence into a wide plain with the path of life winding across it ... But every longing fulfilled is a longing destroyed. Georg LulGics Soul and Fonn, 1910

It took her five weeks to learn that my work could not be restricted by regular eating hours. . . . My appetite was much smaller than before, now that I was Sitting at home all day using my brain, but even so there wasn't always even enough rice. It had been given to [the dog] A Sui.... So there were only the hens to eat my left-overs. It was a long time before I realized this. I was very conscious, however, that my "place in the university," as Huxley describes it, was only somewhere between the dog and the hens. LuXun "Regret for the Past," 1925

In the turbulent times of the May Fourth cultural movement in modern China, the search for a new subjectivity was carried out quite frequently in terms of capturing, in a new form, the identity crisis of the "new women" [xin niixing]. Yet the control of this form was everywhere disciplined by the intellectual (male-centered) self, whose own dilemma of identity tended to be posited in relation to the alien, repressed, but emerging "other" of the woman in question. Such attempts to give "form" to women's identity during the early stages of China's modernization were common not only in the works of female writers like Ding Ling, but more so (though perhaps less ostensibly) in the works ofleading male writers like Lu Xun and Yu Dafu. Mao Dun's early fiction seemed to occupy an ambiguous position somewhere in between, as most of his female protagonists were left, characteristically, between suffering a complete collapse of consciousness in an outpouring of emotions and resigning to the total silence of solitude and despair. However, for Mao Dun, as for Lu Xun and Yu Dafu, the woman's sense of solitude and despair, her gesture of resistance and revolution, indeed the totality of her consciousness-all these could find a channel of

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expression only through a voice that spoke in the grammar of the dominant discourse of crisis, be it the voice of a solitary outcast (in Yu Dafu), the voice of a half-inert, half-sympathetic bystander (in Lu Xun), or the voice of a cool, calm and ultimate revolutionary (in Mao Dun). The result was a mimetic movement toward the (other) self, toward some possible formations of female subjectivity that contributed to the aesthetic dimension of modern Chinese representation nothing less than a labyrinth of discursive modes. My objective in this study is to address the basic question of representation-perhaps the one common message of all realist aesthetics-by focusing on the new images of women as they emerged in specific cultural and historical "formations of despair" during the period immediately following the May Fourth Movement of 1919. As I attempt to re-organize the classical mimetic function of realism around the enunciative performance of language in the Chinese realist discourse, I argue that the modern intellectual wanted desperately to re-present himself via a mutation in the crisis of the "other." At the same time, I am also suggesting that the aesthetic question is definitely a matter of form, but not (in the last analysis) of form alone. Hence, my reading of some of the earliest realist writings in modern China can also be taken as an effort to reconstruct the basic quest for form through what might be called an aesthetics of despair. By approaching the crisis of consciousness from the vantage point of representation-the representation of the "other" by the self, of "reality" by language-I wish to show how the realist obsession with despair is itself an attempt at mediating the contradictions of form. The critical problem I want to layout is this: Given the complex of conflictual social relations involved in the intellectual's will to implement revolution through various new ways of subjective expression (such as love), how was it possible for the realist form (itself the embodiment of a radical discourse) to capture the totality of that crisis-that despair-without handling the problematic of its own crisis-the crisis of representation?

• Actively participating in the so-called New Literary Movement, progressive May Fourth writers like Lu Xun, Yu Dafu, and Mao Dun all tried to bring home to their contemporary readers a critical sense of unrest and bewilderment they felt as part of their historical experiences, not because they could logically show the public the authentic meaning of history, but because they had compelled them to either accept, reject, or compromise the ways in which their common condition of existence was being represented through the text. And as the social and ideological texture of reality thus exposed to the readers was received at once with pity and with fear, the crisis of consciousness it summoned up for them would

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turn out to be contained, ultimately, in a discourse of solitude and despair that spoke to the crisis of feminine subjectivity as the "other" question of representation for the dominant intellectual "self." For everyday events were lived by men and women as history mostly via detours. Often, historical moments were "summoned up" for the collective consciousness without recourse to the normalizing mediation of everyday exercise of power relations. Thus, "history" for the Chinese populace was experienced as collective life when, during the May Fourth era, the dominant culture of the people was being recognized for the first time, by intellectuals and other significant social groups in the urban community, as the actual order of a repressive systematics, namely, the patriarchal hegemony. Reality was now being negatively identified, not as any natural, monologic voice of history, but as the undeniable inauthenticity of an aging patriarch best manifested then in the icon of Confucius himself. What evolved through this collective crisis were not merely the so-called "dark sides" of reality, but the actual formations of what Herbert Marcuse calls in Reason and Revolution a "negative totality. "It designates, for Marcuse, the overall (visible and invisible) conditions that help expose the entire structure of reality, the total network of sociohistorical contradictions in which "every particular moment [of crisis] contains, as its very content, the whole, and must be interpreted as the whole" (159). In the light of this problematic, it may be possible to propose that, for the May Fourth intellectuals (among them iconoclastic writers of all sorts), to capture the historical moments of their time was, in essence, to summon up those experiences of crisis for a new mode of representation, and (thus) as the question of representation itself. As the Confucian icon crumbled in the turbulent New Cultural Movement motivated by enthusiastic intellectuals of the May Fourth generation, word about a new future for women began to spread. Ibsen's Nora became an instant symbol of rebellion and the immediate spokeswoman, as it were, for an alternative hegemony whose foreseeable future remained unknown, uncertain, and unreal. But all the obstacles notwithstanding, one could still witness the emergence of a critical consciousness that addressed women as repressed and marginal under traditional social relationships. Since such a phenomenon was most unusual in a culture dominated for thousands of years by a hyper-static ethical and political order, the subversive act itself might legitimately be considered the collective response to a major historical crisis. The prominent result was, at the pivotal point of May Fourth, a crisis of consciousness among the new intellectuals, for whom all the passionate urges for change came together in the formation of a normally

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unethical discourse, one that was written, spoken, and read in the name of Eros, its lack, its excess, and its reason for being, for despair.l Once repressed, the language of despair-despair as the root of existence, despair as the cause for life-now erupted through layers of institutional and ideological dominance to appear in the formation of a new ethic and a new culture. It gave rise to an alternative discourse that might have contributed to women's new entry into history. Yet despite its revolutionary momentum, the eruption, in effect, also became the very sign of continual disruption. For given the all-pervasive constraints of the traditional hegemony, insertion into an order of legitimacy need not necessarily allow the "new woman" to represent her own identity in, much less to liberate herself from, the presiding Law of the symbolic Father, whose ultimate logos was once embodied, for the Chinese, in the figure of the Dragon. Indeed, it is my belief that even such radical iconoclasts as Lu Xun, Yu Dafu, and Mao Dun must have lived their lives struggling amid the contradictions between the deep sense of alienation they felt before the symbolic Dragon that guarded the entrance to every existing institution and a corresponding sense of alierity-the irresolvable complex of will, passion and frustration experienced in their attempts to overcome that alienation, to dismantle that institution, and to rationalize that very despair. Lu Xun, for one, provides us with a perfect case in which contradictions were multiplied, rather than simply resolved, in the text. As the leading writer of his time, Lu Xun's strong concern for the status of Chinese women was in line with his ruthless criticism of the repressive practices of traditionalism as a whole. Yet despite his persistent commitment to help cure the disease of the Chinese mind, Lu Xun could never separate the ethical drive and historical mission to implement social changes from his own private dilemma of consciousness. Such a dilemma was caused by the inner dialectic of faith and anxiety that constituted the identity crisis for the majority of the May Fourth intellectuals. It was this crisis of split consciousness, of phantom reality, that caught the Chinese writer-as a socially committed individual-between the will to hope before a dawning future of revolution and the recourse to despair as the only remaining powerhouse in the twilight of history. This being understood, it would be easier to comprehend the fact that, after such prominent works as "Zhufu" [The new year's sacrifice] had possibly set the norms for a realist fiction in modern China, Lu Xun should choose to end, more or less, his career as a writer of fiction by publishing a unique volume of prose poems, Yecao [The wild grass], in which moments of intensified despair were highlighted. In another development, the subjective condition of despair had been so desperate for Yu Dafu from the very beginning that it would readily 1 See my discussion in "Eros as Revolution: The Libidinal Dimension of Despair in Mao Dun's Rainbow," Journal o/Oriental Studies 24.1 (1986): 37-53.

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subsume any potential energy left for actual explorations into more manifestly social dilemmas. Hence Yu's formulation of an autobiographical mode that magnified what was equal to Lu Xun's split consciousness in an idiosyncratic fashion. In a significant way, the works of both writers, whether realist or otherwise, had paved the way for a discourse that appeared, on one level, to have disrupted the dominant discourse on women, only to end up, on another level, undermining the initial attempts of subversion as a result of an unforeseen problem, that of representation. It is little but hindsight for us to suggest today that the misguided practice of the May Fourth iconoclasts was partly rooted in their failure to posit a concrete historical as well as textual place for the new women of China. But for the intellectual iconoclasts writing at that particular juncture in history, where contradictions were lived as part of everyday reality, the paradox of representation was a fundamental and critical one. Their choice was most difficult to make-between representing the symbolic liberation of women and disrupting the dominant mode of discourse that had initiated the very act of subversion in the first place. As a writer and a social witness of the new women's history, one's stand was feeble indeed~is place (as Lu Xun would have suggested), possibly somewhere between a few scrawny hens and an old, lonesome dog. The fragility became even more threatening when the position to take was one on the emotional reality of women. Caught at the margin where rationality met irrationality, women's role was habitually normalized and contained within the male-centered network of domestication and accommodation. What concerns me in the following analysis is the textual organization of the (male) intellectual "self' in relation to the (female) emotional "other"-that act of representation that may now be recognized as an objectifying process of the identity crisis rooted in the collective unconscious of the May Fourth writers. Taken as the first step toward any reassurance of selfhood, objectification is a central function in the dialectic of form and consciousness. To objectify is to divest oneself of, to part with, one's self, one's consciousness. The alienated form subsequently evolves as the alterity of consciousness, whereas the wholeness of self is maintained on the basis that it has successfully expelled that which is less coherent and "other" than self. Thus, any possible transcendence of self is to be achieved in its very negativity. In other words, mediation through objectification consists in the process of containing the uncertain (the oneself: herselt) in the certain (the one's self: his selt). To analyze the functioning of the objectifying mode in the representation of self as other, we shall now look more closely at a few examples taken from works by the three major writers mentioned earlier.

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• In Lu Xun's "Shangshi" [Regret for the past], Juansheng is the firstperson narrator who, in a series of notes, attempts to look back into and redeem the essence of his life during a period shortly after the outbreak of the May Fourth Movement, when he has just turned from a follower of "new thoughts" into a poor writer trying to sell manuscripts in support of a family of two. Juansheng begins his notes with these words: "I want, if I can, to describe my remorse and grief for Zijun's sake as well as for my own" ("Shangshi" 110; "Regret" 197). The past, it seems obvious, is here remembered as much to represent his loss of a sense of honor and dignity in life as it is to regret, to re-articulate, that loss as the loss of his wife Zijun. Disillusioned by the mundane life they shared after an initial moment of glory at the outbreak of the May Fourth cultural revolution, Zijun eventually left their home and soon died without her husband knowing. Her "disappearance" is typically represented in the story as Juansheng's loss of someone whom he had first inspired with revolutionary zeal (before their marriage) and from whom he had subsequently alienated himself (after their marriage). As the more stirring moments of the revolution had passed, it became more and more his belief that while he was plunging hard into life, exhausting his brainwork in the desperate hope of filling their stomachs, the woman he loved had simply begun to drift further and further away from a "meaningful" course of life_ To his great disappointment, Zijun's life was now being preoccupied with none other than dogs, hens, and other domestic trivialities. Hence, right before he was to realize his then much-relocated "place in the universe," Juansheng tried to rebuild the integrity of his self and re-articulate the dignity within his ego by drawing upon the agony of which she, his wife, was apparently the cause: Then there was the never-ending business of eating every day. All Zijun's effort seemed to be devoted to our meals. One ate to earn, and earned to eat; while A Sui and the hens had to be fed too. Apparently she had forgotten all she had ever learned, and did not realize that she was interrupting my train of thought when she called me to meals. And although as I sat down I sometimes showed a little displeasure, she paid no attention at all, but just went on munching away quite unconcerned. ("Shangshi" 119; "Regret" 205)

Now Lu Xun never explicitly tells us what Zijun was supposed to have learned, and which, according to Juansheng, she had then completely forgotten. And it need not be argued that Juansheng might actually be justified in his recognition of the change Zijun had undergone. The point, though, is to see the ideological function of the text revealed in the representation of that change.

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In the early stage of their relationship, Juansheng and Zijun, like thousands of other young Chinese of their time, had much to share with respect to the new and exciting changes they recognized and anticipated in their society. In their sharing of the experience of a new culture, as Juansheng later remembers it, "the shabby room would be fllied with the sound of my voice as I held forth on the tyranny of the family, the need to break with tradition, the equality of men and women, Ibsen, Tagore and Shelley ... She would nod her head, smiling, her eyes filled with a childlike look of wonder" ("Shangshi" 111; "Regret" 198). We know little about what Zijun actually thought of all those "new ideas," for we are allowed to know her only as Juansheng remembers her. And apparently her opinions could not be all that different from his own, because, as her mentor, he "was able to read her soberly like a book, body and soul" ("Shangshi" 114; "Regret" 198). Body and soul, she was there to be read and recorded in justification of one's own assertion of self-integrity, one's own transcendence of a painful crisis of identity. And this time, for Zijun, after she had broken away from the confines of her traditional family, the one man in her life turned out to be Juansheng, her husband, mentor and intellectual self. Her voice is represented directly in Juansheng's discourse only once, six months after they started discussing the "new ideas," when she is quoted to have made the most memorable statement to her husband: "I'm my own self; none of them has any right to interfere with me" ("Shangshi" 112; "Regret" 198). For Juansheng, here lies the gist of his regret-that this absolute moment in Zijun's life is never to be captured again. For Zijun, one suspects, this would be the discourse of a Chinese Nora openly betrayed by her share of the revolution. Moreover, this loss of the past is also represented as her loss of the will and passion to live the present. Even despair has been rejected as a source of identity; For Zijun, even the despair of self has to be relocated in the despair of the other. The objectification of its memory in Juansheng's journal may thereby be taken to be the key-hole, the central mediation, through which the other (masculine) self visualizes his will and objectifies his passion; bypassing the despair of Zijun, Juansheng has found his ways to transcend the past, re-live the present, and peep into the future. By the end, it is more for the loss of his selfhood than for hers that Juansheng regrets, through remembering, the passing of time: But where could I go? I realized, naturally, there were many ways open to me, and sometimes seemed to see them stretching before ... Here is the same shabby room as before, the same wooden bed, half dead locust tree and wisteria. But what gave me love and life, hope and happiness before has vanished. There is nothing but emptiness, the empty existence I exchanged for truth. ("Shangshi" 129; "Regret" 214)

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Alternatively, the woman is nothing but emptiness, the empty existence the man is allowed to objectify and exchange for "truth." The emphasis in the citation is added here to accentuate the ideology of a certain split consciousness that Juansheng reveals for his readers throughout his notes, a crisis one can recognize no less at the beginning than at the very end as the undeniable sign of his own anxiety: "I must make a fresh start in life. 1 must hide the truth deep in my wounded heart, and advance silently, takin~ oblivion and falsehood as my guide ... " ("Shangshi" 130; "Regret" 215). Evidently, here and elsewhere in the dominant literary discourse of the May Fourth period, the other is often represented as the cause of the selfs despair, which in tum becomes (ironically) the very incentive needed for any further undertaking of women's liberation as a reason for revolution. The basic contradiction here lies in the fact that while Zijun has no doubt failed to live up to an equivalent of the revolutionary idealism of a Shelley or an Ibsen, Juansheng is likewise not able to bear the indisputable thought that, in the face of all the historical constraints for any revolution, he has also forgotten to allow his wife the opportunities to become what she might have learned from his discourse. What happens to the Chinese Nora after she has left home? Perhaps Lu Xun's answer is given in the impossibility of a genuine representation of Zijun by her man Juansheng. For the latter might have been able to read her body and soul like a book within the framework of a story of despair, but he cannot in his reading allow her to intervene and articulate her-self in language. As a result, no authentic discourse of the "other" is represented. To put it differently, if his own self is to occupy a place somewhere between the dogs and the chickens, then the other questions he has forgotten to ask would perhaps be: What is the position of the woman? How is the site of her other self defined? Textually speaking, where is she to be found?

• Similar traces of this form of objectification can be identified in Yu Dafu, whose works can even better illustrate the question of alienation/representation of "self' from/in the "other." Through the organization of a despair, the intensification of the subjective crisis is achieved. Language mediates and produces a subjectivity caught in despair. And in almost all ofYu's heroes one can see the integrity of selfhood both shaken and re-assembled as the result of an "explosion" of alterity in one form or another. This radical recognition of the alterity of woman, as one may expect, ends up with different possible consequences: the "other" is either more repressed, or it is more free. 2 For a detailed analysis of split consciousness in modem Chinese realism, see my "Split Consciousness: The Dialectic of Desire in Camel Xiangzi," Modem Chinese Literature 2.2 (1986): 171-95.

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In "Niaoluo xing" [The cypress vine trip], one of Yu's earlier pieces of autobiographical fiction, the narrator writes to his wife, who has just left on a train homeward bound after a short visit to him in the city. Throughout his monologue, the narrator addresses his wife as "my woman, the woman whom I can't love and can't refuse to love" (89) and belittles himself as "sincerely" as he can in every conceivable way, trying to make explicit the sentimental point that he too (an unworthy father, son, and husband) is suffering from their arranged marriage just as much as she is. The subjective narrator is supposedly engaged in writing a letter to his wife: "I" pity "you," the addressee, because "you" have epitomized in the "tenderness" and "submissiveness" [roushun] of your femininity all the virtuous norms of social behavior assigned to traditional women by the dominant hegemony. "I" pity "you" for your weakness as a woman, and yet "I" have gotten used to tyrannizing [nuedazl "you" simply because "you" are my woman [wode niiren]. And as your man, "I" can't see why "you" wouldn't want to put the blame on "me." But to be frank enough, "I" am just as vulnerable as "you" are, only less responsible and respectful than "you" could possibly imagine. At times, "I" might have missed "you" and the child, and even shed some tears for "you"; but when "I" had to come face to face with my own survival, "I" didn't hesitate to sell the diamond ring "you" had given "me" as a wedding token. "I" know for certain that "I" have no right whatsoever to even talk about "existence" in this world. Yet, when "I" meditated about suicide, and attempted just that several times, the thought never once crossed my mind as to what might happen to "you" should "I" simply disappear from this world. But then "I" thought (and still think so now) that the responsibility could not be mine alone. It was, after all, the responsibility of "my parents," of "your parents," and of "our society, our nation." "You" are therefore but an innocent scapegoat, paying for the crimes that society has committed day after day, generation after generation. The root of your suffering is to be found in my own inability to right the wrongs that society has done me. lt goes without saying that, unlike Lu Xun's Juansheng, who has tried to ask for Zijun's forgiveness and regretted not having made her happier by sparing her "the truth," Yu Dafu's anti-hero is much more self-repulsive, and hence, paradoxically, self-indulgent. In Yu's works, the absent "other" is usually indicated in her implied relation with the "self' as a marginal character repressed by the power structurally integrated into the social relations under patriarchy. Thus, for the narrative "I" in "The Cypress Vine Trip," my woman, or sometimes in its pure form, woman, is somebody to whom "I" can represent. Her life, her fate, her suffering, her vulnerability, her sexuality, and her despair-all these "1" can assertively represent within the constraints of our social hegemony, because, after all, her identity is nowhere recognizable except in me, and, ironically, my sense of alienation nowhere nourishable but in the marginality-if not the impossibility-of

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"her self." For Yu, typically in his representation of the dominant discourse, "I" am everything except a decent soul, waiting to be eliminated any moment from this earth; "I" am a superfluous nobody, a reservoir of neurotic anxiety, the epitome of human despair. And still it is with this emptiness of selfuood that "I" long to fill the void of her otherness, thus articulating the emptiness in her and asserting it as woman-hood. It is with this absence of self-identity (of the value and meaning of "self') that "I" desire the presence of alterity, the sublimation of that long-repressed "other." But caught inside the hegemony the repressed can have no speech. And as "I" know her so thoroughly well, "I" will speak of her crisis through my-self and try to articulate my despair in her and for her. But the reverse of all this was certainly not possible in the history of modern China. For, notwithstanding Yu Dafu's attempt at self-denial, it was the voice of his woman that remained "superfluous," though her body might not, appear so. She rarely spoke, as a matter of course; and even if she did occasionally, few would be there to listen-except perhaps her "man," the omnipresent "I," the legitimate subject of all discourse. Just as her silence was by custom considered synonymous with her very redundancy, an occasional utterance attributed to her was deemed strategically critical for the final redemption of his lost self, his degraded manhood. Whatever their intrinsic values to the woman might be, the silence and the utterance together constituted a major part of the structural functions and narrative values she carried within the hegemonic order of the Confucian patriarchy. Hence, in such works as "The Cypress Vine Trip," "Chenlun" [Sinking], "Yinhuisede si" [Silvery gray death], and "Yenying" [Smoky shadows], the "other" is virtually voiceless. She is either a desexualized woman sitting helplessly at home with her feet bound, or she is transformed into a sexual fetish waiting mindlessly in a brothel with her legs crossed. Her discourse, if any, is almost always mediated by the solitary consciousness of the man who, whenever in despair, would drop by to talk. But there are also cases more subtle than this. The woman ("my woman") in "Yigeren zai tushang" [Alone on the road]) does speak, though largely with a nightmarish voice. Her little child, named Long, or Dragon, has just died; broken-hearted, she believes she hears him calling "mama" in her dreams. She wakes up to her man, crying "Do you hear? Do you hear?" He never responds, like the "solitary reaper" he considers himself to be. "Indeed," she finally manages to pull herself together and utter in a single breath, "Long is back." It is indeed in the Dragon that man and woman find a common symbolic reason to believe. With such a counteractive attempt to re-present the voiceless paradox of the modern identity crisis, Yu Dafu has revealed the contradictory nature of a discourse both too patronizing and repulsive, too narcissistic and nihilistic, to be considered in any conventional sense "realist."

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(But whether realist or not, the form by itself is not a yardstick of the ethical, much less aesthetic, value of the work. Rather, it is the vehicle through which symptoms of ethical and aesthetic predispositions might be disclosed. Despair, a specific form of the modem emotion, mediates by objectifying the contradictions within the social relations that generated the historical crisis of May Fourth in both its ethical and aesthetic dimensions. Understood in its proper historical context, form transforms, and is transformed by, the dynamics of reality. And if one would not hesitate to call that specific form "realist" in this particular sense, then all literature of the May Fourth era, Yu Dafu's works not excluded, might well be put under its broad rubric.) To further substantiate my argument, let me take the quintessential prose narrative ofYu Dafu, "Chunfeng chenzuide wanshang" [Intoxicating spring nights], written in the summer of 1923. Here, Yu's anti-hero narrates a story about himself and a cigarette-factory girl who speaks only in a southern rural dialect. They are now very close neighbors, sharing the same attic in a Shanghai slum area. Strangers as they are, they seldom talk; they seldom even see each other. She works ten hours a day wrapping cigarettes in the factory; he reads, writes, and stretches himself mindlessly during the day time, sneaks into the city streets at night to mail his manuscripts, and allows himself to be "intoxicated" by the deranging breeze till another weary day dawns in the late spring of Shanghai. Thus, for a short while, they are two housemates, each locked up in a "free prison," alienated each in a unique way from the latest cultural fashions and political currents of a quasi-colonial Shanghai. One day, back from a whole day's labor, and more silent than ever before, she walks up to him, musters her courage, and asks him what strange books he has been reading all day long, what evil deeds he might be engaged in during his nightly excursions, and if he would care to stop smoking, or at least to stop smoking the brand of cigarettes she wraps every day in her factory, the place she so desperately hates. The whole situation is in an extraordinary way both a climax and an anti-climax for our deeply frustrated (sexually and otherwise) hero; it actually conjures up for him a moment of extreme ethical as well as psychopathological tensions. In typical Yu Dafu style, this moment of crisis soon turns into a discourse of perverted and ecstatic sentimentalism, as the perversion and ecstasy finally culminate in an orgy of neurotic monologue that permits the overflow of some very intense feelings-expressions of desire, disillusion, and despair. It highlights, in effect, a moment of ethical conflicts and psychic anxieties in which everything dehumanizing in the external world becomes revitalized through an aesthetic undercurrent. Instead of normalizing the subjective experience in accordance with established moral codes, this libidinal discourse radicalizes it by reiterating the futility of the selfs attempt to embody and empower (ethically but also textually) a transparent "other" in the dark cell of the ego.

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* We may now recall that, with Lu Xun, the crisis of identity is also expressed in the selfs symbiotic containment of the other. In "Regret for the Past," the loss of woman is what posits man as the dominant subject of discourse; at the same time, such a representation of the alienated self is rendered historically viable only through the ideological representation of the marginal position of the "other"-an objectification of that empty site of a disengaging past. The whole process is then significantly radicalized, as we have seen, by Yu Dafu, to the extent that the absence of "other" not only helps project the presence of self, but the introjection of otherness onto selthood also makes it possible for the alterity of a non-beingwoman-to intrude into the integral realm of being and disturb the established hierarchy of consciousness. Mao Dun, on the other hand, starts off with a more orthodox Western realist precept that any objective datum of reality is separable from subjectivity before the process of representation has even taken place. laroslav PruSek has pointed out that in order to achieve objectivity, Mao Dun would erase any subjective voice from his narrative: "There is no trace of the story's being related by anybody. The author's aim is for us to see everything, feel and experience everything directly, to eliminate any intermediary between the reader and what is described in the novel" (123). While it is doubtful that Mao Dun actu~lly succeeds in erasing traces of subjectivity from his narratives, one can readily discern in them an entirely different kind of discursive practice than the one undertaken by Yu Dafu, for whom, in Prusek's words again, "everything is viewed from a single [subjective] angle; that ever-shifting dynamic perspective which we discovered in the work of Mao Dun has here no place" (159). Hence, in Ye qiangwei [Wild roses], Mao Dun's first collection of short stories, published in 1929, all the female protagonists are given in "new woman" images of one type or another. Their identity problems, however, should be read as part of a broader problem of representation within which the dilemma of their ethical revolts against the dominant hegemony might then be contemplated. There are two reasons why this problem has seldom been directly addressed. Primarily, the omnipresence of a subject of intellect freshly released from the repressive system of Confucianism had made it relatively difficult for crises of alterity (the otherness of self) to be brought effectively into emergent power relations within the new cultural hierarchy. Also, the emergence of a trend of decadent intellectualism among a significant portion of the new writers further hindered the spread of any alternative rationality at a time when the insurgent forces of revolution were fully legitimized in the name of Mr. De (Democracy) and Mr. Sai (Science). As a result, it becomes difficult to identify in Mao Dun's

The Language of Despair 25

portrayal of women a consistent voice through which the hitherto repressed crisis of female subjectivity can be clearly implied. One of the major outcomes of the May Fourth cultural revolution was a common intellectual concern for the formation of self and individuality. But to recognize the subjective crisis of identity as part of a more collective crisis of history was also considered an important function of art by many writers, especially those affiliated with the Association for Literary Studies, the center of the so-called realist school, of which Mao Dun was a major spokesman. Still, rather unlike Yu Dafu's more ostensible attempt at alienating the self from the other, the introspective strategy of Mao Dun's realism never allows him to treat the collective crisis of identity from an authentically subjective point of view. But even though the realist's critical discourse can tum inward to self, penetrating a hidden reality where the root of the changing condition of history might be identified, his writings seldom go deep enough to expose the private shades of consciousness. By the same token, lacking a committed voice to speak of their otherness, the "new women" in Mao Dun's early works do not appear disturbed or even concerned enough to be able to experience the turbulent sociocultural crisis as concrete problems of the subject. The dilemma of representation is thus materialized in the search for a language that might objectify inner contradictions as radically and effectively as it would intensify external ones. In his preface to Wild Roses, Mao Dun complains that most people of his time could not recognize what the "real" [zhenshzl truly was; he urges them to reconsider their attitudes toward "reality" [xianshzl, asking them not to sentimentalize any more over the past, or idealize the future, but: to focus their vision on the present (xianshi], to analyze reality (xianshi), and to unveil the real (xianshi). (Mao Dun lun chuangzuo 49-50)

In Mao Dun's own fashion, there is clearly a conflation of several similar yet nonequivalent concepts into the one notion ofxianshi, the root for the Chinese term xianshi zhuyi, or realism. The "real" is taken here, quite naturally, to refer to the moment of the "present" (xianzall, whose protracted course in its contemporary history the realist would try to grasp. It is also, of course, the represented and representable "external" reality, of the "real world" (xianshi shije], upon the basis of which all the critical and analytical functions of realism are to be carried out. Finally, the "real" is the inner "essence" of reality, closer to a more definite notion of "truth" [zhenshzl than to its divergent ramifications in the objective world; the immediate structure of its appearance has therefore to be dismantled before its underlying bedrock becomes fully visible. In Mao Dun's own view, all the female protagonists in Wdd Roses are being taught this lesson of "reality" [xianshll-that to capture the ultimate essence of the future of

26

Ching-kiu Stephen Chan

China is to recognize the historical necessity of the present in its darkest, cruelest, and most improbable representation out there in the "real" objective world. Failure to recognize the various layers of "reality" in the changing society of their time often causes great disillusionment among the women represented by Mao Dun in his early stories. Death, for example, seems to be the only solution for Miss Huan in "Zisha" [Suicide], as she discovers that the man whose child she carries has now gone to war. His sudden disappearance could mean that her loss of virginity would be left entirely unjustified by society, that the absence of her patron (who has left home to sacrifice himself in the name of the greater nation-family) could only be honored by the complete extinction of her own self, body and soul together. Hence, having dreamt that her man did return, but opted not to become her husband, Miss Huan wakes up from the contingent traps of reality and spells out, in despair, and in acknowledgement of the irrefutable reality oflife, that "I am not myself any more." It is, after all, the painful moment of the present that she cannot endure; it is the monstrosity of the real world that she will not live to see; it is also the irrationality of truth that she has refrained from comprehending. In the whole world in which she speaks (or rather mumbles, laments), and is spoken of (by her foster family, by her omniscient narrator), there is not one person whom she can blame or to whom she can simply talk. Huan is not necessarily among Mao Dun's most successful representations of woman; but in the simple form of its narrative, the author has given us the gist of his realistic principle of representation. Evidently, Huan's story is told in a discourse with no real interlocutors, no authentic speaking subject. And Mao Dun's often ambiguous attachment to a quasi-impersonal mode further makes it difficult for one to trace the formation of an integral subject in the way one would be able to discuss Yu Dafu's constitution of self in an objectified other. The realist, within the frame of his model of representation, has indeed tried to refocus the question of subjectivity regarding women's persistent attempts at becoming conscious agents of revolution. But his own ethical consistency is often undermined by an aesthetic tendency in his language to mitigate, if not vulgarize, the articulation of any alternative voice of the woman. In the Eclipse trilogy, for instance, Jing of Huanmie [Disillusioned] is a young woman who wants to plunge herself into the turbulent currents of revolution to learn about the essence and reality of her self. Being "quiet" Uing] by nature and self-consciously "new" in intellectual character, Jing finds herself caught in a dilemma of having to choose between reality and idealism. She is also unwilling and unable to recognize the ironic twist of life that, in revolutionary times, suggests that not to fall in "love" of your own "free will" is tantamount to committing a reactionary crime comparable to that of "counterrevolution" (Shi 70). The test of "love," as it were, constitutes for her a personal and emotional limit beyond which the

The Language of Despair

27

revolutionary zeal must stride before one can become a politically conscious and ethically responsible revolutionary. Inexperienced, ling escapes into a hospital after an initial failure in the "test." There she expects to seek refuge for her defeated spirit; she fakes illness, runs a real fever, and takes in a strong dose of political medicine from her doctor, himself a new intellectual of the conservative camp. His didacticism notwithstanding, the doctor's treatment is enough to transform ling overnight from an ivorytower pessimist into a red-hot patriot. She soon devotes herself to the Women's Liberation Movement and, when disillusioned, hastens to join the revolutionary front at Wuhan as a last resort in her search for her lost identity. But amid bureaucracy and corruption, ling is taken ill again in a state of despair. During this hospitalization, her final chance for resurrection arrives with the entrance of the wounded soldier Qiang Meng ("strong" and "vigorous"), a self-described "futurist" who believes that dying on the battlefield is an ecstatic experience worth the price of a mundane and inert life. Qiang's world, she realizes, is one of glamor, honor, power, and destruction. He is also a lover of blood; and to complete the caricature, Mao Dun adds that, as a result of war, blood has been shed for the nipple our hero has lost from his left breast. Contrasted with ling, Qiang is passion and sensuality reincarnated. With him, the heroine experiences a love that soars high into the mountain air, to the extent that its link to life has been completely cut off. She has previously refused to equate love with anything physical, but is now allowing herself to be loved frantically by a man whose one goal in life is to die sensuously in war. And for a very brief moment, high up on the mountain, they consummate their love. In the very irrationality of his (alien and alienated) ideal, she seems to have found a temporary sanctuary for her long-frustrated "self." It is evident that Mao Dun is eager to expose the existing conflicts among many young men and women of his generation between the pursuit of identity and rationality on the one hand, and the tendency to indulge in sensual and emotional expression of their ego on the other. But given the ethical consciousness on the author's part, his narrative fails to situate the woman effectively in a discourse that would subject her to any concrete crisis pertaining to the collective experience of the "new women" as an emergent category of subjectivity. Jing's helplessness, after all, is never represented as a crisis of consciousness that might begin to undermine the totality of the social structure or cast in radical doubts the overall ethical order of the traditional culture. Instead, the "impersonal" mode of the narrative adopted by the author often ends with a melodramatic aftermath of disillusionment by, for example, presenting Jing first as a man-hater, and then as a clear-minded progressive who suddenly comes to realize that her rational repression of sensual desire is as beneficial to the revolution as the armed man's frantic passion to shed blood on the battlefield of his unseemly imagination.

28

Ching-kiu Stephen Chan

Mao Dun's early works of realism, one may conclude, have not brought forth a discursive voice substantial enough to articulate the complexity of sUbjectivity and its crisis. When Qiang indulges himself in calling the different parts of Jing's body by the names of the various historical sites they have visited on the mountain, and when he permits himself to compare the frenzy of the war experience to the first experience of love by a woman on her wedding night, it is plainly impossible for a reader to project such idiosyncratic mannerisms onto the broader questions of cultural and historical crises. Properly speaking, Qiang does not even play the role of a patriarch; in its form of an ethical counter-ideal, his image remains too abstract to become aesthetically compelling. The absence of a dominant male voice, at the same time, does not imply immediate success for Mao Dun's representation of the female subject. For despite his attempt to introject the historical moment onto the personal crisis of the "other," the language of his realism fails to materialize that crisis as the inner crisis of a conscious "self." Hence, even though Huan or Jing, or any other woman, might have been framed to represent an objective picture of reality, the discourse that is supposed to deiiver the problem does not appear dynamic enough to capture the critical condition of her subjectivity. If such a contradiction is found consistently throughout the Eclipse trilogy and the Wzld Roses collection of stories, it may then be generalized that realism, as practiced by Mao Dun in the early stage of his career, operates on two interrelated levels. Initially, the realist principle governing most of his narratives implies not so much a strict degree of truthfulness to external conditions in the "real world" (despite his frequent exercise in the naturalistic depiction of details), as a tendency to adhere to a properly objective vision of reality under which a more viable form of existence is made available for the protagonists, often women, in crisis. In form, the ethical dilemma of the May Fourth intellectuals is recognizable as the question of representation. Hence, while Yu Dafu's anti-heroes end up introjecting the exterior "other" onto the privacy of an absolute "self," the apparent lack of an integral subject in Mao Dun tends to allow the women's voice to be heard in a more explicit form. Since, for example, no absolute authority is fully embodied in such male personalities as Junshi in "Chuangzao" [Creation] or Youth Bing in "Shi yu sanwen" [Poetry and prose], images of "new women" like Xianxian and Madame Gui in the respective stories appear more provocative than their counterparts in Lu Xun or Yu Dafu. This absence of a dominant voice, however, does not provide the necessary freedom for these women to articulate for themselves, and layout for their readers, the inner contradictions they experience in trying to cope with the social crisis of reality. For Yu Dafu, the objectifying process of crisis has its dialectical counterpart in the internalization of a collective condition of consciousness distinguishable, if not separable, from the individual concerns for ethical and emotional frustration. Indeed,

The Language of Despair

29

the works of Yu Dafu, Lu Xun, and Mao Dun are all directed toward disclosing the inner dilemma of the new intellectual. But as a result of the extreme subjectivism of his form, Yu's discourse may actually be considered more introspective (PruSek 144). Lu Xun's attempt, by comparison, is to provide a more objectively framed narrative for his subject-in-crisis. Hence, his "silent" narrator (such as Juansheng) often urges us to set free the solitary consciousness of the ego in a discursive form open enough to allow the struggle for that freedom to be integrated as part of a collective problematic materialized through the experience of typical individuals (such as Ah Q). Mao Dun's effort, viewed from this perspective, is to rewrite conscientiously the process of representation as a pervasive sociohistorical narrative that aims at penetrating all crises of consciousness and locating them within the more objective contradictions in reality. This brings us to the second general level of his realism. For it must be remembered that one of the reasons why Mao Dun chose the realist form as his mode of representation was that realism seemed to display more readily a vast spectrum of objective reality within the constraints of a single text. In this sense, the overall principle of his realism may also be considered extrospective by virtue of its orientation toward the representation of more immediate historical events upon which the subjective dilemma of individuals would be grounded. This is evidently the way in which the Eclipse trilogy was constructed by Mao Dun. The three individual works in it can be taken together as a historical chronicle of various moments in the short-lived glory of the 1927 Great Revolution. But because of the contemporaneousness and immediacy of the revolution to the author, the characters, and the readers of the time, the very ideal of the "objective" form remains, precisely, an ideal. In other words, whereas the aesthetic vision of history is transformed into (and created through) the subjective crisis of the new women, the form itself can only become ethically viable when it is also taken to be an objective representation of the betrayed revolution. This radical objectification, as I have suggested, is accomplished through the aesthetic formation of despair. For Yu Dafu, the neurotic monologue of the subject is not only a cultural representation of the alterity pertaining to women's experience in new China, but the discourse of self also necessitates the paradox of representation that forever undermines, though never eliminates, the authenticity of the otherness thus articulated. The result is that, whereas Lu Xun has succeeded in foregrounding the deep sense of alienation the entire generation of May Fourth intellectuals would have experienced in the face of overwhelming pressures exerted by the traditional hegemony, Yu Dafu accentuates rather the crisis of a solitary consciousness in its unnameable desire to at once express and repress the ever-increasing frustration of Chinese intellectuals in their attempt to transform, by transcoding, all external social crises into the

30

Ching-kiu Stephen Chan

aesthetic dimension. And if Lu Xun's sympathetic narrator is primarily interested in reiterating the symbolic logic of the story it relates, and Yu Dafu's dejected anti-hero is mostly indulgent in his solitary discourse of despair, Mao Dun's relatively "impersonal" subjects are often less concerned about how well their voices can be heard than with what course of events their narrative frames should capture in order to achieve the panoramic vision of a "total" objective form. Thus, to capture the modem crisis of representation in its proper problematic amid the May Fourth intellectuals is, in effect, to read the dominant story of that crisis as a story about the sociopathological condition of its formation. It is only by re-enacting the interactions of text and subtext that one can begin to analyze the semantic logic of any ostensible story of crisis. In this study, the form of that crisis is captured as despair-understood as the specific tendency in literary discourse to deal with the extinction of hope, the utter loss of the will to discourse, and the disbelief in actions and ideas of any positive value. By identifying such a problematic of representation in a discourse on the "new women," as it might have emerged within the particular aesthetic and historical frames of reference of their time, I have attempted to read the dilemma of modem Chinese realism as a crisis in the formation of "self' for the women within a "new" sociocultural space still very much organized by a language that spoke of despair through the patriarchal voice. In the process of its formation, despair becomes, therefore, the utterance of a marginal subject whose enunciations can hardly express a dynamic self-sustainable by the objective constraints of life. Indeed, the language of despair can only speak of an external reality that would appear neither pure nor eternal. As a result, it seems that the solitude and inertia that constitute the consciousness of despair are rooted not so much in myth or fetishism as in the fonn of history-in the story of collective crisis, the discourse of love and revolution, of frustration and repression, in utterances spoken for the new women in crisis, for any new woman in search of her-self. WORKS CITED Lu Xun. Selected Stories of Lu Hsun. Trans. Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1960. - . "Shangshi" (1925). Lu Xun quanji [The complete works of Lu Xun]. Vol. 2. Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1981. 110-31. English version: "Regretfor the Past." Selected Stories. 197-215. - . Yecao (1927). Lu Xun quanji. Vol. 2. 159-225. English version: Wild Grass. Trans. Feng Yu-sheng. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1974. LuImcs, Georg. Soul and Form (1910). Trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1974. Mao Dun. Mao Dun /un chuangzuo [Mao Dun on creative activities]. Ed. Ye Ziming. Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi, 1980.

The Language of Despair

31

- . Shi [Eclipse]. Shanghai: Kaiming, 1929.

- . Ye qiangwei [Wild roses]. Shanghai: Dajiang, 1929. A collection of short stories containing "Chuangzao" [Creation], "Shi yu sanwen" [Poetry and prose], and "Zisha" [Suicide]. Marcuse, Herbert. Reason and Revolution (1941). New York: Oxford UP, 1960. Pr Mek, Jaroslav. The Lyrical and the Epic: Studies of Modem Chinese Literature. Ed. Leo Ou-fan Lee. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980. Yu Dafu. Chenlun (1921). Rpt. N.p.: Tianxia, 1974. Contains: "Chenlun" [Sinking] and "Yinhuise de si" [Silvery gray death]. - . Dafu zixuanji [An anthology compiled by the author]. N.p.: Tianma, 1932. Rpt. Hong Kong: Lianhe, n.d. Contains: "Chunfeng chenzui de wanshang" [Intoxicating spring nights], "Yenying" [Smoky shadows], and "Yigeren zai tushang" [Alone on the road]. - . "Niaoluo xing" [The cypress vine trip] (1923). Zhongguo xinwenxue daxi. Vol. 5. Ed. Zhao Jiabi. Shanghai: Liangyou, 1935. 89-102.

GLOSSARY "Chenlun"

" ill.

*"

"Chuangzao"

"jill! 71

"Chunfeng chenzui de wanshang"

" .. Jl. ill. ~ ~ It J:. "

Dafu zixuanji Huanmie

Jing LuXun Lu Xun quanji

{(it~tlil.»

«~ ill»

*

·t,~

{( ·t- i! ~

.»

Mao Dun lun chuangzuo

«f

Iti .:iIJ ff»

"Niaoluo xing"

"~

.-tt"

nuedai roushun "Shangshi"

11#

*11

"-fl."

Shi

{(ft»

"Shi yu sanwen"

"#~-ai:"

xianshi xianshi shijie xianshi zhuyi

J..t. J.t.i!t .nJ.t.1- A.

32

Ching-kiu Stephen Chan

xin niixing

'f*.Ji

wade niiren

~tlJ*A.

Yecao

{(Jt~»

"Yenying"

".Jj"

Yeqiangwei YeZiming "Yigeren zai tushang" "Yinhuise de si"

{(Jt • • »

-t-f. " -.,. A.,{! it J: " "~~ I!, tlJ It."

YuDafu

~it~

Zhao Jiabi

.~-i

Zhongguo xinwenxue daxi

«t.ff~.k.$.»

"Zhufu"

" j,lLli"

"Zisha"

" tll.l."

Invention and Intervention: The Female Tradition in Modern Chinese Literature Lydia H. Liu

Is there a female tradition in modern Chinese literature? By asking this question, I intend to bring to critical attention a number of interesting claims put forth by women critics in post-Mao China, particularly the generation that came to maturity in the latter half of the 1980s. To many of them, niixing wenxue (female literature) is more or less afait accompli, something that preexists the critical effort to name it as such. I The job of a critic is thus to establish the collective identity of women writers, pinpoint their difference from male writers, rescue them from the lacunae of historical memory, and restore them to their rightful place in literary history. The whole enterprise is undertaken with a view to bringing the female tradition to light. (Something similar has also happened in the West.) For instance, critic Zhao Mei claims that women writers as a group are the first to bring about a radical break with the previous literature. "In grappling with the mysteries of existence and the nature of life and desire through the mediation of self-consciousness," says she, "women writers successfully broke down the dominant convention of broad social and political themes in fiction.,,2 Another critic, Li Ziyun, attributes a great many of the avant-garde experiments in modem literature to the initiative of women. Describing the most recent developments in Chinese literature, This essay first appeared in From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth-Century China, ed. Ellen Widmer and David Der-wei Wang (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). A different version was published earlier in Genders 12 (Winter 1991) under the title ''The Female Tradition in Modem Chinese Literature: Negotiating Femini~ms Across EastJWest Boundaries." 1 As Wendy Larson points out in her essay "The End of 'Funu Wenxue': Women's Literature from 1925 to 1935" (Modern Chinese Literature 4, nos. 1 and 2 [Spring and Fall 1988]: 39-54), the term niixing wenxue appeared in critical vocabulary as early as the May Fourth period and was interchangeable withjUnu wenxue (women's literature) for a long period of time. It became negative in the late twenties and virtually disappeared from leftist and Marxist criticism afterwards, although the latter has pennitted the subcategory ofjUnu zuojia or nu zuojia (woman writer). Since the mid-1980s niixing wenxue has acquired new historical meanings and become extremely popular, while jUnu wenxue seems to have dropped out of women critics' vocabulary. Most critics now regard niixing wenxue as a literary tradition that had its origin in the May Fourth period.

2 Zhao Mei, "Zhishi nuxing de kunhuo yu zhuiqiu: nuxing wenxue zai xin shiqi shinian zhong" (The dilemma and quest of female intellectuals: female literature in the decade of the new era), Dangdai zuojia pinglun (Studies in contemporary writers) 6 (1986): 30. Translation mine.

34

Lydia H. Liu

she boldly asserts: "We are witnessing a second upsurge in the literary output of female writers in mainland China. This is marked not only by the extraordinary number and quality of women's works but by the vanguard role some of those works have played in Chinese literature. I am referring to their disregard for existing literary conventions, their exploration of new horizons in terms of theme and experience, and their experimentation with form.,,3 In the meantime, the women's studies series edited by Li Xiaojiang includes a number of major historical projects devoted to recognizing a female literature that has developed over time, enjoying a homogeneous textual and intertextual tradition and capable of legislating its own critical vocabulary. Emerging from the Horizon of History, coauthored by Meng Yue and Dai Jinhua, represents one of the most ambitious of such efforts. 4 On the basis of a rigorous analysis of women's literary texts, these authors suggest that modem literature has produced not only a good number of professional women writers but a female literature and a female literary tradition as well. They regard the May Fourth generation as the harbinger of that tradition: "Having rejected the status quo, May Fourth women writers were able to initiate their own tradition in the cracks and fissures of their culture."s What strikes me as important here is less the truth of various claims for a female literary tradition (which women critics have no vested interest in calling into question) than the peculiar historical circumstances that seem to compel those critics to identify, legitimate, and, perhaps, invent a homogeneous tradition on behalf of women writers from the May Fourth period down to the present. 6 To the extent that the female tradition did not come to its own until after women scholars began to make significant 3 Li Ziyun, "Niizuojia zai dangdai wenxue zhongde xianfeng zuoyong" (The Vanguard role of women writers in contemporary literature), Dangdai zuojia pinglun 6 (1987): 4. Translation mine. 4 Also see Li Xiaojiang, Xiawa de tansuo (Eve's pursuit) (Zhengzhou: Henan renmin chuban she, 1988) and her Niixing shenmei yishi tanwei (A preliminary inquiry into the female aesthetic) (Zhengzhou: Henan renmin chuban she, 1989). 5 Meng Yue and Dai Jinhua, Fuchu lishi dibiao (Emerging from the horizon of history ), (Zhengzhou: Henan renmin chuban she, 1989), 14.

6 For further reference, see Wu Daiying, "Niixing shijie he nuxing wenxue" (The female world and female literature), Wenyi pinglun (Art and literary criticism) 1 (1986): 61-65; Jin Yanyu, "Lun niizuojia qun: Xin shiqi zuojia qun kaocha zhi san" (On Women writers as a group phenomenon: a study of contemporary writer groups [part ill)), Dangdai zuojia pinglun 3 (1986): 25-31; Ma E'ru, "Dui 'liangge shi jie' guanzhao zhong de xin shiqi niixing wenxue: jianlun zhongguo nu zuojia shijie de lishi bianhua" (Contemporary female literature and its conception of the "two worlds": a history of the changing perspective of Chinese women writers), Dangdai wenyi sichao (Current trends in art and literature) 5 (1987): 91-95; and also Ren Yiming, "Nuxing wenxue de xiandai xing yanjin" (The evolution offemale literature ina modem age ),Xiaoshuo pinglun (Fiction studies) 3 (1988): 17-22.

Invention and Intervention

35

interventions in literary criticism and historiography (a field heretofore dominated by men) in the second half of the 1980s, their endeavor deserves our undivided attention. Indeed, what is a literary tradition, be it major or minor, male or female, but a product of the collaborative efforts of writers and critics engaged in the specific historical issues of their own time? In undertaking this study, I will neither assume or contest the raison d'etre of the so-called female tradition but try to understand it as an ongoing historical project that involves the agency of both women writers and women critics in post-Mao China. Official Feminism and Chinese Women The category of women, like that of class, has long been exploited by the hegemonic discourse of the state of China, one that posits the equality between men and women by depri ving the latter of their difference (and not the other way around). In the emancipatory discourse of the state, which always subsumes woman under the nationalist agenda, women's liberation means little more than equal opportunity to participate in public labor.7 The image of the liberated daughter and the figure of the strong female Party leader celebrated in the literature of socialist realism are invented for the purpose of abolishing the patriarchal discriminatory construction of gender, but they end up denying difference to women. s During the Cultural Revolution, political correctness consisted largely in women wearing the same dark colors as men, keeping their hair short, and using no makeup. I am not suggesting that women ought to be feminine. But the fact that the state did not require men to wear colorful clothes, grow long hair, or use makeup, which would have produced an equally iconoclastic effect, indicates that it was woman's symbolic difference that had been specifically targeted and suppressed on top of all other forms of political repression. Post-Mao Chinese women are therefore dealing with an order of reality 7 Mao's binary opposition of equality and difference on gender issues incapacitated Chinese women more than it empowered them. It served the interest of the state through exploiting women's labor power. Whenever a labor shortage occurred, women's participation in productive activity was encouraged as a form of gender equality. See Hongjun Su's "Feminist Study on Mao Zedong's Theory of Women and the Policy of the Chinese Communist Party Toward Women Through a Study on the Party Organ Hongqi," Chinese Historian 3, no. 2 (July 1990): 21-35. 8 Meng Yue theorizes gender politics in the literature of Socialist Realism in a recent article entitled "Niixing biaoxiang yu minzu shenhua" (Female images and the myth of the nation), Ershi yi shiji (Twenty-first century) 4 (1991): 103-12. See this volume for English translation. Briefly, she perceives three dominant female images that serve to eliminate female su bjecti vity and uphold the authority of the Party. They are represented respecti vely by the liberated rural woman Xi'er in Baimao nil (The white-haired girl), the intellectual woman Lin Daojing in Qingchun zhige (The song of youth) who becomes a Bildungsroman heroine under the guidance of the Party, and the strong Party leader, such as Jiangjie in Hongyan (Red cliff) or Ke Xiang in Dujuan shan (Mount Azalea).

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Lydia H. Liu

vastly different from that which feminists in the West face within their own patriarchal society, where the female gender is exploited more on the grounds of her difference than the lack thereof. Being named as the "other" and marginalized, feminists in the West can speak more or less from a politically enabling position against the centered capitalist ideology. By contrast, contemporary Chinese women find their political identity so completely inscribed within official discourse on gender and institutionalized by Fulian (the All-China Women's Federation) that they cannot even claim feminism for themselves. As Tani E. Barlow points out, "The importance of Fulian lay in its power to subordinate and dominate all inscriptions of womanhood in official discourse. It is not that Fulian actually represented the 'interests' of women, but rather that one could not until recently be 'represented' as a woman without the agency and mediation of Fulian.,,9 There are currently two translations of the word "feminism" in Chinese. The old nilquan zhuyi denotes militant demands for women's political rights reminiscent of the earlier women's suffrage movements in China and in the West. The new term nilxing zhuyi, emphasizing gender difference, has been in circulation for the past decade in Taiwan and only recently in China. The former is downright negative and the latter sounds rather ambivalent. Contemporary women writers refuse to have their names associated with either term. When one scrutinizes their reluctance, one is furthermore struck by the fact that there is more at stake than the legitimacy of Western feminist discourse as applied to another culture. It appears that the very notion of nil zuojia (woman writer), a Chinese category, has been thrown into question by women writers like Zhang Jie, Wang Anyi, and Zhang Kangkang. To them, once someone is designated (or stigmatized) as a woman writer, she is relegated to a subcategory in the mainstream (male) literature. Zhang Kangkang voices this fear in her article "We Need Two Worlds" using the analogy of the handicapped athlete to illustrate her point. In games held specially for the handicapped, many people applaud the athletes because they think that the handicapped cannot run in the first place. The same holds true for female writers, who are often classified as a subcategory separate from mainstream male authors "as if it were a universally accepted truth that only men could be writers and as if they were born writers."IO Women writers sharing the concerns of Zhang Kangkang feel that they must constantly fight against the condescension of their male colleagues and their own trivialization. The apparent contradiction between 9 Tam Barlow,

"Theorizing Woman: Funii, guojia, jiating," Genders 10 (Spring 1991):

146. 10 Zhang Kangkang, "Women xuyao liangge shijie" (We need two worlds), in Wenyi pinglun 1 (1986): 57. The speech was given earlier at an international symposium on women authors in West Germany.

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their objection to the term "woman writer" on the one hand and a strong female consciousness informing their works on the other must be understood in this light. 11 To contemporary Chinese critics, it is not the term "woman writer" but "feminism" that must be kept at bay at all times. Most women scholars take care to stay away from the word even as they publish sophisticated views on the politics of gender and even though those views may very well be regarded as feminist by scholars from the West. This is what critic Yu Qing does, for example, in her theorizing of the female tradition in Chinese literature. In her view, women's marginal position need not trivialize them: In coming to maturity, female consciousness does not seek to submerge its gender in order to arrive at some abstractly conceived and genderless human condition. It aims to enter the overall human conception of the objective world from the special angle of the female subject and to view and participate in universal human activities from the particular viewpoint of the female gender that is uniquely constructed as such. As we noted in the opening section, the female gender is formulated in societal terms. And as long as the social factors constitutive of the female gender remain, gendered consciousness and gendered literature will not go away. The so-called ultimate (transcendental) consciousness and ultimate literature, therefore, do not and will not exist. 12

Like most other scholars in women's studies, Yu rejects the word "feminism" in her writing, although she has no scruples about quoting the works of Euro-American feminists in support of what she calls her "female" position. 13 In order to grasp this complex situation, one must take into account Chinese women's relationship with the state, official feminism, and its representative, Fulian. As I mentioned in the